He did not like to look at them, he looked away downward and back. He searched for a long time for his own trees, his landmark, and at last found them in what seemed an utterly changed position. They looked very small and far away. He must have veered round in a half-circle? Yet this could still be no more than a mile or two from his home.
The country lay like a map beneath him. He could see a main arterial road cutting across like a white line, and the winding road home, a long way round: and in between the lower-lying fields which he could cross as a direct cut. His home village lay hidden behind a kind of escarpment. Then suddenly, as he was gazing over the wide sunlit vista, his nerves quickened, he held his breath, that whole undulation of rising and falling ground had seemed to move, heave itself.
The shadow of a cloud was passing over the map, it came towards him like a fast-moving tide, heaving the hills as it came.
A simple matter? Not so simple. He watched it, he began to judge whether it would envelop him or not. It came at a fast windblown pace, eating up the fields, blotting out life like the edge of a dangerous sea moving in.
The whole countryside grew more inimical. Every deep acre of this ancient sleeping earth breathed a quiet, purposeful life—and it was against him. Not now the simple material conflict with animals—the grave earth itself and the green things growing in collusion with it took on presence and, never moving, breathed a quiet hatred on to the mineral air. He tried to shrug the feeling away—but it was too strong: and just then the light seemed to blank out, the cloud had reached him and the earth grew grey and more than ever foreboding.
The turf at his feet lost its sunlight, it looked immensely aged, it had a Saxon tread. Winds had blown across those same stones for a thousand years. And above on the hill the ring of trees looked even blacker. Had they been planted to make a sacred grove? The whole pagan mystery, so far from his apparent world of metalled roads and garages and garden fences—yet always so near, always alive just on the other side of the hedge where the field is alone with itself—that great and awful mystery gripped him with its panic force. The graven stone, blood on the stone, dark rings on the pale green grass, bones of old sacrifice sleeping the old terror out over thousands of years…. Harris, not an imaginative man, felt all this, as he would in a dream when unknown instincts rise. And his feet seemed fixed to the spot, he could not run for there was nowhere to run, simply because there was too much of it everywhere, it was all-enveloping: just as in a closed cupboard there is no escape, only the stifling dark, here it was all air, giddying, stifling in its very wideness and its spreading everywhere without end.
He was giddy as a man on a ladder—but then that same cloud saved him. For he looked up. And he saw that not one but several clouds were travelling high, they were in fact massing, and this imminence of storm and rainfall brought him to his senses, he had the ordinary fear to grip on of being caught in the wet. He looked again to where the high-road ran, but it was too far—the best chance was what seemed a short-cut across fields. There was a wood, too, to shelter in: a simple copse set in a kind of dell.
That storm massed quickly, it blew up mauve in the sky—in such a wide sky its full turbulence was seen to grow, it was not like watching a small expanse of clouds form over rooftops. To the left and right the air still clear—but away in front, just over where that escarpment hid his village, this great dark purple mass formed, a monster like a giant jelly-fish hanging dangerous teats of vapour in the sky.
The whole earth darkened. What was green became mauve—only the chalk-pit flashed into white baleful light. But Harris suddenly looked at his watch—this was not only the storm’s darkness, it was late and the sun was falling. Beneath the high purple mass the horizon showed a line of brazen light, a yellow floss of dying fire, apocalyptic, like a plain strip of light beneath a purple stained-glass window. He had to hurry. He glanced once back at that ring of trees above him—they lowered darker than ever, black as storm now against a dark sky—and hurried downhill to where the fields began. He marked his way on the other cluster of trees below that might afford shelter.
Was it a valley he now entered? Technically yes—a river wandered low-lying among its reeds somewhere in those flat miles: better to think of it as a basin, a wide flat circle of meadowland ringed round by the sudden cliffs of the downs. All this lay to the left of the fields by whose roundabout route he had arrived—now he seemed to move more easily, there was indeed a long lane that led exactly in the right direction. Moreover, he was walking downhill. Then the lane suddenly stopped: fields stretched ahead with marsh-grass growing in high green tufts from what looked dangerously watery earth. But there was a kind of raised embankment. He followed this. It led to the little wood.
All this time the sky grew darker, the clouds massed huge above, the dying sun cast shafts from the immense cloud panoply and ringed it with poisonous light—it seemed that up there in the heavens a vast battle was already begun. But not a drop of rain. The air held itself breathless: the whole country lay in the bright gloom of a steel engraving.
Harris hurried along the embankment towards the little wood. As it grew nearer he saw that it was not a little wood at all—but a gathering of ancient ivy-grown trees, some very tall, others of a drooping, stick-branched watery nature, alders and willows. The embankment entered into them, in an almost human way they seemed to be trying to get a foothold on it. Certainly now the grass to either side was wet and boggy, no cows grazing, probably treacherous underfoot. A sluice suddenly appeared—moss-grown mouldering wood barred with rotten iron, its two struts upstanding like a derelict instrument of torture. He passed it quickly, not liking to imagine for what secret purpose of mud and water this engine had been erected. Visions of imponderable masses of floodwater slowly seeping, of dangerous messages—Close the Sluices!—came to mind.
But now also—it was something to do with the very flat meadowland round and the approaching branches, gnarled and twisted, of the first tree—his mind suddenly returned to a picture seen in a story-book years before, perhaps before he could even read. It was a picture that had filled him with terror. It was the picture of an oak-tree: but an oak-tree that ran on castors, that could be seen racing over the fields at eventide, one moment a dot in the distance, zig-zagging nearer at tremendous speed, until its great flying arms came hurtling towards one, clutching all around and far higher than the little cottage, the little boy’s eyes … he could not remember what it had ever done, or how the story went; perhaps in the end it had been quite a kindly castor-tree but it had struck a chill of terror that had never been forgotten.
Remembering this, he even paused for a moment before following the embankment into the wood. He looked uncertainly into the greater, greener gloom arched by the branches: cast his eye once more back at the grey fields, overcast and still, wet and empty—ridiculous, of course to think of crossing them—and then the first heavy splashes of rain came down, each a few yards apart and thudding the grass, and he ran for it.
Inside the wood, darker still. Now ivy and rotten roots exposed like old bones where the earth had dropped, long strands of briar, and everywhere a thousand young leaves speckling everything like giant green lice: so many little leaves dazzled, and now very slowly they moved, shivering and creeping, and began to rustle, as outside the rain-wind rose. Yet these were small movements—up above where the full force of the wind struck the high branches a great thrashing and swaying began: and down below the rotted old trunks, some split, some already fallen, began to creak and strain terribly. And indeed dangerously—some had already half fallen and hung inclined like tall ship’s booms against the upright masts of their ivy-clad fellows. These trees were immensely tall, their thin trunks branchless until very high above; a forest of ivy-sick masts, creaking and straining below, but in dreadful converse above where the wind swayed their foliage to make giant heads talking together.
Harris knew they were talking about him. Alone with their vegetable enormity, with nothing human near
him and his nose filled with the smells everywhere of rotten leaves and mould and green decay, his responsible middle-aged middleman framework of tweeds, mackintosh, tobacco, moustache and all experience ceased to matter at all, it faded and he was in mind naked, a soft nut of human flesh small and childish and vulnerable … and suddenly, for these trees were so mastlike, with the weight of leaves beginning very high up, there came to his naked mind some fearful thing he had read about a giant race of palms, on an island in the Indian Ocean, a unique Seychellian growth whose manner of fertilization puzzled botanists, and of whom native superstition rumoured a silent shifting after nightfall, those monster trees moved together in the tropic dark to embrace in giant and terrible vegetable loves.
He hurried on with the baleful whispering ever louder in his ears. Ridiculous, he said—and hurried the faster. At least the path was clear. Or it had been. It was getting too dark properly to see. A wall of rain was falling somewhere outside—no light appeared now between the tree-trunks. Yet it had looked such a little wood.
Then his foot caught in a root, and he was down. Or had the root instead moved, caught at his foot? He put a hand out to scramble up, and a long arm of thorned briar clutched at his sleeve. He tore it away. Another fastened on to his trousers. He managed to get himself upright and plunged on. More briars took him, the ground slipped thickly underfoot. Then he realized what had happened—the root in that brief black instant had turned him off the path, his mind black with struggle had plunged him thoughtlessly on into the thicket, he had lost the path.
He stood still for a moment breathing heavily in the dark. The wind roared above, the rain rustled its wall somewhere away, the smell of mould rose everywhere—nothing, nothing but wet dark all around and no way of telling where that path was.
But no good standing there. Anything might happen. He pushed on. More briar caught at him, he heard his coat tear, as soon as he freed himself other arms caught at him, he was using his weight now, pushing through, yet all the time getting in thicker and thicker. Nor did he know what ground was beneath … a sudden ditch, a patch of bog, old rabbit holes with earth mouldering loose all round them … appalling words came to mind—hornbeam … creeping osiers … sedge….
Fear mounted on fear. Not only the vegetable conspiracy, but the acute possibility that the storm might really fell a tree, an immense mast of timber crashing black as the dark down upon him … and as he thrashed harder at the briar and the briar clutched him more closely he lost more and more of his balance, sound everywhere giddying his ears, and then the blood pounding inside them roared up to meet it, all rushing and drumming in him like a man lost in the giant thrum of a weir….
And visions of the whole dreadful day came back, all things conspiring against him, gates, animals, the stone menace of the downland, that low water-land and its sluices, the storm, this dreadful wood and all the terrible life around—and there flashed back to him things he had never much noticed: a white horse cantering up a field, unsaddled and too free, a classic beast upon some purpose too much its own; the remote and faceless siren song of telephone wires; an old iron wheel half devoured by high nettles; and a pinprick man away in the fields who had paused in what he was doing to follow Harris round with his eyes, even at that distance an intruder.
There in the dark, caught by thorns, he suddenly stopped: and like an animal bared his teeth.
Then, snarling with fear, sweating, now beginning to shout Help! Help! Help! he blundered further into the blackness, the cruel strands of thorn caught deeper at him, twisting right round him, in their wild state overgrown so that he was like a man caught in a gigantic rose-bush, he could go no further, and sinking his weight on them only sank deeper in, until he was hanging there powerless to move … and then and not till then did he see straight in front, only a few yards further, a wide stretch of dully gleaming white—the chalk-pit, the precipice?
His heart rocked, he raised his eyes up to where the wind howled, raised all his wild dog’s face to heaven to mutter a prayer of thanks—‘O God, O God’, and fainted right away.
It must by then have been getting on for nine o’clock—about the time his wife began telephoning to neighbours and finally the police.
But he hung there for most of the night.
No proper search could be made. The country can easily swallow a man.
It was only by chance that a mobile police car found him towards dawn. Only by chance—for the motor would have drowned the sound of the exhausted cry he put up as gradually he regained consciousness: but at that point the broad white arterial road descended in a long gradient, and the officer driving had shut off his engine, very slowly coasting.
He was found quite easily only a few yards from the road itself, almost on it.
He was drenched through and badly shocked when they brought him home. He developed rheumatic fever, and it bent him double for the rest of his life.
The house was shut up and they returned to live near London. Fear is quickly forgotten—he still talks with some air of the time he lived in the country, regretting that affairs of business forced him back to the suburbs. They still have ‘the car’, and sometimes drive to the country: but he stays inside, bent with his new disease.
Formerly, people would have said that darker forces than nowadays we recognize had cast a spell on him that night. What is a spell? Was it so?
A Last Word
THE house was owned by Henry Cadwaller. It was tall and grey and windowed black; it rose, and was now falling, in the Fulham area, and its presently visible name, DWALLER HO, suggested much of its function—a dwelling-house where people might dawdle to death, with a Ho to summon the aged and weary to its door.
Henry Cadwaller was a man of thrift, and the old gold letters lost from the fanlight of the original HOUSE had never been replaced, nor had half the black-and-white tiles on the steps, nor the stained-glass lights to his hallway. These red and yellow and purple panes, patched nowadays with wood and cardboard, shed a more Gothic gloom than ever: indeed, the whole house was patched, its large Victorian rooms were partitioned with papered three-ply—each lodger lay and stared at his own piece of ceiling frieze, coming from nowhere and disappearing with mad purpose. And the curtains of many of the windows had once patently been tablecloths—or why the ink-stain at the top, why the vertical fringe? And the bedcovers were unmistakably made from old curtains—or should bedcovers have ring-slots, and widen towards one end? Plaster fell freely from the grey façade, and was helped on its way by abandoned wireless aerials that flapped wearily down the walls from window-sills lined with meat-safes and milk-bottles; the garden at the back was a rot of thistles, crates, cans and the shattered glass of the old conservatory, now a plywood bathroom; on the roof the chimneys chatted in all directions, and cowled ventilators sprouted anywhere on the walls like an iron mushroom growth; in the old hallway the little fireplace once used to warm the footman’s rump now held empty bottles and a pair of goloshes, and on the front door there were pinned, like the notes of a white up-ended dulcimer, thin strips of card announcing the names, against bakelite bell-pushes, of fifteen lodgers.
These bells were a source of much irritation to Mr Cadwaller: a long time ago he had had them fixed to save himself trouble at the front door—but had overlooked the fact that each time a bell rang the cost of a small electric impulse went down on his bill. There were some days—on Monday morning when various laundries called, or on Saturday when the coming and going was something appalling—when he sat in his front room holding his hands over his ears to deafen this costly tolling. And sometimes, driven to absurd measures, he would run to the door when he saw a van arrive simply to save that insistent ringing whose every vibration cost money—yet never without his pan and brush, in case a horse had passed to drop manure for his window-box. He liked milk-carts, and only ordered coal from a company that still employed the old drays.
Of all these bells, one angered him more than any other: and that was Mr Horton’s. Mr Horton
, a retired merchant, seldom had visitors; but always—and Mr Cadwaller knew well by now that it was out of malice—he rang his bell before entering the house. To test it, he explained.
Mr Horton was the scourge of Mr Cadwaller’s life: and thus perhaps its main stimulus. A feud had begun months previously, shortly after Mr Horton had arrived, in the bathroom. Throughout the house, Cadwaller had had the overflow-holes in each bath reset three inches lower: expensive, but a reasonable outlay thus to lower authoritatively the level of each lodger’s bath and save on the cost of hot water. And then one morning he had entered a bathroom just quitted by Mr Horton. And he had seen the dark ring left high up above the overflow line.
He studied it, had the overflow tested, and then lay in wait. Each time Mr Horton had a bath he left the same high ring. At length Cadwaller could stand it no longer. ‘You put your foot over it!’ he said, catching Mr Horton in the passage.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Your foot!’ He pointed through the door to the bath. ‘You keep it there.’
It was a second of enormous understanding. Each man sized the other, recognized his intention, grasped his game.
Mr Horton made no attempt to prevaricate, he closed his eyelids and sighed, before passing along the passage.
‘I cannot, Mr Cadwaller, help my sponge floating to the further end of the bath. If,’ his voice rose, ‘you can call it a bath.’
From then on it was war, cold and subtle war. Cadwaller considered, of course, serving Mr Horton his notice. But the rooms were not all full, it would be his own loss; and did he really want Mr Horton to go? For that flash of mutual understanding had been of deep significance—as though twins of some kind had found each other. Each recognized his brother in thrift—and both were as suddenly aware of a physical resemblance. Their thrift, their almost acrobatic thrift—what others might call ‘meanness,’ though where does meanness begin and thrift end?—might have been apparent before: Mr Cadwaller might have noticed the amount of free samples that made up most of Mr Horton’s mail, and Mr Horton might have taken more notice of Mr Cadwaller’s brush and pan. Indeed, idly they must have remarked these and a number of other matters; for now, in a sudden retrogressive flash, each totted up the other’s account—and such was the intensity of the moment that each realized for the first time something else, they recognized their more than strong physical resemblance. Standing in the dim, daylit, room-smelling passage—the one in an old brown dressing-gown, the other in his tweed jacket fortified everywhere with leather—they faced each other like mirrors, two tall stooping grey-haired gentlemen each mumbling on a long jutting, petulant, prognathous jaw. On a long pale turnip of a jaw, on small bottom teeth monkeying forwards and under a drooping grey moustache disguising the short hare-like upper lip. It was as if, in the pale light of some curious asylum out of time and place, Valentin-le-désossé had met the Habsburg Charles II.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 41