Frank made no answer. He went to the hedge and drew out a long supple twig of hazel, stripped it of its leaves, and once more tried, with it, to tie up his parcel. But the angle was too acute, and just as the twig tightened satisfactorily it snapped, and this time the razor slid out sideways into a single minute puddle that lay on the path.
The Major snorted in mirthful impatience.
"But--"
"Kindly let me alone," said Frank icily. "The thing"s got to go like this, or not at all."
He drew out the razor from the puddle, opened it and dried the blade on his sleeve. During the process Gertie moved suddenly, and he looked up.
When he looked down again be perceived that he had slit a neat slice into the cloth of his jacket.
He remained quite still for one moment. Then he sat down on the bank, and examined the twine once more.
The Major began to make slightly offensive comments. Then Frank looked up.
"You can go to h.e.l.l!" he said quite softly, "or anywhere else you like.
But I"m going to do up the bundle in my way and not yours."
Now that is a sort of parable. It really happened, for it was reported to a witness by Frank himself exactly as I have told it, and it seems to me a very good little symbol of his state of mind. It is quite indefensible, of course--and especially his regrettable language that closed the interview; but it gives a pleasant little glimpse, I think, of Frank"s character just now, in section. The things had to go in a certain way: he saw no adequate reason to change that way, and ultimately, of course, the twine held. It must have been a great satisfaction to him.
(III)
It seems that Frank must have been allowed just now to sample several different kinds of moods, for he had a very different kind of awakening a day or two later.
They had come to some piece of open country that I am unable to identify, and for some reason or other determined to spend the night out of doors. There was a copse a hundred yards away from the road, and in the copse a couple of small shelters built, probably, for wood-pigeon shooting. The Major and Gertie took possession of one, and Frank of the other, after they had supped in the dark under the beeches.
Frank slept deeply and well, half waking once, however, at that strange moment of the night when the earth turns and sighs in her sleep, when every cow gets up and lies down again. He was conscious of a shrill crowing, thin as a bugle, from some farm-yard out of sight; then he turned over and slept again.
When he awoke it was daylight. He lay on his back looking at the network of twigs overhead, the beech leaves beyond, and the sky visible only in glimpses--feeling extremely awake and extremely content. Certainly he was a little stiff when he moved, but there was a kind of interior contentment that caused that not to matter.
After a minute or two he sat up, felt about for his shoes and slipped them on. Then he unwound the wrapping about his neck, and crept out of the shelter.
It was that strange pause before the dawn when the light has broadened so far as to extinguish the stars, and to bring out all the colors of earth into a cold deliberate kind of tint. Everything was absolutely motionless about him as he went under the trees and came out above the wide park-land of which the copse was a sort of barrier. The dew lay soaking and thick on the gra.s.s slopes, but there was not yet such light as to bring out its sparkle; and everywhere, dotted on the green before him, sat hundreds of rabbits, the nearest not twenty yards away.
The silence and the solemnity of the whole seemed to him extraordinary.
There was not a leaf that stirred--each hung as if cut of steel; there was not a bird which chirped nor a distant c.o.c.k that crew; the rabbits eyed him unafraid in this hour of truce.
It seemed to him like some vast stage on to which he had wandered unexpectedly. The performance of the day before had been played to an end, the night scene-shifting was finished, and the players of the new eternal drama were not yet come. An hour hence they would be all about: the sounds would begin again; men would cross the field-paths, birds would be busy; the wind would awake and the ceaseless whisper of leaves answer its talking. But at present the stage was clear-swept, washed, clean and silent.
It was the solemnity then that impressed him most--solemnity and an air of expectation. Yet it was not mere expectation. There was a suggestion of the fundamental and the normal, as if perhaps movement and sound were, after all, no better than interruptions; as if this fixed poise of nature were something complete in itself; as if these trees hung out their leaves to listen to something that they could actually hear, as if these motionless creatures of the woodland were looking upon something that they could actually see; as if there were some great secret actually present and displayed in dead silence and invisibility before those only who possessed the senses necessary to perceive it.
It was odd to regard life from this standpoint--to look back upon the days and their incidents that were past, forward upon the days and incidents to come. Again it was possible for Frank to look upon these things as an outsider and a deliberate critic--as he had done in the stuffy room of the lodging-house in the town. Yet now, though he was again an outsider, though he was again out of the whirl of actual living, he seemed to be looking at things--staring out, as he was, almost unseeingly at the gra.s.s slopes before him--from exactly the opposite side. Then, they had seemed to him the only realities, these tangible physical things, and all else illusion: now it was the physical things that were illusive, and something else that was real. Once again the two elements of life lay detached--matter and spirit; but it was as obviously now spirit that was the reality as it had been matter a day or two before. It was obviously absurd to regard these outward things on which he looked as anything but a frame of something completely different. They were too silent, too still, too little self-sufficient to be complete in themselves. Something solid lay embraced within them....
So, then, he stared and ruminated, scarcely perceiving that he thought, so intensely conscious was he of that of which he thought. It was not that he understood anything of that on which he looked; he was but aware that there was something to be understood. And the trees hung rigid above him, and the clear blue sky still a hard stone beyond them, not yet flushed with dawn; and the gra.s.s lay before him, contracted, it seemed, with cold, and every blade soaked in wet; and the silence was profound....
Then a c.o.c.k crew, a mile away, a thin, brazen cry; a rabbit sat up, then crouched and bolted, and the spell faded like a mist.
Frank turned and walked back under the trees, to see if the Major was awake.
CHAPTER V
(I)
We are arrived now at one of those few deplorable incidents in Frank"s career, against which there is no defense. And the painful thing about it is that Frank never seemed to think that it required any defense. He shows no penitence for it in his diary: and yet moralists are united in telling us that we must never do evil that good may come. It is only, paralleled by his rash action in leaving Cambridge in defiance of all advice and good sense; so far, that is to say, as a legally permissible act, however foolish, can be paralleled by one of actual crime.
Moralists, probably, would tell us, in fact, that the first led inevitably to the second.
It fell out in this way.
Once or twice in his travels with the Major he had been haunted by an uncomfortable suspicion that this or that contribution that the warrior made to their common table had not been come by honestly. When a gentleman, known to possess no more than tenpence, and with a predilection to drink, leaves the shelter of a small copse; let us say, at seven o"clock, and reappears, rather breathless, forty minutes later with a newly-plucked fowl--or even with a fowl not plucked at all, and still warm, or with half a dozen eggs; and, in addition, issues out again later in the evening and returns with a strong smell of spirits and a watery eye--it seems a little doubtful as to whether he has been scrupulously honest. In cases of this kind Frank persevered in making some excuse for not joining in the festivity: he put it to himself as being a matter of pride; but it is hard to understand that it was simply that in a young man who made no scruple of begging in cases of necessity. However, there it was, and even the Major, who began by protesting, ended by acquiescing.
They were somewhere in the neighborhood of Market Weighton when the thing happened--I cannot identify the exact spot. The situation was as follows:
They had secured an excellent barn for their night"s lodging--facing on the road on the outskirts of a village. Behind them were, the farm buildings, and the farmer"s household gone to bed. The sun had set and it was dark. They had supped sparingly, of necessity, and had finished every morsel of food. (Frank had even found himself mechanically gathering up crumbs on a wet finger.) They had had a bad week of it; the corn was not yet ready for cutting, and there seemed no work anywhere for honest men. The Major"s gloom had become terrible; he had even made remarks upon a choice between a workhouse and a razor. He had got up after supper and turned his waistcoat pockets inside out to secure the last possible grains of tobacco, and had smoked about a quarter of a pipeful gathered in this way without uttering one word. He had then uttered a short string of them, had seized his cap and disappeared.
Frank, too, was even more heavy and depressed than usual. The last shreds of romance were gone from his adventure long ago, and yet his obstinacy held firm. But he found he could not talk much. He watched Gertie listlessly as she, listless too, began to spread out nondescript garments to make a bed in the corner. He hardly spoke to her, nor she to him.
He was beginning to feel sleepy, when he heard rather hurried steps, as of one trying to run on tiptoe, coming up the lane, and an instant later in popped the Major.
"Put out that d.a.m.ned light!" he whispered sharply.
The candle end went out with the swiftness of thought.
"What"s up?" Frank roused himself to ask. There had been a strenuous look about the face seen an instant before that interested him.
There was dead silence. Gertie seemed frozen into motionlessness in her corner, almost as if she had had experience of this kind of thing before. Frank listened with all his ears; it was useless to stare into the dark: here in this barn the blackness was complete.
At first there was no sound at all, except a very soft occasional sc.r.a.pe of a boot-nail that betokened that the Major was seeking cover somewhere. Then, so suddenly that he started all over, Frank felt a hand on his arm and smelt a tobacco-laden breath. (Alas! there had been no drink to-night.)
"See here, Frankie, my boy.... I ... I"ve got the thing on me.... What shall I do with it?... It"s no good chucking it away: they"d find it."
"Got what?" whispered Frank.
"There was a kid coming along ... she had a tin of something ... I don"t even know what it is.... And ... and she screamed out and someone ran out. But they couldn"t spot me; it was too dark."
"Hush!" whispered Frank sharply, and the hand tightened on his arm. But it was only a rat somewhere in the roof.