'Yes,' said his mother, pleased that he took the news so calmly, 'you
will be sure to see Stonehenge some time.'
He stood still, looking down at the little mould of clay in his hand--so
still that his mother got up and came close to him.
'Quentin,' she said, 'darling, what is it?'
He leaned his head against her.
'I won't make a fuss,' he said, 'but you can't begin to be brave the
very first minute. Or, if you do, you can't go on being.'
And with that he began to cry, though he had not cried after the affair
of the grocer's boy.
* * * * *
The thought of school was not so terrible to Quentin as Mrs. de Ward had
thought it would be. In fact, he rather liked it, with half his mind;
but the other half didn't like it, because it meant parting from his
mother who, so far, had been his only friend. But it was exciting to be
taken to Southampton, and have all sorts of new clothes bought for you,
and a school trunk, and a little polished box that locked up, to keep
your money in and your gold sleeve links, and your watch and chain when
you were not wearing them.
Also the journey to Salisbury was made in a motor, which was very
exciting of course, and rather took Quentin's mind off the parting with
his mother, as she meant it should. And there was a very grand lunch at
The White Hart Hotel at Salisbury, and then, very suddenly indeed, it
was good-bye, good-bye, and the motor snorted, and hooted, and throbbed,
and rushed away, and mother was gone, and Quentin was at school.
I believe it was quite a nice school. It was in a very nice house with a
large quiet garden, and there were only about twenty boys. And the
masters were kind, and the boys no worse than other boys of their age.
But Quentin hated it from the very beginning. For when his mother had
gone the Headmaster said: 'School will be out in half-an-hour; take a
book, de Ward,' and gave him _Little Eric and his Friends_, a mere baby
book. It was too silly. He could not read it. He saw on a shelf near
him, _Smith's Antiquities_, a very old friend of his, so he said: 'I'd
rather have this, please.'
'You should say "sir" when you speak to a master,' the Head said to him.
'Take the book by all means.' To himself the Head said, 'I wish you joy
of it, you little prig.'
When school was over, one of the boys was told to show Quentin his bed
and his locker. The matron had already unpacked his box and his pile of
books was waiting for him to carry it over.
'Golly, what a lot of books,' said Smithson minor. 'What's this?
_Atlantis_? Is it a jolly story?'
'It isn't a story,' said Quentin. And just then the classical master
came by. 'What's that about _Atlantis_?' he said.
'It's a book the new chap's got,' said Smithson.
The classical master glanced at the book.
'And how much do you understand of this?' he asked, fluttering the
leaves.
'Nearly all, I think,' said Quentin.
'You should say "sir" when you speak to a master,' said the classical
one; and to himself he added, 'little prig.' Then he said to Quentin: 'I
am afraid you will find yourself rather out of your element among
ordinary boys.'
'I don't think so,' said Quentin calmly, adding as an afterthought
'sir.'
'I'm glad you're so confident,' said the classical master and went.
'My word,' said Smithson minor in a rather awed voice, 'you did answer
him back.'
'Of course I did,' said Quentin. 'Don't _you_ answer when you're spoken
to?'
Smithson minor informed the interested school that the new chap was a
prig, but he had a cool cheek, and that some sport might be expected.
After supper the boys had half an hour's recreation. Quentin, who was
tired, picked up a book which a big boy had just put down. It was the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_.
'Hi, you kid,' said the big boy, 'don't pretend you read Shakespeare for
fun. That's simple swank, you know.'
'I don't know what swank is,' said Quentin, 'but I like the _Midsummer_
whoever wrote it.'
'Whoever _what_?'
'Well,' said Quentin, 'there's a good deal to be said for its being
Bacon who wrote the plays.'
Of course that settled it. From that moment, he was called not de Ward,
which was strange enough, but Bacon. He rather liked that. But the next
day it was Pork, and the day after Pig, and that was unbearable.
He was at the bottom of his class, for he knew no Latin as it is taught
in schools, only odd words that English words come from, and some Latin
words that are used in science. And I cannot pretend that his arithmetic
was anything but contemptible.
The book called _Atlantis_ had been looked at by most of the school, and
Smithson major, not nearly such an agreeable boy as his brother, hit on
a new nickname.
'Atlantic Pork's a good name for a swanker,' he said. 'You know the
rotten meat they have in Chicago.'
This was in the playground before dinner. Quentin, who had to keep his
mouth shut very tight these days, because, of course, a boy of ten
cannot cry before other chaps, shut the book he was reading and looked
up.
'I won't be called that,' he said quietly.
'Who said you wouldn't?' said Smithson major, who, after all, was only
twelve. 'I say you will.'
'If you call me that I shall hit you,' said Quentin, 'as hard as I can.'
A roar of laughter went up, and cries of, 'Poor old
Smithson'--'Apologise, Smithie, and leave the omnibus.'
'And what should I be doing while you were hitting me?' asked Smithson
contemptuously.
[Illustration: It landed on the point of the chin of Smithson major.]
'I don't know and I don't care,' said Quentin.
Smithson looked round. No master was in sight. It seemed an excellent
opportunity to teach young de Ward his place.
'Atlantic pig-swine,' he said very deliberately. And Quentin sprang at
him, and instantly it was a fight.
Now Quentin had only once fought--really fought--before. Then it was
the grocer's boy and he had been beaten. But he had learned something
since. And the chief conclusion he now drew from his memories of that
fight was that he had not hit half hard enough, an opinion almost
universal among those who have fought and not won.
As the fist of Smithson major described a half circle and hurt his ear
very much, Quentin suddenly screwed himself up and hit out with his
right hand, straight, and with his whole weight behind the blow as the
grocer's boy had shown him. All his grief for his wounded father, his
sorrow at the parting from his mother, all his hatred of his school, and
his contempt for his schoolfellows went into that blow. It landed on the
point of the chin of Smithson major who fell together like a heap of
rags.
'Oh,' said Quentin, gazing with interest at his hand--it hurt a good
deal but he looked at it with respect--'I'm afraid I've hurt him.'
He had forgotten for a moment that he was in an enemies' country, and
so, apparently, had his enemies.
'Well done, Piggy! Bravo, young 'un! Well hit, by Jove!'
Friendly hands thumped him on the back. Smithson major was no popular
hero.
Quentin felt--as his schoolfellows would have put it--bucked. It is one
thing to be called Pig in enmity and derision. Another to be called
Piggy--an affectionate diminutive, after all--to the chorus of admiring
smacks.
'Get up, Smithie,' cried the ring. 'Want any more?'
It appeared that Smithie did not want any more. He lay, not moving at
all, and very white.
'I say,' the crowd's temper veered, 'you've killed him, I expect. I
wouldn't like to be you, Bacon.'
Pig, you notice, for aggravation--Piggy in enthusiastic applause. In the
moment of possible tragedy the more formal Bacon.
'I haven't,' said Quentin, very white himself, 'but if I have he
began--by calling names.'
Smithson moved and grunted. A sigh of relief swept the ring as a breeze
sweeps a cornfield.
'He's all right. A fair knock out. Piggy's got the use of 'em. Do
Smithie good.' The voices hushed suddenly. A master was on the
scene--the classical master.
'Fighting?' he said. 'The new boy? Who began it?'
'I did,' said Quentin, 'but he began with calling names.'
'Sneak!' murmured the entire school, and Quentin, who had seen no reason
for not speaking the truth, perceived that one should not tell all one
knows, and that once more he stood alone in the world.
'You will go to your room, de Ward,' said the classical master, bending
over Smithson, who having been 'knocked silly' still remained in that
condition, 'and the headmaster will consider your case to-morrow. You
will probably be expelled.'
Quentin went to his room and thought over his position. It seemed to be
desperate. How was he to know that the classical master was even then
saying to the Head:
'He's got something in him, prig or no prig, sir.'
'You were quite right to send him to his room,' said the Head,
'discipline must be maintained, as Mr. Ducket says. But it will do
Smithson major a world of good. A boy who reads Shakespeare for fun, and
has views about Atlantis, and can knock out a bully as well.... He'll be
a power in the school. But we mustn't let him know it.'
That was rather a pity. Because Quentin, furious at the injustice of the
whole thing--Smithson, the aggressor, consoled with; himself punished;
expulsion threatened--was maturing plans.
'If mother had known what it was like,' he said to himself, 'she would
never have left me here. I've got the two pounds she gave me. I shall
go to the White Hart at Salisbury ... no, they'd find me then. I'll go
to Lyndhurst; and write to her. It's better to run away than to be
expelled. Quentin Durward would never have waited to be expelled from
anywhere.'
Of course Quentin Durward was my hero's hero. It could not be otherwise
since his own name was so like that of the Scottish guardsman.
Now the school in Salisbury was a little school for little boys--boys
who were used to schools and took the rough with the smooth. But Quentin
was not used to schools, and he had taken the rough very much to heart.
So much that he did not mean to take any more of it.
His dinner was brought up on a tray--bread and water. He put the bread
in his pocket. Then when he knew that every one was at dinner in the
long dining-room at the back of the house, he just walked very quietly
down the stairs, opened the side door and marched out, down the garden
path and out at the tradesmen's gate. He knew better than to shut either
gate or door.
He went quickly down the street, turned the first corner he came to so
as to get out of sight of the school. He turned another corner, went
through an archway, and found himself in an inn-yard--very quiet indeed.
Only a liver-coloured lurcher dog wagged a sleepy tail on the hot
flag-stones.
Quentin was just turning to go back through the arch, for there was no
other way out of the yard, when he saw a big covered cart, whose horse
wore a nose-bag and looked as if there was no hurry. The cart bore the
name, 'Miles, Carrier, Lyndhurst.'
Quentin knew all about lifts. He had often begged them and got them. Now
there was no one to ask. But he felt he could very well explain later
that he had wanted a lift, much better than now, in fact, when he might
be caught at any moment by some one from the school.
He climbed up by the shaft. There were boxes and packages of all sorts
in the cart, and at the back an empty crate with sacking over it. He got
into the crate, pulled the sacking over himself, and settled down to eat
his bread.
Presently the carrier came out, and there was talk, slow, long-drawn
talk. After a long while the cart shook to the carrier's heavy climb
into it, the harness rattled, the cart lurched, and the wheels were loud
and bumpy over the cobble stones of the yard.
Quentin felt safe. The glow of anger was still hot in him, and he was
glad to think how they would look for him all over the town, in vain. He
lifted the sacking at one corner so that he could look out between the
canvas of the cart's back and side, and hoped to see the classical
master distractedly looking for him. But the streets were very sleepy.
Every one in Salisbury was having dinner--or in the case of the
affluent, lunch.
The black horse seemed as sleepy as the streets, and went very slowly.
Also it stopped very often, and wherever there were parcels to leave
there was slow, long talkings to be exchanged. I think, perhaps, Quentin
dozed a good deal under his sacks. At any rate it was with a shock of
surprise that he suddenly heard the carrier's voice saying, as the horse
stopped with a jerk:
'There's a crate for you, Mrs. Baddock, returned empty,' and knew that
that crate was not empty, but full--full of boy.
'I'll go and call Joe,' said a voice--Mrs. Baddock's, Quentin supposed,
and slow feet stumped away over stones. Mr. Miles leisurely untied the
tail of the cart, ready to let the crate be taken out.
Quentin spent a paralytic moment. What could he do?
And then, luckily or unluckily, a reckless motor tore past, and the
black horse plunged and Mr. Miles had to go to its head and 'talk
pretty' to it for a minute. And in that minute Quentin lifted the
sacking, and looked out. It was low sunset, and the street was deserted.
He stepped out of the crate, dropped to the ground, and slipped behind a
stout and friendly water-butt that seemed to offer protective shelter.
Joe came, and the crate was taken down.
'You haven't seen nothing of that there runaway boy by chance?' said a
new voice--Joe's no doubt.
'What boy?' said Mr. Miles.
'Run away from school, Salisbury,' said Joe. 'Telegrams far and near, so
they be. Little varmint.'
'I ain't seen no boys, not more'n ordinary,' said Mr. Miles. 'Thick as
flies they be, here, there, and everywhere, drat 'em. Sixpence--Correct.
So long, Joe.'
The cart rattled away. Joe and the crate blundered out of hearing, and
Quentin looked cautiously round the water-butt.
This was an adventure. But he was cooler now than he had been at
starting--his hot anger had died down. He would have been contented, he
could not help feeling, with a less adventurous adventure.
But he was in for it now. He felt, as I suppose people feel when they
jump off cliffs with parachutes, that return was impossible.
Hastily turning his school cap inside out--the only disguise he could
think of, he emerged from the water-butt seclusion and into the street,
trying to look as if there was no reason why he should not be there. He
did not know the village. It was not Lyndhurst. And of course asking the
way was not to be thought of.
There was a piece of sacking lying on the road; it must have dropped
from the carrier's cart. He picked it up and put it over his shoulders.
'A deeper disguise,' he said, and walked on.
He walked steadily for a long, long way as it seemed, and the world got
darker and darker. But he kept on. Surely he must presently come to some
village, or some signpost.
Anyhow, whatever happened, he could not go back. That was the one
certain thing. The broad stretches of country to right and left held no
shapes of houses, no glimmer of warm candle-light; they were bare and
bleak, only broken by circles of trees that stood out like black islands
in the misty grey of the twilight.
'I shall have to sleep behind a hedge,' he said bravely enough; but
there did not seem to be any hedges. And then, quite suddenly, he came
upon it.
A scattered building, half transparent as it seemed, showing black
against the last faint pink and primrose of the sunset. He stopped, took
a few steps off the road on short, crisp turf that rose in a gentle
slope. And at the end of a dozen paces he knew it. Stonehenge!
Stonehenge he had always wanted so desperately to see. Well, he saw it
now, more or less.
He stopped to think. He knew that Stonehenge stands all alone on
Salisbury Plain. He was very tired. His mother had told him about a girl
in a book who slept all night on the altar stone at Stonehenge. So it
was a thing that people did--to sleep there. He was not afraid, as you
or I might have been--of that lonely desolate ruin of a temple of long
ago. He was used to the forest, and, compared with the forest, any
building is homelike.
There was just enough light left amid the stones of the wonderful broken
circle to guide him to its centre. As he went his hand brushed a plant;
he caught at it, and a little group of flowers came away in his hand.
'St. John's wort,' he said, 'that's the magic flower.' And he remembered
that it is only magic when you pluck it on Midsummer Eve.
'And this _is_ Midsummer Eve,' he told himself, and put it in his
buttonhole.
'I don't know where the altar stone is,' he said, 'but that looks a cosy
little crack between those two big stones.'
He crept into it, and lay down on a flat stone that stretched between
and under two fallen pillars.
The night was soft and warm; it was Midsummer Eve.
'Mother isn't going till the twenty-sixth,' he told himself. 'I sha'n't
bother about hotels. I shall send her a telegram in the morning, and get
a carriage at the nearest stables and go straight back to her. No, she
won't be angry when she hears all about it. I'll ask her to let me go to
sea instead of to school. It's much more manly. Much more manly ... much
much more, much.'
He was asleep. And the wild west wind that swept across the plain spared
the little corner where he lay asleep, curled up in his sacking with the
inside-out school cap, doubled twice, for pillow.
He fell asleep on the smooth, solid, steady stone.
He awoke on the stone in a world that rocked as sea-boats rock on a
choppy sea.
He went to sleep between fallen moveless pillars of a ruin older than
any world that history knows.
He awoke in the shade of a purple awning through which strong sunlight
filtered, and purple curtains that flapped and strained in the wind; and
there was a smell, a sweet familiar smell, of tarred ropes and the sea.
'I say,' said Quentin to himself, 'here's a rum go.'
He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time ago
as it seemed.
The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a rhythm which he knew well
enough. He had felt it when he and his mother went in a little boat from
Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight. There was no doubt in his
mind. He was on a ship. But how, but why? Who could have carried him all
that way without waking him? Was it magic? Accidental magic? The St.
John's wort perhaps? And the stone--it was not the same. It was new,
clean cut, and, where the wind displaced a corner of the curtain,
dazzlingly white in the sunlight.
There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of shuffling
as though people were arranging themselves. And then people outside the
awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all like any music
you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune than a drum has,
or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough glorious exciting
splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense all-alive feeling
that drums and trumpets give.
Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.
Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had
ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets
against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as
the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by
bigger waves than he had ever dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men,
dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were
raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea--but
they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, 'struck so,' for their
eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he
noticed curiously, but with surprise and ... could it be that they were
afraid of him?
[Illustration: 'Who are you?' he said. 'Answer, I adjure you by the
sacred Tau!']
Quentin was shivering with the surprise and newness of it all. He had
read about magic, but he had not wholly believed in it, and yet, now, if
this was not magic, what was it? You go to sleep on an old stone in a
ruin. You wake on the same stone, quite new, on a ship. Magic, magic, if
ever there was magic in this wonderful, mysterious world!
The silence became awkward. Some one had to say something.
'Good-morning,' said Quentin, feeling that he ought perhaps to be the
one.
Instantly every one in sight fell on his face on the deck.
Only one, a tall man with a black beard and a blue mantle, stood up and
looked Quentin in the eyes.
'Who are you?' he said. 'Answer, I adjure you by the Sacred Tau!' Now
this was very odd, and Quentin could never understand it, but when this
man spoke Quentin understood _him_ perfectly, and yet at the same time
he knew that the man was speaking a foreign language. So that his
thought was not, 'Hullo, you speak English!' but 'Hullo, I can
understand your language.'
'I am Quentin de Ward,' he said.
'A name from other stars! How came you here?' asked the blue-mantled
man.
'_I_ don't know,' said Quentin.
'He does not know. He did not sail with us. It is by magic that he is
here,' said Blue Mantle. 'Rise, all, and greet the Chosen of the
Gods.'
They rose from the deck, and Quentin saw that they were all bearded
men, with bright, earnest eyes, dressed in strange dress of something
like jersey and tunic and heavy golden ornaments.
'Hail! Chosen of the Gods,' cried Blue Mantle, who seemed to be the
leader.
'Hail, Chosen of the Gods!' echoed the rest.
'Thank you very much, I'm sure,' said Quentin.
'And what is this stone?' asked Blue Mantle, pointing to the stone on
which Quentin sat.
And Quentin, anxious to show off his knowledge, said:
'I'm not quite sure, but I _think_ it's the altar stone of Stonehenge.'
'It is proved,' said Blue Mantle. 'Thou art the Chosen of the Gods. Is
there anything my Lord needs?' he added humbly.
'I ... I'm rather hungry,' said Quentin; 'it's a long time since dinner,
you know.'
They brought him bread and bananas, and oranges.
'Take,' said Blue Mantle, 'of the fruits of the earth, and specially of
this, which gives drink and meat and ointment to man,' suddenly
offering a large cocoa-nut.