His attention had been caught by a vague movement there. Through the high grass he could see something struggling and bounding in sudden, sharp movement.
It was the inevitable Maestro. He was on top of Hafner, who also had come back to life, and was "kneeing" him with characteristic enthusiasm.
"Mr. Referee," screamed the gentle educator, when he had been pulled away by Roberts, aided by a corporal's squad; "Mr. Referee, he crawled after you blew the whistle! Put that ball back, you scalawag. Our ball!"
Then he fainted, which, considering the day's work, was about the proper thing to do.
Out over Mariveles the sun had set in sombre splendour. A velvet pall of darkness had fallen upon the earth like a conclusion; but the waters of the bay still glowed, glowed with a light that was not reflected, but floated up from within--a luminous exhalation, as it were, from the mysterious depths--a dark purplish light that should not have been, which astonished the soul and was sinister. Someone on the veranda mentioned Morton. The short, idle sentence split the peace of the moment like an electric spark. And the silence that immediately engulfed it was not as the silence that had been before; it was a silence full of unrest, of vague spiritual heavings and stirrings, of tumult invisible, unheard, impalpable and yet felt, poignantly felt, in some immaterial way, as is felt at sea the surge of waters through the impenetrability of the mists. It was such a silence as always followed the invocation of the man; for his case was one which filled us with inward clamour and questioning, and yet pinned us beneath the weight of some indefinable oppression.
But Courtland began to speak, and we leaned forward, intent, knowing that he must understand. Yet his first words were a confession of doubt, of that same inability to pierce the depths of the thing and pass sentence which exasperated us all vaguely.
"I don't know if I understand--yet," he began, slowly. "I've stared and stared at it--and yet--I don't know. Sometimes I think I understand--a little more every day--and yet----"
His voice had droned off gradually. A heavy torpor descended from the low sky. Far out lights flared up, red, dishevelled lights that bounded and leaped, up and down, to and fro, in frenzied dance. The Tagal fishermen were calling the fish with their alluring flames; the soft, insistent tapping of their paddles upon the flanks of their canoes came to our ears like hypnotic suggestion. They began to shout, a mad medley of yells that wavered, broke, began again and at last welded in one long, quavering cry full of incomprehensible desolation.