it, then shoulders pushed at the lorry wheels, which squealed and moved
amid a still fussier babel drawn by four horses, and seven yoke of
cattle. The fugitives could hear the opening of the great gate, the
laborious exit, and, in a moment's pause, again the Governor talking, it
seemed far off, to the expert....
Wearily creaked the cart--beyond the moor--to a country road.
Now chattering words came from Harris: “All damned fine! I don't deny
that you know your way about--”
“Way out”, said Hogarth.
“Yes, a gamesome sort of cock you are in all weathers...but what next?”
“'Next' is to fall upon your knees and worship me, you cur”.
“Thou shalt worship the Lawd thy Gawd”, chattered Harris; “no bloomin'
fear! This is only a new kind of punishment cell. You've got me in; 'ow
are you going to get me out?”
Hogarth believed that the lorry was _en route_ for the railway, and
hoped to escape in the transfer of the bell; but that night lorry and
bell slept in a shed outside a village _en route_ for the sea.
At four A.M. they were again _en route_, and at intervals during the
day, opening their now feeble and sleep-infected eyes, could hear the
hoots of the two cattlemen, the sound of winds, the rowdy gait of
the crooked-legged oxen, and stoppages for drink or rest, and anon an
obstruction, with shouting and fuss. It was night before the waggon came
to rest on a jetty, the elaborate day's journey done.
The fugitives were then deep in sleep, and only awoke at the rattle of
a steam-crane in action above them, to find the bell beginning to tilt,
lift and swing; then they were on a deck; and soon afterwards knew
that it was a steamer's, when they heard the bray of her whistle, and
presently were aware of blaring winds, and billows of the sea.
Harris was for then and there crying out, but Hogarth, now his master,
said: “To-morrow morning”; and they fell again into their morbid
slumber.
When they again awoke, uproar surrounded them, voices, a heaven-high
shouting of quenched fires and screaming steams; moreover, the bell was
leaning steeply, they two huddled together at its edge.
Harris began to bellow: but he was not heard, or not heeded.... There
had been a collision.
“If you can't swim, better catch hold of me”, Hogarth shouted--“there
will be--”
But the earth turned turtle, and Hogarth felt himself struck on the
shoulder, flung, and dragged down, down, into darkness.
After an upward climb and fight to slip the clutch of the ship's
suction, in the middle of a heavy sea he managed to get off his clothes,
and set to swimming, whither he did not know, a toy on mountains of
water.
Exultation raged in him--a crazy intoxication--at liberation attained,
at the sensation of warmth, at all that water and waste of Nature.
But within ten minutes it is finished: he shivers, his false strength
changing to paltriness, the waves washing now over his head; and now he
is drowsing...drowning...
XXII
OLD TOM
He continued, however, to swim after his conscious efforts ceased:
for his body was found next morning on a strip of Cornish sand between
Gorran and Mevagissey, washed by every sheet of surf.
His rescuer, a shrimp-fisher, occupied one of three cots perched on a
ravine; and there on the evening of the second day he opened his eyes on
a settee, four children screaming in play around him; he so far having
been seen only by a reporter from Mevagissey, and the doctor from
Gorran, who, on his wide rounds, had been asked into the cottage.
The same night Hogarth spoke to the fisher: told him that he was not a
wrecked sailor, had reasons for avoiding observation, and would pay
for shelter and silence: whereat the fisher, who was drinking hot beer,
winked, and promised; and the next day took for Hogarth a telegram,
signed “Elm Tree”, to Mevagissey, asking of Loveday five pounds.
Finally, one midnight, after two weeks of skulking, he reached
Whitechapel, where, the fact of his brown skin now giving him the idea
of orientalizing himself, at a Jew's, in a little interior behind the
counter, he bought sandals, a caftan, a black sudayree, an old Bagdad
shawl for girdle, and a greenish-yellow Bedouin head-cloth, or kefie,
which banded the forehead, draped the face like a nun's wimple, and fell
loose. For these he discarded the shrimp-man's clothes; and now dubbed
himself “Peter the Hermit”.
For he meant to start-a Crusade.
At a police-station on the third day he saw a description of himself:
three moles, bloodshot eye, white teeth, pouting mouth; but over the
moles now hung the head-cloth.
For several days he lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning
himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in
the thought of the secret truth which lay in his head.
Up to now, not a word to anyone about it; but on the seventh night he
spoke.
It was in some “Cocoa Rooms” in a “first-class room”, strewn with
sawdust, where, as he sat alone, another man, bearing his jug, came and
sat; and soon he addressed Hogarth.
“Talk English?”
“I am an Englishman”, answered Hogarth.
“What, in those togs? What countryman?”
“Norfolk”.
“Know Manchester?”
“I was there one day”.
“Difference between Manchester and London, isn't there? I am a
Manchester man, I am. All the difference in the world. This cold, stiff,
selfish city. Londoners, eh? A lot of peripatetic tombstones!”
And so he went on; this being his whole theory of God and Man: that
Londoners are peripatetic tombstones, but Manchester-men just the other
way--seemed a mechanic, brisk-eyed, small; a man who had read; but now,
evidently, down on his luck.
“Then, why come to London?”--from Hogarth.
“Looking for work”,--with a shrug--“looking for a needle in a bundle of
hay. What would you have? the whole place overrun with Jews. England no
longer belongs to the English, that's the long and short of it”.
Hogarth looked him in the face. “Did England belong to the English
before the Jews came?”
“How do you mean? Of course it did”.
“Which part of it?”
“Why, all of it”.
“But fix your mind upon some particular piece of England--some street,
or field, that you know--and then tell me: did that belong to the
English?”
“Belonged to some Englishman”.
“But you don't mean to say that some Englishman is the English?”
“Ah, yes, I know what you are driving at”, said the mechanic, with
a patronizing nod: “but the point is this: that, apart from vague
theorizing, a man did manage to make a good living before these dogs
overran the country”.
“But--a _good_ living? How much did you make?--forty shillings a week?
toiling in grime six days, sleeping the seventh? I call that a deadly
living”.
“Well, I _don't_, you see. Besides, I made, not forty, but forty-_five_
shillings, under the sliding-scale”.
“Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors
after it was shown the way to escape them”.
“There _is_ no way”, said the mechanic: “there are the books, and the
talkers; but the economic laws that govern the units like you and me
are as relentless as gravitation. Don't believe anyone who talks to you
about 'ways of escape'”.
“But suppose someone has a new thought?”
“There can be no new thoughts about _that_. The question has long since
been exhausted”.
“Well, come “--with sudden decision--“I will tell you a thought of my
own “. And he told.
If the English people paid the rent for England to themselves--to their
government--instead of to a few Englishmen, then, by one day's labour in
six, Englishmen would be much more rich in all things than a fisherman,
by one day's labour in six, was rich in fish.
The expression which he awaited on the face before him was one of
illuminated astonishment; but, with a chill in his nerves, he saw the
workman's lips curve.
“Bah!” said the Manchester man, “that is an exploded theory!”
_Exploded!!!_
Hogarth was rather pale.
Yet he knew that it was true....Who, then, could have been exploding the
Almighty?
“Who has exploded it?”
“Been exploded again and again!” said the Manchester man; “of all the
theories of land-tenure, that is about the weakest: _I_ should know,
for I've studied them all. The fact is, no change in the system of
land-tenure will have the least effect upon the lot of the masses; would
only make things worse by unsettling the country--if it didn't mean a
civil war”.
“I begin to see”.
Hogarth got up, walked home meditating: and suddenly blushed.
It was known! by mechanics in cocoa-rooms!--that secret thing of his
secret cell. And it was not believed!
As for him, what was he now doing outside Colmoor? That question he
asked himself, as he sat unsandaling his feet; and he commenced to dress
himself again: but paused--would first see Loveday.
Accordingly, the next night, the two friends met at Cheyne Gardens.
And a long time they sat silent, Loveday feeding his eyes upon his
friend's face, that hard, rounded brow which seemed harder, and frowned
now, that gallant largeness of eye which seemed now wilder, and that
manly height, which seemed Mahomet's in the Oriental dress.
“But where have you been for five weeks?” asked Loveday.
“Skulking, and thinking. But about my sister....”
“Do not ask...” said Loveday.
There was a long silence.
“Did not O'Hara tell you to make no more efforts for my escape?” asked
Hogarth.
“Who is O'Hara?”
“Why, the priest who escaped, instead of me, through the copse”.
“O'Hara was not the name he gave me; and no, he said nothing about
that. I got him off to America, and only saw him twice. I thought him
rather--But why didn't you escape youself?”
“I thought it improper”.
“But you did finally?”
“For a reason: you remember the association which I was forming to
answer the question as to the cause of misery? Well, that question I
have answered for myself in prison”.
“Really? Tell me!”
Hogarth absently took up a water-colour drawing from the table, and
turned it round and round, leaning forward on a knee, as he told how the
matter was. Meantime, he kept his eyes fixed upward upon Loveday's face,
who stood before him.
In the midst of his talk Loveday scratched the top of his head, where
the hair was rather thin, and said he, twisting round: “Forgive me-let
me ring for some brandy-and-soda--”
Hogarth stood briskly up.
“What I say, I can see, is not new to you?” said he.
“No, not new”, Loveday confessed: “I believe that it is quite an ancient
theory; there are even savage tribes whose land-tenure is not unlike
what you advocate--the Basutos, for example”.
“And are these Basutos richer, happier, prettier fellows than average
Englishmen?”
“Oh, beyond doubt. Don't suppose that I am gainsaying you: I am only
showing you that the theory is not new--”
“But why do you persist in calling it a _theory?_ Is the fact that
one and one make two a _theory?_”--Hogarth's brow growing every moment
redder.
“What can one call it?”
“Call it what you like! But do you believe it?”
“It is quite possibly true; and now that you say it I believe it; but I
have never seriously considered the matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because--I don't know. It is out of my line”.
“Your line! Yet you are a human being--”
“Well, partly, yes: say--a novelist”.
“Do not jest! It is incredible to me that you have written book after
book, and knew of this divine thing, and did not cram your books with
it!”
Loveday flushed. “You misunderstand my profession; and as to this theory
of land-tenure, let me tell you: it will never be realized--not in
England. Anyway, it would mean civil war....”
Again those words! “Civil war....”
And as, for the second time, he heard them, Hogarth dashed the picture
which he held to the ground, shattering glass and frame: which meant
that, then and there, he washed his hands of the world and its wagging;
meant also his return to Colmoor.
He dashed from the room without a word; down the stairs; out into the
street.
As he ran along the King's Road, he asked a policeman the way to the
nearest police-station, then ran on through a number of smaller streets,
seeking it, till, at a corner, he stopped, once more uncertain, the
night dim and drizzling.
He was about to set off again, when, behind him, he heard: “Excuse me,
mister--could you give a poor man a penny to get a night's lodging?”
Turning, he saw--old Tom Bates: still in the guernsey; but very senile
and broken now.
The fish-rich fisher...! he had come to this...
Hogarth had twenty-eight shillings about him, and, without disclosing
himself, put hand to pocket to give them all, just as the old man
reached up to his ear to say: “It's the lumbago; I got it very bad; but
it won't be long now. It wur a bad day for me as ever I come to Lunnon!
I'm Norfolk born, I am: and I had eight sons, which the last was Fred,
who, they say, met his death in Colmoor....”
At that word, “Fred”, Hogarth started: for under the elm in the
beech-wood between Thring and Priddlestone Fred had concealed a thing
fallen from heaven, which could be sold for--a thousand pounds.
That would keep the fisher rich during the few days that remained to
him!
But the old man could hardly go himself; if he could, would bungle: the
thing was heavy--on the lord-of-the-manor's land....
Do a kind act, Hogarth. He would see the old place, his father's grave;
and there was a girl who lived in the Hall at Westring whom it was a
thrilling thing to be near, even if one did not see....
“Here are two shillings”, said he, in an assumed voice: “and if you be
at this spot, at this hour, on Thursday night coming, you shall have
more. Don't fail”.
Again he ran, and took train, two hours later, for Beccles.
XXIII
UNDER THE ELM
His risk of arrest here, round about his old home, was enormous, and he
drew the Bedouin kefie well round his face, skulking from the station to
the “Fen”, northward, where he got an urchin to buy him a paper lantern
in a general shop, and now trudged up to Priddlestone, then down through
meadows to the beech-wood, the night rough with March winds.
It was not the winds, however, which made him draw close his Arab cloak,
but his approach to the elm: there, one night, he had seen a naked black
man! there had fallen the Arab Jew.
He stood twenty yards from the tree, till, with sudden resolution, he
strode, soon had the lantern ruby, and since the grave of “the affair”
had been digged with a piece of wood, for such a piece he went seeking,
having thrown off his caftan.
Instead, he found the rusted half-blade of a spade, and commenced to dig
round the roots, the lantern shine reddening a face strangely agitated,
uncertainty of finding what he sought heightening his excitement: for
the earth showed no disturbance, and since three years had passed since
that night of Bates in the wood, the object might have been already
unearthed. After an hour his back was aching, his hands dabbled, his
brow beaded, while the night-winds blew, the light now was commoved, and
now glowed a steady red; and still he grovelled.
Presently, as he shovelled in a circle, always two feet deep, moving
the light as he moved, he saw on the top of a shovelful of marl--a twig:
barkless, black, cracked--_scorched!_
To an immoderate degree this thing agitated him--some whisper in the
back of his head--some half-thought: he began now to root furiously,
with a frowning intentness.
But suddenly he shuddered: a finger seemed to touch his shoulder behind;
and he twisted with wild eyes, caught up the light, peered, saw no black
man--nothing: but quite five minutes he stood defiant, with clenched
fists; then resumed the work, though with a constant feeling now that he
was being watched by the unseen seers.
After two new strokes he struck upon something hard, and, digging
eagerly round it, found a quart-can, full of earth. And instantly all
doubt vanished: for this must have been the beer-can carried by Bates.
Strong curiosity now wrought in Hogarth, a zeal to lay eyes upon that
object which had careered through the heights of space to find that
beech-wood and that elm-tree; and during fifteen minutes his little
implement digged with the quick-plying movement of a distaff-shuttle, he
fighting for breath, anon casting a flying wild glance behind, but still
digging.
Now, frequently, he came upon burned objects, twigs, cinders. Even the
marl had a scorched look; and his agitation grew to ecstasy.
Something very singular had happened to his mind with regard to this
“affair” of Bates: Bates had said that it had fallen on the asteroid
night; and O'Hara had told him--falsely, indeed--that a piece of the
asteroid, fallen upon the French coast, had had diamonds; yet, somehow,
never once had his mind associated the Fred Bates “affair” with the
thought of diamonds, but only with the “thousand pounds” which Bates had
been promised by old Bond. So at the moment when he had begun to dig,
his whole thought was of “a thousand pounds”; but, somehow, by the time
his implement at last grated against something two feet down, that word
“diamonds” had grown up in his brain.
But diamonds! In the midst of his shovelling the thought flashed through
him: “The world is God's! and to whom He wills He gives it....”
Now at last the thing lay definitely before him: he grated the spade
from end to end, scraping away the marl; and it was very rough....
The size and shape of a man's leg, and red, anyway in the red
lantern-shine--his sight dim--he moved and saw in an improbable dream;
and when he tried to lift the object and failed, for a long time he
sat on the edge of the trench, passing one palm across and across his
forehead, till the lantern-light leapt, and went out.
He sprang upright then--awake, sure: they were diamonds, those bits of
glass, big celestial ones, not of earth, in hundreds; when he passed his
hand along the meteorite he felt it leprous, octahedron, dodecahedron,
large and small: if they were truly diamonds, he divined that their
owner must be as wealthy as some nations.
About three in the morning he managed to raise the meteorite; refilled
the trench; and since it still rained, rolled the meteorite to the
hollow of the elm, put on his caftan, and with his back on the interior
of the tree, his feet on the meteorite, tumbled into a wonderful
slumber.
XXIV
FRANKL SEES THE METEORITE
He was awaked by a footstep, and, starting, saw rocking along the forest
path one Farmer Pollock, wearing now fez and tassel, and he saw his
clothes all clay, and, with a smile of fondness, saw how, even beneath
its grime, the meteor dodged and jeered, with frolic leers, in the
beams of a bright morning that seemed to him the primal morning, a fresh
wedding-morning, swarming with elves and shell-tinted visions, imps and
pixy princes, profligate Golcondas.
Going first to the spot where he had digged, to give to the surface a
natural look, he trampled the lantern into the mire, threw the tin can
far, then, taking a quantity of marl, plastered the meteorite, to
cover its roughness; then boldly left it, starting out with consummate
audacity for Thring, where everybody, police and all, knew him well.
A singular light now in his eyes, an evil pride; and he had the step of
a Prince in Prettyland. Corresponding to an inward majesty, of which,
from youth, he had been conscious, he now felt an outward, and had not
been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans--plans
of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in
fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled;
and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new-crowned, yet by old
heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the entire little
muck of Man.
At one point where the path ran close to Westring-park proper, the park
on higher ground, a grass-bank seven feet high dividing them, he saw
a-top of the bank in caftan, priest-cap, and phylacteries, taking
snuff--Baruch Frankl.
Hogarth skipped up, and stood before the Jew, having drawn his
face-cloth well forward.
“What's the row?” asked Frankl.
“Could you give a poor man a job?”
“You a Jew?”
“Yes”, replied Hogarth, not dreaming how truly: “London born”.
“A Froom?”
“I keep the fasts”.
“What you doing about here?”
“Tramping”.
“Fine mess you are in”.
“I slept in a hollow tree down yonder--an elm tree”.
“Well, there's many a worse shake-down than that. Who are you? Ever been
about here before?”
“I was once”.
“You put me in mind of an old chum of mine....Well, here's half-a-crown
for you to go on with”.
“Make it a crown”, said Hogarth, “and get me to clean up down there; in
a shocking state with mast and leaves”.
Frankl considered. “All right, I don't mind”.
“I shall want a spade, and--a barrow”.
“Go down the path yonder, till you come to the stables, and tell them”.
Frankl resumed his musing stroll, and Hogarth ran for the barrow.
In twenty minutes he was again at the elm tree, and, with a scheme in
him for seeing Rebekah, heaped the barrow with refuse, pushed it between
a beck and the wood, till, wearying of this, he was about to get the
meteorite into the barrow, when he had the mad thought that Frankl must
be made to see and touch it, so set off to seek him: and a few yards
brought him face to face with Frankl.
“Well, how goes it?” asked the Jew.
“There is a weight there which I can't lift”, said Hogarth. “Then you
must do the other thing. Don't lift it, and you don't get the pay. What
weight is it?”
“It is here”.
Hogarth led him, led him, pointing. Frankl kicked the meteorite.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It can't be a branch”, said Hogarth; “too heavy--more like a piece of
old iron”.
“Well, slip into it. A strapping fellow like you ought to be able to do
that bit”.
“But suppose it's valuable?”
“I make you a present of it, as you are so hard up”.
Now Hogarth, by tilting the barrow, with strong effort of four limbs,
got the meteorite lodged, while Frankl, his smile lifting the wrinkles
above his thick moustache, watched the strain: then, with arms behind,
went his contemplative way.
Hogarth rolled the barrow toward Thring.
XXV
CHURCH ARCHITECTURE
It was already eleven o'clock, the sun shining in a bright sky, under
which the country round the Waveney lay broad to the hills of mist which
seemed to encompass the valley; yet, when one came to them no hills were
there, but were still beyond. When Hogarth came out from the wood upon
a footbridge, to his right a hand-sower was sowing broadcast, with a
two-handed rhythm, taking seed, as he strode, from his scrip; and to the
left ran a path between fields to an eminence with a little church on
it; straight northward some Thring houses visible, and north-east, near
the river, Lagden Dip orchard. Only two stooping women in fields near
Thring could Hogarth see; also, still further, a gig-and-horse whose
remote motion was imperceptible; also the trudging two-handed process of
the sower nourishing the furrows. But for these, England, supposed to be
“overcrowded”, seemed a land once inhabited, but abandoned.
To Hogarth the whole, so familiar, looked uplifted now, the sunlight of
a more celestial essence. Westring he would buy--though one memorable
night in Colmoor he had arrived at the knowledge that it was not just
that Westring should be anyone's; but then what one bought with his own
diamonds was surely his own--his name being Richard.
He had passed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth
person in the landscape--a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing
up, with hung jaw, at the apse window--dressed in a grey jacket, but
a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew.
Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the
hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar,
to whisper: “In the King's name I arrest you”.
The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.
“There is--some mistake--My God! Are you--?”
“Yes”.
“Hogarth?”
“Who else?”
“But you have killed me! My heart--”
“Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And
what are you doing here?”
“I was just examining this lovely old church, with its two south aisles,
and one north, like St. John's at Cirencester. When the church fell in
England, architecture was abolished--But as to why I am in Norfolk at
all, I am skulking: and here is as another place. Your friend packed
me off to America; but for some reasons I should prefer Golmoor--old
Colmoor, eh? I fear I am a voluptuary, my son, fond of comfort, and old
things, and pretty things. And all that I shall have yet! Tut, O'Hara is
not done with the world, nor it with him. As to Norfolk, I once knew--a
person--in this neighbourhood--”