"Ve' well. I said you, 'Right,' I said. I tipped the ol' soul into
sea, and I got the gould savrin."
"Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it's beside
the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to
know for the third time--is what made you let the cat out of the bag?
Why couldn't you keep quiet about it?"
He waved his hand.
"Dear sir," he replied. "This way. Listen me."
It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened.
After all, the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his
place I should have acted as he had done. Fate was culpable, and fate
alone.
It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the
accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view.
While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the
opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned
his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from
London--myself--had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life
brought the professor to shore. Consequently, he was despised by all
as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing stock. The local wags
made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to
take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know
when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they
behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world
over.
Now, all this Mr. Hawk, it seemed, would have borne cheerfully and
patiently for my sake, or, at any rate, for the sake of the good
golden sovereign I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the
problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.
"She said me," explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, "'Harry 'Awk,' she
said, 'yeou'm a girt fule, an' I don't marry noone as is ain't to be
trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by
that Tom Leigh.' I punched Tom Leigh," observed Mr. Hawk
parenthetically. "'So,' she said me, 'yeou can go away, an' I don't
want to see yeou again.'"
This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the
natural result of making him confess all in self-defense, and she had
written to the professor the same night.
I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand,
for he betrayed no emotion.
"It is fate, Hawk," I said, "simply fate. There is a divinity that
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it's no good
grumbling."
"Yiss," said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in
silence, "so she said me, 'Hawk,' she said--like that--'you're a girt
fule--'"
"That's all right," I replied. "I quite understand. As I say, it's
simply fate. Good-by."
And I left him.
As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis.
They passed me without a look.
I wandered on in quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those
moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future
stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is
imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of
Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance.
Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the
fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when
they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even,
if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they
were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit,
and Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and
incited the gramophone to murder "Mumbling Mose," I would steal away
to my bedroom and write--and write--and _write_--and go on writing
till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And,
when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the
best. A man must go through the fire before he can write his
masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose
on the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the man,
might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted
irremovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the author, should turn
out such a novel of gloom that strong critics would weep and the
public jostle for copies till Mudie's doorways became a shambles.
Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a
blessing--effectively disguised.
But I doubted it.
We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge's
spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every
post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed a
league and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought
waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The
popular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Every
morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of
mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement
that Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that the
bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We lived
in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken
at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, had
frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a
beaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill game
for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge
became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand,
I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.
Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack
of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me,
I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was not
even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do
on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let
alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every
day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, and
Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we
would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something
altogether different.
There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me
a check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check and
trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a
leg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks and
potted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.
After that we relapsed into routine again.
Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf and
bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at its
hardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.
It refused to materialize.
I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean
trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of
cauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shape
itself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Instead
of thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserably
of Phyllis.
The only progress I achieved was with my villain.
I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He had
several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was
the thing he did really well.
It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen
in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better
result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little
paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green
woods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to an
entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a
straight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea
wind in my eyes.
But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from
my room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealing
brassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking of
setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does
Kipling say?
And soon you will find that the sun and the wind
And the Djinn of the Garden, too,
Have lightened the Hump, Cameelious Hump,
The Hump that is black and blue.
His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I
could omit that. The sun and wind were what I needed.
I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path
along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.
To reach my favorite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left
and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the
narrow path.
I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the
same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis
entered it from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.