Limekiller!

His heart wrenched for her; he tried a religious approach; surely that would work: “Surely you don’t believe that a loving God would give such dreadful powers to any human being?” he asked, he thought, persuasively. Expecting that at once she would become restored; but -

“I do! I do!. - in a passion of conviction she had cried the words in a low and wavering voice; and again she hid her face in her hand; and she trembled. “Don’t talk about it,” she said.

Limekiller — did he love her? He often made love to her; therefore, say what you will, in a way he did love her — Limekiller sought swift and deep for some verse, scriptural or even merely literary, for instant quotation and comfort: woe that he had been raised in the mere afterglow of the once-fierce fires of the Churches of England and of Scotland; and could think of nothing, not one word more, than this:

The rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity.

— and what was that from? from Silas Marner, poor dear horsefaced “George Eliot,” Mary Anne something-or-other-who-gave-a- spit: utterly useless, now, as, seemingly, utterly true. Insofar as any comfort to Bathsheba w'as concerned. My greatgrandFather was Black and my grandMother was an Indian woman and my grandFather was an Englishman and if God had wanted me be born White I would have been born White: lam Bay folk. Well: every man hath his own madness; every woman as well; and one need not be Bayfolk to be afraid of and not comforted by the evidence of things not seen.

Though some — some? — many — claimed to have seen them.

Some Yankee had said to him, quite without hostility', laxly and idly even, “Canada is kind of nice but it, somehow, oh, it lacks sparkle;” and he had said, instantly, “It’s not flashy, if that’s what you mean…” And yet he knew it was in search of either flash or sparkle that he had left Canada (whose own 20th century, despite Sir Wilfred Laurier, had never yet come, was yet to come: never). And whenever, doom here, say on some day of boiling heat or torrents of rain, he felt in any w'ay homesick, he obliged himself to remember Canada at its own dimmest coldest starchiest dullest; the Monday smell of Sunday’s heavy greasy dinner in or on Prince Edward’s island; the old red brick farmhouse in the outlands of Kingston, Ontario, with the hundred year-old scrapbook of church news for light reading, and the unlovely chemical toilet (“Yes,” said Cousin Alix with great satisfaction, “it is so nice having it, and indoors, too.”); Sunday in Sudbury; the sullen even surly faces of every all who would answer no question not couched in French, or anyway Joual, simply turning away without even a denial of having any English. Canada too had heat and rain; Canada had snow as well. and snow. and snow. and snow. and.

It was safe enough sailing there, inside (and well inside) the Great Reef; like sailing in a giant bath; if coral was high enough to spring the boat, the boat would not much sink.

The Duckersons had brought along a pair of binoculars, they had not brought along two, but Jack by now realized well that, however other the couple might seem to him, they were nevertheless fairly solid and trustworthy and although he might not have cared, had he awakened with a case of clap, to trust its cure to Doctor’s adjustments of your subluxation of your third or any other vertebrar: still, they did not drop things. So he had taken out his much-be-loved and leather-bound spyglass. And lent it to them. While he tended the tiller, they allowed their vision, much magnified, to pick and play along the white and distant strand and the green walls of woods behind them. and, perhaps, for he did not attempt to calculate the angles of their viewing, perhaps also and now and then the Mountains of the Morning. these last obviously named by people who had lived on the other side of the said mountains: the Japanese after all had not themselves in Japan named their nation The Land of the Rising Sun: if you live in japan, the sun rises from the Pacific.

“What’s that, Daddv, over there bv those two trees?” Mrs. now enquired.

Somewhat marvelously, her husband knew exactly which two trees she meant, and at once; “It’s a man,” he said, “no it’s not no man.”

“I thought ut was a man, well, ut’s gone, now.”