Bevis Part 21

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 XII.

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 quant.i.ty 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 ash.o.r.e 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 bra.s.s, to the mast, and put the rope through, and it runs easy--bra.s.s 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?"