O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 12
The world rang hollow underfoot and the stars that swarmed by night seemed as near as the people with whom she talked by day. She found herself alone and in a void. She ate, slept, but she did not know what she ate nor why she slept. Her work progressed with an almost automatic nicety and she felt that her mind had been clarified and sharpened, but that everything else was dulled. A dam seemed to have been thrown across the easy stream of her existence and back of it the waters were rising and rising...She moved, but she moved under a shadow conscious always that something soon would happen. What? Nothing!
Little by little the stack of letters of introduction grew less and the material forwarded to the 'Journal' began to assume book proportions. Mr. Fox was enthusiastic, but why did she not look up Miss Champion? Her work was so immensely popular in the States and she seemed to be the last left who wrote in the Radcliffe tradition of ghosts, dark castles, rattling chains and werewolves. 'Of course she is in no sense an artist—just a literary workman, but you might have fun.'
This rather obscure 'workman' and no artist proved to be the hardest to reach of all the great names. It took much correspondence with her London publishers, Messrs. Double & Pepys, to discover that she made her home with Lady May Bracey, Square Mount Castle, Porlock Weir, North Devon. Such an address and the prospects of a castle and a Lady moved Lanice deeply. Double & Pepys intimated that Miss Champion would see her, and so she set out.
The train took her only to Bath, and from there, in whirling post-chaises and coaches, she jingled and tooted across England. A Roman road shot, like an arrow, over the Mendip Hills. Barrows and tumuli, ferns waist-high, stunted trees, sheep, rain, wind, and little sun; but always the sway of the coach, the smell of wet bracken, the rumble of wheels, the clatter of hoofs, the snap of a whip. Dolls' villages, dolls' churches, twisting dolls' lanes. And so on...
After the steep drop down into the Vale of Avalon, the coaches grew poorer, the horses shaggier and smaller, and the dialect of the natives almost incomprehensible. In spite of difficulties with speech, the inns, with their sanded floors, red earthen jugs, and huge beds, were hospitable. Exmoor at last. The coach ran part of the way in a groove between green hedges, bristling with life, sometimes rising eighteen feet above the roadbed. The hedges shut one in.
A broken axle, a mired coach, the heaving, wildeyed horses jumping furiously against their collars, harnesses breaking, and an unexpected night in a lonely farmhouse, where the owls in a walnut tree hooted all night, and no one slept.
Then the Severn Sea and across the water the white cliffs of Wales. The coach rolled into Porlock Weir. She stayed at the old Ship Inn. There was a rough shingle beach, where the tides sucked and pounded and above were sea-gulls against a low, leaden sky. A few fishermen's houses, loaded like Easter bonnets with masses of flowers. A cobbled street and the old white plaster inn cozy under its hat of thatch.
A certain number of excursionists, free souls, who liked to tramp, came across the moors carrying knapsacks. They knew this inn well and its famous cider.
The long journey, the continual jouncing, and the excitement had tired Lanice. She was glad to lie in her whitewashed room under the eaves deep sunk in her billowy bed which the chambermaid warmed with hot stones. 'I'll stay here,' she decided, 'for weeks—if I want to. I may stay for months.' There was a delicious sense of peace and homely comfort. She would explore this wild romantic country alone and on foot. She would eat her sweet bread and fresh butter, drink her tea before the wide fireplace in the common room below, and sleep the clock around in this huge warm bed.
Her first walk was through the park-like woods along the cliffs to the wee church of Culbane, and so on to Square Mount Castle—no castle at all, only a rambling stone country house almost hidden in beech and oak. The next day she hired the only pair of strictly 'pleasure' horses in the village and in a ridiculous canopied landau she was driven over to present her letter. The sweating 'pleasure' horses pulled up to the doorway and a footman instantly presented himself. Miss Champion—very good, indeed. If the lady would wait, Miss Champion shall be informed. The ancestral clocks struck four and then five. She still waited. A maid came to tell her that Miss Champion could not be disturbed—begged to be excused—nor would she be at liberty the next day. The following week...? Would Miss Bardeen leave her address? A second maid arrived with the message that yes, Miss Champion will see Miss Bardeen—sometime. When that time came she would send for her—possibly the day after to-morrow. Lanice gave the inn as her address and noticed the maids' amazement. 'Fancy,' they would say to each other, 'and she looked a lady.'
'Your tea, Miss,' one of them suggested courteously. 'Have you had your tea as yet?' But Lanice declined. The prettiest of the maids smiled diffidently, 'Don't be put out, Miss, they are all like that—these lady-companions, hard and haughty. I think it's because her has to so bend herself to m'lady—and then her's a great author, too.' Miss Champion sent down another maid—now she would be willing to see the representative of 'Fox's Journal.' Lanice, provoked by the lady's whims, sent back word she could stay no longer.
Lanice settled herself at her inn. She felt a strange sense of waiting during the next few days. Waiting for the clouds to blow away and the sun to pour out over the purple moors and heaving sea; waiting for Miss Champion to send for her; waiting for a letter from Mr. Fox; waiting for the impossible—for the return of Anthony Jones.
Her favorite walk was through Porlock Village up towards Hurlstone Point. The foreland was cut by deep coombes which held their purple shadows like green glass beakers half full of wine. Heather, gorse, ferns, crimson foxgloves. To the south the whole land rolled away into Exmoor. She met sheep and shepherds, but few others. The country was rustling with life—moor ponies, birds, foxes, rabbits, and once she started a stag. She walked every day until her feet, flimsily shod in long black slippers, ached, her voluminous skirts and petticoats were muddied, her hair, caught by the clutching branches of the furze, tumbled down her back. Her face and hands were scratched and her mouth was stained with berries.
Once, intoxicated by the first day of sunshine, she went farther to the loneliest place she had ever seen—almost to Minehead. The red, ribby cliffs which she climbed dropped dizzily into the sea. But even here the sheep had been. Her path—if it were a path—stopped before a fortress of furze. She found that the sheep had made a hole through the thicket. Their continual passing had rounded it and each sheep had left toll from his fleece so that it was lined delicately as a bird's nest with the wool from their bodies. Lanice, bending, peeked through this strange tunnel. The sun, which was before her, caught in the fibre of the wool and made it radiant as a halo. She got herself halfway through easily enough, but her big stiff skirts were unmanageable. Torn and dishevelled she struggled through, leaving as her admittance fee threads of her black hair on the thorns that held the sheep's wool.
She looked about her—a secret little bower, a darling fair place—which she knew to be hers—a place she had crossed the Atlantic and pursued the proud Miss Champion to Devonshire to discover. As she lay there in the sun and listened to the waves lapping far below and to the nervous activity of the birds, her mind went back, not to Anthony nor to the articles she had so valiantly written for Mr. Fox—not to Roger with his quietude and his fever—nor to the broad bed and good food waiting for her at Porlock Weir, but to the witch women of Salem. Her mind, with its curious focusing power, suddenly was able actually to see them—the court-room, old Tituba, the frenzied, afflicted children. She could see their familiar spirits, the magic yellow birds, the black man, and the detestable rites of the Black Sabbath—'Hu-hu-hurahu!'—it was thus that the witches summoned the Devil who was also their lover.
A story came into her head. It was called 'The Tale that is Told.'
In the dusk of dawn Gideon, the grey tomcat, was the first to wake. The mice were still frolicking in the corn crib, the birds had begun to chant. 'Quick, Gideon—take up your duties as a cat.' A little girl sat up abruptly in her trundle bed. She had been sound asleep the moment before, now she was quiveringly awake. Over on the big red press, pewter plates and platters began to shimmer. The spinning-wheel was a great spider web. Nearer, so near her little hand could reach the valance, loomed the great bed on whose deck were stretched the sleeping bodies of Goody and Goodman Bale. Many times before she had awoken at this weird dawning hour and sat thus unreal in an unreal world staring at objects until they became part of her own enchantment. Strange tiny faces began to twist among the onions knotted in long strings from the hewn rafters—hobgoblin faces grimacing. Sometimes a little claw-like hand no larger than a man's thumb-nail would pick at the knots that held it. A whisper at the door—the blow of leaves, the rustles of a skirt. What skirt is that? Not of this world, surely. What woman taps her fingers on the pane? A hag from Hell. Now the red coals begin their cunning winking. The child sees the salamander sprawled contentedly in the fire...
Not frightened—not afraid. They are her people. Mine, mine, mine. And she thinks of her father and mother who burned for their witchcraft in France...
Two hundred witches had burned that day. The ashes had fallen upon the clean decks of the English boat at harbor there, and Captain Bale, a kind man, finding this witch's cub hungry and sobbing about the locked door of a cottage, picked her up and carried her back to his wife who believed the little thing to be the child of the Devil. And so the little creature came secretly to think herself. She could remember once gathering nuts in the woods with her mother and a fine gentleman, appearing in a great flash of light, drew marks upon her forehead. Or did she dream it, or was it a story that her mother had told her? She believed herself signed to the Devil and that he would come to her—even in this distant new land. Secretly and joyously she worshipped her god amidst all the Puritans of Salem. And at last he came—her god and her devil. She met him one night in the birch woods and knew him by a sign that he bore. He was really a sailor charged with piracy hiding for his life. She never saw him except at night. When she saw the tiny monkey which he carried about with him inside his shirt, she knew he was the Devil himself. This hobgoblin was 'the sign,' the proof of its master's infernal origin. (Lanice shut her eyes and saw the tiny creature's head against the broad brown chest. It peeked out wistfully from the open shirt as a lady might from between portieres. One little hand was clutched in the coarse hair of the man's chest.) The whole was a thing remembered. A terrible nightmare. It gripped her until her body grew rigid and her clenched hands white. Then there was the terrible end. The young witch, happy in the knowledge that she had seen her god, dying on the dirty straw of the town jail, while Mr. Noyes and Mr. Parris prayed and exhorted her and the village wives whispered outside, smelt brimstone, saw wonders, and watched for the foul fiend to arrive and carry off his misbegotten imp. Horns it would have and little hoofs like a kid, and a bit of a tail with a spike on the end. 'Eh, no wonder the witch girl died; 'twould be a fearsome thing for mortal frame to bear a thing horned and tailed—as if a human body was not bad enough.' They were disappointed, for she died before her strange delivery. The look of beauty on her face after her miserable death mystified them. And Mr. Noyes and Mr. Parris still prayed.
This was 'The Tale that is Told.'
That night she sat wrapped in her bedclothing, bending before the one candle, writing with cramped eager fingers. At three she went to bed and slept heavily until ten, then woke struggling to remember—a dream—or was it a dream! The paper lay scattered about the floor. It could not be much good. She believed that she could only write well (as she had written her literary articles) by writing slowly. The little green house in the furze that you come to through a fleece-illumined halo—it could not have existed. Her eyes ached, her fingers were lame. She turned over and slept again.
That afternoon Miss Champion sent the baronial barouche and a coachman and a footman and a courteous note. If Miss Bardeen would return in the equipage Miss Champion would be pleased to see her. Lanice instructed the maid to tell the footman that Miss Bardeen was elsewhere. She began another story. Surprising how well she knew the time and people.
She felt a freedom in moving amongst them, she was too self-conscious to have realized in a story of her own times. All her carefully nurtured niceties, all the 'ideals' that Miss Bigley had taught her—all was gone but the curiously grim stage that she had set herself and something alive and burning that she remembered from Anthony Jones. So completely did she come under the spell of this new art she did not leave the inn for five days, and ate and slept but little. She was dark about the eyes, her face white, drawn, and luminous. The kindly landlady was afraid she was ill. Miss Champion came in person. From her bedroom window Lanice indifferently watched a meagre, hatchet-faced old lady, who twitched her bonnet strings and ruffled her black silks as a turkey cock rustles his burnished feathers.
She never again found the sheep path through the furze, and she never again wrote a story of the Salem witches. For better or worse her four stories were written.
First was 'The Tale that is Told.' It had the precocious genius and weakness of a first-born. Next was 'The Salem Satyr,' pastoral almost, with the winds of spring snapping over the hills like whips, and maple leaves unfolding their tiny hands to you. Then 'The Whisperer' next, a weaker brother of 'The Tale that is Told,' a little saner, a little gentler, without either the faults or grandeur of the first story. Last was 'The Amber Witch,' and her poisonous power over men. When at the end her feet in their red-heeled shoes swung six feet above the rocks of Gallows Hill, one felt that even if by mistake the judges had done well and that the woman should hang.
Next Lanice began to eat and sleep. Languorously she sank herself into an almost sensuous lassitude. She read any books she found about the inn and did not care how dull they were. Nothing mattered.
But she found that the pent stream of her existence had broken its dam. Now she was as she had always been, and people were nearer to her than the stars, and the world no longer rang hollow. August was well upon her and soon she must go back to Boston.