I did not know what to do. I had no boat on the river. I stood there with my heart in a turmoil, trying to form a scheme out of the unco-ordinated swirl of my thoughts. I dared not hire a boat; I dared not show myself.
A squeak-creak, squeak-creak, was growing louder on the river. The familiar sound brought me to my senses. Someone was crossing in a dinghy. I moved swiftly and silently to the shadow of the shack. It must be Judas. He knew the river so well. I heard the boat grate gently against the wall at the foot of the steps. A moment later, the white of the old man’s hair and beard appeared as a blur in the darkness. He vanished up the path leading to the house.
This was puzzling. For a moment I bothered myself with wondering what Judas was up to. Then I gave up bothering. There was a boat; across the river, if I were not mistaken, was Oliver. I went down the steps, got into the dinghy, untied the painter, and pushed out on to the water.
*
No light was visible in the Jezebel. I tied up the boat to the ring in the hull and pulled on the bell-cord. There was no answer for a long time. At last, gazing up, I once more saw a head outlined against the stars. Down here on the dark water I would be invisible.
“That you, Judas?” The voice was a cautious, fearful whisper.
“No, Oliver. I am your father.”
There was no answer.
“Let down the ladder,” I said.
I think even at this last minute Oliver must have struggled hard with his obstinacy and pride. The ladder did not come down for a long time. But it came. I climbed up and stood beside him on the deck. He was the first to speak. He said: “I’m glad you’ve come, Father.”
I could not answer him, because I knew I had come too late. He took me by the arm and led me carefully to the stairway. The darkness was intense. But I knew the way pretty well, and when we were down Oliver shut and bolted the door. “Don’t move,” he said. “Stand where you are.”
He struck a match, and I saw that the trap-door was open down to the bilge, where Judas used to keep the dynamite that would blow up the throne of Peter. Whoosh! Bang! Wallop! “You go down first,” Oliver said.
I gripped the sides with my fingers, hung suspended, dropped. Oliver followed and pulled down the trap-door upon us. Then he lit a lantern. “This is all right,” he said. “Quite safe. No one can see the light.”
And that was where I came face to face with Oliver again: in a place like a dungeon below water, with the great keel beneath our feet, and the massive ribs rising out of it, and his shadow wavering, fantastic, gigantic, as he moved in the light of the lantern.
For a moment we did not speak. He propped his feet against the keel and leaned back into the concave side of the ship. I looked at him with my heart breaking. He is twenty-six, my thoughts kept saying. Twenty-six...
He looked ageless: haggard, drawn and dissolute. The only feature I knew was the hair. It had grown long again. It was golden, waving over his forehead. He put up his scarred hand and brushed back that youthful banner from the ruins of his face. His eyes were dull with misery. His wounds stood out white and vivid. His cheeks seemed to have collapsed upon his jawbones.
At last he spoke. “Why did you bother?”
“I want to help you. There must be some way to help you.”
“For God’s sake—why? What am I to you?”
“You are my son.”
He said with his lips twisted into a grin: “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
There was nothing to be said to that. After a while he said: “There is nothing you can do—nothing at all. But I’m glad you came. I suppose this is the moment when I ought to go down at your feet and ask your forgiveness. But I’m not going to do that. I’m glad you came. That’s all I can say.”
“Why?”
“Because when Judas went out I felt lonely and wretched. And I began to think of the time when I had plenty of friends and was happy. I thought of fooling about on this ship when I was a kid, and out there on the water, just a few inches through these planks.” He smacked backwards with his hands at the boards behind him. “Sailing and swimming. And I thought of all the people I knew then and how not one of them knew I was here or cared I was here. And when you came I saw that I was wrong, and that was why I felt glad. It seemed as though I were being told that they would all come if they could: Rory and Maeve, and that chap Donnelly and his daughter—and Mother.”
“They were a good lot,” I said. “We’ve been lucky in our friends, Oliver. But nobody you speak of can do anything for you any more. You’ll have to make the most of me.”
Then I thought of practical things. “What about Captain Judas? What will he do when he finds his boat gone?”
“He won’t be back till the morning,” Oliver said. “He uses Heronwater as a short cut to Truro. He leaves his boat, climbs up through the woods and takes a bus on the high-road. His friend Jansen is in at Truro, and he’s gone to spend the night with him.”
“Does he...”
I couldn’t say it. The words stuck in my throat. Oliver helped me out. “You mean does he know the police are after me?” He pushed his hand wearily across his brow again. “God knows what the old fool thinks. He expected me. I know that. I didn’t surprise him. He swears they shan’t take his Lord this time. He’ll show ’em whether Judas is a betrayer. And that’s all I can get out of him.” He grinned uncomfortably. “What a rescuer! I’ve got myself as far as this, and if I get any farther I’m afraid it won’t be with Judas’s help.”
He sprawled down on the timbers, and I sat beside him. For the first time, our bodies were in close contact. We had not even shaken hands. He hunched himself closer to me, leaned against my shoulder. “That’s better,” he said. I smiled at him timidly, like a man afraid of making too abrupt an advance to a shy animal.
“Remember our old ‘conversations’?” I asked. “You used to sit on the rug. You fitted easily between my feet.”
“I call remember much farther back than that,” he said. “I’ll bet you’ve forgotten the first thing I can remember.”
“What was that?”
“Why, one night when you came home and Mother was bathing me, and it was your turn to do it, and there was a row. That’s the first thing I can remember in all my life. I can remember quite clearly feeling sorry for Mother, but thinking that you and I had to stick together.”
I took out my tobacco-pouch and pipe. Oliver produced an empty pipe and blew through it. I handed him the pouch. Soon we were both smoking.
“I remember that very well,” I said. “Your mother was annoyed because I didn’t hear your prayers after the bath. And then you wouldn’t say them for her.”
“I’d forgotten that part. But I remember thinking about sticking together.”
God! How badly we had done about that! As though the same thought were passing through his head, Oliver smoked in silence. “I wish we had,” he said simply at last.
I ventured to slip an arm round his shoulders. “Me, too,” I said.
“D’you remember writing to me in Germany about Maeve?”
I nodded.
“I got that letter all right. And the tobacco and food later.”
And from this I understood him to be saying that he recognised that then I had held out a hand to him, that I had offered the chance of sticking together, and that the fault was his that it had been rejected.
“I wish,” he said, “that I had come straight back to you when the war was over. But I was too proud. I wanted to go on hurting you. I wanted to go on hurting everybody. And my God! the job they gave me in Ireland was just made for men who felt like that. There’s a chance that I shall hang. I can think about that quite calmly at the moment. I don’t know whether I shall later. But what I can’t think about calmly is a God-awful government that turns you loose to wreck and murder right and left without any rule or pity, and then slips the hounds at you because you go on being what they made you.”
He buried his face in his hands. “
I oughtn’t to have come here,” he said. “This place is too full of Rory.” And then, eagerly: “Let me tell you—”
“No, no. Don’t distress yourself. I know all about that. Maggie came over to England and told me.”
“God, how they must hate me! How they’ll be glad to see me swing—Dermot and Sheila—”
“They don’t know,” I broke in. “Maggie told no one but me. She knew that you didn’t know it was Rory when you shot him, and she said that Rory himself wouldn’t have wished anyone to know. She seemed to understand.”
“I wasn’t in their class,” he said simply. “I wasn’t in the same class as Rory and Maggie. Or Maeve, for that matter. Sorry, Father. God gave you the one bad lot of all the bunch. Why are you bothering with me now?”
Then I told him of all the times I had bothered. I told him of that morning in Holborn when, from the other side of the street, I had watched him come out of Pogson’s office and go to meet Livia Vaynol. I told him how I had spent a long winter night in a taxicab outside his lodgings in Camden Town. There was the day when I had watched him marching over Waterloo Bridge with his head up, and the day when, all newly dressed and glittering, he had left Charing Cross for the front. And other times there were: the time when he had come home a hero and Wertheim had played the spotlight on him; and the time when I had come too late to Manchester to prevent his going to Ireland.
I told him of all this, and of how, at any one of those times, I would have laid myself in the mud at his feet.
“Don’t!” he said harshly. “Don’t say that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re dreaming of a boy who doesn’t exist any more. You’re dreaming of a son you used to have.”
I tightened the arm about his shoulders, but he would not yield himself to me. “I don’t deserve you,” he said. “I’ve muddied your name ever since I can remember. Even as long ago as when I was with that old fool Miss Bussell. And then at school. I was never any good. I was always off the rails. Even down here, with Livia Vaynol, that summer you didn’t come. And I killed Maeve. I killed Rory. I killed Maggie to all intents and purposes. I’ve always gone about killing everything that was decent and better than myself. But I’ve never had the guts to kill myself. I thought of doing it on the way down here, but I hadn’t the guts.”
He told me of that journey. He had boarded the train to Cornwall on Tuesday night. There were not many travellers and he had a sleeping compartment to himself. His nerves were raddled. He had wandered about London all day, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his gloves never off his hands, watching the crime grow in importance through edition after edition of the evening papers. At the end of the day his photograph was in all of them, with a potted biography. They had it all: the V.C., the Manchester motor company, the work in Ireland, even the “romance” with Maeve, “unfortunately terminated by the death of this talented young actress when at the very height of her popularity.”
He felt a hunted man when he reached the train. He didn’t dare look anyone in the face. And then, dashing along the corridor to his compartment, he ran into Pogson, actually collided with the man, beyond possibility of evasion.
“I loathed the chap,” Oliver said, “and he loathed me. D’you remember that night in Maeve’s dressing-room when I shut him up? Yes, I know I didn’t look at you, but I saw you there. I never got on with Pogson after that. I’d sucked up to him for years, and he liked me because I was a sucker. No one else had any use for him at all. But you see, during the war I thought I was someone. I wasn’t a simple-minded disinterested hero, believe me. I liked it all. I liked bossing people, and I liked the medals and the publicity—all the whole shoot of bunk and ballyhoo. And I thought I was a cut above Poggy, and let him know it. But when I barged into him that night, you’d think we were loving twins.”
Pogson recoiled on seeing Oliver, but he quickly recovered and advanced with outstretched hand. You’d think he knew nothing of the hue and cry. “And yet there was an evening paper stuck under the man’s arm, with my own picture staring me in the face.”
“Well, well, if it isn’t old Essex!” Pogson exclaimed. “I thought you’d dropped out of London life completely.”
“So I have,” Oliver said. “I live in the North. But I’ve been over-working, and I’m going down to stay with some people in Devonshire. I’ll be with ’em till over Christmas. And what about you, Poggy? Why are you bound west?”
“Oh, still in thrall to Pogson’s Entire, you know. Just a general business trip round and about to see that the right stuff slakes the nation’s thirst. And talking of thirst, come into my compartment. We’ll get the waiter to bring a few along.”
Oliver excused himself; said he was fagged out and must get straight to bed.
“Well, if you don’t sleep, you’ll know where to find me,” Pogson said. “Only in the next coach.”
He went. Oliver got to his compartment, locked the door, and threw himself, fully-dressed, on the berth. He was sweating and shaking with apprehension. “God! You should have seen the people’s hero then,” he said bitterly. “And that swine knew the funk he’d got me in.”
He thought of leaving the train. But it would be like Pogson to be leaning out of the window, keeping an eye along the platform. Oliver looked through the window on the other side. There were empty rails, a platform beyond them, an arc light burning down on a group of porters and taxi-drivers standing there. No; that would look too queer. It must be the other side, and quickly. But if Pogson...
So his mind tossed, tortured by an indecision to which it was not accustomed. At last he leapt up, put on his hat and the overcoat he had thrown across the berth, picked up his suit-case, and laid his hand on the door-knob. At that moment the train started. He threw down bag, hat and coat again, lay on the berth and trembled. Every footstep along the corridor brought him half-way to his feet, listening, watching the door-handle. He didn’t trust Pogson. If not now, then at the journey’s end, Pogson would have arranged an unpleasant surprise.
With his head down to the pillow, he listened to the wheels drumming over the rails. Words haunted him, attaching themselves to the wheels’ rhythm. Got you at last! Got you at last! Got you at last! And hung by the neck, hung by the neck, hung by the neckety, neckety neck.
It went on for hour after hour. Expresses roared past; they slowed alongside the clacking stutter of shunted trucks; once or twice they stopped in stations, and then he sat upright on the berth, his feet on the floor, grasping the boards with both hands, ready to leap up, fight, run. Then they would move again; he would subside over the rhythm of the wheels, picking up some new diabolical intimation. Guilty, my lord! Guilty, my lord! Guilty, my lord!
The wheels were in his head; his head was on the rails; wheels, head, rails—all were one, compounding a threatening iron rhythm. He leapt up, his eyes feeling dry and bloodshot, his nerves twitching, his head splitting. He pulled on his hat and overcoat and gloves, took his suit-case in his hand. At that moment the hurrying rhythm of the train abated. They slowed; they came to an uncovenanted stop.
A moment’s relief from that damnable rhythm; and then the silence became as threatening as the wheels’ roar had been. For God’s sake, why had they stopped? He stood rigid at the door, his ear leaning upon it. A footstep hurried along the carpeted corridor. From far-off came the sound of a window let down. There was a hiss of escaping steam; a few voices came gravely out of the darkness. A distant engine whistled. And all this was full of menace in the silence of an hour that was beyond midnight.
He pulled the door open an inch and listened. There was no sound from the corridor. The light out there was dim. The place was deserted and therefore friendly. Through the windows he could see nothing but blackness, and that was friendly, too. He stepped through the door, closed it softly behind him, and stood there for a moment listening intently. Now he was in action again, and he was all right, nerves steady, thinking of everything. He opened the door before him, balanced the suit-case on the running
-board outside, stepped out himself, shut the door behind him. “Before I began to do all this,” he explained, “I had remembered that you don’t have to bang Great Western doors in order to shut them. You can do it by turning the handle.” Yes; now that it was action, he remembered everything.
Crouching on the running-board, he shut the door quietly, clutched the board with his fingers, so that he could lower himself without the noise of a jump, then reached down the suit-case. He pushed this between two wheels, and squirmed after it. Hands stretched away in front of his head, clawing at the road-metal, face downwards, he lay on the sleepers. A few minutes passed. “It didn’t seem long. I was thinking of Pogson’s face when he came to spring his little surprise on me in the morning.” Then he heard the deep-chested cough of the engine. The couplings clanked and tautened. The train rumbled forward over his body. It accelerated, and again the rhythm of the rails beat into his head. But he kept his face to the earth, heard it quietening and diminishing, and at last raised his head to see a red eye winking to extinction in the pitch blackness forward.
He did not rise at once. He rolled first to one side, then to the other, using eyes and ears on the darkness. Telling me of it, he actually chuckled. “I’d been caught bending by a Verey light before that.” At last he convinced himself that the darkness was uninhabited. Then he rose, took his bag, and stumbled off the track. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know even in what county the train had stopped. The night was not cold, but it was inky dark and misty. Presently his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. He made out that he was in the vicinity of a small country station. There was a siding with iron beast-pens built upon a concrete ramp, and rising above the pens, looking like a dark oblong blot on the dark sky, was a water-tank, raised on a lattice of iron supports. His mind was still at work, telling him that when he was missed from the train this stopping-place would be remembered. They wouldn’t look for him there, on the very spot where the train had stopped. So there he resolved to stay. He clambered up the trellis to the water-tank, dropped the case over the edge so that it stood on end, and, feeling over, discovered that the top of the case was clear of the water.
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