Mally began to speak with a little jerk; her mouth felt rather stiff.
“Did he know—did Mr. Craddock know I was there to-night?”
“No, he didn’t. He saw you go downstairs with me at Menden, and he fussed to know why you had a hat on. And I told him you had a hat on because you were going out.”
“Does he know you’ve come away?”
“No,” said Candida quickly. “And he mustn’t know—nobody must. I must get back. That’s the horrible part—I must get back, and I don’t know what to do with you. You can’t stay at Curston, and you can’t go to Menden—and where can you go at this time of night? You see, I must get back.”
“Yes, I see.”
Mally sat quite still for a moment. They had come about two miles down the road. It was frightfully difficult to judge distances at night. She didn’t think they had passed the turning to Peaslea station, but she wasn’t sure—that is, she wasn’t quite sure. Anyhow the turning must be quite near, and the station was only half a mile down the lane. She turned to Candida and said:
“It’ll be all right—I’ll get out here.”
“You can’t!”
Mally laughed.
“Of course I can. Good-by, and thank you most, most awfully. You’ve been a brick.”
“Oh, you can’t!”
“I shall be perfectly all right,” said Mally firmly.
She pushed open the door beside her, squeezed Candida’s arm somewhere up near the shoulder, caught up her bundle, and jumped out. The door shut with a slam. To Candida, in the light, Mally had become just one of the shadows on the snowy road.
She put her hand on the starter and winked away a little stinging rush of tears. Something in her cried and said, “I can’t!” and something else never stopped saying, “You must!” She ran into the mouth of a narrow lane and turned.
As she ran back along the way that they had come, the light fell on Mally standing pressed close up against the hedge. All the snow-furred twigs glittered in the dazzle. Mally looked very black against the whiteness; only the rose-red domino, clutched together in a bundle, made a brilliant spot of color against her dark coat.
CHAPTER XXVI
Mally stood against the snowy hedge and saw the car go away from her. The white light swept her and was gone. She watched the red tail-light get smaller and smaller until it was like the smallest spark in the world. Then it too was gone and everything was most frightfully dark and still.
She waited for her eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. It was silly of her really to have watched the lights for so long. She shut her eyes for a little, and then opened them again. She looked up and could see nothing but a formless gloom which seemed to move as she looked at it, slipping down upon her in a thick, stinging fall of snow. She looked down, and the snow made a sort of twilight about her feet. It was odd to have the light—if you could call it light—coming from below like that. She could see the hedge against which she was standing, but she could not see the other side of the road, and the continual movement of the falling snow was very confusing.
She had to get to Peaslea station. Well, Candida had turned the car where a lane ran into the road only a few yards away. That would be the lane that led to the station. She had only to walk along it for about half a mile. She stamped her foot in the snow and felt how hard the ground had frozen. “What a mug I am! What a perfectly idiotic mug! Of course the station will be shut!” It was a most sobering and depressing thought.
Mally could not remember exactly when the last train stopped at Peaslea, but it was somewhat short of ten o’clock. It was now between midnight and the half-hour, and the first train in the morning was just before six.
She began to count on her fingers: Half-past one—half-past two—half-past three—half-past four—half-past five. She reached her thumb with dismay. Five hours at the very least before the station would open—five black, icy, snowy hours, from a January midnight to a January dawn. Only it wouldn’t be dawn even then.
A horrid panic of cold loneliness came down on her. It was just like the closing of a trap. The minute before, she had been shivering and wondering what on earth she was going to do, but quite free, quite able to think and plan and do: and then with a snap the terror closed on her and shut her in. She spun half round and caught at the hedge, at something, anything that she could touch and hold to. Her bundle dropped in the snow at her feet and her bare hands closed convulsively on sharp thorny twigs with ice that melted and ran between her fingers in a cold trickle. Some of it went down her sleeve. She shivered, let go, and shook the water from her: her left-hand sleeve was wet. She looked for a handkerchief, and could not find one. And all in a minute the trap was open again and the terror gone.
She picked up her bundle, shook the snow from it, and began to walk briskly down the lane. As she walked, she thought what she would do. First she would find the station, and then she would walk to and fro between the station and the road until the early train was due. Of course she might be lucky; there might be a shed or something at the station, shelter of some kind where she could sit for a while and get out of the wind. Her spirits began to rise at the thought. Of course there would be a shed or, at any rate, a truck or something. Even a coal truck would be better than having to face this poisonous wind all night.
She went on walking, and the lane went on being a lane, with fields on either side of it, and little stubbly hedges that had been cut to the bone. After about twenty minutes Mally began to get anxious. There ought to be cottages, and a farm, and Peaslea church, if not now, at least very soon. But still there was only the lane and the hedges.
In another ten minutes she knew that she must have taken the wrong lane; this one was quite evidently not going to arrive at Peaslea. She turned round and began to walk back.
Half an hour later she was still walking, but she had not reached the road. She was in another lane with high banks. It wasn’t the lane by which she had come. She stood still, and realized that she had no idea where she was. In the dark she must have got off the road into a branching lane which she had not noticed. She turned again and went back, but with shaken confidence and a complete loss of her sense of direction. She began to feel drowsy. Between these high banks there was not much wind, and only old nursery stories about people going to sleep in the snow and never waking up again saved her from sitting down under the lee of the hedge and falling into a doze.
She must have turned again without knowing it, for presently she was on a wide, flat road with no hedges. The wind drove across it with great gusts; it felt like floods of icy water breaking in waves of cold. There was not a light anywhere, or a sound, except the sound of the wind, and the horrible pale light of the snow, which wasn’t light at all but a sort of ghostly darkness.
She went on walking. But she was getting very much confused. Twice she found herself off the highroad on rough, tussocky grass. Then after a long time she was feeling in front of her with her bare right hand, touching something. Her hand went up and down, backwards and forwards. She was touching something that felt familiar; only she was so shaky that she could not tell what it was. There was a queer smell too, queer and strong—the sort of smell that one knew perfectly well when one wasn’t asleep. Something sharp pricked her. She drew her hand back, and then put it out again, rousing a little. It was a paling; she was touching a paling. The smell was tar; it was a newly tarred paling. She roused a little more. If there was a paling, perhaps there was a house.
She began to feel along the fence until she came to a gap. She went through the gap with the wind behind her. It seemed to push her on, and she saw a large, vague lumpy blackness blotting out the even pallor of the snow. The wind pushed her and she went on, coming nearer to the blackness with her hand out before her, feeling all the time. Only her hand was so cold that she could not really feel. Suddenly she touched the wall of the house and stood still. Mally must really have known that the blackness was a house, because she was not at all surprised when s
he touched it. She drew her fingers down over the brick with a sort of stroking movement, and then she began to feel for the door. She thought that the door would be opposite the gap in the fence.
Finding the house had waked her up, and she had begun to think again. A step up into the porch. The door must be just in front of her then. She moved forward, feeling for it, and found the doorpost. She meant to knock on the door until somebody came, and she put out her hand to feel for the knocker. Her hand went on, right through the place where the door ought to be. There wasn’t any door.
CHAPTER XXVII
Mally caught the doorpost and held on to it. Why wasn’t there any door? She did wish she could think properly. It had given her a curious sort of shock to put her hand out into that dark emptiness. Then it came to her that the house wasn’t finished. That was why there was a gap in the fence; that was why the fence smelled of tar; that was why there was no door.
The wind pushed her, and she went through the empty doorway and felt her way to the wall. It was pitch-dark inside the house. The wall was damp and cold. She felt along it and found a doorway, groped past it, and touched the wall again. It was vaguely in her mind that the wind was blowing in on this side, and that she wanted to get away from the wind.
Keeping to the left-hand wall, she came to a second doorway. Here she turned at right angles and came into the room, still feeling along the wall. When she had taken about half a dozen steps, her foot struck something soft. She stood still at once, not frightened, but puzzled, her frozen thoughts moving very, very slowly.
It was a full minute before she lifted her foot. Then she stooped. There was a pile of sacking lying against the wall. It was the sacking that had felt soft to her foot. She let her bundle drop, and pulled at the sacking. It was heavy and harsh to the touch. She went on pulling rather feebly until she got it back into the corner by the doorway. It came unfolded as she pulled. She put a piece of it on the ground right in the corner and, kneeling on it, pulled all the rest of it up round her and over her. Then, half crouching, half lying, she leaned back against the sacking and the wall and slipped into a strange, deep sleep.
It was many hours before she woke. A dream that she could not remember melted like a mist, and she opened her eyes. The sun was shining right into them, and as she moved and pushed at the heap of sacks, she became quite awake. She got up stiffly and looked about her.
She was in a small square room; the walls of dark, unplastered brick; no door, but the windows were glazed, thank goodness. Each pane had a round white splash in the middle of it, and the sun, very bright and red, shone through the glass and made a level beam which had little dusty motes dancing in it. It was most frightfully nice to see the sun.
She went to the window and looked out. There must have been quite a lot of snow in the night. Well, at any rate, no one would find her footsteps; that was one good thing. It looked as if it might snow again before night. A great bank of fog rose well above the horizon. Where the low sun had cleared the mist, there was a space of purest turquoise; but away to the right there were heavy lead-colored clouds.
Mally thought it must be about ten o’clock, and dismay took hold of her. The early train from Peaslea had gone without her hours and hours ago. She ought to have gone by it; she ought to have got away before she was missed at Menden. It would be very, very risky to walk to Peaslea now; and yet she must do it. And oh, how ragingly hungry she was!
“It’s not the slightest use your being hungry,” she began in her severest manner. And then she remembered that she hadn’t eaten all Candida’s chocolate the night before—no, it wasn’t the night before but the night before that, ages and ages and ages ago. She had put half of it in her jumper pocket, and half of it was worth having. She could eat it all too, because as soon as she got to London she could get food—No, she couldn’t; she wouldn’t have any money. She wasn’t really sure whether she had enough money to pay her fare.
She put her hand into her coat pocket for her purse. Surely—surely she had put it in the right-hand pocket with Barbara’s drawings. It wasn’t there. She felt the left-hand pocket, and it wasn’t there either. She shook her coat, she turned the pockets inside out. She shook herself, and rummaged in her bundle. The purse was gone.
Mally sat down on the new boarded floor, still thick with sawdust and shavings, and said out loud to the damp brick walls, “Oh, Lord, I’m beat!”
The purse must have fallen out in the attic when she changed, or in the car. She was a perfect idiot to have left it in the pocket of a coat which had been turned upside down and inside out and used to roll things up into a bundle with.
“I’m an absolute, first-class, utter, prize, born fool!” said Mally firmly. Then she stuck her chin in the air and laughed. “Thank goodness the chocolate didn’t drop out too!” She undid it and divided it into three. “Breakfast—lunch—tea. Something’s bound to turn up before the evening, so it’s no use glooming.”
She ate “breakfast,” and put away “lunch” and “tea” in her jumper pockets. Then she went outside, quenched her thirst with snow, washed her face and hands, and dried them with her handkerchief. All the interminable hours of the day stretched before her. She went back into the sunny room, sat down on the pile of sacks, and tried hard to make a plan.
Half an hour later she had not thought of a plan, but she had remembered that there was a cross-word puzzle amongst Barbara’s drawings. It would be something to do. Plans won’t always come when you try to make them come. But sometimes, if you stop bothering and think of something else, a really good plan just drops down on you ready-made.
Mally pulled out the bundle of papers and unfolded it. The cross-word puzzle was at the bottom of the pile. She laid it on the top of the drawings and began to read the clues: “Lady Bird”; “A Swift Curler Of Old Times”; “New Child’s Holiday Invention”; “Old Hats for New”; “Hard Amber”… She stared at the words. The person who had made the puzzle must have had a passion for capitals; nearly all the words had capital letters.
There were a lot more clues, and they all looked most frightfully difficult. One, farther on, that caught her eye was “An Elephant’s Height In Nowgong.” And right across the top of the paper was written, “Heliogabulus was never emperor in Constantinople.”
She frowned at the page and turned it so as to get a better light. The sun must have gone behind a cloud; it seemed to have got much darker just in the last ten minutes. The thought of how much darker it had got edged itself into Mally’s mind and suddenly had all her attention. She got up and went to the window.
The bank of fog stood no higher than it had done when she awoke. The space of sky above it was a clear thin blue line tinged with green. The sun was gone. She looked, and could not believe her eyes; went on looking, and had to believe them. The sun was really gone. The wind last night—the wind that had pushed her into the house—had been northeast if she had ever felt a northeast wind in her life. This room on the other side of the house must face southwest, and it was the setting, not the rising sun that had waked her. If she was going to get anywhere at all to-day, it behooved her to make a start and at least reach a main road before the dark closed down and she was lost in it as she had been lost last night.
The shock of her discovery braced her. She felt more awake, more alive, better able to think; and the plan that had eluded her when she racked her brains for it came to her now. She couldn’t stay here, and she couldn’t freeze in the open, and since she had no money, she could not travel by train; she must just find Ethan Messenger and get him to help her. He was staying with aunts four miles from Curston. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was all she had. He had said “my father’s sisters,” so they were probably Miss Messengers—no one spoke of married aunts like that. Of course four miles from Curston might be four miles in the opposite direction, “in which case I’m done.” Well, the first thing was to find some human habitation and just ask for Miss Messenger’s house. It was risky, but Mally had come to the pl
ace where she was bound to take risks or just sit down and starve with cold and hunger.
She went out into the hall, which had become startling dark, and climbed the ladder which led to the upper story. If there were a light anywhere within sight, she would make for that. She went into every room and looked through every window. Trees, fields, snow; but not a twinkle of kindly light anywhere until she came to the last small room and saw from the window a faint, far spark. She very nearly cried out in her relief.
“Even if it’s a policeman’s house and he arrests me the very first minute he sets eyes on me, I don’t care,” said Mally vehemently to herself. “I don’t care. Do you hear? I don’t care. I want to see people, and hear people, and not be alone in this horrible, cold, empty place—Oh! What’s that?”
It was exactly as if some wicked fairy had been listening and had flung Mally her wish with a horrid, mocking laugh. Mally, half-way between the window and the door of the little upstairs room, heard a heavy, stumbling footstep that came nearer and nearer—a man’s footstep—, and then a man’s voice, hoarse and unpleasant, calling out. For a moment Mally thought that he was calling to her, and all the dreadful stories she had ever heard in her life came into her mind and paralyzed her with terror. It was only for a moment, because another voice called back.
There were two men. They were both horrible. They used dreadful words and they had dreadful voices. She put her fingers in her ears so as not to hear them, and then took them out again quickly, because if she couldn’t hear, she wouldn’t be able to tell whether they were coming upstairs or not.
Hue and Cry Page 17
