No More Learning

It was like the
clucking of a hen with a brood of chickens. He told Howard, too, how
wealthy Margaret was said to be.

After this Howard always joined Sherman and Margaret at the tennis.
Sometimes, too, after a little, on days when the study seemed dull and
lonely, and the unfinished essay on St. Chrysostom more than usually
laborious, he would saunter towards the Square before his friend's
arrival, to find Margaret now alone, now with an acquaintance or two.
About this time also press of work, an unusual thing with him, began
to delay Sherman in town half-an-hour after his usual time. In the
evenings they often talked of Margaret--Sherman frankly and carefully,
as though in all anxiety to describe her as she was; and Howard with
some enthusiasm: 'She has a religious vocation,' he said once, with a
slight sigh.

Sometimes they played chess--a game that Sherman had recently become
devoted to, for he found it drew him out of himself more than anything
else.

Howard now began to notice a curious thing. Sherman grew shabbier and
shabbier, and at the same time more and more cheerful. This puzzled
him, for he had noticed that he himself was not cheerful when shabby,
and did not even feel upright and clever when his hat was getting old.
He also noticed that when Sherman was talking to him he seemed to be
keeping some thought to himself. When he first came to know him long
ago in Ballah he had noticed occasionally the same thing, and set it
down to a kind of suspiciousness and over-caution, natural to one who
lived in such an out-of-the-way place. It seemed more persistent now,
however. 'He is not well-trained,' he thought; 'he is half a peasant.
He has not the brilliant candour of the man of the world. '

All this while the mind of Sherman was clucking continually over its
brood of thoughts. 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.