Chapter 1
Kennedy is a
country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay. The high
ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the little town crowds the
quaint High Street against the wall which defends it from the sea. Beyond the
sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of
shingle, with the village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a
spire in a clump of trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a
lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the
vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is low and
flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a
big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes use of the anchoring
ground a mile and a half due north from you as you stand at the back door of
the "Ship Inn" in Brenzett. A dilapidated windmill near by lifting
its shattered arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish heap, and a Martello
tower squatting at the water's edge half a mile to the south of the Coastguard
cottages, are familiar to the skippers of small craft. These are the official
seamarks for the patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty
charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six, with a tiny
anchor engraved among them, and the legend "mud and shells" over all.
The brow of the upland overtops the square
tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road.
Ascending along this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green
trough of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook
and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of
my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had
been the companion of a famous traveler, in the days when there were continents
with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to
scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice - from choice.
The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed
his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating
habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a
particle of a general truth in every mystery. complete series is now available
at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
A good many years ago now, on my return from
abroad, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could
not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds - thirty
miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the
horse reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear
Kennedy's laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had a
big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner,
a bronzed face, and a pair of gray, profoundly attentive eyes. He had the
talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience in
listening to their tales.
One day, as we trotted out of a large village into
a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond
panes in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some
roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up
to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a
line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed, long-necked
chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick
dogskin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge: "How's your
child, Amy?"
I had the time to see her dull face, red, not
with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped,
and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a
tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct
catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
"He's well, thank you."
We trotted again. "A young patient of
yours," I said; and the doctor, flicking the chestnut absently, muttered,
"Her husband used to be."
"She seems a dull creature," I
remarked listlessly. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Precisely," said Kennedy. "She
is very passive. It's enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of
those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of
her mind - an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from
all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate,
such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the
daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd;
the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook
of his widowed father - a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately
struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his
life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek
tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other
tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from
irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that
hangs over all our heads - over all our heads..."
The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the
rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top
of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the
distant horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed
with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute
pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a
wagon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our
heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big,
enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of
legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of
the leading horse projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a
heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in the blue.
Kennedy discoursed.
"She's the eldest of a large family. At
the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I
attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first
time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black
dress every afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There
are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their
whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape
which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The
only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a
sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word. When sharply
spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest.
She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she
was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr.
Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith's gray parrot, its
peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless, when
that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents,
she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For
Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her
want of charm, in view of Smith's well-known frivolousness, was a great
recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in
a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass
helping a toad in difficulties. If it's true, as some German fellow has said,
that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there
is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some.
She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by
pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the
matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still
more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape. . complete series is now
available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"How this aptitude came to her, what it
did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery. She was born in the village, and had
never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived
for four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away
from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields,
hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men
about the farm, always the same - day after day, month after month, year after
year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she
did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put
on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat trimmed with a black
feather (I've seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb
over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along two hundred yards of road -
never further. There stood Foster's cottage. She would help her mother to give
their tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones,
and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the
relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then she fell in
love. She fell in love silently, obstinately - perhaps helplessly. It came
slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the
Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse - a possession!
Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence,
fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky -
and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from
that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable
terror of a brute..."
With the sun hanging low on its western limit,
the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising
ground took on a gorgeous and somber aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness,
like that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the
silence of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with
downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted
their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances. . complete series
is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Yes," said the doctor to my remark,
"one would think the earth is under a curse, since of all her children
these that cling to her the closest are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait
as if their very hearts were loaded with chains. But here on this same road you
might have seen amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed,
straight like a pine with something striving upwards in his appearance as though
the heart within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of the
contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the soles of his
feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He vaulted over the
stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic stride that made him noticeable
at a great distance, and had lustrous black eyes. He was so different from the
mankind around that, with his freedom of movement, his soft - a little startled
- glance, his olive complexion and graceful bearing, his humanity suggested to
me the nature of a woodland creature. He came from there."
The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the
summit of the descent seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the
side of the road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an
immense edifice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter,
ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur of
smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the horizon
like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white sails of a
coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves slowly from under the
branches, floated clear of the foliage of the trees.
"Shipwrecked in the bay?" I said.
"Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant
from Central Europe bound to America and washed ashore here in a storm. And for
him, who knew nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was
some time before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected
to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over the
sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another
miracle he didn't get drowned. But he struggled instinctively like an animal
under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He must have
been, indeed, of a tougher fiber than he looked to withstand without expiring
such buffetings, the violence of his exertions, and so much fear. Later on, in
his broken English that resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he
told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in
this world. And truly - he would add - how was he to know? He fought his way
against the rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some
sheep huddled close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions,
bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on
these shores. It must have been two in the morning then. And this is all we
know of the manner of his landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any
means. Only his grisly company did not begin to come ashore till much later in
the day..." . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his
tongue; we trotted down the hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner
into the High Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.
Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell
of moodiness that had come over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe,
he paced the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its
light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw,
after the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendor of a hazy sea lying
motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the
shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below - never a sign
of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind
me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish outside in a chill and
sumptuous stillness.
"... The relations of shipwrecks in the
olden time tell us of much suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from
drowning to die miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered
violent death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence
with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike or
fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard
upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of
a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the
adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is not one, it
seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am
speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight
of this bay, almost within sight from this very window.
"He did not know the name of his ship.
Indeed, in the course of time we discovered he did not even know that ships had
names - 'like Christian people'; and when, one day, from the top of the
Talfourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar,
lost in an air of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight
before. And probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been
hustled together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth
of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary to see
anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the 'tweendeck and
battened down from the very start. It was a low timber dwelling - he would say
- with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his country, but you went into
it down a ladder. It was very large, very cold, damp and somber, with places in
the manner of wooden boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it
kept on rocking all ways at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes
and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days
before, keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and
everything was being shaken so that in one's little box one dared not lift
one's head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man from the
same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside
and heavy blows fell - boom! boom! An awful sickness overcame him, even to the
point of making him neglect his prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it
was morning or evening. It seemed always to be night in that place. . complete
series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Before that he had been travelling a
long, long time on the iron track. He looked out of the window, which had a
wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the
long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam. He gave
me to understand that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of
people - whole nations - all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he
was made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a
house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he had
to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with his bundle
between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and
was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would have had room
to grow under it. Steam-machines rolled in at one end and out at the other.
People swarmed more than you can see on a feast-day round the miraculous Holy
Image in the yard of the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he
left his home, he drove his mother in a wooden cart - a pious old woman who
wanted to offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He could not give me an
idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang of
iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called Berlin. Then they
rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and
on through a land that wearied his eyes by its flatness without a single bit of
a hill to be seen anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like
a good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst
a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the
morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy
river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense. There
was a steammachine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed
tight, only now there were with them many women and children who made much
noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through, and his
teeth chattered. He and the young man from the same valley took each other by
the hand. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"They thought they were being taken to
America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side
of a thing like a house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and
there uprose, growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of
crosses, extremely high. That's how it appeared to him then, for he had never
seen a ship before. This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to
America. Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder dipping up and down.
He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water
below, which made a great splashing. He got separated from his companion, and
when he descended into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to melt
suddenly within him.
"It was then also, as he told me, that he
lost contact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before
had been going about through all the little towns in the foothills of his
country. They would arrive on market days driving in a peasant's cart, and
would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were three of
them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth
collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government
officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room, so that
the common people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning telegraph machine,
through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The fathers hung about
the door, but the young men of the mountains would crowd up to the table asking
many questions, for there was work to be got all the year round at three
dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.
"But the American Kaiser would not take
everybody. Oh, no! He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and
the venerable man in uniform had to go out of the room several times to work
the telegraph on his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three
dollars, he being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out,
afraid of the great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be
taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot
of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had three dollars a day,
and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be picked up
on the ground. His father's house was getting over full. Two of his brothers
were married and had children. He promised to send money home from America by
post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain
ponies of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pasture land on the sunny
slope of a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time. . complete series is
now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"He must have been a real adventurer at
heart, for how many of the greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth
had for their beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the
mirage or true gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own
words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during
which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me
this story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances
of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby-talk, then, as he acquired
the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing, soft, and at
the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power
into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the
words of an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many
emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart melting
within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards there seemed to
come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as to facts. No doubt he
must have been abominably sea-sick and abominably unhappy - this soft and
passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as
he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter loneliness; for his was a highly
sensitive nature. The next thing we know of him for certain is that he had been
hiding in Hammond's pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as
the crow flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
they seemed to have seared into his soul a somber sort of wonder and
indignation. Through the rumors of the country-side, which lasted for a good
many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West Colebrook had
been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the walls of weatherboard
cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange words in the night. Several
of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had fled in sudden alarm at their
rough angry tones hailing each other in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must
have helped him up the steep Norton hill. It was he, no doubt, who early the
following morning had been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the
roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer
look, but drew back, intimidated by the perfect immobility, and by something
queer in the aspect of that tramp, sleeping so still under the showers. As the
day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such a fright
that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a 'horrid-looking
man' on the road. He edged away, hanging his head, for a few steps, and then
suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness. The driver of Mr. Bradley's
milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy sort
of gypsy fellow who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the Vents, made a
snatch at the pony's bridle. And he caught him a good one too, right over the
face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he
had jumped up; but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony.
Maybe that in his desperate endeavors to get help, and in his need to get in
touch with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three boys
confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all
wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow deep lane by the
limekilns. All this was the talk of three villages for days; but we have Mrs.
Finn's (the wife of Smith's wagoner) unimpeachable testimony that she saw him
get over the low wall of Hammond's pig-pound and lurch straight at her,
babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fright. Having the
baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as
he persisted in coming nearer, she hit him courageously with her umbrella over
the head and, without once looking back, ran like the wind with the
perambulator as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then, out of
breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the
old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs
to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of
the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run
on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head, in the direction
of the New Barns Farm. From that moment he is plainly in the toils of his obscure
and touching destiny. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him. All
is certain now: Mrs. Smith's intense terror; Amy Foster's stolid conviction
held against the other's nervous attack, that the man 'meant no harm'; Smith's
exasperation (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the dog barking
himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics; and all for an
unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even then lurking in his stackyard. Was
he? He would teach him to frighten women. . complete series is now available at
www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but
the sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a
lot of loose straw, and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made
him pause. Then this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and
filth from head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition,
in the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the
dread of an inexplicable strangeness. But when that being, parting with his
black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you part the two
halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening, wild, black-and-white
eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter fairly staggered him. He had
admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate subject of conversation
about here for years) that he made more than one step backwards. Then a sudden
burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with
an escaped lunatic. In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith
has not in his heart given up his secret conviction of the man's essential
insanity to this very day.
"As the creature approached him, jabbering
in a most discomposing manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as
'gracious lord,' and adjured in God's name to afford food and shelter) kept on
speaking firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other
yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him headlong
into the wood-lodge, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow,
though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a
wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he
had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative
enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and
hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge.
Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom;
but Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and
muttering, 'Don't! don't!' I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that evening
with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice crying
obstinately through the door only added to his irritation. He couldn't possibly
have connected this troublesome lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay,
of which there had been a rumor in the Darnford market-place. And I daresay the
man inside had been very near to insanity on that night. Before his excitement
collapsed and he became unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in
the dark, rolling on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold,
hunger, amazement, and despair. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"He was a mountaineer of the eastern range
of the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night before in Eastbay was the
Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling memory.
"A few months later we could read in the
papers the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies' among the Sclavonian
peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these
scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people's homesteads, and they
were in league with the local usurers. They exported their victims through
Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window,
reaching close - hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening
afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coastguard
station. I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of
her spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a background of
ragged, slaty clouds like another and a slighter spire to the left of the
Brenzett church-tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear
in my bed the terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.
"About that time the Coastguardmen thought
they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they
vanished; but it is clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for
shelter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship
amidships (a breach - as one of the divers told me afterwards - 'that you could
sail a Thames barge through'), and then had gone out either scathless or
damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to perish
mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue and cry
that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in
existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
"A completeness without a clue, and a
stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterize this murderous
disaster, which, as you may remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind
would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had
been evidently no time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort
of fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at
daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she had either
dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been
blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a
little and released some of the bodies, because a child - a little fair-haired
child in a red frock - came ashore abreast of the Martello tower. By the
afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs
dashing in and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard
faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on
stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door of the
'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett
Church. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Officially, the body of the little girl
in the red frock is the first thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have
patients amongst the seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially,
I am informed that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look
after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an
ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned
ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was split into
firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing he happened to be
on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated ashore on that hencoop.
He might. I admit it is improbable, but there was the man - and for days, nay,
for weeks - it didn't enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living
soul that had escaped from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned
to speak intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt
better (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the
wind, and the rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck
some time during that night. But we mustn't forget he had been taken out of his
knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four days,
that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have
no definite idea of what was happening to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness
he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of
his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken astonishment that it was neither
seen nor understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women
fierce. He had approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his
country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children
in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for
compassion. Smith's strategy overcame him completely. The wood-lodge presented
the horrible aspect of a dungeon. What would be done to him next?... No wonder
that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The
girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the
morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard.
Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half
a loaf of white bread - 'such bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to
say. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"At this he got up slowly from amongst all
sorts of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful. 'Can you
eat this?' she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a
'gracious lady.' He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the crust.
Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a kiss on her
hand. She was not frightened. Through his forlorn condition she had observed
that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the
kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shuddered at the bare idea of
being touched by that creature.
"Through this act of impulsive pity he was
brought back again within the pale of human relations with his new
surroundings. He never forgot it - never.
"That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer
(Smith's nearest neighbor) came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying
him off. He stood, unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried
mud, while the two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs.
Smith had refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy
Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door;
and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability. But
Smith was full of mistrust. 'Mind, sir! It may be all his cunning,' he cried
repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer started the mare, the
deplorable being sitting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly fell out
over the back of the high two-wheeled cart. Swaffer took him straight home. And
it is then that I come upon the scene.
"I was called in by the simple process of
the old man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I
happened to be driving past. I got down, of course.
"'I've got something here,' he mumbled,
leading the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other
farm-buildings. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"It was there that I saw him first, in a
long low room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and
whitewashed, with a small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane
at its further end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had
given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder
of his strength in the exertion of cleaning himself. He was almost speechless;
his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his glittering,
restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare. While I was
examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing the tips of his
fingers along his shaven upper lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a
bottle of medicine, and naturally made some inquiries.
"'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New
Barns,' said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the
other had been indeed a sort of wild animal. 'That's how I came by him. Quite a
curiosity, isn't he? Now tell me, doctor - you've been all over the world -
don't you think that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'
"I was greatly surprised. His long black
hair scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his
face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque. It didn't necessarily follow that
he should understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and
also with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his
lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one
of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante
for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him
from the doorway. They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of
passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them. They
admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical - but, in conjunction with
his looks perhaps, it was startling - so excitable, so utterly unlike anything
one had ever heard. The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through
the little square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do
with him. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"He simply kept him.
"Swaffer would be called eccentric were he
not so much respected. They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as
ten o'clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can
write a check for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He
himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and
Darnford for these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he
does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of
sheep, and deals extensively in cattle. He attends market days for miles around
in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank
gray hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug
round his legs. The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner.
He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something rigid and
monarchal in the set of his features lends a certain elevation to the character
of his face. He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of
rose in somebody's garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves
to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls 'outlandish.' Perhaps it
was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Perhaps
it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three
weeks I caught sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitchen garden.
They had found out he could use a spade. He dug barefooted.
"His black hair flowed over his shoulders.
I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he
wore still the national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed
ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern
belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into the
village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds
round a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with
astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the people,
especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered what made them so
hardhearted and their children so bold. He got his food at the back door,
carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and, sitting alone on his
pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began. Beside the same
pallet, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the
Lord's Prayer before he slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with
veneration from the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers
over his upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who
kept house frugally for her father - a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of
forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a gray, steady eye.
She was Church - as people said (while her father was one of the trustees of
the Baptist Chapel) - and wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed
severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the
neighborhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago - a young
farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had
the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like
her father's, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl. .
complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"These were the people to whom he owed
allegiance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky
of that winter without sunshine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no
one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been
the faces of people from the other world-dead people - he used to tell me years
afterwards. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn't know where he
was. Somewhere very far from his mountains - somewhere over the water. Was this
America, he wondered?
"If it hadn't been for the steel cross at
Miss Swaffer's belt he would not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a
Christian country at all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel
comforted. There was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the
water were different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside. The
very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three old Norway
pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and these reminded him of his
country. He had been detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against the
trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to himself. They had been like
brothers to him at that time, he affirmed. Everything else was strange.
Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday
material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare. At night, when he
could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece
of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor
angry, nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face
amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the
faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of
the living. I wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from
cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget
the instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon
despair to overcome. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"He did the work which was given him with
an intelligence which surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that
he could help at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the
cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up words,
too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he rescued from an
untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.
"Swaffer's younger daughter is married to
Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year
they come to stay with the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little
girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little
white pinafore, and, toddling across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched
herself over a low wall head first into the horsepond in the yard below.
"Our man was out with the wagoner and the
plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he was leading the team round
to begin a fresh furrow, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody
else would have been a mere flutter of something white. But he had straight-glancing,
quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch and lose their amazing
power before the immensity of the sea. He was barefooted, and looking as
outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could desire. Leaving the horses on the
turn, to the inexpressible disgust of the wagoner he bounded off, going over
the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother,
thrust the child into her arms, and strode away.
"The pond was not very deep; but still, if
he had not had such good eyes, the child would have perished - miserably
suffocated in the foot or so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked
out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a
good look at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from
that time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss
Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in the
doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he fell
to. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him regular wages.
. complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"I can't follow step by step his
development. He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road
going to and fro to his work like any other man. Children ceased to shout after
him. He became aware of social differences, but remained for a long time
surprised at the bare poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn't
understand either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to
steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took
much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to
prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not, however, break him of
his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string
with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a
square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall
by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the
Lord's Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had
heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little,
on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at work, and a
slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round to look
after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. At
last people became used to see him. But they never became used to him. His
rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear;
his habit, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a
hussar's dolman; his manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of
agility, but in the ordinary course of progression - all these peculiarities
were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of
the village. They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the
grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields screaming
dismal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched voice from behind the
ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a lark's, but
with a melancholy human note, over our fields that hear only the song of birds.
And I should be startled myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart, and
full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man
transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his
past and by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance
positively shocked everybody. 'An excitable devil,' they called him. One
evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some whisky), he
upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They hooted him down, and
he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright, and Vincent, the fat
blacksmith, and the other notables too, wanted to drink their evening beer in
peace. On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The dust rose in
clouds from the sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the deal tables,
struck his heels together, squatted on one heel in front of old Preble,
shooting out the other leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl
on one foot, snapping his fingers above his head - and a strange carter who was
having a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint in
his hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and continued
to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn't want any
'acrobat tricks in the tap-room.' They laid their hands on him. Having had a
glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried to expostulate: was ejected
forcibly: got a black eye. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"I believe he felt the hostility of his
human surroundings. But he was tough - tough in spirit, too, as well as in
body. Only the memory of the sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is
left by a bad dream. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to
America. I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where
true gold can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking
up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when there
had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his going? His
eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the immense shimmer of the
sea, he would throw himself face down on the grass. But sometimes, cocking his
hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit
of true gold. That was Amy Foster's heart; which was 'a golden heart, and soft
to people's misery,' he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.
"He was called Yanko. He had explained
that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was
a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall)
he got it for his surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding
ages may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands - Yanko
Goorall - in the rector's handwriting. The crooked cross made by the castaway,
a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn part of the whole
ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.
"His courtship had lasted some time - ever
since he got his precarious footing in the community. It began by his buying
for Amy Foster a green satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his
country. You bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on a fair-day. I don't suppose
the girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honorable
intentions could not be mistaken. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"It was only when he declared his purpose
to get married that I fully understood how, for a hundred futile and
inappreciable reasons, how - shall I say odious? - he was to all the
countryside. Every old woman in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon
him near the farm, promised to break his head for him if he found him about
again. But he twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and
rolled such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who
was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming
whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune,
she would drop whatever she had in her hand - she would leave Mrs. Smith in the
middle of a sentence - and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her
a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody,
and went on her way as if she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I
fancy, could see his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most
graceful in his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in
his aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to see
her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know; and Mrs.
Finn once told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do you some harm some
day yet.' And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she tramping
stolidly in her finery - gray dress, black feather, stout boots, prominent
white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat
slung picturesquely over one shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing
and casting tender glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder
whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he
had ever seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
divine quality of her pity. . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In
his country you get an old man for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did
not know how to proceed. However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he
was now Swaffer's under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father
and declared himself humbly. 'I daresay she's fool enough to marry you,' was
all Foster said. 'And then,' he used to relate, 'he puts his hat on his head,
looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles the dog, and off
he goes, leaving me to do the work.' The Fosters, of course, didn't like to lose
the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give all her money to her mother. But
there was in Foster a very genuine aversion to that match. He contended that
the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For
one thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam'
fool; and then, these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And
perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere - or run off himself. It was
not safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her in
some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if the man
had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was quite an
excitement, and the two went on 'walking out' together in the face of opposition.
Then something unexpected happened.
"I don't know whether old Swaffer ever
understood how much he was regarded in the light of a father by his foreign
retainer. Anyway the relation was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked
formally for an interview - 'and the Miss too' (he called the severe, deaf Miss
Swaffer simply Miss) - it was to obtain their permission to marry. Swaffer
heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the intelligence
into Miss Swaffer's best ear. She showed no surprise, and only remarked grimly,
in a veiled blank voice, 'He certainly won't get any other girl to marry him.'.
complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit
of the munificence: but in a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had
presented Yanko with a cottage (the cottage you've seen this morning) and
something like an acre of ground - had made it over to him in absolute
property. Willcox expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a
great pleasure in making it ready. It recited: 'In consideration of saving the life
of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.'
"Of course, after that no power on earth
could prevent them from getting married.
"Her infatuation endured. People saw her
going out to meet him in the evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes
up the road where he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from
the hip, and humming one of the lovetunes of his country. When the boy was
born, he got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed again a song and a
dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for a woman
married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care. There was a man now (he told
me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country,
and show how to dance by-and-by.
"But I don't know. To me he appeared to
have grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less keen of eye.
Imagination, no doubt; but it seems to me now as if the net of fate had been
drawn closer round him already.
"One day I met him on the footpath over
the Talfourd Hill. He told me that 'women were funny.' I had heard already of
domestic differences. People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find
out what sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he
sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in
his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some harm. Women are funny.
And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected the
boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his
old father when he was a child - in his own country. And I discovered he longed
for their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that
language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre.
Why his wife should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he
said. And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that
she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion, charitable to
the poor! . complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered
whether his difference, his strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion
that dull nature they had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered..."
The Doctor came to the window and looked out at
the frigid splendor of the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the
earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
"Physiologically, now," he said,
turning away abruptly, "it was possible. It was possible."
He remained silent. Then went on--
"At all events, the next time I saw him he
was ill - lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not acclimatized as
well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountaineers
do get fits of home sickness; and a state of depression would make him
vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a couch downstairs.
"A table covered with a dark oilcloth took
up all the middle of the little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a
kettle spouting steam on the hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the
fender. The room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you
noticed perhaps.
"He was very feverish, and kept on
muttering to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him fixedly across the
table with her brown, blurred eyes. 'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I asked.
With a start and a confused stammer she said, 'Oh! ah! I couldn't sit with him
upstairs, Sir.'
"I gave her certain directions; and going
outside, I said again that he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands.
'I couldn't. I couldn't. He keeps on saying something - I don't know what.'
With the memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her short-sighted eyes, at her
dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but seemed, staring
at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was uneasy. . complete series
is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"'What's the matter with him?' she asked
in a sort of vacant trepidation. 'He doesn't look very ill. I never did see
anybody look like this before...'
"'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, 'he
is shamming?'
"'I can't help it, sir,' she said
stolidly. And suddenly she clapped her hands and looked right and left. 'And there's
the baby. I am so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I
can't understand what he says to it.'
"'Can't you ask a neighbor to come in
tonight?' I asked.
"'Please, sir, nobody seems to care to
come,' she muttered, dully resigned all at once.
"I impressed upon her the necessity of the
greatest care, and then had to go. There was a good deal of sickness that
winter. 'Oh, I hope he won't talk!' she exclaimed softly just as I was going
away.
"I don't know how it is I did not see -
but I didn't. And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door,
very still, and as if meditating a flight up the miry road.
"Towards the night his fever increased.
"He tossed, moaned, and now and then
muttered a complaint. And she sat with the table between her and the couch,
watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable
terror, of that man she could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn
the wicker cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the
maternal instinct and that unaccountable fear.
"Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he
demanded a drink of water. She did not move. She had not understood, though he
may have thought he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning
with fever, amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted
impatiently, 'Water! Give me water!'. complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"She jumped to her feet, snatched up the
child, and stood still. He spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances only
increased her fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long
time, entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore
it as long as she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.
"He sat up and called out terribly one
word - some word. Then he got up as though he hadn't been ill at all, she says.
And as in fevered dismay, indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round
the table, she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms.
She heard him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice - and
fled... Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull, blurred glance
of these eyes the specter of the fear which had hunted her on that night three
miles and a half to the door of Foster's cottage! I did the next day.
"And it was I who found him lying face
down and his body in a puddle, just outside the little wicket-gate.
"I had been called out that night to an
urgent case in the village, and on my way home at daybreak passed by the
cottage. The door stood open. My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on
the couch. The lamp smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night
oozed from the cheerless yellow paper on the wall. 'Amy!' I called aloud, and
my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had
cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. 'Gone!' he said distinctly. 'I had only
asked for water - only for a little water...'
"He was muddy. I covered him up and stood
waiting in silence, catching a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no
longer in his own language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of
life. And with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him. She had
left him - sick - helpless - thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his
very soul. 'Why?' he cried in the penetrating and indignant voice of a man
calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a swish of rain answered. .
complete series is now available at www.naijaswap.blogspot.com
"And as I turned away to shut the door he
pronounced the word 'Merciful!' and expired.
"Eventually I certified heart-failure as
the immediate cause of death. His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he
might have stood this night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and
drove away. Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between
the dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
"'Do you know where your daughter is?' I
asked.
"'Don't I!' he cried. 'I am going to talk
to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.'
"'He won't frighten her any more,' I said.
'He is dead.'
"He struck with his stick at the mud.
"'And there's the child.'
"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--
"'I don't know that it isn't for the
best.'
"That's what he said. And she says nothing
at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her
mind as his lithe and striding figure, his caroling voice are gone from our
fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion
of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a
shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for
Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is 'Amy Foster's
boy.' She calls him Johnny - which means Little John.
"It is impossible to say whether this name
recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her
hanging over the boy's cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little
fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with
his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at
him I seemed to see again the other one - the father, cast out mysteriously by
the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."
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