The Gods and Mr. Perrin: A Tragi-Comedy

by Hugh Walpole

I.

WITH the coming dawn he knew what it was that he would do. He waited, sitting in his chair without moving and watching, with unseeing eyes, the gray cold pane of his window and the last faint glow of the sinking coals that lingered in the grate. He did not know what he could have said to Moy-Thompson, what he ought to have said. He thought that he might have faced it out better had the interview been in some other place. There were so many things that hung about that room and made it impossible for him to speak. He had not known that it would be so hard.

But he did not care, he really did not care. He saw vaguely that all these many years the growing suspicion that he was really no good had been coming upon him but he had never confessed it—now it stared him in the face. If he had been any good he would have defied Moy-Thompson. He knew that he had not the courage, at his time in life, to go out and face the world again and get some other work to do. Also he had not the courage to come back another term and go on with the work here. He had not even had the pluck to hate Traill properly, as any other man would do.

And yet he did not feel that it was all his fault. He was a pleasant enough man if only someone had tried to like him—and then these headaches—and then those days when his brain was so strangely confused—no, it was not entirely his fault. And, last of all, if Isabel Desart.—-Well, why think about it? They all mocked him—even Moy-Thompson did not think him important enough to be angry with. He was very sick and tired of life.

II.

The dawn came late in those winter mornings but the house was very silent as the heavy black behind the window lifted to a lighter gray. Some clock downstairs chimed and Perrin raised his eyes from the black cold grate and saw that soon it would be sunrise.

The things in his room were ghostly shapes, but he knew where everything was and he moved about, himself the greatest ghost of all, making everything tidy. He put the books back into their places, he tore up the pile of papers on the table, he laid a note that he had written on the middle of the cloth where it could easily be seen.

At last he stood for a moment and looked at it all in silence, then with a little sigh he took his greatcoat from the back of the door where it was hanging, put it on and went out. He passed very softly through the solemnly-dark corridors, down the cold stone stairs, and along the dark hall that presented such odd shapes and figures to him in the half-light.

He swung back the bolts and bars of the hall-door and stepped out into the mysterious garden. He drew a deep breath at the sweetness of it; its beauty crowded upon him as though with eager fingers, taking hold of him, almost as though it were pleading with him to stay and take pause before he made any decision. It was an ordinary enough garden in the daytime, but now was the most strangely moving moment in all the cycle of the hours when the sun had sent word of his gorgeous coming and when the brown earth and the seeds and roots held by it stirred to share in the pageant. The breeze in Perrin's face was pure with all the freshness of the first moments of the day and all about him he seemed to hear the movement and stirring of countless things. Afterwards in the cold winter day bare branches would rattle against the hard light of the frozen sun—now everything was wrapt in curtains of silver mist.

He left the garden and went down the Brown Hill towards the sea. In front of him a great sheet of sky was slowly catching light into the threads and fibers of it. From its foundations where the dark band of the land hid it great fountains of color were held behind the cloud and the suggestion of their richness was passing already into the thickly-curtained gray.