“You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.”
The priest had a daughter born not in marriage. It was his biggest sin, along with his addiction to alcohol, and this child was conceived because the priest was drunk. These two sins tore his soul, as he felt what his guilt was. But he loved this little girl very much, though he saw her just twice – when she was born and after six years. When he looked at her he understood that he was even more guilty as could not help her little child, he could not spend time with her, and see her grow and become a good person. It was all his fault, and it gave him much pain.
“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
When the priest came to the home where he was once assisted (captain Fellows’ house), he found there nobody but a dog. That dog was in the kitchen with a bone in its teeth. There still was some meat on it and the priest desperately wanted to take it. he managed to take the bone from the dog and drive the dog away. All elements of the situation made him miserable.
“I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”
The life of a vagrant and an outcast does not offer much, and the priest learned to be grateful for what he has at present. He has no home of his own, no family to wait for him, all he had was his duty and it was always with him. So his home was at the same nowhere and everywhere.
