Secret Bread Part 6

CHAPTER IX

FRESH PASTURE

For most children the first day at school is a memorable landmark; for Ishmael it was the more so because all his life hitherto he had lived in one atmosphere, without the little voyagings and visitings in which more happily-placed children are able to indulge. The change to St. Renny, although in the same county, was a great one, for whereas Cloom lay on the wind-swept promontory where only occasional folds in the land could give some hint of what gentler-nurtured pastures might be like, the whole little grey town of St. Renny seemed embowered in foliage that did not indeed encroach upon its actual ways, but that gave the rolling slopes of its guarding hills a richness of dark green that Ishmael had never imagined trees could hold. The life itself bore a very similar a.n.a.logy to that he had led hitherto, not because the school was at all luxurious or riotous, but because his life, even at the Vicarage, had been of an unusual austerity. This new world held at once greater restrictions and more liberty of spirit, for at school every boy works out his own salvation or the reverse. Not being shy, Ishmael had no inner terrors to overcome--only a feeling for self-defence which was the outcome of his anomalous position. The Parson hoped and thought there would be no disagreeables about that at St. Renny; the headmaster, of course, knew of it, but of the boys, those adepts at torture, none happened to be from the furthest West. For St. Renny still bore the reputation it had attained under a famous headmaster, when the best known of West Country novelists had been a scholar there, and parents from right up the country, even from London itself, if they had the blood of Devon or Cornwall in their veins, sent their sons to grey St.

Renny. It was with a London boy, son of a one-time Plymouth merchant who had become an alderman and a s.h.i.+ning light of Bloomsbury, that Ishmael's fortunes were to be most closely linked.

In spite of his pose of self-sufficiency--so ingrained as to deceive himself--Ishmael's heart beat fast as he followed the Parson through the arched doorway of grey granite that was to open so often for him in the years to follow. He was filled with an inarticulate wonder at the knowledge that it was to be so, and it occurred to him for the first time--for children, like animals, accept what comes to them very naturally--that it was odd one could be so completely disposed of by grown-up people, even for one's undoubted good....

Of the interview with the headmaster, so square of jowl and brow and yet so kindly, Ishmael remembered little in after years; for it became blurred by all he grew to know of "Old Tring" during the long though intermittent a.s.sociation of school. Old Tring rang a bell, after a gruff sentence of welcome, and, apparently as glad as Ishmael for an excuse to part, told him he should be shown round by one Killigrew. Old Tring added that he, Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even; Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously he resented that this old man should take advantage of knowing more of books to think that therefore he knew what he, Ishmael, would and would not like.

They all three waited; the Parson ran a finger along the lines of calf-bound books, then paused, Old Tring at his elbow. Ishmael was forgotten, isolated in himself, and, without warning, in the irrational way of such phases, he was overwhelmed by one of those strange periods in which, though actually but a second or so, time seems to hold its breath and the consciousness, m.u.f.fled by some overwhelming dimness, is arrested and stands alone, on a pin-point of eternity, without past or future. It seemed to him that nothing would ever move again in the dim room, where for this fraction of a second everything was motionless except the dust motes that danced in the beam slanting through the low window, wreathing this way and that like steam within the strip of brightness, but ceasing to be visible at the edge as sharply as though they ceased to exist--as though an impalpable line ruled in the air would not allow the twisting coils to pa.s.s beyond, even when the pattern demanded it. Ishmael stared at this aerial path of living light, his mind hypnotised by it, and the remainder of the room by its contrasting density seemed to fall away from him; out of a great distance came the Parson's voice saying, "So you've got a first edition of the Antiquities...." Followed the soft rubbing sound of one smooth book being drawn out from between its companions, then the crisper noise of large pages being turned.

The moment, which had seemed so intensely the present to Ishmael that during it he had thought it could never cease to be, reeled and sank into the past, leaving him with the feeling that time was once more in motion, like a vast clock whose pendulum has stopped for one beat, only to resume its swing again. At once it became possible that everything should go on, the idea of the incursion of the boy Killigrew ceased to be wildly chimerical, and with this acceptance of it Killigrew himself was in the room.

The vibrant path was no longer bright to the shutting-off of all else, material and mental; the Parson looked up from his first edition; Old Tring's hand, advancing, came into the strip of light, and seemed to spring to life, swelled to huge dimensions, became of a glowing whiteness. Killigrew, red-headed, freckled, standing with an air of surly self-protection, suddenly raised his light lashes to give the sweetest smile Ishmael had ever seen. Always, even in moments of irritation, it was to remain with him as illuminative of Killigrew--that peculiar radiant smile which carried him so softly, if not triumphantly, through life. It would have been a disgusting smile if it had been calculated, even self-conscious; as it was, it made of Killigrew a creature subtly apart, though for no deeper reason.

Old Tring said: "Killigrew, this is Ruan, who has come from Bolerium, or, as you would vulgarly term it, Land's End. Take him and show him the school, but bring him back to have tea with his guardian." The two boys went out and as he was shutting the door Ishmael, who had the woodland hearing of a little animal, caught some low-toned words of the Parson's: "... makings of a fine spirit. I a.s.sure you, Tring ..." That was himself, Ishmael Ruan, whom they were speaking of. "A fine spirit ..."; the phrase p.r.i.c.ked his imagination--he swelled to it. He glanced at Killigrew, who was whistling in rosy unconsciousness of proximity to any spirit at all, and suddenly felt enormously relieved that the other boy had not heard, aware, by the new angle to which he was already responding, that Killigrew would have been disgusted rather than impressed. Once in the courtyard, the freemasonry of young things released from the pressure of grown-ups drew their eyes together.

Unconsciously Ishmael thrust his hands into the trouser pockets of his new serge suit, in imitation of Killigrew, whose swagger was really a thing inimitable. Something stirred in Ishmael which had hitherto been unknown to him; it was not love, which in greater or lesser degree he already knew--for he was an affectionate boy in his inarticulate way--it was not merely an impulse for friends.h.i.+p; that would have been no alien thing. It was the beginning of that relations.h.i.+p which only masculine creatures ever really know, a relations.h.i.+p which is intimate without ever making inroads on privacy; full of pleasure in companions.h.i.+p without any feeling of a blank when apart; where love cannot be said to exist, and yet of which, if the irrevocableness of death remove one of the two, there remains to the other a void that is felt recurrently for the rest of his life whenever anything arises which that other person alone could have felt and appreciated in quite the same way. It was no David and Jonathan friends.h.i.+p which grew between Ishmael and Killigrew such as may sometimes be found among boys, but it was an intimacy that, in its aloof way, was to add something to the pattern of their lives that neither would have found without it.

In after years, if Ishmael had examined into the thing, which he never did, he would have seen that it was because, widely different as their two natures were, each had a side that corresponded. For everyone has a part of him, nearly always the larger, which is in relation with the general run of the world, and also a part which is out of key with it.

Neither is more real than the other, though one is always bigger and more insistent than the other, and in the relative proportions lies every possibility. It was those parts of them which were out of key with the ordinary acceptances that were attuned in Ishmael and Killigrew, though neither was as yet aware they had such aspects, far less in what measure. On that first afternoon and for several days afterwards they were merely unthinkingly aware of a blind tolerance for each other that rose more nearly to a warm respect over the matter of Killigrew's badger.

This attractive though violent animal lurked in a hutch artfully concealed between the roof and the rafters at the far end of the dormitory where Killigrew slept. A trap door gave admission to the dim three-cornered place where heads had to be bowed for fear of the beams and voices and footsteps tuned down as low as possible lest someone in authority should overhear. For the badger was contraband, or so its owner, for greater glory, chose to a.s.sume, though as a matter of fact it was more than likely had permission been asked to keep the beast it would have been accorded, for St. Renny had its reputation as the great naturalists' school to keep up. Half the glamour surrounding the savage pet would have vanished, however, and the secret was jealously guarded, the badger himself, by his unconquerable stench, being the only person likely to give it away. Luckily the hutch was not directly over the dormitory, but right at the angle of the roof, where a low window, kept always open by Killigrew, allowed the worst of the smell to be wafted away. The increasing size of the badger and its consequent fierceness were likely to make its ultimate retention impossible; even now, a mere ball of striped fluff, it bit savagely whenever it was handled.

Badgers, which are often erroneously supposed to be nearly extinct in England, swarm over Cornwall, so that Killigrew's specimen did not enjoy any special distinction as a rarity, save in its capacity as a "pet."

They are, however, very difficult to catch, being strong and cunning and armed with terrific teeth and claws, and Killigrew was pa.s.sionately attached to his unyielding prisoner, not so much for its own sake as for what it represented for him--outlawry, romance, the touch of the wild which glorified life. Not on the first day was Ishmael accounted worthy, or even safe, as a repository for this secret, but when Killigrew did show it him, Ishmael rose in importance through his intimate knowledge of badgers and their ways.

"Wouldn't _He_ let you keep it if _He_ knew?" asked Ishmael, when, finger and thumb round its neck and another finger firmly gripping under a forepaw, he had held and admired the spitting animal.

"Rather not. We're not allowed to _keep_ anything, though they make us sweat across the moor what they call 'observing the animal creation in its own haunts.' They like one to grind over beastesses and b.u.t.terflies and suchlike."

"I know a lot about them," boasted Ishmael.

"Then you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, that's all I can say, or the fellows will think you're a prig. It was all right when it was started because the fellows were keen on it themselves, but then the masters took it up, and of course we had to drop it. We're off bugs in this shop."

Ishmael digested in silence the profundity of the point of view thus presented to him, and, according to his habit, quickly made it part of his practice. For his first weeks at school he kept very silent, absorbing its traditions and the unwritten laws made by the boys themselves, on the nice observance of which hung respect and popularity.

The Grammar School of St. Renny was an old-fas.h.i.+oned affair even for those days, but it had a certain name in a quiet way. It was run on cla.s.sical lines, Greek and Latin being considered the only two subjects worth a gentleman's attention. Botany and entomology were the unofficial subjects that had won the school its name, but Ishmael soon found that to show any keenness for these two pursuits was to cla.s.s yourself a prig. The robuster natures preferred rod and line, or line only, in the waters of Bolowen Pool to any dalliance with stink-pots and specimen cases. Like far greater schools, it was really run by the traditions evolved by the boys. There were certain things that were the thing and certain other things that were not the thing, and these varied occasionally. One term you simply had to wear a dark blue-and-white tie for going into the town and bear's grease your hair; another term a certain slovenliness in dress was the thing. You dismissed all womenkind as trivial and useless, but you were in love with the doctor's daughter, a stately, full-blown damsel who floated, so to speak, up the church upon the swaying bubble of her crinoline every Sunday morning, and sat, sunk to the waist in the swelling waves of silk, wors.h.i.+pped by a row of eyes from the school pew.

During the Sunday promenade around the churchyard--an unchanging ritual--you manoeuvred to be the one of the couple pa.s.sing her as she came up the short path that bisected the circular one where you were marching. The two boys who were leading had the advantage of being able to set the pace more or less, but often they miscalculated the time of her appearance, and then some other couple, by a judicious lagging for a moment or a sudden quickening, achieved the meeting that after all was no more than a furtive interchange of glances, supercilious or almost-smiling on her part, according to her mood and the boy that encountered it. None of the boys ever met the damsel in any other way, except sometimes at a select party; but this adoration was a cult, though a purely academic one, so to speak. The true G.o.ddess of the school was far otherwise, as Ishmael was to find.

Another feature of life at St. Renny was the weekly market-day. It was forbidden to go into the town, it being placed out of bounds for the occasion, and therefore to slip out and drink cider at the corner shop and come back with your pockets stuffed with buns and solid country sweets of gaudy hues was a deed that placed you high in the respect of your fellows. Ishmael achieved this once as a matter of form, and then, having no real interest in it, turned his attention to other matters. On ordinary days the boys had a very real freedom, only limited by the hour at which they must return, and Ishmael and Killigrew nearly always took their rods and spent the half-holidays at Bolowen Pool, rarely catching anything, for the trout were abnormally shy; but Ishmael at least had the true fisherman's temperament, and was content to sit all day at one end of a rod and line even without a fish at the other. As for Killigrew, he was soon following where Ishmael led, and would have gone bug-hunting with him had he so decreed, though he felt relieved that Ishmael had cast such things aside.

Ishmael was casting aside much these days. He was at that expanding age which accepts what it is taught as good, but thinks it fine to throw it over. Later comes the age of thinking for oneself and concluding that whatever one has been taught is bad. Curiously enough the outward result of the two states is the same. Only later comes the period of judicious sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his bent for dominance made some action, one way or the other, necessary.

The Parson sank more and more into the background, but there came over the rim of his world a new figure that, oddly enough, filled much the same place.

On that first night at school, when the Parson had gone back home and Ishmael lay in a narrow little bed, one of ten such, in the darkened dormitory, he shed no tears for the Parson, or for his old companions, nor yet for the strangeness of the new world where he might, in the reaction from the first excitement, have been feeling lonely. He was too solidly set on getting all that was possible out of his fresh life. But in his most curious searchings into the likely future as he lay that night for an hour or so upon a wakeful pillow, he did not picture anything as delightful as, in after years, he was to realise Hilaria Eliot had been for those boys who at the time so casually and unthinkingly enjoyed her wayward companions.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER X

HILARIA

"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 cla.s.s, 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 Terpsich.o.r.e," a habit which had earned for himself the simple nickname of "Terps." The cla.s.s was held in a s.p.a.cious room used for b.a.l.l.s, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pa.s.sion. 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ning 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-cla.s.s, as it made movement and s.p.a.cing 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, Maca.s.sar oil, sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fis.h.i.+ng, 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 plat.i.tudes 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 apt.i.tude 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, s.h.i.+ny 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, trans.m.u.ting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's s.h.i.+ning. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 Danaean showers and back through the dimness, coloured like the b.u.t.terflies by the swift transitions, swaying like the blossoms. If not only the s.p.a.cing 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 G.o.d; while Killigrew was divided between trying to signal a question to Hilaria and wis.h.i.+ng 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage 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."