The Hidden Beast by J.

D.

Beresford.

His house is the last in the village towards the forest.

The house has become more and more scattered, reaching out to the wild of the wood, as if they yearned to separate themselves from the swarm that clusters about the church in the Inn.

And his house has taken so long astride from the others that it is held to the village by no more than the slender thread of a long footpath.

Yet the house is set with its face towards us, and has an air of resolutely holding on to the safety of our common life, as if dismayed at its boldness and swimming so far, it had turned and desperately grasped the life line of that footpath.

He lived alone, a strange man, surly and reticent.

Some said he had a sinister look, and on those rare occasions when he joined us at the inn after sunset, he sat aside and spoke little.

I was surprised when, as we came out of the inn one night, he took my arm and asked me if I would go home with him.

The moon was at the full and the black shadows of the dispersing crowd that lunged down the street seemed to gesticulate an alarm of weird dismay.

The village was momentarily mad with the clatter of footsteps and the noise of laughter, And somewhere down towards the forest, a dog was baying.

I wondered if I had not misunderstood him.

As he watched my hesitation, his face pleaded with me.

There are times when a man is glad of company, he said.

We spoke little as we passed through the village towards the silences of his lonely host, but when we came to the footpath, he stopped and looked back.

I lived between two worlds, he said, the wild, And he paused before he rejected the obvious antithesis and concluded the restrained.

Are we so restrained?

I asked, staring at the huddle of black and silver houses clinging to the refuge on the hill.

He murmured something about a compact, and my thoughts turned to the symbol of the chalk white church tower that dominated the honeycomb of the village.

The compact of public opinion, he said more boldly.

My imagination lagged.

I was thinking less of him than of the transfiguration of the familiar scene before me.

I did not remember effort.

I have studied it thus, under the reflections of a full moon.

An echo of his word, differently accented, drifted through my mind.

I saw our life as being, in truth, compact, little and limited.

He took up his theme again.

When we had entered the house and were facing each other across the table in a room that looked out over the forest.

The shutters were unfastened.

The window opened, and I could see how on the further shore of the waste lands the light feebly ebbed and died against the black cliff of the wood.

We have to choose between freedom and safety, he said.

The individual is too wild and dangerous for the common life.

He must make his agreement with the community, submit to become a member of the people's body.

But I, he paused, and laughed, I have taken the liberty of looking out of the back window.

While he spoke, I had been aware of a sound that seemed to come from below the floor of the room in which we were sitting, And when he laughed, I fancied that I had heard the response of a snuffling cry.

He looked at me mockingly across the table.

It's an echo from the jungle, he said, some trick of reflected sound.

I can always hear it in this room at night.

I shivered and stood up.

I prefer the safety of our common life, I told him, and maybe that I have a limited mind and am afraid.

But I found my happiness in the joys of security and shelter.

The wild terrifies me.

A limited mind, he commented, Probably, it is rather that you lack a fire in the blood.

I was glad to leave him, and he, on his part, made no effort to detain me.

It was not long after this visit of mine that the people first began to whisper about him in the village.

At the beginning they brought no charge against him, talking only of his strangeness and of his separation from our common interests.

But presently I heard a story of some fierce wild animal that he caged and tortured in the prison of his house.

One said that he had heard it screaming in the night, and another that he had heard it beating against the door.

And some argued that it was a threat to our safety, since the beast might escape and make its way into the village, and some that such brutality, even though it were to a wild animal, could not be tolerated.

But I wondered inwardly whether the affair were any business of ours, so long as he kept the beast to himself.

I was a member of the council that year, and so took part in the voting when presently the case was laid before us.

But no vote of mine would have helped him if I had dared to overcome my reluctance in speak in his favor.

For whatever reservations may have been secretly withheld by the members of the council, they were unanimous in condemning him.

We went, six of us in full daylight to search his house.

He received us with a laugh and told us that we might seek at our leisure.

But though we sought high and low, peering and tapping, we found no evidence that any wild thing had ever been concealed there.

And within a month of the day of our search, he left the village.

I saw him alone once before he went, and he told me that he had chosen for the wild and freedom, that he could no longer endure to be held to the village, even by the thread of the footpath.

But he did not thank me for having allowed the search of his house to be conducted by daylight, although he knew that I at least was sure no echo of the force could be heard in that little room of his, save in the transfigured hours between the dusk and the dawn.

End of the Hidden Beast by J.

D.

Beresford