They were as tall as towers, their great brows beetling over their sunken eyes, like shelves of overhanging rocks. In their ears were hoops of red gold, and in their mouths scythe-edged cutlasses a-drip. Out of the red darkness they emerged, their eyes half closed against the sun, the water at their waists circling and bubbling with the hot light reflected from their bodies, their dimensions blotted out all else: and still they came on, until their wire-glinting breasts and rocky heads filled out the boy’s brain. And still they came on, until there was only room enough for the smouldering head of the central buccaneer, a great salt-water lord, every inch of whose face was scabbed and scarred like a boy’s knee, whose teeth were carved into the shapes of skulls, whose throat was circled by the tattooing of a scaled snake. And as the head enlarged, an eye became visible in the darkness of its sockets, and in a moment nothing else but this wild and sinister organ could be seen. For a short while it stayed there, motionless. There was nothing else in the great world but this – globe. It
And Titus saw quite clearly not only the great sunflower with its tired, prickly neck which he had seen Fuchsia carrying about for the last two days, but a hand holding it, a hand that was not Fuchsia’s. It held the heavy plant aloft between the thumb and forefinger as though it was the most delicate thing in the world. Every finger of the hand was aflame with gold rings, so that it looked like a gauntlet of flaming metal – an armoured thing.
And then, all at once, blotting it out, a swarm of leaves were swirling through him, a host of yellow leaves, coiling, diving, rising, as they swept forward across a treeless desert, while overhead, like a bonfire in the sky, the sun shone down on the rushing leaves. It was a yellow world: a restless, yellow world: and Titus was beginning to drift into a yet deeper maw of the colour when Bellgrove wakened with a jerk, gathered his gown about him like God gathering a whirlwind, and brought his hand down with a dull, impotent thud on the lid of his desk. His absurdly noble head raised itself. His proud and vacant gaze settled at last on young Dogseye.
‘Would it be too much to ask you,’ he said at last, with a yawn which exposed his carious teeth, ‘whether a young man – a not very studious young man, by name Dogseye – lies behind that mask of dirt and ink? Whether there is a human body within that sordid bunch of rags, and whether that body is Dogseye’s, also.’ He yawned again. One of his eyes was on the clock, the other remained bemusedly on the young pupil. ‘I will put it more simply: Is that really
Dogseye, a nondescript little figure, wriggled.
‘Answer me, Dogseye. Were you carving away when you thought your old master was asleep?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Dogseye, surprisingly loudly; so loudly that he startled himself and glanced about him as though for the voice.
‘What were you carving, my boy?’
‘My name, sir.’
‘What, the whole thing, my boy?’
‘I’d only done the first three letters, sir.’
Bellgrove rose swathed. He moved, a benign, august figure, down the dusty aisle between the desks until he reached Dogseye.
‘You haven’t finished the “G”’, he said in a far-away, lugubrious voice. ‘Finish the “G” and leave it at that. And leave the “EYE” for other things …’ – an inane smirk began to flit across the lower part of his face – ‘such as your grammar-book,’ he said brightly, his voice horribly out of character. He began to laugh in such a way as might develop into something beyond control, but he was brought up short with a twinge of pain and he clutched at his jaw, where his teeth cried out for extraction.
