Unknown (146 page)

“I see we know each other, Nelly,” he said; “but what's the matter? Has Jackie Jones been hitting you again?”

Her tears had not yet ceased pouring down, but, at this word her eyes flashed so fiercely that it was as if a dark lantern had suddenly been turned upon him out of a torrent of rain.

“I hit Jackie. I hit he into ditch! 'A said 'twas sport to see thik poor . . . dog . . . stand on . . . hind-legs . . . when that wicked . . . wicked . . . wicked man beat at he with . . beat . . . at he . . .”

Her tears fell so desperately, as the image of what she had beheld came over her, that it seemed to Sam as if her thin little form would melt away before him. He had never seen a human countenance so dissolved, so literally melted in pitiful crying.

“Where? What? Who?” he cried. “Tell me, Nelly, tell me quick!”

“Will 'ee come and knock that wicked, wicked------”

Again the floods of tears broke her utterance. Sam pulled the child into the house and set her down upon a chair.

“Now stop crying, Nelly, and tell me quick where this man is who's hurting this dog.”

“Will 'ee . . . come wi' I . ? . Holy Sam . . . and kill thik wicked . . . wicked . . . wicked------”

“Where is he? Where is it?” cried Sam again.

And then the child explained to him, clearly enough now, through her streaming tears, that it was in that portion of the town between Paradise and the river—a district known as Beckery—that this was going on. As far as Sam could gathei from what she said the owner of the dog belonged to a group of small circus people who had been running a solitary merry-go-round in one of those outlying Beckery fields that are called “brides,” a name that reverts to the vanished chapel of Mary Magdalene founded by St. Bridget. The child kept referring to Beckery Mill; and Sam knew that there was a sort of common with a right of w&, +hrough it near that place. Beckery Mill in fact gave him the clue; and he visualised with instantaneous vividness the spot she referred to; and this time it was quite unnecessary for his despotic soul to issue any categorical commands.

“I'll go at once, Nelly,” he cried excitedly, "only listen, child! I'll only go on one condition; and it's a fair exchange! You stay here to look after Mr. Twig; and I'll go to Beckeryt

Yes, he's ill, upstairs! I've had to put him to bed; but he's asleep now. I wouldn't go upstairs if I were you till you hear him stirring, or till you hear him calling. Do you understand, Nelly dear? He's ill in bed; but he's not very ill: only a little ill."

A few minutes later Sam was making his way with resolute haste towards the quarter of the town the child had indicated. Yes! Nelly Morgan was right. Near Beckery Mill he soon found the crowd of nondescript loiterers; and there was the dog, a little black cocker spaniel, in the midst of them! When Sam came up to the outskirts of the crowd he could catch at once by the peculiar timbre of these young ruffians' voices that they were still engaged in their cruel sport.

The dog was evidently beginning now to refuse to perform any further tricks and to turn on his tormentors; nor was there any sign of the circus people. They must have gone to their dinner leaving the animal to the mercy of these lads.

“Let that dog alone! What are you doing to him? Who does he belong to?”

His interference was greeted with howls of derision and mocking cries of “Holy Sam! Holy Sam!”

Some of them were throwing stones at the dog who kept running from side to side within their circle seeking refuge but finding none.

“Who does it belong to?” shouted Sam. “Where is its master?”

“He've a-gived he to I,” cried one of the boys, whom Sam recognised at once as the stone-thrower of Terre Gastee, the originator of the phrase "I'd like to------'*

“He did bite he bad and 'a did give 'un to I,” repeated young Chinnock, making a clutch at the dog's collar which was received with a frightened snarl.

“Tom be feared o' touching he,” cried one of the other lads.

“Tom did try to pick he up,” explained a third, “but 'a bit his hand. He be a nasty varmint, thik black dog, ... he be a biting dog!”

All this while the wretched little creature, which had a coal-black glossy coat, long flapping ears, feathery legs and a clipped tail held tightly in its frantic fear against its rump, kept making desperate and insane rushes here and there. It seemed to have been hunted and harried quite beyond the stage of barking, and had grown beside itself with terror.

Sam strode forward into the middle of this circle of young demons and uttering various assuaging murmurs endeavoured to catch the black dog. Tom Chinnock who was nearly as tall as Sam barged against him with his shoulders as if in a game of football.

“His master gave 'un to I,” he cried. “You ain't got no right to 5un!”

“Holy Sam! Holy Sam!” shrieked the excited crowd.

“Don't 'ee let 'un have 'un, lads,” cried an evil-looking man who now appeared from the back of the circle.

“Tony Quart gave 'un to Tom Chinnock! 'Tis Tony Quart's dog. 'Tisn't your'nl”

“Holy Sam! Holy Sam!”

“Take tluxt, ye biting cur!” shouted young Chinnock.

These last words were accompanied by a vicious kick. Sam threw the lad aside and pursuing the dog, till it crouched snarling on the ground, bent down and picked it up, clutching its growling form from which emanated a hot, sweet, dog-flesh odour, against his chest. Blindly the panic-stricken spaniel fixed its teeth in one of Sam's wrists as he strove to prevent its jumping down. Impeded though he was by the struggling creature whose feathery paws scraped furiously against his body as it tried to free itself, Sam managed to fling Tom Chinnock back when he tried to drag the dog away. But the lad came at him again, and this time in such a fury that he hit Sam a nasty blow on the chin.

Sam's right hand, which was quite free at that minute, instinctively clenched itself to strike back; and he was within an ace of giving the boy a blow that would have bowled him over. But that portion of his consciousness which had come to feel to him like an “external soul” issued, in a flash, one of its most imperative mandates.

“Don't be a bloody fool!” he said sternly, dropping his arm.

Chinnock gave him one glance of wide-eyed wonder and cringed away. ¦

“Hit 'un with stones!” he shouted as soon as he was safe back amongst the rest. “Hit 'un with stones! Stones ”nil mcke he give up thik dog! Did yer see the girt clip I give "un?*7

His advice was seconded by the grown man in the rear of the boys; but having encouraged them to go on with the fray, this individual now began to shog off, evidently feeling that Sam was a ticklish customer and that there are moments in life when the satisfaction of cruelty must yield to the dictates of prudence.

Sam looked about him, his mind moving sluggishly as he hugged the black dog against his stomach. He was surrounded now by a half-circle of stone-throwers,

“It's silly to stay here and make an Aunt Sally of myself,” he thought. “The best thing I can do is to break through them and clear off.”

He had scarcely formulated this thought when a stone hit the spaniel in his arms, causing it to utter a shrill yelp of pain. This decided him and he made a fierce rush forward, heading straight for young Chinnock. Although so energetic a collector of sharp stones, the nephew of Mad Bet had not been endowed by Providence with the gift oi fortitude. At the sight of Sam clutching the growling dog against his ribs and running straight towards him, he took ignominiously to his heels.

"You know where to find me,'5 shouted Sam after him. The flight of Tom Chinnock quelled the belligerency of the whole crowd and not a single stone was thrown after Sam and his struggling captive.

Now Beckery Mill lies on the outskirts of a certain municipal enclosure known as Wirral Park which borders on the lower slope of Wirral Hill. Sam sank exhausted upon the first public seat he came to in Wirral Park. Placing the black spaniel on the ground but retaining his hold upon it, he began searching his pockets for his handkerchief, till he remembered that he had left it in Number One's bedroom- After a second's hesitation he then took off his necktie, and using this as an extemporary leash he tied it to the dog's collar.

By some curious psychological process no sooner was the dog secured by Sam's tie than it accepted Sam as the liege-lord of its destiny; and in quite a symbolic manner, like a feudal servant of some cruel baron transferring his allegiance to a cockle-shell pilgrim, he rose up on his hind legs and licked Sam's bleeding wrist. Having tasted his new master's blood, so desperately shed by himself, nothing could exceed the animal's intense contentment.

He stretched himself out on the ground at Sam's feet, not lying as most dogs do, but with his feathery legs stretched straight out behind him.

Sam had not been long seated on his bench, when a tremulously vibrant feeling, that could only be described as a shiver of exultant ecstasy, flowed through him. “I have seen it! I have seen it!” the heart within him cried; and in a vague, delicious, dreamy reverie he became aware of an important psychic change in his inmost self-consciousness. This change was nothing less than a coming together of his body and soul. Although his soul still felt independent of his body, and free of his body, it no longer felt contemptuous of his body. It had ceased to utter its mandates in the tone of a slave-driver. Its mere presence within his body at this moment seemed to make Sam's flesh feel porous and transparent, as if large, cool, undulating waves were sweeping through it. p

Presently, towards the seat where he rested, came a solitary girlish figure; which, as it approached him, assumed the unmistakable form of Miss Angela Beere. What this strange girl was doing in that place, on the edge of Wirral Park, at half-past two on Sunday afternoon, Sam was not inquisitive enough to ask her; but it was clear that even Angela's virginal placidity was a little startled and ruffled by seeing a dishevelled man rise up from the side of a black dog, a dog whom he held fast by means of a bright blue necktie!

“What a beautiful little dog!” was however this imperturbable young lady's greeting, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to encounter the son of Mat Dekker between Wirral Hill and Beckery Mill on a quiet Sunday. “Oh, what a darling little spaniel!”

Sam felt so abysmally happy at that moment that in his confused rapture he raised the small gloved fingers she held out to him to his lips and made way for her to sit down by his side.

The little black dog who had already shown signs of intense nervousness at the approach of this composed figure in her costume of fastidious delicacy, and had even uttered three short barks, became panic-striken at this. He tugged frantically at the blue tie, lowering his belly almost to the ground and extending his four feathery paws in a wide-straddled flurry of panic. Finding that the blue tie did not yields and hearing from the tone of the human invader that she was not at present ill-using his new master or belabouring him with, sticks and stones, the dog rose to a natural standing position and remained there stationary. But, although his body was motionless, his short tail pressed down in quivering terror over the round black rump, uttered the words, as clear as language could utter them: “Nothing, I say nothing could persuade me to look round at the terrifying transactions that are now taking place behind me.”

“I'm so glad I've met you,” Angela Beere observed, rubbing nonchalantly at a tiny red stain that had appeared on her white glove, and glancing coyly round at the stiff back of the little dog, “for I wanted to ask you whether Mrs. Zoyland would like me to call upon her at the Vicarage. Do you think she would? I keep hearing”—here her pale lips displayed her white teeth in a proud smile—“such silly gossip about you all! But Father always says, 'Believe nothing that you hear, and only half of what you see!'”

Sam turned his face full upon her. “If I,” he said, “believed only half of what I've just seen, I'd be the happiest person ever born in Glastonbury!”

The girl's arched eyebrows lifted a little upon her smooth white forehead.

“Did what you saw hurt your wrist?” she said; and then, in a really charming access of compunction, that brought a rose-petal flush to her white cheeks, “Let me tie it up for you, Mr. Dekker!”

She produced a little lace-edged handkerchief; and as she bandaged his hurt, the softening influence of medical tenderness that had made Number One weep to think of the innocuousness of sparrow dung, brought tears to Sam's eyes-

“Will he let me pat him, do you think?” she said, and leaning across Sam's knees she gave a jerk at the straining blue tie. This movement had the result of causing the dog to sink down instantly m his belly, straddle his legs wide apart to gain the necessary purchase, and then tug at his leash with the energy of a frightened alligator.

“All right—don't 'ee mind!” cried Sam to his new pet.

But the girl drew back with flushed cheeks, evidently a little hurt.

“Don't you mind!” he repeated, turning from the dog, who now stood erect, although still shivering with terror, to his disappointed companion, “he's a rather nervous little beast.”

“Rather nervous!” laughed Angela Beere. “He's like I'd feel if I came to see your Nell and she didn't want to see me!”

This “your Nell” ought to have given the stupid Sam an inkling as to how he was regarded by the richer gossips of the town. He very clearly was anything but Holy Sam in the upper circles of Glastonbury! But he answered guilelessly:

“Nell would be overjoyed to see you, I know”

“You'd better go home, Mr. Dekker,” she said, “and get that Penny of yours to attend to your wrist.”

But when he took not the slightest notice of this, “What,” she enquired, “did you say just now that you saw?” ¦ The man was far too happy to be squeamish about telling her everything. He would have liked to have stopped every soul in the streets of the town and told them everything. He was in the mood to shout everything to everyone from the top of the Tor.

“But how can you go on saying, Mr. Dekker,*5 protested Angela after an interval of silence, when he had talked about it to her for nearly a quarter of an hour, ”as you did just now, that there's no God, and no life after death, and no Personal Christ. You couldn't have seen the Grail if there wasn't a God; certainly not if there wasn't a Christ. Come now, Mr. Dekker! You know you couldn't! I'm afraid it's a man's pride in you that makes you talk like this."