Short Stories 1895-1926 (76 page)

The musician tittered.

The Count's visitors were hospitably regaled with rum-and-water. The musician, before his departure, entertained us with a tune. Soon they were gone away with a bit of silver in their pockets, not bound, I trust, for a lunatic asylum. The Count and I tried vainly to converse upon topics befitting the breakfast table. We eyed each other askance, each suspicious of the other's credulity. Conversation was flat and unprofitable, and the ingressive sun a sorry mockery. Optimism is not unfrequently the harbinger of pessimism.

At the first stir of the housekeeper's rising the Count made morosely for bed.

The Giant

The Giant
1

Peter lived with his aunt, and his sister Emma, in a small house near Romford. His aunt was a woman of very fair complexion, her heavy hair was golden-brown, her eyes blue; on work days she wore a broad printed apron. His sister Emma helped her aunt in the housework as best she could, out of school-time. She would sometimes play at games with Peter, but she cared for few in which her doll could take no part. Still, Peter knew games which he might play by himself; and although sometimes he played with Emma and her doll, yet generally they played apart, she alone with her doll, and he with the people of his own imagining.

The rose-papered room above the kitchen (being the largest room upstairs) was his aunt's bedroom. There Emma also slept, in a little bed near the window. For, although in the great double bed was room enough (her aunt being but a middle-sized woman), yet the other pillow was always smooth and undinted, and that half of the bed was always undisturbed. On May-day primroses were strewn here, and a sprig of mistletoe at Christmas.

On a bright morning in July (for not withstanding the sun shone fiercely in the sky, yet a random wind tempered his heat), Peter went to sit under the shadow of the wall to read his book in the garden. But when he opened the door to go out, something seemed strange to him in the garden. Whether it was the garden itself that looked or sounded strange, or himself and his thoughts that were different from usual, he could not tell. He stood on the doorstep and looked out across the grass. He wrinkled up his eyes because of the fervid sunshine that glanced bright even upon the curved blades of grass. And, while he looked across towards the foot of the garden, almost without his knowing it his eyes began to travel up along the trees, till he was looking into the cloudless skies. He quickly averted his eyes, with water brimming over, it was so bright above. But yet, again, as he looked across, slowly his gaze wandered up from the ground into the dark blue. He fumbled the painted covers of his book and sat down on the doorstep. He could hear the neighbouring chickens clucking and scratching in the dust, and sometimes a voice in one of the gardens spoke out in the heat. But he could not read his book for glancing out of his eye along the garden. And suddenly, with a frown, he opened the door and ran back into the kitchen.

Emma was in the bedroom making the great bed. Peter climbed upstairs and began to talk to her, and while he talked drew gradually nearer and nearer to the window. And then he walked quickly away, and took hold of the brass knob of the bedpost.

‘Why don't you look out of the window, Emmie?' said he.

‘I'm a-making the bed, Peter, don't you see?' said Emma.

‘You can see Mrs Watts feeding the chickens,' said Peter.

Emma drew aside the window blind and looked out. Peter stood still, watching her intently.

‘She's gone in now, and they are all pecking in the dust,' said Emma.

‘Can you see the black-and-white pussycat on our fence, Emmie?' said Peter in a soft voice.

Emma looked down towards the poplar trees at the foot of the garden.

‘No,' she said, ‘and the sparrows are pecking up the crumbs I shook out of the tablecloth, so she can't be in our garden at all.'

Emma turned away from the window, and set to dusting the looking-glass, unheeding her grave reflection. Peter watched her in silence awhile.

‘But, Emmie, didn't you see anything else in the bottom of the garden?' he said. But he said it in so small a voice that Emma, busy at her work, did not hear him.

In the evening of that day Peter and his aunt went out to water the mignonette and the sweet-williams, and the nasturtiums in the garden. There were slipper sweetpeas there, also, and lad's love, and tall hollyhocks twice as high as himself swaying, indeed, their topmost flower-cups above his aunt's brown head. And Peter carried down the pots of water to his aunt, and watered the garden, too, with his small rose-pot. Yet he could not forbear glancing anxiously and timidly towards the poplars, and following up with his eye the gigantic shape of his fancy that he found there.

‘Aren't the trees sprouting up tall, Auntie?' said he, standing close beside her.

‘That they are, Peter,' said his aunt. ‘Now some for the middle bed, my man, though I'm much afeared the rose-bush is done for with blight: time it blossomed long since.'

‘How high are the trees, Auntie?' said Peter.

‘Why, surely they're a good lump higher than the house; they do grow wonderful fast,' said his aunt, stooping to pluck up a weed from the bed.

‘How high is the house, Auntie?' said Peter, bending down beside her.

‘Bless me! I can't tell you that,' said she, glancing up; ‘ask Mr Ash there in his garden. Good-evening, Mr Ash; here's my little boy asking me how high the house is – they do ask questions, to be sure.'

‘Well,' said Mr Ash, narrowing his eye, over the fence, ‘I should think, ma'am, it were about thirty foot high; say thirty-five foot to the rim of the chimney-pot.'

‘Is that as high as the trees?' said Peter.

‘Now, which trees might you be meaning, my friend?' said Mr Ash.

‘You mean those down by the fence yonder, don't you, Peter?' said his aunt. ‘Poplars, aren't they? That's what he means, Mr Ash.'

‘Well,' said Mr Ash, pointing the stem of his pipe towards them, ‘if you ask me, the poplars must be a full forty foot high, and mighty well they've growed, too, seeing as how I saw 'em planted.'

Peter watched Mr Ash attentively, as he stood there looking over the fence towards the poplar-trees. But his aunt began to talk of other matters, so that Mr Ash said no more on the subject. Yet he did not appear to have descried anything out of the common there.

Now the evening was darkening; already a lamp was shining at an upper window, and the crescent moon had become bright in the west. Peter stayed close beside his aunt; sometimes peeping from behind her skirts towards the trees, glancing from root to foliage, to crown, and thence into the shadowy skies, whence the daylight was fast withdrawing. By and by his aunt began to feel the chill of the night air. She bade Mr Ash good-night, and went into the house with Peter. Soon Peter heard Mr Ash scraping his boots upon the stones. Presently he also went in, and shut his door, leaving the gardens silent now.

At this time Peter was making a rabbit-hutch out of a sugar-box; but tonight he had no relish for the work, and sat down with a book, while Emma learned her spelling, repeating the words to herself.

‘Auntie,' said Peter, looking up when the clock had ceased striking, ‘If Satan was to come in our garden, would he be like a man, or is he little like a hunchback?'

‘Dearie me? what'll these stories put into his head next? Why, Peter, God would not let him come up into the world like that, not to hurt His dear children. But if they are bad, wicked children, and grown-up folks too for that matter, then God goes away angry, and the Spirit is grieved too. Why, my pretty, in pictures he has great dark wings, just as the angels' are beautiful and bright; but the good angels watch and guard little children and all good people.'

‘Then he's just as big as a man in the pictures, like Mr Ash, not a —'

‘Aunt Elizabeth has heaps of pictures of him in a book, Auntie, with all the wicked angels crowding round,' said Emma; ‘but he's much taller than Mr Ash, like a giant, and they are all standing up in the sky, and —'

‘Yes, Emmie, that's in the book, I daresay,' said her aunt, frowning at Emma, and nodding her head. ‘But come and sit on Auntie's lap, dearie; why he looks quite scared, poor pigeon, with his stories. Auntie will tell you about little Snow White, shall she? – about little Snow White and the dwarfs?'

Peter said nothing, though his lip trembled; and albeit he asked no more questions, yet he did not attend to the story of Snow White.

At the beginning of the next day, Peter woke soon after the dawning, and getting out of bed peered through the glass of his window, down the garden. The flowers were not yet unfolded in the misty air. There was no movement nor sound anywhere. The trees leaned motionless in the early morning. But towering implacable against the rosy east stood that gigantic spectre of his imagination, secret and terrific there. And Peter with a sob ran back quickly to bed.

However, he mentioned nothing of his thoughts during the day, eating his breakfast, and going to school as usual. But when he reached school he had forgotten his lessons, and was kept in. Even there, alone in the vacant schoolroom, he could not learn his returned lessons because of all his vivid fears passing to and fro in his mind. As the afternoon decreased, hour by hour, towards evening, he began to hate the memory of night and bedtime. He lingered on, seeking any excuse for light and company, until Emma spoke roughly to him. ‘Leave off worrying, Peter, do! How you do worry!'

At last, when even his aunt grew vexed at his disobedience, Peter begged her for a light to go to bed by. At first she refused, laughing at his timidity. But, in the end, with importunities he persuaded her; and she gave him a piece of candle in his room, to be burned in a little water, in order that when he was asleep, and the burning wick should fall low, then the water would rush in and extinguish it.

It was far in the night, just when the flame of the candle leapt out into darkness with a hiss, that Peter woke from a dream, and sat up trembling in his bed. He had dreamed of a street in the distance, whither a giant became a speck, and the eye was strained in vain. Even yet he saw its undimmed length retreating back unimaginably. And, as if impelled by an influence inscrutable, he got out silently and drew back the muslin window-blind. In the clear, dark air he saw the row of poplar trees; he saw that gigantic shade of fear abiding there, uplifted as with a threat, and the trembling stars of the heavens about him for a head-dress.

Peter cried out in terror at the sight, hiding his eyes in his hands. And while he stood sobbing bitterly, scarcely able to take breath, his ear caught a sound in the room like the wintry shaking of dry reeds at the brink of a pool. At this new sound he caught back his sobs; his scalp seemed to creep upon his head. He looked out between his fingers towards the bed; and he saw there an Angel standing, whose face was white and steadfast as silver, and whose eyes were pure as the white flame of the Holy Ones. His wings were to him as a covering of perfect brightness, his feet hovering in the silentness of the little room. Peter, his tears dried upon his face, could not bear to gaze long upon that steadfast figure angelical; yet it seemed as if he
was now indeed come out of a dreadful vision into the pure and safe light of day; and when presently the visitant was vanished away, he went back into his still warm bed, his fear more than half abated, and fell asleep.

In the morning, when he looked out of the window, a gentle rustling rain was falling, clear in the reflected cloud-light of the sun. He could hear the waterdrops running together and dripping down from leaf to leaf. He heard the sparrows chirping upon the housetop, the remote crowing of a cock. And the poplar-trees were swaying their leafy tops in the cool air, as if they also had awakened refreshed from the evil perils of a dream.

De Mortuis

De Mortuis
1

There is a graveyard by a solitary wayside, with many an antique tomb in the seclusion of umbrageous yews and willows. A rude wall of flint, the glittering target of the sunbeams, is its barrier against the wild, unconsecrated moorland; a dark tower its ancient sentinel. It is an abandoned garden where flowers meet together without favour – rosemary and nettle, myrtle and lily, and yellow charlock. Green unweeded paths are the waste avenue of its dead. It is the resort of wild bees and yet wilder birds, whose murmur and melody cease only with the twilight, the hour of the owl and the nightjar. There is no sound of lamentation in all its silent ways. A quiet company, country people all, is laid here, who have in stealth departed, and do not return. ‘O Death, O Time,' cries one, ‘the wicket and the approach!' The wicket in due season has been unlatched to each; and now none comes: theirs is the wild vacant solitude, theirs the thicket of elder and crimson hawthorn. Moss, and lichen, and stringent ivy weave ever upon their names and legends the immortal web of oblivion.

They found death no unwholesome theme for rhyme, these country people; they knew him of old – a strange whimsical figure enough with his great key, silent yet eloquent, austere, capricious. To die was but to make an end, the ruddy sun on the stubble, the dark wintry staircase to bed; and the tombstone being narrow at best, and transient after all, they did not daub it with flattery, but they put much in little space:

the final jest of all, and not quite heartless. You may see ‘Mary Alice Gilmore' very clearly in her muslin gown:

A rain-darked stone, a pace or two beyond, echoes shrilly that desperate cry in the
Urn Burial –
‘Even such as hope to rise again …':

He has a friable soil for his rest – too easy, perhaps, if his fear quicken also against the ‘wolf with nails'. Nearby, a vacant man is interred, whose dull ear would scarce have caught the clangour of his own elegiac bells:

The alien grave of the sailor is in the morning shadow of the low wall, dense with flowering nettles, sated with dew:

But the deep sea is beyond the hills, and the wind faint only with the inland sweetness. It might be the quavering voice of Darby McGraw himself complaining of exile.

Thomas Small, a miller, fusty yet of meal, who died in dark February, keeps him company:

and a philosophic warrior, his field of valour undecipherable:

Close to the footpaths, so that children must often have fingered the two long ears rudely carved at the upper corners of its leaning stone, is the grave of a mute. Beneath his pollard window of an April evening, Pan pipes luringly – and in vain – as if the blackbirds were singing.

A mute cares little for the sound of his name: there is scored deep only ‘A.A.'

Under a mound that now scarce would harbour a cherub, a comrade of Falstaff gluts his great body with an intolerable deal of slumber:

Laid a little out of line, three strangers, who could go no farther, solace themselves; the first a rhymeless traveller in a cloak.

The second, a needy fellow with two very memorable ‘e'e,' serves for the celebration of his benefactors a meek and not unusual office of poverty:

In the dazzling fervour of the summer sun stands an obelisk, evidently a public purchase. Yet, despite its unseemly pallor, it is not out of place, for the unstable earth has fallen away, proving it a very trivial thing. Its legend is certainly not the work of its mason:

The wind ever hums along the jagged flints where lies a leper uncontagious:

Time has shown. At the foot of the quiet, windy tower in the deeper grasses is the dust of ‘Elizabeth Page, Spinster':

One vault there is, stared upon by the attentive gargoyles of the tower. It is large and lichenous, and echoes the note of the bird in its depths.

One looks up abashed from reading, and far across the purple moors passes a visionary flock with bleatings and cloven tramplings.

A narrow mound of pebbles set in cement, as it were pearls in a brooch, has for its memorial a slab sunken in the wall:

This is the merry gallery of the grasshoppers; they laugh perpetually all day here from blade across to blade, and in the dark evening their cousin, a cricket, creaks prudently from the wall. Perhaps the following is of these three also:

It was by chance I came upon the ‘natural's' tomb, for his oval stone is matted with ivy. I had pursued a flight of magpies into the dense bushes, and so threw the sunlight on his mouldering inscription:

A long narrow stone had fallen a little asunder in an angle of the wall, and through its crevice bindweed (whose roots strike marvellously deep for so delicate a thing) has sprung up. It puts forth its pale blossoms upon weed, stalk, and stone.