Scarweather

by Anthony Rolls

  6

  The archaeological party were delighted with the results of the day’s work, and were looking forward to the morrow with a positive thrill.

  We sat in the drawing-room again after dinner, talking over the operations from our various points of view.

  Mr. Tuffle, after mixing for himself a filthy decoction which, he assured us solemnly, was the real Kentucky Boneshaker, became exceedingly discursive.

  “Splendid old fellow, Reisby,” he said, “keen as mustard. Pity he can’t get away from his old-fashioned ideas. His theory of sequence-dating—all bunkum—what?”

  “No,” said Mr. Goy sternly.

  “You young men ought to respect your elders,” Mrs. Goy added.

  “I do respect him,” Mr. Tuffle declared fervently, after sipping his Boneshaker, “I respect him tremendously, indeed I do. Only—got to put science first—science first, every time—truth before everything. Whadda you say, Mr. Ellingham?”

  “Professor Ellingham,” Mrs. Goy corrected him tartly, in a most gratuitous fashion. I could see that she disliked Mr. Tuffle, that he inspired her with a placid but persistent hatred.

  “Whadda you say, Pr’fess’r Ellingham?”

  “I agree with you entirely on the question of principle. Our first concern is, or should be, the discovery of truth, or of the highest approximation to the truth. As for sequence-dating, it is admittedly tentative.”

  He turned to Mr. Goy. “What do you suppose we are likely to find in that central chamber?”

  “Cremated burial.” Mr. Goy was quietly emphatic.

  “Well,” replied Ellingham, “I’m not so sure. I have an idea that we shall find a crouching skeleton with a few well-preserved relics.” He smiled, as if he was keeping a joke to himself.

  Mr. Goy merely said: “Improbable.”

  “But not impossible. At Sykeham-le-Barrow, for example, there was a very similar group. I know you will say that the inner and the outer constructions are of the same date. I can only reply that I shall not be surprised if we find a contemporary group of cremated burials and interments within the same enclosure. What do you say, Farringdale?”

  “My dear fellow, what is the use of appealing to me? In the first place, I know nothing about archaeology. In the second place, I should not like to speculate on what is concealed by a mass of earth and stones.”

  “I am justly rebuked,” said Ellingham, “by Farringdale’s common sense. None the less, I repeat once again my firm conviction that we shall find a crouching burial in the central chamber.”

  He spoke with a grim yet humorous intensity.

  “It is not a matter of mere frivolous guess-work. There are many respectable analogies. In addition to Sykeham-le-Barrow in Shuffleshire, there is Twn-y-Glas in Wales, De Varrhus in Guernsey, Wapseywood in Yorkshire—”

  “Intrusion,” said Goy. (Another archaeological method of getting round a corner.)

  “Well, well!” Ellingham replied, “the morrow will prove me right or wrong. I anticipate a skeleton.”

  “How thrilling!” exclaimed Mrs. Goy. “Wilberforce would love a skeleton for the new saloon.—And I have really got seven across at last—umbelliferous.”

  Chapter III

  1

  On the following morning we all met at the tumulus in cheerful anticipation of a great discovery.

  It was a bright, warm day, ideal for our purpose.

  The Reisbys had arrived at the digging before the party from the hotel, and when Reisby greeted us he was holding in one hand a piece of painted board.

  “A warning, my dear people, a warning!” he cried. “Behold the prevalence of superstition among our rude, illiterate folk, our northern barbarians!”

  He displayed the board, and we saw written upon it in sprawling white letters:

  “LEAVE THE DEAD IN PEACE.”

  Reisby was evidently quite undisturbed, but I thought Hilda was uneasy, and I felt a momentary chillness fall upon the group. Our navvies, the gardeners from the Manor, were looking somewhat abashed.

  “Dear, dear!” said Ellingham, “how very depressing! I wonder who is the author of this advice. He is evidently sincere, and, from his point of view, both decent and reasonable.”

  “Ought to have been reassured by presence of Dean,” said Mr. Goy.

  “Awful rot and impertinence.” Mr. Tuffle was not amused.

  I looked at Hilda.

  “I’m sorry they have done it,” she said quietly. “I hate the idea of hurting the susceptibilities of these folk. And I think Professor Ellingham is quite right—they are decent and reasonable susceptibilities.”

  “But these are the tombs of heathen!” shouted Reisby. “And surely these good people know that we have dug up hundreds of ’em already.” (The workmen looked happier.) “They have never objected before. In fact, many of them have assisted me in the work of excavation.”

  “They don’t like us to be digging in this particular place,” said Hilda. “Of course it’s all nonsense, but—”

  Reisby flung the board away with a swing of his powerful arm, and it went skimming and whirling in the air, over the slope of the bank below us, until it crashed into a thicket by the river.

  “Ho, ho, ha-ho! Now, gentlemen, let us continue, let us continue this memorable investigation. Only consider, my dear Goy, the hidden treasure that awaits removal to your cabinets, your cases, your eminently respectable show.”

  2

  It was now decided that everybody should concentrate on the opening of the central chamber, whereby the main purpose of the excavation could be more rapidly and carefully achieved. The experts were merely directing and observing, while the four professional diggers did the work.

  We were uncovering the sides of a rectangular grave, the focus of endeavour and of expectation, when we heard a cheerful voice hailing us from the hill.

  The amiable rotundity of Ugglesby-Gore was approaching us, followed by a man with a hamper. Coming from the inside of the hamper there was a glassy tinkle of bottles.

  “Hullo, Professor! Hullo, everybody! Don’t let me stop you—mustn’t interfere with body-snatching! Mere spectators, silly public, that’s all. Contribution to lunch—some of the best—hope you’ll allow me—”

  And the excellent, simple fellow, literally bubbling with incoherent friendliness, rolled up to the barrow.

  “Digging up poor old boy, pots and everything, eh? Tuth-th! Too bad. Jolly interesting, of course. Can’t say I understand it like you fellas do—too much of a fool—mere spectator!”

  “You are just in time for the opening ceremony,” said Ellingham.

  The tops of the four great slabs which formed the sides of the chamber were now cleared. It was easy work, for the grave was only loosely covered by a mass of sand and soil which had evidently been disturbed on some previous occasion. Two slabs had originally been placed over the grave; one of them had been pushed over into what was presumably an adjoining chamber, and the other had veered obliquely and was now tilted into the grave itself.

  “Put a bar here,” said Reisby, “and another here.”

  In memory I can see him with peculiar distinctness. He wore a tattered Norfolk jacket and a pair of grey flannel trousers. His tawny-silver hair flowed in a grand abundance over his magnificent head. At that moment he was visibly tense, eager, even a little agitated.

  The men placed their bars under the covering-stone.

  “Look out!” shouted Reisby, and he pushed the stone up on its edge, and then let it fall with a flat thud on the debris outside the chamber.

  We all crowded round in silence.

  The inside of the grave, as far as it was to be seen, was filled with bits of white calcinated bone, speckled at random in a mess of sandy soil, mixed up with charcoal, scraps of pottery, lumps of red clay, chips of glossy flint, and a lot of loose rubble. But
this mixture filled the grave to within a few inches of the top. Nobody could yet say what lay below it on the floor of the tomb.

  Mr. Goy, laconic as usual, broke the silence.

  “Cremation,” he observed.

  Ellingham took it as a challenge:

  “Wait until we see the bottom!”

  There was an interval, in which Ellingham took several photographs of the tomb, and William Tuffle most adroitly plotted, measured, examined with meticulous though praiseworthy care every detail, every angle, every sign of a sign.

  Then the upper layers of the deposit, the bits of bone and pottery and so forth, were removed.

  According to Reisby, the bones were those of two men, parts of an ox (the teeth clearly recognisable), a sheep or goat, and a dog. The pottery was of the same kind as that in the adjoining chamber.

  Ellingham scrutinised the material with hawk-like vigilance.

  “Ah, ha!” he said, pouncing suddenly, “what’s this?”

  He held in his hand a tiny pointed fragment, apparently of metal. He rubbed it, and it shone brightly.

  “Silver, what?” said Ugglesby-Gore, “bit of real treasure?”

  “No. It’s a very common object.” Ellingham looked at it thoughtfully. “Merely the blade of a pen-knife.”

  “Oh, you may find anything in that rubbish!” said Reisby, looking (as I thought) rather peevish, annoyed at so much attention being given to such a trifle. “After all, the whole thing has been disturbed, and it’s highly improbable that what we are now taking out was the original filling of the chamber.”

  I observed that Ellingham, instead of throwing the trifle away, put it in his pocket.

  Mr. Tuffle, who was carefully skimming the debris with a gardener’s trowel, gave a cry of excitement.

  “We’ve got him!” he shouted, as if he was running to earth some elusive animal.

  3

  “Look here!” Mr. Tuffle lightly flicked away a layer of thin soil.

  In doing so he exposed the loosely articulated angle of three yellow bones—the bent elbow of a skeleton.

  “There you are, Goy!” said Ellingham calmly, but with intense eagerness. “What did I tell you? A crouching burial—he’s lying on the left side—looks more or less undisturbed.”

  “It is the king, it is the king!” piped a thin, earnest voice behind us.

  The Misses Macwardle, accompanied by Dean Ingleworth, had approached the excavation—one might say, the exhumation.

  “I should be particularly careful, I should exercise great restraint, uncommon restraint,” said the old man querulously, “I should use only the smallest instruments and the most delicate methods in exposing the burial. A very delicate procedure, calling for a great deal of patience. You surprise me by not using a riddle with a much finer mesh.”

  Mr. Goy closely examined the elbow-bones.

  “Young female,” he said.

  I admired his audacity.

  Reisby looked in his turn, kneeling by the side of the grave so that his beard almost touched the earth.

  “No, no, my good sir! A young male, decidedly. As you have observed, Ellingham, it looks as if the burial is undisturbed. In view of all the mess above it, that is remarkable. A most remarkable, exciting and unexpected discovery!”

  He raised himself upright and stood above the stone chamber, looking round at the attentive group with an ironic, unaccountable smile.

  “Got the body, what?” said Ugglesby-Gore, who was really a little shocked. “Got the poor fella’s bones—lot of old body-snatchers, that’s what you fellas are. Can’t understand it myself—too much of a fool. Frightfully ancient Briton—Roman—Phoenician—don’t know, of course.”

  I saw Hilda Reisby look down into the primitive tomb with interest and with gentle curiosity.

  “It does seem rather a shame!”

  “It is precisely what Wilberforce has been longing for,” said Mrs. Goy. “A really good crouching burial is precisely what he wants for the new prehistoric saloon.”

  “A lucky dig for you, Goy!” boomed Reisby. “That skeleton, judging from the bit we can see, ought to be in first-rate condition.”

  Mr. Tuffle delicately flipped away a little more of the earth, revealing the two bones of the forearm lying together.

  “Singularly fresh in appearance,” he said.

  A black, shining beetle, like a tiny knight in armour, tumbled awkwardly over the bones and went scurrying away into the soil.

  “If you invited my opinion,” said the Dean, “I should advise you to begin there”—his trembling fingers fluttered vaguely above the grave—“exercising always the greatest amount of skill and restraint.”

  Kneeling suddenly on the dirty ground, Miss Priscilla Macwardle pressed her cheek against the edge of a slab.

  “Oh, you dear, dear, wonderful old stones!” she cried, in a manner that was both wild and reassuringly self-conscious at the same time. “If only you could tell us what you have seen, what marvels and what mysteries we should hear!”

  “You are quite right, ma’am,” said Reisby. “A good many of our chosen theories would be rudely exploded, I have no doubt.”

  “And others would be confirmed,” said Ellingham drily.

  4

  There was now a consultation between Reisby, Goy, Tuffle and Ellingham. A querulous obbligato was kept up by the Dean, whose vague advice was received with unremitting courtesy, if not with all the attention it deserved.

  At this critical stage, and while these learned gentlemen are conferring, I must ask the reader to bear in mind the nature of the tomb which was being examined. It was a very simple affair. You have only to imagine a rectangular and slightly oblong box or chamber of stone, the sides consisting of granite slabs with a filling of smaller stones at the corners. The size of the inside of the chamber was, roughly, 5 by 4½ feet, and the depth of it, from the top edges of the slabs to the floor, about 3½ feet. This grave had been loosely filled with rubbish and the relics of cremated burials, as I have already described, and we had now removed this material to a depth of some two feet or more. The skeleton which lay on the floor of the tomb was therefore covered by an irregular deposit of soil, charcoal, bits of cremated bone, shards of pottery, and so forth, a deposit which was now from a foot to a foot and half in thickness. Obviously the correct procedure was to remove this deposit without disturbing the burial, and so to reveal and record every circumstance of the arrangement. In order to do this, Reisby decided to remove carefully the slab on the outer side of the grave, replacing it after the burial had been exposed for the purpose of getting photographs. The slab was already loose, and it could be lifted or tilted out of the way without causing any disturbance. Dean Ingleworth opposed the plan, but the others warmly supported it. Eventually the Dean was placated—he wanted to show the tumulus, on the following afternoon, to a party of people from the Littlehope Field and Antiquarian Society, and he was assured that the chamber would be properly restored and ready for inspection.

  By a most ingenious method of gradual shifting and wedging, Reisby and three of the workmen succeeded in lifting the outer slab and placing it flat on the excavated floor of the trench. A trickle of earth fell from the edge of the grave, but the burial was entirely undisturbed. I noticed an acrid, salty, pungent and rather stimulating smell of moist earth.

  We knew already, having seen the exposed elbow-joint, that our skeleton was lying with his back to the slab which had now been taken away.

  Slowly and very methodically the two Professors, aided by Goy and Tuffle, began to remove the rubbish. They started at the end of the tomb where they expected to find the feet of the skeleton; and sure enough it was not long before the pelvic bones and the bones of the two ankles were exposed.

  I watched the operation with a throb of excitement. Indeed, there was a contagion of excitement in the air, somewhat
unusual, I should think, in the normal circumstances of field archaeology. Parts of the two thigh-bones, and the bones of the leg, were soon revealed, and we noticed at once a curious absence of decay or staining. True, the bones of the hip were broken, the toes and ankles were scattered; but yet one had the illusion of all the bones being remarkably fresh and firm.

  Presently there came a thrill.

  Close to the feet of the skeleton Mr. Goy discovered a pottery vessel, slightly cracked, but otherwise perfect.

  “Beaker,” he said.

  “You astonish me very much by describing that beautiful thing as a beaker,” Dean Ingleworth complained. “I should have called it a bi-conical drinking-vessel or chalice—”

  “Poor old fella’s beer-mug, perhaps,” said Ugglesby-Gore, in a tone not wholly devoid of real feeling.

  “The king’s goblet,” said Miss Priscilla, pressing her thin fingers against her bosom, “the royal cup of lovely design—”

  Then, an astounding thing happened.

  While the others were looking at the beaker, Ellingham went on quietly and carefully picking away the earth with the blade of a clasp-knife. He was kneeling, but all at once he partly raised himself. I looked at him.

  What I saw filled me with horror.

  His eyes were fixed, not on the grave or on the group of people who were looking at the beaker, but on the slope of the hill below the barrow. I have never seen a more sudden or a more dreadful change come over a man’s countenance. His eyes were opened wide, his jaw fell, the lines of his face were corrugated by a spasm of deadly fear; for a second he was rigid, frozen, appalling. I could hardly believe that I was not myself the victim of some frightful delusion. Fred Ellingham was a man so controlled, so unemotional, a man of such cold, uncompromising intellect… I believe I cried out as I moved towards him.

  At the same time, three or four of the others observed that something was wrong.

  “Professor Ellingham!” cried Mr. Tuffle.

  But Ellingham raised his right hand and pointed at the green slope, thinly covered with gorse and bracken, which rolled below us down to the valley. His face relaxed. A shrill, hideous yell burst out of him: