Fallen Into the Pit

“No, no, please! This is frightfully urgent, don’t make me go until I’ve told you. You see, I saw him! Last night, at the stile! He gave me a half-crown—it’s in my pocket, Mummy must have found it.” Odd, excited tears, such as he had not experienced by Helmut’s body, came glittering uncertainly into his eyes now, and his voice wouldn’t keep steady. Disgusted and distressed, he clung to George, who was solid and large, and held him firmly. “It’s awful, isn’t it? It didn’t seem to matter so much when it was somebody I didn’t know much, and nobody liked. But Mr. Blunden—I was talking to him last night. I think I must have been the last person who talked to him, except— you know—if somebody killed him, the somebody. He gave me half a crown,” said Dominic, with trembling lips. “He was pleased with himself, and everything. I’m sure he didn’t do it himself, not on purpose. Oh, I don’t want his half-crown now, I wish he hadn’t given it to me—”

George drew him round to sit on the bed beside him, and shut him in with a large, possessive arm, and didn’t try to hurry him, or even to keep him to the point. School could wait. Indeed, if this meant what it appeared to mean, Dominic would be occupied with other matters than school for most of the morning, and if he seemed in a fit state to benefit by a return to normality he could easily go in the afternoon. Meantime, he leaned thankfully into George’s side, and shook a little at intervals, but with diminishing violence.

“Why shouldn’t he give it to you?” said George reasonably. “And why shouldn’t you spend it? He wanted you to have it, didn’t he? He’d be a bit hurt, wouldn’t he, if he knew you’d let it be spoiled for you. What did he say when he gave it to you?”

“He said: ‘Go and celebrate for me.’ And when I thanked him, he said: ‘That’s all right. Buy your girl a choc- ice.’ ”

“Then that’s what you do, and don’t disappoint him. You don’t have to tell Puss where the money came from, that’s just between you and him, and none of her business.”

“I suppose not.” His voice sounded a little soothed. “I’d better tell you about it, hadn’t I? I wish I’d had my watch, because I can’t be quite sure about all the times. Only I know I started from the green as soon as the bus had gone, and it was on time, and that’s five minutes to seven.”

“Well, that’s a good start. You went up the lane to the quarry, did you? That’s the nearest way.”

“Yes. And when I got up to the stile, Charles was sitting on it. How long do you think that would be after I started? I should think it would take me about twenty minutes from the green, because I went as quickly as I could, to have some of the daylight left. But I could walk it again and time it, if you liked. I think it must have been about a quarter-past seven when I got there. He’d been shooting. Did they find any pheasants with him?”

“Yes, Briggs found a brace. Charles spoke to you first, did he? And then you stayed there for a few minutes, talking to him?”

“Yes, I told him I’d heard about the appeal being granted, and then he asked me what I thought about it. I didn’t know what to say, really, because I’d never thought much about it, but I said maybe surface mining was better than shallow mining, anyhow. And then he said that although the appeal had been upheld, it was up to the Coal Board whether the contractors went on working the site, because he was going to tell them tomorrow—that’s today—that they could have the land, after all.”

“What?” George held him off incredulously to stare at him, but the intelligent, slightly stunned hazel eyes stared back firmly, and with an admirably recovered calm. “But they’d been fighting like tigers to keep it, why should he change his mind now? Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand him? That couldn’t have been what he said.”

“Oh, yes, really it was. He said he’d been walking round having another look at the mess his grandfather left behind, the old way. He said you want something like the devil when someone tries to get it from you, but if they give up trying you can see it’s only twenty acres of not very good pasture that’ll have to come up sooner or later, one way or the other, if there’s really that much coal there. So he’d made up his mind to tell them he’d give up his objections, and they could go ahead. I think he wanted to tell somebody quickly, so he wouldn’t get uncertain again, and it was just that nobody happened to come along except me.”

“You mean he hadn’t told anyone else at all?”

“No, he hadn’t. Because I thought there might be a row about it, and like a crumb I said, did his father know? And he laughed, and said no, he didn’t yet, but it was all right, he wouldn’t care, what mattered to him was getting his own way, and after all, he had got that.”

This had a credible sound to George’s ears. And wasn’t it possible that the long arguments with Chad Wedderburn, which had made life wearisome for so long in the snug of the Shock of Hay, had had some odd, cumulative effect in the end? When, as Dominic had said, the pressure was removed, and Charles could afford to think, instead of merely feeling, in the contra-suggestible way of all his family? The whole thing began to make a circumstantial tale, and the stimulation of telling it had pulled Dominic together valiantly after the shattering shock of learning its ending. He had drawn a little away, leaning easily into the circle of George’s arm, facing him with color in his cheeks again, and animated eyes.

“And then he said this was really hot news, and I was the first to hear it. And he threw me the half-crown, and told me to go and celebrate, and said he was going home to break the news. Then he got over the stile, and picked up his birds and went off along the path toward the Harrow, and I went on to the well to meet Pussy. I don’t think I can have been there at the stile with him more than ten minutes, but that would make it about twenty-five past seven, wouldn’t it? And he only got such a little way along the path. You know,” said Dominic, his eyes getting bigger and bigger, “you go over a ridge there to the well, although it’s not far, and I don’t think the sound would carry so sharply. Especially when there were quite a number of guns going at the time, you know, all round the valley. But I think it must have happened awfully soon after I left him, don’t you?”

“It looks like it. You didn’t see anyone else up there? While you were talking, or after you left him?”

“No, not a soul. I didn’t see anyone else until Pussy came up from the village.”

“There’s nothing else strikes you about it?”

“No,” said Dominic, after a minute or two of furrowing his brow over this. “Should it?”

“Oh, I’m not being clever and seeing anything you didn’t see. Just collecting any ideas you may have. Usually they seem to me worth examining,” said George, and smiled at him.

Unexpectedly Dominic blushed deeply at this, and as suddenly paled under the weight of being appreciated and praised thus in intoxicating intimacy; Something inside him was growing so fast, these days, that he could feel it expanding, and sometimes it made him dizzy, and sometimes it frightened him. It was deeply involved, whatever it was, with George, and George’s affairs, and when George trusted him and paid him a compliment it quickened exultingly, and opened recklessly like a deep, sweet flower feeling the sun. He said hesitantly: “There is one thing. Only it isn’t evidence, really; it’s only what I think myself.”