The Unknown Shore Read Free

Elwes endeavoured to open his mind to beauty, and in the end Mr Elwes admitted that it was useless to continue. Tobias joined the yak as one of his disappointments: the last tutor was turned off, Tobias started the first holiday of his life, and the house lapsed into a grey, damp silence from which it was roused only by the terrifying visits of the widow Ellis.
    The widow Ellis was the chief reason why Mr Elwes had lost interest in his experiment – the widow Ellis and Whig politics. He had discovered politics at the end of the first stage in Tobias’ progress, and he had thrown himself into them with great enthusiasm. He had joined the Whigs, to their dismay, and he had done so througha sneaking attorney named Ellis – a fellow whom he employed very often, for he was perpetually at law. And when this person was killed and partially eaten by a performing bear at Mangonell Bagpize, Mr Elwes fell madly in love with his widow. She was an odious woman with a dark red face, black eyebrows that joined across her nose, and seven daughters. She hated Tobias at first sight, and she was determined that her first step in reforming and renovating Plashey would be to put him out of doors.
    ‘Oh the happy wedding day,’ sang Mr Elwes, adding a final stalk of bugwort to the dank swathe under his arm. ‘Happy, happy wedding day.’ His voice died away behind the hedge.
    Jack came out of his leaves and dropped into the lane. He gave the yak an affectionate thump as he passed, asked it how it did, and hurried through the meadow to the temple of Fame, a crumbling plaster-and-rubble edifice hastily run up by Mr Elwes in a spinney to shelter the busts of Galen, Aristotle and Mr Elwes, but now forgotten and taken over by Tobias for his bats.
    Tobias was not there, but Jack knew that he would come, and he sat down cautiously on the steps of the temple to wait. He sat down cautiously and with a meek, dutiful expression, because of Tobias’ bees; they lived in a row of hives in front of the building, and in spite of many sad proofs to the contrary Jack still believed that if he did not provoke them they would not sting him.
    Behind him and above his head Tobias’ bats scratched and rustled in the darkness of their dome, faintly, shrilly gibbering as they quarrelled among themselves. A steady, good-tempered hum came from the hives, and in the sunlight that now came slanting through the spinney the bees could be seen rising and shooting away with surprising speed: Jack gazed at them with detached respect, and wondered vaguely what was keeping his friend.
    It was difficult to account for their friendship. Apart from their age they had nothing at all in common, or at least nothing that appeared at first sight. Nothing could have been more different than their appearance, education and family; nothing could have been more unlike than their pursuits; but they were happy when they were together and they missed one another very much when they were apart. Jack’s education had been completely normal – he had done tolerably well at school and had come away with a certainamount of Latin, a reasonable acquaintance with mathematics, and nothing more. The education of Tobias, on the other hand, might have been calculated to produce a monster, and the fact that it had not done so was rather a proof of the resilience of the human spirit than any evidence of judgment on the part of Mr Elwes.
    Yet one can avoid being a monster without necessarily being ordinary: Tobias was far from ordinary. He had never been to school, and he had never known anyone of his own age except Jack Byron and Georgiana Chaworth; he had spent all his days in that strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and going; he had been kept to his book with inhuman persistence; and he was a strange young creature, very strange indeed.
    ‘But he is so very strange, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth. ‘So very strange. He assured me that toads were