Part 4 (1/2)
”You all heard what Angela said last night in her little address to the committee in the dark. I don't know why she addressed her remarks particularly at me, but as she did so, there is no secret in the matter.
Of course, just at first, it seemed dretful to me that any one should know or speak about it. I cannot understand how you knew, Angela; I am trying not to understand....”
She took up a thin captain biscuit and bit it absent-mindedly. It trembled in her hand like a leaf.
”Yes, it is true that Rrchud isn't like other women's boys. You know it, Meta. Angela evidently knows it, and--at least since yesterday--I know that I know it. His not being able to read or write--I always knew in my heart that my old worn-out tag--'We can't all be literary geniuses'--didn't meet the case. His way of disappearing and never explaining.... Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys, doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy. Well, then, as you know, he couldn't get a commission, couldn't even get his stripe, poor darling. He deserted twice--pure absence of mind--it was always the same from a child--'I wanted to see further,' he'd say, and of course worse in the trenches. Why, you know it all, Angela dear--at least, perhaps not quite all. I should like to tell you--because you said that about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud....
”Pinehurst--my husband, he is a doctor, you know--had that same pa.s.sion for seeing further. He was often ill in London. I said it was asthma, but he said it was not being able to see far enough. We were in America for Rrchud's birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West. I took the precaution of having a good nurse with me. Pinehurst said the East was full of little obstacles, and people's eyes had sucked all the secrets out of the horizon, he said. I like Cape Cod, but he said there was always a wall of sea round those flat wet places. We stayed in a blacksmith's spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have been the Rockies. Pinehurst couldn't stand that, we pushed west--so tahsome. We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light buggy that a goldminer lent us. Oh, of course, you'll think us mad, Meta, but, do you know, we actually found the world's edge, a place with no horizon; we looked between ragged pine trees, and saw over the shoulders of great old violet mountains--we saw right down into the stars for ever.... There was a tower of rocks--rose-red rocks in sloping layers--sunny hot by day, my dears, and a great shelter by night. You know, the little dark clouds walk alone upon the mountain tops at sunset--as you said, Angela--they are like trees, and sometimes like faces, and sometimes like the shadows of little bent gipsies.... I used to look at the mountains and think: 'What am I about, to be so worried and so small, in sight of such an enormous storm of mountains under a gold sky?' I think of those rocks often at night, standing just as we left them, all by themselves, under that unnatural moon,--it was an unnatural moon on the edge of the world there,--all by themselves, with no watching eyes to spoil them, as Pinehurst used to say, not even one's own eyes.... You'll say that adventure--my one adventure--was impossible, Meta. Yes, it was. Rrchud was an impossible boy, born on an impossible day, in an impossible place. Ah, my poor Rrchud.... My dears, I am talking dretful nonsense. We were mad. You'd have to know Pinehurst, really, to understand it. Ah, we can never find our mountain again. I can never forgive Pinehurst....”
”You can never repay Pinehurst,” said the witch.
Lady Arabel did not seem to hear. For a long time there was nothing to be heard but Sarah Brown, murmuring to her Dog David. You must excuse her, and remember that she lived most utterly alone. She was locked inside herself, and the solitary barred window in her prison wall commanded only a view of the Dog David.
Rrchud's mother said at last: ”I really came to tell you that Rrchud came back on leave unexpectedly last night. Of course you must meet him--”
”Rrchud home!” exclaimed Miss Ford. ”How odd! I was just telling Miss Watkins about his Power, and how strongly she reminded me of him. Do tell him to keep Wednesday afternoon free.”
Lady Arabel, ignoring Miss Ford by mistake, said to the witch: ”Will you come on Tuesday to tea or supper?”
”Supper, please,” said the witch instantly. Tact, I repeat, was a stranger to her, so she added: ”I will bring Sarah Brown too. I bet you twopence she hasn't had a decent meal for days.”
And then the Mayor arrived. The witch saw at once that there was some secret understanding between him and her that she did not understand.
Her magic escapades often left her in this position. However, she winked back hopefully. But she was not a skilled winker. Everybody--even the Dog David--saw her doing it, and Miss Ford looked a little offended.
CHAPTER III
THE EVERLASTING BOY
Mitten Island is a place of fine weather, its air is always like stained gla.s.s between you and perfection. Always you will find in the happy ways of Mitten Island a confidence that the worst is left behind, and that even the worst was not so very bad. You can afford to remember the winter, for even the winter was beautiful; you can smile in the sun and think of the grey flush that used to overspread the island under its urgent crises of snow, and it seems that always there was joy running quickly behind the storms, joy looking with the sun through a tall window in a cloud. Even the most dreadful curtain of a winter's day was always drawn up at sunset; its straight edge rose slowly, disclosing flaming s.p.a.ce, and the dramatic figures of the two island churches, exulting and undying martyrs in the midst of flames.
It is a place of fine weather, and this is a book of fine weather, a book written in Spring. I will not remember the winter and the rain. It was the Spring that brought Sarah Brown to Mitten Island, and the Spring that first showed her magic. It was the Spring that awoke her on her first morning in the House of Living Alone.
She awoke because it was so beautiful outside, and because there was a beautiful day coming. You could see the day secretly making preparations behind a s.h.i.+ning mist. She heard a sound of breathless singing, and the whipping of stirred gra.s.s in the garden, the sound of some one unbearably happy, dancing. Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.
Sarah Brown went to her window. The newborn trembling slants of smoke went up from the houses of the island. There was a sky of that quiet design which suffices half a day unchanged. A garden of quite a good many yards lay behind the house; it contained no potatoes or anything useful, only long, very green gra.s.s, and a may tree, and a witch dancing. The extraordinary music to which she was dancing was partly the braying of a neighbouring donkey, and partly her own erratic singing.
She danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana; and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A little wandering of the voice, a little wandering of the feet.... The may tree in the middle of the garden seemed to be her partner. A small blot moved up and down the chequered trunk of the tree, and that was the shadow of a grey squirrel, watching the dancing. The squirrel wore the same fur as the two-and-a-half-guinea young lady wears, and sometimes it looked with a tilted head at the witch, and sometimes it buried its face in its hands and sat for a while shaken with secret laughter. There was certainly something more funny than beautiful about the witch's dancing.
She laughed herself most of the time. She was wearing a mackintosh, which was in itself rather funny, but her feet were bare.
A voice broke in: ”Good for you, cully.”
It was Sarah Brown's fellow-lodger leaning from her window.
The squirrel rippled higher up the may tree.
The pleasure of the thing broke like an eggsh.e.l.l. Sarah Brown turned back towards her bed. It was too early to get up. It was too late to go to sleep again. Eunice, her hot-water bottle, she knew, lay cold as a serpent to shock her feet if she returned. Besides, the Dog David was asleep on the middle of the counterpane, and she was too good a mother to wake him. There are a good many things to do when you find yourself awake too early. It is said that some people sit up and darn their stockings, but I refer now to ordinary people, not to angels. Utterly resourceless people find themselves reduced to reading the penny stamps on yesterday's letters. There is a good deal of food for thought on a penny stamp, but nothing really uplifting. Some people I know employ this morning leisure in scrubbing their consciences clean, thus thriftily making room for the sins of the coming day. But Sarah Brown's conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like s.m.u.ts lay always deep upon it. There were a few regrettable seconds in every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the compensations attached to a really considerable sin. Anyway her conscience would have been a case for pumice-stone, and when she was happy she always tried to forget it. Yet she was not without a good many very small and unessential resources for sleepless moments. Often she wrote vague comments on matters with which she was not familiar, in an exercise-book, always eventually mislaid. She would awake from dear and unspeakable dreams full of hope, and tell herself stories about herself, trying on various lives and deaths like clothes. The result was never likely enough even to laugh at.
To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a loss.
There was a knock upon her door, and a voice: ”Hi, c.o.c.ky, could you oblige me with a loan of a few 'alfpence for the milkman. I 'aven't a bean in me purse.”
”Nor have I,” said Sarah Brown, opening the door. ”But I can p.a.w.n--”
”Ow, come awf it, Cuffbut,” said the fellow-lodger. ”This is a respectable 'ouse, more or less, and you ain't goin' out to p.a.w.n nothink in your py-jams. I'll owe it to the milkman again. Not but what I 'adn't p'raps better pay 'im after all. I got me money paid yesterday, on'y I 'ad thought to put it away for Elbert.”
”Are you Peony, the other lodger?”
”Thet's right, dearie.”