Part 4

The child stared at the glowworm and then surveyed the sky, but the tardy moon was deep behind the hills. He left the open window and climbed into bed again. The house was empty, but he did not mind, father and mother had gone to buy him another birthday gift. He did not mind, the church glowed in its corner on the bureau, the street lamp shined all over the ceiling and a little bit upon the wall where the splendid picture of Wexford Harbour was hanging. It was not gloomy at all, although the Orphanage bell once sounded very piercingly. Sometimes people would stroll by, but not often, and he would hear them mumbling to each other. He would rather have a Chinese lantern first, and next to that a little bagpipe, and next to that a cockatoo with a yellow head, and then a Chinese lantern, and then.... He awoke; he thought he heard a heavy bang on the door as if somebody had thrown a big stone. But when he looked out of the window there was nobody to be seen. The little moon drip was still lying in the dirt, the sky was softly black, the stars were vivid, only the lamp dazzled his eyes and he could not see any moon. But as he yawned he saw just over the downs a rich globe of light moving very gradually towards him, swaying and falling, falling in the still air. To the child's dazzled eyes the great globe, dropping towards him as if it would crush the house, was shaped like an elephant, a fat squat jumbo with a green trunk. Then to his relief it fell suddenly from the sky right on to the down where he and father had played. The light was extinguished and black night hid the fire-balloon.

He scrambled back into bed again, but how he wished it was morning so that he could go out and capture the old elephant--he knew he would find it! When at last he slept he sank into a world of white churches that waved their steeples like vast trunks, and danced with elephants that had bellies full of fire and hidden bells that clanged impetuously to a courageous pull of each tail. He did not wake again until morning was bright and birds were singing. It was early, but it was his birthday. There were no noises in the street yet, and he could not hear his father or mother moving about. He crawled silently from his bed and dressed himself. The coloured windows in the little white fane gleamed still but it looked a little dull now. He took the cake that mother always left at his bedside and crept down the stairs. There he put on his shoes and, munching the cake, tiptoed to the front door. It was not bolted, but it was difficult for him to slip back the latch quietly, and when at last it was done and he stood upon the step he was doubly startled to hear a loud rapping on the knocker of a house a few doors away. He sidled quickly but warily to the corner of the street, crushing the cake into his pocket, and then peeped back. It was more terrible than he had anticipated! A tall policeman stood outside that house, bawling to a woman with her hair in curl papers who was lifting the sash of an upper window. Felix turned and ran through the gap in the hedge and onwards up the hill. He did not wait; he thought he heard the policeman calling out "Tincler!" and he ran faster and faster, then slower and more slow as the down steepened, until he was able to sink down breathless behind a clump of the furze, out of sight and out of hearing. The policeman did not appear to be following him; he moved on up the hill and through the soft smooth alleys of the furze until he reached the top of the down, searching always for the white elephant which he knew must be hidden close there and nowhere else, although he had no clear idea in his mind of the appearance of his mysterious quarry. Vain search, the elephant was shy or cunning and eluded him. Hungry at last and tired he sat down and leaned against a large ant hill close beside the thick and perfumed furze. Here he ate his cake and then lolled, a little drowsy, looking at the few clouds in the sky and listening to birds. A flock of rooks was moving in straggling flight towards him, a wide flat changing skein, like a curtain of crape that was being pulled and stretched delicately by invisible fingers. One of the rooks flapped just over him; it had a small round hole right through the feathers of one wing--what was that for? Felix was just falling to sleep, it was so soft and comfortable there, when a tiny noise, very tiny but sharp and mysterious, went "Ping!" just by his ear, and something stung him lightly in the neck. He knelt up, a little startled, but he peered steadily under the furze. "Ping!" went something again and stung him in the ball of the eye. It made him blink. He drew back; after staring silently at the furze he said very softly, "Come out!" Nothing came; he beckoned with his forefinger and called aloud with friendliness, "come on, come out!" At that moment his nose was almost touching a brown dry sheath of the furze bloom, and right before his eyes the dried flower burst with the faint noise of "Ping!" and he felt the shower of tiny black seeds shooting against his cheek. At once he comprehended the charming mystery of the furze's dispersal of its seeds, and he submitted himself to the fairylike bombardment with great glee, forgetting even the elephant until in one of the furze alleys he came in sight of a heap of paper that fluttered a little heavily. He went towards it; it was so large that he could not make out its shape or meaning. It was a great white bag made of paper, all crumpled and damp, with an arrangement of wire where the hole was, and some burned tow fixed in it. But at last he was able to perceive the green trunk, and it also had pink eyes! He had found it and he was triumphant! There were words in large black letters painted upon it which he could not read, except one word which was CURE. It was an advertisement fire-balloon relating to a specific for catarrh. He rolled the elephant together carefully, and carrying the mass of it clasped in his two arms he ran back along the hill chuckling to himself, "I'm carrying the ole elephant." Advancing down the hill to his home he was precariously swathed in a drapery of balloon paper. The door stood open; he walked into the kitchen. No one was in the kitchen, but there were sharp straight voices speaking in the room above. He thought he must have come into the wrong house, but the strange noises frightened him into silence; he stood quite still listening to them. He had dropped the balloon and it unfolded upon the floor, partly revealing the astounding advertisement of

PEASEGOOD'S PODOPHYLLIN.

The voices above were unravelling horror upon horror. He knew by some divining instinct that tragedy was happening to him, had indeed already enveloped and crushed him. A mortar had exploded at the fireworks display, killing and wounding people that he knew.

"She had a great hole of a wound in the soft part of her thigh as you could put a cokernut in...."

"God a'mighty...."

"Died in five minutes, poor thing."

"And the husband ... they couldn't....?"

"No, couldn't identify ... they could not identify him only by some papers in his pocket."

"And he'd got a little bagpipe done up in a package ... for their little boy...."

"Never spoke a word...."

"Never a word, poor creature."

"May Christ be good to 'em."

"Yes, yes," they all said softly.

The child walked quietly up the stairs to his mother's bedroom. Two policemen were there making notes in their pocket books, their helmets lying on the unused bed. There were also three or four friendly women neighbours. As he entered the room the gossip ceased abruptly. One of the women gasped "O Jesus!" and they seemed to huddle together eyeing him as if he had stricken them with terror. With his fingers still upon the handle of the door he looked up at the tallest policeman and said:

"What's the matter?"

The policeman did not reply immediately; he folded up his notebook, but the woman who had gasped came to him with a yearning cry and wrapped him in her protesting arms with a thousand kisses.

"Ye poor lamb, ye poor little orphan, whatever 'ull become of ye!"

At that moment the bell of the Orphanage burst into a peal of harsh impetuous clangour and the policemen picked up their helmets from the bed.

CRAVEN ARMS

CRAVEN ARMS

All schools since the beginning of time have been modern at some period of their existence, but this one was modern, so the vicar declared, because it was so blessedly hygienic; the townspeople were perhaps proudest of its evening classes, very advanced they were--languages, sciences, arts--and very popular. The school was built upon a high tree-arboured slope overlooking the snug small town and on its western side stared ambiguously at a free upland country that was neither small nor snug. The seventeen young women and the nine young men who comprised the evening sketching class were definitely, indeed articulately, inartistic; they were as unæsthetic as pork pies, all except Julia Tern, a golden-haired pure-complexioned fawn of a girl whose talent was already beyond the reach of any instruction the teacher could give. He could not understand why she continued to attend his classes.

One evening she brought for his criticism a portrait sketch of himself.

"This is extraordinarily beautiful," he murmured.

"Yes," said Julia.

"I mean the execution, the presentation and so on."

Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose and positive chin. What could have inspired her to make this idealisation of himself, for it was idealisation in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He knew he had little enough nobility of character--too little to show so finely--and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic, inscribed with his name--_David Masterman_ 1912.

"When, how did you come to do it?"

"I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal, and there you are!" She said it jauntily, but there was a pink flush in her cheeks.

"It's delicious," he mused, "I envy you. I can't touch a decent head--not even yours. But why have you idealised me so?" He twitted her lightly about the gravity and nobility.

"But you are like that, you are. That's how I see you at this moment."

She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care to ask her for it--there was delicious flattery in the thought that she treasured it so much.

Masterman was a rather solitary man of about thirty. He lived alone in a bungalow away out of the town and painted numbers of landscapes, rather lifeless imitations, as he knew, of other men's masterpieces. They were frequently sold.

Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds, stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone with Julia Tern; but there were other loyal pupils who never missed these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe, the younger, and Katherine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all: he could never divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls--they quite certainly liked him, liked him enormously, and indeed could have had no other reason for continuing in his classes, both being as devoid of artistic grace as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes and shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions, were manifested in many ways, small but significant and kind. On such occasions Julia's eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze. It was absurd. He liked them well enough, and sometimes from his shy wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.

Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed, dressed in cream-coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight, without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But she had an extraordinary vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that exacerbated him, and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did not linger; she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair, her dusky face, her creamy clothes and her delightful rotundities. She had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.

One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of helleborine growing in the dimness under the closely planted saplings.

"Don't! don't!" he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt down together to admire the white virginal flower. His arm fell around Ianthe's waist in a light casual way. He scarcely realised its presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that went he did not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was. Ianthe took no notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not retreat until they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his side until his arm once more stole round her.

"Heavens above," she said, "you do get away with it quick!"

"Life's short, there's no time to lose, I do as I'd be done by."

"And there are so many of us! But glory," said the jolly girl, taking him to her bosom, "in for a penny, in for a pound."

She did not pick any more flowers, and soon they were out of the wood decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia's gaze was full of irony, the timid wonder in Kate's eyes moved him uncomfortably, there was something idiotic in the whole affair.

Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little town or in the city three miles further off. Her uncouthness still repelled him and sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was always happy to be with him, fond and gay with all the endearing alertness of a pert bird.

Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the brink of her emotions, and they, unhappily for her, were often not transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to say, she seemed to stand and wait.

One autumn night after the pupils had gone home from school he walked into the dim lobby for his hat and coat. Kate Forrest was there. She stood with her back to him adjusting her hat. She did not say a word nor did he address her. They were almost touching each other, there was a pleasant scent about her. In the class-room behind the caretaker was walking about the hollow sounding floor, humming loudly as he clapped down windows and mounted the six chairs to turn out the six gas lamps.

When the last light through the glazed door was gone and the lobby was completely dark Kate all at once turned to him, folded him in her arms, and held him to her breast for one startling moment, then let him go, murmuring "O ... O." It made him strangely happy. He pulled her back in the gloom, whispering tender words. They walked out of the hall into the dark road and stopped to confront each other. The road was empty and dark except for a line of gas lamps that gleamed piercingly bright in the sharp air and in the polished surface of the road that led back from the hill down past her father's villa. There were no lamps in the opposite direction and the road groped its way out into the dark country where he lived, a mile beyond the town. It was windy and some unseen trees behind a wall near them swung and tossed with many pleasant sounds.

"I will come a little way with you," Kate said.

"Yes, come a little way," he whispered, pressing her arm, "I'll come back with you."

She took his arm and they turned towards the country. He could think of nothing to say, he was utterly subdued by his surprise: Kate was sad, even moody; but at last she said slowly: "I am unlucky. I always fall in love with men who can't love me."

"O but I can and do, dear Kate," he cried lightly, "love me, Kate, go on loving me, I'm not, well, I'm not very wicked."

"No, no, you do not." She shook her head mournfully; after a few moments she added: "It's Julia Tern."

That astonished him too. How could she have known it! How could anyone have known--even Julia herself. It was queer that she did not refer to his friendship with Ianthe; he thought that was much more obvious than his love for Julia. In a mood that he only half understood he began to deny her reproachful charge. "Why, you must think me very fickle indeed. I really love you, dear Kate, really you."

His arm was around her neck, he smoothed her cheek fondly against his own. She returned his caresses, but he could glimpse the melancholy doubt in her averted eyes.

"We often talk of you, we often talk of you at night in bed, often."

"What do you say about me--in bed? Who?"

"Ianthe and me. She likes you."

"She likes me! What do you say about me--in bed?"

He hoped Ianthe had not been indiscreet, but Kate only said: "She doesn't like you as I do--not like this."

Soon they began to walk back towards the town. He smiled once when, as their footsteps clattered irregularly upon the hard clean road, she skipped to adjust the fall of her steps to his.

"Do not come any further," she begged, as they neared the street lamps. "It doesn't matter, not at all, what I've said to you. It will be all right. I shall see you again."

Once more she put her arms around his neck, murmuring "Good-night, good-night, good-night."

He watched her go quietly away. When he turned homeward his mind was full of thoughts that were only dubiously pleasant. It was all right, surprisingly sweet, but it left him uneasy. He managed to light a cigarette, but the wind blew smoke into his eyes, tore the charred end into fiery rags, and tossed the sparkles across his shoulder. If it had only been Julia Tern!--or even Ianthe!--he would have been wholly happy. Kate was good-looking, but these quietly passionate advances disturbed him. Why had he been so responsive to her? He excused himself, it was quite simple; you could not let a woman down, a loving woman like that, not at once, a man should be kind. But what did she mean when she spoke of always falling in love with men who did not like her?

He tossed the cigarette away and turned up the collar of his coat, for the faintest fall of warm rain blew against his face like a soft beautiful net. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked sharply and forgettingly home.

2

Three miles away from the little town was the big city with tramways, electric light, factories, canals, and tens of thousands of people, and there a few nights later he met Ianthe. Walking around and away from the happy lighted streets they came out upon the bank of a canal where darkness and loneliness were intensified by the silent passage of black water whose current they could define but not see. As they stepped warily along the unguarded bank he embraced her. Even as he did so he cursed himself for a fool to be so fond of this wretched imp of a girl. In his heart he believed he disliked her, but he was not sure. She was childish, artful, luscious, stupid--this was no gesture for a man with any standards. Silently clutching each other they approached an iron bridge with lamps upon it and a lighted factory beyond it. The softly-moving water could now be seen; the lamps on the bridge let down thick rods of light into its quiet depths, and beyond the arch the windows of the factory, inverted in the stream, bloomed like baskets of fire with flaming fringes. A boy shuffled across the bridge whistling a tune; there was the distant rumble and trot of a cab. Then all sounds melted into quiet without one wave of air. Ianthe was replying to him:

"No, no, I like it, I like you." She put her brow against his breast: "I like you, I like you."

His embracing hand could feel the emotion streaming within the girl.

"Do you like me better than her?"

"Than whom," he asked.

Ianthe was coy. "You know, you know."

Masterman's feelings were a mixture of perturbation and delight, delight at this manifestation of jealousy of her sister which was an agreeable thing, anyway, for it implied a real depth of regard for him; but he was perturbed, for he did not know what Kate had told this sister of their last strange meeting.

He saluted her again, exclaiming:

"Never mind her. This our outing, isn't it?"

"I don't like her," Ianthe added naively, "she is so awfully fond of you."

"O confound her," he cried; and then: "You mustn't mind me saying that so, so sharply; you don't mind, do you?"

Ianthe's lips were soft and sweet. Sisters were quite unscrupulous, Masterman had heard of such cases before, but he had tenderness and a reluctance to wound anybody's susceptibility, let alone the feelings of a woman who loved. He was an artist not only in paint but in sentiment, and it is possible that he excelled in the less tangible medium.

"It's a little awkward," he ventured. Ianthe didn't understand, she didn't understand that at all.

"The difficulty, you see," he said, with the air of one handling whimsically a question of perplexity that yet yielded its amusement, "is ... is Kate."

"Kate?" said Ianthe.

"She is so--so gone, so absolutely gone."

"Gone?"

"Well, she's really, really in love, deeply, deeply," looking away anywhere but at her sister's eyes.

"With Chris Halton, do you mean?"

"Ho, ho!" he laughed. "Chris who? Lord, no! With me, with me, isn't she?"

"With you!"

But Ianthe was quite positive, even a little ironical, about that. "She is not. She rather dislikes you, Mr. Prince Charming, so there! We speak of you sometimes at night, in bed--we sleep together. She knows what I think of you. But she's quite, well, she doesn't like you at all--she acts the heavy sister."

"O!" said Masterman, groping as it were for some light in his darkness.

"She--what do you think?--she warns me against you," Ianthe continued.

"Against me?"

"As if I care. Do you?"

"No, no! I don't care."

They left the dark bank where they had been standing and walked along to the bridge. Halfway up its steps to the road he paused, and asked: "Then who is it that is so fond of me?"

"O, you know, you know." Ianthe nestled blissfully in his arm again.

"No, but who is it; I may be making another howler, I thought you meant Kate; what did she warn you of, I mean against me?"

They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre. The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people, there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.

"What did she warn you against?" he repeated.

"You," chuckled Ianthe.

"But what about? What has she got against me?"