Written With My Left Hand

by Nugent Barker

  The carriage had disappeared some time before he reached the inn, over whose tiled and weather-stained roof the redness of the evening was beginning to settle. And now the traveller was conscious of a welcome that seemed to run out and meet him at the very door. He found a log fire crackling in the dining-room; and Mr Bond, holding his hands to the blaze, felt suddenly at ease, and weary. He had intended to assert himself —to shout for Martin Sasserach—to demand that he be escorted down at once from the plateau . . . but now he wished for nothing better than to stand in front of the fire, waiting for Stennet to bring him tea.

  A man began to sing in the heart of the house. Stennet? The fellow’s eyes and hawk-like nose were suddenly visible in the fire. The singing voice grew louder . . . died at length discreetly into silence and the tread of footsteps in the hall . . . and again the traveller was listening to the flames as they roared in the chimney.

  ‘Let me take your coat, sir,’ Stennet said.

  Then Mr Bond whipped round, his cheeks shaking with anger.

  Why did they want to force this hospitality upon him, making him feel like a prisoner? He glared at the large-checked riding-breeches, at the muscular shoulders, at the face that seemed to have grown the sharper through swift driving. He almost shouted: ‘Where’s that bowler hat?’

  Fear? . . . Perhaps. . . . But if fear had clutched him for a moment, it had left him now. He knew that the voice had pleased him, a voice of deference breaking into the cold and irreverent silence of The Headless Man. The cape was already off his shoulders, hanging on Stennet’s bent and respectful arm. And—God be praised!—the voice was announcing that tea would be ready soon. Mr Bond’s spirits leapt with the word. He and Stennet stood there, confidentially plotting. ‘China? Yes, sir. We have China,’ Stennet said.

  ‘And buttered toast,’ said Mr Bond, softly rubbing his chin. Some time after tea he was awakened from his doze by the hand of the manservant, who told him that a can of boiling water was waiting in his room.

  Mr Bond felt that dinner would be a rich meal that night, and it was. He blushed as the dishes were put before him. Hare soup! How did they know his favourite soup? Through entrée, remove, and roast, his hands, soft and pink from washing, were busier than they had been for days. The chicken was braised to a turn. Oh, what mushrooms au gratin! The partridge brought tears to his eyes. The Saxony pudding caused him to turn again to Martin, in Stennet’s praise.

  The landlord bowed with distant courtesy. ‘A game of chess?’ he suggested, when dinner was over. ‘My last opponent was a man like yourself, a traveller making a tour of the inns. We started a game. He is gone from us now. Perhaps you will take his place?’ smiled Martin Sasserach, his precise voice dropping and seeming to transmit its flow of action to the thin hand poised above the board. ‘My move,’ he whispered, playing at once; he had thought it out for a week. But although Mr Bond tried to sink his thoughts into the problem so suddenly placed before him, he could not take them off his after-dinner dyspepsia, and with apologies and groans he scraped back his chair. ‘I’m sorry for that,’ smiled Martin, and his eyes flickered over the board. ‘I’m very sorry. Another night . . . undoubtedly . . . with your kind help . . . another night. . . .’

  The prospect of another day at The Headless Man was at once disturbing and pleasant to Mr Bond as he went wheezing up to bed.

  ‘Ah, Stennet! Do you ever suffer from dyspepsia?’ he asked mournfully, seeing the man at the head of the staircase. Stennet snapped his fingers, and was off downstairs in a moment; and a minute later he was standing at the traveller’s door, with a bowl of Crispin’s famous broth. ‘Oh, that!’ cried Mr Bond, staring down at the bowl. Then he remembered its fine effect on his indigestion at Crispin’s; and when at last he pulled the sheets over his head, he fell asleep in comfort and did not wake until the morning.

  At breakfast Martin Sasserach looked up from his plate. ‘This afternoon,’ he murmured, ‘Stennet will be driving you to my brother Stephen’s.’

  Mr Bond opened his eyes. ‘Another inn? Another of you Sasserachs?’

  ‘Crispin—Martin—Stephen. Just the three of us. A perfect number . . . if you come to think of it.’

  The traveller strode into the garden. Asters glowed in the lustreless light of the morning. By ten o’clock the sun was shining again, and by midday a summer heat lay on the plateau, penetrating even into Mr Bond’s room. The silence of the forest pulled him to the window, made him lift up his head and shut his eyes upon that monstrous mass of trees. Fear was trying to overpower him. He did not want to go to Stephen Sasserach’s; but the hours were running past him quickly now, the stillness was gone from the inn.

  At lunch, to which his host contributed a flow of gentle talk, the traveller felt rising within him an impatience to be off on the third stage of his journey, if such a stage must be. He jumped up from his chair without apology, and strode into the garden. The asters were now shining dimly in the strong sunlight. He opened the gate in the privet hedge, and walked on to the tufted grass that lay between it and the forest. As he did so, he heard the flap of a wing behind him and saw a pigeon flying from a window in the roof. The bird flew over his head and over the forest and out of sight; and for the first time he remembered seeing a pigeon taking a similar course when he was standing in the garden at Crispin’s inn.

  His thoughts were still following the pigeon over the boundless floor of tree-tops when he heard a voice calling to him in the silence. ‘Mr Bond! Mr Bond!’ He walked at once to the gate and down the garden and into the house, put on his Inverness, and hitched his knapsack on to his shoulder; and in a short while he was perched beside Stennet in the flying buggy, staring at the ears of the two horses, and remembering that Martin, at the last moment, instead of bidding his guest goodbye, had gone back to his work.

  ***

  Though he never lost his fear of Stennet, Mr Bond found Martin’s man a good companion on a journey, always ready to speak when spoken to, and even able to arouse the traveller’s curiosity, at times, in the monotonous landscape.

  ‘See those rowans over there?’ said Stennet, nodding to the left. ‘Those rowans belong to Mr Martin. He owns them half-way back to Mr Crispin’s place, and half-way on to Mr Stephen’s. And so it is with Mr Crispin and Mr Stephen in their turn.’

  ‘And what about the forest?’

  ‘Same again,’ said Stennet, waving his hand towards the right. ‘It’s round, you know. And they each own a third, like a huge slice of cake.’

  He clicked his tongue, and the horses pricked up their ears, though on either side of the dashboard the performance was no more than a formality, so swiftly was the buggy moving. ‘Very much quicker than Crispin’s cart!’ gasped the passenger, feeling the wind against his face; yet, when the evening of the autumn day was closing in, he looked about him with surprise.

  He saw the moon rise up above the valley.

  Later still, he asked for information regarding the names of the three inns, and Stennet laughed.

  ‘The gentlemen are mighty proud of them. I can tell you! Romantic and a bit fearsome, that’s what I call them. Poetical, too. They don’t say The Traveller’s Rest, but The Rest of the Traveller, mind you. That’s poetical. I don’t think it was Mr Crispin’s idea. I think it was Mr Martin’s—or Mrs Crispin’s. They’re the clever ones. The Headless Man is merely grim—a grim turn of mind, Mr Martin has—and it means, of course, no more than it says—a man without a head. And then again,’ continued Stennet, whistling to his horses, whose backs were gleaming in the moonlight, ‘the inn you’re going to now—The Traveller’s Head—well, inns are called The King’s Head sometimes, aren’t they, in the King’s honour? Mr Stephen goes one better than that. He dedicates his inn to the traveller himself.’ By this time a spark of light had become visible in the distance, and Mr Bond fixed his eyes upon it. Once, for a moment, the spark went out, and he imagined that Stephen’s head had passed in front of the living-room lamp. At this picture, anger seized him, and h
e wondered, amazed, why he was submitting so tamely to the commands—he could call them no less—of these oddly hospitable brothers. Fanned by his rage, the spark grew steadily bigger and brighter, until at last it had achieved the shape and size of a glowing window through which a man’s face was grinning into the moonshine.

  ‘Look here, what’s all this?’ cried Mr Bond, sliding to his feet.

  ‘The Traveller’s Head, sir,’ answered Stennet, pointing aloft.

  They both stared up at the sign above their heads; then Mr Bond scanned the sprawling mass of the inn, and scowled at its surroundings. The night was still and vibrant, without sound; the endless forest stood like a wall of blue-white dust; and the traveller was about to raise his voice in wrath against the brothers Sasserach, when a commotion burst from the porch of the inn, and on to the moon-drenched grass there strode a tall and ungainly figure, swinging its arms, with a pack of creatures flopping and tumbling at its heels. ‘Here is Mr Stephen,’ Stennet whispered, watching the approach; the landlord of The Traveller’s Head was smiling pleasantly, baring his intensely white teeth, and when he had reached the traveller he touched his forehead with a gesture that was at once respectful and overbearing.

  ‘Mr Bond, sir?’ Mr Bond muttered and bowed, and stared down at the landlord’s children—large-headed, large-bellied, primitive creatures flopping round their father and pulling the skirts of the Inverness cape.

  Father and children gathered round the traveller, who, lost within this little crowd, soon found himself at the entrance of The Traveller’s Head, through which his new host urged him by the arm while two of the children pushed between them and ran ahead clumsily into the depths of the hall. The place was ill-lighted and ill-ventilated; and although Mr Bond knew from experience exactly where the living-room would be situated, yet, after he had passed through its doorway, he found no further resemblance to those rooms in which he had spent two stages of a curious adventure. The oil-lamp, standing in the middle of the round centre table, was without a shade; a moth was plunging audibly at the blackened chimney, hurling swift shadows everywhere over the ceiling and figured wallpaper; while, with the return of the children, a harmonium had started fitfully to grunt and blow.

  ‘Let me take your cloak, your cape, Mr Bond, sir,’ the landlord said, and spread it with surprising care on one of the vast sofas that looked the larger because of their broken springs and the stuffing that protruded through their soiled covers: but at once the children seized upon the cape, and would have torn it to pieces had not Mr Bond snatched it from them—at this, they cowered away from the stranger, fixing him with their eyes.

  Amidst this congestion of people and furniture, Stephen Sasserach smiled and moved continuously, a stooping giant whom none but Mr Bond obeyed. Here was the type of man whose appearance the traveller likened to that of the old-time executioner, the axe-man of the Middle Ages—harsh, loyal, simple, excessively domesticated, with a bulging forehead and untidy eyebrows and arms muscled and ready for deeds. Stephen kept no order in his house. Noise was everywhere, yet little seemed to be done. The children called their father Steve, and put out their tongues at him. They themselves were unlovely things, and their inner natures seemed to ooze through their skins and form a surface from which the traveller recoiled. Three of their names were familiar to Mr Bond. Here were Crispin and Martin and Stephen over again; while Dorcas and Lydia were sisters whose only virtue was their mutual devotion.

  The food at The Traveller’s Head was homely and palatable, and Stephen the father cooked it and served it liberally on chipped plates. He sat in his soiled blue shirt, his knotted arms looking richly sunburnt against the blue. He was never inarticulate, and this surprised Mr Bond. On the contrary, he spoke rapidly and almost as if to himself, in a low rugged voice that was always a pleasure to hear. At moments he dropped into silence, his eyes shut, his eyebrows lowered, and his bulging forehead grew still more shiny with thought; on such occasions, Dorcas and Lydia would steal to the harmonium, while, backed by a wail from the instrument, Crispin the Younger and Martin the Younger would jump from the sofas on to the floor.

  Rousing himself at last, Stephen the Elder thumped his fist on the table, and turned in his chair to shout at the children: ‘Get along with you, devils! Get out your board, and practise, you little devils!’ Whereupon the children erected a huge board, punctured with holes; and each child began to hurl wooden balls through the holes and into the pockets behind them with astonishing accuracy, except for Dorcas and Lydia. And presently their father reminded them: ‘The moon is shining!’ At once the children scuttled out of the room, and Mr Bond never saw them again.

  The noise and the figured wallpaper, and the fat moth beating itself against the only source of light, had caused the traveller’s head to grow heavy with sleep; and now it grew heavier still as he sat by the fire with Stephen after supper was over, listening to the talk of that strangely attractive man in the soiled blue shirt. ‘You fond of children, Mr Bond, sir?’ Mr Bond nodded.

  ‘Children and animals. . . .’ he murmured drowsily.

  ‘One has to let them have their way,’ sighed Stephen Sasserach. The rugged voice came clearly and soothingly into Mr Bond’s ears, until at last it shot up, vigorously, and ordered the guest to bed. Mr Bond pulled himself out of his chair, and smiled, and said goodnight, and the moth flew into his face. Where were the children, he wondered. Their voices could not be heard. Perhaps they had fallen asleep, suddenly, like animals. But Mr Bond found it difficult to imagine those eyes in bed, asleep.

  Lying, some minutes later, in his own massive bed in this third of the Sasserach inns, with an extinguished candle on his bedside table, and gazing towards the open window from which he had drawn apart one of the heavy embroidered curtains, Mr Bond fancied that he could hear faint cries of triumph, and sounds of knocking, coming from the direction of the forest. Starting up into complete wakefulness, he went to the window, and stared at the forest beyond the tufted grass. The sounds, he fancied, putting his hand to his ear, were as those given forth by the children during their game—but louder, as though the game were bigger. Perhaps strange animals were uttering them. Whatever their origin, they were coming from that depth of trees whose stillness was deepened by the light of the moon.

  ‘Oh, God!’ thought Mr Bond, ‘I’m sick to death of the moonlight!’—and with a sweep of the arm he closed the curtains, yet could not shut out the sounds of the forest, nor the sight of the frosted grass beneath the moon. Together, sound and sight filled him with foreboding, and his cheeks shook as he groped for the unlighted candle. He must fetch his Inverness from below, fetch it at once, and get away while there was time. He found his host still sitting by the lamp in the living-room. Stephen’s fist, lying on the table, was closed; he opened it, and out flew the moth.

  ‘He thinks he has got away,’ cried Stephen, looking up, and baring his teeth in a smile: ‘but he hasn’t! He never will!’

  ‘I’ve come for my Inverness,’ said Mr Bond.

  It was lying on one of the massive sofas. The fire was out, and the air chilly, and the depth of the room lay in darkness. An idea crossed the mind of Mr Bond. He said, lifting up the cape: ‘I thought I’d like it on my bed.’ And he shivered to show how cold he was. From one of the folds the moth flew out, and whirled round the room like a mad thing.

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Bond, sir. That’s all right.’ The man had fallen into a mood of abstraction; his forehead shone in the rays of the lamp; and the traveller left the room, holding himself with dignity in his gay dressing-gown, the Inverness hanging on his arm.

  He was about to climb the staircase when a voice spoke softly in his ear, and wished him goodnight.

  Stennet! What was the man doing here? Mr Bond lifted his candle and gazed in astonishment at the back of Martin’s manservant. The figure passed into the shadows, and the soft and deliberate ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall deepened the silence and fear of the moments that followed.

&n
bsp; Mr Bond ran to his room, locked himself in, and began to dress. His dyspepsia had seized him again. If only he were back at Crispin’s! He parted the curtains, and peeped at the night. The shadow of the inn lay on the yard and the tufted grass beyond, and one of the chimneys, immensely distorted, extended as far as the forest. The forest-wall itself was solid with moonlight; from behind it there came no longer the sounds of the knocking, and the silence set Mr Bond trembling again.

  ‘I shall escape at dawn,’ he whispered, ‘when the moon’s gone down.’

  Feeling no longer sleepy, he took from his knapsack a volume of Mungo Park, and, fully dressed, settled himself in an easy chair, with the curtains drawn again across the window, and the candle burning close beside him. At intervals he looked up from his book, frowning, running his eyes over the group of three pagodas, in pale red, endlessly repeated on the wallpaper. The restful picture made him drowsy, and presently he slept and snored and the candle burned on.

  At midnight he was awakened by crashing blows on his door; the very candle seemed to be jumping with fear, and Mr Bond sprang up in alarm.

  ‘Yes? Who’s that?’ he called out, feebly.

  ‘What in the name of God is that?’ he whispered, as the blows grew louder.

  ‘What are they up to now?’ he asked aloud, with rising terror.

  A splinter flew into the room, and he knew in a flash that the end of his journey had come. Was it Stephen or Stennet, Stephen or Stennet behind the door? The candle flickered as he blundered to and fro. He had no time to think, no time to act. He stood and watched the corner of the axe-blade working in the crack in the panel. ‘Save me, save me,’ he whispered, wringing his hands. They fluttered towards his Inverness, and struggled to push themselves into the obstinate sleeves. ‘Oh, come on, come on,’ he whimpered, jerking his arms about, anger rising with terror. The whole room shuddered beneath the axe. He plunged at the candle and blew it out. In the darkness a ray of light shot through a crack in the door, and fell on the window curtain.