§ 4
You perceive how humanitarian motives may sometimes defeat their own end, and how little Lady Laxton’s well-intentioned handbills were serving to rescue Bealby. Instead, they were turning him into a scared and hunted animal. In spite of its manifest impossibility he was convinced that the reward and this pursuit had to do with his burglary of the poultry farm, and that his capture would be but the preliminary to prison, trial and sentence. His one remaining idea was to get away. But his escape across the market gardens had left him so blown and spent, that he was obliged to hide up for a time in this perilous neighbourhood, before going on. He saw a disused-looking shed in the lowest corner of the gardens behind the greenhouses, and by doubling sharply along a hedge he got to it unseen. It was not disused—nothing in Mr. Benshaw’s possession ever was absolutely disused, but it was filled with horticultural lumber, with old calcium carbide tins, with broken wheelbarrows and damaged ladders awaiting repair, with some ragged wheeling planks and surplus rolls of roofing felt. At the back were some unhinged shed doors leaning against the wall, and between them Bealby tucked himself neatly and became still, glad of any respite from the chase.
He would wait for twilight and then get away across the meadows at the back and then go—He didn’t know whither. And now he had no confidence in the wild world any more. A qualm of home-sickness for the compact little gardener’s cottage at Shonts, came to Bealby. Why, as a matter of fact, wasn’t he there now?
He ought to have tried more at Shonts.
He ought to have minded what they told him and not have taken up a toasting fork against Thomas. Then he wouldn’t now have been a hunted burglar with a reward of five pounds on his head and nothing in his pocket but threepence and a pack of greasy playing cards, a box of sulphur matches and various objectionable sundries, none of which were properly his own.
If only he could have his time over again!
Such wholesome reflections occupied his thoughts until the onset of the dusk stirred him to departure. He crept out of his hiding-place and stretched his limbs which had got very stiff, and was on the point of reconnoitring from the door of the shed when he became aware of stealthy footsteps outside.
With the quickness of an animal he shot back into his hiding-place. The footsteps had halted. For a long time it seemed the unseen waited, listening. Had he heard Bealby?
Then someone fumbled with the door of the shed; it opened, and there was a long pause of cautious inspection.
Then the unknown had shuffled into the shed and sat down on a heap of matting.
“Gaw!” said a voice.
The tramp’s!
“If ever I struck a left-handed Mascot it was that boy,” said the tramp. “The little swine!”
For the better part of two minutes he went on from this mild beginning to a descriptive elaboration of Bealby. For the first time in his life Bealby learnt how unfavourable was the impression he might leave on a fellow creature’s mind.
“Took even my matches!” cried the tramp, and tried this statement over with variations.
“First that old fool with his syringe!” The tramp’s voice rose in angry protest. “Here’s a chap dying epilepsy on your doorstep and all you can do is to squirt cold water at him! Cold water! Why you might kill a man doing that! And then say you’d thought’d bring ’im ränd! Bring ’im ränd! You be jolly glad I didn’t stash your silly face in. You [misbegotten] old fool! What’s a shilling for wetting a man to ’is skin. Wet through I was. Running inside my shirt,—dripping.... And then the blooming boy clears!
“I don’t know what boys are coming to!” cried the tramp. “These board schools it is. Gets ’old of everything ’e can and bunks! Gaw! if I get my ’ands on ’im, I’ll show ’im. I’ll—”
For some time the tramp revelled in the details, for the most part crudely surgical, of his vengeance upon Bealby....
“Then there’s that dog bite. ’Ow do I know ’ow that’s going to turn ät? If I get ’idrophobia, blowed if I don’t bite some of ’em. ’Idrophobia. Screaming and foaming. Nice death for a man—my time o’ life! Bark I shall. Bark and bite.
“And this is your world,” said the tramp. “This is the world you put people into and expect ’em to be ’appy....
“I’d like to bite that dough-faced fool with the silly ’at. I’d enjoy biting ’im. I’d spit it out but I’d bite it right enough. Wiping abät with ’is ’O. Gaw! Get off my ground! Be orf with you. Slash. ’E ought to be shut up.
“Where’s the justice of it?” shouted the tramp. “Where’s the right and the sense of it? What ’ave I done that I should always get the under side? Why should I be stuck on the under side of everything? There’s worse men than me in all sorts of positions.... Judges there are. ’Orrible Kerecters. Ministers and people. I’ve read abät ’em in the papers....
“It’s we tramps are the scapegoats. Somebody’s got to suffer so as the police can show a face. Gaw! Some of these days I’ll do something. I’ll do something. You’ll drive me too far with it, I tell you—”
He stopped suddenly and listened. Bealby had creaked.
“Gaw! What can one do?” said the tramp after a long interval.
And then complaining more gently, the tramp began to feel about to make his simple preparations for the night.
“’Unt me out of this, I expect,” said the tramp. “And many sleeping in feather beds that ain’t fit to ’old a candle to me. Not a hordinary farthing candle....”