He sat still for a moment, then raised a hand to his forehead and found it smooth. Inside, the headache persisted, its insistence ignominious, calling attention to tenancy and no more, devising, perhaps, a quantum theory of memory upon the departure of the old man gone, step by step, ushering the gold bellowless bull, Oorooma way? Gone Krakatao and the yellow day in Boston, the Grand Climacteric and Valerian, Ballima way? while he sat here in the full of the morning sun warming Aunt May's side of the face at the breakfast table, looking as she did never across at an empty place. (To right was the dark corner where all Good works were conceived.) — Cave, cave, he got to his feet, — dominus vulgus vult. His eyes were cooled; the sun itself did not warm them, lowering them from the glory there through the window to the low table beneath, and the faded figure in the table's center shivered for an instant, underclothed, and remained still as he passed, shoulders drawn, listening, under surveillance, abruptly considering Tyn-dale strangled and burned for his labor of love. — The devil finds work for idle hands, here, without music, where reverberations of the human voice weary in recall with generations of fruitless exhaustion, denied the very possibility of music. A sharp unfriendly sound from the kitchen confirmed the silence and the vigilant conspiracy of inanimate things, watching for any break in the pattern. A movement broke it, his hand reaching forth to put his glass at his place at the table; and he stood in suspense sustaining the trust thrust upon his frame by the static details of dark woodwork, maintaining the inert vigil which belied music: music as ideal motion, a conceit in itself manifestly sinful, as the Serpent, gliding in the Garden, moved with unqualified motion, as the sound of a lute, struck here now, would move upon undulant planes never before explored, to be cornered and quickly killed by the ruthless angles of the room, proving that those planes had never existed, affirming, in sharp consentaneous silence, the illusion of motion, the sin of possibility, the devil-inspired absurdity of indetermination.
Above, another blue day, (upstairs) the room papered with green-capped pink-faced dogs, and the button drawer, only apparitions move to perfection, there! Pray the Lord to keep you from lying, there, O spectral stabat mater may I go out and play the violin outside to the town wearing its sinside inside and not a soul in sight. Church bells inspissated the air, dropping it in sharp fragments. He sat down in his place at table, excused by the falling weights of the bells, and motionless when they had done. There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside sane-side, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insaneside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone down Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and the doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee.
He swallowed some of the oloroso sherry, and its warm course sent an imbrication of chills over his back. Still, there under the window, the low table looked to be faded, a parody of perfection more Bosch than Hieronymus, the seven deadly sins in meddy-evil indulgence, painted with damning care round the maimed hand upraised in the caveat, as below the brown wainscoting, and the fabricated angles above where the molding met in soiled beaded intimacy, the uneven patches faded on the walls between, and even an unfamiliar floor lamp standing beside him with the cold intent-ness of an unknown sentinel, watching, patient at all events with his prolix presence now the years of waiting were done, rewarded to find him twice-size, twice as difficult of concealment. No part of the room he could not see now, points and attentive angles he had never seen from his chair, saw him now.
He raised his glass. The streak of blood on the back of his hand was dried to a hard ridge of dirt's appearance, hypostasis on the outside and the skin drawn to it in mortal amends, a clot of the essential sediment crusted on the surface, hypostatic scab of the world of shapes and smells provided force and matter to touch a line without changing it, here, untormented by music, where as everywhere matter whetted its appetite for form and was easily pleased, circumspice, low levels of perfection issuing the remorseful timbre of the monogenetic voice, The prosperity of the godly shall be an eyesore to the wicked, Psalm 112, —Wealth and riches shall be in his house: and his righteousness endureth forever, moaning, lowering over the printed page (head bowed), Psalm 112, —GLORIA! sings Handel's soprano, — Gloria! across an ocean and centuries, gloria! far away.
A sharp bell from the kitchen shivered the air for an instant. Then as his fingers loosened on the emptied glass and he rested his elbow on the table and with it his arm and his shoulder and that whole side of him, one after another disposal of muscles went out or use, and contrary to usual sense of awareness in flex and strain (so the man chopping wood the first time in his life, a hand clutching tight right up under the ax-head, measuring the length of the haft between closed hands, right down it goes, neither hand moves on the haft so smoothed from sliding hands, the blade strikes a knot, the end of the haft his knee, and he looks up, pleased though, to say, — Say, using muscles. . (by that night he'll have pulled a tendon in some unconcerned part of his body he'll tell you and not unproudly). . using muscles I never knew I had. . and not in the stroke but recovery he finds them), so now right down from the neck muscles and tendons recovering from usage so long fell in unusual awareness one after another and one after another satisfied now he was asleep.
Reverend Gwyon returned to the breakfast table empty-handed. He startled slightly upon seeing the empty chair to his left, and looked no more composed upon seeing the one to his right occupied. So Reverend Gwyon sat alone there at the head of the table as he did every morning, with a second, a third, and a fourth glass of the dark oloroso from Spain and the look on his face of a man who's just come on a bone in a mouthful of fishmeat.
— "Ah, that dear old mother's Bible, Wherein my name she wrote, And marked me many sacred texts, Which once I well could quote. ."
These words, rising on the clear New England morning air, were neither loud nor clear, for the Town Carpenter was absorbed in his work, and the five ten-penny nails he had clamped between his gums did not serve song as teeth, even so few, might have done. He continued to hammer, and word by word the next stanza became clearer, as nail by nail was taken to be driven into the wood. By the time he reached the last stanza, and stood back to look at his work, his mouth was quite empty of anything but song, which came out quite clear, and the small dog lying there raised its head to attend,
— So who'll bid for a Bible? A purchaser I crave.
Live while we may, we'll drink today:
There's no drinking in the grave.
With that, he threw his hammer in the dog's direction. The dog moved as fast as the hammer, gained its feet, and followed him up the lawn wagging its tail.
Janet was there in the kitchen, older, square-shouldered, her face dark about the chin and faintly blue the rest of it from that mercuric compound of Aunt May's prescription renewed year after year. She strode to the stove, where two pots stood over the fire. The one she stirred, with a large spoon worn off square with stirring, was Scotch oatmeal. The other pot bubbled on, and Janet paid it no attention but to sniff the rising steam and turn away the large features of her face, drawing down her upper lip so that that gum was almost covered, and appearing not to breathe, careful and troubled about many things.