Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett
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page 30 of 180 (16%)
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more often Tramtris.
Of other more sinister figures I remember two. R----s, who bullied me until I was provoked at last into facing him; a greedy, pale, lecherous boy, graceless, a liar, but extremely clever. I had a horror of him which endures now. If he, as I have, had a dweller in the deeps of him, his must have been a satyr. I cannot doubt it now. Disastrous ally for mortal man! Vice sat upon his face like a grease; vice made his fingers quick. He had a lickorous tongue and a taste for sweet things which even then made me sick. So repulsive was he to me, so impressed upon my fancy, that it was curious he did not haunt my inner life. But I never met him there. No shape of his ever encountered me in the wilds and solitary places. In the manifest world he afflicted me to an extent which the rogue-fairy in the wood could never have approached. Perhaps it was that all my being was forearmed against him, and that I fought him off. At any rate he never trespassed in my preserves. The other was R----d, a bleared and diseased creature, a thing of pity and terror to the wholesome, one of those outcasts of the world which every school has to know and reckon with. A furtive, nail-bitten, pick-nose wretch with an unholy hunger for ink, earth-worms and the like. What terrible tenant do the likes of these carry about with them! He, too, haunted me, but not fearfully; but he, too, I now understand too well, was haunted and ridden to doom. I pitied him, tried to be kind to him, tried to treat him as the human thing which in some sort he was. I discovered that when he was interested he forgot his loathsome cravings, and became almost lovable. I went home with him once, to a mean house in ----. He took me into the backyard and showed me his treasury--half a dozen rabbits, as many guinea-pigs, |
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