The Wish House and Other Stories (45 page)

‘No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.’

‘Which?’

‘I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.’

‘Oh, lucky you!’ she cried, and her face brightened. ‘I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard them?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘And if I know anything of children, one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.’

‘You’re fond of children?’

I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

‘Of course, of course,’ she said. ‘Then you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car though the gardens, once or twice – quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their lives pleasant, but—‘ she threw out her hands towards the woods. ‘We’re so out of the world here.’

‘That will be splendid,’ I said. ‘But I can’t cut up your grass.’

She faced to the right. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a flagged path. We call it the Peacocks’ Walk. You can’t see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags.’

It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.

‘May I come too?’ she cried. ‘No, please don’t help me. They’ll like it better if they see me.’

She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the step she called: ‘Children, oh, children! Look and see what’s going to happen!’

The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.

Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood far off and doubting.

‘The little fellow’s watching us,’ I said. ‘I wonder if he’d like a ride.’

‘They’re very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let’s listen.’

I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

‘Oh, unkind!’ she said weariedly.

‘Perhaps they’re only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested.’

‘Yes?’ She raised her head. ‘It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It’s the only thing that makes life worth living-when they’re fond of you, isn’t it? I daren’t think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?’

‘I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.’

‘So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn’t quite the same thing.’

‘Then have you never —?’ I began, but stopped abashed.

‘Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see
them.
I only hear them just as I do when I’m awake.’

‘It’s difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us haven’t the gift,’ I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.

‘I’ve heard that too,’ she said. ‘And they tell me that one never sees a dead person’s face in a dream. Is that true?’

‘I believe it is – now I come to think of it.’

‘But how is it with yourself – yourself?’ The blind eyes turned towards me.

‘I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,’ I answered.

‘Then it must be as bad as being blind.’

The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leafed lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at its end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

‘Have you ever wanted to?’ she said after the silence.

‘Very much sometimes,’ I replied. The child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.

‘Ah! So’ve I, but I don’t suppose it’s allowed…Where d’you live?’

‘Quite the other side of the county – sixty miles and more, and I must be going back. I’ve come without my big lamps.’

‘But it’s not dark yet. I can feel it.’

‘I’m afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone to set me on my road at first? I’ve utterly lost myself.’

‘I’ll send Madden with you to the crossroads. We are so out of the world, I don’t wonder you were lost! I’ll guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won’t you, till you’re out of the grounds? It isn’t foolish, do you think?’

‘I promise you I’ll go like this,’ I said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.

We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day’s journey; passed under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house, which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had seen.

‘Is it so very beautiful?’ she said wistfully when she heard my raptures. ‘And you like the lead figures too? There’s the old azalea garden behind. They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the crossroads, but I mustn’t leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the crossroads. He has lost his way, but – he has seen them.’

A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.

‘Remember,’ she said quietly, ‘if you are fond of them you will come again,’ and disappeared within the house.

The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates, where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in the shrubbery I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-murder.

‘Excuse me,’ he asked of a sudden, ‘but why did you do that, sir?’

‘The child yonder.’

Our young gentleman in blue?’

Of course.’

‘He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, sir?’

‘Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?

‘Yes, sir. And did you ‘appen to see them upstairs too?’

‘At the upper window? Yes.’

‘Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, sir?’

‘A little before that. Why d’you want to know?’

He paused a little. ‘Only to make sure that – that they had seen the car, sir, because with children running about, though I’m sure you’re driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, sir. Here are the crossroads. You can’t miss your way from now on. Thank you, sir, but that isn’t
our
custom, not with —‘

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, and thrust away the British silver.

‘Oh, it’s quite right with the rest of ’em as a rule. Goodbye, sir.’

He retired into the armour-plated conning-tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.

Once beyond the signposts at the crossroads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live – much less to ‘go about talking like carriage folk’. They were not a pleasant-mannered community.

When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin’s Old Farm appeared to be the Survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour – a deep-rooted tree of that soil – and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.

A month or so later – I went again, or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the crossroads where the butler had left me, and a little farther on developed an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing
across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: ‘Children, oh, children! Where are you?’ and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree boles, and though a child, it seemed, clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.

‘Is that you?’ she said, ‘from the other side of the county?’

‘Yes, it’s me from the other side of the county.’

‘Then why didn’t you come through the upper woods? They were there just now.’

‘They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?’

‘In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty-first.’

She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and pushed her hat back.

‘Let me hear,’ she said.

‘Wait a moment,’ I cried, ‘and I’ll get you a cushion.’

She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped above it eagerly. ‘What delightful things!’ The hands through which she saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. ‘A box here – another box! Why, you’ve arranged them like playing shop!’

‘I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don’t need half those things really.’

‘How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were here before that?’

‘I’m sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He’s been watching me like a Red Indian.’

‘It must have been your bell,’ she said. ‘I heard one of them go past me in trouble when I was coming down. They’re shy – so shy even with me.’ She turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: ‘Children, oh, children! Look and see!’

‘They must have gone off together on their own affairs,’ I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.

‘How many are they?’ I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no reason to go.

Her forehead puckered a little in thought. ‘I don’t quite know,’ she said simply. ‘Sometimes more – sometimes less. They come and stay with me because I love them, you see.’

‘That must be very jolly,’ I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I heard the inanity of my answer.

‘You – you aren’t laughting at me?’ she cried. ‘I – I haven’t any of my own. I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because – because – ’

‘Because they’re savages,’ I returned. ‘It’s nothing to fret for. That sort laugh at everything that isn’t in their own fat lives.’

‘I don’t know. How should I? I only don’t like being laughed at about
them.
It hurts; and when one can’t see…I don’t want to seem silly,’ her chin quivered like a child’s as she spoke, ‘but we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It’s different with you. You’ve such good defences in your eyes – looking out – before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with us.’

I was silent, reviewing that inexhaustible matter – the more than inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.

‘Don’t do that!’ she said of a sudden, putting her hand before her eyes.

‘What?’

She made a gesture with her hand.

‘That! It’s – it’s all purple and black. Don’t! That colour hurts.’

‘But how in the world do you know about colours?’ I exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed.

‘Colours as colours?’ she asked.

‘No.
Those
Colours which you saw just now.’

‘You know as well as I do,’ she laughed, ‘else you wouldn’t have asked that question. They aren’t in the world at all. They’re in
you –
when you went so angry.’

‘D’you mean a dull purplish patch, like port wine mixed with ink?’ I said.

‘I’ve never seen ink or port wine, but the colours aren’t mixed. They are separate – all separate.’