Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/86

74 over the table, and began to read at the opened Shakespeare. I read on till it grew a little dusk. All at once a few of the letters seemed to disappear or to have disappeared. I strained my eyes. More went. I peered closer. Two atmospheric circles almost invisible were out-turning on either side of my sight. In a little I could make out nothing but a blurred mass where the two small printed pages had been. I closed them up; then leant my face in my arms over the table and closed my eyes; but the two atmospheric circles almost invisible still were out-turning on either side of my sightlessness. I felt dimly that I had made that movement somewhere before: perhaps in a dream? No, it was not in a dream. I remember now. It was once when a boy (and that is why it may have seemed at first like a dream to me) went to the bench and, half upon it, leant his face in his arms on the cool table-cover.… And could not weep soft tears: the tears were dried behind his eyes.

I started up impatiently. I was crying, my hands were wet with my tears. This was all accursed folly! Hysteria: like a woman! What was the matter with me? Was I ill? Or going to be ill? Or what?… I was tired. That was all. It was nothing more.—But my eyes!… O God, if I break down! 'Nay!' I cried aloud, smiling through my tears. 'I'm the boy who says there is no God!' "The fool hath said in his heart" Cha! That's David's opinion. If ever I write Psalms, I'll put it the other way on. David was the man who never saw the righteous deserted nor the righteous man begging his bread. There 's "inspiration" for you! You blind old driveller you! into the ditch, I say! There'll be plenty of your tribe to follow.' I smiled again, but differently: 'Still Kebes: always hunting out something!' I had waited for thirteen days now.

It happened that, the afternoon after I had the affair with the eyes, coming home from Hampstead Heath by the Grove End Road with my eyes as usual on the ground, I saw what looked like a small part of a silver coin in a heap of dust by a lamp-post. I stopped;