Love Child

by Edith Olivier

  Agatha had at first been afraid that Clarissa might refuse to wear anything except the white cambric dress in which she had at first appeared. But no. She was enchanted at the sight of her new clothes, and. she loved trying on one thing after another. Agatha bought a great deal. Clothes for herself had always bored her. Everything she had ever worn had been made by the dressmaker who had dressed her mother before her, and the woman’s taste had seemed to Agatha as inevitable as a wet day. It was amazing to find herself freely choosing and buying things out of boxes.

  And Clarissa had distinct and very decided tastes of her own. This was a comfort to Agatha, who was inclined to turn the things over and over again, quite unable to make up her mind as to which she liked best, or whether she really liked any of them at all. Clarissa knew in a moment. She liked colours, though not very bright ones—green, and a rather deep yellow, and brown. She would have absolutely nothing to say to the white dresses which Agatha vaguely felt were perhaps the best taste for a child of her age. But when she put on the little coloured tunics and straight short dresses there was no doubt that they suited to perfection her very tiny figure and little pointed face. Agatha was reminded of some pictures of elves and fairies which she had loved as a child in a book of fairy stories given to her by her father, and still her most distinct memory of him.

  After that, Clarissa would never again put on her old clothes. And from the day that she began to wear the new ones she lost her trick of disappearing. There was never again any question as to whether she was visible or not: she was there beside Agatha for all the world to see, and she was as real to the rest of the world as she was to Agatha herself.

  The hotel servants all made friends with her, calling her “an old-fashioned little thing,” and so indeed she was. The toys of ordinary children did not amuse her at all: she could not play with them, and she wanted nothing but to be with Agatha and to play at acting games with her. They played at being all sorts of people, but most of all they played at being themselves. They liked this best. Agatha found herself pretending with Clarissa that they two were doing most unexpected things, and finding themselves in situations which would have been very unpleasant in real life, but which were extremely amusing as games. They were suddenly without any money at all, and obliged to sing in the streets, and to sell primroses for a living: or they were on a desert island, eating quantities of the most delicious fruits, which they found growing there: or they had made friends with some of the other people in the hotel (a thing which was really quite impossible for either of them), and they were entertaining a party of these people in Agatha’s sitting-room.

  Every morning they sat on the beach, and as Agatha watched Clarissa, she saw her becoming daily less frail and shadowy in appearance. There was more colour in her skin: there was a touch of brown in it, and sometimes even of pink, when the sun shone and the wind blew in off the sea. Agatha herself glowed with reflected sunshine at the sight.

  All the other children on the beach were busy with spades and buckets, so Agatha bought some, but Clarissa didn’t at all know how to play with them, nor had Agatha the least idea how to teach her. They took the spades and buckets conscientiously down to the shore where they dug formally and awkwardly, side by side, each for the sake of the other, and both very bored and unnatural. Agatha was almost in tears, feeling that it must be her fault, and that if she knew more about children she would be able to inspire Clarissa to make sand-castles in the same absorbed way that the other children did. She became exasperated with the spade and bucket for failing to create their own mood and atmosphere, but she was afraid to show exasperation. This was partly because she was not in the habit of expressing her emotions, but it was still more because of the fear, which was always with her, that any sudden movement from her might frighten Clarissa away. She still felt as if she were making friends with a very shy little wild bird, who must not on any account be startled. So she jumped with a pang of shocked delight when Clarissa herself one day suddenly stamped her feet, seized the spade and bucket, and hurled them violently into the sea, as far as her small strength would send them. The next wave tossed them back at her feet. Clarissa picked them up, and once again she flung them into the water; then, without waiting for a moment, she turned and fled. Agatha raced after her, horrified, enchanted, and so absorbed in the pursuit that she was quite unaware of the impression she made upon the people sitting on the beach, as she skipped over sand-castles and dived among deck-chairs in her pursuit of the elfin, impish little girl in her short dress of dark green linen.

  When she caught Clarissa, they sat on a breakwater and played at being Punch and Judy. Agatha never tried a spade and bucket again, nor did she buy dolls or any other toys for the little girl. They bored her. Agatha was Clarissa’s only toy, and she was Agatha’s.

  Chapter Five

  Miss Bodenham gave much thought and care to the letter which she wrote to Helen announcing her intention of returning home. She had been nearly three months at Brighton, free and unquestioned, and she had grown so used to having Clarissa with her that she had almost forgotten that the child had not yet been introduced to the servants. But Agatha was beginning to feel homesick. Hotel life was really very uncongenial to her. Its noise and movement wearied her, and she longed to be with Clarissa in her own home, and in the garden where her eyes had first rested on that beloved little form.

  But before she reached this haven she had got to account for Clarissa. Agatha was a reserved woman, and she had an innate dislike of the unusual. It was quite impossible for her to tell anyone that Clarissa was nothing but a toy child of her own making. Moreover, her own common sense told her that no person with equal common sense would for a moment believe such a story. She hardly believed it herself when she thought about it. She just didn’t think about it at all—she lived, and for the first time in her life. After all, who can explain his own presence on this earth? So why expect anyone to be able to explain the presence of another.

  Still, Clarissa’s arrival must be prepared for. Agatha did the obvious thing: she always did.

  “I intend to return next Saturday,” she wrote, “and I shall be very glad to be at home once more. I am bringing a little girl with me, a distant connection of the family, whom I mean to adopt. I know that you will all be glad that I should have this little companion as an interest in my life, and shall not be lonely any more, so that I rely on you to welcome this little orphan and help me to make her happy. Her name is Miss Clarissa Bodenham, and she is eleven years old. I have ordered a small bedstead for her, and this will arrive by goods train before the end of the week. I should like it to be erected in the corner of my own room before we arrive. Miss Clarissa has shared my room here, and I wish this to continue.”

  It seemed a most ordinary and natural announcement to make, so Agatha thought as she read the letter over, but the word “orphan” made her pause. She was a truthful woman.

  Clarissa enjoyed everything, and she was delighted to hear that they were going home. But she hated being kissed by the manageress and the chamber-maid when they said good-bye, and she ducked her head and turned away her face with unconcealed distaste, holding on to Agatha’s hand with a return of her old shyness. Agatha was sorry that these kind women should be snubbed in this way, and their affection for Clarissa gratified her, but, nevertheless, she was inwardly delighted by the child’s fastidiousness. Clarissa was her own. Hers only.

  Miss Bodenham’s servants thought that she had certainly done the right thing in adopting a child. They had been thoroughly frightened by that hysterical outburst of hers as she was starting for Brighton, and had feared that she might be becoming “ queer.” The presence of a child in the house was just what was wanted. So both Agatha and Clarissa received a most cordial welcome when they reached home. Helen and Sarah declared that they could see the likeness to Miss Bodenham when she was a little girl, and they said that anyone could tell that Miss Clarissa was one of the family. This was a subject which Agatha did not pursue,
and she quickly changed the conversation by asking whether the bedstead had arrived and what blankets had been put on to it. Everything was ready: Clarissa’s bed and her niche in the house were waiting for her as if she had always lived there.

  Agatha was amazed to find how easy it was to do an unprecedented thing. Inwardly, she was proud of the way in which she had handled what really was the only event which had happened in her life: and, as she thought to herself, it was an event which would have put the most experienced person into something of a quandary —quite out of the ordinary. Yet here was she, Agatha Bodenham, producing an entirely unexplainable child of eleven years old, and producing her with such an air that no one even thought that an explanation was needed.

  She never left Clarissa alone. The child seemed in every way perfectly normal, and Agatha herself often forgot that she wasn’t, and yet she could not altogether banish from her mind the uneasy feeling that Clarissa’s existence depended on her own immediate presence—that if you happened to find the child alone, you just wouldn’t find her at all. It sounded like a paradox, but Agatha could not express it in any other way. Sometimes she thought she would carry out a test, and send Clarissa upstairs on a message, then casually ask Helen to run up and see if Miss Clarissa was in her bedroom or not. But she was afraid. Such a trick seemed disloyal, and it might drive Clarissa away as magically as she had come.

  Every morning they did lessons together. Clarissa learnt to read far more quickly than Agatha herself had done. It seemed to come by instinct, and once having learnt, she delighted in books, rummaging about the book-cases, and finding all sorts of attractive old volumes which had belonged to Mr. Bodenham, and which had never been disturbed since his death. Agatha had longed to take them out of the shelves when she was a little girl, but they had been forbidden, and by the time she was old enough to read what she liked the taste had gone.

  So when Clarissa found her way into the study, Agatha remembered her own frustrated longings, and hadn’t got the heart to say the books were unsuitable. Besides, as she reminded herself, never having opened them, she could not honestly say whether they were suitable or not.

  Clarissa therefore read what she liked, and she told Agatha the stories she read—Fielding, Richardson, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray. She read much poetry aloud—Crabbe, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Mr. Bodenham’s library was a conventional one. It contained only standard works, and no addition had been made to it since his death.

  One day Clarissa found on an upper shelf the two small leather-bound volumes of a book called Sturm’s Reflections. They were filled with somewhat didactic religious meditations, arranged in a series of readings for every day in the year, and dealing with such subjects as the Wonders of Nature, the Discoveries of Science, and the History and Characteristics of the Peoples of the Globe, The book was completely abreast of the scientific thought of 1817, the year in which it was published, and its tone was religiously and sanely orthodox. Oddly enough, both Agatha and Clarissa were entranced with it. Agatha was at rest among its platitudes, while its scientific tone made her feel in touch with the spirit of the age: and Clarissa delighted in the author’s erratic way of leaping about from Laplanders to comets, and from earthquakes to the attractive powers of bodies.

  This was the most wonderful of all the essays. Clarissa read:

  “We often see two bodies approach each other without being impelled by any external force. The cause which produces this effect is called Attraction, or that principle whereby the minuter particles of matter tend towards each other.… By this is most satisfactorily explained the motions of the Heavenly Bodies.… These spheres, separated from each other by immense intervals, are united by some secret bond.… This power of attraction is in some degree the cause of the juices circulating in the capillary vessels of plants and animals.… The Supreme Wisdom manifests itself in the government of the Celestial bodies, and is equally apparent in that of Rational Beings.”

  Clarissa read quickly, with odd little mispronunciations in the long words, and with pauses now and again between the phrases, wrinkling her forehead and staring at the book, as she tried to follow the course of the stars swinging through those vast spaces, united by that secret bond.

  Agatha’s mind was not bent starwards. Here at last was the great scientific truth which lay behind the appearance of Clarissa. It was the body of Agatha Bodenham herself which had attracted those minute particles of matter from which had been, compounded Clarissa’s exquisite little form, and then, from those particles, by a perfectly normal law of nature, a rational being had come into existence. It was difficult to understand, but there was no doubt that Clarissa could be explained by the very same law which accounted for the appearance of the planets in the sky and the vegetables in the garden. She had her place between the stars and the cauliflowers.

  Agatha never before had considered herself as possessed of any peculiarly attractive power, but now she learnt that it was the attraction exercised by her own body which had drawn Clarissa to her, and had given her life. She blushed uneasily.

  They sat pondering, each absorbed in her own thoughts, till Clarissa said:

  “I wonder what would happen if one of the Stars went just a tiny bit too far away, and got out of the attractive power of the sun.”

  “It couldn’t,” Agatha answered quickly, “That’s impossible.”

  “But suppose it did,” Clarissa insisted.

  “Well, I expect it would just go out,” Agatha said, “ but it couldn’t really happen. That secret bond between them cannot be broken. It said so in the book.”

  “It does happen sometimes though,” Clarissa went on; “but they do go out, just as you said. I mean shooting stars. They must have broken the secret bond, and I expect that’s why I always feel so dreadfully miserable when I see them disappear.”

  “Don’t think about them if it makes you miserable.”

  “But it’s rather a lovely kind of miserableness, too. I like it.”

  And then an idea suddenly struck Clarissa, and she went on:

  “Oh, I’ve thought of a new game. Such a good one. Let’s play Stars. You be the sun, and I’ll be a star that nearly gets away, almost a shooting star, but not quite. Come on, do let us begin.”

  “I don’t quite see how we should play that,” Agatha said doubtfully.

  “Oh, I’ll show you. It’s quite easy. You must go round and round in the middle of the lawn, and I shall go round and round the outside. We can make a thread of your blue silk into the secret bond. That would be perfectly invisible. But if I get too far away, it will break, and I shall go out. It’s a really exciting game, because we shall never know what might be going to happen.”

  It made Agatha terribly giddy, this new game. She held a reel of blue silk in her hand, and slowly revolved in the middle of the lawn, trying to look and feel like the sun, but really both looking and feeling like a very wobbly top, coming to the end of its spin. Clarissa raced round the edge of the grass, every now and then suddenly dashing a few feet out of her course, saying she was attracted by another star. Agatha’s part was to anticipate these deviations, and to counter them by letting out a few extra feet of silk before the thread broke. But Clarissa was too quick for her at last. She had thrown herself so entirely into the spirit of the game that she was longing to go out like a shooting star, and all at once she gave a very unexpected swerve, and the thread was broken. She turned head over heels, and disappeared into the kitchen garden.

  “Oh, oh, oh! I was attracted by the earth, and I’ve bumped my head against it, and I’ve gone out,” she called, and then was perfectly silent.

  Such a long time passed, that Agatha grew frightened, and ran to look for her.

  She was lying quite still, her head hidden inside a large flower pot, which she had pulled over on to its side.

  “Clarissa, darling, get up. Are you hurt?” Agatha said breathlessly.

  There was no reply.

  “Clarissa!”

&
nbsp; It was a cry of real anguish.

  Clarissa tilted the flower pot, and looked out, opening one eye roguishly.

  “It’s no good calling me,” she said. “I’ve gone. The secret bond is broken.”

  Agatha tried to laugh.

  “I thought you had really hurt yourself,” she said.

  “Oh, no, not a bit,” Clarissa sang, and she jumped up and danced away across the lawn, with the flower pot on her head. She looked like a very mad toadstool, and Agatha really laughed this time. She couldn’t help it.

  They spent all their days like this—reading together, playing together, and sometimes inventing new games, like the Star Game, from the books they read. Agatha was supremely happy, so happy that she felt there must be something sinful about so much happiness, and she wondered if it was selfish of her to keep the child so entirely to herself. Ought Clarissa to be encouraged to lead a more normal life: to play with children of her own age, to share their games?

  She silenced these doubts by remembering that as a child she herself had had neither the desire nor the opportunity of playing any game but the game of Clarissa. Other children expected too much of her, the spirit of competition, the power to hit a ball or to run a race. They had always made her feel inferior, out of it. But she sometimes thought that Clarissa was cleverer than she had been: indeed, she often seemed to excel just where Agatha herself had often failed.

  So the first time that Mrs. Burns, the rector’s wife, came to call after Clarissa’s arrival, and brought her Kitty, her little girl of eleven years old, Agatha was relieved to find that Clarissa sat close beside herself, surreptitiously clutching and squeezing her hand, and staring at Kitty without saying a word. Mrs. Burns suggested that the two children should run away and play together, and then Clarissa showed great de-determination, and said in firm tones: