Chapter 4
I
I owed it to my colleague Glossop that I was in the centre of the
surprising things that occurred that night. By sheer weight of
boredom, Glossop drove me from the house, so that it came about
that, at half past nine, the time at which the affair began, I was
patrolling the gravel in front of the porch.
It was the practice of the staff of Sanstead House School to
assemble after dinner in Mr Abney's study for coffee. The room was
called the study, but it was really more of a master's common
room. Mr Abney had a smaller sanctum of his own, reserved
exclusively for himself.
On this particular night he went there early, leaving me alone
with Glossop. It is one of the drawbacks of the desert-island
atmosphere of a private school that everybody is always meeting
everybody else. To avoid a man for long is impossible. I had been
avoiding Glossop as long as I could, for I knew that he wanted to
corner me with a view to a heart-to-heart talk on Life Insurance.
These amateur Life Insurance agents are a curious band. The world
is full of them. I have met them at country-houses, at seaside
hotels, on ships, everywhere; and it has always amazed me that
they should find the game worth the candle. What they add to their
incomes I do not know, but it cannot be very much, and the trouble
they have to take is colossal. Nobody loves them, and they must
see it; yet they persevere. Glossop, for instance, had been trying
to buttonhole me every time there was a five minutes' break in the
day's work.
He had his chance now, and he did not mean to waste it. Mr Abney
had scarcely left the room when he began to exude pamphlets and
booklets at every pocket.
I eyed him sourly, as he droned on about 'reactionable endowment',
'surrender-value', and 'interest accumulating on the tontine
policy', and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt
for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his
pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives,
entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the
fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract
fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be
thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth
birthday made me feel as if it was due tomorrow. He was a man with
a manner suggestive of a funeral mute suffering from suppressed
jaundice, and I had never before been so weighed down with a sense
of the inevitability of decay and the remorseless passage of time.
I could feel my hair whitening.
A need for solitude became imperative; and, murmuring something
about thinking it over, I escaped from the room.
Except for my bedroom, whither he was quite capable of following
me, I had no refuge but the grounds. I unbolted the front door and
went out.
It was still freezing, and, though the stars shone, the trees grew
so closely about the house that it was too dark for me to see more
than a few feet in front of me.
I began to stroll up and down. The night was wonderfully still. I
could hear somebody walking up the drive--one of the maids, I
supposed, returning from her evening out. I could even hear a bird
rustling in the ivy on the walls of the stables.
I fell into a train of thought. I think my mind must still have
been under Glossop's gloom-breeding spell, for I was filled with a
sense of the infinite pathos of Life. What was the good of it all?
Why was a man given chances of happiness without the sense to
realize and use them? If Nature had made me so self-satisfied that
I had lost Audrey because of my self-satisfaction why had she not
made me so self-satisfied that I could lose her without a pang?
Audrey! It annoyed me that, whenever I was free for a moment from
active work, my thoughts should keep turning to her. It frightened
me, too. Engaged to Cynthia, I had no right to have such thoughts.
Perhaps it was the mystery which hung about her that kept her in
my mind. I did not know where she was. I did not know how she
fared. I did not know what sort of a man it was whom she had
preferred to me. That, it struck me, was the crux of the matter.
She had vanished absolutely with another man whom I had never seen
and whose very name I did not know. I had been beaten by an unseen
foe.
I was deep in a very slough of despond when suddenly things began
to happen. I might have known that Sanstead House would never
permit solitary brooding on Life for long. It was a place of
incident, not of abstract speculation.
I had reached the end of my 'beat', and had stopped to relight my
pipe, when drama broke loose with the swift unexpectedness which
was characteristic of the place. The stillness of the night was
split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized
among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill,
piercing squeal that did not rise to a crescendo, but started at
its maximum and held the note; a squeal which could only proceed
from one throat: the deafening war-cry of the Little Nugget.
I had grown accustomed, since my arrival at Sanstead House, to a
certain quickening of the pace of life, but tonight events
succeeded one another with a rapidity which surprised me. A whole
cinematograph-drama was enacted during the space of time it takes
for a wooden match to burn.
At the moment when the Little Nugget gave tongue, I had just
struck one, and I stood, startled into rigidity, holding it in the
air as if I had decided to constitute myself a sort of limelight
man to the performance.
It cannot have been more than a few seconds later before some
person unknown nearly destroyed me.
I was standing, holding my match and listening to the sounds of
confusion indoors, when this person, rounding the angle of the
house in a desperate hurry, emerged from the bushes and rammed me
squarely.
He was a short man, or he must have crouched as he ran, for his
shoulder--a hard, bony shoulder--was precisely the same distance
from the ground as my solar plexus. In the brief impact which
ensued between the two, the shoulder had the advantage of being in
motion, while the solar plexus was stationary, and there was no
room for any shadow of doubt as to which had the worst of it.
That the mysterious unknown was not unshaken by the encounter was
made clear by a sharp yelp of surprise and pain. He staggered.
What happened to him after that was not a matter of interest to
me. I gather that he escaped into the night. But I was too
occupied with my own affairs to follow his movements.
Of all cures for melancholy introspection a violent blow in the
solar plexus is the most immediate. If Mr Corbett had any abstract
worries that day at Carson City, I fancy they ceased to occupy his
mind from the moment when Mr Fitzsimmons administered that historic
left jab. In my case the cure was instantaneous. I can remember
reeling across the gravel and falling in a heap and trying to
breathe and knowing that I should never again be able to, and
then for some minutes all interest in the affairs of this world
left me.
How long it was before my breath returned, hesitatingly, like some
timid Prodigal Son trying to muster up courage to enter the old
home, I do not know; but it cannot have been many minutes, for the
house was only just beginning to disgorge its occupants as I sat
up. Disconnected cries and questions filled the air. Dim forms
moved about in the darkness.
I had started to struggle to my feet, feeling very sick and
boneless, when it was borne in upon me that the sensations of this
remarkable night were not yet over. As I reached a sitting
position, and paused before adventuring further, to allow a wave
of nausea to pass, a hand was placed on my shoulder and a voice
behind me said, 'Don't move!'
