Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (386 page)

“Everything?” Miss Stobhall gasped.

“Oh, everything about our births!” Hamnet said laughingly. “Don’t be a stupid old thing and gasp. Here, help me to lay him out. Ophelia’s going to faint when she might be useful.”

CHAPTER IX

BRANDETSKI was breathing so bard as be crept away round the gorse bush behind them, that he feared he might be heard. He fell upon his hands and knees when he was level with his sack and, keeping as hidden as he could, he dragged the sack towards him almost noiselessly. The odour of paraffin was so strong that he could hardly keep from spitting. His dull, agonised mind was set solely upon revenge. He breathed the word in Russian beneath his breath again and again. He was certain that he had solved the mystery of why the Lifers had given him hospitality. They were keeping him there whilst they negotiated a reward with the Russian Secret Service. They had used Ophelia as a decoy. They had made him wear Russian costume in order to make him more easily identifiable and in his dark and obscure brain of a conspirator Brandetski felt a rage that he had not any means whatever of expressing or relieving. He had been counterplotted, he had been outplotted, and to his rage of hatred, because he imagined himself in desperate danger, he added the rage of hatred of a man who has lost his self-respect. For had he not, Brandetski considered, been outwitted by brains subtler than his own?

Accustomed to a position of absolute irresponsibility half-way between the police and the revolutionaries whom in turn he betrayed to each other, Brandetski had innate in him the feeling that he could be absolutely reckless in his actions. He never thought about it; he simply acted. If he had shot Mr Everard and Ophelia he would simply have told the police that they were dangerous revolutionaries, he would have trumped up some plot, he would have had a large number of the Simple Lifers arrested and no doubt some of them would be hanged or sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. He had been told that in England the police were different, but he flatly and contemptuously refused to believe anything of the sort. Police were police all the world over. They could not differ. The English were merely hypocrites and he knew very well that plotting was going on all over England. Had not he heard the Simple Lifers talk of the Social Revolution? They were always talking about the Social Revolution. There could be not the least doubt that the English police would be thankful to him for the definite information he would be able to give them.

Very cautiously and with great effort he hoisted the heavy sack on to his shoulder and, creeping noiselessly step by step, he swayed between the dim mounds of gorse. For some time he could hear the voices of Miss Stobhall and Hamnet Gubb. When he was out of earshot he set the sack down and rested, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He took it up once more and staggered forward. He had to rest half a dozen times before he reached the road very nearly at the two milestones and perhaps a quarter of a mile from the first house of the village. On the open road the fitful breezes gathered in a small, steady wind, blowing from him towards the houses. Brandetski sat upon the milestone and rested. A carriage and pair went past him from the Luscombes’ and he could see in the village beside the Communal buildings the head lights of a couple of motor-cars. In the Johnson’s cottage there was still a light but in all the rest of the village, even in the inn, there was a deep silence. Having picked up his sack Brandetski crossed the road. He lay down amongst the gorse bushes in such a position that he could see right down the village street. The wind was beginning to get up. It blew the mist up into the sky and sent it racing along in small clouds beneath the moon, whose light at times dwindled and at times seemed brilliantly enhanced.

After a little while he saw a white, rather ghostly dress flitting at a little distance across the Common. That must be Ophelia Bransdon. She approached the lights of the motor-cars and called out. A couple of men sprang to the glare of the head-lights, the chauffeurs without any doubt. Then the Johnsons’ door opened. A number of people came out in evening dress, Mr Lee, Mrs Lee, the Earl and Countess, and Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb. With the lights of the cars falling upon them he could recognise each by the figure and build. Then some of them disappeared into a garden. Afterwards they returned bearing a large, flat thing, apparently a door or the top of a table. Then all of them together went off over the Common. No one else appeared in the cottage, no lights no sound. The wind rose steadily. He could hear Mrs Lee’s voice speaking in high tones. And suddenly he clutched at the revolver in his belt. He took it out, examined it attentively in the moonlight and then drew the trigger. The hammer rose up and fell, hard, sharp, efficient. It must, then, be the cartridges that had failed him. He shook one out from the chamber. The cartridge was intact: the little nipple was pierced. Suddenly he fumbled in his blouse and drew out just such another brass object. He weighed the two in his hands. Bewilderment and rage showed themselves one after the other in his dark face in the moonlight. He shook out all the other cartridges: they were all light. He stood up and crushed one of them under his heel; it was empty. Then Brandetski shook his fist at the sky. Fool that he was, he thought, not to have examined, the revolver before, not to have shot them all — Ophelia, Hamnet, Everard and the old grey woman. He continued staring at the moon and cursing. Now there were too many of them. Probably several of them were armed. He heard voices to windward. They were carrying Everard to the Luscombe’s. A long time afterwards several men came along the road, the two chauffeurs, Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb.

“Not likely,” one of the chauffeurs said, “that she’d go back along the road with that Russian swine waiting and his revolver loaded no doubt!”

Mr Bransdon said:

“Yes! That’s what comes of monkeying with free ideas! It is a crime to let loose forces that you can’t deal with.” His voice grew high. “I was against housing that Odessa dock-rat at all. I was from the first. But you over-ruled me. I knew the sort of scum that it was.”

“Aha!” Brandetski muttered to himself. It was perfectly true that Bransdon had shown no special desire to house his relative near him. At the time Luscombe Green had seemed to him a splendid place in which to hide from revolutionaries and police alike!

He loaded his revolver with great care, weighing and tapping each of the cartridges. Mr Gubb went into the Johnsons’ cottage. Its light went out. The motor-cars began to move towards Brandetski, side by side, along the open road, the chauffeurs talking as they went. They turned in at the Luscombes’ gate. Lights shone in the upper windows of Mr Bransdon’s and Mr Gubb’s cottages. Then the two motor-cars came out from the Luscombes’. One turned away down the road: that was Earl and Countess Croydon’s. The other passed Brandetski once more. He heard Mrs Lee’s voice say: “It must have been a
tramp
! It
must
!” And then after a retort from the man beside her: “Ophelia was always a liar!” The car rushed through the village, lighting up each cottage in turn for a ghastly moment. Then silence fell on the noise-filled silence of the night. The wind rustled through the grasses and sang in the gorse. An owl cried once or twice. Another answered it from far away over the Common. Then a fox cried and in the bush at his elbow something rustled. The spindrift was sweeping over the face of the moon fast now: the light in Mr Gubb’s cottage went out, then in Mr Bransdon’s. It was all still, it was all asleep, it was all dead.

Brandetski arose and grunting heavily got the sack on to his shoulder. He approached the end of the village. Just beside the first cottage there stood three stacks of last year’s hay that Mr Gubb had been unable to sell. Brandetski set his sack down amongst the loose hay where one of the stacks had begun to be cut. He took out a square metal tin of about the size and shape of four bricks in cube. He opened it, inverted it, and jerked its contents all over the hay stack. There went up a profound and penetrating odour of petrol. He returned for another tin and once more deluged the second stack. Then carrying a couple, one in each hand, he crept stealthily up to the first cottage. Like a thief he went up the path and, extracting a funnel from the inside of his blouse, he pushed its point into the little letter-box. He lifted up one of his cans and inverted it over the funnel. He knew the topography of the houses very well. The petrol fell on to a doormat, making no sound, saturating it. When he had used half the can he went, treading cautiously, upon his moving shadow to the next cottage but one.

So quietly and steadily but with an extreme swiftness of motion which suggested that of an agitated ape, he visited the doors of each cottage but one right down the row. To the two last, which contained Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb, he devoted an entire can apiece. He returned to the stacks and drew from his pocket a piece of tarred rope which he cut in two, and a box of those wax matches which will burn in the fiercest wind. The wind, indeed, was rising very fast now, running straight from the stacks to the Settlement. Brandetski ht each piece of rope and laid about a yard apiece on the ground heading towards the soaked haystacks. Then swiftly and without caring much whether he made sound or not, he ran from cottage to cottage, dropping a lighted match in letterbox after letterbox. And in each case he could see through the window that, brilliantly and with an unsteady flame, the dark rooms ht up. He had hardly reached Mr Bransdon’s house, however, before he heard, far away down the road towards New End, the honk of an automobile. He sprang across the way, having already made up his mind, and furiously kicked in the door of the Communal bathing shed. He stood watching the lights in each of the cottage windows grow larger and larger, and presently, to the westward with an immense flare, an immense rustle and roar of flame, the stacks caught, the fire reaching up like a banner high into the air. He heard the loud throb of the motor shooting down upon the place. It slowed down at Mr Bransdon’s house and a voice screamed:

“My God! Fire! Fire!”

Then the car ran forward. When it was nearly level with him Brandetski levelled his revolver and fired at the man. With a great crash the offside lamp went out. The car rushed on, the chauffeur shouting and playing with his mechanical syren a loud, throbbing chord, like the note of an organ. A second bullet struck the hood at the back of the car. A light gleamed pallid under the immense globe of fire in the upper window of the furthest cottage. The car had stopped just on the further side of the burning stacks. Brandetski saw the light gleam on the chauffeur’s clothes as he ran in behind the cottages. Steadily borne down by the rising wind, the flame from the stacks licked the roof of the first cottage. Against the glare the sky itself seemed black and the rustle of flames was so loud that it drowned the desperate cries of the chauffeur, hammering on door after door. As the man’s figure shot through the space between the inn and the red cottage opposite, Brandetski aimed a shot at him, but he seemed to have missed; the man’s cries continued.

Very soon new, sharp sounds flew out upon the air. And, excited by the fiendish glare of the flames, the cracks, the cries, Brandetski threw his cap into the roof of the shed and began to jump up and down and to cry out in triumph, firing his revolver at the faces of the houses and at the invisible stars.

“Ha! Ha, my little pigeon!” he cried. “Little cucumber, now they shall fear thee!”

The glare of the fire ht up great levels of the Common; dim, winking, as if asleep, the stretches of grass, of bushes, of heather, wavered and shone. High in the sky, remote, grotesque, the moon blazed down an ineffectual light. From the backs of the houses white figures ran out into the low-paled back gardens, crying out, wailing. The weeping of terrified children was like the cackle of hens.

Up, on the far eastern end of the line of houses, behind the palings, Mr Bransdon had taken command. He was bareheaded, in his nightshirt and trousers. He had caught up his boots as he ran out of his bedroom and had put them on in the garden. In Mr Gubb’s garden he had found Mr Gubb and the chauffeur, appalled and inactive.

“The first thing,” he said, and his voice was like a park orator’s, huge and without inflections, slow and definite, “the first thing is to see that they’re all out.” He waved a bare, hairy arm towards the end of the row. “Begin at number one,” he said. “Gubb, take two. You three. We’ve got to go into every bedroom of every house. Three on each first floor. The fire won’t have got through from the door of the living room into the sculleries. As you come down again open the living room door to let out any cat or dog, then shut it again. We meet here when we’ve finished. It’s dangerous but it’s got to be done. Pick up every article of loose clothing you can see and bring it out with you. They’ve none of them got anything on to speak of.”

Mr Bransdon ran as fast as his stout figure would permit him along the row of palings. He held up his trousers with his right hand. With his left, he pushed off figures in white that clawed on to him and cried out questions. One young man who held a kettle and was weeping stood right in front of him.

“What’s to be done?” he exclaimed. “What’s to be done?”

Bransdon thrust the hollow of his palm across the man’s mouth and sent him flying sideways over an anthill. Then he paused to say distinctly and very loud:

“Get buckets, not kettles. Make a chain to the bathing shed. That’s all the water there is in the place. You understand? Buckets and make a chain. Send someone to rouse the villagers.” He ran on. The fire gleamed beneath the door of the first cottage, the tiles of the roof were splitting and fell in fragments in the garden. Mr Bransdon tore the end of his nightshirt from his trousers and stuffed it into his mouth and nostrils. He scrambled up the winding stairs and plunged into the first bedroom.