Chapter 7

That night what was a revival of the great gale took place, belling like bucks about their heads, and noising through the tower in many a voice. This so increased their sense of desolation, that even the heart of Hogarth fainted, they like castaways on some ocean whose glooms no sunrise ever goldens; and now a doubt arose whether, even if the bell were removed on the morrow, Harris would have strength to cling on during the descent.

However, early the next day hope revived when five men entered, four mounting among the beams to the swing-beam with tools, one at the ladder-head shouting up orders; and Hogarth, when they had gone, whispered Harris: “They have been unscrewing the sockets in which the bell-beam swings”.

“Let them unscrew away”, said Harris, his chin shivering on his hand.

Five more hours; during which only once did three men enter, seeming to do nothing but talk, with upward glances.

But at three it was evident that there was considerable to-do, though above there the row of the winds drowned all sound. A crowd, chiefly of convicts, passed in and out; then twelve men, one after the other, ran up the ladder, and thence climbed among the beams, with six cables. Half went to the east, half to the west, side of the bell; and three of the cables were fastened round the swing-beam near one end, three near the other end; one three were then cast over a beam higher than the swing-beam, to the north of it; the other three cast over a beam to the south of it; and the six ends lowered--operations which Hogarth, lying on his face, could just see; and the twelve had hardly begun to descend, when he saw a lorry backed into the gateway, filling half 1 the area of the tower; whereupon over a hundred convicts were swarming over and round it.

“Now”, said Hogarth; and he hurried down, tacking his way with slides and runs among the intricate beams, tied the rope to a beam above the swing-beam, and let himself down to the bell's rim; reached out then, caught the knotted rope that was within the bell, and climbed, the clapper now so rough, that hand and knee found grip; and he spent a minute in estimating his power of holding on with one arm, and with both, to its support-shaft.

And now he whispered Harris, and caught and half-sustained the Cockney.

Now they could hear echoes of the tongues below; and now Harris, clinging alternate with Hogarth, arms and legs, face to face, by rope and shaft and clapper, whispered: “But-good Lord-look 'ere-there are some people coming up!”

Four convicts were indeed climbing: but even directly beneath the bell, where it was impossible to come, they would hardly have distinguished the forms huddled in its dark cavern, and their aim was higher, to stand ready, when the beam should lift, to swing it diagonally across the square of beams which had supported it, so that it might find space to descend. And soon the bell-beam stirred at the tightening ropes: the fugitives felt themselves swinging, rising, poised--descending.

They were dizzily aware of shouted orders, the creaking of the toiling, slipping ropes, little jolts and stoppages, two hundred eyes blinking up, not seeing their cringed-up limbs--unnecessary cautious: for the nearer they descended to-ward the half-light, the surer did the area of the lorry make their invisibility. At last they were near; the bell lingered, swinging; babel was around them; the Governor's voice; a cheer: the bell was on the lorry.

Someone struck the bell with a hammer, there was talk, swarmings round it, then shoulders pushed at the lorry wheels, which squealed and moved amid a still fussier babel drawn by four horses, and seven yoke of cattle. The fugitives could hear the opening of the great gate, the laborious exit, and, in a moment's pause, again the Governor talking, it seemed far off, to the expert....

Wearily creaked the cart--beyond the moor--to a country road.

Now chattering words came from Harris: “All damned fine! I don't deny that you know your way about--”

“Way out”, said Hogarth.

“Yes, a gamesome sort of cock you are in all weathers...but what next?”

“'Next' is to fall upon your knees and worship me, you cur”.

“Thou shalt worship the Lawd thy Gawd”, chattered Harris; “no bloomin' fear! This is only a new kind of punishment cell. You've got me in; 'ow are you going to get me out?”

Hogarth believed that the lorry was _en route_ for the railway, and hoped to escape in the transfer of the bell; but that night lorry and bell slept in a shed outside a village _en route_ for the sea.

At four A.M. they were again _en route_, and at intervals during the day, opening their now feeble and sleep-infected eyes, could hear the hoots of the two cattlemen, the sound of winds, the rowdy gait of the crooked-legged oxen, and stoppages for drink or rest, and anon an obstruction, with shouting and fuss. It was night before the waggon came to rest on a jetty, the elaborate day's journey done.

The fugitives were then deep in sleep, and only awoke at the rattle of a steam-crane in action above them, to find the bell beginning to tilt, lift and swing; then they were on a deck; and soon afterwards knew that it was a steamer's, when they heard the bray of her whistle, and presently were aware of blaring winds, and billows of the sea.

Harris was for then and there crying out, but Hogarth, now his master, said: “To-morrow morning”; and they fell again into their morbid slumber.

When they again awoke, uproar surrounded them, voices, a heaven-high shouting of quenched fires and screaming steams; moreover, the bell was leaning steeply, they two huddled together at its edge.

Harris began to bellow: but he was not heard, or not heeded.... There had been a collision.

“If you can't swim, better catch hold of me”, Hogarth shouted--“there will be--”

But the earth turned turtle, and Hogarth felt himself struck on the shoulder, flung, and dragged down, down, into darkness.

After an upward climb and fight to slip the clutch of the ship's suction, in the middle of a heavy sea he managed to get off his clothes, and set to swimming, whither he did not know, a toy on mountains of water.

Exultation raged in him--a crazy intoxication--at liberation attained, at the sensation of warmth, at all that water and waste of Nature.

But within ten minutes it is finished: he shivers, his false strength changing to paltriness, the waves washing now over his head; and now he is drowsing...drowning...

XXII

OLD TOM

He continued, however, to swim after his conscious efforts ceased: for his body was found next morning on a strip of Cornish sand between Gorran and Mevagissey, washed by every sheet of surf.

His rescuer, a shrimp-fisher, occupied one of three cots perched on a ravine; and there on the evening of the second day he opened his eyes on a settee, four children screaming in play around him; he so far having been seen only by a reporter from Mevagissey, and the doctor from Gorran, who, on his wide rounds, had been asked into the cottage.

The same night Hogarth spoke to the fisher: told him that he was not a wrecked sailor, had reasons for avoiding observation, and would pay for shelter and silence: whereat the fisher, who was drinking hot beer, winked, and promised; and the next day took for Hogarth a telegram, signed “Elm Tree”, to Mevagissey, asking of Loveday five pounds.

Finally, one midnight, after two weeks of skulking, he reached Whitechapel, where, the fact of his brown skin now giving him the idea of orientalizing himself, at a Jew's, in a little interior behind the counter, he bought sandals, a caftan, a black sudayree, an old Bagdad shawl for girdle, and a greenish-yellow Bedouin head-cloth, or kefie, which banded the forehead, draped the face like a nun's wimple, and fell loose. For these he discarded the shrimp-man's clothes; and now dubbed himself “Peter the Hermit”.

For he meant to start-a Crusade.

At a police-station on the third day he saw a description of himself: three moles, bloodshot eye, white teeth, pouting mouth; but over the moles now hung the head-cloth.

For several days he lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in the thought of the secret truth which lay in his head.

Up to now, not a word to anyone about it; but on the seventh night he spoke.

It was in some “Cocoa Rooms” in a “first-class room”, strewn with sawdust, where, as he sat alone, another man, bearing his jug, came and sat; and soon he addressed Hogarth.

“Talk English?”

“I am an Englishman”, answered Hogarth.

“What, in those togs? What countryman?”

“Norfolk”.

“Know Manchester?”

“I was there one day”.

“Difference between Manchester and London, isn't there? I am a Manchester man, I am. All the difference in the world. This cold, stiff, selfish city. Londoners, eh? A lot of peripatetic tombstones!”

And so he went on; this being his whole theory of God and Man: that Londoners are peripatetic tombstones, but Manchester-men just the other way--seemed a mechanic, brisk-eyed, small; a man who had read; but now, evidently, down on his luck.

“Then, why come to London?”--from Hogarth.

“Looking for work”,--with a shrug--“looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. What would you have? the whole place overrun with Jews. England no longer belongs to the English, that's the long and short of it”.

Hogarth looked him in the face. “Did England belong to the English before the Jews came?”

“How do you mean? Of course it did”.

“Which part of it?”

“Why, all of it”.

“But fix your mind upon some particular piece of England--some street, or field, that you know--and then tell me: did that belong to the English?”

“Belonged to some Englishman”.

“But you don't mean to say that some Englishman is the English?”

“Ah, yes, I know what you are driving at”, said the mechanic, with a patronizing nod: “but the point is this: that, apart from vague theorizing, a man did manage to make a good living before these dogs overran the country”.

“But--a _good_ living? How much did you make?--forty shillings a week? toiling in grime six days, sleeping the seventh? I call that a deadly living”.

“Well, I _don't_, you see. Besides, I made, not forty, but forty-_five_ shillings, under the sliding-scale”.

“Yes, but no brave nation would submit one day to such petty squalors after it was shown the way to escape them”.

“There _is_ no way”, said the mechanic: “there are the books, and the talkers; but the economic laws that govern the units like you and me are as relentless as gravitation. Don't believe anyone who talks to you about 'ways of escape'”.

“But suppose someone has a new thought?”

“There can be no new thoughts about _that_. The question has long since been exhausted”.

“Well, come “--with sudden decision--“I will tell you a thought of my own “. And he told.

If the English people paid the rent for England to themselves--to their government--instead of to a few Englishmen, then, by one day's labour in six, Englishmen would be much more rich in all things than a fisherman, by one day's labour in six, was rich in fish.

The expression which he awaited on the face before him was one of illuminated astonishment; but, with a chill in his nerves, he saw the workman's lips curve.

“Bah!” said the Manchester man, “that is an exploded theory!”

_Exploded!!!_

Hogarth was rather pale.

Yet he knew that it was true....Who, then, could have been exploding the Almighty?

“Who has exploded it?”

“Been exploded again and again!” said the Manchester man; “of all the theories of land-tenure, that is about the weakest: _I_ should know, for I've studied them all. The fact is, no change in the system of land-tenure will have the least effect upon the lot of the masses; would only make things worse by unsettling the country--if it didn't mean a civil war”.

“I begin to see”.

Hogarth got up, walked home meditating: and suddenly blushed.

It was known! by mechanics in cocoa-rooms!--that secret thing of his secret cell. And it was not believed!

As for him, what was he now doing outside Colmoor? That question he asked himself, as he sat unsandaling his feet; and he commenced to dress himself again: but paused--would first see Loveday.

Accordingly, the next night, the two friends met at Cheyne Gardens.

And a long time they sat silent, Loveday feeding his eyes upon his friend's face, that hard, rounded brow which seemed harder, and frowned now, that gallant largeness of eye which seemed now wilder, and that manly height, which seemed Mahomet's in the Oriental dress.

“But where have you been for five weeks?” asked Loveday.

“Skulking, and thinking. But about my sister....”

“Do not ask...” said Loveday.

There was a long silence.

“Did not O'Hara tell you to make no more efforts for my escape?” asked Hogarth.

“Who is O'Hara?”

“Why, the priest who escaped, instead of me, through the copse”.

“O'Hara was not the name he gave me; and no, he said nothing about that. I got him off to America, and only saw him twice. I thought him rather--But why didn't you escape youself?”

“I thought it improper”.

“But you did finally?”

“For a reason: you remember the association which I was forming to answer the question as to the cause of misery? Well, that question I have answered for myself in prison”.

“Really? Tell me!”

Hogarth absently took up a water-colour drawing from the table, and turned it round and round, leaning forward on a knee, as he told how the matter was. Meantime, he kept his eyes fixed upward upon Loveday's face, who stood before him.

In the midst of his talk Loveday scratched the top of his head, where the hair was rather thin, and said he, twisting round: “Forgive me-let me ring for some brandy-and-soda--”

Hogarth stood briskly up.

“What I say, I can see, is not new to you?” said he.

“No, not new”, Loveday confessed: “I believe that it is quite an ancient theory; there are even savage tribes whose land-tenure is not unlike what you advocate--the Basutos, for example”.

“And are these Basutos richer, happier, prettier fellows than average Englishmen?”

“Oh, beyond doubt. Don't suppose that I am gainsaying you: I am only showing you that the theory is not new--”

“But why do you persist in calling it a _theory?_ Is the fact that one and one make two a _theory?_”--Hogarth's brow growing every moment redder.

“What can one call it?”

“Call it what you like! But do you believe it?”

“It is quite possibly true; and now that you say it I believe it; but I have never seriously considered the matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because--I don't know. It is out of my line”.

“Your line! Yet you are a human being--”

“Well, partly, yes: say--a novelist”.

“Do not jest! It is incredible to me that you have written book after book, and knew of this divine thing, and did not cram your books with it!”

Loveday flushed. “You misunderstand my profession; and as to this theory of land-tenure, let me tell you: it will never be realized--not in England. Anyway, it would mean civil war....”

Again those words! “Civil war....”

And as, for the second time, he heard them, Hogarth dashed the picture which he held to the ground, shattering glass and frame: which meant that, then and there, he washed his hands of the world and its wagging; meant also his return to Colmoor.

He dashed from the room without a word; down the stairs; out into the street.

As he ran along the King's Road, he asked a policeman the way to the nearest police-station, then ran on through a number of smaller streets, seeking it, till, at a corner, he stopped, once more uncertain, the night dim and drizzling.

He was about to set off again, when, behind him, he heard: “Excuse me, mister--could you give a poor man a penny to get a night's lodging?”

Turning, he saw--old Tom Bates: still in the guernsey; but very senile and broken now.

The fish-rich fisher...! he had come to this...

Hogarth had twenty-eight shillings about him, and, without disclosing himself, put hand to pocket to give them all, just as the old man reached up to his ear to say: “It's the lumbago; I got it very bad; but it won't be long now. It wur a bad day for me as ever I come to Lunnon! I'm Norfolk born, I am: and I had eight sons, which the last was Fred, who, they say, met his death in Colmoor....”

At that word, “Fred”, Hogarth started: for under the elm in the beech-wood between Thring and Priddlestone Fred had concealed a thing fallen from heaven, which could be sold for--a thousand pounds.

That would keep the fisher rich during the few days that remained to him!

But the old man could hardly go himself; if he could, would bungle: the thing was heavy--on the lord-of-the-manor's land....

Do a kind act, Hogarth. He would see the old place, his father's grave; and there was a girl who lived in the Hall at Westring whom it was a thrilling thing to be near, even if one did not see....

“Here are two shillings”, said he, in an assumed voice: “and if you be at this spot, at this hour, on Thursday night coming, you shall have more. Don't fail”.

Again he ran, and took train, two hours later, for Beccles.

XXIII

UNDER THE ELM

His risk of arrest here, round about his old home, was enormous, and he drew the Bedouin kefie well round his face, skulking from the station to the “Fen”, northward, where he got an urchin to buy him a paper lantern in a general shop, and now trudged up to Priddlestone, then down through meadows to the beech-wood, the night rough with March winds.

It was not the winds, however, which made him draw close his Arab cloak, but his approach to the elm: there, one night, he had seen a naked black man! there had fallen the Arab Jew.

He stood twenty yards from the tree, till, with sudden resolution, he strode, soon had the lantern ruby, and since the grave of “the affair” had been digged with a piece of wood, for such a piece he went seeking, having thrown off his caftan.

Instead, he found the rusted half-blade of a spade, and commenced to dig round the roots, the lantern shine reddening a face strangely agitated, uncertainty of finding what he sought heightening his excitement: for the earth showed no disturbance, and since three years had passed since that night of Bates in the wood, the object might have been already unearthed. After an hour his back was aching, his hands dabbled, his brow beaded, while the night-winds blew, the light now was commoved, and now glowed a steady red; and still he grovelled.

Presently, as he shovelled in a circle, always two feet deep, moving the light as he moved, he saw on the top of a shovelful of marl--a twig: barkless, black, cracked--_scorched!_

To an immoderate degree this thing agitated him--some whisper in the back of his head--some half-thought: he began now to root furiously, with a frowning intentness.

But suddenly he shuddered: a finger seemed to touch his shoulder behind; and he twisted with wild eyes, caught up the light, peered, saw no black man--nothing: but quite five minutes he stood defiant, with clenched fists; then resumed the work, though with a constant feeling now that he was being watched by the unseen seers.

After two new strokes he struck upon something hard, and, digging eagerly round it, found a quart-can, full of earth. And instantly all doubt vanished: for this must have been the beer-can carried by Bates.

Strong curiosity now wrought in Hogarth, a zeal to lay eyes upon that object which had careered through the heights of space to find that beech-wood and that elm-tree; and during fifteen minutes his little implement digged with the quick-plying movement of a distaff-shuttle, he fighting for breath, anon casting a flying wild glance behind, but still digging.

Now, frequently, he came upon burned objects, twigs, cinders. Even the marl had a scorched look; and his agitation grew to ecstasy.

Something very singular had happened to his mind with regard to this “affair” of Bates: Bates had said that it had fallen on the asteroid night; and O'Hara had told him--falsely, indeed--that a piece of the asteroid, fallen upon the French coast, had had diamonds; yet, somehow, never once had his mind associated the Fred Bates “affair” with the thought of diamonds, but only with the “thousand pounds” which Bates had been promised by old Bond. So at the moment when he had begun to dig, his whole thought was of “a thousand pounds”; but, somehow, by the time his implement at last grated against something two feet down, that word “diamonds” had grown up in his brain.

But diamonds! In the midst of his shovelling the thought flashed through him: “The world is God's! and to whom He wills He gives it....”

Now at last the thing lay definitely before him: he grated the spade from end to end, scraping away the marl; and it was very rough....

The size and shape of a man's leg, and red, anyway in the red lantern-shine--his sight dim--he moved and saw in an improbable dream; and when he tried to lift the object and failed, for a long time he sat on the edge of the trench, passing one palm across and across his forehead, till the lantern-light leapt, and went out.

He sprang upright then--awake, sure: they were diamonds, those bits of glass, big celestial ones, not of earth, in hundreds; when he passed his hand along the meteorite he felt it leprous, octahedron, dodecahedron, large and small: if they were truly diamonds, he divined that their owner must be as wealthy as some nations.

About three in the morning he managed to raise the meteorite; refilled the trench; and since it still rained, rolled the meteorite to the hollow of the elm, put on his caftan, and with his back on the interior of the tree, his feet on the meteorite, tumbled into a wonderful slumber.

XXIV

FRANKL SEES THE METEORITE

He was awaked by a footstep, and, starting, saw rocking along the forest path one Farmer Pollock, wearing now fez and tassel, and he saw his clothes all clay, and, with a smile of fondness, saw how, even beneath its grime, the meteor dodged and jeered, with frolic leers, in the beams of a bright morning that seemed to him the primal morning, a fresh wedding-morning, swarming with elves and shell-tinted visions, imps and pixy princes, profligate Golcondas.

Going first to the spot where he had digged, to give to the surface a natural look, he trampled the lantern into the mire, threw the tin can far, then, taking a quantity of marl, plastered the meteorite, to cover its roughness; then boldly left it, starting out with consummate audacity for Thring, where everybody, police and all, knew him well.

A singular light now in his eyes, an evil pride; and he had the step of a Prince in Prettyland. Corresponding to an inward majesty, of which, from youth, he had been conscious, he now felt an outward, and had not been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans--plans of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled; and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new-crowned, yet by old heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the entire little muck of Man.

At one point where the path ran close to Westring-park proper, the park on higher ground, a grass-bank seven feet high dividing them, he saw a-top of the bank in caftan, priest-cap, and phylacteries, taking snuff--Baruch Frankl.

Hogarth skipped up, and stood before the Jew, having drawn his face-cloth well forward.

“What's the row?” asked Frankl.

“Could you give a poor man a job?”

“You a Jew?”

“Yes”, replied Hogarth, not dreaming how truly: “London born”.

“A Froom?”

“I keep the fasts”.

“What you doing about here?”

“Tramping”.

“Fine mess you are in”.

“I slept in a hollow tree down yonder--an elm tree”.

“Well, there's many a worse shake-down than that. Who are you? Ever been about here before?”

“I was once”.

“You put me in mind of an old chum of mine....Well, here's half-a-crown for you to go on with”.