Short Stories 1895-1926 (9 page)

It was indeed already autumn; the air golden and still. The leaves were beginning to fall. The late fruits were well-nigh over. Robins and tits seemed our only birds now. Rain came in floods. The Wandle took sound and volume, sweeping deep above our stepping stones. Very seldom after this I even so much as saw our neighbour. But I chanced on her again one still afternoon, standing fixedly by the brawling stream, in a rusty-looking old-fashioned cloak, her scanty hair pushed high up on her forehead.

She stared at me for a moment or two, and then, with a scared look over her shoulder, threw me a little letter, shaped like a cock-hat, and weighted with a pebble stone, across the stream. She whispered earnestly and rapidly at me over the water. But I could not catch a single word she said, and failed to decipher her close spidery handwriting. No doubt I was too shy, or too ashamed, or in a vague fashion too loyal, to show it to my grandmother. It is not now a flattering keepsake. I called out loudly I must go in; and still see her gazing after me, with a puzzled, mournful expression on the face peering out of the cloak.

Even after that we sometimes waved to one another across the water, but never if by hiding myself I could evade her in time. The distance seemed to confuse her, and quite silenced me. I began to see we were ridiculous friends, especially as she came now in ever dingier and absurder clothes. She even looked hungry, and not quite clean, as well as ill; and she talked more to her phantoms than to me when once we met.

The first ice was in the garden. The trees stood bare beneath a pale blue sunny sky, and I was standing at the window, looking out at the hoar-frost, when my grandmother told me that it was unlikely that I should ever see our neighbour again.

I stood where I was, without turning round, gazing out of the window at the motionless ghostly trees, and the few birds in forlorn unease.

‘Is she dead, then?' I enquired.

‘I am told,' was the reply, ‘that her friends have been compelled to have her put away. No doubt, it was the proper course. It should have been done earlier. But it is not our affair, you are to understand. And, poor creature, perhaps death would have been a happier, a more merciful release. She was sadly afflicted.'

I said nothing, and continued to stare out of the window.

But I know now that the news, in spite of a vague sorrow, greatly relieved me. I should be at ease in the garden again, came the thought – no longer fear to look ridiculous and grow hot when our neighbour was mentioned, or be saddled with her company beside the stream.

Selina's Parable

Selina's Parable
1

On the wide wooden staircase that led up to her big sea-windy bedroom in the old house in which Selina was staying was a low, square window. For Selina, every window in her small private world had a charm, an incantation all its own. Was it not an egress for her eye to a scene of some beauty, or life, or of forbiddingness; was it not the way of light; either her own outward, or the world's inward? This small window in particular beguiled Selina, because, kneeling there (it was of too narrow a frame to permit a protracted standing or stooping) she looked out of it, and down from it, upon a farmyard. Selina knew farmyards that more seductively soothed her aesthetic sense – farmyards of richer ricks, of solider outbuildings, of a deeper peace. But since this farmyard, despite its litter and bareness, was busy with life – dog in kennel, chicken, duck, goose, gander and goslings, doves, a few wild birds, some even of the sea, an occasional horse and man – contemplation of it solaced her small mind, keeping it gently busy, and yet in a state narrowly bordering on trance.

Selina was dark and narrow-shouldered, with eyes of so intense a brown that, when the spirit that lurked behind them was absorbed in what they gazed on, they were like two small black pools of water. And one long, warm, languorous afternoon she found herself kneeling once again at the low staircase window even more densely engrossed than usual. Towards the bottom of the farmyard, perhaps twenty paces distant, stood a low stone barn or little granary, its square door opening blackly into the sunlight upon a flight of, maybe, ten rough and weed-tousled stone steps. Beyond its roof stretched the green dreaming steeps of the valley. From outside this door, it was the farmer's wont, morning and evening, to feed his winged stock.

On this particular afternoon the hour was but hard on four. Something unusual was afoot. Selina watched the farmer ponderously traverse the yard, and, in his usual stout Alexander-Selkirkian fashion, ascend into the granary. Surely not thus unseasonably to dispense the good grain, but for some purpose or purposes unknown – unknown at least to Selina.

Neverthless, all his chickens, such is faith, instinct, habit, and stupidity, had followed close upon his heels, and were now sleekly and expectantly clustered in mute concourse upon the steps and on the adjacent yardstones, precisely like an assemblage of humanity patiently waiting to be admitted into the pit of a theatre or into the nave of a church.

There was a dramatic pause. The sun shone on. The blue seemed to deepen. A few late-comers flurried in from the by-ways and hedges. The rest of the congregation was steadfast – with just a feverish effort apparent here and there of some one jealous individual to better her position at the expense of those more favourably situated. Then, after a prolonged interval, the square door was reopened, and the farmer emerged, empty-handed and apparently unconscious of the expectant assemblage awaiting him. Without so much as a glance of compassion or even of heed, he trod heavily down the stone steps through the assembled hens, careless to all appearance whether his swinging, cumbrous boots trod the more eager underfoot, and – wonder of wonders! – he left the door behind him, and at its very fullest gape.

Selina sighed: the happiest of sighs, that of expectation and forbidden delight. It was as if the commissionaire of the theatre or the gaitered archdeacon of the cathedral had simply betrayed his edifice, and its treasures, to the mob. God bless me, thought Selina, they'll go in and help themselves!

Only one moiety of this brilliant speculation of Selina's was to be proved justified. Led by a remarkably neat jimp blue-black Leghorn hen, deliciously feminine and adventurous, churchwarden's helpmeet if ever there was one, the whole feathered mob, as if under the gesture of a magician, with an instantaneous and soundless ingurgitation of appetite and desire, swept upward and in. Threescore hens at least were there, the appropriate leaven of cocks, two couple of ducks, three doves, a few predatory wildings, while the little cluster of geese on the outskirts outstretched their serpentine necks and hissed.

Selina, transfixed there in a felicity bordering upon rapture, watched. Like Athene above the plains of Troy, she gathered in her slim shoulders as if to swoop. What was happening within, beyond that strange square of velvety afternoon darkness? The rapine, the orgy, the indiscriminate gorge? Alas, no! Whether or not the marauders had discerned or even so much as descried the fatted bags of oats and maize and wheat that were undoubtedly shelved within that punctual hostel, Selina could not guess. This only was perfectly plain – that the concourse was now dejectedly emerging, dispirited and unfed. One by one, in ruffled groups, peevish, crestfallen, damped, the feathered congregation by ones and twos and threes reappeared, trod, or hopped, or fluttered down the shallow familiar disenchanted steps, the ducks, too, dumb and ignoble, the cocks simulating indifference or contempt, the wildings – as wild as ever.

When Selina, still agape, came to herself, the farmyard was much as usual – dispersed clusters of huffed, short-memoried and dusting fowl, a pacing cock, the dog, head on paws, still asleep, doves in comparatively dispassionate courtship on the roof, duck and drake guzzling in that unfathomable morass of iniquity known as the duck pond.

‘Came to herself' – for Selina's was a type of mind that cannot but follow things up (as far as ever she could go); it was compelled, that is, by sheer natural impulse, to spin queer little stories out of the actual, and even, alas, to moralize.

‘Why,' she mused, ‘poor hen-brained things, they came to be fed. Always when the farmer opened the door and went in, grain, the bread of life, came out. Always. And he, surely, being a more or less generous creature, capable at
any
moment of magnanimity, and not, gracious goodness, a cold and bloated cynic, since one must at least
think
the best of what is and may be, why, of course, they simply could not
but
go in, as they did, and, to say the least of it, just see for themselves. You surely can't impiously raid the
given
. Morning, and possibly afternoon, the poor creatures as best their natural powers allow, reward the farmer for his benefactions. A little indirectly, perhaps, but surely you wouldn't expect the poor things to reason that he gives – well, what he does give – solely for gain, that his bounty is sheer profiteering, that it is their eggs, their poor carcases, or their positive offspring he is after, for his own – well, to them – immeasurably barbarous purposes.

‘Suppose with avid beak (a little magnified, of course) they surge in one day and carry off his last squalling baby – that puffy little Samuel – from his cradle. Suppose they do. It will serve him right: it will be tit for tat. They had believed in him – that was the point. Now they won't: they
can't –
at least not for ten minutes. Though they are always hungry. Yes, they had climbed up, lured on by sheer indifference masquerading as generosity, in the heat of the day, too, and that peculiarly slim and jimp black Leghorn pullet in particular, only to discover – nothing, just cool inner darkness and odoriferous vacancy. Even a horny, fussy old verger would at least have shooed them out again, have told them that they had made a mistake, that there wasn't any extra thing “on” of that kind – no
confirmation
service, you know.' And Selina fleetingly smiled, narrow cheek, delicate lip, and black abstracted eye.

‘How very like poor human beings,' she went on, pursuing her small privy thoughts, slipping down, as she did so, from kneeling to sitting, and automatically readjusting the tortoiseshell comb in her dark hair; ‘punctually they go to church (some of them), not attempting to guess, or not capable, I suppose, of really
knowing,
what for; but confident that the bishop or rector or somebody will be in the pulpit and that they will be fed.

‘And then comes a day … Now what
is
the difference,' mused Selina, contemplatively narrowing her inward gaze, ‘what is the real difference between Farmer Trepolpen and God, and between that fussy, forward – still she was adventurous – little Leghorn, who must lay the most delicious little cream-coloured eggs, and Me? Surely no: He cannot want me (He cannot expect me to go to church and praise and pray) simply for the sake of my wretched little hard-boiled bits of goodness. Does He really only think of us twice in twenty-four hours, like the tides, like matins and evensong, as – well, as I think of Him?

‘And if in between-whiles He did think of me or I of Him, isn't there any inexhaustible store of heavenly manna which my trussed-up soul – and I suppose the others – though I wouldn't mind the doves and the sea-gull or … Oh dear, oh dear!'

Selina stared softly on, down the sunlit and intensely still staircase into the shadow. ‘Of course,' began again that still small voice within in faraway tones, ‘it's not quite like that, it's
not
on all fours. It's a bigger dream than that. If they, silly cackling creatures, mercifully don't know what that carnivorous old egg-hunter is after, I'm pretty certain he doesn't know eventually himself. Merely keeping them alive: though that's something. But not the other. Anyhow, suppose, just suppose
not.
Suppose there's someone, a kind of unseen circumspectious spirit, kneeling crunched-up there at a little square staircase window. Oh, ever so happy and dreamy and sorrowful and alone, and not in the least muddle-minded – omniscient, I
suppose,
though that, of course, must be omni – omni-sensitive, too – just staring down in sheer joy and
interest
at the farmer, and the sunshine, and the valley, and the yard, and the hens, and that delicious filthy duck-pond and – and the Atlantic, absolutely all
Its
, and … What wouldn't I … ?'

But at that moment, and only just in time to dissever the philosophical net in which poor Selina's soul was definitely strangling, a whiff of hot baked ‘splitters' wafted itself up the staircase, and Selina with an exclamatory ‘Lawks!' and a thin flying hand flung up once more to her tortoiseshell comb, remembered her tea.