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Hogarth, meantime, had made his way to the front of the room, then vomiting its throng, discovered Loveday, and, deciding to walk home, they were soon on the cliffs.
And suddenly Loveday: "To-morrow will conclude my fifth week in
Westring. What, do you suppose, has made me stay?"
"I have wondered".
"I work better here…Hogarth, you inspirit me".
"Is that so?"
"It is, yes. Merely your presence is for me a freshness and an enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old Homers—prophet, lawgiver, poet—"
They were passing along a stretch of sand, with some lights of Lowestoft in sight, arm in arm; and Hogarth said: "Well, you speak some big words. But my life, you understand, has been as simple and small as possible. I will tell you: my father sent me to an extraordinary school—where he got the coin I could never find out— Lancing College at Shoreham. There I did very well—only that I was continually getting it! What was the matter with me when a boy I can't understand: I was the devil. One summer vacation (I was fourteen) I stole three pounds from the old man, and ran away one Sunday night. Passed through London and soon was apprentice in a blacksmith's shop in a Kent village called Bigham. But in six months I had the forge at my fingers' ends, and was off: nothing could hold me long. One day I turned up before the Recruiting Office of Marines in Bristol—just of the right age for what they call 'second-class boys'—and decided upon the sea—that sea there—which, from the moment I saw it at the age of four, caused me a swelling of the breast with which, to this day, it afflicts me. Well, I got the birth-certificate of another boy, scraped through, was entered into a District Ship, and finally sailed in the St. Vincent to the Pacific Station.
"However, my trial of His Majesty's ships was not a success: twice I was in irons, once leapt into mid-ocean; nor could the battleship hold me when she had nothing to teach me; so I did to the King what I had done to the old man—cut and ran.
"It was at Valparaiso, and I made my way across the continent to
Buenos Ayres.
"I forget now what took me to Bristol: but there I was one day when I happened to see—what do you think?—a girl—sixteen—I a stripling of nineteen, or so—but she most precocious, spoke like a woman—a grating in a wall between us. Ah, well, God is good, and His Mercy endureth for ever. But she said it could never be—she a Jewess: though that, by the way, is nonsense, for she is a Jewess, and a Parisienne, and a Hindoo, and a Negress, and a Japanese, and the man who marries her will have a harem. My friend, I have seen her this very night!"
He was silent. Suddenly he broke out: "I came home raving! The old man was scared out of his wits by my frenzy—I drank like ten men— in a month was the terror of Westring. One midnight, going home through the beech-wood—I don't know if you have noticed a hollow elm-tree which stands to the right of the path?"
"I think I have", said Loveday.
"We shall pass near it presently; and at the moment when we approach it, I shall feel a little thrill in my back: always it is so with me. But I was saying: that midnight, as I passed the tree, drunk as I was, I saw a naked black man with a long beard run out; I took to my heels; he was after me; till I reached the bridge, when I stopped, faced him, fired a blow into his eyes, and he vanished.
"During the week I continued to see apparitions. My groans were heard in the farm-yard: Lord have mercy upon me! Christ have mercy upon me! I was visited by the Methodist preacher at Thring; and finally I found solace: I became a class-member, a leader, a local preacher.
"For some time I have been conscious of dissatisfaction among the people with my preaching, who say that my God 'is not a personal God', and that my Christianity is 'rum stuff': I am therefore meaning to give it up. But I still preach every second Thursday night.
"It was about that time that, by accident, I found out the power of my hand to cure headache, and things like that, and the sensation among these villagers was enormous, I can tell you, six years ago; now they come to be touched without the slighest sense of the unusual. But what I have done well in was—the farming. I knew little of agriculture—"
At this point they turned into the lane to Westring: and Loveday went with him a little beyond Priddlestone to see the fatal elm.