CHAPTER XV

THE FOUR POTTLES

Kate and Harriet went straight to their bedrooms, Harriet to rehearse her part in the forthcoming scene with Horatio; Kate, in an angry fever, to ring for Gibson to pack her boxes without a moment's delay. She rang several times before a housemaid appeared and informed her ladyship that Gibson was nowhere to be found. There was a suppressed eagerness about the girl, as if she had something further to disclose, something unusual, but Kate did not question her, and she left the room, closing the door reluctantly behind her.

On the table near the bed lay a yellow, paper-backed book, open and face downward, in unseemly straddle, as Kate had left it the day before to keep the place. It was a collection of stories by a new French author. She picked it up and began slowly turning the pages.

Still reading, she sat down on the bed. In a little while she lifted her feet and lay back without taking her eyes from the book. Half an hour later the yellow book lay on the floor where Kate had flung it. How could anyone write such trash!

Alone in her room Harriet waited for Horatio. Since the tragedy of the afternoon before, the husband and wife had scarcely spoken, and Harriet welcomed a storm to relieve the charged atmosphere. She was ready with her opening speech and she knew what Horatio must inevitably reply, and she had prepared a crushing rejoinder. But Horatio did not come.

In the mournful exodus from the library the gentle curate had been the last, holding the door open for the others, and, after softly closing it behind him, without lifting his eyes from the ground, he had passed, unseeing and unseen, through the hall and out into the sunlit garden.

Scarcely noticing and caring not at all where he went, Horatio found himself in the lane, and now, while Harriet listened in vain for his shuffling steps on the stair, the curate was a good mile and a half away in the very heart of the Millbrook woods. He had followed at random any path that offered; if there were a choice, taking the one with the darkling look that might lead to the witches' hut or the cave of the gnomes.

And now, when he was beginning to feel the creepy joy of being lost, that he had never quite outgrown, the curate came suddenly upon a bright grassy hollow among the dark trees, guarded from view on all sides by high ferns. The dark old beeches gathered round it and stretched their great elbows over it as if to keep its existence secret from all the world but one little girl. Even the sun, who was invited everywhere, was only allowed to take furtive peeps through the green fingers of the jealous old beeches. It was as if they said: "Go away! This little golden maid is all the sunshine we need, thank you!" For there, in a green velvet chair formed by the twisting mossy root of an immense beech tree, sat An Petronia.

The curate stood still in the shadow among the tall ferns, fearing to startle her. She was listening with shut eyes and parted lips. Twice through the green solitude sounded the long, intensely solemn note of a wood thrush, then it was gone, leaving behind it an echo-haunted stillness.

An Petronia opened her eyes and caught sight of the curate.

"Daddy Merle!" she called to him. "Did you hear the thrush? I wonder what he said, Daddy Merle?"

"He said, 'I wonder who that little girl is that sits all alone by herself in my private wood?'" intoned the curate. "Aren't you afraid of getting lost?" he said, as he descended the ferny slope to where she sat.

"I isn't losted. I tan't det losted. I has four Pottles."

She pointed to four dolls, in various stages of dilapidation, sitting stiffly in a row in front of her, their eight feet immersed in a trickle of water that seemed to come from nowhere and disappeared magically among the ferns, chuckling to itself at the success of its vanishing trick.

"Dear me," said Merle, inspecting the dolls with a profound show of interest, "I had no idea you had so many children. What are their names?" he inquired.

"They're not children," said An Petronia, "they're Pottles. Their names are Maffew, Mart, Loot, and this one," she picked up the least favored in appearance of the four, "this one is Don." She caressed him tenderly. It was plain that Don was the one she loved best, perhaps because of his great misfortune. Don was headless.

"He had real hair once, but I losted his head," An Petronia sighed deeply. "I wish I had all the Pottles, Daddy Merle."

"Then there are more?" asked the curate, wondering whither the child's strange fancy was leading her.

"Of torse there is. I had a picture of them. Don't you know the twelve Pottles, Daddy Merle?" She opened her blue eyes in pained surprise at the woeful ignorance of this otherwise perfect old gentleman.

Then a great light burst upon Horatio Merle. "Why, to be sure, my dear! Of course I know the twelve apos--I should say Pottles. I have known the twelve Pottles ever since I can remember, my child. Dear me! dear me!" His face fairly beamed with pleasure at this lucky intuition. The curate's happiness at having reinstated himself in the estimation of his little friend was only equaled by An Petronia's joy at the recovery of her so nearly lost ideal.

"I just knew you knew, Daddy Merle!" she cried, and pressed her little palms together in an ecstasy of childish delight.

"But aren't you afraid they'll catch cold?" said the curate presently, in a tone of proper concern, as An Petronia was returning the headless John to his place beside Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who still sat stoically with their feet in the water.

She shook her head gravely, almost reprovingly. "Oh, no! The Pottles is having their feet washed. They tan't tach told." Then, after a moment of pondering: "Would you like to see the picture, Daddy Merle?"

Before he could answer she had jumped up and disappeared behind the great beech tree. She had only been gone a moment when out of the stillness came a small voice: "Tum and see my little house, Daddy Merle!" It was the voice of An Petronia, but strangely muffled and far away.

Full of curiosity, Merle scrambled to his feet and peered round the tree. An Petronia was nowhere to be seen. What had become of her? Another step and the mystery was explained.

Between two of the buttresslike roots on the other side of the ancient beech was a dark fissure extending from the ground upward for three or four feet and just wide enough to form a doorway for little An Petronia. A practical woodman viewing the hollow tree that An Petronia called her "little house" would have had no thought beyond the loss of so many cubic feet of good timber and whether the tree was worth chopping down. To the gentle curate waiting in the green silence, here was a magic door through which at any moment might issue a laughing faun or a wistful dryad. As for Brother Beech, after all the only one vitally concerned, there was no tree specialist to tell him (for a substantial consideration) that he had only a very few years more to live and must avoid strong sunshine as much as possible and give up rain in excess, and above all be careful not to expose himself unnecessarily to the September blasts. And so the reckless little leaves in their gold-green finery laughed and sang and danced and feasted summer after summer just as if they were going to live forever and there were no such things as September gales.

From the inside of the tree came small, whispery, squirrel-like noises, and presently through the moss-rimmed opening stretched the hand of An Petronia, holding out a faded green, oblong package, bulging with papers and tied with white tape.

"Please, Daddy Merle, will you hold it for me?"

Relieved of their burden, the hands disappeared. Merle examined the package with interest. It was the back of an old exercise book converted into a portfolio and was full of papers. He turned it over curiously. On the other side was a white label. The curate smiled as he read the inscription in childish capitals, "The Misforchins of Reginal," by An Petronia Pottle.

An Petronia's novel! It so happened that this was the first time Merle had beheld the little novelist's autograph. "What a funny way to spell Anne!" he said half-aloud.

"That's the way I always spell it, Daddy Merle." He started at the sound of An Petronia's voice. He had not heard her as she slipped out of the tree. Now she was standing close beside him and in her hands was something small wrapped in white tissue paper.

There was a timid challenge in the child's voice, the first hint of the future conflict between artist and critic.

"'An' is the very first word in my spelling-book," she hurried on, "A N--an. It's the same name, Daddy Merle, only in the speller it's An Apple and I'm An Pottle."

There was no disputing such logic as this, accompanied as it was by a rainy look that must be instantly kissed away from An Petronia's wide blue eyes.

"My dear," he said, and if the truth must be told there was a hint of rain in the curate's own eyes, "An is your very own name and the way you spell it is the sweetest and dearest way in all the world, and you must never spell it any other way," which was the first, last and only concession to the "Dire Heresy of Spelling Reform" ever made by the Reverend Horatio Merle.

They were seated once more on the soft moss by the side of the four evangelists, who greeted them with undiminished apostolic serenity. An Petronia had undone the tape that bound her portfolio and was turning over the contents, pieces of paper in various sizes, from half sheets of note to torn scraps of wrapping paper, covered on both sides with the large, irregular handwriting of the budding novelist. By her side sat the curate, his gray head bent over the picture which An Petronia, after unfolding its tissue paper wrappings, had with heroically suppressed misgivings intrusted to his hands. It was her most precious possession, a photograph in a tarnished gilt frame from a painting of Christ washing the feet of the apostles. Below the picture was printed a text from the Gospel of Saint John, xiii., 15:

FOR I HAVE GIVEN YOU AN EXAMPLE, THAT YE SHOULD DO AS I HAVE DONE TO YOU.

The curate stared at the familiar words. Once he had preached a sermon from that very text. He smiled sadly as he recalled that sermon.

"What do these words mean?" he had asked. "Could it be possible they were ever meant to be obeyed literally? Was it not rather a piece of oriental symbolism, a parable without words teaching the lesson of humility............" If only he had ended his discourse there. If some angel of discretion had barred the way to that fateful peroration; "Not the mock humility of the imperial blasphemer who once a year descends from his throne to wash the feet of twelve disinfected beggars......." How should he, Horatio Merle, have known that the crotchety old Rector of Deepmold not only had decided views on the sanctity of kings, but was a relation by marriage of a certain quasi-ecclesiastical person in high favor in the Austrian Emperor's household?

"You would have said it just the same, Horatio!" Harriet had declared in a burst of indignant tears as she crumpled up the rector's letter accepting Horatio's resignation. Perhaps he would--who knows?

Merle sighed regretfully as he thought of that cosy little cottage at Deepmold--the little terrace with the mossy steps--his rose garden, where he used to smoke his pipe (smoking destroyed the pernicious aphidas) and think about his sermon. There was an old sundial on the terrace and round its stone dial Horatio had chiselled with his own hands a verse of Omar Khayyam:

"The moving finger writes and, having writ, Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

Somewhere deep down in Horatio Merle was a soul stratum of fatalism, not the wine-instilled bravado of Omar; rather the inspired fatalism of one who said: "Take no thought of the morrow."

And now, in the afternoon silence of the woods, the curate pondered on the fate that had seemed to shape his ends so unprofitably. Was there ever anyone in the world less fitted to be a clergyman than he?

Why has the silence of the summer woods been so often likened to the silence of a cathedral? They have nothing in common. The silence of the cathedral is the silence of great stones frozen together by Fear. The silence of the woods is the stillness of innumerable sounds blended, as all the colors of the rainbow are blended, into the white light which is invisible.

"Daddy Merle, how do you spell enjoyed?" An Petronia looked up from her writing.

He spelled it for her slowly and she said it after him.

"Thank you, Daddy Merle."

Again he found himself staring at the picture of the apostles. It fascinated him. It seemed to Merle as if the painter's self were speaking to him across the centuries.

"Do they look as if they were acting a play, these holy men that I have painted? Has the spirit of Christianity so changed that the sacred commands of the Master must be explained away with strange words? Has the flock strayed so far that the shepherd's crook has come to be only a symbol and the shears of the shearer a metaphor and the sheepfold a figure of speech? Have I painted my picture in vain?"

And now the printed words of the text before him seemed to speak aloud, to call to him:

"For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you."

There was no mistake about the meaning. It was a command, a command to be obeyed literally. If the church thought otherwise, then he must part company with the church. He could not serve two masters. He had made his choice, he would obey the call. The humbler the service he found to do, the more gladly would he do it. Was not that what Hiram Baxter himself had tried to tell them in his homely way? "It will make men and women of you," that's what he had said. Hiram Baxter was right.

And then a great resolve formed itself in the heart of Horatio Merle. He would take Hiram Baxter at his word, he would tell him he wanted to work. He was willing to do anything so long as it was work, so long as it was helpful. He had been blind, and in his blindness he had tried to lead others as blind as himself.

"I have lost my way," he said aloud. He had risen to his feet and stood with head bowed and hands extended in an attitude that would have been theatrical if it had not been so utterly unconscious.

"You isn't losted, Daddy Merle." He felt the clasp of her little hand. "Tum with me, I know the way."

Together they walked through the high ferns, in some places over An Petronia's head, and through dim, winding woodland passages and secret stairways of mossy rocks behind the tapestry of ivy and convolvulus known only to An Petronia, until they came out on the Millbrook lane just in time to see the last flicker of sunlight through the hawthorn hedge.