“Ooh, we nearly went over then,” said Nina, and the nightmare fell from Dawkins like a veil as they shot out once more into sunlight.
Dawkins blinked happily up at the blue sky and drank the air of an English summer with huge gulps of relief.
Chapter XVI
They came to a place where hurdles were laid across the stream, and the bottom was rocky, and they had to climb out. Dawkins took off his shoes and stockings, and so did Nina, but in addition Nina tucked her diminutive frock inside her other things, and felt much happier in consequence. The banks were not negotiable, so that Dawkins had to exert all his giant strength and lift the boat over the high hurdle while standing in two feet of water, and then they climbed after it and resumed their progress. Neither of them mentioned to the other the need to put on their shoes and stockings again; they were both of them far too comfortable. And Dawkins did not have the heart to tell Nina to pull her frock out again, although his conscience assured him that Miss Lamb would most certainly disapprove.
A little way farther on Dawkins drew the boat in to the grassy bank.
“Do you know what the time is, old lady?” he asked.
“Oh, about ten.”
“It’s nearly one.”
“Goodness! What about dinner? Whatever will Miss Lamb say? And I am so hungry.”
Dawkins stepped, with surprising delicacy for one of his bulk, out on to the bank and looked at Nina’s worried little face.
“Come and sit beside me,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something. And I’ll show you something.”
As Nina scrambled to his side he began dragging parcels out of the bulging pockets of his plus-four jacket.
“Sandwiches,” he said. “Apples and oranges. Hard-boiled eggs. Careful with that, that’s milk for you. And that’s something else for me. You see, I remembered to tell Miss Lamb that we wouldn’t be back for lunch, old lady. Something told me we wouldn’t.”
Nina kicked out her bare legs luxuriously in the sunshine, and rubbed her cheek against his rough sleeve.
“Of course it did,” she said, and she meant it.
Despite the size and number of Dawkins’ parcels they were all of them empty soon enough, so that Nina sighed happily and rolled over on to her side, and Dawkins stretched himself on the flat of his back with his arms behind his head and a cigarette in his mouth and contemplated the blue of the sky with silent satisfaction. It was quite half an hour before Nina’s insatiable restlessness reasserted itself and she sat up and joggled Dawkins.
“Come and see what’s round the bend,” said Nina. “And we haven’t found out anything about the source of the river yet.”
It was that suggestion about seeing “what was round the bend,” of course, which lured Dawkins on; and Nina, being feminine, had known as much. They worked their way steadily up-stream, with heaps of incidents now. Time and again there were hurdles to lift the boat over, and once or twice there were shallows they had to wade past, towing the boat. Luckily the boat unladen hardly drew an inch of water. There was always the excitement of seeing what awaited them round the next bend, and thanks to the height of the banks they neither of them had any idea where they were. Now and again they would climb up to the top and look round. Usually there were cows to be seen, and sometimes sheep, and very occasionally some one could be seen working in the fields. They were in a fold in the ground at the foot of a steep ridge, and a long way away they could still see Summer Hill, the last and greatest of the ridge, and they knew that the Other House was in that direction in consequence. As though it were a hundred miles away they could just hear the noise of the Saturday-afternoon traffic on the main road right across the valley, but it only served to remind them that they were out of the world in the heart of a haunted fairy-land. The shadows were very long before Dawkins could bring himself again to say that they ought to be going home.
“It’s been such a lovely day,” said Nina. “I don’t want to leave it all. I don’t. I don’t.”
“But we won’t get home to-night if we don’t start now,” said Dawkins, feeling just the same. For the moment his comfortable house and his attentive servants had no attraction for him at all. Then a sudden idea struck him.
“By George!” said Dawkins, “we won’t go home to-night, either. Shall we have an adventure, old lady?”
Nina looked up at Dawkins with the bursting admiration a child displays for an adult who says the right thing. Dawkins’ resolve crystallized hard and firm, and he put aside his fear of Miss Lamb and his new-grown respect for the conventions.
“Come on, old lady,” he said. “Tie the boat up here. Good and tight, mind, so that it’ll stay till we get back.”
They tied the boat up securely to a bush, and climbed up the bank. At the top Dawkins looked round him with a guerrilla’s eyes.
“This way, old lady,” he decided. “Over this field and the next one. Through that gap, and if there isn’t a lane there you can call me silly. And that lane will bring us to a village, and there is always a shop in every village.”
Mrs. Timmins, unsuspecting behind the counter of the General Stores, Post-Office, Grocer and Italian Warehouseman, had a series of surprises that evening quite unexpectedly. The Saturday-afternoon business had ended, and there was a lull before the last comers were due—the slack and careless individuals among the village housewives. Then the shop-bell jangled, and two people came in; one was a big bronzed gentleman in brown plus-fours and the other was a little girl. The big bronzed gentleman began buying all sorts of things, bacon and eggs and bread and butter and a little frying-pan—that one’ll do—and a kettle and tea and sugar and tomatoes and a tin of milk, and do you sell blankets?
“Well, sir, I do.”
“Good, we’ll have some. Doesn’t matter much about the color. Those four’ll do. And macintosh sheets?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Don’t keep those.”
“Well, what have you got? Tarpaulin? Sticky stuff. Here, what are those hanging up there? Macintoshes? Let’s have a couple, big ones.”
Mrs. Timmins could not help uttering a protest. It seemed a scandalous waste of money to buy macintoshes when obviously there was no intention of wearing them.
“They’re thirty shillings each, sir.”
“That’s all right. Put ‘em in with the other things. Anything else? Forks? Plates? I suppose we’d better, hadn’t we, Nina? A couple of those forks and three tin plates. That ought to be the lot. What’s that, Nina? Good for you, old lady. Yes, we want some cups. Not tin ones. Hate ‘em. Two of those china ones. You can carry those, Nina, along with the eggs. Stick the rest of the stuff in a sack or something, if you don’t mind. Oh, and after all I think we’ll have a yard or two of that tarpaulin. I beg your pardon? Oh, yes, a rick-cloth would be just the thing. Stick it in the sack. I’ll use the telephone if you don’t mind while you put ‘em away and add up the bill.”
Dawkins never told Nina what he said when he telephoned to the Other House. Truth to tell, he was a little nervous about breaking the news to Miss Lamb that he and Nina were proposing to spend a night together without a roof over them. It was this nervousness which accounted for his unwonted garrulousness while buying the stores, and it simply redoubled itself when he lifted the receiver and asked for the number of the Other House.
“Is that you, Mary? I want you to take a message for Miss Lamb…. No, don’t go and call her. I—I can’t stop. Just tell Miss Lamb that Miss Nina and I won’t be in to dinner—in fact we won’t be back at all to-night… . Yes, that’s right. We won’t be back until to-morrow, lunch-time, perhaps… . Right. Good-by.”
He came out of the box to where Mrs. Timmins and Nina were stuffing the last of the purchases into the sack. There was quite a crowd in the shop now.
“That’s seven pounds one and fourpence, sir,” said Mrs. Timmins apologetically. That was about as much as she took in the whole of some Saturdays, but Mrs. Timmins was not the kind to be elated about it.
Dawkins tugged out
his pocketbook and paid her—it is symptomatic of newly acquired wealth to carry large sums in cash—and then he stooped over the bulging sack. Mrs. Timmins wanted to help him with it, but he twitched it dexterously to his shoulder without an effort. There was not much left for him to learn about carrying sacks. He bowed his back to pass under the low door of the shop, with Nina at his heels, leaving an amazed shopful of people behind him. At the village pump he stopped and pulled from his pockets the milk bottle and his whisky flash for Nina to fill along with the kettle, and then they passed on out of the village into the growing twilight.
“Which way, now, old lady?” asked Dawkins, and of course Nina did not know. One gap in a hedge was very like any other gap to her, especially when presented another way round and in a different light. Nina could no more have found her way back to the boat than she could have flown there, and she realized it. But Dawkins knew quite a lot about Nina by now, just as he knew a lot about guerrilla troops, and he made no attempt to rub the lesson in—which was as well, because Nina would have resented it. He just swung round into one of the fields and headed across it, and Nina loved him for it. It was only a few minutes before they were back by the little river again, and Dawkins could put the sack down.
“M’m,” said Dawkins, “we’ll want a fire first, I suppose.”
Nina was simply thrilled at the idea of a campfire. Dawkins produced his pocket knife and walked back toward the hedge.
“Shan’t be long, old lady,” he said, nor was he. He was back almost at once with an armful of dead wood he had cut from the hedge.
“That’s ready when we want it,” he said. “Tent’s the next thing, isn’t it?”
Nina did not know; it was all too delightful.
Dawkins opened the sack.
“Put the stores over on that side, old lady,” he said. He laid the macintoshes on the empty sack and the blankets on the macintoshes and unfolded the rick-cover and mused over it for a moment.
“Easy as anything,” he said. He brought the boat paddles and dug little holes in the ground so that they could stand in them blade upward. He tied one edge of the rick-cover to them, and Nina held each one up in turn while he ran round with string and pegs made from forked sticks and guyed them securely. Then he pegged out the opposite edge of the rick-cover, and then the sides, and behold, the rick-cover had become a neat wedge-shaped tent open along one side between the paddles.
“Now you’ll be all right even if it rains, old lady,—which it won’t,” said Dawkins. “Let’s have some supper now. We’ve earned it.”
He built up a little handful of fire, carefully but rapidly, in the lee of the tent opening.
“Don’t know whose land we’re on,” he said. “We’ll get run in for trespassing or something, perhaps, if any one sees us, so we don’t want a big blaze. Besides, we can cook much more easily on a small fire.”
So it seemed. In less time than she would ever have thought possible (save that she was too excited and happy to think anything impossible) Nina was sitting on the pile of bedding eating bacon and eggs and bread and butter, and drinking tea with condensed milk (which she hated normally, but which tasted heaps nicer than ordinary tea when drunk out in the open with a hint of beautifully smelling wood smoke in her nostrils). She ate and ate until she was as tight as a drum and most marvelously happy. The fire had died down to red embers, the stars had come out, all the noises of the night had crept in round them, and the river was gurgling and chuckling in a way she had not realized it did until this evening silence came. And she was very tired with all her paddling and walking and excitement, and Dawkins was very near and reliable. She wanted to stay awake and enjoy it all and go on enjoying it, and the more she wanted to keep awake the drowsier she became, so that she found herself drooping on to Dawkins’ big firm shoulder and he put his arm gingerly round her and held her carefully for a little while,—because he wanted the evening to go on for ever, too,—but he soon stirred and remembered his duty, and said:
“Bed, old lady?”
And Nina said, “Ooh, no,” but she was too tired really to mean it, so Dawkins picked her up and sat her on the sack while he spread the macintoshes over the floor of the tent and took one blanket and doubled it neatly for a ground blanket. Then he said:
“It’s like that first night, isn’t it, old lady? You’ll have to sleep in—some of your clothes again. Miss Lamb wouldn’t like it, and neither do I very much, but it can’t be helped this time, can it?”
And Nina said very sleepily, “I haven’t got any combinations on to-day. Shall I wear my vest and knickers?”
“Yes, that’ll do,” said Dawkins hurriedly, and he walked nervously away while Nina got ready.
You see Nina was eleven now, not merely ten, and Dawkins felt more awkward even than he did before. But she was soon ready, and Dawkins came back and showed her how to fold her blankets under her and over her, and he reached down and doubled the tail up under her feet so that she was wrapped up as if she were in a cocoon and warm and comfortable and without much chance of kicking the blankets off during the night. Then he made up a little pillow for her under the ground blanket and spread his handkerchief over it so that the roughness of the wool would not irritate her face, and she snuggled down happily. Then just as she was going to sleep she remembered.
“Aren’t you going to sleep in the tent, too?” she asked, in such a drowsy voice.
“Not just now,” said Dawkins in his comfortable voice, ever so far away. “I’ll be all right, old lady. Good night.”
“Good night, daddy,” said Nina.
It is too much to guess whether Nina said that last word after careful consideration or whether it just slipped out. For by now her vague memory of her father was quite blotted out by the continual presence of a miraculous but reassuringly human Dawkins. Dawkins had done all and more than she expected a father to do—as far as Nina knew a father was a kindly person who took her away from auntie and fed and clothed her and helped her with her home work —to say nothing of taking her for marvelous journeys up rivers, and cooking exciting suppers over camp-fires, and building providential tents.
But that little word made Dawkins jump in his seat on the sack at the tent mouth with the blood running hot under his skin. It would have been a pleasant, yearned-for sensation if only he had not felt at the same time a horrible feeling of treachery and disloyalty toward the Hawk. He sat very still for a while, a prey to a mixture of conflicting sensations. It dawned upon him that Nina had never used the name “uncle” toward him after the first two or three tentative tries at the Piccadilly Palace Hotel. From what Dawkins knew of Nina (and that, by now, was a great deal) she had set her heart upon calling him “daddy” and had worked steadily to this end. Dawkins was torn between his own desires and his love for Nina on the one hand, and his loyalty to the memory of the Hawk on the other. And Nina, snuggled down under blankets under the windbreak of the tent, smiled in her sleep out of sheer happiness. Owls flapped by in the darkness, and screeched and hooted far worse than ever they did at the Other House, so that the noise was heard by Nina even while she slept, but it did not trouble her sleep, for she had lain down secure in the knowledge that Dawkins was close at hand.
Dawkins, indeed, sat patient and still until he was sure that Nina was asleep; so still in fact that the little night wind which came breathing over the fields found him cold and set him shivering. He reached for the one blanket he had kept for himself and put it on in the old fashion he had learned on the Rainless Coast. With his pocket knife he cut a small slit in the center of the blanket, passed his head through and drew the edges beneath him as he squatted on the empty sack with his knees up to his chin. That was how his guerrilla Indians had slept, and he had learned the convenient trick after much trial—it was far and away the most economical use of a single blanket. Clasping his knees, he gazed, solemn and a little melancholy, into the night. He was happy enough, but a whole train of somber thoughts dragged through his mind as he squatted
there.
Boyhood memories, even, of his school, and of his lodgings when he had begun to learn the business of pawnbroking; of nights in France—of one night in particular in High Wood when Platoon Sergeant H. Dawkins had distinguished himself sufficiently to earn a D.C.M.; of the agony of his journey from the aid-post back to the field ambulance after that fragment of shell hit him in the side; of the long and wearisome convalescence in England, after they had cleared the wound of sepsis and taken out those torturing drainage tubes; of the months and months after that in a training camp in England, drilling more and more infantry to feed the furnaces at Passchendaele and Cambrai; of his passage back to France during the German offensive; of the evidence he had had to give (a bitter memory, this) at the court-martial which sent a man to his death; of his practically compulsory transference to an Officer Cadet Battalion, so that only the Armistice stopped him from holding the king’s commission. Then demobilization and a resumption of pawnbroking, with tiny pay and squalid lodgings, so that it was almost inevitable that, infected as he was by the constant example of the evasion and subterfuge of army life, he should turn a listening ear to the temptations of that thieving fellow clerk who needed a confederate—and a catspaw. Dawkins remembered the stammering volubility of his Jewish employer when discovery dawned upon him, the hysterical gesticulations and venomous threats, dying down when he saw Dawkins’ fists clench. Then the passage to Callao, and the beach-combing and general loafing before he strayed into the army of the Hawk.
Now he was back; he had a vast and growing bank balance, and investment in war Loan, and a house and ease and leisure—so much leisure that he had had to find voluntary work for himself. And, truth to tell, Dawkins found not very much pleasure in these things. Success was rather flat and stale to him. All his happiness now was bound up in the hands of the little girl sleeping back there in the tent. There had been a lapse or two from virtue since the mammoth debauch which had preceded his visit to Field Hill, but the memory of them had slipped from Dawkins’ mind without leaving a trace. He could hardly remember the features of any of those frail women of the night. They had had no share of any of the passion he cherished for little Nina, there; and that was a passion so powerful that his stern common sense compelled him to keep it in check lest it should harm its object, and kept him thinking steadily of means by which he could give Nina all she needed or wanted without her feeling that all she ever needed or wanted was coming her way. At least three-quarters of Dawkins’ thoughts were directed to that end. And so they were to-night, until at last, despite want of practise, his forehead drooped down upon his knees, and he slept, like an Indian, for the few hours before dawn.
The Daughter of the Hawk Page 12