“And smells finer,” said Will. “Let’s sit down.”
“Not here,” said Jinny, coyly shrinking. “There’s nettles.”
“They’re dead!” he said, grasping their yellow brittleness. But they walked on.
They came over baby bracken and crisp beechnuts to a sort of ring surrounded by blushing young oaks, and little silver birches with their flat green leaves, and tall aspen-trees, and one lonely mountain-ash with white flowers. Overhead, early as it was, the moon had long been hanging at three-quarters, white and magically diaphanous: a dream-planet. Unseen wood-pigeons purred, and a tomtit was singing.
“Here!” said Will, beginning to sit down.
“No, no!” She clutched his arm to keep him up. “An ant-heap!” This time her shyness had found sounder cover.
He gave a comical “Oh!” and stood watching the squirm of seething life, absolutely black at the central congestion, where ants walked indifferently under or over one another: they were like the moving grains in an hour-glass, Jinny thought. Will poked his stick into the great piazza.
“I’m not hurting them.” The ants were, in fact, already using the rod as a causeway. “Why, they’re like you, Jinny!”
She laughed, and followed their movements with a new sympathy, though she was rather disgusted by those that carried dead flies or dead ants.
“Those are not carriers—those are undertakers,” she insisted.
They sat down at last on a mound of spongy moss, free from formic activity, and there was a silence. The little purling stream was too far off to break it, but they heard a chaffinch and the peep-bo-playing cuckoo, with that golden human note that floats through the warm, brooding May. And then the irrepressible and unbasketable Nip came rushing and tearing, not making straight for them, but appearing and disappearing like a giant fungus in the rich masses of blues or greens or yellows.
He made an opening for conversation, and presently when he came snuggling into Jinny’s arms—poor scotched creature!—an opportunity for joint patting and petting: a process in which hands do not always succeed in partitioning out the pattable and pettable surface rigidly, but graze and brush each other, and even lie passively in abstracted contact.
“Why shouldn’t I buy this wood?” said Will, after one of these sustained manual juxtapositions.