Unknown (155 page)

“ 'Twill be a full tumbler, Mother,” he whispered. “Will Dad be angry?”

“Do as I'm telling 'ee, Elph! The gentleman knows what it be. 'Tisn't for we to say naught if he pours a sovereign's worth down's throat!”

While Elphin was away on this mission and his mother was once more serving her more normal customers with beer, Mr. Evans moved slowly to a wooden bench at the back of the room where the person was seated for whose presence in that place he had been hoping against hope. This person was none other than Finn Toller. The sandy-haired Codfin was sitting alone with an empty flagon in front of him, gazing vacantly into the smoke-filled atmosphere. Watery as usual were his staring, blue eyes within their red circles, and the pale hairs of his eyelashes showed round those rims like the white bristles of a young pig; while his under lip hung down like the lobe of a monstrous purple snapdragon.

“A grey day, Codfin!” remarked Mr. Evans.

“So it be, Mister, I were just thinking there might be rain afore night; but I hopes not. I've a deal to do today one way and the other.”

“Do you feel when you have anything to do, Codfin, that everything's unreal, the people and everything, till you've got it done?”

The man gave him a sudden quick look; for the tone of his voice was queer.

“Some people be afraid to sit by I, Mister, but you baint skeered o' little old Coddie, be 'ee?”

“Perhaps you've given them reason to be afraid of you.”

Again the queer tone! Mr. Toller experienced the uncomfortable sensation that he got sometimes when he woke up at two o'clock in the night. “Red Robinson be death-sick with fear when he do see I coming. Tother day 'a turned clean round and showed 'is bleedin' arse sooner than for we to meet.”

“How do you account for his doing that, Codfin?” said Mr. Evans with burning eye3.

“Dunno. I've done nothink to 'un!”

“Oh, yes, you have, Codfin—Oh, yes, you have. As I was telling you in this place before, you and I are linked together in the movements of the stars and when you come to do what you want to do I'll do what / want to do!”

Toller's gaze drew itself away from vacancy and became the expression of a rabbit contemplating a weasel.

“What do you know about I, Mister?”

“A great deal, Codfin, more than you guess! And that's because we're in the same boat.”

“You be laughing at a poor working-man, Mr. Evans.”

“Not at all, Codfin. Do you want my hand on,it? There . . . there . . . good luck to you. In the same boat . . . that's where we are, Finn Toller, my friend!” s Elph Cantle's eyes nearly started out of his head;, when approaching the little table in front of the two men, with the tumbler of pallid gold in his hand, he saw them shaking hands.

“Mother sez 'tis ten shillingses, Sir, if you please,” he whispered, as he put Our Special down. It was Mr. Toller's turn to look surprised when he saw the great handful of silver emerge from his companion's trouser-pocket.

“Bring us another glass, my lad,” said Owen Evans gravely.

Young Cantle went off with the money and returned with the glass. He was too hypnotised by what he saw to turn away till Mr. Evans had poured half the drink into this empty receptacle and pushed it towards the tramp.

“Off with you, lad! This isn't ginger pop, or I'd treat you to some too.”

When Elphin's figure was swallowed up in the smoke-obscured crowd of labourers, Mr. Evans lifted his glass and nodded to his companion to do the same. It was not often that what he quaffed made Mr. Codfin choke; but the man gasped and spluttered like a woman in his attempt to despatch Our Special at one gulp. As for Mr. Evans he kept murmuring some queer Welsh syllables of carnal approval as he sipped and sipped and sipped at this ancient sack.

“In ... the same . . . boat . . . Codfin,” he repeated, allowing his eyes, with a terrible gleam in them, to rest upon the other's, over the rim of his glass.

There is a danger-instinct in trampish murderers, imbecile thieves, and rural degenerates, which holds out antennae of warning more responsive than the petal-edges of sensitive plants. Had there been the faintest smell of the official, of the normal-respectable, of the moralistic, of the legal, about Mr. Evans, Codfin would have drawn in his horns and been dumb as a deep-sea fish. There was the devil's own luck too about this encounter in that the noisy buzz of talk around them and the fact that their fellow-topers were all the simplest and roughest type of labouring-men rendered their intercourse as safe and private as if it had been held inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Stone Tower, on the top of the Tor. It was of this tower that the tramp began soon to murmur, as his wits seethed up into savage confidence under the fumes of the Drink Perilous.

Mr. Evans had already spoken of the iron bar; and the drunken man seemed to have got it lodged in his imbecile brain that this hook-nosed personage with the blazing eyes had been his confederate from the start.

“Her had been better pleased if it had been she rayther nor he, that I were to hit with me bar. But I never struck a 'oomarj in me life and never will ... no! not for Mad Bet herself.”

Mr. Evans listened to his words with the blood boiling in his veins and his wrist-pulses beating so hard that he felt he must press them against the cold hard edge of the table. The passage in the book that had driven him forth that day had to do with an iron bar; and as often happens with the symbolic images of crime, this eidolon of violence, which had been floating in the back of his mind ever since that evening at the sheep-fold, drew to itself like a magnet all the other mental pictures in the book and absorbed them into itself.

“You're certain, Codfin—absolutely certain—that they're going up the hill today?”

“Sartin, Mister! In the twilight. That's what Frenchy Crow— us working-chaps calls he Frenchy—said himself when I were listening. Tossie—that's the maidie Boss Barter's gone and married, since her kids were born—have never been up Tor Hill of a night-time. And as they all jabbered there and 1 listed to un, they said as they was minded—the whole three on 'em—to meet up there 'in the twilight' so's to show thik gal what a dark night be when it do fall on Hill. ”Only, us must see it fall!“ Frenchy Crow kept saying. Tisn't naught unless us sees it fall.”

“Could ... I ... be .. . hid . . . inside . . .the tower . . . with you, and watch while you . . . while you ... do it?”

“Sartinly you can be inside tower. There be a chink in thik door; for I've used it many a times to watch for -Mad Bet coming and going; and you can see me bring iron bar down on him, snug and pretty—I'se warrant—from inside thik little pussy-crack!”

Mr. Evans in his agitation now began humming a mid-Victorian sentimental catch, that contained the words “In the gloaming, oh, my darling, ere the night begins to fall,” and Mr. Toller with Our Special mounting to his head, caught the spirit of this just as though some ghastly phosphorescence of unholy glee in the contemplation of murder had bubbled up from both their brains, and began to troll a similar stave: “Once I . . . love

A few labourers glanced towards that sequestered bench, when amid the general confusion of voices these cracked tunes rose up like the wind in a couple of broken potsherds, and Elph Cantle pulled at his mother's sleeve; but the outburst was followed by a lowering and pregnant silence.

“To see, to see, to see—through that crack—up-down, up-down, the iron bar, up-down, up-down, the iron bar, and the man, up, up, and then down, the iron bar down.”

From the livid evil Eye of the First Cause, that evil eye that crieth throughout eternity, “Up-down, up-down, the iron bar and the man!” there shivered through Mr. Evans' frame a concentrated essence of all the knee-shaking and pulse-beating passages in his Book of Books.

His hooked nose hung low over his empty glass, low over his two clenched hands upon the wooden table; his bowler hat—for he had not removed it—was pushed far back upon his head; and behold! along the rim of it walked, upon its own purpose bent, a small black fly.

Ajs Mr. Evans' thoughts drove him on, this hat-walker, like a complacent acrobat upon a dizzy ledge, paused in his performance and proceeded to clean his front legs by meticulously rubbing them together.

It has long since been noted how Mr. Evans possessed, in addition to his ^deeper vision, a furiously precise vein of foreground pedantry.

He now envisaged with infernal exactitude the minutest details of the scene to which his whole body and soul—magnetised by that coiled-up snake-nerve—were rushing forward. And he envisaged too—for instead of being dulled or drugged, his intelligence was quickened and heightened—the issue, the issue of it all.

He felt in advance the sucked-out, scooped-out, blood-rusted hollowness of the gap—the eye-tooth of the world wrenched from its nether-place—that would sink down, that rusty-brown gaping hole that was himself, his very life, down to the deepest abyss. This deadly clear envisaging of the issue of today's business—• would it were done and over with now!—drained up every drop of pleasure from the doing of it

What drove him on to it then? What drove him on to this pleasure-divested horror? The coiled snake-nerve of sex! And the strange thing is that the insane will to the satisfaction of this terrible sex-nerve does not demand pleasure. Pleasure? Little do the moralists know! A perverted criminal is called a pleasure-seeker. Great Horns of God! Why, one little tiny drop of the deadly nightshade Mr. Evans was now draining—let it follow the burning path of Our Special down his Cymric gullet!—laid on the tongue of those who talk of pleasure would teach them how feel the sucking lips of the undying Wriggler. No, no, that was the curious thing. Mr. Evans was compelled to contemplate with cold-blooded precision the state of being to< which this up-and-down iron bar—whatever it did to its victim—would conduct himself.

Pity of Jesus! he was there, even now, as he stared at the tiny golden bubbles in the bottom of his tumbler. He was there and looking hack at the iron bar, at the blood, at the murdered man. It is a strange fact and a pretty proof of how deep the double nature of the First Cause sinks, that a person could go marching on like this towards the iron bar, and derive not one single half drop of pleasure out of it. Or of satisfaction either!—though it is the will to satisfaction that drives it forward.

If Mr. Evans' thoughts, in spite of Our Special, were far from being frolicsome, the thoughts of Codfin were no less accurst and no less full of “minute particulars.”

“I'll have to let this gent see it done,” he thought, “for he's so crazy-bent on't that, if I dunna let 'un he'll go and give I up to Tarntan Jail. That's where I'll end anyway; and 'twould be Gibbet Hill, only they hangs 'em behind walls now, so us pore buggers can't wave to our aunties. I wouldna' mind Gibbet Hill one arf what I minds behind walls. Behind walls makes a person feel like a damned abortion, the kind of nothing-no-more what Dr. Fell sticks in back garden between pig-house and privy. I never have liked behind walls and I never will.” What force was it that drove Codfin on to the iron bar; that object which he had already so carefully concealed inside Gwyn-ap-Nud's Tower? It was certainly not any sex-nerve. It was purely and solely his sense of honour. Codfin was honourably committed to do the bidding of Mad Bet, and it had never, for one second, since their talk in the sheepfold, presented itself to his mind as a possibility that he could get out of doing it. All this expectation of ending “behind walls” had been accepted by Codfin at the very start as a Jesuit accepts his superior's command or a revolutionary assassin his sealed orders.

While the two heads of these bewitched slaves of the iron bar. drooped thus low over their empty glasses, there was a sudden disturbance in that smoke-filled room to which they both remained totally oblivious. This disturbance was caused by the sudden entrance from the interior of the tavern of Dave Spear. Dave had quite perceptibly changed since he had become one of the dictators of Glastonbury. His youthful bloom had faded. His pleasant good nature had dried up. His out-going impulsive spontaneity had been replaced by a certain strained reserve, and his honest simplicity had given place to a worried, self-conscious caution. The many-sided struggles he was now engaged upon, his attempt to outwit the incorrigible anarchism of one of his fellow-dictators, to give a rational Marxist turn to the destructive Jacobinism of the other, his constant effort to guide into orthodox Communist channels, the mystic religiosity of their erratic chief, caused a stiff, troubled, harassed look to descend upon his boyish countenance, hardening its disarming contours into something anxious, wistful, and at the same time austere.

His appearance was greeted by a clamour of voices and a rush towards him of a group of puzzled, excited, acquisitive labouring-men, who were all dissatisfied with the arrangements of the new Glastonbury exchequer.

“ 'Tisn't the money what worries I, Mister,” explained a cadaverous shoemaker from Butts Close, “'tis seeing these chaps what wouldn't work, if they had the chanst, getting the same as I, who've worked meself into a* bloody consumpty.”

“What I wants to know,” cried a,burly street-cleaner, pushing himself forward, “is why a man with seven children, same as I've got, only gets five bob more than them as has got two!”

“Listen here, Mister,” cried a chimney sweep from the Beckery district, “Didn't us read in Johnny Geard's paper last week that Glaston belong to Glaston folk and none else i' the world? What I'd like to know, and there's many of us working-chaps who want to know the same, who 'twere that elected these 'ere Trents and Robinsons to be bosses over we and who 'twere that gave these 'ere bosses their girt pay? I've got a wife in the family way, four big-grown hungry kids; whereas this Robinson has got only his Sail; and I dunno what Trent's got; no one I reckon! And Trent's not even a Zoomerset man. They tell I 'ee do come from the Scilly Isles. I wish to hell 'ee'd stayed in the Scilly Isles.” (“Hear! Hear!” cried a lot of excited voices.)

“Zoomerset money,” went on the chimney sweep, “ought to go into Zoomerset pockets; and so 'twould if Bloody Johnny had his zay. Who made this here Trent from Scilly Isles and this here Robinson from London bosses over we Glaston folk? Us selected Johnny Geard, 'cause us knows he; and he be a good drinking man and a good praying man. But us knows naught of this 'ere Trent and this 'ere Robinson. They may be Rooshians, for all us do know!”