Part 8 (1/2)
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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Devons.h.i.+re, 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 of _All the Year Round_ that 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.
CHAPTER XII
SOME AMBITIONS AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT
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 s.h.i.+ning 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 las.h.i.+ng 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.u.mulative 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 demiG.o.d's, the ineffably quiet rubbing of the millions of gra.s.s-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 p.r.i.c.king of the earliest stars, and the rolling up of the sky as the great c.u.muli ma.s.sed 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--” came Doughty's voice again. Ishmael had scrambled up; his blood was still singing in his veins; he felt no dismay at the sight of the looming Doughty.
”Don't be an a.s.s, 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 you _kill_ him, Ishmael!” cried Hilaria viciously.
”Well, why did you want to laugh when Doughty said that?” asked Polkinghorne 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....”