Then as he climbed nearer the silence no longer infringed, but followed and closed in behind on the cold air, — And lest thou shouldst lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God. .
Reverend Gwyon was a big man. And, as the increscent light of the sun reached him and covered him, and he broke off speaking and stood exalted in the light, the sunlight and the silence seemed to augment him, actually to make him larger, standing alone up on the porch. Abruptly he cried out to the figure approaching him, — Turn around. There, turn around!
The sun stood emerged, glowing its great belly, motionless with the effort of emersion accomplished, paused, over the earth's rim, in confident prospect of the journey of the day. Suddenly breaking his own pattern of stillness Reverend Gwyon clattered down the porch steps, and stopped where he could get a full view of the sky. — A bad time of it, he muttered scanning the sky from one end to the other and back, east to west, to east and the sun itself. — A bad time of it today.
— Bad time of… what?
— Why there, the dirty sky, Gwyon said flinging a hand up. — He has a dirty path before him today. As he spoke he lowered his eyes, and what might, on a smaller face, have passed as a look of surprise, settled upon his own as one of curious, even inquisitive abstraction, a look which summoned every battery of history to bear simultaneously upon the immediate problem at hand.
Reverend Gwyon was a tall man; but it was his stance made him appear indomitable, that and the sense of a full meter of silence surrounding him which only he could penetrate, or roll back with the invitatory ardor of his own curiosity. His face was heavily lined, but lines in nowise the fortuitous tracings of disgruntled weariness with which one after another generation proclaims abrogation of responsibility for the future, and liability for the past. Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn the course of youth groping among the obstacles erected, dutifully, by its own hands earlier, along the way of that sublime delusion known as the pursuit of happiness.
Not to be confused with that state of political bigotry, mental obstinacy, financial security, sensual atrophy, emotional penury, and spiritual collapse which, under the name "maturity," animated lives around him, it might be said that Reverend Gwyon had reached maturity.
It must also be noted that, though his position in the community was appointed to justify the accumulated clutter of the things of this world in the eyes of the next, neither was there present in his face that benign betrayal of total incomprehension of the designs of eternity, and the concomitant suspension of the intellect, which so carefully separates this world from the next on Sunday mornings all over the country and, in asylums all over the world, every day of the week.
Gwyon's face was creased with lines of necessity. They sprang away from the eyes he lowered down from the clotted sky and right past the face before him, a face lined itself whose every lineament watched him anxiously. — Ahh, Gwyon said, — you've come. . and his gaze settled on the gold bull. Then as Gwyon reached forth a resolute hand and rested it on the head of the bull figure, an unsteady and blood-streaked hand came up and took his arm and they stood like that, each looking at the hand of the other, when the sun was suddenly blotted out and they were left standing shadow-less on the lawn.
The sky was becoming littered with fragments of cloud. They were being fed across it from a great bank in the north. The cloud bank was gray and motionless, and it did not diminish.
Gwyon shivered suddenly under his hand, and looked up at the impaired sunrise with an expression of severe indignation. Then the bull figure was lifted decisively from under his arm, and with it Gwyon turned before him and made with long strides for the house.
By the time they reached the porch the sun was unencumbered. It had already commenced to diminish in ascent, and to lose the fierce coloring of its violent entering into the sky.
At the top step Reverend Gwyon halted in front of him so abruptly that he almost lost his balance. — There, Gwyon said, making a sweeping motion with his free hand which included the porch and the sun behind them, — any fool can see what the churches lost when they put the entrances around facing the setting sun. His tone rang with the same direct and peremptory appeal that his face had reflected a moment earlier; but as he went on, rearing his great head to the presence he'd apparently expected to find beside him, surprised to find it moving unsteadily round behind, Gwyon's voice lowered as though talking to himself, and as though in the habit of so doing. — The Christian temple at Tyre, he muttered. — The propylaeum faced the rising sun, of course. Attracted passers-by with its glitter that way. Then he glanced quickly as though to secure that he was being followed in.
The hammering began again from the other side of the house, down in the direction of the carriage barn, clear sharp blows from a great distance it seemed; otherwise all was very quiet but for the heavy footfalls of Reverend Gwyon crossing the porch ahead of him. The muffled ka-klack ka-klack had ceased some time earlier. Watching Gwyon stoop before him to open the front door, he was inclined to do so himself, once inside the house, where it was darker and he had only the gold tail of the bull figure to guide him. Surely there was no danger of bumping a doorframe with his head nevertheless childhood still obtained and every portal was lower, and hallway more narrow, every turning closer and room smaller. Thus he hunched, past Olalla as though with cold and past the cruz-con-espejos into the dining room. The house was cold at that.
For some reason he went straight round to Aunt May's place at the dining-room table and sat down there. Gwyon poured two glasses of sherry wine. It was rich dark oloroso, a fresh bottle though the cork had been pulled. He put the bottle down between them and remained standing, one hand on the bull figure which he had not relinquished.
— What a trip, getting here.
— Yes, yes, Gwyon affirmed immediately, agitated. He emptied his own glass quickly and then, a moment later, looked down at it in his hand as though it were an unfamiliar object and he didn't know how it had got there. He put it on the table carefully. — You've come a great way… a great distance, he said looking up again at the figure seated there much, perhaps, as he might have looked upon the incarnation of some abstraction conceived long before, disturbed less by the actual epiphany and its haggard unsteady appearance than by its abiding and familiar permanence, in spite of the transient air it had assumed immediately he gained the weight of the gold bull figure into his own hand. Gwyon stood, with one hand still, heavy on the bull figure, the other busily contriving upon nothing at his side, configuring recourses in the air.
For this moment he seemed bound there, standing at his place at the head of the table. The sun by now was coming through the dining-room window which faced to east where the porch left off on that side of the house. — Here, this:. Gwyon said to him, sitting there with his left side to the exposure where the sun entered, — for safekeeping, this had better be put away for safekeeping. Gwyon flourished the gold figure in a strain of sunlight and left him sitting there in the sun, his back to the buffet, looking at the empty place across the table. He looked up when Gwyon turned out of the room, but too late to see more than the departing back, that most prominently distinguishing feature of Reverend Gwyon.