The Man Within (12 page)

Slowly the moon which swam far out over the Surrey hills grew more distinct, breasting a tide grown darker blue with the approach of evening. Somewhere out by Hassocks the sun sank level with the downs, which lay, barred with the last parallel gold rays pointing to Lewes. Up Harry’s Mount he climbed, his fear forgotten, and reaching its crest looked down with shocked surprise on Lewes, crouching in the valley like a fierce remnant of old winter.

He stood and watched, sick and suddenly tired at heart, half ready to perceive it stretch out an arm to sweep him down. This is the end then, he thought. Must I go down and talk with people again, and be everlastingly careful? Tears of the old self-pity pricked his eyes. There’s no rest for me in England, he thought. I’d better go to France and beg. It was not the begging, however, which raised his heart in instant revolt at the suggestion, but the idea of ceding once and for all sight and sound of Elizabeth.

The sun dived with sudden decision into night from the edge of a distant down. The faint gold powder which had strewn the air was brushed away leaving a still, transparent silver. Andrews walked back and forth with puzzled straying steps that he might keep warm till a deeper darkness came. He looked every now and then at the castle which dominated Lewes from its hill. When it should be cloaked from sight he would go down. It seemed an endless while and it was very cold. The prospect of returning that night the way he had come, his promise fulfilled, grew uninviting. Besides, what welcome would he get from Elizabeth after so literal a fulfilment? There could be no great danger, he persuaded himself, in staying one night in Lewes. He knew from experience that there were many inns, and fortune could hardly deal so ill with him as to bring him face to face with anyone he knew. Carlyon would not dare to enter Lewes when the Assizes were so imminent and the town full of officers.

The shadows had fallen over the town and he could no longer see the castle, save as an indistinct hump or a shrugged shoulder. He began to walk down by a path longer than it had seemed in the silver light. By the time he had reached the first straggling houses, darkness was complete, pierced here and there by the yellow flicker of oil lamps, crowned by dingy pinnacles of smoke from the lengthening wicks. Cautiously he made his way into the High Street, and stood for a while in the shadow of a doorway, probing his mind for the position of the various inns. There were few persons about in the street, which was like the deck of a sleeping ship lit by two lamps, fore and aft, and on each side a sudden fall into a dark sea. Opposite him two old houses leant crazily towards each other, almost touching above the narrow lane called Keerie Street, which dived chaotically into the night – a few confused squares and oblongs of inn signs, six steep feet of cobbles and then vacancy. Out beyond, but he could not see, was Newhaven
and
the Channel, France. Even there lay no complete freedom for him. Along the coasts were scrubby little men, with squinting eyes, hard wrists and a sharp mispronounced knowledge of the English coinage who knew his face well and Carlyon’s better.

His shoulders falling from force of habit into a self-pitying droop, Andrews moved farther down the street. Here and there shops were still open, and their lit windows showed old white-bearded men peering at their ledgers with little lines of content around their eyes. Never, not even at school nor under the pain of the smugglers’ hardly veiled contempt, had Andrews felt so alone. He passed on. Two voices speaking softly in a doorway made him pause. He could not see the speakers. ‘Come tonight,’ ‘Shall I? I oughtn’t to.’ ‘I love you, love you, love you.’

Andrews, to his own surprise, smote the wall against which he stood with his fist and said aloud with a crazy fury, ‘You damned lechers,’ walked on weeping with anger and loneliness. ‘I’ll be drunk if I can’t be content in any other way,’ he thought. ‘I’ve still enough money for that, thank God.’

With sudden resolve he dived down a side street, stumbling at its unexpected steepness, and came to rest with unerring instinct at the door of an inn. Two windows were cracked and stuffed with rags, the sign was long past the possibility of repair. Of the goat, which was the inn’s name, remained only the two horns, as though a mocking warning to husbands not to enter. Loneliness and the desire to forget his loneliness drove away even the instincts of fear and caution, and Andrews flung the door carelessly open and stumbled, eyes red and blind with childish tears, within. The air was thick with smoke, and a roar of human voices, each trying to drown the others and make its opinions heard, smote him in the face like a wave. A tall thin man with small eyes and a red flabby mouth, who was standing by the door, caught his elbow. ‘What do you want, son?’ he
asked
and immediately began to shoulder his way through the throng, calling out to an invisible potman, ‘Two double brandies for a gentleman here,’ and presently re-emerged with what he sought, and vanished again with his own quota leaving Andrews to pay. His brandy drunk, Andrews looked round the room with a clearer mind. He chose a small, respectable man, who stood alone, asked him to join him in a drink. Looking deprecatingly at the empty glass in Andrews’ hand, the stranger replied that he would not mind a glass of sherry.

Andrews fetched it and himself revived by fresh brandy began to question his new acquaintance.

‘I’m looking for a night’s lodging,’ he said. ‘I suppose that won’t be easy now. The town will be full for the Assizes?’

‘I can’t tell that,’ the man replied, eyeing him a little askance as though he feared that Andrews was about to ask him for money. ‘I’m more or less a stranger here myself.’

‘And these Assizes,’ Andrews considered, ‘what are they for anyway? To bring money to the tradespeople. There’s no need for such a fuss to hang a few poor skunks.’

‘I don’t agree with you at all – not at all,’ said the little man sipping his sherry and eyeing Andrews suspiciously. ‘Justice must be done in the proper order.’

‘Yes, but what is the proper order?’ Andrews asked, raising his voice so as to be heard above the din around him and at the same time signalling to the potman that his glass was empty. ‘Surely the crime and then retribution.’

‘You must prove the guilt,’ the stranger said, turning the sherry gently on his tongue.

‘Isn’t it proved well enough without a judge and jury?’ Andrews’ caution vanished still further out of sight at the stinging touch of a third glass. ‘They were caught by the revenue in the act and you can’t dispose of a dead body.’

The stranger put down his glass of sherry carefully on the edge of the table and eyed Andrews even more curiously.
‘You
are referring to the smugglers and the alleged murder?’ he asked.

Andrews laughed. ‘Alleged!’ he cried. ‘Why, it’s patent.’

‘No man is guilty until he is proved so,’ the little man commented as though he were repeating a well-learnt lesson.

‘Then you must wait till Doomsday in this case,’ Andrews murmured, with a sudden bitter sense of divine injustice. He who was innocent suffered persecution, while they…

‘You could not form a jury in Lewes which would convict them.’ He waved his hand round the inn parlour. ‘They are all in it,’ he said, ‘for fear or profit. If you searched the crypt of Southover Church you’d find barrels there, and the parson winks an eye. Do you think he wants to lose his whole congregation or perhaps be whipped at one of his own pillars? If you want to stamp out smuggling you must do away with the idea of justice. Have another drink.’

‘I will wait a little if I may,’ the stranger moved his position, so that the full light of the oil lamp fell on Andrews’ face. The act thrust suspicion into the other’s mind. ‘I must be careful,’ he thought. ‘I must have no more to drink.’ And yet he was certainly not drunk. He saw his surroundings with perfect clarity, and his thoughts were more than usually vivid. He had longed for human companionship and now he had it, and the desire to fling his arm round the shoulder of the little man opposite him was nearly over-mastering. He had so longed to talk to someone, who knew nothing of his past, who would treat him with neither kindness nor contempt, and consider his words with the same respect as he would show to those of any other man.

‘You will take another glass?’ the stranger said stiffly and shyly, as though unaccustomed to the procedure of standing drinks.

‘What is your name?’ Andrews said quickly, with a feeling of pride at his own cunning.

‘Mr Farne,’ the other replied without hesitation.

‘Farne,’ Andrews said slowly. He pondered the name. That it was an honest one he could not doubt. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘I will.’

When he had drunk, the world seemed a fairer place than it had seemed for a long while. There was companionship in it and Mr Farne, who listened to him without mockery and never once reminded him of his father.

‘Perhaps you did not know my father?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I had not that pleasure,’ said Mr Farne.

Andrews laughed. Mr Farne was an ideal companion, for he was a wit. ‘Pleasure!’ he grimaced. ‘You can’t have known him.’

‘What was his name?’ Mr Farne asked.

‘The same as mine,’ Andrews retorted, with a laugh. It seemed to him that he had combined in a sentence of four words the quintessence of witty retort and of caution. For clearly he must not disclose his name to Mr Farne.

‘And what is that?’ asked Mr Farne.

‘Absalom,’ Andrews mocked.

‘I am sorry, but I am a little deaf…’

‘Absalom,’ Andrews repeated. Mr Farne, the sweet simpleton, was taking him seriously. To prolong the excellent joke he searched his pockets for a scrap of paper and a pencil, but could find neither. Mr Farne, however, supplied both. ‘I’ll write my name down,’ Andrews said. He wrote ‘Absalom, son of King David.’

Mr Farne’s laugh suddenly ceased. He stared at the scrap of paper in front of him. ‘You make very curious capital letters,’ he said.

‘Long tails to them,’ Andrews answered. ‘I was always fond of women.’ He stared round him. ‘Isn’t there a woman in this place that’s worth looking at?’ he called angrily. ‘There’s no one here, Mr Farne,’ he said, ‘let’s go into the town.’

‘Women do not attract me,’ Mr Farne said coldly.

‘There’s one that would,’ Andrews stared at him with serious melancholy eyes. ‘Have you ever seen a saint surrounded with white birds? And yet a woman you know that could give a man pleasure. But she’s too good for that. You mustn’t laugh. I mean it. I call her Gretel. I don’t believe that any man will ever touch her.’

‘You are a very strange young man,’ Mr Farne said deprecatingly. Andrews was arousing attention. They were being stared at. A few men were pressing close, while a fat woman began to laugh shrilly and continuously.

‘You don’t believe me,’ Andrews said. ‘You would if you saw her. I’ll show you though. Give me that pencil and paper and I’ll draw her.’

A tall loose-jointed man with a scrubby beard began to clear a circle on a table. ‘Look, folks,’ he said, ‘here’s an artist. He’s going to draw us a woman, a peach of a woman.’

‘Where’s the paper and the pencil?’ Andrews asked.

Mr Farne shook his head. ‘Here is the pencil,’ he said. ‘I can’t find the paper. It must have fallen on the floor.’

‘Never mind, dearie,’ the fat woman called. ‘Here George, get us some paper,’ she implored the potman.

‘Any paper will do,’ Andrews cried, exhilarated by the attention he had aroused.

They found him an old envelope and crowded close; Mr Farne, however, stood a little apart. Andrews knelt down at the table and tried to steady his hand. ‘Now, nothing indecent, mind,’ the potman called across with a laugh.

‘Here, give the boy a whisky on me,’ said the fat woman. ‘There, that will clear you, dearie. Now, show us your little friend.’

Andrews drained the glass and picked up the pencil. Clearly in front of him he saw Elizabeth’s face, white, set and proud, as he had seen it first, when she pointed the gun at his breast. He knew that they were mocking him, but
he
had only to show them that face for them to fall quiet and understand. He held the pencil awkwardly in his fingers. How should he begin? He had never drawn a picture in his life, but when he could see her there so clearly, it must be easy. He would draw the candles first with their yellow flames.

‘She’s a bit of a stick, isn’t she, dearie,’ said the fat woman, ‘where are her arms?’

‘She wants more than arms,’ the loose-jointed man winked and grinned over Andrews’s head and made obscene gestures with his fingers. ‘Give him another drink.’

‘That’s not her,’ Andrews said, ‘those are candles. I’m going to start her now.’ He made a few strokes with the pencil and then, putting his head upon his hands, burst into tears. ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I can’t. She won’t come here.’ Her face was going away from him very far off. Soon only the glow of the candles would be left. ‘Don’t go,’ he implored aloud.

He heard them laughing round him, but with his head bowed and eyes shut, he tried to bring back that vanishing image. Good God, he thought, I can’t even remember how her hair curls. I must be drunk.

‘Never mind, I’ll stay, dearie,’ said the fat woman, bending over him with a giggle, her whisky-laden breath driving like a fume of smoke between his eyes and what he sought.

Andrews jumped to his feet. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Haven’t had anything to eat today,’ he swayed a little on his feet. ‘Bring me some sandwiches.’ He felt in his pockets and found nothing there. He had spent his last penny. ‘No, don’t,’ he said and moved towards the door. A vague feeling of shame suffused his mind. He had tried to bring Elizabeth into this company and he had been fittingly punished. This laughter soiled the thought of her. ‘Be quiet, damn you,’ he cried.

The cool air of the streets went to his head as though it
were
another glass of spirits. The pavement surged under his feet and he leant back against a wall, feeling sick and tired and ashamed. He closed his eyes and shut out the vision of the rolling street.

Mr Farne’s quiet, sedate voice spoke through the dark. ‘You are a very foolish young man,’ he said, ‘to drink on an empty stomach.’