"Oh, well, if you're going to sneer!" she said, and added that it was
getting late, and that she must go home.
"Not yet," I pleaded. "See how pretty everything is. The sky all pink,
and the red sunset between the yews, and that good little moon. And how
black the shadows are under the buttresses. Don't go home--already they
will have lighted the yellow shaded lamps in your drawing-room. Your
sister will be sitting down to the piano. Your mother is trying to match
her silks. Your brother has got out the chess board. Someone is drawing
the curtains. The day is over for them, but for us, here, there is a
little bit of it left."
We were sitting on the lowest step of a high, square tomb, moss-grown
and lichen-covered. The yellow lichens had almost effaced the long list
of the virtues of the man on whose breast this stone had lain, as itself
in round capitals protested, since the year of grace 1703. The
sharp-leafed ivy grew thickly over one side of it, and the long, uncut
grass came up between the cracks of its stone steps.
"It's all very well," she said severely.
"Don't be angry," I implored. "How can you be angry when the bats are
flying black against the rose sky, when the owl is waking up--his is a
soft, fluffy awakening--and wondering if it's breakfast time?"
"I won't be angry," she said. "Besides the owl, it's disrespectful to
the dear, sleepy, dead people to be angry in a churchyard. But if I were
really superstitious, you know, I should be afraid to come here at
night."
"At the end of the day," I corrected. "It is not night yet. Tell me
before the night comes all the wonderful things you believe. Recite your
_credo_."
"Don't be flippant. I don't suppose I believe more unlikely things than
you do. You believe in algebra and Euclid and log--what's-his-names. Now
I don't believe a word of all that."
"We have it on the best authority that by getting up early you can
believe six impossible things before breakfast."
"But they're not impossible. Don't you see that's just it? The things I
like to believe are the very things that _might_ be true. And they're
relics of a prettier time than ours, a time when people believed in
ghosts and fairies and witches and the devil--oh, yes! and in God and
His angels, too. Now the times are bound in yellow brick, and we believe
in nothing but ... Euclid and--and company prospectuses and patent
medicines."
When she is a little angry she is very charming, but it was too dark for
me to see her face.
"Then," I asked, "it is merely the literary sense that leads you to make
the Holy Sign when you find two knives crossed on your table, or to
knock under the table and cry 'Unberufen' when you have provoked the
Powers with some kind word of the destiny they have sent you?"
"I don't," she said. "I don't talk foreign languages."
"You say, 'unbecalled for,' I know, but this is mere subterfuge. Is it
the literary sense that leads you to treasure farthings, to refuse to
give pins, to object to a dinner party of thirteen, to fear the plucking
of the golden elder, to avoid coming back to the house when once you've
started, even if you've forgotten your prayer-book or your umbrella, to
decline to pass under a ladder--"
"I always go under a ladder," she interrupted, ignoring the other
counts; "it only means you won't be married for seven years."
"I never go under ladders. Tell me, is it the literary sense?"
"Bother the literary sense," she said. "Bother" is not a pretty word,
but this did not strike me till I came to write it down. "Look," she
went on, "at the faint primrose tint over the pine trees and those last
pink clouds high up in the sky."
I could see the outline of her lifted chin and her throat against the
yew shadows, but I determined to be wise. I looked at the pine trees and
said--
"I want you to instruct me. Why is it unlucky to break a looking-glass?
and what is the counter-charm?"
"I don't know"--there was some awe in her voice--"I don't think there is
any counter-charm. If I broke a looking-glass I believe I should have to
give up believing in these things altogether. It would make me too
unhappy."