Celia wheeled Mr. Willoughby Kelly south along the Broad Walk. He wore his kiting costume, a glistening slicker many sizes too large for him and a yachting-cap many sizes too small, though the smallest and largest of their kind obtainable. He sat bolt upright, with one gloved hand clutching the winch, with the other the kite furled and in its sheath, and his blue eyes blazed in the depths of their sockets. To either side of him the levers flailed the air with heavy strokes, causing a light draught that he found not unpleasant, for he burned with excitement.
At the top of the incline he laid the winch and kite in his lap and seized the pulls. It was the signal for Celia to let go. His arms flashed back and forth, faster and faster as the chair gathered speed, until he was rocking crazily along at a good 12 m.p.h., a danger to himself and to others. Then resisting with one hand the pull, with the other the thrust of the levers, he brought himself smoothly to rest level with the statue of Queen Victoria, whom he greatly admired, as a woman and as a queen.
It was only in the legs and face that Mr. Kelly was badly gone, he still had plenty of vigour in his arms and torso.
He was as fond of his chair in his own way as Murphy had been of his.
Celia was a long time coming. He unwrapped the old silk kite, stained and faded hexagon of crimson, stretched it on its asterisk of sticks, made fast the tail and line, tested the tassels one by one. One just such milky Saturday afternoon many years previously a regular had said: 'Silk ain't worth a b—. Give me nainsook.' To which Mr. Kelly recalled with satisfaction the exact terms of his rejoinder, which had been loudly applauded: 'Nainsook my rump.'
Celia touched the back of his chair and he said:
'You were a long time.'
'Business,' said Celia.
The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.
It was as though Time suddenly lost patience, or had an anxiety attack.
Beyond the Long Water Rosie Dew and Nelly, the worst of her heat behind her, turned their faces to the rising wind and home. A pair of socks was waiting from Lord Gall. He had written: 'If this pair of socks does not prove more productive, I shall have to try a new control.'
Celia wheeled Mr. Kelly into position, at the north-east corner of the plot between the Round Pond and the Broad Walk, the prow of his chair wedged against the railing. She took the assembled kite gently from his hands, backed along the path until she stood on the margin of the water, held up the kite as high as her arms would reach and waited for the glove to fall. The wind blew her skirt against her legs, her jacket back from her breasts. A week-end lecher well advanced in years, sprawling on his sacrum (which was a mass of eczema) in a chair directly before her, discomposed his features in what he had good reason to suppose was the smile obscene, and jingled his change, his very small change. Celia smiled back, strained upward with her arms, settled herself more firmly on the ground.
Mr. Kelly's hand felt the wind he wanted, the glove fell, Celia threw up the kite. And so great was his skill that in five minutes he was lying back, breathing hard and short, his eyes closed of necessity but in ecstasy as it happened, half his line paid out, sailing by feel.
Celia paused for a second to clinch the client, then rejoined Mr. Kelly. The cord wormed slowly off the winch—out, back a little, stop; out, back a little, stop. The historical process of the hardened optimists. With still a quarter of the line to go the kite rode without a flicker high above the Dell, a speck in the glades that this wind always opened in the east. The chair drove against the railing, Mr. Kelly wished his bottom were more prehensile. Without opening his eyes he said:
'You did that very nicely.'
Celia did not choose to misunderstand him.
'And yesterday?' said Mr. Kelly.
'A kid and a drunk,' said Celia.
Mr. Kelly let out a wild rush of line, say the industrial revolution, then without recoil or stop, gingerly, the last few feet. The kite being now absolutely at the end of its tether, he sat up and opened his eyes, hypermetropic in the extreme, to admire the effect.
Except for the sagging soar of line, undoubtedly superb so far as it went, there was nothing to be seen, for the kite had disappeared from view. Mr. Kelly was enraptured. Now he could measure the distance from the unseen to the seen, now he was in a position to determine the point at which seen and unseen met. It would be an unscientific observation, so many and so fitful were the imponderables involved. But the pleasure accruing to Mr. Kelly would be in no way inferior to that conferred (presumably) on Mr. Adams by his beautiful deduction of Neptune from Uranus. He fixed with his eagle eyes a point in the empty sky where he fancied the kite to swim into view, and wound carefully in.
Moving away a little Celia also looked at the sky, not with the same purpose as Mr. Kelly, for she knew that he would see it long before she could, but simply to have that unction of soft sunless light on her eyes that was all she remembered of Ireland. Gradually she saw other kites, but above all the tandem of the child that had not answered her good night, because he had been singing. She recognised the unusual coupling, not in file but abreast.
The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing—once she would have noticed these things. She watched the tandem coming shakily down from the turmoil, the child running forward to break its fall, his trouble when he failed, his absorbed kneeling over the damage. He did not sing as he departed, nor did she hail him.
The wail of the rangers came faintly out of the east against the wind. All out. All out. All out. Celia turned and looked at Mr. Kelly. He lay back sideways in the chair, his cheek on his shoulder, a fold of the slicker lifting his lip in a mild snarl, not dying but dozing. As she watched the winch sprang from his fingers, struck violently against the railing, the string snapped, the winch fell to the ground, Mr. Kelly awoke.
All out. All out.
Mr. Kelly tottered to his feet, tossed up his arms high and wide and quavered away down the path that led to the water, a ghastly, lamentable figure. The slicker trailed along the ground, the skull gushed from under the cap like a dome from under its lantern, the ravaged face was a cramp of bones, throttled sounds jostled in his throat.
Celia caught him on the margin of the pond. The end of the line skimmed the water, jerked upward in a wild whirl, vanished joyfully in the dusk. Mr. Kelly went limp in her arms. Someone fetched the chair and helped to get him aboard. Celia toiled along the narrow path into the teeth of the wind, then faced north up the wide hill. There was no shorter way home. The yellow hair fell across her face. The yachting-cap clung like a clam to the skull. The levers were the tired heart. She closed her eyes.
All out.
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