Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (290 page)

For that was precisely how it would look, and not only to his mother. Suppose by a miracle it really represented the facts. Suppose that, in spite of the overwhelming evidence in her favour — of the night and the moon and the stars, and the feeling that had come to him from the moment he had kissed her — suppose that, in spite of all this, it turned out that she wasn’t a fairy. Suppose that suggestion of vulgar Common Sense, that she was just a little minx that had run away from home, had really hit the mark. Suppose inquiries were already on foot. A hundred horse-power aeroplane does not go about unnoticed. Wasn’t there a law about this sort of thing — something about “decoying” and “young girls”? He hadn’t “decoyed” her. If anything, it was the other way about. But would her consent be a valid defence? How old was she? That would be the question. In reality he supposed about a thousand years or so. Possibly more. Unfortunately, she didn’t look it. A coldly suspicious magistrate would probably consider sixteen a much better guess. Quite possibly he was going to get into a devil of a mess over this business. He cast a glance behind him. Malvina responded with her changeless smile of ineffable content. For the first time it caused him a distinct feeling of irritation.

They were almost over Weymouth by this time. He could read plainly the advertisement posters outside the cinema theatre facing the esplanade: “Wilkins and the Mermaid. Comic Drama.” There was a picture of the lady combing her hair; also of Wilkins, a stoutish gentleman in striped bathing costume.

That mad impulse that had come to him with the first breath of dawn, to shake the dwindling world from his pinions, to plunge upward towards the stars never to return — he wished to Heaven he had yielded to it.

And then suddenly there leapt to him the thought of Cousin Christopher.

Dear old Cousin Christopher, fifty-eight and a bachelor. Why had it not occurred to him before? Out of the sky there appeared to Commander Raffleton the vision of “Cousin Christopher” as a plump, rubicund angel in a panama hat and a pepper-and-salt tweed suit holding out a lifebelt. Cousin Christopher would take to Malvina as some motherly hen to an orphaned duckling. A fairy discovered asleep beside one of the ancient menhirs of Brittany. His only fear would be that you might want to take her away before he had written a paper about her. He would be down from Oxford at his cottage. Commander Raffleton could not for the moment remember the name of the village. It would come to him. It was northwest of Newbury. You crossed Salisbury Plain and made straight for Magdalen Tower. The Downs reached almost to the orchard gate. There was a level stretch of sward nearly half a mile long. It seemed to Commander Raffleton that Cousin Christopher had been created and carefully preserved by Providence for this particular job.

He was no longer the moonstruck youth of the previous night, on whom phantasy and imagination could play what pranks they chose. That part of him the keen, fresh morning air had driven back into its cell. He was Commander Raffleton, an eager and alert young engineer with all his wits about him. At this point that has to be remembered. Descending on a lonely reach of shore he proceeded to again disturb Malvina for the purpose of extracting tins. He expected his passenger would in broad daylight prove to be a pretty, childish-looking girl, somewhat dishevelled, with, maybe, a tinge of blue about the nose, the natural result of a three-hours’ flight at fifty miles an hour. It was with a startling return of his original sensations when first she had come to life beneath his kiss that he halted a few feet away and stared at her. The night was gone, and the silence. She stood there facing the sunlight, clad in a Burberry overcoat half a dozen sizes too large for her. Beyond her was a row of bathing-machines, and beyond that again a gasometer. A goods train half a mile away was noisily shunting trucks.

And yet the glamour was about her still; something indescribable but quite palpable — something out of which she looked at you as from another world.

He took her proffered hand, and she leapt out lightly. She was not in the least dishevelled. It seemed as if the air must be her proper element. She looked about her, interested, but not curious. Her first thought was for the machine.

“Poor thing!” she said. “He must be tired.”

That faint tremor of fear that had come to him when beneath the menhir’s shadow he had watched the opening of her eyes, returned to him. It was not an unpleasant sensation. Rather it added a piquancy to their relationship. But it was distinctly real. She watched the feeding of the monster; and then he came again and stood beside her on the yellow sands.

“England!” he explained with a wave of his hand. One fancies she had the impression that it belonged to him. Graciously she repeated the name. And somehow, as it fell from her lips, it conjured up to Commander Raffleton a land of wonder and romance.

“I have heard of it,” she added. “I think I shall like it.”

He answered that he hoped she would. He was deadly serious about it. He possessed, generally speaking, a sense of humour; but for the moment this must have deserted him. He told her he was going to leave her in the care of a wise and learned man called “Cousin Christopher”; his description no doubt suggesting to Malvina a friendly magician. He himself would have to go away for a little while, but would return.

It did not seem to matter to Malvina, these minor details. It was evident — the idea in her mind — that he had been appointed to her. Whether as master or servant it was less easy to conjecture: probably a mixture of both, with preference towards the latter.

He mentioned again that he would not be away for longer than he could help. There was no necessity for this repetition. She wasn’t doubting it.

Weymouth with its bathing machines and its gasometer faded away. King Rufus was out a-hunting as they passed over the New Forest, and from Salisbury Plain, as they looked down, the pixies waved their hands and laughed. Later, they heard the clang of the anvil, telling them they were in the neighbourhood of Wayland Smith’s cave; and so planed down sweetly and without a jar just beyond Cousin Christopher’s orchard gate.

A shepherd’s boy was whistling somewhere upon the Downs, and in the valley a ploughman had just harnessed his team; but the village was hidden from them by the sweep of the hills, and no other being was in sight. He helped Malvina out, and leaving her seated on a fallen branch beneath a walnut tree, proceeded cautiously towards the house. He found a little maid in the garden. She had run out of the house on hearing the sound of his propeller and was staring up into the sky, so that she never saw him until he put his hand upon her shoulder, and then was fortunately too frightened to scream. He gave her hasty instructions. She was to knock at the Professor’s door and tell him that his cousin, Commander Raffleton, was there, and would he come down at once, by himself, into the orchard. Commander Raffleton would rather not come in. Would the Professor come down at once and speak to Commander Raffleton in the orchard.

She went back into the house, repeating it all to herself, a little scared.

“Good God!” said Cousin Christopher from beneath the bedclothes. “He isn’t hurt, is he?”

The little maid, through the jar of the door, thought not. Anyhow, he didn’t look it. But would the Professor kindly come at once? Commander Raffleton was waiting for him — in the orchard.

So Cousin Christopher, in bedroom slippers, without socks, wearing a mustard-coloured dressing-gown and a black skull cap upon his head — the very picture of a friendly magician — trotted hastily downstairs and through the garden, talking to himself about “foolhardy boys” and “knowing it would happen”; and was much relieved to meet young Arthur Raffleton coming towards him, evidently sound in wind and limb. And then began to wonder why the devil he had been frightened out of bed at six o’clock in the morning if nothing was the matter.

But something clearly was. Before speaking Arthur Raffleton looked carefully about him in a manner suggestive of mystery, if not of crime; and still without a word, taking Cousin Christopher by the arm, led the way to the farther end of the orchard. And there, on a fallen branch beneath the walnut tree, Cousin Christopher saw apparently a khaki coat, with nothing in it, which, as they approached it, rose up.

But it did not rise very high. The back of the coat was towards them. Its collar stood out against the sky line. But there wasn’t any head. Standing upright, it turned round, and peeping out of its folds Cousin Christopher saw a child’s face. And then looking closer saw that it wasn’t a child. And then wasn’t quite sure what it was; so that coming to a sudden halt in front of it, Cousin Christopher stared at it with round wide eyes, and then at Flight Commander Raffleton.

It was to Malvina that Flight Commander Raffleton addressed himself.

“This,” he said, “is Professor Littlecherry, my Cousin Christopher, about whom I told you.”

It was obvious that Malvina regarded the Professor as a person of importance. Evidently her intention was to curtsy, an operation that, hampered by those trailing yards of clinging khaki, might prove — so it flashed upon the Professor — not only difficult but dangerous.

“Allow me,” said the Professor.

His idea was to help Malvina out of Commander Raffleton’s coat, and Malvina was preparing to assist him. Commander Raffleton was only just in time.

“I don’t think,” said Commander Raffleton. “If you don’t mind I think we’d better leave that for Mrs. Muldoon.”

The Professor let go the coat. Malvina appeared a shade disappointed. One opines that not unreasonably she may have thought to make a better impression without it. But a smiling acquiescence in all arrangements made for her welfare seems to have been one of her charms.

“Perhaps,” suggested Commander Raffleton to Malvina while refastening a few of the more important buttons, “if you wouldn’t mind explaining yourself to my Cousin Christopher just exactly who and what you are — you’d do it so much better than I should.” (What Commander Raffleton was saying to himself was: “If I tell the dear old Johnny, he’ll think I’m pulling his leg. It will sound altogether different the way she will put it.”) “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

Malvina hadn’t the slightest objection. She accomplished her curtsy — or rather it looked as if the coat were curtsying — quite gracefully, and with a dignity one would not have expected from it.

“I am the fairy Malvina,” she explained to the Professor. “You may have heard of me. I was the favourite of Harbundia, Queen of the White Ladies of Brittany. But that was long ago.”

The friendly magician was staring at her with a pair of round eyes that in spite of their amazement looked kindly and understanding. They probably encouraged Malvina to complete the confession of her sad brief history.

“It was when King Heremon ruled over Ireland,” she continued. “I did a very foolish and a wicked thing, and was punished for it by being cast out from the companionship of my fellows. Since then” — the coat made the slightest of pathetic gestures—”I have wandered alone.”

It ought to have sounded so ridiculous to them both; told on English soil in the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Fourteen to a smart young officer of Engineers and an elderly Oxford Professor. Across the road the doctor’s odd man was opening garage doors; a noisy milk cart was clattering through the village a little late for the London train; a faint odour of eggs and bacon came wafted through the garden, mingled with the scent of lavender and pinks. For Commander Raffleton, maybe, there was excuse. This story, so far as it has gone, has tried to make that clear. But the Professor! He ought to have exploded in a burst of Homeric laughter, or else to have shaken his head at her and warned her where little girls go to who do this sort of thing.

Instead of which he stared from Commander Raffleton to Malvina, and from Malvina back to Commander Raffleton with eyes so astonishingly round that they might have been drawn with a compass.

“God bless my soul!” said the Professor. “But this is most extraordinary!”

“Was there a King Heremon of Ireland?” asked Commander Raffleton. The Professor was a well-known authority on these matters.

“Of course there was a King Heremon of Ireland,” answered the Professor quite petulantly — as if the Commander had wanted to know if there had ever been a Julius Caesar or a Napoleon. “And so there was a Queen Harbundia. Malvina is always spoken of in connection with her.”

“What did she do?” inquired Commander Raffleton. They both of them seemed to be oblivious of Malvina’s presence.

“I forget for the moment,” confessed the professor. “I must look it up. Something, if I remember rightly, in connection with the daughter of King Dancrat. He founded the Norman dynasty. William the Conqueror and all that lot. Good Lord!”

“Would you mind her staying with you for a time until I can make arrangements,” suggested Commander Raffleton. “I’d be awfully obliged if you would.”

What the Professor’s answer might have been had he been allowed to exercise such stock of wits as he possessed, it is impossible to say. Of course he was interested — excited, if you will. Folklore, legend, tradition; these had been his lifelong hobbies. Apart from anything else, here at least was a kindred spirit. Seemed to know a thing or two. Where had she learned it? Might not there be sources unknown to the Professor?

But to take her in! To establish her in the only spare bedroom. To introduce her — as what? to English village society. To the new people at the Manor House. To the member of Parliament with his innocent young wife who had taken the vicarage for the summer. To Dawson, R.A., and the Calthorpes!

He might, had he thought it worth his while, have found some respectable French family and boarded her out. There was a man he had known for years at Oxford, a cabinetmaker; the wife a most worthy woman. He could have gone over there from time to time, his notebook in his pocket, and have interviewed her.

Left to himself, he might have behaved as a sane and rational citizen; or he might not. There are records favouring the latter possibility. The thing is not certain. But as regards this particular incident in his career he must be held exonerated. The decision was taken out of his hands.