The Grotesque

the flames beneath have warmed their bones. There is a way, I have come to believe, that a structure, in time, becomes immanent with the spirit of its residents, and to this also I may have been responding when I gazed at the chimneypiece that morning. Strange sentiments for a scientist, you say. But as I think is becoming clear, I was by this time losing my grip on the sternly empirico-mechanist view of Nature to which I had for years been faithful.

Well, as I gazed at the chimneypiece, at the coat-of-arms and, below it, our motto, something totally unexpected occurred. Something stirred within me, and I felt a brief surge of exaltation. Those immortal words over the fireplace, you see, reminded me that I was a Coal, and that I would not be bested by a servant. Completely unwittingly, Fledge had provided me the one single stimulus that was guaranteed to brace and hearten me—and for the first time since the accident I felt the spirit move within me. Perhaps, indeed, I suddenly thought, there really was no reason to despair. From what I had heard in the hospital, the doctors had no confidence in my ever regaining the use of my body, but I decided, there and then, to hope all the same, and within the fossil of my frozen frame something took fire and blazed.

Yes, coming back to Crook revived and reinvigorated me, and so it was, after all, a sort of triumph. As I think back on it now, I remember being shocked at first at the racket my wheelchair made on the old wooden floorboards, how it had rumbled and thundered down the hall, me at the helm with my prowlike nose jutting forward and my old claws clamped on the arms of the thing; but I remember too how, after a moment or so, the shock had been replaced by a grim delight that my progress about my house would be such a noisy business, that my movement would be signaled so loudly and emphatically to all within earshot by this thunder of wheels on boards. Then, too, I was in my tweeds again. I had shrunk in hospital, they were ill-fitting now, but they were my tweeds, my hairy tweeds, with leather patches on the elbows and thick flaps on the pockets so that nothing could fall out. It was a suit that had been made for me by a firm of London tailors who catered exclusively to the country gentleman, and who had dressed my father, and his father before him. (They have since gone out of business, sadly.) But all these things helped to revive me from that awful torpor to which my month in hell had reduced me. And while not a hint, not a flicker, of any of this was apparent in my posture or expression, there was, within, a sort of life-affirming celebration under way. Nil desperandum, Hugo, I told myself, nil desperandum, old chap.

Oh good God, I’ve drifted far ahead of myself. My chronology is all skewed again. Where am I?

George Lecky had gone into the Ceck Marsh, and Limp’s men had been unable to find him. Nothing strange about this; George had lived close to the marsh for twenty-five years, ever since I’d brought him back from Africa with me, and he probably knew that drear tract better than any man in Berkshire, with the exception of old John Crowthorne. So it would not have been hard for him to evade the constabulary out there. But I was not surprised when, three days later, he appeared in my barn. Actually I’d been expecting him—who else would he go to but his old African comrade?

I was sitting in my wicker chair, gazing at Phlegmosaurus, when I became aware of movement in the roof. I looked up; he was standing at the top of the staircase to the loft, his head bathed in a pool of wintry sunlight from the little window in the gable behind him, so that his features were entirely masked by shadow. For a moment neither of us spoke, neither of us moved. It was an important moment, a sort of test. I did not hesitate. Rising from my chair, and extending my arms upward toward him, I cried: “Well good God man, come down. You must be starving!”

I embraced my old comrade warmly, despite the smell. A man who has been living rough in the Ceck Marsh for several days is not in pleasant condition. His jacket and trousers were filthy with mud, still damp on the seat and cuffs, sticks of straw and other plant matter clinging to them. He was bareheaded, unshaven, and foul of breath, and from his features had disappeared that habitually stoic and tranquil expression, replaced now by watchfulness, nervousness, and fear. He had a hunted look. I sat him in the wicker chair and gave him some scotch. He took a swallow, then pulled back his lips from his teeth and briefly rubbed his scalp and then his eyes. He drank more whisky. I could sense it heating and reviving him. I gave him a few minutes to compose himself. Should I go to the house for food? No, not yet, he wanted to talk first. He finished the whisky and bent his body forward in the chair, his palms on his knees and his elbows sticking out, his arms thus forming a pair of rigid buttresses to his tense, exhausted frame. He gazed at the floor of the barn and took a series of deep breaths. “So George,” I said at last, “what’s going on?”

Have I spoken to you of the unreliability of memory? Retrospection does yield order, no doubt about that, but I wonder if this order isn’t perhaps achieved solely as a function of the remembering mind, which of its very nature tends to yield order. I say this only because the conversation that follows occurred a long time ago, and much has happened in the interim. But the spirit of that conversation—this I think I have captured, and this is the important thing.

George shook his head. His hand kept going to his neck, where he rubbed it hard against an angry rash, the result of contact with some virulent piece of vegetation out in the marsh, I presume. Clearly the thing itched badly, and I made a mental note to bring ointment with me from the house. Still staring at the floor he began to speak; and he surprised me, for it was John Crowthorne he spoke about, he was abusing the man, calling him an old fool— it had occurred to me that old John might play a part in all this, but I hadn’t pursued it very far. George spoke with a low, halting cadence; then up came his head, and he glared at me with an angry but pathetically futile passion, the passion of a man who knows his predicament is intractable and hopeless.

“But what about old John?” I coaxed him. In the silence that followed we could both distinctly hear a rat scuffling through the hay at the far end of the barn. “I give him the lorry,” said George at last, dropping his eyes to the floor, “and he takes it round the back of the marsh.” I nodded; old John used George’s swill lorry for his more far-ranging nocturnal poaching expeditions, this I knew well. “I didn’t hear him when he come back, but something woke me in the night so I go to the window, and there’s a light in the shed. Well, I open the window and I hear it.”

Another silence. “Hear what, George?” I said softly. I gave him more scotch.

He rubbed his neck. “Someone chopping in there. I could hear someone chopping in there. So I go down.”

I nodded again; when George mentioned the shed, it was his slaughterhouse he was referring to. “I go down,” he said. His voice had become blank of emotion, hollow, as though unable to admit to comprehension of what he was saying. “I go down,” he repeated. “I can hear him in there as I cross the yard; he’s chopping something. ‘That you, John?’ I say, when I’m at the door. He’s at the back and he’s chopping something up. He turns round, grinning at me like a bloody monkey.”

George fell silent again. His eyes were wide as he stared at the floor. “He didn’t know who it was,” he muttered, and a terrible understanding dawned upon me, and as George stared at the floor the barn seemed to grow suddenly very dark, and in my own mind I could hear that terrible chopping in the night, the terrible chopping that woke George from sleep, and I could see old John grinning in the gloom of the shed as he chopped up what he’d found out on the marsh. “He didn’t know who it was,” whispered George, and there was horror in his voice. “He found him out on the marsh in a sack, and since it weren’t a local man, he says to himself I’ll let the pigs have him.” Silence again; George dropped his head, set his elbows on his knees, and again rubbed his neck. “I took the chopper from him,” he muttered, “but it was too late.”

“Too late?”

Another long pause. George didn’t answer; it hardly mattered, I’d guessed his meaning. “I wanted to knock him down, I was that furious,” he muttered. His voice had a faraway sound to it now, as though it came from the end of a very long tunnel. “Wouldn’t have done no good.” Another silence; the crow stirred in the rafters overhead, then flapped noisily to another perch a few feet higher in the roof. I rose from my chair and again paced the barn; I was now all too clear about what had happened. Just as I’d speculated on Christmas night, someone had disturbed Fledge out on the marsh, and found Sidney’s body in a sack. That someone was old John Crowthorne. “Just had to finish the job,” George murmured, a little later, “that’s all there was to it.” Then he looked up and said in a clear, firm voice: “It was old John buried the bones, when the pigs was done. Didn’t do a very good job of it, eh? Eh?” George laughed, a terrible laugh, hopeless and black. “Made a bloody awful job of it, didn’t he? Oh good Christ”— and he clenched his fists tight, closed his eyes, and pulled back the lips from his teeth in that terrible grimace. A single harsh screech came from the rafters, and again the clumsy flap of wings.