THE LIGHTHOUSE

old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it
was the thing that descended on him—without
his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden
black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak
all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you
(he could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it
had struck when he was a child) and then made
off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad,
reading his book. That he would kill, that he
would strike to the heart. Whatever he did—
(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the
Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he
was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man
at the head of some enterprise, that he would
fight, that he would track down and stamp out-
tyranny, despotism, he called it—making people
do what they did not want to do, cutting off their
right to speak. How could any of them say,
But I won't, when he said, Come to the Light-
house. Do this. Fetch me that. The black
wings spread, and the hard beak tore. And then
next moment, there he sat reading his book; and
he might look up—one never knew—quite
reasonably. He might talk to the Macalisters.
He might be pressing a sovereign into some-
frozen old woman's hand in the street, James
thought; he might be shouting out at some
fisherman's sports; he might be waving his arms

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