The Cardinal's Snuff Box

"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.