Wood and Stone (38 page)

The engine emitted a portentious puff of smoke, and the train began to move. Luke walked by the side of his friend’s window, his hand on the sash.

“You think it is inadvisable to thwart my brother, then,” he said, “in any way at all. You think I must humour him. You are afraid if I don’t—” His walk was of necessity quickened into a run.

“It’s a long story, dearie, a long story. But I had the privilege under God Almighty of knowing your blessed mother when she was called, and I tell you it makes my heart ache to see James going along the same road as—”

Her voice was extinguished by the noise of wheels and steam. Luke, exhausted, was compelled to relax his hold. The rest of the carriages passed him with accumulated speed and he watched the train
disappear
. In his excitement he had advanced far
beyond
the limits of the platform. He found himself
standing in a clump of yellow rag-wort, just behind his own stone-cutter’s shed.

He gazed up the track, along which the tantalizing lady had been so inexorably snatched away. The rails had a dull whitish glitter but their look was bleak and grim. They suggested, in their narrow merciless perspective, cutting the pastures in twain, the presence of some remorseless mechanical Will carving its purpose, blindly and pitilessly, out of the innocent waywardness of thoughtless living things.

An immense and indefinable foreboding passed, like the insertion of a cold, dead finger, through the heart of the young man. Fantastic and terrible images pursued one another through his agitated brain. He saw his brother lying submerged in Hullaway Pond, while a group of frightened
children
stood, in white pinafores, stared at him with gaping mouths. He saw himself arriving upon this scene. He even went so far as to repeat to himself the sort of cry that such a sight might naturally draw from his lips, his insatiable dramatic sense making use, in this way, of his very panic, to project its irrepressible puppet-show. His brother’s words, “Young man, I will never forgive you for this,” rose luridly before him. He saw them written along the edge of a certain dark cloud which hung
threateningly
over the Hullaway horizon. He felt precisely what he would feel when he saw them—luminously phosphorescent—in the indescribable mud and
greenish
weeds that surrounded his brother’s dead face. A sickening sense of loss and emptiness went
shivering
through him. He felt as though nothing in the
world was of the least importance except the life of James Andersen.

With hurried steps he re-crossed the line, re-passed the turn-stile, and began following the direction taken by his brother just two hours before. Never had the road to Hullaway seemed so long!

Half-way there, where the road took a devious turn, he left it, and entering the fields again, followed a vaguely outlined foot-path. This also betraying him, or seeming to betray him, by its departure from the straight route, he began crossing the
meadows
with feverish directness, climbing over hedges and ditches with the desperate pre-occupation of one pursued by invisible pursuers. The expression upon his face, as he hurried forward in this manner, was the expression of a man who has everything he values at stake. A casual acquaintance would never have supposed that the equable countenance of Luke
Andersen
had the power to look so haggard, so drawn, so troubled. He struck the road again less than half a mile from his destination. Why he was so certain that Hullaway was the spot he sought, he could hardly have explained. It was, however, one of his own favourite walks on rainless evenings and Sunday afternoons, and quite recently he had several times persuaded his brother to accompany him. He himself was wont to haunt the place and its
surroundings
, because of the fact that, about a mile to the west of it, there stood an isolated glove-factory to which certain of the Nevilton girls were accustomed to make their way across the field-paths.

Hullaway village was a very small place,
considerably
more remote from the world than Nevilton, and
attainable only by narrow lanes. The centre of it was the great muddy stagnant pond which now so dominated Luke’s alarmed imagination. Near the pond was a group of elms, of immense antiquity,—many of them mere stumps of trees,—but all of them possessed of wide-spreading prominent roots, and deeply indented hollow trunks worn as smooth as ancient household furniture, by the constant fumbling and scrambling of generations of Hullaway children.

The only other objects of interest in the place, were a small, unobtrusive church, built, like everything else in the neighborhood, of Leonian stone, and an ancient farm-house surrounded by a high manorial wall. Beneath one of the Hullaway Elms stood an interesting relic of a ruder age, in the shape of some well-worn stocks, now as pleasant a seat for rural gossips as they were formerly an unpleasant pillory for rural malefactors.

As Luke Andersen approached this familiar spot he observed with a certain vague irritation the
well-known
figure of one of his most recent Nevilton enchantresses. The girl was no other, in fact, than that shy companion of Annie Bristow who had been amusing herself with them in the Fountain Square on the occasion of Mr. Clavering’s ill-timed
intervention
. At this moment she was sauntering
negligently
along, on a high-raised path of narrow paved flag-stones, such paths being a peculiarity of
Hullaway
, due to the prevalence of heavy autumn floods.

The girl was evidently bound for the glove-factory, for she swung a large bundle as she walked, resting it idly every now and then, on any available wall or
rail or close-cut hedge, along which she passed. She was an attractive figure, tall, willowy, and lithe, and she walked in that lingering, swaying voluptuous manner which gives to the movements of maidens of her type a sort of provocative challenge. Luke,
advancing
along the road behind her, caught himself admiring, in spite of his intense preoccupation, the alluring swing of her walk and the captivating lines of her graceful person.

The moment was approaching that he had so
fantastically
dreaded, the moment of his first glance at Hullaway Great Pond. He was already relieved to see no signs of anything unusual in the air of the place,—but the imaged vision of his brother’s drowned body still hovered before him, and that fatal “I’ll never forgive you for this!” still rang in his ears.

His mind all this while was working with
extraordinary
rapidity and he was fully conscious of the grotesque irrelevance of this lapse into the ingrained habit of wanton admiration. Quickly, in a flash of lightning, he reviewed all his amorous adventures and his frivolous philanderings. How empty, how bleak, how impossible, all such pleasures seemed, without the dark stooping figure of this companion of his soul as their taciturn background! He looked at Phyllis Santon with a sudden savage resolution, and made a quaint sort of vow in the depths of his heart.

“I’ll never speak to the wench again or look at her again,” he said to himself, “if I find Daddy Jim safe and sound, and if he forgives me!”

He hurried past her, almost at a run, and arrived at the centre of Hullaway. There was the Great
Pond, with its low white-washed stone parapet. There were the ancient elm-trees and the stocks. There also were the white-pinafored infants playing in the hollow aperture of the oldest among the trees. But the slimy surface of the water was utterly undisturbed save by two or three assiduous ducks who at intervals plunged beneath it.

He drew an immense sigh of relief and glanced casually round. Phyllis had not failed to perceive him. With a shy little friendly smile she advanced towards him. His vow was already in some danger. He waved her a hasty greeting but did not take her hand.

“You’d better put yourself into the stocks,” he said, covering with a smile the brutality of his neglect, “until I come back! I have to find James.”

Leaving her standing in mute consternation, he rushed off to the churchyard on the further side of the little common. There was a certain spot here, under the shelter of the Manor wall, where Luke and his brother had spent several delicious afternoons, moralizing upon the quaint epitaphs around them, and smoking cigarettes. Luke felt as if he were almost sure to find James stretched out at length before a certain old tombstone whose queer appeal to the casual intruder had always especially attracted him. Both brothers had a philosophical mania for these sepulchral places, and the Hullaway graveyard was even more congenial to their spirit than the Nevilton one, perhaps because this latter was so dominatingly possessed by their own dead.

Luke entered the enclosure through a wide-open wooden gate and glanced quickly round him. There
was the Manor wall, as mellow and sheltering as ever, even on such a day of clouds. There was their favourite tombstone, with its long inscription to the defunct seignorial house. But of James Andersen there was not the remotest sign.

Where the devil had his angry brother gone? Luke’s passionate anxiety began to give place to a certain indignant reaction. Why were people so ridiculous? These volcanic outbursts of ungoverned emotion on trifling occasions were just the things that spoiled the harmony and serenity of life. Where, on earth, could James have slipped off to? He remembered that they had more than once gone together to the King’s Arms—the unpretentious Hullaway tavern. It was just within the bounds of possibility that the wanderer, finding their other haunts chill and unappealing, had taken refuge there.

He recrossed the common, waved his hand to Phyllis, who seemed to have taken his speech quite seriously and was patiently seated on the stocks, and made his way hurriedly to the little inn.

Yes—there, ensconced in a corner of the high settle, with a half-finished tankard of ale by his side, was his errant brother.

James rose at once to greet him, showing complete friendliness, and very small surprise. He seemed to have been drinking more than his wont, however, for he immediately sank back again into his corner, and regarded his brother with a queer absent-minded look.

Luke ordered a glass of cider and sat down close to him on the settle.

“I am sorry,” he whispered, laying his hand on his brother’s knee. “I didn’t mean to annoy you. What you said was quite true. I treated Annie very badly. And Ninsy is altogether different. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Daddy Jim?”

James Andersen pressed his hand. “It’s nothing,” he said in rather a thick voice. “It’s like everything else, it’s nothing. I was a fool. I am still a fool. But it’s better to be a fool than to be dead, isn’t it? Or am I talking nonsense?”

“As long as you’re not angry with me any longer,” answered Luke eagerly, “I don’t care how you talk!”

“I went to the churchyard—to our old place—you know,” went on his brother. “I stayed nearly an hour there—or was it more? Perhaps it was more. I stayed so long, anyway, that I nearly went to sleep. I think I must have gone to sleep!” he added, after a moment’s pause.

“I expect you were tired,” remarked Luke rather weakly, feeling for some reason or other, a strange sense of disquietude.

“Tired?” exclaimed the recumbent man, “why should I be tired?” He raised himself up with a jerk, and finishing his glass, set it down with meticulous care upon the ground beside him.

Luke noticed, with an uncomfortable sense, of something not quite usual in his manner, that every movement he made and every word he spoke seemed the result of a laborious and conscious effort—like the effort of one in incomplete control of his sensory nerves.

“What shall we do now?” said Luke with an air of ease and indifference. “Do you feel like strolling
back to Nevilton, or shall we make a day of it and go on to Roger-Town Ferry and have dinner there?”

James gave vent to a curiously unpleasant laugh. “You go, my dear, “You he said,” and leave me where I am.”

Luke began to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. He once more laid his hand caressingly on his brother’s knee. “You have really forgiven me?” he pleaded. “Really and truly?”

James Andersen had again sunk back into a
semicomatose
state in his corner. “Forgive?” he
muttered
, as though he found difficulty in understanding the meaning of the word, “forgive? I tell you it’s nothing.”

He was silent, and then, in a still more drowsy murmur, he uttered the word “Nothing” three or four times. Soon after this he closed his eyes and relapsed into a deep slumber.

“Better leave ’un as ’un be,” remarked the
landlord
to Luke. “I’ve had my eye on ’un for this last ’arf hour. ’A do seem mazed-like, looks so. Let ’un bide where ’un be, master. These be wonderful rumbly days for a man’s head. ’Taint what ’ee’s ’ad, you understand; to my thinking, ’tis these
thunder
-shocks wot ’ave worrited ’im.”

Luke nodded at the man, and standing up
surveyed
his brother gravely. It certainly looked as if James was settled in his corner for the rest of the morning. Luke wondered if it would be best to let him remain where he was, and sleep off his coma, or to rouse him and try and persuade him to return home. He decided to take the landlord’s advice.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll just leave him for a
while to recover himself. You’ll keep an eye to him, won’t you, Mr. Titley? I’ll just wander round a bit, and come back. Maybe if he doesn’t want to go home to dinner, we’ll have a bite of something here with you.”

Mr. Titley promised not to let his guest out of his sight. “I know what these thunder-shocks be,” he said. “Don’t you worry, mister. You’ll find ’un wonderful reasonable along of an hour or so. ’Tis the weather wot ’ave him floored ’im. The liquor ’ee’s put down wouldn’t hurt a cat.”

Luke threw an affectionate glance at his brother’s reclining figure and went out. The reaction from his exaggerated anxiety left him listless and unnerved. He walked slowly across the green, towards the group of elms.

It was now past noon and the small children who had been loitering under the trees had been carried off to their mid-day meal. The place seemed
entirely
deserted, except for the voracious ducks in the mud of the Great Pond. He fancied at first that Phyllis Santon had disappeared with the children, and a queer feeling of disappointment descended upon him. He would have liked at least to have had the opportunity of
refusing
himself the pleasure of
talking
to her! He approached the enormous elm under which stood the stocks. Ah! She was still there then, his little Nevilton acquaintance. He had not seen her sooner, because she was seated on the lowest roots of the tree, her knees against the stocks
themselves
.