A couple of nature boys
I attempt to confuse mosquito.
I installed the air conditioner yesterday after dinner. When I sat in my chair to read my book, I heard a buzz past my ear, and CLAPPED at the air. With what rage I did so! I missed the mosquito. And I was left with a burst of adrenaline that probably lasted till one in the morning. After the mosquito had buzzed by me I turned on the air conditioner, fan only, and the ceiling fan. There was an “Is it there? Isn’t it there?” slight buzzy whistling, the same pitch as a mosquito flying past, by each of my ears as I sat in my chair: the right ear when I turned a bit this way, the left when I turned a bit that. But I never heard another mosquito fly-by. Was there so much cool air flowing around the room in all kinds of drafts that the mosquito was chilled and confused into lethargy? Was the mosquito still flying past, only I couldn’t hear it amid the whistle buzz of the air conditioner?
Fitty young Drake gathers shells, picks flowers, plays in surf, and beguiles the women of Cornwall.
Part II of the Season Three premiere of Poldark. Prudie had another moment with Drake. Drake is very much a nature boy: always out bathing in the stream with his shirt off, swimming (perhaps naked) in the surf with his equally smooth, fit, and cute brother, collecting shells and turning them into a bracelet for his crush Morwenna Chenowyth (Elizabeth’s cousin and Geoffrey Charles’s governess). Drake was bathing and enjoying the presence of God in all things while we the audience, and Prudie, who gazes upon him from the path nearby, enjoy the presence of God in Drake’s pale white skin. She’s got a little metal pitcher, and gives it a toss on the path in front of her.
“Oh lack-a-day, ’tis a fearful thing to be a poor maid with no man to care for her.”
“Would ’ee like for I to help ’ee?”
“’Tis kindly thought. Since my old man did cart off, old Prudie have had to tend to these needs herself.”
Drake hands her back the dropped item—a piece of polished driftwood.
They’re facing each other.
“Not to mention other needs a body might have,” she says, eyes sad and sincere.
Drake looks at her, trembling—then backs away, gathers his remaining clothes and runs off.
Prudie’s lips press together in a hint of a smile, her eyebrows lower mischievously, and she laughs. She’s enjoying the game.
I suspect there will be more!
Drake is very cute. He’s a mix of N___ in London and N___’s former flatmate P____: P____’s looks (and he was more cute in fact than he at first appeared to me), and N___’s innocence and ever-smile. And then there’s Drake’s nature-boy aspect and incredible natural romantic talent that all the other characters, and the director, keep ascribing to him, and which the actor playing Drake gamefully keeps up with, managing to take it completely seriously when Drake, later in the episode, having run upon Morwenna again while trespassing on the Trenwyth estate with his brother Samuel (they were carrying a piece of shipwreck timber home from Ross Poldark’s piece of beach), and briefly interrupting her wildflower picking, after they have already said goodbye (Morwenna warning them to be off the property quickly due to George Warleggan’s men) Drake returns with a bunch of flowers he’s just gathered himself.
“Because I didst just interrupt a maiden’s flower picking,” he says, handing them to her.
Oh, and then there’s their scene later in the episode, when Drake runs into Morwenna and her charge Geoffrey Charles yet again, while they’re on Sir Ross’s beach. Drake not only hands her the shell bracelet he’s made for her, but takes them to see “the Holy Well” in a cave beneath the cliff, where the water was sweet “due to Saint Sawle himself having blessed it a thousand years ago.” They each sip from the fountain deep in the cave. Drake tells them to stick their hand in the water, say “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and make a wish, “and surely it will be granted.”
“Surely that is sacrilege,” says Morwenna.
“But it is not, for this be a Holy Well,” says Drake.
They each make a wish, then, after a series of shot-countershot stolen glances of Drake watching Morwenna, and she catching him, Morwenna says she’s sure Saint Sawle wouldn’t approve of them making “our frivolous wishes at his well.”
“Mine wasn’t frivolous,” says Drake.
“Nor mine,” says precocious Geoffrey Charles.
“Nor mine,” says Morwenna.
Speaking of parlance, it is only Demelza and Prudie this season who have been re- “dost”’ed and “ye”’ed and had that their subjects and verbs reversed, perhaps because now that Demelza’s brothers have shown up with their Cornwall-speak from of a previous era (and it’s an interesting suggestion, that the slang of the lower classes is in fact the authentic way of speaking, that the upper classes have moved on from) Demelza and Prudie need talk that way as well, lest Drake and Samuel really seem like a couple of Godly nature boys from nowhere taking baths in the ocean all the time and reversing their verbs and subjects.