THE VOICE
THE day had been wet and mellow after a longish drought. The soil sucked at the warm flood, as a thirsty horse swills at a trough, drawing in its satisfaction quietly and intently; the cottage windows twinkled under their brows of dripping thatch; the hills, misty and phantasmic, seemed to roll like leviathans in a fog of descending water. And it was under such circumstances of weather that I first saw Balmworth.
One could not conceive a village more faithful to its etymology. It saunters down a gentle slope, half a mile long, from the hills to the sea; slips without a stumble into a tiny cove—landlocked for nine-tenths of its circumference, and green as an aquamarine set in a loop of silver chalk—and elsewhere and on all sides is made comfortable in its place with cushions of velvet down. Coming from the little station-village of Flock—itself a drowsy portal to the hills—one ascends a three-mile rise, traverses a short tableland, and goes straight down, smiling, into the harbourage of the tranquil valley. What does it concern one that those slumberous green pillows which contain it are neighboured on either side by populous and popular "seaside resorts"? The hills are ramparts as well as boundaries, and the vulgar, confined to char-à-bancs and high roads, essay to storm them but fitfully. Their flying visits but serve, in fact, to accent the peace, as the casual rush of a motor-car outside lonely windows leaves a profounder silence in its wake.
And the inhabitants are all in keeping. Here are no sharks of landladies, hungering to feed on the inexperienced adventurer; no maximum of cost for a minimum of service; no cracked pianos at a shilling a thump; no castors estimated in the weekly bill at a figure which would keep a furrier in pepper for a year; no priceless china, cheapened from the nearest crockery store, and put up on brackets to be accidentally broken, and paid for; no charge for the attendance which is ever lacking; no suffering protests, no extortion, no inflated prices whatever. No fleas, I would fain add; but that would not be true. Yet even they feed delicately, with ever a gentle consideration for the provision of the only man in the place who sells Keating.
Balmworth, to be sure, lets lodgings (indeed, in the "season" it is so greatly affected by those who love not the swarming warrens of August that it is difficult to secure a bed there), but on an artless Arcadian plan. It is as ready to take in the houseless traveller as it would be to be taken in by him. Any Jeremy Diddler so inclined might steal his dirty week's toll of its hospitality. Its landladies tot up their bills, all wrong, with infinite travail, and finally beg the good graces of their lodgers to help them to screw and pummel the items into some correspondence with the totals. They smile; they confide; they are on pleasant personal, but not in the least self-obtrusive terms with you from the outset. Supercilious or baronial-nosed people discomfort them. Sometimes they entreat your acceptance of a basket of blackberries or rosy apples. They are mostly the wives and mothers of the boatmen, to whom appertaineth the conduct of the Cove, sailing and fishing, the letting out of craft, the exploiting, in short, of little Balmworth as a sea pleasure-garden.
It is a very quaint and pretty basin among the cliffs, is this Cove—something like Mother Carey's Peace-pool. It is just a mile in circumference; and the land's fond arms, not quite meeting round it, leave open a narrow water-way, through which pleasuring steamers can creep in in all but stormy weather. They do not trouble one much. The life of the Cove congregates all the morning about the eastern side, to which they do not come, and where cluster the little white bathing-huts which are the real lodgings of Balmworth. For this pool of translucent water, on whose floor sixteen feet down one may see the weeds swaying pale as if in moonlight, is very grateful to the bather; and there be those who will camp all day among the little huts, that they may undress and plunge at pleasure.
Opposite the water-way above mentioned sweeps up a mighty forehead of chalk, mottled like old ivory, which, descending gradually as it curves either way about the Cove, ends at the entrance in horns of stratified rock. In the western arm of this curve is gathered the business material of the place—boats, nets, lobster-pots, prawn-chests, lugworms and lumber. It is significant that never a life-belt is to be seen there, unless in the shed where the men of the coastguard keep their trim black boats with the brass fittings. Balmworth pays no tax to the white-horsed farmers of the sea, and that for a simple reason. When the wind blows enough to imperil small craft, no sailing-boat can make the outward passage of the water-way. Even in calm weather so narrow is it that the tripper-steamers have to slip in with caution. Meet that such a place, so secure, so unvexed, so child-like in its character, should be haunted, if at all, by a child's voice.
Perhaps it was the cluck of choked gutters, or the soft trample of the rain on the road, or some small, inarticulate converse of unseen talkers that deceived my hearing; but, as I walked, while the hills sunk fading about me into night and water, I could have thought, and more than once, that something ran beside me, a little thing that begged in a little voice, as a small trained mendicant might do, and sobbed and sniffed to rouse my unresponsive sympathy. The impression was so faint, so unreal, that my only wonder lay in its imposing itself on me so persistently. I sought to associate the fancy with the sights and sounds about me; but it would not so be put away. It ran and babbled, sometimes in front of me, sometimes at my side—not words, but their shadow; no face, but the uplifted glimmering blotch of one, which, when I bent to canvass it, was always a stone in the road.
I felt no distress, but a certain curiosity. That the delusion was a delusion I never had a doubt. The key to the enigma was all that lacked. But I was confident that I should find it sooner or later.
I went on placidly, descending to the Cove. The lights of an inn, of cottages, met me right and left. And then I was going down a narrow gully; and then came a pool of ashy water.
It lapped out of the mists, reaching vainly for the rank of little boats which lay thereby, drawn up on the shingle. Grey wet and desolation held all this quarter of the Cove. Not a light twinkled from the coastguard station, perched high aloft on the butt of the western horn. It was just a minute section of beach and sea, half veiled, half disclosed in the drowning fog. Not a sign of life was in evidence but the figure of a solitary boatman, roping up his craft for the night.
And then, all of a sudden, the voice had become articulate, and I saw the dark form of a little girl go bounding down the stones to the lonely figure.
"Bill, Bill!" she cried, "do let me pull! O, Bill, do let me pull!"
The tone pierced as shrill, as hollowly treble through that sodden desolation as the cry of a hawking seagull. Yet the figure among the boats took no notice of it whatever.
"Bill!" wailed the child; "do let me pull!"
The figure worked on stolidly. "Is he stone deaf?" I thought.
She danced round him, crying and entreating—always in that piercing young voice. He could not fail to see, even if he had not heard her. Suddenly he rose to his height, his task finished, and came clumping up the shingle towards me. In the same moment the figure of the child seemed to go down into the waters and disappear. I uttered a shout and pounded to the spot. Not a bubble, not a ripple betrayed the place of that noiseless plunge. The tide came in, wrinkle over wrinkle, without a break. I beat back and forth, peering, calling, but with no avail. Finally I desisted, and went up the beach to the man. He, at least, though I had questioned it at first, was no ghost. I felt that I was shaking through and through as I approached him. No doubt he thought me demented.
But, if he did, he made a successful pretence of unconcern, as he stood soberly lighting his pipe. His face in the act was revealed to me, glowing and shadowing, as he pulled at the match. It was the face, indisputably, of a kindly, rugged soul, humane, earnest, unguileful—an expression of that spirit of simple gravity which comes of long association with the awe and mystery of the sea.
"I thought I heard a child calling down there," I said, commanding my voice with difficulty. "But there wasn't one, of course?"
"Bless you, see," he said, in a curiously small, indrawn way for such a bushy man, "this isn't no night for children."
"No," I replied, "a black night—no sort of weather for one's first visit to your Cove."
"I've never known the like," he answered, looking up at the sky. (They never have.)
His atmosphere invited frankness.
"What's your name?" I asked. He told me. "And your Christian name?"
"Bill, see," he said. So he pronounced "Sir," quite mincingly.
He was going up the village, and I was suddenly anxious for his company. I refrained, even, from looking over my shoulder as we left the boats and the whispering crescent of beach.
"Ah!" I said; "that was the name I thought I heard the child call—Bill."
"Yes, see," he responded heartily.
"'Bill,' I thought I heard her say, 'do let me pull, Bill.'"
"Ah!" he said; "that'll be little Miss Vera."
"Little Miss—but you said you didn't hear her?"
"No, see," he answered simply. "I can't do it; but others can. She visits us time and again by their showing—the little drownded sperit of her."
"How was she drowned?" My voice seemed something apart from me.
"Had set her heart," he said soberly, "on pulling of a boat all by herself—was always a-crying on me to let her. But I had my orders. She was a bit what you'd call wilful, see; and one evening—it might have been like this" (he had forgotten his former statement)—"she give her lady mother the slip, and run down to the boats, and had one out, all with her own hands, before a soul knew she was gone." He stopped a moment, blowing at his pipe till it scattered a very shower of sparks into the wet. "I picked up her little body myself," he said. "There it was in the water, as quiet as sleep. She'd just run the boat off of the beach, and herself with it. So she'd never had her pull after all. God rest her pretty sperit!"
I saw him later, in the tap of The Pure Drop. He was having his temperate pot and pipe before turning in, and was taking his earnest share in a political discussion. The visitation lay, if it lay at all, quite simply and unharmfully on his mind. Surely that was the right unsophisticated way to accept it. The responsibility for haunting lies with the haunter. As for myself, I have not learned to appreciate Balmworth at a figure less than its due because of that infinite weirdness of my introduction to it. It is a rare haven on a noisy coast; its voices murmur either out of sleep or death. But that one shrill small voice I have never heard again.