XIII
“Well, if they won’t answer, I’ll see if I can go in,” he said. He lifted the latch by plucking the plaited leather bobbin: the door was not locked, it opened before him into a long lit corridor or hall where an English clock was ticking. As he opened the door, the wind blowing in shook the pictures on the wall: they swayed and clacked for an instant, then steadied. There were lighted rooms opening from each side of the corridor, but no sound of any living being.
“Hullo, you inside here,” Hi called. “I am a friend. Is anyone there? Señor Elena. Señor George, Señor William. Hey, hey, heya. Is anyone here at all?”
His voice rang along the corridor and died away: no one was there. “Very well, I’ll go in,” Hi said. He stepped in, and closed the door against the wind. As he did so a letter and envelope, which had been lying on the edge of a table near him, fell to the stone flags with a clatter. He replaced them on the table; then paused to look about him.
He had heard that men of the great ranches lived like princes. The hall in which he stood was bare, big and white, lit by electric lights. There were two stiff black chairs, two black pictures of yellow nymphs, a table heaped with silver horse-trappings, and the English grandfather’s clock, gravely telling the time. He walked up to the clock and read the words on the dial:
Edward Hendred.
1807
Abingdon.
These two little things of old Berkshire met thus in this strange house so many miles from Thames and Down. “Hendred of Abingdon,” he repeated. “There may be a Berkshire man here who may know father.” He glanced at the pictures of the yellow nymphs in their clothes blown out in the grand manner. “Religious pictures,” he thought and glanced away. The house was so still that he hardly dared to go further.
“What can have happened?” he asked. “Some fight or some show or what?”
He walked to the nearest door, on his left. The door was ajar, shewing a lit room: he knocked at the door, had no answer, and therefore looked in. It was a big, long room, in use as the messroom of the household, for whom thirty places had been laid on the table. Food in abundance had been set there for a meal, which had been begun. Baskets of small Meruel loaves were on a sideboard near the door: he felt these by accident as he put out his hand: the under loaves were still warm from the oven. There was warmth in the vast silver cazuela tureen, which stood, more than half empty at the head of the table. The table was littered with the mess of the meal: broken loaves, bowls which had been used for cazuela, halves of oranges, skins of bananas, and the bones of big birds like turkeys. Yet from the look of the plates Hi felt that the meal had never been finished: something had interrupted it before they had reached the coffee and cigarettes. Somebody with some news had come there soon after they were half way through, then chairs had been thrust back and food left, half eaten and the eaters and talkers had gone. Why had they gone, and where? Hi did not like the feeling of this house.
He went again to the hall and cried: “Is there anybody here?” But there was no answer. “There must be someone somewhere in all this barrack,” he said. “Surely in the kitchen or outhouses there will be a woman or a negro or a peon. There must be at least a caretaker or night-watchman. The kitchens will be along the corridor somewhere at the back.”
He went down the corridor, where he found the kitchen. It was a vast room, bare, clean, and empty of people. The fire, which had done the work of cooking, had been allowed to die down; but the castle-kettle, once full of water for coffee and the washing-up of the dishes, was still boiling and half full. A black cat with its paw round its face was curled up asleep on a mat on a chair. “I’m glad that there is something alive here,” he said.
Doors opened from the kitchen into outhouses, sculleries and larders: Hi felt a dread of looking into these rooms, but he overcame it: no one was there.
“Well,” he said, “if there’s no one to ask, I will make a mash for my poor horse. No one could object to that.”
He took one of the big round-up stew cauldrons which lay against a wall. In this he made a hot mash of bread for his horse, adding some salt. He carried it out to the horse, who seemed glad of the warm food for a few instants; but it was not all that he had hoped; in a few instants his muzzle dropped from it. “Poor old boy,” Hi said, “I wish I knew what I could give you, that you would like.”
He lingered by the horse for a few minutes, to pull his ears, and rub him down. The breeze which had set in struck cold, so Hi moved the horse to a more sheltered place behind the immense rain vats a few yards from the tethering posts. He had hoped that somebody would come there while he was outside with the horse, but there came neither sight nor sound of anybody.
“I’ll go in to explore,” Hi said. “There must be someone, and if there’s someone there may be something I can do.”
It was harder to enter the house for this second time than it had been before. The uncanniness was greater now. The clock still ticked, the light still burned, the table still stood uncleared. “I don’t want to be caught bagging things in a strange house,” Hi thought, “but I’m jolly well going to bag some food and leave some money for it.”
He ate and drank of what was on the table, to the amount (as he judged) of a peseta, reckoning in the bread for the horse. He left one of his five pesetas on the table for this. “What am I to do, and where am I to go?” he wondered. “If I leave this? This may be Anselmo; almost must be: yet where are all the Elenas gone? Perhaps I’ll find something in the other rooms.”
There were three more rooms in the corridor of the hall: two on the opposite side, one on his side, nearer the kitchens. The rooms further down the corridor had the look of being offices or studies. “I’ll go into those, first,” he said. “Very likely I’ll come upon somebody dead in one, or on the old mad doctor who runs this private madhouse.” He knocked at the door beside him, which was shut: for one instant he was shocked by thinking that at the sound of his knocking someone within the room had turned the pages of a book. He opened the door upon a dark room, into which the breeze blew from an open ventilator high up in the wall. He saw the light switches and switched the lights fully on. The room was the estancia office, as he had supposed. There was a safe, built into the wall. There were two long tables heaped with papers; but another thing impressed Hi: chairs had been lifted from the floor on to these tables, so that the floor might be swept. Two brooms had begun to sweep the floor: there was the tide mark of dust, earth, torn paper, cigarette ends and cigar butts half way across the room. There were the two brooms resting against the table, just as the unknown sweepers had left them when their task had been interrupted by what? On a third table was a row of flat, square, white china dishes, each containing about a pint of brown or reddish liquid. Hi judged that the liquid was a chemical of some sort, perhaps a parasite mixture.
He crossed the corridor to the room opposite. This was plainly a room for the women. It contained a long settle which faced a row of spinning wheels. On a table there were heaps of palm-blades partly unravelled into the white bast from which the Meruel women plaited their hats. At the further end of the room were two hand-looms on which some weavers had already woven parts of saints for the back cloth of an altar. Someone had spilled a little bottle of scent upon the palm-blades. It was oozing from its cork into a rivulet which had dripped into a pool upon the floor. “There has been a hurry, even here,” Hi said. “Oh, I wish to goodness I had come here an hour ago. If only I had not taken that wrong turn, or slept quite so long, I might have found the people here: and they are good people, doing good things.”
He went again into the corridor to listen: no one had entered the house. “There are all the outhouses to search through presently,” he said. “I must find someone before I can leave here. I’ll try this other room, opposite the dining-room.”
This proved to be the main living-room of a company of men. One side of it was slung with Indian hammocks, loosely woven of dyed fibres: the rest was in the confusion in which undisciplined men will live. It was littered with clothes, shot-guns, cartridges, belts, knives, books, papers, watches, money, cigars, broken cigarettes, pipes, spurs, quirts, matches, plugs of tobacco, photographs of girls, prints of horses, shoes, laces, straps and twitches. Tobacco had been smoked there not more than an hour before, but another smell also struck Hi’s nostrils. It was a familiar smell, yet for an instant in that smell of tobacco he could not say what it was. Then the sight of an empty brass revolver shell upon the floor reminded him that what he smelt was the smell of gunpowder. Somebody had burned a cartridge in that room not more than an hour before: there was the shell of the cartridge.
He picked it up, with the thought that it was the heaviest revolver cartridge he had ever seen. “Why,” he thought, “a thing like this would stop a bison. This is a Jack the Giant Killer. Whoever has fired a thing like this in here?” He put the brass shell to his nose and instantly the pungent smell brought scenes into his mind of two months before. The first scene was of the wood on the down above Tencombe, on a sunny January afternoon, when he had shot a pheasant, and had stood to jerk out the shell. A red squirrel had appeared on one of the leafless oaks there: it had run along the branch to jabber at him, to within six feet of him. This scene floated by into another of the Blowbury Woods at sunset, when he had waited in the cold for wood-pigeons. The orange sky to the west had been netted black by the elm twigs, and the woods had stood still in the cold. He had had a shot at last, but had missed with both barrels, had jerked out the cartridges, and had smelt just this smell, from fumes curling up at him out of the breech.
He dropped the shell: it fell with a tinkle and rolled from him. He was standing, at that moment, some four feet from the door, within the room; he had not much more than entered to take his survey. Fear, anxiety, homesickness, and the torment of failing his friends were all preying upon him. Then he looked up, suddenly, towards one of the windows, where something made his heart stand still. A man with a white face and blazing eyes was watching him through the window with a look of rage which made his blood run cold. The man’s brow was pressed on the pane, while his right hand reached back for a gun. That man was no dweller in the house, but a spy and an enemy.
He did not stay for the hand to come round with the gun, but slipped sideways into the hall, closed the door behind him and drew the bolt with which each of those doors was fitted. He slipped sideways along the hall to the front door, which he bolted likewise. Then he stood for a minute with his heart thumping, listening to hear whether the man were breaking through the window or coming to the door for him.
After a minute, during which nothing happened, his eye caught the letter that had been blown to the floor when he entered the house. The letter was on the table within a few feet of him. “It must have been the last thing read in this house,” he thought. “What if it were the cause of all the people leaving here? It may have brought the deciding news, probably did. At least, it may be addressed to one of the Elenas, or will tell me if this be Anselmo.”
He looked at the envelope, which was addressed in a bold hand
—— J. G.
He had a horror of looking at a private letter, even when made public in a book or newspaper. “It’s a skunk’s trick,” he said, “but I do want to know where I am. I’ll apologise if I ever have the chance.” He pulled the enclosure from the envelope to read it. It proved not to be the letter (that had gone), but a piece of paper which had been sent with the letter. The paper was a half-sheet of coarse bluish notepaper on which the same hand had pencilled the words, “Si, Anselmo.”
“Now what on earth does that mean?” Hi asked himself. “Yes, Anselmo? I would give something to know what is happening in this place.” All was silent about him, save for that ticking of the clock.
With a little chirrupping cry, the black cat, which had been sleeping in the chair in the kitchen, came running along the passage. It was a slim, small-headed, short-coated cat, not yet of full growth; it rubbed against Hi’s legs and purred; Hi leaned down to stroke it, but watched the passage to the kitchen.
“That man has come in by way of the kitchen,” Hi thought. “He has scared the cat, or let in a draught upon him. I’ll be out of this.”
The office window seemed to be the exit most likely to bring him out beside his horse: he slipped into the office and closed the door behind him. Then he listened, with a beating heart, for some swift, stealthy footstep in the corridor or outside the window. “Perhaps,” he thought, “I shan’t hear any footsteps, only the brute’s hand on the latch. He’s a spy and a Red, that devil. Listen.”
In that silence, the beating of the clock clanged like the tolling of a bell. The cat, left to preen his fur in the hall, padded back towards the kitchen. Hi was on the point of turning to open the inner shutter of the window, when a little shrill whirring bell began to scream like an alarm-clock upon some metal hooks on a stand at the table end. The shock of the sound made his hair stand stiff upon his head. He saw the instrument shaking on its hooks with the vehemence of the bell. He had read and heard of these things, but had never before seen one. It rang for ten seconds, then paused, then rang for five seconds and paused again. Then it rang again with determination for half a minute on end, as though bent on having an answer. Someone was telephoning to that house of the dead.
His courage came back in a few seconds. Someone was telephoning: why should he not answer? Possibly an English voice would speak to him or someone who knew English. Even if there were a Red outside the door, he owed it to Carlotta to run the risk, if by running it he could learn where he was and where he should go next. He did not know how to take the call. He lifted the instrument from its hooks and listened, now at one end, now at the other, to silence. “The thing is stopped,” he said. “I don’t know how to work the beastly thing. Yes?” he called. “Yes? Who is there? What is it?”
No answer come to him, not even the murmur of other voices which sometimes comes over the telephone. Then suddenly the thought came to him that perhaps the wire had been cut, or the unseen speaker shot down somewhere far away. He put down the instrument, moved to the window and opened the shutter. As he pulled it aside, the bell tinkled a little, whimpered again, as though about to ring again, and then stopped. “The wires are cut,” he muttered, “that devil the spy has done it.”
Peering out of the window, he could see nothing but a darkness which gradually took shapes to itself of trees swaying in the wind, palms clicking and clacking, and stars which became brighter as he gazed. “Here goes,” Hi thought, “I cannot see that devil; I’ll risk it.” So he scrambled out, landed on his feet, and then stood for an instant lest someone should spring upon him. No one sprang; there was neither sight nor sound of anyone, only his horse nosing at the earth, and the wind shuffling and clicking. He unhitched his rein, mounted and cautiously rode forward.
At the space near the door he halted to listen and to try to see. No one was there.
“They’ll be where the spy was,” he thought, “crouched out of this cold wind. I’ll see and make sure.” He edged his horse a little and a little to the corner of the house, where he held him ready for a dash. Very cautiously he craned forward along his horse’s neck, till he could see round the corner. Then he stared with all his might at the space lit by the windows of the living-room. No horsemen were gathered there out of the wind, but at the lit window the figure of the spy still stood with his hand reached back for his gun and his brow pressed upon the pane. He was staring into the window: Hi could not see his face.
“Golly,” Hi thought, “he’s still there. He’s come here again.” He did not move a muscle for fully fifteen seconds; the spy did not move. Hi waited for that right hand to flash up suddenly with the gun, but it did not come.
Then Hi thought, “But what’s he up to? He saw me in the room five minutes ago; then probably he went after me in the kitchen. What brings him here again? What is he staring at there? Can there be another man in the room? He must know that I cleared out: he saw me do it. Is he waiting to plug me when I come back, or what?”
He waited for another fifteen seconds, but the man never stirred a muscle. He stood at the window, pressed to it, intently staring. Hi had seen cats and foxes waiting intently thus before springing; but the cats and foxes had at least trembled with the intensity of their control, this man was motionless.
“But who in the wide earth is he staring at?” Hi asked himself. “There must be someone in that room whom I never saw, but who was there when I was there.” Then he thought, “Whatever is in the room, there is something wrong with that man. He is not quite of this world.”
That was an opinion which the horse seemed to share, and the presence of it in the horse made Hi’s terror stronger. Yet the intentness of that watching figure “not quite of this world,” was fascinating. All purpose will arrest the purposeless, but this deadly purpose was absorbing. It made Hi forget that looking at a person will draw that person’s eyes towards the looker. For the moment, he did not care; he longed to see what the man saw. He stared: his horse also stared.
Suddenly a gust of the wind, now blowing at its height, caught the window by which Hi had escaped. Hi heard it crash to, with a tinkle of glass. The draught inside the house flung some door open, and blew ajar the unhasped casement by which the watcher stood. The result was something which Hi had not expected. The man slithered sideways, scraping along the wall, and collapsed, with his head towards Hi, and his gun arm twisted askew as no living arm could ever twist. The light, shining now from the unobstructed window pane, showed Hi the bullet-hole through which the body’s death had come.
The horse had swerved aside when the body fell. The knowledge that the man was dead, and had been dead from the first, came to Hi in a flash, at his first movement. The smell of powder in the room suddenly became significant. “That explains the big revolver shell,” he thought. “Oh, golly, let’s get out of this.”
The horse was out of sorts, but the cold had touched him up, and something of his rider’s terror was afflicting him. He swerved away from the house and galloped ahead across a peach plantation. Hi heard horses whinny and a man’s voice hailing him from behind him as he entered the plantation. The dreadful fear that it was the dead man mounted on the nightmare made him crouch on his horse’s neck and urge him forward. He heard shouts, calling to him to stop, or so it seemed.
At any other time, he might have stopped; but he could not now, after the corpse flopping down towards him. In a few moments, he was certain that men were shouting at him, several men, in earnest, shouting no Christian tongue. By this time he had crossed the plantation fence at a place where the bars were down, he was heading across a patch of savannah towards the forest. He heard horses coming after him. He called out that he was English and a friend. The man who was nearest to him, perhaps mistaking this for an insult, fired a shot in the direction of the voice, but missed. Hi crackled through some hard-leaved scrub into the darkness of the covert, leaving the direction to the horse. Many horses crackled into the scrub behind him. He called out again that he was English and a friend, but his bailers cursed him, called to him to stop and opened fire at him. As he rode, he heard the piping drone of birds; then, suddenly, some of the birds spat and hissed close to his ears, twigs fell from the trees about him; he knew suddenly that the birds were bullets.
The pursuers, with one exception, soon pulled up, the firing ceased, only one man still followed, calling to him to stop. Suddenly this one pursuer pulled up, and Hi at the same instant felt a coldness of fear all over him. There came a shot and shock, his horse swerved violently, staggered, recovered, and bolted into the forest. “He hit the horse,” Hi said, “but not badly, or he wouldn’t go like this.” For the rest of the ride his task was to keep on.
How long he rode the forest he never knew: the horse went on in his terror till he could go no more, then he halted, full of the ends of terror, nervy, starting at a shadow and trembling.
The moon was long since down. Hi could make out that he was in a kind of pan or crater in the forest, with wavy indistinctness everywhere, smelling of balm. He dismounted, tried to examine his horse, who would not let himself be examined, but had certainly been cut on the crupper. He tried to comfort the poor beast. Coming to a patch of grass near a brook, he offered him grazing and a drink, both of which he refused. “Poor old Bingo,” Hi said, “you’re dead beat, you shall rest.”
He tethered, unsaddled and spread his coat upon him. The beast stood where he was left without attempting to roll; he drooped his head as though he had come to the end.
“Now I am pretty nearly done,” Hi thought. “I don’t know where I am. I’ve been gone four days. I’ve killed one horse and cooked a second. Now I’m lost in the forest again.”
He listened for some noise of men or the creatures of men, but heard nothing save the noises of the forest. Terrors began to take hold of him, the dread of such a terror as had come the night before, the terror of the man at the window. Yet at last sleep took him from the terror of being awake: he fell into a pit of sleep and slept for hours.
During this, the fourth day of Hi’s journey, young Chacon the notary, reached Don Manuel with all the terrible news still to be told. By this time, men and horses had begun to arrive at the rendezvous. Some copies of the blasphemous proclamation, which had arrived in the west from Port Matoche, had roused intense feeling throughout the west: men answered Don Manuel’s call from all over San Jacinto. While Hi was lying down to sleep, Don Manuel, with an advanced guard of about a hundred men, pushed eastward from the river to begin his march.