§ 1  
Bealby was loth to leave the caravan party even when by his own gross negligence it had ceased to be a caravan party. He made off regretfully along the crest of the hills through bushes of yew and box until the clamour of the disaster was no longer in his ears. Then he halted for a time and stood sorrowing and listening and then turned up by a fence along the border of a plantation and so came into a little overhung road.
His ideas of his immediate future were vague in the extreme. He was a receptive expectation. Since his departure from the gardener’s cottage circumstances had handed him on. They had been interesting but unstable circumstances. He supposed they would still hand him on. So far as he had any definite view about his intentions it was that he was running away to sea. And that he was getting hungry.
It was also, he presently discovered, getting dark very gently and steadily. And the overhung road after some tortuosities expired suddenly upon the bosom of a great grey empty common with distant mysterious hedges.
191It seemed high time to Bealby that something happened of a comforting nature.
Always hitherto something or someone had come to his help when the world grew dark and cold, and given him supper and put him or sent him to bed. Even when he had passed a night in the interstices of Shonts he had known there was a bed at quite a little distance under the stairs. If only that loud Voice hadn’t shouted curses whenever he moved he would have gone to it. But as he went across this common in the gloaming it became apparent that this amiable routine was to be broken. For the first time he realized the world could be a homeless world.
And it had become very still.
Disagreeably still, and full of ambiguous shadows.
That common was not only an unsheltered place, he felt, but an unfriendly place, and he hurried to a gate at the further end. He kept glancing to the right and to the left. It would be pleasanter when he had got through that gate and shut it after him.
In England there are no grey wolves.
Yet at times one thinks of wolves, grey wolves, the colour of twilight and running noiselessly, almost noiselessly, at the side of their prey for quite a long time before they close in on it.
In England, I say, there are no grey wolves.
Wolves were extinguished in the reign of Edward the Third; it was in the histories, and since then no free wolf has trod the soil of England; only menagerie captives.
192Of course there may be escaped wolves!
Now the gate!—sharp through it and slam it behind you, and a little brisk run and so into this plantation that slopes down hill. This is a sort of path; vague, but it must be a path. Let us hope it is a path.
What was that among the trees?
It stopped, surely it stopped, as Bealby stopped. Pump, pump—. Of course! that was one’s heart.
Nothing there! Just fancy. Wolves live in the open; they do not come into woods like this. And besides, there are no wolves. And if one shouts—even if it is but a phantom voice one produces, they go away. They are cowardly things—really. Such as there aren’t.
And there is the power of the human eye.
Which is why they stalk you and watch you and evade you when you look and creep and creep and creep behind you!
Turn sharply.
Nothing.
How this stuff rustled under the feet! In woods at twilight, with innumerable things darting from trees and eyes watching you everywhere, it would be pleasanter if one could walk without making quite such a row. Presently, surely, Bealby told himself, he would come out on a high road and meet other people and say “good-night” as they passed. Jolly other people they would be, answering, “Good-night.” He was now going at a moistening trot. It was getting darker and he stumbled against things.
193When you tumble down wolves leap. Not of course that there are any wolves.
It was stupid to keep thinking of wolves in this way. Think of something else. Think of things beginning with a B. Beautiful things, boys, beads, butterflies, bears. The mind stuck at bears. Are there such things as long grey bears? Ugh! Almost endless, noiseless bears?...
It grew darker until at last the trees were black. The night was swallowing up the flying Bealby and he had a preposterous persuasion that it had teeth and would begin at the back of his legs....
§ 2
 
“Hi!” cried Bealby weakly, hailing the glow of the fire out of the darkness of the woods above.
The man by the fire peered at the sound; he had been listening to the stumbling footsteps for some time, and he answered nothing.
In another minute Bealby had struggled through the hedge into the visible world and stood regarding the man by the fire. The phantom wolves had fled beyond Sirius. But Bealby’s face was pale still from the terrors of the pursuit and altogether he looked a smallish sort of small boy.
“Lost?” said the man by the fire.
“Couldn’t find my way,” said Bealby.
“Anyone with you?”
“No.”
The man reflected. “Tired?”
“Bit.”
194“Come and sit down by the fire and rest yourself.
“I won’t ’urt you,” he added as Bealby hesitated.
So far in his limited experience Bealby had never seen a human countenance lit from behind by a flickering red flame. The effect he found remarkable rather than pleasing. It gave this stranger the most active and unstable countenance Bealby had ever seen. The nose seemed to be in active oscillation between pug and Roman, the eyes jumped out of black caves and then went back into them, the more permanent features appeared to be a vast triangle of neck and chin. The tramp would have impressed Bealby as altogether inhuman if it had not been for the smell of cooking he diffused. There were onions in it and turnips and pepper—mouth-watering constituents, testimonials to virtue. He was making a stew in an old can that he had slung on a cross stick over a brisk fire of twigs that he was constantly replenishing.
“I won’t ’urt you, darn you,” he repeated. “Come and sit down on these leaves here for a bit and tell me all abart it.”
Bealby did as he was desired. “I got lost,” he said, feeling too exhausted to tell a good story.
The tramp, examined more closely, became less pyrotechnic. He had a large loose mouth, a confused massive nose, much long fair hair, a broad chin with a promising beard and spots—a lot of spots. His eyes looked out of deep sockets and they were sharp little eyes. He was a lean 195man. His hands were large and long and they kept on with the feeding of the fire as he sat and talked to Bealby. Once or twice he leant forward and smelt the pot judiciously, but all the time the little eyes watched Bealby very closely.
“Lose yer collar?” said the tramp.
Bealby felt for his collar. “I took it orf,” he said.
“Come far?”
“Over there,” said Bealby.
“Where?”
“Over there.”
“What place?”
“Don’t know the name of it.”
“Then it ain’t your ’ome?”
“No.”
“You’ve run away,” said the man.
“Pr’aps I ’ave,” said Bealby.
“Pr’aps you ’ave! Why pr’aps? You ’ave! What’s the good of telling lies abart it? When’d you start?”
“Monday,” said Bealby.
The tramp reflected. “Had abart enough of it?”
“Dunno,” said Bealby truthfully.
“Like some soup?”
“Yes.”
“’Ow much?”
“I could do with a lot,” said Bealby.
“Ah yah! I didn’t mean that. I meant, ’ow much for some? ’Ow much will you pay for a nice, nice ’arf can of soup? I ain’t a darn charity. See?”
196“Tuppence,” said Bealby.
The tramp shook his head slowly from side to side and took out the battered iron spoon he was using to stir the stuff and tasted the soup lusciously. It was—jolly good soup and there were potatoes in it.
“Thrippence,” said Bealby.
“’Ow much you got?” asked the tramp.
Bealby hesitated perceptibly. “Sixpence,” he said weakly.
“It’s sixpence,” said the tramp. “Pay up.”
“’Ow big a can?” asked Bealby.
The tramp felt about in the darkness behind him and produced an empty can with a jagged mouth that had once contained, the label witnessed—I quote, I do not justify—‘Deep Sea Salmon.’ “That,” he said, “and this chunk of bread.... Right enough?”
“You will do it?” said Bealby.
“Do I look a swindle?” cried the tramp, and suddenly a lump of the abundant hair fell over one eye in a singularly threatening manner. Bealby handed over the sixpence without further discussion. “I’ll treat you fairly, you see,” said the tramp, after he had spat on and pocketed the sixpence, and he did as much. He decided that the soup was ready to be served and he served it with care. Bealby began at once. “There’s a nextry onion,” said the tramp, throwing one over. “It didn’t cost me much and I gives it you for nothin’. That’s all right, eh? Here’s ’ealth!”
Bealby consumed his soup and bread meekly with one eye upon his host. He would, he decided, 197eat all he could and then sit a little while, and then get this tramp to tell him the way to—anywhere else. And the tramp wiped soup out of his can with gobbets of bread very earnestly and meditated sagely on Bealby.
“You better pal in with me, matey, for a bit,” he said at last. “You can’t go nowhere else—not to-night.”
“Couldn’t I walk perhaps to a town or sumpthing?”
“These woods ain’t safe.”
“’Ow d’you mean?”
“Ever ’eard tell of a gurrillia?—sort of big black monkey thing.”
“Yes,” said Bealby faintly.
“There’s been one loose abart ’ere—oh week or more. Fact. And if you wasn’t a grown up man quite and going along in the dark, well—’e might say something to you.... Of course ’e wouldn’t do nothing where there was a fire or a man—but a little chap like you. I wouldn’t like to let you do it, ’strewth I wouldn’t. It’s risky. Course I don’t want to keep you. There it is. You go if you like. But I’d rather you didn’t. ’Onest.”
“Where’d he come from?” asked Bealby.
“M’nagery,” said the tramp.
“’E very near bit through the fist of a chap that tried to stop ’im,” said the tramp.
Bealby after weighing tramp and gorilla very carefully in his mind decided he wouldn’t and drew closer to the fire—but not too close—and the conversation deepened.
198
§ 3
 
It was a long and rambling conversation and the tramp displayed himself at times as quite an amiable person. It was a discourse varied by interrogations, and as a thread of departure and return it dealt with the life of the road and with life at large and—life, and with matters of ‘must’ and ‘may.’
Sometimes and more particularly at first Bealby felt as though a ferocious beast lurked in the tramp and peeped out through the fallen hank of hair and might leap out upon him, and sometimes he felt the tramp was large and fine and gay and amusing, more particularly when he lifted his voice and his bristling chin. And ever and again the talker became a nasty creature and a disgusting creature, and his red-lit face was an ugly creeping approach that made Bealby recoil. And then again he was strong and wise. So the unstable needle of a boy’s moral compass spins.
The tramp used strange terms. He spoke of the ‘deputy’ and the ‘doss-house,’ of the ‘spike’ and ‘padding the hoof,’ of ‘screevers’ and ‘tarts’ and ‘copper’s narks.’ To these words Bealby attached such meanings as he could, and so the things of which the tramp talked floated unsurely into his mind and again and again he had to readjust and revise his interpretations. And through these dim and fluctuating veils a new side of life dawned upon his consciousness, a side that was strange and lawless and dirty—in every way dirty—and dreadful and—attractive. That 199was the queer thing about it, that attraction. It had humour. For all its squalor and repulsiveness it was lit by defiance and laughter, bitter laughter perhaps, but laughter. It had a gaiety that Mr. Mergleson for example did not possess, it had a penetration, like the penetrating quality of onions or acids or asaf?tida, that made the memory of Mr. Darling insipid.
The tramp assumed from the outset that Bealby had ‘done something’ and run away, and some mysterious etiquette prevented his asking directly what was the nature of his offence. But he made a number of insidious soundings. And he assumed that Bealby was taking to the life of the road and that, until good cause to the contrary appeared, they were to remain together. “It’s a tough life,” he said, “but it has its points, and you got a toughish look about you.”
He talked of roads and the quality of roads and countryside. This was a good countryside; it wasn’t overdone and there was no great hostility to wanderers and sleeping out. Some roads—the London to Brighton for example, if a chap struck a match, somebody came running. But here unless you went pulling the haystacks about too much they left you alone. And they weren’t such dead nuts on their pheasants, and one had a chance of an empty cowshed. “If I’ve spotted a shed or anything with a roof to it I stay out,” said the tramp, “even if it’s raining cats and dogs. Otherwise it’s the doss-’ouse or the ‘spike.’ It’s the rain is the worst thing—getting wet. You haven’t been wet yet, not if you only started 200Monday. Wet—with a chilly wind to drive it. Gaw! I been blown out of a holly hedge. You would think there’d be protection in a holly hedge....
“Spike’s the last thing,” said the tramp. “I’d rather go bare-gutted to a doss-’ouse anywhen. Gaw!—you’ve not ’ad your first taste of the spike yet.”
But it wasn’t heaven in the doss-houses. He spoke of several of the landladies in strange but it would seem unflattering terms. “And there’s always such a blamed lot of washing going on in a doss-’ouse. Always washing they are! One chap’s washing ’is socks and another’s washing ’is shirt. Making a steam drying it. Disgustin’. Carn’t see what they want with it all. Barnd to git dirty again....”
He discoursed of spikes, that is to say of work-houses, and of masters. “And then,” he said, with revolting yet alluring adjectives, “there’s the bath.”
“That’s the worst side of it,” said the tramp.... “’Owever, it doesn’t always rain, and if it doesn’t rain, well, you can keep yourself dry.”
He came back to the pleasanter aspects of the nomadic life. He was all for the outdoor style. “Ain’t we comfortable ’ere?” he asked. He sketched out the simple larcenies that had contributed and given zest to the evening’s meal. But it seemed there were also doss-houses that had the agreeable side. “Never been in one!” he said. “But where you been sleeping since Monday?”
201Bealby described the caravan in phrases that seemed suddenly thin and an?mic to his ears.
“You hit it lucky,” said the tramp. “If a chap’s a kid he strikes all sorts of luck of that sort. Now ef I come up against three ladies travellin’ in a van—think they’d arst me in? Not it!”
He dwelt with manifest envy on the situation and the possibilities of the situation for some time. “You ain’t dangerous,” he said; “that’s where you get in....”
He consoled himself by anecdotes of remarkable good fortunes of a kindred description. Apparently he sometimes travelled in the company of a lady named Izzy Berners—“a fair scorcher, been a regular, slap-up circus actress.” And there was also “good old Susan.” It was a little difficult for Bealby to see the point of some of these flashes by a tendency on the part of the tramp while his thoughts turned on these matters to adopt a staccato style of speech, punctuated by brief, darkly significant guffaws. There grew in the mind of Bealby a vision of the doss-house as a large crowded place, lit by a great central fire, with much cooking afoot and much jawing and disputing going on, and then “me and Izzy sailed in....”
The fire sank, the darkness of the woods seemed to creep nearer. The moonlight pierced the trees only in long beams that seemed to point steadfastly at unseen things, it made patches of ashen light that looked like watching faces. Under the tramp’s direction Bealby skirmished round and got sticks and fed the fire until the 202darkness and thoughts of a possible gorilla were driven back for some yards and the tramp pronounced the blaze a “fair treat.” He had made a kind of bed of leaves which he now invited Bealby to extend and share, and lying feet to the fire he continued his discourse.
He talked of stealing and cheating by various endearing names; he made these enterprises seem adventurous and facetious; there was it seemed a peculiar sort of happy find one came upon called a “flat,” that it was not only entertaining but obligatory to swindle. He made fraud seem so smart and bright at times that Bealby found it difficult to keep a firm grasp on the fact that it was—fraud....
Bealby lay upon the leaves close up to the prone body of the tramp, and his mind and his standards became confused. The tramp’s body was a dark but protecting ridge on one side of him; he could not see the fire beyond his toes but its flickerings were reflected by the tree stems about them, and made perplexing sudden movements that at times caught his attention and made him raise his head to watch them.... Against the terrors of the night the tramp had become humanity, the species, the moral basis. His voice was full of consolation; his topics made one forget the watchful silent circumambient. Bealby’s first distrusts faded. He began to think the tramp a fine, brotherly, generous fellow. He was also growing accustomed to a faint something—shall I call it an olfactory bar—that had hitherto kept them apart. The monologue 203ceased to devote itself to the elucidation of Bealby; the tramp was lying on his back with his fingers interlaced beneath his head and talking not so much to his companion as to the stars and the universe at large. His theme was no longer the wandering life simply but the wandering life as he had led it, and the spiritedness with which he had led it and the real and admirable quality of himself. It was that soliloquy of consolation which is the secret preservative of innumerable lives.
He wanted to make it perfectly clear that he was a tramp by choice. He also wanted to make it clear that he was a tramp and no better because of the wicked folly of those he had trusted and the evil devices of enemies. In the world that contained those figures of spirit; Isopel Berners and Susan, there was also it seemed a bad and spiritless person, the tramp’s wife, who had done him many passive injuries. It was clear she did not appreciate her blessings. She had been much to blame. “Anybody’s opinion is better than ’er ’usband’s,” said the tramp. “Always ’as been.” Bealby had a sudden memory of Mr. Darling saying exactly the same thing of his mother. “She’s the sort,” said the tramp, “what would rather go to a meetin’ than a music ’all. She’d rather drop a shilling down a crack than spend it on anything decent. If there was a choice of jobs going she’d ask which ’ad the lowest pay and the longest hours and she’d choose that. She’d feel safer. She was born scared. When there wasn’t anything else to do she’d stop at ’ome and scrub the floors. Gaw! it made a chap 204want to put the darn’ pail over ’er ’ed, so’s she’d get enough of it....
“I don’t hold with all this crawling through life and saying Please,” said the tramp. “I say it’s my world just as much as it’s your world. You may have your ’orses and carriages, your ’ouses and country places and all that and you may think Gawd sent me to run abart and work for you; but I don’t. See?”
Bealby saw.
“I seek my satisfactions just as you seek your satisfactions, and if you want to get me to work you’ve jolly well got to make me. I don’t choose to work. I choose to keep on my own and a bit loose and take my chance where I find it. You got to take your chances in this world. Sometimes they come bad and sometimes they come good. And very often you can’t tell which it is when they ’ave come....”
Then he fell questioning Bealby again and then he talked of the immediate future. He was beating for the seaside. “Always something doing,” he said. “You got to keep your eye on for cops; those seaside benches, they’re ’ot on tramps—give you a month for begging soon as look at you—but there’s flats dropping sixpences thick as flies on a sore ’orse. You want a there for all sorts of jobs. You’re just the chap for it, matey. Saw it soon’s ever I set eyes on you....”
He made projects....
Finally he became more personal and very flattering.
205“Now you and me,” he said, suddenly shifting himself quite close to Bealby, “we’re going to be downright pals. I’ve took a liking to you. Me and you are going to pal together. See?”
He breathed into Bealby’s face, and laid a hand on his knee and squeezed it, and Bealby, on the whole, felt honoured by his protection....
§ 4
 
In the unsympathetic light of a bright and pushful morning the tramp was shorn of much of his overnight glamour. It became manifest that he was not merely offensively unshaven, but extravagantly dirty. It was not ordinary rural dirt. During the last few days he must have had dealings of an intimate nature with coal. He was taciturn and irritable, he declared that this sleeping out would be the death of him and the breakfast was only too manifestly wanting in the comforts of a refined home. He seemed a little less embittered after breakfast, he became even faintly genial, but he remained unpleasing. A distaste for the tramp arose in Bealby’s mind and as he walked on behind his guide and friend, he revolved schemes of unobtrusive detachment.
Far be it from me to accuse Bealby of ingratitude. But it is true that that same disinclination which made him a disloyal assistant to Mr. Mergleson was now affecting his comradeship with the tramp. And he was deceitful. He allowed the tramp to build projects in the confidence of his continued adhesion, he did not warn 206him of the defection he meditated. But on the other hand Bealby had acquired from his mother an effective horror of stealing. And one must admit, since the tramp admitted it, that the man stole.
And another little matter had at the same time estranged Bealby from the tramp and linked the two of them together. The attentive reader will know that Bealby had exactly two shillings and twopence-halfpenny when he came down out of the woods to the fireside. He had Mrs. Bowles’ half-crown and the balance of Madeleine Philips’ theatre shilling, minus sixpence halfpenny for a collar and sixpence he had given the tramp for the soup overnight. But all this balance was now in the pocket of the tramp. Money talks and the tramp had heard it. He had not taken it away from Bealby, but he had obtained it in this manner: “We two are pals,” he said, “and one of us had better be Treasurer. That’s Me. I know the ropes better. So hand over what you got there, matey.”
And after he had pointed out that a refusal might lead to Bealby’s evisceration the transfer occurred. Bealby was searched, kindly but firmly....
It seemed to the tramp that this trouble had now blown over completely.
Little did he suspect the rebellious and treacherous thoughts that seethed in the head of his companion. Little did he suppose that his personal appearance, his manners, his ethical flavour—nay, even his physical flavour—were being 207judged in a spirit entirely unamiable. It seemed to him that he had obtained youthful and subservient companionship, companionship that would be equally agreeable and useful; he had adopted a course that he imagined would cement the ties between them; he reckoned not with ingratitude. “If anyone arsts you who I am, call me uncle,” he said. He walked along, a little in advance, sticking his toes out right and left in a peculiar wide pace that characterized his walk, and revolving schemes for the happiness and profit of the day. To begin with—great draughts of beer. Then tobacco. Later perhaps a little bread and cheese for Bealby. “You can’t come in ’ere,” he said at the first public house. “You’re under age, me boy. It ain’t my doing, matey; it’s ’Erbert Samuel. You blame ’im. ’E don’t objec’ to you going to work for any other Mr. Samuel there may ’appen to be abart or anything of that sort, that’s good for you, that is; but ’e’s most particular you shouldn’t go into a public ’ouse. So you just wait abart outside ’ere. I’ll ’ave my eye on you.”
“You going to spend my money?” asked Bealby.
“I’m going to ration the party,” said the tramp.
“You—you got no right to spend my money,” said Bealby.
“I—’Ang it!—I’ll get you some acid drops,&rdqu............