sight of it. Satisfied?”
“Mmmm, I suppose so. You know, it’s so easy to say things like Cooke was saying, but it isn’t true. All kinds of fellows had to fight, thousands and thousands of them, but they were still just as much all kinds in the end, weren’t they? I think it may have got easier for some, and harder and harder for others. And anyhow, you can’t just lump people all together, like that.” He flushed a little, meeting George’s smile. “Sorry I swore! I was upset.”
“That’s all right. Going out again now?”
“Yes, I came to tell Mummy I might be a bit late, but I shall only be at the Harts’. Mr. Hart is picking the late apples, and they want to finish tonight, so a few extra hands—” For whom, thought George, there would be ample wages in kind at the end of the picking, even if they came only half an hour before the daylight began to fail.
“All right, I’ll tell her. You cut along.” And he watched him spring gaily through the door without a glance at Cooke, with whom he was still seriously annoyed.
An odd, loyal, disturbing, reassuring kid, sharp and sensitive to currents of thought and qualities of character. If he didn’t like Chad Wedderburn “all that much,” very decidedly he liked him in some degree, and that in itself was an argument. But the weakness of the evidence of a man’s own mouth is that it often has two edges. Fighting never settles anything, cannot be right short of a life-and-death matter. But a man must and should be his own judge of what is and what is not a matter of life and death, because that is ultimately an issue he cannot delegate to any other creature. And having reached that stage of maturity, he must realize that in any society—because societies, state or school or church, exist to curb all the nonconforming into conformity—he must pay for the privilege. So far, if he had perfectly understood him, Chad Wedderburn.
Even Cooke was thinking along the same lines. He looked after Dominic with an indulgent smile, and said appreciatively: “Well, I hope the folks who don’t like
George said nothing. It could follow, but it need not follow, that was the devil of it. Only something else echoed ominously in his mind, the hot, reiterated note of Chad’s revulsion from bloodshed, genuine, yes, too terribly genuine, but was it perhaps pitched in an unnatural key? Did it not sometimes sound like the prayers of a man’s mind for deliverance from his own body? Might not a man thus passionately denounce what he feared most of all in himself? A man who was wise enough and deep enough to dread his own facility in destruction, an adept whose skill terrified him. And then the last remote, unexpected case, argued over and over in the mind, where this dreaded efficiency in killing, held so fiercely in restraint, began to look once more legitimate, began to argue its right to a gesture almost of virtue.
“Call your own tune, pay your own piper!” said Constable Cooke, brightly. “Some merely get hammered, some get hanged. It’s a matter for the individual whether he finds it worthwhile!”
VII—Treasure in the Mud
One
« ^ »
Pussy and Dominic were in the loft over the stables at the Shock of Hay, in the warm, clean, high roof, smelling of straw and fruit; they were polishing and wrapping the biggest, soundest apples for keeping until the spring, and laying them out on wooden trays slatted to let the air through. The picking was already done, and the great unsorted baskets of fruit lay below them in the horseless stables, keeping company with the car, and the lawn-mower, and all the garden tools. From time to time Dominic slid himself and his basket down through the trapdoor by the shaky stairs, and selected the finest to haul back with him into the loft. They were working so hard that they forgot to eat, and neglected to light their lantern until the light was almost gone. It was middle evening, the sky outside suddenly clouded, the air heavy as a sad cake.
The end of the long drought came in a puff of air and a thudding of heavy drops down the roof. When the thunder had spent itself the sweet green night would smell heavenly of fresh foliage; but first the noise and the downpour, the ominous drumroll of the earliest scud, and then the clouds opening, and the crashing, splattering fall.
Somebody caught in the garden, where the benches circled the chestnut tree, gave a squeak of protest and ran headlong for the stable door. The two above heard the door crash back to the wall before a precipitate entry, and a gasping laugh, and quick breathing. Sounds came up to them with a strange, dark clarity, cupped and shielded and redoubled in the arch of the roof-beams. They went on peaceably wrapping, intent on finishing their job and earning their wages. Kneeling in the straw by the low shelves, they themselves made no sound.
A second person running, a sudden foot at the brick threshold, and a perceptible check. The rain streamed coolly, wildly, over the tiles of the roof, giving the voice from below a brook’s moving but monotonous sound.
“Oh, it’s you! I’m sorry—I’ll go!” And he actually turned to go, his heel harsh on the gravel. Dominic and Pussy heard, and knew Chad Wedderburn’s voice, but it hovered only in the borders of their consciousness, so occupied were they with their apples.
And the other one was Io, and Io instant in exasperation, bursting out after him angrily: “Come
The slightest of scuffles indicated that she had proceeded beyond words, and unceremoniously hauled him back into shelter. They stood gasping, and shaking and slapping the rain from their clothes, and he said in a harsh, constrained voice: “Aren’t you afraid you might take it from me?” But he made no second attempt to leave her. She must have looked formidably angry.
“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you even act naturally for ten minutes, till the rain stops? Am I diseased, or something, that you take one look at me and run for your life? Don’t be afraid, I’m going back to the house as soon as I can get there without being drowned on the way. You won’t be bothered with me a minute longer than I can help.”
Shrinking away from her in the shadows within the door, he stood drawn into himself hard, and said nothing; and in the moment of silence Dominic and Pussy looked at each other guiltily, stirred back from a world of nothing but apples to a situation they had not foreseen. In the greenish, watery gloom under the skylight, with the refractions of rain flowing across their faces like the deeps of the sea, they stared stilly at each other, and wondered silently what they ought to do. It was now or never. In the first minute you can cough loudly, or drop a tray, or kick over the watering-can, or burst into song, but after that it’s too horribly obvious. And if the first minute passes and is away before you can clutch at it, there is absolutely nothing to be done except hold your breath, and pretend you are not there. To be sure, in other circumstances they would have nudged each other, and giggled, and
