“Nothing like that could ever happen here,” said Dave feelingly.
I laughed bitterly. “Nothing like that could ever happen anywhere — until it does.”
“I mean it,” Dave insisted. “People here aren’t like — ”
“Listen,” I said wearily. “Haven’t you seen people everywhere, here as much as anywhere else, fighting, brawling, cursing, acting like beasts on Saturday night and going pasty-faced and bleary-eyed to sing hymns in church on Sunday morning? The men who howled for our blood, shot Stan, and pulled Carol down on those iron spikes were back with their families that night, doing as they were told and playing with their children.”
Dave was silent.
“I told you this story from our side,” I said. “How about their side? Hadn’t our father been responsible for millions of deaths? Hadn’t he escaped justice by dying before the trouble started? Who was to be punished for it, then? Who but us? Do you see, Dave?”
Dave shook his head. “No, I don’t see. How could people be so utterly inhuman — ordinary people …”
“Because they were afraid,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen a panic-stricken mob? Fighting to get out of a burning hall, clawing their way to the lifeboats, betraying each other to — ”
“No,” Dave said, disturbed. “I always thought — I always hoped …”
“If you’d been in Chicago at the time, you wouldn’t have been in that mob. But what difference would that have made? There were more than three and a half million people in Chicago who weren’t in the mob. The point is, there were a thousand who were.”
Dave nodded unwillingly. “Was that why you said you wished you knew me better?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t think I’d …”
I sighed. “Not you. But somebody. Suppose somebody makes a mistake that kills thousands. From some people he’ll get understanding, even sympathy. But from others, the wives and mothers of the men who died, what can he expect but abuse, hate — in the end, hysterical attack?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. Nevertheless, when something like that has happened to you, you’ve got to talk about it every so often, and I hadn’t talked about it for months.
“Some things you never forget,” I went on. “I’ll forget Stanley — he was reckless and careless and got in the way of a bullet that someone was obviously going to shoot. I can almost think of his death as — as an accident. Anyway, he just fell dead, quickly and cleanly. I’ll get hazy about Gloria — after all, she wasn’t fitted for this world and something like what happened to her was bound to happen sooner or later. But I’ll never forget Carol and the way the mob played with her like a pretty toy, meaning to destroy her in the end but not until they’d worked themselves up to doing it in a way that really satisfied their hate … I wonder what they were going to do to me?”
We drove on at last, silent. Dave and I never talked about that again.
With little or nothing on the roads to slow us down and no more pagget traps, we didn’t take long to reach Stamford. It needed a lot of broken glass to make an effective barrier to modern cars with their tough tires, and the paggets were limited to the empty beer bottles and lemonade bottles they found lying about. None of the paggets, fortunately, was well equipped for carrying things far. Road blocks of that kind would always be rare. I’d never heard of paggets blocking roads with barricades, but that was possible, too.
I had been in England before, and on the Great North Road, but that had been even before Mil had gone to live in Rutland. I knew that Nether Saxham, Rutland, found her all right, but though I had written to her both from America and from France, I hadn’t heard from her for nearly eighteen months and wasn’t surprised. Eighteen months ago there had been some pretense that an international postal system was still in operation, and you’d occasionally receive, with surprise, a letter from Australia, say, while letters which you knew had been mailed twenty miles away had never arrived. One of my letters might have reached her; perhaps some of hers eventually reached places where I had been, though I never received any.
I turned off the Great North Road a few miles past Stamford and stopped in Greetham, the nearest place I knew to Nether Saxham. I was driving again.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Dave murmured. Neither did I. I had already made sure my revolver was ready for use.
Greetham was a small, straggling village like a thousand others in England, dingily whitewashed stone houses built irregularly along the road, itself irregular and narrow. Perhaps what worried Dave and me about it right away was the startling contrast between the Englishness of the village and the foreignness of the people we saw about. Staring at us with curiosity or hostility were the most motley collection of men and women we had seen in England. Every minute more of them appeared, and each new arrival looked less prepossessing than the last.
The man leaning against a wall opposite us had the curly hair and wide nostrils of the Negro, but his face was dead white. Two girls coming along the street toward us, staring curiously at us, were in almost shocking contrast, though the same height and age and both of mixed parentage — the one with all the ugliness of mixed blood, and the other with all its striking, ten-times-larger-than-life beauty. A little fat woman who was waddling in the other direction, looking over her shoulder at us, was grotesque, and a young man who lounged in a wooden seat casually surveying us was an Apollo, with beauty of face and figure to make any girl catch her breath.
The people and the scene were like nothing I could imagine except a movie set. Nowhere in real life did one expect to see anything so wildly melodramatic. It was the Latin Quarter, a gypsy encampment, a traveling circus, Naples, Cairo, Limehouse, Bohemia, and Dirty Eddie’s bar, all rolled into one.
Then something happened that took the strange villagers’ attention off us for a moment or two. There was a shout further along the street and a pacat came darting along the street like a gray flash, dodging and zigzagging as it came.
The man leaning against the wall moved only slightly. There was a silver streak in the air, a queer, choked scream, and the pacat was writhing with a knife through its body. A dirty dark-skinned boy pounced on the creature, finished it with a deft grab and pull at the knife, and then, grinning happily, handed the weapon back to the man who had thrown it — after politely wiping it on his ragged trousers.
I wouldn’t have thought a throw like that was possible. However, though there were shouted congratulations on the throw, no one seemed surprised.
It was certainly an effective way of dealing with pacats, and as far as that went these curious ruffians had my best wishes. Nevertheless my impulse, even more than before, was to drive on while attention was diverted from us. No one was doing anything actually menacing, however, so I addressed the man leaning against the wall, who was nearest.
“Can you tell me where to find Nether Saxham?” I asked, feeling rather like a society girl, loaded with jewels, trying to find her way out of a slum area at midnight.
“Ask him,” said the white Negro, with a flick of his head. The throwing knife had disappeared, I hadn’t seen where.
With a start I took in the appearance of someone who hadn’t been there before — a huge man who at least looked good-humored, more than any of the others did. He was dressed in a soiled white cotton shirt and loose blue trousers that suggested the sea rather than the gypsy caravans from which most of the others seemed to have emerged. Though not as tall as Dave, he was much heavier.
I asked him.
He came over and leaned at the open window of the car, grinning.
“I’m Grimblo,” he declared in a voice that seemed to come from his boots. “At least, that’s my stage name. Ever see my act?”
“No,” I said.
He shrugged. “Too bad. Who are you two?”
I gave him two names that weren’t ours.
“You friends of Mildred Lambert?” he asked next, still grinning. It was becoming obvious that the grin was merely his normal facial expression, signifying nothing.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re not,” he said, and grinned more widely.
If this was second-rate melodrama, it had the difference that we couldn’t very well walk out of the theater. These people knew where Mil was, and there was no point in rousing their resentment more than it was roused already.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said politely. “Where can I find her?”
“Just her? How about the others?”
“I don’t know of any others.”
“Are you going to join them?”
“I don’t know,” I said patiently, “until I find Mrs. Lambert.”
“Is she Mrs.?” asked Grimblo with some interest. “I didn’t know that. Where’s Mister?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “It’s years since I saw Mrs. Lambert.”
“What’s she to you?”
There was no point in telling a man who said he was no friend of Mil that I was her brother. “A friend,” I said.
Grimblo said something coarse which I could take as I liked. I could have laughed, or assented, or got angry. I said merely: “No, nothing like that.”
“You keep your temper better than she does,” said Grimblo surprisingly.
“Maybe I’ve had more practice,” I said.
He nodded at Dave. “Your friend doesn’t say much.”
I couldn’t help remarking: “We’re not saying much either, are we?”
Grimblo’s grin widened again. “Will you take Mrs. Lambert a present?” he asked.
This was the first indication that he proposed to tell me how to find Mil. “Certainly,” I said.
“Anna!” he bellowed. The exotic beauty came forward. He gestured, and she stopped and went into one of the houses.
I started violently when she came back, for she had a big black dog on a leash.
“That’s it,” said Grimblo, the wider grin in evidence again. “Give him to Mrs. Lambert. His name’s Nat.”
I couldn’t understand this at all, unless it was a strange joke. “Is she collecting paggets?” I asked.
Grimblo bellowed with laughter. “Nat’s no pagget,” he said. “Nat’s a nice, friendly little dog.” Between them, he and Anna coerced the dog into the back of the car and shut the door after him. “A mile that way and a mile that way,” said Grimblo briefly, making clear gestures with his hands and arms. He turned away. We were dismissed.
I lost no time in getting on my way. Mil would have to explain Greetham to me. Myself, I had no ideas at all.
Dave was keeping a wary eye on the dog in the back. “He’s an ordinary dog all right,” he said presently. “I don’t think a pagget could act like that.” He stretched a hand back and let Nat lick it. “Just as well he isn’t a pagget. A pagget that size could make quite a nuisance of himself.”
He felt in his pocket, found his pipe, and stuck it gloomily between his teeth. We didn’t talk about Greetham. Neither of us felt he had anything worth while to say on the subject.
We turned off what was already a secondary road onto a road so bad that I came down to second gear. It was a mere farm track, and rough and stony at that.
I found myself almost as excited as if I were nearing a woman I was in love with, not a mere sister. Mil and I had never been really close, and when she had gone to England we had both borne the separation with equanimity. She had been a selfish, egotistical little girl and we had liked each other best from a distance.
However, Mil had always been capable, had always got what she wanted, and without having seen her since the pagget menace had started, I had known all along that she was just the right person to cope with it. Being with Gloria all the time had driven the lesson home to me.
We reached a gateway in a stone wall, opened the heavy wooden gate, turned off the track into it, closed the gate behind us, and drove through an avenue of trees. We were peering ahead to catch our first glimpse of the house when there was a hiss and a thump and another, louder hiss. The car settled on a front wheel — the spare with which I had replaced the tire which parats had bitten through in France.
Startled, we looked to the side of the road and saw a girl there with a weapon in her hands. I call her a girl because she was female and under thirty, but really she was one of the most massive-looking women I’d ever seen. She wasn’t more than five feet eight and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on her, yet she must have weighed some two-hundred-odd pounds.
“Hold it!” I shouted. “I’m a friend.”
It sounded like a silly thing to say. However, at least it came in time to prevent her shooting out the other three tires, which a more considered statement might have failed to do.
There was a sort of sentry box behind the woman, a heavy hut with holes for a gun at all four sides. She was holding the door open with one massive leg, ready to seek cover if it should be necessary.
“Prove it!” she exclaimed, grimly and very much to the point.
“I’m Mil’s brother Don,” I said.
“Don what?” she demanded, with no relaxation of her manner.
“It’s a name I don’t want to say,” I said. “Mil is Mildred Margaret Lambert, five feet four, twenty-six, blonde, has a long scar across her left instep, and lisps when she talks slowly. She never locks doors, never wears a girdle, writes with her left hand but does everything else with her right, smokes thirty cigarettes a day, and eats like a horse. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“What are the names of your other brothers and sisters?” the massive woman asked.
“Stanley and Carol. They’re both dead, incidentally.”
“Go on up to the house,” she said in her very English accent. “Tell them I let you through.”
We got out of the car. Dave brought out Nat, with whom he seemed to have made friends. The woman didn’t show any surprise at seeing Nat, but then, perhaps nothing would surprise her. She was the kind of Englishwoman who was used to dogs, found pleasant things “frightfully jolly,” and in normal times would have spent a lot of time on a hockey field.
“Who shall I say sent us?” I asked, smiling.
“Edith,” she said, not smiling.
“Pleased to meet you, Edith.”
“I’m on a job,” she said, keeping a stiff upper lip. “I’ll meet you socially when I come off duty.”
“Sorry,” I said, still smiling. Edith, left to herself, would have been welcoming us long since with “Good show, chaps!” I felt sure. I thought I recognized Mil’s hand in Edith’s unbending manner while on duty. In circumstances like this Mil would be a whale on discipline.
I looked at the car doubtfully. I didn’t like to leave it even that distance from the house.
“I’ll look after it,” said Edith briefly.
Dave and I went up toward the house, Dave keeping a firm hold on Nat’s leash. It was as well that he did, for we had hardly passed Edith’s box when two other dogs came bounding out of the undergrowth and leaped at Nat. If Nat had been free, he’d probably have been chased away and we’d never have seen him again. As it was, Dave pulled him back and a sharp command from Edith quieted the two other dogs a little. They snapped and snarled around us, no longer meaning us any harm, but inclined to bluster for a bit. When they had sniffed at Nat once or twice and he had sniffed back, they seemed more friendly.
“Here, Roger! Here, Jack!” Edith called, and reluctantly, still looking at us, the two dogs sidled up to her. We took the opportunity to get on our way toward the house again.
The fact that Edith wouldn’t leave her post meant that we had to announce ourselves. The house proved to be one of those curious, miscellaneous collections of the architecture of every country and every age which abound in England. For centuries owners had been adding on a bit here and modifying a bit there. It had not, however, been a big or important house in the first place. It was by no means a grand English country house. It was a little farmhouse made into a big farmhouse, with a new residential wing added by some owner who happened to be wealthier than the others, stables built at some time when horse breeding had been carried out, a garage stuck on at a later stage but when the stables were still needed, a tower added by someone who couldn’t live in a house which hadn’t a tower. Part of the conglomeration had been burned down at some time or other and only half restored.
I knocked at the front door and the way it was immediately opened showed that Edith wasn’t the only guard.
Mil and I faced each other for the first time in years. If she had changed, the change was so much less than I had expected that I couldn’t see that she’d changed at all. So I could hardly understand it when she looked at me without recognition and said:
“Who the dickens are you, what do you want, and why did Edith let you through?”
“Mil!” I said, half in protest, half in disbelief that she could fail to recognize me.
“Why — you must be Don,” she said, with surprise rather than warmth. “What have you done to your face?”
“Plastic surgeons shifted it around a bit. This is — ”
“How are Carol and Stan?” she demanded eagerly.
“Dead. This is Dave.”
“Dead — both of them?” she asked, ignoring the introduction. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. Mil remembered the introduction belatedly, gave Dave her hand absently, and motioned us inside. She didn’t seem to have noticed Nat. Only when he sniffed at her legs did her attention turn to him.
“Where did you get this brute?” she asked.
“From a man called Grimblo.”
“You stole him?”
“No, Grimblo told us to take him to you.”
“Then we’ll have to watch him. Lock him in here just now. Later we’ll decide what’s to be done with him.”
We left Nat in a small, bare room, and Mil led us upstairs.
Mil had never been pretty, but some people had called her beautiful. She was the kind of girl a sculptor or artist would employ as a model, and ordinary people, who weren’t artists, would wonder why. Most people would have said her eyes were too deep-set and quick and piercing. They were always in shadow, being set so far back. Her nose was small and well shaped, but her cleft chin startled quite a few people. It was smooth and not too big, yet it was almost rudely determined. Her soft, feminine mouth didn’t do anything to offset the effect of that dictatorial chin. Her body was slight and trim, not really a body to go with her face. For her body was like that of any attractive girl, and her face was one in a million.
She took us to a big room which overlooked the drive. There were two other girls there already, obviously sisters. It must have been from this room that Mil had seen our arrival.
“My brother Don — Dave — Clare — Eva,” she said briefly, leaving us all to sort out the names. “Now let’s have your story, Don. Start with Stan and Carol — and how about Gloria?”
“Dead too,” I said.
Rapidly, in quick questions and answers, we filled in the picture for each other, not in detail, but in clear enough outline. I was at first reluctant to mention the name Paget in the other two girls’ presence, and Mil equally reluctant to mention it in Dave’s, but a look and a nod were enough to establish the fact that it was safe.
“I wondered about that,” Mil nodded. “The people around here knew I was a Paget, and there was a little trouble. But it died down. After all, I’m not actually a Paget any more.”
Her husband was dead, killed by paggets, but her two children, a boy and a girl, were safe. They were around somewhere, she said in a casual, unconcerned way which indicated they must already have shown something of her own capacity for looking after herself.
I couldn’t help reflecting that of the seven members of the family there had been the last time she had gone to England — the old man, myself, Gloria, Mil, her husband Laurie, Stan, and Carol — only two were left. One had been killed in an accident, two by paggets, and two by the mob.
We took all these deaths for granted. There wasn’t any other way to take them. Death was too commonplace for us to waste much time over it any more.
Besides, if you didn’t see a person for a long time, you half accepted his death as at least a possibility. Rather than being surprised and shocked to find he was dead, you were surprised and relieved to find he wasn’t dead after all.
Mil felt like that about me — I knew that, though she didn’t say so. But I had no such ideas about her. I had known, somehow, that Mil would be alive. She was the type of woman who would be a great-grandmother.
It was good to be with Mil again. We had fought often enough, and it probably wouldn’t be many days until we were fighting again, but at least we always fought as comrades, not as enemies. In the worst battle between us, the intervention of others had made it clear that ours was a private quarrel and that we were united in keeping strangers out of it.