At last the hot Primitive went out, looking very cool and self-reliant in neat blue serge, and Sam knocked at the cottage door just as dusk was hiding the quiet fields beyond the village.
He remained within for half an hour, while voices rose and fell, and there were emotional silences of indecision; then he opened the door and stood cautiously within, holding a basket in one hand and a small ladder in the other, while he looked back for a last word—
“She’ll be that mad,” urged an old man’s voice from the dark interior.
“But you know what to say,” responded Sam, curbing his impatience. “Say you’ve always given the apples to the Church, and when I came for ’em you couldn’t refuse me. That’s true enough.”
A match was struck, a faint and pleasant clinking which made Sam’s mouth water came through the quiet air, but he walked away into the dewy garden with his ladder and basket. And as he stood between the cool green world and the reposeful sky, where faint stars began to glimmer through the dusk, the poet that hides in almost every man was stirred a little. He laid the apples in the basket with the same charmed sense of adventure that children know when they hear of the cave of Aladdin and that spirit first awakes which drives them forth later into the far places of the earth, whence they bring nothing back but a secret memory. Young Sam Petch, with his breeches tied with string, and his grizzled hair, was gathering, in that moment, the enchanted, forbidden fruit of every fable since the world began. The greatest can do no more—a schoolboy in a wood can do no less—real adventure is so splendidly democratic.
At last the apples were all gathered, and the misty twilight had cleared into the soft radiance of a starlit night.
“Here’s your ladder,” said Sam, tapping very cautiously at the cottage door—not that there was any one to hear save a belated crow, but the spirit of adventure is always unconsciously dramatic.
The old man popped out his head into the starlight—he, too, felt somehow stirred and jolly.
“Got ’em?” he whispered.
“Yes, every one,” whispered Sam back.