A girl-child wishes to see signs and wonders. She waits impatiently, hoping that as each new day comes a sign will be shown to her. When she sees the sign, she believes that it will not be long before the wonder comes. But, being young, she does not yet know the world.
She has crept into the world crying, through a portal where suffering and desire jostle for pre-eminence, and one day she will go out by another gate, with a sad groan. Between the infant’s cry and the woman’s last gasp there may be many days for her to live, and in the earlier portion of those days the girl-child will have to run a race. Whether she likes it or not, she will have to run. Nature—that cruel slave-mistress—will be behind her, with a knotted cord in her hand.
The young girl may seem a pretty thing; she may use many gay pastimes for her delight. She may stay, for a while, in a rose garden, or lean over a rock pool and play with the little fish—but she must on. Every girl wears those red shoes that compel her to dance for ever. There is no stopping those red shoes. They may be a misfit, but wear them she must, and dance in them she shall. They will never allow her to rest, a furious demon drives her on.
A fine paper-chase it is, too, that she has to run in. Her young body wonders at first what it lacks, and why she must follow a piper who leads on so strangely. The merry piper who leads on so gaily is but a man. He pipes and the women follow.
A fine hunt ensues. The young women are a pack of hounds; they follow the bucks, that wear large horns. The hounds will win the chase; they will catch those merry stags unawares—an easy prey. The hounds pursue gladly, and without knowing how it has happened, they themselves are the ones that are caught. And the nearest green bank is used for a bridal bed. There, a pretty pastime may be practised with sweet usage, or perhaps, instead of loving manners, a furious frolic may come of it, cruel and hostile to love.
From such doings lust may emanate, or love and gentle content.
But perhaps hideous cruelty alone is there, and its claws bloody. This wonder may come quick and sudden; at other times it is very slow—a ponderous bulk that moves to destroy. Or else it shows its victim for her own face in the glass. ’Tis her own sweetness that brought in the terror. She called for the music, ’twas the piper who played. Her outcries, her screams are forgotten, and she returns again and again to kiss the rod.
Her young eyes, moist and clinging, gaze at the terrible sign. Her knees bend tremblingly; she has entered the pagan grove where the pole is set up. She knows herself to be a sacrifice to the god. The god demands her; his prey must be given to him.
But over all that happens, a watcher stands and looks. This watcher is Madder Hill. Above life—that grand and woeful calamity—Madder Hill looks and yields a kind of consolation to those who bend to it. It may be but the sweet odour of white clover, or the winter’s sun setting in the sea, that tells other tales than the fury of constant becoming and continuous ending. Madder Hill is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. Our eyes have seen it, and not another’s.…
Mere knelt over Susie. He wished her to become conscious, so that she might be fully aware of what he meant to do to her now.
But Susie was still dazed, and to do what he had a mind to do with her, in that state, was not what he wished.
Even a madman, such as Mere seemed to be, does not like to be watched. And the eyes that were now fixed upon Mr. Mere soon drew his attention to them. Mr. Mere turned and saw John Death at the window. John was smiling.
Mere rose, with a curse; he left Susie, unlocked the door, and went out of the house.
Susie had not seen Death, and as soon as Mere was gone, she began to recover her scattered senses. She had supposed that she was going to be killed, and was surprised to find that she was still alive. She had expected, from her fears, to be far more hurt than she was. She was surprised when she found how easily she could get up. The blood from the bite in her shoulder had ceased to flow, and though the wound pained her, she forgave the poor dog who, she supposed, had bitten her. Feeling better, she went into the back-kitchen, and washed the bite; she then went upstairs to change the torn clothes. She cried over them, as if they alone had been hurt. Then she looked into a cracked glass and saw that she was still the same girl.
As well as forgiving the dog, she even thought better of Mr. Mere, now he had gone from her. Mrs. Moggs had told her to beware of the men in her thin clothes. Perhaps it was the pink frock that had done the mischief. Men, she knew, sometimes became quite wild—like bulls. A girl ought to be careful what she wore; Susie even smiled. She supposed that Mr. Mere must have grown tired of visiting Daisy Huddy so often. She was glad of that.
Of course, as a Dodder girl, with so little to spend herself, Susie had always been envious of Daisy. Had a poor man—such as Joseph Bridle was—only visited Daisy, she would not have cared, because Joseph never had anything to give away.
But Mr. Mere was a very different matter to Joe. Many called him the Squire of Dodder, and the highest pew in the church was his to sit in, if he chose. He never entered Daisy’s cottage without carrying, in the inner pocket of his coat, a well-filled wallet. And, though his purse was hardly depleted at all when he came out, yet to be near such wealth must have been very pleasing to a girl. And Daisy would often boast of what he used to show her.
Susie bared her shoulder before the glass, and looked at the wound.
The dog had not hurt her much, and where the bite was no one could notice it. But the dog—she was aware that the man had beaten it horribly. Had it leaped through the window to die?
As Susie felt better, she began to trouble less about what had happened to herself. Perhaps Mr. Mere was shy, and shyness, Susie knew, sometimes makes a man cross. Perhaps Mr. Mere had beaten his dog in order to gain confidence himself.
Mrs. Moggs had often told Susie how a strong man will throw a girl down, a little roughly sometimes, and marry her very gently a month later. Many strange pranks, Susie knew, were often played in a country place before the wedding bells rang. And a man of Mr. Mere’s wealth was not likely to be too kind to a poor girl.
“Perhaps,” thought Susie, “I ought to have been kinder to him.”
Mrs. Moggs had told her, more than once, how a man expects a girl to behave. She now almost wished that Mr. Mere would come back to her again. She even ran out into the lane to see if he still loitered near. In the lane she found John Death waiting for her.
Susie was glad to see him; what she had gone through had made her restless, and she stept happily to John. She knew him as a pleasant man to talk to, with a merry, roguish look, and, even with a beard, he did not look uncomely. Susie had always liked the look of John. She liked the way he played with the children upon the green. He allowed the little boys and girls to play with him at all hours, unless he was sharpening his scythe or searching for his lost parchment.
He had always spoken politely to Susie, as if she were a fine lady and he a gentleman, and he spoke to her, too, in a way that no other man had ever done. When Susie mocked and teased Joe he always became gloomy and sad, but John Death never cared what a girl said. He would answer as saucily and give as good as he got.
Something, Susie felt, had to be done with herself that evening. She was a flower that a storm had blown down, and now she longed to be culled.
But John, when he saw her, appeared a little quieter than usual. He looked at her more seriously than she liked to be looked at—though not as Joe Bridle was wont to look at her. John’s eyes spoke of different doings than his.
He asked her about the dog; that was why, he said, he had come to the window. He had been playing ball with the children upon the green, and had heard the crash and wondered what it meant. In the lane he had seen the dog, all bloody. He saw it roll over, then it got up and staggered into Joe Bridle’s field.
Susie begged John to go with her there, and to kill the dog. She could not bear, she said, to think of its being in such agony. “Mr. Mere,” she cried, “never finishes anything off; he likes to leave an animal in pain.”
On the way to Joseph’s field, Susie was conscious of a strange fascination that drew her to Death. He seemed a man who could do more for a girl than many another. There was a power in his step and a purpose, too, and the nearer he was to her, the more she was aware of his comeliness. He was different from any other man that she knew. As they walked to Joseph’s field, John talked to her pleasantly; he evidently wished to put her quite at her ease.
He began to talk of many little things that every country girl likes to hear of. He spoke of the tradesmen who came from the town shops, and of their cunning ways with their customers. One afternoon a certain Mr. Dicks—who travelled for a draper—had called upon him. Mr. Dicks sold both men’s and women’s clothes. He looked a little curiously at John’s trousers, and asked him whether he would not like to buy a new pair. John replied, with a smile, that he wished to purchase a girl’s frock. Mr. Dicks was quite prepared for such an order. He hurried out to his van and returned with a pretty red dress that he knew would exactly fit Daisy Huddy.
Susie laughed. She liked to think that even Mr. Dicks knew all about Daisy’s bad ways. She liked to think, too, that Mr. Mere had quite finished with Daisy, for on the same day that Mr. Dicks had called upon John, he had also carried a bill for another frock to Daisy, that evidently Mr. Mere had refused to pay.
But as to John, Susie did not seem, curiously enough, to be jealous of him. He was the kind of man whose merry temper permitted him to do exactly what he chose. No man who had ever lived in Dodder was quite like John.
He was the sort of man, Susie supposed, to take a girl into a field of soft grass, please her there, and then go off himself and leave her to admire the yellow buttercups.
Susie looked at Death longingly; he had started her thoughts dancing. They bounded like tennis balls, then they flew like the winged seeds of the sycamore and fell upon Death as upon a good ground. He alone could fully satisfy her; he alone could give her himself wholly and utterly. She knew not how it was, but she became aware then that he loved her too, and she, being a girl, wished that he might soon make her his own.
As soon as she thought so, she knew that he was all-powerful over her, and had he changed himself into a thorn-bush, she would have clung to him as lovingly. She longed to run merrily down the lane of love, at the end of which is Death.
They loitered along without need to hurry. And, even though the task that they had to do—to find the stricken dog and to kill it—was not a pleasant one, yet Susie, now that John was her companion, did not mind the adventure.
There was nothing that he did not know, there was no village girl that he was not aware of. He even went so far as to make fun of Priscilla Hayhoe’s hat, that she wore in church. He had something new to tell her, too—that Mr. Hayhoe read to Daisy Huddy each evening of the week. “And once,” said John, “when Farmer Crawford, who always considered himself a fine fellow—though he was but a small man—came to see her and heard the following passage read, he retired hurriedly without knocking at the door.
“‘Handsome! Nobody can call such an undersized man handsome. He is not five foot nine. I should not wonder if he was not more than five foot eight. I think he is an ill-looking fellow. In my opinion, these Crawfords are no addition at all. We did very well without them.’”
Susie laughed, and John held her nearer to him. All the power of a thinking creature went from her; she appeared to be swallowed up in him, and he in her. This feeling was one of the most exquisite joy. She lost herself in her desire to find him alone. All that she had been went out of her, and only joy was left.
No such wonderful feeling had ever come to her as she talked to Joe Bridle. Though John only thought of pleasure, that pleasure went very deep; his carnal merriment was monstrous; he could, she knew, drink all of her and leave nothing but a mere husk.
Bridle was different. He wanted her as a helpmate, to be but his property, her sweet flesh to bear children to him, to live, to suckle, and to rear them, and to be always to him his loving spouse. Joe Bridle wanted her for himself, his jealousy was Godlike. He was all hope and gloom, and he often troubled her.
As Death had told a story or two, Susie thought she would begin too. She began to invent tales from what Mrs. Moggs had told her. She pretended that she had been out with the boys and told John what they had done to her. She told these tales to prevent John being shy. They were all lies.
Then she said that she believed that she would soon be married to Mr. Mere. When she said his name she spoke proudly. But Death only smiled; he did not take his arm from her or turn away, as Joseph would have done.
“Ah!” he said, smiling upon her, “I rather like Mr. Mere.” He grew thoughtful for a moment, and then observed gaily, “I believe, one of these days, Mr. Mere and I may become better acquainted.”
“It’s nice to be happy,” said Susie.
“Why, even the dead think so,” cried Death, “and though Mr. Hayhoe does say that all will rise at the Last Judgment, yet old Barker and Nancy Prim wish to rise no farther than the charnel grass, and to rise there only for naughtiness.”
John mocked at every one. He observed that Lord Bullman never went to bed without lamenting that young girls and religion were far too much neglected in these modern days, and that both the one and the other ought to be more easy to obtain.
“And, as to my lord’s own fancies,” cried John, “why, he owns himself that all his children were only begotten to please Mr. Titball. Those two,” observed John, “would often talk together like brothers when they visited the cellars. Mr. Titball would guide his lord by the light of a large lantern, and would show him the vast bin where Sir Thomas Bullman—my lord’s great-grandfather—used to keep his wine. ‘Every day he drank three bottles,’ Lord Bullman once observed, ‘but the bin was never empty.’
“‘Miracle!’ cried Mr. Titball. ‘And his family? He had more than one son, I trust?’
“‘He had many children,’ replied Lord Bullman, sadly, taking up a bottle to examine the cork.
“‘I knew it,’ replied Mr. Titball, and led his master to the cellar door.…”