“I’m glad of that,” came Widdup’s apologetic whisper. A long silence. “You’ve won the sweep, anyway,” said Widdup. “Thirty-eight and sixpence.” Edwin grunted.
“If you reckon that you’ll be here four more years, taking into account the number of men—average, you know—who go in for the house sweep every year, you could calculate the exact chances against your ever—”
He was asleep.
II
And while he slept after that day of unusual excitement and fierce colour, he had a curious dream. In the beginning it reflected a little of the anxieties of the afternoon, for he found himself hurrying in the middle of a huge and sweaty crowd which made no way for him. He did not know why he was running so violently; but of one thing he was certain, and this was that he was going to be late. At first he had in front of him the little man in the rusty coat who had been his companion on the Downs: the same queer creature now endowed with an aspect even more grotesque and an agility more elfish, so that Edwin knew from the first that this time he was sure to lose him and never to catch him up again. All the masses of people through whom he pressed were moving even faster than himself and in the same direction, so that it seemed as if he could never gain ground at all, but must go on running for ever with no sight of his goal, nor any hope of getting nearer to it. At last his breath gave out, and he stopped. It wasn’t a bit of good; for the moving crowd wouldn’t stop with him, and he was pushed forward by this multitude of tall people, knowing that if he faltered for a moment or fell (as in the end he must), he would certainly be trampled to death by the feet of those who followed.
At last the little man outstripped him altogether, and feeling that he had lost all hope, Edwin gave a cry. When he cried out the whole hurrying crowd melted away, the noise of their padding footsteps left a clear patch of silence (it was like that) and a puff of cool, thin air blew suddenly right into his nostrils. He thought, “I’m not going to be late after all. . . . Why didn’t they tell me that I was going to Uffdown?” There was no air like that in the world. He drank it down in gulps as a horse drinks water. “Eddie, you’ll choke yourself,” his mother said. . . . “The light won’t last much longer.” “But why should it last, darling?” he replied. “You’ve got to look over there,” she said, “in the west. You see that level ridge dropping suddenly? Well, it’s the third farm from the end. Do you see?”
“Yes, darling, I can see it quite clearly. . . .” And he did see it. A long building of bluish stone with small windows set flush in the walls and no dripstones save one above the oak doorway. Not a soul to be seen. It looked as if the place had been deserted by living creatures for many years. “I can see it,” he said, “but I don’t think anybody lives there.”
“But you can see it?” she asked him eagerly. “Can you see the little bedroom window on the left—the third from the end—quite a little window?”
It was difficult to see, for, after all, it was more than a hundred miles away, and all the time that he was looking, the streamers of cloud kept rolling down from the darens on the mountain and drenching the whole scene in mist. “Eddie . . . there’s not much time,” she pleaded. “Do tell me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see the window you mean.”