“Yes,” agreed Mary, “only he isn’t always there, only sometimes.”
“Where does he go when he isn’t there?” Bobby asked.
“No one knows. Anywhere. Everywhere. Perhaps Loo knows, but no one else and she promised not to tell.”
“Oh, well,” Bobby said, remembering now something Sergeant Turner had remarked casually about the old man’s wanderings extending at times over the whole country, north, south, east and west.
Olive was interested in chocolates, not in wandering hermits. She said:
“My friend was wondering if you would tell us how you make them so nice. Or is that a secret? The church she goes to is having a bazaar and she thought she would like a big lot to sell at her stall. Could you make them for her yourself if it’s a secret?”
“It’s a secret in a way,” Mary agreed, “only not mine. It’s Peter’s. That’s why he’s so angry about the man who was here yesterday.”
“Why? What man was that?” Bobby asked.
“He came yesterday,” Mary explained. “In a car. He had red hair and his hands were hairy and he was fat and you could hardly see his eyes, and his voice made you think of a frying pan when it hadn’t been cleaned properly. I didn’t like him, and when Loo came she said there was a nasty smell where he had been, but she often says things like that. I expect it was only fancy. I expect really he is quite nice. People often are, even when they don’t look it.”
“Oh, yes, quite often,” agreed Bobby, “and sometimes they aren’t when they do. What happened?”
“He wanted to know about my chocolates and he said he would pay me for telling him,” Mary answered and added in a puzzled tone: “I almost think perhaps he didn’t quite believe me when I told him I didn’t know. He seemed to think I might be telling stories.”
“That was very silly of him,” said Olive severely.
“Wasn’t it?” agreed Mary. “I don’t see why he should think such a thing.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Bobby drily, “he has had occasion to meet people who do tell stories.”
“Oh, do you think so?” asked Mary, looking shocked at the idea.
“Perhaps he even tells them himself sometimes,” suggested Bobby again and even more drily.
“Oh, no,” protested Mary, drawing away from so distasteful an idea. “I know I said I didn’t think he looked a very nice man, but I didn’t mean anything as bad as that.”
“Well, we’ll call him Truthful James till we have proof he’s otherwise,” Bobby said. “What happened next?”
“I brought the little bottle of essence to show him,” Mary said. “It’s what Peter gives me. I only put a very little with the chocolates when I’m making them and I don’t know what it is, but it’s what makes them taste like they do.”
“Scrumptious,” interposed Olive, closing her eyes for a moment to lose herself in a gluttonous dream of the past.
“So I showed it him to let him see for himself,” Mary went on, “and he put it in his pocket and walked straight out and I was so astonished at first I couldn’t do anything, and then I ran after him and I called, but he didn’t take any notice and he got in his car and drove off.”
“The—Beast,” said Olive energetically.
“He left a pound note, but it was stealing all the same,” said Mrs Coop from her sofa.
“It’s on the mantelpiece,” Mary said.
“Coop took it,” Mrs Coop told her. “He saw it there and he put it in his pocket and it excited him because he thought there must be more somewhere. And I told him there wasn’t and I told him I would tell you he had taken it and that’s what set him off.”
“It was my fault,” Mary said. “I ought to have known better. We always have to hide any money, but I was so terribly angry, I forgot.”
“Can you do anything?” Olive asked Bobby.
“Difficult,” Bobby said. “Especially if the pound note he left has been used. Probably he would swear black and blue it was a payment and Miss Floyd agreed to take it. I expect he has had the stuff analyzed by now. If he’s got the formula he may fill the bottle up with cold tea or something and give it back and swear he never touched it, and say how sorry he was there had been a misunderstanding.”
“I don’t think he can really be at all a nice man,” decided Mary, though reluctantly.
“I think he’s the biggest pig and brute I ever heard of,” Olive declared with passion. With a memory of old political associations in her mind and expressing the severest condemnation she could think of, she said: “The sort of thing a dictator would do.”
“Only a business man smelling a possible profit,” explained Bobby tolerantly. “Money justifies all means, I suppose.”
“But it wasn’t money,” pointed out Mary, who did not quite understand what Bobby meant. “It was an essence from plants and flowers for flavouring.”
“Might be used for making a lot of money all the same,” Bobby told her.
“Peter wouldn’t like that,” Mary said. “He says it’s good to make things, because that’s creation, but not money, because that’s destruction. I think that is why he was so very angry at the fat man with the little eyes for taking it. There was only a little of the essence left, though.”
“May be enough for him to find out what it’s made of,” Bobby said. “Your friend Peter never told you?”
“No, I never asked. It’s from plants. Peter knows all about plants. He says it’s difficult to make and takes a long time. He only does a little at once. First of all he said I was only to use it for chocolates for ourselves or for puddings or tarts, because that was good—I mean, good to have good things to eat. But one year I hadn’t any money to pay the rent. It was the year when the spring was so cold it seemed like winter still, and all the summer was wind and rain and there was no sun, so that the fruit didn’t ripen and nothing grew and the bees died. You remember?”
Bobby shook his head. Probably that dreadful and disastrous season had meant no more to him than a ruined holiday. No doubt he had been living in a town, secure against the whims of nature. For nature, though she may frown here or there, is sure to smile elsewhere, so that this scarcity may be remedied by that abundance. But for Mary, living by her garden and her bees, nature’s frown had been a sentence of death, as so often in days long past it was to our forefathers. She was looking now slightly bewildered by Bobby’s shake of the head.
“Oh, you must,” she protested. “No one could ever forget that year.” She added: “I couldn’t pay the rent and so they were going to turn us out.”
“Oh-h,” said Olive, in long drawn sympathy. “How dreadful.”
“Dreadful,” echoed the woman on the sofa and Mary, too, echoed the same word, and indeed the dread meaning of that awful sentence she had just pronounced can only be understood by those who themselves have had to fear it.
“It was Loo,” Mary went on. “She found Peter and told him, and he said I might make the chocolates to sell, and he gave Loo some more of the essence and the money I got for the chocolates was enough to pay the rent. He said it was primrose root and violets, only other things as well.”
“Has Loo birds for pets as well as squirrels?” Olive asked. “Because there are birds flying over where the hollyhocks are growing beyond the marigolds and nasturtiums, and I think I can see the hollyhocks moving.”
“If it’s her, please don’t take any notice,” Mary said anxiously. “Or else she may go away and not come back for ever so long. Mother is always dreadfully worried when she stays out all night in the forest.”
“You don’t mean,” Olive gasped, “that you let her do that?”
“We can’t stop her,” explained Mrs Coop, from her sofa. “She just stays. I tell her she mustn’t, but she does. Sometimes she says it got too late to come back, or else she forgot, or there were things she couldn’t leave, like that nest of little thrushes just hatched she found deserted.”
“Well, it’s not safe,” declared Olive with energy. “How old
is she?”
“Nine,” Mrs Coop answered.
“But . . . but . . .” protested Olive, still bewildered. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll get lost?”
“Lost? Oh, no,” answered Mrs Coop in tones of great surprise, and Mary added:
“She knows the forest better than I know this kitchen.”
“But . . .” began Olive again, and then gave it up to subside into dismayed contemplation of this vision of a child of nine who spent whole nights alone in the forest and knew it better than her elders knew their own kitchens.
“It’s all through Peter,” Mrs Coop said, evidently aware of Olive’s dismay. “I know it isn’t right. Peter encourages her. He says trees are friendlier than people and the forest safer than the town.”
“You ought to stop him saying things like that,” declared Olive. “It’s silly and wicked as well. In a town there would always be some one, and she would be perfectly safe if she stayed at home. You ought to make him stop.”
“Yes, I know, only we can’t, no one could,” Mrs Coop answered. “There’s only one way,” she added slowly.
“We may have to,” agreed Mary. “It’s awful to think of. But we’ve got to, if it’s the only way to save Loo.”
“The child can’t spend all her life running about a forest,” declared Olive vigorously.
“No,” agreed Mary. “No.”
“Well, then,” Mrs Coop muttered, half to herself.
CHAPTER VI
BEARS
BOTH MRS COOP and Mary had become very pale, as if at the thought or prospect of some future possibility whereof even the idea filled them with extreme terror and dismay. Olive found herself wondering uneasily what could be in their minds, and wondering still more uneasily if it was the energy of her own protests that had driven them to contemplate some action that hitherto had lain only dimly in the recesses of their minds. Bobby had not been paying much attention to what they were saying though, as was the habit of his mind and training, their words stored themselves as it were automatically in his memory, so that in time to come, when there was occasion, he found himself able to recollect every syllable uttered, every look exchanged. Now Mary was talking in a more normal tone, a little as if she wished to make Olive forget what had just been said.
“You see,” Mary was saying, “it’s through Loo we got to know Peter. Even when she was quite a tiny she liked to wander out there among the trees and she came across Peter and used to watch him gathering plants and flowers, and she asked him why, and he told her, and he gave her medicine for mother, because Dr Maskell wasn’t doing her any good.”
Bobby, privately convinced that what Loo needed was a little healthy discipline, though he did not dare say so out loud, had his attention caught by the doctor’s name. He had already noticed on the kitchen dresser one or two bottles that looked as though they contained medicine and yet not as though they came from any doctor. He asked now:
“Does Dr Maskell know about your getting stuff from someone else?”
“He was awfully angry when we told him,” Mary admitted. “He won’t come any more. He said mother would die and she hasn’t.”
“It stops the pain,” Mrs Coop explained. “The pain was awful and all Dr Maskell could do was to send me to sleep. But now the pain’s much easier. It doesn’t come anything like so often. Peter says he can’t make me better, because he doesn’t know any plants or herbs to cure what’s broken. He says I must do that myself, all he can do is to do his best to make me stronger so that I can try. It was a fall,” she explained, “and something snapped in my back and only Peter has ever been able to do me any good.”
Bobby reflected that if death occurred there might be a good deal of official trouble resulting both for the hermit and the family. But there seemed no immediate danger of that happening, and anyhow it was their business and not his. Olive still brooding over the strange case of Loo, broke in abruptly:
“Doesn’t she go to school?”
“Who? Loo?” asked Mary. “Oh, no. She won’t.”
Mrs Coop said darkly:
“A man came . . .”
She left the sentence unfinished, brooding indignantly on the memory.
“He kept on asking questions,” Mary continued. “He said it was his duty. We told him it would kill Loo to shut her up in school and he said that was nothing to do with him, he had to do his duty, and I asked him why, and he said: ‘Well, he had’, and then he asked a lot more questions.”
“Loo went away into the forest as soon as she saw him coming,” Mrs Coop went on. “Afterwards Coop went to the police and said she was out of control and robbed rabbit traps. He said if they thought it was him, they were wrong. It wasn’t, it was Loo. He said she was out of control and ought to be sent away.”
“It was very wrong of him,” Mary took up the tale, “but it was very wrong of Loo, and very naughty, too, to trip him up into a bed of nettles that night as he was coming home. He simply looked awful next day.”
“I say, though, did she do that?” asked Bobby, glad he wasn’t on duty, or else he supposed he would have had to be shocked.
“What happened?” Olive asked, passing over the deplorable incident of the nettles. “I mean, about school?”
“A lady came,” Mary answered. “She had very big boots with square toes, and she made you think she was always saying you mustn’t. Loo went into the garden and the lady followed her, and we told her not to, the lady, I mean, but she wouldn’t listen, and Loo went out of the garden, and the lady followed, and I told her not to, and she said to hold my tongue, and I did, and Loo went into the forest, and the lady followed, and next morning I had to go to the village to ask them to send to look for her because she hadn’t come back, and we still had her bag all full of papers.”
“What about Loo?” Bobby asked, interested.
“Oh, we didn’t mind so much about Loo,” Mary explained. “She sleeps in a tree or somewhere and then she comes home when she is ready. It was the lady we were worried about, because we didn’t think she would really like sleeping in a tree.”
“One never knows,” murmured Bobby, “but perhaps not.”
“She was quite all right though when they found her,” Mary continued. “At least, not quite all right exactly, because she had fallen into a little stream where it made a pool, and she lost her skirt getting out, and she was scratched all over where she hadn’t any clothes any more, because of the bushes, and she had been crying a lot because she never expected to see her home again, and there had been beetles and spiders and frogs crawling all over her all night, she said, but I’m sure that wasn’t Loo.”
“The frogs might be,” Mrs Coop observed, as one who wished to be quite fair.
“Well, the frogs perhaps,” conceded Mary. “Anyhow, after the lady had been to a convalescent home for a week or two she was quite all right and it’s nonsense to say that was what turned her hair grey, because it was grey before, only dyed.”
“Oh, oh-h,” said Olive, and then “Oo-oo.”
“Why do you say that?” Mary asked.
“Nothing else you can say,” Olive countered.
“What happened next?” asked Bobby, more and more interested.
“They said she was a defective child, unsuited for institutional control,” Mary explained, “and they’ve left us alone ever since. Stepfather was angrier than ever about it, because when they found him in Mrs Hyman’s garden with two of her hens in his pocket, he was sent away for two weeks. He said he was unsuited for institutional control, too, like Loo, but he had to go all the same. He said it wasn’t fair, but he’s never touched Mrs Hyman’s hens since.”
“Well, you know,” Olive remarked, “Loo does seem rather a dangerous sort of person. Is she rather small, even for a nine-year-old, with her hair long and light brown, and now with the sun caught in it, so that it shines, and her face more oval than yours, but the same sort of look? I think it’s the eyes, they’re like yours, only not so dark. And does she stand so
lightly you think the wind would blow her away, but it doesn’t, because really her feet are quite firm upon the ground? Because, if Loo’s like that, then it’s Loo that’s just come out from the flowers by the fence over against the apple trees.”
Mary came to the door of the cottage.
“Yes, that’s Loo,” she said, and called: “Loo, come in to your tea.”
But Loo had vanished again.
“You naughty girl,” said Mary.
“She must come in when she wants something to eat, mustn’t she?” Bobby asked.
“She says the forest is full of things to eat,” Mary told them. “She never seems very hungry when she comes back.”
“In the winter?” Olive asked.
“It’s the same. I think she is like her squirrels and hides away stores of nuts and berries and roots she dries in the sun and other things, too. But I don’t know. She never says.” Mary raised her voice: “Loo, Loo,” she called. “Do come in. I don’t want to keep tea waiting any longer and I’ve made some honey cakes.”
Loo, evidently tempted, appeared again, but still hesitated.
“There’s a big, bad man there,” she explained, looking at Bobby.
“Eh? What? Who? Me?” asked Bobby, even more surprised than hurt.
“Oh, he’s not,” protested Olive, stung to the depths in her wifely pride. “He’s big, but he’s not bad a bit.”
“Yes, he is,” Loo insisted. “He was going to throw things at Henry George only you stopped him. You know he’s bad, or why did you stop him?”
And from the branches of the apple tree just behind her a squirrel chattered indignantly, as if in support of this accusation.
“True bill,” Bobby admitted, “but look here, Loo, as man to man, Henry George, if that’s the name of your friend in the tree, began it. He made an ugly noise at me and that hurt my feelings quite a lot.”
Loo appeared to consider this and to be so far impressed as to come forward a little, though still so lightly poised she continued to give the impression of an ability to vanish like a leaf blown on a gust of wind.
“If there’s one thing,” continued Bobby, perceiving his advantage and determined to follow it up, “that hurts me more than another, it’s being chattered at when I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I think that’s much worse than throwing a twig, especially when the twig doesn’t get thrown.”
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