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(20)

     For now had c ome that moment, that hesitation when dawn
trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale
it will be weighed down. One feather, and the house, sinking,
falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of
darkness. In the ruined room, picknickers would have lit their
kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying on the bare boards;
and the shepherd stored his dinner on the fallen bricks, and the
tramp slept with his c oat round him to ward off the cold. Then
the roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks burgeoning,
curving, would have blotted out path, step and window, would have
grown, unequally but lustily over the mound, until some trespasser,
losing his way, could have told only by a red hot poker among
nettles, or a scrap of blue china in the hemlock, that here once
someone had lived; there had been a house.
     If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale down-
wards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie
upon the sands of oblivion. But there was a force working;
something not highly conscious; something that leered, something
that lurched; something not inspired to go about its work with
dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs. McNab groaned; Mrs.
Bast, her crony, creaked. They were old; they were stiff; their
legs ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they
got to work. All of a sudden, would Mrs. McNab see that the
house was ready, one of the young ladies wrote; would she get
this done: would she get that done; all in a hurry. They might

 


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