Chapter V

He did not see her again for a long time. He would have liked to have seen her, yes, just once more, but of course he was glad, quite glad, that she did not wish to risk it and drag from dim depths the old passion to break again in those idiotic bubbles of propriety. She did not answer his letter--he was amused. Then her long silence vexed him, until vexation was merged in alarm. She had gone away from Tutsan--of course--gone away on family affairs--oh, naturally!--she might be gone for ever. But a real grief came upon him. He had long mocked the girl, not only the girl but his own vision of her; now she was gone his mind elaborated her melancholy immobile figure into an image of beauty. Her absence, her silence, left him wretched. He heard of her from Ianthe who renewed her blandishments; he was not unwilling to receive them now--he hoped their intercourse might be reported to Kate.

After many months he did receive a letter from her. It was a tender letter though ill-expressed, not very wise or informative, but he could feel that the old affection for him was still there, and he wrote her a long reply in which penitence and passion and appeal were mingled.

“I know now, yes, I see it all now; solutions are so easy when the proof of them is passed. We were cold to each other, it was stupid, I should have _made_ you love me and it would have been well. I see it now. How stupid, how unlucky; it turned me to anger and you to sorrow. Now I can think only of you.”

She made no further sign, not immediately, and he grew dull again. His old disbelief in her returned. Bah! she loved him no more than a suicide loved the pond it dies in; she had used him for her senseless egoism, tempting him and fooling him, wantonly, he had not begun it, and she took a chaste pride in saving herself from him. What was it the old writer had said?

“Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections--give it but its head--’tis like a ramping and roaring lion.” Saving herself! Yes, she would save herself for marriage.

He even began to contemplate that outcome.

Her delayed letter, when it came, announced that she was coming home at once; he was to meet her train in the morning after the morrow.

It was a dull autumnal morning when he met her. Her appearance was not less charming than he had imagined it, though the charm was almost inarticulate and there were one or two crude touches that momentarily distressed him. But he met with a flush of emotion all her glances of gaiety and love that were somehow, vaguely, different--perhaps there was a shade less reserve. They went to lunch in the city and at the end of the meal he asked her:

“Well, why have you come back again?”

She looked at him intently: “Guess!”

“I--well, no--perhaps--tell me, Kate, yourself.”

“You are different now, you look different, David.”

“Am I changed? Better or worse?”

She did not reply and he continued:

“You too, are changed. I can’t tell how it is, or where, but you are.”

“O, I am changed, much changed,” murmured Kate.

“Have you been well?”

“Yes.”

“And happy?”

“Yes.”

“Then how unwise of you to come back.”

“I have come back,” said Kate, “to be happier. But somehow you are different.”

“You are different, too. Shall we ever be happy again?”

“Why--why not!” said Kate.

“Come on!” he cried hilariously, “let us make a day of it, come along!”

Out in the streets they wandered until rain began to fall.

“Come in here for a while.” They were passing a roomy dull building, the museum, and they went in together. It was a vast hollow-sounding flagstone place that had a central brightness fading into dim recesses and galleries of gloom. They examined a monster skeleton of something like an elephant, three stuffed apes, and a picture of the dodo. Kate stood before them without interest or amusement, she just contemplated them. What did she want with an elephant, an ape, or a dodo? The glass exhibit cases were leaned upon by them, the pieces of coal neatly arranged and labelled were stared at besides the pieces of granite or coloured rock with long names ending in _orite dorite_ and _sorite_ and so on to the precious gems including an imitation, as big as a bun, of a noted diamond. They leaned over them, repeating the names on the labels with the quintessence of vacuity. They hated it. There were beetles and worms of horror, butterflies of beauty, and birds that had been stuffed so long that they seemed to be intoxicated; their beaks fitted them as loosely as a drunkard’s hat, their glassy eyes were pathetically vague. After ascending a flight of stone steps David and Kate stooped for a long time over a case of sea-anemones that had been reproduced in gelatine by a German with a fancy for such things. From the railed balcony they could peer down into the well of the fusty-smelling museum. No one else was visiting it, they were alone with all things dead, things that had died millions of years ago and were yet simulating life. A footfall sounded so harsh in the corridors, boomed with such clangour, that they took slow diffident steps, almost tiptoeing, while Kate scarcely spoke at all and he conversed in murmurs. Whenever he coughed the whole place seemed to shudder. In the recess, hidden from prying eyes, David clasped her willing body in his arms. For once she was unshrinking and returned his fervour. The vastness, the emptiness, the deadness, worked upon their feelings with intense magic.

“Love me, David,” she murmured, and when they moved away from the gelatinous sea-urchins she kept both her arms clasped around him as they walked the length of the empty corridors. He could not understand her, he could not perceive her intimations, their meaning was dark to him. She was so altered, this was another Kate.

“I have come home to make it all up to you,” she repeated, and he scarcely dared to understand her.

They approached a lecture-room; the door was open, the room was empty, they went in and stood near the platform. The place was arranged like a tiny theatre, tiers of desks rising in half-circles on three sides high up towards the ceiling. A small platform with a lecturer’s desk confronted the rising tiers; on the wall behind it a large white sheet; a magic lantern on a pedestal was near and a blackboard on an easel. A pencil of white chalk lay broken on the floor. Behind the easel was a piano, a new piano with a duster on its lid. The room smelled of spilled acids. The lovers’ steps upon the wooden floor echoed louder than ever after their peregrinations upon the flagstones; they were timid of the sound and stood still, close together, silent. He touched her bosom and pressed her to his heart, but all her surrender seemed strange and nerveless. She was almost violently different; he had liked her old rejections, they were fiery and passionate. He scarce knew what to do, he understood her less than ever now. Dressed as she was in thick winter clothes it was like embracing a tree, it tired him. She lay in his arms waiting, waiting, until he felt almost stifled. Something like the smell of the acids came from her fur necklet. He was glad when she stood up, but she was looking at him intently. To cover his uneasiness he went to the blackboard and picking up a piece of the chalk he wrote the first inconsequent words that came into his mind. Kate stood where he had left her, staring at the board as he traced the words upon it:

_We are but little children weak_

Laughing softly she strolled towards him.

“What do you write that for? I know what it is.”

“What it is! Well, what is it?”

She took the chalk from his fingers.

“It’s a hymn,” she went on, “it goes....”

“A hymn!” he cried, “I did not know that.”

Underneath the one he had written she was now writing another line on the board.

_Nor born to any high estate._

“Of course,” he whispered, “I remember it now. I sang it as a child--at school--go on, go on.”

But she had thereupon suddenly turned away, silent, dropping her hands to her side. One of her old black moods had seized her. He let her go and picking up another fragment of chalk completed the verse.

_What can we do for Jesu’s sake
Who is so high and good and great?_

She turned when he had finished and without a word walked loudly to the piano, fetched the duster and rubbed out the words they had written on the blackboard. She was glaring angrily at him.

“How absurd you are,”--he was annoyed--“let us go out and get some tea.” He wandered off to the door, but she did not follow. He stood just outside gazing vacantly at a stuffed jay that had an indigo eye. He looked into the room again. She was there still, just as he had left her; her head bent, her hands hanging clasped before her, the dimness covering and caressing her--a figure full of sad thoughts. He ran to her and crushed her in his arms again.

“Kate, my lovely.”

She was saying brokenly: “You know what I said. I’ve come to make it all up to you. I promised, didn’t I?”

Something shuddered in his very soul--too late, too late, this was no love for him. The magic lantern looked a stupid childish toy, the smell of the acid was repulsive. Of all they had written upon the blackboard one word dimly remained: _Jesu_.

She stirred in his arms. “You are changed, David.”

“Changed, yes, everything is changed.”

“This is just like a theatre, like a play, as if we were acting.”

“Yes, as if we were acting. But we are not acting. Let us go up and sit in the gallery.”

They ascended the steps to the top ring of desks and looked down to the tiny platform and the white curtain. She sat fondling his hands, leaning against him.

“Have you ever acted--you would do it so well?”

“Why do you say that? Am I at all histrionic?”

“Does that mean insincere? O no. But you are the person one expects to be able to do anything.”

“Nonsense! I’ve never acted. I suppose I could. It isn’t difficult, you haven’t to be clever, only courageous. I should think it very easy to be only an ordinary actor, but I’m wrong, no doubt. I thought it was easy to write--to write a play--until I tried. I once engaged myself to write a little play for some students to act. I had never done such a thing before and like other idiots I thought I hadn’t ever done it simply because I hadn’t ever wanted to. Heavens, how harassed I was and how ashamed! I could not do it, I got no further than the author’s speech.”

“Well that was something. Tell me it.”

“It’s nothing to do with the play. It’s what the author says to the audience when the play is finished.”

She insisted on hearing it whatever it was. “O well,” he said at last, “let’s do that properly, at least. I’ll go down there and deliver it from the stage. You must pretend that you are the enthusiastic audience. Come and sit in the stalls.”

They went down together.

“Now imagine that this curtain goes up and I suddenly appear.”

Kate faintly clapped her hands. He stood upon the platform facing her and taking off his hat, began:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,

“I am so deeply touched by the warmth of this reception, this utterly undeserved appreciation, that--forgive me--I have forgotten the speech I had carefully prepared in anticipation of it. Let me meet my obligation by telling you a story; I think it is true, I made it up myself. Once upon a time there was a poor playwright--something like me--who wrote a play--something like this--and at the end of the performance the audience, a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience--something like this--called him before the curtain and demanded a speech. He protested that he was unprepared and asked them to allow him to tell them a story--something like this. Well, that, too, was a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience, so they didn’t mind and he began again.--Once upon a time a poor playwright--and was just about to repeat the story I have already twice told you when suddenly, without a word of warning, without a sound, without a compunction, the curtain swooped down and chopped him clean in half.”

Masterman made an elaborate obeisance and stepped off the platform.

“Is that all?” asked Kate.

“That’s all.”

At that moment a loud bell clanged throughout the building signifying that the museum was about to close.

“Come along!” he cried, but Kate did not move, she still sat in the stalls.

“Don’t leave me, David, I want to hear the play?” she said archly.

“There _was_ no play. There _is_ no play. Come, or we shall be locked in for the night.”

She still sat on. He went to her and seized her hands.

“What does it matter!” she whispered, embracing him. “I want to make it all up to you.”

He was astoundingly moved. She was marvellously changed. If she hadn’t the beauty of perfection she had some of the perfection of beauty. He adored her.

“But, no,” he said, “it won’t do, it really won’t. Come, I have got to buy you something at once, a ring with a diamond in it, as big as a bun, an engagement ring, quickly, or the shops will be shut.”

He dragged the stammering bewildered girl away, down the stairs and into the street. The rain had ceased, the sunset sky was bright and Masterman was intensely happy.

* * * * *

COTTON

* * * * *

COTTON

At the place where the road from Carnaby Down ends in the main western highway that goes towards Bath there stands, or once stood, a strongly built stone cottage confronting, on the opposite side of the highroad, a large barn and some cattle stalls. A man named Cotton lived with his wife lonely in this place, their whole horizon bounded by the hedges and fences of their farm. His Christian name, for some unchristian reason, was Janifex, people called him Jan, possibly because it rhymed with his wife’s name, which was Ann. And Ann was a robust managing woman of five and thirty, childless, full of desolating cleanliness and kindly tyrannies, with no perceptions that were not determined by her domestic ambition, and no sympathies that could interfere with her diurnal energies whatever they might be. Jan was a mild husbandman, prematurely aged, with large teeth and, since “forty winters had besieged his brow,” but little hair. Sometimes one of the large teeth would drop out, leaving terrible gaps when he opened his mouth and turning his patient smile to a hideous leer. These evacuations, which were never restored, began with the death of Queen Victoria; throughout the reign of her successor great events were punctuated by similar losses until at last Jan could masticate, in his staid old manner, only in one overworked corner of his mouth.

He would rise of a morning throughout the moving year at five of the clock; having eaten his bread and drunk a mug of cocoa he would don a long white jacket and cross the road diagonally to the gate at the eastern corner of the sheds; these were capped by the bright figure of a golden cockerel, voiceless but useful, flaunting always to meet the challenge of the wind. Sometimes in his deliberate way Jan would lift his forlorn eyes in the direction of the road coming from the east, but he never turned to the other direction as that would have cost him a physical effort and bodily flexion had ceased years and years ago. Do roads ever run backward--leaps not forward the eye? As he unloosed the gate of the yard his great dog would lift its chained head from some sacks under a cart, and a peacock would stalk from the belt of pines that partly encircled the buildings. The man would greet them, saying “O, ah!” In the rickyard he would pause to release the fowls from their hut and watch them run to the stubbles or spurn the chaff with their claws as they ranged between the stacks. If the day were windy the chaff would fall back in clouds upon their bustling feathers, and that delighted his simple mind. It is difficult to account for his joy in this thing for though his heart was empty of cruelty it seemed to be empty of everything else. Then he would pass into the stalls and with a rattle of can and churn the labour of the day was begun.

Thus he lived, with no temptations, and few desires except perhaps for milk puddings, which for some reason concealed in Ann’s thrifty bosom he was only occasionally permitted to enjoy. Whenever his wife thought kindly of him she would give him a piece of silver and he would traipse a mile in the evening, a mile along to the _Huntsman’s Cup_, and take a tankard of beer. On his return he would tell Ann of the things he had seen, the people he had met, and other events of his journey.

Once, in the time of spring, when buds were bursting along the hedge coverts and birds of harmony and swiftness had begun to roost in the wood, a blue-chinned Spaniard came to lodge at the farm for a few weeks. He was a labourer working at some particular contract upon the estate adjoining the Cottons’ holding, and he was accommodated with a bed and an abundance of room in a clean loft behind the house. With curious shoes upon his feet, blazing check trousers fitting tightly upon his thighs, a wrapper of pink silk around his neck, he was an astonishing figure in that withdrawn corner of the world. When the season chilled him a long black cloak with a hood for his head added a further strangeness. Juan da Costa was his name. He was slightly round-shouldered with an uncongenial squint in his eyes; though he used but few words of English his ways were beguiling; he sang very blithely shrill Spanish songs, and had a pleasant courtesy of manner that presented a deal of attraction to the couple, particularly Ann, whose casual heart he reduced in a few hours to kindness, and in a few days, inexplicably perhaps, to a still warmer emotion--yes, even in the dull blankness of that mind some ghostly star could glimmer. From the hour of his arrival she was an altered woman although, with primitive subtlety the transition from passivity to passion was revealed only by one curious sign, and that was the spirit of her kindness evoked for the amiable Jan, who now fared mightily upon his favourite dishes.

Sometimes the Spaniard would follow Jan about the farm. “Grande!” he would say, gesturing with his arm to indicate the wide-rolling hills.

“O, ah!” Jan would reply, “there’s a heap o’ land in the open air.”

The Spaniard does not understand. He asks: “What?”

“O, ah!” Jan would echo.

But it was the cleanly buxom Ann to whom da Costa devoted himself. He brought home daily, though not ostensibly to her, a bunch of the primroses, a stick of snowbudded sallow, or a sprig of hazel hung with catkins, soft caressable things. He would hold the hazel up before Ann’s uncomprehending gaze and strike the lemon-coloured powder from the catkins on to the expectant adjacent buds, minute things with stiff female prongs, red like the eyes of the white rabbit which Ann kept in the orchard hutch.

One day Juan came home unexpectedly in mid-afternoon. It was a cold dry day and he wore his black cloak and hood.

“See,” he cried, walking up to Ann, who greeted him with a smile; he held out to her a posy of white violets tied up with some blades of thick grass. She smelt them but said nothing. He pressed the violets to his lips and again held them out, this time to her lips. She took them from him and touched them with the front of her bodice while he watched her with delighted eyes.

“You ... give ... me ... something ... for ... los flores?”

“Piece a cake!” said Ann, moving towards the pantry door.

“Ah ... cake...!”

As she pulled open the door, still keeping a demure eye upon him, the violets fell out and down upon the floor, unseen by her. He rushed towards them with a cry of pain and a torrent of his strange language; picking them up he followed her into the pantry, a narrow place almost surrounded by shelves with pots of pickles and jam, plates, cups and jugs, a scrap of meat upon a trencher, a white bowl with cob nuts and a pair of iron crackers.

“See ... lost!” he cried shrilly as she turned to him. She was about to take them again when he stayed her with a whimsical gesture.

“Me ... me,” he said, and brushing her eyes with their soft perfume he unfastened the top button of her bodice while the woman stood motionless; then the second button, then the third. He turned the corners inwards and tucked the flowers between her flesh and underlinen. They stood eyeing one another, breathing uneasily, but with a pretence of nonchalance. “Ah!” he said suddenly; before she could stop him he had seized a few nuts from the white bowl and holding open her bodice where the flowers rested he dropped the nuts into her warm bosom. “One ... two ... three!”

“Oh...!” screamed Ann mirthfully, shrinking from their tickling, but immediately she checked her laughter--she heard footsteps. Beating down the grasping arms of the Spaniard she darted out of the doorway and shut him in the pantry, just in time to meet Jan coming into the kitchen howling for a chain he required.

“What d’ye want?” said Ann.

“That chain for the well-head, gal, it’s hanging in the pantry.” He moved to the door.

“Tain’t,” said Ann barring his way. “It’s in the barn. I took it there yesterday, on the oats it is, you’ll find it, clear off with your dirty boots.” She “hooshed” him off much as she “hooshed” the hens out of the garden. Immediately he was gone she pulled open the pantry door and was confronted by the Spaniard holding a long clasp knife in his raised hand. On seeing her he just smiled, threw down the knife and took the bewildered woman into his arms.

“Wait, wait,” she whispered, and breaking from him she seized a chain from a hook and ran out after her husband with it, holding up a finger of warning to the Spaniard as she brushed past him. She came back panting, having made some sort of explanation to Jan; entering the kitchen quietly she found the Spaniard’s cloak lying upon the table; the door of the pantry was shut and he had apparently gone back there to await her. Ann moved on tiptoe round the table; picking up the cloak she enveloped herself in it and pulled the hood over her head. Having glanced with caution through the front window to the farmyard, she coughed and shuffled her feet on the flags. The door of the pantry moved slowly open; the piercing ardour of his glance did not abash her, but her curious appearance in his cloak moved his shrill laughter. As he approached her she seized his wrists and drew him to the door that led into the orchard at the back of the house; she opened it and pushed him out, saying, “Go on, go on.” She then locked the door against him. He walked up and down outside the window making lewd signs to her. He dared not call out for fear of attracting attention from the farmyard in front of the house. He stood still, shivered, pretended in dumb show that he was frozen. She stood at the window in front of him and nestled provocatively in his cloak. But when he put his lips against the pane he drew the gleam of her languishing eyes closer and closer to meet his kiss through the glass. Then she stood up, took off the black cloak, and putting her hand into her bosom brought out the three nuts, which she held up to him. She stood there fronting the Spaniard enticingly, dropped the nuts back into her bosom one ... two ... three ... and then went and opened the door.

In a few weeks the contract was finished, and one bright morning the Spaniard bade them each farewell. Neither of them knew, so much was their intercourse restricted, that he was about to depart, and Ann watched him with perplexity and unhappiness in her eyes.

“Ah, you Cotton, good-bye I say, and you señora, I say good-bye.”

With a deep bow he kissed the rough hand of the blushing country woman. “Bueno.” He turned with his kit bag upon his shoulder, waved them an airy hand and was gone.

On the following Sunday Jan returned from a visit in the evening and found the house empty; Ann was out, an unusual thing, for their habits were fixed and deliberate as the stars in the sky. The sunsetting light was lying in meek patches on the kitchen wall, turning the polished iron pans to the brightness of silver, reddening the string of onions, and filling glass jars with solid crystal. He had just sat down to remove his heavy boots when Ann came in, not at all the workaday Ann but dressed in her best clothes smelling of scent and swishing her stiff linen.

“Hullo,” said Jan, surprised at his wife’s pink face and sparkling eyes, “bin church?”

“Yes, church,” she replied, and sat down in her finery. Her husband ambled about the room for various purposes and did not notice her furtive dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief. Tears from Ann were inconceivable.

The year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown, the corn stooked in rows; Ann was with child and the ridge of her stays was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. Fruit dropped from the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the hunt swept over the field. Christmas came and went, and then a child was born to the Cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened Juan.

“He was a kind chap, that man,” said Ann, “and we’ve no relations to please, and it’s like your name--and your name _is_ outlandish!”

Jan’s delight was now to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever mused upon chickens, lambs and calves. “O, ah!” he would say, popping a great finger into the babe’s mouth, “O, ah!” But when, as occasionally happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of suspicion.

Snow, when it falls near spring upon those Cotswold hills, falls deeply and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. Sickness, when it comes, comes with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. Contagious and baffling, disease had stricken the district; in mid March great numbers of the country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were harried from one dawn to another. Jan would come in of an evening and recite the calendar of the day’s dooms gathered from men of the adjacent fields.

“Amos Green ’ave gone then, pore o’ chap.”

“Pore Amos,” the pitying Ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.

“And Buttifant’s coachman.”

“Dear, dear, what ’ull us all come to!”

“Mrs. Jocelyn was worse ’en bad this morning.”

“Never, Jan! Us’ll miss ’er.”

“Ah, and they do say Parson Rudwent won’t last out the night.”

“And whom’s to bury us then?” asked Ann.

The invincible sickness came to the farm. Ann one morning was weary, sickly, and could not rise from her bed. Jan attended her in his clumsy way and kept coming in from the snow to give her comforts and food, but at eve she was in fever and lay helpless in the bed with the child at her breast. Jan went off for the doctor, not to the nearest village for he knew that quest to be hopeless, but to a tiny town high on the wolds two miles away. The moon, large, sharp and round, blazed in the sky and its light sparkled upon the rolling fields of snow; his boots were covered at every muffled step; the wind sighed in the hedges and he shook himself for warmth. He came to the hill at last; halfway up was a church, its windows glowing with warm-looking light and its bells pealing cheerfully. He passed on and higher up met a priest trotting downwards in black cassock and saintly hat, his hands tucked into his wide sleeves, trotting to keep himself warm and humming as he went. Jan asked a direction of the priest, who gave it with many circumstances of detail, and after he had parted he could hear the priest’s voice call still further instructions after him as long as he was in sight. “O, ah!” said Jan each time, turning and waving his hand. But after all his mission was a vain one; the doctor was out and away, it was improbable that he would be able to come, and the simple man turned home with a dull heart. When he reached the farm Ann was delirious but still clung to the dusky child, sleeping snugly at her bosom. The man sat up all night before the fire waiting vainly for the doctor, and the next day he himself became ill. And strangely enough as he worked among his beasts the crude suspicion in his mind about the child took shape and worked without resistance until he came to suspect and by easy degrees to apprehend fully the time and occasion of Ann’s duplicity.

“Nasty dirty filthy thing!” he murmured from his sick mind. He was brushing the dried mud from the hocks of an old bay horse, but it was not of his horse he was thinking. Later he stood in the rickyard and stared across the road at the light in their bedroom. Throwing down the fork with which he had been tossing beds of straw he shook his fist at the window and cried out: “I hate ’er, I does, nasty dirty filthy thing!”

When he went into the house he replenished the fire but found he could take no further care for himself or the sick woman; he just stupidly doffed his clothes and in utter misery and recklessness stretched himself in the bed with Ann. He lay for a long while with aching brows, a snake-strangled feeling in every limb, an unquenchable drouth in his throat, and his wife’s body burning beside him. Outside the night was bright, beautiful and still sparkling with frost; quiet, as if the wind had been wedged tightly in some far corner of the sky, except for a cracked insulator on the telegraph pole just near the window, that rattled and hummed with monstrous uncare. That, and the ticking of the clock! The lighted candle fell from its sconce on the mantelpiece; he let it remain and it flickered out. The glow from the coals was thick upon the ceiling and whitened the brown ware of the teapot on the untidy hearth. Falling asleep at last he began dreaming at once, so it seemed, of the shrill cry of lambs hailing him out of wild snow-covered valleys, so wild and prolonged were the cries that they woke him, and he knew himself to be ill, very ill indeed. The child was wailing piteously, the room was in darkness, the fire out, but the man did not stir, he could not care, what could he do with that flame behind his eyes and the misery of death consuming him? But the child’s cries were unceasing and moved even his numbed mind to some effort. “Ann!” he gasped. The poor wife did not reply. “Ann!” He put his hand out to nudge her; in one instant the blood froze in his veins and then boiled again. Ann was cold, her body hard as a wall, dead ... dead. Stupor returned upon him; the child, unhelped, cried on, clasped to that frozen breast until the man again roused himself to effort. Putting his great hands across the dead wife he dragged the child from her arms into the warmth beside him, gasping as he did so, “Nasty ... dirty ... thing.” It exhausted him but the child was still unpacified and again he roused himself and felt for a biscuit on the table beside the bed. He crushed a piece in his mouth and putting the soft pap upon his finger fed thus the hungry child until it was stilled. By now the white counterpane spread vast like a sea, heaving and rocking with a million waves, the framework of the bedstead moving like the tackle of tossed ships. He knew there was only one way to stem that sickening movement. “I hate ’er, I does,” rose again upon his lips, and drawing up his legs that were at once chilly and streaming with sweat, full of his new hatred he urged with all his might his wife’s cold body to the edge of the bed and withdrew the bedclothes. Dead Ann toppled and slid from him and her body clumped upon the floor with a fall that shook the room; the candle fell from the mantelpiece, bounced from the teapot and rolled stupidly along the bare boards under the bed. “Hate ’er!” groaned the man; he hung swaying above the woman and tried to spit upon her. He sank back again to the pillow and the child, murmuring “O, ah!” and gathering it clumsily to his breast. He became tranquil then, and the hollow-sounding clock beat a dull rhythm into his mind, until that sound faded out with all light and sound, and Jan fell into sleep and died, with the dusky child clasped in his hard dead arms.

* * * * *

A BROADSHEET BALLAD

* * * * *

A BROADSHEET BALLAD

At noon the tiler and the mason stepped down from the roof of the village church which they were repairing and crossed over the road to the tavern to eat their dinner. It had been a nice little morning, but there were clouds massing in the south; Sam the tiler remarked that it looked like thunder. The two men sat in the dim little taproom eating, Bob the mason at the same time reading from a newspaper an account of a trial for murder.

“I dunno what thunder looks like,” Bob said, “but I reckon this chap is going to be hung, though I can’t rightly say for why. To my thinking he didn’t do it at all: but murder’s a bloody thing and someone ought to suffer for it.”

“I don’t think,” spluttered Sam as he impaled a flat piece of beetroot on the point of a pocket-knife and prepared to contemplate it with patience until his stuffed mouth was ready to receive it, “he ought to be hung.”

“There can be no other end for him though, with a mob of lawyers like that, and a judge like that, and a jury too ... why the rope’s half round his neck this minute; he’ll be in glory within a month, they only have three Sundays, you know, between the sentence and the execution. Well, hark at that rain then!”

A shower that began as a playful sprinkle grew to a powerful steady summer downpour. It splashed in the open window and the dim room grew more dim and cool.

“Hanging’s a dreadful thing, continued Sam, and ’tis often unjust I’ve no doubt, I’ve no doubt at all.”

“Unjust! I tell you ... at the majority of trials those who give their evidence mostly knows nothing at all about the matter; them as knows a lot--they stays at home and don’t budge, not likely!”

“No? But why?”

“Why? They has their reasons. I know that, I knows it for truth ... hark at that rain, it’s made the room feel cold.”

They watched the downfall in complete silence for some moments.

“Hanging’s a dreadful thing,” Sam at length repeated, with almost a sigh.

“I can tell you a tale about that, Sam, in a minute,” said the other. He began to fill his pipe from Sam’s brass box which was labelled cough lozenges and smelled of paregoric.

“Just about ten years ago I was working over in Cotswold country. I remember I’d been in to Gloucester one Saturday afternoon and it rained. I was jogging along home in a carrier’s van; I never seen it rain like that afore, no, nor ever afterwards, not like that. B-r-r-r-r! it came down ... bashing! And we come to a cross roads where there’s a public house called _The Wheel of Fortune_, very lonely and onsheltered it is just there. I see’d a young woman standing in the porch awaiting us, but the carrier was wet and tired and angry or something and wouldn’t stop. ‘No room’--he bawled out to her--‘full up, can’t take you!’ and he drove on. ‘For the love o’ God. Mate,’--I says--‘pull up and take that young creature! She’s ... she’s ... can’t you see!’ ‘But I’m all behind as ’tis’--he shouts to me--‘you know your gospel, don’t you: time and tide wait for no man?’ ‘Ah, but dammit all, they always call for a feller’--I says. With that he turned round and we drove back for the girl. She clumb in and sat on my knees; I squat on a tub of vinegar, there was nowhere else and I was right and all, she was going on for a birth. Well, the old van rattled away for six or seven miles; whenever it stopped you could hear the rain clattering on the tarpaulin, or sounding outside on the grass as if it was breathing hard, and the old horse steamed and shivered with it. I had knowed the girl once in a friendly way, a pretty young creature, but now she was white and sorrowful and wouldn’t say much. By and bye we came to another cross roads near a village, and she got out there. ‘Good day, my gal’--I says, affable like, and ‘Thank you, sir,’--says she, and off she popped in the rain with her umbrella up. A rare pretty girl, quite young, I’d met her before, a girl you could get uncommon fond of, you know, but I didn’t meet her afterwards, she was mixed up in a bad business. It all happened in the next six months while I was working round these parts. Everybody knew of it. This girl’s name was Edith and she had a younger sister Agnes. Their father was old Harry Mallerton, kept _The British Oak_ at North Quainy; he stuttered. Well, this Edith had a love affair with a young chap William, and having a very loving nature she behaved foolish. Then she couldn’t bring the chap up to the scratch nohow by herself, and of course she was afraid to tell her mother or father: you know how girls are after being so pesky natural, they fear, O they do fear! But soon it couldn’t be hidden any longer as she was living at home with them all, so she wrote a letter to her mother. ‘Dear Mother,’ she wrote, and told her all about her trouble.

“By all accounts the mother was angry as an old lion, but Harry took it calm like and sent for young William, who’d not come at first. He lived close by in the village so they went down at last and fetched him.

“‘All right, yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll do what’s lawful to be done. There you are, I can’t say no fairer, that I can’t.’

“‘No,’ they said, ‘you can’t.’

“So he kissed the girl and off he went, promising to call in and settle affairs in a day or two. The next day Agnes, which was the younger girl, she also wrote a note to her mother telling her some more strange news:

“‘God above!’ the mother cried out, ‘can it be true, both of you girls, my own daughters, and by the same man! whatever were you thinking on, both of ye! Whatever can be done now!’”

“What!” ejaculated Sam, “both on ’em, both on ’em!”

“As true as God’s my mercy--both on ’em--same chap. Ah! Mrs. Mallerton was afraid to tell her husband at first, for old Harry was the devil born again when he were roused up, so she sent for young William herself, who’d not come again, of course, not likely. But they made him come, O yes, when they told the girls’ father.

“‘Well, may I go to my d ... d ... d ... damnation at once!’ roared old Harry--he stuttered, you know--‘at once, if that ain’t a good one!’ So he took off his coat, he took up a stick, he walked down the street to William and cut him off his legs. Then he beat him until he howled for his mercy, and you couldn’t stop old Harry once he were roused up--he was the devil born again. They do say as he beat him for a solid hour; I can’t say as to that, but then old Harry picked him up and carried him off to _The British Oak_ on his own back, and threw him down in his own kitchen between his own two girls like a dead dog. They do say that the little one Agnes flew at her father like a raging cat until he knocked her senseless with a clout over head; rough man he was.”

“Well, a’ called for it, sure,” commented Sam.

“Her did,” agreed Bob, “but she was the quietest known girl for miles round those parts, very shy and quiet.”

“A shady lane breeds mud,” said Sam.

“What do you say?--O ah!--mud, yes. But pretty girls both, girls you could get very fond of, skin like apple bloom, and as like as two pinks they were. They had to decide which of them William was to marry.”

“Of course, ah!”

“‘I’ll marry Agnes’--says he.

“‘You’ll not’--says the old man--‘You’ll marry Edie.’

“‘No, I won’t,’--William says--‘it’s Agnes I love and I’ll be married to her or I won’t be married to e’er of ’em.’ All the time Edith sat quiet, dumb as a shovel, never a word, crying a bit; but they do say the young one went on like a ... a young ... Jew.”

“The jezebel!” commented Sam.

“You may say it; but wait, my man, just wait. Another cup of beer. We can’t go back to church until this humbugging rain have stopped.”

“No, that we can’t.”

“Its my belief the ’bugging rain won’t stop this side of four o’clock.”

“And if the roof don’t hold it off it ’ull spoil they Lord’s commandments that’s just done up on the chancel front.”

“O, they be dry by now.” Bob spoke reassuringly and then continued his tale. “‘I’ll marry Agnes or I won’t marry nobody’--William says--and they couldn’t budge him. No, old Harry cracked on but he wouldn’t have it, and at last Harry says: ‘It’s like this.’ He pulls a half crown out of his pocket and ‘Heads it’s Agnes,’ he says, ‘or tails it’s Edith,’ he says.”

“Never! Ha! Ha!” cried Sam.

“‘Heads it’s Agnes, tails it’s Edie,’ so help me God. And it come down Agnes, yes, heads it was--Agnes--and so there they were.”

“And they lived happy ever after?”

“Happy! You don’t know your human nature, Sam; wherever was you brought up? ‘Heads it’s Agnes,’ said old Harry, and at that Agnes flung her arms round William’s neck and was for going off with him then and there, ha! But this is how it happened about that. William hadn’t any kindred, he was a lodger in the village, and his landlady wouldn’t have him in her house one mortal hour when she heard of it; give him the rightabout there and then. He couldn’t get lodgings anywhere else, nobody would have anything to do with him, so of course, for safety’s sake, old Harry had to take him, and there they all lived together at _The British Oak_--all in one happy family. But they girls couldn’t bide the sight of each other, so their father cleaned up an old outhouse in his yard that was used for carts and hens and put William and his Agnes out in it. And there they had to bide. They had a couple of chairs, a sofa, and a bed and that kind of thing, and the young one made it quite snug.”

“’Twas a hard thing for that other, that Edie, Bob.”

“It was hard, Sam, in a way, and all this was happening just afore I met her in the carrier’s van. She was very sad and solemn then; a pretty girl, one you could like. Ah, you may choke me, but there they lived together. Edie never opened her lips to either of them again, and her father sided with her, too. What was worse, it came out after the marriage that Agnes was quite free of trouble--it was only a trumped-up game between her and this William because he fancied her better than the other one. And they never had no child, them two, though when poor Edie’s mischance came along I be damned if Agnes weren’t fonder of it than its own mother, a jolly sight more fonder, and William--he fair worshipped it.”

“You don’t say!”

“I do. ’Twas a rum go, that, and Agnes worshipped it, a fact, can prove it by scores o’ people to this day, scores, in them parts. William and Agnes worshipped it, and Edie--she just looked on, ’long of it all, in the same house with them, though she never opened her lips again to her young sister to the day of her death.”

“Ah, she died? Well, it’s the only way out of such a tangle, poor woman.”

“You’re sympathizing with the wrong party.” Bob filled his pipe again from the brass box; he ignited it with deliberation; going to the open window he spat into a puddle in the road. “The wrong party, Sam; ’twas Agnes that died. She was found on the sofa one morning stone dead, dead as a adder.”

“God bless me!” murmured Sam.

“Poisoned!” added Bob, puffing serenely.

“Poisoned!”

Bob repeated the word poisoned. “This was the way of it,” he continued: “One morning the mother went out in the yard to collect her eggs, and she began calling out ‘Edie, Edie, here a minute, come and look where that hen have laid her egg; I would never have believed it,’--she says. And when Edie went out her mother led her round the back of the outhouse, and there on the top of a wall this hen had laid an egg. ‘I would never have believed it, Edie’--she says--‘scooped out a nest there beautiful, ain’t she? I wondered where her was laying. T’other morning the dog brought an egg round in his mouth and laid it on the doormat. There now Aggie, Aggie, here a minute, come and look where the hen have laid that egg.’ And as Aggie didn’t answer the mother went in and found her on the sofa in the outhouse, stone dead.”

“How’d they account for it?” asked Sam, after a brief interval.

“That’s what brings me to the point about that young feller that’s going to be hung,” said Bob, tapping the newspaper that lay upon the bench. “I don’t know what would lie between two young women in a wrangle of that sort; some would get over it quick, but some would never sleep soundly any more not for a minute of their mortal lives. Edie must have been one of that sort. There’s people living there now as could tell a lot if they’d a mind to it. Some knowed all about it, could tell you the very shop where Edie managed to get hold of the poison, and could describe to me or to you just how she administrated it in a glass of barley water. Old Harry knew all about it, he knew all about everything, but he favoured Edith and he never budged a word. Clever old chap was Harry, and nothing came out against Edie at the inquest--nor the trial neither.”

“Was there a trial then?”

“There was a kind of a trial. Naturally. A beautiful trial. The police came and fetched poor William. They took him away and in due course he was hanged.”

“William! But what had he got to do with it?”

“Nothing. It was rough on him, but he hadn’t played straight and so nobody struck up for him. They made out a case against him--there was some onlucky bit of evidence which I’ll take my oath old Harry knew something about--and William was done for. Ah, when things take a turn against you it’s as certain as twelve o’clock, when they take a turn; you get no more chance than a rabbit from a weasel. It’s like dropping your matches into a stream, you needn’t waste the bending of your back to pick them out--they’re no good on, they’ll never strike again. And Edith, she sat in court through it all, very white and trembling and sorrowful, but when the judge put his black cap on they do say she blushed and looked across at William and gave a bit of a smile. Well, she had to suffer for his doings, so why shouldn’t he suffer for hers. That’s how I look at it....”

“But God-a-mighty...!”

“Yes, God-a-mighty knows. Pretty girls they were, both, and as like as two pinks.”

There was quiet for some moments while the tiler and the mason emptied their cups of beer. “I think,” said Sam then, “the rain’s give over now.”

“Ah, that it has,” cried Bob. “Let’s go and do a bid more on this ’bugging church or she won’t be done afore Christmas.”

* * * * *

POMONA’S BABE

* * * * *

POMONA’S BABE

Johnny Flynn was then seventeen years old. At that age you could not call him boy without vexing him, or man without causing him to blush--his teasing, ruddy and uproarious mother delighted to produce either or both of these manifestations for her off-spring was a pale mild creature--but he had given a deal of thought to many manly questions. Marriage, for instance, was one of these. That was an institution he admired but whose joys, whatever they were, he was not anxious to experience; its difficulties and disasters as ironically outlined by the widow Flynn were the subject of his grossest scepticism, scepticism in general being not the least prominent characteristic of Johnny Flynn.

Certainly his sister Pomona was not married; she was only sixteen, an age too early for such bliss, but all the same she was going to have a baby; he had quarrelled with his mother about that. He quarrelled with his mother about most things, she delighted in quarrels, they amused her very much; but on this occasion she was really very angry, or she pretended to be so--which was worse, much worse than the real thing.

The Flynns were poor people, quite poor, living in two top-floor rooms at the house of a shoemaker, also moderately poor, whose pelting and hammering of soles at evening were a durable grievance to Johnny. He was fond of the shoemaker, a kind bulky tall man of fifty, though he did not like the shoemaker’s wife, as bulky as her husband and as tall but not kind to him or to anything except Johnny himself; nor did he like any of the other lodgers, of whom there were several, all without exception beyond the reach of affluence. The Flynn apartments afforded a bedroom in front for Mrs. Flynn and Pomona, a room where Johnny seldom intruded, never without a strained sense of sanctity similar to the feeling he experienced when entering an empty church as he sometimes did. He slept in the other room, the living room, an arrangement that also annoyed him. He was easily annoyed, but he could never go to bed until mother and sister had retired, and for the same reason he had always to rise before they got up, an exasperating abuse of domestic privilege.

One night he had just slipped happily into his bed and begun to read a book called “Rasselas,” which the odd-eyed man at the public library had commended to him, when his mother returned to the room, first tapping at the door, for Johnny was a prude as she knew not only from instinct and observation but from protests which had occasionally been addressed to her by the indignant boy. She came in now only half clad, in petticoat and stockinged feet, her arms quite bare. They were powerful arms as they had need to be, for she was an ironer of linen at a laundry, but they were nice to look at and sometimes Johnny liked looking at them, though he did not care for her to run about like that very often. Mrs. Flynn sat down at the foot of his couch and stared at her son.

“Johnny,” she began steadily, but paused to rub her forehead with her thick white shiny fingers. “I don’t know how to tell you, I’m sure, or what you’ll say....” Johnny shook “Rasselas” rather impatiently and heaved a protesting sigh. “I can’t think,” continued his mother, “no, I can’t think that it’s our Pomony, but there she is and it’s got to be done, I must tell you; besides you’re the only man in our family now, so it’s only right for you, you see, and she’s going to have a baby. Our Pomony!”

The boy turned his face to the wall, although his mother was not looking at him--she was staring at that hole in the carpet near the fender. At last he said, “Humph ... well?” And as his mother did not say anything, he added, “What about it, I don’t mind?” Mrs. Flynn was horrified at his unconcern, or she pretended to be so; Johnny was never sure about the genuineness of her moods. It was most unfilial, but he was like that--so was Mrs. Flynn. Now she cried out, “You’ll have to mind, there, you must. I can’t take everything on my own shoulders. You’re the only man left in our family now, you must, Johnny. What are we to do?”

He glared at the wallpaper a foot from his eyes. It had an unbearable pattern of blue but otherwise indescribable flowers; he had it in his mind to have some other pattern there--some day.

“Eh?” asked his mother sharply, striking the foot of the bed with her fist.

“Why ... there’s nothing to be done ... now ... I suppose.” He was blushing furiously. “How did it happen, when will it be?”

“It’s a man she knows, he got hold of her, his name is Stringer. Another two months about. Stringer. Hadn’t you noticed anything? Everybody else has. You are a funny boy, I can’t make you out at all, Johnny, I can’t make you out. Stringer his name is, but I’ll make him pay dearly for it, and that’s what I want you--to talk to you about. Of course he denies of everything, they always do.”

Mrs. Flynn sighed at this disgusting perfidy, brightening however when her son began to discuss the problem. But she talked so long and he got so sleepy at last that he was very glad when she went to bed again. Secretly she was both delighted and disappointed at his easy acceptance of her dreadful revelation; fearing a terrible outburst of anger she had kept the knowledge from him for a long time. She was glad to escape that, it is true, but she rather hungered for some flashing reprobation of this unknown beast, this Stringer. She swore she would bring him to book, but she felt old and lonely, and Johnny was a strange son, not very virile. The mother had told Pomona terrifying prophetic tales of what Johnny would do, what he would be certain to do; he would, for instance, murder that Stringer and drive Pomony into the street; of course he would. Yet here he was, quite calm about it, as if he almost liked it. Well, she had told him, she could do no more, she would leave it to him.

In the morning Johnny greeted his sister with tender affection and at evening, having sent her to bed, he and his mother resumed their discussion.

“Do you know, mother,” he said, “she is quite handsome, I never noticed it before.”

Mrs. Flynn regarded him with desperation and then informed him that his sister was an ugly disgusting little trollop who ought to be birched.

“No, no, you are wrong, mother, it’s bad, but it’s all right.”

“You think you know more about such things than your own mother, I suppose.” Mrs. Flynn sniffed and glared.

He said it to her gently: “Yes.”

She produced a packet of notepaper and envelopes “_The Monster Packet for a Penny_,” all complete with a wisp of pink blotting paper and a penholder without a nib, which she had bought at the Chandler’s on her way home that evening, along with some sago and some hair oil for Johnny whose stiff unruly hair provoked such spasms of rage in her bosom that she declared that she was “sick to death of it.” On the supper table lay also a platter, a loaf, a basin of mustard pickle, and a plate with round lengths of cheese shaped like small candles.

“Devil blast him!” muttered Mrs. Flynn as she fetched from a cupboard shelf a sour-looking bottle labelled _Writing Fluid_, a dissolute pen, and requested Johnny to compose a letter to Stringer--devil blast him!--telling him of the plight of her daughter Pomona Flynn, about whom she desired him to know that she had already consulted her lawyers and the chief of police and intimating that unless she heard from him satisfactory by the day after tomorrow the matter would pass out of her hands.

“That’s no good, it’s not the way,” declared her son thoughtfully; Mrs. Flynn therefore sat humbly confronting him and awaited the result of his cogitations. Johnny was not a very robust youth, but he was growing fast now, since he had taken up with running; he was very fleet, so Mrs. Flynn understood, and had already won a silver-plated hot water jug, which they used for the milk. But still he was thin and not tall, his dark hair was scattered; his white face was a nice face, thought Mrs. Flynn, very nice, only there was always something strange about his clothes. She couldn’t help that now, but he had such queer fancies, there was no other boy in the street whose trousers were so baggy or of such a colour. His starched collars were all right of course, beautifully white and shiny, she got them up herself, and they set his neck off nicely.

“All we need do,” her son broke in, “is just tell him.”

“Tell him?”

“Yes, just tell him about it--it’s very unfortunate--and ask him to come and see you. I hope, though,” he paused, “I hope they won’t want to go and get married.”

“He ought to be made to, devil blast him,” cried Mrs. Flynn, “only she’s frightened, she is; afraid of her mortal life of him! We don’t want him here, neither, she says he’s a nasty horrible man.”

Johnny sat dumb for some moments. Pomona was a day girl in service at a restaurant. Stringer was a clerk to an auctioneer. The figure of his pale little sister shrinking before a ruffian (whom he figured as a fat man with a red beard) startled and stung him.

“Besides,” continued Mrs. Flynn, “he’s just going to be married to some woman, some pretty judy, God help her ... in fact, as like as not he’s married to her already by now. No, I gave up that idea long ago, I did, before I told you, long ago.”

“We can only tell him about Pomony then, and ask him what he would like to do.”

“What he would _like_ to do, well, certainly!” protested the widow.

“And if he’s a decent chap,” continued Johnny serenely, “it will be all right, there won’t be any difficulty. If he ain’t, then we can do something else.”

His mother was reluctant to concur but the boy had his way. He sat with his elbows on the table, his head pressed in his hands, but he could not think out the things he wanted to say to this man. He would look up and stare around the room as if he were in a strange place, though it was not strange to him at all for he had lived in it many years. There was not much furniture in the apartment, yet there was but little space in it. The big table was covered with American cloth, mottled and shiny. Two or three chairs full of age and discomfort stood upon a carpet that was full of holes and stains. There were some shelves in a recess, an engraving framed in maple of the player scene from “Hamlet,” and near by on the wall hung a gridiron whose prongs were woven round with coloured wools and decorated with satin bows. Mrs. Flynn had a passion for vases, and two of these florid objects bought at a fair companioned a clock whose once snowy face had long since turned sallow because of the oil Mrs. Flynn had administered “to make it go properly.”

But he could by no means think out this letter; his mother sat so patiently watching him that he asked her to go and sit in the other room. Then he sat on, sniffing, as if thinking with his nose, while the room began to smell of the smoking lamp. He was remembering how years ago, when they were little children, he had seen Pomony in her nightgown and, angered with her for some petty reason, he had punched her on the side. Pomony had turned white, she could not speak, she could not breathe. He had been momentarily proud of that blow, it was a good blow, he had never hit another boy like that. But Pomony had fallen into a chair, her face tortured with pain, her eyes filled with tears that somehow would not fall. Then a fear seized him, horrible, piercing, frantic: she was dying, she would die, and there was nothing he could do to stop her! In passionate remorse and pity he had flung himself before her, kissing her feet--they were small and beautiful though not very clean,--until at last he had felt Pomony’s arms droop caressingly around him and heard Pomony’s voice speaking lovingly and forgivingly to him.

After a decent interval his mother returned to him.

“What are we going to do about _her_?” she asked, “she’ll have to go away.”

“Away! Do you mean go to a home? No, but why go away? I’m not ashamed; what is there to be ashamed of?”

“Who the deuce is going to look after her? You talk like a tom-fool--yes, you are,” insisted Mrs. Flynn passionately. “I’m out all day from one week’s end to the other. She can’t be left alone, and the people downstairs are none too civil about it as it is. She’ll have to go to the workhouse, that’s all.”

Johnny was aghast, indignant, and really angry. He would never never consent to such a thing! Pomony! Into a workhouse! She should not, she should stop at home, here, like always, and have a nurse.

“Fool!” muttered his mother, with castigating scorn. “Where’s the money for nurses and doctors to come from? I’ve got no money for such things!”

“I’ll get some!” declared Johnny hotly.

“Where?”

“I’ll sell something.”

“What?”

“I’ll save up.”

“How?”

“And I’ll borrow some.”

“You’d better shut up now or I’ll knock your head off,” cried his mother. “Fidding and fadding about--you’re daft!”

“She shan’t go to any workhouse!”

“Fool!” repeated his mother, revealing her disgust at his hopeless imbecility.

“I tell you she shall not go there,” shouted the boy, stung into angry resentment by her contempt.

“She shall, she must.”

“I say she shan’t!”

“O don’t be such a blasted fool,” cried the distracted woman, rising from her chair.

Johnny sprang to his feet almost screaming, “You are the blasted fool, you, you!”

Mrs. Flynn seized a table knife and struck at her son’s face with it. He leaped away in terror, his startled appearance, glaring eyes and strained figure so affecting Mrs. Flynn that she dropped the knife, and, sinking into her chair, burst into peals of hysterical laughter. Recovering himself the boy hastened to the laughing woman. The maddening peals continued and increased, shocking him, unnerving him again; she was dying, she would die. His mother’s laughter had always been harsh but delicious to him, it was so infectious, but this was demoniacal, it was horror.

“O, don’t, don’t, mother, don’t,” he cried, fondling her and pressing her yelling face to his breast. But she pushed him fiercely away and the terrifying laughter continued to sear his very soul until he could bear it no longer. He struck at her shoulders with clenched fist and shook her frenziedly, frantically, crying:

“Stop it, stop, O stop it, she’ll go mad, stop it, stop.”

He was almost exhausted, when suddenly Pomona rushed into the room in her nightgown. Her long black hair tumbled in lovely locks about her pale face and her shoulder; her feet were bare.

“O Johnny, what are you doing?” gasped his little pale sister Pomony, who seemed so suddenly, so unbelievably, turned into a woman. “Let her alone.”

She pulled the boy away, fondling and soothing their distracted mother until Mrs. Flynn partially recovered.

“Come to bed now,” commanded Pomona, and Mrs. Flynn thereupon, still giggling, followed her child. When he was alone trembling Johnny turned down the lamp flame which had filled the room with smoky fumes. His glance rested upon the table knife; the room was silent and oppressive now. He glared at the picture of Hamlet, at the clock with the oily face, at the notepaper lying white upon the table. They had all turned into quivering semblances of the things they were; he was crying.