my story is of balham and of a family dwelling in balham who were more welsh than balhamitish. strangers to that neighbourhood who go up harrington road from the tram must often wonder why the second turning on the right is called abercorran street: the few who know abercorran town itself, the long grey and white street, with a castle at one end, low down by the river mouth, and an old church high up at the other, must be delighted by the memories thus recalled, but they also must wonder at the name. abercorran street is straight, flat, symmetrically lined on both sides by four-bedroomed houses in pairs, and it runs at right angles out of harrington road into another road which the pair of four-bedroomed houses visible at the corner proclaim to be[2] exactly like it. the only external variety in the street is created by the absence from two of the cast-iron gates of any notice prohibiting the entrance of hawkers and canvassers.
when i myself first saw the white lettering on a blue ground of abercorran street i was perhaps more surprised than most others have been who paid any attention to it. i was surprised but not puzzled. i knew very well why it was called abercorran street. for i knew abercorran house and the morgans, its inhabitants, and the dogs and the pigeons thereof. who that ever knew the house and the people could ever forget them? i knew the morgans, the father and mother, the five sons, the one daughter jessie. i knew the house down to the kitchen, because i knew old ann, the one permanent—i had almost written immortal—servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that they also rule who only serve and wait. i knew the breakfast room where breakfast was never finished; the dark library where they had all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns, traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books, pictures, pebbles from[3] a hundred beaches, and human bones. i knew the conservatory crowded with bicycles and what had been tricycles. i knew as well as any one the pigeon-houses, the one on a pole and the one which was originally a fowl-house, built with some idea or fancy regarding profit. i knew that well-worn square of blackened gravel at the foot of the back steps, where everybody had to pass to go to the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, and the wild garden beyond, and where the sun was always shining on men and children and dogs. this square was railed off from the rest of the garden. that also i knew, its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the garden of abercorran house and called by us the wilderness—a name now immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one beyond abercorran street. under the trees lay a pond containing golden water-lilies and carp. a pond needs nothing else except boys like us to make the best of it. yet we never could fish in it again after the strange girl was drawn out of it dead one morning: nobody knew who she was or why she[4] had climbed over into the wilderness to drown herself; yet ann seemed to know, and so perhaps did the tall roland, but both of them could lock up anything they wished to keep secret and throw away the key. i knew the elms and the one oak of the wilderness as well as the jackdaws did. for i knew them night and day, and the birds knew nothing of them between half-past five on an october evening and half-past five the next morning.
to-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably not distinguish abercorran street and wilderness street from ordinary streets. for the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the jackdaws. the lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is no pond. i can understand people cutting down trees—it is a trade and brings profit—but not draining a pond in such a garden as the wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well have been anywhere else or nowhere at all. i think no. 23 wilderness street probably has the honour and misfortune to stand in the pond’s place, but they call it lyndhurst. ann shares my opinion, and she herself is now[5] living in the house behind, no. 21 abercorran street.
ann likes the new houses as well as the old elm-trees, and the hundreds of men, women, and children as well as the jackdaws—which is saying a good deal; for she loved both trees and birds, and i have heard her assert that the birds frequently talked in welsh as the jackdaws used to do at the castle of abercorran; but when i asked her why she thought so and what they said, she grew touchy and said: “well, they did not speak english, whatever, and if it was welsh, as i think, you cannot expect me to pervert welsh into english, for i am no scholar.” she is keeping house now for the gentleman at 21 abercorran street, a mr henry jones. she would probably have been satisfied with him in any case, since he is the means by which ann remains alive, free to think her own thoughts and to bake her own bread; to drink tea for breakfast, tea for dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea in between; to eat also at long intervals a quart of cockles from abercorran shore, and a baked apple dumpling to follow; and at night to read the welsh bible and a guide to the antiquities of abercorran. but ann is more than satisfied because mr jones is welsh.[6] she admits his claim in spite of her unconcealed opinion that his dolgelly welsh, of which she can hardly understand a word, she says, is not welsh at all. of his speech as of the jackdaws she can retort: “he does not speak english, whatever.”
ann will never leave him unless he or she should die. she is untidy; she has never decided what is truth; and she has her own affairs as well as his to manage; but, as he says himself, he has entertained an angel unawares and she is not to be thrust out. he covers his inability to command her by asking what she could do at her age if she had to leave. it is not likely that mr henry jones could get the better of a woman whom—in spite of the fact that she has never decided what is truth—he has called an angel. for he did not use the word as a mere compliment, as much as to say that she was all that a woman should be when she is in domestic service. she is not; she is excellent only at pastry, which mr jones believes that he ought never to touch. he has been heard to call her “half angel and half bird”; but neither does this furnish the real explanation, though it offers an obvious one. for ann is now—i mean that when we were children she seemed as old[7] as she seems now; she limps too; and yet it might partly be her limp that made mr jones call her “half bird,” for it is brisk and quite unashamed, almost a pretty limp; also she is pale with a shining paleness, and often she is all eyes, because her eyes are large and round and dark, looking always up at you and always a little sidelong—but that alone would not justify a sensible man in calling her “half angel.” nor would her voice, which has a remarkable unexpectedness, wherever and whenever it is heard. she begins abruptly in the middle of a thought without a word or gesture of preparation, and always on an unexpectedly high note. in this she is like the robin, who often rehearses the first half of his song in silence and then suddenly continues aloud, as if he were beginning in mid-song. well, mr henry jones, as i have said, once called her “half angel and half bird,” and declared that he had entertained an angel unawares in ann, and i believe that he is right and more than a sensible man. for he has grasped the prime fact that she is not what she seems.
for my part i can say that she is such a woman that her name, ann lewis, has for those who connect it with her, and with her alone, out[8] of all the inhabitants of earth, a curious lightness, something at once pretty and old with an elfish oldness, something gay and a little weird, also a bird-like delicacy, as delicate as “linnet” and “martin.” if these words are useless, remember at least that, though half bird, she is not a mere human travesty or hint of a winged thing, and that she is totally unlike any other bird, and probably unlike any other angel.
an ordinary bird certainly—and an ordinary angel probably—would have pined away at 21 abercorran street after having lived at abercorran house and at abercorran itself. but ann is just the same as when i last saw her in abercorran house. she alone that day was unchanged. the house, the wilderness, the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, all were changed; i was changed, but not ann. yet the family had then newly gone, leaving her alone in the house. it was some years since i had been there. they had been going on as ever in that idle, careless, busy life which required a big country house and an illimitable playground of moor and mountain for a full and fitting display. gradually their friends grew up, went to a university, to business, or abroad, and acquired preferences which were not easily to be adapted to that sunny,[9] untidy house. at first these friends would be only too glad to go round to abercorran house of an evening after business, or a morning or two after the beginning of the vacation. perhaps they came again, and after a long interval yet again. they said it was different: but they were wrong; it was they themselves were different; the morgans never changed. in this way young men of the neighbourhood discovered that they were no longer boys. they could no longer put up with that careless hullabaloo of lazy, cheerful people, they took offence at the laziness, or else at the cheerfulness. also they saw that jessie, the girl, was as frank and untidy at seventeen as she had always been, and it took them aback, especially if they were wanting to make love to her. the thought of it made them feel foolish against their will. they fancied that she would laugh. yet it was easy to believe that jessie might die for love or for a lover. when somebody was pitying the girl who drowned herself in the wilderness pond, jessie interrupted: “she isn’t a poor girl; she is dead; it is you are poor; she has got what she wanted, and some of you don’t know what you want, and if you did you would be afraid of cold water.” the[10] young men could see the power of such words in jessie’s eye, and they did not make love to her. some took their revenge by calling her a slut, which was what ann used to call her when she was affectionate, as she could be to jessie only. “come on, there’s a slut,” she used to say. it was too familiar for the youths, but some of them would have liked to use it, because they felt that the phrase was somehow as amorous as it was curt, a sort of blow that was as fond as a kiss. even when, in their hard hats at the age of twenty or so, they used the term, in condemnation, they would still have given their hats for courage to speak it as ann did, and say: “come on, jessie, there’s a slut”; for they would have had to kiss her after the word, both because they could not help it, and for fear she should misunderstand its significance. at any rate, i believe that nobody but ann ever addressed that term of utmost endearment to jessie.
thus was there one reason the less for boys who were growing up, ceasing to tear the knees of their trousers and so on, to frequent abercorran house. i lingered on, but the death of one there had set me painfully free. after a time i used to go chiefly to honour an old[11] custom, which proved an inadequate motive. then year after year, of course, it was easier to put off revisiting, and one day when i went, only ann was left. she had her kitchen and her own room; the rest of the house had no visible inhabitants. yet ann would not have it that it was sad. “it does a house good,” she said, “to have all those morgans in it. now they have gone back again to abercorran in the county of caermarthen, and i am sure they are all happy but the mistress, and she was incurable; that was all; and there was an end of it at last.” ann herself was staying on as caretaker till abercorran house was let or sold.
