It will now be seen why the garden, the book, and the letter were the three symbols of his life, summing up as they did his love of out-of-door doings, his meditations, his anxieties. His life in the garden had granted serenity to his forehead, the reading of his few books had filled his eyes with reverie, and the feeling that he was not quite a good citizen had given a slight and occasional trembling to his lips.
He opened the letter. Its contents were what he had long expected. His uncle offered to take him into his office. He laid it spread out before him—a foot on each margin, right and left—and looked at it, turning the matter over and over in his mind. Would he go? would he stay? He did not like the idea much. The lounger in him did not enjoy the thought of London. Gradually his mind wandered away into scheming—infinite scheming—what he would do if he went, what he would do if he did not go.
A beetle, attracted by the faint sunlight, had crawled out of his hole. It saw the paper and crept on to it, the better to catch the sunlight. Sherman saw the beetle but his mind was not occupied with it. “Shall I tell Mary Carton?” he was thinking. Mary had long been his adviser and friend. She was, indeed, everybody’s adviser. Yes, he would ask her what to do. Then again he thought—no, he would decide for himself. The beetle began to move. “If it goes off the paper by the top I will ask her—if by the bottom I will not.”
The beetle went off by the top. He got up with an air of decision and went into the tool-house and began sorting seeds and picking out the light ones, sometimes stopping to watch a spider; for he knew he must wait till the afternoon to see Mary Carton. The tool-house was a favourite place with him. He often read there and watched the spiders in the corners.
“Mother,” he said, “would you much mind if we went away from this?”
“I have often told you,” she answered, “I do not like one place better than another. I like them all equally little.”
After dinner he went again into the tool-house. This time he did not sort seeds—only watched the spiders.
Towards evening he went out. The pale sunshine of winter flickered on his path. The wind blew the straws about. He grew more and more melancholy. A dog of his acquaintance was chasing rabbits in a field. He had never been known to catch one, and since his youth had never seen one for he was almost wholly blind. They were his form of the eternal chimera. The dog left the field and followed with a friendly sniff.