Man in a Black Hat by E. Temple Thurston

Author:E. Temple Thurston [Thurston, E. Temple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Because what was I doing? I was spying on the private life of a man who, I had every reason to know, would bitterly resent my intrusion. It was unpardonable. It was caddish, if you like. As inexcusable as reading a letter that didn’t belong to one. I don’t attempt to mitigate what I did that morning. I hardly knew I had done it. I could see the key left there in that cupboard door and I found myself opening it and looking in.

And there was the answer to all my speculations.

It was an unusually large cupboard space. Almost a little room. What, in the days of wigs and patches, they would have called a powder-closet. There was, of course, no window, yet as I opened the door, I found it filled with a warm, rosy light that penetrated every corner of the cupboard and seemed, notwithstanding its faintness, too sufficient for the space it filled. It was like a perfume that escaped into the room as it found its freedom through the open door. At the same time it would have been impossible to describe it as an illumination. For the first few moments I could not even discover the point of flame from which it derived its light. The glow was everywhere. And then, as I looked about me, I saw a lamp, one of those boat-shaped lamps as were designed in bronze in the Roman period, standing on the floor at the far end of the cupboard.

The string of its wick, passing through the oil in the belly of the lamp, was alight. A tiny tongue of flame, less than a flickering match. Nothing in substance to provide that glow of light that filled the cupboard and passed over me like a mist into the room. Yet there was no other source from which it could have emanated. And as I looked at it, I had the impression of something emitting its waves of light as an organ emits its waves of sound. One presses a little key upon the keyboard and far away in vaulted spaces of a cathedral the volume of a single note fills the vast, silent emptiness. In the same kind of way that tiny flame was giving out its waves of light.

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