Wood-Ladies

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Title:     Wood-Ladies
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

The pine trees of the wood joined their branches into a dome of intricate groinings over the floor of ferns where the children sat sunk to the neck in a foam of tender green. The sunbeams that slanted in made shivering patches of gold about them. Joyce, the elder of the pair, was trying to explain why she had wished to come here from the glooms of the lesser wood beyond.

"I wasn't 'zactly frightened," she said. "I knew there wasn't any lions or robbers, or anything like that. But--"

"Tramps?" suggested Joan.

"No! You know I don't mind tramps, Joan. But as we was going along under all those dark bushes where it was so quiet, I kept feeling as if there was something behind me. I looked round and there wasn't anything, but well, it felt as if there was."

Joyce's small face was knit and intent with the effort to convey her meaning. She was a slim, erect child, as near seven years of age as made no matter, with eyes that were going to be grey but had not yet ceased to be blue. Joan, who was a bare five, a mere huge baby, was trying to root up a fern that grew between her feet.

"I know," she said, tugging mightily. The fern gave suddenly, and Joan fell over on her back, with her stout legs sticking up stiffly. In this posture she continued the conversation undisturbed. "I know, Joy. It was wood-ladies!"

"Wood-ladies!" Joyce frowned in faint perplexity as Joan rolled right side up again. Wood-ladies were dim inhabitants of the woods, beings of the order of fairies and angels and even vaguer, for there was nothing about them in the story-books. Joyce, who felt that she was getting on in years, was willing to be skeptical about them, but could not always manage it. In the nursery, with the hard, clean linoleum underfoot and the barred window looking out on the lawn and the road, it was easy; she occasionally shocked Joan, and sometimes herself, by the license of her speech on such matters; but it was a different affair when one came to the gate at the end of the garden, and passed as through a dream portal from the sunshine and frank sky to the cathedral shadows and great whispering aisles of the wood. There, the dimness was like the shadow of a presence; as babies they had been aware of it, and answered their own questions by inventing wood-ladies to float among the trunks and people the still, green chambers. Now, neither of them could remember how they had first learned of wood-ladies.

"Wood-ladies," repeated Joyce, and turned with a little shiver to look across the ferns to where the pines ended and the lesser wood, dense with undergrowth, broke at their edge like a wave on a steep beach. It was there, in a tunnel of a path that writhed beneath over-arching bushes, that she had been troubled with the sense of unseen companions. Joan, her fat hands struggling with another fern, followed her glance.

"That's where they are," she said casually. "They like being in the dark."

"Joan!" Joyce spoke earnestly. "Say truly truly, mind! do you think there is wood-ladies at all?"

"'Course there is," replied Joan, cheerfully. "Fairies in fields and angels in heaven and dragons in caves and wood-ladies in woods."

"But," objected Joyce, "nobody ever sees them."

Joan lifted her round baby face, plump, serene, bright with innocence, and gazed across at the tangled trees beyond the ferns. She wore the countenance with which she was wont to win games, and Joyce thrilled nervously at her certainty. Her eyes, which were brown, seemed to seek expertly; then she nodded.

"There's one now," she said, and fell to work with her fern again.

Joyce, crouching among the broad green leaves, looked tensely, dread and curiosity the child's avid curiosity for the supernatural alight in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway towards her. There was an impression of eyes, large and tender, of an infinite grace and fragility, of a coloring that merged into the greens and browns of the wood; and as she drew her breath, it was all no more. The trees, the lights and shades, the stir of branches were as before, but something was gone from them.

"Joan!" she cried, hesitating.

"Yes," said Joan, without looking up. "What?"

The sound of words had broken a spell. Joyce was no longer sure that she had seen anything.

"I thought, just now, I could see something," she said. "But I s'pose I didn't."

"I did," remarked Joan.

Joyce crawled through the crisp ferns till she was close to Joan, sitting solid and untroubled and busy upon the ground, with broken stems and leaves all round her.

"Joan," she begged. "Be nice. You're trying to frighten me, aren't you?"

"I'm not," protested Joan. "I did see a wood-lady. Wood-ladies doesn't hurt you; wood-ladies are nice. You're a coward, Joyce."

"I can't help it," said Joyce, sighing. "But I won't go into the dark spots of the wood any more."

"Coward," repeated Joan absently, but with a certain relish.

"You wouldn't like to go there by yourself!" cried Joyce. "If I wasn't with you, you'd be a coward, too. You know you would."

She stopped, for Joan had swept her lap free of debris and was rising to her feet. Joan, for all her plumpness and infantile softness, had a certain deliberate dignity when she was put upon her mettle. She eyed her sister with a calm and very galling superiority.

"I'm going there now," she answered; "all by mineself."

"Go, then!" retorted Joyce, angrily.

Without a further word Joan turned her back and began to plough her way across the ferns towards the dark wood. Joyce, watching her, saw her go at first with wrath, for she had been stung, and then with compunction. The plump baby was so small in the brooding solemnity of the pines, thrusting indefatigably along, buried to the waist in ferns. Her sleek, brown head had a devoted look; the whole of her seemed to go with so sturdy an innocence towards those peopled and uncanny glooms. Joyce rose to her knees to call her back.

"Joan!" she cried. The baby turned. "Joan! Come back; come back an' be friends!"

Joan, maintaining her offing, replied with a gesture. It was a gesture they had learned from the boot-and-knife boy, and they had once been spanked for practicing it on the piano-tuner. The boot-and-knife boy called it "cocking a snook," and it consisted in raising a thumb to one's nose and spreading the fingers out. It was defiance and insult in tabloid form. Then she turned and plodded on. The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood closed behind her like a lid.

Joyce, squatting in her place, blinked a little breathlessly to shift from her senses an oppression of alarm, and settled down to wait for her. At least it was true that nothing ever happened to Joan; even when she fell into a water-butt she suffered no damage; and the wood was a place to which they came every day.

"Besides," she considered, enumerating her resources of comfort; "besides, there can't be such things as wood-ladies, really."

But Joan was a long time gone. The dome of pines took on an uncanny stillness; the moving patches of sun seemed furtive and unnatural; the ferns swayed without noise. In the midst of it, patient and nervous, sat Joyce, watching always that spot in the bushes where a blue overall and a brown head had disappeared. The under-note of alarm which stirred her senses died down; a child finds it hard to spin out a mood; she simply sat, half-dreaming in the peace of the morning, half-watching the wood. Time slipped by her, and presently there came Mother, smiling and seeking through the trees for her babies.

"Isn't there a clock inside you that tells you when it's lunch time?" asked Mother. "You're ever so late. Where's Joan?"

Joyce rose among the ferns, delicate and elfin, with a shy perplexity on her face. It was difficult to speak even to Mother about wood-ladies without a pretence of skepticism.

"I forgot about lunch," she said, taking the slim, cool hand which Mother held out to her. "Joan's in there." She nodded at the bushes.

"Is she?" said Mother, and called aloud in her singing voice that was so clear to hear in the spaces of the wood. "Joan! Joan!"

A cheeky bird answered with a whistle, and Mother called again.

"She said," explained Joyce; "she said she saw a wood-lady, and then she went in there to show me she wasn't afraid."

"What's a wood-lady, chick?" asked Mother. "The rascal!" she said, smiling, when Joyce had explained as best she could. "We'll have to go and look for her."

They went hand in hand, and Mother showed herself clever in parting a path among the bushes. She managed so that no bough sprang back to strike Joyce, and without tearing or soiling her own soft, white dress; one could guess that when she had been a little girl she, too, had had a wood to play in. They cut down by the Secret Pond, where the old rhododendrons were, and out to the edge of the fields; and when they paused Mother would lift her head and call again, and her voice rang in the wood like a bell. By the pond, which was a black water with steep banks, she paused and showed a serious face; but there were no marks of shoes on its clay slopes, and she shook her head and went on. But to all the calling there was no answer, no distant cheery bellow to guide them to Joan.

"I wish she wouldn't play these tricks," said Mother. "I don't like them a bit."

"I expect she's hiding," said Joyce. "There aren't wood-ladies really, are there, Mother?"

"There's nothing worse in these woods than a rather naughty baby," Mother replied. "We'll go back by the path and call her again."

Joyce knew that the hand which held hers tightened as they went, and there was still no answer to Mother's calling. She could not have told what it was that made her suddenly breathless; the wood about her turned desolate; an oppression of distress and bewilderment burdened them both. "Joan! Joan!" called Mother in her strong beautiful contralto, swelling the word forth in powerful music, and when she ceased the silence was like a taunt. It was not as if Joan were there and failed to answer; it was as if there were no longer any Joan anywhere. They came at last to the space of sparse trees which bordered their garden.

"We mustn't be silly about this," said Mother, speaking as much to herself as to Joyce. "Nothing can have happened to her. And you must have lunch, chick."

"Without waiting for Joan?" asked Joyce.

"Yes. The gardener and the boot-boy must look for Joan," said Mother, opening the gate.

The dining-room looked very secure and homelike, with its big window and its cheerful table spread for lunch. Joyce's place faced the window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding the kitchen garden; and when Mother had served her with food, she was left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy passed the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking war-like. There reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling something about tramps.

"Oh, I don't think so," replied Mother's voice.

Mother came in presently and sat down, but did not eat anything. Joyce asked her why.

"Oh, I shall have some lunch when Joan comes," answered Mother. "I shan't be hungry till then. Will you have some more, my pet?"

When Joyce had finished, they went out again to the wood to meet Joan when she was brought back in custody. Mother walked quite slowly, looking all the time as if she would like to run. Joyce held her hand and sometimes glanced up at her face, so full of wonder and a sort of resentful doubt, as though circumstances were playing an unmannerly trick on her. At the gate they came across the boot-boy.

"I bin all acrost that way," said the boot-boy, pointing with his stumpy black forefinger, "and then acrost that way, an' Mister Jenks" Jenks was the gardener "'e've gone about in rings, 'e 'ave. And there ain't no sign nor token, mum, not a sign there ain't."

From behind him sounded the voice of the gardener, thrashing among the trees. "Miss Joan!" he roared. "Hi! Miss Jo-an! You're a-frightin' your Ma proper. Where are ye, then?"

"She must be hiding," said Mother. "You must go on looking, Walter. You must go on looking till you find her."

"Yes'm," said Walter. "If's she's in there us'll find her, soon or late."

He ran off, and presently his voice was joined to Jenks's, calling Joan calling, calling, and getting no answer.

Mother took Joyce's hand again.

"Come," she said. "We'll walk round by the path, and you must tell me again how it all happened. Did you really see something when Joan told you to look?"

"I expect I didn't," replied Joyce, dolefully. "But Joan's always saying there's a fairy or something in the shadows, and I always think I see them for a moment."

"It couldn't have been a live woman or a man that you saw?"

"Oh, no!" Joyce was positive of that. Mother's hand tightened on hers understandingly, and they went on in silence till they met Jenks.

Jenks was an oldish man with bushy grey whiskers, who never wore a coat, and now he was wet to the loins with mud and water.

"That there ol' pond," he explained. "I've been an' took a look at her. Tromped through her proper, I did, an' I'll go bail there ain't so much as a dead cat in all the mud of her. Thish yer's a mistry, mum, an' no mistake."

Mother stared at him. "I can't bear this," she said suddenly. "You must go on searching, Jenks, and Walter must go on his bicycle to the police station at once. Call him, please!"

"Walter!" roared Jenks obediently.

"Comin'!" answered the boot-boy, and burst forth from the bushes. In swift, clear words, which no stupidity could mistake or forget, Mother gave him his orders, spoken in a tone that meant urgency. Walter went flying to execute them.

"Oh, Mother, where do you think Joan can be?" begged Joyce when Jenks had gone off to resume his search:

"I don't know," said Mother. "It's all so absurd."

"If there was wood-ladies, they wouldn't hurt a baby like Joan," suggested Joyce.

"Oh, who could hurt her!" cried Mother, and fell to calling again. Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh roars of Jenks.

Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard Mother's tale, which embodied that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his moustache and his big chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded, exactly as if he saw through the whole business and could find Joan in a minute or two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.

"I understand, then," he said, "that the little girl's been missing for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can't have got far. I sent a couple o' constables round the roads be'ind the wood before I started, an' now I'll just 'ave a look through the wood myself."

"Thank you," said Mother. "I don't know why I'm so nervous, but--."

"Very natural, ma'am," said the big superintendent, comfortingly, and went with them to the wood.

It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and Mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning a little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among the ferns. "It was 'ere she went?" he inquired, as he reached the dark path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced his search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks disposed of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the fields, where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed them without leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a cart-rut.

"We 'ave to consider the possibilities of the matter," said the superintendent. "Assumin' that the wood 'as been thoroughly searched, where did she get out of it?"

"Searched!" growled old Jenks. "There ain't a inch as I 'aven't searched an' seen, not a inch."

"The kidnappin' the'ry," went on the superintendent, ignoring him and turning to Mother, "I don't incline to. 'Owever, we must go to work in order, an' I'll 'ave my men up 'ere and make sure of the wood. All gypsies an' tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I don't think there's no cause for you to feel anxious, ma'am. I 'ope to 'ave some news for you in the course of the afternoon."

They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the corner.

"Oh, dear," said Mother, then: "Why doesn't the baby come? I wish Daddy weren't away."

Now that the police had entered the affair Joyce felt that there remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles, flashing the official bull's eye lantern into the mysterious interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to her mother as it did to her.

"They're sure to bring her back, Mother," she repeated.

"Oh, chick," said Mother, "I keep telling myself so. But I wish I wish."

"What, Mother?"

"I wish," said Mother in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were confessing something that troubled her; "I wish you hadn't seen that wood-lady."

The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed old Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It was a real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground and went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had been lost, and no fewer than three of them trod every inch of the bottom of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old fox's earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived and walked about smoking a pipe a detective! Up from the village, too, came the big young curate and the squire's two sons, civil and sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural that Mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant that anything could have happened to Joyce.

"That baby!" urged the curate. "Why, my dear lady, Joan is better known hereabouts than King George himself. No one could take her a mile without having to answer questions. I don't know what's keeping her, but you may be sure she's all right."

"Course she is," chorused the others, swinging their sticks lightheartedly. "'Course she's all right."

"Get her for me, then," said Mother. "I don't want to be silly, and you're awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. I, I want her."

The squire's sons turned as if on an order and went towards the wood. The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a gentleman, and his hard clean-shaven face could be kind and serious.

"We're sure to get her," he said in lower tones. "And you must help us with your faith and courage. Can you?"

Mother's hand tightened on that of Joyce.

"We are doing our best," she said, and smiled she smiled. The curate nodded and went his way to the wood.

A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and master of all the police in the county, a gay trim soldier whom the children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and bleary eyes bloodhounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle it. Actual living bloodhounds would be more than a match for Joan. Colonel Warden was sure of it too.

"Saves time," he was telling Mother in his high snappy voice. "Shows us which way she's gone, you know. Best hounds in the country, these two; never known 'em fail yet."

The dogs were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry. Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce's hand, followed. The hounds made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and crashed after them. Joyce and Mother came up with them at a place where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without interest about him.

"Dash it all," the colonel was saying; "she can't she simply can't have been kidnapped in a balloon."

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result. They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up as though the scent went no farther. Nothing could induce them to hunt beyond it.

"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his moustache. "This is queer." He stood glancing, around him as though the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the countryside. Joyce found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

"I know inside myself," she told Mother, "right down deep in the middle of me, that Joan's all right."

"Bless you, my chick," said poor Mother. "I wish I could feel like that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during the night Mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan, and Nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night, "till she broke down, poor thing," said Nurse, and Joyce was bidden to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But Mother was about again at lunch time when Joyce went down to the dining room. She was very pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow t she seemed suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce's age, than ever before. They kissed each other, and the child would have tried to comfort.

"No," said Mother, shaking her head. "No dear. Don't let's be sorry for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven't done that, have we?"

"I haven't," said Joyce. "I know it's all right."

After lunch again Mother said she wouldn't be hungry till Joan came home they went out together. There were no searchers now in the wood and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and they were away, combing the countryside and spreading terror among the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn, and the smell of the roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge, the land rolled away to clear perspectives of peace and beauty.

"Let's walk up and down," suggested Mother. "Anything's better than sitting still. And don't talk, chick not just now."

They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence. It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm thrust the gate open, and there advanced into the sunlight, coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway Joan! Her round baby face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep sigh it sounded like that and in a moment she was kneeling on the ground with her arms round the baby.

"Joan, Joan," she said over and over again. "My little, little baby!"

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free, and then rubbed her eyes drowsily.

"Hallo!" she said.

"But where have you been?" cried Mother. "Baby-girl, where have you been all this time?"

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm towards the wood, the wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. "In there," she answered carelessly. "Wiv the wood-ladies. I'm hungry!"

"My darling!" said Mother, and picked her up and carried her into the house.

In the dining-room, with Mother at her side and Joyce opposite to her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workmanlike fashion, and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to darken the mystery of her absence.

"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated Mother.

"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry."

"But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"

"Yes," said Mother. "What else?"

"There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce.

"'Cause I didn't want to be a wood-lady," replied Joan.

"Listen to me, darling," said Mother. "Didn't these people whom you call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."

"I was," said Joan. "I was there all the time, an' I heard Walter an' Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed like leaves rustling."

"But where did you sleep last night?"

"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very sleepy now."

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.

"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: Wood-Ladies

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