Half-Past Bedtime Part 18

She was now as high as Cuthbert had climbed, and rippling away below her she could see the fields and farm-lands stretching into the distance.

Two or three miles to her right lay the spires and chimneys and crinkled roof-tops of the town, and two or three miles to her left, golden in the sunlight, the hills lay strung along the sky. Then she saw yet another fork between two slender boughs, just about a foot above her head, and in a minute or two she had climbed higher even than Cuthbert had done, and was safely perched in the top of the tree. If only the others had been there she could have sighted imaginary s.h.i.+ps for them sooner than any of them had done before; and then she remembered again how sad and lonely she was, and that nothing really mattered after all.

So she stuffed her handkerchief into a crack in the tree just to prove that she had really climbed there; and it was just then that she saw a young man swinging across the fields toward the wood. He was wearing an old shooting-jacket and grey flannel trousers; and he was singing a song, of which she couldn't hear the words. She saw him climb a gate--rather cautiously, she thought; she had expected from his general air that he would vault it; and then he disappeared under the trees just as she began to climb down.

But climbing down anything is often more difficult than climbing up, as Marian found; and half-way down she suddenly discovered that she had somehow worked herself to the wrong side of the tree. Below her were two or three branches that she thought would bear her, but there were long gaps yawning between them; and the main trunk was growing broader and broader, so that she could no longer span it with her arms. Once a piece of bark broke in her fingers, and she slithered down a yard or more and nearly fell; and she could feel her heart jumping against her ribs, as she stood with both feet on a bending bough. Then she heard the young man singing again in a cheerful voice, and she thought of shouting to him, but she felt too shy; and then she began to lower herself very carefully until she touched the branch below her with the tips of her toes.

The young man stopped singing.

"Steady on," he cried. "You're touching a rotten branch."

Marian pulled herself up again.

"But it's the only one there is," she said. "I can't reach any other."

She heard him whistle.

"Hold on," he said. "I'm trying to find you--half a tick."

He came to the bottom of the tree and looked up.

"Where are you now?" he asked. Marian thought it a silly question.

"Why, just here," she said.

"Well, why don't you come down," he asked, "the same way that you got up?"

"I don't know," she said. "I wish I could. But I've got wrong somehow.

I'm stuck."

She saw him touching the elm-trunk with his hands, running his fingers lightly and quickly over it. Then he swung himself up on to the lowest bough, and soon he was near enough to touch her hand.

"Now catch hold," he said, "and jump toward me. Don't be frightened. I'm as firm as a rock."

Marian jumped, and he caught and steadied her.

"Now you're all right," he said. "You'd better go down first."

In another moment or two he was on the ground beside her, looking down at her with a smile. He was about six feet high, she thought, with queer-looking eyes and curly brown hair and a skin like a gipsy's.

"Well, what are you doing here," he asked, "climbing all alone?"

Marian told him about her party, and how she had had to put it off. "And it'll be seven or eight weeks," she said, "before Cuthbert's well again, so that I shan't have one at all."

"Yes, I see," he said. "That's jolly bad luck. What about having some tea with me?"

Marian looked at him a little doubtfully.

"But where do you live?" she asked. "Do you live near here?"

"Well, just at present," he said, "I'm staying with Lord Barrington. But I have a flask in my pocket full of hot tea, and I stole some cakes before I came out."

So they sat down together between the roots of the elm-tree, and the sun poured down upon them, almost as if it had been summer.

"But why did you come here," said Marian--"to this wood I mean?"

"Oh, just by accident," he said, "if there's any such thing."

Marian looked him up and down again. She wondered what he was. Perhaps it was rude, but she ventured to ask him.

"Well, I used to be a painter," he said, "once upon a time. I was rather a successful one. So I saved a little money."

"But you're quite young," she said. "Why aren't you one now?"

"Because I had a disappointment," he said, "just like you have had."

Marian began to like him.

"Was it a bad one?" she asked.

"Pretty bad," he said. "I became blind."

For a moment Marian was so surprised that she couldn't say anything at all; and then she felt such a pig that she didn't want to say anything.

For what was a silly little disappointment like hers beside so dreadful a thing as becoming blind? But he looked so contented and was humming so cheerfully as he counted out the cakes and began to divide them that her curiosity got the better of her, and she spoke to him once more.

"But how did you know," she asked, "that I was up the tree?"

"Quite simple," he said. "I heard you."

"And how could you tell that that was a rotten branch?"

"Because I heard the sound of it when your toes touched it."

Marian was silent for a moment.

"You must have awfully good hearing," she said. "But I suppose you've practised rather a lot."

"Well, a good deal," he admitted. "You see, I was in the middle of Asia when I first lost my sight. I was camping out, and painting pictures, and shooting an occasional buck for my breakfast and dinner. Then a gun went off while somebody was cleaning it, and the next moment I was blind; and for a couple of months there was only one thing I wanted, and that was to die as soon as I could."

He poured out some tea for her and dropped a lump of sugar into it.

"And then one day," he said, "there came a man to see me, and he told me that I oughtn't to be discouraged. He was an old priest of some queer sort of religion that the people of those parts believed in; and he was sorry for me, and took me to stay with him in a little temple up in the mountains. I never knew his name, we were just father and son to each other, and I suppose that most people would have called him a heathen.

But he had lived all his life up among the mountains, studying nature and praying to G.o.d. Well, I stayed with him for more than a year, and he used to talk to me about the things he knew. I was a bad pupil, I'm afraid, but he was infinitely patient; and after a time I began to learn a little. 'You are blind, my son,' he used to tell me, 'but only a little less blind than other people. And you have ears that are still almost deaf. Why not stay with me and learn to hear?' I told him that I _could_ hear, but he only smiled--it's a lovely thing to hear people smile--and then he began to teach me, just as he would have taught a child, the ABC of hearing."

He finished his cake and filled his pipe.

"Did you know," he went on, "that everything has a sound, just as it has a shape and colour of its own? Well, it has; and presently I seemed to be living in a strange new world, all full of music. Of course it wasn't really new. It was the same old world. Only, like most people, I had been almost deaf to it; and when I first heard it, up in that little temple, I nearly went mad with joy. Day after day and night after night I went out by myself and listened, and gradually I began to distinguish the separate sounds of things, like the notes of instruments in an orchestra."

He stopped for a moment.