§ 3
Mr. Benshaw was a small holder, a sturdy English yeoman of the new school. He was an Anti-Socialist, a self-helper, an independent-spirited man. He had a steadily growing banking account and a plain but sterile wife, and he was dark in complexion and so erect in his bearing as to seem a little to lean forward. Usually he wore a sort of grey gamekeeper’s suit with brown gaiters (except on Sundays when the coat was black), he was addicted to bowler hats that accorded ill with his large grave grey-coloured face, and he was altogether a very sound strong man. His bowler hats did but accentuate that. He had no time for vanities, even the vanity of dressing consistently. He went into the nearest shop and just bought the cheapest hat he could, and so he got hats designed for the youthful and giddy, hats with flighty crowns and flippant bows and amorous brims that undulated attractively to set off flushed and foolish young faces. It made his unrelenting face look rather like the Puritans under the Stuart monarchy.
He was a horticulturist rather than a farmer. He had begun his career in cheap lodgings with a field of early potatoes and cabbages, supplemented by employment, but with increased prosperity his area of cultivation had extended and his methods intensified. He now grew considerable quantities of strawberries, raspberries, celery, seakale, asparagus, early peas, late peas, and onions, and consumed more stable manure than any other cultivator within ten miles of Crayminster. He was beginning to send cut flowers to London. He had half an acre of glass and he was rapidly extending it. He had built himself a cottage on lines of austere economy, and a bony-looking dwelling house for some of his men. He also owned a number of useful sheds of which tar and corrugated iron were conspicuous features. His home was furnished with the utmost respectability, and notably joyless even in a countryside where gaiety is regarded as an impossible quality in furniture. He was already in a small local way a mortgagee. Good fortune had not turned the head of Mr. Benshaw nor robbed him of the feeling that he was a particularly deserving person, entitled to a preferential treatment from a country which in his plain unsparing way he felt that he enriched.
In many ways he thought that the country was careless of his needs. And in none more careless than in the laws relating to trespass. Across his dominions ran three footpaths, and one of these led to the public elementary school. That he should have to maintain this latter—and if he did not keep it in good order the children spread out and made parallel tracks among his cultivations—seemed to him a thing almost intolerably unjust. He mended it with cinders, acetylene refuse, which he believed and hoped to be thoroughly bad for boots, and a peculiarly slimy chalky clay, and he put on a board at each end “Keep to the footpaths, Trespassers will be prosecuted, by Order,” which he painted himself to save expense when he was confined indoors by the influenza. Still more unjust it would be, he felt, for him to spend money upon effective fencing, and he could find no fencing cheap enough and ugly enough and painful enough and impossible enough to express his feelings in the matter. Every day the children streamed to and fro, marking how his fruits ripened and his produce became more esculent. And other people pursued these tracks; many, Mr. Benshaw was convinced, went to and fro through his orderly crops who had no business whatever, no honest business, to pass that way. Either, he concluded, they did it to annoy him, or they did it to injure him. This continual invasion aroused in Mr. Benshaw all that stern anger against unrighteousness latent in our race which more than any other single force has made America and the Empire what they are to-day. Once already he had been robbed—a raid upon his raspberries—and he felt convinced that at any time he might be robbed again. He had made representations to the local authority to get the footpath closed, but in vain. They defended themselves with the paltry excuse that the children would then have to go nearly a mile round to the school.
It was not only the tyranny of these footpaths that offended Mr. Benshaw’s highly developed sense of Individual Liberty. All round his rather straggling dominions his neighbours displayed an ungenerous indisposition to maintain their fences to his satisfaction. In one or two places, in abandonment of his clear rights in the matter, he had, at his own expense, supplemented these lax defences with light barbed wire defences. But it was not a very satisfactory sort of barbed wire. He wanted barbed wire with extra spurs like a fighting cock; he wanted barbed wire that would start out after nightfall and attack passers-by. This boundary trouble was universal; in a way it was worse than the footpaths which after all only affected the Cage Fields where his strawberries grew. Except for the yard and garden walls of Maccullum and Schocks and that side, there was not really a satisfactory foot of enclosure all round Mr. Benshaw. On the one side rats and people’s dogs and scratching cats came in, on the other side rabbits. The rabbits were intolerable and recently there had been a rise of nearly thirty per cent in the price of wire netting.
Mr. Benshaw wanted to hurt rabbits; he did not want simply to kill them, he wanted so to kill them as to put the fear of death into the burrows. He wanted to kill them so that scared little furry survivors with their tails as white as ghosts would go lolloping home and say, “I say, you chaps, we’d better shift out of this. We’re up against a Strong Determined Man....”
I have made this lengthy statement of Mr. Benshaw’s economic and moral difficulties in order that the reader should understand the peculiar tension that already existed upon this side of Crayminster. It has been necessary to do so now because in a few seconds there will be no further opportunity for such preparations.
There had been trouble, I may add very hastily, about the shooting of Mr. Benshaw’s gun; a shower of small shot had fallen out of the twilight upon the umbrella and basket of old Mrs. Frobisher. And only a week ago an unsympathetic bench after a hearing of over an hour and in the face of overwhelming evidence had refused to convict little Lucy Mumby, aged eleven, of stealing fruit from Mr. Benshaw’s fields. She had been caught red-handed....
At the very moment that Bealby was butting the baker in the stomach, Mr. Benshaw was just emerging from his austere cottage after a wholesome but inexpensive high tea in which he had finished up two left-over cold sausages, and he was considering very deeply the financial side of a furious black fence that he had at last decided should pen in the school children from further depredations. It should be of splintery tarred deal, and high, with well-pointed tops studded with sharp nails, and he believed that by making the path only two feet wide, a real saving of ground for cultivation might be made and a very considerable discomfort for the public arranged, to compensate for his initial expense. The thought of a narrow lane which would in winter be characterized by an excessive slimness and from which there would be no lateral escape was pleasing to a mind by no means absolutely restricted to considerations of pounds, shillings and pence. In his hand after his custom he carried a hoe, on the handle of which feet were marked, so that it was available not only for destroying the casual weed but also for purposes of measurement. With this he now checked his estimate and found that here he would reclaim as much as three feet of trodden waste, here a full two.
Absorbed in these calculations, he heeded little the growth of a certain clamour from the backs of the houses bordering on the High Street. It did not appear to concern him and Mr. Benshaw made it almost ostentatiously his rule to mind his own business. His eyes remained fixed on the lumpy, dusty, sunbaked track, that with an intelligent foresight he saw already transformed into a deterrent slough of despond for the young....
Then quite suddenly the shouting took on a new note. He glanced over his shoulder almost involuntarily and discovered that after all this uproar was his business. Amazingly his business. His mouth assumed a Cromwellian fierceness. His grip tightened on his hoe. That anyone should dare! But it was impossible!
His dominions were being invaded with a peculiar boldness and violence.
Ahead of everyone else and running with wild wavings of the arms across his strawberries was a small and very dirty little boy. He impressed Mr. Benshaw merely as a pioneer. Some thirty yards behind him was a little collarless, short-sleeved man in red slippers running with great effrontery and behind him another still more denuded lunatic, also in list slippers and with braces—braces of inconceivable levity. And then Wiggs, the policeman, hotly followed by Mr. Maccullum. Then more distraught tailors and Schocks the butcher. But a louder shout heralded the main attack, and Mr. Benshaw turned his eyes—already they were slightly blood-shot eyes—to the right, and saw, pouring through the broken hedge, a disorderly crowd, Rymell whom he had counted his friend, the grocer’s assistant, the doctor’s boy, some strangers—Mumby!
At the sight of Mumby, Mr. Benshaw leapt at a conclusion. He saw it all. The whole place was rising against him; they were asserting some infernal new right-of-way. Mumby—Mumby had got them to do it. All the fruits of fifteen years of toil, all the care and accumulation of Mr. Benshaw’s prime, were to be trampled and torn to please a draper’s spite!...
Sturdy yeoman as Mr. Benshaw was he resolved instantly to fight for his liberties. One moment he paused to blow the powerful police whistle he carried in his pocket and then rushed forward in the direction of the hated Mumby, the leader of trespassers, the parent and abetter and defender of the criminal Lucy. He took the hurrying panting man almost unawares, and with one wild sweep of the hoe felled him to the earth. Then he staggered about and smote again, but not quite in time to get the head of Mr. Rymell.
This whistle he carried was part of a systematic campaign he had developed against trespassers and fruit stealers. He and each of his assistants carried one, and at the first shrill note—it was his rule—everyone seized on every weapon that was handy and ran to pursue and capture. All his assistants were extraordinarily prompt in responding to these alarms, which were often the only break in long days of strenuous and strenuously directed toil. So now with an astonishing promptitude and animated faces men appeared from sheds and greenhouses and distant patches of culture, hastening to the assistance of their dour employer.
It says much for the amiable relations that existed between employers and employed in those days before Syndicalism became the creed of the younger workers that they did hurry to his assistance.
But many rapid things were to happen before they came into action. For first a strange excitement seized upon the tramp. A fantastic delusive sense of social rehabilitation took possession of his soul. Here he was pitted against a formidable hoe-wielding man, who for some inscrutable reason was resolved to cover the retreat of Bealby. And all the world, it seemed, was with the tramp and against this hoe-wielder. All the tremendous forces of human society, against which the tramp had struggled for so many years, whose power he knew and feared as only the outlaw can, had suddenly come into line with him. Across the strawberries to the right there was even a policeman hastening to join the majority, a policeman closely followed by a tradesman of the blackest, most respectable quality. The tramp had a vision of himself as a respectable man heroically leading respectable people against outcasts. He dashed the lank hair from his eyes, waved his arms laterally, and then with a loud strange cry flung himself towards Mr. Benshaw. Two pairs of superimposed coat-tails flapped behind him. And then the hoe whistled through the air and the tramp fell to the ground like a sack.
But now Schocks’s boy had grasped his opportunity. He had been working discreetly round behind Mr. Benshaw, and as the hoe smote he leapt upon that hero’s back and seized him about the neck with both arms and bore him staggering to the ground, and Rymell, equally quick, and used to the tackling of formidable creatures, had snatched and twisted away the hoe and grappled Mr. Benshaw almost before he was down. The first of Mr. Benshaw’s helpers to reach the fray found the issue decided, his master held down conclusively and a growing circle trampling down a wide area of strawberry plants about the panting group....
Mr. Mumby, more frightened than hurt, was already sitting up, but the tramp with a glowing wound upon his cheekbone and an expression of astonishment in his face, lay low and pawed the earth.
“What d’you mean,” gasped Mr. Rymell, “hitting people about with that hoe?”
“What d’you mean,” groaned Mr. Benshaw, “running across my strawberries?”
“We were going after that boy.”
“Pounds and pounds’ worth of damage. Mischief and wickedness.... Mumby!”
Mr. Rymell, suddenly realizing the true values of the situation, released Mr. Benshaw’s hands and knelt up. “Look here, Mr. Benshaw,” he said, “you seem to be under the impression we are trespassing.”
Mr. Benshaw, struggling into a sitting position was understood to enquire with some heat what Mr. Rymell called it. Schocks’s boy picked up the hat with the erotic brim and handed it to the horticulturist silently and respectfully.
“We were not trespassing,” said Mr. Rymell. “We were following up that boy. He was trespassing, if you like.... By the bye,—where is the boy? Has anyone caught him?”
At the question, attention which had been focussed upon Mr. Benshaw and his hoe, came round. Across the field in the direction of the sunlit half acre of glass the little tailor was visible standing gingerly and picking up his red slippers for the third time—they would come off in that loose good soil, everybody else had left the trail to concentrate on Mr. Benshaw—and Bealby—. Bealby was out of sight. He had escaped, clean got away.
“What boy?” asked Mr. Benshaw.
“Ferocious little beast who’s fought us like a rat. Been committing all sorts of crimes about the country. Five pounds reward for him.”
“Fruit stealing?” asked Mr. Benshaw.
“Yes,” said Mr. Rymell, chancing it.
Mr. Benshaw reflected slowly. His eyes surveyed his trampled crops. “Gooo Lord!” he cried. “Look at those strawberries!” His voice gathered violence. “And that lout there!” he said. “Why!—he’s lying on them! That’s the brute who went for me!”
“You got him a pretty tidy one side the head!” said Maccullum.
The tramp rolled over on some fresh strawberries and groaned pitifully.
“He’s hurt,” said Mr. Mumby.
The tramp flopped and lay still.
“Get some water!” said Rymell, standing up.
At the word water, the tramp started convulsively, rolled over and sat up with a dazed expression.
“No water,” he said weakly. “No more water,” and then catching Mr. Benshaw’s eye he got rather quickly to his feet.
Everybody who wasn’t already standing was getting up, and everyone now was rather carefully getting himself off any strawberry plant he had chanced to find himself smashing in the excitement of the occasion.
“That’s the man that started in on me,” said Mr. Benshaw. “What’s he doing here? Who is he?”
“Who are you, my man? What business have you to be careering over this field?” asked Mr. Rymell.
“I was only ’elping,” said the tramp.
“Nice help,” said Mr. Benshaw.
“I thought that boy was a thief or something.”
“And so you made a rush at me.”
“I didn’t exactly—sir—I thought you was ’elping ’im.”
“You be off, anyhow,” said Mr. Benshaw. “Whatever you thought.”
“Yes, you be off!” said Mr. Rymell.
“That’s the way, my man,” said Mr. Benshaw. “We haven’t any jobs for you. The sooner we have you out of it the better for everyone. Get right on to the path and keep it.” And with a desolating sense of exclusion the tramp withdrew. “There’s pounds and pounds’ worth of damage here,” said Mr. Benshaw. “This job’ll cost me a pretty penny. Look at them berries there. Why, they ain’t fit for jam! And all done by one confounded boy.” An evil light came into Mr. Benshaw’s eyes. “You leave him to me and my chaps. If he’s gone up among those sheds there—we’ll settle with him. Anyhow there’s no reason why my fruit should be trampled worse than it has been. Fruit stealer, you say, he is?”
“They live on the country this time of year,” said Mr. Mumby.
“And catch them doing a day’s work picking!” said Mr. Benshaw. “I know the sort.”
“There’s a reward of five pounds for ’im already,” said the baker....