It was as though some spell had been thrown over him.
It was a lovely evening and he walked slowly, not wishing to enter
his house too quickly. He realised that he had, during the last
weeks, found nothing there but trouble. And if Maggie wished, in
spite of what he had told her, to go on with him? And if his father,
impatient at last, definitely asked him to stay at home altogether
and insisted on an answer? And if his gradually increasing
estrangement with his sister broke into open quarrel? And if,
strangest of all, this religious business, that in such
manifestations as the Chapel service of last night he hated with all
his soul, held him after all?
He was in Garrick Street, outside the curiosity shop, his latchkey
in his hand. He stopped and stared down the street as he had done
once before, weeks ago. Was not the root of all his trouble simply
this, that he was becoming against his will interested, drawn in?
That there were things going on that his common sense rejected as
nonsense, but that nevertheless were throwing out feelers like the
twisting threats of an octopus, touching him now, only faintly, here
for a second, there for a second, but fascinating, holding him so
that he could not run away? Granted that Thurston was a charlatan,
Miss Avies a humbug, his sister a fool, his father a dreamer,
Crashaw a fanatic, did that mean that the power behind them all was
sham? Was that force that he had felt when he was a child simply
eager superstition? What was behind this street, this moon, these
hurrying figures, his own daily life and thoughts? Was there really
a vast conspiracy, a huge involving plot moving under the cardboard
surface of the world, a plot that he had by an accident of birth
spied upon and discovered?
Always, every day now, thoughts, suspicions, speculations were
coming upon him, uninvited, undesired, from somewhere, from some
one.
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