Women are quite old for five years, but that is all. They are quite old
between the ages of thirty-five and forty. Then, if God has given them
a heart and they have taken advantage of the gift, youth comes back
again. It is not the youth under the eyes, perhaps; it is the youth in
the eyes. It is not the youth around the lips; it is the youth of the
words that issue from them.
Between thirty-five and forty a woman is trying to remember her youth
and forget her age. That makes her quite old—quite, quite old. After
that—well, I have said, it rests with God and her.
So Miss Taviner was not quite old. She was quite young. She was
sixty-three. Her eyes twinkled, even when she thanked God for her
spinsterdom.
“You’ve got,” said I, “a poor opinion of men.”
“’Tisn’t my opinion—’tis my mother’s,” said she.
I felt there was nothing to be said to that. It would have been
unseemly on my part—who have only just found my own youth—to disagree
with an opinion of such long standing.
You must understand that Miss Taviner could never have been beautiful.
God may have meant her to be; I don’t know anything about that. I am
only aware how Nature interfered. For when she was young—a child not
more, I think, than six—she was struck by lightning, paralysed for a
time, and, when she recovered, her eyes were at loggerheads. They
looked every way but one.
But I like her little shrivelled face, nevertheless. It is crafty,
perhaps. She looks as if she counts every apple on the trees in her old
garden. Why shouldn’t she? She has a poor opinion of men. Besides, the
apples at Beech House Farm—where her father lived and his father before
him—those apples are part of the slender income by which she manages to
cling to the old home. Who could blame her for counting them? I don’t
even blame her for having the cunning look of it in her eyes.
No—I suppose, though I do like her face, it is because I haven’t got to
love it. Possibly that is why she has so poor an opinion of men. Some
man found that he could not love her face and broke his faith with her.
At least, I thought that then. Some heartless wretch has jilted her, I
thought—taught her to love, and then caught sight of a prettier pair
of eyes. I must admit he need not have been on the lookout for them.
“But,” said I presently, when these ideas had passed away, “don’t you
admit men have their uses?”
“None!” she said emphatically.
“Then why,” I asked, “do you hang up that old top hat of your father’s
on a peg in the kitchen, so that the first tramp, as you open the door
to him, may see it?”
“So that he’ll think I’ve got a man in the house, I suppose,” she
replied.
“That’s why you have a couple of glasses and a whiskey bottle on the
table in the evening?”
“Yes.”
“Then a man is useful,” said I, “as far as his hat is concerned?”
She winked her crooked eyes at me and she said, “Yes, so long as there
isn’t a head inside of it.”
I laughed. “Then really,” I concluded, “you do hate men?”
“I suppose I do,” said she.
“Why?”
I thought I was going to hear of her little romance with its pitiable
ending.
But no, she merely shrugged her shoulders, stuck an old tam-o’-shanter
on her head, and went out to see if the gardener was doing his fair
share of work.
I might never have thought of this again, but it chanced that I bought
from her, amongst her old relics of the family property, a mahogany
box, with brass lock and brass handle. Inlaid, it was, round the edge
of the lid. Quite a handsome thing. She had lost its key. It was locked
and, seeing that she did not want to go to the expense of getting a key
made, she sold it to me.
I got a key made. I opened it. It was empty, but for one thing. There
was a letter at the bottom. It is unquestionable that I had no right
to read it. It is also unquestionable that I did.
“_My dear Miss Taviner,_” it ran, “_these evenings that it is so light
they may be playing cricket on the green. Shall we meet at the Cross
beyond the forge?—Yrs. in haste, Henry Yeoman._”
“That’s the man,” said I to myself. “He was ashamed of being seen with
her even then. No wonder she has a poor opinion of men.” My anger went
out to Henry Yeoman on the spot.
But I did him an injustice. For, inquiring at the forge, which I
happened to pass some days later, I stopped and asked the smith about
him.
“Henry Yeoman,” said he, “why he’s left these parts nigh fifteen years.
He’s gone to live at Reading.”
“Is he married?” I asked.
“Yes; married Miss Taviner.”
“Miss Taviner?”
“Yes; sister of her down at Beech House Farm.”
“Never knew she had a sister,” said I.
“Yes. Oh, she had three; all married, they are.”
“Why did she never marry?” I asked, for then I knew the letter was not
to her.
“Why?” He tapped the anvil with his hammer and he laughed a bass
accompaniment to its ring. “Because no one ’ud ever look at her, I
suppose.”
I saw it then. I saw why she had so poor opinion of men. I saw why she
thanked God she had never married.
No man had ever taught her what love was. No man had ever even jilted
her. No wonder she hated them. No wonder she counted her apples.
IX
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
IX
BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
It is not mine to distinguish between the laws of God and the laws of
Nature. This is a distinction peculiar to Bellwattle.
It would be difficult to give precise definition to her conception of
the subtle and imaginary line which divides the two, but, so far as I
can grasp it, it would seem to be this: The laws of God determine those
things which happen despite themselves and to the confusion of all
Bellwattle’s pre-conceived opinions. When, for example, a caterpillar,
in its hazardous struggle for existence, eats into the heart of her
favourite rosebud, that is, for Bellwattle, one of the laws of God.
Now, the laws of Nature are quite different to this. The laws of
Nature—so Bellwattle, I fancy, would tell you—command those things
which happen of their own accord and to the satisfaction of all
Bellwattle’s pre-conceived anticipations. When, for example, a rose
tree bears a thousand blossoms from May to the end of December;
when the peas are ready to pick in the first week in June, and the
delphiniums have grown yet another inch when, every morning, she steps
out into the garden to look at them—these are, for Bellwattle, the
orderly workings of the laws of Nature.
I see her point. I sympathise with her distinction and I wish—oh,
_how_ I wish!—that I could think as she does. For it is a fixed idea
with her. Nothing will shake it. And I have never met any one whose
appreciation of Nature is as great as hers.
Only the other day—so Cruikshank, her husband, tells me—they came
across a wild flower in one of the hedges. In blossom and general
appearance it bore so close a relation to Shepherd’s Needle that at
first sight of it, he dubbed it straight away. On closer examination it
was found that there were no needles; neither could it be Shepherd’s
Purse, for there were no purses.
“Perhaps it’s a Shepherd’s Needle gone wrong?” suggested Bellwattle,
and Cruikshank tells me he left it at that. The sublime conception of
it was beyond the highest reaches of his imagination.
On another occasion, when I had the honour to accompany her on her
walk, we heard the raucous note of a bird from somewhere away in the
meadows.
“I bet you don’t know what that is!” said I, to test her knowledge; but
she answered quite easily—
“It’s a partridge.”
“No,” said I, a little disappointed at her mistake, “that’s a
pheasant.”
“Oh, the same thing,” said Bellwattle, unperturbed.
“Of course; they both begin with a P,” said I.
And then she looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and blinked. I
thank God I did not smile. She would never have believed in me again.
But it is when Bellwattle puts out her gentle hand to help Nature in
her schemes that I think she is most lovable of all. This is the way
with all true women when they love Nature for Nature’s sake. In fact,
it sometimes seems to me, when I watch Bellwattle forestalling God
at every turn, that she is Eve incarnate, the mother of all living.
For to see her in the garden and the country, you would feel that she
almost believes she has suffered the labours of maternity for every
single thing that lives, from the first snowdrop opening its eyes to
the spring to the last little tremulous calf, with its quaking knees,
which the old cow in the farmyard presents to our neighbour over the
way.
“The poor wee mite,” she says, and she gives it the tips of her fingers
with which to ease its toothless gums.
But sometimes, as woman will, she carries this motherdom to excess. You
may aid Nature to a point. Men do it in their pre-eminently practical
way, which has science for the dry heart of it. Watch them pruning
rose trees. I believe they take a positive pleasure in the knife. I am
perfectly sure Bellwattle’s garden would be a forest of briars were
it not that Cruikshank keeps locked within a little drawer a knife
with a handle of horn, which he takes out in the month of March, when
Bellwattle goes to pay a visit to her mother up in town. In fact, the
visit is arranged for that purpose.
“I suppose it has to be done,” she says, packing her trunk. “But it
seems a silly business to me that you should have to cut the arms and
legs off a thing before it can grow properly. They bore roses last
year. Why not this?”
But where Nature needs no aid, there is Bellwattle ready with her
ever-helping hand. She constitutes herself in the capacity of nurse to
all the birds in the garden.
Only this spring a linnet built its nest in the yew tree that grows in
our hedge. In an unwise moment Cruikshank informed her of it. She ran
off at once and counted the eggs. Five there were. She had seen eggs
before, but these were the most beautiful that any bird had ever laid
in its life.
From that moment she became so fussy and excitable that Cruikshank was
at a loss to know what to do with her.
“She’ll drive the bird away,” said Cruikshank to me.
“Well, tell her so,” said I.
“I did.”
“Well?”
“She simply said, ‘The bird must know that I don’t mean to do any
harm.’”
“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “I don’t suppose there’s an animal in
the whole of creation that doesn’t recognise the maternal instinct when
it sees it.”
That was all very well while there were only eggs to be reckoned with.
But when one morning Bellwattle went to the nest and found five black
little heads, like five little Hottentots grown old and grizzled, with
shrivelled tufts of grey hair, there was no containing her.
She clapped her hands. She danced up and down and—
“Oh, the dears!” she cried. “Oh, the little dears! I must give them
something to eat. What will they eat?”
I looked at Cruikshank. I had come round that morning to count his
rosebuds with him—a weakness of his to which he always succumbs. He
tells me it is the only way he can justify his use of the knife. I
looked at him and he looked at me.
“This is going too far,” he whispered. “Can’t we put a stop to it?”
“Leave it to me,” said I, and Bellwattle, hearing our whispers, turned
round and stared at us.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We were talking,” said I.
“Yes, but what about?”
She was fired with suspicion.
“We were wondering the best thing you could feed them with.”
Suspicion fell from her.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Would corn be any good?”
Cruikshank blew his nose.
“A little bit solid,” he said dubiously.
“You can’t do better than give them the same as their mother does,” I
suggested.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Small worms,” I replied, and I watched her face; “those little thin,
red, raw ones.”
She walked away, saying nothing. She hates worms. Well, naturally—every
woman does.
Cruikshank laid an appreciative hand on my shoulder.
“That’s done it,” he said. “I was afraid she’d go worrying about till
she made the poor little beast desert, but that’s done it.”
I was not so sure myself. Therefore it surprised me not at all the next
morning when, arriving unexpectedly in the garden, I came upon her
unawares, carrying at arm’s length two little wriggling worms. There
was an expression on her face which will live in my memory for ever. I
concealed myself behind a tree and watched. I could see nothing, but
this is what I heard—
“Oh, you funny little mites! Bless your little hearts! Here, take
it—take it! Open your mouth, you silly! Not so wide—not so wide. Well,
if you all sit up like that you’ll fall out, you know. Lie down, you
silly little fools; lie down! lie down! Now shut your mouth on it and
you’ll find it. Shut your mouth!”
And so on and so on, till my laughter gave me away.
“Were you listening all the time?” she asked.
I nodded my head.
“So was the mother linnet,” said I, “up in that lilac tree. What do you
think she’ll do now? She’ll think you’ve been trying to kill them.”
“No, she won’t,” said Bellwattle. “I left a big worm on the edge of the
nest for her, so that she’ll know I’ve been feeding them.”
But something worse than that happened. With all this attention paid
to that which by every law of Nature should have been kept a dead
secret, the attention of Bellwattle’s cat was attracted to the spot.
Next morning the nest was found empty and one of those brown little
Hottentots hung dangling in the branches.
Bellwattle came running down the garden, wringing her hands, the tears
glittering in her eyes, her lips quivering as she told us what had
happened.
“That comes of meddling with Nature,” began Cruikshank, but I stopped
him very quickly.
“If you stop her tears and make her angry,” I whispered, “she’ll never
forgive you. Let her cry; it’s the way women learn.”
X
MAY EVE
X
MAY EVE
I was told that some one wanted to see me.
“Who is it?” I asked.
They told me it was an old lady, who would give no name. I inquired of
her appearance. “She is an old lady,” they replied, “and very, very
small.” I think I must have guessed, for I asked no further questions.
I told them to show her in.
If I could only describe to you the way she came into the room! She was
so wee and so tiny. Her eyes sparkled with such brilliancy, she might
have been seven instead of seventy. Then, when she bobbed me a curtsey
as she entered, I could have believed she was a fairy come from the
uttermost ends of the earth to attend a christening.
There was every good reason for my belief, not the least of which was
that it was May Eve. In Ireland, as you know, the folk dare not go out
after dark on this eventful day. The fairies are in the fields, fairies
good and bad, and heaven only knows what you may not come across if you
wander through the boreens or across the hillside when once the evening
has put on her mantle of grey.
Not only will you meet them in the fields, moreover; they come to your
very door and milk they ask of you, and fire and water. Now, except
that she asked for nothing, but rather brought a gift to me, my wee
visitor might have been a fairy come out of the land beyond the edge of
Time; come ten million miles to this old farmhouse which hugs itself so
close to the land in the valley between the hills.
For the moment I felt my heart in my throat. I had added things
together so quickly in my mind that I was sure my belief was right.
She was a fairy. May Eve—the very time of day, when the grey mist is
creeping over the meadows, and the river runs _blip, blip_ between
the reeds—the strange and youthful glitter in her wee brown eyes,
set deep in the hollows of that old and wrinkled face; then last of
all, her bobbing curtsey and the way she smiled at me as though she
had a blessing in her pocket—these were the things I added so swiftly
together in my mind. The result was inevitable. Undoubtedly she was a
fairy. Now see how strange the tricks life plays with you; for, whereas
I had believed in fairies before, I knew now that my belief had been
vain. I had only believed in the idea of them—that was all. I had only
said I believed because I knew I should never see one to contradict the
doubt which still lingered in my heart. That is the way most of us say
our credo.
“I’ve brought you your travelling-rug,” said she, and she bobbed again.
“What travelling-rug?” I asked.
And then, what happened, do you think? I could hardly believe my eyes.
She took from off her arm what seemed at first to me some garment,
lined richly with orange-coloured sateen. My eyes grew wider in wonder
as she laid it down and spread it out upon the floor.
It was a patchwork quilt!
Oh, you never did see such a galaxy of colours in all your life! Blues
and reds, greens, yellows and purples, they all jostled each other for
a place upon that square of orange-coloured sateen. All textures they
were, too; some velvet, some silk, and some brocade. It was as if the
caves of Aladdin had been thrown open to me, and I were allowed just
for one moment to peep within.
But that was not all.
For when I said: “You’ve finished it, then?” I saw to what purpose
that completion had been made. Right in the centre of all those
dazzling patches was a square of purple—purple that the Emperors used
to wear—while worked across in regal letters of gold there were my own
initials.
I stared at them. I went down on my knees, looking close into the
stitches to make sure that there was no mistake. Then I gazed up at her.
“But it’s for me?” said I.
She nodded her head and her whole face was lighted up with pride and
satisfaction. She was so excited, too. Her eyes danced with excitement.
You know the quaint little twisted attitudes that children get into
when they are giving you a present which they have made themselves;
they are half consumed with fear that you are going to laugh at them
and half consumed with pride in their own handiwork. She was just like
that.
Lest you do not know already, I should tell you that I had made her my
pensioner as long as she lives, in order to enable her to leave off
work and make this patchwork quilt whereby she might be remembered
by those who slept beneath it when she had gone to sleep. But I had
thought to myself, surely it will be in the family. I had wondered who
would become the proud possessor of it. Imagine my amazement, then,
when I realised that it was my very own.
“And you’ll think of me when I’m gone, won’t you, sir—when you go to
bed at night?” she said.
“Think of you?” said I. “You may well call it a travelling-rug. I only
have to wrap this round me and, with the mere wish of it, I shall be in
the land of dreams—millions and millions of miles away.”
“P’raps I shall be there, too,” said she, clasping her hands.
“And then we’ll meet,” said I.
She began folding it up with just that care which she had used in the
making of it. She folded it one way.
“It’s nice and warm,” said she.
She doubled it another way.
“Every one of the squares is lined with sateen.”
She redoubled it once more.
“And it’s all padded with cotton wool.”
When she said that, she stood up with her face all beaming with smiles,
and she laid it in my hands.
Then I did what I had wanted to do from the very first moment I saw
her. I took her little face in my hands and I kissed the soft, warm,
wrinkled cheeks.
“When I was very unhappy,” said I, “I used to entertain what is called
a belief in fairies. Now that I know what it is to be happy, I find
them. It’s a very different thing.”
XI
THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL
XI
THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL
Limehouse, Plaistow, and the East India Docks—these are places in the
world to wonder about. Yet even there beauty manages to creep in and
grow in a soil where there would seem to be nothing but decay.
There are societies, I believe, which exist in those quarters, whose
endeavour it is to lift the mind of the East End inhabitant to an
appreciation of what the West End knows to be Art. I am sure that all
their intentions are the sincerest in the world. But what is the good
of Art to a dock labourer and his wife?
We have only arrived at Art ourselves after generations and
generations of a knowledge of what is beautiful. So absolutely have
we arrived, moreover, that we care no longer for what is beautiful; we
only care for Art.
That, however, is another question too long to enter into here. But to
teach Art to the East India dock labourer when he knows so little of
beauty, that is a process of putting carts before horses—a reduction to
absurdity which can be seen at once.
Now when I was a journalist—that is to say, when I wrote lines of
words for a paper which paid me so much per line for the number of
lines which the chief sub-editor was good enough to use—I was one day
despatched to the East End to see if there were any stuff—I speak
colloquially—in a poor people’s flower show.
“It may be funny,” said the editor.
“It might be,” said I.
“Well, make it funny,” said he, for I think he caught the note in my
voice.
I pocketed my notebook and set off for the East End. Oh, there were all
sorts of flowers and doubtless it looked the funniest of flower shows
you would ever have seen. For example, the qualification necessary
for exhibition was that your plant had been grown in a pot and on a
window sill. It was a qualification not difficult to fulfil. In all my
wanderings there to find the place, no plot of ground did I see, save a
graveyard around a church. But the only things that grew there were the
stones in memory of the dead; and they, begrimed with soot and dirt,
were sorry flowers to grace a tomb.
You can imagine the pitiful, shrivelled little things that had
struggled to maintain life on the window sills of the houses in those
dingy courts and darksome alleys. Never did I see such an array in all
my life. They would almost, when you thought of country gardens where
the daffodils stand up and brave the April winds, they would almost
have brought the tears to your eyes.
Little geraniums there were, blinking their poor, tired eyes at the
light. One woman brought a plant of sweet pea, which was climbing so
wearily, yet so anxiously out of its little pot of red up a wee thin
stake of wood. You knew it would never reach the light of the heaven it
so yearned to see. The two faint blossoms that it bore were pale, like
fragile slum children. What would I not have given then to wrench it
out of its poor bed and give it to the great generous sweep of an open
field, with a hedge of hawthorn perhaps on which to lean its tired arms.
The woman saw my eyes in its direction and she beamed with conscious
pride.
“It doesn’t look very healthy,” said I.
She gazed at it and then at me with open wonder in her eyes.
“Not ’ealthy?” she said—“why, I’ve never seen none looking better. Look
at that pansy over there—it can’t ’old its ’ead up.”
“But why compare it with the worst one in the show?” I asked—“I didn’t
mean it as a personal criticism when I said it wasn’t healthy. I’m sure
you’ve taken a tremendous amount of care over it.”
“Care!” she exclaimed—“I should just think I ’ave. It’s ’ad all the
scrapin’s off the road in front of our ’ouse.”
I passed on, for the judges were coming round and the young curate just
down from the university has not a proper respect for the Press. He has
probably written for it. Now the young curate of the parish was the
principal judge.
I did not hear what he said about the sweet pea. I had gone further on
to where a woman was standing with her hand affectionately round a pot
from which rose a fine, healthy plant, with rich, deep purple flowers
nestling in the leaves that grew to the very pinnacle of the stem.
There I waited. I wanted to hear what the judges were going to say
about this one. I wanted to hear very much indeed.
This woman, too, seeing my interest in her exhibit, smiled with
generous satisfaction.
“Think I’ve got a chanst, sir?”
“I don’t know,” said I—“it’s fine and strong.”
“And look at all the blossoms,” said she with enthusiasm—“you wouldn’t
believe it, but my son brought that from the country last year when
’e went for the houtin’. ’E brought it back, dragged up almost to
the roots it was—an’ it was in flower then. ‘Put it in a vawse,’ I
says, but my ole man, ’e says—‘Shove it in a bloomin’ pot,’ ’e says,
‘that’ll grow,’ ’e says—‘it’s got roots to it.’ So we puts it in a pot
and sticks it out on a window sill, and there it is. It died down to
nothin’ last winter, but my ole man, ’e wouldn’t let me throw the pot
away. ‘Give it a chanst of the spring,’ ’e says—‘give it a chanst of
the spring.’ And bless my soul, if we didn’t see little bits of green
sticking up through the mould before the beginning of last March.”
“It’s been a constant interest since then?” said I.
“Hinterest! Why my ole man said as I was killin’ it, the way I watered
it and looked after it.”
“And what do you call it?” I asked.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Nobody seems to know. We call
it—William.”