Volume One—Chapter Ten.Savages.Bevis and Mark went eagerly to bathe by themselves, but immediately left the direct path. Human beings must be kept taut, or, like a rope, they will slacken. The very first morning they took a leaping-pole with them, a slender ash sapling, rather more than twice their own height, which they picked out from a number in the rick-yard, intending to jump to and fro the brook on the way. But before they had got half way to the brook they altered their minds, becoming eager for the water, and raced to the bathing-place. The pole was now to be an oar, and they were to swim, supported by an oar, like shipwrecked people.So soon as he had had a plunge or two, Bevis put one arm over the pole and struck out with the other, thinking that he should be able in that way to have a long swim. Directly his weight pressed on the pole it went under, and did not support him in the least. He put it next beneath his chest, with both arms over it, but immediately he pushed off down it went again. Mark took it and got astride, when the pole let his feet touch the bottom.“It’s no use,” he said. “What’s the good of people falling overboard with spars and oars? What stories they must tell.”“I can’t make it out,” said Bevis; and he tried again, but it was no good, the pole was an encumbrance instead of a support, for it insisted upon slipping through the water lengthways, and would not move just as he wished. In a rage he gave it a push, and sent it ashore, and turned to swimming to the rail. They did not know it, but the governor, still anxious about them, had gone round a long distance, so as to have a peep at them from the hedge on the other side of Fir-Tree Gulf by the Nile. He could tell by the post and rails that they did not go out of their depth, and went away without letting them suspect his presence.When they got out, they had a run in the sunshine, which dried them much better than towels. The field sloped gently to the right, and their usual run was on the slope beside a nut-tree hedge towards a group of elms. All the way there and back the sward was short and soft, almost like that of the Downs which they could see, and dotted with bird’s-foot lotus, over whose yellow flowers they raced. But this morning, being no longer kept taut, after they had returned from the elms with an enormous mushroom they had found there, they ran to the old quarry, and along the edge above. The perpendicular sand-cliff fell to an enclosed pool beneath, in which, on going to the very edge, they could see themselves reflected. Some hurdles and flakes—a stronger kind of hurdle—had been placed here that cattle might not wander over, but the cart-horses, who rub against everything, had rubbed against them and dislodged two or three. These had rolled down, and the rest hung half over.While they stood still looking down over the broad waters of their New Sea, the sun burned their shoulders, making the skin red. Away they ran back to dress, and taking a short path across a place where the turf had partly grown over a shallow excavation pricked their feet with thistles, and had to limp the rest of the way to their clothes. Now, there were no thistles on their proper racecourse down to the elms and back.As they returned home they remembered the brook, and went down to it to jump with the leaping-pole. But the soft ooze at the bottom let the pole sink in, and Bevis, who of course must take the first leap, was very near being hung up in the middle of the brook. Under his weight, as he sprang off, the pole sank deep into the ooze, and had it been a stiffer mud the pole would have stopped upright, when he must have stayed on it over the water, or have been jerked off among the flags. As it was it did let him get over, but he did not land on the firm bank, only reaching the mud at the side, where he scrambled up by grasping the stout stalk of a willow-herb. In future he felt with the butt of the pole till he found a firm spot, where it was sandy, or where the matted roots of grasses and flags had bound the mud hard. Then he flew over well up on the grass.Mark took his turn, and as he put the butt in the water a streak of mud came up where a small jack fish had shot away. So they went on down the bank leaping alternately, one carrying the towels while the other flew over and back.Sometimes they could not leap because the tripping was bad, undermined where cowslips in the spring hung over the stream, bored with the holes of water-rats, which when disused become covered with grass, but give way beneath the foot or the hoof that presses on them pitching leaper or rider into the current, or it was rotten from long-decaying roots, or about to slip. Sometimes the landing was bad, undermined in the same way, or higher than the tripping, when you have not only to get over, but to deliver yourself on a higher level; or swampy, where a wet furrow came to the brook; or too far, where there was nothing but mud to come on. They had to select their jumping-places, and feel the ground to the edge first.“Here’s the raft!” shouted Mark, who was ahead, looking out for a good place.“Is it?” said Bevis, running along on the other side. They had so completely forgotten it, that it came upon them like something new. Bevis took a leap and came over, and they set to work at once to launch it. The raft slipped gradually down the shelving shore of the drinking-place, and they thrust it into the stream. Bevis put his foot on board, but immediately withdrew it, for the water rushed through twenty leaks, spurting up along the joins. Left on the sand in the sun’s rays the wood of the raft shrank a little, opening the planking, while the clay they had daubed on to caulk the crevices had cracked, and the moss had dried up and was ready to crumble. The water came through every where, and the raft was half-full even when left to itself without any pressure.“We ought to have thatched it,” said Mark. “We ought to have made a roof over it. Let’s stop the leaks.”“O! come on,” said Bevis, “don’t let’s bother. Rafts are no good, no more than poles or oars when you fall overboard. We shall have a ship soon.”The raft was an old story, and he did not care about it. He went on with the leaping-pole, but Mark stayed a minute and hauled the raft on shore as far as his strength would permit. He got about a quarter of it on the ground, so that it could not float away, and then ran after Bevis.They went into the Peninsula, and looked at all the fir-trees, to see if any would do for a mast for the blue boat they were to have. As it had no name, they called it the blue boat to distinguish it from the punt. Mark thought an ash-pole would do for the mast, as ash-poles were so straight and could be easily shaved to the right size; but Bevis would not hear of it, for masts were never made of ash, but always of pine, and they must have their ship proper. He selected a tree presently, a young fir, straight as an arrow, and started Mark for the axe, but before he had gone ten yards Mark came back, saying that the tree would be of no use unless they liked to wait till next year, because it would be green, and the mast ought, to be made of seasoned wood.“So it ought,” said Bevis. “What a lot of trouble it is to make a ship.”But as they sat on the railing across the isthmus swinging their legs, Mark remembered that there were some fir-poles which had been cut a long time since behind the great wood-pile, between it and the walnut-trees, out of sight. Without a word away they ran, chose one of these and carried it into the shed where Bevis usually worked. They had got the dead bark off and were shaving away when it was dinner-time, which they thought a bore, but which wise old Pan, who was never chained now, considered the main object of life.Next morning as they went through the meadow, where the dew still lingered in the shade, on the way to the bathing-place, taking Pan with them this time, they hung about the path picking clover-heads and sucking the petals, pulling them out and putting the lesser ends in their lips, looking at the white and pink bramble flowers, noting where the young nuts began to show, pulling down the woodbine, and doing everything but hasten on to their work of swimming. They stopped at the gate by the New Sea, over whose smooth surface slight breaths of mist were curling, and stood kicking the ground and the stones as flighty horses paw.“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”“Lions and tigers,” said Mark, growling, and showing his teeth.“Pooh!”“Shipwrecked people on an island.”“Fiddle! They have plenty to do and are always happy, and we are not.”“No; very unhappy. Let’s try escaping—prisoners running away.”“Hum! Hateful!”“Everything’s hateful.”“So it is.”“This is a very stupid sea.”“There’s nothing in it.”“Nothing anywhere.”“Let’s be hermits.”“There’s always only one hermit.”“Well, you live that side,” (pointing across), “and I’ll live this.”“Hermits eat pulse and drink water.”“What’s pulse?”“I suppose it’s barley water.”“Horrid.”“Awful.”“You say what we shall be then.”“Pan, you old donk,” said Bevis, rolling Pan over with his foot. Lazy Pan lay on his back, and let Bevis bend his ribs with his foot.“Caw, caw!” a crow went over down to the shore, where he hoped to find a mussel surprised by the dawn in shallow water.Bang! “Hoi! Hoo! Yah!” The discharge was half a mile away, but the crow altered his mind, and flew over the water as near the surface as he could without touching. Why do birds always cross the water in that way?“That’s Tom,” said Mark. Tom was the bird-keeper. He shot first, and shouted after. He potted a hare in the corn with bits of flint, a button, three tin tacks, and a horse-stub, which scraped the old barrel inside, but slew the game. That was for himself. Then he shouted his loudest to do his duty—for other people. The sparrows had flown out of the corn at the noise of the gun, and settled on the hedge; when Tom shouted they were frightened from the hedge, and went back into the wheat. From which learn this, shoot first and shout after.“Shall we say that was a gun at sea?” continued Mark.“They are always heard at night,” said Bevis. “Pitch black, you know.”“Everything is somehow else,” said Mark. Pan closed his idle old eyes, and grunted with delight as Bevis rubbed his ribs with his foot. Bevis put his hands in his pockets and sighed deeply. The sun looked down on these sons of care, and all the morning beamed.“Savages!” shouted Mark kicking the gate to with a slam that startled Pan up. “Savages, of course!”“Why?”“They swim, donk: don’t they? They’re always in the water, and they have catamarans and ride the waves and dance on the shore, and blow shells—”“Trumpets?”“Yes.”“Canoes?”“Yes.”“No clothes?”“No.”“All jolly?”“Everything.”“Hurrah!”Away they ran towards the bathing-place to be savages, but Mark stopped suddenly, and asked what sort they were? They decided that they were the South Sea sort, and raced on again, Pan keeping pace with a kind of shamble; he was too idle to run properly. They dashed into the water, each with a wood-pigeon’s feather, which they had found under the sycamore-trees above the quarry, stuck in his hair. At the first dive the feathers floated away. Upon the other side of the rails there was a large aspen-tree whose lowest bough reached out over the water, which was shallow there.Though they made such a splashing when Bevis looked over the railings a moment, he saw some little roach moving to and fro under the bough. The wavelets from his splashing rolled on to the sandy shore, rippling under the aspen. As he looked, a fly fell on its back out of the tree, and struggled in vain to get up. Bevis climbed over the rails, picked an aspen leaf, and put it under the fly, which thus on a raft, and tossed up and down as Mark dived, was floated slowly by the undulations to the strand. As he got over the rails a kingfisher shot out from the mouth of the Nile opposite, and crossed aslant the gulf, whistling as he flew.“Look!” said Mark. “Don’t you know that’s a ‘sign.’ Savages read ‘signs,’ and those birds mean that there are heaps of fish.”“Yes, but we ought to have a proper language.”“Kalabala-blong!” said Mark.“Hududu-blow-fluz!” replied Bevis, taking a header from the top of the rail on which he had been sitting, and on which he just contrived to balance himself a moment without falling backwards.“Umplumum!” he shouted, coming up again.“Ikiklikah,” and Mark disappeared.“Noklikah,” said Bevis, giving him a shove under as he came up to breathe.“That’s not fair,” said Mark, scrambling up.Bevis was swimming, and Mark seized his feet. More splashing and shouting, and the rocks resound. The echo of their voices returned from the quarry and the high bank under the firs.They raced presently down to the elms along the sweet soft turf, sprinkling the dry grass with the sparkling drops from their limbs, and the sunlight shone on their white shoulders. The wind blew and stroked their gleaming backs. They rolled and tumbled on the grass, and the earth was under them. From the water to the sun and the wind and the grass.They played round the huge sycamore trunks above the quarry, and the massive boughs stretched over—from a distance they would have seemed mere specks beneath the immense trees. They raced across to a round hollow in the field and sat down at the bottom, so that they could see nothing but the sky overhead, and the clouds drifting. They lay at full length, and for a moment were still and silent; the sunbeam and the wind, the soft touch of the grass, the gliding cloud, the eye-loved blue gave them the delicious sense of growing strong in drowsy luxury.Then with a shout, renewed, they ran, and Pan who had been waiting by their clothes was startled into a bark of excitement at their sudden onslaught. As they went homewards they walked round to the little sheltered bay where the boats were kept, to look at the blue boat and measure for the mast. It was beside the punt, half drawn up on the sand, and fastened to a willow root. She was an ill-built craft with a straight gunwale, so that when afloat she seemed lower at stem and stern than abeam, as if she would thrust her nose into a wave instead of riding it. The planks were thick and heavy and looked as if they had not been bent enough to form the true buoyant curve.The blue paint had scaled and faded, the rowlocks were mended with a piece cut from an old rake-handle, there was a small pool of bilge water in the sternsheets from the last shower, fall of dead insects, and yellow willow leaves. A clumsy vessel put together years ago in some by-water of the far distant Thames above Oxford, and not good enough even for that unknown creek. She had drifted somehow into this landlocked pond and remained unused, hauled on the strand beneath the willows; she could carry five or six, and if they bumped her well on the stones it mattered little to so stout a frame.Still she was a boat, with keel and curve, and like lovers they saw no defect. Bevis looked at the hole in the seat or thwart, where the mast would have to be stepped, and measured it (not having a rule with him) by cutting a twig just to the length of the diameter. Mark examined the rudder and found that the lines were rotten, having hung dangling over the stern in the water for so long. Next they stepped her length, stepping on the sand outside, to decide on the height of the mast, and where were the ropes to be fastened? for they meant to have some standing rigging.At home afterwards in the shed, while Bevis shaved the fir-pole for the mast, Mark was set to carve the leaping-pole, for the South Sea savages have everything carved. He could hardly cut the hard dried bark of the ash, which had shrunk on and become like wood. He made a spiral notch round it, and then searched till he found his old spear, which had to be ornamented and altered into a bone harpoon. A bone from the kitchen was sawn off while in the vice, and then half through two inches from the largest end. Tapping a broad chisel gently, Mark split the bone down to the sawn part, and then gradually filed it sharp. He also filed three barbs to it, and then fitted the staff of the spear into the hollow end. While he was engraving lines and rings on the spear with his pocket-knife, the dinner interrupted his work.Bevis, wearying of the mast, got some flints, and hammered them to split off flakes for arrowheads, but though he bruised his fingers, he could not chip the splinters into shape. The fracture always ran too far, or not far enough. John Young, the labourer, came by as he was doing this sitting on the stool in the shed, and watched him.“I see a man do that once,” said John.“How did he do it? tell me? what’s the trick?” said Bevis, impatient to know.“Aw, I dunno; I see him at it. A’ had a gate-hinge snopping um.”The iron hinge of a gate, if removed from the post, forms a fairly good hammer, the handle of iron as well as the head.“Where was it? what did he do it for?”“Aw, up in the Downs. Course he did it to soil um.”The prehistoric art of chipping flints lingered among the shepherds on the Downs, till the percussion-cap came in, and no longer having to get flakes for the flintlock guns they slowly let it disappear. Young had seen it done, but could not describe how.Bevis battered his flints till he was tired; then he took up the last and hurled it away in a rage with all his might. The flint whirled over and over and hummed along the ground till it struck a small sarsen or boulder by the wood-pile, put there as a spur-stone to force the careless carters to drive straight. Then it flew into splinters with the jerk of the stoppage.“Here’s a sharp ’un,” said John Young, picking up a flake, “and here’s another.”Altogether there were three pointed flakes which Bevis thought would do. Mark had to bring some reeds next day from the place where they grew half a mile below his house in a by-water of the brook. They were green, but Bevis could not wait to dry them. He cut them off a little above the knot or joint, split the part above, and put the flint flake in, and bound it round and round with horsehair from the carter’s store in the stable. But when they were finished, they were not shot off, lest they should break; they were carried indoors into the room upstairs where there was a bench, and which they made their armoury.They made four or five darts next of deal shaved to the thickness of a thin walking-stick, and not quite so long. One end was split in four—once down and across that—and two pieces of cardboard doubled up thrust in, answering the purpose of feathering. There was a slight notch two-thirds up the shaft, and the way was to twist a piece of twine round it there crossed over a knot so as just to hold, the other end of the twine firmly coiled about the wrist, so that in throwing the string was taut and the point of the dart between the fingers. Hurling it the string imparted a second force, and the dart, twirling like an arrow, flew fifty or sixty yards.Slings they made with a square of leather from the sides of old shoes, a small hole out out in the centre that the stone might not slip, but these they could never do much with, except hurl pebbles from the rick-yard, rattling up into the boughs of the oak, on the other side of the field. The real arrows to shoot with—not the reed arrows to look at—were tipped with iron nails filed to a sharp point. They had much trouble in feathering them; they had plenty of goose-feathers (saved from the Christmas plucking), but to glue them on properly was not easy.
Bevis and Mark went eagerly to bathe by themselves, but immediately left the direct path. Human beings must be kept taut, or, like a rope, they will slacken. The very first morning they took a leaping-pole with them, a slender ash sapling, rather more than twice their own height, which they picked out from a number in the rick-yard, intending to jump to and fro the brook on the way. But before they had got half way to the brook they altered their minds, becoming eager for the water, and raced to the bathing-place. The pole was now to be an oar, and they were to swim, supported by an oar, like shipwrecked people.
So soon as he had had a plunge or two, Bevis put one arm over the pole and struck out with the other, thinking that he should be able in that way to have a long swim. Directly his weight pressed on the pole it went under, and did not support him in the least. He put it next beneath his chest, with both arms over it, but immediately he pushed off down it went again. Mark took it and got astride, when the pole let his feet touch the bottom.
“It’s no use,” he said. “What’s the good of people falling overboard with spars and oars? What stories they must tell.”
“I can’t make it out,” said Bevis; and he tried again, but it was no good, the pole was an encumbrance instead of a support, for it insisted upon slipping through the water lengthways, and would not move just as he wished. In a rage he gave it a push, and sent it ashore, and turned to swimming to the rail. They did not know it, but the governor, still anxious about them, had gone round a long distance, so as to have a peep at them from the hedge on the other side of Fir-Tree Gulf by the Nile. He could tell by the post and rails that they did not go out of their depth, and went away without letting them suspect his presence.
When they got out, they had a run in the sunshine, which dried them much better than towels. The field sloped gently to the right, and their usual run was on the slope beside a nut-tree hedge towards a group of elms. All the way there and back the sward was short and soft, almost like that of the Downs which they could see, and dotted with bird’s-foot lotus, over whose yellow flowers they raced. But this morning, being no longer kept taut, after they had returned from the elms with an enormous mushroom they had found there, they ran to the old quarry, and along the edge above. The perpendicular sand-cliff fell to an enclosed pool beneath, in which, on going to the very edge, they could see themselves reflected. Some hurdles and flakes—a stronger kind of hurdle—had been placed here that cattle might not wander over, but the cart-horses, who rub against everything, had rubbed against them and dislodged two or three. These had rolled down, and the rest hung half over.
While they stood still looking down over the broad waters of their New Sea, the sun burned their shoulders, making the skin red. Away they ran back to dress, and taking a short path across a place where the turf had partly grown over a shallow excavation pricked their feet with thistles, and had to limp the rest of the way to their clothes. Now, there were no thistles on their proper racecourse down to the elms and back.
As they returned home they remembered the brook, and went down to it to jump with the leaping-pole. But the soft ooze at the bottom let the pole sink in, and Bevis, who of course must take the first leap, was very near being hung up in the middle of the brook. Under his weight, as he sprang off, the pole sank deep into the ooze, and had it been a stiffer mud the pole would have stopped upright, when he must have stayed on it over the water, or have been jerked off among the flags. As it was it did let him get over, but he did not land on the firm bank, only reaching the mud at the side, where he scrambled up by grasping the stout stalk of a willow-herb. In future he felt with the butt of the pole till he found a firm spot, where it was sandy, or where the matted roots of grasses and flags had bound the mud hard. Then he flew over well up on the grass.
Mark took his turn, and as he put the butt in the water a streak of mud came up where a small jack fish had shot away. So they went on down the bank leaping alternately, one carrying the towels while the other flew over and back.
Sometimes they could not leap because the tripping was bad, undermined where cowslips in the spring hung over the stream, bored with the holes of water-rats, which when disused become covered with grass, but give way beneath the foot or the hoof that presses on them pitching leaper or rider into the current, or it was rotten from long-decaying roots, or about to slip. Sometimes the landing was bad, undermined in the same way, or higher than the tripping, when you have not only to get over, but to deliver yourself on a higher level; or swampy, where a wet furrow came to the brook; or too far, where there was nothing but mud to come on. They had to select their jumping-places, and feel the ground to the edge first.
“Here’s the raft!” shouted Mark, who was ahead, looking out for a good place.
“Is it?” said Bevis, running along on the other side. They had so completely forgotten it, that it came upon them like something new. Bevis took a leap and came over, and they set to work at once to launch it. The raft slipped gradually down the shelving shore of the drinking-place, and they thrust it into the stream. Bevis put his foot on board, but immediately withdrew it, for the water rushed through twenty leaks, spurting up along the joins. Left on the sand in the sun’s rays the wood of the raft shrank a little, opening the planking, while the clay they had daubed on to caulk the crevices had cracked, and the moss had dried up and was ready to crumble. The water came through every where, and the raft was half-full even when left to itself without any pressure.
“We ought to have thatched it,” said Mark. “We ought to have made a roof over it. Let’s stop the leaks.”
“O! come on,” said Bevis, “don’t let’s bother. Rafts are no good, no more than poles or oars when you fall overboard. We shall have a ship soon.”
The raft was an old story, and he did not care about it. He went on with the leaping-pole, but Mark stayed a minute and hauled the raft on shore as far as his strength would permit. He got about a quarter of it on the ground, so that it could not float away, and then ran after Bevis.
They went into the Peninsula, and looked at all the fir-trees, to see if any would do for a mast for the blue boat they were to have. As it had no name, they called it the blue boat to distinguish it from the punt. Mark thought an ash-pole would do for the mast, as ash-poles were so straight and could be easily shaved to the right size; but Bevis would not hear of it, for masts were never made of ash, but always of pine, and they must have their ship proper. He selected a tree presently, a young fir, straight as an arrow, and started Mark for the axe, but before he had gone ten yards Mark came back, saying that the tree would be of no use unless they liked to wait till next year, because it would be green, and the mast ought, to be made of seasoned wood.
“So it ought,” said Bevis. “What a lot of trouble it is to make a ship.”
But as they sat on the railing across the isthmus swinging their legs, Mark remembered that there were some fir-poles which had been cut a long time since behind the great wood-pile, between it and the walnut-trees, out of sight. Without a word away they ran, chose one of these and carried it into the shed where Bevis usually worked. They had got the dead bark off and were shaving away when it was dinner-time, which they thought a bore, but which wise old Pan, who was never chained now, considered the main object of life.
Next morning as they went through the meadow, where the dew still lingered in the shade, on the way to the bathing-place, taking Pan with them this time, they hung about the path picking clover-heads and sucking the petals, pulling them out and putting the lesser ends in their lips, looking at the white and pink bramble flowers, noting where the young nuts began to show, pulling down the woodbine, and doing everything but hasten on to their work of swimming. They stopped at the gate by the New Sea, over whose smooth surface slight breaths of mist were curling, and stood kicking the ground and the stones as flighty horses paw.
“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.
“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”
“Lions and tigers,” said Mark, growling, and showing his teeth.
“Pooh!”
“Shipwrecked people on an island.”
“Fiddle! They have plenty to do and are always happy, and we are not.”
“No; very unhappy. Let’s try escaping—prisoners running away.”
“Hum! Hateful!”
“Everything’s hateful.”
“So it is.”
“This is a very stupid sea.”
“There’s nothing in it.”
“Nothing anywhere.”
“Let’s be hermits.”
“There’s always only one hermit.”
“Well, you live that side,” (pointing across), “and I’ll live this.”
“Hermits eat pulse and drink water.”
“What’s pulse?”
“I suppose it’s barley water.”
“Horrid.”
“Awful.”
“You say what we shall be then.”
“Pan, you old donk,” said Bevis, rolling Pan over with his foot. Lazy Pan lay on his back, and let Bevis bend his ribs with his foot.
“Caw, caw!” a crow went over down to the shore, where he hoped to find a mussel surprised by the dawn in shallow water.
Bang! “Hoi! Hoo! Yah!” The discharge was half a mile away, but the crow altered his mind, and flew over the water as near the surface as he could without touching. Why do birds always cross the water in that way?
“That’s Tom,” said Mark. Tom was the bird-keeper. He shot first, and shouted after. He potted a hare in the corn with bits of flint, a button, three tin tacks, and a horse-stub, which scraped the old barrel inside, but slew the game. That was for himself. Then he shouted his loudest to do his duty—for other people. The sparrows had flown out of the corn at the noise of the gun, and settled on the hedge; when Tom shouted they were frightened from the hedge, and went back into the wheat. From which learn this, shoot first and shout after.
“Shall we say that was a gun at sea?” continued Mark.
“They are always heard at night,” said Bevis. “Pitch black, you know.”
“Everything is somehow else,” said Mark. Pan closed his idle old eyes, and grunted with delight as Bevis rubbed his ribs with his foot. Bevis put his hands in his pockets and sighed deeply. The sun looked down on these sons of care, and all the morning beamed.
“Savages!” shouted Mark kicking the gate to with a slam that startled Pan up. “Savages, of course!”
“Why?”
“They swim, donk: don’t they? They’re always in the water, and they have catamarans and ride the waves and dance on the shore, and blow shells—”
“Trumpets?”
“Yes.”
“Canoes?”
“Yes.”
“No clothes?”
“No.”
“All jolly?”
“Everything.”
“Hurrah!”
Away they ran towards the bathing-place to be savages, but Mark stopped suddenly, and asked what sort they were? They decided that they were the South Sea sort, and raced on again, Pan keeping pace with a kind of shamble; he was too idle to run properly. They dashed into the water, each with a wood-pigeon’s feather, which they had found under the sycamore-trees above the quarry, stuck in his hair. At the first dive the feathers floated away. Upon the other side of the rails there was a large aspen-tree whose lowest bough reached out over the water, which was shallow there.
Though they made such a splashing when Bevis looked over the railings a moment, he saw some little roach moving to and fro under the bough. The wavelets from his splashing rolled on to the sandy shore, rippling under the aspen. As he looked, a fly fell on its back out of the tree, and struggled in vain to get up. Bevis climbed over the rails, picked an aspen leaf, and put it under the fly, which thus on a raft, and tossed up and down as Mark dived, was floated slowly by the undulations to the strand. As he got over the rails a kingfisher shot out from the mouth of the Nile opposite, and crossed aslant the gulf, whistling as he flew.
“Look!” said Mark. “Don’t you know that’s a ‘sign.’ Savages read ‘signs,’ and those birds mean that there are heaps of fish.”
“Yes, but we ought to have a proper language.”
“Kalabala-blong!” said Mark.
“Hududu-blow-fluz!” replied Bevis, taking a header from the top of the rail on which he had been sitting, and on which he just contrived to balance himself a moment without falling backwards.
“Umplumum!” he shouted, coming up again.
“Ikiklikah,” and Mark disappeared.
“Noklikah,” said Bevis, giving him a shove under as he came up to breathe.
“That’s not fair,” said Mark, scrambling up.
Bevis was swimming, and Mark seized his feet. More splashing and shouting, and the rocks resound. The echo of their voices returned from the quarry and the high bank under the firs.
They raced presently down to the elms along the sweet soft turf, sprinkling the dry grass with the sparkling drops from their limbs, and the sunlight shone on their white shoulders. The wind blew and stroked their gleaming backs. They rolled and tumbled on the grass, and the earth was under them. From the water to the sun and the wind and the grass.
They played round the huge sycamore trunks above the quarry, and the massive boughs stretched over—from a distance they would have seemed mere specks beneath the immense trees. They raced across to a round hollow in the field and sat down at the bottom, so that they could see nothing but the sky overhead, and the clouds drifting. They lay at full length, and for a moment were still and silent; the sunbeam and the wind, the soft touch of the grass, the gliding cloud, the eye-loved blue gave them the delicious sense of growing strong in drowsy luxury.
Then with a shout, renewed, they ran, and Pan who had been waiting by their clothes was startled into a bark of excitement at their sudden onslaught. As they went homewards they walked round to the little sheltered bay where the boats were kept, to look at the blue boat and measure for the mast. It was beside the punt, half drawn up on the sand, and fastened to a willow root. She was an ill-built craft with a straight gunwale, so that when afloat she seemed lower at stem and stern than abeam, as if she would thrust her nose into a wave instead of riding it. The planks were thick and heavy and looked as if they had not been bent enough to form the true buoyant curve.
The blue paint had scaled and faded, the rowlocks were mended with a piece cut from an old rake-handle, there was a small pool of bilge water in the sternsheets from the last shower, fall of dead insects, and yellow willow leaves. A clumsy vessel put together years ago in some by-water of the far distant Thames above Oxford, and not good enough even for that unknown creek. She had drifted somehow into this landlocked pond and remained unused, hauled on the strand beneath the willows; she could carry five or six, and if they bumped her well on the stones it mattered little to so stout a frame.
Still she was a boat, with keel and curve, and like lovers they saw no defect. Bevis looked at the hole in the seat or thwart, where the mast would have to be stepped, and measured it (not having a rule with him) by cutting a twig just to the length of the diameter. Mark examined the rudder and found that the lines were rotten, having hung dangling over the stern in the water for so long. Next they stepped her length, stepping on the sand outside, to decide on the height of the mast, and where were the ropes to be fastened? for they meant to have some standing rigging.
At home afterwards in the shed, while Bevis shaved the fir-pole for the mast, Mark was set to carve the leaping-pole, for the South Sea savages have everything carved. He could hardly cut the hard dried bark of the ash, which had shrunk on and become like wood. He made a spiral notch round it, and then searched till he found his old spear, which had to be ornamented and altered into a bone harpoon. A bone from the kitchen was sawn off while in the vice, and then half through two inches from the largest end. Tapping a broad chisel gently, Mark split the bone down to the sawn part, and then gradually filed it sharp. He also filed three barbs to it, and then fitted the staff of the spear into the hollow end. While he was engraving lines and rings on the spear with his pocket-knife, the dinner interrupted his work.
Bevis, wearying of the mast, got some flints, and hammered them to split off flakes for arrowheads, but though he bruised his fingers, he could not chip the splinters into shape. The fracture always ran too far, or not far enough. John Young, the labourer, came by as he was doing this sitting on the stool in the shed, and watched him.
“I see a man do that once,” said John.
“How did he do it? tell me? what’s the trick?” said Bevis, impatient to know.
“Aw, I dunno; I see him at it. A’ had a gate-hinge snopping um.”
The iron hinge of a gate, if removed from the post, forms a fairly good hammer, the handle of iron as well as the head.
“Where was it? what did he do it for?”
“Aw, up in the Downs. Course he did it to soil um.”
The prehistoric art of chipping flints lingered among the shepherds on the Downs, till the percussion-cap came in, and no longer having to get flakes for the flintlock guns they slowly let it disappear. Young had seen it done, but could not describe how.
Bevis battered his flints till he was tired; then he took up the last and hurled it away in a rage with all his might. The flint whirled over and over and hummed along the ground till it struck a small sarsen or boulder by the wood-pile, put there as a spur-stone to force the careless carters to drive straight. Then it flew into splinters with the jerk of the stoppage.
“Here’s a sharp ’un,” said John Young, picking up a flake, “and here’s another.”
Altogether there were three pointed flakes which Bevis thought would do. Mark had to bring some reeds next day from the place where they grew half a mile below his house in a by-water of the brook. They were green, but Bevis could not wait to dry them. He cut them off a little above the knot or joint, split the part above, and put the flint flake in, and bound it round and round with horsehair from the carter’s store in the stable. But when they were finished, they were not shot off, lest they should break; they were carried indoors into the room upstairs where there was a bench, and which they made their armoury.
They made four or five darts next of deal shaved to the thickness of a thin walking-stick, and not quite so long. One end was split in four—once down and across that—and two pieces of cardboard doubled up thrust in, answering the purpose of feathering. There was a slight notch two-thirds up the shaft, and the way was to twist a piece of twine round it there crossed over a knot so as just to hold, the other end of the twine firmly coiled about the wrist, so that in throwing the string was taut and the point of the dart between the fingers. Hurling it the string imparted a second force, and the dart, twirling like an arrow, flew fifty or sixty yards.
Slings they made with a square of leather from the sides of old shoes, a small hole out out in the centre that the stone might not slip, but these they could never do much with, except hurl pebbles from the rick-yard, rattling up into the boughs of the oak, on the other side of the field. The real arrows to shoot with—not the reed arrows to look at—were tipped with iron nails filed to a sharp point. They had much trouble in feathering them; they had plenty of goose-feathers (saved from the Christmas plucking), but to glue them on properly was not easy.
Volume One—Chapter Eleven.Savages Continued—The Catamaran.With all their efforts, they could not make a blow-tube, such as are used by savages. Bevis thought and thought, and Mark helped him, and Pan grabbed his fleas, all together in the round blue summer-house; and they ate a thousand strawberries, and a basketful of red currants, ripe, from the wall close by, and two young summer apples, far from ready, and yet they could not do it. The tube ought to be at least as long as the savage, using it, was tall. They could easily find sticks that were just the thickness, and straight, but the difficulty was to bore through them. No gimlet or auger was long enough; nor could they do it with a bar of iron, red-hot at the end; they could not keep it true, but always burned too much one side or the other.Perhaps it might be managed by inserting a short piece of tin tubing, and making a little fire in it, and gradually pushing it down as the fire burnt. Only, as Bevis pointed out, the fire would not live in such a narrow place without any draught. A short tube was easily made out of elder, but not nearly long enough. The tinker, coming round to mend the pots, put it into their heads to set him to make a tin blow-pipe, five feet in length; which he promised to do, and sent it in a day or two. But as he had no sheet of tin broad enough to roll the tube in one piece, he had made four short pipes and soldered them together. Nothing would go straight through it because the joints were not quite perfect, inside there was a roughness which caught the dart and obstructed the puff, for a good blow-tube must be as smooth and well bored as a gun-barrel.When they came to look over their weapons, they found they had not got any throw-sticks, nor a boomerang. Throw-sticks were soon made, by cutting some with a good thick knob; and a boomerang was made out of a curved branch of ash, which they planed down smooth one side, and cut to a slight arch on the other.“This is a capital boomerang,” said Bevis. “Now we shall be able to knock a rabbit over without any noise, or frightening the rest, and it will come back and we can kill three or four running.”“Yes, and one of the mallards,” said Mark. “Don’t you know?—they are always too far for an arrow, and besides, the arrow would be lost if it did not hit. Now we shall have them. But which way ought we to throw it—the hollow first, or the bend first?”“Let’s try,” said Bevis, and ran with the boomerang from the shed into the field.Whiz! Away it went, bend first, and rose against the wind till the impetus ceased, when it hung a moment on the air, and slid to the right, falling near the summer-house. Next time it turned to the left, and fell in the hedge; another time it hit the hay-rick: nothing could make it go straight. Mark tried his hardest, and used it both ways, but in vain—the boomerang rose against the wind, and, so far, acted properly, but directly the force with which it was thrown was exhausted, it did as it liked, and swept round to the left or the right, and never once returned to their feet.“A boomerang is a stupid thing,” said Bevis, “I shall chop it up. I hate it.”“No; put it upstairs,” said Mark, taking it from him. So the boomerang was added to the collection in the bench-room. A crossbow was the next thing, and they made the stock from a stout elder branch, because when the pith was taken out, it left a groove for the bolt to slide up. The bow was a thick briar, and the bolt flew thirty or forty yards, but it did not answer, and they could hit nothing with it. A crossbow requires delicate adjustment, and to act well, must be made almost as accurately as a rifle.They shot a hundred times at the sparrows on the roof, who were no sooner driven off than they came back like flies, but never hit one; so the crossbow was hung up with the boomerang. Bevis, from much practice, could shoot far better than that with his bow and arrow. He stuck up an apple on a stick, and after six or seven trials hit it at twenty yards. He could always hit a tree. Mark was afraid to throw his bone-headed harpoon at a tree, lest the head should break off; but he had another, without a bone head, to cast; and he too could generally hit a tree.“Now we are quite savages,” said Bevis, one evening, as they sat up in the bench-room, and the sun went down red and fiery, opposite the little window, filling the room with a red glow and gleaming on their faces. It put a touch of colour on the pears, which were growing large, just outside the window, as if they were ripe towards the sunset. The boomerang on the wall was lit up with the light; so was a parcel of canvas, on the floor, which they had bought at Latten town, for the sails of their ship.There was an oyster barrel under the bench, which was to contain the fresh water for their voyage, and there had been much discussion as to how they were to put a new head to it.“We ought to see ourselves on the shore with spears and things when we are sailing round,” said Mark.“So as not to be able to land for fear.”“Poisoned arrows,” said Mark. “I say, how stupid! we have not got any poison.”“No more we have. We must get a lot of poison.”“Curious plants nobody knows anything about but us.”“Nobody ever heard of them.”“And dip our arrows and spear’s in the juice.”“No one ever gets well after being shot with them.”“If the wind blows hard ashore and there are no harbours it will be awful with the savages all along waiting for us.”“We shall see them dancing and shouting with bows and throw-sticks, and yelling.”“That’s you and me.”“Of course. And very likely if the wind is very hard we shall have to let down the sails, and fling out an anchor and stay till the gale goes down.”“The anchor may drag.”“Then we shall crash on the rocks.”“And swim ashore.”“You can’t. There’s the breakers and the savages behind them. I shall stop on the wreck, and the sun will go down.”“Red like that,” pointing out of window.“And it will blow harder still.”“Black as pitch.”“Horrible.”“No help.”“Fire a gun.”“Pooh!”“Make a raft.”“The clouds are sure to break, or something.”“I say,” said Bevis, “won’t all these things,”—pointing to the weapons—“do first-rate for our war?”“Capital. There will be arrows sticking up everywhere all over the battle-field.”“Broken lances and horses without riders.”“Dints in the ground.”“Knights with their backs against trees and heaps of soldiers chopping at them.”“Flashing swords! the ground will shake when we charge.”“Trumpets!”“Groans!”“Grass all red!”“Blood-red sun like that!” The disc growing larger as it neared the horizon, shone vast through some distant elms.“Flocks of crows.”“Heaps of white bones.”“And we will take the shovels and make a tumulus by the shore.”The red glow on the wall slowly dimmed, the colour left the pear, and the song of a thrush came from the orchard.“I want to make some magic,” said Bevis, after a pause. “The thing is to make a wand.”“Genii are best,” said Mark. “They do anything you tell them.”“There ought to be a black book telling you how to do it somewhere,” said Bevis; “but I’ve looked through the bookcase and there’s nothing.”“Are you sure you have quite looked through?”“I’ll try again,” said Bevis. “There’s a lot of books, but never anything that you want.”“I know,” said Mark suddenly. “There’s the bugle in the old cupboard—that will do for the war.”“So it will; I forgot it.”“And a flag.”“No; we must have eagles on a stick.”Knock! They jumped; Polly had hit the ceiling underneath with the handle of a broom.“Supper.”When they went to bathe next morning, Bevis took with him his bow and arrows, intending to shoot a pike. As they walked beside the shore they often saw jacks basking in the sun at the surface of the water, and only a few yards distant. He had fastened a long thin string one end to the arrow and the other to the bow, so that he might draw the arrow back to him with the fish on as the savages do. Mark brought his bone-headed harpoon to try and spear something, and between them they also carried a plank, which was to be used as a catamaran.A paddle they had made was tied to it for convenience, that their hands might not be too full. Mark went first with one end of the plank on his shoulder, and Bevis followed with the other on his, and as they had to hold it on edge it rather cut them. Coming near some weeds where they had seen a jack the day before, they put the catamaran down, and Bevis crept quietly forward. The jack was not there, but motioning to Mark to stand still, Bevis went on to where the first railings stretched out into the water.There he saw a jack about two pounds’ weight basking within an inch of the surface, and aslant to him. He lifted his bow before he went near, shook out the string that it might slip easily like the coil of a harpoon, fitted the arrow, and holding it almost up, stole closer. He knew if he pulled the bow in the usual manner the sudden motion of his arms would send the jack away in an instant. With the bow already in position, he got within six yards of the fish, which, quite still, did not seem to see anything, but to sleep with eyes wide open in the sun. The shaft flew, and like another arrow the jack darted aslant into deep water.Bevis drew back his arrow with the string, not altogether disappointed, for it had struck the water very near if not exactly at the place the fish had occupied. But he thought the string impeded the shaft, and took it off for another trial. Mark would not stay behind; he insisted upon seeing the shooting, so leaving the catamaran on the grass, they moved gently along the shore. After a while they found another jack, this time much larger, and not less than four pounds’ weight, stationary in a tiny bay, or curve of the land. He was lying parallel to the shore, but deeper than the first, perhaps six inches beneath the surface. Mark stood where he could see the dark line of the fish, while Bevis, with the bow lifted and arrow half drawn, took one, two, three, and almost another step forward.Aiming steadily at the jack’s broad side, just behind the front fins, where the fish was widest, Bevis grasped his bow firm to keep it from the least wavering (for it is the left hand that shoots), drew his arrow, and let go. So swift was the shaft, unimpeded, and drawn too this time almost to the head, in traversing the short distance between, that the jack, quick as he was, could not of himself have escaped. Bevis saw the arrow enter the water, and, as it seemed to him, strike the fish. It did indeed strike the image of the fish, but the real jack slipped beneath it.Bevis looked and looked, he was so certain he had hit it, and so he had hit the mark he aimed at, which was the refraction, but the fish was unhurt. It was explained to him afterwards that the fish appears higher in the water than it actually is, and that to have hit it he should have aimed two inches underneath, and he proved the truth of it by trying to touch things in the water with a long stick. The arrow glanced after going two feet or so deep, and performed a curve in the water exactly opposite to that it would have traced in the air. In the air it would have curved over, in the water it curved under, and came up to the surface not very far out; the water checked it so. Bevis fastened the string again to another arrow, and shot it out over the first, so that it caught and held it, and he drew them both back.They fetched the catamaran, and went on till they came to the point where there was a wall of stones rudely put together to shield the land from the full shock of the waves, when the west wind rolled them heavily from the Indian Ocean and the Golden Sea. Putting the plank down again, Mark went forward with his harpoon, for he knew that shoals of fish often played in the water when it was still, just beneath this rocky wall. As he expected, they were there this morning, for the most part roach, but a few perch. He knelt and crept out on all fours to the edge of the wall, leaving his hat on the sward. Looking over, he could see to the stony bottom, and as there was not a ripple, he could see distinctly.He put his harpoon gently, without a splash, into the sunlit water, and let it sink slowly in among the shoal. The roach swam aside a yard or so from it, but showed no more fear than that it should not touch them. Mark kept his harpoon still till a larger roach came slowly by within eighteen inches of the point, when he jerked it at the fish. It passed six inches behind his tail, and though Mark tried again and again, thrusting quickly, he could not strike them with his single point. To throw it like a dart he knew was useless, they were too deep down, nor could he hit so small an object in motion. He could not do it, but some days afterwards he struck a small tench in the brook, and got him out. The tench was still, so that he could put the head of his harpoon almost on it.They marched on, and presently launched the catamaran. It would only support one at a time astride and half in the water, but it was a capital thing. Sitting on it, Bevis paddled along the shore nearly to the rocky wall and back, but he did not forget his promise, and was not out of his depth; he could see the stones at the bottom all the time. Mark tried to stand on the plank, but one edge would go down and pitch him off. He next tried to lie on it on his back, and succeeded so long as he let his legs dangle over each side, and so balanced it. Then they stood away, and swam to it as if it had been the last plank of a wreck.“Look!” said Mark, after they had done this several times. He was holding the plank at arm’s length with his limbs floating. “Look!”“I see. What is it?”“This is the way. We ought to have held the jumping-pole like this. This is the way to hold an oar and swim.”“So it is,” said Bevis, “of course, that’s it; we’ll have the punt, and try with a scull.”Held at arm’s length, almost anything will keep a swimmer afloat; but if he puts it under his arm or chest, it takes a good-sized spar. Splashing about, presently the plank forgotten for the moment slipped away, and, impelled by the waves they made, floated into deep water.“I’m sure I could swim to it,” said Bevis, and he was inclined to try.“We promised not,” said Mark.“You stupe—I know that; but if there’s a plank, that’s not dangerous then.”“Stupe” was their word for stupid. He waded out till the water was over his shoulders, and tried to lift him.“Don’t—don’t,” said Mark. Bevis began to lean his chest on the water.“If you’re captain,” cried Mark, “you ought not to.”“No more I ought,” said Bevis, coming back. “Get my bow.”“What for?”“Go and get my bow.”“I shan’t, if you say it like that.”“You shall. Am I not captain?”Mark was caught by his own argument, and went out on the sward for the bow.“Tie the arrow on with the string,” shouted Bevis. Mark did it, and brought it in, keeping it above the surface. Bevis climbed on the railings, half out of water, so that he could steady himself with his knees against the rail.“Now, give me the bow,” he said. He took good aim, and the nail, filed to a sharp point, was driven deep into the soft deal of the plank. With the string he hauled the catamaran gently back, but it would not come straight; it slipped sideways (like the boomerang in the air), and came ashore under the aspen bough.When they came out they bathed again in the air and the sunshine; they rolled on the sward, and ran. Bevis, as he ran and shouted, shot off an arrow with all his might to see how far it would go. It went up, up, and curving over, struck a bough at the top of one of the elms, and stopped there by the rooks’ nests. Mark shouted and danced on the bird’s-foot lotus, and darted his spear, heedless of the bone-head. It went up into the hazel boughs of the hedge among the young nuts, and he could not get it till dressed, for the thistles.They ran again and chased each other in and out the sycamore trunks, and visited the hollow, shouting their loudest, till the distant herd looked up from their grazing. The sunlight poured upon them, and the light air came along; they bathed in air and sunbeam, and gathered years of health like flowers from the field.After they had dressed they took the catamaran to the quarry to leave it there (somewhat out of sight lest any one should take it for firewood), so as to save the labour of carrying it to and fro. There was a savage of another tribe in the quarry, and they crept on all fours, taking great pains that he should not see them. It was the old man who was supposed to look after the boats, and generally to watch the water. Had they not been so occupied they would have heard the thump, thump of the sculls as he rowed, or rather moved the punt up to where the narrow mound separated the New, Sea from the quarry.He was at work scooping out some sand, and filling sacks with the best, with which cargo he would presently voyage home, and retail it to the dairymaids and at the roadside inns to eke out that spirit of juniper-berries needful to those who have dwelt long by marshy places. They need not have troubled to conceal themselves from this stranger savage; he would not have seen them if they had stood close by him. A narrow life narrows the sweep of the eye. Miserable being, he could see no farther than one of the mussels of the lake which travel in a groove. His groove led to the sanded inn-kitchen, and his shell was shut to all else. But they crept like skirmishers, dragging the catamaran laboriously behind them, using every undulation of the ground to hide themselves, till they had got it into the hollow, where they left it beside a heap of stones. Then they had to crawl out again, and for thirty yards along the turf, till they could stand up unseen.“Let’s get the poison,” said Mark, as they were going home.So they searched for the poison-plants. The woody nightshade they knew very well, having been warned long ago against the berries. It was now only in flower, and it would be some time before there were any berries; but after thinking it over they decided to gather a bundle of stalks, and soak them for the deadly juice. There were stems of arum in the ditches, tipped with green berries. These they thought would do, but shrank from touching. The green looked unpleasant and slimy.Next they hunted for mandragora, of which John Young had given them an account. It grew in waste places, and by the tombs in the churchyard, and shrieked while you pulled it up. This they could not find. Mark said perhaps it wanted an enchanter to discover it, but he gathered a quantity of the dark green milfoil from the grass beside the hedge and paths, and crammed his pockets with it. Some of the lads had told him that it was a deadly poison. It is the reverse—thus reputation varies—for it was used to cure mediaeval sword-cuts. They passed the water-parsnip, unaware of its pernicious qualities, looking for noisome hemlock.“There’s another kind of nightshade,” said Bevis; “because I read about it in that old book indoors, and it’s much stronger than this. We must have some of it.”They looked a long time, but could not find it; and, full of their direful object, did not heed sounds of laughter on the other side of the hedge they were searching, till they got through a gap and jumped into the midst of a group of haymakers resting for lunch. The old men had got a little way apart by themselves, for they wanted to eat like Pan. All the women were together in a “gaggle,” a semicircle of them sitting round a young girl who lounged on a heap of mown grass, with a huge labourer lying full length at her feet. She had a piece of honey suckle in her hand, and he had a black wooden “bottle” near him.There was a courting going on between these two, and all the other women, married and single, collected round them, to aid in the business with jokes and innuendoes.Bevis and Mark instantly recognised in the girl the one who at “Calais” had shown them the road home, and in the man at her feet the fellow who was asleep on the flint heap.Her large eyes, like black cherries—for black eyes and black cherries have a faint tint of red behind them—were immediately bent full on Bevis as she rose and curtseyed to him. Her dress at the throat had come unhooked, and showed the line to which the sun had browned her, and where the sweet clear whiteness of the untouched skin began. The soft roundness of the swelling plum as it ripens filled her common print, torn by briars, with graceful contours. In the shadow of the oak her large black eyes shone larger, loving and untaught.Bevis did not speak. He and Mark were a little taken aback, having jumped through the gap so suddenly from savagery into haymaking. They hastened through a gateway into another field.“How you do keep a-staring arter they!” said the huge young labourer to the girl. “Yen you seen he afore? It’s onely our young measter.”“I knows,” said the girl, sitting down as Bevis and Mark disappeared through the gateway. “He put a bough on you to keep the flies off while you were sleeping.”“Did a’? Then why didn’t you axe ’un for a quart?”She had slipped along the fields by the road that day, and had seen Bevis put the bough over her lover’s face as he slept on the flint heap—where she left him. The grateful labourer’s immediate idea was to ask Bevis for some beer.Behind the hedge Bevis and Mark continued their search for deadly poison. They took some “gix,” but were not certain that it was the true hemlock.“There’s a sort of sorrel that’s poison,” said Mark.“And heaps of roots,” said Bevis.They were now near home, and went in to extract the essence from the plants they had. The nightshade yielded very little juice from its woody bines, or stalks; the “gix” not much more: the milfoil, well bruised and squeezed, gave most. They found three small phials, the nightshade and “gix” only filled a quarter of the phials used for them: Mark had a phial three-parts full of milfoil. These they arranged in a row on the bench in the bench-room under the crossbow and boomerang, for future use in war. They did not dip their arrows or harpoon in yet, lest they should poison any fish or animal they might kill, and so render it unfit for food.
With all their efforts, they could not make a blow-tube, such as are used by savages. Bevis thought and thought, and Mark helped him, and Pan grabbed his fleas, all together in the round blue summer-house; and they ate a thousand strawberries, and a basketful of red currants, ripe, from the wall close by, and two young summer apples, far from ready, and yet they could not do it. The tube ought to be at least as long as the savage, using it, was tall. They could easily find sticks that were just the thickness, and straight, but the difficulty was to bore through them. No gimlet or auger was long enough; nor could they do it with a bar of iron, red-hot at the end; they could not keep it true, but always burned too much one side or the other.
Perhaps it might be managed by inserting a short piece of tin tubing, and making a little fire in it, and gradually pushing it down as the fire burnt. Only, as Bevis pointed out, the fire would not live in such a narrow place without any draught. A short tube was easily made out of elder, but not nearly long enough. The tinker, coming round to mend the pots, put it into their heads to set him to make a tin blow-pipe, five feet in length; which he promised to do, and sent it in a day or two. But as he had no sheet of tin broad enough to roll the tube in one piece, he had made four short pipes and soldered them together. Nothing would go straight through it because the joints were not quite perfect, inside there was a roughness which caught the dart and obstructed the puff, for a good blow-tube must be as smooth and well bored as a gun-barrel.
When they came to look over their weapons, they found they had not got any throw-sticks, nor a boomerang. Throw-sticks were soon made, by cutting some with a good thick knob; and a boomerang was made out of a curved branch of ash, which they planed down smooth one side, and cut to a slight arch on the other.
“This is a capital boomerang,” said Bevis. “Now we shall be able to knock a rabbit over without any noise, or frightening the rest, and it will come back and we can kill three or four running.”
“Yes, and one of the mallards,” said Mark. “Don’t you know?—they are always too far for an arrow, and besides, the arrow would be lost if it did not hit. Now we shall have them. But which way ought we to throw it—the hollow first, or the bend first?”
“Let’s try,” said Bevis, and ran with the boomerang from the shed into the field.
Whiz! Away it went, bend first, and rose against the wind till the impetus ceased, when it hung a moment on the air, and slid to the right, falling near the summer-house. Next time it turned to the left, and fell in the hedge; another time it hit the hay-rick: nothing could make it go straight. Mark tried his hardest, and used it both ways, but in vain—the boomerang rose against the wind, and, so far, acted properly, but directly the force with which it was thrown was exhausted, it did as it liked, and swept round to the left or the right, and never once returned to their feet.
“A boomerang is a stupid thing,” said Bevis, “I shall chop it up. I hate it.”
“No; put it upstairs,” said Mark, taking it from him. So the boomerang was added to the collection in the bench-room. A crossbow was the next thing, and they made the stock from a stout elder branch, because when the pith was taken out, it left a groove for the bolt to slide up. The bow was a thick briar, and the bolt flew thirty or forty yards, but it did not answer, and they could hit nothing with it. A crossbow requires delicate adjustment, and to act well, must be made almost as accurately as a rifle.
They shot a hundred times at the sparrows on the roof, who were no sooner driven off than they came back like flies, but never hit one; so the crossbow was hung up with the boomerang. Bevis, from much practice, could shoot far better than that with his bow and arrow. He stuck up an apple on a stick, and after six or seven trials hit it at twenty yards. He could always hit a tree. Mark was afraid to throw his bone-headed harpoon at a tree, lest the head should break off; but he had another, without a bone head, to cast; and he too could generally hit a tree.
“Now we are quite savages,” said Bevis, one evening, as they sat up in the bench-room, and the sun went down red and fiery, opposite the little window, filling the room with a red glow and gleaming on their faces. It put a touch of colour on the pears, which were growing large, just outside the window, as if they were ripe towards the sunset. The boomerang on the wall was lit up with the light; so was a parcel of canvas, on the floor, which they had bought at Latten town, for the sails of their ship.
There was an oyster barrel under the bench, which was to contain the fresh water for their voyage, and there had been much discussion as to how they were to put a new head to it.
“We ought to see ourselves on the shore with spears and things when we are sailing round,” said Mark.
“So as not to be able to land for fear.”
“Poisoned arrows,” said Mark. “I say, how stupid! we have not got any poison.”
“No more we have. We must get a lot of poison.”
“Curious plants nobody knows anything about but us.”
“Nobody ever heard of them.”
“And dip our arrows and spear’s in the juice.”
“No one ever gets well after being shot with them.”
“If the wind blows hard ashore and there are no harbours it will be awful with the savages all along waiting for us.”
“We shall see them dancing and shouting with bows and throw-sticks, and yelling.”
“That’s you and me.”
“Of course. And very likely if the wind is very hard we shall have to let down the sails, and fling out an anchor and stay till the gale goes down.”
“The anchor may drag.”
“Then we shall crash on the rocks.”
“And swim ashore.”
“You can’t. There’s the breakers and the savages behind them. I shall stop on the wreck, and the sun will go down.”
“Red like that,” pointing out of window.
“And it will blow harder still.”
“Black as pitch.”
“Horrible.”
“No help.”
“Fire a gun.”
“Pooh!”
“Make a raft.”
“The clouds are sure to break, or something.”
“I say,” said Bevis, “won’t all these things,”—pointing to the weapons—“do first-rate for our war?”
“Capital. There will be arrows sticking up everywhere all over the battle-field.”
“Broken lances and horses without riders.”
“Dints in the ground.”
“Knights with their backs against trees and heaps of soldiers chopping at them.”
“Flashing swords! the ground will shake when we charge.”
“Trumpets!”
“Groans!”
“Grass all red!”
“Blood-red sun like that!” The disc growing larger as it neared the horizon, shone vast through some distant elms.
“Flocks of crows.”
“Heaps of white bones.”
“And we will take the shovels and make a tumulus by the shore.”
The red glow on the wall slowly dimmed, the colour left the pear, and the song of a thrush came from the orchard.
“I want to make some magic,” said Bevis, after a pause. “The thing is to make a wand.”
“Genii are best,” said Mark. “They do anything you tell them.”
“There ought to be a black book telling you how to do it somewhere,” said Bevis; “but I’ve looked through the bookcase and there’s nothing.”
“Are you sure you have quite looked through?”
“I’ll try again,” said Bevis. “There’s a lot of books, but never anything that you want.”
“I know,” said Mark suddenly. “There’s the bugle in the old cupboard—that will do for the war.”
“So it will; I forgot it.”
“And a flag.”
“No; we must have eagles on a stick.”
Knock! They jumped; Polly had hit the ceiling underneath with the handle of a broom.
“Supper.”
When they went to bathe next morning, Bevis took with him his bow and arrows, intending to shoot a pike. As they walked beside the shore they often saw jacks basking in the sun at the surface of the water, and only a few yards distant. He had fastened a long thin string one end to the arrow and the other to the bow, so that he might draw the arrow back to him with the fish on as the savages do. Mark brought his bone-headed harpoon to try and spear something, and between them they also carried a plank, which was to be used as a catamaran.
A paddle they had made was tied to it for convenience, that their hands might not be too full. Mark went first with one end of the plank on his shoulder, and Bevis followed with the other on his, and as they had to hold it on edge it rather cut them. Coming near some weeds where they had seen a jack the day before, they put the catamaran down, and Bevis crept quietly forward. The jack was not there, but motioning to Mark to stand still, Bevis went on to where the first railings stretched out into the water.
There he saw a jack about two pounds’ weight basking within an inch of the surface, and aslant to him. He lifted his bow before he went near, shook out the string that it might slip easily like the coil of a harpoon, fitted the arrow, and holding it almost up, stole closer. He knew if he pulled the bow in the usual manner the sudden motion of his arms would send the jack away in an instant. With the bow already in position, he got within six yards of the fish, which, quite still, did not seem to see anything, but to sleep with eyes wide open in the sun. The shaft flew, and like another arrow the jack darted aslant into deep water.
Bevis drew back his arrow with the string, not altogether disappointed, for it had struck the water very near if not exactly at the place the fish had occupied. But he thought the string impeded the shaft, and took it off for another trial. Mark would not stay behind; he insisted upon seeing the shooting, so leaving the catamaran on the grass, they moved gently along the shore. After a while they found another jack, this time much larger, and not less than four pounds’ weight, stationary in a tiny bay, or curve of the land. He was lying parallel to the shore, but deeper than the first, perhaps six inches beneath the surface. Mark stood where he could see the dark line of the fish, while Bevis, with the bow lifted and arrow half drawn, took one, two, three, and almost another step forward.
Aiming steadily at the jack’s broad side, just behind the front fins, where the fish was widest, Bevis grasped his bow firm to keep it from the least wavering (for it is the left hand that shoots), drew his arrow, and let go. So swift was the shaft, unimpeded, and drawn too this time almost to the head, in traversing the short distance between, that the jack, quick as he was, could not of himself have escaped. Bevis saw the arrow enter the water, and, as it seemed to him, strike the fish. It did indeed strike the image of the fish, but the real jack slipped beneath it.
Bevis looked and looked, he was so certain he had hit it, and so he had hit the mark he aimed at, which was the refraction, but the fish was unhurt. It was explained to him afterwards that the fish appears higher in the water than it actually is, and that to have hit it he should have aimed two inches underneath, and he proved the truth of it by trying to touch things in the water with a long stick. The arrow glanced after going two feet or so deep, and performed a curve in the water exactly opposite to that it would have traced in the air. In the air it would have curved over, in the water it curved under, and came up to the surface not very far out; the water checked it so. Bevis fastened the string again to another arrow, and shot it out over the first, so that it caught and held it, and he drew them both back.
They fetched the catamaran, and went on till they came to the point where there was a wall of stones rudely put together to shield the land from the full shock of the waves, when the west wind rolled them heavily from the Indian Ocean and the Golden Sea. Putting the plank down again, Mark went forward with his harpoon, for he knew that shoals of fish often played in the water when it was still, just beneath this rocky wall. As he expected, they were there this morning, for the most part roach, but a few perch. He knelt and crept out on all fours to the edge of the wall, leaving his hat on the sward. Looking over, he could see to the stony bottom, and as there was not a ripple, he could see distinctly.
He put his harpoon gently, without a splash, into the sunlit water, and let it sink slowly in among the shoal. The roach swam aside a yard or so from it, but showed no more fear than that it should not touch them. Mark kept his harpoon still till a larger roach came slowly by within eighteen inches of the point, when he jerked it at the fish. It passed six inches behind his tail, and though Mark tried again and again, thrusting quickly, he could not strike them with his single point. To throw it like a dart he knew was useless, they were too deep down, nor could he hit so small an object in motion. He could not do it, but some days afterwards he struck a small tench in the brook, and got him out. The tench was still, so that he could put the head of his harpoon almost on it.
They marched on, and presently launched the catamaran. It would only support one at a time astride and half in the water, but it was a capital thing. Sitting on it, Bevis paddled along the shore nearly to the rocky wall and back, but he did not forget his promise, and was not out of his depth; he could see the stones at the bottom all the time. Mark tried to stand on the plank, but one edge would go down and pitch him off. He next tried to lie on it on his back, and succeeded so long as he let his legs dangle over each side, and so balanced it. Then they stood away, and swam to it as if it had been the last plank of a wreck.
“Look!” said Mark, after they had done this several times. He was holding the plank at arm’s length with his limbs floating. “Look!”
“I see. What is it?”
“This is the way. We ought to have held the jumping-pole like this. This is the way to hold an oar and swim.”
“So it is,” said Bevis, “of course, that’s it; we’ll have the punt, and try with a scull.”
Held at arm’s length, almost anything will keep a swimmer afloat; but if he puts it under his arm or chest, it takes a good-sized spar. Splashing about, presently the plank forgotten for the moment slipped away, and, impelled by the waves they made, floated into deep water.
“I’m sure I could swim to it,” said Bevis, and he was inclined to try.
“We promised not,” said Mark.
“You stupe—I know that; but if there’s a plank, that’s not dangerous then.”
“Stupe” was their word for stupid. He waded out till the water was over his shoulders, and tried to lift him.
“Don’t—don’t,” said Mark. Bevis began to lean his chest on the water.
“If you’re captain,” cried Mark, “you ought not to.”
“No more I ought,” said Bevis, coming back. “Get my bow.”
“What for?”
“Go and get my bow.”
“I shan’t, if you say it like that.”
“You shall. Am I not captain?”
Mark was caught by his own argument, and went out on the sward for the bow.
“Tie the arrow on with the string,” shouted Bevis. Mark did it, and brought it in, keeping it above the surface. Bevis climbed on the railings, half out of water, so that he could steady himself with his knees against the rail.
“Now, give me the bow,” he said. He took good aim, and the nail, filed to a sharp point, was driven deep into the soft deal of the plank. With the string he hauled the catamaran gently back, but it would not come straight; it slipped sideways (like the boomerang in the air), and came ashore under the aspen bough.
When they came out they bathed again in the air and the sunshine; they rolled on the sward, and ran. Bevis, as he ran and shouted, shot off an arrow with all his might to see how far it would go. It went up, up, and curving over, struck a bough at the top of one of the elms, and stopped there by the rooks’ nests. Mark shouted and danced on the bird’s-foot lotus, and darted his spear, heedless of the bone-head. It went up into the hazel boughs of the hedge among the young nuts, and he could not get it till dressed, for the thistles.
They ran again and chased each other in and out the sycamore trunks, and visited the hollow, shouting their loudest, till the distant herd looked up from their grazing. The sunlight poured upon them, and the light air came along; they bathed in air and sunbeam, and gathered years of health like flowers from the field.
After they had dressed they took the catamaran to the quarry to leave it there (somewhat out of sight lest any one should take it for firewood), so as to save the labour of carrying it to and fro. There was a savage of another tribe in the quarry, and they crept on all fours, taking great pains that he should not see them. It was the old man who was supposed to look after the boats, and generally to watch the water. Had they not been so occupied they would have heard the thump, thump of the sculls as he rowed, or rather moved the punt up to where the narrow mound separated the New, Sea from the quarry.
He was at work scooping out some sand, and filling sacks with the best, with which cargo he would presently voyage home, and retail it to the dairymaids and at the roadside inns to eke out that spirit of juniper-berries needful to those who have dwelt long by marshy places. They need not have troubled to conceal themselves from this stranger savage; he would not have seen them if they had stood close by him. A narrow life narrows the sweep of the eye. Miserable being, he could see no farther than one of the mussels of the lake which travel in a groove. His groove led to the sanded inn-kitchen, and his shell was shut to all else. But they crept like skirmishers, dragging the catamaran laboriously behind them, using every undulation of the ground to hide themselves, till they had got it into the hollow, where they left it beside a heap of stones. Then they had to crawl out again, and for thirty yards along the turf, till they could stand up unseen.
“Let’s get the poison,” said Mark, as they were going home.
So they searched for the poison-plants. The woody nightshade they knew very well, having been warned long ago against the berries. It was now only in flower, and it would be some time before there were any berries; but after thinking it over they decided to gather a bundle of stalks, and soak them for the deadly juice. There were stems of arum in the ditches, tipped with green berries. These they thought would do, but shrank from touching. The green looked unpleasant and slimy.
Next they hunted for mandragora, of which John Young had given them an account. It grew in waste places, and by the tombs in the churchyard, and shrieked while you pulled it up. This they could not find. Mark said perhaps it wanted an enchanter to discover it, but he gathered a quantity of the dark green milfoil from the grass beside the hedge and paths, and crammed his pockets with it. Some of the lads had told him that it was a deadly poison. It is the reverse—thus reputation varies—for it was used to cure mediaeval sword-cuts. They passed the water-parsnip, unaware of its pernicious qualities, looking for noisome hemlock.
“There’s another kind of nightshade,” said Bevis; “because I read about it in that old book indoors, and it’s much stronger than this. We must have some of it.”
They looked a long time, but could not find it; and, full of their direful object, did not heed sounds of laughter on the other side of the hedge they were searching, till they got through a gap and jumped into the midst of a group of haymakers resting for lunch. The old men had got a little way apart by themselves, for they wanted to eat like Pan. All the women were together in a “gaggle,” a semicircle of them sitting round a young girl who lounged on a heap of mown grass, with a huge labourer lying full length at her feet. She had a piece of honey suckle in her hand, and he had a black wooden “bottle” near him.
There was a courting going on between these two, and all the other women, married and single, collected round them, to aid in the business with jokes and innuendoes.
Bevis and Mark instantly recognised in the girl the one who at “Calais” had shown them the road home, and in the man at her feet the fellow who was asleep on the flint heap.
Her large eyes, like black cherries—for black eyes and black cherries have a faint tint of red behind them—were immediately bent full on Bevis as she rose and curtseyed to him. Her dress at the throat had come unhooked, and showed the line to which the sun had browned her, and where the sweet clear whiteness of the untouched skin began. The soft roundness of the swelling plum as it ripens filled her common print, torn by briars, with graceful contours. In the shadow of the oak her large black eyes shone larger, loving and untaught.
Bevis did not speak. He and Mark were a little taken aback, having jumped through the gap so suddenly from savagery into haymaking. They hastened through a gateway into another field.
“How you do keep a-staring arter they!” said the huge young labourer to the girl. “Yen you seen he afore? It’s onely our young measter.”
“I knows,” said the girl, sitting down as Bevis and Mark disappeared through the gateway. “He put a bough on you to keep the flies off while you were sleeping.”
“Did a’? Then why didn’t you axe ’un for a quart?”
She had slipped along the fields by the road that day, and had seen Bevis put the bough over her lover’s face as he slept on the flint heap—where she left him. The grateful labourer’s immediate idea was to ask Bevis for some beer.
Behind the hedge Bevis and Mark continued their search for deadly poison. They took some “gix,” but were not certain that it was the true hemlock.
“There’s a sort of sorrel that’s poison,” said Mark.
“And heaps of roots,” said Bevis.
They were now near home, and went in to extract the essence from the plants they had. The nightshade yielded very little juice from its woody bines, or stalks; the “gix” not much more: the milfoil, well bruised and squeezed, gave most. They found three small phials, the nightshade and “gix” only filled a quarter of the phials used for them: Mark had a phial three-parts full of milfoil. These they arranged in a row on the bench in the bench-room under the crossbow and boomerang, for future use in war. They did not dip their arrows or harpoon in yet, lest they should poison any fish or animal they might kill, and so render it unfit for food.
Volume One—Chapter Twelve.Savages Continued—Making the Sails.The same evening, having got a great plateful of cherries, they went to work in the bench-room to cut out the sails from the parcel of canvas. There had been cherries in town weeks before, but these were the first considered ripe in the country, which is generally later. With a cherry in his mouth, Bevis spread the canvas out upon the floor, and marked it with his pencil. The rig was to be fore and aft, a mainsail and jib; the mast and gaff, or as they called it, the yard, were already finished. It took forty cherries to get it cut out properly, then they threw the other pieces aside, and placed the sails on the floor in the position they would be when fixed.“You are sure they’re not too big,” said Mark, “if a white squall comes.”“There are no white squalls now,” said Bevis on his knees, thoughtfully sucking a cherry-stone. “It’s cyclones now. The sails are just the right size, and of course we can take in a reef. You cut off—let me see—twenty bits of string, a foot—no, fifteen inches long: it’s for the reefs.”Mark began to measure off the string from a quantity of the largest make, which they had bought for the purpose.“There’s the block,” he said. “How are you going to manage about the pulley to haul up the mainsail?”“The block’s a bore,” mused Bevis, rolling his cherry-stone about. “I don’t think we could make one—”“Buy one.”“Pooh! There’s nothing in Latten; why you can’t buy anything.” Mark was silent, he knew it was true. “If we make a slit in the mast and put a little wheel in off a window-blind or something—”“That would do first-rate.”“No it wouldn’t; it would weaken the mast, stupe, and the first cyclone would snap it.”“So it would. Then we should drift ashore and get eaten.”“Most likely.”“Well, bore a hole and put the cord through that; that would not weaken it much.”“No; but I know! A curtain-ring! Don’t you see, you fasten the curtain-ring, it’s brass, to the mast, and put the rope through, and it runs easy—brass is smooth.”“Of course. Who’s that?”Some small stones came rattling in at the open window, and two voices shouted,—“I say. Holloa!”Bevis and Mark went to the window and saw two of their friends, Bill and Wat, on the garden path below.“When’s the war going to begin?” asked Wat.“Tell us about the war,” said Bill.“The war’s not ready,” said Bevis.“Well how long is it going to be?”“Make haste.”“Everybody’s ready.”“Lots of them. Do you think you shall want any more?”“I know six,” said a third voice, and Tim came round the corner, having waited to steal a strawberry, “and one’s a whopper.”“Let’s begin.”“Now then.”“O! don’t make such a noise,” said Bevis. The sails and the savages had rather put the war aside, but Mark had talked of it to others, and the idea spread in a minute; everybody jumped at it, and all the cry was War!“Make me lieutenant,” said Andrew, appearing from the orchard.“I want to carry the flag.”“Come down and tell us.”“How are we to tell you if you keep talking?” said Mark; Bevis put his head out of window by the pears, and they were quiet.“I tell you the war’s not ready,” he said; “and you’re as bad as rebels—I mean you’re a mutiny to come here before you’re sent for, and you ought to be shot,”—(“Executed,” whispered Mark behind him)—“executed, of course.”“How are we to know when it’s ready?”“You’ll be summoned,” said Bevis. “There will be a muster-roll and a trumpet blown, and you’ll have to march a thousand miles.”“All right.”“And the swords have to be made, and the eagles, besides the map of the roads and the grub,”—(“Provisions,” said Mark)—“provisions, of course, and all the rest, and how do you think a war is to be got ready in a minute, you stupes!” in a tone of great indignation.They grumbled: they wanted a big battle on the spot.“If you bother me much,” said Bevis, “while I’m getting the fleet ready, there shan’t be a war at all.”“Are you getting a fleet?”“Here are the sails,” said Mark, holding up some canvas.“Well, you won’t be long?”“You’ll let us know?”“Shall we tell anybody else?”“Lots,” said Bevis; “tell lots. We’re going to have the biggest armies ever seen.”“Thousands,” said Mark. “Millions!”“Millions!” said Bevis.“Hurrah!” they shouted.“Here,” said Bevis, throwing the remainder of the cherries out like a shower among them.“Are you coming to quoits?”“O! no,” said Mark, “we have so much to do; now go away.” The soldiery moved off through the garden, snatching lawlessly at any fruit they saw.“Mark,” said Bevis on his knees again, “these sails will have to be hemmed, you know.”“So they will.”“We can’t do it. You must take them home to Frances, and make her stitch them; roll them up and go directly.”“I don’t want to go home,” said Mark. “And perhaps she won’t stitch them.”“I’m sure she will; she will do anything for me.”“So she will,” said Mark rather sullenly. “Everybody does everything for you.”Bevis had rolled up the sails, quite indifferent as to what people did for him, and put them into Mark’s unwilling hands.“Now you can have the donkey, and mind and come back before breakfast.”“I can’t catch him,” said Mark.“No; no more can I—stop. John Young’s sure to be in the stable, he can.”“Ah,” said Mark, brightening up a little, “that moke is a beast.”John Young, having stipulated for a “pot,” went to catch the donkey; they sat down in the shed to wait for him, but as he did not come for some time they went after him. They met him in the next field leading the donkey with a halter, and red as fire from running. They took the halter and sent John away for the “pot.” There was a wicked thought in their hearts, and they wanted witnesses away. So soon as John had gone, Mark looked at Bevis, and Bevis looked at Mark. Mark growled, Bevis stamped his feet.“Beast!” said Mark.“Wretch!” said Bevis.“You—you—you, Thing,” said Mark; they ground their teeth, and glared at the animal. They led him all fearful to a tree, a little tree but stout enough; it was an ash, and it grew somewhat away from the hedge. They tied him firmly to the tree, and then they scourged this miserable citizen.All the times they had run in vain to catch him; all the times they had had to walk when they might have ridden one behind the other on his back; all his refusals to be tempted; all the wrongs they had endured at his heels boiled in their breasts. They broke their sticks upon his back, they cut new ones, and smashed them too, they hurled the fragments at him, and then got some more. They thrashed, thwacked, banged, thumped, poked, prodded, kicked, belaboured, bumped, and hit him, working themselves into a frenzy of rage.Mark fetched a pole to knock him the harder as it was heavy; Bevis crushed into the hedge, and brought out a dead log to hurl at him, a log he could but just lift and swung to throw with difficulty,—the same Bevis who put an aspen leaf carefully under the fly to save it from drowning. The sky was blue, and the evening beautiful, but no one came to help the donkey.When they were tired, they sat down and rested, and after they were cooler and had recovered from the fatigue, they loosed him—quite cowed this time and docile, and Mark, with the parcel of sails, got on his back. After all this onslaught there did not seem any difference in him except that his coat had been well dusted. This immunity aggravated them; they could not hurt him.“Put him in the stable all night,” said Bevis, “and don’t give him anything to eat.”“And no water,” said Mark, as he rode off. “So I will.”And so he did. But the donkey had cropped all day, and was full, and just before John Young caught him had had a draught, rather unusual for him and equal to an omen, at the drinking-place by the raft. The donkey slept, and beat them.After Mark had gone Bevis returned to the bench-room, and fastened a brass curtain-ring to the mast, which they had carried up there. When he had finished, noticing the three phials of poison he thought he would go and see if he could find out any more fatal plants. There was an ancient encyclopaedia in the bookcase, in which he had read many curious things, such as would not be considered practical enough for modern publication, which must be dry or nothing. Among the rest was a page of chemical signs and those used by the alchemists, some of which he had copied off for magic. Pulling out the volumes, which were piled haphazard, like bricks shot out of a cart, there was one that had all the alphabets employed in the different languages, Coptic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Syriac, and so on.The Arabic took his fancy as the most mysterious—the sweeping curves, the quivering lines, the blots where the reed pen thickened, there was no knowing what such writing might not mean. How mystic the lettering which forms the running ornament of the Alhambra! It is the writing of the Orient, of the alchemist and enchanter, the astrologer and the prophet.Bevis copied the alphabet, and then he made a roll of a broad sheet of yellowish paper torn from the end of one of the large volumes, a fly-leaf, and wrote the letters upon it in such a manner as their shape and flowing contour arranged themselves. With these he mingled the alchemic signs for fire and air and water, and so by the time the dusk crept into the parlour and filled it with shadow he had completed a manuscript. This he rolled up and tied with string, intending to bury it in the sand of the quarry, so that when they sailed round in the ship they might land and discover it.Mark returned to breakfast, and said that Frances had promised to hem the sails, and thought it would not take long. Bevis showed him the roll.“It looks magic,” said Mark. “What does it mean?”“I don’t know,” said Bevis. “That is what we shall have to find out when we discover it. Besides the magic is never in the writing; it is what you see when you read it—it’s like looking in a looking-glass, and seeing people moving about a thousand miles away.”“I know,” said Mark. “We can put it in a sand-martin’s hole, then it won’t get wet if it rains.”They started for the bathing-place, and carefully deposited the roll in a sand-martin’s hole some way up the face of the quarry, covering it with sand. To know the spot again, they counted and found it was the third burrow to the right, if you stood by the stone heap and looked straight towards the first sycamore-tree. Having taken the bearings, they dragged the catamaran down to the water, and had a swim. When they came out, and were running about on the high ground by the sycamores, they caught sight of a dog-cart slowly crossing the field a long way off, and immediately hid behind a tree to reconnoitre the new savage, themselves unseen.“It’s Jack,” said Bevis; “I’m sure it is.” It was Jack, and he was going at a walking pace, because the track across the field was rough, and he did not care to get to the gateway before the man sent to open it had arrived there. His object was to look at some grass to rent for his sheep.“Yes, it’s Jack,” said Mark, very slowly and doubtfully. Bevis looked at him.“Well, suppose it is; he won’t hurt us. We can easily shoot him if he comes here.”“But the letter,” said Mark.“What letter?”Mark had started for his clothes, which were in a heap on the sward, he seized his coat, and drew a note much frayed from one of the pockets. He looked at it, heaved a deep sigh, and ran with all his might to intercept Jack. Bevis watched him tearing across the field and laughed; then he sat down on the grass to wait for him.Mark, out of breath and with thistles in his feet, would never have overtaken the dog-cart had not Jack seen him coming and stopped. He could not speak, but handed up the note in silence, more like Cupid than messengers generally. He panted so that he could not run away directly, as he had intended.“You rascal,” said Jack, flicking at him with his whip. “How long have you had this in your pocket?”Mark tried to run away, he could only trot; Jack turned his mare’s head, as if half-inclined to drive after him.“If you come,” said Mark, shaking his fist, “we’ll shoot you and stick a spear into you. Aha! you’re afraid! aha!”Jack was too eager to read his note to take vengeance. Mark walked away jeering at him. The reins hung down, and the mare cropped as the master read. Mark laughed to think he had got off so easily, for the letter had been in his pocket a week, though he had faithfully promised to deliver it the same day—for a shilling. Had he not been sent home with the sails it might have remained another week till the envelope was fretted through.Frances asked if he had given it to Jack.Mark started. “Ah,” said she, “you have forgotten it.”“Of course I have,” said Mark. “It’s so long ago.”“Then you did really?”“How stupid you are,” said Mark; and Frances could not press him further, lest she should seem too anxious about Jack. So the young dog escaped, but he did not dare delay longer, and had not Jack happened to cross the field meant to have ridden up to his house on the donkey. When Jack had read the note he looked at the retreating figure of Cupid and opened his lips, but caught his breath as it were and did not say it. He put his whip aside as he drove on, lest he should unjustly punish the mare.Mark strolled leisurely back to the bathing-place, but when he got there Bevis was not to be seen. He looked round at the water, the quarry, the sycamore-trees. He ran down to the water’s edge with his heart beating and a wild terror causing a whirling sensation in his eyes, for the thought in the instant came to him that Bevis had gone out of his depth. He tried to shout “Bevis!” but he was choked; he raised his hands; as he looked across the water he suddenly saw something white moving among the fir-trees at the head of the gulf.He knew it was Bevis, but he was so overcome he sat down on the sward to watch, he could not stand up. The something white was stealthily passing from tree to tree like an Indian. Mark looked round, and saw his own harpoon on the grass, but at once missed the bow and arrows. His terror had suspended his observation, else he would have noticed this before.Bevis, when Mark ran with the letter to Jack, had sat down on the sward to wait for him, and by-and-by, while still, and looking out over the water, his quiet eye became conscious of a slight movement opposite at the mouth of the Nile. There was a ripple, and from the high ground where he sat he could see the reflection of the trees in the water there undulate, though their own boughs shut off the light air from the surface. He got up, took his bow and arrows, and went into the firs. The dead dry needles or leaves on the ground felt rough to his naked feet, and he had to take care not to step on the hard cones. A few small bramble bushes forced him to go aside, so that it took him some little time to get near the Nile.Then he had to always keep a tree trunk in front of him, and to step slowly that his head might not be seen before he could see what it was himself. He stooped as the ripples on the other side of the brook became visible; then gradually lifting his head, sheltered by a large alder, he traced the ripples back to the shore under the bank, and saw a moorcock feeding by the roots of a willow. Bevis waited till the cock turned his back, then he stole another step forward to the alder.It was about ten yards to the willow which hung over the water, but he could not get any nearer, for there was no more cover beyond the alder—the true savage is never content unless he is close to his game. Bevis grasped his bow firm in his left hand, drew the arrow quick but steadily—not with a jerk—and as the sharp point covered the bird, loosed it. There was a splash and a fluttering, he knew instantly that he had hit. “Mark! Mark!” he shouted, and ran down the bank, heedless of the jagged stones. Mark heard, and came racing through the firs.The arrow had struck the moorcock’s wing, but even then the bird would have got away, for the point had no barb, and in diving and struggling it would have come out, had not he been so near the willow. The spike went through his wing and nailed it to a thick root; the arrow quivered as it was stopped by the wood. Bevis seized him by the neck and drew the arrow out.“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted Mark. The other savage pulled the neck, and Mark, leaping down the jagged stones, took the dead bird in his eager hands.“Here’s where the arrow went in.”“There’s three feathers in the water.”“Feel how warm he is.”“Look at the thick red on his bill.”“See his claws.”“Hurrah!”“Let’s eat him.”“Raw?”“No. Cook him.”“All right. Make a fire.”Thus the savages gloated over their prey. They went back up the bank and through the firs to the sward.“Where shall we make the fire?” said Mark. “In the quarry?”“That old stupe may come for sand.”“So he may. Let’s make it here.”“Everybody would see.”“By the hedge towards the elms then.”“No. I know, in the hollow.”“Of course, nobody would come there.”“Pick up some sticks.”“Come and help me.”“I shall dress—there are brambles.”So they dressed, and then found that Mark had broken a nail, and Bevis had cut his foot with the sharp edge of a fossil shell projecting from one of the stones. But that was nothing, they could think of nothing but the bird. While they were gathering armsful of dead sticks from among the trees, they remembered that John Young, who always paunched the rabbits and hares and got everything ready for the kitchen, said coots and moorhens must be skinned, they could not be plucked because of the “dowl.”Dowl is the fluff, the tiny featherets no fingers can remove. So after they had carried the wood they had collected to the round hollow in the field beyond the sycamore-trees, they took out their knives, and haggled the skin off. They built their fire very skilfully; they had made so many in the Peninsula (for there is nothing so pleasant as making a fire out of doors), that they had learnt exactly how to do it. Two short sticks were stuck in the ground and a third across to them, like a triangle. Against this frame a number of the smallest and driest sticks were leaned, so that they made a tiny hut. Outside these there was a second layer of longer sticks; all standing, or rather leaning against the first.If a stick is placed across, lying horizontally, supposing it catches fire, it just burns through the middle and that is all, the ends go out. If it is stood nearly upright, the flame draws up it; it is certain to catch; it burns longer and leaves a good ember. They arranged the rest of their bundles ready to be thrown on when wanted, and then put some paper, a handful of dry grass, and a quantity of the least and driest twigs, like those used in birds’-nests, inside the little hut. Then having completed the pile they remembered they had no matches.“It’s very lucky,” said Bevis. “If we had we should have to throw them away. Matches are not proper.”“Two pieces of wood,” said Mark. “I know; you rub them together till they catch fire, and one piece must be hard and the other soft.”“Yes,” said Bevis, and taking out his knife he cut off the end of one of the larger dead branches they had collected, and made a smooth side to it. Mark had some difficulty in finding a soft piece to rub on it, for those which touched soft crumbled when rubbed on the hard surface Bevis had prepared.A bit of willow seemed best, and Bevis seizing it first, rubbed it to and fro till his arm ached and his face glowed. Mark, lying on the grass, watched to see the slight tongue of flame shoot up, but it did not come.Bevis stopped, tired, and putting his hand on the smooth surface found it quite warm, so that they had no doubt they could do it in time. Mark tried next, and then Bevis again, and Mark followed him; but though the wood became warm it would not burst into flame, as it ought to have done.
The same evening, having got a great plateful of cherries, they went to work in the bench-room to cut out the sails from the parcel of canvas. There had been cherries in town weeks before, but these were the first considered ripe in the country, which is generally later. With a cherry in his mouth, Bevis spread the canvas out upon the floor, and marked it with his pencil. The rig was to be fore and aft, a mainsail and jib; the mast and gaff, or as they called it, the yard, were already finished. It took forty cherries to get it cut out properly, then they threw the other pieces aside, and placed the sails on the floor in the position they would be when fixed.
“You are sure they’re not too big,” said Mark, “if a white squall comes.”
“There are no white squalls now,” said Bevis on his knees, thoughtfully sucking a cherry-stone. “It’s cyclones now. The sails are just the right size, and of course we can take in a reef. You cut off—let me see—twenty bits of string, a foot—no, fifteen inches long: it’s for the reefs.”
Mark began to measure off the string from a quantity of the largest make, which they had bought for the purpose.
“There’s the block,” he said. “How are you going to manage about the pulley to haul up the mainsail?”
“The block’s a bore,” mused Bevis, rolling his cherry-stone about. “I don’t think we could make one—”
“Buy one.”
“Pooh! There’s nothing in Latten; why you can’t buy anything.” Mark was silent, he knew it was true. “If we make a slit in the mast and put a little wheel in off a window-blind or something—”
“That would do first-rate.”
“No it wouldn’t; it would weaken the mast, stupe, and the first cyclone would snap it.”
“So it would. Then we should drift ashore and get eaten.”
“Most likely.”
“Well, bore a hole and put the cord through that; that would not weaken it much.”
“No; but I know! A curtain-ring! Don’t you see, you fasten the curtain-ring, it’s brass, to the mast, and put the rope through, and it runs easy—brass is smooth.”
“Of course. Who’s that?”
Some small stones came rattling in at the open window, and two voices shouted,—
“I say. Holloa!”
Bevis and Mark went to the window and saw two of their friends, Bill and Wat, on the garden path below.
“When’s the war going to begin?” asked Wat.
“Tell us about the war,” said Bill.
“The war’s not ready,” said Bevis.
“Well how long is it going to be?”
“Make haste.”
“Everybody’s ready.”
“Lots of them. Do you think you shall want any more?”
“I know six,” said a third voice, and Tim came round the corner, having waited to steal a strawberry, “and one’s a whopper.”
“Let’s begin.”
“Now then.”
“O! don’t make such a noise,” said Bevis. The sails and the savages had rather put the war aside, but Mark had talked of it to others, and the idea spread in a minute; everybody jumped at it, and all the cry was War!
“Make me lieutenant,” said Andrew, appearing from the orchard.
“I want to carry the flag.”
“Come down and tell us.”
“How are we to tell you if you keep talking?” said Mark; Bevis put his head out of window by the pears, and they were quiet.
“I tell you the war’s not ready,” he said; “and you’re as bad as rebels—I mean you’re a mutiny to come here before you’re sent for, and you ought to be shot,”—(“Executed,” whispered Mark behind him)—“executed, of course.”
“How are we to know when it’s ready?”
“You’ll be summoned,” said Bevis. “There will be a muster-roll and a trumpet blown, and you’ll have to march a thousand miles.”
“All right.”
“And the swords have to be made, and the eagles, besides the map of the roads and the grub,”—(“Provisions,” said Mark)—“provisions, of course, and all the rest, and how do you think a war is to be got ready in a minute, you stupes!” in a tone of great indignation.
They grumbled: they wanted a big battle on the spot.
“If you bother me much,” said Bevis, “while I’m getting the fleet ready, there shan’t be a war at all.”
“Are you getting a fleet?”
“Here are the sails,” said Mark, holding up some canvas.
“Well, you won’t be long?”
“You’ll let us know?”
“Shall we tell anybody else?”
“Lots,” said Bevis; “tell lots. We’re going to have the biggest armies ever seen.”
“Thousands,” said Mark. “Millions!”
“Millions!” said Bevis.
“Hurrah!” they shouted.
“Here,” said Bevis, throwing the remainder of the cherries out like a shower among them.
“Are you coming to quoits?”
“O! no,” said Mark, “we have so much to do; now go away.” The soldiery moved off through the garden, snatching lawlessly at any fruit they saw.
“Mark,” said Bevis on his knees again, “these sails will have to be hemmed, you know.”
“So they will.”
“We can’t do it. You must take them home to Frances, and make her stitch them; roll them up and go directly.”
“I don’t want to go home,” said Mark. “And perhaps she won’t stitch them.”
“I’m sure she will; she will do anything for me.”
“So she will,” said Mark rather sullenly. “Everybody does everything for you.”
Bevis had rolled up the sails, quite indifferent as to what people did for him, and put them into Mark’s unwilling hands.
“Now you can have the donkey, and mind and come back before breakfast.”
“I can’t catch him,” said Mark.
“No; no more can I—stop. John Young’s sure to be in the stable, he can.”
“Ah,” said Mark, brightening up a little, “that moke is a beast.”
John Young, having stipulated for a “pot,” went to catch the donkey; they sat down in the shed to wait for him, but as he did not come for some time they went after him. They met him in the next field leading the donkey with a halter, and red as fire from running. They took the halter and sent John away for the “pot.” There was a wicked thought in their hearts, and they wanted witnesses away. So soon as John had gone, Mark looked at Bevis, and Bevis looked at Mark. Mark growled, Bevis stamped his feet.
“Beast!” said Mark.
“Wretch!” said Bevis.
“You—you—you, Thing,” said Mark; they ground their teeth, and glared at the animal. They led him all fearful to a tree, a little tree but stout enough; it was an ash, and it grew somewhat away from the hedge. They tied him firmly to the tree, and then they scourged this miserable citizen.
All the times they had run in vain to catch him; all the times they had had to walk when they might have ridden one behind the other on his back; all his refusals to be tempted; all the wrongs they had endured at his heels boiled in their breasts. They broke their sticks upon his back, they cut new ones, and smashed them too, they hurled the fragments at him, and then got some more. They thrashed, thwacked, banged, thumped, poked, prodded, kicked, belaboured, bumped, and hit him, working themselves into a frenzy of rage.
Mark fetched a pole to knock him the harder as it was heavy; Bevis crushed into the hedge, and brought out a dead log to hurl at him, a log he could but just lift and swung to throw with difficulty,—the same Bevis who put an aspen leaf carefully under the fly to save it from drowning. The sky was blue, and the evening beautiful, but no one came to help the donkey.
When they were tired, they sat down and rested, and after they were cooler and had recovered from the fatigue, they loosed him—quite cowed this time and docile, and Mark, with the parcel of sails, got on his back. After all this onslaught there did not seem any difference in him except that his coat had been well dusted. This immunity aggravated them; they could not hurt him.
“Put him in the stable all night,” said Bevis, “and don’t give him anything to eat.”
“And no water,” said Mark, as he rode off. “So I will.”
And so he did. But the donkey had cropped all day, and was full, and just before John Young caught him had had a draught, rather unusual for him and equal to an omen, at the drinking-place by the raft. The donkey slept, and beat them.
After Mark had gone Bevis returned to the bench-room, and fastened a brass curtain-ring to the mast, which they had carried up there. When he had finished, noticing the three phials of poison he thought he would go and see if he could find out any more fatal plants. There was an ancient encyclopaedia in the bookcase, in which he had read many curious things, such as would not be considered practical enough for modern publication, which must be dry or nothing. Among the rest was a page of chemical signs and those used by the alchemists, some of which he had copied off for magic. Pulling out the volumes, which were piled haphazard, like bricks shot out of a cart, there was one that had all the alphabets employed in the different languages, Coptic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Syriac, and so on.
The Arabic took his fancy as the most mysterious—the sweeping curves, the quivering lines, the blots where the reed pen thickened, there was no knowing what such writing might not mean. How mystic the lettering which forms the running ornament of the Alhambra! It is the writing of the Orient, of the alchemist and enchanter, the astrologer and the prophet.
Bevis copied the alphabet, and then he made a roll of a broad sheet of yellowish paper torn from the end of one of the large volumes, a fly-leaf, and wrote the letters upon it in such a manner as their shape and flowing contour arranged themselves. With these he mingled the alchemic signs for fire and air and water, and so by the time the dusk crept into the parlour and filled it with shadow he had completed a manuscript. This he rolled up and tied with string, intending to bury it in the sand of the quarry, so that when they sailed round in the ship they might land and discover it.
Mark returned to breakfast, and said that Frances had promised to hem the sails, and thought it would not take long. Bevis showed him the roll.
“It looks magic,” said Mark. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Bevis. “That is what we shall have to find out when we discover it. Besides the magic is never in the writing; it is what you see when you read it—it’s like looking in a looking-glass, and seeing people moving about a thousand miles away.”
“I know,” said Mark. “We can put it in a sand-martin’s hole, then it won’t get wet if it rains.”
They started for the bathing-place, and carefully deposited the roll in a sand-martin’s hole some way up the face of the quarry, covering it with sand. To know the spot again, they counted and found it was the third burrow to the right, if you stood by the stone heap and looked straight towards the first sycamore-tree. Having taken the bearings, they dragged the catamaran down to the water, and had a swim. When they came out, and were running about on the high ground by the sycamores, they caught sight of a dog-cart slowly crossing the field a long way off, and immediately hid behind a tree to reconnoitre the new savage, themselves unseen.
“It’s Jack,” said Bevis; “I’m sure it is.” It was Jack, and he was going at a walking pace, because the track across the field was rough, and he did not care to get to the gateway before the man sent to open it had arrived there. His object was to look at some grass to rent for his sheep.
“Yes, it’s Jack,” said Mark, very slowly and doubtfully. Bevis looked at him.
“Well, suppose it is; he won’t hurt us. We can easily shoot him if he comes here.”
“But the letter,” said Mark.
“What letter?”
Mark had started for his clothes, which were in a heap on the sward, he seized his coat, and drew a note much frayed from one of the pockets. He looked at it, heaved a deep sigh, and ran with all his might to intercept Jack. Bevis watched him tearing across the field and laughed; then he sat down on the grass to wait for him.
Mark, out of breath and with thistles in his feet, would never have overtaken the dog-cart had not Jack seen him coming and stopped. He could not speak, but handed up the note in silence, more like Cupid than messengers generally. He panted so that he could not run away directly, as he had intended.
“You rascal,” said Jack, flicking at him with his whip. “How long have you had this in your pocket?”
Mark tried to run away, he could only trot; Jack turned his mare’s head, as if half-inclined to drive after him.
“If you come,” said Mark, shaking his fist, “we’ll shoot you and stick a spear into you. Aha! you’re afraid! aha!”
Jack was too eager to read his note to take vengeance. Mark walked away jeering at him. The reins hung down, and the mare cropped as the master read. Mark laughed to think he had got off so easily, for the letter had been in his pocket a week, though he had faithfully promised to deliver it the same day—for a shilling. Had he not been sent home with the sails it might have remained another week till the envelope was fretted through.
Frances asked if he had given it to Jack.
Mark started. “Ah,” said she, “you have forgotten it.”
“Of course I have,” said Mark. “It’s so long ago.”
“Then you did really?”
“How stupid you are,” said Mark; and Frances could not press him further, lest she should seem too anxious about Jack. So the young dog escaped, but he did not dare delay longer, and had not Jack happened to cross the field meant to have ridden up to his house on the donkey. When Jack had read the note he looked at the retreating figure of Cupid and opened his lips, but caught his breath as it were and did not say it. He put his whip aside as he drove on, lest he should unjustly punish the mare.
Mark strolled leisurely back to the bathing-place, but when he got there Bevis was not to be seen. He looked round at the water, the quarry, the sycamore-trees. He ran down to the water’s edge with his heart beating and a wild terror causing a whirling sensation in his eyes, for the thought in the instant came to him that Bevis had gone out of his depth. He tried to shout “Bevis!” but he was choked; he raised his hands; as he looked across the water he suddenly saw something white moving among the fir-trees at the head of the gulf.
He knew it was Bevis, but he was so overcome he sat down on the sward to watch, he could not stand up. The something white was stealthily passing from tree to tree like an Indian. Mark looked round, and saw his own harpoon on the grass, but at once missed the bow and arrows. His terror had suspended his observation, else he would have noticed this before.
Bevis, when Mark ran with the letter to Jack, had sat down on the sward to wait for him, and by-and-by, while still, and looking out over the water, his quiet eye became conscious of a slight movement opposite at the mouth of the Nile. There was a ripple, and from the high ground where he sat he could see the reflection of the trees in the water there undulate, though their own boughs shut off the light air from the surface. He got up, took his bow and arrows, and went into the firs. The dead dry needles or leaves on the ground felt rough to his naked feet, and he had to take care not to step on the hard cones. A few small bramble bushes forced him to go aside, so that it took him some little time to get near the Nile.
Then he had to always keep a tree trunk in front of him, and to step slowly that his head might not be seen before he could see what it was himself. He stooped as the ripples on the other side of the brook became visible; then gradually lifting his head, sheltered by a large alder, he traced the ripples back to the shore under the bank, and saw a moorcock feeding by the roots of a willow. Bevis waited till the cock turned his back, then he stole another step forward to the alder.
It was about ten yards to the willow which hung over the water, but he could not get any nearer, for there was no more cover beyond the alder—the true savage is never content unless he is close to his game. Bevis grasped his bow firm in his left hand, drew the arrow quick but steadily—not with a jerk—and as the sharp point covered the bird, loosed it. There was a splash and a fluttering, he knew instantly that he had hit. “Mark! Mark!” he shouted, and ran down the bank, heedless of the jagged stones. Mark heard, and came racing through the firs.
The arrow had struck the moorcock’s wing, but even then the bird would have got away, for the point had no barb, and in diving and struggling it would have come out, had not he been so near the willow. The spike went through his wing and nailed it to a thick root; the arrow quivered as it was stopped by the wood. Bevis seized him by the neck and drew the arrow out.
“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted Mark. The other savage pulled the neck, and Mark, leaping down the jagged stones, took the dead bird in his eager hands.
“Here’s where the arrow went in.”
“There’s three feathers in the water.”
“Feel how warm he is.”
“Look at the thick red on his bill.”
“See his claws.”
“Hurrah!”
“Let’s eat him.”
“Raw?”
“No. Cook him.”
“All right. Make a fire.”
Thus the savages gloated over their prey. They went back up the bank and through the firs to the sward.
“Where shall we make the fire?” said Mark. “In the quarry?”
“That old stupe may come for sand.”
“So he may. Let’s make it here.”
“Everybody would see.”
“By the hedge towards the elms then.”
“No. I know, in the hollow.”
“Of course, nobody would come there.”
“Pick up some sticks.”
“Come and help me.”
“I shall dress—there are brambles.”
So they dressed, and then found that Mark had broken a nail, and Bevis had cut his foot with the sharp edge of a fossil shell projecting from one of the stones. But that was nothing, they could think of nothing but the bird. While they were gathering armsful of dead sticks from among the trees, they remembered that John Young, who always paunched the rabbits and hares and got everything ready for the kitchen, said coots and moorhens must be skinned, they could not be plucked because of the “dowl.”
Dowl is the fluff, the tiny featherets no fingers can remove. So after they had carried the wood they had collected to the round hollow in the field beyond the sycamore-trees, they took out their knives, and haggled the skin off. They built their fire very skilfully; they had made so many in the Peninsula (for there is nothing so pleasant as making a fire out of doors), that they had learnt exactly how to do it. Two short sticks were stuck in the ground and a third across to them, like a triangle. Against this frame a number of the smallest and driest sticks were leaned, so that they made a tiny hut. Outside these there was a second layer of longer sticks; all standing, or rather leaning against the first.
If a stick is placed across, lying horizontally, supposing it catches fire, it just burns through the middle and that is all, the ends go out. If it is stood nearly upright, the flame draws up it; it is certain to catch; it burns longer and leaves a good ember. They arranged the rest of their bundles ready to be thrown on when wanted, and then put some paper, a handful of dry grass, and a quantity of the least and driest twigs, like those used in birds’-nests, inside the little hut. Then having completed the pile they remembered they had no matches.
“It’s very lucky,” said Bevis. “If we had we should have to throw them away. Matches are not proper.”
“Two pieces of wood,” said Mark. “I know; you rub them together till they catch fire, and one piece must be hard and the other soft.”
“Yes,” said Bevis, and taking out his knife he cut off the end of one of the larger dead branches they had collected, and made a smooth side to it. Mark had some difficulty in finding a soft piece to rub on it, for those which touched soft crumbled when rubbed on the hard surface Bevis had prepared.
A bit of willow seemed best, and Bevis seizing it first, rubbed it to and fro till his arm ached and his face glowed. Mark, lying on the grass, watched to see the slight tongue of flame shoot up, but it did not come.
Bevis stopped, tired, and putting his hand on the smooth surface found it quite warm, so that they had no doubt they could do it in time. Mark tried next, and then Bevis again, and Mark followed him; but though the wood became warm it would not burst into flame, as it ought to have done.