Beyond this place (4 page)

"With a little more civility. You don't seem to understand that this affects me just as much as it does you."

"Oh, Ella, for God's sake don't let us be childish at a time like this."

She drew up suddenly, overcome by her sense of injury, by the desire to exert her influence over him. Her face had taken on a greenish colour, her eyes were moist, with the whites upturned.

"I'm afraid ... in your present mood . . . there's no point in our walking any further."

There was a pause. He gazed at her numbly. His thoughts were far away.

"Just as you please."

Disconcerted at being taken at her word, she bit her lip to keep back angry tears. Then, since he made no effort to detain her, she gave him a pale smile, full of reproach and outraged goodness — the martyred smile of an early-Christian virgin when they tore her bosom with hot pincers.

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"Very well. I'll turn and go home. Goodbye, lor the present. I hope you're in a better frame of mind when next we meet."

She swung round and moved off with her head in the air, a shamefully ill-used figure. For a few moments he gazed after her, regretting their unaccountable misunderstanding, yet relieved, deeply relieved, to be alone. When she was lost to view, he moved off slowly in the other direction.

He could not endure to return to Lame Road. There he would find his mother awaiting him with anxious, unbearable solicitude. He shrank from the hushed voice, the putting out of his slippers, the mute coaxing to a safe and peaceful evening in the home.

How strange was this new attitude to his mother! But stranger still, and more illogical, was the feeling, forming unconsciously within him, towards his father. Here, in truth, was the criminal, the cause of all his misery. Yet Paul could not hate him. Instead, during these last tortured, sleepless hours, his thoughts had flown towards him with a singular pity. Fifteen years in prison — was not that punishment enough for any man? Recollections of his early childhood, vague yet poignant, surged upon him. What tenderness he had received, always, from his father — not one harsh memory marred the picture. Tears suddenly blurred his vision.

He had now reached Donegal Quay, the poor dockside district of the city. Unknown to himself, the strange impulse growing within him had brought him here. Head down, he tramped on, across the railway tracks, threading his way through the confusion of bales, sacks, and carboys which littered the cobbled wharfs. An evening mist was stealing in from the sea, mingling with the brackish emanations from the harbour pool, turning the tall pier derricks to spectral shapes. The foghorn of the outer breakwater began to sound its deep melancholy note.

At last, brought up by a barrier of merchandise piled between the sheds, he sat down on a packing case. Immediately opposite, a small rusty freighter was making preparations for departure on the tide — he recognized her as the Vale of Avoca, a cross-channel cargo boat plying between Belfast and Holyhead. Occasionally she carried a few steerage passengers and at the gangway a small group of men and women, potato pickers bound for the Lincoln-

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shire farms, stood with their belongings, taking goodbye of their friends.

Seated there, in the mist, which swirled around him in wraith-like forms, with the foghorn sounding, sounding in his ears, Paul stared at the vessel with a growing intensity. With his holidays begun, his plans for the summer school broken off, time stretched before him mercilessly. A sudden excitement, strange and predestined, passed over him. Impulsively, he took out his notebook and scribbled two lines:

/ am going away for a few days. Do not worry.

Paul

He tore out the page, folded it over, and wrote his mother's name and the address on the back. Summoning a boy from amongst the onlookers, he gave the note to him with a coin to ensure delivery. Then he stood up, advanced steadily to the shipping company's kiosk, and for a few shillings purchased a ticket for Holyhead. They were already casting off as he crossed the gangplank. A moment later a heavy rope splashed; then, with a throbbing of her old engines, the freighter lurched and shuddered to the outer seas.

CHAPTER V

IT was six o'clock next morning and raining heavily when the Avoca berthed at Holyhead. Stiff and chilled, Paul stepped ashore and crossed the tracks to the railway station. There was scarcely time for him to swallow a cup of tea in the refreshment room before the southbound train was signalled. He paid the half-awakened waitress and hurried to take a place in the corner of a third-class compartment. Then the engine shrieked and started off. It was a lengthy journey, through Shrewsbury and Gloucester,

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with two changes at junction stations where, having no coat to protect him, he got thoroughly drenched. Yet with this physical discomfort, more and more his spirit hardened. As though in keeping with this darker mood, gradually the pastoral character of the country altered to a wilder, bleaker note. Stony moors and straggling heaths supplanted the square, hedged fields. Tall monoliths, grouped in circles, weird and prehistoric, struck upon his vision. To the west, from out the pine woods, a livid ridge of mountains rose, capped with grey clouds and veined by tumbling cataracts. The engine laboured as the wind came blasting from the sea, and at a curve of the line Paul saw cold waves beating against high cliffs.

At -last, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, the train drew into a small moorland station — it was his destination. The single platform was almost deserted as, with the blood pounding in his ears, he surrendered his ticket to the solitary porter. He had meant to ask the man to direct him to the prison, but somehow the words thickened on his tongue; he passed through the white wicket in silence. However, once outside, he saw in the distance, across the red earth and rain-drenched heath, crouching behind its castellated walls, the great grey bulk of Stoneheath. He set off along the narrow road which wound across the moor.

The nearer he drew to that grim citadel, the faster his pulse raced. His mouth was dry, his chest constricted, he felt sick and empty: except for a cup of tea and a sandwich he had eaten nothing all day. At an incline on the path he leaned against the bole of a stunted birch tree to gain his breath. Now a patch of greenish opalescent sky had opened on the western horizon, and against this delicate screen he could, from the slight eminence, discern acutely the details of the prison.

There it rose, a great blank windowless square, pierced by a low portcullis, with watch towers hovering like eagles at each corner, sheer as a rock, stern as a medieval fort. Two rows of warders' houses stood outside, with sheds and other workshops, and all around was the desolation of the moor. An unscaleable wall, with spikes on the coping, enclosed the whole domain in which, like enormous wounds, three red stone quarries caught the eye. In one of these some gangs of prisoners were working, seen at

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that distance like grey ants, guarded by tour warders in blue, each promenading slowly, yet menacingly, with a gun. Under Paul's rigid gaze the little drab figures bent and strained and toiled, and over the place was a silence like eternity.

A sudden step behind him, startling as the crack of doom, made him spin around. A shepherd had come up the hill, followed by a shaggy sheep-dog. The man had a close and secret aspect, as though tainted bv this gloomy wilderness, and when he halted beside Paul and leaned upon his crook, a native suspicion was in his eye.

"Not a pretty view," he remarked at length.

"No." Paul spoke with an effort.

The other nodded in slow agreement.

"It's a plague spot if ever there was one. And I should know, I've lived here forty years." He paused. "They had a riot last month — five of the convicts and two of the warders got killed — and it looked just the same then as it does now. Quiet and blind. Ay, even as we're talking here, a guard in that tower has a pair of field glasses levelled on us, watching every move we make."

Paul suppressed a shiver, and forced himself to ask the question uppermost in his mind.

"When do they have visiting days?"

"Visiting days." The crofter looked at him with open derision. "There are no such days in Stoneheath."

Paul felt his heart contract. Quickly, he exclaimed:

"But surely ... on certain days . . . the prisoners' relatives are allowed to see them?"

"They have no visitors," the other said briefly. "No, not ever." His weathered face, never given to merriment, twitched grimly. "It's as hard for us to get in there as it is for them to get out. And now good evening, young sir."

He whistled to his dog and, with a final nod, was gone.

Alone and re-enveloped by the stillness, Paul remained absolutely motionless, all his sanguine expectations dashed to the ground. No visitors . . . never! He could not see his father . . . could not even speak one word with him . . . what he had come to do was quite impossible. Indeed, at this moment, confronted by the chilling reality of the prison, he knew that the hope he had

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entertained and his impetuous, sentimental journey to this benighted spot were both unutterably futile.

The landscape darkened and, as he still lingered, a bell in the prison began slowly and heavily to toll, breaking the everlasting silence as though tolling for the dead. Then he saw the convicts cease their work and, marshalled by their keepers, move in slow line towards the prison. Presently the portcullis was raised to engulf them, then lowered. At that, the last of the green transparency departed from the sky.

Something broke within Paul's breast. Torn by grief, pain, and a terrible frustration, he gave a wild inarticulate cry. Scalding tears burst from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He turned from the accursed heath and made his way back blindly to the railway station.

CHAPTER VI

UPON the outskirts of the city of Wortley, at the corner of Ayres Street and Eldon Avenue, there stands a tobacconist's shop, bearing the faded sign: a. prusty, importer of burma cheroots. This emporium, old-fashioned, yet with a solid and well-established air, has two windows, the one carrying a sober display of cigars, snuff, meerschaums, and the better grades of cut tobacco, the other an opaque blank — except for a small gilt-circled peephole shielding the bench at which the proprietor makes by hand the cigarettes, Robin Hood Straight Cut, for which he is locally renowned.

Towards noon, on tins June day, Mr. Prusty was, in fact, seated at his bench, in apron and shirtsleeves, rolling out his special brand with a rapid and delicate touch. He was a skinny little man, past sixty,-with a blunt porous nose and a choleric complexion. He was bald, except for a single tuft of white hair, and a large wen grew like a plum on his bare scalp. His straggling white moustache was fumed with nicotine and his fingers showed

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the same bright yellow stain. He wore steel-rimmed pince-nez.

Perched on his stool and peering through his peephole, Mr. Prusty had for some minutes been following with inquisitive suspicion the movements of a bareheaded young man who, pacing up and down outside, had several times approached the shop, as though about to enter, only to hesitate at the last moment and turn away. In the end, however, he seemed to muster all his will power. Pale but resolute, he crossed the street with a rush and came through the door. Mr. Prusty, who kept no assistant, slowly got off his stool.

"Yes?" he inquired brusquely.

"I'd like to see Mr. Albert Prusty. That's to say ... if he's still alive."

The tobacconist gave his visitor an acidulous smile.

"So far as I know he's alive. I am Albert Prusty."

The young man, like a diver plunging into any icy sea, took a deep determined breath.

"I am Paul Mathry." It was over. Once he had articulated that name a flood of relief suffused him, his tongue seemed no longer paralysed. "Yes, Mathry. Spelled M-a-t-h-r-y. Not a common name. Does it convey anything to you?"

The cigarette maker's expression had not changed. He answered irritably:

"What would it convey to me? I remember the Mathry case if that's what you mean. I'm not likely to forget the most unpleasant time in my whole life. But what the devil has it to do with you?"

"I am Rees Mathry's son."

A bar of silence throbbed within the low-ceilinged shop. The old man looked Paul up and down, took a pinch of snuff from the canister on the counter before him, then slowly inhaled the pungent dust.

"Why do you come to me?"

"I can't explain ... I had to come." In broken phrases Paul made an effort to define the circumstances which had occasioned his trip to Stoneheath. He concluded: "I got in here this morning . . . there's a train out at nine this evening that connects with the midnight Belfast boat. I felt if only I could learn of some-

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thing . . . oh, I scarcely know what . . . perhaps some extenuating circumstance, I'd go home easier in my mind. I came to you . . . because you were the one favourable witness in all the case."

"What do you mean favourable?" Prusty objected in a provoked voice. "I don't know what you're driving at?"

"Then . . . there is nothing you can tell me?"

"What the devil could I tell you?"

"I ... I don't know." Paul sighed. After a pause he squared his shoulders and turned towards the door. His voice was steady. "Well, I'll go now. I'm sorry I troubled you. Thank you for seeing me."

He was half way out when a testy command drew him up short.

"Wait."

Paul came back slowly. Again Prusty stared him up and down, from his strained young face to the mud-spattered ends of his trousers, and again the tobacconist took snuff.

"You're in a devil of a hurry. You pop up from nowhere after God knows how long, and rush in and out as though you'd come for a box of matches. Damn it all! You can't expect me to go back fifteen years in fifteen minutes."

Before Paul could reply, the shop bell sounded and a customer entered. When he had been served with an ounce of navy cut and was on the point of departure, another of Prusty's clients appeared, a stout man who, having selected and lighted a cigar, seemed disposed to stay and gossip. The tobacconist came over to Paul and addressed him in an undertone.