FANSTEAD is a little country town built on the plan of a sparsely equipped herring bone. There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. All save two. One of these ends abruptly at an inconveniently distant railway station. The other, villa bordered, meanders pleasantly for a mile or so to the tiny village of Pendish where it meets at right angles the great high road, and stops modestly, confronted all of a sudden with rolling open country, swelling downs patched with meadow and corn-field and crowned with great clumps of woodland. Pendish was too small even to have a church. There was a tiny chapel for the convenience of Baptists. But Anglicans tramped into Fanstead or to the larger village of Banton-on-the-Hill, another mile along the great high road. It had a tumbled-down inn, the “Whip and Collar,” and a straggling row of thatched cottages, and a tiny red-brick villa labelled as the home of the County Police. But it also had a post-office, which was also a shop; and this was a small, square two-storied Georgian house imposing among its thatched neighbours and maintaining itself with a curious air of dignity, in spite of the front door open to the public during business hours, and the miscellaneous assortment of sweets, tobacco, tapes and picture postcards exposed in what was once the dining-room window.
It was the freehold of Mrs. Pettiland, a widow of fifty; she had inherited it from her father, a Norfolk thatcher who had brought his mystery to the west and practising it with skill and saving a little fortune brought to him by his wife, had amassed enough to buy the square stone house where he had ended his days. They said in the village that he had never recovered from the shock occasioned by the fate of his son, his apprentice and later his partner, who had gone raving mad a week or two after his marriage and had to be confined in the County Asylum.
Well, the old man had slept with his fathers for many years; his wife had joined him; the son still lingered on in the madhouse; and Mrs. Pettiland, very much alone in the world, save for her husband’s relatives in Fanstead, sold stamps and sweets to the village, and as a very great favour let the best bedroom to an occasional painter with unimpeachable introductions.
She was dark-haired, fresh-coloured, and buxom; she dressed with neatness, wearing old-fashioned stays that gave her a waist and a high bust; and she was the most considerable personage in Pendish.
When she had received a letter from her sister-in-law, Myra Stebbings, asking her as a favour to put up a foolish young man named Briggs who had got himself run over by a motor-lorry, if ever he should act on her suggestion and come to Pendish, she considered it less as an introduction than as a command. Whether she loved Myra or not, she did not know. But she had an immense respect for the dry, grey-faced woman who had come every year to stay with her, so that she could visit the brother whom she had loved, in the house of awfulness, five or six miles away. She stood somewhat in awe of Myra. Her own good man had died comfortably in his bed and had gone for ever, after a couple of years of placid content. It was sad; but it was the common lot. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But at the idea of a woman’s husband being shut off from the world in the living tomb of the County Asylum, she shuddered. Myra always conveyed to her the vague impression, so impossible to be formulated by an uneducated woman ignorant of traditional reference, of a human soul defying the tragedy of existence.
So when this Mr. Briggs wrote from the hospital in London, she sent him a cordial answer. Any friend of Myra Stebbings was more than welcome. She would not charge him more than out-of-pocket expenses. For she did not know who this foolish young man might be. Myra sphinx-like, as usual, had given no clue. But for Myra to ask a favour was an unprecedented occurrence. She must have far more than ordinary interest in the welfare of the young fellow. Mrs. Pettiland’s curiosity was aroused and she awaited the arrival of her new lodger with impatience.
The station car from the Fanstead garage brought him, on a late summer afternoon, with his brown canvas kit-bag and suit-case and khaki overcoat. She stood in the pedimented doorway, over which was fixed the wooden post-office board, and watched him descend. He faced her for a moment, and raised his hat.
“Mrs. Pettiland?”
She looked at his clear cut face, so boyish in spite of whiteness and haggardness, at his careless brown hair sweeping over his temples, at the lips parted in a smile, at the lithe young figure. She caught the significance of his uplifted hat and the pleasant tone of his voice. In her limited category of values he would be only one thing—a gentleman. The manners of an instant charmed her.
“Mr. Briggs?”
“I hope I shan’t be a dreadful nuisance to you, but I need rest and quiet and Miss Stebbings told me to come. And,” he smiled, “What she says generally goes.”
“I see that you know her, sir,” said Mrs. Pettiland pleasantly.
The luggage taken in, the cab dismissed she led him up to his room—a large bed-sitting room, looking over a wild garden and a wide expanse of rolling downs, with the faint white ribbon of high road circling in and out and round about them. His meals, she informed him, he could take in the parlour downstairs, without extra charge.
“But I insist on paying my way,” he said. “Unless my staying here is profitable to you, I can’t remain. For the present at least, I can well afford it.”
So a modest arrangement was made and Triona settled down in his new home.
For some days he enjoyed the peace of Pendish. He had brought with him books, ordered from the hospital; books which would take him long to read; some of the interminable modern French novels; a complete Fielding and Smollett; Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene, neither of which he had as yet had time to go through. He spent hours in the sunny garden riotous with ingenous roses and delphinium and Canterbury bells and burning red-hot pokers as they call them in the West. Often he limped along the green lanes that wound between the fields up and down the downs. Becoming aware that he knew nothing of bird-life, he procured through the Fanstead bookshop popular works on British Birds, and sitting under a tree in a corner of a meadow would strive to identify them by their song and plumage and queer individual habits. He talked to the villagers. He talked to Mrs. Pettiland, who told him the tragic story of Myra and the man in the County Asylum. Of Myra’s doings all the year round, he found she knew little. She was with her lady whom she had served most of her life and had gone back with her to Medlow. Of the lady herself Myra never spoke. Mrs. Pettiland did not know whether the lady was married or not. That was Myra Stebbings’s way. She gave no information and no one dared ask her questions.
“She never even told me, in her letter, who you were, sir,” she added.
“I am just under her protection,” he smiled. “She took me up when I had no one to defend me.”
“She’s a curious woman,” sighed Mrs. Pettiland.
“With strange tastes in protégés.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Pettiland, I don’t quite know myself what I am. But doubtless sooner or later I’ll do something to astonish you.”
The yearning to do this fretted his secret heart. To move about the summer fields when the weather was fine, to lounge in an easy-chair over books in seasons of rain, was all very well for the period of convalescence after the confinement in the hospital ward. But after a while, when his muscles regained strength and the new blood coursing through his veins brought colour to his cheeks, he began to feel the old imperious need of movement and of action. Sometimes he went back, as in his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea; sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd; sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure. Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. Well, he shrugged angry shoulders. It was no use thinking of that. Poland had gone, like Olivia, out of his life. And when he came to think of it, so had everything that had made up all that he had known or conceived of life.
He closed Tom Jones, and stared out of the window on the rain-drenched hills; Tom Jones, with his physical lustiness, his strong animal bravura, was more than he could bear. Tom Jones, no matter in what circumstance he was placed, had all the world before him. His gay confidence offended the lost man. For he was lost. Not a lost soul, he told himself; that was taking an absurd Byronical view of the matter. To pose as a modern Manfred would be contemptible. He went down to bed-rock of commonplace. He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he died. He could write, pour out all the fever of his soul into words. But what was the good, if no word of his could be transmitted from this backwater into the haunts of men? Work without hope—a verse of Coleridge came vaguely to him—was like draining nectar through a sieve. It could only end in heart-break. He stared through the dripping window-pane at the free hills, dim and hopeless in the mist of deluge. Nothingness confronted him.
He wondered whether Myra, with diabolical insight and deliberate malice, had not lured him hither, so that she could hold him in relentless grip. At any rate she had cast him into this prison.
He lay awake all that night. The next morning the sky had cleared and the sun shone down on the gratefully steaming land of green. He breakfasted in the tiny parlour opposite the shop-post-office on the ground floor. The ornaments in it were those of long ago. Prints of the landing of the Guards after the Crimea, of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. Curiously carved and polished coconut shells, and a great egg on which a staring mermaid was nudely painted stood on the mantelpiece. On the chiffonier were calabashes, with gaudy figures of indigenous Indians, such as came from the West Indies seventy years ago, and a model of a full-rigged ship under a glass case, and a moulting stuffed toucan, with its great beak and yellow and red plumage. The late Mr. Pettiland’s father, he had learned, had followed the sea. So, beside the objects on the crowded mantelpiece and in front of palm-leaf fans were sprigs of white coral and strings of strange beads, and a dumpy, shapeless, wooden Polynesian god. And at the end lay a great conch shell with its wide, pink, curving lips, mysterious and alluring.
He could scarcely eat. The night had shaken him. He gulped down some food and coffee, lit a pipe and wandered restlessly about the room............