The
silent house, dark, with thick, timbered walls and the big black
chimney-place, and the sense of secrecy. Dark, with low, little windows,
sunk into the earth. Dark, like a lair where strong beasts had lurked and
mated, lonely at night and lonely by day, left to themselves and their
own intensity for so many generations. It seemed to cast a spell on the
two young people. They became different. There was a curious secret glow
about them, a certain slumbering flame hard to understand, that enveloped
them both. They too felt that they did not belong to the London world any
more. Crockham had changed their blood: the sense of the snakes that
lived and slept even in their own garden, in the sun, so that he, going
forward with the spade, would see a curious coiled brownish pile on the
black soil, which suddenly would start up, hiss, and dazzle rapidly away,
hissing. One day Winifred heard the strangest scream from the flower-bed
under the low window of the living room: ah, the strangest scream, like
the very soul of the dark past crying aloud. She ran out, and saw a long
brown snake on the flower-bed, and in its flat mouth the one hind leg of
a frog was striving to escape, and screaming its strange, tiny, bellowing
scream. She looked at the snake, and from its sullen flat head it looked
at her, obstinately. She gave a cry, and it released the frog and slid
angrily away.
That was Crockham.
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