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“‘My father looked very white and ill, as was natural enough; but his face now had a peaceful, contented expression. I didn’t understand at first that he, in his turn, was dying. But it wasn’t of a broken heart, as you might suppose, or anything like that; he had gnawed his left wrist until he got the arteries open; and he was bleeding to death.

“‘Once a big dead fish was washed up on the beach–it was when I was quite a little boy–but I remembered how, after a day or two, even my parents had no trouble in finding it, and I remembered how my father had scooped a hole in the sand and buried it. So I scooped a great deep hole in the sand, very deep until water began to trickle into it. And I had sense enough, when it came to filling up the hole, to put in lots of big stones, the biggest I could roll in. And I’m strong. I stayed on–for about six months, getting lonelier and lonelier–and then spring came. I think that was really what started me. I still go almost crazy every spring–anyway I got to this place, and found people.'”

* * * * *

“What’s he doing now?” asked Pedder.

“He’s trying,” said Gardiner, “to do it in English. Of course it seems impossible that he should succeed. But then it was absolutely impossible for Shakespeare to do what he did with the English language, wasn’t it? And yet he did it.”

“But–” said Pedder.

“Ped,” said Gardiner, “we don’t control the lightnings; and you never can tell where they are going to strike next–or when.”

Ludlow flushed a little, and did not look at his friends.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” he said, “to be loved and to be in love the way his father and mother were. Maybe they were the ones that really heard and saw, and–sang. We admire the lily, but we owe her to the loves of the blind rain for the deaf and the dumb earth….”

Nobody spoke for some moments. It had been the only allusion that Ludlow had made in years and years to that which had left him a lonely and a cynical man.

“I wonder,” Pedder mused, “how it ever occurred to a blind, deaf mute that severing his wrist with his teeth would induce death?”

Gardiner shrugged his shoulders.

“It is always interesting,” he said, “to know just which part of a story–if any–is thought worthy of consideration by a given individual.”