‘Well?’ he said at last, challengingly, ‘don’t you notice anything?’ He moved from the window as he spoke. Then she did.
‘Good gracious!’ she exclaimed. ‘Jonathan, what have you been doing to yourself? Have you been going about in town looking like that?’
This tone, from Caroline of all people, he could not stand; she at least should be taught to look at the thing properly—with respect.
‘I have been doing nothing to myself—nothing!’ he replied. ‘As it is the will of Heaven, you might try to speak respectfully about it—or else hold your tongue!’
She looked at him in pained bewilderment. ‘Do you mean you can’t help it?’ she said at last.
‘That is exactly what I do mean,’ he said. His pent-up bitterness broke out. ‘I’ve had two days of it—about as much as I can stand. Yes! you round your eyes, but you don’t realize what it has made me go through. It’s been spiritual desolation. I was like an owl in the wilderness, with all the other silly owls hooting at me, taking it for a show, a trick-turn, a patent night-light that burns all through the day to amuse itself; and now you! No; it’s not X-ray; it’s not Tatcho for the hair; it’s not luminous paint; nor is it a mechanical adjustment to prevent people tumbling against one in the dark or help them to read newspapers in omnibuses. All those things have been said to me in the last twenty-four hours; and if only one of them were true, I believe to God I should be a happier man than I am! The plagues of Egypt may have seemed all right to Moses, but Pharaoh didn’t like them! Why Heaven has seen fit—I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘But there it is, so I must learn to bear it.’
Caroline said: ‘When you’ve had your supper, you’ll feel better.’
‘I shall not feel better; I shall never feel better until I know—either what sense to make of it, or how to get rid of it. It’s just as if—as if Heaven didn’t know that the world’s mind has changed about things. I shall become a laughing-stock. What good will that do?’
And then Caroline, who had been brought up on biblical knowledge, was very annoying. ‘Didn’t Jeremiah shave one side of his head?’ she inquired, ‘or roll in the dirt and eat books, and things of that sort? Or was it Isaiah!’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg shortly. ‘It wasn’t me, anyway. If one did that sort of thing to-day, one’s use in the world would be over.’