The Hound of Death - Agatha Christie [72]
‘And what,’ asked Seldon, ‘of all the other things that used to mean so much to you?’
‘That’s the worst of it. I care for them still as much as, if not more than, ever. And these things, comfort, luxury, pleasure, seem to pull opposite ways to the Wings. It’s a perpetual struggle between them–and I can’t see how it’s going to end.’
Seldon sat silent. The strange tale he had been listening to was fantastic enough in all truth. Was it all a delusion, a wild hallucination–or could it by any possibility be true? And if so, why Hamer, of all men…? Surely the materialist, the man who loved the flesh and denied the spirit, was the last man to see the sights of another world.
Across the table Hamer watched him anxiously.
‘I suppose,’ said Seldon slowly, ‘that you can only wait. Wait and see what happens.’
‘I can’t! I tell you I can’t! Your saying that shows you don’t understand. It’s tearing me in two, this awful struggle–this killing long-drawn-out fight between–between–’ He hesitated.
‘The flesh and the spirit?’ suggested Seldon.
Hamer stared heavily in front of him. ‘I suppose one might call it that. Anyway, it’s unbearable…I can’t get free…’
Again Bernard Seldon shook his head. He was caught up in the grip of the inexplicable. He made one more suggestion.
‘If I were you,’ he advised, ‘I would get hold of that cripple.’
But as he went home he muttered to himself: ‘Canals–I wonder.’
III
Silas Hamer went out of the house the following morning with a new determination in his step. He had decided to take Seldon’s advice and find the legless man. Yet inwardly he was convinced that his search would be in vain and that the man would have vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up.
The dark buildings on either side of the passageway shut out the sunlight and left it dark and mysterious. Only in one place, half-way up it, there was a break in the wall, and through it there fell a shaft of golden light that illuminated with radiance a figure sitting on the ground. A figure–yes, it was the man!
The instrument of pipes leaned against the wall beside his crutches, and he was covering the paving stones with designs in coloured chalk. Two were completed, sylvan scenes of marvellous beauty and delicacy, swaying trees and a leaping brook that seemed alive.
And again Hamer doubted. Was this man a mere street musician, a pavement artist? Or was he something more…
Suddenly the millionaire’s self-control broke down, and he cried fiercely and angrily: ‘Who are you? For God’s sake, who are you?’
The man’s eyes met his, smiling.
‘Why don’t you answer? Speak, man, speak!’
Then he noticed that the man was drawing with incredible rapidity on a bare slab of stone. Hamer followed the movement with his eyes…A few bold strokes, and giant trees took form. Then, seated on a boulder…a man…playing an instrument of pipes. A man with a strangely beautiful face–and goat’s legs…
The cripple’s hand made a swift movement. The man still sat on the rock, but the goat’s legs were gone. Again his eyes met Hamer’s.
‘They were evil,’ he said.
Hamer stared, fascinated. For the face before him was the face of the picture, but strangely and incredibly beautified…Purified from all but an intense and exquisite joy of living.
Hamer turned and almost fled down the passageway into the bright sunlight, repeating to himself incessantly: ‘It’s impossible. Impossible…I’m mad–dreaming!’ But the face haunted him–the face of Pan…
He went into the Park and sat on a chair. It was a deserted hour. A few nursemaids with their charges sat in the shade of the trees, and dotted here and there in the stretches of green, like islands in a sea, lay the recumbent forms of men…
The words ‘a wretched tramp’ were to Hamer an epitome of misery. But suddenly, today, he envied them…
They seemed to him of all created