Above the Dark Circus

CHAPTER II. SPINDLE-SHANKS IN A DARK GARDEN-1

CHAPTER II. SPINDLE-SHANKS IN A DARK GARDEN

It will be remembered that when Sancho Panza told his master the story of the beautiful shepherdess Toralva, Don Quixote could not count the number of goats carried by the fisherman across the stream in his boat.

Quoth Sancho: 'How many goats are got over already?'

'Nay, how the devil can I tell?' replied Don Quixote.

'There it is!' quoth Sancho, 'did not I bid you keep count? On my word, the tale is at an end, and now you may go whistle for the rest.'

'Ridiculous,' cried Don Quixote. 'Pray thee, is there no going on with the story unless I know exactly how many goats are wafted over?'

'No, marry is there not,' quoth Sancho, 'for as soon as you answered that you could not tell, the rest of the story quite and clean slipped out of my head; and in troth it is a thousand pities, for it was a special one.'

'So then,' cried Don Quixote, 'the story's ended?'

'Ay, marry is it,' quoth Sancho. 'It is no more to be fetched to life than my dead mother.'

The time has come for me too, before my story can move a step forward, to number my goats. The trouble is not so much in my numbering them as in selecting the best ones for my purpose. There are so many, and they all seem to be conveyed over in the fisherman's boat together.

The period that I must recover is a short one--only six weeks--and the place is definite enough. I will call it Howlett Hall--a name sufficiently near to the reality--and closing my eyes can see again those dark, squat buildings, the beautiful Park running to the sea's very edge, the Devon sea with the red cliffs, the mild lisp of the waves on the shingle in that summer weather, the cooing of the doves in the trees that were scattered on the edge of the shaven lawn, old red-faced Harry Carden calling to his dogs, all the easy, lazy social life of that wealthy carefree world before the war.

And into that easy, normal world stepped, one summer afternoon, the three figures of my drama. Looking back, it seems queer enough, although at the time it was nothing, that these three should have all come into my life on the same day, almost at the same moment--John Osmund, Leroy Pengelly--and Helen Cameron. . . .

Pengelly was the first. I was Harry Carden's land agent, and we were, had been for several years, the greatest friends. Had he lived it would have been another story for me. Of course he was years older than I; our relationship was almost that of father and son--dear Harry with his oaths and tempers and stubbornness and charity and secret shy kindnesses and love of women, dogs and every earthly kind of sport!

Simple! It seems impossible that there should be anyone alive in this complicated world of to-day so guileless.

Well, at about three o'clock of that hot, shimmering afternoon we walked down to the beach to see about some nets that Carden had ordered from a fisherman, saw two nets, watched for a little the sea swell lazily in over the hot dry pebbles, breaking, like the outstretching paw of a sleepy cat, across the rising ridge; then turned back through the little village.

Outside the one and only pub there was standing a man. I noticed him because I knew every soul in the village, and this was a new face to me. When we had struck up through the Park gates Harry said:

'So Pengelly's back again.' He said it, I remember, in a tone that roused my interest, for he disliked so few of his fellow-beings that the grating displeasure in his voice was sufficiently remarkable.

I asked who Pengelly might be. Now here I perceive the danger of melodrama. Pengelly is, I suppose, the villain of this piece, if any villain there be, although it is possibly one of the small values of this story that it contains neither villain nor hero. I should like to be fair to Pengelly, especially in consideration of later events, but, however fair one may try to be, one cannot escape his nastiness. It exuded from him always and everywhere. Harry was the most generous-minded of men, but at once, when he spoke of Pengelly, a sort of disgusting atmosphere crept about us, the air seemed to darken, the warmth of the sun to grow less kindly.

There are one or two people in the world who darken the air, not so much by anything they do as by what simply, of themselves, and possibly quite without their own fault, they are. Not that Pengelly stopped at mere existence, he was quite an active personality until--but what happened to him comes later.

Carden did not say much about Pengelly just then--only that he was the nastiest, meanest, most abject little scoundrel born of woman, that he had come to the village some five years ago, agent, he declared, for some kind of photographic firm, that he had a wife whom he bullied, that he was never seen by anyone to do any work, but simply slouched around the place. Many things were suspected of him, very little proved. Then a girl in the village had a baby of which he was supposed to be the father, his wife died suddenly, and he vanished--to the great relief of everyone. And yet the unexpected thing was, Carden added, that he had a kind of fascination for some people. Even Carden himself had felt it. He was very glib in his talk, had plenty of stories to tell, had travelled, apparently, and his conceit and self-confidence were boundless.

'I hope he's not come back to stay,' said Carden, and a kind of depression fell between us. I am even fanciful enough to imagine that life was never quite the same careless, happy thing for either of us after the moment when we saw Pengelly leaning his scarecrow of a body up against the wall of the Farmer's Boy, his hands in his pockets, and his bony, ugly head thrust forward in that snake-like, piercing way that was so characteristic of him.

That was to be, however, an eventful afternoon for me, and the second new encounter that it brought me quickly knocked the first out of my head.

When we reached the house and stretched ourselves out in chairs on the lawn with a good cool drink at our elbow, Harry told me that people were coming to tea. Borlass and his stout lady and imbecile daughter, for three--and two others.

'John Osmund,' said Harry, 'and the lady who is to marry him.'

'And who may John Osmund be?' I asked him.

Carden told me. John Osmund was a remarkable fellow. One of those men who could do anything if he liked. But he didn't like. And yet you couldn't call him a slacker. He was always doing something and doing it well, but they were odd, unnecessary jobs, jobs that no one else thought of doing.

Where did he come from? Nobody knew. He said that he belonged to some Glebeshire family. Oh, yes, he was a gentleman all right. Extraordinarily handsome fellow and a giant. Must be six foot six at least, and carried himself firmly, as though he had been commanding people all his life.

Funny-tempered chap, though. You never knew what was likely to upset him--went off the rocker at the slightest thing, and when he did lose his temper it was something to see. For the rest he was as sweet as a nut, and his laugh was worth going a mile to hear. But he had odd bees in his bonnet. Couldn't bear this democratic twaddle and yet was always palling up with the fellows out of his own class, not just talking to them, but made real friends of them and didn't mind who saw him with them. It was crowds that he said he hated and the way that everyone cheapened everything. He called it a halfbaked age, and hated it for being that, said he would like to drop bombs on half humanity and leave room for the rest to grow properly. And yet he was the kindesthearted of men, no crank, you understand, only talked of these things when he was roused.

I asked some more questions and discovered that he had been staying for a long time at the Trout Inn at Amberthwaite, a village some five miles in the Exmouth direction. He kept a horse and looked mighty fine riding it.

And the lady? Helen Cameron? She used to come down here often with the Fosters when they rented Onsett. She was an Edinburgh girl. I must have seen her. Three years ago

she was down here, but was only a bit over sixteen, had her hair down. She was nearly twenty now. An orphan, very independent, a delightful girl and fascinated by Osmund.

She had arrived on her own about a month ago, met Osmund and became at once engaged to him. The odd thing, Carden said, was that he didn't think that she was really in love with him. There was no doubt of Osmund's feeling for her, he was simply mad about her, but his will seemed to have overpowered hers, which was saying something, because she was one of the strongest-willed and most independent women in the world. But they were a striking pair, both so good-looking, so unlike other people, so individual and alone. I'd be interested in both of them when I saw them. I felt that I would.

I had no questions to ask about Sir Nevil Borlass and his wife. I knew him well enough-common-place, greedy, self-satisfied, vulgar. He had inherited a fortune from his father and owned a huge place, Pecking, some ten miles distant from Howlett. He wasn't a bad fellow, I suppose, but arrogant, greedy and stupid.

'As a matter of fact,' said Carden, 'I'm sorry I've asked them at the same time as Osmund. Osmund hates them both like poison, and he's no swell at hiding his feelings. You may have the luck to see him in one of his tempers. It's worth seeing.' I did, as it happened, have that luck, and I'm never likely to forget it.

Osmund and his lady walked over from Amberthwaite.

When I saw them standing together on the sun-drenched lawn it was all I could do to restrain an exclamation. There are some people in the world--a few--like that, made, it seems, of different clay from the rest of us.

Osmund would have excited attention anywhere. His height did not seem excessive because he carried himself so magnificently. When I knew him better it was always a trick he had of throwing his head back, a gesture of freedom, of strength, of independence, quite impossible to give any real sense of, that seemed especially his. He was dark and with just that amount of foreignness in his colour that our Celts often have. You would have known him for an Englishman anywhere, though. His smile was delightful, boyish and discerning. His anger--well, I shall have an opportunity of describing that in a moment.

And Helen? If this story has neither hero nor villain, at least it has a heroine. How shall I describe her as she was on that first day? I can remember very little of that first impression. She was slim, tall, dark-haired like Osmund, and I fancy that on that first afternoon I thought her sullen, conceited, fond of her own opinion, a little arrogant.

To tell the truth, I was, I think, on that day so deeply struck by Osmund that I paid little attention to Helen. She certainly paid none at all to me. She had, as I was to learn afterwards, other things just then to think about.

We all sat down together and were very happy. How charming Osmund could be when he liked! He was the most perfectly natural being I have ever known. When he was at his ease and trusted his company he was like a cheery happy-go-lucky boy who hadn't a bother in the world.

At any rate that was what he was on this first meeting--before all his trouble came.

I don't think that any of us heard Fate mutter in our ears as the Borlass family appeared on the horizon, 'Here's the end of your happiness.' No, we didn't hear, but if we had we should have heard the truth.

A more commonplace trio you couldn't have found in all England: Borlass with his thick neck and swelling stomach, and stout calves ridiculous in their rough pinky-brown stockings; Lady Borlass, a stout little woman who walked like a chicken looking for seed. She was always overdressed and, for so small a woman, wore an astonishing amount of jewels. She was famous for her jewels. Her daughter was a large lumpy girl with spectacles and a deep bass voice. She laughed like a man too, and seemed to take the deepest interest in everything that you said. Only her eyes betrayed her, for they stared through their glasses with a blank vacancy which showed that she never listened to a word that anyone uttered. It was her obsession (and also the obsession of her parents) that every male and every mother of every male pursued her for her money.