The White People | Page 6

watched, and out of the water and out of the wood
came two wonderful white people, and they began to play and dance
and sing. They were a kind of creamy white like the old ivory figure in
the drawing-room; one was a beautiful lady with kind dark eyes, and a

grave face, and long black hair, and she smiled such a strange sad smile
at the other, who laughed and came to her. They played together, and
danced round and round the pool, and they sang a song till I fell asleep.
Nurse woke me up when she came back, and she was looking
something like the lady had looked, so I told her all about it, and asked
her why she looked like that. At first she cried, and then she looked
very frightened, and turned quite pale. She put me down on the grass
and stared at me, and I could see she was shaking all over. Then she
said I had been dreaming, but I knew I hadn't. Then she made me
promise not to say a word about it to anybody, and if I did I should be
thrown into the black pit. I was not frightened at all, though nurse was,
and I never forgot about it, because when I shut my eyes and it was
quite quiet, and I was all alone, I could see them again, very faint and
far away, but very splendid; and little bits of the song they sang came
into my head, but I couldn't sing it.
I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure, so
strange that the day on which it happened is always called the White
Day. My mother had been dead for more than a year, and in the
morning I had lessons, but they let me go out for walks in the afternoon.
And this afternoon I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a
new country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult
places, as the way was through many bushes, and beneath the low
branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark
woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed
as if I was going on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like
a tunnel where a brook must have been, but all the water had dried up,
and the floor was rocky, and the bushes had grown overhead till they
met, so that it was quite dark. And I went on and on through that dark
place; it was a long, long way. And I came to a hill that I never saw
before. I was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore
me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all
over, and then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long
way, till at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the
top of a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all
about on the grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree came
out from under a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a

long way. I never saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the
earth some of them, and some looked as if they had been rolled to
where they were, and they went on and on as far as I could see, a long,
long way. I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was
strange. It was winter time, and there were black terrible woods
hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung
with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different
from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods
there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of
them; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all
so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a
wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo. I went on into the dreadful rocks.
There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like
horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at
me out of the stone, and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back
into the rock, so that I should always be there. And there were other
rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out
their