"Point the toe, if you please young gentlemen; slide well forward and bow to your partner from the waist…. Ruan, you have the air of a poker trying to be graceful. Watch Killigrew and do as he does. Now, all together please …"; and the row of self-conscious boys bowed, gloved hands upon severely jacketed chests, while as many little girls, aware of doing the thing correctly and of not looking fools in the doing of it, spread white tarletan skirts in starchy semi-circles by way of reply.
It was the weekly dancing class, when Mr. Pierre Sebastian Eliot, who on other days taught French at the Grammar School, undertook to instruct the boys in what he referred to as "the divine art of Terpsichore," a habit which had earned for himself the simple nickname of "Terps." The class was held in a spacious room used for balls, both subscription and private, at the "George" Inn, and to it came not only those Grammar School boys whose parents paid for this polite "extra," but also the maidens from the gentle families of St. Renny and the neighbourhood.
Ishmael was dancing opposite Hilaria Eliot, and his enjoyment of it lay in knowing that Killigrew, who had basely tried to trip him up shortly before, was suffering pangs of envy. After some four years of knowing her, Killigrew was suddenly in love with Miss Eliot and didn't mind who knew it. In fact, to be accurate, Killigrew's emotion was chiefly based on a desire to be different from the rest of his world, and what was the good of being different unless people knew it?
Thus Killigrew—to Ishmael, who was growing vaguely aware of a difference from his fellows that he could not remedy, the argument would have had no force. Killigrew was neither of those St. Rennyites who despised girls, nor of those who held the cult of the doctor's daughter, that dizzy exemplar of fashion, nor of those others—a small band these latter, made up of the best boys in the school, little and big—who admired and liked Hilaria as a "good sort." Killigrew was determined to be different, and so, like Burns, "battered" himself into love. If Ishmael had been disposed to feel a tender sentiment for her himself, he could not have cherished it with any comfort, being already cast by Killigrew for the confidant of passion. Thus it came about that, though in after years those stolen meetings between Hilaria and a ring of boys would flash into his memory as being romance in essence, at the time they held no more thrill for him than might be imparted by some new novel—contraband in the perpetual war against grown-ups—that she would bring to read aloud to them in some hollow of the moor. Always it was from the angle of the third person—that most comfortable of view-points—that he saw her. Only later by the light that lingered round her ways did he know how she had stood for beauty.
Now, as he watched her sway and dip before him, it only struck him that she differed from the little misses on her either hand, but quite how, except that he would have said she was jollier, more like a boy, he couldn't have told. That indeed, translated from boy-like into unmaidenly, was the town's chief complaint against her, or primarily against her father. Mr. Eliot's position was not an easy one, and he did nothing to make it easier. For he was half French, his mother having been brought over as a little girl at the time of the Terror. There were people still alive in the 'fifties and 'sixties who remembered the Napoleonic wars and the shadow cast by that giant figure upon the world; indeed, so slowly did thought move down in the far West that it might almost have been said that St. Renny was just beginning to realise the wars, and rather resented the fact that English and French had since fought side by side in the Crimea. Also the vagaries of Napoleon III. kept England in a perpetual state of distrust, in spite of the championship of Lord Palmerston, then in his second Ministry. Mothers still frighted their babes with the name of Boney, and the French were still the hereditary enemies of all good Cornishmen, so many of whom had gone to man the fleet that won at Trafalgar. The obscure feeling of distrust that always stirs in the lower classes of remote districts at anything alien did not, of course, extend to the educated people, but Mr. Eliot, being poor and very eccentric, refused such championship from his equals as might have been his.
He lived with his daughter and an old housekeeper in a little cottage on the outskirts of the town, and earned his living by teaching at the Grammar School and giving private lessons in French, dancing, fencing, and physical culture generally. It was this latter that caused him to be looked on with so much suspicion as an eccentric. He actually made his daughter, attired in a skirt that only reached to her knees, perform inelegant feats on parallel bars and ladders, while he was wont to boast that she could out-fence any boy at the school. She was an expert swimmer too, and there were rumours, that at summer bathing excursions she wore a somewhat similar garment to that of the gymnasium, instead of one of those long serge gowns reaching to the ankles that ladies were wont to disport themselves in amidst the surf—gowns in which it was impossible to do anything but bob up and down at the end of a rope.
It was curious that a man who was half a Frenchman should have been the one to have such advanced ideas on female education, but then Mr. Eliot was the son of a refugee, which says much. For those French aristocrats, who never turned hand to a task in their lives till the Revolution, lived to learn very differently after their flight. The farm and the shop taught what the court had failed to impart, and the blood that despite folly directs so truly in moments of extremity did not fail them. The children who, had the course of events never been ruffled, would have grown up in a vicious and futile court, were forced to practise economies and learn at first hand the dignity of labour. With those families who returned to the increasing viciousness which culminated under Napoleon III. the lesson may not always have been lasting, but for those who, like the forbears of Mr. Eliot, allied themselves with their English hosts, and remained where they were, the hard life of struggle, if the alliance had not been rich, continued the new philosophy. Added to all this normal cause, Hilaria's father was certainly an original, or rather one of those people considered so because they are ahead of their time and condemned to misunderstanding in consequence.
None of it mattered to Mr. Eliot, who drifted about the world in a daze that, had it been a happy one, would have made him an enviable man. As it was, his invincible habit of over-sensitive gloom robbed him of the detachment which is the most truly enviable of all the gifts of the gods. He was a little man, beautifully made, with the high nose, the tossed-back hair, the piercing look of the man at once prejudiced and nervous. He lived wrapt in himself, and saw in his daughter more his own hope in old age than a creature wonderful in her youth and vitality for her own ends. When the crude heartlessness of the boys racked him or the well-meaning advances of the gentry offended his alert vanity, it was to Hilaria that he would turn in thoughts and words to attain that measure of approbation without which his own self-love would have languished of inanition. It was Hilaria who healed his hurts, though with increasing difficulty. For there is little gulf, and that easily bridged, between the very young child and the old man, but between the adolescent and the old it is wide and deep. And she was eager where he was retiring, confident where he was suspicious. With what of pity, lovely but half-patronising too, did she solace him!… Between them lay the gulf not only of a generation but of a different habit of thought, of alien tastes, which not all his passionate clutching or her impatient tenderness could bridge for more than a few moments of clinging together against the world. None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without knowing why.
Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost necessities of life. Her low brow—truly Greek in its straightness and the crisp ripple of her hair around it—was not in favour at that time. The hair, which was of a dull ashen brown, was strained back tightly and confined by a round comb. Her eyebrows, too straight for the period and too thick, nearly met above the short, tip-tilted nose, freckled as a plover's egg, and that at a time when no well brought-up damsel ventured forth in the sun's rays without veil or parasol. Her face was deficient in modelling, being one of those subtly concave faces not without a fascination of their own, with an egg-like curve of prominent delicately-square chin. Her mouth, too large, opened very beautifully when she laughed over square thickly-white teeth. Her eyes were small and of no particular colour, though bright with a birdlike shining between the thick short lashes of a neutral brown. She had a something boyish in poise and action that really made her charm, but that also set her hopelessly out of her time. It was impossible to imagine Hilaria happy in a crinoline, and she fought them fiercely, yet crinolines were in full flower, and the one disported by the doctor's daughter of a Sunday was the admiration and envy of the feminine members of the town. "I should feel I was in a cage," quoth Hilaria at the suggestion that she should trammel her long legs in such a contraption—unconsciously hitting on the essential reason for the allure of crinolines. She had to wear one now for dancing-class, as it made movement and spacing so different; but other times she went her wilful way, short nose in air, encouraged by the complacence of her father, who had no more knowledge of what the country people called her "goings-on" than if he had lived in an alien clime.
Hilaria was a hoyden. She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil, sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing trees. She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad way. That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer Eve was proof of all these things, and yet what a scandal it made in St. Renny when the fact leaked out!…
Hilaria was at present going through a phase of "trying to be good," as the bishop was coming to hold a confirmation, and only those accounted worthy were to be confirmed. Her goodness was of that healthy elastic kind natural to children, which never prevents them doing what they wish, because they instinctively keep it in a compartment to itself. There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of honour to be "done" together. Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness of her age in it. She was nearly sixteen, several months younger than Ishmael, who was now just over that age, and who, owing to the reputation for seriousness his secretiveness had earned for him, was one of the candidates undergoing preparation with Old Tring. He had apparently outgrown his fits of unbalanced talkativeness, and had become, with the difficult years, one of those boys who speak with almost comical rarity, and then with unemotional gruffness. This power of reticence never fails to win respect, if of a half-irritated, half-resentful order, and Ishmael held a certain position in the school. Also as the ward of a parson he was supposed to "be good" and know about such things as confirmations. As a matter of fact, he considered his own Tractarian principles, rigidly inculcated by Boase, as superior to the mild evangelical platitudes of Old Tring, and plumed himself accordingly. He was just at that dangerous age, reached somewhat later in the healthy normalities of school than it would have been had he stayed eating his own thoughts at Cloom, when religion either falls away entirely from a boy or flares up into a sudden vitality. Ishmael's blood ran with too much of inherited aptitude for prayer for the former pitfall to ensnare him, but the latter yawned beside him now and he thrilled to its attractions. Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity. It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed, while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as birds. Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he would call it love.
Spring was in the low-browed room at the "George," pouring in at the long windows and spilling in pools of hazy yellow upon the polished boards. Spring was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped through into the fourth dimension. A pair of white butterflies, pearly-grey or golden as they fluttered in and out of those invisible chambers of the air that held sun or shade, chased each other in futile circles; the flower-heads nodded in and out of the brightness; and in the room the white girls dipped into the Danaëan showers and back through the dimness, coloured like the butterflies by the swift transitions, swaying like the blossoms. If not only the spacing of the light but also the waves of movements could have flashed out visibly like the spider's threads the garden and the room would have shown full of the lovely curves.
And Ishmael felt the warm dazzle of the light and thought of the moor and how in another half-hour or so the shadows would be long beside the pool and the trout beginning to rise at their supper, and of how he would like to be a holy hermit and live alone there with a dog and a gun and a rod and God; while Killigrew was divided between trying to signal a question to Hilaria and wishing he could paint the dim room with its splashes of sun and wondering what colours he could get that would be pure enough; and Hilaria was wishing Ishmael would give her a chance to whisper to him the news she was burning to impart and not merely stare at her and everything else with that blank gaze that always seemed to go through her to the wall beyond. And most of the boys itched to get out for an hour or so before supper, while the little girls thoroughly enjoyed themselves and Mr. Eliot wished the whole lot of them, or himself, elsewhere. At last the wheezy piano sounded its last note, the faded lady who once a week thumped it for an hour and the sum of two-and-sixpence gathered her shawl about her and tied the ribbons of her bonnet beneath her pointed chin: the little girls were also enshawled by prim figures who now materialised from the shadowy seats where they had waited for this moment; and the boys, with a hurried touching of caps to Mr. Eliot, went clattering out through the flagged and panelled passage into the High Street. Hilaria, by the door, caught Ishmael's sleeve as he rose from changing his shoes—he was always the last when a fussy quickness was in question—and, ignoring the hovering Killigrew, said in her low husky voice:
"Tell them I can be on the moor in half an hour, will you? I must go and take off this beastly thing first …" She kicked a protesting leg against the framework of her crinoline, that shot out in front of her alarmingly.
"Tell who?" asked Ishmael, densely.
"All of them, of course. Killigrew and Moss minor and the Polkinghornes and Carminow—not Doughty; I didn't like him last time—I don't know why …" She broke off and bent forward, her tones took on a thrill; "I've got it," she announced.
"The new number of 'The Woman in White'? Oh, Hilaria!…"
"It wasn't easy, I can tell you, and we shall have to hurry with it, but it's in my shoe-bag now."
"Must you go home and change? It'll give us so little time. It's dark at eight, and we have to be in to supper then, anyway."
Hilaria hesitated, still slightly leaning forward like a great full-petalled blossom heavy with approaching night.
"I suppose I could manage…. Papa goes on to give a French lesson before he comes home…. It would be awful if it tore though…. All right, I'll risk it, but you'll all have to simply lug me over the stiles. Fancy if I stuck in one all night!" Her laugh, husky as her voice, gurgled out, and Mr. Eliot looked up from the packet of books he was sorting at the end of the room.
"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.
"Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?" And with this adroit carrying of the war into enemy's country she deflected Mr. Eliot's interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task.
A few minutes later, having stopped to spend her week's pocket-money—only threepence—on a paper twist full of jumbles, she might have been seen going in the direction of home, walking, for her, sedately, and looking very lady-like with the important bulk of the crinoline swelling out the mantle that made all women, from behind, seem at least fifty. A few people who saw her said to themselves that Eliot's maid seemed to be growing up at last, but they did not see her when, arrived at the stile she would have passed severely by had she been going home, she flung her shoebag over it and, boldly tilting up the cumbrous hoops, scrambled over it herself, with a flashing display of frilled cambric trousers and white legs terminating in kid boots.
The nearest way to the hollow on the moor that Hilaria had made her own was a tiny track so overgrown with brambles and gorse as hardly to be worthy the name, and on this particular evening, out of care for her strange garb, she took a path which curved with some semblance of smoothness in a wider arc. Thus Ishmael and Killigrew, who had got away in advance of the others of the "Ring," came to the hollow before her and, climbing up behind it, flung themselves on a boulder where they could watch all approaches. It was a wonderful place, that which Hilaria's feminine instinct for the right atmosphere had led her to choose. The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks. They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-clustered buds just breaking into a dense snow of blossom. Periwinkles trailed down upon the turf, and the closely set stonecrop made a reddish bloom on the lower boulders, amidst bronze-hued moss, pale fragile scales of lichen, and glossy leaved fibrous-rooted ivy, that all went to pattern their sullen grey with delicate arabesques. The strongest note of colour was in the wild hyacinths, that, where the earth had been disturbed at some time and so given them a chance, made drifts of a deep blue that seemed almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky.
The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame, thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing weathers—here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a low-hanging mist.
Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils dilating rather like a rabbit's, as they always did if he were moved by anything—a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light.
"Why d'you suppose she don't like Doughty?" asked Killigrew.
"I dunno …; he is rather a swine, anyway."
"Yes, but how does she know that?"
This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer beyond a feeble "Oh, well, because he is."
"If he's been a cad to her—" muttered Killigrew, vengefully.
"I don't know how he can have been; she's only seen him with us. But I don't know what you'd do about it if he had; you can't lick him; he's twice your size and weight."
"Would you never fight unless you were sure of winning?" demandedKilligrew scornfully. Ishmael thought a minute.
"I think it is that I never fight until I'm sure of winning," he said at last; "if I found I wasn't strong enough I wouldn't go in and be beaten; I'd train hard till I was and then fight."
"But that might take ages and you'd forget what you wanted to fight the chap about."
"I don't think I'd forget, if I'd wanted to fight him. I might, though,I suppose…."
"You're all wrong, you know," opined Killigrew; "'tisn't the winning that really matters … sounds silly, but I don't know how to explain it."
"Sounds like something the Parson would say—my Parson," said Ishmael on one of his flashes of intuition; and then they both laughed, for Killigrew was one of those rare creatures, a born pagan—or rather heathen, which is not quite the same thing. The pagan has beliefs of his own; the true heathen denies the need for any, through sheer lack of interest.
"D'you think girls are so very different from us …?" went on Killigrew after a moment's silence. "The sort of things they really want to do and think about?"
"Girls are quite different," said Ishmael firmly; "they talk awful rot;I've heard my sister and Phoebe—that's a girl at home."
"Yes, so does my sister—at least, she talks sort of clever stuff that's as bad. But how about Hilaria?" asked her admirer.
"Well, she's more sensible than most, because she wants to do things as though she weren't a girl, but I don't see how she's going to keep it up. She'll fall in love and then it'll all be over."
"You don't think much of girls, do you?"
"Oh, well … they're all right, I suppose. I want to do things, and girls want to feel things. Oh, yes, Bunny, they're awfully different."
"From you, perhaps … I dunno … I say, d'you really want the old bishop to lay his paws on your head?"
"Yes," replied Ishmael, briefly.
"Well, so does Hilaria. She read me some stuff out of a book—ripping fine stuff it was—by a chap called Mallory. All about knights that were searching for a cup they thought had the blood of God in it or something of the sort. But she seemed to believe it."
"I believe it, too. Not that they lived like that book, but that there is the Blood … Oh, what's the good of trying to explain to you? It's like you when you're painting and you try and make me see a lot of colours I can't."
"Hullo … there she comes," cried Killigrew, with a sudden quickening of voice and aspect; "I say, it must be ghastly trying to walk in one of those things. Girls must be different or they wouldn't put up with them. I'll go and help her. Come on, we'll have to sit down below now."
The two boys scrambled down the boulders and assisted Hilaria—the hem of whose white tarlatan skirts showed already the worse for her walk—over the hummocky patch of rocks and gorse that fringed the hollow. Laughing rather ruefully, she flung herself down, scattering her bonnet, shawl, and bag over the turf in the impetuous movement. The lowest rim of the crinoline promptly stood straight up from the ground like a hoop, displaying her long legs and the multitudinous petticoats lying limply upon them, and she was forced to adopt a change of position. Finally she settled herself with her feet tucked in under her and the obnoxious garment swelling out all round, as though she had just flopped down and made what the children call a "cheese."
"I say, where's the magazine?" asked Ishmael.
"In my bag; but you're not to 'look on.' Here are some jumbles, but we must keep the others' share for them. Did you get them all, Ishmael?" For some reason best known to herself, she called him by his Christian name and Killigrew by his nickname of "Bunny," though she addressed the other boys in mannish fashion of surnames only.
"I told Polkinghorne minor and told him to let the others know."
"Did you remember to tell him we didn't want Doughty?"
"I think so … at least I didn't say to ask him to come," confessedIshmael, who had the worst head in the world for a message.
"Here they are," announced Killigrew; "I think there're only four of them …" He screwed up his eyes to gaze, for he was short-sighted. Ishmael gave a glance.
"There's five …" he said apologetically; "I'm afraid he's there. I can see Polkinghorne and Carminow and Polkinghorne minor and Moss minor and—yes, it's Doughty. I hope you don't mind fearfully, Hilaria?"
She threw a queer little look at him. "It's not for me," she said slowly; "it's only that I don't think he likes you, Ishmael. He tried to tell me something funny about you the other day. He comes to papa for extra coaching in French, you know, and I had to give him tea…."
"About me—?" Ishmael stared blankly, then, more from some premonition than anything else, grew slowly and burningly red. The colour ebbed away, leaving him pale. "What was it?" he asked.
"Nothing. At least, I honestly don't know what. Papa shut him up. He said to him he was no gentleman to say such things before ajeune fille—" She broke off, feeling she had hardly improved matters. A deadly suspicion that had once before knocked on Ishmael's heart and been refused more than a second's glance for sheer incredibility pounded at him again, making the blood sing in his ears. Nothing heard at school or from the Parson—who had long perturbed himself as to the right moment for explanations—had started those first warning notes, but words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then meaningless to him—words that had since echoed back on to fuller knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that Ishmael spent a large part of his holidays with friends of the Parson's in Devon and Somerset, the conspiracy of secrecy, wise or unwise, could not have lasted so long. He stared at Hilaria and his fingers dug into the turf at either side of him.
At that moment Killigrew relieved the tension by jumping up and calling a wild, long-drawn "Hullo-o" to the approaching boys. They came running up the slope and flung themselves down in a circle, while Polkinghorne major, a big, jolly, simple-minded boy, one of the best liked in the school, laid audacious hands on the bag, which Hilaria snatched from him with a shriek.
Doughty had ensconced himself by her, crowding between her and Ishmael to do so, a manoeuvre which the latter, rather to Doughty's surprise, did not seem to resent. This was the more odd as the boys had several times already, both in school and out of it, come into conflict over trifling matters, not so much from any desire to quarrel as because they were by nature extremely antipathetic. Ishmael disliked Doughty and took little trouble to hide the fact. He hated his pasty sleekness, which made him think of a fat pale grub, and he hated the way the elder boy hung round Killigrew; not from jealousy—Ishmael still cherished aloofness too dearly for that—but from some instinct which told him Doughty was evil. Killigrew lay opposite Doughty now, looking oddly girlish with his slim form and colourless face, that would have been insipid but for his too red mouth. There was a white incisiveness about Killigrew, however, a flame-like quality quaintly expressed in his hair, that promised the possibility of many things, and showed up sharply in comparison with the gross but hard bulk of Doughty. There had been no real reason till this evening, when Hilaria had told of his evil-speaking, for Ishmael to dislike Doughty, but now he knew that he had done so all along.
Doughty hated Ishmael because he did not understand him, and he was of the breed which hates the incomprehensible. Though he had only joined the preceding term, Doughty was nearly seventeen, and owing to a spinal weakness of his youth he had till now been educated at home. He came from Devonshire, which would not have mattered had he been popular, but which, as he was not, was frequently thrown at him as a disadvantage. Now, as he lay beside Ishmael, he stared at him with a something slyly exultant in his look, but the younger boy failed to meet his eyes and merely gazed serenely into vacancy. Hilaria settled herself, opened the bag, and disentangled from the ribbons of her dancing shoes the precious number ofAll the Year Roundthat contained the instalment of "The Woman in White" they had all been so eagerly awaiting.
The boys left off fidgeting and became mouse-still, while only the low voice of the girl reading of the helpless lovers, of the terrible smiling Count Fosco and his grim wife, broke the silence. The boys lay, thrilled by the splendid melodrama, their little differences forgotten with the rest of their personal affairs, and so they all stayed, Hilaria as enthralled as they, while unperceived the light began to fade and evening to creep over the moor.
Hilaria read on till, though she held the page close to her eyes, she seemed to fumble over the words. She was by then at the end of the instalment, and when she put the magazine down she pressed her fingers to her lids and complained that her eyes hurt her. "They often do," she said; "it's a good thing I'm not going to be an artist like Bunny or the hero of this story, isn't it?" She dropped her chin into her cupped palms and sat staring ahead, her eyes shining for all their smarting lids. "Isn't it, funny," she went on, "that we're all going to be something, some kind of a person, and don't really know a bit what kind? Yet I feel very much me already…."
"I'm going to be a soldier," said Polkinghorne, serenely missing any metaphysical proposition. He looked forward, on the strength of a Scottish mother, to joining a Highland regiment, and was known to shave his knees twice a week to make them of a manly hairiness against the donning of a kilt.
"I shall have to go into the City like my guv'nor, I suppose," admitted little Moss, "but I don't see why one shouldn't be the kind of chap one wants all the same. Your father's in the city, too, isn't he, Killigrew?"
"Yes, but that's no reason why I should be, and I'm jolly well not going to. I'm going to be an artist like Turner…." And Killigrew's voice unconsciously took on a singing inflection of rapture.
"There's no doubt about old Carminow, anyway," observed Polkinghorne, to be greeted with laughter. For Carminow, though the gentlest of creatures, took an extraordinary delight in all the agonies of human nature. Mine accidents had hardly occurred before Carminow, by some subtle agency, seemed aware of them, and had rushed to the scene, out of bounds or not. It was with genuine simplicity that he once bewailed the fact that it had been "an awfully dull half—no one had been killed for miles around." It was he, too, on the occasion of a terrible tragedy in the High Street, when Teague the baker had been killed by the lashing hoofs of his new horse, who had rushed out to superintend the removal of the body. The widow, clamorous with her sudden grief, had seized his arm, exclaiming "Oh, Master Carminow, whatever shall I do; whatever shall I do?" and, in all good faith he, his soul still unsatisfied by the view of the corpse, had replied kindly: "Do? Why, Mrs. Teague, if I were you I should have him opened…."
The story had lived against Carminow, and when in doubt about any course of action he was always advised to "have it opened." He did not join now in the laugh, but said seriously, failing, as always, to pronounce the letter "r":
"Of course I shall be a doctor. Last holidays I went a lot to Guy's where I have a chum, and I saw a lot of dissecting. Do you know that when they dissect 'em they stick a sort of squirt in their chests and dwaw off all the blood? I've got a theowy that I mean to put into pwactice some day. It seemed to me such a shame that all that good blood should go to waste like that, and it occurred to me what a splendid thing it would be if, instead of doing nothing with murdewers but kill 'em, they dwew off their blood while it was still warm and pumped it into famous men, gweat generals and people like that, who were getting old and feeble. Most murdewers are thundewing stout fellows, you know."
"How horrid you are, Carminow!" cried Hilaria. "I shouldn't think a great man would at all like having a murderer's blood in his veins. I'm sure my darling Lord Palmerston wouldn't."
"Oh, I don't say it's possible at pwesent," replied Carminow placidly, "but when surgeons know their business it will be. One must look at these things from a purely utilitawian standpoint."
Ishmael said nothing. He was lying on his back again, folded arms beneath his head, staring at the glory of the west that had passed from liquid fire to the feather-softness of the sun's aftermath. The presence of the others hardly impinged on his consciousness; vaguely he heard their voices coming from a long way off. One of his moods of exaltation, that only the very young know, was upon him—a state which amounts to intoxication and to recapture any glow of which older people have to be artificially stimulated. That is really the great dividing-line—when the sparkle, the lightness, the sharpened sense which stimulates brain and tongue and feeling, ceases to respond without a flick of help from the right touch of alcohol. That intoxication of sheer living was upon Ishmael now, as it had been on that long-ago evening when the Neck had been cried, as it had a few times since, with music, or a windy sun, or a bathe in rough sea, or some sudden phrase in a book. A something glamorous in the light, the low accents of Hilaria's voice and the stirring quality of what she read, the reaction, had he but known it, from the shock of suspicion occasioned by what she had told him, the cumulative effect of the exalted thoughts of the past weeks, all these things, added to his own rising powers and urgent youth, welled within him and mounted to his brain. He felt tingling with power as he lay there, apparently lax; it seemed to him he could hear the blood leaping in his veins and the beating of his pulses all over his body, could hear the faintest sound of calling lamb or far-off owl, could catch, with ears refined to a demigod's, the ineffably quiet rubbing of the millions of grass-blades, as though he could almost hear the evening falling…. From afar came the babble of the others as to what they might think they were going to be; for himself he could be anything, scale any heights, beat triumphantly through all things. He felt the swelling earth bearing him up, as though he were one with its strength and fertility, one with its irresistible march. He felt the sword-chill breath of the spring wind on his brow; he saw the first faint pricking of the earliest stars, and the rolling up of the sky as the great cumuli massed overhead; and he felt as though he too could sweep into them and be of them. Life was before him for him to do what he liked with. He laughed aloud and rolled over a little, flinging his arms wide. A stinging blow came on his cheek, and he heard Doughty's angry voice crying, "Take that!" and a sharp sound from Hilaria.
"Well, what's he want to laugh at me for? I'll teach him—" cameDoughty's voice again. Ishmael had scrambled up; his blood was stillsinging in his veins; he felt no dismay at the sight of the loomingDoughty.
"Don't be an ass, Doughty," said Polkinghorne sharply; "and if you can't help being a cad, wait till Miss Eliot isn't present."
"Oh, never mind about me; I want to see youkillhim, Ishmael!" criedHilaria viciously.
"Well, why did you want to laugh when Doughty said that?" askedPolkinghorne judicially.
"Said what?" asked Ishmael.
"Why, that he was just going to be a gentleman."
"Did he say that? I didn't hear him. But I should have laughed if I had…."
Killigrew stared at his friend in amazement. Was this the Ishmael who a half-hour or so ago had put forward the theory that one should never fight till one was sure of winning? He did not know that the wine in Ishmael's brain at that minute was the headiest in the world, the most sure in imparting sense of power—the sudden up-welling of the joy of life. It was Doughty's turn to laugh now; he seemed suddenly to have recovered poise.
"I forgot—you'd be such a good judge of a gentleman—with your family history," he said.
The singing went from Ishmael's being, but something hot came up through him like a tide. "What d'you mean by that?" he asked, and still in his passionate dislike of the other did not see what was opening at his feet.
"Only that a fellow with a pack of bastard brothers must have had just the father and mother to teach him…."
There was a moment's silence; the boys all felt intensely uncomfortable, not so much even at Hilaria's presence as at this sudden nakedness of thought and emotion. Doughty, set on justifying himself at least as far as accuracy went, held on. "I heard it at once when I went to my uncle's at Penzance last holidays. Everyone knows it down there. Of course Ruan knew it all along; he's been kidding all you fellows. He's no right in a school for gentlemen at all. His father married his mother when he was dying and all the brats but him were already born. That's why Ruan's being brought up a gentleman—because he's the only one who's not a bastard."
"Shut your foul mouth," ordered Polkinghorne angrily. "Hilaria, let me—"
"It's not true," cried Hilaria. "Tell them it's not true, Ishmael."
Killigrew had the quicker instinct. "What does it matter if it's true or not?" he asked. "We all know Ruan, and we think he's an awfully nice chap, and nothing else is any affair of ours. We don't care what Doughty's father and mother are, because we don't like him; we don't care what Ruan's are because we do like him. Personally, I don't see why Ruan should mind either. The thing doesn't alter him at all."
But that was exactly what Ishmael felt it did, though how he could not yet have told. Although he never doubted what he heard, it seemed to him like a dream that he had dreamt long ago and forgotten. It was a curious sense of unreality that impressed him most, that feeling of "This cannot really have happened to me …" that everyone knows in the first moment of disaster. It was this sensation, not any temporising or actual disbelief, that kept him still motionless, staring. Polkinghorne began to feel the proprieties outraged by this immobility.
"I say," he began, "you can't take no notice …; he's said things about your people, you know—about your mother …"
For in common with many male creatures, men and boys, Polkinghorne, though not feeling more than others any particular sentiment beyond affection for his mother, yet held the point of honour, perhaps dating from ancient days of matriarchy, that an insult to one's mother was the deepest to oneself. Ishmael, too honest to be influenced by this consideration, yet felt constrained by the weight of public opinion. Also he was still upon the uplift of his mood; his blood tingled the more for the mental shock that had numbed his reasoning faculties. As in his turn he hit Doughty's cheek he felt a little glow at his own carelessness of consequences. Polkinghorne was beginning to feel worried, because seen together it was plain that the big Doughty overtopped Ishmael by nearly a head. Suddenly he had an inspiration and threw himself between them as Doughty swung out at the younger boy, thereby incidentally getting the blow himself.
"I'll lick you for that later, Doughty," he ejaculated. "Meanwhile, kindly shut up while I say something. Ruan can't fight you—"
"Can't he? Then what did he hit me for?"
"I can fight him all right, thanks," said Ishmael.
"But he can wrestle you," went on Polkinghorne imperturbably, "because he's a clever wrestler and he'll stand a fair chance. You can take it or leave it, but if you leave it I'll give you a thrashing for the honour of the school."
A murmur of assent came from the others, who saw an impossibly difficult situation thus in a way to be solved as far as the two principals in the quarrel were concerned, while to themselves it gave time to adjust their attitude, which they did not all take as simply as had Killigrew. In a fight Doughty's superior size would have given him all the advantage; in the West Country method of wrestling this would not necessarily hold true. And Ishmael was in far better condition.
Polkinghorne turned to Hilaria.
"Someone will see you home, of course," he said politely. "I shall have to stay as stickler, and Carminow as well, but I'll send Moss and the young 'un with you. And mind you keep your jaws shut about it when you get back to the school, you two."
Polkinghorne minor and Moss both looked considerably taken aback, but not more so than Hilaria. "Oh, I must stay, Polkinghorne," she pleaded, feeling for the first time a terrible sensation of not being wanted, of an unimportance essential to her sex and beyond her power to alter whatever her tastes or her justifiable reliance on her own nerves. But Polkinghorne, backed by Killigrew and Ishmael himself, was adamant, though Carminow saw no reason why she should not stay if it interested her. They stood waiting till her crinoline, like a huge piece of blown thistledown, had swayed around a curve of the path which hid it and the two little boys from sight, and then they prepared for business.
It was growing swiftly dusk, though the amphitheatre of turf where the boys stood, cupped the last of the light from the west, backed as it was by the semi-circle of tall rocks.
Polkinghorne made a quick survey of the place, then placed his men so that the light fell sideways, not directly upon either face.
"Shoes off, Doughty!" he ordered. "None of your nasty Devonshire ways here!" For the Devon rules admit kicking, and that with shoes, while Cornish, though allowing leg-play, insist it should be in stocking-feet, and consist of tripping and locking only. The whole West Country style of wrestling differs enormously from the North Country, in which Ishmael would have stood a poor chance against an opponent so much his superior in size. In the West they play for a hitch, instead of trying for a fall by sheer strength and weight, and if the smaller wrestler has a stock of good holds, and can only get under his opponent quickly enough, he may bring off the "flying mare," the great throw clear over the shoulder. Leg-play is the great feature, even in Cornwall, where prominence is given to the hug, and Ishmael had very strong legs, though his shoulders were not so heavy as Doughty's.
He took his stand opposite Doughty. He had never wrestled with him before, but he had had much practice with boys of all builds. He eyed him closely and knew his best chance lay in trying to rush him so as to get under him and with a good inside lock of the leg trip him up. In shoulder play he would otherwise stand small chance with one so much taller. Doughty's best plan would be to stand off him, a thing not possible in North Country wrestling. In the West a special jacket of strong linen is worn for the taking of hitches, and Polkinghorne made the two boys pull out their shirts as the nearest approach to it. All was arranged to the satisfaction of the three who were acting as "sticklers," and in what seemed to Ishmael the flashing of a moment he and Doughty were crouching, cat-like, opposite each other, legs bent, arms out, hands tense. They stood so for what seemed minutes, though it was only a fraction of the time that had gone in the preparations. Ishmael felt no fear of Doughty; exhilaration was still strong enough within him to eliminate that dread, though the fear of losing that always pricks at the fighter was not quite deadened. He circled, still in that cat-like attitude, Doughty circling also, both waiting to spring. Ishmael was intensely aware of superficial physical sensations—the tense feeling in his skin, and under the soles of his feet the hardness of the ground. He spread his feet a little and moved his toes against the grass. All his muscles were on the alert, and suddenly, from acute consciousness of every fibre of his body, he passed to a splendid lightness, a complete ignoring of anything but poise and spring. In that moment, so swiftly on the edge of the first circling movement that Doughty, the slower of communication from brain to limbs, thought it the same, he had rushed for his hitch.
He got him by the sleeve, and Doughty, surprised at the quick hold, shyed away, but could not twist out of it. He grappled Ishmael more closely to try and get full shoulder-play, but the only result was that each obtained a hitch on the arm and breast of the other's shirt. The "flying mare" was now out of the question for Ishmael this round, but with a dexterous twist of his leg he got an inside lock on his opponent's, and the next moment Doughty was sprawling. He was up the second after, and, since his shoulders had not touched the ground, the fall counted for nothing, and this time he rushed in at Ishmael. He was very angry.
He stooped more, so as to keep his legs out of Ishmael's reach, and the two strained to try and over-balance each other's body, using the ordinary arm and breast hold. Ishmael, after a few moments of this immobile straining, let go Doughty's arm to seize him by the back of the collar, and Doughty, profiting in a flash by the steeper angle of inclination, caught him square under the arms and raised him bodily in the air.
Ishmael hung on grimly, making no effort to disengage himself, which would only have given Doughty the further purchase needed to throw him. Instead he began to work round in the other's arms. As soon as he had sufficient twist on his hips he entwined his feet round Doughty's knees, and with an effort that caused the blood to suffuse his face and neck—for Doughty was fighting the movement with relentless pressure—he got himself, by the hold his legs gave him, round so that his shoulders instead of his chest were against the chest of his upholder. He flung his arms backwards round Doughty's fore-arms, thus keeping himself pressed upon the other, his stomach arched outwards, his legs curled back each side round the other's knees, his arms, also backwards, pressing the other's torso in a curve that followed and supported his own with the disadvantage of having his full weight upon it.
They stayed apparently motionless, breathing heavily, save for that laboured sound seeming like wrestlers of bronze. Slowly Doughty began to feel his balance slipping from him under the full weight of Ishmael upon his chest and stomach; his spine felt as though if it curved a fraction more it would crack. He could not move his feet for the strong coil of Ishmael's legs around his, and he knew that in a moment more he must fall backwards with the weight still upon him. The only joints in which he still had play were his ankles; stiffening them he began to incline forwards. Slowly the interlocked bodies, like a swaying tower, came up and up, till the watchers caught their breath wondering what would happen to the one who was undermost in the fall if both stayed so unyielding.
But Ishmael, whose brain was working with that clarity only attained when it is responding to trained instinct, almost mechanically relaxed his grip on the other's spine when he felt the angle coming forward, then, using all his nerve, he waited—waited till the forward angle, in which he was the underneath, had become acute, till the momentum of the fall had begun. Then he relaxed his grip on one of Doughty's legs, at the same time forcing the other outwards with all the strength of his foot and leg. Doughty had to unstiffen a knee to prevent himself coming taut and prone on the ground, and a hard shove with Ishmael's elbow, thrown backwards against his shoulder, combined with the leg-play to send him spinning sideways. The momentum was too great for him to regulate the fall, and he came fairly on both shoulders, while Ishmael, who had been thrown forwards on one knee, picked himself up and stood reeling slightly but unhurt.
The sticklers ran forward to help Doughty to his feet, but he lay motionless, eyes closed. In his mind, as he lay there, worked the thought that he did not wish either to go on with the fight or to let Ishmael triumph as at an easy victory. He would frighten him, frighten them all, by making out he was very badly hurt. His spine, that would do…. Opening his eyes he murmured, "My back … my back …" and made as though trying to move. A terrible pang shot through his spine as he did so. His next cry was a scream of real pain and fear. The tears gathered in his eyes with his rage and terror. He cried, "You've done for me; you've broken my back! Oh, my back; curse you, my back!…"
The others were terrified. For the second time that evening Ishmael was seized by the awful feeling of irrevocableness, of an impossible thing having happened and of it being still more impossible to undo it.
It had become dark with an effect of suddenness to those who had been intent on other things than the progress of the night; and it seemed to Ishmael that the whole world was narrowed to a circle of dim moor, in the midst of it that white thing crying about its back—always its back….
Carminow, the least perturbed, insisted on raising the sufferer to his feet, and it was found, after much protest on his part, that he could walk slowly with support on either side. It only remained to get him back to the school somehow and in at the side door to his bed and the ministrations of the matron if not the doctor.
The little procession began to move off, Polkinghorne and Carminow, the two biggest, carrying Doughty on their crossed hands, and progressing with a slow sideways motion, trying not to stumble over the uneven ground. Killigrew ran on ahead to warn the matron and urge her to silence, in case the injury might turn out to be but slight after all.
A miserable loneliness fell upon Ishmael. He had won, and none of the sweets of victory were his. He lagged behind. There was a rustle at his side, and Hilaria's hands were round his arm.
"What on earth—" he began—angry, confused, aware that tears were burning in his eyes.
"Don't be cross…. I had to stay. I was up on the boulders. Oh,Ishmael, have you killed him?"
The question jangled his frightened nerves, and he answered sharply, telling her he neither knew nor cared, even while he was shaking with the fear lest what she suggested might be true. "I'll say something to those youngsters for having let you stay," he added, catching sight of Polkinghorne minor and Moss, where they hesitated in the shadows.
"As though they could have prevented me!" she said, with swift scorn. He looked at her more closely, struck by a something strange about her, and saw that her skirts no longer swelled triumphantly on either side, but fell limply, and so long that she had to hold them up when she took a step forward by his side.
"I couldn't climb on the boulders in it," she said, answering his look."I made the boys turn their backs and I took it off."
"Well, I imagine you can't go home without it," said Ishmael wearily. He supposed he would have to see her home, for it was already past the time for the younger boys to be in. He felt he hated girls and the bother that they were.
"Cut off in, you two," he ordered; "and mind, if you blab about Hilaria having been here I'll baste you."
They promised eagerly, and Hilaria thanked him in a subdued voice. She went through the darkness to where she had left her crinoline. They found it lying, wet with dew, a prostrate system of ugly rings, held together by webbing. It looked incredibly naked, a hollow mockery of the portentous dome it had stood for in the eyes of the world.
He slung it over one shoulder without a word, inwardly resenting bitterly the touch of the ludicrous it gave to the evening's happenings, and almost silently he went with the stumbling girl towards the town, only leaving her at the corner of her lane. She thanked him with a new shyness, and taking the cumbrous emblem of her inferiority over her left arm, held out her strong hard little right hand to him.
"Don't think it horrid of me to have stayed," she pleaded. "It was thatI so wanted you to win … I was afraid …"
"It was very—very unladylike," began Ishmael, then paused. Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike…. Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause no more.
"Don't worry, Ishmael," she said. "Father has often told me of people hurting their backs wrestling and doing things like that, and he says it's very seldom anything. If it is they can't walk at all, and he walked quite well. Besides, I know he's pretending it's worse than it is to upset you; he's that sort…."
Ishmael felt a little pang of gratitude, he gripped her hand, muttered a "good-night," and was off through the darkness. But he did not go back to the school for an hour yet. He was in for such trouble an hour more or less after time made no difference, and he was past thinking in terms of the clock. He had grown up violently and painfully in a short space, and ordinary methods of measuring time mean very little to one who has crowded years of growth into one evening. He walked about the moor till physical exhaustion drove him in, where Old Tring, with a glance at him, gave him hot brandy and water and sent him to bed with hardly a word. Not till next day did Ishmael notice he was lame in one knee.
A week after the fight Ishmael went over the moor to the sea. Everything was very still, even his footsteps were soundless on the thick turf. It was one of those days filled with a warm mist, so fine it cannot be observed near at hand, but always seeming to encircle the walker, as though he carried some charm to make a hollow space around him where the breath of the mist may not live. Yet, out in it for long, the clothes become sodden, while every grass-blade and leaf can be seen to hold its burden of a glittering drop, though the earth itself remains dry and powdery and on the hard, pale roads the dust lies all day, as though the actual soil were not of the texture to respond to a mist so fine.
Not a breath blew the vaporous clouds in the wreaths that usually change shapes while one watches, and the long drifts in the valley at Ishmael's feet hung motionless in the air, the dark side of the opposite slope showed here and there, crossed by the pale zig-zag of the path. He went on to the cliff's edge; far below at its foot the sea, lost further out, was visible, motionless and soundless, save for the faint rustle where it impinged upon the cliff in a narrow line of white. No outward pull or inward swell of the sea's breast was visible; it was as though that fine edge of murmurous whiteness were always made of the same particles of water, hissing perpetually along the cliff's foot.
Ishmael lay down on the damp young bracken and listened to the stillness that was only pierced by the rare wail of a syren far out to sea and the steady moan of the horn from the lighthouse. He felt as dead as the world seemed, as grey, as lost to all rousing; and, ignorant of reactions, wondered why, and whether henceforth he would always be like that.
He was suffering from too much fuss. In the days which had elapsed since the wrestling bout on the moor Doughty's injury had seemed likely to prove a bad sprain, but there had been a terrible twenty-four hours when the doctor, a portentous person with more pessimism than knowledge, had wagged his head forebodingly over the moaning patient. Doughty had felt it was not in nature for anyone to be severe on a boy with an injured back, and so he babbled freely, under cover of a pretended delirium, feeling it was better to let his version get first to Old Tring. For he guessed how that personage, always one to examine the springs of action before judgment, would look at his share in the matter. Dr. Harvey had asked for a famous Plymouth surgeon to be sent for, and this afternoon he had arrived. On his verdict as to Doughty's condition depended Ishmael's own fate, and he knew it. For, whatever the provocation, the fact remained that Ishmael had injured a schoolfellow in a wrestling match admittedly serious in its intent, and the discipline of the school had to be considered, all the more rigidly that many rumours, mostly untrue, had circulated in the school. Old Tring had suspended judgment, merely sending for Boase, who had arrived one evening at St. Renny covered with smuts and giving freely his opinions about the railway, on which, for motives of Christian poverty, he had been rash enough to travel in one of the unroofed third class compartments.
And, for the first time in his knowledge, Ishmael was aware that the Parson had not quite understood. It was not that he did not understand what Ishmael felt as much as that he expected him to feel so much more than he did. Ishmael loathed a fuss. Yet the Parson had been a rock of support; Old Tring had been generosity itself; Polkinghorne and Carminow, even the little boys, had held their tongues and let him see that for their part they intended to think no more of what Doughty had said. Killigrew had treated the whole affair as something between a joke and a matter so unimportant it made really no difference to anyone. And of all the attitudes it was Killigrew's, in the revulsion from fuss, that Ishmael was beginning to adopt as his own. The only burning thing he felt about his position was anger—an anger against his father in the first place and against Archelaus, oddly enough, in the second. He knew that his eldest brother would do all in his power to make life as difficult as possible when he went back to take up the reins at Cloom. With that burning grudge went another sensation—the realisation that if all things had been otherwise, been normal, Cloom would, after all, never have been his, and he was struck by a certain unfairness that it should be his now.
But of any shame at his position he felt none, and it was this that apparently he was expected to feel by all save Killigrew. They were all so eager to make him understand that there was nothing for him to feel ashamed about, that no one thought any the less of him or wanted him to think any less of himself. Ishmael began to discover what he never, being very un-self-analytical, fully realised, that he was one of those elect souls born without that gift of the Evil One—shame. Some attain that freedom by hard striving, but some are born free, and of them was Ishmael.
Now, as he lay upon the cliff, all the embarrassment he felt was at this set of emotions that was expected to rack him and did not. He was not yet old enough to have the courage of his lack of convictions, and he feared he had failed in something a finer creature would have responded to. He rolled over on to his elbows and stared at the pale faces of a clump of wet primroses that stared back at him with an equal innocence of emotion. Beyond them the wild violets gleamed like faint blue flames, and the tightly-curled fronds of young bracken showed silvery grey amongst the litter of last year's stalks that lay in patches of a dead burnt-orange upon the grey-green turf. Ishmael spread his fingers wide and plunged them in the primroses, in the grass, in the loose soil, for the pleasure of their soft, clean textures. He rubbed his face in them like a young animal, and drew in deep breaths of the best smell in the world—the smell of damp, green growing things. He turned on to his back again. The mist had begun to waver, a breath was stirring fitfully but finely. It came cool upon him, and as it blew the world seemed very gently to come to life again. He could see what he had come to look at and overshot in the mist—the little harbour of Povah lying to his left. He rolled over and stared curiously at its stone jetties and clustered shipping. There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was still a rare sight in those parts—a steamer. She was a side-wheeler, with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast, fore-and-aft on her mizzen. A little crowd stood on the end of the quay to stare at her, and it was on her that Ishmael too fixed his eyes; then he scrambled up and made his way diagonally down the cliff to the harbour.
It had occurred to him to run away to sea. He was of the land and knew nothing about ships, but he had often read of boys who ran away to sea—they shipped as cabin-boys and often were killed by the rough life or never heard of again. A sick wave of self-pity flooded Ishmael as he thought of it. He whose salvation was that he so seldom saw himself from the outside—unlike Killigrew, the feeder on emotion, now was aware of the poetic fitness of the story—the proud boy who sooner than live with dishonour had left home and friends to face the wide world and roam, a veritable Ishmael. Adventure began to call to him; the salt on his lips as he licked them seemed its very tang. He was big and strong, and had no fear of hard living; neither was he fearful physically. On one thing he was determined—not to stay to be expelled and then be taken ignominiously back to Cloom and the jeers of his family.
But deep down in him his ineradicable honesty kept nagging at him, telling that this new sea-lure was all make-believe, that not that way for him did happiness lie. Yet he kept on, always with a tingle of excitement mingling with an undercurrent of disbelief in the reality of it all, and made his way to the quayside determined to talk to the sailors and introduce the subject of a new hand…. Half an hour later he came away, after a desultory though interesting enough conversation in which his project had never got past his tongue. Through no cowardice or dread, he had simply not been able to broach it. He stared back at the ship when he paused on the crest of the hill, trying to puzzle out what was struggling for recognition in him. Dimly it began to dawn on him that there are only two ways for a man to live fully. The first is by being rooted to a spot that is everything to him, by which he makes his bread, by which and on which he lives, so that its well-being is as that of himself; and the second is by calling no place home, wandering the world over and remaining always free. The way which lies betwixt these two—that of hiring this house or that, putting belongings about it and being attached to it by purely artificial ties of expediency and rent, a house that was born of the thought of some unknown, the fabric of whose ground is nothing to him who hires it—this way, which is the way of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, is false and unsatisfying. It would be splendid to have two lives and give one to each of the primary ways, to live once by the soil and once by the sea; but that is a thing that can happen to no man. He may wander till he is ageing and then "settle down," but that is a different affair. Ishmael was born of the soil; Cloom, not only by inheritance, but by his peculiar training, meant his life. With a sensation of something clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it. Cloom had been too strong for him.
It was the only time another path ever even suggested itself to him, and then the suggestion had not been sincere, merely the promptings of that literary sense which is in all imaginative youth. It prompted, too, not so worthily, in an aspect of his new knowledge that did not escape him—a certain romance about it, a feeling that it made him rather interesting, something of a figure…. He would not have been human had he quite escaped that at his age. And yet it was that feeling no one but Killigrew, who frankly mooted it, had a suspicion of as possible, so Ishmael realised with shame. Also his commonsense told him that the sordid and quite unromantic incidents were likely to pile up more thickly than any of charm or pleasure. His was an admirable position for any one who loved self-pity; he would be able to see himself as a romantic centre, to feed on misunderstanding and enjoy a self-conscious isolation.
That was the real danger, one that the Parson, who was in some matters of a beautiful simplicity, had never realised. He had only foreseen the straightforward shames and difficulties, and by these Ishmael was at an age to be untouched, while he was just ripe for the former snare.
He walked over the moor and rejoined the St. Renny track with the sense of relief that we all get when one of two ways has been definitely discarded. He had even ceased to worry over what decision Old Tring had come to, though when he made out the Parson's figure coming towards him his heart gave a leap and then beat more quickly than its wont. He hastened his steps to meet him.
Boase waved his hat in a gesture of triumph, as though to signal that all was well, and his first shouted words told Ishmael that this was not to be the end of his career at St. Renny. With the knowledge went a queer little pang of disappointment; he had so been accustoming his mind to the glamour of expulsion in circumstances such as his. The Parson, in whose philosophy it would have held nothing but disaster, was beaming with joy. He sat down on a stretch of turf and Ishmael lay beside him, waiting.
"In the first place, the injury isn't serious. Carron, the surgeon from Plymouth, says it's nothing in the world but a muscle torn away, that is painful but not dangerous. He says he does not know why the boy made such a fuss; he can see nothing to account for delirium. I could have given a guess, but refrained…. Anyway, I've been having a talk with Dr. Tring—"
Ishmael kept an ungrateful silence; it seemed to him that week had been all talks.
The Parson waited a second and then, with a tiny pang of disappointment, went on:
"It is to be all right; everything is to be as it was before. I know you feel that is impossible, but it will hurt less and less with time, believe me. Character is what counts in the long run, Ishmael. And I have seen—I can't tell you how proudly—that you have character, that it has made its mark here. That shows in the way this affair has been taken. So pull yourself together; tell yourself how little it all really matters, and you'll find it is so."
A wave of affection for his friend went over Ishmael as he listened to the words that really fitted his case so little and were so kindly spoken. He felt in a flat muddle, unaware whether he wished he did feel all he was expected to or glad he did not; but one good thing the Parson's words accomplished. They purged him of the artificial standpoint of the afternoon. It was impossible for one as naturally direct as Ishmael to be in contact with so much of singleness of purpose as the Parson's and not be ashamed of his own impulses towards theatrical vision. He turned his head away to hide his emotion, which the Parson took to spring from the news he had imparted and welcomed with relief. He took the boy's hand and pressed it, a thing rare for him, who was so sensitive of others' wishes he generally left physical expression to them in the first place.
"Shall we be getting back?" he said, after a moment.
As they were walking over the moor a gleam of sun shone out, wavered, then strengthened, and before a soft breeze the mist began to vanish, only clinging here and there in the pockets of the moor like fine white wool rubbed off the backs of phantom sheep. For a while they strode in silence; then the Parson said:
"By the way, you know old Mr. Eliot's daughter, don't you? Tring told me she went to the dancing classes."
"Yes…. Why?" Ishmael asked in sudden alarm.
If it had all come out—to have a girl mixed up in this story of his—the ignominy of it! The next moment with his relief mingled a contrition for his selfish impulse when Boase replied: "She's not well, apparently. Her father made Carron have a look at her; he's no faith in Harvey. Seems she's been doing too much for her strength—walking too far. She appears to think nothing of ten to fifteen miles."
"There's nothing wrong, really wrong, is there?"
"Oh, no, only they think change of air will be good for her and more rest. She's to go on a long visit to some relations in France. I don't know what she'll think of the change, a girl like that. She's a splendid creature."
"Have you met her?" asked Ishmael in surprise.
"Why, yes. Her father seemed to think she was a little hysterical and asked me to see if she would talk to me…."
"More talking …" thought Ishmael.