Rogue Male (18 page)

I crawled to the door and pushed against it; nothing moved. Then I felt a sense of panic with which was mingled relief that the end had come at last. I intended to rush out and let them shoot. A quick death, merited. I took the axe that had hollowed out the sandstone and drove it between the planks of the door. It turned. I ripped off the planks. On the far side of them was an iron plate. It rang hollow except in the centre. They had jammed it in place with a baulk of timber, the other end of which rested against the opposite bank of the lane.

I don’t know what happened to me then. When I heard Quive-Smith’s voice I was lying on the bag with my head on my arms, pretending to myself that I was thinking things out. I was controlled, but my ears were drumming and my skin oozing cold sweat. I suppose that if one sits on hysteria long enough and hard enough, one loses consciousness. Something has to give way, and if the mind won’t, the body must.

Quive-Smith was saying:

‘Can you hear me?’

I pulled myself together and sloshed a handful of water over my head. There was no point in keeping silence; he must have heard me battering on the iron. The only thing to do was to answer him and play for time.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can hear you.’

‘Are you badly wounded?’

Damn him for asking that question then! I should have found it very useful later if I could have persuaded them that I was suffering from a neglected wound and incapable. As it was, I answered the truth:

‘Nothing much. You hit a whisky flask with a leather jacket behind it.’

He muttered something that I could not hear. He was speaking with his mouth close to the ventilation hole. If he jerked his head, the voice was lost.

I asked him how he had found me. He explained that he had gone straight from the barn to the lane on the off chance that I had been responsible for the broken roof and that he might see me returning to my mysterious hiding-place.

‘Simple,’ he said, ‘so simple that I was very much afraid that it was what you meant me to do.’

I told him that I had never attempted to kill him, that I could have done it a dozen times if I had wished.

‘I suppose so,’ he replied. ‘But I counted on you leaving me alone. You would only have exchanged me for the police, and it was obviously wiser to persuade me that you had gone. You did, as a matter of fact.’

His voice had a weary harshness. He must have been in fear of his life all the time that he was at the farm. A braver man and a cleverer than I am, but without—I was going to write ethics. But God knows what right I have to claim any! I have neither cruelty nor ambition, I think; but that is the only difference between Quive-Smith and myself.

‘Couldn’t you give me a cleaner death than this?’ I asked.

‘My dear fellow, I don’t want you to die at all,’ he said, ‘not now. I am so glad you had the sense not to break out while I was sealing you up. This position has taken me by surprise as well as you. I can’t promise you anything, but your death seems wholly unnecessary.’

‘The only alternative is the zoo,’ I answered.

He laughed at this for a nervous, uncontrollable moment. Lord, he must have been relieved to know where I was!

‘Nothing so drastic,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you wouldn’t survive in captivity. No, if they take my advice, I shall be ordered to return you to your position and friends.’

‘On what condition?’

‘Trifling—but we needn’t go into that yet. Now, how are you off for food?’

‘Reasonably well, thank you.’

‘No little delicacies I can bring you from the farm?’

I nearly lost my temper at this. The man’s voice had just the right touch of concern; there was but the tiniest shade of irony to tell me that he was thoroughly enjoying his own acting. He would have brought me anything I asked, I have no doubt. For the cat-and-mouse act to be subtle enough to please his taste, it had to be hardly distinguishable from genuine kindness.

‘I think not,’ I answered.

‘All right. But there’s no need for you to suffer any more.’

‘Look here!’ I said. ‘You won’t get any more out of me than your police did, and you can’t stay here indefinitely. So why not get it over?’

‘I can stay here for months,’ he answered quietly. ‘Months, you understand. I and my friend are going to study the habits and diet of the badger. The large piece of timber which is holding your door is for us to sit on. The bush placed in front of your door is a hide for the camera, and there will shortly be a camera in it. I’m afraid all these preparations are wasted since nobody ever comes into the lane. But if anyone should—well, all he will see is my friend or myself engaged in the harmless study of the life of the badger. We might even get a nice young man with a microphone and have him tell the children what Bertie the Brock keeps under his tail.’

I called him a damned fool, and told him that the whole countryside would be consumed with curiosity—that all their doings would be public property in twenty-four hours.

‘I doubt it,’ he answered. ‘Nobody at the farm pays any attention to my innocent rambles. Sometimes I go out with a gun, sometimes not. Sometimes on foot, sometimes in the car. Why should they guess I am always in this lane? They have never seen you. They won’t see me. As for my assistant, he has no connexion with me at all. He is staying in Chideock and his landlady thinks he is a night watchman at Bridport. He isn’t as careful in making his way here as I should like. But we can’t expect a paid agent to have our experience, can we, my dear fellow?’

This ‘dear fellow’ of his infuriated me. I am ashamed to remember that I rammed my axe against the door in anger.

‘How about that?’ I asked.

‘It makes surprisingly little noise,’ he said coolly.

It did, even in my closed space. He explained that there were felt and plywood over the iron.

‘And if you think it out,’ he added, ‘what would happen if anyone did hear you? That disagreeable peasant who owns the field over your head, for example? You would compel me to remove the pair of you, and to arrange the bodies to show murder and suicide.’

It was true enough—so true, at any rate, that there was little object in pointing out that he couldn’t get at me without running a grave risk himself. He held the only fire-arm and all the cards. He could foresee a more or less satisfactory outcome if he killed me; but if I killed him I could foresee nothing but murder on my conscience, and death or disgrace eventually at the hands of the service to which he belonged. Psychologically I was at his mercy. My mind cowered.

‘We must stop talking now,’ he said. ‘No conversation in daylight will be our rule. I shall be on duty from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and we shall talk during the last couple of hours. My assistant will be on duty the rest of the time. Now, let me make the position perfectly clear. I cannot, I expect, prevent you forcing your way out over the top of the door. But if you do, you’ll be shot before you can shoot, and closed up again in your cosy home. Your back-door is very thoroughly blocked, and if we hear you working we shall cut off your air. So be careful, my dear fellow, and don’t lose heart! Quite calm—that’s the watchword. Your release is certain.’

I sat for hours with my ear to the ventilator. I didn’t expect to learn anything, but hearing was the only one of my senses which could keep in touch with my captors. So long as I heard them, I had the illusion that I was not wholly defenceless, that I was planning, gathering data for an escape.

I heard the twittering of birds at dawn. I heard a crackle as Quive-Smith adjusted or trimmed the screen of dead thorn outside my door. Then I heard a low mutter of voices which I translated as the sound of Quive-Smith’s colleague taking over the watch from him. They couldn’t, of course, keep to their schedule on that first day. The major had presumably to telegraph a report.

The new man sat quite still. I imagined his figure as a silhouette thrown against the darkness of the door. I had only seen him at a distance. I thought of him as dark and thick, as a contrast to Quive-Smith, who was fair and tall. I was quite wrong.

All the time that I crouched at the ventilator, my mind had been drifting over the wildest images of escape, enveloping them, rejecting them, concentrating finally upon the two practical schemes. The first, as Quive-Smith had suggested, was to cut a passage diagonally upwards over the top of the door. I took one of my long spits and drove it through the red earth. So far as I could tell, it passed over the top of their plate; but the knowledge was useless. As he had said, if I stuck out my head I would be shot—and, by the tone of his voice, I knew he did not mean killed, but deliberately crippled. The final break-through was bound to be so noisy that the watcher would have ample warning.

The second and far more likely way of escape was by the bolt-hole. They hadn’t caged me so neatly as they thought. Their tree-trunk had not blocked the whole length of my tunnel; only its vertical section between the surface and the twist. The passage quarried through the sandstone was open. All I had to do was to cut a new passage through the earth, and surely I could work at that so silently that not a sound would be heard outside.

I crawled into the choked inner chamber and began to dig with my knife. There was no room to use the axe; I was kneeling on the pile of muck and earth with my body filling the whole tunnel. Very silently and carefully, catching earth and stones in my hand, spending minutes in wearing through some root that I could have cleared with a jerk, I went at the job of digging a tunnel parallel to the tree trunk. The roar of my breath, thumping and gasping like the Diesel engines that had carried me to England, was by far the loudest sound.

The air was foul, for the draught between ventilator and bolt-hole no longer existed. The carbon dioxide that I breathed out collected between my shoulders and the working surface. My energy steadily diminished. I cleared a foot of clay and broken sandstone, and then had to return to the ventilator to breathe. On the next shift I cleared six inches; on the next three; on the next, again three. But there I interfered with the laws of geometrical progression, and faded out before I reached the ventilator.

I had insisted to myself that my sensation of extreme lassitude was sheer slackness; but now it was quite obvious that my body would collapse, try what I might in the way of compulsion, if I didn’t allow it to obey the laws that governed its intake of oxygen. God knows what I was breathing in that muck-heap! If I had the exact figures of work and rest, no doubt some chemist would be able to work it out. Since I had only moved out of the burrow for a few hours in thirteen days, there must have been many gases besides carbon dioxide.

I came to after an unknown lapse of time. In the original den there was plenty of air so long as I did not work at anything too long or too fast. The ventilator was a passage some four feet long and curving down from the bank to the side of the den. It had a diameter large enough for Asmodeus to go in and out, but so small that I was always amazed he could.

It seemed to me at the time that I kept a remarkable control over myself. I concentrated on breathing in and out by the ventilator, forcing my mind to remain blank, to stay in that state where all activity is inhibited by shock and it is freed to wander through space obsessed by trivialities. I felt that I was, to use a horrid phrase, captain of my soul. I had hardly been tested. The only periods, I suspect, when a man feels captain of his soul are those when he has not the slightest need of such an organ.

For short intervals, separated by lengthy halts to breathe, I worked at the old chimney. There was no space to swing or thrust, nowhere to put the earth that fell. It was like trying to burrow through a sandhill, impossible to breathe, impossible to remove the debris. I could have obtained more air by boring another hole through to the lane (though it wouldn’t have done me much good in the inner chamber), but I dared not give them a direct view into the burrow. The one strength of my position was that they could never see what I was doing.

The day passed quickly. Time drags only when one is thinking fast, and all my mental processes were slowed down. I was lying by the ventilator when night fell and Quive-Smith wished me a cheerful good evening.

‘Everything has gone splendidly,’ he said. ‘Splendidly! We’ll have you out of there in an hour. Free to go home, free to live on that lovely estate of yours, free to do anything you like. I’m very glad, my dear fellow, I have a great respect for you, you know.’

I replied that I doubted his respect, that I knew him to be a good party man.

‘I am,’ he agreed. ‘But I can admire such an individualist as you. What I respect in you is that you have no need of any law but your own. You’re prepared to rule, or to be suppressed, but you won’t obey. You are able to deal with your own conscience.’

‘I am not. But I see what you mean,’ I said.

‘You must be! A man in your position to commit what you described in the subsequent proceedings as a sporting stalk! And then calmly pitching a spy on the live rail at Aldwych!’

I kept silence. I didn’t know where this was leading. I hated the philosophy he was ascribing to me; it was a travesty of the truth.

‘I’m not blaming you in the least for defending yourself,’ he went on. ‘The man was worthless, and got in your way. What other result could there have been? I should be disappointed—really, I mean it—to find a lot of sloppy scruples in such an anarchial aristocrat as you.’

‘That’s your morality rather than mine,’ I answered.

‘My dear fellow!’ he protested. ‘There’s all the difference in the world! It’s the mass that we are out to discipline and educate. If an individual interferes, certainly we crush him; but for the sake of the mass—of the State, shall I say? You, you don’t give a damn for the State. You obey your own taste and your own laws.’

‘That’s true enough,’ I admitted. ‘But I have respect for the rights of other individuals.’

‘Of course. But none at all for the nation. Admit it now, my dear fellow, you could get along perfectly well without any State!’

‘Yes, damn you!’ I answered angrily—I hated his pseudo-Socratic cross-examination. ‘Without the shameless politicians who run this country or the incompetent idiots who would like to, or your blasted spotlight Caesars.’