TREASURE TROVE.
The rain--the last, for many weeks, to visit Polpier--cleared up soon
after midday. At one o'clock or thereabouts Nicky-Nan, having dined
on a stale crust and a slice of bacon, and recovered somewhat from
his first alarm (as even so frugal a meal will put courage into a
man), ventured to the porch again for a look at the weather.
The weather and the set of the wind always come first in a Polpier
man's interest. They form the staple of conversation on the
Quay-side. Fish ranks next: after fish, religion: after religion,
clack about boats and persons; and so we come down to politics, peace
and war, the manner of getting to foreign ports and the kind of
people one finds in them.
Nicky-Nan could read very few signs of the weather from his dark
little parlour. The gully of the river deflected all true winds, and
the overhanging houses closed in all but a narrow strip of sky,
prolonged study of which was apt to induce a crick in the neck.
To be sure, certain winds could be recognised by their voices: a
southerly one of any consequence announced itself by a curious
droning note which, if it westered a little, rose to a sharp whistle
and, in anything above half-a-gale, to a scream. But to _see_ what
the weather was like, you must go to the front porch.
Nicky-Nan went to the front porch and gazed skyward. The wind--as
the saying is--had "catched in," and was blowing briskly from the
north-west, chasing diaphanous clouds across the blue zenith.
The roofs still shone wet and dazzling, and there were puddles in the
street. But he knew the afternoon was going to be a fine one.
He took pleasure in this when, a few moments later, his ear caught
the thudding of a distant drum. . . . Yes, yes--it was Bank Holiday,
and the children would be assembling, up the valley, for the
Anniversary Treat of the Wesleyan Sunday School. There would be
waggons waiting to convey them up-inland to Squire Tresawna's
pleasure-grounds--to high shaven lawns whereon, for once in the year,
they could enjoy themselves running about upon the level.
(In Polpier, as any mother there will tell you, a boy has to wear out
his exuberance mostly on the seat of his breeches and bring it to a
check by digging in his heels somewhere. And the wastage at these
particular points of his tailoring persists when he grows up to
manhood; for a crabber sits much on the thwart of a boat and drives
with his heels against a stretcher. Thus it happens that
three-fourths of Billy Bosistow's cobbling is devoted to the
"trigging" of boot-heels, while the wives, who mend all the small
clothes, have long ago and by consent given up any pretence of
harmonising the patch with the original garment. At Troy and at
St Martin's they will tell you that every Polpier man carries about
his home-address on his person, and will rudely indicate where.
Mrs Penhaligon put it one day in more delicate proverbial form.
"In a rabbit-warren," she said, "you learn not to notice scuts.")
While Nicky-Nan--who, as we have said, had a fondness for children--
stood and eyed the weather with approval, Mrs Penhaligon came
bustling out, with her bonnet on.
"Lord sakes!" she exclaimed. "Be that the drum already? What a
whirl one does live in!--and if there's one thing I hate more'n
another, 'tis to be fussed."
"What about the children, ma'am?"
"The children? . . . Gone on this half-hour, I should hope.
'Beida's a good gel enough, when once ye've coaxed her into her best
things. It sobers her you can't think. She'll look after 'Biades
an' see that he don't put 'Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us' into
his mouth, though 'tis where he puts most things."
"But you're goin' to the Treat yourself, ma'am?" Nicky-Nan suggested.
"What, in _this_ rig-out? Catch me!" answered Mrs Penhaligon, not
with literal intention but idiomatically. "No, I'm but goin' up to
see 'em off decent. But I wonder at you liggin' behind, when 'tis
the only Bank Holiday randivoo this side o' Troy. . . ."
"'Tidn' for want o' will," Nicky-Nan answered ruefully and
truthfully, with a downward glance, which reminded Mrs Penhaligon to
be remorseful.
"Eh, but I forgot . . . and you with that leg on your mind!
But you'll forgive a body as has been these two days in a stirabout.
And if you're fittin' to take a stroll before I get back, maybe
you'll not forget to lock the house up."
Nicky-Nan promised. (He and the Penhaligons had separate keys of the
main door.) He watched the good woman as she hurried on her way,
tying her bonnet-strings as she went.
It occurred to him that, leg or no leg, he felt lonely, and would be
all the better for a stroll. So, having fetched his stick and locked
the house-door behind him, he dandered down towards the Quay.
The street was empty, uncannily silent. "It's queer now," thought
Nicky-Nan, "what a difference childern make to a town, an' you never
noticin' it till they're gone." All the children had departed--the
happy little Wesleyans to climb on board the waggons, the small
Church of England minority to watch them, and solace their envy with
expectation of their own Treat, a more select one, promised for
this-day-fortnight. Then would be _their_ turn, and some people
would live to be sorry that they went to Chapel. But a fortnight is
a long time, and weather in the West is notoriously uncertain.
Of course you cannot eat your cake and have it: but Mrs Penhaligon
arrived just in time to stop a fight between 'Bert and Matthey
Matthew's ugly boy, who sang in the Church choir, and hoped it would
rain. (_Odium theologicum_.)
The most of the mothers had departed also, either to "assist" at the
Treat or to watch the embarkation: while those of the men whom the
War had not claimed had tramped it over to Troy, which six weeks
ago--and long before the idea of a European War had occurred to any
one--had advertised a small regatta for Bank Holiday, with an
afternoon's horse-racing.
The tunding of the drum up the valley seemed to Nicky-Nan to
emphasise the loneliness all about him. But down by the Quay-head he
came in sight of Policeman Rat-it-all (so named from his only and
frequent expletive), seated on a bollard and staring up at the sky.
Nicky-Nan hesitated: hung, indeed, for a moment, on the edge of
flight. This was Bank Holiday, and until to-morrow's sunrise a
constable was powerless as Satan in a charmed circle. Still, the man
might have the ejectment order in his pocket--would, if not already
furnished with it, almost certainly know about it. On the other hand
there was a chance--it might be worth while--to discover how much
Rat-it-all knew. Forewarned is forearmed. Moreover, when your
country is at war, and silence holds the city, there is great comfort
in a chat. Nicky-Nan advanced with a fine air of nonchalance.
"Lookin' at the sky?" said he. "Wind's back in the nor'-west again.
Which, for settled weather, I'd rather it took off-shore a bit later
in the afternoon. It'll last though, for all that, I shoudn'
wonder."
Policeman Rat-it-all withdrew his gaze from the firmament.
"I wasn' thinkin' of the wind," said he. "I take no account of the
elements, for my part. Never did; and now never shall--havin' been
born up to Bodmin, where the prison is."
"Oh!" said Nicky-Nan suspiciously. "What's it like?"
"Bodmin?" Policeman Rat-it-all seemed to reflect for a moment.
"Well, I wouldn't just say it's altogether _like_ any place in
particular. There's a street, of course, . . . and there's the
prison, and the barracks, and an asylum where they keep the lunatics,
and a workhouse and what-not. But if you put to me, in so many
words, what it's _like_--"
"I--I meant the prison," explained Nicky-Nan; that being the only
feature of Bodmin in which he felt any instant concern.
"It's a place," answered Policeman Rat-it-all with painful lucidity,
"where they shut people up. Sometimes there's an execution. But not
often; not very often; once in a while, as you might say. There's a
monument, too,--upon a hill they call the Beacon. I'm very fond of
Bodmin. It's the County Town, you know; and with these little things
going on, in one way and another, why, that enlarges the mind."
"Does it so?" asked Nicky-Nan, a trifle puzzled.
"It do indeed," the constable assured him with conviction. "Take
_me_, now, at this present moment, for instance. You comes upon me
suddent, and what do you catch me doin'? You catches me,"--here his
voice became impressive--"you catches me lookin' up at the sky.
And why am I lookin' up at the sky? It is to say to you, 'Nicholas
Nanjivell, the wind is sot in the sou'-west?'"
"Not if you expect me to believe 'ee. 'Tisn' a point off
north-an-by-west."
"--Or," the constable continued, lifting a hand, "is it to say to
you, 'It is sot in the _north-west_,' as the case may be? Or is it I
was wastin' the day in idleness, same as some persons I could mention
in the Force if there wasn' such a thing as discipline? Not so. I
was lookin' up in the execution of my duty. An' what do you suppose
I was lookin' for?"
"I'm sure I can't tell 'ee," answered Nicky-Nan after a painful
effort at guessing. "It couldn' be for obscene language; nor yet for
drunks."
Policeman Rat-it-all leant forward and touched him on the top button
of his waistcoat.
"Zepp-a-lins!" he said mysteriously.
"Eh?"
"Zepp-a-lins!"
"Oh!"--Nicky-Nan's brow cleared--"You mean them German balloon things
the papers make so much fuss about."
"Die-rigitable," added Rat-it-all. "That's the point."
"Well? . . . Have 'ee seen any?" Nicky-Nan lifted his gaze skyward.
"I won't go so far as to say that I've seen anything answerin' to
that description knockin' about--not up to the present. But these
are times when a man must keep his eyes liftin' if he doesn' want Old
England to be taken with what the newspapers call a Bolt from the
Blue."
"I've come across the expression," said Nicky-Nan.
"Well, what I say is, Down here, in this corner of the world--though,
mind you, I'm not sayin' anything against it--you don't _reelise_
things: you reely don't. Now I come from Bodmin, as I think I must
have told you."
"You did."
"Where you see the soldiers goin' about with the stripes down their
trowsers: but they've done away with that except for the Yeomanry
(which is black, or dark blue, I forget which), and that's how you
know the difference. So your mind gets enlarged almost without your
knowin' it, and you feel what's at stake."
"I wonder you didn' want to enlist," said Nicky-Nan.
"I did: but I was too tall--too tall _and_ too strong," sighed the
policeman, bending his arm and causing his biceps to swell up
mountainously. "You haven't a notion how strong I am--if, for
instance, I took it into my head to catch you up and heave you over
the Quay here. Yes, yes, I am wonderfully well made! And on top of
that, Mother picked up some nonsense against soldiering off a speaker
at a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. There was nothing for it but the
Force. So here I AM. But give me the wings of a dove, and I'd join
the Royal Flyin' Corps to-morrow, where they get higher pay because
of the risk, same as with the submarines. If you ask _me_, every
Englishman's post at this moment is in the firing line."
Nicky-Nan winced, and changed the subject in haste.
"Well, it must be a great consolation to have such strength as
yours," he said pleasantly. "But I wonder--with nothing else doin',
and on a Bank Holiday too--you could manage to stay away from the
School Treat."
"Rat it all!" broke out the constable, and checked himself.
"I thought I was igsplaining to you," he went on as one who reasons
patiently with an infant, "that a man has to think of something above
an' beyond _self_ in these days."
"I never found time to think out the rights an' wrongs o' warfare,
for my part," said Nicky-Nan.
"Ah, I daresay not." Policeman Rat-it-all blew out his chest.
"It's a deep subject," he added, wagging his head solemnly.
"A very deep subject; and I quite understand your not having time for
it lately. How about that Ejectment Order?"
Nicky-Nan jumped like a man shot. "Ha--have you got the--the thing
about 'ee?" he twittered. "Don't tell me that Pamphlett has got 'em
to send it down? . . . But there, you can't do anything on a Bank
Holiday, anyway."
"Have I got the thing about me?" echoed the policeman slowly. "You
talk as if 'twas a box o' matches. . . . Well, I may, or I mayn't;
but anyways I've followed the case before Petty Sessions; and if you
haven't a leg to stand on, the only thing is to walk out peaceably.
Mind, I'm puttin' it unofficial, as between friends."
"And what if I don't?"
"Then, rat it all!--I mean," the constable corrected himself to a
tolerant smile and gazed down on his mighty hands and arms--"then I
got to put you into the street."
Nicky-Nan leaned on his stick and the stick shook with his
communicated fury. "Try it--try it--try it!" he blazed out.
"Try it, you Bodmin fathead!"
He shuffled away, nodding his head with wrath. He roamed the
cliff-paths for an hour, pausing now and again to lean his back
against an out-cropping mass of rock and pass the back of his hand
across his eyes, that at first were bloodshot with fury. He had a
great desire to kill Policeman Rat-it-all. As his passion died down
and he limped forward, to pause and again limp forward, his gait and
the backward cast of his eye were not unlike those of a hunted hare.
He reached the house door at nightfall, just as Mrs Penhaligon came
shepherding her offspring home down the dusky street, 'Biades had
yielded to the sleep of exhaustion, and lay like a log in his
mother's arms. 'Bert, for no other reason than that he had tired
himself out, was sulky and uncommunicative. But 'Beida--whose whole
manner ever changed when once she had been persuaded into fine
clothes--wore an air of sustained gentility.
"Squire Tresawna keeps seven gardeners," she reported. "He has three
motor-cars and two chauffeurs. The gardeners keep the front lawn so
short with their mowing-machines that 'Biades couldn't possibly have
made the front of his blouse in the mess it is unless he had
purposely crawled on his stomach to lower me in the eyes of all.
When it got to a certain point I pretended to have no connection with
him. There was nothing else to do. Then he felt sorry and wanted to
hug me in front of everybody. . . . Oh, thank you . . . yes, I've
enjoyed myself very much! Mrs Tresawna wears a toque: but I suppose
that when you get to a certain position you can carry on with toques
long after every one else has given them up. She has two maids; one
of them in a grey velours dress that must have been one of Mrs
Tresawna's cast-offs, for it couldn't possibly have come out of her
wages; though, by the fit, it might have been made for her."
A little before ten o'clock Nicky-Nan climbed the stairs painfully to
his bedroom, undressed in part, and lay down--but not to sleep.
For a while he lay without extinguishing the candle--his last candle.
He had measured it carefully, and it reached almost to an inch beyond
the knuckle of his forefinger. It would last him a good two hours at
least, perhaps three.
He lay for a while almost luxuriously, save for the pain in his leg,
and watched the light flickering on the rafters. They had a few more
days to abide, let Pamphlett's men be never so sharp: but this was
his last night under them. His enemies--some of them until this
morning unsuspected--were closing in around him. They had him, now,
in this last corner.
But that was for to-morrow. The very poor live always on the edge of
to-morrow; and for that reason the night's sleep, which parts them
from it, seems a long time.
After all, what could his enemies do to him? If he sat passive, the
onus would rest on them. If Policeman Rat-it-all flung him into the
street, why then in the street he would sit, to the scandal of
Polpier. If, on the other hand, Government claimed him for a
deserter, still Government would have to fetch a cart to convey him
to jail: his leg would not allow him to walk. Of wealth and goods
God Almighty had already eased him. _Cantat vacuus_ . . . He slid a
hand under the bed-clothes and rubbed the swelling on his leg,
softly, wondering if condemned men felt as little perturbed--or some
of them--on the eve of execution.
He ceased rubbing and lay still again, staring up at the play of
light on the rafters. Fine old timbers they were . . . solid English
oak. Good old families they had sheltered in their time; men and
women that feared God and honoured the King--now all gone to decay in
churchyard, all as cold as homeless fellows. The Nanjivells had been
such a family, and now--what would his poor old mother think of
_this_ for an end? Yet it was the general fate. Pushing men, your
Pamphletts, rise in the world. Old families go down, . . . it
couldn't be worked else. If he had only been born with _push_, now!
If it could only be started over again, . . . if he had been put to a
trade, instead of being let run to sea--
He broke off to wonder at the different things the old beams had
looked down upon. Marriages, births--and deaths. The Old Doctor
(he knew) had died in the fore-room, for convenience--the room where
the Penhaligons slept: and even so, the family had been forced to
lift the coffin in and out of the window, because of that twist in
the stairs. There wasn't that difficulty with people's coming _into_
the world. No doubt in its time this room must have seen a mort of
births too. . . . And the children? All gone, the same way!
Drizzle o' rain upon churchyard graves. . . . "And you, too,"--with a
flicker of his closing eyelids threatening the flicker on the beams--
"you, too, doomed, my billies! Pamphlett'll take _me_ to-morrow,
_you_ the day after; as in time the Devil'll take him and his!"
Nicky-Nan rolled over on his side and, perceiving the candle to be
burnt down to a short inch, hastily blew it out. Almost in the act
of relaxing the elbow on which he had raised himself for this effort
he dropped asleep to his pillow.
For three hours he lay like a log. Then his troubled brain began to
reassert itself. At about two in the morning he sat bolt upright in
his bed. For twenty minutes or so he had been thinking rather than
dreaming, yet with his thought held captive by sleep.
He reached for his matchbox and struck a light. . . . The whole world
was after him, hunting him down, tearing down the house above his
head! . . . Well, he would go down with the house. Pamphlett, or
Government, might take his house: but there was the old
hiding-cupboard to the right of the chimney-breast. . . .
When they summoned him to-morrow, he would have vanished.
Only by uncovering his last shelter should they discover what was
left of him. He would perish with the house.
He lit the candle and carried it to the cupboard; opened this, and
peered into the well at his feet: lifted one of the loose
bottom-boards, and, holding himself steady by a grip on the scurtain,
thrust a naked leg down, feeling into vacancy.
The ball of his foot touched some substance, hard and apparently
firm. He supposed it to be a lower ceiling of the hole, and, after
pressing once or twice to make sure, put all his weight upon it.
With a creak and a rush of masonry the whole second flooring of the
cupboard gave way beneath him, leaving his invalid leg dangling, in
excruciating pain. But that the crook of his elbow caught across the
scurtain (shooting darts as of fire up the jarred funny-bone), he had
made a part of the avalanche, the noise of which was enough to wake
the dead. Luckily, too, he had set his candle on the planching
floor, just wide of the cupboard entrance, and it stood burning as
though nothing had happened.
With pain which surely must be worse than any pain of death, he
heaved himself back and on to the bedroom floor again. The cascade
of plaster, timber, masonry, must (he judged) have shot itself
straight down into his parlour below.
He picked up the candle, and warily--while his leg wrung him with
torture at every step--crept down the stairs to explore.
The parlour door opened inwards. He thrust it open for a short way
quite easily. Then of a sudden it jammed: but it left an aperture
through which he could squeeze himself. He did so, and held the
candle aloft.
While he stared, first at a hole in the ceiling, then at the "scree"
which had broken through it and lay spread, fan-shaped, on the solid
floor at his feet, he heard a footstep, and Mrs Penhaligon's voice in
the passage without.
"Mr Nanjivell! Is that Mr Nanjivell?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
"Oh, what has happened?"
"Nothing, ma'am. Only a downrush of soot in the chimney," answered
Nicky-Nan, gasping: for the heap of dust and mortar at his feet lay
scattered all over with golden coins!
"But the noise was terrible. I--I thought for sure it must be the
Germans," came in Mrs Penhaligon's voice.
"Nothing of the sort. You exaggerate things," answered Nicky-Nan,
commanding his voice. "A rush of soot down the chimney, that's all.
I've been expectin' it for weeks."
"You mustn't mind my bein' easily alarmed--left alone as I be with a
family--"
"Not in the least, ma'am." Nicky-Nan resolutely closed the door and
lifted his candle to confirm the miracle.
The candle, which had been guttering, shot up one last flame and died
on a flicker of gold.