THICK WOODS
When Len and Janey came in from the yard that evening they found Nigel
in the kitchen, sitting at the table scowling. His hair was damp on the
temples, and his cheeks were flushed.
"Hullo, old man!" cried Janey, "when did you come in?"
He did not answer, but supplemented his scowl by a grin. It was
characteristic of him to scowl and grin at the same time.
Len went up to his brother, and looked at him closely and rather
sternly.
"What have you been up to?"
Still Nigel did not speak. Then suddenly he dropped his head, rolling it
on his arms.
"Is he drunk?" whispered Janey.
"What d'you think?"
Len tried to pull up his brother's head, but Nigel growled and shook him
off.
"Nigel!" cried Janey.
He made no answer.
She tried to slip her hand under his forehead, and lift it.
"Nigel, what have you been doing?"
He snarled something at her, and she remembered the other awful occasion
when she had seen her brother drunk.
"Leave him alone, and he'll come to himself," said Len. "It's natural
for him to get drunk--he's the sort."
"Oh, no, he isn't!--Nigel, come upstairs with me, and let me put
something cool on your head."
"Damn you!" growled the boy, "leave me alone."
"Oh, Nigel, don't hate me--I'm not blaming you--I think I know why you
got drunk, and I----"
Her sentence was never finished. With a yell of fury he sprang to his
feet, knocking over his chair, and seized her in a grip of iron.
"Hold your tongue, you ----!"
"Oh!" cried Janet.
Leonard vaulted across the table, grasped his brother's collar, and
struck him on the side of the head. Nigel loosed his grip of Janet, and
turned to close with Len, who was, however, much the better man of the
two. He forced Nigel down on the table, and proceeded to punish him with
all his might.
"Apologise, you brute ... beg her pardon on your knees," he shouted.
Nigel did not speak--his lips were tight shut, a thin red streak in the
whiteness of his face.
"Len ... stop!--you'll kill him!" cried Janet. She stood petrified,
trembling from head to foot. Never in her whole life had she witnessed
such a scene in the Furlonger family. The boys were fighting. She had
seen them spar before, but never anything like this. And Nigel's
drunkenness ... and his words to her ... a sickly, stifling horror crept
up her throat and nearly choked her.
"Len--stop!--he's had enough."
"Not till he apologises--apologise, you damn brute!"
Nigel's teeth were set. He struggled mechanically, Len had hold of his
right wrist, and his left hand was bent under him. Suddenly, however, he
managed to wrench them both free--the next minute he seized his
brother's throat. For a moment or two they struggled desperately,
Leonard half strangled, and in the end Nigel rolled off the table to the
floor, where both young men lay together.
Leonard was the first to rise.
"Good Lord, Janey," he said weakly.
"Nigel--he's dead."
"Not he!"
They both knelt down, and raised him a little. Blood began to run out of
the corner of his mouth.
"You've killed him!" cried Janey.
"No--he's only bitten his tongue. Look"--lifting the corner of his
brother's lip--"his teeth are locked like a vice."
"Oh, all this has been too horrible!"
"Run and fetch some water--we'll bring him to in a minute."
She filled a jug at the tap, and together they bathed Nigel's forehead
and neck. Len's rage had entirely cooled, and he handled his unconscious
brother almost tenderly.
At last the boy opened his eyes. To the surprise of both Len and Janet
his first glance was quite mild.
"Oh ..." he said weakly.
Then suddenly remembrance seemed to come. He shook off his brother's
hand, scowled at Janey, and struggled to his feet.
"I'm going to bed," he muttered, leaning unsteadily against the table.
"You mustn't stand," said Janet, trying to soothe him, "come and sit
here for a minute, and then Len shall help you up to bed."
"I don't want Len, damn him!"
He staggered towards the door.
"Len--go after him."
"Not if I know it."
"He'll never get upstairs without you."
"He's much better alone."
They heard Nigel slipping and stumbling on the stairs. Once he fell with
a crash, but at last he reached the top. Luckily his door was open, and
he lurched in. The next minute they heard a thud and a creak as he flung
himself on the bed.
He woke at dawn from what seemed an eternity of sleep--not one of those
swift, deep sleeps which we are unconscious of till we find their
healing touch on our lids at waking, but a series of sleeps, heavy, yet
tossed, continually broken by grey glimmers of consciousness, by sudden
heats and pains, quick stabs of memory, blind spaces of
forgetfulness--that feverish, aching forgetfulness, which is memory in
its acutest form.
He sat up in bed, his temples throbbing, his face flushed and damp. He
pushed his hair back from his forehead, and stared out at the morning
with eyes that burned. He fully remembered all that had happened,
without such reminders as his headache, his sickness, and the rumpled
clothes in which he had slept all night. His brain throbbed to the point
of torture. Sharp cuts of pain tore through it, hideous revisualisations
seemed to scorch whole surfaces of it with sudden flames. Facts hammered
at it with monotonous mercilessness.
He fell back on the pillow, and for some minutes lay quite still,
staring out at the woods. There they lay in their straight brown line,
those woods. He could almost hear the rock of the wind in them, creeping
to him over the stillness of the fields. They seemed to whisper
peace--peace to his throbbing pulses and burning skin and aching body
and breaking heart. All his universe was shattered, except those quiet
external things--the woods and fields round his home. They stood
unchanged through all his turmoils, they responded only to their own
remote influences--the warming and cooling of winds, the waxing and
waning of the sun's heat, the frostiness of vapours. He might rage,
despair, scream, and curse in them without changing the colour of one
leaf.
He longed stupidly for tears, but those easy tears of his humiliation
would not come. He felt that if he thought of Len and Janey he might
cry. But he would not think of them, though in his heart was an infinite
tenderness. Len and Janey were like the woods, they did not change--then
suddenly he realised that nothing had changed, it was only he. He had
changed, and could not fit in with his old environment. Curse it! Damn
it! Where could he find peace?
Perhaps he had formally renounced peace on that day he plunged his
hands into the pitchy mess of money-making. He had known peace before
then--soft dreams that flew to him from the lattices of dawn. He
remembered days when he had lain in the corner of some field, among the
rustling hay-grass, his soul lost in the eternities of peace within it.
But now--he had renounced peace. He had turned from pure things to
defiled--and he had sharpened his brain, whetted it on artificialities.
For the man with brains there is seldom peace, but an eternal questing.
The man without brains suffers only the problem of "what?" It is the man
with brains who has to face the seven-times hotter problem of "why?"
Why was a man, alone of all creatures, allowed to be at war with his
environment--a prey to changes that were independent of, and unable to
reproduce themselves in, the world around him? Why was a man the
meeting-place of god and brute, the battle-ground of the two with their
unending wars?--and so made that if one should triumph and drive out the
other, the vanquished, whether god or brute, took away part of his
manhood with him, and peace was won only at the price of
incompleteness?... Why was consummation only a prelude to
destruction?--the lustreless horns of the daylight moon seemed to be
telling him that it waxed full only to wane. Why was a man given desires
that were gratified only at their own expense? Why did his young blood
call--call into the fire and dark--with only the fire and dark to answer
it?
It was in this turmoil of "whys" that Nigel's longing for the woods
became desperate. He raised himself on his elbow, and stared out at
them--Swites Wood, Summer Wood, and the woods of Ashplats and Hackenden.
He found himself dreaming of their narrow, soaking paths, of their brown
undergrowth, and carpet of dead leaves--he seemed to see the long rows
of ash, with here and there a yellow leaf fluttering on a bough. He
would go to the woods, he would find rest in their silent thickness.
He sprang out of bed and across the room, with what seemed one movement
of his big, graceful body. He lifted his water-jug from the floor, and
drank deeply--then he washed himself and put on fresh clothes. He felt
clean and cool, and the mere physical sensation gave him new strength
and dignity. He went quietly downstairs. Len was up and in the yard,
Janet was in the kitchen--but neither saw him as he stole out of the
house and up the lane.
He left it soon after passing Wilderwick, and plunged into a field. The
grass was covered with frost-crystals, beginning to melt in the lemon
glare of the sun. It was a strange, yellow dawn, dream-like, pathetic--a
little wind fluttered with it from the east, and smote the hedges into
ghostly rustlings. Nigel crept through the pasture as if he feared to
wake some one asleep, and entered the first of his woods.
The rim was touched with flame--one or two fiery maples blazed out of
the hedge against a background of yellow. Creeping through those golds
and scarlets into the sober browns was symbolic. He went a few steps,
then flung himself down upon the leaves. On the top they were dry,
underneath he felt and smelt their gracious dampness.
The fires in his heart seemed to die. He felt bruises where Len had
struck him, but they galled him no longer; the half-forgotten peace and
liberty of other days was beginning to drift like a shower into his
breast. Why could he not live always in the woods, instead of among
people whom he hurt and who hurt him, though he loved them and they
loved him? There was no love in the woods--love had passed out of them
in September, leaving them very quiet, very peaceful, in a great brown
hush of sleep. Love was what hurt in life--love and brains; take away
these and you take away suffering. Oh, if love and thought could go
together out of his life as they had gone out of the woods--and leave
him in a great brown hush of sleep.
For nearly an hour he lay in the brake, hidden by golden tangles of
bracken and stiff clumps of tansy. He had begun to drowse, and capture
rags of happiness in dreams, when suddenly he heard a rustling in the
bushes. Hang it all! He could not have peace, even in the woods. The
rustling came nearer, and he heard the panting of a dog--with a mumbled
oath he sat up in the fern.
"Oh!..."
Nigel's head and shoulders were not a reassuring sight to confront one
suddenly on a lonely woodland walk, and though Tony did not scream her
voice was full of alarm. At first Nigel did not recognise her, she
stirred up in him merely impersonal feelings of annoyance, but the next
moment he seemed to see her face in a glow of lamplight on East
Grinstead platform. This was the lone girl-kid he had befriended--and
thought no more of since then.
"I beg your pardon," he said hastily, scrambling to his feet, "I'm
afraid I startled you."
"Oh, no"--she looked awkward and embarrassed. "You're Mr. Smith, aren't
you?"
Nigel stared at her in some bewilderment, then suddenly remembered
another of the half-forgotten incidents of that night.
"Yes--I'm Smith," he said slowly. "I--I hope you got home all right in
the taxi."
"Quite all right, thank you--and mother said I ought to be very grateful
to you for taking such care of me."
There was something about this school-girl, who evidently took him for a
man of her own class and position, which filled him with an infinite
pain--a pain that was half a wistful pleasure. She stood before him in
the path, a slim, unripe promise of womanhood, her long hair plaited
simply on her back, her face glowing with health, her eyes bright and
shy. He felt unfit, uncouth--and yet she did not seem to see anything
strange in his appearance, sudden as it had been. He realised that now
at last he was face to face with a human being between whom and him the
barrier of his disgrace did not stand. This child did not exalt him for
his evil story, neither did she despise him--his crime simply did not
exist. Its hideousness was not tricked out with tinsel and scarlet, as
by the cads in the bar--it was just invisible, put away. Strange words
thrilled faintly into his mind--"the remission of sins."
"I'm glad you came to me at East Grinstead," said Tony, a little
embarrassed by the long pause. "You see, mother never got my postcard,
so no wonder there wasn't any one to meet me."
"I'm glad I was any use." He spoke stiffly, in a mortal fear lest, for
some reason unspecified, her attitude of fragrant ignorance should
collapse.
"Do you live near here?" she asked naïvely.
He hesitated. "Not very."
"I do--quite near. I think I must be going home now."
She held out her hand to say good-bye, when suddenly a shrill wailing
scream rose from the field outside the wood.
"Oh!" cried Tony.
They both turned and listened, their hands still clasped. The next
minute it came again--shrill, frantic.
"What is it?" asked the girl, shuddering, "it sounds just like a baby."
"I think it's a rabbit--perhaps it's caught in a trap."
He left hold of her hand and looked over the hedge. The next minute he
sprang into it, forcing his way through, while she stared after him with
troubled eyes.
"Yes, it's a rabbit," he cried thickly, "caught in one of those spring
traps, poor little devil!"
She scrambled after him into the field.
"Oh, let it out!--poor little thing!--oh, save it!"
But he was already struggling with the trap, and she saw blood on his
hands where the teeth had caught them.
"I'll do it, never fear," he muttered, grinding his teeth. "Can you hold
the poor little chap?--He'll hurt himself worse than ever if he
struggles so."
She grasped the soft mass of fur, damp and draggled with its agony,
while Nigel tried to prise open the steel jaws.
"There!"
The rabbit bounded out of the trap, but the next minute fell down
struggling.
"It's leg's broken," cried Nigel. "Poor little beast!--what a damned
infernal shame!"
He picked it up tenderly.
"Hadn't you better destroy it?" asked Tony, gulping her tears.
"I think perhaps I had--look the other way."
She moved off a few steps, and heard nothing till Nigel said, "Poor
little beggar!"
He came up to her, holding the dead rabbit by its ears.
"That's all you're good for when you've been in a trap--to die. Being in
a trap breaks parts of you that can never be mended. It's always kind to
kill broken things."
He stood hesitating a moment, then suddenly he flushed awkwardly,
pulled off his cap and turned away.
Tony stared after him. She saw him go with bowed head across the field.
Half way he dropped the rabbit, but he did not stop. He walked straight
to the fence, and climbed over it into the lane.
An impulse seized her--she could not account for it, but she suddenly
turned to follow him. She wanted to thank him again, perhaps--to ask him
something, she scarcely knew what. But he was gone. There was only the
dead rabbit, lying still warm in the grass.