“Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up their meaning.”
She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up, Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan. Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome Hindoos—aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?”
He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way, with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of his thought—implications that he suspected her of already pretty sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how seriously she might be forced to take them.
VII
OR the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite willing,—somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,—to help her in her crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general, to the rather alarmed quarry himself,—not unwilling to come to terms,—but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than her own not altogether temperate zeal.
She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant—mere kindliness, and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody.
It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into something more ambiguous—an incident that gave margins for possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to fear.
They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky, in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages; above it was the blank, hard sky.
Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future, as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth, the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched him and the toadstool made him shrink.