by Hugh Walpole
Peter had heard no single word of this. His ears were straining for the return of that whisper. They were nearly once again at the hilltop. Then in front of them there would be the sea — at the top of the hill there would be the sea.... He was seized with a great terror — frightened like a child in the dark.... “Bill Tregothny, you must understand sir, ‘ad always been a idiot — always, born so. When ’e was all well again ’e told strange tales about the lot of them havin’ boarded the vessel and there bein’ gold all over the decks — bars of it with the rain fallin’ all about it — piled in ‘eaps and ’e said the sailors weren’t like common sailors yer knew, but all in silks with cocked hats and the gold lyin’ all about —
“O course Bill was the idiot you must understand, but it’s true enough that there were no vessel in the marnin’ — no vessel at all — and my father and the rest were never seen again — nor no bodies neither.... And they do say—”
Here Mr. Jackson dropped his voice —
They were just at the top of the hill now. Peter was sitting with his hands clenched, his body trembling.
“... They do say that up in the potato field over Dunotter they’ve seen a man all in a cocked hat and red silk and gold lace — a ghost you must understand, sir — which Bill Tregothny says ...”
The sea broke upon them with an instant, menacing roar. Between them and this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here and there where the moonlight touched it.
But across it, like a mob’s menace, fell the thunder, flung up to them from below, swelling from a menace to a sudden crash, then from crash to echo, dying to murmur again. It had in it anger and power, also pity and tenderness, also scorn and defiance. It cared for no one — it loved every one. It was more intimate than any confidence ever made, and then it shouted that intimacy to the whole world. It flung itself into Peter’s face, beat his body, lashed his soul— “Oh! you young fool — you’ve come slinking back, have you? After all these years you’ve come slinking back. Where are all your fine hopes now, where all those early defiances, those vast ambitions? — Worthless, broken, defeated — worthless, broken, defeated.”
And then it seemed to change:
“Peter — Peter — Hold out a little longer — the battle isn’t over yet — struggle on for a little, Peter — I’ll help you — I’ll bring your courage back to you — Trust me, Peter — trust me....”
Through the rattle of the surf there came the sick melancholy lowing of the Bell Rock; swinging over a space of waters it fell across fields, unutterably, abominably sad.
And in the boy there instantly leapt to life his soul. Maimed and bruised and stunned it had been — now alive, tearing him, bringing on to his bending shoulders an awful tide of knowledge: “Everything is gone — your wife, your boy, your friend, your work.... We have won, Peter, we have won. The House is waiting for you....”
And above those dreadful voices the thundering echo, indifferent to his agonies, despising his frailties, flinging him, sea-wreck of the most miserable, to any insignificant end....
Peter suddenly stood up, rocking on his box. He seized the whip from the driver’s hands. He lashed the miserable horse.
“Get on, you devil, get on — leave this noise behind you — get out of it, get out of it—”
The cab rocked and tossed, Mr. Jackson caught the boy about the shoulders, held him down. The horse, tired and weary, paid no heed to anything that might be happening but stumbled on.
“Good Lord, sir,” Mr. Jackson cried, “you might have had us over — What’s it all about, sir?”
But Peter now was huddled down with his coat about his ears and did not move again.
“Catchin’ the whip like that — might ‘ave ‘ad us right into the ‘edge,” muttered Mr. Jackson, wishing his journey well over.
As they turned the corner the lights of Treliss burst into view.
CHAPTER II
SCAW HOUSE
I
Mr. Jackson inquired as to the hotel that Peter preferred and was told to drive anywhere, so he chose The Man at Arms.
The Man at Arms had been turned, by young Mr. Bannister, from a small insignificant hostelry into the most important hotel in the West of England. It stood above the town, looking over the bay, the roofs of the new town, the cottages of the old one, the curving island to the right, the lighthouse to the left — all Cornwall in those grey stones, that blue sea, the grave fishing boats, the flocks of gulls, far, far below.
Mr. Bannister had spared no trouble over The Man at Arms, and now it was luxuriously modern Elizabethan, with an old Minstrels’ Gallery kept studiously dusty, and the most splendid old oak and deep fire-places with electric light cunningly arranged, and baths in every passage. Of course you paid for this skilful and comfortable romance, but Mr. Bannister always managed his bills so delicately that you expected to find a poem by Suckling or Lovelace on the back of them. When Peter had been last in Treliss The Man at Arms had scarcely existed, but he was now utterly unconscious of it, and stood in the dim square hall talking to Mr. Bannister like a man in a dream.
He was aware now that he was exhausted with a fatigue that was beyond anything that he had ever experienced. It was a weariness that was not, under any conditions, to be resisted. He must lie down — here, anywhere — now, at once and sleep ... sleep ... sleep.
Mr. Bannister caught him by the arm as he swayed.
“You looked played out, sir.”
“Done up... done up!”
His eyes were closed. Then suddenly he had touched Mr. Bannister’s shoulder. He was looking at a wire letter rack, hanging by the superintendent’s little office. There were some telegrams and many letters stretched behind the wire netting. One envelope was addressed —
Miss Norah Monogue,
The Man at Arms Hotel.
Treliss,
Cornwall.
“Miss Monogue ... Miss Monogue ... have you any one here called Miss Monogue?”
“Yes, sir — been here some weeks. Poor lady, she’s very ill I’m afraid. Something to do with her heart — strained it in some way. Seemed much better ... but the last few days....”
Peter stumbled upstairs to his room.
II
Some clock was striking five when he awoke and looking vaguely about his room saw, by the light, that it must be late afternoon. He must have slept for a day and a night. As he lay back on his bed his first moments of consciousness were filled with a pleasant sense of rest and ease. He remembered nothing ... he only knew that in the air there was the breath of flowers and that through the open window there floated up to him a song, a murmur of the sea, a rattle of little carts.
He looked about his room. On a distant wall there was a photograph— “Dunotter Rocks, from the East.” Then he remembered.
He flung the bed-clothes off him and hurried to dress. He must go up to Scaw House at once, at once, at once. Not another moment must be wasted. His hands trembled as he put on his clothes and when he came downstairs he was dishevelled and untidy. He had eaten nothing for many hours but food now would have choked him. He hurried out of the hotel.
The town must have had many recollections to offer him had he observed it but he passed through it, looking neither to the right nor the left, brushing people aside, striding with great steps up the steep cobbled street that leads out of the town, on to the Sea Road.
Here on the Sea Road he paused. The wind, tearing, as it had always done, round the corner met him and for a moment he had to pull himself together and face it. He remembered, too, at that instant, Norah Monogue. Where had he seen her? What had brought her to his mind quite lately? What did she mean by interfering? — interfering? Then he remembered. It was her name in the letter rack. She was at The Man at Arms ill. Impatiently, he would have driven her from him, but all the way down the Sea Road she kept pace with him.
“I’m done with her.... I’m done
with everybody. Damn it all, one keeps thinking....”
In the evening light the sea below the road was a pale blue and near the shore a calm green. It was all very peaceful. The water lapped the shore, the Bell Rock sighed its melancholy note across space; out a little way, when some jagged stones sprang like shoulders from the blue, gentle waves ringed them in foam like lace and broke with a whisper against their sides.
Except for the sea there was absolute silence. Peter alone seemed to walk the world. As he strode along his excitement increased and his knees trembled and his eyes were burning. He did not think of the earlier days when he had walked that same road. That was another existence that had nothing to do with him as he was now. The anticipation that possessed him was parallel with the eager demand of the opium-smoker. “Soon I shall be drugged. I’m going to forget, to forget, to forget. Just to let myself go — to sink, to drown.”
He had still with him the consciousness of keeping at bay an army of thoughts that would leap upon him if he gave them an opportunity. But soon that would be all over — no more battle, no more struggle. He turned the corner and saw Scaw House standing amongst its dark trees, with its black palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house was flaming but the trees were sombre and the house was cold.
It did not seem to him to have changed in any way since he had left it. The windows had always been of a grim hideous glass, the stone shape of the place always squat and ugly, and the short flight of steps that led up to the heavy beetling door had always hinted, with their old hard surface, at a surly welcome and a reluctant courtesy. It was all as it had been.
The sky, now a burning red, looked down upon an utterly deserted garden, and the silence that was over all the place seemed to rise, like streaming mist, from the heart of the nettles that grew thick along the crumbling wall.
The paint had faded from the door and the knocker was rusty; as Peter hammered his arrival on to the flat silence a bird flew from the black bunch of trees, whirred into the air and was gone....
For a long time after the echo of his knock had faded away there was silence, and it seemed to him that this could be only another of those dreams — those dreams when he had stood on the stone steps in the heart of the deserted garden and woken the echoes through the empty house. At last there were steps; some one came along the passage and halted on the other side of the door and listened. They both waited on either side, and Peter could hear heavy thick breathing. He caught the knocker again and let it go with a clang that seemed to startle the house to its foundations. Then he heard bolts, very slowly drawn back, again a pause and then, stealthily the door swung open.
A scent of rotten apples met him as the door opened, a scent so strong that it was confused at once with his vision of the woman who stood there, she, with her gnarled and puckered face, her brown skin and crooked nose standing, as it were, for an actual and visible personification of all the rotten apples that had ever been in the world.
He recognised also a sound, the drunken hesitating hiccough of the old clock that had been there when he had come in that evening long ago ready to receive his beating, that had kept pace with his grandfather’s snorings and mutterings and had seemed indeed, the only understanding companion that the old man had ever had. The woman was, he saw, the arms-akimbo ferocious cook of the old days, but now how wrinkled and infirm! — separated by so many more years than the lapse of time allowed her from the woman of his past appearance there. There was more in her than the mere crumbling of her body, there was also the crumbling of her spirit, and he saw in her old bleared eyes the sign of some fierce battle fought by her, and fought to her own utter defeat.
In her eyes he saw the thing that his father had become....
What did he want, she asked him, coming disturbing them at that hour, but in her face there was, he fancied, something more than the surly question justified, some curiosity, some eagerness that seemed to show that she did not have many visitors here and that their company might be an eager relief.
“I’m Peter Westcott and I’ve come to see my father.”
She did not answer this, but only, with her hand to her breast stood back a little and watched him with frightened eyes. She was wearing an old, faded, green blouse, open at her scraggy neck and her skirt was a kind of bed-quilt, odd bits of stuffs of many colours stuck together. Her scanty hair was pulled into a bunch on the top of her head, her face where it was not brown was purple, and her hands were always shaking so that her fingers rattled together like twigs. But her alarmed and startled eyes had some appeal that made one pity her poor battered old body.
“You don’t remember me,” he said, looking into her frightened eyes. But she shook her head slowly.
“You’d much better have kept away,” she said.
“Where is he?” he asked her.
She shuffled in front of him down the dark hall. Except for this strange smell of rotting apples it was all very much as it had been. The lamp hanging at the foot of the stairs made the same spluttering noise and there was the door of the room that had once been his grandfather’s, and Peter fancied that he could still see the old man swaying there in the doorway, laughing at his son and his grandson as they struggled there on the floor.
The woman pushed open the dining-room door and Peter went in.
Peter’s first thought was that his father was not there. He saw standing in front of the well-remembered fireplace a genial-looking gentleman clothed in a crimson dressing-gown — a bald gentleman, rather fat, with a piece of toast in one hand and a glass of something in the other. Peter had expected he knew not what — something stern and terrible, something that would have answered in one way or another to those early recollections of terror and punishment that still dwelt with him. He had remembered his father as short, spare, black-haired, grim, pale — this gentleman, who was now watching him, bulged in the cheeks and the stomach, was highly coloured with purple veins down the sides of his nose and his rather podgy hands trembled. Nevertheless, it was his father. When the red dressing-gown spoke it was in a kind of travesty of that old sharp voice, those cutting icy words — a thickened and degenerate relation:
“My boy! At last!” the gentleman said.
The room presented disorder. On the table were scattered playing cards, a chair was overturned, under the cactus plant lay what looked like a fiddle, and the only two pictures on the wall were very indecent old drawings taken apparently from some Hogarthian prints.
Peter stared at all this in amazement. It was, after the grim approach and the deserted garden, like finding an Easter egg in a strong box. Peter saw that his father was wearing under the dressing-gown a white waistcoat and blue trousers, both of them stained with dark stains and smelling very strongly of whisky. He noticed also that his father seemed to find it difficult to balance himself on both his legs at the same time, and that he was continually shifting his feet in an indeterminate kind of way, as though he would like to dance but felt that it might not be quite the thing.
Mr. Westcott closed up both his eyes, opened his mouth and shut it again and shook Peter excitedly by the hand. At the same time Peter felt that his father was shaking his hand as much because he wanted to hold on to something as for reasons of courtesy.
“Well, I am glad. I wondered when you would come to see your poor old father again — after all these years. I’ve often thought of you and said to myself, ‘Well, he’ll come back one day. You only be patient,’ I’ve said to myself, ‘and your son will come back to you — your only son, and it isn’t likely that he’s going to desert you altogether.’”
“Yes, father, I’ve come back,” said Peter, releasing his hand. “I’ve come back to stay.”
He thought of the many times in London when he’d pictured his father, stern and dark, pulling the wires, dragging his wicked son back to him — he thought of that ... and now this. And yet....
“Well
now, isn’t that pleasant — you’ve come to stay! Could I have wanted anything better? Come and sit down — yes, that chair — and have something to drink. What, you won’t? Well, perhaps later. So you’ve come to keep your old father company, have you? I’m sure that’s delightful. Just what a son ought to do. We shall get along very well, I’m sure.”
All the while that his father talked, still holding the toast and the glass of something, Peter was intensely conscious of the silent listening house. After all that grimness, that desertion, the old woman’s warning had gone for something. And yet, in spite of a kind of dread that hung about him, in spite of a kind of perception that there was a great deal more in his father than he at present perceived, he could not resist a kind of warm pleasure that here at any rate was some sort of a haven, that no one else in the world might want him, but here was some one who was glad to see him.
“Well, my boy, tell me all you’ve been doing these years.”
“I’ve been in London, writing—”
“Dear, dear — have you really now? And how’s it all turned out?”