MERCURY IN SAGITTARIUS
In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed;
Walter Moody conceals his most recent memory; and Thomas Balfour begins to
tell a story.
The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the
impression of a party accidentally met. From the variety of their
comportment and dress – frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons
of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill – they might have been
twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a
city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied
isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap
his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to
take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily
silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway – deadened
here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the
rain.
Read on...
Read on...
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