Part 8

Jack had a little pony, Tom. He frequently would take it from The stable where it used to stand And give it sugar with his hand. He also gave it oats and hay And carrots twenty times a day And grass in basketfuls and greens And swedes and mangels: also beans; And patent foods from various sources And bread—which isn’t good for horses— And chocolate and apple-rings, And lots and lots of other things The most of which do not agree With Polo Ponies such as he, And all in such a quantity As ruined his digestion wholly And turned him from a Pono Poly —I mean a Polo Pony—into A case that clearly must be seen to, Because he swelled and swelled and swelled. Which, when the kindly boy beheld, He gave it medicine by the pail In malted milk, and nutmeg ale, And yet it only swelled the more Until its stomach touched the floor; And then it heaved and groaned as well And staggered, till at last it fell And found it could not rise again. Jack wept and prayed—but all in vain. The pony died, and, as it died, Kicked him severely in the side.

MORAL

Kindness to animals should be Attuned to their brutality.

Tom and His Pony, Jack

H. BELLOC

Tom had a little pony, Jack: He vaulted lightly on its back And galloped off for miles and miles, A-leaping hedges, gates and stiles, And shouting “Yoicks!” and “Tally-Ho!” And “Heads I win!” and “Tails below!” And many another sporting phrase. He rode like this for several days, Until the pony, feeling tired, Collapsed, looked heavenward and expired. His father made a fearful row. He said, “By Gum! You’ve done it now! Here lies, a Carcase on the ground, No less than five and twenty pound! Indeed, the value of the beast Would probably have much increased. His teeth were false; and all were told That he was only four years old. Oh! Curse it all! I tell you plain I’ll never let you ride again.”

MORAL

His father died when he was twenty, And left three horses—which is plenty.

“Pigtails Ltd.”

WALTER DE LA MARE

How such an odd and curious notion had ever come into Miss Rawlings’s mind, not even Miss Rawlings herself could have said. When had it come? She could not answer even that question either. It had simply stolen in little by little like a beam of sunshine into a large room.

Not of course into an empty room, for Miss Rawlings had many things to think about. She was by far the most important person in the Parish, and everyone—from Archdeacon Tomlington and his two curates, Mr. Moffat and Mr. Timbs, down to little old Mrs. Ort the hump-backed charwoman who lived in the top attic of a cottage down by Clopbourne—or, as they called it, Clobburne—Bridge, everyone knew how _practical_ she was.

But once that sunny beam had begun to steal into Miss Rawlings’s mind and into her life, it had lightened up with its precious gold everything that was there. It was nevertheless a fantastic notion, simply because it could not possibly be true. How could Miss Rawlings ever have lost a little girl if there had never been any little girl to lose? Yet that exactly was Miss Rawlings’s idea. It had flitted into her imagination like a nimble, bright-feathered bird. And once it was really there, she never hesitated to talk about it; not at all.

“My little girl, you know,” she would say with a little emphatic nod and a pleasant smile on her broad face. Or rather, “My little gal”—for she always pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Sal—the short for Sarah. This, too, was an odd thing; for Miss Rawlings had been brought up by her parents with the very best education, and seldom mispronounced even such words as Chloe or Psyche or epitome or misled. And so far as I know—which is not very far—and apart from shall and pal and Hal, there is not a single word of one syllable in our enormous English language that is pronounced like Sal; for Pall Mall, of course, is pronounced Pell Mell. Still, Miss Rawlings did talk about her little girl, and she called her, her little gal.

It never occurred to anybody in the Parish—not even to Mr. Timbs—to compare the Little Gal to a gay little bird or to a beam of sunshine. Mrs. Tomlington said indeed that it was merely a bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet. But whether or not, partly because she delighted in bright colours, and partly because, in fashion or out, she had entirely her own taste in dress, there could not be a larger or brighter or flowerier bonnet for any bee to be _in_. Apart from puce silk and maroon velvet and heliotrope feathers and ribbons and pom-poms and suchlike, Miss Rawlings’s bonnets invariably consisted of handsome spreading flowers—blue-red roses, purple pansies, mauve cineraria—a complete little garden for any bee’s amusement. And this bee sang rather than buzzed in it the whole day long.

You might almost say it had made a new woman of her. Miss Rawlings had always been active and positive and good-humoured and kind. But now her spirits were so much more animated. She went bobbing and floating through the Parish like a balloon. Her _interest_ in everything seemed to have first been multiplied by nine, and then by nine again. And eighty-one times anything is a pretty large quantity. Beggars, gipsies, hawkers, crossing-sweepers, blind men positively smacked their lips when they saw Miss Rawlings come sailing down the street. Her heart was like the Atlantic, and they like row-boats on the deep—especially the blind men. As for her donations to the Parochial Funds, they were first doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled.

There was, first, for example, the Fund for giving all the little parish girls and boys not only a bun and an orange and a tree at Christmas and a picnic with Veal and Ham Pie and Ice Pudding in June, but a Jack-in-the-Green on May-day and a huge Guy on November the 5th, with Squibs and Roman Candles and Chinese Crackers and so on. There was not only the Fund for the Delight of Infants of Every Conceivable Description; there was also the Wooden-Legged Orphans’ Fund. There was the Home for Manx and Tabby Cats; and the Garden by the River with the willows for Widowed Gentlewomen. There was the Threepenny-Bit-with-a-Hole-in-It Society; and the Organ Grinders’ Sick Monkey and Blanket Fund, and there was the oak-beamed Supper Room in “The Three Wild Geese” for the use of Ancient Mariners—haggis and toad-in-the-hole, and plum duff and jam roley-poley. And there were many others. If Miss Rawlings had been born in another parish, it would have been a sad thing indeed for the cats and widows and orphans and organ monkeys in her own.

With such a power and quantity of money, of course, writing cheques was very much like just writing in birthday-books. Still you can give too much to any Fund; though very few people make the attempt. But Miss Rawlings was a practical woman. Besides, Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well that charity must at any rate _begin_ at home, so all this time she was keeping what the Ancient Mariners at the “Three Wild Geese” called a “weather eye” wide open for her lost Little Gal. But how, it may be asked, could she keep any kind of an eye open for a lost Little Gal, when she didn’t know what the lost Little Gal was like? And the answer to that is that Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well.

She may not have known where the absurd notion came from, or when, or why; but she knew that. She knew what the Little Gal looked like as well as a mother thrush knows what an egg looks like; or Sir Christopher Wren knew what a cathedral looks like. But as with the Thrush and Sir Christopher, a good many little things had happened to Miss Rawlings first. And this quite apart from the old wooden doll she used to lug about when she was seven, called Quatta.

One morning, for example, Miss Rawlings had been out in her carriage and was thinking of nothing in particular, just daydreaming, when not very far from the little stone bridge at Clobburne she happened to glance up at a window in the upper parts of a small old house. And at that window there seemed to show a face with dark bright eyes watching her. Just a glimpse. I say _seemed_, for when in the carriage Miss Rawlings rapidly twisted her head to get a better view, she discovered either that there had been nobody there at all, or that the somebody had swiftly drawn back, or that the bright dark eyes were just too close-together flaws in the diamond-shaped bits of glass. In the last case what Miss Rawlings had seen was mainly “out of her mind.” But if so, it went back again and stayed there. It was excessively odd, indeed, how clear a remembrance that glimpse left behind it.

Then again, Miss Rawlings, like her great-aunt Felicia, had always enjoyed a weakness for taking naps in the train, the flowers and plumes and bows in her bonnet nodding the while above her head. The sound of the wheels on the iron lines was like a lullaby; the fields trailing softly away beyond the window drowsed her eyes. Whether asleep or not, she would generally close her eyes and at least appear to be napping. And not once, or twice, but three separate times, owing to a screech of the whistle or a jolt of the train, she had suddenly opened them again to find herself staring out (rather like a large animal in a field) at a little girl sitting on the opposite seat, who, in turn, had already fixed _her_ eyes on Miss Rawlings’s countenance. In every case there had been a look of intense, patient interest on the little girl’s face.

Perhaps Miss Rawlings’s was a countenance that all little girls are apt to look at with extreme interest—especially when the owner of it is asleep in the train. It was a broad countenance with a small but powerful nose with a round tip. There was a good deal of fresh colour in the flat cheeks beneath the treacle-coloured eyes; and the hair stood out like a wig beneath the huge bonnet. Miss Rawlings, too, had a habit of folding her kid-gloved hands upon her lap as if she was an image. None the less, you could hardly call it only “a coincidence” that these little girls were so much alike, and so much like the face at the window. And so very much like the real lost Little Gal that had always, it seemed, been at the back of Miss Rawlings’s mind.

Not that there had ever been any kind of a ghost in Miss Rawlings’s family. Her family was far too practical for that; and her mansion was most richly furnished. All I mean is that each one of these little girls happened to have a rather narrow face, a brown pigtail, rather small dark brown bright eyes and narrow hands, and except for the one at the window, they wore round beaver hats and buttoned coats. No; there was no ghost _there_. What Miss Rawlings was after was an absolutely real Little Gal. And her name was Barbara Allan.

This sounds utterly absurd. But so it had come about. For a long time—having talked about her Little Gal again and again to the Archdeacon and Mrs. Tomlington and Mr. Moffat and other ladies and gentlemen in the Parish, Miss Rawlings had had no name at all for her small friend. But one still summer evening, there being a faint red in the sky, while she was wandering gently about her immense drawing-room, she had happened to open a book lying on an “occasional” table. It was a book of poetry—crimson and gilt-edged, with a brass clasp—and on the very page under her nose she had read this line:

“Fell in love with Barbara Allan.”

The words ran through her mind like wildfire. Barbara Allan—it was _the_ name! Or how very like it! An echo? Certainly some words and names _are_ echoes of one another—sisters or brothers once removed, so to speak. Tomlington and Pocklingham, for example; or quince and shrimp; or angelica and cyclamen. All I mean is that the very instant Miss Rawlings saw that printed “Barbara Allan,” it ran through her heart like an old tune in a nursery. It _was_ her Little Gal, or ever so near it—as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing, viz., crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry.

Now, if Miss Rawlings had been of royal blood and had lived in a fairy-tale; if, that is, she had been a Queen in Grimm—it would have been a quite ordinary thing that she should be seeking a little lost Princess, or badly in need of one. But except that her paternal grandfather was a Sir Samuel Rawlings, she was but very remotely connected with royalty. Still, if you think about it, seeing that once upon a time there were only marvellous Adam and beautiful Eve in the Garden, that is in the whole wide world, and seeing that all of Us as well as all of the earth’s Kings and Queens must have descended from them, _therefore_ all of Us must have descended from Kings and Queens. So too with Miss Rawlings. But—unlike Mrs. Tomlington—she had not come down by the grand staircase.

Since then Miss Rawlings did not live in a fairy-tale nor in Grimm, but was a very real person in a very real Parish, her friends and acquaintances were all inclined in private to agree with Mrs. Tomlington that her Little Gal was nothing but a bee in her bonnet. And that the longer it stayed there the louder it buzzed. Indeed, Miss Rawlings almost began to think of nothing else. She became absent-minded, quite forgetting her soup and fish and chicken and French roll when she sat at dinner. She left on the gas. She signed cheques for the Funds without looking back at the counterfoils to see what she had last subscribed. She gave brand-new mantles and dolmens away to the Rummagers; ordered coals from her fishmonger’s; rode third class with a first class ticket; addressed a postcard to Mrs. Tomfoolington—almost every kind of absent-minded thing you can imagine.

And now she was always searching: even in the house sometimes; even in the kitchen quarters. And her plump country maids would gladly help too. “No, m’m, she ain’t here.” “No, m’m, we ain’t a-seed her yet.” “Lor’, yes’m, the rooms be ready.”

Whenever Miss Rawlings rose from her chair, she would at once peer sharply out of the window to see if any small creature were passing in the street beyond the drive. When she went a-walking, she was frequently all but run over by cabs and vans and phaetons and gigs, because she was looking the other way after a vanishing pigtail. Not a picture-shop, not a photographer’s could she pass without examining every single face exhibited in the window. And she never met a friend, or the friend of a friend, or conversed with a stranger without, sure enough, beginning to talk about Young Things. Puppies or kittens or lambs, perhaps, first, and then gradually on to little boys. And then, with a sudden whisk of her bonnet, to Little Girls.

Long, long ago now she had learnt by heart the whole of “Barbara Allan”:

“... She had not gane a mile but twa, When she heard the dead-bell ringing, And every jow that the dead-bell gied, It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_

‘O mother, mother, make my bed! O make it saft and narrow! Since my love died for me to-day, I’ll die for him to-morrow.’”

Oh dear, how sad it was; and you never knew! Could it be, could it be, she cried one day to herself, that the dead, lovely Barbara Allan of the poem had got by some means muddled up in Time, and was in actual fact _her_ Little Gal? Could it be that the maiden-name of the wife of Miss Allan’s father had been Rawlings?

Miss Rawlings was far too sensible merely to wonder about things. She at once enquired of Mr. Moffat (who had been once engaged to her dearest friend, Miss Simon, now no more) whether he knew anything about Barbara Allan’s family. “The family, Felicia?” Mr. Moffat had replied, his bristling eyebrows high in his head. And when, after a visit to the British Museum, Mr. Moffat returned with only two or three pages of foolscap closely written over with full particulars of the ballad and with “biographical details” of Bishop Percy and of Allan Ramsay and of Oliver Goldsmith and of the gentleman who had found the oldest manuscript copy of it in Glamis Castle, or some such ancient edifice, and of how enchantingly Samuel Pepys’s friend, Mrs. Knipp, used to sing him the air—but nothing else: Miss Rawlings very reluctantly gave up all certainty of this. “It still might be my Little Gal’s family,” she said, “and on the other hand it might not.” And she continued to say over to herself with infinite sorrow in her deep rich voice, that tragic stanza:

She had not gane a mile but twa, When she heard the dead-bell ringing, And every jow that the dead-bell gied, It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_

And “Oh no! not Woe,” she would say in her heart.

Soon after this, Miss Rawlings fell ill. A day or two before she took to her bed, she had been walking along Laburnum Avenue, and had happened to see the pupils of the Miss Miffinses’ Young Ladies’ Seminary taking the air. Now, the last two and smallest of these pupils—of the Crocodile, as rude little boys call it—were walking arm in arm with the nice English mistress, chattering away like birds in a bush. Both of them were rather narrow little creatures, both wore beaver hats beneath which dangled brown pigtails. It was yet one more astonishing moment, and Miss Rawlings had almost broken into a run—as much of a run, that is, as being of so stout and ample a presence she was capable of—in order to get a glimpse of their faces.

But, alas! and alack! the wrought-iron gates of the school were just round the corner of Laburnum Avenue, and the whole Crocodile had completely disappeared into the great stone porch beyond by the time she had come in sight of the two Monkey-Puzzles on the lawn, and the brass curtain bands to the windows.

Miss Rawlings stood and gazed at these—for the moment completely forgetting polite manners. The hurry and excitement had made her hot and breathless: and the wind was in the east. It dispirited her, and instead of ringing the bell and asking for the Miss Miffinses, she had returned home and had at once written an invitation to the whole school to come to tea the following Sunday afternoon. In a moment of absent-mindedness, however, she left the note on her little rose-wood secretaire beside the silver inkstand that had belonged to Sir Samuel. And two days afterwards—on the Friday, that is, the month being February—she had been seized with Bronchitis.

It was a rather more severe attack than was usual for Miss Rawlings, even in foggy November, and it made Miss Rawlings’s family physician a little anxious. There was no immediate danger, he explained to Nurse Murphy; still care is care. And Miss Rawlings, being so rich and so important to the Parish, he at once decided to invite an eminent Consultant to visit his patient—a Sir James Jolliboy Geoghehan who lived in Harley Street and knew more about Bronchitis (Harley Street being also in a foggy parish) than any other medical man in Europe or in the United States of America (which are not usually foggy places).

Fortunately, Sir James took quite as bright and sanguine a view of his patient as did Miss Rawlings’s family physician. There Miss Rawlings lay, propped up against her beautiful down pillows with the frills all round, and a fine large pale blue-ribboned bed cap stood up on her large head. She was breathing pretty fast, and her temperature, according to both the gentlemen’s thermometers, was 102.6.

A large copper kettle was ejecting clouds of steam from the vast cheerful fire in the vast brass and steel grate, with the Cupids in the chimneypiece. There were medicine bottles on the little table and not only Nurse Murphy stood grave but brave on the other side of the bed, but, even still more Irish Nurse O’Brien also. Now, the more solemn _she_ looked the more her face appeared to be creased up in a gentle grin.

Miss Rawlings panted as she looked at them all. Her eye was a little absent, but she too was smiling. For if there was one thing Miss Rawlings was certain to do, it was to be cheerful when most other people would be inclined to be depressed. As she knew she was ill she felt bound to be smiling. She even continued to smile when Sir James murmured, “_And_ the tongue?” And she assured Sir James that though it was exceedingly kind of him to call it wasn’t in the least necessary. “I frequently have bronchitis,” she explained, “but I never die.” Which sounded a little like “rambling.”

When Sir James and the family physician had gone downstairs and were closeted together in the gilded Library, Sir James at once asked this question: “What, my dear sir, was our excellent patient remarking about a Miss Barbara Allan? Has she a relative of the name?”

At this Miss Rawlings’s family physician looked a little confused. “No, no; oh dear no,” he exclaimed. “It’s merely a little fancy, a caprice. Miss Rawlings has a notion there is a little girl belonging to her somewhere—probably of that name, you know. Quite harmless. An aberration. In fact, I indulge it; I indulge it. Miss Rawlings is a most able, sagacious, energetic, philanthropic, practical, generous, and—and—humorous lady. The fancy, you see, has somehow attached itself to the _name_ Barbara Allan—a heroine, I believe, in one of Sir Walter Scott’s admirable fictions. Only that. Nothing more.”

Sir James, a tall man, peered down at Miss Rawlings’s family physician over his gold pince-nez. “I once had a patient, my dear Dr. Sheppard,” he replied solemnly in a voice a good deal deeper but not so rich as Miss Rawlings’s, “who had the amiable notion that she was the Queen of Sheba and that I was King Solomon. A _most_ practical woman. She left me three hundred guineas in her will, for a mourning ring.” He thereupon explained (in words that his patient could not possibly have understood, but that Dr. Sheppard understood perfectly), that Miss Rawlings was in no immediate danger and that she was indeed quite a comfortable little distance from Death’s Door. Still, bronchitis _is_ bronchitis; so let the dear lady be humoured as much as possible. “Let her have the very best nurses, excellent creatures; and all the comforts.” He smiled as he said these words, as if Dr. Sheppard was a long-lost brother. And he entirely approved not only of the nice sago puddings, the grapes, the delicious beef-juice (with toast _or_ a rusk), the barley water and the physic, but of as many Barbara Allans as Miss Rawlings could possibly desire. And all that he said sounded so much like the chorus of “Yeo, ho, ho,” or “Away to Rio,” or “The Anchor’s Weighed,” that one almost expected Dr. Sheppard to join in.

Both gentlemen then took their leave, and Dr. Sheppard having escorted Sir James to his brougham (for this was before the days of machine carriages), the two nurses retired from the window and Miss Rawlings sank into a profound nap.

In a few days Miss Rawlings was much, much, much better. Her temperature was 97.4. Her breathing no more than twenty-four or five to the minute—at most. The flush had left her cheeks, and she had finished three whole bottles of medicine. She devoured a slice from the breast of a chicken and said she enjoyed her sago pudding. The nurses _were_ pleased.