Part 8

“At least she said so; though Heaven knows that the pompous fool, for all his fine linen, weren’t a patch on what I was at twenty-one. Anyway, he comed courting her, for ’twas not known yet that me an’ Nelly was more’n friends; an’ then when he heard how we had been secretly tokened for no less than six years, he comed to see me with a long-winded lie in his mouth. An’ the lie was larded wi’ texts from scripture. Nelly Baker had misunderstood her feelings about me, he said; her had never knowed what true love was till she met him; an’ he hoped I’d behave as honestly as he had—an’ all the rest of it. In fact, she’d throwed me over for him an’ his money an’ his high position; an’ he comed to let me down gently with bits from the Bible. As for her, she always lusted after money and property.

“Us fought hand to hand, for I flew at him, man, like a dog, an’ I’d have strangled him an’ tored the liver out of him, but some chaps heard him howling an’ runned along, an’ pulled me off his throat in time.

“He didn’t have the law of me; but Nelly Baker kept out of my way afterwards, like as if I was the plague; an’ then six months passed an’ they was axed out in marriage so grand as you please at Widecombe Church.

“I only seed her once more; but after lying in wait for her, weeks an’ weeks, like a fox for a rabbit, it chanced at last that I met her one evening going home across the moor above Aller Bottom Farm ’pon the edge of the last of our fields. Then us had a bit of a tell. ’Twas only a fortnight afore she was going to marry Mr. Oliver Honeywell.

“I axed her to change her mind; I spoke to her so gentle as a dove croons; but she was ice all through—cold an’ hard an’ wicked to me. Then I growed savage. I noticed how mincing her’d growed in her speech since Honeywell had took her up. She was changed from a good Devon maid into a town miss, full o’ airs an’ graces that made me sick to see. He’d poisoned her.

“‘Do try an’ be sensible,’ she said. ‘We were silly children all them years, you know, Mr. Mundy. You’ll find somebody much better suited to you than I am—really you will. Have you ever thought of Mary Reep, now? She’s prettier than I am—I am sure she is.’

“Her named the darter of William Reep, a common laborer as worked on Honeywell’s farm at ten shilling a week. The devil in me broke loose, an’ quite right too.

“‘We’ve gone up in the world of late then? ’Twas always your hope and prayer to come by a bit of property. But ’tis a coorious thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know that you’m standing just where my brother, John James, stood last time ever he was seed by mortal eyes?’

“‘What’s that to me?’ she said. ‘Let me go by, please, Mr. Mundy. I’m late, as it is.’

“‘He was never seed again,’ I told her. ‘’Tis a coorious thing to me, as you be stand’—on the same spot at the same time—just as he did, in the first shadow of night. His going, you see, made me my father’s heir, an’ rich enough to give you a good home some day.’

“Then her growed a thought pale an’ tried to pass me.

“I went home presently; but from that hour Nelly Baker was seen no more. None ever knowed I’d been the last to speak with her; an’ none ever pitied me. But there was a rare fuss made over Oliver Honeywell. He wore black for her; an’ lived a bachelor for five year. Then he married a widow; but not till his mother died.

“An’ that’s the story I thought would interest some folks.”

The minister tapped his pipe on the hob, and knocked the ashes out. He cleared his throat and spoke. He had learned nothing that was new to him.

“It is a strange story indeed, Mr. Mundy, and I am interested to have heard it from your own lips. Rumor has not lied, for once. The tale, as you tell it, is substantially the same that has been handed down in this village for two generations. But no one knows that you were the last to see Nelly Baker. Did you ever guess what happened?”

The old man smiled, and showed his empty gums.

“No—I didn’t guess, because I knowed very well without guessing,” he said. “All the same I should have thought that you, with your mighty fine knowledge of human nature, would have guessed very quick. ’Twas I killed my brother—broke in the back of his head wi’ a pickax when he was down on one knee tying his bootlace. An’ me only fifteen year old! An’ I killed Nelly Baker—how, it don’t matter. You’ll find the dust of ’em side by side in one of them old ‘money pits’ ’pon Bellever Tor. ’Tis a place that looks due east, an’ there’s a ring of stones a hundred yards away from it. The ‘old men’ buried their dead there once, I’ve heard tell. Break down a gert flat slab o’ granite alongside a white thorn tree, an’ you’ll find what’s left of ’em in a deep hole behind. So she never comed by any property after all.”

The ancient sinner’s head fell forward, but his eyes were still open.

“Good God! After all these years! Man, man, make your peace! Confess your awful crime!” cried the clergyman.

The other answered:

“None of that—none of that rot! I’d do the same this minute; an’ if there was anything that comed after—if I meet that damned witch in hell tomorrow I’d kill her over again, if her still had a body I could shake the life out of. Now get you gone, an’ let me pass in peace.”

The reverend gentleman departed at his best speed, but presently returned, bringing soups and cordials. With him there came a cottage woman who performed services for the sick. But when Mrs. Badger saw Noah Mundy, she knew that little remained to do.

“He’s gone,” she said, “soft an’ sweet as a baby falls to sleep. Some soap an’ water an’ a coffin be all he wants now, your honor; not this here beautiful broth, nor brandy neither. So you had best go back along, Sir, an’ send Old Mother Dawe up to help me, if you please.”

_Eden Phillpotts_.

IRON

The child Cecily waited until her brother had made a bridge from a fallen bough, and then clasping her adorably grubby hands about his neck allowed him to carry her across the stream.

“Which way, little sister?” he asked.

A dragon-fly hovered above the water and then darted away, and Cecily with a vague idea of following it chose a sunken path that almost traced the brook in its course. It was a silent little stream running through the sleepy meadows, and where it widened among the pond lilies it almost stopped. Here and there it eddied self-consciously about the yellow flowers and further on it almost rippled in shy haste. And in the golden afternoon Cecily knew that the boy, so clever at building bridges, so capable in the midst of barbed wire, and above all, so kind to her, was wonderful beyond all telling.

* * * * *

When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away in a great clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they returned no more.

At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .

* * * * *

Cecily in the twilight pressed her face against the window pane. The gaunt branch of a tree waved and pointed across the snow, but the little frozen stream was hidden away.

The child thought that when the boy returned he would still be wonderful.

_Randolph Edgar_.

THE PERFECT INTERVAL

The sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from his plate.

“F sharp,” he remarked. “Same pitch as the bell in my shop.”

“How extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!” exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.

“All in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “No, thank you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. I never paint the lily, as father used to say. . . . I’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world with a ‘come again’ always behind me if I hadn’t had something of an ear, would I, now?”

“But accurate to such a degree! I thought one tuned by chords and melodies and—and that sort of thing.”

“Chords! Melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “Of course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. The octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”

“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”

“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “I wish I’d known. There was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with him about his music.”

“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”

“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor Cartwright!”

“Cartwright?” repeated the professor curiously.

“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he began his tale.

* * * * *

What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me thinking about Cartwright. I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . . but I’d better begin at the beginning.

It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.

“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.

When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were, and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.

The Silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to look about as much as we liked.

“There’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “It’s got asthma or something. If you can cure it, I’ll gladly foot the bill. I’m a church-going man when I’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke, “but that organ puts me clean off religion.”

Well, I made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were for it, too. Then I went up to the British commissioner’s, where I was told there was a piano needing attention. Davidson, the commissioner, was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument put into shape. The missionary ladies had suggested that Molly and I stay with them while the Silvershell was in port, so I could put in a tidy bit of work in a day. But there were only twenty white families in the place, and I’d about gone through the work when one afternoon Davidson stopped me as I was going back to the mission, and asked me to step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.

The friend was Cartwright. I shall never forget that first sight of him, not to my dying day. He was standing in the big music room where I’d been working for Davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he turned and gave us such a look!

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come in the door. And then, as Davidson introduced us, he nodded in an offhand sort of way. He was the only man I’ve ever called beautiful. Beautiful was the only word to describe him. “Golden lads,”—I once heard an actor spout about them at a play, and now, when I remember that expression, I think of Cartwright. He was a golden lad, for all his haunted, unhappy face.

“I’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a moment. “Rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me in the morning I’ll make it worth your while.”

“If it isn’t too far away,” I said. “I’m only stopping here while the Silvershell is in port.”

“Not so far,” says Cartwright. “I could have you back here in three or four days. And I’ll make it worth your while.” In spite of his off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.

Of course I said I’d go, and then Cartwright nodded and said something about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.

“But he never told me what was needed for the piano,” I said to Davidson.

“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been touched in ten years.”

“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”

“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone. He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and Charlotte had been singing together.”

“Was Charlotte his wife?”

“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know. They are expected back from England almost any day now.”

Davidson’s face had gone quite red at the mention of the girl’s name, and all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright, too, was preparing.

“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then. She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”

As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and went back to tell Molly about my new job.

I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore, cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.

He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.

Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.

“Wonderful pitch!” I said.

“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.

“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.

About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove of breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.

“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early start this morning.”

I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.

“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.

Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.

“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.

“Just a parrot,” Cartwright said. “You’ve upset her nest, you see. Be careful when you lift the lid. There may be centipedes inside.”

“If you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, I’ll see to the inside,” I said. “I should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to nest in, sir.

“It seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little. “I wish I could explain—”

He caught himself up, and I answered never a word, but began examining the piano. It was a Broadwood grand, but the state it was in! I’d hard work not to give him a further piece of my mind.

For three days I worked at the poor thing. Hammers eaten off by the white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing really in shape but the sounding board. And all the time I was working the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the point, and I kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much I’d have to tell Molly when I got back.

Now and again Cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. He stopped quite a time the third morning. I was busy tuning and hadn’t much to say, but gradually he came nearer.

“How’s it coming on?” he asked.

“All in shape but one string,” I said. “Try the tone of it, sir.”

“I mustn’t touch it, I mustn’t touch it,” he says to himself, but all the time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. He put out his hand and struck B flat octave.

“The upper B is mute!” he cries.

I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to putting another in.

“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”

I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.

“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”

He spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.

That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and Cartwright had been great friends.

“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”

“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”

“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”

I waited, and after a little he went on.

“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.