FIRST THE BLADE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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FIRST THE BLADE

A COMEDY OF GROWTH

BY

CLEMENCE DANE

Author of “Regiment of Women”

First the blade, then the ear, after that

the full corn in the ear.

St. Mark 4.28

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1918

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1918

By CLEMENCE DANE

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Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1918

Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the past and present, and the true word of immortality;

No one can acquire for another—not one,

Not one can grow for another—not one.

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,

The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,

The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,

The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail,

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And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or the indication of his own.

Walt Whitman.

FIRST THE BLADE

FIRST THE BLADE

CHAPTER I

‘Once upon a time’—and we pull in our deep chairs, you quietly, I with a quick impatient jerk that scrabbles up the hearth-rug and worries your tidy soul. But you yourself have forgotten the blinds! Draw them close, lest the Zeppelins catch us at our story-telling, whilst I put the carpet to rights again and pile up logs (we sawed them ourselves, didn’t we?) upon the fire. One must save the electricity these hard times. And now—you have your knitting and I the fountain-pen you gave me: it has not run out, for a wonder! pen and fat, blank scribbling book. Are you ready? The postman has gone by for the last time tonight—no letters—but the news was not so bad today—the Russians have taken prisoners—our front is quiet—we dare forget the war for an hour.

Think—we are beginning a book! Do you remember our breathless hour three years ago? We were overwhelmed by our own daring—such grubs as we, to dream of spreading wings, real, published, book-cover wings, black or red (you were soberly for black, of course, and I for red) with gilt lettering across them. In anticipation we enjoyed ourselves so hugely that the book itself had much ado to get written at all. But the war has ended that keen pleasure of ours, as it has ended better things. We begin soberly now-a-days—‘Once upon a time——’

Once upon a time, before the war——

You know, Adam and Eve must have reckoned that way! Can’t you hear them telling stories to Cain and little Abel?

‘Ever so long ago, when the tree of knowledge was still pink——’

‘Once upon a time, before the apples were ripe——’

Even so, Collaborator (clumsy title, but even in the Imperial Dictionary it has no synonym) even so—once upon a time, before the war, there lived a hero and a heroine—and their relations.

And, you know, we got as far as that four months ago.

It’s not so easy, writing a book!

Let us run over our facts.

The hero is called Justin, and the girl, Laura—Laura Valentine. I know you dislike it, but it is my turn to choose, and honestly, if you think it over, you will find that ‘Laura’ is the only name for her. She is real enough already to make me sure of that. Laura—grave, graceful, ageless word, fits like a glove my Laura, our Laura, so unmodern in her ways and thoughts, for all she was born in ’94. Yet the name stands, to you, for ringlets and bottleneck shoulders, for simpers and sighs and Harry and Lucy? But those were its evil days, when it was befrilled and crinolined by the same spirit that figleafs Apollo and measures the Milo Venus for a pair of stays. The name has older memories, older even than its Italian gardens and passionate poets, memories old as sunshine and song and the laurel-tree itself. Indeed, that enchanted bush, that grave tree with blood-red berries, that panting girl within stiff bark and quiet leaves, reminds me not a little of Laura, our own bewildered Laura, when Love, the crazy torch-bearer, came rioting down the Brackenhurst lanes, to break through the garden fences of her ignorance, and, entering, set the quiet house of her mind afire.

And so, unless you insist, we will keep the name: it has taught us already something about her.

What is she like—to look at?

She is shadowy as yet, but I think you said, and I agreed, that she has soft, shining eyes—shining, not sparkling—and is wonderfully light on her feet. I think, what with the sway of her pretty figure, and her quick white hands that are the only restless things about her, she has, though she is not a little woman, a fugitive, thistledown air, that makes you want to dance with her. Yet she cannot dance: never troubled to learn. Dancing bored Justin. Her dancing days were over before she learned that it is not always wise to humour Justin.

Thus far Laura Valentine. The name grows on you, doesn’t it? That is why you are such a perfect Collaborator. I can always persuade you into agreeing with me.

But ‘Justin’—less easy to conceive, eh? Yet, knowing Laura as little even as we do, he should be obvious—prose to her verse: she, the glove for his hand: the red and white halves of an apple. Laura implies Justin as day implies night, winter—summer, sunshine—rain. We should be justified in leaving them, at the end, wooed and wedded and a’, in a very rainbow of happiness. And yet—I doubt.

They fit too well, complement each other too perfectly. I foresee complications. Suppose—only suppose—that, nicely adjusted as their ages are with seven years between them in the love season, there should yet be a hitch? She, as girls do, may have grown in a day, an hour, in the swiftness of a handshake, into a woman: have entered into that heritage of knowledge, and instinct that is more than knowledge, that Lilith willed her, and Helen perfected, and Rachel and Monica, Grizel and Mother Goose, have all passed on: while he? Suppose that he does not grow up at all? I only say, suppose! I have not as yet an idea of how the story develops. We are still groping for our hero—don’t even know if he were short or tall.

What have you fancied, of all possible types? You must distinguish, you know, between the Justin of Laura’s fantasy, Jupiter Tonans when he is not Tom-Fool, and the Justin of sheer fact, who, worthy man, has not the imagination to be either. You must not protest. He is, as Laura and his mother are fond of agreeing, a dear, an utter dear, if you like (I never know which face is the prettier to watch as they say it) but imaginative, never! Not, at least, as far as the story has run. We are discussing the middle of the book by now, have hurried on so, shall have to go back to our beginnings soon. Let us hope people will not find it confusing. Not, I repeat, dear solemn man, with one lonely spark of imagination—and little enough humour. Collaborator, he positively must not have a sense of humour or he would never collect birds’ eggs. And it is essential, as you will see later, that he should collect birds’ eggs—with passion. We were saying that he possibly does not grow-up at all. ‘Grow’ would perhaps be the better word, for, in a sense he has been, at every age, definitely grown-up; has indeed, except for the birds’ eggs, never been youthful. There are some early photographs.... (No, there are none of Laura—she was a high-tempered child. She sat still once for love of a non-existent canary, but you did not deceive her twice.) But Justin ‘took’ beautifully. In all the innumerable pictures his bright squirrel of a mother never tired of showing Laura, he is exactly the same. Justin with rattle: Justin enjoying his toe: Justin with spade and pail and a seascape: Justin with blazer and bat: Justin and a smudge of moustache: Justin aggressively clean-shaven: Justin at any age from three to thirty; but never the incipient Justin, the developing Justin, never grub and chrysalis and moth, but Justin Homunculus, Justin in enlargement, never Justin in growth.

Pleasant, yellowed pictures, for all that, of a squarish face with an obstinate mouth and intent, solemn eyes. Solemnity is perhaps the first quality that would be impressed upon you if you should interview Justin. Here, you would perceive, was one who took life, revolving as it did upon the axis of Henry Justin Cloud, with becoming gravity. He was not pompous, but his slow-moving mind would be alarming because its very intentness upon such facts as it grasped rendered it unobservant, to the point of inhumanity, of anything to which its attention had not been attracted. And you would not find its attention easy to attract. Upon your honour, unless you were careful, you might find yourself at times, his creator though you were, a trifle in awe of Justin. Laura certainly was. This, you know, is curious, for, as a rule, nothing but a keen sense of humour can wake in a man’s eye that comprehending twinkle that alone intimidates a woman of poise. And Justin, we know, had no sense of humour at all.

What? You protest once more that without a sense of humour he cannot be a hero? I am shocked. Who are we, to fall foul of Henry V, and Mr. Rochester, and Garth Dalmain? Nevertheless, if you insist——

To tell you the truth, I am rather glad that you do insist. Unless our hero and our heroine have a sense of humour there is no chance at all of a happy ending: and in these days a happy ending, for a conscientious scribbler holding the mirror to nature, would be so manifestly untrue to life, would be so consequently inartistic, would be, in short, such a blessed relief, that one is tempted to leave a small chance, a stray peg on which to hang a wedding garment, should sir and lady, at the last, combine to send out invitations and include their chroniclers.

So Justin is to have an embryonic sense of humour; that is to say, he shall have, at least, eyes in his head, and will one day, you are sure and I hope, learn to see with them; but at the crisis of his life I fear he will be still purblind, wearing the pedantry his own spiritual myopia has induced, like smoke-coloured spectacles upon his Roman nose.

Thus far, in his turn, Henry Justin Cloud. He has stirred at last, and the girl with him, in the shadows of this half-planned tale in which we, too, wander uncertainly, ignorant of their story, guessing at their fate, knowing only, with a touch of awe, that out of nothingness they have been born and must continue, linked and struggling, to an appointed, undiscovered end.

And here, suddenly, in the vague muddle of my mind or yours, but as certainly as if he were sitting beside us, Justin lights his pipe. And the spark, flaring up like a thought, shows Laura at his elbow, shows how soft and pale and eager her face is as she looks at him—and that she has beech-red hair. And the light fades again more quickly even than it came, and leaves us still sitting over the fire, but with two new, solid facts to guide us: Laura, we have seen it with our eyes, loves Justin, and Justin loves, at least, his pipe. Which, for one evening’s work, Collaborator, is not so bad!

Time for bed, I think. But tomorrow, if the news is good, and war-work done, and it is too rainy to garden, we will pull up our chairs again, and perhaps, with luck, get on with Chapter Two.

CHAPTER II

As usual, you are perfectly right. The first thing, I agree, is to decide where to begin; that is, to discover at what period Laura and Justin, who, after all, interest themselves from the days when they were as old as their tongues, and months ahead of their teeth, begin to be interesting to other people. That is a simple matter? I believe you think, oh trustful Collaborator, that you have but to drop a suggestion, like a penny in a chocolate machine, for a chapter to roll out, ready written, for your censorship! Consider the initial difficulties! Who, for instance, is to decide this question of the interesting moment? John Smith, who likes a good wholesome love story with Sweet Seventeen for heroine? Or Sweet Seventeen herself, whose Prince Charming must be fifty if a day, grey-headed, iron-mouthed, and hopelessly entangled with a repentant actress of at least three distinct, disreputable pasts? Would they be interested in the countrified Laura, not yet a schoolgirl, whom I should dearly love to draw? Of course not!

No, the protagonists must be at least in their quarter century. But what would Mrs. Cloud, on the other hand, say to that? Slur over, if not ignore, the first ten, let alone the first thirty, years of her son’s life, we are, of course, at liberty to do. It is our affair! But, in that case, the book, frankly, will not be worth reading. A character such as Justin’s is not so easily deciphered. Thoroughly to appreciate Justin we must begin at the beginning. We are probably not aware that he weighed, at the very beginning, ten pounds. And speaking of teeth half a page ago—do we know that there is a little white tooth, in a little white thimble-box, in Mrs. Cloud’s big work-basket, that still bears witness how unflinchingly, at five and a quarter, Henry Justin could bear pain? Mrs. Cloud showed it to Laura one expansive day, and Laura, fingering it as she listened to the anecdote that led so inevitably to another anecdote, and another, and yet another, was whimsically jealous that his mother should have had so much more of him than she. Had, as she put it away again in the big basket under the pile of socks, a cold eye for the exquisite darns: wondered that Justin had not got blisters on his heel before now. And without an attempt at consistency, sat herself meekly down at Mrs. Cloud’s feet to beg a darning lesson; which Mrs. Cloud, with the discerning twinkle her son has not as yet acquired, was very ready to give. They were excellent friends, those two. They had affection, and that confident respect for each other which comes of thinking exactly alike on an extremely important subject. They would have both agreed, Collaborator, that to make our book a success, we unquestionably must begin at the beginning—the beginning, of course, of Henry Justin Cloud.

But I would rather talk about Laura.

I know the precedence is Justin’s: for Adam was first formed, then Eve.... Yet Eve, bless her ingenuous, enterprising heart, is always so much more interesting than Adam. If Adam were not in the Bible, wouldn’t you call him ‘stodgy’? And don’t you think Eve did, under her breath?

‘Adam—what’s that, in that tree?

‘Look, Adam!

‘No, not there! Can’t you see where I’m pointing?

‘Rather like a pear, only round.

‘Adam, if you put your foot so—and swing yourself up.

‘Of course the branch will bear you!

‘Oh, Adam, you might!

‘I don’t want to eat it. I only want to know what it is.

‘I do think you might!

‘Don’t then!’

And there the serpent’s bright, unwinking eye catches hers, and the serpent, all unperceived of Adam, whispers in her ear the one adjective adequate to the situation.

And as, from that day to this, young birds have twittered as old birds sing, I shouldn’t be surprised if Laura, in her turn, has had moments—red, secret, shameful, iconoclastic moments when she, too, has rolled the word relishingly over her tongue——

“Stodgy! Stodgy! Stodgy!”

But she was always very sorry afterwards. And so, I daresay, was Eve.

Adam was never sorry. He was always perfectly happy and self-satisfied. That is why I prefer to begin, at any rate, with Eve—Laura, I mean. For a happy man or woman is necessarily dull, dull as a healthy oyster, and as safe. Few enough will care to pry open the hard shell and prod the smug, snug mollusc inside. But when, as will sometimes happen, a grain or two of sharp-edged sand sifts in, to scrape and fret and fester the soft flesh, why, then the pearls begin to come, and the oyster is worth a dive at last.

Justin, kindly born and bred, is, as far as we know, to be happy all his life, though he had those ill-used months somewhere in his twenties for which Mrs. Cloud, at least, never quite forgave Laura. But Laura’s happiness cracked like a cup when she was six, and though she drank from it later, often enough, and pure nectar at that, it was always uncertainly, with a frightened eye upon the rivets with which Time, who mends most things, had put it together again.

I told you, I think, that the two were orphaned: he had lost one and she both parents: and if it were a schoolboy’s misfortune to have forgotten his father (Mrs. Cloud had no opinion of Solomon: if his precepts could produce nothing better than Rehoboam, she had every intention of sparing the rod!) it was very much more definitely a small girl’s tragedy that she could remember her mother.

From six o’clock in the morning, undisturbed by the erection of a tent in her bed, to six o’clock in the evening, comprehending that the gutterings from the night-light, surreptitiously kneaded in small hot hands, are more soothing and inductive to sleep than hymns, chocolates, or even The Three Little Men in the Wood, Laura’s mother was the most wonderful and satisfactory person in the whole world.

She had tweedy, uncomplaining skirts that could get through the scratchiest holes in a hedge without tearing like Nurse’s, and blouses with blue fluttery ribbons, and petersham waistbelts that would go twice round Laura if she pulled hard, and a little straw hat like a schoolboy’s. And she hardly ever wore gloves. But on Sundays she had a floppy thing with a rose in it and a great trailing feather, and a beautiful brown frock, with red silk down the front, that Laura called the robin dress. She could sing like a robin too, high and sweet, and she knew all the songs that had ever been sung, and had read all the books that had ever been written, and could tell you all about them all. She had a dear smiling face, and her hair was so long that she could sit on it, just like Rapunzel, and nobody could brush it as Laura did, because her mother, twisting a little in her chair and making funny faces, often said so. Her mother was always saying and doing funny things: she could make Laura laugh by just looking at her. Yet she was always properly serious over a dead bird or a bumped forehead, and had a most soothing way of making an armchair of lap and arm and shoulder for Laura to curl up in till she felt better.

With Nurse she was simply magnificent. She had a way of pretending that she wasn’t afraid of her that made Laura gasp. She had poured a glass of rhubarb and magnesia into the slop-pail once, before Nurse’s own eyes: and had said, of course Laura might have the door of the night-nursery left open if she wanted it—why not?—though she explained those shadows that dance upon the wall privately to Laura afterwards, and so satisfactorily that Laura was ready to withdraw her objection.

Yes, she was an understanding person. When they drove out in the low pony-trap through the narrow lanes that were hedged with damson trees, she never wondered that Laura should want the long yellow straws that dangled from the branches to show where a waggon-load of corn had passed. She would stand up and rake them down with her whip without more ado. She would stop half a dozen times in half an hour to let Laura jump out and pick herb-robert, or convolvulus, or ropes of briony, and give advice as to the weaving of a wreath, and wear it round her hat when it was done at whatever angle Laura preferred, with an air that proved to Nurse and other mothers that she wore it to please herself quite as much as Laura.

And Laura, subconsciously, was aware that the mother she worshipped, worshipped with equal frankness a small daughter whom no one else found particularly attractive. And it was possibly that knowledge that allowed the mother’s personality so to interknit with the daughter’s, that its uprooting came near to tearing out the child’s heart also.

Yet the alliance was so inevitable. There were the twins, of course, but they were obviously Nurse’s property. They were fat, greedy, red-crested darlings, with mottled arms and legs, and mouths that were always half open like baby thrushes. Laura and her mother were very fond of them, though Laura’s attitude was prompted, I fear, by the glory of sharing a responsibility with her mother, rather than by sisterly devotion, for she was always persuasively protestant when Mrs. Valentine suggested a visit to the nursery.

“My chick, we really must go and play with Wilfred and James!”

“Oh, Mother! Ten minutes more! They’re quite happy. They don’t really want us, you know. Oh, Mother, just another ten minutes! Because, Mother—darling, dear Mother—in the inside of the very inside of your heart, you would rather read to me, wouldn’t you?”

“What? Read to a whipper-snip like you, when the poor little twins—I never heard of such a thing!” And Mother’s knees would give way suddenly and Laura, slipping to the floor, would be tickled till she squealed. And when she had had her ten minutes, full measure, Mother would recollect herself guiltily, and hurrying upstairs, be very, very kind to Wilfred and to James. But Laura, in dutiful imitation, would yet be glancing, ever and again, from Noah’s Ark and pat-ball, to watch the beloved face, and wait for a stray smile; and when it came her way, would whisper to herself in fierce, delicious exultation——

“But she’s my mother most!”

You protest? You think such jealousy, such ecstasy, unchildlike and fantastic? And if not impossible in such a baby, at least improbable and rather distressing? And you don’t believe children are like that? I can’t help it. You ought to be right, but you are not. Laura was ‘like that.’ An unpleasant child? If you please. But her mother never thought so. And if some premature instinct made her, young as she was, so proud and jealous of her place in her mother’s heart, the instinct was, at least, a sure one. For though many are to like her, and some to love, never in all her life will she be first fiddle with any one again.

Moreover her golden age was coming to its end. Not suddenly, with a hushed house and red eyelids and the definite, numbing ritual of carriages and handkerchiefs and hothouse flowers: not in a black day that would have yawned like a gulf between Then and Now, a cleavage, definitely unbridgeable, on whose further brink Mother would move ever more mistily, shrouded in hopeless glamour; but imperceptibly, tenuously, in an ever lengthening spider-thread of hope deferred.

For Mother had only gone away to get better! She was ill, because she had begun to wear little white shawls, although it was summer-time, and sat still so much, and did not pour away Nurse’s medicines any more. So Laura saved her sugar at tea-time for her mother, to take the taste away. There was a day when Mother cried. Laura had never known till then that mothers could cry. She held her head and tried to be grown-up and comforting, but she was secretly terrified, yet a little important too, because Mother would not let any one be called, but lay quiet against Laura’s shoulder, just as Laura had so often lain against hers. The next day, or week, or months, she could never remember how long it was, her lazy mother had breakfast in bed, and she was to be sent away to stay with Gran’papa Valentine. The twins were to be left behind. “Too young to understand,” said Nurse significantly to the parlour-maid. Understand what? She coaxed, implored, stormed, for an explanation. Why shouldn’t she stay, if the twins did? She had not been naughty—she had been good, good! Mother wanted her. Mother couldn’t want the twins without her. Mother always wanted her. And she wanted her mother—she wanted her mother——

She fought like a little wild cat while they dressed her, in a fit of passionate anger that shook her small body as wind shakes a bush, and that only her mother had ever been able to control. There was a wildness about it that startled even the stolid nurse, who could not guess at the foreboding, the desperation that underlay the paroxysm, and was, of course, as incomprehensible to the child herself as his own despair to the dog who watches you pack your trunk.

It was the friendly parlour-maid who came to the rescue with her cheerful——

“Now, Miss Laura, you won’t be let say good-bye to your ma if you can’t be good!”

That quieted her, banished the unreasoning fear that had been upon her of the hateful strength of her nurse’s arms, that at any peremptory moment might seize and bear her, struggling, helpless, into the wilderness where Mother was not. She would not, could not, go without a word from her mother, or a promise or a kiss.... But if she might say good-bye—why, the world had righted itself again!... Mother would make all clear.... Mother would make all right.... Could she go to Mother now? this directly minute?

She submitted herself to the maid (she would not go near the nurse) and was re-arranged and smoothed and tidied, and left at last at the bedroom door, with a final injunction to be a good girl, and very quiet, and not stay long.

She shook off the maid’s hand, and, awed a little in spite of herself, slipped into the room.

She was so small that the foot of the big bedstead blocked her vision like a wall, and for a blank moment she thought the room empty. Then the clothes rustled faintly, and emboldened she peeped round the post. There, sure enough, lay her mother, her beautiful long plaits disordered, an arm flung out weakly.

She clambered on to the bed and cast herself upon her in an ecstasy of relief.

“Mother! Mother!”

Well, she had her half-hour and was sent away comforted. Laura was to enjoy herself—and be very good—and go on with her lessons—and be kind to Wilfred and James: and there should be letters, many letters, in a round hand that Laura could read all by herself. And soon, very soon, Mother would come and fetch her home—and so good-bye to Laura, her Laura, her own little girl——

That is how Laura went to live at Brackenhurst with Gran’papa Valentine.

She got her letters, three of them, but no more, though that was only because there was a new postman! But though the twins followed her in a little while in white overalls and black sashes, and the weeks went by, and Laura grew daily more excited and impatient, her mother never came to fetch her home.

CHAPTER III

If they had only told her that her mother was dead!

Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the beloved mongrel who was poisoned, and Grandmamma, and birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had explained it all to her at the time. Remembering, she would still have had, in the shock, her mother to lean upon. And, especially to a child, death’s finality is its own anodyne. But nobody, with that anxious English substitution of euphemism for tact, ever used the bald word ‘death.’ Mother, she was told, was alive and well and happy. She was living in heaven with Jesus and Our Father. She knew everything that Laura did, and one day, if Laura were good, she would see her again.

Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a superfluity of imagination, and a knowledge of life that would have amused a London sparrow!

It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at any moment, and she would come, of course, from the station, along the dusty high-road that swept past the end of the lane and that you could see from the window of the inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in desperation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion, scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy days, keep a mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden window-seat to watch the distant strip with an air of expectancy that would have made that awaited mother’s heart ache.

The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, boundaries were enlarged, and from the end of the lane a wider vista was under her observation, a white river on which black, far-away specks were for ever swimming boat-like into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into figures of men and women—women in tweedy skirts and blue ribbons and little straw hats, that were always Mother until they were near. What mad terrier-rushes that high-road saw, helter-skelter down the last hundred yards, and what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away.

But fine weather brought worse things than disappointment. It brought the long daily walks, and picnics, sometimes, when an aunt who was doing her duty by roly-poly nephews and a taciturn niece, thought it time for a treat. And then would come the scenes, delays, excuses, direct petition, and the final ‘temper,’ the white-hot rebellion that exhausted alike the bored nursemaid and bewildered aunt, and did indeed at first accomplish Laura’s object of being left behind. For, locked in the night-nursery to consider its sins, the ha’porth of misery, perched on its high chair like a tousled bird, would be fiercely rejoicing that once more it had staved off catastrophe—a mother arriving and departing again while her little girl was out for a walk.

But such a reason could not be explained to Aunt Adela, Who Smelt of Lanoline.

Laura hated Aunt Adela as she hated every one in those first interminable months in that alien household. Her all-satisfying intimacy with her mother had created in her a habit of indifference to the rest of even her own tiny world, and now, stranded among semi-strangers, she was at first so shy and so fastidious that, in the happiest circumstances, it would have taken time before she learned how to make or receive advances. But it is not easy to be polite with a hidden trouble gnawing, like a fox, at one’s vitals: and Laura did not try over hard. For Laura, fighting for her memories like a dog for its bones, with a more insidious foe than honest Aunt Adela, had lost already much of her treasure, dropping one by one as she struggled the pretty ways her mother had taught her, and growing, in her bitter loneliness, into a very wild apple of a small girl, over whom aunt and household and visitors shook their heads in despair.

She became, of course, as the months went by, outwardly more amenable—was tamed as a wolf-cub can be tamed, into a semblance of domesticity. There came, at least, an end to the flinging of a frantic body from side to side of its cage. She bruised herself at last into a state of acquiescence, and even learned to do tricks. But she never forgot that she was trapped. Aunt Adela, taking Wilfred and James to her well-meaning heart, would wonder why it was so much more difficult to do her duty by Laura. Laura had been naughty at first, but under her, Adela’s, wise management she was certainly settling down. Yet there was something about her that Adela found, she hardly knew why, disturbing—distressing even. Why couldn’t Laura be more like other children? Why, for instance, would she not make friends with the playfellows of Adela’s anxious choice? A conscientious aunt might well plume herself on the advantages she could confer—advantages that her late lamented, yet (between you and her) eccentric sister-in-law had never troubled to procure for an excessively spoiled daughter. There were the Vicar’s daughters—such well-behaved children. There were the two nieces of Brackenhurst’s great man, old Timothy Cloud, thrice Mayor of the neighbouring market town before he died and had a stained glass window in Brackenhurst parish church. And there was the son himself, young Justin Cloud, though he was at school of course, and older, but nominally at least an ornament of a most select little circle.

Above all there were the five little Mouldes, models of deportment, with neat pinafores, and straight fair hair, and white eyelashes, and noses moistly pink, like puppies. Laura was expected to invite or to go to tea with them at least once a week, though it soon appeared that the visits needed Aunt Adela’s eye to be even superficially successful. Only Aunt Adela’s eye could prevent Laura from retiring under the nearest bed with a book, and refusing to budge till it was time for herself or her visitors to depart. It enraged Laura that the accident of age should mark her down for friendship with Annabel Moulde, a sly, skinny child to whom Aunt Adela invariably referred as “A little mother. So good to all her brothers and sisters.” As if Laura didn’t try to be good to Wilfred and James—when Aunt Adela wasn’t looking!... Because it was for Mother ... because she had promised ... not to please Aunt Adela ... not to show off like Annabel.... Laura despised Annabel for her ostentatious virtue and her meagre bookshelf—Queechy, Ministering Children, Melbourne House, Jessica’s First Prayer.... She was expected to be friends with a little girl who enjoyed—yes, enjoyed—reading Jessica’s First Prayer! Yet Annabel, unconsciously, had done her a good turn; for Laura, bursting with the humorous horror of that discovery, had been impelled to break her habit of silence to impart the joke, tentatively, to Gran’papa Valentine—and Gran’papa, over his spectacles and his Boswell, had been surprised into a chuckle, and a stirring of interest in a granddaughter to whose credit he had heard little, and, conversation developing, had ended, to their mutual amazement, in bestowing upon her the freedom of his sitting-room and his biscuit tin, and certain of his unlocked bookshelves. After which there was, at least, always Gran’papa!

Gran’papa’s room was the pleasantest in the house—small, square and cosy. The furniture was of some yellowish wood, glassy with polish, and there was a chequered crimson tablecloth and, summer and winter, a dancing yellow fire. The window was always open, and the fresh warmed air smelt faintly of biscuits and tobacco and old bindings. The pictures on the walls hung orderly, in couples, Landseer engravings and framed coloured casts of trout; for Gran’papa was a fisherman. He was a fiddler too, though here zeal outran discretion. His violin was wrapped away in silk and velvet, like a lady, and Laura was never quite sure that it was not, say—first cousin? to the fairy fiddle in Grimm’s. She longed to experiment. There was the big desk with ink and seals and wax, and neat papers innumerable, and a pot with marigolds or mignonette, and always there was sunshine and the bad-tempered canary, that would dash at you from its open cage, with peckings and shrill squeaks of jealous rage, till Gran’papa whistled, when it would perch upon his finger or his skull-cap, and slowly condense from a passionate puff-ball into an elegant little gentleman in lemon yellow breeches and snuff-coloured swallow-tails, with an eye so fixed and bright that you could swear it wore a monocle.

A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild’s throat, the picture of stern old Gran’papa, with his whole edifice of dignity built up so solidly, from his square-toed boots and speckless broadcloth and his grey satin tie with its pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue eyes, and the unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head, fantastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up Laura, looking back, a long way back, might begin, belatedly, to miss a half-forgotten Gran’papa, might wonder whether, after all, she had sufficiently appreciated him, realize with a sigh that she had learned in those young years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully as he had loved her; though ‘love’ was not a word that Laura could imagine Gran’papa using, any more than she could hear him saying, ‘pretty girl’ when he meant, he emphatically meant, ‘an elegant young female.’ Even ‘young woman’ would have been a concession for Gran’papa’s nice ear. Just so, Laura’s phrase would have been tempered by Gran’papa to ‘affection,’ ‘esteem,’ ‘respect.’ And there she would have agreed with him again, for she certainly respected him profoundly. And he, secretly, respected her, because in her he could recognize his own keen, fastidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, but intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and kindred minds. Not kindred souls—there they parted company; for where Laura’s affection could invariably be trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the testing tool of her grandfather’s hypercritical taste had left him, at the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at all—save Laura. That Laura, his flesh and blood, had something of his own grey matter in her head too, was a secret delight to him: and by the time he was eighty and she eighteen, Laura had discovered that secret and how, in consequence, to wind him, for all his tetchiness, round her finger. But that is at yet eight or nine years ahead, and Laura only beginning to discover that in Gran’papa’s room, at Gran’papa’s lowest bookshelf, she could sometimes forget to wonder if Mother would come this afternoon.

Gran’papa’s bookshelf was crammed with volumes so tall and heavy that to pull one out was breathless work, and to lift it a greater feat than lifting the coal-scuttle or Wilfred who weighed three stone. They had to be read by a literary Laura reposing on her stomach, her legs waving airily, her elbows so chafed and reddened by the harsh carpet and her own weight, that they are to this day her worst point. Which is the reason, Collaborator, if the matter has bothered you, that Laura, even at that dinner-party we shall attend sooner or later, never wore really short sleeves.

But the books were worth it, even to the later Laura at her most feminine hour when Justin, unprompted, had admired her frock and said, not joking, that he liked red hair. (Truly—he said so!) For the books were an education, and an education is more useful than pretty elbows when one has a Justin for whom to stand tiptoe.

But to the early Laura, with her mother half lost and Justin not yet found, they were not education but Nepenthe—Nepenthe and the Fields.

There was Herodotus, and The Swiss Family Robinson, and Gulliver’s Travels; Pamela, and a first edition of Alice (Gran’papa approved of Tenniel) and three or four single poems, each a book to itself, with a profusion of bright-coloured illustrations—Gilpin, The Elegy on a Mad Dog, The Three Jovial Hunstmen, and Laura’s favourite, So She went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf. There was the Churchman’s Family Bible, with Adam in voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with hair like Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were the Cruikshanks—huge albums into which Gran’papa had pasted every print or drawing of his favourite artist that he had come across in fifty magpie years. And there was Mr. Punch, immortal Mr. Punch, endless volumes of him, inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation of the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian politics with which Laura of the tenacious memory could, on occasion, confound an opponent. Pouring over the cartoons, devouring the antiquated letter-press as only a small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela one day on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition of group after group of Her Majesty’s Ministers who had died before she was born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for instance, and pitied him deeply for losing his wife, for she had him thoroughly entangled with The Lord of Burleigh. But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and ‘Joey,’ whose speeches in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept and learned by heart, and would declaim unweariedly to the looking-glass and the indifferent twins, and who was nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming, unfocussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. Alfred Jingle.

Worship was even then, I suppose, a necessity of her nature, and, her chief altar veiled, her mind was in process of becoming a pantheon, in which Jane Eyre and Jephthah’s daughter, Mary Stuart and Napoleon (it shocked her intensely that Gran’papa could refer to him familiarly as ‘Boney’) shared incense with Wamba son of Witless, and Admiral Byng, and poor Arachne, who did sew better than Minerva anyhow! For Laura’s gods were generally selected for their misfortunes’ sake. She had the instinct for lost causes: would always be the loyalest of rebels. Indeed her early and equal passion for John Milton and Marie Corelli was occasioned by the fact that here, at least, were two who could appreciate a poor devil’s good points. If Laura could have had Providence under her orders for but one busy hour, how topsy-turvily perfect the world would have rolled on again, with never a discrowned king nor a carrotless donkey nor a motherless eight-year-old in all its boundaries. Her baby sorrows had intensified her inborn sympathy with any ill-treated thing, and, as the leaves began to fall in that first lonely autumn, she would fling small, motherly arms round the shivering poplar on the lawn as she passed it, and hug it and warm it, with defiant glances at the comfortable fir trees and well-dressed laurels: would rescue dying flowers from the bonfire, and worms from the birds, and birds from the pussy-cat: and when she found a tell-tale hole and a nibbled book in Gran’papa’s bookshelf she was quite as anxious as the mouse to preserve the secret. Can you see Laura, Collaborator, breathing heavily with excitement, eye and ear cocked against detection, guiltily dropping stolen cheese down that mouse’s tunnel before she corked it up and turned with equally eager sympathy to the smoothing of the poor torn book, and so, incidentally, to her reward? For in that brown, ancient book, with its long s’s and its wood-cuts and its map, she found the information that neither Gran’papa nor Nurse nor Aunt Adela would give her, nothing more or less than a definite description of her mother’s new home, and full directions as to how Laura was to get there.

She and the mouse had happened, in short, upon an early edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

CHAPTER IV

If you had asked Laura what heaven was like, she would have answered, almost involuntarily—“‘A bald head,’” and Wilfred and James would have tumbled over each other in their anxiety to join in the chorus—“‘Because it is a bright and shining place where there is no parting,’” and to watch the effect upon you of that dazzling joke.

But after the twins came to live at Brackenhurst, Laura laid a taboo upon it. One might joke with Mother, but to joke about her, about anything connected with her, was sacrilege. Heaven, the twins were once and for all to understand, was not in the least like a bald head. It was in the Bible, a very beautiful place, a sort of hospital, and Mother was staying there just now to get well, and if Wilfred or James ever mentioned that riddle again, Laura would tell Jesus about it when she said her prayers, and Jesus would tell Mother, and Mother would not bring them one little bit of chocolate when she came back. (You see, she was learning already how to manage her men-folk.) The twins were impressed and obedient; yet the phrase, more illuminating than all Aunt Adela’s theology, stuck in their minds, and as no child attempts to imagine an abstraction, Laura’s bright and shining heaven lived on in hers as a pile of summer clouds lined with pink and silver, on which Mother lay as on a bed, with her beautiful long plaits disordered and her arm flung out weakly.

In haymaking time, when Laura was tired of cocking hay for the twins to pull down again, and the lemonade and bread-and-dripping had vanished, and the jolly sun, like Bacchus on a barrel, sat astride the midday sky, the indefatigable twins would trot away on their private business that was not unconnected with forbidden strawberry beds, and Laura, lying on her back in the uncut hay, would stare up through the sorrel and the toddling grass, and the tall daisies, and watch the slow clouds coming up like ships over the edge of the world, and screw up her eyes till there were little white crowsfeet in the tan, to peer the better at each dazzling brightness that might be heaven itself for all she knew. Sometimes the cloud line was broken by a wisp of vapour, and then Laura tried to be sure that it was her mother’s thin hand waving to her from over the edge of heaven. But she was never quite sure.

Generally the clouds—it was a summer of northerly winds—came sailing up over a slope whose crest of beeches, a mile away, flanked Green Gates and the road; so that when she discovered The Pilgrim’s Progress, and a drifting cloud-heaven had become a stationary Cœlestial City, it was behind Beech Hill that it lay, and towards Beech Hill that, suddenly grown acquiescent in the matter of walks and picnics, she would urge the nurse and the perambulator: and it was on the sky-line beyond Beech Hill that she and Christian did at last, one autumn day, see it shining. For though she poured over the unfamiliar print till her eyes ached, it was autumn before she had mastered the book and her instructions, and could prepare for her own private expedition.

It was Christian’s fault: he simply wouldn’t be hurried. Stumbling along beside him over the difficult words, she was out of patience twenty times a day with his credulous, open-mouthed simplicity. He was no better than Wilfred and James who always believed every word that the coachman told them, or the gardener’s boy, or the chattering, black-eyed Frenchmen who came to the yard on Saturdays to sell onions. She had no patience with them or with conversational Christian, wasting his time and losing his way. Did he think that she, Laura, would have been taken in like that, over and over again, by Vain Confidence and Flatterer and Mr. Worldly Wiseman? Why, the very names were enough to put even the twins on their guard, and Christian was grown-up! Byways Meadow—there she acknowledged that she too might have strayed: she hankered after little cross-country paths herself, though Nurse and Aunt Adela always insisted on the dull, dusty, put-on-your-gloves high-road; but she would never have pounded off to Sinai, or stood by the hour arguing and disputing and contradicting about unintelligible things like Carnal Cogitations and The Carcase of Religion, long before she had got to heaven and found Mother.

But though Christian would go his own gait, and skipping was unsafe because the adventure were tucked away among the arguments like strawberries in a bed of leaves, he did at last bring her past the Enchanted Ground (disappointingly unproductive of fairies) to the Land of Beulah and a clear view of the Cœlestial City itself.

Absorbed Laura, curled-up by Gran’papa’s fire on that clear October morning, reading of the Reflexion of the sun on the City (for the City was of pure gold) and dutifully looking up Rev. xxi. 28, had just stumbled upon a more marvellous heaven than even Bunyan drew, when the nursemaid, as it always happened, pounced upon her and brushed her and buttoned her and gloved her and stuck a hat upon her and hurried her off for a walk, too dazed to protest, with her head full of rivers of life and fruit trees and gates that were one pearl (like Mother’s ring) and strange, intoxicating, unpronounceable names—the third, chalcedony, and the seventh, chrysolite, and the eighth, beryl. She was far too absorbed to notice the way they went, and Wilfred and James were pelting each other with fallen leaves, and Nurse was leaning panting against the perambulator, before she realized that they had climbed the long Beech Hill Road that Nurse disliked because it was steep and lonely, but which, as the highest point of the highest village in a hilly county, did certainly satisfy Aunt Adela’s belief in fresh air.

She stripped off her gloves, dreamily accepting her goodluck, and leaving the nurse to spread rugs beneath the little wooden seat, and unwrap the biscuits and the bottle of milk, she wandered off aimlessly through the sun-splashed grove, her thoughts still caught like flies in a web of make-believe, yet aware and enjoying with all her sensitive little soul the gallantry of the autumn morning.

It was perfect day. Its colours shone through the clear air like pebbles freshened in water, and away upon the sky-line the threadlike roads and midget trees were as cleanly defined as the great trunks of the beeches themselves, that stood, brown and naked and stately, like a troop of tall savages, against the brilliant sky. Overhead the jolly wind that lived on the hill-top and never went to sleep, was hard at work as usual, scattering the clouds in every direction, like a bad dog frightening sheep, tugging and tearing at the beech boughs, and sending down the last of the leaves in golden gusts into the deep pits at the roots of the trees, that were half filled already by generations of leaves, and were as safe and soft to jump into as a feather-bed. Laura, forced into a trot and then a run, was caught up at last in a sudden scamper of twigs and dust and stray leaves, and whirled along till she felt as if she were flying, and clutched at a trail of bramble to steady herself and get her breath; but the peremptory wind would have no lagging, and, catching at her little round hat, lifted it off her head and trundled it along in front of her like a schoolboy dribbling a football, till they were clear of the trees, when it turned tail in its sudden whimsical way, leaving the hat upon the ground and Laura panting beside it.

For some slow, pleasant minutes she lay still, listening to the footsteps of the wind and her own heart-beats, with her cheek pressed close to the thymy earth, still besprinkled, late as it was, with milk-wort and rest-harrow and yellow sparks of tormentil, that glimmered like flung match-ends in fuel that was a clump of spent brown heather. The bright, thin sunshine settled lightly upon her like a gossamer scarf or a baby’s breath upon your cheek before it kisses you. Through shut eyes she enjoyed the spacious peace of the hill-top, and the delicate warmth seemed a physical expression of the sensation of well-being that was stealing over her, a sensation that, in the old days, had been but another word for her mother’s presence. The wind, raging again in the beech-grove, was a turbulent giant guarding the entrance to enchanted lands: its far-away fury heightened the impression of expectant silence. Through her pleasant drowsiness she had an odd feeling that something, something important, was about to happen.

Lazily she sat up and looked about her.

She had never before strayed further than their shadows’ length from the beeches: the low-banked trench, where the twins played ‘King of the Castle’ and the sheep huddled against the rain, had fenced off adventure. But today she and the wind had cleared it in a flying leap and had run out to the very edge of the wide level table-land that had bounded her view, and before her lay unknown valleys and ridges, valleys and ridges, rolling away to the sky-line like waves of the sea.

And on the sky-line itself, trembling between earth and heaven as if it were a great diamond swinging on a silver chain, hung a glancing, shimmering translucency in the shape of a house—a castle—a king’s pavilion—with a central arch that glistered like a high priest’s breast-plate, and twin towers reflecting the sun in glints and rays and flashes of white and golden light.

For a long minute Laura sat motionless, staring—staring. Then her heart began to beat so wildly that she felt the thud of it as a sharp pain, and her cold little fingers dug and clutched at the soft turf. She could hardly breathe: she was choking, drowning in the flood of joy that swirled over her like waters set free. She sat, white and sick with ecstasy, her eyes devouring the miracle, while in her ears remembered phrases pealed like wedding bells.

The Reflexion of the Sun upon the City....

... and the city was of pure gold, like unto pure glass....

... a bright and shining place, where there is no parting....

Her light was like unto a stone most precious, as it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal....

The uncounted minutes tiptoed past.

She spoke at last, in a little whispering voice—

“I’ve found it,” said Laura. “It’s here. It was here all the time. And Mother——”

She counted the easy ridges that seemed so clear and near, traced, with a finger that quivered, the merry white road playing bo-peep in and out of the woods.

“They’re the Delectable Mountains,” said Laura. “Of course, the Delectable Mountains and the Cœlestial City. And I can get there by tea-time. If I run—if I don’t stop once—oh, Mother, I can get to you by tea-time.”

CHAPTER V

Though its anticipation and memory can fill a lifetime, the actual emotion must inevitably measure its intensity by its brevity. Ecstasy and despair, those hill-tops of human experience, can offer, in the nature of things, no abiding place for a pilgrim’s feet.

With the return of the mere capacity for thought, Laura declined rapidly from her timeless bliss into a mood of active, bustling pleasure. A thousand devices and anticipations flitted through her mind as, in feverish excitement, she mapped out the day.

She would start at once, as soon as she had satisfied Nurse by appearing for milk and biscuits.... She and the twins were accustomed to wander, within limits, as they pleased.... She would be over the hill and away by the time Nurse was repacking the perambulator, and when she was missed, who would guess where she had gone?... At least, she was not so sure of that.... It was very strange that Nurse and Aunt Adela had never said a word about heaven being so close to Brackenhurst.... It looked as if they were afraid of her finding out ... as if they didn’t want her to see Mother.... She clenched her fist. If they tried to stop her now!... They had better not try, that was all! But she would not give them a chance.... She would not let them guess that she knew anything.... She, too, could pretend ignorance, even if she had to tell a story over it.... Mother couldn’t bear you to tell stories—but this was different.... She would explain it all to Mother, and of course Mother would understand.... Oh, the blessedness of being back with Mother who always understood!

She was so absorbed in her meditations that the nursemaid could approach unheard.

“Miss Laura, are you deaf? ’Ere I’ve calling till I’m ’oarse. Come along, do, you naughty child, an’ ’ave your biscuits. It’s eleven or more—you won’t eat no lunch if you leave ’em so late. Come along. What are you staring at?”

Laura’s eyes were as blank as a cat’s. She waved her hand airily as she scrambled to her feet.

“That over there. What’s that—that shining house, Nurse?”

“Green’ouse, I expect.” Nurse screwed up her eyes and followed the direction of Laura’s grubby finger. “Oh, that! That’s the Crystal Pallis. It stands very ’igh, you know. As ’igh as us, almost. Miss Laura, on’y look at your ’ands. Reely! A terrier’d ’ave more sense. If Miss Adela meets us——”

The Crystal Palace! As beautiful a name as any other for a Cœlestial City....

“Have you seen it before, Nurse?”

“Lord, yes—any fine day. Must ’ave a fine day, of course. I wonder I ’aven’t shown it you. I come at night once with my friend to see the fireworks. My friend, ’e——”

Laura broke in. She knew all about Nurse’s friend.

“Please to remember—Fifth of November?” She was puzzled.

“Not only then. Any night. Lights up all the sky—blues and reds, like joolry. Lovely. I’d like to see it close to.”

“Why—may any one go there?” asked Laura casually as they walked towards the beeches. But her indifference was the quivering indifference of a well-trained dog on trust before a lump of sugar.

“Lord, yes! Mother went once.”

“Your mother? Your mother too? Did she?”

“Yes. She went once. Brock’s Benefit. Fine time she ’ad too. Come along, Miss Laura.” She took her by her unwilling hand. “You can look at it after. It won’t run away.”

“Was it——What was it like, Nurse?”

“Well—it’s all glass, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Laura. “Like pure gold——Many gates?”

“Oh, I dunno——”

“Twelve, should you think?”

“I dessay. It’s a big place. What, Miss Laura?”

“Twelve thousand furlongs,” Laura was murmuring. She raised her voice. “What else, Nursie?”

“Oh, there’s fountains and parrots and stalls with joolry—that brooch of mine come from there—” (it was a sham moonstone that Laura and Nurse agreed in thinking superb) “and gardens something lovely. Orange trees, my mother said, and trees with tulips on ’em.”

She was thinking of magnolias, but Laura, lover of flowers, drew a deep breath, thrilling to a vision of the tallest tree on Beech Hill parti-coloured to its topmost twig with the tulips you buy in shops, long-stemmed, scarlet and purple, half a crown a dozen.

“Oh, Nurse!! And was there a river, Nurse?”

“Oh, yes—runs right through the grounds, with animals on the islands—what d’you call ’em—antiluviums—awful-looking beasts. Gave my mother the creeps, they did.”

Laura nodded, but she was not impressed. She knew them. She and Christian had known them in the Valley of the Shadow and had taken no harm. Yet to assure herself she asked——

“What are they like? Is it difficult to get past them?”

“Why, Miss Laura, they’re not real beasts. On’y stone. Just antiluviums. Sort of stone dragons, you know.”

“Oh, I see.” Laura nodded again as one enlightened. She was acquainted with the Dragon, too, and the Beast; had met them at church.... They were bound for a thousand years.... Turning into stone was a very good way of binding them.... She gave a great sigh of content. It was simply wonderful how everything fitted in....

I beg your pardon, Collaborator? You think it curious that the conversation should have been such a satisfaction to her?

But why? Her Cœlestial City hardly needed a nursemaid’s recognition?

Oh, I see. I see what you mean. But then you are arguing as a ‘grown-up.’ We grown-ups, of course, believe or disbelieve—black or white—one thing or the other—and there’s an end of it. But this is a child. A child can reconcile—look back, Collaborator—implicit belief and frank scepticism in a way that, to us, is all but incomprehensible. A child will show you a fairy ring without dreaming that it can be anything but the track of elfin feet, yet will instantly and vigorously denounce as a story-teller the contemporary who claims to have seen the Little People at their dancing. Fantasy and Common Sense sit see-saw in those early years, and keep a wonderful balance; but when the lanky ‘teens add their weight it is generally Common Sense that comes to earth with a thud, while poor Fantasy is jerked sky high and lost for good among the stars: which is a pity.

Do you understand now why Laura—who will always keep that balance, I believe, however old she grows—could, with only the Kent hills between her and heaven, be yet distinctly relieved that Nurse’s mother had been there before her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, you see, like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the counter of Nurse’s mother’s experiences and pronounced coin of the realm.

Laura—but I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Collaborator! I lose the thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but first let me talk myself out. And it is not polite to murmur “Impossible” pointedly to your pointed knitting needles!

But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the twins, eating her biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl.

She was always good when she was left alone, as the new nurse had at last discovered; so when the biscuits had been eaten and the children dismissed to another hour’s play before going home, it was with the twins that Nurse’s paperback shared her attention, rather than with Laura, slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was scarcely to be distinguished from a slim beech sapling a-sway in the wind. Nurse would have settled down to her reading with less composure if she could have seen beyond the screen of trees, have caught Laura’s backward glances, half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill-top, and her odd proceedings when she decided that she was out of every one’s inquisitive sight.

For Laura, the careless, the untidy, the hard-on-her-clothes, swayed, I suppose, by some broken memory of kind hands pinching up her ribbons and smoothing her curls, of eyes very proud and critical of their Laura, was first and fastidiously concerned with her appearance. She rubbed her hands as clean as she could on the grass, fastened a careless button, pulled up her stockings and adjusted her suspenders. Mother hated wrinkly stockings.... She tightened her hair ribbon, straining her hair off her face till her eyes nearly jumped out of her head, and did her best to brush the long locks, that the wind had whipped into rats’-tails, round and round her finger into the sausages that grown-ups desire. She took off her shoes and shook out the sand and bits of leaf, and tied them in the complicated tangle that Laura believed to be a ‘Louise’ knot, because it never under any circumstances came undone. Indeed, it needed scissors in the evening. Finally she took out her purse, poured the hoard into her lap and counted it breathlessly. A penny, three halfpennies, two farthings, and the threepenny bit that she had had given her to put in the plate on that fortunate Sunday when there had not, after all, been a collection. Sixpence exactly. Children were half price, so sixpence exactly could smuggle you through gates of pearl into your mother’s lap.

She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the hill-side.

CHAPTER VI

How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten than towns passed in the train. How long a little time can be! Once I saw a woman—not Laura—grow old between a question and an answer—between the opening and the shutting of a door.

Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence with “When I was a little girl,” and look bewildered if you laughed. “When I was young,” said Laura, as innocently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with Mother at the beginning, and at the end of it—Justin. And yet, less of it than of the four-hour Odyssey that closes her childhood, that cuts her memories in two and provides you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely curious, as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting wearily, amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening skirts, amid vanities and ignorances and experiments, for body and brain to grow up to it.

Those four hours—joyfully down dale and up hill to another glimpse of a receding heaven, and then down dale again, not quite so springily—those four hours Laura never forgot. Each incident of the road—the stumble-stone that cut her knee: a bolting rabbit startling itself and her, and the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it stiffly like an Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that frightened her into ditches, and once a nettle-bed: that black wood where, through dead leaves, her own shadow had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were the echoes of her own: the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trailing and tropical, like pictures in the Swiss Family Robinson, with mighty garlands of old-man’s beard: a village pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies: babies on door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: dust and sunshine and the terrible tramps—each and all had been etched indelibly upon a mind that excitement had made more than ever sensitive to impressions.

She picked a bunch of flowers as she trotted along, for a mother who would appreciate them. They were fruit trees in heaven, of course, with leaves for the healing of the nations, like the eucalyptus tree, she supposed, on the vicarage front lawn; but Rev. xxii said nothing about flowers. “Too much pavement,” thought Laura, the gardener. She supposed that even if grass tried to seed itself in the dust of the cracks the dust would be gold.... There couldn’t be much nourishment in gold-dust.... Anyhow, here was one of Mother’s own autumn bunches for her, pulled from the dear chalk soil—an exquisite disorder of oat-grass and hips-and-haws, late sprigs of yellow-wort between the scabious cushions, like stars on a lilac sky, with oak-apples and bleached heather and fans of scarlet bracken—all put together by the skilful, flower-loving hands she had inherited from her mother.

A bigger part than she realized of her first light-footed hour had gone in the picking of them. The end of the second saw her passing a village bakery, with a wistful eye on the stack of loaves and bars of mouldy chocolate behind the blurred, thick panes. She hesitated as, through the open door, the round, red-rimmed baker’s clock told her, between hiccoughs, that it was half-past two and that she was hungry. So hungry, indeed, that for a moment her fingers closed on the purse at the bottom of her pocket. A penny, three half-pennies, two farthings and a threepenny bit.... Sixpence ... Gran’papa’s Euclid himself couldn’t make it more than sixpence.... No, she mustn’t.... Yet there was such virtue in a ha’penny bun—a round, shiny, sticky, steamy, curranty ha’penny bun! She supposed it wouldn’t do if she offered St. Peter fivepence halfpenny—and explained? If only St. John had the keys.... St. John would let her in at once, she felt sure. But St. Peter? He might, of course ... but perhaps it was wiser not to risk it.... When she got to Mother there would be tea, tea without bread-and-butter first, the kind of tea Aunt Adela never knew.... Mother would see to that.... She could wait.... She wasn’t so awfully hungry....

She turned resolutely from temptation and hurried on.

But she was no longer dancing effortlessly along like a kitten or a whirled leaf: her haste had become deliberate and would soon be painful. She was growing—infallible sign of exhaustion—conscious of her body: conscious that her back was aching; that she was thirsty as well as hungry; that, through her sand shoes, the surface of the road knubbed her wincing feet. She carried her bunch of flowers, drooping, too, by this time, across her shoulder to ease her tired arm, but they were very heavy. Such a great big bunch—but then Laura, her life long, will always undertake a little more than she can manage.

Above her the unconquered hill-road stretched as steep and long and high as Jack’s Beanstalk. She climbed it wearily, bargaining herself upward—

“I will go to the second bend, up to the white birch. If I do it in a hundred steps I will stop a minute. If I do it in ninety steps I will stop two minutes.”

But it was always more than a hundred steps for sand shoes, and so, honourably, though her breathless little body were rocking, she would not stop.

She reached the top at last, too hot from walking to flinch at the shock of the wind, or to notice that the sun had gone in: and found her goal again—twin towers and arched body—yet so strangely altered in an afternoon, that, as she looked, she gave a cry of dismay. It had been so near, so clear, a parrot’s flight from Beech Hill, but now, withdrawn to an immense distance, it rose without a glitter from the iron rim of the world, a grey, frozen blur upon the sullen sky.

She stared fearfully.

She couldn’t ... she hadn’t ... she couldn’t have made a mistake?... Yet what had happened?... What in the name of enchantment had happened to the Crystal Palace, the Cœlestial City, the bright and shining heaven?...

Enchantment! In a flash her scared wits seized at the only endurable explanation. Enchantment! Of course! Of course! Oh, blessedly of course! What was she thinking of so soon to forget Christian, and her Shepherds?...

Beware that ye steppe.... How they had rubbed it in too! And she hadn’t come to a single danger yet except motor-cars and the cow with the leering eye; did she suppose she was to win through without a qualm? Foolish Laura, to forget that between Delectable Mountains and the Gates of the City lies, with all its bewilderments, the Enchanted Ground.

The Enchanted Ground! Her eyes sought the far hills, and once more credulity was fortified into conviction, for even as she watched, the white autumn dusk uprose noiselessly, and before it city and hills alike shrank and were gone. It was as convincing a piece of magic as could be wanted.

Laura only wished Aunt Adela could have been there to see it—Aunt Adela, who did not believe in witches—Aunt Adela, always sniffing at Grimm’s Fairy Tales! Besides, even Aunt Adela would be—only for a moment—some sort of a companion, flesh and blood at least, at a small girl’s elbow, as she stands lonesomely on a strange hill-top, buttoning the reefer that had seemed so hot and thick down in the valley, pulling down cuffs of sleeves through which the wind is tunnelling, making shivering preparation for the plunge down—down—down—into Enchanted Ground.

Impossible to turn back now—wasn’t it?... What a notion?... Mother would be waiting.... Mother would know by now that she was coming.... One of the Shining Ones would be sure to have told her.... How excited Mother would be growing.... The Enchanted Ground stretched from sky to sky.... It was beginning to rain, and the wind cut through one’s reefer as if it were gauze.... But there was Mother.... She could get through somehow.... Only she must hurry, for it must be nearly tea-time.... She simply had to get to heaven by tea-time....

She shifted her autumn bunch, tucked her free hand between frock and skin to keep it as warm as might be, and, screwing up eyes and mouth against the drizzle that whipped her face, set off at a stumbling trot down her second hill-side in an afternoon.

CHAPTER VII

Now the same gust of rain that was disputing with Laura every inch of her downward path, buffeting her face, twisting invisible hands in her hair, and sopping her shoes till she slipped and slithered down the clay-lined runnels of the road, had already more glorious insults to its credit; for it had bespattered unconcernedly, as it soughed past him, the comfortable person as well as the immaculate bicycle of Mr. H. J. Cloud. Henry Justin, no less, who, on this particular October Saturday at half-past four of what should have been a fine afternoon, was a week short of his sixteenth birthday; discreetly placed alike in his form and his house, near enough to the heights to satisfy Mrs. Cloud and his own dignity, yet not near enough to cause him any responsible discomfort; pleased as usual with himself, and more or less tolerant of his world; cycling home from school, to spend the Sunday with his mother.

But the hoyden rain, abetted by her partner the wind, had driven dripping fingers between the collar of Henry Justin and the tanned neck of Henry Justin, with no more emotion than if it had been the neck and collar of the shivering insignificance in the reefer coat a mile or so away up the road: had trailed damply over him and across him, dulling his nickel work and tipping his hat over his eyes, and shrilling on ahead again without even paying him the compliment of waiting for his opinion of her. It was brief. He jumped off his bicycle and, with a thrust-out underlip and a glance at the threatening sky, gave the exclamation which stood with him for acquiescence, dissent, interest, indecision, or (as in this instance) annoyance, the economical exclamation that Laura, in a goaded moment, will refer to as a grunt. But she will withdraw the expression unreservedly as soon as her better self once more supervenes. Which is typical of Laura, of the rebel temper and the Quaker conscience.

But that is to come.

We should be talking of Justin, a hundred yards ahead of us, opening a gate into a field of stubble, disposing himself comfortably beneath a convenient haystack till the rain should be over. To do him justice, Justin would have walked through it contentedly enough, rather enjoying the sluicing downpour, certainly without a thought of his clothes, which were as he liked them, old and shapeless and comfortable; but he would not ride. He was as near an old maid about his possessions as a healthy boy can be, and the idea of exposing his fine new bicycle simply did not occur to him. He had lifted it like a baby across the stones and stubble, and had the absorbed face that his mother loved as he polished its bespattered handlebars with his handkerchief, picked a straw from its chain, and, propping it in the lee of the wind, covered it with his coat, as a premature prince might cover a sleeping beauty with still a week of her hundred years to run. Thereon, climbing to the low shelf above it, he raked together a pillow of hay, settled himself against it with another grunt—contentment this time, for the hay was soft and scented and the corner screened alike from wind and rain—and drew a small book and a large apple from his pocket. Justin never neglected either of his inner men. The apple was a pippin, and the book’s author a discovery of Justin’s. He recommended him to every one. I think his name was Carlyle.

He had been reading for half an hour, more and more slowly, for the haystack-drowse that is not the least of the spells of the Witch of Kent was creeping over him, when his ear was caught by a rustle that might have been a mouse in the wall of the stack, or a sparrow stealing straw, or the leaves of his own book—it had slipped from his fingers—fluttered by the air. He opened his eyes, idly surprised to find that they had been closed, but, seeing nothing but rain-laced sky and sodden field, made no objection to their shutting out that blank prospect again, when the rustle recommenced, punctuated with jumping sounds as of a small dog scrambling on to a forbidden sofa, and finally by a voice, as small and soft and breathless a voice as he had ever heard.

“If you please,” said the voice, “if, if you please—could you tell me the way to the Crystal Palace?”

Justin sat up and stared. Facing him, on the edge of the shelf of hay, hooked to it insecurely by fingers and little digging chin, hung a small peaked countenance, wreathed in drenched elf-locks, with eyes like black diamonds set in rain-washed, wind-whipped cheeks.

Justin was too well-fed to be imaginative. And the creature after all had spoken, had asked him something in good enough English: on its bewildering head it wore the most ordinary child’s sailor cap with a gilt lettering on the ribbon—H.M.S. Indomitable; yet, for a ridiculous instant, its fugitive, bodiless air beguiled him, and he could have believed himself agape before a changeling, a come-by-chance of wind and rain, a fairy nothing, gone with the sky’s first dispelling streak of blue.

“If you please,” the creature began again anxiously, and stopped. There was a sound of yielding hay, and before Justin could stretch out a hand it had disappeared with some suddenness. There was a scuffle and a bump, and Justin thought he heard a whimper. He rolled lazily to the edge of the shelf and looked over. The child—he could see now that it was a little girl—was standing below him in the crushed stubble, brushing mournfully with a handful of the treacherous hay at the mud that plastered its wisp of skirt. It had the gallantest air of assuring itself that nothing on earth should induce it to cry; though its eyes, as it lifted them to Justin again, had that shimmering brilliance that only unshed tears can give. But it returned to the charge.

“If you please——” Then, with a sudden alluring solicitude, “It’s only me. I’m not a tramp. Oh, I hope I didn’t frighten you?”

“Well—it was a bit of a shock.” Justin looked amused. “I may get over it.”

“I’m so sorry. It’s fearful meeting tramps, isn’t it?” She had all the Kent child’s horror of its bogey in her voice. “That’s why I was frightened, too. I thought you were one, at first——”

Justin murmured his gratification.

She amended anxiously.

“Oh, only from far off. But even if you were, I had to ask the way. And when I saw the bicycle I knew you couldn’t be. It’s a lovely bicycle.” She regarded it with wistful admiration and, insensibly, Justin thawed, like any other male child between eight and eighty, to the feminine intelligence that appreciated his hobby.

“It’s not bad,” he admitted, stretching out a long arm to twitch modestly at the bicycle’s covering, much as a woman straightens the hat that a man’s glance has told her is becoming. “Humber, you know.”

She nodded eagerly.

“They’re the best, aren’t they? Mother’s is a Swift. She’s going to have a Humber, though, when she comes back. She’s going to teach me to ride, then. She promised. I began, you know, before she went away. I could jump off splendidly as long as there was grass to fall on, but I couldn’t jump on. But Aunt Adela won’t let me practise at all now. I wonder——” her face lit up, “Oh—do you suppose there are bicycles at the Crystal Palace?”

He looked down at her amusedly.

“Why, of course. There’s a track. Races. Awful sport. You ought to get your mother to take you one day, if you’re so keen.”

“Oh, she will,” Laura assured him happily. “She always does what I want. I’ll get her to, directly after tea. Unless——” she glanced up at the heavy sky. “Oh, I oughtn’t to be talking. I must get on. I shall be so dreadfully late. If you’ll just tell me which road to take——” She paused. “I suppose—is it specially your haystack?” she hinted delicately.

“Why?”

“Because, if you didn’t mind—if you’d help me up—it’s so high——”

Justin leant over good-naturedly and held out his hands to her. She caught at them and was swung up with a crow of delight.

“You’re stronger than Mother!”

He threw her gently from him on to the hay.

“Here, don’t splash me all over. You’re as wet as the Thames.” For her dripping hair had whipped across his face.

“Horrid, sergy wet!” She sniffed at herself in delicate disgust.

“Well, and now you’re up, what do you want to do?”

“There’s a cross-roads further on. I saw it from Beech Hill.” She tiptoed. “Yes, there! I couldn’t see from the road. D’you see? Through that tree—level with the nest. Which of them ought I to take?”

“Where to?”

“Why—I told you—the Cœlestial City.”

“The Cœlestial—that’s in the Pilgrim’s Progress! Is it a game?”

“A game!” She was disappointed at such futility in the big, pleasant-faced boy she was beginning to like. “As if——” Then she broke off, enlightened. “Oh, I see—you call it the Crystal Palace, too. So does Nurse. Shall I get there by tea-time, do you think?”

“To the Crystal Palace? You! My good kid! Some one’s been pulling your leg. It’s miles to the Crystal Palace.”

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “It’s only the enchantment that makes it look far. It’s close—it’s quite close, really. I saw it myself from Beech Hill—as bright as bright——”

“Beech Hill!” He regarded the diminutive athlete incredulously. “You walked from Beech Hill today? By yourself? Rot!”

“Oh, yes!” But he could see that his surprise or some thought of her own disquieted her. She jerked herself to her knees from the comfort of the hay. “I think I’ll be getting on now,” she said, with transparent politeness and a sidelong glance at him.

Now Justin was placidly accustomed to take things as they came—rain, haystacks, or nixies interested in Humber bicycles. But as he examined her more closely, it was apparent even to his indifference that, for all her dishevelment, there must somewhere be a nursemaid in search of this particular nixie. Her shyness, rounded by courtesy, was not the mere coltishness of the village child. A vague sense of responsibility mingled in his mind with a good deal of amusement.

“Hi! Stop a minute!” he called. “You! H.M.S. Indomitable!”

“My name,” she flashed at him, “is Laura.”

“And mine,” he countered, with a twinkle, “is Justin.”

She gave him a wicked child’s grin.

“Good-bye, Mr. Justin——” and whipped her legs over the side of the stack.

But Justin could be quick when he chose. His long arm shot out and caught her by her loose child’s belt. She wriggled in his grip like a snared rabbit.

“Steady! You’d have walloped right into my bicycle if you’d jumped then,” he reproached her.

“It wasn’t that! You didn’t stop me for that! You guessed! I saw you guess!” She faced him quivering, defiant.

“Oh, you are running away then,” he chuckled. “Thought so!”

She turned on him like a leaping flame.

“You’re going to stop me? Oh, and I thought you were nice. Oh, you’re not going to tell? You couldn’t be such a sneak!”

He flushed a little in spite of his sixteen dignified years. She was quick to see it. Her tone altered. She appeased him hurriedly.

“Oh, but truly it’s all right. I promise you. Aunt Adela will be angry, of course, like Mrs. Christian—but Mother won’t mind. Mother lives there, you see. I’m almost certain she’s expecting me. They’re bound to have opera glasses there, like the Shepherds——”

“The Shepherds?”

“Oh, you know!” She stamped a muddy foot impatiently. “They lent them to Christian and Hopeful to see the City through—from the Hill called Clear. But one can see better still from Beech Hill. I almost saw Mother. She’s sure to be watching for me over the walls. And I’m so late. I’m so late. Oh, do tell me the way and let me get on. If you hadn’t seen your mother for months and months and months——” Her mouth trembled.

“All right! All right! Keep your hair on! Nobody’s going to stop you.” He was surprised to find himself so concerned with her concern. “But you can’t go anywhere in this rain,” he told her. “You’d be drowned. You’re half drowned already. It’s getting worse and worse. You wait till it’s over and I’ll see if I can’t give you a lift on my step.”

“Oh, would you?” Her eyes adored him. “Oh, could you? Shouldn’t I be too heavy?”

“But you’d never get to the Palace tonight, you know,” he warned her. “It’s five miles to the next station.”

“Oh, I mustn’t go by train. It wouldn’t be safe. They all walk in the Pilgrim’s Progress. Indeed, I don’t know whether it’s safe to sit here so long. The hay’s making me awfully sleepy. You know what the Shepherds said, Beware that ye sleep not—and beware——Oh!” She pulled herself suddenly to her knees, examining him with eyes of suspicion.

“What’s up?” he demanded.

“It’s all right. Your face isn’t black.” She sank back relieved from the inspection. “I only wondered for a dreadful minute if you were the Flatterer.” She smiled at him. “One has to be so careful,” she apologized, “on Enchanted Ground.”

He pulled at his ear.

“You seem to be up in Bunyan. I don’t understand this game. Look here—why don’t you squat down and tell me all about it? I won’t give you away.”

“Won’t you?” She eyed him wistfully. Her eyes, like any dog’s, said, “Can I trust you?” and his, though he did not know it, told her that she might. With that long look she probed and accepted him, never, I think, through all their tangled future to doubt him again. Exasperation she might feel, and weariness, and once a very exaltation of contempt; but never doubt—never any doubt at all that within the limitations of his nature, he was honest and kind.

And, with belief in him, the film of secretiveness that had formed over her mind, that was not natural to her, that was but a consequence of her situation, was wiped away like mist from a window-pane. She did not realize that she had been longing for a confidant, but she did curl herself, without more ado, as close as she could wriggle to this likeable fellow-creature, and began to talk to him at a rate that would have astonished Aunt Adela. But then Justin did not interrupt her account of her own pilgrim’s progress to tell her that her stockings were muddy. And so he heard, sleepily, with his eyes on the steady slant of the rain, and most of his thoughts far enough away from Laura, all about Mother, and the twins, and Gran’papa, and the City of Gold, and what Nurse’s mother had said, and what Laura would do when she got there—a long, long tale, that reached him in some shape as the Mouse’s tale reached Alice. He was left with a vague notion that Laura was a rum little kid, also that the mother must be rather a charming person. He supposed, when the rain stopped, he should have to see the child back to her home.... Yet it was a bit of a shame to get her into trouble.... Queer, that she shouldn’t be living with her mother.... He wondered what was behind it all.... And what was the mother doing at the Palace?... He thought that only the attendants had quarters there....

He roused himself.

“Your mother lives at the Crystal Palace, did you say?” He propped himself on his elbows, nibbling a straw and frowning meditatively at Laura, who sat, hugging her knees, hunched like a witch against the wall of the stack. “Oh, no! She’s only staying there—till she gets well.”

“Then where do you live?”

“Oh, I live with Mother. But I’m staying with Gran’papa.”

“Yes, but where?”