Fallen Into the Pit

On the evening after the inquest opened, George was late, and Dominic met him as he came in. Inky from his homework, the brat couldn’t wait.

So George told him; it was like cutting out one of his own nerves to hold out any part of the complications of living and dying to Dominic, thus prematurely as he felt it to be; but he owed it to him. Yes, there were positive reactions. The crumpled upper edge of the shield had retained, soon covered by sand and silt as it had been, the faintest possible traces, in its threads of tarnish and dirt, of something else which was undoubtedly skin tissue and blood.

Dominic’s eyes grew immense, remembering how the whole accumulation of matter in those furrows had been no thicker than a rather coarse hair, and marveling how any tests could extract from them exact information about particles he could not even see.

“Could it be his? Can they tell that, too?”

“They can tell that it could be, but not that it is. Yes, it may be Helmut’s.”

“Well—” said Dominic on a long, deep breath, “being found right there, and if it could be—there isn’t much doubt, is there?”

George owned soberly that the odds in favor were certainly heavy.

“Then we’ve only got to find the stick!”

George merely smiled at him rather wryly, clapped an arm round his shoulders, and drew him in to supper. It sounded so very simple, the way Dominic said it.

Two

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The wreath for the funeral was delivered late in the evening. Dominic went into the scullery, where it reposed upon the table, and stood looking at it for a minute as if he hoped it had something to tell him, with his face solemn and thoughtful, and his lip caught doubtfully between his teeth. Then he said to Bunty, somewhat gruffly: “I’ll take it up to the farm tomorrow as I go to school.”

“It would mean getting up awfully early,” said Bunty comfortably. “Don’t you bother about it, I’ll take it up later, or George will.” Penitence was nice, but she didn’t want him too good.

“No, I can easily get up in plenty of time. I’ll take it.” For a moment she was at a loss what to say, and looked at him narrowly, hoping he wasn’t genuinely moping about Charles and the unhappy meeting with him at the tail- end of his life, and hoping still more sternly that he wasn’t doing a little artificial moping, dramatizing the encounter into something it had certainly not been in reality and his past interest in Charles into a warm relationship which in fact had never existed. She felt vaguely ashamed of supposing it possible, in this most healthy and normal of children, but round about thirteen queer things begin to happen even to the extroverts, and it pays to knock the first little emotional self-indulgence on the head, before it begins to be a necessity of life. But Dominic chewed his lip, and said jokingly: “You know, it wouldn’t seem so bad if I’d even liked him. But I didn’t much, and it’s awful humbug trying to pretend you did because a fellow’s dead, isn’t it?” He misinterpreted Bunty’s relieved silence, and looked at her a little deprecatingly. “It sounds a bit beastly, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I do think he was quite a good sort of chap—only sort of secondhand. You know—there wasn’t anything about him you couldn’t have found first somewhere else. And—and there ought to have been,” said Dominic firmly, “he had plenty of chance.”

“You didn’t know him so very well,” said Bunty. “I dare say there was more to him than you found out.”

“Well, maybe. Only I don’t want to go putting on any act. It doesn’t seem decent sucking up to a fellow just because he’s dead, and you were somehow sort of dragged into it at the end. It’s awfully difficult, isn’t it,” said Dominic, turning on her a perplexed and appealing face, “knowing how you ought to behave to people, not to be dishonest, and not to be just beastly, either? I get all mixed up when I start thinking about it.”

“Then don’t think about it too hard,” advised Bunty. “It only gets you a bit hypnotized, like staring at one thing till you begin seeing spots before your eyes. Mostly the spots aren’t really there.”

“Well, but does it go on being as complicated as this?” he asked rather pathetically.

“Much the same, Dom, but you get used to picking your way. Don’t you worry about it, I’ll back your instincts to be pretty near the right balance most of the time.”

Dominic frowned thoughtfully at the brilliant bronze and gold chrysanthemums of the wreath, and said definitely: “Well, I’ve got an instinct I owe him something.”

The half-crown? thought Bunty for a moment; for even that was a legitimate point, to a punctilious young thing who had lost the chance of returning satisfaction for a gift. But no, it wasn’t that. What stuck in his conscience and made him feel bound to Charles was the confidence which had suddenly passed between them. It had hardly mattered to Charles, at the time, who first received his news in trust; but it mattered to Dominic.

So she made no demur, even in the way of kindness; and Dominic, rising half an hour earlier than usual, and without being called more than twice, at that, set off through the fields and the plantation for the Harrow farm.

It was a meek sort of morning, gray, amorphous, not even cold, the tufts of grass showery about his ankles, the heather festooned with wet cobwebs in a shadowy, silvery net, and the subdued, moist conversations of birds uneasy in the trees. Dominic hoisted the heavy wreath from one hand to the other for ease, and found it awkward however he carried it. His mind behind the musing face was furiously busy, but he was not sure that it was getting anywhere. Point by point he went over all he had told George, and wondered if he had left anything out. It isn’t always easy remembering every detail of an encounter which you had no reason to believe, at the time, would turn out to be evidence in a murder case. They hadn’t yet said it was murder, of course, officially, but all the village was saying it, and Dominic couldn’t help imbibing some of that premature certainty. Charles, who had taken him into his confidence, and had thereupon astonishingly died, nagged at him now to make use of what he knew. He owed him that much, at any rate.

And seriously, who could have wanted Charles dead? It wasn’t as if he had been positive enough and individual enough to have any real enemies. You don’t kill people you can’t dislike, people who haven’t got it in them to rouse you at all. As for old Wedderburn, that was bunk. Maybe Charles Blunden had been in his way where Io Hart was concerned, but then Io had never shown any obvious inclination to single out either of them. Maybe, thought Dominic doubtfully, fellows who’ve got it bad for girls imagine these things; but it seemed to him Chad regarded his chances with Io as marred at least as surely by his own past as by the existence of Charles. As though he’d lost a leg, or something, so that he could never think of marrying, and yet couldn’t stop thinking of it, either. Was it really possible to feel yourself maimed for life, merely because you had been pushed into killing other people in a war in