I jumped into my tree and down into the lane, regardless of darting pain whenever I moved my right arm. Then I shut the door of the den behind me and lay down to collect myself. When I had regained a more graceful mastery of my spirit, I lit a candle and explored the damage.
The bullet—from a .45 revolver—had turned on the nickel of the flask in my breast-pocket, ploughed sideways through my leather jacket and come to rest (point foremost, thank God!) in the fleshy part of my right shoulder. It was so near the surface that I squeezed it out with my fingers. The skin was bruised and broken right across my chest, and I felt as if I had been knocked down by a railway engine; but no serious damage had been done.
I understood why the hunter had not even taken the trouble to examine his kill. He had shot along the beam of a flash-lamp, seen the bullet strike and watched the stain of whisky, which couldn’t in artificial light be distinguished from blood, leap to the breast of my coat and spread. It wasn’t necessary to pay me any further attention for the moment; he had no use for my pelt or liver.
I patched myself up and lit a pipe, thinking of the fellow who had shot me. He had used a revolver because a rifle couldn’t be handled in such thick cover and at so close a range, but his technique showed that he had experience of big-game. He had got into my mind. He knew that sooner or later I should have a look at that side-car. And his gentle calling of my name to make me turn my head was perfect.
They had despatched a redoubtable emissary. He knew, as the police did not, who I was and what sort of man I was; thus he had been suspicious of my elaborate false trails. He guessed the plain facts: that I had committed a folly in going to Lyme Regis, and that my jack-in-the-box tricks thereafter were evidence of nothing but my anxiety. Therefore I had some secure hiding-place not far from Lyme Regis and almost certainly on the Beaminster side of it. His private search for the side-car, which he may have been carrying on for weeks, was then concentrated on the right spot. That he found it was due to imagination rather than luck. It had to be near a track or lane; it was probably in wood or water. And I think if I had been he I should have voted for water. There was a pattern in my escape. I had a preference for hiding, travelling, throwing off pursuit by water. Water, as the Spanish would say, was my querencia.
Well, he had missed. I think I wrote in some other context which I have forgotten that the Almighty looks after the rogue male. Nevertheless this sportsman (I allow him the title, for he must have waited up two or three nights over his bait, and been prepared to wait for many more) would be content. He had discovered the bit of country where I had been hiding, and he could even be pretty sure whereabouts my lair was. My panic-stricken dash through the water-meadow showed that I was bolting south. I wouldn’t be camping in the marshland; therefore the only place for me was on or just over the semicircle of low hills beyond. All that he had to do was to go into the long grass, as it were, after his wounded beast. The hunt had narrowed from all England to Dorset, from Dorset to the western corner of the county, and from that to four square miles.
I had known that this fate, whether delayed for months or years, was on the way to me; but the tranquillity of my life in the lane had taken the edge off my fear. I had been inclined to brood over my motives and congratulate myself on my superior cleverness, to look back rather than forward. There is, indeed, nothing to look forward to, no activities, no object; so I clung, and clung to what I have—this lane. I might have escaped and lived on the country, but sooner or later one pack or the other would run me to earth, and no earth could be so deep and well-disguised as this.
It was obvious that, if I stayed where I was, I must completely reverse my policy of keeping the lane closed. The thorns must go, and the place be wide open to inspection while I myself lived underground.
I started on the work immediately. A south-west gale was sweeping down the hillside carrying along with it a solid ceiling of cloud high enough for the rain to drive and sting, so low that the whole sky seemed in movement. I welcomed the rain, for it helped me to obliterate all trace of myself and it would discourage the two men in the car from attempting to follow me up until visibility was better.
The eastern hedge, beneath which my burrow ran, was as wide as a cottage and promised to be as impenetrable in winter as in summer. The western hedge, however, which bounded the ploughed field, had not been allowed to eat up so much land and formed a thinner screen. I built up the weak stretches, thus getting rid of the poles from my platform and a lot of loose brushwood. The holly bush and the larger branches of thorn I shoved into the eastern hedge, hiding the cut ends. I stamped the earth hard down over my rubbish pit, and the water that was now rushing along the bottom of the lane covered pit and floor with a smooth expanse of dead bracken and red sand. I then retired indoors, leaving it to the rain to wash out my foot prints. I have never had a chance to dry the clothes in which I was working.
The obliteration was not perfect. Bracken and nettles were crushed, but, since the whole lane was filled with the dying debris of autumn, the traces of my tramplings and removals were not very plain. There was a faint but definite smell. Worst of all, there were the steps cut up the inside of the elm which could not be disguised. If the fellow who was about to go into the covert after me had an observant eye—and I knew he had—he was bound to consider the lane suspicious; but I hoped he would judge his suspicions wrong and conclude that, whether or not I had once lived between the hedges, I had taken to the open and died of my wound.
The door was a faultless piece of camouflage; I had planted around it the same weeds as were over it, and no one could tell which had died with their roots in earth and which with their roots in glue. A few trails of living ivy hung over the door from the hedge.
Thenceforth my way out of the burrow was the chimney. The diameter of its course through the solid sandstone was already sufficient to receive my body; only the last ten feet of broken stone and earth had to be widened. I completed the job that afternoon—a nightmarish job, for my shoulder was painful and I was continually knocking off to rest. Then I would begin to dream of the root or the stone or the water that was beating me, and I would get up again and go to work, half naked and foul with the red earth, a creature inhuman in mind and body. I think that sometimes I must have worked while asleep. It was the first time that I experienced this dazed and earthly dreaming; it has since become very common.
A queer tunnel it seemed to me when I examined it after a night’s sleep. I hadn’t attempted to cut through any roots that were thicker than a thumb; I had gone round them. At one point I had tunnelled right away from the chimney, and come back to it. This was all to the good. Though the curve demanded odd contortions to get in and out, the roots acted as the rungs of a ladder, and the slope as a sump for water. The mouth was still well hidden under the blackberry bush. The only disaster was that my inner chamber was now full of wet earth, and I have no means of dumping it elsewhere.
God! When I look back upon them those blind hours of work seem to have been happy in spite of all their muddy and evasive horror. I had something to do. Something to do. There is no fearing dreams when they produce work. It is when they feed upon themselves that one becomes uncertain of reality, unable to distinguish between the present in one’s mind and the present as it appears to the outer world.
I stared at my face today, hoping to see those spiritual attributes which surprised me when I first looked in the fisherman’s mirror. I wanted comfort from my face, wanted to know that this torture, like the last, had refined it. I saw my eyes fouled with earth, my hair and beard dripping with blood-red earth, my skin grey and puffed as that of a crushed earthworm. It was the mask of a beast in its den, terrified, waiting.
But I must not anticipate. To preserve my sanity it is necessary that I take things in their order. That is the object of this confession: to tell things in their order, reasonably, precisely: to recover that man with his insolence, his irony, his ingenuity. By writing of him I become him for the time.
It was Major Quive-Smith who had shot me by the stream. I am sure of it because his subsequent behaviour and his character (which by now I know as an old fox, outliving his contemporaries, knows the idiosyncrasies of the huntsman) correspond to those of the man who waited patiently over the side-car, who called my name to make me turn my head.
Two days I spent recovering from the wound, light in itself but aggravated by all that sudden toil. On the third I emerged from my chimney and crawled from bush to bush along the edge of the eastern pasture until I reached an ivy-covered oak at the bottom of the lane. It was nearly dead, and a paradise of wood-pigeons. From the top I could see the Marshwood Vale spread out as on a map, and I overlooked the courtyard of Patachon’s farm.
Pat and Patachon are the names I have given to my two neighbours. I live unsuspected between them like an evil spirit, knowing their ways and their characters but not permitted to discover their true names. Pat, the farmer to whom the cows and the eastern hedge belong, is a tall, thin youth with a lined, brown face, a habit of muttering to himself, and a soul embittered by bad home-made cider. His little dairy farm can barely pay its way; but he has an active wife with a lot of healthy poultry, which probably produce all the ready cash. On the other hand she is prolific as her hens. They have six children with expensive tastes. I judge the kids by the fact that they suck sweets at the same time as eating blackberries.
Patachon, who owns the western hedge and the great grey farm, is a chunky, red-faced old rascal, always with a tall ash-plant in his hand when he hasn’t a gun. His terse Dorset speech delights his labourers, and is heard, I should guess, on a number of local boards. His land runs past the lower end of the lane, and round over the top of the hill, so that Pat’s pasture is an enclave in the middle of it. On warm evenings he walks his side of the hedge in the hope of picking up rabbit or wood-pigeon, but the only shots he has ever fired were at Asmodeus. The old poacher was too quick for him; all you can do to Asmodeus is to shoot where he ought to be but never is.
All morning I saw nothing of interest from the tree, but in the afternoon two men in a car drove into the yard of Patachon’s farm and dropped a bag and a gun-case. Then they bumped along the lower edge of the stubble, following the farm track which joined the serviceable portion of my lane. I guessed that they must be bound for Pat’s farm; if they had been going beyond it, they would have taken a better road. I couldn’t keep them under observation, for the southern slopes were much too dangerous in daylight. There were deep lanes which had to be crossed or entered, with no possibility of avoiding other pedestrians.
In half an hour they were back at Patachon’s. One of the men got out and went indoors. The other drove the car away. Someone, then, had come to stay at the farm. I remained on watch in the tree, for I didn’t like the look of things.
In the evening Patachon and his visitor emerged from the farmhouse with their guns under their arms, prepared for a stroll round the estate. They started towards the low-lying thickets at the western end of the farm, and I didn’t see them again for an hour. Patachon owned a lot of rough land in that direction which I had never bothered to explore. I heard a few shots. A flight of three duck shot northwards and vanished in the dusk. A wood-pigeon came homing to my tree, saw me, banked against the wind and dived side-ways with brilliant virtuosity. When I caught sight of the two guns again, they were stealing along the edge of the lane, separated from me only by the width of the two hedges. Patachon’s visitor was Major Quive-Smith.
The farmer picked up a stone and flung it smack into the tree, just missing my feet. No pigeon flew out of the ivy, needless to say.
‘And if ’e’d a bin there,’ said Patachon bitterly, ‘ ’e’d a flewed t’other way.’
‘He would,’ agreed Major Quive-Smith. ‘By Jove! I can’t think why that fellow wouldn’t let his little bit of shooting!’
That explained why he had gone to see Pat. And Pat, I am sure, refused his request rudely and finally.
‘Sour man, ’e is!’ said the farmer. ‘Sour!’
‘Does he shoot at all himself?’
‘No. ’E baint a man for fun. But don’t ’ee go botherin’ ’im, Major, for there’s nobbut in the ’edge this year.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Quive-Smith.
I could see the swift, suspicious turn of his head, and hear the bark in the question.
‘A perishin’ cat! Can’t trap ’un. Can’t shoot ’un.’
‘Very shy of man, I suppose?’
‘Knows as well as we what us would do to ’un if us could catch ’un,’ Patachon agreed.
They strolled down to the farm for supper. I observed that the major carried one of those awkward German weapons with a rifled barrel below the two gun barrels. As a rifle, it is inaccurate at 200 yards; as a gun, unnecessarily heavy. But the three barrels were admirably adapted to his purpose of ostensibly shooting rabbits while actually expecting bigger game.
I don’t yet know Quive-Smith’s true nationality or name. As a retired military man he had nearly, but not quite, convinced Saul. In his present part, a nondescript gentleman amusing himself with a farm holiday and some cheap and worthless shooting, there was no fault to be found. Tall, fair, slim, and a clever actor, he could pass as a member of half a dozen different nations according to the way he cut his hair and moustache. His cheekbones are too high to be typically English, but so are my own. His nose is that unmistakable Anglo-Roman which with few exceptions—again I am one of them—seems to lead its possessor to Sandhurst. He might have been a Hungarian or Swede, and I have seen faces and figures like his among fair-haired Arabs. I think he is not of pure European origin; his hands, feet, and bone structure are too delicate.
To rent the shooting over three-quarters of the country where I was likely to be was a superb conception. He had every right to walk about with a gun and to fire it. If he bagged me, the chances were a thousand to one against the murder ever being discovered. In a year or two Saul would have to assume that I was dead. But where had I died? Anywhere between Poland and Lyme Regis. And where was my body? At the bottom of the sea or in a pit of quick-lime if Quive-Smith and his unknown friend with the car knew their business.
I was glad of my two unconscious protectors: Asmodeus, whose presence in the lane made my own rather improbable, and Pat who wouldn’t have trespassers on his land and wouldn’t let his little bit of shooting. I know that type of dyspeptic John Bull. When he has forbidden a person to enter his ground, he is ready to desert the most urgent jobs merely to watch his boundary fence. Quive-Smith couldn’t be prevented from exploring Pat’s side of the hedge, but he would have to do it with discretion and preferably at night.
I returned to my burrow, now no larger than it had been in the first few weeks, and much damper. I cursed myself for not having widened the chimney before I cleaned up the lane; I could then have thrown out the earth and allowed the rain to distribute it. The inner chamber was uninhabitable and so remains.
I stayed in my sleep-bag for two wretched days. I envied Quive-Smith. He was showing great courage in hunting single-handed a fugitive whom he believed to be desperate. Twice Asmodeus came home with a rush through the ventilation hole and crouched at the back of the den, untouchable and malignant—a sure sign that somebody was in the lane. I lay still underground. Desperate I was, and am, but I want no violence.
On the third afternoon I found the immobility and dirt no longer endurable, and decided to reconnoitre. Asmodeus was out, so I knew that there was no human being in the immediate vicinity. I hoped that Quive-Smith was already paying attention to some other part of the county, or at least to some other farm, but I warned myself not to underestimate his patience. I poked my filthy head and shoulders out into the heart of the blackberry bush and remained there, listening. It was a long and intricate process to leave the bush; I had to lie flat on the ground, separating the trailing stems with gloved hands and pushing myself forwards with my toes.
I sat among my green fortifications, enjo
ying the open air and watching Pat’s field and the sheep down beyond. It wasn’t much to have under observation. Behind me was my own lane, and fifty yards to my left the cross hedge in which was another lane running up to the down; there might have been a platoon of infantry in both, for all that I could have seen of them or they of me. Opposite me was another hedge that separated Pat’s pasture from Patachon’s sheep; to my right, the skyline of the pasture.
About five o’clock Pat came into the field to drive the cows home himself—a task that hitherto he had always left to a boy—and remained for some time staring about him truculently and swinging a stick. At sunset Major Quive-Smith detached himself from a brown-scarred rabbit warren on the hillside, and put his field-glasses back in their case. I had not the remotest notion that he was there, but, since I had been assuming he was everywhere, I knew he had not seen me. To let me see him I thought obliging.
He struck down the hillside into the lane leading to Patachon’s farm. As soon as he was in dead ground I crawled to the corner to have a look at him while he passed beneath me. A clump of gorse covered me from observation from the pasture as I crouched in the angle of the hedges.
I waited but he didn’t come. Then it occurred to me that he must hate those deep tracks almost as much as I did; a man walking along them was completely at the mercy of anyone above him. So he was possibly behind the opposite hedge, working his way back to the farm across the fields. It seemed odd that he should take all that trouble when he could have gone home by the vale and run no risks whatever; it seemed so odd that I suddenly realized I had been out-manoeuvred. He had shown himself deliberately. If I were haunting the lane, which he suspected, and out for revenge, of which he must have been sure, then I should have waited for him just in that corner where I was.
Rogue Male Page 12
