Phillip was still puzzled.
“Are you happy?” said the old gentleman, looking at him keenly.
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
“Always?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I am delighted to have met you. I congratulate you again on your description of the walk by the river. Thank you, Headmaster.” The old gentleman sat back, Phillip knew it was over, and he was all right.
“Now, Phillip,” said Mr. Garstang, “you may return to the classroom. Give this note to Mr. Twine, with my compliments, and ask him to send the boys whose names are written there into the hall at once. Your name is among them,” he smiled.
*
When Mr. Garstang had told the ten boys that each had won a scholarship, he said that they could have the rest of the day free, and he would trust them to go straight home to tell their mothers. Eagerly they set off, some turning north of the entrance to Wakenham School, others to the south, along the road now without the trees which had lined its way for centuries. East of the road lay the cemetry, once the Great Field of thirty acres, of Lammas or half-year land.
Here, under a yellow mound of clay not yet grown with grass, set with a single jam-jar whose flowers had long since withered, lay the very old man whose act in bringing a jug of ass’s milk to Richard Maddison one morning eleven years before, when his baby son was dying, had saved the baby’s life. The ancient man lay in a pauper’s grave: in his own boyhood he had plowed, with a yoke of oxen, the land where now he rested: he had seen corn cut with the sickle on the Great Field when Napoleon was master of Europe; he was back where he began.
The boy who owed his life to the old man, and through him to his donkey, the boy who feared, almost as much as he dreaded physical pain, the stigma of his nickname, was passing the railings and the evergreen shrubs without knowledge of the grave’s existence, and yet with such happiness for life in his breast it might well have been that in the moment’s freedom a feeling of deep instinctive love had passed from the human relics in the soil to the medium of the boy’s mind; since, for no reason known to him the boy suddenly stopped, peered through the shrubbery, and smiled in secret, to what he did not know: except that now he must hurry home to tell his mother news which he knew would bring her happiness.
November 1951—March 1952 Devon.
By the Same Author
THE FLAX OF DREAM
The Beautiful Years
Dandelion Days
The Dream of Fair Women
The Pathway
The Wet Flanders Plain
A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT
The Dark Lantern
Donkey Boy
Young Phillip Maddison
How Dear Is Life
A Fox Under My Cloak
Love and the Loveless
A Test to Destruction
The Innocent Moon
It Was the Nightingale
The Power of the Dead
The Phoenix Generation
A Solitary War
Lucifer Before Sunrise
The Gale of the World
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© Henry Williamson Literary Estate, 1952
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ISBN 978–0–571–31047–0