Short Fiction, Arthur Machen [books suggested by bill gates TXT] 📗

copings and stucco doorposts; there were brass plates on a lot of the doors, and one had ‘Maker of Shell Boxes’ on it, and I was quite pleased, as I had often wondered where those boxes and things that you buy at the seaside came from. A few children were playing about in the road with some rubbish or other, and men were singing in a small public-house at the corner, and I happened to look up, and I noticed what a wonderful colour the sky had turned. I have seen it since, but I don’t think it has ever been quite what it was that night, a dark blue, glowing like a violet, just as they say the sky looks in foreign countries. I don’t know why, but the sky or something made me feel quite queer; everything seemed changed in a way I couldn’t understand. I remember, I told an old gentleman I knew then⁠—a friend of my poor father’s, he’s been dead for five years, if not more⁠—about how I felt, and he looked at me and said something about fairyland; I don’t know what he meant, and I dare say I didn’t explain myself properly. But, do you know, for a moment or two I felt as if that little back street was beautiful, and the noise of the children and the men in the public-house seemed to fit in with the sky and become part of it. You know that old saying about ‘treading on air’ when one is glad! Well, I really felt like that as I walked, not exactly like air, you know, but as if the pavement was velvet or some very soft carpet. And then⁠—I suppose it was all my fancy⁠—the air seemed to smell sweet, like the incense in Catholic churches, and my breath came queer and catchy, as it does when one gets very excited about anything. I felt altogether stranger than I’ve ever felt before or since.”

Darnell stopped suddenly and looked up at his wife. She was watching him with parted lips, with eager, wondering eyes.

“I hope I’m not tiring you, dear, with all this story about nothing. You have had a worrying day with that stupid girl; hadn’t you better go to bed?”

“Oh, no, please, Edward. I’m not a bit tired now. I love to hear you talk like that. Please go on.”

“Well, after I had walked a bit further, that queer sort of feeling seemed to fade away. I said a bit further, and I really thought I had been walking about five minutes, but I had looked at my watch just before I got into that little street, and when I looked at it again it was eleven o’clock. I must have done about eight miles. I could scarcely believe my own eyes, and I thought my watch must have gone mad; but I found out afterwards it was perfectly right. I couldn’t make it out, and I can’t now; I assure you the time passed as if I walked up one side of Edna Road and down the other. But there I was, right in the open country, with a cool wind blowing on me from a wood, and the air full of soft rustling sounds, and notes of birds from the bushes, and the singing noise of a little brook that ran under the road. I was standing on the bridge when I took out my watch and struck a wax light to see the time; and it came upon me suddenly what a strange evening it had been. It was all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life, particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn’t be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into another. Well, I found my way back somehow or other, and as I went along I made up my mind how I’d spend my holiday. I said to myself, ‘I’ll have a walking tour as well as Ferrars, only mine is to be a tour of London and its environs,’ and I had got it all settled when I let myself into the house about four o’clock in the morning, and the sun was shining, and the street almost as still as the wood at midnight!”

“I think that was a capital idea of yours. Did you have your tour? Did you buy a map of London?”

“I had the tour all right. I didn’t buy a map; that would have spoilt it, somehow; to see everything plotted out, and named, and measured. What I wanted was to feel that I was going where nobody had been before. That’s nonsense, isn’t it? as if there could be any such places in London, or England either, for the matter of that.”

“I know what you mean; you wanted to feel as if you were going on a sort of voyage of discovery. Isn’t that it?”

“Exactly, that’s what I was trying to tell you. Besides, I didn’t want to buy a map. I made a map.”

“How do you mean? Did you make a map out of your head?”

“I’ll tell you about it afterwards. But do you really want to hear about my grand tour?”

“Of course I do; it must have been delightful. I call it a most original idea.”

“Well, I was quite full of it, and what you said just now about a voyage of discovery reminds me of how I felt then. When I was a boy I was awfully fond of reading of great travellers⁠—I suppose all boys are⁠—and of sailors who were driven out of their course and found themselves in latitudes where no ship had ever sailed before, and of people who discovered wonderful cities in strange countries; and all the second day of