An idea, suited to the romantic opportunism of his present absurd career, suddenly swept over his mind, and he rushed out to look at the cart and donkey. The next moment he was back again, asking the tinker what his price was, and almost in the same breath offering a much bigger price than the tinker would have dreamed of asking. This was considered, however, as a lunacy specially allowed to gentlemen; the tinker had some more rum on the strength of the payment, and then Dalroy, offering his excuses, sealed up the cask and took it and the cheese to be stowed in the bottom of the cart. The money, however, he still left lying in shining silver and copper before the silver beard of old Marne.
No one acquainted with the quaint and often wordless camaraderie of the English poor will require to be told that they all went out and stared at him as he loaded the cart and saw to the harness of the donkey –all except the old cottager, who sat as if hypnotised by the sight of the money. While they were standing there they saw coming down the white, hot road, where it curled over the hill, a figure that gave them no pleasure, even when it was a mere marching black spot in the distance. It was a Mr. Bullrose, the agent of Lord Ivywood’s estates.
Mr. Bullrose was a short, square man with a broad, square head with ridges of close, black curls on it, with a heavy, froglike face and starting, suspicious eyes; a man with a good silk hat but a square business jacket. Mr. Bullrose was not a nice man. The agent on that sort of estate hardly ever is a nice man. The landlord often is; and even Lord Ivywood had an arctic magnanimity of his own, which made most people want, if possible, to see him personally. But Mr. Bullrose was petty. Every really practical tyrant must be petty.
He evidently failed to understand the commotion in front of Mr. Marne’s partly collapsed cottage, but he felt there must be something wrong about it. He wanted to get rid of the cottage altogether, and had not, of course, the faintest intention of giving the cottager any compensation for it. He hoped the old man would die; but in any case he could easily clear him out if it became suddenly necessary, for he could not possibly pay the rent for this week. The rent was not very much; but it was immeasurably too much for the old man who had no conceivable way of borrowing or earning it. That is where the chivalry of our aristocratic land system comes in.
“Good-bye, my friends,” the enormous man in the fantastic uniform was saying, “all roads lead to rum, as Lord Ivywood said in one of his gayer moments, and we hope to be back soon, establishing a first class hotel here, of which prospectuses will soon be sent out.”
The heavy froglike face of Mr. Bullrose, the agent, grew uglier with astonishment; and the eyes stood out more like a snail’s than a frog’s. The indefensible allusion to Lord Ivywood would in any case have caused a choleric intervention, if it had not been swallowed up in the earthquake suggestion of an unlicensed hotel on the estate. This again would have effected the explosion, if that and everything else had not been struck still and rigid by the sight of a solid, wooden sign-post already erected outside old Marne’s miserable cottage.
“I’ve got him now,” muttered Mr. Bullrose. “He can’t possibly pay; and out he shall go.” And he walked swiftly towards the door of the cottage, almost at the same moment that Dalroy went to the donkey’s head, as if to lead it off along the road.
“Look here, my man,” burst out Bullrose, the instant he was inside the cottage. “You’ve cooked yourself this time. His lordship has been a great deal too indulgent with you; but this is going to be the end of it. The insolence of what you’ve done outside, especially when you know his lordship’s wishes in such things, has just put the lid on.” He stopped a moment and sneered. “So unless you happen to have the exact rent down to a farthing or two about you, out you go. We’re sick of your sort.”
In a very awkward and fumbling manner, the old man pushed a heap of coins across the table. Mr. Bullrose sat down suddenly on the wooden chair with his silk hat on, and began counting them furiously. He counted them once; he counted them twice; and he counted them again. Then he stared at them more steadily than the cottager had done.
“Where did you get this money?” he asked in a thick, gross voice. “Did you steal it?”
“I ain’t very spry for stealin’,” said the old man in quavering comedy.
Bullrose looked at him and then at the money; and remembered with fury that Ivywood was a just though cold magistrate on the bench.
“Well, anyhow,” he cried, in a hot, heady way, “we’ve got enough against you to turn you out of this. Haven’t you broken the law, my man, to say nothing of the regulations for tenants, in sticking up that fancy sign of yours outside the cottage? Eh?”
The tenant was silent.
“Eh?” reiterated the agent.
“Ar,” replied the tenant.
“Have you or have you not a sign-board outside this house?” shouted Bullrose, hammering the table.
The tenant looked at him for a long time with a patient and venerable face, and then said: “Mubbe, yes. Mubbe, no.”
“I’ll mubbe you,” cried Mr. Bullrose, springing up and sticking his silk hat on the back of his head. “I don’t know whether you people are too drunk to see anything, but I saw the thing with my own eyes out in the road. Come out, and deny it if you dare!”
“Ar,” said Mr. Marne, dubiously.
He tottered after the agent, who flung open the door with a businesslike fury and stood outside on the threshold. He stood there quite a long time, and he did not speak. Deep in the hardened mud of his materialistic mind there had stirred two things that were its ancient enemies; the old fairy tale in which every thing can be believed; the new scepticism in which nothing can be believed–not even one’s own eyes. There was no sign, nor sign of a sign, in the landscape.
On the withered face of the old man Marne there was a faint renewal of that laughter that has slept since the Middle Ages.
* * *
CHAPTER VI
THE HOLE IN HEAVEN
THAT delicate ruby light which is one of the rarest but one of the most exquisite of evening effects warmed the land, sky and seas as if the whole world were washed in wine; and dyed almost scarlet the strong red head of Patrick Dalroy as he stood on the waste of furze and bracken, where he and his friends had halted. One of his friends was re-examining a short gun, rather like a double-barrelled carbine, the other was eating thistles.
Dalroy himself was idle and ruminant, with his hands in his pockets and his eye on the horizon. Land-wards the hills, plains and woods lay bathed in the rose-red light; but it changed somewhat to purple, to cloud and something like storm over the distant violet strip of sea. It was towards the sea that he was staring.
Suddenly he woke up; and seemed almost to rub his eyes, or at any rate, to rub his red eyebrow.
“Why, we’re on the road back of Pebblewick,” he said. “That’s the damned little tin chapel by the beach.”
“I know,” answered his friend and guide. “We’ve done the old hare trick; doubled, you know. Nine times out of ten it’s the best. Parson Whitelady used to do it when they were after him for dog-stealing. I’ve pretty much followed his trail; you can’t do better than stick to the best examples. They tell you in London that Dick Turpin rode to York. Well, I know he didn’t; for my old grandfather up at Cobble’s End knew the Turpins intimately–threw one of them into the river on a Christmas day; but I think I can guess what he did do and how the tale got about. If Dick was wise, he went flying up the old North Road, shouting ‘York! York!’ or what not, before people recognised him; then if he did the thing properly, he might half an hour afterwards walk down the Strand with a pipe in his mouth. They say old Boney said, ‘Go where you aren’t expected,’ and I suppose as a soldier he was right. But for a gentleman dodging the police like yourself, it isn’t exactly the right way of putting it. I should say, ‘Go where you ought to be expected’ –and you’ll generally find your fellow creatures don’t do what they ought about expecting any more than about anything else.”
“Well, thi
s bit between here and the sea,” said the Captain, in a brown study, “I know it so well–so well that–that I rather wish I’d never seen it again. Do you know,” he asked, suddenly pointing to a patch and pit of sand that showed white in the dusky heath a hundred yards away, “do you know what makes that spot so famous in history?”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Pump, “that’s where old Mother Grouch shot the Methodist.”
“You are in error,” said the Captain. “Such an incident as you describe would in no case call for special comment or regret. No, that spot is famous because a very badly brought up girl once lost a ribbon off a plait of black hair and somebody helped her to find it.”
“Has the other person been well brought up?” asked Pump, with a faint smile.
“No,” said Dalroy, staring at the sea. “He has been brought down.” Then, rousing himself again, he made a gesture toward a further part of the heath. “Do you know the remarkable history of that old wall, the one beyond the last gorge over there?”
“No,” replied the other, “unless you mean Dead Man’s Circus, and that happened further along.”
“I do not mean Dead Man’s Circus,” said the Captain. “The remarkable history of that wall is that somebody’s shadow once fell on it; and that shadow was more desirable than the substance of all other living things. It is this,” he cried, almost violently, resuming his flippant tone, “it is this circumstance, Hump, and not the trivial and everyday incident of a dead man going to a circus to which you have presumed to compare it, it is this historical event which Lord Ivywood is about to commemorate by rebuilding the wall with solid gold and Greek marbles stolen by the Turks from the grave of Socrates, enclosing a column of solid gold four hundred feet high and surmounted by a colossal equestrian statue of a bankrupt Irishman riding backwards on a donkey.”
He lifted one of his long legs over the animal, as if about to pose for the group; then swung back on both feet again, and again looked at the purple limit of the sea.
“Do you know, Hump,” he said, “I think modern people have somehow got their minds all wrong about human life. They seem to expect what Nature has never promised; and then try to ruin all that Nature has really given. At all those atheist chapels of Ivywood’s they’re always talking of Peace, Perfect Peace, and Utter Peace, and Universal Joy and souls that beat as one. But they don’t look any more cheerful than anyone else; and the next thing they do is to start smashing a thousand good jokes and good stories and good songs and good friendships by pulling down ‘The Old Ship.’” He gave a glance at the loose sign-post lying on the heath beside him, almost as if to reassure himself that it was not stolen. “Now it seems to me,” he went on, “that this is asking for too much and getting too little. I don’t know whether God means a man to have happiness in that All in All and Utterly Utter sense of happiness. But God does mean a man to have a little Fun; and I mean to go on having it. If I mustn’t satisfy my heart, I can gratify my humour. The cynical fellows who think themselves so damned clever have a sort of saying, ‘Be good and you will be happy; but you will not have a jolly time.’ The cynical fellows are quite wrong, as they generally are. They have got hold of the exact opposite of the truth. God knows I don’t set up to be good; but even a rascal sometimes has to fight the world in the same way as a saint. I think I have fought the world; et militavi non sine–what’s the Latin for having a lark? I can’t pretend to Peace and Joy, and all the rest of it, particularly in this original briar-patch. I haven’t been happy, Hump, but I have had a jolly time.”
The sunset stillness settled down again, save for the cropping of the donkey in the undergrowth; and Pump said nothing sympathetically; and it was Dalroy once more who took up his parable.
“So I think there’s too much of this playing on our emotions, Hump; as this place is certainly playing the cat and banjo with mine. Damn it all, there are other things to do with the rest of one’s life! I don’t like all this fuss about feeling things–it only makes people miserable. In my present frame of mind I’m in favour of doing things. All of which, Hump,” he said with a sudden lift of the voice that always went in him with a rushing, irrational return of merely animal spirits–“All of which I have put into a Song Against Songs, that I will now sing you.”
“I shouldn’t sing it here,” said Humphrey Pump, picking up his gun and putting it under his arm. “You look large in this open place; and you sound large. But I’ll take you to the Hole in Heaven you’ve been talking about so much, and hide you as I used to hide you from that tutor–I couldn’t catch his name–man who could only get drunk on Greek wine at Squire Wimpole’s.”
“Hump!” cried the Captain, “I abdicate the throne of Ithaca. You are far wiser than Ulysses. Here I have had my heart torn with temptations to ten thousand things between suicide and abduction, and all by the mere sight of that hole in the heath, where we used to have picnics. And all that time I’d forgotten we used to call it the Hole in Heaven. And, by God, what a good name–in both senses.”
“I thought you’d have remembered it, Captain,” said the innkeeper, “from the joke young Mr. Matthews made.”
“In the heat of some savage hand to hand struggle in Albania,” said Mr. Dalroy, sadly, passing his palm across his brow, “I must have forgotten for one fatal instant the joke young Mr. Matthews made.”
“It wasn’t very good,” said Mr. Pump, simply. “Ah, his aunt was the one for things like that. She went too far with old Gudgeon, though.”
With these words he jumped and seemed to be swallowed up by the earth. But they had merely strolled the few yards needed to bring them to the edge of the sand-pit on the heath of which they had been speaking. And it is one of the truths concealed by Heaven from Lord Ivywood, and revealed by Heaven to Mr. Pump, that a hiding-place can be covered when you are close to it; and yet be open and visible from some spot of vantage far off. From the side by which they approached it, the sudden hollow of sand, a kind of collapsed chamber in the heath, seemed covered with a natural curve of fern and furze, and flashed out of sight like a fairy.
“It’s all right,” he called out from under a floor or roof of leaves. “You’ll remember it all when you get here. This is the place to sing your song, Captain. Lord bless me, Captain, don’t I remember your singing that Irish song you made up at college–bellowing it like a bull of Bashan–all about hearts and sleeves or some such things–and her ladyship and the tutor never heard a breath, because that bank of sand breaks everything. It’s worth knowing all this, you know. It’s a pity it’s not part of a young gentleman’s education. Now you shall sing me the song in favour of having no feelings, or whatever you call it.”
Dalroy was staring about him at the cavern of his old picnics, so forgotten and so startlingly familiar. He seemed to have lost all thought of singing anything, and simply to be groping in the dark house of his own boyhood. There was a slight trickle from a natural spring in sandstone just under the ferns, and he remembered they used to try to boil the water in a kettle. He remembered a quarrel about who had upset the kettle which, in the morbidity of first love, had given him for days the tortures of the damned. When the energetic Pump broke once more through the rather thorny roof, on an impulse to accumulate their other eccentric possessions, Patrick remembered about a thorn in a finger, that made his heart stop with something that was pain and perfect music. When Pump returned with the rum-keg and the cheese and rolled them with a kick down the shelving sandy side of the hole, he remembered, with almost wrathful laughter, that in the old days he had rolled down that slope himself, and thought it a rather fine thing to do. He felt then as if he were rolling down a smooth side of the Matterhorn. He observed now that the height was rather less than that of the second storey of one of the stunted cottages he had noted on his return. He suddenly understood he had grown bigger; bigger in a bodily sense. He had doubts about any other.
“The Hole in Heaven!” he said. “What a good name! What a good poet I was in those days! The Hole in Heaven. Bu
t does it let one in, or let one out?”
In the last level shafts of the fallen sun the fantastic shadow of the long-eared quadruped, whom Pump had now tethered to a new and nearer pasture, fell across the last sunlit scrap of sand. Dalroy looked at the long exaggerated shadow of the ass; and laughed that short explosive laugh he had uttered when the doors of the harems had been closed after the Turkish war. He was normally a man much too loquacious; but he never explained those laughs.
Humphrey Pump plunged down again into the sunken nest, and began to broach the cask of rum in his own secret style, saying– “We can get something else somehow tomorrow. For tonight we can eat cheese and drink rum, especially as there’s water on tap, so to speak. And now, Captain, sing us the Song Against Songs.”
Patrick Dalroy drank a little rum out of a small medicine glass which the generally unaccountable Mr. Pump unaccountably produced from his waistcoat pocket; but Patrick’s colour had risen, his brow was almost as red as his hair; and he was evidently reluctant.
“I don’t see why I should sing all the songs,” he said. “Why the divil don’t you sing a song yourself? And now I come to think of it,” he cried, with an accumulating brogue, not, perhaps, wholly unaffected by the rum, which he had not, in fact, drunk for years, “and now I come to think of it, what about that song of yours? All me youth’s coming back in this blest and cursed place; and I remember that song of yours, that never existed nor ever will. Don’t ye remember now, Humphrey Pump, that night when I sang ye no less than seventeen songs of me own composition?”
“I remember it very well,” answered the Englishman, with restraint.
The Flying Inn Page 5