Part 6

Now that the police had entered the affair, Joyce felt that there remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles, flashing the official bull’s-eye lantern into the mysterious interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to her mother as it did to her.

“They’re sure to bring her back, mother,” she repeated.

“Oh, chick,” said mother, “I keep telling myself so. But I wish—I wish——”

“What, mother?”

“I wish,” said mother, in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were confessing something that troubled her—“I wish you hadn’t seen that wood-lady.”

The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed old Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It was a real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground and went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had been lost, and no less than three of them trod every inch of the bottom of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old fox’s earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived and walked about smoking a pipe—a detective! Up from the village, too, came the big young curate and the squire’s two sons, civil and sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural that mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant that anything could have happened to Joan.

“That baby!” urged the curate. “Why, my dear lady, Joan is better known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a mile without having to answer questions. I don’t know what’s keeping her, but you may be sure she’s all right.”

“’Course she is,” chorused the others, swinging their sticks light-heartedly. “’Course she’s all right.”

“Get her for me, then,” said mother. “I don’t want to be silly and you’re awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I—I want her.”

The squire’s sons turned as if on an order and went toward the wood. The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a gentleman, and his hard, clean-shaven face could be kind and serious.

“We’re sure to get her,” he said, in lower tones. “And you must help us with your faith and courage. Can you?”

Mother’s hand tightened on that of Joyce.

“We are doing our best,” she said, and smiled—she smiled! The curate nodded and went his way to the wood.

A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and master of all the police in the county, a gay, trim soldier whom the children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and bleary eyes—blood-hounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle it. Actual living blood-hounds would be more than a match for Joan. Colonel Warden was sure of it too.

“Saves time,” he was telling mother, in his high snappy voice. “Shows us which way she’s gone, you know. Best hounds in the country, these two; never known ’em fail yet.”

The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore which Joan had worn at breakfast was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry. Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce’s hand, followed. The hounds made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and crashed after them. Joyce and mother came up with them at a place where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without interest about him.

“Dash it all,” the colonel was saying; “she can’t—she simply can’t have been kidnapped in a balloon.”

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result. They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up as though the scent went no further. Nothing could induce them to hunt beyond it.

“I can’t understand this,” said Colonel Warden, dragging at his mustache. “This is queer.” He stood glancing around him as though the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the country-side. Joyce found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

“I know inside myself,” she told mother, “right down deep in the middle of me, that Joan’s all right.”

“Bless you, my chick,” said poor mother. “I wish I could feel like that. Go to bed now, like a good girl.”

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan’s railed cot standing empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during the night mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan and nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night, “till she broke down, poor thing,” said nurse, and Joyce was bidden to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But mother was about again at lunch-time when Joyce went down to the dining-room. She was very pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow she seemed suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce’s age, than ever before. They kissed each other and the child would have tried to comfort.

“No,” said mother, shaking her head. “No, dear. Don’t let’s be sorry for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven’t done that, have we?”

“_I_ haven’t,” said Joyce. “I _know_ it’s all right.”

After lunch—again mother said she wouldn’t be hungry till Joan came home—they went out together. There were no searches now in the wood and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and they were away, combing the country-side and spreading terror among the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn and the smell of the roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge the land rolled away to clear perspectives of peace and beauty.

“Let’s walk up and down,” suggested mother. “Anything’s better than sitting still. And don’t talk, chick—not just now.”

They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence. It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm thrust the gate open and there advanced into the sunlight, coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway—Joan! Her round baby face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep sigh—it sounded like that—and in a moment she was kneeling on the ground with her arms round the baby.

“Joan, Joan,” she said, over and over again. “My little, little baby!”

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free and then rubbed her eyes drowsily.

“Hallo!” she said.

“But where have you been?” cried mother. “Baby-girl, where have you been all this time?”

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm toward the wood, the wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. “In there,” she answered carelessly. “Wiv the wood-ladies. I’m hungry!”

“My darling!” said mother, and picked her up and carried her into the house.

In the dining-room, with mother at her side and Joyce opposite to her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workman-like fashion, and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to darken the mystery of her absence.

“But there aren’t any wood-ladies really, darling,” remonstrated mother.

“There is,” said Joan. “There’s lots. They wanted to keep me but I wouldn’t stay. So I comed home, ’cause I was hungry.”

“But,” began mother, “where did they take you to?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Joan. “The one what I went to speak to gave me her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!”

“Yes?” said mother. “What else?”

“There was anuvver little girl there,” went on Joan. “Not a wood-lady, but a girl like me, what they’d tooked from somewhere. She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Joyce.

“’Cause I didn’t want to be a wood-lady,” replied Joan.

“Listen to me, darling,” said mother. “Didn’t these people whom you call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole wood, you know, and you weren’t there at all.”

“I was,” said Joan. “I was there all the time an’ I heard Walter an’ Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an’ the wood-ladies laughed like leaves rustling.”

“But where did you sleep last night?”

“I didn’t sleep,” said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. “I’se very sleepy now.”

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.

“God help us,” said mother, in a whisper. “What is the truth of this?”

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan’s. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.

ON THE FEVER SHIP[6] By RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Footnote 6:

From _The Lion and the Unicorn_. Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

THERE were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones of iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them from the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held him in. Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water which ended in a line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged palms. Beyond that again rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck upon the loftiest peak of all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the brow of the mountain against the naked sky as impudently as a cracker-box set upon the dome of a great cathedral.

As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines. From his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe, painstaking interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very block-house itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight. And again it sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped them out of the picture as though they were a line of chalk.

The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the sea would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the palm-trees or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when it failed to reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of ill use, of having been wronged by some one. There was no other reason for submitting to this existence save these tricks upon the wearisome, glaring landscape; and now, whoever it was who was working them did not seem to be making this effort to entertain him with any heartiness.

It was most cruel. Indeed, he decided hotly, it was not to be endured; he would bear it no longer, he would make his escape. But he knew that this move, which could be conceived in a moment’s desperation, could only be carried to success with great strategy, secrecy, and careful cunning. So he fell back upon his pillow and closed his eyes, as though he were asleep, and then opening them again, turned cautiously, and spied upon his keeper. As usual, his keeper sat at the foot of the cot turning the pages of a huge paper filled with pictures of the war printed in daubs of tawdry colors. His keeper was a hard-faced boy without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy and fiendish cruelty. To make it worse, the fiend was a person without a collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red cross bound by a safety-pin to his left arm. He was intent upon the paper in his hands; he was holding it between his eyes and his prisoner. His vigilance had relaxed, and the moment seemed propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms and legs, the prisoner swept the bed-sheet from him, and sprang at the wooden rail and grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee pressed against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath it. Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and dark and gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in his bones, he thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which scorched his eyeballs.

But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea swept over him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He could not lift the lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed dizzily and trembled. He trembled. He who had raced his men and beaten them up the hot hill to the trenches of San Juan. But now he was a baby in the hands of a giant, who caught him by the wrist and with an iron arm clasped him around his waist and pulled him down, and shouted, brutally, “Help, some of youse, quick! he’s at it again. I can’t hold him.”

More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them took the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and pulled back the fingers one by one, saying, “Easy now, Lieutenant—easy.”

The ragged palms and the sea and block-house were swallowed up in a black fog, and his body touched the canvas cot again with a sense of home-coming and relief and rest. He wondered how he could have cared to escape from it. He found it so good to be back again that for a long time he wept quite happily, until the fiery pillow was moist and cool.

The world outside of the iron bars was like a scene in a theater set for some great event, but the actors were never ready. He remembered confusedly a play he had once witnessed before that same scene. Indeed, he believed he had played some small part in it; but he remembered it dimly, and all trace of the men who had appeared with him in it was gone. He had reasoned it out that they were up there behind the range of mountains, because great heavy wagons and ambulances and cannon were emptied from the ships at the wharf above and were drawn away in long lines behind the ragged palms, moving always toward the passes between the peaks. At times he was disturbed by the thought that he should be up and after them, that some tradition of duty made his presence with them imperative. There was much to be done back of the mountains. Some event of momentous import was being carried forward there, in which he held a part; but the doubt soon passed from him, and he was content to lie and watch the iron bars rising and falling between the block-house and the white surf.

If they had been only humanely kind, his lot would have been bearable, but they starved him and held him down when he wished to rise; and they would not put out the fire in the pillow, which they might easily have done by the simple expedient of throwing it over the ship’s side into the sea. He himself had done this twice, but the keeper had immediately brought a fresh pillow already heated for the torture and forced it under his head.

His pleasures were very simple, and so few he could not understand why they robbed him of them so jealously. One was to watch a green cluster of bananas that hung above him from the awning, twirling on a string. He could count as many of them as five before the bunch turned and swung lazily back again, when he could count as high as twelve; sometimes when the ship rolled heavily he could count to twenty. It was a most fascinating game, and contented him for many hours. But when they found this out they sent for the cook to come and cut them down, and the cook carried them away to his galley.

Then, one day, a man came out from the shore, swimming through the blue water with great splashes. He was a most charming man, who spluttered and dove and twisted and lay on his back and kicked his legs in an excess of content and delight. It was a real pleasure to watch him; not for days had anything so amusing appeared on the other side of the prison-bars. But as soon as the keeper saw that the man in the water was amusing his prisoner, he leaned over the ship’s side and shouted, “Sa-ay, you, don’t you know there’s sharks in there?”

And the swimming man raced back to the shore like a porpoise with great lashing of the water, and ran up the beach half-way to the palms before he was satisfied to stop. Then the prisoner wept again. It was so disappointing. Life was robbed of everything now. He remembered that in a previous existence soldiers who cried were laughed at and mocked. But that was so far away and it was such an absurd superstition that he had no patience with it. For what could be more comforting to a man when he is treated cruelly than to cry. It was so obvious an exercise, and when one is so feeble that one cannot vault a four-railed barrier it is something to feel that at least one is strong enough to cry.

He escaped occasionally, traversing space with marvellous rapidity and to great distances, but never to any successful purpose; and his flight inevitably ended in ignominious recapture and a sudden awakening in bed. At these moments the familiar and hated palms, the peaks, and the block-house were more hideous in their reality than the most terrifying of his nightmares.

These excursions afield were always predatory; he went forth always to seek food. With all the beautiful world from which to elect and choose, he sought out only those places where eating was studied and elevated to an art. These visits were much more vivid in their detail than any he had ever before made to these same resorts. They invariably began in a carriage, which carried him swiftly over smooth asphalt. One route brought him across a great and beautiful square, radiating with rows and rows of flickering lights; two fountains splashed in the center of the square, and six women of stone guarded its approaches. One of the women was hung with wreaths of mourning. Ahead of him the late twilight darkened behind a great arch, which seemed to rise on the horizon of the world, a great window into the heavens beyond. At either side strings of white and colored globes hung among the trees, and the sound of music came joyfully from theaters in the open air. He knew the restaurant under the trees to which he was now hastening, and the fountain beside it, and the very sparrows balancing on the fountain’s edge; he knew every waiter at each of the tables, he felt again the gravel crunching under his feet, he saw the _maître d’hôtel_ coming forward smiling to receive his command, and the waiter in the green apron bowing at his elbow, deferential and important, presenting the list of wines. But his adventure never passed that point, for he was captured again and once more bound to his cot with a close burning sheet.

Or else, he drove more sedately through the London streets in the late evening twilight, leaning expectantly across the doors of the hansom and pulling carefully at his white gloves. Other hansoms flashed past him, the occupant of each with his mind fixed on one idea—dinner. He was one of a million of people who were about to dine, or who had dined, or who were deep in dining. He was so famished, so weak for food of any quality, that the galloping horse in the hansom seemed to crawl. The lights of the Embankment passed like the lamps of a railroad station as seen from the window of an express; and while his mind was still torn between the choice of a thin or thick soup or an immediate attack upon cold beef, he was at the door, and the _chasseur_ touched his cap, and the little _chasseur_ put the wicker guard over the hansom’s wheel. As he jumped out he said, “Give him half-a-crown,” and the driver called after him, “Thank you, sir.”

It was a beautiful world, this world outside of the iron bars. Everyone in it contributed to his pleasure and to his comfort. In this world he was not starved nor man-handled. He thought of this joyfully as he leaped up the stairs, where young men with grave faces and with their hands held negligently behind their backs bowed to him in polite surprise at his speed. But they had not been starved on condensed milk. He threw his coat and hat at one of them, and came down the hall fearfully and quite weak with dread lest it should not be real. His voice was shaking when he asked Ellis if he had reserved a table. The place was all so real, it must be true this time. The way Ellis turned and ran his finger down the list showed it was real, because Ellis always did that, even when he knew there would not be an empty table for an hour. The room was crowded with beautiful women; under the light of the red shades they looked kind and approachable, and there was food on every table, and iced drinks in silver buckets. It was with the joy of great relief that he heard Ellis say to his underling, “_Numéro cinq, sur la terrace, un couvert_.” It was real at last. Outside, the Thames lay a great gray shadow. The lights of the Embankment flashed and twinkled across it, the tower of the House of Commons rose against the sky, and here, inside, the waiter was hurrying toward him carrying a smoking plate of rich soup with a pungent, intoxicating odor.

And then the ragged palms, the glaring sun, the immovable peaks, and the white surf stood again before him. The iron rails swept up and sank again, the fever sucked at his bones, and the pillow scorched his cheek.