Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

THE AIR-GUN

It was Philip Brandon's last day at Oxford. Behind him lay four pleasant years spent partly in dawdling through the Honors schools, chiefly in gratifying his own various tastes for athletics, social intercourse, and contemporary literature. In front of him lay—what? The thought stuck in his throat; so, in an unsettled spirit, he lit a cigar and sauntered out into the High, with a vague idea of doing the rounds as he used in his schoolboy days, and taking a last farewell of the old city's 'coronal of towers.'

Passing a gunsmith's, he remembered he wanted some cartridges, and, going in to buy them, saw there that fatal air-gun, which he afterwards declared to himself was the cause of all his troubles. Curiously enough this shirking of the responsibility of his own acts was not in his case a sign of weakness, it was his very directness of mind that made him perceive and value the morality of his own conduct with the same remorseless logic as he extended to his neighbors, and would have made him intolerable to himself had he not taken refuge in some such obliquity of mental vision. A man who is free from self-deception is not a man at all, but a monster. Self-hypocrisy, after all, is only another form of self-respect, and it is part of human nature to desire our own good opinion no less than other people's.

To outward seeming the air-gun was merely an ordinary hazel walking-stick with a crook handle, and the closest examination would barely reveal its real nature. In his restless mood this novelty in puzzles took Brandon's fancy, and he bought it on the spot. There was something sinister and secret about having this unsuspected weapon. He was pleased with it, as he had been pleased when a boy with his first sword-stick; and he determined then and there to tell no one that it was more than it actually appeared—an ordinary walking-stick.

He had packed all his luggage and warehoused his furniture in readiness for his start to Ireland in the morning, so there was nothing left to be done but to wonder why he was going there at all. His uncle had hitherto paid his way through school and college, but had recently told him that his income had been so diminished by the depreciation in Irish land, that he could no longer afford to continue his allowance or start him in a profession, as he had originally intended; so that, on leaving the 'Varsity, Philip must shift for himself, but would be welcome, if he chose, to come on a visit while 'looking about him.'

This invitation Philip had accepted, though without much feeling of gratitude to his uncle. He felt that he had been hardly used. He had been led to expect a fair start in a profession; and now, at an age when most other avenues of employment were closed to him, with a useless general education and no means of supplementing it with a special one, he was calmly turned adrift. It would have been kinder to have cast him off earlier, when his tastes were still unformed and his notions less refined. Even now he could not help feeling that it would only have taken a slight effort on his uncle's part to redeem the tacit pledges he had given; but with all his easy good-nature, the old man had the failing, which so often goes with it, of intense selfishness, and had no idea of curtailing his own pleasures in order to set his nephew upon his legs. It would do the young man good, he thought, to knock about a little at the outset. But he had made a mistake: Philip's nature was too intense to take kindly to such discipline, it was apt to strike in too deeply, and there was no knowing what the result might be. As it was, Oxford had performed its part for him, as for so many other penniless young men, of totally unfitting him for any professions but the pulpit and the birch-rod, the two which his soul most utterly abhorred.

Perhaps it would have been wiser under these circumstances to have started work at once, but Philip felt a desire to take breath before his plunge into the stream of life. Hitherto his life had been a series of preparations for some one definite event,—his examinations, the end of his school life, the end of his university life. Now he had come to the end of the latter, and he found that it was not an end nor even a beginning. The whole of life lay spread before him to choose from, with no means of making a choice. Contemplating it in the mass, the boundless indefiniteness of the prospect bewildered his gaze and paralyzed his energies. The world was so large he did not know where to begin upon it. He was not close enough to it to recognize that there, as elsewhere, only a single stage of the journey occupies our attention at a time. He shrank aghast into himself and took refuge in habit. His habit led him to his uncle's house.

Arrived in the cheerful island of his birth, what with the dampness of the climate, and the dulness of country life at Lisnamore, his lassitude grew upon him and enveloped him as with a miasma. He was always a great reader, and now did little else but read novels. Real life pressed so heavily upon him, that he was driven to take refuge in a world of unrealities. But they increased rather than diminished his malady. This cloud of alien personalities obscured his own, acting upon his mind like an anæsthetic, so that for weeks he lived and moved in that atmosphere of unreality which constant novel-reading engenders, and which is so apt to unfit one for the stress of actual life. A melancholy and moodiness of humor possessed him, so that he passed whole days with scarcely speaking a word, and to the other inmates of the house he appeared a very different person from the light-hearted and good-natured lad of former visits.

In fact, up to this point in his life the easy good-nature common to the rest of his family had been his most salient characteristic upon the surface, and he had taken for granted that it was part of his real nature. So long as the world had treated him kindly he had met it in his turn with a most amiable countenance. It is true that he had not been widely popular at college, but he had explained this to himself by ascribing it to too great self-reliance on his own part. His epithets for his own character in the secret places of his heart were 'strong' and 'original'—epithets which he had justified to a certain extent at Balliol by going his own way irrespective of Dons and lectures, and by a certain readiness to act without reference to conventional standards or traditions, together with a disdain for the ordinary grooves of life, which made his conduct under any given circumstances difficult to foretell. Nevertheless, he had been liked by his own set; and when he did go out of his way to cultivate an acquaintance, perhaps partly owing to this very fastidiousness of his, he rarely failed to attract.

But now that his lot had become soured, he surprised himself at times indulging in moods and fancies, that showed him there were unsuspected forces in his nature which had hitherto lain dormant, but which might spring into activity at any instant. In his moments of introspection he sometimes dimly wondered now if he were not in truth just a little bit selfish at bottom, else how to account for this extravagant solicitude about his own fortunes.

The fact was that the unsettlement of the conditions of his existence, the gravity of this first appearance of his upon the platform of every-day life, and the dreariness of the outlook had affected his nature more deeply than he was himself aware. His life at Oxford, with its atmosphere of ease and luxury, had unfitted him for the stern realities of the world in which he was now called upon to earn his bread. The hopelessness in modern life of effecting one's aim had thus early begun to impress him. Nowadays, as heretofore, he saw that effort is not wasted, but that it produces a result absurdly inadequate to the force expended. Everywhere around him he saw men of brilliant parts and dauntless courage ground beneath the wheels of that modern Juggernaut, the soul-destroying round of mechanical toil; men whose ambition originally would not have strained at kingdoms, reduced to hack writers for journals and ushers in a school. A young man aims at the moon and hits a suburban cottage. Pegasus is put to grind a mill. Seeing all this, he felt shut-in upon every side. For a time he beat the pinions of his mind helplessly against his prison-bars. Then the black moodiness of despair enwrapped him in its folds. He had no tools with which to shape his destiny, so he apathetically left the issue upon the knees of Fate.

But he was young and buoyant, and this depression could not last forever. The first sign of its breaking up was a desire for outdoor exercise. He roused himself from his lethargy, and to escape its influence determined on a fishing excursion to a distant mountain lough. He thought that the drive and the fresh air would re-invigorate him. And indeed by the time he had accomplished the twelve miles there, and had caught a few trout, he was more like his usual self; but by noon the weather had settled down into one of those broiling days which one occasionally meets with in Ireland, generally in October, and fishing had become hopeless. The fish were small, but plentiful, and now they rose all round him, and flapped his flies with their tails in a tantalizingly derisive manner.

He had brought his air-gun with him, and to while away the time, he got it out and began shooting at the fish as they rose. He soon found that, by allowing for the curve of the pellets, he could hit a spot the size of half-a-crown at a dozen yards with some certainty, and at this sport he amused himself for the rest of the afternoon, until he had acquired a fair command of the weapon. Gradually as he continued his pastime, the vicious snick of the bullets in the water infected his blood, and gave rise to curious thoughts within him. He grasped his weapon more tightly, the perspiration stood out upon his forehead, and a fierce satisfaction surged through him each time he hit his aim. Suddenly he came to himself with a start and recognized the emotion that had been driving him. It was a feeling of murderous revolt against that society which had given him expensive tastes without the means of gratifying them. All those yearnings of his for fine books and pictures, the pleasures of the palate, and the love of women, for everything which can be bought by money, or, rather cannot be procured without its possession, must run to waste and remain forever unsatisfied. It was against the possessors of all those good things which he had not and could never hope to have, that in his mind he had been directing those bullets with such fatal accuracy.

The knowledge came home to him with a sudden shock, and horror-stricken at himself he hastily put up his rod and started on his homeward journey. The sultriness of the day, as is often the case in the hour before sunset, had become even intensified. There was not a breath of air, as he jogged quietly along in the evening light. All nature seemed to perspire, and a dull yellow haze covered the surrounding country. The road stretched straight and dusty before him between its walls of sod; and upon either hand spread a flat and uninteresting expanse of bog and moorland. The approach to the town was signalled by the change from the clay to a limestone soil; and instead of the occasional ditches of sod or huge drains, which divided the country and restricted the wanderings of a few isolated cows and donkeys, frequent stone walls began to appear, built by piling odd stones together without cement of any kind, and separating fields of hay, wheat, and potatoes.

Rather more than half the distance had been traversed, when an object detached itself from the haze in the middle distance and rapidly approached. As it drew near he saw that it was a car, with a man sitting upon one side, and the other side turned up; and as it came still closer he recognized in the driver a cousin of his own, the land-steward of the Duke of Ulster. The other was going to pass with a wave of his whip. But a sudden revulsion of feeling had come over Philip. Nature had taken upon herself the oppression of his own spirits, and had shamed him out of his febrile emotions by the spectacle of her larger melancholy. So now that he had met a fellow-creature he was glad to escape the surrounding monotony and was seized with a sudden craving for conversation.

'Hullo, Dick, whither away so fast?' he shouted. 'Here, have I not seen you for a whole year, and you cut me as dead as if you owed me money.'

Both pulled up their horses, and Dick replied: 'Sorry, old man. Didn't mean to offend you, but I've got a lot of money here, so I'm in a hurry to get home, and have it off my hands. Been collecting the quarter's rents, and have got about five thousand pounds in cash to take care of.'

'Pooh, you're codding. Why didn't you put it in the Bank?'

'Couldn't. Shuts early on Saturdays. And no safe in my office to keep it in.'

'Well, but after all there wouldn't be so much harm done, even if you did get it collared. I suppose you've taken the numbers of the notes.'

'Why, my dear fellow,' replied the other, 'all the tenants are small farmers, and pay either in coin or in one pound notes, that would be just as difficult to trace.'

So saying he put his horse into a walk to pass him. At that moment feeling for his whip, Philip's hand fell upon that demon-possessed air-gun, which he had left loaded on the cushion beside him. An electric thrill passed through all his nerves. Almost without volition the weapon flew to his shoulder. He saw Dick's temple turned sideways towards him for a moment. There was a whip-like crack, a thud, and his body swayed heavily and fell backwards on the stone ditch beside the road. Both horses stood still. All nature held her breath. A vast silence brooded over the landscape. There wasn't a figure to be seen within the horizon.

He sat there quite still for at least five minutes, still grasping his infernal instrument. He did not realize at first what had happened, and waited for Dick to rise up again. It was as though something outside himself, that did not belong to him, had done this thing. His murderous thoughts of the forenoon had borne unexpected fruit. Presently Dick's horse began to crop the grass by the wayside. The crunching sound broke in upon his stupefaction. Dick himself did not move. He got down and walked up to him, keeping carefully on the grass all the way, so as to leave no trace of footsteps. He had fallen with the back of his head upon a stone, and even to Philip's inexperienced eye it was evident that he was already dead. He had not expected this, but it was better so. He felt his heart, to make sure. It had stopped beating.

Then he got on the car to search for the money. First he looked in the well. It was not there. A cold perspiration burst over him. What if Dick were only joking after all? But soon he found the bag under the end of the cushion his cousin had been sitting on. He started off the horse with a lash of the whip, which he laid down again beside the dead man, rolled a large stone into the middle of the road to account for the accident, carried the bag to his own car, wrapped it in his mackintosh, and quickly drove on home.

At first his faculties had been stunned with a physical numbness by the sudden shock of his own action, and everything that he had done hitherto had been merely mechanical. But now his mind began to recover its tone. It rushed at once to the other extreme of an almost painfully intense activity. Thoughts whirled through his head at lightning speed. In one illuminating flash he saw himself in his naked reality. His seething ambition, his easy-going temper, his constitutional dislike of running in grooves, and his recent despondency, all rose and confronted him in the guise of a colossal Egoism, a selfishness which desired exemption from the common lot of mankind, a lot of hopeless futureless toil; while a yet darker suggestion loomed dimly forth from the background of his mind. He recognized that his good-nature at ordinary times was really only an absolute indifference to other people's affairs, except when they touched him nearly. Even in his own concerns his cold logicality of intellect kept him supine except in cases of the extremest importance. This was really the first important crisis of his life. He had in a measure that habit of self-analysis, which goes with a cold and self-centred brain, though it was chiefly of the flattering sort, and he knew that his nature was of an almost elemental simplicity and directness; but he had rarely suspected before to-day that when deeply stirred an elemental cruelty was one of its ingredients.

These moments of self-revelation come in the life of all of us, when our ordinary every-day self, familiar to ourselves and our home circle, is suddenly brought face to face with that other deeper lying and often semi-barbarous self, which crouches hidden beneath the veneer of civilization and the mask of social habit, and we are forced into a swift mental comparison of the two. Happy is the man in whom these two selves are identical; for his shall be a stagnant life, and is not that the life of the gods? But these flashes of insight do not remain long with us. We make haste and cover them up, and put such importunate thoughts away from us, and only a vague uncomfortableness remains in the memory for a short time.

So in Philip's mind the first clearness of the impression of his own baseness soon faded, and was swallowed up in consideration of its consequences. His act, that concrete expression of his character, could not be glossed over. It remained behind there in all its naked hideousness in the person of his murdered cousin lying in the road.

Questions of expediency came first. Could he risk finding the body and taking it home with him? It was not yet too late. No, the money would prevent that, though otherwise it might be the best plan. There was only the one road and he must have met his cousin somewhere. But he had almost walked his horse hitherto, it was still quite fresh, and now if he drove hard, he could say that he had met Dick two or three miles nearer home, and the time would agree all right. And the money? It might very well appear that some tramp had come by and taken it, after the accident had occurred. For himself—offenders that did not belong to the ordinary criminal classes, were always detected through their own folly. They couldn't control their countenances, or were overcome by remorse or betrayed the hiding-place of their spoil through over-anxiety. He had no such weaknesses. His education had at least done him the service of eradicating from his breast all scruples of conscience and superstitious fancies. He would conceal his gains in a safe spot he knew, and leave the country, so that he could not rouse suspicion. Next year he could return for the money, and it would go hard with him, but it would help him on the road to fortune.

He was ambitious. He had felt that he had ability above the ordinary. But the world had afforded him no opening. Now with five thousand pounds to back him the world was at his feet. He would select a congenial profession, which should draw forth all his energies, and would gain experience. Brains, experience, capital, each was almost useless by itself. But with a combination of the three what could he not do? The world was his oyster, and what he had been pining for latterly was the lack of an oyster-knife to open it.

Then Dick again! His thoughts reverted to him, poor chap! What of him?—how had it all come about? How had he come to do what he had done? Of course, in the first instance, it was the result of the opportunity of the moment and what he now saw to be his morbid craving after wealth for the last few weeks, the unhealthy dreams of a sick imagination. But to probe deeper. He was a fatalist, and it was no good crying over spilt milk. But let him at least be honest with himself; let him know the full meaning of his own action. Did he regret what had happened? would he do the same if he had to do it over again? Probably not; simply because in spite of the philosophers a man never does act twice alike under the same circumstances. But he felt that he would not have restored his cousin to life now, had that been possible. His main feeling was a guilty satisfaction that things had fitted in so well. He was not a coward, and before this the thought of suicide had come to him as a way out of his perplexities. For he had no near relations to think of, no ties to bind him to life. The worst that could now happen to him was almost preferable to the mediocre existence of mean and monotonous drudgery, which had formerly seemed his only prospect.

But gradually, as he brooded over the events of the afternoon, he began to lose sight of the benefit which had accrued to him. The idea had already become familiar by assimilation, and now his thoughts tended to dwell rather upon the danger which he had incurred, and whose proportions increased the longer he regarded it. A vague sense of irritation and injury began to grow up in his mind against his cousin as the author of his trouble, and even against the inanimate instrument of his violence, 'It's all the fault of that air-gun,' he muttered; and again, 'What business had he to meet me in the mood I was in with his babbling confidences? He has only himself to thank for his fate, and he has put my neck in danger too by his folly. Damn him!'

At the thought a sudden passionate wave of hatred, roused by the prick of personal fear, surged through his bosom. He was already beginning to set a higher value on life than heretofore, and he hated Dick that he had brought him the danger along with the benefit. He felt that he was unreasonable, but that only made him hate his cousin the more. After all, he had never seen much of Dick, and he was always a fool; he showed that even in his death—snuffed out like a candle. If it had been he, he would have made a harder fight for it than that; there was something contemptible about giving in so easily.

By this time he had reached the house. He carried the bag in under the mackintosh, and the walking-stick in his hand. The latter he put in the stand. He had used it constantly of late, and its absence would excite remark.

The bag he wrapped in oil-cloth to keep it from the damp, carried it out into the garden at the first opportunity, and hid it in an apple-tree, high up among the branches, in a hole, which had been his secret alone since boyhood.

Late that night the rumor reached the house that his cousin had fallen off his car and broken his neck. They all scouted the idea, and Philip mentioned having met him that afternoon a couple of miles out of the town, but Dick wouldn't stop to speak to him. The next day the rumor was confirmed: Philip had been the last person to see him alive.

For himself, Philip was physically prostrated, he could hardly move, and ached in every limb and every muscle: the fatigue resulting from the emotions which had racked him on the previous day was so much greater than any mere bodily fatigue he had hitherto known. The day afterwards—the Monday—he received a visit from the police-sergeant. He went cheerfully down. It was to summon him, he supposed, as a witness at the inquest, which was fixed for the morrow. Judge, then, of his surprise when he was arrested on a charge of having murdered his cousin.

He was very angry at first. Then the absurdity of the situation struck him, and he laughed aloud. Here had this lumbering country lout stumbled on the truth by accident, where a cleverer man would not have dreamt of looking for it. But it might prove no laughing matter for him, once the scent had been struck. The sergeant had applied, it seemed, to the magistrate for the warrant, upon his own responsibility, on the strength of a rumor that Philip was at the bottom of the affair somehow. How the rumor originated he never discovered—probably from some distortion in the repetition of his own story of the meeting. But it made matters very unpleasant for him for the time. He said that he would go quietly to the police-barracks if he were not handcuffed.

When he arrived there, the officer in charge—the District Inspector, and an old friend of Philip's, named Fitzgerald—cried out:

'Hullo, young 'un, what have you been doing now?—run in for being drunk and disorderly?' He thought that Philip had dropped in to see him, and that the presence of the sergeant was only a coincidence. Great was his surprise when he heard that the young man was really a prisoner—and upon what charge? He was more angry than Philip had been, and called the sergeant a blundering idiot, only in stronger language. At last he cooled down again and said:

'Well, never mind, you'll have to stop here to-night, but you'll be let loose again to-morrow, and everybody will think it only a good joke.'

'Yes, that's all very well,' replied Philip; 'but Richards, the coroner, has a grudge against me. As you know, he is the town baker; last year he set up a carriage, and heard me call it the bread-cart. He is sure to seize the opportunity of taking the change out of me. And I entirely fail to see where the joke comes in.'

When he arrived in the court next day, everybody was talking and laughing. They thought it an absurd farce that he should be accused of such a crime at all. Even the police-sergeant had been sneered out of his momentary inspiration of shrewdness long ago. Philip alone knew what a hair's-breadth removed from earnest the affair was capable of proving. He was like a man sitting on a powder magazine with people ignorantly letting off crackers all round him, one of which might at any moment blow him into eternity.

The body of the court was crowded as usual with corner-boys—a shiftless race of loafers peculiar to Ireland, who hang about the streets and the corners of the public-houses, and never do a day's work from year's end to year's end. They sponge upon their wives, spending all the money that they can beg upon drink during that short portion of the year that they are not retained in jail at their country's expense. 'God presarve yer ahner, wherever ye may go,' cried one of these as he entered. Philip had given him many a screw of tobacco, and knew that it was not for him, but for the loss of his tobacco that the man feared.

That bit of smartness about the bread-cart cost him an anxious time. The doctor gave his evidence that there were two injuries upon the body of the deceased—a cut upon the back of the head, which had been caused by falling off the car onto a stone, and a very small bruise on the temple. What had occasioned the latter, or if it were connected with the accident, he couldn't say. But neither injury was sufficient to cause death. That had resulted from stoppage of the heart's action, which had long been diseased. Philip paid little attention to this; he was sufficiently honest with himself to recognize that he had committed murder in intention if not in actual fact.

Then the coroner wanted to know could the bruise on the temple have been caused by a blow from a whip or a stick? The doctor thought not. Nevertheless Philip's whip and all his sticks were fetched. The servants gave evidence as to the one he had used that day; it was handed round. Everybody was surprised at its lightness. Philip's heart stood in his mouth. The doctor and the coroner examined it minutely. If either of them had a grain of penetration, he was a lost man; but he could reckon with confidence on their stupidity. The air-gun preserved its secret well; for once it did not betray him. Its lightness proved even in his favor. The doctor decided that it was incapable of inflicting a stunning blow, that it was probably hollow, and would break on slight provocation.

He was acquitted, a verdict of accidental death returned, and the jury remarked severely upon the hasty action of the sergeant in adding to his natural grief at his cousin's death by such an unnatural accusation.

But Philip was in a fever until that wretched air-gun should be safely disposed of. At any moment it might change its mind and inform against him. He hooked his arm in Fitzgerald's directly the inquest was over, and said, 'Come along, and have a bathe after this beastly stuffy court; and as you have the custody of my sticks, I suppose you won't mind letting me have one now?' Fitzgerald laughed, and he took the air-gun. The other wanted to look at it, and see if it was really as light as they all made out. But Philip was not such a fool; the officer's trained eyesight was likely to prove too sharp.

They went to bathe in the river channel, a couple of miles below the town, and about half a mile from its mouth. When they had undressed, Philip threw the stick as far as he could into the middle, under pretence of sending Fitzgerald's retriever in after it. But the tide was on the ebb and the stream ran strong, so, as he knew would be the case, the dog turned back long before he reached the stick. Philip hoped never to see the wretched thing again. Suddenly a terror seized him; he could not leave it to the mercy of blind chance like that. What if the sea gave up its prey?—the next tide might wash it ashore again. Some one might find it and return it again, or worse still, find out the secret. He must get rid of it more effectually at all hazards. He plunged in after it, and quickly reached it; then pretending to put his feet between his hands, while holding the stick at either end he snapped it in two and cast it from him.

Meanwhile he had not noticed that he had rounded the last turn in the channel in its journey seaward. He had got into the strength of the current, and it swept him away like a leaf. He swam against it aslant with all his strength, but could not reach the edge, and in a moment he was among the breakers on the bar.

For a short time he succeeded in swimming over the waves or diving through them, and hoped to be able to get right out to sea. But soon he was seized by a huge roller, the ninth wave, and carried resistlessly back again upon its crest. The edge of the breaker curled thin beneath him like a shaving, dissolving into spray. He looked down as he reached the bar, and suddenly the water seemed to vanish under him. One moment he was ten feet in the air, the next he fell with stunning force upon the sand, covered only with a couple of feet of surf. Before he recovered his senses, the broken water of the next wave was upon him, and the black-surge of the first was fighting with it for him. He was rolled over and over. Sand entered his eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears. He was conscious of swallowing oceans of water. He struggled blindly for a time; he, at any rate, would not give in until the last gasp. But gradually there stole over him a feeling of drowsiness, of disinclination for further effort, a feeling that Fate had been too much for him. 'It's all that damned air-gun's fault,' he muttered again obstinately; and the waters closed over him.

When he came to himself again, he was lying on the strand, and Fitzgerald was bending over him. He had been washed by chance into the corner of an eddy near the shore, the D.I. had run along the bank, rushed in and rescued him before the life was quite buffeted out of him.

Thanks, old boy,' he said, looking up at his friend; 'you have saved my life, and I won't forget it.'

'Oh, nonsense; you would do as much for me any day.'

They dressed in silence. At last Philip remarked:

'That stick was hollow after all; it snapped like a twig in my hands. I suppose it will fill with sand now and stop at the bottom of the sea.'

'Yes; you will never see it again, and a good job too: it was near being the death of you.'

'Yes,' said Philip, with a slow smile; 'it was very near being the death of me.'