LULL BEFORE STORM
There was a place upon the cliff which Ishmael had made peculiarly his, where he went whenever he wished to be alone, which was not seldom. No other place since that hollow where the favoured boys had been wont to meet Hilaria had meant so much to him, and this one had the supreme advantage that it belonged to him only. The rest of his family did not indulge in cliff-climbing. Generally he was accompanied there by Wanda, his big farm-dog, a jolly, rollicking, idiotically adoring creature who spent her days wriggling and curvetting at his feet, her silly pink tongue dabbing at him, her moist eyes beaming through her tangled fringe. She was not very clever, being one of those amiable fool dogs whose quality of heart is their chief recommendation, but she had a certain wisdom of her own nevertheless.
Nowhere on all the coast was it possible to see a wider stretch of sky than from this plateau half-way down the sloping turf-clad cliff. On either side was ranked headland after headland, growing dimmer with the soft bruised hue of distance, while the plateau itself was set in an inward-curving stretch of cliff from which the whole line of the horizon made a vast convexity. Sometimes Ishmael would lie upon his back and, blotting the green protruding edge of the plateau from his mind, watch only the sky and sea, where, such was their expanse, it was often possible to glimpse three different weathers in one sweeping glance. Away to the left, where, far out to sea, the Longships stuck a white finger out of the foam, a sudden squall might come up, obliterating lighthouse, headlands, all the sea to the cliff's foot, with its purple smother. Directly in front of him, below a piled mass of cumuli that hung darkly from zenith to horizon, a line of livid whiteness would show the sea's rim, while nearer him, half-way across the watery floor, great shafts of light, flanked by others of varying brightness, poured down from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of the delicate exhaust of both.
Killigrew was not long in discovering this place, which he declared presented an unrivalled stage for the setting of vast dream-dramas he watched trailing their cloudy way across it, and Ishmael was not loth to share his plateau with him. The incursion of Vassie was another matter, but by this time—nearly a month after that momentous birthday—Ishmael felt helplessly drifting. He was enjoying himself, while Killigrew showed no signs of wishing to return to Paris and Vassie was blooming as never before. She sat to him for sketches that never were finished, and that to her eyes, though she did not say so, looked just the same even when Killigrew declared a stroke more would wreck their perfection. Ishmael was neglecting his personal supervision of the farm these days—he had developed a new theory that it was time he tested how far things could go well without him. He had heard a hint or two dropped to the effect that the friend from foreign parts was only amusing himself with proud Vassie, but he paid no heed. What could be more absurd, he reflected, than the idea that she could want a boy a couple of years her junior and a mere student to fall in love with her? Thus Ishmael, while Killigrew laughed at him and with Vassie all day long, and she glowed and answered him and seemed as light-hearted, as either of them.
On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Vassie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground "rooms" of a dead people. Now, as the day drew to a burnished close, they all sat upon the soft turf, and Killigrew and Ishmael watched with half-closed eyes the play of the sea-birds below them. The wheatears flirted their black and white persons over the rocks, the gulls dipped and wheeled, planed past them on level wings, uttering their harsh cries, or for a flashing moment rested so close that the blot of blood-red above their curved yellow beaks showed vividly; out to sea a gannet hung a sheer two hundred feet in air, then dropped, beak downwards…. He hit the sea like a stone with his plumage-padded breast, a column of water shot up from his meteoric fall, and he reappeared almost before it subsided with his prey already down his shaken throat. Killigrew clapped his hands in approbation and Vassie feigned interest.
"What a life!" exclaimed Killigrew; "if we do have to live again in the form of animals, I hope I shall be a bird, a sea-bird for choice. Just imagine being a gull or a gannet…. I wish one could paint the pattern they make in the air as they fly—a vast invisible web of curves, all of them pure beauty."
"Don't wish to be a bird in this part of the world, then," advised the
Parson drily.
"Why not? Don't they have a good time?"
"If you had watched as long as I have … seen all the mutilated birds with trailing legs and broken wings that pick up a miserable living as long as the warm weather lasts…. There's not a boy in the countryside, save a few in whom I've managed to instil the fear of the Lord, that doesn't think he's a perfect right to throw stones at them, and, worse, to catch them on devilish little hooks and as likely as not throw them aside to die when caught. Grown men do it—it's quite a trade. I know one who, if he catches on his hooks a bird he does not want, wrenches its beak open and, tearing the hook out, flings the bird away to die. This just mutilates the bird sufficiently to prevent it getting caught and giving him all the trouble over again. And the Almighty does not strike this man with his lightning from heaven…. I sometimes marvel at the patience of God, and in my short-sighted ignorance even deplore it…."
"Don't tell me," said Killigrew swiftly. "I don't want to know. I'd rather think they were all safe and happy. It isn't as though one could do anything."