laughing in the country roads, and the horses biting at each other's
manes, and the birds circling together in the soft air. For, as if
Somebody had known that it was going to be her birthday and waved a wand
during the night, the wind had dropped and the clouds vanished, and the
air was full of a thousand scents. There were earth-scents, warm and
wet, and hedge-scents of primroses and growing weeds, and the scents of
small animals, and cow-scents and lamb-scents, and tree-scents of bark
and cracking buds. Invisibly they rose and spread and mingled, like
children flocking upstairs in their party frocks; and the sun beamed
down on them like some gay old admiral who had just spied summer on the
horizon.
But Marian was still unhappy and disappointed, and when she had given
her message to old Miss Hubbard she wandered across the fields, not very
much caring where she went or what might happen to her. That was how she
was feeling when she came at last to a small wood, called the Pirate's
Wood because it was shaped rather like a ship, with a lot of masts in
it, easy to climb. It was Cuthbert who had christened this wood, because
he had climbed higher than the others--almost to the top of the tallest
tree. But Doris had climbed nearly as high, and they both laughed at
Marian, because she would only climb half-way up. It occurred to her
this afternoon, however, that she would climb higher than either of
them; and she didn't care, she said, if she fell from the top.
So she swung herself up on to the lowest branch of the big elm-tree near
the middle of the wood; and presently she saw above her the fork between
two boughs that Cuthbert had christened the crow's-nest. Level with her
nose, cut in the bark of the trunk, was a big D, standing for Doris, so
that already she had climbed as high as Doris had climbed, and was able
to look out over the other trees. But now she had come to the hardest
part of the climb, for in order to reach the crow's-nest she would have
to swarm up a piece of the elm-trunk from which there were no branches
sticking out to help her. There were only roughnesses in the bark, into
which she would have to dig her fingers, and first of all she had to
pull up her skirt and tuck it down inside her knickers. For a moment or
two she began to be frightened. But then she told herself that she
didn't care; and soon she had swarmed high enough to reach one of the
forking boughs, and had swung herself up into the crow's-nest.
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 ships 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 God. 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.
"Just behind us, for instance, there's a clump of anemones singing next
to some primroses."
Marian turned and saw them, just as he had said.
"Oh, I wish," she cried, "that I could hear them too."
The painter smiled.
"Wait for a moment," he said. "Well, then once more I began to grow
miserable. For I was an artist, you see, and every artist wants to make
other people see what he sees. That was why I had painted my pictures.
But how could I make people hear what I heard? So I told the old priest
about it, and he said that, if I were a real artist, the power would
come back to me somehow. 'Wait a little,' he said, 'Stay a little
longer. You've hardly begun yet to hear for yourself.'"
He paused again and lit his pipe.
"And at last it came to me," he said. "Hold my hand."
Marian slipped her hand into his.
"Now close your eyes," he told her, "and listen."
For a moment she could hear nothing but a ploughman shouting to his
horses and the tap-tapping of a woodpecker; but slowly as she listened
sounds began to come to her, as of a hidden band far in the distance.
Presently they drew nearer, and at first they were confused, like
hundreds of people gently humming through closed lips; but at last she
began to recognize different notes, like tiny drums and flutes and
fifes. All the time, too, close at hand, there was a faint persistent
ringing of bells; and these were the anemones swaying on their stems;
and the little trumpet-sounds came from the primroses. Then there was a
rough sort of scraping sound; and that was a mole, he said, burrowing in
the earth two or three yards away. And there was a sound like a chant on
one full note from a big field of grass just in front of the wood. Those
were the distincter notes; but there was a continuous sharp undertone,
like millions of finger-tips tapping on stretched parchment; and those
were the buds opening all along the hedges and upon the leaf-twigs up
above them. But deeper than all, deeper and softer than the softest
organ, there was a great sound; and that was the sap, he told her,
rising like a flood in all things living for miles around them.
Then she opened her eyes and dropped his hand, and it was as if she had
suddenly become almost deaf. She lifted her fingers and put them in her
ears.
"It's as if they were stopped up," she said. "Hold my hand again."
But he turned and smiled at her.
"Are you still unhappy?" he asked.
Marian shook her head.
"No, not now," she answered.
"That's right," he said. "The world's much too good a place for a little
girl like you to be unhappy in."
Then he held her hand again, and as the sounds of the world came back to
her there happened the oddest thing of all. For now there came other
sounds, clearer and nearer, lighter than breath and closer than her
heart. They said "Marian" to her, "Marian, Marian"; and the strange
thing was that she seemed to remember them--just as if their names were
on the tip of her tongue, like the names of old friends, stupidly
forgotten.
"That's what they are," he said. "They're the voices of the friends that
we left behind us when we were born. Whenever we go back, and whenever
we have a birthday, they come flocking down to greet us."
He stood up and stretched himself, and Marian rose to her feet.
"So you've had a party," he said, "after all."
Could we, down the road to school,
Run but with undeafened ears,
Then what joy in this sweet spring
Just to hear the gardens sing,
Scilla with her drooping bells
Playing her enchanted peal,
Primrose with his golden throat
Shouting his triumphant note.
THE SORROWFUL PICTURE
[Illustration: Porto Blanco]
XII
THE SORROWFUL PICTURE
Marian never told anybody, not even Gwendolen, about that strange party
of hers under the elm-tree; and the blind painter faithfully promised
that he would keep it a secret too. But a fortnight later, when the
doctor said that it was quite safe, she introduced him to Gwendolen; and
Gwendolen was rather excited, because he was the very man who had
painted her favourite picture.
This was a picture, only half finished, that her aunt had bought when
Gwendolen was quite little and when she used to play games all by
herself in the big house in Bellington Square. One of these games was a
queer sort of game, in which she would shut herself up in a room, and
imagine herself climbing into the pictures on the wall and having
adventures with the people inside them. If the picture had a tower in
it, she would climb up the tower and peep down over the other side; or
if there were ships in it she would go on board and talk to the sailors
down below. But her favourite picture she called the "sorrowful
picture," because though she loved it, it made her feel sad.
It was really little more than a sketch, rapidly painted in a few
strokes, and Gwendolen's aunt had only bought it because she had been
told that the artist was famous. But it was full of sunlight, of a hot,
foreign sunlight, through which an old house had stared at the painter,
a yellow-walled house with latticed windows and violet shadows under its
broken roof. In a crooked pot near the front door a dead palm stretched
its withered fingers; and the front door itself was a cave of darkness,
with a jutting eave above it like a frowning eyebrow.
But what made it so sorrowful, at any rate to Gwendolen, was a little
window up in the right-hand corner--an unlatticed window, as dark as the
front door, but with a different sort of darkness. For the darkness of
the front door was an angry darkness. When Gwendolen was little, it had
made her feel frightened. But the darkness of the window was like a
wound. She wanted to kiss it and make it well. After she had played with
the other pictures, and climbed the mountains in them, and gone paddling
in the streams, she always came to this one and stood on its threshold
and wondered why it was so different from the others. She never played
with it. It seemed too real. "I believe there's something sad," she
said, "that the window wants to tell me."
But she loved it too, better than all the other pictures, because nobody
else seemed to understand it; and when her aunt had married Captain
Jeremy, and they had left Bellington Square, and most of the other
pictures had been sold, her aunt had allowed her to take this one with
her and hang it in her bedroom in the old farmhouse. So she was rather
excited when Marian introduced her to the blind painter; and when he
came to tea with them in the middle of April she took him upstairs and
told him all about it, because, of course, he could no longer see it.
But he couldn't remember it, or even where he had painted it, though
there was a date on it which showed that it was six years old, because
that was a year, he said, in which he was travelling all over the world
and making little sketches almost every day. But he didn't laugh at her
as her nurse had done, because pictures, he said, were queer things; and
nothing was more likely than that there should be something in this one
that only Gwendolen could feel.
"You see, a picture," he said, "if you look at it properly, is just like
a conversation painted on canvas; and you can see what the artist said
to his subject as well as what his subject said to him. Of course, in
most pictures, just as in most conversations, all that happened is
something like this: 'Good morning,' said the artist, 'fine weather
we're having,' and whatever he was painting just nodded its head. That's
because he was really thinking about something else--his indigestion or
the money that he hoped to make; and nobody ever tells their inmost
thoughts to people who talk to them like that. But if he has tried to be
a real artist, loving and understanding, and not thinking about himself
at all, the hills and the trees, or whatever he was painting, have begun
to tell him all about themselves. They've swopped secrets with him just
like old friends; and there they are for you to see. Sometimes they have
even told him things that he didn't understand himself. But he has
painted them so faithfully that other people have; and that's the most
wonderful thing that can happen to an artist--better than finding a
hundred pounds."
He lit a cigarette.
"And I shouldn't be surprised," he said, "if that little window wasn't
giving me a message. Only it was a message that I never understood; and
perhaps Gwendolen does."
But Gwendolen shook her head.
"Not very well," she said. "I only know that it makes me feel sad."
And then Gwendolen's aunt came to tell them that tea was ready, and in a
couple of minutes they had forgotten all about the picture; and a
quarter of an hour later they forgot it still more, for in came Captain
Jeremy and Lancelot, the bosun's mate. They were both in high spirits,
because they had had an order to put to sea again for Porto Blanco, to
fetch a cargo of fruit from the Gulf of Oranges, on the shores of which
Porto Blanco was the principal town.
"A matter of three months," said Captain Jeremy, "out and home." He gave
Marian a kiss and pulled Gwendolen's pigtail. "You'd better come with
us. What do you say, Lancelot? Or do you think they'd bring us bad
luck?"
But Lancelot only grinned and made a husky noise--not because he was
naturally shy, but because he was always afraid of having tea in the
drawing-room, in case he should spill something on the carpet. He would
much have preferred, in fact, to have tea in the kitchen with Mrs
Robertson, the housekeeper, because he was very fond of Mrs Robertson,
and wanted to marry her, and had told her so several times. But Mrs
Robertson couldn't make up her mind. Her first husband had been rather a
nuisance; and though he had been dead for nine and a half years, she was
still a little doubtful about taking a second one. But Marian and
Gwendolen couldn't help jumping up and down, and the blind painter said
that they ought to go, and Captain Jeremy promised to go round to Peter
Street and see what Marian's mother had to say about it.
"But you'll have to talk to her," said Marian, "through the window,
because she's still nursing Cuthbert."
"Then that's all the more reason," said Captain Jeremy, "why she'll be
glad to let you go."
Then he asked the blind painter if he would like to come as well, but he
shook his head and said that he would be unable to, though he had
several times visited the Gulf of Oranges, and would much have liked to
go there once more. But after a little persuasion Marian's mother said
that Marian could go if Gwendolen went; and a week later they were
climbing on board the schooner as she lay at anchor in Lullington Bay.
That was the first time that Marian had been aboard her, and everything
seemed strange to her, smelling so fresh and salt. But of course
Gwendolen knew all about the ship, and soon she was busy taking Marian
round. She showed her the big hold, dark and empty, in which they would
bring back the cases of fruit, and the cook's galley, and the sailors'
bunks, and Captain Jeremy's neat little cabin. And then, just after
tea, the anchor was pulled up, and the sails were shaken out, and the
wind began to fill them; and presently there were little waves slapping
against the bow, and the land was fading into the dusk behind them.
Both of them were sea-sick during the night, and felt rather queer most
of the next day. But the day after that they were as hungry as they
could be, and were soon on deck talking to the sailors. Most of these
were the same sailors that had been to Monkey Island, and so Gwendolen
knew them already; and she introduced Marian to them, who very soon felt
as if they had been friends of hers all her life. But Lancelot was her
favourite, just as he was Gwendolen's, and when he was off duty and
smoking his pipe, they would sit on either side of him and listen to his
stories as the deck beneath them rose and fell. As for Porto Blanco and
the Gulf of Oranges, he had been there more times, he said, than he
could remember; and once he had been stranded there for such a long time
that he had learned to talk the language as well as any of the
inhabitants.
"But it's a queer place," he said, "and they're queer people, sort of
half-way between black and white, and the sun's in the bones of them,
and half the time they're fighting, and the other half they're snoozing
in the shadders." But for the most part, he said, they were kindly
people and very indulgent to each other's faults; and the women all went
barefooted and smoked cigarettes, and the men sang love-songs together
when they weren't quarrelling.
"And up in the hills," said Lancelot, "back of the town, you can see
such flowers as you never saw anywhere, and great big oranges hanging
off of the trees, and corn-cobs taller than your head. And back of the
orange-trees there's great big forests, full of little Injuns with long
beards, and nasty yeller snakes, and birds of paradise, and parrots and
monkeys and inji-rubber trees," and sometimes he would go on talking
till they forgot all about supper-time, and the stars would open above
their heads, and far away, perhaps, like a little chain of beads, they
would see the port-lights of some great liner.
The wind held so fair that by the end of a month they were nearly four
thousand miles from home, and a week later when they came on deck they
found the sea dotted with little islands. So lovely were they in their
wet colours that they might have been enamelled there during the night,
and Marian and Gwendolen almost gasped with joy as the ship slid past
them in the early morning. For a long time now the weather had been so
hot that awnings had been stretched over the deck; and Marian and
Gwendolen wore as little as they could--the thinnest of white jerseys
and the shortest of skirts. For nearly three weeks they had worn no
shoes or stockings, and their feet and legs were the colour of copper;
and for two or three hours in the middle of the day Captain Jeremy had
made them go to sleep.
But to-day they were much too excited to stay in their hammocks; and
presently, as they hung over the schooner's bow, they could see the
horizon beginning to creep closer, and the hill-tops and forests of the
mainland. The wind had dropped now, and the sea was like glass, and
sometimes the ship scarcely seemed to move, but early in the afternoon
they began to see the roofs of the town and the tower of the cathedral
and the white-walled quay. Slowly they drew nearer until they could see
the people on the shore or lounging in the other ships at anchor in the
harbour; and just before sunset they had come to their moorings and were
lying securely against the quay.