And even when
she had lashed him with her tongue, as she did sometimes, he still
laughed--after the smart was over--because he liked spirit. He would
never have a horse that had not some blood, and he had never driven a
sluggard in his life more than once. But wife and child and world, and
all that therein was, existed largely because they were necessary to Jean
Jacques.
That is the way it had been; and it was as though the firmament had been
rolled up before his eyes, exposing the everlasting mysteries, when he
saw his wife in the arms of the master-carpenter. It was like some
frightening dream.
The paper and pencil waked him to reality. He looked towards his house,
he looked the way George Masson had gone, and he knew that what he had
seen was real life and not a dream. The paper fell from his hand. He did
not pick it up. Its fall represented the tumbling walls of life, was the
earthquake which shook his world into chaos. He ground the sheet into the
gravel with his heel. There would be no cheese-factory built at St.
Saviour's for many a year to come. The man of initiative, the man of the
hundred irons would not have the hundred and one, or keep the hundred hot
any more; because he would be so busy with the iron which had entered
into his soul.
When the paper had been made one with the earth, a problem buried for
ever, Jean Jacques pulled himself up to his full height, as though facing
a great thing which he must do.
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