‘THEY’
by Rudyard Kipling
[Originally published in Traffics and Discoveries (London:
Macmillan, 1904)
Republished
in 1905 as a separate book, with illustrations by F. H. Townsend. These are
reproduced below, from a 1909 American edition.]
THE
RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs’
dove-winged races—
Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the
Dome;
Plucking the radiant robes of the passers-by, and with
pitiful faces
Begging what Princes and Powers
refused:—’Ah, please will you let us go home ?’
Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary
the Mother,
Kneeled
and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway—
Yea, the all-iron unbribeable Door which Peter must guard
and none other—
Straightway She took the Keys
from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway.
Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: On the
night that I bore Thee,
What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven
that was not my arm?
Didst Thou push from the nipple, O Child, to hear the
angels adore Thee?
When we two lay in the breath of
the kine?’ And He said:—’Thou hast done no harm.’
So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand
in hand,
Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless
Heavens stood still;
And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for
they heard the Command:
‘Shall I that have suffered the
children to come to me hold them against their will ?’
One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half
across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the
snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The
orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast,
where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles;
and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I
had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which
stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages
where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung
grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for
heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their
churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of
the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse,
bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little
further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
As the wooded hills closed about me I
stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head
is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie
of the country would bring me across some westward running road that went to
his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick
turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next
into a gloomy tunnel where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about
my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple
of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech
to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on
whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly,
white-stalked blue-bells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off the
power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a
keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the
twilight of the trees.
Still the track descended. I was on the
point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in
some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.
It was down again at once. As the light
beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from
which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks,
and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of
clipped yew. Across the lawn—the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood
an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and
roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red,
that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew
man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I
caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.
Here, then, I stayed; a horseman’s green
spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that
setting.
“If I am not packed off for a trespasser,
or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me,” thought I, “Shakespeare and
Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me
to tea.”
A child appeared at an upper window, and
I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a
companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among
the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the
house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the
sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes
I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.
The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in
the thickness of the wall—opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her
foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the
turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she
was blind.
“I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in my
road. I should have turned off up above—I never dreamed—” I began.
“But I’m very glad. Fancy a motor car
coming into the garden! It will be such a treat—” She turned and made as though
looking about her. “You—you haven’t seen any one, have you—perhaps?”
“No one to speak to, but the children
seemed interested at a distance.”
“Which?”
“I saw a couple up at the window just
now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.”
“Oh, lucky you!” she cried, and her face
brightened. “I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard
them?”
“Yes,” I answered. “And if I know
anything of children one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain
yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.”
“You’re fond of children?”
I gave her one or two reasons why I did
not altogether hate them.
“Of course, of course,” she said. “Then
you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car
through the gardens, once or twice—quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see
it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant,
but—” she threw out her hands towards the woods. “We’re so out of the world
here.”
“That will be splendid,” I said. “But I
can’t cut up your grass.”
She faced to the right. “Wait a minute,”
she said. “We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a
flagged path. We call it the Peacock’s Walk. You can’t see it from here, they
tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the
first peacock and get on to the flags.”
It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming
house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the
turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path
where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.
“May I come too?” she cried. “No, please
don’t help me. They’ll like it better if they see me.”
She felt her way lightly to the front of
the car, and with one foot on the step she called: “Children, oh, children!
Look and see what’s going to happen!”
The voice would have drawn lost souls
from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not
surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the
child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat
in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.
“The little fellow’s watching us,” I
said. “I wonder if he’d like a ride.”
“They’re very shy still. Very shy. But,
oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let’s listen.”
I stopped the machine at once, and the
humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could
hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that
might have been the doves.
“Oh, unkind!” she said weariedly.
“Perhaps they’re only shy of the motor.
The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested.”
“Yes?” She raised her head. “It was wrong of
me to say that. They are really fond of me. It’s the only thing that makes life
worth living—when they’re fond of you, isn’t it? I daren’t think what the place
would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?”
“I think it is the most beautiful place I
have ever seen.”
“So they all tell me. I can feel it, of
course, but that isn’t quite the same thing.”
“Then have you never?” I began, but
stopped abashed.
“Not since I can remember. It happened
when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember
something, else how could I dream about colours? I see light in my dreams, and
colours, but I never see them. I only hear them just as I do when I’m awake.”
“It’s difficult to see faces in dreams.
Some people can, but most of us haven’t the gift,” I went on, looking up at the
window where the child stood all but hidden.
“I’ve heard that too,” she said. “And
they tell me that one never sees a dead person’s face in a dream. Is that
true?”
“I believe it is—now I come to think of
it.”
“But how is it with yourself—yourself?”
The blind eyes turned towards me.
“I have never seen the faces of my dead
in any dream,” I answered.
“Then it must be as bad as being blind.”
The sun had dipped behind the woods and
the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the
light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard
green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had
accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among
the shadows.
“Have you ever wanted to?” she said after
the silence.
“Very much sometimes,” I replied. The
child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.
“Ah! So’ve I, but I don’t suppose it’s
allowed. . . . Where d’you live?”
“Quite the other side of the county—sixty
miles and more, and I must be going back. I’ve come without my big lamp.”
“But it’s not dark yet. I can feel it.”
“I’m afraid it will be by the time I get
home. Could you lend me some one to set me on my road at first? I’ve utterly
lost myself.”
“I’ll send Madden with you to the
cross-roads. We are so out of the world, I don’t wonder you were lost! I’ll
guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won’t you,
till you’re out of the grounds? It isn’t foolish, do you think?”
“I promise you I’ll go like this,” I
said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.
We skirted the left wing of the house,
whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day’s journey; passed
under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front
of the house which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that
all others I had seen.
A butler appeared noiselessly at the
miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put
on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay,
and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.
“Remember,” she said quietly, “if you are
fond of them you will come again,” and disappeared within the house.
The butler in the car said nothing till
we were nearly at the lodge gates, where, catching a glimpse of a blue blouse
in a shrubbery, I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play
should drag me into child-murder.
“Excuse me,” he asked of a sudden, “but
why did you do that, Sir?”
“The child yonder.”
“Our young gentleman in blue?”
“Of course.”
“He runs about a good deal. Did you see
him by the fountain, Sir?”
“Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn
here?”
“Yes, Sir. And did you ‘appen to see them
upstairs too?”
“At the upper window? Yes.”
“Was that before the mistress come out to
speak to you, Sir?”
“A little before that. Why d’you want to
know?”
He paused a little. “Only to make sure
that—that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about,
though I’m sure you’re driving particularly careful, there might be an
accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can’t miss your way
from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn’t our custom, not with—”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, and thrust
away the British silver.
“Oh, it’s quite right with the rest of
‘em as a rule. Good-bye, Sir.”
He retired into the armour-plated conning
tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the
honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
Once beyond the signposts at the
cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that
I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage
along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand
that people with motor cars had small right to live—much less to “go about
talking like carriage folk.” They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
When I retraced my route on the map that
evening I was little wiser. Hawkin’s Old Farm appeared to be the survey title
of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude
to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early
Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried
my difficulty to a neighbour—a deep-rooted tree of that soil—and he gave me a
name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
A month or so later—I went again, or it
may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the
fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew
through the high-walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the
cross-roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut
into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a
six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had
first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my
repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like,
which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood,
for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused
in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though
the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread
of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden
noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard
in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: “Children, oh, children, where
are you?” and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry.
She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree-boles, and though a
child, it seemed, clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit
as she drew nearer.
“Yes, it’s me from the other side of the
county.”
“Then why didn’t you come through the
upper woods? They were there just now.”
“They were here a few minutes ago. I
expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun.”
“Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars
break down?”
“In fifty different ways. Only mine has
chosen the fifty-first.”
She laughed merrily at the tiny joke,
cooed with delicious laughter, and pushed her hat back.
“Let me hear,” she said.
“Wait a moment,” I cried, “and I’ll get
you a cushion.”
She set her foot on the rug all covered
with spare parts, and stooped above it eagerly. “What delightful things!” The
hands through which she saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. “A box
here—another box! Why you’ve arranged them like playing shop!”
“I confess now that I put it out to
attract them. I don’t need half those things really.”
“How nice of you! I heard your bell in
the upper wood. You say they were here before that?”
“I’m sure of it. Why are they so shy?
That little fellow in blue who was with you just now ought to have got over his
fright. He’s been watching me like a Red Indian.”
“It must have been your bell,” she said.
“I heard one of them go past me in trouble when I was coming down. They’re
shy—so shy even with me.” She turned her face over her shoulder and cried
again: “Children! Oh, children! Look and see!”
“They must have gone off together on
their own affairs,” I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered
voices broken by the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my
tinkerings and she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.
“How many are they?” I said at last. The
work was finished, but I saw no reason to go.
Her forehead puckered a little in
thought. “I don’t quite know,” she said simply. “Sometimes more—sometimes less.
They come and stay with me because I love them, you see.”
“That must be very jolly,” I said,
replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I heard the inanity of my answer.
“Because they’re savages,” I returned.
“It’s nothing to fret for. That sort laugh at everything that isn’t in their
own fat lives.”
“I don’t know. How should I? I only don’t
like being laughed at about them. It hurts; and when one can’t see. . . . I
don’t want to seem silly,” her chin quivered like a child’s as she spoke, “but
we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at
our souls. It’s different with you. You’ve such good defences in your
eyes—looking out—before any one can really pain you in your soul. People forget
that with us.”
I was silent, reviewing that
inexhaustible matter—the more than inherited (since it is also carefully
taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of
the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into
myself.
“Don’t do that!” she said of a sudden,
putting her hands before her eyes.
“What?”
She made a gesture with her hand.
“That! It’s—it’s all purple and black.
Don’t! That colour hurts.”
“But how in the world do you know about
colours?” I exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed.
“Colours as colours?” she asked.
“No. Those Colours which you saw just
now.”
“You know as well as I do,” she laughed,
“else you wouldn’t have asked that question. They aren’t in the world at all.
They’re in you—when you went so angry.”
“D’you mean a dull purplish patch, like
port-wine mixed with ink?” I said.
“I’ve never seen ink or port-wine, but
the colours aren’t mixed. They are separate—all separate.”
“Do you mean black streaks and jags
across the purple?”
She nodded. “Yes—if they are like this,”
and zigzagged her finger again, “but it’s more red than purple—that bad
colour.”
“And what are the colours at the top of
the—whatever you see?”
Slowly she leaned forward and traced on
the rug the figure of the Egg itself.
“I see them so,” she said, pointing with
a grass stem, “white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or
bad, black across the red—as you were just now.”
“Who told you anything about it—in the
beginning?” I demanded.
“About the colours? No one. I used to ask
what colours were when I was little—in table-covers and curtains and carpets,
you see—because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me;
and when I got older that was how I saw people.” Again she traced the outline
of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.
“All by yourself?” I repeated.
“All by myself. There wasn’t any one
else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours.”
She leaned against the tree-bole plaiting
and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn
nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
“Now I am sure you will never laugh at
me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at them.”
“Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my
train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing
too—is a heathen!”
“I didn’t mean that of course. You’d
never laugh at children, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might
laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon. . . . What are you going to laugh
at?”
I had made no sound, but she knew.
“At the notion of your begging my pardon.
If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress
you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the
other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable.”
She looked at me, her head against the
tree trunk—long and steadfastly—this woman who could see the naked soul.
“How curious,” she half whispered. “How
very curious.”
“Why, what have I done?”
“You don’t understand . . . and yet you
understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?”
She spoke with a passion that nothing had
justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered
themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over
something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers
were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was
hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.
“No,” I said, and shook my head as though
the dead eyes could note. “Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I
shall later—if you’ll let me come again.”
“You will come again,” she answered. “You
will surely come again and walk in the wood.”
“Perhaps the children will know me well
enough by that time to let me play with them—as a favour. You know what
children are like.”
“It isn’t a matter of favour but of
right,” she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman
plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with
agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind
woman heard and stepped forward. “What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?” she asked.
The woman flung her apron over her head
and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to
death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her
wits’ end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.
“Where’s the next nearest doctor?” I
asked between paroxysms.
“Madden will tell you. Go round to the
house and take him with you. I’ll attend to this. Be quick!” She half-supported
the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of
Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose
to the crisis like a butler and a man.
A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds
caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him,
much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the
road to await the verdict.
“Useful things cars,” said Madden, all
man and no butler. “If I’d had one when mine took sick she wouldn’t have died.”
“How was it?” I asked.
“Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew
what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the Doctor. She was choked
when we came back. This car ‘d ha’ saved her. She’d have been close on ten
now.”
“Have you seen ‘em again, Sir—this
mornin’?”
“Yes, but they’re well broke to cars. I
couldn’t get any of them within twenty yards of it.”
He looked at me carefully as a scout
considers a stranger—not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely
appointed superior.
“I wonder why,” he said just above the
breath that he drew.
We waited on. A light wind from the sea
wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses,
whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
A woman, wiping the suds off her arms,
came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.
“I’ve be’n listenin’ in de back-yard,”
she said cheerily. “He says Arthur’s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck
just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t’will come Jenny’s turn to walk in de
wood nex’ week along, Mr. Madden.”
“Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is
slipping,” said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and
hurried away.
“What does she mean by `walking in the
wood’?” I asked.
“It must be some saying they use
hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself,” said Madden. “They’re an independent lot
in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir.”
I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage
followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make
treaty for her with Death. “Dat sort,” she wailed—“dey’re just as much to us
dat has ‘em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much—just as much! An’ God he’d
be just as pleased if you saved ‘un, Doctor. Don’t take it from me. Miss
Florence will tell ye de very same. Don’t leave ‘im, Doctor!”
“I know. I know,” said the man, “but
he’ll be quiet for a while now. We’ll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as
we can.” He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be
privy to what followed; but I saw the girl’s face, blotched and frozen with
grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved
away.
* * *
* * *
*
I had
intended to return in a day or
two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many
pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a
brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within
hand’s reach—a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of
my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I
reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under
the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the
Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden
collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across
copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored
fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through
sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first dry sample of autumn leaves. When I
reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was
telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer
England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all
the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their
outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds
of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime
stuck to my lips.
Inland the smell of autumn loaded the
thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the
late flowers—mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the
garden—showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little
sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open,
and bare-legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to
shout “pip-pip” at the stranger.
I made bold to call at the sweetmeat
shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman’s hospitable tears. Jenny’s
child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt,
best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did
not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. “Not but
what Jenny didn’t tend to Arthur as though he’d come all proper at de end of de
first year—like Jenny herself.” Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been
buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst’s opinion, more than covered the
small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without,
the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
“But how’s the mother?” I asked.
“In this weather?”
Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed
eyes across the counter.
“I dunno but it opens de ‘eart like. Yes,
it opens de ‘eart. Dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in de long
run, we do say.”
Now the wisdom of the old wives is
greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so
extendedly as I went up the road that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at
the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
“Awful weather!” I cried, as I slowed
dead for the turn.
“Not so bad,” she answered placidly out
of the fog. “Mine’s used to ‘un. You’ll find yours indoors, I reckon.”
Indoors, Madden received me with
professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he
would put under cover.
I waited in a still, nut-brown hall,
pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire—a place of
good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great
effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot
say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child’s cart and
a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I
felt that the children had only just hurried away—to hide themselves, most
like—in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out
of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing—from
the soul:
In the pleasant orchard-closes.
And
all my early summer came back at the call.
In the pleasant orchard-closes,
God bless all our gains say we—
But may God bless all our losses,
Better suits with our degree.
She
dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated—
I
saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.
“Is that you—from the other side of the
county?” she called.
“Yes, me from the other side of the
county,” I answered, laughing.
“What a long time before you had to come
here again.” She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail.
“It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!”
“I meant to come before, but Fate
prevented.”
“I knew it. Please do something to that
fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit
it!”
I looked on either side of the deep
fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a
black log into flame.
“It never goes out, day or night,” she
said, as though explaining. “In case any one comes in with cold toes, you see.”
“It’s even lovelier inside than it was
out,” I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky
panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An
old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart,
distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the
curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to
stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see
valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted
them with legions of dead leaves.
“Yes, it must be beautiful,” she said.
“Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.”
I followed her up the unflinching,
wagon-wide staircase to the gallery, whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan
doors.
“Feel how they put the latch low down for
the sake of the children.” She swung a light door inward.
She did not answer at once. Then, “I can
only hear them,” she replied softly. “This is one of their rooms—everything
ready, you see.”
She pointed into a heavily-timbered room.
There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, its
hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded
saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the
lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
“Surely they’ve only just gone,” I
whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle
of a frock and the patter of feet—quick feet through a room beyond.
“I heard that,” she cried triumphantly.
“Did you? Children, oh, children, where are you?”
The voice filled the walls that held it
lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I
had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step
here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our
quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single
ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable—recesses in walls, embrasures of deep
slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and
abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our
game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had
seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end
of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged
woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
“No, I haven’t seen her either this
evening, Miss Florence,” I heard her say, “but that Turpin he says he wants to
see you about his shed.”
“Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very
badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden.”
“And now we’ll have some tea,” she said.
“I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at
manners, somehow, when one lives alone and is considered—h’m—peculiar.” Then
with very pretty scorn, “would you like a lamp to see to eat by?”
“The firelight’s much pleasanter, I
think.” We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.
I took my chair in the direction of the
screen, ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her
permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the
fire.
“Where do you get these beautiful short
faggots from?” I asked idly. “Why, they are tallies!”
“Of course,” she said. “As I can’t read
or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me
one and I’ll tell you what it meant.”
I passed her an unburnt hazel-tally,
about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.
“This is the milk-record for the home
farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,” said she. “I don’t know
what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the
system. It’s out of date now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One
of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here
out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man—very greedy or—he wouldn’t
come here after dark.”
“Have you much land then?”
“Only a couple of hundred acres in hand,
thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my
folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man—and a highway robber.”
“Certainly not. You have the right. He
hasn’t any children.”
“Ah, the children!” I said, and slid my
low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. “I wonder
whether they’ll come out for me.”
There was a murmur of voices—Madden’s and
a deeper note—at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered
giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
“Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin,” she said.
“If—if you please, Miss, I’ll—I’ll be
quite as well by the door.” He clung to the latch as he spoke, like a
frightened child. Of a sudden I realised that he was in the grip of some almost
overpowering fear.
“Well?”
“About that new shed for the young
stock—that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in . . . but I’ll come
again, Miss.” His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.
“I think not,” she answered levelly. “The
new shed—m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?”
“I—fancied p’r’aps that if I came to see
you—ma—man to man like, Miss—but—”
His eyes rolled into every corner of the
room, wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered,
but I noticed it shut again—from without and firmly.
“He wrote what I told him,” she went on.
“You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty
bullocks—even in Mr. Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and
you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the
heart out of the farm.”
“I’m—I’m getting some
minerals—superphosphates—next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load
already. I’ll go down to the station to-morrow about ‘em. Then I can come and
see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight. . . . That gentleman’s not
going away, is he?” He almost shrieked.
I had only slid the chair a little
further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he
jumped like a rat.
“No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.”
She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old
and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him—his plea for the
new cowshed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure
pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had
bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of
his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
ran wet on his forehead.
I ceased to tap the leather—was, indeed,
calculating the cost of the shed—when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned
softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a
moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers. . .
.
The little brushing kiss fell in the
centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close:
as the all faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to
neglect even when grown-ups were busiest—a fragment of the mute code devised
very long ago.
Then I knew. And it was as though I had
known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.
I heard the door shut. The woman turned
to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.
What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the
chair very close to the screen.
“Now you understand,” she whispered,
across the packed shadows.
“Yes, I understand—now. Thank you.”
“Be very glad then,” said I, for my soul
was torn open within me.
“Forgive me!”
She was still, and I went back to my
sorrow and my joy.
“It was because I loved them so,” she
said at last, brokenly. “That was why it was, even from the first—even before I
knew that they—they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!”
She stretched out her arms to the shadows
and the shadows within the shadow.
“They came because I loved them—because I
needed them. I—I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?”
“No—no.”
“I—I grant you that the toys and—and all
that sort of thing were nonsense, but—but I used to so hate empty rooms myself
when I was little.” She pointed to the gallery. “And the passages all empty. .
. . And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose—”
“Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!” I cried.
The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the
leaded windows.
“And the same thing with keeping the fire
in all night. I don’t think it so foolish—do you?”
I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw,
through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and
bowed my head.
“I did all that and lots of other
things—just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know
that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me—”
“The butler’s wife? What?”
“One of them—I heard—she saw—and knew.
Hers! Not for me. I didn’t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I
began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because—. . .
Oh, you must bear or lose,” she said piteously. “There is no other way—and yet
they love me. They must! Don’t they?”
There was no sound in the room except the
lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took
comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still
in my chair by the screen.
In truth I could see, and my vision
confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and
flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.
“You think it is wrong, then?” she cried
sharply, though I had said nothing.
“Not for you. A thousand times no. For
you it is right. . . . I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be
wrong. For me only. . . .”
“Why?” she said, but passed her hand
before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. “Oh, I see,”
she went on simply as a child. “For you it would be wrong.” Then with a little
indrawn laugh, “and, d’you remember, I called you lucky—once—at first. You who
must never come here again!”
She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.