Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/43

 gold pattern that the Hand of Time had wiped into an indistinct blur.

As his sensitive, groping fingers touched the naked steel, he had the sudden impression of if something in his brain was being wrenched violently loose from its fastenings. It was as if his entire soul life and soul understanding were shifting within him with utter completeness. At that moment, something quite lonely, quite ancient, and quite untamed seemed to be born within him, or, rather, reborn. A new perception of life came to him, certain new and massive sensations which he felt instinctively, without being able to classify or to describe them.

It has been so ever since he could remember, ever since, an Eton “oppidan” home on vacation, he had found the ancient blade in the lumber room.

Whenever he touched the blade. It—that was the name he had given the unknown sensation during his boyhood years—would suddenly flash down upon him with terrific force, with the strength of wind and sun and sea and the stars. He would feel himself caught in a huge, irresistible whirlpool that swept out of the womb of the past, and back into the present—the future!

Once he had spoken of it to his father—he had been about fifteen at the time—and his father had dismissed it with a hooting bellow of laughter and an unkind allusion to “growing pains—what you need, my boy, is more cricket and less thinking. It ain’t good form to think so jolly much, you know!”

But he had always felt, felt now, that the blade had a meaning in his life.