He spent his days by the Turlie; happy and relaxed above the brown swirling water. The water was clear as beer and its foam froth-white; it filled his ears with music and his days with delight. The damp soft air smurred his tweed with fine dew and the hazel twigs dripped down the back of his neck.
For nearly a week he thought fish, talked fish, and ate fish.
And then, one evening, on his pet pool below the swing bridge, he was startled out of his complacence.
He saw a man’s face in the water.
There was time for his heart to come up into his mouth before he realised that the face was not under the surface of the water but at the back of his eyes. It was the dead white face with the reckless eyebrows.
He swore, and sent his Jock Scott singing viciously to the far side of the pool. He was finished with B Seven. He had grown interested in B Seven under a complete misunderstanding of the situation. He had thought that B Seven too had been hounded by demons. He had built up for himself an entirely fallacious picture of B Seven. That toper’s Paradise in B Seven’s compartment boiled down to an overturned whisky bottle. He was no longer interested in B Seven: a very ordinary young man, bursting with rude health to the point of toughness, who had had one over the eight on a night journey and ended his life in the highly undignified manner of falling backwards and then crawling about on his hands and knees until he stopped breathing.
‘But he wrote those line about Paradise,’ a voice in him said.
‘He didn’t,’ he said to the voice. ‘There’s not the slightest evidence that he did any such thing.’
‘There’s his face. No ordinary face. It was the face that you first succumbed to. Long before you began to think of his Paradise at all.’
‘I have not succumbed,’ he said. ‘In my job you take an automatic interest in people.’