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Page 24
What less, thought I, than power unearthly could long maintain that
stern, impassable barrier of green vacancy between their hoofs and
him? And I suppose for the very reason that these were beasts of a
long-sharpened sagacity, wild-hearted, rebellious, yet not the slaves
of impulse, he yet kept himself their king who was, in fact, their
captive.
"Houyhnhnms?" I heard him cry; "pah--Yahoos!" His voice fell; he stood
confronting in silence that vast circumference of restless beauty. And
again broke out inhuman, inarticulate, immeasurable revolt. Far across
over the tossing host, rearing, leaping, craning dishevelled heads,
went pealing and eddying that hostile, brutal voice.
Gulliver lifted his hand, and a tempestuous silence fell once more.
"Yahoos! Yahoos!" he bawled again. Then he turned, and passed back
into his hideous garden. The gate was barred and bolted behind him.
Thus loosed and unrestrained, surged as if the wind drove them, that
concourse upon the stockade. Heavy though its timbers were, they
seemed to stoop at the impact. A kind of fury rose in me. I lusted to
go down and face the mutiny of the brutes; bit, and saddle, and
scourge into obedience man's serfs of the centuries. I watched, on
fire, the flame of the declining sun upon those sleek, vehement
creatures of the dust. And then, I know not by what subtle irony, my
zeal turned back--turned back and faded away into simple longing for
my lost friend, my peaceful beast-of-evening, Rosinante. I sat down
again in the litter of my bed and earnestly wished myself home;
wished, indeed, if I must confess it, for the familiar face of my Aunt
Sophia, my books, my bed. If these were this land's horses, I thought,
what men might here be met! The unsavouriness, the solitude, the
neighing and tumult and prancing induced in me nothing but dulness at
last and disgust.
But at length, dismissing all such folly, at least from my face, I
lifted the trap-door and descended the steep ladder into the room
beneath.
Mr. Gulliver sat where I had left him. Defeat stared from his eyes.
Lines of insane thought disfigured his face. Yet he sat, stubborn and
upright, heedless of the uproar, heedless even that the late beams of
the sun had found him out in his last desolation. So I too sat down
without speech, and waited till he should come up out of his gloom,
and find a friend in a stranger.
But day waned; the sunlight went out of the great wooden room; the
tumult diminished; and finally silence and evening shadow descended on
the beleaguered house. And I was looking out of the darkened window at
a star that had risen and stood shining in the sky, when I was
startled by a voice so low and so different from any I had yet heard
that I turned to convince myself it was indeed Mr. Gulliver's.
"And the people of the Yahoos, Traveller," he said, "do they still
lie, and flatter, and bribe, and spill blood, and lust, and covet? Are
there yet in the country whence you come the breadless bellies, the
sores and rags and lamentations of the poor? Ay, Yahoo, and do vicious
men rule, and attain riches; and impious women pomp and
flattery?--hypocrites, pandars, envious, treacherous, proud?" He
stared with desolate sorrow and wrath into my eyes.
Words in disorder flocked to my tongue. I grew hot and eager, yet by
some instinct held my peace. The fluttering of the dying flames, the
starry darkness, silence itself; what were we who sat together?
Transient shadows both, phantom, unfathomable, mysterious as these.
I fancied he might speak again. Once he started, raised his arm, and
cried out as if acting again in dream some frenzy of the past. And
once he wheeled on me extraordinary eyes, as if he half-recognised
some idol of the irrevocable in my face. These were momentary,
however. Gloom returned to his forehead, vacancy to his eyes.
I heard the outer gate flung open, and a light, strange footfall. So
we seated ourselves, all three, for a while round the smouldering
fire. Mr. Gulliver's servant scarcely took his eyes from my face. And,
a little to my confusion, his first astonishment of me had now passed
away, and in its stead had fallen such a gentleness and humour as I
should not have supposed possible in his wild countenance. He busied
himself over his strips of skin, but if he caught my eye upon his own
he would smile out broadly, and nod his great, hairy head at me, till
I fancied myself a child again and he some vast sweetheart of my
nurse.
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