Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard Part 31

"Yes, child."

"Do you see the stars?"

"Yes, child."

"Do you feel them?"

"Yes."

"Oh, can't we die now?"

She felt him move stiffly. "There's a ship! I'm certain of it now--I'm certain! Oh, if it were day!"

The stars went on dazzling. She did not understand about the ship. Time moved forward, or stood still. For her the night was timeless. It was eternity.

But things were happening outside in time and s.p.a.ce. By what means they had been seen or had attracted attention she did not know. But the floating dreamlight and the shivering starlight on the sea were broken by a dark movement on the waveless waters. A boat was coming. For some time there had been shouting and calling in strange voices, one of them her boy's. But once again she hovered on the dim verge of consciousness. She had flown from the body he was painfully unbinding from his own. What he had suffered in holding it there so long she never knew. From leagues away she heard him whispering, "Child, can you help yourself a little?" And now for an instant her soul re-approached her body, and looked at him through the soft midnight of her eyes, and he saw in them such starlight as never was in sky or on sea.

"Kiss me," said Helen.

He kissed her.

With a great effort she lifted herself and stood upright on the raft, swaying a little and holding by the mast. The boat was still a little distant.

"Good-by, my boy."

"Child--!"

"Don't jump. You promised not to. You promised. But I can't come with you now. You must let me go."

He looked at her, and saw she was in a fever. He made a desperate clutch at her blue gown. But he was not quick enough. "Keep your promise!" she cried, and disappeared in the dreamlit waters; she disappeared like a dream, without a sound. As she sank, she heard him calling her by the only name he knew....

When she was thirty-five her father died. Now she was free to go where she pleased. But she did not go anywhere.

Ever since, as a child, she had first tasted salt water, she had longed to travel and see other lands. What held her now? Was it that her longing had been satisfied? that she had a host of memories of great mountains and golden sh.o.r.es, of jungles and strange cities of the coast, of islands lost in seas of sapphire and emerald? of caravans and towers of ivory? of haunted caverns and deserted temples? where, a child always, with her darling boy, she had had such adventures as would have filled a hundred earthly lives. They had built huts in uninhabited places, or made a twisted bower of strong green creepers, and lived their primitive paradisal life wanting nothing but each other; sometimes, through accidents and illness, they had nursed each other, with such unwearied tenderness that death himself had to withdraw, defeated by love. Once on a ship there had been mutiny, and she alone stood by him against a throng; once savages had captured her, and he, outwitting them, had rescued her, riding through leagues of prairie-land and forest, holding her before him on the saddle. In nearly all these adventures it was as though they had met for the first time, and were struck anew with the dumb wonder of first love, and the strange shy sweetness of wooing and confession. Yet they were but playing above truth. For the knowledge was always between them that they were bound immortally by a love which, having no end, seemed also to have had no beginning. They quarreled sometimes--this was playing too. She put, now herself, now him, in the wrong. And either reconciliation was sweet. But it was she who was oftenest at fault, his forgiveness was so dear to her. And still, this was but playing at it.

When all these adventures and pretenses were done, they stood heart to heart, and out of their only meeting in life built up eternal truth and told each other. They told it inexhaustibly.

And so, when her father left her free to go, Helen lived on still in the mill of dreams, and kept her millstones grinding. Two years went by. And her hard gray lonely life laid its hand on her hair and her countenance. Her father had worn her out before her time.

It was only invisible grain in the mill now. The peasants came no longer with their corn. She had enough to live on, and her long seclusion unfitted her for strange men in the mill, and people she must talk to. And so long was the habit of the recluse on her, that though her soul flew leagues her body never wandered more than a few hundred yards from her home. Some who had heard of her, and had glimpses of her, spoke to her when they met; but they could make no headway with this sweet, shy, silent woman. Yet children and boys and girls felt drawn to her. It was the dream in her eyes that stirred the love in their hearts; though they knew it no more than the soup in the pipkin knows why it bubbles and boils. For it cannot see the fire. But to them she did not seem old; her strength and eagerness were still upon her, and that silver needlework with which time broiders all men had in her its special beauty, setting her aloof in the unabandoned dream which the young so often desert as their youth deserts them. Those of her age, seeing that unyouthful gleam of her hair combined with the still-youthful dream of her eyes, felt as though they could not touch her; for no man can break another's web, he can only break his own, and these had torn their films to tatters long ago, and shouldered their way through the smudgy rents, and no more walked where she walked. But very young people knew the places she walked in, and saw her clearly, for they walked there too, though they were growing up and she was growing old.

At the end of the second year there was a storm. It lasted three days without stopping. Such fury of rain and thunder she had never heard.

The gaunt rooms of the mill were steeped in gloom, except when lightning stared through the flat windows or split into fierce cracks on the dingy gla.s.s. Those three days she spent by candle-light. Outside the world seemed to lie under a dark doom.

On the third morning she woke early. She had had restless nights, but now and then slept heavily; and out of one dull slumber she awakened to the certainty that something strange had happened. The storm had lulled at last. Through her window, set high in the wall, she could see the dead light of a blank gray dawn. She had seen other eyeless mornings on her windowpane; but this was different, the air in her room was different. Something unknown had been taken from or added to it. As she lay there wondering, but not yet willing to discover, the flat light at the window was blocked out. A seagull beat against it with its wings and settled on the sill.

The flutter and the settling of the bird overcame her. It was as though reality were more than she could bear. The birds of memory and pain flew through her heart.

She got up and went to the window. The gull did not move. It was broken and exhausted by the storm. And beyond it she looked down upon the sea.

Yes, it was true. The sea itself washed at the walls of the mill.

She did not understand these gray-green waters. She knew them in vision, not in reality. She cried out sharply and threw the window up.

The draggled bird fluttered in and sank on the floor. A sea-wind blew in with it. The bird's wings shivered on her feet, and the wind on her bosom. She stared over the land, swallowed up in the sea. Wreckage of all sorts tossed and floated on it. Fences and broken gates and branches of trees; and fragments of boats and nets and bits of cork; and gra.s.s and flowers and seaweed--She thought--what did she think? She thought she must be dreaming.

She felt like one drowning. Where could she find a sh.o.r.e?

She hurried to the bed and got her sh.e.l.l; its touch on her heart was her first safety. In her nightgown as she was she ran with her naked feet through the dim pa.s.sages until she stood beside the grinding stones....

"Child! child! child!"

"Where are you, my boy, where are you?"

"Aren't you coming? Must I lose you after all this?--Oh, come!"

"But tell me where you are!"

"In a few hours I should have been with you--a few hours after many years."

"Oh, boy, for pity, tell me where to find you!"

"You are there waiting for me, aren't you, child? I know you are--I've always known you were. What would you have said to me when you opened the door in your blue gown?--"

"Oh, but say only where you are, my boy!"

"Do you know what I should have said? I shouldn't have said anything. I should have kissed you--"

"Oh, let me come to you and you shall kiss me...."

But she listened in vain.

She went back to her room. The gull was still on the floor. Its wing was broken. Her actions from this moment were mechanical; she did what she did without will. First she bound the broken wing, and fetched bread and water for the wounded bird. Then she dressed herself and went out of the mill. She had a rope in her hands.

The water was not all around the mill. Strips and stretches of land were still unflooded, or only thinly covered. But the face of the earth had been altered by one of those great inland swoops of the sea that have for centuries changed and re-changed the point of Suss.e.x, advancing, receding, shifting the coast-line, making new sh.o.r.es, restoring old fields, wedding the soil with the sand.

Helen walked where she could. She had no choice of ways. She kept by the edge of the water and went into no-man's land. A bank of rotting gra.s.ses and dry reeds, which the waves had left uncovered, rose from the marshes. She mounted it, and beheld the unnatural sea on either hand. Here and there in the desolate water mounds of gray-green gra.s.s lifted themselves like drifting islands. Trees stricken or still in leaf reared from the unfamiliar element. Many of those which were leafless had put on a strange greenness, for their boughs dripped with seaweed. Over the floods, which were littered with such flotsam as she had seen from her window, flew sea-birds and land-birds, crying and cheeping. There was no other presence in that desolation except her own.

And then at last her commanded feet stood still, and her will came back to her. For she saw what she had come to find.

He was hanging, as though it had caught him in a snare, in a tree standing solitary in the middle of a wide waste of water. He was hanging there like a dead man. She could distinguish his dark red hair and his blue jersey.

She paused to think what to do. She couldn't swim. She would not have hesitated to try; but she wanted to save him. She looked about, and saw among the bits of stuff washing against the foot of the bank a large dismembered tree-trunk. It bobbed back and forth among the hollow reeds. She thought it would serve her if she had an oar. She went in search of one, and found a broken plank cast up among the tangled growth of the bank. When she had secured it she fastened one end of her rope around the stump of an old pollard squatting on the bank like a st.u.r.dy gnome, and the other end she knotted around herself. Then, gathering all the middle of the rope into a coil, and using her plank as a prop, she let herself down the bank and slid shuddering into the water. But she had her tree-trunk now; with some difficulty she scrambled on to it, and paddled her way into the open water.

It was not really a great distance to his tree, but to her it seemed immeasurable. She was unskillful, and her awkwardness often put her into danger. But her will made her do what she otherwise might not have done; presently she was under the branches of the tree.

She pulled herself up to a limb beside him and looked at him. And it was not he.