Down on the porch, Reverend Gwyon stood staring at the sky, reflecting in his attitude and expression the bull's disdain for what was going on up there. In Gwyon's case, however, the simple grandeur of the bull's impersonal contempt for the storm was impaired by lines of fierce indignation, as though to indicate that this celestial turmoil had been got up as a personal affront to him, or one for whose honor he was jealous. Gwyon did not lower his eyes to the figure approaching up the lawn until the porch steps clattered immediately beneath him; at that, he broke off his engagement, muttering, and turned hastily to open the front door.
— There!… I mean, here! sounded behind him, teeth a-clatter.
— Whoo. . what is it? Gwyon got out, looking wide-eyed over his shoulder, with the door open.
— Terror coming both ways. . like being a child again. Yes, there, get the door closed. .
Reverend Gwyon got the front door closed with a bang, rattling the bell in it. Then he started to turn down the hall, but his way was blocked. Though neither of them moved, a regular creaking had been set up in the hallway and sounded all around them.
— Why, it's. . this whole house is saturated with priesthood, with. .
— Priesthood? Gwyon repeated, looking for an opening.
— Ministry, the ministry then, eh? Yes, here we are, no exception, except I'm late. Late coming. Here, every creak, do you hear them? Every creak one of doubt, generations of it, so I'm no exception, except I'm late. But I… that's what I was trained for, after all, isn't it. Here, it's so familiar, all so familiar here. .
Reverend Gwyon found an opening and got through it. Immediately he started to talk, striding down the hall. — Familiar, yes, he commenced, gauging his words to the distance ahead of him. — Science, science has a fool theory about recognition. Half the forepart of the brain receives an impression, they say, an instant before the other half. When it reaches the second half the brain recognizes it! A lot of bosh, of course, he paused a step to confide, — but it gives these fool scientists something to do, keeps them from meddling in important matters that don't concern them.
Reverend Gwyon had timed this observation perfectly; for as he reached the last phrases he had turned the corner to his study. The still surfaces of the mirrors in the cruz-con-espejos were alerted by his passage, but too late to hinder it, for with the last word he was inside, leaving them empty but vigilant now. Alone among books and papers in precarious piles, Reverend Gwyon sat down. There were books open and closed, some with twenty bits of paper between their pages; passages underlined, written in, crossed out. There were periodicals, and ribbons of newspaper littered everywhere. Near one knee a headline said, Science Shows There's a Cod, Pope Declares. Gwyon rested an elbow on Osseruatore Romano. ("Who is capable of fixing his eyes on the shining sun?" It was that issue in which Cardinal Tedeschini testified to the Papal vision: "But he was able to do so, and during those days could witness the life of the sun under the hand of Mary.") Gwyon reached Saint John of the Cross down from a shelf. ("The agitated sun was convulsed and transformed in a picture of life, in a spectacle of heavenly movements, and it transmitted silent but eloquent messages to the Vicar of Christ.") This caught the corner of Gwyon's eye, which narrowed, and he grunted impatiently and covered it with another paper, the Scientific American for 11 April 1891. There, for a moment, he stared at a picture of Doctor Variot and a colleague consulting beside a baby skewered on an electrode in an electro-metallurgic bath.". . Rather than to rescue our cadavers from the worms of the grave," he read half aloud, with idle satisfaction, and sat back, staring at the door.
The gold figure of the bull lay on its side among some papers on his desk. Beyond, through the windows, the wind whipped the branches of yew with snow. But Reverend Gwyon's was not an empty stare, arrested by that blank surface. He looked as though he saw straight through the door, and was fully aware of the two eyes which, at that instant, were looking square on a line with his own from the dark hallway, where the clear mirrors of the cruz-con- espejos on the wall behind had seized, and held, dim fragments of the arm raised to knock.
Gwyon waited for a moment; then he opened the book in his lap, and thrust his hand into the cavity cut ruthlessly out of The Dark Night of the Soul.
— Drink; drink! Drain, drain! Another link for the Devil's Chain, sang the Town
Carpenter into the white teeth of violation. He left off, for an anxious moment, as he approached the Civil War monument, which he never passed in bad weather without a look of uneasy solicitude, though near half a century had passed since his mother's last obstinate bivouac there.
The wind was pursuing its career with extravagant glee, now it had one. The snow was driven to places which only this paranoid force could care to oppress so; though, to be striding forth in it was to assume the delusions of the storm itself, becoming the object of its hostility, and thus abruptly render a validifying dimension to this manic phase of a reality which would, left to itself, blow itself out in senselessness. Therefore, to redeem these absurd extravaganzas, which is after all the way of a hero, requires a worthy goal; then the gratuitous violence threatens only that path, and as the wind rises, the more worthy the goal then, and the more heroic the journey.
The Depot Tavern was presided over by the head of a twelve-point buck, whose look of resignation implied understanding of the fact that his antlers would never again be shed and renewed, a fate tempered by a festoon of Christmas tree bulbs which were, momentarily, seasonal, though he wore them with great forbearance whatever the solstice. Otium cum dignitate, the chipped lips posed up there, and with great dignity, considering his circumstances, the buck gazed down through dust-filmed eyeballs upon the present.
Just now this present was being cajoled toward a disfigurated future by a man with a woman tattooed on his left arm. She reposed there so long as he talked or listened; but when he interrupted to raise his glass, she was strangled. Though she had been suffering this treatment for many years, she bore it with the same surprise contorting her blue face whenever it was repeated; and when it was done, she returned to the same pose of unsuspecting tranquillity. (True, she was not entirely innocent: turned at another angle, and a portion of her covered up, she was capable of a pose which none who did not know her might have suspected from her placid countenance.) — The Resurrectionists! said he; and she was strangled.
— The Resurrectionists? What would it have to do with grave-robbers? It was the sermon on medicine made from mummies. Mummies ground up in a powder tor medicine, said a man as far from the weather as possible, at the far end of the bar.
— Not that any of you have ever heard one of his sermons, said a small man in the middle. — Relying on what your wives repeat to you.
— And you was there, I suppose, imperson?
— I was. It was the sermon in which the Swiss rooster is condemned to burn to death for laying an egg.
— Fourteen seventy-four. I know that one myself.
There was an air of grudging conspiracy over all this; and if voices rose in argument the overtones were slightly quelled, suggesting, as in any totalitarian society, walls with ears, the ubiquitous dictator long in residence hie, et ubique, disputing no passage, for He was going nowhere. — But that little man selling brushes. .
— A manic. .
— Manichee…
— He was sent here, but Reverend saved us from that. If good and evil was absolutes, we would all of us be Manichean heretics, says the Reverend. I was there, you see. If it wasn't for evil being a depraved qualification of good, says the Reverend, we should all be Manicheans like the little brush salesman.