1:1 In earlier days, before the story had hardened into recital, there was spoken among certain people the name of Chard, though seldom in tones of clean approval.
1:2 And he was remembered not for greatness, nor for ruin, but for a kind of persistence which outlived explanation.
1:3 Around him there was always some setting half-improvised and never quite dignified, and yet men referred to it later as though it had been a place of consequence.
1:4 Whether this place was pit, shelter, court, or merely an unfortunate corner is no longer agreed upon.
1:5 But the witnesses concur in this: that it was damp in spirit, narrow in promise, and sufficient somehow for the continuance of Chard.
1:6 Thus the first layer of the matter was laid down, shabby in detail yet strangely durable in memory.
2:1 One token by which Chard was known was his manner of speech, for he addressed men, objects, mishaps, and passing conditions with the same strange confidence.
2:2 His words gave often the impression of leadership after the leadership itself had wandered off.
2:3 He spake as one forever opening a meeting that no one recalled agreeing to attend.
2:4 There were certain phrases much repeated in association with him, though scribes differ on their exact form and degree of menace.
2:5 Thus his sayings endured, not because they were wise, but because they hung in the air like smoke in a low room.
2:6 And people remembered less what was meant than the feeling that something inconvenient had just been declared official.
3:1 There are places where foolishness should dissolve: by the trees at evening, beside a low fire, under weather honest enough to strip pretence from a man.
3:2 Yet the lore witnesseth that even such places did not wholly reject Chard.
3:3 Rather they altered him, so that he seemed less like a mere nuisance and more like a thing already halfway translated into tale.
3:4 For beyond the warm ring of light, where figures blur and tone outruns fact, his sort of presence is made stronger.
3:5 And many have known the discomfort of feeling that someone unsuitable stands just outside the conversation, waiting for the wrong moment to become part of it.
3:6 In this way the outer places did not cleanse the matter, but dressed it in darker clothing.
4:1 It must be recorded that the matter was not always comic.
4:2 For there were seasons in which laughter stepped back and left only unease to occupy the room.
4:3 At such times Chard seemed altered less in body than in arrangement, as though the parts were all present but badly reassembled.
4:4 His stillness became intrusive, his timing abominable, his nearness difficult to justify.
4:5 Witnesses speak in careful vagueness of doorways, wall-edges, corners, and that unpleasant sense of being observed by someone with no useful purpose.
4:6 Some named these episodes. Others refused names altogether, knowing that names are hooks by which a thing may cling harder.
4:7 But all agree that the room itself seemed to notice him, and not kindly.
5:1 There was also upon him, from time to time, a condition of excess: too much speech for the subject, too much confidence for the evidence, too much momentum for the route chosen.
5:2 Then would one matter flow into another without bridge, border, or apology.
5:3 It was as if every small notion believed itself destined to become revelation, though none possessed the strength.
5:4 Rooms wearied of this. Conversations bent around it. The patient discovered the limits of patience.
5:5 Yet he pressed onward with the assurance of a man mistaking noise for progress and movement for command.
6:1 Here lieth the chief perplexity: that Chard cannot be profitably sorted among the simple categories.
6:2 For there was in him something intrusive, something faintly cursed, something inclined always to arrive with the wrong energy.
6:3 Yet there was also something local and almost tender in the repetition of him, as with an old nuisance too woven into the place to be cleanly hated.
6:4 Thus men mocked him, avoided him, quoted him, half-defended him, and carried him onward into memory against their own better instincts.
6:5 For some figures survive not by merit, but by becoming inseparable from the atmosphere around them.
7:1 If thou hast read thus far, thou art already too near the edge of the thing.
7:2 For such lore, once admitted, doth not depart in tidy fashion.
7:3 It lingers in jokes, in silences, in badly timed remarks, and in the strange afterlife of ordinary phrases.
7:4 Therefore reckon gently with any voice that sounds too familiar in an unsuitable place.
7:5 And if thou encounter some underwhelming corner invested with more story than it deserves, pass on without enquiry.