Tatterdemalion Part 21

"'But I'm his wife,' she said, and flew out of the room."

The doctor paused, staring at the fire. He shrugged his shoulders, and went on: "I'd have stopped her fury if I could! A dying man is not the same as the live animal, that he must needs be wrangled over! And suffering's sacred, even to us doctors. I could hear their voices outside. Heaven knows what they said to each other. And there lay G.o.dwin with his white face and his black hair--deathly still--fine-looking fellow he always was! Then I saw that he was coming to! The women had begun again outside--first, the wife, sharp and scornful; then the other, hushed and slow. I saw G.o.dwin lift his finger and point it at the door. I went out, and said to the woman, 'Dr. G.o.dwin wishes to see you; please control yourself.'

"We went back into the room. The wife followed. But G.o.dwin had lost consciousness again. They sat down, those two, and hid their faces. I can see them now, one on each side of the bed, their eyes covered with their hands, each with her claim on him, all murdered by the other's presence; each with her torn love. H'm! What they must have suffered, then! And all the time the child crying--the child of one of them, that might have been the other's!"

The doctor was silent, and the old Director turned towards him his white-bearded, ruddy face, with a look as if he were groping in the dark.

"Just then, I remember," the doctor went on suddenly, "the bells of St.

Jude's close by began to peal out for the finish of a wedding. That brought G.o.dwin back to life. He just looked from one woman to the other with a queer, miserable sort of smile, enough to make your heart break.

And they both looked at him. The face of the wife--poor thing!--was as bitter hard as a cut stone, but she sat there, without ever stirring a finger. As for the other woman--I couldn't look at her. He beckoned to me; but I couldn't catch his words, the bells drowned them. A minute later he was dead.

"Life's a funny thing! You wake in the morning with your foot firm on the ladder--One touch, and down you go! You snuff out like a candle. And it's lucky when your flame goes out, if only one woman's flame goes out too.

"Neither of those women cried. The wife stayed there by the bed. I got the other one away to her carriage, down the street.--And so she was there to-day! That explains, I think, the look you saw."

The doctor ceased, and in the silence the old Director nodded. Yes! That explained the look he had seen on the face of that unknown woman, the deep, unseizable, weird look. That explained the look he had seen on the wife's face at the funeral twenty years ago!

And peering wistfully, he said:

"They looked--they looked--almost triumphant!"

Then, slowly, he rubbed his hands over his knees, with the secret craving of the old for warmth.

1914.

VI

FAIRYLAND

It was about three o'clock, this November afternoon, when I rode down into "Fairyland," as it is called about here. The birch-trees there are more beautiful than any in the world; and when the clouds are streaming over in rain-grey, and the sky soaring above in higher blue, just-seen, those gold and silver creatures have such magical loveliness as makes the hearts of mortals ache. The fairies, who have been driven off the moor, alone watch them with equanimity, if they be not indeed the birch-trees themselves--especially those little very golden ones which have strayed out into the heather, on the far side of the glen.

"Revenge!" the fairies cried when a century ago those, whom they do not exist just to amuse, made the new road over the moor, cutting right through the home of twilight, that wood above the "Falls," where till then they had always enjoyed inviolable enchantment. They trooped forthwith in their mult.i.tudinous secrecy down into the glen, to swarm about the old road. In half a century or so they had it almost abandoned, save for occasional hors.e.m.e.n and harmless persons seeking beauty, for whom the fairies have never had much feeling of aversion.

And now, after a hundred years, it is all theirs; the ground so golden with leaves and bracken that the old track is nothing but a vague hardness beneath a horse's feet, nothing but a runnel for the rains to gather in. There is everywhere that glen scent of mouldering leaves, so sweet when the wind comes down and stirs it, and the sun frees and livens it. Not very many birds, perhaps because hawks are fond of hovering here. This was once the only road up to the village, the only communication with all that lies to the south and east! Now the fairies have got it indeed, they have witched to skeletons all the little bridges across the glen stream; they have mossed and thinned the gates to wraiths. With their dapple-gold revelry in sunlight, and their dance of pied beauty under the moon, they have made all their own.

I have ridden many times down into this glen; and slowly up among the beeches and oaks into the lanes again, hoping and believing that, some day, I should see a fairy take shape to my thick mortal vision; and to-day, at last, I have seen.

I heard it first about half-way up the wood, a silvery voice piping out very true what seemed like mortal words, not quite to be caught.

Resolved not to miss it this time, I got off quietly and tied my mare to a tree. Then, tiptoeing in the damp leaves which did not rustle, I stole up till I caught sight of it, from behind an oak.

It was sitting in yellow bracken as high as its head, under a birch-tree that had a few branches still gold-feathered. It seemed to be clothed in blue, and to be swaying as it sang. There was something in its arms, as it might be a creature being nursed. Cautiously I slipped from that tree to the next, till I could see its face, just like a child's, fascinating, very, very delicate, the little open mouth poised and shaped ever so neatly to the words it was singing; the eyes wide apart and ever so wide open, fixed on nothing mortal. The song, and the little body, and the spirit in the eyes, all seemed to sway--sway together, like a soft wind that goes sough-sough, swinging, in the tops of the ferns. And now it stretched out one arm, and now the other, beckoning in to it those to which it was singing; so that one seemed to feel the invisible ones stealing up closer and closer.

These were the words which came so silvery and slow through that little mouth: "Chil-dren, chil-dren! Huss.h.!.+"

It seemed as if the very rabbits must come and sit-up there, the jays and pigeons settle above; everything in all the wood gather. Even one's own heart seemed to be drawn in by those beckoning arms, and the slow enchantment of that tinkling voice, and the look in those eyes, which, lost in the unknown, were seeing no mortal glen, but only that mazed wood, where friendly wild things come, who have no sound to their padding, no whirr to the movement of their wings; whose gay whisperings have no noise, whose eager shapes no colour--the fairy dream-wood of the unimaginable.

"Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hus-s-h!"

For just a moment I could see that spirit company, ghosts of the ferns and leaves, of b.u.t.terflies and bees and birds, and four-footed things innumerable, ghosts of the wind, the sun-beams, and the rain-drops, and tiny flickering ghosts of moon-rays. For just a moment I saw what the fairy's eyes were seeing, without knowing what they saw.

And then my mare trod on a dead branch, and all vanished. My fairy was gone; and there was only little "Connemara," as we called her, nursing her doll, and smiling up at me from the fern, where she had come to practise her new school-song.

1911.

VII

THE NIGHTMARE CHILD

I set down here not precisely the words of my friend, the country doctor, but the spirit of them:

"You know there are certain creatures in this world whom one simply dare not take notice of, however sorry one may be for them. That has often been borne in on me. I realised it, I think, before I met that little girl. I used to attend her mother for varicose veins--one of those women who really ought not to have children, since they haven't the very least notion of how to bring them up. The wife of a Suss.e.x agricultural labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually a.s.sociates with men of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended n.o.body. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got into various kinds of trouble, and had to migrate, leaving two illegitimate children behind her with their grandparents. The younger girl, the child of this story, who was called Emmeline, of all names--p.r.o.nounced Em'leen, of course--was just fifteen at the time of my visits to her mother. She had eyes like a hare's, a mouth which readily fell open, and brown locks caught back from her scared and k.n.o.bby forehead. She was thin, and walked with her head poked a little forward, and she so manoeuvred her legs and long feet, of which one turned in rather and seemed trying to get in front of the other, that there was something clodhopperish in her gait. Once in a way you would see her in curl-papers, and then indeed she was plain, poor child! She seemed to have grown up without ever having had the least attention paid to her. I don't think she was ill-treated--she was simply not treated at all. At school they had been kind enough, but had regarded her as almost deficient. Seeing that her father was paid about fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week, that her mother had no conception of housekeeping, and that there were two babies to be fed, they were, of course, villainously poor, and Em'leen was always draggle-tailed and badly shod. One side of her too-short dress seemed ever to hang lower than the other, her stockings always had one hole at least, and her hat--such queer hats--would seem about to fly away. I have known her type in the upper cla.s.ses pa.s.s muster as "eccentric" or "full of character." And even in Em'leen there was a sort of smothered natural comeliness, trying pathetically to push through, and never getting a chance. She always had a lost-dog air, and when her big hare's eyes clung on your face, it seemed as if she only wanted a sign to make her come trailing at your heels, looking up for a pat or a bit of biscuit.

"She went to work, of course, the moment she left school. Her first place was in a small farm where they took lodgers, and her duties were to do everything, without, of course, knowing how to do anything. She had to leave because she used to take soap and hairpins, and food that was left over, and was once seen licking a dish. It was just about then that I attended her mother for those veins in her unwieldy legs, and the child was at home, waiting to secure some other fate. It was impossible not to look at that little creature kindly, and to speak to her now and then; she would not exactly light up, because her face was not made that way, but she would hang towards you as if you were a magnet, and you had at once the uncomfortable sensation that you might find her clinging, impossible to shake off. If one pa.s.sed her in the village, too, or coming down from her blackberrying in the thickets on the Downs--their cottage lay just below the South Downs--one knew that she would be lingering along, looking back till you were out of sight. Somehow one hardly thought of her as a girl at all, she seemed so far from all human hearts, so wandering in a queer lost world of her own, and to imagine what she could be thinking was as impossible as it is with animals. Once I pa.s.sed her and her mother dawdling slowly in a lane, then heard the dot-and-go-one footsteps pattering after me, and the childish voice, rather soft and timid, say behind my shoulder: "Would you please buy some blackberries, sir?" She was almost pretty at that moment, flushed and breathless at having actually spoken to me, but her eyes hanging on my face brought a sort of nightmare feeling at once of being unable to get rid of her.

"Isn't it a cruel thing when you come to think of it, that there should be born into the world poor creatures--children, dogs, cats, horses--who want badly to love and be loved, and yet whom no one can quite put up with, much less feel affection for!

"Well, what happened to her is what will always happen to such as those, one way or another, in a world where the callous abound; for, however unlovable a woman or girl, she has her use to a man, just as a dog or a horse has to a master who cares nothing for it.

"Soon after I bought those blackberries I went out to France on military duty. I got my leave a year later, and went home. It was late September, very lovely weather, and I took a real holiday walking or lying about up on the Downs, and only coming down at sunset. On one of those days when you really enter heaven, so pure are the lines of the hills, so cool the blue, the green, the chalk-white colouring under the smile of the afternoon sun--I was returning down that same lane, when I came on Em'leen sitting in a gap of the bank, with her dishevelled hat beside her, and her chin sunk on her hands. My appearance seemed to drag her out of a heavy dream--her eyes awoke, became startled, rolled furtively; she scrambled up, dropped her little, old school curtsey, then all confused, faced the bank as if she were going to climb it. She was taller, her dress longer, her hair gathered up, and it was very clear what was soon going to happen to her. I walked on in a rage. At her age--barely sixteen even yet! I am a doctor, and accustomed to most things, but this particular crime against children of that helpless sort does make my blood boil. Nothing, not even pa.s.sion to excuse it--who could feel pa.s.sion for that poor child?--nothing but the cold, clumsy l.u.s.t of some young ruffian. Yes, I walked on in a rage, and went straight to her mother's cottage. That wretched woman was incapable of moral indignation, or else the adventures of her elder daughter had exhausted her powers of expression. 'Yes,' she admitted, 'Em'leen had got herself into trouble too, but she would not tell, she wouldn't say nothin' against n.o.body. It was a bad business, surely, an' now there would be three o' them, an' Alliner was properly upset, that he was!'

That was all there was to be had out of _her_. One felt that she knew or suspected more, but her fingers had been so burned over the elder girl that anything to her was better than a fuss.

"I saw Alliner; he was a decent fellow, though dirty, distressed in his simple, shallow-pated way, and more obviously ignorant than his wife. I spoke to the schoolmistress, a shrewd and kindly married woman.

"Poor Emmeline! Yes, she had noticed. It was very sad and wicked! She hinted, but would not do more than hint, at the son of the miller, but he was back again, fighting in France now, and, after all, her evidence amounted to no more than his reputation with girls. Besides, one is very careful what one says in a country village. I, however, was so angry that I should not have been careful if I could have got hold of anything at all definite.

"I did not see the child again before my leave was up. The very next thing I heard of her, was in a newspaper--Emmeline Alliner, sixteen, had been committed for trial for causing the death of her illegitimate child by exposure. I was on the sick list in January, and went home to rest. I had not been there two days before I received a visit from a solicitor of our a.s.size town, who came to ask me if I would give evidence at the girl's trial as to the nature of her home surroundings. I learned from him the details of the lugubrious business. It seems that she had slipped out one bitter afternoon in December, barely a fortnight after her confinement, carrying her baby. There was snow on the ground, and it was freezing hard, but the sun was bright, and it was that perhaps which tempted her. She must have gone up towards the Downs by the lane where I had twice met her; gone up, and stopped at the very gap in the bank where she had been sitting lost in that heavy dream when I saw her last.

She appears to have subsided there in the snow, for there she was found by the postman just as it was getting dark, leaning over her knees as if stupefied, with her chin buried in her hands--and the baby stiff and dead in the snow beside her. When I told the lawyer how I had seen her there ten weeks before, and of the curious dazed state she had been in, he said at once: 'Ah! the exact spot. That's very important; it looks uncommonly as if it were there that she came by her misfortune. What do you think? It's almost evident that she'd lost sense of her surroundings, baby and all. I shall ask you to tell us about that at the trial. She's a most peculiar child; I can't get anything out of her. I keep asking her for the name of the man, or some indication of how it came about, but all she says is: "n.o.body--n.o.body!" Another case of immaculate conception! Poor little creature, she's very pathetic, and that's her best chance. Who could condemn a child like that?'

"And so indeed it turned out. I spared no feelings in my evidence. The mother and father were in court, and I hope Mrs. Alliner liked my diagnosis of her maternal qualities. My description of how Em'leen was sitting when I met her in September tallied so exactly with the postman's account of how he met her, that I could see the jury were impressed. And then there was the figure of the child herself, lonely there in the dock. The French have a word, _Hebetee_. Surely there never was a human object to which it applied better. She stood like a little tired pony, whose head hangs down, half-sleeping after exertion; and those hare eyes of hers were glued to the judge's face, for all the world as if she were wors.h.i.+pping him. It must have made him extraordinarily uncomfortable. He summed up very humanely, dwelling on the necessity of finding intention in her conduct towards the baby; and he used some good strong language against the unknown man. The jury found her not guilty, and she was discharged. The schoolmistress and I, antic.i.p.ating this, had found her a refuge with some Sisters of Mercy, who ran a sort of home not far away, and to that we took her, without a 'by your leave' to the mother.

"When I came home the following summer, I found an opportunity of going to look her up. She was amazingly improved in face and dress, but she had attached herself to one of the Sisters--a broad, fine-looking woman--to such a pitch that she seemed hardly alive when out of her sight. The Sister spoke of it to me with real concern.

"'I really don't know what to do with her,' she said; 'she seems incapable of anything unless I tell her; she only feels things through me. It's really quite trying, and sometimes very funny, poor little soul! but it's tragic for her. If I told her to jump out of her bedroom window, or lie down in that pond and drown, she'd do it without a moment's hesitation. She can't go through life like this; she must learn to stand on her own feet. We must try and get her a good place, where she can learn what responsibility means, and get a will of her own.'

"I looked at the Sister, so broad, so capable, so handsome, and so puzzled, and I thought, 'Yes, I know exactly. She's on your nerves; and where in the world will you find a place for her where she won't become a sort of nightmare to some one, with her devotion, or else get it taken advantage of again?' And I urged them to keep her a little longer. They did; for when I went home for good, six months later, I found that she had only just gone into a place with an old lady-patient of mine, in a small villa on the outskirts of our village. She used to open the door to me when I called there on my rounds once a week. She retained vestiges of the neatness which had been grafted on her by the Sister, but her frock was already beginning to sag down on one side, and her hair to look ill-treated. The old lady spoke to her with a sort of indulgent impatience, and it was clear that the girl's devotion was not concentrated upon her. I caught myself wondering what would be its next object, never able to help the feeling that if I gave a sign it would be myself. You may be sure I gave no sign. What's the good? I hold the belief that people should not force themselves to human contacts or relations.h.i.+ps which they cannot naturally and without irritation preserve. I've seen these heroic attempts come to grief so often; in fact, I don't think I've ever seen one succeed, not even between blood relations. In the long run they merely pervert and spoil the fibre of the attempter, without really benefiting the attemptee. Behind healthy relations.h.i.+ps between human beings, or even between human beings and animals, there must be at least some rudimentary affinity. That's the tragedy of poor little souls like Em'leen. Where on earth can they find the affinity which makes life good? The very fact that they must wors.h.i.+p is their destruction. It was a soldier--or so they said--who had brought her to her first grief; I had seen her adoring the judge at the trial, then the handsome uniformed Sister. And I, as the village doctor, was a sort of tin-pot deity in those parts, so I was very careful to keep my manner to her robust and almost brusque.

"And then one day I pa.s.sed her coming from the post office; she was looking back, her cheeks were flushed, and she was almost pretty. There by the inn a butcher's cart was drawn up. The young butcher, new to our village (he had a stiff knee, and had been discharged from the Army), was taking out a leg of mutton. He had a daredevil face; and eyes that had seen much death. He had evidently been chatting with her, for he was still smiling, and even as I pa.s.sed him he threw her a jerk of the head.

"Two Sundays after that I was coming down past Wiley's copse at dusk, and heard a man's coa.r.s.e laugh. There, through a tiny gap in the nut-bushes, I saw a couple seated. He had his leg stiffly stretched out, and his arm round the girl, who was leaning towards him; her lips were parted, and those hare's eyes of hers were looking up into his face.

Adoration!

"I don't know what it was my duty to have done, I only know that I did nothing, but slunk on with a lump in my throat.