The Pond lay almost due north under the Great Wall. It was two miles, or thereabouts, to it, but a by-road ran almost up to it from our house, and was, indeed, the nearest way to it. I covered the distance with such speed that I reached a point of the road that gave me a view of the Pond in less than a quarter of an hour.
I hardly know what I expected, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. The Pond looked much the same as ever, except that its waters were low. Anne was wrong. It had not emptied yet.
“A hundherd year, Maisther Tony, sin’ it emptied afore,” said a voice behind me.
I turned. Old Josiah had hobbled out of his hut and come up behind me.
“A hundherd year,” he repeated. “Me faither niver sit eyes on it, tho’ he lived four score and nine year—on the Pond—and I niver seed it, till now—but ma grandfather seed it— the day Maister Lucius wint—hundherd years agone.”
“But what did you see, Josiah?” I interrupted.
‘T bottom o’ t’ Pond—I seed it—t’ bottom stone—last nicht afore thunner—t’ bottom o’ t’ Pond.”
“But did you see my father?” I cried.
“Tha faither? Naw—he wad na be theer. I seed t’ bottom o’ t’ Pond—ah tell ee—t’ call have come——”
“But,” I cried, “the Pond isn’t empty——”
“Last nicht it war empty afore t’ thunner—half t’ nicht—Pond were bare to t’ bone-crackin’ with t’ drouth—then t’ thunner came an’t’ wather cum back with a rush.”
“But did you see my father?” I asked.
“Tha faither? Naw, I didn’t see tha faither—but he be gone—baint he? T’ Pond have emptied, an’ Squire be gone——”
“Then you don’t really know anything about his being gone?” said my mother’s voice.
I turned round. She had come up behind us unnoticed, and was looking at the old man with hard eyes. He looked back steadily at her under his bushy brows.
“I know t’ call be cum,” he said sturdily. “When Julian calls Julian mun go.”
“But you haven’t seen the Squire since you came to the house last Saturday?” she said.
“Naw,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen t’ Squire.”
“And this is the rubbish the Vicar builds his information on, and comes to me with,” she said to me. “This poor old man’s dodderings about the Pond being empty.”
“They baint no dotlierins,” said Josiah angrily. “I seed t’ bottom o’ t’ Pond—as sure as I see you ditherin’ there afore me—and Squire seed it—he be gone. When t’ call cum, Julian mun go—and I wud hev yah to look out, ma’am, an’ not draw t’ wrath o’ t’ Pond—if ye do, I’m mista’an if ye don’t do it long,” and with that he turned and hobbled back, with dignity, to the house.
I put my arm through my mother’s, and tried to lead her home. She resisted, and began to walk towards the Wall. It was the first time for many years that she had taken that direction.
We walked in silence, arm in arm. We knew each other’s minds, and each knew that the other was clear that my father was gone. He had found the trapdoor and had gone down into the darkness.
When we reached the Wall the dusk was falling.
There was a worn flight of steps leading from the path up the Wall and we mounted this. Then we stood staring, in the dusk, silently along the Wall.
It was no use looking for the trapdoor in the gathering darkness. If there was one, perhaps it was in the Pond. Perhaps it was in another part of the Wall. We had not come here to look for it. We had come here to bid goodbye to my father—to attend his funeral.
CHAPTER THREE
The World Below
WHOEVER wishes to see the Roman Wall along its course from sea to sea, should see it in the month of May, when the cuckoo is crying over the barren heights, on which the Wall still stands most completely, and over the softer lowlands where men have destroyed its traces.
Carrowburg of the Batavian Cohort, and Rudchester of the Frisians, and Halton Chesters and Walwick Chesters of the Savinians and the Asturians, and Carvoran and Birdoswald of the Dalmatians: they are all at their greatest beauty in May when the Wall ditch is carpeted with primroses and marsh marigolds.
There apple-blossom and the lilac and laburnum linger long after they have disappeared from the more southerly lands. On the higher lands the whistling song of the curlew is always with you, and the air is full of the scent of almonds from the gorse. Yet it was in all the glory of a May of ravishing colour and brightness that I turned my back on the world of sunlight and went down into the darkness.
On that May day, when I accidentally discovered the secret of the Wall, my father had already been gone for seven years. I had left school the year after his disappearance, and, instead of going up to Oxford, as I probably would have done if my father had been with us, I went into the motor business with John Sackett.
Everybody thought that, when I took up work there, my mother would come down to the Midlands to be near me and her relations. She did not do so, however, nor did she do any of the other things that were expected of her.
If the neighbours had thought that she would supply them with a series of dramatic sensations and scenes after my father’s death, they must have been grievously disappointed, for she acted in all respects as he would have wished her to act.
Indeed, from the day of his disappearance, she seemed to have regained the concord and contact with him that she had not had since the first years of their marriage.
Not only did she refuse to discuss his disappearance or to authorise any of the attempts at a search that were planned by well-meaning or curious people, but she gave up all thought of leaving Julian’s Pond, in spite of the urgent desire of her brothers that she should turn her back forever on a house and a countryside whose associations were nearly all of anxiety and trouble.
Nor did she stay near the Wall in order to search for traces of my father. She went to the Wall often now, but it was not to search for the trapdoor. It was to keep in touch with him.
Often of an evening, when the sun was setting, I have found her there, with her hands folded on her lap, looking along the Wall, as it ran away to the west, or staring down at the Pond in the gathering dusk. We never mentioned him, but, when I put my arm through hers and led her home, I often felt a soft pressure that told me that she knew my thoughts.
I was not able to accept the situation as calmly as my mother did. As long as the sensation caused by my fathers disappearance drew the attention of people to us and to the Wall, I avoided all appearance of looking for him; but, when it died down, I spent all my spare time, vacations, and week-ends looking for the trapdoor, and trying to discover, from our records, where it was likely to be.
I discovered nothing. The records that remained gave no information; during all those years the Wall kept its secret, and the only result of my searches was that the Sacketts began to press my mother very strongly to come to live with them, not merely because they disliked the idea of her living alone near the scene of her trouble during the weekdays when I was down with them, but also because they wanted to get me away from the Wall. I know that they urged the latter reason most strongly on my mother, but they had as little effect on her as they would have had on my father. In this, as in other things, it was indeed remarkable how she took up his outlook and made it her own, as if it was her only sure way of keeping in touch with him.
To their arguments that it was most desirable that I should break all connection with the Wall, she answered that neither she nor my father had any desire that I should do so.
It is probable that what happened was that the disappearance of the real man enabled her to reconstruct in her mind the image that she had fashioned of my father in the early days of her life with him, and that she was now living with a dream-lover and trying to carry’ out his wishes as far as she could divine them.
As far as my safety was concerned, she was not only under the influence of her dreams, but she was too sure o
f her own beliefs, too secure in her faith and trust in God, to think it necessary to divorce me from the place where I had been born and that was now consecrated for her in all her memories. This at least is my reading of her stubborn refusal to leave the neighbourhood of the Wall, and her ignoring of the possibility that I too would discover the trapdoor and go to look for my father in the world that had swallowed him up.
When my mother’s family had failed to move her, they tried to work on me to get her to leave Julian’s Pond, and, when I refused to do that, they tried by every method they could think of to keep me away from the North Country. One of their plans for doing this was trying to arrange a marriage for me with Hilda Meadowes, a wealthy girl of their own set, who was keen on my company.
They might as well have tried to marry her to one of their machines. My working-life was given to them and their interests, but my real life was lived apart from them—in the same world in which my mother lived hers. Like her, I had been most profoundly moved by my father’s disappearance, and, as in her case, my dream-life was lived in the atmosphere of the Wall. It had been the source of my earliest and dearest associations with my father, and, now that it had deprived me of him, it had given me in his place an obsession that possessed my mind as strongly as it had possessed his, and, indeed, justified itself as a continuance of my life with him. There was, in my case, the additional incentive that I could not settle down to live the normal life of humanity without making a final effort to find him, as well as solve the mystery of the world that had taken him from me.
Therefore I spent all my spare time searching the Wall for its secret, as he had done.
The countryside thought that I was mad, and prophesied for me the same tragic fate that had befallen my father. Hie Sacketts agreed, although they acknowledged that I was not mad in any other respect, since, in their works, I had proved to be not merely a competent scientific worker and a good business man, but an inventor. I had in fact transformed the motor business of John Sackett into a thoroughly progressive concern, and even in the munitions work of Edward Sackett, in which I took less interest, I had introduced not merely improvements, but some new inventions of my own that had greatly impressed both the brothers.
I was, indeed, well on the way to making my fortune as well as greatly increasing their income, and they could not understand how, when the week-ends came, particularly in summer, I turned my back on all their hopes and dreams and went back to the Wall.
The truth was that, while I had sufficient of their breed in me to make me share their interest in industry and finance, I was fundamentally a man of an entirely different type. At bottom, I, like my father, am a romantic dreamer, to whom external things matter comparatively little, and my imagination was not concerned with their life and projects, but deeply engrossed with the problem of my father’s fate and the discovery of the secret path by which he had disappeared from my world.
Whether the entrance to the world of my dreams lay through the floor of the Pond, or through a secret passage under the Wall, or both, was the question that I was determined to solve.
There was one time when I toyed with the idea of having the Pond drained, but I finally rejected it, as I could not have it done privately, and, if once the stoiy got abroad, it would immediately draw on us the glare of publicity that had disgusted me at the time of my father’s disappearance. Besides, owing to the wording of the legends, I did not believe that the trapdoor was in the Pond. I was certainly determined to be present, if by any chance it ran dry, partly in order to examine its bottom thoroughly, but more because the legends seemed to indicate that the emptying of the Pond in some way freed or revealed a trapdoor in the Wall. Meantime I spent my time searching every inch of the Wall and the ground near it, and the fosse.
It was during one of these searches that I suddenly discovered the trapdoor in the floor of the Wall; and like many another discovery that is eagerly sought, this one came by accident more than through the actual search.
It was, as I have said, a most colourful May. The weather was at its brightest and the North Country along the Wall was beautiful, as only it can be in the first days of summer.
I had come up to the Wall on that Saturday as heavily equipped with food and camping outfit as the most austere hiker, and suddenly I found myself on the strangest road that ever a hiker has followed.
I will not say in what section I discovered the trapdoor lest others may be tempted to search for the road I entered on so unexpectedly. Hie time was the late afternoon. Away below me the country stretched for miles in all the quiet summer beauty of our English landscape: the scattered homesteads; the little fields; the winding streamlets; the joy and happiness and cosiness of rural England on a summer’s day.
I stood on a flagstone beside the Wall, looking at it with delight. Then suddenly I was falling through darkness. My body struck a soft heap of something, my eyes and mouth were choked with dust, and I was rolling, sliding, rushing down a steep slope in a heap of moving sand or dust. I made frantic efforts to grasp something. My struggles only increased the movement of the sliding mass. I realised this, and let myself go with it, keeping my eyes and mouth tightly closed. I remember thinking in a flash that I had searched the Wall, troubled it, intruded on it, and now it had seized me. Then I felt something more solid under the dust that was carrying me along. The avalanche was slowing down, settling.
My lungs were bursting. I could stand it no longer. I was being smothered—drowned. I made a great effort, and sat up through the heap of dust that was on top of me. My head came clear. I drew a deep breath, and struggled to rise.
I was up to my breast in a heap of something like ashes, but I could see nothing. I was in complete darkness. I felt for my kit. It was intact. I groped for my electric torch, got it and flashed it round. I was standing up to my waist in a heap of ashes on a rocky floor that showed from under the ashes some distance farther down. Behind me the slope, down which the avalanche had carried me, ran up into the darkness out of my sight. I could not see the underpaid of the ground above me, through which I had fallen. It was too far up to be visible.
I could see no roof or sides to the space in which I was standing, nothing but the ash-heap that surrounded me, and the flat rock floor beyond it. I moved down towards the clear space.
I could see no roof or sides to the space in which I was standing, nothing but the ash-heap that surrounded me, and the flat rock floor beyond it. I moved down towards the clear space.
I could see nothing in front of me but empty space, into which the floor sloped very gradually downward. Where I was standing there was a slight cover of ashes, but a little farther down the rock floor stood out clearly.
I went forward slowly, listening for any sound or sign of movement. There was none. When I reached the clear rock, I stooped down and examined it. It was a fairly smooth floor, and I had a feeling that its smoothness was due to the work of men. Then, as I went forward, I realised with a start that this was certainly the case. On the rock on my right- hand side there were figures carved in the stone. I went over and examined them. They were the forms of three women, one of whom had a torch in her hand, another a pitcher, and a third something else that I could not make out, but that looked like a loaf of bread. They were drawn in attitudes of flight, and behind them was a blurred mass of something that looked like men in pursuit.
The direction towards which the women were flying was the downward slope. I followed in this direction, and, after a few feet, came upon a square raised stone with some sort of caning on it. I flashed the torch over it. The top of the stone had a large six-cornered star cut in it, and under this the lettering DIBVS VITERIBVS—soldiers’ Latin, “To the old Gods.” It was obviously an altar made by somebody who, in despair, had given up the Christian faith. I walked round it. The far side was also carved. On top there was the word DEO, with a wreath round it, and under it a caning of a man holding a bull by the horns.
As I moved nearer, to get a better look at i
t, my foot struck something. I looked down, and saw a little boat-shaped vessel. I took it up. It seemed to be of bronze. I looked round me, almost expecting to see the men who made the altar coming towards me. There was nothing, however, to be seen, except the walls and floors of solid rock. The stillness was unbroken. I was in a state of extreme excitement, but at the same time cool and collected.
It might be imagined that it would now have occurred to me to get back to the surface of the earth, in order to make proper preparations for a search of this subterranean world, or at least to discover how I could make my exit from it, if I were in danger. No such thought, however, entered my mind. The moment that I had been waiting for so long had come, and the idea of turning back, even for a little, would have seemed impossible to me, especially as there seemed to be no obstacle in my way. In my knapsack I had a certain amount of provision for a journey—plenty of food for two days at least. The air of the place was chilly but pure, and, as far as I could judge, free from noxious gases. If there were still living men in this world, they would be somewhere at the bottom of that slope, and I was determined to find them. The figures and inscriptions showed that they had once been there at any rate.
I began to move forward slowly. The place was extremely dark, so that I could not do without my torch, although it made me conspicuous, and I knew that I should be an easy target for any hostile thing that lurked in the darkness round me. I stopped and listened intently.
There was a slight sound coming from the right-hand side—a little, murmuring, sliding sound.
I put my torch out, and stood rigid, staring in the direction of the sound. It was a soft, bubbling noise, quite unmistakable, and it came from the one source. It was continuous—too evenly continuous to proceed from the voice or movements of any living thing.
My attitude of tension relaxed. It was probably running water, for there must be some running water in the neighbourhood, since human beings had lived there.
Land Under England Page 3
