“Trix, you’re the uncanniest little mortal that ever lived, and I can’t imagine how you could have guessed, or what exactly it is you really do know. But I believe I am going to take your advice.”
CHAPTER XXVI
AN OFFER AND A REFUSAL
Antony was working in his front garden. It was a Saturday afternoon, and a blazingly hot one. Every now and then he paused to lean on his spade, and look out to where the blue sea lay shining and glistening in the sunlight.
It was amazingly blue, almost as blue as the sea depicted on the posters of famous seaside resorts, posters in which a bare-legged child with a bucket and spade, and the widest of wide smiles is invariably seen in the foreground. Certainly the designers of these posters are not students of child nature. If they were, they would know that a really absorbed and happy child is almost portentously solemn. It hasn’t the time to waste on smiles; the building of sand castles and fortresses is infinitely too engrossing an occupation. A smile will greet the anticipation; it is lost in the stupendous joy of the fact. But as smiles are evidently considered de rigueur by the designers of posters, and as the mere anticipation will not allow of the portrayal of the Rickett’s blue sea, destined to hit the eye of the beholder, smiles and sea have—rightly or wrongly—to be combined.
Antony gazed at the sea, if not quite as blue as a poster sea, yet—as already stated—amazingly blue. Josephus lay on a bit of hot earth watching him, his nose between his forepaws, and quite exhausted after a mad and wholly objectless ten minutes’ race round the garden.
Antony turned from his contemplation of the sea, and once more grasped his spade. Presently he turned up a small flat round object, which at first sight he took to be a penny. He picked it up, and rubbed the dirt off it. It proved to be merely a small lead disk, utterly useless and valueless; he didn’t even know what it could have been used for. He threw it on the earth again, and went on with his digging. But it, or his action of tossing it on to the earth, had started a train of thought. It is extraordinary what trifles will serve to start a lengthy and connected train of thought. Sometimes it is quite interesting, arriving at a certain point, to trace one’s imaginings backwards, and see from whence they started.
The disk reminded Antony of the coppers he had tossed to the child at Teneriffe. From it he quite unconsciously found himself reviewing all the subsequent happenings. They linked on one to the other without a break. He hardly knew he was reviewing them, though they so absorbed his mind that he was totally unconscious of his surroundings, and even of the fact that he was digging. His employment had become quite mechanical.