"I think something must have happened to my watch," Peter
said, next day.
Indeed, its hands moved with extraordinary, with exasperating
slowness.
"It seems absurd that it should do no good to push them on," he
thought.
He would force himself, between twice ascertaining their
position, to wait for a period that felt like an eternity,
walking about miserably, and smoking flavourless cigarettes;
--then he would stand amazed, incredulous, when, with a smirk
(as it almost struck him) of ironical complacence, they would
attest that his eternity had lasted something near a quarter of
an hour.
"And I had professed myself a Kantian, and made light of the
objective reality of Time! thou laggard, Time!" he cried, and
shook his fist at Space, Time's unoffending consort.
"I believe it will never be four o'clock again," he said, in
despair, finally; and once more had out his watch. It was
half-past three. He scowled at the instrument's bland white
face. "You have no bowels, no sensibilities--nothing but dry
little methodical jog-trot wheels and pivots!" he exclaimed,
flying to insult for relief. "You're as inhuman as a French
functionary. Do you call yourself a sympathetic comrade for an
impatient man?" He laid it open on his rustic table, and waited
through a last eternity. At a quarter to four he crossed the
river. "If I am early--tant pis!" he decided, choosing the
lesser of two evils, and challenging Fate.
He crossed the river, and stood for the first time in the
grounds of Ventirose--stood where she had been in the habit of
standing, during their water-side colloquies. He glanced back
at his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as
it were, from her point of view. They had a queer air of
belonging to an era that had passed, to a yesterday already
remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover--the
garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped
sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them--left
them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the
day, to be sure; but then everything would be different. A
chapter would have added itself to the history of the world; a
great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken
place.
He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend.
He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even
that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity. The
ice-broken, if you will, but still present in abundance--would
have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but then a
new era would have begun.