Regiment Of Women Part 17

"Not a proper one--only Arabian Nightsy."

"What's a proper one, Louise?"

Louise hesitated.

"Well, heaps that one loves aren't. Grimm's and Hans Andersen's aren't, or even _The Wondrous Isles_. And, of course, none of the Lang books. I hate those. You know, proper fairy stories aren't easy to get. You have to dig. You get bits out of the notes in the Waverley Novels, and there's _Kilmeny_, and _The Celtic Twilight_, and _The Lore of Proserpine_, and Lempriere. Do you believe in fairies, Miss Hartill?"

"It depends on the mood I'm in," said Clare seriously, "and the place.

Elves and electric railways are incompatible."

Louise flung herself upon the axiom.

"Do you think so? Now I don't, Miss Hartill--I don't. If they are--they can stand railways. But you just believe in them literaturily----"

"Literally," Clare corrected.

"No, no--literaturily--just as a pretty piece of writing. You'll never see them if you think of them like that, Miss Hartill. The Greeks didn't--they just believed in Pan, and the Oreads, and the Dryads, and all those delicious people; and the consequence was that the country was simply crammed with them. You just read Lempriere! I wish I'd lived then. Miss Hartill, did you ever see a Good Person?"

"I'm afraid not, Louise. But I had a nurse who used to tell me about her grand-aunt: she was supposed to be a changeling."

Louise wriggled with delight.

"Oh, tell about her, Miss Hartill. What was she like?"

"Tiny and black, with a very white skin. They were a fair family. Nurse said they all disliked her, though she never did them any harm. She used to be out in the woods all day--and she ate strange food."

"What?"

"Fungi, and nettle-tops, and young bracken, and blackberries, my nurse said."

"Blackberries?"

"She was Irish; the Irish peasants won't touch blackberries, you know.

We're just as bad, Louise. Heaps of fungi are delicious--wait till you've been in Germany. They know what's good: but, then, they won't touch rabbits, so there you are! I expect my nurse's aunt thought us an odd lot, us humans."

"Was she really a fairy?" Louise was breathless.

"How do I know? A witch perhaps. I should think a young witch, by all accounts."

"What happened to her?"

"She was 'swept' on her wedding-day."

"Crossing water?"

"No. She was to marry an old farmer. She went into the woods at dawn to wash in dew, and gather bindweed for her wreath----" She paused dramatically, her eyes dancing with fun; but Louise was wholly in earnest.

"Go on! Oh, go on!"

"She was never seen again."

"Oh, how lovely!" Louise s.h.i.+vered ecstatically. "I wish I'd been her.

What did her foster people do?"

"What could they? I think they were glad to be rid of her." (Clare suppressed a certain tall young gipsy, who had figured suspiciously in the original narrative.) "Fairy blood is ill to live with, Louise. I don't envy Mrs. Blake, or Mrs. Thomas Rhymer."

"No. But it's so difficult to live in two worlds at once."

"Shouldering the wise man's burden already?"

"You get absent-minded, and forget--ink-stains, you know, and messages."

"I know," said Clare.

"You see, I have such a gorgeous world inside my head, Miss Hartill: I go there when I'm rather down, here. It's a sort of Garden of the Hesperides, and you are there, and Mother, and all my special friends."

"Who, for instance?" Clare was curious; it was the first she had heard of Louise with friends of her own.

"Well--Elizabeth Bennett, and the Little Women, and Garm, and Amadis of Gaul----"

"Oh--not real people?" Clare was amused at herself for being relieved.

"Oh, but Miss Hartill--they are real." Louise was indignant. "Ever so much more than--oh, most people! Look at Mrs. Bennett and Mamma! n.o.body will think of Mamma in a hundred years--but who'd ever forget Mrs.

Bennett?"

"Mrs Bennett in the Garden of the Hesperides, Louise?" Clare began to chuckle. "I can't swallow that."

Louise pealed with laughter.

"You should have seen her the other day, with the dragon after her.

She'd been trying to sneak some apples, because Bingley was coming to tea."

"Who came to the rescue?"

"Oh, I did." Louise was revelling in her sympathetic listener. "I have to keep order, you know. She was awfully blown, though. Siegfried helped me."

"I wish I could get to fairyland as easily as you do."

Louise considered.

"I don't. My country is only in my head. Fairyland must be somewhere, mustn't it? Do you know what I think, Miss Hartill?"

"In patches, Louise."

Louise blushed.

"No, but seriously--don't laugh. You know you explained the fourth dimension to us the other day?"

"That I'm sure I never did." Clare was lying back in her chair, her arms behind her head, smiling inscrutably.