“I—don’t—quite—follow,” uttered in Oliver’s most phlegmatic manner. Stuart’s reception of his tidings struck him as neither respectful nor efficient.
“How long has she been gone?” queried Peter practically. “She went down to the village, I thought.”
“Yes. Village seven minutes’ distance. She went at twenty to six. Now it’s past eight. I don’t suppose for an instant,” continued Oliver, “that she proposes to stop away longer than a few hours, for the purpose of annoying me; I believe I wasn’t in favour,” with a slight smile. “She has played this kind of trick before. High spirits, that’s all. But it’s getting dark, and I wondered whether we hadn’t better go out with lanterns.”
“Lanterns, indeed! I tell you, Strachey, it’s the Wild Duck. Don’t look at me in that—that bovine fashion. Has she taken your pistols?”
“Why should she?” helplessly.
“Wild Duck!” chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.
The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water. The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and the reeds had still been tipped with the sun’s gold. An hour later, and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart’s strange repetition of ‘Wild Duck! Wild Duck!’ term which now held a gloom and menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.
“Perhaps you’ll explain your reference, Stuart?”
“Ibsen—and the Doll’s House—when Nora went out to find her soul. You refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her hair.—No, that’s Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there’s an impossible husband in that, too!”
‘Pistols’ were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, “You imply that my wife has committed suicide?”