Nicky-Nan, Reservist Part 9

"I won't go so far as to say that I've seen anything answerin' to that description knockin' about--not up to the present. But these are times when a man must keep his eyes liftin' if he doesn' want Old England to be taken with what the newspapers call a Bolt from the Blue."

"I've come across the expression," said Nicky-Nan.

"Well, what I say is, Down here, in this corner of the world--though, mind you, I'm not sayin' anything against it--you don't _reelise_ things: you reely don't. Now I come from Bodmin, as I think I must have told you."

"You did."

"Where you see the soldiers goin' about with the stripes down their trowsers: but they've done away with that except for the Yeomanry (which is black, or dark blue, I forget which), and that's how you know the difference. So your mind gets enlarged almost without your knowin' it, and you feel what's at stake."

"I wonder you didn' want to enlist," said Nicky-Nan.

"I did: but I was too tall--too tall _and_ too strong," sighed the policeman, bending his arm and causing his biceps to swell up mountainously. "You haven't a notion how strong I am--if, for instance, I took it into my head to catch you up and heave you over the Quay here. Yes, yes, I am wonderfully well made! And on top of that, Mother picked up some nonsense against soldiering off a speaker at a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. There was nothing for it but the Force. So here I AM. But give me the wings of a dove, and I'd join the Royal Flyin' Corps to-morrow, where they get higher pay because of the risk, same as with the submarines. If you ask _me_, every Englishman's post at this moment is in the firing line."

Nicky-Nan winced, and changed the subject in haste.

"Well, it must be a great consolation to have such strength as yours," he said pleasantly. "But I wonder--with nothing else doin', and on a Bank Holiday too--you could manage to stay away from the School Treat."

"Rat it all!" broke out the constable, and checked himself.

"I thought I was igsplaining to you," he went on as one who reasons patiently with an infant, "that a man has to think of something above an' beyond _self_ in these days."

"I never found time to think out the rights an' wrongs o' warfare, for my part," said Nicky-Nan.

"Ah, I daresay not." Policeman Rat-it-all blew out his chest.

"It's a deep subject," he added, wagging his head solemnly.

"A very deep subject; and I quite understand your not having time for it lately. How about that Ejectment Order?"

Nicky-Nan jumped like a man shot. "Ha--have you got the--the thing about 'ee?" he twittered. "Don't tell me that Pamphlett has got 'em to send it down? . . . But there, you can't do anything on a Bank Holiday, anyway."

"Have I got the thing about me?" echoed the policeman slowly. "You talk as if 'twas a box o' matches. . . . Well, I may, or I mayn't; but anyways I've followed the case before Petty Sessions; and if you haven't a leg to stand on, the only thing is to walk out peaceably.

Mind, I'm puttin' it unofficial, as between friends."

"And what if I don't?"

"Then, rat it all!--I mean," the constable corrected himself to a tolerant smile and gazed down on his mighty hands and arms--"then I got to put you into the street."

Nicky-Nan leaned on his stick and the stick shook with his communicated fury. "Try it--try it--try it!" he blazed out.

"Try it, you Bodmin fathead!"

He shuffled away, nodding his head with wrath. He roamed the cliff-paths for an hour, pausing now and again to lean his back against an out-cropping ma.s.s of rock and pa.s.s the back of his hand across his eyes, that at first were bloodshot with fury. He had a great desire to kill Policeman Rat-it-all. As his pa.s.sion died down and he limped forward, to pause and again limp forward, his gait and the backward cast of his eye were not unlike those of a hunted hare.

He reached the house door at nightfall, just as Mrs Penhaligon came shepherding her offspring home down the dusky street, 'Biades had yielded to the sleep of exhaustion, and lay like a log in his mother's arms. 'Bert, for no other reason than that he had tired himself out, was sulky and uncommunicative. But 'Beida--whose whole manner ever changed when once she had been persuaded into fine clothes--wore an air of sustained gentility.

"Squire Tresawna keeps seven gardeners," she reported. "He has three motor-cars and two chauffeurs. The gardeners keep the front lawn so short with their mowing-machines that 'Biades couldn't possibly have made the front of his blouse in the mess it is unless he had purposely crawled on his stomach to lower me in the eyes of all.

When it got to a certain point I pretended to have no connection with him. There was nothing else to do. Then he felt sorry and wanted to hug me in front of everybody. . . . Oh, thank you . . . yes, I've enjoyed myself very much! Mrs Tresawna wears a toque: but I suppose that when you get to a certain position you can carry on with toques long after every one else has given them up. She has two maids; one of them in a grey velours dress that must have been one of Mrs Tresawna's cast-offs, for it couldn't possibly have come out of her wages; though, by the fit, it might have been made for her."

A little before ten o'clock Nicky-Nan climbed the stairs painfully to his bedroom, undressed in part, and lay down--but not to sleep.

For a while he lay without extinguis.h.i.+ng the candle--his last candle.

He had measured it carefully, and it reached almost to an inch beyond the knuckle of his forefinger. It would last him a good two hours at least, perhaps three.

He lay for a while almost luxuriously, save for the pain in his leg, and watched the light flickering on the rafters. They had a few more days to abide, let Pamphlett's men be never so sharp: but this was his last night under them. His enemies--some of them until this morning unsuspected--were closing in around him. They had him, now, in this last corner.

But that was for to-morrow. The very poor live always on the edge of to-morrow; and for that reason the night's sleep, which parts them from it, seems a long time.

After all, what could his enemies do to him? If he sat pa.s.sive, the onus would rest on them. If Policeman Rat-it-all flung him into the street, why then in the street he would sit, to the scandal of Polpier. If, on the other hand, Government claimed him for a deserter, still Government would have to fetch a cart to convey him to jail: his leg would not allow him to walk. Of wealth and goods G.o.d Almighty had already eased him. _Cantat vacuus_ . . . He slid a hand under the bed-clothes and rubbed the swelling on his leg, softly, wondering if condemned men felt as little perturbed--or some of them--on the eve of execution.

He ceased rubbing and lay still again, staring up at the play of light on the rafters. Fine old timbers they were . . . solid English oak. Good old families they had sheltered in their time; men and women that feared G.o.d and honoured the King--now all gone to decay in churchyard, all as cold as homeless fellows. The Nanjivells had been such a family, and now--what would his poor old mother think of _this_ for an end? Yet it was the general fate. Pus.h.i.+ng men, your Pamphletts, rise in the world. Old families go down, . . . it couldn't be worked else. If he had only been born with _push_, now!

If it could only be started over again, . . . if he had been put to a trade, instead of being let run to sea--

He broke off to wonder at the different things the old beams had looked down upon. Marriages, births--and deaths. The Old Doctor (he knew) had died in the fore-room, for convenience--the room where the Penhaligons slept: and even so, the family had been forced to lift the coffin in and out of the window, because of that twist in the stairs. There wasn't that difficulty with people's coming _into_ the world. No doubt in its time this room must have seen a mort of births too. . . . And the children? All gone, the same way!

Drizzle o' rain upon churchyard graves. . . . "And you, too,"--with a flicker of his closing eyelids threatening the flicker on the beams-- "you, too, doomed, my billies! Pamphlett'll take _me_ to-morrow, _you_ the day after; as in time the Devil'll take him and his!"

Nicky-Nan rolled over on his side and, perceiving the candle to be burnt down to a short inch, hastily blew it out. Almost in the act of relaxing the elbow on which he had raised himself for this effort he dropped asleep to his pillow.

For three hours he lay like a log. Then his troubled brain began to rea.s.sert itself. At about two in the morning he sat bolt upright in his bed. For twenty minutes or so he had been thinking rather than dreaming, yet with his thought held captive by sleep.

He reached for his matchbox and struck a light. . . . The whole world was after him, hunting him down, tearing down the house above his head! . . . Well, he would go down with the house. Pamphlett, or Government, might take his house: but there was the old hiding-cupboard to the right of the chimney-breast. . . .

When they summoned him to-morrow, he would have vanished.

Only by uncovering his last shelter should they discover what was left of him. He would perish with the house.

He lit the candle and carried it to the cupboard; opened this, and peered into the well at his feet: lifted one of the loose bottom-boards, and, holding himself steady by a grip on the scurtain, thrust a naked leg down, feeling into vacancy.

The ball of his foot touched some substance, hard and apparently firm. He supposed it to be a lower ceiling of the hole, and, after pressing once or twice to make sure, put all his weight upon it.

With a creak and a rush of masonry the whole second flooring of the cupboard gave way beneath him, leaving his invalid leg dangling, in excruciating pain. But that the crook of his elbow caught across the scurtain (shooting darts as of fire up the jarred funny-bone), he had made a part of the avalanche, the noise of which was enough to wake the dead. Luckily, too, he had set his candle on the planching floor, just wide of the cupboard entrance, and it stood burning as though nothing had happened.

With pain which surely must be worse than any pain of death, he heaved himself back and on to the bedroom floor again. The cascade of plaster, timber, masonry, must (he judged) have shot itself straight down into his parlour below.

He picked up the candle, and warily--while his leg wrung him with torture at every step--crept down the stairs to explore.

The parlour door opened inwards. He thrust it open for a short way quite easily. Then of a sudden it jammed: but it left an aperture through which he could squeeze himself. He did so, and held the candle aloft.

While he stared, first at a hole in the ceiling, then at the "scree"

which had broken through it and lay spread, fan-shaped, on the solid floor at his feet, he heard a footstep, and Mrs Penhaligon's voice in the pa.s.sage without.

"Mr Nanjivell! Is that Mr Nanjivell?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Oh, what has happened?"

"Nothing, ma'am. Only a downrush of soot in the chimney," answered Nicky-Nan, gasping: for the heap of dust and mortar at his feet lay scattered all over with golden coins!

"But the noise was terrible. I--I thought for sure it must be the Germans," came in Mrs Penhaligon's voice.

"Nothing of the sort. You exaggerate things," answered Nicky-Nan, commanding his voice. "A rush of soot down the chimney, that's all.

I've been expectin' it for weeks."