The Happy Isles

by Basil King

Since the scene by the roadside on the previous afternoon he had taken a measure of his father not very far from accurate. He, Quidmore, wanted something of which he was afraid. He was too much afraid of it to press for it urgently; and yet he wanted it so fiercely that he couldn't give it up. What it was the boy could not discover, except that it had something to do with them all. When he said with them all he included the elusive Bertha; though why he included her he once more didn't know.

In God he was disappointed; that he did not deny. In spite of the shortcomings of his prayer, he had clung to the hope that they might be overlooked. He argued a little from what he himself would have done had anyone come with a request inadequately phrased. He wouldn't think of the manners or the words in his eagerness to do what lay within his power. With God apparently it was not so.

There was, of course, the other effect of his prayer. He had only asked to be stopped if the thing was not to be done. If he was not stopped the inference was obvious. He was to go ahead. It was in order to go ahead that he left the corn patch.

The kitchen when he got to it was empty. Both the windows, that in the south wall and that in the west, were open to let the wind sweep out the smell of cooking. Creeping halfway up the stairs, he saw that his mother had closed her bedroom door, a sign that she was really lying down. There was no help now for what he had to do.

He stole back to the kitchen again. On the dresser he saw the brown teapot in which she would presently make her tea. He would only have to take it down, and spill the powder into it. The powder was in his waistcoat pocket. He drew it out. It was small and flat, in a neatly folded paper. Opening the paper, he saw something innocent and white, not unlike the sugar you spread on strawberries. Laying it in readiness on the table by the west window, at which his mother baked, he turned to take down the teapot.

The gale grew fiercer. It was almost a tornado. With the teapot in his two hands he paused to look out of the south window at the swaying of the blue spruces. They moaned, they sobbed, they rocked wildly. You might have fancied them living creatures seized by a madness of despair. The fury of the wind, even in the kitchen, blew down a dipper hanging on the wall.

There was now no time to lose. The noise of the falling dipper might have disturbed his mother, so that at any minute she might come downstairs. With the teapot again in his hands he turned to the table where he had left the thing which was to do her good.

It was not there.

Dismayed, startled, he looked for it on the floor; but it was not there. It was not anywhere in the kitchen. He searched and searched.

Going outside, he found the paper caught in a rosebush under the window, but the something innocent and white had been blown to the four corners of the world.