mouth: "Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hussh!"
It seemed as if the very rabbits must come and sit-up there, the jays
and pigeons settle above; everything in all the wood gather. Even one's
own heart seemed to be drawn in by those beckoning arms, and the slow
enchantment of that tinkling voice, and the look in those eyes, which,
lost in the unknown, were seeing no mortal glen, but only that mazed
wood, where friendly wild things come, who have no sound to their
padding, no whirr to the movement of their wings; whose gay whisperings
have no noise, whose eager shapes no colour--the fairy dream-wood of the
unimaginable.
"Chil-dren, chil-dren! Hus-s-h!"
For just a moment I could see that spirit company, ghosts of the ferns
and leaves, of butterflies and bees and birds, and four-footed things
innumerable, ghosts of the wind, the sun-beams, and the rain-drops, and
tiny flickering ghosts of moon-rays. For just a moment I saw what the
fairy's eyes were seeing, without knowing what they saw.
And then my mare trod on a dead branch, and all vanished. My fairy was
gone; and there was only little "Connemara," as we called her, nursing
her doll, and smiling up at me from the fern, where she had come to
practise her new school-song.
1911.
VII
THE NIGHTMARE CHILD
I set down here not precisely the words of my friend, the country
doctor, but the spirit of them:
"You know there are certain creatures in this world whom one simply dare
not take notice of, however sorry one may be for them. That has often
been borne in on me. I realised it, I think, before I met that little
girl. I used to attend her mother for varicose veins--one of those women
who really ought not to have children, since they haven't the very least
notion of how to bring them up. The wife of a Sussex agricultural
labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar
prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually associates with men
of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just
a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband
was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended
nobody. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got
into various kinds of trouble, and had to migrate, leaving two
illegitimate children behind her with their grandparents. The younger
girl, the child of this story, who was called Emmeline, of all
names--pronounced Em'leen, of course--was just fifteen at the time of my
visits to her mother. She had eyes like a hare's, a mouth which readily
fell open, and brown locks caught back from her scared and knobby
forehead. She was thin, and walked with her head poked a little forward,
and she so manoeuvred her legs and long feet, of which one turned in
rather and seemed trying to get in front of the other, that there was
something clodhopperish in her gait. Once in a way you would see her in
curl-papers, and then indeed she was plain, poor child! She seemed to
have grown up without ever having had the least attention paid to her. I
don't think she was ill-treated--she was simply not treated at all. At
school they had been kind enough, but had regarded her as almost
deficient. Seeing that her father was paid about fifteen shillings a
week, that her mother had no conception of housekeeping, and that there
were two babies to be fed, they were, of course, villainously poor, and
Em'leen was always draggle-tailed and badly shod. One side of her
too-short dress seemed ever to hang lower than the other, her stockings
always had one hole at least, and her hat--such queer hats--would seem
about to fly away. I have known her type in the upper classes pass
muster as "eccentric" or "full of character." And even in Em'leen there
was a sort of smothered natural comeliness, trying pathetically to push
through, and never getting a chance. She always had a lost-dog air, and
when her big hare's eyes clung on your face, it seemed as if she only
wanted a sign to make her come trailing at your heels, looking up for a
pat or a bit of biscuit.
"She went to work, of course, the moment she left school. Her first
place was in a small farm where they took lodgers, and her duties were
to do everything, without, of course, knowing how to do anything. She
had to leave because she used to take soap and hairpins, and food that
was left over, and was once seen licking a dish. It was just about then
that I attended her mother for those veins in her unwieldy legs, and the
child was at home, waiting to secure some other fate. It was impossible
not to look at that little creature kindly, and to speak to her now and
then; she would not exactly light up, because her face was not made that
way, but she would hang towards you as if you were a magnet, and you had
at once the uncomfortable sensation that you might find her clinging,
impossible to shake off. If one passed her in the village, too, or
coming down from her blackberrying in the thickets on the Downs--their
cottage lay just below the South Downs--one knew that she would be
lingering along, looking back till you were out of sight. Somehow one
hardly thought of her as a girl at all, she seemed so far from all human
hearts, so wandering in a queer lost world of her own, and to imagine
what she could be thinking was as impossible as it is with animals. Once
I passed her and her mother dawdling slowly in a lane, then heard the
dot-and-go-one footsteps pattering after me, and the childish voice,
rather soft and timid, say behind my shoulder: "Would you please buy
some blackberries, sir?" She was almost pretty at that moment, flushed
and breathless at having actually spoken to me, but her eyes hanging on
my face brought a sort of nightmare feeling at once of being unable to
get rid of her.
"Isn't it a cruel thing when you come to think of it, that there should
be born into the world poor creatures--children, dogs, cats, horses--who
want badly to love and be loved, and yet whom no one can quite put up
with, much less feel affection for!
"Well, what happened to her is what will always happen to such as those,
one way or another, in a world where the callous abound; for, however
unlovable a woman or girl, she has her use to a man, just as a dog or a
horse has to a master who cares nothing for it.
"Soon after I bought those blackberries I went out to France on military
duty. I got my leave a year later, and went home. It was late September,
very lovely weather, and I took a real holiday walking or lying about up
on the Downs, and only coming down at sunset. On one of those days when
you really enter heaven, so pure are the lines of the hills, so cool the
blue, the green, the chalk-white colouring under the smile of the
afternoon sun--I was returning down that same lane, when I came on
Em'leen sitting in a gap of the bank, with her dishevelled hat beside
her, and her chin sunk on her hands. My appearance seemed to drag her
out of a heavy dream--her eyes awoke, became startled, rolled furtively;
she scrambled up, dropped her little, old school curtsey, then all
confused, faced the bank as if she were going to climb it. She was
taller, her dress longer, her hair gathered up, and it was very clear
what was soon going to happen to her. I walked on in a rage. At her
age--barely sixteen even yet! I am a doctor, and accustomed to most
things, but this particular crime against children of that helpless sort
does make my blood boil. Nothing, not even passion to excuse it--who
could feel passion for that poor child?--nothing but the cold, clumsy
lust of some young ruffian. Yes, I walked on in a rage, and went
straight to her mother's cottage. That wretched woman was incapable of
moral indignation, or else the adventures of her elder daughter had
exhausted her powers of expression. 'Yes,' she admitted, 'Em'leen had
got herself into trouble too, but she would not tell, she wouldn't say
nothin' against nobody. It was a bad business, surely, an' now there
would be three o' them, an' Alliner was properly upset, that he was!'
That was all there was to be had out of _her_. One felt that she knew or
suspected more, but her fingers had been so burned over the elder girl
that anything to her was better than a fuss.
"I saw Alliner; he was a decent fellow, though dirty, distressed in his
simple, shallow-pated way, and more obviously ignorant than his wife. I
spoke to the schoolmistress, a shrewd and kindly married woman.
"Poor Emmeline! Yes, she had noticed. It was very sad and wicked! She
hinted, but would not do more than hint, at the son of the miller, but
he was back again, fighting in France now, and, after all, her evidence
amounted to no more than his reputation with girls. Besides, one is very
careful what one says in a country village. I, however, was so angry
that I should not have been careful if I could have got hold of
anything at all definite.
"I did not see the child again before my leave was up. The very next
thing I heard of her, was in a newspaper--Emmeline Alliner, sixteen, had
been committed for trial for causing the death of her illegitimate child
by exposure. I was on the sick list in January, and went home to rest. I
had not been there two days before I received a visit from a solicitor
of our assize town, who came to ask me if I would give evidence at the
girl's trial as to the nature of her home surroundings. I learned from
him the details of the lugubrious business. It seems that she had
slipped out one bitter afternoon in December, barely a fortnight after
her confinement, carrying her baby. There was snow on the ground, and it
was freezing hard, but the sun was bright, and it was that perhaps which
tempted her. She must have gone up towards the Downs by the lane where I
had twice met her; gone up, and stopped at the very gap in the bank
where she had been sitting lost in that heavy dream when I saw her last.
She appears to have subsided there in the snow, for there she was found
by the postman just as it was getting dark, leaning over her knees as if
stupefied, with her chin buried in her hands--and the baby stiff and
dead in the snow beside her. When I told the lawyer how I had seen her
there ten weeks before, and of the curious dazed state she had been in,
he said at once: 'Ah! the exact spot. That's very important; it looks
uncommonly as if it were there that she came by her misfortune. What do
you think? It's almost evident that she'd lost sense of her
surroundings, baby and all. I shall ask you to tell us about that at the
trial. She's a most peculiar child; I can't get anything out of her. I
keep asking her for the name of the man, or some indication of how it
came about, but all she says is: "Nobody--nobody!" Another case of
immaculate conception! Poor little creature, she's very pathetic, and
that's her best chance. Who could condemn a child like that?'
"And so indeed it turned out. I spared no feelings in my evidence. The
mother and father were in court, and I hope Mrs. Alliner liked my
diagnosis of her maternal qualities. My description of how Em'leen was
sitting when I met her in September tallied so exactly with the
postman's account of how he met her, that I could see the jury were
impressed. And then there was the figure of the child herself, lonely
there in the dock. The French have a word, _Hebetee_. Surely there never
was a human object to which it applied better. She stood like a little
tired pony, whose head hangs down, half-sleeping after exertion; and
those hare eyes of hers were glued to the judge's face, for all the
world as if she were worshipping him. It must have made him
extraordinarily uncomfortable. He summed up very humanely, dwelling on
the necessity of finding intention in her conduct towards the baby; and
he used some good strong language against the unknown man. The jury
found her not guilty, and she was discharged. The schoolmistress and I,
anticipating this, had found her a refuge with some Sisters of Mercy,
who ran a sort of home not far away, and to that we took her, without a
'by your leave' to the mother.
"When I came home the following summer, I found an opportunity of going
to look her up. She was amazingly improved in face and dress, but she
had attached herself to one of the Sisters--a broad, fine-looking
woman--to such a pitch that she seemed hardly alive when out of her
sight. The Sister spoke of it to me with real concern.
"'I really don't know what to do with her,' she said; 'she seems
incapable of anything unless I tell her; she only feels things through
me. It's really quite trying, and sometimes very funny, poor little
soul! but it's tragic for her. If I told her to jump out of her bedroom
window, or lie down in that pond and drown, she'd do it without a
moment's hesitation. She can't go through life like this; she must learn
to stand on her own feet. We must try and get her a good place, where
she can learn what responsibility means, and get a will of her own.'
"I looked at the Sister, so broad, so capable, so handsome, and so
puzzled, and I thought, 'Yes, I know exactly. She's on your nerves; and
where in the world will you find a place for her where she won't become
a sort of nightmare to some one, with her devotion, or else get it taken
advantage of again?' And I urged them to keep her a little longer. They
did; for when I went home for good, six months later, I found that she
had only just gone into a place with an old lady-patient of mine, in a
small villa on the outskirts of our village. She used to open the door
to me when I called there on my rounds once a week. She retained
vestiges of the neatness which had been grafted on her by the Sister,
but her frock was already beginning to sag down on one side, and her
hair to look ill-treated. The old lady spoke to her with a sort of
indulgent impatience, and it was clear that the girl's devotion was not
concentrated upon her. I caught myself wondering what would be its next
object, never able to help the feeling that if I gave a sign it would be
myself. You may be sure I gave no sign. What's the good? I hold the
belief that people should not force themselves to human contacts or
relationships which they cannot naturally and without irritation
preserve. I've seen these heroic attempts come to grief so often; in
fact, I don't think I've ever seen one succeed, not even between blood
relations. In the long run they merely pervert and spoil the fibre of
the attempter, without really benefiting the attemptee. Behind healthy
relationships between human beings, or even between human beings and
animals, there must be at least some rudimentary affinity. That's the
tragedy of poor little souls like Em'leen. Where on earth can they find
the affinity which makes life good? The very fact that they must worship
is their destruction. It was a soldier--or so they said--who had brought
her to her first grief; I had seen her adoring the judge at the trial,
then the handsome uniformed Sister. And I, as the village doctor, was a
sort of tin-pot deity in those parts, so I was very careful to keep my
manner to her robust and almost brusque.
"And then one day I passed her coming from the post office; she was
looking back, her cheeks were flushed, and she was almost pretty. There
by the inn a butcher's cart was drawn up. The young butcher, new to our
village (he had a stiff knee, and had been discharged from the Army),
was taking out a leg of mutton. He had a daredevil face; and eyes that
had seen much death. He had evidently been chatting with her, for he was
still smiling, and even as I passed him he threw her a jerk of the head.
"Two Sundays after that I was coming down past Wiley's copse at dusk,
and heard a man's coarse laugh. There, through a tiny gap in the
nut-bushes, I saw a couple seated. He had his leg stiffly stretched out,
and his arm round the girl, who was leaning towards him; her lips were
parted, and those hare's eyes of hers were looking up into his face.
Adoration!
"I don't know what it was my duty to have done, I only know that I did
nothing, but slunk on with a lump in my throat.
"Adoration! There it was again! Hopeless! Incurable devotions to those
who cared no more for her than for a slice of suet-pudding to be eaten
hot, gulped down, forgotten, or loathed in the recollection. And there
they are, these girls, one to almost every village of this country--a
nightmare to us all. The look on her face was with me all that evening
and in my dreams.
"I know no more, for two days later I was summoned North to take up work
in a military hospital."
1917.
VIII
BUTTERCUP-NIGHT
Why is it that in some places one has such a feeling of life being, not
merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single breathing,
glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a part than
the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in the meadows, the
sycamores and ash-trees and flowers in the fields, the rocks and little
bright streams, or even than the long fleecy clouds and their
soft-shouting drivers, the winds?
True, we register these parts of being, and they--so far as we know--do
not register us; yet it is impossible to feel, in such places as I speak
of, the busy, dry, complacent sense of being all that matters, which in
general we humans have so strongly.
In these rare spots, which are always in the remote country, untouched
by the advantages of civilisation, one is conscious of an enwrapping web
or mist of spirit--is it, perhaps the glamourous and wistful wraith of
all the vanished shapes once dwelling there in such close comradeship?
It was Sunday of an early June when I first came on one such, far down
in the West country. I had walked with my knapsack twenty miles; and,
there being no room at the tiny inn of the very little village, they
directed me to a wicket gate, through which, by a path leading down a
field, I would come to a farm-house, where I might find lodging. The
moment I got into that field I felt within me a peculiar contentment,
and sat down on a rock to let the feeling grow. In an old holly-tree
rooted to the bank about fifty yards away, two magpies evidently had a
nest, for they were coming and going, avoiding my view as much as
possible, yet with a certain stealthy confidence which made one feel
that they had long prescriptive right to that dwelling-place. Around,
far as one could see, was hardly a yard of level ground; all hill and
hollow, long ago reclaimed from the moor; and against the distant folds
of the hills the farm-house and its thatched barns were just visible,
embowered amongst beeches and some dark trees, with a soft bright crown
of sunlight over the whole. A gentle wind brought a faint rustling up
from those beeches, and from a large lime-tree which stood by itself; on
this wind some little snowy clouds, very high and fugitive in that blue
heaven, were always moving over. But I was most struck by the
buttercups. Never was field so lighted up by those tiny lamps, those
little bright pieces of flower china out of the Great Pottery. They
covered the whole ground, as if the sunlight had fallen bodily from the
sky, in millions of gold patines; and the fields below as well, down to
what was evidently a stream, were just as thick with the extraordinary
warmth and glory of them.
Leaving the rock at last, I went towards the house. It was long and low,
and rather sad, standing in a garden all mossy grass and buttercups,
with a few rhododendrons and flowery shrubs, below a row of fine old
Irish yews. On the stone verandah a grey sheep-dog and a very small
golden-haired child were sitting close together, absorbed in each other.
A woman came in answer to my knock, and told me, in a pleasant soft,
slurring voice, that I might stay the night; and dropping my knapsack, I
went out again. Through an old gate under a stone arch I came on the
farmyard, quite deserted save for a couple of ducks moving slowly down a
gutter in the sunlight; and noticing the upper half of a stable-door
open, I went across, in search of something living. There, in a rough
loose-box, on thick straw, lay a chestnut, long-tailed mare, with the
skin and head of a thoroughbred. She was swathed in blankets, and her
face, all cut about the cheeks and over the eyes, rested on an ordinary
human's pillow, held by a bearded man in shirt-sleeves; while, leaning
against the white-washed walls, sat fully a dozen other men, perfectly
silent, very gravely and intently gazing. The mare's eyes were
half-closed, and what could be seen of them was dull and blueish, as
though she had been through a long time of pain. Save for her rapid
breathing, she lay quite still, but her neck and ears were streaked with
sweat, and every now and then her hind-legs quivered. Seeing me at the
door, she raised her head, uttering a queer, half-human noise; but the
bearded man at once put his hand on her forehead, and with a "Woa, my
dear, woa, my pretty!" pressed it down again, while with the other hand
he plumped up the pillow for her cheek. And, as the mare obediently let
fall her head, one of the men said in a low voice: "I never see anything
so like a Christian!" and the others echoed him, in chorus, "Like a
Christian--like a Christian!" It went to one's heart to watch her, and I
moved off down the farm lane into an old orchard, where the apple-trees
were still in bloom, with bees--very small ones--busy on the blossoms,
whose petals were dropping on to the dock leaves and buttercups in the
long grass. Climbing over the bank at the far end, I found myself in a
meadow the like of which--so wild and yet so lush--I think I have never
seen. Along one hedge of its meandering length were masses of pink
mayflower; and between two little running streams quantities of yellow
water iris--"daggers," as they call them--were growing; the
"print-frock" orchis, too, was all over the grass, and everywhere the
buttercups. Great stones coated with yellowish moss were strewn among
the ash-trees and dark hollies; and through a grove of beeches on the
far side, such as Corot might have painted, a girl was running with a
youth after her, who jumped down over the bank and vanished. Thrushes,
blackbirds, yaffles, cuckoos, and one other very monotonous little bird
were in full song; and this, with the sound of the streams, and the
wind, and the shapes of the rocks and trees, the colours of the flowers,
and the warmth of the sun, gave one a feeling of being lost in a very
wilderness of Nature. Some ponies came slowly from the far end, tangled,
gipsy-headed little creatures, stared, and went off again at speed. It
was just one of those places where any day the Spirit of all Nature
might start up in one of those white gaps which separate the trees and
rocks. But though I sat a long time waiting, hoping--Pan did not come.
They were all gone from the stable, when I went back to the farm, except
the bearded nurse, and one tall fellow, who might have been the "Dying
Gaul," as he crouched there in the straw; and the mare was sleeping--her
head between her nurse's knees.
That night I woke at two o'clock, to find it bright as day, almost, with
moonlight coming in through the flimsy curtains. And, smitten with the
feeling which comes to us creatures of routine so rarely--of what beauty
and strangeness we let slip by without ever stretching out hand to grasp
it--I got up, dressed, stole downstairs, and out.