Pocket came to anchor with a new flutter at his heart. This upright fence was not meant for scaling; it was like a lot of area palings, as obvious and intentional an obstacle. And the whole place closed at twelve, did it? The flutter became a serious agitation as Pocket saw himself breaking the laws of the land as well as those of school, saw himself not only expelled but put in prison! Well, so much the better for his story so long as those penalties were not incurred; even if they were, so much the greater hero he!
No wonder his best friends called him disparaging names; he was living up to the hardest of them now, and he with asthma on him as it was! But the will was on him too, the obstinate and reckless will, and the way lay handy in the shape of a row of Park chairs which Pocket had just passed against the iron palings. He went back to them, mounted on the first chair, wedged his bag between two of the spikes, set foot on the back of the chair, and somehow found himself on the other side without rent or scratch. Then he listened; but not a step could he hear. So then the cunning dog put his handkerchief through the palings and wiped the grit from the chair on which he had stood. And they called him a conscientious ass at school!
But then none of these desperate deeds were against his conscience, and they had all been thrust on Pocket Upton by circumstances over which he had lost control when the last train went without him from St. Pancras. They did not prevent him from kneeling down behind the biggest bush that he could find, before curling up underneath it; neither did his prayers prevent him from thinking — even on his knees — of his revolver, nor yet — by the force of untimely association — of the other revolvers in the Chamber of Horrors. He saw those waxen wretches huddled together in ghastly groups, but the thought of them haunted him less than it might have done in a feather bed; he had his own perils and adventures to consider now. One thing, however, did come of the remembrance; he detached the leather strap he wore as a watch-guard. And used it to strap a pin-fire revolver, loaded in every chamber, to his wrist instead.
That was the last but one of the silly boy’s proceedings under the bush; the last of all was to drain the number-one draught prescribed by Bompas in the morning, and to fling away the phial. The stuff was sweet and sticky in the mouth, and Pocket felt a singular and most grateful warmth at his extremities as he curled up in his overcoat. It was precisely then that he heard a measured tread approaching, and held his breath until it had passed without a pause. Yet the danger was still audible when the boy dropped off, thinking no more about it, but of Mr. Coverley and Charles Peace and his own people down in Leicestershire.
HIS PEOPLE
It so happened that his people in Leicestershire were thinking of him. They had been talking about him at the very time of the boy’s inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it still.
On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled.
“It’s no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think you’re frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.”
“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young man.
“Tony’s no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.
“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He’s being absolutely spoilt, and you’re at the bottom of it.”
“I didn’t give him asthma!”
“Don’t be childish, Letty.”
“But that’s what’s spoiling his life.”
“I wasn’t talking about his life. I don’t believe it, either.”
“You think he enjoys his bad nights?”
“I think he scores by them. He’d tell you himself that he never even thinks of getting up to first school now.”
“Would you if you’d been sitting up half the night with asthma?”
“Perhaps not; but I don’t believe that happens so often as you think.”
“It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for two or three bad ones.”
“I don’t call that playing the game. I call it shamming.”
“Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his spare time, and got most marks in the exam.”
“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder brother. “I’m glad he didn’t buck to me about that.”
“I don’t think there’s much danger of his bucking to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt. “I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it’s rather rough on Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves that Tony’s nobody even in the house!”
Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest brother.
“But don’t you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the standard you two set up; it’s natural enough, but it isn’t fair.”
“He needn’t be a flyer at games,” said Horace, duly softened by a little flattery. “But he might be a tryer!”
“Wait till we get a little more breath into his body.”
“A bag of oxygen wouldn’t make him a cricketer.”
“Yet he’s so keen on cricket!”
“I wish he wasn’t so keen; he thinks and talks more about it than Fred or I did when we were in the eleven, yet he never looked like making a player.”
“I should say he thinks and talks more about most things; it’s his nature, just as it’s Fred’s and yours to be men of action.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s not allowed to cumber the crease this season,” said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct swerve in the air. “To have him called our ‘pocket edition,’ on the cricket-field of all places, is a bit too thick.”
Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand.
“He’s as good a sportsman as either of you, at heart,” she said warmly. “And I hope he may make you see it before this doctor’s done with him!”
“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo her change of tone as well. “You mean the fool who wanted to send that kid round the world on his own?”
“He’s no fool, Horace, and you know nothing whatever about him.”
“No; but I know something about our Tony! If he took the least care of himself at home, there might be something to be said for letting him go; but he’s the most casual young hound I ever struck.”
“I know he’s casual.”
Lettice made the admission with reluctance; next moment she was sorry her sense of fairness had so misled her.
“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn’t be cured if he could. Think what he’d miss!”
“Oh, if you’re coming back to that, there’s no more to be said.”
And the girl halted at the lighted windows.
“But I do come back to it. Isn’t he up in town at this moment under this very doctor of yours?”
“He’s not my doctor.”
“But you first heard about him; you’re the innovator of the family, Letty, so it’s no use trying to score off
me. Isn’t Tony up in London to-night?”
“I believe he is.”
“Then I’ll tell you what he’s doing at this moment,” cried Horace, with egregious confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. “It’s after eleven; he’s in the act of struggling out of some theatre, where the atmosphere’s so good for asthma!” Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means blind to his many and obvious failings; but they interested her more than the equally obvious virtues of her other brothers, whose unmeasured objurgations drove her to the opposite extreme in special pleading. She tried to believe that there was more in her younger brother than in any of them, and would often speak up for him as though she had succeeded. It may have been merely a woman’s weakness for the weak, but Lettice had taught herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of all his people she was the only one who could have followed his vagaries of that night without thinking the worse of him.
But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have gone indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily at that moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared with some asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her; otherwise it was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk about till all hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck and a smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a woman at her worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her brother, but of other clay.
That young man smoked a last cigarette in his father’s library, and unhesitatingly admitted the subject of dissension and dissent upon the terrace.
“I said he wasn’t doing much good there,” he added, “and I don’t think he is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does.”
“Do you mean that he’s doing any harm?” asked Mr. Upton plainly.
“Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I — I sometimes wish there was more!”
“More manhood, I suppose you’d call it?”
Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness.
“More go about him,” said Horace. He could not say as much to his father as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to bolt from his guns.
“Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?” continued Mr. Upton, with severity.
“I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course that’s really why he’s doing no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn’t seem to be doing him any either.”
Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite another quarter.
“I agree with you there!” cried his father vehemently. “I don’t believe in the man myself; but he was recommended by the surgeon who has done so much for your poor mother, so what could one do but give him a trial? The lad wasn’t having a fair chance at school. This looked like one. But I dislike his going up to town so often, and I dislike the letters the man writes me about him. He’d have me take him away from school altogether, and pack him off to Australia in a sailing ship. But what’s to be done with a boy like that when we get him back again? He’d be too old to go to another school, and too young for the University: no use at the works, and only another worry to us all.”
Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an already worried man, not with intentional unkindness, but yet with that unimaginative want of sympathy which is often the instinctive attitude of the sound towards the unsound. He hated sickness, and seemed at present surrounded by it. His wife had taken ill the year before, had undergone a grave operation in the winter, and was still a great anxiety to him. But that was another and a far more serious matter; he had patience and sympathy enough with his wife. The case of the boy was very different. Himself a man of much bodily and mental vigour, Mr. Upton expected his own qualities of his own children; he had always resented their apparent absence in his youngest born. The others were good specimens; why should Tony be a weakling? Was he such a weakling as was made out? Mr. Upton was often sceptical on the point; but then he had always heard more about the asthma than he had seen for himself. If the boy was not down to breakfast in the holidays, he was supposed to have had a bad night; yet later in the day he would be as bright as anybody, at times indeed the brightest of the party. That, however, was usually when Lettice drew him out in the absence of the two athletes; he was another creature then, excitable, hilarious, and more capable of taking the busy man out of himself than any of his other children. But Lettice overdid matters; she made far too much of the boy and his complaint, and was inclined to encourage him in random remedies. Cigarettes at his age, even if said to be cigarettes for asthma, suggested a juvenile pose to the man who had never studied that disorder. The specialist in London seemed another mistake on the part of that managing Lettice, who had quite assumed the family lead of late. And altogether Mr. Upton, though he saw the matter from a different point of view, was not far from agreeing with his eldest son about his youngest.
And what chance was there for a boy whose own father thought he posed, whose brothers considered him a bit of a malingerer, and his schoolfellows “a conscientious ass,” while his sister spoilt him for un enfant incompris? You may say it would have taken a miracle to make an ordinary decent fellow of him. Well, it was a night of strange happenings to the boy and his people; perhaps it was the one authentic type of miracle that capped all in the morning.
The father had gone to bed at midnight, after an extra allowance of whisky-and-water to take the extra worry off his mind; it did so for a few hours only to stretch him tragically awake in the early morning. The birds were singing down in Leicestershire as in Hyde Park. The morning sun was slanting over town and country, and the father’s thoughts were with his tiresome son in town. Suddenly a shrill cry came from the adjoining room.
In a trice the wakeful man was at his sick wife’s side, supporting her in bed as she sat up wildly staring, trembling in his arms.
“Tony!” she gasped. “My Tony!”
“I was just thinking of him!” he cried. “What about him, dear?”
“I saw him,” she quavered. “I saw him plainer than I see you now. And I’m almost positive I heard — a shot!”
A GRIM SAMARITAN
Though he afterwards remembered a shout as well, it actually was the sound of a shot that brought the boy to his senses in Hyde Park. He opened his eyes on a dazzle of broad daylight and sparkling grass. The air was strangely keen for the amount of sunshine, the sunshine curiously rarefied, and the grass swept grey where it did not sparkle.
Pocket’s first sensation was an empty stomach, and his next a heavy head into which the puzzle of his position entered by laborious steps. He was not in bed. He was not at school. He was not even under the shrub he now remembered in a mental flash which lit up all his adventures overnight. He was wandering ankle deep in the dew, towards a belt of poplars like birch-rods on the skyline, and a row of spiked palings right in front of his nose. He had walked in his sleep for the first time for years, and some one had fired a shot to wake him.
Slow as these automatic discoveries had seemed, they had been in reality so swift that the report was still ringing in his ears when he who must have made it sprang hideously into being across the palings. A hand darted through them and caught Pocket’s wrist as in a vice. And he looked up over the spikes into a gnarled face tinged with fear and fury, and working spasmodically at the suppression of some incomprehensible emotion.
“Do you know what you did?” the man demanded in the end. The question seemed an odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to be reproduced phonetically, corresponded with the peculiarity of tense, reminding Po
cket of the music-masters at his school. It was less easy to account for the tone employed, which was low in pitch and tremulous with passion. And the man stood tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an iron jaw, and a weird cloak and hat that helped to invest him with the goblin dignity of a Spanish inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel in quivering flesh.
“I must have been walking in my sleep,” began Pocket, shakily; further explanations were cut very short.
“Sleep!” echoed the other, in bitter unbelief.
Pocket felt his prime quality impugned.
“Well? I can’t help it! I’ve done it before to-day; you needn’t believe me if you don’t like! Do you mind letting go of my hand?”
“With that in it!”
The scornful tone made the boy look down, and there was the pistol he had strapped to his wrist, not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but his finger actually on the trigger.
“You don’t mean to say I let it off?” cried Pocket, horrified.
“Feel the barrel.”
The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched it with his left hand. The barrel was still warm.
“It was in my sleep,” protested Pocket, in a wheezy murmur.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“I tell you it was!”
The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but shut them on a second impulse. The daggers in his eyes probed deeper into those of the boy, picking his brains, transfixing the secrets of his soul. No master’s eye had ever delved so deep into his life; he felt as though the very worst of him at school was known in an instant to this dreadful stranger in the wilds of London. He writhed under the ordeal of that protracted scrutiny. He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist. His captor was meanwhile fumbling with a penknife in his unoccupied hand. A blade was slowly opened; the leather watch-guard was sliced through in a second; the revolver dropped harmlessly into the dew. The man swooped down and whipped it through the railings with a snarl of satisfaction.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 318