CHAPTER VII—THE OPEN WORLD

That night in the tent I slept soundly, with the fortuneteller’s arm about me and my head nearly touching Ruthita’s across her breast. The soft rise and fall of her bosom made me dream of my mother.

Glimmerings of the early autumn sunrise crept in through holes in the canvas. I raised myself cautiously and gazed at the woman who had cared for me. I call her a woman, for she seemed to me a woman then; she was about seventeen—little more than a girl. Her face was gentle and passionate; her jet black hair streamed down in a torrent across her tawny throat and breast. She smiled in her sleep and murmured to herself; the arm which clasped Ruthita kept twitching, as though to draw her nearer. While I watched, her eyes opened; she said nothing, but lay smiling up at me. Presently she put her free arm about my neck, and drew me down so my cheek rested against hers. She turned her head and I saw that, though she looked happy, there were tears on her long dark lashes. Her lips moved and I knew what she wanted. Putting my arms about her, I kissed her good-morning.

Rousing Ruthita, she raised the flap of the tent and we slipped out. Mists were drifting across the woodland, pink and golden where the sunrise caught them, but lavender in the shadows. It was a quiet fairy world, like the face of a sleeping woman, which was pale with dew upon the forehead and copper and bronze with the streaming hair of faded foliage. Outside the door the grass was blackened in a circle where a gipsy fire had burnt. The yellow caravan stood near. In and out the bracken rabbits were hopping, nibbling at the cool green turf. The gipsy’s lurcher watched them, crouched with his nose between his paws, waiting his opportunity to steal closer. Lilith set about gathering brushwood for the fire and we helped her.

“Ruthie, am I taller?”

She eyed me judicially and shook her curls. “No. But p’raps we shall grow tall quite suddenly, when the honeymoon is ended.”

I was beginning to have my doubts of that, so I changed the subject. “Lilith has a baby. She carries it on her back.”

“Where does she keep it now?” asked Ruthita. “It wasn’t on her back last night in the tent.” Then she commenced to hop about like an eager, excited little bird. “I shall ask her. I shall ask her, Dante, and she’ll let me hold it.”

But when we ran to Lilith her back was straight and unbulgy. And when we asked her where she kept the baby, she dropped the bundle of sticks she was carrying and sank to her knees, with her hands pressed against her breast. She swayed to and fro, with her eyes closed, muttering in a strange language. Then she bent forward, kissing the ground and chanting words which sounded like, “Coroon! Coroon! Oh, dearie, come back. Come back!”

We heard the door of the caravan open. Lilith sprang to her feet and picked up her sticks as though ashamed of what she had been doing. The fierce man stood on the caravan steps. He strode across the grass to Lilith and laid his hand on her shoulder with a rough gesture which was almost kindly. “The wind blows, sister,” he said, “and it sinks behind the moon. The flowers grow, sister, and they fall beneath the earth. Where they have gone there is rest.”

He passed on, whistling to his lurcher. The gaudily dressed woman came out; while he was gone, the fire was kindled and breakfast was prepared.

During breakfast a great discussion arose in their strange language. When it was ended, Lilith took us with her into the tent. She closed the flap carefully and began to undress us. While she was doing it she explained matters. She told us that the man was too busy just now with the cocoa-nut-shies to spare time to go and fetch my uncle to us. In a few days he would go, but meanwhile we must stay with them in camp. She said that they were good gipsies, but no one would believe it if they saw us with them. They would have to make us like gipsy children so no one would suspect. So she daubed our bodies all over a light brown color, and she stained my hair because it was flaxen. Then she gave us ragged clothes, without shoes or stockings, and dug a hole in the ground and hid ours. She was curious to know what had brought us to the forest; but we would not tell. We had the child’s feeling that telling a grown-up would break the spell—we should never be married then, the little house would never be built, and none of the other pleasant things would happen. We should have to go back to the garden again and live always within walls.

Those days spent in our first dash for freedom stand out in my memory as among the happiest. I ate of the forbidden fruit of romance and reaped no penalties. Ruth-ita cried at times for her mother; but I had only to remind her of the babies, she would have, and her courage returned.

The smell of the camp-fire is in my nostrils as I write; I can feel again the cool nakedness of unpaved woodlands beneath my feet and open skies above my head. I see Ruthita unsubdued and bare-legged, plunging shoulder-high into golden bracken, shouting with natural gladness, followed by the gipsy boys and girls. We tasted life in its fullness for the first time, she and I, on that fantastic honeymoon of ours. We felt in our bones and flesh the simple ecstasy of being alive—the wide, sweet cleanness of the open world. And remembering, I wonder now, as I wondered then, why men have toiled to learn everything except to be happy, and have labored with so much heaviness to build cities when the tent and the camp-fire might be theirs.

Books, schoolmasters, and universities have taught me much since then. They have spattered the windows of my soul with knowledge to prevent my looking out. Luckily I discovered what they were doing and stopped the rascals. But I knew more things that were essentially godlike before they commenced their work. The major part of what they taught me was a weariness to the flesh in the learning, and a burden to the brain when learnt. Of how many days of shouting and sunshine they robbed me with their mistaken kindness. Of what worth is a Euclid problem at forty, when compared with the memory of a childhood’s day of flowers, and meadows, and happiness?

For twenty years my father sat prisoner at a desk, unbeautifully and doggedly driving his pen across countless pages that he might be able to buy me wisdom. With all his years of sacrifice and my years of laborious study, he gave me nothing which was half so valuable as that which a boy of nine stole for himself in his ignorance in the forest. There I learnt that the sound of wind in trees is the finest music in the world; that the power to feel in one’s own body the wholesome beauties of nature is more rewarding than wealth; that to know how to abandon oneself to the simple kindness of living people is a wiser knowledge than all the elaborate and codified wisdom of the dead.

We roamed the countryside with Lilith by day, listening to her telling fortunes. By night we slept in her arms in the tent. Only one thing was forbidden us—to speak with strangers. But there was one man who recognized us in spite of that. It was on the first morning. We were sitting by the side of the road with the fierce man; he was showing us how to make a snare for a rabbit. We were so interested that we did not notice a flock of sheep approaching until they were quite close. Then I looked up and caught the eye of old Dot-and-Carry One burning in his head, glaring out at us as if it would fly from its socket. He would have spoken had he dared, but just then the fierce man saw him. He sank his chin upon his breast and, for all that he was “a human, made in Gawd’s h’image,” limped away into the distance in a cloud of dust, as meekly sheepish as any of the sheep he followed.

Ruthita spent a lot of her time in searching for Lilith’s baby. She wanted so badly to hold it. We felt quite certain that she had hidden it somewhere, as she had our clothes. Even if it was a dead’un, it was absurd to suppose that a person so clever as to tell fortunes should not know where it might be found. We determined to watch her. We thought that if her baby was really dead and she went to it by stealth, then by following her we should be able to find my mother and, perhaps, Ruthita’s father. Ruthita had already abandoned the dread that Dot-and-Carry-One had had anything to do with her entrance into the world.

Naphtha-lamps were extinguished. The crowd of merrymakers had departed. I was roused by Lilith stirring. Very gently she eased her arm from under me. I kept my eyes tightly shut and feigned that I was undisturbed. Cautiously she pulled aside the flap of the tent and stole out. I rose to my feet when she had gone. Ruthita was sleeping soundly, her small face cushioned in her hand. Without waking her I followed.

Near to the caravan the camp-fire smoldered, making a splash of red like a pool of blood in the blackness. As I watched, it was momentarily blotted out by a moving shadow. The lurcher shook himself and growled. Lilith’s voice reached me, telling him to lie down. A bank of cloud lay across the moon, but I knew the way she went by the rustle of the fallen leaves, turning beneath her tread. I followed her down the glades of the forest, peering after her, glancing behind me at the slightest sound, timid lest I might lose her, timid lest I might lose myself, stealing on tiptoe into the unknown with sobbing, stifled breath. The ground began to descend into a hollow at the bottom of which a pond lay black and sullen. A tall beech stood at its edge, spreading out its branches and leaning across it as if to hide it. The leaves beneath her footsteps ceased to stir.

When I could no longer hear her, a horrible, choking sense of solitude took hold of me. What if she had entered into the tree and should never return? Without her, how should I find my way back? I crept as near the pond as I dared, and crouched among the dead leaves, trembling. The water began to splash. “Someone,” I thought, “is rising out of it.” Little waves, washing in the rushes, caused the brittle reeds to shake and shiver, whispering in terror among themselves. A low sing-song muttering commenced. It came from the middle of the pond. I tried to stop breathing. It seemed quite possible that the baby was hidden there.

The bank of cloud trailed across the sky. The yellow harvest moon dipped, broad and smiling, into the latticework of boughs which roofed the dell.

In the middle of the pond, knee-deep, Lilith stood. She had cast aside her Romany rags and rose from the water tall and splendid. Her tawny body was a gold statue glistening beneath the moon. Her night-black hair fell sheer from her shoulders like a silken shadow. She was bending forward, peering eagerly beneath the water’s surface, whispering hurried love-words. Of all that she said I could only catch the words, “Coroon. Coroon. Come back, little dearest. Come back.” She laughed gladly and held out her arms, as though there drifted up towards her that which she sought. I could see nothing, for her back was towards me. Still lower she bent till her lips kissed the water’s surface; plunging her arms in elbow-deep, she seemed to support the thing which she saw there.

“Lilith, oh Lilith!” I cried.

She started and turned. I feared she was going to be angry. “Show me my Mama,” I whispered.

She put her finger to her lips, and beckoned, and nodded.

Hastily I undressed, tossing my rags beside hers. I waded out to where she was standing. The night air was chilly. She gave me her hand and drew me to her. Placing me before her, so that I could gaze into the pond like a mirror, she chanted over and over a low, wild tune. She peered above my shoulders. At first I could see only my own reflection and hers. Then, as she sang, the water moved, the inky blackness reddened; I forgot everything, the cold, Lilith, my terror, and lived only in that which was coming.

In the bottom of the pool, infinitely distant, a picture grew. It came so near that I thought it would touch me; I became a part of it. I saw my mother. She was seated by a fire in an unlighted room. A little boy lay in her lap with his arms about her. She glanced up at me smiling faintly, gazing into my eyes directly. For a moment I saw her distinctly, and caught again the fragrance of violets that clung about her. The water rippled and the vision died away in smoke and cloud. Lilith gathered me to her cold wet breast and carried me to the shore and dressed me. Without knowing why, I knew that this was a happening that I must not tell.

We returned to camp. Woods were stirring. Shadows were thinning. Dawn was breaking. The coldness in the air became intense. We threw branches on the fire and blew the smoldering embers, till sparks began to fly and twigs to crackle. Lilith sat with me in her arms, and hushed and mothered me. I was not ashamed; for five years I had wanted just that. I was glad that she understood. Ruthita could not see me; nobody but the dawn would ever know. So I fell asleep and went back to the fragrance of violets, the fire, and the cosy darkened room.