Текст книги "Rogue Male "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

I was magnificently fit as a result of my life in the open and the brisk autumn air. I remember how easily my muscles answered the call I made on them. By God, in all this immobility and carrion thought it does me good to think of the man I was!

I intended to lie still wherever there was a scrap of not too obvious cover and to let the hunt pass me; but I didn’t reckon on a young and active inspector who shed his overcoat and seemed able to do the quarter-mile in well under sixty seconds. As we neared the bottom of the slope, I had no chance of playing hide-and-seek in the gorse or vanishing into a hedge. The lead of a hundred and fifty yards which, in the gathering dusk, I had considered ample for my purpose had been reduced to fifty.

I had to keep running—either for a gate that led into another open field, or a gate beyond which I saw a muddy farm-track with water faintly gleaming in the deep hoof-marks. I chose the mud, and vaulted the gate into eighteen inches of it. I was bogged, but so would he be, and then endurance could count; he wouldn’t be able to give me any more of his cinder-track stuff. I pounded along the track, spattering as much mud as a horse over myself and the hedges. He was now twenty yards behind, and wasting his breath by yelling at me to stop and come quietly.

While he was still in the wet clay, and the rest of the police had just entered it, I pulled out on to hard surface. The wall of a farmhouse loomed up ahead; it was built in the usual shape of an E without the centre bar, the house at the back, the barns forming the two wings. It seemed an excellent place for the police to surround and search; they would be kept busy for the next few hours, and the cordon between Lyme Regis and Beaminster, through which I had to pass, would be relaxed.

I looked back. The inspector had dropped back a little; the rest of the hunt I could hear plunging and cursing in the mud. I put on a spurt and dashed round the lower bar of the E. Knowing the general layout of English farms, I was sure that my wanted patch of not too obvious cover would be right at the corner, and it was. I dropped flat on my face in a pattern of mounds and shadows. I couldn’t see myself of what they consisted. My head landed in a manure heap with a smell of disinfectant—they had probably been dosing the sheep for worms—and my elbow on an old millstone; there were hurdles and firewood; the dominating shadow was that of an old mounting-block.

The inspector raced round the corner after me and into the open barns, flashing his light on the carts, the piles of fodder and the cider barrels. As soon as he passed me, I shot out of the yard, crouching and silent, and dropped against the outer wall. I hadn’t any luck in minor matters. This time I put my face in a patch of nettles.

The police, a full half-minute behind us, dashed into the yard, rallying to their inspector. He was shouting to them to come on boys, that he had the beggar cornered. The farm and its dogs woke up to the fact that there was a criminal in their midst, and I left the police to their search; it was probably long and exhausting, for there was not, from their point of view, the remotest possibility of my escaping from the three-sided trap into which I had run.

I had no intention of going home. There could be no peace for me in the lane until I had laid a false scent and knew that the police were following it to the exclusion of all others.

First: I had to make a false hiding-place and satisfy the police that there I had lived, so that they wouldn’t do too thorough a search between Beaminster and Lyme Regis.

Second: I must persuade the police that I had left the district for good.

I followed the main road, along which I had come in the bus, back towards Lyme Regis. I say, I followed it—I had to, since I wasn’t sure of my direction in the dark—but I didn’t walk on it. I moved parallel, climbing a fence or forcing a hedge about every two hundred yards for three solid miles. It’s a major feat of acrobatics to follow a main road without ever setting foot on it, and I began to feel infernally tired.

The high ground to the east of Beaminster, where a new den had to be faked, was twenty miles away. I decided to jump a lorry on the steep hill between Lyme Regis and Charmouth, where I could be pretty sure of getting a lift unknown to the driver.

A mile or so outside the town, I cut down into a valley and up the other side towards the steep hairpin bend where heavy traffic had to slow to walking-pace. I thought this an ingenious and original scheme, but the police, more mechanically-minded than myself, had thought of it already. At the steepest part of the road was a sergeant with a bicycle, keeping careful watch.

I cursed him heartily and silently, for now I had to go down again to the bottom of the valley, draw him off, and return to the road. My knees were very heavy, but there was nothing else for it. I stood in a little copse at the bottom and started yelling bloody murder in a terrified soprano—‘Help!’ and ‘Let me go!’ and ‘God, won’t anybody come!’ and then a succession of hysterical screams that were horrible to hear and quite false. The screams of a terrified woman are rhythmical and wholly unnatural, and had I imitated them correctly the sergeant would have thought me a ghost or some fool yodelling.

I heard the whine of brakes hastily applied, and several dim figures ran down into the valley as I ran up. I peered over the hedge. The sergeant had gone. A grocer’s van and a sports car stood empty by the side of the road. I gave up my original idea of boarding a lorry and took the sports car. I reckoned that I should have the safe use of it for at least twenty-five minutes—ten minutes before the party gave up their search of the wooded bottom, five minutes before they could reach a telephone, and ten more minutes before patrols and police cars could be warned.

Over my head and round my beard I wrapped my muffler. Then I pulled out in front of a noisy milk truck that was banging up the hill, in case the owner should recognize the engine of his own car. It was a fine car. I did the nine twisting miles to Bridport in eleven minutes and ten miles along the Dorchester road in ten minutes. I hated that speed at the time, and I’m ashamed of it. No driver has a right to average more than forty; if he wants to terrify his fellows there are always a few wars going on, and either side will be glad to let him indulge his pleasure and get some healthy exercise at the same time.

Three miles from Dorchester I turned to the left and abandoned the car in a neglected footpath, no wider than itself, between high hedges. I stuck ten pounds in the owner’s licence with pencilled apologies (written in block capitals with my left hand) and my sincere hope that the notes would cover his night’s lodgings and any incidental loss.

It was now midnight. I crossed the down, slunk unseen round a village and entered the Sydling Valley, which, by the map, appeared to be as remote a dead-end as any in Dorset. I spent the rest of the night in a covered stack, sleeping warmly and soundly between the hay and the corrugated iron. The chances of the police finding the car till daylight were negligible.

After breakfast of blackberries, I struck north along the watershed. There was a main road a quarter of a mile to the west. I watched the posting of constables at two crossings. Down in the valley a police car was racing towards Sydling. They made no attempt to watch the grass tracks, being convinced, I think, that criminals from London never go far from roads. No doubt Scotland Yard had exact statistics showing what my next move would be. My theft of a car had put me into the proper gangster pigeon-hole—from their point of view, a blatant, self-advertising gangster.

The downs on both sides of the Sydling Valley were country after my own heart: patches of gorse and patches of woodland, connected by straggling hedges which gave me cover from the occasional shepherd or farmer but were not thick enough to compel me to climb them. I assumed that all high ground had been picqueted and reckoned—unnecessarily, I expect—on field-glasses as well as eyes.

The valley ended in a great bowl of turf and woodland, crossed by no road, and two miles from the village. Dry bottoms ran up from the head of the valley like the sticks of a fan. In any one of them I might very reasonably have been camping since September.

That which I chose had a wood of hazel on one side and of oak on the other. Between them the brown bracken grew waist high, and through the bracken ran a ride of turf upon which the rabbits were feeding and playing. The glade smelt of fox, turf, and rabbit, the sweet musk that lingers in dry valleys where the dew is heavy and the water flows a few feet underground. The only signs of humanity were two ruined cottages, some bundles of cut hazel rods, and a few cartridge cases scattered about the turf.

On the green track that led to the cottages tall thistles grew unbroken, showing that few ever passed that way. The gardens had been swamped by wild vegetation, but an apple-tree was bearing fruit in spite of the bramble and ivy which grabbed at the low, heavily-laden branches. That invaded tree and garden reminded me of the tropics.

The cottages were roofless, but in one was a hearth that ran two feet back into the thick masonry. I built a rough wall of fallen stone around it, and succeeded in making a fairly convincing nest for a fugitive, drier and more airy than my own but not so safe. While I was working I saw no one but a farmer riding through the bracken on the opposite ridge. I knew what he was looking for—a cow that had just calved. I had run across her earlier in the day, and had been encouraged by this sure sign that the farm was large and full of cover.

When night fell I lit a fire, piling it fiercely up the chimney so that the ash and soot would appear the result of many fires. While it burned I lay in the hazel wood, in case anyone should be attracted by the light and smoke. Then I sat over the ashes dozing and shivering till dawn. I was still wearing my town suit, inadequate for the cold and mist of an October night.

It was hard to make the place look as if I had lived there for weeks. I distributed widely and messily the corpse of a rabbit that was polluting the atmosphere a little way up the valley. I fouled and trampled the interior of the cottage, stripped the apple-tree, and strewed apple-cores and nutshells over the ground. A pile of feathers from a wood-pigeon and a rook provided further evidence of my diet. Plucking the ancient remains of a hawk’s dinner was the nastiest job of all.

I spent the day sitting in the bracken and waiting for the police, but they refused to find me. Possibly they thought that I had made for the coast. There was, after all, no earthly reason why I should be in the Sydling Valley more than anywhere else. I put the night to good use. First I collected a dozen empty tins from a rubbish heap and piled them in a corner of the cottage; then I went down to sleeping Sydling and did a smash-and-grab raid on the village shop. My objects were to draw the attention of those obstinate police, and to get hold of some dried fish. In this sporting country some damned fool was sure to try bloodhounds on my scent.

In the few seconds at my disposal I couldn’t find any kippers or bloaters, but I did get four tins of sardines and a small bag of fertilizer. I raced for the downs while the whole village squawked and muttered and slammed its doors. It was probably the first time in all the history of Sydling that a sudden noise had been heard at night.

As soon as I was back in my cottage I pounded the sardines and fertilizer together, tied up the mixture in the bag, and rubbed the corner of the hearth where I had sat and the wall I had built. Trailing the bag on the end of a string, I laid a drag through the hazels, over the heather on the hilltop, round the oak wood, and into the bracken overlooking the cottage. There I remained and got some sleep.

In spite of all the assistance I had given them it was nearly midday before the police discovered the cottages. They moved around in them as respectfully as in church, dusting all likely surfaces for finger-prints. There weren’t any. I had never taken off my gloves. They must have thought they were dealing with an experienced criminal.

Half an hour later a police car came bumping over the turf and decanted an old friend of mine into the cottages. I had quite forgotten that he was now Chief Constable of Dorset. If he had looked closely at those feathers he would have seen at once that a hawk, not a man, had done the killing; but naturally he was leaving the criminology to Scotland Yard, and they weren’t likely to go into the fine point of whether the birds had met their death through the plumage of back or breast.

The dry bottom began to look like a meet of the Cattistock. The couple of bloodhounds that I had expected turned up, towing a bloodthirsty maiden lady in their wake. She was encouraging them with yawps and had feet so massive that I could see them clearly at two hundred yards—great brogued boats navigating a green sea. She was followed by half the village of Sydling and a sprinkling of local gentry. Two fellows had turned out on horseback. I felt they should have paid me the compliment of pink coats.

Away went the bloodhounds on the trail of the fertilized sardines, and away I went too; I had a good half hour’s law while they followed my bag through the hazels and heather. I crossed the main road—a hasty dash from ditch to ditch while the constable on watch was occupied with the distant beauty of the sea—and slid along the hedges into a great headland of gorse above Cattistock. There I wove so complicated a pattern that boat-footed Artemis must have thought her long-eared darlings were on the line of a hare. I skirted Cattistock and heard their lovely carillon most appropriately chime ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ at my passage, followed by ‘Lead, Kindly Light’. It was half-past five and dusk was falling. I waded into the Frome, passed under the Great Western Railway, and paddled upstream for a mile or so, taking cover in the rushes whenever there was anyone to see me. Then I buried the sardines in the gravel at the bottom of the river, and proceeded under my own scent.

I have not the faintest idea what hounds can or cannot do on the trail of a man. I doubt if they could have run on my true scent from the cottages to my lane, but I had to guard against the possibility. Looking back on those two days, it cheers me to see the healthy insolence in all I did.

I moved slowly westwards, following the lanes but taking no risks—slowly, deliberately slowly, in the technique that I have developed since I became an outlaw. It was nearly four in the morning when I swung myself on to the elm branch that did duty as my front door, and climbed down into the lane. I felt Asmodeus brush against my legs but I could not see him in that safe pit of blackness. That I consider darkness safety sets me, in itself alone, apart from my fellows. Darkness is safety only on condition that all one’s enemies are human.

I ate a tremendous breakfast of beef and oatmeal, and set aside my town suit to be made into bags and lashings—all it was now good for. I was relieved to be done with it; it reminded me too forcibly of the newspapers’ well-dressed man. Then I slipped into my bag, unwearing, damp-proof citadel of luxury, and slept till nightfall.

When I awoke I felt sufficiently strong and rested to attempt the second feint: to convince the police that I had left the country for good. This was rash, but necessary. I still think it was necessary. If I hadn’t gone the bicycle would be in the lane, and the evidence of my presence here a deal stronger than it is.

By the light of two candles—for the battery of the headlamp had run down—I turned to the unholy job of reassembling the tandem. It was after midnight before I had the machine, entire and unpunctured, clear of the lane, and the thorns replaced in a sufficiently forbidding pattern.

I dressed myself in the warmest of my working clothes, tearing off all distinguishing marks and the maker’s name. I put a flask of whisky in my inside-breast-pocket, and took plenty of food. I could be away for days without worrying. Even the ventilation hole was no longer suspicious, for Asmodeus used it when the door was jammed home and had given the entrance the proper sandy, claw-worn look. I think he always treated the den as his headquarters in my absence, but, being a cleanly cat, he never left a sign of his tenancy.

I pedalled cautiously through the lanes of the Marshwood Vale and up into the hills beyond. The by-roads were empty. Before crossing any main road I put the bicycle in the hedge and explored on foot and belly. Once I was nearly caught. I crawled almost into a constable whom I mistook, as he towered above me, for a tree-stump. It was the fault of the massive overcoat. The same error, I believe, is frequently made by dogs.

By dawn I was past Crewkerne and well into Somerset. It was now time to let myself be seen and to put the police on a trail that obviously led north to Bristol or some little port on the Bristol Channel. I shot through two scattered villages, where I gave the early risers a sight to look at and talk about for the rest of the day; then on into the Fosse Way, speeding along the arrow-straight road to Bristol and drawing cheers and laughter from the passing lorry-drivers. I was too incredible a sight to be thought a criminal—muddy, bearded, and riding a tandem, as odd a creature as that amusing tramp who used to do tricks on the Halls with a collapsible bicycle.

After showing myself over a mile of main road I was more than ready to hide the bicycle for good and myself till nightfall, but the country on both sides of the great Roman highway was open and unpleasantly short of cover; indeed much of it was below the level of the road. I pedalled on and on in the hope of reaching a wood or heath or quarry. It was all flat land with well-trimmed hedges and shallow drains.

By the side of the road was an empty field of cabbages—one of those melancholy fields with a cinder track leading into it and a tumbledown hut leaning against a pile of refuse. Close to the hut and at a stone’s throw from the road was a derelict car. When the only traffic was a cluster of black dots a mile or two away, I lifted the tandem on to my shoulder, to avoid leaving a track, and staggered into the shelter of the hut. I smashed the two sets of handle-bars so that the bicycle would lie flat on the ground, and shoved it under the car, afterwards restoring the trampled weeds to a fairly upright position. It will not be found until the car moulders away above it, and then it will be indistinguishable from the other rusty debris.

I now had to take cover myself. The hut was too obvious a place. The hedges were inadequate. I dared not risk so much as a quarter-mile walk. There was nothing for it but to lie on the clay among those blasted cabbages. In the middle of the field I was perfectly safe.

It was a disgusting day. The flats of England on a grey morning remind me of the classical hell—a featureless landscape where the peewits twitter and the half-alive remember hills and sunshine. And the asphodel of this Hades is the cabbage. To lie among cabbages in my own country should have been nothing after the pain and exposure I suffered during my escape; but it was summer then and it was autumn now. To lie still on a clay soil in a gentle drizzle was exasperating. But safe! If the owner of that vile field had been planting, he’d have stuck his dibber into me before noticing that I wasn’t mud.

I was so bored that I was thankful when in the early afternoon a car stopped at the gate into the field, and a party of three policemen crunched up the cinder path. I had been expecting them for hours; they knew that I had been seen on the Fosse Way in the morning, and since then nowhere, so it was certain they would search every possible hiding-place along the highway and its by-roads. They looked into the hut and into that decaying car. I kept my face well down between my arms, so I don’t know whether they even glanced at the cabbage field. Probably not. It was so open and innocent.

I shivered and grumbled for an eternity in that repellant field. I tried to find comfort in infinitesimal changes of position; there was none to be had, but it occupied my mind to change, for example, my head from elbow to forearm or to twist my feet from resting on the ankles to resting on the insteps. I analysed the comparative discomforts of the various movements open to me. I made patterns out of the avenues of cabbages that spread in a quadrant before my eyes. I tortured myself (for even torture may be a diversion) by thinking of the flask of whisky in my inner breast-pocket and refusing to allow myself to touch it. I knew damn well that I dared not touch it; the wriggles necessary to get at it and the flash of the nickel-plate might have given me away. There were plenty of cars and cyclists on the road, and the owner of the field, presumably advised that his hut had received a visit from the police, was leaning against it in the company of two friends and looking over his possessions with ruminative pride. I don’t suppose there had been so much excitement in the villages since Monmouth’s troops were flying from Sedgemoor, foundering their horses in that awful plough-land, and crawling in the muck like me and the worms.

At last the cabbage-man went home to his soggy tea, and dusk fell and I stood up. I drank a quarter of my flask and struck eastwards away from the road. Cross-country travel in the dark was nearly impossible. I felt my way along drains and hedges, usually circumnavigating three sides of a field before I found the way out of it—and when I did find the way out, it invariably led me into a village or back into the cabbage field.

After an hour or two of this maze, I struck straight across country, climbing or wading whatever obstacles were in my way. This was sheer obstinacy. I was wet to the armpits; I was leaving a track like a hippopotamus; and, since I didn’t know where I was heading, it was all objectless. Finally, I took to the lanes—or roads, I should call them, for they were narrow ribbons of tarmac with low hedges. There I spent most of the time pretending to be a manure heap, for the roads were relatively crowded with pedestrians. The average was certainly one person for every two hundred yards. Evening entertainment in that dreary vale consists of pub-crawling to the next village and back again. If you haven’t the money for beer, you lie under a mackintosh with a girl. At normal times I have only sympathy for so firm an attachment to the preliminaries of procreation, but the groups by the wayside were not recognizable as human until I had practically stepped on them. My own county is gayer and more pagan. When it rains we do our love-making in the tithe barn or the church porch or under the steps at the back of the Women’s Institute, and we don’t care who sees us. Trespassers are expected to guffaw and look away.

I should have been forced to spend another day in the cabbage field if I had not stumbled across a railway line which I followed towards Yeovil, stepping quietly from sleeper to sleeper. Two railway employees passed me walking homewards, but their boots on the ballast gave me ample warning of their approach. I avoided them, and the one train, by lying down at the bottom of the embankment.

A denser darkness on the horizon warned me that I was nearing the massed little houses of Yeovil. It was then about two in the morning, and the by-roads were deserted; so I turned south towards the hills. When the slow autumn dawn turned night to mist I could feel the short turf under my feet and see the gleam of chalk and flint wherever man or beast had scraped the escarpment.

I drank at the piped spring which fed a cattle-trough and took refuge in the heart of a wild half-acre of gorse and heather. Here I startled an old dog fox, and startled myself, when I came to consider it, a deal more. I flatter myself I am able to get as near to game as any civilized man and most savages; indeed it has been my favourite pursuit since I was given my first air-rifle at the age of six, and told—an injunction which, with a single exception, I have obeyed—that I must never point a gun at anyone. Yet I should certainly not have backed myself to approach within three yards of a fox, even knowing where he was and deliberately stalking him. Oddly enough, it worried me that I had come to move with such instinctive quietness. I was already on the look-out for all signs of demoralization—morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity.

I chose a south bank where short heather was gradually overcoming the turf, laying back springs under its green mattress. The sun promised a mild heat, and I spread out my coat and leather jacket to dry. I dozed sweetly, awakening whenever a bird perched on the gorse or a rabbit scuttered through the runways, but instantly and easily falling asleep again.

A little after midday I woke up for good. There was nothing immediately visible to account for the sudden clarity of my senses, so I peered over the gorse. Up wind were two men strolling along the crest of the hill. One was a sergeant of the Dorset constabulary; the other a small farmer—to judge by the fact that he carried an old-fashioned hammer-gun. They passed me within ten yards, the policeman pressing down with firm feet as if searching for a pavement beneath that silent and resilient turf, the farmer plodding along with the slightly bent knees of a man who seldom walks on the flat.

I decided to follow these two solemn wanderers and hear what they had to say. They were discussing me, since the farmer had remarked, apropos of nothing: ‘’Tis my belief he was over to Zumerset all the time’—a final and definite pronouncement as of one who should say: I believe he went to South America and died there.

It’s curious how much cover there is on the chalk downs. A body of men couldn’t move unseen, but a single man can. In the vales of southern England, though they look like woodland from the top of hills, hedges and fences compel the fugitive to go the way of other men, and sooner or later he is forced, as I was, to lie down and pray for the earth to cover him. But on the bare—apparently bare—downs there are prehistoric pits and trenches, tree-grown stumps, gorse and the upper edge of coverts, lonely barns and thickets of thorn. And the hedges, where there are any, are either miniature forests or full of gaps.

It was easy to catch them up. They went at an easy pace, stopping every now and then to exchange a few words. The weighty business of conversation could not be disturbed by movement. At last they settled on a gate and leaned over it, contemplating twenty acres of steely green mangel-wurzels which sloped down to the golden hedges of the vale. I crawled the length of a dry ditch and came within earshot.

The sergeant finished a long mumble with the word ‘foreigners’, pronounced loudly and aggressively.

‘’Err, they bastards!’ said the farmer.

The sergeant considered this judicially, turning with deliberation towards his companion and me. He was a uniformed servant of the State, and thus, I imagine, predisposed to diplomacy.

‘I wouldn’t ’ardly go so far as that,’ he said. ‘Not that I ’old with furr’ners—but I don’t know as I’d go so far as that.’

There was a deal more conversation which I couldn’t hear, because neither of them was sufficiently excited to raise his voice. The farmer, I think, must have denied that any foreigners ever came to Dorset. The suggestion that they did was almost a criticism on his county.

‘I tell ’ee there’s been furr’ners askin’ for ’m,’ said the sergeant. ‘And I knows that, because the inspector says to me, ’e says …’ then his voice trailed away again.

‘Mrs Maydoone says ’e were a proper gent,’ chuckled the farmer.

The sergeant chuckled in sympathy and then showed offended dignity.

‘Told me she couldn’t ’ardly call ’im to mind, she did! Don’t ’ee come asking questions, she says, as if the Bull were a nasty common public-’ouse, she says.’

There was more laughter, which turned to a full-throated giggle as both remembered the opulent Mrs Maydoone and dug each other in their own less admirably covered ribs. She was a respectably eager widow who owned the inn in Beaminster where I had lunched. The doctors, she told me, had never seen anything like Mr Maydoone’s kidneys outside a London hospital.

My two friends marched off across the downs, while I remained in the ditch digesting the scraps of news. I was perturbed, but not surprised. It was natural enough that my enemies should get possession of Scotland Yard’s clue to my whereabouts. If dear old Holy George couldn’t manage it, then one of their newspaper correspondents in London could. It wasn’t confidential information.

I returned to my form in the heart of the gorse. The early afternoon sun had a dying bite of summer in it, and I was glowing with the exertion of my stalk. At dusk I ate the last of my provisions and drank again at the spring. By good fortune I left untouched the half-flask of whisky that remained. I feared its effect—slight, but enough to give me confidence, when my safe return to the lane and my peace of mind throughout the winter depended on moving now with the utmost caution.

I kept to the hill-tops, following the ridgeways southwards till they ended on Eggardon Down. There I was lost. There was not a star showing, and although I knew I was on Eggardon, I could not tell from what point of the compass I had immediately approached it; the tracks, ancient and modern, green and metalled, crossed and switched like the lines in a goods yard. At last I found myself in the outer ditch of the camp and, to make sure of my orientation, walked half-way round the huge circuit of earthworks until I could see far below me the faint lights of a town, which had to be Bridport.