Ruth met North as he came up the garden path.
“So you have come this afternoon! I did so hope you would.”
“What is it?” he asked. “Nothing wrong with the farm?”
“Wrong with the farm!” Ruth laughed. “Now just _feel_ it.”
It was steeped in sunshine and the scent of violas. On the garden wall
the pigeons cooed sleepily. From the river came the lilt of a child’s
laugh.
“It feels all right,” said North gravely.
“Just as happy and sound and wholesome as can be,” she said. “I asked
you to come because something wonderful—I believe wonderful—has
happened. I felt I must tell you at once. And I want to ask you things,
want to ask you quite terribly badly. Come up and sit by the blue flower
border. I have the chairs there. It is at its very best.”
“So you have kept that too,” said North, even as his daughter had said.
“It is one of the many beautiful things I found here,” she answered.
“The place is full of thoughts just like that. I hope I have not lost
any, but if I have they will come back.” She stopped to lift up some of
the frail nemophilas. Just so North had seen women arrange their
children’s hair.
“Are not the delphiniums in perfection? They always look to me as if
they were praying.”
Now years ago, standing in just that selfsame spot, Dick Carey had said
that very same thing. It came back to North in a flash, and how he had
answered:
“I should think those meek droopy white things look more like it.”
For a moment he hesitated. Then he gave her the same answer.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed. “To pray you must aspire. And they must be
blue.”
Dick Carey had said, “Prayer is aspiration, not humility. Besides,
they’re not blue.”
Again that sense of well-being which had belonged to the companionship
of his friend stole over North. Again the bitterness and pain seemed to
fade and melt. The present took on a new interest, a new understanding.
He gave himself up to it with a sigh of content as he dropped into the
chair by Ruth Seer’s side. The warmth of the June afternoon, the sleepy
murmur of the life of the farm, the hum of bees, that wonderful blue, it
was all part of it.
“Now light your pipe and be very comfortable,” she said, and left him
alone while the peace and beauty soaked in. Left him alone for how long
he did not know. When you touch real rest, time ceases.
Presently he re-lit the pipe which he had lighted and left to go out.
“Now,” he said, “tell me. I am ready to be convinced of anything
wonderful, just here and now.”
Ruth smiled. She was sitting very still, her elbow on her knee, her chin
in the hollow of her hand. A great content made her face beautiful. Her
grey eyes dwelt lovingly upon the little world, which held so many
worlds in its circle. The laughter of the children came again across the
field. Then she began to talk.
“It is so wonderful,” she said. “I can hardly yet believe it can be
true, which is so foolish, because the truth undoubtedly _is_ wonderful
beyond our conceiving. We only see such little bits of it here, even the
wisest of us. And we will think it is the whole. When we do see the
whole, I think what will be the most wonderful thing about it will be
its amazing simplicity. We shall wonder how we ever groped about among
so many seeming complications, so much dirt and darkness.”
She stopped for a few moments, and North waited. He felt he was
shrinking back into himself, away from whatever might be coming. Like
many very intellectual persons, he was inclined to resent what he could
not account for, and to be wholly unsympathetic, if not a little brutal,
towards it.
Psychical investigation always had repelled him. Repelled him only less,
and in a different way, than the search for knowledge among the tortured
entrails of friendly dogs. With the great forces of nature he could
fight cleanly, and courageously, to harness them to the service of man.
They were enormously interesting, amazingly beautiful. Powerful enough
to protect themselves if necessary. One wrested their secrets from them
at one’s own peril. And the scientist who strives with the great forces
of nature has the mark of his craft branded into his very soul. Its name
is Truth. To that mark, if he be a true scientist, he is faithful
absolutely, unswervingly. Indeed it must be so. And, ever seeking the
truth, the true scientist knows that his discoveries are ever only
partial; that soon, even before his own little day here is ended, will
come new discoveries which shall modify the old. So that he will never
say “I know,” only “I am learning.” And now for the first time psychic
investigation was making its appeal to him, by the mouth of Ruth Seer,
in the name of Truth.
“Very well, tell me,” he said, struggling with his dislike. “I will cast
from me, as far as possible all preconceived objections, and, possibly,
prejudices. I will bring an open mind.”
Ruth turned, her whole face alight. “Ah, that is just what I want! Only
be as critical as you will. I want that too. That is why I wanted so
much to tell you, because you will bring a trained mind to bear on it
all. Because of that, and also because you are his friend, I can speak
about it to you. It would be very difficult to anyone else.”
She stopped, gathering herself up as it were, before she started.
“You remember the day you first came? To fetch Larry?”
North nodded.
“We all forgathered together at the gate, you and I and the dogs. I told
you about Larry, how he had come the night before, tired and miserable,
and hunted everywhere, and early in the morning he had gone again, so
far as I knew. And just before you came I had found him down by the
stream, quite happy apparently, with a man. I think I told you?”
“Yes.”
“The man was watching some kingfishers, and I stopped to watch them too.
Very still we all were. I had never seen the birds close. The man was
lying on the grass, but he looked a tall man. He wore a brown suit,
rather shabby. I could not see his face, only the back of his head
propped up on his hand. It was a long, thin hand, very sunburnt. A
well-shaped, sensitive hand. And he had dark hair with a strong wave in
it. Though it was cut very short, the waves showed quite plainly and
evenly.”
North had taken his pipe out of his mouth now and was staring at it.
“Then your motor siren startled us all, and the man vanished as swiftly,
it seemed, as the birds. I wondered just a little—when I thought of it
after, where he could have got to—but not for long. This morning I saw
the same man again. I was in the buttercup field, and he was standing in
the road in front of the new cottages, looking at them. Again I could
only see his back, and he is very tall. He had no hat on, and it was the
same dark wavy hair. You know the little pitch of hill that goes up to
the cottages? When I reached the bottom I could see him quite clearly.
He was pulling Larry towards him by a handkerchief lead, and then
letting him go suddenly—playing with him, you know. And I could hear
Larry snarling as a dog does in play. Then Larry caught sight of me and
stopped to look. And when he looked the man turned and looked at me
too——”
She paused. The summer sounds of the farm sang on, but it seemed that
just around those two there was a tense silence. North broke it.
“Well!” he said, his voice harsh and almost impatient.
“He had a thin, very sunburnt face,” Ruth went on, “lined, but with the
lines that laughter makes. Very blue eyes, the blue eyes that look as if
they had a candle lit behind them. When he saw me he smiled. There was a
flash of very white teeth, and his smile was like a sudden bright
light.”
North’s pipe dropped on to the flagged pathway with the little dull
click of falling wood.
Ruth leant towards him; her voice dropped almost to a whisper.
“Was Dick Carey like that?” she asked.
“Yes.” North met her eyes for the first time since she had begun to tell
him. The suggestion of unwillingness to listen which had shown in his
manner from the first dropped from him. “What happened next?”
“I don’t quite know how to describe it. He did not fade or vanish or
anything like that. He remained quite distinct, and that wonderful smile
still shone, but my sight failed. It seemed to grow more and more dim
until at last I could not see him at all. I hurried, I even tried to
call out to him, but it was no good.”
“But you were not blind; you could see everything else?”
“Yes, when I looked for them I could. I wish I could explain to you how
it was. The nearest I can get to it is, that his figure, while I saw it,
stood out more distinctly than anything else. All the rest seemed in the
background, indistinct by comparison. Ah, I know—like—have you ever
noticed on a bright sunny day, looking in a shop window, how suddenly
the things reflected are much clearer and more visible than the things
actually in the window? They seem to recede, and the reflection is
strong and clear. Well, it was something like that. As if one had two
sights and one for the moment overbore the other. I’m explaining badly,
but it’s difficult. At any rate he did not evaporate or fade as they say
these visions invariably do. It was the sight failed me.”
“That is enormously interesting,” said North slowly.
“You see,” said Ruth eagerly, “ever since I came here this—this being in
touch with Dick Carey has been growing. It is becoming a wonderful
experience; it seems to me of possibly enormous value, but I don’t want
to take it one step beyond where it can reasonably and legitimately be
taken. I want the truth about it. I want your brains, your intelligence,
to help me. I want you honestly and truly to tell me just what you think
of these happenings. And I want to know whether you yourself have had
any sense of his presence here, even ever so faint.”
North recovered his pipe, re-lit it, and began to smoke again before he
answered. Indeed, he smoked in silence for quite a long time.
“I cannot deny the fact,” he said at length, “that I have what perhaps
should be described as a prejudice against any supposed communication
with the dead. It has always been surrounded, to my mind, with so much
that is undesirable, nor do I believe in any revelation save that of
science, and on these lines science has no revelation. But there are two
things here that do force themselves on my consideration. One is that
you never knew Dick in the flesh, the other that since you came here,
not before, I have myself felt, not a presence of any sort, but the
sense of well-being and content which always belonged to my
companionship with him. And that I never feel anywhere but at Thorpe, or
at Thorpe except when you are with me. The latter can be explained in
various ways. The former is rather different. Have you ever seen a
photograph of Dick, or has anyone described him to you?”
“No. I have never seen a photograph, and no one has ever described his
appearance to me.”
Then she smiled at him suddenly and delightfully. “I am not a curious
woman, but I am human,” she said. “Before we go any further, for pity’s
sake describe Dick Carey to me, and tell me if he was in the habit of
leading Larry by a pocket-handkerchief!”
“You _have_ described him,” said North, smiling too. “Especially his
smile. I am short-sighted, but I could always tell Dick in a crowd if he
smiled, long before I could distinguish his features. And he did lead
Larry by his handkerchief. It was a regular game between them.”
“Surely that is in the nature of proof!” exclaimed Ruth.
“Let us call it circumstantial evidence.”
“But worth even your—a scientist’s—consideration?”
“Undoubtedly! By the way, what happened to Larry?”
“When I thought of him again it was some little time later; he was going
back to the house across the field. And—and—oh, I know it sounds mad—he
was following somebody, and so were Sarah and Selina. You know, don’t
you, what I mean? Dogs run quite differently when they are out on their
own. And I have never known Sarah and Selina leave me to follow anyone
else before, in all their lives.”
“Any dog would follow Dick,” said North, and then looked as if he would
like to have taken the words back, but she stopped him.
“You promised,” she said. “And that, too, is a piece of evidence. As I
said, I don’t want to push it a fraction of an inch beyond where it will
go. But think what it means? The breaking down of that awful impassable
wall between the living and the dead. Think what some knowledge, of the
next step only, beyond the Gateway of Death means.”
“Always supposing there is a next step,” said North. “Again there is no
evidence I can accept. Though, mind you”—he was really in earnest now—“I
am not among those who are content, indeed glad, that it should all end
here. This old universe is too interesting a riddle to drop after a few
years’ study.”
“Ah, do you know Walt Whitman’s lines?—
“This day, before dawn, I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded
Heaven.
And I said to my spirit,
When we become the enfolders of these orbs, and the pleasure and
knowledge of everything in them,
Shall we be filled and satisfied then?
And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
beyond.”
North nodded. “That’s it! I’m out for that right enough, if it’s going.
I don’t say, mind you, that I’m certain we don’t go on. I’m not such a
fool. But, to my mind, all the evidence so far is the other way.”
“Have you ever tried to get evidence?”
“No. All the methods appear to me to be objectionable, very. Even over
this—this possible sight of yours—I don’t feel keen on the idea that
those who have gone are hanging round their old homes, round us who
cannot cognize them.”
He spoke haltingly, as if expressing himself with difficulty. His
unwillingness to discuss these matters again became evident.
“But surely time and space in the next world will not exist as we
understand them here, and that must make an almost incalculable
difference. And when you think that so many gave their lives for this
world, isn’t it reasonable to think that the work for some of them may
still be linked up with it? Do you remember when you were talking of the
outlook at the present moment, and Lady Condor asked me what I thought
of it? And I said we were not alone, that those who had died that things
might be better, they with their added knowledge—guided—helped—you
remember? Well, that wasn’t _my own_ idea somehow. It came to me from
somewhere else, quite suddenly, on the moment, as it were. And I had to
say it—though I felt shy and uncomfortable. One does not speak of these
things to all the world. But _some one_ wanted me to say it—just then
and there.”
She stopped, and in both their minds was a vision of Violet Riversley’s
beautiful angry unhappy face.
“I remember,” answered North. “And your idea is that Dick’s mind can
communicate with yours by thought?”
Ruth thought a little; her eyes looked out without seeing.
“It is not an idea,” she said at last. “I know.”
“And have you any idea or knowledge why it should be so, seeing you
never knew each other in this life? If you had, and had loved very
deeply, it would be more comprehensible, though less interesting from
the point of view of proving communication. As it is, there seems to me
nothing sufficiently important to account for it. Nothing beyond a
certain likeness of thought and interests.”
Ruth smiled. The interest had gripped him again. He was thinking out
aloud. She waited until he looked at her.
“What is your explanation?” he asked.
And suddenly Ruth found it amazingly difficult to explain. The memory of
that velvet night of stars, the message in the song of the little brown
bird, the revelation which had come to her, swept over her again with a
renewed and surprising sweetness, but of words she seemed bereft.
Compared with the wonder and beauty of the thought they seemed utterly
inadequate and hopeless. She put out both her hands with a little
foreign gesture of helplessness.
“You have none?” he asked, and she caught the disappointment in his
voice, and looking at him saw, as she had seen once before on his first
visit, the lonely tired soul of the man who, losing Dick Carey, had lost
much. And Dick Carey was there, so very surely there.
“It isn’t the personal love for one that really brings together,” she
said, her voice very, very gentle. “It is the love for everything that
has life or breath. _That_ love must be communion. It makes you belong.”
There was a little silence before she went on:
“You see, I never had any one person to concentrate on, unless it was
old Raphael Goltz, and looking back, I see now he was a cosmic sort of
person. He did really in some way grip the whole of things, and it
helped me more than I had any idea of at the time. Then I cared so much
for all the men out in Flanders who came in and out of my life so
swiftly and spasmodically. Then I came here, and found how much I cared
for all living things in the lower worlds. And he is linked up too with
them all, because he cared so much. And we have both by chance, whatever
chance may be, focused on Thorpe. Do you at all understand what I mean?”
“Yes, after a fashion,” said North. “It’s like watching some one dimly
moving about in an unknown, and to me a visionary, world. I own you are
right—he moved in it too; and I am also ready to own it is possible
because of my own limitations that I can only regard it as visionary.”
“Raphael had many books dealing with these things,” said Ruth. “I feel
so sorry now that they did not interest me then. You see, I had never
lost anyone by death. I had no one to lose. It was only out in France
when the men came in and drank my soup or coffee, and some slept like
tired children, and others played a game of cards, or talked to me of
home, and we all seemed like children of one family belonging to each
other. And in a few hours, perhaps less, I would see one or more of them
lying dead—gone out like flames extinguished quite suddenly. And I
didn’t know what life or death meant.”
North nodded. “It hits one sometimes,” he said.
“And their people at home—I used to write for some of those who were
brought in to the estaminet and died before they could get them farther.
One thought of them all the time. Going on with their everyday life at
home, and waiting. That is why what has happened to me here seems so
amazingly important, why its truth needs such close questioning, why I
so much want your help.”
“For what it is worth it is at your disposal, and”—he paused before he
went on with decision—“I own I am interested, as I have never been
before in so-called communication with another world.”
“There are some books here dealing with psychic faculties. I found them
on the top of the oak bookcase. Mostly by German authors. Would they
have been Mr. Carey’s?”
“More likely they belonged to a friend of his who used to stay here.”
“Oh, the German friend!” exclaimed Ruth.
“You have heard of him?”
“Mr. Fothersley spoke of him only this morning, and your daughter
mentioned him the other day.”
“He was an interesting personality, and very strong on the point that
there were extraordinary powers and forces latent in man. I never cared
to discuss them with him. He went too far, and looking back I think I
almost unconsciously dreaded his influence over Dick. I don’t think I
need have. Dick was, I recognize it now, the stronger of the two.”
“But he was interested in the same things?”
“Undoubtedly. Possibly I was jealous; I preferred him to be interested
in my particular line of study. He _was_ interested to a great extent of
course, but von Schäde’s lines of thought appealed to him more. I
remember the last night von Schäde was here. It was in the June of 1914.
He had been paying Dick a long visit and was leaving in the morning. It
was the sort of night when the world seems much bigger than it does by
day—a wonderful night. The sky was thick with stars, and he stood just
over there with their light on his face, and talked to us as if we were
a public meeting. He was a good-looking chap in a hard frozen sort of
style. Oliver Lodge had been speaking to the Royal Art Society on the
Sources of Power, and it had got von Schäde on to his hobby.
“‘You talk of the power of atomic energy, you scientists,’ he said; ‘it
is as nothing compared with the forces possessed by man in himself. If
we studied these, if we understood these, if we knew how to harness and
direct them, there is nothing in heaven and earth we should not be
masters of. Men—we should be gods! And you men with brains puddle about
among the forces of nature, blind and deaf to the forces in man which
could harness every one of the forces of nature obedient to your will,
and leave the study of these things to hysterical madmen and neurotic
women. And those who have some knowledge, who have the gift, the power,
to experiment with these forces if they would, they are afraid of this
and that. My God, you make me sick!’
“He threw out both his arms and his face was as white as a sheet. Old
Dick got up and put his arm round the fellow’s shoulders. Goodness knows
what he saw in him! ‘We’ll get the forces harnessed right enough, old
fellow, when we’re fit to use them,’ he said.
“And they looked at each other for a full minute, von Schäde glaring and
Dick smiling, and then von Schäde suddenly began to laugh.
“‘Mostly I’m fond of you, Dick,’ he said, ‘but sometimes I hate you like
the deuce!’
“He went the next morning, and I was glad. For another thing he fell in
love with Vi, and she was such a little demon to flirt that until the
last minute you never knew if she was serious or not. Morally and
socially he was irreproachable, but—well, I didn’t like him! I often
wondered how he took the news of her engagement to Dick.”
“That happened after he left?”
“Yes. The second time Dick went out to the front. He wasn’t a marrying
man really. But you know how things were then. Vi broke down over his
going, and he had always been fond of her since she was a baby. But I
don’t think it would have been a success. I never could picture old Dick
as anything but a bachelor.”
He stopped, for he saw she was not listening. She was thinking hard. Her
black brows bent, her grey eyes almost as black beneath them.
“That is very interesting,” she said presently, speaking slowly, as one
tracking an idea. “Von Schäde must have known that Dick Carey knew
better how to exercise those latent powers than he did. They were both
seeking the same thing from different motives.”
“Explain, please.”
Ruth was silent again for a moment, still thinking hard. “It’s not easy,
you know,” she said. “But this is the best I can do. They were both
scientists of the invisible, just as you are a scientist of the visible,
but Dick Carey was seeking union with God and von Schäde was seeking
knowledge and power for himself. Therefore they studied the unseen
sources of life and death by different methods, and Dick Carey had got
farther than von Schäde and von Schäde knew it.”
North shook his head. “Now you are wandering in the mist so far as I am
concerned,” he said.
Ruth sighed. “I explain badly, but then I am only struggling in the mist
myself. I wish I had cared for these things when Raphael Goltz was
alive! So many things he said which passed me by then come back to me
now with a new meaning. But there is one thing just lately I have felt
very strongly. When he was in the physical body Dick Carey was a far
more wonderful man than any of you knew—except probably von Schäde. Yes,
you loved him I know, the world is black without him, but you didn’t
think he was anything extraordinary. You are a great man and he was
nobody, in the eyes of the world. You don’t know even now how wonderful
he was. And now he has escaped from this clogging mould, this blinding
veil of physical matter, he is, I firmly believe, making this little
corner of the earth, this little Sussex farm, what every home and
village the town might be if we were in touch with the invisible secret
source of all.”
She stopped, for she felt that North was not following her any longer,
was shrinking back again.
“Oh!” she cried, “why won’t you believe it is worth your study at any
rate?”
North turned on her suddenly, harshly, almost brutally.
“I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t you see it’s all shapeless,
formless, to a mind like mine? I want to believe. God! it would give one
an horizon beyond eternity; but you talk of what to me is foolishness.”
He looked at her with an immeasurable dreariness of soul in his eyes,
and very gently she put her worn brown hand in his and held it.
“Listen,” she said, and her voice was deep with sudden music. “The
children come now. You cannot keep them away. Something draws them to
Thorpe. The wild creatures one can understand. It is sanctuary. But the
children—it must mean something.”
“You are here.”
She shrank back as if hurt. “No, oh no! It is not me. It is something
altogether beyond me. Oh, do listen. They were always slipping in, or
standing by the gate with their little faces peeping between the bars.
Quite tinies some of them, and I took them back to their homes at first.
I thought their mothers would be anxious. And then—then I began to
guess. So now I have given them the field beyond the stream and they
come out of school hours.”
“The lower field!” exclaimed North. “No wonder you have taken
Fothersley’s breath away.”
“Oh, he does not know of that. Fortunately he was here in the morning
during school hours, so he only saw the Blackwall children. You see,”
she added apologetically, “it is _such_ a child’s field, with the stream
and the little wood with blue-bells, and there are cowslips in the
spring and nuts in the autumn, and I shall make hay as usual, of course.
We cut on Tuesday.”
“Don’t you find them very destructive?”
“They haven’t trampled down a yard of grass,” said Ruth triumphantly. “I
gave them a strip by the stream under the silver birches. The primrose
bit, you know, and the wood. And the hay is in a way their property. You
go and try to walk across it! You’ll have a nest full of jackdaws at
you!”
“But the trees and flowers!”
“That is just another thing,” she smiled at him. “Oh, why won’t you
believe? I have had to teach them hardly anything. They know. No branch
is ever torn down. Never will you find those pathetic little bunches of
picked and thrown-away flowers here. The birds are just as tame. I teach
them very little. I’m afraid of spoiling my clumsy help. It is so
wonderful. They bring crumbs of any special bit of cake they get, for
the birds, and plant funny little bits of roots and sow seeds. Come down
and see them with me. I don’t take, or tell, other people. I am so
afraid of it getting spoilt.”
North extracted his long frame from his chair.
“All right,” he said, with that odd smile of his as of one humouring a
child. “But you are mad, you know, quite mad.”
“You said that to me before.”
And then North remembered suddenly that he had often said it to Dick
Carey.
Their way led across the flower garden, and under the cherry-orchard
trees where the daisies shone like snow on the green of the close-cut
grass. Here they found Bertram Aurelius lying on his back talking in
strange language to the whispering leaves above him, and curling and
uncurling his bare pink toes in the dappled sunlight. His mother sat
beside him, her back against a tree trunk, mending the household linen
when she could keep her eyes off him for more than a minute. The dogs
fell upon Bertram Aurelius, who took them literally to his bosom,
fighting them just as a little puppy fights, and his mother smiled up at
them with her big blue eyes and foolish loose-lipped red mouth.
“Have you ever heard anything of the father?” said North, when they were
out of earshot.
“Killed at Bullecourt,” Ruth answered. “I could not help feeling it was
perhaps best. He will be a hero to her now always.”
The lower field was steeped in the afternoon sunshine, and the children
were chirping like so many birds. Two sat by the stream blowing
dandelion clocks, which another small child carried to them with careful
footsteps, his tongue protruding in the anxious effort to convey the
fragile globes in safety before they floated away. Two bigger boys were
planting busily in a clearing in the wood. Another slept, seemingly just
as he had fallen, with all the lissom grace of childhood, and on the
bank beside him a small girl crooned to something she nursed against her
flat little chest.
Roger North looked at the peaceful scene with relief.
“I believe I’d expect a sort of school feast,” he said. “If you don’t
break forth any more violently than this, I’m with you. What are the
little beggars planting?”
“Michaelmas daisies. They should do there, don’t you think? And we are
trying lilies in that far corner. The soil is damp and peaty. We were
too late for fruit trees this year but I’ve great plans for autumn
planting.”
North, oddly enough, so it seemed to many, was popular with children. He
never asked them endless questions, or if they wanted to do this or
that. He liked the little people, and had discovered that at heart they
were like the shy wild things. Leave them alone and keep quiet, and, ten
to one, presently a little hand will creep into yours.
He let himself down on the bank near the crooning child, in silence. She
was a thin white slip of a thing, with very fair hair and a pair of big
translucent eyes. It was an old doll she was nursing, so old that its
face had practically disappeared, and a blank white circle gazed to
heaven from under a quite smart tam-o’-shanter. She was telling some
story apparently, but only now and then were any words intelligible.
Presently she began to look at North sideways, and her voice rose out of
its low monotone into a higher key. It was like the sudden movement of a
bird nearer to something or some one whose _bona fides_ it has at first
mistrusted.
The words she was crooning became more intelligible, and gradually North
realized, to his astonishment, that she was repeating, after her own
fashion, the old Saga of Brynhild the warrior maid whom Segurd found
clad in helm and byrne. A queer mixture of the ride of the Valkyries, of
Brynhild asleep surrounded by the eternal fires. Brynhild riding her
war-horse on to the funeral pyre. Loki the Fire God. Wotan with his
spear. All were mixed up in a truly wonderful whole. But still more to
his astonishment it was the sword which appealed evidently above all to
this small white maiden. On the sword she dwelt lovingly, and wove her
tale around its prowess. And when she had brought her recital to a
triumphantly shrill close at the moment when Siegmund draws the sword
from the tree, she turned and looked him full in the face, half shyly,
half triumphantly, wholly appealing. It was as if she said, “What do you
think of that now?”
North nodded at her. “That’s first rate, you know,” he said.
“Which would you choose, if you had the choice? Would you choose the
ring or the sword?” she asked.
“Well, I’m inclined to think old Wotan’s spear is more in my line,” said
North in a tone of proper thoughtful consideration. “It broke the sword
once, didn’t it? At least I believe it did. But it’s rather a long time
ago since I read about these things. Do you learn them at school?”
“They aren’t lessons.” She looked at him with some contempt. “They’re
stories.”
“It’s such a long time ago since anyone told me stories,” said North
apologetically. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”
She looked at him with compassion, holding the battered doll closer to
her. Her eyes reminded him of a rain-washed sky.
“I tell Tommy lots of stories,” she said.
Another child’s voice called to her from the wood, “Moira, Moira,” and
she fled away. It was like the sudden flight of a bird.
“Who is the child who tells her dolls the story of the Ring?” he asked
Ruth, when she rejoined him. “She is rather like one of Rackham’s Rhine
Maidens herself, by the way.”
“Moria Kent? Isn’t she a lovely little thing? Her mother is the village
school-mistress.”
“Ah, that accounts for it I suppose,” said North.
Ruth opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again. Instead of what she
had meant to say, she said, “Come, it is time for tea. And I have
ordered strawberries and cream.”