What Mr. Merritt Found
Mr. Merritt began to pick up his health and spirits a good deal. For
the first morning or two of his stay at the doctor’s he contented
himself with a very comfortable deck chair close to the house, where he
sat under the shade of an old mulberry tree beside his wife and watched
the bright sunshine on the green lawns, on the creamy crests of the
waves, on the headlands of that glorious coast, purple even from afar
with the imperial glow of the heather, on the white farmhouses gleaming
in the sunlight, high over the sea, far from any turmoil, from any
troubling of men.
The sun was hot, but the wind breathed all the while gently,
incessantly, from the east, and Merritt, who had come to this quiet
place, not only from dismay, but from the stifling and oily airs of the
smoky Midland town, said that that east wind, pure and clear and like
well water from the rock, was new life to him. He ate a capital dinner,
at the end of his first day at Porth and took rosy views. As to what
they had been talking about the night before, he said to Lewis, no
doubt there must be trouble of some sort, and perhaps bad trouble;
still, Kitchener would soon put it all right.
So things went on very well. Merritt began to stroll about the garden,
which was full of the comfortable spaces, groves, and surprises that
only country gardens know. To the right of one of the terraces he found
an arbor or summer-house covered with white roses, and he was as
pleased as if he had discovered the Pole. He spent a whole day there,
smoking and lounging and reading a rubbishy sensational story, and
declared that the Devonshire roses had taken many years off his age.
Then on the other side of the garden there was a filbert grove that he
had never explored on any of his former visits; and again there was a
find. Deep in the shadow of the filberts was a bubbling well, issuing
from rocks, and all manner of green, dewy ferns growing about it and
above it, and an angelica springing beside it. Merritt knelt on his
knees, and hollowed his hand and drank the well water. He said (over
his port) that night that if all water were like the water of the
filbert well the world would turn to teetotalism. It takes a townsman
to relish the manifold and exquisite joys of the country.
It was not till he began to venture abroad that Merritt found that
something was lacking of the old rich peace that used to dwell in
Meirion. He had a favorite walk which he never neglected, year after
year. This walk led along the cliffs towards Meiros, and then one could
turn inland and return to Porth by deep winding lanes that went over
the Allt. So Merritt set out early one morning and got as far as a
sentry-box at the foot of the path that led up to the cliff. There was
a sentry pacing up and down in front of the box, and he called on
Merritt to produce his pass, or to turn back to the main road. Merritt
was a good deal put out, and asked the doctor about this strict guard.
And the doctor was surprised.
“I didn’t know they had put their bar up there,” he said. “I suppose
it’s wise. We are certainly in the far West here; still, the Germans
might slip round and raid us and do a lot of damage just because
Meirion is the last place we should expect them to go for.”
“But there are no fortifications, surely, on the cliff?”
“Oh, no; I never heard of anything of the kind there.”
“Well, what’s the point of forbidding the public to go on the cliff,
then? I can quite understand putting a sentry on the top to keep a
look-out for the enemy. What I don’t understand is a sentry at the
bottom who can’t keep a look-out for anything, as he can’t see the sea.
And why warn the public off the cliffs? I couldn’t facilitate a German
landing by standing on Pengareg, even if I wanted to.”
“It is curious,” the doctor agreed. “Some military reasons, I suppose.”
He let the matter drop, perhaps because the matter did not affect him.
People who live in the country all the year round, country doctors
certainly, are little given to desultory walking in search of the
picturesque.
Lewis had no suspicion that sentries whose object was equally obscure
were being dotted all over the country. There was a sentry, for
example, by the quarry at Llanfihangel, where the dead woman and the
dead sheep had been found some weeks before. The path by the quarry was
used a good deal, and its closing would have inconvenienced the people
of the neighborhood very considerably. But the sentry had his box by
the side of the track and had his orders to keep everybody strictly to
the path, as if the quarry were a secret fort.
It was not known till a month or two ago that one of these sentries was
himself a victim of the terror. The men on duty at this place were
given certain very strict orders, which from the nature of the case,
must have seemed to them unreasonable. For old soldiers, orders are
orders; but here was a young bank clerk, scarcely in training for a
couple of months, who had not begun to appreciate the necessity of
hard, literal obedience to an order which seemed to him meaningless. He
found himself on a remote and lonely hillside, he had not the faintest
notion that his every movement was watched; and he disobeyed a certain
instruction that had been given him. The post was found deserted by the
relief; the sentry’s dead body was found at the bottom of the quarry.
This by the way; but Mr. Merritt discovered again and again that things
happened to hamper his walks and his wanderings. Two or three miles
from Porth there is a great marsh made by the Afon river before it
falls into the sea, and here Merritt had been accustomed to botanize
mildly. He had learned pretty accurately the causeways of solid ground
that lead through the sea of swamp and ooze and soft yielding soil, and
he set out one hot afternoon determined to make a thorough exploration
of the marsh, and this time to find that rare Bog Bean, that he felt
sure, must grow somewhere in its wide extent.
He got into the by-road that skirts the marsh, and to the gate which he
had always used for entrance.
There was the scene as he had known it always, the rich growth of reeds
and flags and rushes, the mild black cattle grazing on the “islands” of
firm turf, the scented procession of the meadowsweet, the royal glory
of the loosestrife, flaming pennons, crimson and golden, of the giant
dock.
But they were bringing out a dead man’s body through the gate.
A laboring man was holding open the gate on the marsh. Merritt,
horrified, spoke to him and asked who it was, and how it had happened.
“They do say he was a visitor at Porth. Somehow he has been drowned in
the marsh, whatever.”
“But it’s perfectly safe. I’ve been all over it a dozen times.”
“Well, indeed, we did always think so. If you did slip by accident,
like, and fall into the water, it was not so deep; it was easy enough
to climb out again. And this gentleman was quite young, to look at him,
poor man; and he has come to Meirion for his pleasure and holiday and
found his death in it!”
“Did he do it on purpose? Is it suicide?”
“They say he had no reasons to do that.”
Here the sergeant of police in charge of the party interposed,
according to orders, which he himself did not understand.
“A terrible thing, sir, to be sure, and a sad pity; and I am sure this
is not the sort of sight you have come to see down in Meirion this
beautiful summer. So don’t you think, sir, that it would be more
pleasant like, if you would leave us to this sad business of ours? I
have heard many gentlemen staying in Porth say that there is nothing to
beat the view from the hill over there, not in the whole of Wales.”
Every one is polite in Meirion, but somehow Merritt understood that, in
English, this speech meant “move on.”
Merritt moved back to Porth—he was not in the humor for any idle,
pleasurable strolling after so dreadful a meeting with death. He made
some inquiries in the town about the dead man, but nothing seemed known
of him. It was said that he had been on his honeymoon, that he had been
staying at the Porth Castle Hotel; but the people of the hotel declared
that they had never heard of such a person. Merritt got the local paper
at the end of the week; there was not a word in it of any fatal
accident in the marsh. He met the sergeant of police in the street.
That officer touched his helmet with the utmost politeness and a “hope
you are enjoying yourself, sir; indeed you do look a lot better
already”; but as to the poor man who was found drowned or stifled in
the marsh, he knew nothing.
The next day Merritt made up his mind to go to the marsh to see whether
he could find anything to account for so strange a death. What he found
was a man with an armlet standing by the gate. The armlet had the
letters “C.W.” on it, which are understood to mean Coast Watcher. The
Watcher said he had strict instructions to keep everybody away from the
marsh. Why? He didn’t know, but some said that the river was changing
its course since the new railway embankment was built, and the marsh
had become dangerous to people who didn’t know it thoroughly.
“Indeed, sir,” he added, “it is part of my orders not to set foot on
the other side of that gate myself, not for one scrag-end of a minute.”
Merritt glanced over the gate incredulously. The marsh looked as it had
always looked; there was plenty of sound, hard ground to walk on; he
could see the track that he used to follow as firm as ever. He did not
believe in the story of the changing course of the river, and Lewis
said he had never heard of anything of the kind. But Merritt had put
the question in the middle of general conversation; he had not led up
to it from any discussion of the death in the marsh, and so the doctor
was taken unawares. If he had known of the connection in Merritt’s mind
between the alleged changing of the Afon’s course and the tragical
event in the marsh, no doubt he would have confirmed the official
explanation. He was, above all things, anxious to prevent his sister
and her husband from finding out that the invisible hand of terror that
ruled at Midlingham was ruling also in Meirion.
Lewis himself had little doubt that the man who was found dead in the
marsh had been struck down by the secret agency, whatever it was, that
had already accomplished so much of evil; but it was a chief part of
the terror that no one knew for certain that this or that particular
event was to be ascribed to it. People do occasionally fall over cliffs
through their own carelessness, and as the case of Garcia, the Spanish
sailor, showed, cottagers and their wives and children are now and then
the victims of savage and purposeless violence. Lewis had never
wandered about the marsh himself; but Remnant had pottered round it and
about it, and declared that the man who met his death there—his name
was never known, in Porth at all events—must either have committed
suicide by deliberately lying prone in the ooze and stifling himself,
or else must have been held down in it. There were no details
available, so it was clear that the authorities had classified this
death with the others; still, the man might have committed suicide, or
he might have had a sudden seizure and fallen in the slimy water
face-downwards. And so on: it was possible to believe that case A _or_
B _or_ C was in the category of ordinary accidents or ordinary crimes.
But it was not possible to believe that A _and_ B _and_ C were all in
that category. And thus it was to the end, and thus it is now. We know
that the terror reigned, and how it reigned, but there were many
dreadful events ascribed to its rule about which there must always be
room for doubt.
For example, there was the case of the _Mary Ann_, the rowing-boat
which came to grief in so strange a manner, almost under Merritt’s
eyes. In my opinion he was quite wrong in associating the sorry fate of
the boat and her occupants with a system of signaling by flashlights
which he detected or thought that he detected, on the afternoon in
which the _Mary Ann_ was capsized. I believe his signaling theory to be
all nonsense, in spite of the naturalized German governess who was
lodging with her employers in the suspected house. But, on the other
hand, there is no doubt in my own mind that the boat was overturned and
those in it drowned by the work of the terror.