Page:Across the Stream.djvu/102

92 At first the meaningless scribbles appeared, made more grotesque and senseless by the running of the ink. There was a pencil on the table by him, and he took that up instead of the pen, while his hand twitched and jerked to be at its task again. The day before he had pinched his finger in the hinge of a slamming window, and he saw the moon-shaped blot of blood below the nail quivering as his fingers starved to hold an instrument of writing again. Then his hand settled down, like a hovering bird on to a bough, as he picked up the pencil.

For a little while the scribbles went on: then, watching the marks on the blotting-paper just as an excited spectator watches the action of a play, he saw words coming. His brain did not know what they were till they appeared on the paper.

"Archie, Archie," said the pencil, "I want to talk to you. I can't always, but sometimes I can. Dear Archie, try to be ready when I get through. Lovely to talk to you. Can't to mother."

An incontrollable excitement seized the boy. "Oh, who is it?" he said aloud. "Is it Martin?"

He felt the twitching die away in his fingers, and presently he was left sitting there, his copy on the floor and the scrawl on the blotting-paper. But he had, somewhere inside him, a sense of extraordinary satisfaction. Something or somebody had "got through," whatever that meant. The words in pencil on his blotting-paper had "got through." And he turned it over hastily, and picked up the unfinished copy, as the door-handle into his room rattled, and Jeannie came out on to the balcony again with her corrected French exercise.

Several days of this chilly dripping weather, with the föhn wind from the south went by, and when that ceased, and the wind veered to the north, blowing high over Grives, and raising feathers of