Now, as he lay upon the cliff, all the embarrassment he felt was at this set of emotions that was expected to rack him and did not.  He was not yet old enough to have the courage of his lack of convictions, and he feared he had failed in something a finer creature would have responded to.  He rolled over on to his elbows and stared at the pale faces of a clump of wet primroses that stared back at him with an equal innocence of emotion.  Beyond them the wild violets gleamed like faint blue flames, and the tightly-curled fronds of young bracken showed silvery grey amongst the litter of last year’s stalks that lay in patches of a dead burnt-orange upon the grey-green turf.  Ishmael spread his fingers wide and plunged them in the primroses, in the grass, in the loose soil, for the pleasure of their soft, clean textures.  He rubbed his face in them like a young animal, and drew in deep breaths of the best smell in the world—­the smell of damp, green growing things.  He turned on to his back again.  The mist had begun to waver, a breath was stirring fitfully but finely.  It came cool upon him, and as it blew the world seemed very gently to come to life again.  He could see what he had come to look at and overshot in the mist—­the little harbour of Povah lying to his left.  He rolled over and stared curiously at its stone jetties and clustered shipping.  There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was still a rare sight in those parts—­a steamer.  She was a side-wheeler, with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast, fore-and-aft on her mizzen.  A little crowd stood on the end of the quay to stare at her, and it was on her that Ishmael too fixed his eyes; then he scrambled up and made his way diagonally down the cliff to the harbour.

It had occurred to him to run away to sea.  He was of the land and knew nothing about ships, but he had often read of boys who ran away to sea—­they shipped as cabin-boys and often were killed by the rough life or never heard of again.  A sick wave of self-pity flooded Ishmael as he thought of it.  He whose salvation was that he so seldom saw himself from the outside—­unlike Killigrew, the feeder on emotion, now was aware of the poetic fitness of the story—­the proud boy who sooner than live with dishonour had left home and friends to face the wide world and roam, a veritable Ishmael.  Adventure began to call to him; the salt on his lips as he licked them seemed its very tang.  He was big and strong, and had no fear of hard living; neither was he fearful physically.  On one thing he was determined—­not to stay to be expelled and then be taken ignominiously back to Cloom and the jeers of his family.