Nevertheless I enjoyed hearing him talk, and encouraged him with bits of questions and exclamations. Did he believe, perhaps, in the pagan G.o.ds?--Mars and all that? Was there, even at this very moment, cramped up among the moss and the roots, a crazy, brutal Pan in the woods? And those delicious Nymphs and Naiads! What would he do if one beckoned to him?--or Pan's pipes began wheedling?

"Nymphs!" he grunted, "aren't you----"

"Oh," I cried, coming to a pause beside a holly-tree so marvellously sparkling with waterdrops on every curved spine of it that it took my breath away: "let's talk no more thoughts. They are only mice gnawing. I can hear _them_ at night."

"You cannot sleep?" he inquired, with so grave a concern that I laughed outright.

"Sleep! with that Mr Crimble on my nerves?" I gave a little nod in my mind to my holly, and we went on.

"Crimble?" he repeated. His eyes, greenish at that moment, shot an angry glance at me from under their lids. "Who is he?"

"A friend, a friend," I replied, "and, poor man, as they say, in love.

Calm yourself, Mr Jealousy; not with me. I am three sizes too small.

With Miss Bowater. But there," I went on, in dismay that mere vanity should have let this cat out of its bag, "that's not my secret. We mustn't talk of that either. What I really want to tell you is that we haven't much time. I am going away. Let's talk of Me. Oh, Mr Anon, shall I ever be born again, and belong to my own world?"

It seemed a kind of mournful serenity came over his face. "You say you are going away"; he whispered, pointing with his finger, "and yet you expect me to talk about _that_."

We were come to the brink of a clear rain-puddle, perhaps three or four feet wide, in the moss-greened, stony path, and "_that_" was the image of myself which lay on its surface against the far blue of the sky--the under-scarlet of my cape, my face, fair hair, eyes. I trembled a little.

His own reflection troubled me more than he did himself.

"Come," I said, laying a hand on his sleeve, "the time's so short, and indeed I _must_ see your house, you know: you have seen mine. Ah, but you should see Lyndsey and Chizzel Hill, and the stream in my father's garden. I often hear _that_ at night, Mr Anon. I would like to have died a child, however long I must live."

But now the cloud had completely swallowed up the sun; a cold gust of wind swept hooting down on us, and I clung to his arm. We pushed on, emerged at last from the rusty gates, its eagles green and scaling, and came to the farm. But not in time. A cloud of hail had swirled down; beating on our heads and shoulders. It all but swept me up into the air.

Catching hands, we breasted and edged on up the rough, miry lane towards a thatched barn, open on one side and roofing a red and blue wagon.

Under this we scrambled, and tingling all over with the buffetings of the wind and the pelting of hailstones, I sat laughing and secure, watching, over my sodden skirts and shoes, the sweeping, pattering drifts paling the green.

Around us in the short straw and dust stalked the farmer's fowls, cackling, with red-eyed glances askew at our intrusion. Ducks were quacking. Doves flew in with whir of wing. I thought I should boil over with delight. And presently a sheep-dog, ears down and tail between its legs, slid round the beam of the barn door. Half in, half out, it stood bristling, eyes fixed, head thrust out. My companion drew himself up and with a large stone in his hand, edged, stooping and stealthily--and very much, I must confess, like the picture of a Fuegian I have seen in a book--between the gaudy wheels of the wagon, and faced the low-growling beast. I watched him, enthralled. For a moment or two he and the sheep-dog confronted each other without stirring. Then with one sharp bark, the animal flung back its head, and with whitened eye, turned and disappeared.

"Oh, _bravissimo_!" said I, mocking up at Mr Anon from under my hood.

"He was cowed, poor thing. _I_ would have made friends with him."

We sate on in the sweet, dusty scent of the stormy air. The hail turned to rain. The wind rose higher. I began to be uneasy. So heavily streamed the water out of the clouds that walking back by the way we had come would be utterly impossible for me. What's to be done now?--I thought to myself. Yet the liquid song of the rain, the gurgling sighs and trumpetings of the wind entranced me; and I turned softly to glance at my stranger. He sat, chin on large-boned hands, his lank hair plastered on his hollow temples by the rain, his eyes gla.s.sy in profile.

"I am glad of this," he muttered dreamily, as if in response to my scrutiny. "We are here."

A scatter of green leaf-sheaths from a hawthorn over against the barn was borne in by the wind.

"I am glad too," I answered, "because when you are at peace, so I can be; for that marvellous land you tell me of is very far away. Why, who----?" But he broke in so earnestly that I was compelled to listen, confiding in me some queer wisdom he had dug up out of his books--of how I might approach nearer and nearer to the brink between life and reality, and see all things as they are, in truth, in their very selves.

All things visible are only a veil, he said. A veil that withdraws itself when the mind is empty of all thoughts and desires, and the heart at one with itself. That is divine happiness, he said. And he told me, too, out of his far-fetched learning, a secret about myself.

It was cold in the barn now. The fowls huddled close. Rain and wind ever and again drowned the low, alluring, far-away voice wandering on as if out of a trance. Dreams, maybe; yet I have learned since that one half of his tale is true; that at need even an afflicted spirit, winged for an instant with serenity, may leave the body and, perhaps, if lost in the enchantments beyond, never turn back. But I swore to keep his words secret between us. I had no will to say otherwise, and a.s.sured him of my trust in him.

"My very dear," he said, softly touching my hand, but I could make no answer.

He scrambled to his feet and peered down on me. "It is not my peace. All the days you are away...." He gulped forlornly and turned away his head.

"But that is what I mean. Just nothing, all this"--he made a gesture with his hands as if giving himself up a captive to authority--"nothing but a sop to a dog."

Then stooping, he drew my cape around me, banked the loose hay at my feet and shoulders, smiled into my face, and bidding me wait in patience a while, but not sleep, was gone.

The warmth and odour stole over my senses. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, but drugged with fatigue. With a fixed smile on my face (a smile betokening, as I believe now, little but feminine vanity and satisfaction after feeding on that strange heart), my thoughts went wandering. The sounds of skies and earth drowsed my senses, and I nodded off into a nap. The grinding of wheels awoke me. From a welter of dreams I gazed out through the opening of the barn at a little battered cart and a s.h.a.ggy pony. And behold, on the chopped straw and hay beside me, lay stretched out, nose on paw, our enemy, the sheep-dog. He thumped a friendly tail at me, while he growled at my deliverer.

Thoughtful Mr Anon. He had not only fetched the pony-cart, but had brought me a bottle of hot milk and a few raisins. They warmed and revived me. A little light-witted after my sleep in the hay, I clambered up with his help into the cart and tucked myself in as snugly as I could with my draggled petticoats and muddy shoes. So with myself screened well out of sight of prying eyes, we drove off.

All this long while I had not given a thought to Mrs Bowater. We stood before her at last in her oil-cloth pa.s.sage, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. Her oldest bonnet on her head, she was just about to set off to the police station. And instead of showing her grat.i.tude that her anxieties on my account were over, Mrs Bowater cast us the blackest of looks. Leaving Mr Anon to make our peace with her, I ran off to change my clothes. As I emerged from my bedroom, he entered at the door, in an old trailing pilot coat many sizes too large for him, and I found to my astonishment that he and my landlady had become the best of friends. I marvelled. This little achievement of Mr Anon's made me _like_ him--all of a burst--ten times as much, I believe, as he would have been contented that I should _love_ him.

Indeed the "high tea" Mrs Bowater presided over that afternoon, sitting above her cups and saucers just like a clergyman, is one of the gayest memories of my life. And yet--she had left the room for a moment to fetch something from the kitchen, and as, in a self-conscious hush, Mr Anon and I sat alone together, I caught a glimpse of her on her return pausing in the doorway, her capped head almost touching the lintel--and looking in on us with a quizzical, benign, foolish expression on her face, like that of a grown-up peeping into a child's dolls' house. So swirling a gust of hatred and disillusionment swept over me at sight of her, that for some little while I dared not raise my eyes and look at Mr Anon. All affection and grat.i.tude fled away. Miss M. was once more an Ishmael!

Lyme Regis

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Out of a cab from a livery stable Mrs Bowater and I alighted at our London terminus next morning, to find positively awaiting us beside the wooden platform a first-cla.s.s railway carriage--a palatial apartment.

Swept and garnished, padded and varnished--a miracle of wealth! At this very moment I seem to be looking up in awe at the orange-rimmed (I think it was orange) label stuck on the gla.s.s whose inscription I afterwards spelled out backwards from within: "Mrs Bywater and Party." As soon as we and our luggage were safely settled, an extremely polite and fatherly guard locked the door on us. At this Mrs Bowater was a little troubled by the thought of how we should fare in the event of an accident. But he rea.s.sured her.

"Never fear, ma'am: accidents are strictly forbidden on this line.

Besides _which_," he added, with a solemn, turtle-like stare, "if I turn the key on the young lady, none of them young a-ogling Don Jooans can force their way in. Strict orders, ma'am."

To make a.s.surance doubly sure, Mrs Bowater pulled down the blinds at every stopping-place. We admired the scenery. We read the warning against pickpockets, and I translated it out of the French. After examining the enormous hotels depicted in the advertis.e.m.e.nts, we agreed there was nothing like home comforts. Mrs Bowater continued to lose and find in turn our tickets, her purse, her spectacle-case, her cambric pocket-handkerchief, not to mention a mysterious little screw of paper, containing lozenges I think. She scrutinized our luxury with grim determination. And we giggled like two school-girls as we peeped together through the crevices of the blinded windows at the rich, furry pa.s.sengers who ever and again hurried along, casting angry glances at our shrouded windows.

It being so early in the year--but how mild and sweet a day--there were few occupants of the coach at Axminster. As I had once made a (frequently broken) vow to do at once what scared me, I asked to be perched up on the box beside the lean, brick-faced driver. Thus giddily exalted above his three cantering roan horses, we bowled merrily along.

With his whip he pointed out to me every "object of interest" as it went floating by--church and inn, farm and mansion.

"Them's peewits," he would bawl. "And that's the selfsame cottage where lived the little old 'ooman what lived in a shoe." He stooped over me, reins in fist, with his seamed red face and fiery little eye, as if I were a small child home for the holidays. Evening sunlight on the hill-tops and shadowy in the valleys. And presently the three stepping horses--vapour jetting from their nostrils, their sides panting like bellows--dragged the coach up a hill steeper than ever. "And that there," said the driver, as we surmounted the crest--and as if for emphasis he gave a prodigious tug at an iron bar beside him, "that there's the Sea."

The Sea. Flat, bow-shaped, hazed, remote, and of a blue stilling my eyes as with a dream--I verily believe the saltest tears I ever shed in my life smarted on my lids as the spirit in me fled away, to be alone with that far loveliness. A desire almost beyond endurance devoured me.

"Yes," cried hidden self to self, "I can never, never love him; but he shall take me away--away--away. Oh, how I have wasted my days, sick for home."

But small opportunity was given me for these sentimental reflections.

Nearly at the foot of even another hill, and one so precipitous that during its rattling descent I had to cling like a spider to the driver's strap, we came to a standstill; and in face of a gaping knot of strangers I was lifted down--with a "There! Miss Nantuckety," from the driver--from my perch to the pavement.

The lodgings Mrs Monnerie had taken for us proved to be the sea rooms in a small, white, bow-windowed house on the front, commanding the fishing-boats, the harbour, and the stone Cobb. I tasted my lips, snuffed softly with my nose, stole a look over the Bay, and glanced at Mrs Bowater. Was she, too, half-demented with this peculiar and ravishing experience? I began to shiver; but not with cold, with delight. Face creased up in a smile (the wind had stiffened the skin), cheeks tingling, and ravenously hungry, I watched the ceremonious civilities that were pa.s.sing between landlady and landlady: Mrs Bowater angular and spare; Mrs Petrie round, dumpy, smooth, and a little bald.

My friend Mrs Monnerie was evidently a lady whose lightest word was Sesame. Every delicacy and luxury that Lyme out of its natural resources can have squandered on King George III. was ours without the asking.

Mrs Bowater, it is true, at our sea-fish breakfast next morning, referred in the first place to the smell of drains; next to fleas; and last to greasy cooking. But who should have the privilege of calling the Kettle black unless the Pot? Moreover, we were "first-cla.s.s" visitors, and _had_ to complain of something. I say "we"; but since, in the first place, all the human houses that I have ever entered have been less sweet to the nose than mere country out-of-doors; since next (as I discovered when I was a child) there must be some ichor or acid in my body unpleasing to man's parasites; and since, last, I cannot bear cooked animals; these little inconveniences, even if they had not existed solely in Mrs Bowater's fancy, would not have troubled me.

The days melted away. We would sally out early, while yet many of Lyme's kitchen chimneys were smokeless, and would return with the shadows of evening. How Mrs Bowater managed to sustain so large a frame for so many hours together on a few hard biscuits and a bottle of cold tea, I cannot discover. Her mood, like our weather that April, was almost always "set fair," and her temper never above a comfortable sixty degrees. We hired a goat-chaise, and with my flaxen hair down my back under a sunbonnet, I drove Reuben up and down the Esplanade--both of us pa.s.sable ten-year-olds to a careless observer. My cheeks and hands were scorched by the sun; Mrs Bowater added more and more lilac and white to her outdoor attire; and Mrs Petrie lent her a striped, and once handsome parasol with a stork's head for handle, which had been left behind by a visitor--otherwise unendeared.

On warm mornings we would choose some secluded spot on the beach, or on the fragrant, green-turfed cliffs, or in the Uplyme meadows. Though I could never persuade Mrs Bowater to join me, I sometimes dabbled in the sun in some ice-cold, shallow, seaweedy pool between the rocks. Then, while she read the newspaper, or crocheted, I also, over book or needle, indulged in endless reverie. For hours together, with eyes fixed on the gla.s.s-green, tumbling water, I would listen to its enormous, far, phantom bells and voices, happier than words can tell.

And I would lie at full length, basking in the heat, for it was a hot May, almost wishing that the huge furnace of the sun would melt me away into a little bit of gla.s.s: and what colour would that have been, I wonder? If a small heart can fall in love with the whole world, that heart was mine. But the very intensity of this greed and delight--and the tiniest sh.e.l.l or pebble on the beach seemed to be all but exploding with it--was a severe test of my strength.

One late twilight, I remember, as we idled homeward, the planet Venus floating like a luminous water-drop in the primrose of the western sky, we pa.s.sed by a low white-walled house beneath trees. And from an open window came into the quiet the music of a fiddle. What secret decoy was in that air I cannot say. I stopped dead, looking about me as if for refuge, and drinking in the while the gliding, lamenting sounds.