David’s soft grey hat with house-colours on it was tilted over his eyes
to screen them from the sun, and he lay full length on the hot dry sand
above high-water mark on the beach at Naseby, stupefied and simmering
with content. His arms, bare to the elbow in rolled-up shirt sleeves,
were extended, and he kept filling his hands with sand and letting it
ooze out again through the interstices of his fingers in a pleasant,
tickling manner, hourglass fashion, though the action evoked in him
neither edifying nor melancholy reflection on the subject of the passing
of time. Beside him lay two coats and two bags of golf-clubs, for he and
Maddox, with whom he was staying, had just come back from a morning
round of golf, and had gone down to the shore to bathe before lunch.
They had tossed up as to which of them should go to fetch towels, and,
Maddox having lost, had just disappeared up the steep, crumbling path
that led to the top of the sand-cliffs, where was perched the house his
mother usually took for the summer holidays. A few hundred yards farther
north these cliffs broke into tumbled sand-dunes and stretches of short,
velvety turf, where greens nestled in Elysian valleys surrounded by
saharas.
Maddox would be absent some ten minutes, and David let his lazy thoughts
float down the stream of the very pleasant thinkings which made up his
extreme contentment. He did not direct them, but let them drift, going
swiftly here, eddying round there, while the memory-shores of the last
few months glided by. In the first place, and perhaps most important of
all, he was staying here with his friend—this was an eddy; he went
round and round in it. Though he had been here three days already,
passing them entirely with Maddox, playing golf with him, playing tennis
with him, bathing with him, and quite continuously talking to him, David
could not get used to this amazing situation. He called him “Frank” too,
just as if he was nobody in particular, and at the thought of it David
rolled over on to his side, wriggling, and said “Lord!”
It was but a little more than a year ago that he had been, in his own
phrase, “a scruggy little devil with stag-beetles,” capable, it is true,
of hero-worship, and able to recognise a hero when he saw him, for had
not his heart burned within him when, going up for his scholarship
examination, the demigod had thrown a careless word to him? It was quite
sufficient then that Maddox, the handsomest fellow in the world, the
best bat probably that Marchester had ever produced, and altogether the
most glorious of created beings, should have noticed him at all: indeed,
that was more than sufficient; it was sufficient that Maddox should
exist. And since then only a year had passed, and here he was calling
him Frank, and leaning on his arm when so disposed, and tossing him who
should get towels, and staying with his mother. Often she would say
something to him in French, unconscious which language she talked, and
Frank would answer in French, which seemed wonderfully romantic. Though
their ages were so diverse (for Frank was eighteen and David fifteen,
and three years, when the combined total is so small, make a vast
difference) here, staying with him, David hardly felt the gap. At school
it was otherwise, a hundred seasons sundered them, but here they were
equal. All difference was swallowed up in friendship, friendship even
swallowed up hero-worship sometimes.
David dwelled gluttonously on the steps that had led up to this. There
was that meeting at Baxminster, with the splendid adventure of the
second edition of Keats, and here he made an agitated excursion into the
fate of that. He and Margery had decided to sell it, and had got the
enormous sum of twelve (not ten) pounds for it. But the glory of that
had been abruptly extinguished, for their father had insisted that their
equal shares should be invested in the savings bank, to roll up at some
beggarly rate of interest, and do no good to anybody. Really, grown-up
people were beyond words. . . .
He dismissed this distressing topic and hitched on to Maddox again.
Public-school life began with his installation as fag, and there
hero-worship had soared like a flame day by day, until that afternoon
when, after playing squash with Bags in the rain, he had gone back to
the house for a bath. David had always avoided the thought of that; it
remained a moment quite sundered from the rest of his intercourse with
Frank, embarrassing, and to be forgotten, like the momentary opening of
a cupboard where nightmare dwelt. Anyhow, it had been locked again
instantly, and the key thrown away. Never a sound had again issued
therefrom.
Thereafter came a flood of jolly things to swim in. After the new
arrangement in Remove A, consequent on that monumental cribbing-row, he
had got into the lower fifth at Easter, and would, when he went back at
Michaelmas, find himself in the middle fifth. Frank had made him work
with intelligence and industry as well, though the distractions of the
summer-half had been frightfully alluring. For David was really coming
on as a wily left-hand bowler, and it had been extremely difficult to
give more than casual attention to the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar,
when his inmost mind was wrapped up in cricket. It was not hundreds of
overs, but thousands of them that David delivered in imagination when he
ought to have been crossing the Alps with Hannibal, or challenging
Medea’s strange use of the pluperfect when that infuriated lady was in
the act of stabbing her children. But he had got his remove, and a
satisfactory report of his work, so that there was peace and joy at
Baxminster, and his father sanguinely prophesied that he would go up
into a fresh form every term, as he himself had done.
Half-way through the summer-half had come the most intoxicating
possibility, namely, that he had a chance of getting his house-colours
for cricket, his very first year at school. This was a thing nearly
unheard of (though, of course, Maddox had done it), but he had been
tried in house-matches, and had done rather well. Then that hope had
gone to the grave, for when Maddox put up the list of the completed
house-eleven his name did not appear. But he had known that it was not
going to do so already, and the manner of its exclusion was, secretly to
him, almost a greater gratification than its appearance would have been.
That, too, lying on the hot sand, he turned greedily over in his mind,
licking the chops of memory.
It had happened thus. He had come one afternoon into Maddox’s study,
just before the final promotions were made, and Maddox opened the
subject.
“David, would you be fearfully sick if I didn’t give you your
house-colours?” he asked abruptly.
David had already allowed himself to hope for, even to expect them, and
the sunshine went out of life.
“I think I should,” he said. “Not that it matters a hang. . . . I say,
I’m going up town. Do you want anything?”
“No, thanks. But just wait a minute. Oh, don’t look like that!”
David’s face had taken an expression of the most Stygian gloom.
“Sorry,” he said. “Of course I was an ass to hope it.”
“No, you weren’t,” said Maddox. “But I’ve been bothering about it, and I
thought I’d talk to you. It’s like this: you and Ozzy have about equal
claim, and, if we weren’t such pals, I think I should toss up which of
you I gave colours to. But the house would think I was favouring you if
I put you in. There’s another thing, too; it’s Ozzy’s last year, and
your first. I don’t know that that matters so much; so, if you find
yourself left out, it’ll be because we’re pals. See?”
David moved a step nearer; the woe had gone from his face.
“Gosh, then, leave me out,” he said. “I—I prefer being left out, if
that’s it.”
“Really?” asked Maddox.
“Yes, rather, and—and thanks ever so much.”
There had been no need for more than these jerked telegraphic sentences,
but David went up town, treading on air, with a secret heavenly pride
that was certainly among the “rippingest feelings” he had ever had. He
congratulated Ozzy with complete sincerity. . . . And here was Frank
himself sliding down the crumbling sand-path with towels.
Frank threw a towel at him and knocked off his hat.
“Mother’s lunching out,” he said, “so we can bathe just as long as we
please without being late. Oh, and she said to me, ‘need you’—that’s
you—‘go away on Saturday?’ I said I’d ask you.”
David had no hesitation over this.
“No, of course I needn’t,” he said. “At least——”
“At least?” said Frank, emptying the sand out of his shoes.
“I mean, are you sure I’m not being a bore? I should love to stop, of
course. But won’t you and your mother get blasted sick of me?”
“Don’t think she will,” said Maddox gravely. “I shall rather, but it
doesn’t matter. In fact, I was wondering whether perhaps you’d mind
going on Friday instead of Saturday.”
David laughed.
“That’s a poor shot at getting a rise out of me,” he said. “Absolute
failure. I shan’t go away on Friday or Saturday.”
Frank just shrugged his shoulders, and stifled a yawn with dreadful
versimilitude. David gave him one short, anxious glance.
“And that wasn’t such a poor shot after all,” said Frank. “Just for a
second you wondered if I was in earnest.”
“No, I didn’t,” said David promptly.
“And that’s a lie,” said Frank.
David gave it up, and lay back on the sand again, beginning to unbutton.
“I know it is,” he said. “You yawned jolly well.”
Frank picked up a handful of the dry powdery sand and let it trickle
gently into the gap of shin that showed between the end of David’s
trousers, and the beginning of his sock. This caused him to spring up.
“Lord, what’s that?” he said. “Oh, I see. Funny; I thought it was a bug
of sorts.”
“Well, if you will grow so that your trousers only reach half-way down
your legs, what else is to be done with the intervals?” asked Frank.
“I grew two inches last half,” said David. “I shall be taller than you
before I’ve done.”
“Very likely. You will be the image of a piece of asparagus, if you like
that. And certainly, if you grow up to the size of your feet, you’ll be
big enough. I shall call you Spondee.”
David’s shirt was half over his head, but he paused and spoke muffled.
“Because why?” he asked.
“Because a spondee is two long feet.”
David gave a great splutter of laughter, as his shirt came off.
“Oh, quite funny,” he said. “Wish I had guessed. Jove, doesn’t the sea
look good? I’m glad it was made, and—and that I didn’t die in the
night. You didn’t bring down anything to eat, did you? Isn’t it bad to
bathe on an empty tummy? Or is it a full one?”
“Don’t know. I’m going to bathe on my own, anyhow. David, there’s a
sharp line round your neck, where your clothes begin, when you’ve got
any, as if you’d painted your neck with the sprain-stuff, Iodine.”
“I did,” said David fatuously, standing nude. “Come on; the ripping old
sea’s waiting for us.”
* * * * *
The tide was high and the beach steep, so that a few steps across the
belt of sand all a-tremble in the heat, and a few strokes into the cool,
tingling water, were sufficient to snatch them away from all solid
things, and give them the buoyancy of liquid existences. The sea slept
in the windlessness of this August weather, and, as if with long-taken
breaths, a silence and alternate whisper of ripple broke along its rims.
Far out a fleet of herring-boats with drooping sails hovered like
grey-winged gulls; above, an unclouded sun shone on the shining watery
plains, and on the two wet heads, one black, one yellow, that moved out
seawards with side-stroke flashings of white arms clawing the sea, amid
a smother of foam. Farther and farther they moved out, till at last
David rolled over in the water, and floated on his back.
“Oh, ripping,” he said. “Good old mother sea!”
Frank turned over also and lay alongside.
“It’s like something I read yesterday,” he said. “‘As the heart of
us—oh, something and something—athirst for the foam.’ I seem to
remember it well, don’t I?”
“Yes. What is it, anyhow? Who did it?”
“Fellow called Swinburne. Good man is Swinburne, at times. Lord, you can
lie down on the sea like a sofa, if you get your balance right. Oh, dear
me, yes; Swinburne knows a trick or two. For instance, ‘when the hounds
of spring are on winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow and
plain fills the shadows and windy places with lisp of leaves and ripple
of rain. And the bright brown nightingale’—oh, how does it go?”
He lay with head a-wash, and eyes half closed against the glare, and the
spell of the magical words framed itself more distinctly in his mind.
“O listen, David,” he said. “Drink it in!”
“‘For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins,
The day dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins:
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’”
David would have appreciated this in any case, but never had any poem so
romantic a setting as when Frank repeated it to him here, as they lay
side by side right out away from land, away from anything but each other
and this liquid Paradise of living water.
“Oh-oh,” he said rapturously. “And what’s the name of it? Go on,
though.”
Frank thought a moment.
“Can’t remember the next verse,” he said. “But it’s ‘Atalanta in
Calydon.’”
“Oh, she’s the chap that went out hunting with her maidens,” said David
confidently.
“She is. Look out, there’s a jelly-fish. All right, it’s floating by. I
say, the water’s as warm as—as—I don’t know.”
“I think you’re babbling,” said David. “Go on about Atalanta. Did she
have good sport?”
Maddox laughed, forgetting that he was balanced in a briny sea, and
swallowed a large quantity of it.
“What’s the row?” asked David. “What did I say?”
Maddox ejected as much of the water as was accessible.
“Oh, you are such a kid,” he said, “and I keep forgetting it.”
David kicked himself into a perpendicular position and trod water.
“Well, I’m getting older as quick as I can,” he said in self-defence.
“Blast! I wish it could go on for ever.”
“What?”
“As if you didn’t know! Being in the sea, and being with you, and being
alive, and so on.”
“Same here,” said Frank. “Lord, but I wish I could _be_ the sea as
well.”
“Rather jam. But I don’t think I’d allow everybody to bathe in me,” said
David. “Dogs, yes, and some people, not all. Or should we charge a
shilling, and let anybody?”
Maddox pushed himself upright in the water.
“’Fraid we ought to come out,” he said. “It must be latish. I’ll race
you to shore.”
“Right oh. Give me twenty yards start.”
“Measure them very carefully,” said Frank.
“Well, twenty strokes then,” said the wily David, shoving from Frank’s
shoulder to get a movement on, and then, taking very long, slow strokes,
letting his impetus exhaust itself.
“Now,” he said.
Both boys swam with the overhand side-stroke, breathing whenever their
heads happened to be above water, and ploughed landwards with waves of
bubble and broken water behind them. Frank overtook the other in the
last thrilling ten yards, won by the length of an arm and a head, and
panting, but still cool, they lay for a little in the shallow water, and
then reluctantly went up over the beach to where their clothes lay.
There the hot sun soon rendered superfluous the towels Frank had been at
pains to fetch, and presently after they laboured up the sandy path to
the house, slack and hungry and content, with the half of the wonderful
day still in front of them. Once on the upward ascent David paused, his
mind going back to the magic of words.
“O-o-oh,” he said again rapturously. “‘Blossom by blossom the spring
begins.’ I shall read some more of that after lunch.”
Lunch took a considerable time, for David’s appetite, like his bones and
muscles, seemed but to grow larger with the food he ate, and it was not
till he had taken Frank’s evil advice and drunk a second bottle of
ginger-beer that he declared himself able to turn his attention to
literature again. They were going to play golf once more in half an
hour, and David staggered out on to the lawn to lie on the shady
terrace-bank for a short spell of Swinburne, which Frank went to fetch
from his bedroom. Letters had arrived during lunch, and he found one for
himself and one for David, which with Swinburne and the daily paper that
would contain one important matter, namely, the result of the county
match between Sussex and Surrey, he took out with him.
“There’s a letter for you,” he said, “and there’s Swinburne and the
_Daily Telegraph_. What order of merit?”
“Oh, _Telegraph_ first,” said David. “I bet you that Surrey—oh, this
letter’s from Margery. Might just see what’s going on. I say, I know
exactly how a balloon feels. But it was jolly good ginger-beer.”
Frank flopped down on the bank by him, and began opening his letter.
“What else do you expect,” he said, “if you inflate yourself with gas,
as you did at lunch?”
“Don’t expect anything else,” said David thickly. “And it was you who
suggested it. I think I must see what happened in the match first.”
“Well, let’s have a look too, you selfish devil,” said Maddox, putting
down his half-opened letter. “Can’t you turn over, and put the paper on
the grass here, so that we can read it together?”
“Lord, no,” said David. “At least it’d be a risk. But I can sit up if I
do it slowly.”
Sussex, which had the good fortune to be David’s county, and for which
he felt rather responsible, had done him credit on this occasion, and
had won by half a dozen wickets. The rest of the paper did not seem to
contain anything that mattered, and, throwing it aside, he and Frank
began on their letters. Margery’s was quite short, though good of its
kind, and, having finished it, David looked up, and saw that Frank was
reading his, and that there was trouble in his face.
“Oh, I say, is anything wrong?” he asked.
Frank did not reply at once.
“I’ve heard from Adams,” he said at length. “There’s been a row. Some
letter has been found, and Hughes isn’t to be allowed to come back in
September.”
“Why? What sort of letter?” asked David.
Then, as Frank was still silent:
“Oh, something beastly, is it?” he asked. “What an ass Hughes is! He was
such a nice chap, too, at my other school.”
Frank had finished reading, and was looking out over the Surrey garden,
biting his lip.
“I say, Frank, what’s wrong with you?” said David.
Frank gave Adams’s letter to him.
“Read it,” he said.
David took it. It spoke of the letter written by Hughes to a boy in the
house, a letter disgusting and conclusive. . . . Then it spoke of the
disgrace Hughes had brought on himself, and the misery he had brought on
his father and mother. He read it and gave it back to Frank.
“Well, I’m awfully sorry, just as you are,” he said; “but if fellows
will be brutes——Old Adams seems no end cut up about it. But somehow,
I’d ceased to be pals with Hughes. Where’s the Swinburne?”
But still Frank did not answer, and David knitted puzzled brows.
“What’s up?” he said.
Maddox turned over on to his back, and tilted his hat over his eyes till
his face was invisible.
“I might have been Hughes,” he said.
Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came into his
mind.
“Oh, rot,” he said lamely, hating the subject.
Maddox was silent a moment.
“’Tisn’t quite rot,” he said. “But then there came a thing, which I dare
say you’ve forgotten, only I haven’t. You came in from playing squash
one wet afternoon, and you and your innocence made me suddenly see what
a beast I was.”
David could not help giving a little shudder, but the moment after he
was ashamed of it.
“I don’t care what you were like before,” he said. “But what I’m
perfectly sure of is that since then—I remember it very well—you’ve
been all right.”
“Yes.”
“There you are, then!” said David.
Frank was still lying with his hat over his face, but now he pushed it
back and looked at David.
“It’s all serene for you,” he said, “because you’ve always been a
straight chap. But it’s different for me. I feel just rotten.”
David scratched his head in some perplexity. The whole matter was vague
and repugnant to him, and he did not want to hear more or know more.
There were such heaps of jolly proper things in the world to be
interested in and curious about. But he understood without any vagueness
at all and with the very opposite of repulsion, that his friend was in
trouble, and that he wanted sympathy with that. So the whole of his
devoted little heart went out there. It was bad trouble, too, the worst
trouble a fellow could have.
“It must be perfectly beastly for you,” he said, “and I’m as sorry as I
can be. But you’re sorry yourself, and what more can a chap do? If you
weren’t sorry it would be different. There’s another thing too, to set
against what you’ve done, and that’s how you’ve behaved to me. You’ve
been an absolute brick to me. You’ve kept that sort of filth away from
me: I know you have.”
David paused for a moment. This morning alone on the hot beach his mind
had dwelt long and eagerly on this wonderful friendship, and now, just
when it was the very thing that was wanted to comfort Frank, this aspect
of it struck him. He remembered how often Frank had, by a seemingly
chance word, discouraged him from seeing much of certain fellows in the
house; he remembered the night when Hughes came and sat on his bed, and
with what extraordinary promptitude Frank had ejected him; he remembered
how his dormitory had been changed, and he had been put in Frank’s, and
had since then slept in the bed next him. All this with swift certainty
started into his mind, and with it the policy that lay behind it. Frank
had consistently kept nasty things away from him; here was his
atonement.
So he went on eagerly.
“I know what you’ve done for me,” he said. “You’ve always—since
then—had an eye on me, and kept filth away. I’m no end grateful. And
since you’ve done that, chalk it up on the other side. You’ve made it
easier for me to be decent. Oh, damn, I’m jawing.”
David suddenly became aware of this, and stopped abruptly, rolling over
on to his side, with his face to his friend.
“Haven’t you been doing that on purpose?” he demanded. “I could give you
heaps of instances.”
“Well, yes.”
“Then let’s chuck the whole subject,” said David.
“In a moment, I just want to tell you: I tried, instead of corrupting
you, to uncorrupt myself. But you did it; it was all your doing. You
made me ashamed.”
David gave a shy little wriggle towards him.
“I never heard of anything so ripping,” he said. “Though it sounds
rather cheek.”
Maddox sat up.
“That’s what you’ve done,” he said. “And if it was cheeky, the other
name of that is salvation.”
There was silence a moment, and probably David had never known such
intense happiness as he tasted then. And, just because he was feeling so
deeply, the idea of anything approaching sentiment was impossible. It
had been said, and the harvest was garnered.
Frank felt that, too; they could not feel differently from each other
just then, and away went the whole subject, a mountain a few minutes
ago, and now light as thistledown on a summer wind.
“It’s done,” he said. “Oh, what was the other thing we brought out?
‘Atalanta in Calydon,’ wasn’t it? First chorus.”
“Yes, that would be ripping,” said David. “At the same time it’s just
struck three, and we were to play golf at three.”
“Jove, so we were! How you must have jawed!”
For one second David was not quite certain whether Frank was trying to
get a rise out of him or not, with such naturalness did he speak.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m afraid I did.”
Frank laughed.
“David, it’s no sport trying to get a rise out of you,” he said. “You
simply rise at anything. I really didn’t think you’d rise at that.”
“Oh, all right,” said David; “then it was a nice surprise for you. Come
on. If you’ll give me a stroke hole, I’ll—I’ll probably get beaten,” he
added, in a sudden accession of modesty most unusual. “I say, what a
ripping day it’s being.”
“’Tain’t bad. And you’re not such a bad little devil.”
This bordered on past conversation again, and he hastened away from it.
“Go and get our clubs, David,” he said. “I lost the toss about the
towels this morning.”
“That’s not fair,” said David. “We tossed this morning, and that’s
finished. We’ll toss again. Heads!”
“Well, then, it isn’t. It’s tails. But I’ll go if you like!”
It was still very hot, and the links, although the usual August crowd
was at Naseby, were nearly deserted, since it seemed to most of the
world to be the better part of wisdom to sit quiet till the heat had a
little abated, and resume activities again after tea. The two boys,
therefore, had an empty green before them, and since finance in both
their cases happened to be precarious, and there was no need to keep
their places on the green, they took no caddies. On the right along the
first hole lay the sea, shimmering and still, so near that it was easily
possible (to say the least of it) to slice a ball on to the beach, and
in front lay the fairway of the course, stretches of velvet grass,
interrupted by tossing seas of sand-dunes, fringed and bearded with
coarse bents, while a flag planted thereon showed where lay the
direction of the desired haven. Then came trudges through sandy places,
with breathless suspense to see whether the balls had carried the last
of the bunkers and in other cases the equally vivid conviction that they
had done nothing of the sort, and would be found nestling in little,
steep, bare hollows and be-devilled hiding-places. David, in especial,
found himself frequently in amazing and awful places, of which Satan had
certainly been the architect.
But, in spite of the intimate nature of all that had passed between the
two so few minutes before, their unbroken solitude together did not
produce in either of them the least wish to re-open the subject. It had
been closed; a door had been triumphantly slammed on it, so that even if
golf had not been so absorbing, they would neither of them have
mentioned it again. And yet, deep down in each, and unknown to them, all
that had passed had taken root, and was silently germinating, making
fibre in their unconscious minds, building up the stem on which
character bursts into blossom. Many words were consciously spoken, and
many thoughts thought, and all the words and all the thoughts did not
stray beyond the fortunes of the little white india-rubber balls.
At Marchester golf was a recognised school game, played on their own
links, for the two winter halves, when it did not interfere with
cricket, and Frank—it was just like him, so thought David—had become a
fine player with really no trouble at all. He had only played for two
years, but at school he was a scratch player, and here at Naseby had
just won a medal prize, starting from four. He confessed that it had
come easy to him (everything seemed to), and to David’s observant eye he
did not seem to do anything particular that caused him not to top one
drive, and send the next spouting in the air like a geyser. When it came
to approaching, it was with the same supple ease that he flicked the
ball high with a little fid of turf flying after it. It all appeared so
perfectly simple: you merely hit the ball with the middle of the club.
At times, if you were playing against him, the thing became almost
monotonous.
Whatever could be said about David’s play, it could not be called
monotonous. He gave an excellent example of his methods this afternoon
at the third hole, slicing far and gorgeously from the tee out on to the
sand. There had been no interest in Frank’s drive; it had merely gone
straight, and a very long way, and so he came with David to walk up his
ball, which was found to be lying fairly well.
“Silly ass,” he said to him as David took out an iron and prepared to
play with it. “Take your niblick and make certain of getting back on to
grass.”
“But I could get on to the green with an iron, if I hit it,” said David
excitedly, “and then I should be there in two, and you can’t get them in
less than two, and I’ve got a stroke and should win the hole off you, if
I putted my first near it.”
“Right oh,” said Frank. “Never mind the ‘ifs.’”
“Not an atom!” said David.
The ball was not lying so very badly, and there was really a certain
excuse for David. So he took his iron and hit the ball rather firmly on
the head. It went about fifteen yards in an injured manner, and settled
itself in the moat of what had been a child’s sand-castle.
“And it’ll take the deuce of a putt to get near the hole from there,”
remarked Frank.
David, as always, took his game very seriously, and for a moment felt
merely wild with rage, impotent, ineffective rage. Nobody cared.
“Hell——” he began.
Then his admirable temper asserted itself before he settled what hell
was going to do.
“Oh dear, you’re always right, Frank,” he said. “Niblick it is, and I
wish it had been before. Now I’m going to take trouble.”
He shifted with his feet in the loose sand, as Frank had told him to do,
till he got a firm stance. Then (which Frank had never told him to do)
he took the most prodigious wipe at his ball and shut his eyes as the
sand fell in showers round him.
“Didn’t see it!” he said. “What happened?”
Somehow or other he had hit the ball clean and hard and perfectly
straight for the green. It wasn’t a niblick shot at all; nobody, David
least of all, knew how it had happened.
“Well, of all the almighty flukes,” said Frank. “Probably on the green.”
David bubbled with laughter.
“Oh, I say, what sport!” he said. “Now I know how to play golf. If you
lie rather badly, take an iron and make it worse. Then take a niblick
and hit it home.”
They went back to the course to walk up Frank’s ball. It was lying
impeccably twenty yards short of the shored-up bunker that guarded the
green. And for once he was not monotonous; he chipped at it with a lot
of back-spin, and it bounced against the boards of the bunker and fell
at their feet. Thereafter he played racquets against the boards. Then he
gave it up, and David, the reckless and unreasonable, was lying just a
foot beyond the bunkers.
In such wise the hot, heavenly afternoon went by. Dreadful and
delightful things happened. Frank, after long consideration as to
whether he could get over the brook with a drive at the tenth hole,
decided to play short with a cleek, and pitched full into it. David,
with two strokes in hand, putted four times at the eleventh before he
got down, and, both of them trying to carry the far bunker at the
thirteenth, topped into the near one instead. But there were delightful
incidents to balance these distressing ones: Frank holed a mashie shot
at the sixteenth, and at the next David ran through two (not one)
bunkers off a topped drive, and a third with his second shot. But, deep
down below, the basis of their enjoyment was their friendship, and
neither thought how easily that priceless possession might have
foundered and been lost in quagmires. . . .
Frank won: a wholly loathsome putt on the last green, which went into
the hole not by the honest front-door, nor even with a kick at the
honest back door, but with a stealthy, sideway entrance, after circling
round the hole, decided the match.
“Oh, good putt,” said David politely, and instantly the politeness broke
down. “Gosh, what a fluke!” he added.
“Rot! I tried to hole it, and did,” said Frank.
“Well, I said ‘good putt’ once,” said David. “And I can’t say it again.
Simply can’t.”
After tea at the club-house, it seemed a necessity to play again, and
this time, regardless of financial stringency, Frank treated David to a
caddy, and they went forth with pomp, now playing seawards into the hazy
east, now westwards into the blaze of the declining sun, absorbed in
their game and yet absorbed in their friendship of boy-love, hot as fire
and clean as the trickle of ice-water on a glacier. The knowledge of
their talk had made Frank able to turn himself away from all the bad
business of Adams’s letter, and instead of brooding on the irremediable
worst of himself, he took hold of all that was best. And by his side was
David, the friend of friends, now with his arm linked in his, now
excitedly addressing a cupped ball with his largest driver, now
brilliantly slicing among untrodden sand-hills, now dancing with
exultation at the success of a shot that was wholly beyond expectation,
now half whispering to him, “Oh, it’s the rippingest day.”
Then followed lawn-tennis, till it was so dark that the ball could
hardly be seen at all, and in consequence David, standing at the net,
got hit full on the end of his nose, which bled with extraordinary
profusion. Indeed, had murder been committed that night at Naseby, as
Frank said, when they went down for a hurried dip before dressing for
dinner, it would have required no Sherlock Holmes to draw the certain
but quite erroneous conclusion that the deed had been done in David’s
bedroom, and the body carried down to the beach afterwards with the idea
of its being taken away and out by the ebbing tide and the seaward
current. A slop-pail with blood-stained water (analysed by Professor
Pepper and found to be Mammalian) would be discovered in his bedroom,
and at intervals down the path to the beach, further traces of the same
incriminating gore.
The cool sea-water put an end to David’s bleeding, and as he dressed he
began to feel delightfully uncomfortable (as in the attics of
Baxminster) so grimly and gravely did Frank reconstruct the history of
the crime with fearful imaginative details thrown in. A little way from
them on the beach was something vague and black and humped up, and Frank
suddenly pointed at it.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked David in a whisper.
“That black thing? No. What?”
“It’s the body,” said Frank.
Of course this was all nonsense, but David peered at it through the
gloom, and Frank suddenly gave a deep and hollow groan, which startled
him quite awfully.
“It wasn’t utterly dead,” he explained. “It tried to call for help, but
it couldn’t call loud, as its throat was cut from ear to ear. But it
just groaned. The body was that of a boy of fifteen, tall for his age,
David, and well nourished.”
David could not help it; he had to run in his bare feet to where the
supposed corpse lay, kicked it, and came back.
“Only seaweed,” he said. “Now the murderer did it in my room, you say, I
mean he cut the well-nourished boy’s throat there, and then carried it
down to the beach. That won’t do. There are only quite a few drops of
blood on the way down. If its throat had been cut from ear to ear,
there’d be more blood.”
“Not at all,” said Frank. “The murderer held the two edges of the wound
together—no, he’d want both hands to carry the body—he pinned the
edges of the wound together with—with safety pins, so that it only just
leaked. He carried it down to the beach like that, and then took out the
pins, because he had a saving disposition, and this let the boy bleed to
death. As I said, he thought the tide would carry it away, but it
didn’t, and it was found there next morning. Lobsters had got at it
though, and howked pieces out of it. There’s lobster for dinner
to-night. Then the police traced the bloodstains to your bedroom, and
found the slop-pail, and you were kept in prison till you were sixteen,
and then hung at Norwich.”
“And what did he—I—I don’t know which I am, the corpse or the
murderer——”
“You’re both,” said Frank. “The pins? They were put back in the
pin-cushion on your dressing-table, where I saw them just now. There
were stains on them that looked like rust. But they weren’t rust, they
were——”
“They were blood,” said David. “Mammalian.”
Frank looked hastily round for more material for horror, and saw a
fisherman coming down the steep path just behind them carrying two
lobster-pots. This was luck, for David had not seen him, being employed
in putting his shoes on. Frank went on without pause.
“After that the beach at Naseby,” he said, “was not a place where
prudent people cared to be after sunset, especially during the month of
August, and particularly on—on August the tenth, which was the exact
day when the murder was committed. Prudent people avoided it, for there
was no doubt it was haunted. A figure was often seen coming down that
steep path just behind us, carrying a ghastly burden.”
David looked quickly round with the intention of reassuring himself that
there was no one there. That was a dreadful mistake. There was. Frank,
after his one glance at the figure, had not looked at the path again.
“Good Lord,” said David in a whisper. “There’s something coming down it
now. It’s coming straight towards us!”
Then he saw more distinctly, and gave a great cackle of laughter.
“Oh-oh-oh, it’s only a fisherman with lobster-pots,” he said. “But you
did give me such a turn. You said that awfully well. When I looked round
and saw that old buffer coming down I could have screamed. I say, do
lobsters really eat deaders?”
“Whenever they can get them. There are a good many about now, too. The
cook told me that the one we’re going to have for dinner to-night had a
man’s finger in its claws when they brought it up to the house. The best
ones——”
“Oh, dry up,” shouted David. “You’ve a foul mind.”
Frank laughed.
“Oh, you kid!”
Nor was the immortal day over yet. The man-eating lobster was in turn
eaten by man, and after dinner Frank read to his mother and David the
neglected “Atalanta,” after which they played ridiculous games till
bedtime. Frank’s room and David’s communicated with each other, and, as
they undressed, further details and embellishments of horror were added
to the murder story, through the open door. But to one of Frank’s most
gruesome inventions there had been no response, and, looking in, he saw
that David was kneeling by his bed. And at that he went back to his room
again.
The silence was not of long duration, and in a moment David called to
him.
“What was that last, Frank?” he said. “It sounded jolly beastly, but I
wasn’t attending.”
Frank repeated it, and David squealed as he drew his bed-clothes up to
his chin.
“I think that’s enough,” he said. “I shall have gory nightmares. Oh,
hasn’t it been a jolly day?”
“Ripping. Good night, David.”
“Good night. What a pity it can’t be this morning again.”
Frank lay long awake that night. Before he slept he slid out of bed and
followed David’s example.