Chapter M: R. S. Andrews: The Perfect Tribute; François Coppee: The (2)

The next morning Avdeitch rose before daylight and said his prayers.
Then he made up the stove, got ready some cabbage soup and porridge,
lighted the _samovar_, slung his leather apron about him, and sat
down to his work in the window. He sat and worked hard, yet all the
time his thoughts were centred upon last night. He was in two ideas
about the vision. At one moment he would think that it must have
been his fancy, while the next moment he would find himself
convinced that he had really heard the voice. “Yes, it must have
been so,” he concluded.

As Martin sat thus by the window he kept looking out of it as much
as working. Whenever a pair of boots passed with which he was
acquainted he would bend down to glance upwards through the window
and see their owner’s face as well. The doorkeeper passed in new
felt boots, and then a water-carrier. Next, an old soldier, a
veteran of Nicholas’ army, in old, patched boots, and carrying a
shovel in his hands, halted close by the window. Avdeitch knew him
by his boots. His name was Stepanitch, and he was kept by a
neighboring tradesman out of charity, his duties being to help the
doorkeeper. He began to clear away the snow from in front of
Avdeitch’s window, while the shoemaker looked at him and then
resumed his work.

“I think I must be getting into my dotage,” thought Avdeitch with a
smile. “Just because Stepanitch begins clearing away the snow I at
once jump to the conclusion that Christ is about to visit me. Yes, I
am growing foolish now, old greybeard that I am.”

Yet he had hardly made a dozen stitches before he was craning his
neck again to look out of the window. He could see that Stepanitch
had placed his shovel against the wall, and was resting and trying
to warm himself a little.

“He is evidently an old man now and broken,” thought Avdeitch to
himself. “He is not strong enough to clear away snow. Would he like
some tea, I wonder? That reminds me that the _samovar_ must be ready
now.”

He made fast his awl in his work and got up. Placing the _samovar_
on the table, he brewed the tea, and then tapped with his finger on
the window-pane. Stepanitch turned round and approached. Avdeitch
beckoned to him, and then went to open the door.

“Come in and warm yourself,” he said. “You must be frozen.”

“Christ requite you!” answered Stepanitch. “Yes, my bones are almost
cracking.”

He came in, shook the snow off himself, and, though tottering on his
feet, took pains to wipe them carefully, that he might not dirty the
floor.

“Nay, do not trouble about that,” said Avdeitch. “I will wipe your
boots myself. It is part of my business in this trade. Come you here
and sit down, and we will empty this tea-pot together.”

He poured out two tumblerfuls, and offered one to his guest; after
which he emptied his own into the saucer, and blew upon it to cool
it. Stepanitch drank his tumblerful, turned the glass upside down,
placed his crust upon it, and thanked his host kindly. But it was
plain that he wanted another one.

“You must drink some more,” said Avdeitch, and refilled his guest’s
tumbler and his own. Yet, in spite of himself, he had no sooner
drunk his tea than he found himself looking out into the street
again.

“Are you expecting anyone?” asked his guest.

“Am—am I expecting anyone? Well, to tell the truth, yes. That is to
say, I am, and I am not. The fact is that some words have got fixed
in my memory. Whether it was a vision or not I cannot tell, but at
all events, my old friend, I was reading in the Gospels last night
about Our Little Father Christ, and how He walked this earth and
suffered. You have heard of Him, have you not?”

“Yes, yes, I have heard of Him,” answered Stepanitch; “but we are
ignorant folk and do not know our letters.”

“Well, I was reading of how He walked this earth, and how He went to
visit a Pharisee, and yet received no welcome from him at the door.
All this I read last night, my friend, and then fell to thinking
about it—to thinking how some day I too might fail to pay Our Little
Father Christ due honor. ‘Suppose,’ I thought to myself, ‘He came to
me or to anyone like me? Should we, like the great lord Simon, not
know how to receive Him and not go out to meet Him?’ Thus I thought,
and fell asleep where I sat. Then as I sat sleeping there I heard
someone call my name; and as I raised myself the voice went on (as
though it were the voice of someone whispering in my ear): ‘Watch
thou for me to-morrow, for I am coming to visit thee.’ It said that
twice. And so those words have got into my head, and, foolish though
I know it to be, I keep expecting _Him_—the Little Father—every
moment.”

Stepanitch nodded and said nothing, but emptied his glass and laid
it aside. Nevertheless Avdeitch took and refilled it.

“Drink it up; it will do you good,” he said. “Do you know,” he went
on, “I often call to mind how when Our Little Father walked this
earth, there was never a man, however humble, whom He despised, and
how it was chiefly among the common people that He dwelt. It was
always with _them_ that He walked; it was from among _them_—from
among such men as you and I—from among sinners and working folk—that
He chose His disciples. ‘Whosoever,’ He said, ‘shall exalt himself,
the same shall be abased; and whosoever shall abase himself, the
same shall be exalted.’ ‘You,’ He said again, ‘call me Lord; yet
will I wash your feet.’ ‘Whosoever,’ He said, ‘would be chief among
you, let him be the servant of all. Because,’ He said, ‘blessed are
the lowly, the peacemakers, the merciful, and the charitable.’”

Stepanitch had forgotten all about his tea. He was an old man, and
his tears came easily. He sat and listened, with the tears rolling
down his cheeks.

“Oh, but you must drink your tea,” said Avdeitch; yet Stepanitch
only crossed himself and said the thanksgiving, after which he
pushed his glass away and rose.

“I thank you, Martin Avdeitch,” he said. “You have taken me in, and
fed both soul and body.”

“Nay, but I beg of you to come again,” replied Avdeitch. “I am only
too glad of a guest.”

So Stepanitch departed, while Martin poured out the last of the tea
and drank it. Then he cleaned the crockery, and sat down again to
his work by the window—to the stitching of a back-piece. He stitched
away, yet kept on looking through the window—looking for Christ, as
it were—and ever thinking of Christ and His works. Indeed, Christ’s
many sayings were never absent from Avdeitch’s mind.

* * * * *

Two soldiers passed the window, the one in military boots, and the
other in civilian. Next, there came a neighboring householder, in
polished goloshes; then a baker with a basket. All of them passed
on. Presently a woman in woollen stockings and rough country shoes
approached the window, and halted near the buttress outside it.
Avdeitch peered up at her from under the lintel of his window, and
could see that she was a plain-looking, poorly-dressed woman and had
a child in her arms. It was in order to muffle the child up more
closely—little though she had to do it with!—that she had stopped
near the buttress and was now standing there with her back to the
wind. Her clothing was ragged and fit only for summer, and even from
behind his window-panes Avdeitch could hear the child crying
miserably and its mother vainly trying to soothe it. Avdeitch rose,
went to the door, climbed the steps, and cried out: “My good woman,
my good woman!”

She heard him and turned round.

“Why need you stand there in the cold with your baby?” he went on.
“Come into my room, where it is warm, and where you will be able to
wrap the baby up more comfortably than you can do here. Yes, come in
with you.”

The woman was surprised to see an old man in a leather apron and
with spectacles upon his nose calling out to her, yet she followed
him down the steps, and they entered his room. The old man led her
to the bedstead.

“Sit you down here, my good woman,” he said. “You will be near the
stove, and can warm yourself and feed your baby.”

“Ah,” she replied. “I have had nothing to eat this morning.”
Nevertheless she put the child to her breast.

Avdeitch nodded his head approvingly, went to the table for some
bread and a basin, and opened the stove door. From the stove he took
and poured some soup into the basin, and drew out also a bowl of
porridge. The latter, however, was not yet boiling, so he set out
only the soup, after first laying the table with a cloth.

“Sit down and eat, my good woman,” he said, “while I hold your baby.
I have had little ones of my own, and know how to nurse them.”

The woman crossed herself and sat down, while Avdeitch seated
himself upon the bedstead with the baby. He smacked his lips at it
once or twice, but made a poor show of it, for he had no teeth left.
Consequently the baby went on crying. Then he bethought him of his
finger, which he wriggled to and fro towards the baby’s mouth and
back again—without, however, actually touching the little one’s
lips, since the finger was blackened with work and sticky with
shoemaker’s wax. The baby contemplated the finger and grew
quiet—then actually smiled. Avdeitch was delighted. Meanwhile the
woman had been eating her meal, and now she told him, unasked, who
she was and whither she was going.

“I am a soldier’s wife,” she said, “but my husband was sent to a
distant station eight months ago, and I have heard nothing of him
since. At first I got a place as cook, but when the baby came they
said they could not do with it and dismissed me. That was three
months ago, and I have got nothing since, and have spent all my
savings. I tried to get taken as a nurse, but no one would have me,
for they said I was too thin. I have just been to see a tradesman’s
wife where our grandmother is in service. She had promised to take
me on, and I quite thought that she would, but when I arrived to-day
she told me to come again next week. She lives a long way from here,
and I am quite worn out and have tired my baby for nothing. Thank
Heaven, however, my landlady is good to me, and gives me shelter for
Christ’s sake. Otherwise I should not have known how to bear it
all.”

Avdeitch sighed and said: “But have you nothing warm to wear?”

“Ah, sir,” replied the woman, “although it is the time for warm
clothes I had to pawn my last shawl yesterday for two
_grivenki_.”[4]

Footnote 4:

The grivenka = 10 copecks = about five cents.

Then the woman returned to the bedstead to take her baby, while
Avdeitch rose and went to a cupboard. There he rummaged about, and
presently returned with an old jacket.

“Here,” he said. “It is a poor old thing, but it will serve to cover
you.”

The woman looked at the jacket, and then at the old man. Then she
took the jacket and burst into tears. Avdeitch turned away, and went
creeping under the bedstead, whence he extracted a box and pretended
to rummage about in it for a few moments; after which he sat down
again before the woman.

Then the woman said to him: “I thank you in Christ’s name, good
grandfather. Surely it was He Himself who sent me to your window.
Otherwise I should have seen my baby perish with the cold. When I
first came out the day was warm, but now it has begun to freeze. But
He, Our Little Father, had placed you in your window, that you might
see me in my bitter plight and have compassion upon me.”

Avdeitch smiled and said: “He did indeed place me there: yet, my
poor woman, it was for a special purpose that I was looking out.”

Then he told his guest, the soldier’s wife, of his vision, and how
he had heard a voice foretelling that to-day the Lord Himself would
come to visit him.

“That may very well be,” said the woman as she rose, took the
jacket, and wrapped her baby in it. Then she saluted him once more
and thanked him.

“Also, take this in Christ’s name,” said Avdeitch, and gave her a
two-_grivenka_ piece with which to buy herself a shawl. The woman
crossed herself, and he likewise. Then he led her to the door and
dismissed her.

When she had gone Avdeitch ate a little soup, washed up the crockery
again, and resumed his work. All the time, though, he kept his eye
upon the window, and as soon as ever a shadow fell across it he
would look up to see who was passing. Acquaintances of his came
past, and people whom he did not know, yet never anyone very
particular.

* * * * *

Then suddenly he saw something. Opposite his window there had
stopped an old pedlar-woman, with a basket of apples. Only a few of
the apples, however, remained, so that it was clear that she was
almost sold out. Over her shoulder was slung a sack of shavings,
which she must have gathered near some new building as she was going
home. Apparently, her shoulder had begun to ache under their weight,
and she therefore wished to shift them to the other one. To do this,
she balanced her basket of apples on the top of a post, lowered the
sack to the pavement, and began shaking up its contents. As she was
doing this, a boy in a ragged cap appeared from somewhere, seized an
apple from the basket, and tried to make off. But the old woman, who
had been on her guard, managed to turn and seize the boy by the
sleeve, and although he struggled and tried to break away, she clung
to him with both hands, snatched his cap off, and finally grasped
him by the hair. Thereupon the youngster began to shout and abuse
his captor. Avdeitch did not stop to make fast his awl, but threw
his work down upon the floor, ran to the door, and went stumbling up
the steps—losing his spectacles as he did so. Out into the street he
ran, where the old woman was still clutching the boy by the hair and
threatening to take him to the police, while the boy, for his part,
was struggling in the endeavor to free himself.

“I never took it,” he was saying. “What are you beating me for? Let
me go.”

Avdeitch tried to part them as he took the boy by the hand and said:

“Let him go, my good woman. Pardon him for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, I will pardon him,” she retorted, “but not until he has tasted
a new birch-rod. I mean to take the young rascal to the police.”

But Avdeitch still interceded for him.

“Let him go, my good woman,” he said. “He will never do it again.
Let him go for Christ’s sake.”

The old woman released the boy, who was for making off at once had
not Avdeitch stopped him.

“You must beg the old woman’s pardon,” he said, “and never do such a
thing again. I saw you take the apple.”

The boy burst out crying, and begged the old woman’s pardon as
Avdeitch commanded.

“There, there,” said Avdeitch. “Now I will give you one. Here you
are,”—and he took an apple from the basket and handed it to the boy.
“I will pay you for it, my good woman,” he added.

“Yes, but you spoil the young rascal by doing that,” she objected.
“He ought to have received a reward that would have made him glad to
stand for a week.”

“Ah, my good dame, my good dame,” exclaimed Avdeitch. “That may be
_our_ way of rewarding, but it is not God’s. If this boy ought to
have been whipped for taking the apple, ought not we also to receive
something for our sins?”

The old woman was silent. Then Avdeitch related to her the parable
of the master who absolved his servant from the great debt which he
owed him, whereupon the servant departed and took his own debtor by
the throat. The old woman listened, and also the boy.

“God has commanded us to pardon one another,” went on Avdeitch, “or
_He_ will not pardon us. We ought to pardon all men, and especially
the thoughtless.”

The old woman shook her head and sighed.

“Yes, that may be so,” she said, “but these young rascals are so
spoilt already!”

“Then it is for us, their elders, to teach them better,” he replied.

“That is what I say myself at times,” rejoined the old woman. “I had
seven of them once at home, but have only one daughter now.” And she
went on to tell Avdeitch where she and her daughter lived, and how
they lived, and how many grandchildren she had.

“I have only such strength as you see,” she said, “yet I work hard,
for my heart goes out to my grandchildren—the bonny little things
that they are! No children could run to meet me as they do.
Aksintka, for instance, will go to no one else. ‘Grandmother,’ she
cries, ‘dear grandmother, you are tired’”—and the old woman became
thoroughly softened. “Everyone knows what boys are,” she added
presently, referring to the culprit. “May God go with him!”

She was raising the sack to her shoulders again when the boy darted
forward and said:

“Nay, let me carry it, grandmother. It will be all on my way home.”

The old woman nodded assent, gave up the sack to the boy, and went
away with him down the street. She had quite forgotten to ask
Avdeitch for the money for the apple. He stood looking after them,
and observing how they were talking together as they went.

Having seen them go, he returned to his room, finding his
spectacles—unbroken—on the steps as he descended them. Once more he
took up his awl and fell to work, but had done little before he
found it difficult to distinguish the stitches, and the lamplighter
had passed on his rounds. “I too must light up,” he thought to
himself. So he trimmed the lamp, hung it up, and resumed his work.
He finished one boot completely, and then turned it over to look at
it. It was all good work. Then he laid aside his tools, swept up the
cuttings, rounded off the stitches and loose ends, and cleaned his
awl. Next he lifted the lamp down, placed it on the table, and took
his Testament from the shelf. He had intended opening the book at
the place which he had marked last night with a strip of leather,
but it opened itself at another instead. The instant it did so, his
vision of last night came back to his memory, and, as instantly, he
thought he heard a movement behind him as of someone moving towards
him. He looked round and saw in the shadow of a dark corner what
appeared to be figures—figures of persons standing there, yet could
not distinguish them clearly. Then the voice whispered in his ear:

“Martin, Martin, dost thou not know me?”

“Who art Thou?” said Avdeitch.

“Even I!” whispered the voice again. “Lo, it is I!”—and there
stepped from the dark corner Stepanitch. He smiled, and then, like
the fading of a little cloud, was gone.

“It is I!” whispered the voice again—and there stepped from the same
corner the woman with her baby. She smiled, and the baby smiled, and
they were gone.

“And it is I!” whispered the voice again—and there stepped forth the
old woman and the boy with the apple. They smiled, and were gone.

Joy filled the soul of Martin Avdeitch as he crossed himself, put on
his spectacles, and set himself to read the Testament at the place
where it had opened. At the top of the page he read:

“For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye
gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in.”

And further down the page he read:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren ye have done it unto Me.”

Then Avdeitch understood that the vision had come true, and that his
Saviour had in very truth visited him that day, and that he had
received Him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

WOOD-LADIES[5]
By PERCEVAL GIBBON

Footnote 5:

By permission of the author. Copyright by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

THE pine-trees of the wood joined their branches into a dome of
intricate groinings over the floor of ferns where the children sat,
sunk to the neck in a foam of tender green. The sunbeams that
slanted in made shivering patches of gold about them. Joyce, the
elder of the pair, was trying to explain why she had wished to come
here from the glooms of the lesser wood beyond.

“I wasn’t ’zactly frightened,” she said. “I knew there wasn’t any
lions or robbers, or anything like that. But——”

“Tramps?” suggested Joan.

“No! You know I don’t mind tramps, Joan. But as we was going along
under all those dark bushes where it was so quiet, I kept feeling as
if there was—something—behind me. I looked round and there wasn’t
anything, but—well, it felt as if there was.”

Joyce’s small face was knit and intent with the efforts to convey
her meaning. She was a slim erect child, as near seven years of age
as makes no matter, with eyes that were going to be gray, but had
not yet ceased to be blue. Joan, who was a bare five, a mere huge
baby, was trying to root up a fern that grew between her feet.

“I know,” she said, tugging mightily. The fern gave suddenly, and
Joan fell over on her back, with her stout legs sticking up stiffly.
In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. “I know,
Joy. It was wood-ladies!”

“Wood-ladies!” Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled
right side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods,
being of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there
was nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she
was getting on in years, was willing to be sceptical about them, but
could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard clean
linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and
the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes
herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a
different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden,
and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky
to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood.
There the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they
had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing
wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still green
chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first
learned of wood-ladies.

“Wood-ladies,” repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to
look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood,
dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep
beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath
overarching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of
unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern,
followed her glance.

“That’s where they are,” she said casually. “They like being in the
dark.”

“Joan!” Joyce spoke earnestly. “Say truly—truly, mind!—do you think
there _is_ wood-ladies at all?”

“’Course there is,” replied Joan cheerfully. “Fairies in fields and
angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods.”

“But,” objected Joyce, “nobody ever sees them.”

Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with
innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns.
She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and
Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were
brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.

“There’s one now,” she said, and fell to work with her fern again.

Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread
and curiosity—the child’s avid curiosity for the supernatural—alight
in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the
shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague
movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a
flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that
passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed
to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of
a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway toward her. There was an
impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and
fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of
the wood; and as she drew her breath it was all no more. The trees,
the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but
something was gone from them.

“Joan,” she cried, hesitating.

“Yes,” said Joan, without looking up. “What?”

The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that
she had seen anything.

“I thought, just now, I could see something,” she said. “But I
s’pose I didn’t.”

“I did,” remarked Joan.

Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan,
sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken
stems and leaves all round her.

“Joan,” she begged. “Be nice. You’re trying to frighten me, aren’t
you?”

“I’m not,” protested Joan. “I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies
doesn’t hurt you; wood-ladies are _nice_. You’re a coward, Joyce.”

“I can’t help it,” said Joyce, sighing. “But I won’t go into the
dark parts of the wood any more.”

“Coward,” repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.

“You wouldn’t like to go there by yourself,” cried Joyce. “If I
wasn’t with you, you’d be a coward too. You know you would.”

She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of débris and was
rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile
softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her
mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm and very galling
superiority.

“I’m going there now,” she answered; “all by mineself.”

“Go, then,” retorted Joyce angrily.

Without a further word, Joan turned her back and began to plough her
way across the ferns toward the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw
her go, at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with
compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity
of the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in
ferns. Her sleek brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her
seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence toward those peopled and
uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.

“Joan!” she cried. The baby turned. “Joan! Come back; come back an’
be friends!”

Joan, maintaining her offing, replied only with a gesture. It was a
gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had
once been spanked for practising it on the piano-tuner. The
boot-and-knife boy called it “cocking a snook,” and it consisted in
raising a thumb to one’s nose and spreading the fingers out. It was
defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on.
The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she
knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches,
squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of
blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was
gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid.

Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to
shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to
wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to
Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage;
and the wood was a place to which they came every day.

“Besides,” she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort;
“besides, there can’t be such things as wood-ladies _really_.”

But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny
stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural;
the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and
nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a
blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The undernote of
alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to
spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the
morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her and presently
there came mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her
babies.

“Isn’t there a clock inside you that tells you when it’s
lunch-time?” asked mother. “You’re ever so late. Where’s Joan?”

Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy
perplexity on her face. It was difficult to speak even to mother
about wood-ladies without a pretence of scepticism.

“I forgot about lunch,” she said, taking the slim cool hand which
mother held out to her. “Joan’s in there.” She nodded at the bushes.

“Is she?” said mother, and called aloud in her singing-voice, that
was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. “Joan! Joan!”

A cheeky bird answered with a whistle and mother called again.

“She _said_,” explained Joyce—“she _said_ she saw a wood-lady and
then she went in there to show me she wasn’t afraid.”

“What’s a wood-lady, chick?” asked mother. “The rascal!” she said,
smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. “We’ll have to
go and look for her.”

They went hand in hand, and mother showed herself clever in parting
a path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to
strike Joyce and without tearing or soiling her own soft white
dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she,
too, had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond,
where the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields;
and when they paused mother would lift her head and call again, and
her voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a
black water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face;
but there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook
her head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no
distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.

“I wish she wouldn’t play these tricks,” said mother. “I don’t like
them a bit.”

“I expect she’s hiding,” said Joyce. “There aren’t wood-ladies
really, are there, mother?”

“There’s nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby,”
mother replied. “We’ll go back by the path and call her again.”

Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went and
there was still no answer to mother’s calling. She could not have
told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about
her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment
burdened them both. “Joan, Joan!” called mother in her strong
beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and
when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan
were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer
any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees
which bordered their garden.

“We mustn’t be silly about this,” said mother, speaking as much to
herself as to Joyce. “Nothing can have happened to her. And you must
have lunch, chick.”

“Without waiting for Joan?” asked Joyce.

“Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan,” said
mother, opening the gate.

The dining-room looked very secure and home-like, with its big
window and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce’s place faced
the window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding
the kitchen garden; and when mother had served her with food, she
was left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy
passed the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking warlike.
There reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling
something about tramps.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” replied mother’s voice.

Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything.
Joyce asked her why.

“Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes,” answered mother. “I
sha’n’t be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?”

When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet
Joan when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite
slowly, looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held
her hand and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and
a sort of resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an
unmannerly trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.

“I bin all acrost that way,” said the boot-boy, pointing with his
stumpy black forefinger, “and then acrost _that_ way, an’ Mister
Jenks”—Jenks was the gardener—“’e’ve gone about in rings, ’e ’ave.
And there ain’t sign nor token, mum—not a sign there ain’t.”

From beyond him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among
the trees. “Miss Joan!” he roared. “Hi! Miss Jo-an! You’re
a-frightin’ your ma proper. Where are ye, then?”

“She must be hiding,” said mother. “You must go on looking, Walter.
You must go on looking till you find her.”

“Yes, ’m,” said Walter. “If she’s in there, us’ll find her, soon or
late.”

He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks’s, calling
Joan—calling, calling, and getting no answer.

Mother took Joyce’s hand again.

“Come,” she said. “We’ll walk round by the path, and you must tell
me again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan
told you to look?”

“I expect I didn’t,” replied Joyce dolefully. “But Joan’s always
saying there’s a fairy or something in the shadows and I always
think I see them for a moment.”

“It couldn’t have been a live woman—or a man—that you saw?”

“Oh, no!” Joyce was positive of that. Mother’s hand tightened on
hers understandingly and they went on in silence till they met
Jenks.

Jenks was an oldish man with bushy gray whiskers, who never wore a
coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.

“That there ol’ pond,” he explained. “I’ve been an’ took a look at
her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an’ I’ll go bail there ain’t
so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer’s a mistry,
mum, an’ no mistake.”

Mother stared at him. “I can’t bear this,” she said suddenly. “You
must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to
the police-station at once. Call him, please!”

“Walter!” roared Jenks obediently.

“Coming!” answered the boot-boy and burst forth from the bushes. In
swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget,
mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency.
Walter went flying to execute them.

“Oh, mother, where do you think Joan can be?” begged Joyce when
Jenks had gone off to resume his search.

“I don’t know,” said mother. “It’s all so absurd.”

“If there _was_ wood-ladies, they wouldn’t hurt a baby like Joan,”
suggested Joyce.

“Oh, who could hurt her!” cried mother, and fell to calling again.
Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh
roars of Jenks.

Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently
punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang
in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself
wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a
blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard mother’s tale, which
embodied that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his mustache
and his big chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded,
exactly as if he saw through the whole business and could find Joan
in a minute or two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.

“I understand then,” he said, “that the little girl’s been missing
for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can’t have got far.
I sent a couple o’ constables round the roads be’ind the wood before
I started, an’ now I’ll just ’ave a look through the wood myself.”

“Thank you,” said mother. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, but——”

“Very natural, ma’am,” said the big superintendent comfortingly, and
went with them to the wood.

It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and
mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the
spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning
a little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among
the ferns. “It was _’ere_ she went?” he inquired, as he reached the
dark path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced
his search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks
disposed of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the
fields, where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed
them without leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a
cart-rut.

“We ’ave to consider the possibilities of the matter,” said the
superintendent. “Assumin’ that the wood ’as been thoroughly
searched, where did she get out of it?”

“Searched!” growled old Jenks. “There ain’t a inch as I ’aven’t
searched an’ seen—not a inch.”

“The kidnappin’ the’ry,” went on the superintendent, ignoring him
and turning to mother, “I don’t incline to. ’Owever, we must go to
work in order, an’ I’ll ’ave my men up ’ere and make sure of the
wood. All gypsies an’ tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I
don’t think there’s no cause for you to feel anxious, ma’am. I ’ope
to ’ave some news for you in the course of the afternoon.”

They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the
corner.

“Oh, dear,” said mother then; “why doesn’t the baby come? I wish
daddy weren’t away.”

Now that the police had entered the affair, Joyce felt that there
remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of
events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the
police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant
by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles,
flashing the official bull’s-eye lantern into the mysterious
interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly
women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they
would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed
as inevitable to her mother as it did to her.

“They’re sure to bring her back, mother,” she repeated.

“Oh, chick,” said mother, “I keep telling myself so. But I wish—I
wish——”

“What, mother?”

“I wish,” said mother, in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were
confessing something that troubled her—“I wish you hadn’t seen that
wood-lady.”

The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed
old Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It
was a real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground
and went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had
been lost, and no less than three of them trod every inch of the
bottom of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old
fox’s earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived
and walked about smoking a pipe—a detective! Up from the village,
too, came the big young curate and the squire’s two sons, civil and
sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural
that mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant
that anything could have happened to Joan.

“That baby!” urged the curate. “Why, my dear lady, Joan is better
known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a
mile without having to answer questions. I don’t know what’s keeping
her, but you may be sure she’s all right.”

“’Course she is,” chorused the others, swinging their sticks
light-heartedly. “’Course she’s all right.”

“Get her for me, then,” said mother. “I don’t want to be silly and
you’re awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I—I want
her.”

The squire’s sons turned as if on an order and went toward the wood.
The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a
gentleman, and his hard, clean-shaven face could be kind and
serious.

“We’re sure to get her,” he said, in lower tones. “And you must help
us with your faith and courage. Can you?”

Mother’s hand tightened on that of Joyce.

“We are doing our best,” she said, and smiled—she smiled! The curate
nodded and went his way to the wood.

A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and
master of all the police in the county, a gay, trim soldier whom the
children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more
policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and
bleary eyes—blood-hounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle
it. Actual living blood-hounds would be more than a match for Joan.
Colonel Warden was sure of it too.

“Saves time,” he was telling mother, in his high snappy voice.
“Shows us which way she’s gone, you know. Best hounds in the
country, these two; never known ’em fail yet.”

The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood,
strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in
motion. A pinafore which Joan had worn at breakfast was served to
them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at
it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till
one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry.
Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across
the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce’s hand, followed. The hounds
made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had
entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and
crashed after them. Joyce and mother came up with them at a place
where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf
that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and
scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without
interest about him.

“Dash it all,” the colonel was saying; “she can’t—she simply can’t
have been kidnapped in a balloon.”

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result.
They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave
up as though the scent went no further. Nothing could induce them to
hunt beyond it.

“I can’t understand this,” said Colonel Warden, dragging at his
mustache. “This is queer.” He stood glancing around him as though
the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to
bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by
scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to
thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the country-side. Joyce
found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

“I know inside myself,” she told mother, “right down deep in the
middle of me, that Joan’s all right.”

“Bless you, my chick,” said poor mother. “I wish I could feel like
that. Go to bed now, like a good girl.”

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan’s railed cot standing
empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely
begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion
that during the night mother came in more than once, and she had a
vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could
not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in
the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no
Joan and nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if
she had been crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night,
“till she broke down, poor thing,” said nurse, and Joyce was bidden
to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But mother was about again
at lunch-time when Joyce went down to the dining-room. She was very
pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow she seemed
suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce’s age, than ever
before. They kissed each other and the child would have tried to
comfort.

“No,” said mother, shaking her head. “No, dear. Don’t let’s be sorry
for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven’t
done that, have we?”

“_I_ haven’t,” said Joyce. “I _know_ it’s all right.”

After lunch—again mother said she wouldn’t be hungry till Joan came
home—they went out together. There were no searches now in the wood
and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and
they were away, combing the country-side and spreading terror among
the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn and the smell of the
roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge the land rolled away to
clear perspectives of peace and beauty.

“Let’s walk up and down,” suggested mother. “Anything’s better than
sitting still. And don’t talk, chick—not just now.”

They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which
led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence.
It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the
gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved
arm thrust the gate open and there advanced into the sunlight,
coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway—Joan! Her round baby
face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body,
the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a
deep sigh—it sounded like that—and in a moment she was kneeling on
the ground with her arms round the baby.

“Joan, Joan,” she said, over and over again. “My little, little
baby!”

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free and then
rubbed her eyes drowsily.

“Hallo!” she said.

“But where have you been?” cried mother. “Baby-girl, where have you
been all this time?”

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm toward the wood, the
wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. “In
there,” she answered carelessly. “Wiv the wood-ladies. I’m hungry!”

“My darling!” said mother, and picked her up and carried her into
the house.

In the dining-room, with mother at her side and Joyce opposite to
her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workman-like fashion,
and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only
served to darken the mystery of her absence.

“But there aren’t any wood-ladies really, darling,” remonstrated
mother.

“There is,” said Joan. “There’s lots. They wanted to keep me but I
wouldn’t stay. So I comed home, ’cause I was hungry.”

“But,” began mother, “where did they take you to?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Joan. “The one what I went to speak to gave me
her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a
place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they
gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!”

“Yes?” said mother. “What else?”

“There was anuvver little girl there,” went on Joan. “Not a
wood-lady, but a girl like me, what they’d tooked from somewhere.
She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they
wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Joyce.

“’Cause I didn’t want to be a wood-lady,” replied Joan.

“Listen to me, darling,” said mother. “Didn’t these people whom you
call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the
whole wood, you know, and you weren’t there at all.”

“I was,” said Joan. “I was there all the time an’ I heard Walter an’
Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an’ the wood-ladies laughed
like leaves rustling.”

“But where did you sleep last night?”

“I didn’t sleep,” said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. “I’se very
sleepy now.”

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and mother and Joyce
looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious
face.

“God help us,” said mother, in a whisper. “What is the truth of
this?”

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan’s. And
she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an
adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know
herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she
has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ON THE FEVER SHIP[6]
By RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Footnote 6:

From _The Lion and the Unicorn_. Copyright, 1899, by Charles
Scribner’s Sons.

THERE were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones
of iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them
from the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held
him in. Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water
which ended in a line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged
palms. Beyond that again rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck
upon the loftiest peak of all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the
brow of the mountain against the naked sky as impudently as a
cracker-box set upon the dome of a great cathedral.

As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her
sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines.
From his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe,
painstaking interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very
block-house itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight.
And again it sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped
them out of the picture as though they were a line of chalk.

The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the
sea would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the
palm-trees or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when
it failed to reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of
ill use, of having been wronged by some one. There was no other
reason for submitting to this existence save these tricks upon the
wearisome, glaring landscape; and now, whoever it was who was
working them did not seem to be making this effort to entertain him
with any heartiness.