“Joan!” she cried. The baby turned. “Joan! Come back; come back an’ be friends!”
Joan, maintaining her offing, replied only with a gesture. It was a gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had once been spanked for practising it on the piano-tuner. The boot-and-knife boy called it “cocking a snook,” and it consisted in raising a thumb to one’s nose and spreading the fingers out. It was defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on. The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid.
Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood was a place to which they came every day.
“Besides,” she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort; “besides, there can’t be such things as wood-ladies really.”
But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural; the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The undernote of alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her and presently there came mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her babies.
“Isn’t there a clock inside you that tells you when it’s lunch-time?” asked mother. “You’re ever so late. Where’s Joan?”
Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity on her face. It was difficult to speak even to mother about wood-ladies without a pretence of scepticism.
“I forgot about lunch,” she said, taking the slim cool hand which mother held out to her. “Joan’s in there.” She nodded at the bushes.
“Is she?” said mother, and called aloud in her singing-voice, that was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. “Joan! Joan!”
A cheeky bird answered with a whistle and mother called again.