And now, with the lonely countryside all round him, George became conscious of the mysterious architecture of night. As he felt the abiding strength and everlastingness of the earth, he began to feel also a sense of exultation and release. It was a feeling he had had many times before, a feeling that every man who lives in a vast modern city must feel when, after months within the hive of the city's life--months of sweat and noise and violence, months of grimy brick and stone, months of the incessant thrust and intershift and weaving of the endless crowd, months of tainted air and tainted life, of treachery, fear, malice, slander, blackmail, envy, hatred, conflict, fury, and deceit, months of frenzy and the tension of wire-taut nerves and the changeless change--he leaves the city and is free at last, out beyond the remotest filament of that tainted and tormented web. He that has known only a jungle of mortared brick and stone where no birds sing, where no blade grows, has now found earth again. And yet, unfathomable enigma that it is, he has found earth and, finding it, has lost the world. He has found the washed cleanliness of vision and of soul that comes from earth. He feels himself washed free of all the stains of ancient living, its evil and its lust, its filth and cruelty, its perverse and ineradicable pollution, But curiously, somehow, the wonder and the mystery of it all remains, its beauty and its magic, its richness and its joy, and as he looks back upon that baleful glow that lights the smoky blanket of the sky, a feeling of loss and loneliness possesses him, as if in gaining earth again he has relinquished life.
The car sped onwards and still onwards, until finally the last outpost of London was left behind and the glow in the sky was gone. They were driving through dark country and night towards their journey's end. McHarg had not uttered a word. He still sat with legs sprawled out and head thrown back, swaying from the motion of the car but held in position by one limp arm which was hooked in the strap beside him. George was getting more and more alarmed at the thought of bringing him in this exhausted state to the house of an old friend whom he had not seen for years. At last he stopped the car and told the driver to wait while he pleaded with his master.
He switched on the overhead light and shook him, and to his surprise McHarg opened his eyes right away and by his responses showed that his mind was completely clear and alert. George told him that, worn out as he must be, he could not possibly enjoy a visit with his friend. He begged him to change his mind, to return to London for the night, to let him telephone his friend from the nearest town to say that he had been delayed and would see him in a day or two, but by all means to defer his visit until he felt better able to make it. After McHarg's former display of obstinate determination, George had little hope of success, but to his amazement McHarg now proved most reasonable. He agreed to everything George said, confessed that he himself thought it would be better not to see his friend that night, and said he was prepared to embrace any alternative George might propose, except--on this he was most blunt and flat--he would not go back to London. All day his desire to get out of London had had the force and urgency of an obsession, so George pressed no further on that point. He agreed that they should not turn back, but asked McHarg if he had any preference about where they should go. McHarg said he didn't care, but after meditating with chin sunk forward on breast for several moments, he said suddenly that he would like the sea.
This remark did not seem at all astonishing to George at the time. It became astonishing only as he thought of it later. He accepted the proposal of going to the sea as naturally as a New Yorker might accept a suggestion of riding on a Fifth Avenue bus to see Grant's tomb. If McHarg had said he wanted to go to Liverpool or to Manchester or to Edinburgh, it would have been the same--George would have felt no astonishment whatever. Once out of London, both of these Americans, in their unconscious minds, were as little impressed by the dimensions of England as they would have been by a half-acre lot. When McHarg said he'd like the sea, George thought to himself: "Very well. We'll just drive over to the other side of the island and take a look at it."
So George thought the idea an excellent one and fell in with it enthusiastically, remarking that the salt air, the sound of the waves, and a good night's sleep would do them both a world of good, and would make them fit and ready for further adventures in the morning. McHarg, too, began to show whole-hearted warmth for the plan. George asked him if he had any special place in mind. He said no, that it didn't matter, that any place was good as long as it was on the sea. In rapid order they named over seacoast towns which they had either heard of or at one time or another had visited--Dover, Folkestone, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Blackpool, Torquay, Plymouth.
"Plymouth! Plymouth!" cried McHarg with enthusiastic decision. "That's the very place! I've been in there in ships dozens of times, but never stopped off. True, it's in the harbour, but that doesn't matter. It always looked like a nice little town. Let's go there for the night."
"Oh, sir," spoke up the chauffeur, who till now had sat quietly at his wheel, listening to two maniacs dismember the geography of the British Isles. "Oh, sir," he repeated, with an intonation of quite evident alarm, "you can't do that, you know. Not to-night, sir. It's quite himpossible to make Plymouth to-night."
"What's the reason it is?" McHarg demanded truculently.
"Because, sir," said the driver, "it's a good two 'undred and fifty miles, sir. In this weather, what with rain and never knowing when the fog may close in again, it would take ite all of eight hours, sir, to do it. We should not arrive there, sir, until the small hours of the morning.
"Well, then, all right," McHarg cried impatiently. "We'll go somewhere else. How about Blackpool? Blackpool, eh, Georgie?" he said, turning to Webber feverishly, his lips lifting in a grimace of puckered nervousness. "Let's try Blackpool. Never been there. Like to see the place."
"But, sir"--the driver was now obviously appalled--"Blackpool--Blackpool, sir, is in the north of England. Why, sir," he whispered, "Blackpool is even farther away than Plymouth is. It must be all of three 'undred miles, sir," he whispered, and the awe in his tone could not have been greater if they had just proposed an overnight drive from Philadelphia to the Pacific coast. "We couldn't reach Blackpool, sir, before to-morrow morning."
"Oh, well, then," said McHarg in disgust. "Have it your own way. You name a place, George," he demanded.
Webber thought earnestly for a long minute, then, fortified with memories of scenes from Thackeray and Dickens, he said hopefully: "Brighton. How about Brighton?"
Instantly he knew that he had hit it. The driver's voice vibrated with a tone of unspeakable relief. He turned round in his seat and whispered with almost fawning eagerness:
"Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Brighton! We can do that very nicely, sir."
"How long will it take?" McHarg demanded.
"I should think, sir," said the driver, "I could do it from 'ere in about two and a 'arf hours. A bit late for dinner, sir, but still, it is within reach."
"Good. All right," McHarg said, nodding his head with decision and settling back in his seat. "Go ahead." He waved one bony hand in a gesture of dismissal. "We're going to Brighton."
They started off again, and at the next cross-road charged their course to hunt for the Brighton road.
From that time on, their journey became a nightmare of halts and turnings and changes of direction. The little driver was sure they were headed towards Brighton, but somehow he could not find the road. They twisted this way and that, driving for miles through towns and villages, then out into the open country again, and getting nowhere. At last they came to an intricate and deserted cross-road where the driver stopped the car to look at the signs. But there was none to Brighton, and he finally admitted that he was lost. At these words, McHarg roused and pulled himself wearily forward in his seat, peered out into the dark night, then asked George what he thought they ought to do. The two of them knew even less about where they were than the driver, but they had to go somewhere. When George hazarded a guess that Brighton ought to be off to the left somewhere, McHarg comm
anded the man to take the first left fork and see where he came out, then sank back in his seat and closed his eyes again. At each intersection after that McHarg or Webber would tell the driver what to do, and the little Londoner would obey them dutifully, but it was evident that he harboured increasing misgivings at the thought of being lost in the wilds of Surrey and subject to the unpredictable whim of two strange Americans. For some inexplicable reason it never occurred to either of them to stop and ask their way, so they only succeeded in getting more lost than ever. They shuttled back and forth, first in one direction, then in another, and after a while George had the feeling that they must have covered a good part of the whole complex system of roads in the region south of London.
The driver himself was being rapidly reduced to a nervous wreck. The little man was now plainly terrified. He agreed with frenzied eagerness to everything that was said to him, but his voice trembled when he spoke. From his manner, he obviously felt that he had fallen into the clutches of two madmen, that he was now at their mercy in the lonely countryside, and that something dreadful was likely to happen at any moment. George could see him bent over the wheel, his whole figure contracted with the tenseness of his terror. If either of the crazy Americans on the back seat had chosen to let out a bloodcurdling war whoop, the wretched man would not have been surprised, but he would certainly have died instantly.
Under these special circumstances the very geography of the night seemed sinister and was conducive to an increase of his terror. As the hours passed, the night grew wilder. It became a stormy and demented kind of night, such as one sometimes finds in England in the winter. A man alone, if he had adventure in his soul, might have found it a thrilling and wildly beautiful night. But to this quiet little man, who was probably thinking bitterly of a glass of beer and the snug haven of his favourite pub, the demoniac visage of the night must have been appalling. It was one of those nights when the beleaguered moon drives like a spectral ship through the scudding storm rack of the sky, and the wind howls and shrieks like a demented fiend. They could hear it roaring all round them through the storm-tossed branches of the barren trees. Then it would swoop down on them with an exultant scream, and moan and whistle round the car, and sweep away again while gusts of beating rain drove across their vision. Then they would hear it howling far away--remote, demented, in the upper air, rocking the branches of the trees. And the spectral moon kept driving in and out, now casting a wild, wan radiance over the stormy landscape, now darting in behind a billowing mass of angry-looking clouds and leaving them to darkness and the fiendish howling of the wind. It was a fitting night for the commission of a crime, and the driver, it was plain to see, now feared the worst.
Somewhere along the road, after they had spent hours driving back and forth and getting nowhere, McHarg's amazing reserves of energy and vitality ran completely out. He was sitting sprawled out as before, with head thrown back, when suddenly he groped blindly with a hand towards George and said:
"I'm done in, George! Stop the car! I can't go on."
George stopped the car at once. There by the roadside in the darkness, in stormy wind and scudding rain, they halted. In the van and fitful light of the spectral moon McHarg's appearance was ghastly. His face now looked livid and deathlike. George was greatly alarmed and suggested that he get out of the car and see if the cold air wouldn't make him feel better.
McHarg answered very quietly, with the utter finality of despair. "No," he said. "I just feel as if I'd like to die. Leave me alone." He slumped back into his corner, dosed his eyes, and seemed to resign himself entirely into George's keeping. He did not speak again during the remainder of that horrible journey.
In the half-darkness, illuminated only by the instrument panel of the car and the eerie light of the moon, George and the driver looked at each other in mute and desperate interrogation. Presently the driver moistened his dry lips and whispered:
"What are we to do now, sir? Where shall we go?"
George thought for a moment, then answered: "We'll have to go back to his friend's house, I think. Mr. McHarg may be very ill. Turn round quickly, and let's get there as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir! Yes, sir!" the driver whispered. He backed the car round and started off again.
From that point on, the journey was just pure nightmare. The directions they had received were complicated and would have been hard enough to follow if they had kept to the road they had first intended to take. But now they were lost and off their course, and had somehow to find their way back to it. Through what seemed to George nothing less than a miracle, this was finally accomplished. Then their instructions required them to look carefully for several obscure cross-roads, make the proper turns at each, and at the end of all this find the lonely country lane up which McHarg's friend lived. In attempting it, they lost their way again and had to go back to a village, where the driver got his bearings and the true directions. It was after ten-thirty before they finally found the lane leading up to the house which was their destination.
And now the prospect was more sinister and weird than any they had seen. George could not believe that they were still in England's Surrey. He had always thought of Surrey as a pleasant and gentle place, a kind of mild and benevolent suburb of London. The name had called to his mind a vision of sweet, green fields, thick-sown with towns and villages. It was, he had thought, a place of peace and tranquil spires, as well as a kind of wonderful urbs in rure, a lovely countryside of which all parts were within an hour's run of London, a place where one could enjoy bucolic pleasures without losing any of the convenient advantages of the city, and a place where one was never out of hailing distance of his neighbour. But the region they had now come to was not at all like this. It was densely wooded, and as wild and desolate on that stormy night as any spot he had ever seen. As the car ground slowly up the tortuous road, it seemed to George that they were climbing the fiendish slope of Nightmare Hill, and he rather expected that when the moon broke from the clouds again they would find themselves in a cleared and barren circle in the forest, surrounded by the whole witches' carnival of Walpurgis Night. The wind howled through the rocking trees with insane laughter, the broken clouds scudded across the heavens like ghosts in flight, and the car lurched, bumped, groaned, and lumbered its way up a road which must have been there when the Romans came to Rye, and which, from the feel of it, had not been repaired or used since. There was not a house or a light in sight.
George began to feel that they were lost again, and that surely no one would choose to live in this inaccessible wilderness. He was ready to give up and was about to command the driver to turn back when, as they rounded a bend, he saw, away on the right, a hundred yards or so off the road and at some elevation above it, a house--and from its windows issued the beaconing assurance of light and warmth.
* * *
36. The House in the Country
The chauffeur brought the car to a jolting halt. "This must be it, sir," he whispered. "It's the only 'ouse there is." His tone indicated heightened tension rather than relief.
George agreed that it was probably the place they were looking for.
All the way up the hill McHarg had given no signs of life. George was seriously alarmed about him, and his anxiety had been increased the last few miles by the inanimate flappings and jerkings of the long, limp arms and bony hands of the exhausted figure every time the car hit a new bump in the road or lurched down into another rut. George spoke to him, but there was no answer. He did not want to leave him, so he suggested to the chauffeur that he'd better get out and go up to the house and find out if Mr. McHarg's friend really lived there; if so, George told him to ask the man to come down to the car.
This request was more than the chauffeur could bear in his already, terrified state. If before he had been frightened to be with them, he seemed now even more frightened at the thought of being without them. What he was afraid of George did not know, but he spoke as if he thought the other members of their bloody gan
g were in that house, just waiting for him.
"Oh, sir," he whispered, "I couldn't go up there, sir. Not to that 'ouse," he shuddered. "Really, sir, I couldn't. I'd much rather you'd go, sir."
Accordingly, George got out, took a deep breath to brace himself, and started reluctantly up the path. He felt trapped in a grotesque and agonising predicament. He had no idea whom he was going to meet. He did not even know the name of McHarg's friend. McHarg had spoken of him only as Rick, which George took to be an abbreviation or a nickname. And he could not be certain that the man lived here. All he knew was that after a day filled with incredible happenings, and a nightmarish ride in a Rolls-Royce with a terrified driver, he was now advancing up a path with rain and wind beating in his face towards a house he had never seen before to tell someone whose name he did not know that one of the most distinguished of American novelists was lying exhausted at his door, and would he please come out and see if he knew him.
So he went on up the path and knocked at the door of what appeared to be a rambling old farm-house that had been renovated. In a moment the door opened and a man stood before him, and George knew at once that he must be, not a servant, but the master of the place. He was a well-set and well-kept Englishman of middle age. He wore a velvet jacket, in the pockets of which he kept his hands thrust while he stared out with distrust at his nocturnal visitor. He had on a wing collar and a faultless bow tie in a polka-dot pattern. This touch of formal spruceness made George feel painfully awkward and embarrassed, for he knew what a disreputable figure he himself must cut. He had not shaved for two days, and his face was covered with a coarse smudge of stubbly beard. Save for the afternoon's brief nap, he had not slept for thirty-six hours, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. His shoes were muddy, and his old hat, which was jammed down on his head, was dripping with the rain. And he was tired out, not only by physical fatigue, but by nervous strain and worry as well. It was plain that the Englishman thought him a suspicious character, for he stiffened and stood staring at him without a word.