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am a man held in my interlocking restraints; I am not free to enjoy the fruits of pleasure.
    Interlocking restraints.
    Sometimes his spirit cried out, wept, he wanted sometimes to be, just for one day, indolent. To say, drink alcohol, like some of the others. To lay down the burden. He could see nothing in gambling. But yet there must be something in it for men to pursue it so fanatically. That was just another pleasure he could not touch. He was locked in place. In the yoke. He feared the rules. He was frightened that relaxation was irreversible. That, once relaxed, the rules would not return to place. A slide would begin. Into what? What did he fear?
    Into insignificance.
    He did not want to be insignificant. That was his terror, his nightmare.
    Sin wasn’t a matter of hellfire for him. Sin was for him misdirected energy, if it was anything.
    He really didn’t know how to sin.
    He was swept with tearfulness, like a rain squall across the sea.
    He pulled himself together.
    Up again, he washed his face, wetted his hair, parted it, and went downstairs.
    The Union Man was definitely gone. Coffey was at golf. That dejected him. He played no sport himself. After throwing a stick to the dog for a while, he decidedto go back a night earlier than planned.
    Packing the car, he jarred his thumb on the door. He could hardly bear it. He hopped about blowing warm air on his hand, damning and blasting and F- dashing. It hurt like the blazes. It was a bad sign, lack of inner co-ordination.
    Driving along with his aching thumb, on his way out of town he pulled up at the railway station, idling there and looking about for the Union Man.
    The Union Man was there. Riding-boots and all. George saw him from a distance. He was talking with the station-master. George switched off the ignition and went onto the platform. George then noticed something. He noticed that the Union Man was about his age. He’d really thought him older. And he noticed this also, he saw that the Union Man was clenching and unclenching his hand behind his back as he talked with the station-master.
    Why, thought George, this Union Man is a nervous sort.
    George watched from the platform entrance. No, I have nothing more to say, and went away without the Union Man seeing him.
    We are all shy, observed George wondrously, we are all shy people.
    Driving off, his thumb aching as he bumped along the bad mountain road, he admitted that he could not relax—too bad. Coffey at golf. He didn’t care. Every existence its own rules. A long drive ahead on the rough, dusty road. He didn’t mind that.
    He had one vice which he could not explain or put a word to, which made him sick to bring to mind. It intruded in his dreams. But he was still a young man, although considered old for his years, and he could and would overcome it. Expunge it.
    He had a flat at Fitzroy Falls and skinned his knuckle changing the wheel. He almost wept with the feeling of being so jangled, so rattled. It was the body turning on itself.
    Back on the dusty road down the mountain.
    A question kept coming to him. Who had, in all hell, made the telephone trunk call to the city. A trunk-line call.
    Whoever made the call had something in them. But it was still unforgivable—the bringing-in of outside people to handle town problems.
    That old buzzard Simon would never have talked on a telephone in his life, but he had a feeling it was him.
    For George, the weekend had pulled apart like a bad soldering job.
    Thelma expressed surprise at his early return and asked if he’d had a ‘nice time’.
    He said business was no picnic.
    He went to the bathroom, locked himself in to bathe his jarred thumb and skinned knuckles.

Clarifying Muddy Water
    The water-supply from the local river was so muddy at times that it would not go through a filter. George found that to overcome this problem he agitated each barrel of water with two pounds of phosphate of lime and then allowed it to settle.