Secret Bread | Page 5

moving wet nostrils, turned towards Ishmael. She was against the sun, and at the edges of her the fine outer hairs, gleaming transparent, made her seem outlined in flame--she was a glorified, a transfigured cow, a cow for the gods. In a newly-turned field beyond a man and a boy were planting young broccoli; they worked with the swiftness and smoothness of a machine, the man making a succession of holes with his spud as he walked along, the boy dropping in the plants on the instant. From where Ishmael sat the boy and his basket were hidden behind the man, and it looked as though wherever that shining spud touched the earth a green thing sprang up as by magic. Truly, Cloom was a farm in the grand manner this morning, a farm fit for the slopes of Olympus. Ishmael flogged his gate and bounced up and down till the latch rattled in its socket and the wide collar of his little print shirt blew up under his chin like two cherub wings supporting his glowing face.
A clatter of hoofs made him look around, and a young man rode down the lane opposite and into the farmyard. He was a splendid young man, and he sat the big, bare-backed horse as though he were one with it, his powerful thighs spreading a little as they gripped its glossy sides. His fair hair curled closely over his head and clung to his forehead in damp rings, the sweat standing out all over his face made it shine like metal, and the soaked shirt clung to the big muscles of his body. His face changed a little as he caught sight of the child on the gate--such a faint expression, something between sulkiness and resentment, that it was obviously the result of instinctive habit and not of any particular emotion of the moment. As he flung himself off the horse a woman emerged from the courtyard and called out to Ishmael.
"Come and tak' th' arse to meadow for your brother, instead of wasten' the marnen'. Couldn' 'ee be gleanen' in th' arish? You may be gentry, but you'll go starve if you do naught but twiddle your thumbs for the day."
"Lave en be, lave en be, mother," said Archelaus Beggoe impatiently. "Women's clacken' never mended matters nawthen. It'll be a good day, sure 'nough, when he goes to school to St. Renny, if it gives we a little peace about the place. Do 'ee hold tha tongue, and give I a glass o' cider, for I'm fair sweaten' leaken'."
Mother and son passed through the archway into the courtyard, and Ishmael, who had been silently buckling on his belt, took hold of the rope head-stall and led the horse towards the pasture. As he went his childish mind indulged in a sort of gambling with fate.
"I wonder if my right foot or my left will step into the lane first. If it's my right I'll have it to mean that I shall be saved...." Here he paused for a moment, aghast; it was such a tremendous risk to take, such a staking of his soul. He went forward, measuring the distance with his eye, and trying to calculate which foot would take that fateful step from the cobbles on to the lane. He was there, and for one awful moment it seemed as though it would be his left, but an extra long stride just met the case.
"It didn't come quite natural that way," he thought, anxiously, "but p'raps it means I'll be saved by something I do myself. I wish I could be quite sure. Shall I have it that if I see a crow in the field I shall be saved?"
The reflection that for a dozen times on entering the pasture he saw no crow for once that he did made him change to, "Suppose I say if I don't see a crow I shall be saved?" But that too had its drawback, as if, after laying a wager in which the odds were so tremendously in his favour, he did see a crow, there would then be no smoothing away the fact, as often before, with "Perhaps that doesn't count"--it would be too obviously a sign from Heaven. He finally changed the wager to, "If I see birds in the field I'll see Phoebe to-day:" to such considerations does a man turn after contemplation of his soul. On seeing a couple of magpies, the white and black of their plumage showing silver and iridescent green in the sun as they swooped over the field, he took steps to justify the omen by setting off across the moors in quest of Phoebe.
CHAPTER II
THE MILL
As Ishmael went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as an offering to