Though its anticipation and memory can fill a lifetime, the actual
emotion must inevitably measure its intensity by its brevity. Ecstasy
and despair, those hill-tops of human experience, can offer, in the
nature of things, no abiding place for a pilgrim’s feet.
With the return of the mere capacity for thought, Laura declined rapidly
from her timeless bliss into a mood of active, bustling pleasure. A
thousand devices and anticipations flitted through her mind as, in
feverish excitement, she mapped out the day.
She would start at once, as soon as she had satisfied Nurse by appearing
for milk and biscuits.... She and the twins were accustomed to wander,
within limits, as they pleased.... She would be over the hill and away
by the time Nurse was repacking the perambulator, and when she was
missed, who would guess where she had gone?... At least, she was not so
sure of that.... It was very strange that Nurse and Aunt Adela had never
said a word about heaven being so close to Brackenhurst.... It looked as
if they were afraid of her finding out ... as if they didn’t want her to
see Mother.... She clenched her fist. If they tried to stop her now!...
They had better not try, that was all! But she would not give them a
chance.... She would not let them guess that she knew anything.... She,
too, could pretend ignorance, even if she had to tell a story over
it.... Mother couldn’t bear you to tell stories—but this was
different.... She would explain it all to Mother, and of course Mother
would understand.... Oh, the blessedness of being back with Mother who
always understood!
She was so absorbed in her meditations that the nursemaid could approach
unheard.
“Miss Laura, are you deaf? ’Ere I’ve calling till I’m ’oarse. Come
along, do, you naughty child, an’ ’ave your biscuits. It’s eleven or
more—you won’t eat no lunch if you leave ’em so late. Come along. What
are you staring at?”
Laura’s eyes were as blank as a cat’s. She waved her hand airily as she
scrambled to her feet.
“That over there. What’s that—that shining house, Nurse?”
“Green’ouse, I expect.” Nurse screwed up her eyes and followed the
direction of Laura’s grubby finger. “Oh, that! That’s the Crystal
Pallis. It stands very ’igh, you know. As ’igh as us, almost. Miss
Laura, on’y look at your ’ands. Reely! A terrier’d ’ave more sense. If
Miss Adela meets us——”
The Crystal Palace! As beautiful a name as any other for a _Cœlestial
City_....
“Have you seen it before, Nurse?”
“Lord, yes—any fine day. Must ’ave a fine day, of course. I wonder I
’aven’t shown it you. I come at night once with my friend to see the
fireworks. My friend, ’e——”
Laura broke in. She knew all about Nurse’s friend.
“Please to remember—Fifth of November?” She was puzzled.
“Not only then. Any night. Lights up all the sky—blues and reds, like
joolry. Lovely. I’d like to see it close to.”
“Why—may any one go there?” asked Laura casually as they walked towards
the beeches. But her indifference was the quivering indifference of a
well-trained dog on trust before a lump of sugar.
“Lord, yes! Mother went once.”
“Your mother? Your mother too? Did she?”
“Yes. She went once. Brock’s Benefit. Fine time she ’ad too. Come along,
Miss Laura.” She took her by her unwilling hand. “You can look at it
after. It won’t run away.”
“Was it——What was it like, Nurse?”
“Well—it’s all glass, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Laura. “_Like pure gold_——Many gates?”
“Oh, I dunno——”
“Twelve, should you think?”
“I dessay. It’s a big place. What, Miss Laura?”
“_Twelve thousand furlongs_,” Laura was murmuring. She raised her voice.
“What else, Nursie?”
“Oh, there’s fountains and parrots and stalls with joolry—that brooch of
mine come from there—” (it was a sham moonstone that Laura and Nurse
agreed in thinking superb) “and gardens something lovely. Orange trees,
my mother said, and trees with tulips on ’em.”
She was thinking of magnolias, but Laura, lover of flowers, drew a deep
breath, thrilling to a vision of the tallest tree on Beech Hill
parti-coloured to its topmost twig with the tulips you buy in shops,
long-stemmed, scarlet and purple, half a crown a dozen.
“Oh, Nurse!! And was there a river, Nurse?”
“Oh, yes—runs right through the grounds, with animals on the
islands—what d’you call ’em—antiluviums—awful-looking beasts. Gave my
mother the creeps, they did.”
Laura nodded, but she was not impressed. She knew them. She and
_Christian_ had known them in the _Valley of the Shadow_ and had taken
no harm. Yet to assure herself she asked——
“What are they like? Is it difficult to get past them?”
“Why, Miss Laura, they’re not real beasts. On’y stone. Just antiluviums.
Sort of stone dragons, you know.”
“Oh, I see.” Laura nodded again as one enlightened. She was acquainted
with the _Dragon_, too, and the _Beast_; had met them at church.... They
were bound for a thousand years.... Turning into stone was a very good
way of binding them.... She gave a great sigh of content. It was simply
wonderful how everything fitted in....
I beg your pardon, Collaborator? You think it curious that the
conversation should have been such a satisfaction to her?
But why? Her _Cœlestial City_ hardly needed a nursemaid’s recognition?
Oh, I see. I see what you mean. But then you are arguing as a
‘grown-up.’ We grown-ups, of course, believe or disbelieve—black or
white—one thing or the other—and there’s an end of it. But this is a
child. A child can reconcile—look back, Collaborator—implicit belief and
frank scepticism in a way that, to us, is all but incomprehensible. A
child will show you a fairy ring without dreaming that it can be
anything but the track of elfin feet, yet will instantly and vigorously
denounce as a story-teller the contemporary who claims to have seen the
Little People at their dancing. Fantasy and Common Sense sit see-saw in
those early years, and keep a wonderful balance; but when the lanky
‘teens add their weight it is generally Common Sense that comes to earth
with a thud, while poor Fantasy is jerked sky high and lost for good
among the stars: which is a pity.
Do you understand now why Laura—who will always keep that balance, I
believe, however old she grows—could, with only the Kent hills between
her and heaven, be yet distinctly relieved that Nurse’s mother had been
there before her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, you see,
like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the counter of Nurse’s
mother’s experiences and pronounced coin of the realm.
Laura—but I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Collaborator! I lose the
thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but first let me talk myself
out. And it is not polite to murmur “Impossible” pointedly to your
pointed knitting needles!
But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the twins, eating her
biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl.
She was always good when she was left alone, as the new nurse had at
last discovered; so when the biscuits had been eaten and the children
dismissed to another hour’s play before going home, it was with the
twins that Nurse’s paperback shared her attention, rather than with
Laura, slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and
red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was scarcely to be
distinguished from a slim beech sapling a-sway in the wind. Nurse would
have settled down to her reading with less composure if she could have
seen beyond the screen of trees, have caught Laura’s backward glances,
half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill-top, and her
odd proceedings when she decided that she was out of every one’s
inquisitive sight.
For Laura, the careless, the untidy, the hard-on-her-clothes, swayed, I
suppose, by some broken memory of kind hands pinching up her ribbons and
smoothing her curls, of eyes very proud and critical of their Laura, was
first and fastidiously concerned with her appearance. She rubbed her
hands as clean as she could on the grass, fastened a careless button,
pulled up her stockings and adjusted her suspenders. Mother hated
wrinkly stockings.... She tightened her hair ribbon, straining her hair
off her face till her eyes nearly jumped out of her head, and did her
best to brush the long locks, that the wind had whipped into
rats’-tails, round and round her finger into the sausages that grown-ups
desire. She took off her shoes and shook out the sand and bits of leaf,
and tied them in the complicated tangle that Laura believed to be a
‘Louise’ knot, because it never under any circumstances came undone.
Indeed, it needed scissors in the evening. Finally she took out her
purse, poured the hoard into her lap and counted it breathlessly. A
penny, three halfpennies, two farthings, and the threepenny bit that she
had had given her to put in the plate on that fortunate Sunday when
there had not, after all, been a collection. Sixpence exactly. Children
were half price, so sixpence exactly could smuggle you through gates of
pearl into your mother’s lap.
She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie
of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like
a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the
hill-side.
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