There May Be Danger (5 page)

“Excuse me, I never can come in this room without feeling bad,” said Mrs. Howells, plumping down Kate's knapsack, which she had insisted on carrying as well as the candle, and wiping her eyes on the back of her broad hand. “I cannot bear to think what has happened to that poor boy!”

Kate patted her shoulder and made consoling noises, adding, for it was her business to investigate every possibility as quickly as possible:

“What do you
think
has happened to him, Mrs. Howells?”

Mrs. Howells could not, or would not, say. She could, and would, say what had not happened to him, however.

“The police thinks as he went back to London,” she said with some indignation. “They thinks that if a boy's home is in London, that will be sure to be where he's gone, too! But me and Corney knows as Sidney would never have wanted to go back to London! He was always saying that even when the war was over, he would never want to go back! We used to be surprised that he did not care more for his home and relations, but when we had the letter from his aunt after he went away, then we was not so surprised!”

Kate nodded. She was looking thoughtfully at the little row of books on the mantelpiece. “The Boy's Own Annual,” an ancient bound volume of “Children's Encyclopaedia,” “Wild Life in Streams and Ditches,” and a book called “Things For a Boy to Do,” shared the space with a collection of well-battered schoolbooks. She picked up the latter volume, which had the yellow label of the County libraries, and ran her eye through it.

“Had Sidney any special hobbies? I suppose he didn't say why he took this book out of the library?”

Mrs. Howells smiled sadly.

“Sidney was a boy that was always wanting to do things,” she sighed, and nervously rubbing her hands over the big knob at the bed-foot, she said hurriedly, as if she could hardly bear to utter the words, but had better get them out: “I am afraid he is dead, or he would have come back.”

“But to have disappeared so completely, Mrs. Howells, bicycle and all!” 

“I knows, but—the bracken is very high on the hills at this time of year, and the hills is very wild,” said Mrs. Howells in a low voice, repeating almost what Mr. Davis had said.

“Why do you think he went out at all, in the middle of the night, like that, without telling anyone?”

Mrs. Howells shook her head.

“Boys is like that, isn't they? They never talks about the thing they're thinking most about doing. But I knows, whatever he was trying to do, he was not going back to London. Well, I hopes you'll be comfortable, young lady!”

She withdrew, and Kate heard her going down the little wooden staircase, and the murmur of voices below, and the raking out of the fire, and later, as she sat up in bed studying her Ordnance Survey map by the light of a candle, the quick padding steps of Mr. Howells' stockinged feet and the slower, noisier step of Mrs. Howells' shoes, coming up again to the next bedroom, and the rattling of a chest-of-drawers on an uneven floor and the creaking of a loose wire-mattress, and then silence.

Kate sat up on an extremely buxom feather bed on top of two or three other varieties of mattress and two creaking straw palliasses, feeling like a princess in a fairy-story, and examined the map spread out on the Marcella counterpane. Cartography was not Kate's strong subject, but she supposed that she could master the elements of it with a little determination.

Radnorshire, according to the map, seemed to be mostly of a brown, warty nature, shading to narrow strips of delicate green, and gemmed here and there with little spots of blue. Hastry was on a pale brown strip, Hastry Station on a pale-green. There was the main road she had come along in Mr. Davis's tub, crossing the little stream in the valley and forking just this side of it. Here was Pentrewer, in slightly better baked biscuit colour than Hastry, and an inch or so north of it, and here was the black-letter word MOUND, with which Kate had become so familiar in Dorsetshire two years ago. On the other side of the large brown wart Kate took to be Rhosbach, there was a big blue spot and a few black dots marked “Control Station”—doubtless the Berminster waterworks referred to by Mrs. Davis. This was a half-inch map, and Kate, guessing at a radius of five inches, searched everywhere for Llanhalo and Aminta. She found them at last, on a pale brown strip due north of Pentrewer. And there was the Veault, a quarter-of-an-inch farther on.

Childishly pleased with herself, Kate folded the map up and blew out the candle. The room was so small, and the bed so big, that the little window was within reach, and she leant and drew back the black-out curtain. But she looked into a blackness almost as dense as that within the room. She could not tell whether she were looking on to the pale green valley or the dark brown hill. There was a gusty, noisy wind tearing across the sky. But, at least, the rain had stopped.

The next morning, waking disgracefully late, with a slightly suffocated feeling induced by the feather bed, and a mild rheumatic affliction of the hip-joints induced by the straw palliasses underneath, Kate decided that the first thing she must do must be to acquire a bicycle.

Mr. Howells had gone forth on the business of His Majesty's Government, and Mrs. Howells was attending to customers in the tiny stone-flagged shop. The tearing wind had torn blue spaces in the clouds for the sun to shine through, and was still at the attack. Kate could see in the distance, down the valley, the slanting lines of rain, but here the wind had blown the hillside dry, tindery leaves rolled along the road, and Monday's belated washing flapped above the cabbages and battered asters.

When Kate returned from the cottage of Mrs. Howells' daughter, Mrs. Evans, it was on a bicycle, with pockets full of pears which Mrs. Evans, foiled in her hospitality by Kate's refusal to drink another lot of tea or eat another lot of bread-and-butter, had pressed upon her. The straggling village, bathing coldly in the autumn sunlight, looked a very different place from the rain-enwrapped, silent huddle under the lowering hill which Kate had approached last night in Mr. Davis's trap. There were people about, and a grocery-van at the kerb, and a man with a flock of sheep and a collie dog. And in the playground of the red-brick school a large number of small children in shirts and dresses as variegated as a flower garden were performing toes rise and double knee-bend under the tuition of a stout elderly teacher who was struggling bravely to get an untrained voice across the wind—Kate made a mental note that she ought to go and see Sidney's schoolmaster. He might give Kate another angle on Sidney's character and habits.

So far, the impression of Sidney Brentwood that she had derived from Mrs. Howells tallied pretty closely with the sketchier portrait supplied by his great-aunt in Bayswater. It was, Kate surmised, the portrait of a boy who might well go off on his own and get lost; but it was not the portrait of a boy who would have any dark or abstruse reason for doing so. 

Sidney Brentwood's character seemed singularly free from psychological complications. The reason for his absence, Kate, toiling up the village street on a bicycle far too low for her, decided, was probably simple. Had he intended to go for good?

On the face of it, the answer appeared to be no. For to go off and send no word for three weeks to Mr. and Mrs. Howells seemed too heartless an action for a “real nice boy.” But, Kate reminded herself, many real nice boys were of that adventurous temperament which neither worries nor considers worry in other people, which looks always ahead and never backward, and to whom to be out of sight is to be out of mind. Kate reflected that Sidney's father was a sailor, and that there was something traditionally sailor-like about such a character.

However, if there was no psychological improbability about Sidney's trying to disappear, there was a strong practical improbability of his succeeding, in these days of ration-books and registration-cards. One could discount the possibility, Kate thought, of a successful voluntary disappearance. What remained?

Accident. The obvious answer, and one Kate had already received not only from Miss Brentwood and Mrs. Howells and Mrs. Davis, but from Mrs. Evans and the nice woman in the County Library as well. Sidney had left Hastry for a boy's simple reason, a night's adventure, and had met with an accident, and had not come back.

But what accident could completely remove every trace of a boy and his bicycle? The answer to that question was not so obvious, and nobody, so far, had been able to provide it.

Perhaps, then, the adventure upon which Sidney had gone that night was not so simple as it had seemed to him: perhaps there had been other people, not happy-go-lucky boys, involved in the adventure: perhaps he had been prevented from coming back. That would explain his complete disappearance better than any easy, sorrowful talk of “accident” could do. But what kind of adventure could such have been? Kate had to admit that the possibilities that flitted through her mind were vague, wild, and improbable: but then, she reminded herself, the complete disappearance of a boy and his bicycle is itself an improbable thing, yet it has happened.

She propped her new bicycle up against the woodshed wall in Mrs. Howells' garden, and stood frowning at a small troop of purple asters in a box-encircled camp. Suppose the adventure Sidney had set forth upon that night had been dangerous, more dangerous than he knew? Unlawful, more unlawful than he knew?

If only all Sidney's words and actions for, say, a week before his disappearance could be recalled, so that Kate could pore over the record for any hint of what had been occupying his mind! But nobody noticed, nobody remembered, the things children chattered about, the questions they asked! Only from the librarian in the County Library had Kate received a hint of one subject which had recently interested Sidney, and that was an unexpected and an innocent one enough. He had wished, it seemed, some weeks ago, for a book on net-making.

Turning aside from her review of the trooped asters, Kate went in at the front door, which opened, in fact was already open, straight into the shop.

Kate had taken for normal Welsh expressiveness the high-pitched vocal noise that had been going on in the shop while she had been reviewing the asters. But as she set foot on the worn doorstep, she saw that there was a grand row going on. Kind Mrs. Howells, her hand resting on a biscuit tin as though she might at any moment hurl it like a hand-grenade, stood crimson-faced behind her counter. And on the strip of jute matting that protected her well-whitened floor, stood a spare little elderly woman with a large basket over her arm, clutching an umbrella as if it were a rifle. Between them on the counter stood an old-fashioned pair of brass scales, one or two loaves of bread and several tall glass sweet-jars, mostly empty. Leaning unobtrusively against the window sill, listening to the duel going on between the two women, stood a gaunt, elderly man of strange, poetic and wild appearance.

“It iss no wonder the poor boy ran away!” the customer was saying all but at the top of her voice. “He ran away because he wass neglected and I do not blame him!”

“Please not to say another word, Ann Gilliam!” said Mrs. Howells. Her voice was lower, but vibrated more.

This was, it seemed, a public row, so Kate, seeing no reason why she should retire, remained in the doorway.

“Please to get out of my shop, Ann Gilliam!”

The customer, who was no match in size for Mrs. Howells, stood with a back like a poker and two rather large feet in black gum-boots well turned out at the toes, and replied, without moderating her tone at all:

“I will have my half-pound of sultanas, if you please, before I go, Mary Howells!”

Mrs. Howells seized up her hand-grenade and banged it on to a shelf behind her.

“Oh, indeed, and you will not!”

“You cannot refuse to serve a customer!”

“Indeed, then, I can and I do! And if you do not like it, Ann Gilliam, you can go to the police!” 

“Well, I wonder you would be talking about the police, Mary Howells, in that free way! The police has been here often enough, hassn't they, asking questions you wass not able to answer!”

The bard-like being by the window here intervened, in a melodious, rather melancholy voice:

“There is plenty questions none of us can't answer, Miss Gilliam, but there is also plenty more as us could answer if us was willing, but as us doesn't answer because us is not willing, and that is more of a different matter, Miss Gilliam, whether the police is aware of it or not!”

What there was in this speech, which was delivered not at all in a threatening, but rather in a pensively jocular, fashion, to damp Miss Gilliam's fires, Kate could not see. But damped they obviously were.

“Nobody wass asking you for your opinion, Gwyn Lupton!” she said, with a somewhat half-hearted sharpness.

“If I was always waiting to be asked for my opinion,” said the bard imperturbably. “I should not have said many words in my long life. And yet there has been some times when I has not said so many words as I might have said, and people has been grateful to me because I has not said them.”

So fascinating did Kate find the melodious and dignified delivery of these remarks that she scarcely realised that she was listening to a kind of poetic blackmail, until she saw the effect of them on little Miss Gilliam. Miss Gilliam clasped her umbrella slantwise in her arms, as if it were a lily and she a saint, tucked her elbows well into her sides, and backed a few steps towards the door.

“I shall change my registration, Mary Howells, and I shall be a customer at the International where they knows how to be civil!”

“It is all the same to me so long as you do not come here asking for your pound of sultanas when there is not enough to go round!”

“And as for you, Gwyn Lupton, I am surprised you have not got something better to do in a war than poke about in the ground after old pieces of money and stand about in shops poking your nose into other people's affairs!”