It was over and he was walking down the lane towards the road beside the river. The trees had been thickened by the crowding buds and he did not see the car flash along the road, cross the bottom of the lane and go on to the church where Daphne was expecting to find her daffodils. When he reached the road he did not look back, as he usually did, to catch a glimpse of the church tower rising above the trees. He turned to the right and went resolutely loping on beside the river, still holding the dead bird.
Chapter 2
1
Michael leaned his arms on the parapet of the bridge, watching the gulls. The attack of dizziness had passed. He was all right as long as he kept still. He merely felt a bit lightheaded, and the sensation was pleasant rather than otherwise for it was a dreamy lightheadedness that softened the edges of things. Past and future no longer pressed sharply upon him and the dream of the moment was shot through with incredible beauty. It flowed in to him through sight and sound and even touch, filling him with such an airy lightness that he seemed floating even while the rough stone of the grand old bridge held him up so strongly. He felt like a small child swinging on his father’s hand, in delicious danger and delicious safety at the same time.
Below him the river was pearl grey, faintly flecked with the light of a clouded day. He was glad there was no sun to sparkle too brightly on the water. He liked it like this. It wound away through the lovely valley very quietly, making no sound except where its eddies chuckled about the piers of the bridge. Upon either side of the valley the fields lifted to the beech woods and their color did not seem so dim to him as it had to Harriet, for he had not seen them yesterday. For him the green was a laughing green and the color of the ploughed fields a song. But the laughter and song were distant. What was near was the voice of the water about the piers of the bridge and the sweep of the gulls’ wings all about him. They were not uttering their strange cries now. Those that were over the river were dipping and wheeling and soaring silently, those in the fields were facing all one way into the wind and gliding along as though the ridges of the ploughed land were the waves of an inland sea. Against the deep crimson of the turned earth their wings gleamed white as unsoiled snow, but when he looked up at those that were about him he could see the grey feathers among the white, that same exquisite mother-of-pearl grey of the slipping water, and the greenish tinge of the hooked beaks. And their flight! The freedom that was in those great sweeping curves. The freedom of the water flowing unchecked to the sea. The freedom of the lifting fields and the beech woods, and the great hills that swelled against the sky. The ecstasy of this freedom was such music in his blood that his whole body pulsed with intense joy. It was the beat of this joy in freedom that kept him swinging in light even when the stone of the parapet gripped his right hand that was laid upon it.
The throbbing increased and became an almost monotonous beat like that of a footfall. It thrummed in his head, too, and behind his eyes, and hammered in his chest. He could no longer hear the water, only the ugly hammering in his ears and the monotonous steps coming down the passage to take him away. The light in which he had swung was thinning to darkness. He clutched at the hand that had held his but it was not there. He turned, groping for it, and the ground slid away like ice beneath his feet. He would have fallen had he not found the hand again. Or rather it found him, gripping his arm.
“Hold on!” said a startled voice. “Steady, now. This way, and you can sit down.”
He was sitting down, on a wooden bench by the bridge, his back against the hard stone.
“Take a pull at this disgusting liquid,” said the voice again. “It won’t do you any harm for I doubt if you’re drunk.”
Michael took a gulp at the flask for politeness’ sake and then pushed it gently away. “Certainly not,” he said. Then he smiled. “At least I wasn’t, but I am now. That’s very good brandy.” For even the small dose he had had, on a completely empty stomach, had sent the world reeling round him again. But he was aware that he was under scrutiny and was not surprised when the voice said, “When was your last meal?”
“Breakfast,” said Michael.
“Liar,” said the voice equably. “Stay where you are. I won’t be a moment.”
Michael stayed where he was. Coming down the road he had noticed a gate and a cart track leading to a farm, and he guessed that the owner of the voice had gone there. He had seen a board by the gate announcing “Bed and Breakfast” and had gazed longingly at the breakfast bit of the notice. But a bed for the night at Silverbridge, and the razor and toothbrush he had bought there, had taken the last of his cash. There was nothing in his pocket now but a half-penny and two farthings. What a crazy fool he had been. The fumes of the brandy slowly cleared from his mind, and sitting down now withdrawn within himself behind the shutters of his closed eyes, the beauty that had so exalted him shut out, the fool that he had been yesterday was very much with him. He had completely lost control of himself yesterday. Damn fool. Cowardly fool. Just because he had seen a gleam of recognition in the eyes of a man he had known he must bolt as senselessly as a terrified rabbit driven out of the last of the standing corn. He’d been momentarily happy yesterday, leaning on the parapet of that other bridge, with the roar of the indifferent city behind his back, the blank grey sky over his head and the river below. The huge blank indifference of the city, the sky and the river had been balm to him. No one had known or cared. He had swung round to enjoy the indifference of the city, and had been leaning comfortably with his back against the parapet, when he had met the eyes of the man he had known and seen that flash of recognition.
It was then that he had lost his nerve. He had gone straight to the station, without even going back to his flat, and caught the west-country express. He could not take up work again in London and meet the contempt of men and women he had known. A brave man would have faced it. He couldn’t; at least not yet. So he’d run away. Taken a ticket for that place in the far southwest whose name had stuck in his mind since he’d seen it in some months’ old newspaper he’d got hold of years ago in the war . . . Silverbridge . . . Fighting in Africa it had been incredible to read about angling at Silverbridge. It had been much the same as reading about harping in heaven. He’d never forgotten the name and he’d always meant to go there.
And now here he was; but forgetting to pick up his wallet again when he’d put it down to buy his ticket, and arriving at Silverbridge with only the loose change he had in his pocket had landed him in a tiresome, if temporary, mess, and now the virtue had gone out of Silverbridge. When he had arrived there in the sunset light it had seemed a paradise, hungry though he was, but when he had got up in the morning, even hungrier, it was just a little country town like any other. Yet he had had the curiosity to ask where it was they held the angling competitions, and when the river road had been pointed out to him he had followed it aimlessly, until his attack of dizziness had nearly upset the milk van. Then upon the bridge had come that strange, almost anguished experience of incomparable beauty. That had been paradise, for a moment or two. But what now? Where did he go from here? Any grain of common sense that he might have had in the past was now entirely lost. He was the greatest fool who ever lived.
“Bread and cold bacon and coffee. My own breakfast was a bit sketchy. We’ll share it, shall we? You don’t see a dead bird anywhere about, do you?”
Michael drank some coffee from the mug into which his host had poured it from a brown earthenware jug, devoured a thick bacon sandwich like a famished dog, and then enquired, “What did you say? I don’t think I quite understood.”
“No matter,” said the vague and gentle voice. “I was carrying a dead bird but I seem to have mislaid it.”
A bit cracked, thought Michael, and reached for another sandwich. Yet sufficiently intelligent to have produced a thoroughly good breakfast. And probably not as crackers as he was himself.
“Did you want it?” he asked politely. “Might I have so
me more coffee?”
“Help yourself,” said John. “There it is, on the bridge. I must have dropped it when I caught hold of you. Excuse me a moment.”
He mounted the arc of the bridge, stooped and picked something up. He brought it back and showed it sadly to Michael.
“A hedge sparrow,” said Michael. “The dun-colored birds are the most beautiful, don’t you think? I’d rather have that little chap than a goldfinch any day.”
John picked a dock leaf, laid the bird gently upon it and then launched the small boat upon the river. Borne by the current it floated slowly away towards the sea.
“The Lady of Shalott,” said Michael, a little breathless with suppressed laughter.
“I think it was the cock,” said John with extreme gravity. “Though there’s so little difference in the plumage that it’s difficult to tell.”
“I know,” said Michael weakly. “It was the boat that made me think of that tuneful lady. ‘The broad stream bore her far away, the Lady of Shalott.’ ” He suppressed the last of his laughter. It was unkind to laugh at these amiable lunatics, and this one, when he had stooped from his great spindly height to launch the hedge sparrow upon its journey, had looked exactly like Michael’s idea of Don Quixote, “the luminary and mirror of all knight-errantry,” and for that gentle and melancholy knight Michael had always had the greatest affection. Indeed, he was almost his favorite character in literature. . . And he had been created by a man in prison. . . The thought of the great Cervantes, “the maimed perfection,” and of his sufferings so triumphantly endured, was one of the things that had helped to keep him sane many times, he imagined. He was young enough to believe that men go mad, that men die, more easily than in fact they do. He put the point where endurance is no longer possible at a reasonable distance along the way, not at that distant point where John could have told him that it does in fact exist.
“It would be such a pity if a child saw it,” explained John. “Children grieve over these things.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Michael bitterly. “Children are heartless little beasts. Compassion is a late development. And rare. Most of the kindness one meets is bogus.”
John turned round, his lean face alight with amusement. “You’re young still,” he said. When John was amused his smile was like wintry sunshine. His cadaverous boniness was suddenly transformed with brilliant promise and one almost expected to see him blossom into spring upon the instant. Michael was taken aback by the promise.
“Not your kindness,” he said with quick humility. “I believe I’ve eaten the last sandwich. We were to have shared this meal, but we don’t seem to have done so.” He peered into the coffee jug. “Only dregs there. And you paid for it. That, I imagine, is typical.”
“Of what?” asked John.
“Of the kind of man you are. Of the kind of man I am.”
“It’s early days to pass judgment on each other,” said John. “Though in any case I think that’s an unprofitable employment. Human character is so full of surprises. Even those one knows best continually surprise one.” He paused. “And in the things one does sometimes, the thoughts one has, one surprises oneself most of all. Invariably unpleasantly.”
“There you’re right,” said Michael, shortly, grimly and desperately.
John sat down beside him, absent-mindedly pulled out his empty pipe and sucked at it. He was remembering what Harriet had said this morning. “A new color being threaded in for a new pattern.” He gazed straight in front of him but he did not see the gulls riding the wine-dark sea of the ploughed lands, the sight that was once more absorbing Michael; he saw instead, as clearly as though he looked upon a painted portrait, the face of the man beside him. He had always had this queer visual gift. He could take in, with a few quick glances, every detail of a face, and then see it again as though memory were a lantern that projected the picture upon the purity of his compassion. He would not so have explained it to himself. His love for men, existing side by side with his self-distrustful shrinking from them when they were not actually confronting him, and his compassion for them that had been bled white and stretched taut with use, were remarkable but had not been remarked by himself.
Though he could not trust his own judgment he nevertheless knew men, and the face he was looking at both interested and touched him. It was the face of a fairly young man, though not so young as his bitterness had at first led him to expect. But not yet forty. It was a brittle-looking, charming face, thin and dark, with a certain childishness about it that was contradicted by the wariness of the eyes and the weather-beaten appearance of the skin. It was a weak face, obstinately and rather angrily set in repose but with a delightful puckish humor breaking through when he laughed or spoke. His dark hair, closely cropped, stood vitally and unbecomingly on end like the fur of an infuriated short-haired cat. Indeed in his lithe wiriness, wariness and hungryness he reminded John of a stray black tom-cat spitting sparks at a would-be rescuer. Not that there was any sign of spitting at the moment, but any attempt at rescuing would undoubtedly produce it. The man wore good, well-cut clothes but he was the untidy type. Wrinkled socks and a tie askew were obviously a part of his temperament. But a good shave and clean hands were a part of his temperament too, and those with clean hands and expensive clothes in a prosperous country are seldom hungry.
“What is the matter? And what do I do?” wondered John in an appalling state of worry. It was perpetually his duty as a priest to do something about somebody and his prayers for guidance were seldom answered in any way that was apparent to him. He prayed now, frantically, and remained as worried as before. And he liked this man, not only with his habitual love of mankind but with an intense personal sympathy as well. He was not adult any more than he was himself. Most probably the child in him had not been able to meet the challenge with which life confronts a man. He might spit defiance with an angry attempt at courage, with deliberate deception he might swagger along with an apparent crust of toughness upon the surface of his weakness, but any sudden test would shatter the crust. In the depths of his failure he would know an exceedingly bitter shame. John almost sweated in sympathy. It was merely the good fortune of circumstance, he thought, that none of his own failures had let him down into degradation. . . But for the grace of God. . . That was a consideration that always made it impossible to get up and go away, even if he were justified in doing so, which at the moment he was not. One had to do something, no matter how futile. One had to stick like a bur, and as irritatingly. It was the other chap who had to do the pulling off, when he could no longer stand the irritation.
“Now what do we do?” he asked, and his blue eyes, as he turned them on Michael, were full of bewilderment.
Michael laughed and a most invigorating sense of strength came to him. This chap seemed even more incompetent than he was himself. Any appeal for help always touched and steeled him as nothing else did. It was so rare.
“I go on my way and you go on yours,” he suggested. “That is, you go on to Silverbridge and I go to wherever this road’s going to.”
“I wasn’t going to Silverbridge,” said John, “I was coming to find you. And if you were going to where this road leads to, it’s Belmaray, and we’ll go there together.”
He sighed with relief as he unfolded himself and stood up. So far, so good. The next ten minutes of their existences were now mapped out for them.
“Nothing to worry about for ten minutes,” he said. “Fifteen, if we go slowly.”
“Should we make it twenty and return the mugs and jug to the farm?” suggested Michael.
John looked at him with admiration. “I should have forgotten them,” he said.
“You stay here,” said Michael. “I’ll take them.”
John did as he was told. The initiative had passed now to the younger man and he rejoiced in nothing so much as in obedience. But when Michael came back he was once more sucking at his em
pty pipe because he had just remembered that he had not told Mrs. Wilmot to wash the traycloth.
“Are you temporarily out of tobacco or do you prefer it that way?” asked Michael, as they strolled companionably along the road.
“Except on Sundays I don’t smoke now,” said John. “It’s not necessary. But my pipe has got a bit of a habit with me. I pull at it without thinking what I’m doing.” He put it away. “And it’s not necessary.”
“In this damnable world smoking is most necessary,” said Michael, and offered a silver cigarette case with one cigarette in it.
John stopped dead in horror, about to protest, for the cigarette cried aloud to him that it had been kept for a particularly bad moment. Then he took it, and felt at once in his own spirit the balm he had given to the spirit of the other. In terms of sacrifice the meal was now more than paid for.
“What did you mean, that you were coming to look for me?” asked Michael as they strolled on again. “How did you know I was draped over the bridge?”
“The milk van,” said John. “We’ve not had our milk yet.”