Сарбан - Ringstones

Nuaman stretched himself on the grass at my feet; he plucked a blade and chewed it, looking at me meanwhile in a comical way. “They'll say anything, those two,” he remarked. “They tell awful fibs. Don't you?”

Marvan nodded her head penitently without looking up.

“Oh well,” I said, “perhaps she only wishes they would come. After all, it's perhaps a long time since you've seen your people.”

He yawned widely. “I say,” he said. “Do you know I've only just had my breakfast?” It was nearly lunch time. I got up and we all walked back to the house together.

Katia loved swimming. She waylaid me in the hall as we went in and while the children ran upstairs she proposed a trip to the pool in the afternoon. I said we would all go.

Nuaman didn't want any lunch. The girls were late coming down for theirs, but they never ate very much at midday. That day, I remember, they were a shorter time than ever over their lunch. Marvan fidgeted and sulked and Ianthe giggled and teased her, and as soon as I mentioned swimming the pair of them flew off to be at the pool before us.

Later, while I was waiting until Katia was ready, I went in search of Nuaman. I ran him to earth in his room. He was curled up on his bed, fast asleep. I suppose he had been roaming about most of the night. He did not stir, but he opened his eyes and was wide awake before I reached his bedside.

“Come on!” I said. “We're all going swimming.”

He stretched his arms and legs out stiffly, just like an animal, and smiled and shook his head, quite obviously enjoying his nap much too much to stir. I couldn't budge him.

“Oh, well,” I said, “I dare say we can do without you. We shall have more peace. I can teach Marvan and Ianthe the crawl.”

He suddenly sat bolt upright and smacked his forehead with his palm—a trick he copied, with exaggeration, from Katia. “I'd forgotten that!” he exclaimed.

“Forgotten what?”

He chuckled softly and thought for a moment, then snuggled down again.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “Remember, they tell awful fibs.” He grinned and shut his eyes tight and pretended to be so fast asleep that I left him.

Katia was waiting for me on the terrace. She conveyed, with several wild linguistic lunges, that we should not be late back for tea. Nuaman wanted her for something.

“Why,” I demanded, “must you always obey Nuaman so abjectly?”

When I had finally got this into a form of words that she more or less understood she made her blue eyes round and serious.

“Because if not he weep,” she declared.

I derided the idea. “Weep? Nuaman weep? What nonsense!”

She protested it was true, but I just laughed. She waved her arms about and tried to convince me by opening her eyes so wide and nodding her head so hard that I half expected to see her shake her blue orbs out on to the grass.

“He do! He do!” she cried, stuttering in her effort, to carry conviction. “He make Sarkissian weep!”

The thought of the surly, blue−chinned Armenian shedding tears for Nuaman's waywardness was too funny for words, but Heaven knows what fantastic notions existed in the impenetrable jungle of Katia's mind.

The pool in which we swam, or rather splashed, was in the narrow glen beyond the house where the, beck came tumbling down among great rocks before reaching the level of the park. At one point the water flowed over a great, flat, greenish rock and then spouted sheer down fifteen or twenty feet to foam into a natural basin beneath. From there it poured into a deeply scooped hollow, one side of which was a sheer brown crag and the other a Up of lovely soft green turf. The side of the glen behind this bank of turf was hollowed out and the hollow screened by a thicket of birches, making a little arbour which I used for a dressing−room. The high, steep sides of the glen sheltered the place completely from the wind, unless it blew due North, and on a summer afternoon such as we were then having, the sun blazed down, heating turf and rock until one could lie and bask there as people do on a Mediterranean beach. It was a private place: the only way into it was by a faint path up the glen, partly along the steep sides, where one found a goat's footing on the heather roots, and partly over the very boulders among which the beck tumbled and foamed.

As we scrambled up and came out on to the strip of turf I heard from the squealing and laughing that was going on that Marvan and Ianthe were already in the pool. Then I saw their naked glistening bodies twisting and turning and shining brown in the clear amber water as quick as otters or seals. Katia flung down her towel and stripped off her clothes in a trice. When she saw me deliberately unrolling my costume from my towel, she cried: “Bad pants! Niet! No man shall come here but No Man!”

Having put on my costume, I loitered on the grass before diving. It was on this strip of turf, I supposed, that Nuaman used to come and watch his cousins wrestle after their bathe. Supple and shining as they climbed from the pool they might have been little models of those ancient athletes Dr Ravelin had fancied contending on such springy turf; or models, at any rate, of Diana's maidens or Penthesilea's. And, indeed, their clothes— the only sign of the century—being off, there was nothing there in that place of rocks and water, turf and trees, all the same as when the world began, to prove that the fancy was only a fancy.

Katia's bleached locks had appeared above the surface. I curled my toes round the soft edge and smiled at the two girls as they stood shaking the water from their hair. Ianthe turned away to go and stretch herself in the sun, but, as I drew my breath for the plunge, I saw Marvan suddenly stiffen and gaze intently up at something on the high hillside. I followed her gaze. The sun was in my eyes, but I thought I caught sight of something slipping through the bracken, high up. It wasn't a sheep, because it had looked a lightish brown and smooth. A dog, or perhaps a fox? I wondered. Had Marvan and Ianthe not been both down in the glen I might have thought it could have been one of them. It might even have been Nuaman slipping along to surprise us. But I saw it only for a second. I looked at Marvan, but she dropped her eyes and turned away. She had sulked ever since Nuaman spoke to her before lunch, and now she marched away with her hands clasped over her round little behind and a toss of her hair as if she was offended.

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.

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.