"One can do very little. Lack of imagination, which is doubtless the sin against the Holy Ghost, is at the root of it, and to that the tongues of men and of angels plead in vain. But something can be done with the children, if one gets them young enough, or so one hopes. Sometimes I reproach myself because when one of the people who practise these abominations is in pain and grief, I look on and feel very little pity when I remember all. 'It is not here the pain of the world is swelled,' I say to myself; 'it is out on the rocks, in the fields, where the little maimed things are creeping and wondering why, and the rabbits are crying all night in the traps….' It could all be so easily avoided; that's what makes it worse. Deliberately to augment the sum of suffering in the world, where there must be so much—it's inconceivable."
"Like adding to the sum of ugliness. These people do that too," said Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by day; "and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one only lets it alone…."
"There's a queer vein of cruelty in the Celt—at least in the Cornish Celt—that is worse than the Latin," went on Boase. "When they are angered they wreak vengeance on anything. And sometimes when there are a lot of them together under circumstances which you would think would have roused their pity, the devil of wanton cruelty enters into them. I shall never forget when a school of whales came ashore in the Bay … they lay there stranded, poor creatures! And from the oldest man to the little boys out of school a blood-lust came on everyone. They tore and hacked at the poor creatures with penknives and any weapon they could get, they carved their names on them and stopped up their blow-holes with stones, till the place was a perfect shambles and the blood soaked into the sand as into an arena in ancient Rome…. Nobody could stop them. It was a sight to make one weep for shame that one was a man."
Ishmael lay in silence. He knew—no one with eyes to see could live there and not know—but, like Killigrew, he had always tried not to think too much about it. He was so unable to take things superficially that he feared thought, and hence often did less than men who did not care as much. He gave a slight movement now that was not so much impatience as a thrusting away of a thing that sickened him and which he felt he could not stem. It seemed to him that the glory of the day had departed. He, too, remembered that shambles of which the Parson spoke; it had been the first time the pain in the world he so loved had come home to him. He remembered now how, as he and the Parson had come back, in melancholy silence, from that scene of blood, his own declarations about its being such a good world, made to the Parson on his first night home and repeated so often since to his own high-beating heart, had mocked at him. What did it avail being happy when there was such pain in the world? Himself or another, or, worse still, these innocents that could not philosophise about it—that any should suffer made all happiness futile. The same deadly consciousness came upon him now on the sunny cliff, and he resented that the topic should have been started, himself keeping a sullen silence. But the Parson turned and spoke directly to him.
"By the way," he said, "I hate to have to tell you, but I hear, and I'm afraid it's true, that Archelaus is starting bush-beating on the estate again. I met John-Willy Jacka coming back from the direction of the wood late one night with a suspicious-looking sack and a bludgeon, and next day I asked John-James if he knew anything. He didn't give anyone away, but I gathered—"
"If it's true—" Ishmael paused for sheer rage, then went on: "I'll tackle John-Willy, and if it's true he can go. But of course it's Archelaus really, just because he knows how I feel about it. It isn't even as though it were the season for it, if you can talk of a season for such a thing, but no one can be very hard up for food as late as this. Oh, if I can't be free of him even now he's working at Botallack—"
"I had such a quarrel with Mamma about that this morning," struck in Vassie, who disliked the conversation and thought she had been out of it long enough. "She was boasting at breakfast—after you'd gone out, Ishmael—that Archelaus was a captain now, and I laughed, and said it was more than he'd ever been in the army, but that of course a mine captain wasn't a real one … and she was furious. She said it was quite real enough for her and Archelaus anyway, though perhaps not for the likes of me. I met Archelaus at the mill the other day when I was over seeing Phoebe, and he certainly did seem smart, ever so different from when he came back. You wouldn't have known him."
She ended on her high laugh and rolled over a little woolly puppy that lay in her lap, burying her long fingers in its coat. She was perched upon a grassy slope like some vast moth that had alighted there, her pale skirts spread, a white cashmere shawl swathed about her shoulders, her golden head tipped back on her full throat. Over her, like a swaying flower, a tiny parasol reared on a long tasselled stalk, held in Killigrew's hand as he lounged beside her. He let his eyes run over her now, tipping the parasol to one side so that at his pleasure the late sunlight should touch her hair and her still flawless skin. She knew she could stand the test, and stayed a moment before motioning him to tip the parasol back again.
"It seems to me Archelaus is going a lot to the mill," observed Killigrew idly, and more for the purpose of saying something than because he really thought so. "I ran into him there the other day when I was doing my sketch of it."
A short hush, pregnant with thought, followed on his words. To Boase and Vassie—those two so different beings—came the swift reflection "That would not be at all a bad thing. It would remove a danger."