weavings. 116

The First Lesson

In the Border Country

THE HUT IN THE WOOD

The woman who told me this, and other strange tales which I may one day
try to put together, had no gift of writing, but only a pathetic regard
for those who had. I say pathetic, because to me her extraordinary
experiences so far outvalue the tinkling art of recording them as to
make her simple admiration for the artist little short of absurd. She
had herself a pretty talent for painting, of which I knew her to have
made much in the years before we met. It was, indeed, because I
remembered what hopes she had encouraged in her teachers in this and
older countries, and how eagerly she had laboured at her craft, finding
no trick of technique too slight, no repetition too arduous, no
sacrifice too great, if only they might justify their faith in her,
that I asked her one day, when I had come to know her well, why it was
that she had stopped so suddenly in the work that many of us had learned
to know before we knew her. For now she paints only quaint toys for her
many lovely children, or designs beautiful gardens for her husband,
himself an able artist and her first teacher, or works at the wonderful
robes in which he paints her, burning in the autumn woods or mist-like
through spring boughs.

We sat, that morning, I remember, on the edge of the wood that finishes
their wide estate among the hills, looking down its green mazy aisles,
listening to the droning of the June air, lapped in the delicious peace
of early summer. "Why did you?" I asked, "what happened?"

She gave me a long look.

"I have often thought I would tell you," she said, "for you can tell the
others. When I hear this warm, droning noise, this time of the year, it
always reminds me----"

She looked at me, but I knew that she saw something or someone else.
After a long pause her lips began to form a word, when suddenly she drew
a short, frightened breath.

"What--do you smell it, too? Am I going away again--_what_ is that
odour?"

I sniffed the air. A dull, sweet taste flavoured it, unpleasant, vaguely
terrifying. I looked about carefully and caught sight of a wide-mouthed
bottle lying on its side, the cork half loosened. A brown moth fluttered
feebly in the bottle.

"It is only chloroform," I assured her, remembering that the two oldest
children were collecting butterflies, and I tightened the cork.

"Oh, yes," she said, a d