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."
