Malvina of Brittany

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This etext was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorest from the
1916 Cassell and Company edition.

MALVINA OF BRITTANY

Contents.

MALVINA OF BRITTANY.
The Preface.
I. The Story.
II. How it came about.
III. How cousin Christopher became mixed up with it.
IV. How it was kept from Mrs. Arlington.
V. How it was told to Mrs. Marigold.
VI. And how it was finished too soon.
The Prologue.
THE STREET OF THE BLANK WALL.
HIS EVENING OUT.
THE LESSON.
SYLVIA OF THE LETTERS.
THE FAWN GLOVES.

MALVINA OF BRITTANY.

THE PREFACE.

The Doctor never did believe this story, but claims for it that, to
a great extent, it has altered his whole outlook on life.

"Of course, what actually happened--what took place under my own
nose," continued the Doctor, "I do not dispute. And then there is
the case of Mrs. Marigold. That was unfortunate, I admit, and still
is, especially for Marigold. But, standing by itself, it proves
nothing. These fluffy, giggling women--as often as not it is a mere
shell that they shed with their first youth--one never knows what is
underneath. With regard to the others, the whole thing rests upon a
simple scientific basis. The idea was 'in the air,' as we say--a
passing brain-wave. And when it had worked itself out there was an
end of it. As for all this Jack-and-the-Beanstalk tomfoolery--"

There came from the darkening uplands the sound of a lost soul. It
rose and fell and died away.

"Blowing stones," explained the Doctor, stopping to refill his pipe.
"One finds them in these parts. Hollowed out during the glacial
period. Always just about twilight that one hears it. Rush of air
caused by sudden sinking of the temperature. That's how all these
sort of ideas get started."

The Doctor, having lit his pipe, resumed his stride.

"I don't say," continued the Doctor, "that it would have happened
without her coming. Undoubtedly it was she who supplied the
necessary psychic conditions. There was that about her--a sort of
atmosphere. That quaint archaic French of hers--King Arthur and the
round table and Merlin; it seemed to recreate it all. An artful
minx, that is the only explanation. But while she was looking at
you, out of that curious aloofness of hers--"

The Doctor left the sentence uncompleted.

"As for old Littlecherry," the Doctor began again quite suddenly,
"that's his speciality--folklore, occultism, all that flummery. If
you knocked at his door with the original Sleeping Beauty on your
arm he'd only fuss round her with cushions and hope that she'd had a
good night. Found a seed once--chipped it out of an old fossil, and
grew it in a pot in his study. About the most dilapidated weed you
ever saw. Talked about it as if he had re-discovered the Elixir of
Life. Even if he didn't say anything in actually so many words,
there was the way he went about. That of itself was enough to have
started the whole thing, to say nothing of that loony old Irish
housekeeper of his, with her head stuffed full of elves and banshees
and the Lord knows what."

Again the Doctor lapsed into silence. One by one the lights of the
village peeped upward out of the depths. A long, low line of light,
creeping like some luminous dragon across the horizon, showed the
track of the Great Western express moving stealthily towards
Swindon.

"It was altogether out of the common," continued the Doctor, "quite
out of the common, the whole thing. But if you are going to accept
old Littlecherry's explanation of it--"

The Doctor struck his foot against a long grey stone, half hidden in
the grass, and only just saved himself from falling.

"Remains of some old cromlech," explained the Doctor. "Somewhere
about here, if we were to dig down, we should find a withered bundle
of bones crouching over the dust of a prehistoric luncheon-basket.
Interesting neighbourhood!"

The descent was rough. The Doctor did not talk again until we had
reached the outskirts of the village.

"I wonder what's become of them?" mused the Doctor. "A rum go, the
whole thing. I should like to have got to the bottom of it."

We had reached the Doctor's gate. The Doctor pushed it open and
passed in. He seemed to have forgotten me.

"A taking little minx," I heard him muttering to himself as he
fumbled with the door. "And no doubt meant well. But as for that
cock-and-bull story--"

I pieced it together from the utterly divergent versions furnished
me by the Professor and the Doctor, assisted, so far as later
incidents are concerned, by knowledge common to the village.

I. THE STORY.

It commenced, so I calculate, about the year 2OOO B.C., or, to be
more precise--for figures are not the strong point of the old
chroniclers--when King Heremon ruled over Ireland and Harbundia was
Queen of the White Ladies of Brittany, the fairy Malvina being her
favourite attendant. It is with Malvina that this story is chiefly
concerned. Various quite pleasant happenings are recorded to her
credit. The White Ladies belonged to the "good people," and, on the
whole, lived up to their reputation. But in Malvina, side by side
with much that is commendable, there appears to have existed a most
reprehensible spirit of mischief, displaying itself in pranks that,
excusable, or at all events understandable, in, say, a pixy or a
pigwidgeon, strike one as altogether unworthy of a well-principled
White Lady, posing as the friend and benefactress of mankind. For
merely refusing to dance with her--at midnight, by the shores of a
mountain lake; neither the time nor the place calculated to appeal
to an elderly gentleman, suffering possibly from rheumatism--she on
one occasion transformed an eminently respectable proprietor of tin
mines into a nightingale, necessitating a change of habits that to a
business man must have been singularly irritating. On another
occasion a quite important queen, having had the misfortune to
quarrel with Malvina over some absurd point of etiquette in
connection with a lizard, seems, on waking the next morning, to have
found herself changed into what one judges, from the somewhat vague
description afforded by the ancient chroniclers, to have been a sort
of vegetable marrow.

Such changes, according to the Professor, who is prepared to
maintain that evidence of an historical nature exists sufficient to
prove that the White Ladies formed at one time an actual living
community, must be taken in an allegorical sense. Just as modern
lunatics believe themselves to be china vases or poll-parrots, and
think and behave as such, so it must have been easy, the Professor
argues, for beings of superior intelligence to have exerted hypnotic
influence upon the superstitious savages by whom they were
surrounded, and who, intellectually considered, could have been
little more than children.

"Take Nebuchadnezzar." I am still quoting the Professor. "Nowadays
we should put him into a strait-waistcoat. Had he lived in Northern
Europe instead of Southern Asia, legend would have told us how some
Kobold or Stromkarl had turned him into a composite amalgamation of
a serpent, a cat and a kangaroo." Be that as it may, this passion
for change--in other people--seems to have grown upon Malvina until
she must have become little short of a public nuisance, and
eventually it landed her in trouble.

The incident is unique in the annals of the White Ladies, and the
chroniclers dwell upon it with evident satisfaction. It came about
through the betrothal of King Heremon's only son, Prince Gerbot, to
the Princess Berchta of Normandy. Malvina seems to have said
nothing, but to have bided her time. The White Ladies of Brittany,
it must be remembered, were not fairies pure and simple. Under
certain conditions they were capable of becoming women, and this
fact, one takes it, must have exerted a disturbing influence upon
their relationships with eligible male mortals. Prince Gerbot may
not have been altogether blameless. Young men in those sadly
unenlightened days may not, in their dealings with ladies, white or
otherwise, have always been the soul of discretion and propriety.
One would like to think the best of her.

But even the best is indefensible. On the day appointed for the
wedding she seems to have surpassed herself. Into what particular
shape or form she altered the wretched Prince Gerbot; or into what
shape or form she persuaded him that he had been altered, it really,
so far as the moral responsibility of Malvina is concerned, seems to
be immaterial; the chronicle does not state: evidently something
too indelicate for a self-respecting chronicler to even hint at.
As, judging from other passages in the book, squeamishness does not
seem to have been the author's literary failing, the sensitive
reader can feel only grateful for the omission. It would have been
altogether too harrowing.

It had, of course, from Malvina's point of view, the desired effect.
The Princess Berchta appears to have given one look and then to have
fallen fainting into the arms of her attendants. The marriage was
postponed indefinitely, and Malvina, one sadly suspects, chortled.
Her triumph was short-lived.

Unfortunately for her, King Heremon had always been a patron of the
arts and science of his period. Among his friends were to be
reckoned magicians, genii, the Nine Korrigans or Fays of Brittany--
all sorts of parties capable of exerting influence, and, as events
proved, only too willing. Ambassadors waited upon Queen Harbundia;
and Harbundia, even had she wished, as on many previous occasions,
to stand by her favourite, had no alternative. The fairy Malvina
was called upon to return to Prince Gerbot his proper body and all
therein contained.

She flatly refused. A self-willed, obstinate fairy, suffering from
swelled head. And then there was that personal note. Merely that
he should marry the Princess Berchta! She would see King Heremon,
and Anniamus, in his silly old wizard's robe, and the Fays of
Brittany, and all the rest of them--! A really nice White Lady may
not have cared to finish the sentence, even to herself. One
imagines the flash of the fairy eye, the stamp of the fairy foot.
What could they do to her, any of them, with all their clacking of
tongues and their wagging of heads? She, an immortal fairy! She
would change Prince Gerbot back at a time of her own choosing. Let
them attend to their own tricks and leave her to mind hers. One
pictures long walks and talks between the distracted Harbundia and
her refractory favourite--appeals to reason, to sentiment: "For my
sake." "Don't you see?" "After all, dear, and even if he did."

It seems to have ended by Harbundia losing all patience. One thing
there was she could do that Malvina seems either not to have known
of or not to have anticipated. A solemn meeting of the White Ladies
was convened for the night of the midsummer moon. The place of
meeting is described by the ancient chroniclers with more than their
usual exactitude. It was on the land that the magician Kalyb had,
ages ago, raised up above all Brittany to form the grave of King
Taramis. The "Sea of the Seven Islands" lay to the north. One
guesses it to be the ridge formed by the Arree Mountains. "The Lady
of the Fountain" appears to have been present, suggesting the deep
green pool from which the river D'Argent takes its source. Roughly
speaking, one would place it halfway between the modern towns of
Morlaix and Callac. Pedestrians, even of the present day, speak of
the still loneliness of that high plateau, treeless, houseless, with
no sign of human hand there but that high, towering monolith round
which the shrill winds moan incessantly. There, possibly on some
broken fragment of those great grey stones, Queen Harbundia sat in
judgment. And the judgment was--and from it there was no appeal-
-that the fairy Malvina should be cast out from among the community
of the White Ladies of Brittany. Over the face of the earth she
should wander, alone and unforgiven. Solemnly from the book of the
roll-call of the White Ladies the name of Malvina was struck out for
ever.

The blow must have fallen upon Malvina as heavily as it was
unexpected. Without a word, without one backward look, she seems to
have departed. One pictures the white, frozen face, the wide-open,
unseeing eyes, the trembling, uncertain steps, the groping hands,
the deathlike silence clinging like grave-clothes round about her.

From that night the fairy Malvina disappears from the book of the
chroniclers of the White Ladies of Brittany, from legend and from
folklore whatsoever. She does not appear again in history till the
year A.D. 1914.

II. HOW IT CAME ABOUT.

It was on an evening towards the end of June, 1914, that Flight
Commander Raffleton, temporarily attached to the French Squadron
then harboured at Brest, received instructions by wireless to return
at once to the British Air Service Headquarters at Farnborough, in
Hampshire. The night, thanks to a glorious full moon, would afford
all the light he required, and young Raffleton determined to set out
at once. He appears to have left the flying ground just outside the
arsenal at Brest about nine o'clock. A little beyond Huelgoat he
began to experience trouble with the carburettor. His idea at first
was to push on to Lannion, where he would be able to secure expert
assistance; but matters only getting worse, and noticing beneath him
a convenient stretch of level ground, he decided to descend and
attend to it himself. He alighted without difficulty and proceeded
to investigate. The job took him, unaided, longer than he had
anticipated. It was a warm, close night, with hardly a breath of
wind, and when he had finished he was feeling hot and tired. He had
drawn on his helmet and was on the point of stepping into his seat,
when the beauty of the night suggested to him that it would be
pleasant, before starting off again, to stretch his legs and cool
himself a little. He lit a cigar and looked round about him.

The plateau on which he had alighted was a table-land standing high
above the surrounding country. It stretched around him, treeless,
houseless. There was nothing to break the lines of the horizon but
a group of gaunt grey stones, the remains, so he told himself, of
some ancient menhir, common enough to the lonely desert lands of
Brittany. In general the stones lie overthrown and scattered, but
this particular specimen had by some strange chance remained
undisturbed through all the centuries. Mildly interested, Flight
Commander Raffleton strolled leisurely towards it. The moon was at
its zenith. How still the quiet night must have been was impressed
upon him by the fact that he distinctly heard, and counted, the
strokes of a church clock which must have been at least six miles
away. He remembers looking at his watch and noting that there was a
slight difference between his own and the church time. He made it
eight minutes past twelve. With the dying away of the last
vibrations of the distant bell the silence and the solitude of the
place seemed to return and settle down upon it with increased
insistence. While he was working it had not troubled him, but
beside the black shadows thrown by those hoary stones it had the
effect almost of a presence. It was with a sense of relief that he
contemplated returning to his machine and starting up his engine.
It would whir and buzz and give back to him a comfortable feeling of
life and security. He would walk round the stones just once and
then be off. It was wonderful how they had defied old Time. As
they had been placed there, quite possibly ten thousand years ago,
so they still stood, the altar of that vast, empty sky-roofed
temple. And while he was gazing at them, his cigar between his
lips, struggling with a strange forgotten impulse that was tugging
at his knees, there came from the very heart of the great grey
stones the measured rise and fall of a soft, even breathing.

Young Raffleton frankly confesses that his first impulse was to cut
and run. Only his soldier's training kept his feet firm on the
heather. Of course, the explanation was simple. Some animal had
made the place its nest. But then what animal was ever known to
sleep so soundly as not to be disturbed by human footsteps? If
wounded, and so unable to escape, it would not be breathing with
that quiet, soft regularity, contrasting so strangely with the
stillness and the silence all round. Possibly an owl's nest. Young
owlets make that sort of noise--the "snorers," so country people
call them. Young Raffleton threw away his cigar and went down upon
his knees to grope among the shadows, and, doing so, he touched
something warm and soft and yielding.

But it wasn't an owl. He must have touched her very lightly, for
even then she did not wake. She lay there with her head upon her
arm. And now close to her, his eyes growing used to the shadows, he
saw her quite plainly, the wonder of the parted lips, the gleam of
the white limbs beneath their flimsy covering.

Of course, what he ought to have done was to have risen gently and
moved away. Then he could have coughed. And if that did not wake
her he might have touched her lightly, say, on the shoulder, and
have called to her, first softly, then a little louder,
"Mademoiselle," or "Mon enfant." Even better, he might have stolen
away on tiptoe and left her there sleeping.

This idea does not seem to have occurred to him. One makes the
excuse for him that he was but three-and-twenty, that, framed in the
purple moonlight, she seemed to him the most beautiful creature his
eyes had ever seen. And then there was the brooding mystery of it
all, that atmosphere of far-off primeval times from which the roots
of life still draw their sap. One takes it he forgot that he was
Flight Commander Raffleton, officer and gentleman; forgot the proper
etiquette applying to the case of ladies found sleeping upon lonely
moors without a chaperon. Greater still, the possibility that he
never thought of anything at all, but, just impelled by a power
beyond himself, bent down and kissed her.

Not a platonic kiss upon the brow, not a brotherly kiss upon the
cheek, but a kiss full upon the parted lips, a kiss of worship and
amazement, such as that with which Adam in all probability awakened
Eve.

Her eyes opened, and, just a little sleepily, she looked at him.
There could have been no doubt in her mind as to what had happened.
His lips were still pressing hers. But she did not seem in the
least surprised, and most certainly not angry. Raising herself to a
sitting posture, she smiled and held out her hand that he might help
her up. And, alone in that vast temple, star-roofed and moon-
illumined, beside that grim grey altar of forgotten rites, hand in
hand they stood and looked at one another.

"I beg your pardon," said Commander Raffleton. "I'm afraid I have
disturbed you."

He remembered afterwards that in his confusion he had spoken to her
in English. But she answered him in French, a quaint, old-fashioned
French such as one rarely finds but in the pages of old missals. He
would have had some difficulty in translating it literally, but the
meaning of it was, adapted to our modern idiom:

"Don't mention it. I'm so glad you've come."

He gathered she had been expecting him. He was not quite sure
whether he ought not to apologise for being apparently a little
late. True, he had no recollection of any such appointment. But
then at that particular moment Commander Raffleton may be said to
have had no consciousness of anything beyond just himself and the
wondrous other beside him. Somewhere outside was moonlight and a
world; but all that seemed unimportant. It was she who broke the
silence.

"How did you get here?" she asked.

He did not mean to be enigmatical. He was chiefly concerned with
still gazing at her.

"I flew here," he answered. Her eyes opened wider at that, but with
interest, not doubt.

"Where are your wings?" she asked. She was leaning sideways, trying
to get a view of his back.

He laughed. It made her seem more human, that curiosity about his
back.

"Over there," he answered. She looked, and for the first time saw
the great shimmering sails gleaming like silver under the moonlight.

She moved towards it, and he followed, noticing without surprise
that the heather seemed to make no sign of yielding to the pressure
of her white feet.

She halted a little away from it, and he came and stood beside her.
Even to Commander Raffleton himself it looked as if the great wings
were quivering, like the outstretched pinions of a bird preening
itself before flight.

"Is it alive?" she asked.

"Not till I whisper to it," he answered. He was losing a little of
his fear of her. She turned to him.

"Shall we go?" she asked.

He stared at her. She was quite serious, that was evident. She was
to put her hand in his and go away with him. It was all settled.
That is why he had come. To her it did not matter where. That was
his affair. But where he went she was to go. That was quite
clearly the programme in her mind.

To his credit, let it be recorded, he did make an effort. Against
all the forces of nature, against his twenty-three years and the red
blood pulsing in his veins, against the fumes of the midsummer
moonlight encompassing him and the voices of the stars, against the
demons of poetry and romance and mystery chanting their witches'
music in his ears, against the marvel and the glory of her as she
stood beside him, clothed in the purple of the night, Flight
Commander Raffleton fought the good fight for common sense.

Young persons who, scantily clad, go to sleep on the heather, five
miles from the nearest human habitation, are to be avoided by
well-brought-up young officers of His Majesty's Aerial Service. The
incidence of their being uncannily beautiful and alluring should
serve as an additional note of warning. The girl had had a row with
her mother and wanted to get away. It was this infernal moonlight
that was chiefly responsible. No wonder dogs bayed at it. He
almost fancied he could hear one now. Nice, respectable,
wholesome-minded things, dogs. No damned sentiment about them.
What if he had kissed her! One is not bound for life to every woman
one kisses. Not the first time she had been kissed, unless all the
young men in Brittany were blind or white blooded. All this
pretended innocence and simplicity! It was just put on. If not,
she must be a lunatic. The proper thing to do was to say good-bye
with a laugh and a jest, start up his machine and be off to
England--dear old practical, merry England, where he could get
breakfast and a bath.

It wasn't a fair fight; one feels it. Poor little prim Common
Sense, with her defiant, turned-up nose and her shrill giggle and
her innate vulgarity. And against her the stillness of the night,
and the music of the ages, and the beating of his heart.

So it all fell down about his feet, a little crumbled dust that a
passing breath of wind seemed to scatter, leaving him helpless,
spellbound by the magic of her eyes.

"Who are you?" he asked her.

"Malvina," she answered him. "I am a fairy."

III. HOW COUSIN CHRISTOPHER BECAME MIXED UP WITH IT.

It did just occur to him that maybe he had not made that descent
quite as successfully as he had thought he had; that maybe he had
come down on his head; that in consequence he had done with the
experiences of Flight Commander Raffleton and was now about to enter
on a new and less circumscribed existence. If so, the beginning, to
an adventuresome young spirit, seemed promising. It was Malvina's
voice that recalled him from this train of musing.

"Shall we go?" she repeated, and this time the note in her voice
suggested command rather than question.

Why not? Whatever had happened to him, at whatever plane of
existence he was now arrived, the machine apparently had followed
him. Mechanically he started it up. The familiar whir of the
engine brought back to him the possibility of his being alive in the
ordinary acceptation of the term. It also suggested to him the
practical advisability of insisting that Malvina should put on his
spare coat. Malvina being five feet three, and the coat having been
built for a man of six feet one, the effect under ordinary
circumstances would have been comic. What finally convinced
Commander Raffleton that Malvina really was a fairy was that, in
that coat, with the collar standing up some six inches above her
head, she looked more like one than ever.

Neither of them spoke. Somehow it did not seem to be needed. He
helped her to climb into her seat and tucked the coat about her
feet. She answered by the same smile with which she had first
stretched out her hand to him. It was just a smile of endless
content, as if all her troubles were now over. Commander Raffleton
sincerely hoped they were. A momentary flash of intelligence
suggested to him that his were just beginning.

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