Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
"_That's_ the thing to do with your cockerels. I have no time to try it
myself, but you are so clever, Mrs. Westenra, and would be sure to make
it pay. Turn your cockerels into capons. It is the most profitable
business going."
"Capons?" said Val, vague-eyed. "I always thought capons were fish, and
that monks ate them for Friday's dinner."
"Oh, dear me, no, they are not fish, though monks will eat them fast
enough if they get the chance--any one will, they 're delicious. You
'll get from seven shillings and sixpence to ten shillings for them any
day in the week," averred Mrs. Scone, and proceeded to explain to the
open-mouthed Val and Haidee the process of caponising.
"So simple. Just cut a small slit above the wing of each bird with a
pair of special scissors which you buy; then you hook up and remove the
two little glands that lie along the backbone, and there you have your
capon!--instead of a young cockerel that is always tearing about the run
fighting and eating his head off without putting on any fat."
Val was deeply intrigued. Cockerels had become one of her problems.
More than half the chickens upon which she had counted for spring eggs
had either succumbed to the pip, or never hatched out at all; of the
remainder the larger proportion had turned out to be of male sex.
Rose-coloured dreams of getting into touch with the Jesuit College on
the hill above St. Helier and doing a flourishing business with the
monks now floated through her mind. But she shivered at the thought of
the caponising operation. She was physically incapable of cutting
anything, even the head off a dead fish.
"Oh, I couldn't," she said, "at least I don't think I could."
"A pity!" said Mrs. Scone. "There's a fortune in it for them as will do
it--a mint of money."
This gave Val pause. Had she, just because she was a coward about
cutting things, any right to reject a scheme that had a mint of money in
it? Was it fair to Westenra? After profound consideration, and much
guileful persuasion by Haidee, always eager for experiments, she decided
to at least give the idea a fair trial. So, on an afternoon, twelve of
the finest cockerels were enthusiastically chased and captured by
Haidee, aided by one of Farmer Scone's farm boys kindly lent for the
occasion, and put under a rabbit-hutch to await their fate. A packing
case constituted the operating table and the instruments of torture lay
beside it--Val had sent for a little case from London (price thirty
shillings). Mrs. Scone and Haidee held the first bird on the table, and
Val under the direction of the former, with white face and trembling
lips, made the first slit. The cockerel at the prick of the instrument
screamed like a banshee, and Val's unnerved hand fell to her side.
"Oh! how brutal it seems!" she faltered.
On the urgent advice of the others she attempted to finish the operation
(with her eyes closed), but the cockerel objected strenuously, blood
flew in every direction and heart-rending shrieks tore the air. White
as ashes the operator let the scissors fall and staggered to the door.
Mrs. Scone, purring solicitously, supported her into the open air.
"Dear me, dear me! What a good heart you have, to be sure, Mrs.
Westenra!"
Later, leaving Val sitting outside very sick, she returned to the
operating theatre, and she, and Haidee and the farm hand between them
performed on the rest of the cockerels with such vigour that three of
them died the same night, and two more a few days later; four, after a
long convalescence, recovered, but stayed languid and appetiteless for
the remainder of their existence; while the rest, after a week or two
recovering their usual sprightly temperament, fought, pursued each
other, and ate up all the food as gaily as before.
That was the end of the caponising business. The great scheme for
supplying fat capons to the Jesuit College (not for Friday's dinner, of
course, but as an article of nourishment proper to monasteries) never
materialised.
----
Westenra in the meantime was writing grimly, and not often. From his
letters Val gathered something of the strain of life at No. 700 West 68.
The place was paying better now under Miss Holland's management, but, as
she had foreseen, he hated to live in such close communion with people
who were nothing to him. After the first few weeks he had gone into
bachelor quarters once more, not his old ones in the city, but rooms
near the sanatorium. Operations were coming in well, but there were big
gaps in his banking account made by the fateful year of experiment. A
note of weariness often crept into his letters--and when he wrote:
"So glad you are happy--_at last_--with your fowls and rabbits. Do not
let them absorb you altogether," it sounded to her very like a reproach.
Often he said, "I envy you--with the children about you." But for the
most part he rejoiced that the conditions of her life should be so ideal
for health and happiness. Sometimes to Haidee he would cry out
boyishly:
"How I would like to be with you and Bran in the windy fields, running
after the rabbits."
Like every man whose boyhood has been spent in the country, he loved
fields, and rabbits, and birds--all wood and hedge creatures; could
describe the eggs and whistle the note of every bird in the British
Isles. Haidee wrote him long accounts of the life at Cliff Farm, and
when she began to make a collection of eggs by very carefully taking
only one from a nest of four or five, if ever she had any doubt on the
subject of parentage Westenra was never too busy to clear up the matter
by return mail.
He was obliged to economise narrowly, and the consciousness of this
drove Val into a state of frenzy if obliged to spend an unexpected sou.
But never having been trained in economy she had not the faintest notion
of how to practise it, except by doing without personal things herself.
No gowns; no new hats; no clothes at all, for herself. Yet somehow that
did not make any difference to the bills. There was always the awful
food problem, and the boot problem, and the problem of how to make hens
lay without paying large grain bills, and a dozen other incidental
problems!
Like a good many people, Val had supposed that fowls fed themselves.
Her brain had pictured them actively pursuing worms, and insects, and
wild seeds during the intervals of laying. She found instead that they
were like children in the matter of meals, always there on time. At
dawn and eve, to say nothing of mid-day, she would find them standing
dolorously at the back door with eyes cocked expectantly at whoever came
out. Only after a good meal did they go forth to promenade, and then it
was to lay their eggs in some distant hedge where nobody could find
them.
When the grain bills began to come in she realised that in the poultry
business there was an output, as well as an intake, and that all her
small profits were eaten up by the fowls.
CHAPTER X
WORRY-BELLS
"Tout homme digne de ce nom
A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune
Installe comme sur un trone,
Qui, s'il dit: 'Je veux!' repond: 'Non!'"
BAUDELAIRE.
As the months went by and the first exhaustion of body and spirit in
which she had left New York passed, Val's imagination once more woke up,
and began to torment her nights, undoing the good effect of days spent
in healthy occupation. In the soft, kind climate of Jersey her body
must soon have regained all its old nervous strength if the spirit had
not begun once more to chafe and wear its scabbard. Had she been a
woman merely separated for a while from the man she loved with the
certain hope of swift reunion, how happy she could have been in the
thought of his joy in finding Bran so lovely and sturdy, Haidee strong
and handsome, herself recovered! If only all had been well! But all
was not well, and the realisation of this fact began to push serenity
from her mind, waking up old aches and hungers she had believed long
since extinguished--the longing to pack a knapsack and depart for the
horizon, to bathe her soul in the Lethe of a distant sunset, and arise
renewed and free of the cares and conventions of life. Her feet tingled
to travel. The sky-line began to pull at, and "play" her as if it had a
hook in her very vitals. With every ship that disappeared over the brim
of the world went some shade of her inmost being. The song of the
rolling stone sang in her veins:
"I have a love for other lands,
Which thro' my home life dogs my way.
My very soul scarce understands
The love I have for other lands."
She got into the way of sitting on a rabbit-hutch staring before her at
the empty sea until she saw it no longer, nor the sea-gulls that wheeled
in circles, but only the wide veldt empty of all but a line of kops and
a great berg to be passed on the morrow--changing pictures round an
out-spanned waggon--oxen with heads bent, moving gradually onwards, the
tinkling of a cattle-bell, evening fires lighted--Haidee and Bran
bounding about examining new flowers, strange insects, the spoor of wild
creatures--Westenra with a gun--problems gone out of his eye, the rustle
of dollars forgotten--just a simple, primitive vagabond like herself.
Ah! Vain day dreams! Even while she dreamed she could feel the
wretched truth stirring at the back of her mind, waiting like some
horrible yellow viper with head reared ready to strike.
Sleep became rare with her. However hard the day's work, she never had
more than an hour or two of the dead slumber of exhaustion. Then,
regular as an alarm, a little worry-bell would ring in her brain, dimly
at first, then more and more insistent and clamorous. At last she would
be as widely awake as if some one had taken her by the shoulders and
shaken her out of sleep to hear some terrible and significant news.
"Wake up, Val Valdana, you have slept long enough! There is the little
affair of Garrett Westenra's happiness to consider--and Garrett
Westenra's son--and Horace Valdana's lease of life! There are several
other affairs also, which in the daytime you are apt to consider of
minor importance, but which you can see clearly in these small still
hours are very important and pressing indeed--the affair of that grain
bill for which you have not the ready money!--those new shoes Haidee
requires!--the young cockerels eating off their heads--and how are you
going to raise more money for Valdana?"
Ah! that yellow viper that sits in the human heart and haunts the human
brain, crying _yes_ when we cry _no_, and _pleasure_ when we cry _duty_,
and _duty_ when we cry _pleasure_, and _wake_ when we cry _sleep_--Val
lay with it through the hours of many a weary night!
Only once had definite news come to her of Valdana, and that was about
two months after she had settled in Jersey: a letter from his mother in
answer to one Val had written telling of the _rencontre_ in New York
came through the medium of Val's agent in London. Old Mrs. Valdana's
letter was dismal in tone and matter.
"Yes, Horace is indeed with us still, but not for long. Can you not be
kind to him, Val?" was the cry from her mother-heart; but the same
instinct in Val hardened her to the cry. She, too, was a mother, and in
most women the mother-love comes before wife-love and friend-love, and
even lover-love. Nature thus decrees it, that life may go unfalteringly
on. So Val could not be kind to Valdana because it meant being hurtful
to her son. Besides, what was the kindness asked? Of any affection for
her he was utterly devoid, he desired nothing but money, which she did
not possess. Her jewels were exhausted save a few rings, beautiful in