CHAPTER I

IN A FIELD

I

Sandwiches, supplied in liberal manner by Mr. Master and not touched on the railway journey, sufficed Mr. Wriford's needs through the following day. He tramped aimlessly the greater part of the time. Evening again provided him with a bed by the roadside. It was the next morning, to which he awoke feeling cold and feeling ill, that aroused him to his first thoughts of his present situation. He clearly must do something; but he had only negative ideas as to what it should be. Negative, as that, in passing a farm, it crossed his mind to apply for work as had been the practice with Mr. Puddlebox. But he recalled the nature of that work and was at once informed that he was now completely unfitted for it. He had been very strong then. He felt very weak now. He had then been extraordinarily vigorous and violent in spirit, and his spirit's violence had led him to delight in exercising his body at manual labour. Now he felt very weary and submissive in mind; and that feeling of submission was reflected in extreme lassitude of his limbs. It came back to this--and at once he was returned again to his mental searching--that then there seemed object and relief in taxing himself arduously: now he had proved that trial and knew that no object lay beyond it, that no relief would ever now be contained in it. And in any event he was not capable of it: he was weak, weak; he felt very ill.

But something must be done. Let him determine how he stood; and with this thought he began for the thousandth time to rehearse his life as he had lived it. One of the lucky ones: he had been that: it had driven him into the river. One of the free: that also he now had been. Those months with Puddlebox he had cared for nothing and for nobody: recked nothing whether he lived or died. He had worked with his hands as in the London days he had imagined happiness lay in working. He had attained in brimming fulness all that in the London days he had madly desired. It had brought him where now he was--to knowledge that there was something in life he had missed, and to baffled, to bewildered ignorance what it might be or in what manner of living it might be found. Well, let him drag on. Just to drag on was now the best that he could do. Let life take him and do with him just whatsoever it pleased. Let him be lost, be lost, to all who knew him and to all and everything he knew. Let him a second time start life afresh, and this time not attack it as in the wild Puddlebox days he had attacked it, but be washed by it any whither it pleased, stranded somewhere and permitted to die perhaps, perhaps have disclosed to him, and be allowed to seize, whatever it might be that somehow, somehow, somewhere, somewhere, he had missed.

Thus, as aimlessly he wandered, his thoughts took the form of plans or resolutions, yet were not resolutions in any binding sense. They drifted formlessly through his mind as snatches of conversation, carried on in a crowded apartment, will drift through a mind pre-occupied with some idea; or they drifted through him as snow at its first fall will for long drift over and seem to leave untouched any stone that rises above the surface of the ground. He was preoccupied with his own ceaseless questioning. He was preoccupied with helpless and hopeless sense of helplessness and hopelessness. There was something that others found that gave them peace and gave them happiness, that he had missed, that he knew not where he had missed or where to begin to find.

All of plan or resolution that in any way settled upon this deeper brooding was that somehow he must find something to do. In the midst of his brooding he would jolt against realisation of that necessity, think aimlessly upon it for a little, then lose it again. Slowly it permeated his mind. Evening brought him to the outskirts of a small town; and at a house in a by-street where "Beds for Single Men" were offered, and where he listlessly turned in, the matter of being called upon for the price of a lodging shook him to greater concentration upon his resources. He found that, by Mr. Master's carelessness or kindness, he had been left with a trifle of change over the money given him to make his way across town when he broke his journey in London--elevenpence. He paid ninepence for his bed. In the morning there remained to him two coppers for food, and he knew himself faint with protracted fasting. In a street of dingy shops he turned into a coffee-house. "Shave?" said a man in soiled white overalls, and he realised that he had mistaken the door and stepped into a barber's adjoining the refreshment shop. He was unshaven, and any work that he could do would demand a reasonably decent appearance. "Attend to you in a moment," said the soiled overalls, and Mr. Wriford dropped into a chair to await his pleasure. The ragged fragment of a local newspaper lay on a table beside him, and he took it up with some vague idea of discovering employment among the advertisements. That portion of the paper was missing. His eye was attracted by an odd surname, "Pennyquick," and when the barber called him and was operating on him he found himself listlessly reflecting upon what he had read of an inquest following the sudden death of the assistant-master at Tower House School, chief evidence given by Mr. Pennyquick, headmaster.

A penny was the price of his shave. He took his penny that remained into the adjoining coffee-shop and obtained with it a large mug of cocoa. "Three ha'pence with a slice of bread and butter," said the woman at the counter, pushing the cocoa towards him. "Don't you want nothing to eat?"

Her tone and the look she gave him were kindly. "I want it," said Mr. Wriford significantly.

"You look like it," said the woman. "There!" and slid him a hunk of dry bread.

He tried to thank her. He felt strangely overcome by her kindness. Tears of weakness sprang to his eyes; but no words to his mouth. "That's all right," she said. "You're fair starved by the look of you."

He puzzled as he finished his meal, and as he wandered out and up the street again, to know why he had been so touched by the woman's action. He found himself feeling towards her that same swelling in his heart as when the oldest sea-captain living with stained lips had whispered: "Matey! Matey!"

Was there something in life that he had missed? What in the name of God had that to do with being given a piece of bread?

II

He found himself late in the afternoon reaching the end of a deserted road of widely detached villas. The last house carried on its gate a very dingy brass plate.

TOWER HOUSE SCHOOL JAMES PENNYQUICK, B.A.

Pennyquick? Pennyquick? It was the name that had caught his attention in the paper at the barber's. What had he read about it? He trailed on a few steps and remembered the inquest on the assistant-master, and stopped, and stared.

A rough field lay beyond the house. It was separated from the road by barbed-wire fencing which trailed between dejected-looking poles that at one time had supported it but now bowed towards the ground in various angles of collapse. Within the field were pitched at intervals decayed cricket stumps set in a wide circle, and there stood about dejectedly in this circle dejected-looking boys to the number of eighteen or twenty. At intervals, as Mr. Wriford stood and watched, the boys stirred into a dejected activity which gave them the appearance of being engaged in a game of rounders. A gentleman, wearing on his head a dejected-looking mortar-board without a tassel, and beneath it untidy black garments of semi-clerical appearance, imparted these intervals of activity to the boys. He paced the field in a series of short turns near the house, hands behind his back, head bent, and, as Mr. Wriford could see, sucking in the cheeks of a coarse-looking face surrounded by scrubby whiskers of red hair. Every now and then he would throw up his head towards the dejected-looking boys and bawl "PLAY UP!" whereupon the dejected-looking boys would give momentary attention to their game.

Mr. Wriford stepped over the trailing wire and approached the maker of this invigorating call. "Excuse me," said Mr. Wriford, come within speaking distance. "Are you Mr. Pennyquick?"

Halted in his pacing at sight of Mr. Wriford, the gentleman thus addressed awaited him with lowered head and lowering gaze much as a bull might regard the first movements of an intruder. He sucked more rapidly at his cheeks as Mr. Wriford came near, and for a space sucked and fiercely stared after receiving the question.

"Well, what if I am?" he then returned. His voice was extraordinarily harsh, and he came forward a step that brought his face close to Mr. Wriford's and stared more threateningly than before. His eyes were dull and heavily bloodshot, and there went with the sucking at his cheeks a nervous agitation that seemed to possess his neck and all his joints. "What if I am?" he demanded again, and his words discharged a reek communicative of the fact that, whoever he was, abstinence from alcohol was not among his moral principles.

"By any chance," said Mr. Wriford, "do you happen to want an assistant-master?"

"I don't want you."

"I thought you might want temporary assistance."

He was stared at a moment from the clouded eyes. Then, in another volume of the fierce breath, "Well, you thought wrong!" he was told. "Now!"

"Very well," said Mr. Wriford and turned away.

He went a dozen paces towards the road. There seized him as he turned and as he walked away a sudden realisation of his case, a sudden panic at his plight, a sudden desperation to cling on to what he believed offered here. He must find something to do. There could be no concealment, no peace for him while he wandered outcast and penniless. That way lay what most he feared. He would be found wandering or found collapsed, and questions would be asked him and explanations demanded of him. That terrified him. He could not face that. Whatever else happened he must be left alone. He must find something to do that would hide him--give him occupation enough to earn him food and shelter and leave him to himself to think.

He turned and went back desperately. The man he believed to be Mr. Pennyquick was standing staring after him and waited staring as he came on.

"Look here," said Mr. Wriford desperately. "Look here, Mr. Pennyquick. I know you think it strange my coming to you like this. But I heard, I heard in the town, that you wanted an assistant-master. If you don't--"

"I've told you," said Mr. Pennyquick, admitting the personality by not denying it, "I've told you I don't want you. Now!"

"If you don't," said Mr. Wriford, unheeding the rebuff, more desperate by reason of it, "if you don't, there's an end of it. But if you want temporary help--temporary, a day, or a week--I can do it for you."

"Do what?" demanded Mr. Penny quick.

"I can teach," said Mr. Wriford. There was sign of relenting in Mr. Pennyquick's question, and Mr. Wriford took it up eagerly. "I can teach," he repeated.

"What can you teach?"

"I can teach all the ordinary subjects."

"I'm getting a University man," said Mr. Pennyquick.

"Temporarily," Mr. Wriford urged. As every passage of their conversation brought him nearer this sudden chance or threw him further from it, his panic at its failure, and what must happen, then increased desperately. "Temporarily," he urged. "I've had a public-school education."

"Yes, you look it!" said Mr. Pennyquick, and laughed.

"English subjects," cried Mr. Wriford. "Latin, mathematics. I can do it if you want it."

Mr. Pennyquick glanced over his shoulder at his dejected-looking boys, then stared back again at Mr. Wriford and began to speak with more consideration and less fierceness. "I'm not saying," said Mr. Pennyquick, "that I don't want temmo--temmer--PLAY UP! Tem-po-rary assistance. I do. I'm very ill. I'm shaken all to bits. I ought to be in bed. What I'm saying is I don't want you. I don't know anything about you. I've got the reputation of my school to consider. That's what I'm saying to you."

Dizziness began to overtake Mr. Wriford--the field to rock in long swells, Mr. Pennyquick by turns to recede and advance, swell and diminish. He felt himself upon the verge of breaking down, wringing his hands in his extremity and staggering away. But where? Where? "Temporarily," he pleaded. "Temporarily."

"You might drink for all I know," said Mr. Pennyquick, pronouncing this possibility as if consumed with an unnatural horror of it.

"I don't drink."

"How do I know that?"

Mr. Wriford cried frantically: "It's only temporarily! If I drink, if I'm not suitable, you can stop it in a moment."

"No notice?" said Mr. Pennyquick.

"No--no notice. Temporarily--it's only temporarily. That'll be understood."

"Well, if no notice is understood I'll take the risk--for a week, while I'm getting a man. I'll give you fifteen shillings. No, I won't. I'll give you twelve. I'll give you twelve shillings, and if I have to sack you before the week's out--well, you just go. That's understood?"

"Thank you," Mr. Wriford said. The field was spinning now. He could think of nothing else to say. "Thank you."

"Be here at nine to-morrow," said Mr. Pennyquick. "Just before nine," and he turned away and shouted to his boys: "Stop now! Come in now!"

"But--" said Mr. Wriford. "But--but--" He was trying for words to frame his difficulty. "But--do I live in?"

"Live in!" cried Mr. Pennyquick. "I'm taking risks enough having you at all! Live in! Stop now. Come in now!" and he walked away towards the house.