In the Land of Time (44 page)

“Three miles doesn't sound far: it's no more than from here to Kensington: but I knew a man who was followed for far less by only a lion, and he swore it was longer than any walk he had ever walked before, or any ten. And only a lion, with breath and blood like himself; death perhaps, yet a death such as comes to thousands; but here was I with a terror from outside human experience, a thing against which no man had ever had to steel himself, a thing that I never knew I should one day have to face. And still I did not run.

“A change at last seemed coming over the loneliness. It wasn't merely the lights that began to shine from Lingham, nor the smoke from chimneys, the banner of man in the air; nor any warmth from the houses that could beat out as far as this: it was a certain feeling wider than warmth could go, a certain glow that one felt from the presence of man. And it was not only I that felt it: the poplars along the road were no longer watching me with quite that excited interest with which a while ago they had seemed to expect my slaughter.”

“How did they show it?” said Terbut, who can never leave Jorkens alone.

“If you had studied poplars for years and years,” said Jorkens, “or if you had watched them as I watched them on that walk, when vast stretches of time seem condensed in one dreadful experience, you too would have been able to tell when poplars were watching you. I have seldom seen it since, and never again so as to be quite certain, but it was unmistakable then, a certain strained tensity in every leaf, twigs like the fingers of a spectre saying Hush to a village; you could not mistake it. But now the leaves were moving again in the soft evening air, the twigs seemed to be menacing nothing, and nothing about the trees was pointing or hinting or waiting; if you can use so mild a word as ‘waiting' for their dreadfully strained expectancy. And better than all that, I had a hope—I could not yet call it any more—that my frightful pursuer was slowly dropping behind. And as I neared the windows the hope grew. Their mellow light, some reflecting the evening, some shining from lamps already, seemed throwing far over the marshes the influence of man. I heard a dog bark then, and, immediately after, the healthy clip clap clop of a good cart-horse, going home to his byre. The influence of these sounds on all nature can scarcely be estimated. I knew at once that there had been no revolution. I knew the animal kingdom was still supreme. I heard now unmistakably a certain hesitance come in the frightful footsteps behind me. And still I plodded on with my regular steps, whatever my pulse was doing. And now I began to hear the sound of geese and ducks, more cart-horses and now and then a boy shouting at them, and dogs joining in, and I knew I was back again within the lines of the animal kingdom; and had it not been for that terrible clod clod clod that I still heard behind me, though fainter, I could have almost brought myself to disbelieve in the tree. Yes, as easily as you can, Terbut,” for Jorkens saw he was about to say something, “sitting safely here.” And in the end Terbut said nothing.

“When at last I reached the village the steps were far fainter, and yet I was still pursued, and only my fears could guess how far the revengeful tree would dare to penetrate into Lingham to face the arrogant mastery, and even the incredulity, of our kind. I hurried on, still without running, till I came to an inn with a good stout door. For a moment I stood and looked at it, door, roof and front wall, to satisfy myself that it could not easily be battered in, and when I saw it was really the shelter I sought, I slipped in like a rabbit.

“The brave appearance I kept up in front of the poplar dropped from me like a falling cloak, as I sat or lay on a wooden chair by a table, part of me on the table and part on the chair; till people came up and began to speak to me. But I couldn't speak. Three or four working men, in there for their glass of beer, and the landlord of the Mug of Ale, all came round me. I couldn't speak at all.

“They were very good to me. And, when I found that the words would come again, I said I had had an attack. I didn't say of what, as I might have blundered on to something that whiskey was bad for, and my life depended on a drink. And they gave me one. I will indeed say that for them. They gave me a tumbler of neat whiskey. I just drank it. And they gave me another. Do you know, the two glasses had no effect on me whatever. Not the very slightest. I wanted another, but before I took that there was one thing I had to be sure of. Was there anything waiting for me outside? I daren't ask straight out.

“ ‘A nice village,' I said, lifting up my head from the table. ‘Nice tree outside.'

“ ‘No tree out there,' said one of the men.

“ ‘No tree?' I said. ‘I'll bet you five shillings there is.'

“ ‘No,' he said, and stuck to it. He didn't even want to bet.

“ ‘I thought I noticed something like a' I daren't even say the word ‘poplar,' so I said ‘a tree' instead. ‘Just outside the door,' I added.

“‘No, no tree,' he repeated.

“ ‘I'll bet you ten shillings,' I said.

“He took that.

“ ‘Well, go and have a look, governor,' he said.

“You don't think I was going outside that door again. So I said, ‘No, you shall decide. I mayn't trust your memory against mine, but if you go outside and look, and say whether it's there or not, that's quite good enough for me.'

“He smiled and thought me a bit dotty. Oh Lord, what would he have thought me if I'd told him the bare truth.

“Well, he came back with the news that thrilled all through me, the golden glorious news that I'd lost my ten shillings. And at that I paid my bet and had my third tumbler of whiskey, which I did not dare to risk while I didn't know how things were. And that third whiskey won. It beat my misery, it beat my fatigue and my terror, and the awful suspicion which partly haunted my reason, that this unquestioned dominion that animal life believes itself to have established was possibly overthrown. It beat everything, and I dropped into a deep sleep there at the table.

“I woke next day at noon immensely refreshed, where the good fellows had laid me upstairs on a bed. I looked out over ruddy tiles; there was a yard below, with poultry, among walls of red brick, and a goat was tied up there, and a woman went out to feed him; and from beyond came all the ancient sounds of the farm, against which time can do nothing. I revelled in all these sounds of animal mastery, and felt a safety there in the light of that bright morning that somehow told me my dreadful experience was over.

“Of course you may say it was all a dream; but one doesn't remember a dream all those years like that. No, that frightful poplar had something against man, and with cause enough I'll admit.

“What it would have done if I'd run doesn't bear thinking of.” And Jorkens didn't think of it; with a cheery wave of his hand he made the sign to the waiter, that drowns memory.

A few of us at the Billiards Club one day were sitting in the bay window: no one that day had any particular idea as to what the Government ought to do, or what things were coming to, or indeed about any topic whatever; so we were looking out at the street. Not only had conversation drooped and then died away; but, as often happens when things are dull in the club, they seemed dull in the street too. I for one would not have watched the street at all if I had had anything else to do; and that, I think, was the feeling of all of us. It was dull, and dull people passed through it. And then came an open motor, and in it reclined a man with sun-tanned skin, sharp aquiline features, small grey beard and rather foreign expression, in a coat of luxurious fur; with a cigar in the fingers of his right hand and one large diamond shining on one of them. His passage through the street seemed to change its whole aspect: it was dull no longer. I turned to my next neighbour, who chanced to be Jorkens, to make some comment on this rare personality; and I saw as I turned that everyone else seemed a little stirred by him too.

“He's gone up a lot in the world,” said Jorkens.

Was it envy that made him say this?

“Who?” I said in order to draw Jorkens.

“That fellow,” said Jorkens pointing to the man in the new car. “Satyrides, the Greek financier.”

I had heard the name. “Is that who he is?” I said.

“Yes,” said Jorkens. “He is not Greek really.”

“What is he?” two or three of us asked.

“I'll tell you his story,” said Jorkens.

And there and then he did; and it only shows us that one can wander the countryside for years, and at the end of all that time find something one knew nothing about; or, as is very often the case, never find it at all.

“There was a painter called Meddin,” said Jorkens, “who lived in a very large cottage, or perhaps one should call it a farmhouse, a really delightful building covered with honey-suckle and built in the way they used to build in Kent, with large flints and mortar. It had a garden behind it, and beyond that a small orchard, and beyond the orchard a wood. Meddin's property ended at the further edge of the orchard: the wood belonged to the Rillswood estate. Meddin lived there with his sister. All through the warm weather he used to sit and paint in the garden, until there was no light left. I think he preferred the dim gloaming to good light, as he did imaginative pictures and could fancy classical figures between the wood and his orchard more easily when the glare of day was gone. It is not easy to describe in words a picture painted with oils, but an evident love of trees and an interest in old mythology, that was showed by his dim figures, often haunting a wood, rather suggested Corot.
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He was not imitative; but, if he had a master during the last hundred years, Corot would have been the man. Even in actual fact there can have been few places pleasanter than that garden of Meddin's, and in his pictures it was doubly delightful. And then they developed, as they call it, the Rillswood estate; and one day they began to cut the wood down. In a month it was all gone, and in two months bungalows were going up.

“At this time Meddin and his sister Lucy both began to notice scratchings in their lawn: buttercups were being scratched up and larger plants, and sometimes they saw a bulb, all white in the earth, that had been exposed by these scratchings and then left where it grew, as though whatever had laid it bare had been scared away before eating it. They put it down to a badger. And then the tulips, that they had in the orchard, began to be scratched up. Meddin and his sister went all round the garden and could find nothing. Sometimes they listened from their windows at night, and both distinctly heard noises. Then they talked it all over, and they decided that the best thing to do would be for Meddin to sit up later than usual in the garden, with a gun. They had a shotgun with which Meddin used to shoot pigeons, until the houses of the Rillswood estate began to grow round them, and the pigeons came no longer.

“ ‘But you mustn't shoot it if it's a fox,' said Lucy.

“ ‘No, no, that would never do,' said Meddin.

“All this, I may say, was more than thirty years ago, and the shooting of a fox would have meant the placing of the Meddins for the rest of their lives in a class or caste to which the nearest approach would perhaps be the Indian Untouchables.

“Whatever it was seemed to avoid the house, and the scratchings in the lawn were all on the far side, and there were more of them in the orchard, deep scratchings to uncover small roots, which had apparently been eaten. Meddin had never had any more exciting sport than shooting an occasional pigeon, and when he left the house with his loaded shotgun and crossed the lawn, all hushed except for the birds' last songs coming from shrubs and hedge, I gather that some of those thrills that come to men who sit up at nightfall for tigers came as near to Meddin as they were ever to come. The mystery with which evening always leaves us, and the uncertainty of sport, helped to bring such feelings to Meddin in his villa-surrounded garden. He crossed the lawn to the orchard in the direction in which the scratchings were thickest, and a new look came to the apple-trees; for hitherto he had looked at them as an artist, and beyond them to catch fancies stealing out from the wood, but now he approached them as a hunter. The difference was immense, for the fancies that lurked on the orchard's edge for the artist were all friendly, while he carried a gun for them now; and whatever haunted the evening seemed hostile to Meddin, as he was hostile to it. As an artist he would almost have wept at that hour to see all the solemnity and mystery that had haunted the wood gone, and all its beauty, and the very earth that the wood had enchanted lying bare and untidy; but as a man with a gun, looking for something that lurked, he felt glad that it had less hiding-place than it had a month ago, if only the whole evening, stealing swiftly towards night, were not hiding-place enough for anything that might lurk. He went cautiously to a rhododendron just at the edge of the orchard, and got into it and sat down on a small camp-stool he carried, and was pretty well hidden, but could see the orchard. Darkness came to the desolate land where the wood had been, and Meddin had not hidden in his rhododendron long, when he heard the sound of steps that seemed soft and heavy stealing amongst his apple-trees. He shoved forward the safety-catch of his gun, which his sister had told him, quite rightly, not to do until the very last moment, and peered through his leafy screen. Whatever was coming came from where the wood had been, but it kept so persistently behind apple-trees that, though Meddin could hear where it was, he could not catch a glimpse of it. It stopped to scratch up some roots from the earth, still hidden from view: Meddin knew which apple-tree was giving it covert, but could not move to see round it without disturbing the whole rhododendron, which must have scared whatever it was away. Then, when the thing had eaten whatever it had scratched up, it came forward again, slipping slowly round the apple-tree. Meddin says that he knew what it was the moment he saw it, though I don't set much store by what men tell you afterwards about such moments as that. Anyway it was a satyr.”