The Man Within (2 page)

He stood and watched it and swayed a little upon his feet. Soon he would go up and knock, but for the moment in spite of weariness and the pain from his wounded wrist, he was engaged in the favourite process of dramatizing his actions. ‘Out of the night,’ he said to himself, and liking the phrase repeated it, ‘out of the night.’ ‘A hunted man,’ he added, ‘pursued by murderers,’ but altered that to ‘by worse than death.’ He imagined himself knocking on that door. He saw it opening, and there would appear an old white-faced woman with the face of a saint. She would take him in, and shelter him. She would be like a mother to him and bind his wrist and give him food and drink, and when he
had
slept he would tell her everything – ‘I am a hunted man,’ he would say, ‘pursued by worse than death.’

He became afraid again of his own reiteration of the phrase ‘worse than death’. There was little satisfaction in an image which stood upon a fact. He looked behind him once into the dark from which he had come, half expecting to see Carlyon’s face luminous there, like a lighted turnip. Then he stepped nearer to the cottage.

When he felt the rough stones warm under his palm, he was comforted. At least it was something solid to have at one’s back. He turned and faced the wood, stared and stared, trying to pick out details and to see where each trunk stood. But either his eyes were tired, or else the darkness was too deep. The wood remained a black, forbidding immensity. He felt his way cautiously along the wall to the window and then, standing on tiptoe, tried to peer within. He could perceive only shadows, and the flame of a candle which stood on the ledge inside. He thought that one shadow in the room moved, but it might merely have been the effect of the flickering light. His mind cleared a little and gave room for cunning, and with cunning there crawled in uneasiness. He felt his way very cautiously along the wall towards the door, listening for any sound from the cottage on one side of him and from the wood on the other. It would be like his luck, he thought, his heart giving a sick jolt, if he had stumbled on a smuggler’s hole. It was just such a night, he knew, as he would have chosen himself to run a cargo, dark and moonless. Perhaps he had better move on and avoid the place, and even as the thought crossed his mind his fingers touched the wood of the door. His legs were weak as butter, his wrist was sending stab after stab of pain up his arm, and the edge of an approaching mist touched his consciousness. He could go no farther. Better face what lay within the cottage than lie defenceless outside with Carlyon perhaps approaching through the wood. The vision of the white-haired old mother had been
effaced
very completely. He fumbled at the door, but he was unprepared for it to swing readily open, and he fell on his knees across the threshold in a silly sprawl.

He looked up. Clogged and dulled by that ever-approaching mist a voice had spoken to him. ‘Stay where you are,’ it had said with a kind of quiet and unsurprised command. Now he saw at the other side of the room, wavering a little like a slim upstrained candle-flame, a woman. She was young, he recognized with an automatic leer, and white in the face but not frightened. What kept him still upon his knees, besides the complete physical weariness that made him unwilling to rise, was the gun which was aimed steadily at his chest. He could see the hammer raised.

‘I say,’ he said. ‘I say.’ He was displeased at the dead sound of his own voice. He felt that it should be full of the mingled pathos of weariness and appeal. ‘You needn’t be afraid,’ he tried again. ‘I’m done in.’

‘You can stand up,’ she said, ‘and let me look at you.’ He rose shakily to his feet, with a feeling of immense grievance. This wasn’t the way for a woman to behave. She should be frightened, but she very damnably wasn’t. It was he who felt the fear, with his eye warily watching the gun.

‘Now what do you want?’ she asked. To his surprise there was no anger in her voice, but a quite genuine curiosity. It annoyed him to know that she was patently the mistress of the situation. It made him even in his weakness want to bully her, to teach her. If only he could get that gun…

‘I want a hiding place,’ he said. ‘I’m being followed.’

‘Runners?’ she asked. ‘Gaugers? You can’t stop here. You’d better go the way you came.’

‘But I can’t,’ he said, ‘they’d get me. Look here, I’m on the side of the law. It’s not the officers who are after me.’ His eyes fixed on the gun, he made a step forward, spreading out his hands in appeal, in a gesture which he had often seen made on the stage.

‘Keep back,’ she said, ‘you can’t stay here. Turn round and go out.’

‘For the love of God,’ he said. He had picked that expression also from the stage, but the girl could not be expected to know it. It sounded genuine, for his voice was full of real tears. He was tired and wanted to sleep.

‘If you are being followed,’ she said, as though speaking to a very stupid child, ‘you are wasting time here.’

‘When I get you,’ he said with sudden fury, ‘I’ll teach you charity. Call yourself a Christian’ – his eyes filled with warm sentimental tears at a sudden vision of little grey churches, corn fields, stiles, honeyed distant bells in the dusk, robins in snow. ‘I’ll teach you,’ he said again. The white serenity of her face infuriated him. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do to you.’ With childish petulance he flung his mud at something beautiful and very distant, hated himself and enjoyed his hatred. He described what he would do to her in a brief, physiological sentence, and rejoiced at the flush which it fetched to her face. His outburst brought the mist down closer upon him. ‘You can join your fellows on the streets then,’ he cried at her, determined to hurt before fainting should make him a powerless, shameful weakling at her mercy. For a moment he thought that she was going to shoot. He was too exhausted for fear now and felt only a vague satisfaction that he had made himself sufficiently hateful to drive her to action. Then the danger passed. ‘I told you to go,’ was all she said, ‘I don’t know what you want here.’

He swayed a little on his feet. He could hardly see her now. She was a lighter wisp in a world of grey. ‘Look, he’s at the window,’ he cried with sudden vehemence, and as the wisp moved he lunged forward.

He felt the gun within his hand and forced it upwards, struggling at the same time for the trigger. The girl had been taken by surprise and for the moment gave way.

With the muzzle pointing somewhere at the ceiling, he
pulled
the trigger. The hammer fell, but there was no explosion. The girl had fooled him with an unloaded weapon. ‘Now, I’ll teach you,’ he said. He tried to wrench the gun away, the better to get at her, but his right wrist seemed to double up and collapse with the effort. He felt a hand press against his face, and his whole body grew weak, and he stumbled backwards. He hit against a table which he had not seen was in the room, so focused had his eyes been on the danger in front of him. He put out a hand to save himself, for his legs seemed made in numerous joints, which were now all folding in upon each other. Something fell to the floor with a brief dart of gold, like a disdainful guinea, and his fingers were scorched for a moment by flame.

The pain cleared his brain with the suddenness of an unseen hand wrenching a curtain aside. He looked behind him and found himself staring into a heavy bearded face, over which three other candles sent a straying luminance.

‘But…’ he cried, and never knew what he meant to add. He backed away in disgust from the body where it lay in its unlidded and unvarnished coffin. He had never met death before so startlingly face to face. His mother he had never seen in death, for his father had huddled her quickly away in earth with a cross and a bunch of flowers, and his father had been killed in a running fight at sea and dropped unobtrusively over the side, while he was learning to decline
oikia
at his school in Devon. He was frightened and disgusted and sick and somehow ashamed. It was, he felt remotely, indecorous to broil thus over a coffin, even though the coffin were of unvarnished deal. His eyes searched a deepening darkness, flickering with gold points where the candles shone, until they found a face which seemed now white rather with weariness than serenity. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and then the lights were all extinguished.

OVER A TOPPLING
pile of green vegetables two old women were twittering. They pecked at their words like sparrows for crumbs. ‘There was a fight, and one of the officers was killed.’ ‘They’ll hang for that. But three of them escaped.’ The vegetables began to grow and grow in size, cauliflowers, cabbages, carrots, potatoes. ‘Three of them escaped, three of them escaped,’ one of the cauliflowers repeated. Then the whole pile fell to the ground, and Carlyon was walking towards him. ‘Have you heard this one?’ he said. ‘Three of them escaped, three of them escaped.’ He came nearer and nearer and his body grew in size, until it seemed as though it must burst like a swollen bladder. ‘Have you heard this one, Andrews?’ he said. Andrews became aware that somewhere behind a gun was being levelled, and he turned, but there were only two men, whose faces he could not see, laughing together. ‘Old Andrews, we won’t see his like again. Do you remember the time …’ ‘Oh, shut up, shut up,’ he called, ‘he was only a brute, I tell you. My father was a brute.’ ‘Ring a ring a roses,’ his father and Carlyon were dancing round him, holding hands. The ring got smaller and smaller and he could feel their breath, Carlyon’s cool and scentless, his father’s stale, tobacco-laden. He was gripped round the waist, and someone called out, ‘Three of them escaped.’ The arms began to drag him away. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he cried. ‘I didn’t do it.’ Tears ran down his cheeks. He struggled and struggled against the pulling arms.

He emerged slowly into a grey dispersing mist, cut by jagged edges. They grew towards his sight and became boxes, old trunks, dusty lumber. He found that he was lying upon a pile of sacking and there was a stale smell in the
room
of earthen mould. A pile of gardening implements leant up against one wall, and one upturned lidless trunk full of little shrivelled bulbs. At first he thought that he was in the potting shed of his home. Outside should be a lawn and a tall pine, and presently he would hear the shuffling footsteps of the gardener. The old man always dragged his left foot behind him, so that there was no regular cadence to his steps. They had to be counted like an owl’s – one twoooo – one twoooo. How it was that he came to be lying in the potting shed in the grey light of early morning Andrews did not question. He knew very well the unwisdom of questioning it – half indeed he was aware in what place he lay. I will play a little longer, he thought, and turned over and lay with his face to the wall, so that he might not notice the unfamiliar details of the room, shed, whatever it might be. Then he shut his eyes, because the wall he faced was stone and it should have been wood.

With his eyes shut all was well. He sniffed the warm scent of the mould comfortingly.

The old man would grumble at his presence, complain that he had shifted a hoe, a spade, a fork. Then as certainly as night closed day he would take up a box lid full of seeds, rattle the seeds back and forth with a noise like small quick hailstones and murmur, ‘Winkle dust’. Andrews screwed his eyes tighter, sniffed deeper. He remembered how the old man had been standing once beneath the pine at the end of the lawn. He was feeling his chin thoughtfully and staring up at the tapering dark slimness above him. ‘Three hundred years,’ he was saying slowly to himself, ‘three hundred years.’ Andrews had commented on the sweet elusive smell that came sifting through the air. ‘That’s age,’ said the old man, ‘that’s age.’ He spoke with such conviction that Andrews half expected to see him vanish himself into a faint perfume formed out of bulbs and damp turned earth. ‘They make coffins out of pines,’ the old man continued,
‘coffins
, that’s why you get the smell sometimes where there ain’t no pines. Up through the ground you see.’

The thought of coffins jerked Andrews’ eyes open. He saw again the candle fall and the bearded face looking up at him. It was sheer chance that he had not placed his hand full on that dead stubble. Three years swept past; the present scratched at his nerves. He jumped up and looked round. How long had he slept? What had that girl been doing in the meanwhile? He had been a weak fool to collapse and a sentimental fool to dream into the past. The present called for brisk action if he was to bring himself to safe haven, but remembering all the circumstances of the last few weeks, he wondered with a sick lurch at the heart whether there was any haven to which Carlyon would not penetrate.

In the wall opposite was a window cobwebbed and dusty. By piling two of the boxes together he was able to reach it, and he calculated that he could just squeeze his body through the opening. He was afraid to break the glass, because of the noise the act would cause, and his fingers felt cautiously and timidly at the catch, which was almost welded to its position with the rust of many years. He began to pick at the rust with his nails and by small fractions of an inch he was able to move the catch. The tiny noises he made fretted at his nerves and the very need of caution made him careless. He stood on tiptoe, partly with excitement and a restlessness to be gone, partly that he might get a better purchase on the terribly reluctant catch. With a long drawn out squeak, it twisted and left the window free; at the same moment the noise of a door handle turning swung him round. He had hardly noticed the door of the room, so certain had he been that it was locked, until now when it opened and the girl stood there. Andrews felt acutely ridiculous balanced upon his boxes. Carefully and slowly, with his eyes fixed on her, he stepped down.

She laughed, but without amusement. ‘What were you doing up there?’ she asked. He felt furious with her at finding him in so ignominious a position.

‘I was trying to escape,’ he said.

‘Escape?’ she turned the word over on her lips as though it were a novel taste. ‘If you mean you wanted to go,’ she said, ‘there was the door, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes, and you with the gun,’ he snapped back.