No More Learning

A week passed slowly as a month. The wheels of the cabs and carriages
seemed to be rolling through his mind. He often remembered the quiet
river at the end of his garden in the town of Ballah. How the weeds
swayed there, and the salmon leaped! At the week's end came a note
from Miss Leland, complaining of his neglecting her so many days. He
sent a rather formal answer, promising to call soon. To add to his
other troubles, a cold east wind arose and made him shiver continually.

One evening he and his mother were sitting silent, the one knitting,
the other half-asleep. He had been writing letters and was now in a
reverie. Round the walls were one or two drawings, done by him at
school. His mother had got them framed. His eyes were fixed on a
drawing of a stream and some astonishing cows.

A few days ago he had found an old sketchbook for children among some
forgotten papers, which taught how to draw a horse by making three
ovals for the basis of his body, one lying down in the middle, two
standing up at each end for flank and chest, and how to draw a cow by
basing its body on a square. He kept trying to fit squares into the
cows. He was half inclined to take them out of their frames and retouch
on this new principle.
Then he began somehow to remember the child with
the swollen face who threw a stone at the dog the day he resolved to
leave home first. Then some other image came. His problem moved before
him in a disjointed way. He was dropping asleep. Through his reverie
came the click, click of his mother's needles. She had found some
London children to knit for. He was at that marchland between waking
and dreaming where our thoughts begin to have a life of their own--the
region where art is nurtured and inspiration born.

He started, hearing something sliding and rustling, and looked up to
see a piece of cardboard fall from one end of the mantelpiece, and,
driven by a slight gust of air, circle into the ashes under the grate.

'Oh,' said his mother, 'that is the portrait of the _locum tenens_. '
She still spoke of the Rev. William Howard by the name she had first
known him by. 'He is always being photographed. They are all over the
house, and I, an old woman, have not had one taken all my life. Take it
out with the tongs. ' Her son, after some poking in the ashes, for it
had fallen far back, brought out a somewhat dusty photograph. 'That,'
she continued, 'is one he sent us two or three months ago.