She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like the weight of some great iron engine with jagged raw edges—like a battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings backwards and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”
“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.
She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another moment?”
They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his heart suggested.
“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.
“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see me.”
He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the full-brimmed current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the high mud-banks.
The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and asserting its identity with an exultant joy. It seemed almost to purr, with a kind of feline satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward towards the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it drew from it some sort of half-human sound—some whisper or murmur or protest of querulous complaining.
The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories moaned; and all the while, with gurglings and suckings and lappings and deep-drawn, inward, self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.
On that night, of all nights, the Loon seemed to have reached that kind of emphasis of personality which things are permitted to attain—animate as well as inanimate—when their functional activity is at its highest and fullest.