FullReads

“D’you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?” I said.

“I’ve never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren’t mixed. They are separate—all separate. ”

“Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?”

She nodded. “Yes—if they are like this,” and zigzagged her finger again, “but it’s more red than purple—that bad colour. ”

“And what are the colours at the top of the—whatever you see?”

Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg itself.

“I see them so,” she said, pointing with a grass stem, “white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red—as you were just now. ”

“Who told you anything about it—in the beginning?” I demanded.

“About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was little—in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see—because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people. ” Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.

“All by yourself?” I repeated.

“All by myself. There wasn’t any one else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours. ”

She leaned against the tree-bole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.

“Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at them. ”

“Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing too—is a heathen!”

“I didn’t mean that of course. You’d never laugh atchildren, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon…. What are you going to laugh at?”

I had made no sound, but she knew.

“At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable. ”

She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk—long and steadfastly—this woman who could see the naked soul.

“How curious,” she half whispered. “How very curious. ”

“Why, what have I done?”

“You don’t understand … and yet you understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?”

She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.

“No,” I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. “Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later—if you’ll let me come again. ”

“You will come again,” she answered. “
You will surely come again and walk in the wood. ”

“Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them—as a favour. You know what children are like. ”

“It isn’t a matter of favour but of right,” she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. “What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?” she asked.