It’s to be our day, Teddy.”
The gate swung to behind them with a clang. He looked back and saw his father, framed in the window; then the palings of the next-door garden shut him out He was alone with her. It was as though with the clanging of the gate he had said “good-by” to childish things forever.
The world shone forth to meet them, romantic with frost and lacquered with ice. It was as though the sky had rained molten glass which, spreading out across trees, houses and pavements, had covered them with a skin of burning glory. Eden Row sparkled quaint and old-fashioned as a Christmas card. The river, which followed its length, gleamed like a bared saber. Windows, in the cliff-line of crooked houses, were jewels which glittered smoothly in the sunlight In the park, beyond the river, black boughs of trees were hieroglyphics carved on glaciers of cloud. Chimneys were top-hatted sentinels, crouching above smoldering camp-fires. Overhead the golden gong of the sun hung silent At any moment it seemed that a cloud must strike it and the brittle boom of the impact would mutter through the heavens. It was a world transformed—no longer a prison swung out into the void in which men and women struggled, and misunderstood, and loved and, in their loving, died.
Vashti felt for his hand. He wanted to take it and yet—— If he did, people who didn’t understand would think him nothing but a little boy. What he really wanted was to take her arm; he couldn’t reach up to that “Don’t you want to hold it?”
He laughed shyly and slipped his fingers softly into hers.
As they passed Orchid Lodge, standing flush with the pavement, she glanced up at the second story, where the line of windows commenced.
“The people who live there hate me. They’ll hate me more presently. I can’t blame them.”
She hurried her steps. Drawing a breath of relief, she whispered, “Look back and tell me whether anybody saw us.”
He looked back. Two figures were emerging from the doorway—one excessively fat, the other so lean that he looked like a straight line.
“Only the murd—— I mean Mr. Sheerug and Mr. Hughes. I don’t think they saw us.”
“That’s all right.”
She laughed merrily—not on one note as most people laugh, but all up and down the scale. The sparkle of morning was in her voice. Like a flash out of a happy dream she moved through the ice-cold world. People turned to gaze after her. A policeman, stamping his feet on the look-out for some attractive housemaid, touched his helmet She nodded.
“D’you know him?”
“Never clapped eyes on him in my life. A pretty woman belongs to the whole world, Teddy.”
Butcher boys, hopping down from carts, stood thunderstruck. After she had passed they whistled, giving vent to their approbation. Teddy had the satisfaction of knowing that he was envied; he snuggled his hand more closely into hers. Even Mr. Yaffon, the man who was as faded as a memory, raised dim eyes and shrunk against the wall, stung into painful life. His little dog waddled ahead, doing her best to coax him to come on, trying to say, “None of that, Master. You’ve done it once; please not a second time.”
Was it only Teddy’s fancy—the fancy of every lover since the world was created—that everything, animate and inanimate, was jealous of him? Streets seemed to blaze at her coming. Sparrows flew down and chirped noisily in the gutters, as though they felt that where she was there should be singing. Famished trees shivered and broke their silence, mumbling hoarse apologies: “It isn’t our fault Winter’s given us colds in the head. If we had our way, we’d be leafy for you.”
Years later Teddy looked back and questioned, was it love that the little boy felt that winter’s morning? He had experienced what the grown world calls real love by then, and yet he couldn’t see the difference, except that real love is more afraid, thinks more of itself and is more exacting. If love be a divine uplifting, a desirable madness, a mirage of fine deception which exists only in the lover’s brain, then he felt it that morning. And he felt it in all its goodness, without the manifold doubts as to ulterior motives, without the unstable tenderness which so swiftly changes to utterest cruelty, and without the need to crush in order to make certain. In his love of Vashti he came nearer to the white standards of chivalry than was ever again to be his lot In later years he asked himself, was she really so incredibly beautiful? Did her step have the lightness, her face the bewitching power, her voice the gentleness he had imagined? By that time he had learnt the cynical wisdom which wonders, “What is this hand that I hold so fast, more than any other hand? What are these lips? Flesh—-there are others as warm and beautiful Is this meeting love or is it chance?”
He was far from that blighting caution yet Merely to be allowed to serve her, if it could help her to be allowed to die for her, to be allowed to give his all—he asked no more. He carried his all in an ill-wrapped parcel beneath his arm. She observed it.
“Holloa! Brought your luggage?”
“Not my luggage.”
“Then what?”
He flushed. “Can’t tell you yet.”
“Oh, but tell me!”
“I—I couldn’t here—not where every one’s passing.”
“Something for me?” she guessed.
He nodded.
Higher up the street, outside a public house, a hansom cab was standing.
“I must know,” she laughed. “Can’t wait another second. We’ll be alone in that.”
“Where to?” asked the cabby, peering through the trap.
“Anywhere. Piccadilly Circus.”
The doors closed as if folded by invisible hands. The window lowered. They were in a little house which fled across main thoroughfares, up side streets, round corners. He was more alone with her than ever. He could feel the warmth of her furs. He could hear her draw her breath.
“Well?” she asked.
As he placed it in her lap the parcel jingled. “I saved it,” he explained, “for us—for you and me, because of what somebody told me.”
She tore the paper off. In her hands was a wooden box with MARRIAGE inked across it.
“Marriage!” She raised it to her ear and shook it “Money!”
Teddy gazed straight before him. The pounding of the horse’s hoofs seemed no louder than the pounding of his heart. ’Harriet said that five pounds were the least that a lady would expect. “And so—and so—— There’s five pounds.”
He wasn’t looking at her. He didn’t dare to look at her. And so he couldn’t be sure whether she had sighed or laughed. A horrible fear struck him: she might be wondering how so young a person could come honestly by so large a fortune. He spoke quickly. “It’s mine, all of it I asked for money for Christmas. Jimmie Boy paid me for going into his picture; and Hal and Mrs. Sheerug—they gave me——”
“And it’s for me?”
“Why, of course.”
“And it’s all you’ve got—everything you have in the world?” Her arm slipped about him. “You’re the little god Love, Teddy; that’s what you are.”
Traffic was growing thick about them. They came to a crossing where a policeman held up his hand. Through the panes misted over by their breath, they watched the crawling caravan of carts and buses. In the sudden cessation from motion it seemed to Teddy that the eyes of the world were gazing in on them. “A little boy and a grown lady!” they were saying. “He wants to be her husband!” And then they laughed. Not till they were traveling again did he pick up his courage.
“Can we—can we——”
“Can we what?”
“Be married to-day? You said ‘some day’ when you promised.”
For her it was a strange situation, as absurd as it was pathetic. For a moment she tried not to take him seriously, then she glanced down at the eager face, the Eton suit, the clasped hands. In his childish world the make-believe was real. For him the faery tale, enacted for her own diversion, had been a promise. She felt angry with herself—as angry as a sportsman who, intending to miss, has brought down a songbird. Playing at love was her recreation. She couldn’t help it—it was in her blood: her approach to everything masculine was by way of fascination. She felt herself a goddess; it was life to her to be worshiped. All men’s friendships had to be love affairs or else they were insipid; on her side she pledged herself to no more than friendship. Not to be adored piqued her.
But to have flirted with a child! To have filled him with dreams and to have broken down his shyness! As she sat there with his box, labeled MARRIAGE, in her lap, she wondered what was best to be done. If she told him it was a jest, she would rub the dust off the moth-wings of his faith forever. There was only one thing: to continue the extravagant pretense.
“It’s splendid of you, Teddy, to have saved so much.”
“Is it much? Really much?”
“Well, isn’t it?”
His high spirits came back. He laughed and leant his head against her shoulder. “I don’t know. I’m not very old yet.”
“It’s because of that——” She knitted her brows, puzzling how she could break the news to him most gently. In the back of her mind she smiled to remember how much this consideration would have meant to some of her lovers. “It’s because you’re not so very old yet, that I think we ought to wait a year.”
“A year!” He sat up and stared. “But a year’s a whole twelve months!”
She patted his hand. “You wouldn’t like to have people laugh at me, would you? A year would give you time to grow up. And besides, before I marry, there are so many things to be done. I haven’t told you, but I’m going to America almost directly—going to sing there. Five pounds is a terrific lot of money in England, but in America it would soon get spent. Even though you were my husband, you wouldn’t be able to come. You’d have to stay here alone in our new house, and that wouldn’t be very jolly.”
He saw his dream crumbling and tried to be a man; but his lip trembled. “I don’t think—— Perhaps you never meant your promise.”
The trap-door in the roof opened. The hoarse voice of the cabby intruded. “’Ere we are. Piccadilly Circus.”
Vashti felt for her purse in her muff. It wasn’t there. She thought for a minute, then gave the man an address and told him to drive on.
“But I did mean my promise,” she assured Teddy. “Why, a year’s not long. Cheer up. Think of all the fun we’ll have writing letters. Harriet can’t have told you properly about marriage. One has to be very careful. One has to get a house and buy things for it. There are heaps of things to be bought when one gets married.”
“And wouldn’t five pounds be enough?”
She shook her head sorrowfully. “Not quite enough. But don’t let’s think about it. This is our day, Teddy, and we’re going to be happy. Guess where I’m taking you; it proves that I meant my promise.”
When he couldn’t guess, she bent over him and whispered. He clapped his hands. “To see a house!”
“To see our house,” she corrected, smiling mysteriously. “I always knew that some day I’d meet the little god Love; and so I got a house ready for him. It’s a faery house, Teddy; only you and I can see it. If you were ever to tell any one, especially Mrs. Sheerug, it would vanish.”
“I’ll never, never tell. I won’t even tell Dearie. And does nobody, nobody but you and me, know about it?”
She hesitated; then, “Nobody,” she answered.
To have a secret with her which no one else shared, almost made up for the disappointment of not being married. Holding her hand, he watched eagerly the flying rows of houses, trying to guess which was the one.
“It’s in nearly the next street, Teddy.”
“This one?”
“Not this one. Ours has a little white gate and a garden; it’s ever so much cosier.”
They had left the traffic where the snow was churned into mud. Once more it was a world of spun glass, of whiteness and quiet, that they traversed. To Teddy it seemed that the cab was magic; it knew its way out of ugliness to the places where dreams grow up.
The cab halted; the window flew back and the doors opened of themselves. They stepped out on to the pavement. The little white gate was there, just as Vashti had said. A path led up, through snow as soft as cotton-wool, to a red-brick nest of a house. A look of warmth lay behind its windows. Plants, leaning forward to catch the light, pressed against the panes. A canary fluttered in a gilded cage like a captured ray of sun.
A maid in cap and apron answered the bell. She was not at all like Jane, who never looked tidy till after lunch.
“Lost my purse, Pauline,” Vashti pouted. “I couldn’t pay my fare, so had to drive home. The cabman’s waiting.” Pauline had been watching the strange little boy with unfriendly eyes. “If you please, mam, he’s here.” She sank her voice. Teddy caught the last words, “In the drawing-room, playing with Miss Desire.”
Vashti frowned. She looked at Teddy as Pauline had done. He felt at once that a mistake had been made, that there was something that he must not see and that, because of the person in the drawing-room, he was not wanted.
“What shall I do? Stupid of me!” Turning to the maid, Vashti spoke in a lowered voice, “Go up to my room quietly and bring me down my money. We’ll be sitting in the cab and you can bring it out—— No. That won’t do. He might think that I hadn’t wanted to see him. There’d be a fuss. What am I to do, Pauline? For heaven’s sake suggest something.”
“Couldn’t the little boy go and sit in the cab, while you——”
Vashti had her hand on the latch to let Teddy out when shrill laughter rang through the house. A door in the hall burst open and a small girl ran out, pursued by a man on his hands and knees. He had a rug flung over his head and shoulders, and was roaring loudly like a lion. The little girl was too excited to notice where she was going or who were present.
She ran on, glancing backward, till she charged full tilt into Teddy. “Save me,” she cried, clinging to him and trying to hide herself behind him. He put his arms about her and faced the lion.
Balked of his prey, the lion halted. No one spoke. In the unaccounted-for silence the lion lost his fierceness. Throwing back the rug, he looked up. Teddy found himself gazing into a face he recognized.
“Of all the——”
Hal rose to his feet and dusted his knees. He glanced meaningly from Teddy to Vashti. “Is this wise?”
“Shish!” Her lips did scarcely more than frame the warning. “Hal, I never told you,” she said gayly, “Teddy’s in love with me and one day we’re going to be married. That’s why I brought him to see the house. He’s promised never to breathe a word of what he sees, because it’s a faery house and, if he does, it’ll vanish.”
Hal tried to look very serious. “Oh, yes, most certainly it’s a faery house. I’m only allowed here because I’m your champion.”
The boy’s quick instinct told him that an attempt was being made to deceive him. He wondered why. Who was the little girl who had nestled against him? Finding that he was a stranger she had become shy. He looked at her. She was younger than himself. Long curls, the color of Vashti’s, fell upon her tiny shoulders. She was exquisitely slight Her frock was a pale blue to match her eyes, and very short above her knees. She looked like a spring flower, made to nod and nod in the sunshine and to last only for a little while. More spirit than body had gone to her making; a puff of wind would send her dancing out of sight.
“Desire, come here, darling. Say thank you to the boy for saving you from the lion.”
Kneeling, Vashti took the little girl’s reluctant hand and held it out to Teddy. Desire snatched it away and began to cry. A knocking at the door caused a diversion; it was the cabman demanding his fare and asking how much longer they expected him to wait Hal paid; Teddy noticed that Vashti let him pay as if it were his right.
He was mystified; the house and what happened in it were so different from anything he had expected. Vashti had been so emphatic that no one but herself and himself were to know about it, and here were Hal and Pauline and the little girl who knew about it already. Hal’s expression, when he had thrown the rug from his shoulders, had been that of a man who was found out. But his eyes, when they had met Vashti’s, had become daring with gladness. Teddy was aware that he had been brought unintentionally to the edge of a big secret which he could not understand.
The cabman had been gone for a long time. Teddy had been left to amuse himself in the room where the canary hopped in its cage and the plants leant forward to catch the sunlight. It was a long room, running from the front of the house to the back and was divided by an archway. In the back part a fire burned and a couch was drawn up before the fire. He hadn’t the heart to go to it, but stood gazing out between the plants into the street in the exact spot where Vashti had left him. Every now and then the canary twittered, as if trying to draw him into conversation; sometimes it dropped seeds on his head. He didn’t know quite what it was he feared or why. On an easel in the archway he espiedThe Garden Enclosed, which his father had painted. The little god was still peering in through the gate. Teddy had hoped that by now he might have entered the garden. Like the little god he waited, with ears attentive to catch any sound in the quiet He seemed to have been waiting for ages.
A door in the back half of the room opened. Hal and Vashti came in, walking near together. Vashti looked round Hal’s shoulder and called to Teddy, “Not much longer now. I’ll be with you in a moment.” Then they both seemed to forget him.
Seated on the couch before the fire, their heads nearly touching, they spoke earnestly. Perhaps they didn’t know how far their voices carried. Perhaps they were too self-absorbed to notice. Perhaps they didn’t care. Hal held her hand, opening and closing the fingers, and stooping sometimes to kiss the tips of them.
“I’d come to the breaking point,” he whispered; “I either had to have you altogether or to do without you. It was the shilly-shallying, the neither one thing nor the other, that broke me down.” He laughed and caught his breath. “I tried to do without you, Vashti; there were times when I almost hated you. You seemed not to trouble that I was going out of your life. But now—— Well, if you must keep your freedom, we’ll at least have all the happiness we can. I’ll do what you like. I’m not going to urge you any more, but I still hope for Desire’s sake that some day we’ll——”
“Poor boy, you still want to own me. But tell me, was it hearing that I was going to America that brought you back?”
“Brought me back!” He pressed her open palm against his mouth. “To you, dearest, wherever you were, I should always be coming back. How could I help it? Hulloa! That’s fine.” His eyes had caught the picture. “Where did you——”
“All the while you were angry with me I was having it painted for you. But I shan’t be giving it to you now.” She glanced sideways at him with mocking tenderness. “You won’t need it. It was to be a farewell present to some one who had changed his mind.”
He drew her face down. “My darling, my mind will never change.”
Suddenly she broke from his embrace and glanced back into the room, raising her voice. “You know it’s Teddy that I’m going to marry, if ever I do marry. Why, we almost thought we’d get married this morning. Come here, my littlest lover. Don’t look so downhearted. Champions are allowed to kiss their ladies’ hands. Didn’t Hal tell you? Well, they are, and you may if you like.”
Teddy didn’t kiss her hand. He cuddled down on the hearthrug with his head against her knees, feeling himself like Love in the picture, forever shut out. The soul had vanished from his glorious day. He was hoping that Hal would go; she didn’t seem to belong to him while he stayed. Lunch went by, tea came, and still he stayed. A blind forlornness filled his mind that he couldn’t be a man. In spite of her caresses he felt in his heart that all her promises had been pretense.
Not until night had fallen and she got into the cab to take him home did he have her to himself. The lamps stared out on the snow like two great eyes. Once again it was a faery world of mysterious hints and shadows.
She drew him to her. She realized the dull hopelessness of the child and wondered what would be his estimate of her, if he remembered, when he became a man. Would he think that he had been tampered with and made the plaything of a foolish woman’s idleness? She wanted to provide against that. She wanted him always to think well of her. She felt almost humble in the presence of his accusing silence. She had a strange longing to apologize.
“It hasn’t—hasn’t been quite our day, Teddy—not quite the day we’d planned. I’m dreadfully sorry; I wouldn’t have had it happen this way for the world.”
He didn’t stir—didn’t say a word. She made her voice sound as if she were crying; he wasn’t certain that she wasn’t crying.
“You’re not angry with me, are you? It’s so difficult being grown up. Sooner or later every one gets angry, even Hal. But I thought that my littlest lover would be different—that, though he didn’t understand, he’d still like me and believe that I’d tried——”
His arms shot up and clasped her neck. In the flashlight of the passing street lamps she saw his face, quivering and tear wet. She couldn’t account for it, why she, a woman, should be so deeply moved. She had conjured dreams of a man who would one day gaze into her eyes like that, believing only the best that was in her and, because of that belief, making the best permanent. She had experimented with the world and knew that she would never meet the man; love lit passion in men’s eyes. But for a moment she had found that faith in the face of a little child. The fickleness and wildness died down in her blood; the moment held a purifying silence. Taking his face between her hands, she kissed his lips.
“I’m going away,” she whispered. “Whatever you hear, even when you’ve become a man, believe always that I wanted to be good. Believe that, whatever happens. Promise me, Teddy. It—it’ll help.”
For a week he had no news of her. Then his father said to him one morning, “Oh, by the way,The Garden Enclosedis going to be exhibited. I asked Miss Jodrell to lend it to me.”
“Will—will she bring it herself?” he asked, trying to disguise his anxiety.
“Herself! No. She’s rather an important person. She’s gone to America.”
Then the news leaked out that Hal had gone too.
Some nights later he was driving back down Eden Row with his father. They had been to the gallery where the picture was hanging. Without warning the cab pulled up with a jerk; he found himself clinging to the dashboard. His eyes were staring into the gas-lit gloom of Eden Row.
Almost touching the horse’s nose, two men, a fat and a lean one, had darted out from the shadow of the pavement They were shouting at something that sat balanced, humped like a sack, on the spiked palings which divided the river from the road. They had all but reached it; it screamed, shot erect, and jumped. There was a sullen splash, then silence and the gurgling of the river as the ripples closed slowly over it.
The silhouette of the fat man bent double; the silhouette of the lean man, using it as a stepping stone, climbed the palings and dived into the blackness. It would have been a dumb charade, if the fat man hadn’t said, “Um! Um!” when he felt the lean man’s foot digging into his back.
Teddy was hauled out into the road by his father. Grampus puffings were coming from the river, splashings and groanings. The cabman was standing up in his seat, profanely expressing his emotions. A police-whistle called near at hand. A hundred yards away another answered. Through the emptiness of night the pounding of feet sounded.
In an instant, as though it had sprung out of the ground, a crowd had gathered. People started to strike matches, which they held out through the palings in a futile endeavor to see what was happening.
A policeman came up, elbowing and shoving. He caught the horse’s head and whisked the cab round so that its lamps shone down on the river. They revealed Mr. Hughes, his bowler hat smashed over his forehead, swimming desperately with one hand and towing a bundle towards the bank.
Men swarmed over the palings and dragged him safe to land. Clearing his throat, he commenced explaining to the policeman, “As I was walkin’ with my friend, I sees ’er climbin’ over. I says to ’im, That’s queer. That ain’t allowed.’ And at that moment——”
Teddy lost the rest. Letting go his father’s hand, he was wriggling his way to the front through the legs of the crowd. He reached the palings and peered through.
Stretched limply on the bank, her hair broken loose, the policeman’s bull’s-eye glaring down on her, was Harriet.
Vashti’s name was never mentioned in connection with the attempted suicide, but he quickly knew that in some mysterious way she was held responsible. When he asked his mother, “Was it because Hal went to America?” she answered him evasively, “Harriet’s a curious girl—not quite normal. That may have had something to do with it.”
For many months, as far as Orchid Lodge was concerned, Vashti’s memory was a hand clapped over the mouth of laughter. Harriet broke dishes now only by accident and never in temper. She went about her work without singing. Mrs. Sheerug put away her gay green mantle; after Hal left, she dressed in black. She spoke less about men being shiftless creatures. If she caught herself doing it from habit, she stopped sharply, fearing lest she should be suspected of accusing some one man. Her great theme nowadays was the blighting influence of selfishness. She was always on the look-out for signs of selfishness in Teddy. Once, at parting with him, she refrained from the usual gift of money, saying, “My dear, beware of selfishness. I’m afraid you come here not because you love me, but for what you can get” She spent much of her time in covering page after page of foreign notepaper in the spare-room where the gilded harp stood against the window. She did it in the spare-room because, if it so happened that she wanted to cry, no one could see her there. Questioned by careless persons about Hal, she would answer, “He’s gone to America. He’s doing splendidly. He’ll be back some time. No, I can’t say when.”
Her other two children, Ruddy and Madge, didn’t interest her particularly. Ruddy was redheaded and always pulling things to pieces to see how they worked. Madge was twenty, a cross girl who loved animals and pretended to hate men.
When at the end of two months the portrait came back from the gallery, a dispute arose which brought home to Teddy the way in which Vashti was regarded. She had written none of the promised letters, so Jimmie Boy didn’t know her address. He might have asked Mrs. Sheerug, but the matter was too delicate. He made up his mind to hang the picture in his house and had set about doing so, when Dearie put her foot down.
“I won’t have it.”
“But it’s my best work. What’s got into your head, Dearie, to make you so prudish? You might as well object to all Romney’s Lady Hamiltons because she——”
“Lady Hamilton’s dead. Romney wasn’t my husband, and Nelson’s mother wasn’t my friend.”
Dearie was obstinate and so, as though it were something shameful, Vashti’s portrait was carried down to the stable. There, among the dust and cobwebs, with its face to the wall like a naughty child,The Garden Enclosedwas forbidden the sunlight. Only Teddy gave it a respite from its penance when, having made certain that he was unobserved, he lifted it out to gaze at it. But because she never wrote to him, he went to gaze at it less and less. Little by little she became a beautiful and doubtful memory. He learnt to smile at his wistful faery story, as only a child can smile at his former childishness.
New interests sprang up to claim his attention; the chief of these was a gift from Mr. Sheerug of a pair of pigeons. In giving them to him he explained to Teddy, “My friend, Mr. Ooze—he’s a rum customer—drops his aitches and was born in a hansom cab, but he knows more about pigeons than any man in London. Trains mine for me—goes out into the country and throws ’em up. That’s where he’s gone now. When he lost his precious Henrietta he nearly went off his head. His hobby saved him. A hobby’s a kind of life-preserver—it keeps you afloat when your ship’s gone down.”
His pigeons, more than anything else, helped him to forget Vashti. His soul went with them on their flights through wide clean spaces. The sense gradually grew up within him that she had betrayed him; this was partly due to the hostile way in which she was regarded by others. At the time when she had tampered with his power of dreaming he had been without consciousness of sex; but as sex began to stir, he felt a tardy resentment. This was brought to a climax by Mr. Yaffon.
Looking from his bedroom window one morning across the neighbors’ walled-in strips of greenness, where crocuses bubbled and young leaves shuddered, he noticed that in Mr. Yaffon’s garden the parrot had been brought out. It was a sure sign that at last the spring had come. As he watched, Mr. Yaffon pottered into the sunlight to make an inspection of his bulbs. Several times he passed near the perch; each time the parrot jigged up and down more violently, screaming, “But I love you. I love you.”
As if unaware that he was being taunted, the old gentleman took no notice. But the parrot had been accustomed to measure success by the fear he inspired. When his master tried neither to appease nor escape him he redoubled his efforts, making still more public his shameful imitation of a falsetto voice declaring love.
Mr. Yaffon rose from examining a bed of tulips; blinking his dim eyes, he stood listening, with his head against his shoulder. Deliberately, without any show of anger, he sauntered up to the parrot, caught him by the neck and wrung it. It was so coolly done that it seemed to have been long premeditated. It looked like murder. The gurgling of that thin voice, so like Mr. Yaffon’s, protesting as it sank into the silence, “But I love you. I love you,” gave Teddy the shudders.
Mr. Yaffon got a spade, dug a hole, and buried the parrot. When he had patted down the mold, he went into the house and returned in a few minutes with a basketful of letters. With the same unhurried purpose, he walked down the path towards his tool-shed, made a pile of dead branches, and set a bonfire going. A breeze which was blowing in gusts rescued one of the papers and led Mr. Yaffon a chase across lawns and flower beds. Just as he was on the point of capturing it, the wind lifted it spitefully over the wall into Mr. Gurney’s garden.
Teddy, who had watched these doings with all his curiosity aroused, lost no time in hurrying down from the bedroom. In a lilac bush he found the lost paper. It was a letter, yellowed by age, charred with fire and written in a fine Italian hand—a woman’s. It read:
My dear Penny-Whistles,
You don’t like me calling you Penny-Whistles, do you? You mustn’t be angry with me for laughing at your voice: I can laugh and still like you. But can I laugh and still marry you? That’s the question. I’m afraid my sense of humor——
Teddy stopped. He realized that he was spying. He knew at last what Mr. Yaffon had been doing: burning up his dead regrets. The letter had already slipped from his hand, when the ivy behind him commenced to rustle. The top of a ladder appeared above the wall, followed by Mr. Yaffon’s head. It sounded as though the parrot had come to life.
“Little boy,” he said, in his squeaky voice, “a very important letter has—— Ah, there it is. To be sure! Right at your feet, boy. Make yourself tall and I’ll lean down for it. There, we’ve managed it. Thank you.”
When the head and the ladder had vanished, Teddy stood in the sunshine pondering. The spring was stirring. Everything was beginning afresh. Then he, too, lit a fire. When it was crackling merrily, he ran indoors to a cupboard. Standing on a chair, he dragged from a corner a box across whose lid was scrawled the one word MARRIAGE. Tucking it under his jacket, he escaped into the garden and rammed the box well down into the embers. As he watched it perish, he whispered to himself: “Silly kid—that’s what I was.”
No doubt Mr. Yaffon was telling himself the same thing, only in different language.
Then the child, on his side of the wall, strolled away to dream of pigeons; and the older child, on the other side, stooped above his flowers.
The memories of a man are of the past. A child has no past; his memories are of the imagined future. His soul, in its haste for new experience, rushes on, outdistancing life.
After his false awakening by Vashti, the world which Teddy annexed for himself was composed of sky and pigeons. Often as he watched his birds rise into the air, he would make his mind the companion of their flight. It seemed to him that his body was left behind and that the earth lay far below him, an unfolding carpet of dwarfed trees and houses as small as pebbles. By day his thoughts were of wings. By night, gazing from his bedroom window when the coast-line of the clouds had grown blurred, he would watch the Invincible Armada of the stars, plunging onward and ever onward through the heavens. The little he had learnt of life had pained him; so he took Mr. Sheerug’s advice and remade the world with a hobby. When the stars winked, he believed they were telling him that they knew that one day he would be great.
His pigeons and the wide clean thoughts they gave him, kept his mind from morbid physical inquiries. The school he attended in Eden Row was conducted by an old Quaker, a man whose gentle religion shamed the boys of shameful conversations.
The inklings of life which he had gained through Vashti, made him re-act against further knowledge. Love in her case had begun with beauty, but it had ended with the wretched face of a woman and a policeman’s bull’s-eye staring down on it. Perhaps love always ended that way, causing pain to others and ugliness. He shrank from it. Like a tortoise when its head has been touched, he withdrew into his shell and stayed there. He was content to be young and to remain incurious as to the meaning of his growing manhood. The days slipped by while he lived his realities in books and pigeons, and in his father’s paintings. Not until he was fifteen did he again awaken, when the door unexpectedly opened, leading into a new experience.
It was an afternoon in July, the last day of the summer term. The school had broken up. The playground was growing empty. With the last of the boys he came out of the gate and stood saying “Good-by.” They had told him where they were going—all their plans for the green and leafy future. They were going to farmhouses in the country and to cottages by the sea. Some of them were not returning to school; they were going to the city to become men and to earn money. He watched them saunter away down Eden Row, joking and aiming blows at one another with their satchels.
From across the river, softened by distance, came laughter and the pitter-pat of tennis. In the golden spaces between trees of the park, girls advanced and retreated, volleying with their racquets. Their hair rose and fell upon their shoulders as they twisted and darted. They were as unintelligible to Teddy as if they had spoken a different language.
What was it that he wanted? It was something for which he never found a name—something which continually eluded his grasp. He was haunted by desire for an intenser beauty. All kinds of things, totally unrelated, would stab him into yearning: sometimes a passage in a book; sometimes the freedom of a bird in flight; and now the music of girlish laughter. He was burdened with the sense that life would not wait for him—would not last; that it was escaping like water through his fingers. He wanted to live it fully. He wanted to be wise, and happy, and splendid. And yet he was afraid—afraid of disillusion. He feared that if he saw anything too closely, it would lose its fascination. Those girls, if he were to be with them, he could not laugh as they laughed; he would have nothing to say. And yet, he knew of boys——
Hitching the strap of his satchel higher, he smiled. These thoughts were foolish; they had come to him because he had been saying good-by. They always came when he felt the hand of Change upon his shoulder.
Before his home a cab was standing. On entering the hall he heard the murmurous sound of voices. A door opened. His mother slipped out to him with the air of mystery that betokened visitors.
“How late you are, darling! Run and get tidy. Some one’s been waiting for you for hours.”
As he made a hasty schoolboy toilet he wondered who it could be. His mother had seemed flustered and excited. No one ever came to see him; to him nothing ever happened. Other boys went away for summer holidays; he knew of one who had been to France. But to stir out of Eden Row was expensive; all his journeys had to be of the imagination. When one had a genius for a father, even though he was unacknowledged, one ought to be proud of poverty. To be allowed to sacrifice for such a father was a privilege. That was what Dearie was always telling him.
The room in which the visitor was waiting was at the back of the house. It had folding windows, which were open, and steps leading down into the garden. Evening fragrances drifted in from flowers. In the waning sunlight the garden became twice peopled—by its old inhabitants and by their shadows. On the lawn a sprinkler was revolving, throwing up a mist which sank upon the turf with the rustle of falling rain.
A man rose from the couch as he entered—a fair, thin man with blue impatient eyes and a worn, wistful expression. He looked as though he had been always trying to clasp something and was going through life with his arms forever empty. He placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders, gazing at him intently.
“Taller, but not much older. In all the time I’ve been away you’ve scarcely altered. Do you know me?”
“Why, of course. It’s Mr. Hal.”
“No, just Hal. You didn’t used to call me ‘Mister.’ You can’t guess why I’ve come. I’ve told your mother, and she’s consented, if you are willing. I want your help.” Teddy glanced at his mother. Her eyes were shining; she had been almost crying. What could Hal have said to make her unhappy? How could he, a boy, help a man? In the silence he heard the sprinkler in the garden mimicking the sound of rain.
Hal’s voice grew low and embarrassed. “I want your help about a little girl. She’s lonely. I call her little, but in many ways she’s older than you are. She’s living in a house in the country, and she wants some one to play with. I’ve been so long out of England that I’d forgotten how tall you’d been getting. But, perhaps, you won’t mind, even though she’s a girl. It’s a pretty place, this house in the country, with cows and wild flowers and a river. You’d enjoy it, and—and you’d be helping me and her.”
“Sounds jolly,” said Teddy; “I’d like to go most awfully, only—only what makes you and mother so sad?”
Hal tried to appear more cheerful. “I’m not sad. I was worried. Thought you wouldn’t come when you heard it was to play with a girl.”
“He’s not sad,” said Dearie; “it’s only that, if you go, we mustn’t tell anybody—not even Mrs. Sheerug; at least, not yet.”
Teddy chuckled. At last something was going to happen. “That’ll be fun. But how glad Mrs. Sheerug must be to have you back.”
Hal rose to his feet. “She isn’t That’s another of the things she doesn’t know yet. I must be going. Your mother says she can have you ready to-morrow, so I’ll call for you.”
Teddy noticed how he dashed across the pavement to his cab. He felt certain that his reason was not lack of time, but fear lest he might be observed. He questioned his mother. She screwed her lips together: “Dear old boy, I’m not allowed to tell.”