Now, at the Other Side, i.e. at home, things had gone smoothly for them
till the day before, in a measure owing to the harvest, and for the rest
to the slow ways of old-fashioned country people. When they had gone
away to Jack’s before in disgrace, Bevis’s mother could not rest, the
ticking of the clock in the silent house, the distant beat of the
blacksmith’s hammer, every little circumstance of the day jarred upon
her. But on this occasion they had, she believed, gone for their own
pleasure, and though she missed them, they were not apart and separated
by a gulf of anger.
Busy with the harvest, there was no visiting, no one came down from
Jack’s, and so the two slipped for the moment out of the life of the
hamlet. Presently Bevis’s short but affectionate letter arrived, and
prevented any suspicion arising, for no one noticed the postmark. Mamma
wrote by return, and when her letter addressed to Bevis was delivered at
Jack’s you would have supposed the secret would have come out. So it
would in town life--a letter would have been written saying that Bevis
was not there, and asking where to forward it.
But not so at the old house in the hills. Jack’s mother put it on the
shelf, remarking that no doubt Bevis was coming, and would be there
to-morrow or next day. As for Jack he was too busy to think about it,
and if he had not been he would have taken little notice, knowing from
former experience that Bevis might turn up at any moment. The letter
remained on the shelf.
On the Saturday the carrier left a parcel for Bevis--at any other time a
messenger would have been sent, and then their absence would have been
discovered--but no one could be spared from the field. The parcel
contained clean collars, cuffs, and similar things which they never
thought of taking with them, but which mamma did not forget. Like the
letter the parcel was put aside for Bevis when he did come; the parcel
indeed was accepted as proof positive that he was coming. Jack’s mother
never touched a pen if she could by any means avoid it, old country
people put off letter-writing till absolutely compelled.
On the Sunday afternoon while Bevis and Mark were lying under the
fir-trees in New Formosa, dear mamma, always thinking of her boy and his
friend, was up in her bedroom turning over the yellowish fly-leaves at
the end of an old Book of Common Prayer, too large to go to and fro to
church, and which was always in the room. Upon these fly-leaves she had
written down from time to time the curious little things that Bevis had
said. In the very early morning (before he could talk) he used to sit
up in the bed while she still slept, and try to pick her eyelids open
with finger and thumb. What else could a dumb creature do that wished
to be looked at with loving eyes and fondled?
There it was entered, too, how when he was a “Bobby,” all little boys
are “Bobbies,” he called himself Bobaysche, and said mejjible-bone for
vegetable marrow. Desiring to speak of wheat, and unable to recall its
proper term, he called it bread-seed; and one day stroking his favourite
kitten asked “If God had a pussy?” It was difficult for him to express
what time he meant, “When that yesterday that came yesterday went away,”
was his paraphrase for the day before yesterday.
One day in the sitting-room he fancied himself a hunter with a dart, and
seizing the poker balanced it over his head. He became so excited he
launched his dart at the flying quarry, and it went through the
window-pane. In a day or two--workmen are not to be got in a hurry in
the country--an old glazier trudged out to put in fresh glass, and while
he cut out the dry putty and measured his glass, and drew the diamond
point across, Bevis emptied his tool-basket and admired the chisels and
hammers. By and by, tired of things which he was not permitted to use
lest he should cut himself, he threw them in and handed the basket to
the workman: “Here,” he said, “Here--take your toys!”
Toys indeed. The old man had laboured fifty years with these toys till
his mind had become with monotony as horny and unimpressionable as his
hand. He smiled: he did not see the other meaning that those childish
words convey.
Nothing then pleased Bevis so much as moving furniture, the noise and
disturbance so distasteful to us was a treat to him. It was
“thunder-boy” and “cuckoo-boy,” as the thunder rolled or the cuckoo
called; he could not conceive anything being caused unseen without human
agency.
The Deity was human.
“Ah!” said he thoughtfully, “He got a high ladder and climbed up over
the hedges to make the thunder.”
“Has He got any little Bobbies?”
“No.”
“I suppose He had when He was down here?”
“No.”
“No,” (with pity) “He didn’t have no peoples.” The pleasure of refusal
was not to be resisted.
“Now do, Bobby, dear?”
“I san’t: say it again.”
“O! _do_ do it.”
“I san’t: say it again.”
“Now, _do_.”
“I san’t,” shaking his head, as much as to say it’s very dreadful of me,
but I shan’t. They could not explain to him that the glowing sunset was
really so far away, he wanted to go to it. “It’s only just over the
blackberry hedge.” Some one was teaching him that God loved little
boys; “But does he love ladies too?”
As for papa he had to tell stories by the hour, day after day, and when
he ceased and said he could not remember any more, Bevis frowned. “Rack
your brains! rack your brains!” said he. A nightingale built in the
hedge near the house, and all night long her voice echoed in the bed
room. Listening one night as he was in bed he remarked, “The
nightingale has two songs: first he sings ‘Sir-rup--sir-rup,’ and then
he sings ‘Tweet.’”
For his impudence he had a box on the ear: “Pooh! It went pop like a
foxglove,” he laughed.
At Brighton he was taken over the Pavilion, and it was some trouble to
explain to him that this fine house had been built for a gentleman
called a king. By-and-by, in the top stories, rather musty from old
carpets and hangings: “Hum!” said he; “seems stuffy. I can smell that
gentleman’s dinner,” i.e. George the Fourth’s.
Visiting a trim suburban villa, while the ladies talked they sent him
out on the close-mown lawn to play. When he came in, “Well, dear, did
you enjoy yourself?”
“Don’t think much of _your_ garden,” said Bevis; “no buttercups.”
At prayers: “Make Bobby a good boy, and see that you do everything I
tell you.”
“You longered your promise,” did not fulfil it for a long time.
“Straight yourselves,” when out walking he wished them to go straight on
and not turn. “Round yourselves, round yourselves,” when he wanted them
to take a turning. When he grew up to be a big man he expressed his
determination to “knock down the policeman and kill the hanging-man,”
then he could do as he liked. “Tiffeck” was the cat’s cough.
Driving over Westminster Bridge the first time, and seeing the Houses of
Parliament, which reminded him of his toy bricks, he inquired “If there
was anything inside?” Older people have asked that of late years. As
he did not get his wishes quickly, it appeared to him there were “too
many perhapses in this place:” he wanted things done “punctually at
now.” A waterfall was the “tumbling water.”
They told him there was one part of us that did not die. “Then,” he
said directly, “I suppose that is the thinking part.” What more, O!
Descartes, Plato, philosophers, is there in your tomes? The crucifixion
hurt his feelings very much, the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear: he
looked at the picture a long time, and then turned over the page,
saying, “If God had been there He would not have let them do it.”
“What are you going to be when you’re a man?” asked grandpa. “An
engineer, a lawyer?”
“Pooh! I’m going to be a king, and wear a gold crown!”
A glowing March sunset made the tops of the elms, red with flower before
the leaf, show clear against the sky. “They look like red seaweed
dipped in water,” he said.
Such were some of the short and disconnected jottings in mamma’s
prayer-book: mere jottings, but well she could see the scene in her mind
when the words were said. Latest of all, the second visit to the
seaside, where, after rioting on the sands and hurling pebbles in the
summer waves, suddenly he stopped, looked up at her and said, “O! wasn’t
it a good thing the sea was made!” It was indeed.
Every one being so much in the field, mamma was left alone, and wearying
of it, asked Frances to come up frequently to her: Frances was willing
enough to do so, especially as she could talk unreservedly of Big Jack,
so that it was a pleasure to her to come. At last, on the Friday, as
Bevis did not write again, his mother proposed that they should drive up
to Jack’s, and see how the boys were on the morrow. Frances was
discreetly delighted: Jack could not come down to see her just now, and
with Bevis’s mother she could go up and see him with propriety. So it
was agreed that the dog-cart should be ready early on Saturday
afternoon. Charlie learned something of this--he played in and out the
place, and waved his cap thrice as a warning.
Now, in the kitchen on Friday evening there was a curious talk of Bevis
and Mark. Had it not been for the harvest something would have crept
out about them among the cottagers. Such inveterate gossipers would
have sniffed out something, some one would have supposed this, another
would have said they were not at Big Jack’s, a third might have caught a
glimpse of them when on the mainland. But the harvest filled their
hands with work, sealed their eyes, and shut their mouths. An
earthquake would hardly disturb the reapers. So soon as they had
completed the day’s work they fell asleep. Pan’s nocturnal rambles
would have been noticed had it not been for this, though he might have
come down from Jack’s.
However, as it chanced, not a word was said till the Friday evening,
when there came into the kitchen a labouring man, sent by his master to
have some talk with the Bailiff respecting a proposed bargain. Every
evening the Bailiff took his quart in the kitchen, and though it was
summer always in the same corner by the hearth. He had no home, an old
and much-crusted bachelor: he had a dim craving for company, and he
liked to sit there and sip while Polly worked round briskly.
A deal of gossip was got through in that kitchen. Men came in and out,
they lingered on the door-step with their fingers on the latch just to
add one more remark. That evening when the bargain, a minor matter, had
been discussed, this man, with much roundabout preliminary solemnly
declared that as he had been working up in Rushland’s field (about half
a mile from the New Sea), he had distinctly heard Bevis and Mark talking
to each other, and it seemed to him that the sound came over the water.
Sometimes he said he could hear folk talk at a great distance, four or
five times as far off as most could, and had frequently told people what
they had been conversing about when they had been a mile or more away.
He could not hear like this always, but once now and then, and he was
quite sure that he had heard Master Bevis and Master Mark talking
something about shooting, and that the sound came from over the water.
He did not believe they were at Jack’s, there was “summat” (something)
very curious about it.
The Bailiff and Polly and the visitor turned this over and over, and
gossiped, and discussed it for some time, till the man had to go. They
never for a moment doubted the perfect truth of what he had stated.
Half-educated people are always ready to believe the marvellous, nor was
there anything so unusual in this claim to a second sight of hearing, so
to say. Once now and then, in the country, you meet with people who lay
serious claim to possess the power, and most astonishing instances are
related of it.
Whether being so much in the open air sharpens the senses, whether the
sound actually did travel over the water, it is not possible to say, or
whether some little suspicion of the real facts had got out, and this
fellow cunningly devised his story knowing that sooner or later
confirmation of his wonderful powers of hearing would be derived in the
discovery of what Bevis had been doing. The only persons who could tell
were John Young and Loo: the one was spell-bound by the bribe he knew he
should obtain, Loo was much too eager to share the game to breathe a
word. Poachers, however, get about at odd hours in odd places, and see
things they are not meant to.
Still in the country the belief lingers that here and there a person
does possess the power, and the story so worked upon the Bailiff and
Polly, that at last Polly ventured in to tell her mistress. Her
mistress at once dismissed it as ridiculous. She was too well educated
to dream dreams. Yet when she retired, do you know! she sat a little
while and thought about it, so contagious is superstition. In the
morning she sent down to Frances to come an hour earlier--she wanted to
see Bevis.
Frances came, and the dog-cart was at the door when Loo (who had been
sent on an errand to the town--a common thing on Saturdays) rushed up to
the door, thrust a letter into mamma’s hand, and darted away.
“Why!” said she. “It’s Bevis--why!” she read aloud, Frances looking
over her shoulder:--“Dear Mamma, Please come up to the place where the
boats are kept directly you get this and mind you come this very
minute,” (twice dashed). “We are coming home from New Formosa in our
ship the Calypso, and want you to be there to see the things we have
brought you, and to hear all about it. Mind and be sure and come this
very minute, please.”
Wondering and excited with curiosity, the two ladies ran as fast as they
could up the meadow footpath, and along the bank of the New Sea, till
they came to a clear place where the trees did not interfere with the
view. Then, a long way up, they saw a singular-looking boat with a
black sail.
“There they are!”
“They’re coming!”
“What _can_ they have been doing?”
“That is not the Pinta!”
“This has a black sail!”
The sail was black because it was the rug, an old-fashioned one, black
one side and grey the other. After long discussion Bevis and Mark had
decided that the time had come when they must return from the island,
for if Bevis’s mother went to Jack’s and found they were not there, her
anxiety would be terrible, and they could not think of it. So Bevis
wrote a letter and sent Loo back with it at once, and she was to watch
and see if his mother did as she was asked. If she started for the
shore Loo was to raise a signal, a handkerchief they lent her for the
purpose.
Some time after Loo went they embarked on the raft, and drifted slowly
down before the south wind till they reached the Mozambique, where they
stayed the raft’s progress with their poles till Loo displayed the
signal. The sail was then hoisted, and they bore down right before the
wind.
With dark sail booming out the Calypso surged ahead, the mariners saw
the two ladies on the shore, and waved their hands and shouted. Bevis
steered her into port, and she grounded beside the Pinta. The first
caress and astonishment over: “Where are your hats?” said Frances.
“Where are your collars?” said his mother. “And gracious, child! just
look at his neck!”
As for hats and collars they had almost forgotten their existence, and
having passed most of the time in shirt sleeves like gold-miners, with
necks and chests exposed, they were as brown as if they had been in the
tropics. Mark especially was tanned, completely tanned: Bevis was too
fair to brown well. The sun and the wind had purified his skin almost
to transparency with a rosy olive behind the whiteness. There was a
gleam in his eye, the clear red of his lips--lips speak the state of the
blood--the easy motion of the limbs, the ringing sound of the voice, the
upright back, all showed primeval health. Both of them were often
surprised at their own strength.
In those days of running, racing, leaping, exploring, swimming, the skin
nude to the sun, and wind and water, they built themselves up of steel,
steel that would bear the hardest wear of the world. Had they been put
in an open boat and thrust forth to sea like the viking of old, it would
not have hurt them.
Frances played with Bevis’s golden ringlets, but did not kiss him as she
had used to do. He looked too much a man. She placed her hand on her
brother’s shoulder, but did not speak to him as once she had done.
Something told her that this was not the boy she ordered to and fro.
They could not believe that the two had really spent all the time on an
island. This was the eleventh morn since they had left--it could not
be: yet there was the raft in evidence.
“Let us row them up in the Pinta,” said Mark.
“In a minute,” said Bevis. “Get her ready; I’ll be back in a minute--
half a second.” He ran along the bank to a spot whence he knew he could
see the old house at home through the boughs. He wanted just to look at
it--there is no house so beautiful as the one you were born in--and then
he ran back.
There was a little water in the boat but not much, they hauled out some
of the ballast, the ladies got in and were rowed direct to New Formosa.
The stockade--so well defended, the cage before the door, the hut, the
cave, their interest knew no bounds.
“But you did not really sleep on this,” said Bevis’s mother in a tone of
horror, finding the bed was nothing but fir branches: she could not be
reconciled to the idea.
The matchlock, the niche for the lantern, the marks where their fires
had been, the sun-dial, there was no detail they did not examine: and
lastly they went all round the island by the well-worn path. This
occupied a considerable time, it was now too late to drive up to Jack’s
and the object was removed, but Bevis’s mother, ever anxious for others’
happiness, whispered to Frances that she would write and send a
messenger, and ask Jack to come down to-morrow--surely he could spare
Sunday--to bring back the parcel, and see the wonderful island.
When at last they landed the ladies, there was Charlie on the bank, and
Cecil and Val, who had somehow got wind of it--they were wild with
curiosity not unmingled with resentment. These had to be rowed to New
Formosa and they stayed longer even than the ladies, and insisted on a
shot each with the matchlock. So it was a most exciting afternoon for
these returned shipwrecked folks. In the evening they had the dog-cart,
and drove in to Latten with the otter to have it preserved.
They did not see much or think much of the governor till towards
supper-time--Mark had snatched half an hour to visit his Jolly Old Moke
and returned like the wind. The governor was calmly incredulous: he
professed to disbelieve that they had done it all themselves, there must
have been a man or two to help them. And if it was true, how did they
suppose they were going to pay for all the damage they had done to the
trees on the island?
This was a difficult question, they did not know that the governor could
cut the trees if he chose, indeed they had never thought about it. But
having faced so many dangers they were not going to tremble at this.
They could not quite make the governor out, whether he was chaffing
them, or whether he really disbelieved, or whether it was a cover to his
anger. In truth, he hardly knew himself, but he could not help admiring
the ingenuity with which they had effected all this.
He was a shrewd man, the governor, and he saw that Bevis and Mark had
the ladies on their side; what is the use of saying anything when the
ladies have made up their minds? Besides, there was this about it at
any rate: they had gained the primeval health of the primeval
forest-dwellers. Before gleaming eyes, red lips, sun-burned and yet
clear skin, ringing voices and shouts of laughter, how could he help but
waver and finally melt and become as curious as the rest.
In the end they actually promised, as a favour, to row him up to their
island to-morrow.
Volume Three, Chapter XVI.