Short Stories 1895-1926 (15 page)

‘She glanced into my eyes with a peculiar smile on her lips. “You see, nowadays, so far as my own family is concerned, I am the last,” she continued. “So you will realize how welcome even the remotest of cousins must be! Of all these years – all those births and deaths, and births again – there is not one left of us in this world here except me.” She glanced up under the half-moon with shining eyes, almost as if in apology, yet still, as if in boast.

‘“And are you a traveller, too?” I questioned.

‘She beckoned me to follow her back by the way I had come.

‘“A traveller? No indeed. Not I. Our bright particular genius has always refused to meddle the least bit with me. I used to lie awake half the night long, summer and winter too, in hope to be exiled. That was years and years ago; the mad ‘teens. But deep, deep down, perhaps, I feared my own desire. I cannot tell you – this place is rooted in my heart. It
is
me. Here, only, I seem to catch at the meaning of being alive at all. It is a little lodge, and yonder winds the mysterious avenue. I'll wait. Forgive such nonsense; but it is that incessant expectation –
incessant;
boxes packed and corded, as it were, the door ajar. It is
that
I hunger for – for then … And this quiet – it is always silent in these woods. The winds and storms go over us, you see, like the waters in the book of Job. I never remember it when I am away, – this curious quiet even beneath the hollow tumult of a gale far overhead – without an almost unendurable shudder of longing. Shall I ever cease if I begin to talk of it? But now I see that with that longing, that greed – far, far beyond the greed of the little girl I used to be even for ices and macaroons (and would you believe it, to see a ghost!) – it was like keeping a wild beast without meat, to deny my poor heart its native air. Better dead than dying. It was an extraordinary home-coming – this very morning. I was alone. I got back early, soon after daybreak, and opened a window to the first rose of dawn. I cannot tell you the
voracity
of it all: the dew, the depth, and the immortal usualness.

‘“And now – well, really it is
very
delightful – though an hour ago I should have madly resented such an idea – it
is
delightful to have found so old an unknown friend waiting me – and one remembered so well.”

‘She laughed out, when I tried to excuse myself for so dull a memory.

‘“That's because you are a poet, Mr —” she said. “You see, I know all about you; and you, nothing about me! I have noticed it again and again. People with imagination are almost indecently bereft of the common feelings. And now, will you please sit on this bench while I make some tea for us both. It's all I can offer. I shan't be long But stuff your fingers into your ears. He screams at night too! Now which was the door I left unfastened?”

‘I sat there – where she had left me. The moon slid on, casting her shadows. A few late moths ghosted about me in and out of her beams. It might have been a dream. I might have been thousands of years old. Strange, that. Strange. Why, I might have been in another world … But never mind that.

‘Well, my unconventional hostess returned in a few minutes, and we sat sipping our tea on the little balcony in the mild autumnal night.

‘And as we sat we talked – as fancy led; she in a rather high-pitched voice, and with curious half-gestures. It seemed as if she thought always with arrow on the string and bow bent – a bow which a dull world had invariably reminded her to slacken. Her eyes were extraordinarily dark and lustrous in the shadow of that thin clear light, revealing, it seemed, a curious exaltation of spirit at this sudden and strange return to solitude and to her old home. She exulted in her solitude, and had not the least misgiving at the thought of staying indefinitely in the house.

‘“It won't be for long,” she repeated. “They have patched and tortured and experimented, and at last I am done. They've as good as told me so now, the poor dear, scientific creatures. Surely it is not surrender when the wound is mortal and the enemy is – that one. But
enemy
! What shallow, stuffy nonsense
that
is! We have handed down our restless memories, the old forlorn absurdities, father to son and son again, and now I am, well, just the last echo of the refrain before the end. ‘Ah, Elizabeth,' mother used to laugh at me in the old days when we were a happy family in the Wood, ‘he will sing to you too in due season.' Probably she meant a far tamer fowl. In her heart of hearts she hated the wander-taint, as you may imagine. And yet – she herself at last couldn't resist it. We are wayfaring men one and all and
my
journey will be better than dreams.”

‘There was a peculiar sidelong movement of her head, as she said this; she was stooping a little, busied over the tea-things. With teapot poised in one thin narrow hand, she suddenly turned on me.

‘“Shall I tell you why? Shall I?” Again that curious movement, and I fancied for an instant that she was about to cry. “It is because I am coming back.”

‘For an instant or two I did not catch her meaning; then, with that odd warmth and confusion within one's very body which any unforeseen reference to death inevitably brings, I muttered a few of the familiar clichés. “Besides,” I added, “look at me. Surely this face is nearer the sight of death than yours. You cannot see your own in this moonlight. Shall we have a wager on it? And pay – when at last we meet again? For good? Come, now.”

‘“Yes, but you see,” she replied eagerly, “it's all very well to talk about happy reunions. Where? Call it a condition of mind; whose? Surely that which found the very bones of its delight here? Do you remember what Catherine says in
Wuthering Heights
? But there, never mind, when
my
bird wings free, I know its resting place. I
know
it. You see? The ones that have gone – they changed little; but strangely and instantaneously. And now they thrid some finer air, have rarer senses, and their tap is heard on walls of the mind that are scarcely there, so tenuous they are. Not that I want proof. And such proof! I
know
it. And when your time comes, I give you my invitation now. What
is
that old phoenix of ours? Do you suppose we could snare him, cage him; tie him to a perch? Isn't he in our very minds? How then? Could we be else than wanderers? May we be forgiven for this futile waste of its powers.”

‘I suppose I was a little taken aback by this outpouring. For she leaned her face into her hands and laughed.

‘“Just ‘hysteria,' you are thinking,” she said suddenly, looking up at me from them. I sat in the shadow now, so perhaps my face was not too clearly visible.

‘“But what
is
this coming back?” I stupidly questioned.

‘“Oh, but you don't understand,” she cried, turning breathlessly on me. “It is here now. And then, shall I not see? shall I not know? and probably before the very last of these leaves is fallen? Oh, how I detest the sentimentality they talk; fobbing us off with their precious stones and golden harps. Symbols if you like, but beyond any poor earthly spirit's hope or desire. If we humans have
climbed
to where we are – though I don't believe it – by way of the happy and innocent animals, do you suppose we are going to suddenly jump half-a-dozen stories instead of ascending on and on and on? What is space but the all I am? What is time but the all I was and shall be? I cannot express myself, but if you could hear the roaring of the fire
here,
you would not be wanting any words. Never in the whole of my reading, in the whole queer skein of things called my life – never have I encountered a single human being who expressed a tenth of the sheer delight of sharing – well, say, just that bit of garish moon in this tiny bowl of the world's greenery. ‘Blind,' ‘ungrateful,' ‘worms of earth,' no word in the language could express our fatuity.
Then
I shall be free … But there, it's time, as the old Scottish ballad says, you were awa'. And it's time, as some less anonymous poet says, I sought my couch. I confess I hated the very sight of you when I saw you trespassing in my woods. Another hereditary taint. But you have forgiven me … and I will walk a little distance with you on your way.”

‘Well, I confess, her vehemence had stirred up my sluggish mind a good deal more even than had the bird before her. I followed her all but in silence. We came to a kind of alley, its yew hedge long untended, though the light of the moon pierced through upon its sward.

‘She paused, her face averted. “And now” – she said, “goodbye, for this life. Yours that way; mine this. And may all that is meant by heaven be with you.”

‘I did as I was bid. Silence crept in upon me – an entire world – like a dangerous flood. The grass was hoar with a moonlight almost as white as snow. The years seemed to melt away like a dream, and, as I turned, seeing her there still waiting, I realized that she herself must have devised this echo of our first and only other meeting. The strange rapt face looked curiously unreal. With queer contrary thoughts in my mind, I gazed across at her, not more trustful of my eyes perhaps in that uncertain light than I had been of my ears earlier in the evening. She did not stir. All perfectly still things seem to have a look of agelessness and of the eternal. And then – I turned on my heel, and when, now no longer a shy awkward silly boy, I looked back as of old and for the last time; again it was in vain. She was gone …'

So this, it appeared was all. This was the story of ‘The Wood'! We others glanced a little uncomfortably at one another, I remember, at this crisis in the evening's talk – a poet's story in sober earnest: incoherent, obscure, unreal, unlifelike, without an ending.

‘And the Bird?' cried one of us, maybe a little more ‘fatuous' than the rest. The old man was at that moment beckoning to the Club waiter, and appeared not to have noticed the question. And nobody, it seemed, had either the stupidity or the courage to add, ‘And what, pray, are
you
waiting for?'

The Bowl

The Bowl
1

It was one autumn evening – in the month of October, I think, for I can just remember that the thin gold and tawny beechleaves were still floating down in the garden in the hazy sunshine, and that already a fire burned in the grate to cheer the colder twilights, when first my very young eyes fell in wonder upon Mrs Orchardson's silver bowl. Perhaps it had always been there, and always as conspicuous. But it was then, I am sure, that I first noticed it. It stood on the sideboard beside a cut-glass decanter reflecting the ruddy colour of its wine in the smooth cheeks of its two laughing Cupids. It had handles, two pendant rings as plain in workmanship as the buckle on a child's shoe. I stood and stared up at it, as young eyes will at any such magical object. There was a sort of secret jollity in the very look of it – an air to blow bubbles in, cool as an orchard, or as the half-hidden valleys of a summer cloud.

I was astonished at it, entranced by it; longed to touch and handle it, and   even felt, I verily believe, a kind of covetousness and an envy of the friend whose bowl it was. And if I had been a jackdaw of equal proportions to myself, I should certainly have carried it off to hide in the chimney or hole in the wall, wherever my nest might be. As it was, I at least carried off a very vivid remembrance of it in my mind – which, fortunately, in a world hedged about with a superfluity of
Don'ts,
is not a felony.

Anyhow, when one dark rainy morning the sharp need came for
some
thing
of this kind, it was I who thought of the bowl, which, after all, could contain almost as much Jordan water as could the freestone font in St Barnabas's, and was twenty times more beautiful.

All through the night, while I had been placidly asleep, I learned at my lonely breakfast, my friend Mrs Orchardson's little baby had been simply burning like a coal at death's door. It was a most interesting and enthralling piece of news. And I'm not so sure that I did not speculate how it was that, in my long nocturnal journeyings in the wilds of dreamland, I had not heard its wailing cries as it, too, a much smaller spirit, ran along into the shadowy valley. For after all, abstractions like death are for a child little more than a vague and menacing something in a dream.

Mrs Orchardson's baby had, of course, been sickening for some little time past. I had been angry and jealous more than once because it had been the cause of my seeing very little of her, and of my being entertained a good deal less than I thought proper on so short a visit. I could remember well enough its little blue-eyed puckered face and slatey-blue eyes, with an expression in them too, almost as dull as slate. Indeed, one morning, not long before – an unusually hot morning for October – she and I and it had sat on a rug in the garden together under the elms. A few withered wild flowers still showed in the grass, I remember, with nothing but their swollen seed vessels left of their summer.

And I had noticed too, how peculiar a shiningness had come into Mrs Orchardson's grey eyes when she talked to her baby. Yet anxiety kept her forehead frowning even while she was smiling, as she stared down into its small ugly wizened face. I didn't think it was in the least a pretty baby, and was vexed at its persisting in being ill.

These last few days, indeed, I had been left almost entirely to myself, with nobody to say a word to, except Esther, the parlourmaid – a sandy-coloured woman with a thick down on her face – and now and then to Mrs Orchardson's cook, who had a way of speaking to me as if I were a kind of clockwork image incapable of even hearing her words. ‘And how is the poor little infant this morning?' I asked her once, mimicking the old doctor. She looked at me as if I were a snake in the grass – as no doubt I was.

But to come back to the silver bowl again. I had finished my bread and milk, had for the third time shooed away the cat from getting on to the table, and now sat staring through the long rainy window with my spoon in my mouth, when the door opened, and Mrs Orchardson put her face in at it. It was grey, almost like wet chalk, and her eyes were so sharp and far-off-looking that she seemed scarcely to be aware of me at all. She was certainly looking at me, and yet as if through me, and with almost as horrified an expression as if she could see the very bones in my body. And then suddenly she came in, almost fell down on her knees beside my chair, clasped me round, and hid her face in my lap. ‘O, Nick, Nick, you poor lonely thing,' she said, sobbing, ‘she is worse, much, much worse. She is dying.'

‘Oh, dear!' I said in a mournful voice, ‘oh, dear!'

‘So you will just try,' she went on hurriedly, as if she were saying something that at any moment might be forgotten, ‘you will Just try to be quiet and happy by yourself. It won't be long; not very long.' She paused, and I sat on as still as the loaf of bread on the table. She did not seem even to be breathing. But in a minute or two she lifted her wet face from my pinafore, and was looking entirely different from herself. I should hardly have recognized her – and yet she was quite calm, though her cheeks were almost like clay and her eyes as if they had fallen a little back into her head. ‘And now, you see,' she added, as if not to me at all, ‘Mr Cairns is coming to christen her, to make her God's little child. As you are, Nick.'

‘Isn't it going to be taken to church, then?' I said in a sepulchral voice.

‘No,' she answered, listening, but not to me.

‘But why?' I said in disappointment. She put her hands to my cheeks, cupping my chin in them, and simply looking at me.

‘But,' I said wriggling away, ‘there's no font here; there
must
be a font like as at church.' I frowned, looking at her a little scornfully out of the corner of my eye. ‘It won't be much good if you don't. At least that's what Esther says.'

She only shook her head, still gazing at me, and listening. ‘
I
know!' I said, ‘will that big silver bowl on the sideboard do for a font, Mrs Orchardson? It's a very big bowl!'

She smiled at me brightly.

‘Why, of course, you strange creature, that will do beautifully … And now —' She got up, and stood looking for a moment out of the window, as if she had forgotten my presence altogether. ‘In all this loveliness!' she almost whispered, though all that she could see was just an ordinary wet morning …

Dr Sharp would not return again for an hour, so there were only Mrs Orchardson, and Esther, and Mr Cairns in the bedroom besides myself and the baby. The cook, I heard, wouldn't come, because she was afraid of being upset. That seemed silly to me. When I went into the room, a little square table already stood between the fire and the sunshine, and it was covered with a linen napkin with a fringe. On this were burning two tall white candles in silver sticks; and in the midst was the bowl with a little water in it which by tiptoeing I could just manage to see. I stared between surprise and dismay at Mr Cairns when he came in in his surplice. He seemed to be a person absolutely different from the two Mr Cairns I knew already – the one a smiling but rather silly-smiling elderly man in his old clerical clothes in the Vicarage garden; the other, of course, looking almost artificial, as he stood intoning the service in church.

Having blown out the candles, and placed them on the dressing table he signed to us to stand up, myself being between Mrs Orchardson and Esther, and the baby lying still and scarlet and open-eyed and without a single sound in Mrs Orchardson's arms. Once I remember, as he leaned over towards her, Mr Cairns's surplice brushed my cheek with its peculiar dry perfume of cambric. And when he dipped his fingers into the bowl I saw the water-butterflies jig on the ceiling.

He did not seem to have noticed that I was there, though for a moment or two his glasses blazed on me like lanterns when he fronted the window. He took the little baby in his great hands. It had begun to cry then. But its crying was more like a very, very old woman's than a natural baby's, and the fingers it spread out in the air an instant were like white match-sticks, they were so thin and shrunken. I smiled at it and made a grimace to please it, but it looked at me like purple glass, as if it was not there to see me or to be amused.

When the service was done, Mr Cairns stooped down and kissed the baby, and he looked a very old man indeed; and yet when he stood up again and had taken off his stole and surplice, he was exactly the same as when I had seen him reading in his garden.

‘My dear, dear lady, you must not grieve over-much,' he said to Mrs Orchardson, at the door of the bedroom, ‘He knows His lambs, all His lambs. And He is merciful.'

He leant his chin, and smiled towards me with a curious wrinkle on his face. His brown eyes reminded me of berries. They were full of kindness, even though the look in them was not very attentive. I whispered to Esther, asking if I might be allowed to carry the silver bowl downstairs again. And all she gave me was a sharp shake of the head and a greenish look, because I don't think she liked to say no while Mr Cairns was in hearing. He must have heard what I said, because he put his fingers on my hair and smiled at me again, so that I had to go downstairs in front of him, and I think he must have told Mrs Orchardson meanwhile what to do with the bowl and the water.

In the hall he talked for a minute or two in secret with Esther. ‘In that case send the little boy to me, then,' I heard him say. ‘Mrs Cairns will be at home. Poor tiny lamb! To think it must have suffered like you and me!' Esther shut her fair-lashed eyes a moment as if to show it would be a mercy if the baby did die, and then opened them again very stern and mournfully when she saw me watching her.

Yet in my heart of hearts I was perfectly sure that Mrs Orchardson's little baby would
not
die. I cannot tell whence this assurance came. It may have been the fruit of a child's natural intuition; or even of his exquisite eyesight – experienced, as it would seem, to see through, and not only on the surface. But for one thing, I had all along felt a firm belief in the inherent virtue of the bowl, and was contemptuous of Esther for shutting her eyes like that. It seemed impossible that the clear shallow water in its shadowy deeps should not wash all taint of sickness away. Besides,
I
had thought of it.

This, I think, was the reason why I flatly refused to accept Mr Cairns's invitation to go to the Rectory, when Esther told me to do so. I knew perfectly well she wouldn't be able to make me go against my will while the baby was so ill. At last she gave a furious empty toss with my grey wool scarf that she was carrying in her hand, and looked at me as if no tongue could express her hatred.

‘And don't you feel
no
pity for that poor suffering mite upstairs, you obstinate boy?' she asked me in a low compressed voice. I merely stared at her without answering, and she had to turn her eyes away.

‘He don't even know the meaning of the word!' she said, and shut the door of the dining-room after her as if she hoped its wood would stick for ever after to the lintel. But I did not mind her temper. Presently she came in again, looking even angrier and whiter than before.

‘Is this the time for building and Noah's-Arking,' she almost shouted in my ear as I sat on the hearth rug; ‘is
this
the time? – when that poor little innocent is rattling its very life out over your head?'

I looked no further up at her than at the tray in her hand. ‘You little imp!'

‘I suppose when it gets well, it will have to be christened all over again,
properly,
won't it?' I inquired. I knew she was staring at me, and hating me for not caring what she said.

‘Where' – she gasped, almost losing herself in her rage – ‘where you pick up such evil heathenish notions from I can't think. Not from
this
house. There's not a speck of sin left in the whole of that infant's body now; not a speck. And if you had gone to that kind Mr Cairns as he arst, he would have
told
you so.'

‘I didn't want to go, and Mrs Orchardson wouldn't have tried to make me.' The blood seemed to rise up in my body and I could hear my own voice growing more insolent and trumpeting every moment. ‘What's more, Miss Esther, I don't believe a bit in your old holy water. It isn't
going
to die, and even if you hope it will, it won't. And you're treading on one of my animals.'

At that she deliberately kicked down the fort I was building with her foot.

‘You are a little devil incarnate; that's what you are,' she screamed at me, if one can scream without raising one's voice. ‘A little devil. You ought never to have been allowed in a Christian house. It's Tophet and the roaring flames that you're bound for, my young man. You've
murdered
that poor mite. You mark my words!'

I was so much enraged at this that I hit at a little bulge in her boot with one of my bricks.