‘Am I to walk in front of you still?’ There was a touch of resignation in the boy’s voice.
‘Yes – straight forward. It’s a perfectly secure path. But, if you don’t want a ducking, don’t take too big a jump when anything startles you.’ Ivor was gay. ‘And one or two things can do that. Look’ – and he flashed the torch upwards – ‘the roof is stalactitic, as you can see. That means an occasional drop of very cold water on your nose or down the back of your neck. And do you notice how we have started whispering?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘It’s because any noise multiplies itself quite astoundingly. For instance, fish swim right in, and sometimes they leap. The row is quite surprising. It might be the body of the murdered man going overboard in a sack.’
‘I see.’ Humphrey’s tone acknowledged the perfect appropriateness of this image to the spirit of the place. He halted and peered down at the water a few feet below him. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why it flows. It’s like a subterranean river.’
‘It’s the flow that makes a little current of air all through, and keeps the atmosphere pure. And it flows because the whole cave is in the form of a horseshoe, with a second, rather smaller, entrance at the other side of the headland. That the sea goes slowly through is some trick of the currents here.’
‘Don’t you feel that the whole place is a trick?’
‘The whole place?’ Ivor was again disconcerted.
‘A papier-mâché cave in a fun-fair. You pay sixpence to drift slowly through in a boat, and there are all sorts of prepared surprises. Romantic views of Venice behind dirty gauze, and luminous skeletons that drop down from the roof. I don’t think I’d feel it out of the way if we met one or two prepared effects here. It’s in the air, as you might say.’
‘I doubt the romantic view of Venice.’ Ivor answered readily, but he was now more conscious still of the boy’s power to set him guessing. He was relieved to think that in five minutes the present ticklish phase of the affair would be over.
‘Well, I think I’d have more stomach for the skeleton not on an empty stomach. Do we turn back presently, or go right through?’
‘I’m all for breakfast too. But it will be just as quick, now, to go right through, and up another track through the cliff. Only’ – Ivor’s voice was regretful – ‘we shan’t have time to look into any of the little caves.’
‘Little ones?’
‘They ramify out from this. We’ll pass several entrances presently. Some are quite long; others are odd little places, rather like side chapels in a cathedral. You must never explore them by yourself, though.’ Ivor delivered this caution with benevolent emphasis. ‘Not all of them are safe, as the main cave is. Some have crevasses you can’t easily see, with stalagmites like needles at the bottom. Others have deep pools, with smooth sides, like wells. And in some the roof is unsafe, and one might be walled up.’
Humphrey laughed softly. ‘To be entombed in papier-mâché – what a horrid fate!’ For the first time the boy glanced round. And Ivor, glimpsing his face, felt considerably relieved – for the boy’s expression was not that of one taking matters so lightly as his mocking words suggested. He was – rather magnificently, Ivor acknowledged – keeping up a part: a part out of some favourite book, perhaps, in which the hero marched insouciant upon his fate. But he was as pale as a sheet in the torch’s beam, and his lower lip faintly trembled. Better still, he was puzzled; he had found, in whatever conjecture he had formed, no absolute certainty. And, so long as his mind hung in the balance between one interpretation of his situation and another, the event now imminent could scarcely but take it down on the desired side in the end. Reassured as to this, Ivor could spare a little admiration for the boy’s performance. And how superb the intuition of the papier-mâché, the factitious and contrived, essence of the scene!
But the cave itself – or rather the vast cavern that, in fact, it was – stretched sufficiently substantially around them. It had now taken in its course a turn entirely excluding the daylight, and the water flowing perceptibly through it, together with the unintermitted unfolding before their torch’s beam of the gentle curve from which it took its essential form, gave it all the suggestion of some interminable subterranean river projected from the imagination of Humphrey’s favourite poet. The rock face was damp and chill as they brushed it; and neither chill nor damp would wax or wane, whatever change befell external nature – for here the varying cycle of the year had no power to probe. Owning thus no pulse, no rhythm, the place was lifeless and ungenial, propagating only an unnatural and abundant brood of sounds. The waters that were now, as they climbed to a greater height, almost invisible beneath them, whispered ceaselessly like conspiring maniacs in some Tartarean bedlam. Single drops of water, falling from the fretted vault, exploded on polished stone with a strange resonance, like that of a distant harp string snapping in an empty house at night. And their very footsteps, as if each in alarm at the other’s tread, fled before them and behind them in a constantly repeated diminuendo of frenzied escape. When they spoke their voices, like every other sound, were distorted strangely, so that it was as if they were beset by their own travestied images in some hall of misshapen mirrors. And above them, as perceptibly present as if some muscular effort of their own must hold it off, was the vast suspended burden of living rock, so that one could think up through it until at length, at what might be almost an aeroplane’s elevation, one came upon sheep nibbling the turf directly overhead.
‘Here’s the first of the smaller caves.’ Ivor’s voice called Humphrey back to what was no more than a narrow slit in the rock face. The torch, thrust through at the length of an extended arm, played upon a blank surface only some yards ahead – the meagre aperture making it impossible to see what lay on either side. Ivor laughed softly. ‘I haven’t been in there since I was a kid – for obvious reasons! It’s not exciting, though – just a small, almost square chamber, like a cell. I think you could just get in, although I certainly could not. If we thrust you in, Humphrey, and fattened you up on nourishing dishes, or just left you till you’d grown a bit–’ He broke off, again laughing softly – laughter through which there for the first time incautiously sounded as it were the overtones of an unlicensed and sinister imagination.
‘I think’, said Humphrey, ‘that we’d better go on.’ They moved forward again. ‘How soon do we see daylight?’
‘I should say it’s just a little more than as far again… Hold hard! Here’s another one.’
This time the aperture was larger, and gave upon an oval chamber, low-roofed, down the longer axis of which the light of Ivor’s torch led the eye to two further openings, set close together, that led apparently to further cavities or passages. And of this place the form was at once unreasonably alarming and mysteriously compelling or attractive; it seemed to tug at the very roots of the mind. ‘And behind’, said Ivor, ‘there’s a sort of maze of interconnected tunnels. One could bring a picnic and play hide-and-seek.’
‘I still think we’d better go on.’ There was now a tremor in the boy’s voice, and he pushed forward even before Ivor had swung his torch back to the ledge – it was perhaps three feet broad – which had now climbed to something more than a tall man’s height above the water below. He walked for some moments in silence. Then his voice came back – and this time it was once more level, but very serious, ‘Ivor,’ it asked, ‘why have you brought me here?’
The direct challenge was curiously difficult to meet. There really seemed, for the moment, to be no colourable reason. And, because of this, Ivor, it may be, a little over-pitched his reply. ‘Why? Because it’s such tremendous fun!’
‘Of course I see that.’ Humphrey’s reply was now not so much level in its tones as drowsy, and it was almost as if he spoke with some ambiguity he scarcely understood. ‘I can see you find it that; I can see…the fascination. But it’s…well, so decidedly underground and isolated.’
Ivor felt the torch twitch i
n his hand, felt indeed his whole body twitch as if a touch had been set to his mainspring. It was true that he had for long – and for no very pressing exterior necessity – found his fun in a world uncompromisingly subterraneous. But now, blessedly, the definitive moment had come, and he could neatly enough introduce it by elaborating upon his reply. ‘Rather fun,’ he repeated. ‘And at the same time quite safe for us in our present odd situation. Not that this wouldn’t be rather a neat place for an ambush.’ He let the torch play idly around them as he spoke. ‘But it’s only the local people who really know about the caves. The kidnapping crowd would never find their way in here.’ He laughed lazily – injecting into the tone of it all the suggestion of unweariness, of relaxed vigilance, that he could. ‘By the way, there’s another little side-cave just here.’ For a second his torch touched a dark concavity beside them. ‘And it’s here that there’s an echo. If we stand with our backs to the little cave’ – and he swung Humphrey round – ‘we’ll just catch it… Cooee!’
There was certainly an echo – although no very remarkable one, perhaps, in this home of echoes. They listened to it die away. ‘Yes,’ said Humphrey doubtfully. His voice was almost that of one who catches from the air some hint of defeated expectation.
‘Coo-ee!’
In its turn, too, Ivor’s second call ebbed away. There was a second of something as near to silence as the place allowed. And Ivor received it rigidly, his every muscle quivering. He turned – his motion was at once swift and indecisive, blundering – and strode into the small cave behind them. Humphrey – driven by darkness, led by curiosity and the full store of courage he had brought into these recesses – followed.
The boy followed – and it was as if he had dived head foremost into a maelstrom of violence whose buffeting made all mental process impossible, made observation as discontinuous, as phantasmagoric, as it was terrifying. Immediately before him was a flailing octopus-shape, uncertainly resolvable into the locked bodies of struggling men. From amid them Ivor’s torch, as if in a clenched hand forced upwards, circled wildly on the dripping, gleaming roof. From some farther corner another torch was at play upon the scene, and through its beam Humphrey dimly glimpsed two further figures that seemed to be of men bound, gagged, and thrust out of the way, like supers whose moment was past in the advancing play. Then all his attention was swept to Ivor’s face, sprung into fierce illumination, as by some searing light thrust hard against it. Desperation and rage glared from it, and with these emotions were mingled still the mere surprise of the wary man, betrayed against all expectations. His head went back, blinded; and from amid the confusion of pants, and groans, and blows driven hard upon a human body – grievous sounds multiplied and distorted into indeterminable agonies by the configuration of the place – Humphrey heard his companion’s voice straining for a command of articulate words. ‘They’ve got us! Run, Humphrey. R–’ A fist came up hard against the working jaw. He saw blood spurt from Ivor’s crushed mouth. The panting and groaning grew of heavier respiration more desperate.
For a moment Humphrey stood motionless – paralysed by his fear, paralysed by the vast injustice of the road his thoughts had lately been travelling. For here was revelation. Here was his cousin Ivor – whom he had monstrously suspected, whom he had even believed himself by cunning questions to have lured into self-betrayal – here was Ivor straitly beset by his, Humphrey’s, true enemies; here was Ivor literally defending him to the death… And Humphrey’s legs, which for some seconds had been no legs at all, but clammy columns rooting him to the rock – Humphrey’s legs became compact of nerve and muscle. Even his lungs obeyed him, so that it was with a shout of passionate anger, admirably calculated to wake the remotest echoes of the caves, that he charged into the fight, raining blows where he could.
And the struggling mass of heaving limbs and straining torsos gave for a moment under this fresh impetus, gave sufficiently for Ivor to heave himself partly free and snatch out his revolver. But they were upon him again in an instant, and it was without aim or any effective control that the weapon, twisted into air, now again and again spat fire – spat fire and vomited thunder, cataclysm, chaos as of the ruining down of the very pillars of the world. For this rapid succession of reports, which would have been sufficiently ear-splitting in itself, the caves in their farthest extension, their remotest and most intricate honeycombing, rose to nobly, as to a challenge. Second after second the uproar only grew, as if straining to some hideous consummation, some final shattering of the ear, the begetting of some last, all embracing Noise by which, as by the angel’s terminal trumpet, all noises should be ended… It ebbed; hearing, exhausted, slept even in the midst of continued turmoil; another, and sluggish sense took over; the universe was all gunpowder and sweat.
Humphrey’s arms were pinioned. There were shins before him and he kicked; there was some fleshly part, straining through stretched cloth, and he bit it – deep. He felt himself lifted bodily and pitched through space; he might have been in mid-air still when his reawakening ear heard what was surely Ivor’s last shuddering cry; he fell shatteringly on rock and for a moment lay still, knowing only that the pain he would presently feel would be deep and sickening in belly and groin. But the fight, he realized, continued after all; gasps and grunts attested it to his ear even while nothing but a swimming blackness hung before him. He staggered up on one knee, and as his eyes cleared saw standing before him, looking dispassionately down, the bearded man of the Heysham train. The man smiled at him – a sweet, evil smile, far more terrifying than any expression of ferocity could have been. The man smiled and then – expertly, with cold brutality – kicked the boy’s raised knee, so that he tumbled again, as through a wave of agony, to the ground. His consciousness mercifully flickered; he was fadingly aware of the fight rolling out of the little cave to the narrow ledge beyond, and then of a reverberating splash, as of some inert body being pitched into the dark waters below. Instantly, as if it were his own fate, some cold element closed over him.
Ice-cold water deluged him. But it was not that they had thrown him in too; it was simply that they had found means to give him a good soaking by way of restoring him to consciousness. And at least it worked. His mind suddenly was very clear; he lay on his back and stared up into dazzling torchlight; beyond this hung the faces of his bearded enemy and two other men. They looked down on him in grim proprietorship, like people who had run some troublesome pest to earth. The bearded man spoke. ‘He’s cost us a good deal,’ he said. ‘But there he is. Bring him along.’
Humphrey was in great pain. In the attempt to smother it, he rolled over on his stomach. One of the men bent down and took him hard by the hair, dragging him up upon his hands and knees. Weakly, he began to crawl. The second man kicked him hard behind.
Had it not been for this last savagery it would all have been over with Humphrey, for he had believed himself – and with substantial reason – to be beaten. But in this there was sheer indignity as well as pain; it confronted him with obscure memories he had resolved never again to entertain; a flame of anger rose in him and brought him supernaturally to his feet; he saw the dark cave and the men around him through a milky mist. And he found that he had a weapon in his hand. It was no more than a short length of heavy rope, brought by his antagonists for their own sinister ends. But involuntarily he had grasped it – and now, straight before him, was the bearded man’s face. He put all his strength into the lash; he heard a scream that went through his veins like wine. He swung round and one of the other men confronted him – surprised, straddled, vulnerable. Humphrey praised God for his stout shoes and kicked. The man went down howling. Humphrey jumped his body as it fell and ran out of the little cave.
He was in darkness and on the narrow shelf that led – but over interminable distances, as it seemed to his memory – to daylight and the possibility of freedom. A dozen feet below him, and flowing between walls of sheer rock, was the sea; and somewhere down there the dead body of Ivor drifted. Behind him were
two ruffians recovering from an unexpected overthrow, and a third, uninjured, who must be coming hard after him now. They would have torches. He had only eyes which – from sheer necessity and the love of dear life – had at least some apparent power of distinguishing between the greater and the lesser darkness of rock and air. But this served him only as he stood and with concentration peered. Whereas his only chance – his only ghost of a chance – lay in the rapid flight that might gain him a flying start. He must race along this winding ledge in blind precipitance, with nothing to guide him but his finger-tips stretched out and brushing the rock face beside him as he ran. Yes, that was decidedly his single hope: to wring from his sheer desperation a speed more hazardously headlong than any his enemies, equipped with torches though they were, would willingly venture on.
It is not easy to run full-tilt through any pitch darkness; it outrages an instinct against which the will can scarcely urge the muscles on. Much less is it easy in the knowledge that ice-cold waters, through which a corpse is drifting, await one at the length of an extended arm. But Humphrey, having come at the intellectual necessity of running, ran. He remembered that the path, worn smooth whether by generations of smugglers or by the operation of the sea, had presented a reasonably level surface underfoot, so that there was comparatively little danger of a stumble. But in places, and even when he had been moving with care the other way, it had been too slippery for comfort; and in this there lay one of the dangers that he could afford now only to ignore.
For now they were after him. The cave was alive with their footfalls – footfalls that appeared to recede from him with miraculous speed, others that with an equal speed overtook him, but died away as they came. He was skilled to interpret this echoing confusion now; he knew that all three men were in the pursuit; and he knew that they were failing to gain on him as they ran. Hope in him grew suddenly strong. They could, of course, pinning him down in the beam of their torches, shoot. But there was no reason to suppose that a dead boy would be of any use to them, and he knew enough of firearms to realize that only an exceptional marksman could, under such conditions, with any confidence fire only to maim. Certainly it was not unlikely that, if their pursuit failed them, they would shoot to kill rather than let him carry his story out of the cave. But this was simply another of the dangers about which nothing could be done.
The Journeying Boy Page 30