He cut at the furze again, being by nature combative.  And—­stopped short, with a start, a tremor running through him.  Something rustled, scuttled away amongst the bushes, and something flapped upward behind him into the thick lowering sky above.  A wailing cry—­whether human, or of bird or beast, he was uncomfortably ignorant—­came out of the mist ahead, to be answered by a like and nearer cry from a spot which he failed, in his agitation, to locate.

Under ordinary conditions the young cleric was neither troubled by imagination nor lacking in pluck.  His habitual outlook was sensible, literal and direct.  But, it must be owned, this wide indistinct landscape, over which pale vapours trailed and brooded, the immense loneliness of the felt rather than seen, expanse of water, marsh and mud-flat of the Haven—­the tide being low—­along with the goblin whispering chuckle of the river speeding seaward away there on his left, made him oddly jumpy and nervous.  No human being was in sight, neither did any human dwelling show signs of habitation.  He wished he had gone round by the road and through the length of the village.  He registered a vow against short cuts—­save in broad daylight—­for his present surroundings inspired him with the liveliest distrust.  They were to him positively nightmarish.  He suffered the nastiest little fears of what might follow him, what might, even now, peer and lurk.  Heretofore he had considered the earth as so much dead matter, to be usefully and profitably exploited by all-dominant man—­specially by men of his own creed and race.  But now the power of the earth laid hands on him.  She lived, and mankind dwindled to the proportions of parasitic insects, at most irritating some small portions of her skin, her vast indifferent surface.  Such ideas had never occurred to him before.  He resented them—­essayed to put them from him as trenching on blasphemy.

Starting on again, angry alike with himself for entertaining, and with the unknown for engendering, such subversive notions, his pace unconsciously quickened to a run.  But the line of some half-dozen ragged Scotch firs, which here topped the low cliff bordering the river, to his disordered vision seemed most uncomfortably to run alongside him, stretching gaunt arms through the encircling mist to arrest his flight.

He regarded them with an emotion of the liveliest antipathy; consciously longing, meanwhile, for the humming thoroughfares of his native industrial town, for the rattle and grind of the horse-trams, the brightly lighted shop-fronts, the push all about him of human labour, of booming trade and vociferous politics.  Even the glare of a gin palace, flooding out across the crowded pavement at some street corner, would have, just now, been fraught with solace, convinced prohibitionist though he was.  For he would, at least, have been in no doubt how to feel towards that stronghold of Satan—­righteously thanking God he was not as those reprehensible others, who passed in and out of its ever-swinging doors.  While towards this earth dominance, this dwarfing of human life by the life of things he had hitherto called inanimate, he did not know how to feel at all.  It attacked some unarmoured, unprotected part of him.  Against its assault he was defenceless.