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.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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..."
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.'
"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!
"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.
"'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!'
"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.
"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."
