Chapter I: Walked in Arden (4)

He returned in the afternoon full of determination. Behold, like a favourable augury, the door by the console table stood open, wide open. It did occur to him that an open door might be a trap for unwary men but he rapped the brass knocker courageously. Of course there was no response--how could there be--and he stepped inside the room. His glance had but just time to take in the small black piano, the dark carpet, the waxed margins of the floor, the floral dinginess of the walls brightened by mirrors and softened by gilt and crimson furniture, when the quiet woman, his Diana, came to him joyfully holding out both her hands. Well, there was no mystery here after all, nothing at all, although the elder lady was out and they were apparently alone. Hardross held her hands for some moments, the intensity of which was as deeply projected in her own eyes as in the tightness of his clasp. And there was tea for him! She was at her brightest, in a frock of figured muslin, and sitting before her he marvelled at the quickness of her understanding, the vividness of her gestures, the gentleness with which she touched his sleeve. That criminal suspicion of her sanity crowned him with infamy. Such communication was deliciously intimate; there came a moment when Hardross in a wild impulsive ecstasy flung himself before her, bowing his head in her lap. The quiet woman was giving him back his embraces, her own ardour was drooping beautifully upon him, when he heard a strange voice exclaim in the room: “God is my help! Well then!” A rattle of strange words followed which he could not comprehend. He turned to confront the elder woman, who surveyed them with grim amusement. The other stood up, smiling, and the two women spoke in finger language. The newcomer began to remove her gloves, saying:

“It is Mr. Hardross then. I am glad to meet. There is a lot of things to be spoken, eh?”

She was not at all the invalid he had half expected to find. She removed her hat and came back a competent-looking woman of about fifty, who had really an overwhelming stream of conversation. She took tea and, ignoring the girl as if she were a block of uncomprehending ornament, addressed herself to the interloper.

“You do not know me, Mr. Hardross?”

“It is a pleasure I have but looked forward to,” he replied, in the formal manner that at times irresistibly seized him, “with the keenest possible anticipation and....”

“No, I am Madame Peshkov. We are from Odessa, do you know it? We go back to our Russia tomorrow; yes, it is true.”

His organs of comprehension began to crackle in his skull, but he went on stirring his fresh cup of tea and continued to do so for quite a long time.

“No, you ... are ... Russian! I did not know.” Amid his musing astonishment that fact alone was portentous; it explained so much, everything in fact, but how he could ever contrive to learn such a language was the question that agitated him, so fearfully difficult a language, and on his fingers too! Then that other thunderclap began to reverberate: they were going, when was it? Tomorrow! All this while Madame Peshkov ran on with extravagant volubility. She had the habit of picking one of the hairpins from her hair and gently rubbing her scalp with the rounded end of it; she would replace the pin with a stylish tap of her fingers. It was a long time before Hardross extracted the pith from her remarks, and then only when the hypnotism induced by the stirring of his tea suddenly lapsed; he became aware of the dumb girl’s gaze fixed piercingly upon him, while his own was drawn away by the force of the other’s revelations. What he had already taken in was sad and strange. Her name was Julia Krasinsky. She was not at all related to Madame Peshkov, she was an orphan. Madame’s own daughter had been deaf and dumb, too, and the girls had been inseparable companions until two years ago, when Natalia Peshkov had died--O, an unspeakable grief still. He gathered that Madame was a widow, and that since Natalia’s death the two women had lived and travelled together. Madame talked on; it was tremendously exciting to Hardross crouching in his chair, but all that echoed in his mind were the words Julia Krasinsky, Julia Krasinsky, until she suddenly asked him:

“Do you love her?”

He was startled by this appalling directness; he stammered a little but he finally brought out:

“I adore her. Beyond everything I deeply deeply love her.” He then added: “I feel shameful enough now. I rage inwardly. All these many weeks I have dallied like a boy, I did not understand the situation. I have wasted our chances, our time, and now you are going.”

“You can’t waste time”; retorted the abrupt lady. “Time deals with you no matter how you use his hours.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed quite helplessly, “but we might have been extraordinary friends.”

“O, but you are, eh! She is bewitched, you cannot speak to her, she cannot speak to you, but yet you love. O, she is vairy vairy fond of you, Mr. Hardross. Why not? She has the best opinions of you.”

“Ah, she will change her opinion now. A fool like me?”

“No one ever changes an opinion. Your opinions govern and guide and change you. If they don’t they are not worth holding. And most of them are not, eh, do you see, we are such fools but God is our help.”

She talked confidently, intimately and quickly, but Hardross wished she would not do so, or use her hairpins in that absurd distracting way. He himself had no confidence; he was reserved by nature, irrevocably, and the mask of deliberation was necessary to him.

“Madame Peshkov, I shall take her out for a walk in the town, now, at once!” he cried.

“Ah, so?” Madame nodded her head vigorously, even approvingly. He had sprung up and approached the quiet woman. All her gentle nearness overcame him and he took her audaciously into his arms. Not less eagerly she slid to his breast and clung there like a bird to the shelter of its tree. Julia turned to Madame Peshkov with a smiling apologetic shrug, as much as to say: “What can one do with such a fellow, so strong he is, you see!” Madame bade him bring Julia later on to the café where they always dined.

His happiness was profound. He had never had an experience so moving as the adorable dumb woman by his side: yet so unsurprising, as if its possibility had always lain goldenly in his mind like an undreamed dream, or like music, half-remembered music. There was nothing, of course, just nothing they could talk about. They could look into shop windows together rather intimately, and they were a long time in a shady arcade of the park, full of lime-browsing bees, where they sat watching a peacock picking the gnats off the shrubs. It was the pleasantest possible defeat of time. Then there was the handsome girl crossing the yard of a weaving mill as they passed. She was carrying a great bale of bright blue wool and had glanced at them with a friendly smile. Her bare white arms encircled the wool: she had big gilt rings in her ears, and her fine shining chestnut-coloured hair was disarrayed and tumbled upon the bale. Julia had pressed his arm with joy. Yes, she delighted in the things he delighted in; and she felt too that sense of sorrow that hung in the air about them.

Her appearance in the café stirred everybody like a wave of sweet air. Hardross was filled with pride. He felt that it was just so that she would enrich the world wherever she wandered, that things would respond to her appearance in astonishing mysterious ways. Why, even the empty wine glasses seemed to behave like large flowers made miraculously out of water, a marvel of crystal petals blooming but for her; certainly the glasses on other tables didn’t look at all like these. He drank four glasses of wine and after dinner they all sat together in the flat until the half darkness was come. And now Madame Peshkov too was very silent; she sat smoking or scratching her head with her pins. It was nine o’clock, but there remained a preposterous glare in the west that threw lateral beams against the tops of tall buildings, although the pavements were already dim. It made the fronts of the plastered houses over the way look like cream cheese. Six scarlet chimney pots stood stolidly at attention--the torsos of six guardsmen from whom head and limbs had been unkindly smitten; the roof seemed to be rushing away from them. Beyond was an echo of the sunset, faint in the northern sky. How sweet, how sad, to sit so silently in this tremulous gloom. It was only at the last when they parted at her door that the shadow of their division became omnipresent. Then it overwhelmed them.

Hardross crept upstairs to his own rooms. In such plights the mind, careless of time present and time past, full of an anguish that quenches and refills like a sponge, writhes beyond hope with those strange lesions of demeanour that confound the chronicler. Tra-la-la, sang the distracted man, snapping his sweating fingers in time with a ribald leering ditty, Tra-la-la. He dropped plumb to Atlantean depths of grief, only to emerge like a spouting whale with the maddening Tra-la-la tugging him, a hook in his body, from despair to dementia. He was roused from this vertiginous exercise by a knocking at his door. The door was thrust open, and Madame Peshkov asked if he was there. He rose up and switched on a light.

“What is to be done now?” cried the lady. If her silence below had been complete, as complete as poor Julia’s, she was now fully audible and not a little agitated. “What is to be done? I cannot believe it of her but it is true, as true as God!”

Hardross beheld her sink, stricken with some trouble, into an armchair, beating her hands together.

“I have no influence, gone it is, no power over her, none whatever. What is to be done? Assist us please. She has been so.... O, for days, and now it comes, it comes....”

“What has come?” he interrupted sharply.

“I cannot believe it of her, but it is true ... as God. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone, a mountain.”

“Is this about Julia?”

“She will not go. Of course she will not go! She declines, she will not come back to Odessa. She says she will not come. I have to tell you this, Mr. Hardross, I cannot move her. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone. What then?”

Madame’s appeal seemed pregnant with a significance that he but dimly savoured. He asked: “What is she going to do then?”

“To stop in this England, here, in this very place! But our passages are booked, tomorrow it is--pooh, it does not matter!--I am to leave her here in this place, here she will stay, in a foreign land, without speech or understanding. But what is to be done, I ask of you?”

He was delirious himself; he kept whispering Julia, Julia, but he managed to ask with a lugubrious covering of propriety:

“What? I don’t know. Shall I go to her?”

“But can you not see? Do you comprehend, you Hardross? O, it is a madness, I want to explain it to you but it is all so gross, so swift, like a vulture. You see it is impossible for me to remain an hour longer, an hour in England impossible absolutely; there are reasons, lives perhaps, depending on my return. Yes, it is true; we live in Russia, do you see, and in Russia ... ah, you understand! But how shall I leave this woman here?”

Madame stared at him with curious inquisitiveness, beating her hands upon the arm of the chair as if she expected an answer, a prompt one:

“Of course she will not go away from you now, of course, of course, she has never had a lover before--how could she, poor thing. I understand it, she is not a child. And you Mr. Hardross you are a generous man, you have courage, a good man, a man of his honour, O yes, it is true, I see it, I feel it, and so she will not be torn away from you now. I understand that, she is no longer a child.”

Madame rose and took him by the arm. “Marry her, my friend! Do not you see? I can leave her to you. Marry her at once, marry her!” She stood as if it were something that could be done on the spot, as easy as giving one a cup of tea. But he did not hesitate.

“Why, I would give my soul to do it!” he cried, and rushed away down the stairs to Julia.

And surely she was as wise as she was beautiful, and as rich as she was wise.

* * * * *

THE TRUMPETERS

* * * * *

THE TRUMPETERS

They were crossing the Irish Sea. It was night, blowing a moderate gale, but the moon, aloft on the port bow with a wind, was chock full of such astounding brightness that the turmoil of the dark waves was easy and beautiful to see. The boat was crowded with soldiers on leave; the few civilian passengers--mechanics, labourers, and a miner going to his home in Wexford, who had got drunk at the harbour inn before coming aboard--were congregated in the angles on the lee-side of the saloon bunks and trying to sleep amid the chill seething, roaring, and thudding. The miner, young, powerful, and very much at his ease, sprawled among them intoxicated. He sang, and continued to sing at intervals, a song about “The hat that my father wore,” swaying, with large dreamy gestures, to and fro, round and about, up and down upon the unfortunate men sitting to right and left of him. Close at hand sat another young man, but smaller, who carried a big brass trumpet.

“Throw him in the sea, why not, now!” the trumpeter shouted to the drunken man’s weary supporters. “Begad I would do it if he put his pig’s face on e’er a shoulder of me!” He was a small, emphatic young man: “Give him a crack now, and lay on him, or by the tears of God we’ll get no repose at all!”

His advice was tendered as constantly and as insistently as the miner’s song about his parent’s headgear, and he would encourage these incitements to vicarious violence by putting the brass trumpet to his lips and blowing some bitter and not very accurate staves. So bitter and so inaccurate that at length even the drunken miner paused in his song and directed the trumpeter to “shut up.” The little man sprang to his feet in fury, and approaching the other he poured a succession of trumpet calls close into his face. This threw the miner into a deep sleep, a result so unexpected that the enraged trumpeter slung his instrument under his arm and pranced belligerently upon the deck.

“Come out o’ that, ye drunken matchbox, and by the Queen of Heaven I’ll teach ye! Come now!”

The miner momentarily raised himself and recommenced his song: “’Tis the Hat that me Father wore!” At this the trumpeter fetched him a mighty slap across the face.

“Ah, go away,” groaned the miner, “or I’ll be sick on ye.”

“Try it, ye rotten gossoon! ye filthy matchbox! Where’s yer khar_kee_?”

The miner could display no khaki; indeed, he was sleeping deeply again.

“I’m a man o’ me principles, ye rotten matchbox!” yelled the trumpeter. “In the Munsters I was ... seven years ... where’s your khar_kee_?”

He seized the miner by the collar and shook that part of the steamer into a new commotion until he was collared by the sailors and kicked up on to the foredeck.

Nothing up there, not even his futile trumpeting, could disturb the chill rejoicing beauty of the night. The wind increased, but the moonlight was bland and reassuring. Often the cope of some tall wave would plunge dully over the bows, filling the deck with water that floundered foaming with the ship’s movement or dribbled back through the scuppers into the sea. Yet there was no menace in the dark wandering water; each wave tossed back from its neck a wreath of foam that slewed like milk across the breast of its follower.

The trumpeter sat upon a heap of ropes beside a big soldier.

“The rotten matchbox, did ye ever see the like o’ that? I’ll kill him against the first thing we step ashore, like ye would a flea!”

“Be aisy,” said the soldier; “why are ye making trouble at all? Have ye hurt your little finger?”

“Trouble, is it? What way would I be making trouble in this world?” exclaimed the trumpeter. “Isn’t it the world itself as puts trouble on ye, so it is, like a wild cat sitting under a tub of unction! O, very pleasant it is, O ay! No, no, my little sojee, that is not it at all. You can’t let the flaming world rush beyant ye like that....”

“Well, it’s a quiet life I’m seeking,” interjected the soldier, wrapping his great coat comfortingly across his breast, “and by this and by that, a quiet night too.”

“Is that so? Quiet, is it? But I say, my little sojee, you’ll not get it at all and the whole flaming world whickering at ye like a mad cracker itself. Would ye sleep on that wid yer quiet life and all? It’s to tame life you’d be doing, like it was a tiger. And it’s no drunken boozer can tame me as was with the Munsters in the East ... for seven holy years.”

“Ah, go off wid you, you’ve hurt your little finger.”

“Me little finger, is it?” cried the trumpeter, holding his thin hands up for inspection in the moonlight, “I have not then.”

“You surprise me,” the soldier said, gazing at him with sleepy amused tolerance. “Did you never hear of Tobin the smith and Mary of Cappoquin?”

“I did not then,” snapped the other. “Who was they?”

“He was a roaring, fatal feller, a holy terror, a giant. He lived in the mountains but he went over the country killing things--a tiger or two at an odd time, I’m thinking--and destroying the neat condition of the world. And he had a nasty little bit of a bugle....”

“Was it the like o’ that?” demanded the other, holding out the trumpet and tapping it with his fingers.

“‘A bugle,’ I said,” replied the soldier sternly, “and every time he puffed in its tubes the noise of it was so severe the hens in the town fell dead....”

“The hens!”

“Yes, and the ducks on the ponds were overcome with emotion and sank to the bottom. One day he was in his forge driving a few nails into the shoe of an ass when he hit his little finger such a blow, a terrible blow, that it bled for a day. Then he seared the wound with his searing iron, but it was no better, and it bled for a night. I will go--says he--to the physician of Cappoquin and be sewn up with some golden wire. So he drove into Cappoquin, but when he was in it the physician was gone to a christening; there was only his daughter Mary left to attend to him, a bright good girl entirely, and when she saw the finger she said to Tobin: ‘I declare on my soul if I don’t chop it off it’s not long till you have your death.’ ‘Chop it off, then,’ says Tobin, and she did so. He came back the next day and this is how it was; the physician was gone to a wake. ‘What’s your need?’ asked Mary. He showed her his hand and it dripping with blood. ‘I declare to my God,’ said Mary, ‘if I don’t chop it off it’s short till you have your death.’ ‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off the hand. The day after that he drove in again, but the physician was gone to an inquest about a little matter concerning some remains that had been found. ‘What is it today, Tobin?’ and he showed her his arm bleeding in great drops. ‘I declare by the saints,’ says she, ‘that unless I chop it off you’ll die in five minutes.’ ‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off his arm. The next day he was back again with the stump of his arm worse than before. ‘Oh, I see what it is,’ said Mary, and going behind him she struck off his head with one blow of her father’s sharp knife and gave it to the cat.”

“That is a neat tale,” said the trumpeter. “Did you hear the story of the dirty soldier and the drummer?”

“No--” The soldier hesitated reflectively. “No, I never heard it.”

“Well, this is how it was....”

But just then the steamer began to approach the harbour, and in the hurry and scurry of preparations to land the two friends were separated and the tale was never told.

At the disembarkation passengers and soldiers crowded on the pier awaiting the boat train. The harbour was full of lights; the moon was still high in the heavens, but her glory faded as the sun began to rise. The thick densities of the night sky quivered into frail blues, violet and silver were mingled in the sea, the buildings on the wharf looked strange; icily, bitterly grey. The trumpeter ran about in the bleak air seeking the “rotten matchbox,” but he could not find him. He comforted himself by executing some castigating blares upon his instrument. The hollow wharves and the pier staging echoed with acrid sound that pleased his simple heart. He blew and blew and blew until he was surrounded by people watching him strain his determined eyes and inflate his pale cheeks--all of them secretly hoping that the ones might fall out or the others might crack. Suddenly he caught sight of the now-sobered miner, quite close to him, almost touching him! The call he was blowing faded with a stupid squeak. The world began to flame again ... when an officer burst into the circle, demanding to know who he was, where from, and what in all the realm of blasphemous things he meant by tootling in that infernal manner on that infernal thing.

The trumpeter drew himself proudly to attention and saluted.

“Discharged I am, sir, it’s with the Munsters I was, seven years, sir, with the Munsters, in the east.”

“You disgrace the Army! If I hear another tootle on that thing, I ... I’ll have you clapped in irons--I will! And ... and transported ... damn me if I don’t! You understand?”

The trumpeter meekly saluted as the captain swaggered away. At that moment the miner laid his hand upon his arm.

“What, my little man,” said he, “have you lost your teeth? Give it me now!”

And putting the trumpet to his own lips he blew a brilliant and mocking reveille, whose echoes hurtled far over the harbour and into the neighbouring hills.

“God save us!” cried the trumpeter with a furtive eye on the captain at the end of the platform, who did not appear to have heard that miraculous salvo, “it’s a great grand breath you’ve got, sir.”

* * * * *

THE ANGEL AND THE SWEEP

* * * * *

THE ANGEL AND THE SWEEP

I’d been sitting in the _Axe & Cleaver_ along of Mrs. Pellegrini for an hour at least; I hadn’t seen her in five years since she was doing the roads near Pontypool. An hour at least, for isn’t the _Axe & Cleaver_ the pleasant kind of place? Talking or not talking you can always hear the water lashing from the outfall above Hinney Lock, the sound of it making you feel drowsy and kind. And isn’t the old bridge there a thing to be looking at indeed?

Mrs. Pellegrini had a family of pikeys who traded in horses, willow-wattles, and rocksalt; she was as cunning as a jacksnipe, and if she _had_ a deep voice like a man she was full of wisdom. A grand great woman was Rosa Pellegrini, with a face silky-brown like a beechnut, and eyes and hair the equal of a rook for darkness. The abundance of jewellery hooked and threaded upon her was something to be looking at too. Old man and young Isaac kept going out to look at the horses, or they’d be coming in to upbraid her for delaying, but she could drink a sconce of beer without the least sparkle of hilarity, as if it were a tribute she owed her whole magnificent constitution, or at least a reward for some part of it. So she kept doing it, while her son and her husband could do no other and did it with nothing of her inevitable air.

Well, I was sitting in the _Axe & Cleaver_ along of Mrs. Pellegrini when who should rove in but Larry McCall, good-looking Larry, bringing a friend with him, a soft kind of fellow who’d a harsh voice and a whining voice that we didn’t like the noise of tho’ he had good money in his purse. Larry gave me the grace of the day directly he entered the door, and then, letting a cry of joy out of him, he’d kissed Mrs. Pellegrini many times before she knew what was happening to her. She got up and punished him with a welt on his chin that would have bruised an oak-tree, and bade him behave himself. He sat down soothingly beside her and behaved very well. His companion stood very shy and nervous, like a kitten might be watching a cockfight.

“Who is this young man?” Mrs. Pellegrini asks.

“That’s Arthur,” said Larry: “I forget what Arthur knocks a living out of--I’ve known him but these three bits of an hour since we were walking in the one direction.”

“My dad,” said Arthur slowly and raspingly, “is an undertaker, and he lets me help him in his business: we bury people.”

“Oh come, young man,” said Mrs. Pellegrini, “that’s no sort of a trade at all--d’ye think it, Mr. McCall?”

“No, I do not,” replied Larry, “but Arthur does. It don’t seem to be a trade with very much humour in it. Life ain’t a sad solid chunk.”

“Now that’s just where you’re wrong,” drawled Arthur.

“’Tain’t a life at all,” Rosa interrupted severely, “it’s only sniffing, having a bad cold! No sort of a life at all--d’ye think it, Mr. McCall?”

“No, I do not,” said Larry with a chuckle, “but Arthur does!”

“Oh, I know what you’re a deluding on,” commenced the young man again, “but....”

“Strike me dead if I can see any fun in funerals!” Mrs. Pellegrini said with finality, taking up her mug. “But if you _will_ have your grief, young man,” she added, pausing in one of her gulps to gaze at Arthur until he quivered, “you must have it, and may fortune fall in love with what we like. Fill up that cup now!”

The young man in agitation obeyed, and while this was doing we all heard someone come over the bridge singing a song, and that was Jerry Ogwin, who could tell the neatest tales and sing the littlest songs. Well, there were great salutations, for we all knew Jerry and loved Jerry, and he loved some of us. But he was the fiercest looking, fieriest gipsy man you ever saw, and he had all the gullible prescience of a cockney.

“My fortune! Where are you from, you cunning little man?”

“I bin doing a bit o’ road down Kent and London way. D’ye know Lewisham?” commenced Jerry.

“No,” said Larry, grinning at me, “but Arthur does!”

“No, I don’t; I never been there,” chanted Arthur.

“Now what’s the good of talking like that!” said McCall sternly, and letting a wink at me.

“More I ain’t,” asserted Arthur.

“Then I was at Deptford and Greenwich--know Greenwich?” continued Jerry.

“No,” replied Larry, then adding nonchalantly, “Arthur does.”

“No, I don’t, I don’t,” said Arthur wormily, for Jerry was glaring at him, and that fighting scar all down his nose, where his wife Katey once hit him with the spout of a kettle, was very disturbing.

“What’s the good of that?” urged the devilish-minded Larry. “Why don’t you talk to the gentleman, you don’t want to vex him, do you?”

“You ain’t blooming silly, are you?” queried Jerry.

Without waiting for reply he drifted off again.

“Me and my mate was doing a bit o’ road with oranges and things, you know--three for a ’eaver--down Mary’s Cray; d’ye know Mary’s Cray?”

But this time Arthur was looking avidly out of the window.

“Well, we was ’avin’ a bit of grub one night, just about dark it was, you know, with a little fire, we’d bin cookin’ something, when a blooming sweep come along. I’ll tell it to you; it was just inside a bit of a wood and we was sleeping rough. My mate was a bit nervous, you know, ’e kept looking round as if ’e could see something, but it was that dark you might be looking in a sack. I says to Timmy: what’s up with you? I dunno, ’e says, something going on, and just as ’e says that this blooming sweep ’oofs in from nowhere and falls over our beer. I says to Timmy, ’e’s knocked over our beer; are you going to fight ’im or shall I? And Timmy shouts: look at ’im, ’e’s laying on the fire! And s’elp me God so ’e was, ’is legs was in the sticks and ’is trousers was a-burning. Come out of it, we says, but ’e didn’t move. No, my oath, ’e layed there like a dead sheep. Well, we pulled ’im off it, but ’e was like a silly bloke. ’E couldn’t stand up and ’e couldn’t say anything. ’E got a lot of froth round ’is mouth like a ’orse that’s going wicked. And ’e wasn’t drunk, neither, but, _you_ know, ’e was just frightened out of ’is life about something. We sit ’im down with ’is back against a tree and made the fire up again. What’s the matter with you, we says; you got a fit, we says; what d’ye want coming ’ere, we says? But we couldn’t get no answer from ’im. ’Is face was that dam white ’cept where it was smudged with soot, and there was this froth dribbling on ’im, and what d’yer think, ’e’d got a red rose stuck in ’is button-’ole. ’E was a horrible sight; we couldn’t bear ’im, so we picks ’im up, and Timmy give ’im a clout in the ear and shoves ’im out among some bushes where we couldn’t see ’im. Sw’elp me if ’e didn’t come crawling back on ’is hands and knees where we was sitting round the fire. Oh, ’e was horrible. Timmy went nearly daft and I thought ’e was going to give ’im one good kick in the mouth and finish ’im. ’Stead of that we picks ’im up again and runs ’im further down the wood and heaves ’im into some blackberry bushes and tells ’im what we’d do to ’im if ’e come again. That was no good; in five minutes ’e crawled back. Timmy was shaking like a dog, and fell on ’im as if ’e was going to strangle ’im, but we had to let ’im stay, and old Timmy was blacker than the sweep when ’e’d done with ’im. But the bloke _wouldn’t_ say nothing or open ’is eyes, _you_ know, he _wouldn’t_ open his eyes, ’e was like something what had been murdered and wouldn’t die, if you know what I mean. Blast ’im, I could kill ’im, Timmy says. That’s no good of, says I, and at last we left ’im ’side the fire, and we went off somewhere just outside the wood and packed up in a clump of ur-grass. I went to sleep, but I don’t believe old Timmy did, well, I know ’e didn’t. Now we hadn’t ’eard nothing all night, nothing at all, but when I wakes up in the morning the blooming sweep was gone and not a chink of ’im left anywhere. But,” said Jerry impressively to Arthur, who eyed him with horror, “we found something else!” There was silence while Jerry’s face was connected to his mug of beer. Nobody spoke. We eyed him with eager interest. He vanquished his thirst and smacked his lips but held the mug in readiness for further libation.

“Not twenty chain away a woman was laying down. Timmy touches me frightened like and says, Look, what’s that? My eyes was nearly skinned out of me. I couldn’t speak. We walked quietly up to ’er like two sick men. She lay there just as if she’d dropped out of the sky, naked as an angel, not a shift nor a stocking, not a button on ’er.” There was again silence until Larry struck a match loudly on a jar, his pipe, hooked tightly in his forefinger, having gone out. Mrs. Pellegrini stared, and breathed audibly. “And,” said Jerry impressively, “she was the grandest creature what ever you see. I touched ’er with them two fingers and she was cold as iron, stiff, gone a bit dull like pearls look, but the fine build of that lady was the world’s wonder. There was not a scratch or a wound on ’er or the sign of ’er death anywhere. One of ’er legs was cocked up at the knee like she’d lay in bed. ’Er two eyes was just looking at the ground and there was a kind of funny smile on ’er face. Fine long hair she had, black as a cat’s back and long as the tail of a horse. And in it there was a red rose, and in one of ’er hands she was holding a white lily. There was a little bird’s dropping on ’er stomach. I wiped it off. I says to Timmy: That sweep! And ’e says to me, Jerry Ogwin, we’re ’aving a share out. What about that sweep I says to ’im, but all ’e says was: we’re ’aving a share out. ’E was afraid of getting pulled for this job, _you_ know. I never seen a man so frightened afore, and ’e was not a chap as renagged ever, not Timmy.”

“That ’e wasn’t,” said Mrs. Pellegrini, “I seen ’im once half murder two sojers for beating a deaf and dumb man.”

“Well,” continued Jerry, “I says all right Timmy, and so we ’as a share out and gits on different roads. My share was a clothes basket and a pair of spectacles cost tuppence ha’penny, _you_ know, and I walked all that day as ’ard as ever I could. Then I bushes for the night, and when I woke up nex’ morning I ’eard some talking going on. I looks under the ’edge and found I was side a strawberry field, _you_ know, a lot of strawberries. So I ’ops in and sells my basket to the strawberry pickers for a shilling. They give me a shilling for it, so that was all right. ’Ad a shilling and a pair of spectacles for my share out. I goes on a bit and then I comes across a beanfeast party, and I showed ’em my pair o’ gold spectacles--I’d just found ’em--_you_ know!”

Larry burst into a peal of laughter that seemed to surprise Jerry and he said:

“Ain’t you ever met a feller what’s found a pair of gold spectacles?”

Larry couldn’t reply and Jerry continued:

“No, ain’t you really? God, what a laugh! Yes, I sells ’em to a fly young party for two and fo’ pence and off I goes. Never ’eard no more of Timmy. Never ’eard no more of anything. I dunno if they found the girl. I dunno if they found that sweep. They didn’t find _me_.”

He paused for a moment.

“They didn’t find _me_,” he repeated.

There was silence at last; the room was getting dim with evening. Mrs. Pellegrini spoke:

“And you wiped it off her stomach, did you, Jerry?”

“I did,” said he.

Mrs. Pellegrini turned to Arthur and said in a sharp voice:

“Fill that pot for the gentleman!”

The young man in terror obeyed, he exceedingly obeyed.

When the last pot was emptied Jerry and Larry and the wretched mute went off along the road together. Rosa Pellegrini said “So long” to me and drove off with her cavalcade. The inn was empty and quiet again so you could hear the water at the outfall.

I walked along the bank of the old river until I came to the lock where the water roaring windily from the lasher streamed like an old man’s beard; a pair of swans moved in the slack water of the pool. Away there was a fine lea of timothy grass looking as soft as wool. And at the end of the lea there was a low long hill covered with trees full of the arriving darkness; a train that you could not hear the noise of shot through a grove and poured a long spool of white fume upon the trees quietly, a thing to be looking at, it was so white and soft. But I was thinking ... thinking ... thinking of the grand white slim woman who did not seem dead at all to me, lying with a lily in her hand, a red rose in her hair. And I could not think it to be true at all; I believe Jerry was only telling us one of his tales.

* * * * *

ARABESQUE

* * * * *

ARABESQUE: THE MOUSE

In the main street amongst tall establishments of mart and worship was a high narrow house pressed between a coffee factory and a bootmaker’s. It had four flights of long dim echoing stairs, and at the top, in a room that was full of the smell of dried apples and mice, a man in the middle age of life had sat reading Russian novels until he thought he was mad. Late was the hour, the night outside black and freezing, the pavements below empty and undistinguishable when he closed his book and sat motionless in front of the glowing but flameless fire. He felt he was very tired yet he could not rest. He stared at a picture on the wall until he wanted to cry; it was a colour print by Utamaro of a suckling child caressing its mother’s breasts as she sits in front of a blackbound mirror. Very chaste and decorative it was, in spite of its curious anatomy. The man gazed, empty of sight though not of mind, until the sighing of the gas jet maddened him. He got up, put out the light, and sat down again in the darkness trying to compose his mind before the comfort of the fire. And he was just about to begin a conversation with himself when a mouse crept from a hole in the skirting near the fireplace and scurried into the fender. The man had the crude dislike for such sly nocturnal things, but this mouse was so small and bright, its antics so pretty, that he drew his feet carefully from the fender and sat watching it almost with amusement. The mouse moved along the shadows of the fender, out upon the hearth, and sat before the glow, rubbing its head, ears, and tiny belly with its paws as if it were bathing itself with the warmth, until, sharp and sudden, the fire sank, an ember fell, and the mouse flashed into its hole.

The man reached forward to the mantelpiece and put his hand upon a pocket lamp. Turning on the beam, he opened the door of a cupboard beside the fireplace. Upon one of the shelves there was a small trap baited with cheese, a trap made with a wire spring, one of those that smashed down to break the back of ingenuous and unwary mice.

“Mean--so mean,” he mused, “to appeal to the hunger of any living thing just in order to destroy it.”

He picked up the empty trap as if to throw it in the fire.

“I suppose I had better leave it though--the place swarms with them.” He still hesitated. “I hope that little beastie won’t go and do anything foolish.” He put the trap back quite carefully, closed the door of the cupboard, sat down again and extinguished the lamp.

Was there any one else in the world so squeamish and foolish about such things! Even his mother, mother so bright and beautiful, even she had laughed at his childish horrors. He recalled how once in his childhood, not long after his sister Yosine was born, a friendly neighbour had sent him home with a bundle of dead larks tied by the feet “for supper.” The pitiful inanimity of the birds had brought a gush of tears; he had run weeping home and into the kitchen, and there he had found the strange thing doing. It was dusk; mother was kneeling before the fire. He dropped the larks.

“Mother!” he exclaimed softly. She looked at his tearful face.

“What’s the matter, Filip?” she asked, smiling too at his astonishment.

“Mother! What you doing?”

Her bodice was open and she was squeezing her breasts; long thin streams of milk spurted into the fire with a plunging noise.

“Weaning your little sister,” laughed mother. She took his inquisitive face and pressed it against the delicate warmth of her bosom, and he forgot the dead birds behind him.

“Let me do it, mother,” he cried, and doing so he discovered the throb of the heart in his mother’s breast. Wonderful it was for him to experience it, although she could not explain it to him.

“Why does it do that?”

“If it did not beat, little son, I should die and the Holy Father would take me from you.”

“God?”

She nodded. He put his hand upon his own breast. “Oh feel it, Mother!” he cried. Mother unbuttoned his little coat and felt the gentle _tick tick_ with her warm palm.

“Beautiful!” she said.

“Is it a good one?”

She kissed his upsmiling lips. “It is good if it beats truly. Let it always beat truly, Filip, let it always beat truly.”

There was the echo of a sigh in her voice, and he had divined some grief, for he was very wise. He kissed her bosom in his tiny ecstasy and whispered soothingly: “Little mother! little mother!” In such joys he forgot his horror of the dead larks; indeed he helped mother to pluck them and spit them for supper.

It was a black day that succeeded, and full of tragedy for the child. A great bay horse with a tawny mane had knocked down his mother in the lane, and a heavy cart had passed over her, crushing both her hands. She was borne away moaning with anguish to the surgeon who cut off the two hands. She died in the night. For years the child’s dreams were filled with the horror of the stumps of arms, bleeding unendingly. Yet he had never seen them, for he was sleeping when she died.

While this old woe was come vividly before him he again became aware of the mouse. His nerves stretched upon him in repulsion, but he soon relaxed to a tolerant interest, for it was really a most engaging little mouse. It moved with curious staccato scurries, stopping to rub its head or flicker with its ears; they seemed almost transparent ears. It spied a red cinder and skipped innocently up to it ... sniffing ... sniffing ... until it jumped back scorched. It would crouch as a cat does, blinking in the warmth, or scamper madly as if dancing, and then roll upon its side rubbing its head with those pliant paws. The melancholy man watched it until it came at last to rest and squatted meditatively upon its haunches, hunched up, looking curiously wise, a pennyworth of philosophy; then once more the coals sank with a rattle and again the mouse was gone.

The man sat on before the fire and his mind filled again with unaccountable sadness. He had grown into manhood with a burning generosity of spirit and rifts of rebellion in him that proved too exacting for his fellows and seemed mere wantonness to men of casual rectitudes. “Justice and Sin,” he would cry, “Property and Virtue--incompatibilities! There can be no sin in a world of justice, no property in a world of virtue!” With an engaging extravagance and a certain clear-eyed honesty of mind he had put his two and two together and seemed then to rejoice, as in some topsy-turvy dream, in having rendered unto Cæsar, as you might say, the things that were due to Napoleon! But this kind of thing could not pass unexpiated in a world of men having an infinite regard for Property and a pride in their traditions of Virtue and Justice. They could indeed forgive him his sins but they could not forgive him his compassions. So he had to go seek for more melodious-minded men and fair unambiguous women. But rebuffs can deal more deadly blows than daggers; he became timid--a timidity not of fear but of pride--and grew with the years into misanthropy, susceptible to trivial griefs and despairs, a vessel of emotion that emptied as easily as it filled, until he came at last to know that his griefs were half deliberate, his despairs half unreal, and to live but for beauty--which is tranquillity--to put her wooing hand upon him.

Now, while the mouse hunts in the cupboard, one fair recollection stirs in the man’s mind--of Cassia and the harmony of their only meeting, Cassia who had such rich red hair, and eyes, yes, her eyes were full of starry enquiry like the eyes of mice. It was so long ago that he had forgotten how he came to be in it, that unaccustomed orbit of vain vivid things--a village festival, all oranges and houp-là. He could not remember how he came to be there, but at night, in the court hall, he had danced with Cassia--fair and unambiguous indeed!--who had come like the wind from among the roses and swept into his heart.

“It is easy to guess,” he had said to her, “what you like most in the world.”

She laughed; “To dance? Yes, and you...?”

“To find a friend.”

“I know, I know,” she cried, caressing him with recognitions. “Ah, at times I quite love my friends--until I begin to wonder how much they hate me!”

He had loved at once that cool pale face, the abundance of her strange hair as light as the autumn’s clustered bronze, her lilac dress and all the sweetness about her like a bush of lilies. How they had laughed at the two old peasants whom they had overheard gabbling of trifles like sickness and appetite!

“There’s a lot of nature in a parsnip,” said one, a fat person of the kind that swells grossly when stung by a bee, “a lot of nature when it’s young, but when it’s old it’s like everything else.”

“True it is.”

“And I’m very fond of vegetables, yes, and I’m very fond of bread.”

“Come out with me,” whispered Cassia to Filip, and they walked out in the blackness of midnight into what must have been a garden.

“Cool it is here,” she said, “and quiet, but too dark even to see your face--can you see mine?”

“The moon will not rise until after dawn,” said he, “it will be white in the sky when the starlings whistle in your chimney.”

They walked silently and warily about until they felt the chill of the air. A dull echo of the music came to them through the walls, then stopped, and they heard the bark of a fox away in the woods.

“You are cold,” he whispered, touching her bare neck with timid fingers. “Quite, quite cold,” drawing his hand tenderly over the curves of her chin and face. “Let us go in,” he said, moving with discretion from the rapture he desired. “We will come out again,” said Cassia.

But within the room the ball was just at an end, the musicians were packing up their instruments and the dancers were flocking out and homewards, or to the buffet which was on a platform at one end of the room. The two old peasants were there, munching hugely.

“I tell you,” said one of them, “there’s nothing in the world for it but the grease of an owl’s liver. That’s it, that’s it! Take something on your stomach now, just to offset the chill of the dawn!”

Filip and Cassia were beside them, but there were so many people crowding the platform that Filip had to jump down. He stood then looking up adoringly at Cassia, who had pulled a purple cloak around her.

“For Filip, Filip, Filip,” she said, pushing the last bite of her sandwich into his mouth, and pressing upon him her glass of Loupiac. Quickly he drank it with a great gesture, and, flinging the glass to the wall, took Cassia into his arms, shouting: “I’ll carry you home, the whole way home, yes, I’ll carry you!”

“Put me down!” she cried, beating his head and pulling his ears, as they passed among the departing dancers. “Put me down, you wild thing!”

Dark, dark was the lane outside, and the night an obsidian net, into which he walked carrying the girl. But her arms were looped around him, she discovered paths for him, clinging more tightly as he staggered against a wall, stumbled upon a gulley, or when her sweet hair was caught in the boughs of a little lime tree.

“Do not loose me, Filip, will you, do not loose me,” Cassia said, putting her lips against his temple.

His brain seemed bursting, his heart rocked within him, but he adored the rich grace of her limbs against his breast. “Here it is,” she murmured, and he carried her into a path that led to her home in a little lawned garden where the smell of ripe apples upon the branches and the heavy lustre of roses stole upon the air. Roses and apples! Roses and apples! He carried her right into the porch before she slid down and stood close to him with her hands still upon his shoulders. He could breathe happily at the release, standing silent and looking round at the sky sprayed with wondrous stars but without a moon.

“You are stronger than I thought you, stronger than you look, you are really very strong,” she whispered, nodding her head to him. Opening the buttons of his coat she put her palm against his breast.

“Oh how your heart does beat: does it beat truly--and for whom?”

He had seized her wrists in a little fury of love, crying: “Little mother, little mother!”

“What are you saying?” asked the girl, but before he could continue there came a footstep sounding behind the door, and the clack of a bolt....

What was that? Was that really a bolt or was it ... was it ... the snap of the trap? The man sat up in his room intently listening, with nerves quivering again, waiting for the trap to kill the little philosopher. When he felt it was all over he reached guardedly in the darkness for the lantern, turned on the beam, and opened the door of the cupboard. Focussing the light upon the trap he was amazed to see the mouse sitting on its haunches before it, uncaught. Its head was bowed, but its bead-like eyes were full of brightness, and it sat blinking, it did not flee.

“Shoosh!” said the man, but the mouse did not move. “Why doesn’t it go? Shoosh!” he said again, and suddenly the reason of the mouse’s strange behaviour was made clear. The trap had not caught it completely, but it had broken off both its forefeet, and the thing crouched there holding out its two bleeding stumps humanly, too stricken to stir.