A CHANCE MEETING
XVI
I roamed the place in search of the varlet for the space of half anhour, and, after having drawn all his familiar haunts, found him atlength leaning over the sea wall near the church, gazing thoughtfullyinto the waters below.
I confronted him.
"Well," I said, "you're a beauty, aren't you?"
He eyed me owlishly. Even at this early hour, I was grieved to see, heshowed signs of having looked on the bitter while it was brown.
"Beauty?" he echoed.
"What have you got to say for yourself?"
It was plain that he was engaged in pulling his faculties together bysome laborious process known only to himself. At present my wordsconveyed no meaning to him. He was trying to identify me. He had seenme before somewhere, he was certain, but he could not say where, orwho I was.
"I want to know," I said, "what induced you to be such an abject idiotas to let our arrangement get known?"
I spoke quietly. I was not going to waste the choicer flowers ofspeech on a man who was incapable of understanding them. Later on,when he had awakened to a sense of his position, I would begin reallyto talk to him.
He continued to stare at me. Then a sudden flash of intelligence litup his features.
"Mr. Garnick," he said.
"You've got it at last."
He stretched out a huge hand.
"I want to know," I said distinctly, "what you've got to say foryourself after letting our affair with the professor become publicproperty?"
He paused a while in thought.
"Dear sir," he said at last, as if he were dictating a letter, "dearsir, I owe you--ex--exp--"
"You do," said I grimly. "I should like to hear it."
"Dear sir, listen me."
"Go on, then."
"You came me. You said, 'Hawk, Hawk, ol' fren', listen me. You tipthis ol' bufflehead into sea,' you said, 'an' gormed if I don't give'ee a gould savrin.' That's what you said me. Isn't that what you saidme?"
I did not deny it.
"Ve' well. I said you, 'Right,' I said. I tipped the ol' soul intosea, and I got the gould savrin."
"Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it's besidethe point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want toknow for the third time--is what made you let the cat out of the bag?Why couldn't you keep quiet about it?"
He waved his hand.
"Dear sir," he replied. "This way. Listen me."
It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened.After all, the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in hisplace I should have acted as he had done. Fate was culpable, and fatealone.
It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of theaccident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view.While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite theopposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drownedhis passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero fromLondon--myself--had not plunged in, and at the risk of his lifebrought the professor to shore. Consequently, he was despised by allas an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing stock. The local wagsmade laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums totake their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to knowwhen he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, theybehaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the worldover.
Now, all this Mr. Hawk, it seemed, would have borne cheerfully andpatiently for my sake, or, at any rate, for the sake of the goodgolden sovereign I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in theproblem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.
"She said me," explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, "'Harry 'Awk,' shesaid, 'yeou'm a girt fule, an' I don't marry noone as is ain't to betrusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him bythat Tom Leigh.' I punched Tom Leigh," observed Mr. Hawkparenthetically. "'So,' she said me, 'yeou can go away, an' I don'twant to see yeou again.'"
This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had thenatural result of making him confess all in self-defense, and she hadwritten to the professor the same night.
I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand,for he betrayed no emotion.
"It is fate, Hawk," I said, "simply fate. There is a divinity thatshapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it's no goodgrumbling."
"Yiss," said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while insilence, "so she said me, 'Hawk,' she said--like that--'you're a girtfule--'"
"That's all right," I replied. "I quite understand. As I say, it'ssimply fate. Good-by."
And I left him.
As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis.
They passed me without a look.
I wandered on in quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of thosemoods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the futurestretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it isimperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example ofMr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance.Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among thefowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs whenthey laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even,if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when theywere stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit,and Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars andincited the gramophone to murder "Mumbling Mose," I would steal awayto my bedroom and write--and write--and _write_--and go on writingtill my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And,when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for thebest. A man must go through the fire before he can write hismasterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we loseon the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the man,might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron plantedirremovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the author, should turnout such a novel of gloom that strong critics would weep and thepublic jostle for copies till Mudie's doorways became a shambles.
Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really ablessing--effectively disguised.
But I doubted it.
We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge'sspirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by everypost. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed aleague and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thoughtwaves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. Thepopular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Everymorning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state ofmind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcementthat Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that thebearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We livedin a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chickenat meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, hadfrayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were abeaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill gamefor nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridgebecame uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand,I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lackof chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me,I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was noteven permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to doon the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be letalone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And everyday one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, andMrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and wewould try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was somethingaltogether different.
There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent mea check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check andtrooped round the town in a body, laying out t
he money. We bought aleg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks andpotted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.
After that we relapsed into routine again.
Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf andbathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at itshardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.
It refused to materialize.
I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a meantrick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order ofcauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shapeitself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Insteadof thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserablyof Phyllis.
The only progress I achieved was with my villain.
I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He hadseveral other social defects, but that was his profession. That wasthe thing he did really well.
It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, penin hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no betterresult than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that littleparadise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by greenwoods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to anentirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in astraight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the seawind in my eyes.
But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me frommy room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealingbrassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking ofsetting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What doesKipling say?
And soon you will find that the sun and the wind And the Djinn of the Garden, too, Have lightened the Hump, Cameelious Hump, The Hump that is black and blue.
His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but Icould omit that. The sun and wind were what I needed.
I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the pathalong the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.
To reach my favorite clearing I had to take to the fields on the leftand strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down thenarrow path.
I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at thesame moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllisentered it from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.
Love Among the Chickens Page 16
