Part 5
"I wired to my husband. You should have seen me going home. I was so nervous,--I was not half as nervous when I read my paper (it was rather a celebrated paper, perhaps you heard of it) to the Royal Geographical Society; it was on Esquimaux marriage songs, and the analogy between them and the Song of Solomon. She was so light, and so wrapped up, and my _pince-nez_ kept dropping off when I stooped over her (I got spectacles after that); and I used to fancy I had dropped her out of the wrappings, and peep under the shawl to make sure [with a sick shiver], to find her sucking her thumb. And I nearly passed my station; and then a valuable book--indeed, it is really a case of Mss., and almost unique--I had borrowed for reference, with some trouble, could not be found, and my husband roared with laughter when it turned up in the cradle. Belinda was at the gate anxious to take her, and he said I did not know how to hold her,--that I was holding her like a book of notes at a lecture; and so I gave her to Belinda. I think the poor little thing found it all strange, and when she puckered up her face and thrust out her under-lip, and two great tears jumped off her lashes, we all felt ready for hanging. But Belinda, though she doesn't know one language, not even her own, for she sows her _h's_ broadcast and picks them up at hazard,--she _can_ talk to a baby. I am so glad for that reason she is bigger now. I couldn't manage it: I could not reason out any system they go on in baby talk. I tried mixing up the tenses, but somehow it wasn't right. My husband says it is not more odd than salmon taking a fly that is certainly like nothing they ever see in nature. Anyway it answered splendidly. Belinda used to say (I made a note of some of them): 'Did-sum was denn? Oo did! Was ums de prettiest itta sweetums denn? Oo was. An' did um put 'em in a nasty shawl an' joggle 'em in an ole puff-puff? Um did; was a shame! Hitchy cum, hitchy cum, hitchy cum hi, Chinaman no likey me!' This always made her laugh, though in what connection the Chinaman came in I never _could_ fathom. I was a little jealous of Belinda, but she knew how to undress her. George, that's my husband's name, said the bath-water was too hot, and that the proper way to test it was to put one's elbow in. Belinda laughed; but I must confess it did feel too hot when I tried it that way: but how did he know? I got her such pretty clothes! I was going to buy a pragtbind of Nietzsche, but that must wait. George made her a cot with her name carved on the head of it; such a pretty one!"
"Did you find she made a change in your lives?" I asked.
"Oh, didn't she! Children are such funny things. I stole away to have a look at her later on, and did not hear him come after me. She looked so sweet, and she was smiling in her sleep. I believe the Irish peasantry say that an angel is whispering when a baby does that. I had given up all belief myself, except the belief in a Creator who is working out some system that is too infinite for our finite minds to grasp. If one looks round with seeing eyes, one can't help thinking that after a run of eighteen hundred and ninety-three years Christianity is not very consoling in its results. But at that moment, kneeling next the cradle, I felt a strange, solemn feeling stealing over me: one is conscious of the same effect in a grand cathedral filled with the peal of organ music and soaring voices. It was as if all the old, sweet, untroubled child-belief came back for a spell, and I wondered if far back in the Nazarene village Mary ever knelt and watched the Christ-child sleep; and the legend of how he was often seen to weep but never to smile came back to me, and I think the sorrow I felt as I thought was an act of contrition and faith. I could not teach a child scepticism; so I remembered my husband prayed, and I resolved to ask him to teach her. You see [half hesitatingly] I have more brains, or at least more intellectuality, than my husband; and in that case one is apt to undervalue simpler, perhaps greater, qualities. That came home to me, and I began to cry, I don't know why; and he lifted me up, and I think I said something of the kind to him. We got nearer to each other someway. He said it was unlucky to cry over a child.
"It made such a difference in the evenings! I used to hurry home,--I was on the staff of the 'World's Review' just then; and it was so jolly to see the quaint little phiz smile up when I went in.
"Belinda was quite jealous of George. She said 'Master worritted in an' out, an' interfered with everything; she never seen a man as knew so much about babies, not for one as never 'ad none of 'is own. Wot if he didn't go to Parkins hisself, an' say as how she was to have the milk of one cow, an' mind not mix it!' I wish you could have seen the insinuating distrust on Belinda's face. I laughed. I believe we were all getting too serious; I know I felt years younger. I told George that it was really suspicious: how did he acquire such a stock of baby lore? _I_ hadn't any. It was all very well to say 'Aunt Mary's kids.' I should never be surprised if I saw a Zwazi woman appear with a lot of tawny pickaninnies in tow. George was shocked! I often shock him.
"She began to walk as soon as she got stronger. I never saw such an inquisitive mite. I had to rearrange all my bookshelves, change 'Le Nu de Rabelais' (after Garnier, you know) and several others from the lower shelves to the top ones. One can't be so Bohemian when there is a little white soul like that playing about, can one? When we are alone, she always comes in to say her prayers and good-night. Larry Moore of the 'Vulture,'--he is one of the most wickedly amusing of men; prides himself on being _fin de siècle_ (don't you detest that word?) or nothing; raves about Dégas, and is a worshipper of the decadent school of verse; quotes Verlaine, you know,--well, he came in one evening on his way to some music hall. She's a whimsical little thing, not without incipient coquetry either,--well, she would say them to him. If you can imagine a masher of the Jan van Beer type bending his head to hear a child in a white 'nighty' lisping prayers, you have an idea of the picture. She kissed him good-night too (she never would before), and he must have forgotten his engagement, for he stayed with us to supper. She rules us all with a touch of her little hands, and I fancy we are all the better for it. Would you like to see her?"
She hands me a medallion, with a beautiful painted head in it. I can't say she is a pretty child,--a weird, elf-like thing, with questioning, wistful eyes, and masses of dark hair,--and yet as I look the little face draws me to it, and makes a kind of yearning in me, strikes me with a "fairy blast," perhaps.
The journey was all too short, and when we got to Hull she saw me to my train. It was odd to see the quiet way in which she got everything she wanted. She put me into the carriage, got me a foot-warmer and a magazine, kissed me, and said as she held my hand,--
"The world is small; we run in circles; perhaps we shall meet again. In any case I wish you a white elf."
I was sorry to part with her; I felt richer than before I knew her. I fancy she goes about the world giving graciously from her richer nature to the poorer endowed folk she meets on her way.
Often since that night I have rounded my arm and bowed down my face, and fancied I had a little human elf cuddled to my breast.
* * * * *
I am very busy just now getting everything ready; I had so much to buy. I don't like confessing it even to myself, but down in the bottom of my deepest trunk I have laid a parcel of things,--such pretty, tiny things. I saw them at a sale; I couldn't resist them, they were so cheap. Even if one doesn't want the things, it seems a sin to let them go. Besides, there may be some poor woman out in Cincinnati. I wrote to Hans Jörgen, you know, back in spring, and--Du störer Gud! there is Hans Jörgen coming across the street!
A LITTLE GRAY GLOVE.
EARLY-SPRING, 1893.
The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, and ends--with Revelations.--OSCAR WILDE.
Yes, most fellows' book of life may be said to begin at the chapter where woman comes in: mine did. She came in years ago, when I was a raw undergraduate. With the sober thought of retrospective analysis, I may say she was not all my fancy painted her; indeed, now that I come to think of it, there was no fancy about the vermeil of her cheeks, rather an artificial reality. She had her bower in the bar of the Golden Boar, and I was madly in love with her, seriously intent on lawful wedlock. Luckily for me she threw me over for a neighboring pork butcher; but at the time I took it hardly, and it made me sex shy. I was a very poor man in those days: one feels one's griefs more keenly then; one hasn't the wherewithal to buy distraction. Besides, ladies snubbed me rather on the rare occasions I met them. Later I fell in for a legacy, the forerunner of several; indeed, I may say I am beastly rich. My tastes are simple too, and I haven't any poor relations: I believe they are of great assistance in getting rid of superfluous capital; wish I had some!
It was after the legacy that women discovered my attractions. They found that there was something superb in my plainness (before they said ugliness), something after the style of the late Victor Emanuel, something infinitely more striking than mere ordinary beauty. At least so Harding told me his sister said, and she had the reputation of being a clever girl. Being an only child I never had the opportunity other fellows had of studying the undress side of women through familiar intercourse, say with sisters. Their most ordinary belongings were sacred to me. I had, I used to be told, ridiculous, high-flown notions about them (by the way I modified those considerably on closer acquaintance): I ought to study them; nothing like a woman for developing a fellow. So I laid in a stock of books in different languages, mostly novels, in which woman played title-rôles, in order to get up some definite data before venturing among them. I can't say I derived much benefit from this course. There seemed to be as great a diversity of opinion about the female species as, let us say, about the salmonidae. My friend Ponsonby Smith, who is one of the oldest fly-fishers in the three kingdoms, said to me once:--
"Take my word for it, there are only four true salmo,--the salar, the trutta, the fario, the ferox; all the rest are just varieties, sub-genuses of the above,--stick to that. Some writing fellow divided all the women into good-uns and bad-uns; but as a conscientious stickler for truth, I must say that both in trout as in women I have found myself faced with most puzzling varieties, that were a tantalizing blending of several qualities."
I then resolved to study them on my own account. I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a spirit of purely scientific investigation. I knew you'd laugh sceptically at that, but it's a fact. I was impartial in my selection of subjects for observation,--French, German, Spanish, as well as the home product. Nothing in petticoats escaped me. I devoted myself to the freshest _ingénue_ as well as the experienced widow of three departed; and I may as well confess that the more I saw of her the less I understood her. But I think they understood me. They refused to take me _au sérieux_. When they weren't fleecing me, they were interested in the state of my soul (I preferred the former); but all humbugged me equally, so I gave them up. I took to rod and gun instead, _pro salute animæ_; it's decidedly safer. I have scoured every country in the globe; indeed, I can say that I have shot and fished in woods and waters where no other white man, perhaps, ever dropped a beast or played a fish before. There is no life like the life of a free wanderer, and no lore like the lore one gleans in the great book of Nature; but one must have freed one's spirit from the taint of the town before one can even read the alphabet of its mystic meaning.
What has this to do with the glove? True, not much; and yet it has a connection--it accounts for me.
Well, for twelve years I have followed the impulses of the wandering spirit that dwells in me. I have seen the sun rise in Finland, and gild the Devil's Knuckles as he sank behind the Drachensberg. I have caught the barba and the gamer yellow-fish in the Vaal River, taken muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over guapote and cavallo in Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up duckling. But I have been shy as a chub at the shadow of a woman.
Well, it happened last year I came back on business,--another confounded legacy; end of June too, just as I was off to Finland. But Messrs. Thimble and Rigg, the highly respectable firm who look after my affairs, represented that I owed it to others, whom I kept out of their share of the legacy, to stay near town till affairs were wound up. They told me, with a view to reconcile me perhaps, of a trout stream with a decent inn near it,--an unknown stream in Kent. It seems a junior member of the firm is an angler; at least he sometimes catches pike or perch in the Medway, some way from the stream where the trout rise in audacious security from artificial lures. I stipulated for a clerk to come down with any papers to be signed, and started at once for Victoria. I decline to tell the name of my find, firstly because the trout are the gamest little fish that ever rose to fly, and run to a good two pounds; secondly, I have paid for all the rooms in the inn for the next year, and I want it to myself. The glove is lying on the table next me as I write. If it isn't in my breast-pocket or under my pillow, it is some place where I can see it. It has a delicate gray body (Suede, I think they call it), with a whipping of silver round the top and a darker gray-silk tag to fasten it. It is marked 5-3/4 inside, and has a delicious scent about it,--to keep off moths, I suppose; naphthaline is better. It reminds me of a "silver-sedge" tied on a ten hook.
I startled the good landlady of the little inn (there is no village, fortunately) when I arrived, with the only porter of the tiny station, laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room; but eventually we compromised matters, as I was willing to share it with the other visitor. I got into knickerbockers at once, collared a boy to get me worms and minnow for the morrow; and as I felt too lazy to unpack tackle, I just sat in the shiny arm-chair (made comfortable by the successive sitting of former occupants) at the open window, and looked out. The river (not the trout stream) winds to the right, and the trees cast trembling shadows into its clear depths; the red tiles of a farm roof show between the beeches, and break the monotony of blue sky background. A dusty wagoner is slaking his thirst with a tankard of ale. I am conscious of the strange lonely feeling that a visit to England always gives me. Away in strange lands, even in solitary places, one doesn't feel it somehow,--one is filled with the hunter's lust, bent on a "kill;" but at home in the quiet country, with the smoke curling up from some fireside, the mowers busy laying the hay in swaths, the children tumbling under the trees in the orchards, and a girl singing as she spreads the clothes on the sweetbrier hedge,--amid a scene quick with home sights and sounds, a strange lack creeps in and makes itself felt in a dull, aching way. Oddly enough, too, I had a sense of uneasiness, a "something going to happen." I had often experienced it when out alone in a great forest, or on an unknown lake; and it always meant "ware danger" of some kind. But why should I feel it here? Yet I did, and I couldn't shake it off. I took to examining the room. It was a commonplace one of the usual type. But there was a work-basket on the table, a dainty thing, lined with blue satin. There was a bit of lace stretched over shiny blue linen, with the needle sticking in it,--such fairy work, like cobwebs seen from below, spun from a branch against a background of sky. A gold thimble too, with initials,--not the landlady's, I know. What pretty things, too, in the basket!--a pair of scissors, a capital shape for fly-making; a little file, and some floss silk and tinsel, the identical color I want for a new fly I have in my head, one that will be a demon to kill,--the "northern devil" I mean to call him. Some one looks in behind me, and a light step passes upstairs. I drop the basket, I don't know why. There are some reviews near it. I take up one, and am soon buried in an article on Tasmanian fauna. It is strange, but whenever I do know anything about a subject, I always find these writing fellows either entirely ignorant or damned wrong.
After supper, I took a stroll to see the river. It was a silver-gray evening, with just the last lemon and pink streaks of the sunset staining the sky. There had been a shower, and someway the smell of the dust after rain mingled with the mignonette in the garden brought back vanished scenes of small-boyhood, when I caught minnows in a bottle, and dreamt of a shilling rod as happiness unattainable. I turned aside from the road in accordance with directions, and walked toward the stream. Holloa! some one before me,--what a bore! The angler is hidden by an elder-bush, but I can see the fly drop delicately, artistically, on the water. Fishing up the stream, too! There is a bit of broken water there, and the midges dance in myriads; a silver gleam, and the line spins out, and the fly falls just in the right place. It is growing dusk, but the fellow is an adept at quick, fine casting. I wonder what fly he has on, why he's going to try down stream now! I hurry forward, and as I near him I swerve to the left out of the way. S-s-s-s! a sudden sting in the lobe of my ear. "Hey!" I cry, as I find I am caught; the tail-fly is fast in it. A slight, gray-clad woman holding the rod lays it carefully down and comes toward me through the gathering dusk. My first impulse is to snap the gut and take to my heels; but I am held by something less tangible but far more powerful than the grip of the Limerick hook in my ear.
"I am very sorry!" she says in a voice that matched the evening, it was so quiet and soft; "but it was exceedingly stupid of you to come behind like that."
"I didn't think you threw such a long line; I thought I was safe," I stammered.
"Hold this!" she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which she has taken a pair of scissors. I obey meekly. She snips the gut.
"Have you a sharp knife? If I strip the hook you can push it through; it is lucky it isn't in the cartilage."
I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only handed her the knife, and she proceeded as calmly as if stripping a hook in a man's ear were an every-day occurrence. Her gown is of some soft gray stuff, and her gray-leather belt is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch. The thought flashed through my mind that I had just missed that--a woman's voluntary tender touch, not a paid caress--all my life.
"Now you can push it through yourself; I hope it won't hurt much."
Taking the hook, I push it through, and a drop of blood follows it. "Oh!" she cries, but I assure her it is nothing, and stick the hook surreptitiously in my coat sleeve. Then we both laugh, and I look at her for the first time. She has a very white forehead, with little tendrils of hair blowing round it under her gray cap; her eyes are gray (I didn't see that then,--I only saw they were steady, smiling eyes, that matched her mouth). Such a mouth! the most maddening mouth a man ever longed to kiss, above a too pointed chin, soft as a child's; indeed, the whole face looks soft in the misty light.
"I am sorry I spoilt your sport!" I say.
"Oh, that don't matter, it's time to stop. I got two brace, one a beauty."
She is winding in her line, and I look in her basket; they _are_ beauties, one two-pounder, the rest running from a half to a pound.
"What fly?"
"Yellow dun took that one; but your assailant was a partridge spider."
I sling her basket over my shoulder; she takes it as a matter of course, and we retrace our steps. I feel curiously happy as we walk toward the road; there is a novel delight in her nearness. The feel of woman works subtilely and strangely in me; the rustle of her skirt as it brushes the black-heads in the meadow-grass, and the delicate perfume, partly violets, partly herself, that comes to me with each of her movements, is a rare pleasure. I am hardly surprised when she turns into the garden of the inn; I think I knew from the first that she would.
"Better bathe that ear of yours, and put a few drops of carbolic in the water." She takes the basket as she says it, and goes into the kitchen.
I hurry over this, and go into the little sitting-room. There is a tray, with a glass of milk and some oaten cakes, upon the table. I am too disturbed to sit down; I stand at the window and watch the bats flitter in the gathering moonlight, and listen with quivering nerves for her step; perhaps she will send for the tray, and not come after all. What a fool I am to be disturbed by a gray-clad witch with a tantalizing mouth! That comes of loafing about doing nothing. I mentally darn the old fool who saved her money instead of spending it. Why the devil should I be bothered? I don't want it anyhow. She comes in as I fume, and I forget everything at her entrance. I push the arm-chair toward the table, and she sinks quietly into it, pulling the tray nearer. She has a wedding-ring on; but somehow it never strikes me to wonder if she is married or a widow, or who she may be. I am content to watch her break her biscuit; she has the prettiest hands, and a trick of separating her last fingers when she takes hold of anything: they remind me of white orchids I saw somewhere. She led me to talk,--about Africa, I think. I liked to watch her eyes glow deeply in the shadow and then catch light as she bent forward to say something in her quick responsive way.
"Long ago when I was a girl," she said once.
"Long ago?" I echo incredulously,--"not surely?"
"Ah, but yes; you haven't seen me in the daylight," with a soft little laugh. "Do you know what the gypsies say? 'Never judge a woman or a ribbon by candle-light.' They might have said moonlight equally well."
She rises as she speaks, and I feel an overpowering wish to have her put out her hand. But she does not; she only takes the work-basket and a book, and says "good-night" with an inclination of her little head.
I go over and stand next her chair; I don't like to sit in it, but I like to put my hand where her head leant, and fancy, if she were there, how she would look up.