Behold him, entered on his last three weeks, toiling up a mountain pass, his shirt open at the chest and his tightly strapped trousers somewhat the worst for dust—a fine figure of a man in a thin, fiery way, with singularly child-like eyes set in a network of wrinkles—the result of having spent his thirty odd years with a lavish though fastidious hand. Sickened suddenly of the ordered olive slopes, he went on and up till he had left the sleek country behind him, and entered the region that looks like a burnt-out landscape of the moon. At last he came to the mouth of a gorge, one side of it rising up sheer into the sunlight, while the other seemed to hang to the earth like a dark curtain. Looking up, Bernardy saw, perched at the rim of the sunlit cliff, a little town. In some places its sloping flanks were built right over the edge, as though they had been poured out, while molten, from a giant spoon. It was so many hundred feet above him that he could only just distinguish it was a town, and not a mere huddle of pale-hued boulders; so high it gave the effect of being on the edge of the world. Bernardy knew, beyond a doubt, that he must attain this town, and he cast about to find a way. Obviously there must be a track on the other side, as the cliff was bare of so much as a shrub, and yet no path was to be discerned on its scarred and abrupt surface. Eventually Bernardy made his way round a fold of gorge and up a steep, winding track to a gently sloping stretch of country that led up to the town from behind.
Throwing himself upon the short, thorn-entangled grass, he locked his hands behind his head and gazed under half-shut lids at the little town which he now saw dark against the sky. He lay, idly counting the towers of it, till his lids grew too heavy to stay open, and his fingers fell apart, and with his head pillowed on his arm, he slept.
When he awoke the day was at its brief height, and he scrambled to his feet with an odd feeling that was more than a mere sense of rest. It was as though a sponge had been deftly passed over his mind, leaving it a clean, smooth surface, ready to receive new impressions, unbiased by anything that was past, the confiding, expectant attitude of a young child. He had forgotten nothing, it was rather that all his old arrangement of values had been swept aside, leaving him free to assess things anew. And, although, for all he could remember, his sleep had been dreamless, yet he was haunted by half-recollections which pricked at and eluded him. As he went towards the town something in the sweeping lines of the fortifications seemed vaguely familiar, and again fragments of a dream, at which he snatched in vain, floated by him.
Passing under the cool shadow of the gateway he stood wondering which way to go; then, saying to himself, "I'll go past the Mayor's house, I always liked it because of the painted walls," he turned to the right, and walked several paces before the strangeness of his own words struck him. "What can I have meant?" he asked himself, "and yet—I seem to remember a house, a white house, with a painted frieze of fruit and birds, and the Mayoress was a funny, fat old thing who made échédets. . . ."
With his heart beating fast, he turned the corner and found himself at the house he sought. The more he looked at it the more he remembered it, and details crowded on him. He walked down the alley at the side, and found a stone stairway he knew quite well, a stairway that led to a carved door. He stumbled into the street again like a man distraught.
"Has the horror turned my brain?" he thought. "Well, what matter, if it makes it easier to die?"
The whole street struck him as familiar, but not until he turned into the Square did knowledge flash upon him.
"It's my town!" he cried aloud, "it's my town!"
He felt no perplexity at the incredible nature of the thing, a calming influence, too gracious to be akin to his former stupor, stole over him; he moved as in a dream, with no responsibility, but full enjoyment. The naked plane-trees made a silvery network against the cold, pure blue of the winter sky; into a raised washhouse across the Square the sun shone obliquely, and the many-hued skirts of the stooping women made vivid blotches of colour that harmonized with the rhythmic splash of the water as only music of sight can with music of sound. Dark against the cream-washed wall of the church, that seemed almost lambent in the glare of the sun, sat a row of burnt-out old men with shrivelled throats, and on the steps of the fountain were two old women in black, one wearing a white cap of folded wings, the other the wide-brimmed black straw hat common to the peasantry. The lady of the hat plunged her brown old fingers into the thin arc of water, and Bernardy saw how the drops that clung to her hand glittered like diamonds before she shook them off to pit the dust with pock-marks. With that intense sympathy which had done much to make him an artist, Bernardy tried for a moment to think himself into the mind of the black-hatted old woman, and to imagine the Square and his own figure from her mental and physical point of view. It was a favourite trick of his, but one of which latterly the strain had been too much for him. Sometimes he would succeed so well for a flash that it only made the impalpable but stern barrier of personality more definite even while almost seeming to overleap it. "If I could only achieve the thing properly," thought Bernardy, "I suppose I should attain exchange of identity, or at least be absorbed into that of the old lady. And then—no more of this black horror, and the shell of me would, I suppose, disfigure the gravel."
He lifted the heavy, leathern curtain over the church door and entered. Within the air struck cool, though heavy with stale incense; gradually the gleam of gilding, then separate colours and degrees of dusk and pallor detached themselves from the darkness, and he saw he was in the typical little church of the neighbourhood—a rococo affair decked with rows of plaster saints on painted brackets, each with its little bunch of flowers in a china mug in front of it. Beneath all the superfluous decoration there was a pleasing austerity and sturdiness of line; solid pillars and a low-groined roof made a square-set, beetle-browed little building, at once tawdry and stark. To Bernardy's receptive mind there was something peculiarly charming about these churches where everything spoke of religion being taken in the right way—as a mere matter of course. A lighted wick, floating in a jam-jar of oil, caught his eye and, moving forward, he saw it burned before a crèche.