Country life -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction
Potiphar was a finely modelled bull with a suede skin, rough and
comfortable and warm in bed. He was my own special joy and pride, and I
thrilled with honest emotion when Potiphar emerged to light once more,
stout-necked and stalwart as ever.
“That'll have to do,” said Charlotte, getting up. “We dursn't take any
more, 'cos we'll be found out if we do. Make the box all right, and
bring 'em along.”
Harold rammed down the wads of paper and twists of straw he had
disturbed, replaced the lid squarely and innocently, and picked up his
small salvage; and we sneaked off for the window most generally in use
for prison-breakings and nocturnal escapades. A few seconds later and we
were hurrying silently in single file along the dark edge of the lawn.
Oh, the riot, the clamour, the crowding chorus, of all silent things
that spoke by scent and colour and budding thrust and foison, that
moonlit night of June! Under the laurel-shade all was still ghostly
enough, brigand-haunted, crackling, whispering of night and all its
possibilities of terror. But the open garden, when once we were in
it--how it turned a glad new face to welcome us, glad as of old when
the sunlight raked and searched it, new with the unfamiliar night-aspect
that yet welcomed us as guests to a hall where the horns blew up to a
new, strange banquet! Was this the same grass, could these be the same
familiar flower-beds, alleys, clumps of verdure, patches of sward?
At least this full white light that was flooding them was new, and
accounted for all. It was Moonlight Land, and Past-Ten-o'clock Land, and
we were in it and of it, and all its other denizens fully understood,
and, tongue-free and awakened at last, responded and comprehended and
knew. The other two, doubtless, hurrying forward full of their mission,
noted little of all this. I, who was only a super, had leisure to take
it all in, and, though the language and the message of the land were not
all clear to me then, long afterwards I remembered and understood.
Under the farthest hedge, at the loose end of things, where the outer
world began with the paddock, there was darkness once again--not the
blackness that crouched so solidly under the crowding laurels, but a
duskiness hung from far-spread arms of high-standing elms. There, where
the small grave made a darker spot on the grey, I overtook them, only
just in time to see Rosa laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the
moonlight, but her brave smile triumphant and undaunted as ever. It
was a tiny grave and a shallow one, to hold so very much. Rosa once in,
Potiphar, who had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so many
days and such various weather, must needs bow his head and lie down
meekly on his side. The elephant and the beetle, equal now in a silent
land where a vertebra and a red circulation counted for nothing, had to
snuggle down where best they might, only a little less crowded than in
their native Ark.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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