For many years he remembered that day. He was alone in his brickfield
on a gusty March morning-the Easter holidays had released him from
school-squatting by his hole under the lee of a mass of earth and
rubbish. It was a mean expanse, blackened by soot and defiled by
refuse. Here and there bramble and stunted gorse struggled for an
existence; but the flora mainly consisted in bits of old boots and foul
raiment protruding grotesquely from the soil, half-buried cans, rusty
bits of iron, and broken bottles. On one side the backs of grimy little
houses, their yards full of fluttering drab underwear, marked the edge
of the hopeless town which rose above them in forbidding buildings,
belching chimney shafts and the spikes of a couple of spires. On the
other sides it was bounded by the brick walls of factories, the
municipal gasworks and the approach to the railway station, indicated
by signal-posts standing out against the sky like gallows, and a
tram-line bordered by a row of skeleton cottages. Golgotha was a grim
garden compared with Paul's brickfield. Sometimes the children of the
town scuttled about it like dingy little rabbits. But more often it was
a desolate solitude. Perhaps all but the lowest of the parents of
Bludston had put the place out of bounds, as gipsies and other dwellers
in vans were allowed to camp there. It also bore an evil name because a
night murder or two had been committed in its murky seclusion. Paul
knew the exact spot, an ugly cavity toward the gasworks end, where a
woman had been "done in," and even he, lord of the brickfield,
preferred to remain at a purifying distance. But it was his own domain.
He felt in it a certain pride of possession. The hollow under the lee
of the rubbish-heap, by the side of the hole where he kept his paper
library, was the most homelike place he knew.
For many years he remembered that day. The light that never was on sea
or land fell upon the brickfield. He had read the story at one stretch.
He had sat there for hours reading, for hours rapt in his Vision. At
last material darkness began to gather round him, and he awoke with a
start to realization that he had been sitting there most of the day.
With a sigh he replaced his book in the hole, which he cunningly masked
with a lump of hard clay, and, feeling stiff and cold, ran, childlike,
homeward. In the silence of the night he took out his cornelian heart
and fondled it. The day had been curiously like, yet utterly unlike,
the day on which she had taken it from her neck. In a dim fashion he
knew that the two days were of infinite significance in his life and
were complementary. He had been waiting, as it were, for nine months
for this day's revelation, this day's confirmation.