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.
