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Updated: June 26, 2025
Then rage, the old rage the rage he had so often felt against Pawkins came upon him again. He went on, leaping and striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on nothing, and fell headlong. There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalkpits, with a leg twisted back under him.
It had killed Pawkins, but it had also thrown Hapley out of gear, so to speak, and his doctor advised him to give up work for a time, and rest. So Hapley went down into a quiet village in Kent, and thought day and night of Pawkins, and good things it was now impossible to say about him. At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the pre-occupation tended.
He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the face, and making his last speech every sentence a beautiful opening for Hapley. He turned to fiction and found it had no grip on him. He read the "Island Nights' Entertainments" until his "sense of causation" was shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat on the edge of the bed in his shirt sleeves and reasoned with himself. Was it pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for his sanity with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed against Pawkins. So persistent is mental habit, that he felt as if it were still a struggle with Pawkins.
He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when it came it surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch the influenza, to proceed to pneumonia, and to die. It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the circumstances, and largely turned the current of feeling against Hapley.
He soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping ineffectually against check-mate, and Hapley decided to give up chess. Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be better diversion.
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters one can fancy the man's disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for his antagonist and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it.
"Where?" said the Vicar. "You don't see a moth on the edge of the table there?" said Hapley. "Certainly not," said the Vicar. Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him. Clearly the man saw nothing. "The eye of faith is no better than the eye of science," said Hapley awkwardly. "I don't see your point," said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the argument.
It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion! It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were closed. Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when fluttering to its present position. Strange that it should match the table-cloth. Stranger far that to him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was altogether unknown. There was no delusion.
"What was that fearful smash?" she said. "Has anything " The strange moth appeared fluttering about the chink of the door. "Shut that door!" said Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her. The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then in the pause he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door, and drag something heavy across the room and put against it.
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