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Updated: June 26, 2025
Once something hovered and fluttered round his head, but by an effort of will he drove that impression out of his mind again. In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him upon theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with briar, and smoked as they wrangled. "Look at that moth!" said Hapley, suddenly, pointing to the edge of the wooden table.
And very soon he was hard at work, in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the way-side pool. It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special form of green shade.
But few of those who heard him I was absent from that meeting realised how ill the man was. Hapley had got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed with a simply brutal attack upon Pawkins, in the form of a paper upon the development of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of a most extraordinary amount of mental labour, and yet couched in a violently controversial tone.
It was a dim grey night; an almost unbroken sheet of watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge and trees in front of the house were black against the pale roadway. They saw Hapley, looking like a ghost in his shirt and white trousers, running to and fro in the road, and beating the air.
At this the moth grew bolder, and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he struck out violently with his arms, they tied these also. At this the moth came and crawled over his face, and Hapley wept, swore, screamed, prayed for them to take it off him, unavailingly. The doctor was a blockhead, a just-qualified general practitioner, and quite ignorant of mental science.
And very soon he was hard at work in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the way-side pool. It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp with the special form of green shade.
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.
"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.
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 influenza, proceed to pneumonia, and 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 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.
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