The Man Within (11 page)

He shook his head. ‘No man in his senses would.’ He hesitated and added slowly, dwelling on the name with that puzzling mixture of love and hatred, ‘Except Carlyon.’

‘Well then,’ she said, ‘go to Lewes, go to the Assizes, bear your witness and you will have shown yourself to have more courage than they.’

‘But I haven’t,’ he said.

‘You hesitate and hesitate and then you are lost,’ she replied. ‘Can’t you ever shut your eyes and leap?’

‘No, no,’ Andrews said. He got to his feet and moved restlessly about the room. ‘I can’t. You are trying to drive me and I won’t be driven.’

‘I’m not driving you. Why should I? Is there nothing in you which would welcome the open?’

‘You don’t understand,’ he cried with a sudden fury. His sentimental melodramatic self, which longed for deep-breasted maternal protection, stood with its back to the wall and uttered the old cry with a sharper despair. For he knew that something in him was answering the appeal, and he was afraid. ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ he said.

‘But think,’ she said, her eyes following him in all his movements, ‘to escape from this…’

He stopped suddenly and turned directly to her. ‘This!’ he said. ‘But this is Paradise.’ He came a little nearer. ‘If I was to stop hesitating and leap,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘I could do better than go to Lewes.’

‘Do better?’ she repeated with a light trace of mockery.

‘Why do you always repeat words like that?’ he said angrily. ‘It’s maddening. You sit there cool, collected, at peace. Oh, I’d hate you if I didn’t love you.’

‘You are crazy,’ she said.

He came nearer. ‘Suppose I take your advice,’ he spoke angrily, as though he did indeed hate her, ‘not to hesitate any longer. I want you. Why shouldn’t I have you?’

Elizabeth laughed. ‘Because you will always hesitate,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried. I give you up.’

‘That’s why I won’t touch you, is it?’ Andrews’ breath rose into a sob, as he felt his last defences crumbling, and over them straddling a new and terrifying future. ‘You are
wrong
. I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll go to Lewes.’ The word Lewes coming so out of his mouth frightened him. He struck one more hopeless blow against the threatening future. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘I promise nothing else. I’ll go to Lewes and see. I don’t promise to go into court.’

Elizabeth gave a little sigh of weariness and rose from her chair. ‘You have a long walk before you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You must sleep.’ She watched him and the faint suspicion in her glance pleased him. He took it as a sign that she was already partly convinced. He grew suddenly proud and confident in his decision and was happier than he had been for many years. ‘I will sleep where I slept last night,’ he said.

She went to the window and pulled the curtain across it ‘The fog has gone,’ she said. ‘The sky is quite clear and I can see six stars.’ She opened the little door beside the fire-place and stood on the bottom step of the small flight of stairs.

‘Good night.’

‘Good night.’

ANDREWS WOKE TO
a surge of gold light. He lay for a little in unconsciousness of anything save warmth. Somewhere a long way outside his mind disturbing facts nibbled like a brood of mice. But he kept them on one side and with eyes fixed upon that golden stationary wave hypnotized himself into a vacancy of mind. Yet the mice must have continued their nibbling, for suddenly and overwhelmingly reality burst in upon his consciousness. I am leaving here, he thought, I have promised to go, and he thought of Lewes as a dark and terrifying enemy, lying in wait for him to trip him up and fling him backwards into death. But I need do no more than go to Lewes, he told himself. That is all I have promised. And he wondered, in that case, whether he could not break – evade he called it – his promise altogether. But then I can never come back, he said, and it seemed to him an overwhelming, an impossible loss to lose for ever Elizabeth – or rather the sound of her voice, which wrapped him in peace.

He got up and shook himself hopelessly, like a rumpled dog just escaped from a pond who knows his master intends to drive him back into the water many times more. I will go to Lewes, he thought, but I will leave again before the Assizes open. He tried to calculate what day of the month it was. He had dated his letter to the Shoreham Customs, he knew, on the third of February and a week passed before the betrayal was made absolute. On the night of the tenth they had tried to run a cargo, for the last time. Then this was the fourth day of his flight, and only a few days before the Assizes opened. He must not wait in Lewes long. Too many local people would come in to watch the smugglers’ fate – or triumph, as likely as not, with a local jury to
try
them. Every man is against me, he thought. None are on my side save outcasts and the hoard of strangers who will come from London. Judge, counsel, officers. Must I always stand alone on one side? And his heart protested against the necessity which drove him from his present shelter.

The room where Elizabeth and he had told their stories the previous night was empty. He looked round for some scrap of paper on which he could write his gratitude, but there was none, nor had he any pen or ink. He did not dare to go up to where she slept, feeling that if he saw her face again he could not leave her. And yet to go without a word or sign seemed impossible. He felt in his pockets. They were empty, save for some ancient crumbs, hard as shot, and his knife. He stared at his knife hesitatingly. His heart told him to leave it as a gift which might help her, a sign that he was grateful; his mind told him that very soon in Lewes he would need it. He opened the blade and stroked it. It was clean and sharp and on it, very roughly engraved, a schoolboy’s first experiment with acids, was his name. It’s my only weapon, he thought. It’s of more use to me than to her. What could she use it for but toasting and cutting bread? I shall be defenceless without it. Leave it for that very reason, his heart appealed. A sacrifice. But to his fingers running along the blade it was so comfortingly sharp.

I’ll leave nothing, he decided. After all she is driving me into this risk, and he moved to the door. Leaning in one corner beside it was the gun, with which she had overcome him. He remembered her laugh, ‘I haven’t an idea how to load it.’ Suppose that Carlyon – but Carlyon would do nothing against a woman. There could be no danger for her, and yet he felt uneasy. He returned with lagging, unwilling steps to the table, and suddenly, drawing the knife from his pocket, plunged it into the wood, so that it stood there quivering like an arrow. I can get another in Lewes, he told himself, and he shut the door of the cottage behind
him
. But it is far to Lewes, he thought, robbed suddenly of four sheltering walls, alone in a bare, chill, hostile world.

The morning was cold and sharp and sunny. The bare coppice at the edge of which the cottage stood was bathed in a slow yellow surge. Above it lay the down over which he had come two nights before in scurrying terror. His danger now was greater than ever, for was he not pledged at last to visit Lewes? And yet his fear was not so great. Before it had drowned reason. Now through contact with one firm spirit his reason was predominant. He knew that this was only for a time, that his full blinding cowardice would return, but he would make the most of this respite by deciding on his course of action. His quickest route to Lewes was by road, and quickness he desired. Like a runner in a relay race he wished to touch but the fringes of Lewes and retire, his duty fulfilled. The sooner he reached the town, the sooner he could escape. But though the road was the quickest route, he was very unwilling to trust to it. He imagined himself as a clear-cut conspicuous figure thrown up against a white, bare road, and behind every hedge the possibility of Carlyon or his two companions. No, by way of the downs was longer, but safer. There, if he could be seen, he could at least see others with equal clearness. And the down would take him by Ditchling Beacon and Harry’s Mount to the very threshold of Lewes. He could lie out on the last slope until dark came. He glanced at the sun with hate, his heart desirous of that dark.

On the slopes of the down the grass grew in long tufts, so that each foot that fell was clogged as though it had been plunged in treacle. When he reached the summit Andrews was out of breath and he lay down to rest. He wondered what hour it was. The sun seemed to indicate late morning, for as he faced inland it shone nearly full upon his back. We have both been tired, he thought, and have slept long, and he was glad that he had not wakened her. The down all around him was empty and refreshingly safe, and though
danger
might be lurking in the world below, it was dwarfed by distance. Somewhere twelve miles away lay Lewes, but for a little he need have no care of that. He was perched high up upon a safe instant of time and he clung hard to that instant, drowning all thought in mere sensation, the sight of the country unrolled like a coloured map below him, the feel of warmth creeping from neck to spine. In that long wash of sun, which left the moon an indistinct wraith in the transparent, fragile blue, lay a first hint of spring, and in the breeze, salt from the Channel, hidden from sight by yet another ridge of down, gorse-laden, prophesying green. There was no green yet in the coppice, which lay like a band of soft brown fur fringing the hill, but green crept cautiously, afraid still of an ambush from winter, into the flat ploughed fields below, advancing from pastures where small white sheep were grazing. Dotted across the distance were toy farms, which displayed how far from the isolation he had imagined was the cottage where Elizabeth slept. Along a white road a scarlet cart crawled like a ladybird along the rim of a leaf. The Surrey hills peered through a silver veil, as though they were an old man’s face, austere, curious and indestructibly chaste. A cock a mile away crowed with frosty clarity and a lamb bewildered and invisible cried aloud. The turf on which he lay was fresh with the previous rain and mist, yet crisp with salt from the sea.

At the sound of a horse behind him Andrews turned, his mind again harried by fear. There was no cause. Some unknown farmer from the lands below, riding with uncovered head, passed across the brow of Ditchling Beacon, the horse stepping high and delicately, in the manner of a great lady conscious of a crowd. With ears pricked it watched its rider out of the corner of one desirous eye, heart yearning for the gallop, and was gone. The olive green slopes lay bare once more to the spring, which came as Jove to Danae in a shower of gold. A mile of grass and thirty miles of sea
were
carried in the breeze down over Plumpton and Ditchling and on past Lindfield and Ardingly to fade only before that quiet, impassive silver veil. Save for the passing wind and the small dots of moving men and cattle safely far, the world was motionless. Above a round blue dewpond a singing bird floated in the air like a scrap of charred paper, too light to stir.

She will be awake now, he thought, and coming down the stairs into the kitchen. I wish I had stayed to thank her. Will she realize what the knife means? He watched the cottage intensely, and as though it were a signal of remembrance to him upon the down a puff of white smoke emerged from the single chimney, hung whole for a moment in the sky and then was broken into fragments. Some the sun caught, so that they seemed like a drift of birds, wheeling and flashing their white underwings. He found in the crevice of his mind, where childhood harboured, the faint memory of a pictured saint, a young girl with a pale, set face, round whose head a flock of doves turned and twisted. He rebuked the uneasiness which had made him leave his knife. She says there is a God, he thought, and no God could help but guard her. Yet what strange ideas of guarddianship gods had, for those who were most their own they often paid with death, as though the failure of life itself was not a branch of guardianship. Andrews instinctively stretched out his arms, as though he would gather the white birds to his breast, as though, if he had indeed been given the power, they would not have dissolved into the flecks of smoke which they were.

I would rather trust a devil to look after his own than a god, he thought, for there seemed to him nothing more final and irrevocable than death. It did not occur to him that Elizabeth’s death might be irrevocable only to him and his desire. Thinking of the devil, he thought too of the stubbled face of dead Mr Jennings. Perhaps he would guard her, as she believed, through the crude force of jealousy. If love
survived
the body, as church people believed, why not also jealousy, spilt like a bitter wine into the unhoused spirit? Keep her, he implored, till I return, not noticing the paradox of his appeal. He would return the next day or the day after, having fulfilled the letter of his promise.

It was hard to leave this point of the down, where he could watch the cottage. He wanted by the intensity of his gaze to pierce the walls, make a breach through which, even if he were still robbed of sight, the slow sound of her feet might come to him.

‘I will return,’ he said out loud, but the inner critic who had been still for so long roused himself as though at a challenge and taunted him. You coward, what use? What are you that she should look twice at you? At least a fool, he protested, who may be running himself into a trap for her. The mocker spoke suddenly as though in the heart itself, denuded for the once of reproach. Would she not be worthy of the full risk? Then if you come back you bring her something of value. Yes, but that ‘if’. There was the rub. I was born a coward, he protested, and I will live a coward. At least I have shown these fools that I must be reckoned with, and rising and turning his back on the cottage, he began to walk rapidly in the direction of Lewes, as though he would outpace an image moving at his side of a girl’s face set between candles, the mouth twisted with the wry taste of a betrayal.

Yet his quick walk soon slackened, for the day was warm, and he was in no hurry to reach Lewes. He paused here to watch the valley and the light on a small squat church, there to drink with a herd of black and white cows at a dewpond on the downs, bright blue from the reflected sky as though it were part of an illuminated Missal. The cows raised their soft eyes, too drowsy for suspicion, and then made room for him. They were contented and at peace and so for a short while was he. But at every reiterated summit on the downs his heart filled with apprehension,
lest
below him he should see the object of his journey, and filled again with blessed relief as he gazed before him at the inevitable slopes rising in the distance to yet another crest. At the edge of one such summit he heard voices and dropped cautiously into a narrow gorge of chalk, the cold walls on either side gleaming like blue icicles. The voices, however, belonged only to two dark-skinned gipsy youths, trotting intently over the rise followed by a couple of flippant black puppies, who journeyed over each other and rolled in the grass mocking their master’s serious purpose. Andrews asked the boys whether he was on the right way to Lewes, and they nodded their heads, watching him with the same dark drowsy peace as had the cattle. Then, like all else, they left him to comforting solitude. The minutes and the hours passed him almost unnoticed. He even forgot his fear of reaching the final summit, so inevitable the relief seemed. He was aware only of the warm day dying when he was no longer able to rest so long upon the slopes before chill gripped him.