A Little Treachery

35

Now a great harvest moon blazed all night, whitening with its singing rays and making visible a landscape which was not a shadowy replica of the day, but something different, subtly uncharted, giving rise to thoughts of haunts and dreams.

‘The garden of sleep’. She remembered the old, banal song, probably revived for popular listening, which Emmy had caught up and often sung for Simon; and the moonstruck valley returned echoes of the coarse, strong voice, mockingly sweetened to match the sentimental air. ‘Waiting for thee – in the garden of sleep.’ That was all she remembered of it, and perhaps remembered wrong; those words, reiterated cloyingly in the drowsing brain.

Eloquent nights, they made one wakeful; even the child felt it, was restless and cried out. Once she saw his sleeping face with a beam of moonlight across it, and drew the curtain closer, thinking vaguely of old superstitions, near to magic, and lunar influences, accounted baleful.

In the morning, the orb was still there; thin gold, standing in the west over the valley filled with mist which rose like thick steam and rolled off the water, while the half-submerged trees, touched by the sun, seemed to have put on overnight the rusty and yellowing livery of autumn. Later in the day they might still descry it, worn to a rim of silver.

Catherine felt dazed from lack of sleep, or perhaps like one deprived of a drug, wrecked and all to pieces.

At first she had been diverted from her own troubles by Simon, who had wept and howled and conducted himself in a manner which was not only intolerable but threw her into alarm, for she feared he would make himself ill. But that had passed after a few hours. Shrewdly, with her natural realism, Emmy had judged that a day or so would suffice to take the edge off the little boy’s grief; and to Catherine’s surprise, so it happened. But then Simon still went under the belief that Emmy was coming back, and quite shortly. The girl had once or twice gone to London for a day or so at a time, so that he had grown accustomed to the idea of lacking Emmy for a few days, if not resigned to it; and the fact was that he took this occasion to be like the others. He calmed down, but of course twelve hours had not passed before he was asking, ‘Will it be tomorrow, d’you suppose?’ She was obliged to say, ‘Not tomorrow.’ He fretted a little and was inclined to weep. But he was good and quiet, subdued by his griefs. ‘Tomorrow?’

She felt they had done very unwisely in not telling him the truth, that Emmy’s temporization was going to make trouble later; but she hoped it might tide her over till the child went.

That could not be long now. She had heard from Margaret Forrester that Hungerford was to be back from the north in the following week, when he and his family were to move into their new house on the Surrey hills. And she would be heartily thankful when the child was sent for. She wished him gone, for his going would remove a new anxiety. She saw that she did not talk to him enough, and that this was not good for him. Yet the days passed in a state of amity. They jogged along together in quaint semblance of an ancient pair who understood each other with few words. Under her unexciting rule, he was tractable as never before – only was he now too quiet? He was, of course, much too quiet, a child not quiet by nature.

He still spent long hours in the garden, in solitude now, and she would sometimes see him leaning against a tree, or sitting with face cupped in his hands in an adult attitude of thought, for a length of time which struck her; it seemed to her a stillness unnaturally prolonged. But then, while she looked and grew anxious, he would begin jumping about, gesturing, talking to himself, like any solitary child at play.

Closer to him now than she had ever been, she considered him as she had not done before. It had always been plain to her that there were less intelligible sides to his character. She had seen that he was abnormally responsive to sensuous impressions. He would stand gazing at some object which had taken his fancy, or perhaps some patch of colour with sunlight playing on it, till he appeared almost stupefied. He loved to handle Emmy’s pretty things, to stroke the silky or velvet surfaces of which certain of Emmy’s clothes were made, to nuzzle in them; to jump back on the unmade bed and roll there; a little fellow who liked to bask in warmth, on softness, a little lotus-eater. And without knowing much about it, she had felt all this to be rather unusual in a boy of his age, but had taken it to be due to the artistic strain of which Margaret Forrester had spoken. Now she thought more of it.

All the summer, he had been ‘running wild’; an exercise which in the old days had been held to strengthen children. He seemed well, he was brown as a nut. Yet his appetite was often fastidious – but they had put that down to the hot weather. All the summer he had been tumbling and basking in that miniature jungle, with his blood heated by the fervid sun – some strain in it perhaps responding with an untold ecstasy to the tropical intemperance; handling nature’s playthings, obsessed by the strange, fascinating forms, noxious and gorgeous, which the spot produced; dabbling in its pools and puddles and weltering ditches; seeing the tiger-eyes of the hunting cats crouched in the grass, the shimmering demoiselles and the great, globe-eyed dragonflies darting on their prey, the birds coupling, the fecund life of the channels; learning nothing but the lessons of his senses, with senses all richly assailed and none to forbid animal joy. What life could have been more ‘natural’?

But none could recognize better than herself its artificiality. Wrapped in his own game, lacking child companions, with everything about him of the wrong size and too much heightened for him, he had been inhabiting a charged, adult world, and that world had its criminal, perilous mystery with which he had made ignorant play. Blind love. The little hero of a dream tale – or was it a crime story?

Now it was an earth of decrescent joys, a shiver struck through the warm blood. Although the days were still hot, there was not that constant blandness in their rise and decline. The mornings were sharp, there was an icy dew, cobwebs like grey rags draped the bushes, falling in heavy swags, torn by their load of moisture; the smooth leaves glistened and the hairy and rough leaves exuded a grey sweat; icy drops and tricklings made the garden unwelcoming for hours after the sun was up, and he was called in long before dark because of the falling chill. Then there was no one but herself for him. She thought his quietness had some part of bewilderment.

Once she looked into the garden-room and saw him in a chair before the table, his arms flung out over the table-top and his head laid on them; the attitude of one abandoned to grief. She lifted him up, his head hung down, he would not look at her; but he was not crying.

‘Simon, what’s the matter with you? Are you sleepy?’

He did not answer, but presently sat up and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. She saw that he had not been posing. She supposed that he had really been half asleep. He had been playing in the hot garden all the morning, and one could account for it like that.

But it could not be said that she thought no more of it. She had looked at those mute lips, and the room – the same room! – had rung with silence.

Another time, she said to him, after long hesitation, as they ate their meal, she with a book beside her, ‘What game do you play down the garden, Simon?’ And she took a look at his face while he was unconscious of her scrutiny. His long eyes wandered aside with an ineffable expression of sleep.

She said no more. She had a profound unwillingness to probe further.

In the morning, the postman put two letters through the door and Simon jumped down from the breakfast table and pounced on one of them with a shout of triumph. He had a card from Emmy which pleased him mightily and made him laugh, and before Catherine could be allowed to look at her own letter this had to be deciphered and admired. The card was a highly coloured one, and at the first moment she felt surprise and distaste at Emmy’s choice of a hunting-scene. But on looking at it more attentively she saw what it was which had made Simon laugh so; on three of the foremost of that pack of horrible curs Emmy had bestowed wings. And what on earth did Emmy mean by that? Oh, she saw, but was hardly willing to see. She remembered a casual reference to a Greek drama being produced in London at that moment. So there ran old Foxy, about to be torn by the Furies. After all, it was a joke intended only for herself, and she was acclimatized to Emmy’s humour. The written message was in a different style: ‘Dear Simon, who’d believe it? I was down in the garden last night! Love from Emmy. Love, love from your own Emmy. Think of me, Simon, think of me.’

‘Bad girl,’ she said to herself, scolding her in her mind, not realizing the quality of that indulgence which made her smile as she did so. Then she explained carefully to the little boy that Emmy only meant she had dreamed of the garden.

Well, fortunately feeling could not be kept alive in a child of that age simply by messages, written words; the presence gone, the emotion raised by it must quickly fade.

With the usual apprehension, she picked up her own letter, not knowing the writing.

It was a very brief one, the gist of it contained in a single statement: ‘The car will call at two o’clock. Will you please be so good as to have Simon ready?’ It enclosed a cheque, settling accounts with her. A polite, cold letter from Hungerford himself, saying that the child’s visit must terminate, giving no reasons for the short notice, not pretending to consult her convenience, making no attempt to soften its directions with any graceful acknowledgement of what she had done for the little boy. Simon was to be removed from her care, that was all.

If the demand had been anticipated, yet the manner of it was unexpected. ‘You’re squashing up your letter,’ cried Simon, exploding with laughter, the card from Emmy having excited him; and so she was – squashing up her letter, cheque and all.

He remained in high, noisy spirits, restless, weeping easily.

In the late afternoon, she having spent the day over Simon’s clothes, they walked in the woods and she pondered how to prepare the child for this fresh uprooting.

Bronzed and dark, with leaves already falling, with grass no longer verdant after the parched summer, with the black brand of fire in open places, the woods seemed dull and spent, coming swiftly to ruin. But it was warm still where there was shelter and she sat down on a fallen trunk at the foot of a long, wooded hill, while Simon ran and climbed and rooted, and dabbled himself with blackberries; and with her eyes following his little figure, but hardy seeing him, she speculated upon what had happened. She had now had time to reflect that if a fond father could be imagined to have heard of that unfortunate luncheon party at the Unicorn, then the letter was comprehensible enough; she could hardly wonder if anyone cherishing the child had taken fright. The matter passed from her thoughts, it fell into insignificance. Hungerford and his affairs dropped into insignificance.

For she was face to face with her own abandonment. Could she pretend to be fond of Simon, that she felt this added heaviness? Whether it was so or not, the thought of his going somehow lessened the daylight. The end of the frivolities! The jollification turned to ashes, or collapsed into starveling misery like the falsehood it was, after serving to corrupt her still more deeply – perhaps that was all; and no doubt other diversions would be forced upon her, even more beguiling, even more damning.

But only while there were sporting and laughter and busy, flighty comings and goings did that house cease to give out crazing echoes.

She entered upon a long, gloomy reverie. The metallic glinting of the leaves in the sunlight on the opposite slope wearied her eyes, and she leaned her forehead on her hand, shielding them. Words came from some forgotten source. ‘The Lord casts no one into hell, but evil spirits cast themselves in.’ A blankness followed; no great feeling. Her thoughts seemed gradually to sink in a dark spiral, down and down, into depth upon depth of evil done.

She shuddered at last and, raising her eyes, found that the shade had crept over her, while the trees up the hill were standing in a blaze of dull gold, their rusty leaves of the end of summer fired to this colouring. A mass of stormy, fiery clouds had gathered round the sunset, and from this the thick light poured. But the great bank of purple cloud behind the trees, flushed and gilded, wanned and deepened to a hue that defied definition, was so much darker that the source of light seemed reversed, and such effects are always sombre.

She rose and walked vaguely.

Simon ran up. ‘Oh, Miss Hare, I’ve thought of something beautiful! Do let us go to Aldershot and get an ice there and see the soldiers – like I did with Emmy. Here we can’t get any ices, the shops are shut. A wood is all very nice, I like it, but all the same you can’t say it has anywhere to get ices. Gosh, I, could eat an ice now!’

‘Why, Simon, look at your coat, and I haven’t time to get it cleaned.’

Simon was indifferent. ‘Oh, Miss Hare, do let’s go home quickly, quickly, at once, because Emmy may have come while we’ve been out!’ And Simon’s treble piped on and on, at full pitch, until, terribly weary in the head, she was constrained to say, ‘Hush, Simon – how loudly you speak. Don’t you hear how loud it sounds in this quiet place?’

‘But the robins,’ argued Simon, astonished, ‘are making a fearful noise all the time, much more noise than I am, and yet you say, how beautiful! . . . Miss Hare, why do you walk like this?’ and Simon went with his head drooping.

They continued on their homeward path, somewhat erratically, climbing vigorously for a few minutes, then pausing, Simon for wayside attractions or for argument, she from absence of mind, with Simon time and again rather scornfully setting her right about the direction.

‘But supposing, now, we go to London? Oh, yes, do let’s go, tomorrow, all the way up to London – for there we could see Emmy! I have her address, you know, there it is on my card, in that little round by the stamp –’ And thus he went on building up his plans and, getting excited, rousing the echoes with his strong, shrill voice.

She at last came to a halt and spoke tentatively. ‘But you know you’ll be going home very soon now. You’re a lucky boy, you’ve got a lovely new home, I hear. And then think how glad your father will be to have you home again.’

‘Going home?’ said Simon in a voice so astonished and confounded, so sharp with apprehension, that she was shocked at her tactlessness, vividly realizing of a sudden how vast a landscape that summer must appear to the little boy, the farther side of it hardly in view to the near-sighted eyes of childhood. She thought the word, used like that, had not really conveyed anything to him but a kind of threat – for was he not going home at that moment?

‘Going, I mean, to your own home, where your father is.’

‘Oh, bother – bother them!’ he cried, losing his temper. ‘Why can’t they give me to you? – I don’t see why they can’t! Do ask them. Miss Hare, to give me to you! They’ve got that old baby!’ This was vigorous language, but the squaring mouth, the round, frightened eyes, did not go with it. Simon cast himself upon her.

‘Yes, bother, bother, indeed!’ she said; but she summoned up patience, made an effort, and began to draw rosy pictures of the home he was going to. And to please him, she added. ‘It’s not so very far away from here, either, it won’t seem any distance when you go by car.’

‘No!’ cried Simon, with a wild turn of the eye and stamping about passionately. ‘No, no, no! I won’t go. I’ll hide.’

‘But what an unkind boy you are, not to want to go back to your own father,’ she said, feeling her head throbbing and all this too much of a strain on something within her, some resource almost exhausted. ‘Think how that would grieve him.’

Simon cried with wailing, breaking voice, ‘Oh, no, he’s all right, he likes that old baby!’

‘But that’s quite wrong – I’m sure he loves you best. He loves you very dearly.’

‘You love me!’ said Simon weepily; and then, with incomparably more feeling, ‘Emmy loves me! Emmy loves me!’

‘Of course, of course she does,’ she answered, stroking his head, unable to say otherwise. ‘Yes, I love you,’ and she knelt and took the little boy in her arms, seeing that he had collapsed into a weak, helpless mood and was wanting to be comforted.

But she felt perplexed how to deal with him. An offer of brandy snaps for supper had an unexpectedly good effect, better than any argument she could devise at the moment. She pitied him, the little boy who was already so far astray; but it was an exhausted, barren pity in which there was no help.