Page:Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams.djvu/206

THE HILL OF DREAMS their designed rhythm, and rang with sonorous words, but he dreamed of a prose in which the music should be less explicit, of neumes rather than notes. He was astonished that morning at his own fortune and facility; he succeeded in covering a page of ruled paper wholly to his satisfaction, and the sentences, when he read them out, appeared to suggest a weird elusive chanting, exquisite but almost imperceptible, like the echo of the plainsong reverberated from the vault of a monastic church.

He thought that such happy mornings well repaid him for the anguish of depression which he sometimes had to suffer, and for the strange experience of 'possession' recurring at rare intervals, and usually after many weeks of severe diet. His income, he found, amounted to about sixty-five pounds a year, and he lived for weeks at a time on fifteen shillings a week. During these austere periods his only food was bread, at the rate of a loaf a day; but he drank huge draughts of green tea, and smoked a black tobacco, which seemed to him a more potent mother of thought than any drug from the scented East. 'I hope you go to some nice place for dinner,' wrote his cousin; 'there used to be some excellent 196