And God planted a garden and drove out man; and he placed at the east of Eden angels and the flame of a sword.
It happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.
This is my earliest recollection. If it be true that the soul is born not at the same time as the body, but at a later period with the first glimmering of memory, then this was the morning on which my soul groped its way into the world.
I have sometimes thought that I have never grown wiser than the knowledge contained in that first recollection. Nothing that I have to record in this book will carry me much further. The scene is symbolic: a little child, inarticulate, early awakened in a sunlit room, vainly striving to make life answer questions. Do we ever get beyond that? The woman is Nature. The man is God. The room is the world—for me it has always been filled with sunlight.
My mother I remember as very tall and patient, vaguely beautiful and smiling. I can recall hardly anything she said—only her atmosphere and the fragrance of violets which seemed always to cling about her. I know that she took me out beneath the stars one night; there was frost on the ground and church-bells were ringing. And I know that one summer’s day, on a holiday at Ransby, she led me through lanes far out into the country till my legs were very tired. We came to a large white house, standing in a parkland. There we hid behind a clump of trees for hours. A horseman came riding down the avenue. My mother ran out from behind the trees and tried to make him speak with her. She held me up to show me to him, and grasped his rein to make him halt. He said something angrily, set spurs to his horse, and disappeared at a gallop. She began to cry, telling me that the man was her father. I was too tired to pay much attention. She had to carry me most of the way home. It was dark when we entered Ransby.
In London some months later—it must have been wintertime, for we were sitting by the fire-light—she took me in her arms and asked me if I would like to have a sister. I refused stoutly. At dawn I was wakened by hurrying feet on the staircase. Next day I was given a new box of soldiers to keep me quiet. A lot of strange people stole in and out the house as if they owned it. I never saw my mother again.
All I had known of her had been so shy and gentle that it was a good deal of a surprise to me to learn years later that, as a girl, she had been considered rather dashing. She had been called “The gay Miss Fannie Evrard” and her marriage with my father had begun with an elopement. Her father was Sir Charles Evrard, brother-in-law to the Earl of Lovegrove; my father’s folk were ship-chandlers in Ransby, outfitting vessels for the Baltic trade.
The inequality of the match, as far as social position was concerned, made life in Ransby impossible. My father was only a reporter on the local paper at the time of his escapade; the Evrards lived at Woadley Hall and were reckoned among the big people in the county. It must have been to this house that my mother took me on that dusty summer’s day.
After his marriage my father settled down in London, gaining his living as a free-lance journalist. I believe he was very poor at the start. He did not re-visit Ransby until years later. Pride prevented. My mother returned as often as finances would allow, in the vain hope of a reconciliation with her family. On these occasions she would stay at the ship-chandler’s, and was an object of curiosity and commiseration among the neighbors.
Most of the facts which lie outside my own recollection were communicated to me by my grandmother. She never got over her amazement at her son’s audacity. It was without parallel in her experience until I attempted to repeat his performance with an entirely individual variation. She never tired of rehearsing the details; it was noticeable that she always referred to my mother as “Miss Fannie.”
“Often and often,” she would say, “have I seen Miss Fannie come a-prancin’ down the High Street with her groom a-followin’. She was always mounted on a gray horse, with a touch of red about her. Sometimes it was a red feather in her hat and sometimes a scarlet cloak. When Sir Charles rode beside her you could see the pride in his eye. She was his only child.”
After my small sister failed to arrive someone must have told me that my mother had gone to find her. I would sit for hours at the window, watching for her homecoming.
I was born in South London on a crowded street lying off the Old Kent Road. It was here that my mother died. When I was about six, a false-dawn came in my father’s prospects, on the promise of which he moved northward to the suburb of Stoke Newington.
At the time of which I write, Stoke Newington still retained a village atmosphere. The houses, for the most part, were old, bow-windowed, and quaint. Many of them were occupied by leisured people—retired city-merchants, maiden-ladies, and widows, who came there because it was reasonable in price without being shabby. It was a backwater of the surging stream of London life where one found time to grow flowers, read books, and be kindly. Its red, tree-shaded streets witnessed many an old-fashioned love-affair. The early morning was filled with country sounds—singing of birds, creaking of wooden-gates, and cock-crowing.
Our house was situated in Pope Lane, a blind alley overgrown with limes. It had posts set up at the entrance to prevent wheel-traffic. You could not see the houses from the lane, so steeply did the walls rise up on either side. It led nowhere and was a mere tunnel dotted with doors. Did the doors open by chance as you were passing, you caught glimpses of kitchen-gardens, shrubberies, and well-kept lawns. We rarely saw our neighbors. Each door hid a mystery, on which a child could exercise his fancy.
My father was too strenuously engaged in wringing an income out of reluctant editors to pay much attention to my upbringing. In moving to Pope Lane, he had made an increase in his expenditure which, as events proved, his prospects did not warrant. The keeping up of appearances was a continuous and unrelenting fight. Early in the morning he was at his desk; the last thing in the evening, when I ventured into his study to bid him good-night, his pen was still toiling industriously across the page. His morn-. ings were spent in hack-work, preparing special articles on contemporary economics for a group of daily papers. His evenings were given over to the writing of books which he hoped would bring him fame, many of which are still unpublished.
He coveted fame and despised it. He wrote to please himself and expected praise. He was an unpractical idealist, always planning huge undertakings for which there was no market. His most important work, which occupied twenty years of his life, was The History of Human Progress. It was really a history of human selfishness, written to prove that every act which has dug man out of the mire, however seemingly sacrificial and noble, had for its initial motive an enlightened self-interest. He never managed to get it before the public. It was disillusionizing. We all know that we are selfish, but we all hope that with luck we could be heroes.
The trouble with my father was that he was an emotionalist ashamed of his emotions. He wanted to be scrupulously just, and feared that his sentiments would weaken his judgments. Temperamentally he was willing to believe everything. But he had read Herbert Spencer and admired the academic mind; consequently he off-set his natural predisposition to faith by re-acting from everything accepted, and scrawled across the page of recorded altruism a gigantic note of interrogation. He gave to strangers and little boys the impression of being cynical and hard, whereas he had within him the smoldering enthusiasms and compassion which go to the kindling of martyrs and saints. He was planned for a man of action, but had turned aside to grope after phantoms in the mazes of the mind. His career is typical of the nineteenth century and sedentary modes of life.
Looking back I often wonder if he would not have been happier as a ship-chandler, moving among jolly sea-captains, following his father’s trade. How many hours, mounting into years, he wasted on literary failures—hours which might have been spent on people and friendships. As a child I rarely saw him save at meal-times, and then he was pre-occupied. For some years after my mother’s death he was afraid to love anyone too dearly.
He solved the problem of my immediate existence by locking the door into the lane, and giving me the freedom of the garden. I can recall it in every phase. Other and more recent memories have passed away, but, when I close my eyes and think back, I am there again. Moss-grown walks spread before me. Peaches on the wall ripen. I catch the fragrance of box, basking in sunshine. I see my father’s study-window and the ivy blown across the pane. He is seated at his desk, writing, writing. His face is turned away. His head is supported on his hand as though weary. I am wondering why it is that grown people never play, and why it is that they shut smaller people up always within walls.
I saw nothing of the outside world except on Sundays. My father used to lead me as far as the parish church, and call for me when service was ended. He never came inside. His intellectual integrity forbade it. He was an agnostic. My mother, knowing this, had made him promise to take me. He kept his word exactly.
Few friends called on us. My companions were cooks and housemaids. I borrowed my impressions of life, as most children do, from the lower orders of society. A servant is a prisoner; so is a child. Both are subject to tyranny, and both are dependent for their happiness on omnipotent persons’ moods and fortunes. A maidservant is always dreaming of a day when she will marry a lord, and drive up in a glittering carriage to patronize her old employer. A child, sensitive to misunderstanding, has similar visions of a far-off triumph which will consist in heaping coals of fire. He will heap them kindly and for his parents’ good, but unmistakably.
It was in Pope Lane that I first began to dream of a garden without walls. As I grew older I became curious, and fretted at the narrowness of my restraint. What happened over there in the great beyond? Rumors came to me; sometimes it was the roar of London to the southward; sometimes it was the sing-song of a mower traversing a neighbor’s lawn. I dreamt of an unwalled garden, through which a child might wander on forever—an Eden, where each step revealed a new beauty and a fresh surprise, where flowers grew always and there were no doors to lock.
It was a book which gave the first impulse to this thought; in a sense it was responsible for the entire trend of my character and life. In recent years I have tried to procure a copy. All traces of it seem to have vanished. If I ever knew the name of the author I have forgotten it. I am even uncertain of the exact title. I believe it was called The Magic Carpet.
Mine was a big red copy. The color came off when your hands got sticky. It had to be supported on the knees when read, or the arms got tired. It was a story of children, ordered about by day, who by night went forth invisible to wander the world, riding on the nursery carpet. Absurd! Yes, but this carpet happened to be magic. All you had to do was to seat yourself upon it, hold on tight, and wish where you wanted to be carried. In a trice you were beyond the reach of adults, flying over roofs and spires, post-haste to the land of your desire. In that book little boys ate as much as they liked and never had stomach-ache. They defeated whole armies of cannibals without a scratch. They rescued fair ladies, as old as housemaids, but ten times more beautiful, who wanted to marry them. No one seemed to know that they were little. No one condescended or told them to run away and wash their faces. Nobody went to school. Everybody was polite.
The pictures which illustrated the adventures still seem in remembrance the finest in the world. They typify the spirit of romance, the soul of youth, the revolt against limitations. They appealed to the lawless element within me, which still yearns to straddle the stallion of the world and go plunging bare-back through space.
I tried every carpet in the house, but none of ours were magic. I lay awake imagining the lands, I would visit if I had it. I would go to my mother first, and try to bring her back. I remembered vaguely how care-free my father had been when we had had her with us. Perhaps, if she returned, he would be happy. Then an inspiration came; there was one carpet which I had not tested—it lay before the fire-place in my father’s study. But how should I get at it? Only in the hours of darkness was it different from any other carpet, and in the evenings my father was always there. I never doubted but that this was the carpet; its difficulty of access proved it.
One night I lay awake, pinching myself to stave off sleep. It was winter. Outside I could hear the trees cracking beneath the weight of snow upon their boughs. The servants came to bed. I saw them pass my door, casting long shadows, screening their candles with their hands lest the light should strike across my eyes and rouse me. I waited to hear the study-door open and close. In waiting I began to drowse. I came to myself with a shudder. What hour it was I could not guess. I got out of bed. Stealing to the top of the stairs I looked down; all was blackness. Listening, I could hear the heavy breathing of sleepers. Bare-footed, I crept down into the hall, clinging to the banisters. The air was bitter. I was frightened. Each step I took seemed to cause the house to groan and tremble. The door of the study stood open. By the light of the fire, dying in the grate, I could just make out the carpet. Darting across the threshold, I knelt upon it. “Take me to Mama,” I whispered. The minutes ticked by; it did not stir. I spoke again; nothing happened.
I heard a sound in the doorway—a sudden catching of the breath. I turned. My father was standing, watching me. I did not scream or cry out. He came toward me through the darkness. What with fear of consequences and disappointment, I fell to sobbing.
I think he must have seen and overheard everything, for, with a tenderness which had something hungry and awful about it, he gathered me in his arms. Without a word of question or explanation, he carried me up to bed. Before he left, he halted as though he were trying to utter some thought which refused to get said. Suddenly he bent above the pillow, just as my mother used to do, and kissed me on the forehead. His cheeks were salty.
As my eyes closed, a strange thing happened. The snow lay on the ground and there were no flowers, but the room was filled with the fragrance of violets.
One day there was a ring at the door in the lane, followed by a loud and impatient rat-a-tat. A gentleman, who was a stranger to me, hurled himself across the threshold. He wore the frown of one who is intensely in earnest, whose mind is very much occupied. His mustaches were the fiercest and most eager that I ever saw on any man. They stuck out at right angles from under his nose like a pair of shaving-brushes. They were of an extraordinary purplish color, and would have done credit to a pirate. But his dress was more clerical than sea-faring. It consisted of a black frock coat, bound with braid at the edges where the cloth was fretted; his vest was low-cut to display an ocean of white shirt, above which a small tie of black silk wobbled. Hurrying up the path, tugging at his bushy eye-brows, he disappeared into the house. The last I saw of him was a red bandana handkerchief, streaming like a danger-signal from his coat-tail pocket. I thought he must be one of those hostile publishers my father talked about or, at the very least, an editor.
Hetty, the maid, came into the garden looking worried. She did not stand on the steps and yell, as was customary, as though daring me to disobey her. She caught up her skirts with a dignified air and spoke my name softly, employing the honeyed tones with which she enticed our milkman every morning. I perceived at once that something momentous had occurred, and came out from behind the bushes. Then I saw the reason for her sudden change of manners—the purple mustached stranger was watching us from behind the curtains of my father’s study-window. I was most agreeably and unpresentably grubby. Hetty was distressed at my appearance; I knew she was by the way she kept hurting my hand and muttering to me to hide behind her.
When we got inside the house she became voluble, but only in whispers.
“Now, Master Dante, I can’t ’elp it if the soap do get into your mouth. You’ve got to be a clean boy fer once in yer h’existence. It may mean h’everythin’. That gent’s some relation o’ yourn. ’E’s goin’ to take you away wiv him, an’ he may ’ave money. I shall ’ate to lose yer. Now let’s look at yer neck.”
She scrubbed away at my face till it was scarlet; she let the water from the flannel trickle down my back. I was too awe-inspired to wriggle; by some occult power the dreadful personage downstairs might learn about it. Having been pitched into my Sunday sailor-suit and squeezed into a pair of new boots and prickly stockings, I was bundled into the august presence.
When I entered he was straddling the fire-place carpet—the one which ought to have been magic—and waggling his coat-tails with his hands.
My father rose from his chair. “This is your great-uncle, Obadiah Spreckles. Come and be introduced, Dante.”
Up to now I had never heard of such a relative, but I came timidly forward and shook hands.
“A fine little fellow. A very fine little fellow, and the image of his mother,” said my great-uncle.
My father winced at the mention of my mother. My great-uncle spread his legs still wider and addressed me in a jerky important manner.
“Got a lot of dogs and cats. Got a goat and a cow. Got some hens. Got up early this morning. Saw the sun shining. Thought you might like to take a look at ’em, young man.”
Turning to my father, “Well, Cardover, I must be going. I’ll take good care of him and all that. I’m very busy—hardly a moment to spare.”
Before I knew what had happened, I had said good-bye to my father and was standing in the lane alone with my strange uncle.
When the door had banged and he knew that no grownup could see him, he changed his manner. His hurry left him. Placing his hands on my shoulders, he looked down into my face, laughing. “Now for a good time, old chap.”
At the end of the lane, where the posts blocked the passage, stood a little dog-cart and pony. My bag was stowed under the seat; at a click of the tongue from my uncle, the little beast started up like the wind.
It was a bright June morning. The sky was intensely blue and cloudless. The air was full of flower-fragrance and dreamy somnolence. I had seen so little of the world that everything was vivid to me, and touched with the vagrant poetry of romance. Tram-lines were streaks of silver down the streets, shops were palaces, cabbies gentlemen who plied their trade because they loved horses. Postmen going their rounds were philanthropists. Everyone was free, doing what he liked, and happy. In my child’s way I realized that neither my father nor myself was typical—not all little boys were locked in gardens and not all grown men slaved from morning to midnight. A great lump came into my throat. It would have been quite easy to cry, I was so glad.
Uncle Obadiah kept chatting away, telling me that the name of his little mare was Dollie and how he came to buy her. “Couldn’t afford it, you know, old chap. She costs me ten shillings a week for fodder. But when I saw that coster whacking her, and she looked up into my eyes when I went to stop him, I just couldn’t resist her. She seemed to be asking me to buy her, and I did. You should have heard what your Aunt Lavinia said.”
All the way along the streets he kept pointing with his whip to things that he thought were interesting. He engaged me in conversation—a thing which no one had thought worth doing. He asked me questions which were not senseless, and seemed to suppose that a child had reasoning powers. I was flattered, and began to surprise myself by the boldness of the things I said.
We rattled down the City Road, past the Mansion House, over London Bridge to the Elephant and Castle, and so out toward Dulwich till we came within sight of the Crystal Palace.
He began to slow down and grow pensive, as though working out a problem. “You see, she’ll have lunch ready. She’s expecting us. She’s very precise about the keeping of hours and won’t like it.” Then, “Hang it all. We may as well have a holiday now we’re out.”
Shaking loose the reins we started forward again, racing everything we met upon the road. My uncle’s high spirits returned. I don’t know where we went. I know there were woods and farm-houses. We stopped for lunch at a village-inn. It stood on the edge of a gorse-common. On the common a donkey was grazing. A flock of geese wandered across it. Boys were playing cricket against a tree-stump. Several great wagons, piled high with vegetables, were drawn up, the horses with their heads deep in nose-bags.
We had our meal in the tap-room with the wagoners. While they were present my uncle assumed his pontifical manner, addressing me as “young man” and them as “my good fellows.” He was very dignified, and benevolent, and haughty. They were much impressed. But when they had left and we were alone, he winked his eye at me solemnly, as much as to say “that was all pretense. Now let’s be natural,” and entered once more into my boy’s world of escapades and gilded shadows.
While the mare rested, we strolled round. In a hollow of the woods we came across a gipsy encampment. Three yellow caravans were drawn up together. A fire was burning in the open, over which an iron pot was suspended from a bough. A fierce, gaudily clad woman was bent above it stirring. She looked up at sound of our approach and the big ear-rings which dropped upon her neck jangled. Recognizing my uncle she nodded, and allowed us to sit down and watch her. Presently a rough man came out of the woods and threw himself down beside us. A young woman returned from fortune-telling, with her baby in a shawl across her shoulders. Bowls were brought out, and we had a second lunch from the great pot bubbling on the fire. Pipes were produced; the women smoked as well as the men. My uncle asked them where they had been and how they had fared since last he saw them. I listened intently to their answers; it seemed that they must have discovered the boundless garden of which I had only dreamt.
In the dog-cart on the homeward journey, I learnt that my uncle was acquainted with a number of queer people. “Everybody’s interesting, Dante,” he said, by way of excuse and explanation; “it’s never safe to despise anyone.”
In course of conversation he informed me that he had always longed to be a gipsy, but had never dared. When I asked why not, he answered shortly, “Your Aunt Lavinia—she’s not like us and wouldn’t understand.”
“But if there wasn’t any Aunt Lavinia—would you dare then?”
“I might have to,” he said, smiling grimly.
I didn’t know at all what he meant. He didn’t intend I should. After all these years those words, chance-spoken to a child, remain with me. They were as near to a confession that his wife supported him as was possible for a proud man.
My grandmother Cardover at Ransby, whose sister he had married, had a habit of nicknaming people with words of her own invention. She called my great-uncle The Spuffler. Whether the verb to Spuffle is Suffolk dialect or a word of her own coining, I have never been able to find out—but in its hostile sense it described him exactly.
A spuffler is a gay pretender, who hides his lack of success beneath the importance of his manners. Time is his one possession, and to him it is valueless; yet he tries to impress the world with its extreme rarity. A spuffler is always in a hurry; he talks loudly. He plays a game of make-believe that he is a person of far-reaching authority; he deceives others and almost deceives himself. He is usually small in stature and not infrequently bald-headed. In conversing he makes an imaginary lather with his hands and points his finger, at you. He may splutter and spit when he gets excited; but this is accidental and not necessary. The prime requisite is that he should affect the prosperity of a bank-president and be dependent on some quite obscure source for his pocket-money. Since I have lived in America I have become familiar with a word which is very similar—a bluffer. But a bluffer is a conscious liar and may be a humorist, whereas a spuffler does all in his power to deceive himself and is always in dead earnest.
It is a curious fact that the men whom I loved best as a child were all three incompetents in the worldly sense. They were clever, but they lacked the faculty of marketing their talents. They were boys in men’s bodies. With children they had the hearts of children and were delightful. With business men their light-heartedness counted as irresponsibility and was a drawback. In two out of the three cases named, the disappointments which resulted from continual defeat produced vices. Only my Uncle Obadiah, clad in his armor of unpierceable spuffle, rode through the ranks of life scatheless, with his sweetness unembittered and his integrity untarnished. But they were all good men.
Through the June twilight we returned to the outskirts of London. We turned in at a ruined gateway, and rode through a tunnel of overhanging trees where laburnum blazed through the dusk. A long rambling house grew up before us. At one time it must have been the country estate of some city-merchant. At sound of our wheels on the gravel, the front-door opened and a little lady stepped out to greet us. She was neat and speckless as a hospital nurse. Her body was slim and dainty as a girl’s. There was an air of decision and restraint about her, which was in direct opposition to my uncle’s hurried geniality.
When we had halted, she lifted me out of the dog-cart and carried me into the house to a large room at the back, which looked into a shadowy garden and a paddock beyond. It seemed older and more opulent than any house I had known as yet. There was so much space about it.
My uncle came in from stabling Dollie. “Well, Lavinia, I couldn’t get home to lunch. Very sorry, but it couldn’t be helped.”
He darted a look across at me, wondering how much I had told her. The secret was established; I knew that I must hold my tongue. I knew something else—that he was afraid of her. Throughout the meal he kept up a stream of strenuous pretense, discussing large plans aloud with himself. What they were I cannot now remember. I suppose my grandmother would have called them spuffle. Suddenly he rose from the table, saying that he had a lot of letters to answer and excused himself. But when I went into his room an hour later to bid him good-night, he was sitting before his desk, doing nothing in particular, biting the end of his pen.
When my aunt and I were left together I felt very lonely at first. She had sat so silent all through supper.
But when the door had closed, she turned to me laughing. I knew at once that, like most grown-ups when they are together, she had only been shamming. Now she was-going to be real.
“Did you have a good day in the country?” she asked. “Oh, he can’t deceive me; I could tell by the dust on the wheels.”
Then, realizing, I suppose, that it was not fair to pump me, she stopped asking questions and began to speak about myself. She drew up a chair to the window and sat with me in the dark with her arms about me. She seemed extraordinarily young, and when her silky gray hair touched my cheek as she bent above me, I wondered what had made my uncle say that she wasn’t like us and wouldn’t understand.
They each had their secret world of desire: his was the open road, where liberty was and lack of convention; hers was a home with fire-light and children. She was childless. Into both these worlds a little boy might enter. That night as I lay awake in bed I was puzzled. Why was it that grown people were so funny, and could never be real with one another?
It was my Uncle Obadiah who first opened my eyes to the mysteries of the animal world. In so doing he flung wide a door into happiness which many a wiser man has neglected. He derived nearly all his pleasures from the cheerful little things of life. A curious sympathy existed between him and the lower creation. All the cats and dogs in the district were his friends. He attributed to them almost human personalities, and gave them special names of his own choosing. It was a wonderful day for me when he first made me realize that all-surrounding was a kingdom of beasts and birds of which I, who had always been ruled, might be ruler.
In the paddock which lay between the garden and orchard, he had his own especial kingdom. His subjects were a cow, a goat, some very domestically inclined rabbits, about a hundred hens, and innumerable London sparrows. The latter he had trained to fly down from the trees and settle on his shoulders when he whistled.
Early in the morning we would go there together; the first duty of the day was to feed the menagerie. How distinctly I can recall those scenes—the dewy lawn, dappled golden by sunlight falling through leaves, the droning of bees setting forth from hives on their day’s excursion, the smoke slowly rising in the summer stillness from distant chimney-pots, and my uncle’s voice making excited guesses at how many eggs we should gather.
Eggs represented almost his sole contribution to the family income. Among his many Eldorados was the persistent belief that he could make his fortune at poultryraising. He would talk to me about it for hours as we worked in the garden, like a man inspired, making lightning calculations of the sums he would one day realize. He was continually experimenting and crossing breeds with a view to producing a more prolific strain of layers. He had a dream that one day he would produce the finest strain of fowl in the world. He would call it The Spreckles —his name would be immortalized. He would be justified in the eyes of Aunt Lavinia; and success would justify him in the eyes of all men.
Meanwhile my aunt declared that Obad spent more time and thought on that blest live-stock than he would ever see back in money. “Obad” was her contraction for his name; when she spoke to him sharply it sounded like her opinion of his character. But, in her own way, she was fond of him. Perhaps she had come to love his very failings as we do the faults of our friends. She was secretly proud of her own capacity; her thwarted mother-instinct found an outlet in the sense of his dependence. Nevertheless, the great fundamental cleavage lay between them: she lived in an anxious world where tradesmen’s bills required punctual payment; his world was a careless playground in which no defeat was ever final. She was stable in her moods, self-reliant and tenaciously courageous. He was forever changing: with adults he was like a house in mourning, shuttered, austere, grave; but should a youngster pass by, the blinds were jerked aside and a laughing face peered out.
His most important make-believe was that he was a benefactor of humanity. He held honorary positions of secretary to various philanthropic societies—The Society for the Housing of Gipsies; The Society for the Assisting of Decrepit. Ladies, etc. The positions were honorary because he could find no one willing to pay him. He worked for nothing because he was ashamed of being forever out of employment. He got great credit for his services among charitable people; the annual votes of thanks which he received helped to bolster up his self-respect throughout the year.
As I grew older and more observant, I used to wonder what had induced my aunt to marry him. Again it was my Grandmother Cardover who told me, “He spuffled Lavinia into it, my dear.” It seems that he caught her by the vast commercial and humanitarian possibilities of one of his many plans. When she awoke to the fact that her husband was not a man, but the incarnation of perpetual boyhood, she may have been disappointed, but she did not show it. Like a sensible woman, instead of crying her eyes out, she set about earning a livelihood. Uncle Obad had one marketable asset—his religion and the friends he gained by it. She took a decayed mansion in Charity Grove and established a Christian Boarding House. All her lodgers were young men, and by that proud subterfuge of poverty they were known as paying-guests.
The only Christian feature that I can remember about her establishment was that my uncle said grace before all meals at which the lodgers were present. At the midday meal, from which they were absent, it was omitted. The Christian Boarding House idea caught on with provincial parents whose sons were moving up to the city for the first time; it seemed to guarantee home morals. The sons soon perceived how matters stood and buried their agnostic prejudices beneath good feeding.
A general atmosphere of obligation was created by my aunt in her husband’s favor; she always spoke as though it was very kind of so public a man as Mr. Spreckles to squander his scanty privacy by letting paying-guests share his roof. She made such a gallant show with what she earned that everyone thought her husband had a private fortune, which enabled him to live in such style and give so much time to charitable works. She would hint as much in conversing with her friends, and invariably feigned the greatest pride and contentment in his activities. Thanks to his spuffling and her courage, there were not five people outside the family who ever guessed the true circumstances.
But when all is said, the real business of my Uncle Obad’s life was not philanthropy or running a boardinghouse, but poultry-raising. It was he who gave me the old white hen, without which I might never have met Ruthita. My money-making instincts were roused by his talk of the profits to be derived from eggs. I was enthusiastic to follow in his footsteps. To this end, at the hour of parting, when I was returning to Pope Lane, he gave me an ancient white Leghorn. He did not tell me she was ancient; he recommended her to me as belonging to a strain that could never get broody.
On the long drive home across London, my grief at leaving Charity Grove was partly mitigated by my new possession. It was a tremendous experience to feel that I had it in my power to make a live thing, even though it were but a hen, sad or happy. I discussed with Uncle Obad all the care that was necessary for egg-production. I got him to work out sums for me. If my hen were to lay an egg every other day throughout the year, how much money would I make by selling each egg to my father at a penny? I felt that the foundations of my financial fortunes were secure. The genuineness of my expectations made my uncle restless and ashamed; he knew that the hen had passed her first youth, and suggested that pepper in her food might help matters.
It was supper-time when I arrived home. I let the hen loose on the lawn to stretch her legs. My father was busy as usual, but he delayed a little longer over the meal in honor of my home-coming.
Some of the things I blurted out about my uncle must have revealed to him the comradeship that lay between us. He had risen from the table, but he sat down again. “You have known your uncle just a fortnight,” he said, “and yet you seem to have told him more about yourself than you have told me in all these years. Why is it, Dante? You’re not afraid of me? It can’t be that.” We were both of us shy. He reached over and took my hand, repeating, “It can’t be that.”
He knew that it was that and so did I. Yet he was hungry for my affection. He was making an unaccustomed effort to win my confidence and draw me out. But he spoke to me as though I was a grown man, whereas my uncle to get near me had become himself a child. If he had only talked to me about my white hen, I should have chattered. But I was awed by his embarrassment, and remained silent and unresponsive.
He went on to tell me that all the time he was away from me in his study he was working for my sake. “I want to have the money to give you a good start in life. I never had it. You must succeed where I have failed.”
I understood very little of what he was saying except that money and success seemed to be the same. That was the way Uncle Obad had talked about poultry-raising. I had no idea where money came from or how it was obtained. I must have asked him some question about it, for I recall one of the phrases he used in replying, “A man succeeds not by what he does, but by the things at which he has aimed.”
The red sun fell behind the trees while we talked, peered above my father’s shoulder, and sank out of sight. It was dusk when I ran into the garden.
I felt prisoned again—the door into the lane was locked and the walls were all about me. The lamp in my father’s study was kindled and flung a bar of light across the shrubbery. He was working to get the money that I might be allowed to work. I didn’t like the idea. I didn’t want to work. Why couldn’t one drive always through the sunshine, pulling up at taverns and sitting beside gipsy camp-fires?
I commenced to search for the white hen and so forgot these economic complications. Here and there I came across places where she had been scrabbing, but I could see her nowhere. At last I discovered her roosting on the branch of an apple-tree which grew close by the wall at the end of the garden. I spoke to her kindly, but she refused to come down. She was too high up for me to reach her from the ground. When I scattered grain, she blinked at me knowingly, as much as to say, “Surely you don’t think I’m as big a fool as that.” It seemed to me that she was grieving for all the cocks and hens to whom she had said farewell. She was embittered against me because she was solitary. I explained to her that, if she’d lay eggs, I’d buy her a husband. She remained skeptical of my good intentions. There was nothing for it—but to climb. I could hear the leaves shaking and the apples bumping on the ground; my hand was stretched out to catch her when, with a hoarse scream of defiance, she flapped her wings and disappeared into the great nothingness over our neighbor’s wall.
Unless the white hen had blazed the trail, I might have remained in the walled-in garden for years without ever daring to discover a way out. I was too excited at this crisis to measure my temerity. In my fear of losing her I did a thing undreamt of and unplanned—I swung myself from the branch on to the top of the brickwork and dropped on the other side. A bed of currant bushes broke my fall. I got upon my feet scratched and dazed.
The first thing I saw was a long stretch of grass bordered by flowers. At the end of it was a small two-storied house, gabled and with verandas running round it. In one of the upper-story windows a light was burning; all the rest was in darkness. In the middle of the lawn I could see my white hen strutting in a very stately manner. I stole up behind her, but she began clucking. In my fear of discovery, I lost all patience and commenced to chase her vigorously. I ran her at last into a bed of peas, where she became entangled. I had her in my arms when I heard a voice, “Who are you?”
Turning suddenly, I found that a little girl was standing close behind me.
“My name’s Dante.”
“And mine’s Ruthita.”
We stared at one another through the dusk. I had never spoken to a little girl and for some reason, difficult to explain, commenced to tremble. It was not fear that caused it, but something strong and emotional.
“Dante,” she whispered. “How pretty!” Then, “Where do you live?”
I jerked my thumb in the direction of the wall.
“You climbed over?”
I nodded. She laughed softly. “Could you do it again? Oh, do come often, often. I’m so lonely, and we could play together.”
Just then the voice of Hetty began to call in the distance,
“Dan-tee, Dan-tee, where are you? Come to bed di-rectly.”
Her voice drew nearer. She was searching for me, and passed quite close to us on the other side of the wall. We could hear the indignant rustle of her skirt and her heavy breathing with bending down so low to peer under bushes.
Ruthita came near to me so that I had my first glimpse of her eyes in the dark—eyes which were always to haunt me. Her hands were clasped against her throat in eagerness—she seemed to be standing tiptoe. “Don’t tell,” she pleaded. “It’s our secret. But come again to-morrow.”
I promised.
She watched me scrambling for a foot-hold in the wall. When I sat astride it, just before I vanished, she waved her hand.
The white hen had lost her importance in my thoughts;
I bundled her into the tool-house, and then surrendered to Hetty. Hetty was very cross. She wanted to discover where I had been hiding, but I wouldn’t tell her. When she left me, I crept out of bed and knelt beside the window for a long time gazing down into the blackness.
Far away a bird was calling. The tall trees waved their arms. The moon leapt out of clouds, and the branches reached up to touch her with their fingers. A little beam of light struggled free and ran about the garden. I tried to tell myself it was Ruthita.
The garden seemed less of a prison now—rather a place of magic and enchantment.
Next morning I was up early. Spiders’ webs were still crystal with dew in the garden; they had not yet been tattered by the sun lifting up the flowers’ heads. I had no hope that I would see Ruthita, but I wanted to peep across the wall while everyone was in bed and there was no one to observe me.
I had covered half the distance to the apple-tree, when I heard a sound of voices. They came from behind the tool-house. I fisted my hands and listened. A man and woman were conversing, but in such low tones that I could hear nothing that was said. I made sure they were thieves who had heard about my hen, and had come to rob me. I looked back at the windows of our house. All the blinds were lowered; everyone was sleeping. There was no sign of life anywhere, save the hopping of early risen blackbirds between bushes in search of early risen worms. With a quickly beating heart I crouched beside the wall, advancing under cover of a row of sunflowers. Looking out from between their stalks, I discovered a man sitting on a wheelbarrow; a woman was balanced on his knee with her arm about his neck. The woman was Hetty and the man was our gardener.
Hetty was wearing her starched print-dress, ready to begin her morning’s work. She wasn’t a bit scornful or solemn, but was laughing and wriggling and tossing her head. She seemed quite a different person from the stern, moral housemaid, God’s intimate friend, who told me everything that God had thought about me through the day when at night she was putting me to bed. Up to that moment it had never occurred to me that she was pretty, but now her cheeks were flushed and the sun was in her rumpled hair. While I watched, our gardener drew her close and kissed her. She squeaked like a little mouse, and pretended to struggle to free herself.
I never dreamt that grown people ever behaved like that. I hadn’t the faintest notion what she was doing or why she was doing it; but I knew that it was something secret, and silly, and beautiful. I also had the feeling that it was something pleasant and wrong, just like the things I most enjoyed doing, for which I was punished. I wanted to withdraw and tried to; but tripped over the sunflowers and fell.
Hetty and the gardener sprang apart. I knew what was going to happen next; I had caught them being natural—they were going to commence shamming. The gardener became very busy, piling his tools into the barrow. Hetty, talking in her cold and distant manner, said to him, “And don’t forget the lettuce for breakfast, John. Master’s very partic’lar about it.”
I came from my hiding, thrusting my hands deep in my pockets, as though I kept my courage there and was frightened of its dropping out. The gardener’s back was towards me, but he caught sight of me from between his legs. He just stopped like that with his face growing redder, his mouth wide-open, and stared. Hetty didn’t look as pretty as she had been looking, but before she could say anything I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I came to see my fowl—— but I won’t tell.”
“Bless ’is little ’eart,” cried John; “I thought it were ’is Pa, I wuz that scared.”
Hetty knelt down beside me and rocked me to and fro half-hysterically, making me promise again and again that I would never tell.
“Was you doin’ somethin’ wrong?” I asked. “What was you doin’?”
They looked foolishly at one another.
All that day they kept me near them on one pretext or another, afraid to let me get away from them. I had never known them so sensible and obliging; they did all kinds of things for me that they had never done before. After breakfast, while Hetty was dusting, John built me a little fowl-run. In the afternoon, while he was cutting the grass, Hetty sat with me beneath the apple-tree and told me what life meant. She spoke in whispers like a conspirator, and all the time that she was talking, I could hear Ruthita humming just the other side of the wall.
As I understood it, this was what she told me. When: you first get here, here being the world, you own nothing; and know nothing. Then, as you grow up, you know something but still own nothing. That’s why you’re ordered about and told not to do all the things that you want most to do. You can only please yourself when nobody’s looking and must obey nearly everyone until you get money. There are several ways of getting it, and the pleasantest is sweet-hearting.
Here I interrupted her to inquire what was sweet-hearting. “Well,” she said, turning her face away and looking dreamily at John, who was pushing the mower across the lawn, “sweet-heartin’s what you saw me and John doin’.’”
“Does it always have to be done before breakfast?”
She threw back her head and laughed, swaying backwards and forwards. Then she became solemn and answered, “I ’ave to do it before breakfast ‘cause I’m a servant. But I does it of evenin’s on my night out.”
She went on to tell me that sweet-hearting was the first step towards freedom and money. The second step was a. honeymoon, which consisted in going away with a person of the other sex for a week to some place where you weren’t known. When you came back to the people who knew you, they said you were married. So marriage was the third and last step. After that you were given a house, and money, and all the things for which you had always yearned. You had other people, who were like you were before you went sweet-hearting, to take your orders, and run your errands, and say “Sir” or “Madam.” Sometimes when you came back from your honeymoon, you found children in the house.
So through that long summer’s afternoon beneath the apple-tree, with the leaves gently stirring and the sound of Ruthita humming across the wall, I gained my first lesson in sexology and domestic economics. It solved a good many problems by which I had been puzzled. For instance, why Uncle Obad had a pony and I hadn’t; why I was sent to bed always at the same hour and my father went only when he chose; why big people could lose their tempers without being wicked, whereas God was always angry when I did it. There was only one thing that I couldn’t understand: why two boys couldn’t go on a honeymoon together, or two girls, and have the same results follow. Except for this, the riddle of society was now solved as far as I was concerned. Marriage seemed a thousand times more wonderful than the magic carpet.
I was tremendously interested in the possibilities of sweet-hearting and promised to help Hetty all I could. In return she declared that, when she was married, she would persuade my father to let her take me out of the garden.
That evening I crept over the wall and found Ruthita waiting. She was a slim dainty little figure, clad in a short white dress. She had great gray eyes, and long black hair and lashes. Her voice was soft and caressing, like the twittering of a bird in the ivy when one wakens on a summer morning. I told her in hurried whispers what I had discovered. It was all news to her. She slipped her hand into mine while I spoke and nestled closer.
“Little boy,” she whispered when I had ended, “you are funny! You come climbing over the garden-wall and you tell me everything.”
An old man came out of the house and began to pace up and down the walks. His head was bent forward on his chest and he had a big red scar on his forehead. A cloak hung loosely from his shoulders. He carried a stick in his hand on which he leant heavily. Ruthita said he was her grandfather. Soon he began to call for her, and she had to go to him.
Little by little I learnt her story. Her grandfather was a French general. He had fought in the Franco-Prussian War until the Fall of the Empire and Proclamation of the Republic. Shortly after the flight of the Empress Eugénie he had come to England in disgust. His son, Ruthita’s father, had stayed behind and been cut to pieces in the Siege of Paris. Ruthita’s mother was an Englishwoman. She had never recovered from the shock of her husband’s death. It was her light that I saw burning in the bedroom window of evenings. They were almost poor now and lived in great seclusion. The grandfather had dropped his rank and was known as plain Monsieur Favart. So Ruthita was even a closer prisoner than myself.
What did we talk about in those first stolen hours of’ childish friendship? I asked her once when we were grown up, but she could not tell me. Perhaps we did not say much. We felt together—felt the mystery of the enchanted unseen world. Why, the pigeons strutting on the housetops had seen more than we had; and they were not half as old as we were! They spread their wings, soared up into the clouds, and vanished. We told one another stories of where they went; but long before the stories were ended Monsieur Favart would come searching for Ruthita or the voice of Hetty would ring through the dusk, calling me to bed. Then I would lie awake and imagine myself a pigeon, and finish the story to myself.
The great beauty of our meetings was that they were undiscovered. It was always I who went to Ruthita—she was nothing of a climber, and the red bricks and green moss would have left tell-tale marks upon her dress. We had a nest of straw behind the currant bushes. Here, with backs against the hard wall and fingers digging in the cool damp earth, we would sit and wonder, talking in whispers, of all the mysteries that lay before us. Ruthita had vague memories of Paris, of soldiers marching and the beating of drums. Sometimes she would sing French songs to me, of which she would translate the meaning between each verse. My contribution to our little store of knowledge was limited to what I have written in these few chapters.
I don’t know at what stage in the proceedings our great idea occurred. It must have been in the early autumn, for the evenings were drawing in and often it was chilly. I had been talking about Hetty, when suddenly I exclaimed, “Why can’t we do that?”
“Do what?” she questioned.
“Get married!”
Then I reminded her of the extreme simplicity of marriage as explained by our housemaid. All we had to do was to slip out of the garden for a few days, and then come back. We should find a house ready for us. Perhaps I should have a pony like Uncle Obad, and, instead of dolls, Ruthita would have real babies. It was the real babies that caught her fancy. Because of her mother, she needed a little persuading. “What will she do wivout me?”
“And what would she do if you’d never been borned?” I said.
Ruthita had five shillings in her money-box. I had only a shilling; for the white hen, in spite of pepper, had failed to lay any eggs. Six shillings seemed to us a fortune—ample to provide for the honeymoon of two small children.
The gate from Monsieur Favart’s garden was never locked: that was evidently our easiest way out.
What did we hope to find that autumn morning when we slipped through that narrow door, forsaking the walls? It was all a guess to us—what lay beyond; but we knew that it must be something splendid. Of one thing we were quite certain: that at the end of a few days we should have grown tall; we should return to Pope Lane a man and woman. The little house would be there waiting, magically built in our hours of absence. Perhaps work had been begun already upon the babies that Ruthita wanted.
For the first time I had kissed her that morning, awkwardly and shyly, feeling that somehow it was proper. At any rate, Hetty and our gardener always kissed when they got the chance and no one was looking.
Monsieur Favart’s door swung to behind us. We ran as quickly as our legs would carry us. The fear of pursuit was upon us. Pinned to the pillow of each of our empty beds was a sheet of paper on which was scrawled, “Gon to git Maried,”.
When at last we halted for breath, we seemed to have covered many miles of our journey. We were standing in a long, quaint street. On one side flowed a river, railed in so we couldn’t get near it. On the other side stood an irregular row of substantial houses, for the most part creeper-covered. No faces appeared in the houses’ windows. No one passed up or down the street. It was as yet too early. It seemed that the world was empty, and that we and the birds were its only tenants. We turned to the right, half-walking, half-running. I held Ruthita’s hand tightly; the feel of it gave me courage.
We must have made a queer pair in the mellow autumn sunlight. Ruthita wore a white dress with a red cloak flung over it. On her head was a yellow straw poke-bonnet, which made her face look strangely small. She had on black shoes, fastened by a single strap, and black and white socks which, when she ran, kept dropping.
We had no idea of direction, but just hurried on with a vague idea that we must keep moving forward.
Presently we came across a drover, driving a flock of bewildered, tired sheep. He was a lame man. He had an inflamed red face and one of his eyes was out. When he wanted to make his flock move faster, he jabbed viciously at their tails with a pointed stick and started hopping from side to side, barking like a dog. He passed right by us, saying nothing, waving a red flag in his left hand with which he would sometimes mop his forehead. We followed. We followed him through streets of shops all shuttered; we followed him up a broad-paved hill; we followed him down a winding lane to a bridge across a river, beyond which lay marshes. Then he turned and called to us.
“Little master, where be you goin’ and why be you followin’?”
To the country, I told him, to find the forest. I wanted to show Ruthita the unwalled garden through which my uncle had led me.
The man screwed up his one eye, and gazed upon us shrewdly. “You be wery small to be goin’ to the forest. But so be you’re travellin’ along my route you might as well ’elp an old feller.”
We made our bargain with him. We would help him with his sheep, if he would guide us to the forest. We ran beside him across the short, crisp grass, imitating his cries to prevent the sheep from scattering. He told us that he had driven them from Epping up to London, but that times were cruel bad and the farmer who employed him had been unable to sell them. “It’s cruel ’ard on a man o’ my years,” he kept saying, “cruel ’ard.”
When I asked him what was cruel hard, he shook his-head as though language failed to express his wrongs: “The world in gineral.”
There was one of the sheep whose leg was broken. It kept lagging behind the rest, which made the man jab at it furiously. Ruthita’s eyes filled with tears of indignation when she saw it. She stamped her little foot and insisted that he should not do it. The man pushed back his battered hat and scratched his forehead, staring at her. He seemed embarrassed and tried to excuse himself. “Humans is humans, miss, and sheep is sheep. It makes an old chap, made in Gawd’s h’image, kind o’ bitter to ’ave to spend his days a-scampering after a crowd o’ silly quadrupeds. But if yer don’t like it, I won’t do it.”
The river wound round about us. Sometimes it would leave us, but always it came flowing after us, in great circles as though lonely and eager for our company. On its banks stood occasional taverns, gaily painted, with wooden tables set before them. The grass about them was trodden bare, showing that they were often populous; but now they were deserted. Big barges lay sleepily at anchor, basking in the sun.
The drover commenced speaking again. “I’m an old soldier, I am. I lost me eye and got lamed in the wars; and now they makes game o’ my h’infirmities and calls me——”
The name they called him was evidently too dreadful. He sighed heavily.
“Poor man,” said Ruthita, slipping her hand into his horny palm. “What do they call you?”
“Old-Dot-and-Carry-One, ’cause o’ the way I walks. It’s woundin’. It ’urts me feelin’s, after the way I’ve served me country.”
We seated ourselves by the muddy river-bank, while the sheep grazed and rested. Far in the distance trees broke the level of the sky-line, so I knew that we were going in the right direction and our guide was to be trusted. Dot-and-Carry-One produced a loaf of bread from his pocket and, dividing it into three pieces, shared it with us.
Little by little he gave us his confidence, telling us of the world as he knew it. “It’s a place o’ wimen and war. To the h’eye wot’s prejoodiced there’s nothin’ else in it. But your h’eye ain’t prejoodiced, and don’t yer never let it git so, young miss and master. I’ve seen lots. I wuz in the Crimea and I wuz in h’India, but I never yet seen the country where a man can’t be ’appy if he wants. There’s music, an’ there’s nature, an’ there’s marriage. Now music for h’instance.”
He produced from his ragged coat a penny whistle and trilled out a tune upon it. While he played he looked as merry a fellow as one could hope to meet in a day’s march. The sheep stopped cropping to gaze at us. We clapped our hands and asked him to go on.
He shook his head and replaced his pipe. “Then there’s nature. Just now I wuz complainin’. But supposin’ I do drive sheep back and forth, how many men wuz up in Lun’non to see the sunrise this mornin’? I never miss it, ’ceptin’ when I’m drunk. I knows the seasons o’ the bloomin’ flowers, Gawd bless ’em, and can h’imitate the birds’ songs and call ’em to me. That’s somethin’. An’ if I don’t sleep in a stuffy bed, which would be better, for me rheumatics, I can count the stars and have the grass for coverin’. And then there’s marriage——”
He paused. His eye became moist and his face gentle. “I ’ad a little nipper and a girl once.”
That was all. We wanted to ask him questions about marriage, but he pulled his hat down over his eyes and lay back, refusing to answer.
Ruthita and I guarded the sheep and kept them from straying, while he slept. We made chains out of flowers, and, taking off our shoes and socks, paddled in the water. Then Ruthita grew tired and, leaning against my shoulder, persuaded me to tell her the story of where we were going. Before the tale was ended, her eyes were closed and her lips were parted. My arms began to ache terribly; I wondered whether it was with holding her or because I was growing. I hoped it was because I was growing.
Dot-and-Carry-One woke up. He looked at the sun. “Time we wuz h’orf,” he remarked shortly.
We had not gone far along the river-bank when we came to a tavern on our side of the water. Ruthita said that she was thirsty, so we entered. The drover spread himself out on a bench and, soliciting my invitation, called for “a pint of strong.” Good beer, he said, never hurt any man if taken in moderation.
We must have sat for the best part of the morning, watching him toss off pot after pot while we gritted our feet on the sanded floor. For each pot he thanked us, taking off his battered hat to Ruthita and blowing away the froth from the top in our honor. He explained to all and sundry that we wuz his little nipper and girl wot he had losht. He losht us years ago, so long he could hardly remember. The tavern-girl entered into a discussion with him, saying that we could not be more than nine and that he was at least seventy. He became angry, demanding whether a man of seventy hadn’t lived long enough to know his own children, and what bloody indifference it made to her, anyway.
It occurred to me that it might be just possible that he really was Ruthita’s father. I had no idea what dying meant. I had been told that the dead were not really dead—only gone. So I thought that death might mean not being with your friends in the garden. I half expected to find my mother in the forest, just as I had hoped to bring her back on the magic carpet. So when Dot-and-Carry-One was so positive, I asked him if he had heard of the Siege of Paris. He was in a mood when he had heard of everything, been everywhere, and had had every important person for a friend. Of course he had heard of the Siege of Paris; if it hadn’t been for him, to-day there wouldn’t be any Paris. When I told him of General Favart, he wept copiously and called for another pot.
The tavern-girl told him that that must be his last, and he said that it was cruel ’ard the way an old soldier were persecooted. When we had paid for his drinks, we discovered that we had only three shillings and eightpence left of our little stock of money. The tavern-girl said we were poor h’innercent lambs and she should set the police on him. The drover told her that spring, not autumn, was the lambing season.
All through the long and drowsy afternoon we wandered on. Dot-and-Carry-One seemed in no great hurry to reach his destination. Beer had had a transfiguring effect upon him. He lurched along jauntily, his hat cocked sideways on his head, winking with his one good eye at any girls we met in our path. His cares and sense of injustice were forgotten. He told us tales of his wars, painting tremendous and bloody scenes of carnage. He slew whole armies that afternoon, and at the end of each battle he was left alone, wounded but dauntless, with the dead ’uns piled high about him. He went into grisly details of the manner of their dying, and stopped now and then to show us with his stick the different ways in which you could kill a man with a sword. Cockney lovers on the river gaped after us, resting on their oars. They saw nothing but an intoxicated old ruffian in charge of a flock of sheep and two small children. But we were in hero-land, and Dot-and-Carry-One was our giant-killer.
When Ruthita got tired, he hoisted her on to his shoulders, where she rode straddling his neck, with her hands clasped about his forehead. The forest, like a green silent army, with its flags unfurled marched nearer. The sun sank lower behind us; our long lean shadows ran on before us till they lay across the backs of the sheep.
We left the marshes and entered on a white dusty road. Carriages and coaches and wagons kept passing, which made the sheep bewildered. They kept turning this way and that, bleating pitifully. Ruthita had to walk again, while Dot-and-Carry-One barked and waved his stick to keep the flock from scattering. The night came on and we were hungry. At last Ruthita’s legs gave out and she sat down by the roadside crying, saying that she was frightened and could go no further. Then Dot-and-Carry-One drove his flock into the forest, and borrowed a shilling from me and left us, promising to go and buy food with it.
The sheep lay down about the roots of the trees, and we pillowed our heads against their woolly backs. The silence became intense; the last of the twilight vanished. I was glad when Ruthita put her arms round my neck, for I too was nervous though I would not own it. We waited for the drover to return, and in waiting slept.
I woke with a start. The moon was shining; long paths of silver had been hewn between the trees. The fleece of the kneeling sheep was sparkling and dewy. Far down one of the paths I could see a limping figure approaching. He was shouting and singing and stabbing at his shadow. As he came nearer I could distinctly see that he held a bottle in his hand. Something warned me. I roused Ruthita, telling her to make no sound. We ran till we were breathless and the shouting could be no more heard.
Trees grew wider apart where we had halted. Far away a flare of light shone up; as we watched we saw that people passed before it. Hand-in-hand we advanced. Something groaned quite near us. We commenced to run, but, looking back, saw that it was only a tethered donkey. We came to the outskirts of the crowd. We wanted company badly. Burrowing under arms and legs we made our way to the front. A great linen sheet was stretched between two trees. Set up on iron rings before it was a line of cocoanuts. On either side flaring naphtha-lamps were burning. About thirty yards away from the sheet a woman was serving out wooden balls. Between the sheet and the cocoanuts a man was darting up and down, dodging the balls as they were thrown and returning them. The man and woman were calling out together, “Two shies a penny. Two shies a penny. Every ball ’its a cocoanut. Down she goes. ’Ere you are, sir. Two for the children and one for the missis. Walk up. Walk up. Two shies a penny.”
Whether a cocoanut went down or stayed up, they continued to assert in a hoarse, cracked monotone that it had fallen. Their faces were dripping with perspiration. The man returned the balls and the woman served them out again mechanically. The throwers took off their coats and hurled furiously, to the accompaniment of the shrill staccato chatter of the crowd.
Ruthita and I stood blinking in the semi-darkness, our eyes dazzled by the lamps. Suddenly I called out, and pushing my way between the throwers, commenced running up the pitch. The man behind the cocoanuts, realizing that the balls had ceased coming, stopped dodging and looked up to see what was the matter. Just then an impatient thrower hurled a ball which went whizzing over me, missed the cocoanuts, and hit the man on the head, splitting his eyebrow. I was terribly afraid that he would topple over and lie still, like Dot-and-Carry-One had told me men did in battle. Instead of that, when I came within reach of him he clutched me angrily by the shoulder, asking me what the devil I meant. The blood, creeping down his face in a slow trickle, made him look twice as fierce as when I had first met him with my Uncle Obad by the gipsy campfire. He drew me near to one of the lamps, smearing his forehead with the back of his hand. He recognized me.
“Oh, it’s you, you young cuss, is it?”
Just then the fortune-telling girl came up, whom I had seen before with the baby on her back. She was carrying Ruthita.
“Here, Lilith,” he said, speaking gruffly, “take ’im to your tent.”
Then he commenced again, “Two shies a penny. Two shies a penny. Every ball ’its a cocoanut. Down she goes,” etc.
I was glad to creep into the cool darkness, clinging close to Lilith’s skirt. I was a little boy now, with scarcely a desire to be a husband. When I looked across my shoulder the game was in full swing. The woman was serving out the balls; the crowd was paying its pennies; the man was dodging up and down before the sheet, avoiding the balls and returning them. I heaved a sigh of relief; then he had not succumbed—he was not yet a dead’un.
That night in the tent I slept soundly, with the fortuneteller’s arm about me and my head nearly touching Ruthita’s across her breast. The soft rise and fall of her bosom made me dream of my mother.
Glimmerings of the early autumn sunrise crept in through holes in the canvas. I raised myself cautiously and gazed at the woman who had cared for me. I call her a woman, for she seemed to me a woman then; she was about seventeen—little more than a girl. Her face was gentle and passionate; her jet black hair streamed down in a torrent across her tawny throat and breast. She smiled in her sleep and murmured to herself; the arm which clasped Ruthita kept twitching, as though to draw her nearer. While I watched, her eyes opened; she said nothing, but lay smiling up at me. Presently she put her free arm about my neck, and drew me down so my cheek rested against hers. She turned her head and I saw that, though she looked happy, there were tears on her long dark lashes. Her lips moved and I knew what she wanted. Putting my arms about her, I kissed her good-morning.
Rousing Ruthita, she raised the flap of the tent and we slipped out. Mists were drifting across the woodland, pink and golden where the sunrise caught them, but lavender in the shadows. It was a quiet fairy world, like the face of a sleeping woman, which was pale with dew upon the forehead and copper and bronze with the streaming hair of faded foliage. Outside the door the grass was blackened in a circle where a gipsy fire had burnt. The yellow caravan stood near. In and out the bracken rabbits were hopping, nibbling at the cool green turf. The gipsy’s lurcher watched them, crouched with his nose between his paws, waiting his opportunity to steal closer. Lilith set about gathering brushwood for the fire and we helped her.
“Ruthie, am I taller?”
She eyed me judicially and shook her curls. “No. But p’raps we shall grow tall quite suddenly, when the honeymoon is ended.”
I was beginning to have my doubts of that, so I changed the subject. “Lilith has a baby. She carries it on her back.”
“Where does she keep it now?” asked Ruthita. “It wasn’t on her back last night in the tent.” Then she commenced to hop about like an eager, excited little bird. “I shall ask her. I shall ask her, Dante, and she’ll let me hold it.”
But when we ran to Lilith her back was straight and unbulgy. And when we asked her where she kept the baby, she dropped the bundle of sticks she was carrying and sank to her knees, with her hands pressed against her breast. She swayed to and fro, with her eyes closed, muttering in a strange language. Then she bent forward, kissing the ground and chanting words which sounded like, “Coroon! Coroon! Oh, dearie, come back. Come back!”
We heard the door of the caravan open. Lilith sprang to her feet and picked up her sticks as though ashamed of what she had been doing. The fierce man stood on the caravan steps. He strode across the grass to Lilith and laid his hand on her shoulder with a rough gesture which was almost kindly. “The wind blows, sister,” he said, “and it sinks behind the moon. The flowers grow, sister, and they fall beneath the earth. Where they have gone there is rest.”
He passed on, whistling to his lurcher. The gaudily dressed woman came out; while he was gone, the fire was kindled and breakfast was prepared.
During breakfast a great discussion arose in their strange language. When it was ended, Lilith took us with her into the tent. She closed the flap carefully and began to undress us. While she was doing it she explained matters. She told us that the man was too busy just now with the cocoa-nut-shies to spare time to go and fetch my uncle to us. In a few days he would go, but meanwhile we must stay with them in camp. She said that they were good gipsies, but no one would believe it if they saw us with them. They would have to make us like gipsy children so no one would suspect. So she daubed our bodies all over a light brown color, and she stained my hair because it was flaxen. Then she gave us ragged clothes, without shoes or stockings, and dug a hole in the ground and hid ours. She was curious to know what had brought us to the forest; but we would not tell. We had the child’s feeling that telling a grown-up would break the spell—we should never be married then, the little house would never be built, and none of the other pleasant things would happen. We should have to go back to the garden again and live always within walls.
Those days spent in our first dash for freedom stand out in my memory as among the happiest. I ate of the forbidden fruit of romance and reaped no penalties. Ruth-ita cried at times for her mother; but I had only to remind her of the babies, she would have, and her courage returned.
The smell of the camp-fire is in my nostrils as I write; I can feel again the cool nakedness of unpaved woodlands beneath my feet and open skies above my head. I see Ruthita unsubdued and bare-legged, plunging shoulder-high into golden bracken, shouting with natural gladness, followed by the gipsy boys and girls. We tasted life in its fullness for the first time, she and I, on that fantastic honeymoon of ours. We felt in our bones and flesh the simple ecstasy of being alive—the wide, sweet cleanness of the open world. And remembering, I wonder now, as I wondered then, why men have toiled to learn everything except to be happy, and have labored with so much heaviness to build cities when the tent and the camp-fire might be theirs.
Books, schoolmasters, and universities have taught me much since then. They have spattered the windows of my soul with knowledge to prevent my looking out. Luckily I discovered what they were doing and stopped the rascals. But I knew more things that were essentially godlike before they commenced their work. The major part of what they taught me was a weariness to the flesh in the learning, and a burden to the brain when learnt. Of how many days of shouting and sunshine they robbed me with their mistaken kindness. Of what worth is a Euclid problem at forty, when compared with the memory of a childhood’s day of flowers, and meadows, and happiness?
For twenty years my father sat prisoner at a desk, unbeautifully and doggedly driving his pen across countless pages that he might be able to buy me wisdom. With all his years of sacrifice and my years of laborious study, he gave me nothing which was half so valuable as that which a boy of nine stole for himself in his ignorance in the forest. There I learnt that the sound of wind in trees is the finest music in the world; that the power to feel in one’s own body the wholesome beauties of nature is more rewarding than wealth; that to know how to abandon oneself to the simple kindness of living people is a wiser knowledge than all the elaborate and codified wisdom of the dead.
We roamed the countryside with Lilith by day, listening to her telling fortunes. By night we slept in her arms in the tent. Only one thing was forbidden us—to speak with strangers. But there was one man who recognized us in spite of that. It was on the first morning. We were sitting by the side of the road with the fierce man; he was showing us how to make a snare for a rabbit. We were so interested that we did not notice a flock of sheep approaching until they were quite close. Then I looked up and caught the eye of old Dot-and-Carry One burning in his head, glaring out at us as if it would fly from its socket. He would have spoken had he dared, but just then the fierce man saw him. He sank his chin upon his breast and, for all that he was “a human, made in Gawd’s h’image,” limped away into the distance in a cloud of dust, as meekly sheepish as any of the sheep he followed.
Ruthita spent a lot of her time in searching for Lilith’s baby. She wanted so badly to hold it. We felt quite certain that she had hidden it somewhere, as she had our clothes. Even if it was a dead’un, it was absurd to suppose that a person so clever as to tell fortunes should not know where it might be found. We determined to watch her. We thought that if her baby was really dead and she went to it by stealth, then by following her we should be able to find my mother and, perhaps, Ruthita’s father. Ruthita had already abandoned the dread that Dot-and-Carry-One had had anything to do with her entrance into the world.
Naphtha-lamps were extinguished. The crowd of merrymakers had departed. I was roused by Lilith stirring. Very gently she eased her arm from under me. I kept my eyes tightly shut and feigned that I was undisturbed. Cautiously she pulled aside the flap of the tent and stole out. I rose to my feet when she had gone. Ruthita was sleeping soundly, her small face cushioned in her hand. Without waking her I followed.
Near to the caravan the camp-fire smoldered, making a splash of red like a pool of blood in the blackness. As I watched, it was momentarily blotted out by a moving shadow. The lurcher shook himself and growled. Lilith’s voice reached me, telling him to lie down. A bank of cloud lay across the moon, but I knew the way she went by the rustle of the fallen leaves, turning beneath her tread. I followed her down the glades of the forest, peering after her, glancing behind me at the slightest sound, timid lest I might lose her, timid lest I might lose myself, stealing on tiptoe into the unknown with sobbing, stifled breath. The ground began to descend into a hollow at the bottom of which a pond lay black and sullen. A tall beech stood at its edge, spreading out its branches and leaning across it as if to hide it. The leaves beneath her footsteps ceased to stir.
When I could no longer hear her, a horrible, choking sense of solitude took hold of me. What if she had entered into the tree and should never return? Without her, how should I find my way back? I crept as near the pond as I dared, and crouched among the dead leaves, trembling. The water began to splash. “Someone,” I thought, “is rising out of it.” Little waves, washing in the rushes, caused the brittle reeds to shake and shiver, whispering in terror among themselves. A low sing-song muttering commenced. It came from the middle of the pond. I tried to stop breathing. It seemed quite possible that the baby was hidden there.
The bank of cloud trailed across the sky. The yellow harvest moon dipped, broad and smiling, into the latticework of boughs which roofed the dell.
In the middle of the pond, knee-deep, Lilith stood. She had cast aside her Romany rags and rose from the water tall and splendid. Her tawny body was a gold statue glistening beneath the moon. Her night-black hair fell sheer from her shoulders like a silken shadow. She was bending forward, peering eagerly beneath the water’s surface, whispering hurried love-words. Of all that she said I could only catch the words, “Coroon. Coroon. Come back, little dearest. Come back.” She laughed gladly and held out her arms, as though there drifted up towards her that which she sought. I could see nothing, for her back was towards me. Still lower she bent till her lips kissed the water’s surface; plunging her arms in elbow-deep, she seemed to support the thing which she saw there.
“Lilith, oh Lilith!” I cried.
She started and turned. I feared she was going to be angry. “Show me my Mama,” I whispered.
She put her finger to her lips, and beckoned, and nodded.
Hastily I undressed, tossing my rags beside hers. I waded out to where she was standing. The night air was chilly. She gave me her hand and drew me to her. Placing me before her, so that I could gaze into the pond like a mirror, she chanted over and over a low, wild tune. She peered above my shoulders. At first I could see only my own reflection and hers. Then, as she sang, the water moved, the inky blackness reddened; I forgot everything, the cold, Lilith, my terror, and lived only in that which was coming.
In the bottom of the pool, infinitely distant, a picture grew. It came so near that I thought it would touch me; I became a part of it. I saw my mother. She was seated by a fire in an unlighted room. A little boy lay in her lap with his arms about her. She glanced up at me smiling faintly, gazing into my eyes directly. For a moment I saw her distinctly, and caught again the fragrance of violets that clung about her. The water rippled and the vision died away in smoke and cloud. Lilith gathered me to her cold wet breast and carried me to the shore and dressed me. Without knowing why, I knew that this was a happening that I must not tell.
We returned to camp. Woods were stirring. Shadows were thinning. Dawn was breaking. The coldness in the air became intense. We threw branches on the fire and blew the smoldering embers, till sparks began to fly and twigs to crackle. Lilith sat with me in her arms, and hushed and mothered me. I was not ashamed; for five years I had wanted just that. I was glad that she understood. Ruthita could not see me; nobody but the dawn would ever know. So I fell asleep and went back to the fragrance of violets, the fire, and the cosy darkened room.
R uthita and I were terribly puzzled about that baby. We couldn’t make out how it had found its way into the world. We supposed that God had made a mistake in sending it to Lilith, and that was why He had taken it back.
Our difficulty rose from the fact that Lilith did not appear ever to have been married. The fierce man was not her husband. So far as we could discover from the gipsy children she had never had a husband. Then she couldn’t have had a honeymoon: and, if she had never had a honeymoon, she oughtn’t to have had a baby. Our ideas on the question of birth were utterly disorganized. There was only one explanation—that we had been misinformed by Hetty and people could have babies by themselves. The effect of this conjecture on Ruthita was revolutionizing: it made our honeymoon unnecessary and me entirely dispensable. She had only been persuaded to elope for the sake of exchanging dolls for babies, and now it appeared she could have them and her mother as well. I had no argument left with which to combat her desire to return. There was only one way of arriving at the truth on the subject, and that was by inquiring of Lilith. Neither of us would have done this for worlds after the way she had cried when we found that her back was no longer bulgy.
The days grew shorter and the forest became bare. We could see long distances now between the tree-trunks; it was as though the branches had fisted their hands. Holiday-seekers came to the cocoanut-shies less and less. The fierce man, whom we learnt to call G’liath, had hardly any bruises on his face and hands; he dodged the balls easily. The few chance throwers had no crowd to make them reckless; they shied singly now and not in showers. The gaudily dressed woman lost her hoarseness. She no longer had to shout night and morning, “Two shies a penny. Two shies a penny. Every ball ’its a cocoanut. Down she goes,” etc. Why should she? There was no one to get excited—nobody to pay her pennies. Instead she sat by the fire, weaving wicker-baskets, watching the pearl-colored smoke go up in whiffs and eddies. Though she seldom said anything, she had taken a fancy to Ruthita and would spread for her a corner of her skirt that she might sit beside her while she worked.
Every day as Ruthita became more sure that she could have a baby all by herself, she wanted to go home more badly. One evening the gaudy woman found her crying. She told G’liath that next morning he must harness in his little moke and go for Mr. Spreckles. I did not hear her tell him, but Lilith told me when she came to lie down beside me in the tent.
That night she held me closer. I could feel her heart thumping. She roused me continually in the darkness to ask me needless questions. Whether I would ever forget her. “No.” Whether I would like to see her again. “Yes.” Whether I would like to become a gipsy. “Wouldn’t I!”
She was silent for so long that I began to drowse. I awoke with the tightening of her arms about me. When I lifted my face to hers, she commenced to kiss me passionately. “You shall. You shall,” she said. “I’ll make a gipsy of you, so you’ll always remember and never be content with their closed-in world. They’ll take you from me to-morrow, but your heart will never be theirs.”
I didn’t understand, but at dawn she showed me. Frost lay on the ground. Every little blade of grass was stiff and sword-like. It was as though the hair of the world had turned white from shock and was standing on end.
She led me away through the tall stark forest to a glade so secret that no one could observe us. At first I thought she was escaping with me, carrying me off to her gipsy-land. But she made me kneel down beside her. As the sun wheeled above the cold horizon she snatched a little knife from beneath her dress, and pricked her wrist and mine so that they bled. She held her hand beneath our wrists, catching the blood in her palm so it mingled. Then she let it drip through her fingers, making scarlet stains on the frosted turf.
As it fell she spoke to the grass and the trees and the air, telling them that I was hers and, because our blood was mingled, was one of them. “Whenever he hears your voice,” she said, “it will speak to him of me. If he goes where you do not grow, oh grass, then the trees shall call him back. If he goes where you do not grow, oh trees, then the wind shall tell him. His hand shall be as ours, against the works of men. When he hears your voice, oh grass, or your voice, oh trees, or your voice, oh winds, he shall turn his face from walls and come back. Though he leaves us he shall always hear us calling, for he is ours!”
And it seemed to me when her voice had ceased that I heard the grass nodding its head. From the dawn came a breath of wind, sweeping through the trees, stooping their leafless branches as though they gave assent.
That morning for the first time we had breakfast in the caravan. After breakfast Lilith and I went out together, hand-in-hand. G’liath was harnessing in his donkey. We watched him drive down the road and vanish. I did not want to go back and he knew it; he looked ashamed of himself. The country was bitter and cheerless; it had an atmosphere of parting—everything was withered. Birds huddled close on branches with ruffled feathers. Fields were harsh and cracked.
“Little brother,” Lilith said, “one day you will be a man. Until then they will keep you prisoner and try to make you forget all the things which you and I have learnt. They will tell you that the trees have no voices: that it is only the wind that stirs them. They will tell you that rivers are only water flowing. But remember that out in the open they are all waiting for you, and that the other people who have no bodies are there.”
I thought of the picture I had seen in the pool and knew what she meant.
Towards evening we returned to the camp. The melancholy autumn twilight lay about us; in the heart of it the fire burnt red. We sat round it in silence, watching the hard white road through the trees and listening for G’liath coming back. “Ruthita,” I whispered, “do you think we shall find the little house?”
She shook her head doubtfully, as if she scarcely cared. She was thinking of the lighted room, perhaps, and the long white bed, where her mother was eagerly awaiting her.
Coming up the road we heard a sharp tap-a-tap. Dancing in and out the tree-trunks we saw the golden eyes of carriage-lamps. The dog-cart and Dollie came into sight and halted; my Uncle Obad jumped out. He had come alone to fetch us; I was glad of that. I could explain things to him so much more easily than to my father, and he was sure to understand. Catching sight of me by the fire, he ran forward and lifted me up in his arms. All he could say was, “Well, well, well!” His face was beaming; every little wrinkle in his face was trembling. He hugged me so tightly that he took away my breath. I didn’t get a chance to speak until he had set me down. Then I said, “Uncle Obad, this is Ruthita.”
He held out his hand to her gravely. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Dante Cardover,” he said. Then, because she was such a little girl and her face looked so thin and wistful, he took her in his arms and hugged her as well.
Suddenly the gaudy woman remembered that we were still clothed in our gipsy rags. She wanted to take us into the caravan and dress us, but Uncle Obad wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on carrying us off to Pope Lane just as we were.
It was night when he said, “Dollie is rested; we must be going.” When we rose to our feet to say good-by, Lilith was not there. He lifted us into the dog-cart and wrapped rugs about our shoulders to make us cozy. Then he jumped in beside us and we had our last look at the camp. The gaudy woman was standing up by the fire with her children huddled about her skirts. I could see the gleam of her ear-rings shaking, the lighted window of the caravan in the background, and the lurcher sneaking in and out the shadows. G’liath and his donkey travelled slowly; they had not returned when we left. Uncle Obad cracked his whip; we started forward across the turf and were soon bowling between the dim skeletons of trees down the hard road homeward.
Ruthita crept closer to me. She may have been cold and she may have been lonely, but I think she was just feeling how flat things were now our great adventure was over. She had feared it while it lasted; now, womanlike, she was wishing that it was not quite ended. Every now and then she drew her fingers across my face—a little love-trick she had. She leant her head against my shoulder and was soon sleeping soundly.
“Old chap, why did you do it?”
I looked up at my uncle; I could not see his face because of the darkness. His voice was very solemn and kindly.
“We couldn’t see anything in the garden,” I said; “we wanted to find where the pigeons went.”
“But why did you take the little girl?”
I hesitated about telling. It might spoil what was left of the magic; I still had a faint hope that by the time we reached Pope Lane I might have grown into a man. And then, in telling, I might do Hetty a damage. Instead of answering, I asked him a question.
“When you’re married, you get everything you want, don’t you?”
“That depends on what you call everything, Dante.”
“Well, money, and a house, and a pony, and babies.”
“Not always.”
He spoke softly. Then I knew I oughtn’t to have mentioned babies, because, like Lilith, he hadn’t any.
“It wasn’t I who wanted the babies,” I explained hurriedly; “that was Ruthie. She wanted them instead of dolls to play with. I wanted to be allowed to go in and out, like the children with the magic carpet.”
He knew at once what I meant. “You didn’t want to have grown people always bothering, telling you to do this and not to do that, and locking doors behind you? You wanted always to be free and jolly, like you and I are together? And you thought that you could be like that if you were married?”
He slowed Dollie down to a walk.
“Little man, you’ve been trying to get just what everyone’s reaching after. When you’re a boy you say, ‘I’ll have it when I’m a man.’ When you’re a man you say, ‘I’ll have it when I’m married.’ You’ve been searching for perpetual happiness. You’ll never have it in this world, Dante. And don’t you see why you’ll never have it? You hurt other people in trying to get it. Your father and Ruthita’s mother, all of us have been very anxious. I’ve often been tempted to run away myself because I’m not much use to anybody. But that would mean leaving someone I love; so I’ve had to stop on and face it out. You ran away to enjoy yourself, and other people were sorry. Other people always have to be sorry when a fellow does that.”
He shook the reins over Dollie and she commenced to trot again. Presently he said, half-speaking to himself, “There’s a better word than happiness, and that’s duty. If a chap does his duty the best he can, he makes other folk happy. Then he finds his own happiness by accident, within himself. I’m a queer one to be talking—I’m not awfully successful. I’ve run away a little. But you must do better. And if you can’t bear things, just imagine. What’s the difference between the things you really have and the things you pretend? Imagination is the magic carpet; you can pretend yourself anything and anywhere. If you’ve learnt that secret, they can lock all the doors—it won’t matter. I can’t put it plainer; there are things that it isn’t right for you to understand—this business about marriage. You’ll know when you’re a man. Now promise that you’ll never run away again.”
I promised.
When we got to Pope Lane it must have been very late. I suppose I fell asleep on the journey, for I remember nothing more until the light flashed in my eyes and my father was bending over me. Ruthita wasn’t there; she had been left already at her mother’s house. My father had me in his arms. He was standing in the hall. The door was wide open and my uncle was going down the steps, calling “Good-night” as he went. Behind me I could see Hetty peering over the banisters in a gray flannel nightdress—her night-dresses were all of gray flannel. When my father turned, she scuttled away like a frightened rabbit.
He carried me into his study—just as I was, clad in my gipsy rags—and closed the door behind him with a slam. His lamp on the table was turned low. The floor was littered with books and papers. A fire in the hearth was burning brightly. He drew up an easy-chair to the blaze and sat down, still holding me to him. I was always timid with my father, especially when we were alone together. This time I was very conscious of wrong-doing. I waited to hear him say something; but he remained silent, staring into the fire. The lamp flickered lower and lower, and went out.
“Father, I—I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Then I saw that he was crying. His tears splashed down. His face had lost that stem look. I was shaken by his sobs as he held me.
“Little son. My little son,” he whispered.
The room grew fainter. The pictures on the walls became shadowy. My eyes opened and closed. When I awoke the gray light of morning was stealing in at the window. The fire had fallen away in ashes. The air was chilly. My father was sitting in the easy-chair, his head sunk forward—but his arms were still about me.
My father never asked me why I had run away or where I had gone. His tongue was ever stubborn at loving with words. With Hetty it was different. When my father had wakened and let me out of his arms to go upstairs and dress, she caught me into her bosom and half-smothered me, scolding and comforting by turns. Her corsets hurt me and her starched print-dress was harsh; I was glad when she left off and set me down on the bed.
“And who ever ’eard the likes o’ that,” she said: “a little boy to run away from his dear Pa and take with ’im a little sweet-’eart as we never knew ’e ’ad. Oh, the deceit of children for all they looks so h’innercent! And ’ere was your dear Pa a-tearin’ all the ’air out of ’is ’ead. And ’ere was me and John—we couldn’t do no work and we couldn’t do nothin’ for thinkin’ where you’d went. And there was you a-livin’ with those dirty gipsies and wearin’ their dirty rags———-”
“They’re not dirty,” I interrupted, “and I shan’t like you if you talk like that.”
“Well, I’m only tellin’ you the truth; you was always perwerse and ’eadstrong.”
“You didn’t tell me the truth when you told me about marriage,” I said. “Everything’s just the same as when we left. We ar’n’t any taller, and we hav’n’t got a little house, and——”
She sat back on her heels and stared at me. “Oh, Lor,” she burst out, “was that why you did it?” And then she began to laugh and laugh. Her face grew red and again she fell upon me, until her corsets cut into me to such an extent that I called to her to leave off.
“What I told you was gorspel true,” she said solemnly, “but you didn’t understand. That’s wot ’appens to wimmen when they goes away with men. I wasn’t speakin’ of little boys and girls. But it’ll never ’appen to you when you grow up if you tell anybody wot I said.”
That morning after breakfast, instead of going into his study to work, my father led me round to the Favarts’. As we came up the path I saw Ruthita at the window watching for us. Monsieur Favart opened the door to our knock. He said something to my father in French, shook me by the hand gravely, and led the way upstairs. We entered a room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. A lady, almost as small as Ruthita, was lying on a couch with cushions piled behind her head. She was dressed completely in white; she had dark eyes and white hair, and a face that somehow surprised you because it was so young and little. From the first I called her the Snow Lady to myself.
She held out her hand to me and then, instead, put her arm about my waist, smiling up at me. “So you are Dante, the little boy who wanted to marry my little girl?”
Her voice was more soft and emotional than any voice I had ever heard. It held me, and kept me from noticing anything but her. It seemed as though all the eagerness of living, which other people spend in motion, was stored up in that long white throat of hers and delicate scarlet mouth.
“You can’t marry Ruth yet, you know,” she said; “you hav’n’t any money. But if you like, you may go and kiss her.”
She turned me about and there was Ruthita standing behind me. I did what I was told, shyly and perfunctorily. There was no sense of pleasure in doing what you were ordered to do just to amuse grown people. The Snow Lady laughed gaily. “There, take him out into the garden, Ruthita, and teach him to do it properly.”
As I left the room, I saw that my father had taken my place by the couch. Monsieur Favart was looking out of the window, his hands folded on the head of his cane and his chin resting on them.
We played in the garden together, but much of the charm had gone out of our playing now that it was allowed. The game we played was gipsies in the forest. We gathered leaves and made a fire, pretending we were again in camp. I was G’liath; Ruthita was sometimes the gaudy woman and sometimes Lilith telling fortunes. But the pretense was tame after the reality.
“Ruthie,” I said, “we ar’n’t married. What Hettie told me was all swank. It’s only true of men and women, and not of boys and girls.”
“But we can grow older.”
“Yes. But it’ll take ages.”
She folded her hands in her pinafore nervously.
“We can go on loving till then,” she said.
On the way home my father told me that he liked Ruthita—liked her so much that he had arranged with Madam Favart to have a door cut in the wall between the two gardens so that we could go in and out. I didn’t tell him that I preferred climbing over; he could scarcely guess it for himself. There was no excitement in being pushed into the open and told to go and play with Ruthita. It was all too easy. The fun had been in no one knowing that I did play with such a little girl—not even knowing that there was a Ruthita in the world. We tried to overcome this by always pretending that we were doing wrong when we were together. We would hide when we heard anybody coming. I despised the door and only went through it when a grown person was present, otherwise I entered by way of the apple-tree and the wall. My father caught me at it, and couldn’t understand why I did it. Hetty said it was because I liked being grubby.
Through the gray autumn months I wandered the garden, listening to the dead leaves whispering together. “They’ll take you from me, but your heart will never be theirs,” Lilith had said, and I tried to fancy that the rustling of leaves was Lilith’s voice calling. It was curious how she had plucked out my affections and made them hers.
Often I would steal into the tool-house and tell the white hen all about it. But she also was a source of disillusionment. After long waiting I found one egg in her nest. I thought she must be as glad about it as I was, so left it there a little while for her to look at. I thought the sight of it would spur her on to more ambitious endeavors. But when I came back her beak was yellowy and the egg had vanished. After this unnatural act of cannibalism I told her no more secrets; she had proved herself unworthy. Shortly afterwards she died—perhaps of remorse. I made my peace with her by placing her in a cardboard shoe-box for a coffin and giving her a most handsome funeral.
One evening, when I had been put to bed, I stole to the window to gaze into the blackness. I saw a man with a lantern go across our lawn and disappear by the apple-tree through the door in the wall. After that I watched. Nearly every night it happened. I was always too sleepy to stay awake to see at what hour he came back. But I knew that he did come back, for with the first fall of snow I traced his returning footsteps. They came from Monsieur Favart’s door and entered in at our study-window. So I guessed that the man was my father.
Madam Favart seemed to be growing stronger; she was able to get up and walk about. Sometimes I would go into her house for tea, and she would sit by the firelight and tell Ruthita and myself stories. She used to try and get me to climb on her knee while she told them. I always refused, because my mother used to do that. The Snow Lady used to laugh at me and say, “Ruthita, Dante won’t make love to Mother. Isn’t he silly?” Then I would grow sulky and sit as far off as I could.
When Christmas came round, the Favarts were invited over to spend it with us. The Snow Lady brought a bunch of misletoe with her and hung it about our house. After dinner the General fell asleep in his chair, and we children played hide and seek together. I wanted to hide so securely that Ruthita would never catch me. It was getting dark, and I knew that she wouldn’t hunt for me in my father’s study. I was a little awed myself at going there. I pushed open the door. The room was unlighted. I entered, and then halted at the sound of voices whispering. Standing in the window, silhouetted against the snow, were my father and Madam Favart. He was holding a sprig of misletoe over her; his arm was about her, and they were leaning breast to breast. She saw me first and started back from him, just as Hetty had done when I found her with John. Then my father, turning sharply, saw me. He called to me sternly, “Dante, what are you doing, sir?” He sounded almost afraid because I had been watching. Then he called again more softly, “Dante, my boy, come here.”
But a strange rebellious horror possessed me. It seemed as though something were tearing out my heart. I was angry, fiercely angry because he had been disloyal to my mother. At that moment I hated him, but hated Madam Favart much worse. I knew now why she had told me stories, and why she had wanted me to climb on her knee, and why she had tried to force me to make love to her. I rushed from the room and down the passage. Ruthita ran out laughing to catch me, but I pushed her aside roughly and unjustly. I wanted to get away by myself and fled out into the snow-covered garden. My father came to the door and called. But Madam Favart was with him; I could see by the gaslight, which fell behind them, the way she pressed towards him. I could hear her merry contralto laugh, and refused to answer.
“He’ll come by himself,” she said.
When the door closed and they left me, I felt miserably lonely. They had been wicked and they were not sorry. Hetty said that God was twice as angry with you for not being sorry as He was with you for doing wrong. Hetty knew everything about God; she used to hold long conversations with Him every night in her gray flannel nightdress. Soon the snow began to melt into my shoes and the frost to nip’ my fingers. I wished they would come out again and call me.
I became pathetic over the fact that it was Christmas. I pictured to myself a possible death as a result of exposure. I saw myself dying in a beautiful calm, forgiving everybody, and with everybody kneeling by my bedside shaken with sobbing; the sobs of Madam Favart and my father were to be the loudest. I was to be stretching out long white hands, trying to quiet them; but their sense of guilt was to have placed them beyond all bounds of consolation. Every time I tried to comfort them they were to cry twice as hard. Then I saw my funeral and the big lily wreaths: “From his broken-hearted father”; “From Madam Favart with sincere regrets”; “From Hetty who told God untruths about him”; “From Ruthita who loved him.” And in the midst of these tokens of grief I lay fully conscious of everything, arrayed in a gray flannel nightshirt, opening one eye when no one was looking, and winking at Uncle Obad.
I began to feel little pangs of hunger, and my pride gave way before them. Reluctantly I stole nearer the house and peeked into the study. They were all there seated round the fire, callously enjoying themselves. The secret was plainly out—my father was holding Madam Favart’s hand. Ruthita was cuddled against my father’s shoulder; she was evidently reconciled rather more than stoically. I tapped on the pane. The old General saw me. He signed to the others to remain still. He threw up the window and lifted me into the warmth. I believe he understood. Perhaps he felt just as I was feeling. At any rate, when it was decreed that I should go to bed at once and drink hot gruel, he slipped a crown-piece into my hand and looked as though he hadn’t done it.
Within a month the marriage was celebrated, my father being a methodical man who hated delays and loved shortcuts. It was a vicarious affair; Ruthita and I had taken the honeymoon, and our parents were married. If Uncle Obad hadn’t given me the white hen, and the hen hadn’t flown over the wall, and I hadn’t followed, these things would never have happened.
I grew to admire the Snow Lady immensely. She always called me her little lover. She never ordered me to do anything or played the mother, but flirted with me and trusted to my chivalry to recognize her wants. We played a game of pretending. It had only one disadvantage, that it shut Ruthita out from our game, for one couldn’t court two ladies at once. I learnt to kiss Ruthita as a habit and to take her, as boys will their sisters, for granted. It is only on looking back that I realize how beautiful and gentle she really was, and what life would have been without her.
General Favart lived in the other house through the door in the wall. He came to visit us rarely. He leant more heavily on his cane, and his cloak seemed to have become blacker, his hair whiter, and his scar more prominent. He could scarcely speak a word of English, so I never knew what he thought. But it seemed to me he was sorrowing. One day we children were told that he was dead; after that the door between the two gardens was taken down and the hole in the wall bricked up.