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Was she glad or sorry to have yielded to this impulse, when by a closer inspection she perceived that the word was not ALGEBRA at all, but ALGERNON, I HATE A ETHERIDGE. I HATE A. E. I HATE ALGERNON E. all over the page, and here and there on other pages, sometimes in characters so rubbed and faint as to be almost unreadable and again so pressed into the paper by a vicious pencil-point as to have broken their way through to the leaf underneath.
Surely she must know that I care not a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me unless she has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of thirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two" and to set her down as forty to be on the safe side.
The arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description, so that it be borne in mind that each time a notch is passed in turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the pencil-point, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet and armature which allows a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting shaft.
"And there's the big Barren," he went on, tracing it out with the pencil-point. "Up here, you see, is the Arctic Ocean, and away over there the Roes Welcome and Hudson's Bay. That's where the storm starts, and when it gets out on the Barren, without a tree or a rock to break its way for five hundred miles "
Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group at the doorway: to Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced sentences, who had seen the world around from mining camps of the west to Serbian refugee camps; to "our Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil-point which raced on till he was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to blithesome Thomas who will never grow up, making words dance a tune, quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a movable zero luck to them all!
"Look here, Lascelles," said he, making a mark on the chart with his pencil-point, "there is where we are, and that," pointing away over the larboard bow, "is Cristo Cay. Now, whereabouts is the channel that you saw that big felucca going into?" "It is further on to the westward; you cannot see it from here. But why do you ask?" I inquired.
Whether it was worse to stay with my co-inmates, or to sit alone, I had not considered; I naturally took up the latter alternative; if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it; only under the lid of my desk could it harbour, nestling between the leaves of some book, gilding a pencil-point, the nib of a pen, or tinging the black fluid in that ink-glass.
The sea, which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough darkness without quality.
Taking it to the candle he read, deeply bitten into the paper by a hard pencil-point: "At half-past one." There was nothing else no signature; but the handwriting was NOT Mrs. MacSpadden's! Then whose? Was it that of the mysterious figure whom he had just seen? Had he been selected as the medium of some spiritual communication, and, perhaps, a ghostly visitation later on?
Again I put my head in the office. I write down an approximate estimate of the number of trucks, and no longer attempt to sort them out, so many to a potential train. A hunt over the railway system reveals no fewer than twelve trains. These I pencil-point on my map, as far as I am able to locate them.
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