THE TWO COASTGUARDS
The next morning, when Hugh and I came to Strete for our lessons, we
found a lot of yeomen and preventives drawn up in the village. People
were talking outside their houses in little excited groups. Jan
Edeclog, the grocer, was at the door of his shop, wiping his hands on
his apron. There was a general rustle and stir, something had
evidently happened.
"What's all the row about, Mr Edeclog?" I asked.
"Row?" he asked. "Row enough, Master Jim. Two of the coastguards, who
were on duty yesterday afternoon, have disappeared. It's thought
there's been foul play."
My heart sank into my boots, my head swam, I could hardly stand
upright. All my thought was: "They have been killed. And all through
my telling Marah. And I'm a murderer."
I don't know how I could have got to the Rectory gate, had not the
militia captain come from the tavern at that moment. He mounted his
horse, called out a word of command, and the men under him moved off
towards Slapton at a quick trot.
"They have gone to beat the Lay banks," said some one, and then some
one laughed derisively.
I walked across to the Rectory and flung my satchel of books on to the
floor. The Rector's wife came into the hall as we entered. "Why, Jim,"
she said, "what is the matter? Aren't you well?"
"Not very," I answered.
"My dear," she cried to her husband, "Jim's not well. He looks as
though he'd seen a ghost, poor boy."
"Why, Jim," said the Rector, coming out of the sitting-room, "what's
the matter with you? Had too much jam for breakfast?"
"No," I said. "But I feel faint. I feel sick. Can I go to sit in the
garden for a minute?"
"Yes," he answered. "Certainly. I'll get you a glass of cold water."
I was really too far gone to pay much heed to anything. I think I told
them that I should be quite well in a few minutes, if they would leave
me there; and I think that Mrs Evans told her husband to come indoors,
leaving me to myself. At any rate they went indoors, and then the cool
air, blowing on me from the sea, refreshed me, so that I stood up.
I could think of nothing except the words: "I am a murderer." A wild
wish came to me to run to the cliffs by Black Pool to see whether the
bodies lay on the grass in the place where I had seen them (full of
life) only a few hours before. Anything was better than that
uncertainty. In one moment a hope would surge up in me that the men
would not be dead; but perhaps only gagged and bound: so that I could
free them. In the next there would be a feeling of despair, that the
men lay there, dead through my fault, killed by Marah's orders, and
flung among the gorse for the crows and gulls. I got out of the
Rectory garden into the road; and in the road I felt strong enough to
run; and then a frenzy took hold of me, so that I ran like one
possessed. It is not very far to Black Pool; but I think I ran the
whole way. I didn't feel out of breath when I got there, though I had
gone at top speed; a spirit had been in me, such as one only feels at
rare times. Afterwards, when I saw a sea-fight, I saw that just such a
spirit filled the sailors, as they loaded and fired the guns.
I pushed my way along the cliffs through the gorse, till I came to the
patch where the coast-guards had lain. The grass was trampled and
broken, beaten flat in places as though heavy bodies had fallen on it;
there were marks of a struggle all over the patch. Some of the near-by
gorse twigs were broken from their stems; some one had dropped a small
hank of spun-yarn. They had lain there all that night, for the dew was
thick upon them. What puzzled me at first was the fact that there were
marks from only two pairs of boots, both of the regulation pattern.
The men who struggled with the coastguards must have worn moccasins,
or heelless leather slippers, made out of some soft hide.
I felt deeply relieved when I saw no bodies, nor any stain upon the
grass. I began to wonder what the night-riders had done with the
coastguards; and, as I sat wondering, I heard, really and truly, a
noise of the people talking from a little way below me, just beyond
the brow of the cliff. That told me at once that there was a cave,
even as I had suspected. I craned forward eagerly, as near as I dared
creep, to the very rim of the land. I looked down over the edge into
the sea, and saw the little blue waves creaming into foam far below
me.
I could see nothing but the side of the cliff, with its projecting
knobs of rock; no opening of any kind, and yet a voice from just below
me (it seemed to come from below a little projecting slab a few feet
down): a voice just below me, I say, said, quite clearly, evidently
between puffs at a pipe, "I don't know so much about that." Another
voice answered; but I could not catch the words. The voice I should
have known anywhere; it was Marah's "good-temper voice," as he called
it, making a pleasant answer.
"That settles it," I said to myself. "There's a cave, and the
coastguards are there, I'll be bound, as prisoners. Now I have to find
them and set them free."
Very cautiously I peered over the cliff-face, examining every knob and
ledge which might conceal (or lead to) an opening in the rock. No. I
could see nothing; the cliff seemed to me to be almost sheer; and
though it was low tide, the rocks at the base of the cliffs seemed to
conceal no opening. I crept cautiously along the cliff-top, as near to
the edge as I dared, till I was some twenty feet from the spot where I
had heard the voice. Then I looked down again carefully, searching
every handbreadth for a firm foothold or path down the rocks, with an
opening at the end, through which a big man could squeeze his
body. No. There was nothing. No living human being could get down that
cliff-face without a rope from up above; and even If he managed to get
down, there seemed to be nothing but the sea for him at the end of his
journey. Again I looked carefully right to the foot of the
crag. No. There was absolutely nothing; I was off the track somehow.
Now, just at this point the cliff fell Inland for a few paces, forming
a tiny bay about six yards across. To get along the cliff towards
Strete I had to turn inland for a few steps, then turn again towards
the sea, in order to reach the cliff. I skirted the little bay in this
manner, and dropped one or two stones into it from where I stood. As I
craned over the edge, watching them fall into the sea, I caught sight
of something far below me, in the water.
I caught my breath and looked again, but the thing, whatever it was,
had disappeared from sight. It was something red, which had gleamed
for a moment from behind a rock at the base of the cliff. I watched
eagerly for a moment or two, hearing the sucking of the sea along the
stones, and the cry of the seagulls' young in their nests on the
ledges. Then, very slowly, as the slack water urged it, I saw the red
stem-piece of a rather large boat nosing slowly forward apparently
from the cliff-face towards the great rock immediately in front of
it. The secret was plain in a moment. Here was a cave with a
sea-entrance, and a cave big enough to hide a large, seagoing fisher's
boat; a cave, too, so perfectly hidden that it could not possibly be
seen from any point except right at the mouth. A coastguard's boat
could row within three yards of the entrance and never once suspect
its being there, unless, at a very low tide, the sea clucked strangely
from somewhere within. Any men entering the little bay in a boat would
see only the big rock hiding the face of the cliff. No one would
suspect that behind the rock lay a big cave accessible from the sea,
at low tide in fair weather. Even in foul weather, good boatmen (and
all the night-riders were wonderful fellows in a boat) could have made
that cave in safety, for at the mouth of the little bay there was a
great rock, which shut it in on the southwest side, so that in our bad
southwesterly gales the bay or cove would have been sheltered, though
full of the foam spattered from the sheltering crag.
I had found the cave, but my next task was to find an entrance, and
that seemed to be no easy matter. I searched every inch of the
cliff-face for a foothold, but there was nothing there big enough for
anything bigger than a sea-lark. I could never have clambered down the
cliff, even had I the necessary nerve, which I certainly had not. The
only way down was to shut my eyes and walk over the cliff-edge, and
trust to luck at the bottom, and "that was one beyond me"--only Marah
Gorsuch would have tried that way. No; there was no way down the
cliff-side, that was certain.
Now, somebody--I think it was old Alec Jewler, the ostler at the Tor
Cross posting-house--had told me that here and there along the coast,
but most of all in Cornwall, near Falmouth, there had once been
arsenic mines, now long since worked out. Their shafts, he said, could
be followed here and there for some little distance, and every now and
again they would broaden out into chambers, in which people sometimes
live, even now. It occurred to me that there might be some such
shaft-opening among the gorse quite close to me; so I crept away from
the cliff-brink, and began to search among the furze, till my skin was
full of prickles. Though I searched diligently for an hour or two, I
could find no hole big enough to be the mouth of a shaft. I knew that
a shaft of the kind might open a hundred yards from where I was
searching, and I was therefore well prepared to spend some time in my
hunt. And at last, when I was almost tired of looking, I came across a
fox or badger earth, not very recent, which seemed, though I could not
be certain, to broaden out inside. I lay down and thrust my head down
the hole, and that confirmed me. From up the hole there came the reek
of strong ship's tobacco. I had stumbled upon one of the cave's
air-holes.