to be
dreadfully closing in upon him. The old house conveyed a sense of having
the power to choke out of him every sane and orderly and decent impulse.
For a whim of tristfulness, for the luxury of consummating the ineffable
depression the house created in him, Michael prepared to glance at every
one of the five rooms. The front door armed with the exaggerated
defenses of an earlier period in building tempted him to lock and
double-lock it, to draw each bolt and to fasten the two clanking chains.
He had the fantastic notion to do this so that Mr. and Mrs. Murdoch and
Poppy might stay knocking and ringing outside in the summer night, while
himself escaped into the sunflowers of the back garden and went climbing
over garden wall and garden wall to abandon this curious mixture of
salacity and respectableness, of flimsiness and solidity, this quite
indefinably raffish and sinister and yet in a way strangely cozy house.
He opened gingerly the door of the ground-floor front. He peered
cautiously in, lest Poppy should be lying on her bed. The gas-jet was
glimmering with a scarcely perceptible pinhead of blue flame, but the
light from the passage showed all her clothes still strewn about. From
the open door came out the faint perfume of stale scent which mingled
with the fusty odor of the passage in a most subtle expression of the
house's personality. He closed the door gently. In the silence it seemed
almost as if the least percussion would rouse the very clothes from
their stupor of disuse. In the kitchen was burning another pinhead of
gas, and the light from the passage reaching here very dimly was only
just sufficient to give all the utensils a ghostly sheen and to show the
mutilated hands at a quarter past five upon the luminous face of the
clock. This unreal hour added the last touch to unreality, and when
Michael went upstairs and saw the books littering his room, even they
were scarcely sound guarantors of his own actuality. He had a certain
queasiness in opening the door of the Murdochs' bedroom, and he was
rather glad when he was confronted here by a black void whose secrecy he
did not feel tempted to violate. With three or four books under his arm
he went upstairs to bed. As he leaned out of the window two cats yawled
and fizzed at one another among the laurels, and then scampered away
into muteness. From a scintillation of colored lights upon the horizon
he could hear the scrannel sounds of the railway come thinly al