Amy Foster

After Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay. The High Street of the little town stretches along the wall which defends it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there are miles of the barren beach, with the village of Brenzett standing across the water; and still further out the column of a lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a pencil, marks the end of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a big ship stops a mile and a half to the north from the “Ship Inn” in Brenzett.

If you walk from the Colebrook Church up the road, you will see a broad valley. In this valley with Brenzett, Colebrook and Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards was the companion of a famous traveler. His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice.

Many years ago, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily, and as he could not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds – thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached after the leafy branches, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy’s laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and a patience in listening to their tales.

One day, as we were leaving a large village, I saw on our left a low, black cottage, with some roses climbing on the porch. Kennedy pulled up. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. The doctor raised his voice over the hedge: “How’s your child, Amy?”

I had the time to see her dull face, red, as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, the squat figure, the thin brown hair drawn into a knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. Her voice sounded low and timid.

“He’s well, thank you.”

We trotted again. “A young patient of yours,” I said; and the doctor muttered, “Her husband used to be.”

“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked.

“Yes,” said Kennedy. “She is very passive. It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind – an inertness that is safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? She had enough imagination to fall in love. She’s the daughter of Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd. His misfortunes began from his runaway marriage with the cook of his father, who passionately struck his name off his will.”

Kennedy continued.

“She’s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a kind person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don’t know what made me notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness. When sharply spoken to, she was able to lose her head at once; but her heart was very kind. She had never expressed a dislike for anybody, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries, to Mrs. Smith’s gray parrot. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties. There is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt about it; for you need imagination to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

“How this ability came to her is a mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields and hills; at the trees and the hedges; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same – day after day, month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat with a black feather, climb over two hills, walk over three fields and along two hundred yards of road – never further. There stood Foster’s cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to want anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately – perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful charm…”

With the sun hanging low in the west, the men we met walked past slow and unsmiling.

“Yes,” said the doctor to my remark about them, “but here on this same road, among these heavy men you could see a light man with long legs and arms, straight like a pine, and vigorous as though the heart within him was beating faster than in others. Perhaps it was by the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, his feet did not seem to me to touch the road. I could notice him at a great distance. And he had lustrous black eyes. He was so different from the men around that, with his freedom of movement, his soft – a little startled – glance and his olive complexion. He came from there.”

The doctor pointed at the sea.

“Shipwrecked in the bay?” I said.

“Yes; he was a poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to America and washed ashore here in a storm. And as for him, England was an unknown country. It was some time before he learned its name. He climbed in the dark over the sea-wall, and struggled out into a field. Later on, in his broken English that was like the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world. And – he would add – how was he to know? He made his way against the rain and the wind on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep under the hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on this shore. It must have been two in the morning then. And this is all we know of his landing, though he did not arrive alone. Only his company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day…”

We trotted down the hill. Then turning into the High Street, we arrived home.

Late in the evening Kennedy returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he walked the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw the sea lying motionless under the moon.

“He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, later we discovered he did not even know that ships had names – ‘like Christian people’; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he saw the sea lying open before him, there was wild surprise in his eyes, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been brought together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of the Elbe, too bewildered to see his surroundings, too tired to see anything. They were driven below and shut up from the very start. It was a low wooden dwelling – he would say – with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very cold and damp, with places like wooden boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all the time. He got into one of these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before, keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and everything was shaken so that in his little box he did not dare lift his head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell – boom! boom! He was awfully sick, he even neglected his prayers. Besides, he could not tell whether it was morning or evening. It seemed always to be night in that place.

“Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the railway. He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand that he had seen a lot of people – whole nations – all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a house with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines rolled in at one end and out at the other. He could not give me an idea of how large and full of noise and smoke the place was, but someone had told him it was called Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land without a single hill anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable among a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they were all led down to the shores of a very broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed very big. There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it, only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through. He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand.

“They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water. This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America. He went up on his hands and knees fearing to fall into the water below. He got separated from his companion, and when he got into the bottom of that ship his heart sank.

“It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in his country. They would arrive on market days in a peasant’s cart, and would set up an office in an inn. There were three of them; and they had red collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials. They sat behind a long table; and in the next room, so that the common people shouldn’t hear, they kept a telegraph machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The young men of the mountains would come up to the table asking many questions, for there was work all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.

“But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the man in uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph for him. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, for he was young and strong. Besides, those only who had some money could be taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot of money to get to America; but you had three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father’s house was getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children. He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of mountain ponies, and a plot of good pasture land in order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.

“He must have been a real adventurer at heart! I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in two or three years, during which I often had an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me this story of his adventure with many smiles and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of baby-talk, then, as he learned the language, with great fluency. No doubt he must have been awfully sea-sick and awfully unhappy – this soft and passionate adventurer with a highly sensitive nature. Through the rumors of the countryside, which lasted for many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed by heavy knocks against the walls of cottages, and by a voice crying strange words in the night. Several of them looked out even, but, no doubt, he had fled hearing their angry voices speaking to each other in the darkness. It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning was seen lying on the roadside grass under the rain. Later in the day, some children came running into school at Norton in such a fear that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a ‘horrid-looking man’ on the road. He listened to her, hanging his head, and then suddenly ran off. The driver of Mr. Bradley’s milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gypsy fellow, right over the face, that made him drop down in the mud. Maybe that in his desperate attempts to get help, and in his need to get in touch with someone, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three boys said afterwards they had thrown stones at a funny tramp, all wet and muddy. All this was the talk of three villages for days. Mrs. Finn (the wife of Smith’s wagoner) said that she had seen run straight at her, talking aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fear. Having the baby with her, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as he came nearer, she hit him with her umbrella over the head and ran like the wind with the baby as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis; and the old man looked where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again in the direction of the New Barns Farm. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is certain now: Mrs. Smith’s terror; Amy Foster’s conviction that the man ‘meant no harm’; Smith’s (on his return from Darnford Market) finding the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics; and all for a dirty tramp, hiding in his stackyard. He would teach him to frighten women.

“Smith is hot-tempered, but the sight of a creature sitting among a lot of straw, and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud from head to foot. Smith, alone with this creature felt strange fear. When that creature parted with his black hands the long hair that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with wild, black-and-white eyes, he made more than one step backwards.

“As the creature approached him, making strange sounds, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as ‘gracious lord,’ and adjured in God’s name to afford food and shelter) kept on retreating all the time. At last, watching his chance, he pushed him into the wood-lodge, and shut him up there. He had done his duty by shutting up a dangerous maniac. Smith isn’t a hard man at all, but he had only one idea – this was a lunatic. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be suffering from cold and hunger. At first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the wood-lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster cried at the kitchen door, muttering, ‘Don’t! don’t!’ Smith had a hard time that evening with this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the door. He didn’t connect this lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumor in the Darnford market-place. And I believe the man inside was very near to insanity on that night.

“He was a mountaineer of the eastern Carpathians, and the ship sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea.

“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among peasants in the remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get the poor ignorant people’s money, and they were in league with some local people. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I watched her out of this very window, coming into the bay on a dark, windy afternoon. I remember before the night fell looking out again at her. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrible wind and the sounds of heavy rain.

“About that time the people saw the lights of a steamer in the bay. It is clear that another ship tried for find shelter in the bay on that awful night. It hit the German ship, and then went out, unknown and unseen. Of her nothing ever came to light.

“The wind, probably, prevented the loudest cries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for signals of trouble. The Hamburg ship, filling with water all at once, sank, and at daylight there nothing to be seen above water. She was missed, of course, and at first they thought that she had been blown out to sea during the night. By the afternoon, however, you could see along three miles of the beach dead bodies of men, women with hard faces, and children, mostly fair-haired. They were laid out under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.

“It is possible that the man (if he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) could be washed ashore on a piece of wood. I admit it is possible, but for days, no, for weeks – it didn’t enter our heads that we had among us the only living soul that had escaped from that accident. The man himself, even when he learned to speak English, could tell us very little. He remembered the darkness, the horrible wind, and the rain. This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn’t forget, that he had no idea of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could not understand what was happening to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered his misery, his astonishment that he was not understood, his indignation at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce. He approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for help. Smith’s behaviour struck him. The wood-lodge seemed a prison to him. What would be done to him next?… No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel. The girl was not able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she opened the door of the wood-lodge, she looked in and gave to him half a loaf of white bread – ‘such bread as the rich eat in my country,’ he said.

“At this he got up slowly from among all sorts of rubbish, hungry, trembling, miserable. ‘Can you eat this?’ she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a ‘gracious lady.’ He ate the bread, and tears were falling on it. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her hand and kissed it. She was not frightened. Through his awful condition she observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.

“That morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith’s nearest neighbor) came over and ended by carrying him off. He stood, meek, covered with dried mud, while the two men talked around him in an unknown language. Mrs. Smith had refused to come downstairs till the lunatic was off the farm; Amy Foster watched through the open back door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him. When Mr. Swaffer started the cart, the awful creature sitting by his side nearly fell out. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon the scene.

“I was called as I happened to be driving past. I got down, of course.

“‘I’ve got something here,’ Swaffer said, leading the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.

“It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room that was a coach-house. It was bare, with a small window at its further end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent all his strength in an attempt of cleaning himself. He was almost speechless; his quick breathing, his restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally asked some questions.

“‘Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,’ said the old man as if the other had been indeed a sort of wild animal. ‘That’s how I came by him. Now tell me, doctor – you’ve been all over the world – don’t you think that he’s a Hindoo.’

“I was greatly surprised. His long black hair contrasted with the olive complexion of his face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque. It didn’t mean that he understood Spanish; but I said a few words I know, and also some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, frightened by the passionate speech he made. They admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical – but so unlike anything one had ever heard. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.

“He simply kept him.

“Swaffer would be called eccentric if he were not so much respected. They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o’clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a check for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep, and has a lot of cattle. He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather. He can drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody’s garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by someone. He loves to hear of or to be shown something that he calls ‘outlandish.’ Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I saw Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden. They had found out he could dig very well.

“His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the old cotton shirt; but he wore still the national brown trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights. And he had never yet gone into the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him well kept, like the grounds round a landowner’s house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; and the appearance of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of wealth. He wondered what made them and their children so hardhearted. He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and made the sign of the cross before he began. Kneeling at the end of the day, he recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer before he slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house for her father – a broad-shouldered, big woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys. She wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed in black, in memory of a boy to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago – a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She spoke very seldom.

“These were the people who gave him food and shelter. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these were the faces of people from the other world – dead people – he used to tell me years afterwards. I wonder he did not go mad. He didn’t know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains – somewhere over the water. Was this America, he wondered?

“If it hadn’t been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer’s waist he would not, he said, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all. There was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water were different. The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees except the three old Norway pines before Swaffer’s house, and these reminded him of his country. He was seen once with his head against one of them, crying, and talking to himself. They were like brothers to him at that time, he said. Everything else was strange. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only kind face among all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, as the faces of the dead.

“He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the cattle, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he rescued from death a grand-child of old Swaffer.

“Swaffer’s younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor in Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white dress, and fell into the pond in the yard.

“Our man was out with the wagoner and the plough in the field nearest to the house, and he saw something white in the pond. But he had quick, far-reaching eyes. Leaving the horses, he ran over the ploughed ground, and suddenly appeared before the mother, put the child into her arms, and ran away.

“The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have been drowned in the foot or so of mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black, would come and stand in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he started his meal. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him regular wages.

“I can’t follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like any other man. Children no longer shouted after him. He learned of social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn’t understand why they were kept shut up on week days. Was it to keep people from praying too often? He did not, however, give up his habit of crossing himself, and he was still heard every evening reciting the Lord’s Prayer, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life. At last people became used to see him. But they never became used to him, his rapid walk; his swarthy complexion; his habit, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder. They wouldn’t in their dinner hour lie on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields singing loudly foreign tunes. Ah! He was different: full of good will, which nobody wanted, like a man transplanted into another planet. One evening, in the Coach and Horses (having drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They told him to shut up, for they wanted to drink their evening beer in peace. He was pained. On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The landlord interfered. He didn’t want any ‘acrobat tricks in the room.’ They laid their hands on him and he got a black eye.

“I believe he felt the hostility of the local people. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready for anybody to pick it up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when they had sold a cow, two ponies, and a plot of land to pay for his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and he would throw himself face down on the grass. But he found his bit of true gold. That was Amy Foster’s heart; which was ‘a golden heart, and soft to people’s misery,’ he would say with conviction.

“He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his surname. And this is the only trace of him in the marriage register of our church. There it stands – Yanko Goorall – in the rector’s handwriting.

“His courtship had lasted some time. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You bought a ribbon for a girl. I don’t suppose the girl knew what to do with it, but he showed her his serious intentions.

“When he declared he wanted to get married, everyone was up against him. Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised to break his head if he found him near his place. He also told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him whistling from beyond the garden, she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence, and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a fool. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she were deaf. Only she and I, I believe, could see his real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful like a wild creature from the woods. Her mother moaned over her whenever the girl came to see her on her day off. The father was angry; and Mrs. Finn once told her that ‘this man, my dear, will do you some harm some day yet.’ And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she walked in a gray dress, black feather, stout boots, white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat over one shoulder, walking by her side, looking tenderly at the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among women so different from what he had ever seen, he was not able to judge; or perhaps he was attracted by her pity.

“Yanko was in great trouble now. He did not know how to propose marriage. However, one day in the middle of sheep in a field he took off his hat to the father and declared his intentions. ‘She’s fool enough to marry you,’ was all Foster said. And then, he put his hat on his head, looked black at him as if he wanted to cut his throat, and off he went. The Fosters, of course, didn’t like to lose the girl’s wages: Amy gave all her money to her mother. But Foster did not like the idea of this marriage in general. He said that the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry, for he used to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a fool; and then, perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere – or run off himself. It was not safe. He said so to his daughter. She made no answer. People discussed the matter. It was quite an excitement, and the two went on ‘walking out’ together. Then something unexpected happened.

“I don’t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was seen as a father by his foreign worker. So when Yanko asked formally for an interview – ‘and the Miss too’ (he called Miss Swaffer simply Miss) – it was to get their permission to marry. Swaffer heard him in silence. Miss Swaffer showed no surprise, and only remarked, ‘He certainly won’t get any other girl to marry him.’

“In a few days it became known that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a cottage (the cottage you’ve seen this morning) and an acre of ground – had given it over to him in absolute property. In the document it was written: ‘In consideration of saving the life of my grandchild, Bertha Willcox.’

“Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting married.

“Her passion still grew. People saw her going out to meet him in the evening. She stared up the road where he was expected to appear, walking freely, and singing one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he got drunk at the ‘Coach and Horses,’ sang and danced, and was again thrown out. People expressed their sympathy for a woman married to that fool. He didn’t care. There was a man now (he told me) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.

“But I don’t know. One day I met him. He told me that ‘women were funny.’ I had heard already of domestic differences. People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what sort of man she had married. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat singing to him a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing the baby some harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child – in his own country. And I discovered he wanted their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, and so strange. Why his wife disliked the idea he couldn’t tell. But that would pass, he said. She was not hard, not fierce, open to other people!

“I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his strangeness were not becoming hateful to the dull nature of his wife. I wondered…”

The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the sea.

“It was possible,” he said, turning away, “it was possible.”

He remained silent. Then went on –

“The next time I saw him he was ill – lung trouble. He was strong, but he was not acclimatized as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountaineers have home sickness; and depression might make him weaker. He was lying half dressed on a couch downstairs. A table took up all the middle of the room. There was a cradle on the floor. The room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.

“He had a fever, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him across the table with her brown eyes. ‘Why don’t you have him upstairs?’ I asked. She said, ‘Oh! ah! I couldn’t sit with him upstairs, Sir.’

“I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that he ought to be in bed upstairs. ‘Oh no, no. He keeps on saying something – I don’t know what.’ With the memory of all the talk against the man that had been put into her ears, I looked at her closely. I looked into her short-sighted eyes, that once in her life had seen something that attracted her, but seemed to see nothing at all now. I saw she was uneasy.

“‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t look very ill. I’ve never seen anybody look like this before…’

“‘Do you think,’ I asked indignantly, ‘he is pretending?’

“‘I can’t help it, sir,’ she said. And suddenly she looked right and left. ‘And there’s the baby. I am so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can’t understand what he says to him.’

“‘Can’t you ask a neighbor to come in tonight?’ I asked.

“‘Please, sir, nobody will agree to come,’ she muttered.

“I told her the greatest care was necessary, and then had to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. ‘Oh, I hope he won’t talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.

“I don’t know how it is I did not see – but I didn’t.

“Towards the night his fever increased.

“He tossed and moaned. And she sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she could not understand. She had drawn the cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct and that unreasonable fear.

“Suddenly coming to himself he demanded a drink of water. She did not move. She did not understand, though he may have thought he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently, ‘Water! Give me water!’

“She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He spoke to her, and his passionate speech only increased her fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time. She says she bore it as long as she could. And then rage came over him.

“He sat up and called out terribly one word – some word. Then he got up as though he hadn’t been ill at all, she says. And as in indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice – and fled… Ah! She ran on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster’s cottage!

“And it was I who found him lying face down and his body near the little gate.

“I had been called out that night to a patient in the village, and saw him on my way home by the cottage. The door stood open. My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The fire was out. ‘Amy!’ I called aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this small house as if I had cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. ‘Gone!’ he said. ‘I had only asked for water – only for a little water…’

“He was muddy. I covered him with a blanket and stood waiting in silence, catching a word now and then. They were no longer in his own language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. She had left him – sick – helpless – thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried in the indignant voice of a man calling to the Maker.

“And as I turned away to shut the door he said the word ‘Merciful!’ and died.

“I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death. His heart must have indeed failed him, too. I closed his eyes and drove away. Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking with his dog.

“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.

“‘Don’t I!’ he cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.’

“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’

“‘It is for the best.’

“That’s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as gone from her mind as his figure, his singing voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’ She calls him Johnny – which means Little John.

“It is impossible to say whether this name means anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her standing near the boy’s bed in a passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, like a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one – the father, washed out mysteriously by the sea to die in loneliness and despair.”