The children, Mrs. Sarkissian said, were somewhere about the house waiting to see me. She had told them they were not to bother me until I had had my tea. We went from her room through the house into the front hall. There she peeped through a door into a small sitting−room.
“That's their room,” she said. “But they're not there. Wait a minute. I'll go and call them.”
She went away down a passage and left me to look round the hall. A wide oak staircase with one turn led up to a little gallery from which, it seemed, the upstairs passages led off. The banisters and rails were richly carved and turned. The hall itself was panelled nearly to the top of the walls and there were several dark old paintings hanging up, but no collections of arms or heads of animals such as I expected to see in such a house. I wondered if Dr Ravelin's predecessors had all been students like himself. By one wall was a big chest ornamented with intricate brass−work and studded all over with brass nails, and on the stone flags were several dark red rugs which I thought must be Persian. I wandered round, gazing up at the dim pictures, and finally came back to the foot of the stairs where I stood on the bottom step, leaning against the stout carved end−post of the banisters and looking across the hall, out at the brilliant picture of sunlit grass and trees framed by the half−open front door.
Suddenly there came a swift light pit−pat of feet on the stairs behind me and before I could turn round a cool hand touched me lightly on the back of the neck. There, a few steps above me, leaning down with one hand on the banister, was a young boy. He was arching his brows and looking at me with an expression that plainly said he was only waiting for me to smile to burst into delighted laughter. I smiled, and he shouted with glee.
“Nuaman?” I asked, laughing myself. He nodded and became suddenly serious, studying me with thoughtful, dark eyes. I knew, looking back at him as he steadily looked me up and down, that we were going to be good friends. I had never seen so beautiful a boy nor one whose face expressed such gaiety and at the same time such tranquillity and wisdom. There was innocence and eagerness too, I thought, in that small brown face; a kind of wonder and desire to see and learn and know. All my misgivings about teaching vanished. There could be only joy in teaching Nuaman. Because I notice such things I wondered at the perfection of his physical development. There was no awkwardness or gawkiness about him. He was dressed in a pair of little green corduroy shorts and a cream silk shirt with short sleeves. His face, arms and legs were tanned to a lovely light golden colour; every slight movement that he made as he leaned above me there revealed a supple young strength and grace which I had never seen in any boy of his age before. He was so well formed and so beautifully proportioned that I did not then see how small he was for his age. I could not think of him in those few moments as someone who was going to grow bigger.
I heard Mrs. Sarkissian's voice from the passage and I turned to the hall again. Nuaman swung himself down beside me as softly as a cat. The two little dark−haired girls whom Mrs. Sarkissian shepherded before her were small enough, I suppose, with their prettiness, to be called doll−like. But it was their size only that suggested that; the comparison didn't dwell in my mind more than a second. The next instant I had thought of some kind of small gazelle I had seen somewhere, not in a picture, but alive. They had just the same rounded softness of body and limb combined with a surprising suppleness and grace. Like Nuaman's, their dress seemed more than is usual with English children to set off their figures rather than to cover them. Their clothes were on them rather than they in their clothes. They both wore little white sleeveless frocks of pure
silk which lay smoothly to the curves of their bodies and made the sun−tan of their arms and legs glow more duskily by contrast with its gleaming whiteness. Their black hair was tied with broad ribbons and they wore white shoes and socks. They were creatures of summer and some country of the sun.
Nuaman introduced them, glancing from them to me as if he was well aware of their loveliness and proud of being able to show them off to me. They were shy, and I guessed that they did not know English or English customs so well as Nuaman for, taking my hand and murmuring their replies to me, they looked at him to see if they were doing the right thing.
“Marvan and Ianthe,” Nuaman introduced them. “They both look very much alike,” he added with grave simplicity, “but you can tell Marvan because she has black eyes and Ianthe because she has brown ones.” He said something to them in their own language which made them lift their heads and look up at me.
“Oh, Ianthe's eyes are much too lovely to be called just brown,” I said. “I should call them onyx.”
“Yes?” he said, eagerly, and came across to look into them, as if he had never looked at Ianthe before. “Onyx,” he repeated to himself several times, trying over the new word and treasuring it.
“Are you twins?” I asked the girls, because they both seemed so much an age and so much alike. But neither they nor Nuaman seemed to understand the word.
When we parted Nuaman touched my arm shyly, looking up into my face to see whether I minded his touching me and then, when I smiled, he clutched my hand and exclaimed with the frankest pleasure:
“You know, Miss Hazel, I shall like having you here!”
I went blithely in to dinner that evening with Dr Ravelin. He put me a good deal more at my ease than he had done at the interview in London. Some formality remained; or what I thought formality. Dr Ravelin wore a dinner jacket; we sat at opposite ends of a large, highly polished dark table set with fine glass and silver and embroidered table−mats; and we were waited on by Mr. Sarkissian who, in the office of footman and butler, wore a clean shirt and a dark green velvet jacket. Having seen something of the Doctor's ceremoniousness I had changed out of my suit, in which I had travelled, and put on my best dress which I had only worn about three times before; but I felt that the next night I ought to wear my evening dress and promised to make up for the demands this job would make on my wardrobe by buying myself a new evening dress out of my earnings—provided I could drive a hard enough bargain with my aunt over the coupons.
Here in his own house the little touches of formality in Dr Ravelin's speech and manners were attractive. They seemed appropriate to his style of living, to the old−fashioned house and to this air of space and leisure that was so new to me. In a clumsy, roundabout way I tried to convey this by saying how much I admired the Hall and its setting and the way it had been maintained unspoilt. I said, or tried to say, that to live in such a place, in such a way, gave a sense of continuity that was lacking in most people's lives. He listened to my stumbling remarks attentively.
“Continuity,” he said. “It is a very old puzzle, isn't it? The riddle of mutability that has vexed men's minds and set them an unanswerable problem ever since the Egyptians of pre−dynastic times buried their dead crouched in the form of a question−mark! We haven't answered the question yet. It is put afresh with every death of a human being. We seek, perhaps, some partial solution of it in a generalisation, in the concept of a genus that lives though individuals die. Or some of us can, as you say, fancy that we feel the thread on which the beads are strung, by living where our fathers have lived and extending by our own short span the work of a few past generations. Or a dabbling antiquarian like myself may grope a little further and elaborate the illusion.