Richard Howland had the reputation of being an excellent worker. He was married to a sensible woman, had three children who would soon be grown up, and had long ago been promoted from labouring on the home farm to the position of head gardener at the Park itself. It was said that Howland had always been something of a favourite with old General Alford, and that he owed his exalted position at Thorley more to this than to anything that could be called high horticultural ability. Nevertheless everybody respected him. There had been some trouble when he was a small boy, but the report of this, as happens in the handing down of village legends, had assumed such a variety of dim versions that nobody much attended to it. Another point about Howland – perhaps not one regarded, at least by the younger people, as particularly in his favour – was his being much involved with the church. Of course the church was so entirely an annex of Thorley Park, and the tombstones surrounding it merged so imperceptibly into General Alford’s lawns and rose-gardens, that it was natural that the head gardener (rather than the vicar) should have charge of it. Howland saw to the heating (which was excellent, the late Mrs Alford having been of a rheumatic tendency), rang the bell, and took the collection. On a very special occasion, connected with a Royal Jubilee, Howland and not the General had been called upon to read the first lesson. The congregated gentry judged his performance entirely creditable.
Howland’s principal notion of the duties of a head gardener was to see that everything was kept extremely tidy. Mowing and clipping and weeding were the activities he chiefly set his two young assistants to. He himself was particularly good at bonfires – perhaps because ‘burning up’ is the most definitive part of the tidying process. He could get the most unpromising pile of garden refuse blazing in no time, and then kept completely under control. No vagrant smuts ever reached the linen hung out to dry on the green behind the laundry. If General Alford, and his widowed daughter who lived with him, ever chanced to observe this operation through the high Georgian windows of the drawing-room (Georgian in style, although almost the entire fabric now was quite modern) it was with the knowledge that no single waft of smoke would drift their way to cloud the panes. On the other hand if the Loamshire Hunt had met, and the pack had come lumbering and slavering and senselessly yelping through not only the park but even the gardens as well, and the General knew that his neighbour the M.F.H. would treat any complaint with an irritating good-humoured off-handedness, Howland would go to work to different effect. Thorley Park was planted almost on the verge of its demesne, and so, as it chanced, was Sir Charles Apperley’s house, Chesney Lodge. There was a bare two hundred yards between them. Howland would bide his time, attending on the winds, and would meanwhile make large collections of well-chosen combustibles. The day would come when the weather-vane above the stable clock at Thorley Park pointed dead at Chesney Lodge. Then the match would be applied, and almost within minutes Sir Charles Apperley and all his household (including numerous hounds in honourable retirement) would be enveloped in mephitic vapours. But because these two elderly landed proprietors had been at school together, and because each was the nearest conversational resource of the other, this peculiar warfare generated no ill-feeling. The two men between them had come to run the village, and much else for miles around.
It was to be remarked, too, that Sir Charles, although he well knew whose was the hand responsible for those punitive visitations upon his nostrils, always had a civil word for Richard Howland when he encountered him. This was because, like the General, and unlike the majority of his more rustic neighbours, he retained a clear and undistorted memory of this sober gardener’s early history. That history is the subject of the present brief narrative.
General Arthur Alford had at one time been the youngest field officer in the British army: a dedicated professional soldier who was tipped to go far. When this promotion came to him he was already the owner of Thorley Park, since his father had died in early middle age. Having been as precocious in the marital as the martial sphere, he was also married and with several children. So a new and spacious home was a welcome accession in itself. He had at once decided, however, that he would not allow this responsibility to interfere with his military career, and this meant that for a long time he was something of an absentee landlord. His family saw much more of Thorley than he did. When he did get down to the place, and moved about the estate, it was almost with the feeling of being a visitor. The house had not been his boyhood home, since his grandfather had predeceased his father by only a few years. It had, however, been a regular holiday resource, and when it eventually came his way he was already decently fond of it. He tried to get to know his tenants and the local people generally, and he found a little time for squirearchal activities of one sort and another. As the years passed and his seniority rapidly increased, he found that he could be influential in various ways. Ten miles away there was a minor public school; he was helpful about its OTC, making sure that it was a decent chap who was sent down from the War Office to cope with Cert. A, and that the right things were done when the General Inspection came along. He gave a similar leg-up to the Territorials. He accepted some titular rank or other with the Boy Scouts of the county. It was as a Boy Scout – or perhaps as a boy aspiring to be a Boy Scout – that he first became aware of his future head gardener.
He had gone for an evening walk with his wife and his daughter Anne, who was home from school on her half-term holiday. It was already dusk, but the air was warm after an autumn day of steady sunshine. The Alfords strolled through the gardens, and then straight ahead through two lines of beech trees which would have constituted a long avenue had any roadway ever been laid down between them. Old prints showed that there had never been anything of the kind, but only a broad ribbon of grass opening upon a level pasture where the trees came to an end. This transition however was marked by two imposing stone columns, crowned with elaborately carved cornucopias tumbling out flowers, fruit and corn – no doubt by way of symbolising the productivity of the region. The wrought-iron gates which these pillars were designed to support had disappeared long ago, and before that can never have supplied any useful office, the whole affair having been designed merely to lend consequence to the vista commanded from the terrace in front of the house.
The Alfords paused at this point, turned, and in silence surveyed Thorley Park. It was no sort of gem of the guide-book order, and like the lady in the song perhaps looked best in the dusk – as now – whether or not with a light behind it. The fabric had come slowly into being in bits and pieces over several centuries, and not every part was even approximately congruous with the whole. But a building that has thus changed through processes of accretion, demolition and re-edification through many generations renders, perhaps paradoxically, a strong impression of permanence. It was a satisfaction to Arthur Alford, standing between his wife and daughter and keeping his thoughts to himself, to reflect that this gracious and essentially unassuming place would be the home of Alfords yet unborn.
‘Just the right distance, this,’ he said to his wife – much as if that song from Trial by Jury had actually been in his head. ‘You could never tell it all needed a good lick of paint. But it may be possible to get going on that now. There ought to be a bit of leisure to give my mind to it.’
‘I think it’s wonderful news – quite wonderful.’ Mrs Alford, who didn’t often say things like this, emphasised her words with a brisk nod. And it was true that, earlier that day, something extremely agreeable had happened. Her husband had received word that a tour of duty overseas which appeared to lie directly ahead of him had been cancelled so far as he himself was concerned by a stroke of some august pen, and that his own position was at once to become a much more exalted one on the Imperial General Staff. For some years ahead, his place of domicile during the greater part of the year could be entirely of his own choosing. There would be high-level conferences in plenty. Below that, the chaps from the Dominions and so on would simply be invited to Thorley, and his own subordinates would be summoned there, and great matters would be settled in the course of modest country-house entertainment. General Alford (for he was now to be the youngest General in the British army) told himself with some complacency that the Empire’s strength lay very much in that sort of approach to things.
‘Shall we go round by the Long Spinney?’ he asked. ‘We’ll have plenty of time before it’s anything like dark.’
‘And see the magic cottage,’ Anne said. She had given this name in an arbitrary manner to a commonplace little structure, in fact a lambing hut, which stood in a shallow coomb beyond the spinney and at no great remove from the group of cottages connected with the home farm. ‘The necromancer may be at home.’ Anne Alford was not a particularly fanciful child, but from near-infancy she had been provided with what were judged the appropriate books for the decade or so after the mere dawn of life. This had led her conscientiously to people the environs of Thorley with fairies and similar supernatural creatures of the adult imagination.
‘If the necromancer is there,’ General Alford said, ‘we can have a little chat with him.’ The General was feeling well-disposed to all the world this evening, and took pleasure in indulging his daughter’s charming nonsense. So they walked on to the lambing hut. It was a solid stone structure, like a very small ancient barn. The remains of its roof, which had long ago fallen into decay, had been removed some years before on the instructions of Colonel Alford (as he then was) when he had heard that the village children sometimes played there and might be endangered by it.
The Alfords negotiated a stile and emerged from the spinney. There, the dusk had been deepening, but over the pasture now before them there seemed to lie no more than a first twilight. The hut itself, although shadowed by a great elm, stood out clearly enough as a grey wall pierced by two black holes: a small one where there had formerly been a window of sorts, and a larger one where there had hung a door. They were already moving towards it when there momentarily appeared through both these apertures a flicker of light. A few seconds passed, and the flicker was repeated.
‘Glow-worms!’ Anne exclaimed with a correct excitement. Glow-worms went with fairies, being much in demand among them as an illuminant of festive occasions. It was very probable that necromancers similarly employed them when boiling up toads in kettles.
‘We must investigate,’ General Alford said. He rather wanted to add, ‘You two wait here, while I nip over and see.’ This was because he had at once decided that what the lambing hut sheltered was a tramp – a tramp taking comfort from lighting up an evening pipe. If it were so, he would send the fellow about his business; again because of the village children who might conceivably come larking here in the gloaming. A tramp can frighten small children, and he wasn’t going to have anything of the sort happen on his land. Of course he would give the man five shillings and address him with proper politeness; nevertheless he would somehow prefer not to perform this slightly heavy-handed action before his womenfolk. But by this time his wife – an active woman whose rheumatism still lay in the future – was halfway to the hut, with Anne skipping gleefully beside her; General Alford was suddenly a little irritated by Anne. Anne was much too old to skip gleefully. And – what was more – the gleeful skipping was a turn, put on because the child thought her parents still expected it. General Alford, who was a highly intelligent man (as you must be if you are to become the youngest general in the army), had really tumbled to this about the fairies and so on some time ago. The truth about his daughter was that she owned a thoroughly rational cast of mind. And this, after all, was something to find satisfaction in, since it distinguished her from the majority of her sex. It would similarly have distinguished her, he thought, had she been a male and become an army officer. General Alford, a modest man, when contemplating his own meteoric career sometimes reminded himself that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
He lengthened his stride, and they all three arrived before the lambing hut together. Meantime there had been two more flickers of light, and their character was such that there could be no doubt now that it had been the striking of a match that had occasioned them. The tramp must be having difficulty with his pipe. The General felt in a pocket for his tobacco pouch. He’d add to his effect of firm benevolence the little grace note of inviting the old chap to have a fill.
He entered the hut first, as was proper where there was an unknown situation. It was a square, bare place, and there was no tramp in it. The matches were being struck by a small boy. He was alone, and his occupation so absorbed him that he remained for a moment unaware that he was now pursuing it in the presence of spectators.
‘Three!’ the boy said to himself aloud. ‘It mun be three!’ And in apparent despair he threw his matchbox into a litter of twigs on the earthen floor of the hut.
Although the light was poor, it was possible to see that the boy wore a scarf and a bleached khaki shirt with a couple of small badges sewn on one of its short sleeves. General Alford took in the situation at a glance.
‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Practising for your next test, eh? What’s your name, boy?’
‘Dicky, sir.’ The boy had turned and was staring, wide-eyed and apprehensive, at the intruders. But he had answered as a properly drilled village child should.
‘Dicky Howland,’ Anne said informatively. Anne was well-briefed on the village, having frequently gone round with her mother on charitable and disciplinary missions. ‘From the pub,’ she added.
‘Yes, of course.’ The General, although not so well acquainted with the locals as he would have liked to be, knew that it was a fellow called Howland who kept the pub. ‘Well, Dicky, let’s see.’ It was clear that General Alford (himself connected, in some fashion he wasn’t quite certain of, with the Boy Scout Movement) was disposed to take young Howland’s meritorious efforts seriously. ‘Just forget about us, and try again.’
A shade reluctantly, Dicky Howland retrieved the matchbox. He was slender, dark-haired, black-eyed, and there was something wary, almost feral, in his sidelong glance. He might well have been a gipsy child. One could imagine him as an odd-boy-out in the little bucolic community around Thorley. His movements were nervous. He was gathering twigs, rapidly but a little fumblingly, from the litter around him. The Alfords watched silently, having cast themselves in the role of examiners of the rehearsal now in progress. Dicky made a small tent of twigs; it tumbled once, twice – and then at the third attempt seemed stable. He struck a match and inserted it with a trembling hand within the structure; it went out at once. He tried again. There was a little upward drift of smoke this time. A tiny flame climbed up one of the twigs, only to extinguish itself a moment later. Suddenly Dicky gave a yelp of pain and jumped to his feet. He had burnt his fingers on the match end.
‘It won’t do at all, you little duffer.’ General Alford said this good-humouredly and indeed almost affectionately, but was at once aware that it hadn’t been quite right. Even in the half-light it had been possible to see the child flush darkly, as an offended adult might have done. ‘Will you let me have a go?’ the General went on quickly. ‘First there’s the twigs, you see. It’s not their size that matters, so much as that they should be dry. Don’t use them if they bend. Use them only if they snap. Cast around, Dicky.’
The boy obeyed, captured by this brisk expertness. In no time there was a little pile of dry twigs to the General’s hand.
‘And now try it another way,’ the General went on, standing back. ‘Not a tent or pyramid, Dicky. That tumbles in no time, and out goes your fire. Criss-cross and four-square – as you’ve seen timber stacked when the men have been felling it. Leaving a little square chimney in the middle. Carry on, boy.’ General Alford was enjoying himself. He might have been a young subaltern again, rapidly and lucidly explaining some simple operation to his platoon. Dicky was not so much enjoying himself as keyed up. His hands had steadied. He went to work on this new structural principle with the concentration another child might have put into building a house of cards, and this time with complete success. The fire required not the three matches allowed but only one. Had the Alfords been Dicky’s real examiners, he would have passed his test triumphantly. And now he was enchanted. Rigid and oblivious, he stood gazing at the tiny blaze as if it had been a vast combustion. Then suddenly he sprang into life, darting here and there about the hut to gather further twigs, placing these – first carefully and then in careless handfuls – amid the flames, so that presently the whole place had become a flickering chiaroscuro. The boy halted once more, froze, stood staring into his achievement entranced, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his shabby khaki shorts.
‘So there you are,’ General Alford said, laughing. ‘We must be getting home now, Dicky. Good luck with your test.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ It was almost as if Dicky Howland had jerked awake in order to produce this surprisingly well-mannered response. ‘Just one match! I won’t forget how easy it is.’
‘And you had better cut along home, too. Otherwise, darkness will catch up with you.’
‘I like the dark.’ Dicky spoke decidedly. ‘You can see things then.’
‘I’d say that’s just what you can’t do.’
‘You can if you try. You can see things that don’t come out in the day-time – or hardly ever. Like the badgers.’
‘Perfectly true, my dear lad. But don’t forget listening as well as looking. Listening’s the key to quiet movement in the dark.’ The General produced this military lore in an approving tone. It was evident that he thought well of this budding field naturalist. But Mrs Alford appeared to have been affected differently.
‘Arthur,’ she said during dinner, ‘do you know I much doubt whether that boy is a Scout at all? He didn’t look like one.’
‘In his rig, you mean?’
‘Yes—or that chiefly.’
‘I rather agree with you. It wasn’t very trim. Wouldn’t do on parade – if they hold parades. But he knew about the tests and things. What they call proficiency badges, and so forth.’
‘The Howlands must be quite well off. If they really had a son in the local troop, they’d see that he was properly dressed.’
‘Perhaps so. Yes. He may be pretending a bit. Dug an older brother’s abandoned togs out of the rag bag.’
‘Possibly some enquiry should be made.’
‘My dear old girl!’ The General was a little given to this sort of indulgent address. ‘If the boy isn’t a Scout, but wants to dress up and dream of himself as a Scout, good luck to him. It would scarcely make the worthy Baden-Powell turn in his grave. And you couldn’t call it a case of masquerading in the King’s uniform.’
‘I think Daddy is quite right,’ Anne Alford said importantly. Anne had lately been promoted to the dinner table on domestic occasions, and was a shade uppish as a result. ‘After all, Dicky was getting fun out of it, wasn’t he? He was tremendously excited by his silly little fire. Just like when he danced in the stubble.’
‘When he did what?’ the General asked, puzzled.
‘It was when they were burning off the twelve-acre. I found it rather exciting too. Little licking lines of fire moving across the field, like waves on a beach. And Dicky Howland danced among them. He danced like a wave of the sea.’ Anne had lately been turning away from the nursery bookshelves with their empty jingles and digging grown-up poetry out of the library. It was mostly incomprehensible, but thrilling all the same.
‘Burning off!’ Abruptly, General Alford quite ceased to be interested in Dicky Howland. ‘There’s another instance of its being high time I took matters in hand. It’s a beastly practice – and I don’t doubt brought in from America. Dangerous to property, for one thing. And destructive to no end of harmless and interesting insect life. It has to happen in war: the snail crushed by the felloe-rim, and all that.’ (It was the General himself who had put most of the modern poetry in the library.) ‘But peace and scorched earth don’t go together. I’ll have something pretty stiff to say about it. Laziness at the bottom of it, if you ask me.’ General Alford was quite clear that, as a landowner now to be much around his own properties, he was going to see that his word would be law.
The Howlands were not very favourably regarded in the village – a fact which didn’t greatly perturb either the publican or his wife, since theirs was the only licensed house within five miles of Thorley. Behind this lack of esteem there may have lain nothing more than the petty xenophobia characteristic of rural communities. Howland was a foreigner from somewhere in the Midlands, shoved into the job by the brewery company; his wife might almost have been a foreigner in the more authentic sense of the word, since she was dark and exotic-seeming like her son Dicky. So the villagers were no doubt prejudiced against them. But Mrs Alford, too, had not taken to the Howlands, and had once briefly remarked to her husband that they were ‘perhaps not wholly desirable’. All these circumstances were to have some bearing on Richard Howland’s history.
The Apperley Arms was not the kind of pub into which it would have occurred to any of the surrounding gentry to drop for a drink. The vicar, however, paid the Howlands an occasional visit, pastoral care being a duty which he discharged in a conscientious although untalented manner. Dr Ayliffe was a scholar, now of advanced age, and he had been presented to the living a long time ago by an Oxford contemporary, Sir Digby Apperley of Chesney Lodge, when it became apparent that a college Fellowship wasn’t coming his way. Dr Ayliffe, as the phrase is, ‘kept up his scholarship’, and was understood to contribute to theological journals of the learned sort. He had never quite got the feel of village life.
Mrs Howland was a complaining woman. She was this so preponderantly that a tone of grievance accompanied her speaking voice whether or not she was referring to any identifiable cause of discontent. On his visits to the Apperley Arms the vicar listened with much patience to the dismal woman. This was the more difficult of achievement in that he felt patience to be not enough; that he ought to be admonishing Mrs Howland to that resigned and even cheerful acceptance of daily trials and small adversities incumbent upon one who would lead the active Christian life. But in fact he shrank from this, compromising upon a resolve to work something of the kind into his sermon when Mrs Howland next came to church. She didn’t come very often.
Among the circumstances occasioning Mrs Howland’s vexation of spirit it sometimes appeared that there had to be numbered the mere existence of her son Dicky. Dr Ayliffe, although he wasn’t very sure that he liked the look of this particular juvenile parishioner, found the attitude peculiarly disheartening. He was a bachelor who kept a large photograph of his dead mother on his writing-table in the vicarage, and he judged it quite dreadful that a woman should ever speak other than in terms of warm affection of her son. So sometimes he simply didn’t listen to Mrs Howland when the shortcomings of Dicky were her theme. The boy often stayed out later than he should at his age. He’d even get up in the middle of the night at times, just to go fooling around with owls. He could hoot at owls so that owls would hoot back at him. Now, what was the use of that? The vicar reflected that it might get you into a poem by Wordsworth. But as this thought would not have conveyed much to Mrs Howland he held his peace, and perhaps a little removed his mind to other matters. Then one day he became aware of this tiresome female as complaining that Dicky was also far too fond of playing with matches. It was right dangerous, she said, and there might be a fatality – which was something you couldn’t afford in a licensed house.
Dr Ayliffe didn’t see that fatalities were to be less afforded in a public house than anywhere else. Nor did he quite understand what Mrs Howland was worried about. Dicky was at this moment on view through an open door, scowling over his homework at a table in the pub’s back parlour, and he was surely past the age when striking matches is commonly considered dangerous in the young. Not having heard from any of the Alfords about the little episode in the lambing hut, the vicar was unable to connect the behaviour complained of with any honourable ambition connected with Boy Scouts. It occurred to him that in some obscure way Mrs Howland was not being quite frank with him, and had some more substantial occasion for anxiety than she had avowed. The notion remained with him after he had left the Apperley Arms, and later that afternoon he retailed the incident to Miss Nott, the District Nurse. He knew that she frequently visited the pub in a professional way, the senior Howland being much afflicted with boils. She might keep an eye on the boy, and judge whether there was anything wrong with him.
Unfortunately Dr Ayliffe (who had a fine carrying voice) made this communication to Miss Nott upon running into her in the village post office – a signal instance of his innocence in face of the mores of rural society. In no time the news was all over the place that young Dicky Howland was a detected – or at least suspected – fire-bug.
Perhaps prompting the swift spread of this intelligence was a circumstance which in a vague way may have been in the vicar’s own head. Only in the next parish there had recently been several cases of petty incendiarism in farm buildings and the like. As setting a match to this or that item of another man’s property in requital of injuries actual or supposed is a fairly common feature of rustic life these sporadic incidents had occasioned no great remark, and rated only a brief paragraph in the local paper. Yet they did probably lend some impetus to the spread of this agreeable information, or misinformation, about the Howlands’ boy.
Then, on the very next day, occurred the incident of the school’s waste-paper basket. It was a very large basket, full of inky English compositions and grossly erroneous arithmetical calculations, and it was put out in the yard to be emptied perhaps a couple of times a week. On this occasion, and just before afternoon school, it was found to be blazing, and the schoolmistress had been so alarmed that she employed a fire extinguisher to deal with it. Perhaps because conscious that this had been to over-react, and that a bucket of water would have served equally well, she then took somewhat precipitate action. She might have reflected that it had been Mr Elcox’s morning (Mr Elcox came to conduct Swedish drill on one morning a week) and that Mr Elcox was known to be careless with his cigarette butts. Instead of this, and with the previous day’s news filling her head, she roundly accused Richard Howland of the deed. Dicky, at once scared and sullen, said he knew nothing about it, he didn’t. At this the schoolmistress, who didn’t like Dicky anyway, declared that he had yet further darkened his atrocious deed by telling a very very wicked lie. She then whipped Dicky – not only on the bottom but also, and equally painfully, on the calves as well. At the end of this performance Dicky managed to suspend his howling and blubbering for sufficiently long to spit at the schoolmistress copiously and with entire accuracy of aim. Whereupon afternoon school broke up in confusion. All the children ran home (in great glee about the spitting, which made Dicky something of a hero) and piously told their parents that a very bad boy had got the stick for trying to burn down the school.
The schoolmistress, who knew that she ought not to have beaten Richard Howland on the mere strength of an arbitrary suspicion, reported the incident to nobody, and even went into the local market town and bought a new waste-paper basket with her own money. So the children’s lurid version of Dicky’s delinquency passed uncontradicted into history. General Alford heard it, and retailed it to his schoolfellow Sir Charles Apperley, at that time a vigorous and youngish landowner like himself. Neither of the gentlemen judged it a very probable story, and they agreed that if that hideous little Victorian school-house had been burnt down it would have been a capital thing. The General however did tell his friend about Dicky’s activity in the lambing hut.
Even the stoutest proponent of corporal punishment could not have maintained that young Richard Howland’s flogging had done him any good. He swaggered among the other children in a new way, and was at times inclined to adopt the pose of a very wicked fellow indeed.
He treated the schoolmistress with thinly masked contempt and ridicule, intuitively aware that, for some time at least, she would be frightened to wallop him again. Whether justifiably or not, he resented what had been done to him, and it might have been said that the hurt to his pride was lasting longer by a good way than the hurt to his backside. One wouldn’t, somehow, have expected a son of Mr and Mrs Howland to be a sensitive plant. But he was certainly touchy. He hadn’t liked being called a little duffer by the General, even in a genial way. Still less had he liked being reduced to squealing and blubbering by an old woman with a cane. An uncharitable observer might have declared him to be the sort of person who is determined to get his own back one day, perhaps by some random outrage against society at large. But this would only have been a guess, and it was possible that Dicky’s resentments didn’t go deep. Nobody really knew much about him. Nobody had bothered to find out.
A few weeks after this something much more substantial than a school waste-paper basket went up in flames at Thorley. But on this occasion the school was again at least in the picture, or not far off it. Its playground lay next to the rick-yard of the home farm, and it was there that a large haystack was suddenly seen to be on fire round about eleven o’clock in the morning. There was quite a strong wind blowing; wisps of burning hay were floating all over the place in no time; the schoolmistress, perhaps rendered particularly nervous by her recent experience, judged it wise to evacuate the school until the fire-engine arrived. The only result of this precaution was to put her charges at some risk as they tumbled into the rick-yard to view the conflagration. There was naturally a good deal of excitement – more than there had been since a small and rather mangy travelling menagerie had set up in a neighbouring field a couple of years before. The children pranced around, shouting and singing, much as they might have done on Guy Fawkes night. Dicky Howland was of course among them, but few could honestly have maintained that he was more excited than many of his companions, much less that he had in any way been hinting that this was in some peculiar degree his show. But by this time Dicky was a marked man – or a marked small boy, and by that evening it was widely believed that he was a dire menace to the King’s lieges in their lawful beds. Dr Ayliffe was extremely perturbed – so much so that he thought it well to call both General Alford and Sir Charles Apperley into conference. They were magistrates – Sir Charles, indeed, had recently become chairman of the local bench – and might find some means of obviating painful court proceedings.
‘This is all nonsense,’ Sir Charles said at once. ‘So far, I mean, as the lad Howland is concerned. The police ought to be hunting for the fellow who had been up to these games over at Little Treby.’
‘Quite right, Charles.’ General Alford nodded vigorously. ‘I’ve spoken to Miss Powney.’ Miss Powney was the schoolmistress. ‘She’s most upset by this talk about the lad. She feels she set it going with that hullabaloo over the waste-paper basket. Made the kid tip an arse, you know, in a most unwarranted manner. However, she’s a decent woman enough, and anxious to get this quite clear. The boy hadn’t been out of her sight since the school clocked in after breakfast. Hadn’t so much as asked to be excused – which it seems is what they say when they want to go out and pee. So he could have had nothing to do with it.’
‘I devoutly hope it may be so.’ The vicar spoke on a desponding note. ‘But if the boy eluded Miss Powney’s notice for five minutes it would have been enough. Or he may have employed some ingenious device. Some sort of slow-burning fuse.’
‘Good Lord, padre!’ Sir Charles exclaimed. He was at times an impatient man, and could even forget what was owing to one whose cloth had, so to speak, been draped on him by his, Sir Charles’s, own grandfather. ‘What notions you learned fellows can get in your heads. This lad isn’t a professional anarchist, you know. Consider his years.’
‘I would be very willing to give him the benefit of every doubt, Apperley. But there is abundant testimony that fire holds a morbid fascination for him.’
‘Oh, come!’ the General said. ‘”Morbid” pitches it a bit high, you know. Say “unusually strong”. Anybody can get a bit excited by a fire. It’s one of those odd psychological things.’
‘I have hesitated to mention it, Alford. But there is one report that is really disturbing. Howland ran about shouting and so on like the other children. But then – if old Ritchings is to be believed, and you will both know him as a most respectable labouring man – the boy suddenly went quiet; withdrew, as he thought, from public observation; and then behaved in what I must term a sexually reprehensible manner.’
Neither of the landowners addressed ventured to betray amusement at this vocabulary; they probably reflected that the vicar belonged to a generation in which boys were taught that only instant insanity could succeed upon such behaviour as Dicky Howland had now been indicted of. But General Alford, at least, was a little shaken by what he had heard – and perhaps spoke out the more firmly as a result.
‘It may have been so, Ayliffe – although old men like Ritchings sometimes think they see something their minds have been running on. In any case, it would be no proof that it was this wretched boy who set the confounded rick on fire. More things can prompt to a bout of masturbation, you know, than the sight of a wench in her shift. It’s all part of our being fearfully and wonderfully made.’ The General had produced this thought of the psalmist by way of making amends for the perhaps too robust expressions that had preceded it. ‘But the practical question is: What can we do?’
‘I can preach a sermon against malicious gossip, I suppose.’ Dr Ayliffe, although a serious man, was by no means incapable of humour. ‘But if the boy is as innocent as I am anxious to believe – and I am quite as anxious as either of you – the fact won’t help once the village people have a down on him. He’ll be a black sheep – just as a matter of giving a dog a bad name.’ The vicar frowned, conscious that a certain confusion attended these images. ‘The lad would be better elsewhere.’
‘Aren’t those publicans shunted around by the breweries?’ Sir Charles asked. ‘It ought to be easy to find the top man in this particular concern. Likely enough we were at school with him—eh, Arthur? The place reeked of malt and hops, as I remember it. We could ask him – just as a favour to an old chum – to promote those unappealing Howlands. It shouldn’t be difficult. The Apperley Arms is a pretty miserable pot-house, if you ask me.’
‘Unworthy of the family name,’ the General said with a chuckle. ‘But it’s an idea, Charles, distinctly an idea.’
‘The boy could start again with a clean sheet,’ Dr Ayliffe said.
‘That’s the state of his sheet already, in my opinion. Call it just a fresh start.’
But benevolent plans of the kind these three gentlemen were perpending take time to mature. This one was overtaken by events.
The village school had shut down for the Christmas holidays, and the schoolmistress, who felt it had been a trying term, had gone off to spend the festive season in the household of a married sister in another part of the country. The children fooled around, hoping for snow and ice. There had been another fire, this time at Great Treby: it was much more serious than the last, since a church hall had been destroyed. This spectacular incendiarism was generously reported, and naturally kept arson well to the fore in Thorley heads. Nobody was made more aware of this than Dicky Howland, and its effect was to enhance in him that nocturnal habit deplored by his mother. It was no season for hooting-matches with owls at midnight, but when Dicky was not to be found in his bed it was presumably activities of that sort that he was up to. By day he either skulked or went about in an ostentatiously defiant manner. Had a psychiatrist been around (only in those days there probably wasn’t one within a hundred miles of Thorley) he might have declared that an identity crisis was confronting this boy; that in face of such group hostility – but also, perhaps, gratifying attention – he was uncertain what role to assume. The person who came closest to this perception about Dicky was Anne Alford, whose own holidays had begun. She was rapidly becoming an articulate girl, and she had the advantage of being very much Dicky’s age. When she heard of Sir Charles Apperley’s plan for promoting the innkeeper she didn’t at all approve of it, and she rebuked her father for lending countenance to anything so unconsidered.
‘If those Howlands are sent away,’ she said, ‘even if it’s pretended they deserve a better pub, everybody will know that it’s because of Dicky that they’ve had to go. And the story will follow them, too. So there will have been a kind of confession of guilt where I just don’t believe there has been any guilt. And neither do you, Daddy. So I don’t know how you can have been led into such a plan by that stupid Sir Charles.’
‘Anne, dear, you must not call Charles Apperley stupid. He is a very old friend of mine, and if you wish to criticise his ideas – which I consider you have a right to do – it must be in terms of proper respect.’ If General Alford spoke thus severely, it may have been because he knew that his daughter was dead right. ‘Perhaps’—he added without sarcasm—’you have a better idea yourself.’
‘Of course I haven’t. I know I’m only an ignorant child.’ Anne had lately become fond of this irritating remark. ‘But I think they should catch the man who has been burning things down at Treby before he manages to roast some wretched old couple in their hovel. What’s more, I think he may have made Treby too hot to hold him.’ Anne didn’t pause to invite appreciation of this bizarre joke, although she hadn’t produced it inadvertently. ‘He has started casting around more widely – and that’s what explains our haystack.’
‘I think that may well be true.’ It was becoming one of General Alford’s pleasures to be able at times to treat his daughter as a grown-up. ‘And if an end were put to his activities, all this village interest in fire-raising would fade away, and the boy would be all right again.’
‘He certainly isn’t all right now,’ Anne said with decision. ‘I saw him yesterday, and it quite shook me.’
‘Ah.’ General Alford, too, had been shaken – chiefly by the disagreeable allegation preferred by old Ritchings: something that couldn’t possibly be mentioned to Anne. At the moment he was a little struck by his daughter’s enlarging vocabulary. ‘The boy looks under the weather, would you say?’
‘I think he may be beginning to wonder whether he ought to give people a run for their money.’
‘Live up to his reputation, you mean?’
Anne Alford did take a moment to grasp this expression.
‘Yes,’ she then said vigorously. ‘That might be it.’
The greater part of Thorley Park was destroyed by fire that night. The blaze had started in, and been detected while still confined to, the cluster of miscellaneous offices contiguous with the mansion. These included much disused stabling at ground level, with numerous equally disused small chambers, once the quarters of grooms and stable-boys and other humble persons, ranged in two stories above. A good deal of this was tinder-dry, and the construction of the roof-spaces was such that the flames were quickly funnelled into the upper ranges of the house itself. The local fire brigade, although not a professional and full-time organisation, was mustered with commendable speed, and yet more remarkable was the rapidity with which enormous mechanical monsters appeared from Great Treby. Not much could be done, all the same.
Something – perhaps a falling tile or the splintering of glass – had awakened General Alford almost before anybody else was alerted to the disaster. He at once set about checking his domestic staff out of the house, with strict orders not to attempt to enter it again on any account at all. By the time he had done this the entire village had assembled, and he made it his next business to get the children out of the way. So Mrs Alford, who knew all about being a commanding officer’s wife and setting an example to married quarters, firmly led off the protesting Anne to Chesney Lodge, and then returned (accompanied by Sir Charles) to add her authority to the carrying out of similarly prudent action by the other Thorley mothers.
So at least there was going to be no loss of life – unless, indeed, on the part of a fireman – and firemen were at risk by their own choice, after all. Assured of this, and with Charles Apperley beside him, the General was able to take a reasonably dispassionate view of the destruction of his ancestral home. Or he would have been, could he have been assured that confronting him was what the lawyers – rather oddly – call an Act of God. He very much wanted it to be an Act of God, since the notion of some individual malignity at work, even if it had been directed against him quite at random, disturbed him greatly. When the village constable, a stupid and good-natured man called Curley, came up to him with some muttered remark about collaring the bastard this time, he shut the man up with a sharpness that surprised himself.
It was a very cold winter night, and the fire was very hot. The flames were a lurid red and now seemed to stain the sky and the smoke rising up to it; but at play upon the mansion at the same time were arc lights from the monsters which somehow seemed as chilly as the north wind fanning the flames.
‘It looks as if they may save the west wing,’ Apperley said to the General. His voice was carefully matter-of-fact rather than designed to be heartening. ‘Did they manage to get much out?’
‘The silver is in what’s supposed to be a fire-proof safe. Bullion by now, I expect. Burford’—this was the General’s butler—’seems to have managed to pitch out a good many paintings. Competent chap, Burford. There will be things of my wife’s that I’ll be sorry about. And the books. Something nasty about the idea of books burning. Good show by the fire brigade, wouldn’t you say? Fellows well on their toes.’
Thus were these two gentlemen sparely conversing according to their order when they were disturbed by a woman’s scream from close behind them.
‘Dicky—it’s Dicky!’ the woman screamed. She was Mrs Howland.
Other people were now yelling too, and it was certainly Dicky they were excited about. Even as a diminutive and blackened figure now vanishing behind a pall of smoke and now luridly lit by a flicker of flame, there was no mistaking his identity as, high overhead, he scrambled frantically to and fro on the very ridge of the fast-collapsing stable block. And, now that he could be seen, his own faint cries, terrified and despairing, could be heard above the roar and crackle of the conflagration.
‘My God!’ Apperley exclaimed. ‘It was that boy, Arthur. And now he’s done for – the poor crazy kid.’
Dicky, however, was not done for – although he too undoubtedly believed he was. Miraculously, a great red ladder with a helmeted man at the tip of it extended itself in air, swung, dipped, hung for a moment over a sea of flame, and then rose again with Dicky in the fireman’s arms. It had been like the sort of legend in which an eagle swoops down and carries off an infant exposed on a rock.
A minute later Dicky Howland stood in the centre of a circle of hostile or merely curious and gaping villagers. Suddenly there were murmurs, angry shouts, and Constable Curley thrust hastily forward.
‘Quiet, there!’ Curley called out with all the majesty of the law. ‘Hold hard! Hold hard, I say – I have my eye on you!’ He had been only just in time to stop an ugly rush at Dicky. And it was upon Dicky that he himself advanced now. He put out an arm as if to grasp the boy. Then he paused and glanced towards General Alford. The General was a magistrate, which meant a good deal. For miles around the General owned every acre not owned by Sir Charles Apperley, and this meant a good deal more.
Dicky too looked at General Alford. The boy was cowering, trembling all over, as black as a sweep. He was not, it seemed, burnt – or at least not badly – but he smelt as if some demon barber had been singeing him all over. For a moment he looked fixedly at the General. The General looked fixedly back – but how sternly, with how condemnatory a regard, he perhaps didn’t know. Suddenly young Richard Howland appeared to brace himself, square himself, plant himself less insecurely on the ground. He had stopped trembling – yet his whole body seemed to vibrate, all the same. His voice, which during this horrible episode had been the vehicle of nothing except the howling of a frightened child, now rose up in abrupt command of articulate speech.
‘All right, then!’ Dicky shouted at General Alford. ‘It was me, just like you all thought it was. Do you hear – all of you?’ And he glared wildly and defiantly round the assembled villagers. ‘It was me, I tell you, me!’
There was a moment’s utter silence – or what would have been that but for the continued roar of the flames. Again Constable Curley glanced uncertainly at General Alford. For a bare second the General hesitated. Then he gave a curt nod. Constable Curley led Richard Howland away.
More than a couple of days went by before the searchers – firemen still, but now also the insurance people as well – found the charred body of the fire-bug in the ruins of Thorley Park. There could be no doubt about his identity. The police at Great Treby had already guessed who was the man they were looking for. Intermittently insane or near it, he had served a term of imprisonment for arson ten years before.
While this strange dawn of knowledge had been heaving up slowly towards the horizon things had been happening at a different pace to Dicky. Mrs Curley had given him hot milk and biscuits while her husband had made rather agitated telephone calls. Just occasionally, Constable Curley had to lock up a drunk in a little place at the bottom of his garden, but he was unaccustomed to juvenile offenders guilty of such heinous crime that they must clearly be held in custodial care from the start. He didn’t like it at all. So he contrived to get Dicky into the presence of the chairman of the local children’s court shortly after breakfast next morning – remembering to take Dicky’s father the publican along with him. Within twenty minutes of this formality Dicky was on his way to something at that time called a juvenile remand centre, there to await due processes of law.
Although the county was proud of its remand centre Dicky didn’t find it a nice place at all. He believed it, indeed, to be what his schoolfellows called bad school: an institution in which he was liable to be confined for years, and get the stick every day. What he got straight away was a certain amount of unwelcome attention from some rather bigger boys who had settled in, grasped the hang of the institution, and perfected numerous varieties of instant torture to be deployed whenever the screws (as they precociously expressed it) relaxed their surveillance. Dicky was soon wishing very much that he hadn’t, in his moment of extremity, told that rash and boastful lie. He was also frightened by his own complete lack of knowledge as to why he had done so. And he didn’t, of course, have Anne Alford to enlighten him.
General Alford, on learning the truth, was appalled by his own behaviour. With a single nod he had in fact denied his own intuitive conviction about the pub-keeper’s unfortunate son. Being thus furious with himself, he quickly became furious with other people, even ringing up the remand centre and demanding Richard Howland’s instant release in a very high-handed manner. Being politely informed that these things took a little time, he drove up to London accompanied by Sir Charles Apperley, organised perhaps excessive legal assistance around him, and by that afternoon arrived before the portals of Dicky’s prison accompanied by the elder Howland and armed with a brief but sufficient document obtained from a judge in chambers. So there was no fuss at all, and he drove the liberated child and his father straight home.
Dicky gave an account of himself on the way. It wasn’t very coherent, but it certainly began with owls. There was a species of owl pre-eminently likely to be discovered in abandoned stabling, and he had gone in search of that. What he had found was a maniac busily engaged in burning the place down. With some rashness in the circumstances, Dicky had expostulated with this person, who had promptly pursued him through the building – this in nearly pitch darkness – with murder plainly in his mind. Dicky had fled to its upper regions, and there the maniac, taking a rash leap at him in the murk, had gone clean through a gap in the decayed flooring and fallen into what was already a lake of flame below. Dicky had then managed to find and climb down a loft ladder, and had done his best to haul the man clear – partly from a confused notion that, not himself having been murdered after all, he might be accused of murder on his own part if his adversary perished, and partly because he understood that a Boy Scout (he still aspired to be a Scout) was expected to behave in a heroic manner on occasions of the kind. But the fire had defeated him, and he had been obliged to retreat to the roof.
Such was Dicky’s entire story. General Alford listened to it in silence, and ended by accepting its substantial veracity. He had of course other things to think of besides this unfortunate boy’s strange history. He would have to find time for the whole business of getting the insurance settled and building himself a new house, and he would have to do this without docking ten minutes from his labours on the Imperial General Staff. But of course the boy was a decent boy, just as he had always supposed, and something would have to be done for him. Preferably, it ought to be on the estate, so that in an unobtrusive way secure employment could be ensured for him as he grew older.
Yes, that was it. Whatever was appropriate to his abilities and ambitions it must be put within Richard Howland’s power to achieve.