All you have talked about I have known since I took the bungalow.
Stay on and wait. Tietjens has left me. Are you going too?"
I had seen him through one little affair connected with an idol that had
brought me to the doors of a lunatic asylum, and I had no desire to help him
through further experiences. He was a man to whom unpleasantnesses arrived as
do dinners to ordinary people.
Therefore I explained more clearly than ever that I liked him immensely, and
would he happy to see him in the daytime, but that I didn't care to sleep under
his roof. This was after dinner, when Tietjens had gone out to lie in the
veranda.
"'Pon my soul, I don't wonder," said Strickland, with his eyes on the ceiling-
cloth. "Look at that."
The tails of two snakes were hanging between the cloth and the cornice of the
wall. They threw long shadows in the lamp-light. "If you are afraid of snakes,
of course"--said Strickland. "I hate and fear snakes, because if you look into
the eyes of any snake you will see that it knows all and more of man's fall,
and that it feels all the contempt that the devil felt when Adam was evicted
from Eden. Besides which its bite is generally fatal, and it bursts up trouser
legs."
"You ought to get your thatch over-hauled," I said.
Pages:
1275
1276
1277
1278
1279
1280
1281
1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288
1289
1290
1291
1292
1293
1294
1295
1296
1297
1298
1299