Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard
a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten
fact. For he remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d’Arc
years ago, when, hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend
Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate
dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless human
types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as a timid,
insufficient, and “weak” type, who would never marry; to regard Diana
Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for
her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady’s
daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as
if he had heard those distant drums.
“She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,” said Moon,
glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted
ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.
“Rather a small box for you, sir,” said the waggish Mr. Gould.
“Splendid room, though,” answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
head inside his Gladstone bag. “I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
like Gothic. By the way,” he cried out, pointing in quite a startling
way, “where does that door lead to?”
“To certain death, I should say,” answered Michael Moon, staring up at
a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
“I don’t think there’s a loft there; and I don’t know what else it
could lead to.” Long before he had finished his sentence the man with
the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after a
struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two
symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it
like a whole county upside down.
“Hullo, you fellows!” came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently
from some remote pinnacle. “Come up here; and bring some of my things
to eat and drink. It’s just the spot for a picnic.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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