“At this time o’ night?” said Aunt Sarah Jane, scandalised.
“Let the boy have a try,” said Uncle Will, rising. “’Tis a beautivul moonlight night, and I’ll take him over the field where the new water-pipe runs.”
“You’m mad, the two of you,” said his aunt with a sigh.
Edwin and his uncle went out into the garden, and there the boy watched the gardener’s clumsy, skilful hands cut a forked twig from a blackthorn bush.
“Hazel do work as well,” he said, “but father always used the thorn.”
Then they went out together over a dewy meadow, and his uncle showed him how to hold the rod: with his two hands turned palm upwards, the arms of the twig between the third and fourth fingers, the thumb, and the palm of each hand, and the fork downwards between them. Over the meadow grass they walked slowly, then suddenly the tip of the rod began to turn upwards by no agency of which Edwin was aware. It was very thrilling, for his hands were quite still.
“There you are,” said his uncle, “you’ve a found our water-pipe.”
He did so, and now the mysterious force was so strong that the arms of the twig snapped.
“Now, you’ve gone and broke it,” said Uncle Will. “Come in or you’ll catch cold.”
“Oh, he’s a proper dowser, sure enough,” said Uncle Will.
Edwin was still curiously thrilled with the whole business. He felt that a little more excitement in his attainment was due to him; but no one, not even his father, seemed in the least impressed. It comforted him to think that his cousin Joe, his eyes fixed on his book in the corner, had really less in common than himself with the strange dark people from whom they were both descended. It was better, he thought, to be a born dowser than a Fellow of Balliol. More wonderful still to be both.
All the rest of that evening he felt a queer elation in his mysterious birthright, and when his father yawned and they both went up to bed he lay awake for a long time listening to the drowsy music of the corncrake and the wail of hunting owls, trying to put himself more closely in touch with the romantic past that had bred him: with that magnificent figure his grandfather, and the innumerable strange and passionate ancestry that slept under the shadow of Highberrow church on the Batch. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” he thought. And so he came to think of his father, through whom these things came to him: of his hard achievements, of his loneliness, of his difficulty of expressing—if it were not a disinclination to express—all the powerful and stormy things that must lie hidden in his heart. And a feeling of passionate kinship carried Edwin away: an anxiety to show his love for his father in unmistakable ways; to make clear to him once and for all the depth of his son’s devotion. He began to think of his father as a mother might think of her child. It must have been in that way, he imagined, that his own mother had thought of her husband. The night was so still that he imagined he could hear the rusty ivory of the acacia-blossom falling at the gate.