THE ROMAN ROAD
1
That night was one of the cold and starry nights which sometimes fall
on the downs in the middle of summer. As they began to climb up the
slope, the earth seemed to be returning in warm, almost tangible waves,
the heat it had received during the day from the sun. But when they got
clear of the gloomy beech groves on the lower slopes, when the uneven
track had failed them and left them in the middle of a great sweep of
open grass, this ceased, and the air grew gradually cooler. Presently
the wind, which had fallen at dusk, rose again, coming from another
direction, faint but chilly. The motion of the air could hardly be
felt, yet it had in it some quality which touched and stayed the blood
and enervated the spirit. These hours of darkness promised, before they
were done, to reduce the fugitives to a lower state of wretchedness
than they yet had suffered.
When they had stumbled for some time up the steeply rising hill-side
which bore only small and scattered patches of gorse and juniper,
Jeremy realized that they were now as far from the road as they needed
to be, and that it would be impossible for them to walk on much longer.
He looked about him for some shelter in which they might pass the night
and not be immediately obvious to any searcher when day broke. But he
could see none; and he began to be troubled in his mind, for he dared
not halt lest exhaustion should pin them in the open where they stood.
He scanned eagerly every patch of bush that they passed; but all were
too thin and too much exposed. At last on his left he thought he saw
a line dark against the dark sky, which might perhaps be a wood. He
pulled gently at the old man’s arm and directed their steps towards it.
When they came close it proved to be a thick grove of bushes and low
thorn trees, running on either hand out of the narrow limits of their
sight.
“This will do well enough,” he said in the murmured voice of
pre-occupation; and Eva assented with a single word.
They pushed their way through the close growth, and came suddenly on a
steep bank three or four yards from the edge of the thicket.
“_This_ will do!” Jeremy cried in a heartier tone; and he explained
that he wished to be well hidden by bushes, but not so much shut in
that in the morning they could not get a clear view of the country
around them. But, while he was explaining all this, Eva was gently
laying down the Speaker, so that his head rested against the bank, and
making for his head a pillow out of her cloak. Jeremy silently gave her
his own cloak, with which she covered the sleeping or comatose old man.
When she had finished she stood up, shivered slightly, and folded her
arms as if to retain the last vanishing sparks of warmth in her body.
Jeremy, standing also, quiet and somber, felt a wave of inexpressible
emotion rise in his heart at the sight of her slender and shadowy
figure.
“Eva ... Eva ...” he murmured, and she came into his arms as though
that had been the homing-cry. They had no words to use with one
another. They kissed once, and then stood locked in his embrace, Eva’s
face pressed into his shoulder, one of his broad hands on her hair, the
other at her waist. After a little while he pressed her head gently
backwards, bent the supple waist and lowered her on to the ground
as tenderly as she had lowered her father. She suffered what he did
without speaking or resisting, and allowed him to move her head so
that it rested on a thick tuft of grass, and to wrap her riding skirt
tightly about her ankles. For a moment after he had done the silence
endured, and Jeremy thought that, even thus, after the fatigues of
the day, she would not find it hard to sleep. But when she saw him
standing, square, black and aloof, between her and the stars, she
called out to him softly,
“Jeremy! Jeremy! come down to me!” He knelt by her side, and laid
one hand on her arm, conscious, as he made it, of the clumsiness and
inexpressiveness of the gesture. “Lie down by me,” she went on. “The
night will be cold, and we shall keep one another warm.”
After the first exquisite exhilaration of finding himself at her side,
limb to limb, cheek to cheek, clasped in her arms as she in his, the
faculty of reckoning minutes and hours vanished from his mind. This
seemed to him an image of the eternal night which descends on all.
He had a vision of a shrouded figure pacing an endless corridor and
pausing for the length of a human life between one step and the next.
Only the slow, unintermittent rhythm of the girl’s breathing suggested
to him that time passed. He stirred slightly in her arms: he wished to
look up at the sky.
At their heads stood a low hawthorn, beaten, stunted, and misshapen by
many fierce winds, which threw out its sprawling branches over them;
and close to their side was a thick overhanging clump of gorse. Between
the two swam vaguely the North Star; and his eyes strayed from this to
the Great Bear, whence he found or guessed the other constellations,
riding the night sky, remote, brilliant and serene. It seemed to him
that what spirit he had left ceased to be human and was sucked up
into the fellowship of those bright indifferent lights, and the vast
spaces which separated them. He began to amuse himself by calling back
to mind as much as he could remember of that ancient and ridiculous
science, astronomy. Odd facts floated into his thoughts concerning
the weight of the stars, the speed of a ray of light, the nature of
gravitation. He recalled epoch-making and cataclysmic discoveries,
all records of which were now very likely erased from the annals of
mankind. He wondered idly what had become of So-and-so who had been
forever busy with the perihelion of Mercury, and of Such-and-such who
had exhibited strange frenzies when you mentioned to him the name of
a noted Continental astronomer. He recollected queer empty wrangles
about the relation between the universe we can see or conceive, and
the infinite, inconceivable universe, of the existence of which our
minds mysteriously inform us. He was fascinated by the recurrence in
his thoughts of a theory that our system, and all the stars we can see,
are but one minute and negligible organism, moving regularly through
space.... He was trying to form some image of what this must mean, when
he felt himself recalled, as though to another life, by a voice that
was infinitely distant, infinitely faint, and which had once held an
infinite significance for him. It was a struggle to come back to this
forgotten point in time and space: he struggled....
The girl was speaking. “Jeremy,” she repeated, louder, “I am not
asleep.”
He came back, awoke into the real world with a shock like that of a
diver coming out of the sea, and found that still the same night was
in progress, that nothing around him had changed, and that he was very
cold. They had both of them given up their cloaks to the old man and
had nothing to cover them. The wind, so faint and tenuous that it was
impossible to tell whence it came, crept insidiously through or over
everything that might have served them for a shelter. The thin air
surrounded and drenched them with its enervating chill, taking away
from them almost even the strength for speech. But Jeremy answered,
“Nor am I, dearest. I was thinking.”
They lay silent for some time. Then Eva began again, “Do you know where
we are?”
“I don’t at all. I didn’t think to ask the name of the village. We must
be somewhere on the downs between Bury and Duncton, but I couldn’t
see whereabouts in the darkness. Anyway, in the morning we must make
towards the west.”
Silence again.
But the effort of recalling these facts had drawn Jeremy back to human
life; and presently he said with simplicity, “I love you ... I love
you....” She answered him, and they talked, telling one another of
their feelings, exploring strange paths, making strange discoveries,
each taking turns to draw the other aside, like two children together
in a wood, one of whom points out the flowers, while the other, finger
on lip, calls for silence to listen to the birds. As they talked in
soft murmurs they forgot the cold and the passage of time: it was the
longest converse they had ever held in intimacy. Thus it was not the
gray light of morning stealing over the hill-side but the Speaker, who
suddenly began to be restless and to cough and moan in his sleep, that
first drew their attention from themselves.
Eva started hurriedly out of Jeremy’s embrace and went to the old man.
He was in the grip of another attack; and his contorted face showed
that he was suffering deeply. Jeremy followed her, and stood helplessly
by while she arranged more comfortably the folded cloak under his
head and drew over his body the wrappings which, as constantly, with
aimless violent movements of his arms he threw off again. Then, as
suddenly as the attack had begun, it seemed to pass. The old man grew
calm and allowed himself to be covered. He settled on his back, folded
his arms across his breast and threw back his head; and his breathing
became more gentle. Jeremy discovered with a shock that the sunken and
brilliant eyes were open and were intensely fixed on his. He opened his
mouth to say he knew not what, but the Speaker had begun in a faint but
distinct whisper.
“Jeremy, we were beaten----”
It was as though he had returned to the last moment of the battle, as
though the three days of his aberration had not been, and he was saying
now what he might have said then. But to Jeremy there was nothing but
injustice in this long-suspended comment. He forgot where they were and
what was their condition; and words of hot anger rose in his mouth. He
was deceived for a moment by the serenity and calmness of the Speaker’s
voice into thinking that this was indeed the man who had tyrannically
driven them all into disaster by his ungovernable will.
“You----” shaped itself on his lips, never spoken; for the girl plucked
in terror at his arm and at the same moment he stopped, jaw dropping,
eyes starting and hands hanging as though the tendons of the wrists had
been cut. For the old man was dead.
Eva threw herself down beside the body and pressed her lips on her
father’s cold forehead. Then realizing that what she had dreaded was
true, that the final event had taken place, she slipped helpless to
one side, sobbing violently with dry eyes and convulsed mouth. Jeremy
looked from the dead man to the grief-racked girl, impotent and abased.
This was the end of the old man’s schemes and efforts, his life-long
devotion, his last sufferings--this cold and miserable death, in the
beginning of the morning, on a bare hill in the country that was no
longer his own to scheme for. In the contemplation of the body Jeremy
felt for a moment relieved of human desires, contemptuous of what
demanded so much pains for so small a reward.
But while he stood thus he realized for the first time how light it
had grown. All the down was dimly revealed, the sun was on the point
of rising, and faint mists, curling off the fields, obscured the
distances. But close at hand the grove in which they had hidden, and
the bank against which they had rested, were plainly shown. Again a
sense of staggering recognition invaded Jeremy’s brain, and he did not
know in what world or what time he was living. Then in a flash he was
enlightened.
“The Roman road!” he exclaimed, forgetting the dead and living
companions who lay at his feet. For the long bank, overgrown and
almost hidden, extending into the mist on either side, was the Stane
Street, running over the downs like an arrow to Bignor Hill. A pure
wonder overcame Jeremy, and he went nearer to the road, touched the
high unmistakable stony mound and followed its trace with his eyes.
He remembered it, having tracked it without any difficulty from near
Halnaker Hill through the Nore Wood, past Gumber Farm and past this
very place, no longer ago than--no longer ago than the year 1913. The
month had been September, and blackberries had been very thick in the
hedges. He was bewildered and the waking earth turned dizzily round
him, while the tragedy in which he had just taken a part and which was
perhaps to continue, sank into the category of small and negligible
things. It seemed to take its place with the road and everything else
in a fantasy of idle invention.
He recovered himself when Eva touched him lightly on the arm. She was
self-possessed again, save that she was trembling violently and that
her beautiful face was drawn and pale. He wished to explain to her what
had thus struck him dumb, but she whispered,
“Look! Look down there!”
The sun was now just up, the mists were fast clearing, and the open
spaces and long shadows of the hill-side and the plain were very
distinct. As he followed her pointing finger, he saw a line of little
figures, a mile away, spread out as though they were beating the
ground, advancing slowly up the hill.
“The Welsh!” he uttered, somberly and without agitation. This was what
he had known and expected, and his heart did not beat a fraction the
faster for it. When he looked at Eva, she too was calm, almost rigid,
waiting for his next word.
“We must creep up through the bushes,” he whispered, as though the
enemy had been already within earshot. “Perhaps we can get away from
them in the woods up there.” She nodded, and while he unstrapped his
pistols and saw that they were loaded, she bent over her father,
disposed his limbs and covered his face with her cloak. Then she put
her hand in Jeremy’s, saying only,
“We must leave him. We could do nothing for him.”
Without another glance at the dead man, they began to hurry, bending
almost double, beside the bank of the road, stumbling over roots and
avoiding the swinging bushes as best they could. Once or twice they had
to dash across open spaces where the ancient road had disappeared, gaps
kept clear by old cart-tracks or a shepherd’s path; and once, where the
bushes clustered too thickly, they had to leave shelter and run for a
hundred yards in the bare field.
2
As they ran, hand in hand, torn and impeded by the briars, growing
more and more exhausted, Jeremy owned to himself, without a conscious
shaping of the thought, that they were lost, that they had too small
a start of their pursuers, and that these pursuers were acting in a
careful and methodical way, which was an ill omen. But he was dazed
and rendered distraught by the surroundings of their flight. With one
part of his mind he felt no more than the animal’s impulse to run for
safety, carrying his mate with him. With the rest he was revolving
loosely the odd chance that had landed them thus in familiar country
and by the side of this great deserted causeway, a remnant of antiquity
on which he had once looked with the feelings of awe and wonder that
these people now bestowed on the vestiges of his own days. It was to
this side of him that the landscape was growing increasingly familiar,
seeming to drag him back into his own natural century, away from all
the violent and incredible events of the last few weeks, away from the
bravely struggling girl at his side.... He felt her pull on his hand
grow heavier, felt that she was stumbling more and more. Then the Nore
Wood showed, obscure and gloomy ahead of them, and at the same moment
Jeremy glanced through a gap in the bushes and saw, at the bottom
of a gentle slope, Gumber Farm, the old weathered building with its
small windows and the well in front of it, and a woman standing in
a half-opened door, emptying out a bucket on the ground. Why run so
painfully, he wondered, through a world that could not but be a dream?
He halted suddenly and dragged Eva back. A few hundred yards in front
of them, at the point where the Stane Street entered the wood, was a
soldier on horseback, a dark, motionless, watchful figure, the long
barrel of his pistol lying in the crook of his arm and shining in a
stray beam of the sun.
“No good going on,” he panted. “We must lie close somewhere for a bit.”
Eva said nothing and he saw that her face was white, her lips pressed
together closely, her eyes half shut. Her free hand was clasped to her
side, she was bending backwards from the waist, and her breath came
and went in short convulsive gasps.
Near them, starting out of the growth on the old road and running down
the slope of the hill, was another black hedge which seemed to lead
to a little wooded knoll. Without speaking, Jeremy pulled Eva towards
it, and keeping close in the shelter of the bushes they reached it
without hearing any cry that showed they had been discovered. They
scrambled to the top, which was some twenty feet above the level of
the neighboring fields, and lay for a few moments, face downwards,
exhausted and oblivious among the gorse and bracken. Then Jeremy
recovered, sat up and surveyed their position. They were well hidden,
and, by peering through the branches, they could watch all the country
for some distance round. His hopes began to revive a little. They might
even, with great good fortune, lie here unperceived while the trackers
passed by: at the worst the cover was enough to help him to offer some
encouragement to Eva. And his chief thought was to restore her, to see
her breathe easily again, and the color come back to her cheeks, to
stanch the blood that trickled from a deep scratch on her forehead, to
kiss and hold her torn hands. If the very worst should happen and they
were found---- His thoughts broke off and he looked at her in agony,
fearing to meet her eyes. She too had sat up and was fumbling in the
bosom of her dress, as though looking for something.
When she saw that he was gazing at her she smiled faintly and said
in a natural tone, “At any rate we can rest now.” Then she began to
rearrange her skirts, to put the tumbled folds into place, as well as
the great rents in them would allow, and to smooth the disordered
strands of her hair.
“Rest. Yes, we can rest,” he answered somberly. And then he thought how
adorable she looked and, bending over towards her without rising, took
her in his arms and kissed her; and she returned his kisses. Presently
they released one another, and Jeremy murmured, almost in a whisper,
“How quiet it is! You wouldn’t think there was any one in the downs
but us.” And as she made no reply he went on, “Do you know what that
bank was? It was a road built by the Romans more than two thousand
years ago. Travelers and regiments of soldiers used to march over it,
though it’s so lonely now.” He broke off and stared abstractedly at the
ground. “That seems a strange thing to talk about just now when we ...
when we....” He stopped altogether. She came closer to him, put her arm
round his shoulder and drew his head down on her breast. Then she began
gently to stroke his hair and there was infinite solace in her touch.
He wondered whether he ought to discuss with her what they should do if
they were discovered; but the pain of that thought was so great that it
drove him back before he even felt it. He dared not ... he dared not
... he owned his cowardice. He let it go, closed his eyes and abandoned
himself to the sweetness of her caresses.
Once more time vanished and became an unreal thing. It seemed an
eternity before he opened his eyes again; but when he did so, lazily,
it was to see the black remorseless figures of the pursuers spread out
in a long crescent in the field below, half a mile away. Every muscle
in his body stiffened, he felt his lips curling back from his teeth
like those of a fighting animal, and he sat up abruptly and grasped his
pistol. They were coming quite close, and they were searching all the
hill-side with methodical care, advancing with regular and terrifying
deliberation. Perhaps they had been led thus far by foot-prints and
broken branches and rags left fluttering on the thorns, and now were
casting about for further signs.
Jeremy turned and again took Eva into his arms, and pressed his mouth
on hers. The kiss continued, seemed endless, was intolerably sweet
and bitter, a draught not like any he had ever known. Then he broke
away, saw with minute care to the readiness of his pistol, and bent
forward, watching intently the approaching Welshmen. Eva, sitting a
little behind him, again slipped her hand into his and held it with a
firm clasp which, though he could no longer see her, conveyed to him
all her sweetness and her love. Thus they waited without moving, they
did not know how long, while the trackers advanced, vanished in a fold
of the ground, began to emerge again. Then one of them uttered a harsh
piercing view-halloo, that echoed horribly through the empty fields
and sky; and in the next moment Jeremy felt Eva’s hand tighten on his
convulsively and then a weight behind it, dragging it back. He forgot
the enemy, forgot his resolution to kill as many as he could of these
hateful savages before he was himself destroyed. But when he swung
round the girl had fallen on her back, and was staring upwards, her
eyes and her lips quite peaceful, the pallor on her face no longer that
of fear and exhaustion, but now the serene and even pallor of death. In
her free hand lay open the little metal box which once she had taken
from her foolish waiting-maid; and it was empty.
Jeremy did not rave or cry out, but an immense weariness overcame
him, in which those who were approaching slipped altogether from
his thoughts. Was it for this, he wondered, staring vacantly at the
familiar English country around him, that he had come so far and done
and suffered so much? All were gone now, all were enveloped in a common
darkness, those friends of his earlier life and his new friends, the
old, vehement Speaker, poor Roger Vaile, and, last and dearest of them,
the Lady Eva, to find whom a century and a half asleep in the grave
had been a slight and welcome preparation. What was he doing here? The
Welsh were coming, the Welsh had sacked London, they had taken England
in their ravening jaws. He had a vision of the world sinking further
below the point from which in his youth he had seen it, still on a
level with him. Cities would be burnt, bridges broken down, tall towers
destroyed and all the wealth and learning of humanity would shiver to a
few shards and a little dust. The very place would be forgotten where
once had stood the houses that he knew; and the roads he had walked
with his friends would be as desolate and lonely as the Stane Street of
the Romans. Even all this story, his victory and his defeat, his joy
and his sorrow, would fade out of the memory of man. But what did it
all matter to Jeremy Tuft, who, wonder and portent that he was, strange
anachronism, unparalleled and reluctant ambassador from one age to the
next, had suffered in the end that common ill, the loss of his beloved?
He raised the pistol to his head and fired.
THE END
FOOTNOTE
[A] A phrase which gained currency in 1919 or earlier, and which was
formed on the analogy of P.B.I., used, to describe themselves, by the
infantry in the Great War.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.