CHAPTER VIBEALBY AND THE TRAMP
Bealby was loth to leave the caravan party even when by his own gross negligence it had ceased to be a caravan party. He made off regretfully along the crest of the hills through bushes of yew and box until the clamour of the disaster was no longer in his ears. Then he halted for a time and stood sorrowing and listening and then turned up by a fence along the border of a plantation and so came into a little overhung road.
His ideas of his immediate future were vague in the extreme. He was a receptive expectation. Since his departure from the gardener’s cottage circumstances had handed him on. They had been interesting but unstable circumstances. He supposed they would still hand him on. So far as he had any definite view about his intentions it was that he was running away to sea. And that he was getting hungry.
It was also, he presently discovered, getting dark very gently and steadily. And the overhung road after some tortuosities expired suddenly upon the bosom of a great grey empty common with distant mysterious hedges.
It seemed high time to Bealby that something happened of a comforting nature.
Always hitherto something or someone had come to his help when the world grew dark and cold, and given him supper and put him or sent him to bed. Even when he had passed a night in the interstices of Shonts he had known there was a bed at quite a little distance under the stairs. If only that loud Voice hadn’t shouted curses whenever he moved he would have gone to it. But as he went across this common in the gloaming it became apparent that this amiable routine was to be broken. For the first time he realized the world could be a homeless world.
And it had become very still.
Disagreeably still, and full of ambiguous shadows.
That common was not only an unsheltered place, he felt, but an unfriendly place, and he hurried to a gate at the further end. He kept glancing to the right and to the left. It would be pleasanter when he had got through that gate and shut it after him.
In England there are no grey wolves.
Yet at times one thinks of wolves, grey wolves, the colour of twilight and running noiselessly, almost noiselessly, at the side of their prey for quite a long time before they close in on it.
In England, I say, there are no grey wolves.
Wolves were extinguished in the reign of Edward the Third; it was in the histories, and since then no free wolf has trod the soil of England; only menagerie captives.
Of course there may beescapedwolves!
Now the gate!—sharp through it and slam it behind you, and a little brisk run and so into this plantation that slopes down hill. This is a sort of path; vague, but it must be a path. Let us hope it is a path.
What was that among the trees?
It stopped, surely it stopped, as Bealby stopped. Pump, pump—. Of course! that was one’s heart.
Nothing there! Just fancy. Wolves live in the open; they do not come into woods like this. And besides, there are no wolves. And if one shouts—even if it is but a phantom voice one produces, they go away. They are cowardly things—really. Such as there aren’t.
And there is the power of the human eye.
Which is why they stalk you and watch you and evade you when you look and creep and creep and creep behind you!
Turn sharply.
Nothing.
How this stuff rustled under the feet! In woods at twilight, with innumerable things darting from trees and eyes watching you everywhere, it would be pleasanter if one could walk without making quite such a row. Presently, surely, Bealby told himself, he would come out on a high road and meet other people and say “good-night” as they passed. Jolly other people they would be, answering, “Good-night.” He was now going at a moistening trot. It was getting darker and he stumbled against things.
When you tumble down wolves leap. Not of course that thereareany wolves.
It was stupid to keep thinking of wolves in this way. Think of something else. Think of things beginning with a B. Beautiful things, boys, beads, butterflies, bears. The mind stuck at bears.Are there such things as long grey bears?Ugh! Almost endless, noiseless bears?...
It grew darker until at last the trees were black. The night was swallowing up the flying Bealby and he had a preposterous persuasion that it had teeth and would begin at the back of his legs....