innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns.
She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and
Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were
brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.
“There’s one now,” she said, and fell to work with her fern again.
Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread
and curiosity—the child’s avid curiosity for the supernatural—alight
in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the
shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague
movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a
flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that
passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed
to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of
a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway toward her. There was an
impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and
fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of
the wood; and as she drew her breath it was all no more. The trees,
the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but
something was gone from them.
“Joan,” she cried, hesitating.
“Yes,” said Joan, without looking up. “What?”
The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that
she had seen anything.
“I thought, just now, I could see something,” she said. “But I
s’pose I didn’t.”
“I did,” remarked Joan.
Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan,
sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken
stems and leaves all round her.
“Joan,” she begged. “Be nice. You’re trying to frighten me, aren’t
you?”
“I’m not,” protested Joan. “I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies
doesn’t hurt you; wood-ladies are _nice_. You’re a coward, Joyce.”
“I can’t help it,” said Joyce, sighing. “But I won’t go into the
dark parts of the wood any more.”
“Coward,” repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.
“You wouldn’t like to go there by yourself,” cried Joyce. “If I
wasn’t with you, you’d be a coward too. You know you would.”
She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of débris and was
rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile
softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her
mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm and very galling
superiority.
“I’m going there now,” she answered; “all by mineself.”
“Go, then,” retorted Joyce angrily.
Without a further word, Joan turned her back and began to plough her
way across the ferns toward the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw
her go, at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with
compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity
of the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in
ferns. Her sleek brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her
seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence toward those peopled and
uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.
“Joan!” she cried. The baby turned. “Joan! Come back; come back an’
be friends!”
Joan, maintaining her offing, replied only with a gesture. It was a
gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had
once been spanked for practising it on the piano-tuner. The
boot-and-knife boy called it “cocking a snook,” and it consisted in
raising a thumb to one’s nose and spreading the fingers out. It was
defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on.
The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she
knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches,
squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of
blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was
gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid.
Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to
shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to
wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to
Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage;
and the wood was a place to which they came every day.
“Besides,” she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort;
“besides, there can’t be such things as wood-ladies _really_.”
But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny
stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural;
the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and
nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a
blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The undernote of
alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to
spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the
morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her and presently
there came mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her
babies.
“Isn’t there a clock inside you that tells you when it’s
lunch-time?” asked mother. “You’re ever so late. Where’s Joan?”
Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy
perplexity on her face. It was difficult to speak even to mother
about wood-ladies without a pretence of scepticism.
“I forgot about lunch,” she said, taking the slim cool hand which
mother held out to her. “Joan’s in there.” She nodded at the bushes.
“Is she?” said mother, and called aloud in her singing-voice, that
was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. “Joan! Joan!”
A cheeky bird answered with a whistle and mother called again.
“She _said_,” explained Joyce—“she _said_ she saw a wood-lady and
then she went in there to show me she wasn’t afraid.”
“What’s a wood-lady, chick?” asked mother. “The rascal!” she said,
smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. “We’ll have to
go and look for her.”
They went hand in hand, and mother showed herself clever in parting
a path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to
strike Joyce and without tearing or soiling her own soft white
dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she,
too, had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond,
where the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields;
and when they paused mother would lift her head and call again, and
her voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a
black water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face;
but there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook
her head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no
distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.
“I wish she wouldn’t play these tricks,” said mother. “I don’t like
them a bit.”
“I expect she’s hiding,” said Joyce. “There aren’t wood-ladies
really, are there, mother?”
“There’s nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby,”
mother replied. “We’ll go back by the path and call her again.”
Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went and
there was still no answer to mother’s calling. She could not have
told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about
her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment
burdened them both. “Joan, Joan!” called mother in her strong
beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and
when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan
were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer
any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees
which bordered their garden.
“We mustn’t be silly about this,” said mother, speaking as much to
herself as to Joyce. “Nothing can have happened to her. And you must
have lunch, chick.”
“Without waiting for Joan?” asked Joyce.
“Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan,” said
mother, opening the gate.
The dining-room looked very secure and home-like, with its big
window and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce’s place faced
the window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding
the kitchen garden; and when mother had served her with food, she
was left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy
passed the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking warlike.
There reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling
something about tramps.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” replied mother’s voice.
Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything.
Joyce asked her why.
“Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes,” answered mother. “I
sha’n’t be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?”
When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet
Joan when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite
slowly, looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held
her hand and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and
a sort of resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an
unmannerly trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.
“I bin all acrost that way,” said the boot-boy, pointing with his
stumpy black forefinger, “and then acrost _that_ way, an’ Mister
Jenks”—Jenks was the gardener—“’e’ve gone about in rings, ’e ’ave.
And there ain’t sign nor token, mum—not a sign there ain’t.”
From beyond him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among
the trees. “Miss Joan!” he roared. “Hi! Miss Jo-an! You’re
a-frightin’ your ma proper. Where are ye, then?”
“She must be hiding,” said mother. “You must go on looking, Walter.
You must go on looking till you find her.”
“Yes, ’m,” said Walter. “If she’s in there, us’ll find her, soon or
late.”
He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks’s, calling
Joan—calling, calling, and getting no answer.
Mother took Joyce’s hand again.
“Come,” she said. “We’ll walk round by the path, and you must tell
me again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan
told you to look?”
“I expect I didn’t,” replied Joyce dolefully. “But Joan’s always
saying there’s a fairy or something in the shadows and I always
think I see them for a moment.”
“It couldn’t have been a live woman—or a man—that you saw?”
“Oh, no!” Joyce was positive of that. Mother’s hand tightened on
hers understandingly and they went on in silence till they met
Jenks.
Jenks was an oldish man with bushy gray whiskers, who never wore a
coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.
“That there ol’ pond,” he explained. “I’ve been an’ took a look at
her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an’ I’ll go bail there ain’t
so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer’s a mistry,
mum, an’ no mistake.”
Mother stared at him. “I can’t bear this,” she said suddenly. “You
must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to
the police-station at once. Call him, please!”
“Walter!” roared Jenks obediently.
“Coming!” answered the boot-boy and burst forth from the bushes. In
swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget,
mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency.
Walter went flying to execute them.
“Oh, mother, where do you think Joan can be?” begged Joyce when
Jenks had gone off to resume his search.
“I don’t know,” said mother. “It’s all so absurd.”
“If there _was_ wood-ladies, they wouldn’t hurt a baby like Joan,”
suggested Joyce.
“Oh, who could hurt her!” cried mother, and fell to calling again.
Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh
roars of Jenks.
Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently
punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang
in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself
wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a
blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard mother’s tale, which
embodied that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his mustache
and his big chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded,
exactly as if he saw through the whole business and could find Joan
in a minute or two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.
“I understand then,” he said, “that the little girl’s been missing
for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can’t have got far.
I sent a couple o’ constables round the roads be’ind the wood before
I started, an’ now I’ll just ’ave a look through the wood myself.”
“Thank you,” said mother. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, but——”
“Very natural, ma’am,” said the big superintendent comfortingly, and
went with them to the wood.
It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and
mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the
spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning
a little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among
the ferns. “It was _’ere_ she went?” he inquired, as he reached the
dark path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced
his search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks
disposed of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the
fields, where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed
them without leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a
cart-rut.
“We ’ave to consider the possibilities of the matter,” said the
superintendent. “Assumin’ that the wood ’as been thoroughly
searched, where did she get out of it?”
“Searched!” growled old Jenks. “There ain’t a inch as I ’aven’t
searched an’ seen—not a inch.”
“The kidnappin’ the’ry,” went on the superintendent, ignoring him
and turning to mother, “I don’t incline to. ’Owever, we must go to
work in order, an’ I’ll ’ave my men up ’ere and make sure of the
wood. All gypsies an’ tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I
don’t think there’s no cause for you to feel anxious, ma’am. I ’ope
to ’ave some news for you in the course of the afternoon.”
They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the
corner.
“Oh, dear,” said mother then; “why doesn’t the baby come? I wish
daddy weren’t away.”
Now that the police had entered the affair, Joyce felt that there
remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of
events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the
police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant
by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles,
flashing the official bull’s-eye lantern into the mysterious
interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly
women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they
would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed
as inevitable to her mother as it did to her.
“They’re sure to bring her back, mother,” she repeated.
“Oh, chick,” said mother, “I keep telling myself so. But I wish—I
wish——”
“What, mother?”
“I wish,” said mother, in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were
confessing something that troubled her—“I wish you hadn’t seen that
wood-lady.”
The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed
old Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It
was a real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground
and went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had
been lost, and no less than three of them trod every inch of the
bottom of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old
fox’s earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived
and walked about smoking a pipe—a detective! Up from the village,
too, came the big young curate and the squire’s two sons, civil and
sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural
that mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant
that anything could have happened to Joan.
“That baby!” urged the curate. “Why, my dear lady, Joan is better
known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a
mile without having to answer questions. I don’t know what’s keeping
her, but you may be sure she’s all right.”
“’Course she is,” chorused the others, swinging their sticks
light-heartedly. “’Course she’s all right.”
“Get her for me, then,” said mother. “I don’t want to be silly and
you’re awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I—I want
her.”
The squire’s sons turned as if on an order and went toward the wood.
The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a
gentleman, and his hard, clean-shaven face could be kind and
serious.
“We’re sure to get her,” he said, in lower tones. “And you must help
us with your faith and courage. Can you?”
Mother’s hand tightened on that of Joyce.
“We are doing our best,” she said, and smiled—she smiled! The curate
nodded and went his way to the wood.
A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and
master of all the police in the county, a gay, trim soldier whom the
children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more
policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and
bleary eyes—blood-hounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle
it. Actual living blood-hounds would be more than a match for Joan.
Colonel Warden was sure of it too.
“Saves time,” he was telling mother, in his high snappy voice.
“Shows us which way she’s gone, you know. Best hounds in the
country, these two; never known ’em fail yet.”
The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood,
strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in
motion. A pinafore which Joan had worn at breakfast was served to
them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at
it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.
They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till
one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry.
Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across
the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce’s hand, followed. The hounds
made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had
entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and
crashed after them. Joyce and mother came up with them at a place
where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf
that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and
scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without
interest about him.
“Dash it all,” the colonel was saying; “she can’t—she simply can’t
have been kidnapped in a balloon.”
They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result.
They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave
up as though the scent went no further. Nothing could induce them to
hunt beyond it.
“I can’t understand this,” said Colonel Warden, dragging at his
mustache. “This is queer.” He stood glancing around him as though
the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.
The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to
bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by
scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to
thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the country-side. Joyce
found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.
“I know inside myself,” she told mother, “right down deep in the
middle of me, that Joan’s all right.”
“Bless you, my chick,” said poor mother. “I wish I could feel like
that. Go to bed now, like a good girl.”
There was discomfort in the sight of Joan’s railed cot standing
empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely
begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion
that during the night mother came in more than once, and she had a
vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could
not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in
the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no
Joan and nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if
she had been crying.
Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night,
“till she broke down, poor thing,” said nurse, and Joyce was bidden
to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But mother was about again
at lunch-time when Joyce went down to the dining-room. She was very
pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow she seemed
suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce’s age, than ever
before. They kissed each other and the child would have tried to
comfort.
“No,” said mother, shaking her head. “No, dear. Don’t let’s be sorry
for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven’t
done that, have we?”
“_I_ haven’t,” said Joyce. “I _know_ it’s all right.”
After lunch—again mother said she wouldn’t be hungry till Joan came
home—they went out together. There were no searches now in the wood
and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and
they were away, combing the country-side and spreading terror among
the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn and the smell of the
roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge the land rolled away to
clear perspectives of peace and beauty.
“Let’s walk up and down,” suggested mother. “Anything’s better than
sitting still. And don’t talk, chick—not just now.”
They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which
led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence.
It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the
gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved
arm thrust the gate open and there advanced into the sunlight,
coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway—Joan! Her round baby
face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body,
the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a
deep sigh—it sounded like that—and in a moment she was kneeling on
the ground with her arms round the baby.
“Joan, Joan,” she said, over and over again. “My little, little
baby!”
Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free and then
rubbed her eyes drowsily.
“Hallo!” she said.
“But where have you been?” cried mother. “Baby-girl, where have you
been all this time?”
Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm toward the wood, the
wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. “In
there,” she answered carelessly. “Wiv the wood-ladies. I’m hungry!”
“My darling!” said mother, and picked her up and carried her into
the house.
In the dining-room, with mother at her side and Joyce opposite to
her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workman-like fashion,
and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only
served to darken the mystery of her absence.
“But there aren’t any wood-ladies really, darling,” remonstrated
mother.
“There is,” said Joan. “There’s lots. They wanted to keep me but I
wouldn’t stay. So I comed home, ’cause I was hungry.”
“But,” began mother, “where did they take you to?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Joan. “The one what I went to speak to gave me
her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a
place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they
gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!”
“Yes?” said mother. “What else?”
“There was anuvver little girl there,” went on Joan. “Not a
wood-lady, but a girl like me, what they’d tooked from somewhere.
She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they
wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Joyce.
“’Cause I didn’t want to be a wood-lady,” replied Joan.
“Listen to me, darling,” said mother. “Didn’t these people whom you
call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the
whole wood, you know, and you weren’t there at all.”
“I was,” said Joan. “I was there all the time an’ I heard Walter an’
Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an’ the wood-ladies laughed
like leaves rustling.”
“But where did you sleep last night?”
“I didn’t sleep,” said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. “I’se very
sleepy now.”
She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and mother and Joyce
looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious
face.
“God help us,” said mother, in a whisper. “What is the truth of
this?”
There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan’s. And
she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an
adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know
herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she
has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ON THE FEVER SHIP[6]
By RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
Footnote 6:
From _The Lion and the Unicorn_. Copyright, 1899, by Charles
Scribner’s Sons.