THE BATTLE OF CRAYMINSTER
§ 1
Bealby was beginning to realize that running away from one’s situation
and setting up for oneself is not so easy and simple a thing as it had
appeared during those first days with the caravan. Three things he
perceived had arisen to pursue him, two that followed in the daylight,
the law and the tramp, and a third that came back at twilight, the
terror of the darkness. And within there was a hollow faintness, for the
afternoon was far advanced and he was extremely hungry. He had dozed
away the early afternoon in the weedy corner of a wood. But for his
hunger I think he would have avoided Crayminster.
Within a mile of that place he had come upon the ‘Missing’ notice again
stuck to the end of a barn. He had passed it askance, and then with a
sudden inspiration returned and tore it down. Somehow with the daylight
his idea of turning King’s Evidence against the tramp had weakened. He
no longer felt sure.
Mustn’t one wait and be asked first to turn King’s Evidence?
Suppose they said he had merely confessed....
The Crayminster street had a picturesque nutritious look. Half-way down
it was the White Hart with cyclist club signs on its walls and geraniums
over a white porch, and beyond a house being built and already at the
roofing pitch. To the right was a baker’s shop diffusing a delicious
suggestion of buns and cake and to the left a little comfortable
sweetstuff window and a glimpse of tables and a board: ‘Teas.’ Tea! He
resolved to break into his ninepence boldly and generously. Very likely
they would boil him an egg for a penny or so. Yet on the other hand if
he just had three or four buns, soft new buns. He hovered towards the
baker’s shop and stopped short. That bill was in the window!
He wheeled about sharply and went into the sweetstuff shop and found a
table with a white cloth and a motherly little woman in a large cap.
Tea? He could have an egg and some thick bread and butter and a cup of
tea for fivepence. He sat down respectfully to await her preparations.
But he was uneasy.
He knew quite well that she would ask him questions. For that he was
prepared. He said he was walking from his home in London to Someport to
save the fare. “But you’re so dirty!” said the motherly little woman. “I
sent my luggage by post, ma’m, and I lost my way and didn’t get it. And
I don’t much mind, ma’m, if you don’t. Not washing....”
All that he thought he did quite neatly. But he wished there was not
that bill in the baker’s window opposite and he wished he hadn’t quite
such a hunted feeling. A faint claustrophobia affected him. He felt the
shop might be a trap. He would be glad to get into the open again. Was
there a way out behind if for example a policeman blocked the door? He
hovered to the entrance while his egg was boiling and then when he saw a
large fat baker surveying the world with an afternoon placidity upon his
face, he went back and sat by the table. He wondered if the baker had
noted him.
He had finished his egg; he was drinking his tea with appreciative
noises, when he discovered that the baker _had_ noted him. Bealby’s
eyes, at first inanely open above the tilting tea cup, were suddenly
riveted on something that was going on in the baker’s window. From where
he sat he could see that detestable bill, and then slowly, feeling about
for it, he beheld a hand and a floury sleeve. The bill was drawn up and
vanished and then behind a glass shelf of fancy bread and a glass shelf
of buns something pink and indistinct began to move jerkily.... It was a
human face and it was trying to peer into the little refreshment shop
that sheltered Bealby....
Bealby’s soul went faint.
He had one inadequate idea. “Might I go out,” he said, “by your back
way?”
“There isn’t a back way,” said the motherly little woman. “There’s a
yard—.”
“If I might,” said Bealby, and was out in it.
No way at all! High walls on every side. He was back like a shot in the
shop, and now the baker was half-way across the road. “Fivepence,” said
Bealby and gave the little old woman sixpence. “Here,” she cried, “take
your penny!”
He did not wait. He darted out of the door.
The baker was all over the way of escape. He extended arms that seemed
abnormally long and with a weak cry Bealby found himself trapped.
Trapped, but not hopelessly. He knew how to do it. He had done it in
milder forms before, but now he did it with all his being. Under the
diaphragm of the baker smote Bealby’s hard little head, and instantly he
was away running up the quiet sunny street. Man when he assumed the
erect attitude made a hostage of his belly. It is a proverb among the
pastoral Berbers of the Atlas mountains that the man who extends his
arms in front of an angry ram is a fool.
It seemed probable to Bealby that he would get away up the street. The
baker was engaged in elaborately falling backward, making the most of
sitting down in the road, and the wind had been knocked out of him so
that he could not shout. He emitted “Stop him!” in large whispers. Away
ahead there were only three builder’s men sitting under the wall beyond
the White Hart, consuming tea out of their tea cans. But the boy who was
trimming the top of the tall privet hedge outside the doctor’s saw the
assault of the baker and incontinently uttered the shout that the baker
could not. Also he fell off his steps with great alacrity and started in
pursuit of Bealby. A young man from anywhere—perhaps the grocer’s
shop—also started for Bealby. But the workmen were slow to rise to the
occasion. Bealby could have got past them. And then, abruptly at the
foot of the street ahead the tramp came into view, a battered
disconcerting figure. His straw-coloured hat which had recently been
wetted and dried in the sun was a swaying mop. The sight of Bealby
seemed to rouse him from some disagreeable meditations. He grasped the
situation with a terrible quickness. Regardless of the wisdom of the
pastoral Berbers he extended his arms and stood prepared to intercept.
Bealby thought at the rate of a hundred thoughts to the minute. He
darted sideways and was up the ladder and among the beams and rafters of
the unfinished roof before the pursuit had more than begun. “Here, come
off that,” cried the foreman builder, only now joining in the hunt with
any sincerity. He came across the road while Bealby regarded him
wickedly from the rafters above. Then as the good man made to ascend
Bealby got him neatly on the hat, it was a bowler hat, with a tile. This
checked the advance. There was a disposition to draw a little off and
look up at Bealby. One of the younger builders from the opposite
sidewalk got him very neatly in the ribs with a stone. But two other
shots went wide and Bealby shifted to a more covered position behind the
chimney stack.
From here, however, he had a much less effective command of the ladder,
and he perceived that his tenure of the new house was not likely to be a
long one.
Below, men parleyed. “Who _is_ ’e?” asked the foreman builder. “Where’d
’e come from?” “’E’s a brasted little thief,” said the tramp. “’E’s one
of the wust characters on the road.” The baker was recovering his voice
now. “There’s a reward out for ’im,” he said, “and ’e butted me in the
stummick.”
“’Ow much reward?” asked the foreman builder.
“Five pound for the man who catches him.”
“’Ere!” cried the foreman builder in an arresting voice to the tramp.
“Just stand away from that ladder....”
Whatever else Bealby might or might not be, one thing was very clear
about him and that was that he was a fugitive. And the instinct of
humanity is to pursue fugitives. Man is a hunting animal, enquiry into
the justice of a case is an altogether later accretion to his complex
nature, and that is why, whatever you are or whatever you do, you should
never let people get you on the run. There is a joy in the mere fact of
hunting, the sight of a scarlet coat and a hound will brighten a whole
village, and now Crayminster was rousing itself like a sleeper who wakes
to sunshine and gay music. People were looking out of windows and coming
out of shops, a policeman appeared and heard the baker’s simple story, a
brisk hatless young man in a white apron and with a pencil behind his
ear became prominent. Bealby, peeping over the ridge of the roof, looked
a thoroughly dirty and unpleasant little creature to all these people.
The only spark of human sympathy for him below was in the heart of the
little old woman in the cap who had given him his breakfast. She
surveyed the roof of the new house from the door of her shop, she hoped
Bealby wouldn’t hurt himself up there, and she held his penny change
clutched in her hand in her apron pocket with a vague idea that perhaps
presently if he ran past she could very quickly give it him.
§ 2
Considerable delay in delivering the assault on the house was caused by
the foreman’s insistence that he alone should ascend the ladder to
capture Bealby. He was one of those regular-featured men with large
heads who seem to have inflexible backbones, he was large and fair and
full with a sweetish chest voice and in all his movements authoritative
and deliberate. Whenever he made to ascend he discovered that people
were straying into his building, and he had to stop and direct his men
how to order them off. Inside his large head he was trying to arrange
everybody to cut off Bealby’s line of retreat without risking that
anybody but himself should capture the fugitive. It was none too easy
and it knitted his brows. Meanwhile Bealby was able to reconnoitre the
adjacent properties and to conceive plans for a possible line of escape.
He also got a few tiles handy against when the rush up the ladder came.
At the same time two of the younger workmen were investigating the
possibility of getting at him from inside the house. There was still no
staircase, but there were ways of clambering. They had heard about the
reward and they knew that they must do this before the foreman realized
their purpose, and this a little retarded them. In their pockets they
had a number of stones, ammunition in reserve, if it came again to
throwing.
Bealby was no longer fatigued nor depressed; anxiety for the future was
lost in the excitement of the present, and his heart told him that, come
what might, getting on to the roof was an extraordinarily good dodge.
And if only he could bring off a certain jump he had in mind, there were
other dodges—....
In the village street an informal assembly of leading citizens, a little
recovered now from their first nervousness about flying tiles, discussed
the problem of Bealby. There was Mumby, the draper and vegetarian, with
the bass voice and the big black beard. He advocated the fire engine. He
was one of the volunteer fire brigade and never so happy as when he was
wearing his helmet. He had come out of his shop at the shouting. Schocks
the butcher, and his boy were also in the street. Schocks’s yard, with
its heap of manure and fodder, bounded the new house on the left. Rymell
the vet emerged from the billiard room of the White Hart, and with his
head a little on one side was watching Bealby and replying attentively
to the baker, who was asking him a number of questions that struck him
as irrelevant. All the White Hart people were in the street.
“I suppose, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, “there’s a mort of dangerous
things in a man’s belly round about ’is Stummick?”
“Tiles,” said Mr. Rymell. “Loose bricks. It wouldn’t do if he started
dropping those.”
“I was saying, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, after a pause for digestion,
“is a man likely to be injured badly by a Blaw in his stummick?”
Mr. Rymell stared at him for a moment with unresponsive eyes. “More
likely to get you in the head,” he said, and then, “Here! What’s that
fool of a carpenter going to do?”
The tramp was hovering on the outskirts of the group of besiegers,
vindictive but dispirited. He had been brought to from his fit and given
a shilling by the old gentleman, but he was dreadfully wet between his
shirt—he wore a shirt, under three waistcoats and a coat—and his skin,
because the old gentleman’s method of revival had been to syringe him
suddenly with cold water. It had made him weep with astonishment and
misery. Now he saw no advantage in claiming Bealby publicly. His part,
he felt, was rather a waiting one. What he had to say to Bealby could be
best said without the assistance of a third person. And he wanted to
understand more of this talk about a reward. If there was a reward out
for Bealby—
“That’s not a bad dodge!” said Rymell, changing his opinion of the
foreman suddenly as that individual began his ascent of the ladder with
a bricklayer’s hod carried shield-wise above his head. He went up with
difficulty and slowly because of the extreme care he took to keep his
head protected. But no tiles came. Bealby had discovered a more
dangerous attack developing inside the house and was already in retreat
down the other side of the building.
He did a leap that might have hurt him badly, taking off from the corner
of the house and jumping a good twelve feet on to a big heap of straw in
the butcher’s yard. He came down on all fours and felt a little jarred
for an instant, and then he was up again and had scrambled up by a heap
of manure to the top of the butcher’s wall. He was over that and into
Maccullum’s yard next door before anyone in the front of the new house
had realized that he was in flight. Then one of the two workmen who had
been coming up inside the house saw him from the oblong opening that was
some day to be the upstairs bedroom window, and gave tongue.
It was thirty seconds later, and after Bealby had vanished from the
butcher’s wall that the foreman, still clinging to his hod, appeared
over the ridge of the roof. At the workman’s shout the policeman, who
with the preventive disposition of his profession, had hitherto been
stopping anyone from coming into the unfinished house, turned about and
ran out into its brick and plaster and timber-littered backyard,
whereupon the crowd in the street realizing that the quarry had gone
away and no longer restrained, came pouring partly through the house and
partly round through the butcher’s gate into his yard.
Bealby had had a check.
He had relied upon the tarred felt roof of the mushroom shed of
Maccullum the tailor and breeches-maker to get him to the wall that gave
upon Mr. Benshaw’s strawberry fields and he had not seen from his roof
above the ramshackle glazed outhouse which Maccullum called his workroom
and in which four industrious tailors were working in an easy
dishabille. The roof of the shed was the merest tarred touchwood, it had
perished as felt long ago, it collapsed under Bealby, he went down into
a confusion of mushrooms and mushroom-bed, he blundered out trailing
mushrooms and spawn and rich matter, he had a nine-foot wall to
negotiate and only escaped by a hair’s-breadth from the clutch of a
little red-slippered man who came dashing out from the workroom. But by
a happy use of the top of the dustbin he did just get away over the wall
in time, and the red-slippered tailor, who was not good at walls, was
left struggling to imitate an ascent that had looked easy enough until
he came to try it.
For a moment the little tailor struggled alone and then both Maccullum’s
little domain and the butcher’s yard next door and the little patch of
space behind the new house, were violently injected with a crowd of
active people, all confusedly on the Bealby trail. Someone, he never
knew who, gave the little tailor a leg-up and then his red slippers
twinkled over the wall and he was leading the hunt into the market
gardens of Mr. Benshaw. A collarless colleague in list slippers and
conspicuous braces followed. The policeman, after he had completed the
wreck of Mr. Maccullum’s mushroom shed, came next, and then Mr.
Maccullum, with no sense of times and seasons, anxious to have a
discussion at once upon the question of this damage. Mr. Maccullum was
out of breath and he never got further with this projected conversation
than “Here!” This he repeated several times as opportunity seemed to
offer. The remaining tailors got to the top of the wall more sedately
with the help of the Maccullum kitchen steps and dropped; Mr. Schocks
followed, breathing hard, and then a fresh jet of humanity came
squirting into the gardens through a gap in the fence at the back of the
building site. This was led by the young workman who had first seen
Bealby go away. Hard behind him came Rymell, the vet, the grocer’s
assistant, the doctor’s page-boy and, less briskly, the baker. Then the
tramp. Then Mumby and Schocks’s boy. Then a number of other people. The
seeking of Bealby had assumed the dimensions of a Hue and Cry.
The foreman with the large head and the upright back was still on the
new roof; he was greatly distressed at the turn things had taken and
shouted his claims to a major share in the capture of Bealby, mixed with
his opinions of Bealby and a good deal of mere swearing, to a sunny but
unsympathetic sky....
§ 3
Mr. Benshaw was a small holder, a sturdy English yeoman of the new
school. He was an Anti-Socialist, a self-helper, an independent-spirited
man. He had a steadily growing banking account and a plain but sterile
wife, and he was dark in complexion and so erect in his bearing as to
seem a little to lean forward. Usually he wore a sort of grey
gamekeeper’s suit with brown gaiters (except on Sundays when the coat
was black), he was addicted to bowler hats that accorded ill with his
large grave grey-coloured face, and he was altogether a very sound
strong man. His bowler hats did but accentuate that. He had no time for
vanities, even the vanity of dressing consistently. He went into the
nearest shop and just bought the cheapest hat he could, and so he got
hats designed for the youthful and giddy, hats with flighty crowns and
flippant bows and amorous brims that undulated attractively to set off
flushed and foolish young faces. It made his unrelenting face look
rather like the Puritans under the Stuart monarchy.
He was a horticulturist rather than a farmer. He had begun his career in
cheap lodgings with a field of early potatoes and cabbages, supplemented
by employment, but with increased prosperity his area of cultivation had
extended and his methods intensified. He now grew considerable
quantities of strawberries, raspberries, celery, seakale, asparagus,
early peas, late peas, and onions, and consumed more stable manure than
any other cultivator within ten miles of Crayminster. He was beginning
to send cut flowers to London. He had half an acre of glass and he was
rapidly extending it. He had built himself a cottage on lines of austere
economy, and a bony-looking dwelling house for some of his men. He also
owned a number of useful sheds of which tar and corrugated iron were
conspicuous features. His home was furnished with the utmost
respectability, and notably joyless even in a countryside where gaiety
is regarded as an impossible quality in furniture. He was already in a
small local way a mortgagee. Good fortune had not turned the head of Mr.
Benshaw nor robbed him of the feeling that he was a particularly
deserving person, entitled to a preferential treatment from a country
which in his plain unsparing way he felt that he enriched.
In many ways he thought that the country was careless of his needs. And
in none more careless than in the laws relating to trespass. Across his
dominions ran three footpaths, and one of these led to the public
elementary school. That he should have to maintain this latter—and if he
did not keep it in good order the children spread out and made parallel
tracks among his cultivations—seemed to him a thing almost intolerably
unjust. He mended it with cinders, acetylene refuse, which he believed
and hoped to be thoroughly bad for boots, and a peculiarly slimy chalky
clay, and he put on a board at each end “Keep to the footpaths,
Trespassers will be prosecuted, by Order,” which he painted himself to
save expense when he was confined indoors by the influenza. Still more
unjust it would be, he felt, for him to spend money upon effective
fencing, and he could find no fencing cheap enough and ugly enough and
painful enough and impossible enough to express his feelings in the
matter. Every day the children streamed to and fro, marking how his
fruits ripened and his produce became more esculent. And other people
pursued these tracks; many, Mr. Benshaw was convinced, went to and fro
through his orderly crops who had no business whatever, no honest
business, to pass that way. Either, he concluded, they did it to annoy
him, or they did it to injure him. This continual invasion aroused in
Mr. Benshaw all that stern anger against unrighteousness latent in our
race which more than any other single force has made America and the
Empire what they are to-day. Once already he had been robbed—a raid upon
his raspberries—and he felt convinced that at any time he might be
robbed again. He had made representations to the local authority to get
the footpath closed, but in vain. They defended themselves with the
paltry excuse that the children would then have to go nearly a mile
round to the school.
It was not only the tyranny of these footpaths that offended Mr.
Benshaw’s highly developed sense of Individual Liberty. All round his
rather straggling dominions his neighbours displayed an ungenerous
indisposition to maintain their fences to his satisfaction. In one or
two places, in abandonment of his clear rights in the matter, he had, at
his own expense, supplemented these lax defences with light barbed wire
defences. But it was not a very satisfactory sort of barbed wire. He
wanted barbed wire with extra spurs like a fighting cock; he wanted
barbed wire that would start out after nightfall and attack passers-by.
This boundary trouble was universal; in a way it was worse than the
footpaths which after all only affected the Cage Fields where his
strawberries grew. Except for the yard and garden walls of Maccullum and
Schocks and that side, there was not really a satisfactory foot of
enclosure all round Mr. Benshaw. On the one side rats and people’s dogs
and scratching cats came in, on the other side rabbits. The rabbits were
intolerable and recently there had been a rise of nearly thirty per cent
in the price of wire netting.
Mr. Benshaw wanted to hurt rabbits; he did not want simply to kill them,
he wanted so to kill them as to put the fear of death into the burrows.
He wanted to kill them so that scared little furry survivors with their
tails as white as ghosts would go lolloping home and say, “I say, you
chaps, we’d better shift out of this. We’re up against a Strong
Determined Man....”
I have made this lengthy statement of Mr. Benshaw’s economic and moral
difficulties in order that the reader should understand the peculiar
tension that already existed upon this side of Crayminster. It has been
necessary to do so now because in a few seconds there will be no further
opportunity for such preparations.
There had been trouble, I may add very hastily, about the shooting of
Mr. Benshaw’s gun; a shower of small shot had fallen out of the twilight
upon the umbrella and basket of old Mrs. Frobisher. And only a week ago
an unsympathetic bench after a hearing of over an hour and in the face
of overwhelming evidence had refused to convict little Lucy Mumby, aged
eleven, of stealing fruit from Mr. Benshaw’s fields. She had been caught
red-handed....
At the very moment that Bealby was butting the baker in the stomach, Mr.
Benshaw was just emerging from his austere cottage after a wholesome but
inexpensive high tea in which he had finished up two left-over cold
sausages, and he was considering very deeply the financial side of a
furious black fence that he had at last decided should pen in the school
children from further depredations. It should be of splintery tarred
deal, and high, with well-pointed tops studded with sharp nails, and he
believed that by making the path only two feet wide, a real saving of
ground for cultivation might be made and a very considerable discomfort
for the public arranged, to compensate for his initial expense. The
thought of a narrow lane which would in winter be characterized by an
excessive slimness and from which there would be no lateral escape was
pleasing to a mind by no means absolutely restricted to considerations
of pounds, shillings and pence. In his hand after his custom he carried
a hoe, on the handle of which feet were marked, so that it was available
not only for destroying the casual weed but also for purposes of
measurement. With this he now checked his estimate and found that here
he would reclaim as much as three feet of trodden waste, here a full
two.
Absorbed in these calculations, he heeded little the growth of a certain
clamour from the backs of the houses bordering on the High Street. It
did not appear to concern him and Mr. Benshaw made it almost
ostentatiously his rule to mind his own business. His eyes remained
fixed on the lumpy, dusty, sunbaked track, that with an intelligent
foresight he saw already transformed into a deterrent slough of despond
for the young....
Then quite suddenly the shouting took on a new note. He glanced over his
shoulder almost involuntarily and discovered that after all this uproar
was his business. Amazingly his business. His mouth assumed a
Cromwellian fierceness. His grip tightened on his hoe. That anyone
should dare! But it was impossible!
His dominions were being invaded with a peculiar boldness and violence.
Ahead of everyone else and running with wild wavings of the arms across
his strawberries was a small and very dirty little boy. He impressed Mr.
Benshaw merely as a pioneer. Some thirty yards behind him was a little
collarless, short-sleeved man in red slippers running with great
effrontery and behind him another still more denuded lunatic, also in
list slippers and with braces—braces of inconceivable levity. And then
Wiggs, the policeman, hotly followed by Mr. Maccullum. Then more
distraught tailors and Schocks the butcher. But a louder shout heralded
the main attack, and Mr. Benshaw turned his eyes—already they were
slightly blood-shot eyes—to the right, and saw, pouring through the
broken hedge, a disorderly crowd, Rymell whom he had counted his friend,
the grocer’s assistant, the doctor’s boy, some strangers—Mumby!
At the sight of Mumby, Mr. Benshaw leapt at a conclusion. He saw it all.
The whole place was rising against him; they were asserting some
infernal new right-of-way. Mumby—Mumby had got them to do it. All the
fruits of fifteen years of toil, all the care and accumulation of Mr.
Benshaw’s prime, were to be trampled and torn to please a draper’s
spite!...
Sturdy yeoman as Mr. Benshaw was he resolved instantly to fight for his
liberties. One moment he paused to blow the powerful police whistle he
carried in his pocket and then rushed forward in the direction of the
hated Mumby, the leader of trespassers, the parent and abetter and
defender of the criminal Lucy. He took the hurrying panting man almost
unawares, and with one wild sweep of the hoe felled him to the earth.
Then he staggered about and smote again, but not quite in time to get
the head of Mr. Rymell.
This whistle he carried was part of a systematic campaign he had
developed against trespassers and fruit stealers. He and each of his
assistants carried one, and at the first shrill note—it was his
rule—everyone seized on every weapon that was handy and ran to pursue
and capture. All his assistants were extraordinarily prompt in
responding to these alarms, which were often the only break in long days
of strenuous and strenuously directed toil. So now with an astonishing
promptitude and animated faces men appeared from sheds and greenhouses
and distant patches of culture, hastening to the assistance of their
dour employer.
It says much for the amiable relations that existed between employers
and employed in those days before Syndicalism became the creed of the
younger workers that they did hurry to his assistance.
But many rapid things were to happen before they came into action. For
first a strange excitement seized upon the tramp. A fantastic delusive
sense of social rehabilitation took possession of his soul. Here he was
pitted against a formidable hoe-wielding man, who for some inscrutable
reason was resolved to cover the retreat of Bealby. And all the world,
it seemed, was with the tramp and against this hoe-wielder. All the
tremendous forces of human society, against which the tramp had
struggled for so many years, whose power he knew and feared as only the
outlaw can, had suddenly come into line with him. Across the
strawberries to the right there was even a policeman hastening to join
the majority, a policeman closely followed by a tradesman of the
blackest, most respectable quality. The tramp had a vision of himself as
a respectable man heroically leading respectable people against
outcasts. He dashed the lank hair from his eyes, waved his arms
laterally, and then with a loud strange cry flung himself towards Mr.
Benshaw. Two pairs of superimposed coat-tails flapped behind him. And
then the hoe whistled through the air and the tramp fell to the ground
like a sack.
But now Schocks’s boy had grasped his opportunity. He had been working
discreetly round behind Mr. Benshaw, and as the hoe smote he leapt upon
that hero’s back and seized him about the neck with both arms and bore
him staggering to the ground, and Rymell, equally quick, and used to the
tackling of formidable creatures, had snatched and twisted away the hoe
and grappled Mr. Benshaw almost before he was down. The first of Mr.
Benshaw’s helpers to reach the fray found the issue decided, his master
held down conclusively and a growing circle trampling down a wide area
of strawberry plants about the panting group....
Mr. Mumby, more frightened than hurt, was already sitting up, but the
tramp with a glowing wound upon his cheekbone and an expression of
astonishment in his face, lay low and pawed the earth.
“What d’you mean,” gasped Mr. Rymell, “hitting people about with that
hoe?”
“What d’you mean,” groaned Mr. Benshaw, “running across my
strawberries?”
“We were going after that boy.”
“Pounds and pounds’ worth of damage. Mischief and wickedness.... Mumby!”
Mr. Rymell, suddenly realizing the true values of the situation,
released Mr. Benshaw’s hands and knelt up. “Look here, Mr. Benshaw,” he
said, “you seem to be under the impression we are trespassing.”
Mr. Benshaw, struggling into a sitting position was understood to
enquire with some heat what Mr. Rymell called it. Schocks’s boy picked
up the hat with the erotic brim and handed it to the horticulturist
silently and respectfully.
“We were not trespassing,” said Mr. Rymell. “We were following up that
boy. _He_ was trespassing, if you like.... By the bye,—where _is_ the
boy? Has anyone caught him?”
At the question, attention which had been focussed upon Mr. Benshaw and
his hoe, came round. Across the field in the direction of the sunlit
half acre of glass the little tailor was visible standing gingerly and
picking up his red slippers for the third time—they would come off in
that loose good soil, everybody else had left the trail to concentrate
on Mr. Benshaw—and Bealby—. Bealby was out of sight. He had escaped,
clean got away.
“What boy?” asked Mr. Benshaw.
“Ferocious little beast who’s fought us like a rat. Been committing all
sorts of crimes about the country. Five pounds reward for him.”
“Fruit stealing?” asked Mr. Benshaw.
“Yes,” said Mr. Rymell, chancing it.
Mr. Benshaw reflected slowly. His eyes surveyed his trampled crops.
“Gooo _Lord_!” he cried. “Look at those strawberries!” His voice
gathered violence. “And that lout there!” he said. “Why!—he’s lying on
them! That’s the brute who went for me!”
“You got him a pretty tidy one side the head!” said Maccullum.
The tramp rolled over on some fresh strawberries and groaned pitifully.
“He’s hurt,” said Mr. Mumby.
The tramp flopped and lay still.
“Get some water!” said Rymell, standing up.
At the word water, the tramp started convulsively, rolled over and sat
up with a dazed expression.
“No water,” he said weakly. “No more water,” and then catching Mr.
Benshaw’s eye he got rather quickly to his feet.
Everybody who wasn’t already standing was getting up, and everyone now
was rather carefully getting himself off any strawberry plant he had
chanced to find himself smashing in the excitement of the occasion.
“That’s the man that started in on me,” said Mr. Benshaw. “What’s he
doing here? Who is he?”
“Who are _you_, my man? What business have you to be careering over this
field?” asked Mr. Rymell.
“I was only ’elping,” said the tramp.
“Nice help,” said Mr. Benshaw.
“I thought that boy was a thief or something.”
“And so you made a rush at me.”
“I didn’t exactly—sir—I thought you was ’elping ’im.”
“You be off, anyhow,” said Mr. Benshaw. “Whatever you thought.”
“Yes, you be off!” said Mr. Rymell.
“That’s the way, my man,” said Mr. Benshaw. “We haven’t any jobs for
you. The sooner we have you out of it the better for everyone. Get right
on to the path and keep it.” And with a desolating sense of exclusion
the tramp withdrew. “There’s pounds and pounds’ worth of damage here,”
said Mr. Benshaw. “This job’ll cost me a pretty penny. Look at them
berries there. Why, they ain’t fit for jam! And all done by one
confounded boy.” An evil light came into Mr. Benshaw’s eyes. “You leave
him to me and my chaps. If he’s gone up among those sheds there—we’ll
settle with him. Anyhow there’s no reason why my fruit should be
trampled worse than it has been. Fruit stealer, you say, he is?”
“They live on the country this time of year,” said Mr. Mumby.
“And catch them doing a day’s work picking!” said Mr. Benshaw. “I know
the sort.”
“There’s a reward of five pounds for ’im already,” said the baker....
§ 4
You perceive how humanitarian motives may sometimes defeat their own
end, and how little Lady Laxton’s well-intentioned handbills were
serving to rescue Bealby. Instead, they were turning him into a scared
and hunted animal. In spite of its manifest impossibility he was
convinced that the reward and this pursuit had to do with his burglary
of the poultry farm, and that his capture would be but the preliminary
to prison, trial and sentence. His one remaining idea was to get away.
But his escape across the market gardens had left him so blown and
spent, that he was obliged to hide up for a time in this perilous
neighbourhood, before going on. He saw a disused-looking shed in the
lowest corner of the gardens behind the greenhouses, and by doubling
sharply along a hedge he got to it unseen. It was not disused—nothing in
Mr. Benshaw’s possession ever was absolutely disused, but it was filled
with horticultural lumber, with old calcium carbide tins, with broken
wheelbarrows and damaged ladders awaiting repair, with some ragged
wheeling planks and surplus rolls of roofing felt. At the back were some
unhinged shed doors leaning against the wall, and between them Bealby
tucked himself neatly and became still, glad of any respite from the
chase.
He would wait for twilight and then get away across the meadows at the
back and then go—He didn’t know whither. And now he had no confidence in
the wild world any more. A qualm of home-sickness for the compact little
gardener’s cottage at Shonts, came to Bealby. Why, as a matter of fact,
wasn’t he there now?
He ought to have tried more at Shonts.
He ought to have minded what they told him and not have taken up a
toasting fork against Thomas. Then he wouldn’t now have been a hunted
burglar with a reward of five pounds on his head and nothing in his
pocket but threepence and a pack of greasy playing cards, a box of
sulphur matches and various objectionable sundries, none of which were
properly his own.
If only he could have his time over again!
Such wholesome reflections occupied his thoughts until the onset of the
dusk stirred him to departure. He crept out of his hiding-place and
stretched his limbs which had got very stiff, and was on the point of
reconnoitring from the door of the shed when he became aware of stealthy
footsteps outside.
With the quickness of an animal he shot back into his hiding-place. The
footsteps had halted. For a long time it seemed the unseen waited,
listening. Had he heard Bealby?
Then someone fumbled with the door of the shed; it opened, and there was
a long pause of cautious inspection.
Then the unknown had shuffled into the shed and sat down on a heap of
matting.
“_Gaw!_” said a voice.
The tramp’s!
“If ever I struck a left-handed Mascot it was that boy,” said the tramp.
“The little _swine_!”
For the better part of two minutes he went on from this mild beginning
to a descriptive elaboration of Bealby. For the first time in his life
Bealby learnt how unfavourable was the impression he might leave on a
fellow creature’s mind.
“Took even my matches!” cried the tramp, and tried this statement over
with variations.
“First that old fool with his syringe!” The tramp’s voice rose in angry
protest. “Here’s a chap dying epilepsy on your doorstep and all you can
do is to squirt cold water at him! Cold water! Why you might _kill_ a
man doing that! And then say you’d thought’d bring ’im ränd! Bring ’im
ränd! You be jolly glad I didn’t stash your silly face in. You
[misbegotten] old fool! What’s a shilling for wetting a man to ’is skin.
Wet through I was. Running inside my shirt,—dripping.... And then the
blooming boy clears!
“_I_ don’t know what boys are coming to!” cried the tramp. “These board
schools it is. Gets ’old of everything ’e can and bunks! Gaw! if I get
my ’ands on ’im, I’ll show ’im. I’ll—”
For some time the tramp revelled in the details, for the most part
crudely surgical, of his vengeance upon Bealby....
“Then there’s that dog bite. ’Ow do I know ’ow that’s going to turn ät?
If I get ’idrophobia, blowed if I don’t _bite_ some of ’em. ’Idrophobia.
Screaming and foaming. Nice death for a man—my time o’ life! Bark I
shall. Bark and bite.
“And this is your world,” said the tramp. “This is the world you put
people into and expect ’em to be ’appy....
“I’d like to bite that dough-faced fool with the silly ’at. I’d enjoy
biting _’im_. I’d spit it out but I’d bite it right enough. Wiping abät
with ’is _’O. Gaw!_ Get off my ground! Be orf with you. Slash. ’E ought
to be shut up.
“Where’s the justice of it?” shouted the tramp. “Where’s the right and
the sense of it? What ’ave _I_ done that I should always get the under
side? Why should _I_ be stuck on the under side of everything? There’s
worse men than me in all sorts of positions.... Judges there are.
’Orrible Kerecters. Ministers and people. I’ve read abät ’em in the
papers....
“It’s we tramps are the scapegoats. Somebody’s got to suffer so as the
police can show a face. Gaw! Some of these days I’ll do something. I’ll
do something. You’ll drive me too far with it, I tell you—”
He stopped suddenly and listened. Bealby had creaked.
“Gaw! What can one do?” said the tramp after a long interval.
And then complaining more gently, the tramp began to feel about to make
his simple preparations for the night.
“’Unt me out of this, I expect,” said the tramp. “And many sleeping in
feather beds that ain’t fit to ’old a candle to me. Not a hordinary
farthing candle....”
§ 5
The subsequent hour or so was an interval of tedious tension for Bealby.
After vast spaces of time he was suddenly aware of three vertical
threads of light. He stared at them with mysterious awe, until he
realized that they were just the moonshine streaming through the cracks
of the shed.
The tramp tossed and muttered in his sleep.
Footsteps?
Yes—Footsteps.
Then voices.
They were coming along by the edge of the field, and coming and talking
very discreetly.
“Ugh!” said the tramp, and then softly, “what’s that?” Then he too
became noiselessly attentive.
Bealby could hear his own heart beating.
The men were now close outside the shed. “He wouldn’t go in there,” said
Mr. Benshaw’s voice. “He wouldn’t dare. Anyhow we’ll go up by the glass
first. I’ll let him have the whole barrelful of oats if I get a glimpse
of him. If he’d gone away they’d have caught him in the road....”
The footsteps receded. There came a cautious rustling on the part of the
tramp and then his feet padded softly to the door of the shed. He
struggled to open it and then with a jerk got it open a few inches; a
great bar of moonlight leapt and lay still across the floor of the shed.
Bealby advanced his head cautiously until he could see the black obscure
indications of the tramp’s back as he peeped out.
“_Now_,” whispered the tramp and opened the door wider. Then he ducked
his head down and darted out of sight, leaving the door open behind him.
Bealby questioned whether he should follow. He came out a few steps and
then went back at a shout from away up the garden. “There he goes,”
shouted a voice, “in the shadow of the hedge.”
“Look out, Jim!”—_Bang_—and a yelp.
“Stand away! I’ve got another barrel!”
_Bang._
Then silence for a time, and then the footsteps coming back.
“That ought to teach him,” said Mr. Benshaw. “First time, I got him
fair, and I think I peppered him a bit the second. Couldn’t see very
well, but I heard him yell. He won’t forget that in a hurry. Not him.
There’s nothing like oats for fruit stealers. Jim, just shut that door,
will you? That’s where he was hiding....”
It seemed a vast time to Bealby before he ventured out into the summer
moonlight, and a very pitiful and outcast little Bealby he felt himself
to be.
He was beginning to realize what it means to go beyond the narrow
securities of human society. He had no friends, no friends at all....
He caught at and arrested a sob of self-pity.
Perhaps after all it was not so late as Bealby had supposed. There were
still lights in some of the houses and he had the privilege of seeing
Mr. Benshaw going to bed with pensive deliberation. Mr. Benshaw wore a
flannel night-shirt and said quite a lengthy prayer before extinguishing
his candle. Then suddenly Bealby turned nervously and made off through
the hedge. A dog had barked.
At first there were nearly a dozen lighted windows in Crayminster. They
went out one by one. He hung for a long time with a passionate
earnestness on the sole surviving one, but that too went at last. He
could have wept when at last it winked out. He came down into the marshy
flats by the river, but he did not like the way in which the water
sucked and swirled in the vague moonlight; also he suddenly discovered a
great white horse standing quite still in the misty grass not thirty
yards away; so he went up to and crossed the high road and wandered up
the hillside towards the allotments, which attracted him by reason of
the sociability of the numerous tool sheds. In a hedge near at hand a
young rabbit squealed sharply and was stilled. Why?
Then something like a short snake scrabbled by very fast through the
grass.
Then he thought he saw the tramp stalking him noiselessly behind some
currant bushes. That went on for some time, but came to nothing.
Then nothing pursued him, nothing at all. The gap, the void, came after
him. The bodiless, the faceless, the formless; these are evil hunters in
the night....
What a cold still _watching_ thing moonlight can be!...
He thought he would like to get his back against something solid, and
found near one of the sheds a little heap of litter. He sat down against
good tarred boards, assured at least that whatever came must come in
front. Whatever he did, he was resolved, he would not shut his eyes.
That would be fatal....
He awoke in broad daylight amidst a cheerful uproar of birds.
§ 6
And then again flight and pursuit were resumed.
As Bealby went up the hill away from Crayminster he saw a man standing
over a spade and watching his retreat and when he looked back again
presently this man was following. It was Lady Laxton’s five pound reward
had done the thing for him.
He was half minded to surrender and have done with it, but jail he knew
was a dreadful thing of stone and darkness. He would make one last
effort. So he beat along the edge of a plantation and then crossed it
and forced his way through some gorse and came upon a sunken road, that
crossed the hill in a gorse-lined cutting. He struggled down the steep
bank. At its foot, regardless of him, unaware of him, a man sat beside a
motor bicycle with his fists gripped tight and his head downcast,
swearing. A county map was crumpled in his hand. “Damn!” he cried, and
flung the map to the ground and kicked it and put his foot on it.
Bealby slipped, came down the bank with a run and found himself in the
road within a couple of yards of the blond features and angry eyes of
Captain Douglas. When he saw the Captain and perceived himself
recognized, he flopped down—a done and finished Bealby....
§ 7
He had arrived just in time to interrupt the Captain in a wild and
reprehensible fit of passion.
The Captain imagined it was a secret fit of passion. He thought he was
quite alone and that no one could hear him or see him. So he had let
himself shout and stamp, to work off the nervous tensions that tormented
him beyond endurance.
In the direst sense of the words the Captain was in love with Madeleine.
He was in love quite beyond the bounds set by refined and decorous
people to this dangerous passion. The primordial savage that lurks in so
many of us was uppermost in him. He was not in love with her prettily or
delicately, he was in love with her violently and vehemently. He wanted
to be with her, he wanted to be close to her, he wanted to possess her
and nobody else to approach her. He was so inflamed now that no other
interest in life had any importance except as it aided or interfered
with this desire. He had forced himself in spite of this fever in his
blood to leave her to pursue Bealby, and now he was regretting this
firmness furiously. He had expected to catch Bealby overnight and bring
him back to the hotel in triumph. But Bealby had been elusive. There she
was, away there, hurt and indignant—neglected!
“A laggard in love,” cried the Captain, “a dastard in war! God!—I run
away from everything. First I leave the manœuvres, then her. Unstable as
water thou shalt not prevail. Water! What does the confounded boy
matter? What does he matter?
“And there she is. Alone! She’ll flirt—naturally she’ll flirt. Don’t I
deserve it? Haven’t I asked for it? Just the one little time we might
have had together! I fling it in her face. You fool, you laggard, you
dastard! And here’s this map!”
A breathing moment.
“How the _devil_,” cried the Captain, “am I to find the little beast on
this map?
“And twice he’s been within reach of my hand!
“No decision!” cried the Captain. “No instant grip! What good is a
soldier without it? What good is any man who will not leap at
opportunity? I ought to have chased out last night after that fool and
his oats. Then I might have had a chance!
“Chuck it! Chuck the whole thing! Go back to her. Kneel to her, kiss
her, compel her!
“And what sort of reception am I likely to get?”
He crumpled the flapping map in his fist.
And then suddenly out of nowhere Bealby came rolling down to his feet, a
dishevelled and earthy Bealby. But Bealby.
“Good Lord!” cried the Captain, starting to his feet and holding the map
like a sword sheath.
“What do you want?”
For a second Bealby was a silent spectacle of misery.
“Oooh! I want my _breckfuss_,” he burst out at last, reduced to tears.
“Are you young Bealby?” asked the Captain, seizing him by the shoulder.
“They’re after me,” cried Bealby. “If they catch me they’ll put me in
prison. Where they don’t give you anything. It wasn’t me did it—and I
’aven’t had anything to eat—not since yesterday.”
The Captain came rapidly to a decision. There should be no more
faltering. He saw his way clear before him. He would act—like a
whistling sword. “Here! jump up behind,” he said ... “hold on tight to
me....”
§ 8
For a time there was a more than Napoleonic swiftness in the Captain’s
movements. When Bealby’s pursuer came up to the hedge that looks down
into the sunken road, there was no Bealby, no Captain, nothing but a
torn and dishevelled county map, an almost imperceptible odour of petrol
and a faint sound—like a distant mowing machine—and the motor bicycle
was a mile away on the road to Beckinstone. Eight miles, eight rather
sickening miles, Bealby did to Beckinstone in eleven minutes, and there
in a little coffee house he was given breakfast with eggs and bacon and
marmalade (Prime!), and his spirit was restored to him while the Captain
raided a bicycle and repairing shop and negotiated the hire of an
experienced but fairly comfortable wickerwork trailer. And so, to London
through the morning sunshine, leaving tramps, pursuers, policemen,
handbills, bakers, market gardeners, terrors of the darkness and
everything upon the road behind—and further behind and remote and
insignificant—and so to the vanishing point.
Some few words of explanation the Captain had vouchsafed, and that was
all.
“Don’t be afraid about it,” he said. “Don’t be in the least bit afraid.
You tell them about it, just simply and truthfully, exactly what you
did, exactly how you got into it and out of it and all about it.”
“You’re going to take me up to a Magistrate, sir?”
“I’m going to take you up to the Lord Chancellor himself.”
“And then they won’t do anything?”
“Nothing at all, Bealby; you trust me. All you’ve got to do is to tell
the simple truth....”
It was pretty rough going in the trailer, but very exciting. If you
gripped the sides very hard, and sat quite tight, nothing very much
happened and also there was a strap across your chest. And you went past
everything. There wasn’t a thing on the road the Captain didn’t pass,
lowing deeply with his great horn when they seemed likely to block his
passage. And as for the burglary and everything, it would all be
settled....
The Captain also found that ride to London exhilarating. At least he was
no longer hanging about; he was getting to something. He would be able
to go back to her—and all his being now yearned to go back to her—with
things achieved, with successes to show. He’d found the boy. He would go
straight to dear old uncle Chickney, and uncle Chickney would put things
right with Moggeridge, the boy would bear his testimony, Moggeridge
would be convinced and all would be well again. He might be back with
Madeleine that evening. He would go back to her, and she would see the
wisdom and energy of all he had done, and she would lift that dear chin
of hers and smile that dear smile of hers and hold out her hand to be
kissed and the lights and reflections would play on that strong soft
neck of hers....
They buzzed along stretches of common and stretches of straight-edged
meadowland, by woods and orchards, by pleasant inns and slumbering
villages and the gates and lodges of country houses.
These latter grew more numerous, and presently they skirted a town, and
then more road, more villages and at last signs of a nearness to London,
more frequent houses, more frequent inns, hoardings and advertisements,
an asphalted sidewalk, lamps, a gasworks, laundries, a stretch of
suburban villadom, a suburban railway station, a suburbanized old town,
an omnibus, the head of a tramline, a stretch of public common thick
with noticeboards, a broad pavement, something-or-other parade, with a
row of shops....
London.