 21 Spells. It was a busy day which followed. I restored Kissa to her parents in the morning, posed for several hours after lunch, and then was tracked down by Mrs. Penrose in her old-fashioned little Victoria, and borne off to tea. Mrs. Penrose is absurdly like William, with the same slightly sandy hair, in her case flecked with white, and the same fresh wholesome colour. Being the dearest, kindest, most dogmatic and conventional person on earth, her horror at my situation was great, and I softened as much as possible the recital of my adventures since I had been alone in the world. Who would have thought your father would have muddled his affair so, she exclaimed? You needn't flush up so, my dear. I don't mean anything against him. Only he was an unworldly babe. That's all he was, and you're just such another. You need a man to take care of you and protect you, my dear. William was saying so this morning. The dickens he was, I thought in dismay, but I was spared answering, as William himself came in at that moment for tea, and afterwards insisted on seeing me back to the culvers. After that first day, life settled down apparently quietly enough. I found the nature-vibrationists, consisted of Avadne and Ted, who were, so to speak, high priests, of Kissa Lanine, who was allowed to learn a little painting on condition she never worked from the nude, and of a child of sixty summers who shared the culvers' cottage, and who wore a poke bonnet on her snowy hair, and a tame marmoset on her shoulder. He was the curse of our lives, that marmoset, for he would get loose and shin up the trees in the carn where we worked. But then she gave us no peace till he was caught again. Also he ate our paints until one day when we pointed out to his owner a herd of those pinkish young pigs who are profusely freckled with blue in parts of their persons. That's the result of their having made too free with cobalt and go to hell Rosa, said Ted gravely. The German make of rose-matter we used had too hell Rosa inscribed on the tubes, hence the name by which I regret to say it was known amongst us. You wouldn't like Jacob to come out all over spots like that, would you? After that the child of sixty summers kept a stricter eye on her darling. But I think no one else was sorry when he overdid it on her flake white. Although we dutifully gave flowers for the funeral. However we were little better off, for she then started ring-doves, which cooed unceasingly till Ted threatened to come down in the night and cut them off at the ring. These two were discarded, for, as she told us, my dears I took Roderick shopping with me into Pencance the other day, and he misbehaved himself. How do you think he did? He laid an egg on the counter. Although I did not succumb to the methods of the nature-vibrationists, I did quite a crop of little pictures in the intervals opposing. For the latter occupation, attired in a Greek dress of white crepe and a mangy leopard skin from which Avodny had cut away the scalloped red flannel edge. I entwined myself in trees or poised, as though for flight, hand to ear, striving after the expression Ted demanded, which was to be of startled nymphhood mingled with Hellenic impersonality. He spent most of his time doing a series of little news for which the model, a peroxide blonde with the loveliest mouth in the world, a silly little chin and a supple figure, posed on a private strip of beach with, why I cannot imagine, her fiancée sitting on the rocks above as chaperone. Her name, not unhumorously, considering her profession, precluded the wearing of so much as a thread, was Cotton, Gladys Cotton, and we called her Glad Eyes. She was of that curious betwixt in between glass who seemed to err on the side of over-refinement. And though she talked to me a good deal, treating me to what I could not help feeling was a rather posé philosophy, it was not possible to make much of a comrade of her. Her chief characteristic just then was an aggressive purity of soul. She talked to me of her profession, telling me how a dear friend had advised her to adopt it. You see, Miss Lovell, she confided, he said to me, you have that beautiful innocence which wouldn't mind, and I thought that was so exquisite, don't you? I replied prosaically that I had never been able to understand the connection of the idea of indecency with the human body, and that I should assume think of having to control my thoughts before looking at the marble arch. This placid point of view seemed to annoy her, and I suppose it was to impress me with her superior delicacy that she, very inconsistently, refused to come bathing with Ted and William and myself. You do bathe, don't you? I asked in surprise. Thank you, Miss Lovell, she replied, I do bathe, but not mixed. The two people I saw most of away from work hours were Kissa and William. Kissa had elected to take for me what, in the schoolgirl parlance from which she was only just emancipated, she would have called a rave. I often went to tea with her on the windswept lawn of the bleak Marland vicarage, and always William turned up and saw me home. I saw twice when I caught Kissa's brown eye looking wistfully at him. I tried to shake him off, but there was a burl-like quality about William at times. Undoubtedly he liked me very much, and it roused a little demon of amusement in me to see how his disapproval of my way of life kept on fighting with what I was beginning regretfully to feel was his affection. And yet, was it regret and fear, I felt, supposing it were so. Ever since that night in Clonats, when for the first time in my wandering existence, the spell of a roof-tree and fireside had descended on me. My point of view had been changing. The life of a country house, that unique and English thing, was luring me. In itself seemed restful and oh so conducive to self-respect. Not only Clonats was attracting me, but even William, because of the life he could give me. He was not a rich man, only having enough to live quietly on his own land and have a chute and a fishing of country. But he would buy Clonats back for me if I asked him to. And I should watch the rotation of the crops with him year by year and become a cabbage myself. And what was there more peaceful, idyllic and wholesome than a cabbage? I let both William and myself drift. For the spell of that side of my inheritance, which till now had never been called into play, was on me. And all this time, what was Peter doing that I was so cut off from the old atmosphere, which letters would have succeeded in keeping up? He had only written to me once, quite at the beginning. I miss you very much, his letter ran, and London looks dreadfully itself again without you. It was good going about with you. I once saw a countryman in a smock frock at Ludgate Circus. Deep butterflies visit my fifth-floor window-boxes. A thrush used to sing in a square where I lived. And I have met sheep being driven down the strand. But a dryad on a motor-bus and me with her is a thing that never happened in London till you came there. I wore this letter in the breast pocket of my pajamas as an amulet for some time. But when no more followed it, I put it away in disgrace. I thought of Peter, his gay philosophy, his spits of black depression, and his unvarying grasp through both of some central fact. And I tried to catch some of his gift for seeing that inner soul, which he always declared fitted into and around everything, like air. But in vain. It was not for me to see the little kingdoms Peter bore about with him. For on me the spell of tangible things was strong just then. I tried to clear my mind by sleeping out, a proceeding more potent in that respect than most things I know of. The sleep itself is broken and little as to quantity. But it is exquisite in quality. One cannot have a bad dream out of doors. I slung a hammock between the only two suitable trees, which happened to be at the side of the mill-dam. The mill itself stood under the hill lower down. And I trained my subconscious mind to make me fall out on the field side of the hammock, instead of into the dam. It is no relief sleeping out of doors unless you undress and really go to bed. So I trailed out across the fields to my hammock every night, attired in the peach bloomers as Peter had dubbed them. With sheets and blankets and an apple in my arms. From the carne came the tremulous calling of the owls. Which has the plaintive melancholy of a distant reed-pipe. In a field near a horse would stamp and shake itself. Every now and then came the suspicious note of some farm dog. While sometimes, all down the valley, sounded the bark of a fox. Which is not a bark at all, but like nothing on earth, saved the collerage's line, woman wailing for her demon lover. I lay in my hammock and listened to the long-drawn olulations till they thrilled in my blood, and the leaves of the hazel-bushes beside the dam seemed to stir with the sighs from a lost soul. With the approach of dawn and the plop-plop of the tiny trout in the dam as they rose at the earliest flies, I would bait two or three fish-lines with which I poached and leave them there while I slipped on my big coat and went towel in hand down the valley to the cove. To do this I had to pass the culver's house, which stood in a narrow strip of garden raised some six feet above the road. And one morning, catching an unwanted gleam of white through their gate, I ran up the steps and looked over. At first I thought the German invasion must have come, and that I was looking on an impromptu field-hospital. For what met my gaze was a row of little beds all side by side. Then on their respective pillows I made out the shock-head of Ted and the very similar one appertaining to Abadney. The white locks looking strangely unreverent in their abandon of the child of sixty summers, the curls aggressively golden even in the dim grey dawn of Miss Gladys Cotton, and on a mattress beyond her the prim small head and unfinished chin of her fiancee, whose name was Albert and whose profession, when not on his holiday, was I should have guessed, that of sign in a big shop. Somehow they all looked very incongruous lying there. And I lent on the gate convulsed with silent mirth and wondered what would be the feelings of any well-brought-up tramp who had chance to have upon this scene. It was later in that day that I managed to get my own back on Gladys. She was telling me of what a delightful night they had all had. And didn't I think it was a beautiful thing to do? And wouldn't I bring my bed and join them? I knew Ted and Abadney to possess the most genuinely simple and charming minds on earth. But I was not so sure of the simplicity of Gladys. And I freely admitted to myself that my own objected to doing anything as intimate as getting into bed in front of any of them, let alone Albert. Sleeping out of doors is too good a thing to profane. Therefore I refused Miss Cotton's kind invitation. She opened her beautiful agate-colored eyes at me in a stare of protest. Oh, but you do sleep out, don't you?" she asked. Oh, yes, I replied sweetly. I do sleep out. But not mixed. End of Chapter XXI. Chapter XXII of the Milky Way The Milky Way by F. Tennyson Jesse Chapter XXII and Epitaph There was no mistaking William's intentions by the end of August, when my engagement with the Culver's ended also. Something, perhaps my aversion to anything settled indefinite, had made me avoid William of late and turned two-pointed conversations by force. But when he announced his intention of giving a dinner party, to which the Lanines, a few neighbors, and I were to be hidden, while all the world was to come to some sort of entertainment ending with a small dance afterwards. Then I felt the moment was at hand. My frock was a serious trouble to me, for the simple reason that I hadn't any. William wished me to let his mother give me one, but I refused. I didn't want William presented to me with a pound of tea, so to speak. Eventually I washed and ironed my white crepe Greek dress, girdling it with a silver cord. Evadny lent me some lovely misty old lace, to give it more of a truly gown look. And I painted my slippers with some silver paint Ted kept for doing halos with. Unexpectedly gallant, Ted went to Penzance that morning and brought me a pair of long white suede gloves and a bunch of roses, the kind that are so dark they have a velvety blackness on them. In the afternoon I went to a garden party and sale of work at the vicarage. William was too busy with his preparations to come. And I felt very lonely. Mrs. Lanine had for some time been a little distant towards me. The guests were all people who had known each other for years. And Kissa, though she was as sweet as ever, was pale and quiet. She was looking especially pretty, attired in pale blue, a Philistine color eye of whore, but in which she seemed charming. Her hat was too gray a blue for the more skyy nature of her frock. And as she exerted herself running about with cups of tea, her delicate little nose would have been the better for some powder. And yet both these things seemed an added charm because they showed how unsophisticated she was. I went away and watched her from behind a clump of dahlias. And the silly hot tears kept coming to my eyes. I hated myself because I had not let a sheltered life like she had. Because I wore my perpetual old silk shirt and the holland skirt I'd made myself. In short I felt I was young in years, but middle-aged in vice. And I grew very silly and unhappy, and worst of all self-pitying. Just the mood for which William's admiration and protectiveness would be the best sav. And then still behind my dahlia-bush I heard two women talking. Poor little Kissa said one. Anyone can see she's head over ears in love with him, and he's going to marry Miss Lovell, who hasn't a penny and has come from heaven nose-where. Oh, her family are very well known down here. I remember her father. Such a charming man, but quite mad. I'm sorry for Mrs. Lenine. Of course she'd always counted on young penrose for Kissa. The voices drifted away. I remained with burning cheeks in the heart that went thump, thump. So that was why Kissa looked so pale, why she was perpetually discussing love and marriage with me. I had never thought for an instant that she had more than the affection of a playmate for William, or I would have nipped him in the bud at once. All that I could do now was to go away and leave William to the one person who really would suit him. For infatuated as he was with me, it was Kissa's type which was his ideal, and to which, while never recognizing that she was of it, he was always unconsciously trying to fit me. In the long run all that William would want of his wife would be that she should never say, do or think, anything unconventional. Farewell to my dreams of Clonance, for though if I had been in love with William I should have gone straight for him and held him, yes and made him glad to be held against any one. I could not take him from Kissa when she cared, and I did not. I stayed behind my dahlia bush, staring at the sun-bleached lawn, with loneliness and resentment surging up within me. Against the steely purple clouds that often mass up in a blue sky, the church-tower, in full sunshine, with its one pinnacle cocked at the corner, showed a light gray-white. Beyond it the roll of the moors made a faint stain of hyacinth. Everything was in an extraordinarily high key. The shadows all light and soft. Even the black silk jet-trimmed best dresses of some of the parishioners looked, in the full sun, of a gray-green tone. The county was mostly in linen coats and skirts of last year's muslins. The few men were in flannels, and every one was talking and looking as though St. Annan's parochial party were the most absorbing function on earth, and St. Annan's vicarage garden, the only place bounded by an intent horizon. And I wished fiercely with all my heart that I could be one of them. I realized that the worst, the only penalty that I paid for a wandering and precarious existence, was that it made me feel different from other girls, girls brought up as Kissa had been, innocent and sheltered. I realized that what had always given me that little feeling of shyness with Kissa, which I had never acknowledged even to myself, was that I felt unfit to be her friend, that at the bottom of my heart I was aware that if Mr. and Mrs. Lanine knew all that I had seen and done, they might not like Kissa to make a friend of me. I had felt prickings of the same feeling before, as I have since, but never with the burning fierceness of that afternoon. Everything I ran out of the garden, down the empty village street, where the granite cottages glittered with a thousand little diamond-like facets in the sun, up the steps leading to the churchyard and so blindly to the dim, bare coolness of the church. There the bleakness and austerity of the place began to soothe me. And after a while I wandered out again, and rounding the church came into a wing of shade thrown by the angle of the transept. There a brass tablet led into the stone of the wall caught my eye, and I stood staring up at it for a minute without taking it in. For it was stained darkly with time and weather, and the lettering was uneven. There are moments in life when an external and apparently alien thing strikes at the heart, because the thing itself was conceived in a mood, or was the direct outflow of a feeling which finds kinship in oneself. The four lines I now read flashed on me with that quality of gleam, and stirred a something which was more a certain knowledge than hope, which I had not known was in me. The tablet bore the date 1721, and had been put up by my little ancestress to her husband, who had died at the age of eighty-five. It ran thus. Sleep here awhile, thou dearest part of me. In little while I'll come and sleep with thee. She died a year later, aged eighty. I repeated it over and over, and then I went across the moors to clonance with it like a song in my heart. I went along a windy ridge, level with the crests of a copse of ash and oak, all the leaves blown pale-side outwards as they fluttered from me on their yielding twigs. Over the gaps in the foliage I caught glimpses of that far distance which is of the blue of wood smoke. Before it lay miles of moorland, patched here and there with party-colored fields, and dappled with cloud shadows, spilled over it like purple wine stains. Then the copse ended and I came out on a wide sloping field, where the corn still lay heaped in little stooks. Before being built into the great cornish-arish-mose, and from it the dusty brown partridges word clamorously at my approach. All among the stubble wandered a long-stemmed polygonum, whose red leaves shaped like arrowheads glowed transparent as blood where the low-lying sun shone through them. To my left a little quarry, cut out of a streak of deeply orange soil, was scarped into great ribs where the ragwort lay in drifts like yellow stars. While from the floor of it clumps of smoke-blue borage, tipped with specks of flame-color seemed to puff upwards. Smoke and star-drift, hearth-fires and an answering sky, of such was the life the pearly lady and her husband must have led. For of such things was the soul homely enough, yet with the certainty of the future and the inner vision that Peter possessed, which had inspired that epitaph. And I had thought it possible to give up all hope of that, for safety with Harry. How long ago he seemed, or the right atmosphere with William. Because I never was able to believe in what is known as a great passion, the lauded thrill of being in love, I had thought the whole thing left me indifferent. Now in the pearly lady's epitaph I saw the other side. A protecting affection was in itself a passion. Because in year after year of intercourse and interchange it fused two people in one more completely than any transitory gleam of fervour, however on the heights that might be. And of all emotions, fusion of one self in another, that dearest part of one must be the most intense. Peter I guessed would have seen things somewhat differently. For him the heights were not mere projections of the imagination that never touched him personally. But I was not Peter, and could only walk by what light I had. And that it was a very lowly one, a mere beckoning spark from a distant hearth I might never reach. Was no reason why, now I had caught sight of it, I should ever be false to it again. Down the valley side to home I scrambled, intoning to a little no tune of my own. Sleep here awhile, thou dearest part of me. In little while I'll come and sleep with thee. CHAPTER XXIII As I sat beside William that night in the paneled dining-room at Boscarn, I realized that I should have to do something pretty violent to shock him out of his feeling for me. Way to go away in a noble self-sacrificing manner would be to have him after me. The unpleasant task must be mine of shocking his amorapropra into Kissa's keeping. I looked about me at the portraits mediocre in themselves, valuable to the penroses as relics of their kin, at the old silver on which the candlelight sparkled, at Kissa looking so absolutely right in her romney muslin frock and blue sash, with pearls in her soft hair. And I realized that the spell which had been on me, drawing me to this kind of life, had lost its grip. Do spells have a grip, I wonder? I have always pictured them as long-waving whitenesses with sinuous fingers, breathing out of a cauldron, or off a fairy ring on a hillside. I want you to come and see the orchids with me before everyone begins to arrive, murmured William in my ear after dinner. Why not, he added, as I shook my head. I explained I hated sitting round in conservatories and that sort of thing. A pleased and somewhat fatuous smile dawned on his face. I'm so glad nothing has spoiled you, Viv, he said. Many girls leading your life. He paused. Well, what, said I, on the defensive? Well, wouldn't be so particular about the kind of thing you mean. Of course you must meet Cads who'd like to sit out in conservatories with you, and who wouldn't mean anything except to flirt with you. But you know I don't mean I've never come across the kind of person you mention, I flared, forgetting in my temper, that I was saying the wrong thing for the role I meant to adopt. I'm not the sort of girl who gets kissed in conservatories. Darling, I beg your pardon. It slipped out. But I mean it. I know you're not. That's just what I'm saying. That sort of life hasn't touched you. There's nothing about you a man wouldn't want in his wife. Viv, I must tell you that. William, your tie is crooked, and it gives you such a squiffy appearance, I interrupted. A look of pain at my tactlessness and the slangy expression I used crossed his face, but his hand flew to his tie and his gaze to a mirror, and I slipped away. Soon after all the world began to arrive. And I attached myself to a botany and ted. Till William, as master of the ceremonies, drove us all on to the lawn, on which rows of chairs were arranged, and across the far end of which a pair of curtains hung. I saw glad eyes amongst the audience, evidently in the mood of girlish modesty she assumed with her clothes, for she was in one of those light half-hearted frocks, that are neither high nor low, neither bond nor free. I don't mean that glad eyes was immodest when out of her garments she wasn't. Only she couldn't be natural about it, any more than I thought she could be about anything else. In which last supposition I proved wrong. I noticed she was placed at the back with the servants, a position I feared she would find insulting. But there again I was wrong. She was happier when able to imagine people asking, who was that wonderfully elegant girl, than she would have been had she looked out of place in not such a pleasing manner among her superiors. I found myself sat down beside William, in the unenviable publicity of the front row, and whispered, What's going to happen? It's a troupe of performers who've just come down to Penzance, whispered William back again. They've made rather a hit at Falmouth. They call themselves the Odds and Ends. Behind the curtains someone tuned a fiddle, and then began to play, a light-lilting thing I had never heard before. The curtains rattled asunder, and there was presented to our days, against a background of trees, and illuminated by fairy lights and Chinese lanterns hanging from the bowels, and a row of footlights in front, the company of the Odds and Ends. After the first moment of incredulity I only saw the one who was playing the fiddle. And he was Peter. He looked straight at me from under the pale locks matted over his browner forehead and fair-flaunting eyebrows. He was dressed as to the upper part in fleshings, a trail of ivy being as a concession to the feelings of the audience, artfully disposed across his chest. From the waist downwards he had achieved a triumph in goat-skin breeches, and his hoofs were miracles of cardboard. His ears, always crusted at the tip, were added to by spirals of wax, and he wagged them at me in time to the music, in a way he knew I'd detested. Then he stepped forward and made a little speech. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, allow me to present to you, as their spokesman, the company of Odds and Ends. We are the leftovers of the world. The rest of the time of the great God Pan, obliged to exploit ourselves for a living. I am, as you see, a fawn. Here is the last of the mermaids in the water-type pram. The pram was a tank on wheels, over one end of which drooped the sea-lady's tail, while at the other appeared her pale face and weed-bound hair. The face and hair of Chloe. She looked lovely in a sleek half-drowned way suitable to her role, though very different from her usual type. Here continued Peter is a troubadour who will sing old minstrel songs to you. And here is our centaur, whose name is Algernon Lackward. This is not, as you might suppose, one of the players from Chanticleur, but the phoenix rising from the ashes of a misspent life. This india-rubbery-looking individual is a changeling, while the last of all is the original black cat belonging to the witch of Endor. I must apologize for the absence of our dryad. But she missed the train at Falmouth. I hope she caught a later one and will be here in time to give a dance. By now I had pulled myself together a trifle and recognized the changeling, an easy task, for she was tired in dark tights as she was want to be at Haggis, though a skull-cap rather like a harlequin's was spitted over her head. In the troubadour, in spite of a long red wig, I recognized to my intense surprise Edgar Murdoch. I was at a loss to identify the centaur, who was constructed in the best pantomime manner of two individuals who formed his front and his back half respectively. In the phoenix a bunchy kind of bird covered with bronze feathers and reposing, apparently asleep, in a wicker-worked nest, I, to my horror, recognized Little John. Luckily the night was warm and she appeared to be sleeping through the proceedings with her usual sang-fois. The witch of Endor's cat was, of course, the nelephant. I wondered very much whom the dryad Peter had referred to might be. His little speech concluded, he bowed and retreated, and the performance began. The centaur's jig was a marvel of ingenuity. To see his fore and his hind legs, setting to each other as to partners, was very pleasant. After that, being a centaur of literally many parts, he picked up the vial in and began to play. I recognized the air at once. It was Bruno's setting of Catullo Mandez's exquisite song Le Roe Vagabond, and Peter stepped forward to sing it. In his sweet, though not very powerful baritone, the gay pathetic words fell on my ears with added meaning, and I buried my fingers in my bunch of roses. Chaman V. Parle Chaman Le Roe Lan sang Peter, and I thought of how I had purposed leaving him to tramp along those roads without me, who had called myself his friend. Chédon Mancourt Fleury Chante Rossignol Chante Sigerie Chédon Mancourt Jolie Lirely Mamilla I felt the old lilt waking in my blood. I raised my head and met Peter's eyes. He flung back his head triumphantly as he drew to the end of the song, when the vagabond, robbed of his toise cou, and with no more bread, still sings that Chédon Mancourt Fleury Chante Rossignol Chante Sigerie Chédon Mancourt Jolie Lirely Mamilla Oh what a mistake I had been on the point of making. To imagine I could ever settle down to the audience, like these well-fed people round me, who applauded in a patronizing way. I felt doubly an impostor as I sat there, for I knew I was on the wrong side of the footlights. I heard Peter speaking again. He had a telegram in his hand. I am sorry to say this is from the dryad announcing that the train, when she did catch it, took her to the wrong place. Is there any dryad in disguise among the audience who would be kind enough to give us a dance instead? I stood up, and William's hand flew to my arm. Viv, Viv, sit down. What are you doing? He whispered. It's no good, William. Let me go. You can't stop me. I must go. And I slipped from his irresolute grasp and threw the curtains. There Peter was waiting me. Do you want to break away, Viv? He asked, if not say the word, and I'll go. But I couldn't help thinking it might be a case of saving your soul alive. It is? Come and do a fawn and nymph dance with me. Those slippers won't do. I kicked them off and threw my silk stockings after them, and the next moment I was dancing on to the grassy stage. After the first few moments I ceased to see William's hurt and angry face and forgot everything except that I was a dryad again, free and uncaught, dancing for joy of the cool grass against my baritose. Then at sound of questing hoof I darted behind a tree and Peter pranced on, and panpipes to his mouth began to play cunningly. I peeped round my tree, put out a foot, hesitated, finally fell under the spell of the music and danced into the open. Wilder and wilder grew the music. More and more it urged the dryad, till her almost exhausted breath beat in her throat like a bird, and she sank on the turf. The fawn sprang forward and scattered red roses over her, then swept her up into his arms and ran towards the trees. In a moment I was myself again, and breaking free I ran off and away. On and on with my frock turned up over my shoulders like a cape I ran, through the gate at the end of the plantation, across a strip of moorland, where I splashed into little pools, not slowing down till I was in the carn. I still broke into little runs, crushing the slippery brittle toadstools and sinking into the drifts of dead leaves that made a noise like surf as I plunged through them. The moon shining through the branches flung a net of shadows over the floor of the wood, and the gleams of light ran up over and over me as I went like the ripples of a tide. Not until I was out on the rutted track leading to the manor did I feel tired. And then I knew my feet hurt me, and that I wanted to lie down. And I went to bed as I was, and slept soundly. The sun was just rising when I woke and went downstairs to the hall. A fire was burning on the hearth, and by it set feeder, still in fawns attire. I do want some breakfast, don't you?" he said. I did. Come, and I'll show you where to draw water, I replied, and I led the way to the well. The water's full of black slugs with yellow frills, I explained, so you must be careful not to let them get into the kettle, as they're apt to stick in the spout, which they fit as a banana does its skin. We filled the kettle, and then, girdling my gown round my hips with the silver cord, I took the pail from the well and bore it to a field nearby. There with many blandishments I approached a cow, and inserting myself and my pail beneath her proceeded to steal her milk. I knew where a hen from a neighboring farm was laying astray, and I went to her hedge-hidden haunt and drew out three warm-brown eggs. A large forlorn mushroom I found on my way back was added to the other provisions, and then Peter and I had the best breakfast ever eaten, all cooked in relays in an old kettle without a lid. When we had finished we broke our eggshells so as to harbour no evil spirits, and emptied the remains of the milk over my ancestral threshold as a libation to the gods. And I told him all about everything, and as nearly as was possible for a man, he understood. We can catch the early train from Penzant's if we can find something to drive us in, he said, pulling the watch out of the recesses of his goat-skin. I told the others to wait for us on the platform. Tell me, Peter, why didn't you write? Because I saw a chance of coming down here just when your engagement with the culvers was up. I didn't think of your engagement with anyone else being on, he added slyly. And who are the others? I saw Chloe and the changeling, and Edgar Murdock and Little John, who had no business to be up so late. It was such a mild night. The centaur was Joe and her young man. What young man? This is something new. Peter, is it serious? How thrilled I am. Very serious. His name is Charles G. Chetwind, and they're engaged. What's he? Oh, a sort of man about town, but a ripping good chap. We call him the man about, for short. Joe calls him Chaz. She's training him. So I should imagine. Which half was he? Front, I suppose, or I should have recognized Joe's face. Yes, and he said it augured well for their married life, that he should be the head. But Joe said that, to use a very vulgar expression. It showed that she would wear the breeches. Peter, I said thoughtfully. Who was the dryad who missed the train at Falmouth? Oh, replied Peter with a grin. She was in the nature of a decoy duck. Her name I should fancy would be Mrs. Harris. Now I think you'd better begin to get ready. I wrote a note to William and his mother, and another to Abadney. Left my borrowed flumes on the bed, threw my own belongings into a bag, and then went down again to the hall, where I paused to say farewell to the pearly lady. Then we went to the neighboring farm, caught the pony and led it into the yard, where the farm dog came cringing out to us with wagging tail but curled back lip. There was no one about. Apparently everyone was busy with the cows. So we put in the pony, chalked a message on the door of the cart shed, and drove off through the fragrance of the early morning to Pensant's. Along the cave we went, where hundreds of little pointed waves sparkling in the sun rose and fell incessantly, each always in the same place, so that the little boats nudged each other and ripples of light flickered over their white painted sides. We found a boy to whom we confided the return of the pony and cart, and at a little cottage bought a big bunch of dew-wet roses as a farewell present for the farmer's wife. Then Peter and I ran on to the station. Jadon, Monke, Fleury, Chanta, Rossignol, Chanta, Siegerie, Jadon, Monke, Jolie, Lirely, Mamie, Hummed, Peter, and hand in hand we went to the tune of it. CHAPTER XXIV Peter fled straight to the waiting room to change behind a dusty palm while I leapt screaming down the platform, and after my physical absence and my more serious mental deflection was once more hugged by Little John and the changeling, Joe and Chloe, I even tried to embrace the nelephant but ever charry of caresses she merely shrieked with rage. Then I became aware of a stranger looming by the luggage, and Joe now dragged him towards me. This is Charles G. Chetwind, and we're engaged, she said. And I am going to be a bromide and say I hope you'll like each other, since you're both friends of mine. But he really is rather nice, Viv. The man about was a youngish in the thirties. His hair was very sleek and beautifully brushed back, his moustache very crisp, and his Harris-Tweed suit, of the color of Devonshire Earth, just matched his eyes. He was one of those men who give you the impression of being thoroughly nice, which he was. The only kink in him was claimed by his nose, which had a humorous twist to one side. And I have heard that all his relations put down what they call poor dear Charles eccentricities to that twist in his nose. He gets it from his poor mother, they would add, murmuring bohemian blood, as though it were the kind of thing that broke out in a moral eczema. The man about's mother, I may mention, I have since had the joy of meeting. And she is a sort of whimsical, placid, delightfully naughty old lady, who would shock poor Mrs. Penrose out of her well-preserved skin. I bore Joe off on the pretext of hunting for a carriage, and burst forth with questions. Do tell me all about it. You are a dark horse, Joe. Tell me when, where, how, and why? I've known him from my youth up, began Joe, obediently. But I couldn't bring myself to marry a soldier. He is really awfully good at painting for an amateur. Only he's never had the chance to study, owing to the misfortune of being an elder son. But now he's the head of the family, and will no longer have to trail about with his regiment. So I said I'd think about it. Doesn't it all sound calculating? But there's a little thing I forgot to mention. And that? Oh, well, I'm what I suppose one would call in love with him, said Joe. And her round, even-colored face became a deep, thick red. We shall be awfully poor, according to his way of thinking, because he has two sisters to bring out, and an aged parent to support in the Dower House. Only as a matter of fact they are all going on living in the big house for the first year, because Charles and I want to travel. Here the man about himself retrieved us from the far end of the station, where we had wandered and packed us into a carriage. First class, said Joe, reprovingly. Chas, have you dared to have our tickets accessed? If you think I'm going to let you travel third while I'm with you, you're mistaken, replied the man about. I am far too fond of my own creature comforts. Josie, sure you wouldn't like a cup of coffee? Your feet aren't cold? To hear our manly Joe called Josie, and asked if her feet were cold. I think in that moment I realized I'd always been a bit selfish towards Joe. She was such a tower of strength in her quiet, humorous, apparently lazy way, that one had drifted into a state of mind about her, which had never allowed for her having a life of her own. I looked round the carriage. In one corner sat the changeling, in her arms little John, who was sucking rather obtrusively at her bottle. But Chloe was curled up, giving the nelephant out of the palm of her hand, milk stolen from little John. Peter, attired in an old flannel suit, his fondship under his arm in a bundle, was coming up the platform. All the odds and ends were assembled, saving Edgar Murdoch. I could almost believe I had dreamt him. At the troubadour I asked. Poor boy, said Joe. He's coming, I hope. Go into the corridor, Chaz. You mustn't hear this. It's not my secret. I can't think why he's so late. His mother died, and he made his way to the Hencoupe to find you. However, when I saw what a loose end he was at, I told him I knew the whole story, and I really think he was enormously relieved. He said he could never be honest, unless somebody knew enough to make him. So he stayed with Peter while the farmland was being sold, and we saw him dispatch the money to pay all his debts. He's got a couple of hundred left over, and is thinking of emigrating, and do you know, Viv, I think it's the best thing he could do. I know he won't run straight for long here. But he wouldn't go till he'd seen you again. He thinks the world of you. Here's Peter. I say Peter, have you seen Edgar Murdoch anywhere? Edgar, and more than Edgar, is now approaching, replied Peter. More than? What do you mean? I asked, and sticking my head out of the window. I saw, to my surprise, Gladys Cotton hanging on Edgar's arm, and mopping at her eyes with a pale pink handkerchief. At sight of me she started to run towards me, then halted, and jumping out I went to meet her. Why, what's the matter, Gladys? I asked anxiously. Have you come with a message? There's nothing wrong with any one, is there? Only with me, sobbed Gladys. Please go on ahead, Mr. Murdoch. You've been most kind, I'm sure. Oh, Miss Lovell, please I must come with you. You've got my baby. Oh, oh, oh! And the handkerchief flew up again. Your baby, I echoed, with, as I recognized, a version in my voice. Or something told me she was speaking the truth. And in a flash I knew what the withdrawal of my little John would mean to me. Yes, my baby, can a mother, and here without being unkind, I think I may say Gladys began to enjoy her role. Can a mother be mistaken in the child she bore? Never, Miss Lovell. Last night, after you'd gone and the party began to break up, and everyone was thinking your behavior so peculiar, if you'll excuse my saying so. Yes, yes, go on. Well I went up to talk to the performers, because it did seem so funny you knowing them, I mean. Never mind about me, do go on. And then something in the turn of the baby's head caught my eye. And I went and took her up, and she was my Lucy. Gladys sobbed afresh, and I found myself idiotically enough, thinking how inappropriate Lucy seemed as a name for my little John. I don't see that you can be sure, I began. Nor did I at first, Miss Lovell. But then I asked questions, and Mr. Murdock began to say how you'd got her off a ship that was sinking, and the big young lady came along and shut him up. But then I knew, because you see it was me who was on the sailing ship. And when we struck I made sure we were going down, because you always think a steamer's bound to come out best, don't you? And I saw you standing there, and I'd just dropped baby down to you, shrieking, London, meaning to say, if I wasn't drowned, I'd meet you and baby there. And why didn't you, said I sternly. I—oh, don't despise me. But you see I was coming back from Brittany. I'd been ill there. Lucy was born there. Yes? I'd been sitting to the gentleman who's Lucy's father, for he's a gentleman right enough. And Lucy came, and I was very ill, and after I was better he seemed to like me again, and made me sit with Lucy for a virgin and child. And I found that that was all he wanted. When he'd finished that picture he gave me some money and said Brittany was played out and went away. So I came back to London, meaning to face the world honest, in spite of baby. But then, after you'd taken her, and I knew she was safe, well it seemed a providence. And it was a good thing, for her own sake I threw Lucy down to you, because we were driven ashore, and clung for five hours to the rigging soaked through. She'd have caught her death. But I don't understand, said I in bewilderment, how you could not want to have your own baby. The gentlemen and I weren't married, Miss Lovell. And I dreaded facing every one I knew in London so. But now I don't care. I've left Albert and everything, and him getting three pounds of week already. I must have Lucy. In the last words every shred of pose fell away from glad eyes. She spoke fiercely, and her fingers tightened on my arm. Go along to that carriage, said I. You'll find her there. I'll get your ticket. I just waited to see with a dreadful jealous pang at my heart, glad eyes snatching up little John and covering her with kisses. That child I am glad to say lived up to my opinion of her legacity, by breaking into a wail. Don't cry, my lamb. Mother's got you, coot glad eyes. Mother got her so suddenly it made her cry, observed Peter. Then he pursued me to the booking office, and there, as the storybooks say, I told him all. He whistled long and low. I jove another addition to your menage, Viv, he said rather ruefully, and I'd already added Murdoch to it in your absence. You know, it won't be nearly as nice if you've too many people hanging on to you. They don't hang, and glad eyes will be self-supporting, and Edgars a blooming millionaire compared with us. I wasn't thinking of ways and means. Hello! They seem to be getting up steam. Even this train must make up its mind to leave some time, I suppose, though it seems a most casual function. Get in here and we'll walk along the corridor. Oh, Viv, even if you collect whole orphanages and homes for inebriates round you, it's jolly good to have you again. And so it is to have you. I can't think how I could have ever thought of, well, never mind. But oh, Peter, I wish you could always be with me to prevent me losing grip of the things that matter. Other things influence me so, and I lose directness of vision somehow. You've got directness of vision right enough. In a way, but it's not a sort of x-ray vision like yours is. We were at our own carriage by now. Glad eyes, her nose once more nicely powdered, and the traces of tears almost gone from her pretty golden eyes, was bending over little John. For a long moment I stood looking in, sick and shaken, with a jealousy I had not suspected. I loved Joe and Chloe and Peter, it was true. Yet not as I had loved little John. For they could all look after themselves more or less. But little John had been dependent on my protection. And there is no sensation in the world as satisfying as protecting what one loves. Little John had taught me that much. I stepped into the carriage, and glad eyes, looking up, gave a little start. Oh, Miss Lovell, she said. I've been telling your friends all about it, and they think it's so romantic. About the wreck I mean, and me being left a widow in a foreign land. A widow, I exclaimed, in tactless surprise. Oh, yes, didn't I tell you Mr. Gray was dead? But there, I suppose you've hardly realized yet even that my name is Mrs. Gray, said glad-eyes Cotton. CHAPTER XXV PAN at Covent Garden From Cornwall Peter went back to his attic, and while Chloe, the two pensioners and I, all lived together at the Hencoupe, Joe went away to spend September with the Manabout's people, and only came back at the end of the month. The changeling was very useful in the house, but there was no pretending that Little John did anything for her keep. Or I either bought a matter of that, beyond saving Joe and Chloe the expense of a model. Glad-eyes was in regular work again, and called to take Little John for an airing every Sunday. Peter began to sell an occasional story, but no luck came my way, and the thought that I was living on Joe and Chloe became unbearable. And they must be sick of my face and my altogether by now, I said mournfully to Peter. They must know it all by heart. By heart is just how I know your face, answered Peter. As to your birthday suit, I only know that from pictures they've done of you. But I'm sure it's beautiful, because all your lines are right, and the way you're put together. The great thing is to belong in the leg. And I'm simply all leg, but no amount of leg helps me to get a living, since I'm not a dancer or a chorus girl. And I know Joe is wanting to save for her true so, to say nothing of being in debt for the clothes she had to have when she went to stay with the man about's people. If a quid's any good to you, I've just got that for an article. You know I loathe borrowing, I said pettishly, and very ungratefully. Besides, I added, you must want that quid, because you haven't sold anything since the sonnet. I haven't written anything the last week or so. I've tried to, but nothing came. And at last I just sat at my window and watched the sky go by. We must both try and find some settled job, Viv. We tried. Peter obtained some circulars to address, and did so many thousands that he vowed it was enough to turn a nigger white, and he should never look at a circular without a feeling of respect again. Nothing at all rewarded my efforts. Because I never like deliberately to plan anything. As it seems trying to cheat chants, who is nearly always a good friend if one trusts him. Therefore I never would advertise, but preferred to wait for a leading, as old-fashioned people say. One gray day we were walking rather mournfully along, when at the street corner I saw a blaze of splendid fire-color. The masked chrysanthemums, which were the stock in trade of the stout red-faced flora who graced the pavement. I spent one of my last six pence on a bunch, then, burying my nose in it, drew in a deep breath of that smell which is like nothing else but the smell of earth after rain. With it I drew inspiration. Peter, flowers, I said. We'll sell flowers. What an ideal occupation! Peter caught fire at once. Of course he cried. I must have had no soul not to have thought of it myself. And I've been so sick with London lately, I might have known it was traffic with something of the country I needed. I'll go to Covent Garden tomorrow morning and lay in a stock. One may catch a glimpse of the country's spirit there, who knows. Perhaps even a flash of pan's hoof. Will you come, too? I'll come, but I'm not sure it would be wise of us both to sell flowers. Not too close together, anyway, I said. That's true, and I shouldn't like you to be doing anything like that out of sight of me. At this moment we came level to a pavement artist, a ragged, seedy-looking individual, his open cap beside him agape for pennies. I threw one in on the principle of supporting a brother of a brush. And with that came the second inspiration. I'll be a pavement artist, I said, and you shall sell flowers alongside of me. So it was settled, and I laid out my remaining capital on chocks, and then called in at the nearest police station and made all inquiries of a very charming and fatherly policeman who refused to believe that I was not either doing it for a bet or to benefit the suffragist cause. I found out that no license was necessary, and obtained besides advice as to a likely pitch. I finally settled on a stretch of pavement outside Kensington Gardens, as I thought the trees might help me. Peter saw me back to the studio, and there over our evening cocoa I confided the plan to Joe and Chloe. Joe is the biggest girl I have ever seen, five feet ten in height, and as she began to raise herself up from the floor, fold upon fold, I thought she would never end, and told her so. Ah! said she, looming over me. You may laugh, but I assure you, if you were as brawny a female as I, then perhaps your plan mightn't be so mad. But a little bit of a thing like you, who couldn't say bow to a policeman, why it's absurd. You'd get a crowd round you, and they might be rude, and then you know you'd be utterly miserable. It's out of the question. Here Chloe chimed in. Joe is quite right, she said. It's madness. You're far too pretty for that kind of thing. I'm not pretty at all, beyond a pair of saucer eyes and a chin that has an amusing little point. But you can't call that strictly beautiful. No one whose pale and has straight, mousy hair can be pretty. If I were you, I admit, I would think twice about it. And anyway, nothing else has turned up, and I can draw if I can do nothing else. And so pavement artistry it will have to be, and do be sporting and cheer me up instead of scolding. They relented enough to take an interest in what I was to wear. And the property box was brought into use again. For my burberry and tweed skirt, shabby though they were, still looked too much the right thing to be suitable. Finally we settled on a soft old blue flannel shirt, open at the throat, a darker blue skirt that was literally in tatters and an enormous black woolen shawl. Soon after four o'clock the next morning Peter called for me, and attired in these garments, with the addition of Peter's cap, I sallied forth to help him buy his flowers at Covent Garden. Joe, in a voluminous dressing gown, made us tea and saw us off. He was very amiable, but resisted alike our entreaties that she should come too. And our taunt set her lack of sporting spirit. It was at five o'clock that Peter and I approached the market. A violet sky hung to the roof crests. Such an ineffable violet, deep and soft, as was more suggestive of Greece than England. Along the street the electric lamps strung a line of white glowing spheres, and we neared each one with our shadows lying behind us. Then as we passed it our shadows gathered themselves together like animals before they spring, and hurled themselves ahead of us, only to shorten and fall behind again as we approached the next globe of light. Joe, guarded by our shadows, that seemed to weave a fairy web as they sprang shuttle-like back and forth, we neared the market. A pang struck me at first glimpse. The place looked so uncountrified, so like a great set-piece on the stage. Knight has a way of making shapes or get their substance and their color, but here the fierce glares intensified both. Shadows fought for bare existence under bewildering cross-lights, and the marketplace seemed a well of life and color set in neutral gray, as a pool of vivid sea-weeds and anemones may lie in a dark expanse of rock. We paused a moment in the side street before entering the market. Near us was a row of emptied carts, whose vermilion shafts were up-reared. The shadows of their wheels lying like giant spiderwebs upon the road. The unharnessed horses had the air of standing about wherever they had been left, with hanging heads and the steam softly curling from their nostrils. The sides of the white horses were streaked and matted into dark points with sweat, and on the wet flanks of the bays the blue light of nascent dawn reflected wanly. From the market came a conflict of sounds. Men's voices, the metallic scrape of struggling hoofs on the cobbles, the grind of iron-rimmed wheels against a curve, the buds of crates set down, and occasionally the harsh roar suggesting the long backwash of pebbles on the beach, made by a van driving thunderously out of the yard. We stayed fascinated for a moment or two, then went on into the market. There two lights were fighting for mastery. The yellow of the paraffin flares that threw intensely blue shadows, and the cold light of dawn that was as blue as ice. The whole effect was to steep the place in blueness, so that one felt as though walking in the depths of the sea. We passed stacked turnips that showed like luminous fairy things, each reflecting pearl-like, the glare of the lamps. But each with an astonishingly blue crescent of shadow on its undercurve. While further on, the glossy leaves of piled cabbages reflected the slowly pailing sky in steely shimmers. Peter gripped my arm. "'Isn't it gorgeous?' "'Oh, isn't it gorgeous?' he said. "'Look at that woman passing now. That great fat red woman. She doesn't seem to be enjoying it a bit. She looks as impassive as a sphinx. But look at that box of nickel-mess daisies on her head. They're as fine as mist, and they're shaking like ballet-girls' skirts. Yes, it's splendid. But oh, Peter, look!' Some quickening of movement, a tense little feeling of interest in the people round, had made me turn, and Peter's eyes followed my pointing finger. There running past a lighted stall, heads down in slippered feet flashing, went three dancers from the covent garden ball. The middle figure was a man, with a dark overcoat over his evening dress, the nearer girl wore a vivid scarlet cloak, and the further one showed a fringe of flesh-pink skirt under her black domino. Something attracted their notice, and for a moment they stopped as unpoised wings. She of the vermillion domino hung backward on the man's arm, while he paused, laughing and irresolute, and the further girl remained bent forward in the attitude of running, so that the three of them were opened out like a fan. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life. There was something of the Hellenic spirit about the three, not merely in their gay carelessness, but in the arrested swing of their limbs and garments, the music of graceful action crystallized as in some sculptured frieze. So they stayed for a fleeting moment, the black and vermillion of their fluttered draperies, dark against the yellow light, yet keeping a subdued vividness, and then action was caught up again where it had been arrested. Swaying skirts and outward poised feet swept forward in a harmony of curves, and with a gust of laughter the dancers ran on and vanished. Oh, Peter, I said, oh, Peter! I had caught his hand, and we laughed aloud for sheer joy in what we had seen. Then I remembered that in practical matters I had to be the man of the party, and I frowned sternly. Business, Peter, business, said I. We must now buy your flowers. We laid out the money with care, mostly on chrysanthemums, choosing only those that went well together, from flaming yellow through the rosy, fire-colored ones, to the deep copper red. And then we wandered about for a little longer in a trance of pleasure, while the dusky sky paled first to amethyst, then to a bleached whiteness that crept up like a tide, showing the draggled flower heads and cabbage leaves trodden into the muddy ground, simmering paly on the roofs of vans, on the upper curves of wheels, and on the metal handles of hundreds of baskets, intensifying the black and white of a couple of nuns who were buying sheaves of pearly honesty. The dawn had come, but with no effect of sunrise, no warmth in the pallid sky showed where behind the houses the sun was hid. Rather this bleak, diffused light seemed shed with dispassionate equality. Only on the pavement some careless splashes of orange sand looked so like the reflections from some strong glow, that we both glanced involuntarily upwards, then laughed over the wish that on a gray day we could go through the city, scattering patches of orange sand on the pavements. Slowly we circled the market, our arms full of flowers, meeting curious faces, insolent faces, kindly faces, but nowhere a face with that woodland look which is the best of all. At the last corner we came on a flower girl who was sorting her bunches of chrysanthemums, while her baby, folded in a shawl, was laid on a barrow near her. A reddish sun had swum up into the watery sky and was piercing it with tentative yellow, and a tremulous gleam appeared on the baby's shawl, then grew suddenly definite and the cast shadows leapt into being. The baby opened his eyes and caught sight of a flicker of sun gilding the shawl fringe. Slowly an answering gleam dawned in his look and he dabbed at it with an uncertain little fist. I tossed him one of the yellow flowers I carried, and rolling his round elfin head towards it he gurgled into its petals, doubtless as I informed Peter, exchanging confidences with it. Here at last we had caught a gleam of the pan spirit, instinctive and unself-conscious. It's a fawn baby, Peter, I said, and added, shall it be the first picture I draw on the pavement? Add a feeding-bottle and write, abandoned, nobody loves me underneath, and you'll make a fortune, suggested Peter cynically. We breakfasted at a coffee-stall, and then walked through the park to Kensington, and there my nerve failed me. I can't sit and draw in such a populated place as this, Peter, I wailed. I simply can't. You stay here, and I'll go to a side street. Nonsense! Of course I shall come, too. Let's look for a quiet, self-contained street with gas and H&C. At last we settled ourselves in a charming Georgian street, on a strip of pavement backed by a garden wall. And I took out my chalks and set to work. I had decided to do a whole series called A Day in the Life of a Fawn, and I began by showing him wriggling out of one of those great vegetable baskets that look like lobster pots. I made him slim and brown and gave him piebald fur on his goat's legs. As a background I suggested a corner of the market, with the domes showing slate-colored against the amethyst sky, as I had seen it that morning, and the blue light on the cabbages. In the next picture my little fawn was peeping into the door of a reach-me-down shop, and slyly tweaking at a pair of check-breeches. Next he was seen wearing them, also a knitted jersey and a pair of shoes, while he played on a flute by the steps of Piccadilly Fountain. The fat flower-sellers in their hard straw hats were craning their faces in his direction, and a man who looked something in the with splendid white chalk shines on his black chalked topper and boots had stopped to listen. Peter greatly excited abandoned his flowers to suggest the next picture, which showed the fawn tripping down the steps of the fountain, still piping and a crowd of people following. The top-headed man with a chrysanthemum stuck behind his ear, and an errand-boy, a fashionably clad lady kicking her high-heeled shoes off for better progress, and a policeman dancing as he went, making believe to play upon his truncheon. Then came a somewhat futuristic picture, showing in a rush of lines and blurred colors the speed to which the whole procession attained. Peter played the smoke and chimneys of London Town, while ahead tripped the fawn, his horns flashing in the light of the evening sun. Finally the last two flagstones showed, first, a group of dishevelled, breathless people sitting on a wide heath in the twilight gazing at each other in an ecstasy of delirious amazement. A pair of check-breaches, a jersey, and some shoes lying before them as the only relics of their mad guide. While the second depicted the fawn, his strenuous day at an end, sitting with crossed legs on a hill-crest dark against the rising moon to which he piped. CHAPTER 26 WE LEAP SCREAMING By the time this masterpiece was achieved the sun was high in the heavens and my chalks were worn to mere stumps that hurt my fingertips to use. The crowd, threatened by Joe, began mysteriously to collect out of the blue, and pennies showered into my expectant cap. A good many people spoke to me, and I answered them in broadest carnage. There happened to be no one standing at gaze when a door in the wall opened and an elderly man, his portly form outlined in a white waistcoat, stepped on to the pavement. He came along it, then caught sight of my picture-gallery and stopped abruptly. Is that your own work, he asked? Yes, faith for sure, said I. Then he began to cross-examine me. Where had I learned to draw, how old was I? Why was I doing it? What had I thought of the theme myself, to all of which I answered truthfully, still in cornish? It was while the old gentleman stood gazing and wrapping out his questions that I first noticed a very peculiar couple drifting up the street on the opposite side. At least one of the persons drifted, the other and smaller, seemed to be trying to guide her along. The old gentleman saw my fixed gaze and turned to, and he, Peter and I, stared at the newcomers. Forgetting my dialect, I clutched Peter by the arm and declared, Peter, that's either a man in disguise or a lunatic. For the bigger of the two creatures advancing was indeed large beyond the dreams of avarice, and walked with an extraordinary rolling kind of gait. She, if she it were, was attired in clothes far too small for her generous proportions. On her head, where the hair was sleek down so tightly as to appear a wig, was perched a rusty and wholly inadequate crepe bonnet. Enormous blue spectacles, with side-pieces of glass, were astride her nose, which latter features stared triumphantly through a hole in the blue-gauze veil that covered her face. In her arms she carried, as though it were, a baby, a bunch of magenta asters, which she rocked to and fro in time with her undulating gait. The little gray-haired person with her also wore spectacles, but of untinted glass, and her attention seemed divided between her companion and a hunch of brown bread at which she was gnawing. A schoolgirl with her books was walking down the pavement. She of the goggles pranced up to her and, shaking magenta asters, leaned forward and glared into the girl's face. With one yell, the girl dropped her books and ran. The peculiar couple then began to cross the road in our direction, and at that moment a policeman appeared round a corner of the road. For a moment evidently aware of their striking aspect the couple paused, then seeing a door in the wall, and little knowing the elderly gentlemen staring at them in such amazement had just stepped out of it. They pushed it open and bolted in. Apparently propitiated by this, the policeman was passing on. When the old gentleman exploded with a violent officer-officer, go after those people at once, that's my house. A kind of gasping chuckle seemed to come from over my head. I looked up and there was the lunatic leaning over the wall. She was toying. There is no other word for it, with two enormous iron nails knocking them foolishly one against the other, and smiling seraphically. Her large hands bursting out of their black-thread gloves seemed to flop loosely from the wrist. Ting-ting went the nails, and the lunatic smiled on while Peter, the old gentleman, the policeman and I, stood rooted to the spot. Then the policeman bestirred himself. This will need caution, he observed heavily. Lunatics is ticklish work. He too made for the door in the wall. Suddenly Peter gave a shriek and caught my arm. It's Joe, he gasped. I recognize her nose. It's Joe and Chloe. It was. We in our turn darted into that garden, and the luckless owner of it ejaculating, either all of you are mad or I am, sprinted after us. Once within we found ourselves in an oblong-paved courtyard, with an urn full of geraniums in the middle, and round this urn dodged the policeman, Chloe and Joe, who had descended from the ladder which lent against the wall. Joe held her skimpy skirts well up and away from enormous elastic sided boots that I remembered seeing in the property box, and whenever the policeman made a little run at her she skipped coily to one side, Chloe behind her. Peter slipped between them and the policeman. Run, he shouted. They put down their heads and charged. The policeman wheeled round, but there is a limit to the speed at which a heavy body can change its course. And Joe and Chloe got clear out of the door, we on their heels, the policeman and the old gentleman on ours. Oh, oh, idiots that we were, shrieked Chloe, her powdered hair descending on her respectable jet-trimmed mantle. Joe's crepe bonnet rose and fell on her head like a bad rider on horseback. An ominous zip came from her skirt, but helpless laughter jerked from her as she ran. Peter and I could easily have outrun them, town-birds that they were, so we seized an arm of each and urged them on. Stop thieves, bellowed the old gentleman. From the policeman came no sound but the heavy, fud, fud of his regulation boots. A messenger boy forgot his errand, a milkman left his cart. Several indescribable unemployed joined in, and on we all tore. We doubled round a corner, then again, and yet again. Our only chance lay in keeping to the network of side streets, and so it came about that we found ourselves again in the street where we had started. As I ran, the idea came into my head that the performance in which we were all engaged was absurdly like the scene I had drawn on the pavement. At our head ran the fawn like Peter, a bunch of prosanthemums still under one arm, and his flute in his hand, while behind pounded as incongruous a procession as any I could have imagined. At the thought I laughed aloud, and the more I laughed, the more my breath failed me, and the less capable I became of running. We were all beginning to flag, and fresh pursuers who had just joined the chase were on our heels. There was only one thing to be done, and Peter did it. He dashed once more through the door in the wall. Joe, Chloe, and I after him, and slamming the door we locked and barred it. It was then that we perceived that the old gentleman, who had early retired, winded from the chase, had taken refuge in his garden to await events. As the blows of our pursuers began to rain upon the door, the old gentleman rushed to open it. I slipped in front of him, and stood with my back against it. Please, please listen a moment, I begged. We aren't mad or thieves, indeed we aren't. It's all a mistake. I mean part of it was a joke, and the rest was trying to earn our living. Oh, do please listen! Considering that it must have seemed to him as though the world were upside down, or he had strayed into the middle of a comic opera, he pulled himself together wonderfully. For a second we stood looking into each other's eyes. Then at the indignant bellow of the policeman from the other side of the door I spoke again desperately. I give you my word of honour, we've done nothing wrong, I said. Please send everyone away and let me tell you about it. I am—we all are—offly sorry that we've upset you so. Upon my word I don't know why I should believe you, he replied. But I do believe you all the same. Come this way. The policeman I suggested. Hadn't you better say something to him? Because roused policemen are difficult to soothe. Your right, said the old gentleman—officer, he called. Send that ravel away and come round to the front door. Now young lady, perhaps you and your—your friends had better follow me. We all trailed into the house after him, and were shut into a room lined with books, to think over our sins while he parlayed with the policeman. Eventually, as I have learned since, the policeman accepted a drink and a little matter of a coin, as a salve for his wounded dignity, and the elderly gentleman joined us in the study. And now, said he, having dragged me, a respectable publisher of the age of—of my age, round the streets with a rabble of errant boys, to say nothing of bursting into my garden and making free with my gait. Perhaps you'll explain the meaning of it all. I'll hear the little lady of the pavement pictures first. So then I began. I told him how Peter and I were stranded with nothing to do, although Peter was beginning to sell his articles, and how it had occurred to us to combine in industries of the pavement. Also how I had thought I should attract less attention if I dressed suitably for the part, hence the rusty black shawl. Peter here threw in as a parenthesis that he had found his usual clothes did very well for a flower-seller, just as they were. The old gentleman nodded at each point in my tail. Then waved his hand towards Joe and Chloe. And your friends, he asked, who after all were the cause of the whole trouble. Where do they come in? His glance softened as it fell on Chloe, and well it might. The powder had shaken out of her hair, and her hair itself lay tumbled in a web of pale yellow on her shoulders. She had contrived while the old gentleman was busy with the policeman to turn down the prim-black tucker of her gown so as to show her white, slim neck. The begetted mantle she wore slipping off her shoulders like a fashionable scarf. The whole rapid adjustment was so characteristic of Chloe, and so eminently successful. Her absurd little bonnet and big spectacles were tucked away in her pocket, and she now looked up appealingly. Oh, it was all my fault, Joe's and mine, she said artlessly, in the best little girl manner we knew so well. You see, Viv, Miss Vivian Lovell, who's just been talking to you, wanted us to go with her and Mr. Wimperous to the market this morning. And when we said we didn't want to get up so early, she said we weren't sporting. So Joe and I decided we would be sporting in a way Viv hadn't meant. We dressed ourselves like this and set off to find her and Peter. We had a little difficulty because they weren't in the main road where we expected to find them. And we had such thrilling adventures. Once we had to take a taxi to get away from the crowd, and Joe bowed to the people as we drove along, like royalty. Joe now spoke for the first time. My fault really, she said, in her gruff boy's voice, and I'm paid out. I can't stretch my legs in this skirt. She laughed suddenly, her big beautiful laugh that makes you wonder how you ever thought her plain, and the next moment and answering smile began to twitch on the face of the elderly gentleman. He tried to restrain it, but unavailingly, and the next moment he broke into a roar of laughter. At the relief of it we all began to laugh helplessly, and the more we laughed, the more we had to, till we ached with it, and the tears ran down. At last, still gasping, we wiped our faces and grew calmer, and our hosts rang the bell. Some fruit and cake and things he told the man who answered it, and some hawk and seltzer. I never eat more for lunch, he added, turning to us. But I hope you'll join me. I ought to have been at my office long ago, but now it is so late it may as well be later. You seem to be the ring-leader, Miss Viv. So you shall sit here by me. I want to talk to you about those drawings of yours. I drew up my chair, and we plunged into the subject of illustrating as an art. We were still at it when the lunch arrived, and afterwards, previous to summoning the cab, which was the only method of getting us all home unobserved, he and I went out to inspect my stretch of pavement again. You must give the sort of thing up, my dear, he told me, and come into the legitimate profession of illustrating. I'm not going to promise anything, but I shouldn't wonder if I hadn't worked for you to do. Oh, you're an angel, I said, but do you think you could possibly find something for Peter, too? You've no idea how brilliantly he writes, far, far better than I draw. Tell me about this, Peter, of yours. Any relation, eh? No, I only met him six months ago, on a cargo-tramp. We were wrecked and lost all our worldly goods, so we became platonics. I'm great on platonics, and have always tried to get things to do together ever since. In short, you love him like a brother, remarked my new friend. No, it doesn't feel quite like that, I said, wrinkling my brows. It's more, more as though he were my son. Don't laugh at me, girls are always older than men, you know. I wasn't laughing, my dear, he said. Then I'll see what I can do for your Peter. Good specimens of your work, yours and his, round to my office. Here's my card. And now, for two calves, you've made me so confoundedly late between you, I shall have to forego my usual exercise. Though, when I think of that run, I'm not sure I haven't had enough to last me a week. He bad us farewell, and we insisted on his acceptance of all Peter's stock of flowers to decorate his office. And then Joe, Chloe, Peter and I drove off in state to the Hencoupe. It was late that night, after much excited discussion of what the future might bring forth, that Peter went home to his attic. The chrysanthemum he had stuck in his buttonhole he gave to me. And I slept with it under my pillow as a mascot. CHAPTER 27 SEALS OF LOVE, BUT SEALED IN VANE Next day a careful selection of his articles and pen and inks and watercolours of mine went off to Mr. Brennan, our publishing friend, and we anxiously awaited results. They were quick incoming. He sent for us, and this time clad as decently as our scanty wardrobes allowed. I, in a new pink silk shirt of Chloe's, we went to his office. He was very nice about my illustrations, but to my joy I saw it once that he really thought the world of Peter. The end of it all was that he commissioned us to go abroad and make a book on Provence. For a series of beautiful country's books he was issuing. I was to do pictures for it in Peter to supply the letterpress. The mere statement sounds bald, but what a magic vista it opened up. We walked home to the Hencoupe through the burnished glory of the autumn day, and as we went we discussed the book. Not only the geographical and historical interest of Provence should find place therein, but the old Troubadour songs and those of Mastral, the old legends and superstitions, while above all did we hope to recapture the spirit of that time when King Rene and his court made Provence famous. We'll call it King Rene's country, said Peter to me, as we entered the courtyard, which was a well for the clear pale sunlight, only the further side of it being hung with blue shadow. I won't come up, he added. I'm off to scour the second-hand bookshops for a copy of Ocasan and Nicolette in the original long doi, and I'll teach myself Provence all, too, before I'm much older. I know enough to stumble through Meret and Calendol. We'll read them together out there. Oh, Peter, Provence with you. It will be Paradise, said Peter. No, it won't. Do you remember Ocasan's repudiation of Paradise? I do not wish to enter there. How does he say it? There go the old cripple and the maimed man and the beggar. These go into Paradise, and with them I have no part. But into hell I would go with the fair clerk and the fair knights who died in turnies and rich wars. And there go the fair ladies who have two lovers or three beside their lords, and there go the gold and silver and the white fur and the grey. I've always remembered that bit, Viv. Isn't it stunning? The white fur and the grey. And he goes on to say that the harpers and minstrels and the king of the world go there. And thither would he too go if he can only have Nicolette with him. Do you remember how he calls her Sister Fair Friend? Are you insinuating, said I lightly, for there was something in Peter's tone that seemed to me more gilded than Platonic? That Provence not only isn't Paradise, but is the other place? I'll tell what it's going to be for us, he replied. Yes. Have you ever heard of a place called the Pais de Tondre? Asked Peter. The words caught at my imagination, and I stared out at the courtyard till it seemed to swell and diminish again in the brightness. The Pais de Tondre. Surely one could take that much. It did not mean a lover's country, or so I thought. Vaguely I realized that it must be the happiest thing in the world that Pais de Tondre, which is partly actual environment, and partly a state of mind, happier than any time of actual engagement, far happier than a honeymoon. What I did not realize was that no one ever comes out of it with his soul, his own, as when he entered there. Viv, I'm off, broken Peter. As a rule we hardly ever shook hands. A mere nod sufficing. But now he took both my hands and turned me towards him, saying, Viv, would you mind? I stared at him, though with the last of the sun full on my face I hardly saw him. I seemed to think of great many things at once. One was that Peter wanted to kiss me, and another ran something like this. Perhaps I am in love with Peter, and will only know it if he kisses me. Perhaps I really should begin to feel things then. So I hesitated, and was aware of astonishment that I could even have come as far as hesitation. I, who had not only never let a man kiss me, but never felt anything but a passionate shrinking and dislike at the suggestion. But the sun was shining, the sky arched blue overhead. A little breeze blew softly past my neck. We were so young. It seemed such a natural, such a sensible thing to kiss. Then came the sound of an approaching footstep, and Peter said, For heaven's sake be quick, someone's coming to spoil it. And I somehow gasped, Yes, but oh, I meant never to. Never mind, he said, and then suddenly his arms were round me, though quite lightly. I was caught towards him, and he kissed my cheek. The blank disappointment of that moment. I had tilted my head back and shut my eyes as one had always imagined lovers did to get the full glory of a kiss. And I prepared to feel the world go round. I felt nothing at all, absolutely nothing. No sensation thrilled through me. I was only aware of the next moment of an awful sensation of something shattered forever. Even with the kiss I tasted regret. With a quick muttered thanks Peter rushed away out of the courtyard, and I fled into the uttermost recesses of the harness-room, and wished I'd never been born. My one most cherished ideal was broken. I had been kissed, and nothing could ever give me virginity of cheek again. And under all that, more insistent still, was a little voice saying, If only it had been worth it. If only it had been worth it. There was the sting. I had risked all for a hoped-for sensation, and had not achieved it. I stayed in the harness-room and a tumult of miserable emotions for a while, and then made my way up the ladder to the studio, where I found Joe and Chloe doing their hair for tea. Joe told me long after that they guessed at once what had happened. For I had one pale cheek, and one very pink. End of Chapter 27