Authors: Hilaire Belloc
Tags: #Azizex666, #Fiction, #General, #Literary Collections, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #European
First and Last (26 page)
"I assure you it was a very wonderful sight, and I was awed though I was not afraid. And how glad I was to find that the world had an edge to it, and that all that talk about its being round was nonsense!
"When the sun was set it grew dark, and I returned to find my boat; but I must have missed my way, for the track became broader and better, and at last I came to a gate of a human sort, with an initial on it, which showed that it had been put up by some landlord. It was an open gate, and after I had entered it I came upon a broad highway, beautifully metalled, and when I had gone along this for less than half a mile I came to this inn where I am now sitting. That was a week ago, and I have been here ever since. They took me in kindly enough, but they would not believe what I had to tell them about the End of the World. It is a great pity, gentlemen, for that wonderful sight is to be discovered somewhere hereabouts, and a mere accident of my losing my way in the darkness makes it difficult for me to find it by daylight."
Having said all this, the stranger was silent.
One of my companions whispered to me that the old man must be mad. The stranger overheard him, and said with a thin smile:
"Oh, I know all about that; several have suggested it already; but it is no answer, for if I did not come from the End of the World, where did I come from? No one has seen me hereabouts during the last few days until I came to this inn. And all the first part of my journey I can very easily explain, for I have notes of it, and it lasted for years. It is only this last part which seems to me so difficult.... I tell you I lost my way, and when a man has lost his way at night he can never find it again in the daytime."
As he spoke he took a little piece of folded paper, rather dirty, out of his inner pocket, on which a rough sketch-map was drawn, and he began touching it with a stump of pencil that he held in his hand. His eyes seemed to grow dimmer as he did so, and he leaned his head upon his hand. "I think I have got hold of it, gentlemen," he said.
We did not get up or go too near him, for we thought he might be dangerous.
"I think, gentlemen," he repeated in a more mumbling and lower and less certain voice, "I think I have got hold of it. I go backwards again through the gate to the right, just as then I went to the left, and after that it cannot be very far, for I see those two rocks in front of me. Besides which," he muttered less and less coherently, "I ought to have remembered of course those very high and silent hills with nothing living upon them...." And he added, half asleep, as his head dropped upon his hand, "It was westward.... I had forgotten that." Having so spoken, he seemed to fall asleep altogether, and his head fell back upon the corner of the wainscoting behind the bench where he sat. He made no noise in breathing as he slept.
It was the first time that any of us young men had come across this fairly common sight of a man who took things within for things without; some of us were frightened, and all of us wished to be rid of the place and to get away. As we went out we told the landlord nothing either of the old fellow's vagaries or of his sleep, but we went out and reached the town of Whitney, and when we had stayed there a couple of hours or so we went out southward to the station and waited there for the train which should take us back to Oxford.
While we were waiting there in the station two farmers were talking together. One said to the other:
"Ar, if he'd paid them they wouldn't have minded so much."
To which the other answered:
"Ar, 'tisn't only the paying: it's always an awkward thing when a man dies in your house, specially if it's licensed. My wife's brother was caught that way."
Then as they went on talking we found that they were talking of the man in the inn, who it seems had not slept very long, but was dead, and had died in that same room. It was a shocking thing to hear. The first farmer said to the second in the railway carriage when we had all got in:
"Where'd he come from?"
The other, who was an old man, grinned and said:
"Where we all come from, I suppose, and where we all go to." He touched his forehead with his hand. "He said he'd come from the End of the World."
"Ar," said the other gloomily in answer, "like enough!" And after that they talked no more about the matter.
1.
The Rhododendrons on the great lawn are modern.
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