shoulder as I went. A coquettish, prancing effect it must have given me!
At the gate I turned squarely and looked up at the house. One of the
candles guttered out, and she must have heard the faint sputter of it,
for she turned from the wind and the night and rushed back into the
room, slamming the door. Mingled with the crash of the closing door I
heard an angry scream--not like other screams. The singular volume of
her voice, quite uncontrolled by mind or sense, lent it a quality that
I can never describe. Evidently her mad logic saw in the four
candle-flames some desperate symbol. I stepped down into the road, and
almost immediately I heard a clatter of breaking glass, as if she had
mistaken a window for the door. I did not wait to hear more, but broke
across the road into the orchard opposite, where I could neither be seen
nor divined. Behind a twisted apple-tree, long past bearing, I listened;
but at the end of five minutes all was still silent, except for the
steady choral chanting of the wind.
I reconnoitred carefully with my flashlight, taking good care to
interpose my body constantly between the little spot of illumination and
the road. I had no desire to make any further attempt at demanding
shelter, though my watch, which I drew out gingerly, showed me it was
scarcely past ten o’clock. I asked only to live out the hours between
then and daylight with no human interruption. My cautious search
revealed to me a little cave ahead of me in the hillside--the entrance
shored up with stones, after the troglodyte fashion of the countryside.
Very slowly I made my way to it. A vegetable-cellar was not the retreat
I should have chosen, but the broken and gaping door suggested that it
was no longer used--that at least it was not likely to be occupied. It
was a loathsome hole, I found, when I got in. My battery ran down at
that moment, and I was reduced to striking more matches. Their little
flicker made almost no impression on the stenchy blackness of the place,
but by dint of feeling the entire circumference of the walls with a firm
hand, I assured myself of its proportions and its emptiness. A rough
trough was half-filled with rotten sacking, and across the hard earth
floor something brilliant and green writhed in a hundred convolutions.
I started--it was so rankly serpentine in that wavering
match-flare--but it was only a potato-vine grossly intent on surviving.
My chief comfort in being reduced to this shelter was that it had
obviously long been out of use. “If she wants potatoes in the middle of
the night, she won’t come here for them,” I found myself gravely
whispering. I pulled to the rotten door--there was, of course, no inside
fastening, and I could only wedge it with sacking in a makeshift
fashion, against the wind. The gaps in the boards were many, however,
and I withdrew into a corner of the cellar to light my pipe, calculating
angles of vision as best I could. I did not care to have the tiniest
spot of light visible from the road.
With a great deal of meticulous labor I got out socks and shoes and
flask from my _rücksack_. It really took two hands on that windy night
to keep a match going. Finally I managed it, and sitting in the dark on
the edge of the trough, I changed into dry footgear and took the most
solitary drink I have ever had. There was no hope of a restful position,
but by sitting cross-legged in the trough I could lean against the cold
stones of the wall behind. I hoped that somnolence would come, if not
sleep.
In a measure, I suppose, it did; for though I heard--hours later, as it
seemed--the baying of hounds, the sound had some fantastic context that
must have belonged in part to a dream. A pistol-shot followed the dogs’
baying, but it, too, wove itself into some vision that I was
sufficiently awake to know was partly sleep-induced. The rest of the
night was silent except for the sudden gusts of wind and the patter of
milder rains. Now and then I relieved my cramped discomfort by pacing
the narrow floor of the cellar, but, luckily for me, I was too tired to
keep, through the endless hours, unbrokenly alert. My nervousness
dropped: I did not feel alarmed. I was in a kind of trance, and my only
hold on waking sanity was to say to myself occasionally in a whisper:
“Morning will come.” I was to that extent safe on the outer edge of
nightmare, and I spurred myself with the assurance now and then, to keep
myself on that outer edge. But Martin’s Hollow was very nearly
impregnable to common sense.
Dawn finally came. I have had, ever since that night, an absurd
consideration for the solar system. Quite honestly, it seemed to me in
the hour before sunrise as if nothing less fundamental and august than
the central mechanism of the spheres could release me. If anything in
magic or human science could have perpetuated that night, I should have
felt sure that dawn would never break. If I had not known beyond a doubt
that Martin’s Hollow was ultimately subject to the laws of the planet, I
should have imagined suns rising over other valleys of earth and leaving
this free in its own Stygian aberration. But against that doubt the
muscles of my mind contrived to array themselves. Otherwise I should
probably long since have qualified myself for residence in Martin’s
Hollow.
When the light came, in a blessed irresistible flow, I shook myself
together and prepared to start on my way. I was cold to the marrow, and
stiff in every joint. Somewhere inside me an insistent little pain
protested that I needed food. I was hungry, in no ravenous way, but with
a factitious exhaustion, as if I had been fasting for forty hours. And,
reassured though I was by the first streaks of light on the orchard
outside, I was loath to break my flimsy barricade. I had no wish to look
at the house across the road, though it was morning of a perfect summer
day. But the desire to have done with Martin’s Hollow overbore all else,
and about five o’clock I stepped into the worn-out orchard (not without
bravado) like a free man. I kept to the fields for a time, for even in
the light I did not care to be hailed from the house opposite. I was not
more than three-quarters of a mile above the entrance--or the outlet,
rather, as my mood put it--of the Hollow, and I made my way at a good
pace to the main road. I passed a few houses, but did not stop. Even if
I should have luck, I preferred to eat elsewhere.
In half an hour I was clear of the gorge and on a road that, as my map
showed, would take me to Hebron--the “village” of my over-night
colloquies. I had turned for one view of the Hollow as I stepped into
the main road, and was constrained to admit that it was very lovely. Far
up the right-hand side I saw some red barns--undoubtedly “Foster’s.”
Presently a buckboard overtook me. The driver half pulled up as he
passed and nodded mechanically. He was a cheerful, shrewd-looking
farmer, and I decided to ask him for a lift. The man stopped and looked
me over.
“Get in,” he said abruptly.
I thanked him politely, and described my general situation. Instinct
warned me not, at the moment, to mention how I had spent the night. Some
careful references to the countryside at large, the mention of a certain
judge I knew in a small town down the railway, and probably my obvious
cockneyism, seemed to reassure him. He broke through one or two of the
outer walls of his reserve.
“Got caught in the rain on Silvernail, did you? Well, them showers will
come up, this time o’ year. Seems as if we’d had more’n our fair share
this season, though. Been awful bad for the hayin’.”
I made a few remarks well calculated to show that I was familiar with
the problems of the farmer. I also put a few questions as to crops. My
English was as careful as I could make it. A few more outlying bastions
crumbled silently. Finally he turned to me.
“Pretty early start I got this mornin’.”
“It _is_ early for any one who didn’t get caught on Silvernail in a
shower.”
“Yes--had to take the constable over to Curtis. He come to my place
about half-past three. ‘Go ’way, John,’ says I, ‘chickens ain’t up yet.’
‘You harness up your team an’ take me over to Curtis,’ says he. ‘County
business.’ An’ county business it was, but I ain’t had my breakfast yet,
’count of his county business.” He laughed. “They had the hounds out all
night, but the rain come an’ spoiled the scent, an’ he went over to
Curtis to get the sheriff an’ a posse, an’ they’ll be back some time
along. I won’t be drivin’ ’em, though. I’m goin’ to have my breakfast.”
At this moment I happened to remember a college acquaintance of mine who
had been born most respectably in Hebron. The man slewed his horses
skilfully round a bad break in the road and settled down to comfortable
narrative.
“I knew there was trouble up in Martin’s Hollow weeks ago, but I didn’t
know when I went to bed last night as how it had broke out again. One of
the Teeder boys shot up his cousin yesterday, an’ made for the woods.
His three brothers helpin’ him, of course.”
“What was the trouble?” I asked.
“Oh, the trouble goes back a piece, I guess. You can’t keep track o’
things over in Martin’s Hollow. We don’t see them over our side much,
except the Fosters. They’ve got a fine farm up there, but they’re down
sick with typhoid now. They’re about the only folks in the Hollow that
amounts to anything. It’s kind o’ gone to seed. If Jim Foster didn’t
have a hankerin’ after his father’s old place, he’d move away, too.
Guess he’d sell, but people ain’t buyin’ much in Martin’s Hollow. It’s
too discouragin’. Used to be some good places up there, too.”
We went over a dangerous grade crossing with due solemnity.
“I never want to see the place again,” I ventured. And I told him of my
vain hunt for a lodging, without going into details. I was sure that the
brothers in the old stone house were Teeders, and I had no desire to be
detained as a witness in a clumsy country trial.
“Sho!” He laughed. “Excuse _me_, but the idea of your goin’ round from
one of those houses to the other for a Christian lodgin’ is a little too
much. How come you didn’t go to Foster’s? ’Twouldn’t have done any good,
for they’re down sick, but you could have slept in the barn, maybe. The
hired man’s all right. ’Less they took you for Sam Teeder in the dark!”
He chuckled over his mild joke. “It was a bad night to be in Martin’s
Hollow. Constable had the dogs all over the place. Between you an’ me, I
don’t think they’ll find Sam. He might be in most any house over there.”
“Are they all such desperate characters?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say desperate. Most of ’em ain’t up to that.” He
laughed again. “But they’re all connected up over there--Teeders an’
Rowells an’ Skeeles--an’ I guess they’ve got sense enough to stick by
each other. The man that was shot was a Skeele, but he an’ his family
quarrelled, an’ I guess the whole crowd would stick by Sam Teeder. Andy
Skeele didn’t have anybody much left but his old father, an’ he’s half
cracked.”
“Is there also an old woman in the Hollow who’s more than half cracked?”
“Old Mrs. Rowell, the Teeder boys’ aunt? She’s crazy as a loon. You
didn’t go _there_?”
“I did.” Again I gave no details.
The man slapped his thigh. “Well, of all the--Guess you didn’t want to
stop after you seen _her_, did you? I drove a patent-medicine fellow
over to Martin’s Hollow last spring. Hebron’s dry as a bone, an’ all
those folks can get is some kind of tonic with a big per cent of alcohol
in it. Well, he wanted to stop there--the house is kind of imposin’, you
know--an’ I thought I’d let him. I don’t care about agents much. I
stayed with the horses. Old Mrs. Rowell come to the door, an’ he lit out
with one whoop. I had to laugh. I don’t know what she said to him, but
he wouldn’t go anywheres else except Foster’s, an’ of course they didn’t
want his stuff. Excuse _me_, but you certainly did get the worst of the
bunch. My father’s told me she used to be a real pretty woman, too,
before anythin’ happened to her. There was plenty of good stock up in
Martin’s Hollow once, but--well, you know how ’tis.” He looked a little
shamefaced and lowered his voice. “Fact is, they’ve intermarried and
intermarried over there, till you don’t know what relation any of them
is to each other. Guess they don’t know themselves. Now and then they
have a row. Them Teeder boys won’t last long. They ain’t worth the
stones in their own pasture.”
“What was the Teeder-Skeele quarrel about?”
“Oh, it began with a girl. She died last winter, but there’s been bad
blood ever since.”
“Was she from Martin’s Hollow?”
He did not answer my question directly. “Her name was Rowell.”
Though I had known Pete Manning at college, I was still an outsider, and
Martin’s Hollow was in the township. I quite understood the psychology
of it, and did not press him further. We drove into the peaceful village
of Hebron, and I went to the hotel for breakfast.
I did not go on with my walking-trip. I was afraid that my tone was past
recovering. I took the afternoon train, very glad to escape from
hotel-porch and corner-store gossip. The talk was all of Martin’s
Hollow, and I was so bursting with the knowledge of how I could have
interested the inhabitants of Hebron, had I chosen, that I was afraid I
should proceed to interest them in spite of myself.
Towards noon I met the man who had driven me into Hebron. He waved his
hand. “’Spose you’re goin’ up Silvernail to-night?” he inquired jocosely
as he passed. The question was purely rhetorical. My answer also was
purely rhetorical.
I went back to town where there were a dozen thrillers on my desk, and I
reviewed them with a pen dipped in vitriol. With a Martin’s Hollow in
the world, there really seemed no excuse for people’s not doing better.
V
THE KNIGHT’S MOVE
Havelock the Dane settled himself back in his chair and set his feet
firmly on the oaken table. Chantry let him do it, though some
imperceptible inch of his body winced. For the oak of it was neither
fumed nor golden; it was English to its ancient core, and the table had
served in the refectory of monks before Henry VIII decided that monks
shocked him. Naturally Chantry did not want his friends’ boots havocking
upon it. But more important than to possess the table was to possess it
nonchalantly. He let the big man dig his heel in. Any man but Havelock
the Dane would have known better. But Havelock did as he pleased, and
you either gave him up or bore it. Chantry did not want to give him up.
Chantry was a feminist; a bit of an æsthete but canny at affairs;
good-looking, and temperate, and less hipped on the matter of sex than
feminist gentlemen are wont to be. That is to say, while he vaguely
wanted _l’homme moyen sensuel_ to mend his ways, he did not expect him
to change fundamentally. He rather thought the women would manage all
that when they got the vote. You see, he was not a socialist: only a
feminist.
Havelock the Dane, on the other hand, was by no means a feminist, but
was a socialist. What probably brought the two men together--apart from
their common likableness--was that each, in his way, refused to ‘go the
whole hog.’ They sometimes threshed the thing out together, unable to
decide on a programme, but always united at last in their agreement that
things were wrong. Havelock trusted Labor, and Chantry trusted Woman;
the point was that neither trusted men like themselves, with a little
money and an inherited code of honor. Havelock wanted his money taken
away from him; Chantry desired his code to be trampled on by innumerable
feminine feet. But each was rather helpless, for both expected these
things to be done for them.
Except for this tie of ineffectually, they had nothing special in
common. Havelock’s life had been adventurous in the good old-fashioned
sense: the bars down and a deal of wandering. Chantry had sown so many
crops of intellectual wild oats that even the people who came for
subscriptions might be forgiven for thinking him a mental libertine,
good for subscriptions and not much else. Between them, they boxed the
compass about once a week. Havelock had more of what is known as
“personality” than Chantry; Chantry more of what is known as “culture.”
They dovetailed, on the whole, not badly.
Havelock, this afternoon, was full of a story. Chantry wanted to listen,
though he knew that he could have listened better if Havelock’s heel had
not been quite so ponderous on the saecular oak. He took refuge in a
cosmic point of view. That was the only point of view from which
Havelock (it was, by the way, his physical type only that had caused him
to be nicknamed the Dane: his ancestors had come over from England in
great discomfort two centuries since), in his blonde hugeness, became
negligible. You had to climb very high to see him small.
“You never did the man justice,” Havelock was saying.
“Justice be hanged!” replied Chantry.
“Quite so: the feminist slogan.”
“A socialist can’t afford to throw stones.”
The retorts were spoken sharply, on both sides. Then both men laughed.
They had too often had it out seriously to mind; these little insults
were mere convention.
“Get at your story,” resumed Chantry. “I suppose there’s a woman in it:
a nasty cat invented by your own prejudices. There usually is.”
“Never a woman at all. If there were, I shouldn’t be asking for your
opinion. My opinion, of course, is merely the rational one. I don’t
side-step the truth because a little drama gets in. I am appealing to
you because you are the average man who hasn’t seen the light. I
honestly want to know what you think. There’s a reason.”
“What’s the reason?”
“I’ll tell you that later. Now, I’ll tell you the story.” Havelock
screwed his tawny eyebrows together for a moment before plunging in.
“Humph!” he ejaculated at last. “Much good anybody is in a case like
this. What did you say you thought of Ferguson?”
“I didn’t think anything of Ferguson--except that he had a big brain for
biology. He was a loss.”
“No personal opinion?”
“I never like people who think so well of themselves as all that.”
“No opinion about his death?”
“Accidental, as they said, I suppose.”
“Oh, ‘they said!’ It was suicide, I tell you.”
“Suicide? Really?” Chantry’s brown eyes lighted for an instant. “Oh,
poor chap; I’m sorry.”
It did not occur to him immediately to ask how Havelock knew. He trusted
a plain statement from Havelock.
“I’m not. Or--yes, I am. I hate to have a man inconsistent.”
“It’s inconsistent for any one to kill himself. But it’s frequently
done.”
Havelock, hemming and hawing like this, was more nearly a bore than
Chantry had ever known him.
“Not for Ferguson.”
“Oh, well, never mind Ferguson,” Chantry yawned. “Tell me some anecdote
out of your tapestried past.”
“I won’t.”
Havelock dug his heel in harder. Chantry all but told him to take his
feet down, but stopped himself just in time.
“Well, go on, then,” he said, “but it doesn’t sound interesting. I hate
all tales of suicide. And there isn’t even a woman in it,” he sighed
maliciously.
“Oh, if it comes to that, there is.”
“But you said----”
“Not in it exactly, unless you go in for _post hoc, propter hoc_.”
“Oh, drive on.” Chantry was pettish.
But at that point Havelock the Dane removed his feet from the refectory
table. He will probably never know why Chantry, just then, began to be
amiable.
“Excuse me, Havelock. Of course, whatever drove a man like Ferguson to
suicide is interesting. And I may say he managed it awfully well. Not a
hint, anywhere.”
“Well, a scientist ought to get something out of it for himself.
Ferguson certainly knew how. Can’t you imagine him sitting up there,
cocking his hair” (an odd phrase, but Chantry understood), “and deciding
just how to circumvent the coroner? I can.”
“Ferguson hadn’t much imagination.”
“A coroner doesn’t take imagination. He takes a little hard, expert
knowledge.”
“I dare say.” But Chantry’s mind was wandering through other defiles.
“Odd, that he should have snatched his life out of the very jaws of
what-do-you-call-it, once, only to give it up at last, politely, of his
own volition.”
“You may well say it.” Havelock spoke with more earnestness than he had
done. “If you’re not a socialist when I get through with you, Chantry,
my boy----”
“Lord, Lord! don’t tell me your beastly socialism is mixed up with it
all! I never took to Ferguson, but he was no syndicalist. In life _or_
in death, I’d swear to that.”
“Ah, no. If he had been! But all I mean is that, in a properly regulated
state, Ferguson’s tragedy would not have occurred.”
“So it was a tragedy?”
“He was a loss to the state, God knows.”
Had they been speaking of anything less dignified than death and genius,
Havelock might have sounded a little austere and silly. As it
was--Chantry bit back, and swallowed, his censure.
“That’s why I want to know what you think,” went on Havelock,
irrelevantly. “Whether your damned code of honor is worth Ferguson.”
“It’s not my damned code any more than yours,” broke in Chantry.
“Yes, it is. Or, at least, we break it down at different
points--theoretically. Actually, we walk all round it every day to be
sure it’s intact. Let’s be honest.”
“Honest as you like, if you’ll only come to the point. Whew, but it’s
hot! Let’s have a gin-fizz.”
“You aren’t serious.”
Havelock seemed to try to lash himself into a rage. But he was so big
that he could never have got all of himself into a rage at once. You
felt that only part of him was angry--his toes, perhaps, or his
complexion.
Chantry rang for ice and lemon, and took gin, sugar, and a siphon out of
a carved cabinet.
“Go slow,” he said. He himself was going very slow, with a beautiful
crystal decanter which he set lovingly on the oaken table. “Go slow,” he
repeated, more easily, when he had set it down. “I can think just as
well with a gin-fizz as without one. And I didn’t know Ferguson well;
and I didn’t like him at all. I read his books, and I admired him. But
he looked like the devil--_the_ devil, you’ll notice, not _a_ devil.
With a dash of Charles I by Van Dyck. The one standing by a horse. As
you say, he cocked his hair. It went into little horns, above each
eyebrow. I’m sorry he’s lost to the world, but it doesn’t get me. He may
have been a saint, for all I know; but there you are--I never cared
particularly to know. I am serious. Only, somehow, it doesn’t touch me.”
And he proceeded to make use of crushed ice and lemon juice.
“Oh, blow all that,” said Havelock the Dane finally, over the top of his
glass. “I’m going to tell you, anyhow. Only I wish you would forget your
prejudices. I want an opinion.”
“Go on.”
Chantry made himself comfortable.
“You remember the time when Ferguson didn’t go down on the _Argentina_?”
“I do. Ferguson just wouldn’t go down, you know. He’d turn up smiling,
without even a chill, and meanwhile lots of good fellows would be at the
bottom of the sea.”
“Prejudice again,” barked Havelock. “Yet in point of fact, it’s
perfectly true. And you would have preferred him to drown.”
“I was very glad he was saved.” Chantry said it in a stilted manner.
“Why?”
“Because his life was really important to the world.”
Chantry might have been distributing tracts. His very voice sounded
falsetto.
“Exactly. Well, that is what Ferguson thought.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me.”
“You must have known him well. Thank heaven, I never did.”
Havelock flung out a huge hand. “Oh, get off that ridiculous animal
you’re riding, Chantry, and come to the point. You mean you don’t think
Ferguson should have admitted it?”
Chantry’s tone changed. “Well, one doesn’t.”
The huge hand, clenched into a fist, came down on the table. The crystal
bottle was too heavy to rock, but the glasses jingled and a spoon slid
over the edge of its saucer.
“There it is--what I was looking for.”
“What were you looking for?” Chantry’s wonder was not feigned.
“For your hydra-headed Prejudice. Makes me want to play Hercules.”
“Oh, drop your metaphors, Havelock. Get into the game. What is it?”
“It’s this: that you don’t think--or affect not to think--that it’s
decent for a man to recognize his own worth.”
Chantry did not retort. He dropped his chin on his chest and thought for
a moment. Then he spoke, very quietly and apologetically.
“Well--I don’t see you telling another man how wonderful you are. It
isn’t immoral, it simply isn’t manners. And if Ferguson boasted to you
that he was saved when so many went down, it was worse than bad manners.
He ought to have been kicked for it. It’s the kind of phenomenal luck
that it would have been decent to regret.”
Havelock set his massive lips firmly together. You could not say that he
pursed that cyclopean mouth.
“Ferguson did not boast. He merely told me. He was, I think, a modest
man.”
Incredulity beyond any power of laughter to express settled on Chantry’s
countenance. “Modest? and he _told_ you?”