Fallen Into the Pit

scrambled across the ridges of clay and went up the terraced slope beyond on hands and knees, for it was steep, and it does not take long to count to two hundred. Through the hedge at the top, by enlarged dog-holes which no one bothered to repair, and headlong into a wilderness of furze and birch saplings, tunneling like rabbits among the spiny places, slithering like lizards through the silvery, slippery leaves.

“Where shall we go?” asked Pussy in Dominic’s ear; and at this eerie hour even Pussy whispered.

It was the tail-end of the evening’s play, and they had almost exhausted the charms of every ordinary hiding- place. At this hungry and thirsty and yearning hour, with the uneasiness of the dark and the inevitability of bedtime clutching at them, something more was needed than the spidery tunnels of the furze and broom, and the clay hollows of elders and watery pits of willow, full of lean shadows. Rustlings and whisperings and tremors quivered across the vanishing face of the waste land after the feet of their companions. The pit mounds inhaled with one great sigh, and the children were swallowed up. And Pussy and Dominic, straight as arrows, restless, wanting something more, set their course directly upward from the well across the ribbon of wilderness, and fetched up breathlessly under the pale fence of the Harrow preserve, looking into a sweet, warm, olive-green darkness within.

Dominic panted: “I never thought it was quite so near.” He shook the pales, and looked along the fence, and saw nothing on his side but the same thickets in which he had already buried himself grubbily half a dozen times this same evening.

“Where shall we go?” repeated Pussy. “Quick, they’ll be coming, if you don’t make up your mind.”

But he had made up his mind already. It might not have happened, if the pale had not been broken out of its place, rotted away with its top still dangling in the circle of wire. Only fifty yards along the fence there was a gate, and with no wire atop, either, and a path ran tidily away from it into the dark of the plantation, heading for the Harrow farm; but the gate would not have charmed him, because it was a right of way, whereas this was a way to which he had no right. And all the guns had ceased now, and the darkness had a hush upon it as if the wood held its breath to see if he would really come. He slid one leg through. The pale behind him gave unexpectedly, swinging aside to widen the gap as his negligible hip struck it. He didn’t even have to wriggle.

“You’ll catch it,” said Pussy practically, “if anyone comes.”

“Who’s going to come, at this time of night? Come on— unless you’re scared!”

But though she put the case against it, she was already sliding through the gap after him. Her head butted him in the side smartly. He tugged her through and away into the warm grassless deeps of the trees. “Come on! I can hear Sandy moving off. You take an age!—and the gap’s big enough for a man.”

Pussy said giggling: “Who d’you suppose made it? I never knew about it before, did you?”

“No, but I’ll bet there are dozens like it. Poachers, of course! Who d’you think would make quick ways out, if it wasn’t poachers?”

“Dope, I meant which poachers! Because I know several of the special ways that belong to special people, so there!”

“Oh, yes, they’d be sure to tell you!” said Dominic, unkindly and unwisely.

“I keep my ears open. You ought to try it some time! I could draw you maps—”

They crashed suddenly a little downhill, slithering in the thin, shiny coating of pine-needles, blind, wrapped in a scented, sudden, womblike darkness. They were not accustomed yet to the black of it, and Dominic, treading light and quick upon the light, quickening heels of his intuition, suddenly checked and felt ahead cautiously with one toe, putting out a hand to hold Pussy back as she made to pass him.

“Look out, there’s a hole!”

“I can’t see a thing,” she said blithely, leaning forward hard against the pluck of his arm.

“Shine the light! You’ve got it.”

“But they’ll see it. We don’t want to show it till we have to.”

“They won’t see it from here, if you keep it this way on the ground. Be quick!”

Clawing it indifferently out of the leg of her school knickers, she felt for the button of the pencil-slim torch, the button which always stuck, and had to be humored. “Besides, I’m not sure we’re not cheating, coming in here. They’ll take it for granted it’s out of bounds beyond the fence. Nobody ever does come in here.”

“Well, there’s never been anything to stop ’em. We never said it was out of bounds. And anyhow, when we have to shine the torch they’ll know.”

“I don’t believe the silly torch intends to be shone. I can’t get it on.” She shook it, and it made a ferocious rattling, but no light. “Maybe the bulb’s gone. And if old Blunden comes along and hears us in here there’s going to be trouble.”

“Well, why did you come, if you’re scared? I never made you! And I don’t believe old Blunden would be so very fierce, either; he’s always quite decent about things, if you ask me.”

“Not people with torches in among his pheasants at night,” said Pussy positively.

“Well, we haven’t got what I’d call a torch—”

But they had. The button sprang coyly away under her finger at that precious moment, and a wavering wand of light sailed out ahead of them and plucked slender young tree-trunks vibrating out of the dark like harp-strings, with a suddenness which sang. They saw each other’s eyes brilliant and large as the eyes of owls in the night, as the eyes of cows encountered unexpectedly nose to nose when short-cutting by gaps in the hedges. Their hearts knocked hard, for no good reason except the reminder of the combat of light and dark, before they even saw the chasm yawning under their toes. Then Pussy squeaked, and scuffled backwards and brought them both down in the pine-needles.

But it wasn’t the abyss it had seemed at first glance. Dominic took the torch from her, and crawled forward on his knees to shine it into the hole, and the plunging hell of dark dwindled into a pocketful of dingy, cobwebby shadows. A filled-in pit-shaft, narrow among the trees, but still thrusting them a little aside to make room for it. Gray clay slopes breaking barrenly through poor grass and silt of needles, like a beggar’s sides through his tattered shirt; a few bricks from the shaft beaten into the composite of clay and earth, showing fragmentarily red among the gray and green. The place had been leveled, long before the trees were planted, but the earth’s hungry empty places underneath had not been nearly satisfied, and now the inevitable shifting fall had made once again a pit, ten