Rogue Male

by Geoffrey Household

  It was now my job to prevent children or lovers pushing through that way again. I worked the side-car into the thicket and deposited it in the first bare stretch of lane, where the foliage overhead was so thick that nothing grew but ferns. Then I unpacked the bill-hook and slashed at the dead wood on the inside of the hedges. I jammed the bicycle cross-wise between the banks and piled over it a hedge of thorn that would have stopped a lion. At the lower end of the lane the trailing brambles were sufficient defence, and I reinforced them with a dead holly-bush. That was all I dared do for the moment. The light was growing, and the strokes of my hook echoing down the hillside.

  I cut steps up the western bank and up the inner side of a young elm; it had a top-heavy branch hanging low over the hedge and within reach of the ground on the farther side. This elm became my way in and out of the lane. I spent most of the day up the tree, whence I had a clear view to the north and west. I wanted to watch the routine of the neighbouring farms and to see if I had overlooked any danger.

  The field on the east of the lane was rough pasture. An hour after dawn the cows came wandering into it over the skyline, having been driven through a gate which I could not see. Farther to the east was a down where the short turf was only good for sheep. To the west, immediately below my tree, was a forty-acre field of wheat stubble, falling away sharply to a great, grey, prosperous farm with generous barns and a duck-pond.

  It was as quiet a hillside as any in England. The activities of the farm below me were chiefly in the vale. Of the inhabitants of the farm to the east I saw none, only heard the boy who called the cows home in the evening—which he did without ever entering the pasture. In the lanes of the Marshwood Vale there was little traffic. I saw the postman with his motor-bike and red side-car. I saw the schoolbus and an occasional car, and a couple of milk lorries bobbing about among the trees to collect the cans set out on wooden platforms by the road or on the pebble bottoms of the streams.

  The section of lane that I had chosen was so damp and dark that the roots which crept over the earth were white. In the evening I moved my possessions farther down into a tiny glade of bracken where the sun shone for three hours a day. It was protected by the high banks, topped by untrimmed hedges of ash, and buttressed on the east by bushes of blackberry and sloe extending far out into the pasture.

  I cut the bracken and scraped out a channel for the stream that ran down the lane after every shower. Then I slung ashpoles from bank to bank—where the distance was a bare six feet—making a monkey’s platform on top of them with twigs and bracken. A day or two later, when I stole some bricks from a tumbledown barn and propped up my poles in the middle, the platform was as strong and dry as a floor of laths.

  The eastern bank was full of rabbit holes which ran into the heavy topsoil along the upper level of the sandstone. On this same night I began the work on them which has provided me with shelter from the rain and with a hearth. By morning I had made a hollow about two feet in diameter and long enough to receive my body. The roof and sides were of earth and the floor of sandstone.

  Burrowing into the stone, soft though it was, proved an interminable job; but I found that it was easy to scrape away the surface, and thus lower the floor inch by inch. In a week I had a shelter to be proud of. The roof had a high vault, packed with clay. The drip trickled down the sides and was caught on two projecting ledges which ran the length of the burrow and were channelled to lead the water into the lane. The floor was three feet below the level of the ledges and crossed by short faggots of ash which kept my sleeping-bag from resting on damp stone. The hole was very much the size and shape of two large bath-tubs, one inverted upon the other.

  As soon as my beard had grown, I walked to Beaminster and came back with knapsack full of groceries, a grill, iron spits, and a short pick, one arm of which was shaped like a miniature battle-axe. I do not know what it is for, but it seemed admirably fitted for working sandstone in a confined space. I aroused no particular interest in Beaminster—a mere untidy holiday-maker with dark glasses—and gave out that I was camping on the hills just across the Somerset border. I had a meal in an inn and read the papers. There was only a passing reference to the Aldwych Mystery. The verdict had been murder by a person or persons unknown. When I climbed down the elm into the lane I felt that I had come home—a half-melancholy sense of slippered relaxation.

  I began a routine of sleeping by day and working on the burrow at night. Working by day was too dangerous; someone might walk past the hedge while I was underground, and hear the noise of the pick. There was a morning when I was nearly caught by a party of children picking blackberries on the edge of the pasture.

  I ran the hole a good ten feet back into the bank and then drove a gallery to the right, intending only to make a hearth; but I found the stone so split by tree-roots and easily worked that I ended the gallery with a bee-hive grotto in which I could comfortably squat. After some difficult surface measurements (by sticking a pole through the hedge and climbing out to see where the tip had got to) I drove a chimney straight upwards into the centre of a blackberry bush. I could then risk a fire at night and cook fresh food.

  All this while I had wondered why it was that I had no trouble with dogs. I was so prepared to frighten any dogs which investigated me that they would never come back, but it appeared that something had already scared them for me; dogs gave the lane a wide berth. The cause was Asmodeus. I observed him first as two ears and two eyes apparently attached to a black branch. When I moved my head, the ears vanished, and when I stood up the rest of him had vanished. I put out some scraps of bully beef behind the branch, and an hour later they too had vanished.

  One morning when I had just gone to bed, and was lying with my head out of the burrow chewing biscuits, he slunk on to my platform and watched me, tail gripping the ground, head savage and expectant. He was a thin and powerful tomcat, black, but with many of his hairs ending in a streak of silver, like a smooth-headed Mediterranean beauty just turning grey. I don’t think that in his case it is age, but a freak of colouring inherited from some silver ancestor. I threw him a biscuit; he was out of sight while it was still in the air. It had gone, of course, when I woke up, and so had half a tin of bully beef.

  He began to consider me as a curious show for his leisure hours, sitting motionless at a safe distance of ten feet. In a few more days he would snatch food from my hand, hissing and bristling if I dared advance the hand to touch him. It was then that I named him Asmodeus for he could make himself appear the very spirit of hatred, and malignity.

  I won his friendship with a pheasant’s head, attached to the end of a string. I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food—which they take for granted—but his or her entertainment value. Asmodeus took to his toy enthusiastically. In another week he permitted me to stroke him, producing a raucous purr, but, in order to save his face, pretending to be asleep. Soon afterwards he started a habit of sleeping in the burrow with me during the day, and hunting while I worked at night. But bully beef was the meat he preferred; no doubt it gave him the maximum nourishment for the minimum effort.

  I made two more journeys to Beaminster, walking there and back at night and spending the intervening day—after doing my shopping—hidden on a hillside of gorse. From the first expedition I returned with food and paraffin for the Primus; from the second with a glue-pot and a small door which I had ordered from the local carpenter.

  This door or lid fitted exactly into the entrance to my burrow. On the inside was a stout handle by which I could lift and jam it into position; on the outside was camouflage. I sprinkled over a coating of glue a rough layer of sandstone dust, and on that stuck an arrangement of twigs and dead plants, some of which trailed over the edges of the door so that they masked the outline when it was in place.

  As soon as I was satisfied with the door, I practised a drill for effacing myself completely from the lane. The platform was dismantled, the bricks were scattered, an
d the poles thrust into the hedge; my latrine and rubbish-pit were covered by a dead thorn, and I myself was inside in the burrow, all in ten minutes. Anyone forcing a way into the lane might or might not notice that some gypsy had been camping there, but could not guess that the place was inhabited at the moment. The only sign was an apparent rabbit-hole, a bit artificial in spite of the droppings I scattered round the entrance, which gave me air while I was shut in the burrow.

  The tandem bicycle could not be seen. I took it apart and propped the pieces against the bank, covering them with a mass of dead vegetation. The side-car was a continual nuisance. I couldn’t bury it or take it to bits, and the bright aluminium shone through the brushwood I heaped on it. It was so new and strong that no one could be deceived into thinking it innocently abandoned. Eventually I had to spend a night tearing down my defences in order to get the thing out of the lane, and half wheeling, half carrying it down to the vale.

  I didn’t know what on earth to do with it. Wherever I put it, it might be found, and the more remote the place, the more the question as to how it came there. Nor could I waste any time; if I met anyone, he would see my gleaming and awkward burden long before I saw him. Finally I chucked it into a sheltered stream, hoping that the action of water would destroy it; I couldn’t.

  I am now prepared to spend the first half of the winter where I am, subject to the bottom of the lane being still invisible when the leaves have fallen—which seems probable. I cannot be seen and, if I am careful, I cannot be heard. I avoid chopping wood and risk the noise of my bill-hook only on one night a week when I fill the inner chamber with brushwood and burn it. This dries out the whole den and gives me a layer of hot ashes on which I can grill at one time whatever store of meat I have.

  My dry and tinned food is sufficient, for I have been living largely on the country. There are cob-nuts, sloes, and blackberries at my door, and from time to time I extract a bowl of milk from a red cow; she has a great liking for salt, and can be tempted to stand quietly among the domes and ramps of blackberry bush that flank the eastern hedge.

  My catapult keeps me supplied with the rabbits I want. It’s an inefficient weapon. As one whose hobby is the craft of ballistics, ancient and modern, I ought to be ashamed of myself for depending on rubber when a far better weapon could be made from twisted hair or cord. But I have a distaste for the whole business. I have to compel myself to shoot a rabbit in these days. After all, it is perfectly justifiable to kill for food.

  I am not content, in spite of the fact that this Robinson Crusoe existence ought to suit my temperament pretty well. There is not, any longer, enough to do. I am not affected by loneliness nor by the memories of this place. Asmodeus helps there. He is a ridiculous outlet for a lot of sentimentality. I am uncertain of myself. Even this journal, which I was sure would exorcise my misgivings, has settled nothing.

  I start on this exercise book again, for I dare not leave my thoughts uncontrolled. Sitting below the ventilator, I have just enough light. It is good to hold the white page before it. My eyes as well as my mind long for some object on which to concentrate.

  A month ago I wrote that I did not feel lonely. It was true, and it accounts for my folly. The essence of safety is that a hunted man should feel lonely; then his whole being throws out tendrils, as it were, towards the outer world. He becomes swift to imagine, sensitive as an animal to danger. But I, I was sunk in a gentle, moody preoccupation with my cat and my conscience. Dear God, I might as well have been a retired company director living in a solitary cottage and mildly worried whether his speculations were discovered!

  I committed the supreme folly of writing to Saul to send me books. Once my earth was finished, I had too much leisure and no use for it. Besides all my other incoherent dissatisfactions, questions of sex were worrying me.

  For me, sex has never been a problem. Like most normal people, I have been able to suppress my desires without difficulty. When there was no need to suppress them, my appreciation has been keen, but my emotions have not been deeply involved. Indeed, I begin to think that I have never known truly passionate love. I have no doubt that, say, an Italian would consider me the perfect type of frigid Anglo-Saxon.

  Why, then, my strong resistance to coming to this lane? I take it that I showed a resistance, since I refused to admit to myself that this was my destination until I was within twenty miles of it—and that though the double hedge was an excellent hiding-place which I was eager to reach. Well, I suppose I wished to save myself pain. But I cannot even remember her face, except that her eyes appeared violet against the tawny skin. And that I know to be a trick of memory, for I have often looked for violet eyes in man and woman and never seen them. I repeat, I was never in love. The proof of it is that I so calmly accepted the destruction of my happiness. I was prepared for it. I begged her to stay in England, or at least, if she felt it her duty to return, to temper her politics with discretion. When I heard that she was dead, I really suffered very little.

  I wrote to Saul for books: meaty stuff which I could reread throughout the winter, penetrating with each reading a little further into what the author meant rather than what he said. I did not, of course, sign the letter, but wrote in block capitals, asking him to send the books to Professor Foulsham at a sub-post office in Lyme Regis. Foulsham was (and still is, I trust) the professor of Christian Ethics in my day, and it seemed to me that my hairy face looked rather like his. It probably didn’t; but it is always well to choose and think oneself into a part.

  I did not wish to see Beaminster any more. While the holiday season was still on, my three visits and my account of myself naturally passed unchallenged, but a man who claimed to be still camping on the downs in the gathering gales of October would start any amount of gossip about where he was and why. I picked Lyme Regis because the little town had a winter colony of visitors and strangers presumably attracted no attention.

  I had a straggly beard that was quite as convincing as most of those one sees in Bloomsbury. My eye, as a result of continual washing in dew and lotion, was no longer swollen; it looked odd, but more like a bad glass eye than a wounded one. There was nothing in my appearance of a harmless and rather dirty eccentric to arouse the curiosity of the police. As for my other enemies, they had then no more reason to search Dorset than Kamchatka.

  I walked to the outskirts of the town in a couple of hours before dawn, and concealed myself during the day in the shrubbery of a large empty house. In the evening I called at the post office, introduced myself as Professor Foulsham, and asked if a parcel of books had come for me. It was one of those small, dark shops that sell stationery and tobacco, and have a back room with the inevitable pot of tea stewing by the fire.

  ‘Sorry! There is no parcel in that name,’ said the postmistress.

  I asked if there were a letter.

  ‘I think there may be,’ she said archly, and reached under the counter for half a dozen letters.

  A woman who had been examining a row of dress-making magazines hung on strings across the window said good night and opened the door, letting the last of the evening light into the shop. The postmistress stared at me as if her eyes had stuck—shoe-button eyes they were, sharp and nervous.

  ‘There—there’s more letters in the back room,’ she stammered, and edged through the door into the parlour, still watching me.

  I heard frantic whispering, and a girl’s voice say: ‘Oo, Ma, I couldn’t do that!’—followed by a resounding slap.

  A schoolgirl of about twelve dashed out of the back room, dived under the flap of the counter, and with one terrified glance at me bolted down the road. The postmistress remained at the threshold of her room, still fascinated by my appearance.

  I didn’t like the look of things, but what was wrong I couldn’t imagine. I was wearing my reach-me-down suit and muffler, and had succeeded, I thought, in impersonating a weatherproof don on his hardy way from a tea-party. I left my glasses at home, believing that I should attract less attention without
those tremendous blinkers. As a matter of fact it would have made no difference whether I wore them or not.

  ‘Now, madam,’ I said severely, ‘if you can bring yourself to attend to public business, I should like my letter.’

  ‘Don’t you dare come near me!’ she squeaked, shrinking back into the doorway.

  It was no time for respecting His Majesty’s mails. She had dropped the letters behind the wire enclosure which protected her cash and stamps. I reached over it, and took an envelope addressed to Professor Foulsham.

  ‘Kindly satisfy yourself, madam,’ I said, seeing that she was mustering courage to scream, ‘that this letter is actually addressed to me. I regret that it will be my duty to report your extraordinary behaviour. Good afternoon.’

  This pomposity, delivered in a most professorial tone, held her with her mouth open long enough for me to move with dignity out of the shop. I jumped on a bus that was running uphill out of the town, and got off it ten minutes later at a cross-roads on the Devon and Dorset border. Safe for the moment in the thick cover of a spinney I opened my letter, hoping it would tell me why a description of me had been circulated to Dorset post offices.

  The letter was typewritten and unsigned, but Saul had made his identity certain. He wrote in some such words as these:

  ‘The parrots paid the fisherman. I must not send you books in case they are found and traced to the buyer. If you know nothing of a caravan trailer, write to me again and I will risk it.

  ‘About two weeks ago the police tried to find the owner of a trailer near Weymouth. It was a routine enquiry. The campsite was deserted, and the landlord did not wish to be held responsible for damage done by children who had broken a window and were climbing in and out of the trailer.

  ‘The police established that the owner had bought and let the caravan on the same evening, that this was the evening after a man had been found killed in the Aldwych station, and that the owner wore dark glasses.