‘Accident!’ said Nurse Eden promptly, and dashed through the empty bar, followed by Mary. They found Mrs Gerritt, the publican’s wife, who could only gasp and point to the yard, where a little cart-lodge was sliding sideways amid a clatter of tiles. Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet drying before the fire, ran out, lifted something from the ground, and flung the sheet round it. The sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform too, as she bore the load into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt, aged nine, whom Mary had known since her perambulator days.
‘Am I hurted bad?’ Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden’s dripping hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she could shut her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.
‘It’s a wonder she spoke at all,’ said Nurse Eden. ‘What in God’s name was it?’
‘A bomb,’ said Mary.
‘One o’ the Zeppelins?’
‘No. An aeroplane. I thought I heard it on the Heath, but I fancied it was one of ours. It must have shut off its engines as it came down. That’s why we didn’t notice it.’
‘The filthy pigs!’ said Nurse Eden, all white and shaken. ‘See the pickle I’m in! Go and tell Dr Hennis, Miss Postgate.’ Nurse looked at the mother, who had dropped face down on the floor. ‘She’s only in a fit. Turn her over.’
Mary heaved Mrs Gerritt right side up, and hurried off for the doctor. When she told her tale, he asked her to sit down in the surgery till he got her something.
‘But I don’t need it, I assure you,’ said she. ‘I don’t think it would be wise to tell Miss Fowler about it, do you? Her heart is so irritable in this weather.’
Dr Hennis looked at her admiringly as he packed up his bag.
‘No. Don’t tell anybody till we’re sure,’ he said, and hastened to the ‘Royal Oak’, while Mary went on with the paraffin. The village behind her was as quiet as usual, for the news had not yet spread. She frowned a little to herself, her large nostrils expanded uglily, and from time to time she muttered a phrase which Wynn, who never restrained himself before his womenfolk, had applied to the enemy. ‘Bloody pagans! They are bloody pagans. But,’ she continued, falling back on the teaching that had made her what she was, ‘one mustn’t let one’s mind dwell on these things.’
Before she reached the house Dr Hennis, who was also a special constable, overtook her in his car.
‘Oh, Miss Postgate,’ he said, ‘I wanted to tell you that that accident at the “Royal Oak” was due to Gerritt’s stable tumbling down. It’s been dangerous for a long time. It ought to have been condemned.’
‘I thought I heard an explosion too,’ said Mary.
‘You might have been misled by the beams snapping. I’ve been looking at ’em. They were dry-rotted through and through. Of course, as they broke, they would make a noise just like a gun.’
‘Yes?’ said Mary politely.
‘Poor little Edna was playing underneath it,’ he went on,still holding her with his eyes, ‘and that and the tiles cut her to pieces, you see?’
‘I saw it,’ said Mary, shaking her head. ‘I heard it too.’
‘Well, we cannot be sure.’ Dr Hennis changed his tone completely. ‘I know both you and Nurse Eden (I’ve been speaking to her) are perfectly trustworthy, and I can rely on you not to say anything – yet at least. It is no good to stir up people unless—’
‘Oh, I never do – anyhow,’ said Mary, and Dr Hennis went on to the county town.
After all, she told herself, it might, just possibly, have been the collapse of the old stable that had done all those things to poor little Edna. She was sorry she had even hinted at other things, but Nurse Eden was discretion itself. By the time she reached home the affair seemed increasingly remote by its very monstrosity. As she came in, Miss Fowler told her that a couple of aeroplanes had passed half an hour ago.
‘I thought I heard them,’ she replied. ‘I’m going down to the garden now. I’ve got the paraffin.’
‘Yes, but – what have you got on your boots? They’re soaking wet. Change them at once.’
Not only Bid Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper, and put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with the longest kitchen poker, she left.
‘It’s raining again,’ was Miss Fowler’s last word, ‘but – I know you won’t be happy till that’s disposed of.’
‘It won’t take long. I’ve got everything down there, and I’ve put the lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.’
The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had completed her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she lit the match that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a groan or a grunt behind the dense Portugal laurels.
‘Cheape?’ she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago, in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the sanctuary. ‘Sheep,’ she concluded, and threw in the fusee. The pyre went up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened night around her.
‘How Wynn would have loved this!’ she thought, stepping back from the blaze.
By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A broken branch lay across his lap – one booted leg protruding from beneath it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as still as the tree’s trunk. He was dressed – she moved sideways to look more closely – in a uniform something like Wynn’s, with a flap buttoned across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads were dark and glossy. This man’s was as pale as a baby’s, and so closely cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His lips moved.
‘What do you say?’ Mary moved towards him and stooped.
‘Laty!Laty! Laty!’ he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to use the poker there. Wynn’s books seemed to be catching well. She looked up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet with dependent strings, showed like a bird’s-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame. Evidently this person had fallen through the tree. Wynn had told her that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn told her too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator’s fall, but in this case the aviator must have been broken or he would have moved from his queer position. He seemed helpless except for his horrible rolling head. On the other hand, she could see a pistol case at his belt – and Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain Belgian reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with one – a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said, were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised enemies. ‘They’re good enough for us,’ Miss Fowler had replied. ‘Show Mary how it works.’ And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any such need, hadled the craven winking Mary into the Rector’s disused quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible machine. It lay now in the top-left-hand drawer of her toilet-table – a memento not included in the burning. Wynn would be pleased to see how she was not afraid.
She slipped up to the house to get it. When she came through the rain, the eyes in the head were alive with expectation. The mouth even tried to smile. But at sight of the revolver its corners went down just like Edna Gerritt’s. A tear trickled from one eye, and the head rolled from shoulder to shoulder as though trying to point out something.
‘Cassée. Tout cassée,’ it whimpered.
‘What do you say?’ said Mary disgustedly, keeping well to one side, though only the head moved.
‘Cassée,’ it repeated. ‘Che me rends. Le médicin! Toctor!’
‘Nein!’ said she, bringing all her small German to bear with the big pistol. ‘Ich haben de
r todt Kinder gesehn.’
The head was still. Mary’s hand dropped. She had been careful to keep her finger off the trigger for fear of accidents. After a few moments’ waiting, she returned to the destructor, where the flames were falling, and churned up Wynn’s charring books with the poker. Again the head groaned for the doctor.
‘Stop that!’ said Mary, and stamped her foot. ‘Stop that, you bloody pagan!’
The words came quite smoothly and naturally. They were Wynn’s own words, and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on earth would have torn little Edna into those vividly coloured strips and strings. But this thing hunched under the oak-tree had done that thing. It was no question of reading horrors out of newspapers to Miss Fowler. Mary had seen it with her own eyes on the ‘Royal Oak’ kitchen table. She must not allow her mind to dwell upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the oak would the too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a family that had a knack of dying under, as she told MissFowler, ‘most distressing circumstances’. She would stay where she was till she was entirely satisfied that It was dead – dead as dear papa in the late ’eighties; aunt Mary in ’eighty-nine; mamma in ’ninety-one; cousin Dick in ’ninety-five; Lady McCausland’s housemaid in ’ninety-nine; Lady McCausland’s sister in nineteen hundred and one; Wynn buried five days ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for decent earth to hide her. As she thought – her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and nostrils wide – she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick work above. She looked at her wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the rain was coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change. Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn’s things were burning well in spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a quite distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The exercise of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of her bones. She hummed – Mary never had a voice – to herself. She had never believed in all those advanced views – though Miss Fowler herself leaned a little that way – of woman’s work in the world; but now she saw there was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was her work – work which no man, least of all Dr Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at such a crisis, would be what Wynn called a ‘sportsman’; would leave everything to fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house. Now a woman’s business was to make a happy home for – for a husband and children. Failing these – it was not a thing one should allow one’s mind to dwell upon – but—
‘Stop it!’ Mary cried once more across the shadows. ‘Nein, I tell you! Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.’
But it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be useful – more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a pavior through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain was damping the fire, but she could feel – it was too dark to see – that her work was done. There was a dull red glow at the bottom of the destructor, notenough to char the wooden lid if she slipped it half over against the driving wet. This arranged, she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly. ‘Go on,’ she murmured, half aloud. ‘That isn’t the end.’Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot. ‘That’s all right,’ said she contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, ‘quite handsome!’
THE VILLAGE THAT VOTED THE EARTH WAS FLAT
Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his, and Pallant, the MP. Woodhouse’s business was the treatment and cure of sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper’s life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and the new start which can be given by gold injections – and genius. He was wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcass there was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of the evening paper’s common shares, and was explaining the whole art of editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture. Pallant, the long, wrinkled MP, whose voice is more like a crane’s than a peacock’s, took no shares, but gave us all advice.
‘You’ll find it rather a knacker’s yard,’ Woodhouse was saying. ‘Yes, I know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my papers do. I’ve only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff. It’ll come out all right.’
Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely straight for half a mile ahead withouteven a sidelane. ‘That’s just what we depend on,’ said the policeman unpleasantly.
‘The usual swindle,’ said Woodhouse under his breath ‘What’s the name of this place?’
‘Huckley,’ said the policeman. ‘H-u-c-k-l-e-y,’ and wrote something in his notebook at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft), and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.
‘Damn it, man, you’ve got your silly fist on it! Take it off!’ Woodhouse shouted.
‘Ho!’ said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we had trapped them. ‘That won’t do you any good either,’ and he wrote once more in his notebook before he allowed us to go.
This was Woodhouse’s first brush with motor law, and since I expected no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was very serious. I took the same view myself when in due time I found that I, too, was summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to endangering traffic.
Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a small Jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse drove us there in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in the summons, came with us as moral support. While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates. He said to one of them – for I took the trouble to note it down – ‘It falls away from my lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile. I’d defy any one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of ’em last month. No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side of the county, Mike. They simply can’t resist it.’
‘Whew!’ said Woodhouse. ‘We’re in for trouble. Don’t yousay a word – or Ollyett either! I’ll pay the fines and we’ll get it over as soon as possible. Where’s Pallant?’
‘At the back of the court somewhere,’ said Ollyett. ‘I saw him slip in just now.’
The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman, and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart, MP, of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with
an allocution pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires. Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause, was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not applaud too.
Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse’s man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who ‘happened to be riding by’! There were other remarks too – primitive enough – but it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality of the justice, or the laughter of the audience, that stung our souls out of all reason. When we were dismissed – to the tune of twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence – we waited for Pallant to join us, while we listened to the next case – one of driving without a licence. Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.
‘It’s all right,’ said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. ‘We never report Sir Thomas in extenso. Only the fines and charges.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.
The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking clothes,to whichSir Thomas,now thoroughlywarmed, drew public attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the man’s name, but insisted on calling him ‘Mr Masquerader,’ and every time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their established auto-da fé.
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 69