felt himself grow so angry that he picked up a strange looking flower
pot at his feet and hurled it at the retreating gardener. It struck
Bond in the middle of the back and, passing clean through him, broke on
the wheel of his barrow, but Bond seemed to be quite unaware of this
catastrophe. Codling rushed after, and, taking the gardener by the
throat, he yelled, “Damn you, will you tell me what all this means?”
But Bond proceeded calmly about his work un-noticing, carrying his
master about as if he were a clinging vapour, or a scarf hung upon
his neck. In a few moments, Codling dropped exhausted to the ground.
“What.... O Hell ... what, what am I to do?” he groaned, “What has
happened to me? What shall I _do_? What _can_ I do?” He looked at the
broken flowerpot. “Did I invent that?” He pulled out his watch. “That’s
a real watch, I hear it ticking, and it’s six o’clock.” Was he dead or
disembodied or mad? What was this infernal lapse of identity? And who
the devil, yes, who was it upstairs with Mildred? He jumped to his feet
and hurried to the window; it was shut; to the door, it was fastened;
he was powerless to open either. Well! well! this was experimental
psychology with a vengeance, and he began to chuckle again. He’d have
to write to McDougall about it. Then he turned and saw Bond wheeling
across the lawn towards him again. “_Why_ is that fellow always shoving
that infernal green barrow around?” he asked, and, the fit of fury
seizing him again, he rushed towards Bond, but, before he reached him,
the three children danced into the garden again, crying, with great
excitement, “Bond, O, Bond!” The gardener stopped and set down the
terrifying barrow; the children crowded about him, and Gabriel held
out another shining thing, asking: “Bond, is this box any _good_?” The
gardener took the box and at once his eyes lit up with interest and
delight. “O, Marse Gabriel, where’d ye get it? Where’d ye get it?”
“Bond,” said the boy impatiently, “Is the box any _good_?” “Any good?”
echoed the man, “Why, Marse Gabriel, Marse Adam, Miss Eve, look yere!”
Holding it down in front of them, he lifted the lid from the box and a
bright coloured bird flashed out and flew round and round above their
heads. “O,” screamed Gabriel with delight, “It’s a kingfisher!” “That’s
what it is,” said Bond, “a kingfisher!” “Where?” asked Adam. “Where?”
asked Eve. “There it flies--round the fountain--see it? see it!” “No,”
said Adam. “No,” said Eve.
“O, do, do, see it,” cried Gabriel, “here it comes, it’s coming!” and,
holding his hands on high, and standing on his toes, the child cried
out as happy as the bird which Codling saw flying above them.
“I can’t see it,” said Adam.
“Where is it, Gaby?” asked Eve.
“O, you stupids,” cried the boy, “_There_ it goes. There it goes ...
there ... it’s gone!”
He stood looking brightly at Bond, who replaced the lid.
“What shall we do now?” he exclaimed eagerly. For reply, the gardener
gave the box into his hand, and walked off with the barrow. Gabriel
took the box over to the fountain. Codling, unseen, went after him,
almost as excited as the boy; Eve and her brother followed. They sat
upon the stone tank that held the falling water. It was difficult for
the child to unfasten the lid; Codling attempted to help him, but he
was powerless. Gabriel looked up into his father’s face and smiled.
Then he stood up and said to the others:
“Now, _do_ watch it this time.”
They all knelt carefully beside the water. He lifted the lid and,
behold, a fish like a gold carp, but made wholly of fire, leaped from
the box into the fountain. The man saw it dart down into the water, he
saw the water bubble up behind it, he heard the hiss that the junction
of fire and water produces, and saw a little track of steam follow the
bubbles about the tank until the figure of the fish was consumed and
disappeared. Gabriel, in ecstasies, turned to his sister with blazing
happy eyes, exclaiming:
“There! Evey!”
“What was it?” asked Eve, nonchalantly, “I didn’t see anything.”
“More didn’t I,” said Adam.
“Didn’t you see that lovely fish?”
“No,” said Adam.
“No,” said Eve.
“O, stupids,” cried Gabriel, “it went right past the bottom of the
water.”
“Let’s get a fishin’ hook,” said Adam.
“No, no, no,” said Gabriel, replacing the lid of the box. “O no.”
Jaffa Codling had remained on his knees staring at the water so long
that, when he looked around him again, the children had gone away.
He got up and went to the door, and that was closed; the windows,
fastened. He went moodily to a garden bench and sat on it with folded
arms. Dusk had begun to fall into the shrubs and trees, the grass
to grow dull, the air chill, the sky to muster its gloom. Bond had
overturned his barrow, stalled his tools in the lodge, and gone to his
home in the village. A curious cat came round the house and surveyed
the man who sat chained to his seven-horned dilemma. It grew dark and
fearfully silent. Was the world empty now? Some small thing, a snail
perhaps, crept among the dead leaves in the hedge, with a sharp,
irritating noise. A strange flood of mixed thoughts poured through his
mind until at last one idea disentangled itself, and he began thinking
with tremendous fixity of little Gabriel. He wondered if he could brood
or meditate, or “will” with sufficient power to bring him into the
garden again. The child had just vaguely recognized him for a moment
at the waterside. He’d try that dodge, telepathy was a mild kind of a
trick after so much of the miraculous. If he’d lost his blessed body,
at least the part that ate and smoked and talked to Mildred.... He
stopped as his mind stumbled on a strange recognition.... What a joke,
of course ... idiot ... not to have seen _that_. He stood up in the
garden with joy ... of course, _he_ was upstairs with Mildred, it was
himself, the other bit of him, that Mildred had been talking to. What a
howling fool he’d been.
He found himself concentrating his mind on the purpose of getting the
child Gabriel into the garden once more, but it was with a curious
mood that he endeavoured to establish this relationship. He could not
fix his will into any calm intensity of power, or fixity of purpose,
or pleasurable mental ecstasy. The utmost force seemed to come with a
malicious threatening splenetic “entreaty.” That damned snail in the
hedge broke the thread of his meditation; a dog began to bark sturdily
from a distant farm; the faculties of his mind became joggled up like
a child’s picture puzzle, and he brooded unintelligibly upon such
things as skating and steam engines, and Elizabethan drama so lapped
about with themes like jealousy and chastity. Really now, Shakespeare’s
Isabella was the most consummate snob in.... He looked up quickly to
his wife’s room and saw Gabriel step from the window to the balcony
as if he were fearful of being seen. The boy lifted up his hands and
placed the bright box on the rail of the balcony. He looked up at the
faint stars for a moment or two, and then carefully released the lid of
the box. What came out of it and rose into the air appeared to Codling
to be just a piece of floating light, but as it soared above the roof
he saw it grow to be a little ancient ship, with its hull and fully
set sails and its three masts all of faint primrose flame colour. It
cleaved through the air, rolling slightly as a ship through the wave,
in widening circles above the house, making a curving ascent until it
lost the shape of a vessel and became only a moving light hurrying to
some sidereal shrine. Codling glanced at the boy on the balcony, but
in that brief instant something had happened, the ship had burst like
a rocket and released three coloured drops of fire which came falling
slowly, leaving beautiful grey furrows of smoke in their track. Gabriel
leaned over the rail with outstretched palms, and, catching the green
star and the blue one as they drifted down to him, he ran with a rill
of laughter back into the house. Codling sprang forward just in time
to catch the red star; it lay vividly blasting his own palm for a
monstrous second, and then, slipping through, was gone. He stared at
the ground, at the balcony, the sky, and then heard an exclamation ...
his wife stood at his side.
“Gilbert! How you frightened me!” she cried, “I thought you were in
your room; come along in to dinner.” She took his arm and they walked
up the steps into the dining room together. “Just a moment,” said her
husband, turning to the door of the room. His hand was upon the handle,
which turned easily in his grasp, and he ran upstairs to his own room.
He opened the door. The light was on, the fire was burning brightly,
a smell of cigarette smoke about, pen and paper upon his desk, the
Japanese book-knife, the gilt matchbox, everything all right, no
one there. He picked up a book from his desk.... _Monna Vanna._ His
bookplate was in it--_Ex Libris_--_Gilbert Cannister_. He put it down
beside the green dish; two yellow oranges were in the green dish, and
two most deliberately green Canadian apples rested by their side. He
went to the door and swung it backwards and forwards quite easily. He
sat on his desk trying to piece the thing together, glaring at the
print and the book-knife and the smart matchbox, until his wife came up
behind him exclaiming: “Come along, Gilbert!”
“Where are the kids, old man?” he asked her, and, before she replied,
he had gone along to the nursery. He saw the two cots, his boy in one,
his girl in the other. He turned whimsically to Mildred, saying, “There
_are_ only two, _are_ there?” Such a question did not call for reply,
but he confronted her as if expecting some assuring answer. She was
staring at him with her bright beautiful eyes.
“Are there?” he repeated.
“How strange you should ask me that now!” she said.... “If you’re a
very good man ... perhaps....”
“Mildred!”
She nodded brightly.
He sat down in the rocking chair, but got up again saying to her
gently--“We’ll call him Gabriel.”
“But, suppose--”
“No, no,” he said, stopping her lovely lips, “I know all about him.”
And he told her a pleasant little tale.
* * * * *
THE PRINCESS OF KINGDOM GONE
* * * * *
THE PRINCESS OF KINGDOM GONE
Long ago a princess ruled over a very tiny kingdom, too small, indeed,
for ambition. Had it been larger she might have been a queen, and had
it been seven times larger, so people said, she would certainly have
been an empress. As it was, the barbarians referred to her country
as “that field!” or put other indignities upon it which, as she was
high-minded, the princess did not heed, or, if she did heed, had too
much pride to acknowledge.
In other realms her mansion, her beautiful mansion, would have been
called a castle, or even a palace, so high was the wall, crowned with
pink tiles, that enclosed and protected it from evil. The common gaze
was warded from the door by a grove of thorns and trees, through which
an avenue curved a long way round from the house to the big gate.
The gate was of knotted oak, but it had been painted and grained
most cleverly to represent some other fabulous wood. There was this
inscription upon it: NO HAWKERS, NO CIRCULARS, NO GRATUITIES. Everybody
knew the princess had not got any of these things, but it was because
they also knew the mansion had no throne in it that people sneered,
really--but how unreasonable; you might just as well grumble at a
chime that hadn’t got a clock! As the princess herself remarked--“What
_is_ a throne without highmindedness!”--hinting, of course, at certain
people whom I dare not name. Behind the mansion lay a wondrous garden,
like the princess herself above everything in beauty. A very private
bower was in the midst of it, guarded with corridors of shaven yew and
a half-circle hedge of arbutus and holly. A slim river flowed, not by
dispensation, but by accident, through the bower, and the bed and bank
of it, screened by cypresses, had been lined, not by accident but by
design--so strange are the workings of destiny--with tiles and elegant
steps for a bathing pool. Here the princess, when the blazon of the sun
was enticing, used to take off her robes of silk and her garments of
linen and walk about the turf of the bower around the squinancy tree
before slipping into the dark velvet water.
One day when she stepped out from the pool she discovered a lot of
crimson flower petals clinging to her white skin. “How beautiful
they are,” she cried, picking up her mirror, “and where do they come
from?” As soon as convenient she enquired upon this matter of her Lord
Chancellor, a man named Smith who had got on very well in life but was
a bit of a smudge.
“Crimson petals in the bath!”
“Yes, they have floated down with the stream.”
“How disgusting! Very! I’ll make instant enquiries!”
He searched and he searched--he was very thorough was Smith--but though
his researches took no end of time, and he issued a bulky dossier
commanding all and sundry to attach the defiant person of the miscreant
or miscreants who had defiled the princess’s bath stream or pool with
refuse detritus or scum, offering, too, rewards for information leading
to his, her or their detection, conviction, and ultimate damnation,
they availed him not. The princess continued to bathe and to emerge
joyfully from the stream covered with petals and looking as wonderful
as a crimson leopard. She caught some of the petals with a silver net;
she dried them upon the sunlight and hid them in the lining of her
bed, for they were full of acrid but pleasing odours. So she herself
early one morning walked abroad, early indeed, and passed along the
river until she came to the field adjoining the mansion. Very sweet and
strange the world seemed in the quiet after dawn. She stopped beside a
half-used rick to look about her; there was a rush of surprised wings
behind the stack and a thousand starlings fled up into the air. She
heard their wings beating the air until they had crossed the river
and dropped gradually into an elm tree like a black shower. Then she
perceived a tall tree shining with crimson blooms and long dark boughs
bending low upon the river. Near it a tiny red cottage stood in the
field like a painted box, surrounded by green triangular bushes. It was
a respectable looking cottage, named _River View_. On her approach the
door suddenly opened, and a youth with a towel, just that and nothing
more, emerged. He took flying rejoicing leaps towards the flaming
tree, sprung upon its lowest limb and flung himself into the stream.
He glided there like a rod of ivory, but a crimson shower fell from
the quivering tree and veiled the pleasing boy until he climbed out
upon the opposite bank and stood covered, like a leopard, with splendid
crimson scars. The princess dared peer no longer; she retraced her
steps, musing homewards to breakfast, and was rude to Smith because he
was such a fool not to have discovered the young man who lived next
door under the mysterious tree.
At the earliest opportunity she left a card at _River View_. Narcissus
was the subject’s name, and in due time he came to dinner, and they
had green grapes and black figs, nuts like sweet wax and wine like
melted amethysts. The princess loved him so much that he visited her
very often and stayed very late. He was only a poet and she a princess,
so she could not possibly marry him although this was what she very
quickly longed to do; but as she was only a princess, and he a poet
clinking his golden spurs, he did not want to be married to her. He had
thick curling locks of hair red as copper, the mild eyes of a child,
and a voice that could outsing a thousand delightful birds. When she
heard his soft laughter in the dim delaying eve he grew strange and
alluring to the princess. She knew it was because he was so beautiful
that everybody loved him and wanted to win and keep him, but he had no
inclination for anything but his art--which was to express himself.
That was very sad for the princess; to be able to retain nothing of him
but his poems, his fading images, while he himself eluded her as the
wind eludes all detaining arms, forest and feather, briar and down of
a bird. He did not seem to be a man at all but just a fairy image that
slipped from her arms, gone, like brief music in the moonlight, before
she was aware.
When he fell sick she watched by his bed.
“Tell me,” she murmured, her wooing palms caressing his flaming hair,
“tell me you love me.”
All he would answer was: “I dream of loving you, and I love dreaming of
you, but how can I tell if I love you?”
Very tremulous but arrogant she demanded of him: “Shall I not know if
you love me at all?”
“Ask the fox in your brake, the hart upon your mountain. I can never
know if you love _me_.”
“I have given you my deepest vows, Narcissus; love like this is wider
than the world.”
“The same wind blows in desert as in grove.”
“You do not love at all.”
“Words are vain, princess, but when I die, put these white hands like
flowers about my heart; if I dream the unsleeping dream I will tell you
there.”
“My beloved,” she said, “if you die I will put upon your grave a shrine
of silver, and in it an ark of gold jewelled with green garnets and
pink sapphires. My spirit should dwell in it alone and wait for you;
until you came back again I could not live.”
The poet died.
The princess was wild with grief, but she commanded her Lord Chancellor
and he arranged magnificent obsequies. The shrine of silver and the ark
of jewelled gold were ordered, a grave dug in a new planted garden
more wonderful than the princess’s bower, and a _To Let_ bill appeared
in the window of _River View_. At last Narcissus, with great pomp, was
buried, the shrine and the ark of gold were clapped down upon him,
and the princess in blackest robes was led away weeping on the arm of
Smith--Smith was wonderful.
The sun that evening did not set--it mildly died out of the sky.
Darkness came into the meadows, the fogs came out of them and hovered
over the river and the familiar night sounds began. The princess sat in
the mansion with a lonely heart from which all hopes were receding; no,
not receding, she could see only the emptiness from which all her hopes
had gone.
At midnight the spirit of Narcissus in its cerecloth rose up out of the
grave, frail as a reed; rose out of its grave and stood in the cloudy
moonlight beside the shrine and the glittering ark. He tapped upon the
jewels with his fingers but there was no sound came from it, no fire,
no voice. “O holy love,” sighed the ghost, “it is true what I feared,
it is true, alas, it is true!” And lifting again his vague arm he
crossed out the inscription on his tomb and wrote there instead with a
grey and crumbling finger his last poem:
_Pride and grief in your heart,
Love and grief in mine._
Then he crept away until he came to the bower in the princess’s garden.
It was all silent and cold; the moon was touching with brief beam the
paps of the plaster Diana. The ghost laid himself down to rest for
ever beneath the squinancy tree, to rest and to wait; he wanted to
forestall time’s inscrutable awards. He sank slowly into the earth as
a knot of foam slips through the beach of the seashore. Deep down he
rested and waited.
Day after day, month after month, the constant princess went to her
new grove of lamentation. The grave garden was magnificent with holy
flowers, the shrine polished and glistening, the inscription crisp and
clear--the ghost’s erasure being vain for mortal eyes. In the ark she
knew her spirit brooded and yearned, she fancied she could see its tiny
flame behind the garnets and sapphires, and in a way this gave her
happiness. Meanwhile her own once happy bower was left to neglect. The
bolt rusted in its gate, the shrubs rioted, tree trunks were crusted
with oozy fungus, their boughs cracked to decay, the rose fell rotten,
and toads and vermin lurked in the desolation of the glades. ’Twas
pitiful; ’twas as if the heart of the princess had left its pleasant
bower and had indeed gone to live in her costly shrine.
In the course of time she was forced to go away on business of state
and travelled for many months; on her return the face of the Lord
Chancellor was gloomy with misery. The golden ark had been stolen.
Alarm and chagrin filled the princess. She went to the grave. It too
had now grown weedy and looked forlorn. It was as if her own heart had
been stolen away from her. “Oh,” she moaned, “what does it matter!”
and, turning away, went home to her bower. There, among that sad
sight, she saw a strange new tree almost in bloom. She gave orders for
the pool to be cleansed and the bower restored to its former beauty.
This was done, and on a bright day when the blazon of the sun was kind
she went into the bower again, flung her black robes from her, and
slipped like a rod of ivory into the velvet water. There were no blooms
to gather now, though she searched with her silver net, but as she
walked from the pool her long hair caught in the boughs of the strange
tall squinancy tree, and in the disentangling it showered upon her
beautiful crimson blooms that as they fell lingered upon her hips, her
sweet shoulders, and kissed her shining knees.
* * * * *
COMMUNION
* * * * *
COMMUNION
He was of years calendared in unreflecting minds as tender years, and
he was clothed in tough corduroy knickerbockers, once the habiliments
of a huger being, reaching to the tops of some boots shod with
tremendous nails and fastened by bits of fugitive string. His jacket
was certainly the jacket of a child--possibly some dead one, for it
was not his own--and in lieu of a collar behold a twist of uncoloured,
unclean flannel. Pink face, pink hands, yellow hair, a quite
unredeemable dampness about his small nose--altogether he was a country
boy.
“What are you doing there, Tom Prowse?” asked Grainger, the sexton,
entering to him suddenly one Saturday afternoon. The boy was sitting on
a bench in the empty nave, hands on knees, looking towards the altar.
He rose to his feet and went timidly through the doorway under the
stern glance of that tall tall man, whose height enabled him to look
around out of a grave when it was completely dug. “You pop on out of
’ere,” said Grainger, threateningly, but to himself, when the boy had
gone.
Walking into the vestry Grainger emptied his pockets of a number of
small discarded bottles and pots of various shapes and uses--ink
bottles, bottles for gum and meat extract, fish-paste pots, and tins
which had contained candy. He left them there. The boy, after he had
watched him go away, came back and resumed his seat behind one of the
round piers.
A lady dressed in black entered and, walking to the front stall under
the pulpit, knelt down. The boy stared at the motionless figure for a
long time until his eyes ached and the intense silence made him cough
a little. He was surprised at the booming hollow echo and coughed
again. The lady continued bowed in her place; he could hear her lips
whispering sibilantly: the wind came into the porch with sudden gust
and lifted the arras at the door. Turning he knocked his clumsy boots
against the bench. After that the intense silence came back again,
humming in his ears and almost stopping his breath, until he heard
footsteps on the gravel path. The vicar’s maid entered and went towards
the vestry. She wished to walk softly when she observed the kneeling
lady but her left shoe squeaked stubbornly as she moved, and both heels
and soles echoed in sharp tones along the tiles of the chancel. The
boy heard the rattle of a bucket handle and saw the maid place the
bucket beside the altar and fetch flowers and bottles and pots from
the vestry. Some she stood upon the table of the altar; others, tied
by pieces of string, she hung in unique positions upon the front and
sides, filling them with water from the pail as she did so; and because
the string was white, and the altar was white, and the ugly bottles
were hidden in nooks of moss, it looked as if the very cloth of the
altar sprouted with casual bloom.
Not until the maid had departed did the lady who had been bowed so long
lift up her head adoringly towards the brass cross; the boy overheard
her deep sigh; then she, too, went away, and in a few moments more the
boy followed and walked clumsily, thoughtfully, to his home.
His father was the village cobbler. He was a widower, and he was a
freethinker too; no mere passive rejector of creeds, but an active
opponent with a creed of his own, which if less violent was not less
bigoted than those he so witheringly decried. The child Tom had never
been allowed to attend church; until today, thus furtively, he had
never even entered one, and in the day school religious instruction had
been forbidden by his atheistic father. But while faith goes on working
its miracles the whirligigs of unfaith bring on revenges. The boy now
began to pay many secret visits to the church. He would walk under
the western tower and slip his enclosing palms up and down the woolly
rope handles, listen to the slow beat of the clock, and rub with his
wristband the mouldings of the brass lectern with the ugly bird on a
ball and the three singular chubby animals at the foot, half ox, half
dog, displaying monstrous teeth. He scrutinized the florid Georgian
memorial fixed up the wall, recording the virtues, which he could not
read, of a departed Rodney Giles; made of marble, there were two naked
fat little boys with wings; they pointed each with one hand towards
the name, and with the other held a handkerchief each to one tearful
eye. This was very agreeable to young Prowse, but most he loved to
sit beside one of the pillars--the stone posties, he called them--and
look at the window above the altar where for ever half a dozen angels
postured rhythmically upon the ladder of Jacob.