For some days he enjoyed the peace of Pendish. He had brought with him books, ordered from the hospital; books which would take him long to read; some of the interminable modern French novels; a complete Fielding and Smollett; Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene, neither of which he had as yet had time to go through. He spent hours in the sunny garden riotous with ingenous roses and delphinium and Canterbury bells and burning red-hot pokers as they call them in the West. Often he limped along the green lanes that wound between the fields up and down the downs. Becoming aware that he knew nothing of bird-life, he procured through the Fanstead bookshop popular works on British Birds, and sitting under a tree in a corner of a meadow would strive to identify them by their song and plumage and queer individual habits. He talked to the villagers. He talked to Mrs. Pettiland, who told him the tragic story of Myra and the man in the County Asylum. Of Myra’s doings all the year round, he found she knew little. She was with her lady whom she had served most of her life and had gone back with her to Medlow. Of the lady herself Myra never spoke. Mrs. Pettiland did not know whether the lady was married or not. That was Myra Stebbings’s way. She gave no information and no one dared ask her questions.
“She never even told me, in her letter, who you were, sir,” she added.
“I am just under her protection,” he smiled. “She took me up when I had no one to defend me.”
“She’s a curious woman,” sighed Mrs. Pettiland.
“With strange tastes in protégés.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Pettiland, I don’t quite know myself what I am. But doubtless sooner or later I’ll do something to astonish you.”
The yearning to do this fretted his secret heart. To move about the summer fields when the weather was fine, to lounge in an easy-chair over books in seasons of rain, was all very well for the period of convalescence after the confinement in the hospital ward. But after a while, when his muscles regained strength and the new blood coursing through his veins brought colour to his cheeks, he began to feel the old imperious need of movement and of action. Sometimes he went back, as in his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea; sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd; sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure. Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. Well, he shrugged angry shoulders. It was no use thinking of that. Poland had gone, like Olivia, out of his life. And when he came to think of it, so had everything that had made up all that he had known or conceived of life.
He closed Tom Jones, and stared out of the window on the rain-drenched hills; Tom Jones, with his physical lustiness, his strong animal bravura, was more than he could bear. Tom Jones, no matter in what circumstance he was placed, had all the world before him. His gay confidence offended the lost man. For he was lost. Not a lost soul, he told himself; that was taking an absurd Byronical view of the matter. To pose as a modern Manfred would be contemptible. He went down to bed-rock of commonplace. He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he died. He could write, pour out all the fever of his soul into words. But what was the good, if no word of his could be transmitted from this backwater into the haunts of men? Work without hope—a verse of Coleridge came vaguely to him—was like draining nectar through a sieve. It could only end in heart-break. He stared through the dripping window-pane at the free hills, dim and hopeless in the mist of deluge. Nothingness confronted him.
He wondered whether Myra, with diabolical insight and deliberate malice, had not lured him hither, so that she could hold him in relentless grip. At any rate she had cast him into this prison.
He lay awake all that night. The next morning the sky had cleared and the sun shone down on the gratefully steaming land of green. He breakfasted in the tiny parlour opposite the shop-post-office on the ground floor. The ornaments in it were those of long ago. Prints of the landing of the Guards after the Crimea, of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. Curiously carved and polished coconut shells, and a great egg on which a staring mermaid was nudely painted stood on the mantelpiece. On the chiffonier were calabashes, with gaudy figures of indigenous Indians, such as came from the West Indies seventy years ago, and a model of a full-rigged ship under a glass case, and a moulting stuffed toucan, with its great beak and yellow and red plumage. The late Mr. Pettiland’s father, he had learned, had followed the sea. So, beside the objects on the crowded mantelpiece and in front of palm-leaf fans were sprigs of white coral and strings of strange beads, and a dumpy, shapeless, wooden Polynesian god. And at the end lay a great conch shell with its wide, pink, curving lips, mysterious and alluring.