Professor Bowles was a compact little man wearing spectacles with alternative glasses, partly curved, partly flat; he was hairy and dressed in that sort of soft tweedy stuff that ravels out—he seemed to have been sitting among thorns—and baggy knickerbockers with straps and very thick stockings and very sensible, open air, in fact quite mountainous, boots. And yet though he was short and stout and active he had a kind of authority about him, and it was clear that for all her persuasiveness his wife merely ran over him like a creeper without making any great difference to him. “I’ve found,” he said, “the perfect place for your encampment.” She had been making suggestions. And presently he left the ladies and came hurrying after the caravan to take control.
He was evidently a very controlling person.
“Here, you get down,” he said to William. “That poor beast’s got enough to pull without you.”
And when William mumbled he said, “Hey?” in such a shout that William for ever after held his peace.
“Where d’you come from, you boy, you?” he asked suddenly, and Bealby looked to Mrs. Bowles to explain.
“Great silly collar you’ve got,” said the Professor, interrupting her reply. “Boy like this ought to wear a wool shirt. Dirty too. Take it off, boy. It’s choking you. Don’t you feel it?”
Then he went on to make trouble about the tackle William had rigged to contain the white horse.
“This harness makes me sick,” said Professor Bowles. “It’s worse than Italy....”
“Ah!” he cried and suddenly darted off across the turf, going inelegantly and very rapidly, with peculiar motions of the head and neck as he brought first the flat and then the curved surface of his glasses into play. Finally he dived into the turf, remained scrabbling on all fours for a moment or so, became almost still for the fraction of a minute and then got up and returned to his wife, holding in an exquisite manner something that struggled between his finger and his thumb.
“That’s the third to-day,” he said, triumphantly. “They swarm here. It’s a migration.”