Part 9

“A beastly shame leaving it alone like that!” They both felt it; scarcely liked to meet each other’s eyes over it. And yet, pity it as they might, engrossed in it as they were, they couldn’t stay there with it after dark. No reason, no fear—just couldn’t! Why? Oh, well, for all its new-found life, it was as far away as any ghost.

“Poor brute!” said Rhoda.

“Poor chap!” Hector’s under-lip was thrust out, his look aggressive. But there was no argument; and when he treated her—“Don’t be silly; of course it’s not a man; any duffer could see that”—with contemptuous silence, Rhoda knew that he was absolutely fixed in his convictions.

He proved it, too, next morning, leading the creature out into the half-dried mud and back again to where his sister sat, following his apparently aimless movements with puzzled eyes.

“Now, look,” he crowed. “Just you look, Miss Blooming-Cocksure!”

He was right. There was the mark of his own heavy nailed boot, and beside it the track of other feet; oddly-shaped enough, but with the weight distinctly thrown upon the heel and great-toe, as no beast save man has ever yet thrown it—that fine developed great-toe, the emblem of leadership. Hardly a trace of such pressure as the three greater apes show, all on the outer edge of the foot; not even flat and even as the baboon throws his.

It was after this that—without another word said—Rhoda, meek for once, followed her brother’s example, and began to speak of the creature as “He.”

They even gave him a name. They called him Hodge; only in fun, and yet with a feeling that here was one of the first of all countrymen: less learned, and yet in some way so much more observant, self-sufficing, than his machine-made successors.

He could run at an almost incredible rate, bent as he was; climb any tree; out-throw either of them, doubling the distance. It was there that they got at the meaning of that closed fist; for at least three days he had never let go of his stone—his one weapon.

“He didn’t trust us.” Rhoda was hurt, her vanity touched; and when they had seemed to be making such progress, too!

“Not that—a sort of ingrained habit; the poor devil didn’t feel dressed without it,” protested Hector. “Of course he trusts us as much as a perfectly natural creature ever trusts anything or anybody.”

* * * * *

The Rector had gone on a visit to their only relative, an old aunt, who was dying in as leisurely a fashion as she had lived, and was unable to leave her. A neighbouring curate took that next Sunday’s service.

It had been a Monday when Hector found Hodge, and a very great deal can happen in that time.

From the first it had seemed clear that nothing in the way of communicating with authorities, experts, could be done until their father was there to back them, adding his own testimony. It was no good just writing—Hector did, indeed, begin a letter to Sir Ray Lankester, but tore it up, appalled by his own formless, boyish handwriting. “He’d think we were just getting at him—a couple of silly kids,” was his reflection.

He knew a lot for his age; was very certain of his own knowledge; felt no personal fear of this wild man of his. But ordinary grown-up people! That was altogether a different matter. And here he touched the primitive mistrust of all real youth for anything too completely finished and sophisticated.

Of course, from the very beginning, there were all sorts of minor troubles with Matty over their continued thefts of food; difficulties in keeping the creature away from the house and village.

But all that was nothing to what followed.

The first dim, unformulated sense of fear began on the night when Hector, awakened by a loud rustling among the leaves of that one tree, discovered Hodge there, climbing along a bough which ended close against Rhoda’s window.

Rhoda’s, not his—that was the queer part of it!

The boy felt half huffed as he drove him off. But when he came again, some instinct, something far less plain than thought, began to worry him: something which seemed ludicrous, until it gathered and grew to a feeling of nausea so horrible that the cold sweat pricked out upon his breast and forehead.

At the third visit the fear was more defined. But still.... That brute “smitten” with Rhoda! He tried to laugh it off. Anyhow, what did it matter? And yet.... Hang it all! there was something sickening about it all. It was impossible to sleep at night, listening, always listening.

He was only thirteen. Of course he had heard other chaps talking, but he had no real idea of the fierce drive of physical desire. And yet it was plain enough that here was something “beastly” beyond all words.

He told Rhoda to keep her window bolted, and when she protested against such “fugging,” touched on his own fears, tried, awkwardly enough, to explain without explaining.

“I’m funky about Hodge—he’s taken to following us. He might get in—bag something.”

“The darling!” cried Rhoda. “Look here, old chap. I really believe he’s fond of me; fonder of me than of you!”

She persisted in putting it to the test next day; left “Hodge” sitting by her brother, and walked away.

The creature moved his head uneasily from side to side, glanced at Hector, and his glance was full of hatred, malevolence; then, scrambling furtively to his feet, helping himself with his hands, one fist tight-closed, in the old fashion, he passed round the back of the boy, and followed her.

For a minute or two Hector sat hunched together, staring doggedly out to sea. If Rhoda chose to make an ass of herself—well, let her. After all, what could the brute do? She was bigger than he was, had nothing on her worth stealing; nothing of any use to Hodge, anyhow, he told himself.

Then, of a sudden, that half-formulated dread, that sick panic seized him afresh. He glanced round; both Hodge and his sister were out of sight, and he started to run with all his might, shouting.

There was an answering cry from Rhoda, shriller than usual, with a note of panic in it. This gave him the direction; and, plunging off among a group of shallow sand-dunes, he found himself almost upon them.

Rhoda was drawn up very straight, laughing nervously, her shoulders back, flushed to the eyes, while Hodge stood close in front of her, gabbling—they had tried him with their own words, but the oddly-angled jaw had seemed to cramp the tongue beyond hope of articulate speech—gabbling, gesticulating.

“Oh, Hector!” The girl’s cry was full of relief as she swung sideways toward him; while Hodge, glancing round, saw him, raised his hand, and threw.

The stone just grazed the boy’s cheek, drawing a spurt of blood; but this was enough for Rhoda, who forgot her own panic in a flame of indignation.

The creature could not have understood a word of what she said: her denunciation, abuse, “the wigging” she gave him. But her look was enough, and he shrank aside, shamed as a beaten dog.

They did not bid him good-night. They had taught him to shake hands; but now that he was in disgrace all that was over, and they turned aside with the set severity of youth: bent brows and straightened, hard mouths.

Rhoda was the first to relent, half-way home, breaking their silence with a laugh: “Poor old Hodge! I don’t know why I was so scared—I must have got him rattled, or he’d never have thrown that stone. Why, it was always you he liked best, followed,” she added magnanimously.

And yet she was puzzled, all on edge, as she had never been before. The look Hodge had cast at her brother was unmistakable; but why?—why? What had changed him? She never even thought of that passion common to man and beast, interwoven with all desire, hatred—the lees of love—jealousy.

All that evening Hector scarcely spoke. He was not so much scared as gravely anxious in a man’s way. If that brute got him with a stone, what would happen to Rhoda? Even supposing that there had been anyone to consult, he could not, for the life of him, have put his fear into words. So much a man, he was yet too much a boy for that. Terrified of ridicule, incredulity, he hugged his secret, as that strange man-beast hugged his—the highest and lowest—the most primitive and the most cultured—forever uncommunicative; those in the midway the babblers.

He was so firm in his insistence upon Rhoda changing her room that night that she gave way, without argument, overawed by his gravity, by an odd, chill sense of fear which hung about her. “I must have got a cold. I’ve a sort of feeling of a goose walking over my grave,” was what she said laughingly, half-shamefaced, accustomed as she was to attribute every feeling to some natural cause.

That night, soon after midnight, the brute was back in the tree. Hector heard the rustling, then the spring and swish of a released bough. Before he lay down he had unbolted one of the long bars from the underneath part of his old-fashioned iron bedstead; and, now taking it in his hand, he ran to Rhoda’s room.

The white-washed walls and ceiling were so flooded with moonlight that it was almost as light as day.

Hodge was already in the room: the clothes were torn from the bed; the cupboard doors wide open; the whole place littered with feminine attire.

He—It—the impersonal pronoun slid into its place in the boy’s mind, and no words of self-reproach or condemnation could have said more—stood at the foot of the empty bed, with something white—it might have been a chemise—in its hand, held up to its face. Hector could not catch its expression, but there was something inexpressibly bestial in the silhouette of its head, bent, sniffing; he could actually hear the whistling breath.

He would have given anything if only it had stayed, fought it out then. But it belonged to a state too far away for that—defensive, at times aggressive, but forever running, hiding, slinking: a thrower from among thick boughs behind tree-trunks—and in a moment it was out of the window, bundling over the sill, so clumsy and yet so amazingly quick.

He could hear the swing of a bough as it caught it. There was a loud rustle of leaves, and a stone hurtled in through the window; but that was all.

Hector tidied the room, tossed the scattered garments into the bottom of the wardrobe, and re-made the bed in his awkward boy-fashion, moving mechanically, as if in a dream; his hands busied over his petty tasks, his mind engrossed with something so tremendous that he seemed to be two separate people, of which the one, the greater, revolved slowly and certainly in an unalterable orbit, quite apart from his old everyday life, from that Hector Fane whom he had always known, thought of, spoken of as “myself.”

He went to his own room, put on his collar and coat—for he had lain down upon his bed without undressing, every nerve on edge—laced up his boots with meticulous care. He was no longer frightened or hurried; he knew exactly what he was going to do, and that alone hung him—moving slowly, surely—as upon a pivot.

The moonlight was so clear that there was no need for a candle, flooding the stairway, the study with its shabby book-shelves.

Easy enough to take the old shot-gun from the nails over the mantelshelf; only last holiday—years and years ago, while he was still a child—he had been allowed to use it for wild-duck shooting—and run his hand along the back of the writing-table drawer in search of those three or four cartridges which he had seen there a couple of days earlier.

The cartridges in his pocket swung against his hip as he mounted his bicycle and rode away—guiding himself with one hand, the gun lying heavily along his left arm; it was like someone nudging, reminding.

The scene was entirely familiar; but what was so strange in himself lent it an air of something new and uncanny. The winding road had a swing, drawing him with it; the mingled mist and moonlight were sentient, watchful, holding their breath.

Once or twice he seemed to catch sight of a low, stooping figure amid the rough grass and rush-tufted hollows to the left of him; but he could not be sure until he reached the very shore, left his bicycle in the old place.

Then a stone grazed his shoulder, and there was a blurred scurry of brown, from hummock to hummock, low as a hare to the ground.

Once in the open he got a clear sight of Hodge. The far-away tide was on the flow, but there was still a good half-mile of mud, like lead in the silvery dawn.

The man-beast bundled down the sandy strip of shore and out on to the mud: ungainly, stumbling; the boy behind it—“It.” Hector held to that: the pronoun was altogether reassuring now—something to hold to, hard as a bone in his brain.

On the edge of the tide it tried to turn, double; then paused, fascinated, amazed: numb with fear of the strange level pipe pointing, oddly threatening, the first ray of sunlight running like an arrow of gold along the top of it.

There was something utterly naïve and piteous in the misplaced creature’s gesture: the way in which it stood—long arms, short, bandy legs—moving its head uneasily from side to side; bewildered, yet fascinated.

“Poor beggar!” muttered Hector. He could not have said why, but he was horribly sorry, ashamed, saddened.

Years later he thought more clearly—“Poor beggar! After all, what did he want but life—more life—the complete life of any man—or animal, either, come to that!”

As he pressed his finger to the trigger he saw the rough brown figure throw up its arms, leap high in the air, and drop.

Something like a red-hot iron burnt up the back of his own neck; his head throbbed. After all, what did death matter when life was so rotten, so inexplicable? It wasn’t that, only—only.... Well, it was beastly to feel so tired, so altogether gone to pieces.

With bent head he made his way, ploughing through the mud and sand, back to the shore; sat down rather suddenly, with a feeling as though the ground had risen up to meet him, and winding his arms round his knees, stared out to sea; washed through and through, swept by an immense sense of grief, a desperate regret which had nothing whatever to do with his immediate action—the death of Hodge.

That was something which had to be gone through with; it wasn’t that—not exactly that.... But, oh, the futility, the waste of ... well, of everything!

“Rotten luck!” He shuddered as he dragged himself wearily to his feet. He could not have gone before, not while there was the mud with “that” on it; not even so long as the shining sands were bare. It would have seemed too hurried, almost indecent. But now that an unbroken, glittering sheet of water lapped the very edge of the shore, the funeral ceremony—with all its pomp of sunrise—was over; and, turning aside, he stumbled wearily through the rough grass to the place where he had left his bicycle.

HATTERAS

By A. W. MASON

The story was told to me by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton cutter, one night when we lay anchored in Helford River. It was towards the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look. There was no other boat on the wooded creek and the swish of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All these circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story, but most of all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the story of a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled his soul. However, let the story speak for itself.

Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never classmates. Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children overbore this prophecy. Hatteras, the father, disorganized his son’s future by dropping unexpectedly through one of the trapways of speculation into the Bankruptcy Court beneath, just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a stock-in-trade which consisted of a schoolboy’s command of the classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker.

The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch factory in the Bight of Benin.

Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone, and met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident did not come to Walker’s ears until some time afterwards, nor when he heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point, and so may as well be immediately told.

There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself on the swamps of the Forcados River with the mangrove forest closing in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach. Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him, but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation. Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail of a word they said, and at last he retired from the din of their chatter through the windows of a room which gave on to the verandah, and sat down to wait for his superior, the agent.

It was early in the morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the house, so he contemplated the mud banks and the mud river and the mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There are few things quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the quietude began to jar on Hatteras’ nerves. He was besides very hungry. To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.

He walked along the side of the houses towards the back, and as he neared the back he heard a humming sound. The further he went the louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.

Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this—a shuttered window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming outside the window; they streamed in through the lattice of the shutters in a busy, practical way; they came in columns from the forest and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the room.

Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy for the sake of company, but at that moment there was not one to be seen.

He felt the cold strike at his spine. He went back into the room in which he had been sitting. He sat again but he sat shivering. The agent had left no word for him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to explain—something. The humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras a more explicit language than the Kru boys’ chatterings. He penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors. He opened one of them ever so slightly and the buzzing came through like the hum of a wheel in a factory revolving in the collar of a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved himself to enter.

At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a while, however, he made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with a black furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black furry rug suddenly lifted itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras’ face, and dissolved into flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the fever. The agent had died of it three days before.

Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too.

“It’s an obscene country,” he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.

Now the second item of his stock-in-trade was a gift of tongues, and about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect, and with the dialect inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the west coast, and at the end of six years Hatteras could speak as many of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood; he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service under the Niger Protectorate, so that when, two years later, Walker came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the Bonny River, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.

Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny River town to meet the steamer which brought his friend.

“I say, Dick, you look bad,” said Walker.

“People are not, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts.”

“I know that; but you’re the weariest bag of bones I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,” said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.

“Your factory is next to the Residency,” said Hatteras. “There’s a compound to each running down to the river, and there’s a palisade between the compounds. I’ve cut a little gate in the palisade as it will shorten the way from one house to the other.”

The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few months—indeed more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. There he would sit for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a comic opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big atlas, and one of Hatteras’ chief diversions was to trace with his finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay until he reached London.