Part 3

Chapter 34,524 wordsPublic domain

Every morning she comes and looks over the old place. I suppose she is staying in the neighbourhood. From every side she views it and all the while she talks to herself. Now, women do this more than you would think. They do it when they are going to bed at night. They do it when they are getting up in the morning. It always seems as if there were some one inside them to whom they must tell the truth, because, I believe, they are the most truthful beings in the world—to themselves.

Only yesterday, when she thought she was absolutely alone, I heard her saying—

“You wouldn’t like it, you know, once you were fixed up there again. It’s out of the way, of course, quiet, but you wouldn’t like it.”

And then, having told herself the truth, she began immediately to contradict it.

Why they do this is more than I can tell you. The only people who can tell the truth, they seemingly dislike it more than any one else. A man loves the truth, lives for it, dies for it, but seldom tells it. With a woman it is just the opposite, and I cannot for the life of me tell you why.

“You’d be a fool if you took it,” she said to herself as she went away to the house agent’s. “You don’t know who you’ll have for neighbours. They might be disgusting people.”

I followed her to the house agent’s, and this, if you please, was the first question she put to him—

“What sort of people do you think’ll take the house over the way?”

I pitied the house agent from the bottom of my heart, because how on earth could he know? Yet upon his answer hung all his chances of letting. I thought he replied very cleverly.

“They’re sure to be good people,” said he; “we only get the best class round here.”

And then, just listen to her retort—

“But you can’t tell,” said she. “What’s the good of pretending you know. It might be a butcher and his family. You couldn’t stop them if they wanted the house.”

The agent leaned back in his chair, then leaned forward over his desk, turning over pages and pages of a ledger.

“Well, will you take an order to view this one?” said he. “Same rent—a little more accommodation.”

“No, I don’t want to see any more,” she replied. “This is the one I like best.”

“Well, would you like to settle on that?” said the agent. “I’ll write to the landlord to-night.”

“I’ll let you know to-morrow,” said she.

For three weeks she has gone on just like this.

And it is still to let, that little house in the bowl of my old apple tree. But every morning she comes just the same and, sitting on the topmost branch, she chatters to herself incessantly for half an hour, as starlings and women do—for she is a lady starling. I shall be curious to know when she makes up her mind, but, knowing nothing about women and less than nothing about starlings, I cannot say when or what it will be.

VIII

A SUFFRAGETTE

VIII

A SUFFRAGETTE

She thanked God, she told me, that she had never been married.

She was quite old—well, quite old? Can you ever say that of a woman? Women are quite old for five years, but that is all. They are quite old between the ages of thirty-five and forty. Then, if God has given them a heart and they have taken advantage of the gift, youth comes back again. It is not the youth under the eyes, perhaps; it is the youth in the eyes. It is not the youth around the lips; it is the youth of the words that issue from them.

Between thirty-five and forty a woman is trying to remember her youth and forget her age. That makes her quite old—quite, quite old. After that—well, I have said, it rests with God and her.

So Miss Taviner was not quite old. She was quite young. She was sixty-three. Her eyes twinkled, even when she thanked God for her spinsterdom.

“You’ve got,” said I, “a poor opinion of men.”

“’Tisn’t my opinion—’tis my mother’s,” said she.

I felt there was nothing to be said to that. It would have been unseemly on my part—who have only just found my own youth—to disagree with an opinion of such long standing.

You must understand that Miss Taviner could never have been beautiful. God may have meant her to be; I don’t know anything about that. I am only aware how Nature interfered. For when she was young—a child not more, I think, than six—she was struck by lightning, paralysed for a time, and, when she recovered, her eyes were at loggerheads. They looked every way but one.

But I like her little shrivelled face, nevertheless. It is crafty, perhaps. She looks as if she counts every apple on the trees in her old garden. Why shouldn’t she? She has a poor opinion of men. Besides, the apples at Beech House Farm—where her father lived and his father before him—those apples are part of the slender income by which she manages to cling to the old home. Who could blame her for counting them? I don’t even blame her for having the cunning look of it in her eyes.

No—I suppose, though I do like her face, it is because I haven’t got to love it. Possibly that is why she has so poor an opinion of men. Some man found that he could not love her face and broke his faith with her. At least, I thought that then. Some heartless wretch has jilted her, I thought—taught her to love, and then caught sight of a prettier pair of eyes. I must admit he need not have been on the lookout for them.

“But,” said I presently, when these ideas had passed away, “don’t you admit men have their uses?”

“None!” she said emphatically.

“Then why,” I asked, “do you hang up that old top hat of your father’s on a peg in the kitchen, so that the first tramp, as you open the door to him, may see it?”

“So that he’ll think I’ve got a man in the house, I suppose,” she replied.

“That’s why you have a couple of glasses and a whiskey bottle on the table in the evening?”

“Yes.”

“Then a man is useful,” said I, “as far as his hat is concerned?”

She winked her crooked eyes at me and she said, “Yes, so long as there isn’t a head inside of it.”

I laughed. “Then really,” I concluded, “you do hate men?”

“I suppose I do,” said she.

“Why?”

I thought I was going to hear of her little romance with its pitiable ending.

But no, she merely shrugged her shoulders, stuck an old tam-o’-shanter on her head, and went out to see if the gardener was doing his fair share of work.

I might never have thought of this again, but it chanced that I bought from her, amongst her old relics of the family property, a mahogany box, with brass lock and brass handle. Inlaid, it was, round the edge of the lid. Quite a handsome thing. She had lost its key. It was locked and, seeing that she did not want to go to the expense of getting a key made, she sold it to me.

I got a key made. I opened it. It was empty, but for one thing. There was a letter at the bottom. It is unquestionable that I had no right to read it. It is also unquestionable that I did.

“_My dear Miss Taviner,_” it ran, “_these evenings that it is so light they may be playing cricket on the green. Shall we meet at the Cross beyond the forge?—Yrs. in haste, Henry Yeoman._”

“That’s the man,” said I to myself. “He was ashamed of being seen with her even then. No wonder she has a poor opinion of men.” My anger went out to Henry Yeoman on the spot.

But I did him an injustice. For, inquiring at the forge, which I happened to pass some days later, I stopped and asked the smith about him.

“Henry Yeoman,” said he, “why he’s left these parts nigh fifteen years. He’s gone to live at Reading.”

“Is he married?” I asked.

“Yes; married Miss Taviner.”

“Miss Taviner?”

“Yes; sister of her down at Beech House Farm.”

“Never knew she had a sister,” said I.

“Yes. Oh, she had three; all married, they are.”

“Why did she never marry?” I asked, for then I knew the letter was not to her.

“Why?” He tapped the anvil with his hammer and he laughed a bass accompaniment to its ring. “Because no one ’ud ever look at her, I suppose.”

I saw it then. I saw why she had so poor opinion of men. I saw why she thanked God she had never married.

No man had ever taught her what love was. No man had ever even jilted her. No wonder she hated them. No wonder she counted her apples.

BELLWATTLE AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

It is not mine to distinguish between the laws of God and the laws of Nature. This is a distinction peculiar to Bellwattle.

It would be difficult to give precise definition to her conception of the subtle and imaginary line which divides the two, but, so far as I can grasp it, it would seem to be this: The laws of God determine those things which happen despite themselves and to the confusion of all Bellwattle’s pre-conceived opinions. When, for example, a caterpillar, in its hazardous struggle for existence, eats into the heart of her favourite rosebud, that is, for Bellwattle, one of the laws of God.

Now, the laws of Nature are quite different to this. The laws of Nature—so Bellwattle, I fancy, would tell you—command those things which happen of their own accord and to the satisfaction of all Bellwattle’s pre-conceived anticipations. When, for example, a rose tree bears a thousand blossoms from May to the end of December; when the peas are ready to pick in the first week in June, and the delphiniums have grown yet another inch when, every morning, she steps out into the garden to look at them—these are, for Bellwattle, the orderly workings of the laws of Nature.

I see her point. I sympathise with her distinction and I wish—oh, _how_ I wish!—that I could think as she does. For it is a fixed idea with her. Nothing will shake it. And I have never met any one whose appreciation of Nature is as great as hers.

Only the other day—so Cruikshank, her husband, tells me—they came across a wild flower in one of the hedges. In blossom and general appearance it bore so close a relation to Shepherd’s Needle that at first sight of it, he dubbed it straight away. On closer examination it was found that there were no needles; neither could it be Shepherd’s Purse, for there were no purses.

“Perhaps it’s a Shepherd’s Needle gone wrong?” suggested Bellwattle, and Cruikshank tells me he left it at that. The sublime conception of it was beyond the highest reaches of his imagination.

On another occasion, when I had the honour to accompany her on her walk, we heard the raucous note of a bird from somewhere away in the meadows.

“I bet you don’t know what that is!” said I, to test her knowledge; but she answered quite easily—

“It’s a partridge.”

“No,” said I, a little disappointed at her mistake, “that’s a pheasant.”

“Oh, the same thing,” said Bellwattle, unperturbed.

“Of course; they both begin with a P,” said I.

And then she looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and blinked. I thank God I did not smile. She would never have believed in me again.

But it is when Bellwattle puts out her gentle hand to help Nature in her schemes that I think she is most lovable of all. This is the way with all true women when they love Nature for Nature’s sake. In fact, it sometimes seems to me, when I watch Bellwattle forestalling God at every turn, that she is Eve incarnate, the mother of all living. For to see her in the garden and the country, you would feel that she almost believes she has suffered the labours of maternity for every single thing that lives, from the first snowdrop opening its eyes to the spring to the last little tremulous calf, with its quaking knees, which the old cow in the farmyard presents to our neighbour over the way.

“The poor wee mite,” she says, and she gives it the tips of her fingers with which to ease its toothless gums.

But sometimes, as woman will, she carries this motherdom to excess. You may aid Nature to a point. Men do it in their pre-eminently practical way, which has science for the dry heart of it. Watch them pruning rose trees. I believe they take a positive pleasure in the knife. I am perfectly sure Bellwattle’s garden would be a forest of briars were it not that Cruikshank keeps locked within a little drawer a knife with a handle of horn, which he takes out in the month of March, when Bellwattle goes to pay a visit to her mother up in town. In fact, the visit is arranged for that purpose.

“I suppose it has to be done,” she says, packing her trunk. “But it seems a silly business to me that you should have to cut the arms and legs off a thing before it can grow properly. They bore roses last year. Why not this?”

But where Nature needs no aid, there is Bellwattle ready with her ever-helping hand. She constitutes herself in the capacity of nurse to all the birds in the garden.

Only this spring a linnet built its nest in the yew tree that grows in our hedge. In an unwise moment Cruikshank informed her of it. She ran off at once and counted the eggs. Five there were. She had seen eggs before, but these were the most beautiful that any bird had ever laid in its life.

From that moment she became so fussy and excitable that Cruikshank was at a loss to know what to do with her.

“She’ll drive the bird away,” said Cruikshank to me.

“Well, tell her so,” said I.

“I did.”

“Well?”

“She simply said, ‘The bird must know that I don’t mean to do any harm.’”

“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “I don’t suppose there’s an animal in the whole of creation that doesn’t recognise the maternal instinct when it sees it.”

That was all very well while there were only eggs to be reckoned with. But when one morning Bellwattle went to the nest and found five black little heads, like five little Hottentots grown old and grizzled, with shrivelled tufts of grey hair, there was no containing her.

She clapped her hands. She danced up and down and—

“Oh, the dears!” she cried. “Oh, the little dears! I must give them something to eat. What will they eat?”

I looked at Cruikshank. I had come round that morning to count his rosebuds with him—a weakness of his to which he always succumbs. He tells me it is the only way he can justify his use of the knife. I looked at him and he looked at me.

“This is going too far,” he whispered. “Can’t we put a stop to it?”

“Leave it to me,” said I, and Bellwattle, hearing our whispers, turned round and stared at us.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We were talking,” said I.

“Yes, but what about?”

She was fired with suspicion.

“We were wondering the best thing you could feed them with.”

Suspicion fell from her.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Would corn be any good?”

Cruikshank blew his nose.

“A little bit solid,” he said dubiously.

“You can’t do better than give them the same as their mother does,” I suggested.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Small worms,” I replied, and I watched her face; “those little thin, red, raw ones.”

She walked away, saying nothing. She hates worms. Well, naturally—every woman does.

Cruikshank laid an appreciative hand on my shoulder.

“That’s done it,” he said. “I was afraid she’d go worrying about till she made the poor little beast desert, but that’s done it.”

I was not so sure myself. Therefore it surprised me not at all the next morning when, arriving unexpectedly in the garden, I came upon her unawares, carrying at arm’s length two little wriggling worms. There was an expression on her face which will live in my memory for ever. I concealed myself behind a tree and watched. I could see nothing, but this is what I heard—

“Oh, you funny little mites! Bless your little hearts! Here, take it—take it! Open your mouth, you silly! Not so wide—not so wide. Well, if you all sit up like that you’ll fall out, you know. Lie down, you silly little fools; lie down! lie down! Now shut your mouth on it and you’ll find it. Shut your mouth!”

And so on and so on, till my laughter gave me away.

“Were you listening all the time?” she asked.

I nodded my head.

“So was the mother linnet,” said I, “up in that lilac tree. What do you think she’ll do now? She’ll think you’ve been trying to kill them.”

“No, she won’t,” said Bellwattle. “I left a big worm on the edge of the nest for her, so that she’ll know I’ve been feeding them.”

But something worse than that happened. With all this attention paid to that which by every law of Nature should have been kept a dead secret, the attention of Bellwattle’s cat was attracted to the spot. Next morning the nest was found empty and one of those brown little Hottentots hung dangling in the branches.

Bellwattle came running down the garden, wringing her hands, the tears glittering in her eyes, her lips quivering as she told us what had happened.

“That comes of meddling with Nature,” began Cruikshank, but I stopped him very quickly.

“If you stop her tears and make her angry,” I whispered, “she’ll never forgive you. Let her cry; it’s the way women learn.”

MAY EVE

I was told that some one wanted to see me.

“Who is it?” I asked.

They told me it was an old lady, who would give no name. I inquired of her appearance. “She is an old lady,” they replied, “and very, very small.” I think I must have guessed, for I asked no further questions. I told them to show her in.

If I could only describe to you the way she came into the room! She was so wee and so tiny. Her eyes sparkled with such brilliancy, she might have been seven instead of seventy. Then, when she bobbed me a curtsey as she entered, I could have believed she was a fairy come from the uttermost ends of the earth to attend a christening.

There was every good reason for my belief, not the least of which was that it was May Eve. In Ireland, as you know, the folk dare not go out after dark on this eventful day. The fairies are in the fields, fairies good and bad, and heaven only knows what you may not come across if you wander through the boreens or across the hillside when once the evening has put on her mantle of grey.

Not only will you meet them in the fields, moreover; they come to your very door and milk they ask of you, and fire and water. Now, except that she asked for nothing, but rather brought a gift to me, my wee visitor might have been a fairy come out of the land beyond the edge of Time; come ten million miles to this old farmhouse which hugs itself so close to the land in the valley between the hills.

For the moment I felt my heart in my throat. I had added things together so quickly in my mind that I was sure my belief was right. She was a fairy. May Eve—the very time of day, when the grey mist is creeping over the meadows, and the river runs _blip, blip_ between the reeds—the strange and youthful glitter in her wee brown eyes, set deep in the hollows of that old and wrinkled face; then last of all, her bobbing curtsey and the way she smiled at me as though she had a blessing in her pocket—these were the things I added so swiftly together in my mind. The result was inevitable. Undoubtedly she was a fairy. Now see how strange the tricks life plays with you; for, whereas I had believed in fairies before, I knew now that my belief had been vain. I had only believed in the idea of them—that was all. I had only said I believed because I knew I should never see one to contradict the doubt which still lingered in my heart. That is the way most of us say our credo.

“I’ve brought you your travelling-rug,” said she, and she bobbed again.

“What travelling-rug?” I asked.

And then, what happened, do you think? I could hardly believe my eyes. She took from off her arm what seemed at first to me some garment, lined richly with orange-coloured sateen. My eyes grew wider in wonder as she laid it down and spread it out upon the floor.

It was a patchwork quilt!

Oh, you never did see such a galaxy of colours in all your life! Blues and reds, greens, yellows and purples, they all jostled each other for a place upon that square of orange-coloured sateen. All textures they were, too; some velvet, some silk, and some brocade. It was as if the caves of Aladdin had been thrown open to me, and I were allowed just for one moment to peep within.

But that was not all.

For when I said: “You’ve finished it, then?” I saw to what purpose that completion had been made. Right in the centre of all those dazzling patches was a square of purple—purple that the Emperors used to wear—while worked across in regal letters of gold there were my own initials.

I stared at them. I went down on my knees, looking close into the stitches to make sure that there was no mistake. Then I gazed up at her.

“But it’s for me?” said I.

She nodded her head and her whole face was lighted up with pride and satisfaction. She was so excited, too. Her eyes danced with excitement. You know the quaint little twisted attitudes that children get into when they are giving you a present which they have made themselves; they are half consumed with fear that you are going to laugh at them and half consumed with pride in their own handiwork. She was just like that.

Lest you do not know already, I should tell you that I had made her my pensioner as long as she lives, in order to enable her to leave off work and make this patchwork quilt whereby she might be remembered by those who slept beneath it when she had gone to sleep. But I had thought to myself, surely it will be in the family. I had wondered who would become the proud possessor of it. Imagine my amazement, then, when I realised that it was my very own.

“And you’ll think of me when I’m gone, won’t you, sir—when you go to bed at night?” she said.

“Think of you?” said I. “You may well call it a travelling-rug. I only have to wrap this round me and, with the mere wish of it, I shall be in the land of dreams—millions and millions of miles away.”

“P’raps I shall be there, too,” said she, clasping her hands.

“And then we’ll meet,” said I.

She began folding it up with just that care which she had used in the making of it. She folded it one way.

“It’s nice and warm,” said she.

She doubled it another way.

“Every one of the squares is lined with sateen.”

She redoubled it once more.

“And it’s all padded with cotton wool.”

When she said that, she stood up with her face all beaming with smiles, and she laid it in my hands.

Then I did what I had wanted to do from the very first moment I saw her. I took her little face in my hands and I kissed the soft, warm, wrinkled cheeks.

“When I was very unhappy,” said I, “I used to entertain what is called a belief in fairies. Now that I know what it is to be happy, I find them. It’s a very different thing.”

THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL

Limehouse, Plaistow, and the East India Docks—these are places in the world to wonder about. Yet even there beauty manages to creep in and grow in a soil where there would seem to be nothing but decay.

There are societies, I believe, which exist in those quarters, whose endeavour it is to lift the mind of the East End inhabitant to an appreciation of what the West End knows to be Art. I am sure that all their intentions are the sincerest in the world. But what is the good of Art to a dock labourer and his wife?

We have only arrived at Art ourselves after generations and generations of a knowledge of what is beautiful. So absolutely have we arrived, moreover, that we care no longer for what is beautiful; we only care for Art.

That, however, is another question too long to enter into here. But to teach Art to the East India dock labourer when he knows so little of beauty, that is a process of putting carts before horses—a reduction to absurdity which can be seen at once.

Now when I was a journalist—that is to say, when I wrote lines of words for a paper which paid me so much per line for the number of lines which the chief sub-editor was good enough to use—I was one day despatched to the East End to see if there were any stuff—I speak colloquially—in a poor people’s flower show.

“It may be funny,” said the editor.

“It might be,” said I.

“Well, make it funny,” said he, for I think he caught the note in my voice.