by Jack Mann
CHAPTER X
plague of locusts
Taking the cross-over from the Guildford road to the old lane over the Hog’s Back, next morning, Gees said: “I have never driven a more silent passenger. Not that I drive many.”
“Do you object?”
“Not a bit. There are so many fools on the roads these days, especially near London. You have to concentrate to dodge them.”
“You seem quite sure of your way.”
“Looked it out before starting,” he explained. “The wise man — I’m one — always plans his route before he turns out. The others stop beside the road at intervals and consult a map, which will tell you everything except how to fold it up again. We wise ones get there first.”
She made no comment. Gees took the Winchester road, swinging over its switchback undulations as one might drive a boat across the crests and hollows of an unquiet sea.
At a distance of three miles or less from the city, the flies came . . .
A little black cloud, compact as a swarm of bees, appeared to leap over the low hedge on the near side of the car — and envelop both him and Eve in a blinding, buzzing mass.
She cried out as he braked to stop, and, quick though he was, one front wheel struck the guard rail forcefully as a northward-bound car flashed past them. Had he swerved to the right instead of pulling off the road, the speed at which the other car was going would have meant sure and sudden death to them both.
Great, blue, buzzing foulnesses, thousands of them. Both he and Eve Brandon fought at them with their hands. Although he had been going at a good clip, they had got in behind the windshield, and the car was alive with them. He beat at them with his hat, and smelt freshly shed blood, as when he and Helen Aylener had walked away from MacMorn’s house in Brachmornalachan.
Then, suddenly as it had appeared, the swarm rose up, and swung back over the hedge. Their buzzing grew faint and ceased, and — assurance that he had not dreamed it all — hundreds of dead or dying flies littered the floor rug and seats. “If you’ll get out, I’ll clean up a bit.” She stepped on to the grass, while he threw out the seat cushions, took up the rug and shook it into the road, and knocked out all that remained on the floor of the car. All this in complete and grim silence. The smell that had struck on his nostrils was in his mind.
“Now you can get back,” he said, after he had replaced the cushions and deposited his hat in the locker.
“I felt — still feel quite sick.” She seated herself as she spoke.
“M’yes,” he observed unsympathetically. “I could have understood it better if it had been July, but even then I’ve never seen a swarm like that in this country. We’ll stop in Winchester and get you a spot of brandy. Yon look quite peaky over it. Or shall I drive you to the station at Winchester and send you back by train?”
“Certainly not!”
He drove on. “Did you — er — smell them?”
“That was what was so sickening,” she said. “A beastly smell — I know no other word for it. Utterly repulsive.”
“Yes.” He remembered Helen Aylener’s saying that she both disliked and liked an exactly similar smell. Over its recurrence here, and the appearance of the flies, he refused to think.
In a hotel lounge in Winchester he and Eve sipped neat brandy, and went on. He scarcely observed the notice: Beware of wandering cattle as they entered the forest. Here, with spring foliage at its gayest in the brilliant noon sunlight, he slackened his pace.
They dipped down from a crest toward a shaded hollow from which the road rose again, straight and straight under an arch of green. To their left, a half-dozen forest ponies grazed on a stretch of sward. There were rushes and reeds fringing a stream in the hollow —
The brakes saved them.
The pony nearest the road had leaped directly in front of the car. Had Gees been going faster, he could not have averted a crash. As it was, the front bumper was not two feet from the animal when the car came to a standstill.
With a lurid oath he got out, and as his foot touched the ground the pony leaped away with a terrified snort and disappeared in the brushwood. The other five beasts went on grazing quietly.
“Sorry I cussed, Miss Brandon,” he remarked, getting back to his seat and easing off the hand brake. The car moved on.
“It was justifiable,” she rejoined. ‘Quite a — a fruity effort, too. Do you often have adventures like these on the road?”
“As nearly as I can remember, no.”
“Perhaps I’m a Jonah,” she suggested, as they began the ascent beyond the hollow. “Inexplicable flies, and a mad pony — ”
They came out to open, heather-covered waste, and still the road ran straight and straight, with no life but their own on the landscape. But Gees kept to thirty miles an hour as carefully as in a restricted stretch. “We’ll have lunch at the first likely place.”
“But what about the barmaid?”
“She’ll never know what she’s missing,” he answered. “I’m not going near her, and we’re not going back this way, either. Nor am I telling you which way we are going back. I’m smitten with a hunch.”
“So am I,” she admitted, after a pause.
“Good! We’ll have lunch, and not swap hunches till we get home.”
“But why am I not to know our way back?” she asked.
“Your mind might leak,” he explained. “And I’m keeping mine tight shut, too. We’ve been annoyed quite enough, for one day.”
CHAPTER XI
fear is a shadow
There was a big limousine with white ribbons stretched between the front corners of its roof and the headlamps, at the end of a row of five cars, parked in front of a countryside hotel like the one where they had lunched. Gees nodded at them as he drove past. “Just as well we didn’t,” he remarked.
“What didn’t we?” she asked, after thinking it over.
“That’s where she lives,” he explained. “Works, anyhow. With a wedding party in the place, I’d never have a chance to vamp her and find out she bilks the cash register. And now, next on the left.”
“Did you mean to take the next on the left when we started out this morning?” she asked.
“No. I began to mean it about a minute ago. I’m going to navigate by the sun from now on, and don’t ask any more about it.”
Any road, he told himself, except the one by which he had planned to return. Keep roughly parallel with the coast for awhile . . .
“About that report you dictated yesterday,” Miss Brandon remarked after he had turned left into a rather narrow road, obviously not a main highway like the one they had left. “Do you mind talking about it?”
“I see no reason why I should,” he answered non-committally.
“Then — can you tell me — why are all the old gods such fierce beings? Except the Egyptian deities, perhaps — Osiris and Isis were fairly reasonable and polite. But the others — even the last of them, the Roman Jupiter — were no more than bloodthirsty hobgoblins and most of the earlier ones were simply unspeakable. The Hebrew Tahveh was more often angry than not, and had to be propitiated with all sorts of sacrifices.”
“The Egyptians got an easy living in the Nile Valley,” Gees said, “and therefore nature appeared to them as fairly benevolent. They patterned their gods on their own way of life — and so did all the other tribes and civilizations of antiquity.
“Most of them found nature fierce and evil. They saw life as a perpetual struggle against unyielding cruelty, some sort of supreme rule, to their belief, which perpetually tortured them by famine and storm and war, and they attempted propitiation out of their own experience. Life was an evil thing, therefore the gods who gave it must be evil, and had to be approached by evil and cruelty.”
“It sounds reasonable,” she reflected.
“Is,” he insisted. “As life got kinder, the gods became less evil, until — as you said — under the pax Romana Jove was no more nor less than an unpleasant old roue, everlastingly dod
ging away from Juno after some mortal maiden. Where you get a fierce, hard life, like the old Norse civilization, the gods are fierce and hard too. Man has made gods in his own image from the very beginning of time.”
She nodded and fell silent. With the sun striking over his right shoulder Gees drove on, keeping a steady slow speed. The road was wide enough for two cars, and bordered on either side by a low hawthorn hedge set on a sloping bank, about a foot above road level.
One small sports car passed them, and, coming in the opposite direction, an occasional truck rumbled by. Empty ones gave way freely enough, but those with loads swerved off as little as possible in passing.
With one of them, the flies appeared again.
The truck was from twenty to thirty yards away when Gees saw the small black cloud lift over the hedge to his right and swing like a thrown ball to envelop the truck driver, hiding his head and shoulders in its blackness. The lumbering vehicle swerved, drove at the Rolls-Bentley — inescapably, it seemed for long, tensed seconds. Tramping hard on the gas, Gees swung his wheel, and the car shot ahead, its near wheels mounting the bank.
There was a clanging crash and shock, and he stopped with the car at an angle just short of turning turtle, to see the truck also stopped behind him — and his rear mudguard quivering down on the tire, held to the car by no more than two studs.
“All right, Miss Brandon?” he asked cheerfully.
“I — I think so,” she answered, her voice very shaky.
“Good! I’ll investigate the damage, then.”
He got out, and waited until the approaching truck driver stopped facing him. The man’s face was ash-white, and he was trembling visibly.
“How many had you had?” Gees asked.
“Not a drop today, I’ll take oath, sir,” the man answered. “Blinded, I was, sir. I thought it was bees, at first — didn’t you see ’em, sir?”
“I saw something,” Gees admitted. “License?”
The man produced it. “Ten years clean record!” he said bitterly. “Gorn! And jobs ain’t easy, these days. I’m to blame, I know — you got a witness. I ain’t. And if I said flies, they’d larf.”
“They surely would.” Gees said deliberately, and returned the license after glancing at the name and address. “Here, take it, and give me a hand to pull that mudguard clean off so I can put it in the back of the car. I think that’s the extent of the damage.”
It was, he found when they had pulled the sheet metal clear. A projection on the back of the truck had caught under the mudguard and ripped it away, and, since the wheel was already angled by the slant of the car, it had escaped damage. They laid the bent and crumpled guard down in front of the back seat, and Gees pulled the waterproof cover over again and buttoned it down. Then he turned to the glooming truck driver.
“They’d laugh,” he said. “I don’t. Your license stays clean.”
“Blimey!” He gasped the ejaculation, and stared incredulously.
“I’ve met those flies before,” Gees explained.
“Gord! D’you mean there’s a plague, sir?”
“One pip of a plague, but it’s over as far as you are concerned. You won’t see any more of them — they don’t attack the same man twice. Your truck isn’t damaged, I suppose?”
“No, sir.” He shook his head. “It takes a lot to damage a six-tonner like that. But you lettin’ me off like this, sir — I’ll stand the racket if you think I ought. My wheel tracks show who was to blame!”
“Man, you’re something new in drivers.” Gees laughed, and brought two half-crowns out from his pocket. “Here, I’ve been so lucky this is just a thank-offering, and I know the blame doesn’t rest on either of us two. What made you swerve when the flies hit you, though?”
“I dunno, sir. Didn’t know I did. It felt like the wheel was wrung in my hands, somehow. I tried to steer straight, too.”
“Oh, well, forget it. And good luck.”
“Gord bless you, sir!”
Gees turned back to his car, and saw tears running unchecked down Miss Brandon’s cheeks. He leaned toward her, anxiously.
“Shock,” he diagnosed. “Would you rather walk to the nearest house, or can you stand being driven till we come to one?”
“Not — not that, altogether,” she got out, whisperingly. “You — your utter kindness to that man, when you might have — ” She broke off, and got a handkerchief out from her bag to wipe her eyes.
“When I might have batted him on the beezer — yes.” He got into the car and took the wheel. “But to tell the honest truth, it didn’t occur to me. I know another beezer I badly want to bat.”
She laughed, shakily. “Shall we — shall we ever get back?” she asked. “Your — your new way home doesn’t seem to work very well.”
“Maybe the worst is over,” he said. “Maybe, on the other hand, it isn’t. So far, you’ve got to own, we’ve suffered no personal damage.”
He drove on, and the car became level again. “Also,” he observed, “I’ve got another hunch. I believe I’ve made a discovery. Not a very useful one, at present, apart from its effect on my self-esteem.”
“Mr. Green, I think you are the sanest man I’ve ever met,” she said impulsively, with, as he noted, far more steadiness of voice.
“Testimonial filed for production before the lunacy commissioners,” he remarked calmly. “If we can find another pub that doesn’t look too immoral, what are your views on the subject of tea? Or not?”
“Not, I think, if you don’t mind. If — if I got out, I might not have the courage to get in again today. Don’t think me too silly.”
“I think you’re probably wise. We’ll head for home, then.”
Keeping a north-east course by the sun, he struck the main London-Southampton road, and breathed more easily when he saw its width before him. Miss Brandon sat quite still and silent beside him until, having encountered no more flies nor mad ponies, he stopped in Grosvenor Place.
“Handiest for you, I believe,” he remarked. “I’m sorry it’s been such a lurid day for you. I hoped for peace and barmaid.”
“It’s been splendid, really,” she assured him. “I’m very grateful Mr. Green, and — do we exchange hunches tomorrow?”
“After going through the mail,” he answered. “There might be another barmaid case in it, worth investigating. Goodnight, Miss Brandon. Ring me in the morning if you don’t feel fit.”
“But I shall feel fit, I know. Goodnight, Mr. Green.”
Nobody, Gees decided over his coffee and cigarette the next morning, could have behaved better than Eve Madeleine. He knew she had guessed some part of the reason behind those flies and the mad pony, but she had kept her head and made no fuss, even over the most nearly successful attempt at wrecking him. Yes, she had grit, and he congratulated himself again on his choice of a secretary.
So much so, that yet another idea entered his mind as he went along the corridor of the flat to her room, having heard her remove the metal cover from her typewriter after entering. He leaned against the doorpost and watched her slit envelopes with a paper-cutter.
“End of the week, Miss Brandon, pay yourself an additional ten bob, and keep it up from now on. It’s the first raise since you began work here, and I wonder you haven’t started a mutiny before now.”
“But, Mr. Green” — she stopped work on the envelopes to protest — “I’m doing absolutely nothing nearly all the time!”
“Makes no difference,” he insisted, “and I can’t tolerate insubordination. Raise or the sack — take your choice.”
“Well, it’s very good of you.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Unless there’s anything that looks special among that lot you have there, leave ’em alone and let’s consider our respective hunches of yesterday. Yours for a beginning. What was it?”
She made little stabs with the paper-cutter at the palm of her left hand, nervously. “It was — first, though, I take back all my skepticism about the report you dictated to me th
e day before. About your view of the man MacMorn, I mean. I don’t believe in those things as a rule, but after yesterday — well, I see no alternative.”
“And very noble of you, too,” he commented. “It amounts to being convinced by what happened yesterday, I take it.”
“It amounts to — My hunch” — she paused to consider her words carefully — “amounts to your being in very grave danger, as I see it. For some reason, and I can’t tell what it is, somebody wants you out of the way. Wants you dead, to put it plainly. Tried to kill you.”
“MacMorn, you think,” he suggested.
“Against that is the fact that you left Brachmornalachan without doing anything against him,” she pointed out. “So I don’t see — ”
“Then my hunch — the first of my two, rather — takes on where yours leaves off,” he said, as she did not end her sentence. “I do see — but we’ll take my second hunch first. Ever heard of Beelzebub, Miss Brandon? You’ll find him described in the New Testament as the prince of devils, I think. I’m not quite sure of the quotation.”
“Yes, of course I’ve read that,” she said.
“In reality, Baal-Zebub, one of the Carthaginian Baals or gods — known under that name all over Phonecian civilization, too. The god of corruption — of flies. Does anything occur to your receptive mind?”
“You mean — those flies yesterday?” she asked.
“Remember the report on the case,” he urged. “I remember dictating the bit about the black goat, and how MacMorn and I talked about it. Incautiously — I dictated the remark to you — very incautiously, he said — ‘This soil breeds flies.’ That is, the soil inside his circle.”
“I think I begin to understand,” she said reflectively.
“The symbol on his gateway stone is undoubtedly that of Kore,” he said, “but it looks as if he makes sacrifice to Baal-Zebub. Being able to use flies like that, I mean. Not that my knowing it amounts to anything, except, as I said, it enables me to call myself a clever little feller. And since MacMorn seems determined to take up the flies against me, I feel like taking up the cudgels against him. Full of fight, in fact. It’ll cost pounds to put that mudguard back, and I’m annoyed.”
