by George Moore
I asked what had kept her out so late, and her answer was that she had gone to the forest to think.
“To think of what?” says I.
“Of my marriage, of course, Mother, for what else is there for me to think about?”
“Think about thy marriage!” says I. “But thou’rt as good as married to Sidney Fitch - in three days! Now, what did thy thinking come to?”
“To nothing good, I’m thinking.”
‘And then fair frightened, and feeling my wits leaving me, I said: “Thy lovely dress - the presents - the breakfast - and the dance.”
‘And what did she say to all that?’
‘Not a word: and not being able to get an answer out of her, I went on: “It isn’t fair, Cicely, to break off a marriage within three days of the wedding without giving any reason; you are keeping something from us and Sidney. What’s to become of him?”’
‘And she had nothing to say about him?’
‘Only as she didn’t feel sure she’d be happy in married life. “But,” said I, “is it only a feeling?” She didn’t answer. “I’ve been a good, kind mother, haven’t I?” says I, and she answered straight she had naught to complain of. And then suddenlike she threw herself into my arms, and when she had had her cry out I tried coaxing her, till at last she began to give way, and to hearten her I asked her if it was anything to do with Sidney.
‘She said: “No, Mother, Sidney is all right. He’s a good lad, but I can’t marry him.” More than that she wouldn’t say.
‘I kept on - you can call it nagging, if you like, but I was afeared, and felt I must get at the truth. That was my mistake - happen it was, happen it wasn’t.
‘“I don’t know what Father will say when he hears it,” I said; “it will break his heart.” Maybe I went too far, for seeing as the words “break his heart” stirred her, I went on till she broke down again. I know I was ‘ard with her, I know I was. “Thou’lt break ’is ‘eart, and mine, too; both our ‘earts will be broken. Thy father and I have loved thee, Cicely, all thy life. All our love ‘as gone to thee. We had nobody else to love. And now it is beginning to come to thee that we’re thinking only of ourselves.”
‘“I didn’t say that, Mother,” said she.
‘“No, but that’s what is in thy mind. I can read it in thy face.”
‘“If Father is that set on this marriage, and thou’rt on his side and against me, I don’t know what will happen to me.” Her foot was on the stairs, but I called, and she came back.
‘“Thou’lt have to tell it all to Father, and he, being a man with a liking for reasons, will listen to reason.”
‘“To his own reasons, Mother, but not to mine.”
‘“I’ve a thought for thy meaning, Cicely, and maybe thou’d do well to tell me when the feeling began that Sidney was not the husband for thee.”
‘“Last week, Mother.”
‘“Thou’st seen nobody since walking out with Sidney.”
‘“Yes, I have, Mother.”’
‘“Nobody’s been here but Grigg.” And we stood looking at each other.’
‘Thou hasn’t told me of Grigg, ‘Arriet. I can’t call to mind hearing his name afore.’
‘Hast forgotten the tuner, Fred, that came to put the piano right for the dance, the spare man in the brown clothes, him as trails a lock of black hair across his skull?’
‘I ‘eard him tuning, and being busy in the shop didn’t catch sight of him before leaving. But he was here more days than one.’
‘He was here twice, for the first time he couldn’t get the piano right, his ear being out, so he said. He was here an hour before I came in to see how they were getting on, and for an excuse for interrupting I asked if he had tuned the piano.’
“Of course, Mother, what art thinking of?” Cicely cried, and not being able to get an answer out of myself at the moment, I said:
“Of course, what am I saying?” and ran my fingers over the keys for to have an excuse for complimenting him. “Why,” says I, “the piano isn’t in tune!”
“I’ve tuned thirteen to-day and my ear is out,” said Mr Grigg, “and I’ll come back to-morrow and finish my tuning”, which he did. And he was about going when Cicely starts talking to him about the forest, and so eager was she to hear of the Rufus Stone, the great King and Queen Oaks at Mark Ash, and the Lymington River, and he nothing loath to talk about the forest, I couldn’t but ask him to stay and take a cup of tea with us.
‘It was whilst we were ‘aving our tea as he told us he tuned pianos all over the country - at Lyndhurst, Brockenhurst (I think he said he had some pianos to tune there), and that his round took him to Beaulieu and often to Christchurch. He had a lot to say, too, about forest glades and nightingales. Cicely and I came down-stairs to see him off, and he was barely out of sight when Cicely began to talk of the wonderful forest.
“Cicely,” said I, “I never heard thee speak of the forest afore; to hear thee one would think it had arrived no later than the day before yesterday!”
‘Maybe she went to meet Grigg.’
‘Grigg was miles away. I heard him say that he was going straight to Lyndhurst.’
‘Thy story, ‘Arriet, seems likely enough for many another girl, but our Cicely, I’m thinking, was too natural a sort to throw over a young fellow like Sidney Fitch for the old tuner with his wisp of black hair drawn over a bald skull, no more than three days before her wedding.’
‘I said nothing about a change of mind. Her words were: “Sidney’s all right, Mother. Sidney’s a good lad, but I can’t marry him.”’
‘She was willing enough to marry him at the back end of the week, so her mind must have gone over -’
‘I think it was the grocery store that frightened her.’
‘Frightened her! Wasn’t she born into it?’
‘Yes, Fred, she was; and she was contented enough in it till she took fright at the thought as her married life would be no more than her single life over again. She’d come to that time of life when a girl begins to weary of the days she has known and to long for days she don’t know. Our days be like beads on a string, and a young girl wearies of the lot she has been stringing, and then it is main easy to set her off; well-nigh anything will do it.’
‘I never ‘eard thee speak like that afore, ‘Arriet, yet we’ve been stringing the same beads all our lives. When I told thee that I was but a grocer’s apprentice -’
‘The shop was our romance, Fred, but it wasn’t Cicely’s. I don’t say she wouldn’t have gone tired of green branches and wandering after pianos to be tuned, for there are bad days in the forest same as in the store; but she’d have had her romance.’
‘But why should our daughter have been that different from her mother? For when we walked the common, ‘Arriet, and the gipsy tilted his horse over a gate, thou’dst no thought to jump up behind him.’
‘All that is long ago, Fred, and I’m no ways willing to think myself better than my daughter. I was fond of thee, and there was no crying off, though thou wast no more than a grocer’s apprentice at the time, with a good notion in thy head as Brandlesbury needed a grocery store. And for twenty year we’ve worked at our counters, thinking always of the five-pound note to put with the others to make a fortune for Cicely when she wedded. But she’s been took from us, and Sidney.’
‘Yes, ‘Arriet, thou has said it. We’ve worked eighteen long years for her, who had no thought for us, only for herself.’
‘I’ve told thee thy daughter’s story out of my own heart, and spoilt her for thee in the telling, but thou’lt understand her presently, and after thine own heart.’
‘It would have been a ‘ard blow ‘ad she married the tuner and gone wandering from ‘ome with him, but I’d ‘ave borne it.’ And catching a sudden glimpse of Cicely in his wife’s small, frail body, black hair, and death-pale face, he added: ‘We must be careful not to speak unkind of her for what she’s done, for she may still be about the house, and passing of judgement upon her may
scare her ghost away for ever.’
‘Cicely will not be scared away, and knowing more than before will have pity on us both.’
Fred left the parlour, and returning from the shop laid several dishes in front of his wife.
‘However sick at heart we may be, we must eat. I cannot have thee ill in the house. Here - cheese, butter, biscuits, dates, apples and bananas. And after eating we might take a bit of a walk about the edges of the forest.’
‘Yes, about the edges of the forest,’ Harriet answered. ‘I shall not be long finding a bonnet and shawl.’
The words that rose to his lips were: ‘Don’t hurry; we be’ant pressed for time this afternoon,’ but he kept himself from speaking them, and was pacing up and down the parlour, his hands behind his back, when the front door bell began to ring. ‘Now, who can this be?’ and raising the window, he leaned out, but withdrew his head quickly, for the police had come with an ambulance to take Cicely away to the Hare and Hounds for the inquest...
‘I’m thinking, ‘Arriet, that the edge of the forest is no place for us to be seen walking’; and Harriet being somewhat of the same mind, each sought for some work that would distract their minds. And Fred thinking to find his in the account books, retired to his desk; but Cicely’s handwriting was on every page and he found only memories. And Harriet, ascending the stairs to consider what might be done with Cicely’s wedding clothes, came upon a vision of Cicely going up the aisle in a muslin dress and veil, and her grief burst the restraint she had put upon it. She threw herself on Cicely’s bed, and when she rose from it she said:
‘This grief will last for ever. As the days go by we shall miss her more and more. But what are we to do with these clothes, the stockings, the gloves, the shoes?’
Whilst folding them into a parcel her thoughts came upon Mrs Wenman. She, too, had lost a daughter. There are moments when women want to talk to women, and in Mrs Wenman’s cottage the afternoon passed away in sadness, but not in the cruel, hard, unrelenting sadness of the morning. Some of the wistfulness of the skies seemed to have come into her heart, and at the end of the day Mrs Wenman came home with her, and her companionship was so soothing that Harriet asked her in. They cooked some food together, and after eating they left Wyatt and collected what remained of Cicely’s clothes; and these Mrs Wenman took away, Harriet keeping only her daughter’s books and music.
‘I’m glad the music was kept, for it will remind us of her playing,’ Fred said, when they lay down together. ‘Isn’t that so, ‘Arriet?’
‘Aye, true enough,’ Harriet answered. ‘But let’s not go over it all again.’
‘Thou’rt thinking of the ghost that may be about the house.’
‘Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, Fred’... And waking suddenly, she cried: ‘She spoke in my ear! A voice spoke, and I heard it plain as I hear thee, Fred.’
An hour later it was Fred’s turn to wake, not to hear but to see Cicely’s pretty face under the lamp working at her account books. He called his wife to look, but she could see nothing, and there were many more wakings and sleepings through the long dawn that began at three and continued for hours amid the songs of blackbirds and thrushes, till the rumble of cart-wheels awoke them. Another hour passed, and then it was the jingle of harness and the crack of a carter’s whip that roused them, and later the dogs that were let through the doorways and ran barking down the street.
‘I’d give a good bit of money,’ said Wyatt as he rose from his bed, ‘if the half-day that’s afore us was over.’
‘Why the half-day, Fred?’
‘Well, won’t the inquest be over by then?’ he answered, and whilst they dressed their hope was that Grigg would tell his story without straying from it; and on their way to the Hare and Hounds they were agreed that the only evidence Sidney had to give was that he and Cicely had walked out together in the middle of the week, and that she seemed to look forward to her marriage with pleasure.
Sidney, whom they met on their way thither, was calmer than yesterday and seemed to see clearly that Grigg could not be held responsible for the mischief. He was followed into the witness box by Grigg, who told his story of the thirteen pianos and created a stir of admiration - Brandlesbury did not know that it possessed so great a musician. And the end of it all was that the jury found the usual verdict, and the people dispersed, discovering many reasons for Cicely Wyatt’s death in their wandering fancies.
At the end of the week Sidney came to see them, and Fred’s words were:
‘We be main glad to see thee, lad, for we have something on our minds, something for thee to hear. We’ve tried to carry on, but we can’t. The missus and myself are of the same mind. We want a change - that’s about it, and we’d look upon it as a kindness if thou’d look after the customers whilst our absence.’
Sidney asked if they intended to open a grocery store in another town, and they answered that they had no plans. It might be they’d start another business elsewhere, or it might be that they’d come back; they didn’t know.
‘And when do ye expect to leave Brandlesbury?’
Wyatt answered that they were leaving next morning, and next morning Sidney accompanied them to the turn of the road.
‘Good-bye, lad.’
‘You’ll write to us?’
‘Yes, we’ll write.’
‘If you come back you’ll be welcome, and if you don’t come back at the end of the year we’ll buy your business from you at a valuation.’
‘We’ll write,’ Wyatt answered.
‘We’ll write,’ Mrs Wyatt repeated; and he watched the two old people wandering away anywhither, nowhither, feeling he’d like to wander with them, for with them he would not be as far from Cicely as he would be with his own father and mother.
THE STRANGE STORY OF THE THREE GOLDEN FISHES
A COMEDY OF A MAN WHO ALWAYS WAS LUCKY - ESPECIALLY IN MARRIAGE
Once on a time shipping showed aloft in the ports and estuaries of certain Kentish and Sussex towns, but the Cinque Ports were deserted some centuries ago by the sea, their common benefactor, and now life moulders in Rye, Romney, and Sandwich amid recollections of better days.
A tidal river or estuary flows past Sandwich through the marshes, reaching the sea somehow, and on the occasion of my first visit I was grateful to two fishing-smacks and a collier moored in its sluggish current, for these small craft by spell of contrast reminded me of the great, square-sailed galleons that once littered the wharves with bales of silk, crates of rare porcelain, and barrels of wine from Lisbon and the Canaries; and my imagination, now fully roused, perceived horses from Barbary coming ashore marvellously accoutred, with high-pommelled saddles and a strange array of bits and bridles. For a moment the past was again the present; vision succeeded vision; and the gilded, painted coaches of merchant princes rattled through the great gateway to welcome the arrival of ships long overdue.
This old town smells of story, said I to myself, and could I but trace one to its lair... I had heard my friends speak of a fifteenth-century town hall, and I inquired my way thither from the passers by. None was in doubt as to the whereabouts of the hall. All the same, I allowed a small boy to lead me. But the doors of the hall were locked.
A reflection that human beings rouse my imagination when gable ends leave it sleeping, carried me a hundred yards farther into the town, and I welcomed a sudden vision of farmers repairing to an old-time inn on market-days to drink lusty ale after disposing of the sheep that I had admired in the fields on the way to Sandwich, rough little fields adorned with thorn-bushes and watered with pleasant brooks.
On the heels of these visions, memories and reflections came a sudden sympathy with sheep and lusty ale, and determined to enjoy both, one in leg of mutton and the other in pewter tankard, I said: ‘If a story awaits me in Sandwich I shall come upon it in the Royal George.’ And finding the George in a triangle of small streets, almost a courtyard, I entered the parlour, saying: ‘An inn of story, the veritable inn of my imagination; sanded f
loor, coloured prints of horses that have won the Derby, the Oaks, the Leger, and gamecocks of unrecorded exploits. Nothing lacks. The waiter is according to my aspiration; he is in perfect harmony with the town deserted by her friend and accomplice, the sea; a stocky man of sixty, over whose skull some last wisps of hair were trailed carefully this morning, and are probably trailed with the same care every morning. Trimmed away are the large Victorian whiskers he once wore; of them remain only some small bunches of curled hair looking like crisp parsley above his ears.’
It seemed to me that I had seen his long, wide mouth in many waiters before, and remarking his cumbrous, trailing gait, I said to myself: ‘A man grown old in the habits of his trade, but no less a human being for that.’ And satisfied that this was so, I followed him to a seat and heard him speak the words that I had already heard in my esurient imagination:
‘A nice leg of mutton is ready, Sir.’
It was pleasant to watch him bundle himself out of the parlour and return a few minutes afterwards with two slices of mutton, a piece of Yorkshire pudding, a dish of potatoes and greens. I liked him to be near me while I ate; answering from time to time his questions about the mutton, and passing from mutton to sheep, I spoke to him of the flocks I had seen from the train feeding under broken hedges or collected by watercourses as in a picture. Within five minutes I learned that his name was John Selby and that he had lived all his life in Sandwich.
‘A declining town for years,’ he said, ‘long before my time - declining for hundreds of years, so I have heard, ever since the sea left us. We are holding on somehow, but if something doesn’t happen, Sir, a luncheon such as you are eating will be a thing of the past in the George. Pickles, Sir? Worcester sauce, Sir?’
‘No thank you,’ I answered. ‘On second thoughts, John, I’ll have both, for they remind me of the days when I ate them, days of wax fruit, antimacassars, and rep sofas.’
We spoke of the race-horses on the walls, winners of the Oaks and the Derby and the Leger and the Two Thousand Guineas, and of the game-cocks, and I heard much from John about the art of trimming cocks for battle, of the minting of spurs and the trying of them, and speaking thereof John said:
