by Ruskin Bond
‘But I can’t ever forget Jim,’ said Mary.
‘You don’t have to forget him. Keep him to yourself, that’s all, and act fairly by your husband.’
‘But mustn’t I tell him…?’
‘About Jim?’
‘About the child?’
‘No. There’s no cause to tell him. No one here knows about it, and never will.’
A month later Mary became Mrs Brakefield.
It was getting dark when Mary Brakefield opened her eyes and found herself alone under the sky in the angle of the rampart. Dazed and chilly, she got to her feet. If she did not hurry she would never find the path down the steep slope. Already when she climbed down the great turf wall and emerged from the ditch, the village below her was lost in the gloom of its elms, and by the time she had reached the foot of the down and struck into the road the last pale streaks in the west were closing into the darkness of a stormy sky.
She felt desolate and tired by her long, lonely ecstasy. She clung to Jim, trying to keep him with her still, but he withdrew from her. Her spirit was too weak now to hold him, her attention too distracted by the need of keeping her path on the dark road. If only there was someone who knew, someone who would come towards her now, down this dark road, and as he passed her call out: ‘Goodnight, Mrs Ansell.’ Those few short words would be enough to keep her and Jim together.
But the road was deserted, and, as she turned into the village, large drops of rain began to fall.
When she entered the inn her husband’s voice greeted her.
‘Two gentlemen wanting tea, Mary. I’ve got the kettle on and shown them into the parlour, by the fire.’
The two young men had walked all day. They had lunched off beet and bread and cheese at an inn twelve miles away and had hoped to find another inn in the cove they had reached late in the afternoon. But no inn was there, and when they had asked for the nearest they had been directed to Netherhinton, four miles away. Now they sat, tired and contented, in the little parlour of the Golden Lion, one on each side of the fireplace, with their legs stretched to the warmth, waiting for the tea they had ordered.
When he had finished a cigarette, the more energetic of the two got out of his chair and, with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, began prowling round the room, examining the pictures and photographs. When he had reached the bookcase be called to his friend: ‘I say, Guy, here’s The Return of the Native, and Jude, and Lorna Doone, and the Bible, and Pickwick. Not a bad lot for a village inn.’
He took down Jude the Obscure, opened the cover, and read, ‘Mary Ansell, 1919.’ Pickwick revealed the same name, and then he was interrupted by the opening of the door. A thin-faced woman brought in their tea on a tray. The young man, caught with Pickwick in his hand, spoke to her. ‘I’ve found a nice lot of books here,’ he said. ‘Are they yours?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes met his. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said in her tired, toneless voice; ‘they’re all mine.’
She set the tea on the table. ‘Just ring the bell if you want anything, gentlemen,’ she said as she went quietly out.
They thanked her, and the other young man rose from his chair and went over to where his friend was standing. ‘What’s this?’ he said, bending his head to inspect Jim’s scroll.
‘Some poor devil that was killed in the war,’ said the first, and he read: ‘Lance-corporal James Ansell.’
‘Her son, I expect,’ said the other as they sat down to their tea.
When they had finished they rang for the bill, and the thin-faced woman returned. How far was it, they asked, to Wareham?
Six miles, she told them; and there was a bus in twenty minutes’ time if they were tired of walking.
‘Good! Then, if you don’t mind, we’ll sit here till it comes.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ she said, without raising her eyes from the tray on which she was piling the used tea-things.
‘Not exactly a cheerful specimen, is she?’ said one to the other as they returned to their chairs beside the fire.
Five minutes before the time for the bus they slung their knapsacks on their backs and went out of the room. As they passed the kitchen door it was ajar, and the first young man called out a goodnight as he passed. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Ansell,’ he called.
She was standing at the kitchen table, her pale eyes cast down, her mouth drooping bitterly at the corners, preparing supper for herself and her husband; but at the sound of the young man’s voice her face bloomed suddenly as if kindled by some inner, spiritual light, and her mouth, its bitterness gone, took on the charming, wistful smile of a young girl.
THE LAST LEAF
O. Henry
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called ‘places’. These ‘places’ make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a ‘colony’.
At the top of a squatty, three-storey brick house Sue and Johnsy had their studio. ‘Johnsy’ was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’hte of an Eighth Street ‘Delmonico’s’, and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown ‘places’.
Mr Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch windowpanes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow.
‘She has one chance in—let us say, ten,’ he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. ‘And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?’
‘She—she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,’ said Sue.
‘Paint?—bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking twice—a man for instance?’
‘A man?’ said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. ‘Is a man worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.’
‘Well, it is the weakness, then,’ said the doctor. ‘I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.’
After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young author
s write to pave their way to literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle of the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy’s eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting—counting backward.
‘Twelve,’ she said, and little later ‘eleven’; and then ‘ten,’ and ‘nine’; and then ‘eight’ and ‘seven’, almost together.
Sue look solicitously out of the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
‘What is it, dear?’ asked Sue.
‘Six,’ said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. ‘They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.’
‘Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.’
‘Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?’
‘Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,’ complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. ‘What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were—let’s see exactly what he said—he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.’
‘You needn’t get any more wine,’ said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. ‘There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.’
‘Johnsy, dear,’ said Sue, bending over her, ‘will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.’
‘Couldn’t you draw in the other room?’ asked Johnsy, coldly.
‘I’d rather be here by you,’ said Sue. ‘Beside, I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.’
‘Tell me as soon as you have finished,’ said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as fallen statue, ‘because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.’
‘Try to sleep,’ said Sue. ‘I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move ’til I come back.’
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along with the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in anyone, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly-lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away, when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
‘Vass!’ he cried. ‘Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der brain of her? Ach, dot poor leetle Miss Yohnsy.’
‘She is very ill and weak,’ said Sue, ‘and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid old—old flibbertigibbet.’
‘You are just like a woman!’ yelled Behrman. ‘Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes.’
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour’s sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
‘Pull it up; I want to see,’ she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last one on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from the branch some twenty feet above the ground.
‘It is the last one,’ said Johnsy. ‘I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time.’
‘Dear, dear!’ said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, ‘think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?’
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
‘I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,’ said Johnsy. ‘Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and—no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.’
And hour later she said:
‘Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.’
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.
‘Even chances,’ said the doctor, taking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. ‘With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behr
man, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital today to be made more comfortable.’
The next day the doctor said to Sue: ‘She’s out of danger. You won. Nutrition and care now—that’s all.’
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.
‘I have something to tell you, white mouse,’ she said. ‘Mr Behrman died of pneumonia today in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.’
THE DUENNA
Marie Belloc Lowndes
I
Laura Delacourt, after a long and gallant defence of what those who formed the old-fashioned world to which she belonged would have called her virtue, had capitulated to the entreaties of Julian Trevilic. They had been friends—from tomorrow they would be lovers.
As she lay enfolded in his arms, her head resting on his breast, while now and again their lips met in a trembling clinging kiss, the strangest and, in some ways, the most incongruous thoughts flitted shadow-wise through her mind, mingled with terror at the possible though not the probably, consequence of her surrender.
Her husband, Roger Delacourt, was thirty years older than herself. Though still a vigorous man, he had come to a time of life when even a vigorous man longs instinctively for warmth; so he had left London the day after Christmas Day to join a friend’s yacht for a month’s cruise in the Mediterranean. And now, just a week later, the wife who he considered a negligible quantity in his self-indulgent, still agreeable existence, had consented to embark on what she knew must be a perilous adventure in a one-storeyed stone house, well named The Folly, built by Julian Treville’s great-grandfather.