THE HERO
October dropped from red to brown in a sudden night of rain, and the
Three Counties began to draw over themselves their fallow cloaks of
sleep. In every view the ploughed fields spread brown and wet and empty,
some with a ruddy touch of Kentish clay, others with a white gleam of
Surrey chalk.
Nigel flung himself into the farmyard toil, and complained because it
was too scanty. Their ten acres of grass and orchard, with three or four
cows and some poultry, did not give nearly enough work, he thought, to
two able-bodied men. He remembered the days when the acres of Sparrow
Hall had rolled through marsh and coppice into Kent--when fifteen
sweet-mouthed cows had gathered at the gates at milking-time, and golden
rye from their high fields had gone in their waggon to Honey Mill. He
was miserably aware that he had no one but himself to blame for this,
though his brother and sister never reproached him. He had been
impatient of the slow bounties of the fields, he had plunged into quick,
adventurous dealings; for a few months he had brought wealth, hurry and
excitement into his life--then had come poverty, and the ageless
monotony of prison.
When he looked round on their reduced estate it was not so much
humiliation that ate into his heart as a sense of treachery. He had
betrayed the country. Impatient of its slow, honest ways, he had sought
others, crooked, swift, defiled. He had turned renegade to the quiet
fields round his home, and entered a rival camp of reckless strivings
and meanness. This had been his sin, and he was being punished for it
still. The punishment of the State for his sin against the State was
over ... but the punishment for his sin against his home, the country,
and himself was still being meted out to him by all three.
The high spirits that had seized him on that first rainy morning of his
freedom often came and snatched him up again, but they always dropped
him back into a depression that was almost horror. He had moments of
crazy gaiety and uproariousness, of sheer animal delight in his bodily
freedom; but behind them all lurked the consciousness that he was still
in prison. He had been sentenced for life. He was shut up in some dreary
place, away from the farm, away from Len and Janey. He might work on the
farm the whole day, and fool with his brother and sister the whole
evening, but he knew none the less that he was shut up away from them
all.
During this time he had peculiar dreams. He often fell asleep full of
fury and despair, but his dreams were always of sunlit spaces, children
and flowers. Again and again in them appeared the little girl Ivy--not
dirty and cross, but lovely and fresh and winsome, smiling and
beckoning. It seemed as if behind all the horrors and fogs of his life
something divine and innocent was calling--at times it was comfort and
peace and healing to him, at others it was the chief of his torments.
The Furlongers had always lived aloofly at Sparrow Hall--scorned, even
before their downfall, by their own class, they had nevertheless not
sought comrades in the classes beneath them. They had always sufficed
one another, and had not cared for the distractions of over-the-fence
gossip or the public-house.
However, since his return from Parkhurst, Nigel had realised a certain
tendency on the part of labourers and small farmers to seek him out and
claim equal terms. This was not merely due to the consciousness of his
degradation, the delight of patronising the proud Furlonger--its chief
motive was a strange sort of deference. Socially, his crime had reduced
him to their level, but morally it had given him an exaltation which had
never been his before. He now belonged to that world of which they
caught rare dazzling glimpses in their Sunday papers. He was only a rank
below Crippen in their hero-worship, and when they met him in the
village they stared at him in much the same way as they stared at the
murderer's photograph in _The People_.
At first Nigel hung back from them, sick and confused with shame, but as
the days went by, the emptiness of his life beat him into conciliation.
Humiliated to the dust, he longed for some sort of regard, however
spurious, just as a starving man will eat dung. His brother and sister
gave him love and kindness in plenty, but they were much too practical
in their emotions any longer to give him deference. Before he went to
prison he had been, though the youngest, the leader of the family--his
stronger brain, his quicker wits had made him the captain of their
exploits. But now his brain and wits were discredited. Len and Janey did
not despise him, they were not ashamed of him before men--but he had
forfeited his position in the household. They no longer looked upon him
as their superior, he was just the younger brother. At first he had
scarcely noticed this--everything had been strange, and he had let slip
former realities. But as the days went by, and Parkhurst became more and
more of a horrible and suggestive parenthesis, he was able to recall the
old ways and see how things had changed. He made no complaint, but his
spirit was chafed, and sought crazily for balms.
"Come, don't be stand-offish, Mus' Furlonger," said the shepherd of
Little Cow Farm, who, meeting him outside the Bells at Lingfield, had
suggested a drink.
"No, you're a better man than me now--aren't you?" said Nigel, showing
his teeth.
"I wurn't hinting such, Mus' Furlonger--only t'other chaps in there do
want to hear about the prison."
"Why?"
"Oh, it's always interesting to hear about prison--specially from chaps
wot has bin there. We git a lot about 'em in _Lloyd's_ and _The People_,
but there's nothing like a fust-hand story--surelye!"
Nigel laughed crudely.
"And it's a treat to meet a real convict--none of your petty larceny and
misdemeanour fellers...."
"Well, here's greatness thrust upon me," said Furlonger, and swaggered
into the bar.
The fuggy atmosphere affected him in much the same way as the smell of
ether and dressings affects a man entering a hospital--the spirit of the
place, assisted by crude outward manifestations, cowed him and made him
its slave.
"Name it," said the shepherd.
"Porter."
It was three years since he had had a really stiff drink. He had never
cared for liquor, indeed he had always been a man of singularly
temperate life, a spare eater, a water drinker. But to-day a sudden
desire consumed him--not only to drink, but to be drunken. He remembered
the one occasion which he had been drunk. It was the day he had known
definitely of the collapse of Wickham's scheme, and his own inevitable
disgrace. He had sat in the kitchen at Sparrow Hall, drinking brandy
till his head had fallen forward on the table and his legs trailed back
behind his chair. Afterwards, there had been a shameful waking, but he
could never forget how peace had crept in some mysterious physical way
up his spine, from the base of his neck to his brain, with a soft
tingling--it had been purely physical at first, then it had passed on to
mental dulling and dimming.
To-day, as the frothy brown porter ran down his throat, he felt that
gracious tingling, that creeping upwards of relief. He looked round the
bar. It was full of labouring men and smallholders, who stared at him
with round eyes that were curious and would be ingratiating--they wanted
to know him, because in their opinion he was better worth knowing than
before he went to gaol.
"This is Mus' Breame of Gulledge," said the Little Cow shepherd. "How
are you, Mus' Breame?--This is Mus' Furlonger of Sparrow Hall."
Mus' Breame held out a dark and hairy hand. Nigel's lips were twitching.
Somehow he felt much more humiliated by the beery approval of these men
than by the cold looks of their betters. However, he gave his short, dry
laugh, and shook hands.
"And here's Mus' Dunk of Golden Compasses, and Mus' Boorer of Kenthouse
Hatch--this here is old Adam Harmer, as has been cowman at Langerish
this sixty year."
Nigel had seen all the men before, and had once sold a calf to Adam
Harmer, but he realised that now he was meeting them on new terms.
"I wur wunst in the lock-up meself for a week," drawled old Harmer.
"'Twas summat to do wud poaching, but so long ago as I forget 'xactly
wot. Surelye!"
"Reckon prisons have changed unaccountable since your day," said Dunk,
throwing a glance at Nigel, as if to show that an opening had been
tactfully made for him. But Harmer clung to speech.
"Reckon they have: surelye. In my days you'd hemmed liddle o' whitewash
and all that--it wur starve and straw and bugs in my day, and two or
three fellers together in a cell, either larkin' or murderin' each
other."
The Little Cow shepherd looked uneasily at Furlonger.
"Yus--and the constables too, so different. Not near so haughty as they
is now, but comfortable chaps, as 'ud let yer see yer gal fur a drink,
and walk out o' the plaace fur half a sovereign."
The conversation was obviously getting into the wrong hands. The only
person who looked interested was Nigel.
"Reckon all that's changed now," hastily put in Dunk--"they say now as
gaol's lik a hotel--but not so free and easy, I take it, not so free and
easy. Name it, Mus' Furlonger--see your glass is empty."
This time Nigel named a brandy.
"Reckon you can't order wot you lik fur dinner--and got to do your
little bit o' work. But the gaol-buildings themselves, they're just lik
hotels, they're palisses--handsomer than a workhouse."
"They're damned stinking hells," said Nigel--the brandy had loosed his
tongue.
A murmur of approval ran through the bar. The great Furlonger had at
last been drawn into the conversation. He sat at a small table, his
fingers round his empty glass--about half a dozen voices begged him to
"name it."
At first he hesitated. He was now a hero--for the first time for
years--and yet it was a hero-worship he could not swallow sober. But he
wanted it. He wanted to be looked up to, for a change--to be deferred
to, and exalted; and if he could not stand it sober, he must get drunk,
that was all. He named another brandy.
The patrons of the bar were drawing round him. The barmaid was patting
and pulling at her hair; even "Charley," the seedy nondescript that
haunts all bars, and, unsalaried and ignored, brings the dirty glasses
to the counter from the outlying tables--even "Charley" came forward
with a deprecating grin and heel-taps of stout.
Nigel had gulped down the brandy, and, without exactly knowing why, had
sprung to his feet.
"Give us a speech, Mus' Furlonger!" cried Boorer of the Kenthouse. "Tell
us about gaol, and why it's damned and stinking."
"Have something to cool you fust," suggested Breame.
Nigel shook his head. He was in that convenient state when a man is
sober enough to know he is drunk.
"Gaol's damned and stinking," he began, glaring sharply round him, "in
the same way that this bar is damned and stinking--because it's full of
men. But in gaol they're divided into two classes, top scoundrels and
bottom scoundrels. The top scoundrels are the warders, with their eye at
your door, and their hand inside your coat--in case you've got baccy."
A murmur of sympathy ran through his listeners, who had been a little
taken aback by his opening phrases.
"Baccy's one of the things you aren't allowed. There's lots of
others--drink, and girls, and your own body and soul--the body your
mother gave you, and the soul God gave you," he finished sententiously
with a hiccup.
Some one thrust another glass into his hand, and he gulped it down. It
burnt his throat.
"I once had a body, and I once had a soul, but they aren't mine any
longer now. They belong to the state--hic--they're number
seventy-six--that's me who's speaking to you--number seventy-six--no
other name for three yearsh ... go and see the p'lice every
month--convict seventy-six ... made me no better'n a child--hic--what'er
you to do with a man when he's got too clever for you?--turn him into a
child--a crying child--a damn crying child--like me----"
And Furlonger burst into tears.
The bar looked disconcerted. Nigel stood leaning up against the table,
sobbing and hiccuping. The barmaid offered him her handkerchief, which
was strongly scented, and edged with lace. Breame muttered--"We're
unaccountable sorry, Mus' Furlonger," and Dunk suggested another brandy.
Suddenly Nigel flung round on them, his lips shrinking from his teeth,
his eyes blazing.
"Damn you!" he cried thickly--"damn you all--you cheap cads--gaping and
cringing and pumping--feeding on my misery and my shame--hic ... look at
you all grinning ... you're pleased because I'm in hell. You'll go home
and gas about me, and say 'poor fellow'--blast you!--I'm better than
anything in _Lloyd's_ or the _News of the World_--hic--let me go--you're
dirt, all of you--let me go----"
He plunged forward, and elbowed his way through them to the door. He was
very unsteady, and crashed into the doorpost, bruising his forehead. But
at last he was out in the sun-spattered afternoon--with a cool breeze
bringing the scent of rain from the forest, and little clouds flying
low.