Thenceforward, as day followed day, Aunt Rachel rocked no more; and with the packing and partial melting of the snow the gipsies up at the caravans judged it time to be off about their business. It was on the morning of Christmas Eve that they came down in a body to the Abbey Farm to express their thanks to those who had befriended them; but the bailiff was not there. He and the farm men had ceased work, and were down at the church, practising the carols. Only Aunt Rachel sat, still and knitting, in the black walnut chair; and the children played on the floor.
A night in the toy-box had apparently bred discontent between Jack and Flora--or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world; at any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room, Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead-balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor-car. With the air of performing some vaguely momentous ritual, the children were kissing one another beneath the bunch of mistletoe that hung from the centre beam. In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well, and Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel had Brown Titus also.
"Stay you here; I will give the lady dear our thanks," said Annabel to the group of gipsies gathered about the porch; and she entered the great hall-kitchen. She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat.
There was obeisance in the bend of her body, but command in her long almond eyes, as she spoke.
"Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live."
Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work.
"Rocking, I should not live long," she replied.
"We are leaving you."
"All leave me."
"Annabel fears she has taken away your comfort."
"Only for a little while. The door closes behind us, but it opens again."
"But for that little time, rock--"
Aunt Rachel shook her head.
"No. It is finished. Another has seen.... Say good-bye to your companions; they are very welcome to what they have had; and God speed you."
"They thank you, lady dear.... Will you not forget that Annabel saw, and rock?"
"No more."
Annabel stooped and kissed the hand that bore the betrothal hoop of pearls. The other hand Aunt Rachel placed for a moment upon the smoky head of the babe in the sling. It trembled as it rested there, but the tremor passed, and Annabel, turning once at the porch, gave her a last look. Then she departed with her companions.
That afternoon, Jack and Flora had shaken down to wedlock as married folk should, and sat together before the board spread with the dolls' tea-things. The pallid light in the great hall-kitchen faded; the candles were lighted; and then the children, first borrowing the stockings of their elders to hang at the bed's foot, were packed off early--for it was the custom to bring them down again at midnight for the carols. Aunt Rachel had their good-night kisses, not as she had them every night, but with the special ceremony of the mistletoe.
Other folk, grown folk, sat with Aunt Rachel that evening; but the old walnut chair did not move upon its rockers. There was merry talk, but Aunt Rachel took no part in it. The board was spread with ale and cheese and spiced loaf for the carol-singers; and the time drew near for their coming.
When at midnight, faintly on the air from the church below, there came the chiming of Christmas morning, all bestirred themselves.
"They'll be here in a few minutes," they said; "somebody go and bring the children down;" and within a very little while subdued noises were heard outside, and the lifting of the latch of the yard gate. The children were in their nightgowns, hardly fully awake; a low voice outside was heard giving orders; and then there arose on the night the carol.
"Hush!" they said to the wondering children; "listen!..."
It was the Cherry Tree Carol that rose outside, of how sweet Mary, the Queen of Galilee, besought Joseph to pluck the cherries for her Babe, and Joseph refused; and the voices of the singers, that had begun hesitatingly, grew strong and loud and free.
"... and Joseph wouldn't pluck the cherries," somebody was whispering to the tiny Angela....
"_Mary said to Cherry Tree,
'Bow down to my knee,
That I may pluck cherries
For my Babe and me._'"
the carollers sang; and "Now listen, darling," the one who held Angela murmured....
"_The uppermost spray then
Bowed down to her knee;
'Thus you may see, Joseph,
These cherries are for me.'
"'O, eat your cherries, Mary,
Give them your Babe now;
O, eat your cherries, Mary,
That grew upon the bough._'"
The little Angela, within the arms that held her, murmured, "It's the gipsies, isn't it, mother?"
"No, darling. The gipsies have gone. It's the carol-singers, singing because Jesus was born."
"But, mother ... it is the gipsies, isn't it?... 'Cos look..."
"Look where?"
"At Aunt Rachel, mother ... The gipsy woman wouldn't go without her little baby, would she?"
"No, she wouldn't do that."
"Then has she lent it to Aunt Rachel, like I lend my new toys sometimes?"
The mother glanced across at Aunt Rachel, and then gathered the night-gowned figure more closely.
"The darling's only half awake," she murmured.... "Poor Aunt Rachel's sleepy too...."
Aunt Rachel, her head dropped, her hands lightly folded as if about some shape that none saw but herself, her face again ineffable with that sweet and peaceful smile, was once more rocking softly in her chair.
HIC JACET
A TALE OF ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE
INTRODUCTION
As I lighted my guests down the stairs of my Chelsea lodgings, turned up the hall gas that they might see the steps at the front door, and shook hands with them, I bade them good night the more heartily that I was glad to see their backs. Lest this should seem but an inhospitable confession, let me state, first, that they had invited themselves, dropping in in ones and twos until seven or eight of them had assembled in my garret, and, secondly, that I was rather extraordinarily curious to know why, at close on midnight, the one I knew least well of all had seen fit to remain after the others had taken their departure. To these two considerations I must add a third, namely, that I had become tardily conscious that, if Andriaovsky had not lingered of himself, I should certainly have asked him to do so.
It was to nothing more than a glance, swift and momentary, directed by Andriaovsky to myself while the others had talked, that I traced this desire to see more of the little Polish painter; but a glance derives its import from the circumstance under which it is given. That rapid turning of his eyes in my direction an hour before had held a hundred questions, implications, criticisms, incredulities, condemnations. It had been one of those uncovenanted gestures that hold the promise of the treasures of an eternal friendship. I wondered as I turned down the gas again and remounted the stairs what personal message and reproach in it had lumped me in with the others; and by the time I had reached my own door again a phrase had fitted itself in my mind to that quick, ironical turning of Andriaovsky's eyes: "Et tu, Brute!..."
He was standing where I had left him, his small shabby figure in the attitude of a diminutive colossus on my hearthrug. About him were the recently vacated chairs, solemnly and ridiculously suggestive of still continuing the high and choice conversation that had lately finished. The same fancy had evidently taken Andriaovsky, for he was turning from chair to chair, his head a little on one side, mischievously and aggravatingly smiling. As one of them, the deep wicker chair that Jamison had occupied, suddenly gave a little creak of itself, as wicker will when released from a strain, his smile broadened to a grin. I had been on the point of sitting down in that chair, but I changed my mind and took another.
"That's right," said Andriaovsky, in that wonderful English which he had picked up in less than three years, "don't sit in the wisdom-seat; you might profane it."
I knew what he meant. I felt for my pipe and slowly filled it, not replying. Then, slowly wagging his head from side to side, with his eyes humorously and banteringly on mine, he uttered the very words I had mentally associated with that glance of his.
"Et tu, Brute!" he said, wagging away, so that with each wag the lenses of his spectacles caught the light of the lamp on the table.
I too smiled as I felt for a match.
"It was rather much, wasn't it?" I said.
But he suddenly stopped his wagging, and held up a not very clean forefinger. His whole face was altogether too confoundedly intelligent.
"Oh no, you don't!" he said peremptorily. "No getting out of it like that the moment they've turned their backs! No running--what is it?--no running with the hare and hunting with the hounds! You helped, you know!"
I confess I fidgeted a little.
"But hang it all, what could I do? They were in my place," I broke out.
He chuckled, enjoying my discomfiture. Then his eyes fell on those absurd and solemn chairs again.
"Look at 'em--the Art Shades in conference!" he chuckled. "That rush-seated one, it was talking half an hour ago about 'Scherzos in Silver and Grey!' ... Nice, fresh green stuff!"
To shut him up I told him that he would find cigarettes and tobacco on the table.
"'Scherzos in Silver and Grey'!" he chuckled again as he took a cigarette....
All this, perhaps, needs some explanation. It had been the usual thing, usual in those days, twenty years ago--smarming about Art and the Arts and so forth. They--"we," as apparently Andriaovsky had lingered behind for the purpose of reminding me--had perhaps talked a little more soaringly than the ordinary, that was all. There had been Jamison in the wicker chair, full to the lips and running over with the Colour Suggestions of the late Edward Calvert; Gibbs, in a pulpy state of adoration of the less legitimate side of the painting of Watts; and Magnani, who had advanced that an Essential Oneness underlies all the Arts, and had triumphantly proved his thesis by analogy with the Law of the Co-relation of Forces. A book called Music and Morals had appeared about that time, and on it they--we--had risen to regions of kite-high lunacy about Colour Symphonies, orgies of formless colour thrown on a magic-lantern screen--vieux jeu enough at this time of day. A young newspaper man, too, had made mental notes of our adjectives, for use in his weekly (I nearly spelt it "weakly") half-column of Art Criticism; and--and here was Andriaovsky, grinning at the chairs, and mimicking it all with diabolical glee.
"'Scherzos in Silver and Grey'--'Word Pastels'--' Lyrics in Stone!'" he chuckled. "And what was it the fat fellow said?' A Siren Song in Marble!' Phew!... Well, I'll get along. I shall just be in time to get a pint of bitter to wash it all down if I'm quick... Bah!" he broke out suddenly. "Good men build up Form and Forms--keep the Arts each after its kind--raise up the dikes so that we shan't all be swept away by night and nothingness--and these rats come nosing and burrowing and undermining it all!... Et tu, Brute!"
"Well, when you've finished rubbing it in--" I grunted.
"As if you didn't know better!... Is that your way of getting back on 'em, now that you've chucked drawing and gone in for writing books? Phew I... Well, I'll go and get my pint of beer--"
But he didn't go for his pint of beer. Instead, he began to prowl about my room, pryingly, nosingly, touching things here and there. I watched him as he passed from one thing to another. He was very little, and very, very shabby. His trousers were frayed, and the sole of one of his boots flapped distressingly. His old bowler hat--he had not thought it necessary to wait until he got outside before thrusting it on the back of his head--was so limp in substance that I verily believed that had he run incautiously downstairs he would have found when he got to the bottom that its crown had sunk in of its own weight. In spite of his remark about the pint of beer, I doubt if he had the price of one in his pocket.
"What's this, Brutus--a concertina?" he suddenly asked, stopping before the collapsible case in which I kept my rather old dress suit.
I told him what it was, and he hoisted up his shoulders.
"And these things?" he asked, moving to something else.
They were a pair of boot-trees of which I had permitted myself the economy. I remember they cost me four shillings in the old Brompton Road.
"And that's your bath, I suppose.... Dumb-bells too.... And--oh, good Lord!..."
He had picked up, and dropped again as if it had been hot, somebody or other's card with the date of a "day" written across the corner of it....
As I helped him on with his overcoat he made no secret of the condition of its armholes and lining. I don't for one moment suppose that the garment was his. I took a candle to light him down as soon as it should please him to depart.
"Well, so long, and joy to you on the high road to success," he said with another grin for which I could have bundled him down the stairs....
In later days I never looked to Andriaovsky for tact; but I stared at him for his lack of it that night. And as I stared I noticed for the first time the broad and low pylon of his forehead, his handsome mouth and chin, and the fire and wit and scorn that smouldered behind his cheap spectacles. I looked again; and his smallness, his malice, his pathetic little braggings about his poverty, seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship had somehow gone.
As I watched him, a neighbouring clock struck the half-hour, and he did even as I had surmised--cursed the closing time of the English public-houses....
I lighted him down. For one moment, under the hall gas, he almost dropped his jesting manner.
"You do know better, Harrison, you know," he said. "But, of course, you're going to be a famous author in almost no time. Oh, ca se voit! No garrets for you! It was a treat,' the way you handled those fellows--really ... Well don't forget us others when you're up there--I may want you to write my 'Life' some day...."
I heard the slapping of the loose sole as he shuffled down the path. At the gate he turned for a moment.
"Good night, Brutus," he called.
When I had mounted to my garret again my eyes fell once more on that ridiculous assemblage of empty chairs, all solemnly talking to one another. I burst out into a laugh. Then I undressed, put my jacket on the hanger, took the morrow's boots from the trees and treed those I had removed, changed the pair of trousers under my mattress, and went, still laughing at the chairs, to bed.
This was Michael Andriaovsky, the Polish painter, who died four weeks ago.
