whiskers, and delightful eyes, who continued to smile after the carriage
had quite vanished. Noticing, perhaps, that I, too, was smiling, he
said: "'Tes a funny thing, tu, when a maid like that gets married--makes
you go all of a tremble--so it du." And to my nod he added: "Brave bit
o' sunshine--we'll miss her hereabout; not a doubt of it. We ain't got
another one like that."
"Was that her father?" I asked, for the want of something to say. With a
sharpish look at my face, he shook his head.
"No, she an't got no parents, Mr. Mara bein' her uncle, as you may say.
No, she an't got no parents," he repeated, and there was something ill
at ease, yet juicy, about his voice, as though he knew things that he
would not tell.
Since there was nothing more to wait for, I went up to the little inn,
and ordered bread and cheese. The male congregation was whetting its
whistle noisily within, but, as a stranger, I had the verandah to
myself, and, finishing my simple lunch in the March sunlight, I paid and
started on. Taking at random one of the three lanes that debouched from
the bottom of the green, I meandered on between high banks, happy in the
consciousness of not knowing at all where it would lead me--that
essential of a country ramble. Except one cottage in a bottom and one
farm on a rise, I passed nothing, nobody. The spring was late in these
parts, the buds had hardly formed as yet on any trees, and now and then
between the bursts of sunlight a few fine specks of snow would come
drifting past me on the wind. Close to a group of pines at a high
corner, the lane dipped sharply down to a long farm-house standing back
in its yard, where three carts were drawn up, and an empty waggonette
with its shafts in the air. And suddenly, by some broken daffodils on
the seats and confetti on the ground, I perceived that I had stumbled on
the bride's home, where the wedding feast was, no doubt, in progress.
Gratifying but by no means satisfying my curiosity by gazing at the
lichened stone and thatch of the old house, at the pigeons, pigs, and
hens at large between it and the barns, I passed on down the lane, which
turned up steeply to the right beside a little stream. To my left was a
long larch wood, to my right rough fields with many trees. The lane
finished at a gate below the steep moorside crowned by a rocky tor. I
stood there leaning on the top bar, debating whether I should ascend or
no. The bracken had, most of it, been cut in the autumn, and not a
hundred yards away the furze was being swaled; the little blood-red
flames and the blue smoke, the yellow blossoms of the gorse, the
sunlight, and some flecks of drifting snow were mingled in an amazing
tangle of colour.
I had made up my mind to ascend the tor, and was pushing through the
gate, when suddenly I saw a woman sitting on a stone under the wall
bordering the larch wood. She was holding her head in her hands, rocking
her body to and fro; and her eyes were evidently shut, for she had not
noticed me. She wore a blue serge dress; her hat reposed beside her, and
her dark hair was straggling about her face. That face, all blowsy and
flushed, was at once wild and stupefied. A face which has been
beautiful, coarsened and swollen by life and strong emotion, is a
pitiful enough sight. Her dress, hat, and the way her hair had been done
were redolent of the town, and of that unnameable something which clings
to women whose business it is to attract men. And yet there was a
gipsyish look about her, as though she had not always been of the town.
The sight of a woman's unrestrained distress in the very heart of
untouched nature is so rare that one must be peculiar to remain unmoved.
And there I stood, not knowing what on earth to do. She went on rocking
herself to and fro, her stays creaking, and a faint moaning sound coming
from her lips; and suddenly she drooped over her lap, her hands fallen
to her sides, as though she had gone into a kind of coma. How go on and
leave her thus; yet how intrude on what did not seem to me mere physical
suffering?
In that quandary I stood and watched. This corner was quite sheltered
from the wind, the sun almost hot, and the breath of the swaling reached
one in the momentary calms. For three full minutes she had not moved a
finger; till, beginning to think she had really fainted, I went up to
her. From her drooped body came a scent of heat, and of stale violet
powder, and I could see, though the east wind had outraddled them,
traces of rouge on her cheeks and lips; their surface had a sort of
swollen defiance, but underneath, as it were, a wasted look. Her
breathing sounded faint and broken.
Mustering courage, I touched her on the arm. She raised her head and
looked up. Her eyes were the best things she had left; they must have
once been very beautiful. Bloodshot now from the wind, their wild,
stupefied look passed after a moment into the peculiar, half-bold,
half-furtive stare of women of a certain sort. She did not speak, and in
my embarrassment I drew out the flask of port I always take with me on
my rambles, and stammered:
"I beg your pardon--are you feeling faint? Would you care--?" And,
unscrewing the top, I held out the flask. She stared at it a moment
blankly, then taking it, said:
"That's kind of you. I feel to want it, tu." And, putting it to her
lips, she drank, tilting back her head. Perhaps it was the tell-tale
softness of her u's, perhaps the naturally strong lines of her figure
thus bent back, but somehow the plumage of the town bird seemed to drop
off her suddenly.
She handed back the flask, as empty as it had ever been, and said, with
a hard smile:
"I dare say you thought me funny sittin' 'ere like that."
"I thought you were ill."
She laughed without the faintest mirth, and muttered:
"I did go on, didn't I?" Then, almost fiercely, added: "I got some
reason, too. Seein' the old place again after all these years." Her dark
eyes, which the wine seemed to have cleared and boldened, swept me up
and down, taking me in, making sure perhaps whether or no she had ever
seen me, and what sort of a brute I might be. Then she said: "I was born
here. Are you from these parts?" I shook my head--"No, from the other
side of the county."
She laughed. Then, after a moment's silence, said abruptly:
"I been to a weddin'--first I've seen since I was a girl."
Some instinct kept me silent.
"My own daughter's weddin', but nobody didn't know me--not likely."
I had dropped down under the shelter of the wall on to a stone opposite,
and at those words looked at her with interest indeed. She--this
coarsened, wasted, suspiciously scented woman of the town--the mother of
that sweet, sunny child I had just seen married. And again instinctively
silent about my own presence at the wedding, I murmured:
"I thought I saw some confetti in that farmyard as I came up the lane."
She laughed again.
"Confetti--that's the little pink and white and blue things--plenty o'
that," and she added fiercely: "My own brother didn' know me--let alone
my girl. How should she?--I haven't seen her since she was a baby--she
was a laughin' little thing," and she gazed past me with that look in
the eyes as of people who are staring back into the bygone. "I guess we
was laughin' when we got her. 'Twas just here--summer-time. I 'ad the
moon in my blood that night, right enough." Then, turning her eyes on my
face, she added: "That's what a girl _will_ 'ave, you know, once in a
while, and like as not it'll du for her. Only thirty-five now, I am, an'
pretty nigh the end o' my tether. What can you expect?--I'm a gay woman.
Did for me right enough. Her father's dead, tu."
"Do you mean," I said, "because of your child?"
She nodded. "I suppose you can say that. They made me bring an order
against him. He wouldn't pay up, so he went and enlisted, an' in tu
years 'e was dead in the Boer War--so it killed him right enough. But
there she is, a sweet sprig if ever there was one. That's a strange
thing, isn't it?" And she stared straight before her in a sudden
silence. Nor could _I_ find anything to say, slowly taking in the
strangeness of this thing. That girl, so like a sunbeam, of whom the
people talked as though she were a blessing in their lives--her coming
into life to have been the ruin of the two who gave her being!
The woman went on dully: "Funny how I knew she was goin' to be
married--'twas a farmer told me--comes to me regular when he goes to
Exeter market. I always knew he came from near my old home. 'There's a
weddin' on Tuesday,' 'e says, 'I'd like to be the bridegroom at.
Prettiest, sunniest maid you ever saw'; an' he told me where she come
from, so I knew. He found me a bit funny that afternoon. But he don't
know who I am, though he used to go to school with me; I'd never tell,
not for worlds." She shook her head vehemently. "I don't know why I told
you; I'm not meself to-day, and that's a fact." At her half-suspicious,
half-appealing look, I said quickly:
"I don't know a soul about here. It's all right."
She sighed. "It was kind of you; and I feel to want to talk sometimes.
Well, after he was gone, I said to myself: 'I'll take a holiday and go
an' see my daughter married.'" She laughed--"I never had no pink and
white and blue little things myself. That was all done up for me that
night I had the moon in me blood. Ah! my father was a proper hard man.
'Twas bad enough before I had my baby; but after, when I couldn't get
the father to marry me, an' he cut an' run, proper life they led me, him
and stepmother. Cry! Didn' I cry--I was a soft-hearted thing--never went
to sleep with me eyes dry--never. 'Tis a cruel thing to make a young
girl cry."
I said quietly: "Did you run away, then?"
She nodded. "Bravest thing I ever did. Nearly broke my 'eart to leave my
baby; but 'twas that or drownin' myself. I was soft then. I went off
with a young fellow--bookmaker that used to come over to the sports
meetin', wild about me--but he never married me"--again she uttered her
hard laugh--"knew a thing worth tu o' that." Lifting her hand towards
the burning furze, she added: "I used to come up here an' help 'em
light that when I was a little girl." And suddenly she began to cry. It
was not so painful and alarming as her first distress, for it seemed
natural now.
At the side of the cart-track by the gate was an old boot thrown away,
and it served me for something to keep my eyes engaged. The dilapidated
black object among the stones and wild plants on that day of strange
mixed beauty was as incongruous as this unhappy woman herself revisiting
her youth. And there shot into my mind a vision of this spot as it might
have been that summer night when she had "the moon in her blood"--queer
phrase--and those two young creatures in the tall soft fern, in the
warmth and the darkened loneliness, had yielded to the impulse in their
blood. A brisk fluttering of snowflakes began falling from the sky still
blue, drifting away over our heads towards the blood-red flames and
smoke. They powdered the woman's hair and shoulders, and with a sob and
a laugh she held up her hand and began catching them as a child might.
"'Tis a funny day for my girl's weddin'," she said. Then with a sort of
fierceness added: "She'll never know her mother--she's in luck there,
tu!" And, grabbing her feathered hat from the ground, she got up. "I
must be gettin' back for my train, else I'll be late for an
appointment."
When she had put her hat on, rubbed her face, dusted and smoothed her
dress, she stood looking at the burning furze. Restored to her town
plumage, to her wonted bravado, she was more than ever like that old
discarded boot, incongruous.
"I'm a fool ever to have come," she said; "only upset me--and you don't
want no more upsettin' than you get, that's certain. Good-bye, and thank
you for the drink--it lusened my tongue praaper, didn't it?" She gave me
a look--not as a professional--but a human, puzzled look. "I told you my
baby was a laughin' little thing. I'm glad she's still like that. I'm
glad I've seen her." Her lips quivered for a second; then, with a faked
jauntiness, she nodded. "So long!" and passed through the gate down into
the lane.
I sat there in the snow and sunlight some minutes after she was gone.
Then, getting up, I went and stood by the burning furze. The blowing
flames and the blue smoke were alive and beautiful; but behind them they
were leaving blackened skeleton twigs.
"Yes," I thought, "but in a week or two the little green grass-shoots
will be pushing up underneath into the sun. So the world goes! Out of
destruction! It's a strange thing!"
1916.
V
TWO LOOKS
The old Director of the 'Yew Trees' Cemetery walked slowly across from
his house, to see that all was ready.
He had seen pass into the square of earth committed to his charge so
many to whom he had been in the habit of nodding, so many whose faces
even he had not known. To him it was the everyday event; yet this
funeral, one more in the countless tale, disturbed him--a sharp reminder
of the passage of time.
For twenty years had gone by since the death of Septimus Godwin, the
cynical, romantic doctor who had been his greatest friend; by whose
cleverness all had sworn, of whose powers of fascination all had
gossiped! And now they were burying his son!
He had not seen the widow since, for she had left the town at once; but
he recollected her distinctly, a tall, dark woman with bright brown
eyes, much younger than her husband, and only married to him eighteen
months before he died. He remembered her slim figure standing by the
grave, at that long-past funeral, and the look on her face which had
puzzled him so terribly--a look of--a most peculiar look!
He thought of it even now, walking along the narrow path towards his old
friend's grave--the handsomest in the cemetery, commanding from the
topmost point the whitened slope and river that lay beyond. He came to
its little private garden. Spring flowers were blossoming; the railings
had been freshly painted; and by the door of the grave wreaths awaited
the new arrival. All was in order.
The old Director opened the mausoleum with his key. Below, seen through
a thick glass floor, lay the shining coffin of the father; beneath, on
the lower tier, would rest the coffin of the son.
A gentle voice, close behind him, said:
"Can you tell me, sir, what they are doing to my old doctor's grave?"
The old Director turned, and saw before him a lady well past middle age.
He did not know her face, but it was pleasant, with faded rose-leaf
cheeks, and silvered hair under a shady hat.
"Madam, there is a funeral here this afternoon."
"Ah! Can it be his wife?"
"Madam, his son; a young man of only twenty."
"His son! At what time did you say?"
"At two o'clock."
"Thank you; you are very kind."
With uplifted hat, he watched her walk away. It worried him to see a
face he did not know.
All went off beautifully; but, dining that same evening with his friend,
a certain doctor, the old Director asked:
"Did you see a lady with grey hair hovering about this afternoon?"
The doctor, a tall man, with a beard still yellow, drew his guest's
chair nearer to the fire.
"I did."
"Did you remark her face? A very odd expression--a sort of--what shall I
call it?--Very odd indeed! Who is she? I saw her at the grave this
morning."
The doctor shook his head.
"Not so very odd, I think."
"Come! What do you mean by that?"
The doctor hesitated. Then, taking the decanter, he filled his old
friend's glass, and answered:
"Well, sir, you were Godwin's greatest chum--I will tell you, if you
like, the story of his death. You were away at the time, if you
remember."
"It is safe with me," said the old Director.
"Septimus Godwin," began the doctor slowly, "died on a Thursday about
three o'clock, and I was only called in to see him at two. I found him
far gone, but conscious now and then. It was a case of--but you know the
details, so I needn't go into that. His wife was in the room, and on the
bed at his feet lay his pet dog--a terrier; you may recollect, perhaps,
he had a special breed. I hadn't been there ten minutes, when a maid
came in and whispered something to her mistress. Mrs. Godwin answered
angrily, 'See him? Go down and say she ought to know better than to come
here at such a time!' The maid went, but soon came back. Could the lady
see Mrs. Godwin for just a moment? Mrs. Godwin answered that she could
not leave her husband. The maid looked frightened, and went away again.
She came back for the third time. The lady had said she must see Dr.
Godwin; it was a matter of life and death! 'Death--indeed!' exclaimed
Mrs. Godwin: 'Shameful! Go down and tell her, if she doesn't go
immediately, I will send for the police!'
"The poor maid looked at me. I offered to go down and see the visitor
myself. I found her in the dining room, and knew her at once. Never mind
her name, but she belongs to a county family not a hundred miles from
here. A beautiful woman she was then; but her face that day was quite
distorted.
"'For God's sake, Doctor,' she said, 'is there any hope?'
"I was obliged to tell her there was none.
"'Then I must see him,' she said.
"I begged her to consider what she was asking. But she held me out a
signet ring. Just like Godwin--wasn't it--that sort of Byronism, eh?
"'He sent me this,' she said, 'an hour ago. It was agreed between us
that if ever he sent that, I must come. If it were only myself I could
bear it--a woman can bear anything; but he'll die thinking I wouldn't
come, thinking I didn't care--and I would give my life for him this
minute!'
"Now, a dying man's request is sacred. I told her she should see him. I
made her follow me upstairs, and wait outside his room. I promised to
let her know if he recovered consciousness. I have never been thanked
like that, before or since.
"I went back into the bedroom. He was still unconscious, and the terrier
whining. In the next room a child was crying--the very same young man we
buried to-day. Mrs. Godwin was still standing by the bed.
"'Have you sent her away?'
"I had to say that Godwin really wished to see her. At that she broke
out:
"'I won't have her here--the wretch!'
"I begged her to control herself, and remember that her husband was a
dying man.
"'But I'm his wife,' she said, and flew out of the room."
The doctor paused, staring at the fire. He shrugged his shoulders, and
went on: "I'd have stopped her fury if I could! A dying man is not the
same as the live animal, that he must needs be wrangled over! And
suffering's sacred, even to us doctors. I could hear their voices
outside. Heaven knows what they said to each other. And there lay Godwin
with his white face and his black hair--deathly still--fine-looking
fellow he always was! Then I saw that he was coming to! The women had
begun again outside--first, the wife, sharp and scornful; then the
other, hushed and slow. I saw Godwin lift his finger and point it at the
door. I went out, and said to the woman, 'Dr. Godwin wishes to see you;
please control yourself.'
"We went back into the room. The wife followed. But Godwin had lost
consciousness again. They sat down, those two, and hid their faces. I
can see them now, one on each side of the bed, their eyes covered with
their hands, each with her claim on him, all murdered by the other's
presence; each with her torn love. H'm! What they must have suffered,
then! And all the time the child crying--the child of one of them, that
might have been the other's!"
The doctor was silent, and the old Director turned towards him his
white-bearded, ruddy face, with a look as if he were groping in the
dark.
"Just then, I remember," the doctor went on suddenly, "the bells of St.
Jude's close by began to peal out for the finish of a wedding. That
brought Godwin back to life. He just looked from one woman to the other
with a queer, miserable sort of smile, enough to make your heart break.
And they both looked at him. The face of the wife--poor thing!--was as
bitter hard as a cut stone, but she sat there, without ever stirring a
finger. As for the other woman--I couldn't look at her. He beckoned to
me; but I couldn't catch his words, the bells drowned them. A minute
later he was dead.
"Life's a funny thing! You wake in the morning with your foot firm on
the ladder--One touch, and down you go! You snuff out like a candle. And
it's lucky when your flame goes out, if only one woman's flame goes out
too.
"Neither of those women cried. The wife stayed there by the bed. I got
the other one away to her carriage, down the street.--And so she was
there to-day! That explains, I think, the look you saw."
The doctor ceased, and in the silence the old Director nodded. Yes! That
explained the look he had seen on the face of that unknown woman, the
deep, unseizable, weird look. That explained the look he had seen on the
wife's face at the funeral twenty years ago!
And peering wistfully, he said:
"They looked--they looked--almost triumphant!"
Then, slowly, he rubbed his hands over his knees, with the secret
craving of the old for warmth.
1914.
VI
FAIRYLAND
It was about three o'clock, this November afternoon, when I rode down
into "Fairyland," as it is called about here. The birch-trees there are
more beautiful than any in the world; and when the clouds are streaming
over in rain-grey, and the sky soaring above in higher blue, just-seen,
those gold and silver creatures have such magical loveliness as makes
the hearts of mortals ache. The fairies, who have been driven off the
moor, alone watch them with equanimity, if they be not indeed the
birch-trees themselves--especially those little very golden ones which
have strayed out into the heather, on the far side of the glen.
"Revenge!" the fairies cried when a century ago those, whom they do not
exist just to amuse, made the new road over the moor, cutting right
through the home of twilight, that wood above the "Falls," where till
then they had always enjoyed inviolable enchantment. They trooped
forthwith in their multitudinous secrecy down into the glen, to swarm
about the old road. In half a century or so they had it almost
abandoned, save for occasional horsemen and harmless persons seeking
beauty, for whom the fairies have never had much feeling of aversion.
And now, after a hundred years, it is all theirs; the ground so golden
with leaves and bracken that the old track is nothing but a vague
hardness beneath a horse's feet, nothing but a runnel for the rains to
gather in. There is everywhere that glen scent of mouldering leaves, so
sweet when the wind comes down and stirs it, and the sun frees and
livens it. Not very many birds, perhaps because hawks are fond of
hovering here. This was once the only road up to the village, the only
communication with all that lies to the south and east! Now the fairies
have got it indeed, they have witched to skeletons all the little
bridges across the glen stream; they have mossed and thinned the gates
to wraiths. With their dapple-gold revelry in sunlight, and their dance
of pied beauty under the moon, they have made all their own.
I have ridden many times down into this glen; and slowly up among the
beeches and oaks into the lanes again, hoping and believing that, some
day, I should see a fairy take shape to my thick mortal vision; and
to-day, at last, I have seen.
I heard it first about half-way up the wood, a silvery voice piping out
very true what seemed like mortal words, not quite to be caught.
Resolved not to miss it this time, I got off quietly and tied my mare
to a tree. Then, tiptoeing in the damp leaves which did not rustle, I
stole up till I caught sight of it, from behind an oak.
It was sitting in yellow bracken as high as its head, under a birch-tree
that had a few branches still gold-feathered. It seemed to be clothed in
blue, and to be swaying as it sang. There was something in its arms, as
it might be a creature being nursed. Cautiously I slipped from that tree
to the next, till I could see its face, just like a child's,
fascinating, very, very delicate, the little open mouth poised and
shaped ever so neatly to the words it was singing; the eyes wide apart
and ever so wide open, fixed on nothing mortal. The song, and the little
body, and the spirit in the eyes, all seemed to sway--sway together,
like a soft wind that goes sough-sough, swinging, in the tops of the
ferns. And now it stretched out one arm, and now the other, beckoning in
to it those to which it was singing; so that one seemed to feel the
invisible ones stealing up closer and closer.