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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Living Alone, by Stella Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Living Alone
+
+Author: Stella Benson
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2005 [EBook #14907]
+[Date last updated: February 12, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIVING ALONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LIVING ALONE
+
+BY
+
+STELLA BENSON
+
+AUTHOR OF "I POSE," "THIS IS THE END"
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
+1920
+
+
+
+
+
+_First Edition 1919_
+_Reprinted 1920 (twice)_
+
+
+
+
+     This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor
+     should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so
+     many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and
+     there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a
+     little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined
+     minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.
+
+
+
+
+     I have to thank the Editor of the _Athenaeum_ for allowing me to
+     reprint the poem "Detachment" and the first chapter of this book.
+     The courtesy of the Editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in permitting
+     me to use again any of my contributions to his paper also enables
+     me to include in the fifth chapter the tragic incident of the Mad
+     'Bus.
+
+     S.B.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MAGIC COMES TO A COMMITTEE                                             1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE COMMITTEE COMES TO MAGIC                                          19
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE EVERLASTING BOY                                                   53
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE FORBIDDEN SANDWICH                                                75
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+AN AIR RAID SEEN FROM BELOW                                           97
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+AN AIR RAID SEEN FROM ABOVE                                          129
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FAERY FARM                                                       155
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE REGRETTABLE WEDNESDAY                                            195
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE HOUSE OF LIVING ALONE MOVES AWAY                                 221
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE DWELLER ALONE                                                    257
+
+
+
+
+THE DWELLER ALONE
+
+    My Self has grown too mad for me to master.
+    Craven, beyond what comfort I can find,
+    It cries: "_Oh, God, I am stricken with disaster_."
+    Cries in the night: "_I am stricken, I am blind_...."
+    I will divorce it. I will make my dwelling
+    Far from my Self. Not through these hind'ring tears
+    Will I see men's tears shed. Not with these ears
+    Will I hear news that tortures in the telling.
+
+    I will go seeking for my soul's remotest
+    And stillest place. For oh, I starve and thirst
+    To hear in quietness man's passionate protest
+    Against the doom with which his world is cursed.
+    Not my own wand'rings--not my own abidings--
+    Shall give my search a bias and a bent.
+    For me is no light moment of content,
+    For me no friend, no teller of the tidings.
+
+    The waves of endless time do sing and thunder
+    Upon the cliffs of space. And on that sea
+    I will sail forth, nor fear to sink thereunder,
+    Immeasurable time supporting me:
+    That sea--that mother of a million summers,
+    Who bore, with melody, a million springs,
+    Shall sing for my enchantment, as she sings
+    To life's forsaken ones, and death's newcomers.
+
+    Look, yonder stand the stars to banish anger,
+    And there the immortal years do laugh at pain,
+    And here is promise of a blessed languor
+    To smooth at last the seas of time again.
+    And all those mothers' sons who did recover
+    From death, do cry aloud: "_Ah, cease to mourn us.
+    To life and love you claimed that you had borne us,
+    But we have found death kinder than a lover_."
+
+    I will divorce my Self. Alone it searches
+    Amid dark ruins for its yesterday;
+    Beats with its hands upon the doors of churches,
+    And, at their altars, finds it cannot pray.
+    But I am free--I am free of indecision,
+    Of blood, and weariness, and all things cruel.
+    I have sold my Self for silence, for the jewel
+    Of silence, and the shadow of a vision....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MAGIC COMES TO A COMMITTEE
+
+
+There were six women, seven chairs, and a table in an otherwise
+unfurnished room in an unfashionable part of London. Three of the women
+were of the kind that has no life apart from committees. They need not
+be mentioned in detail. The names of two others were Miss Meta Mostyn
+Ford and Lady Arabel Higgins. Miss Ford was a good woman, as well as a
+lady. Her hands were beautiful because they paid a manicurist to keep
+them so, but she was too righteous to powder her nose. She was the sort
+of person a man would like his best friend to marry. Lady Arabel was
+older: she was virtuous to the same extent as Achilles was invulnerable.
+In the beginning, when her soul was being soaked in virtue, the heel of
+it was fortunately left dry. She had a husband, but no apparent tragedy
+in her life. These two women were obviously not native to their
+surroundings. Their eyelashes brought Bond Street--or at least
+Kensington--to mind; their shoes were mudless; their gloves had not been
+bought in the sales. Of the sixth woman the less said the better.
+
+All six women were there because their country was at war, and because
+they felt it to be their duty to assist it to remain at war for the
+present. They were the nucleus of a committee on War Savings, and they
+were waiting for their Chairman, who was the Mayor of the borough. He
+was also a grocer.
+
+Five of the members were discussing methods of persuading poor people to
+save money. The sixth was making spots on the table with a pen.
+
+They were interrupted, not by the expected Mayor, but by a young woman,
+who came violently in by the street door, rushed into the middle of the
+room, and got under the table. The members, in surprise, pushed back
+their chairs and made ladylike noises of protest and inquiry.
+
+"They're after me," panted the person under the table.
+
+All seven listened to thumping silence for several seconds, and then, as
+no pursuing outcry declared itself, the Stranger arose, without grace,
+from her hiding-place.
+
+To anybody except a member of a committee it would have been obvious
+that the Stranger was of the Cinderella type, and bound to turn out a
+heroine sooner or later. But perception goes out of committees. The more
+committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand.
+When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of
+committees you might as well be dead.
+
+The Stranger was not pretty; she had a broad, curious face. Her clothes
+were much too good to throw away. You would have enjoyed giving them to
+a decayed gentlewoman.
+
+"I stole this bun," she explained frankly. "There is an uninterned
+German baker after me."
+
+"And why did you steal it?" asked Miss Ford, pronouncing the H in "why"
+with a haughty and terrifying sound of suction.
+
+The Stranger sighed. "Because I couldn't afford to buy it."
+
+"And why could you not afford to buy the bun?" asked Miss Ford. "A big
+strong girl like you."
+
+You will notice that she had had a good deal of experience in social
+work.
+
+The Stranger said: "Up till ten o'clock this morning I was of the
+leisured classes like yourselves. I had a hundred pounds."
+
+Lady Arabel was one of the kindest people in the world, but even she
+quivered at the suggestion of a common leisure. The sort of clothes the
+Stranger wore Lady Arabel would have called "too dretful." If one is
+well dressed one is proud, and may look an angel in the eye. If one is
+really shabby one is even prouder, one often goes out of one's way to
+look angels in the eye. But if one wears a squirrel fur "set," and a
+dyed dress that originally cost two and a half guineas, one is damned.
+
+"You have squandered all that money?" pursued Miss Ford.
+
+"Yes. In ten minutes."
+
+A thrill ran through all six members. Several mouths watered.
+
+"I am ashamed of you," said Miss Ford. "I hope the baker will catch
+you. Don't you know that your country is engaged in the greatest
+conflict in history? A hundred pounds ... you might have put it in the
+War Loan."
+
+"Yes," said the Stranger, "I did. That's how I squandered it."
+
+Miss Ford seemed to be partially drowned by this reply. One could see
+her wits fighting for air.
+
+But Lady Arabel had not committed herself, and therefore escaped this
+disaster. "You behaved foolishly," she said. "We are all too dretfully
+anxious to subscribe what we can spare to the War Loan, of course. But
+the State does not expect more than that of us."
+
+"God bless it," said the Stranger loudly, so that everybody blushed. "Of
+course it doesn't. But it is fun, don't you think, when you are giving a
+present, to exceed expectations?"
+
+"The State--" began Lady Arabel, but was nudged into silence by Miss
+Ford. "Of course it's all untrue. Don't let her think we believe her."
+
+The Stranger heard her. Such people do not only hear with their ears.
+She laughed.
+
+"You shall see the receipt," she said.
+
+Out of her large pocket she dragged several things before she found what
+she sought. The sixth member noticed several packets labelled MAGIC,
+which the Stranger handled very carefully. "Frightfully explosive," she
+said.
+
+"I believe you're drunk," said Miss Ford, as she took the receipt. It
+really was a War Loan receipt, and the name and address on it were:
+"Miss Hazeline Snow, The Bindles, Pymley, Gloucestershire."
+
+Lady Arabel smiled in a relieved way. She had not long been a social
+worker, and had not yet acquired a taste for making fools of the
+undeserving. "So this is your name and address," she said.
+
+"No," said the Stranger simply.
+
+"This is your name and address," said Lady Arabel more loudly.
+
+"No," said the Stranger. "I made it up. Don't you think 'The Bindles,
+Pymley,' is too darling?"
+
+"Quite drunk," repeated Miss Ford. She had attended eight committee
+meetings that week.
+
+"S--s--s--sh, Meta," hissed Lady Arabel. She leaned forward, not
+smiling, but pleasantly showing her teeth. "You gave a false name and
+address. My dear, I wonder if I can guess why."
+
+"I dare say you can," admitted the Stranger. "It's such fun, don't you
+think, to get no thanks? Don't you sometimes amuse yourself by sending
+postal orders to people whose addresses look pathetic in the telephone
+book, or by forgetting to take away the parcels you have bought in poor
+little shops? Or by standing and looking with ostentatious respect at
+boy scouts on the march, always bearing in mind that these, in their own
+eyes, are not little boys trotting behind a disguised curate, but
+British Troops on the Move? Just two pleased eyes in a crowd, just a
+hundred pounds dropped from heaven into poor Mr. Bonar Law's wistful
+hand...."
+
+Miss Ford began to laugh, a ladylike yet nasty laugh. "You amuse me,"
+she said, but not in the kind of way that would make anybody wish to
+amuse her often.
+
+Miss Ford was the ideal member of committee, and a committee, of course,
+exists for the purpose of damping enthusiasms.
+
+The Stranger's manners were somehow hectic. Directly she heard that
+laughter the tears came into her eyes. "Didn't you like what I was
+saying?" she asked. Tears climbed down her cheekbones.
+
+"Oh!" said Miss Ford. "You seem to be--if not drunk--suffering from some
+form of hysteria."
+
+"Do you think youth is a form of hysteria?" asked the Stranger. "Or
+hunger? Or magic? Or--"
+
+"Oh, don't recite any more lists, for the Dear Sake!" implored Miss
+Ford, who had caught this rather pretty expression where she caught her
+laugh and most of her thoughts--from contemporary fiction. She had a lot
+of friends in the writing trade. She knew artists too, and an actress,
+and a lot of people who talked. She very nearly did something clever
+herself. She continued: "I wish you could see yourself, trying to be
+uplifting between the munches of a stolen bun. You'd laugh too. But
+perhaps you never laugh," she added, straightening her lips.
+
+"How d'you mean--laugh?" asked the Stranger. "I didn't know that noise
+was called laughing. I thought you were just saying 'Ha--ha.'"
+
+At this moment the Mayor came in. As I told you, he was a grocer, and
+the Chairman of the committee. He was a bad Chairman, but a good grocer.
+Grocers generally wear white in the execution of their duty, and this
+fancy, I think, reflects their pureness of heart. They spend their days
+among soft substances most beautiful to touch; and sometimes they sell
+honest-smelling soaps; and sometimes they chop cheeses, and thus reach
+the glory of the butcher's calling, without its painfulness. Also they
+handle shining tins, marvellously illustrated.
+
+Mayors and grocers were of course nothing to Miss Ford, but Chairmen
+were very important. She nodded curtly to the Mayor and grocer, but she
+pushed the seventh chair towards the Chairman.
+
+"May I just finish with this applicant?" she asked in her thin inclusive
+committee voice, and then added in the direction of the Stranger: "It's
+no use talking nonsense. We all see through you, you cannot deceive a
+committee. But to a certain extent we believe your story, and are
+willing, if the case proves satisfactory, to give you a helping hand. I
+will take down a few particulars. First your name?"
+
+"M--m," mused the Stranger. "Let me see, you didn't like Hazeline Snow
+much, did you? What d'you think of Thelma ... Thelma Bennett Watkins?...
+You know, the Rutlandshire Watkinses, the younger branch----"
+
+Miss Ford balanced her pen helplessly. "But that isn't your real name."
+
+"How d'you mean--real name?" asked the Stranger anxiously. "Won't that
+do? What about Iris ... Hyde?... You see, the truth is, I was never
+actually christened ... I was born a conscientious objector, and
+also----"
+
+"Oh, for the Dear Sake, be silent!" said Miss Ford, writing down "Thelma
+Bennett Watkins," in self-defence. "This, I take it, is the name you
+gave at the time of the National Registration."
+
+"I forget," said the Stranger. "I remember that I put down my trade as
+Magic, and they registered it on my card as 'Machinist.' Yet Magic, I
+believe, is a starred profession."
+
+"What is your trade really?" asked Miss Ford.
+
+"I'll show you," replied the Stranger, unbuttoning once more the flap of
+her pocket.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She wrote a word upon the air with her finger, and made a flourish under
+the word. So flowery was the flourish that it span her round, right
+round upon her toes, and she faced her watchers again. The committee
+jumped, for the blind ran up, and outside the window, at the end of a
+strange perspective of street, the trees of some far square were as soft
+as thistledown against a lemon-coloured sky. A sound came up the
+street....
+
+The forgotten April and the voices of lambs pealed like bells into the
+room....
+
+Oh, let us flee from April! We are but swimmers in seas of words, we
+members of committees, and to the song of April there are no words. What
+do we know, and what does London know, after all these years of
+learning?
+
+Old Mother London crouches, with her face buried in her hands; and she
+is walled in with her fogs and her loud noises, and over her head are
+the heavy beams of her dark roof, and she has the barred sun for a
+skylight, and winds that are but hideous draughts rush under her door.
+London knows much, and every moment she learns a new thing, but this she
+shall never learn--that the sun shines all day and the moon all night on
+the silver tiles of her dark house, and that the young months climb her
+walls, and run singing in and out between her chimneys....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nothing else happened in that room. At least nothing more important than
+the ordinary manifestations attendant upon magic. The lamp had
+tremulously gone out. Coloured flames danced about the Stranger's head.
+One felt the thrill of a purring cat against one's ankles, one saw its
+green eyes glare. But these things hardly counted.
+
+It was all over. The Mayor was heard cracking his fingers, and
+whispering "Puss, Puss." The lamp relighted itself. Nobody had known
+that it was so gifted.
+
+The Mayor said: "Splendid, miss, quite splendid. You'd make a fortune on
+the stage." His tongue, however, seemed to be talking by itself, without
+the assistance of the Mayor himself. One could see that he was shaken
+out of his usual grocerly calm, for his feverish hand was stroking a cat
+where no cat was.
+
+Black cats are only the showy properties of magic, easily materialised,
+even by beginners, at will. It must be confusing for such an orderly
+animal as the cat to exist in this intermittent way, never knowing, so
+to speak, whether it is there or not there, from one moment to another.
+
+The sixth member took a severely bitten pen from between her lips, and
+said: "Now you mention it, I think I'll go down there again for the
+week-end. I can pawn my ear-rings."
+
+Nobody of course took any notice of her, yet in a way her remark was
+logical. For that singing Spring that had for a moment trespassed in the
+room had reminded her of very familiar things, and for a few seconds she
+had stood upon a beloved hill, and had looked down between beech trees
+on a far valley, like a promised land; and had seen in the valley a pale
+river and a dark town, like milk and honey.
+
+As for Miss Ford, she had become rather white. Although the blind had
+now pulled itself down, and dismissed April, Miss Ford continued to look
+at the window. But she cleared her throat and said hoarsely: "Will you
+kindly answer my questions? I asked you what your trade was."
+
+"It's too dretful of me to interrupt," said Lady Arabel suddenly. "But,
+do you know, Meta, I feel we are wasting this committee's time. This
+young person needs no assistance from us." She turned to the Stranger,
+and added: "My dear, I am dretfully ashamed. You must meet my son
+Rrchud.... My son Rrchud knows...."
+
+She burst into tears.
+
+The Stranger took her hand.
+
+"I should like awfully to meet Rrchud, and to get to know you better,"
+she said. She grew very red. "I say, I should be awfully pleased if you
+would call me Angela."
+
+It wasn't her name, but she had noticed that something of this sort is
+always said when people become motherly and cry.
+
+Then she went away.
+
+"Lawdy," said the Mayor. "I didn't expect she'd go out by the door,
+somehow. Look--she's left some sort of hardware over there in the
+corner."
+
+It was a broomstick.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE COMMITTEE COMES TO MAGIC
+
+
+I don't suppose for a moment that you know Mitten Island: it is a
+difficult place to get to; you have to change 'buses seven times, going
+from Kensington, and you have to cross the river by means of a ferry. On
+Mitten Island there is a model village, consisting of several hundred
+houses, two churches, and one shop.
+
+It was the sixth member who discovered, after the committee meeting,
+that the address on the forsaken broomstick's collar was: Number 100
+Beautiful Way, Mitten Island, London.
+
+The sixth member, although she was a member of committees, was neither a
+real expert in, nor a real lover of, Doing Good. In Doing Good, I think,
+we have got into bad habits. We try in groups to do good to the
+individual, whereas, if good is to be done, it would seem more likely,
+and more consonant with precedent, that the individual might do it to
+the group. Without the smile of a Treasurer we cannot unloose our
+purse-strings; without the sanction of a Chairman we have no courage;
+without Minutes we have no memory. There is hardly one of us who would
+dare to give a flannelette nightgown to a Factory Girl who had Stepped
+Aside, without a committee to lay the blame on, should the Factory Girl,
+fortified by the flannelette nightgown, take Further Steps Aside.
+
+The sixth member was only too apt to put her trust in committees.
+Herself she did not trust at all, though she thought herself quite a
+good creature, as selves go. She had come to London two years ago, with
+a little trunk and a lot of good intentions as her only possessions, and
+she had paid the inevitable penalty for her earnestness. It is a sad
+thing to see any one of naturally healthy and rebellious tendency stray
+into the flat path of Charity. Gay heedless young people set their
+unwary feet between the flowery borders of that path, the thin air of
+resigned thanks breathed by the deserving poor mounts to their heads
+like wine; committees lie in wait for them on every side; hostels and
+settlements entice them fatally to break their journey at every mile;
+they run rejoicing to their doom, and I think shall eventually find
+themselves without escape, elected eternal life-members of the Committee
+that sits around the glassy sea.
+
+The sixth member was saved by a merciful inefficiency of temperament
+from attaining the vortex of her whirlpool of charity. To be in the
+vortex is, I believe, almost always to see less. The bull's eye is
+generally blind.
+
+The sixth member was a person who, where Social Work was concerned, did
+more or less as she was told, without doing it particularly well. The
+result, very properly, was that all the work which a committee
+euphemistically calls "organising work" was left to her. Organising work
+consists of sitting in 'buses bound for remote quarters of London, and
+ringing the bells of people who are almost always found to be away for a
+fortnight. The sixth member had been ordered to organise the return of
+the broomstick to its owner.
+
+Perhaps it would be more practical to call the sixth member Sarah Brown.
+
+The bereaved owner of the broomstick was washing her hair at Number 100
+Beautiful Way, Mitten Island. She was washing it behind the counter of
+her shop. She was the manageress of the only shop on Mitten Island. It
+was a general shop, but made a speciality of such goods as Happiness and
+Magic. Unfortunately Happiness is rather difficult to get in war-time.
+Sometimes there was quite a queue outside the shop when it opened, and
+sometimes there was a card outside, saying politely: "Sorry, it's no use
+waiting. I haven't any." Of course the shop also sold Sunlight Soap, and
+it was with Sunlight Soap that the shop-lady was washing her hair,
+because it was Sunday, and this was a comparatively cheap amusement. She
+had no money. She had meant to go down to the offices of her employer
+after breakfast, to borrow some of the salary that would be due to her
+next week. But then she found that she had left her broomstick
+somewhere. As a rule Harold--for that was the broomstick's name--was
+fairly independent, and could find his way home alone, but when he got
+mislaid and left in strange hands, and particularly when kindly finders
+took him to Scotland Yard, he often lost his head. You, in your
+innocence, are suggesting that his owner might have borrowed another
+broomstick from stock. But you have no idea what arduous work it is,
+breaking in a wild broomstick to the saddle. It sometimes takes days,
+and is not really suitable work for a woman, even in war-time. Often the
+brutes are savage, and always they are obstinate. The shop-lady could
+not afford to go to the City by Tube, not to mention the ferry fare,
+which was rather expensive and erratic, not being L.C.C. Of course a
+flash of lightning is generally available for magic people. But it is
+considered not only unpatriotic but bad form to use lightning in
+war-time.
+
+The shop was not expecting customers on Sunday, but its manageress had
+hardly got her head well into the basin when somebody entered. She stood
+up dripping.
+
+"Is Miss Thelma Bennett Watkins at home?" asked Sarah Brown, after a
+pause, during which she made her characteristic effort to remember what
+she had come for.
+
+"No," said the other. "But do take a seat. We met last night, you may
+remember. Perhaps you wouldn't mind lending me one-and-twopence to buy
+two chops for our luncheon. I've got an extra coupon. There's tinned
+salmon in stock, but I don't advise it."
+
+"I've only got sevenpence, just enough to take me home," answered Sarah
+Brown. "But I can pawn my ear-rings."
+
+I dare say you have never been in a position to notice that there is no
+pawn-shop on Mitten Island. The inhabitants of model villages always
+have assured incomes and pose as lilies of the field. Sarah Brown and
+her hostess sat down on the counter without regret to a luncheon
+consisting of one orange, found by the guest in her bag and divided, and
+two thin captain biscuits from stock. They were both used to dissolving
+visions of impossible chops, both were cheerfully familiar with the
+feeling of light tragedy which invades you towards six o'clock P.M., if
+you have not been able to afford a meal since breakfast.
+
+"Now look here," said Sarah Brown, as she plunged her pocket-knife into
+the orange. "Would you mind telling me--are you a fairy, or a
+third-floor-back, or anything of that sort? I won't register it, or put
+it on the case-paper, I promise, though if you are superhuman in any way
+I shall be seriously tempted."
+
+"I am a Witch," said the witch.
+
+Now witches and wizards, as you perhaps know, are people who are born
+for the first time. I suppose we have all passed through this fair
+experience, we must all have had our chance of making magic. But to most
+of us it came in the boring beginning of time, and we wasted our best
+spells on plesiosauri, and protoplasms, and angels with flaming swords,
+all of whom knew magic too, and were not impressed. Witches and wizards
+are now rare, though not so rare as you think. Remembering nothing, they
+know nothing, and are not bored. They have to learn everything from the
+very beginning, except magic, which is the only really original sin. To
+the magic eye, magic alone is commonplace, everything else is unknown,
+unguessed, and undespised. Magic people are always obvious--so obvious
+that we veteran souls can rarely understand them,--they are never
+subtle, and though they are new, they are never Modern. You may tell
+them in your cynical way that to-day is the only real day, and that
+there is nothing more unmentionable than yesterday except the day
+before. They will admire your cleverness very much, but the next moment
+you will find the witch sobbing over Tennyson, or the wizard smiling at
+the quaint fancies of Sir Edwin Landseer. You cannot really stir up
+magic people with ordinary human people. You and I have climbed over our
+thousand lives to a too dreadfully subtle eminence. In our day--in our
+many days--we have adored everything conceivable, and now we have to
+fall back on the inconceivable. We stand our idols on their heads, it is
+newer to do so, and we think we prefer them upside down. Talking
+constantly, we reel blindfold through eternity, and perhaps if we are
+lucky, once or twice in a score of lives, the blindfolding handkerchief
+slips, and we wriggle one eye free, and see gods like trees walking. By
+Jove, that gives us enough to talk about for two or three lives! Witches
+and wizards are not blinded by having a Point of View. They just look,
+and are very much surprised and interested.
+
+All witches and wizards are born strangely and die violently. They are
+descended always from old mysterious breeds, from women who wrought
+domestic magic and perished for its sake, and from men who wrought other
+magic among lost causes and wars without gain, and fell and died, still
+surprised, still interested, with their faces among flowers. All men who
+die so are not wizards, nor are all martyred and adventuring women
+witches, but all such bring a potential strain of magic into their line.
+
+"A witch," said Sarah Brown. "Of course. I have been trying to remember
+what broomsticks reminded me of. A witch, of course. I have always
+wished to be friends with a witch."
+
+The witch was unaware that the proper answer to this was: "Oh, my Dear,
+_do_ let's. Do you know I had quite a _crush_ on you from the first
+minute." She did not answer at all, and Sarah Brown, who was tired of
+proper answers, was not sorry. Nevertheless the pause seemed a little
+empty, so she filled it herself, saying pedantically: "Of course I don't
+believe friendship is an end in itself. Only a means to an end."
+
+"I don't know what you mean," said the witch, after wrestling
+conscientiously with this remark for a minute. "Do tell me--do you know
+yourself, or are you just saying it to see what it means?"
+
+Sarah Brown was obviously damped by this, and the witch added kindly: "I
+bet you twopence you don't know what this place is."
+
+"A shop," said Sarah Brown, who was sitting on the counter.
+
+"It is a sort of convent and monastery mixed," replied the witch. "I am
+connected with it officially. I undertook to manage it, yet I forget
+what the proper word for me is. Not undertaker, is it?"
+
+"Superintendent or secretary," suggested Sarah Brown moodily.
+
+"Superintendent, I think," said the witch. "At least I know Peony calls
+me Soup. Do you live alone?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then you ought to live here. This is the only place in the world of its
+kind. The name of this house is Living Alone. I'll read you the
+prospectus."
+
+She fell suddenly upon her knees and began fighting with a drawer. The
+drawer was evidently one of the many descendants of the Sword
+Excalibur--none but the appointed hand could draw it forth. The witch,
+after a struggle, passed this test, and produced a parchment covered
+with large childish printing in red ink.
+
+"My employer made up this," said the witch. "And the ferryman wrote it
+out for us."
+
+This is the prospectus:
+
+     The name of this house is Living Alone.
+
+     It is meant to provide for the needs of those who dislike hotels,
+     clubs, settlements, hostels, boarding-houses, and lodgings only
+     less than their own homes; who detest landladies, waiters,
+     husbands and wives, charwomen, and all forms of lookers after. This
+     house is a monastery and a convent for monks and nuns dedicated to
+     unknown gods. Men and women who are tired of being laboriously kind
+     to their bodies, who like to be a little uncomfortable and quite
+     uncared for, who love to live from week to week without speaking,
+     except to confide their destinations to 'bus-conductors, who are
+     weary of woolly decorations, aspidistras, and the eternal two
+     generations of roses which riot among blue ribbons on hireling
+     wall-papers, who are ignorant of the science of tipping and
+     thanking, who do not know how to cook yet hate to be cooked for,
+     will here find the thing they have desired, and something else as
+     well.
+
+     There are six cells in this house, and no common sitting-room.
+     Guests wishing to address each other must do so on the stairs, or
+     in the shop. Each cell has whitewashed walls, and contains a small
+     deal table, one wooden chair, a hard bed, a tin bath, and a little
+     inconvenient fireplace. No guest may bring into the house more than
+     can be carried out again in one large suit-case. Carpets, rugs,
+     mirrors, and any single garment costing more than three guineas,
+     are prohibited. Any guest proved to have made use of a taxi, or to
+     have travelled anywhere first class, or to have bought cigarettes
+     or sweets costing more than three shillings a hundred or
+     eighteenpence a pound respectively, or to have paid more than three
+     and sixpence (war-tax included) for a seat in any place of
+     entertainment, will be instantly expelled. Dogs, cats, goldfish,
+     and other superhuman companions are encouraged.
+
+     Working guests are preferred, but if not at work, guests must spend
+     at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four entirely alone. No
+     guest may entertain or be entertained except under special license
+     obtainable from the Superintendent.
+
+     There is a pump in the back yard. There is no telephone, no
+     electric light, no hot water system, no attendance, and no modern
+     comfort whatever. Tradesmen are forbidden to call. There is no
+     charge for residence in this house.
+
+"It certainly sounds an unusual place," admitted Sarah Brown. "Is the
+house always full?"
+
+"Never," said the witch. "A lot of people can swallow everything but the
+last clause. We have at present one guest, called Peony."
+
+She replaced the prospectus in the drawer, which she then tried to shut.
+While she was engaged in this thundering endeavour, Sarah Brown noticed
+that the drawer was full of the little paper packets which she had seen
+the day before in the witch's possession.
+
+"What do you do with your magic?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, many things. Chiefly I use it as an ingredient for happiness,
+sometimes to remind people, and sometimes to make them forget. It seems
+to me that some people take happiness rather tragically."
+
+"I find," said Sarah Brown, rather sententiously, "that I always owe my
+happiness to earth, never to heaven."
+
+"How d'you mean heaven?" said the witch. "I know nothing about heaven.
+When I used to work in the City, I bought a little book about heaven to
+read in the Tube every morning. I thought I should grow daily better.
+But I couldn't see that I did."
+
+Sarah Brown was naturally astonished to meet any one who did not know
+all about heaven. But she continued the pursuit of her ideas on
+happiness. Sarah Brown meant to write a book some day, if she could find
+a really inspiring exercise-book to start in. She thought herself
+rather good at ideas--poor Sarah Brown, she simply had to be confident
+about something. She was only inwardly articulate, I think, not
+outwardly at all, but sometimes she could talk about herself.
+
+"Heaven has given me wretched health, but never gave me youth enough to
+make the wretchedness adventurous," she went on. "Heaven gave me a thin
+skin, but never gave me the natural and comforting affections. Heaven
+probably meant to make a noble woman of me by encrusting me in
+disabilities, but it left out the necessary nobility at the last moment;
+it left out, in fact, all the compensations. But luckily I have found
+the compensations for myself; I just had to find something. Men and
+women have given me everything that such as I could expect. I have never
+met with reasonless enmity, never met with meanness, never met with
+anything more unbearable than natural indifference, from any man or
+woman. I have been, I may say, a burden and a bore all over the world; I
+have been an ill and fretful stranger within all men's gates; I have
+asked much and given nothing; I have never been a friend. Nobody has
+ever expected any return from me, yet nothing was grudged. Landladies,
+policemen, chorus girls, social bounders, prostitutes, the natural
+enemies, one would say, of such as I, have given me kindness, and often
+much that they could not easily spare, and always amusement and
+distraction...."
+
+"Ah, how you interest and excite me," said the witch, whose attention
+had been frankly wandering. "You are exactly the sort of person we want
+in this house."
+
+"But--ill?" said Sarah Brown pessimistically. "Oh, witch, I have been so
+wearisome to every one, so constantly ill. The first thing I get to know
+about a new hostess or a landlady is always the colour of her
+dressing-gown by candlelight, or whether she has one."
+
+"Illnesses are never bad here," said the witch. "I bet you twopence I've
+got something in the shop that would make you well. Three fingers of
+happiness, neat and hot, at night--"
+
+"But, witch--oh, witch--this is the worst of all. My ears are failing
+me--I think I am going deaf...."
+
+"You can hear what I say," said the witch.
+
+"Yes, I can hear what you say, but when most people talk I am like a
+prisoner locked up; and every day there are more and more locked doors
+between me and the world. You do not know how horrible it is."
+
+"Oh, well," said the witch, "as long as you can hear magic you will not
+lack a key to your prison. Sometimes it's better not to hear the other
+things. You are the ideal guest for the House of Living Alone."
+
+"I'll go and fetch David my Dog and Humphrey my Suit-case," said Sarah
+Brown.
+
+At that moment a taxi was heard to arrive at the other side of the
+ferry, and the ferryman's voice was heard shouting: "All right, all
+right, I'll be there in half a tick."
+
+"I hope this isn't Peony in a taxi," said the witch. "I get so tired of
+expelling guests. She's been drawing her money, which may have been
+tempting."
+
+They listened.
+
+They heard someone alight from the ferry-boat, and the voice of Miss
+Meta Mostyn Ford asking the ferryman: "Do you know anything about a
+young woman of the name of Watkins, living at Number 100 Beautiful
+Way----"
+
+"No, he doesn't," shouted the witch, opening the shop door. "But do step
+in. We met yesterday, you may remember. I'll ask the ferryman to get
+half-a-dozen halfpenny buns for tea, if you will be so kind as to lend
+me threepence. We don't bake ourselves."
+
+"I have had tea, thank you," said Miss Ford. "I have just come from a
+little gathering of friends on the other side of the river, and I
+thought I would call here on my way home. I had noted your address----"
+
+She started as she came in and saw Sarah Brown, and added in her
+committee voice: "I had noted your address, because I never mind how
+much trouble I take in following up a promising case."
+
+Sarah Brown, on first hearing that trenchant voice, had lost her head
+and begun to hide under the counter. But the biscuit-tins refused to
+make room, so she drew herself up and smiled politely.
+
+"How good of you to go to a little gathering of friends," said the
+witch, obviously trying to behave like a real human person. "I never do,
+except now and then by mistake. And even then I only stay when there are
+grassy sandwiches to eat. Once there were grassy sandwiches mixed with
+bits of hard-boiled egg, and then I stayed to supper. You didn't have
+such luck, I see, or you would look happier."
+
+"I don't go to my friends for their food, but for their ideas," said
+Miss Ford.
+
+Sarah Brown was gliding towards the door.
+
+"Oh, don't go," said the witch, who did not recognise tact when she met
+it. "I have sent Harold the Broomstick for your Dog David and your
+Suit-case Humphrey. He is an excellent packer and very clean in his
+person and work. Please, please, don't go. Do you know, I live in
+constant dread of being left alone with a clever person."
+
+"I must apologise for my intrusion, in that case," said Miss Ford, with
+dignity. "I repeat, I only came because I saw yours was an exceptional
+case."
+
+There was a very long silence in the growing dusk. The moon could
+already be seen through the glass door, rising, pushing vigorously aside
+the thickets of the crowded sky. A crack across the corner of the glass
+was lighted up, and looked like a little sprig of lightning, plucked
+from a passing storm and preserved in the glass.
+
+Miss Ford suddenly began to talk in a very quick and confused way. Any
+sane hearer would have known that she was talking by mistake, that she
+was possessed by some distressingly Anti-Ford spirit, and that nothing
+she might say in parenthesis like this ought to be remembered against
+her.
+
+"Oh, God," said Miss Ford, "I have come because I am hungry, hungry for
+what you spoke of last night, in the dark.... You spoke of an April
+sea--clashing of cymbals was the expression you used, wasn't it? You
+spoke of a shore of brown diamonds flat to the ruffled sea ... and
+white sandhills under a thin veil of grass ... and tamarisks all blown
+one way...."
+
+"Well?" said the witch.
+
+"Well," faltered Miss Ford. "I think I came to ask you ... whether you
+knew of nice lodgings there ... plain wholesome bath ... respectable
+cooking, hot and cold ..."
+
+Her voice faded away pathetically.
+
+There was a sudden shattering, as the door burst open, and a dog and a
+suit-case were swept in by a brisk broomstick.
+
+"I am so sorry, Miss Watkins," said Miss Ford stiffly. Her face was
+scarlet--neat and formal again now, but scarlet.--"I am so sorry if I
+have talked nonsense. I am rather run down, I think, too much work, four
+important meetings yesterday. I sometimes think I shall break down. I
+have such alarming nerve-storms."
+
+She looked nervously at Sarah Brown. It is always tiresome to meet
+fellow-members of committees in private life, especially if one is in a
+mood for having nerve-storms. People may be excellent in a philanthropic
+way, of course, and yet impossible socially.
+
+But Sarah Brown had heard very little. She always found Miss Ford's
+voice difficult. She was on her knees asking her dog David what it had
+felt like, coming. But David was still too much dazed to say much.
+
+"You must not think," said Miss Ford, "that because I am a practical
+worker I have no understanding of Inner Meanings. On the contrary, I
+have perhaps wasted too much of my time on spiritual matters. That is
+why I take quite a personal and special interest in your case. I had a
+great friend, now in the trenches, alas, who possessed Power. He used to
+come to my Wednesdays--at least I used to invite him to come, but he was
+dreamy like you and constantly mistook the date. He helped me
+enormously, and I miss him.... Well, the truest charity should be
+anything but formal, I think, and I saw at a glance that your case was
+exceptional, and that you also were Occult----"
+
+"How d'you mean--occult?" asked the witch. "Do you mean just knowing
+magic?"
+
+"A strange mixture," mused Miss Ford self-consciously. It is impossible
+to muse aloud without self-consciousness. "A strange and rather
+interesting mixture of naivete and power. The question is--power to what
+extent? Miss Watkins, I want you to come to one of my Wednesdays to meet
+one or two people who might possibly help you to a job--lecturing, you
+know. Lectures on hypnotism or spiritualism, with experiments, are
+always popular. You certainly have Power, you only want a little
+advertisement to be a real help to many people."
+
+"How d'you mean--advertisement?" asked the witch. "This new
+advertisement stunt is one of the problems that tire my head. I am
+awfully worried by problems. The world seems to be ruled by posters now.
+People look to the hoardings for information about their duty. Why don't
+we paste up the ten commandments on all the walls and all the 'buses,
+and be done with it?"
+
+"Now listen, Miss Watkins," persisted Miss Ford. "I want you to meet
+Bernard Tovey, the painter, and Ivy MacBee, who founded the Aspiration
+Club, and Frere, the editor of _I Wonder_, and several other regular
+Wednesday friends of mine, all interested in the Occult. It would be a
+real opportunity for you."
+
+"I am afraid you will be very angry with me," said the witch presently
+in a hollow voice. "If I was occult last night--I'm awfully sorry, but
+it must have been a fluke. I seem to have said so much last night
+without knowing it. I'm afraid I was showing off a little."
+
+The painful tears of confession were in her eyes, but she added,
+changing the subject: "Do you live alone?"
+
+"Yes, absolutely," said Miss Ford. "My friends call me a perfect hermit.
+I hardly ever have visitors in my spare room, it makes so much work for
+my three maids."
+
+"I suppose you wouldn't care to divorce your three maids and come and
+live here," suggested the witch. "I could of course cure you of the
+nerve-storms you speak of. Or rather I could help you to have
+nerve-storms all the time, without any stagnant grown-upness in between.
+Then you wouldn't notice the nerve-storms. This house is a sort of
+nursing home and college combined. I'll read you the prospectus."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Very amusing," said Miss Ford, after waiting a minute to see if there
+was any more of the prospectus. She had quite recovered herself, and was
+wearing the brisk acute expression that deceived her into claiming a
+sense of humour. "But why all those uncomfortable rules? And why that
+discouragement of social intercourse? I am afraid the average person of
+the class you cater for does not recognise the duty of social
+intercourse."
+
+"This house," replied the witch, "caters for people who are outside
+averages. The ferryman says that people who are content to be average
+are lowering the general standard. I wish you could have met Peony, the
+only guest up to now, but she is out, and may be a teeny bit drunk when
+she comes in. She has gone to draw her money."
+
+"What sort of money?" asked Miss Ford, who was always interested in the
+sources of income of the Poor.
+
+"Soldier's allotment. Unmarried wife."
+
+The expression of Miss Ford's face tactfully wiped away this bald
+unfortunate statement from the surface of the conversation. "And how do
+you make your boarding-house pay," she asked, "if there is no charge for
+residence?"
+
+"How d'you mean--pay?" asked the witch. "Pay whom? And what with? Look
+here, if you will come and live here you shall have a little Wednesday
+every week on the stairs, under license from me. Harold the Broomstick
+is apt to shirk cleaning the stairs, but as it happens, he is keeping
+company with an O-Cedar Mop in Kentish Town, and I've no doubt she would
+come over and do the stairs thoroughly every Tuesday night. Besides, we
+have overalls in stock at only two and eleven three----"
+
+"Oh, I like your merry mood," said Miss Ford, laughing heartily. "You
+must remember to talk like that when you come to my Wednesdays. Most of
+my friends are utter Socialists, and believe in bridging as far as
+possible the gulf between one class and another, so you needn't feel
+shy or awkward."
+
+The splashing of the ferry-boat was once more heard, and then the shop
+quaked a little as a heavy foot alighted on the landing-stage. The
+ferryman was heard saying: "I don't know any party of that name, but I
+believe the young woman at the shop can help you."
+
+Lady Arabel Higgins entered the shop.
+
+"What, Meta, you here? And Sarah Brown? What a too dretfully funny
+coincidence. Well, Angela dear, I made a note of your address yesterday,
+and then lost the note--too dretfully like me. So I rang up the Mayor,
+and he said he also had made a note, and he would come and show me the
+way. But I didn't wait for him. I wanted to talk to you about----"
+
+"Well, I must truly be going," interrupted Sarah Brown. "I'll just nip
+across to the Brown Borough and find a pawn-shop, being hungry."
+
+"There is no need for any one to move on my account," said Lady Arabel.
+"You all heard what Angela said last night in her little address to the
+committee in the dark. I don't know why she addressed her remarks
+particularly at me, but as she did so, there is no secret in the matter.
+Of course, just at first, it seemed dretful to me that any one should
+know or speak about it. I cannot understand how you knew, Angela; I am
+trying not to understand...."
+
+She took up a thin captain biscuit and bit it absent-mindedly. It
+trembled in her hand like a leaf.
+
+"Yes, it is true that Rrchud isn't like other women's boys. You know it,
+Meta. Angela evidently knows it, and--at least since yesterday--I know
+that I know it. His not being able to read or write--I always knew in my
+heart that my old worn-out tag--'We can't all be literary
+geniuses'--didn't meet the case. His way of disappearing and never
+explaining.... Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys,
+doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with
+hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever
+had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy. Well, then, as
+you know, he couldn't get a commission, couldn't even get his stripe,
+poor darling. He deserted twice--pure absence of mind--it was always the
+same from a child--'I wanted to see further,' he'd say, and of course
+worse in the trenches. Why, you know it all, Angela dear--at least,
+perhaps not quite all. I should like to tell you--because you said that
+about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud....
+
+"Pinehurst--my husband, he is a doctor, you know--had that same passion
+for seeing further. He was often ill in London. I said it was asthma,
+but he said it was not being able to see far enough. We were in America
+for Rrchud's birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West. I took the
+precaution of having a good nurse with me. Pinehurst said the East was
+full of little obstacles, and people's eyes had sucked all the secrets
+out of the horizon, he said. I like Cape Cod, but he said there was
+always a wall of sea round those flat wet places. We stayed in a
+blacksmith's spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon
+seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we
+saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have
+been the Rockies. Pinehurst couldn't stand that, we pushed west--so
+tahsome. We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light
+buggy that a goldminer lent us. Oh, of course, you'll think us mad,
+Meta, but, do you know, we actually found the world's edge, a place with
+no horizon; we looked between ragged pine trees, and saw over the
+shoulders of great old violet mountains--we saw right down into the
+stars for ever.... There was a tower of rocks--rose-red rocks in sloping
+layers--sunny hot by day, my dears, and a great shelter by night. You
+know, the little dark clouds walk alone upon the mountain tops at
+sunset--as you said, Angela--they are like trees, and sometimes like
+faces, and sometimes like the shadows of little bent gipsies.... I used
+to look at the mountains and think: 'What am I about, to be so worried
+and so small, in sight of such an enormous storm of mountains under a
+gold sky?' I think of those rocks often at night, standing just as we
+left them, all by themselves, under that unnatural moon,--it was an
+unnatural moon on the edge of the world there,--all by themselves, with
+no watching eyes to spoil them, as Pinehurst used to say, not even one's
+own eyes.... You'll say that adventure--my one adventure--was
+impossible, Meta. Yes, it was. Rrchud was an impossible boy, born on an
+impossible day, in an impossible place. Ah, my poor Rrchud.... My dears,
+I am talking dretful nonsense. We were mad. You'd have to know
+Pinehurst, really, to understand it. Ah, we can never find our mountain
+again. I can never forgive Pinehurst...."
+
+"You can never repay Pinehurst," said the witch.
+
+Lady Arabel did not seem to hear. For a long time there was nothing to
+be heard but Sarah Brown, murmuring to her Dog David. You must excuse
+her, and remember that she lived most utterly alone. She was locked
+inside herself, and the solitary barred window in her prison wall
+commanded only a view of the Dog David.
+
+Rrchud's mother said at last: "I really came to tell you that Rrchud
+came back on leave unexpectedly last night. Of course you must meet
+him--"
+
+"Rrchud home!" exclaimed Miss Ford. "How odd! I was just telling Miss
+Watkins about his Power, and how strongly she reminded me of him. Do
+tell him to keep Wednesday afternoon free."
+
+Lady Arabel, ignoring Miss Ford by mistake, said to the witch: "Will you
+come on Tuesday to tea or supper?"
+
+"Supper, please," said the witch instantly. Tact, I repeat, was a
+stranger to her, so she added: "I will bring Sarah Brown too. I bet you
+twopence she hasn't had a decent meal for days."
+
+And then the Mayor arrived. The witch saw at once that there was some
+secret understanding between him and her that she did not understand.
+Her magic escapades often left her in this position. However, she winked
+back hopefully. But she was not a skilled winker. Everybody--even the
+Dog David--saw her doing it, and Miss Ford looked a little offended.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE EVERLASTING BOY
+
+
+Mitten Island is a place of fine weather, its air is always like
+stained glass between you and perfection. Always you will find in the
+happy ways of Mitten Island a confidence that the worst is left behind,
+and that even the worst was not so very bad. You can afford to remember
+the winter, for even the winter was beautiful; you can smile in the sun
+and think of the grey flush that used to overspread the island under its
+urgent crises of snow, and it seems that always there was joy running
+quickly behind the storms, joy looking with the sun through a tall
+window in a cloud. Even the most dreadful curtain of a winter's day was
+always drawn up at sunset; its straight edge rose slowly, disclosing
+flaming space, and the dramatic figures of the two island churches,
+exulting and undying martyrs in the midst of flames.
+
+It is a place of fine weather, and this is a book of fine weather, a
+book written in Spring. I will not remember the winter and the rain. It
+was the Spring that brought Sarah Brown to Mitten Island, and the Spring
+that first showed her magic. It was the Spring that awoke her on her
+first morning in the House of Living Alone.
+
+She awoke because it was so beautiful outside, and because there was a
+beautiful day coming. You could see the day secretly making preparations
+behind a shining mist. She heard a sound of breathless singing, and the
+whipping of stirred grass in the garden, the sound of some one
+unbearably happy, dancing. Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad
+before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like
+getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.
+
+Sarah Brown went to her window. The newborn trembling slants of smoke
+went up from the houses of the island. There was a sky of that quiet
+design which suffices half a day unchanged. A garden of quite a good
+many yards lay behind the house; it contained no potatoes or anything
+useful, only long, very green grass, and a may tree, and a witch
+dancing. The extraordinary music to which she was dancing was partly the
+braying of a neighbouring donkey, and partly her own erratic singing.
+She danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather
+like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana;
+and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud
+tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A
+little wandering of the voice, a little wandering of the feet.... The
+may tree in the middle of the garden seemed to be her partner. A small
+blot moved up and down the chequered trunk of the tree, and that was the
+shadow of a grey squirrel, watching the dancing. The squirrel wore the
+same fur as the two-and-a-half-guinea young lady wears, and sometimes it
+looked with a tilted head at the witch, and sometimes it buried its face
+in its hands and sat for a while shaken with secret laughter. There was
+certainly something more funny than beautiful about the witch's dancing.
+She laughed herself most of the time. She was wearing a mackintosh,
+which was in itself rather funny, but her feet were bare.
+
+A voice broke in: "Good for you, cully."
+
+It was Sarah Brown's fellow-lodger leaning from her window.
+
+The squirrel rippled higher up the may tree.
+
+The pleasure of the thing broke like an eggshell. Sarah Brown turned
+back towards her bed. It was too early to get up. It was too late to go
+to sleep again. Eunice, her hot-water bottle, she knew, lay cold as a
+serpent to shock her feet if she returned. Besides, the Dog David was
+asleep on the middle of the counterpane, and she was too good a mother
+to wake him. There are a good many things to do when you find yourself
+awake too early. It is said that some people sit up and darn their
+stockings, but I refer now to ordinary people, not to angels. Utterly
+resourceless people find themselves reduced to reading the penny stamps
+on yesterday's letters. There is a good deal of food for thought on a
+penny stamp, but nothing really uplifting. Some people I know employ
+this morning leisure in scrubbing their consciences clean, thus
+thriftily making room for the sins of the coming day. But Sarah Brown's
+conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like
+smuts lay always deep upon it. There were a few regrettable seconds in
+every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the
+compensations attached to a really considerable sin. Anyway her
+conscience would have been a case for pumice-stone, and when she was
+happy she always tried to forget it. Yet she was not without a good many
+very small and unessential resources for sleepless moments. Often she
+wrote vague comments on matters with which she was not familiar, in an
+exercise-book, always eventually mislaid. She would awake from dear and
+unspeakable dreams full of hope, and tell herself stories about herself,
+trying on various lives and deaths like clothes. The result was never
+likely enough even to laugh at.
+
+To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a
+loss.
+
+There was a knock upon her door, and a voice: "Hi, cocky, could you
+oblige me with a loan of a few 'alfpence for the milkman. I 'aven't a
+bean in me purse."
+
+"Nor have I," said Sarah Brown, opening the door. "But I can pawn--"
+
+"Ow, come awf it, Cuffbut," said the fellow-lodger. "This is a
+respectable 'ouse, more or less, and you ain't goin' out to pawn nothink
+in your py-jams. I'll owe it to the milkman again. Not but what I 'adn't
+p'raps better pay 'im after all. I got me money paid yesterday, on'y I
+'ad thought to put it away for Elbert."
+
+"Are you Peony, the other lodger?"
+
+"Thet's right, dearie."
+
+Peony was not in her first youth, in fact she was comfortably into her
+second. Her voice was so beautiful that it almost made one shy, but her
+choice of language, tending as it did in the other direction, reassured
+one. She had fine eyes of an absolute grey, and dark hair parted in the
+middle and drawn down so as to make a triangle of a face which, left to
+itself, would have been square. Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among
+them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of
+a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere. On the whole, she
+looked like the duckling of the story, serenely conscious of a secret
+swanhood. She showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as
+though she had a taxi waiting at the door.
+
+"Who's Elbert?" asked Sarah Brown, and then wished she had not asked,
+for even without Peony's flush she should have guessed.
+
+"'Arf a mo, kiddie, till I get rid of the milkman. Come an' sit on the
+stairs, an' I'll tell you a tale. I like no end tellin' this tale."
+
+Harold the Broomstick was desultorily sweeping the stairs. He worked
+harder when first conscious of being watched, but seeing that they
+intended to stay there, on the top step, he made this the excuse to
+disappear indolently, leaving little heaps of dust on several of the
+lower steps.
+
+"I come across Elbert first when I was about eight an' twenty," said
+Peony, when Sarah Brown, in rather a loud dressing-gown, had taken her
+seat on the stairs beside her. "Elbert was the ideel kid, an'
+me--nothing to speak of. Nothin' more than a lump o' mud, I use to say.
+All my life, if you'll believe me, cully, I've lived in mud--an' kep' me
+eye on the moon, so to say. I worked in a factory all day, makin' mud,
+as it were, for muddy Jews, an' every Saturday night I took 'ome twelve
+shillin's-worth o' mud to keep meself alive in a city o' mud until the
+Saturday after. But o' nights there was the moon, or else the stars, or
+else the sunset, an' anyway all the air between to look at. I 'ad a back
+room, 'igh up, and o' nights I use to sit an' breave there, an' look at
+the sky. Believe me, dearie, I was mad about breavin'--it was me only
+recreation, so to say. By Gawd, it's a fair wonder 'ow the sky an' the
+air keeps on above the mud, and 'ow we looks at it, an' breaves it, an'
+never pays no rent for it, when all's said an' done. There ain't never a
+penny put in the slot for the moonlight, when you come to think of it,
+yet still it all goes on. Well, in those days, I never spoke to a soul,
+an' 'ated everybody, an' I got very queer, queerer nor many as is
+locked up in Claybury this minute. I got to thinkin' as 'ow there was a
+debt 'anging over us all, some'ow the sky seemed like a sort of upper
+floor to all our 'ouses, with the stars an' the moon for windows, an' it
+seemed like as if there did oughter be some rent to pay, though the
+Landlord was a reel gent and never pressed for it. There might be people
+'oo lived among flowers in the sunlight, an', so to say, rented the
+parlour floor, but not me. I 'ad the upper floor, an' breaved the light
+o' the moon. As for flowers--bless you, I'd never 'ardly seen a flower
+stuck proper to the ground until a year ago. Well, dearie, I use to make
+believe as 'ow we'd all get a charnce, all to ourselves, to pay what we
+owed. Some people, I thought, runs away from the debt, an' some pays it
+in bad money, but, I ses to meself, if ever my charnce come, I'll pay it
+the very best I can. Lawd, 'ow I 'ated everybody in those days. It
+seemed like people was all rotten, an' as if all the churches an' all
+the cherities was the rottenest of all the lot. Well, then, dearie,
+Elbert blew in. You know what kids is mostly like in the Brown Borough,
+but Elbert--'e never was. Straight legs 'e 'ad, an' never a chilblain
+nor a sore, an' a small up-lookin' face, an' yallery 'air--what you
+could see of it, for of course I always made 'im keep it nicely cropped
+to the pink. You never see sich a clean boy, you never see 'im but what
+'e seemed to 'ave sponged 'is collar that minute, an' the little seat to
+'is breeks always patched in the right colour, an' all. Yet 'e wasn't
+one of them choir-boy kinds, 'e could 'ave 'is little game with the best
+of 'em, an' often kicked up no end of a row when we was playin'
+pretendin' games of a wet Sunday. 'E 'ad one little game 'e loved best
+of all--not marbles, it wasn't, nor peg-tops--but there, I won't tell
+you what it was, for you'd laugh like the gal at the shop did when I
+spoke of it. I don't often get talkin', but I'd 'ad a nip of brandy at
+the time. Laugh fit to bust, she did--'avin' 'ad a nip of the same
+'erself--an' as't if Elbert wasn't blind as well, an' if 'e wore any
+clothes besides wings.... The funny thing was thet Elbert did 'ave bad
+sight, it always seemed odd to me thet with 'is weak eyes 'e should
+choose to play the little game 'e did. I use to take 'im to the 'Eath of
+a summer Sunday, an' 'e use to stand on them little ridges below the
+Spaniards Road, with 'is eyes shut against the sun, never botherin' to
+take no aim. I can see 'im now, a-pulling of the string of 'is bow--it
+'ad an 'igh note, like the beginnin' of a bit o' music--an' then awf
+'e'd go like a rebbit, to see where the arrer fell. It was always a
+marvel to me 'e didn't put somebody's eye out, but I didn't mind--I
+'ated everybody. 'E didn't live with me, 'e just came in an' out. 'E
+never tol' me 'is name was Elbert--I just called 'im thet, the prettiest
+name I knew. 'E never tol' me 'oo 'is people were; I shouldn't think
+they could 'ave bin Brown Borough people, for Elbert seemed to 'ave bin
+about a lot, seen mountains an' oceans an' sichlike, an' come acrost a
+lot of furriners--even Germans. 'E talked a lot about people--as good as
+a novelette 'is stories was, but bloody 'igh-flavoured. Children knows a
+lot in the Brown Borough. 'Ow 'e'd noticed the things 'e 'ad with them
+blindish eyes of 'is, I don't know. I got to count on that boy no end.
+Fair drunk with satisfaction, I use to feel. Call me a fool if you like,
+cully, but it was three or four year before I got the idee that there
+was anythink funny about Elbert. It was when it begun to look as if the
+War 'ad come to stop, an' one couldn't look at any boy without countin'
+up to see 'ow long 'e 'ad before the Army copped 'im. An' then I
+calc'lated that Elbert should be rising fourteen now, an' I saw then
+thet 'e 'adn't grown an inch since I first see 'im, nor 'e hadn't
+changed 'is ways, but still 'e run about laughin', playin' 'is little
+kiddy-game, with 'is face to the sun. An' then I remembered 'ow often
+'e'd tol' me things thet seemed too 'istorical for sich as 'im to come
+by honest, tales about blokes in 'istory--nanecdotes 'e'd use to pass
+acrost about Admiral Nelson, or Queen Bess--she use to make 'im chuckle,
+she did--an' a chap called Shilly or Shally, 'oo was drownded. An' I got
+struck all of an 'eap, to think 'e was some sort of an everlasting boy,
+an' p'raps 'e was a devil, I thought, an' p'raps I'd sold me soul
+without knowin' it. I never took much stock of me soul, but I always
+'ad that debt o' mine in me mind, an' I wanted to pay it clean. For them
+London mists agin the sky in the Spring, an' for the moonlight, an' for
+the sky just before a thunderstorm--all them things seemed to 'ave come
+out of the same box, like, an' I didn't like feelin' as 'ow they was all
+jest charity.... 'Owever, I got this idee about Elbert, an' I didn't
+sleep a wink thet night, an' couldn't enjoy me starlight. In the mornin'
+'e come as usual, with 'is pretty blind smile, an' I ses to 'im:
+'Elbert,' I ses, 'You ain't a crool boy, are you? You wouldn't do
+anythink to 'urt me?' Lookin' at 'im, I couldn't believe it. ''Urt you?'
+'e ses quite 'appily; 'an' why wouldn't I 'urt you? I'd as lief send you
+to the Devil as not,' 'e ses. Well, cocky, I don't mind tellin' you I
+lost me 'ead at that. I run awiy--run awiy from my Elbert--Oh, Gosh! I
+bin an' give up me bits o' sticks to a neighbour, an' got a place, an'
+went into service. I sneaked out one night, when Elbert 'ad gone 'ome. I
+got a place up Kilburn way, an ol' couple, retired from the pawnbrokin'
+line. The ol' man 'ad softening in 'is brain, an' said one thing all the
+blessed time, murmurin' like a bee. The ol' woman never spoke, never did
+no work, lef' it all to me. She was always a-readin' of 'er postcard
+album, shiftin' the cards about--she 'ad thousands, besides one 'ole
+book full of seaside comics. A beautiful collection. Well, I was dishin'
+up the tea one night in the kitchen, an' I 'eard a laugh--Elbert's
+laugh, like three little bells--an' there was Elbert lookin' in at the
+window. I run after 'im--there wasn't nobody there. When I come back the
+tripe was burnt an' I lef' it on the fire an' run away, thet minute.
+They owed me wages, but I didn't stop for nothink. I was frightened. I
+got a place afterwards up Islington, three ol' sisters, kep' a fancy
+shop, fought with each other every minute of their lives. I 'adn't bin
+there two days before Elbert walked in, jest as laughin' an' lovin' as
+ever. I see then it was no use, good or bad 'e'd got me. I let 'im sit
+in my kitchen, an' give 'im some sugar-bread. An' one of the ol'
+cat-sisters come in. ''Oo's this?' she ses. 'A young friend o' mine,' I
+ses. 'You're a liar,' she ses, 'I seed from the first minute as you
+wasn't no respectable gal,' she ses, 'an' now per'aps me sisters'll
+believe me. So out I 'ad to go, an' I wasn't sorry. It seemed like there
+wasn't nothink in the world mattered but Elbert, like as if damnation
+was worth while. 'Ow, Elbert,' I ses, 'I'd go to the Devil for you, an'
+smile all the way.' 'E laughed an' laughed. 'Come on,' 'e ses, 'to-day's
+an 'oliday.' Though it wasn't, it was a Tuesday in August. 'Come on,' 'e
+ses, 'get yer best 'at on,' an' 'e gives me a yaller rose, for me
+button-'ole. A year ago come August, thet was. I follered Elbert at a
+run all up the City Road, an' near the Angel we took a taxi. 'Tell 'im
+Euston Station,' ses Elbert, an' so I did. You know the 'uge top o' thet
+station from the 'ill by the Angel--well, kid, I tell you I saw a reel
+mountain for the first time, when I saw thet. It was the 'eat mist, an'
+a sort o' pink light made a reel 'ighland landscape out of it. I paid
+the taxi-man over 'alf of all the money I 'ad, an' we went to the
+ticket-awfice. 'Elbert,' I ses, 'where shell we book to,' I ses, like
+that, though I 'adn't 'ardly a bloody oat in me purse. 'Take a platform
+ticket,' 'e ses, an' so I did. But 'e run on to the platform without no
+ticket, an' begun dancin' up an' down among the people like a mad thing,
+but nobody seemed to mind 'im. I set down on a seat to watch 'im. I
+thought: 'Blimey,' I thought, 'if I ain't under thet blinkin' mountain
+now, an' all these people,' I ses, 'is the Little People they tell of,
+that lives inside 'ills, an' on'y comes out under the moon.' I
+remembered thet moonlight debt o' mine, an' I thought--'I'm done with
+the mud now, I'm comin' alive now,' I ses, 'and this'll be my charnce.'
+Presently Elbert come back to me, an' 'e was draggin' a soldier by the
+'and. 'This is a magic man,' ses Elbert, 'come back from livin' under
+the sky. Can't you feel the magic?' 'e ses.
+
+"Well, dearie, take it 'ow you will, thet's 'ow I met my Sherrie. A
+magic man 'e was, for 'e 'ad my ticket taken, an' never seemed
+surprised. Ten days leave 'e 'ad, an' we spent it at an inn in a village
+on a moor, jest a mile out o' sound of the sea. The moor an' the sea,
+touchin' each other. ... Oh Gawd!... The sea was like my sky at night
+come nearer--come near enough to know better, like. In between the moor
+an' the sea there was the beach--it looked like a blessed boundary road
+between two countries, an' it led away to where you couldn't see nothing
+more except a little white town, sort of built 'igh upon a mist, more
+like a star.... Oh Gawd!...
+
+"Anyway, Cuffbut, thet was me charnce, an' thet's 'ow I come to know 'ow
+my debt was goin' to be paid. Sherrie understood all thet. 'E was a
+magic man, 'e was. At least, 'e was mostly magic, but some of 'im was
+nothin' but a fool when all's said an' done--like any other man. I
+couldn't 'ave done with an all-magic bloke. Ow, 'e was a fool.... All
+the things 'e might 'ave bin able to do, like polishin' 'is equipment,
+or findin' 'is clean socks, 'e use to forever be askin' me to do. I
+loved doin' it. But all the things 'e couldn't do at all, like drawin'
+me likeness, or cuttin' out a blouse for me, 'e was forever tryin' to
+do."
+
+She spoke of Sherrie as a naturalist would speak of a new animal,
+gradually finding out the pretty and amusing ways of the creature.
+
+"I called 'im Sherrie because thet's what 'e called me. A French word it
+was, 'e ses, meaning 'dearie,' as it were. 'E was a reel gent, was
+Sherrie. I as't 'im once why 'e took up with a woman like me, instead of
+with a reel young lady. 'E ses as 'ow 'e'd never met before anybody 'oo
+seed themselves from outside an' yet was fairly honest. I know what 'e
+meant, for I was always more two people than one, an' I watch meself
+sometimes as if I was a play. I wouldn't be tellin' you this story,
+else. Well, dearie, Elbert was always in an' out, an' always a-hollerin'
+an' a-laughin' an' a-playin' 'is game. 'E stayed with us all them ten
+days, an' 'e come with me to Victoria, to see Sherrie off to France.
+It's Sherrie's allotted money what I fetch every week. But I won't touch
+it, I puts it away for Elbert. I don't want to owe nothin' to nobody,
+for I'm payin' sich a big debt. Elbert, when 'e comes back to me, 'e's
+going to be my payment to the world, an' it's got to be good money. For
+Elbert left me after Sherrie went. 'E said as 'ow 'e was going 'ome, an'
+as 'ow 'e would come back to me in the Spring, an' stay with me always.
+It wasn't like partin', e' ses, 'im an' me could never do thet. I know
+what 'e meant, now...."
+
+"And what about Sherrie?" asked Sarah Brown.
+
+"Oh, Sherrie, 'e never writes to me. But 'e promised too to come back in
+the Spring, an' so 'e will, for there ain't no Boche bullet that can 'it
+a magic man."
+
+"It's springtime now," said Sarah Brown.
+
+"It's springtime now," repeated Peony. "Ow, it's wonderful, seems like
+as if I was gettin' too much given me, so as I can never repay. But I'm
+keepin' count, I'm not forgettin'. It ain't long now before I'll pay my
+debt. Come the middle o' May...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE FORBIDDEN SANDWICH
+
+
+While Sarah Brown's unenviable leisure was spent in acting as slave to
+committees, she had at the same time a half-time profession which, when
+she was well enough to follow it, brought twenty shillings a week to her
+pocket. She was in the habit of sitting every morning in a small office,
+collecting evidence from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and,
+after wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very
+beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have the
+benefit of all his forerunners' experience. Sarah Brown never thought
+about the theory of this work, because the different coloured inks and
+the beautiful writing pleased her so.
+
+There are people to whom a ream of virgin paper is an inspiration, who
+find the first sharpening of a pencil the most lovable of all labours,
+who see something almost holy in the dedication of green and red
+penholders to their appropriate inks, in whose ears and before whose
+eyes the alphabet is like a poem or a prayer. Touch on stationery and
+you touched an insane spot in Sarah Brown's mind. Her dream of a perfect
+old age was staged in a stationer's shop in a quiet brown street; there
+she would spend twilit days in stroking thick blotting-paper, in drawing
+dogs--all looking one way--with new pen-nibs, in giving advice in a
+hushed voice to connoisseur customers, who should come to buy a diary or
+a book-plate or a fountain-pen with the same reverence as they now show
+who come to buy old wine.
+
+Therefore Sarah Brown's hand had found ideal employment on a charity
+register. As for her mind, it usually shut its eye during office hours.
+Her Dog David liked the work too, as the hearth-rug was a comfortable
+one, and Charity, though it may suffer long in other directions, is
+rather particular about its firing.
+
+On the Monday after her change of home, Sarah Brown found that the
+glory had gone out of the varied inks, and even a new consignment of
+index-cards, exquisitely unspotted from the world, failed to arouse her
+enthusiasm. This was partly because the first name in the index that she
+looked up was that of Watkins, Thelma Bennett, single, machinist. The
+ciphers informed the initiated that Watkins had called on the War
+Association, to ask for Help and Advice, See Full Report. Sarah Brown
+felt sad and clumsy, and made two blots, one in green on the Watkins
+card, and the other in ordinary Stephens-colour on the card of one Tonk,
+chocolate-box-maker, single, to whom a certain charity was obstinately
+giving a half-pint of milk daily, regardless of the fact that last month
+she had received a shilling's-worth of groceries from the Parish.
+
+The air of that office rang with the name of Tonk that morning. Hardly
+had the industrious Sarah Brown finished turning the blot upon her card
+into the silhouette of a dromedary by a few ingenious strokes of the
+pen, when the lady representing the obstinate charity came in, her lips
+shaped to the word Tonk.
+
+"Tonk," she said. "Late of Mud Street. She has changed her address. I am
+the Guild of Happy Hearts. She still comes to fetch her half-pint of
+milk daily, and only yesterday I learnt from a neighbour that she had
+left Mud Street three weeks ago. It really is disgraceful the way these
+poor people conceal important facts from us. Have you her new address?"
+
+"Our last address for Tonk was 12 Mud Street," answered Sarah Brown
+coldly. "But we have already notified you three times that the woman is
+not entitled to milk from the Happy Hearts, as she has been having
+parish relief, as well as an allotment."
+
+"Tonk is--hm--hm," said the Happy Heart delicately in an undertone, so
+that the blushing masculine ear of the Dog David might be spared. "After
+Baby Week, you know, we feel bound to help all hm--hm women as far as we
+can, regardless of other considerations--"
+
+"Really you oughtn't to. Tonk is posing as a single
+chocolate-box-maker." Sarah Brown was rapidly becoming exasperated with
+everybody concerned, but not least with the evidently camouflaging Tonk.
+
+"She has a soldier at the Front," said the Happy Heart. "I am sorry to
+say that she will not promise to marry him, even if he does come home.
+But even so--"
+
+Sarah Brown wrote down on Miss Tonk's card the small purple cipher that
+stood for hm--hm. "I will make enquiries about her address," she said.
+
+But that was not the last of Tonk. Presently the red face of the
+Relieving Officer loomed over the index.
+
+"In the case of Plummett--" he began loudly.
+
+"In the case of Tonk--" interrupted Sarah Brown, to whom, in her present
+mood, Plummett could only have been a last straw. She hated the
+Relieving Officer unjustly, because he knew she was deaf and raised his
+voice, with the best intentions, to such a degree that the case papers
+on the index were occasionally blown away. "We have already notified you
+three times that Tonk is having a half-pint of milk daily from the
+Happy Hearts, as well as an allotment from a soldier."
+
+"We stopped the groceries," roared the Relieving Officer. "But in the
+case of Plummett--"
+
+"In the case of Tonk--" persisted Sarah Brown. "She has moved from Mud
+Street, can you tell me her last address?"
+
+"She is living in a sort of private charitable institution, somewhere on
+the outskirts of the district--Mitten Island, I fancy. I don't know the
+exact address, because we have stopped the groceries, she paying no rent
+now. In the case of Plummett, I thought you might be interested to know
+that she got a month this morning for assaulting the Sanitary
+Inspector--pulling his nose, I hear. She told the magistrate it struck
+her as being a useless nose if it didn't notice anything wrong with her
+drains. The children came into the House this morning."
+
+"What is Tonk's Christian name?" asked Sarah Brown, who had been a
+changed woman since Mitten Island was mentioned.
+
+"I forget. Some flower name, I think. Probably Lily or Ivy. In the case
+of M'Clubbin, the woman is said to have fallen through a hole in the
+floor of the room she and her three children slept in. She was admitted
+into the Infirmary last night, and her furniture will be sold to pay her
+rent--"
+
+"It begins with P," said Sarah Brown. "P. Tonk, unmarried wife, of
+Mitten Island...."
+
+The Relieving Officer went away, for it was dinner-time. Sarah Brown
+absently unwrapped the little dinner which she had brought hanging by a
+thin string from a strangled finger. Mustard sandwiches with just a
+flavouring of ham, and a painfully orthodox 1918-model bun, made of
+stubble. Sarah Brown almost always forgot the necessity of food until
+she was irrevocably in the 'bus on her way to work. But this morning, as
+she had taken her seat with David in the bouncing ferry-boat, there had
+been a panting rustling noise behind her, and Harold the Broomstick had
+swept a little packet of sandwiches into her lap. He had disappeared
+before she had been able to do more than turn over in her mind the
+question whether or no broomsticks ever expect to be tipped.
+
+Now I could not say with certainty whether the witch, in making up this
+packet of sandwiches, had included the contents of one of her own little
+packets of magic. Sarah Brown would have been very susceptible to such a
+drug; her mind was always on the brink of innocent intoxication. Perhaps
+she was only half a woman, so that half a joy could make her heart reel
+and sing, and half a sorrow break it. She was defenceless against
+impressions, and too many impressions make the heart very tired.
+Therefore, I think, she was a predestined victim of magic, and it seems
+unlikely that the witch should have missed such an opportunity to
+dispense spells.
+
+After the first bite at the first sandwich, Sarah Brown was conscious of
+a Joke somewhere. This feeling in itself was akin to delirium, for there
+are no two facts so remote as a Joke and a Charity Society. The office
+table confronted Sarah Brown, and she wondered that she could ever have
+seen it as anything but a butt. She wondered how she had been able to
+sit daily in front of that stout and earnest index without poking it in
+the ribs and making a fool of it. The office clock, alone among clocks,
+had never played a practical joke. The sad fire below it, conscious of a
+Mission, was overloaded with coal and responsibility.
+
+The second bite, ten minutes later, caused Sarah Brown to be tired and
+distrustful of a room that had no smile. Her eyes turned to seek the
+hidden Joke beyond the limits of that lamentable room. There was a
+spring-coloured tree in the school-ground opposite, and above the tree a
+rough blue and silver sky contradicted all the doctrines preached in
+offices. There was in the wind something of the old raw simplicity and
+mirth that always haunts the sea, and penetrates inland only on rare
+spring days. The high white clouds crossed the sky like galleons, like
+old stories out of the innocent Eden-like past of the sea, before she
+learnt the ways of steam and secret killing. Old names of ships came to
+Sarah Brown's mind ... Castle-of-Comfort ... Cloud-i'-the-Sun....
+
+"I am doing wrong," said Sarah Brown. She took a third bite.
+
+And then she felt the spirit of the Naughty Poor in the room; there was
+laughter, as of the registered, in the ears of the Registrar. It is not
+really permissible for the Naughty Poor to invade offices which exist to
+do them good. The way of charity lies through suspicion, but the
+suspicion of course must be all on one side. We have to judge the
+criminal unheard; if we called him as a witness in his case we might
+become sentimental. The Charity Society may be imagined as keeping two
+lists of crimes, a short one for Registrars and Workers, and a very long
+one for the registered. High on the list of crimes possible to
+Registrars and Workers is Sentimentality. It is sentimental to feel
+personal affection for a Case, or to give a child of the Naughty Poor a
+penny without full enquiry, or to say "A-goo" to a grey pensive baby
+eating dirt on the pavement, or to acknowledge the right of a Case to
+ask questions sometimes instead of answering them, or to disapprove of
+spying and tale-bearing, or to believe any statement made by any one
+without an assured income, or to quote any part of the New Testament, or
+in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of charity and love. Christ,
+who, by the way, unfortunately omitted to join any reputable
+philanthropic society, commanded seekers of salvation to be poor and to
+despise themselves. But this was sentimental, and the Charity Society
+decrees that only the prosperous and the self-respectful shall deserve a
+hearing.
+
+"I am sentimental," said Sarah Brown to her Dog David in a broken voice.
+She turned again to her enchanted sandwich.
+
+There was increased laughter in the air, and through it she heard the
+hoarse and happy shouting of the sparrows in the spring-coloured tree
+opposite. Sparrows are the ideal Naughty Poor, the begging friars, the
+gypsies of the air, they claim alms as a right and as a seal of
+friendship; with their mouths full of your crumbs they share with you
+their innocent and vulgar wit, they give you in return no I.O.U., and no
+particulars for your case-paper. When they have got from you all that
+you will give, they wink and giggle and shake the dust of your
+window-sill from off their feet.
+
+Sarah Brown opened the office window, and the air of the office began at
+once to dance with life and the noise of children and birds. She thought
+perhaps these were magic noises, for she heard them so clearly. She
+broke her second sandwich upon the window-sill, and the sparrows crossed
+the street and stood on the area railing in a row below her, all
+speaking at once in an effort to convey to her the fact that a retreat
+on her part would be tactful.
+
+The sparrow obviously buys all his clothes ready-made, probably at
+Jumble Sales, and he always seems to choose clothes made for a stouter
+bird. There is no reason why he should never look chic; he has a slimmer
+figure than the bullfinch, for instance, who always manages to look so
+well-tailored. It is just arrogance, pure Londonism, on the part of the
+sparrow, just that impudent socialistic spirit that makes it so
+difficult for us to reform the Naughty Poor.
+
+Sarah Brown retreated one step. "I'm not going farther away. Either you
+eat that sandwich with me looking on, or you leave it."
+
+The sparrows whispered together for a moment, saying to each other, "You
+go first." They obviously knew that it was a charity window-sill, and
+were afraid Sarah Brown might intend to rebuke them for not shutting
+their beaks while chewing, or for neglecting to put any crumbs into the
+Savings Bank. But after a minute one sparrow moistened his beak and
+came.... He ate, they all ate, and did not seek to escape as the door of
+the office opened and the witch came in. She went straight to the window
+and picked up from among the stooping sparrows a piece of the broken
+sandwich, and ate it. The Dog David was making sure that there was no
+surviving crumb on the floor to tell the tale of his mother's
+sentimental weakness. Almost instantly, therefore, that sandwich was but
+a memory, a fading taste in about twenty beaks and two mouths. But still
+the window stood open, and the air danced, and the white reflections of
+the ship-like clouds lay on the oilcloth floor.
+
+Sarah Brown in the meanwhile, disregarding the witch, had returned to
+the index, and had taken from its drawer a notification form. In the
+space given for Name of Case she had written in her irreproachable
+printing hand:
+
+"CHARITY, Cautionary Case, 12 Pan Street, Brown Borough. With reference
+to the above case, I have to report that it seems unsatisfactory. There
+are indeed grave suspicions that the above name is only an alias, the
+address being also probably false, for the genuine Charity's place of
+origin is said to be the home rather than the office. The present
+registrar is at a loss to identify with certainty this case. It would
+seem to be one of the Habits that haunt the world, collecting Kudos
+under assumed names...."
+
+"It puzzles me," said the witch, looking out of the window, "why one
+never sees two birds collide. If there were as many witches in the air
+as there are birds, I bet you twopence there would be constant
+accidents. Do you think they have any sort of a rule of the road, or do
+they indicate with their beaks--"
+
+"Witch," said Sarah Brown, "I have got to say something."
+
+"Oh, have you?" said the witch, a little disappointed at being
+interrupted. "Oh, well, I can sympathise, I know what that feels like.
+Get on and say it."
+
+The Dog David, who was really a good and attentive son to Sarah Brown,
+came and laid his chin, with an exaggerated look of interest, on her
+knee-cap.
+
+"Is it any use," said Sarah Brown, "fighting against the Habits in the
+world, there are so many. Who set these strange and senseless deceivers
+at large? Religion which has forgotten ecstasy.... Law which has
+forgotten justice.... Charity which has forgotten love.... Surely magic
+has suffered at the stake for saner ideals than these?"
+
+"Why, of course," said the witch impatiently. "Magic generally suffered
+_because_ it was so sane. I thought everybody knew that."
+
+"All habits. All habits," chanted Sarah Brown. "What is this Charity,
+this clinking of money between strangers, and when did Charity cease to
+be a comforting and secret thing between one friend and another? Does
+Love make her voice heard through a committee, does Love employ an
+almoner to convey her message to her neighbour?"
+
+"Not that I know of," sighed the witch. "Sarah Brown, how long do you
+want me to keep quiet, while you say things that everybody surely
+knows?"
+
+But Sarah Brown went on. "The real Love knows her neighbour face to
+face, and laughs with him and weeps with him, and eats and drinks with
+him, so that at last, when his black day dawns, she may share with him,
+not what she can spare, but all that she has."
+
+The Dog David grunted a little, by way of rather dubious applause. Sarah
+Brown, with her own voice printed loud and stark upon the retina of her
+hearing, felt a little abashed. But presently she added in a whisper:
+"Listen. I am a spy. I am a lover of specially recommended neighbours
+only. I am here to help to give the black cloud Tyranny a rather dirty
+silver lining. I am the False Steward, in the interest of the
+Superfluously Comfortable. My Masters sit upon the King's Highway,
+taking toll in bitterness and humiliation from every traveller along
+that road. For surely comfort is every man's heritage, surely the happy
+years should come to every man--not doled out, not meanly dependent on
+his moral orthodoxy, but as his right. The fat philanthropist is a
+debtor, but he behaves like a creditor; he distributes obligations with
+his gold, yet he has no right to the gold he gives. He makes his brother
+beg upon his knees for the life and the health and the dear opportunity
+that should have been that brother's birthright."
+
+"You are possessed, dear Sarah Brown," said the witch. "Don't be
+frightened, it will soon pass off. I knew a girl who had an attack very
+much like this; while she was under its influence she made up a psalm
+pretty nearly as good as one of David's. Her mother was much alarmed
+about her. But she recovered quite quickly, except that she left her job
+as typist in a mind-improving institute and went to sea as a
+stewardess."
+
+Sarah Brown talked on, louder and louder. "Too long I have been a
+servant in the house of this stranger, this greedy Charity; too long
+have I sat--a silly proxy for the Too-Fortunate--in this narrow
+stiff-backed judgement-seat from ten till three daily. There is Love and
+April outside the window, there is too much wind and laughter outside to
+allow of the forming of Habits. I have seen Love and the Spring only
+through the glass of a charity office window, the rude voices of
+children and sparrows and other inheritors of opportunity have been
+dulled for me by grey panes. The white ships ... Castle-of-Comfort ...
+Cloud-i'-the-Sun have sailed into port from the open sky without a cargo
+for me...."
+
+"Good God!" said Sarah Brown, pushing David from her. "What has happened
+to me? I have become sentimental."
+
+The room seemed to her wild imagination to be full of the spirits of
+parsons and social workers with flaming swords, pointing at the door.
+
+"Well, that's the end of that job," said the witch. "I'll tell you what,
+let's go and sit on the Swing-leg Seat on the Heath. The air there and
+the look of Harrow church steeple'll do you good."
+
+"I am damned. I am a Cautionary Case," cried Sarah Brown, and she slunk
+behind the witch through the frowning gate of her Eden of fair inks and
+smooth white surfaces. She had shared with David the remains of her
+Sandwich of Knowledge; she had left on the table her puny paper
+defiance. David, except that he had required but little temptation, had
+played Adam's part very creditably in the affair. For him Eden had been
+a soft warm place, and he was anxious to blame somebody--the woman for
+choice--for the loss of his comfort. He followed her out into the cold,
+to become, as you shall hear, like Adam, a tiller of the soil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+AN AIR RAID SEEN FROM BELOW
+
+
+Magic is a disconcerting travelling companion. While seldom actually
+conspicuous, it seems to have a mysterious and varying effect on the
+surrounding public. I have met travellers by Tube who tell of strange
+doings in those regions, when the conductor of one compartment fell
+suddenly in love with the conductress of the next, and they ran to each
+other and met in the middle of the car. As nobody opened the gates or
+rang the bells, the bewildered train stood for hours at Mornington
+Crescent before any member of the watching public could find the heart
+to interrupt the pretty scene. It is patent that a magic person must
+have been the more or less deliberate cause of this episode. Then again,
+there is the story of the 'bus that went mad, just as it was leaving its
+burrow at Dalston. It got the idea that the kindly public was its
+enemy. You should have seen the astonishment of Liverpool Street and
+the Bank as it rushed by them. Old ladies about to ask it whether it
+went to Clapham--its label said it was bound for Barnes--stood aghast,
+and their questions died on their lips. Policemen put up their hands
+against it,--it ran over them. It even learned the trick of avoiding the
+nimble business man by a cunning little skid just as he thought he had
+caught it. You will hardly believe me, but that 'bus ran seven times
+round Trafalgar Square, until the lions' tails twisted for giddiness,
+and Nelson reeled where he stood. I don't know where it went to that
+day, certainly not to Barnes, but late in the evening it burst into
+another 'bus's burrow at Tooting, its sides heaving, its tyres worn to
+the quick, its windows streaming with perspiration, and a great bruise
+on its forehead where a chance bomb had struck it. I believe the poor
+thing had to be put out of its misery in the end. And what was the
+reason of all this? It was found that a wizard, called Innocent, of
+Stoke Newington, had been asleep on the top all the time, having
+forgotten to alight the night before, on his return from the City.
+
+Sarah Brown, on the night of Lady Arabel's supper party, was unaware of
+the risk she ran in entering a public conveyance in company with a
+witch. But she was spared to a merciful extent, for nothing happened on
+any of the 'buses they boarded, except that, as they crossed the Canal,
+a cloud of sea-gulls swooped and swirled into the 'bus, resting awhile
+on the passengers' willing shoulders before disappearing again. Also the
+passengers on the Baker Street stretch sang part-songs, all the way down
+to Selfridge's. The conductor turned out to have rather a pleasing tenor
+voice.
+
+The witch and Sarah Brown knocked at the Higgins' door five minutes
+before supper-time. Lady Arabel herself opened it.
+
+"My dears, isn't it too dretful. All our servants are gone. It's an
+extraordinary thing, they never can stand Rrchud and his ways."
+
+The tactful Sarah Brown nudged the witch. "Better not stay," she
+murmured.
+
+"Of course we'll stay," replied the witch loudly. "I'm horribly hungry,
+and there's sure to be some supper."
+
+"Certainly there is," added Lady Arabel. "I cooked it myself. Do you
+know, I've never seen a cookery book before, and the little pictures of
+animals with the names of joints written all over them shocked me
+dretfully. I feel I could have a too deliciously intimate conversation
+with a bullock now."
+
+The house of Higgins had an enormous hall to which a large number of
+high windows gave the impression of a squint. I should think two small
+Zeppelins could have danced a minuet under its dome. Sarah Brown and the
+witch put on their cathedral look at once, by mistake, and propping
+their chins upon their umbrellas gazed reverently upward.
+
+"Too dretful, a house of this size without servants," said Lady Arabel.
+"The fourth footman was the last to go. He said even the Army would be
+better than this. He liked spooks, he said, at second hand, but not
+otherwise. Too funny how people take dear Rrchud seriously. I'm glad to
+say the orchestra has stayed with us. Come into Rrchud's study, won't
+you, while I just go and help the first violin to dish up the soup."
+
+Sarah Brown and the witch were left in a small room that opened on to
+the great hall. It was furnished rather like a lodging-house parlour.
+There was a thermometer elaborately disguised as a model of the
+Eddystone Lighthouse on the mantelpiece, flanked on each side by a china
+boot in pink, with real bootlaces, and a pig looking out of the top of
+each. There were pictures on the walls, mostly representing young
+ladies, more or less obviously in love, supported by rustic properties.
+I have noticed that the girl's first love is the monopoly of the
+Victorian painter, whereas the boy's is that of the novelist, but I do
+not know the reason of this.
+
+There was a slight clap of thunder and Richard entered. He would have
+been very obviously a wizard even without the thunder, and seemed much
+less innocent about his magic than the witch. He had pale hair, a pale
+face, and eyes that did not open wide without a certain effort on the
+part of the brows.
+
+"You are despising my ornaments," he said to Sarah Brown. "I admire them
+awfully. I don't like really clever art. Do you know, it makes me
+sneeze."
+
+Directly he spoke, one saw that he was making the usual effort of magic
+to appear real. Witches and wizards lead difficult lives because they
+have no ancestry working within them to prompt them in the little
+details. Whenever you see a person being unusually grown-up, suspect
+them of magic. You can always notice witches and wizards, for instance,
+after eight o'clock at night, pretending that they are not proud of
+sitting up late. It is all nonsense about witches being night birds;
+they often fly about at night, indeed, but only because they are like
+permanent children gloriously escaped for ever from their Nanas.
+
+"This picture," added Richard, "seems to me very beautiful." The picture
+might have cost a shilling originally, framed, or it might have been
+attached to a calendar once. It was a landscape so thick in colouring
+and so lightless that it failed to give an outdoor impression at all.
+There was a river and waterfall like well-combed hair in the middle, and
+a dozen leaden mountains lying about
+with--apparently--pocket-handkerchiefs on their tops, and a
+dropsical-looking stag drinking. "I can't imagine," insisted Richard,
+"that there could be a more beautiful picture than that, but perhaps it
+appeals to me specially because father and mother and I so often talk
+about the place together--the place like that, near to the mountain
+where I was born. That was in the Rockies, you know, and just below our
+mountain I am sure there was a canyon like that--I dream of it--with
+milky-green water running under and over and round the most
+extraordinary shapes of ice, and cactuses like green hedgehogs in the
+crevices of the rocks, and great untidy pine-trees clinging to an ounce
+of earth on an inch of flat surface. And the rocks are a most splendid
+rose-red, and lie in steep layers, and break out into shapes that are so
+deliberate, they look as if they must mean something. Indeed they
+do...."
+
+A stave played by a 'cello called them to supper, and, as they returned
+to the hall, a burst of earnest music from the whole orchestra partially
+drowned the clap of thunder that again marked Richard's passage through
+the door. Sarah Brown felt sure that Lady Arabel arranged this on
+purpose. The wizard's mother obviously had great difficulty in not
+noticing the phenomena connected with her son, and she wore a striving
+smile and a look of glassy and well-bred unconsciousness whenever
+anything magic happened.
+
+At the end of the hall the orchestra, arranged neatly in a crescent, was
+busily employing its violins in a unanimous melody of so rude and
+destructive a nature that it seemed as if every string must be broken.
+This mania spread until even the outlying bassoons, triangles, and
+celestas were infected. A piercing note of command, however, from a
+clarinet caused a devastating dumbness to fall suddenly on every
+instrument except the piano, which continued self-consciously alone. The
+pianist looked at the ceiling mostly, but one note seemed to be an
+especial favourite with him, and whenever he played it he looked closely
+and paternally at it, almost indeed applying his nose to it. All at
+once, just as Sarah Brown was beginning to imagine that she could catch
+the tune and the time, the music ceased, apparently in the middle of a
+bar. Richard sneezed once or twice. That unsophisticated wizard was
+evidently enjoying himself in the practice of his art. One felt that
+magic was not encouraged in the Army, and that the supernatural orgy in
+which he was now indulging was the accumulated reaction after long
+self-control. Strange noises of unnatural laughter, for instance,
+proceeded from distant corners of the hall, and each of the electric
+lights in turn winked facetiously. The string of the double bass broke
+loudly, and the new string which its devotee laboriously inserted also
+broke at once. The performer looked appealingly at Lady Arabel, but she
+refrained from meeting his eye. A blizzard of butterflies enveloped the
+table. This was evidently rather a difficult trick, for the spell
+collapsed repeatedly, and from one second to another Sarah Brown was
+never quite sure whether there were really Purple Admirals drowning in
+her soup or not.
+
+"You are so lucky," sighed the witch, "plenty of room and every
+facility. I myself am so dreadfully cramped and hampered. I often have
+to boil my incantations over a spirit lamp, and even that is becoming
+difficult--no methylated."
+
+"Not really lucky," said Richard. "In France the smallest pinch of magic
+seems to make the N.C.O. sick, and that's why I never got my stripe. To
+keep my hand in, I once did a little stunt with the sergeant's
+cigarette: it grew suddenly longer as he struck a match to light it, and
+went on growing till he had to ask me to light it for him, and then it
+shrank up and burnt his nose. Of course he couldn't really bring the
+thing home to me, but somehow--well, as I say, I never got my stripe."
+
+To this discussion, and indeed to all the enchantments, Lady Arabel paid
+no attention, but continued to talk a little nervously on very insipid
+subjects. Her eyes had the pathetic look often seen in stupid people's
+eyes, the "Don't-listen-to-me" look, "I am not saying what I should like
+to say. The real Me is better than this."
+
+Finally Richard indulged in a trick that was evidently a stock joke
+among magic people, for the witch laughed directly it began. Just as the
+hostess, with poised fork and spoon, was about to distribute the
+whitebait, the round table began to spin, and the whitebait were whisked
+away from her. The table continued to spin for a moment, with a deep
+thrilling organ sound, and when it stopped, the whitebait were found to
+have assembled opposite to Richard's place. He distributed them gravely.
+Lady Arabel turned scarlet, and murmured to Sarah Brown: "So dretfully
+ingenious, and so merry."
+
+Sarah Brown took pity on her, and began talking at random. The orchestra
+was busy again, and to the tune of a loud elusive rag-time, she shouted:
+"Do you know, I gave my job the sack this morning. I shall be on the
+brink of starvation in three and a half days' time. That's counting a
+box of Oxo Cubes I have by me. You don't happen to know of a suitable
+job. I can't cook, and if I sew a button on it comes off quicker than if
+I hadn't. But I once learnt to play the big drum."
+
+"My dear," said Lady Arabel, instantly motherly. "How too dretful. I
+wish I knew of something suitable. But--war-time you know,--I'm afraid I
+shan't be justified in keeping on the orchestra, certainly not in adding
+to it. Besides, of course, although women are simply too splendid
+nowadays, don't you think the big drum--just a wee bit unwomanly, my
+dear. However----"
+
+"Are you clever?" asked Richard.
+
+"Yes, she is," said the witch proudly. "She writes Minor Poetry. I saw a
+bit by her in a magazine that had no pictures,--the bit of poetry was
+between an article on Tariff Reform and a statement of the Coal
+Situation, and it began 'Oh my beloved....' I thought it was a very
+beautiful bit of Minor Poetry, but somehow I couldn't make it fit in
+with the two articles. That worried me a little."
+
+"If you'd try your best not to be clever I'd give you a job," said
+Richard, who with a rather tiresome persistence was now levitating the
+chicken, so that, invisibly suspended at a height of eighteen inches
+above the middle of the table, it dripped gravy into a bowl of
+daffodils. "In fact I will give you a job. I have a farm called Higgins
+Farm, just about half-way between sea-level and sky-level. You can be a
+Hand, if you like, at sixpence an hour. You can get there from Mitten
+Island every day quite easily, and I'll tell you how. It's just the
+other side of the Parish of Faery, on your right as you reach the
+mainland from Mitten Island. You follow the Green Ride through the
+Enchanted Forest, until you come to the Castle where the Youngest
+Prince--who rescued one of the Fetherstonhaugh girls from a giant and
+married her--used to live. The Castle's to let now; she is an ambulance
+driver in Salonika, and he a gunner--just got his battery, I believe.
+Below the outer wall of the Castle you will see the Daisified Path, and
+that leads you straight to the gate of Higgins Farm, under a clipped box
+archway."
+
+"I haven't got a land outfit," said Sarah Brown. "But I saw a pair
+called Mesopotamian Officer's Model, with laces and real white buckskin
+collision mats between the knees, that would fit me, and I can pawn
+my----"
+
+At that moment there was a loud report. Every one looked at the double
+bass, but all his strings were for the moment intact.
+
+"A maroon," said the witch.
+
+"My dears," exclaimed Lady Arabel, much relieved to hear that this new
+sensation was not supernatural. "How too dretfully tahsome with the
+sweet and the savoury still to come. Do you know, I promised
+Pinehurst--my husband--never to remain in this house during an air-raid.
+It was his own fault, the dear thing; he had a craze for windows; this
+house has more glass space than wall, I think, and Pinehurst, in his
+spare time, used always to be making plans for squeezing in more
+windows. Our room is like a conservatory--so dretfully embarrassing. So
+I always take my knitting across the road to the crypt of St.
+Sebastian's, and I'm sure you won't mind coming too. You might have
+brought a box of spellicans, or a set of table croquet, but I'm afraid
+the Vicar wouldn't like it. A nice man but dretfully particular. We must
+wait for the end of this piece, the first violin is so touchy."
+
+They all waited patiently while the piece continued. It was a plain
+uneventful piece, composed by a Higgins relative and therefore admired
+in the household.
+
+"A thing that puzzles me," said the witch, taking advantage of an
+emotional pause while one violin was wheezing a very long small note by
+itself, "is why only ugly songs are really persistent. Haven't you
+noticed, for instance, that a peacock, or a cat on the wall, or a baby
+with a tin trumpet, will give their services most generously for hours
+on end, while a robin on a snowy tree, or a nightingale, or a fairy----"
+
+She was interrupted by a scuffling sound in the umbrella-stand, and
+Harold the Broomstick, after a moment's rather embarrassing entanglement
+with a butterfly net, approached, panting.
+
+"I must go," said the witch. "I bet you twopence we shall have some fun
+to-night. Sarah Brown, I'll come back and fetch you when it's all
+over."
+
+Lady Arabel and Sarah Brown crossed the road to the church, Richard
+following a few yards behind.
+
+"I'm afraid my little dinner-party wasn't a great success," said Lady
+Arabel confidentially. "Rrchud and Angela didn't get that good talk on
+occult subjects as Meta Ford said they would. Of course Rrchud, as you
+noticed, was dretfully restless and lighthearted; all boys are like that
+for the first few hours of their leave. He is naturally of a quiet
+disposition, though you wouldn't think it from to-night."
+
+There was a distant blot of gunfire on the air, just as they reached the
+door of the crypt. The very stout dog of the Vicar (are not all reverend
+dogs fat?) was waiting there with a bored look.
+
+"The Vicar allows no animals inside the crypt. So hard on Mrs. Perry's
+canary which has fits. I was here once when the Vicar's youngest son
+brought in a rabbit under his coat. A dretful scene, my dear."
+
+That district of London happened to be rather a courageous one. The
+inhabitants felt that if the War had to be brought home to them, common
+politeness dictated that it should find them at home. There were not
+more than a dozen people in the crypt therefore. Most of them were old
+ladies from the district's less respectable quarter, knitting. The Vicar
+was trying to press comfort upon them, but without much success, for
+they were all quite content, discussing the deaths in their families.
+
+The noise of gunfire was coming nearer, shaking the ground like the
+uneven tread of a drunken giant. Sarah Brown concentrated on an evening
+newspaper, busily reading again and again one of those columns of
+confidential man-to-man advertisement, which everybody reads with
+avidity while determining the more never to buy the article advertised.
+But presently the fidgeting hands of Richard caught her eye, and she
+looked at him. He was sitting next to his mother on a stone step. He
+seemed to be in a quieter mood and attempted no manifestation. Sarah
+Brown thought he was suppressing excitement, however, and indeed he
+presently said: "I say, won't it be fun lying about all this to
+posterity and Americans, and other defenceless innocents."
+
+Opposite to them, on two campstools, sat a young bridling mother of
+fifty, with her old hard daughter of sixteen or so. Hard was that
+daughter in every way; you would have counted her age in winters, not in
+summers, so obviously untender were her years. An iron plait of hair lay
+for about six inches down her spine; her feet and ankles made the
+campstool on which she sat, looking pathetically ethereal. Of such stuff
+as this is the backbone of England made, which is perhaps why the
+backbone of England sometimes seems so sadly inflexible.
+
+There was a screeching noise outside, followed by an incredible crash.
+It seemed to cleave a bottomless abyss between one second and the next,
+so that one seemed to be conscious for the first time in an astonished
+and astonishing world.
+
+Lady Arabel said: "Boys will be boys, of course I know, but really this
+is going a little too far. Pinehurst's one hobby was his windows."
+
+The campstooled mother gave a luxurious little shriek as soon as the
+crash was safely over. "The villains," she said kittenishly. "Aiming at
+places of worship as usual. I am absolutely paralysed with terror. Mary,
+darling, I don't believe you turned a hair."
+
+"Pas un cheval," replied her firm daughter, in not unnatural error. One
+could easily see that she was beloved at home, and one wondered why.
+
+The sound of the guns seemed only a negative form of sound after the
+bomb, and clearly above the firing could be heard a howl. The Vicar's
+dog, still howling, ran into the crypt.
+
+"RUPERT!" said the Vicar, in a terrible voice, interrupting himself in
+the middle of a cheering platitude. But he had no time to say anything
+more, for behind Rupert came a procession of perhaps a dozen people, all
+dressed in sheets. Everybody saw at one pitiful glance that these were
+unfortunate householders, so suddenly roused from oblivion as to forget
+all their ordinary suburban dignity, probably barely escaping from
+ruined homes with their lives and a sheet each. There was a very old
+man, a middle-aged spinster, and then an enormous group of children of
+ages varying from two months to twenty years, followed by their parents,
+teachers, or guardians.
+
+A nearer gun began to fire, and one of the old ladies on the other side
+of the crypt suddenly threw down her knitting and began confessing her
+sins. "Ow, I shall go to 'ell," she shouted dramatically. "I bin sich a
+wicked ol' woman. I nearly done in me first ol' man by biffin' the
+chopper at 'is nob, and Lawd, the lies I bin an' tol' me second only
+yesterday."
+
+"This is indeed a solemn moment," said the sheeted spinster sitting down
+beside Lady Arabel. "I hope I am meeting it in a proper spirit, but of
+course one is still only human, and naturally nervous. I have learned my
+statement by heart."
+
+"What statement?" asked Lady Arabel, who was rather deeply engrossed in
+turning the heel of the sock she was knitting.
+
+"The statement I shall make when the sheep are divided from the goats."
+
+"Oh, come, come," said kind Lady Arabel. "Things are not so bad as
+that, surely. You must not be so dretfully pessimistic."
+
+"You mistake me," said the sheeted lady, bridling. "There is, I am
+confident, no cause whatever for pessimism on my part. I have no
+misgivings as to the verdict. But not being used to courts of law, I
+thought it best to learn my statement, as I say, by heart."
+
+The old knitter had been rather annoyed to find her confession
+interrupted. "A wicked ol' woman I may be," she said with more dignity.
+"But I'll never regret givin' that bloody speshul a bit o' me mind this
+mornin' when 'e turned saucy to the sugar queue. I ses to 'im----"
+
+"We all have our faults," Lady Arabel's neighbour broke in. "But I
+think, at this solemn moment, I may feel thankful that hastiness of
+recrimination was never one of mine. All my life I have made it an
+unalterable rule never to make a statement without first asking myself:
+Is it _TRUE_? Is it _JUST_? Is it _KIND_?"
+
+"You may well say so," replied Lady Arabel pleasantly. "I only wish the
+younger generation would follow your example. Nowadays it is much more
+likely to be: Is it true? No. Is it just? No. Is it kind? No. Is it
+_FUNNY_? Yes. And out it comes."
+
+"Be that as it may," said the ladylike creature. (One could see she was
+a Real Lady even through the sheet. Obviously she read the _Morning
+Post_ daily.) "Be that as it may, perhaps you can help me in one little
+matter which is intriguing me slightly even at this solemn moment. Do
+you suppose the sheep will be allowed to hear the trial of the goats, or
+will the court be cleared? I must say I should be so interested to hear
+the defence of the late churchwarden who eloped with----"
+
+"Ah, please, please," said Lady Arabel, "don't talk in that dretful way.
+Don't let your mind dwell on the worst. I assure you that you will be
+all right."
+
+"Of course I shall be all right, as you put it," said the elderly lady,
+coldly drawing herself up. "Everybody can be my witness that I have kept
+my candle burning in my small corner----"
+
+"Good gracious," shrieked the kittenish mother. "A candle burning
+to-night. And probably unshaded. Don't you know that those fiends in the
+sky are always on the watch for the slightest illumination?"
+
+"Fiends in the sky!" exclaimed the sheeted lady. "Do you mean to say
+they are abroad even at this solemn moment?"
+
+"Oh, don't talk such rot," implored the hard flapper. "Who the dickens
+do you suppose was responsible for that crash?"
+
+"Responsible for the crash!" said the other, whose tones were becoming
+more and more alive with exclamation marks. "Is then the solemn work of
+summoning us entrusted to the minions of the Evil One?"
+
+A series of crashes interrupted her, the work of the adjacent gun. The
+earth shook, and each report was followed by the curious ethereal wail
+of shells on their way.
+
+"What, again?" exclaimed Lady Arabel's sheeted neighbour. "I should have
+thought one would have been ample. But still, one cannot be too careful,
+and some people are heavy sleepers. I heard the first myself without any
+possibility of mistake, and rose at once, though the slab lay heavy on
+my chest----"
+
+"Most unwise," said Lady Arabel, "to touch that sort of thing late at
+night. I always have a little Benger myself."
+
+Sarah Brown happened to look at Richard. His eyes were shut, but he was
+smiling very broadly with tight lips, and his face was turned towards
+the ceiling. His fingers were very tense and busy on his lap, as though
+he were still fidgeting with magic. But her study of him was interrupted
+by the loud denouncing voice of the very venerable man who had led the
+procession of late-comers.
+
+"A dog in this hallowed place," he said, pointing at the deeply
+disconcerted Rupert who was weaving himself nervously in and out of his
+master's legs. "Never in all the forty years of my ministration here
+have I allowed such an outrage----"
+
+"Gently, gently, my dear sir," protested the Vicar, a little roused. "I
+am the minister of this church, and the dog is mine. I was indeed about
+to turn it out when you entered, after which I lost sight of it for a
+moment. Rupert, go home."
+
+Rupert howled again, and lay down as if about to faint.
+
+"Forty years have I been Vicar of this parish," said the veteran, "and
+never----"
+
+"What?" interrupted the Vicar, "Forty years Vicar of this parish. Then
+you must be Canon Burstley-Ripp. How very extraordinary, I always
+understood that he passed away quite ten years ago."
+
+He approached the old man and strove to button-hole him. The sheet at
+first foiled him in this intention, but he presently contented himself
+with seizing a little corner of it, by which he led his aged brother
+vicar into a corner. There they could be heard for some time
+misunderstanding each other in low earnest tones.
+
+"Ow, what a wicked ol' woman I bin an' bin," suddenly burst forth again
+the repentant knitter. "I bin an' stole 'arf a pound o' sugar off of the
+Eelite 'Atshop where I does a bit o' cleanin'. Ef I get out o' this
+alive, I swear I'll repay it an 'undredfold--that is ef I can get that
+much awf me sugar card...."
+
+Sarah Brown was becoming sleepy. A blankness was invading her mind, and
+the talk in the crypt seemed to lose its meaning, and to consist chiefly
+of S's. She pondered idly on the family of children with their elders,
+all of whom were now studying each other with a certain look of
+disillusionment. It was a group whose relationships were difficult to
+make out, the ages of many of the children being unnaturally
+approximate. There seemed to be at least seven children under three
+years old, and yet they all bore a strong and regrettable family
+likeness. Several of the babies would hardly have been given credit for
+having reached walking age, yet none had been carried in. The woman who
+seemed to imagine herself the mother of this rabble was distributing
+what looked like hurried final words of advice. The father with a
+pensive eye was obviously trying to remember their names, and at
+intervals whispering to a man apparently twenty years his senior, whom
+he addressed as Sonny. It was all very confusing.
+
+A long dim stretch of time seemed to have passed when suddenly the note
+of a bugle sprang out across space. Somehow the air at once felt cooler
+and more wholesome, the sound of the All-clear had something akin to the
+sight of the sun after a thunderstorm, lighting up a crouching whipped
+world.
+
+"The Trump at last," said Lady Arabel's garrulous neighbour, rising with
+alacrity, and twitching her sheet into more becoming folds. "I was just
+wondering----"
+
+But at that moment the two Vicars approached, and the elder one,
+including both the spinster and the mysterious family in one glance,
+spoke in a clerical yet embarrassed voice.
+
+"Dear friends, a slight but inconvenient mistake has occurred, and I am
+afraid I must ask you to submit blindly to my guidance in a matter
+strangely difficult to explain, even as I--myself in much confusion--bow
+to the advice of my reverend friend here. It would be out of place----"
+
+The spinster interrupted, and, by the way she did it, one saw that she
+was Chapel. "Excuse me, Canon," she said acidly, "but is not all
+discussion out of place at this solemn moment?"
+
+"Believe me, madam," replied the aged Burstley-Ripp. "You overrate the
+solemnity of the moment. I must earnestly ask you all to return with me
+to the places whence--labouring under an extraordinary error--we came
+to-night. I see that Mrs. Parachute trusts me, and is prepared to lead
+her little flock to rest again. You, madam----"
+
+"Where Mrs. Parachute leads, far be it from me to seem behindhand," said
+the other, much ruffled, as she gathered her sheet about her. By the way
+she said it, one saw that she and Mrs. Parachute did not call. She bowed
+to Lady Arabel, and became satirical, even arch. "Good afternoon,
+Mrs.--er--, I am assured that the moment is not solemn, and therefore
+solemn it shall not be. To turn to lighter subjects, I hope I shall have
+the pleasure of meeting you and your delightful son and daughter again
+at no distant date, the moment then being genuinely solemn. I fear I
+have no visiting card on me, but--er--perhaps my slab just outside--very
+superior granite--would do as a substitute...."
+
+The pale party filed out of the crypt and disappeared. The remaining
+Vicar smote his brow, and addressed the now calm Rupert in a low voice,
+but with such unaccountable warmth that that harassed animal disappeared
+precipitately in the direction of his home.
+
+Lady Arabel, Sarah Brown, and Richard crossed the churchyard together.
+
+"Oh, my dears, look," said Lady Arabel. "How too too dretful, that bomb
+fell quite close to us. Do look how it has disturbed the graves...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+AN AIR RAID SEEN FROM ABOVE
+
+
+The moonlight lay like cream upon the pavement when the witch and
+Harold her broomstick left the Higgins' doorstep. London was a still
+Switzerland in silver and star-grey, unblotted by people. There was a
+hint of pale green about the moonlight, and the lamps with their dim
+light downcast were like daffodils in faery fields.
+
+The witch mounted. Harold, who was every inch a thoroughbred and very
+highly strung, trembled beneath her, but not with fear. They reached
+Piccadilly Circus with supernatural speed, and flashed across it. The
+sound of people singing desultorily while taking shelter in the Tube
+floated up to them. Here the witch said "Yoop" to Harold, and he reared
+and shot upwards, narrowly missing the statue of One In A Bus-catching
+Attitude, which marks the middle of the Circus.
+
+As soon as the witch had out-distanced the noise of expectant London,
+she heard quite distinctly the approach of London's guests. They came
+with a chorus of many notes, all deep and dangerous.
+
+There were a few clouds wandering about among the stars, and to one of
+these the witch and her faithful Harold repaired. A cloud gives quite
+reasonable support to magic people, and most witches and wizards have
+discovered the delight of paddling knee-deep about those quicksilver
+continents. They wander along shining and changing valleys under a most
+ardent sky; they climb the purple thunderclouds, or launch the first
+snowflake of a blizzard; they spring from pink stepping-stone to pink
+stepping-stone of clouds each no bigger than a baby's hand, across great
+sunsets. Often when in London I am battling with a barrage of rain, or
+falling over unseen strangers into gutters during fogs, I think happily
+of the sunlit roof of cloud above my head, and of the witches and
+wizards, lying on their backs with their coats off, among cloud-meadows
+in a glory of perfect summer and sun.
+
+The witch, with one soothing hand on the bristling mane of her Harold,
+lay on her front on the cloud she had chosen, and looked down through a
+little hole in it. It was practically the only cloud present that would
+have afforded reasonable cover; the others were mere wisps of sky-weed
+floating in the moonlight.
+
+There was a greater chorus of aeroplanes below her now; the whole sky
+was ringing with it. The witch could hear a deep bass-voiced machine, a
+baritone, a quavering tenor, and--thin and sharp as a pin--a little
+treble sound that made Harold rear and struggle to be free.
+
+"Another witch," said the witch. "I was wondering why the Huns hadn't
+got their magic organised by now." She mounted her Harold and slipped
+off the cloud.
+
+The guns were shouting now, and the shells wailed and burst not so very
+far below them, but Harold trembled no longer. More quickly than a
+falling star he swooped, and in a second the alien witch was in sight,
+an unwieldy figure whose broomstick sounded rather broken-winded,
+probably owing to the long-distance flight and to the fourteen stone of
+Teutonic magic on its back. There was a wicked-looking apparatus
+attached to the collar of the German broomstick, obviously designed to
+squirt unpleasant enchantments downward. This contrivance was apparently
+giving some trouble, for the German was so busy attending to it that at
+first she did not see or hear the approach of Harold and his rider. She
+was aroused to her danger by a heavy chunk of magic which struck and
+nearly unseated her. In a second, however, she was ready with a parrying
+enchantment, and the fight began. The two broomsticks reared and circled
+round each other, and over and under each other. From their riders'
+finger-tips magic of the most explosive kind crackled, and incantations
+of such potency were exchanged that, I am told, the tiles and
+chimney-pots of the streets below suffered a good deal. Round and round
+and over and under whirled the broomsticks, till the very spaces went
+mad, and London seemed to rush down nightmare slopes into a stormy sky,
+while its lights swung from pole to pole and were entangled with the
+stars.
+
+Both broomsticks were by now so uproariously excited that neither witch
+was able to aim her magic missiles very carefully, and indeed it was not
+long before Harold passed entirely beyond control. After bucking
+violently once or twice, he gave a wild high cry that was like the wind
+howling through the fierce forest past of his race, and fell upon the
+other broomstick, fixing his bristles into its throat. The shock of the
+collision was too much for both witches. Our witch--if I may call her
+so--was shot over Harold's head, and landed on the ample breast of her
+adversary, who, in consequence, lost her balance. They fell together
+into space.
+
+"Oh, lost, lost, ..." cried our witch, and thoughts rushed through her
+mind of green safe places, and old safe years, and the little hut in a
+pale bluebell wood, where she was born. She had time to remember the
+blue ground, dimpled and starred with sunlight, and the way the bees
+pulled over the bluebells and swung on them to the tune of cuckoos in a
+May mist; she had time to think of the green globe ghosts of the
+bluebells that haunted the wood after the spring was dead. Bluebells and
+being young were in all her thoughts, and it was some time before she
+noticed how slowly she and her enemy were falling.
+
+For they were locked together. And the enemy witch's cloak, an orthodox
+witch cloak except for its colour, which was German field-grey instead
+of red, was spread out like a parachute, and was supporting them upon
+their peaceful and almost affectionate descent.
+
+For all I know they might have alighted gently in the Strand, and the
+authorities might by now be regretting the capture of a most
+embarrassing and unaccountable prisoner. But something intervened. The
+cloud, like a sheep suffering from the lack of other sheep to follow,
+had not yet quitted the scene. The witches' battle had tended upward,
+and it had ended several hundred feet above the level of the cloud,
+which was apparently sinking. The downward course of the combatants'
+fall was therefore arrested, and they found themselves still
+interlocked, prostrate and embedded, with their eyes and mouths full of
+woolly wisps of cloud.
+
+Our witch was the first to recover herself. She stood up and brushed
+herself, remarking: "By jove, that parachute cloak of yours is a great
+dodge. I wish I'd thought of it. I always keep my full-dress togs put
+away, like the ass that I am. A stitch or two, and a few lengths of
+whalebone would have done the trick."
+
+The German was an older woman, and less adaptable to the strange chances
+of War. She was silent for a few minutes, seated in the small crater
+made in the cloud by her fall. She was not exactly ugly. She had the
+sort of face about which one could not help feeling that one could have
+done it better oneself, or at least that one could have taken more
+trouble. It seemed moulded--even kneaded--carelessly, in very soft
+material. Beneath her open cloak her dress was of the ordinary German
+_Reform-Kleid_ type, and her figure had the rather jelloid appearance of
+those who affect this style. Her regulation witch's hat was by now,
+probably, in the Serpentine, and her round head was therefore disclosed,
+with two stout sand-coloured plaits pursuing each other round it.
+
+The witches faced each other for some seconds. A long way away they
+could hear the spitting and crackling sound of the two broomsticks
+fighting. Looking up, they could see the combatants, like black comets
+in collision. Our witch, who had good sight, saw that the enemy
+broomstick was upper-most, and that the writhing Harold was being shaken
+like a mouse. Their bristles were interlocked. One twig floated down
+between the witches, and our witch recognised it as coming from her poor
+Harold's mane. As, for this purpose, she brought her eyes to her
+immediate surroundings, it seemed to her suddenly that the sky was
+growing larger, and then she realised that this was because their refuge
+was growing smaller. The edges of the cloud were dissolving. She saw at
+last her peril and her disadvantage. If Harold should be killed or
+disabled she could never reach the earth again, except by means of a
+fatal fall of several thousand feet. The enemy witch, with her
+ingenious cloak contrivance strapped securely about her, stood a
+reasonable chance of escape. But our witch was an amateur in War, she
+was without support, forlornly dressed in her faithful blue serge
+three-year-old, and her little squirrel tippet.
+
+Magic, as you know, has limitations. Fire is of course a plaything in
+magic hands. Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be
+tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions
+to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable
+Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no
+power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost
+between us and the moon, and all magic people know--and tremble to
+know--that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may
+close, and the shell of time first crack and then be crushed, and magic
+be one with nothingness and death and all other delusions. This is why
+magic, which treats the other elements as its servants, bows before
+space, and has to call such a purely independent contrivance as a
+broomstick to its help in the matter of air-travel.
+
+The witches faced each other on their little unstable sanctuary in the
+kingdom of space. Our witch felt secretly sick, and at the same time she
+tore fear from her mind, and knew that death was but an imperfectly kept
+secret, and that not an evil one. After all, we have condemned it
+unheard.
+
+Both witches could talk a magic tongue, and make themselves mutually
+understood. Neither knew the other's natural tongue. But when our witch
+noticed several large ferocious tears rolling down her opponent's
+cheeks, she was able, by means of magic, to say: "Great Scott, my good
+person, what are you crying for?"
+
+"I am not crying," replied the German witch. "I would not allow one tear
+of mine to fall upon and water one possible grain of wheat in this
+accursed country of yours. Certainly I am not crying."
+
+"Accursed country?" echoed the astounded English witch. "How d'you
+mean--accursed? This is England, you know. England hasn't done anything
+accursed. Aren't you muddling it up with Germany?"
+
+"England is the World Enemy," said the German, evidently pleased to meet
+someone to whom this information was fresh. "Throughout the ages she has
+been the Robber State, crushing the weaker nations, adding to her own
+wealth by treachery, and now forcing this war of aggression upon her
+peace-loving neighbours."
+
+Our witch laughed. She was forgetting her danger. "This is really rather
+funny," she said. "Do you know what's happened? You've been reading the
+_Daily Mail_ and misunderstanding it. The whole of that quotation
+applied to Germany, not England. It's Germany that's being naughty. You
+made a mistake, but never mind, I won't repeat it."
+
+The German took no notice of this. The past three years had made her an
+adept in taking no notice.
+
+"And now," she added. "After all these weary months of hoping, and
+long-distance broomstick practice, and of parachute practice, and of
+conflict with narrow officialdom, I have come--and this is the result. I
+am separated from my broomstick, which has all the germ-bombs hanging
+from its collar--the germs are those of dissension and riot--I am
+marooned upon an English cloud, with no enemy at my mercy but a paltry
+and treacherous non-combatant----"
+
+"At your mercy," breathed our witch, remembering. She looked up. The
+broomsticks were closer now, and through the breathless air, amidst the
+dream-like firing of the guns below, she could hear the difficult
+gasping of the hard-pressed Harold, still fighting bravely but with
+hardly a twig on his head.
+
+The tide of space was coming in. The edge of the cloud was barely six
+inches from her hand. Our witch's mind overflowed with the thought of
+invasions and the coming in of tides. It seemed that all her life she
+had been living on a narrowing shore. She remembered all her dawns as
+precarious footholds of peace on a threatened rock, and all her evenings
+as golden sands sloping down into encroaching sleep. She realised
+Everything as a little hopeless garrison against the army of Nothing.
+
+She clutched a pinch of cloud nervously, and it broke off in her hand.
+She recalled her senses with a devastating effort.
+
+"Do you mean to say," she said, after a moment, "that poor dear Germany
+really believes that she is right and we are wrong? I suppose, when you
+come to think of it, a man-eating tiger feels the same way. It fights
+with a high heart, and a hot reproach, just as we do----"
+
+"We are Crusaders," said the German. "Crusaders at War with Evil."
+
+"Why, how funny--so are we," said our witch. "But then how very peculiar
+that two Crusaders should apparently be fighting each other. Where then
+is the Evil? In No Man's Land?"
+
+"We are fighting," recited the German glibly, "because England is the
+World Enemy. Throughout the ages she has been the Rob----"
+
+There was a violent explosion quite close to them, and the cloud reeled
+and shook. About a foot of the German end of it broke off and was
+dissolved.
+
+"We're within range of our guns," said our witch, looking down. "This
+cloud must be sinking."
+
+"It will never sink enough to save you," said the German, trying to
+conceal the nervousness with which she rearranged her rigid-looking
+cloak round her. She seemed to be sinking herself to a certain extent;
+perhaps the warmth of her emotions was melting the cloud beneath her.
+Certainly she now sat, apparently squat as an idol, her figure submerged
+in cloud to the waist.
+
+The English witch looked down, singing a little to keep up her _morale_.
+London looked exactly like the maps you buy for sixpence from
+sad-looking gentlemen in the Strand, only it was sown with a thin crop
+of lights, and was chiefly designed in grey and darker grey, and the
+Tubes did not show so indecently. With surprising clearness the rhythmic
+whispering of the trains and the scanty traffic could be heard, and once
+even the shrill characteristic voice of an ambulance. Somehow space did
+not seem disturbed by these sounds; its quietness pressed upon the
+listeners' minds like a heavy dream, and there was no real believing in
+anything but space. Our witch felt she could have smudged London off the
+face of space with her finger, and the thought of seven million lives
+involved in the fate of that sliding chart carried no conviction to her.
+She forced into her mind the realisation of humanity, and of little
+lives lived in little rooms.
+
+"As one Crusader to another," she said, "do you find it does much good
+in the war against Evil to drop bombs on people in their homes? After
+all, every baby is good in bed, and even soldiers when on leave are
+anti-militarist."
+
+"It always does good to exterminate vermin in their lair," said the
+German, trying restlessly to raise herself more to the level of her
+lighter companion, who was still perched on the surface of the cloud.
+"It is at home that Evil is originated, it is at home that English women
+conceive and bear a new generation of enemies of the Right, it is at
+home that English children are bred up in their marauding ways. It is
+on the home, the vital place of Evil, that the scourge should fall."
+
+"Oh, but surely not," said our witch eagerly. "It is at home that people
+are kindly and think what they will have for supper, and bathe their
+babies. Men come home when they are hurt or hungry, and women when they
+are lonely or tired. Nobody is taught anything stupid or international
+at home. You can bring death to a home, but never a righteous scourge.
+Nobody feels scourged or instructed by a bomb in their parlour, they
+just feel dead, and dead without a reason."
+
+The cloud was very small now. The filmy edges of it were faintly rising
+and falling like the seaweed frill of a rock in the sea. The witch kept
+her eyes on her opponent's face, because to look anywhere else gave her
+a white feeling in her head.
+
+"Crusades of the high explosive kind," she said, "can work only on
+battle-fields. Indeed, even on battle-fields--ah, what are we about,
+what are we about? We are neither of us killing Evil, we are killing
+youth...."
+
+"I know, I know," wept the German witch. "My wizard fell at Vimy
+Ridge...."
+
+"You are talking magic at last," said our witch. "Dear witch, why don't
+you go home and ask how it can be a good plan for one Crusader against
+Evil to blow up another? How can two people be righteously scourging
+each other at the same time? It is like the old problem of two serpents
+eating each other, starting at the tail. There must be some
+misunderstanding somewhere. Or else some real Evil somewhere."
+
+"There is," said the German, recovering herself. "England is Evil.
+England is the World Enemy. Throughout the ages she has been the Robber
+State, crushing----"
+
+But she had little luck. Once more she was interrupted by an explosion,
+a much louder one, directly above them. Our witch hardly heard the
+noise; she seemed suddenly to have found the climax of her life, and the
+climax was pain. There was pain and a feeling of terrible change all
+over her, smothering her, and a super-pain in her shoulder. After a
+second or two as long as death, she realised dimly that she was all
+tensely strung to an attitude, like a marionette. Her hands were up
+trying to shield her head, her chin was pressed down to her drawn-up
+knees. Her blue serge shoulder was extraordinarily wet and immovable.
+She looked along the cloud. Her enemy was not there. There was a round
+hole in the cloud, and as she leaned painfully towards it, she could see
+a few of the lights of London, and something falling spasmodically
+towards them.
+
+The cloud had been shaken to its foundations by the two explosions, and
+the German witch, who had been seated perhaps on a seam in the material,
+or at any rate on one of the less stable parts of the fabric, had fallen
+through. Her parachute cloak, in passing through the hole in the cloud,
+had been turned inside out above her head, and rendered useless. Over
+and about her falling figure her broomstick darted helplessly, uttering
+curious sad cries, like a seagull's.
+
+Even as the English witch watched her enemy's disaster, the larger part
+of the cloud, weakened by all the shock and movement, broke away with a
+hissing sound. The witch's feet hung now over space, she dared not move;
+she had difficulty in steadying herself with her unwounded arm, for her
+hand could find only a quicksand of dissolving cloud to lean on. She had
+no thoughts left but thoughts of danger and of pain.
+
+But Harold the Broomstick came back. The witch heard a rustling sound
+close to her, and it startled her more than all the noise of the guns,
+which had come, as it seemed, from the forgotten other side of eternity.
+The rough head of Harold appeared over the cloud's edge, and insinuated
+itself pathetically under her arm. Very carefully and very painfully the
+witch reached a kneeling position, damaging her refuge with every
+movement in spite of her care. She gasped with pain, and Harold tried to
+look very strong and hopeful to comfort her. He straightened his back,
+and she crawled into the saddle. The tremor of their launching split the
+cloud into several parts, which disintegrated. There was no more
+foot-hold on it; the tide had come up and submerged it.
+
+Harold the Broomstick was crippled, he stumbled as he flew, sometimes he
+dropped a score of feet, and span. He did stunts by mistake.
+
+They had not strength enough between them to get home. They made a
+forced landing in the silver loneliness of Kensington Gardens. It was a
+fortunate place, for there is much magic there. Wherever there are
+children who pretend, there grows a little magic in the air, and
+therefore the wind of Kensington Gardens thrills with enchantment, and
+the Round Pond, full of much pretence of great Armadas, crossed and
+re-crossed with the abiding wakes of ships full of treasure and romance,
+is a blessed lake to magic people.
+
+The witch bathed Harold, her broomstick, in the Round Pond. He evidently
+felt its healing quality at once, for after the first minute of
+immersion, he swam about exultantly, and shook drops full of moonlight
+out of his mane.
+
+The bugles sounded All-clear in many keys all round the ear's horizon;
+their sound matched the waning moonlight.
+
+The witch bathed her shoulder, and then she found her way to a little
+quiet place she knew of, where no park-keeper ever looks, a place where
+secret and ungardened daffodils grow in springtime, a place where all
+the mice and birds play unafraid, because no cat can find the way
+thither. You can see the Serpentine from that place, and the bronze
+shadows under its bridge, but no houses, and no railways, and no signs
+of London.
+
+Here the witch made a little fire, and leaned three sticks together over
+it; she lighted the fire with her finger-tip and hung over it the little
+patent folding cauldron, which she always carried on a chatelaine
+swinging from her belt. And she made a charm of daisy-heads, and
+spring-smelling grasses, and the roots of unappreciated weeds, and the
+mosses that cover the tiny faery cliffs of the Serpentine. Over the
+mixture she shook out the contents of one of her little paper packets of
+magic. All this she boiled over her fire for many hours, sitting beside
+it in the silver darkness, with her knees drawn up and her hands clasped
+in front of them. The trees sprang up into the moonlight like dark
+fountains from the pools of their own shadows. Little shreds of cloud
+flowed wonderfully across the sky. There was no sound except the sound
+of the water, like an uncertain player upon a little instrument. The
+charm was still unfinished when the dawn passed over London, and the sun
+came up, the seed of another day, sown in a rich red soil. The trees of
+the Gardens remembered their daylight shadows again, and forgot their
+mystery. The water-birds, after examining their shoulder-blades with
+minute care for some moments, launched themselves upon a lake of
+diamonds. There seemed a veil of mist and bird-song over the world. The
+sudden song of the birds was like finding the hearing of one's heart
+restored, after long deafness.
+
+The witch anointed her shoulder with the charm, after having first made
+a drop of potion out of the bubbles in it. This potion she drank, and
+was healed of her wound and her weariness, and of all desires except a
+desire to sleep with her face among the daffodils. She was the most
+beautifully alone person in the world that morning; nobody could have
+found her. A thin string of very blue smoke went up from her faint fire
+and was tangled among the boughs of a flowering tree, but the coarse eye
+of a park-keeper could never have seen it. She had escaped from the net
+of the cruel hours; for her the stained world was washed clean; for her
+all horror held its breath; for her there was absolute spring, and an
+innocent sun, and the shadows of daffodils upon closed eyes....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE FAERY FARM
+
+
+Sarah Brown, finding herself unfetched by the witch, went home alone
+as soon as the 'buses began putting out to sea after the storm. She
+expected to find the witch at home, but only the Dog David and Peony
+were in the House of Living Alone. David lay on Peony's bed, and Peony
+under it. Sarah Brown saw them as she passed their open door.
+
+"Ow Marmaduke!" said Peony, "is it all over? Are you sure? Them 'uns is
+so bloody deceitful you never know but what they might go an' blow a
+bugle or two to mike believe they'd done, an' then drops bombs on us
+just as we was comin' 'appily out from under our beds."
+
+Peony, with a touching faith in the combined protective powers of twelve
+inches of mattress and nine inches of dog, had been reading a little
+paper book called _Love in Society_ by the light of an electric torch.
+
+"It's all truly over," said Sarah Brown, who had come home through a
+roar of rumour. "They say we've brought down at least one Boche. In fact
+the ferryman says his aunt telephoned that the special on her corner
+says a female Boche was brought down. But that hardly sounds likely.
+Hasn't the witch come home yet?"
+
+"Lawd no," replied Peony. "The dear ol' Soup never comes 'ome of a
+moonlight night. It's my belief she goes to Maiden'ead among the Jews,
+to keep out of the wiy, and 'oo's to blime 'er?"
+
+"Well, that's all right," said Sarah Brown. "For now I shall be able to
+buy--without pawning anything for the moment--a little land outfit from
+stock. I know she has some."
+
+The night was by then far from young, in fact it was well into its
+second childhood. But Sarah Brown and the Dog David sought and tried on
+land outfits for several hours.
+
+The shop was divided into three horizontal departments. Nearest the
+floor were the foodstuffs; biscuit tins buttressed the counter on every
+side; regiments of Grape-nuts, officered by an occasional Quaker Oat,
+stood in review order all round the lower shelves. On the counter little
+castles of tinned fruit were built, while bins beneath it held the
+varied grain, cereal, and magic stock. About on a level with one's head
+the hardware department began: frying-pans lolled with tin coffee-pots
+over racks, dust-pans divorced from their brushes were platonically
+attached to flat-irons or pie-dishes, Stephen's Inks were allied with
+penny mugs or tins of boot polish in an invasion of the middle shelves,
+and a wreath of sponges crowned the champion of a row of kettles in
+shining armour. Against the ceiling the drapery section was found.
+Overalls, ready-made breeches, babies' socks, and pink flannelette
+mysteries hung doubled up as if in pain over strings nailed to the
+rafters. From this department Sarah Brown, balanced upon three large
+biscuit tins placed on the counter, chose her outfit with vanity and
+care. The general effect was not good, but she did not know this, for
+she studied the parts separately in a six-inch mirror. She was filled
+with a simple pleasure. For she was always absurdly moved by little
+excitements, and by any prospect of a changed to-morrow. She was not
+really used to being alive at all, and that is what made her take to
+magic so kindly.
+
+"In six hours," she said, "I shall be on my way to something utterly
+new."
+
+And in six hours she was on her way, whistling, across the Parish of
+Faery. The Dog David ran in front of her among the daisies. The rabbits
+can never be caught in this land of happy animals, but they give good
+sport and always play fair.
+
+David Blessing Brown, a dog of independent yet loving habit, had spent
+about four-fifths of his life in the Brown family. He was three years
+old, and though ineligible for military service, made a point of wearing
+khaki about his face, and in a symmetrical heart-shaped spot near his
+tail. To Sarah Brown he was the Question and the Answer, his presence
+was a constant playtime for her mind; so well was he loved that he
+seemed to her to move in a little mist and clamour of love. With every
+one else she held but lame intercourse, but her Dog David and she
+withheld no passing thought from each other. They could often be heard
+by unmattering landladies and passers-by exchanging views in the strong
+Suffolk accent that was a sort of standing joke between them. I believe
+that Sarah Brown had loved the Dog David so much that she had given him
+a soul. Certainly other dogs did not care for him. David said that they
+had found out that his second name was Blessing, and that they laughed
+at him for it. His face was seamed with the scars of their laughing. But
+I know that the enmity had a more fundamental reason than that. I know
+that when men speak with the tongues of angels they are shunned and
+hated by men, and so I think that when dogs approach humanity too nearly
+they are banished from the love of their own kind.
+
+Sarah Brown was not altogether unfamiliar with the Parish of Faery, but
+she never failed to be surprised by the enchantment of the Enchanted
+Forest. The Green Ride runs straight through it, so incredibly straight
+that as you walk along it the end of it is at the end of your sight, and
+is like a star in a green sky. There is a dream that binds your mind as
+you cross the forest; it is like an imitation of eternity, so that, as
+you pass into the forest's shade, time passes from before you, and, as
+you pass out of it, you seem to have lived a thousand quiet and utterly
+forgotten lives. Clocks and calendars have no meaning in the forest; the
+seasons and the hours haunt it at their will, and abide by no law. Just
+as the sun upon a stormy day makes golden a moving and elusive acre in
+our human woods, so the night in the Enchanted Forest comes and goes
+like a ghost upon the sight of lovers of the night. For there you may
+step, unastonished, from the end of a day into its beginning; there the
+summer and the winter may dodge each other round one tree; there you may
+see at one glance a spring hoar frost and an autumn trembling of airs, a
+wild cherry tree blossoming beside a tawny maple. The forest is so deep
+and so thick that it provides its own sky, and can enjoy its own
+impulses, and its own quiet anarchy. There you forget that sky of ours
+across whose face some tyrant drives our few docile seasons in
+conventional order.
+
+I think the Dog David in his own way shared the dream that leads
+wayfarers through the Enchanted Forest. When he came out with Sarah
+Brown under the tasselled arch of Travellers' Joy that crosses the end
+of the Green Ride, he was all shining and dewy with adventure, and his
+tail was upright, as though he were pretending that it carried a flag.
+
+On an abrupt hill in the middle of an enormous green meadow a Castle
+stood, just as Richard had predicted. It was To Let, and was not looking
+its best. Some man of enterprise, taking advantage of its forlorn
+condition, had glued an advertisement upon its donjon keep. You could
+almost have measured that advertisement in acres; it recommended a face
+cream, and represented a lady with a face of horrible size, whose
+naturally immaculate complexion was marred by the rivets and loopholes
+of the donjon keep itself, which protruded in rather a distressing way.
+
+Oak trees stood round the foot of that pale hill, and the general effect
+was rather that of parsley round a ham.
+
+Between two oaks Sarah Brown, following directions, found the beginning
+of the Daisified Path. There were not only daisies all over the path but
+real violets on either side of it. The daisies looked one in the face,
+but the violets did not, because they had morbidly bad manners. Still of
+course manners are very small change and count for very little; the
+violet, being an artist, is entitled to any manners it likes, while the
+daisy has no temperament whatever, and no excuse for eccentricity.
+Grasshoppers tatted industriously and impartially among the daisies and
+the violets.
+
+Here outside the forest there was weather again, and the weather was
+more promising than generous. It continued to promise all day without
+exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any
+special fulfilment. Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep
+angle across a grey slate view.
+
+At the gate of Higgins Farm, Sarah Brown was a little disconcerted to
+find a small dragon. It was coiled round a tree beside the clipped box
+archway. It was not a very fine specimen, being of a brownish-green
+colour, and having lost the tip of one wing. Its spine was serrated,
+especially deeply between its shoulder blades, where it could raise a
+sort of crest if angered or excited. But at present it was asleep, its
+saturnine and rather wistful face rested upon one scaly paw.
+
+Sarah Brown was uncertain what to do, but the Dog David took the matter
+into his own paws by mistake. He had just met one of the castle dogs,
+one of those tremulous-tailed creatures who spend themselves in a rather
+pathetic effort to sustain an imaginary reputation for humour. David
+retorted to this dog's first facetious onslaught with a kindly quip,
+they trod on each other once or twice with extravagant gestures, and
+then parted hysterically, each supposing himself to be pursued by the
+other. It was then that David tripped over the dragon's barbed tail.
+David squeaked, and the dragon awoke. It uncoiled itself suddenly like
+a broken spring.
+
+"Gosh," it said. "Asleep again! I was waiting for you, and the sun on my
+back always makes me sleepy. I am the foreman. Higgins telephoned that
+you were coming."
+
+It preceded her through the little green archway that led to the farm.
+The sight reminded Sarah Brown of watching from Golders Green Tube
+Station the train one has just missed dive into the tunnel. She
+followed.
+
+On the other side of the archway the whole view of the plain called
+Higgins Farm met the adventurer. The farm-buildings were heaped
+graciously together on a little wave in the sea of ploughed fields.
+Except for two pale ricks in their midst, they exactly matched their
+surroundings, they were plastered dark red, and thatched with very old
+green and brown thatch. Beyond the buildings was a little wood, its
+interior lighted up with bluebells, and this wood merged into an
+orchard, where a white pony and an auburn pig strove apparently to eat
+the same blade of grass. The various sections of the farm land lay
+mapped out in different intensities of brown, very young green, and
+maturer green, and each section was dotted with people. They seemed
+small people even from a distance, and, as Sarah Brown advanced at the
+tail of the dragon, she saw that the workers were all indeed under
+ordinary human size. The tallest, a man guiding a miniature plough
+behind a tall horse, might have reached Sarah Brown's shoulder. None of
+them seemed hard at work, they stood talking in little groups. One group
+as they passed it was trafficking in cigarette cards. "I want to get my
+Gold Scale set of English Kings complete," a voice was saying
+tragically. "Has nobody got Edward the Confessor?" None of them took any
+notice of the foreman.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't got the gift of discipline," sighed the dragon.
+"And fairies are of course abnormally undisciplined creatures. Still, we
+simply can't get any one else, and Higgins will not apply for a few
+German prisoners. Get on with your work, you people, do. There, you see,
+they defy me to an extent. Ever since the cowmen dipped me in the
+horse-pond my authority's gone--gone where the good niggers go."
+
+I find that there are quite a lot of people who cannot say the word
+"gone" without adding the clause about the good niggers. These people
+have vague minds, sown like an allotment with phrases in grooves.
+Directly the dragon said "to an extent" without qualifying the extent,
+one saw why it had no gift of discipline.
+
+"I wouldn't attempt this job," it continued, winding breathlessly along
+the rutty road, "only I am under a great obligation to Richard Higgins.
+I am a _protidgy_ of his, you know, he rescued me from a lot of
+mischievous knights who were persecuting me. One of them had tied his
+tin hat to my tail, I remember, and the rest were trying to stick their
+nasty spears between my scales. Really, you know, it was quite
+dangerous. I have known a fellow's eye put out that way. I am not very
+good at fighting, though I might have tackled one at a time. Richard
+Higgins rode right into the midst of them, knocking them right and
+left. Gosh, he gave them a talking to, and they slank away. He took my
+case up after that, made enquiries, and gave me this job. We scrape
+along somehow, but I'm afraid I'm not really suited for it."
+
+They reached a part of a field in which broad beans were enjoying an
+innocent childhood among white butterflies.
+
+"If you wouldn't mind," said the dragon shyly, "I should like you to hoe
+between the rows of these beans. You will find a hoe against the big
+stack. This is your row, I reserved it for you."
+
+All the other rows were occupied by fairy women with their skirts tucked
+up--for only your amateur land-woman wears breeches. They all had hoes,
+but were not using them much. They were singing curious old round songs
+like summer dreams; you could hear strange fragments of phrases passing
+from voice to voice. They took no notice of Sarah Brown, and she began
+to work.
+
+"Oh, my One," she said to David. "How happy this is. No wonder they
+sing. Any one must sing working like this in great fields. Why, I even
+remember that the Shropshire Lad whistled once by mistake, while
+ploughing, on his own admission, until a fatalistic blackbird recalled
+him to his usual tragic mind."
+
+David sat uncomfortably on a broad bean, protesting against this new
+mania. For a moment he had thought that she was seeking for a mouse with
+some patent mouse-finding implement. He had even tried to help her, and
+turned over a clod with a critical paw, but one sniff had showed him the
+empty futility of the thing.
+
+Sarah Brown hoed rather happily for a couple of hours, and then she
+began to count the beans still waiting trustfully in the queue, waiting
+to be attended to and freed from their embarrassments. There were
+ninety-six, she decided, standing up ostensibly to greet an aeroplane.
+She became very glad of the occasional aeroplanes that crossed above her
+field, and gave her an excuse for standing with a straight back to watch
+them. Aeroplanes, crossing singly or in wild-bird formations, are so
+common in the sky of Faery that every one in those parts, while turning
+his own eyes inevitably upwards, secretly thinks his neighbour
+lamentably rustic and unsophisticated for looking at them.
+
+Every aeroplane that crosses Faery feels, I suppose, the reflected magic
+from the land below, for there is never one with the barest minute to
+spare that does not pause and try to be clever over Higgins Farm. You
+may see one industriously climbing the clouds over the Enchanted Forest,
+evidently trying hard to be intent on its destination. You may see it
+falter, struggling with its sense of duty, and then break weakly into a
+mild figure eight. The ragged rooks of Faery at once hurry into the air
+to show their laborious imitator how this should be done. The spirit of
+frivolous competition enters into the aeroplane, its duty is flung to
+the winds. It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say:
+"Now look, everybody, I'm going to be clever." Then it goes mad. It
+leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its head and falls downward
+until the very butterflies begin to take cover, it stands upon its tail
+and falls upward, it writes messages in a flowing hand across the sky
+and returns to cross the t's. It circles impertinently round your head,
+fixing its bold tricolour eye upon you until you begin to think there
+must be something wrong with your appearance. It bounds upon a field of
+onions and rebounds in the same breath from the topmost cloud of heaven.
+The rooks return disconsolately to their nests.
+
+Then you may see the erring machine suddenly remember itself, and check
+itself in the act of some new paroxysm. It remembers the European War
+that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its
+coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly. The eastern sky becomes once more
+its highway instead of its trapeze. It collects its wits, emits a few
+contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps beyond sight.
+
+Whenever this happened, the female fairies behaved in a very plebeian
+and forward manner, waving their hoes at each machine, encouraging it by
+brazen gestures to further extravagances, and striving to reach its
+hearing with loud shrill cries. There was very little difference
+between these fairies and other lady war-workers. In fact they were only
+distinguishable by their stature and by the empty and innocent
+expression of their faces. Also perhaps by their tuneful singing, and by
+a habit of breaking out suddenly into country dances between the
+bean-rows.
+
+Sarah Brown, who worked a great deal more industriously than any one
+else in sight, soon overtook them, and while conscious of that touch of
+interested scorn always felt by the One towards the Herd, found relief
+in watching their vagaries, and presently in speaking to them.
+
+For she needed relief, poor Sarah Brown, her disabilities were catching
+her up; a hoarse contralto cough was reminding her of many doctors'
+warnings against manual work. She could feel, so to speak, the distant
+approaching tramp of that pain in her side under whose threat she had
+lived all her life. But there were seventy-five beans yet.
+
+The note of her hoe, a high note not quite true pitched, clamoured
+monotonously upon her brain. Three blisters and a half were persecuting
+her hands.
+
+"Let them blist," she said defiantly. "This row of beans was given me to
+hoe, and Death itself shall not take it from me."
+
+She could almost imagine she saw Death, waiting for her tactfully beyond
+the last bean. She had no sense of proportion. She was so very weary of
+having her life interrupted by her weakness that anything that she had
+begun to do always seemed to her worth finishing, even under torture. To
+finish every task, in spite of all hindrance, was her only ambition, but
+it was almost always frustrated.
+
+Seventy more beans. "Three score and ten," thought Sarah Brown. "What's
+that? Only a lifetime." She bent to her work.
+
+A great clump of buttercups bestrode her bean row, and as after a
+struggle she dragged its protesting roots from the earth, something fell
+from it.
+
+"Oh, a nest," she gasped. "Look, I have hoed up a nest."
+
+"Good gracious," exclaimed a fairy. "Look what she's done. It's
+Clement's nest, poor chap, he only married in February. Say, girls,
+here's Clement's semi-detached gone up."
+
+Cries of consternation were heard from every bean-row.
+
+Clement's nest was really almost more than semi-detached. It had been
+but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks. The two eggs in it were
+at once unseated, and one was broken. Sarah Brown was deeply distressed.
+
+"What a blind fool I am," she said, trying helplessly to replace the
+nest. "Won't Clement ever come back?"
+
+"Mrs. Clement won't," said the nearest fairy. "She is almost hysterical
+about the sanctity of the home, and all that. She'll probably get a
+divorce now."
+
+"Oh, poor Clement, poor Clement," said Sarah Brown. "Will he be terribly
+cut up?"
+
+"There he is," replied the fairy, pointing upward. "He's watching you.
+That's Clement's voice you hear."
+
+"Clement's voice," exclaimed Sarah Brown. "Singing like that? Why, he
+sounds perfectly happy."
+
+"Perfectly happy," mocked the fairy. "His family only sings like that
+when it's upset. Perfectly happy indeed! Can't you understand tragedy
+when you hear it?"
+
+Sarah Brown with despairing care tucked the nest up under a bean, and
+replaced the unbroken egg.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me, then," she said, after a busy painful pause,
+"that Shelley probably misunderstood that lark he wrote a poem about? He
+called it a blithe spirit, you know, because it sang. Do you suppose it
+wasn't one?"
+
+"Certainly not," said the fairy. "I don't know the actual facts of the
+case, but without a doubt your friend Shelley was standing on the
+unfortunate bird's nest all the time he was writing his poem."
+
+Sarah Brown, with a deep sigh, began hoeing again.
+
+Fifty beans yet.
+
+She had altogether ceased to find pleasure in the day. Pain is an
+extinguisher that can put out the sun. She had ceased to find pleasure
+in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no
+more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl. She was irritated by the fact
+that the cuckoo had only one song to sing. She tried not to hoe in time
+to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her. Her row of beans
+stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked
+along it the end seemed farther away. Every time she raised her hoe the
+sword of pain slipped under her guard.
+
+The Dog David, impatient of her unnatural taste in occupations, had
+forsaken her. She could trace his course by a moving ripple across the
+potato patch, just as a shark's movement seams the sea.
+
+Forty beans.
+
+Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors. Under the sun time
+stands almost still. Only when every minute is a physical effort do you
+discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one
+hour is very little nearer to the evening than another. People who work
+indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face.
+Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and
+when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over. We of Out of
+Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands
+are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and
+sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn
+before a blackbird's song is over. We know the length of days. And after
+many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with
+much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find
+them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.
+
+Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.
+
+"I can't hoe any more," she said. "There are twenty-five more beans, but
+I can't hoe them."
+
+"Why should you?" asked the nearest fairy indifferently. "The foreman
+never notices if we shirk. We always do."
+
+"I said I would hoe this row," said Sarah Brown. "But I am accursed. It
+is a good thing at least to know one's limitations."
+
+Even in affliction she was prosy.
+
+"I would advise you to go and have your dinner," another fairy said.
+"Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now. But I left a
+little lemonade in your bottle. Go under the trees and drink it."
+
+"I can't move," said Sarah Brown.
+
+"Sit there then," said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not
+uprooting the weeds in their rows. Fairies are never ill. They have
+immortal bodies, but no souls. If they see you in pain, they simply
+think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their
+faces.
+
+The dragon undulated up the field. "Very nicely hoed," he said, looking
+vaguely at Sarah Brown's row. "Much better than the other rows. Having
+your dinner? Quite right too."
+
+He never noticed the twenty-five unhoed beans.
+
+Sarah Brown sat on the edge of a shore of green shadow, and a sea of sun
+speckled with buttercups was before her. David Blessing came and leaned
+against her. His first intentions were good, he kissed her hurriedly on
+the chin, but after that he kissed the sandwich bag.
+
+Sarah Brown wondered whether she could cut her throat with a hoe.
+
+"Suicide while of sound mind," she said. "The said mind being entirely
+sick of its unsound body."
+
+If she sat absolutely still and upright the pain was bearable. But even
+to think of movement brought tears of pain to her eyes. She detached her
+mind from her predicament, and sank into a warm tropical sea of thought.
+She was no real thinker, but she thought much about thinking, and was
+passionately interested in watching her own mind at work. Thought was
+like sleep to her, she sank deeply into it without reaching anything
+profound, nothing resulted but useless dreams, and a certain comforting
+and defiant intimacy with herself.
+
+She thought of Richard, and wished that she could have hoed a blessing
+into every bean of his that she had hoed. She noted half-consciously and
+without surprise that the thought of him was beautiful to her. She
+could not conjure up his face before her mind, because she always forgot
+realities, and only remembered dreams. She could not imagine the sound
+of his voice, she could not recall anything that he had said. Yet she
+felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the
+things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never
+would happen, between him and her. All the best things that she
+remembered had only happened in her dreams, her imagination no sooner
+sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up for her great
+absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah Brown
+might thirst in vain. But there was no waking Sarah Brown. Her life was
+only a sleep-walking; only very rarely did she awake for a moment and
+feel ashamed to see how alert was the world about her.
+
+So she thought of Richard, not of Richard's Richard, but of some pale
+private Richard of her own.
+
+The approach of Richard upon a white horse for some time seemed only an
+extension of her dream. It was only when she realised that he was riding
+up her bean-row, and partially undoing the work of her hoe, that she
+awoke suddenly with a start, and caught and tore her breath upon a pin
+of pain.
+
+It seemed that the afternoon had now long possessed the fields, it had
+wakened into a live and electric blue the Enchanted Forest which she had
+last noticed shimmering in its noon green.
+
+All the workers at the approach of Richard were working busily, bent
+ostentatiously in the form of hairpins up and down their rows. The
+dragon was rippling anxiously along at the heels of the white horse; a
+helpless hoping for the best expressed itself in every spike along his
+spine.
+
+"I don't really know why she's idling like that," Sarah Brown heard him
+say in his breathy pathetic voice. "I left her hard at work. They're all
+the same when my back's turned. A fellow needs to have eyes at the tip
+of his tail."
+
+"Are you suffering from that Leverhulme six-hour-working-day sort of
+feeling?" asked Richard politely of Sarah Brown, in the manner of an
+advertisement of a cure for indigestion, as he approached. "I think it's
+just splendid how receptive and progressive working people are in these
+days."
+
+"I was meditating suicide," replied Sarah Brown candidly, if faintly. "I
+am a stricken and useless parasite on the face of your fine earth. But
+my hoe is too blunt."
+
+"I have a pocket-knife with three blades I could lend you," said
+Richard, slapping himself enquiringly over several pockets. "Or would
+you rather try a natty little spell I thought of this morning while I
+was shaving. I think any one stricken might find it rather useful."
+
+"Ah, give it to me. Give it to me," said Sarah Brown.
+
+The pain was like a wave breaking upon her, carrying her away from her
+safe shore of shadow, to be lost in seething and suffocating seas
+without rest. Her eyes felt dried up with fever, and whenever she shut
+them, the darkness was filled with a jumble of nauseating squares in
+blue upon a mustard-coloured background. The smell of beans was
+terrible.
+
+Richard fumbled with something very badly folded up in newspaper. He
+also tried ineffectively to light a match by wiping it helplessly
+against his riding breeches. He seemed to have none of the small skill
+in details that comes to most people before they grow up. He did
+everything as if he were doing it for the first time.
+
+"I had nothing but the _Morning Post_ to wrap it in," he murmured. "I'm
+afraid that may have spoilt the magic a little."
+
+It was the dragon finally who produced the necessary light. After
+watching Richard with the anxious sympathy of one ineffectual for
+another, it said: "Let me," and kindly breathed out a little flame,
+which set the packet aflare for a moment.
+
+The ashes fluttered down from Richard's hand among the beans, and a thin
+violet stalk of smoke went up.
+
+Sarah Brown smelt the unmistakable sour smell of magic, and saw
+soundless words moving Richard's little khaki moustache. Then she found
+that she had disappeared.
+
+She had never done this before, she had always been present to disturb
+and interrupt herself. She had never seen the world before, except
+through the little glazed peepholes, called eyes, through which her
+everyday self rather wistfully believed that it could see. Now, of
+course, she knew what seeing was, and for the first time she was aware
+of the real sizes of things. Poor man measures all things by the size of
+his own foot. He looks complacently at the print of his boot in the mud,
+and notices that the ant which he crushed was not nearly as big as his
+foot, therefore the ant does not matter to him. He also notices that
+those same feet of his would not be able to walk to the moon within a
+reasonable time, therefore the moon does not matter to him.
+
+But Sarah Brown had disappeared, and therefore could not measure
+anything. The spider strode from hill to hill, with the wind rushing
+through the hair on his back. The blue sky was just a lampshade, clipped
+on to the earth to shield it from the glare of the gods, beyond it was a
+mere roof of eternity, pricked with a few billion stars to keep it well
+ventilated.
+
+Sarah Brown had for a while all the fun of being a god. She was nowhere
+and she was everywhere. She could have counted the hairs on David's
+head. The world waved like a flower upon a thin purple stalk of
+smoke....
+
+Her eyes began to see again. She was aware, of the hollowed tired eyes
+of Richard fixed upon her. The dragon dawned once more upon her sight,
+it was inquisitively watching developments, while pretending to claw a
+weed or two out of a neighbouring bean-row.
+
+The horizon was rusty with a rather heavy sunset. The fields were full
+of twilight and empty of fairies.
+
+Sarah Brown came to herself with a start, she was shocked to find that
+she had opened her mouth to say something absolutely impossible to
+Richard. David's chin was resting on her hand. Her side felt frozen and
+dangerous but not painful.
+
+"It didn't altogether answer," said Richard. "I'm afraid the wrapping
+was a mistake. A spell of that strength ought to have set you dancing
+in three minutes. I'll take you home on my horse. His name is Vivian."
+
+The Horse Vivian, who was so white as to be almost phosphorescent in the
+dusk, was now further illuminated by a little red light on his breast,
+and a little green light on his tail. Richard was fond of making
+elaborate and unnecessary arrangements like this, while neglecting to
+acquire skill in the more usual handicrafts.
+
+Sarah Brown, a person of little weight, was placed astride on the back
+of the Horse Vivian. Richard walked beside. The dragon nodded good-bye,
+and disappeared into its home, a low tunnel-like barn, evidently built
+specially for it, with a door at each end, and a conveniently placed
+chimney which enabled it to breathe enough fire to cook its meals
+without suffocating itself.
+
+Sarah Brown never saw the dragon again, but it stayed always in her
+memory as a puzzled soul born tragically out of its time, a shorn lamb,
+so to speak, to whom the wind had not been sufficiently tempered.
+
+Now this ride home, through the Enchanted Forest, on a tall horse, with
+Richard walking beside her, was the most perfect hour of Sarah Brown's
+life.
+
+The Enchanted Forest is only an accumulation of dreams, and from every
+traveller through it it exacts toll in the shape of a dream. By way of
+receipt, to every traveller it gives a darling memory that neither death
+nor hell nor paradise can efface.
+
+Sarah Brown knew that her dream and Richard's could never meet. The fact
+that he was thinking of some one else all the way home was not hidden
+from her. But she was a person used to living alone, she could enjoy
+quite lonely romances, and never even envy real women, whose romances
+were always made for two. She was not a real woman, she was morbidly
+bodiless. Strange though it may seem, the kind, awkward, absent-minded
+touch of Richard as he had lifted her on to the Horse Vivian's back had
+been for her the one flaw in that enchanted ride. She could not bear
+touch. She had no pleasure in seeing or feeling the skin and homespun
+that encloses men and women. She hated to watch people feeding
+themselves, or to see her own thin body in the mirror. She ought really
+to have been born a poplar tree; a human body was a gift wasted on her.
+
+As they passed along the Green Ride, the red light from the Horse
+Vivian's neck made a sort of heralding ghost before them on the grass.
+Bats darted above them for a few yards at a time, and were twitched
+aside as though by a string or a reminding conscience. The telegraph
+wires, bound for the post office of Faery, run through the Enchanted
+Forest, and the poles in the faint light were like tall crucifixes. A
+long way off, through the opening at the end of the Forest, were the
+little lights of Mitten Island.
+
+"Do you know," said Richard--and this is unfortunately the sort of thing
+that young men do say at silent and enchanted moments--"that if all the
+magic in this Forest were collected together and compressed into a
+liquid form, it would be enough to stop the War in one moment?"
+
+"My hat!" said Sarah Brown. "In one moment?"
+
+"In one moment."
+
+"My hat!" said Sarah Brown.
+
+"The powers of magic haven't been anything like thoroughly estimated
+even yet," said Richard.
+
+"I suppose the War was made by black magic," suggested Sarah Brown,
+trying to talk intelligently and to be faithful to her own thoughts at
+the same time.
+
+"Good Lord, no," replied Richard. "The worst of this war is that it has
+nothing whatever to do with magic of any sort. It was made and is
+supported by men who had forgotten magic, it is the result of the coming
+to an end of a spell. Haven't you noticed that a spell came to an end at
+the beginning of the last century? Why, doesn't almost every one see
+something lacking about the Victorian age?"
+
+"Something certainly died with Keats and Shelley," sighed Sarah Brown.
+
+"Oh well," said Richard, "I don't know about books. I can't read, you
+know. But obviously what was wrong with the last century was just that
+it didn't believe in fairies."
+
+"Does this century believe in fairies? If the spell came to an end, how
+is it that we are so magic now?"
+
+"This century knows that it doesn't know everything," said Richard. "And
+as for spells--we have started a new spell. That's the curious part of
+this War. So gross and so impossible and so unmagic was its cause, that
+magic, which had been virtually dead, rose again to meet it. The worse a
+world grows, the greater will magic grow to save it. Magic only dies in
+a tepid world. I think there is now more magic in the world than ever
+before. The soil of France is alive with it, and as for Belgium--when
+Belgium gets back home at last she will find her desecrated house
+enchanted.... And the same applies to all the thresholds in the world
+which fighting-men have crossed and will never cross again, except in
+the dreams of their friends. That sort of austere and secret magic, like
+a word known by all and spoken by none, is pretty nearly all that is
+left to keep the world alive now...."
+
+Richard seemed to be becoming less and less of a man and more and more
+of a wizard the farther he penetrated into the Enchanted Forest. He was
+saying things that would have embarrassed him very much had they been
+said in the Piccadilly Restaurant, even after three glasses of
+champagne. For this reason, although the borders of the Enchanted Forest
+are said to be widening, it is to be hoped that they will not encroach
+beyond the confines of the Parish of Faery. What would happen if its
+trees began to seed themselves in the Strand? Imagine the Stock Exchange
+under the shadow of an enchanted oak, and the consequent disastrous
+wearing thin of the metal casing in which all good business men keep
+their souls.
+
+Sarah Brown thought if rather a curious coincidence that so soon after
+they had spoken of the dead Keats they should see him alive. They saw
+him framed in a little pale aisle of the Forest, a faintly defined
+fragile ghost, crouched against the trunk of a tree, bent awkwardly into
+an attitude of pain forgotten and ecstatic attention. It was his dearest
+moment that they saw, a moment without death. For he was a prisoner in
+a perfect spell; he was utterly entangled in the looped and ensnaring
+song of a nightingale. The song was like beaten gold wire. Never again
+in her life did Sarah Brown profane with her poor voice the words that a
+perfect singer begot in a marriage with a perfect song. But in
+unhappiness, and in the horrible nights, the song came to her,
+always....
+
+The travellers were approaching the end of the Green Ride, but that did
+not matter to Sarah Brown, for there had been nothing lacking all the
+way.
+
+"Love----," began Richard in a loud exalted voice, and then suddenly a
+searchlight glared diagonally across the end of the Ride, over Mitten
+Island, and quenched the magic of the moment.
+
+"Sorry," said Richard. "I thought I was talking to my True Love."
+
+"I'm sorry you weren't," said Sarah Brown, as they emerged from the
+Forest. "I mean, I'm sorry it was only me you were talking to."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE REGRETTABLE WEDNESDAY
+
+
+"What a very singular thing," said the Mayor, meeting the witch
+towards three o'clock in the afternoon, as she came down the Broad Walk
+towards Kensington, having slept invisibly among the daffodils for
+nearly twelve hours. "A really very singular thing. 'Tisn't once in five
+years I visit these parts, and now I'm here I meet the very person I was
+thinkin' about." He winked.
+
+"It's almost like magic, isn't it," said the witch, winking busily in
+return.
+
+"Well, I've done what you told me to," said the Mayor.
+
+"What was that?"
+
+"You will 'ave your joke," he retorted indulgently. "Pretending not to
+know, indeed. I've done what you told me the other day when you came to
+that committee with your cat. I thought it over--I'm not a proud man,
+never above takin' a hint,--and I admitted to meself that what you
+said was fair about makin' money. Some'ow I never thought but what money
+was the first thing to make in business. To tell you the truth, I always
+thought it rather a feather in my cap that I never took advantage of
+Brown Borough customers in selling adulterated goods, for--Lawdy--they'd
+swallow anythink. It's different with your business, bein' in an
+'igher-class locality. 'Igh prices, I thought, was only natural. Make
+'ay while the sun shines was my motter, and I says to meself there was
+no reason why this war should make _everyone_ un'appy. As for lookin' at
+the grocery business as a trust from God, like you said, I never dremp
+of such a thing, although I've bin to Chapel regular for ten years. But
+I see now there was a lot in what you said, and when I come to think of
+it, there was no need to make such a terrible lot of extra hay, 'owever
+much the sun might be shinin'. When you put it like that, I couldn't say
+why I was so set on more money, 'aving quite enough. Well, I says to
+meself, after shutting meself up to think it out, like you said, 'ere
+am I giving up all my life an' all my jolly days an' 'olidays, an' I'm
+damned if I know what for. For money,--just money stewin' in its own
+juice in a bank,--not money I can use. Well, everybody's trained so, I'm
+thinkin'. Anyway I took it friendly of you to put it so delicate, so
+fanciful as you did, so as them charity ladies didn't smell a rat. I
+appreciated that, an' thought the more of what you said. I'm not a proud
+man."
+
+"You're just proud enough," said the witch. "You're a darling. If ever I
+can help you in a business way, let me know. If you want to start a side
+line, for instance, in Happiness, I can give you a tip where to get it
+wholesale, within limits. It'd go like wildfire in the Brown Borough, if
+you put in an ounce or two, gratis of course, with every order."
+
+"You will 'ave your joke," murmured the Mayor. "But I like it in you.
+I'm a man that never takes a joke amiss. Let's go for a walk together."
+
+"No," said the witch. "I am so hungry that my ribs are beginning to bend
+inwards. I must go and have sausages and mash and two apple dumplings."
+
+They found themselves presently seated at the marble-topped table of an
+A.B.C. After an interval that could hardly be accurately described as
+presently, sausages and mash dawned on the horizon, and the witch waved
+her fork rudely at it as it approached.
+
+"Mashed is splendid stuff to sculp with," she said, roughing in a ground
+plan upon her plate with the sure carelessness of the artist. "This is
+going to be an ivory castle built upon a rock in a glassy sea. The
+sausage is the dragon guarding it, and this little crumb of bread is the
+emprisoned princess, a dull but sterling creature----"
+
+"Look 'ere, Miss Watkins," interrupted the Mayor. "I'm not as a rule an
+impulsive man, and I don't want to startle you----"
+
+"How d'you mean startle me?" asked the witch. "You haven't startled me
+at all. But the fact is, I never have been much of a person for getting
+married, thank you very much. I'm an awful bad house-keeper. And I _do_
+so much enjoy having no money."
+
+"Well, I'm blessed," exclaimed the Mayor. "You're a perfect witch, I
+declare." He laid a large meat-like hand upon hers. "But you know, you
+can't put the lid on me so easy as that. Ever since you came into that
+old committee room I saw there was something particular about you,
+something that you an' me 'ad in common. I'm not speakin' so much of us
+bein' in the same line of business. Some'ow--oh, 'ang it all, let's get
+out of this and take a taxi. I'm not a kissing man, but----"
+
+He seemed very persistent in applying negatived adjectives to himself.
+It was not his fault if the world failed to grasp exactly what he was,
+or rather exactly what he was not.
+
+"I have often wondered," interrupted the witch, "talking of
+kissing--what would happen if two snipes wanted to kiss each other? It
+would have to be at such awfully long range, wouldn't it. Or----"
+
+"Come off it," ordered the Mayor irritably. "What about gettin' out of
+this and----"
+
+"Don't you think this is becoming rather a tiresome scene?" said the
+witch. "Somehow over luscious, don't you think? I wish those apple
+dumplings would hurry up."
+
+"'Ere, miss," said the Mayor ungraciously to a passing whirlwind. "'Urry
+them dumplings."
+
+"'Urry them dumplings," echoed the whirlwind to a little hole in the
+wall.
+
+The witch had a silly vision of two distressed dumplings, like dilatory
+chorus girls, mad with the nightmare feeling of not being dressed in
+time, hearing their cue called in a heartless voice from the inexorable
+sky, desperately applying the last dab of flour to their imperfect
+complexions. But the witch found no fault with them when they came. She
+gave them her whole attention for some minutes.
+
+"Well, well," she said, laying down her fork and spoon, "that's good. I
+feel awfully grown-up, having had a proposal. When real girls ask me now
+how many I've had, I shall be able to say One. But I met a girl the
+other day who had had six. She had six photographs, but she called them
+scalps. If you would give me your photograph I could label it A Scalp,
+and hang it in the Shop. That would be very grown-up, wouldn't it?"
+
+"You will 'ave your joke," said the Mayor in a hollow voice. "I never
+met such a gurl as you for a bit of fun. I don't believe you've got any
+'eart."
+
+There, of course, he was right. A heart is a sort of degree conferred by
+Providence on those who have passed a certain examination. Magic people
+are only freshmen in our college, and it is useless for us--secure in
+the possession of many learned letters after our names--to despise them.
+They will become sophisticated in due course.
+
+"How d'you mean--heart?" asked the witch therefore. "I've still got an
+awful hunger inside me, if that's anything to do with it. I'll tell you
+what. It's Wednesday. Let's go and call on Miss Ford. She might have
+grassy sandwiches."
+
+There was a most abrupt and disturbing draught in Miss Ford's sleek and
+decorous flat as the witch and the Mayor entered it. The serenity of the
+night and the morning had been suddenly obliterated, and Kensington
+suffered a gust or two of gritty wind which blew the babies home from
+the Gardens, and kept all the window-gazers in the High Street on the
+alert with their fingers on the triggers of their umbrellas.
+
+But no rain fell. Rain cannot fall in this book of fine weather.
+
+The draught that intruded into the flat ruffled the neat hair of five
+persons, Miss Ford herself, Lady Arabel Higgins, Miss Ivy MacBee, Mr.
+Bernard Tovey, and Mr. Darnby Frere.
+
+Miss MacBee always seemed to be seated on tenterhooks, even in the most
+comfortable of chairs. Her Spartan spine never consented graciously to
+the curves of cushions. She had smooth padded hair and smooth padded
+manners, and her eyes were magnified by thick pince-nez to a cow-like
+size. Most people, especially most women, were instinctively sorry for
+her, because she always looked a little clever and very uncomfortable.
+
+Mr. Bernard Tovey was a blunt-nosed beaming person. He leaned forward
+abruptly whenever he spoke, thereby swinging a lock of hair into his
+right eye. He agreed so heartily with everything that was said that
+people who addressed him were left with the happy impression that they
+had said something Rather Good. This habit, combined with the fact that
+he never launched an independent remark, had given him the reputation of
+being one of the best talkers in Kensington.
+
+Mr. Darnby Frere was the editor of an advanced religious paper called _I
+Wonder_, but he never wondered really. He knew almost everything, and
+therefore, while despising the public for knowing so little, he
+encouraged it to continue wondering, so that he might continue despising
+and instructing it.
+
+Now it was an almost unprecedented thing for two members of the small
+trades-man class to come into Miss Ford's drawing-room, especially on a
+Wednesday. The utmost social mingling of the classes that those walls
+had ever seen was the moment when Miss Ford asked the electric light man
+what he thought of the war. The electric light man's reply had been
+quoted in the dialect on two or three of the following Wednesdays, as a
+proof of Miss Ford's daring intimacy with men in Another Station of
+Life. Really it would have been simpler, though of course not so
+picturesque, to have quoted it direct from its original source, _John
+Bull_, the electric light man's Bible.
+
+The entrance of the witch and the Mayor was to a certain extent a
+crisis, but Miss Ford kept her head, and her three friends, though
+grasping at once the extraordinary situation, did not give way to panic.
+
+"Well, well, well," said the Mayor, looking round and breathing very
+loudly. "This is a cosy little nook you've got 'ere."
+
+He was not at all at his ease, but being a business man, and being also
+blessed with a peculiarly inexpressive face, he was successfully
+dissembling his discomfort.
+
+For it had happened that the lift had been one of those lifts that can
+do no wrong, the kind that the public is indulgently allowed to work by
+itself. And the Mayor, looking upon this fact as specially planned by a
+propitious god of love, had tried to kiss the witch as they shot up the
+darkened shaft. If I remind you that the witch was still accompanied by
+her broomstick, Harold, a creature of unreasoning fidelity, I need
+hardly describe the scene further. The Mayor stepped out of the lift
+with a tingling scraped face, and if he had possessed enough hair on his
+head, it would have been on end. As it was, when the lift stopped, he
+retrieved his hat from the floor with a frank oath, and, as the witch
+had at once rung the bell of Miss Ford's flat, he instinctively followed
+her across that threshold.
+
+She looked round in the hall, and said with a friendly smile: "I'm
+afraid Harold gets a bit irritable sometimes. I often tell him to count
+ten before he lets himself go, but he forgets. Did he hurt you?"
+
+I am afraid the angry Mayor did not give Harold credit for much
+initiative.
+
+"Kissing is such a funny habit, isn't it," said the witch briskly as she
+shook Miss Ford's hand. "I wonder who decided in the first place which
+forms of contact should express which forms of emotion. I wonder----"
+
+She interrupted herself as her eyes fell on some green sandwiches which
+were occupying the third floor of a wicker Eiffel Tower beside Miss
+Ford. "Oh how gorgeous," she said. "Do you know, I've only had two meals
+in the last two days."
+
+Nobody present had ever been obliged to miss a meal, so this statement
+seemed to every one to be a message from another world.
+
+"You must tell us about all your experiences, my dear Miss Watkins,"
+said Miss Ford, leading the witch towards a chair by the fire. The witch
+sat down suddenly cross-legged on the hearth-rug, leaving her rather
+embarrassed hostess in the air, so to speak, towering rigidly above her.
+
+"How d'you mean--experiences?" said the witch, after eating one sandwich
+in silent ecstasy. "I was up in the sky last night, talking to a German.
+Was that an experience?"
+
+"The sky last night was surely no place for a lady," said Mr. Frere with
+rather sour joviality.
+
+"Oh, I know what she means," said Miss MacBee earnestly. "I was up in
+the sky last night too----"
+
+"Great Scott," exclaimed the witch. "But----"
+
+"Yes, I was," persisted Miss MacBee. "I lay on the hammock which I have
+had slung in my cellar, and shut my eyes, and loosed my spirit, and it
+shot upward like a lark released. It detached itself from the common
+trammels of the body, yes, my spirit, in shining armour, fought with the
+false, cruel spirits of murderers."
+
+"I hadn't got any shining armour," sighed the witch, who had been
+looking a little puzzled. "But I had the hell of a wrangle with a Boche
+witch who came over. We fought till we fell off our broomsticks, and
+then she quoted the _Daily Mail_ at me, and then she fell through a hole
+and broke her back over the cross on St. Paul's."
+
+It was Miss MacBee's turn to look puzzled, but she said to Miss Ford:
+"My dear, you have brought us a real mystic."
+
+Mr. Frere, though emitting an applauding murmur, leaned back and fixed
+his face in the ambiguous expression of one who, while listening with
+interest to the conversation of liars, is determined not to appear
+deceived.
+
+"How d'you mean--mystic?" asked the witch. "I don't think I can have
+made myself clear. Excuse me," she added to Miss Ford, "but this room
+smells awfully clever to any one coming in from outside. Do you mind if
+I dance a little, to move the air about?"
+
+"We shall be delighted," said Miss Ford indulgently. "Shall I play for
+you?"
+
+The witch did not answer; she rose, and as she rose she threw a little
+white paper packet into the fire. She danced round the sofa and the
+chairs. The floor shook a little, and all her watchers twisted their
+necks gravely, like lizards watching an active fly.
+
+The parlour-maid, by appearing in the doorway with an inaudible
+announcement, diverted their attention, though she did not interrupt the
+witch's exercises.
+
+A very respectable-looking man came in. Darnby Frere, who was a student
+of Henry James's works, and therefore constantly made elaborate guesses
+on matters that did not concern him, and then forgot them
+because--unlike Mr. James's guesses--they were always wrong, gave the
+newcomer credit for being perhaps a shopwalker, or perhaps a
+South-Eastern and Chatham ticket-collector, but surely a chapel-goer.
+
+At any rate the stranger looked ill at ease, and especially disconcerted
+by the sight of the dancing witch.
+
+Miss Ford realised by now that her Wednesday had for some reason gone
+mad. She had lost her hold on the reins of that usually dignified
+equipage; there was nothing now for her to do but to grip tight and keep
+her head.
+
+She therefore concealed her ignorance of her newest guest's identity,
+she stiffened her lips and poured out another cup of tea with a
+nerveless hand. The stranger took the cup of tea with some relief, and
+said: "Thenk you, meddem."
+
+The witch stopped dancing, and stood in front of the newcomer's chair.
+
+"I think yours must be a discouraging job," she said to him. "Getting
+people punished for doing things you'd love to do yourself. Oh, awfully
+discouraging. And do tell me, there's a little problem that's been on my
+mind ever since the war started. I hear that Hindenburg says the German
+Army intends to march through London the moment it can brush away the
+obstacles in front of it. Have you considered what will happen to the
+traffic, because you know Germans on principle march on the wrong side
+of the street--indeed everybody in the world does, except the
+conscientious British. Think of the knotted convulsions of traffic at
+the Bank, with a hundred thousand Boches goose-stepping on the wrong
+side of the road--think of poor thin Fleet Street, and the dam that
+would occur in Piccadilly Circus. What do you policemen intend to do
+about it?"
+
+"I don't know I'm sure, miss," said the newcomer coldly. "It's a long
+time since I was on point duty. I'm a plain clothes man, meddem," he
+added to Miss Ford. "I'm afraid I'm intruding on your tea-party, owing
+to your maid misunderstanding my business. But being 'ere, I 'ope you'll
+excuse me stating what I've come for."
+
+"Oh certainly, certainly," said Miss Ford, who was staring vaguely into
+the fireplace. A rather fascinating thread of lilac smoke was spinning
+itself out of the ashes of the little white paper packet.
+
+"The names of the Mayor of the Brown Borough, Miss Meter Mostyn Ford,
+and Lady A. 'Iggins--all of 'oom I understand from the maid are
+present--'ave been mentioned as being presoomably willing to give
+information likely to be 'elpful in the search for a suspicious
+cherecter 'oo is believed to 'ave intruded on a cheritable meeting, at
+which you were present last Seturday, in order to escape arrest, 'aving
+just perpetrated a petty theft from a baker, 'Ermann Schwab. The
+cherecter is charged now with a more important offence, being in
+possession of an armed flying machine, in defiance of the Defence of the
+Realm Act, and interfering with the work of 'Is Majesty's Forces during
+enemy attack. The cherecter is believed to be a man in female disguise,
+but enquiry up to date 'as failed to get any useful description. You
+ladies and gents, I understand, should be able to 'elp the Law in this
+metter."
+
+There was a stunned silence in the room, broken only by the pastoral
+sound of the witch eating grassy sandwiches. After a moment Miss Ford,
+the Mayor, and Lady Arabel all began speaking at once, and each stopped
+with a look of relief on hearing that some one else was ready to take
+the responsibility of speaking.
+
+Then the witch began with her mouth full: "You know----," but Lady
+Arabel interrupted her.
+
+"Angela dear, be silent. This does not concern you. Of course,
+inspector, we're all only too dretfully anxious to do anything to help
+the Law, but you must specify the occasion more exactly. Our committee
+sees so many applicants."
+
+"You are Lady A. 'Iggins, I believe," said the policeman impassively.
+"Well, my lady, may I ask you whether you are aware thet the cherecter
+in question was seen to leave your 'ouse last night, at nine forty-five
+P.M., after the warning of approaching enemy atteck was given, and to
+disappear in an easterly direction, on a miniature 'eavier than air
+machine, make and number unknown?"
+
+The threads of curious smoke in the fireplace were increasing. They
+shivered as though with laughter, and flowed like crimped hair up the
+chimney.
+
+"I had a dinner-party last night certainly," stammered Lady Arabel. A
+trembling seized the sock she was knitting. She had turned the heel some
+time ago, but in the present stress had forgotten all about the toe. The
+prolonged sock grew every minute more and more like a drain-pipe with a
+bend in it. "Why yes, of course I had a dinner-party; why shouldn't I?
+My son Rrchud, a private in the London Rifles, this young lady, Miss
+Angela--er--, and her friend--such a good quiet creature...."
+
+"And 'oo else was in the 'ouse?" asked the policeman, glancing haughtily
+at the witch.
+
+"Oh nobody, nobody. The servants all gave notice and left--too dretfully
+tahsome how they can't stand Rrchud and his ways. Of course there was
+the orchestra--twenty-five pieces--but _so_ dependable."
+
+"Dependable," said the witch, "is a mystery word to me. I can't think
+how it got into the English language without being right. Surely
+Depend-on-able----"
+
+"Your son 'as peculiar ways, you say, my lady," interrupted the
+policeman.
+
+"Oh, nothing to speak of," answered Lady Arabel, wincing. "Merely
+lighthearted ... too dretfully Bohemian ... ingenious, you know, in
+making experiments ... magnetism...."
+
+"Experiments in Magnetism," spelt the policeman aloud into his notebook.
+"And 'oo left your 'ouse at nine forty-five P.M. last night?"
+
+"I did," said the witch.
+
+The policeman withered her once more with a glance.
+
+"Lady 'Iggins, did you say your son left your 'ouse at nine forty-five
+P.M. last night?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"Thenk you, my lady."
+
+"You seem to me dretfully impertinent," said Lady Arabel. "This is not a
+court of law. My son Rrchud left the house with me and our guest to seek
+shelter from the raid."
+
+"Thenk you, my lady," repeated the policeman coldly, and turned to Miss
+Ford.
+
+"Could you identify the cherecter 'oo came into your committee room last
+Seturday?" he asked of her.
+
+"No," she replied.
+
+"Couldn't you say whether it seemed like a male or a female in disguise?
+Couldn't you mention any physical pecooliarity that struck you?"
+
+"No," said Miss Ford.
+
+"'Ave you no memory of last Seturday night?"
+
+"No," said Miss Ford.
+
+"I have," said the witch.
+
+The policeman bridled. "I was addressing this 'ere lady, Miss M.M. Ford.
+Can you at least tell me, meddem, 'ow long you and the 'Iggins family
+'ave been acquainted?"
+
+"No," said Miss Ford.
+
+"Eighteen years," said Lady Arabel.
+
+The fumes from the fireplace were very strong indeed, but nobody called
+attention to them.
+
+"I'm sorry, ..." said Miss Ford presently, very slowly, "that ... I ...
+can't help you. I have ... been having ... nerve-storms ... since ...
+last ... Saturday...."
+
+The policeman fixed his ominous gaze upon her for quite a minute before
+he wrote something in his notebook.
+
+"Is Private Richard 'Iggins in town to-night?" he asked of Lady Arabel
+in a casual voice.
+
+"I suppose so," she replied. "But he has such a dretful habit of
+disappearing...."
+
+The policeman turned to the Mayor.
+
+"Now, sir," he said. "Could you help me at all in----"
+
+"Look here," said the witch, rising. "If you would only come along to my
+house in Mitten Island I can truly give you all the information you
+need. In fact, won't you come to supper with me? If some one will kindly
+lend me half-a-crown I will go on ahead and cook something."
+
+Mr. Tovey mechanically produced a coin.
+
+"Here, Harold," called the witch, and holding Harold's collar she
+stepped out on to the balcony, mounted, and flew away.
+
+She left a room full of noise behind her.
+
+The policeman, who was intoxicated with the strange fumes, said: "Hell.
+Hell. Hell."
+
+Lady Arabel called in vain: "Angela, Angela, don't be so dretfully
+rash."
+
+Mr. Tovey, now afflicted with a lock of hair in each eye, seized the
+policeman by the shoulder thinking to prevent him from jumping out of
+the window. "You fool," he shouted.
+
+The Mayor slapped his thigh with a loud report. "Lawdy," he yelled.
+"She's a sport. She will 'ave 'er joke."
+
+Miss MacBee laughed hysterically and very loudly.
+
+Mr. Darnby Frere said "My word" rather cautiously several times, and
+rubbed the bridge of his nose. He rather thought everybody was pulling
+his leg, but could not be sure.
+
+Only Miss Ford sat silent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE HOUSE OF LIVING ALONE MOVES AWAY
+
+
+When Sarah Brown and Richard, followed by the Dog David, reached the
+Mitten Island Ferry, after travelling slowly by moonlight, they were
+surprised to see a great crowd of people banked up on the Island, and
+one man in the uniform of a policeman, standing alone on the mainland.
+About ten yards from land the ferryman sat in his boat, rowing gently to
+keep himself stationary in the current.
+
+"You'll 'ave to come to shore now," said the policeman, in the tone of
+one exhausted by long argument. "'Ere's some more parties wanting to
+cross." He turned to Richard. "Look 'ere, mate," he said. "I'm 'ere in
+the discharge of my dooty, and this ferryman is obstructin' me."
+
+"Deah, deah," said Richard.
+
+The ferryman said: "If the King of England--why, if the two ghosts of
+Queen Victoria and Albert the Good--was waiting to cross now, I
+wouldn't come in for them, not if it was going to give you a chance to
+set foot on Mitten Island."
+
+The crowd across the river, divining that a climax of defiance was being
+reached, shouted: "Yah, yah," in unison.
+
+"Is either of you parties an 'ouse'older on Mitten Island?" asked the
+policeman of Sarah Brown and Richard.
+
+"I am," said Richard, to his companion's surprise.
+
+"Can you give me any information regarding the whereabouts of a
+cherecter known under any of these names: Iris 'Yde, T.B. Watkins,
+Hangela the Witch, possibly a male in female disguise, believed to
+conduct a general shop and boardin' 'ouse on Mitten Island?"
+
+"There is only one shop on Mitten Island," said Richard. "And one
+boarding house. All in one. I own it. I can recite you the prospectus if
+you like. I have a superintendent there. I have known her all my life. I
+did not know she was believed to be a male in female disguise. I did not
+know she had any name at all, let alone half-a-dozen."
+
+The policeman seemed to be troubled all the time by mosquitoes. He
+slapped his face and his ears and the back of his neck. He succeeded in
+killing one insect upon the bridge of his nose, and left it there by
+mistake, a strangely ignoble corpse. Sarah Brown suspected Richard of
+some responsibility for this untimely persecution.
+
+"That party is charged with an offence against the Defence of the Realm
+Act," said the policeman,--"with being, although a civilian, in
+possession of a flying machine, and--er--obstructin' 'Is Majesty's
+enemies in the performance of their dooty."
+
+"Oh deah, deah," said Richard. "Deah, deah, deah...."
+
+"Do either of you know the present whereabouts of the party?" persisted
+the policeman. Attacked on every side by insects, he was becoming rather
+pathetic in his discomfort and indignity. His small eyes, set in red
+fat, stared with uncomprehending protest; his fat busy hands were not
+agile enough to defend him. He felt unsuccessful and foolish, and very
+near the ground. He wished quite disproportionately to be at home with
+his admiring wife in Acton.
+
+Sarah Brown shook her head in reply, and Richard could say nothing but
+"Oh deah, deah...."
+
+"May I take your name and 'ome address, and regimental number, please,
+young man," said the policeman, after a baffled pause.
+
+"Now my address," said Richard, with genuine shame, "is a thing I
+honestly can never remember. I know I've heard it; I've tried and tried
+to learn it at my mother's knee. It begins with an H, I think. That's
+the worst of not being able to read or write. I can describe the place
+to you exactly, a house with a lot of windows, that sees a long way. If
+you turn your back on the Marble Arch, and go on till you get to a big
+poster saying Eat Less Meat, and then turn to your right--(pointing to
+the left)--or again, if you go by air as the crow flies--or rather as
+the witch flies----"
+
+"You shall 'ear of this foolery, my fine feller," said the distressed
+policeman, almost with a break in his voice. "Seein' as 'ow you refuse
+information, an' this ferryman thinks fit to defy the law, I 'ave no
+course open but to whistle for my mate, and leave 'im 'ere while I
+telephone for a police-boat."
+
+He raised his whistle to his lips, but before he could blow it, the
+climax of this the least successful evening of his life, overwhelmed
+him. A shadow swept over the party, a large flying substance caught him
+full on the back of the neck and knocked him off the landing-stage into
+the river.
+
+The witch on Harold her Broomstick landed on the spot vacated by the
+policeman.
+
+"Oh, look what I've done, look what I've done ..." she exclaimed in an
+ecstasy of vexation. There was no need to tell anybody to look. Five
+hundred odd people were already doing so with enthusiasm. "Oh, what a
+dreadfully bad landing! Oh, Harold, how could you be so careless?"
+
+She took the cringing Harold by the mane and slapped him violently once
+or twice. Richard stretched out his riding-crop to the splashing
+policeman, murmuring: "Oh deah, deah...."
+
+"Don't be frightened," said the witch to the policeman. "We'll soon get
+you out, and the water's so shallow you can't sink. Talking of sinking,
+Richard, there's a question that puzzles me rather. If a rat got on to a
+submarine, how would it behave? A submarine, you see, is a sinking ship,
+and rats pride themselves so on knowing when to----"
+
+Sarah Brown seized the witch by the shoulder. "Go away, witch," she
+said.
+
+"How d'you mean--go away?" asked the witch. "I've only just this minute
+come."
+
+"Go away, go away," was all that Sarah Brown could manage to repeat.
+
+"Oh, very well," said the witch in her offended grown-up voice. "I can
+take a hint, I suppose, as well as anybody. I'm going."
+
+She seated herself with an irritable flouncing movement on Harold's
+saddle, and flew away.
+
+The policeman climbed out of the water, looking like an enraged seal.
+Peals of laughter from the other side of the moonlit river robbed him of
+adequate words.
+
+"Not ser fast, my fine feller," he roared, seeing Richard kissing the
+Horse Vivian on the nose, preparatory to riding away. "Don't you think
+for a minute I don't know 'oo's at the bottom of this."
+
+"You don't know how tired I am of loud noises," said Richard, lifting
+one foot with dignity to the stirrup. "You don't know how bitterly I
+long to be still and hear things very far off ... but always there is an
+angry voice or the angry noise of guns in the way...."
+
+He twined one finger negligently into the mane on the Horse Vivian's
+neck, and pulled himself slowly into the saddle. The policeman stood
+mysteriously impotent. Water dripped loudly from his clothes and
+punctuated Richard's quiet speech.
+
+"Dear policeman," continued Richard. "I believe you have talked so much
+to-night that you haven't heard what a quiet night it is. You are
+smaller than a star, and yet you make more noise than all the stars
+together. You are not so cold as the moon, and yet your teeth chatter
+more loudly than hers. The heat of your wrath is less than the heat of
+the sun, and yet, while he is silent and departed, you fill the air with
+clamour, and--if I may say so--seem to be outstaying your welcome. Oh,
+dear policeman, listen.... Do you know, if there were no London on this
+side and no War on that, the silence would be deep enough to fill all
+the seas of all the worlds...."
+
+He shook the reins, and the Horse Vivian moved, treading quietly on the
+strip of grass that borders the path to the ferry.
+
+"I am going to talk to my True Love now," said Richard, his voice fading
+away as he rode. "My True Love's voice is the only voice that is a
+little more beautiful to me than silence...."
+
+For a moment he looked every inch a wizard. Every button on his uniform
+and every buckle on the Horse Vivian's harness caught the moonlight, and
+changed into faery spangles as he turned and waved his hand before
+disappearing.
+
+The policeman seemed quieted, as he looked at Sarah Brown sitting, white
+and haggard with pain, on the river bank, with her arm round the
+shivering David.
+
+"In a minute, in a minute, my One," she was saying to David. "We are
+nearly home now. We shall soon be quiet now."
+
+There was always something startlingly inoffensive about Sarah Brown's
+appearance.
+
+"I'd like to know 'oo was responsible for this houtrage, all the same,"
+said the policeman.
+
+Sarah Brown did not hear him, but she said: "Oh, I am so very sorry it
+happened. It was a pure accident, of course, but it is so terrible to
+see any one have an accident to his dignity. You must forget it quickly,
+you must run and find someone who knows you at your best, you must tell
+her a fine revised version of the incident, and then you will feel
+better."
+
+The ferryman shouted: "I don't mind coming in now to fetch this young
+woman. You can come too now if you like, Mr. Pompous-in-the-Pond, for
+the party you're looking for is not at home, and I've no doubt but what
+that crowd over there will give you a gay welcome."
+
+"I'll look into the metter to-morrer," said the policeman. "You 'aven't
+'eard the last of this, none of you 'aven't, not by a long chalk. I've a
+good mind to get the Mayor to read the Riot Act at you."
+
+As Sarah Brown landed on Mitten Island she could not distinguish the
+faces of the waiting crowd, but she heard sharp anxious voices.
+
+"They ain't goin' to get 'er, not if I knows it."
+
+"She never speaks but kindness, the dear lamb."
+
+"She's more of a saint than any in the Calendar."
+
+"She gave my Danny a room in 'er house, and put 'eart into 'im after 'e
+lost 'is sight in the War."
+
+"She's the good fairy of the Island."
+
+"She grew all them Sweet Williams in my garden in one night, when I
+first come 'ere and was 'omesick for Devon."
+
+"The law's always after saints and fairies, always 'as bin."
+
+"But the law can't catch 'er."
+
+"The law has driven her away," said Sarah Brown. "There is no magic now
+on Mitten Island."
+
+She staggered through the open door of the Shop. "This is Richard's
+house," she said to herself as she entered, and felt doubly alone
+because Richard was far away, riding to his True Love. She struck her
+last match, lit the lantern, and looked round. There was no sound in the
+house of Living Alone, she thought there would never again be any magic
+sound there to penetrate to her imprisoned hearing. The aprons hanging
+from the ceiling near the door flapped in the cold wind, and she thought
+they were like grey bats in a cave. The breeze blew out the open
+lantern. Ah, how desolate, how desolate....
+
+A piece of paper was impaled upon the counter by means of a headless
+hatpin. There was something very largely and badly written on it. Sarah
+Brown read: "Well Soup it looks like my Night's come and what dyou think
+Sherry's come too. Im an me as gone off to a place e knows that's a fine
+place for such a boy as Elbert to be born in so no more at present from
+your true Peony."
+
+Sarah Brown climbed up the short stairway, painful step by painful step,
+to her cell. She sat on her bed holding her throbbing side, and
+breathing with fearful caution. She looked at the empty grate. She put a
+cigarette in her mouth, the unconscious and futile answer of the Dweller
+Alone to that blind hunger for comfort. But she had no matches, and
+presently, dimly conscious that her groping for comfort had lacked
+result, she absently put another cigarette into her mouth, and then felt
+a fool.
+
+She stared at the cold window. The sky seemed to be nailed carelessly to
+it by means of a crooked star or two.
+
+These are the terrible nights of Living Alone, when you have fever and
+sometimes think that your beloved stands in the doorway to bring you
+comfort, and sometimes think that you have no beloved, and that there is
+no one left in all the world, no word, no warmth, nor ever a kindly
+candle to be lighted in that spotted darkness that walls up your hot
+sight. Again on those nights you dream that you have already done those
+genial things your body cries for, or perhaps That Other has done them.
+The fire is built and alight at last, a cup of something cool and
+beautifully sour stands ready to your hand, you can hear the delicious
+rattle of china on a tray in the passage--someone coming with food you
+would love to look at, and presently perhaps to eat ... when you feel
+better. But again and again your eyes open on the cold dumb darkness,
+and there is nothing but the wind and strange sinister emptiness
+creaking on the stair.
+
+These are the terrible nights of Living Alone, yet no real lover of that
+house and of that state would ever exchange one of those haunted and
+desert nights for a night spent watched, in soft warm places.
+
+Sarah Brown was not long left alone that night to look at the strip of
+moonlight on the cold ashes of her fireplace. The Shop below shook
+suddenly with many footfalls, and the metallic officious barking of the
+Dog David rent the still air of her cell.
+
+A man's voice at the foot of the stairs said: "I can hear a dog
+barking." And a woman's voice followed it: "Angela, dear, is that you?"
+
+Sarah Brown was only aware of a vague and irksome disturbance. She
+groped to her door, opened it, and shouted miserably: "Go away,
+policeman, go away. She is not here."
+
+Lady Arabel came up, flashing an electric torch.
+
+"My dear, you look dretfully ill. Why look, you are trembling. Why look,
+your little dog is making your counterpane muddy. Don't be afraid for
+Angela, we are all here to try and help her."
+
+"All here?"
+
+"Yes, Meta and the Mayor and Mr. Tovey and Mr. Frere. Let me help you
+into bed, and then you shall tell me what you know of her. You have had
+a dretfully trying time."
+
+"I am well," said Sarah Brown ungraciously. "You are none of you going
+to help the witch without me."
+
+"Ah, this is all very dretful," sighed Lady Arabel. "Most foolish of us
+to come here all together like this, after the policeman took our names
+and addresses, and was dretfully impertinent and suspicious. But Meta
+insisted. I quite expect to spend the next twenty-four hours in gaol, or
+else to be shot for Offence of the Realm. In fact, speaking as a
+ratepayer, I think the police ought to have done it before. Still, Meta
+thought we might perhaps be able to help Angela.... Meta has many
+friends who seem influential ... but _so_ talkative, my dear."
+
+She led the way downstairs. Mr. Tovey and the Mayor were talking at the
+foot of the stairs, Mr. Frere was listening sardonically. As Sarah Brown
+went past them into the Shop, she smelt the unflower-like scent that
+always denoted the presence of Miss Ford. Sarah Brown herself was
+accompanied by nothing more seductive than a faint smell of gasoline,
+showing that her clothes had lately been home-cleaned. In the darkness
+of the Shop she saw Miss Ford stooping, trying to shut the big difficult
+drawer in which the witch kept her magic.
+
+"It is frightfully explosive," said Sarah Brown.
+
+Miss Ford started and straightened her back. "Ah, Miss Brown.... I was
+just looking about...."
+
+Sarah Brown sat gasping on the counter, and the rest of the party
+re-entered the Shop, bringing the lantern.
+
+"How very absurd all this is," said Miss Ford nervously,--"taking such a
+great deal of trouble about a necessitous case."
+
+"America is in my mind," said Lady Arabel. "If we could get her there.
+Anybody who has done anything silly goes to America. Indeed, if I
+remember rightly, America is entirely populated with fugitives from
+somewhere else. So dretfully confusing for the Red Indians. They say the
+story of the Tower of Babel was only a prophecy about the Woolworth
+Building--"
+
+"You couldn't get a passport," said Mr. Darnby Frere, who was the only
+person present really conscious of sanity. "Only a miracle could produce
+a passport in these days, especially for a fugitive from justice."
+
+"Only a miracle--or magic," said Sarah Brown.
+
+Miss Ford moved instinctively behind the counter towards the open drawer
+full of ingredients for happiness.
+
+"We must remember," added Mr. Frere, "that, after all, she did break the
+law. In fact I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth we are
+all--"
+
+"Oh, Darnby, do be sensible," said Miss Ford. "Of course we know it is
+wrong to break the law, but in this case--well, I myself should be the
+last to blame her."
+
+"No, not the last," said Sarah Brown.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Certainly not the last. Probably not even the penultimate one. You
+flatter yourself."
+
+"Why, surely some of you ladies, movin' in the 'ighest circles, knows of
+gentlemen in the Foreign Office that would do a little shut-eye job, for
+old times' sake," suggested the Mayor.
+
+This was a challenge to Miss Ford. She ceased to gaze haughtily on Sarah
+Brown. "Men from three departments of the Foreign Office are fairly
+regular Wednesday friends of mine," she said. "But I could hardly
+trouble any of them on--er--so trivial a matter."
+
+There was silence, while Miss Ford toyed gingerly with one of the paper
+packets out of the witch's drawer. Presently she said: "What about
+Richard?"
+
+Lady Arabel showed sudden irritation. "There you go again, Meta; I have
+spoken to you of it again and again. It's Rrchud this and Rrchud that
+whenever anything in the least tahsome or out of the way happens. One
+would think you considered the poor boy a wizard."
+
+"You needn't lose your temper, Arabel," said Miss Ford coldly. "I only
+meant that Richard might be useful, having so many friends, and such
+skill in ... chemistry...." As if unconsciously she tore off one corner
+of the packet of magic she held before adding: "And besides, as I have
+often told you, I believe Richard to have real Occult Power, which would
+give him a special interest in this case."
+
+Sarah Brown, who was burying her face in her hands and missing much of
+the conversation, caught the name of Richard, and said: "Richard has
+gone to his True Love."
+
+A tempest of restrained embarrassment arose.
+
+"She's feverish," murmured Miss Ford, turning scarlet.
+
+"My dear Sarah," said Lady Arabel tartly. "You are quite mistaken, and I
+must beg of you to be careful how you repeat idle gossip about my son.
+Rrchud is at his office. You know it is only open at night--one of
+Rrchud's quaint fancies."
+
+"I will ring up his office," said Miss Ford, deciding to ignore Sarah
+Brown both now and in future. "Where is the telephone?"
+
+"There is none," replied Sarah Brown. "This is the House of Living
+Alone."
+
+Miss Ford was pouring a grain or two of the magic into her palm. "How
+very credulous people are," she said with a self-conscious smile. "If
+Thelma Bennett Watkins were here she would credit this powder with--"
+
+She stopped, for an astonishing sharp smell filled the Shop. Almost
+immediately a curious wheezy sound, punctuated by taps, proceeded from
+the corner. It was Mr. Bernard Tovey trying to sing, "Mon coeur s'ouvr'
+a ta voix," and beating time by swinging his heels against the counter
+on which he sat.
+
+Sarah Brown felt suddenly well. She trembled but was well. She jumped
+off the counter. "I will run across, if you like," she said, "and ring
+up Richard from the ferryman's house. He may have left his True Love
+now. I am not deaf on the telephone, and the ferryman won't admit
+strangers."
+
+As she left, the smell of magic was getting stronger and stronger. Mr.
+Tovey, still impersonating Delilah in the corner, was approaching the
+more excitable passages of the song. Miss Ford was saying, "Really,
+Bernard...." Sarah Brown felt a slight misgiving.
+
+A warm and rather dramatic-looking light was shining behind the red
+curtain of the ferryman's lattice window, as Sarah Brown crossed the
+moonlit road. She delighted, after her recent black hours, to think of
+all those people in the world who were sitting stuffily and pleasantly
+in little ugly rooms that they loved, doing quiet careful things that
+pleased them. And she told herself that the thought of Richard's little
+office, alone and alight in the deserted City every night, would comfort
+her often in the darkness.
+
+The ferryman opened his door, and invited her genially to his telephone.
+He had been sitting at his table, surrounded by the snakes that for him
+took the place of a family. On the table was a bowl of milk from which a
+large bull-snake, in a gay Turkey-carpet design, was drinking. A yellow
+and black python lay coiled in several figures of eight in the armchair,
+and an intelligent-looking small dust-coloured snake with a broad nose
+and an active tongue leaned out of the ferryman's breast pocket.
+
+"Aren't they beautiful?" he said, with shy and paternal pride, as Sarah
+Brown tried to find a place on which the python would like to be tickled
+or scratched. Somehow the python has a barren figure, from a caresser's
+point of view. The ferryman went on: "There is something about the grip
+and spring in a snake's body that makes me feel giddy with pleasure.
+Snakes to me, you know, are just a drug, sold by the yard instead of in
+bottles. My brain is getting every day colder and quieter, and all
+through loving snakes so."
+
+Sarah Brown rang up Richard's office, and the over-refined voice of a
+young gentleman clerk answered her.
+
+Mr. Higgins was not in the office.
+
+Mr. Higgins had left particular word that if any one wanted him they
+were to be told that he had--er--gone to his True Love.
+
+But any minor business matter connected with magic could be attended to
+in his absence. Mr. Higgins spending so much of his time on the
+battlefield at present, a good deal of the routine work had to be done
+in any case by the speaker, his confidential clerk.
+
+Passports to America? Perfectly simple. The office had simply to issue
+blank sheets treated in a certain way, and every official to whom the
+sheet should be presented would read upon it what he would want. But
+Mr. Higgins would have to affix his mark and seal. Mr. Higgins would be
+in the office sometime to-night, probably within the hour.
+
+How many passports?
+
+"Two," said Sarah Brown. "One for my friend and one for me. A dog
+doesn't need one, does he--a British dog? I will book the berths
+to-morrow. I can pawn my--or rather, I can sell my War Loan."
+
+As she hung up the receiver, the ferryman asked: "Are you having a party
+up at the Shop, in the superintendent's absence?"
+
+"Not intentionally," replied Sarah Brown. "Why?"
+
+"Well, I just wondered. There's a noise like a thousand mad gramophones
+playing backwards, coming from there."
+
+Sarah Brown's misgivings returned like a clap of thunder. She rushed
+back to the Shop.
+
+The lantern was standing in the middle of the floor, its glass was
+shattered, and out of each of its eight panels streamed a great flame
+six or seven feet high, like the petal of an enormous flower. Facing
+these flames stood Miss Ford and Mr. Tovey, hand in hand, each singing a
+different song very earnestly. Lady Arabel had found somewhere a patent
+fire extinguisher, and was putting on her glasses in order to read the
+directions. Mr. Frere was hesitating in the background with a leaking
+biscuit tin full of water. The Mayor was gone.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Sarah Brown. You'll burn the place down. Look at
+that row of petticoats up there, catching fire already. What have you
+done with the Mayor?"
+
+"We made him invisible by mistake," whispered Mr. Tovey. "But sh--sh, he
+doesn't know it yet."
+
+"Nothing matters," said Miss Ford. "We are all going to America." And
+she continued her song, which was an extempore one about the sea.
+
+"But that's no reason why you should burn the house down," said Sarah
+Brown.
+
+"That's what I thought," agreed Mr. Frere. "But water won't put out that
+flame."
+
+The singers fell silent. Only the voice of the invisible Mayor could be
+heard, singing, "If those lips could only speak," in a loud tremulous
+voice, to the accompaniment of his own unseen stamping feet.
+
+"You've been putting magic into that flame," said Sarah Brown
+distractedly. "I told you it was dangerous. Nothing will put magic out,
+except more magic. What will the witch say?"
+
+"It doesn't matter what anybody says," said Miss Ford. "We are all going
+to America. No place and no person matters when I am not there. There
+are no places and no people existing where I am not. I have suspected it
+before, and now I am sure that everything is all a pretence, except me.
+Look how easy it was to dismiss that gross grocer from sight. He was
+just a bit of background. I have painted him out."
+
+The drapery department on the ceiling was ablaze now, and flakes of ashy
+petticoat, and the metal frames of buttons, showered to the floor.
+
+"I will go and get help," said Sarah Brown, and hurried out of doors,
+followed feverishly by David, who was not a very brave dog in moments
+of crisis, and yet liked to appear busy and helpful. It was to the
+ferryman's telephone that they returned. Sarah Brown knew that the fire
+was a magic fire, and that an appeal to the L.C.C. Fire Brigade would
+only bring defeat and unnecessary bewilderment upon a deserving
+organisation.
+
+Sarah Brown rang up Richard's office, and Richard, who had a heroic and
+almost cinematic gift for being on hand at the right moments, answered
+her himself.
+
+"Come at once," said Sarah Brown. "The House of Living Alone is on fire.
+Someone has been tampering with the magic drawer."
+
+"Oh deah, deah," said Richard. "And this is such a busy night at the
+office too. Do you think it is really important? It is my house, you
+know."
+
+"Well, I don't see what is to prevent Mitten Island from being burnt to
+the water's edge. In fact I don't see why, being a magic fire, it should
+stop at the water's edge. Not to mention that the Mayor----"
+
+"Very well, I'll come," said Richard.
+
+As she stepped out of the door he arrived.
+
+"I came by flash of lightning," he explained, smoothing his hair and
+readjusting his Bill Sykes service cap, in the manner of one who has
+moved swiftly. "The lightning service is getting very bad. I was held up
+for quite three-quarters of a second over Whitehall. There was some
+wireless war-news coming in, and the lightning had to let it pass. Now,
+what's all this fuss about, Sarah Brown?"
+
+There was a crowd of delirious Mitten Islanders round the House of
+Living Alone. While Sarah Brown and Richard were about fifty yards away,
+a many-forked and enormous white flame suddenly wrapped the house about,
+like a hand clutching and crushing it.
+
+"The faggots round the stake are lighted," said Richard. "But the witch
+has fled."
+
+It seemed that the stars were devoured by the flame, so far did it
+outshine them. The flame shrank in upon itself and collapsed. There was
+no more House of Living Alone.
+
+"Oh, Richard," said Sarah Brown. "Your mother and Miss Ford and----"
+
+"Was mother in there?" asked Richard placidly. "Wonders will never
+cease. Well, well, it is fortunate that no magic of any sort could ever
+touch mother."
+
+And indeed, as they pushed through the crowd, they saw all the recent
+occupants of the Shop arguing at the front gate.
+
+"I didn't blow it," Mr. Tovey was saying in an aggrieved voice. "I was
+singing, not blowing."
+
+"Well, all I know is that while you were on that high note something
+seemed to scatter the flames, and the drawer full of explosives caught
+fire," said Mr. Darnby Frere aggressively, flourishing his empty biscuit
+tin.
+
+"It doesn't matter," said Miss Ford calmly. "We are all going across the
+sea to-morrow." She roused herself a little, and said to Mr. Frere with
+a smile: "You know, I inherit the sea tradition. My father commanded
+H.M.S. _Indigestible_ in '84."
+
+"I wonder what put out the flame so suddenly?" asked Mr. Tovey, who was
+still dreamily beating time to imaginary music with one hand.
+
+"I put it out," said Richard.
+
+"I wonder whose house it is?" added Mr. Tovey, turning vaguely to face
+Richard.
+
+"It is my house," said Richard.
+
+They all discovered his presence.
+
+"Your house, dear Rrchud?" exclaimed Lady Arabel. "Are you sure? I
+didn't know the Higginses had any house property on Mitten Island."
+
+"They haven't now," replied Richard. "But never mind. It has always
+seemed to me that there were too many houses in the world. Most houses
+are traps into which everything enters, and out of which nothing comes.
+It always grieves me to see tradesmen pouring sustenance in at the back
+door, and no result or justification coming out of the front door. I
+often think that only the houses that men's bodies have deserted are
+really inhabited."
+
+"It was I who burnt your house down, Richard," said Miss Ford. "But it
+doesn't matter. It wasn't a real house."
+
+"You are right," said Richard. "To such as you, dear Meta, it was not a
+real house. It was the House of Living Alone, and only to people who
+live alone was it real. It is dark and deserted now, and levelled with
+the cold ground; it is as though it were a tent, being moved from its
+position to follow the fortunes of those dwellers alone who wander
+continually in silence up and down the world...."
+
+He looked at Sarah Brown.
+
+"Talking of wandering," said Miss Ford. "We are all going to America,
+Richard. Can you get us passports?"
+
+"Certainly," agreed Richard. "To America, eh? A nice little trip for you
+all. America, you know, would be entirely magic, if it weren't for the
+Americans...."
+
+"I have quite a circle of friends in New York," said Miss Ford, who
+seemed to be recovering from her nerve-storm.
+
+"Beware," said Richard, "lest you all forget the magic of to-night, and
+change from adventurers to tourists."
+
+"I am not going to America," said Lady Arabel. "I am going home. I never
+heard such dretful nonsense. I was only in fun when I agreed to the
+plan."
+
+"I never agreed to the plan at all," said Mr. Frere. "I shall be truly
+thankful to get to bed, and wake up to-morrow sober. I will never go out
+to tea in Kensington again if this is the result."
+
+"I am going to America," said Mr. Tovey, fixing his innocent eyes,
+obscured by hair, upon Miss Ford.
+
+"I am going to America," echoed the unseen Mayor from an unexpected
+direction. Nobody had yet dared to tell him of the misfortune that had
+overtaken him. "I'll give up this Mayor job to-morrer. Catch me stayin'
+be'ind if--oh, by the way, that reminds me----"
+
+"I didn't need reminding," interrupted Sarah Brown. "It seems to me that
+everybody has forgotten why they came here. Please, Richard, do you know
+of a spell to find a missing person?"
+
+"Yes, several," answered Richard, who was always as eager as a
+travelling salesman to recommend his wares. "There is an awfully
+ingenious little spell I can show you, if you happen to have a
+telephone book and a compass and a toad's heart and a hair from a black
+goat's beard about you. Or again, if you stand on a sea-beach at low
+tide on Christmas night with the moon at your back and a wax candle in
+your left hand, and write upon the sand the name--by the way, who is it
+you want to find?"
+
+"The witch," answered Sarah Brown.
+
+Richard's face fell. "Oh, only the witch?" he said. "I can tell you
+where she is without any spell at all. She's with my True Love at
+Higgins Farm, helping--oh, by the way, mother, I forgot to tell you. You
+are a grandmother."
+
+"RRCHUD!" said Lady Arabel. She sat down suddenly on the smooth grass
+slope between the road and the garden hedge. "Ah, it is too cruel," she
+cried, burying her face in her hands. "It is too cruel. Is this my son?
+I meant so well, and all my life I did the things that other people did,
+the natural things. Except just once. And for that once, I am so cruelly
+punished.... I am given a son who is no son to me, who says only things
+I mustn't understand ... who does only things I mustn't see...." She
+paused, and, taking her hands from her face, looked round aghast at
+Richard, who was sitting beside her on the bank, stroking her arm. "_A
+faery son_ ..." she added in a terrified whisper, and then broke out
+again crying: "Ah, it is too cruel...."
+
+Richard continued to stroke her arm without comprehension. "Yes, mother,
+and Peony, my True Love, insists on calling him Elbert," he said.
+"Mother, listen, Elbert your faery grandson...."
+
+But Lady Arabel still sobbed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE DWELLER ALONE
+
+
+"Well, Sarah Brown, here we are," said the witch, her Byronic hair
+flying as she sat perilously on the rail of the deck. The distant flying
+buttresses of New York were supporting a shining sky, and north and east
+lay the harbour and sea, and many ships moving with the glad gait of
+home-comers after perilous voyaging.
+
+Every minute upon the sea is a magic minute, but the voyage of the witch
+and Sarah Brown had been unmarked by any supernatural activities on the
+part of the witch. She had been more or less extinguished by the
+presence of five hundred Americans, not one of whom had ever heard the
+word "magic" used, except by advertisers in connection with their wares.
+
+Miss Ford had been left behind, cured for ever of nerve-storms. She had
+become unexpectedly engaged to Mr. Bernard Tovey while looking for a
+porter on Lime Street Station, Liverpool, and had returned with him to
+London to celebrate the event by means of a Super-Wednesday. The Mayor
+also had failed to embark. Indeed the unfortunate man had not been
+heard of since his seizure on the night of the fire, and I believe that
+the London police are still trying to arrest him as a German spy.
+
+"Here we are," said the witch to Sarah Brown. "At least, I suppose this
+City on its Tiptoes is New York. Do you think I ought to call the
+attention of the Captain to that largish lady on our left, who seems to
+be marooned upon a rock, and signalling to us for help?"
+
+"That is the Statue of Liberty," said three neighbouring Americans in
+chorus.
+
+"How d'you mean--Liberty?" asked the witch.
+
+The three Americans froze her with three glances.
+
+"America is the home of Liberty," they said all together.
+
+"Oh yes, of course, how stupid of me," said the witch. "I ought to have
+remembered that every country is the Home of Liberty. Such a pity that
+Liberty never seems to begin at home. Every big shop in London, you
+know, is labelled Patronised by Royalty, yet I have bought haberdashery
+by the hour without running across a single queen. I suppose if you
+didn't have this big label sticking up in your harbour, you Americans
+might forget that America is the Home of Liberty. I know quite a lot
+about America from a grey squirrel who rents my may-tree on Mitten
+Island. It is a long time since he came over, but he still chitters with
+a strong New England accent. He came away because he was a socialist. I
+gather America is too full of Liberty to leave room for socialism, isn't
+that so? My squirrel says there are only two parties in America,
+Republicans and Sinners--at least I think that was what he said--and
+anybody who belongs to neither of these parties is given penal servitude
+for life. So I understood, but I may be wrong. I am not very good at
+politics. Anyway, my squirrel had to leave the Home of Liberty and come
+to England, so as to be able to say what he thought. I wish I were there
+too. Sarah Brown, I don't yet know why you brought me here."
+
+"I brought you here to escape the Law," said Sarah Brown.
+
+"How d'you mean--escape the Law? Didn't you know that all magic lives
+and thrives on the wrath of the Law? Have you forgotten our heroic
+tradition of martyrdom and the stake? Isn't the world tame enough
+already? What do you want Magic to become? A branch of the Civil
+Service?"
+
+"I spent all I had in bringing you here," said Sarah Brown. "I left all
+I loved to bring you here. I am as if dead in England now. Nobody there
+will ever think of me again, except as a thing that has been heard the
+last of."
+
+The witch looked kindly at her. "You know," she said, "when you first
+told me to go away, after Harold made that bad landing on a policeman, I
+thought perhaps you were a sort of cinema villainess, driving me away
+from my house and heritage. At first I thought of arguing the matter,
+but then I remembered that villains always have a rotten time, without
+being bullied and persecuted by the rest of us. Besides solid things are
+never worth fighting over. So I have been patient with you all this
+time, and have fallen in courteously with all your fiendish plans--as I
+thought--and now I am glad I was patient, for I see you meant well.
+Dear Sarah Brown, you did mean well. How sad it is that people who have
+once lived in the House of Living Alone can never make a success of
+friendship. You say you left all you loved--what business have you with
+love? Thank you, my dear, for meaning so well, and for these fair days
+at sea. But I mustn't stay with you. I mustn't set foot on this land--I
+can smell cleverness and un-magic even from here. I must go back to my
+little Spring island, and my parish of Faery...."
+
+"Ah, witch, don't leave me, don't leave me like this, ill and bewildered
+and so far from home...."
+
+"How can you ever be far from home, you, a dweller in the greatest home
+of all. Did you think you had destroyed the House of Living Alone? Did
+you think you could escape from it?"
+
+Sarah Brown said nothing. She watched the witch call Harold her
+Broomstick to her, and adjust the saddle and tighten the strap round his
+middle. She watched her mount and embark upon the sunny air. The three
+Americans were talking politics, and did not notice anything but each
+other. The witch alighted for a moment on one spike of the crown of
+Liberty, and climbing carefully down on to the lady's parting, was seen
+by Sarah Brown to bend down till her head hung apoplectically upside
+down, and gaze long and curiously into that impassive bronze eye.
+Presently she remounted Harold, and, with a flippant and ambiguous
+gesture of her foot, launched herself eastward. She disappeared without
+looking back.
+
+The dock was reached. Sarah Brown collected David her Dog, and Humphrey
+her Suit-case. Hers was a very wieldy family. An official asked her
+something, using one side of his mouth only to do so, in the alarming
+manner of American officials.
+
+"I cannot hear you," said Sarah Brown. "I am stone deaf."
+
+And she stepped over the threshold of the greater House of Living Alone.
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Living Alone, by Stella Benson
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