Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard by Eleanor Farjeon (best new books to read txt) 📕

"You are there waiting for me, aren't you, child? I know you are-- I've always known you were. What would you have said to me when you opened the door in your blue gown?--"

"Oh, but say only where you are, my boy!"

"Do you know what I should have said? I shouldn't have said anything. I should have kissed you--"

"Oh, let me come to you and you shall kiss me...."

But she listened in vain.

She went back to her room. The gull was still on the floor. Its wing was broken. Her actions from this moment were mechanical; she did what she did without will. First she bound the broken wing, and fetched bread and water for the wounded bird. Then she dressed herself and went out of the mill. She had a rope in her hands.

The water was not all around the mill. Strips and stretches of land were still unflooded, or only thinly covered. But the face of the earth had been altered by one of those great inland swoops of the sea that have for centuries changed and re-changed the point of Sussex, advancing, receding, shifting the coast-line, making new shores, restoring old fields, wedding the soil with the sand.

Helen walked where she could. She had no choice of ways. She kept by the edge of the water and went into no-man's land. A bank of rotting grasses and dry reeds, which the waves had left uncovered, rose from the marshes. She mounted it, and beheld the unnatural sea on either hand. Here and there in the desolate water mounds of gray-green grass lifted themselves like drifting islands. Trees stricken or still in leaf reared from the unfamiliar element. Many of those which were leafless had put on a strange greenness, for their boughs dripped with seaweed. Over the floods, which were littered with such flotsam as she had seen from her window, flew sea-birds and land-birds, crying and cheeping. There was no other presence in that desolation except her own.

And then at last her commanded feet stood still, and her will came back to her. For she saw what she had come to find.

He was hanging, as though it had caught him in a snare, in a tree standing solitary in the middle of a wide waste of water. He was hanging there like a dead man. She could distinguish his dark red hair and his blue jersey.

She paused to think what to do. She couldn't swim. She would not have hesitated to try; but she wanted to save him. She looked about, and saw among the bits of stuff washing against the foot of the bank a large dismembered tree-trunk. It bobbed back and forth among the hollow reeds. She thought it would serve her if she had an oar. She went in search of one, and found a broken plank cast up among the tangled growth of the bank. When she had secured it she fastened one end of her rope around the stump of an old pollard squatting on the bank like a sturdy gnome, and the other end she knotted around herself. Then, gathering all the middle of the rope into a coil, and using her plank as a prop, she let herself down the bank and slid shuddering into the water. But she had her tree-trunk now; with some difficulty she scrambled on to it, and paddled her way into the open water.

It was not really a great distance to his tree, but to her it seemed immeasurable. She was unskillful, and her awkwardness often put her into danger. But her will made her do what she otherwise might not have done; presently she was under the branches of the tree.

She pulled herself up to a limb beside him and looked at him. And it was not he.

It was not her boy. It was a man, middle-aged, rough and weatherbeaten, but pallid under his red-and-tan. His hair was grizzled. And his face was rough with a growth of grizzled hair. His whole body lurched heavily and helplessly in a fork of the tree, and one arm hung limp. His eyes were half-shut.

But they were not quite shut. He was not unconscious. And under the drooping lids he was watching her.

For a few minutes they sat gazing at each other in silence. She had her breath to get. She thought it would never come back.

The man spoke first.

"Well, you made a job of it," he said.

She didn't answer.

"But you don't know much about the water, do you?"

"I've never seen the sea till to-day," said Helen slowly.

He laughed a little. "I expect you've seen enough of it to-day. But where do you live, then, that you've never seen the sea? In the middle of the earth?"

"No," said Helen, "I live in a mill."

His eyelids flickered. "Do you? Yes, of course you do. I might have guessed it."

"How should you guess it?"

"By your blue dress," said the man. Then he fainted.

She sat there miserably, waiting, ready to prop him if he fell. She did not know what else to do. Before very long he opened his eyes.

"Did I go off again?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Yes. Well, it's time to be making a move. I dare say I can now you're here. What's your name?"

"Helen."

"Well, Helen, we'd better put that rope to some use. Will that tree at the other end hold?"

"Yes."

"Then just you untie yourself and we'll get aboard and haul ourselves home."

She unfastened the rope from her body, and helped him down to her makeshift boat.

"You take the paddle," he said. "My arm's damaged. But I can pull on the rope with the other."

"Are you sure? Are you all right? What's your name?"

"Yes, I can manage. My name's Peter. This would have been a lark thirty years ago, wouldn't it? It's rather a lark now."

She nodded vaguely, wondering what she would do if he fell off the log in mid-water.

"Suppose you faint again?"

"Don't look for trouble," said the man. "Push