“It’s nothing to what lies below out of sight,” Javitt remarked with pride.
There were necklaces and bracelets, lockets and bangles, pins and rings and pendants and buttons. There were quantities of those little gold objects which girls like to hang on their bracelets: the Vend6me column and the Eiffel Tower and a Lion of St. Mark’s, a champagne bottle and a tiny booklet with leaves of gold inscribed with the names of places important perhaps to a pair of lovers—Paris, Brighton, Rome, Assisi and Moreton-in-Marsh There were gold coins too—some with the heads of Roman emperors and others of Victoria and George IV and Frederick Barbarossa. There were birds made out of precious stone with diamond-eyes, and buckles for shoes and belts, hairpins too with the rubies turned into roses, and vinaigrettes. There were toothpicks of gold, and swizzle-sticks, and little spoons to dig the wax out of your ears of gold too, and cigarette-holders studded with diamonds, and small boxes of gold for pastilles and snuff, horse-shoes for the ties of hunting men, and emerald-hounds for the lapels of hunting women: fishes were there too and little carrots of ruby for luck, diamond stars which had perhaps decorated generals or statesmen, golden key-rings with emerald-initials, and sea-shells picked out with pearls, and a portrait of a dancing-girl in gold and enamel, with Haidee inscribed in what I suppose were rubies.
“Enough’s enough,” Javitt said, and I had to drag myself away, as it seemed to me, from all the riches of the world, its pursuits and enjoyments. Maria would have packed everything that lay there back into the cardboard-boxes, but Javitt said with his lordliest voice, “Let them lie,” and back we went in silence the way we had come, in the same order, our shadows going ahead. It was as if the sight of the treasure had exhausted me. I lay down on the sacks without waiting for my broth and fell at once asleep. In my dream within a dream somebody laughed and wept.
7
I have said that I can’t remember how many days and nights I spent below the garden. The number of times I slept is really no guide, for I slept simply when I had the inclination or when Javitt commanded me to lie down, there being no light or darkness save what the oil-lamp determined, but I am almost sure it was after this sleep of exhaustion that I woke with the full intention somehow to reach home again. Up till now I had acquiesced in my captivity with little complaint; perhaps the meals of broth were palling on me, though I doubt if that was the reason, for I have fed for longer, with as little variety and less appetite, in Africa; perhaps the sight of Javitt’s treasure had been a climax which robbed my story of any further interest; perhaps, and I think this is the most likely reason, I wanted to begin my search for Miss Ramsgate.
Whatever the motive, I came awake determined from my deep sleep, as suddenly as I had fallen into it. The wick was burning low in the oil-lamp and I could hardly distinguish Javitt’s features and Maria was out of sight somewhere behind the curtain. To my astonishment Javitt’s eyes were closed—it had never occurred to me before that there were moments when these two might sleep. Very quietly, with my eyes on Javitt, I slipped off my shoes—it was now or never. When I had got them off with less sound than a mouse makes, an idea came to me and I withdrew the laces—I can still hear the sharp ting of the metal tag ringing on the gold po besides my sacks. I thought I had been too clever by half, for Javitt stirred—but then he was still again and I slipped off my makeshift bed and crawled over to him where he sat on the lavatory-seat. I knew that, unfamiliar as I was with the tunnel, I could never outpace Javitt, but I was taken aback when I realized that it was impossible to bind together the ankles of a one-legged man.
But neither could a one-legged man travel without the help of his hands—the hands which lay now conveniently folded like a statue’s on his lap. One of the things my brother had taught me was to make a slipknot. I made one now with the laces joined and very gently, millimetre by millimetre, passed it over Javitt’s hands and wrists, then pulled it tight.
I had expected him to wake the howl of rage and even in my fear felt some of the pride Jack must have experienced at outwitting the giant. I was ready to flee at once, taking the lamp with me, but his very silence detained me. He only opened one eye, so that again I had the impression that he was winking at me. He tried to move his hands, felt the knot, and then acquiesced in their imprisonment. I expected him to call for Maria, but he did nothing of the kind, just watching me with his one open eye.
Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Ha, ha,” he said, “my prodigal, the strayed sheep, you’re learning fast.”
“I promise not to tell a soul.”
“They wouldn’t believe you if you did,” he said.
“I’ll be going now,” I whispered with regret, lingering there absurdly, as though with half of myself I would have been content to stay for always.
“You better,” he said. “Maria might have different views from me.” He tried his hands again. “You tie a good knot.”
“I’m going to find your daughter,” I said, “whatever you may think.”
“Good luck to you then,” Javitt said. “You’ll have to travel a long way; you’ll have to forget all your schoolmasters try to teach you; you must lie like a horse-trader and not be tied up with loyalties any more than you are here, and who knows? I doubt it, but you might, you just might.”
I turned away to take the lamp, and then he spoke again. “Take your golden po as a souvenir,” he said. “Tell them you found it in an old cupboard. You’ve got to have something when you start a search to give you substance.”
“Thank you,” I said, “I will. You’ve been very kind.” I began—absurdly in view of his bound wrists—to hold out my hand like a departing guest; then I stooped to pick up the po just as Maria, woken perhaps by our voices, came through the curtain. She took the situation in as quick as a breath and squeaked at me—what I don’t know—and made a dive with her bird-like hand.
I had the start of her down the passage and the advantage of the light, and I was a few feet ahead when I reached Camp Indecision, but at that point, what with the wind of my passage and the failing wick, the lamp went out. I dropped it on the earth and groped on in the dark. I could hear the scratch and whimper of Maria’s sequin dress, and my nerves leapt when her feet set the lamp rolling on my tracks. I don’t remember much after that. Soon I was crawling upwards, making better speed on my knees than she could do in her skirt, and a little later I saw a grey light where the roots of the tree parted. When I came up into the open it was much the same early morning hour as the one when I had entered the cave. I could hear kwahk, kwahk, kwahk, come up from below the ground—I don’t know if it was a curse or a menace or just a farewell, but for many nights afterwards I lay in bed afraid that the door would open and Maria would come in to fetch me, when the house was silent and asleep. Yet strangely enough I felt no fear of Javitt, then or later.
Perhaps—I can’t remember—I dropped the gold po at the entrance of the tunnel as a propitiation to Maria; certainly I didn’t have it with me when I rafted across the lake or when Joe, our dog, came leaping out of the house at me and sent me sprawling on my back in the dew of the lawn by the green broken fountain.
PART THREE
1
Wilditch stopped writing and looked up from the paper. The night had passed and with it the rain and the wet wind. Out of the window he could see thin rivers of blue sky winding between the banks of cloud, and the sun as it slanted in gleamed weakly on the cap of his pen. He read the last sentence which he had written and saw how again at the end of his account he had described his adventure as though it were one which had really happened and not something that he had dreamed during the course of a night’s truancy or invented a few years later for the school-magazine. Somebody, early though it was, trundled a wheelbarrow down the gravel-path beyond the fountain. The sound, like the dream, belonged to childhood.
He went downstairs and unlocked the front door. There unchanged was the broken fountain and the path which led to the Dark W
alk, and he was hardly surprised when he saw Ernest, his uncle’s gardener, coming towards him behind the wheelbarrow. Ernest must have been a young man in the days of the dream and he was an old man now, but to a child a man in the twenties approaches middle-age and so he seemed much as Wilditch remembered him. There was something of Javitt about him, though he had a big moustache and not a beard—perhaps it was only a brooding and scrutinizing look and that air of authority and possession which had angered Mrs. Wilditch when she approached him for vegetables.
“Why, Ernest,” Wilditch said, “I thought you had retired?”
Ernest put down the handle of the wheelbarrow and regarded Wilditch with reserve. “It’s Master William, isn’t it?”
“Yes. George said—”
“Master George was right in a way, but I have to lend a hand still. There’s a thing in this garden others don’t know about.” Perhaps he had been the model for Javitt, for there was something in his way of speech that suggested the same ambiguity.
“Such as . . .?”
“It’s not everyone can grow asparagus in chalky soil,” he said, making a general statement out of the particular in the same way Javitt had done.
“You’ve been away a long time, Master William.”
“I’ve travelled a lot.”
“We heard one time you was in Africa and another time in Chinese parts. Do you like a black skin, Master William?”
“I suppose at one time or another I’ve been fond of a black skin.”
“I wouldn’t have thought they’d win a beauty prize,” Ernest said.
“Do you know Ramsgate, Ernest?”
“A gardener travels far enough in a day’s work,” he said. The wheelbarrow was full of fallen leaves after the night’s storm. “Are the Chinese as yellow as people say?”
“No.”
There was a difference, Wilditch thought: Javitt never asked for information, he gave it: the weight of water, the age of the earth, the sexual habits of a monkey. “Are there many changes in the garden,” he asked, “since I was here?”
“You’ll have heard the pasture was sold?”
“Yes. I was thinking of taking a walk before breakfast—down the Dark Walk perhaps to the lake and the island.”
“Ah.”
“Did you ever hear any story of a tunnel under the lake?”
“There’s no tunnel there. For what would there be a tunnel?”
“No reason that I know. I suppose it was something I dreamed.”
“As a boy you was always fond of that island. Used to hide there from the missus.”
“Do you remember a time when I ran away?”
“You was always running away. The missus used to tell me to go and find you. I’d say to her right out, straight as I’m talking to you, I’ve got enough to do digging the potatoes you are always asking for. I’ve never known a woman get through potatoes like she did. You’d have thought she ate them. She could have been living on potatoes and not the fat of the land.”
“Do you think I was treasure-hunting? Boys do.”
“You was hunting for something. That’s what I said to the folk round here when you were away in those savage parts—not even coming back here for your uncle’s funeral. ‘You take my word,’ I said to them, ‘he hasn’t changed, he’s off hunting for something, like he always did, though I doubt if he knows what he’s after,’ I said to them. The next we hear,’ I said, ‘he’ll be standing on his head in Australia.’ ”
Wilditch remarked with regret, “Somehow I never looked there”; he was surprised that he had spoken aloud. “And The Three Keys, is it still in existence?”
“Oh, it’s there all right, but the brewers bought it when my uncle died and it’s not a free house any more.”
“Did they alter it much?”
“You’d hardly know it was the same house with all the pipes and tubes. They put in what they call pressure, so you can’t get an honest bit of beer without a bubble in it. My uncle was content to go down to the cellar for a barrel, but it’s all machinery now.”
“When they made all those changes you didn’t hear any talk of a tunnel under the cellar?”
“Tunnel again. What’s got you thinking of tunnels? The only tunnel I know is the railway tunnel at Bugham and that’s five miles off.”
“Well, I’ll be walking on, Ernest, or it will be breakfast time before I’ve seen the garden.”
“And I suppose now you’ll be off again to foreign parts. What’s it to be this time? Australia?”
“It’s too late for Australia now.”
Ernest shook his brindled head at Wilditch with an air of sober disapproval. “When I was born,” he said, “time had a different pace to what it seems to have now,” and, lifting the handle of the wheelbarrow, he was on his way towards the new iron gate before Wilditch had time to realize he had used almost the very words of Javitt. The world was the world he knew.
2
The Dark Walk was small and not very dark—perhaps the laurels had thinned with the passing of time, but the cobwebs were there as in his childhood to brush his face as he went by. At the end of the walk there was the wooden gate on to the green which had always in his day been locked—he had never known why that route out of the garden was forbidden him, but he had discovered a way of opening the gate with the rim of a halfpenny. Now he could find no halfpennies in his pocket.
When he saw the lake he realized how right George had been. It was only a small pond, and a few feet from the margin there was an island the size of the room in which last night they had dined. There were a few bushes growing there, and even a few trees, one taller and larger than the others, but certainly it was neither the sentinel-pine of W.W.’s story nor the great oak of his memory. He took a few steps back from the margin of the pond and jumped.
He hadn’t quite made the island, but the water in which he landed was only a few inches deep. Was any of the water deep enough to float a raft? He doubted it. He sloshed ashore, the water not even penetrating his shoes. So this little spot of earth had contained Camp Hope and Friday’s Cave. He wished that he had the cynicism to laugh at the half-expectation which had brought him to the island.
The bushes came only to his waist and he easily pushed through them towards the largest tree. It was difficult to believe that even a small child could have been lost here. He was in the world that George saw every day, making his mound of a not very remarkable garden. For perhaps a minute, as he pushed his way through the bushes, it seemed to him that his whole life had been wasted, much as a man who has been betrayed by a woman wipes out of his mind even the happy years with her. If it had not been for his dream of the tunnel and the bearded man and the hidden treasure, couldn’t he have made a less restless life for himself, as George in fact had done, with marriage, children, a home? He tried to persuade himself that he was exaggerating the importance of a dream. His lot had probably been decided months before that when George was reading him The Romance of Australian Exploration. If a child’s experience does really form his future life, surely he had been formed, not by Javitt, but by Grey and Burke. It was his pride that at least he had never taken his various professions seriously: he had been loyal to no one—not even to the girl in Africa (Javitt would have approved his disloyalty). Now he stood beside the ignoble tree that had no roots above the ground which could possibly have formed the entrance to a cave and he looked back at the house: it was so close that he could see George at the window of the bathroom lathering his face. Soon the bell would be going for breakfast and they would be sitting opposite each other exchanging the morning small talk. There was a good train back to London at 10:25. He supposed that it was the effect of his disease that he was so tired—not sleepy but achingly tired as though at the end of a long journey.
After he had pushed his way a few feet through the bushes he came on the blackened remains of an oak; it had been split by lightning probably and then sawed close to the ground for logs. It could easily have been the source of
his dream. He tripped on the old roots hidden in the grass, and squatting down on the ground he laid his ear close to the earth. He had an absurd desire to hear from somewhere far below the kwahk, kwahk from a roofless mouth and the deep rumbling of Javitt’s voice saying, “We are hairless, you and I,” shaking his beard at him, “so’s the hippopotamus and the elephant and the dugong—you wouldn’t know, I suppose, what a dugong is. We survive the longest, the hairless ones.”
But, of course, he could hear nothing except the emptiness you hear when a telephone rings in an empty house. Something tickled his ear, and he almost hoped to find a sequin which had survived the years under the grass, but it was only an ant staggering with a load towards its tunnel.
Wilditch got to his feet. As he levered himself upright, his hand was scraped by the sharp rim of some metal object in the earth. He kicked the object free and found it was an old tin chamber-pot. It had lost all colour in the ground except that inside the handle there adhered a few flakes of yellow paint.
3
How long he had been sitting there with the pot between his knees he could not tell; the house was out of sight: he was as small now as he had been then—he couldn’t see over the tops of the bushes, and he was back in Javitt’s time. He turned the pot over and over; it was certainly not a golden po, but that proved nothing either way; a child might have mistaken it for one when it was newly painted. Had he then really dropped this in his flight—which meant that somewhere underneath him now Javitt sat on his lavatory-seat and Maria quacked beside the calor-gas . . .? There was no certainty; perhaps years ago, when the paint was fresh, he had discovered the pot, just as he had done this day, and founded a whole afternoon-legend around it. Then why had W.W. omitted it from his story?
Wilditch shook the loose earth out of the pot, and it rang on a pebble just as it had rung against the tag of his shoelace fifty years ago. He had a sense that there was a decision he had to make all over again. Curiosity was growing inside him like the cancer. Across the pond the bell rang for breakfast and he thought, “Poor mother—she had reason to fear,” turning the tin chamber-pot on his lap.
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