When I came up from my plunge I looked round for Marvan, but she and Ianthe were already away up the hillside making for a broad flat rock about halfway up where we sometimes climbed to sit in the full beat of the sun. Katia was still hanging on to the bank, looking after the girls. I sent a fountain of water over her and she rounded on me and we splashed each other furiously for a few seconds. Poor Katia still had my scornful scepticism about Nuaman's tears on her mind.
“I tell, he do weep,” she gasped when we both had a little breath again.
“Ertcha!” I replied and while she struggled for words I took a mean advantage and ducked her.
(8)
I had not been outside the Park once since I came to Ringstones. I had promised myself the day Sarkissian brought me in the trap across the moor from Blagill that one of the days—one of my 'days off' as I put it to myself then—I would go for a tramp across the moor. But I had not done. The Park seemed to suffice. Then, what need had I to go anywhere? Every few days Sarkissian would yoke out the pony−trap and go to Blagill, sometimes as far as Staineshead. He took the letters, brought the rations and did any other errands there were to do. The delight of Ringstones was that, as far as I could see, one could live there almost completely independent of the outer world. We had no electricity to be cut off, no telephone to go wrong and vex us. We reaped the benefit of the forethought of people who took isolation for granted: fallen trees of old Squire John Pococke's planting supplied Mrs. Sarkissian with fuel for her range, and the beck itself flowed through venerable lead pipes into our old−fashioned bathrooms. If candles and paraffin were hard to get it was light so long those summer evenings that we rarely needed them. The sun was our clock. The thrushes woke us and the bats told us when it was bedtime.
Mrs. Sarkissian put the idea of a picnic into my head. I had been saying that the sunny days seemed to be going on for ever. “Why don't you all go and take your tea out?” she said. “It'll be drier on the moor now than it has been for many a year, and you'd best go up there while it is dry!”
The suggestion fell in with something I had had at the back of my mind all the time I had been there. I wanted to go and see the Stone Circle. That evening I told Dr Ravelin that I thought of taking the children up on to the moor the next day. I thought we might go to the standing stones. As I said it I hoped that he wouldn't show that he saw the humour of the phrase 'taking the children'. He knew as well as I did by then that it was Nuaman who took me. To my surprise he said he would come himself. “It's time I got out into the sun and air a bit,” he said when I protested that I did not want to take him away from his work. “Besides, that is my work, you know. I shall come and mingle instruction with your relaxation in the best Victorian manner.”
Marvan and Ianthe, when I told them the next morning, seemed at first surprised, a little hesitant, and then, to my surprise, excited. I supposed that their hesitation sprang from their having been told not to go outside the Park by themselves.
“May we go...?” Ianthe asked with that inevitable glance round, looking for Nuaman's approval. Nuaman, however, was not with us at that moment.
“May? Of course we may!” I said breezily. “Dr Ravelin's coming too.” It was then that their hesitation turned to excitement and as soon as we had finished the reading we were doing together they ran off to find Mrs. Sarkissian and arrange about the tea and sandwiches.
I met Nuaman as he came strolling up from the stables just before lunch. “Well,” I said, “you're going to show me the Stone Circle this afternoon. We're all going to take our tea up there.”
He gave a quick little smile and shake of the head. Then, when I had explained clearly where we were going, I thought I saw a shade of discontent cross his face. It went immediately and then I thought, when he spoke, that I had taken for discontent what was really disappointment, for he said, pulling a rueful face: “Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't go. Sarkissian has promised to help me with something I am making and we have to do it this afternoon.”
“Oh, Nuaman!” I said, disappointed, too. “Can't you put it off, whatever it is? Why do you want to stick yourself away in those dark old stables making things on a glorious day like this?”
He smiled and laid his hand caressingly on my arm and stroked it gently in the soothing, persuasive way he had which always did somehow persuade me and make me yield to him without feeling that I had lost the point. His hands were good hands: dry, cool and muscular and sensitive.
“Why,” he said mildly, smiling up at me, “there will be another day. The sun will shine as long as I am here. I want it to!” And we both burst out laughing at the innocent and entirely convincing assurance he gave.
We were a party of five, then, who walked slowly up the narrow road on the Western side of the Park that afternoon; for Katia had got wind of the picnic, and with a brief and quite incomprehensible explanation and a vague gesture backwards, perhaps to indicate that the house could safely be left in Mrs. Sarkissian's charge for an hour or two, she picked up the tea basket and attached herself to us as we gathered on the terrace. She had put on an old dress, one that bore the stains of much romping and tumbling about the grass, but, as a concession to the sharp gravel of the road, she kept her shoes on. Marvan and Ianthe, in identical little linen frocks, walked as usual a few paces behind us, while Dr Ravelin, having offered to take the basket from Katia and been repulsed vigorously in Polish, or perhaps German, took the lead with me.
He halted us every so often on the road to point out with his ash stick spots of interest in the Park below. In particular, from near the top of the drive, he had us stand and gaze to make out what he was pleased to fancy the ancient bank of the road leading up from the Park. By dint of closing first one eye and then the other, or alternatively by half closing them both, I did succeed in seeing some kind of faint lines or ridges on the rough grass slope, which I was willing to accept, on his assurance, as the remains of the embankment of the ancient causeway. What was much plainer to me, because I knew it so well, was the circular unplanted track round the Park. From our position on the hill it was quite clear that it was designed and had not just happened so by chance.
When we reached the moor Dr Ravelin's keenness redoubled with the difficulty of his task. For there, try as hard as I might, I could not make out, across the billows of heather and the natural dips and rises of the moor, the traces of the broad way which he declared had led in ancient times direct from the top of the causeway to the Stone Circle. True, here and there a grey old stone did hump its back above the green, brown and purple sea, but it needed far more faith or training than I possessed to build out of those such a stately avenue of monoliths as Dr Ravelin wanted me to see. And then, I don't think I wanted to picture it like that; I liked the moor better for its wildness. Yet when we reached the low flat hillock on which the Stone Circle stands, I think that even without Dr Ravelin's guidance I should have been impressed by the recognition of human traces in a place where human beings seemed so out of place. As we came up out of the waist−deep heather on to that crown of smooth sward from which nothing of the Park is visible we stood still. The two girls and Katia slipped off their shoes, invited I suppose by the pleasant turf, but for an instant it seemed like a gesture of reverence; I almost looked to see Dr Ravelin put off the shoes from his feet.