‘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 cross-roads. 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 cross-roads, but I mustn’t leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. 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 a 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 cross-roads. 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. Good-bye, 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 cross-roads 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 overran 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 cross-roads 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,3 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 ina
nity of my answer.
‘You – you aren’t laughing 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 hands 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.’
‘Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?’
She nodded. ‘Yes – if they are like this,’ and zig-zagged her finger again, ‘but it’s more red than purple – that bad colour.’
‘And what are the colours at the top of the – whatever you see?’
Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg itself.4
‘I see them so,’ she said, pointing with a grass-stem, ‘white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red – as you were just now.’
‘Who told you anything about it – in the beginning?’ I demanded.
‘About the Colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was little – in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see – because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people.’ Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.
‘All by yourself?’ I repeated.
‘All by myself. There wasn’t any one else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours.’
She leaned against the tree-bole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass-stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
‘Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,’ she went on after a long silence. ‘Nor at them.’
‘Goodness! No!’ I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. ‘A man who laughs at a child – unless the child is laughing too – is a heathen!’
‘I didn’t mean that, of course. You’d never laugh at children, but I thought – I used to think – that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon … What are you going to laugh at?’
I had made no sound, but she knew.
‘At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the State and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me – inexcusable.’
She looked at me, her head against the tree-trunk – long and steadfastly – this woman who could see the naked soul.
‘How curious!’ she half whispered. ‘How very curious!’
‘Why, what have I done?’
‘You don’t understand … and yet you understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?’
She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.
‘No,’ I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later – if you’ll let me come again.’
‘You will come again,’ she answered. ‘You will surely come again and walk in the wood.’
‘Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them – as a favour. You know what children are like.’
‘It isn’t a matter of favour but of right,’ she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. ‘What is it, Mrs Madehurst?’ she asked.
The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits’ end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.
‘Where’s the next nearest doctor?’ I asked between paroxysms.
‘Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I’ll attend to this. Be quick!’ She half supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful,5 and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.
A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
‘Useful things cars,’ said Madden, all man and no butler. ‘If I’d had one when mine took sick she wouldn’t have died.’
‘How was it?’ I asked.
‘Croup. Mrs Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax-cart6 for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car’d ha’ saved her. She’d have been close on ten now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day.’
‘Have you seen ’em again, sir – this mornin’?’
‘Yes, but they’re well broke to cars. I couldn’t get any of them within twenty yards of it.’
He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger – not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
‘I wonder why,’ he said just above the breath that he drew.
We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.
‘I’ve be’n listenin’ in de back-yard,’ she said cheerily. ‘He says Arthur’s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck7 just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t’will come Jenny’s turn to walk in de wood nex’ week along, Mr Madden.’
‘Excuse me, sir, but your lap-robe is slipping,’ said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
‘What does she mean by “walking in the wood”?’ I asked.
‘It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself,’ said Madden. ‘They’re an independent l
ot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, sir.’
I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. ‘Dat sort,’ she wailed – ‘dey’re just as much to us dat has ’em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much – just as much! An’ God, He’d be just as pleased if you saved ’un, Doctor. Don’t take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don’t leave ’im, Doctor!’
‘I know, I know,’ said the man; ‘but he’ll be quiet for a while now. We’ll get the nurse and the medicines as fast as we can.’ He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl’s face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick-bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses – magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois – all hostile to motors – gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor’s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shady trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
The Man Who Would Be King Page 51
