Part 8

Provisionally they had fixed their Forest at the Miocene Period. Or, rather, this is what it came to: the boy ceasing to protest against the winged monsters, the rhinoceros, the long-jawed mastodon which fascinated the girl’s imagination; though there was one impassioned scene when he flamed out over his clear remembrance of a sabre-toothed tiger, putting all those others—stupid, hulking brutes!—out of court by many thousands of years.

“They couldn’t have been there, couldn’t—not with us and with ‘It’—I saw it, I tell you—I tell you I saw it!” His pale face flamed, his eyes were as bright as steel. “The mastodon! That’s nothing—nothing! But the sabre-toothed tiger—I tell you I saw it. What are you grinning at now?—in our Forest—ours, mind you!—I saw it!”

“Oh, indeed, indeed!” Suddenly, because the day was so hot, because they were bored, because she was unwittingly impressed, as always, by her brother’s heat of conviction, Rhoda’s serene temper was gone. “And did you see yourself? and what were you doing there, may I ask—you! Silly infant, don’t you know that there weren’t any men then? Phew! Everyone knows that—everyone. You and your old tiger!”

There was mockery in her laugh as she took him by the lapels of his coat; shook him.

Then, next moment when he turned aside, sullen and pale, his brows in a pent-house above his eyes, she was filled with contrition. The rotten, thundery day had set her all on edge; it was a shame to tease him like this; and, after all, how often had she herself remembered back? Though there was a difference, and she knew it, a sense of fantasy, pretending; while Hector was as jealous of every detail of their Forest as a long-banished exile over every cherished memory of his own land.

Though, of course, there were no men contemporary with that wretched tiger: he knew that; he must know.

Lolling under their one tree, in the steamy, early afternoon, she coaxed him back to the subject, and was beaten upon it, as the half-hearted always are.

He was so amazingly clear about the whole thing.... Why, it might have happened yesterday!

He had been up in the trees, slinking along—not the hunting man, but the hunted—watchful, furtive; a picker-up of what other beasts had slain and taken their fill of: more watchful than usual because he had already come across a carcass left by the long-toothed terror, all the blood sucked out of it. Swinging from bough to bough by his hands—which, even when he stood upright, as upright as possible, dangled far below his knees—he had actually seen it; seen its gleaming tusks, its shining eyes; seen it, and fled, wild with terror.

Was it likely that he could ever forget it? “It and its beastly teeth!” he added; then fell silent, brooding; while even Rhoda was awed to silence.

It was that very evening that they found their Forest, or, rather, a part of it. They had gone over to the shore meaning to bathe, but for once their memories were at fault; and they found that the tide was out, a mere rim of molten lead on the far edge of the horizon.

They were both tired, but they could not rest. They cut inland for a bit, then out again; crossing the mudflats until the mud oozed above their boots and drove them back again.

They must have wandered about a long time, for the light—although it did not actually go—became illusive; the air freshened with that salty scent which tells of a flowing tide.

Hector insisted that they ought to wait until it was full in, and have their bath by moonlight; but, as Rhoda pointed out, that would mean no supper, dawdling about for hours. After some time they compromised: they would go out and meet the tide; see what it was like.

Almost at the water’s edge they found It—their Forest.

There it was, buried like a fly in amber: twisted trunks and boughs, matted creepers, all ash-grey and black.

How far it stretched up and down the shore they could not have said, the time was too short, the sea too near for any exploration; but not far, they thought, or they must have discovered it before. “Nothing more than a fold out of the world, squeezed up to the surface”; that was what they agreed upon.

They divided and ran in opposite directions—“Just to try and find out,” as Rhoda said. But after a few yards, a couple of dozen, maybe, they called back to each other that they had lost it.

The darkness gathering, the water almost to their feet; they were bitterly disappointed, but anyhow there was to-morrow, many “to-morrows.”

All that evening they talked of nothing else. “It’s been there for thousands and tens of thousands of years! It will be there to-morrow,” they said.

It was towards two o’clock in the morning that Hector, restless with excitement and fear, padded into his sister’s room; found her sleeping—stupidly sleeping—with the moonlight full upon her, and shook her awake; unreasonably angry, as wakeful people always are with the sleepers.

“Suppose we never find it again! Oh, Rhoda, suppose we never find it again!”

“Find what?”

“The Forest, you idiot!—our Forest.”

“Hector, don’t be silly. Go back to bed; you’ll get cold. Of course we’ll find it.”

“Why of course? I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking. There wasn’t a tree or bush or landmark of any sort: we had pottered about all over the shop: supposing we’ve lost it for ever? Oh, supposing, Rhoda, Rhoda! What sillies we were! Why didn’t we stay there, camp opposite it until the tide went out? I feel it in my bones—we’ll never find it again—never—never—never! There might have been skulls, all sorts of things—long teeth—tigers’ teeth! And now we’ve lost it. It’s no good talking—we’ve lost it; I know we’ve lost it—after all these years! After thousands and thousands and thousands of years of remembering!”

The boy’s forehead was glistening with sweat; the tears were running down his face, white as bone in the moonlight. Rhoda drew him into her bed, comforted him as best she could, very sleepy, and unperturbed—for, of course, they would find it. How could they help finding it? And after a while he fell asleep, still moaning and crying, searching for a lost path through his dreams.

He was right in his foreboding. They did not find it. Perhaps the tide had been out further than usual: they had walked further than they thought; they had dreamt the whole thing; the light had deceived them—impossible to say.

At first, in the broad light of day, even Hector was incredulous of their misfortune. Then, as the completeness of their loss grew upon them, they became desperate—possessed by that terrible restlessness of the searcher after lost things. Day after day they would come back from the sea worn out, utterly hopeless; declaring that here was the end of the whole thing; sick at the very thought of the secret mud, the long black shore.

They gave it up. They would never go near “the rotten thing” again.

Then, a few hours later, the thought of the freshly-receding tide began to work like madness in their veins, and they would be out and away.

It was easier for Rhoda; for she was of those who “sleep o’ nights”; easier until she found that her brother slipped off on moonlight nights while she slumbered: coming back at all hours, haggard and worn to fainting-point.

He stooped more than ever: his brow was more overhung, furrowed with horizontal lines. Sometimes, furious with herself for her sleepiness, Rhoda would awake, jump out of bed and run to the window in the fresh dawn, to see the boy dragging himself home, old as the ages, his hands hanging loose to his knees.

At last the breaking-point came. He was very ill: after a long convalescence, money was collected from numerous relations, family treasures were sold, and he was sent away to school.

He came back for his holidays a changed creature, talking of footer, then of cricket; of boys and masters; of school—school—school—nothing but school; blunt and practical.

But all this was at the front of him, deliberately displayed in the shop-windows.

At the back of him, buried out of sight, there was still the visionary rememberer. Rhoda, who loved him, realised this.

At first she did not dare to speak of the Forest. Then, trying to get at something of the old Hector, she pressed the point; pressed it and pressed it. It was she now who kept on with that eternal, “Don’t you remember?”

The worst of the whole thing was that he did not even pretend to forget. He did worse—he laughed. And in her own pain she now realised how often and how deeply she must have hurt him.

“Oh, that rot! What silly idiots we were! Such rot!”

And yet, at the back of him, at the back of his too-direct gaze, his laughter, there was _something_. Oh, yes, there was something. She was certain of that.

Deep, deep, hidden away at the back of him, at the back of that most imperturbable of all reserves, a boy’s reserve, he remembered, felt as he had always felt. He shut her out of it, that was all: her—Rhoda.

At the end of a year they ceased to talk of the Forest; all those far-back things dropped away from their intercourse. To outward seeming their love for the countryside, their strange, unyouthful interest in geology, the age-buried world, seemed a thing of the past.

Hector had a bicycle now: he was often away for hours at a time. He never even spoke of where he had been, what he had been doing. It was always: “Nowhere in particular; nothing in particular.”

Then, two years later, upon just such a breathless mid-summer day, he burst in upon his sister, his face crimson with excitement.

“I’ve found it! I never gave up—never for a moment! I pretended—I thought you thought it rot—were drawing me on—but it’s there. We were right. It’s there—there! Quick! quick! Now the tide’s just almost full out.... Oh, by Jingo! to think I’ve found it! Rhoda, hurry up—quick!” He was dancing with impatience.

“I can ride the bike—you on the step,” breathed Rhoda, and snatched up a hat.

They flew. The village shot past them: the flat country swirled like a top. At last they came to a place where there was a tiny rag of torn handkerchief tied to a stick stuck upright in the ground. Here they left the road, laid the bicycle in a dry ditch, and cut away across the marsh; guided by more signals—scraps of cambric, then paper; towards the end, one every ten yards or less, until Rhoda wondered how in the world had the boy curbed himself to such care!

Then—there it was.

They stepped it: just on fifty yards long, indefinitely wide, running out into little bays, here and there tailing off so that it was impossible to discover any definite edge, sinking away out of sight like a dream.

The sun was blazing hot and the top of the mud dry. In places they went down upon their hands and knees, peering; but really one saw most standing a little way off, with one’s head bent, eyeing it sideways.

It was in this way that Rhoda found It—Him!

“Look—look! Oh, I say—there’s something.... A thing—an animal! No—no—a—a——”

“Sabre-toothed tiger!” The boy’s wild shriek of triumph showed how he had hugged that old conjecture.

He came running, but until he got his head at exactly the same slant as hers he could see nothing, and was furiously petulant.

“Idiot! Silly fool!—nothing but a bough. You——” A lucky angle, and, “Oh, I say, by Jove! I’ve got it now! A man—a man!”

“A monkey—a great ape; there were no men, then, with ‘It.’” There, it seemed, she conceded him his tiger. “A little nearer—now again, there!”

They crept towards it. It was clear enough at a little distance; but nearer, what with the blazing sun and the queer incandescent lights on the mud, they found difficulty in exactly placing it. At last they had it, found themselves immediately over it; were able, kneeling side by side, to gaze down at the strange, age-old figure, lying huddled together, face forward.

It was not more than a couple of feet down; the semitransparent mud must have been silting over it for years and years: silted away again through centuries. And all for them—just for them. What a thought!

Hector raced off for his bicycle, and so on to the nearest cottage to borrow a spade.

The mental picture of the “man” and the sabre-toothed tiger met and clashed in his brain. If he was so certain of the man he must concede the tiger, given in to Rhoda and her later period. Unless—unless.... Suddenly he clapped his hands to his ears as though someone were shouting: his eyes closed, shutting out sight and sound. There _was_ a tiger, he remembered—of course he remembered! And if he were there, others were there also—not one tiger, not one man, but tigers and men; both, both!

By the time he got back to where he had left his sister, the water was above her knees, the tide racing inwards.

They were not going to be done this time, however.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and their father was away from home. Rhoda went back and ordered the household with as much sobriety as possible; collected a supply of food and a couple of blankets—they had camped out before and there was nothing so very amazing in their behaviour—then returned to the shore, the shrine.

Hector was sitting at the edge of the water, staring fixedly, white as a sheet.

Rhoda collected driftwood and built a fire; almost fed him, for he took nothing but what was put into his hand.

“It will still be there, even if we go to sleep,” she said; then, “Anyhow, we’ll watch turn and turn about.”

But it was all of no use. The boy might lie down in his turn, but he still faced the sea with steady, staring eyes.

Soon after three he woke his sister, shaking her in a frenzy of impatience. Oh, these sleepers!

“Sleeping! Sleeping! You great stupid, you! I never! I.... Just look at the tide—only look!”

The tide was pretty far out, the whole world a mist of pinkish-grey. Step by step they followed the retreating lap of water.

* * * * *

By six o’clock they had the heavy body out, and were dragging it across the rapidly-drying mud.

It was not as big as Hector: five-foot-one at the most, but almost incredibly heavy, with immense rounded shoulders.

By the time they reached the true shore they were done, and flung themselves down, panting, exhausted. But they could not rest. A few minutes more and they were up again, turning the creature over, rubbing the mud away from the hairy body with bunches of grass; parting the long, matted locks which hung over its lowering face, with the overhung brow, flat nose, almost non-existent chin. The eyes were shut, but oddly unsunken: it smelt of marsh slime, of decayed vegetation, but nothing more.

Hector poked forward a finger to see if he could push up one eyelid, and drew back sharply.

“Why—hang it all—the thing’s warm!”

“No wonder, with this sun. I’m dripping from head to foot. Hector, we must go home. Matty will tell; there’ll be the eyes of a row.”

For all her insistence it was another hour before Rhoda could get her brother away. Again and again he met the returning tide with her hat, bringing it back full of water; washing their find from head to foot, combing its matted hair with a clipped fragment of driftwood. But at last they dragged it to a dry dyke, covered it with dry yellow grass, and were off, Rhoda on the step this time, Hector draped limply over the handle of the bicycle.

He slept like a dead thing for the best part of that day. But soon after three they were away again: no use for Rhoda to raise objections; the unrest of an intense excitement was in her bones as in his, and he knew it.

It had been a cloudless day, the veil of mist fainter than usual, the sky bluer.

As they left the bicycle and cut across the rough foreshore the sun beat down upon them with an almost unbearable fierceness. There was a shimmer like a mirage across the marshes: the sea was the colour of burnt steel.

They dog-trotted half the way, arguing as they ran; Hector, still fixed, pivoting upon his sabre-toothed tiger, and yet insistent that _this_ was a man—a real man—contemporary with it: the first absolute proof of human existence anterior to the First Glacial age.

“An ape—a sort of ape—nearish to a man, but—well, look at his hair.” She’d give him his tiger, but not his man.

“By Gad, you’d grow hair, running wild as he did—a man——”

“Hector, what rot! Why, anyone—anyone could see—” She thought of her father, the smooth curate, the rubicund farmers.... A man!

“Well, stick to it—stick to it! But I bet you anything—anything....”

Hector’s words were jerked out of him as he padded on:

“We’ll get hundreds and hundreds of pounds for him! Travel—see the world—go to Java, where that other chap—what’s his name—was found. Why, he’s older than the Heidelberg Johnny—a thousand thousand times great-grandfather to that Pitcairn thing—older—older—oh, older than any!”

Panting, stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, the boy was still a good six yards in front of his sister as he reached the dry dyke where they had left their treasure.

Rhoda saw him stand for a moment, staring, then spin round as though he had been shot, throwing up his arms with a hoarse scream.

By the time she had her own arms about him, he could only point, trembling from head to foot.

* * * * *

There was nothing there! Torn grass where they had pulled it to rub down their find; the very shape of the body distinct upon the sandy, sparsely-covered soil; the stick with the pennant of blue ribbon which Rhoda had taken from her hat to mark the spot.... Nothing more, nothing whatever.

Up and down the girl ran, circling like a plover, her head bent. It must be somewhere, it must—it must!

She glanced at her brother, who stood as though turned to stone: this was the sort of thing which sent people mad, killed them—to be so frightfully disappointed, and yet to stand still, to say nothing.

She caught at his arm and faced him, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Oh, my dear, my dear—” she began, then broke off, staring beyond him.

“Why ... why—Hector—I say—” Her voice broke to a whisper: she had a feeling as though she must be taking part in some mad dream. Quite inconsequently the thought of Balaam came to her. How did Balaam feel when the ass spoke to him? As she did—with eye more amazed than any ears could ever be.

“Hector—look.... It—It....”

As her brother still stood speechless, with bent head and ashen face, she dropped to silence: too terrified of It, of her plainly deluded self, of everything on earth, to say more....

One simply could not trust one’s own eyes; that’s what it came to.

Her legs were trembling; she could feel her knees touching each other, cold and clammy.

It would have been impossible to say a word, even if she had dared to reveal her own insanity; she could only pluck the lapels of her brother’s coat, running her dry tongue along her lips.

Something in her unusual silence must have stirred through the boy’s own misery, for after a moment or so he looked up, at first dimly, as though scarcely recognising her. Then—slowly realising her intent glance fixed on something beyond his own shoulder, he turned—and saw.

Twenty yards or more off, on a mound of coarse grass and sand just above the high-tide mark, “It” was sitting, its long arms wound round its knees, staring out to sea.

For a moment or so they hung, open-mouthed, wide-eyed.

For the life of her, Rhoda could not have moved a step nearer. The creature’s heavy shoulders were rounded, its head thrust forward. Silhouetted against sea and sky, white in contrast to its darkness, it had the aloofness of incredible age; drawn apart, almost sanctified by its immeasurable remoteness, its detachment from all that meant life to the men and women of the twentieth century: the web of fancied necessities, trivial possessions, absorptions.

“There was no sea—of course, there was no sea anywhere near here then!” The boy’s whisper opened an incalculable panorama of world-wide change.

There _had_ been no sea here then; no Bristol Channel, no Irish Sea. Valley and river, that was all!

This alien being who had lived, and more than half-died, in this very spot, was gazing at something altogether strange: a vast, uneasy sheet of water with but one visible bank; no golden-brown lights, no shadows, no reflections: a strange, restless and indifferent god.

“Well—anyhow.... Oh, blazes! here goes! if—” Young Fane broke off with a decision that cut his doubts, and moved forward.

In a moment the creature was alert, its head flung sideways and up, sniffing the air like a dog.

It half turned, as though to run; then, as the boy stopped short, it paused.

“Rhoda—get the grub—go quietly—don’t run.... Bread-and-butter—anything!”

They had flung down the frail with the bottle of milk, cake, bread-and-butter that they had brought with them—enough for tea and supper—heedless in their despair. Rhoda moved a step or two away, picked up a packet, unfolded it and thrust the food into her brother’s hand—cake, a propitiation!

The strange figure, upright—and yet not upright as it is counted in these days—remained stationary; there was one quick turn of the head following her, then the poise of it showed eyes immovably fixed upon the male.

Hector moved forward very slowly, one smooth step after another. Rhoda had seen him like that with wild birds and rabbits. He wore an old suit of shrunken flannels, faded to a yellowish-grey, which blurred him into the landscape. Far enough off to catch his outline against the molten glare of the sea, she noted that his shoulders were almost as bent as those of that Other.... Other what?—man?—ape? The speculation zigzagged to and fro like lightning through her mind. She could scarcely breathe for anxiety.

As the boy drew quite near to the dull, brownish figure it jerked its head uneasily aside—she knew what Hector’s eyes were like, a steady, luminous grey under the bent brows—made a swinging movement with its arms, half turned; then stopped, stared sideways, crouching, sniffing.

The boy’s arm was held out at its fullest stretch in front of him. Heaven—the old, old gods—only knew upon what beast-torn carrion the creature had once fed; but it was famished, and some instinct must have told it that here was food, for it snatched and crammed its mouth.

Hector turned and Rhoda’s heart was in her throat, for there was no knowing what it might not do at that. But as he moved steadily away, without so much as a glance behind him, it hesitated, threw up its hand, as though to strike or throw; then followed.

* * * * *

That was the beginning of it. During those first days it would have followed him to the end of the world. Later on, he told himself bitterly that he had been a fool not to have seen further; gone off anywhere—oh, anywhere, so long as it was far enough—dragging the brute after him while his leadership still held.

It was with difficulty that they prevented it from dogging them back to the Rectory—just imagine it tailing through the village at their heels! But once it understood that it must stay where it was, it sat down on a grassy hummock, crouching with its arms round its knees, one hand tightly clenched, its small, light eyes, overhung by that portentous brow, following them with a look of desolate loneliness.

Again and again the boy and girl glanced back, but it still sat there staring after them, immovable in the spot which Hector had indicated to it. They had left it all the food they had with them, and one of the blankets which they had been too hot to carry home that morning. As it plainly had not known what to do with the thing, Rhoda, overcome by a sort of motherliness, had thrown it over its shoulders. Thus it sat, shrouded like an Arab, its shaggy head cut like a giant burr against the pale primrose sky.