College students -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Murderers -- Fiction
He fetched Banker from the stable where he was kept and set off along
the hard white road. He had behaved very badly to Bunker, a but the dog
showed no signs of delight at his release. On other days when he had
been kept in his stable for a considerable time he had gone mad with joy
and jumped at his master, wagging his whole body in excitement. Now he
walked very slowly by Olva's side, a little way behind him; when
Olva spoke to him he wagged his tail, but as though it were duty that
impelled it.
The air grew colder aid colder--slowly now there had stolen on to the
heart of the blue sky white pinnacles of cloud--a dazzling whiteness,
but catching, mysteriously, the shadow of the gold light that heralded
the setting sun. These clouds were charged with snow; as they hung there
they seemed to radiate from their depths an even more piercing coldness.
They hung above Olva like a vast mountain range and had in their outline
so sharp and real an existence that they were part of the hard black
horizon, rising, immediately, out of the long, low, shivering flats.
There was no sound in all the world; behind him, sharply, the Cambridge
towers bit the sky--before him like a clenched hand was the little
wood.
The silence seemed to have a rhythm and voice of its own so that if one
listened, quite clearly the tramp of a marching army came over the level
ground. Always an army marching--and when suddenly a bird rose from the
canal with a sharp cry the tramping was caught, with the bird, for an
instant, into the air, and then when the cry was ended sank down again.
The wood enlarged; it lay upon the cold land now like a man's head; a
man with a cap. Spaces between the trees were eyes and it seemed that he
was lying behind the rim of the world and leaning his head upon the edge
of it and gazing. . . .
Bunker suddenly stopped and looked up at his master.
"Come on," Olva turned on to him sharply.
The dog looked at him, pleading. Then in Olva's dark stern face he
seemed to see that there was no relenting--that wood must be faced. He
moved forward again, but slowly, reluctantly. All this nonsense that
Lawrence had talked about Druids. We will soon see what to make of
that. And yet, in the wood, it did seem as though there were something
waiting. It was now no longer a man's head--only a dark, melancholy band
of trees, dead black now against the high white clouds.
There had risen in Olva the fighting spirit. Fear was still there,
ghastly fear, but also an anger, a rage. Why should he be thus
tormented? What had he done? Who was Carfax that the slaying of him
should be so unforgettable a sin? Moreover, had it been the mere vulgar
hauntings of remorse, terrors of a frightened conscience, he could
have turned upon himself the contempt that any Dune must deserve for so
ignoble a submission.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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