He planned it all beforehand. It was the fag-end of the day, and the
whistle had gone and the prisoners were trooping back across a potato
field. Martin and Ernie were very slow. They lingered apparently to
discuss some matter connected with the soil. There were two sentries in
sight, one near them and the other perhaps a hundred yards away. The
potato field was on a slope and at the bottom of the field were two lines
of barbed wire entanglements. The other prisoners passed out of sight,
and the sentry near them called out something, probably telling them to
hurry up. They started to go up the field when suddenly Martin staggered
and clutched his throat. Then he fell over backwards and commenced to
have an epileptic fit. Ernie said it was the realest thing he’d ever
seen. The sentry ran up, at the same time whistling to his comrade. Ernie
released Martin’s collar-band and tried to help him. Both the sentries
approached, and Ernie stood back. He saw them bending over the prostrate
man, when suddenly a most extraordinary thing happened. Both their
heads were brought together with fearful violence. One fell completely
senseless, but the other staggered forward and groped for his rifle.
When Ernie told this part of the story he kept dabbing his forehead with
his handkerchief.
“I never seen such a man as Martin I don’t think,” he said. “Lord! He had
a fist like a leg of mutton. He laid ’em out neatly on the grass, took
off their coats and most of their other clothes, and flung ’em over the
barbed wire and then swarmed over like a cat. I had more difficulty, but
he got me across too, somehow. Then we carted the clothes away to the
next line.
“We got up into a wood that night, and Martin draws out his compass and
he says: ‘We’ve got a hundred and seven miles to do in night shifts,
cully. And if we make a slip we’re shot as safe as knife.’ It sounded
the maddest scheme in the world, but I somehow felt that Martin would
get through it. The only thing that saved me was that—that I didn’t have
to think. I simply left everything to him. If I’d started thinking I
could have gone mad. I had it fixed in my mind, ‘either he does it or he
doesn’t do it. I can’t help it.’ I reely don’t remember much about that
journey. It was all a dream like. We did all our travelin’ at night by
compass, and hid by day. Neither of us had a word of German. But Gawd’s
truth! that man Martin was a marvel! He turned our trousers inside out,
and made ’em look like ordinary laborers’ trousers. He disappeared the
first night and came back with some other old clothes. We lived mostly
on raw potatoes we dug out of the ground with our hands, but not always.
One night he came back with a fowl which he cooked in a hole in the
earth, making a fire with a flint and some dry stuff he pinched from a
farm. I believed Martin could have stole an egg from under a hen without
her noticing it. He was the coolest card there ever was. Of course there
was a lot of trouble one way and another. It wasn’t always easy to find
wooded country or protection of any sort. We often ran into people and
they stared at us, and we shifted our course. But I think we were only
addressed three or four times by men, and then Martin’s methods were the
simplest in the world. He just looked sort of blank for a moment, and
then knocked them clean out, and bolted. Of course they were after us all
the time, and it was this constant tacking and shifting ground that took
so long. Fancy! he never had a map, you know, nothing but the compass.
We didn’t know what sort of country we were coming to, nothing. We just
crept through the night like cats. I believe Martin could see in the
dark.... He killed a dog one night with his hands.... It was necessary.”
VII
It was impossible to discover from Ernie how long this amazing journey
lasted—the best part of two months I believe. He was himself a little
uncertain with regard to many incidents, whether they were true or
whether they were hallucinations. He suffered greatly from his wound
and had periods of feverishness. But one morning, he said, Martin began
“prancing.” He seemed to develop some curious sense that they were near
the Dutch frontier. And then, according to Ernie, “a cat wasn’t in it
with Martin.”
He was very mysterious about the actual crossing. I gathered that there
had been some “clumsy” work with sentries. It was at that time that Ernie
got a bullet through his arm. When he got to Holland he was very ill. It
was not that the wound was a very serious one, but, as he explained:
“Me blood was in a bad state. I was nearly down and out.”
He was very kindly treated by some Dutch Sisters in a convent hospital.
But he was delirious for a long time, and when he became more normal they
wanted to communicate with his people in England, but this didn’t appeal
to the dramatic sense of Ernie.
“I thought I’d spring a surprise packet on you,” he said, grinning.
We asked about Martin, but Ernie said he never saw him again. He went
away while Ernie was delirious, and they said he had gone to Rotterdam to
take ship somewhere. He thought Holland was a dull place.
During the relation of this narrative my attention was divided between
watching the face of Ernie and the face of Ernie’s mother.
I am quite convinced that she did not listen to the story at all. She
never took her eyes from his face, and although her tongue was following
the flow of his remarks, her mind was occupied with the vision of Ernie
when he was a little boy, and when he ordered five tons of coal to be
sent to the girls’ school.
When he had finished she said:
“Did you meet either of them young Stellings?”
And Ernie laughed rather uproariously and said no, he didn’t have the
pleasure of renewing their acquaintance.
On his way home, it appeared, he had reported himself at headquarters,
and his discharge was inevitable.
“So now you’ll be able to finish the rabbit-hutch,” said Lily’s husband,
and we all laughed again, with the exception of Mrs. Ward.
* * * * *
I found her later standing alone in the garden. It was a warm Spring
night. There was no moon, but the sky appeared restless with its burden
of trembling stars. She had an old shawl drawn round her shoulders, and
she stood there very silently, with her arms crossed.
“Well, this is splendid news, Mrs. Ward,” I said.
She started a little, and coughed, and pulled the shawl closer round her.
She said, “Yes, sir,” very faintly.
I don’t think she was very conscious of me. She still appeared immersed
in the contemplation of her inner visions. Her eyes settled upon the
empty house next door, and I thought I detected the trail of a tear
glistening on her cheeks. I lighted my pipe. We could hear Ernie, and
Lily, and Lily’s husband still laughing and talking inside.
“She used to make a very good puddin’,” Mrs. Ward said suddenly, at
random. “Dried fruit inside, and that. My Ernie liked it very much....”
Somewhere away in the distance—probably outside “The Unicorn”—some one
was playing a cornet. A train crashed by and disappeared, leaving a trail
of foul smoke which obscured the sky. The smoke cleared slowly away. I
struck another match to light my pipe.
It was quite true. On either side of her cheek a tear had trickled. She
was trembling a little, worn out by the emotions of the evening.
There was a moment of silence, unusual for Dalston.
“It’s all very ... perplexin’ and that,” she said quietly.
And then I knew for certain that in that great hour of her happiness
her mind was assailed by strange and tremulous doubts. She was thinking
of “them others” a little wistfully. She was doubting whether one could
rejoice—when the thing became clear and actual to one—without sending out
one’s thoughts into the dark garden to “them others” who were suffering
too. And she had come out into this little meager yard at Dalston and had
gazed through the mist and smoke upwards to the stars, because she wanted
peace intensely, and so she sought it within herself, because she knew
that real peace is a thing which concerns the heart alone.
And so I left her standing there, and I went my way, for I knew that she
was wiser than I.
THE BENT TREE
THE BENT TREE
The call was irresistible. I had tramped for nearly two hours along
the white road, when suddenly a long stretch of open heath with
sparsely-scattered trees and high gorse bushes invited me to break my
journey and to seek the shade of a wood that fringed it on the western
side. The ground sloped upwards at a steep gradient and I was soon
among the cool shadows of the larch trees. After climbing for nearly
half-an-hour I found myself on a kind of plateau, looking down upon one
of the most beautiful sights in the world, the Weald of Sussex trembling
in a gray heat mist framed through a thin belt of trees. I pushed
forward, determining to rest in this most attractive spot. Nearing the
fringe of this little clump, I observed a bent tree in a clearing. As I
approached it it occurred to me that the subject before me was curiously
like Corot’s famous masterpiece. It was indeed a wonderful and romantic
spot. Beneath me a river rambled through the meadows and became lost in
the gray-line distances. There was no sign of civilization except sleepy
cattle and the well-kept fields, and occasionally a village nestling in
the hollow of the downs. The only sound was the movement of leaves, the
drone of bees and the lowing of cattle in the distant meadows.
I sat down on the bent tree, and as I looked around it occurred to me
that the spot I had chosen was like a little arbor. It might have been
the home of some God of ancient Britain, who could have lived here
undisturbed through all the generations. I was wondering whether any one
else had ever penetrated to this glorious retreat from the world when my
eye caught a small square of white paper pinned on the trunk of the bent
tree. I examined it, and lo! on it was written in ink: “GONE TO LUNCH,
BACK IN 20 MINUTES.”
Now if there is one thing that makes me wretchedly unhappy it is the
action of people who find pleasure in disfiguring nature, in carving
their initials on tree-trunks, in scattering paper and orange-peel about
the country-side; but somehow, when I caught sight of this absurd city
office formula pinned to a tree in this most inaccessible and romantic
spot, I must confess that “my lungs did crow like Chanticleer.” I felt
that here indeed was the work of a vast and subtle humorist. The formula
was so familiar. How often had I waited hours in murky passages, buoyed
up by this engaging promise! It seemed so redolent of drab staircases,
and files and roll-top desks, that its very mention out here struck a
fantastic note. That any one should suggest that he carried on a business
here, that his time was precious, that after gulping down a cup of
coffee, he would rush back, cope with increasing press of affairs, seemed
to me wonderfully and amazingly funny. I must acknowledge that I made
myself rather ridiculous. I laughed till the tears streamed down my face,
and my only desire was for a companion with whom to share the manna of
this gigantic jest. I looked at the card again. It was comparatively
clean, so I presumed that the joke had been perpetrated quite recently.
And then I began to wonder whether the jester would return, whether,
after all, the slip had any significance. Was it the message of a poacher
to a friend? Or was this the secret meeting place of some gods of High
Finance? I determined in any case to wait the allotted span, and in the
meantime I stretched myself on the stem of the bent tree, and, lighting a
cigarette, prepared to enjoy the tranquillity of the scene.
It was barely ten minutes before my siesta was disturbed by a man coming
stealthily up the slope. He was a medium-sized, sallow-faced fellow with
small tired eyes set in dark hollows. He was wearing a tail-coat and a
bowler hat. He shuffled quickly through the wood, pushing the branches of
the trees away from him. His eyes fixed me furtively, and as he entered
the little arbor, he took off his hat and fidgeted with it, as though
looking for a customary hook on which to hang it.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?” was his greeting.
“Not at all,” I found myself answering, for lack of a more suitable reply.
“Did Binders send you?” he asked tentatively.
“No,” I replied, pulling myself together. “I just happened to come here.”
A look of disappointment passed over his face. “Oh!” he said, walking
up and down. “I sometimes do a bit with Binders and his friends, you
know”—he waved his arms vaguely—“you know, from Corlesham.”
Corlesham I knew to be a village rather more than two miles away, a
sleepy hamlet of less than fifty souls.
“Oh, I see,” I replied, more with the idea of not discouraging him than
because any particular light had come to me.
He looked at me searchingly for some moments, and then, going over to
a thick gorse-bush, he knelt down and groped underneath and presently
produced a thick pile of papers and circulars.
“I wonder whether you would like to do anything in these? These West
Australians are good. They’re right down to 65. If you can hold on,
a sure thing. If you would like a couple of thousand now....” he
was nervously biting his nails; then he said, “Could you spare me a
cigarette?”
I produced my case and handed him one.
“Thanks very much,” he said. “They don’t like me to smoke at home,” and
he waved his hand towards the north. I followed the direction, and just
caught sight of the top of a gable of a large red-brick building through
the trees.
So this was the solution!
“This is a glorious place,” I said.
This seemed a very harmless platitude and one not likely to drive a being
to despair. But it had a strange effect on my individual, for he sat down
on a broken branch and burst into a paroxysm of invective.
“Oh, Gawd!” he said. “I hate it, hate the sight of it! Day after day—all
the same! All these blinkin’ trees and fields—all the same, nothing
happenin’ ever.”
I found it very difficult to meet this outburst. I could think of nothing
to say, so I kept silent. After a time he got up, puffing feverishly
at the cigarette, and walked round the little arbor. Every now and
then he would stop and make a gesture towards the shrubs. I believe he
was visualizing files and folios, ledgers, and typewriters. He made a
movement of opening and shutting drawers.
“You’ve been a bit run down, haven’t you?” I said at last, with a feeble
attempt to bridge the gulf.
He looked at me uncertainly, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
“I was unlucky,” he said sullenly. “I worked like a nigger for thirty
years, but so do the others—lots of them—and they’re all right. Just
sheer bad luck, if you know what I mean. I can do it now when they let
me. That’s why I come here. Binders helps me a bit. He sends me people.
And, do you know?” he whispered to me confidentially, “I’ve got the
postman on my side. He delivers me letters here at twopence a time.
Look! here is my mail-box!” He stooped down and lifted a large stone and
produced a further pile of correspondence and circulars. “Would you like
to buy some of these Trinidads? I could work it for you.”
He looked at me anxiously, and I made some elaborate excuse for not
seizing such a splendid opportunity. He sighed, and placed the papers
back under the stone.
“Have you ever dealt in big things?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not—in your sense,” I answered, nurturing an instinctive
sense of outraged superiority against this person who I felt despised me.
“You know what I mean by big things,” he said fiercely. “Millions and
millions, and the lives and works of millions of people! Do you know why
I come down here to this rotten little clearing? Because it sometimes
reminds me of my office off Throgmorton Street. Look! It was just this
size. I had my desk over there. Horswall, my secretary, had his desk
here. Here was the fireplace. The press just here by the window. Here the
shelves with all the files. Can you imagine what it’s like to have been
there all those years, to have worked up what I did—all out of nothing,
mark you!—to have got the whole rubber market in the hollow of my
hand!—and then, oh, God! to be condemned to—this!” and he made a gesture
of fierce contempt towards the Weald of Sussex.
“For nearly two years now,” he continued, “I’ve been living in this hole.”
“Nature has a way,” I said, in my most sententious manner, “of coming
back on us.”
“Naycher! Naycher!” he almost screamed. “Don’t talk to me about
Naycher! What sort of friend is Naycher to me or you? Naycher gives you
inclinations, and then breaks you for following them! Two men fall into
a pond—what does Naycher care that one man was trying to drown his enemy
while the other was trying to save a dog? They both stand their chance
of death. Naycher leads you up blind alleys and into marshes and lets you
rot. Besides, isn’t man Naycher? Isn’t it Naycher for me to work and make
money, as it is for these blighting birds to sing? Aren’t roll-top desks
as much Naycher as—these blasted trees?”
He blinked savagely at the surrounding scene. The smoke from a distant
hamlet drifted sleepily heavenwards, like incense to the gods of the
Downs.
“My father was a turner in Walham Green, and he apprenticed me to
the joinery, but I had my ambitions even in those times.” He nodded
knowingly, and mopped his brow. “At eighteen I was a clerk in a
wholesale house in St. Paul’s Churchyard. For three years I worked there
underground, by artificial light. Then I got made sub-manager of a wharf
at the South end of Lower Thames Street. I was there for five years, and
saved nearly three hundred pounds out of a salary of £120 a year. Then I
met Jettison, and we started that office together, Jettison & Gateshead,
Commission Agents. Work and struggle, work and struggle, year after year.
But it was not till I got on to rubber that I began to make things move.
That was eight years after. Do you remember the boom? I got in with
Gayo, who had lived out in the Malay Straits—knew everything—we got the
whole game at our fingers’ ends. We knew just when to buy and just when
to sell. Do you know, I’ve made as much as four thousand pounds in one
afternoon, just talking on the telephone! And we done it all in that
little room”—he gazed jealously round the little arbor in the hills, and
scowled at me. Then he produced a packet of cigarettes and lighted one
from the stump of the last.
“In those days, through Gayo’s friends, we followed the whole course of
the raw stuff. Then Gayo went out to Malay, and he used to cable me every
few days, putting me on to the right thing. My God, he was a man! It went
on for two years, when suddenly a cable came to say he was dead—fever,
or something, up-country. That was the end. The slump came soon after. I
worked hard, but I never got control back. Down and down and down they
went, as though Gayo was dragging them through the earth.” His lower lip
trembled as he rolled the emaciated cigarette over.
“Lord, what a fight I had, though I sat in that office there, in my
shirt-sleeves, day and night for months on end, checking tapes, cabling,
lying, faking, bluffing”—he chuckled with a meditative intensity. “I’d
have done it then, if they’d given me time. But they closed in; there
were two Scotch firms, and a man named Klaus. I knew they meant to do
me down. There was a set against me. I wasn’t there in the end. I was
sitting in the office one night....” He passed his hand over his brow and
swept away a wasp that had settled there. He sat silent for some moments,
as though trying to recall things, and twice started to speak without
framing a sentence.
“My brother was very good to me,” he said suddenly, waving his hand
toward the red-brick gable in the trees. “He was very good to me all
through.” Then he added, with a sort of contemptuous shrug, “In the
cabinet-making he was; got a little works at Bow—made about four hundred
a year—married, and five children.”
He sat for some minutes with his head in his hands, and then he sat up
and gazed upon the joyous landscape with unseeing eyes.
I ventured to remark, “Well, I’m sure this place ought to do you good.”
He turned his melancholy eyes upon me, and sighed.
“Yes,” he said, after a pause. “You’re just the sort. I’ve seen so many
of you about. Some of you have butterfly nets.” He kept repeating at
intervals, “Butterfly-nets!” One felt that the last word in contumely had
been uttered. He sank into an apathy of indifference. Then he broke out
again.
“I tell you,” he uttered fiercely, “that I had millions and millions. I
controlled the work and the lives of millions of men, and you come here
and talk to me of Naycher. Look at these damned trees! They go green in
the summer, yellow in the autumn, and bare in the winter. Year after
year, exactly the same thing, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sick of
the sight of them. But look at men! Think of their lives, the change and
variety! What they can do! Their clothes, their furniture, their houses,
their cities! Think of their power! The power of making and marring!”
“You mean the power of buying and selling,” I ventured.
“Yes, that’s just it!” he said, feeling that he was converting me.
“The power of buying and selling! Of making men rich or poor!” He stood
up and waved his thin arms and gazed wildly round him. “Not chasing
butterflies!”
At that moment we both became aware that a third person was on the scene.
He was a well set-up man, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He was
dressed in a dark-blue serge suit and a tweed cap. He stepped quietly
through the trees, and went up to my companion, and said:
“Ah! there you are, Mr. Gateshead. I’m afraid it’s almost time for your
afternoon nap, sir.” And then, turning to me, he nodded and remarked: “A
warm afternoon, sir!” He spoke with a quiet, suave voice that somehow
conveyed the feeling of the “iron hand in the velvet glove.” His voice
seemed to have a sedative effect on Mr. Gateshead. My companion did not
look at him, but he seemed to shrink within himself. A certain flush that
had accompanied his excitement vanished, and his face looked old and
set. He drew his narrow shoulders together and his figure bent. He stood
abstractedly for a few moments, gazing at the trees around him, and then,
with a vague gesture that was characteristic of him, he clutched the
lapels of his coat, and with his head bent forward he walked away towards
the building. He did not cast a glance in my direction, and the man in
the serge suit nodded to me and followed him leisurely.
I clambered down the slope of the wood, and for some reason felt happy to
get once more upon the road.
About half a mile from Corlesham I met the postman coming up the hill,
wheeling his bicycle. He was a sandy-haired man, splendidly Saxon, with
gray-blue eyes and broad mouth. I asked him if there was a footpath to
Corlesham, and he directed me.
“Do you have a long round?” I asked.
“Three or four mile, maybe,” he said, looking at me narrowly.
“It’s a good pull up to the Institution,” I ventured.
“What institution might that be?” he said, and his mild blue eyes
disarmed me with their ingenuousness.
“The house with the three red gables,” I answered.
“Oh!” came the reply. “You mean old Gateshead’s.”
“Does he own it?” I said incredulously.
“Ay, and he could own six others for all the difference it would make to
his money. He owns half the county.”
“And yet what a strange idea,” I murmured insinuatingly. “To own a large
house and yet to have one’s letters delivered in a wood!”
The postman swung his bag into a more comfortable position and looked
across his machine at me with a grin.
“Those as has money can afford to have any ideas they like,” he said at
last.
“I’m afraid his money doesn’t make him very happy,” I ventured, still
groping for further enlightenment.
The postman gave his right pedal a vigorous twirl as a hint of departure.
He then took out a packet of Navy Cut cigarettes and lighted one. This
action seemed to stimulate his mental activities, and he leant on the
handle-bars and said:
“Ay, if one has no money maybe one can make oneself happy thinking one
has. And if one has money, may be one can make oneself happy by thinking
one hasn’t.” He blinked at me, and then added, by way of solving all
life’s mysteries: “If one—puts too much store by these things.”
I could find no remark to complement the postman’s sententious
conclusions, and, dismissing me with a nod, he mounted his bicycle and
rode off up the hill.
THE GREAT UNIMPRESSIONABLE
THE GREAT UNIMPRESSIONABLE