by Cyril Hare
Mr. Olding gravely nodded. Clearly it was all right by him.
“Then the next thing I know, here’s this fellow on the pony, cantering across the top as though the whole place belonged to him. I shouted at him-I waved- and what does he do? Turns round like a flash and rides lickety split down hill as hard as he can go after the hounds. All right. If that isn’t stealing I’d like to know what is.”
“A person steals who, without the consent of the owner…” As a pious man in extremity will say a prayer, so Pettigrew murmured to himself the opening words of the Larceny Act, 1916. The familiar phrases comforted him. Not only did they assure him of his own innocence in law; they represented something solid and substantial to cling to at a moment when he was beginning to doubt the evidence of his senses. He had got to the stage of feeling that if the others went on discussing him as though he wasn’t there, he would soon begin to question his own identity.
“And then,” Olding was saying, “he turns up at the kill with a cock-and-bull story about finding your bleeding carcase with the pony standing over it.”
“All right. That proves it, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, rather, I should say it did.”
“… fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith…”
“You’ll give evidence about it, if they want you to?”
“Oh, I say, Percy, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it? I mean, that sort of thing isn’t going to do the Hunt any good, and you’ve got the pony back.”
“All right, if you say so, Olding. It seems a pity to let the blighter off scot free, though. What I can’t get over is his saying I was dead. Such blasted cheek.”
“… takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen…”
“He went on saying it right up to the end. Took me to the very place where he said you’d be. I was led right up the garden path. Absolutely, I can tell you.”
“Extraordinary thing to do. Do you think he’s quite-?”
For the first time the two men seemed to be aware that Pettigrew was listening to their conversation. They did not stop talking, but walked their mounts out of earshot.
“… with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof,” Pettigrew concluded defiantly. Let anyone suggest he was out of his mind after that!
“Did you say something, sir?”
He looked round. Tom was speaking to him, and speaking, moreover, in a surprisingly friendly tone. Moreover, he was standing at Pettigrew’s elbow and not talking down at him from the vantage point of a saddle.
The fact encouraged Pettigrew to treat him as a man and a brother. At the same time it puzzled him.
“What have you done to your horse?” he asked.
Tom grinned, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Looking past him, Pettigrew saw the horse standing where Tom had left it when he dismounted to help Percy. It was quite motionless, its head up, its ears pricked, looking towards its master as though waiting for orders. “That’s a well-trained animal,” said Pettigrew. “Better behaved than your pony,” he added with a feeble laugh.
“I can’t afford a disobedient animal in my job,” Tom replied. “He’ll stay there all day if I tell him to, and come when he’s called.”
Tired as he was, Pettigrew looked with interest at this equine phenomenon. He was no judge of horseflesh, but he thought it a very plain-looking animal, a stocky dun-coloured beast, with powerful quarters and a distinctly roman nose. He approached it and its ears went flat back on its head while a set of very ugly teeth champed in his direction.
“Don’t go too close,” Tom called out. “He’s not safe with strangers.”
Pettigrew turned back. Tom was vaguely poking about in the heather with his hunting-crop, a look of scepticism on his face.
“Somewhere about here, you thought he was?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Pettigrew. “I don’t know whether you think me mad or not, but there was a man lying here.”
Tom nodded gravely. “ ’Twasn’t Mr. Percy, though,” he remarked.
“Obviously not, if he came down at Tucker’s Barrows. It was someone else.”
“And he’s not there now.”
“And he’s not there now. That’s what’s so extraordinary.”
“What did he look like, exactly?” Tom asked.
Pettigrew closed his eyes for a moment, the better to concentrate. The picture that he saw in his mind’s eye was absolutely clear. The man was lying on his back, his head slightly askew on the narrow shoulders, the face upturned, looking very white and sharp against the ground, like a piece of paper. The pony all but trod on him, so that Pettigrew was thrown forward and only saved himself from falling by holding on to his mane…
He suddenly realized something, and with the realization his head began to swim. Tom’s pony had a severely hogged mane. Nobody could possibly have held on to that. He was confusing it with the far smaller pony that he had ridden as a boy, which had sported a long, flowing chestnut mane. And the dead face that he had just been seeing so clearly in his mind’s eye was part of the same vivid memory. He must think again. But try as he might, he could not summon up any precise picture of what he had seen that afternoon. The whole episode was hopelessly blurred in his mind.
He shook his head.
“I’m afraid I can’t say what he looked like,” he said lamely.
“But you saw him?”
“Oh yes. I saw him all right.”
“Ah.” Tom said nothing more for an appreciable time. “A funny old place, the Tussock,” he remarked at last. “There’s no knowing what you mightn’t see up here. Night times, especially. Of course, there is those as can see by day.”
“Do you mean the place is-haunted?”
Tom shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m not saying it is,” he said. “But there’s them as do.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Pettigrew protested. But even as he spoke, doubts assailed him. After all, the Tussock was haunted for him, and in a very particular way. The conditions for a hallucination were ideal. He had been all day obsessed with the recollections of the past, of which this one, because so long suppressed, had become by far the most powerful. Given the coincidence of the pony’s sudden swerve at precisely the right time and place to fit in with his thoughts, was it not possible that an optical illusion might follow? And people who were prone to optical illusions of this nature might be called, as Percy put it, “not quite…”
He felt strongly the necessity of impressing upon someone his sanity and respectability, if only to convince himself that he was, in spite of everything, sane and respectable. “I’m afraid I may have done your pony some damage,” he went on quickly. “If you think you ought to call in a vet, you must do it at my expense. There’ll be the shoeing to pay for anyway, and I dare say you feel I ought to give you something for my ride.”
Tom looked at, him seriously and not unkindly. “That’s a fair offer, sir,” he said. “I tell you what- you’ve not got a bad seat on a horse-better than Mr. Percy’s, if you want to know. What do you say if I was to find you something a bit quieter, more suitable to a man of your age, like? I’d forget about the other matter then. What do you say?” Pettigrew shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Thank you for the compliment but quite definitely No.”
Tom shrugged his shoulders and looked round to where the other two men were now approaching. Then he gave a whistle, and his horse trotted obediently up to where he stood. He climbed easily into the saddle. “Shall I let you know about the pony, then?” he asked. “Do, please. My name is Pettigrew and I am staying at Sallowcombe.”
“Oh.” The friendliness in the man’s face faded as the colour in a Japanese lantern fades when the candle inside is blown out. He turned his horse’s head away. “Well, Mr. Olding,” he called out, “we’d best be getting along home.”
Pettigrew stared after the three men as they rode away across the moor in a mood of gloomy resigna
tion. He was too tired even to feel resentment at the brutally sudden change of front. It seemed, in any case, all of a piece with the illogical sequence of disasters that had marked the afternoon. No doubt there was an explanation, but it was not worth while looking for one. Just now he was concerned only with how he, Pettigrew, was to get along home from where he was.
The sound of motor traffic close at hand reminded him that Bolter’s Tussock was no longer the remote spot that it once had been. He moved wearily but thankfully towards the road.
The first vehicle that approached him pulled up at his frantic signals. With an extraordinary sense of returning to reality from a world of dreams, he opened the door and climbed in beside his wife.
“Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now? ”
But Frank was already fast asleep.
CHAPTER VII. Lying Up
I think,” said Eleanor, “that it might be a good plan if you were to go to bed.”
Her husband murmured faintly that perhaps it would. He was far too grateful to her for the superb tact with which she had refrained from asking any questions about his afternoon’s adventures to oppose any suggestion that she might care to make. But in any case he knew that the sooner he was in bed the better. It was not merely that he was extremely tired; he felt, if not ill, at least decidedly out of sorts. The appetite which he had brought home from his expedition had dwindled to nothing at the sight of food, and from certain uneasy qualms he was fairly sure that he was running a temperature. This latter fact, however, he hoped would escape Eleanor’s notice.
Vain hope! No sooner was he in bed than a thermometer was thrust into his mouth. Following the maddening custom of nurses all the world over, Eleanor did not reveal the verdict, but he was not interested in the precise reading. He knew without being told that he was officially an invalid. He knew, further, that he had brought it on himself, and that it served him right. He swallowed meekly the concoction that Eleanor handed him and sank gratefully back on his pillow.
His sleep was restless and disturbed by ugly dreams. Waking in the small hours, he was shocked to realize that they were in all essentials the same grisly nightmares that had troubled him as a schoolboy, with perhaps an added element of horror. If he had not realized it before, he knew now that the sentimental backward journey in time on which he had been engaged had its dangers as well as its attractions. I must be my age in future, he told himself, and on that resolution fell asleep once more.
Whether because his resolution took effect or for some other cause, his sleep this time was peaceful enough. He woke late, his fever gone, but with a body aching as though it had been scientifically belaboured by experts. He accepted without protest the decision that he should spend the day in bed. An immense lassitude of mind possessed him. He was vaguely conscious of there being something that should be done, a decision that ought to be taken, but he drowsily postponed the effort of even seeking to remember what it was.
It was Sunday morning. Eleanor had announced her intention of going to church for morning service. Sunday newspapers came late to this remote spot, but he had brought plenty of books with him, and presently he roused himself sufficiently to glance at them. He picked up successively a historical work which he was very anxious to read, a neglected classic which he had always intended to read and a cheap thriller which he had brought along because Eleanor liked that sort of stuff.
One hour, eight chapters and one hundred and twenty pages later, he was contemplating the predicament of a heroine who owed her perilous state entirely to her pigheaded refusal to inform the proper authorities that in Chapter I she had found a dead body in her dustbin. Pettigrew felt that this was trying his credibility a little too high. At the same time, the young woman’s dilemma seemed in some way faintly familiar… His tired brain shied away from the problem that lay just below the level of consciousness, and by the time that Eleanor returned from church he was slumbering once more.
He made only a pretence of eating lunch, and the tray was hardly out of the room before he was again asleep. Some time later he was jerked wide awake by the ringing of a bell. It took him an appreciable time to realize that it was a telephone, and that the thudding sounds that made his bed shake were the footsteps of Mrs. Gorman scurrying to answer it. It still seemed to him vaguely inappropriate that Sallowcombe should have this, or any other, attribute of modernity. Evidently, the line was not particularly good, for Mrs. Gorman’s part in the conversation was loud enough to penetrate all over the house. Pettigrew could not but hear, though at first he paid little attention to what was being said. He caught the name of “Gilbert” repeated once or twice, and then, “When did it happen?” He was left in no doubt as to what had happened to Gilbert, for Mrs. Gorman’s next words were: “Well, it’s a merciful release, I reckon, after all these years.” The phrase struck Pettigrew as being neither original nor provocative, but it was plainly not to the taste of the other party to the conversation, for Mrs. Gorman’s succeeding observation, spoken very loudly and with an unexpected rasp in her voice, was: “I’ll thank you not to talk to me like that, Louisa. You can keep that sort of language for Jack. If you dare to use it, that is.”
By this time, Pettigrew was unashamedly listening to what promised to be an exciting family row. But it did not develop in the way that might have been expected. “What?” Mrs. Gorman went on, “What did you say?… No, of course not. Jack isn’t with me at this moment, you know that as well as I do… Well, I don’t know, I’m sure… He’s his own master, I suppose… Yes, he’ll be at the funeral, miss, and the girls too. At Minster, of course. Tuesday? Wednesday?… You’ll let me know. Very well.” And she rang off.
There succeeded a full half minute of dead silence, before Pettigrew heard Mrs. Gorman’s footsteps moving away from the entrance hall where the telephone was situated. Pettigrew pictured her standing quietly there, turning over in her mind the significance of what she had just heard. To judge from the tone of her voice, the question of Jack’s whereabouts had caused her a good deal more concern than Gilbert’s death. It was tantalizing to find oneself on the fringe of a domestic drama, with no obvious means of penetrating any nearer to its centre. He would have liked to discuss it with Eleanor, but at his express desire, she had taken herself off on to the moor for the afternoon, rather than waste the fine weather with him indoors. Now his watch told him that it was nearly time for tea, and he realized with pleasure that he was looking forward to it with something approaching hunger. He heard the front door of the house open and close again and a little later Mr. Joliffe’s deep, slow voice. Evidently his daughter came to meet him in the hall, for her voice mingled with his. The voices moved in the direction of Mr. Joliffe’s sitting-room and the door shut with a bang. Half an hour later he was still waiting for his tea in a mood of starved exasperation. It was all very well for Mrs. Gorman to discuss with her father the news of Gilbert’s death, but she had no business to allow such personal matters to come before her duty to her guests. People had no sense of obligation nowadays…
The door of the sitting-room must have opened, for he suddenly heard a babel of words. Mrs. Gorman and her father were both talking at once, and talking in no very friendly spirit, to judge from the tone of their voices. Of what they said, Pettigrew could distinguish one word only, which was repeated by both speakers with considerable emphasis. It was the name, “Jack”. Once more, he observed, it was the live Jack rather than the deceased Gilbert who seemed to be the centre of concern. Then he heard the sitting-room door close again, and Mrs. Gorman’s footsteps making their way across the hall and along the passage that led to the kitchen. He thought, too, that he could distinguish something very much like a sob.
The tea was brought after what in the circumstances Pettigrew could not but feel was a commendably short interval. It was a tea worth waiting for, in the true Exmoor tradition, with farmhouse scones, heather honey in the comb and clotted cream. It was brought, not by Mrs. Gorman but by Doreen, breathin
g heavily and biting her underlip as she manoeuvred the tray into position, with Beryl, her younger sister, in giggling attendance.
“Mum says she’s sorry she can’t bring the tea herself, but she’s a bit upset this afternoon,” said Doreen gravely.
“I’m sorry,” said Pettigrew, politely.
“Uncle Gilbert’s dead!” exclaimed Beryl from the door, in a tone that was more like a shout of triumph than anything else.
“You be quiet, Beryl!” Doreen commanded. “It’s quite true what she says,” she informed Pettigrew. “But he wasn’t a real uncle, only a sort of cousin.”
“I see,” said Pettigrew. “I’m sorry.”
“There isn’t nothing to be sorry about,” remarked Doreen coldly. “Uncle Gilbert’s been ill for ages and ages. And now he’s dead we shall get all his money, Mummy says.”
“And we shall all go away and live with Daddy and leave the ’lectric light on as much as we like,” chanted Beryl. “All day if we want to. And I shall have a bicycle and a-”
“That’s enough!” Doreen drove her sister from the room, and turned back to Pettigrew. “You’ll have to excuse Beryl,” she said. “Mum’s always on at her about gossiping to strangers, but she’s that young, she will do it. And Mum says if there’s anything else you require will you knock on the floor and I’ll come up.”
Pettigrew required nothing else except some further information to satisfy his curiosity about the Gorman family, and this was denied him. Doreen had gone some way to clear up the question of Gilbert’s identity, and he knew from Eleanor that Jack was identical with the Daddy who was expected to allow his daughters to leave the electric light on-a sidelight on Jack’s character which he had not expected. But this still left a number of questions unanswered. Pettigrew postponed their consideration until he had disposed of his tea. Eating clotted cream and honey in bed may be among the highest of human pleasures, but it demands from its votaries undivided attention if it is to be accomplished without disaster to the bed-clothes. The tray removed (by a subdued and silent Mrs. Gorman), he pondered at length the various problems raised by the evidence, and amused himself by fabricating a number of theories to account for them. Then Eleanor came in, and with her assistance the theories became progressively more and more fantastic. It was merely idle curiosity on his part. The affairs of the Gormans and their congeners could be of no conceivable interest to him. But it served to pass the time-served, too, as an excuse for shelving once more the question which, at the back of his mind, he knew would have to be faced sooner or later. He slept badly again that night.