Later, the chief character seemed to himself to be standing in a corner of a walled garden beside the hospital of two storeys, except that the plants and the pathways were those that he had seen whenever he had visited as a child the stone house where his father’s unmarried siblings lived with their parents. From beneath a certain bush in an opposite corner of the garden, some or another small creature seemed to be signalling to him. What he saw was a series of tiny flashes, and yet afterwards he used the word winking to describe the sight. He understood, in the way that he seemed to understand certain matters in his dreams, that the creature under the bush was one of a sort of beetle that had infested the garden around the stone house mentioned above. He had learned from his father’s sisters to call the beetles soldier beetles. He admired the beetles’ wing-cases, which were dark-brown with orange-yellow markings, but after he had heard from his aunts that the beetles damaged many of the plants in their garden he killed any beetle that he saw and afterwards earned praise from his aunts when he told them how many he had killed. The beetles were easy to kill, especially the many pairs that moved less nimbly because they were joined rear-to-rear. These he sought out so as to boost his tally. He did not learn until some years later that the joined pairs had been copulating. For as long as he saw the signals that he later described as winking, the chief character understood that the sender of the signals shared with him certain secret knowledge although he, the chief character, could not have said what this knowledge consisted of; for as long as he saw the signals mentioned, the chief character understood also that the sender of the signals was well disposed towards him; and soon after he had first observed the signals, the chief character understood further that the sender of the signals was God—not a symbol of God or a manifestation of God but the almighty being that he, the chief character, had addressed in his prayers during earlier years and had tried often to see in his mind. God was no more and no less than an image of a beetle with orange-yellow markings on a dark-brown wing-case in an image-corner of an image-garden in his, the chief character’s, mind.

For as long as he lay in the upper room, the chief character was in a light-hearted mood. Having found himself in the presence of God, the chief character directed towards God the sort of wordless message that he seemed able to send in his dreams. The content of the message was that there should be no hard feelings between God and the chief character. The flashing or winking from the wing-case of the Beetle-god then ceased. The chief character could no longer make out the orange-yellow markings or any other details in the shade beneath the bush. He understood that he had been politely dismissed; that nothing needed to be discussed between God and himself; that he ought to leave God to attend to his own affairs while he, the chief character, went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction. (Barley Patch)