Miss Shanklin wept, not aloud or passionately, but to the point of having to wipe her eyes and depart for the kitchen to ask for some tea. By the time this tea was brought—by the “hired girl”, whose softening influence on Mary Dempster had been so deplored by the matrons of Amasa Dempster’s congregation—Miss Shanklin and I were on quite good terms.

“I love to hear you say that Mary was so good and sweet, even after that terrible accident—it was an accident, wasn’t it? A blow on the head? From a fall or something?—and that you thought of her even when you were away at the war. I always had such hopes for her. Not just to keep her with me, of course, but—well, I know she loved Amasa Dempster, and love is supposed to excuse anything. But I am sure there would have been other men, and she could hardly have been worse off with one of them, now could she? Life with Amasa seems to have been so dark and wintry and hopeless. Mary used to be so full of hope—before she married.

“Now she remembers so little, and it’s better so, because when she does remember she thinks of Paul. I don’t even let myself speculate on what would happen to a little fellow like that, running away with show folks. As like as not he’s dead long since, and better so, I suppose. But of course she thinks of him as a little boy still. She has no idea of time, you see. When she thinks of him, it’s awful to hear her cry and carry on. And I can’t get rid of the feeling that if I had just had a little more real sand and horse sense, things would have been very different.

“I’d meant to tell you not to come again, ever, but I won’t. Come and see Mary, but promise you’ll get to know her again, as a new friend. She hasn’t any idea of the past, except for horrible mixed-up memories of being tied up, and Paul disappearing, and Amasa—she always remembers him with a blue mouth, like a rotten hole in his face—telling God he forgave her for ruining his life. Amasa died praying, did you know?”

It was the following May, in the fated year 1929, that I had a call from Boy—in itself an unusual thing, but even more unusual in its message.

“Dunny, don’t be in too much of a rush, but you oughtn’t to lose more than a couple of weeks in getting rid of some of your things.” And he named half-a-dozen stocks he knew I had, because he had himself advised me to buy them.

“But they’re mounting every week,” I said.

“That’s right,” said he; “now sell ‘em and get hold of some good hard stuff. I’ll see that you get another good block of Alpha.”

So that is what I did, and it is to Boy’s advice I owe a reputation I acquired in the school as a very shrewd businessman. Just about every master, like some millions of other people on this continent, had money in the market, and most of them had invested on margin and were cleaned out before Christmas. But I found myself pleasantly well off when the worst of the crash came, because Boy Staunton regarded me as in certain respects a responsibility.

My mind was not on money at the time, however, for I was waiting impatiently for the end of term so that I could take ship and set out on a great hunt, starting in England and making my way across France, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, and at last to Czechoslovakia. This was the first of my annual journeys, broken only by the 1939–45 war, saint-hunting, saint-identifying, and saint-describing; journeys that led to my book A Hundred Saints for Travellers, still in print in six languages and a lively seller, to say nothing of my nine other books, and my occasional articles. This time I was after big game, a saint never satisfactorily described and occurring in a variety of forms, whose secret I hoped to discover.

There is a saint for just about every human situation, and I was on the track of a curious specimen whose intercession was sought by girls who wanted to get rid of disagreeable suitors. Her home ground, so to speak, was Portugal, and she was reputed to have been the daughter of a Portuguese king, himself a pagan, who had betrothed her to the King of Sicily; but she was a Christian and had made a vow of virginity, and when she prayed for assistance in keeping it, she miraculously grew a heavy beard; the Sicilian king refused to have her, and her angry father caused her to be crucified.

It was my purpose to visit every shrine of this odd saint, compare all versions of the legend, establish or demolish the authenticity of a prayer reputedly addressed to her and authorized by a Bishop of Rouen in the sixteenth century, and generally to poke my nose into anything that would shed light on her mystery. Her case abounded with the difficulties that people of my temperament love. She was commonly called Wilgefortis, supposed to be derived from Virgo-Fortis, but she was also honoured under the names of Liberata, Kummernis, Ontkommena, Uvrade, and in England—she once had a shrine in St. Paul’s—as Uncumber. The usual fate for Wilgefortis, among the more conservative hagiologists, was dismissal as an ignorant peasant misunderstanding of one of the many paintings of the Holy Face of Lucca, in which a long-haired and bearded figure in a long robe hangs from a cross; it is, of course, Christ, reputedly painted by St. Luke himself; but many copies of it might well be pictures of a bearded lady.

I, however, had one or two new ideas about Uncumber, which I wanted to test. The first was that her legend might be a persistence of the hermaphrodite figure of the Great Mother, which was long worshipped in Cyprus and Carthage. Many a useful and popular wonder-working figure had been pinched from the pagans by Christians in early days, and some not so early. My other bit of information came from two physicians at the State University of New York, Dr. Moses and Dr. Lloyd, who had published some findings about abnormal growth of hair in unusually emotional women; they instanced a number of cases of beard-growing in girls who had been crossed in love; furthermore, two English doctors attested to a thick beard grown by a girl whose engagement had been brutally terminated. Anything here for Uncumber? I was on my way to Europe to find out.

So I jaunted cheerfully about the Continent on my apparently mad mission, hunting up Uncumber in remote villages as well as in such easy and pleasant places as Beauvais and Wissant, and once positively identifying an image that was said to be Uncumber (Wilgeforte, she was locally called, and the priest was rather ashamed of her) as Galla, the patroness of widows, who is also sometimes represented with a beard. It was not until August that I arrived in the Tyrol, searching for a shrine that was in a village about thirty-five miles northwest of Innsbruck.

It was about the size of Deptford, and its three inns did not expect many visitors from North America; this was still before the winter sports enthusiasm opened up every Tyrolean village and forced something like modern sanitation on every inn and guest-house. I settled in at the inevitable Red Horse and looked about me.

I was not the only stranger in the village.

A tent and some faded banners in the market-place announced the presence of Le grand Cirque forain de St. Vite. I was certainly not the man to neglect a circus dedicated to St. Vitus, patron of travelling showmen, and still invoked in country places against chorea and palsy and indeed anything that made the body shake. The banners showed neither the cock nor the dog that the name of St. Vitus would have suggested, but they promised a Human Frog, Le plus grand des Tyroliens, Le Solitaire des forets and—luck for me—La Femme a barbe. I determined to see this bearded lady, and if possible to find out if she had been violently crossed in love.

As a circus it was a pitiable affair. Everything about it stank of defeat and misery. There was no planned performance; now and then, when a sufficient crowd had assembled, a pair of gloomy acrobats did some tumbling and walked a slack wire. The Human Frog sat down on his own head, but with the air of one who took no pleasure in it. The Wild Man roared and chewed perfunctorily on a piece of raw meat to which a little fur still clung; the lecturer hinted darkly that we ought to keep our dogs indoors that night, but nobody seemed afraid. When not on view the Wild Man sat quietly, and from the motion of his jaws I judged that he was solacing himself with a quid of chewing tobacco.