The Riddle and Other Stories/The Bowl
THE BOWL
IT was one autumn evening—in the month of October, I think, for I can just remember that the thin gold and tawny beech-leaves were still floating down in the garden in the hazy sunshine, and that already a fire burned in the grate to cheer the colder twilights, when first my very young eyes fell in wonder upon Mrs. Orchardson's silver bowl. Perhaps it had always been there, and always as conspicuous. But it was now, I am sure, that I first noticed it. It stood on the sideboard beside a cut-glass decanter reflecting the ruddy colour of its wine in the smooth cheeks of its two laughing Cupids. It had handles, two pendant rings as plain in workmanship as the buckle on a child's shoe. I stood and stared up at it, as young eyes will at any such magical object. There was a sort of secret jollity in the very look of it—an air to blow bubbles in, cool as an orchard, or as the half-hidden valleys of a summer cloud.
I was astonished at it, entranced by it; longed to touch and handle it, and even felt, I verily believe, a kind of covetousness and an envy of the friend whose bowl it was. And if I had been a jackdaw of equal proportions to myself, I should certainly have carried it off to hide in the chimney or hole in the wall, wherever my nest might be. As it was, I at least carried off a very vivid remembrance of it in my mind—which, fortunately, in a world hedged about with a superfluity of Dont's, is not a felony.
Anyhow, when one dark rainy morning the sharp need came for something of this kind, it was I who thought of the bowl, which, after all, could contain almost as much Jordan water as could the freestone font in St. Barnabas's, and was twenty times more beautiful.
All through the night, while I had been placidly asleep, I learned at my lonely breakfast, my friend Mrs. Orchardson's little baby had been simply burning like a coal at death's door. It was a most interesting and enthralling piece of news. And I'm not so sure that I did not speculate how it was that in my long nocturnal journeyings in the wilds of dreamland, I had not heard its wailing cries as it, too, a much smaller spirit, ran along into the shadowy valley. For after all, abstractions like death are for a child little more than a vague and menacing something in a dream.
Mrs. Orchardson's baby had, of course, been sickening for some little time past. I had been angry and jealous more than once because it had been the cause of my seeing very little of her, and of my being entertained good deal less than I thought proper on so short a visit. I could remember well enough its little blue-eyed puckered face and slatey-blue eyes, with an expression in them too, almost as dull as slate. Indeed, one morning, not long before—an unusually hot morning for October—she and I and it had sate on a rug in the garden together under the elms. A few withered wild flowers still showed in the grass, I remember, with nothing but their swollen seed vessels left of their summer.
And I had noticed, too, how peculiar a shiningness had come into Mrs. Orchardson's grey eyes when she talked to her baby. Yet anxiety kept her forehead frowning even while she was smiling, as she stared down into its small ugly wizened face. I didn't think it was in the least a pretty baby, and was vexed at its persisting in being ill.
These last few days, indeed, I had been left almost entirely to myself, with nobody to say a word to, except Esther, the parlourmaid—a sandy-coloured woman with a thick down on her face—and now and then to Mrs. Orchardson's cook, who had a way of speaking to me as if I were a kind of clockwork image incapable of even hearing her words. “And how is the poor little infant this morning?” I asked her once, mimicking the old doctor. She looked at me as if I were a snake in the grass—as no doubt I was.
But to come back to the silver bowl again. I had finished my bread and milk, had for the third time shooed away the cat from getting on to the table, and now sat staring through the long rainy window with my spoon in my mouth, when the door opened, and Mrs. Orchardson put her face in at it. It was gray, almost like wet chalk, and her eyes were so sharp and far-off-looking that she seemed scarcely to be aware of me at all. She was certainly looking at me, and yet as if through me, and with almost as horrified an expression as if she could see the very bones in my body. And then, suddenly she came in, almost fell down on her knees beside my chair, clasped me round, and hid her face in my lap. “O, Nick, Nick, you poor lonely thing,” she said, sobbing, “she is worse, much, much worse. She is dying.”
“Oh, dear!” I said in a mournful voice, “oh, dear!”
“So you will just try,” she went on hurriedly, as if she were saying something that at any moment might be forgotten, “you will just try to be quiet and happy, by yourself. It won't be long; not very long.” She paused, and I sat on as still as the loaf of bread on the table. She did not seem even to be breathing. But in a minute or two she lifted her wet face from my pinafore, and was looking entirely different from herself. I should hardly have recognised her—and yet she was quite calm, though her cheeks were almost like clay and her eyes as if they had fallen a little back into her head. “And now, you see,” she added, as if not to me at all, “Mr. Cairns is coming to christen her, to make her God's little child. As you are, Nick.”
“Isn't it going to be taken to Church, then?” I said in a sepulchral voice.
“No,” she answered, listening, but not to me.
“But why?” I said in disappointment. She put her hands to my cheeks, cupping my chin in them, and simply looking at me.
“But,” I said wriggling away, “there's no font here: there must be a font like as at Church.” I frowned, looking at her a little scornfully out of the corner of my eye. “It won't be much good, if you don't. At least that's what Esther says.”
She only shook her head, still gazing at me, and listening, “I know!” I said, “will that big silver bowl on the sideboard do for a font, Mrs. Orchardson? It's a very big bowl.”
She smiled at me brightly.
“Why, of course, you strange creature, that will do beautifully. And now” She got up, and stood looking for a moment out of the window, as if she had forgotten my presence altogether. “In all this loveliness!” she almost whispered, though all that she could see was just an ordinary wet morning…
Dr. Sharp would not return again for an hour, so there were only Mrs. Orchardson, and Esther and Mr. Cairns in the bedroom besides myself and the baby. The cook, I heard, wouldn't come, because she was afraid of being upset. That seemed silly to me. When I went into the room, a little square table already stood between the fire and the sunshine, and it was covered with a linen napkin with a fringe. On this were burning two tall white candles in silver sticks; and in the midst was the bowl with a little water in it which by tiptoeing I could just manage to see. I stared between surprise and dismay at Mr. Cairns when he came in in his surplice. He seemed to be a person absolutely different from the two Mr. Cairns, I knew already—the one a smiling but rather silly-smiling elderly man in his old clerical clothes in the Vicarage garden; the other, of course, looking almost artificial, as he stood intoning the service in church.
Having blown out the candles, and placed them on the dressing table; he signed to us to stand up, myself being between Mrs. Orchardson and Esther, and the baby lying still and scarlet and open-eyed and without a single sound in Mrs. Orchardson's arms. Once I remember, as he leaned over towards her, Mr. Cairn's surplice brushed my cheek with its peculiar dry perfume of cambric. And when he dipped his fingers into the bowl I saw the water-butterflies jig on the ceiling.
He did not seem to have noticed that I was there, though for a moment or two his glasses blazed on me like lanterns when he fronted the window. He took the little baby in his great hands. It had begun to cry then. But its crying was more like a very, very old woman's than a natural baby's, and the fingers it spread out in the air an instant were like white match-sticks, they were so thin and shrunken. I smiled at it and made a grimace to please it, but it looked at me like purple glass, as if it was not there to see me or to be amused.
When the service was done, Mr. Cairns stooped down and kissed the baby and he looked a very old man indeed; and yet when he stood up again and had taken off his stole and surplice, he was exactly the same as when I had seen him reading in his garden.
“My dear, dear lady, you must not grieve overmuch,” he said to Mrs. Orchardson, at the door of the bedroom, “He knows His lambs, all His lambs. And He is merciful.”
He leant his chin, and smiled towards me with a curious wrinkle on his face. His brown eyes reminded me of berries. They were full of kindness even though the look in them was not very attentive. I whispered to Esther, asking if I might be allowed to carry the silver bowl downstairs again. And all she gave me was a sharp shake of the head and a greenish look, because I don't think she liked to say no while Mr. Cairns was in hearing. He must have heard what I said, because he put his fingers on my hair and smiled at me again, so that I had to go downstairs in front of him, and I think he must have told Mrs. Orchardson meanwhile what to do with the bowl and the water.
In the hall he talked for a minute or two in secret with Esther. “In that case send the little boy to me, then,” I heard him say. “Mrs. Cairns will be at home. Poor tiny lamb! To think it must have suffered like you and me!” Esther shut her fair-lashed eyes a moment as if to show it would be a mercy if the baby did die, and then opened them again very stern and mournfully when she saw me watching her.
Yet in my heart of hearts I was perfectly sure that Mrs. Orchardson's little baby would not die. I cannot tell whence this assurance came. It may have been the fruit of a child's natural intuition; or even of his exquisite eyesight—experienced, as it would seem, to see through, and not only on the surface. But for one thing, I had all along felt a firm belief in the inherent virtue of the bowl, and was contemptuous of Esther for shutting her eyes like that. It seemed impossible that the clear shallow water in its shadowy deeps should not wash all taint of sickness away. Besides, I had thought of it.
This, I think was the reason why I flatly refused to accept Mr. Cairns's invitation to go to the Rectory, when Esther told me to do so. I knew perfectly well she wouldn't be able to make me go against my will while the baby was so ill. At last she gave a furious empty toss with my gray wool scarf that she was carrying in her hand, and looked at me as if no tongue could express her hatred.
“And don't you feel no pity for that poor suffering mite upstairs, you obstinate boy?” she asked me in a low compressed voice. I merely stared at her without answering, and she had to turn her eyes away.
“He don't even know the meaning of the word!” she said, and shut the door of the dining-room after her as if she hoped its wood would stick for ever after to the lintel. But I did not mind her temper. Presently she came in again, looking even angrier and whiter than before.
“Is this the time for building and Noah's-arking,” she almost shouted in my ear as I sat on the hearthrug; “is this the time?—when that poor little innocent is rattling its very life out over your head?”
I looked no further up at her than at the tray in her hand. “You little imp!”
“I suppose when it gets well, it will have to be christened all over again, properly, won't it?” I enquired. I knew she was staring at me, and hating me for not caring what she said.
“Where,”—she gasped almost losing herself in her rage, “where you pick up such evil heathenish notions from, I can't think. Not from this house. There's not a speck of sin left in the whole of that infant's body now; not a speck. And if you had gone to that kind Mr. Cairns as he arst, he would have told you so.”
“I didn't want to go, and Mrs. Orchardson wouldn't have tried to make me.” The blood seemed to rise up in my body and I could hear my own voice growing more insolent and trumpeting every moment. “What's more, Miss Esther, I don't believe a bit in your old holy water. It isn't going to die, and even if you hope it will, it won't. And you're treading on one of my animals.”
At that she deliberately kicked down the fort I was building with her foot.
“You are a little devil incarnate; that's what you are,” she screamed at me, if one can scream without raising one's voice. “A little devil. You ought never to have been allowed in a Christian house. It's Tophet and the roaring flames that you're bound for, my young man. You've murdered that poor mite. You mark my words!”
I was so much enraged at this that I hit at a little bulge in her boot with one of my bricks.
“You're a beast,” I bawled at her in a voice no louder than her own. “You're a filthy beast. And I don't mind where I go, so long as you aren't there. Not a—not a dam'.”
Her face was so close to mine in its hatred that I saw her eyes change, and her lips stiffen, as if she was afraid. “You wait, Master Nicholas; you wait! For that vile horrid word! You wait! The master shall hear of that.”
I laughed at her sneeringly. “I dare you to say it to him. He wouldn't care; he thinks you're a stupid hairy woman. And I think you're hateful." She lifted her hand and shut her eyes. “O, my God,” she said, “I can't stand it,” and all but ran out of the room.
When she was gone—with the inside of my stomach feeling as if it were on fire—I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, and, boots and all, flung myself down on the white quilt of the bed.
Nothing happened. The house remained in silence. A flying shower rattled on the window pane, and then the sun returned and shone grey and golden on the raindrops. And I hated everything I looked at. I thought how I would kill Esther; and how I would kick her body when she was dead.
But gradually the furnace within me began to die down, my “thoughts” wandered away, and my eyelids were drooping into a drowse when I heard a muffled sound of footsteps to and fro, to and fro, ascending from the bedroom immediately beneath me, and I remembered the baby. And suddenly a dark shivering horror turned me to ice, and there, as I lay, I prayed to be forgiven for having been myself, and implored God to let me take its sufferings or to die instead of it. So I lay; flat on my stomach, and prayed.
The afternoon had now grown a little darker in the room, and in a while after this, I must have emptily fallen asleep. For the next thing I remember is finding a cold arm round me in the dregs of the dusk and lips close to my face softly whispering and murmuring, their soft warm breath on my cheek.
“Guess, Nick! Guess!” said that soft, thrilling voice, when I stirred a little nearer. “Guess!”
I put back my head, and by staring close could just see the light from the window reflected in Mrs. Orchardson's eyes. A curious phosphorescence was there too; even her skin seemed very faintly to shine.
“Why,” I said, “she's much better.”
At which those eyes gazed through the narrow air between us as incredulously as if at an angel. “You knew it; you knew it? You precious holy thing! And all this while you have been brooding up here by yourself. What can I say? How can I tell you? Oh, Nick, I shall die of happiness.”
She squeezed herself closer to me in the vacant space on the bed, clasping me round—her shoulders shaking with what just for a minute I thought was laughing.
“I never can say how, Mrs. Orchardson;" I managed to murmur after a long pause. “But I was quite sure, you know. I don't think grown-up people understand.”
“And I don't, either,” she said with a little hysterical laugh. “Indeed, indeed I don't. But there—" she raised her face, sat up, put her hands to her hair, and smiled down on me. I too scrambled up; and could see her plainly now as if by a thin mist-like light from her own body. “Bless me, Nick, I have made your hair all wet with crying. God bless you, my dear. It was all you; all you.”
She sat in silence a moment, but not as if she was thinking. Then suddenly she breathed, and lifted her head. “And now I must go, and we mustn't make the teeniest tiniest little crick of a sound. She is asleep. Follow me down—just two shadows. And don't, Nick, don't let me vanish away.”
“Will everything,” I asked her when we were safely downstairs; “will everything be just as ordinarily again now, Mrs. Orchardson?”
“You have missed me, you dear thing?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder, in the glaring light that now stretched down on us. She was kneeling at the sideboard.
“Esther never says a word, except to make me hate her,” I replied. “So, of course, most what she says about me is true. So I think now that the baby's quite better, Mrs. Orchardson, I had better go home again. Even Mr. Cairns wouldn't let me carry the bowl downstairs. And if it hadn't been for that …”
The blue of her eyes shone across at me like bits of the sky seen through a window. They opened wider and wider. “But, Nick, my dear!” she cried at last, clear and small as a bird. “I hadn't a notion that you had been unhappy. Indeed, indeed I hadn't. Blind selfish creature that I am. He is shaking, poor darling. He is absolutely worn out!”
And at that I could refrain my self-righteousness and self-commiseration no longer. I ran over to her, bowed myself double beside her on the floor, and sobbed “as if my heart would break.”