“Quite.”
“If you had taken my advice you would have left studying spirits and have confined your attention to the world.”
“The world!” cried Genius. “I have studied the world, and have found it about as interesting as a repeating decimal, a long continuance of redundancy.”
“Once Virginius advised you to restrain your contempt for the world. It was the only piece of wise advice he ever gave you. But we will wait and see the issue of this marvellous book, which is to remove hereditary curses, lighten the author’s faith, and work as many impossibilities as are contained in its leaves themselves.”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SILENT FOREST[1]
Then Deborah, walking alone in the shade of evening, came on the outskirts of a dense forest. The foliage within was thick and feathery, the branches heavy and dark. Above there hung a cloud so black that it sent a dull shadow through the dull leaves, and made the ground below blacker than itself.
Just outside the cloud, where the sky was pale with the after-glow of clear evening, shone a star, a very large and bright one. But the cloud was so heavy that it hung over the whole forest like some dark curse. It looked like a thunder-cloud that could not burst, being held by iron chains covered with black rust. There was unutterable silence in the forest, so that you looked in with a strange fear, and then turned away, and yet again returned. Surely no living thing stirred or breathed in there!
[1] There are indications in the paging of this chapter in MS. that it was written separately from the previous chapters. It was afterwards added and the connection is obviously incomplete. To this state of incompletion may be referred the indefiniteness of the conclusion, though it may have been also part of the author’s deliberate intention.—Ed. Note.
A great dampness rose from the ground, a vapour in the gathering twilight, as it rises in the marshy districts near the sea. Now a bat whirled out from the gloom on to the lonely flats, and then came a sound like the hoot of an owl. But was it an owl? Oh, no. It was one more “exceeding bitter cry,” at the bitter end, you know.
Then, there is life in the breathless forest after all.