The room was singularly bare: a tin lamp with a green glass shade, on an
uncovered deal table, illuminated an open book, wood chairs with roughly
split, hickory backs, a couch with no covering over its wire springs and
iron frame; there was no carpet on the floor of loosely grooved boards, no
decorations on the plastered walls save a dark engraving of a man in
intricate armor, with a face as passionate, as keen, as relentless, as a
hawk's, labelled, "Loyola."
Merlier silently indicated a chair, but he remained standing with his gaze
lowered upon the floor. He was a burly man, with a heavy countenance
impassive as an oriental's, out of which, startling in its unexpected
rapidity, a glance flashed and stabbed as steely as Loyola's sword. His
hands were clasped before him; they were, in that environment, strangely
white, and covered with the scars of what, patently, were unaccustomed
employments.
"It feels good inside," Gordon observed tritely. He noted uneasily the
muddy tracks his shoes had printed upon the otherwise spotless board
floor, "I got caught in a gust on the mountain," he explained awkwardly,
in a constraint which deepened with the other's continued silence; "I
ought to have cleaned up before I came in ... it's terrible dark out." He
rose, tentatively, but the priest waved him back into the chair. Opening a
door opposite the one by which Gordon had entered, and which obviously
gave upon an outer shed, Merlier procured a roughly made mop; and,
returning, he obliterated all traces of the mud. Suddenly, to Gordon's
dismay, his supreme discomfort, he stooped to a knee, and began to remove
the former's shoes.
"Hey!" Gordon protested; "don't do that; I can tend to my own feet." He
was prepared to kick out, but he recognized that a struggle could only
make the situation insufferable, and he submitted in an acute, writhing
misery to the ministrations. The priest rose with Gordon's shoes and
placed them, together with the mop, outside the door. He then brought from
an inner room an immaculate, white cambric shirt, a pair of trousers, old
but carefully ironed, and knitted, grey worsted slippers.
"If you will change," he said in a low, impersonal voice, "I will see what
there is for you to eat." He left the room, and Gordon gratefully shifted
into the fresh, dry clothes. The trousers were far too large; they
belonged, he recognized, to the priest, but he belted them into baggy
folds. The other appeared shortly with a wooden tray bearing a platter of
cooked, yellow beans, a part loaf of coarse bread, raw eggs and a pitcher
of milk. "I thought," he explained, "you would wish something immediately;
there is no fire; Bartamon is out." The latter, Gordon knew, was a
sharp-witted old man who had made a precarious living in the local fields
and woodsheds until the priest had taken him as a general helper. "There
are neither coffee nor tea in the house," Merlier stated further.
He closed the book, moved the lamp to the end of the table, and stood with
his countenance lowered, his folded hands immovable as stone, while Gordon
Makimmon consumed the cold food. Once the priest replenished the other's
glass with milk.
If there had been a gleam of fraternal feeling, the slightest indication
of generous impulse, a mere accent of hospitality, in the priest's
actions, Gordon, accepting them in such spirit, might have been at ease.
But not the faintest spark of interest, of curiosity, the most perfunctory
communion of sympathy, was evident on Merlier's immobile countenance; his
movements were machine-like, he seemed infinitely removed from his
charitable act, infinitely cold.
Gordon's discomfort burned into a species of illogical, resentful anger.
He cursed the priest under his breath, choked on the food; he was heartily
sorry that he had obeyed the fleeting impulse to enter. But even the
anger expired before Merlier's impassivity--he must as well curse a figure
carved from granite, cast in lead. He grew, in turn, uneasy at the other's
supernatural detachment; it chilled his blood like the grip of an
unexpected, icy hand, like the imminence of inevitable death. The priest
resembled a dead man, a dead man who had remained quick in the mere
physical operations of the body, while all the machinery of his thoughts,
his feelings, lay motionless and cold within.
Gordon found relief in a customary cigarette when the uncomfortable repast
was finished. The priest removed the dishes, and reappeared with bed
linen, with which he proceeded to convert the bare couch into a provision
for sleeping. Then he returned the lamp to the center of the table, opened
the book and seated with his back squarely toward the room, addressed
himself to the pages.
Gordon Makimmon's head throbbed, suddenly paining him--it was as though
sharp, malicious fingers were compressing the spine at the base of his
brain. That, and the profound weariness which swept over him, were
disconcerting; he was so seldom ill, so rarely tired, that those unwelcome
symptoms bore an aggravated menace; it was the slight, premonitory
rusting, the corrosion of time, upon the iron of his manhood.
In an instinctive need for human support, the reassurance of the
comprehension of his kind, he directed an observation at the broad, squat,
somber back. "I might have been drunk a month," he asserted, "by the way I
feel." The priest paused in his reading, inserted a finger in the page,
and half turned. Gordon could see the full, smooth cheek, the drooping
gaze, against the green radiance of the lamp.
"If you will drink," Merlier said in a bitter, repressed voice, "if you
will indulge the flesh, don't whimper at the price." He made a gesture,
indicating the bed, then returned to his reading.
"The man doesn't live who's heard me whimper," Gordon began loudly; but
his angry protest trailed into silence. There was no comfort, no redress,
to be obtained from that absorbed, ungainly figure. He slipped out of the
baggy trousers, the worsted slippers, and, extending himself on the couch,
fell heavily asleep.