Gentian Hill Page 7

  "Why didn’t you call?" demanded the boy. "If I’d known which direction you were coming from you could have handed me the grub through the bars. You need not have gone falling on your nose like that."

  "Someone might have heard," panted Stella. "And here abouts-since the mutiny and everything-they’re scared of strangers!"

  The boy was still holding her, looking down at her, his hard hands gripping her arms above the elbows. "And aren’t you scared of strangers?"

  “Sometimes. But not of you, after the first minute when I thought you were Bony. I knew you were all right. Hodge told me."

  For a moment he shifted his gaze from her to Hodge, standing beside her slowly swinging his tail, and they exchanged a long, appreciative look, as man to man. Then he looked back at Stella again. The moon was so bright that he could see her face as though it were day. She was very flushed, the hood of her cloak had fallen back from her short tumbled boyish curls, and there were beads of perspiration on her forehead.

  "You’re all in a lather," he ejaculated.

  "It was lifting the tree trunk and opening the gate," said Stella.

  "And you such a little ’un!" he murmured. He picked her up, carried her to the old oak tree that grew beside the gate, and set her down where the knotted roots made a comfortable armchair for a small person. Then he fetched the plate and jug from the top of the pillar, walking in a queer sort of way as though he were lopsided, and as though the ground beneath his feet were red-hot, and sat down beside her, Hodge lying near them. But starving though he had professed himself to be, he seemed in no hurry to eat. He set the food and drink at his feet and looked at them, much as David must have looked at the cup of cold water which they brought him in the cave. But he had more common sense than David. His tribute of denial, though offered up with all his heart, was merely momentary, and having offered it, he turned to Stella, said "Thank you," gently, and then fell upon the pigeon pie like a wolf.

  Yet a well-mannered, aristocratic wolf. Had Stella been older she would have gazed at this most unusual vagabond with bewildered speculation. But to Stella the world was still so full of surprises that all the ordinary happenings of life seemed as wonderful as fairy tales, and conversely, fairy tales didn't seem anything out of the ordinary. Everything and everybody was so surprising that something or somebody a bit extra surprising did not put her out at all. Besides, though she had never seen anyone in the least like this boy, she was completely at ease with him. She felt, for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.

  Though she loved Father and Mother Sprigg so deeply, she had never felt with them this particular feeling of safety. The gulf that yawned between her and the village children was only a crack between her and Father and Mother Sprigg, but it was there. Between her and this unknown boy it was not there. It was very odd. Turning to look at him, she had the queer feeling that she was turning to look at herself. Yet she was quite sure that she did not look like this. She hoped she didn’t, for he was almost as much of a fright as poor old Daniel. That, she supposed pitifully, was because they were both outside people.

  He was tall, and his tattered shirt and torn trousers fluttered on a body so bony and thin that, set up in a field, he would have done very well as a bird scarer. But here the likeness to a scarecrow ended; indeed, a discerning grownup, looking again at this boy, would have dismissed the analogy and thought, instead, of a tall reed shaken by the wind, or a terrified, unbroken colt galloping to the sea, but not of anything so static as a scarecrow. Even in comparative stillness, his body, mind, and soul absorbed in pigeon pie, a sensitiveness and grace were apparent in this boy. The grace at present was clumsy, but it had a thoroughbred air. The sensitiveness showed itself now in a stubborn defensiveness of expression and restless movements; set free from adversity it might have been a thing of smooth and responsive beauty. The physical contrasts were striking. The untidy dark hair fell over a broad low forehead, the skin very white where it had been shielded from the sunburn that tanned the rest of the face. The dark eyes were somber beneath heavy dark eyebrows, but the nostrils of the thin acquiline nose flared like those of a startled horse. Though the lips could set obstinately, laughter transfigured them to gentleness. His hands had broken nails and calloused palms, but they were finely shaped.

  One could not see his feet, for they were wrapped in bloody mud-caked bandages of torn rag. He finished eating and wiped his fingers delicately on the grass upon either side of him.

  “Have you a handkerchief? he asked Stella.

  She fished a delicate little square of cambric out of her pocket and gave it to him, and he blew his nose loudly and satisfyingly.

  "That was almost worse than anything," he said.

  "What was?" asked Stella.

  "Blowing my nose into the air."

  "Old Sol, our ploughman, never has a handkerchief and he does it beautifully, like this," said Stella, and she gave an exhibition-a serious and charming exhibition, quite without vulgarity.

  "It needs practice," said the boy. "Would you mind-please-may I keep your handkerchief?”

  There had been no pathos about him until now, but in the shy pleading of his question it showed for a moment. Then it vanished as she nodded and smiled, and laughing he stuck the handkerchief in his pocket.

  "My name is Stella Sprigg," said Stella. "What is your name?" To her, as to all children, names were tremendously important. Your Christian name, joining you to God, your surname linking you to your father. If you had both names you had your place in the world, walking safely along with a hand held upon either side. If you had neither you were in a bad way, you just fell down and did not belong any where, and if you only had one you only half belonged.

  "Zachary," said the boy.

  "Only Zachary?"

  "Only Zachary."

  “Just a Christian name?"

  "That’s all."

  Stella looked at him with concern. Only God had hold of him. He was lopsided. She had noticed it in his gait when she first saw him walking. Then she remembered that but for Father and Mother Sprigg she would have been lopsided too, for her nameless mother had died. This memory deepened her feeling of oneness with Zachary, and she put out a small hand and laid it on his knee.

  "Do you know where you come from?" she asked wonderingly.

  "From the moon," replied Zachary promptly. "Haven’t you seen me up there?"

  Stella dimpled delightedly. She loved moonlight, and when she had been smaller and in need of a playmate, she had often wished that the man in the moon would come

  down and play with her.

  "Zachary Moon," she said with pleasure, and felt she had got him a bit better supported upon the other side. Zachary put his hand on hers that lay on his knee, carefully and gently, as though it were a small bird. Then he turned her hand over and put their two palms together, as though they were the two halves of a shell. "I come from the moon and you’re a star," he said. “Quite right, isn’t it, that we should see each other first at night.’ Then he lifted her hand off his knee with a light gesture, as though he tossed back the captive bird to freedom. "But not right that you should be out of your bed so late."

  He got up clumsily, still as though the ground were red-hot to his feet, and picked up the bowl and plate. Then he held out his free hand. "Come on, Stella. I’ll help you over the gate."

  He was very grownup suddenly, and Stella felt chilled. But she got up obediently and put her hand in his, and they walked along silently, Zachary with his lopsided gait,

  Stella light and airy as a fairy’s child. Hodge loped along behind. When they reached the tall locked gate, Zachary helped the child and the dog to scramble over and then

  passed over the bowl and plate. "Thank you," he said. "I haven’t tasted a meal like that since I left the moon. Good-by, Star. Good-by, Hodge."

  There was a
flat finality in his tone, and Stella felt dreadful, like one half of a bivalve shell being detached from the other half. "No, Zachary!" she pleaded. “No!"

  Her chin only just reached the top of the gate. She propped it there, her hands laid upon the bar, one on each side. Hodge thrust his head between the bars below and whined distress fully. Zachary looked from the little pointed face and the row of small fingertips to the furry countenance below, as though memorizing them.

  "No what, Stella?"

  “No good-by," said Stella.

  His face grew somber. Looking up at him, Stella saw it with queer dark shadows on it, like the moon. He caught his breath sharply, as though he were going to say something more, but he seemed to change his mind, for his face set hard, and without another look at her, he turned away and was hidden by the thick thorn hedge. Stella did not call after him, for she knew that set look on a man’s face. Father Sprigg looked like that when he had been telling her stories and had suddenly had enough of it, and put her down off his knee and went off to the milking. She never ran after Father Sprigg at those times, for she knew by instinct that men do not want women with them all the time; they keep certain compartments in their lives for them, and do not want them overflowing into the wrong ones.

  Yet, as she walked slowly homeward through the meadow, Hodge beside her with his tail between his legs, she stumbled several times because she was crying. It was for Zachary she was crying. She was sure that neither the place that he had come from, when he had stepped into that moonlit magic hour that had enclosed them both, nor the place to which he was going when he left her, were good places .... And he could have stayed here if Father Sprigg had not sent him away .... He was like the bedraggled bird who once flew in from the outside darkness when snow was on the ground, circled about the lighted kitchen and then flew out again, and though she had cried out for pity he was gone so quickly, and the frozen dark outside was so immense, that there was nothing at all she could do about it.

  4

  But Stella was a child who scarcely ever cried, and by the time she had reached the great gate into the yard she had rubbed the tears out of her eyes and had complete command of herself and the situation. Hodge’s tail, too, as sensitive to her moods as a compass needle to the magnetic north, had trembled uncertainly back to the perpendicular. But they were tired, both of them, and they could not lift the tree trunk and get it back into position.

  "It’s no good, Hodge," Stella gasped after ten minutes fruitless struggle. "We can’t do it."

  Hodge snorted exhausted agreement. They left the tree trunk there on the cobbles and putting the plate and bowl behind the mounting block again to be rescued by Stella in

  the morning, they tackled the climb back up the thatch to Stella’s bedroom window. It was harder than usual tonight, but they managed it, and fell in an exhausted heap upon the floor.

  "Hush, Hodge!" whispered Stella, for a line of light showed beneath the door and there was a murmur of sleepy voices from the big bedroom. They must have been gone a long time, for Father and Mother Sprigg were in bed already. Sometimes Mother Sprigg looked in upon Stella when she came up, but evidently tonight she had not done so, and as she quickly and silently undressed Stella thanked heaven for her luck. Of course, in the morning, with the pigeon pie gone and the tree trunk not in its place, something or other was bound to happen, but it was a comfort Hot to have it happening tonight. She wanted peace and silence tonight. A great flood of feeling had been for hours dammed up just behind the routine happenings of the evening, and then behind the adventure of Zachary, but it would have to come free now and submerge her.

  She slipped into bed, lay down, and shut her eyes. Hodge usually slept at the foot of her bed, but tonight he came and lay down close beside her, so that she could put her hand down over the edge of the bed and touch his soft head. It comforted her to do this. Touching Hodge, she could imagine herself a small ship safely tied up to a bigger one. Feeling, like harsh black water, might swirl about her but she would not be torn away.

  Her mother, her real mother, in her brave green gown. Against the Hood of dark water she saw the dead face as clearly as though she looked on a picture, and it was white and shadowed, like Zachary’s when he had said good-by. Mother Sprigg had thought her too young to feel grief at the story told her, but there she had been wrong. Stella was old for her age beyond Mother Sprigg’s understanding, sensitive beyond her understanding, and loving too, and possessed of love’s supreme power of dissimulation for the sake of the beloved. "You are my real mother," she had said. Not by a word or a look had she then, would she ever, let Mother Sprigg know that she found any lack in her motherhood. Yet at this moment she longed for the arms of her real mother as she had never longed for anything yet, and recoiled from the horror of her death with that instinctive understanding without benefit of experience that is both the blessing and the bane of the imaginative.

  She shivered with cold and fatigue as she lay flat in her bed, staring at the square of moonlit, starlit sky that was her window, yet the sweat ran down her body and soaked her nightgown, as though she had a fever. Tired though she was, she could not shut her eyes-the lids seemed glazed open. She was her mother, dying in the cold water, trying desperately to save her child. She was Zachary, hungry and thin, his feet wrapped in bloodstained rags. She was both of them coming from unknown darkness, going back to the darkness again. By being them she tried to comfort them, just as she tried to comfort Daniel and the stable cats by going to them night after night to share their outlawry. But it wasn’t much use, she thought. She could only be them for a little while between darkness and darkness. She could not follow into the outside darkness because she did not know anything about it. She wished that she knew, for though it was dreadful being them, it was much worse not being them. She began to cry again, but without sound, the diflicult tears trickling out of the corners of her eyes and making stiff, scorching tracks down the side of her face until they dripped off onto her pillow. Daniel and the cats had claimed her sympathy, but not more than that, for though their condition might have been bettered it was not really very bad, but now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life’s blood were running away.

  This must be stopped, thought Hodge. He knew all she was feeling-the touch of her hand on his head conveyed it. He jumped up on her bed (a thing he had never done before) and wedging himself in between her and the wall lay down beside her, his cold nose against her ear .... A tear dropped on it and he sneezed irritably .... Suddenly she began to laugh, a strangled laugh choked by sobs, but still a laugh. Hodge was funny; warm and comforting and funny. She turned over on her side towards him and flung an arm across his back. Her eyelids, that had been so painfully stuck open, fluttered and closed, and soon she was asleep.

  CHAPTER V

  1

  Stella woke up abruptly next morning, awakened by some sound beneath her window. It was still very early, with the light of the September dawn entering her little room in the slow conspiratorial way she loved, as though night were still on guard and the light had to creep in very secretly lest it be caught and turned back again. It was a gray light, for the shadow of night had fallen upon it as it passed by, but there was a gleam both of silver and gold in the gray, as though it held a sunbeam dusted with starlight beneath the veil of shadow. Stella watched in delight for a moment, her desolation of the night before forgotten while she watched the light which, in some way that she did not understand, was an extension of the loveliness that she had known in sleep.

  She could not remember where she had been in her sleep but the words "not yet, not yet," seemed to be saying themselves in her mind, as though she had nearly got somewhere but had been turned back; but the dawn’s light that had been more successful than she, and slipped triumphantly through night’s fingers, held a reassurance of eventual arrival that took all bitterness from the return, and left it saturated with the same peace that she had known in that far place. Then the noi
se that had disturbed her came again and she was wide awake, remembering last night’s desolation, facing today’s difficulty, yet not bruised between them because that timeless loveliness lay between the harshness of the one and the other, and held them apart by its greater power.

  The noise was Father Sprigg in one of his mighty rages, bellowing at old Sol down in the yard below. "Maundering twily old dotard!" shouted Father Sprigg, relapsing into gentler language after a stream of profanity that had echoed like thunder around the yard. "Addle-pated old numbskull! Going to your bed leaving the yard door all abroad, and the countryside alive with mutineers and vagabonds. And I’d told you at supper there was one about. No thanks to you, old scoundrel, if the womenfolk are not murdered in their beds. There’s the best part of a pigeon pie gone as ’tis, and the mistress all of a galdiment to think of a thief in her larder. I’d take a whip to your shoulders if you weren’t such a rattling old bag of bones that you’d fall to pieces at a touch, an’ not be worth the burying, you vinny old death’s head!"

  “No call to be so tilty, Master," said old Sol equably, as Father Sprigg paused for breath. "Poor soul o’ me! Whoever left the door abroad, ’tweren’t I. Madge and I, we closed un an’ barred un same as always. lf the pisgies tumbled the bar down that ain’t my fault. I done my duty, same as I always done it, man an’ boy these fifty years an’ more."

  “Fags!" interrupted Father Sprigg violently. "Pisgies, is it? I’ll not stand here and listen to such vlother. I’m a patient man, Sol Doddridge, but I’m a fore-right man, and neglect of duty puts me so out of temper!"

  A jerk of Sol’s thumb upwards checked him. Stella was leaning out of her window and calling, "I did it, Father! I did it!"