Ellis Peters - George Felse 01 - Fallen Into The Pit (18 page)

“And what did you say?” asked George, respectfully grave.

“Well, Rabbit said O.K. like a shot, of course he
would
! And I was a bit peeved, really, because you want time to think when you get something like that shot at you. So he sent Rabbit away; I thought that was a pretty good show. And I thought pretty hard, and I said I thought he was right, really, about fighting being a bad thing, but still he
had
fought. But he wasn’t mad, he just said yes, but not over nothing, like us. And he said I had to make up my mind, and promise not to start scrapping over it again, or else! He’d never licked anybody, not since he came, but he told me straight he would this time, so I had to think frightfully fast, and maybe it wasn’t such a bright effort. Only I couldn’t see why
I
shouldn’t be allowed to judge what was nothing and what wasn’t, and I still couldn’t see why Rabbit should call him a liar and a cheat, and get away with it. At least,” he said honestly, “I could see that I couldn’t exactly be
allowed
to judge, but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t
do
it, all the same. So I explained to him that I’d rather not make any promises, because I thought that I ought to decide for myself what was worth righting for, and what wasn’t.”

“And what did he say to that? Was he angry?”

“No, he— You know,” said Dominic doubtfully, “I think he was
pleased
! It sounds awfully daft, but honestly, he looked at me as if he was. Only I can’t think why, I expected him to be mad as the dickens, because it sounded fearful cheek, only it really wasn’t meant to be. But I honestly
didn’t
see how it could be right just to let somebody else make the rules for you, without making up your own mind at all.”

“Did he agree with you?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly say. He just said that when you’ve got to that stage of maturity, you have to go the next bit, whether you want to or not, and realize that in any society you have to be prepared to pay for the privilege of making up your own mind. I can’t remember all the right words, but you get what he meant. He didn’t seem a bit angry, but I knew he wouldn’t let me off, and he was giving me a chance to back out. But I wasn’t going to. So I said yes, all right, I
would
pay.”

“And then he licked you,” said George.

“Well, he had to, really, didn’t he?” said Dominic reasonably.

“Wasn’t that a bit illogical,” suggested Cooke, with his hearty, good-natured, insensitive laugh, “for a bloke who’d just been preaching nonviolence?”

Dominic replied, but punctiliously to his father’s look, not to Cooke who was in his black books: “No, I don’t think so, really, because he had to make up his mind, too. If you see what I mean!”

“Yes,” said George, “I see what you mean.”

“So you see, don’t you, that what Cooke was saying about him is just bunk? He didn’t get used to it, it
sickened
him, only there just wasn’t anything else then for him to do. And honestly, he’s the last man in the place who could have done a murder—even that murder. Dad, don’t make an awful mistake like that, will you?”

“I’ll try not to,” said George, softened and gentle with astonishment at seeing his son’s face all earnest anxiety on his account. “Don’t worry, Dom, I’ll remember all you’ve told us. It’s perfectly good evidence, and I won’t lose sight of it. Satisfied?”

“Mmmm, I suppose so. You know, it’s so easy to say things like Cooke was saying, but it isn’t true. All kinds of fellows had to fight, thousands and thousands of them, but they were still just as much all kinds in the end, weren’t they? I think it may have got easier for some, and harder and harder for others. And anyhow, you can’t just lump people all together, like that.” He flushed a little, meeting George’s smile. “Sorry I swore! I was upset.”

“That’s all right. Going out again now?”

“Yes, I came to tell Mummy I might be a bit late, but I shall only be at the Harts’. Mr. Hart is picking the late apples, and they want to finish tonight, so a few extra hands—” For whom, thought George, there would be ample wages in kind at the end of the picking, even if they came only half an hour before the daylight began to fail.

“All right, I’ll tell her. You cut along.” And he watched him spring gaily through the door without a glance at Cooke, with whom he was still seriously annoyed.

An odd, loyal, disturbing, reassuring kid, sharp and sensitive to currents of thought and qualities of character. If he didn’t like Chad Wedderburn “all that much,” very decidedly he liked him in some degree, and that in itself was an argument. But the weakness of the evidence of a man’s own mouth is that it often has two edges. Fighting never settles anything, cannot be right short of a life-and-death matter. But a man must and should be his own judge of what is and what is not a matter of life and death, because that is ultimately an issue he cannot delegate to any other creature. And having reached that stage of maturity, he must realize that in any society—because societies, state or school or church, exist to curb all the nonconforming into conformity—he must pay for the privilege. So far, if he had perfectly understood him, Chad Wedderburn.

Even Cooke was thinking along the same lines. He looked after Dominic with an indulgent smile, and said appreciatively: “Well, I hope the folks who don’t like
me
all that much will stick up for me as nobly. Poor kid, he doesn’t know what it all adds up to. Call your own tune, pay your own piper! Well, and what if he did just that? He allowed Dom the right to, you can bet he’d insist on the same rights for himself. What did he decide about Helmut, do you suppose? That it would be worth it?”

George said nothing. It could follow, but it need not follow, that was the devil of it. Only something else echoed ominously in his mind, the hot, reiterated note of Chad’s revulsion from bloodshed, genuine, yes, too terribly genuine, but was it perhaps pitched in an unnatural key? Did it not sometimes sound like the prayers of a man’s mind for deliverance from his own body? Might not a man thus passionately denounce what he feared most of all in himself? A man who was wise enough and deep enough to dread his own facility in destruction, an adept whose skill terrified him. And then the last remote, unexpected case, argued over and over in the mind, where this dreaded efficiency in killing, held so fiercely in restraint, began to look once more legitimate, began to argue its right to a gesture almost of virtue.

“Call your own tune, pay your own piper!” said Constable Cooke, brightly. “Some merely get hammered, some get hanged. It’s a matter for the individual whether he finds it worthwhile!”

Pussy and Dominic were in the loft over the stables at the Shock of Hay, in the warm, clean, high roof, smelling of straw and fruit; they were polishing and wrapping the biggest, soundest apples for keeping until the spring, and laying them out on wooden trays slatted to let the air through. The picking was already done, and the great unsorted baskets of fruit lay below them in the horseless stables, keeping company with the car, and the lawn-mower, and all the garden tools. From time to time Dominic slid himself and his basket down through the trapdoor by the shaky stairs, and selected the finest to haul back with him into the loft. They were working so hard that they forgot to eat, and neglected to light their lantern until the light was almost gone. It was middle evening, the sky outside suddenly clouded, the air heavy as a sad cake.

The end of the long drought came in a puff of air and a thudding of heavy drops down the roof. When the thunder had spent itself the sweet green night would smell heavenly of fresh foliage; but first the noise and the downpour, the ominous drumroll of the earliest scud, and then the clouds opening, and the crashing, splattering fall.

Somebody caught in the garden, where the benches circled the chestnut tree, gave a squeak of protest and ran headlong for the stable door. The two above heard the door crash back to the wall before a precipitate entry, and a gasping laugh, and quick breathing. Sounds came up to them with a strange, dark clarity, cupped and shielded and redoubled in the arch of the roof-beams. They went on peaceably wrapping, intent on finishing their job and earning their wages. Kneeling in the straw by the low shelves, they themselves made no sound.

A second person running, a sudden foot at the brick threshold, and a perceptible check. The rain streamed coolly, wildly, over the tiles of the roof, giving the voice from below a brook’s moving but monotonous sound.

“Oh, it’s you! I’m sorry—I’ll go!” And he actually turned to go, his heel harsh on the gravel. Dominic and Pussy heard, and knew Chad Wedderburn’s voice, but it hovered only in the borders of their consciousness, so occupied were they with their apples.

And the other one was Io, and Io instant in exasperation, bursting out after him angrily: “Come
back
! Good Lord, haven’t you got
any
sense? Come out of it, and don’t be a fool! I shan’t give you the plague.”

The slightest of scuffles indicated that she had proceeded beyond words, and unceremoniously hauled him back into shelter. They stood gasping, and shaking and slapping the rain from their clothes, and he said in a harsh, constrained voice: “Aren’t you afraid you might take it from me?” But he made no second attempt to leave her. She must have looked formidably angry.

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you even act naturally for ten minutes, till the rain stops? Am I diseased, or something, that you take one look at me and run for your life? Don’t be afraid, I’m going back to the house as soon as I can get there without being drowned on the way. You won’t be bothered with me a minute longer than I can help.”

Shrinking away from her in the shadows within the door, he stood drawn into himself hard, and said nothing; and in the moment of silence Dominic and Pussy looked at each other guiltily, stirred back from a world of nothing but apples to a situation they had not foreseen. In the greenish, watery gloom under the skylight, with the refractions of rain flowing across their faces like the deeps of the sea, they stared stilly at each other, and wondered silently what they ought to do. It was now or never. In the first minute you can cough loudly, or drop a tray, or kick over the watering-can, or burst into song, but after that it’s too horribly obvious. And if the first minute passes and is away before you can clutch at it, there is absolutely nothing to be done except hold your breath, and pretend you are not there. To be sure, in other circumstances they would have nudged each other, and giggled, and made the most of it, but somehow it was immediately apparent that this was not the occasion for such behavior. The voices, both of them, had overtones which raised the blood to their cheeks hotly.

“I’m sorry you had to be marooned with such an uncongenial company.” Such a tight, dark voice, a disembodied pain. “It could just as easily have been someone more pleasing. Charles, for instance!”

“Oh, lord!” groaned Io. “I expected that! Must you carry on like a bad-tempered child?”

“I hope to God,” he said, “there are no children in any way resembling me. It would be better to put them away quietly if there are.”

“How can you talk like that! I suppose you’re half-tight,” said Io viciously.

“Not even half. What’s the use, when it doesn’t take?”

And now it was palpably too late to do anything about it. There they were, crouching mouse-still in the loft, holding their breath with shock, and not even looking at each other any more, because it was as disturbing as looking into a mirror. It would be awful if the two below should ever find out that they had been overheard. It was awful having to sit here and listen, but it was far too late to move.

The voice resumed, corrosive and unnatural in the void quiet, under the liquid lash of the rain.

“I can’t make you out.
I
call it cowardice, to carry on as if you had nothing to live for, as if you were crippled, or something, just because things don’t fall into your hand. For God’s sake, what happened to you during the war? You got the reputation of being able to stand up to anything, but it must have been a mistake.”

“It was a mistake,” he said harshly, “the worst I ever made. The intelligent people lay down, for good.”

“You make me mad!” she said furiously. “Moping like a sick cow, for want of your own way! And you haven’t even the wits to see that if you’re not careful, and don’t pull yourself together, you could die yet. Do you
want
people to believe you’re a murderer? The police think so already.”

“Why not? I am—a hundred times over.”

“Don’t go on talking like that! What happened in the war wasn’t your fault, and it’s over. And anyhow, most people found your part of it rather admirable,” she said indignantly.

“Admirable!” he said, in a soft, indrawn howl. “My good God almighty!”

“Well, I didn’t invent your reputation. I can’t help it if you don’t like being a hero!”

“I don’t like it!” he shouted hoarsely. “I loathe it! Don’t insult me with it! I never want to hear it from you, whatever the damned herd choose to think. Hero! Oh, yes, it’s a fine thing to be a hero!—to have the identity ripped clean out of you—to be violated—in the middle of your being—”

It was awful, frightening; his voice broke in a terrible ugly sound, and then there was just an almost-silence, full of a sort of heaving and struggling for breath, like a drowning man fighting to regain his footing. Dominic turned his face right away from Pussy’s sight, and leaned hard against the shelves, because he was trembling. His inside felt hollow and molten-hot. His heart hurt him. He wanted to think that Chad was really a little drunk, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t very experienced, but he knew a true grief from a drunken one even by its sound. And now somebody was crying. Io was crying, very quietly and laboriously and angrily, muffling it in her hands and the shadows and an inadequate handkerchief. And the painful quaking of the air which emanated from Chad had suddenly stilled into a listening silence.

“Why are you crying? As you said, it’s over. And if it wasn’t, you’ve no reason to shed any tears over it—you find it admirable.”

“I find you detestable,” cried Io furiously.

“I know! You’ve made that quite plain.” And after an uneasy moment of the rain’s song he said with sour, grudging gentleness: “Don’t cry, Io! It isn’t worth it.”

“I’m not crying! Go away! Get to hell out of here, and leave me alone!”

He seemed to hesitate a moment, and then the heel of his shoe rang violently on the threshold, and he ran lurching through the downpour away from her.

Instant upon his going, she began to cry in earnest, candidly and stormily in a long, diminishing outburst, until her tears and the thunderstorm ebbed together. She went out slowly, plashing mournfully across the gravel path starred with sudden pools, and in a few minutes the two in the loft could move and breathe again. They stirred and looked at each other with quick, evasive, scared glances.

“Wasn’t it awful? If they’d heard us!”

“Awful!”

They relaxed, and sat trembling, stiff with bracing themselves in one position, all large, wild eyes in the green gloom under the skylight.

“I’ve been worrying about her,” said Pussy, “for a long time. You know, it’s true what she said—your father thinks it was him who did the murder. Doesn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I tried to tell him it was crazy, but I’m afraid he does think it. I know he’s making an awful mistake.”

“He jolly well mustn’t make it, then!” said Pussy with fierce energy. “I’m not going to have my sister made miserable like that all her life, no fear I’m not. If nobody else will do anything about it, we’ve got to, Dom, that’s all.”

Dominic, a little puzzled and still shaken by the sudden and searing contact of other people’s misery, blinked at her for a moment without understanding. “Well, but I thought your sister—I didn’t know that she—everybody always said it was the other one. And she—well, she wasn’t being exactly nice to him, was she?”

“Oh, use your loaf!” said Pussy impatiently. “He wasn’t being exactly nice to her, but everybody knows he’s stuck on her so bad it’s half-killing him. What d’you think she was crying about? Of course he’s the one! I’ve thought so for a long time. They wouldn’t bother to fight if they weren’t gone on each other, because there’d be nothing to fight about. But, Dom, what on earth are we going to do?”

“If only we could solve it ourselves,” said Dominic wistfully.

“Well, couldn’t we at least try? It doesn’t seem as if anyone else is doing much about it, and somebody’s got to.”

“My father—” began Dominic, his hackles rising at once.

“Your father’s a dear, and I know he’s trying all he can, and listen, I’m too upset to argue with you. I’m only asking you, couldn’t we try? It’s awful when you think about people being so miserable. If only it wasn’t for this business hanging over them, maybe they could act a little more sensibly, maybe it would come out right. But as things are, what chance have they got? Dom, let’s at least try!”

“I’d like to,” said Dominic, “I want to. But I’m trying to think. What is there we can do? We haven’t got a clue. We don’t know where to look for one. There’s only the basin by the well, where we found
him
. And the pit where the pheasants were, but there’s nothing there, the police have been over it with microscopes, practically. And we don’t even know what we’re looking for,” he admitted despondently.

“If only we could find the weapon—or even a trace of it—”

“Well, there’s only one thing we can do, and that’s go over and over the ground inch by inch, for
anything
, anything at all. Anyhow, there’s no harm in trying. Are you game?”

“Yes, of course I am. When shall we go? Tomorrow?”

“The sooner the better. I’ll meet you there as soon as I’ve done my homework. I’ll bring a really good torch. Anyhow, if there is anything there, this time we won’t miss it.” He looked at Pussy crouching on the floor among the straw, and was touched to see the bright scornful eyes blinking back tears. He knew they were only going on a wild-goose chase, he knew they might just as well start going through the Harrow stacks for the proverbial needle, but he wouldn’t admit it, if the pretense could comfort Pussy. He clapped her on the shoulders, a hard, comradely clout. “It’ll be all right in the end, old girl, you see if it isn’t. We’ll try tomorrow, and we’ll go on trying till we jolly well get somewhere. We’ve got to get ourselves and everyone else out of this mess, and we’re going to do it, too.”

Pussy said: “You know, Dom—I know I go on about Io, sometimes, but she’s really not bad. I—I
like
her!”