The Wooden Horse

by Hugh Walpole

And she had claimed Harry again. Everything for which he had been longing during that past week had come to him at last; their friendship, their faith in an old god, and above all that sense of a great adventure, for the spirit of which he had so diligently been searching. "Up-along" life was an affair of measured rules and things foreseen. "Down-along" it was a game of unending surprises and a gossamer web shot with the golden light of romance. High-falutin perhaps, but to Harry, as he sat before the fire with the strange dog and those ten wild men, words and pictures came too speedily to admit of a sense of the absurd.

An old man, with a long white beard and a shaking hand, knew strange tales of the moor. When the mists creep up and blot out the land, then the four grey stones take life and are the giants of old, and strange sacrifices are grimly performed. Talse Carlyon had seen things late on a moonlit night with the mists swimming white and silvery-grey over the moor. He had lost his way and had met a man of mighty size who had led him by the hand. There had been spirits about, and at the foot of the grey stone a pool of blood—he had never been the same man since.

"There are spirits and spirits," said the old man solemnly, "and there 'm some good and some bad, for the proper edification of us mortals, and, for my part, it's not for the like of us to meddle."

He stroked his beard—a very gloomy old man with a blind eye. Harry remembered that he had had a wife twenty years before, so he inquired about her.

"Dead," said the old man fiercely, "dead—and, thank God, she went out like a candle."

He muttered this so fiercely that Harry said no more, and the white beard shone in the light of the fire, and his blind eye opened and shut like a box, and his wrinkled hand shook on his knee. The fishing had been bad of late, and here again they spoke as if some personal power had been at work. There were few there who had not lost some one during the years that they had served her, and the memory of what this had been and the foreshadowing of the dangerous future hung over them in the room. Songs were sung, jokes were made, but they were the songs and laughter of men on guard, with the enemy to be encountered, perhaps, in the morning.

Harry sat in his corner of the great seat, watching the leaping of the flames, his hand on Newsome's shoulder, listening to the murmuring voices at his side. He scarcely knew whether he were awake or sleeping; their laughter came to him dimly, and it seemed that he was alone there with only Newsome by his side and the dog sleeping at his feet. The tobacco smoke hung in grey-blue wreaths above his head and the gold light of the two lamps shone mistily, without shape or form. Perhaps it was really a dream. The old man with the white beard and the blind eye was sleeping, his head on his breast. A man with a vacant expression was telling a tale, heavily, slowly, gazing at the fire. The others were not listening—or at any rate not obviously so. They, too, gazed at the fire—it had, as it were, become personal and mesmerised the room. Perhaps it was a dream. He would wake and find himself at "The Flutes." There would be Clare and Garrett and—Robin! He would put all that away now; he would forget it for a moment, at least. He had failed them; they had not wanted him and had told him so,—but here they had known him and loved him; they had welcomed him back as though there had been no intervening space of years. They at least had known what life was. They had not played with it, like those others. They had not surrounded themselves with barricades of artificiality, and glanced through distorting mirrors at their own exaggerated reflection; they had seen life simply, fearlessly, accepting their peril like men and enjoying their fate with the greatness of soul that simplicity had given them. They were not like those others; those on the hill had invaded the sea with noisy clamour, had greeted her familiarly and offered her bathing-machines and boarding-houses; these others had reverenced her and learnt to know her, alone on the downs in the first grey of the dawn, or secretly, when the breakers had rolled in over the sand, carrying with them the red and gold of some gorgeous sunset.

He contrasted them in his mind—the Trojans and the Greeks. He turned round a little in his seat and listened to the story: "It were a man—a strange man with horns and hoofs, so he said—and a merry, deceiving eye; but he couldn't see him clear because of the mist that hung there, with the moon pushing through like a candle, he said. The man was laughing to himself and playing with leaves that danced at his feet under the wind. It can't have been far from the town, because Joe heard St. Elmo's bell ringin' and he could hear the sea quite plain. He ..."

The voice seemed to trail off again into the distance; Harry's thoughts were with his future. What was he to do? It seemed to him that his crisis had come and was now facing him. Should he stay or should he flee? Why should he not escape—away into the country, where he could live his life without fear, where there would be no contempt, no hampering family traditions? Should he stay and wait while Robin learnt to hate him? At the thought his face grew white and he clenched his hands. Robin ... Robin ... Robin ... it always came back to that—and there seemed no answer. That dream of love between father and son, the dream that he had cherished for twenty years, was shattered, and the bubble had burst....

"So Joe said he didn't know but he thought it was to the left and down through the Cove—to the old church he meant; and the man laughed and danced with the leaves through the mist; and once Joe thought he was gone, and there he was back again, laughin'."