The bell rang three strokes, with a pause between each. There was a longer pause. Then once more came its threefold note.
The sound struck strangely on David’s ear, and more strangely still on his heart. With the sound he became extraordinarily aware of some vital Presence near at hand. Something that suffused the whole atmosphere with Its Personality.
Somehow the quiet of the morning, its meditation, its silent ecstasy, seemed to have been leading up to that moment. It seemed to him now that here was the moment for which the morning had been waiting, and he with the morning. Neither did the moment pass; it remained, prolonged, expanded. Time again vanished; there was no time, there was nothing but himself and that extraordinary mystical sense which was suffusing the atmosphere.
He made no attempt to explain it; he couldn’t have explained it had he tried. It was something beyond words, beyond reason, beyond feeling, even, in the ordinary sense of the term. It was not actually in his mind that he was aware of it at all, but in something far deeper. In one way it was as if the notes of that bell had struck on some deep recess of his soul, setting free some tiny spring of hidden knowledge and sweetness; and yet he knew that it was not by virtue of that knowledge and sweetness that the mystical sense suffusing the atmosphere had been translated into terms of fact. It was external to them; it was actual, real, palpitating. He knew that it would have been there had the well of his inner consciousness remained untouched. Only somehow, in some extraordinary manner, it had sprung up to meet it; and the tiny freed spring had been caught into great waters, submerging him in a sweetness he could not understand.
I don’t know how long David stood by the wicket gate; but, at last, barely conscious of his surroundings, he turned from it along the grass sward.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE GREEN MAN
The parlour at the Green Man is the parlour pure and simple. It calls itself by no grand-sounding title. You eat there, you sit there to smoke and talk—if you do not sit in the garden, and you write there.
It has five round tables, deal, and covered with strong white cloths. It has rush-bottomed chairs; it has casement windows; it has a great fireplace with oak settles on either side of it. For the rest, the walls are buff-washed, and hung with coloured prints, mainly of a sporting nature. The floor is red stone, with three mats on it. The mats are made of small loose strips of coloured stuff. The window curtains are of highly coloured chintz.
The front door of the Green Man stands flush with the cobbled pavement. Above the door swings the square sign with the name painted thereon. It is a question, in Malford, from whence that name has originated. The oldest inhabitants of the place, in particular Mrs. Joan Selby, who has passed her ninetieth birthday, will tell you that it is in honour of the Little People, who, long years since, footed it in the moonlight on the grassy hill behind the house. She will declare that she had it from the present owner’s great-grandfather himself, that the first visitor to the house, when it was yet unnamed, was a little man, clad in green, red-capped, who promised luck in his own name and that of his Tribe.
This, you may believe, is looked upon as sheer superstition by the younger and more enlightened of the inhabitants of Malford. There is one ribald wag, who declares that the name originated through the verdant propensities of a former owner.