The Literary Sense/Under the New Moon

by E. Nesbit

 

UNDER THE NEW MOON

THE white crescent of the little new moon blinked at us through the yew boughs. As you walk up the churchyard you see thirteen yews on each side of you, and yet, if you count them up, they make twenty-seven, and it has been pointed out to me that neither numerical fact can be without occult significance. The jugglery in numbers is done by the seventh yew on the left, which hides a shrinking sister in the amplitude of its shadow.

The midsummer day was dying in a golden haze. Amid the gathering shadows of the churchyard her gown gleamed white, ghostlike.

"Oh, there's the new moon," she said. "I am so glad. Take your hat off to her and turn the money in your pocket, and you will get whatever you wish for, and be rich as well."

I obeyed with a smile, half of whose meaning she answered.

"No," she said, "I am not really superstitious; I'm not at all sure that the money is any good, or the hat, but of course everyone knows it's unlucky to see it through glass."

"Seen through glass," I began, "a hat presents a gloss which on closer inspection—"

"No, no, not a hat, the moon, of course. And you might as well pretend that it's lucky to upset the salt, or to kill a spider, especially on a Tuesday, or on your hat."

"Hats," I began again, "certainly seem to—"

"It's not the hat," she answered, pulling up the wild thyme and crushing it in her hands, "you know very well it's the spider. Doesn't that smell sweet?"

She held out the double handful of crushed sun-dried thyme, and as I bent my face over the cup made by her two curved hands, I was constrained to admit that the fragrance was delicious.

"Intoxicating even," I added.

"Not that. White lilies intoxicate you, so does mock-orange; and white may too, only it's unlucky to bring it into the house."

I smiled again.

"I don't see why you should call it superstitious to believe in facts," she said. "My cousin's husband's sister brought some may into her house last year, and her uncle died within the month."

"My husband's uncle's sister's niece
 Was saved from them by the police.
 She says so, so I know it's true—"

I had got thus far in my quotation when she interrupted me.

"Oh, well, if you're going to sneer!" she said, and added that it was getting late, and that she must go home.

"Not yet," I pleaded. "See how pretty everything is. The sky all pink, and the red sunset between the yews, and that good little moon. And how black the shadows are under the buttresses. Don't go home—already they will have lighted the yellow shaded lamps in your drawing-room. Your sister will be sitting down to the piano. Your mother is trying to match her silks. Your brother has got out the chess board. Someone is drawing the curtains. The day is over for them, but for us, here, there is a little bit of it left."

We were sitting on the lowest step of a high, square tomb, moss-grown and lichen-covered. The yellow lichens had almost effaced the long list of the virtues of the man on whose breast this stone had lain, as itself in round capitals protested, since the year of grace 1703. The sharp-leafed ivy grew thickly over one side of it, and the long, uncut grass came up between the cracks of its stone steps.

"It's all very well," she said severely.

"Don't be angry," I implored. "How can you be angry when the bats are flying black against the rose sky, when the owl is waking up—his is a soft, fluffy awakening—and wondering if it's breakfast time?"

"I won't be angry," she said. "Besides the owl, it's disrespectful to the dear, sleepy, dead people to be angry in a churchyard. But if I were really superstitious, you know, I should be afraid to come here at night."

"At the end of the day," I corrected. "It is not night yet. Tell me before the night comes all the wonderful things you believe. Recite your credo."

"Don't be flippant. I don't suppose I believe more unlikely things than you do. You believe in algebra and Euclid and log—what's-his-names. Now I don't believe a word of all that."

"We have it on the best authority that by getting up early you can believe six impossible things before breakfast."

"But they're not impossible. Don't you see that's just it? The things I like to believe are the very things that might be true. And they're relics of a prettier time than ours, a time when people believed in ghosts and fairies and witches and the devil—oh, yes! and in God and His angels, too. Now the times are bound in yellow brick, and we believe in nothing but . . . Euclid and—and company prospectuses and patent medicines."

When she is a little angry she is very charming, but it was too dark for me to see her face.

"Then," I asked, "it is merely the literary sense that leads you to make the Holy Sign when you find two knives crossed on your table, or to knock under the table and cry 'Unberufen' when you have provoked the Powers with some kind word of the destiny they have sent you?"

"I don't," she said. "I don't talk foreign languages."

"You say, 'unbecalled for,' I know, but this is mere subterfuge. Is it the literary sense that leads you to treasure farthings, to refuse to give pins, to object to a dinner party of thirteen, to fear the plucking of the golden elder, to avoid coming back to the house when once you've started, even if you've forgotten your prayer-book or your umbrella, to decline to pass under a ladder—"

"I always go under a ladder," she interrupted, ignoring the other counts; "it only means you won't be married for seven years."

"I never go under ladders. Tell me, is it the literary sense?"

"Bother the literary sense," she said. "Bother" is not a pretty word, but this did not strike me till I came to write it down. "Look," she went on, "at the faint primrose tint over the pine trees and those last pink clouds high up in the sky."

I could see the outline of her lifted chin and her throat against the yew shadows, but I determined to be wise. I looked at the pine trees and said—

"I want you to instruct me. Why is it unlucky to break a looking-glass? and what is the counter-charm?"

"I don't know"—here was some awe in her voice—"I don't think there is any counter-charm. If I broke a looking-glass I believe I should have to give up believing in these things altogether. It would make me too unhappy."

I was discreet enough to pass by the admission.

"And why is it unlucky to wear black at a wedding? And if anyone did wear black at your wedding, what would you do?"

"You are very tiresome this evening," she said. "Why don't you keep to the point? Nobody was talking of weddings, and if you must wander, why not stray in more amusing paths? Why don't you talk of something interesting? Why do you try to be disagreeable? If you think I'm silly to believe all these nice picturesque things, why don't you give me your solid, dull, dry, scientific reasons for not believing them?"

"Your wish is my law," I responded with alacrity. "Superstition, then, is the result of the imperfect recognition in unscientific ages of the relations of cause and effect. To persons unaccustomed correctly to assign causes, one cause is as likely as another to produce a given effect. Hallucinations of the senses have also, doubtless—"

"And now you're only dull," she said.

The light had slowly faded while we spoke till the churchyard was almost dark, the grass was heavy with dew, and sadness had crept like a shadow over the quiet world.

"I am sorry. Everything I say is wrong to-night. I was born under an unlucky star. Forgive me."

"It was I who was cross," she admitted at once very cheerfully, but, indeed, not without some truth. "But it doesn't do anyone any harm to play at believing things; honestly, I'm not sure whether I believe them or not, but they have some colour about them in an age grown grey in its hateful laboratories and work-shops. I do want to try to tell you if you really want to know about it. I can't think why, but if I meet a flock of sheep I know it is lucky, and I'm cheered; and if a hare crosses the path I feel it is unlucky, and I'm sad; and if I see the new moon through glass I'm positively wretched. But all the same, I'm not superstitious. I'm not afraid of ghosts or dead people, or things like that"—I'm not sure that she did not add, "So there!"

"Would you dare to go to the church door at twelve at night and knock three times?" I asked, with some severity.

"Yes," she said stoutly, though I know she quailed, "I would. Now you'll admit that I'm not superstitious."

"Yes," I said, and here I offer no excuse. The devil entered into me, and though I see now what a brute beast I was, I cannot be sorry. "I own that you are not superstitious. How dark it is growing. The ivy has broken the stone away just behind your head: there is quite a large hole in the side of the tomb. No, don't move, there's nothing there. If you were superstitious you might fancy, on a still, dark, sweet evening like this, that the dead man might wake and want to come up out of his coffin. He might crouch under the stone, and then, trying to come out, he might very slowly reach out his dead fingers and touch your neck. Ah!"

The awakened wind had moved an ivy spray to the suggested touch. She sprang up with a cry, and the next moment she was clinging wildly to me, as I held her in my arms.

"Don't cry, my dear, oh, don't! Forgive me, it was the ivy."

She caught her breath.

"How could you! how could you!"

And still I held her fast, with—as she grew calmer—a question in the clasp of my arms, and, presently, on my lips.

"Oh, my dear, forgive me! And is it true—do you?—do you?"

"Yes—no—I don't know. . . . No, no, not through my veil, it is so unlucky!"