The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (2 page)

Already evening was coming on and the little town, lazy in the warm, buzzed only with the ever-busy flies. Silently the friends passed along the quiet, narrow streets, but always on the shady side. Ahead of them rose the great shoulders of the Downs where dark shadows were sweeping, like giant's hands lifting in abhorrence at the deep, inquiring brother and his patiently following friend. For, though Bostock was immensely strong, Adelaide was portly and her weight hampered his stride and kept him in the rear.

Tiny Adelaide dreamed she was in the branches of a tree and the wind was bouncing her up and down. She smiled into the musty darkness of Bostock's coat and her fat fingers found a waistcoat button . . .

“Harris!” Bostock's voice was sharp with alarm. “I—I think she's leaking or something. I'm all wet, Harris.”

Harris hurried back and examined his sister. “I think she's peed, Bosty.” For a moment the friends stared down at Adelaide in her cocoon of shawling, as if for the first time divining her to be vaguely as themselves, subject to the same pains, pleasures and natural laws. Then they observed the rapidly deepening sky and hastened on till the road dwindled away and became no more than a finger scratch of broken chalk through the stubbly green.

On and on went Harris, across the uneven ground and skirting the chalky hollows that glared up abruptly, like the bleached sockets of half-buried giants' skulls. It was plain to the panting Bostock that Harris had one particular spot in mind. At last they reached it, and Bostock knew it well: a place of mystery, trysts and blackberries. It was a steep declivity, carpeted with close turf and bordered on three sides by thick, mysterious walls of bramble. This dense darkness was always full of strange rustlings and sudden cracklings as unseen denizens went about their sharp affairs.

“There,” breathed Harris, pointing to the turf. “Lay her there.”

Bostock hesitated, and Harris looked surprised. Then and only then did he understand that Bostock was totally ignorant of his purpose. At once a great warmth filled him as he realized the scope of his friend's trust. That Bostock should have come so far and on so strange an errand just because he, Harris, had asked him, spoke volumes for the power of friendship. Harris blinked. Even though Bostock must have thought he was mad, he'd followed him without a word.

“Old friend,” he whispered moistly. “You an' me's going to behold wonders.”

Rapidly and eagerly he explained everything. Did Bostock recall the tale of the two Roman infants that were suckled by the she-wolf? Bostock frowned and nodded. Few things ever got into his mind, but when they did there was no getting them out again.
They stayed there like the alien fixtures of another man's house—a source of passing wonder and bewilderment. He did not have the creative imagination that seizes on matters, apparently of little use and far apart, and instantly divines the link between them.

But Harris had. When Mr. Brett had mentioned the she-wolf, Harris's mind had leaped to the vixens that roamed the Downs, and when Mr. Brett had told of Spartan infants being exposed, Harris had thought at once of Adelaide. Then, putting all together in a sudden blaze, he'd hit on the inspired notion of seeing how native wild life accepted a human baby in its midst. He had every hope, he whispered excitedly, of a vixen with full dugs coming to suckle Adelaide!

Bostock stared at Harris in awe. “Well?” said Harris. But Bostock was unable to speak, so Harris, mistaking his silence for doubt, said defensively, “Anyway, she's my sister, and if she perishes it'll be me what'll have to bear her loss. Go on, Bosty—lay her down, old friend . . .”

Fat little Adelaide smiled and dreamed . . . dreamed she was being laid among buttercups and daisies on a cradling green.

Bostock and Harris crouched down to the windward in a patch of long grass through which only disconnected parts of them could be seen, and there, with bright sharp eyes and pounding hearts they awaited the arrival of the vixen with full dugs.

Harris never doubted for a moment that something of the kind would turn up and they'd witness an extraordinary phenomenon in nature. And Bostock never doubted Harris.

“This is the most exciting moment of my whole life,” thought Bostock, with difficulty. “Harris is a real genius and he's my best friend. I'm so excited I could jump and shout and kick the grass. Something's going to happen. I don't know how to keep still. Who can I tell about it? I must . . . no, I mustn't. I wish I could think. Oh, I'm so horribly excited and Harris looks so calm. I wish I could stop thinking. Someone might hear me . . .”

Harris's thoughts, though no less turbulent, were of a more advanced nature and concerned the youngest person ever to read a learned paper before the Royal Society. Faintly, in his inner ear, he heard the bravos peal out like a storm of church bells on Judgment Sunday, and he bowed his head to hide his happy tears . . .

Suddenly the two friends grew still in mind and body. A sound had petrified them. A faint, but unmistakable panting and snuffling and crackling of bramble. Then there was a crunching of dry twigs. Harris's face, briefly blossoming in the long grass, was ashy with expectation.

Little Adelaide, deep in her blind sleep, chuckled and dreamed she was about to be fed again.

It was coming, it was coming! The vixen—the vixen with full dugs!

YOUNG, PRETTY AND
in yellow muslin, Tizzy Alexander, daughter of the fiery Major who taught arithmetic, was in a condition of terrified excitement. Her heart was thumping half out of her bodice and she kept clutching at her scarf to hide it. She must have been mad to have put herself in Ralph Bunnion's way, but wild curiosity had at last overpowered her. Ralph Bunnion—cricketer, horseman and hero of the school. What was he like, this terrible, handsome, heartless breaker of hearts? Tall, fashionable, and so far as could be judged from the ends of them, clean-limbed.

The use of this last expression had given her a brief feeling of maturity, but it had gone when she'd stolen glance after glance at Dr. Bunnion's dashing
and notorious son. It was said he'd once fought a duel—and everyone knew he drank prodigious quantities of claret at the Old Ship Inn with three young men almost as famous as himself.

Oh Tizzy, why ain't you back in the school, safe with your ma and pa? She shook her head. In her heart of hearts she knew she'd always have regretted it. She knew that if she missed this chance, she'd have dreamed and wondered all her life long what it would have been like to have been swept off her feet by a Ralph Bunnion. Only once in a lifetime did such an adventure befall a young girl.

With a start she felt his hand on her arm and she realized they'd walked all the way from the school to the beginning of the Downs. All her instincts bade her fly back home, but she could not. The sun was dropping down and warning shadows were pooling in the rough, tufted ground like treacherous black pits. Tizzy! Tizzy! When will it begin? Oh, Tizzy, what a little fool you are! Thus her fears and hopes raced hand in hand.

He was talking to her, had been for some time, but she'd been too engrossed in her own confused sensations to know what he'd been saying. All she'd noticed was that as he laughed his teeth flashed like bayonets.

Lord, he was handsome! He wore a mouse-colored coat with smart tails and a waistcoat embroidered with a design of love-lies-bleeding.

“D'you know,” he said, laughing gently, “the last time I walked this way was with poor Maggie Hemp?”

“Oh, dear,” said Tizzy. “I saw her only yesterday in Bartholomew's. I didn't know aught was amiss.”

“Then—then she's not—not drowned?”

“Oh, no—”

“Thank God!” breathed Ralph fervently. “I say thank God for that!”

“I never knew,” began Tizzy, when Ralph shook his head as if the subject was painful to him. But in a little while he overcame his distress and admitted to Tizzy that Maggie Hemp had threatened to throw herself off Black Rock and into the pounding sea.

“Why?” asked Tizzy. Ralph glanced at her a shade coldly.

“Who knows the secrets of a woman's heart?” he wondered aloud, and then went on to explain that Lizzy Cooper had come between them. He believed it possible that Maggie's affections were more deeply engaged than he'd supposed, and it distressed him very much. He wished such things wouldn't keep happening to him, for he was, by nature, retiring and shy. “As I was saying to Dolly Packer, only last night at the Assembly Rooms, she shouldn't set her heart on me . . .”

“And poor—poor Miss Cooper?” whispered Tizzy, in deeper waters than ever she'd supposed. Ralph sighed, shrugged his broad shoulders and tightened his grip on her arm. Tizzy moaned inwardly and saw herself poised on some cruel eminence with the wind blowing her pretty ringlets, crying, “Ralph!” as she leaped to a popular oblivion.

“You women!” said the hapless Ralph, laughing ruefully. “We men don't stand a chance!”

Imperceptibly their pace had quickened. Ahead lay a dangerously romantic-looking hedge of brambles that crowned a scooped out bed of turf. Such mysterious trysting places had often figured in Tizzy's dreams—such lovers' couches of green with leafy curtains to shut out the eyes of the world.

Her heart fluttered and she looked, half yearningly, back along the way they'd come. With a pang she saw the humdrum little town far below. It looked for all the world as though it had slipped down the green hillsides and come to rest at the edge of the wide swallowing sea for the greater convenience of Ralph Bunnion's unhappy loves.

“You snare us and trap us with your charms,” said Ralph, laughing bitterly now. Tizzy waited, nervously hopeful of discovering which of her charms was proving the deadliest. But it was not to be. Instead she learned to her dismay that Ralph was as clay in women's hands. Somehow or another they always seemed to be attracted to him. He didn't know why, but wondered if there might be some sort of shining about him.

He paused and eyed her with an air of weary expectancy. Tizzy blushed and looked hurriedly down at her black shoes popping in and out of her daffodil gown and carrying her onward to her fate. Ralph laughed, frowning this time, and admitted that his mysterious attractiveness was really quite unwelcome. There were times, even, when he dreaded it and envied his friends who might go anywhere without so much as a single admiring look.

Could she, Tizzy, understand how wretched it was that every time he stood up to dance at the Old Ship Assembly Room everyone fell back to watch? Yes, he
was
a fine dancer, but then so were many others. Yes, he
was
a brilliant cricketer, but so were several others. Yes, he
was
a remarkable horseman, but there were others almost as good. So what was it?

He felt so—so foolish about it all. More often than not he longed to be at home with a good book, but it was never to be. What
was
it about him, he demanded of Tizzy. Was he—here he laughed incredulously—was he really so outrageously handsome?

“No—no!” breathed Tizzy, confused and grateful to have been brought into the conversation.

Ralph glared at her. He'd underplayed his hand and been too modest. It was a weakness of his. He kicked a lump of chalk, laughed fiercely and said, “Dolly Packer once said I was like a Greek statue . . .”

Tizzy looked up. The dark and secret hedge of bramble was almost upon them. She thought of the soft green bed it screened, but to her surprise, she felt nothing of the terrified expectancy with which she'd set out. Perhaps she was being swept off her feet without knowing it? She sighed. Was life always such a disappointment? Was she never to learn that her eyes were like mysterious pools and her lips a pair of kissing cherries? Was she never to share those high, sweet passions with which the lovers of old led each other up the mountains of bliss?

“Dolly said my profile was extraordinarily Greek . . .”
He presented this aspect of himself for Tizzy's admiration. Unluckily Tizzy was still brooding on life's disappointments and her expression was touched with something very like boredom. Fatally offended, the handsome Ralph felt one of his rages coming on. As through a veil of red, he saw Tizzy ahead of him. She was picking her way around the bramble hedge to the very edge of the soft, grassy couch. Angry, lustful thoughts inflamed him. He would teach her what it meant to be out with Ralph Bunnion. There was a terrible look in his eyes, and with a savage laugh he launched himself at Tizzy, meaning to seize her and bear her to the amorous ground.

At the selfsame moment, Tizzy saw, of all amazing things, a tiny human baby, lying all alone, asleep in the grass. She cried out, “Lord save us! A baby!” and rushed to gather it up.

Thus it happened that with nothing in the way to halt him, Ralph Bunnion, still laughing savagely, flew a goodish way across the declivity before coming down and striking the ground with his face. He gave a sharp, loud cry of pain, but Tizzy urgently begged him to be quiet as the baby was sleeping.

Tiny Adelaide dreamed of deliciously frightening storms and thunder. Then she chuckled as she fancied herself to be borne up and floating in a sea of milk . . . gently, gently toward some crisp, entrancing shore . . .

“The shame of it,” murmured Tizzy Alexander, walking with the greatest care and tenderness as she
bore her precious burden. “To leave such a sweet thing to die! Lord! What's the world coming to? What can have come over the mother to part with her darling soft morsel?”

Ralph Bunnion did not answer. He was not interested. He followed after Tizzy with a handkerchief pressed to his face. He had suffered severe scratches and bruises and his nose would not stop bleeding. He feared it might have been put out of shape. He had heard of such things. He was consumed with hatred for Tizzy and the infant in her arms.

“What should we do with it, Mister Bunnion? We can't just let it go on the parish. Perhaps it could go to the Foundlings? But wouldn't that be a shame? It's such a darling. And—and finding it so. I get a queer shivering that we were
meant
to come on it as we did . . . as if it's something special, like Moses in the bulrushes or—or Perseus in his ark. Maybe it's going to grow up into a saint or a hero or something. Oh, Mister Bunnion! D'you think we could keep it? It wouldn't be no trouble. We could give it every love and care and Pa could teach it arithmetic . . .”