Fallen Into the Pit

across the mounts, well, it isn’t really so astonishing as it seems,” said Bunty reasonably.

“Not when you come to weigh up everything, perhaps. But it’s confoundedly inconvenient. Here we’ve got Wedderburn going off in the sulks to walk off a slight load before he goes home to his mother. And Jim Tugg wandering home by devious ways, alone but for his dog—but I grant you, there’s nothing new about that, Jim likes his dog’s company far better than most men’s. And Hollins stalking Helmut, by his own confession, with intent to knock hell out of him at the very least, and then taking his disordered fancy for a walk until the agitation set up by the thought of murder had passed—”

“And Mrs. Hollins,” said Bunty very soberly, “at home by herself all this time, shut up with the thought of Helmut. Nobody to take her mind off it, nobody to see what she did, nobody even to tell us whether she was really there or not.”

George looked through the detestable smoke of his unthrifty crop at her, and found her looking very solemn and rather pale under the ruffled red hair. Awfully like the shivering but acute waif, so pale, so important, so large and scared of eye, who had met him on the clay-flats by the shrunken brook, standing over the blond head of Helmut.

“You don’t really think, do you, that she might have done it?”

“I think I might,” said Bunty, “in her place. Especially if I had reason to think that you might be thinking of doing it for me. She had a background of desperation. I don’t mean it came naturally to her, but her scope had been rather forcibly widened, you see. And she had, if we come to it in earnest, the finest motive you could wish to see.”

“But the fact that her mind was used to dealing with these awful things would also mean that it was trained and equipped to resist them. I mean, she could not only seriously consider murder, after all she’d experienced—she could effectively reject it, too. I’m not satisfied that it’s the strongest motive we have to look for. People of insignificant balance kill for insignificant things—sometimes almost lightly. And we haven’t quoted the tenth part of Helmut’s enemies. There are dozens of them, more trivial ones but real ones, round this village unaccounted for. There’s at least one good union man who began the ideological feud with him long before young Fleetwood ever opened his mouth. And plenty of others, too. And there’s something about this whole affair that makes me feel it never was planned. It came out of nowhere, out of some man’s mind through his hands so fast he never had time to stop it or even see what it was, until it was done. That’s how it feels to me.”

“It could still have been a woman,” said Bunty, “even that way.”

“It could. Women have murderous impulses, too. But wouldn’t a woman have been—more disastrously subtle about it, afterwards? I don’t know. This was so short and simple. No messy attempts to cover up, but a clean walk-out.”

“And no weapon,” said Bunty, biting her underlip. “I suppose the revolver didn’t show any sign?”

“Not a mark. Nobody’s head was beaten in with the butt of that gun recently, that’s certain.”

“If only,” burst out Bunty, speaking for Comerford with authentic passion, “if only it weren’t for all the people whose lives are being bent out of shape now, I’d pray like anything that nobody’d ever solve it. But it’s the village that’s being murdered, not Helmut. Oh, George, isn’t there any way out of it?”

“Only one. Straight ahead and out the other side—one man short or one woman short,” said George, “whichever it turns out to be. And the sooner the better, for everybody concerned!”

VI—Feathers in the Wind

One

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It was odd how all the games which came into season with the autumn, the ranging games which can extend over a whole square half-mile of country, had gravitated this year toward Webster’s well, which sat, as it were, in the midst of a charmed circle of play. The younger boys evacuated their gangs from the village into this particular wilderness out of all the circle of pit-mounds open to them, and files of Indians moved up the shadowed side of the high field hedge there, while the hollows of birch saplings scattered in the clay wastes began to heave with commandos. There had always been cycles of fashion in playgrounds, of course, and usually for the most unsuitable reasons. Once for a whole autumn the favorite place had been the ruined engine-house on the brambly, naked mounds near the station. An elderly man of none too sound mind had been found hanged there, and horrid fascination had drawn all the boys and many of the bolder girls to haunt it for months after, especially at the shadowy hour between evening and night, when it was most terrifying, and lingering there repaid terror well-concealed with the most enviable kudos. Another year a farmer’s horse, grazed in a field with a brook at the bottom, got itself bogged to the neck during the night, and had to be rescued by the inevitable and long-suffering fire-brigade, whose entire working life, in these parts, appeared to be spent in fetching kittens down from telegraph poles, or dogs out of pit-shafts. The rescue lasted all day, and a crowd large enough for a fair-ground had gathered to witness the end of it; after which the marshy corner had become haunted ground for at least a month, and all the mothers of Comerford had more than usually muddy children.

But this year it was Webster’s well. Webster’s well and the mounts round it had no rival. Even the older children, past the stage of pretend games, took their elaborate versions of hide-and-seek up there to play. Pussy had a splendid variation of her own, which involved dusk, and pocket torches, and therefore could only be played in the end of daylight, which meant at the extremest end of a thirteen-year-old’s evening, until summertime ended, later in October. Usually they wound up the fine evenings with a bout of it, before they went home to bed. Pussy was trailing a gang at the time. She had her solitary periods and her periods of communal activity, and Dominic, largely independent of his company though willing to cooperate with any numbers, acquiesced in her moods but retained to himself, formidably and irrevocably, the right to secede. He didn’t care how many people she collected about her, if the result continued to entertain him; but if they proved boring, and began to waste too much time in argument and wrangling, he was off. Life, even at thirteen, was too short for inaction.

It was growing dark on this particular early October evening, with the silvery darkness of autumnal, clear nights when frosts have not yet begun. The occasional reports of guns in the preserves had already become so snugly familiar that they fell into the silence almost as softly as drops of dew from the trees. They sounded warm when the warmth of the day ended, prolonging activity long into the inactive hours like an echo; and now with dusk they chimed once or twice more, and ceased upon a stillness. The earth sighed, stretched and relaxed, composing itself for sleep.

At this point even the games grew stealthier, brigandage molten into witchcraft. The fat child with the gym tunic, and the sandy-haired boy with glasses, who were hunters for the occasion, sat in the grass close beside Webster’s well, counting up to two hundred in leisurely, methodical whispers, no longer shouting out the numbers belligerently as by daylight. The flock scattered into the waste woods voiceless and soft of foot. Pussy and Dominic