Short Stories 1895-1926 (71 page)

The Hangman Luck

The Hangman Luck
1

I woke at the sound of the voice with such a jerk of chin upon chest as seemed to rattle the brains in my head. I leapt from the bench with a shiver. The heavy meal and the old ale after long hunger had sent my wits woolgathering. Blinking my eyes in dazed fashion, I turned my head slowly and discovered the breaker of my slumbers, and at the sight was assured of safety. He stood with a glass of spirits before him, laughing and talking loudly with the landlord. My head was giddy, and my legs heavy, so that in trying to get on my feet and go – for it was not a wise thing to be seen by strangers – I stumbled and fell back with a crash. The fellow turned sharply, and clutching his glass, came and took a seat at my side of the bench. A spasm of terror shot through my body, and perhaps I squirmed from his touch, for he shouted heartily, ‘Eh! man, I've got room enough for my carcase; it's my good spirits that be difficult to tie up.'

I was sick and weary, and devilish thoughts kept flashing through my head. I stared at his glass; this also he noticed.

‘Not
them,
' said he, and dropped his voice to a whisper; ‘for 'tween you and me and old Strong's deaf ear I cannot abide spirits; but I make it a pleasure if they do smack of a black draught. Beer is too cheap for the day. Surely!'

‘What is the fool chattering about?' thought I angrily, and made a move to go. He clutched me by the arm; I turned swiftly.

‘Lord!' says he, ‘ye're white as chalk.'

‘And what the devil —' I started, my stomach heaving with fear.

‘Man,' said he solemnly catching my hand, ‘pride's out of season with me. When the world treads on a man, it uses muddy boots. You have seen fairer days; tramping it, I can see. Thank God you have got bread and cheese and a pair of eyes. If rum's to your taste – why —' His hand delved into his pocket and hauled out a canvas bag.

‘Rum!' he shouted.

In came the landlord – yes, for twilight was gathering fast, and the dusty road looked blue-grey outside the open door. A string of geese went strutting pertly by as I looked. My eyes smarted. I was weak as water, for I had been nearly starved before tasting my bread and cheese. I would have liked to sleep.

The landlord clapped the rum on the table – forgetting manners, I took a gulp. The neat spirit pelted hot as fire through my veins and roused my courage for a trice. I turned upon the stranger and open-mouthed landlord (the last at a loss whether to crow at my appreciation of his spirits or to frown upon my mongrel manners), and said with a smack of the lips, ‘To the hangman, Luck!'

My fellow customer burst into such a roar of laughter at this that it brought down dust and bits of plaster from the oaken beams above.

‘I like your pluck,' said he, and the landlord grinned approval.

This reception to my toast in some unaccountable fashion displeased me greatly. Placing my hand on the table, again I tried to rise. As my knees straightened beneath me, I discerned in the half-light a patch of sullen red upon my hand. I stood, a fool, struck senseless, staring down upon my hand, and first the landlord and then the stranger followed my eyes.

‘Ah, a nasty tear,' said stranger, almost as softly as a pitying woman; but the landlord eyed me under a forest of eyebrow, and went away into his parlour, without a word.

As for me, I smiled in sickly fashion, and collapsed upon the bench for the third time.

‘A thorn in the hedge?' suggested the stranger.

I stared at him and hid my hand in the folds of my ragged coat.

He turned his face towards the door, and looking out, began softly to whistle. The cuckoo clock clucked on its shelf above the two Delft fat men, with good bellies full of tobacco. I sipped my rum with feigned good comfort, eyeing the loose-sitting stranger over the brim. Even in my rags and full of horrid fear, for the rum had added fuel to the furnace, I felt myself to be his better – he was heavy-limbed and ruddy, uncouth in carriage, and wore a-tilt on his head a hat of an old-fashioned brim.

The curve of his cheek, seen dimly against the planks of the wall, was gentle as an infant. His bag of money sat upon the table, squat, for all the world like a surfeited hunchback. I looked at the bag and grinned. The melancholy tone of the fellow's whistle fell suddenly into a galloping jig.

A wagon and team of lusty horses came journeying past the door.

‘Hi!' shouts my man.

‘Gee wo-a!' chanted the old fellow plodding at the side and put his head in at the door just as the wheels screeched and came to a standstill.

‘A pint of beer!' shouted my man.

The landlord drew it foaming from the tap, peering askance at me the while. The lean old crony blew off the froth, clucked in his throat, and guzzled the beer, then, with a tremulous nod of approval, turned to go.

‘If you see the old mother as ye pass by, maybe she's watching, I be coming on,' sang out my man.

‘Maybe I will,' twittered the old fellow, and shuffled out. Away went the team and crunching wagon wheels. Down the hill they would go tardily, and along the winding lane under the oaks, and on past cottages, and past women gossiping at garden gates in the twilight, and past homeward harvesters – and by fields of standing corn, thought I – fields of corn.

‘You come from the town?' said my man, when the sound of the wheels was low in the distance.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Cities are the devil's works,' said he.

‘A man pelts down to hell never seeing a gleam of a star; look at me,' said I, all my hopelessness and misery boiling in my heart, nearly choking speech. ‘What chance have I had? Maybe I am weak-kneed and a lounger. But if I had been no sinner, maybe I should have been a saint! And now' – my tongue was running on, oiled into freedom by the rum, when suddenly I caught a glimpe of the landlord lurking in the shadow. I pulled up short.

‘Why, man, God won't shut heaven's gates in your face because your coat is in holes.'

‘Ay,' said I, and hugged my hand closer.

There was a short silence, then the fellow's whistle chirruped forth again. Suddenly it ceased; he turned a red face to me, and laid his hand upon the money bag.

‘All in a month,' said he, vain as cock on a wall. ‘I am taking it home. Perhaps you are wondering why I am not up and on my way, and you'd wonder well, if you did, for my feet ache to run. But, think you of the pleasant
waiting,
here, looking forward; drinking a good harvest and dreaming in this quiet room – the flower-garden, and the cottage windows all of a sparkle in the sun. That's why I sit here shuffling feet; d'ye see, man?' He lurched forward with a wink of delight. ‘And p'raps the old lady is dancing on thorns, all the time thinking I'll not be coming tonight. And I expects she listens to the belly of pork grumbling in the pot. It's more than a month and it's less than a minute since she put her two hands on my shoulders and, high on her toes, kissed me on the cheek. God bless me – this cheek, man!'

He leaned forward, speaking softly. ‘You shall come with me, and bide a bit by the hollyhocks whilst I go in; then I'll come back and bring ye in to the bacon and ale – that I will. How the honeysuckle do swim about the place!'

He sniffed in delight, took a sip of his spirits, shuddered, and turned a dancing, roving eye on me.

I sat, looking out upon the purple shadows of the roadway; a cricket was chirruping and a glow-worm greening in the gloom. ‘Ah, God!' said I, and hid my face in my hands.

‘Eh! now, what's the matter, lad?' said the fellow, laying his hand upon my shoulder.

‘I have no wife waiting for
me,
I said, knowing nothing else to say.

‘Then you're in luck,' says he, laughing loudly. ‘I thought you were quarrelling with your Maker, not giving Him praise. It ain't a wife I go to, it's my old mother, she's grey and feeble … my old mother.'

I leapt in a flash from my chair – the landlord put his head in at the parlour door at the sound.

‘You startled me, you did,' said the stranger rising. ‘Are you going on?'

I nodded. Walking softly to the door I looked to the right, under the painted signboard, up the hill, where only the rabbits skipped and nibbled in the gloaming under the overhanging trees; and to the left, down the hill, westwards, where the dying red of the sunset painted blacker the woods, and the fields lay quiet under the faint stars. A mist was creeping up from the weedy pond and the low hedge-ditches – a soft mist obscuring the distant fields, creeping up stealthily from the fields towards me. I stood in the porch looking westward. Far back there … My teeth chattered; I couldn't face the night alone. Not yet.

The thickset fellow came out after me.

‘I am thinking you're sick. Would you now be coming on with me where my old mother will see to you and physic you? It would be a pleasure.'

‘Why do you force yourself upon me?' said I, in a fury.

‘“Force!”' said the landlord, indignantly.

‘No, man, you did not mean that, I know,' said the stranger consolatorily. ‘You are sick of hedgerows, eh? and haystacks … you are sick of life. Maybe you are too proud for your old clothes, you are. And I – I am an old fool who is crazy for his mother, and who would bring a patch of colour into your cheeks, if you would give us a chance. We're wayfaring men, both of us, after all, and she'd open her arms to you if you followed me in. An apple pasty after the bacon! Ay? Think of it! She's been everything to me since I was so high; she'd die for me. Lord alive, I nearly make a woman of myself at the end of every long month. Now you'll come; give me your hand on it. I mind not the blood, I mind not the past; an empty stomach cannot thrive – it takes its right.'

No, he wasn't, maybe, quite sober; but so he spoke, with his great face beaming; and the landlord snuffled in confusion behind us. All the horrors of the coming night welled up at his touch, and away went care for my safety. A man stood with me who would realize my need, I thought, who perhaps for his mother's sake would listen, and might even give me a word of pity. The quiet evening mocked my hopes, and evil things threatened me out of the dense foliage of the trees.

‘There'll be a heavy dew,' I said. ‘I will come with you.'

So he paid the landlord, cracking his joke, while I waited on the roadway shaking in the cold of the night. Soon the fellow strode out of the house. I turned my face eastwards.

‘No,' says he, with wondrous cheerfulness in his voice, ‘our way lies towards the sun.'

I turned upon my trying vainly to speak. But what did it matter; near or far; everywhere fear stalked, and worse than fear – a vile hatred of self, a sickening of life. I buttoned my coat about me (the mists were upon us) and walked away at his side.

As we turned the corner under the pine tree I caught a glimpse of the landlord almost hidden in the gloom of the porch, watching our departure with suspicious eyes. We spoke little for nearly half a mile, I should say. And each step was nearing us to the cornfield, each step was retracing the way by which I had come. I had thought those few hours since to be safe if I kept my wits and nerve rested. And now I didn't care.

I only followed my friend without speaking as a child might its mother. He made the silence crow at the sound of his laughter, and he made it sigh with stories of his childhood here. He even told me the names of the flowers in his mother's garden and of those in the old lady's cap! He would rattle his money gleefully at me one minute and as suddenly pocket it, remembering my empty pockets, the next. And we drew nearer to the cornfield.

‘I know a little pond,' he said, ‘near the watercress beds, where you may wash your hands.'

He led me by a by-path to a place in the shadow of the trees, where there was a shallow pond. I bade him sit down, and with my hand in the water and the blood being washed away, I told him I was afraid.

‘I have been walking all day,' I said. ‘In the late afternoon, being worn and hungry, I drew near to a village. At each house I asked for milk and food; at every one I was refused. The children of the place ran after me in the roadway, hooting and throwing dust. The men in the fields stayed for a moment to shout a jest to their neighbours at my coming. The loony of the place spat on me under the rectory wall, and a dog snapped at my heels when I had left the village behind.

‘By-and-by I came to cottages, solitary in vast gardens and hemmed with fruit trees – there also the people refused me food.' My companion at last interrupted my story.

‘Let us hasten on,' he said. ‘The bacon is boiling, friend, and the old mother waits. You shall finish your story in the chimney corner, behind a pipe of tobacco.'

I shook my head. ‘At last,' I said, going on with my story, ‘an old woman answered to my knock. She all but screamed at me, called me a thief and a tramp. She told me' (even at the moment I wondered at my calm memory and my cool words) ‘she told me that the pigs had all she did not want, and they should always have it. They were cleaner beasts than some she knew of.