IT was close on midnight when a car grated and stopped in front of the little Georgian house in Pendish, and the truant stumbled through the door, left open, into the presence of Mrs. Pettiland who was anxiously awaiting him. He was wet through, dishevelled, exhausted. He was shivering with cold and his face was like the mask of a ghost. She met him in the passage and dragged him into the little sea-haunted parlour. “Oh, what have you been doing?”
She had been worried all day, unable to account for the money, a month’s rent and board in advance, in the envelope addressed to her.
“Didn’t I tell you not to overdo yourself?”
He greeted her upbraidings with a laugh of bravado.
“I set out to-day on my last adventure. This is the end of it. I’m here for the rest of time.”
“You’ll be in the churchyard for the rest of eternity, if you don’t go to bed at once,” she declared.
She packed him to his room; fussed motherwise about him; dosed him with ammoniated quinine; stuck hot-water bottles in his bed; stood over him with hot Bovril with an egg in it. She prescribed whisky, also hot; but since the fatal night at Rowington’s dinner party, he had abjured alcohol.
“Now perhaps you’ll tell me what has happened,” she said.
“My game leg gave out when I got to some quarries. I believe the beastly place is called Woorow——”
“Woorow! Why that’s the other side of the county!” She looked at him aghast. “Do you mean to say that you walked to Woorow in your state? Really men oughtn’t to be allowed to run about loose.”
“I’ve run about loose since I was fourteen,” said he.
“And a pretty mess you seem to have made of it. And then what did you do?”
She took away the cup of Bovril and poached egg which he had devoured ravenously, to her womanly satisfaction, and handed him another. He continued his story, recounting it, between spoonfulls, in his imaginative way. When he found he could go no further he curled up to sleep in a wood. When things went wrong, he assured her, there was nothing like going to sleep in a wood. All the pixies and elves and rabbits and stoats and weasels came and sat round you in a magic circle, shielding you from harm. What would have happened to the Babes in the Wood, he cried, if it hadn’t been for the robins?
“I wonder what your temperature is,” said Mrs. Pettiland.
“Normal,” said he. “This is the first hour I’ve been normal for months.”
“I’ll take it before I leave you,” she said. “Well, you went to sleep?”
Yes. He slept like an enchanted dog. He woke up four hours afterwards to find it pouring with rain. What could he do? He had to get back. Walking, with his rotten old leg, was out of the question. In the daytime a decent looking pedestrian may have the chance of stopping a motoring Good Samaritan and, with a tale of sudden lameness, get a lift by the side of the chauffeur. But at night it was impossible. To stand with arresting arms outspread in front of the hell-lamps of an advancing car would be an act of suicidal desperation. No; he had returned by all sorts of stages. He had almost forgotten them. A manure cart had brought him some way. Then he had gone dot and carry one for a mile. Then something else. He could only hail slow moving traffic in the wet and darkness. Then he spent an endless time in the cab of a steam traction engine which he had abandoned on seeing a two-seater car with flaring head-lamps, stationed at a cottage gate.
“The old campaigner’s instinct, Mrs. Pettiland. What should it be but a doctor’s car, outside a poor little cottage? And as the head-lamps were pointing to where I had come from, I concluded he had drawn up and would turn round and go where I wanted to get to.”
“And was it a doctor?”
He laughed. Of course it was. He had taken shelter from the rain under the hood of the car for an hour. Then, when the cottage door opened, he had scrambled out and waited for the owner. There had been a few words of explanation. By luck, it was Doctor Stansfield of Fanstead——
“Dr. Stansfield—why——”
“Why of course. He knows you inside and out. A charming fellow. He dropped me here, or rather I dropped him.”
“And he never came in to look after you—a man in your condition? I’ll give him a piece of my mind when I see him.”
He soothed the indignant lady. The good doctor was unaware that anything particular was wrong with him. Poor man, he had been on the go since five o’clock the previous morning—human beings are born inconsiderate of the feelings of others—and he was dog-tired. Too dog-tired even to argue. He would have given a lift to Judas Iscariot, or the Leper of Aosta, so long as he wasn’t worried.
“He nearly pitched us over, at a curve called Hell’s Corner—you know. The near front wheel was just an inch off the edge. And then he stopped dead and flung his hands over his eyes and said: ‘Oh, my God!’ He had lost his nerve. Then when I told his I had driven everything from a General’s Rolls Royce to an armoured car all over Russia in the war, he let me take the wheel. And that’s the whole thing.”
He chatted boyishly, in high spirits, and smoked a cigarette. Mrs. Pettiland went for a clinical thermometer. To her secret disappointment, his temperature was only just above normal. She would have loved to keep him in bed a few days and have the proper ordering of him. A woman loves to have an amazing fool of a man at her mercy, especially if she is gifted with a glimmer of humour. When she left him, he laughed out loud. Well, he had had his adventure with a vengeance. A real old Will-o’-the-Wisp chase, which had landed him, as ever, into disaster. Yet it had been worth it, every bit, until his leg gave out on the quarry hill. Even his slumber he did not regret. His miserable journey back, recalling old days, had its points. It was good to get the better of circumstances.
As to his money which was to have started him in life among coral reefs and conch-shells, that had gone irretrievably. Of course, he could have gone to the nearest police-station. But if the miscreants were arrested, he would have to prosecute. Highway robbery was a serious affair; the stolen belt packed with bank notes, a romantic one. The trial would provide a good newspaper story. There would be most undesirable publicity; and publicity is the last thing a man dead to the world would desire. He shrugged philosophic shoulders. Let the money go. The humour of the situation tickled his vagabond fancy. He was penniless. That was the comical end of his pursuit of the ignis fatuus. The freak finality and inevitability of it stimulated his sense of the romantic. If he had been possessed of real courage, he would have made over all his money, months ago, to Olivia and disappeared, as he was now, into the unknown. His experience of life ought to have taught him the inexorable fatality of compromise. What would he do? He did not know. Drowsy after the day’s fatigue, and very warm and comfortable, he did not care. He curled himself up in the bed and went to sleep.
One afternoon, a week afterwards, he limped into Mrs. Pettiland’s post-office with a gay air.
“Mrs. Pettiland,” said he, “at last I have found my true vocation.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” she replied undisturbed in her official duties which consisted in taking the coppers from a small child in payment for two stamps. “You’ve been rather restless these last few days.”
Triona watched the child depart, clasping the stamps in a clammy hand.
“When one hasn’t a penny in the world and starvation stares you in the face, one may be excused for busy search for a means of livelihood.”
“You’ve got plenty of money.”
“I haven’t.”
“You paid me a month’s board and lodging in advance, the other day—though why you did it, I can’t understand.”
“I was going to run away,” he said cheerfully. “To compensate you in that miserable manner for inconvenience was the least I could do. But the gods rightly stepped in and hauled me back.” He swung himself on the counter and smiled at her. “I’m a fraud, you know.”
The plump and decorous lady could not realize his earnestness. Behind his words lay some jest which she could not fathom.
“You don’t believe me?”
He sighed. If he had told her a fairy tale she, like all the rest of the world in his past life, would have believed him. Now that he told the truth, he met with blank incredulity.
“I’m going to earn my living. I’m taking on a job as chauffeur.”
She stared at him. “A chauffeur—you?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Her mind ran over his intellectual face, his clothes, his manners, his talk—free and sometimes disconcertingly allusive, like that of the rare and impeccably introduced artists whom she had lodged—his books . . .
“Why—you’re a gentleman,” she gasped.
“Oh no. Not really. I’ve been all kinds of things in my time. Among them I’ve passed as a gentleman. But by trade I’m a chauffeur. I practically started life as a chauffeur—in Russia. For years I drove a Russian Prince all over Europe. Now there aren’t any more Russian Princes I’m going to drive the good people of Fanstead to railway stations and dinner parties.”
“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Pettiland.
“There’s a young man—an ex-officer—Radnor by name, in Fanstead—who has just set up a motor garage.” “He’ll fail,” said Mrs. Pettiland. “They all do. Old Hetherington of ‘The Bull’ has all the custom.”
“With one rickety death-trap for hire and a fool of a mechanic who has wrecked every car sent in for repairs for a radius of thirty miles. I offered Hetherington to teach him his business. You might as well sing ‘Il Trovatore’ to a mule. So I went to Radnor. He had just sacked a man, and with my invariable luck, I stepped in at the right moment. No, Mrs. Pettiland—” he swung his sound leg and looked at her, enjoying her mystification “—the reign of Hetherington is over. Radnor’s Garage is going to be the wonder of the countryside.”
He believed it implicitly. Radnor, a mild and worried young man, with quite a sound knowledge of his business, might struggle along and earn a hand-to-mouth living. But he lacked driving-power. To Triona, during his two or three interviews with him, that was obvious. He had sufficient capital for a start, a good garage equipment, a fairly modern 25 h.p. utility car and was trying to make up his mind to buy another. Triona divined his irresolution. He would be at the mercy of unscrupulous mechanics and chauffeurs. His spirit seemed to have been broken by two years imprisonment in Germany. He had lost the secret of command. And, by nature, a modest, retiring gentleman. Triona pitied him. He had wandered through the West of England seeking a pitch where the competition was not too fierce, and finding unprogressive Fanstead, had invested all his capital in the business. He had been there a couple of months during which very little work had come in. He could stick it out for six months more. After that the deluge.
“Give me four pounds a week as head mechanic and chauffeur,” said Triona, “and............