One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down
a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken
my fancy. A simple enough request, but surprisingly received. She
stiffened all over and eyed the bookcase with a singular intensity. "The
books there," she said, "are what they call the dead past burying its
dead."
Spoon in hand, I paused, looking now at Mrs Bowater and now at the
coveted book. "_Mr_ Bowater," she added from deep down in herself,
"followed the sea." This was, in fact, Mr Bowater's debut in our
conversation, and her remark, uttered in so hollow yet poignant a tone,
produced a romantic expectancy in my mind.
"Is----" I managed to whisper at last: "I hope Mr Bowater isn't _dead_?"
Mrs Bowater's eyes were like lead in her long, dark-skinned face. She
opened her mouth, her gaze travelled slowly until, as I realized, it had
fixed itself on the large yellowing photograph behind my back.
"Dead, no"; she echoed sepulchrally. "Worse than."
By which I understood that, far from being dead, Mr Bowater was still
actively alive. And yet, apparently, not much the happier for that.
Instantaneously I caught sight of a rocky, storm-strewn shore, such as I
had seen in my _Robinson Crusoe_, and _there_ Mr Bowater, still
"following the sea."
"Never, never," continued Mrs Bowater in her Bible voice, "never to
darken these doors again!" I stole an anxious glance over my shoulder.
There was such a brassy boldness in the responsive stare that I was
compelled to shut my eyes.
But Mrs Bowater had caught my expression. "He was, as some would say,"
she explained with gloomy pride, "a handsome man. _Do_ handsome he did
never. But there, miss, things being as they must be, and you in the
green of your youth--though hearing the worst may be a wholesome physic
if taken with care, as I have told Fanny many a time...." She paused to
breathe. "What I was saying is, there can be no harm in your looking at
the book if that's all there's to it." With that she withdrew the
dry-looking volume from the shelf and laid it on the table beside my
chair.
I got down, opened it in the middle (as my father had taught me, in
order to spare the binding), opened it on a page inky black as night all
over, but starred with a design as familiar to me as the lines on the
palm of my hand.
"But oh! Mrs Bowater!" I cried, all in a breath, running across,
dragging back the curtain, and pointing out into the night; "look, look,
it's there! It's Orion!"
There, indeed, in the heavens beyond my window, straddling the dark,
star for star the same as those in the book, stood the Giant, shaking
his wondrous fires upon the air. Even Mrs Bowater was moved by my
enthusiasm. She came to the table, compared at my direction chart with
sky, and was compelled rather grudgingly to admit that her husband's
book was at least true to the facts. Stooping low, I read out a brief
passage. She listened. And it seemed a look of girlhood came into the
shadowy face uplifted towards the window. So the stars came into my
life, and faithful friends they have remained to this day.
Mrs Bowater's little house being towards the crest of the hill, with
sunrise a little to the left across the meadows, my window commanded
about three-fifths of the southern and eastern skies. By day I would
kneel down and study for hours the charts, and thus be prepared for the
dark. Night after night, when the weather was fair, or the windy clouds
made mock of man's celestial patternings, I would sit in the glow of the
firelight and summon these magic shiners each by name--Bellatrix, huge
Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and the rest. I would look at one, and, while so
doing, watch another. This not only isolated the smaller stars, but
gradually I became aware that they were one and all furtively signalling
to _me_! About a fortnight later my old Lyndsey friend, the Dogstar,
topped the horizon fringe of woodland. I heard myself shout at him
across the world. His sudden molten bursts of crimson betwixt his
emeralds and sapphires filled me with an almost ridiculous delight.
By the middle of December I had mastered all the greater stars in my
region, and with my spyglass a few even of the Gammas and Deltas. But
much of the zenith and all the north was closed to me, and--such is
human greed--I began to pine beyond measure for a sight of Deneb, Vega,
and the Chair. This desire grew unendurable, and led me into a piece of
genuine foolhardiness. I determined to await the first clear still night
and then to sally out and make my way, by hook or crook, up to my
beech-roots, from which I should be able to command a fair stretch of
the northern heavens. A quiet spell favoured me.
I waited until Mrs Bowater had gone to her bedroom, then muffled myself
up in my thickest clothes and stole out into the porch. At my first
attempt, one glance into the stooping dark was enough. At the second, a
furtive sighing breath of wind, as I breasted the hill, suddenly flapped
my mantle and called in my ear. I turned tail and fled. But never faint
heart won fair constellation. At the third I pressed on.
The road was deserted. No earthly light showed anywhere except from a
lamp-post this side of the curve of the hill. I frisked along, listening
and peering, and brimming over with painful delight. The dark waned; and
my eyes grew accustomed to the thin starlight. I gained the woods
unharmed. Rich was my reward. There and then I begged the glimmering
Polestar to be true to Mr Bowater. Fear, indeed, if in a friendly
humour, is enlivening company. Instead of my parasol I had brought out a
curved foreign knife (in a sheath at least five inches long) which I had
discovered on my parlour what-not.
The whisperings of space, the calls of indetectable birds in the wastes
of the sky, the sudden appearance of menacing or sinister shapes which
vanished or melted themselves into mere stocks or stones as I drew
near--my heart gave many an anguished jump. But quiet, and the
magnificence of night, vanquished all folly at last. It seemed to me
that a Being whom one may call Silence was brooding in solitude where
living and human visitants are rare, and that in his company a harmless
spirit may be at peace. Oblivious of my ungainly knife, yet keeping a
firm arm on it, self seemed to be the whole scene there, and my body
being so small I was perhaps less a disturber than were most intruders
of that solemn repose.
Why I kept these night-walks secret, I cannot say. It was not
apprehension of Mrs Bowater. She would have questioned my discretion,
but would not, I think, have attempted to dissuade me from them against
my will. No. It may be that every true astronomer is a miser at heart,
and keeps some Lambda or Mu or lost nebula his eternal friend, named
with his name, but unrecorded on any chart. For my part I hoarded the
complete north for a while.
A fright I got one night, however, kept me indoors for the better part
of a week. In my going out the little house door had been carelessly
left unlatched. Algol and the red planet Mars had been my quarry among
the floating woolpack clouds. The wind was lightly blowing from the
north-west after the calm. I drew down my veil and set off briskly and
lightheartedly for home.
The sight of the dark-looking hole in the door quickly sobered me down.
All was quiet, however, but on entering my room, there was a strangeness
in the air, and that not due to my landlady's forlorn trumpetings from
above. Through the floating vaporous light I trod across to my staircase
and was soon in bed. Hardly had my eyes closed when there broke out of
the gloom around me a dismal, appalling cry. I soon realized that the
creeping horror this caused in me was as nothing compared with that of
the poor beast, lured, no doubt, into the house by Henry, at finding
itself beneath a strange roof.
"Puss, puss," I pleaded shakenly; and again broke out that heart-sick
cry.
Knife in hand, I descended my staircase and edging as far as possible
from the baleful globes greenly burning beneath a mahogany chair, I
threw open both doors and besought my unwelcome visitor to take his
departure. The night wind came fluttering; there was the blur of a
scuttering, shapeless form, and in the flash of an eye I was sprawling
on the floor. A good deal shaken, with a nasty scratch on my thigh, but
otherwise unharmed, I waved my hand after the fugitive and returned to
bed.
The blood soon ceased to flow. Not daring to send my blood-stained
nightgown to the wash, I concealed it behind my dresses in the wardrobe,
and the next fine morning carried it off with me and buried it as deeply
as I could in a deserted rabbit-burrow in the woods. Such is an evil
conscience that, first, I had the fancy that during my digging a twig
had inexplicably snapped in the undergrowth; and next, for "burnt
offering," I made Mrs Bowater the present of an oval handglass set in
garnets (one of my grandfather's gifts). This she took down to a local
jeweller's to be mounted with a pin, and wore it on Sundays in place of
her usual cameo depicting the Three Graces disporting themselves under a
Palm-tree beside a Fountain.
Meanwhile I had heard a little more about the "Fanny" whom Mrs Bowater
had mentioned. My landlady was indeed a slow confider. Fanny, I
gathered, had a post as mistress at a school some forty miles away. She
taught the little boys "English." The fleeting Miss Perry returned to
mind, and with a faint dismay I heard that Fanny would soon be returning
home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs Bowater's allusions to her were the
more formidable for being veiled. I dreaded the invasion. Would she not
come "between us"?
Then by chance I found hidden in my star-book the photograph of an
infant in arms and of a pensive, ringleted woman, who, in spite of this
morsel in her lap, seemed in her gaze out of nowhere to be vaguely
afraid. On the back was scrawled in pencil: "F.: six weeks"--and an
extremely cross six weeks "F." looked. For some inexplicable reason I
pushed back this lady's photograph into the book, and said nothing about
it. The suspicion had entered my mind that Fanny was only a daughter by
marriage. I sank into a kind of twilight reflection at this. It seemed,
in an odd fashion, to make Mrs Bowater more admirable, her husband more
formidable, and the unknown Fanny more mysterious and enigmatical. At
the first opportunity I crept my way to the subject and asked my
landlady if she could show me a portrait of her daughter.
The photograph she produced from upstairs had in fading almost become a
caricature. It had both blackened and greyed. It depicted herself many
years younger but hardly less grim in appearance in full flounced
skirts, Fanny as a child of about five or six standing at her knee, and
Mr Bowater leaning with singular amenity behind her richly-carved chair,
the fingers of his left hand resting disposedly on her right shoulder. I
looked anxiously at the child. It was certainly crosspatch "F.", and a
far from prepossessing little creature with that fixed, level gaze. Mr
Bowater, on the other hand, had not yet adopted the wild and rigid stare
which dominated the small parlour.
Mrs Bowater surveyed the group with a lackadaisical detachment.
"Fractious!--you can see the tears on her cheeks for all what the young
man could do with his woolly lamb and grimaces. It was the heyday."
_What_ was the heyday, I wondered. "Was Mr Bowater--attached to her?"
seemed a less intrusive question.
"Doted," she replied, polishing the glass with her apron. "But not to
much purpose--with an eye for every petticoat."
This seemed a difficult conversation to maintain. "Don't you think, Mrs
Bowater," I returned zealously, "there is just the faintest tinge of
_Mr_ Bowater in the _chin_? I don't," I added candidly, "see the
faintest glimpse of _you_."
Mrs Bowater merely tightened her lips.
"And is she like that now?" I asked presently.
Mrs Bowater re-wrapped frame and photograph in their piece of newspaper.
"It's _looks_, miss, that are my constant anxiety: and you may be
thankful for being as you might say preserved from the world. What's
more, the father will out, I suppose, from now till Day of Judgment."
How strangely her sentiments at times resembled my godmother's, and yet
how different they were in effect. My thoughts after this often drifted
to Mrs Bowater's early married life. And so peculiar are the workings of
the mind that her husband's star-chart, his sleek appearance as a young
father, the mysterious reference to the petticoats, awoke in me an
almost romantic interest in him. To such a degree that it gradually
became my custom to cast his portrait a satirical little bow of greeting
when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning, and even to kiss my hand
to his invisible stare when I retired for the night. To all of which
advances he made no reply.
My next bout of star-gazing presaged disaster. I say star-gazing, for it
is true that I stole out after honest folk are abed only when the
heavens were swept and garnished. But, as a matter of fact, my real
tryst was with another Self. Had my lot been different, I might have
sought that self in Terra del Fuego or Malay, or in a fine marriage.
Mine was a smaller world. Bo-peep I would play with shadow and dew-bead.
And if Ulysses, as my father had read me, stopped his ears against the
Sirens, I contrariwise unsealed mine to the ethereal airs of that bare
wintry solitude.
The spectral rattle of the parched beechleaves on the saplings, the
faintest whisper in the skeleton bracken set me peeping, peering,
tippeting; and the Invisibles, if they heeded me, merely smiled on me
from their grave, all-seeing eyes. As for the first crystal sparking of
frost, I remember in my folly I sat down (bunched up, fortunately, in
honest lamb's-wool) and remained, minute by minute, unstirring,
unwinking, watching as if in my own mind the exquisite small fires
kindle and flit from point to point of lichen and bark, until--out of
this engrossment--little but a burning icicle was left to trudge along
home.
It was December 23rd. I remember that date, and even now hardly
understand the meaning or intention of what it brought me. Love for the
frosty, star-roofed woods, that was easy. And yet what if--though
easy--it is not enough? I had lingered on, talking in my childish
fashion--a habit never to leave me--to every sudden lovely morsel in
turn, when, to my dismay, I heard St Peter's clock toll midnight. Was it
my fancy that at the stroke, and as peacefully as a mother when she is
alone with her sleeping children, the giant tree sighed, and the whole
night stilled as if at the opening of a door? I don't know, for I would
sometimes pretend to be afraid merely to enjoy the pretending. And even
my small Bowater astronomy had taught me that as the earth has her poles
and equator, so these are in relation to the ecliptic and the
equinoctial. So too, then, each one of us--even a mammet like
myself--must live in a world of the imagination which is in everlasting
relation to its heavens. But I must keep my feet.
I waved adieu to the woods and unseen Wanderslore. As if out of the
duskiness a kind of reflex of me waved back; and I was soon hastening
along down the hill, the only thing stirring in the cold, white,
luminous dust. Instinctively, in drawing near, I raised my eyes to the
upper windows of Mrs Bowater's crouching house. To my utter confusion.
For one of them was wide open, and seated there, as if in wait for me,
was a muffled figure--and that not my landlady's--looking out. All my
fine boldness and excitement died in me. I may have had no apprehension
of telling Mrs Bowater of my pilgrimages, but, not having told her, I
had a lively distaste of being "found out."
Stiff as a post, I gazed up through the shadowed air at the vague,
motionless figure--to all appearance completely unaware of my presence.
But there is a commerce between minds as well as between eyes. I was
perfectly certain that I was being _thought_ about, up there.
For a while my mind faltered. The old childish desire gathered in me--to
fly, to be gone, to pass myself away. There was a door in the woods.
Better sense, and perhaps a creeping curiosity, prevailed, however. With
a bold front, and as if my stay in the street had been of my own
choosing, I entered the gate, ascended my "Bateses," and so into the
house. Then I listened. Faintly at last sounded a stealthy footfall
overhead; the window was furtively closed. Doubt vanished. In
preparation for the night's expedition I had lain down in the early
evening for a nap. Evidently while I had been asleep, Fanny had come
home. The English mistress had caught her mother's lodger playing
truant!