THE PERFUMES OF ARABIA
‘Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.’
――_Coleridge._
Looking rather tired, with a large hole in the knee of his stocking,
and a very dirty collar, but in the glory of a motor-car, Grif arrived
home when the others were finishing dinner. The car had departed again
before any one had time to reach the door, but Grif and Pouncer were
there, upon the step, and in her relief at seeing him safe and sound
Aunt Caroline forgot all about the scolding she had prepared.
He was dragged into the dining-room by excited young Westons, though
in the general hubbub nothing could be made out very clearly, except
that he was home once more and had had his dinner. Ann, finding it
difficult to get near her brother, devoted herself to Pouncer.
For a minute or two the noise was deafening, because everybody tried to
talk at once. Then Grif’s adventures were drawn from him in jerks, and
the tale of Palmer’s burglar, who that morning had been discharged and
sent back to his comrades, was told by Edward.
In the first lull Aunt Caroline pounced upon Grif. She wanted him to
go to bed, or at least to lie down on the sofa. Only through repeated
assurances that he could not possibly sleep was he absolved from this,
and, even then, promises were extracted from him that he would keep
quiet, and not run about in the sun. She accompanied him to his room
and watched him change his stockings and his collar.
“If Doctor O’Neill comes round before you go to bed this evening you’re
to see him,” she suddenly declared.
“I’m all right,” Grif protested. “I know I am, and I hate doctors.”
“But _I_ don’t know it,” said Aunt Caroline. She looked at the sallow
face, at the dusky lines under the dark eyes, and felt dissatisfied.
“Where are you going to now? Why can’t you stay quietly in the house?”
“I’m going to be quiet. I want to read about Tobias. Grandpapa told me
it was in the old Bible in church.”
“The church is locked up.”
“He told me I could have the key,” said Grif. “He left it for me in the
drawer of the hat-stand, so that I could get it when I wanted.”
“Come and let me brush you; your jacket’s covered with dust. Grandpapa
spoils you all. If you _do_ go, remember you’re not to be late for tea.
I’ll be very angry if you are, and not allow you to go out by yourself
again.”
“How can I help forgetting, if I do forget?” Grif argued gently, as
Aunt Caroline turned him round to brush the back of his coat. “I mean I
can’t _remember_ not to forget.”
“You can remember to come straight home at any rate,” said Aunt
Caroline. “You must have _known_, Grif, that you shouldn’t have run off
the way you did yesterday, without telling anybody where you were going
to!”
Grif listened patiently, and as she dropped the brush stooped and
picked it up for her. “I didn’t know: I hadn’t time to think: it was
hearing the engine whistle that put it into my head. And at all events
I got Pouncer.”
“If you had stayed at home, if you had told grandpapa, you would have
got Pouncer; and you wouldn’t have needed to wander about out of doors
all night.”
She let him depart, reluctantly, for after the events of yesterday
nothing seemed safe, though it was difficult, unless an aeronaut
descended and carried him off, to imagine what harm could come to
him now. She herself was going into Ballinreagh to return Palmer’s
revolver. She had insisted on grandpapa’s confiscating _that_
immediately after breakfast, and she felt that she shouldn’t be happy
till it was safely back in the shop, and till she had said a word or
two to the man who had sold it.
She had kept Grif so long, however, giving him various injunctions,
and examining him minutely as to the state of his health, that when he
at last escaped from her clutches the others had disappeared. He went
round to the back of the house and whistled two or three times; then,
getting no answer, trotted on down the drive by himself, and out on to
the road.
He took a short-cut across the fields, but, characteristically, stopped
to scratch the face of a cow, and to brush away the flies that kept
buzzing round her eyes and settling at the corners of them. The cow
lowered her head till it was well within Grif’s reach, and then stood
perfectly still, breathing her sweet breath into his face, while he
rubbed all round her eyes where the flies tormented her. Solemn,
motionless as one of those extraordinary wooden beasts of Noah’s Arks,
she probably would have been pleased to pass a good portion of the
afternoon in the enjoyment of this novel and delightful sensation, but
Grif, having scratched for several minutes, moved on. The cow followed
him as far as the next stile, where she stood, her head stretched over
the bars. A low moo brought the tender-hearted Grif back again, but he
couldn’t scratch the cow forever, and, giving her a last pat on her wet
soft nose, he turned and ran across the field and on to the church.
He opened the door with his big iron key, and went up to the
reading-desk for the Bible. It was a large book, and a brown powder
from its calf back came off on his jacket as he carried it under his
arm. He brought it out into the sunlit churchyard and looked about for
a comfortable corner. He wandered among the graves, most of them marked
by head-stones stained green by time and weather, some with their
lettering almost indecipherable, and some lying prone on the grass. He
read the names and the dates, now and then having to kneel down and
pull away a creeper that had half hidden an inscription:――
Our Life a Vapour
Our days do quickly pass
Fade as a flower
And wither as the grass.
It seemed odd to Grif to think that many of these people who lay
here had lived more than a hundred years ago――some of them a great
deal more. It made the world appear very old, and gave him a curious
impression of dabbling in past times.
Here lieth the Body of
Henry Tisdale
Who was present at
the Action off Cape Trafalgar
October 1805.
In the midst of it all he remembered Billy Tremaine, and began to
search for _his_ grave, looking among the newer stones. Yet, when he
found it, it was rather an old one, and there were several names on
it, the one he sought for being the last:――William Batt Tremaine, aged
fourteen years. There was no text, merely at the top of the stone an
engraved crest, with a Latin motto which he could not make out. All the
other people buried in this grave had been old, and it seemed to Grif
rather sad that a boy should have to lie here among men and women, not
one of whom but had attained his allotted span of three score years and
ten.
The grave was close to the wall, and just beside it Grif sat down,
with his book on the grass near him. The hot sun made him sleepy and
comfortable and not inclined to begin reading, so he remained for a
while thinking of the Batts, and of Billy’s room, which he had not yet
been taken to see, though he had gone to the house a good many times;
and presently he heard the thin, creaking, rather battered voice of the
wall:――
In the old grey stone wall grow daisies,
White and gold,
With green trembling leaves like feathers
And roots that hold
Firmly between the grey crumbling stones.
In the old grey stone wall grow thistles,
Purple and strong,
And the ivy clings there and dark mosses
Creep along
The battered ancient stones.
Here out of the wind and in the sunshine
I find a nook;
Pleasant to lie here in simple idleness,
Or with a book
Sit, leaning my back against the stones.
While overhead the sky is blue,
And at my feet the grass is green,
And a bee crawls on the thistle,
And a lark sings, unseen.
And quietly the spider spins his web
Between the stones, and waits for foolish flies;
And a cock crows in the distance, and a dog barks,
And when the wind passes, when the wind shakes it and awakens it,
The old elm-tree sighs.
Grif opened his Bible and after some trouble found the Book of Tobit.
He read it carefully, but with a good deal of disappointment, for,
though it was like them, it did not seem to him nearly so interesting
as the stories in the _Arabian Nights_. The genni that fled from Tobias
into “the utmost parts of Egypt” was evidently not so powerful as
those which King Solomon had sealed up in brazen jars and thrown into
the ocean; nor was the magic which Tobias used very exciting. He only
burned the heart and liver of a fish, and it was just the smell that
the genni didn’t like. Perhaps it was a herring, Grif thought, for he
himself detested the smell of herrings. Moreover, Tobias’s dog, which
he had imagined as playing a principal part in the adventure, was just
mentioned and no more. Grif believed he could make up a better story
out of his own head, and one more like the picture.
He shut the Bible and placed it on the grass beside him. Through
sleepy, narrowed lids he looked at the square tower of the church. He
wondered if it could be getting late already, for the sun seemed to be
setting; and he thought dimly of teatime and then forgot it. Across
the dusky flush of the sky he saw a bridge of golden light, and he knew
that if he could walk up this bridge it would lead him to fairy-land.
Above his head he heard a heavy flapping of wings, a flapping growing
louder and louder, till at last it made quite a wind in the trees. An
immense shadow suddenly darkened the churchyard, and Grif, lifting
his face, saw an enormous lizard-shaped creature, with great green
protuberant eyes, eyes brighter than the brightest motor-lamps,
circling over him and dropping closer and closer to the ground. Its
flaming green and yellow body shone as if it were coated with precious
stones; it had huge claws, and its legs were in a kind of bunch in
the front: all the rest of it seemed to stretch out in an enormous
tail. From its open jaws came a glow like the glow of a smith’s fire,
brightening and dulling as it breathed. Suddenly, with a startled
little scream, he saw it drop on to the church tower and swing there,
its tail reaching nearly to the ground. For a moment he felt afraid,
and then, as it slid to the earth and sprawled over the graves, his
fear vanished, for he saw it was only the dragon-fly he had saved that
morning....
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The dragon had vanished; the dragon-fly
too; but the sound that had awakened him persisted. It was the sound
of some one running, running quickly, down the cinder path. He sprang
to his feet and was just in time to see Palmer disappear through the
gate, which he slammed behind him in Mr. Bradley’s face.