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Tarbury's house, when she got to it, presented its usual Sunday afternoon appearance. The window curtains were up at all angles in the dining-room, hot sunshine streamed through the fly- specked panes, the draught from the open door drove a wild whirl of newspapers over the room. Cigarette smoke hung heavy upon the air.
And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fulfil an order. He turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind, I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it.
At every pause the train made at the little wayside stations, this gentleman became visibly more impatient, pulling out his watch, consulting his time table, and cursing the delay. Occasionally he glanced out through the window across the white plain that stretched level to the horizon, specked here and there by infrequent little black shacks and by huge stacks of straw half buried in snow.
"I am thy friend," said the man, "fear nothing, for I shall be with thee always." Then the man and the hound disappeared as if they had been resolved into the rays of the sun; Setanta saw nothing, only the grey-necked crow starting for flight. Then a second man in a wide blue mantle specked with white like flying foam came against him and flung his mantle over Setanta.
In one corner was a desk knocked together of boards, littered with papers; near it on the floor were boxes stuffed with rolls of blue-prints; the wall spaces between windows were filled with statements and reports; bulging card-board files rested on a shelf; from nails hung an old coat and a camera; in another corner leaned a tripod, rod, and a six-foot brass-edged measure specked with clay; and piled in a heap beyond the stove were a saddle, a pair of boots, chunks of piñon pine, and a discarded flannel shirt on which lay a gray cat nursing a kitten.
A crisp breeze from the river hinted at the possibility of frost when the night should have become older. The grass at one side of the steps was specked with the white stubs of Grandemont's cigarettes. The cotton-broker's clerk sat in his chair with the smoke spiralling above him. I doubt that he once thought of the little fortune he had so impotently squandered.
The old woman wiped her eyes as she said to her companion, "Hit do seem a speshul blessin', Lizy, dat I been spaihed to see dat chile once mo' in de flesh. He sholy was mighty nigh to my hea't, an' w'en he went erway, I thought it 'ud kill me. But I kin see now dat hit uz all fu' de bes'. Think o' 'Rastus comin' home, er big man! Who'd evah 'specked dat?"
Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs, specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high. It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois even could climb those precipices. Lovers on opposite cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond with a rifle.
He had been there so often when he wanted a handful of cookies and knew, if he clinked the cover, he might hear his father's voice from the dining-room where he sat reading his paper: "What are you doing out there?" The cookies were waiting for him, unchanged, as if there were an everlasting pattern of cookies and you couldn't get away from it: oak-leaf, discreetly specked with caraway.
"Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind and wailing and alone, Into the light of day. *. "From the unknown sea that reels and rolls, Specked with the barks of little souls, Barks that were launched on the other side, And slipped from Heaven on an ebbing tide." The wealth of material, however, clustering around each period of developing life is so great that selection must be made.
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