Jacobs Room | Page 8

home.

Rebecca had caught the death's-head moth in the kitchen.
A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes.
Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of
seaweed. Tawny ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon
them.
The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly
marked with kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no
crescent upon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it.
There had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the
wood. And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home
late. The only one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said.
Morris called it "an extremely local insect found in damp or marshy
places." But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a
very fine pen, made a correction in the margin.
The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern,
stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead
beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red
underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red
underwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was after
twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room,
playing patience, sitting up.
"How you frightened me!" she had cried. She thought something
dreadful had happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so
early.
There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot
room, blinking at the light.
No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.
The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under
Jacob's window, and it creaked--creaked, and rattled across the lawn

and creaked again.
Now it was clouding over.
Back came the sun, dazzlingly.
It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very
gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the
butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the
moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries
flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on
the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the
peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away
from home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the
commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round
an oak tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living
alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every
summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early
morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could
always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like
two boys fighting, she said.
"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob," said his mother, popping her
head in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye." It was
the last day of the Easter holidays.
Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day. He dressed himself very neatly
in blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted
two fingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out
from the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the
afternoon.
At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.
"Move me," she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the
esplanade for fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr.
Dickens." At the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he
would stay the chair there in the bright strip.

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot--
James Coppard's daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street
joins Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the
time of Queen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon
municipal watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc
blinds of solicitors' consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never
visited the Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had
caught the shark quite well), and when the men came by with the
posters she eyed them superciliously, for she knew that she would
never see the Pierrots, or the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her
troupe of performing seals. For Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the
esplanade was a prisoner-- civilization's prisoner--all the bars of her
cage falling across the esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the
drapery stores, the swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the
ground with shadow.
An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand