I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a bush near by. "I am going away soon," I said, "to the sea."
The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. "That will be very pleasant for me, won't it?" I said.
"The sea?" he returned coldly, with averted head. "Well, _I_ am bound still further."
The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. "Why are you so angry? What is your name? And where do you live?" It was my turn to ask questions, and I popped them out as if from a _Little by Little_.
And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into a long, low monologue. He gave me his name--and "Mr Anon" describes him no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my landlady's, of betraying and soiling myself.
Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of my book, and laughed also low in my heart.
"Oh, contempt!" he cried. "I am used to that."
The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs Bowater and her kind--mere Humanity--that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!
What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were mine; as if _I_ had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling, but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed air "a dewdrop could chill"; I was as near lovely naught made visible as the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones....
"Yes, a wren's picking," I rudely interrupted. "And what of my soul, please? Why, you talk like--like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady. What has _size_ to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her grave, I saw her spirit--young, younger than I, and bodiless, and infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame--though shadowy. Besides, I don't see how you can help _pitying_ men and women. They seem to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their numbers."