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The Golden Scarecrow

by Hugh Walpole · English · Gutenberg #14201 · 330,720 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Golden Scarecrow

Author: Hugh Walpole


        
Release date: November 29, 2004 [eBook #14201]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOLDEN SCARECROW ***

THE GOLDEN SCARECROW


BY


HUGH WALPOLE


AUTHOR OF

"THE DUCHESS OF WREXE," "FORTITUDE," "THE PRELUDE TO
ADVENTURE," "THE WOODEN HORSE." ETC.

NEW YORK

1915

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                            PAGE
        PROLOGUE--HUGH SEYMOUR         11
     I. HENRY FITZGEORGE STRETHER      43
    II. ERNEST HENRY                   65
   III. ANGELINA                       94
    IV. BIM ROCHESTER                 121
     V. NANCY ROSS                    146
    VI. 'ENERY                        172
   VII. BARBARA FLINT                 198
  VIII. SARAH TREFUSIS                226
    IX. YOUNG JOHN SCARLET            256
        EPILOGUE                      274




PROLOGUE

HUGH SEYMOUR


I

When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon, where
his parents lived, to be educated in England. His relations having, for
the most part, settled in foreign countries, he spent his holidays as a
very minute and pale-faced "paying guest" in various houses where other
children were of more importance than he, or where children as a race
were of no importance at all. It was in this way that he became during
certain months of 1889 and 1890 and '91 a resident in the family of the
Rev. William Lasher, Vicar of Clinton St. Mary, that large rambling
village on the edge of Roche St. Mary Moor in South Glebeshire.

He spent there the two Christmases of 1890 and 1891 (when he was ten
and eleven years of age), and it is with the second of these that the
following incident, and indeed the whole of this book, has to do. Hugh
Seymour could not, at the period of which I write, be called an
attractive child; he was not even "interesting" or "unusual." He was
very minutely made, with bones so brittle that it seemed that, at any
moment, he might crack and splinter into sharp little pieces; and I am
afraid that no one would have minded very greatly had this occurred. But
although, he was so thin his face had a white and overhanging
appearance, his cheeks being pale and puffy and his under-lip jutted
forward in front of projecting teeth--he was known as the "White Rabbit"
by his schoolfellows. He was not, however, so ugly as this appearance
would apparently convey, for his large, grey eyes, soft and even, at
times agreeably humorous, were pleasant and cheerful.

During these years when he knew Mr. Lasher he was undoubtedly
unfortunate. He was shortsighted, but no one had, as yet, discovered
this, and he was, therefore, blamed for much clumsiness that he could
not prevent and for a good deal of sensitiveness that came quite simply
from his eagerness to do what he was told and his inability to see his
way to do it. He was not, at this time, easy with strangers and seemed
to them both conceited and awkward. Conceit was far from him--he was, in
fact, amazed at so feeble a creature as himself!--but awkward he was,
and very often greedy, selfish, impetuous, untruthful and even cruel: he
was nearly always dirty, and attributed this to the evil wishes of some
malign fairy who flung mud upon him, dropped him into puddles and
covered him with ink simply for the fun of the thing!

He did not, at this time, care very greatly for reading; he told himself
stories--long stories with enormous families in them, trains of
elephants, ropes and ropes of pearls, towers of ivory, peacocks, and
strange meals of saffron buns, roast chicken, and gingerbread. His
active, everyday concern, however, was to become a sportsman; he wished
to be the best cricketer, the best footballer, the fastest runner of his
school, and he had not--even then faintly he knew it--the remotest
chance of doing any of these things even moderately well. He was bullied
at school until his appointment as his dormitory's story-teller gave
him a certain status, but his efforts at cricket and football were
mocked with jeers and insults. He could not throw a cricket-ball, he
could not see to catch one after it was thrown to him, did he try to
kick a football he missed it, and when he had run for five minutes he
saw purple skies and silver stars and has cramp in his legs. He had,
however, during these years at Mr. Lasher's, this great over mastering
ambition.

In his sleep, at any rate, he was a hero; in the wide-awake world he
was, in the opinion of almost every one, a fool. He was exactly the type
of boy whom the Rev. William Lasher could least easily understand. Mr.
Lasher was tall and thin (his knees often cracked with a terrifying
noise), blue-black about the cheeks hooked as to the nose, bald and
shining as to the head, genial as to the manner, and practical to the
shining tips of his fingers. He has not, at Cambridge, obtained a rowing
blue, but "had it not been for a most unfortunate attack of scarlet
fever-----" He was President of the Clinton St. Mary Cricket Club, 1890
(matches played, six; lost, five; drawn, one) knew how to slash the ball
across the net at a tennis garden party, always read the prayers in
church as though he were imploring God to keep a straighter bat and
improve His cut to leg, and had a passion for knocking nails into walls,
screwing locks into doors, and making chicken runs. He was, he often
thanked his stars, a practical Realist, and his wife, who was fat,
stupid, and in a state of perpetual wonder, used to say of him, "If Will
hadn't been a clergyman he would have made _such_ an engineer. If God
had blessed us with a boy, I'm sure he would have been something
scientific. Will's no dreamer." Mr. Lasher was kindly of heart so long
as you allowed him to maintain that the world was made for one type of
humanity only. He was as breezy as a west wind, loved to bathe in the
garden pond on Christmas Day ("had to break the ice that morning"), and
at penny readings at the village schoolroom would read extracts from
"Pickwick," and would laugh so heartily himself that he would have to
stop and wipe his eyes. "If you must read novels," he would say, "read
Dickens. Nothing to offend the youngest among us--fine breezy stuff with
an optimism that does you good and people you get to know and be fond
of. By Jove, I can still cry over Little Nell and am not ashamed of
it."

He had the heartiest contempt for "wasters" and "failures," and he was
afraid there were a great many in the world. "Give me a man who is a
man," he would say, "a man who can hit a ball for six, run ten miles
before breakfast and take his knocks with the best of them. Wasn't it
Browning who said,

  "'God's in His heaven,
  All's right with the world.'

Browning was a great teacher--after Tennyson, one of our greatest. Where
are such men to-day!"

He was, therefore, in spite of his love for outdoor pursuits, a cultured
man.

It was natural, perhaps, that he should find Hugh Seymour "a pity."
Nearly everything that he said about Hugh Seymour began with the words----

"It's a pity that----"

"It's a pity that you can't get some red into your cheeks, my boy."

"It's a pity you don't care about porridge. You must learn to like it."

"It's a pity you can't even make a little progress with your
mathematics."

"It's a pity you told me a lie because----"

"It's a pity you were rude to Mrs. Lasher. No gentleman----"

"It's a pity you weren't attending when----"

Mr. Lasher was, very earnestly, determined to do his best for the boy,
and, as he said, "You see, Hugh, if we do our best for you, you must do
your best for us. Now I can't, I'm afraid, call this your best."

Hugh would have liked to say that it _was_ the best that he could do in
that particular direction (very probably Euclid), but if only he might
be allowed to try his hand in quite _another_ direction, he might do
something very fine indeed. He never, of course, had a chance of saying
this, nor would such a declaration have greatly benefited him, because,
for Mr. Lasher, there was only one way for every one and the sooner (if
you were a small boy) you followed it the better.

"Don't dream, Hugh," said Mr. Lasher, "remember that no man ever did
good-work by dreaming. The goal is to the strong. Remember that."

Hugh, did remember it and would have liked very much to be as strong as
possible, but whenever he tried feats of strength he failed and looked
foolish.

"My dear boy, _that's_ not the way to do it," said Mr. Lasher; "it's a
pity that you don't listen to what I tell you."


II

A very remarkable fact about Mr. Lasher was this--that he paid no
attention whatever to the county in which he lived. Now there are
certain counties in England where it is possible to say, "I am in
England," and to leave it at that; their quality is simply English with
no more individual personality. But Glebeshire has such an
individuality, whether for good or evil, that it forces comment from the
most sluggish and inattentive of human beings. Mr. Lasher was perhaps
the only soul, living or dead, who succeeded in living in it during
forty years (he is still there, he is a Canon now in Polchester) and
never saying anything about it. When on his visits to London people
inquired his opinion of Glebeshire, he would say: "Ah well!... I'm
afraid Methodism and intemperance are very strong ... all the same,
we're fighting 'em, fighting 'em!"

This was the more remarkable in that Mr. Lasher lived upon the very edge
of Roche St. Mary Moor, a stretch of moor and sand. Roche St. Mary Moor,
that runs to the sea, contains the ruins of St. Arthe Church (buried
until lately in the sand, but recently excavated through the kind
generosity of Sir John Porthcullis, of Borhaze, and shown to visitors,
6d. a head, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons free), and in one of the
most romantic, mist-laden, moon-silvered, tempest-driven spots in the
whole of Great Britain.

The road that ran from Clinton St. Mary to Borhaze across the moor was
certainly a wild, rambling, beautiful affair, and when the sea-mists
swept across it and the wind carried the cry of the Bell of Trezent Rock
in and out above and below, you had a strange and moving experience. Mr.
Lasher was certainly compelled to ride on his bicycle from Clinton St.
Mary to Borhaze and back again, and never thought it either strange or
moving. "Only ten at the Bible meeting to-night. Borhaze wants waking
up. We'll see what open-air services can do." What the moor thought
about Mr. Lasher it is impossible to know!

Hugh Seymour thought about the moor continually, but he was afraid to
mention his ideas of it in public. There was a legend in the village
that several hundred years ago some pirates, driven by storm into
Borhaze, found their way on to the moor and, caught by the mist,
perished there; they are to be seen, says the village, in powdered wigs,
red coats, gold lace, and swords, haunting the sand-dunes. God help the
poor soul who may fall into their hands! This was a very pleasant story,
and Hugh Seymour's thoughts often crept around and about it. He would
like to find a pirate, to bring him to the vicarage, and present him to
Mr. Lasher. He knew that Mrs. Lasher would say, "Fancy, a pirate. Well!
now, fancy! Well, here's a pirate!" And that Mr. Lasher would say, "It's
a pity, Hugh, that you don't choose your company more carefully. Look at
the man's nose!"

Hugh, although he was only eleven, knew this. Hugh did on one occasion
mention the pirates. "Dreaming again, Hugh! Pity they fill your head
with such nonsense! If they read their Bibles more!"

Nevertheless, Hugh continued his dreaming. He dreamt of the moor, of
the pirates, of the cobbled street in Borhaze, of the cry of the Trezent
Bell, of the deep lanes and the smell of the flowers in them, of making
five hundred not out at cricket, of doing a problem in Euclid to Mr.
Lasher's satisfaction, of having a collar at the end of the week as
clean as it had been at the beginning, of discovering the way to make a
straight parting in the hair, of not wriggling in bed when Mrs. Lasher
kissed him at night, of many, many other things.

He was at this time a very lonely boy. Until Mr. Pidgen paid his visit
he was most remarkably lonely. After that visit he was never lonely
again.


III

Mr. Pidgen came on a visit to the vicarage three days before Christmas.
Hugh Seymour saw him first from the garden. Mr. Pidgen was standing at
the window of Mr. Lasher's study; he was staring in front of him at the
sheets of light that flashed and darkened and flashed again across the
lawn, at the green cluster of holly-berries by the drive-gate, at the
few flakes of snow that fell, lazily, carelessly, as though they were
trying to decide whether they would make a grand affair of it or not,
and perhaps at the small, grubby boy who was looking at him with one eye
and trying to learn the Collect for the day (it was Sunday) with the
other. Hugh had never before seen any one in the least like Mr. Pidgen.
He was short and round, and his head was covered with tight little
curls. His cheeks were chubby and red and his nose small, his mouth also
very small. He had no chin. He was wearing a bright blue velvet
waistcoat with brass buttons, and over his black shoes there shone white
spats.

Hugh had never seen white spats before. Mr. Pidgen shone with
cleanliness, and he had supremely the air of having been exactly as he
was, all in one piece, years ago. He was like one of the china ornaments
in Mrs. Lasher's drawing-room that the housemaid is told to be so
careful about, and concerning whose destruction Hugh heard her on at
least one occasion declaring, in a voice half tears, half defiance,
"Please, ma'am, it wasn't me. It just slipped of itself!" Mr. Pidgen
would break very completely were he dropped.

The first thing about him that struck Hugh was his amazing difference
from Mr. Lasher. It seemed strange that any two people so different
could be in the same house. Mr. Lasher never gleamed or shone, he would
not break with however violent an action you dropped him, he would
certainly never wear white spats.

Hugh liked Mr. Pidgen at once. They spoke for the first time at the
mid-day meal, when Mr. Lasher said, "More Yorkshire pudding, Pidgen?"
and Mr. Pidgen said, "I adore it."

Now Yorkshire pudding happened to be one of Hugh's special passions just
then, particularly when it was very brown and crinkly, so he said quite
spontaneously and without taking thought, as he was always told to do,

"So do I!"

"My _dear_ Hugh!" said Mrs. Lasher; "how very greedy! Fancy! After all
you've been told! Well, well! Manners, manners!"

"I don't know," said Mr. Pidgen (his mouth was full). "I said it first,
and I'm older than he is. I should know better.... I like boys to be
greedy, it's a good sign--a good sign. Besides. Sunday--after a
sermon--one naturally feels a bit peckish. Good enough sermon, Lasher,
but a bit long."

Mr. Lasher of course did not like this, and, indeed, it was evident to
any one (even to a small boy) that the two gentlemen would have
different opinions upon every possible subject. However, Hugh loved Mr.
Pidgen there and then, and decided that he would put him into the story
then running (appearing in nightly numbers from the moment of his
departure to bed to the instant of slumber--say ten minutes); he would
also, in the imaginary cricket matches that he worked out on paper, give
Mr. Pidgen an innings of two hundred not out and make him captain of
Kent. He now observed the vision very carefully and discovered several
strange items in his general behaviour. Mr. Pidgen was fond of whistling
and humming to himself; he was restless and would walk up and down a
room with his head in the air and his hands behind his broad back,
humming (out of tune) "Sally in our Alley," or "Drink to me only." Of
course this amazed Mr. Lasher.

He would quite suddenly stop, stand like a top spinning, balanced on his
toes, and cry, "Ah! Now I've got it! No, I haven't! Yes, I have. By God,
it's gone again!"

To this also Mr. Lasher strongly objected, and Hugh heard him say,
"Really, Pidgen, think of the boy! Think of the boy!" and Mr. Pidgen
exclaimed, "By God, so I should!... Beg pardon, Lasher! Won't do it
again! Lord save me, I'm a careless old drunkard!" He had any number of
strange phrases that were new and brilliant and exciting to the boy, who
listened to him. He would say, "by the martyrs of Ephesus!" or "Sunshine
and thunder!" or "God stir your slumbers!" when he thought any one very
stupid. He said this last one day to Mrs. Lasher, and of course she was
very much astonished. She did not from the first like him at all. Mr.
Pidgen and Mr. Lasher had been friends at Cambridge and had not met one
another since, and every one knows that that is a dangerous basis for
the renewal of friendship. They had a little dispute on the very
afternoon of Mr. Pidgen's arrival, when Mr. Lasher asked his guest
whether he played golf.

"God preserve my soul! No!" said Mr. Pidgen. Mr. Lasher then explained
that playing golf made one thin, hungry and self-restrained. Mr. Pidgen
said that he did not wish to be the first or last of these, and that he
was always the second, and that golf was turning the fair places of
England into troughs for the moneyed pigs of the Stock Exchange to swill
in.

"My dear Pidgen!" cried Mr. Lasher, "I'm afraid no one could call me a
moneyed pig with any justice--more's the pity--and a game of golf to me
is----"

"Ah! you're a parson, Lasher," said his guest.

In fact, by the evening of the second day of the visit it was obvious
that Clinton St. Mary Vicarage might, very possibly, witness a disturbed
Christmas. It was all very tiresome for poor Mrs. Lasher. On the late
afternoon of Christmas Eve, Hugh heard the stormy conversation that
follows--a conversation that altered the colour and texture of his
after-life as such things may, when one is still a child.


IV

Christmas Eve was always, to Hugh, a day with glamour. He did not any
longer hang up his stocking (although he would greatly have liked to do
so), but, all day, his heart beat thickly at the thought of the morrow,
at the thought of something more than the giving and receiving of
presents, something more than the eating of food, something more than
singing hymns that were delightfully familiar, something more than
putting holly over the pictures and hanging mistletoe on to the lamp in
the hall. Something there was in the day like going home, like meeting
people again whom one had loved once, and not seen for many years,
something as warm and romantic and lightly coloured _and_ as comforting
as the most inspired and impossible story that one could ever, lying in
bed and waiting for sleep, invent.

To-day there was no snow but a frost, and there was a long bar of
saffron below the cold sky and a round red ball of a sun. Hugh was
sitting in a corner of Mr. Lasher's study, looking at Doré's "Don
Quixote," when the two gentlemen came in. He was sitting in a dark
corner and they, because they were angry with one another, did not
recognise any one except themselves. Mr. Lasher pulled furiously at his
pipe and Mr. Pidgen stood up by the fire with his short fat legs spread
wide and his mouth smiling, but his eyes vexed and rather indignant.

"My dear Pidgen," said Mr. Lasher, "you misunderstand me, you do indeed!
It may be (I would be the first to admit that, like most men, I have my
weakness) that I lay too much stress upon the healthy, physical, normal
life, upon seeing things as they are and not as one would like to see
them to be. I don't believe that dreaming ever did any good to any man!"

"It's only produced some of the finest literature the world has ever
known," said Mr. Pidgen.

"Ah! Genius! If you or I were geniuses, Pidgen, that would be another
affair. But we're not; we're plain, common-place humdrum human beings
with souls to be saved and work to do--work to do!"

There was a little pause after that, and Hugh, looking at Mr. Pidgen,
saw the hurt look in his eyes deepen.

"Come now, Lasher," he said at last. "Let's be honest one with another;
that's your line, and you say it ought to be mine. Come now, as man to
man, you think me a damnable failure now--beg pardon--complete
failure--don't you? Don't be afraid of hurting me. I want to know!"

Mr. Lasher was really a kindly man, and when his eyes beheld
things--there were of course many things that they never beheld--he
would do his best to help anybody. He wanted to help Mr. Pidgen now;
but he was also a truthful man.

"My dear Pidgen! Ha, ha! What a question! I'm sure many, many people
enjoy your books immensely. I'm sure they do, oh, yes!"

"Come, now, Lasher, the truth. You won't hurt my feelings. If you were
discussing me with a third person you'd say, wouldn't you? 'Ah, poor
Pidgen might have done something if he hadn't let his fancy run away
with him. I was with him at Cambridge. He promised well, but I'm afraid
one must admit that he's failed--he would never stick to anything.'"

Now this was so exactly what Mr. Lasher had, on several occasions, said
about his friend that he was really for the moment at a loss. He pulled
at his pipe, looked very grave, and then said:

"My dear Pidgen, you must remember our lives have followed such
different courses. I can only give you my point of view. I don't myself
care greatly for romances--fairy tales and so on. It seems to me that
for a grown-up man.... However, I don't pretend to be a literary fellow;
I have other work, other duties, picturesque, but nevertheless
necessary."

"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Pidgen, who, considering that he had invited his
host's honest opinion, should not have become irritated because he had
obtained it; "that's just it. You people all think only _you_ know what
is necessary. Why shouldn't a fairy story be as necessary as a sermon? A
lot more necessary, I dare say. You think you're the only people who can
know anything about it. You people never use your imaginations."

"Nevertheless," said Mr. Lasher, very bitterly (for he had always said,
"If one does not bring one's imagination into one's work one's work is
of no value"), "writers of idle tales are not the only people who use
their imaginations. And, if you will allow me, without offence, to say
so, Pidgen, your books, even amongst other things of the same sort, have
not been the most successful."

This remark seemed to pour water upon all the anger in Mr. Pidgen's
heart. His eyes expressed scorn, but not now for Mr. Lasher--for
himself. His whole figure drooped and was bowed like a robin in a
thunderstorm.

"That's true enough. Bless my soul, Lasher, that's true enough. They
hardly sell at all. I've written a dozen of them now, 'The Blue Pouncet
Box,' 'The Three-tailed Griffin,' 'The Tree without any Branches,' but
you won't want to be bothered with the names of them. 'The Griffin' went
into two editions, but it was only because the pictures were rather
sentimental. I've often said to myself, 'If a thing doesn't sell in
these days it must be good,' but I've not really convinced myself. I'd
like them to have sold. Always, until now, I've had hopes of the next
one, and thought that it would turn out better, like a woman with her
babies. I seem to have given up expecting that now. It isn't, you know,
being always hard-up that I mind so much, although that, mind you, isn't
pleasant, no, by Jehoshaphat, it isn't. But we would like now and again
to find that other people have enjoyed what one hoped they _would_
enjoy. But I don't know, they always seem too old for children and too
young for grown-ups--my stories, I mean."

It was one of the hardest traits in Mr. Lasher's character, as Hugh well
realised, "to rub it in" over a fallen foe. He considered this his duty;
it was also, I am afraid, a pleasure. "It's a pity," he said, "that
things should not have gone better; but there are so many writers to-day
that I wonder any one writes at all. We live in a practical, realistic
age. The leaders amongst us have decided that every man must gird his
loins and go out to fight his battles with real weapons in a real cause,
not sit dreaming at his windows looking down upon the busy
market-place." (Mr. Lasher loved what he called "images." There were
many in his sermons.) "But, my dear Pidgen, it is in no way too late.
Give up your fairy stories now that they have been proved a failure."

Here Mr. Pidgen, in the most astonishing way, was suddenly in a terrible
temper. "They're not!" he almost screamed. "Not at all. Failures, from
the worldly point of view, yes; but there are some who understand. I
would not have done anything else if I could. You, Lasher, with your
soup-tickets and your choir-treats, think there's no room for me and my
fairy stories. I tell you, you may find yourself jolly well mistaken one
of these days. Yes, by Cæsar, you may. How do you know what's best worth
doing? If you'd listened a little more to the things you were told when
you were a baby, you'd be a more intelligent man now."

"When I was a baby," said Mr. Lasher, incredulously, as though that were
a thing that he never possibly could have been, "my _dear_ Pidgen!"

"Ah, you think it absurd," said the other, a little cooler again. "But
how do you know who watched over your early years and wanted you to be a
dreamy, fairy tale kind of person instead of the cayenne pepper sort of
man you are. There's always some one there, I tell you, and you can have
your choice, whether you'll believe more than you see all your life or
less than you see. Every baby knows about it; then, as they grow older,
it fades and, with many people, goes altogether. He's never left _me_,
St. Christopher, you know, and that's one thing. Of course, the ideal
thing is somewhere between the two; recognise St. Christopher and see
the real world as well. I'm afraid neither you nor I is the ideal man,
Lasher. Why, I tell you, any baby of three knows more than you do!
You're proud of never seeing beyond your nose. I'm proud of never seeing
my nose at all: we're both wrong. But I _am_ ready to admit _your_ uses.
You _never_ will admit mine; and it isn't any use your denying my
Friend. He stayed with you a bit when you just arrived, but I expect he
soon left you. You're jolly glad he did."

"My _dear_ Pidgen," said Mr. Lasher, "I haven't understood a word."

Pidgen shook his head. "You're right. That's just what's the matter with
me. I can't even put what I see plainly." He sighed deeply. "I've
failed. There's no doubt about it. But, although I know that, I've had a
happy life. That's the funny part of it. I've enjoyed it more than you
ever will, Lasher. At least, I'm never lonely. I like my food, too, and
one's head's always full of jolly ideas, if only they seemed jolly to
other people."

"Upon my word, Pidgen," said Mr. Lasher. At this moment Mrs. Lasher
opened the door.

"Well, well. Fancy! Sitting over the fire talking! Oh, you men! Tea!
tea! Tea, Will! Fancy talking all the afternoon! Well!"

No one had noticed Hugh. He, however, had understood Mr. Pidgen better
than Mr. Lasher did.


V

This conversation aroused in Hugh, for various reasons, the greatest
possible excitement. He would have liked to have asked Mr. Pidgen many
questions. Christmas Day came, and a beautiful day enthroned it: a pale
blue sky, faint and clear, was a background to misty little clouds that
hovered, then fled and disappeared, and from these flakes of snow fell
now and then across the shining sunlight. Early in the winter afternoon
a moon like an orange feather sailed into the sky as the lower stretches
of blue changed into saffron and gold. Trees and hills and woods were
crystal-clear, and shone with an intensity of outline as though their
shapes had been cut by some giant knife against the background. Although
there was no wind the air was so expectant that the ringing of church
bells and the echo of voices came as though across still water. The
colour of the sunlight was caught in the cups and runnels of the stiff
frozen roads and a horse's hoofs echoed, sharp and ringing, over fields
and hedges. The ponds were silvered into a sheet of ice, so thin that
the water showed dark beneath it. All the trees were rimmed with
hoar-frost.

On Christmas afternoon, when three o'clock had just struck from the
church tower, Hugh and Mr. Pidgen met, as though by some conspirator's
agreement, by the garden gate. They had said nothing to one another and
yet there they were; they both glanced anxiously back at the house and
then Mr. Pidgen said:

"Suppose we take a walk."

"Thank you very much," said Hugh. "Tea isn't till half-past four."

"Very well, then, suppose you lead the way." They walked a little, and
then Hugh said: "I was there yesterday, in the study, when you talked
all that about your books, and everything." The words came from him in
little breathless gusts because he was excited.

Mr. Pidgen stopped and looked upon him. "Thunder and sunshine! You don't
say so! What under heaven were you doing?"

"I was reading, and you came in and then I was interested."

"Well?"

Hugh dropped his voice.

"I understood all that you meant. I'd like to read your books if I may.
We haven't any in the house."

"Bless my soul! Here's some one wants to read my books!" Mr. Pidgen was
undoubtedly pleased. "I'll send you some. I'll send you them all!"

Hugh gasped with pleasure. "I'll read them all, however many there
are!" he said excitedly. "Every word."

"Well," said Mr. Pidgen, "that's more than any one else has ever done."

"I'd rather be with you," said the boy very confidently, "than Mr. Lasher.
I'd rather write stories than preach sermons that no one wants to listen
to." Then more timidly he continued: "I know what you meant about the man
who comes when you're a baby. I remember him quite well, but I never can
say anything because they'd say I was silly. Sometimes I think he's still
hanging round only he doesn't come to the vicarage much. He doesn't like
Mr. Lasher much, I expect. But I _do_ remember him. He had a beard and I
used to think it funny the nurse didn't see him. That was before we went
to Ceylon, you know, we used to live in Polchester then. When it was
nearly dark and not quite he'd be there. I forgot about him in Ceylon, but
since I've been here I've wondered ... it's sometimes like some one
whispering to you and you know if you turn round he won't be there, but he
_is_ there all the same. I made twenty-five last summer against
Porthington Grammar; they're not much good _really_, and it was our
second eleven, and I was nearly out second ball; anyway I made
twenty-five, and afterwards as I was ragging about I suddenly thought of
him. I _know_ he was pleased. If it had been a little darker I believe I'd
have seen him. And then last night, after I was in bed and was thinking
about what you'd said I _know_ he was near the window, only I didn't look
lest he should go away. But of course Mr. Lasher would say that's all rot,
like the pirates, only I _know_ it isn't." Hugh broke off for lack of
breath, nothing else would have stopped him. When he was encouraged he was
a terrible talker. He suddenly added in a sharp little voice like the
report from a pistol: "So one can't be lonely or anything, can one, if
there's always some one about?"

Mr. Pidgen was greatly touched. He put his hand upon Hugh's shoulder.
"My dear boy," he said, "my dear boy--dear me, dear me. I'm afraid
you're going to have a dreadful time when you grow up. I really mustn't
encourage you. And yet, who can help himself?"

"But you said yourself that you'd seen him, that you knew him quite
well?"

"And so I do--and so I do. But you'll find, as you grow older, there are
many people who won't believe you. And there's this, too. The more you
live in your head, dreaming and seeing things that aren't there, the
less you'll see the things that _are_ there. You'll always be tumbling
over things. You'll never get on. You'll never be a success."

"Never mind," said Hugh, "it doesn't matter much what you say now,
you're only talking 'for my good' like Mr. Lasher. I don't care, I heard
what you said yesterday, and it's made all the difference. I'll come and
stay with you."

"Well, so you shall," said Mr. Pidgen. "I can't help it. You shall come
as often as you like. Upon my soul, I'm younger to-day than I've felt
for a long time. We'll go to the pantomime together if you aren't too
old for it. I'll manage to ruin you all right. What's that shining?" He
pointed in front of him.

They had come to a rise in the Polwint Road. To their right, running to
the very foot of their path, was the moor. It stretched away, like a
cloud, vague and indeterminate to the horizon. To their left a dark
brown field rose in an ascending wave to a ridge that cut the sky, now
crocus-coloured. The field was lit with the soft light of the setting
sun. On the ridge of the field something, suspended, it seemed, in
midair, was shining like a golden fire.

"What's that?" said Mr. Pidgen again. "It's hanging. What the devil!"

They stopped for a moment, then started across the field. When they had
gone a little way Mr. Pidgen paused again.

"It's like a man with a golden helmet. He's got legs, he's coming to
us."

They walked on again. Then Hugh cried, "Why, it's only an old Scarecrow.
We might have guessed."

The sun, at that instant, sank behind the hills and the world was grey.

The Scarecrow, perched on the high ridge, waved its tattered sleeves in
the air. It was an old tin can that had caught the light; the can
hanging over the stake that supported it in drunken fashion seemed to
wink at them. The shadows came streaming up from the sea and the dark
woods below in the hollow drew closer to them.

The Scarecrow seemed to lament the departure of the light. "Here, mind,"
he said to the two of them, "you saw me in my glory just now and don't
you forget it. I may be a knight in shining armour after all. It only
depends upon the point of view."

"So it does," said Mr. Pidgen, taking his hat off, "you were very fine,
I shan't forget."


VI

They stood there in silence for a time....


VII

At last they turned back and walked slowly home, the intimacy of their
new friendship growing with their silence. Hugh was happier than he had
ever been before. Behind the quiet evening light he saw wonderful
prospects, a new life in which he might dream as he pleased, a new
friend to whom he might tell these dreams, a new confidence in his own
power....

But it was not to be.

That very night Mr. Pidgen died, very peacefully, in his sleep, from
heart failure. He had had, as he had himself said, a happy life.


VIII

Years passed and Hugh Seymour grew up. I do not wish here to say much
more about him. It happened that when he was twenty-four his work
compelled him to live in that Square in London known as March Square (it
will be very carefully described in a minute). Here he lived for five
years, and, during that time, he was happy enough to gain the intimacy
and confidence of some of the children who played in the Gardens there.
They trusted him and told him more than they told many people. He had
never forgotten Mr. Pidgen; that walk, that vision of the Scarecrow,
stood, as such childish things will, for a landmark in his history. He
came to believe that those experiences that he knew, in his own life, to
be true, were true also for some others. That's as it may be. I can only
say that Barbara and Angelina, Bim and even Sarah Trefusis were his
friends. I daresay his theory is all wrong.

I can only say that I _know_ that they were his friends; perhaps, after
all, the Scarecrow _is_ shining somewhere in golden armour. Perhaps,
after all, one need not be so lonely as one often fancies that one is.




CHAPTER I

HENRY FITZGEORGE STRETHER


I

March Square is not very far from Hyde Park Corner in London Town.
Behind the whir and rattle of the traffic it stands, spacious and cool
and very old, muffled by the little streets that guard it, happily
unconscious, you would suppose, that there were any in all the world so
unfortunate as to have less than five thousand a year for their support.
Perhaps a hundred years ago March Square might boast of such superior
ignorance, but fashions change, to prevent, it may be, our own too
easily irritated monotonies, and, for some time now, the Square has been
compelled, here, there, in one corner and another, to admit the invader.
It is true that the solemn, respectable grey house, No. 3, can boast
that it is the town residence of His Grace the Duke of Crole and his
beautiful young Duchess, née Miss Jane Tunster of New York City, but it
is also true that No. ---- is in the possession of Mr. Munty Ross of
Potted Shrimp fame, and there are Dr. Cruthen, the Misses Dent, Herbert
Hoskins and his wife, whose incomes are certainly nearer to £500 than
£5,000. Yes, rents and blue blood have come down in March Square; it is,
certainly, not the less interesting for that, but----

Some of the houses can boast the days of good Queen Anne for their
period. There is one, at the very corner where Somers Street turns off
towards the Park, that was built only yesterday, and has about it some
air of shame, a furtive embarrassment that it will lose very speedily.
There is no house that can claim beauty, and yet the Square, as a whole,
has a fine charm, something that age and colour, haphazard adventure,
space and quiet have all helped towards.

There is, perhaps, no square in London that clings so tenaciously to any
sign or symbol of old London that motor-cars and the increase of speed
have not utterly destroyed. All the oldest London mendicants find their
way, at different hours of the week, up and down the Square. There is,
I believe, no other square in London where musicians are permitted. On
Monday morning there is the blind man with the black patch over one eye;
he has an organ (a very old one, with a painted picture of the Battle of
Trafalgar on the front of it) and he wears an old black skull-cap. He
wheezes out his old tunes (they are older than other tunes that March
Square hears, and so, perhaps, March Square loves them). He goes
despondently, and the tap of his stick sounds all the way round the
Square. A small and dirty boy--his grandson, maybe--pushes the organ for
him. On Tuesday there comes the remnants of a German band--remnants
because now there are only the cornet, the flute and the trumpet. Sadly
wind-blown, drunken and diseased they are, and the Square can remember
when there were a number of them, hale and hearty young fellows, but
drink and competition have been too strong for them. On Wednesdays there
is sometimes a lady who sings ballads in a voice that can only be
described as that contradiction in terms "a shrill contralto." Her notes
are very piercing and can be heard from one end of the Square to the
other. She sings "Annie Laurie" and "Robin Adair," and wears a battered
hat of black straw. On Thursday there is a handsome Italian with a
barrel organ that bears in its belly the very latest and most popular
tunes. It is on Thursday that the Square learns the music of the moment;
thus from one end of the year to the other does it keep pace with the
movement.

On Fridays there is a lean and ragged man wearing large and, to the
children of the Square, terrifying spectacles. He is a very gloomy
fellow and sings hymn-tunes, "Rock of Ages," "There is a Happy Land,"
and "Jerusalem the Golden." On Saturdays there is a stout, happy little
man with a harp. He has white hair and looks like a retired colonel. He
cannot play the harp very much, but he is quite the most popular visitor
of the week, and must be very rich indeed does he receive in other
squares so handsome a reward for his melody as this one bestows; he is
known as "Colonel Harry." In and out of these regular visitors there
are, of course, many others. There is a dark, sinister man with a
harmonium and a shivering monkey on a chain; there is an Italian woman,
wearing bright wraps round her head, and she has a cage of birds who
tell fortunes; there is a horsey, stable-bred, ferret-like man with,
two performing dogs, and there is quite an old lady in a black bonnet
and shawl who sings duets with her grand-daughter, a young thing of some
fifty summers.

There can be nothing in the world more charming than the way the Square
receives its friends. Let it number amongst its guests a Duchess, that
is no reason why it should scorn "Colonel Harry" or "Mouldy Jim," the
singer of hymns. Scorn, indeed, cannot be found within its grey walls,
soft grey, soft green, soft white and blue--in these colours is the
Square's body clothed, no anger in its mild eyes, nor contempt anywhere
at its heart.

The Square is proud, and is proud with reason, of its garden. It is not
a large garden as London gardens go. It has in its centre a fountain.
Neptune, with a fine wreath of seaweed about his middle, blowing water
through, his conch. There are two statues, the one of a general who
fought in the Indian Mutiny and afterwards lived and died in the Square,
the other of a mid-Victorian philanthropist whose stout figure and
urbane self-satisfaction (as portrayed by the sculptor) bear witness to
an easy conscience and an unimaginative mind. There is, round and about
the fountain, a lovely green lawn, and there are many overhanging trees
and shady corners. An air of peace the garden breathes, and that
although children are for ever racing up and down it, shattering the
stillness of the air with their cries, rivalling the bells of St.
Matthew's round the corner with their piercing notes.

But it is the quality of the Square that nothing can take from it its
peace, nothing temper its tranquillity. In the heat of the days
motor-cars will rattle through, bells will ring, all the bustle of a
frantic world invade its security; for a moment it submits, but in the
evening hour, when the colours are being washed from the sky, and the
moon, apricot-tinted, is rising slowly through the smoke, March Square
sinks, with a little sigh, back into her peace again. The modern world
has not yet touched her, nor ever shall.


II

The Duchess of Crole had three months ago a son, Henry Fitzgeorge,
Marquis of Strether. Very fortunate that the first-born should be a son,
very fortunate also that the first-born should be one of the healthiest,
liveliest, merriest babies that it has ever been any one's good fortune
to encounter. All smiles, chuckles and amiability is Henry Fitzgeorge;
he is determined that all shall be well.

His birth was for a little time the sensation of the Square. Every one
knew the beautiful Duchess; they had seen her drive, they had seen her
walk, they had seen her in the picture-papers, at race-meetings and
coming away from fashionable weddings. The word went round day by day as
to his health; he was watched when he came out in his perambulator, and
there was gossip as to his appearance and behaviour.

"A jolly little fellow."

"Just like his father."

"Rather early to say that, isn't it?"

"Well, I don't know, got the same smile. His mother's rather languid."

"Beautiful woman, though."

"Oh, lovely!"

Upon a certain afternoon in March about four o'clock, there was quite a
gathering of persons in Henry Fitzgeorge's nursery. There was his
mother, with those two great friends of hers, Lady Emily Blanchard and
the Hon. Mrs. Vavasour; there was Her Grace's mother, Mrs. P. Tunster
(an enormously stout lady); there was Miss Helen Crasper, who was
staying in the house. These people were gathered at the end of the cot,
and they looked down upon Henry Fitzgeorge, and he lay upon his back,
gazed at them thoughtfully, and clenched and unclenched his fat hands.

Opposite his cot were some very wide windows, and three windows were
filled with galleons of cloud--fat, bolster, swelling vessels, white,
save where, in their curving sails, they had caught a faint radiance
from the hidden sun. In fine procession, against the blue, they passed
along. Very faint and muffled there came up from the Square the
lingering notes of "Robin Adair." This is a Wednesday afternoon, and it
is the lady with the black straw hat who is singing. The nursery has
white walls--it is filled with colour; the fire blazes with a yellow-red
gleam that rises and falls across the shining floor.

"I brought him a rattle, Jane, dear," said Mrs. Tunster, shaking in the
air a thing of coral and silver. "He's got several, of course, but I
guess you'll go a long way before you find anything cuter."

"It's too pretty," said Lady Emily.

"Too lovely," said the Hon. Mrs. Vavasour.

The Duchess looked down upon her son. "Isn't he old?" she said.
"Thousands of years. You'd think he was laughing at the lot of us."

Mrs. Tunster shook her head. "Now don't you go imagining things, Jane,
my dear. I used to be just like that, and your father would say, 'Now,
Alice.'"

Her Grace raised her head. Her eyes were a little tired. She looked from
her son to the clouds, and then back again to her son. She was
remembering her own early days, the rich glowing colour of her own
American country, the freedom, the space, the honesty.

"I guess you're tired, dear," said her mother. "With the party to-night
and all. Why don't you go and rest a bit?"

"His eyes _are_ old! He _does_ despise us all."

Lady Emily, who believed in personal comfort and as little thinking as
possible, put her arm through her friend's.

"Come along and give us some tea. He's a dear. Good-bye, you little
darling. He _is_ a pet. There, did you see him smiling? You _darling_.
Tea I _must_ have, Jane, dear--_at_ once."

"You go on. I'm coming. Ring for it. Tell Hunter. I'll be with you in
two minutes, mother."

Mrs. Tunster left her rattle in the nurse's hands. Then, with the two
others, departed. Outside the nursery door she said in an American
whisper:--"Jane isn't quite right yet. Went about a bit too soon. She's
headstrong. She always has been. Doesn't do for her to think too much."

Her Grace was alone now with her son and heir and the nurse. She bent
over the cot and smiled upon Henry Fitzgeorge; he smiled back at her,
and even gave an absent-minded crow; but his gaze almost instantly swung
back again to the window, through which, deeply and with solemn
absorption, he watched the clouds.

She gave him her hand, and he closed his fingers about one of hers; but
even that grasp was abstracted, as though he were not thinking of her at
all, but was simply behaving like a gentleman.

"I don't believe he's realised me a bit, nurse," she said, turning away
from the cot.

"Well, Your Grace, they always take time. It's early days."

"But what's he thinking of all the time?"

"Oh, just nothing, Your Grace."

"I don't believe it's nothing. He's trying to settle things. This--what
it's all about--what he's got to do about it."

"It may be so, Your Grace. All babies are like that at first."

"His eyes are so old, so grave."

"He's a jolly little fellow, Your Grace."

"He's very little trouble, isn't he?"

"Less trouble than any baby I've ever had to do with. Got His Grace's
happy temperament, if I may say so."

"Yes," the mother laughed. She crossed over to the window and looked
down. "That poor woman singing down there. How awful! He'll be going
down to Crole very shortly, Roberts. Splendid air for him there. But the
Square's cheerful. He likes the garden, doesn't he?"

"Oh, yes, Your Grace; all the children and the fountain. But he's a
happy baby. I should say he'd like anything."

For a moment longer she looked down into the Square. The discordant
voice was giving "Annie Laurie" to the world.

"Good-bye, darling." She stepped forward, shook the silver and coral
rattle. "See what grannie's given you!" She left it lying near his
hand, and, with a little sigh, was gone.


III

Now, as the sun was setting, the clouds had broken into little pink
bubbles, lying idly here and there upon the sky. Higher, near the top of
the window, they were large pink cushions, three fat ones, lying
sedately against the blue. During three months now Henry Fitzgeorge
Strether had been confronted with the new scene, the new urgency on his
part to respond to it. At first he had refused absolutely to make any
response; behind him, around him, above him, below him, were still the
old conditions; but they were the old conditions viewed, for some reason
unknown to him, at a distance, and at a distance that was ever
increasing. With every day something here in this new and preposterous
world struck his attention, and with every fresh lure was he drawn more
certainly from his old consciousness. At first he had simply rebelled;
then, very slowly, his curiosity had begun to stir. It had stirred at
first through food and touch; very pleasant this, very pleasant that.

Milk, sleep, light things that he could hold very tightly with his
hands. Now, upon this March afternoon, he watched the pink clouds with a
more intent gaze than he had given to them before. Their colour and
shape bore some reference to the life that he had left. They were "like"
a little to those other things. There, too, shadowed against the wall,
was his Friend, his Friend, now the last link with everything that he
knew.

At first, during the first week, he had demanded again and again to be
taken back, and always he had been told to wait, to wait and see what
was going to happen. So long as his Friend was there, he knew that he
was not completely abandoned, and that this was only a temporary
business, with its strange limiting circumstances, the way that one was
tied and bound, the embarrassment of finding that all one's old means of
communication were here useless. How desperate, indeed, would it have
been had his Friend not been there, reassuring pervading him,
surrounding him, always subduing those sudden inexplicable alarms.

He would demand: "When are we going to leave all this?"

"Wait. I know it seems absurd to you, but it's commanded you."

"Well, but--this is ridiculous. Where are all my old powers I Where are
all the others?"

"You will understand everything one day. I'm afraid you're very
uncomfortable. You will be less so as time passes. Indeed, very soon you
will be very happy."

"Well, I'm doing my best to be cheerful. But you won't leave me?"

"Not so long as you want me."

"You'll stay until we go back again!"

"You'll never go back again."

"Never?"

"No."

Across the light the nurse advanced. She took him in her arms for a
moment, turned his pillows, then layed him down again. As he settled
down into comfort he saw his Friend, huge, a great shadow, mingling with
the coloured lights of the flaming sky. All the world was lit, the white
room glowed. A pleasant smell was in his nostrils.

"Where are all the others? They would like to share this pleasant
moment, and I would warn them about the unpleasant ones."

"They are coming, some of them. I am with them as I am with you."
Swinging across the Square were the evening bells of St. Matthew's.

Henry Fitzgeorge smiled, then chuckled, then dozed into a pleasant
sleep.


IV

Asleep, awake, it had been for the most part the same to him. He swung
easily, lazily upon the clouds; warmth and light surrounded him; a part
of him, his toes, perhaps, would be suddenly cold, then he would cry, or
he would strike his head against the side of his cot and it would hurt,
and so then he would cry again. But these tears would not be tears of
grief, but simply declarations of astonishment and wonder.

He did not, of course, realise that as, very slowly, very gradually he
began to understand the terms and conditions of his new life, so with
the same gradation, his Friend was expressed in those terms. Slowly that
great shadow filled the room, took on human shape, until at last it
would be only thus that he would appear. But Henry would not realise the
change, soon he would not know that it had ever been otherwise. Dimly,
out of chaos, the world was being made for him. There a square of
colour, here something round and hard that was cool to touch, now a
gleaming rod that ran high into the air, now a shape very soft and warm
against which it was pleasant to lean. The clouds, the sweep of dim
colour, the vast horizons of that other world yielded, day by day, to
little concrete things--a patch of carpet, the leg of a chair, the
shadow of the fire, clouds beyond the window, buttons on some one's
clothes, the rails of his cot. Then there were voices, the touch of
hands, some one's soft hair, some one who sang little songs to him.

He woke early one morning and realised the rattle that his grandmother
had given to him. He suddenly realised it. He grasped the handle of it
with his hand and found this cool and pleasant to touch. He then, by
accident, made it tinkle, and instantly the prettiest noise replied to
him. He shook it more lustily and the response was louder. He was, it
seemed, master of this charming thing and could force it to do what he
wished. He appealed to his Friend. Was not this a charming thing that he
had found? He waved it and chuckled and crowed, and then his toes,
sticking out beyond the bed-clothes, were nipped by the cold so that he
halloed loudly. Perhaps the rattle had nipped his toes. He did not know,
but he would cry because that eased his feelings.

That morning there came with his grandmother and mother a silly young
woman who had, it was supposed, a great way with babies. "I adore
babies," she said. "We understand one another in the most wonderful
way."

Henry Fitzgeorge looked at her as she leaned over the cot and made faces
at him. "Goo-goo-gum-goo," she cried.

"What is all this?" he asked his Friend. He laid down the rattle, and
felt suddenly lonely and unhappy.

"Little pet--ug--la--la--goo--losh!" Henry Fitzgeorge raised his eyes.
His Friend was a long, long way away; his eyes grew cold with contempt.
He hated this thing that made the noises and closed out the light. He
opened his eyes, he was about to burst into one of his most abandoned
roars when his stare encountered his mother. Her eyes were watching him,
and they had in them a glow and radiance that gave him a warm feeling of
companionship. "I know," they seemed to say, "what you are thinking of.
I agree with all that you are feeling about her. Only don't cry, she
really isn't worth it." His mouth slowly closed then to thank her for
her assistance, he raised the rattle and shook it at her. His eyes never
left her face.

"Little darling," said the lady friend, but nevertheless disappointed.
"Lift him up, Jane. I'd like to see him in your arms."

But she shook her head. She moved away from the cot. Something so
precious had been in that smile of her son's that she would not risk any
rebuff.

Henry Fitzgeorge gave the strange lady one last look of disgust.

"If that comes again I'll bite it," he said to his Friend.

When these visitors had departed, he lay there remembering those eyes
that had looked into his. All that day he remembered them, and it may be
that his Friend, as he watched, sighed because the time for launching
him had now come, that one more soul had passed from his sheltering arms
out into the highroad of fine adventures. How easily they forget! How
readily they forget! How eagerly they fling the pack of their old world
from off their shoulders! He had seen, perhaps, so many go, thus
lustily, upon their way, and then how many, at the end of it all,
tired, worn, beaten to their very shadows, had he received at the end!

But it was so. This day was to see Henry Fitzgeorge's assertions of his
independence. The hour when this life was to close, so definitely, so
securely, the doors upon that other, had come. The shadow that had been
so vast that it had filled the room, the Square, the world, was drawn
now into small and human size.

Henry Fitzgeorge was never again to look so old.


V

As the fine, dim afternoon was closing, he was allowed, for half an hour
before sleep, to sprawl upon the carpet in front of the fire. He had
with him his rattle and a large bear which he stroked because it was
comfortable; he had no personal feeling about it.

His mother came in.

"Let me have him for half an hour, nurse. Come back in half an hour's
time."

The nurse left them.

Henry Fitzgeorge did not look at his mother.

He had the bear in his arms and was feeling it, and in his mind the
warmth from the flickering, jumping flame and the soft, friendly
submission of the fur beneath his fingers were part of the same mystery.

His mother had been motoring; her cheeks were flushed, and her dark
clothes heightened, by their contrast, her colour. She knelt down on the
carpet and then, with her hands folded on her lap, watched her son. He
rolled the bear over and over, he poked it, he banged its head upon the
ground. Then he was tired with it and took up the rattle. Then he was
tired of that, and he looked across at his mother and chuckled.

His mind, however, was not at all concentrated upon her. He felt, on
this afternoon, a new, a fresh interest in things. The carpet before him
was a vast country and he did not propose to explore it, but sucking his
thumb, stroking the bear's coat, feeling the firelight upon his face, he
felt that now something would occur. He had realised that there was much
to explore and that, after all, perhaps there might be more in this
strange condition of things than he had only a little time ago
considered possible. It was then that he looked up and saw hanging
round his mother's neck a gold chain. This was a long chain hanging
right down to her lap; as it hung there, very slowly it swayed from side
to side, and as it swayed, the firelight caught it and it gleamed and
was splashed with light. His eyes, as he watched, grew rounder and
rounder; he had never seen anything so wonderful. He put down the
rattle, crawled, with great difficulty because of his long clothes, on
to his knees and sat staring, his thumb in his mouth. His mother stayed,
watching him. He pointed his finger, crowing. "Come and fetch it," she
said.

He tumbled forward on to his nose and then lay there, with his face
raised a little, watching it. She did not move at all, but knelt with
her hands straight out upon her knees, and the chain with its large gold
rings like flaming eyes swung from hand to hand. Then he tried to move
forward, his whole soul in his gaze. He would raise a hand towards the
treasure and then because that upset his balance he would fall, but at
once he would be up again. He moved a little and breathed little gasps
of pleasure.

She bent forward to him, his hand was outstretched. His eyes went up
and, meeting hers, instantly the chain was forgotten. That recognition
that they had given him before was there now.

With a scramble and a lurch, desperate, heedless in its risks, he was in
his mother's lap. Then he crowed. He crowed for all the world to hear
because now, at last, he had become its citizen.

Was there not then, from some one, disregarded and forgotten at that
moment, a sigh, lighter than the air itself, half-ironic, half-wistful
regret?




CHAPTER II

ERNEST HENRY


I

Young Ernest Henry Wilberforce, who had only yesterday achieved his
second birthday, watched, with a speculative eye, his nurse. He was
seated on the floor with his back to the high window that was flaming
now with the light of the dying sun; his nurse was by the fire, her
head, shadowed huge and fantastic on the wall, nodded and nodded and
nodded. Ernest Henry was, in figure, stocky and square, with a head
round, hard, and covered with yellow curls; rather light and cold blue
eyes and a chin of no mean degree were further possessions. He was
wearing a white blouse, a white skirt, white socks and shoes; his legs
were fat and bulged above his socks; his cold blue eyes never moved from
his nurse's broad back.

He knew that, in a very short time, disturbance would begin. He knew
that doors would open and shut, that there would be movement, strange
noises, then an attack upon himself, ultimately a removal of him to
another place, a stripping off him of his blouse, his skirt, his socks
and his shoes, a loathsome and strangely useless application of soap and
water--it was only, of course, in later years that he learned the names
of those abominable articles--and, finally, finally darkness. All this
he felt hovering very close at hand; one nod too many of his nurse's
head, and up she would start, off she would go, off _he_ would go.... He
watched her and stroked very softly his warm, fat calf.

It was a fine, spacious room that he inhabited. The ceiling--very, very
far away--was white and glimmering with shadowy spaces of gold flung by
the sun across the breast of it. The wallpaper was dark-red, and there
were many coloured pictures of ships and dogs and snowy Christmases, and
swans eating from the hands of beautiful little girls, and one garden
with roses and peacocks and a tumbling fountain. To Ernest Henry these
were simply splashes of colour, and colour, moreover, scarcely so
convincing as the bright blue screen by the fire, or the golden brown
rug by the door; but he was dimly aware that, as the days passed, so
did he find more and more to consider in the shapes and sizes between
the deep black frames.... There might, after all, be something in it.

But it was not the pictures that he was now considering.

Before his nurse's descent upon him he was determined that he would
walk--not crawl, but walk in his socks and shoes--from his place by the
window to the blue screen by the fire. There had been days, and those
not so long ago, when so hazardous an Odyssey had seemed the vainest of
Blue Moon ambitions; it had once been the only rule of existence to
sprawl and roll and sprawl again; but gradually some further force had
stirred his limbs. It was a finer thing to be upright; there was a finer
view, a more lordly sense of possession could be summoned to one's
command. That, then, once decided, upright one must be and upright, with
many sudden and alarming collapses, Ernest Henry was.

He had marked out, from the first, the distance from the wall to the blue
screen as a very decent distance. There was, half-way, a large
rocking-chair that would be either a danger or a deliverance, as Fate
should have it. Save for this, it was, right across the brown, rose-strewn
carpet, naked country. Truly a perilous business. As he sat there and
looked at it, his heart a little misgave him; in this strange, new world
into which he had been so roughly hustled, amongst a horde of alarming and
painful occurrences, he had discovered nothing so disconcerting as that
sudden giving of the knees, that rising of the floor to meet you, the
collapse, the pain, and above all the disgrace. Moreover, let him fail
now, and it meant, in short,--banishment--banishment and then darkness.
There were risks. It was the most perilous thing that, in this new
country, he had yet attempted, but attempt it he would.... He was as
obstinate as his chin could make him.

With his blue eyes still cautiously upon his nurse's shadow he raised
himself very softly, his fat hand pressed against the wall, his mouth
tightly closed, and from between his teeth there issued the most distant
relation of that sound that the traditional ostler makes when he is
cleaning down a horse. His knees quivered, straightened; he was up. Far
away in the long, long distance were piled the toys that yesterday's
birthday had given him. They did not, as yet, mean anything to him at
all. One day, perhaps when he had torn the dolls limb from limb, twisted
the railways until they stood end upon end in sheer horror,
disembowelled the bears and golliwogs so that they screamed again, he
might have some personal feeling for them. At present there they lay in
shining impersonal newness, and there for Ernest Henry they might lie
for ever.

For an instant, his hand against the wall, he was straight and
motionless; then he took his hand away, and his journey began. At the
first movement a strange, an amazing glory filled him. From the instant,
two years ago, of his first arrival he had been disturbed by an
irritating sense of inadequacy; he had been sent, it seemed, into this
new and tiresome condition of things without any fitting provisions for
his real needs. Demands were always made upon him that were, in the
absurd lack of ways and means, impossible of fulfilment. But now, at
last, he was using the world as it should be used.... He was fine, he
was free, he was absolutely master. His legs might shake, his body lurch
from side to side, his breath come in agitating gasps and whistles; the
wall was now far behind him, the screen most wonderfully near, the
rocking-chair almost within his grasp. Great and mighty is Ernest Henry
Wilberforce, dazzling and again dazzling the lighted avenues opening now
before him; there is nothing, nothing, from the rendings of the toys to
the deliberate defiance of his nurse and all those in authority over
him, that he shall not now perform.... With a cry, with a wild wave of
the arms, with a sickening foretaste of the bump with which the gay
brown carpet would mark him, he was down, the Fates were upon him--the
disturbance, the disrobing, the darkness. Nevertheless, even as he was
carried, sobbing, into the farther room, there went with him a
consciousness that life would never again be quite the dull,
purposeless, monotonous thing that it had hitherto been.


II

After a long time he was alone. About him the room, save for the yellow
night-light above his head, was dark, humped with shadows, with grey
pools of light near the windows, and a golden bar that some lamp beyond
the house flung upon the wall. Ernest Henry lay and, now and again,
cautiously felt the bump on his forehead; there was butter on the bump,
and an interesting confusion and pain and importance round and about it.
Ernest Henry's eyes sought the golden bar, and then, lingering there,
looked back upon the recent adventure. He had walked; yes, he had
walked. This would, indeed, be something to tell his Friend.

His friend, he knew, would be very shortly with him. It was not every
night that he came, but always, before his coming, Ernest Henry knew of
his approach--knew by the happy sense of comfort that stole softly about
him, knew by the dismissal of all those fears and shapes and terrors
that, otherwise, so easily beset him. He sucked his thumb now, and felt
his bump, and stared at the ceiling and knew that he would come. During
the first months after Ernest Henry's arrival on this planet his friend
was never absent from him at all, was always there, drawing through his
fingers the threads of the old happy life and the new alarming one,
mingling them so that the transition from the one to the other might not
be too sharp--reassuring, comforting, consoling. Then there had been
hours when he had withdrawn himself, and that earlier world had grown a
little vaguer, a little more remote, and certain things, certain foods
and smells and sounds had taken their place within the circle of
realised facts. Then it had come to be that the friend only came at
night, came at that moment when the nurse had gone, when the room was
dark, and the possible beasts--the first beast, the second beast, and
the third beast--began to creep amongst those cool, grey shadows in the
hollow of the room. He always came then, was there with his arm about
Ernest Henry, his great body, his dark beard, his large, firm hands--all
so reassuring that the beasts might do the worst, and nothing could come
of it. He brought with him, indeed, so much more than himself--brought a
whole world of recollected wonders, of all that other time when Ernest
Henry had other things to do, other disciplines, other triumphs, other
defeats, and other glories. Of late his memory of the other time had
been untrustworthy. Things during the day-time would remind him, but
would remind him, nevertheless, with a strange mingling of the world at
present about him, so that he was not sure of his visions. But when his
friend was with him the memories were real enough, and it was the
nurse, the fire, the red wallpaper, the smell of toast, the taste of
warm milk, that were faint and shadowy.

His friend was there, just as always, suddenly sitting there on the bed
with his arm round Ernest Henry's body, his dark beard just tickling
Ernest Henry's neck, his hand tight about Ernest Henry's hand. They told
one another things in the old way without tiresome words and sounds;
but, for the benefit of those who are unfortunately too aged to remember
that old and pleasant intercourse, one must make use of the English
language. Ernest Henry displayed his bump, and explained its origin; and
then, even as he did so, was aware that the reality of the bump made the
other world just a little less real. He was proud that he had walked and
stood up, and had been the master of his circumstance; but just because
he had done so he was aware that his friend was a little, a very little
farther away to-night than he had ever been before.

"Well, I'm very glad that you're going to stand on your own, because
you'll have to. I'm going to leave you now--leave you for longer, far
longer than I've ever left you before."

"Leave me?"

"Yes. I shan't always be with you; indeed, later on you won't want me.
Then you'll forget me, and at last you won't even believe that I ever
existed--until, at the end of it all, I come to take you away. _Then_ it
will all come back to you."

"Oh, but that's absurd!" Ernest Henry said confidently. Nevertheless, in
his heart he knew that, during the day-time, other things did more and
more compel his attention. There were long stretches during the day-time
now when he forgot his friend.

"After your second birthday I always leave you more to yourselves. I
shall go now for quite a time, and you'll see that when the old feeling
comes, and you know that I'm coming back, you'll be quite startled and
surprised that you'd got on so well without me. Of course, some of you
want me more than others do, and with some of you I stay quite late in
life. There are one or two I never leave at all. But you're not like
that; you'll get on quite well without me."

"Oh, no, I shan't," said Ernest Henry, and he clung very tightly and
was most affectionate. But he suddenly put his fingers to his bump, felt
the butter, and his chin shot up with self-satisfaction.

"To-morrow I'll get ever so much farther," he said.

"You'll behave, and not mind the beasts or the creatures?" his friend
said. "You must remember that it's not the slightest use to call for me.
You're on your own. Think of me, though. Don't forget me altogether. And
don't forget all the other world in your new discoveries. Look out of
the window sometimes. That will remind you more than anything."

He had kissed him, had put his hand for a moment on Ernest Henry's
curls, and was gone. Ernest Henry, his thumb in his mouth, was fast
asleep.


III

Suddenly, with a wild, agonising clutch at the heart, he was awake. He
was up in bed, his hands, clammy and hot, pressed together, his eyes
staring, his mouth dry. The yellow night-light was there, the bars of
gold upon the walls, the cool, grey shadows, the white square of the
window; but there, surely, also, were the beasts. He knew that they were
there--one crouching right away there in the shadow, all black, damp;
one crawling, blacker and damper, across the floor; one--yes, beyond
question--one, the blackest and cruellest of them all, there beneath the
bed. The bed seemed to heave, the room flamed with terror. He thought of
his friend; on other nights he had invoked him, and instantly there had
been assurance and comfort. Now that was of no avail; his friend would
not come. He was utterly alone. Panic drove him; he thought that there,
on the farther side of the bed, claws and a black arm appeared. He
screamed and screamed and screamed.

The door was flung open, there were lights, his nurse appeared. He was
lying down now, his face towards the wall, and only dry, hard little
sobs came from him. Her large red hand was upon his shoulder, but
brought no comfort with it. Of what use was she against the three
beasts? A poor creature.... He was ashamed that he should cry before
her. He bit his lip.

"Dreaming, I suppose, sir," she said to some one behind her. Another
figure came forward. Some one sat down on the edge of the bed, put his
arm round Ernest Henry's body and drew him towards him. For one wild
moment Ernest Henry fancied that his friend had, after all, returned.
But no. He knew that these were the conditions of this world, not of
that other. When he crept close to his friend he was caught up into a
soft, rosy comfort, was conscious of nothing except ease and rest. Here
there were knobs and hard little buttons, and at first his head was
pressed against a cold, slippery surface that hurt. Nevertheless, the
pressure was pleasant and comforting. A warm hand stroked his hair. He
liked it, jerked his head up, and hit his new friend's chin.

"Oh, damn!" he heard quite clearly. This was a new sound to Ernest
Henry; but just now he was interested in sounds, and had learnt lately
quite a number. This was a soft, pleasant, easy sound. He liked it.

And so, with it echoing in his head, his curly head against his father's
shoulder, the bump glistening in the candle-light, the beasts defeated
and derided, he tumbled into sleep.


IV

A pleasant sight at breakfast was Ernest Henry, with his yellow curls
gleaming from his bath, his bib tied firmly under his determined chin,
his fat fingers clutching a large spoon, his body barricaded into a high
chair, his heels swinging and kicking and swinging again. Very fine,
too, was the nursery on a sunny morning--the fire crackling, the roses
on the brown carpet as lively as though they were real, and the whole
place glittering, glowing with size and cleanliness and vigour. In the
air was the crackling smell of toast and bacon, in a glass dish was
strawberry jam, through the half-open window came all the fun of the
Square--the sparrows, the carts, the motor-cars, the bells, and
horses.... Oh, a fine morning was fine indeed!

Ernest Henry, deep in the business of conveying securely his bread and
milk from the bowl--a beautiful bowl with red robins all round the
outside of it--to his mouth, laughed at the three beasts. Let them show
themselves here in the sunlight, and they'd see what they'd get. Let
them only dare!

He surveyed, with pleased anticipation, the probable progress of his
day. He glanced at the pile of toys in the farther corner of the room,
and thought to himself that he might, after all, find some diversion
there. Yesterday they had seemed disappointing; to-day in the glow of
the sun they suggested, adventure. Then he looked towards that stretch
of country--that wall-to-screen marathon--and, with an eye upon his
nurse, meditated a further attempt. He put down his spoon, and felt his
bump. It was better; perchance there would be two bumps by the evening.
And then, suddenly, he remembered.... He felt again the terror, saw the
lights and his nurse, then that new friend.... He pondered, lifted his
spoon, waved it in the air; and then smiling with the happy recovery of
a pleasant, friendly sound, repeated half to himself, half to his nurse:
"Damn! Damn! Damn!"

That began for him the difficulties of his day. He was hustled, shaken;
words, words, words were poured down upon him. He understood that, in
some strange, unexpected, bewildering fashion he had done wrong. There
was nothing more puzzling in his present surroundings than that
amazingly sudden transition from serenity to danger. Here one was, warm
with food, bathed in sunlight, with a fine, ripe day in front of one....
Then the mere murmur of a sound, and all was tragedy.

He hated his toys, his nurse, his food, his world; he sat in a corner of
the room and glowered.... How was he to know? If, under direct
encouragement, he could be induced to say "dada," or "horse," or
"twain," he received nothing but applause and, often enough, reward.
Yet, let him make use of that pleasant new sound that he had learnt, and
he was in disgrace. Upon this day, more than any other in his young
life, he ached, he longed for some explanation. Then, sitting there in
his corner, there came to him a discovery, the force of which was never,
throughout all his later life, to leave him. He had been deserted by his
friend. His last link with that other life was broken. He was here,
planted in the strangest of strange places, with nothing whatever to
help him. He was alone; he must fight for his own hand. He would--from
that moment, seated there beneath the window, Ernest Henry Wilberforce
challenged the terrors of this world, and found them sawdust--he would
say "damn" as often as he pleased. "Damn, damn, damn, damn," he
whispered, and marked again, with meditative eye, the space from wall to
screen.

After this, greatly cheered, he bethought him of the Square. Last night
his friend had said to him that when he wished to think of him, and go
back for a time to the other world, a peep into the Square would assist
him. He clambered up on to the window-seat, caught behind him those
sounds, "Now, Master Ernest," which he now definitely connected with
condemnation and disapproval, shook his curls in defiance, and pressed
his nose to the glass. The Square was a dazzling sight. He had not as
yet names for any of the things that he saw there, nor, when he went out
on his magnificent daily progress in his perambulator did he associate
the things that he found immediately around him with the things that he
saw from his lofty window; but, with every absorbed gaze they stood more
securely before him, and were fixed ever more firmly in his memory.

This was a Square with fine, white, lofty houses, and in the houses were
an infinite number of windows, sometimes gay and sometimes glittering.
In the middle of the Square was a garden, and in the middle of the
garden, very clearly visible from Ernest Henry's window, was a fountain.
It was this fountain, always tossing and leaping, that gave Ernest Henry
the key to his memories. Gazing at it he had no difficulty at all to
find himself back in the old life. Even now, although only two years had
passed, it was difficult not to reveal his old experiences by means of
terms of his new discoveries. He thought, for instance, of the fountain
as a door that led into the country whose citizen he had once been, and
that country he saw now in terms of doors and passages and rooms and
windows, whereas, in reality, it had been quite otherwise.

But now, perched up there on the window-sill, he felt that if he could
only bring the fountain in with him out of the Square into his nursery,
he would have the key to both existences. He wanted to understand--to
understand what was the relation between his friend who had left last
night, why he might say "dada," but mustn't say "damn," why, finally, he
was here at all. He did not consciously consider these things; his brain
was only very slightly, as yet, concerned in his discoveries; but, like
a flowing river, beneath his movements and actions, the interplay of
his two existences drove him on through, his adventure.

There were, of course, many other things in the Square besides the
fountain. There was, at the farther corner, just out of the Square, but
quite visible from Ernest Henry's window, a fruit-shop with coloured
fruit piled high on the boards outside the windows. Indeed, that side
street, of which one could only catch this glimpse, promised to be most
wonderful always; when evening came a golden haze hovered round and
about it. In the garden itself there were often many children, and for
an hour every afternoon Ernest Henry might be found amongst them. There
were two statues in the Square--one of a gentleman in a beard and a
frock-coat, the other of a soldier riding very finely upon a restless
horse; but Ernest Henry was not, as yet, old enough to realise the
meaning and importance of these heroes.

Outside the Square there were many dogs, and even now as he looked down
from his window he could see a number of them, black and brown and
white.

The trees trembled in a little breeze, the fountain flashed in the sun,
somewhere a barrel-organ was playing.... Ernest Henry gave a little
sigh, of satisfaction.

He was back! He was back! He was slipping, slipping into distance
through the window into the street, under the fountain, its glittering
arms had caught him; he was up, the door was before him, he had the key.

"Time for you to put your things on, Master Ernest. And 'ow you've
dirtied your knees! There! Look!"

He shook himself, clambered down from the window, gave his nurse what
she described as "One of his old, old looks. Might be eighty when he's
like that.... They're all like it when they're young."

With a sigh he translated himself back into this new, tiresome
existence.


V

But after that morning things were never again quite the same. He gave
himself up deliberately to the new life.

With that serious devotion towards anything likely to be of real
practical value to him that was, in his later years, never to fail him,
he attacked this business of "words." He discovered that if he made
certain sounds when certain things were said to him he provoked instant
applause. He liked popularity; he liked the rewards that popularity
brought him. He acquired a formula that amounted practically to "Wash
dat?" And whenever he saw anything new he produced his question. He
learnt with amazing rapidity. He was, his nurse repeatedly told his
father, "a most remarkable child."

It could not truthfully be said that during these weeks he forgot his
friend altogether. There were still the dark hours at night when he
longed for him, and once or twice he had cried aloud for him. But slowly
that slipped away. He did not look often now at the fountain.

There were times when his friend was almost there. One evening, kneeling
on the floor before the fire, arranging shining soldiers in a row, he
was aware of something that made him sharply pause and raise his head.
He was, for the moment, alone in the room that was glowing and quivering
now in the firelight. The faint stir and crackle of the fire, the rich
flaming colour that rose and fell against the white ceiling might have
been enough to make him wonder. But there was also the scent of a clump
of blue hyacinths standing in shadow by the darkened window, and this
scent caught him, even as the fountain had caught him, caught him with
the stillness, the leaping fire, the twisted sense of romantic
splendours that came, like some magician's smoke and flame, up to his
very heart and brain. He did not turn his head, but behind him he was
sure, there on the golden-brown rug, his friend was standing, watching
him with his smiling eyes, his dark beard; he would be ready, at the
least movement, to catch him up and hold him. Swiftly, Ernest Henry
turned. There was no one there.

But those moments were few now; real people were intervening. He had no
mother, and this was doubtless the reason why his nurse darkly addressed
him as "Poor Lamb" on many occasions; but he was, of course, at present
unaware of his misfortune. He _had_ an aunt, and of this lady he was
aware only too vividly. She was long and thin and black, and he would
not have disliked her so cordially, perhaps, had he not from the very
first been aware of the sharpness of her nose when she kissed him. Her
nose hurt him, and so he hated her. But, as he grew, he discovered that
this hatred was well-founded. Miss Wilberforce had not a happy way with
children; she was nervous when she should have been bold, and secret
when she should have been honesty itself. When Ernest Henry was the
merest atom in a cradle, he discovered that she was afraid of him; he
hated the shiny stuff of her dress. She wore a gold chain that--when you
pulled it--snapped and hit your fingers. There were sharp pins at the
back of her dress. He hated her; he was not afraid of her, and yet on
that critical night when his friend told him of his departure, it was
the fear of being left alone with the black cold shiny thing that
troubled him most; she bore of all the daylight things the closest
resemblance to the three beasts.

There was, of course, his nurse, and a great deal of his time was spent
in her company; but she had strangely little connection with his main
problem of the relation of this, his present world, to that, his
preceding one. She was there to answer questions, to issue commands, to
forbid. She had the key to various cupboards--to the cupboard with
pretty cups and jam and sugar, to the cupboard with ugly things that
tasted horrible, things that he resisted by instinct long before they
arrived under his nose. She also had certain sounds, of which she made
invariable use on all occasions. One was, "Now, Master Ernest!" Another:
"Mind-what-you're-about-now!" And, at his "Wash dat!" always
"Oh-bother-the-boy!" She was large and square to look upon, very often
pins were in her mouth, and the slippers that she wore within doors
often clipclapped upon the carpet. But she was not a person; she had
nothing to do with his progress.

The person who had to do with it was, of course, his father. That night
when his friend had left him had been, indeed, a crisis, because it was
on that night that his father had come to him. It was not that he had
not been aware of his father before, but he had been aware of him only
as he had been aware of light and heat and food. Now it had become a
definite wonder as to whether this new friend had been sent to take the
place of the old one. Certainly the new friend had very little to do
with all that old life of which the fountain was the door. He belonged,
most definitely, to the new one, and everything about him--the
delightfully mysterious tick of his gold watch, the solid, firm grasp of
his hand, the sure security of his shoulder upon which Ernest Henry now
gloriously rode--these things were of this world and none other.

It was a different relationship, this, from any other that Ernest Henry
had ever known, but there was no doubt at all about its pleasant
flavour. Just as in other days he had watched for his friend's
appearance, so now he waited for that evening hour that always brought
his father. The door would open, the square, set figure would appear....
Very pleasant, indeed. Meanwhile Ernest Henry was instructed that the
right thing to say on his father's appearance was "Dada."

But he knew better. His father's name was really "Damn."


VI

The days and weeks passed. There had been no sign of his friend.... Then
the crisis came.

That old wall-to-screen marathon had been achieved, and so
contemptuously banished. There was now the great business of marching
without aid from one end of the room to the other. This was a long
business, and always hitherto somewhere about the middle of it Ernest
Henry had sat down suddenly, pretending, even to himself, that his shoe
_hurt_, or that he was bored with the game, and would prefer some other.

There came, then, a beautiful spring evening. The long low evening sun
flooded the room, and somewhere a bell was calling Christian people to
their prayers, and somewhere else the old man with the harp, who always
came round the Square once every week, was making beautiful music.

Ernest Henry's father had taken the nurse's place for an hour, and was
reading a _Globe_ with absorbed attention by the window; Mr.
Wilberforce, senior, was one of London's most famous barristers, and the
_Globe_ on this particular afternoon had a great deal to say about this
able man's cleverness. Ernest Henry watched his father, watched the
light, heard the bell and the harp, felt that the hour was ripe for his
attempt.

He started, and, even as he did so, was aware that, after he had
succeeded in this great adventure, things--that is, life--would never be
quite the same again. He knew by now every stage of the first half of
his journey. The first instalment was defined by that picture of the
garden and the roses and the peacocks; the second by the beginning of
the square brown nursery table; and here there was always a swift and
very testing temptation to cling, with a sticky hand, to the hard and
shining corner. The third division was the end of the nursery table
where one was again tempted to give the corner a final clutch before
passing forth into the void. After this there was nothing, no rest, no
possible harbour until the end.

Off Ernest Henry started. He could see his father, there in the long
distance, busied with his paper; he could see the nursery table, with
bright-blue and red reels of cotton that nurse had left there; he could
see a discarded railway engine that lay gaping there half-way across,
ready to catch and trip him if he were not careful. His eyes were like
saucers, the hissing noise came from between his teeth, his forehead
frowned. He passed the peacock, he flung contemptuously aside the
proffered corner of the table; he passed, as an Atlantic liner passes
the Eddystone, the table's other end; he was on the last stretch.

Then suddenly he paused. He lifted his head, caught with his eye a pink,
round cloud that sailed against the evening blue beyond the window,
heard the harpist, heard his father turn and exclaim, as he saw him.

He knew, as he stood there, that at last the moment had come. His friend
had returned.

All the room was buzzing with it. The dolls fell in a neglected heap,
the train on the carpet, the fire behind the fender, the reels of cotton
that were on the table--they all knew it.

His friend had returned.

His impulse was, there and then, to sit down.

His friend was whispering: "Come along!... Come along!... Come along!"
He knew that, on his surrender, his father would make sounds like,
"Well, old man, tired, eh? Bed, I suggest." He knew that bed would
follow. Then darkness, then his friend.

For an instant there was fierce battle between the old forces and the
new. Then, with his eyes upon his father, resuming that hiss that is
proper only to ostlers, he continued his march.

He reached the wall. He caught his father's leg. He was raised on to his
father's lap, was kissed, was for a moment triumphant; then suddenly
burst into tears.

"Why, old man, what's the matter?"

But Ernest Henry could not explain. Had he but known it he had, in that
rejection of his friend, completed the first stage of his "Pilgrimage
from this world to the next."




CHAPTER III

ANGELINA


I

Angelina Braid, on the morning of her third birthday, woke very early.
It would be too much to say that she knew it was her birthday, but she
awoke, excited. She looked at the glimmering room, heard the sparrows
beyond her windows, heard the snoring of her nurse in the large bed
opposite her own, and lay very still, with her heart thumping like
anything. She made no noise, however, because it was not her way to make
a noise. Angelina Braid was the quietest little girl in all the Square.
"You'd never meet one nigher a mouse in a week of Sundays," said her
nurse, who was a "gay one" and liked life.

It was not, however, entirely Angelina's fault that she took life
quietly; in 21 March Square, it was exceedingly difficult to do anything
else. Angelina's parents were in India, and she was not conscious, very
acutely, of their existence. Every morning and evening she prayed, "God
bless mother and father in India," but then she was not very acutely
conscious of God either, and so her mind was apt to wander during her
prayers.

She lived with her two aunts--Miss Emmy Braid and Miss Violet Braid--in
the smallest house in the Square. So slim was No. 21, and so ruthlessly
squeezed between the opulent No. 20 and the stout ruddy-faced No. 22,
that it made one quite breathless to look at it; it was exactly as
though an old maid, driven by suffragette wildness, had been arrested by
two of the finest possible policemen, and carried off into custody. Very
little of any kind of wildness was there about the Misses Braid. They
were slim, neat women, whose rather yellow faces had the flat, squashed
look of lawn grass after a garden roller has passed over it. They
believed in God according to the Reverend Stephen Hunt, of St.
Matthew-in-the-Crescent--the church round the corner--but in no other
kind of God whatever. They were not rich, and they were not poor; they
went once a week--Fridays--to visit the poor of St. Matthew's, and
found the poor of St. Matthew's on the whole unappreciative of their
efforts, but that made their task the nobler. Their house was dark and
musty, and filled with little articles left them by their grand-parents,
their parents, and other defunct relations. They had no friendly feeling
towards one another, but missed one another when they were separated.
They were, both of them, as strong as horses, but very hypochondriacal,
and Dr. Armstrong of Mulberry Place made a very pleasant little income
out of them.

I have mentioned them at length, because they had a great deal to do
with Angelina's quiet behaviour. No. 21 was not a house that welcomed a
child's ringing laughter. But, in any case, the Misses Braid were not
fond of children, but only took Angelina because they had a soft spot in
their dry hearts for their brother Jim, and in any case it would have
been difficult to say no.

Their attitude to children was that they could not understand why they
did not instantly see things as they, their elders, saw them; but then,
on the other hand, if an especially bright child did take a grown-up
point of view about anything _that_ was considered "forward" and
"conceited," so that it was really very difficult for Angelina.

"It's a pity Jim's got such a dull child," Miss Violet would say. "You
never would have expected it."

"What I like about a child," said Miss Emmy, "is a little cheerfulness
and natural spirit--not all this moping."

Angelina was not, on the whole, popular.... The aunts had very little
idea of making a house cheerful for a child. The room allotted to
Angelina as a nursery was at the top of the house, and had once been a
servant's bedroom. It possessed two rather grimy windows, a faded brown
wallpaper, an old green carpet, and some very stiff, hard chairs. On one
wall was a large map of the world, and on the other an old print of
Romans sacking Jerusalem, a picture which frightened Angelina every
night of her life, when the dark came and the lamp illuminated the
writhing limbs, the falling bodies, the tottering walls. From the
windows the Square was visible, and at the windows Angelina spent a
great deal of her time, but her present nurse--nurses succeeded one
another with startling frequency--objected to what she called
"window-gazing." "Makes a child dreamy," she said; "lowers her spirits."

Angelina was, naturally, a dreamy child, and no amount of nurses could
prevent her being one. She was dreamy because her loneliness forced her
to be so, and if her dreams were the most real part of her day to her
that was surely the faults of her aunts. But she was not at all a quick
child; although to-day was her third birthday she could not talk very
well, could not pronounce her r's, and lisped in what her trail of
nurses told her was a ridiculous fashion for so big a girl. But, then,
she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her
features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year. Her
eyes were large and black and rather fine.

On this morning she lay in bed, and knew that she was excited because
her friend had come the night before and told her that to-day would be
an important day. Angelina clung, with a desperate tenacity, to her
memories of everything that happened to her before her arrival on this
unpleasant planet. Those memories now were growing faint, and they came
to her only in flashes, in sudden twists and turns of the scene, as
though she were surrounded by curtains and, every now and then, was
allowed a peep through. Her friend had been with her continually at
first, and, whilst he had been there, the old life had been real and
visible enough; but on her second birthday he had told her that it was
right now that she should manage by herself. Since then, he had come
when she least expected him; sometimes when she had needed him very
badly he had not appeared.... She never knew. At any rate, he had said
that to-day would be important.... She lay in bed, listening to her
nurse's snores, and waited.


II

At breakfast she knew that it was her birthday. There were presents from
her aunts--a picture-book and a box of pencils--there was also a
mysterious parcel. Angelina could not remember that she had ever had a
parcel before, and the excitement of this one must be prolonged. She
would not open it, but gazed at it, with her spoon in the air and her
mouth wide open.

"Come, Miss Angelina--what a name to give the poor lamb!--get on with
your breakfast now, or you'll never have done. Why not open the pretty
parcel?"

"No. Do you think it is a twain?"

"Say train--not twain."

"Train."

"No, of course not; not a thing that shape."

"Oh! Do you think it's a bear?"

"Maybe--maybe. Come now, get on with your bread and butter."

"Don't want any more."

"Get down from your chair, then. Say your grace now."

"Thank God nice bweakfast, Amen."

"That's right! Now open it, then."

"No, not now."

"Drat the child! Well, wipe your face, then."

Angelina carried her parcel to the window, and then, after gazing at it
for a long time, at last opened it. Her eyes grew wider and wider, her
chubby fingers trembled. Nurse undid the wrappings of paper, slowly
folded up the sheets, then produced, all naked and unashamed, a large
rag doll.

"There! There's a pretty thing for you, Miss 'Lina."

She had her hand about the doll's head, and held her there, suspended.

"Give her me! Give her me!" Angelina rescued her, and, with eyes
flaming, the doll laid lengthways in her arms, tottered off to the other
corner of the room.

"Well, there's gratitude," said the nurse, "and never asking so much as
who it's from."

But nurse, aunts, all the troubles and disappointments of this world had
vanished from Angelina's heart and soul. She had seen, at that first
glimpse that her nurse had so rudely given her, that here at last, after
long, long waiting, was the blessing that she had so desired. She had
had other dolls--quite a number of them. Even now Lizzie (without an
eye) and Rachel (rather fine in bridesmaid's attire) were leaning their
disconsolate backs against the boarding beneath the window seat. There
had been, besides Rachel and Lizzie, two Annies, a Mary, a May, a
Blackamoor, a Jap, a Sailor, and a Baby in a Bath. They were now as
though they had never been; Angelina knew with absolute certainty of
soul, with that blending of will and desire, passion, self-sacrifice and
absence of humour that must inevitably accompany true love that here was
her Fate.

"It's been sent you by your kind Uncle Teny," said nurse. "You'll have
to write a nice letter and thank him."

       *       *       *       *       *

But Angelina knew better. She--a name had not yet been chosen--had been
sent to her by her friend.... He had promised her last night that this
should be a day of days.

Her aunts, appearing to receive thanks where thanks were due, darkened
the doorway.

"Good-morning, mum. Good-morning, mum. Now, Miss 'Lina, thank your kind
aunties for their beautiful presents."

She stood up, clutching the doll.

"T'ank you, Auntie Vi'let; t'ank you, Auntie Em'ly--your lovely
pwesents."

"That's right, Angelina. I hope you'll use them sensibly. What's that
she's holding, nurse?"

"It's a doll Mr. Edward's sent her, mum."

"What a hideous creature! Edward might have chosen something---- Time for
her to go out, nurse, I think--now, while the sun's warm."

But she did not hear. She did not know that they had gone. She sat there
in a dreamy ecstasy rocking the red-cheeked creature in her arms,
seeing, with her black eyes, visions and the beauty of a thousand
worlds.


III

The name Rose was given to her. Rose had been kept, as a name, until
some one worthy should arrive.... "Wosie Bwaid," a very good name. Her
nakedness was clothed first in Rachel's bridesmaid's attire--alas! poor
Rachel!--but the lace and finery did not suit those flaming red cheeks
and beady black eyes. Rose was, there could be no question, a daughter
of the soil; good red blood ran through her stout veins. Tess of the
countryside, your laughing, chaffing, arms-akimbo dairymaid; no poor
white product of the over-civilised cities. Angelina felt that the satin
and lace were wrong; she tore them off, searched in the heaped-up
cupboard for poor neglected Annie No. 1, found her, tore from her her
red woollen skirt and white blouse, stretched them about Rose's portly
body.

"T'ank God for nice Wose, Amen," she said, but she meant, not God, but
her friend. He, her friend, had never sent her anything before, and now
that Rose had come straight from him, she must have a great deal to
tell her about him. Nothing puzzled her more than the distressing fact
that she wondered sometimes whether her friend was ever really coming
again, whether any of the wonderful things that were happening on every
side of her wouldn't suddenly one fine morning vanish altogether, and
leave her to a dreary world of nurse, bread and milk, and the Romans
sacking Jerusalem. She didn't, of course, put it like that; all that it
meant to her was that stupid people and tiresome things were always
interfering between herself and _real_ fun. Now it was time to go out,
now to go to bed, now to eat, now to be taken downstairs into that
horrid room where she couldn't move because things would tumble off the
tables so ... all this prevented her own life when she would sit and
try, and try, and remember _what_ it was all like once, and wonder why
when once things had been so beautiful they were so ugly and
disappointing now.

Now Rose had come, and she could talk to Rose about it. "What she sees
in that ugly old doll!" said the nurse to the housemaid. "You can take
my word, Mary, she'll sit in that window looking down at the gardens,
nursing that rag and just say nothing. It fair gives you the creeps ...
left too much to herself, the poor child is. As for those old women
downstairs, if I 'ad my way--but there! Living's living, and bread and
butter's bread and butter!"

But, of course, Angelina's heart was bursting with affection, and there
had been, until Rose's arrival, no one upon whom she might bestow it.
Rose might seem to the ordinary observer somewhat unresponsive. She sat
there, whether it were tea-time, dressing-time, bed-time, always staring
in front of her, her mouth closed, her arms, bow-shaped, standing
stiffly away from her side, taking, it might seem, but little interest
in her mistress's confidences. Did one give her tea she only dribbled at
the lip; did one place upon her head a straw hat with red ribbon torn
from poor May--once a reigning favourite--she made no effort to keep it
upon her head. Jewels and gold could rouse no appreciation from her; she
was sunk in a lethargy that her rose-red cheeks most shamefully belied.

But Angelina had the key to her. Angelina understood that confiding
silence, appreciated that tactful discretion, adored that complete
submission to her will. It was true that her friend had only come once
to her now within the space of many, many weeks, but he had sent her
Rose. "He's coming soon, Wose--weally soon--to tell us stowies.
Bu-ootiful ones."

She sat, gazing down into the Square, and her dreams were longer and
longer and longer.


IV

Miss Emily Braid was a softer creature than her sister, and she had,
somewhere in her heart, some sort of affection for her niece. She made,
now and then, little buccaneering raids upon the nursery, with the
intention of arriving at some intimate terms with that strange animal.
But she had no gift of ease with children; her attempts at friendliness
were viewed by Angelina with the gravest suspicion and won no return.
This annoyed Miss Emily, and because she was conscious that she herself
was in reality to blame, she attacked Angelina all the more fiercely.
"This brooding must be stopped," she said. "Really, it's most
unhealthy."

It was quite impossible for her to believe that a child of three could
really be interested by golden sunsets, the colours of the fountain
that was in the centre of the gardens, the soft, grey haze that clothed
the houses on a spring evening; and when, therefore, she saw Angelina
gazing at these things, she decided that the child was morbid. Any
interest, however, that Angelina may have taken in her aunts before
Rose's arrival was now reduced to less than nothing at all.

"That doll that Edward gave the child," said Miss Emily to her sister,
"is having a very bad effect on her. Makes her more moody than ever."

"Such a hideous thing!" said Miss Violet. "Well, I shall take it away if
I see much more of this nonsense."

It was lucky for Rose meanwhile that she was of a healthy constitution.
The meals, the dressing and undressing, the perpetual demands upon her
undivided attention, the sudden rousings from her sleep, the swift
rockings back into slumber again, the appeals for response, the abuses
for indifference, these things would have slain within a week one of her
more feeble sisters. But Rose was made of stern stuff, and her rosy
cheeks were as rosy, the brightness of her eyes was undimmed. We may
believe--and surely many harder demands are made upon our faith--that
there did arise a very special relationship between these two. The whole
of Angelina's heart was now devoted to Rose's service, Rose's was not
devoted to Angelina?... And always Angelina wondered when her friend
would return, watched for him in the dusk, awoke in the early mornings
and listened for him, searched the Square with its trees and its
fountain for his presence.

"Wosie, when did he say he'd come next?" But Rose could not tell. There
_were_ times when Rose's impenetrability was, to put it at its mildest,
aggravating.

Meanwhile, the situation with Aunt Emily grew serious. Angelina was
aware that Aunt Emily disliked Rose, and her mouth now shut very tightly
and her eyes glared defiance when she thought of this, but her
difference with her aunt went more deeply than this. She had known for a
long, long time that both her aunts would stop her "dreaming" if they
could. Did she tell them about her friend, about the kind of pictures of
which the fountain reminded her, about the vivid, lively memories that
the tree with the pink flowers--the almond tree--in the corner of the
gardens--you could just see it from the nursery window--called to her
mind; she knew that she would be punished--put in the corner, or even
sent to bed. She did not think these things out consecutively in her
mind, but she knew that the dark room downstairs, the dark passages, the
stillness and silence of it all frightened her, and that it was always
out of these things that her aunts rose.

At night when she lay in bed with Rosie clasped tightly to her, she
whispered endlessly about the gardens, the fountain, the barrel organs,
the dogs, the other children in the Square--she had names of her own for
all these things--and him, who belonged, of course, to the world
outside.... Then her whisper would sink, and she would warn Rose about
the rooms downstairs, the dining-room with the black chairs, the soft
carpet, and the stuffed birds in glass cases--for these things, too, she
had names. Here was the hand of death and destruction, the land of
crooked stairs, sudden dark doors, mysterious bells and drippings of
water--out of all this her aunts came....

Unfortunately it was just at this moment that Miss Emily Braid decided
that it was time to take her niece in hand. "The child's three, Violet,
and very backward for her age. Why, Mrs. Mancaster's little girl, who's
just Angelina's age, can talk fluently, and is beginning with her
letters. We don't want Jim to be disappointed in the child when he comes
home next year." It would be difficult to determine how much of this was
true; Miss Emily was aggravated and, although she would never have
confessed to so trivial a matter, the perpetual worship of Rose--"the
ugliest thing you ever saw"--was irritating her. The days followed,
then, when Angelina was constantly in her aunt's company, and to neither
of them was this companionship pleasant.

"You must ask me questions, child. How are you ever going to learn to
talk properly if you don't ask me questions?"

"Yes, auntie."

"What's that over there?"

"Twee."

"Say tree, not twee."

"Tree."

"Now look at me. Put that wretched doll down.... Now.... That's right.
Now tell me what you've been doing this morning."

"We had bweakfast--nurse said I--(long pause for breath)--was dood
girl; Auntie Vi'let came; I dwew with my pencil."

"Say 'drew,' not 'dwew.'"

"Drew."

All this was very exhausting to Aunt Emily. She was no nearer the
child's heart.... Angelina maintained an impenetrable reserve. Old maids
have much time amongst the unsatisfied and sterile monotonies of their
life--this is only true of _some_ old maids; there are very delightful
ones--to devote to fancies and microscopic imitations. It was
astonishing now how largely in Miss Emily Braid's life loomed the figure
of Rose, the rag doll.

"If it weren't for that wretched doll, I believe one could get some
sense out of the child."

"I think it's a mistake, nurse, to let Miss Angelina play with that doll
so much."

"Well, mum, it'd be difficult to take it from her now. She's that
wrapped in it." ... And so she was.... Rose stood to Angelina for so
much more than Rose.

"Oh, Wosie, _when_ will he come again.... P'r'aps never. And I'm
forgetting. I can't remember at all about the funny water and the twee
with the flowers, and all of it. Wosie, _you_ 'member--Whisper." And
Rose offered in her own mysterious, taciturn way the desired comfort.

And then, of course, the crisis arrived. I am sorry about this part of
the story. Of all the invasions of Aunt Emily, perhaps none were more
strongly resented by Angelina than the appropriation of the afternoon
hour in the gardens. Nurse had been an admirable escort because, as a
lady of voracious appetite for life with, at the moment, but slender
opportunities for satisfying it, she was occupied alertly with the
possible vision of any male person driven by a similar desire. Her eye
wandered; the hand to which Angelina clung was an abstract, imperceptive
hand--Angelina and Rose were free to pursue their own train of
fancy--the garden was at their service. But with Aunt Emily how
different! Aunt Emily pursued relentlessly her educational tactics. Her
thin, damp, black glove gripped Angelina's hand; her eyes (they had a
"peering" effect, as though they were always searching for something
beyond their actual vision) wandered aimlessly about the garden, looking
for educational subjects. And so up and down the paths they went,
Angelina trotting, with Rose clasped to her breast, walking just a
little faster than she conveniently could.

Miss Emily disliked the gardens, and would have greatly preferred that
nurse should have been in charge, but this consciousness of trial
inflamed her sense of merit. There came a lovely spring afternoon; the
almond tree was in full blossom; a cloud of pink against the green
hedge, clumps of daffodils rippled with little shudders of delight, even
the statues of "Sir Benjamin Bundle" and "General Sir Robinson Cleaver"
seemed to unbend a little from their stiff angularity. There were many
babies and nurses, and children laughing and crying and shouting, and a
sky of mild forget-me-not blue smiled protectingly upon them. Angelina's
eyes were fixed upon the fountain, which flashed and sparkled in the air
with a happy freedom that seemed to catch all the life of the garden
within its heart. Angelina felt how immensely she and Rose might have
enjoyed all this had they been alone. Her eyes gazed longingly at the
almond tree; she wished that she might go off on a voyage of discovery
for, on this day of all days, did its shadow seem to hold some pressing,
intimate invitation. "I shall get back--I shall get back.... He'll come
and take me; I'll remember all the old things," she thought. She and
Rose--what a time they might have if only---- She glanced up at her aunt.

"Look at that nice little boy, Angelina," Aunt Emily said. "See how
good----" But at that very instant that same playful breeze that had been
ruffling the daffodils, and sending shimmers through the fountain
decided that now was the moment to catch Miss Emily's black hat at one
corner, prove to her that the pin that should have fastened it to her
hair was loose, and swing the whole affair to one side. Up went her
hands; she gave a little cry of dismay.

Instantly, then, Angelina was determined. She did not suppose that her
freedom would be for long, nor did she hope to have time to reach the
almond tree; but her small, stumpy legs started off down the path almost
before she was aware of it. She started, and Rose bumped against her as
she ran. She heard behind her cries; she saw in front of her the almond
tree, and then coming swiftly towards her a small boy with a hoop....
She stopped, hesitated, and then fell. The golden afternoon, with all
its scents and sounds, passed on above her head. She was conscious that
a hand was on her shoulder, she was lifted and shaken. Tears trickling
down the side of her nose were checked by little points of gravel. She
was aware that the little boy with the hoop had stopped and said
something. Above her, very large and grim, was her aunt. Some bird on a
tree was making a noise like the drawing of a cork. (She had heard her
nurse once draw one.) In her heart was utter misery. The gravel hurt her
face, the almond tree was farther away than ever; she was captured more
completely than she had ever been before.

"Oh, you naughty little girl--you _naughty_ girl," she heard her aunt
say; and then, after her, the bird like a cork. She stood there, her
mouth tightly shut, the marks of tears drying to muddy lines on her
face.

She was dragged off. Aunt Emily was furious at the child's silence; Aunt
Emily was also aware that she must have looked what she would call "a
pretty figure of fun" with her hat askew, her hair blown "anyway," and a
small child of three escaping from her charge as fast as she could go.

Angelina was dragged across the street, in through the squeezed front
door, over the dark stairs, up into the nursery. Miss Violet's voice
was heard calling, "Is that you, Emily? Tea's been waiting some time."

It was nurse's afternoon out, and the nursery was grimly empty; but
through the open, window came the evening sounds of the happy Square.
Miss Emily placed Angelina in the middle of the room. "Now say you're
sorry, you wicked child!" she exclaimed breathlessly.

"Sowwy," came slowly from Angelina. Then she looked down at her doll.

"Leave that doll alone. Speak as though you were sorry."

"I'm velly sowwy."

"What made you run away like that?" Angelina said nothing. "Come, now!
Didn't you know it was very wicked?"

"Yes."

"Well, why did you do it, then?"

"Don't know."

"Don't say 'don't know' like that. You must have had some reason. Don't
look at the doll like that. Put the doll down." But this Angelina would
not do. She clung to Rose with a ferocious tenacity. I do not think that
one must blame Miss Emily for her exasperation. That doll had had a
large place in her mind for many weeks. It were as though she, Miss
Emily Braid, had been personally, before the world, defied by a rag
doll. Her temper, whose control had never been her strongest quality, at
the vision of the dirty, obstinate child before her, at the thought of
the dancing, mocking gardens behind her, flamed into sudden, trembling
rage.

She stepped forward, snatched Rose from Angelina's arms, crossed the
room and had pushed the doll, with a fierce, energetic action, as though
there was no possible time to be lost, into the fire. She snatched the
poker, and with trembling hands pressed the doll down. There was a great
flare of flame; Rose lifted one stolid arm to the gods for vengeance,
then a stout leg in a last writhing agony. Only then, when it was all
concluded, did Aunt Emily hear behind her the little half-strangled cry
which made her turn. The child was standing, motionless, with so old, so
desperate a gaze of despair that it was something indecent for any human
being to watch.


V

Nurse came in from her afternoon. She had heard nothing of the recent
catastrophe, and, as she saw Angelina sitting quietly in front of the
fire she thought that she had had her tea, and was now "dreaming" as she
so often did. Once, however, as she was busy in another part of the
room, she caught half the face in the light of the fire. To any one of a
more perceptive nature that glimpse must have seemed one of the most
tragic things in the world. But this was a woman of "a sensible, hearty"
nature; moreover, her "afternoon" had left her with happy reminiscences
of her own charms and their effect on the opposite sex.

She had, however, her moment.... She had left the room to fetch
something. Returning she noticed that the dusk had fallen, and was about
to switch on the light when, in the rise and fall of the firelight,
something that she saw made her pause. She stood motionless by the door.

Angelina had turned in her chair; her eyes were gazing, with rapt
attention, toward the purple dusk by the window. She was listening.
Nurse, as she had often assured her friends, "was not cursed with
imagination," but now fear held her so that she could not stir nor move
save that her hand trembled against the wall paper. The chatter of the
fire, the shouts of some boys in the Square, the ringing of the bell of
St. Matthew's for evensong, all these things came into the room.
Angelina, still listening, at last smiled; then, with a little sigh, sat
back in her chair.

"Heavens! Miss 'Lina! What were you doing there? How you frightened me!"
Angelina left her chair, and went across to the window. "Auntie Emily,"
she said, "put Wosie into the fire, she did. But Wosie's saved.... He's
just come and told me."

"Lord, Miss 'Lina, how you talk!" The room was right again now just as,
a moment before, it had been wrong. She switched on the electric light,
and, in the sudden blaze, caught the last flicker in the child's eyes of
some vision, caught, held, now surrendered.

"'Tis company she's wanting, poor lamb," she thought, "all this being
alone.... Fair gives one the creeps."

She heard with relief the opening of the door. Miss Emily came in,
hesitated a moment, then walked over to her niece. In her hands she
carried a beautiful doll with flaxen hair, long white robes, and the
assured confidence of one who is spotless and knows it.

"There, Angelina," she said. "I oughtn't to have burnt your doll. I'm
sorry. Here's a beautiful new one."

Angelina took the spotless one; then with a little thrust of her hand
she pushed the half-open window wider apart. Very deliberately she
dropped the doll (at whose beauty she had not glanced) out, away, down
into the Square.

The doll, white in the dusk, tossed and whirled, and spun finally, a
white speck far below, and struck the pavement.

Then Angelina turned, and with a little sigh of satisfaction looked at
her aunt.




CHAPTER IV

BIM ROCHESTER


I

This is the story of Bim Rochester's first Odyssey. It is a story that
has Bim himself for the only proof of its veracity, but he has never, by
a shadow of a word, faltered in his account of it, and has remained so
unamazed at some of the strange aspects in it that it seems almost an
impertinence that we ourselves should show any wonder. Benjamin (Bim)
Rochester was probably the happiest little boy in March Square, and he
was happy in spite of quite a number of disadvantages.

A word about the Rochester family is here necessary. They inhabited the
largest house in March Square--the large grey one at the corner by Lent
Street--and yet it could not be said to be large enough for them. Mrs.
Rochester was a black-haired woman with flaming cheeks and a most
untidy appearance. Her mother had been a Spaniard, and her father an
English artist, and she was very much the child of both of them. Her
hair was always coming down, her dress unfastened, her shoes untied, her
boots unbuttoned. She rushed through life with an amazing shattering
vigour, bearing children, flinging them into an already overcrowded
nursery, rushing out to parties, filling the house with crowds of
friends, acquaintances, strangers, laughing, chattering, singing, never
out of temper, never serious, never, for a moment, to be depended on.
Her husband, a grave, ball-faced man, spent most of his days in the City
and at his club, but was fond of his wife, and admired what he called
her "energy." "My wife's splendid," he would say to his friends, "knows
the whole of London, I believe. The _people_ we have in our house!" He
would watch, sometimes, the strange, noisy parties, and then would
retire to bridge at his club with a little sigh of pride.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the nursery there were children of all ages, and
two nurses did their best to grapple with them. The nurses came and
went, and always, after the first day or two, the new nurse would give
in to the conditions, and would lead, at first with amusement and a
rather excited sense of adventure, afterwards with a growing feeling of
dirt and discomfort, a tangled and helter-skelter existence. Some of the
children were now at school, but Lucy, a girl ten years of age, was a
supercilious child who rebelled against the conditions of her life, but
was too idle and superior to attempt any alteration of them. After her
there were Roger, Dorothy, and Robert. Then came Bim, four years of age
a fortnight ago, and, last of all, Timothy, an infant of nine months.
With the exception of Lucy and Bim they were exceedingly noisy children.
Lucy should have passed her days in the schoolroom under the care of
Miss Agg, a melancholy and hope-abandoned spinster, and, during lesson
hours, there indeed she was. But in the schoolroom she had no one to
impress with her amazing wisdom and dignity. "Poor mummy," as she always
thought of her mother, was quite unaware of her habits or movements, and
Miss Agg was unable to restrain either the one or the other, so Lucy
spent most of her time in the nursery, where she sat, calm and
collected, in the midst of confusion that could have "given old Babel
points and won easy." She was reverenced by all the younger children
for her sedate security, but by none of them so surely and so
magnificently as Bim. Bim, because he was quieter than the other
children, claimed for his opinions and movements the stronger interest.

His nurses called him "deep," "although for a deep child I must say he's
'appy."

Both his depth and his happiness were at Lucy's complete disposal. The
people who saw him in the Square called him "a jolly little boy," and,
indeed, his appearance of gravity was undermined by the curl of his
upper lip and a dimple in the middle of his left cheek, so that he
seemed to be always at the crisis of a prolonged chuckle. One very
rarely heard him laugh out loud, and his sturdy, rather fat body was
carried rather gravely, and he walked contemplatively as though he were
thinking something out. He would look at you, too, very earnestly when
you spoke to him, and would wait a little before he answered you, and
then would speak slowly as though he were choosing his words with care.
And yet he was, in spite of these things, really a "jolly little boy."
His "jolliness" was there in point of view, in the astounding interest
he found in anything and everything, in his refusal to be upset by any
sort of thing whatever.

But his really unusual quality was his mixture of stolid English
matter-of-fact with an absolutely unbridled imagination. He would
pursue, day by day, week after week, games, invented games of his own,
that owed nothing, either for their inception or their execution, to any
one else. They had their origin for the most part in stray sentences
that he had overheard from his elders, but they also arose from his own
private and personal experiences--experiences which were as real to him
as going to the dentist or going to the pantomime were to his brothers
and sisters. There was, for instance, a gentleman of whom he always
spoke of as Mr. Jack. This friend no one had ever seen, but Bim quoted
him frequently. He did not, apparently, see him very often now, but at
one time when he had been quite a baby Mr. Jack had been always there.
Bim explained, to any one who cared to listen, that Mr. Jack belonged to
all the Other Time which he was now in very serious danger of
forgetting, and when, at that point, he was asked with condescending
indulgence, "I suppose you mean fairies, dear!" he always shook his head
scornfully and said he meant nothing of the kind, Mr. Jack was as real
as mother, and, indeed, a great deal "realer," because Mrs. Rochester
was, in the course of her energetic career, able to devote only
"whirlwind" visits to her "dear, darling" children.

When the afternoon was spent in the gardens in the middle of the Square,
Bim would detach himself from his family and would be found absorbed in
some business of his own which he generally described as "waiting for
Mr. Jack."

"Not the sort of child," said Miss Agg, who had strong views about
children being educated according to practical and common-sense ideas,
"not the sort of child that one would expect nonsense from." It may be
quite safely asserted that never, in her very earliest years, had Miss
Agg been guilty of any nonsense of the sort.

But it was not Miss Agg's contempt for his experiences that worried Bim.
He always regarded that lady with an amused indifference. "She _bothers_
so," he said once to Lucy. "Do you think she's happy with us, Lucy?"

"P'r'aps. I'm sure it doesn't matter."

"I suppose she'd go away if she wasn't," he concluded, and thought no
more about her.

No, the real grief in his heart was that Lucy, the adored, the wonderful
Lucy, treated his assertions with contempt.

"But, Bim, don't be such a silly baby. You know you can't have seen him.
Nurse was there and a lot of us, and _we_ didn't."

"I did though."

"But, Bim----"

"Can't help it. He used to come lots and lots."

"You _are_ a silly! You're getting too old now----"

"I'm _not_ a silly!"

"Yes, you are."

"I'm not!"

"Oh, well, of course, if you're going to be a naughty baby."

Bim was nearer tears on these occasions than on any other in all his
mortal life. His adoration of Lucy was the foundation-stone of his
existence, and she accepted it with a lofty assumption of indifference;
but very sharply would she have missed it had it been taken from her,
and in long after years she was to look back upon that love of his and
wonder that she could have accepted it so lightly; Bim found in her
gravity and assurance all that he demanded of his elders. Lucy was never
at a loss for an answer to any question, and Bim believed all that she
told him.

"Where's China, Lucy?"

"Oh, don't bother, Bim."

"No, but _where_ is it?"

"What a nuisance you are! It's near Africa."

"Where Uncle Alfred is?"

"Yes, just there."

"But _is_ Uncle Alfred in--China?"

"No, silly, of course not."

"Well, then----"

"I didn't say China was in Africa. I said it was near."

"Oh! I see. Uncle Alfred could just go in the train?"

"Yes, of course."

"Oh! I see. P'r'aps he will."

But, for the most part, Bim, realising that Lucy "didn't want to be
bothered," pursued his life alone. Through all the turmoil and disorder
of that tempestuous nursery he gravely went his way, at one moment
fighting lions and tigers, at another being nurse on her afternoon out
(this was a truly astonishing adventure composed of scraps flung to him
from nurse's conversational table and including many incidents that were
far indeed from any nurse's experience), or again, he would be his
mother giving a party, and, in the course of this, a great deal of food
would be eaten, his favourite dishes, treacle pudding and cottage pie,
being always included.

With the exception of his enthusiasm for Lucy he was no sentimentalist.
He hated being kissed, he did not care very greatly for Roger and
Dorothy and Robert, and regarded them as nothing but nuisances when they
interfered with his games or compelled him to join in theirs.

And now this is the story of his Odyssey.


II

It happened on a wet April afternoon. The morning had been fine, a
golden morning with the scent in the air of the showers that had fallen
during the night. Then, suddenly, after midday, the rain came down,
splashing on to the shining pavements as it fell, beating on to the
windows and then running, in little lines, on to the ledges and falling
from there in slow, heavy drops. The sky was black, the statues in the
garden dejected, the almond tree beaten, all the little paths running
with water, and on the garden seats the rain danced like a live thing.

The children--Lucy, Roger, Dorothy, Robert, Bim, and Timothy--were, of
course, in the nursery. The nurse was toasting her toes on the fender
and enjoying immensely that story by Mrs. Henry Wood, entitled "The
Shadow of Ashlydyat." It is entirely impossible to present any adequate
idea of the confusion and bizarrerie of that nursery. One must think of
the most confused aspect of human life that one has ever known--say, a
Suffrage attack upon the Houses of Parliament, or a Channel steamer on a
Thursday morning, and then of the next most confused aspect. Then one
must place them together and confess defeat. Mrs. Rochester was not, as
I have said, very frequently to be found in her children's nursery, but
she managed, nevertheless, to pervade the house, from cellar to garret,
with her spirit. Toys were everywhere--dolls and trains and soldiers,
bricks and puzzles and animals, cardboard boxes, articles of feminine
attire, a zinc bath, two cats, a cage with white mice, a pile of books
resting in a dazzling pyramid on the very edge of the table, two glass
jars containing minute fish of the new variety, and a bowl with
goldfish. There were many other things, forgotten by me.

Lucy, her pigtails neatly arranged, sat near the window and pretended to
be reading that fascinating story, "The Pillars of the House." I say
pretending, because Lucy did not care about reading at any time, and
especially disliked the works of Charlotte Mary Yonge, but she thought
that it looked well that she and nurse should be engaged upon literature
whilst the rest of the world rioted and gambolled their time away. There
was no one who at the moment could watch and admire her fine spirit, but
you never knew who might come in.

The rioting and gambolling consisted in the attempts of Robert, Dorothy,
and Roger, to give a realistic presentation to an audience of one,
namely, the infant Timothy, of the life of the Red Indians and their
Squaws. Underneath the nursery table, with a tablecloth, some chairs and
a concertina, they were presenting an admirable and entirely engrossing
performance.

Bim, under the window and quite close to Lucy, was giving a party. He
had possessed himself of some of Dorothy's dolls' tea things, he had
begged a sponge cake from nurse, and could be heard breaking from time
to time into such sentences as, "Do have a little more tweacle pudding,
Mrs. Smith. It's the best tweacle," and, "It's a nice day, isn't it!"
but he was sorely interrupted by the noisy festivities of the Indians
who broke, frequently, into realistic cries of "Oh! Roger, you're
pulling my hair," or "I won't play if you don't look out!"

It may be that these interruptions disturbed the actuality of Bim's
festivities, or it may be that the rattling of the rain upon the window
panes diverted his attention. Once he broke into a chuckle. "Isn't they
banging on the window, Lucy?" he said, but she was, it appeared, too
deeply engaged to answer him. He found that, in a moment of abstraction,
he had eaten the whole of the sponge cake, so that it was obvious that
the party was over. "Good-bye, Mrs. Smith. It was really nice of you to
come. Good-bye, dear, Mrs. ---- I think the wain almost isn't coming
now."

He said farewell to them all and climbed upon the window seat. Here,
gazing down into the Square, he saw that the rain was stopping, and, on
the farther side, above the roofs of the houses, a little splash of gold
had crept into the grey. He watched the gold, heard the rain coming more
slowly; at first, "spatter-spatter-spatter," then, "spatter--spatter."
Then one drop very slowly after another drop. Then he saw that the sun
from somewhere far away had found out the wet paths in the garden, and
was now stealing, very secretly, along them. Soon it would strike the
seat, and then the statue of the funny fat man in all his clothes, and
then, perhaps, the fountain. He was unhappy a little, and he did not
know why: he was conscious, perhaps, of the untidy, noisy room behind
him, of his sister Dorothy who, now a Squaw of a quite genuine and
realistic kind, was crying at the top of her voice: "I don't care. I
will have it if I want to. You're _not_ to, Roger," and of Timothy, his
baby brother, who, moved by his sister's cries, howled monotonously,
persistently, hopelessly.

"Oh, give over, do, Miss Dorothy!" said the nurse, raising her eye for a
moment from her book. "Why can't you be quiet?"

Outside the world was beginning to shine and glitter, inside it was all
horrid and noisy. He sighed a little, he wanted to express in some way
his feelings. He looked at Lucy and drew closer to her. She had beside
her a painted china mug which one of her uncles had brought her from
Russia; she had stolen some daffodils from her mother's room downstairs
and now was arranging them. This painted mug was one of her most valued
possessions, and Bim himself thought it, with its strange red and brown
figures running round it, the finest thing in all the world.

"Lucy," he said. "Do you s'pose if you was going to jump all the way
down to the street and wasn't afraid that p'r'aps your legs wouldn't get
broken?"

He was not, in reality, greatly interested in the answer to his
question, but the important thing always with Lucy was first to enchain
her attention. He had learnt, long ago, that to tell her that he loved
her, to invite tenderness from her in return, was to ask for certain
rebuff--he always began his advances then in this roundabout manner.

"_What do_ you think, Lucy?"

"Oh, I don't know. How can I tell? Don't bother."

It was then that Bim felt what was, for him, a very rare sensation. He
was irritated.

"I don't bovver," he said, with a cross look in the direction of his
brother and sister Rochesters. "No, but, Lucy, s'pose some one--nurse,
s'pose--_did_ fall down into the street and broke all her legs and arms,
she wouldn't be dead, would she?"

"You silly little boy, of course not."

He looked at Lucy, saw the frown upon her forehead, and felt suddenly
that all his devotion to her was wasted, that she didn't want him, that
nobody wanted him--now when the sun was making the garden glitter like a
jewel and the fountain to shine like a sword.

He felt in his throat a hard, choking lump. He came closer to his
sister.

"You might pay 'tention, Lucy," he said plaintively.

Lucy broke a daffodil stalk viciously. "Go and talk to the others," she
said. "I haven't time for you."

The tears were hot in his eyes and anger was in his heart--anger bred of
the rain, of the noise, of the confusion.

"You _are_ howwid," he said slowly.

"Well, go away, then, if I'm horrid," she pushed with her hand at his
knee. "I didn't ask you to come here."

Her touch infuriated him; he kicked and caught a very tender part of her
calf.

"Oh! You little beast!" She came to him, leant for a moment across him,
then slapped his cheek.

The pain, the indignity, and, above all, a strange confused love for his
sister that was near to passionate rage, let loose all the devils that
owned Bim for their habitation.

He did three things: He screamed aloud, he bent forward and bit Lucy's
hand hard, he seized Lucy's wonderful Russian mug and dashed it to the
ground. He then stood staring at the shattered fragments.


III

There followed, of course, confusion. Nurse started up. "The Shadow of
Ashlydyat" descended into the ashes, the children rushed eagerly from
beneath the table to the centre of hostilities.

But there were no hostilities. Lucy and Bim were, both of them, utterly
astonished, Lucy, as she looked at the scattered mug, was, indeed,
sobbing, but absent-mindedly--her thoughts were elsewhere. Her
thoughts, in fact, were with Bim. She realised suddenly that never
before had he lost his temper with her; she was aware that his affection
had been all this time of value to her, of much more value, indeed, than
the stupid old mug. She bent down--still absent-mindedly sobbing--and
began to pick up the pieces. She was really astonished--being a dry and
rather hard little girl--at her affection for Bim.

The nurse seized on the unresisting villain of the piece and shook him.
"You _naughty_ little boy! To go and break your sister's beautiful mug.
It's your horrid temper that'll be the ruin of you, mark my words, as
I'm always telling you." (Bim had never been known to lose his temper
before.) "Yes, it will. You see, you naughty boy. And all the other
children as good as gold and quiet as lambs, and you've got to go and do
this. You shall stand in the corner all tea-time, and not a bite shall
you have." Here Bim began, in a breathless, frightened way, to sob.
"Yes, well you may. Never mind, Miss Lucy, I dare say your uncle will
bring you another." Here she became conscious of an attentive and deeply
interested audience. "Now, children, time to get ready for tea. Run
along, Miss Dorothy, now. What a nuisance you all are, to be sure."

They were removed from the scene. Bim was placed in the corner with his
face to the wall. He was aghast; no words can give, at all, any idea of
how dumbly aghast he was. What possessed him? What, in an instant of
time, had leapt down from the clouds, had sprung up from the Square and
seized him? Between his amazed thoughts came little surprised sobs. But
he had not abandoned himself to grief--he was too sternly set upon the
problem of reparation. Something must be done, and that quickly.

The great thought in his mind was that he must replace the mug. He had
not been very often in the streets beyond the Square, but upon certain
occasions he had seen their glories, and he knew that there had been
shops and shops and shops. Quite close to him, upon a shelf, was his
money-box, a squat, ugly affair of red tin, into whose large mouth he
had been compelled to force those gifts that kind relations had
bestowed. There must be now quite a fortune there--enough to buy many
mugs. He could not himself open it, but he did not doubt that the man
in the shop would do that for him.

Not for many more moments would he be left alone. His hat was lying on
the table; he seized that and his money-box, and was out on the landing.

The rest is _his_ story. I cannot, as I have already said, vouch for the
truth of it. At first, fortune was on his side. There seemed to be no
one about the house. He went down the wide staircase without making any
sound; in the hall he stopped for a moment because he heard voices, but
no one came. Then with both hands, and standing on tiptoe, he turned the
lock of the door, and was outside.

The Square was bathed in golden sun, a sun, the stronger for his
concealment, but tempered, too, with the fine gleam that the rain had
left. Never before had Bim been outside that door alone; he was aware
that this was a very tremendous adventure. The sky was a washed and
delicate purple, and behold! on the high railings, a row of sparrows
were chattering. Voices were cold and clear, echoing, as it seemed,
against the straight, grey walls of the houses, and all the trees in the
garden glistened with their wet leaves shining with gold; there seemed
to be, too, a dim veil of smoke that was homely and comfortable.

It is not usual to see a small boy of four alone in a London square, but
Bim met, at first, no one except a messenger boy, who stopped and looked
after him. At the corner of the Square--just out of the Square so that
it might not shame its grandeur--was a fruit and flower shop, and this
shop was the entrance to a street that had much life and bustle about
it. Here Bim paused with his money-box clasped very tightly to him. Then
he made a step or two and was instantly engulfed, it seemed, in a
perfect whirl of men and women, of carts and bicycles, of voices and
cries and screams; there were lights of every colour, and especially one
far above his head that came and disappeared and came again with
terrifying wizardry.

He was, quite suddenly, and as it were, by the agency of some outside
person, desperately frightened. It was a new terror, different from
anything that he had known before. It was as though a huge giant had
suddenly lifted him up by the seat of his breeches, or a witch had
transplanted him on to her broomstick and carried him off. It was as
unusual as that.

His under lip began to quiver, and he knew that presently he would be
crying. Then, as he always did, when something unusual occurred to him,
he thought of "Mr. Jack." At this point, when you ask him what happened,
he always says: "Oh! He came, you know--came walking along--like he
always did."

"Was he just like other people, Bim?"

"Yes, just. With a beard, you know--just like he always was."

"Yes, but what sort of things did he wear?" "Oh, just ord'nary things,
like you." There was no sense of excitement or wonder to be got out of
him. It was true that Mr. Jack hadn't shown himself for quite a long
time, but that, Bim felt, was natural enough. "He'll come less and
seldomer and seldomer as you get big, you know. It was just at first,
when one was very little and didn't know one's way about--just to help
babies not to be frightened. Timothy would tell you only he won't. Then
he comes only a little--just at special times like this was."

Bim told you this with a slightly bored air, as though it were silly of
you not to know, and really his air of certainty made an incredulous
challenge a difficult thing. On the present occasion Mr. Jack was just
there, in the middle of the crowd, smiling and friendly. He took Bim's
hand, and, "Of course," Bim said, "there didn't have to be any
'splaining. _He_ knew what I wanted." True or not, I like to think of
them, in the evening air, serenely safe and comfortable, and in any
case, it was surely strange that if, as one's common sense compels one
to suppose, Bim were all alone in that crowd, no one wondered or stopped
him nor asked him where his home was. At any rate, I have no opinions on
the subject. Bim says that, at once, they found themselves out of the
crowd in a quiet, little "dinky" street, as he called it, a street that,
in his description of it, answered to nothing that I can remember in
this part of the world. His account of it seems to present a dark,
rather narrow place, with overhanging roofs and swinging signs, and
nobody, he says, at all about, but a church with a bell, and outside one
shop a row of bright-coloured clothes hanging. At any rate, here Bim
found the place that he wanted. There was a little shop with steps down
into it and a tinkling bell which made a tremendous noise when you
pushed the old oak door. Inside there was every sort of thing. Bim lost
himself here in the ecstasy of his description, lacking also names for
many of the things that he saw. But there was a whole suit of shining
armour, and there were jewels, and old brass trays, and carpets, and a
crocodile, which Bim called a "crodocile." There was also a friendly old
man with a white beard, and over everything a lovely smell, which Bim
said was like "roast potatoes" and "the stuff mother has in a bottle in
her bedwoom."

Bim could, of course, have stayed there for ever, but Mr. Jack reminded
him of a possibly anxious family. "There, is that what you're after?"
he said, and, sure enough, there on a shelf, smiling and eager to be
bought, was a mug exactly like the one that Bim had broken.

There was then the business of paying for it, the money-box was produced
and opened by the old man with "a shining knife," and Bim was gravely
informed that the money found in the box was exactly the right amount.
Bim had been, for a moment, in an agony of agitation lest he should have
too little, but as he told us, "There was all Uncle Alfred's Christmas
money, and what mother gave me for the tooth, and that silly lady with
the green dress who _would_ kiss me." So, you see, there must have been
an awful amount.

Then they went, Bim clasping his money-box in one hand and the mug in
the other. The mug was wrapped in beautiful blue paper that smelt, as we
were all afterwards to testify, of dates and spices. The crocodile
flapped against the wall, the bell tinkled, and the shop was left behind
them. "Most at once," Bim said they were by the fruit shop again; he
knew that Mr. Jack was going, and he had a sudden most urgent longing to
go with him, to stay with him, to be with him always. He wanted to cry;
he felt dreadfully unhappy, but all of his thanks, his strange desires,
that he could bring out was, in a quavering voice, trying hard, you
understand, not to cry, "Mr. Jack. Oh! Mr.----" and his friend was gone.


IV

He trotted home; with every step his pride increased. What would Lucy
say? And dim, unrealised, but forming, nevertheless, the basis for the
whole of his triumph, was his consciousness that she who had scoffed,
derided, at his "Mr. Jack," should now so absolutely benefit by him.
This was bringing together, at last, the two of them.

His nurse, in a fine frenzy of agitation, met him. Her relief at his
safety swallowed her anger. She could only gasp at him. "Well, Master
Bim, and a nice state---- Oh, dear! to think; wherever----"

On the doorstep he forced his nurse to pause, and, turning, looked at
the gardens now in shadow of spun gold, with the fountain blue as the
sky. He nodded his head with satisfaction. It had been a splendid time.
It would be a very long while, he knew, before he was allowed out again
like that. Yes. He clasped the mug tightly, and the door closed behind
him.

I don't know that there is anything more to say. There were the empty
money-box and the mug. There was Bim's unhesitating and unchangeable
story. There _is_ a shop, just behind the Square, where they have some
Russian crockery. But Bim alone!

_I_ don't know.




CHAPTER V

NANCY ROSS


I

Mr. Munty Ross's house was certainly the smartest in March Square; No.
14, where the Duchess of Crole lived, was shabby in comparison. Very
often you may see a line of motor-cars and carriages stretching down the
Square, then round the corner into Lent Street, and you may know
then--as, indeed, all the Square did know and most carefully
observed--that Mrs. Munty Boss was giving another of her smart little
parties. That dark-green door, that neat overhanging balcony, those
rows--in the summer months--of scarlet geraniums, that roll of carpet
that ran, many times a week, from the door over the pavement to the very
foot of the waiting vehicle--these things were Mrs. Munty Ross's.

Munty Ross--a silent, ugly, black little man--had had made his money in
potted shrimps, or something equally compact and indigestible, and it
really was very nice to think that anything in time could blossom out
into beauty as striking as Mrs. Munty's lovely dresses, or melody as
wonderful as the voice of M. Radiziwill, the famous tenor, whom she
often "turned on" at her little evening parties. Upon Mr. Munty alone
the shrimps seemed to have made no effect. He was as black, as
insignificant, as ugly as ever he had been in the days before he knew of
a shrimp's possibilities. He was very silent at his wife's parties, and
sometimes dropped his h's. What Mrs. Munty had been before her marriage
no one quite knew, but now she was flaxen and slim and beautifully
clothed, with a voice like an insincere canary; she had "a passion for
the Opera," a "passion for motoring," "a passion for the latest
religion," and "a passion for the simple life." All these things did the
shrimps enable her to gratify, and "the simple life" cost her more than
all the others put together.

Heaven had blessed them with one child, and that child was called Nancy.
Nancy, her mother always said with pride, was old for her age, and, as
her age was only just five, that remark was quite true. Nancy Ross was
old for any age. Had she herself, one is compelled when considering her
to wonder, any conception during those first months of the things that
were going to be made out of her, and had she, perhaps at the very
commencement of it all, some instinct of protest and rebellion? Poor
Nancy! The tragedy of her whole case was now none other than that she
hadn't, here at five years old in March Square, the slightest picture of
what she had become, nor could she, I suppose, have imagined it possible
for her to become anything different. Nancy, in her own real and naked
person, was a small child with a good flow of flaxen hair and light-blue
eyes. All her features were small and delicate, and she gave you the
impression that if you only pulled a string or pushed a button somewhere
in the middle of her back you could evoke any cry, smile or exclamation
that you cared to arouse. Her eyes were old and weary, her attitude
always that of one who had learnt the ways of this world, had found them
sawdust, but had nevertheless consented still to play the game. Just as
the house was filled with little gilt chairs and china cockatoos, so was
Nancy arrayed in ribbons and bows and lace. Mrs. Munty had, one must
suppose, surveyed during certain periods in her life certain real
emotions rather as the gaping villagers survey the tiger behind his bars
in the travelling circus.

The time had then come when she put these emotions away from her as
childish things, and determined never to be faced with any of them
again. It was not likely, then, that she would introduce Nancy to any of
them. She introduced Nancy to clothes and deportment, and left it at
that. She wanted her child to "look nice." She was able, now that Nancy
was five years old, to say that she "looked very nice indeed."


II

From the very beginning nurses were chosen who would take care of Nancy
Boss's appearance. There was plenty of money to spend, and Nancy was a
child who, with her flaxen hair and blue eyes, would repay trouble. She
_did_ repay it, because she had no desires towards grubbiness or
rebellion, or any wildnesses whatever. She just sat there with her doll
balanced neatly in her arms, and allowed herself to be pulled and
twisted and squeezed and stretched. "There's a pretty little lady,"
said nurse, and a pretty little lady Nancy was sure that she was. The
order for her day was that in the morning she went out for a walk in the
gardens in the Square, and in the afternoon she went out for another.
During these walks she moved slowly, her doll delicately carried, her
beautiful clothes shining with approval of the way that they were worn,
her head high, "like a little queen," said her nurse. She was conscious
of the other children in the gardens, who often stopped in the middle of
their play and watched her. She thought them hot and dirty and very
noisy. She was sorry for their mothers.

It happened sometimes that she came downstairs, towards the end of a
luncheon party, and was introduced to the guests. "You pretty little
thing," women in very large hats said to her. "Lovely hair," or "She's
the very image of _you_, Clarice," to her mother. She liked to hear that
because she greatly admired her mother. She knew that she, Nancy Ross,
was beautiful; she knew that clothes were of an immense importance; she
knew that other children were unpleasant. For the rest, she was neither
extravagantly glad nor extravagantly sorry. She preserved a fine
indifference.... And yet, although, here my story may seem to
matter-of-fact persons to take a turn towards the fantastic, this was
not quite all. Nancy herself, dimly and yet uneasily, was aware that
there was something else.

She was not a little girl who believed in fairies or witches or the
"bogey man," or anything indeed that she could not see. She inherited
from her mother a splendid confidence in the reality, the solid,
unquestioned reality of all concrete and tangible things. She had been
presented once with a fine edition of "Grimm's Fairy Tales," an edition
with coloured pictures and every allure. She had turned its pages with a
look of incredulous amazement. "What," she seemed to say--she was then
aged three and a half--"are these absurd things that you are telling me?
People aren't like that. Mother isn't in the least like that. I don't
understand this, and it's tedious!"

"I'm afraid the child has no imagination," said her nurse.

"What a lucky thing!" said her mother.

Nor could Mrs. Ross's house be said to be a place that encouraged
fairies. They would have found the gilt chairs hard to sit upon, and
there were no mysterious corners. There was nothing mysterious at all.
And yet Nancy Ross, sitting in her magnificent clothes, was conscious as
she advanced towards her sixth year that she was not perfectly
comfortable. To say that she felt lonely would be, perhaps, to emphasise
too strongly her discomfort. It was perhaps rather that she felt
inquisitive--only a little, a very little--but she did begin to wish
that she could ask a few questions.

There came a day--an astonishing day--when she felt irritated with her
mother. She had during her walk through the garden seen a little boy and
a little girl, who were grubbing about in a little pile of earth and
sand there in the corner under the trees, and grubbing very happily.
They had dirt upon their faces, but their nurse was sitting, apparently
quite easy in her mind, and the sun had not stopped in its course nor
had the birds upon the trees ceased to sing. Nancy stayed for a moment
her progress and looked at them, and something not very far from envy
struck, in some far-distant hiding-place, her soul. She moved on, but
when she came indoors and was met by her mamma and a handsome lady, her
mamma's friend, who said: "Isn't she a pretty dear?" and her mother
said: "That's right, Nancy darling, been for your walk?" she was, for an
amazing moment, irritated with her beautiful mother.


III

Once she was conscious of this desire to ask questions she had no more
peace. Although she was only five years of age, she had all the
determination not "to give herself away" of a woman of forty. She was
not going to show that she wanted anything in the world, and yet she
would have liked--A little wistfully she looked at her nurse. But that
good woman, carefully chosen by Mrs. Ross, was not the one to encourage
questions. She was as shining as a new brass nail, and a great deal
harder.

The nursery was as neat as a pin, with a lovely bright rocking-horse
upon which Nancy had never ridden; a pink doll's-house with every modern
contrivance, whose doors had never been opened; a number of expensive
dolls, which had never been disrobed. Nancy approached these
joys--diffidently and with caution. She rode upon the horse, opened the
doll's-house, embraced the dolls, but she had no natural imagination to
bestow upon them, and the horse and the dolls, hurt, perhaps, at their
long neglect, received her with frigidity. Those grubby little children
in the Square would, she knew, have been "there" in a moment. She began
then to be frightened. The nursery, her bedroom, the dark little passage
outside, were suddenly alarming. Sometimes, when she was sitting quietly
in her nursery, the house was so silent that she could have screamed.

"I don't think Miss Nancy's quite well, ma'am," said the nurse.

"Oh, dear! What a nuisance," said Mrs. Ross who liked her little girl to
be always well and beautiful. "I do hope she's not going to catch
something."

"She doesn't take that pleasure in her clothes she did," said the nurse.

"Perhaps she wants some new ones," said her mother. "Take her to
Florice, nurse." Nancy went to Florice, and beautiful new garments were
invented, and once again she was squeezed, and tightened, and stretched,
and pulled. But Nancy was indifferent. As they tried these clothes, and
stood back, and stepped forward, and admired and criticised, she was
thinking, "I wish the nursery clock didn't make such a noise."

Her little bedroom next to nurse's large one was a beautiful affair,
with red roses up and down the wall-paper and in and out of the crockery
and round and round the carpet. Her bed was magnificent, with lace and
more roses, and there was a fine photograph of her beautiful mother in a
silver frame on the mantelpiece. But all these things were of little
avail when the dark came. She began to be frightened of the dark.

There came a night when, waking with a suddenness that did of itself
contribute to her alarm, she was conscious that the room was intensely
dark, and that every one was very far away. The house, as she listened,
seemed to be holding its breath, the clock in the nursery was ticking in
a frightened, startled terror, and hesitating, whimsical noises broke,
now close, now distant, upon the silence. She lay there, her heart
beating as it had surely never been allowed to beat before. She was
simply a very small, very frightened little girl. Then, before she could
cry out, she was aware that some one was standing beside her bed. She
was aware of this before she looked, and then, strangely (even now she
had taken no peep), she was frightened no longer.

The room, the house, were suddenly comfortable and safe places; as water
slips from a pool and leaves it dry, so had terror glided from her side.
She looked up then, and, although the place had been so dark that she
had been unable to distinguish the furniture, she could figure to
herself quite clearly her visitor's form. She not only figured it, but
also quite easily and readily recognised it. All these years she had
forgotten him, but now at the vision of his large comfortable presence
she was back again amongst experiences and recognitions that evoked for
her once more all those odd first days when, with how much discomfort
and puzzled dismay, she had been dropped, so suddenly, into this
distressing world. He put his arms around her and held her; he bent down
and kissed her, and her small hand went up to his beard in exactly the
way that it used to do. She nestled up against him.

"It's a very long time, isn't it," he said, "since I paid you a visit!"

"Yes, a long, long time."

"That's because you didn't want me. You got on so well without me."

"I didn't forget about you," she said. "But I asked mummy about you
once, and she said you were all nonsense, and I wasn't to think things
like that."

"Ah! your mother's forgotten altogether. She knew me once, but she
hasn't wanted me for a very, very long time. She'll see me again,
though, one day."

"I'm so glad you've come. You won't go away again now, will you?"

"I never go away," he said. "I'm always here. I've seen everything
you've been doing, and a very dull time you've been making of it."

He talked to her and told her about some of the things the other
children in the Square were doing. She was interested a little, but not
very much; she still thought a great deal more about herself than about
anything or anybody else.

"Do they all love you?" she said.

"Oh, no, not at all. Some of them think I'm horrid. Some of them forget
me altogether, and then I never come back, until just at the end. Some
of them only want me when they're in trouble. Some, very soon, think it
silly to believe in me at all, and the older they grow the less they
believe, generally. And when I do come they won't see me, they make up
their minds not to. But I'm always there just the same; it makes no
difference what they do. They can't help themselves. Only it's better
for them just to remember me a little, because then it's much safer for
them. You've been feeling rather lonely lately, haven't you?"

"Yes," she said. "It's stupid now all by myself. There's nobody to ask
questions of."

"Well, there's somebody else in your house who's lonely."

"Is there?" She couldn't think of any one.

"Yes. Your father."

"Oh! Father----" She was uninterested.

"Yes. You see, if he isn't----" and then, at that, he was gone, she was
alone and fast asleep.

In the morning when she awoke, she remembered it all quite clearly, but,
of course, it had all been a dream. "Such a funny dream," she told her
nurse, but she would give out no details.

"Some food she's been eating," said her nurse.

Nevertheless, when, on that afternoon, coming in from her walk, she met
her dark, grubby little father in the hall, she did stay for a moment on
the bottom step of the stairs to consider him.

"I've been for a walk, daddy," she said, and then, rather frightened at
her boldness, tumbled up on the next step. He went forward to catch her.

"Hold up," he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused
and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum. These were, very nearly, the
first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together,
interchanged. Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was
discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the
uneasiness that he felt with children. Little girls (who certainly
looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly;
moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy
with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright
and easy in any society. "Poor old Munty," she would say to her friends,
"it's not all his fault----" It was, as a fact, very largely hers. He had
never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness
slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier
conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom. It had been understood
from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father's world. He
would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at
certain periods, paid bills for her clothes.

"What's a child want with all this?" he had ventured once to say.

"Hardly your business, my dear," his wife had told him. "The child's
clothes are marvellously cheap considering. I don't know how Florice
does it for the money." He resented nothing--it was not his way--but he
did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that
it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his
daughter was praised, that "the kid will grow up with the most
tremendous ideas."

He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily
accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father. "She might
just want to see me occasionally. But I'd only frighten her, I suppose,
if she did."

Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was
completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in
the worth and goodness of no one at all. He had, for a brief wild
moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that,
"the earlier the better." "My dear," she would say to a chosen friend,
"what Munty's like when he's romantic!" She never, after the first month
of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him.

Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his
little daughter tumbling on the stairs. He wondered what had made her do
it. He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.

To Nancy also it had made a great difference. She wished that she had
stayed there on the stairs a little longer to hold a more important
conversation. She had thought of her father as "all horrid"--now his
very contrast to her little world pleased and interested her. It may
also be that, although she was young, she had even now a picture in her
mind of her father's loneliness. She may have seen into her mother's
attitude with an acuteness much older than her actual years.

She thought now continually about her father. She made little plans to
meet him, but these meetings were not, as a rule, successful, because so
often he was down in the city. She would wait at the end of her
afternoon walk on the stairs.

"Come along, Miss Nancy, do. What are you hanging about there for?"

"Nothing."

"You'll be disturbing your mother."

"Just a minute."

She peered anxiously, her little head almost held by the railings of the
banisters; she gazed down into black, mysterious depths wherein her
father might be hidden. She was driven to all this partly by some real
affection that had hitherto found no outlet, partly by a desire for
adventure, but partly, also, by some force that was behind her and quite
recognised by her. It was as though she said: "If I'm nice to my father
and make friends with him, then you must promise that I shan't be
frightened in the middle of the night, that the clock won't tick too
loudly, that the blind won't flap, that it won't all be too dark and
dreadful." She knew that she had made this compact.

Then she had several little encounters with her father. She met him one
day on the doorstep. He had come up whilst she was standing there.

"Had a good walk?" he said nervously. She looked at him and laughed.
Then he went hurriedly indoors.

On the second occasion she had come down to be shown off at a luncheon
party. She had been praised and petted, and then, in the hall, had run
into her father's arms. He was in his top-hat, going down to his old
city, looking, the nurse thought, "just like a monkey." But Nancy
stayed, holding on to the leg of his trousers. Suddenly he bent down and
whispered:

"Were they nice to you in there?"

"Yes. Why weren't you there?"

"I was. I left. Got to go and work."

"What sort of work?"

"Making money for your clothes."

"Take me too."

"Would you like to come?"

"Yes. Take me."

He bent down and kissed her, but, suddenly hearing the voices of the
luncheon-party, they separated like conspirators. He crept out of the
house.

After that there was no question of their alliance. The sort of
affection that most children feel for old, ugly, and battered dolls,
Nancy now felt for her father, and the warmth of this affection melted
her dried, stubborn little soul, caught her up into visions, wonders,
sympathies that had seemed surely denied to her for ever.

"Now sit still, Miss Nancy, while I do up the back."

"Oh, silly old clothes!" said Nancy.

Then one day she declared,

"I want to be dirty like those children in the garden."

"And a nice state your mother would be in!" cried the amazed nurse.

"Father wouldn't," Nancy thought. "Father wouldn't mind."

There came at last the wonderful day when her father penetrated into the
nursery. He arrived furtively, very much, it appeared, ashamed of
himself and exceedingly shy of the nurse. He did not remain very long.
He said very little; a funny picture he had made with his blue face, his
black shiny hair, his fat little legs, and his anxious, rather stupid
eyes. He sat rather awkwardly in a chair, with Nancy on his knee; he
wrung his hair for things to say.

The nurse left them for a moment alone together, and then Nancy
whispered:

"Daddy, let's go into the gardens together, you and me; just us--no
silly old nurse--one mornin'." (She found the little "g" still a
difficulty.)

"Would you like that?" he whispered back. "I don't know I'd be much good
in a garden."

"Oh, you'll be all right," she asserted with confidence. "I want to
dig."

She'd made up her mind then to that. As Hannibal determined to cross the
Alps, as Napoleon set his feet towards Moscow, so did Nancy Ross resolve
that she would, in the company of her father, dig in the gardens. She
stroked her father's hand, rubbed her head upon his sleeve; exactly as
she would have caressed, had she been another little girl, the damaged
features of her old rag doll. She was beginning, however, for the first
time in her life, to love some one other than herself.

He came, then, quite often to the nursery. He would slip in, stay a
moment or two, and slip out again. He brought her presents and sweets
which made her ill. And always in the presence of Mrs. Munty they
appeared as strangers.

The day came when Nancy achieved her desire--they had their great
adventure.


IV

A fine summer morning came, and with it, in a bowler hat, at the nursery
door, the hour being about eleven, Mr. Munty Boss.

"I'll take Nancy this morning, nurse," he said, with a strange, choking
little "cluck" in his throat. Now, the nurse, although, as I've said, of
a shining and superficial appearance, was no fool. She had watched the
development of the intrigue; her attitude to the master of the house was
composed of pity, patronage, and a rather motherly interest. She did not
see how her mistress could avoid her attitude: it was precisely the
attitude that she would herself have adopted in that position, but,
nevertheless, she was sorry for the man. "So out of it as he is!" Her
maternal feelings were uppermost now. "It's nice of the child," she
thought, "and him so ugly."

"Of course, sir," she said.

"We shall be back in about an hour." He attempted an easy indifference,
was conscious that he failed, and blushed.

He was aware that his wife was out.

He carried off his prize.

The gardens were very full on this lovely summer morning, but Nancy,
without any embarrassment or confusion, took charge of the proceedings.

"Where are we going?" he said, gazing rather helplessly about him,
feeling extremely shy. There were so many bold children--so many bolder
nurses; even the birds on the trees seemed to deride him, and a stumpy
fox-terrier puppy stood with its four legs planted wide barking at him.

"Over here," she said without a moment's hesitation, and she dragged him
along. She halted at last in a corner of the gardens where was a large,
overhanging chestnut and a wooden seat. Here the shouts and cries of the
children came more dimly, the splashing of the fountain could be heard
like a melodious refrain with a fascinating note of hesitation in it,
and the deep green leaves of the tree made a cool, thick covering. "Very
nice," he said, and sat down on the seat, tilting his hat back and
feeling very happy indeed.

Nancy also was very happy. There, in front of her, was the delightful
pile of earth and sand untouched, it seemed. In an instant, regardless
of her frock, she was down upon her knees.

"I ought to have a spade," she said.

"You'll make yourself dreadfully dirty, Nancy. Your beautiful frock----"
But he had nevertheless the feeling that, after all, he had paid for it,
and if he hadn't the right to see it ruined, who had?

"Oh!" she murmured with the ecstasy of one who has abandoned herself,
freely and with a glad heart, to all the vices. She dug her hands into
the mire, she scattered it about her, she scooped and delved and
excavated. It was her intention to build something in the nature of a
high, high hill. She patted the surface of the sand, and behold! it was
instantly a beautiful shape, very smooth and shining.

It was hot, her hat fell back, her knees were thick with the good brown
earth--that once lovely creation of Florice was stained and black.

She then began softly, partly to herself, partly to her father, and
partly to that other Friend who had helped her to these splendours, a
song of joy and happiness. To the ordinary observer, it might have
seemed merely a discordant noise proceeding from a little girl engaged
in the making of mud pies. It was, in reality, as the chestnut tree, the
birds, the fountain, the flowers, the various small children, even the
very earth she played with, understood, a fine offering--thanksgiving
and triumphal pæan to the God of Heaven, of the earth, and of the waters
that were under the earth.

Munty himself caught the refrain. He was recalled to a day when mud pies
had been to him also things of surpassing joy. There was a day when, a
naked and very ugly little boy, he had danced beside a mountain burn.

He looked upon his daughter and his daughter looked upon him; they were
friends for ever and ever. She rose; her fingers were so sticky with mud
that they stood apart; down her right cheek ran a fine black smear; her
knees were caked.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. She flung herself upon him and kissed him;
down his cheek also now a fine smear marked its way.

He looked at his watch--one o'clock. "Good heavens!" he said again. "I
say, old girl, we'll have to be going. Mother's got a party." He tried
ineffectually to cleanse his daughter's face.

"We'll come back," she cried, looking down triumphantly upon her
handiwork.

"We'll have to smuggle you up into the nursery somehow." But he added,
"Yes, we'll come again."


V

They hurried home. Very furtively Munty Boss fitted his key into the
Yale lock of his fine door. They slipped into the hall. There before
them were Mrs. Ross and two of her most splendid friends. Very fine was
Munty's wife in a tight-clinging frock of light blue, and wearing upon
her head a hat like a waste-paper basket with a blue handle at the back
of it; very fine were her two lady friends, clothed also in the tightest
of garments, shining and lovely and precious.

"Good God, Munty--and the child!"

It was a terrible moment. Quite unconscious was Munty of the mud that
stained his cheek, perfectly tranquil his daughter as she gazed with
glowing happiness about her. A terrible moment for Mrs. Ross, an
unforgettable one for her friends; nor were they likely to keep the
humour of it entirely to themselves.

"Down in a minute. Going up to clean." Smiling, he passed his wife. On
the bottom step Nancy chanted:

"We've had the most lovely mornin', daddy and I. We've been diggin'.
We're goin' to dig again. Aren't I dirty, mummy?"

Round the corner of the stairs in the shadow Nancy kissed her father
again.

"I'm never goin' to be clean any more," she announced. And you may
fancy, if you please, that somewhere in the shadows of the house some
one heard those words and chuckled with delighted pleasure.




CHAPTER VI

'ENERY


I

Mrs. Slater was caretaker at No. 21 March. Square. Old Lady Cathcart
lived with her middle-aged daughter at No. 21, and, during half the
year, they were down at their place in Essex; during half the year,
then, Mrs. Slater lived in the basement of No. 21 with her son Henry,
aged six.

Mrs. Slater was a widow; upon a certain afternoon, two and a half years
ago, she had paused in her ironing and listened. "Something," she told
her friends afterwards, "gave her a start--she couldn't say what nor
how." Her ironing stayed, for that afternoon at least, where it was,
because her husband, with his head in a pulp and his legs bent
underneath him, was brought in on a stretcher, attended by two
policemen. He had fallen from a piece of scaffolding into Piccadilly
Circus, and was unable to afford any further assistance to the
improvements demanded by the Pavilion Music Hall. Mrs. Slater, a stout,
amiable woman, who had never been one to worry; Henry Slater, Senior,
had been a bad husband, "what with women and the drink"--she had no
intention of lamenting him now that he was dead; she had done for ever
with men, and devoted the whole of her time and energy to providing
bread and butter for herself and her son.

She had been Lady Cathcart's caretaker for a year and a half, and had
given every satisfaction. When the old lady came up to London Mrs.
Slater went down to Essex and defended the country place from
suffragettes and burglars. "I shouldn't care for it," said a lady
friend, "all alone in the country with no cheerful noises nor human
beings."

"Doesn't frighten me, I give you my word, Mrs. East," said Mrs. Slater;
"not that I don't prefer the town, mind you."

It was, on the whole, a pleasant life, that carried with it a certain
dignity. Nobody who had seen old Lady Cathcart drive in her open
carriage, with her black bonnet, her coachman, and her fine, straight
back, could deny that she was one of Our Oldest and Best--none of your
mushroom families come from Lord knows where--it was a position of
trust, and as such Mrs. Slater considered it. For the rest she loved her
son Henry with more than a mother's love; he was as unlike his poor
father, bless him, as any child could be. Henry, although you would
never think it to look at him, was not quite like other children; he had
been, from his birth, a "little queer, bless his heart," and Mrs. Slater
attributed this to the fact that three weeks before the boy's birth,
Horny Slater, Senior, had, in a fine frenzy of inebriation, hit her over
the head with a chair. "Dead drunk, 'e was, and never a thought to the
child coming, ''Enery,' I said to him, 'it's the child you're hitting as
well as me'; but 'e was too far gone, poor soul, to take a thought."

Henry was a fine, robust child, with rosy cheeks and a sturdy, thick-set
body. He had large blue eyes and a happy, pleasant smile, but, although
he was six years of age, he could hardly talk at all, and liked to spend
the days twirling pieces of string round and round or looking into the
fire. His eyes were unlike the eyes of other children, and in their blue
depths there lurked strange apprehensions, strange anticipations,
strange remembrances. He had never, from the day of his birth, been
known to cry. When he was frightened or distressed the colour would pass
slowly from his cheeks, and strange little gasping breaths would come
from him; his body would stiffen and his hands clench. If he was angry
the colour in his face would darken and his eyes half close, and it was
then that he did, indeed, seem in the possession of some disastrous
thraldom--but he was angry very seldom, and only with certain people;
for the most part he was a happy child, "as quiet as a mouse." He was
unusual, too, in that he was a very cleanly child, and loved to be
washed, and took the greatest care of his clothes. He was very
affectionate, fond of almost every one, and passionately devoted to his
mother.

Mrs. Slater was a woman with very little imagination. She never
speculated on "how different things would be if they were different,"
nor did she sigh after riches, nor possessions, nor any of the goods
Fate bestows upon her favourites. She would, most certainly, have been
less fond of Henry had he been more like other children, and his
dependence upon her gave her something of the feeling that very rich
ladies have for very small dogs. She was too, in a way, proud. "Never
been able to talk, nor never will, they tell me, the lamb," she would
assure her friends, "but as gentle and as quiet!"

She would sit, sometimes, in the evening before the fire and think of
the old noisy, tiresome days when Henry, Senior, would beat her black
and blue, and would feel that her life had indeed fallen into pleasant
places.

There was nothing whatever in the house, all silent about her and filled
with shrouded furniture, that could alarm her. "Ghosts!" she would cry.
"You show me one, that's all. I'll give you ghosts!"

Her digestion was excellent, her sleep undisturbed by conscience or
creditors. She was a happy woman.

Henry loved March Square. There was a window in an upstairs passage from
behind whose glass he could gaze at the passing world. The Passing
World!... the shrouded house behind him. One was as alive, as bustling,
as demonstrative to him as the other, but between the two there was, for
him, no communication. His attitude to the Square and the people in it
was that he knew more about them than anyone else did; his attitude to
the House, that he knew nothing at all compared with what "They" knew.
In the Square he could see through the lot of them, so superficial were
they all; in the House he could only wait, with fingers on lip, for the
next revelation that they might vouchsafe to him.

Doors were, for the most part, locked, yet there were many days when
fires were lit because the house was an old one, and damp Lady Cathcart
had a horror of.

Always for young Henry the house wore its buried and abandoned air. He
was never to see it when the human beings in it would count more than
its furniture, and the human life in it more than the house itself. He
had come, a year and a half ago, into the very place that his dreams
had, from the beginning, built for him. Those large, high rooms with the
shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their
curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers
and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it
sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper,
"I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming!" that, nevertheless, again and
again defeated expectation. How could he but enjoy the fine field of
affection that these provided for him?

His mother watched him with maternal pride. "He's _that_ contented!" she
would say. "Any other child would plague your life away, but 'Enery----"

It was part of Henry's unusual mind that he wondered at nothing. He
remained in constant expectation, but whatever was to come to him it
would not bring surprise with it. He was in a world where anything might
happen. In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin
drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano
muffled in brown holland. The mirror caught the piano with its peaked
inquiring shape, that, in its inflection, looked so much more tremendous
and ominous than it did in plain reality. Through the mirror the piano
looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing
about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in
the house.

The windows of the room gave a fine display of the gardens, the
children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the
Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because
then the empty house and the empty square prepared themselves together
for some tremendous occurrence. Whenever such an interval of silence
struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the
world screwed itself up for the next event. "One--two--three." But the
crisis never came. The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted,
bells rang and motors screamed. Nevertheless, one day something would
surely happen.

The house was full of company, and the boy would, sometimes, have
yielded to the Fear that was never far away, had it not been for some
one whom he had known from the very beginning of everything, some one
who was as real as his mother, some one who was more powerful than
anything or any one in the house, and kinder, far, far kinder.

Often when Mrs. Slater would wonder of what her son was thinking as he
sat twisting string round and round in front of the fire, he would be
aware of his Friend in the shadow of the light, watching gravely, in the
cheerful room, having beneath his hands all the powers, good and evil,
of the house. Just as Henry pictured quite clearly to himself other
occupants of the house--some one with taloned claws behind the piano,
another with black-hooded eyes and a peaked cap in the shadows of an
upstairs passage, another brown, shrivelled and naked, who dwelt in a
cupboard in one of the empty bedrooms so, too, he could see his Friend,
vast and shadowy, with a flowing beard and eyes that were kind and
shining.

Often he had felt the pressure of his hand, had heard his reassuring
whisper in his ears, had known the touch of his lips upon his forehead.
No harm could come to him whilst his Friend was in the house--and his
Friend was always there.

He went always with his mother into the streets when she did her
shopping or simply took the air. It was natural that on these occasions,
he should be more frightened than during his hours in the house. In the
first place his Friend did not accompany him on these out-of-door
excursions, and his mother was not nearly so strong a protector as his
Friend.

Then he was disturbed by the people who pressed and pushed about
him--he had a sense that they were all like birds with flapping wings
and strange cries, rushing down upon him--the colours and confusion of
the shops bewildered him. There was too much here for him properly to
understand; he had enough to do with the piano, the mirror, the shadowed
passages, the staring windows.

But in the Square he was happy again. Mrs. Slater never ventured into
the gardens; they were for her superiors, and she complacently accepted
a world in which things were so ordered as the only world possible. But
there was plenty of life outside the gardens.

There were, on the different days of the week, the various musicians,
and Henry was friendly with them all. He delighted in music; as he stood
there, listening to the barrel-organ, the ideas, pictures, dreams, flew
like flocks of beautiful birds through his brain, fleet, and always just
beyond his reach, so that he could catch nothing, but would nod his head
and would hope that the tune would be repeated, because next time he
might, perhaps, be more fortunate.

The Major, who played the harp on Saturdays, was a friend of Mrs.
Slater. "Nice little feller, that of yours, mum," he would say. "'Ad
one meself once."

"Indeed?"

"Yes, sure enough.... Nice day.... Would you believe it, this is the
only London square left for us to play in?... 'Tis, indeed. Cruel shame,
I call it; life's 'ard.... You're right, mum, it is. Well, good-day."

Mrs. Slater looked after him affectionately. "Pore feller; and yet I
dare say he makes a pretty hit of it if all was known."

Henry sighed. The birds were flown again. He was left with the
blue-flecked sky and the grey houses that stood around the gardens like
beasts about a water-pool. The sun (a red disc) peered over their
shoulders. He went, with his mother within doors. Instantly on his
entrance the house began to rustle and whisper.


II

Mrs. Slater, although an amiable and kind-hearted human being who
believed with confident superstition in a God of other people's making,
did not, on the whole, welcome her lady friends with much cordiality. It
was not, as she often explained, as though she had her own house into
which to ask them. Her motto was, "Friendly with All, Familiar with
None," and to this she very faithfully held. But in her heart there was
reason enough for this caution; there had been days--yes, and nights
too--when, during her lamented husband's lifetime, she had "taken a
drop," taken it, obviously enough, as a comfort, and a solace when
things were going very hard with her, and "'Enery preferrin' 'er to be
jolly 'erself to keep 'im company." She had protested, but Fate and
Henry had been too strong for her. "She had fallen into the habit!"
Then, when No. 21 had come under her care, she had put it all sternly
behind her, but one did not know how weak one might be, and a kindly
friend might with her persuasion----

Therefore did Mrs. Slater avoid her kindly friends. There was, however,
one friend who was not so readily to be avoided; that was Mrs. Carter.
Mrs. Carter also was a widow, or rather, to speak the direct truth, had
discovered one morning, twenty years ago, that Mr. Carter "was gone"; he
had never returned. Those who knew Mrs. Carter intimately said that, on
the whole, "things bein' as they was," his departure was not entirely to
be wondered at. Mrs. Carter had a temper of her own, and nothing
inflamed it so much as a drop of whisky, and there was nothing in the
world she liked so much as "a drop."

To meet her casually, you would judge her nothing less than the most
amiable of womankind--a large, stout, jolly woman, with a face like a
rose, and a quantity of black hair. At her best, in her fine Sunday
clothes, she was a superb figure, and wore round her neck a rope of sham
pearls that would have done credit to a sham countess. During the week,
however, she slipped, on occasion, into "déshabille," and then she
appeared not quite so attractive. No one knew the exact nature of her
profession. She did a bit of "char"; she had at one time a little
sweetshop, where she sold sweets, the _Police Budget_, and--although
this was revealed only to her best friends--indecent photographs. It may
be that the police discovered some of the sources of her income; at any
rate the sweetshop was suddenly, one morning, abandoned. Her movements
in everything were sudden; it was quite suddenly that she took a fancy
to Mrs. Slater. She met her at a friend's, and at once, so she told Mrs.
Slater, "I liked yer, just as though I'd met yer before. But I'm like
that. Sudden or not at all is _my_ way, and not a bad way either!"

Mrs. Slater could not be said to be everything that was affectionate in
return. She distrusted Mrs. Carter, disliked her brilliant colouring and
her fluent experiences, felt shy before her rollicking suggestiveness,
and timid at her innuendoes. For a considerable time she held her
defences against the insidious attack. Then there came a day when Mrs.
Carter burst into reluctant but passionate tears, asserting that Life
and Mr. Carter had been, from the beginning, against her; that she had
committed, indeed, acts of folly in the past, but only when driven
desperately against a wall; that she bore no grudge against any one
alive, but loved all humanity; that she was going to do her best to be a
better woman, but couldn't really hope to arrive at any satisfactory
improvement without Mrs. Slater's assistance; that Mrs. Slater, indeed,
had shown her a New Way, a New Light, a New Path.

Mrs. Slater, humble woman, had no illusions as to her own importance in
the scheme of things; nothing touched her so surely as an appeal to her
strength of character. She received Mrs. Carter with open arms,
suggested that they should read the Bible together on Sunday mornings,
and go, side by side, to St. Matthew's on Sunday evenings. There was
nothing like a study of the "Holy Word" for "defeating the bottle," and
there was nothing like "defeating the bottle" for getting back one's
strength and firmness of character.

It was along these lines that Mrs. Slater proposed to conduct Mrs.
Carter.

Now unfortunately Henry took an instant and truly savage dislike to his
mother's new friend. He had been always, of course, "odd" in his
feelings about people, but never was he "odder" than he was with Mrs.
Carter. "Little lamb," she said, when she saw him for the first time. "I
envy you that child, Mrs. Slater, I do indeed. Backwards 'e may be, but
'is being dependent, as you may say, touches the 'eart. Little lamb!"

She tried to embrace him; she offered him sweets. He shuddered at her
approach, and his face was instantly grey, like a pool the moment after
the sun's setting. Had he been himself able to put into words his
sensations, he would have said that the sight of Mrs. Carter assured
him, quite definitely, that something horrible would soon occur.

The house upon whose atmosphere he so depended instantly darkened; his
Friend was gone, not because he was no longer able to see him (his
consciousness of him did not depend at all upon any visual assurance),
but because there was now, Henry was perfectly assured, no chance
whatever of his suddenly appearing. And, on the other hand, those
Others--the one with the taloned claws behind the piano, the one with
the black-hooded eyes--were stronger, more threatening, more dominating.
But, beyond her influence on the house, Mrs. Carter, in her own physical
and actual presence, tortured Henry. When she was in the room, Henry
suffered agony. He would creep away were he allowed, and, if that were
not possible, then he would retreat into the most distant corner and
watch. If he were in the room his eyes never left Mrs. Carter for a
moment, and it was this brooding gaze more than his disapproval that
irritated her. "You never can tell with poor little dears when they're
'queer' what fancies they'll take. Why, he quite seems to dislike me,
Mrs. Slater!"

Mrs. Slater could venture no denial; indeed, Henry's attitude aroused
once again in her mind her earlier suspicions. She had all the
reverence of her class for her son's "oddness." He knew more than
ordinary mortal folk, and could see farther; he saw beyond Mrs. Carter's
red cheeks and shining black hair, and the fact that he was, as a rule,
tractable to cheerful kindness, made his rejection the more remarkable.
But it might, nevertheless, be that the black things in Mrs. Carter's
past were the marks impressed upon Henry's sensitive intelligence; and
that he had not, as yet, perceived the new Mrs. Carter growing in grace
now day by day.

"'E'll get over 'is fancy, bless 'is 'eart." Mrs. Slater pursued then
her work of redemption.


III

On a certain evening in November, Mrs. Carter, coming in to see her
friend, invited sympathy for a very bad cold.

"Drippin' and runnin' at the nose I've been all day, my dear. Awake all
night I was with it, and 'tain't often that I've one, but when I do it's
somethin' cruel." It seemed to be better this evening, Mrs. Slater
thought, but when she congratulated her friend on this, Mrs. Carter,
shaking her head, remarked that it had left the nose and travelled into
the throat and ears. "Once it's earache, and I'm done," she said.
Horrible pictures she drew of this earache, and it presently became
clear that Mrs. Carter was in perfect terror of a night made sleepless
with pain. Once, it seemed, had Mrs. Carter tried to commit suicide by
hanging herself to a nail in a door, so maddening had the torture been.
Luckily (Mrs. Carter thanked Heaven) the nail had been dragged from the
door by her weight--"not that I was anything very 'eavy, you
understand." Finally, it appeared that only one thing in the world could
be relied upon to stay the fiend.

Mrs. Carter produced from her pocket a bottle of whisky.

Upon that it followed that, since her reformation, Mrs. Carter had come
to loathe the very smell of whisky, and as for the taste of it! But
rather than be driven by flaming agony down the long stony passages of a
sleepless night--anything.

It was here, of course, that Mrs. Slater should have protested, but, in
her heart, she was afraid of her friend, and afraid of herself. Mrs.
Carter's company had, of late, been pleasant to her. She had been
strengthened in her own resolves towards a fine life by the sight of
Mrs. Carter's struggle in that direction, and that good woman's genial
amiability (when it was so obvious from her appearance that she could be
far otherwise) flattered Mrs. Slater's sense of power. No, she could not
now bear to let Mrs. Carter go.

She said, therefore, nothing to her friend about the whisky, and on that
evening Mrs. Carter did take the "veriest sip." But the cold
continued--it continued in a marvellous and terrible manner. It seemed
"to 'ave taken right 'old of 'er system."

After a few evenings it was part of the ceremonies that the bottle
should be produced; the kettle was boiling happily on the fire, there
was lemon, there was a lump of sugar.... On a certain wet and depressing
evening Mrs. Slater herself had a glass "just to see that she didn't get
a cold like Mrs. Carter's."


IV

Henry's bed-time was somewhere between the hours of eight and nine, but
his mother did not care to leave Mrs. Carter (dear friend, though she
was) quite alone downstairs with the bottom half of the house unguarded
(although, of course, the doors were locked), therefore, Mrs. Carter
came upstairs with her friend to see the little fellow put to bed; "and
a hangel he looks, if ever I see one," declared the lady
enthusiastically.

When the two were gone and the house was still, Henry would sit up in
bed and listen; then, moving quietly, he would creep out and listen
again.

There, in the passage, it seemed to him that he could hear the whole
house talking--first one sound and then another would come, the wheeze
of some straining floor, the creak of some whispering board, the shudder
of a door. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" and then, above that murmur,
some louder voice: "Watch! there's danger in the place!" Then, shivering
with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower
passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were
deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little
streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim
light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and
cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the
far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange
contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred
echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like a cloud of gnats at the
window-pane. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" the house cried, and Henry,
with chattering teeth, was on guard.

There came an evening when standing thus, shivering in his little shirt,
he was aware that the terror, so long anticipated, was upon him. It
seemed to him, on this evening, that the house was suddenly still; it
was as though all the sounds, as of running water, that passed up and
down the rooms and passages, were, in a flashing second, frozen. The
house was holding its breath.

He had to wait for a breathless, agonising interval before he heard the
next sound, very faint and stifled breathing coming up to him out of the
darkness in little uncertain gusts. He heard the breathings pause, then
recommence again in quicker and louder succession. Henry, stirred
simply, perhaps, by the terror of his anticipation, moved back into the
darker shadows in the nook of the cabinet, and stayed there with his
shirt pressed against his little trembling knees.

Then followed, after a long time, a half yellow circle of light that
touched the top steps of the stairs and a square of the wall; behind the
light was the stealthy figure of Mrs. Carter. She stood there for a
moment, one hand with a candle raised, the other pressed against her
breast; from one finger of this hand a bunch of heavy keys dangled. She
stood there, with her wide, staring eyes, like glass in the
candle-light, staring about her, her red cheeks rising and falling with
her agitation, her body seeming enormous, her shadow on the wall huge in
the flickering light. At the sight of his enemy Henry's terror was so
frantic that his hands beat with little spasmodic movements against the
wall.

He did not _see_ Mrs. Carter at all, but he saw rather the movement
through the air and darkness of the house of something that would bring
down upon him the full naked force of the Terror that he had all his
lif

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