"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 lashing 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 pronounce 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 passed 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 cumulative 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 demigod's, the ineffably quiet rubbing of the millions of grass-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 pricking of the earliest stars, and the rolling up of the sky as the great cumuli massed 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.