And now----”

She rose. “Aunt Hester, you shouldn’t leave your sentences unfinished,” I said. She shook her head. “My dear, that sentence will finish itself,” she said. “But what a time
of night! I must go to bed, and you too, or they will think we have to
keep lights burning here through the dark hours.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the
windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking
out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the
shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That,
as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now
returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap
of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one like
globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious
lights and reflections. Then, raising my eyes a little, I saw against
the black hill-side the windows of the quarry-house still alight. Morning, as is so often the case, brought no shattering of my illusion. As I began to regain consciousness, I fancied that I was a boy again
waking up in the shelter in the garden, and though, as I grew more
widely awake, I smiled at the impression, that on which it was based
I found to be indeed true. It was sufficient now as then to be here,
to wander again on the cliffs, and hear the popping of the ripened
seed-pods on the gorse-bushes; to stray along the shore to the
bathing-cove, to float and drift and swim in the warm tide, and bask
on the sand, and watch the gulls fishing, to lounge on the pier-head
with the fisher-folk, to see in their eyes and hear in their quiet
speech the evidence of secret things not so much known to them as
part of their instincts and their very being. There were powers and
presences about me; the white poplars that stood by the stream that
babbled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their
knowledge sometimes, like the gleam of their white underleaves; the
very cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it.... All that I
wanted was to lie there and grow soaked in it too; unconsciously, as
a boy, I had done that, but now the process must be conscious. I must
know what stir of forces, fruitful and mysterious, seethed along the
hill-side at noon, and sparkled at night on the sea. They could be
known, they could even be controlled by those who were masters of the
spell, but never could they be spoken of, for they were dwellers in the
innermost, grafted into the eternal life of the world. There were dark
secrets as well as these clear, kindly powers, and to these no doubt
belonged the _negotium perambulans in tenebris_ which, though of deadly
malignity, might be regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of
sacrilegious and impious deeds.... All this was part of the spell of
Polearn, of which the seeds had long lain dormant in me. But now they
were sprouting, and who knew what strange flower would unfold on their
stems? It was not long before I came across John Evans. One morning, as I lay
on the beach, there came shambling across the sand a man stout and
middle-aged with the face of Silenus. He paused as he drew near and
regarded me from narrow eyes. “Why, you’re the little chap that used to live in the parson’s garden,”
he said. “Don’t you recognise me?”

I saw who it was when he spoke: his voice, I think, instructed me, and
recognising it, I could see the features of the strong, alert young man
in this gross caricature. “Yes, you’re John Evans,” I said. “You used to be very kind to me: you
used to draw pictures for me.”

“So I did, and I’ll draw you some more. Been bathing? That’s a risky
performance. You never know what lives in the sea, nor what lives on
the land for that matter. Not that I heed them. I stick to work and
whisky. God! I’ve learned to paint since I saw you, and drink too for
that matter. I live in the quarry-house, you know, and it’s a powerful
thirsty place. Come and have a look at my things if you’re passing. Staying with your aunt, are you? I could do a wonderful portrait of
her. Interesting face; she knows a lot. People who live at Polearn get
to know a lot, though I don’t take much stock in that sort of knowledge
myself.”

I do not know when I have been at once so repelled and interested. Behind the mere grossness of his face there lurked something which,
while it appalled, yet fascinated me. His thick lisping speech had the
same quality. And his paintings, what would they be like?... “I was just going home,” I said. “I’ll gladly come in, if you’ll allow
me.”

He took me through the untended and overgrown garden into the house
which I had never yet entered. A great grey cat was sunning itself in
the window, and an old woman was laying lunch in a corner of the cool
hall into which the door opened. It was built of stone, and the carved
mouldings let into the walls, the fragments of gargoyles and sculptured
images, bore testimony to the truth of its having been built out of
the demolished church. In one corner was an oblong and carved wooden
table littered with a painter’s apparatus and stacks of canvases leaned
against the walls. He jerked his thumb towards a head of an angel that was built into the
mantelpiece and giggled. “Quite a sanctified air,” he said, “so we tone it down for the
purposes of ordinary life by a different sort of art. Have a drink? No? Well, turn over some of my pictures while I put myself to rights.”

He was justified in his own estimate of his skill: he could paint (and
apparently he could paint anything), but never have I seen pictures
so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and
you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a
drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now
seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There
was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing
which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his
garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were
presences ready to spring out on you....

“Well, do you like my style?” he said as he came up, glass in hand. (The tumbler of spirits that he held had not been diluted.) “I try to
paint the essence of what I see, not the mere husk and skin of it, but
its nature, where it comes from and what gave it birth. There’s much
in common between a cat and a fuchsia-bush if you look at them closely
enough. Everything came out of the slime of the pit, and it’s all going
back there. I should like to do a picture of you some day. I’d hold the
mirror up to Nature, as that old lunatic said.”

After this first meeting I saw him occasionally throughout the months
of that wonderful summer.