FANSTEAD is a little country town built on the plan of a sparsely
equipped herring bone. There is the central High Street, a jumble of old
half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and
sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling
in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the
sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. All save two. One of these
ends abruptly at an inconveniently distant railway station. The other,
villa bordered, meanders pleasantly for a mile or so to the tiny village
of Pendish where it meets at right angles the great high road, and stops
modestly, confronted all of a sudden with rolling open country, swelling
downs patched with meadow and corn-field and crowned with great clumps
of woodland.
Pendish was too small even to have a church. There was a tiny chapel for
the convenience of Baptists. But Anglicans tramped into Fanstead or to
the larger village of Banton-on-the-Hill, another mile along the great
high road. It had a tumbled-down inn, the “Whip and Collar,” and a
straggling row of thatched cottages, and a tiny red-brick villa labelled
as the home of the County Police. But it also had a post-office, which
was also a shop; and this was a small, square two-storied Georgian house
imposing among its thatched neighbours and maintaining itself with a
curious air of dignity, in spite of the front door open to the public
during business hours, and the miscellaneous assortment of sweets,
tobacco, tapes and picture postcards exposed in what was once the
dining-room window.
It was the freehold of Mrs. Pettiland, a widow of fifty; she had
inherited it from her father, a Norfolk thatcher who had brought his
mystery to the west and practising it with skill and saving a little
fortune brought to him by his wife, had amassed enough to buy the square
stone house where he had ended his days. They said in the village that
he had never recovered from the shock occasioned by the fate of his son,
his apprentice and later his partner, who had gone raving mad a week or
two after his marriage and had to be confined in the County Asylum.
Well, the old man had slept with his fathers for many years; his wife
had joined him; the son still lingered on in the madhouse; and Mrs.
Pettiland, very much alone in the world, save for her husband’s
relatives in Fanstead, sold stamps and sweets to the village, and as a
very great favour let the best bedroom to an occasional painter with
unimpeachable introductions.
She was dark-haired, fresh-coloured, and buxom; she dressed with
neatness, wearing old-fashioned stays that gave her a waist and a high
bust; and she was the most considerable personage in Pendish.
When she had received a letter from her sister-in-law, Myra Stebbings,
asking her as a favour to put up a foolish young man named Briggs who
had got himself run over by a motor-lorry, if ever he should act on her
suggestion and come to Pendish, she considered it less as an
introduction than as a command. Whether she loved Myra or not, she did
not know. But she had an immense respect for the dry, grey-faced woman
who had come every year to stay with her, so that she could visit the
brother whom she had loved, in the house of awfulness, five or six miles
away. She stood somewhat in awe of Myra. Her own good man had died
comfortably in his bed and had gone for ever, after a couple of years of
placid content. It was sad; but it was the common lot. The Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away. But at the idea of a woman’s husband being
shut off from the world in the living tomb of the County Asylum, she
shuddered. Myra always conveyed to her the vague impression, so
impossible to be formulated by an uneducated woman ignorant of
traditional reference, of a human soul defying the tragedy of existence.
So when this Mr. Briggs wrote from the hospital in London, she sent him
a cordial answer. Any friend of Myra Stebbings was more than welcome.
She would not charge him more than out-of-pocket expenses. For she did
not know who this foolish young man might be. Myra sphinx-like, as
usual, had given no clue. But for Myra to ask a favour was an
unprecedented occurrence. She must have far more than ordinary interest
in the welfare of the young fellow. Mrs. Pettiland’s curiosity was
aroused and she awaited the arrival of her new lodger with impatience.
The station car from the Fanstead garage brought him, on a late summer
afternoon, with his brown canvas kit-bag and suit-case and khaki
overcoat. She stood in the pedimented doorway, over which was fixed the
wooden post-office board, and watched him descend. He faced her for a
moment, and raised his hat.
“Mrs. Pettiland?”
She looked at his clear cut face, so boyish in spite of whiteness and
haggardness, at his careless brown hair sweeping over his temples, at
the lips parted in a smile, at the lithe young figure. She caught the
significance of his uplifted hat and the pleasant tone of his voice. In
her limited category of values he would be only one thing—a gentleman.
The manners of an instant charmed her.
“Mr. Briggs?”
“I hope I shan’t be a dreadful nuisance to you, but I need rest and
quiet and Miss Stebbings told me to come. And,” he smiled, “What she
says generally goes.”
“I see that you know her, sir,” said Mrs. Pettiland pleasantly.
The luggage taken in, the cab dismissed she led him up to his room—a
large bed-sitting room, looking over a wild garden and a wide expanse of
rolling downs, with the faint white ribbon of high road circling in and
out and round about them. His meals, she informed him, he could take in
the parlour downstairs, without extra charge.
“But I insist on paying my way,” he said. “Unless my staying here is
profitable to you, I can’t remain. For the present at least, I can well
afford it.”
So a modest arrangement was made and Triona settled down in his new
home.
For some days he enjoyed the peace of Pendish. He had brought with him
books, ordered from the hospital; books which would take him long to
read; some of the interminable modern French novels; a complete Fielding
and Smollett; _Paradise Lost_ and _The Faerie Queene_, neither of which
he had as yet had time to go through. He spent hours in the sunny garden
riotous with ingenous roses and delphinium and Canterbury bells and
burning red-hot pokers as they call them in the West. Often he limped
along the green lanes that wound between the fields up and down the
downs. Becoming aware that he knew nothing of bird-life, he procured
through the Fanstead bookshop popular works on British Birds, and
sitting under a tree in a corner of a meadow would strive to identify
them by their song and plumage and queer individual habits. He talked to
the villagers. He talked to Mrs. Pettiland, who told him the tragic
story of Myra and the man in the County Asylum. Of Myra’s doings all the
year round, he found she knew little. She was with her lady whom she had
served most of her life and had gone back with her to Medlow. Of the
lady herself Myra never spoke. Mrs. Pettiland did not know whether the
lady was married or not. That was Myra Stebbings’s way. She gave no
information and no one dared ask her questions.
“She never even told me, in her letter, who you were, sir,” she added.
“I am just under her protection,” he smiled. “She took me up when I had
no one to defend me.”
“She’s a curious woman,” sighed Mrs. Pettiland.
“With strange tastes in protégés.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth,
Mrs. Pettiland, I don’t quite know myself what I am. But doubtless
sooner or later I’ll do something to astonish you.”
The yearning to do this fretted his secret heart. To move about the
summer fields when the weather was fine, to lounge in an easy-chair over
books in seasons of rain, was all very well for the period of
convalescence after the confinement in the hospital ward. But after a
while, when his muscles regained strength and the new blood coursing
through his veins brought colour to his cheeks, he began to feel the old
imperious need of movement and of action. Sometimes he went back, as in
his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea;
sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable
steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd;
sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his
wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he
cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure.
Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. Well,
he shrugged angry shoulders. It was no use thinking of that. Poland had
gone, like Olivia, out of his life. And when he came to think of it, so
had everything that had made up all that he had known or conceived of
life.
* * * * *
He closed _Tom Jones_, and stared out of the window on the rain-drenched
hills; Tom Jones, with his physical lustiness, his strong animal
bravura, was more than he could bear. Tom Jones, no matter in what
circumstance he was placed, had all the world before him. His gay
confidence offended the lost man. For he was lost. Not a lost soul, he
told himself; that was taking an absurd Byronical view of the matter. To
pose as a modern Manfred would be contemptible. He went down to bed-rock
of commonplace. He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough
for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg
in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he
died. He could write, pour out all the fever of his soul into words. But
what was the good, if no word of his could be transmitted from this
backwater into the haunts of men? Work without hope—a verse of
Coleridge came vaguely to him—was like draining nectar through a sieve.
It could only end in heart-break. He stared through the dripping
window-pane at the free hills, dim and hopeless in the mist of deluge.
Nothingness confronted him.
He wondered whether Myra, with diabolical insight and deliberate malice,
had not lured him hither, so that she could hold him in relentless grip.
At any rate she had cast him into this prison.
He lay awake all that night. The next morning the sky had cleared and
the sun shone down on the gratefully steaming land of green. He
breakfasted in the tiny parlour opposite the shop-post-office on the
ground floor. The ornaments in it were those of long ago. Prints of the
landing of the Guards after the Crimea, of Queen Victoria and the Prince
Consort. Curiously carved and polished coconut shells, and a great egg
on which a staring mermaid was nudely painted stood on the mantelpiece.
On the chiffonier were calabashes, with gaudy figures of indigenous
Indians, such as came from the West Indies seventy years ago, and a
model of a full-rigged ship under a glass case, and a moulting stuffed
toucan, with its great beak and yellow and red plumage. The late Mr.
Pettiland’s father, he had learned, had followed the sea. So, beside the
objects on the crowded mantelpiece and in front of palm-leaf fans were
sprigs of white coral and strings of strange beads, and a dumpy,
shapeless, wooden Polynesian god. And at the end lay a great conch shell
with its wide, pink, curving lips, mysterious and alluring.
He could scarcely eat. The night had shaken him. He gulped down some
food and coffee, lit a pipe and wandered restlessly about the room,
looking at these tokens of the lands far away which he had never seen.
The coral fascinated him. In the hospital he had read _Typee_ and
_Oomoo_ of Herman Melville in Dent’s cheap collection of classics. The
sight of the coral quickened dormant longings. He took the great
conch-shell in his hand wondering at its beauty of curve and colour. And
as he did so his mind went back to early childhood—to an old aunt whom
he occasionally was taken to visit in torturing Sunday clothes
sacrosanct from the defilement of jam under dreadful penalties, and who
possessed such a shell. He remembered that the shell was the glory that
compensated the frigid horror of that house. He would hold it to his ear
and listen to the boom of far-off surfs and then go home and mingle the
message with the pointing finger of Salvation Yeo. And now, grown man,
inured to adventure, he put the shell to his ear, and the message was
the same, vibrating the call of oceans thundering on distant beaches
through the fibres of his being.
He went out into the garden and stood in the sun and looked almost
unseeingly at the rolling downs. Suddenly he became aware of the ribbon
of road that lost itself not far away, behind a bluff. It was the Great
High Road that led eventually to a great western port, where great ships
sailed to the South Seas. The Power seemed to impel him, as it had
impelled him as a boy to run away from home. By following that road, he
would reach the port. At the port he could ship before the mast. On
board his limp would not matter. For the rest, he was strong, as strong
as a lion, in spite of all pronouncements by the doctors. It was the one
adventure life left open to him. Nay more, the one chance of maintaining
his reason. He stood with hands clenched staring at the road, the sweat
beading on his forehead.
To pack up belongings and arrive with genteel suit-case and kit-bag at
the dock-side and expect to be taken on as an ordinary hand would be the
act of an embecile. He passed his hand mildly through his hair in his
instinctive gesture. Why not go as he was, a cap on his head, and his
money, all he had in the world, in a belt (bought for Poland) round his
waist? It was escape from prison. Escape from Myra. The final
disappearance from the orbit of Olivia.
Perhaps it was the maddest thing he had done in his life. But what did
it matter? If he crocked up, he crocked up. At least he could try. He
went indoors and in the parlour found an old railway timetable. There
were only two trains a day from Fanstead to the main-line junction, and
the morning train had already gone. Why should he not tramp to the
Junction, as in the old days, getting a lift here and there on a cart,
and know again the freedom of the vagabond road?
He went up to his room, put on his belt of money and good thick boots,
and made up a bundle of necessaries. On his dressing-table he left a
letter addressed to Mrs. Pettiland, enclosing a month’s rent. He looked
round the room for the last time, as he had looked round so many in his
life, and laughed. No books on this journey. As he had not left the
Tyneside with books years ago, so would he start now afresh, with the
same equipment. He went downstairs with a light heart, and called out to
Mrs. Pettiland busy in her post-office.
“I’m going off on a jaunt—so don’t expect me till you see me.”
And the answer came: “Don’t overdo yourself with your lame leg.”
He laughed at the idea. His leg could bear his whole weight to-day
without a twinge. Retracing his steps down the passage, he entered the
garden and left the place by the wicket-gate and struck up the winding
lanes and across fields to the high road, his stick and bundle over his
shoulder. By doing so, instead of taking the road at the end of the
village, he could cut off a mile. It was a morning of freshness and
inspiration. A cool breeze sent the clouds scurrying across the sky and
rustled the leaves of the elms and rippled the surface of the half-grown
corn. His spirits rose as he walked, somewhat of a jog-trot walk, it is
true, but that would last for the rest of his life; so long as the pain
had gone for ever, all was well. He reached the high road and settled
down to his tramp, gladdened by the sight of cart and car and cottage
gardens flaming with roses and hollyhocks or restful with screens of
sweet-peas. In the soft-mannered West-country fashion, folks gave him
“good day” as he passed. The road undulated pleasantly, now and then
sweeping round the full bosom of a hill, with a steeply sloping drop of
thirty feet to the valley. Such spots were grimly sign-posted for
motorists; for at one of them, so Mrs. Pettiland had told him, a
motor-lorry during the war had slipped over at night and all the
occupants had been killed. He regarded it with a chauffeur’s eye and
smiled contemptuously at the inefficiency of the driver. He could race
along it at sixty miles an hour. But still, if you did go over—there
was an end of you.
By noon he was hungry and ate cold meat and bread at a wayside inn, and
smoked contentedly afterwards on the bench outside and talked of crops
and licensing laws with the landlord. When he started again he felt
stiff from the unaccustomed exercise. Walking would relax his muscles.
Yet he began to tire. A while later he came upon a furniture removing
van which had broken down. Two men drew their heads from below the
bonnet and looked at each other ruefully, and their speech was profane.
He asked what was wrong. They didn’t know. He threw off his coat, glad
to get to an engine again, and in a quarter of an hour had set it going
merrily. For two or three miles he sat on the tailboard between the two
canvas-aproned packers, enjoying the respite. When they turned off
eventually from the main road, and he had to descend, he felt strangely
disinclined to walk. The Junction was still a long way off. It would
have been better, after all, to wait for the evening train from
Fanstead. He was always starting on crazy ventures without counting the
cost. But he limped on.
The road went through a desolate land of abandoned quarry and ragged
pine woods. The ascent was steep. Suddenly, as though someone had
pierced his leg with hot iron, flamed the unmistakable pain. He stood
aghast at the pronouncement of doom. At that moment, while he hung there
in agony, a rough figure of a man in old khaki slacks rose from a near
hollow in the quarry and, approaching him, asked what time it was.
Triona took out his watch, a gold one, the gift of Olivia. It was four
o’clock. The man thanked him gruffly and returned to his stony Bethel.
Triona hobbled on a few more steps. But the torture was too great. He
must rest. The pine-wood’s cool quiet invited him. He dragged himself
thither wearily, and sat down, his back against the trunk of a tree. He
tried to think. Of course the simplest method of extrication was to hail
any passing car and beg for a lift, either to the Junction or back to
Pendish. Walking was out of the question. But which of those ways should
he take? The weight of physical tiredness overwhelmed him and dulled the
deciding brain. He had set out at nine in the morning and it was now
four o’clock in the afternoon. He had not realized how slow his progress
had been. Yes, he was exhausted and sleepy. Nothing mattered. He rolled
on his side, stuck his arm under his head and fell into a dead sleep.
Thirty yards away, at varying intervals, motor vehicles flashed by.
* * * * *
He was dreaming of a rabbit running across his throat, when suddenly he
awoke to find the rabbit a man’s arm. He gripped it, instinctively. It
was nearly dark.
“What the devil are you doing?”
The man replied: “Why we thought you was dead.”
At the significance of the plural, his grasp relaxed and he sat up,
staring at two men who had come upon him in his solitude. They were
dirty, unshaven, not nice to look upon. On one of them he noticed a pair
of old khaki slacks. As soon as he moved they knelt one on each side of
him.
“And if I’d been dead, you’d have run through my pockets wouldn’t you?”
Suddenly he clapped his hands in front of him. “You swine, you’ve got my
watch and chain.”
He thrust them aside and scrambled anyhow to his feet, and struck
instinctively with his left full in the face of the nearest man who had
sprung up also. But all his weight was then on his left foot and the
flame of agony shot up through his thigh and his leg crumpled up before
the blow reached the man. Then the one in the khaki slacks came in with
an upper cut on the point of his jaw and he fell senseless.
When he recovered consciousness a few minutes afterwards, he found
himself alone, dazed, rather sick, in an uncomprehended world of
gathering darkness. Black clouds had swept over the brow of the quarry
hill. A pattering noise some way off struck his ear. He realized it was
rain on the road. He drew himself up to a sitting posture and in a
moment or two recovered wits and memory. There had been a fight. There
was one man in khaki slacks—why, that was the man who had asked him the
time at four o’clock in the afternoon. He had lain in wait for him and
robbed him of his watch and chain. What a fool he had been to parade it
in this manner. Well, it was gone. It would teach him a lesson in
prudence. But the other man? How did he come in? Why did they wait three
or four hours before attacking him? Perhaps the man of the khaki slacks
had struggled against temptation until a more desperate acquaintance
came along. He remembered the landlord of the inn where he had lunched
telling him of an ugly quarrying village he would pass through, a nest
of out-of-works—owing to quarries, unprofitable at the high rate of
wages, being closed down—living discontented Bolshevik lives on high
out-of-work pay. He cursed his leg. If it had not failed him, he would
have got home on the first man, as easily as shaking hands—the flabby,
unguarded face shimmered in front of him; and then he could have turned
his attention to the man in khaki slacks, a true loafer type, spiritless
when alone—the kind of man, who, if he had worn those slacks in the
army, would have been in guard-room every week, and would have cowered
as a perpetual cleaner of latrines under the eyes of vitriol-tongued
sergeants. Far from a fighting man. His imagination worked, almost
pleasurably, in the reconstitution of the robbery. But for his
abominable leg he would have downed both the degenerate scoundrels, and
have recovered his precious belongings. He damned them and his leg
impartially. The watch and chain were all that he had kept materially of
Olivia. In the morning he had hesitated as to the advisability of
carrying them with him, gold watches and chains not being customarily
accoutrements of a common sailor in wind-jammer or tramp steamer
fo’c’sle. But sentiment had prevailed. He could hide them somewhere,
when he reached the port, and at convenient slop-shops he could have
reorganized attire and equipment.
The rain pattering on the open road came dribbling through the branches
of the pines. He cursed the rain. He must go on somewhere. Absurd to
stay in the wood and get wet through. He struggled to his feet and then
for the first time became aware of a looseness around his middle. He
looked down. His trousers were unbuttoned, his shirt sagged out
immodestly as if the front had been hurriedly tucked in. His hands
sought his waist. The belt with all the money he had in the world had
gone.