§ 1  
Bealby was beginning to realize that running away from one’s situation and setting up for oneself is not so easy and simple a thing as it had appeared during those first days with the caravan. Three things he perceived had arisen to pursue him, two that followed in the daylight, the law and the tramp, and a third that came back at twilight, the terror of the darkness. And within there was a hollow faintness, for the afternoon was far advanced and he was extremely hungry. He had dozed away the early afternoon in the weedy corner of a wood. But for his hunger I think he would have avoided Crayminster.
Within a mile of that place he had come upon the ‘Missing’ notice again stuck to the end of a barn. He had passed it askance, and then with a sudden inspiration returned and tore it down. Somehow with the daylight his idea of turning King’s Evidence against the tramp had weakened. He no longer felt sure.
Mustn’t one wait and be asked first to turn King’s Evidence?
Suppose they said he had merely confessed....
227The Crayminster street had a picturesque nutritious look. Half-way down it was the White Hart with cyclist club signs on its walls and geraniums over a white porch, and beyond a house being built and already at the roofing pitch. To the right was a baker’s shop diffusing a delicious suggestion of buns and cake and to the left a little comfortable sweetstuff window and a glimpse of tables and a board: ‘Teas.’ Tea! He resolved to break into his ninepence boldly and generously. Very likely they would boil him an egg for a penny or so. Yet on the other hand if he just had three or four buns, soft new buns. He hovered towards the baker’s shop and stopped short. That bill was in the window!
He wheeled about sharply and went into the sweetstuff shop and found a table with a white cloth and a motherly little woman in a large cap. Tea? He could have an egg and some thick bread and butter and a cup of tea for fivepence. He sat down respectfully to await her preparations.
But he was uneasy.
He knew quite well that she would ask him questions. For that he was prepared. He said he was walking from his home in London to Someport to save the fare. “But you’re so dirty!” said the motherly little woman. “I sent my luggage by post, ma’m, and I lost my way and didn’t get it. And I don’t much mind, ma’m, if you don’t. Not washing....”
All that he thought he did quite neatly. But he wished there was not that bill in the baker’s 228window opposite and he wished he hadn’t quite such a hunted feeling. A faint claustrophobia affected him. He felt the shop might be a trap. He would be glad to get into the open again. Was there a way out behind if for example a policeman blocked the door? He hovered to the entrance while his egg was boiling and then when he saw a large fat baker surveying the world with an afternoon placidity upon his face, he went back and sat by the table. He wondered if the baker had noted him.
He had finished his egg; he was drinking his tea with appreciative noises, when he discovered that the baker had noted him. Bealby’s eyes, at first inanely open above the tilting tea cup, were suddenly riveted on something that was going on in the baker’s window. From where he sat he could see that detestable bill, and then slowly, feeling about for it, he beheld a hand and a floury sleeve. The bill was drawn up and vanished and then behind a glass shelf of fancy bread and a glass shelf of buns something pink and indistinct began to move jerkily.... It was a human face and it was trying to peer into the little refreshment shop that sheltered Bealby....
Bealby’s soul went faint.
He had one inadequate idea. “Might I go out,” he said, “by your back way?”
“There isn’t a back way,” said the motherly little woman. “There’s a yard—.”
“If I might,” said Bealby, and was out in it.
No way at all! High walls on every side. He was back like a shot in the shop, and now the 229baker was half-way across the road. “Fivepence,” said Bealby and gave the little old woman sixpence. “Here,” she cried, “take your penny!”
He did not wait. He darted out of the door.
The baker was all over the way of escape. He extended arms that seemed abnormally long and with a weak cry Bealby found himself trapped. Trapped, but not hopelessly. He knew how to do it. He had done it in milder forms before, but now he did it with all his being. Under the diaphragm of the baker smote Bealby’s hard little head, and instantly he was away running up the quiet sunny street. Man when he assumed the erect attitude made a hostage of his belly. It is a proverb among the pastoral Berbers of the Atlas mountains that the man who extends his arms in front of an angry ram is a fool.
It seemed probable to Bealby that he would get away up the street. The baker was engaged in elaborately falling backward, making the most of sitting down in the road, and the wind had been knocked out of him so that he could not shout. He emitted “Stop him!” in large whispers. Away ahead there were only three builder’s men sitting under the wall beyond the White Hart, consuming tea out of their tea cans. But the boy who was trimming the top of the tall privet hedge outside the doctor’s saw the assault of the baker and incontinently uttered the shout that the baker could not. Also he fell off his steps with great alacrity and started in pursuit of Bealby. A young man from anywhere—perhaps the grocer’s shop—also started for 230Bealby. But the workmen were slow to rise to the occasion. Bealby could have got past them. And then, abruptly at the foot of the street ahead the tramp came into view, a battered disconcerting figure. His straw-coloured hat which had recently been wetted and dried in the sun was a swaying mop. The sight of Bealby seemed to rouse him from some disagreeable meditations. He grasped the situation with a terrible quickness. Regardless of the wisdom of the pastoral Berbers he extended his arms and stood prepared to intercept.
Bealby thought at the rate of a hundred thoughts to the minute. He darted sideways and was up the ladder and among the beams and rafters of the unfinished roof before the pursuit had more than begun. “Here, come off that,” cried the foreman builder, only now joining in the hunt with any sincerity. He came across the road while Bealby regarded him wickedly from the rafters above. Then as the good man made to ascend Bealby got him neatly on the hat, it was a bowler hat, with a tile. This checked the advance. There was a disposition to draw a little off and look up at Bealby. One of the younger builders from the opposite sidewalk got him very neatly in the ribs with a stone. But two other shots went wide and Bealby shifted to a more covered position behind the chimney stack.
From here, however, he had a much less effective command of the ladder, and he perceived that his tenure of the new house was not likely to be a long one.
231Below, men parleyed. “Who is ’e?” asked the foreman builder. “Where’d ’e come from?” “’E’s a brasted little thief,” said the tramp. “’E’s one of the wust characters on the road.” The baker was recovering his voice now. “There’s a reward out for ’im,” he said, “and ’e butted me in the stummick.”
“’Ow much reward?” asked the foreman builder.
“Five pound for the man who catches him.”
“’Ere!” cried the foreman builder in an arresting voice to the tramp. “Just stand away from that ladder....”
Whatever else Bealby might or might not be, one thing was very clear about him and that was that he was a fugitive. And the instinct of humanity is to pursue fugitives. Man is a hunting animal, enquiry into the justice of a case is an altogether later accretion to his complex nature, and that is why, whatever you are or whatever you do, you should never let people get you on the run. There is a joy in the mere fact of hunting, the sight of a scarlet coat and a hound will brighten a whole village, and now Crayminster was rousing itself like a sleeper who wakes to sunshine and gay music. People were looking out of windows and coming out of shops, a policeman appeared and heard the baker’s simple story, a brisk hatless young man in a white apron and with a pencil behind his ear became prominent. Bealby, peeping over the ridge of the roof, looked a thoroughly dirty and unpleasant little creature to all these people. The only spark of human 232sympathy for him below was in the heart of the little old woman in the cap who had given him his breakfast. She surveyed the roof of the new house from the door of her shop, she hoped Bealby wouldn’t hurt himself up there, and she held his penny change clutched in her hand in her apron pocket with a vague idea that perhaps presently if he ran past she could very quickly give it him.
§ 2
 
Considerable delay in delivering the assault on the house was caused by the foreman’s insistence that he alone should ascend the ladder to capture Bealby. He was one of those regular-featured men with large heads who seem to have inflexible backbones, he was large and fair and full with a sweetish chest voice and in all his movements authoritative and deliberate. Whenever he made to ascend he discovered that people were straying into his building, and he had to stop and direct his men how to order them off. Inside his large head he was trying to arrange everybody to cut off Bealby’s line of retreat without risking that anybody but himself should capture the fugitive. It was none too easy and it knitted his brows. Meanwhile Bealby was able to reconnoitre the adjacent properties and to conceive plans for a possible line of escape. He also got a few tiles handy against when the rush up the ladder came. At the same time two of the younger workmen were investigating the possibility of getting at him from inside the house. There was still no 233staircase, but there were ways of clambering. They had heard about the reward and they knew that they must do this before the foreman realized their purpose, and this a little retarded them. In their pockets they had a number of stones, ammunition in reserve, if it came again to throwing.
Bealby was no longer fatigued nor depressed; anxiety for the future was lost in the excitement of the present, and his heart told him that, come what might, getting on to the roof was an extraordinarily good dodge.
And if only he could bring off a certain jump he had in mind, there were other dodges—....
In the village street an informal assembly of leading citizens, a little recovered now from their first nervousness about flying tiles, discussed the problem of Bealby. There was Mumby, the draper and vegetarian, with the bass voice and the big black beard. He advocated the fire engine. He was one of the volunteer fire brigade and never so happy as when he was wearing his helmet. He had come out of his shop at the shouting. Schocks the butcher, and his boy were also in the street. Schocks’s yard, with its heap of manure and fodder, bounded the new house on the left. Rymell the vet emerged from the billiard room of the White Hart, and with his head a little on one side was watching Bealby and replying attentively to the baker, who was asking him a number of questions that struck him as irrelevant. All the White Hart people were in the street.
234“I suppose, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, “there’s a mort of dangerous things in a man’s belly round about ’is Stummick?”
“Tiles,” said Mr. Rymell. “Loose bricks. It wouldn’t do if he started dropping those.”
“I was saying, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, after a pause for digestion, “is a man likely to be injured badly by a Blaw in his stummick?”
Mr. Rymell stared at him for a moment with unresponsive eyes. “More likely to get you in the head,” he said, and then, “Here! What’s that fool of a carpenter going to do?”
The tramp was hovering on the outskirts of the group of besiegers, vindictive but dispirited. He had been brought to from his fit and given a shilling by the old gentleman, but he was dreadfully wet between his shirt—he wore a shirt, under three waistcoats and a coat—and his skin, because the old gentleman’s method of revival had been to syringe him suddenly with cold water. It had made him weep with astonishment and misery. Now he saw no advantage in claiming Bealby publicly. His part, he felt, was rather a waiting one. What he had to say to Bealby could be best said without the assistance of a third person. And he wanted to understand more of this talk about a reward. If there was a reward out for Bealby—
“That’s not a bad dodge!” said Rymell, changing his opinion of the foreman suddenly as that individual began his ascent of the ladder with a bricklayer’s hod carried shield-wise above his head. He went up with difficulty and slowly 235because of the extreme care he took to keep his head protected. But no tiles came. Bealby had discovered a more dangerous attack developing inside the house and was already in retreat down the other side of the building.
He did a leap that might have hurt him badly, taking off from the corner of the house and jumping a good twelve feet on to a big heap of straw in the butcher’s yard. He came down on all fours and felt a little jarred for an instant, and then he was up again and had scrambled up by a heap of manure to the top of the butcher’s wall. He was over that and into Maccullum’s yard next door before anyone in the front of the new house had realized that he was in flight. Then one of the two workmen who had been coming up inside the house saw him from the oblong opening that was some day to be the upstairs bedroom window, and gave tongue.
It was thirty seconds later, and after Bealby had vanished from the butcher’s wall that the foreman, still clinging to his hod, appeared over the ridge of the roof. At the workman’s shout the policeman, who with the preventive disposition of his profession, had hitherto been stopping anyone from coming into the unfinished house, turned about and ran out into its brick and plaster and timber-littered backyard, whereupon the crowd in the street realizing that the quarry had gone away and no longer restrained, came pouring partly through the house and partly round through the butcher’s gate into his yard.
Bealby had had a check.
236He had relied upon the tarred felt roof of the mushroom shed of Maccullum the tailor and breeches-maker to get him to the wall that gave upon Mr. Benshaw’s strawberry fields and he had not seen from his roof above the ramshackle glazed outhouse which Maccullum called his workroom and in which four industrious tailors were working in an easy dishabille. The roof of the shed was the merest tarred touchwood, it had perished as felt long ago, it collapsed under Bealby, he went down into a confusion of mushrooms and mushroom-bed, he blundered out trailing mushrooms and spawn and rich matter, he had a nine-foot wall to negotiate and only escaped by a hair’s-breadth from the clutch of a little red-slippered man who came dashing out from the workroom. But by a happy use of the top of the dustbin he did just get away over the wall in time, and the red-slippered tailor, who was not good at walls, was left struggling to imitate an ascent that had looked easy enough until he came to try it.
For a moment the little tailor struggled alone and then both Maccullum’s little domain and the butcher’s yard next door and the little patch of space behind the new house, were violently injected with a crowd of active people, all confusedly on the Bealby trail. Someone, he never knew who, gave the little tailor a leg-up and then his red slippers twinkled over the wall and he was leading the hunt into the market gardens of Mr. Benshaw. A collarless colleague in list slippers and conspicuous braces followed. The policeman, 237after he had completed the wreck of Mr. Maccullum’s mushroom shed, came next, and then Mr. Maccullum, with no sense of times and seasons, anxious to have a discussion at once upon the question of this damage. Mr. Maccullum was out of breath and he never got further with this projected conversation than “Here!” This he repeated several times as opportunity seemed to offer. The remaining tailors got to the top of the wall more sedately with the help of the Maccullum kitchen steps and dropped; Mr. Schocks followed, breathing hard, and then a fresh jet of humanity came squirting into the gardens through a gap in the fence at the back of the building site. This was led by the young workman who had first seen Bealby go away. Hard behind him came Rymell, the vet, the grocer’s assistant, the doctor’s page-boy and, less briskly, the baker. Then the tramp. Then Mumby and Schocks’s boy. Then a number of other people. The seeking of Bealby had assumed the dimensions of a Hue and Cry.
The foreman with the large head and the upright back was still on the new roof; he was greatly distressed at the turn things had taken and shouted his claims to a major share in the capture of Bealby, mixed with his opinions of Bealby and a good deal of mere swearing, to a sunny but unsympathetic sky....
§ 3
 
Mr. Benshaw was a small holder, a sturdy English yeoman of the new school. He was 238an Anti-Socialist, a self-helper, an independent-spirited man. He had a steadily growing banking account and a plain but sterile wife, and he was dark in complexion and so erect in his bearing as to seem a little to lean forward. Usually he wore a sort of grey gamekeeper’s suit with brown gaiters (except on Sundays when the coat was black), he was addicted to bowler hats that accorded ill with his large grave grey-coloured face, and he was altogether a very sound strong man. His bowler hats did but accentuate that. He had no time for vanities, even the vanity of dressing consistently. He went into the nearest shop and just bought the cheapest hat he could, and so he got hats designed for the youthful and giddy, hats with flighty crowns and flippant bows and amorous brims that undulated attractively to set off flushed and foolish young faces. It made his unrelenting face look rather like the Puritans under the Stuart monarchy.
He was a horticulturist rather than a farmer. He had begun his career in cheap lodgings with a field of early potatoes and cabbages, supplemented by employment, but with increased prosperity his area of cultivation had extended and his methods intensified. He now grew considerable quantities of strawberries, raspberries, celery, seakale, asparagus, early peas, late peas, and onions, and consumed more stable manure than any other cultivator within ten miles of Crayminster. He was beginning to send cut flowers to London. He had half an acre of glass and he was rapidly extending it. He had built 239himself a cottage on lines of austere economy, and a bony-looking dwelling house for some of his men. He also owned a number of useful sheds of which tar and corrugated iron were conspicuous features. His home was furnished with the utmost respectability, and notably joyless even in a countryside where gaiety is regarded as an impossible quality in furniture. He was already in a small local way a mortgagee. Good fortune had not turned the head of Mr. Benshaw nor robbed him of the feeling that he was a particularly deserving person, entitled to a preferential treatment from a country which in his plain unsparing way he felt that he enriched.
In many ways he thought that the country was careless of his needs. And in none more careless than in the laws relating to trespass. Across his dominions ran three footpaths, and one of these led to the public elementary school. That he should have to maintain this latter—and if he did not keep it in good order the children spread out and made parallel tracks among his cultivations—seemed to him a thing almost intolerably unjust. He mended it with cinders, acetylene refuse, which he believed and hoped to be thoroughly bad for boots, and a peculiarly slimy chalky clay, and he put on a board at each end “Keep to the footpaths, Trespassers will be prosecuted, by Order,” which he painted himself to save expense when he was confined indoors by the influenza. Still more unjust it would be, he felt, for him to spend money upon effective fencing, and he could find no fencing cheap enough 240and ugly enough and painful enough and impossible enough to express his feelings in the matter. Every day the children streamed to and fro, marking how his fruits ripened and his produce became more esculent. And other people pursued these tracks; many, Mr. Benshaw was convinced, went to and fro through his orderly crops who had no business whatever, no honest business, to pass that way. Either, he concluded, they did it to annoy him, or they did it to injure him. This continual invasion aroused in Mr. Benshaw all that stern anger against unrighteousness latent in our race which more than any other single force has made America and the Empire what they are to-day. Once already he had been robbed—a raid upon his raspberries—and he felt convinced that at any time he might be robbed again. He had made representations to the local authority to get the footpath closed, but in vain. They defended themselves with the paltry excuse that the children would then have to go nearly a mile round to the school.
It was not only the tyranny of these footpaths that offended Mr. Benshaw’s highly developed sense of Individual Liberty. All round his rather straggling dominions his neighbours displayed an ungenerous indisposition to maintain their fences to his satisfaction. In one or two places, in abandonment of his clear rights in the matter, he had, at his own expense, supplemented these lax defences with light barbed wire defences. But it was not a very satisfactory sort of barbed wire. He wanted barbed wire with extra spurs like a fighting 241cock; he wanted barbed wire that would start out after nightfall and attack passers-by. This boundary trouble was universal; in a way it was worse than the footpaths which after all only affected the Cage Fields where his strawberries grew. Except for the yard and garden walls of Maccullum and Schocks and that side, there was not really a satisfactory foot of enclosure all round Mr. Benshaw. On the one side rats and people’s dogs and scratching cats came in, on the other side rabbits. The rabbits were intolerable and recently there had been a rise of nearly thirty per cent in the price of wire netting.
Mr. Benshaw wanted to hurt rabbits; he did not want simply to kill them, he wanted so to kill them as to put the fear of death into the burrows. He wanted to kill them so that scared little furry survivors with their tails as white as ghosts would go lolloping home and say, “I say, you chaps, we’d better shift out of this. We’re up against a Strong Determined Man....”
I have made this lengthy statement of Mr. Benshaw’s economic and moral difficulties in order that the reader should understand the peculiar tension that already existed upon this side of Crayminster. It has been necessary to do so now because in a few seconds there will be no further opportunity for such preparations.
There had been trouble, I may add very hastily, about the shooting of Mr. Benshaw’s gun; a shower of small shot had fallen out of the twilight upon the umbrella and basket of old Mrs. Frobisher. And only a week ago an unsympathetic 242bench after a hearing of over an hour and in the face of overwhelming evidence had refused to convict little Lucy Mumby, aged eleven, of stealing fruit from Mr. Benshaw’s fields. She had been caught red-handed....
At the very moment that Bealby was butting the baker in the stomach, Mr. Benshaw was just emerging from his austere cottage after a wholesome but inexpensive high tea in which he had finished up two left-over cold sausages, and he was considering very deeply the financial side of a furious black fence that he had at last decided should pen in the school children from further depredations. It should be of splintery tarred deal, and high, with well-pointed tops studded with sharp nails, and he believed that by making the path only two feet wide, a real saving of ground for cultivation might be made and a very considerable discomfort for the public arranged, to compensate for his initial expense. The thought of a narrow lane which would in winter be characterized by an excessive slimness and from which there would be no lateral escape was pleasing to a mind by no means absolutely restricted to considerations of pounds, shillings and pence. In his hand after his custom he carried a hoe, on the handle of which feet were marked, so that it was available not only for destroying the casual weed but also for purposes of measurement. With this he now checked his estimate and found that here he would reclaim as much as three feet of trodden waste, here a full two.
Absorbed in these calculations, he heeded little 243the growth of a certain clamour from the backs of the houses bordering on the High Street. It did not appear to concern him and Mr. Benshaw made it almost ostentatiously his rule to mind his own business. His eyes remained fixed on the lumpy, dusty, sunbaked track, that with an intelligent foresight he saw already transformed into a deterrent slough of despond for the young....
Then quite suddenly the shouting took on a new note. He glanced over his shoulder almost involuntarily and discovered that after all this uproar was his business. Amazingly his business. His mouth assumed a Cromwellian fierceness. His grip tightened on his hoe. That anyone should dare! But it was impossible!
His dominions were being invaded with a peculiar boldness and violence.
Ahead of everyone else and running with wild wavings of the arms across his strawberries was a small and very dirty little boy. He impressed Mr. Benshaw merely as a pioneer. Some thirty yards behind him was a little collarless, short-sleeved man in red slippers running with great effrontery and behind him another still more denuded lunatic, also in list slippers and with braces—braces of inconceivable levity. And then Wiggs, the policeman, hotly followed by Mr. Maccullum. Then more distraught tailors and Schocks the butcher. But a louder shout heralded the main attack, and Mr. Benshaw turned his eyes—already they were slightly blood-shot eyes—to the right, and saw, pouring through the broken hedge, a disorderly crowd, Rymell whom 244he had counted his friend, the grocer’s assistant, the doctor’s boy, some strangers—Mumby!
At the sight of Mumby, Mr. Benshaw leapt at a conclusion. He saw it all. The whole place was rising against him; they were asserting some infer............