The throw was strong and astray, perhaps with the injured weight of his unfinished homework behind it, and Pussy’s hands were wet. It sailed through her grabbing fingers, and flew over the top of the well, to vanish soundlessly down the dimpled slope below.
“In the brook, probably,” she said, giving him a hard, considering look. “Now you can jolly well go and find it—or buy me another, which you like.”
“If you weren’t such a muff—” he grumbled, nevertheless climbing docilely to his feet.
“If you could throw straight, you mean!”
Dominic went over the crest, and began to trot down the slope from path to path toward the watery hollow, looking about him on the ground. When Pussy looked over the roof of the well again he was down among the tree shadows, looking before him into the water, and paying no attention to her. She called impatiently: “It can’t have gone as far as that!”
Dominic turned his head and looked back with a start. His eyes seemed very big in the shadows, his face suddenly and rather unwillingly serious. “No, it’s all right, I’ve got it. It’s only—wait a minute!”
He went nearer to the stormy clay sea, with the two or three murmuring tides still flowing through it in deep channels, green with the reflected green of the overhanging trees. She saw him leaning forward, peering; then, as she began to follow him down the slope, he turned and came back at a stumbling run to meet her, crying as he came, in a peremptory tone which made her hackles rise at once: “Don’t come! I’m coming now! I’ve got it!” As if she cared about the comb, when her thumbs had pricked at the wide light gleam of his eyes, and his face so white that the freckles looked almost vermilion by contrast. But when he reached her he caught her by the wrist, and turned her about quite roughly, and hustled her back up the slope with him, tugging and furious.
“What is it? What on earth do you think you’re doing, Dom Felse? Let me go! Do you want a clip in the ear?”
But she was only angry as he was masterful, by reversion from some other emotion not at all understood. She wrenched at her wrist, and at his fingers which held it, and panted: “What did you see down there? Loose my arm! I’m going to look what it was.”
“No!” said Dominic, with quite unexpected violence. “You’re not to! I’ll hit you if you try it!” But before he had dragged her a dozen yards past the well on the homeward path his pallor became suddenly green, his knees quaked, and he leaned helplessly into the long grass and lost all interest in Pussy. She did not wait to hold his forehead, but with a ruthless singleness of mind flew back to bound down the hill like a chamois, and probe the depths where he had seen whatever it was he had seen. Between sympathy and curiosity Pussy plumped for curiosity, though she would not be the first cat it had killed. Dominic, for the moment, was too busy being sick to observe that she had deserted and disobeyed him, and in the circumstances he would not, in any event, have expected anything else. Only in extremity would he have thought of giving orders to Pussy.
By the time he had recovered sufficiently to see and hear again, she was just coming back, at a rather automatic walk, and half her face was a green, scared shining of eyes.
“You would go!” said Dominic with pallid satisfaction.
“Anyhow,” said Pussy, equally malevolent and equally shaken, “I wasn’t sick!”
“I’m sick easily. It’s a ph-physical reaction.”
Pussy sat down in the grass beside him, because her own knees were none too steady. She sat hugging her hands together in her lap, while they looked at each other forlornly, but with the dawning of a steadying excitement deep in their eyes. When you have something to do in an emergency, you are not sick, and you forget to be frightened.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Pussy.
“Yes.” Saying it made it at once more normal; after all, it is normal, there are funerals every week in almost every village, and you hear your parents talking about this one and that one who has died. Not always old, either, and not always naturally. And then, books and films have made the thing a commonplace, even if parents do frown upon that kind of film and that kind of novel. It only takes a bit of getting used to when you suddenly fall over the thing itself in a corner of your own home woods. “Did you see who it was?”
She shook her head, ashamed to admit that she had not waited to look closely, but on recognition of a man’s body in the nearer channel of the brook had turned and run for her life.
“It’s that German fellow—Helmut Schauffler.” His voice quavered hollowly upon the words, for giving the body a name somehow brought the issues of life and death right to his own doorstep.
“He must have fallen in,” said Pussy strenuously, “or fainted, or something.”
“No, he—no, I’m sure he didn’t. What would he be doing down there, leaning over the water, if he felt faint? And besides—” But his voice faded quite away before the details could come tumbling out.
“What have we got to do?” asked Pussy, for once glad to lean on him for guidance; and she drew a little nearer in the grass, to feel the warmth of his shoulder near her, in the sudden chill which was not altogether the fruit of the falling evening. She began to shiver, and to be aware that she was wet and cold.
“We’ve got to get my father here at once. One of us ought to stay here, I think—I’m almost sure—to make sure nothing’s disturbed until he comes.”
“But there’s no one to disturb anything,” protested Pussy, thinking of the long run home alone, or, far worse, the long, chilly wait here in this suddenly unpleasing place.
“No, but there might be before he came. Anyhow, I shall stay here. You go and get Dad—please, Puss, don’t argue this time, do go! You can run, it’s all downhill, nearly, and you’ll get warm if you run. Will you?”
And she did not argue, nor complain, nor tell him frankly that he was no boss of hers, nor do any of the things which might have been expected of her, but with exemplary sweetness suddenly smiled at him, and jumped to her feet.
“He’ll still be lecturing, but you’ll have to interrupt. He won’t care, when he knows why. But don’t let anybody shush you and make you wait, promise!”
She could give him that assurance with goodwill; and indeed, the curative effect of having something definite and essential to do in the matter had brought back the color to her cheeks and the flash to her green eyes. Even the
