The House Without Windows
Page 11
Once she found beautiful little violet-shaped pink flowers with bowed heads and feathery leaves – snow pinks blooming there, thrusting their buds from the snow itself. She tucked a spray of them into her dress of fluttering ferns.
And then she would return to the river and follow it again. When the moon came, dappling the foamy water with silver, she watched it as it dipped down its forehead in the stream and touched the treetops with magic. Then she would go on again through the moonlit night. Once she came to a place where the brook separated, and she had difficulty choosing which branch to follow.
And when the russet dawn reappeared, tipping the mountains with apple blossom and fire, she had followed it to its goal in the very meadow from where she had started – a pool hitherto unseen by her. About a hundred feet across it was, beached with clean white pebbles. In it bloomed water lilies, fragrant and white, with centres of gold; strange red flowers, too, she saw on the bottom, growing between the pebbles. Dragonflies with crackling wings swept over it in circles. She saw, too, a shoal of tiny fishes of a brownish colour, striped with yellow. They would suddenly dart forward as if something had frightened them, and then poise themselves stock-still, mimicking so many sticks in the shadows of the abundant lily pads.
She was wading about in the pool when suddenly – where there had been ground for her foot to rest on, nothing was there. The bottom of the pool under her foot had slid forward and collapsed! Suddenly ‘Clug-glug, clug-glug, chugarum, glug!’ reached her, as a big bull-frog’s nose appeared by the side of a lily pad. A second later the frog climbed up on the lily pad and stared at Eepersip with his goggly eyes. She burst out laughing, he looked so ridiculous staring at her like that.
She stayed in the meadow, playing gaily among the leaves and flowers. Butterflies of all the colours of the rainbow swept over it all, great flocks. Flowers bloomed so thickly that there was hardly any grass – white ones with waxen petals, striped and bordered with heavy golden bands; red ones with centres of dark green-gold, great blossoms of pink and purple, whose petals fluttered about in the breeze like butterflies.
One morning, she was awakened early by ‘Peep, peep, twitter-itter-ee-e-e-e-e-e, twit chirup; twitter-ee-e-e, twit!’ She looked up and saw a great flock of snow-white birds with long narrow wings. They were flying northward. The flock was much more gigantic than Eepersip had supposed, for it kept on until she began to think that it was going round and round. But no, after ten or fifteen minutes the sky cleared, and she heard faintly in the distance: ‘Twitter-itter-ee-e-e-e-e, ee-e-per-s-sip! e-e-p, e-p, chirup.’
Day after day she danced here, playing, as on the first meadow, with the butterflies, flowers and swallows. And now, as she danced, she seemed to float through the air, her feet almost motionless. Sometimes she would leap high and come down – float down – quite slowly. She seemed to have no weight at all, and a breeze would almost lift her off the ground and hold her up in the air. Indeed, when she ran with the wind behind her she would be blown along – blown like a leaf just above the flowers.
One day she was dancing there – dancing and leaping in the long grass, amid the blossoms. Butterflies drifted over the sunny field – butterflies of red and yellow, blue and green, black and white, orange and purple. How gracefully they flew; how delicately they alighted on the flowers; how fairy-like they were, hovering for an instant over some blossom, then dipping their wings and starting off again! Eepersip felt as though – as though she were going to be one of them; as though she were so happy that she must fly about with them, sip the honey from the flowers with them.
As she was thinking happily she heard a few faint peeps, which became louder as she danced towards a certain part of the field. Then there was a desperate twitter right at her feet, and, looking down, she saw a yellow fledgling hopping towards her. She picked him up carefully and saw that he had broken his left wing. She worked a moment with her hands and pulled the bone into place. Then she made him a comfortable nest of grass and set out to see where he had come from. Looking up, she saw a nest from which a bird was peering about anxiously. Straightway she took the little one from the nest she had made and climbed the tree with it to its own nest; upon which the mother bird gave a twitter of joy.
After doing this Eepersip descended the tree and continued her happy dance with the butterflies until evening. Then they all found shelters under the leaves, and the stars came out, one by one. Presently Eepersip spied a flicker in the meadow – then another and still another, until the fireflies were out in full play. They gathered around Eepersip in one flaming mass, kissing her with their feathery wings. Making her way over to the pool, she saw her reflection, a shimmer of gold.
A light darted out towards her from the woods; then another and yet another, until there were hundreds of lights flickering and blinking at her from all corners of the great field – the lights of elves and gnomes, little fairies of the field. And she danced happily among them – danced until the dawn appeared on the horizon, sending away the darkness and making the stars fade into space. It flushed the whole sky with rose, sent arms of it even as far as the west; arms and streamers of colour which paled towards their tips. Little white clouds grew pink, too, and the colour was reflected on the distant mountaintops. Again the snowfield seemed to become fire – fire which was soon quenched by the coolness of the snow. As the sun sent its first golden beams above the horizon, the colour faded, turned to yellow and soon entirely disappeared. Then the sky was blue-deep, quivering blue, with the fluffy clouds like pearls in an azure setting.
Suddenly Eepersip saw that she was dressed in a flouncy array of spring crocuses and maidenhair ferns. Lovely flowers of pink and yellow were entwined in her hair, and butterflies fluttered around her. She danced happily and leaped high in the air. How free and light she felt in the lovely dress that had been given her!
That day Eepersip was even happier than usual. She floated about, visiting each flower, each bush and tree. She played games with the butterflies, the games she had played on the old meadow, that first summer of her life in the House Without Windows. When she rested, she sat on top of a laurel bush, and not a twig bent beneath her. The slightest breeze blew her about, changed the direction of her dance. Butterfly after butterfly flew to her, flock after flock, as if they had some message to tell her; and after each visit she was happier than before. Yes, they were messengers, these happy creatures; messengers who came to whisper her a secret – a secret from Nature, a secret of the beautiful meadow, a secret from the fairies.
And, when the sun again tinged the sky with colour, a flock of these butterflies, of purple and gold and green, came swooping and alighted on her head in a circle, the largest in front. Others came in myriads and covered her dress with delicate wing touches. Eepersip held out her arms a moment: A gold-and-black one alighted on each wrist. And then – she rose into the air, and, hovering an instant over a great laurel bush, vanished.
She was a fairy – a wood nymph. She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature – a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.
Further Reading
With thanks to Stefan Cooke for keeping the memory of Barbara alive in his collection of the letters from her archive, Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters (Farksolia, 2015), and in the website dedicated to her life and work, http://www.farksolia.org/.
Further information about Barbara Newhall Follett can be found at:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/celebrity/vanishing-act
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078771/
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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1927
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2019
Illustrations and introduction copyright © Jackie Morris, 2019
Photograph of Barbara Newhall Follett in a bed of ferns, date unknown, from the Barbara Newhall Follett Papers.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-98608-0
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