Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 17

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He went, down the echoing corridors, through the solemn, flagged court-yards and out into the dank river-side air. A crowd had gathered on the pavement; they were cheering and surging excitedly about an oddly-shaped two-horsed carriage in which the object of their enthusiasm, a dark man with an ugly, flushed face and a long tip-tilted nose, waved his hand and smiled.

“Bravo, Brougham,” they shouted. “Bravo, Brougham! Down with slavery!”

John forced his way roughly through the press. “Down with slavery!” he thought bitterly. “Why, we’re all of us slaves!” He was so shaken with anger and disappointment at his own failure that it was not until he had turned his back on Westminster that he realized that his lip had been cut and his mouth was bleeding. He walked furiously westward, seeing nothing of the streets through which he passed, caring nothing for the curses of drivers who swerved to escape running him down, feeling that only through violence or physical action could he release his brain’s angry content or cool its boiling turbulence. He walked, without food or rest, till his legs would carry him no farther, having no idea how far he had travelled until, tracing the cut inscription on a milestone, he found he was forty miles from London and only thirteen from Oxford. There, staggering into a field where a haystack stood close to the road, he lay down and slept the death-like, dreamless sleep of utter bodily exhaustion.

During the night the great fog fell. By the time he woke it was so dense that no glimmer in the uniform whiteness betrayed the position of the sun by marking which he might have guessed how long he had slept. Between emptiness and fatigue John Oakley’s spirits were now in a state of strange volatility. Though he knew he had failed, the very completeness of his failure and the futility of regretting what could not be mended absolved him of any further fruitless anxiety; and it was better perhaps, after all, to have failed than never to have striven.

The utter obliteration of the landscape by the fog, which grew more impenetrable with every mile he covered, encouraged him in a new sense of isolation and freedom. Though he was retracing his steps automatically to Grafton Lovett, bringing home his bad news, to take one last sentimental look (if the fog would let him) at the roof that had sheltered him for two years and to pick up his tool-bag, he knew that he could not stay there. After the events of the last few months Grafton Lovett would be no place for him. The Enclosure Commissioners would pull down his cottage and uproot his hedges; he would have no further part or lot in the land his grandfather had recovered from the waste. Yet, oddly enough, in the exalted mood that had succeeded the other of anger and humiliation, this did not seem to matter. Let them do what they would and be damned to them! It was better to starve and be free, he told himself—though it cheered him to feel the roll of guineas in his pocket—than to work on the stolen land at the mercy—scant mercy, too!—of Tom Collins or Willets the overseer, with the threat of Bromsberrow workhouse hung over his head. Yet the world was wide, he told himself; he was young and strong and could earn his bread by the trade he had learnt. No tie of blood or duty or even of affection bound him: and in this he was luckier than most men. Now, indeed, as, fatigue forgotten, he swung along, unseeing, invisible, through grey vapour so dense as to hide not merely the domes and spires of Oxford but the very parapets of the Cherwell bridge and the faint-lit shops and colleges on either side of the High Street, he was as free and detached from life as a disembodied spirit—more free and indeed more secure afoot (he smiled to think) than the rich men who travelled in coaches—it was here that the Hirondelle, with Mr. Vizard aboard it, stole cautiously past, its candle-lamps glimmering like haloed moons through the mirk—with the prospect of a crashing collision and a night in a sodden ditch.

He reached Stow-on-the-Wold that night and filled his stomach at an ale-house with the first food that had passed his lips for twenty-four hours; paid sixpence, although he grudged it, for a warmer night’s lodging, and dropped down over the scarp of Cotswold early next day. In the Vale the fog lay thicker; the roads were scattered with ditched wagons and stationary coaches that dared not move. Amid the tangled lanes of the Lenches, he was as good as lost until a lonely carter, huddled in sacks, put him right on the road to Chaddesbourne.

From this point onwards the fog made no difference to him: he knew the road so well that he could have found his way blindfold. This return to familiar surroundings should have encouraged his steps. On the contrary, without any warning, he felt mortally tired. That stormy exaltation, the mere after-swell of the emotional tempest on whose crest his spirits had ridden, fell suddenly to a sullen calm in which the sense of failure, hitherto masked by excitement, returned. The moment approached when he would have to admit his failure to the friends who had trusted him, to defend and excuse himself; and his weakness shrank from confession because he knew that they could not share the freedom in which he had found compensation—that they could not escape but were bound to the soil because they knew no other means of livelihood and had wives and families, hostages in the enemy’s hands.

This prospect was one which, in his present state of fatigue, he shirked facing, though every dragging step brought him relentlessly nearer to it. A dim light diffused through the fog ahead puzzled him—he could not, he thought, have reached the outskirts of the village so soon—till it struck him that it must be shining from the sack-curtained windows of an isolated ale-house kept by one of his prospective fellow-victims, a ruffian named Jem Rudge. He had no fancy either for the house, which had a bad name, or for its keeper; but, by this time, his waning strength was nearly exhausted: he might manage to pull himself together, he thought, if he sat down for a few moments and fortified himself with a mug of beer. He staggered up to the door and tried to open it. It was barred inside with a wooden bolt. When he knocked he heard anxious whispers and a sound of scurrying feet. Heavier steps drew near; the bolt was cautiously shot back, and Rudge’s ugly face appeared in a chink of the doorway.

“Who be there?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s me ... John Oakley.”

“John Oakley?” the man repeated. “I thought you was in London. You give me a regular scare. Come in, then: we’re all friends here.”

“Give us a pot of ale, Jem,” John said. “I’ve been on the road three days and I’m well-nigh famished.”

Rudge drew him a mug of treacle-coloured liquor. “That’ll soon put some heat in you,” he said.

“Ay, good health, lad! And I’ll have another pot too, Jem, damned if I won’t, if you’ll give me strap!”

The hovel was so dim—the fire that filled it with smoke was no more than a smoulder, and a single tallow-dip stuck in a bottle-neck afforded its only illumination—that, until the voice spoke, John had not been aware of its other occupants. Now two huddled shapes detached themselves from the dark background. One was George Dicketts, the maimed ex-soldier with the wooden leg, and the other Aaron Sheldon, a shady character, but the only labourer in Grafton who had shown any spirit over the Enclosure. John wished them both good evening.

“Well, and how did it go, John?” Sheldon grunted. “What news?”

“No good news, I reckon. ’Tis a hole-in-the-corner business—as good as settled as soon as they set it going.”

“What did I tell thee, Aaron?” Dicketts broke in excitedly. “John ought to have gone to the Duke, not to Parliament. The Duke’ld have seen us righted.”

“You and your bloody Duke! He be the same as the rest on ’em,” Sheldon answered, spitting contemptuously. “John Oakley, he’s got neither more nor less than I knew he would get, and come back with a flea in his ear, the same as I said. My motto’s the right one, George: don’t go begging for your rights—you might as well ask for the moon for all you’ll get—and don’t ask for a living neither. Go out nights and take it, like I do.”

“You’re right there, Aaron: there be no two ways about it. All the same, I say as if John here had gone to the Duke ...”

Sheldon interrupted him ruthlessly. “What’s it like outside, John?”

“You can see a two-three yards. It lies thicker in patches.”

“Ay, rare weather for one of my trade, but it’s falsified us to-night, and no mistake. Do’st see this here sack?”—he kicked a bundle on the floor—“well, inside that there sack there’s a dozen cock pheasants, my hearty, as lovely a lot of birds as Squire Abberley ever r’ared. A’roostin’ that snug they was, over in Pritchett’s Wood, that George here and me could pick ’em off so easy as blackberryin’, and the keepers a-rubbin, their eyes in the fog not two fields off! Old Ballance, I reckon he knew we was after them to-night; but the poor beggar couldn’t see a yard before him. Still, it cuts two ways, lad, the same as everything else. When we come along the hedge to the fork of the Worcester road, where the guard of the Brummagem—Bristol mail, who’s the poulterer’s man, picks ’em up and gives us the money, damn my eyes if there was a sign of the coach on the road. Two hours late, and not a sign of him! A chap who drove by in a chaise, he told me there’s half a dozen, not counting the mail, held up between Bromsberrow and Worcester. So here we be, out of harm’s way ’tis to be hoped, drinking Jem Rudge’s ale and spending the money them there birds has never earned.”

“What are you going to do with them, Aaron?” John asked.

“I’ve give one to Jem here, and you can have one if you like, and I reckon it’s just about time I took the rest home with me to hide in the pigsty or burn ’em under the copper. ’Tis a crying shame—such a beautiful lot of birds, too!” He picked up the sackful of pheasants in one hand and a gun in the other. “Come on, George,” he said. “It’s no good us stopping and bezzling here all night. If the fog lifted up we should look a fine pair of fools. Here’s one for you, John. You can shove it in your pocket: there be no blood about it, its purty neck has been wrung.”

“Thank you kindly, Aaron,” John said. “I’ll cook him to-night. What’s more, if you like, I’ll give you a hand with that sack. It’s a two-handed job, and your gun’ll be going off if you don’t look out, and it’s loaded.”

“Oh, it’s loaded, you make no mistake,” Sheldon laughed. “I don’t take no risks with Ballance about.”

John laughed too. That one pot of Jem Rudge’s dark ale on an empty stomach—and even more the charitable way in which Sheldon had made light of his failure—had plucked up his spirits enormously. He was ready to laugh at anything and no longer ashamed of himself. The fatigue had miraculously left his limbs. The weight of the bag of pheasants over his shoulder seemed negligible. As they stepped out into the fog, Aaron Sheldon staggering in front with the gun under his arm, and the one-legged man stumbling behind, he was pleased by the alertness of his senses: his ears were so sharp he could hear a fox barking by Pritchett’s Wood. It pleased him, too, to think of himself as the only completely sober member of the party. On the edge of the village Sheldon halted and summoned them with a wave of his arm.

“Now this here’s where we’ve got to be careful,” he whispered. “There bain’t no saying but what that beggar Ballance won’t be back and on the look-out for us. What I ordain is this: you go back of the churchyard, John—if anyone sees that there sack you might just pass the word as you’d bought a stone of potatoes off Jem Rudge. George Dicketts, he’ll go through the village as bold as brass—and mind you make plenty of noise with that peg of yourn, George, to show them you’ve nothing to fear. Then I shall cut round behind Parson Ombersley’s wall—I can travel quicker—and meet you two chaps at Monk’s Norton cross-road in five minutes’ time. Now be that clear, George?”

“Ay, them’s the marching orders: bold as brass,” George Dicketts bellowed cheerfully. Sheldon clutched his arm:

“Keep your mouth shut, you fool! Do’st want all Grafton to hear us? What’s that?” he whispered quickly. “I’ld have sworn I heard steps!”

“Not a sound. You’m a-fancying of it, Aaron,” Dicketts chuckled. “If you go on that way, you’ll be seeing things next. My God, though, they’m comin’!”

They burst out of the fog with a rush, four spectral figures, Bob Ballance, a giant, leading. He shouted: “Each to his man, lads: there’s only three on ’em!” George Dicketts, awkwardly turning to run, went down with a crash, as the foremost keeper leapt on top of him. John Oakley took a straight hit to the point of the chin that knocked him silly. As he staggered backwards and fell with the sack beneath him, he heard the simultaneous report of a gun-shot and a hoarse cry of pain. Then hands gripped his throat and choked him. He tried to tear them away. But the strength had gone out of his body: there was no fight left in him.