Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (67 page)

The shout, with which she began, proved to be only a momentary effort.
After a very few notes, Bessie toned down, and sang on in a small but very sweet voice.
At first her great black eyes were fixed on her mother, but soon her gaze wandered upwards, among the apples, and she seemed to have quite forgotten that she had any other audience than her Baby, and her Head-Nurse, who once or twice supplied, almost inaudibly, the right note, when the singer was-getting a little ‘flat’.

‘Matilda fane, you never look At any toy or picture-book:

I show you pretty things in vain—

You must be blind, Matilda fane!

‘I ask you riddles, tell you tales, But all our conversation fails:

You never answer me again—

I fear you’re dumb, Matilda fane!

‘Matilda, darling, when I call, You never seem to hear at all:

I shout with all my might and main—

But you’re so deaf, Matilda fane!

‘Matilda fane, you needn’t mind:

For, though you’re deaf, and dumb, and blind, There’s some one loves you, it is plain—

And that is me, Matilda fane!’

She sang three of the verses in a rather perfunctory style, but the last stanza evidently excited the little maiden.
Her voice rose, ever clearer and louder: she had a rapt look on her face, as if suddenly inspired, and, as she sang the last few words, she clasped to her heart the inattentive Matilda Jane.

‘Kiss it now!’
prompted the Head-Nurse.
And in a moment the simpering meaningless face of the Baby was covered with a shower of passionate kisses.

‘What a bonny song!’
cried the Farmer’s wife.
‘Who made the words, dearie?’

‘I—I think I’ll look for Bruno,’ Sylvie said demurely, and left us hastily.
The curious child seemed always afraid of being praised, or even noticed.

‘Sylvie planned the words,’ Bessie informed us, proud of her superior information: ‘and Bruno planned the music—and I sang it!’
(this last circumstance, by the way, we did not need to be told).

So we followed Sylvie, and all entered the parlour together.
Bruno was still standing at the window, with his elbows on the sill.

He had, apparently, finished the story that he was telling to the fly, and had found a new occupation.
‘Don’t imperrupt!’
he said as we came in.
‘I’m counting the Pigs in the field!’

‘How many are there?’
I enquired.

‘About a thousand and four,’ said Bruno.

‘You mean "about a thousand",’ Sylvie corrected him.
‘There’s no good saying "and four": you ca’n’t be sure about the four!’

‘And you’re as wrong as ever!’
Bruno exclaimed triumphantly.
‘It’s just the four I can be sure about; ‘cause they’re here, grubbling under the window!
It’s the thousand I isn’t pruffickly sure about!’

‘But some of them have gone into the sty,’ Sylvie said, leaning over him to look out of the window.

‘Yes,’ said Bruno; ‘but they went so slowly and so fewly, I didn’t care to count them.’

‘We must be going, children,’ I said.
‘Wish Bessie good-bye.’
Sylvie flung her arms round the little maiden’s neck, and kissed her: but Bruno stood aloof, looking unusually shy.
(‘I never kiss nobody but Sylvie!’
he explained to me afterwards.) The Farmer’s wife showed us out: and we were soon on our way back to Elveston.

‘And that’s the new public-house that we were talking about, I suppose?’
I said, as we came in sight of a long low building, with the words ‘THE GOLDEN LION’ over the door.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Sylvie.
‘I wonder if her Willie’s inside?
Run in, Bruno, and see if he’s there.’

I interposed, feeling that Bruno was, in a sort of way, in my care.
‘That’s not a place to send a child into.’
For already the revellers were getting noisy: and a wild discord of singing, shouting, and meaningless laughter came to us through the open windows.

‘They wo’n’t see him, you know,’ Sylvie explained.
‘Wait a minute, Bruno!’
She clasped the jewel, that always hung round her neck, between the palms of her hands, and muttered a few words to herself.
What they were I could not at all make out, but some mysterious change seemed instantly to pass over us.
My feet seemed to me no longer to press the ground, and the dream-like feeling came upon me, that I was suddenly endowed with the power of floating in the air.
I could still just see the children: but their forms were shadowy and unsubstantial, and their voices sounded as if they came from some distant place and time, they were so unreal.
However, I offered no further opposition to Bruno’s going into the house.
He was back again in a few moments.
‘No, he isn’t come yet,’ he said.
‘They’re talking about him inside, and saying how drunk he was last week.’

While he was speaking, one of the men lounged out through the door, a pipe in one hand and a mug of beer in the other, and crossed to where we were standing, so as to get a better view along the road.
Two or three others leaned out through the open window, each holding his mug of beer, with red faces and sleepy eyes.
‘Canst see him, lad?’
one of them asked.

‘I dunnot know,’ the man said, taking a step forwards, which brought us nearly face to face.
Sylvie hastily pulled me out of his way.
‘Thanks, child,’ I said.
‘I had forgotten he couldn’t see us.
What would have happened if I had stayed in his way?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sylvie said gravely.
‘It wouldn’t matter to us; but you may be different.’
She said this in her usual voice, but the man took no sort of notice, though she was standing close in front of him, and looking up into his face as she spoke.

‘He’s coming now!’
cried Bruno, pointing down the road.

‘He be a-coomin noo!’
echoed the man, stretching out his arm exactly over Bruno’s head, and pointing with his pipe.

‘Then chorus agin!’
was shouted out by one of the red-faced men in the window: and forthwith a dozen voices yelled, to a harsh discordant melody, the refrain:

‘There’s him, an’ yo’, an’ me,  Roarin’ laddies!

We loves a bit o’ spree, Roarin’ laddies we,  Roarin’ laddies  Roarin’ laddies!’

The man lounged back again to the house, joining lustily in the chorus as he went: so that only the children and I were in the road when ‘Willie’ came up.

CHAPTER SIX

WILLIE’S WIFE

HE made for the door of the public-house, but the children intercepted him.
Sylvie clung to one arm; while Bruno, on the opposite side, was pushing him with all his strength, and many inarticulate cries of ‘Gee-up!
Gee-back!
Woah then!’
which he had picked up from the waggoners.

‘Willie’ took not the least notice of them: he was simply conscious that something had checked him: and, for want of any other way of accounting for it, he seemed to regard it as his own act.

‘I wunnut coom in,’ he said: ‘not to-day.’

‘A mug o’ beer wunnut hurt ‘ee!’
his friends shouted in chorus.
‘Two mugs wunnut hurt ‘ee!
Nor a dozen mugs!’

‘Nay,’ said Willie.
‘I’m agoan whoam.’

‘What, withouten thy drink, Willie man?’
shouted the others.
But ‘Willie man’ would have no more discussion, and turned doggedly away, the children keeping one on each side of him, to guard him against any change in his sudden resolution.

For a while he walked on stoutly enough, keeping his hands in his pockets, and softly whistling a tune, in time to his heavy tread:

his success, in appearing entirely at his ease, was almost complete; but a careful observer would have noted that he had forgotten the second part of the air, and that, when it broke down, he instantly began it again, being too nervous to think of another, and too restless to endure silence.

It was not the old fear that possessed him now—the old fear that had been his dreary companion every Saturday night he could remember as he had reeled along, steadying himself against gates and garden-palings, and when the shrill reproaches of his wife had seemed to his dazed brain only the echo of a yet more piercing voice within the intolerable wail of a hopeless remorse: it was a wholly new fear that had come to him now: life had taken on itself a new set of colours, and was lighted up with a new and dazzling radiance, and he did not see, as yet, how his home-life, and his wife and child, would fit into the new order of things: the very novelty of it all was, to his simple mind, a perplexity and an overwhelming terror.

And now the tune died into sudden silence on the trembling lips, as he turned a sharp corner, and came in sight of his own cottage, where his wife stood, leaning with folded arms on the wicket-gate, and looking up the road with a pale face, that had in it no glimmer of the light of hope—only the heavy shadow of a deep stony despair.

‘Fine an’ early, lad!
Fine an’ early!’
the words might have been words of welcoming, but oh, the bitterness of the tone in which she said it!
‘What brings thee from thy merry mates, and all the fiddling and the jigging?
Pockets empty, I doubt?
Or thou’st come, mebbe, for to see thy little one die?
The bairnie’s clemmed, and I’ve nor bite nor sup to gie her.
But what does thou care?’
She flung the gate open, and met him with blazing eyes of fury.

The man said no word.
Slowly, and with downcast eyes, he passed into the house, while she, half terrified at his strange silence, followed him in without another word; and it was not till he had sunk into a chair, with his arms crossed on the table and with drooping head, that she found her voice again.

It seemed entirely natural for us to go in with them: at another time one would have asked leave for this, but I felt, I knew not why, that we were in some mysterious way invisible, and as free to come and to go as disembodied spirits.

The child in the cradle woke up, and raised a piteous cry, which in a moment brought the children to its side: Bruno rocked the cradle, while Sylvie tenderly replaced the little head on the pillow from which it had slipped.
But the mother took no heed of the cry, nor yet of the satisfied ‘coo’ that it set up when Sylvie had made it happy again: she only stood gazing at her husband, and vainly trying, with white quivering lips (I believe she thought he was mad), to speak in the old tones of shrill upbraiding that he knew so well.

‘And thou’st spent all thy wages—I’ll swear thou hast—on the devil’s own drink—and thou’st been and made thysen a beast again—as thou allus dost—’

‘Hasna!’
the man muttered, his voice hardly rising above a whisper, as he slowly emptied his pockets on the table.
‘There’s th’

wage, Missus, every penny on’t.’

The woman gasped and put one hand to her heart, as if under some great shock of surprise.
‘Then how’s thee gotten th’ drink?’

‘Hasna gotten it,’ he answered her, in a tone more sad than sullen.
‘I hanna touched a drop this blessed day.
No!’
he cried aloud, bringing his clenched fist heavily down upon the table, and looking up at her with gleaming eyes, ‘nor I’ll never touch another drop o’ the cursed drink—till I die—so help me God my Maker!’
His voice, which had suddenly risen to a hoarse shout, dropped again as suddenly: and once more he bowed his head, and buried his face in his folded arms.