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By Root 1318 0

with a boy called McLusky who didn’t play with the other boys because he was feebleminded. Thaw told long stories with himself as hero and McLusky helped him mime the actable bits. The vivid part of his life became imaginary. Thaw and his sister slept in adjacent rooms, and at night he told her stories through the doorway between, stories with the adventures and landscapes of books he had read by day. Sometimes he stopped and asked, “Are you asleep yet? Will I go on?” and Ruth answered, “No, Duncan, please go on,” but at last she would fall asleep. Next night she would say, “Go on with the story, Duncan.”

“All right. Where did I stop last night?”

“They … they had landed on Venus.”

“No, no. They had left Venus and gone to Mercury.”

“I … don’t remember that, Duncan.”

“Of course you don’t. Ye fell asleep. Well, I’m not going to tell you stories if you don’t want to listen.”

“But I couldnae help falling asleep, Duncan.”

“Then why didn’t ye tell me you were falling asleep instead of letting me go on talking to myself?”

After bullying her some more he would continue the story, for he spent a lot of time each day preparing it.

He bullied Ruth in other ways. She was forbidden to stott her ball indoors. He saw her do it once, and terrified her for weeks by threatening to tell their mother. One day Mrs. Thaw accused her children of stealing sugar from the livingroom sideboard. Both denied it. Later Ruth told him, “you stole that sugar.”

He said “yes. But if you tell Mum I said so I’ll call you a liar and she won’t know who to believe.” Ruth at once told their mother, Thaw called Ruth a liar, and Mrs. Thaw didn’t know who to believe.

During the first few weeks at school he had looked carefully among the girls for one to adventure with in his imagination, but they were all too obviously the same vulgar clay as himself. For almost a year he resigned himself to loving Miss Ingram, who was moderately attractive and whose authority gave her a sort of grandeur. Then one day when visiting the village store he saw a placard in the window advertising Amazon Adhesive Shoe Soles. It showed a blond girl in brief Greek armour with spear and shield and a helmet on her head. Above her were the words BEAUTY PLUS STAMINA, and her face had a plaintive loveliness which made Miss Ingram seem commonplace. During the dinner intervals Thaw walked to the store and looked at the girl for the length of time it took to count ten. He knew that by looking too hard and often even she might come to seem commonplace.

CHAPTER 14.

Ben Rua

Mr. Thaw wanted a keener intimacy with his son and liked open-air activities. There were fine mountains near the hostel, the nearest of them, Ben Rua, less than sixteen hundred feet high; he decided to take Thaw on some easy excursions and bought him stout climbing boots. Unluckily Thaw wanted to wear sandals.

“I like to move my toes,” he said.

“What are ye blethering about?”

“I don’t like shutting my feet in these hard solid leather cases. It makes them feel dead. I can’t bend my ankles.”

“But you arenae supposed to bend your ankles! It’s the easiest thing in the world to break an ankle if you slip in an awkward place. These boots are made especially to give the ankle support—once a single nail gets a grip it can uphold your ankle, your leg, your whole body even.”

“What I lose in firmness I’ll make up in quickness.”

“I see. I see. For a century mountaineers have gone up the

Alps and Himalayas and Grampians in nailed climbing boots. You might think they knew about climbing. Oh, no, Duncan Thaw knows better. They should have worn sandals.”

“What’s wrong for them might be right for me.”

“My God!” cried Mr. Thaw. “What’s this I’ve brought into the world? What did I do to deserve this? If we could only live by our own experience we would have no science, no civilization, no progress! Man has advanced by his capacity to learn from others, and these boots cost me four pounds eight.” “There would be no science and civilization and all that if everybody did things the way everybody else does,” said Thaw. The discussion