Short Stories 1895-1926 (7 page)

So lucid a portrayal of her own exact sensations astonished the girl. ‘Well, but what is it, what is it, Sarah?'

Sarah strapped the air with the loose end of the clothes-line. ‘Part, Miss, the hauntin' of the garden. Part as them black-jacketed clergymen would say, because we's we. And part 'cos it's all death the other side – all death.'

She drew her head slowly in, her puffy cheeks glowed, her small black eyes gazed as fixedly and deadly as if they were anemones on a rock.

The very fulness of her figure seemed to exaggerate her vehemence. She gloated – a heavy somnolent owl puffing its feathers. Alice drew back, swiftly glancing as she did so over her shoulder. The sunlight was liquid wan gold in the meadow, between the black tree-trunks. They lifted their cumbrous branches far above the brick human house, stooping their leafy twigs. A starling's dark iridescence took her glance as he minced pertly in the coarse grass.

‘I can't quite see why
you
should think of death,' Alice ventured to suggest.

‘Me? Not me! Where I'm put, I stay. I'm like a stone in the grass, I am. Not that if I were that old mealy-smilin' bag of bones flat on her back on her bed up there with her bits of beadwork and slops through a spout, I wouldn't make sure over-night of not being waked next mornin'. There's something in me that won't let me rest, what they call a volcano, though no more to eat in that beetle cupboard of a kitchen than would keep a Tom Cat from the mange.'

‘But, Sarah,' said Alice, casting a glance up at the curtained windows of the other house, ‘she looks such a quiet,
patient
old thing. I don't think I
could
stand having not even enough to eat. Why do you stay?'

Sarah laughed for a full half-minute in silence, staring at Alice meanwhile. ‘“Patient”!' she replied at last, ‘Oo-ay. Nor to my knowledge did I ever breathe the contrary. As for staying; you'd stay all right if that loveyer of yours come along. You'd stand anything – them pale narrow-chested kind; though me, I'm neether to bend nor break. And if the old man was to look down out of the blue up there this very minute, ay, and shake his fist at me, I'd say it to his face. I loathe your whining psalm-singers. A trap's a trap. You wait and see!'

‘But how do you mean?' Alice said slowly, her face stooping.

There came no answer. And, on turning, she was surprised to see the bunchy alpaca-clad woman already disappearing round the corner of the house.

The talk softly subsided in her mind like the dust in an empty room. Alice wandered on in the garden, extremely loth to go in. And gradually a curious happiness at last descended upon her heart, like a cloud of morning dew in a dell of wild flowers. It seemed in moments like these, as if she had been given the power to think – or rather to be conscious, as it were, of thoughts not her own – thoughts like vivid pictures, following one upon another with extraordinary rapidity and brightness through her mind. As if, indeed, thoughts could be like fragments of glass, reflecting light at their every edge and angle. She stood tiptoe at the meadow wall and gazed greedily into the green fields, and across to the pollard aspens by the waterside. Turning, her eyes recognized clear in the shadow and blue-grey air of the garden her solitude – its solitude. And at once all thinking ceased.

‘The Spirit is
me
:
I
haunt this place!' she said aloud, with sudden assurance, and almost in Sarah's own words. ‘And I don't mind – not the least bit. It can be only my thankful, thankful self that is here. And that can
never
be lost.

She returned to the house, and seemed as she moved to see – almost as if she were looking down out of the sky on herself – her own dwarf figure walking beneath the trees. Yet there was at the same time a curious individuality in the common things, living and inanimate, that were peeping at her out of their secrecy. The silence hung above them as apparent as their own clear reflected colours above the brief Spring flowers. But when she stood tidying herself for the usual hour of reading to Miss Lennox, she was conscious of an almost unendurable weariness.

That night Alice set to work with her needle upon a piece of sprigged muslin to make her ‘watch-gown' as Sarah called it. She was excited. She hadn't much time, she fancied. It was like hiding in a story. She worked with extreme pains, and quickly. And not till the whole flimsy thing was finished did she try on or admire any part of it. But, at last, in the early evening of one of the middle days of April, she drew her bedroom blind up close to the ceiling, to view herself in her yellow grained looking-glass.

The gown, white as milk in the low sunlight, and sprinkled with even whiter embroidered nosegays of daisies, seemed to attenuate a girlish figure, already very slender. She had arranged her abundant hair with unusual care, and her own clear, inexplicable eyes looked back upon her beauty, bright it seemed with tidings they could not speak.

She regarded closely that narrow, flushed, intense face in an unforeseen storm of compassion and regret, as if with the conviction that she herself was to blame for the inevitable leavetaking. It seemed to gaze like an animal its mute farewell in the dim discoloured glass.

And when she had folded and laid away the gown in her wardrobe, and put on her everyday clothes again, she felt an extreme aversion for the garden. So, instead of venturing out that afternoon, she slipped off its faded blue ribbon from an old bundle of letters which she had hoarded all these years from a school-friend long since lost sight of, and spent the evening reading them over, till headache and an empty despondency sent her to bed.

Lagging Time brought at length the thirtieth of April. Life was as usual. Miss Lennox had even begun to knit her eighth pair of woollen mittens for the annual Church bazaar. To Alice the day passed rather quickly; a cloudy, humid day with a furtive continual and enigmatical stir in the air. Her lips were parched; it seemed at any moment her skull might crack with the pain as she sat reading her chapter of Macaulay to Miss Lennox's sparking and clicking needles. Her mind was a veritable rookery of forebodings, flying and returning. She scarcely ate at all, and kept to the house, never even approaching a window. She wrote a long and rather unintelligible letter, which she destroyed when she had read it over. Then suddenly every vestige of pain left her.

And when at last she went to bed – so breathless that she thought her heart at any moment would jump out of her body, and so saturated with expectancy she thought she would die – her candle was left burning calmly, unnodding, in its socket upon the chest of drawers; the blind of her window was up, towards the houseless byroad; her pen stood in the inkpot.

She slept on into the morning of Mayday, in a sheet of eastern sunshine, till Miss Lennox, with a peevishness that almost amounted to resolution, decided to wake her. But then, Alice, though unbeknown in any really conscious sense to herself perhaps, had long since decided not to be awakened.

Not until the evening of that day did the sun in his diurnal course for a while illumine the garden, and then very briefly: to gild, to lull, and to be gone. The stars wheeled on in the thick-sown waste of space, and even when Miss Lennox's small share of the earth's wild living creatures had stirred and sunk again to rest in the ebb of night, there came no watcher – even the very ghost of a watcher – to the garden, in a watch-gown. So that what peculiar secrets found reflex in its dark mirror no human witness was there to tell.

As for Sarah, she had long since done with looking-glasses once and for all. A place was a place. There was still the washing to be done on Mondays. Fools and weaklings would continue to come and go. But give her
her
way, she'd have blown them and their looking-glasses all to ribbons – with the birds.

Miss Duveen

Miss Duveen
1

I seldom had the company of children in my grandmother's house beside the river Wandle. The house was old and ugly. But its river was lovely and youthful even although it had flowed on for ever, it seemed, between its green banks of osier and alder. So it was no great misfortune perhaps that I heard more talking of its waters than of any human tongue. For my grandmother found no particular pleasure in my company. How should she? My father and mother had married (and died) against her will, and there was nothing in me of those charms which, in fiction at any rate, swiftly soften a superannuated heart.

Nor did I pine for her company either. I kept out of it as much as possible.

It so happened that she was accustomed to sit with her back to the window of the room which she usually occupied, her grey old indifferent face looking inwards. Whenever necessary, I would steal close up under it, and if I could see there her large faded amethyst velvet cap I knew I was safe from interruption. Sometimes I would take a slice or two of currant bread or (if I could get it) a jam tart or a cheese cake, and eat it under a twisted old damson tree or beside the running water. And if I conversed with anybody, it would be with myself or with my small victims of the chase.

Not that I was an exceptionally cruel boy; though if I had lived on for many years in this primitive and companionless fashion, I should surely have become an idiot. As a matter of fact, I was unaware even that I was ridiculously old-fashioned – manners, clothes, notions, everything. My grandmother never troubled to tell me so, nor did she care. And the servants were a race apart. So I was left pretty much to my own devices. What wonder, then, if I at first accepted with genuine avidity the acquaintanceship of our remarkable neighbour, Miss Duveen?

It had been, indeed, quite an advent in our uneventful routine when that somewhat dubious household moved into Willowlea, a brown brick edifice, even uglier than our own, which had been long vacant, and whose sloping garden confronted ours across the Wandle. My grandmother, on her part, at once discovered that any kind of intimacy with its inmates was not much to be desired. While I, on mine, was compelled to resign myself to the loss of the Willowlea garden as a kind of no-man's-land or Tom Tiddler's ground.

I got to know Miss Duveen by sight long before we actually became friends. I used frequently to watch her wandering in her long garden. And even then I noticed how odd were her methods of gardening. She would dig up a root or carry off a potted plant from one to another overgrown bed with an almost animal-like resolution; and a few minutes afterwards I would see her restoring it to the place from which it had come. Now and again she would stand perfectly still, like a scarecrow, as if she had completely forgotten what she was at.

Miss Coppin, too, I descried sometimes. But I never more than glanced at her, for fear that even at that distance the too fixed attention of my eyes might bring hers to bear upon me. She was a smallish woman, inclined to be fat, and with a peculiar waddling gait. She invariably appeared to be angry with Miss Duveen, and would talk to her as one might talk to a post. I did not know, indeed, until one day Miss Duveen waved her handkerchief in my direction that I had been observed from Willowlea at all. Once or twice after that, I fancied, she called me; at least her lips moved; but I could not distinguish what she said. And I was naturally a little backward in making new friends. Still I grew accustomed to looking out for her and remember distinctly how first we met.

It was raining, the raindrops falling softly into the unrippled water, making their great circles, and tapping on the motionless leaves above my head where I sat in shelter on the bank. But the sun was shining whitely from behind a thin fleece of cloud, when Miss Duveen suddenly peeped in at me out of the greenery, the thin silver light upon her face, and eyed me sitting there, for all the world as if she were a blackbird and I a snail. I scrambled up hastily with the intention of retreating into my own domain, but the peculiar grimace she made at me fixed me where I was.

‘Ah', she said, with a little masculine laugh. ‘So this is the young gentleman, the bold, gallant young gentleman. And what might be his name?'

I replied rather distantly that my name was Arthur.

‘Arthur, to be sure!' she repeated, with extraordinary geniality, and again, ‘Arthur,' as if in the strictest confidence.

‘I know you, Arthur, very well indeed. I have looked, I have watched; and now, please God, we need never be estranged.' And she tapped her brow and breast, making the Sign of the Cross with her lean, bluish forefinger.

‘What is a little brawling brook', she went on, ‘to friends like you and me?' She gathered up her tiny countenance once more into an incredible grimace of friendliness; and I smiled as amicably as I could in return. There was a pause in this one-sided conversation. She seemed to be listening, and her lips moved, though I caught no sound. In my uneasiness I was just about to turn stealthily away, when she poked forward again.

‘Yes, yes, I know you quite intimately, Arthur. We have met
here
.' She tapped her rounded forehead. ‘You might not suppose it, too; but I have eyes like a lynx. It is no exaggeration, I assure you – I assure everybody. And now what friends we will be! At times,' she stepped out of her hiding-place and stood in curious dignity beside the water, her hands folded in front of her on her black pleated silk apron – ‘at times, dear child, I long for company – earthly company.' She glanced furtively about her. ‘But I must restrain my longings; and you will, of course, understand that I do not complain.
He
knows best. And my dear cousin, Miss Coppin – she too knows best. She does not consider too much companionship expedient for me.' She glanced in some perplexity into the smoothly swirling water.

‘I, you know,' she said suddenly, raising her little piercing eyes to mine, ‘I am Miss Duveen, that's not, they say, quite the thing here.' She tapped her small forehead again beneath its sleek curves of greying hair, and made a long narrow mouth at me. ‘Though, of course,' she added, ‘we do not tell
her
so. No!'

And I, too, nodded my head in instinctive and absorbed imitation. Miss Duveen laughed gaily. ‘He understands, he understands!' she cried, as if to many listeners. ‘Oh, what a joy it is in this world, Arthur to be understood. Now tell me,' she continued with immense nicety, ‘tell me, how's your dear mamma?'

I shook my head.

‘Ah,' she cried, ‘I see, I see; Arthur has no mamma. We will not refer to it. No father, either?'

I shook my head again and, standing perfectly still, stared at my new acquaintance with vacuous curiosity. She gazed at me with equal concentration, as if she were endeavouring to keep the very thought of my presence in her mind.

‘It is sad to have no father,' she continued rapidly, half closing her eyes; ‘no head, no guide, no stay, no stronghold; but we have, O yes, we have another father, dear child, another father – eh? … Where … Where?'

She very softly raised her finger. ‘On high,' she whispered, with extraordinary intensity.

‘But just now,' she added cheerfully, hugging her mittened hands together, ‘we are not talking of Him; we are talking of ourselves, just you and me,
so
cosy, so
secret!
And it's a grandmother? I thought so, I thought so, a grandmother! O yes, I can peep between the curtains, though they do lock the door. A grandmother – I thought so; that very droll old lady!
Such
fine clothes! Such a presence, oh yes! A grandmother.' She poked out her chin and laughed confidentially.

‘And the long, bony creature, all rub and double' – she jogged briskly with her elbows, ‘who's that?'

‘Mrs Pridgett,' I said.

‘There, there,' she whispered breathlessly, gazing widely about her. ‘Think of that!
He
knows;
He
understands. How firm, how manly, how undaunted! …
One
t?'

I shook my head dubiously.

‘Why should he?' she cried scornfully. ‘But between ourselves, Arthur, that is a thing we
must
learn, and never mind the headache. We cannot, of course, know everything. Even Miss Coppin does not know everything' – she leaned forward with intense earnestness – ‘though I don't tell her so. We must try to learn all we can; and at once. One thing, dear child, you may be astonished to hear, I learned only yesterday, and that is how exceedingly
sad
life is.'

She leaned her chin upon her narrow bosom pursing her lips. ‘And yet you know they say very little about it … They don't
mention
it. Every moment, every hour, every day, every year – one, two, three, four, five, seven, ten,' she paused, frowned, ‘and so on. Sadder and sadder. Why? why? It's strange, but oh, so true. You really can have no notion, child, how very sad I am myself at times. In the evening, when they all gather together, in their white raiment, up and up and up, I sit on the garden seat, on Miss Coppin's garden seat, and precisely in the middle (you'll be kind enough to remember that?) and my
thoughts
make me sad.' She narrowed her eyes and shoulders. ‘Yes and frightened, my child! Why must I be so guarded? One angel – the greatest
fool
could see the wisdom of that. But billions! – with their fixed eyes shining, so very boldly, on me. I never prayed for so many, dear friend. And we pray for a good many odd things, you and I, I'll be bound. But there, you see, poor Miss Duveen's on her theology again – scamper, scamper, scamper. In the congregations of the wicked we must be cautious! … Mrs Partridge and grandmamma, so nice, so nice; but even that, too, a
little
sad, eh? She leaned her head questioningly, like a starving bird in the snow.

I smiled, not knowing what else she expected of me; and her face became instantly grave and set.

‘He's right; perfectly right. We must speak evil of
no
one. No one. We must shut our mouths. We —' She stopped suddenly and, taking a step leaned over the water towards me, with eyebrows raised high above her tiny face. ‘S–sh!' she whispered, laying a long forefinger on her lips. ‘Eavesdroppers!' She smoothed her skirts, straightened her cap, and left me; only a moment after to poke out her head at me again from between the leafy bushes. ‘An assignation, no!' she said firmly, then gathered her poor, cheerful, forlorn, crooked, lovable face into a most wonderful contraction at me, that assuredly meant – ‘But,
yes
!'

Indeed it was an assignation, the first of how many, and how few. Sometimes Miss Duveen would sit beside me, apparently so lost in thought that I was clean forgotten. And yet I half fancied it was often nothing but feigning. Once she stared me blankly out of countenance when I ventured to take the initiative and to call out good morning to her across the water. On this occasion she completed my consternation with a sudden, angry grimace – contempt, jealousy, outrage.

But often we met like old friends and talked. It was a novel but not always welcome diversion for me in the long shady garden that was my privy universe. Where our alders met, mingling their branches across the flowing water, and the kingfisher might be seen – there was our usual tryst. But, occasionally, at her invitation, I would venture across the stepping-stones into her demesne; and occasionally, but very seldom indeed, she would venture into mine. How plainly I see her, tip-toeing from stone to stone, in an extraordinary concentration of mind – her mulberry petticoats, her white stockings, her loose spring-side boots. And when at last she stood beside me, her mittened hand on her breast, she would laugh on in a kind of paroxysm until the tears stood in her eyes, and she grew faint with breathlessness.

‘In all danger,' she told me once, ‘I hold my breath and shut my eyes. And if I could tell you of every danger, I think, perhaps, you would understand – dear Miss Coppin …' I did not, and yet, perhaps, very vaguely I did see the connection in this rambling statement.

Like most children, I liked best to hear Miss Duveen talk about her own childhood. I contrived somehow to discover that if we sat near flowers or under boughs in blossom, her talk would generally steal round to that. Then she would chatter on and on: of the white sunny rambling house, somewhere, nowhere – it saddened and confused her if I asked where – in which she had spent her first happy years; where her father used to ride on a black horse; and her mother to walk with her in the garden in a crinolined gown and a locket with the painted miniature of a ‘divine' nobleman inside it. How very far away these pictures seemed!

It was as if she herself had shrunken back into this distant past, and was babbling on like a child again, already a little isolated by her tiny infirmity.

‘That was before — ' she would begin to explain precisely, and then a criss-cross many-wrinkled frown would net her rounded forehead, and cloud her eyes. Time might baffle her, but then, time often baffled me too. Any talk about her mother usually reminded her of an elder sister, Caroline. ‘My sister, Caroline,' she would repeat as if by rote, ‘you may not be aware, Arthur, was afterwards Mrs Bute.
So
charming,
so
exquisite,
so
accomplished. And Colonel Bute – an officer and a gentleman, I grant. And yet … But no! My dear sister was
not
happy. And so it was no doubt a blessing in disguise that by an unfortunate accident she was found
drowned
. In a lake, you will understand, not a mere shallow noisy brook. This is one of my private sorrows, which, of course, your grandmamma would be horrified to hear – horrified; and which, of course, Partridge has not the privilege of birth even to be informed of –
our
secret, dear child – with all her beautiful hair, and her elegant feet, and her eyes no more ajar than this; but blue, blue as the forget-me-not. When the time comes, Miss Coppin will close my own eyes, I hope and trust. Death, dear, dear child, I know they
say
is only sleeping. Yet I hope and trust
that
. To be sleeping wide awake; oh no!' she abruptly turned her small untidy head away.