V
At a quarter to eight that evening I saw the sun set behind the hills. As I wandered reflectively down the lane that goes towards Challis Court, a blackbird was singing ecstatically in a high elm; here and there a rabbit popped out and sat up, the picture of precocious curiosity. Nature seemed to be standing in her doorway for a careless half-hour’s gossip, before putting up the shutters to bar the robbers who would soon be about their work of the night.
It was still quite light as I strolled back over the Common, and I chose a path that took me through a little spinney of ash, oak, and beech, treading carefully to avoid crushing the tender crosiers of bracken that were just beginning to break their way through the soil.
As I emerged from the little clump of wood, I saw two figures going away from me in the direction of Pym.
One was that of a boy wearing a cricket-cap; he was walking deliberately, his hands hanging at his sides; the other figure was a taller boy, and he threw out his legs in a curious, undisciplined way, as though he had little control over them. At first sight I thought he was not sober.
The two passed out of sight behind a clump of hawthorn, but once I saw the smaller figure turn and face the other, and once he made a repelling gesture with his hands.
It occurred to me that the smaller boy was trying to avoid his companion; that he was, in one sense, running away from him, that he walked as one might walk away from some threatening animal, deliberately—to simulate the appearance of courage.
I fancied the bigger boy was the idiot Harrison I had seen that afternoon, and Farmer Bates’s “We hoped we were shut of him,” recurred to me. I wondered if the idiot were dangerous or only a nuisance.
I took the smaller boy to be one of the villagers’ children. I noticed that his cricket-cap had a dark patch as though it had been mended with some other material.
The impression which I received from this trivial affair was one of disappointment. The wood and the Common had been so deserted by humanity, so given up to nature, that I felt the presence of the idiot to be a most distasteful intrusion. “If that horrible thing is going to haunt the Common there will be no peace or decency,” was the idea that presented itself. “I must send him off, the brute,” was the rider. But I disliked the thought of being obliged to drive him away.