III
Silas Hamer went out of the house the following morning with a new determination in his step. He had decided to take Seldon's advice and find the legless man.
Yet inwardly he was convinced that his search would be in vain and that the man would have vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him up.
The dark buildings on either side of the passageway shut out the sunlight and left it dark and mysterious.
Only in one place, halfway up it, there was a break in the wall, and through it there fell a shaft of golden light that illuminated with radiance a figure sitting on the ground. A figure - yes, it was the man!
The instrument of pipes leaned against the wall beside his crutches, and he was covering the paving stones with designs in coloured chalk.
Two were completed, sylvan scenes of marvellous beauty and delicacy, swaying trees and a leaping brook that seemed alive.
And again Hamer doubted.
Was this man a mere street musician, a pavement artist?
Or was he something more...?
Suddenly the millionaire's self-control broke down, and he cried fiercely and angrily:
"Who are you?
For God's sake, who are you?"
The man's eyes met his, smiling.
"Why don't you answer?
Speak, man, speak!"
Then he noticed that the man was drawing with incredible rapidity on a bare slab of stone.
Hamer followed the movement with his eyes... A few bold strokes, and giant trees took form. Then, seated on a boulder... a man... playing an instrument of pipes.
A man with a strangely beautiful face - and goat's legs...
The cripple's hand made a swift movement. The man still sat on the rock, but the goat's legs were gone.
Again his eyes met Hamer's.
"They were evil," he said.
Hamer stared, fascinated.
For the face before him was the face of the picture, but strangely and incredibly beautified... Purified from all but an intense and exquisite joy of living.
Hamer turned and almost fled down the passageway into the bright sunlight, repeating to himself incessantly:
"It's impossible.
Impossible...
I'm mad - dreaming!"
But the face haunted him - the face of Pan...
He went into the park and sat on a bench.
It was a deserted hour.
A few nursemaids with their charges sat in the shade of the trees, and dotted here and there in the stretches of green, like islands in a sea, lay the recumbent forms of men...
The words "a wretched tramp" were to Hamer an epitome of misery.
But suddenly, today, he envied them...
They seemed to him of all created beings the only free ones.
The earth beneath them, the sky above them, the world to wander in... they were not hemmed in or chained.
Like a flash it came to him that that which bound him so remorselessly was the thing he had worshipped and prized above all others - wealth! He had thought it the strongest thing on earth, and now, wrapped round by its golden strength, he saw the truth of his words.
It was his money that held him in bondage...
But was it? Was that really it? Was there a deeper and more pointed truth that he had not seen? Was it the money or was it his own love of the money?
He was bound in fetters of his own making; not wealth itself, but love of wealth was the chain.
He knew now clearly the two forces that were tearing at him, the warm composite strength of materialism that enclosed and surrounded him, and, opposed to it, the clear imperative call - he named it to himself the Call of the Wings.
And while the one fought and clung, the other scorned war and would not stoop to struggle.
It only called - called unceasingly...
He heard it so clearly that it almost spoke in words.
"You cannot make terms with Me," it seemed to say. "For I am above all other things.
If you follow my call, you must give up all else and cut away the forces that hold you.
For only the Free shall follow where I lead..."
"I can't," cried Hamer. "I can't..."
A few people turned to look at the big man who sat talking to himself.
So sacrifice was being asked of him, the sacrifice of that which was most dear to him, that which was part of himself.