Читать книгу Vanessa - Hugh Walpole - Страница 13

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There was at that time in the hills between Derwentwater and Crummock a very lonely farm called Hatchett’s Fosse.

To this farm Benjamin Herries rode some three days after Adam Paris’ burial at Ireby.

Adam’s charred and almost unrecognisable body had been found when at last the fire had died sufficiently for safe search to be made. The red brick walls of Fell House still stood, blackened and scorched but enduring. But these walls were a shell. Nothing else remained. The wind that night had been so ferocious that in any circumstances there could have been small hope of saving the house, but everything had contributed to aggravating the disaster: the ancient fire-engine at Braithwaite broke down on the road. There was nothing at the house itself, no protection of any kind. The horses and animals were saved. No life was lost but Adam’s. A little furniture, some pictures, were rescued. That was all. Fell House, Uldale, was no more.

The death of Adam Paris shocked the whole countryside. He had not been widely known. He was held to be a ‘shy sort of man’ but he was liked. He was said to be kindly, friendly, generous. No one had anything against him. He was old Madame’s son, even though he had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, and he wrote books. But more than any of these, he was the father of Vanessa, whose beauty was renowned from Silloth to Kendal. Everyone knew how she had loved him, and there was something deeply real and true in the sympathy that rose now on every side of her. Cumberland people are reputed by those who know them little to be too blunt of tongue for complacent comfort, but any man in trouble will be lucky if he has Cumbrian friends near to him. They have not been masters of their own soil for hundreds of years without learning what courtesy means, and courtesy is not in this part of England another name for heartlessness.

But Vanessa was stricken down in these first days beyond any possibility of help. With Jane Bellairs and Will she went back to Cat Bells and there she stayed, seeing nobody. On the day before the funeral she saw Benjie. He knew at once that she could not just then bear either to see him or talk to him.

She spoke in a low voice, looking beyond him at the door as though she expected someone to come in.

‘I don’t blame you, Benjie. You did what you thought right, but you should not have held me back.’

‘Vanessa, how could I have let you go? The roof fell in a moment later. You would have been killed as well as Adam. What good would that have been?’

‘I had rather have been killed. To think that he was alone in there! That nobody but myself and Will thought of him!’

He saw that at present there was nothing to be done. He kissed her. She made no movement, no response. She said in a low voice:

‘The awful thing is that I heard him calling me. From some other part of the house. But Timothy told me he was out. I will never forgive Timothy and I will never forgive myself.’

When he went home things were no better. His mother had been unwell for some months, and the night of the fire with its tragic consequences was a shock from which it was unlikely that she would recover. The destruction of Fell House was a dreadful thing to her. She had been there so often. John, her husband, had been born there; he had walked out of there to his death. More than that, this appeared to her to be a revenge from the past. Her father had built the Fortress to triumph over Fell House. It had seemed at his death that he was defeated: but he had not been defeated. This was the last unexpected triumph of the Fortress, a house that she had always hated and now detested. She seemed to hear her brother Uhland tapping with his stick night and day about the passages. How satisfied he must be! These vindictive people were stronger in death than they had been in life and there was no end to their malevolence. She had loved Adam, and her heart ached now for Vanessa. She was old, alone with ghosts. No one could help her.

Benjie, her son, it seemed, least of all. She had been very patient with his selfishness, but now at last she was exasperated. He seemed to her hard and callous. For once her intuition failed her. She did not know that he was suffering more deeply than she. On the day after Adam’s funeral he came into her bedroom and said:

‘I can’t bear this, Mother. I must go away for a day or two.’

‘What can’t you bear?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Vanessa,’ he broke out in a kind of storm of indignation, ‘thinks that I was responsible for Adam’s death.’

She thought that he was indignant with Vanessa, but had she been well and strong she would have known that the indignation was with himself.

‘She is suffering from shock,’ she answered. ‘You must be patient and wait.’

‘Wait! Wait!’ he burst out. ‘For what? Everything is changed, Mother. It will never be the same again.’

The farmer at Hatchett’s Fosse was Fred Halliday, the son of the woman with whom Benjie had stayed at Seascale.

Some months back Benjie, riding along Main Street, saw Mrs. Halliday and her daughter Marion looking at him from across the street. His first impulse had been to move on, but something had prevented him. He did not like them, he did not wish to see them again; nevertheless he rode over and spoke to them. They were to stay in Keswick for a while. Mrs. Halliday had notions of opening a boarding-house there. Still with that strange mingling of attraction and repulsion, he had met them a number of times. Mrs. Halliday was definitely repugnant to him: she whined, she crept, she was genteel, she was vindictive. The girl spoke little, had little colour in her voice or movements, but she had some power over him. He kissed her and hated himself for doing so. She appeared to expect his distaste; indeed she said to him once:

‘How you dislike me!’

But she did not seem at all to resent this except that, in her still, motionless way, she resented everything. Her pale skin, thin anaemic body, quiet, almost stealthy movements, stirred him as though he were attracted by his own exact opposite. She did not speak to his mind nor his heart, but his senses. When he touched her—and always it seemed that it was by her volition and not his—he felt no tenderness nor affection, but a sensual inquisitiveness as though something persuaded him to explore further—as though some sensual secret were hidden there which would, when discovered, excite and surprise him.

He did not know—and he did not care—whether she liked him or no. She appeared to like no one, to have no life beside that of sudden little movements, unexpected advances and withdrawals. One evening he met her in the dusk walking down the hill behind St. John’s Church. He talked to her and then embraced her passionately. She eagerly returned his embraces. He went home in a mood of bitter revulsion against himself. He had met her brother several times in Keswick. Fred Halliday was a big, broad, red-faced hearty man, quite unlike his mother and sister, who laughed at everything, drank a good deal and was friend of all the world. And yet it was true that nobody in Keswick liked him. He was not trusted, and it was said that when drunk he was very quarrelsome and abusive.

Not a very worthy family for Benjie to be friendly with, but then it was always like that with him. When he was jolly, as at most times he was, anyone would do to be jolly with. At this period of his life almost anyone was good enough to pass the time of day with. Who was he to be a judge? Except for his mother and Vanessa no one alive mattered. He was proud of not caring. Life was not important and one man resembled another. He loved Vanessa, who was much too good for him, and if women liked to be kissed, why, he liked to kiss them! In spite of his escapades he had never yet got any woman into trouble. His luck in that had held. He would not hurt anyone for the world.

But as he rode out to Hatchett’s Fosse he was not sure that he did not want to hurt everybody. Fred Halliday had often invited him to come and see the farm; he had never thought that he would really go. But now anywhere would do, anywhere away from his own unhappiness, his sense that he had lost Vanessa for ever and that he deserved to have lost her.

The morbid side of his character had grown stronger during this past year. Although he loved the place, this Cumberland country always increased the strain of superstition so deeply ingrained in his character. Away from his home he was as other men and could consort with them on equal terms, but at the Fortress and in the country around him he felt sometimes like a man caught in a trap. On the one hand was the small lonely house in Skiddaw Forest where his father had been murdered; on the other—and only a step away—the great cavern beneath Skiddaw where all the spirits of the true men lived and rejoiced for ever. Surely fantastic nonsense as food for a healthy man’s brain! But in this Benjie was not healthy, nor are most imaginative men free of certain dreams, omens and apprehensions. These two contrasted things were for him perhaps only symbols, but they brought with them a conviction that, whenever he returned to this country, he was not his own free master. And yet he must return! He could not keep away from it. He could not remain in it when he was there. And were his instincts altogether wrong? Had he not, in this last year, been twice prevented from marrying Vanessa, once by her father’s illness and now by this cursed fire? The Men under Skiddaw would receive him in their company if he could reach them, but, like a man in a dream, he was held back. Who could dare to deny that the past was more powerful than the present and that you must fight like the devil or the moment you were born you were done for! That old ancestor of his, Francis Herries, might still have something to say!

All this was, of course, only a part of Benjie’s mind. None of the men who knew him as he roamed the world would credit him with this kind of imagination! But he was compounded of stiff incongruities—proud and yet humble, faithful and yet most unfaithful, wandering but steadfast—and at this time he was still young with most of his soul-making ahead of him.

So as he rode down Bassenthwaite and on towards Braithwaite he felt only an urgent need of escape: escape from the senseless waste of Adam’s death, from all the grief that that was causing (he had an eager sensitiveness to the unhappiness of others); escape from his mother, whom he knew that he should not be leaving; but above all escape from Vanessa, whom he loved now when he was sure that he had lost her, with a deeper sense of frustration than ever before.

Then he raised his head, looked up at the stormy sky and swore. ‘Well, this has settled the business. She is better, far better, without me. She’ll know that at last.’

But even while he said this he felt that they were inseparable, that however their lives went they would be bound together for ever—yes, even when he was secure and singing with the Men under Skiddaw he would be thinking of her!

As he began slowly to climb Whinlatter he felt the wind tugging at him. On the day following the fire the wind had folded its arms and stolen away as though the purpose of its coming were accomplished. Then, as is often the case in the late spring, it sprang up again and rushed about the country in flurries of excitement, blowing the daffodils silly, making the young leaves tremble and the young sheep skip, and flashing quivers of light like turning glass across the streams. The colours were all delicate—faint shadowed plum, a gold so pale that it was almost white under cloud, a wet virginal green of the young bracken. And field after field, up and up the hillsides, was silver-grey.

This afternoon, though, quite another mood was in the air, spring was forgotten. It happens sometimes here that the hills, as though an order had been given, suddenly dominate all the scene. The pastoral fields, the farms, the roads, towns, villages shrink together into nothingness and the hills step forward, spread their shoulders, swell their chests out, raise their heads and begin to march. If you listen you can almost hear the tramping. It is at such times that you can understand Benjie’s fantasy of his men under the mountain, for it is no fantasy just then. Lie down on the turf and listen with your ear to the ground and you can catch the echo of the voices, a rumble of a drinking song and laughter like the cracking of a drum’s skin. At such a moment when the hills take power there is a sense of menace in the air. The sky is disturbed with a furious confusion, great sweeps of cloud smoking along with a wind behind them that is personal in its strength. The old pictures of Aeolus blowing the four winds from his mouth is true now. You can see him standing behind the hills, his strong legs spread across the sea, his broad naked shoulders stretched above his vigorous lungs. The wind and the hills act in unison. The hills, that are in actual measurement so slight, take on themselves additional properties that belong to the great mountains of the world. With white mist flanking them and black funnels of cloud eddying above their heads, they seem as powerful as Everest. Their power is menacing. They seem to crowd together in conclave: ‘Now shall we step forward and crush out of existence these little fields, cowering hamlets, tiny midgets of humans?’ You can watch them as they bend their heads together and twitch their shoulders with the impatience of a group of boys waiting for the word of release. The wind is enchanted with the sport promised. It goes swinging from arm to arm of the hills, crying: ‘Now let us go! Now we are off!’ and it sweeps whirlwinds of rain now here, now there, making it sting the earth like a hail of small shot, then raising it again in sheets of steel as though all the heavens were letting down their defensive gates. A great game that leads to no ill because the power here is friendly. They have not learnt any deep vindictiveness. This square of earth is kind to the men who settle, for a moment, upon its surface. The Genius here is benevolent.

Such a storm of wind without rain rose about Benjie as he climbed Whinlatter. The water of Bassenthwaite below him that had been a field of grey shadows as he rode beside it was now, when he looked down upon it, trembling with white waves that gleamed with an almost phosphorescent glow under the blackness of Skiddaw. The clouds were so low that when he was at the highest point of the Pass they skirted him on every side, shifting from place to place with long sweeps of spidery grey. It was bitterly cold and he had to lower his head, pulling up the collar of his riding-coat.

He knew that with Lorton Fell on his right, before he turned off down to Swinside, his path branched away to the left. The farm was just here somewhere, in a hollow between Grisedale Pike and Hobcarton. He directed his horse across the rough turf, moving very slowly under the sting of the wind. To his right he looked down on to the flat plain that stretched to the Border with fields like squares of a chessboard and trees and houses like dolls’ furniture. The wind raced over this flat country with a shrill whistling exultation; thin patches of white broke the grey sky above the sea. It was raining above St. Bees.

It would be difficult to find this place, and if the mist came down, impossible. He might wander here for hours. He cursed himself for coming, and had an impulse to turn back. In certain moods this driving wind and cold sharp air would have exalted him, but not to-day, for he was sick with his own self-distrust and disapproval. Nothing grand about him to-day to answer the grandeur of the elements. Why should he not turn back and wait patiently for Vanessa to recover? How impulsive he had been to have taken her present mood as permanent! And how selfish he had been to ride away from her at the very moment when, in her heart, she needed him! He half turned his horse’s head. He would go back. Then, as he looked round him, he saw the farm, a little to his right in the fold of the hill, a bare meagre place with a few bent trees and a stone wall. The first drops of rain stung his cheek. He rode on.

When he reached the farm two dogs ran out, wildly barking: he heard Fred’s voice cursing them and then saw the big stout man filling the doorway.

He gave a shout when he saw who it was.

‘Hullo, Herries! What a surprise!’

He came to meet him, his face beaming.

‘You’ve come for the night, I hope?’

‘Yes,’ said Benjie. ‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Of course I’ll have you. Couldn’t be better.’

They led the horse round to the stable at the back of the house, Halliday talking all the time.

‘My mother and sister are staying here and some friends of ours are coming up from Lorton this evening, so you’ve struck the right moment. It’s going to be a wild night. The wind’s blowing great guns. Come along in and get warm.’

Benjie went in, hung up his hat and coat, passed into an inner room that seemed half kitchen, half living-room. Sitting beside a roaring fire were Mrs. Halliday and her daughter.

At the moment when he saw them, the large smoke-stained fireplace, the window that looked out on to a little scrambling path where a cluster of primroses was hiding, two canaries in a cage, and a large sheep-dog lying in front of the fire with his nose on his paws, his mood changed. This was jolly, cheerful, friendly. They were all friends of his. Other friends were coming. They would make a night of it. He had closed a door, a heavy silent-swinging door like one that guards a cathedral, upon all that other world where his friends were burnt, those whom he loved blamed him and, worst of all, where he blamed himself. Here he loved no one and no one loved him. It was not a world of hurting, haunting intimacies. He would be happy. So, as always when he was happy, he wanted to do things for everybody, drew a chair to the fire and chattered like a boy, threw back his head and roared with laughter, his rather ugly face with friendliness and generosity in all its wrinkles. And the two women quietly answered or asked questions while Fred Halliday leaned his bulk against the kitchen dresser and, with a smile on his face, watched them.

Benjie had all the London gossip: of the success that Iolanthe was and the other piece that the German Reeds were running, The Mountain Heiress, where Corney Grain was a solicitor and sang a wonderful song called ‘Our Mess,’ and that Goring Thomas’ Esmeralda at the Lane, where Mr. Carl Rosa had a month’s opera season, contained, they say, some pretty songs but that Mme. Georgina Burns couldn’t act for toffee.

Mrs. Halliday said that the matter with the London theatre to-day was that it was too expensive, not comfortable enough, and that most of the plays were silly. In fact, with a few well-chosen words, she demolished the London theatre. And Benjie said, oh, he didn’t know. That was a little severe, wasn’t it, and that one went to the theatre to be jolly, didn’t one, and that he’d go a long way to hear Corney Grain sing ‘Our Mess.’ Then they discussed the Budget, which had been introduced a week or two before by Mr. Childers. Certainly had forestalled the Conservatives, who had been intending to come out as Champions of Economy, but Gladstone knew two of that. Everyone talking of Economy now. Yes, said Mrs. Halliday, the great thing was of course to be economical, but easier to say than to do. Benjie, nodding his head profoundly, agreed that that was the problem!

Then they discussed books, and Benjie said that he did hope that Miss Marion didn’t read French novels, and Miss Marion said that she sometimes did and thought them very amusing, much nearer to real life than silly writers like Rhoda Broughton and Ouida. She liked poetry, though. Did Mr. Herries read poetry? No, Mr. Herries didn’t. A writer like Tennyson took such a long time to say what he wanted to. No, Miss Halliday did not agree. Poetry could do something that nothing else could do. Wouldn’t Mr. Herries agree to that? And, yes, he thought on the whole that he did agree to that!

So they talked in the pleasantest fashion and the time flew by while the wind roared outside and the rain that had swept up from the sea beat against the window-frames. Fred Halliday had some excellent beer and Benjie drank plenty of it. The fire, the beer, the pleasant easy talk all comforted and reassured him. Yes, the door, with its heavy leather curtain, had swung to; all sounds from the outer world were deadened. Mrs. Halliday, he thought, was a more agreeable woman than he supposed. She sat there knitting a stocking most domestically. Her face was grave, but after all, not repellent at all. The glow from the fire softened her rather gaunt features.

Once and again she smiled, baring her teeth with her upper lip, almost as though she were about to whistle.

And as to the girl he felt once more, and increasingly as the beer warmed him, that he would like to touch her. He must be kind to her, poor child, for she could not have much happiness in her life. He began to wonder whether she had not finer feelings, more sensitive tastes than her mother and brother could satisfy. She read French, she liked poetry. Not that she had any pride. No one could be quieter about her accomplishments. Once or twice he caught her looking at him, her pale eyes staring at him, and he felt then a little embarrassment, as though he should be ashamed of his brown face and strong body when she herself was so delicate. At the thought of her delicacy some sensuous nerve in him was touched. She was so slight, so fragile, that in his arms she would be powerless, must submit to anything that he wished. Not that he would hurt her. He would not hurt anybody in the world.

The shrill clock on the mantelpiece struck seven and, a moment later, the door was flung open and Halliday came in, bringing three men with him. These men had taken their coats off in the passage; two of them were youngish, had rough corduroy trousers with long black coats containing deep pockets. One of the two was little and wiry, with bright red hair and a small shaggy red beard; the other was broad, strong, very dark with bright, glancing, restless eyes and a close-clipped black moustache. He was a handsome fellow. These two men might be both between thirty and forty in age. The third, as Benjie immediately learned, was the father of these two. He was tall and thin, dressed in a long black coat with wide tails and black trousers. His hair was grey and sparse; he had little eyes and above them a very high domed forehead. He looked something like a schoolmaster.

Halliday introduced them to Benjie. Their name, he discovered, was Endicott; Thomas the elder one, George and Robert the two sons. They all sat down by the fire. Thomas Endicott had rather a shrill piercing voice, small in compass and high-pitched. He spoke with care as though, with difficulty, he had learned how to be cultured. The voices of the two younger men were rough. Robert, the little red-haired fellow, spoke with an effeminate note; he was restless and given to gestures. George’s voice was deep but without any Cumbrian accent. They seemed friendly. They knew the two women and were old acquaintances, it appeared, of Halliday. Endicott the elder talked to Benjie, a little pompously and always with that slow carefulness as though he would choose the right word and never on any account drop an ‘h’. Oh no, they did not live at Lorton. He himself resided in Whitehaven. Yes, oh yes, his wife and her sister lived with him. This boy George here, oh! he was a rascal, could settle to nothing, had been in the Army for a bit, hadn’t he, George? Could put his hand to anything, a fine boxer; oh yes, a splendid footballer if he kept in condition—but a rascal. Wouldn’t settle to anything, would he, George? They all laughed, and George smiled at Benjie in friendly fashion, as much as to say: ‘I like you. I’ve taken to you. We shall be friends.’

Oh yes, and Robert was a wanderer too. He would go from place to place selling things, go round Fairs, you know, all over the country. What you would call a pedlar in the old days. Didn’t mind what he did any more than George.

Oh, they were a wandering family. That’s what his wife always complained of. Yes, an old Border family. Nothing much to boast of a hundred years ago—smugglers and worse, so he heard.

‘As a matter of fact, Mr. Herries,’ he said, ‘I have been wanting to meet you. We’re almost related in a kind of a way. There was a girl in our family years ago married one of your ancestors, well known in the Borrowdale district. Rogue Herries he was called.’

‘What!’ cried Benjie. ‘Rogue Herries! Why——!’

‘Aye, there were two brothers, George and Anthony Endicott, mad Tony they called him. Their sister married a man called Starr and these two had a daughter. It was her old Herries married.’

Why, that was Judith’s mother! Benjie was indeed amazed; what with the beer and the warmth of the kitchen everything seemed to him now wonderful and jolly and all that it should be. Here they were, these three nice fellows, and their ancestress was Judith’s mother. Judith’s mother, Vanessa’s great-grandmother—but at that thought the leather-curtained door, that had for a moment swung back, was closed again. No thought of Vanessa. Vanessa was far away.

‘Aye,’ said Thomas Endicott. ‘Funny how small the world is. I’ve often thought I’d like to meet one of you, although maybe those ancestors of ours are nothing to be proud of.’

‘Proud of them!’ cried Benjie. ‘I should think I am! Francis Herries you’re speaking of, was a great man, a grand fighter and a man of his hands.’

‘Aye,’ said Thomas Endicott slowly. ‘There are plenty of stories of him in Borrowdale. He sold his woman at a Fair once, they tell.’

‘And a good thing too!’ Benjie cried. ‘What do you say, Mrs. Halliday? If you’re tired of a woman and someone else wants her? Why not sell her? Fair exchange, you know.’

But Mrs. Halliday only smiled and went on knitting.

Then they had supper, a very good supper too, ham and beef and chicken, a big apple tart, rum butter and cheese and plenty of cakes. Halliday produced a wine, a good warming Burgundy, and while they ate and chattered and laughed the wind tore at the house as though it would tumble it over. But the house was strong, very old, Halliday told them.

‘There was a man murdered here once,’ Halliday said. ‘In the ‘forties it was. His wife and daughter murdered him for his money. Cut his head open with a hatchet and he bled all over this very floor.’

After supper they all helped to clear the table and then they sang songs. There was an old piano there, not strictly in tune but what did that matter? They roared out the songs and banged the piano and laughed and stood with their arms round one another’s shoulders.

Soon Benjie knew that he was very merry, very merry indeed. Not drunk; oh no, not drunk at all, but as happy as a grig. He had never had a better evening. What splendid fellows they were, and especially George! His hand rested on George’s shoulder. He must see George again, must see George often. This was the kind of evening he enjoyed. Yes, he would like to do something for him, put George in the way of a job if he wanted one. And George looked at him as though he liked him. He didn’t say much, but he smiled and pushed out his chest when he sang and poured the beer down his throat.

The ladies said good-night. It was time for them to retire.

‘We shall see you in the morning,’ said Mrs. Halliday. ‘What a wild night it is, to be sure!’

Some time later Benjie thought that he must go to the door for a moment to cool his head. He slipped out, opened the front door and was almost tumbled off his feet by the wind. The world was raging outside, the rain sweeping through the air in whipping fury. With great difficulty he closed the door again and turned back to see the girl standing there quite close to him. There was a dim reflection of light from the upper floor. The voices of the men singing came raucously from the inner room.

‘Why, Marion!’ he said.

‘I am just going up to bed.’

‘It was so hot in there I came out for a breath of air.’

‘Yes, I know. I was hot too.’

Her hand was touching his. He caught it, then, putting his arms round her, kissed her. She kissed him passionately in return, her lips clinging to his as though they would never leave them. When he held her in his arms, so slight and slender was she that he was afraid of hurting her.

‘I’m hurting you,’ he whispered.

‘I like you to hurt me,’ she whispered back, then gently freeing herself, said ‘Good night’ and ran up the stairs.

Oh, well, he shouldn’t have done that. But she was so close to him. She was in his arms before he realised it. Kissing a girl—nothing in it. It was natural to kiss a girl. There was something about her ... not that he liked her. ... He stood for a moment leaning against the wall in the dark passage, and felt an odd chagrin, an almost desperate loneliness, an impulse to leave the house at once, fetch his horse from the stable and ride home....

But he went back into the room, joining the chorus with them as he entered it.

Now that the women were gone, gaiety and friendliness rose a note higher. This was what life should be, men together with care thrown out of the window, plenty to drink, a wild night outside, all friends together. They might have known one another all their lives. Father Endicott was not such a schoolmaster as you might suppose. He possessed, in fact, a grand fund of bawdy stories. Very funny they were. That one about the old farmer’s wife of Esthwaite and the two simple young men and the lady from London. There was nothing about old Cumberland life that he didn’t know, the life that was going now so fast with all the tourists in the summer and the railways everywhere. A pity, a pity! Those were the good old days when Lizzie O’Branton the witch jumped out of her coffin at her funeral and rode away on a broomstick, and Mrs. Machell of Penrith would drive her ghostly carriage whenever a ‘helm’ wind was blowing, when the ‘need fire’ charmed the cattle, when the song was sung at the shearing. Here they broke out all together:

Heigh O! Heigh O! Heigh O!

And he that doth this health deny,

Before his face I him defy.

He’s fit for no good company,

So let this health go round.

Good fun, too, when they had the public whippings, or the hangings in Carlisle or the witch-drownings.

‘Changed times,’ said old Endicott sadly. ‘All the fine spirit gone.’

But their spirit was not gone. It increased with every drop they drank. The table was pushed aside and George and Benjie tried a ‘wrastle.’ They took off their coats, waistcoats and shoes and went to it. Solemnly they circled round and round trying for a hold. But Benjie was no very great wrestler and soon George had ‘buttocked’ him and, throwing him, tumbled over him. They crashed to the floor and then lay there, panting, one on the other. For they were not drunk, oh no, not drunk at all, but it was comfortable there on the floor and Benjie had his arm round George’s neck, looked up at the whitewashed ceiling, pulled George’s hair, said, laughing, ‘I like you, George. We’re friends, we are,’ and George’s hand rested on Benjie’s back and he said nothing at all. Old Endicott played a polka on the piano and they danced heavily, clumsily, staggering about the room, and Benjie cried:

‘There’s a fine place under Skiddaw, George, where we’ll go when we’re dead and we’ll dance and sing for ever and ever.’

‘Aye,’ said George. ‘Aye. That’ll be grand.’

In all the merry evening there was only one unpleasant incident, which Benjie could never after properly recall.

He said something to little red-bearded Robert, and Robert took offence. The little man was dancing with rage and screaming out:

‘You’re a liar, I tell you. A damned bloody liar!’

‘Call me a liar?’ shouted Benjie.

‘Aye, and I will too. Who do you think I am?’

‘Why!’ cried Benjie. ‘I’ll tell you who you are. You’re a funny little man, that’s who you are!’

‘I was here in this country before any of you were born. Aye, and I was too, selling laces and silver boxes, visiting the witches in Borrowdale——’

‘Shut your mouth, Robert,’ cried George. ‘Who wants to listen to your lies? Why, man——’

‘Lies, are they?’ The little man was screaming, dancing up and down until to Benjie’s dazzled eyes he seemed a dozen little men with peaked caps on their heads, riding through the kitchen on the wind and rain. But the little man wanted to fight, and the others, roaring with laughter, held his arms and they knocked the lamp over. The room was dark save for the firelight. Oh, but the little man’s red beard shone and he was angry! And Benjie embraced him, pulled his beard, gave him a friendly kick on the pants, and he went and sat in a corner by the fireplace, waving his hands and making shadows of rabbits on the wall with his fingers.

Later, Benjie found himself with a candle wandering on his way to bed. Halliday showed him where his room was, a little whitewashed room at the top of the house. Halliday helped him into bed.

And later than that, as he lay looking at the ceiling and smiling, the door opened. The girl stood there, a candle in her hand, wearing a dressing-gown with a wool collar over her night-dress.

He sat up on his elbow and looked at her. She closed the door very softly and came over to him. She smiled and said:

‘The wind’s died down. Everyone’s sleeping.’

He could only stare at her. She took off her dressing-gown and carefully laid it on the chair. Then she blew out the candle, climbed into bed and lay down beside him.