The Happy Isles

Title: The Happy Isles

Author: Basil King

Illustrator: John Alonzo Williams

Release date: February 8, 2020 [eBook #61344] Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61344

Credits: E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happy Isles, by Basil King

THE HAPPY ISLES

BOOKS BY BASIL KING

The Happy Isles The Dust Flower The Thread of Flame The City of Comrades Abraham's Bosom The Empty Sack Going West The Side of the Angels

Harper & Brothers Publishers

"THEY'LL SAY I STOLE HIM. IT'LL BE TWENTY YEARS FOR ME"

THE HAPPY ISLES

By BASIL KING

Author of

"THE EMPTY SACK," "THE INNER SHRINE," "THE DUST FLOWER," ETC.

With Illustrations by

JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS

Publishers

Harper & Brothers

New York and London

MCMXXIII

THE HAPPY ISLES

Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition

K-X

ILLUSTRATIONS

They'll Say I Stole Him. It'll Be Twenty Years for Me That's a Terr'ble Big Wad for a Boy Like You to Wear" Get Up, I Tell You Mrs. Ansley Took Him as an Affliction

The Happy Isles

Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on, Day and night, and night and day.... —Shelley.

I

At eight months of age his only experience of life had been one of well-being. [Pg 1]He was fed when hungry; he slept when sleepy; he woke when he had slept enough. When bored or annoyed or uneasy he could cry. If crying brought him attentions it was that much to the good; if the effort was thrown away it did no one any harm. Even when least fertile of results it was a change from the crowing and gurgling which were all he had to distract him when left to his own company.

Though his mind worked in co-operation with the subconscious more than with the conscious, it worked actively. In waking minutes there was everything to observe and register.

His intimate needs being met, there were the phenomena of light and darkness. He knew not only the difference between them, but in a general way when to expect the turn of each. He knew that light brought certain formalities, chiefly connected with his[Pg 2] person, and that darkness brought certain others. The reasons remained obscure, but the variety was pleasing.

Then there was the room, or rather the spectacular surroundings of his universe. The nursery was his earth, his atmosphere, his firmament, the ether in which his heavenly bodies went rolling away into the infinite. And, just as with grown-up people, the nearness and distance of Mars or Sirius or Betelgueuse have gone through experimental stages of guesswork first and calculation afterwards, so the exact location of the wardrobe, the table, or the mantelpiece, was a subject for endless wonderment. At times they were apparently so close that he would put out his hand to touch them from his crib; but at once they receded, fixing themselves against the light-blue walls, home of a menagerie of birds and animals, with something between him and them which he was learning to recognize as space.

There was also motion. Certain things remained in place; other things could move. He himself could move, but that was so near the fundamental necessities as hardly to call for notice. True, there were discoveries even here. The day when he learned that once his legs were freed he could lie on his back and kick was one of emancipation. In finding that he could catch his foot with his hands and put it in his mouth he made his first advance in skill. But there was motion superior to this. There were beings who walked about the room, who entered it and left it. Merely to watch their goings and comings sent spasms through his feet.

[Pg 3]

Little by little he had come to discern in these creatures a difference in function and personality. Enormous in size, irresistible in strength, they were nevertheless his satellites. One of them supplied his wants; another worshipped him; the third lifted him up, carried him about, tickled him deliciously with his mustache or his bushy outstanding eyebrows, and otherwise entertained him. For the first his tongue essayed the syllables, Na-Na; for the second his lips rose and fell with an explosive Ma-Ma; the last sent his tongue clicking toward the roof of his mouth in the harsher sound of Da-Da; and yet between these efforts and the accomplishment there was still some lack of correspondence.

Of his many enthralling interests speech was the most magical. In his analysis of life it came to him early that these coughings and barkings and gruntings were meant to express thought. He himself had thoughts. What he lacked was the connection of the sounds with the ideas, and of this he was not unaware. They supposed him a little animal who could only eat and sleep, when all the while he was listening, recording, distinguishing, defining, correlating the syllable with the thing that was evidently meant, so that later he should astonish his circle by uttering a word. It was a stimulating game and in it his daily progress was not far short of marvelous.

If the nursery was his universe, his crib was his private domain, cushioned and soft, and as spotless as an ermine's nest. It was a joy to wake up in it, and equally a joy to go to sleep. Joy, Tenderness, and Comfort, were the only elements in life with[Pg 4] which he was acquainted. Thriving on them as he throve on the carefully prepared formulas of his food, he grew in the spirit without obstacles to struggle with, as his body grew in the sunlight and the air.

By the time he had reached the May morning on which his story begins he had come to take Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, as life's essentials. Never having known anything else, he had no suspicion that anything else would lurk within the possible. The ritual that attended his going out was as much a matter of course to him as a red carpet to tread on is to a queen. He took it for granted that, when he had been renewed by bottle and bath, she for whom he tried to say Na-Na would be in a flutter of preparation, while she whose sweet smile forced the Ma-Ma to his lips would put a little coat on his back, a little cap on his head, little mittens on his hands, and smother him with adoration all the time she was doing it.

On this particular morning these things had been done. Nestled into a canopied crib on wheels, he was ready for the two gigantic ministrants whom he could not yet distinguish as the first and second footmen. These colossi lifted his vehicle down the steps, to set it on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, where for the time being dramatic episodes were at an end. The town didn't interest him. Moreover, a filmy curtain, to protect him against flies as well as against too much sun, having shut him in from the vastness of the scene, he had nothing to do but let himself be lulled to his customary slumber.

[Pg 5]

II

Miss Nash, the baby carriage in front of her, furrowed a way through the traffic of the avenue, relatively scant in those days, and reaching the safety of the other side passed within the Park. She was a trained child's-nurse, and wore a uniform. England being at that time the only source of this specialty, examples in New York were limited to the heirs-apparent of the noble families. Between a nursemaid and a trained child's-nurse you will notice the same distinction as between a lady's maid and a princess's lady-in-waiting.

Having entered the Park, Miss Nash stopped the carriage to lift the veil protecting her charge. He was already beyond the noises and distractions of the planet in his rosy, heavenly sleep. Miss Nash smiled wistfully, because it was the only way in which she could smile at all. A superior woman by nature, she clung to that refinement which best expresses itself in something melancholic. Daughter of a solicitor's clerk and niece to a curate, she felt her status as a lady most fittingly preserved in an atmosphere delicate, subdued, and rather sad.

And yet when she looked on her little boy asleep she was no longer superior, and scarcely so much as a lady. She was only a woman enraptured before[Pg 6] one of those babies so compact of sweetness, affection, and intelligence that they tug at the heartstrings. She was on her guard as to loving her children overmuch, since it made it so hard to give them up when the minute for doing so arrived; but with this little fellow no guard had been effective. Whether he crowed, or cried, or kicked, or snuggled in her arms to croon with her in baby tunelessness, she found him adorable. But when he was asleep, chubby, seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels.

"No," she confessed one day to her friend, Miss Etta Messenger, the only other uniformed child's nurse among her acquaintance in New York, "it won't do. I must break myself. I shall have to leave him some day. But I do envy the mother who will have him always."

"It don't pay you," Miss Messenger declared, as one who has had experience. "Anyone, I always say, can hire my services; but my affections remain my own. Now this little girl I'm with while I'm in New York, I could leave her to-morrow without a pang if—but then I've got something to leave her for."

"And what does he say to things now?" Miss Nash inquired, with selfless interest in her friend's drama.

Miss Messenger answered, judicially, "I've put it to him straight. I've told him he must simply fix a date to marry me, or give me up. As I know he simply won't give me up—you never knew a fellow so wild about a girl as he is about me...."

[Pg 7]

The fortnight which had intervened between that conversation and the morning when our little boy's story opens had given time for Miss Messenger's affairs to take another turn. In the hope of learning the details of this turn Miss Nash sought a corner of the Park, not much frequented by nursemaids, where she and Miss Messenger often met, but Etta was not there. Drawing the carriage within the shade of a miniature grove of lilacs in perfumed flower, Miss Nash once more lifted the veil, wiped the precious mouth, and adjusted the coverlet outside which lay the mittened baby hands. Since there was no more to be done, she sat down on a convenient bench to her reading of Juliet Allingham's Sin.

In the scene where the lover drowns she became so absorbed as not to notice that on a bench on the other side of a lilac bush Miss Messenger came and installed herself and her baby carriage in the shade of a near-by fan-shaped elm, bronze-green in its young leafage. Miss Nash looked up only when, her emotions having grown so poignant, she could read no more. She was drying her eyes when, through the branches of the lilac, the flutter of a nurse's cape told her that her friend must have arrived.

"Why, Etta!"

On going round the barrier she found herself greeted by what she had come to call Etta's fighting eyes. They were fine flashing black eyes, set in a face which Miss Nash was further accustomed to describe as "high-complexioned." Miss Messenger spoke listlessly, and yet as one who knew her mind.

[Pg 8]

"I saw you. I thought I wouldn't interrupt. I haven't very good news."

Miss Nash glided to a seat beside her friend, seizing both her hands. "Oh, my dear, he hasn't——?"

"That's just what he has." Etta nodded, drily. "Bring your baby round here and I'll tell you."

But Miss Nash couldn't wait. "He's all right there. He's sound asleep. I'll hear him if he stirs. Do tell me what's happened."

"Well, he simply says that if that's the way I feel perhaps we'd better call it off."

"And are you going to?"

Etta's eyes blazed with their black flames. "Call it off? Me? Not much, I won't."

"Still if he won't fix a date...."

"He'll jolly well fix a date—or meet me in the court."

"Oh, but, Etta, you wouldn't...."

"I don't say I would for choice. There are two or three other things I could do, and I think I'll try them first."

"What sort of things?"

In the answer to that question Miss Nash was even more absorbed than in Juliet Allingham's sin. Juliet Allingham was after all but a creature of the brain; whereas Etta Messenger's adventures might conceivably be her own. It was not merely some one else's love story that held her imagination in thrall; it was the possibility that one of these days she, Milly Nash, might have a man playing fast and loose with her heart's purest offering....

[Pg 9]

III

Anyone closely watching the strange woman would have said that her first care was not to seem distraught; but then, no one was closely watching her. On a rapturous May morning, with the lilac scenting the air, and the tulip beds in only the passing of their glory, there were so many things better worth doing than observing a respectably dressed young woman, probably the wife of an artisan, that she went unobserved. As there were at that very minute some two or three hundred more or less like her also pushing babies in the Park, the eye that singled her out for attention would have had more than the gift of sight.

What she did that was noticeable—again had there been anyone to notice her—was to approach first one little group and then another, quickly sheering away. One would have said that she sheered away from some queer motive of strategy. Her movements might have been called erratic, not because they were aimless, but because she didn't know or didn't find the object of her search. Even if that were so, she neither advanced nor receded, nor drifted hither or yon, more like a lost thing than many another nursemaid giving her charge the air or killing time.

There was nothing sinister about her, unless it was[Pg 10] sinister to have moments of seeming dazed or of muttering to herself. She muttered to herself only when sure that there was no one to overhear, and with similar self-command she indulged in looking dazed only when she knew that no eye could light on her. As if aware of abnormality, she schooled herself to a semblance of sanity. Otherwise she was some thirty years of age, neatly if cheaply clad, and too commonplace and unimportant for the most observant to remember her a second after she had passed.

At sight of a little hooded vehicle, standing unguarded where the lilac bushes made a shrine for it, she paused. Again, the pause was natural. She might have been tired. Pushing a baby carriage in a park is always futile work, with futile starts and stops and turnings in this direction or in that. If she stood to reconnoiter or to make her plans there was no power in the land to interfere with her.

Her further methods were simple. Behind the bench on which Miss Nash and Miss Messenger were by this time entering on an orgy of romantic confidence there rose a gentle eminence. To the top of this hill the strange woman made her way. She made it with precautions, sauntering, dawdling, simulating all the movements of the perfect nurse. When two women, wheeling young laddies strapped into go-carts, crossed her path she walked slowly till they were out of sight. When a park attendant with a lawnmower clicked his machine along to cut a distant portion of the greensward, she waited till he too had disappeared. A few pedestrians were scattered[Pg 11] here and there, but so distant as not to count. A few riders galloped up or down the bridle-path near Fifth Avenue, but these too she could disregard. Except for Miss Nash and Miss Messenger, turned towards each other, and with their backs to her, she had the world to herself. Softly she crept down the hill; softly she stole in among the lilacs.

"My little Gracie! my little Gracie!" she kept muttering, but only between closed lips. "My little Gracie!"

"Oh, don't think, Milly," Miss Messenger was saying, "that I shan't give him the chance to come across honorable. I shall. You say that an action for breach doesn't seem to you delicate, and I don't say but what I shrink from it. But when you've a trunkful of letters simply burning with passion, simply burning with it, what good are they to you if you don't?... And he's worth fifty thousand dollars if he's worth a penny. Don't talk to me! A fishmonger, right in the heart of East Eighty-eighth Street, the very best district.... If I sue for twenty-five thousand dollars I'd be pretty sure of getting five ... and with a sympathetic jury, possibly six or eight ... and with all that money I could set up a little nursing home in London ... say in the Portland Place neighborhood ... with a specialty in children's diseases ... and put you in charge of it as matron. You and me together...."

"Oh, but, Etta, I couldn't leave my little boy, not till he's able to do without me. By that time there may be other children for me to take care of, so that[Pg 12] I could keep near him. I've thought of that. He being the first, and his father and mother such a fine healthy young couple, with everything to support a big family...."

During the minutes which marked his transfer from one destiny to another, Miss Nash's little boy remained in the sweet, blest country to which little babies go in dreams. When a swift hand raised the veil, lifting him with deft gentleness, he knew nothing of what was happening. While the cap was peeled from his head and pulled over that of a big, featureless rag doll shaped to the outlines of a baby's limbs, he was still on the lap of Miss Nash's angels. On the lap of these angels he stayed during the rest of the exchange. The strange woman's hand was tender. Lightly it drew over the little boy's head the soiled, cheap bonnet worn by the big rag doll; lightly it laid the little warm body into its new bed. Where he had nestled the big rag doll with his cap on its head gave a fair imitation of his form, unless inspected closely. By the time the veils were lowered on the two little carriages there was nothing for the most suspicious eye to wonder at. A respectable woman of the humbler classes was trundling her baby back to its home. The infant rested quietly.

The rag doll, too, rested quietly when Miss Nash returned to her charge, as Miss Messenger to hers. Miss Nash had heard so much within an hour that she was not quite mistress of herself. Nothing was so rare with her as to neglect the due examination of her child, but this time she neglected it. Etta had given her so much to think of that for the minute her[Pg 13] mind was over-taxed. Because the love theme had become involved with the compelling dictates of self-interest, which even a sweet creature like Miss Nash couldn't overlook, she laid her hands absently on the push-bar, beginning to make her way homeward. There was no question as to Etta's worldly wisdom. The choice lay between worldly wisdom and the warm, glowing, human thing we call affection. In Milly Nash's experience it was the first time such a choice had been put up to her.

"Don't talk to me!" Miss Etta pursued, as they sauntered along side by side. "I simply love my children up to every penny I'm paid for it, not a farthing more; and if you'll take my advice, Milly Nash, you'll follow my example."

Miss Nash felt humble, rebuked. Through fear of disturbing her little boy, she pushed as gently as a zephyr blows.

"I'm not sure that I could measure it out, not with this little fellow."

"This little fellow, fiddlesticks! He's just like any other little fellow."

"Oh, no, he isn't. There's character in babies just as there is in grown-up people. This child's got it strong, all sweetness and loveliness, and so much sense—you'd never believe it! Why, he knows—there's nothing that he doesn't know, in his own dear little way. I tell you, Etta, that if you had him you'd feel just like me."