“May it please your Lordship; ladies and gentlemen of the jury. On the first Monday in December last, Percy Lupton, a young man of twenty-seven, went out to his work in the district of Higher Broughton in Manchester. He was a young man who had known a good deal of misfortune. He was gassed during the war, and was something of an invalid thereafter. The consequence was that after leaving the army he was unable to obtain regular employment for a long time. But at last his luck changed—changed, alas! for the worse, as we shall hear—for he was given what promised to be a permanent job. It is one of the most tragic features of this case that on the strength of this promise Lupton married. He had taken a brief honeymoon—a mere week-end—and on that first Monday of December he set out for the first time as a man with work, with hope, with a purpose in life. His young wife’s last words to him as he left the house—the last words, as it happened, that she was to speak to him on earth—were these: ‘Mind this fog. It will be the death of you.’ Words, my lord, and ladies and gentlemen, which seem, as we recall them now, to have had a dreadful prescience and prophecy.
“Lupton’s work was this. His uncle was a builder who owned a great deal of house property. There was a small office in the builder’s yard, and here Lupton was to take charge of the ordering of builder’s material; he was to hear complaints from tenants as to necessary repairs to property; he was to investigate them; and generally make himself useful on the administrative side of his uncle’s business. On Monday afternoons, he was to make the rounds of the considerable number of houses which his uncle owned and collect the rents. No one else worked in the office: it was a one-man job.
“You will be told in evidence that Lupton was seen to arrive at the office soon after nine in the morning. The men who came and went in the yard saw him there throughout the morning, and some of them spoke to him. He was seen eating his lunch in the office, and at about two o’clock he was seen to set out on his rounds, carrying a small black Gladstone bag.
“Evidence will be put in, tracing his movements almost to the second of his death. You will hear of the houses he called at and how much money had accumulated in the bag by the time the afternoon was over.
“You will hear that Oliver Essex, who stands there before you accused of the murder of Percy Lupton, lodged in one of the houses at which Lupton collected the rent, that he was aware that Monday was the day for the collection, because his landlady, Mrs. Newbiggin, had once left the money and asked him to pay it, when the collector called. She will tell you that she happened on that occasion to return home earlier than she had expected and that she heard Essex say jokingly to the collector, the predecessor of the murdered man, Lupton, that his little black bag seemed well furnished and might be worth a snatch. The collector replied that he would like to see anyone try a snatch from him; and to that Essex answered: ‘I know something of the art.’
“Evidence will be given that Essex had done no work for a long time, that he was in debt not only to his landlady but also to many tradespeople. One of these tradespeople, a tailor to whom he owed fifteen guineas, had pressed him for payment the week before Percy Lupton was killed. He will tell you that Essex said: ‘Don’t worry. You shall have the money soon if I have to do someone in to get it.’
“Well, now, let us return to what Percy Lupton was doing on that fatal day. Just as he was leaving the last house at which he had to call, he met an acquaintance and old army comrade, Henry Sugden. It was now six o’clock, the fog was thicker than it had been all day, and Sugden will tell you how he and Lupton walked along together, and how Lupton expressed his joy at having found regular work which permitted him to set up a home of his own. Sugden’s way home happened to be past the builder’s yard where Lupton’s office was. Lupton took out his key, opened the office door, and stood for a moment talking to Henry Sugden. He said: ‘Don’t wait, Harry. I may be ten minutes. I want to enter this money in the books and lock it in the safe.’ Sugden then said good-night, and no one saw Percy Lupton alive again.
“Sugden will tell you the exact time at which he parted from the dead man, because when Lupton told him not to wait, he looked at his wrist-watch, and he remembers saying: ‘No. I must push off. It’s twenty-past six.’
“As it happens, we have a check on time a little later. A young waiter named Daniel Kassassian had arranged to meet his sweetheart, a domestic servant, at a street corner at six-thirty. The corner was on the opposite side of the street from Lupton’s office, and about thirty yards farther down. Kassassian, as soon as he arrived there, looked at his watch to see if he were in time for his appointment. He will tell you that he noted he was dead on time—six-thirty; and that at that very moment he heard a terrible cry.
“What happened, my lord, and ladies and gentlemen, in that little office between six-twenty and six-thirty, when Kassassian bounded across the road, it will be for this court, on the evidence submitted, to decide. It is the contention of the prosecution in this case that in those ten fatal minutes Oliver Essex murdered Percy Lupton.
“This is what Daniel Kassassian will tell you. The fog was so thick that he could see nothing. He ran across the road in the direction of the cry, and on the pavement outside the office he collided with a man who seemed—he will go no further than that—who seemed to have come out of the office. The collision was so violent, for both were running, that the man’s hat, a black felt hat, was knocked off. Kassassian stooped to pick it up, and when it was in his hand the man snatched it so violently that, to use Kassassian’s words, ‘it seemed a bit queer to me.’ Then Kassassian noticed a peculiar thing: bound round the man’s face was a black handkerchief. It was tied over the bridge of his nose, leaving his eyes uncovered, but obscuring the lower half of his face. Kassassian was so startled by this that he retained his hold of the hat and something of a struggle went on for the possession of it. In the course of this struggle, the two swayed within the faint light cast through the fog by a street lamp, and that light was sufficient for Kassassian to see that down the back of one of the man’s hands ran a livid scar.
“At last the masked man tired of the struggle, gave Kassassian a push, leaving him in possession of the hat, and ran as fast as he could go into the fog.
“Now Kassassian proceeded to investigate the cry which had brought him to the spot. He entered the office, and to his horror, stretched before the open door of the safe, he discovered the body of a man, later identified as Percy Lupton, with his head battered in. A round ebony ruler, bloodstained, lay alongside him.
“Kassassian placed upon the table the black felt hat, within which, as you will hear from the hatter who sold it to Oliver Essex, were the initials ‘O.E.,’ and he rang up the police...”
*
The grey wig surmounting the unmoving blur of scarlet; counsel twitching his gown as he wove mesh after mesh of the net; twelve intent faces of jurors; all about me here in the public gallery the livid eager faces of men and women in at the kill; it all wavered through the foggy air of the court, the phantasmagoric, unbelievable reality upon which I had been waiting. From the moment when Oliver had entered the dock, standing thin and upright as a young poplar, his hand, marked with the scar that Kassassian had seen in the lamplight that foggy night, clutching the rail before him, I had not looked at him. The judge’s scarlet was a bloody focus of my vision; all outside it rayed and danced uncertainly like a shimmer of summer heat.
Suddenly it all seemed meaningless, a staged, fantastic show, nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Oliver. I got up and stumbled down the stairs, across the wide tiled hall where a few policemen stood and lawyers went with clicking shoes, their gowns fluttering behind them like black wings. Down the stone steps to the mean and sordid street. And as I looked at the people hurrying by, nothing green, nothing gracious, a wilderness of soot and stone, I knew that this was the phantasmagoria, that the reality was now behind me, and I walked blindly away from its intolerable presence, my heart crying: “O Oliver, my son, my son!”
*
He had destroyed so much that I had loved: Livia Vaynol, and Maeve, and Rory, and Maggie; but he had called me “Father” again; not “Sir” as in that time when there was ice between our hearts. Oh, why should I sit there and listen to the words and the words and the words, when I knew better than any of them what had happened? He had told me himself, and somehow, God help me, there was comfort in that.
He ran into the fog, and as he ran a voice kept crying in him: “You’ve left your hat, you fool; you’ve left your hat.” But if he had known incontrovertibly that the hat would hang him, the impulse to run was now stronger than the impulse to go back. “I had killed so many men,” he said, with brutal candour; “I had been applauded for killing them, promoted for killing them, given medals for killing them; but don’t let any fool tell you there’s no difference between killing in peace and war. In three seconds after I had killed that man I knew the difference. I knew that I had killed one man too many.”
So, panic in his heart, he ran. There was nobody at home in his lodgings. Dennis Newbiggin had taken his mother to the first house of a music hall. So to calm himself he took a hot bath and changed his clothes. He didn’t want to look flustered or unkempt. He was thinking it all out clearly. He left the house feeling fresh, with an overcoat in place of his raincoat, a new hat, well-polished shoes, a few clothes in a small suit-case. He now had a useful sum of money in his pocket. He didn’t leave till after nine, and he walked into town. Remembering the tell-tale scar upon his hand, he wore gloves. He habitually wore his hat with the brim tilted forward to hide the scars about his eyes.
To test his nerve, he walked past the builder’s yard. The light was on in the office. Two or three people, including a policeman, were inside, and there was another policeman at the door. A knot of curious sightseers had assembled on the pavement. He mingled with them for a moment and asked what the trouble was. Then he went on, his nerves in control, no panic, no haste.
He had a meal at an hotel, spinning it out as late as possible, and then booked a sleeping-berth on the night train to London. The steward who woke him in the morning brought a newspaper with his tea. The death of Percy Lupton was reported in it, though it had not caused much excitement. Kassassian’s struggle with the masked man was related, and the paragraph said that “the police are hopeful of tracing this man through the initials ‘O.E.’ found on the hatband.” Well, he was in London now, a big place where O.E. was not likely to be recognised.
What he intended to do was already beginning to take shape in his mind. He set off for Paddington in a taxi, intending to leave his suit-case there, and suddenly panic leapt upon him again. His eye fell on the suit-case, all the initials “O.E.” stamped boldly on its side. That was the sort of thing one overlooked! Carrying one’s doom about in a taxi!
So at Padding ton, instead of putting the bag into the left-luggage office, he hung about for a time and then took another taxicab to Victoria. It was still early. The police would hardly be looking for “O.E.” yet, and if they came looking here and found O.E.’s suit-case, so much the better. Let them hang about and wait till he called for it. They would wait a long time. In the taxi he had transferred pyjamas and shaving tackle to his overcoat pockets. He now bought a new, cheap suit-case, had some bogus initials stamped on it in the shop, put his things into it, and left it at Paddington.
All this, which should have eased his mind, irritated it. He began to be overburdened with a sense of the innumerable small slips that might be made, the innumerable small things that must be done to ensure his safety. He found himself taking off his gloves to pay the taximan, remembering that he must keep them on, fumbling in his pocket, and getting hot and worried.
He intended to travel to Cornwall, but would not do so in the daytime. People in his compartment, people in the dining-car, people in the corridor. Too many people keeping him under observation. Here, among millions, he could move about and be seen by no one twice. In a train it was another matter. So he booked a sleeper on the night train, giving a name that would fit the bogus initials on his suit-case, and then he wandered out to lose himself in London.
*
Dear God! After all these years Oliver had called me Father again. And again, as when he was a child, we were having “conversations.” And this is our conversation: here in the dark bilge of the Jezebel his voice is going on and on, telling me of what happened when he had killed one man too many! But there is no ice between our hearts. I do not hate him, and his face, as he looks at me, is not cold. It is old and sleepless and sad, but it is not cold. He has overtaken me in experience. We understand one another. We are easy. There is even a strange happiness flowing between us, as if two ice-floes had melted and come together in an element greater and deeper than either.
*
I read of the murder of Percy Lupton in the Daily Telegraph on the morning of the first Tuesday in December, 1922. I read that a black felt hat had been handed to the police by a man named Kassassian, and that the initials “O.E.” were on the lining-band. It meant nothing to me. I went into my study and wrote. At eleven o’clock Annie Suthurst brought me my coffee. When she had put it on the table, she went to the window, looked through the parted curtains, and said: “Ah wonder what yon copper wants? Been standin’ there gawpin’ at t’house all t’mornin’. Looks as though ’e’s keepin’ us under observation or summat, You ’aven’t committed a crime, Mr. Essex?”
I went to the window. “Where? What man?”
“Yon feller walkin’ up an’ down. He’s a plain-clothes man. You can always tell ’em. Look at t’webs on ’im.”
“What makes you think he’s watching us?” I asked anxiously.
She broke into a laugh. “Nay, get on wi’ thy work. Ah’m nobbut jokin’. But there ’e’s been sin’ nine o’clock.”
She left the room and I went back to my desk, but I did not work. I was strangely troubled. I was troubled by thoughts that were monstrous, fantastic. I resisted for a long time the urging to take up the Daily Telegraph again; but at last it overcame me.
“The initials O.E.”
But why should a detective be outside my door?
Well, that’s pretty obvious. Suppose they have discovered who O.E. is? Wouldn’t they keep an eye on any place he might bolt to—his father’s flat, for example?
But this is nonsense—madness. My dear man, you’re going off your head.
I suddenly discovered that I was standing before the fire with the paper gripped in both hands, my knuckles standing out white through the skin. My eyes encountered my image in a mirror over the fireplace, a face tense and contorted, with the cheek muscles twitching, out of control.
I sank into a chair lest my trembling legs should drop me. I knew what Oliver had done.
Knew? Yes; in that moment I knew, as certainly as if I had been physically present in that little Manchester office and seen the blows raining through the fog-misted light. I knew that now there could be nothing else. Here was a morally logical conclusion. I felt sick to death: old and grey and withered. It was a long time since I had thought of Nellie. Now she was with me, unobtrusive as when she was alive, but persistent and deadly.
“You’re bad for Oliver. You’re ruining the boy.”
As though it were being enacted even now before my eyes, I saw the cane lashing down upon the white skin of his young bare back, saw the blue and purple weals start up when, for the only time, she had thrashed him. That day when he had cheated at school, that day when Rory had fled, both to protect Oliver and to test his nerve for torturing ordeals.
“Love. A great idea you’ve got of love! D’you call it love to bring a child up to think he can do what he likes without taking the consequences?”
And as the cane fell on Oliver’s back: “I’m doing your work.”
You ghost of a grey, joyless bitch, leave me alone, leave me alone! I took my hat and coat and almost rushed into the street, but she was there before the gay shop windows, among the hurrying people, in the keen blowing of winter wind and the grind and roar of the traffic: “You’ll know one of these days! You’ll know that I was right.”
*
By the afternoon the murder was a big affair. It was on the front pages. “FAMOUS V.C. AND MURDERED CASHIER.”
The hatter had identified O.E. Yes, he remembered selling the hat, only a week before, to Major Oliver Essex.
“The police, making inquiries into Major Essex’s movements last night, found that he had not spent the night at his lodgings. His present whereabouts are unknown. Major Essex is the son of William Essex, the well-known dramatist and novelist.”
I had remained out till four o’clock. I crept up the stairs to the flat as though I myself were a hunted man. Annie Suthurst brought me some tea. She said nothing. She was as solicitous as a nurse dealing with a patient sick to death. She had seen the papers all right.
*
Hard on her heels, Dermot came into the room. “Why, Bill,” he said, “Bill...” and could say no more. He stood there on the verge of tears.
“For God’s sake, get out,” I said savagely. “Get out! Leave me alone!”
In the morning I went to Paddington and took the train to Truro.
So far as I knew, there was only one man in England to whom Oliver could turn now, and that was Captain Judas. I didn’t know what I intended to do, except that I must get to Heronwater. I told nobody where I was going—not Dermot; not Annie Suthurst. Just to go, just to feel that at this last desperate moment I might get near to Oliver.
It was dark when the train ran over the viaduct into Truro station. I had never before travelled down here by train in the winter. We rumbled slowly over the viaduct, always associated in my mind with tea-time of a summer’s day, the children leaning eagerly out of the window: “The viaduct! Look! The cathedral! Look at the green copper roof!” The long journey nearly done, and joy in the morning. And now again, in the dark of the deepening winter night, the long journey was nearly done.
I did not take a taxi from Truro to Heronwater. I walked. No one must know that there was anyone at Heronwater. The shops were lit as I walked through the town. The windows were gay with lanterns and Christmas trees and coloured dainties. But it was a wretched night. A thin rain was drizzling down, and once the main streets were left behind the town seemed like my heart to be bowed beneath a load of misery.
Before I left the town I bought tea and condensed milk, a loaf of bread and a quarter of a pound of butter. That was all I could carry. It was a good four miles to Heronwater, and I did not reach the house till nearly seven o’clock. The big wrought-iron gates were fastened with a padlock and chain. There was a small iron gate at the side: the gate on which Oliver had swung that day when we waited for Dermot who was bringing Donnelly and Maggie to stay with us. I had a key to this small gate, and when I had passed through I locked it behind me. Half a dozen paces took me into the darkness of the rhododendrons. I was alone now in my own little world: a world of blackness and dripping water. I followed the twist of the drive to the front of the house. The place was deserted: not a sound, not a gleam of light. I went on, scrunching over the gravel to the path that led down through the wood to the water. The surface was treacherous with wet leaves and smooth slippery pebbles. Down at last, at the little grassy quay on the water’s edge. Here was the shack that had been turned into two rooms for Sam Sawle. That was my objective: the lair in which I could lie hidden and observe all that happened on the Jezebel.
I went into the shack, locked the door, saw that the curtains were drawn close across the window, and then ventured to strike a light. Hanging to a hook behind the door was a hurricane lamp that Sawle had used many a time for lighting us to the steps when we came home on dark nights. There was a candle still in it. By this meagre light I looked about the damp and dusty room, filled with relics of the days when Heronwater was alive with happy children. Oars leaned in a corner. Carefully coiled fishing lines, dim with spiders’ webs, were on a shelf. There were gaily-coloured cushions for the boats and squares of canvas for repairing sails. A girl’s flimsy green bathing-suit was hanging from a hook, and standing along a wall was an assortment of boots and shoes: canvas shoes and rubber shoes and wellingtons. Boat-hooks, bait-tins, a glass jar filled with bright pebbles and cowrie shells from Molunan beach. Over it all, dust undisturbed for years, and a disagreeable musty odour of decay.
Piled in the little hearth was a store of logs. With my booted foot I smashed up a packing-case and managed to start a fire. No one could see the smoke, down there in the darkness alongside the river. Gradually the chill was chased from the room. I sat down in Sam Sawle’s sprawling wicker chair and stretched the wet legs of my trousers to the blaze. I opened my overcoat upon another chair. The fag-end of candle in the hurricane lamp spluttered and went out, and in the glow of the firelight I sat there amid the mementoes of so much that had turned to dust. Nellie and Donnelly, Maeve and Rory, Sawle and Martin: all had here come running in and out, dumping this, snatching up that, with the green grass and the green water shining in the sun without. Sitting there isolated from the world, tired to death and grey at the heart, with not a sound reaching me from the night, with the very rain too light and ghostly to make a sound as it dewed the roof, I felt like the survivor of an age that time had done with, and wondered why I myself had been chosen to remain.
*
I awoke in the first light of the morning stiff and cold. My bones seemed to creak as I got up out of the chair. I was faint for want of food. There was no water in Sawle’s shack, so I took the food I had bought in Truro and climbed up the path to the house. I was thankful that we pumped our water; otherwise, the supply would have been cut off. The pump was in the kitchen, and the sound of its clanking in the grey morning light seemed to fill the sheeted house. Sheets everywhere: cold, spectral. Again I had to light a fire to boil the water, and the breakfast, when it came, was nothing but tea and bread and butter. But the hot tea made a great difference. I lit a pipe and felt better. I did not want to enter the ghostly sheeted house again; so I took a few buckets of water, a kettle, a teapot and crockery down to the shack, and then cleared the woodshed of all its logs. I felt, irrationally, but with conviction, that Oliver would come to the Jezebel. I did not know how long I should have to wait. Now I could give myself a fire at night, and, if need be, I could live on a loaf for two days. So on that Thursday morning I settled down to wait, looking for hour after hour at the black hull of the Jezebel across the river.
*
I did not see him come. I saw Judas come up on deck once or twice during the Thursday, and his lights burned steadily all through Thursday night. On Friday there was nothing all day, nothing but the blue shimmer of smoke rising from the galley chimney. It was dark by four o’clock; by five the stars were out in a cloudless sky. I shut the door of the shack behind me and walked across the quay, down the steps to the river. I stood there listening to the gentle slapping of the water, looking at the lace-work of bare trees rising above the opposite bank, etched against the star-patterned sky. Then my heart stood still. Leaning over the bulwarks of the Jezebel, with nothing to show he was there but a head blocking out a few stars, was a man, and then there were two men. The night was so dark that I could have believed my long vigil had made me ready to see what was not. Then, clearly, two heads moved once more against the stars, and I knew that the waiting was over.
I did not know what to do. I had no boat on the river. I stood there with my heart in a turmoil, trying to form a scheme out of the unco-ordinated swirl of my thoughts. I dared not hire a boat; I dared not show myself.
A squeak-creak, squeak-creak, was growing louder on the river. The familiar sound brought me to my senses. Someone was crossing in a dinghy. I moved swiftly and silently to the shadow of the shack. It must be Judas. He knew the river so well. I heard the boat grate gently against the wall at the foot of the steps. A moment later, the white of the old man’s hair and beard appeared as a blur in the darkness. He vanished up the path leading to the house.
This was puzzling. For a moment I bothered myself with wondering what Judas was up to. Then I gave up bothering. There was a boat; across the river, if I were not mistaken, was Oliver. I went down the steps, got into the dinghy, untied the painter, and pushed out on to the water.
*
No light was visible in the Jezebel. I tied up the boat to the ring in the hull and pulled on the bell-cord. There was no answer for a long time. At last, gazing up, I once more saw a head outlined against the stars. Down here on the dark water I would be invisible.
“That you, Judas?” The voice was a cautious, fearful whisper.
“No, Oliver. I am your father.”
There was no answer.
“Let down the ladder,” I said.
I think even at this last minute Oliver must have struggled hard with his obstinacy and pride. The ladder did not come down for a long time. But it came. I climbed up and stood beside him on the deck. He was the first to speak. He said: “I’m glad you’ve come, Father.”
I could not answer him, because I knew I had come too late. He took me by the arm and led me carefully to the stairway. The darkness was intense. But I knew the way pretty well, and when we were down Oliver shut and bolted the door. “Don’t move,” he said. “Stand where you are.”
He struck a match, and I saw that the trap-door was open down to the bilge, where Judas used to keep the dynamite that would blow up the throne of Peter. Whoosh! Bang! Wallop! “You go down first,” Oliver said.
I gripped the sides with my fingers, hung suspended, dropped. Oliver followed and pulled down the trap-door upon us. Then he lit a lantern. “This is all right,” he said. “Quite safe. No one can see the light.”
And that was where I came face to face with Oliver again: in a place like a dungeon below water, with the great keel beneath our feet, and the massive ribs rising out of it, and his shadow wavering, fantastic, gigantic, as he moved in the light of the lantern.
For a moment we did not speak. He propped his feet against the keel and leaned back into the concave side of the ship. I looked at him with my heart breaking. He is twenty-six, my thoughts kept saying. Twenty-six...
He looked ageless: haggard, drawn and dissolute. The only feature I knew was the hair. It had grown long again. It was golden, waving over his forehead. He put up his scarred hand and brushed back that youthful banner from the ruins of his face. His eyes were dull with misery. His wounds stood out white and vivid. His cheeks seemed to have collapsed upon his jawbones.
At last he spoke. “Why did you bother?”
“I want to help you. There must be some way to help you.”
“For God’s sake—why? What am I to you?”
“You are my son.”
He said with his lips twisted into a grin: “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
There was nothing to be said to that. After a while he said: “There is nothing you can do—nothing at all. But I’m glad you came. I suppose this is the moment when I ought to go down at your feet and ask your forgiveness. But I’m not going to do that. I’m glad you came. That’s all I can say.”
“Why?”
“Because when Judas went out I felt lonely and wretched. And I began to think of the time when I had plenty of friends and was happy. I thought of fooling about on this ship when I was a kid, and out there on the water, just a few inches through these planks.” He smacked backwards with his hands at the boards behind him. “Sailing and swimming. And I thought of all the people I knew then and how not one of them knew I was here or cared I was here. And when you came I saw that I was wrong, and that was why I felt glad. It seemed as though I were being told that they would all come if they could: Rory and Maeve, and that chap Donnelly and his daughter—and Mother.”
“They were a good lot,” I said. “We’ve been lucky in our friends, Oliver. But nobody you speak of can do anything for you any more. You’ll have to make the most of me.”
Then I thought of practical things. “What about Captain Judas? What will he do when he finds his boat gone?”
“He won’t be back till the morning,” Oliver said. “He uses Heronwater as a short cut to Truro. He leaves his boat, climbs up through the woods and takes a bus on the high-road. His friend Jansen is in at Truro, and he’s gone to spend the night with him.”
“Does he...”
I couldn’t say it. The words stuck in my throat. Oliver helped me out. “You mean does he know the police are after me?” He pushed his hand wearily across his brow again. “God knows what the old fool thinks. He expected me. I know that. I didn’t surprise him. He swears they shan’t take his Lord this time. He’ll show ’em whether Judas is a betrayer. And that’s all I can get out of him.” He grinned uncomfortably. “What a rescuer! I’ve got myself as far as this, and if I get any farther I’m afraid it won’t be with Judas’s help.”
He sprawled down on the timbers, and I sat beside him. For the first time, our bodies were in close contact. We had not even shaken hands. He hunched himself closer to me, leaned against my shoulder. “That’s better,” he said. I smiled at him timidly, like a man afraid of making too abrupt an advance to a shy animal.
“Remember our old ‘conversations’?” I asked. “You used to sit on the rug. You fitted easily between my feet.”
“I call remember much farther back than that,” he said. “I’ll bet you’ve forgotten the first thing I can remember.”
“What was that?”
“Why, one night when you came home and Mother was bathing me, and it was your turn to do it, and there was a row. That’s the first thing I can remember in all my life. I can remember quite clearly feeling sorry for Mother, but thinking that you and I had to stick together.”
I took out my tobacco-pouch and pipe. Oliver produced an empty pipe and blew through it. I handed him the pouch. Soon we were both smoking.
“I remember that very well,” I said. “Your mother was annoyed because I didn’t hear your prayers after the bath. And then you wouldn’t say them for her.”
“I’d forgotten that part. But I remember thinking about sticking together.”
God! How badly we had done about that! As though the same thought were passing through his head, Oliver smoked in silence. “I wish we had,” he said simply at last.
I ventured to slip an arm round his shoulders. “Me, too,” I said.
“D’you remember writing to me in Germany about Maeve?”
I nodded.
“I got that letter all right. And the tobacco and food later.”
And from this I understood him to be saying that he recognised that then I had held out a hand to him, that I had offered the chance of sticking together, and that the fault was his that it had been rejected.
“I wish,” he said, “that I had come straight back to you when the war was over. But I was too proud. I wanted to go on hurting you. I wanted to go on hurting everybody. And my God! the job they gave me in Ireland was just made for men who felt like that. There’s a chance that I shall hang. I can think about that quite calmly at the moment. I don’t know whether I shall later. But what I can’t think about calmly is a God-awful government that turns you loose to wreck and murder right and left without any rule or pity, and then slips the hounds at you because you go on being what they made you.”
He buried his face in his hands. “I oughtn’t to have come here,” he said. “This place is too full of Rory.” And then, eagerly: “Let me tell you—”
“No, no. Don’t distress yourself. I know all about that. Maggie came over to England and told me.”
“God, how they must hate me! How they’ll be glad to see me swing—Dermot and Sheila—”
“They don’t know,” I broke in. “Maggie told no one but me. She knew that you didn’t know it was Rory when you shot him, and she said that Rory himself wouldn’t have wished anyone to know. She seemed to understand.”
“I wasn’t in their class,” he said simply. “I wasn’t in the same class as Rory and Maggie. Or Maeve, for that matter. Sorry, Father. God gave you the one bad lot of all the bunch. Why are you bothering with me now?”
Then I told him of all the times I had bothered. I told him of that morning in Holborn when, from the other side of the street, I had watched him come out of Pogson’s office and go to meet Livia Vaynol. I told him how I had spent a long winter night in a taxicab outside his lodgings in Camden Town. There was the day when I had watched him marching over Waterloo Bridge with his head up, and the day when, all newly dressed and glittering, he had left Charing Cross for the front. And other times there were: the time when he had come home a hero and Wertheim had played the spotlight on him; and the time when I had come too late to Manchester to prevent his going to Ireland.
I told him of all this, and of how, at any one of those times, I would have laid myself in the mud at his feet.
“Don’t!” he said harshly. “Don’t say that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re dreaming of a boy who doesn’t exist any more. You’re dreaming of a son you used to have.”
I tightened the arm about his shoulders, but he would not yield himself to me. “I don’t deserve you,” he said. “I’ve muddied your name ever since I can remember. Even as long ago as when I was with that old fool Miss Bussell. And then at school. I was never any good. I was always off the rails. Even down here, with Livia Vaynol, that summer you didn’t come. And I killed Maeve. I killed Rory. I killed Maggie to all intents and purposes. I’ve always gone about killing everything that was decent and better than myself. But I’ve never had the guts to kill myself. I thought of doing it on the way down here, but I hadn’t the guts.”
He told me of that journey. He had boarded the train to Cornwall on Tuesday night. There were not many travellers and he had a sleeping compartment to himself. His nerves were raddled. He had wandered about London all day, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his gloves never off his hands, watching the crime grow in importance through edition after edition of the evening papers. At the end of the day his photograph was in all of them, with a potted biography. They had it all: the V.C., the Manchester motor company, the work in Ireland, even the “romance” with Maeve, “unfortunately terminated by the death of this talented young actress when at the very height of her popularity.”
He felt a hunted man when he reached the train. He didn’t dare look anyone in the face. And then, dashing along the corridor to his compartment, he ran into Pogson, actually collided with the man, beyond possibility of evasion.
“I loathed the chap,” Oliver said, “and he loathed me. D’you remember that night in Maeve’s dressing-room when I shut him up? Yes, I know I didn’t look at you, but I saw you there. I never got on with Pogson after that. I’d sucked up to him for years, and he liked me because I was a sucker. No one else had any use for him at all. But you see, during the war I thought I was someone. I wasn’t a simple-minded disinterested hero, believe me. I liked it all. I liked bossing people, and I liked the medals and the publicity—all the whole shoot of bunk and ballyhoo. And I thought I was a cut above Poggy, and let him know it. But when I barged into him that night, you’d think we were loving twins.”
Pogson recoiled on seeing Oliver, but he quickly recovered and advanced with outstretched hand. You’d think he knew nothing of the hue and cry. “And yet there was an evening paper stuck under the man’s arm, with my own picture staring me in the face.”
“Well, well, if it isn’t old Essex!” Pogson exclaimed. “I thought you’d dropped out of London life completely.”
“So I have,” Oliver said. “I live in the North. But I’ve been over-working, and I’m going down to stay with some people in Devonshire. I’ll be with ’em till over Christmas. And what about you, Poggy? Why are you bound west?”
“Oh, still in thrall to Pogson’s Entire, you know. Just a general business trip round and about to see that the right stuff slakes the nation’s thirst. And talking of thirst, come into my compartment. We’ll get the waiter to bring a few along.”
Oliver excused himself; said he was fagged out and must get straight to bed.
“Well, if you don’t sleep, you’ll know where to find me,” Pogson said. “Only in the next coach.”
He went. Oliver got to his compartment, locked the door, and threw himself, fully-dressed, on the berth. He was sweating and shaking with apprehension. “God! You should have seen the people’s hero then,” he said bitterly. “And that swine knew the funk he’d got me in.”
He thought of leaving the train. But it would be like Pogson to be leaning out of the window, keeping an eye along the platform. Oliver looked through the window on the other side. There were empty rails, a platform beyond them, an arc light burning down on a group of porters and taxi-drivers standing there. No; that would look too queer. It must be the other side, and quickly. But if Pogson...
So his mind tossed, tortured by an indecision to which it was not accustomed. At last he leapt up, put on his hat and the overcoat he had thrown across the berth, picked up his suit-case, and laid his hand on the door-knob. At that moment the train started. He threw down bag, hat and coat again, lay on the berth and trembled. Every footstep along the corridor brought him half-way to his feet, listening, watching the door-handle. He didn’t trust Pogson. If not now, then at the journey’s end, Pogson would have arranged an unpleasant surprise.
With his head down to the pillow, he listened to the wheels drumming over the rails. Words haunted him, attaching themselves to the wheels’ rhythm. Got you at last! Got you at last! Got you at last! And hung by the neck, hung by the neck, hung by the neckety, neckety neck.
It went on for hour after hour. Expresses roared past; they slowed alongside the clacking stutter of shunted trucks; once or twice they stopped in stations, and then he sat upright on the berth, his feet on the floor, grasping the boards with both hands, ready to leap up, fight, run. Then they would move again; he would subside over the rhythm of the wheels, picking up some new diabolical intimation. Guilty, my lord! Guilty, my lord! Guilty, my lord!
The wheels were in his head; his head was on the rails; wheels, head, rails—all were one, compounding a threatening iron rhythm. He leapt up, his eyes feeling dry and bloodshot, his nerves twitching, his head splitting. He pulled on his hat and overcoat and gloves, took his suit-case in his hand. At that moment the hurrying rhythm of the train abated. They slowed; they came to an uncovenanted stop.
A moment’s relief from that damnable rhythm; and then the silence became as threatening as the wheels’ roar had been. For God’s sake, why had they stopped? He stood rigid at the door, his ear leaning upon it. A footstep hurried along the carpeted corridor. From far-off came the sound of a window let down. There was a hiss of escaping steam; a few voices came gravely out of the darkness. A distant engine whistled. And all this was full of menace in the silence of an hour that was beyond midnight.
He pulled the door open an inch and listened. There was no sound from the corridor. The light out there was dim. The place was deserted and therefore friendly. Through the windows he could see nothing but blackness, and that was friendly, too. He stepped through the door, closed it softly behind him, and stood there for a moment listening intently. Now he was in action again, and he was all right, nerves steady, thinking of everything. He opened the door before him, balanced the suit-case on the running-board outside, stepped out himself, shut the door behind him. “Before I began to do all this,” he explained, “I had remembered that you don’t have to bang Great Western doors in order to shut them. You can do it by turning the handle.” Yes; now that it was action, he remembered everything.
Crouching on the running-board, he shut the door quietly, clutched the board with his fingers, so that he could lower himself without the noise of a jump, then reached down the suit-case. He pushed this between two wheels, and squirmed after it. Hands stretched away in front of his head, clawing at the road-metal, face downwards, he lay on the sleepers. A few minutes passed. “It didn’t seem long. I was thinking of Pogson’s face when he came to spring his little surprise on me in the morning.” Then he heard the deep-chested cough of the engine. The couplings clanked and tautened. The train rumbled forward over his body. It accelerated, and again the rhythm of the rails beat into his head. But he kept his face to the earth, heard it quietening and diminishing, and at last raised his head to see a red eye winking to extinction in the pitch blackness forward.
He did not rise at once. He rolled first to one side, then to the other, using eyes and ears on the darkness. Telling me of it, he actually chuckled. “I’d been caught bending by a Verey light before that.” At last he convinced himself that the darkness was uninhabited. Then he rose, took his bag, and stumbled off the track. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know even in what county the train had stopped. The night was not cold, but it was inky dark and misty. Presently his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness. He made out that he was in the vicinity of a small country station. There was a siding with iron beast-pens built upon a concrete ramp, and rising above the pens, looking like a dark oblong blot on the dark sky, was a water-tank, raised on a lattice of iron supports. His mind was still at work, telling him that when he was missed from the train this stopping-place would be remembered. They wouldn’t look for him there, on the very spot where the train had stopped. So there he resolved to stay. He clambered up the trellis to the water-tank, dropped the case over the edge so that it stood on end, and, feeling over, discovered that the top of the case was clear of the water.
Listening to Oliver describing these extraordinary proceedings that went forward in the blackness of a December night, his voice here in the boat sounding tranquil and detached, and thinking of that Hampstead house where I had made arrangements so complete for no wind to blow upon him, I felt, for all our proximity, that here was someone I had never known, someone whom now I should never know.
He climbed into the water-tank and sat down upon the end of the suit-case. His feet were propped against one side of the tank, clear of the water. Sitting thus, with his head sunk on his chest, he was invisible. Before an hour had passed he realised that even superhuman resolution would not permit him to keep his legs up, with no support but their own muscular pressure against the side of the tank. Again and again they dropped; again and again he raised them; at last he gave it up, allowed them to rest on the bottom of the tank, under the water. In this position, worn out with anxiety, gnawed by hunger, he dozed through the night.
With the first light of the morning he raised his head and looked about him. As far as he could see, a flat landscape of meadows lay around him. A few elms with a tall church spire pricking through them broke the monotony to the east.
He bowed his head again on to his chest, faced now by the fearful prospect of spending the day doubled up thus in his tin box. He tried to prop up his feet again. They were numb with cold and dropped at once into the water. He cursed himself for not having had the foresight to take off his shoes, stuff his socks into them, and tie them round his neck. He had rolled his trousers up above his knees, but now his shoes would never dry.
The light grew stronger. Men came to work in the station. Trains began to pass through. Now he dared not straighten himself. He had not realised what this was going to mean, but before long he could have cried with the agony of sitting still on a few inches of leather. “It must have been about nine in the morning,” he said, “that I suddenly plunged down on my knees, water or no water.”
That was a relief, and throughout the day he was now sitting, now kneeling, but never knew a moment’s cessation of the strain of keeping his head low.
Sometimes he slept, sitting on the edge of the suit-case, his head hanging towards his knees. The roar of expresses through the station would wake him up, shaking with apprehension, shivering with cold. His legs from the thighs down were blue and pimpled and numbed. He rubbed and rubbed, glad to have something to do.
Men lounged and talked in the beast-pens below him. He could hear the very words of their slow, deliberate country speech. He was glad to have something to listen to.
By noon he could feel no sensation of life in his feet, but his neck and back were strained and burning with the long muscular distortion of his bending. And his stomach was ravening for food. “I could have chucked the whole thing, jumped up and yelled.” But he gritted his teeth and told himself that now he had spent more hours in the tank than he had yet to spend.
It was dark by five o’clock, but the station was not yet shut. By now he was down on his hands and knees, moving his head up and down like an animal in a stall in order to loosen the tortured muscles of his neck. For the same purpose, he writhed his back from side to side. His clothes were soaked from head to foot, but now he was long past caring for that. He was whimpering for the deeper dark as a child whimpers for the light.
He left the suit-case when he climbed out of the tank. He could not feel the iron lattice with his feet. He let himself down hand over hand and when his feet touched the ground he collapsed as though he had no bones. He crawled on hands and knees till he was hidden by a hedge. Then he stripped himself naked and worked over his body, slapping life into his legs, harshly massaging his neck. At the end of an hour he was warmer, able to stand and walk. He dressed and made in the direction whence he had seen a light burning an hour ago. It was now extinguished.
He reached the cottage and walked quietly all round it. There was no sign that anyone was awake, but the day and night in the tank had made another hour seem a small matter. He walked up and down on the grass verge of the lane that ran between the cottage and the high-road. He walked for an hour, his legs strengthening all the time.
Then he opened one of the cottage windows. It was a kid’s job, he said, that you could do with a pocket-knife. In the cottage kitchen theembers of a fire were still burning. He put on a little more coal, took off his trousers, spread them over a chair, placed his shoes and socks on the fender. Then he found some bread and cheese, ate what he wanted and put the rest in his pocket. When his clothes were fairly dry he dressed again, and then his eye fell on a pair of trouser-clips, such as cyclists use, hanging from a hook screwed into the fireplace. He went out quietly to look for the bicycle, found it in a shed behind the cottage, and five minutes later was cycling west. From that moment the luck was with him, the last luck he was to know.
*
I woke with a start, not knowing for a moment where I was. The atmosphere in the bilge was disgusting, fetid with our breath and stale tobacco smoke. The lantern had guttered out, my mouth felt stale, my stomach retched. In the pitch darkness I could feel Oliver’s head resting against my shoulder. I could hear the slow, gentle drawing of his breath. We had talked and dozed, and waked and talked again, far into the night. Then we had fallen asleep, leaning against the ship’s timbers.
I moved my hand and felt his hair, long and silky, the hair I had brushed so carefully that day before taking him down to the birthday party wearing his black silk pyjamas. It felt just the same. I fondled it very softly, fearing to wake him, and tears scalded my eyelids and then began to flow quietly down my face.
O God! Don’t let him wake! Don’t ever let him wake again. And don’t let that lantern ever be lit. I don’t want to see his face. I want to feel his hair.
I wished we could both die there, in the darkness below the Jezebel’s decks, with his head on my shoulder, his soft hair under my hand.
*
Suddenly his whole body twitched violently and his head was wrenched away. Then, as though he had recollected where he was, he sighed, and leaned back against me. “Hallo, Father,” he said.
I could see by the illuminated dial of his wrist-watch that it was seven o’clock. I wiped my eyes furtively. I got up and heard my bones creak. “Gosh! I’m getting an old man,” I said, yawning.
“Christ!” he said. “You’re not half as old as I am. I feel a million.”
He pushed up the trap-door and a faint light fell upon his uplifted face. He looked a million: ashen from the airless night, scarred, dirty, unshaven. His hollow cheek ticked in, out, in, out, as regularly as the ticking of a clock. And his eyes were the eyes of a doomed man who knows it. “This might be the bottom of the drop,” he said suddenly; and I shuddered from head to foot.
He remained standing there for a moment, one hand resting on the ship’s side, his grey face upturned to the grey light. Then he said: “I’d like to go up for some food, but I promised Judas to stay down here.”
I knew he was afraid to go up. He was afraid of the light of day. “Give me a hand,” I said.
He locked his fingers together. I put one foot upon the palms of his wounded hands, rested one hand in the tangle of his hair. He bore me lightly. He was very strong.
In the body of the ship there was hardly more light than in the bilge. I pulled the curtains back from the windows and swung them open, taking deep breaths of the raw damp morning air. Mist was curling up in little smoky wisps from the river. I could scarcely see the opposite bank.
I lit the galley fire and made some coffee, cut bread and butter. Then I called to him to come up, lay flat on the floor and reached a hand down to him in the pit. He grasped it strongly and I heaved him up, glad to be grovelling on the ground to help him.
We sat at the table with Judas’s thin womanly china between us. It was not much of a meal, but it was many years since we had eaten together. He recurred to a thought that had troubled him before. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said.
“Never mind why I’m doing it,” I answered. “Don’t you know that I’m very happy? I’ve got a son again.”
The wounds round his eyes creased into little puckers of puzzlement. For the first—and last—time in his life I saw in him a resemblance to Nellie. It was identically her short-sighted bewildered look, and it moved me to the bones.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t understand it.”
“Never mind,” I repeated. “There it is. If you had had a son you might know what I mean.”
“I might have had,” he said. “Maeve might have had a son... Poor Maeve...”
He buried his face in his hands. I could see the wound in his hand’s back and the fair disordered hair falling through his fingers.
“Then it would have been so different,” he said, looking up with his white face cupped in his hands. “She became a sweet girl, and very beautiful. Did she speak to you about me? Did she get to like me?”
“She loved you very much,” I lied.
I began to clear away the things from the table. “Sit down, and let me do that,” he said. “You’re as tired as I am. We’re both worn out.”
That was true. We were both worn out, and not by the events of the last few days. We were a couple of haggard, unshaven old men—my son Oliver and I. Now that the light was stronger, I could see my face in the mirror. I had not shaved for three days. I saw that if I let my beard grow it would be white.
Oliver came out from the galley, and grasping the table edge, looked down on me. “Did you ever see Livia Vaynol again?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Never since the night you left her in Maeve’s dressing-room.”
“Nor I. I treated her pretty badly.” He added after a pause: “But that was a habit of mine. There’s only one thing in my whole life that I’m glad about at this moment.”
I looked at him questioningly.
“I’m glad Mother didn’t live.”
Then he dismissed all that with a shrug of the shoulders. “Had we better descend again to the underworld?” he asked.
“It’s not necessary. Stay here where the air’s fresher. No one can see you, and we can see anyone who approaches the ship. What are you going to do?”
He sat with his hands drooping between his knees. “Hang,” he said.
At that, a cry was dragged out of me. “No, no!” I said. “Don’t say that! For God’s sake don’t talk about that, even as a possibility. We must think. We must devise some scheme...”
He looked at me wearily. “Think! Believe me, I’ve done plenty of thinking. There’s just a possibility... just one dog’s chance. That’s what I came here for.”
“Yes?” I prompted him, childishly, pitiably eager.
“I knew I could rely on Judas. I thought that if he could hide me in the bilge till Jansen came in with the Kay, I might get away with it.”
“Yes, yes!” I cried. “After all, he took you for one voyage, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t take you for another.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” Oliver objected. “Taking a passenger on a honeymoon is one thing. Helping a murderer to escape is another.”
The brutal word seemed to strike me between the eyes. “He’ll do it,” I muttered desperately. “He’d do anything for Judas.”
“Yes, I know. And Judas would do anything for me. On paper it’s perfect. But paper’s thin stuff. You could fall through it on the end of a rope.”
He sank his head in his hands again, ruffled his hair. “Jansen’s no fool. Why, damn it all!” he shouted, suddenly erect and angry and excited, “don’t you see what it might mean to him—losing his name and his ship and his livelihood? Yes! That’s what it means now to help a man like me! You’d better clear out, too. It’ll do you no good if you’re found here. Get out while the going’s good. Go on!”
“I’ll go and see Jansen myself,” I said. “I’ll beg him on my hands and knees. Why, good God! I could buy him up, ship and all. I’m a rich man. If he loses over this...”
I had lost control of myself. I was standing up, shouting, quivering. Oliver put an arm round my shoulders, and a strange shudder compounded of joy and repulsion went through me at the touch. “Calm yourself,” he said. “I know you would do anything for me. I have always known that, pig-headed swine that I’ve been. I’ve always known you were there. There were times when I hated you, but I never doubted you. Is it any consolation to you to know that?”
I nodded my head, unable to speak.
“I’m glad,” he said, his grip round my shoulders tightening like a vice, “because now it’s too late. You can do nothing more. Look!”
The arm that was not holding me shot out towards the window, the long scar pointing like an arrow. As I looked, his strong arm held me up, or I should have fallen. “That’s the end,” he said.
He released me, and I gripped the edge of the table for support. My knees were like water. Oliver held out his hand. “We’ll say good-bye now,” he said.
I took his hand. It closed on mine like iron, not trembling.
“Oliver... Oliver...”
It was a mere quiver of sound, the ghost of all that had been between us fluttering out of the body now dead.
He was not afraid now. I could see that. His face was grey but stern, with the tick-tick again pricking the rigid muscles of his jaw.
“Thank you for coming—and for everything,” he said. Then he dropped my hand.
We stood face to face at the table, not speaking for a moment, listening to the engine of the motor-boat. The engine dropped to half-speed as the bows pointed in towards the Jezebel.
Then he spoke again. “Don’t fool yourself with hopes. There’s no earthly chance. I want you to make me a promise.”
I couldn’t speak. I looked at him in anguished silence.
“Don’t come to see me in gaol when it’s all over. I shouldn’t like that. Promise?”
I nodded.
“This is better. We all loved this place—Maeve, Rory, all of us. This is a better place to say good-bye. I’ll go and throw the ladder down for those chaps.”
He went up the stairs to the deck. I stayed where I was, sunk in misery. I don’t know how long I stood there, but at last, footsteps sounding, I looked up. I thought Oliver had come back.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Essex.”
I believed it. The man seemed friendly and anxious to help. It was the plain-clothes officer I had seen watching outside my flat a few days before. With a rough gesture of goodwill, he pulled a cigar-case out of his pocket and held it towards me. I shook my head and sank on to a chair.
“There’s no need for you to come into this at all,” he said. “The fellows in the boat haven’t seen you, and for that matter, neither have I. Understand?”
He took my arm and gazed into my face.
I nodded.
“That’s all right, then. Good-bye to you.”
He held out his hand and I shook it, scarcely knowing what I was doing. I must have lost my senses for a moment. When I recovered, I rushed to the window, in time to see the boat rounding the bend. Oliver was sitting in the stern with the man who had just left me. They had an absurd air of friendship. I might have been watching the Maeve setting off for Truro when we were all young and happy, and Maeve and Rory and Oliver...
My hands clutched the window-sill as I crumpled to my knees and wept, for Oliver had turned, and waved his hand, and now I could see nothing but the river, grey and empty, and the trees that had forgotten summer.
I did not remain after the boat had passed from sight. Judas’s dinghy was still at the foot of the ladder. I rowed her across to Heronwater and tied her up where Judas had left her the night before.
There was nothing to wait for, nor any more need to conceal my presence. But I did not want Judas to know that I had been there. Nothing could come of that now. I hid myself in the shack and had not long to wait. He and Jansen came down the path from the house, talking noisily and excitedly together. From behind the curtain I watched them get into the dinghy, saw Jansen pulling across the river with slow powerful strokes, and Judas in the stern pointing to the unusual fact of the dropped ladder.
I sat down for a moment, wondering whether they had come to any decision, whether they had cooked any plot. Jansen was the sort of hare-brained fool who would try anything.
Well, they were too late now, whatever they may have had in mind. I got up to go, saw Jansen step aboard, turn round, and playfully take the little captain by the collar of the jacket and heave him with one hand over the bulwarks. His great laugh came across the water, on which I had heard so much laughter in my time. When they were gone below, I ran up the path and a few minutes later the ’bus was taking me in to Truro.
*
There is nothing more to be said. They hanged Oliver in Strangeways gaol. I do not know whether a bell was tolled or a flag flown at half-mast or a proclamation nailed to the prison door. I only know that in the desolate street where, so long before, the people had sung and cheered as the Manchester Martyrs went to their doom, I lingered till, almost without seeing, I was aware that the small crowd had broken up and was drifting away.
Then I, too, went, walking in the mournful weather down the squalid road that leads to the heart of the town. The trams crashed by, the pavements were lively with men and women marching in to their accustomed concerns. All the energy of another day was moving to its appointed ends.
Rain was falling as gently as mercy, and a woman, walking with long swift strides, went by me. Her opened umbrella brushed my cheek and she half-turned with a muttered word. It was Livia Vaynol, her quick walk making me think that she was fleeing, as she had fled that day when for the first time she saw Oliver leave for France. Recognition struck instantly between us, but she did not stop. A strong shudder seemed to shake her as she strode ahead of me through the mist. Her hair, I saw, was grey; her hat, her raincoat, were old and shabby.
I knew that she had been saying good-bye, and wondered at her faithfulness.
But this is not the place where I shall say good-bye. I shall go back to London and rest awhile, for I am very tired. Then some day I shall take a train from Paddington. At Fishguard I shall go aboard the little liner that takes you to Cork. I have never been there, but I am told that, having travelled all night, you wake in a wide harbour with a loveliness to make you wonder.
I shall do that, and I shall go ashore and go to Ballybar and find there the grave where Rory lies. Because in my heart you, too, Oliver, will always be lying there. It was not you who went that day with a handkerchief on his face, and struck, and stole, and ran. That was the simulacrum that remained after you had died at Ballybar. You died when you killed your friend. There was nothing for you of good or evil after that. So I shall say good-bye to you by Rory’s grave.
Perhaps Dermot will come with me. We shall say good-bye to you together—to you and to Rory—and remember the night before either of you was born when in pride and blindness we told the years what they should do with our sons.
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