§ 12
The Captain, a confusion of motives that was as it were a mind returning to chaos, started. He had seen tears in her eyes. Just for one instant, but certainly they were tears. Tears of vexation. Or sorrow? (Which is the worse thing for a lover to arouse, grief or resentment?) But this boy must be caught, because if he was not caught a perpetually developing story of imbecile practical joking upon eminent and influential persons would eat like a cancer into the Captain’s career. And if his career was spoilt what sort of thing would he be as a lover? Not to mention that he might never get a chance then to try flying for military purposes.... So anyhow, anyhow, this boy must be caught. But quickly, for women’s hearts are tender, they will not stand exposure to hardship. There is a kind of unreasonableness natural to goddesses. Unhappily this was an expedition needing wariness, deliberation, and one brought to it a feverish hurry to get back. There must be self-control. There must be patience. Such occasions try the soldierly quality of a man....
It added nothing to the Captain’s self-control that after he had travelled ten miles he found he had forgotten his quite indispensable map and had to return for it. Then he was seized again with doubts about his inductions and went over them again, sitting by the roadside. (There must be patience.) ... He went on at a pace of thirty-five miles an hour to the inn he had marked upon his map as Bealby’s limit for the second evening. It was a beastly little inn, it stewed tea for the Captain atrociously and it knew nothing of Bealby. In the adjacent cottages also they had never heard of Bealby. Captain Douglas revised his deductions for the third time and came to the conclusion that he had not made a proper allowance for Wednesday afternoon. Then there was all Thursday, and the longer, lengthening part of Friday. He might have done thirty miles or more already. And he might have crossed this corner—inconspicuously.
Suppose he hadn’t after all come along this road!
He had a momentary vision of Madeleine with eyes brightly tearful. “You left me for a Wild Goose Chase,” he fancied her saying....
One must stick to one’s job. A soldier more particularly must stick to his job. Consider Balaclava....
He decided to go on along this road and try the incidental cottages that his reasoning led him to suppose were the most likely places at which Bealby would ask for food. It was a business demanding patience and politeness.
So a number of cottagers, for the greater part they were elderly women past the fiercer rush and hurry of life, grandmothers and ancient dames or wives at leisure with their children away at the Council schools, had a caller that afternoon. Cottages are such lonely places in the daytime that even district visitors and canvassers are godsends and only tramps ill received. Captain Douglas ranked high in the scale of visitors. There was something about him, his fairness, a certain handsomeness, his quick colour, his active speech, which interested women at all times, and now an indefinable flow of romantic excitement conveyed itself to his interlocutors. He encountered the utmost civility everywhere; doors at first tentatively ajar opened wider at the sight of him and there was a kindly disposition to enter into his troubles lengthily and deliberately. People listened attentively to his demands, and before they testified to Bealby’s sustained absence from their perception they would for the most part ask numerous questions in return. They wanted to hear the Captain’s story, the reason for his research, the relationship between himself and the boy, they wanted to feel something of the sentiment of the thing. After that was the season for negative facts. Perhaps when everything was stated they might be able to conjure up what he wanted. He was asked in to have tea twice, for he looked not only pink and dusty, but dry, and one old lady said that years ago she had lost just such a boy as Bealby seemed to be—“Ah! not in the way you have lost him”—and she wept, poor old dear! and was only comforted after she had told the Captain three touching but extremely lengthy and detailed anecdotes of Bealby’s vanished prototype.
(Fellow cannot rush away, you know; still all this sort of thing, accumulating, means a confounded lot of delay.)
And then there was a deaf old man.... A very, very tiresome deaf old man who said at first he had seen Bealby....
After all the old fellow was deaf....
The sunset found the Captain on a breezy common forty miles away from the Redlake Royal Hotel and by this time he knew that fugitive boys cannot be trusted to follow the lines even of the soundest inductions. This business meant a search.
Should he pelt back to Redlake and start again more thoroughly on the morrow?
A moment of temptation.
If he did he knew she wouldn’t let him go.
No!
NO!
He must make a sweeping movement through the country to the left, trying up and down the roads that, roughly speaking, radiated from Redlake between the twenty-fifth and the thirty-fifth milestone....
It was night and high moonlight when at last the Captain reached Crayminster, that little old town decayed to a village, in the Crays valley. He was hungry, dispirited, quite unsuccessful, and here he resolved to eat and rest for the night.
He would have a meal, for by this time he was ravenous, and then go and talk in the bar or the tap about Bealby.
Until he had eaten he felt he could not endure the sound of his own voice repeating what had already become a tiresome stereotyped formula; “You haven’t I suppose seen or heard anything during the last two days of a small boy—little chap of about thirteen—wandering about? He’s a sturdy resolute little fellow with a high colour, short wiry hair, rather dark....”
The White Hart at Crayminster, after some negotiations, produced mutton cutlets and Australian hock. As he sat at his meal in the small ambiguous respectable dining-room of the inn—adorned with framed and glazed beer advertisements, crinkled paper fringes and insincere sporting prints—he became aware of a murmurous confabulation going on in the bar parlour. It must certainly he felt be the bar parlour....
He could not hear distinctly, and yet it seemed to him that the conversational style of Crayminster was abnormally rich in expletive. And the tone was odd. It had a steadfast quality of commination.
He brushed off a crumb from his jacket, lit a cigarette and stepped across the passage to put his hopeless questions.
The talk ceased abruptly at his appearance.
It was one of those deep-toned bar parlours that are so infinitely more pleasant to the eye than the tawdry decorations of the genteel accommodation. It was brown with a trimming of green paper hops and it had a mirror and glass shelves sustaining bottles and tankards. Six or seven individuals were sitting about the room. They had a numerous effect. There was a man in very light floury tweeds, with a floury bloom on his face and hair and an anxious depressed expression. He was clearly a baker. He sat forward as though he nursed something precious under the table. Next him was a respectable-looking, regular-featured fair man with a large head, and a ruddy-faced butcher-like individual smoked a clay pipe by the side of the fireplace. A further individual with an alert intrusive look might have been a grocer’s assistant associating above himself.
“Evening,” said the Captain.
“Evening,” said the man with the large hand guardedly.
The Captain came to the hearthrug with an affectation of ease.
“I suppose,” he began, “that you haven’t any of you seen anything of a small boy, wandering about. He’s a little chap about thirteen. Sturdy, resolute-looking little fellow with a high colour, short wiry hair, rather dark....”
He stopped short, arrested by the excited movements of the butcher’s pipe and by the changed expressions of the rest of the company.
“We—we seen ’im,” the man with the big head managed to say at last.
“We seen ’im all right,” said a voice out of the darkness beyond the range of the lamp.
The baker with the melancholy expression interjected, “I don’t care if I don’t ever see ’im again.”
“Ah!” said the Captain, astonished to find himself suddenly beyond hoping on a hot fresh scent. “Now all that’s very interesting. Where did you see him?”
“Thunderin’ vicious little varmint,” said the butcher. “Owdacious.”
“Mr. Benshaw,” said the voice from the shadows, “’E’s arter ’im now with a shot gun loaded up wi’ oats. ’E’ll pepper ’im if ’e gets ’im, Bill will, you bet your ’at. And serve ’im jolly well right tew.”
“I doubt,” said the baker, “I doubt if I’ll ever get my stummik—not thoroughly proper again. It’s a Blow I’ve ’ad. ’E give me a Blow. Oh! Mr. ’Orrocks, could I trouble you for another thimbleful of brandy? Just a thimbleful neat. It eases the ache....”