Quincunx

  Once out on the street I quickened my pace and then, breaking into a run, dived down a bye-street and then another and then another. In view of what I had overheard I realized that I could attempt to leave the town only after dark and that I would have to travel by night, and find a means of avoiding the turnpike-gates. Meanwhile, it would be dangerous to wander about the streets. Hunger, however, could not be resisted and so once I had bought a small loaf — leaving me two shillings and nine-pence of Stephen’s half-sovereign — I found my way into the poorest part of the town down by the river.

  Eventually I discovered what I was looking for: a deserted yard off a quiet bye-street where there was a range of abandoned outhouses which belonged to a former livery-stable. Although they were padlocked, the old door of one of them was so worm-eaten that I was able to remove it and then replace it behind me. In the dim light I could see that I was in a three-stall stable with a loft above, reached by a ladder which looked strong enough to bear my weight. I sat on an ancient manger and ate half of my bread, rejoicing that I was dry, relatively warm and for the first time fairly safe. The very smell of the stable — compounded of hemp because of the old sacks strewn about, of malt, of rotted wood and ancient straw — was oddly reassuring for it suggested that the place had been long abandoned. I cautiously climbed the ladder — to which surely no grown man would entrust himself — crawled into the musty straw in the darkness further back, pulled it around me and slept.

  When I awoke it was nearly dark. I descended, ate some more of the bread, waited until night had fallen, and then ventured into the unlit back-lanes. By means of them I picked my way out of the town towards the North in case the roads to the South were being watched. After a mile or two I left the highway and, keeping the lights of the town always at a distance, made a wide sweep to the South, being careful to rejoin the road beyond the toll-house in case the keeper had been alerted. This manoeuvre cost me several hours, but at least my injured leg had so much benefited from the rest that I was able to keep up a brisk pace. This time I did not leave the carriageway to hide from other travellers except when I saw riders coming towards me, in case Quigg and Roger should be returning from Selby already. I reached the outskirts of that town before dawn and found a lonely barn to sleep in and there, with nothing more to eat than the last of my bread, I spent the day.

  When darkness fell I skirted the town and pressed on South. As I walked, the harvest moon sailed above the horizon and the latticed windows of the darkened cottages I passed glinted in its light. When dawn was approaching I bought bread from a baker, who was overcome by floury surprise to have a customer so early. I found an isolated barn and slept for a few hours but then, feeling that I had eluded capture and could henceforward travel by day and sleep by night, I walked on in the bright mid-morning.

  In this manner I made my way South. Occasionally a passing carter gave me a cast, but most of the time I walked, sleeping in barns by night. Often as I was sleeping under some straw in a musty byre or on a rattling cart, I started up from my sleep in the belief that my mother had called me, and it seemed to me that her voice sounded not frightened or anxious but strangely calm. As my money ran out I learned to beg — always on the watch for the constable — and when that failed, lived on raw turnips stolen from the fields, pea-shucks, and the dwindling produce of the autumnal hedgerows — sorrel leaves, berries, sloes, and crabs.

  I have not leisure now to record the many adventures and the many strange meetings I had with the folk I met on the high-road: the packmen and wandering beggars, each with a wallet over his shoulder, and honest workmen upon the tramp and disembodied soldiers and crippled sea-men and cheap-jacks on their way to one or other of the statute-fairs and the man leading a dancing-bear with whom I walked for half a day. I met tinkers crying: “Any razors or scissars to grind? / Or anything else in the tinker’s line? / Any old pots or kettles to mend?” When I went by the drove-roads and green-lanes I fell in with drovers leading cattle South from Scotland to be fed in Norfolk; and I often saw from a distance the dark-eyed, silent gypsies passing in their brightly-painted waggons. Ill-use I received from some, but charity from more. Yet even so, once my money had run out I had difficulty in obtaining food. At least once I walked a whole day on nothing more than a piece of bread and it was then — on the sixth day after leaving the Quiggs’ farm — that I had an experience whose memory has haunted me all my life.

  I had come to a district where the hamlets and farms gave way to a landscape of manufactories and canals and high hillocks of slag among which little lines of mean brick cottages started and broke off seemingly at hazard. Most of them were of recent construction but even so many were already in ruins, and often the carriageway sank several feet as if the land beneath it had caved in. The road and the buildings, the hedgerows and trees, and even the faces of the people I met, were covered with a fine layer of black ash and there was an oppressive smell like camphor. From behind high walls that ran alongside the road on one side there came the monotonous thump of a steam-engine and other sounds like the distant roar of malevolent seas. I drew my ragged coat about me to keep out the chill wind, but could do nothing against the dust and ashes that were blown into my mouth and eyes with every gust.

  The faces of the country-people I had passed had been for the most part suspicious and closed and I had been better treated by my fellow way-farers, but the features of the people I met here were wild in either their misery or their exultation. And it seemed to be at these two extremes that the denizens of this place lived, for I saw many in the deepest poverty while others swaggered along in fine clothes. From either group my attempts to beg were unavailing, and since there were no hedgerows or fields to batten on, I became hungrier and hungrier. As evening approached I found myself surrounded by wide pits that belched flames and smoke from underground fires, lighting the ground up all around with a lurid flickering glow that made the shadows of the tall chimneys bend and waver alarmingly on either side of me. Now I remembered the fires that I had seen and the noises I had heard as I travelled north with Mr Steplight.

  Further on I passed great hillsides of ashes which were the refuse of nearby lime-kilns. I was stopped by a small boy scantily clad in rags even on an October night who held out a grubby palm.

  “I have nothing,” I said.

  “Sister’s sick,” he said, still holding out his hand.

  “Where is your mam?” I asked.

  “Gorn away,” he said.

  “Where do you live?”

  He jerked his head.

  “Where do you mean?”

  He repeated the gesture and I looked at the great mound that rose up beside us. Some flimsy pieces of wood with tarred sacking over them had been placed across a space that had been hollowed out in the hillside. Now that I peered into the gloom I could see several of these makeshift shelters. I hurried on.

  Even as night fell I walked forward for I wanted to get clear of that place of desolation, but it went on and on limitlessly. Hunger was making me light-headed and it became difficult to know if the noises I heard and the lights that flashed were inside my head or outside. It grew darker and darker and the sulphurous smell grew worse. I thought I had been walking for hours and could not tell why the dawn had not come. Now I began to have the strangest fancies: that perhaps the dawn would never come for the place I had entered was not on the face of the earth.

  At last, I lay down a few paces from the side of the road and slept. It seemed to me that when I awoke it was still night for the same thick pall of smoke hung over the land and I walked on, and either a grudging daylight came at last or the smoke grew clearer. Then I was walking along a road on the edge of a town — or perhaps it was between two towns, for I could not tell where one ended and another began — and I came to a canal over which the road passed on an iron bridge. I looked down and there was a high, blank and windowless manufactory in pink brick like a boiled lobster with a row of dreary red-bricked cottages beside it and heaps of waste all
around. There was a laden barge passing on the canal being drawn by no horse but with a little metal chimney puffing smoke, and there was a man at the tiller who was puffing on a pipe like a smaller imitation of the funnel. The building before me was immense with two high chimneys belching out smoke and long rows of arched windows and a hollow pediment in the centre through whose vast arch-way I could glimpse hundreds of men — black and almost naked — furiously pushing waggons heaped with coal on metal rails up to the very maw of a giant furnace where others fed it into the flames.

  Then I was overcome by a sudden terror. What was I doing here in this nameless waste where I knew nothing and nobody and might lie down and die and not even my name be known to record my death? I must hasten on. Yet where was I going to? Whom, apart from my mother, did I know even in London? My hand was resting on the cold metal surface of the bridge’s parapet and as I looked at the rusted surface it seemed to me that its pattern of stains and scratches was both meaninglessly accidental and yet the only thing that mattered in the world.

  I walked on and the next thing I recall is that there was a high wall on one side of the way and that it seemed that I had been walking along that road all my life and would walk along it for ever. Despairing of its ever ending, I lay down and slept, and then it seemed that I rose and went on and that I watched the most beautiful dawn I had ever seen unfold in the eastern sky, and that the land changed again and I came down into a delightful valley and found myself following a willow-bordered stream that flowed gently through a landscape of neat houses and well-kept fields dotted with clumps of trees like so many pleasure-demesnes. Still following the stream I entered a village by a foot-path that led along the backs of tall old houses, each with a walled sally-garden running down to the water into whose edges tall willows were weeping. Children were splashing about in the stream and their elders watching them from the ancient bridge accosted me with smiles and shook me courteously by the hand and pressed me to stay there. But I walked on. And later I must have lain down to sleep for I awoke and did not know where I was.

  I went on again through the sullied landscape thinking about the sweetness of that village and remembering Melthorpe.

  Gradually the waste-tips and canals and chimneys ebbed and the countryside came back. There was a smell of winter in the air and the sense of nature closing up and withdrawing made me anxious to quicken my pace. Then suddenly one morning a day or two later I saw on a finger-post a name I knew: Sutton Valancy 12 mi. Then Melthorpe could only be a few miles away! The thought gave me new strength for suddenly it came to me that I would go there. Sukey would help me!

  On the ninth or tenth day after my escape I reached the well-remembered lane that led from the turnpike-road down Gallow-tree-hill to Melthorpe. It was late afternoon on a fine day and the familiar houses and fields lay in the autumnal sunshine of late October. How brief a time had passed since I last saw the village, but how much had happened! I made my way down the hill and past the Green, and there were the tumbledown cottages rising from the mud of Silver-street. The door of Sukey’s was open and I went up to it, knocked and went a little way inside. All seemed at peace: a fire burned merrily in the hearth; a knitting-frame stood idle in a corner; some children — two girls and a boy — were sitting on the dirt-floor plaiting straw, and a woman was busied over a cooking-pot that hung over the fire. She turned on hearing my entrance and I saw that it was Sukey.

  She stared at me for a moment, then a look of astonishment appeared on her face.

  “Yes, Sukey. It’s I.”

  With a cry she rushed towards me: “Master Johnnie!”

  I felt myself pressed against her and so much of the past flooded back! After all that I had been through her welcome broke something inside me that had been holding firm, and I began to sob.

  “For a minute I didn’t know you!” Sukey cried, holding me at arm’s length. “You’re so much taller. And so thin.” At this she hugged me again. “What has happened to you?” she cried. “And to your sweet mither? Is she in good cue?”

  But when I tried to answer she hushed me and insisted that explanations should come later. I was seated before the fire and a bowl of the thick soup in the pot was ladled out and laid before me with a piece of the coarse barley-bread of the northern districts. Meanwhile Sukey put a skillet over the fire and fried some potatoes and a little bacon-fat which I consumed with relish after the broth.

  When I had eaten this — the first hot food I had had for months — I was permitted to answer one question: “How is your mither?”

  “When I left her she was well,” I answered.

  She read my meaning in my face. “Wait while I get the children abed,” she said.

  When she had over-seen the washing and preparations for bed of the children — two little girls of about ten and six and a boy of eight — she came back to the fireplace and wearily seated herself beside me.

  “How are all of you?” I asked.

  Sukey looked down: “My mam died last winter. And Sally was carried off by the fever this Pack-rag Day.”

  “I’m sorry. And how are the others?”

  “The girls help me with the work. Amos gets what work he can by the day. Jem starves the crows now for Farmer Lubbenham like Harry done.”

  “And Harry?”

  She glanced down and then said: “He had a place as a farm-servant over towards Mere Bassett but he lost it for his bad ways, and now he’s a roundsman on the paritch, like most of the men in the village. He’s working on the ’Ougham estate right over beyond Stoke Mompesson. Most likely, he’ll not be back till gone late.”

  She explained that a roundsman was a parish pauper who was hired out by the Overseer of the Poor each day to whichever farmer bid most for his labour.

  Interested though I was, I could not stifle a yawn and Sukey insisted that I should sleep immediately and tell her my story when I awoke. Despite my protests, she laid an old straw palliasse in a corner of the cottage and the sight of it brought an immense yearning for rest upon me. I laid myself down and once I was lying there with a couple of ragged old blankets over me no-one would even have known I was there in the dark corner among the spiders.

  I woke up late in the evening at the sound of a man shouting. For a moment, when I had recalled where I was, I wondered sleepily if it could be Sukey’s father until I remembered that he was dead. I looked out from among the straw and blankets and recognised in the tall, brawny-shouldered figure with straw-coloured hair the boy I had known as Harry and who, though only three or four years older than I, was already a man. He flung some coins down on the floor and shouted: “That’s all, so don’t you complain none.”

  “Why it’s good of you, Harry,” Sukey said timidly as she stooped for the money. “Many a young man wouldn’t bring back none at all. But I wish you wouldn’t …”

  “If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t need to. She’ll have to go. I can’t feed her and the young ’uns on my reg’lars.”

  “I know, I know,” Sukey said propitiatingly.

  What was it Harry was doing? I believed I could guess. I kept hidden while Sukey calmed him down, pulled off his boots, and heated up some food for him. At last he climbed the ladder, threw himself down on the straw near his sleeping siblings, and was soon deeply and stertorously asleep.

  I crept out and in a whisper Sukey invited me to sit with her before the dying fire which gave all the light we needed. And now at her request I told her the burden of all that had happened since my mother and I had left the village.

  Sukey said nothing until I had finished my account, and then, when she had expressed her indignation against all things Quiggish, she remarked: “But I can set you straight about what happened here arter you’d gone. It was all down to Mrs Bissett. What she done was, she sold off your mither’s things to a higgler in Sutton Valancy. He come over and boughten everything. Sent two carts for it the next day. And many folks hereabouts said they would have paid a deal more if they’d been gave the chance, for yo
ur mither had some fine things. Folks saw them sold in Sutton Valancy for a mort o’ money. Some said Mrs Bissett took a share herself, but I would not go so far.”

  “I see,” I said. “So then there was not enough money to pay the creditors?”

  “That is so. Mrs Bissett went round to each on ’em and offered ’em a few shillin’ in the pound.”

  “But then why did they go to law?”

  “Why, do you mind that Mr Barbellion?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I believe him and her had an understanding. Mrs Bissett was a three-cunning creatur’ and she got letters and met strangers that you and your mam never knowed nothin’ about. And this Mr Barbellion come down a few days arter the sale and persuaded all the shop-keepers to club together and go to the magistrate agin her. Whyever should he do that, Master Johnnie?”

  “Because he works for some people who are enemies of my mother and myself, Sukey.”

  “They must be indeed,” she replied. “Though why they should choose to make trouble for you when they are so rich themselves and they’re blood-relatives, too, by all accounts — why ’tis past my understanding.”

  I was astonished by her words. She seemed so well-informed when I was myself only dimly aware of the identity of these people.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Why, it’s common knowledge hereabouts that Mr Barbellion works for the Mumpseys.”

  I smiled for I saw that there was a misunderstanding: “No, Sukey. You’re mistaken. There is no connexion between them.”

  “I’m not wrong, Master Johnnie. For Auntie Twelvetrees saw him often at Mumpsey-park. You remember her, don’t you? Her goodman was lodge-keeper there.”

  “Then it is she who is in error. She may have seen the Mompessons’ lawyer at Hougham,” I conceded, “but I don’t see how she could know he was the gentleman who came to see my mother on those two occasions.”