No More Learning

Ballah was being constantly suggested to him. The
grey corner of a cloud slanting its rain upon Cheapside called to mind
by some remote suggestion the clouds rushing and falling in cloven
surf on the seaward steep of a mountain north of Ballah. A certain
street-corner made him remember an angle of the Ballah fish-market. At
night a lantern, marking where the road was fenced off for mending,
made him think of a tinker's cart, with its swing-can of burning coals,
that used to stop on market days at the corner of Peter's Lane at
Ballah. Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling
of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet
balanced a wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract
with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds
at Ballah. Wandering among these memories a footstep went to and fro
continually, and the figure of Mary Carton moved among them like a
phantom. He was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday
morning to the border of the Thames--a few hundred yards from his
house--and looking at the osier-covered Chiswick eyot. It made him
remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed
his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake,
whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry-gathering. At the
further end was a little islet called Innisfree. Its rocky centre,
covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often
when life and its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of
some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to
dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and
burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the
island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water
and the quivering of the bushes--full always of unknown creatures--and
going out at morning to see the island's edge marked by the feet of
birds.

These pictures became so vivid to him that the world about him--that
Howard, Margaret, his mother even--began to seem far off. He hardly
seemed aware of anything they were thinking and feeling.
The light
that dazzled him flowed from the vague and refracting regions of hope
and memory; the light that made Howard's feet unsteady was ever the
too-glaring lustre of life itself.


IV

On the evening of the 20th of June, after the blinds had been
pulled down and the gas lighted, Sherman was playing chess in the
smoking-room, right hand against left. Howard had gone out with a
message to the Lelands. He would often say, 'Is there any message I
can deliver for you? I know how lazy you are, and will save you the
trouble. ' A message was always found for him. A pile of books lent for
Sherman's improvement went home one by one.

'Look here,' said Howard's voice in the doorway, 'I have been watching
you for some time. You are cheating the red men most villainously. You
are forcing them to make mistakes that the white men may win. Why, a
few such games would ruin any man's moral nature. '

He was leaning against the doorway, looking, to Sherman's not too
critical eyes, an embodiment of all that was self-possessed and
brilliant. The great care with which he was dressed and his whole
manner seemed to say: 'Look at me; do I not combine perfectly the
zealot with the man of the world? ' He seemed excited to-night. He had
been talking at the Lelands, and talking well, and felt that elation
which brings us many thoughts.

'My dear Sherman,' he went on, 'do cease that game.