ESTATE OF POMPEII
181
Tansy had ended up sitting on the Wildernesses' porch and talking.
. . . Some time later on-it must have been nearly midnight for it
was dark-Fairhaven had gone back to his shack to get an ill-trans–
lated collection of ancient belles-lettres published in the nineties, and
a damned stupid book too-Lamartine, Volney, god knows who–
he for some reason wanted to read from in answer to something
Wilderness had said. And it was this walk through the woods and
back that he particularly remembered now: the stillness in the forest,
the absolute peace, the stars sparkling and blazing through the trees
(high on a cedar his flashlight gleamed on the four watching shining
timorous curious eyes of two racoons), the stillness, the peace, but
also the sense of hurt, the anxiety because of the renewed talk that
evening of the possibility of the railroad coming through, or that
the forest would be slaughtered to make way for auto camps or a
subsection, so that their troubles had seemed all at once, or once
again, like those of country folk in a novel by George Eliot, or Fin–
nish pioneers in the sixties (or, as Virginia Wilderness had remarked
bitterly, Canadians or human beings of almost any period): and
the sense too of something else topsy-turvily
all
the wrong way;
Roderick stood quietly on his porch a moment, listening to the con–
versation of the tide coming in, bringing with it distantly, shadowily,
more luminously, an oil-tanker with it. To him, standing on his porch,
holding his book and flashlight, it was as
if
Eridanus had suddenly
become, like ancient Rome, a theatre of prodigies, real and imaginary.
As
though the white whale hadn't been enough, the 4 o'clock news
report from Vancouver heard over the Wildernesses' radio had re–
lated this in renewed reports from "several accredited sources" of
the famous "flying saucers" of that period which had been witnessed
that very afternoon from several different points travelling over Eri–
danus itself, and a sworn statement by the Chief of Police "now re–
leased for the first time to the public, that he had, while fishing with
his son beyond Eridanus Port the previous Sunday, seen, cavorting
there, a sea serpent." Good God! This was all hilariously, horribly
funny, and Roderick could laugh again thinking about it now. But
the truth was he wasn't really amused: these things taken together
with his other deeper anxieties, agitated him with that kind of dark
conviction of the monstrous and threatening
in
everything sometimes
begotten by a hangover. And unable to
fit
these matters comfortably
