Fathers of Men

Haigh took less notice of this insult than Jan had known him to take of a false quantity in school. His only comment was to transfer his attention to Mulberry, who by now had scrambled to his legs. Leaning through the forked tree, the master held out his hand for the stamped envelope, obtained possession of it without a word, and read it as he came round into the open.

“This looks like your writing, Rutter?”

“It is mine.”

Jan was still more indignant than abashed.

“May I ask what it refers to?”

“You may ask what you please, Mr. Haigh.”

“Come, Rutter! I might have put worse posers, I should have thought. Still, as it won’t be for me to deal with you for being here, instead of wherever you’re supposed to be, I won’t press inquiries into the nature of your dealings with this man.”

It was Mulberry’s turn to burst into the breach; he did so as though it were the ring, dashing his battered hat to the ground with ominous exultation.

“Do you want to know what he’s had off me?” he demanded of Haigh. “If he won’t tell you, I will!”

Jan’s heart sank as he met a leer of vindictive triumph. “Who’s going to believe your lies?” he was rash enough to cry out, in a horror that increased with every moment he had for thought.

“I’m not going to listen to him,” remarked Haigh, unexpectedly. “Or to you either!” he snapped at Jan.

“Oh, ain’t you?” crowed Mulberry. “Well, you can shut your ears, and you needn’t believe anything but your own eyes. I’ll show you! I’ll show you!”

He dived into a bramble bush alongside the old forked tree. It was a literal dive. His head disappeared in the dense green tangle. He almost lost his legs. Then a hand came out behind him, and flung something at their feet. It was an empty champagne bottle. Another followed, then another and another till the open space was strewn with them. Neither Haigh nor Jan said a word; but from the bush there came a gust of ribaldry or rancour with every bottle, and last of all the man himself, waving one about him like an Indian club.

“A live 'un among the deaders!” he roared deliriously. “Now I can drink your blessed healths before I go!”

Master and boy looked on like waxworks, without raising a hand to stop him, or a finger between them to brush away a fly. Jan for his part neither realised nor cared what was happening; it was the end of all things, for him or Evan, if not for them both. Evan would hear of it – and then – and then! But would he hear? Would he, necessarily? Jan glanced at Haigh, and saw something that he almost liked in him at last; something human, after all these years; but only until Haigh saw him, and promptly fell upon the flies.

Mulberry meanwhile had knocked the neck off the unopened bottle with a dexterous blow from one of the empties. A fountain of foam leapt up like a plume of smoke; the pothouse expert blew it to the winds, and drank till the jagged bottle stood on end upon his upturned visage. His blood ran with the overflowing wine – scarlet on purple – and for a space the draught had the curiously clarifying effect of liquor on the chronic inebriate. It made him sublimely sober for about a minute. The sparkle passed from the wine into those dim red eyes. They fixed themselves on Jan’s set face. They burst into a flame of sudden recognition.

“Now I remember! Now I remember! I told him I’d seen him – ”

He stopped himself with a gleam of inspired cunning. He had nearly defeated his immediate ends. He looked Jan deliberately up and down, did the same by Haigh, and only then snatched up his ugly bludgeon.

“You’d better be careful with that,” snapped Haigh, with the face which had terrorised generations of young boys. “And the sooner you clear out altogether, let me tell you, the safer it’ll be for you!”

“No indecent haste,” replied Mulberry, leaning at ease upon his weapon. The sparkle of the wine even reached that treacherous tongue of his, reviving its humour and the smatterings of other days. “Festina Whats-'er-name – meaning don’t you be in such a blooming hurry! That nice young man o’ yours and me, we’re old partic’lars, though you mightn’t think it; don’t you run away with the idea that he’s emptied all them bottles by his little self! It wouldn’t be just. I’ve had my share; but he don’t like paying his, and that’s where there’s trouble. Now we don’t keep company no more, and I’m going to tell you where that nice young man an’ me first took up with each other. Strictly 'tween ourselves.”

“I’ve no wish to hear,” cried Haigh. He looked as Jan had seen him look before running some fellow out of his hall. “Are you going of your own accord – ”

“Let him finish,” said Jan, with a grim impersonal interest in the point. In any case it was all over with him now.

“Very kind o’ nice young man – always was nice young man!” said Mulberry. “Stric’ly 'tween shelves it was in your market-place, one blooming fair, when all good boys should ha’ been tucked up in bed an’ 'sleep. Nasty night, too! But that’s where I see 'im, havin’ barney about watch, I recollec’. That’s where we first got old partic’lars. Arcade Sambo – birds of eather – as we used say when I was at school. I seen better days, remember, an’ that nice young man’ll see worse, an’ serve him right for the way he’s tret his ol’ p’rtic’lar, that took such care of him at the fair! Put that in your little pipes an’ smoke it at the school. Farewell, a long farewell! Gobleshyer … Gobleshyer …”

They heard his reiterated blessings for some time after he was out of sight. It was not only distance that rendered them less and less distinct. The champagne was his master – but it had been a good servant first.

“At any rate there was no truth in that, Rutter?” Haigh seemed almost to hope that there was none.

“It’s perfectly true, sir, that about the fair.”

“Yet you had the coolness to suggest that he was lying about the wine!”

“I don’t suggest anything now.”

Jan kicked an empty bottle out of the way. The man’s second tone had cut him as deep as in old odious days in form.

“Is that your money he’s left behind him?”

Jan’s answer was to go down on his knees and begin carefully picking up the forgotten coins from the carpet of last year’s leaves. Haigh watched him under arched eyebrows; and once more the flies were allowed to settle on the master’s limp collar and wet wry face. Then he moved a bottle or so with furtive foot, and kicked a coin or two into greater prominence, behind Jan’s bent back.

“When you’re quite ready, Rutter!” said Haigh at length.

CHAPTER XXVI

CLOSE OF PLAY

It is remarked of many people, that though they go through life fretting and fuming over trifles, and making scenes out of nothing at all, yet in a real emergency their calmness is quite amazing. It need not amaze anybody who gives the matter a little thought; for a crisis brings its own armour, but a man is naked to the insect enemies of the passing moment, and he may have a tender moral and intellectual skin. This was the trouble with Mr. Haigh – a naturally irritable man, who in long years of chartered tyranny had gradually ceased to control his temper in the absence of some special reason why he should. But fellows in his house used to say that in the worst type of row they could trust Haigh to sort out the sinned against from the sinning, and not to lose his head, though he might still smack theirs for whistling in his quad.

Thus it is scarcely to be doubted that already Mr. Haigh had more sympathy with the serious offender whom he had caught red-handed with little clods who ended pentameters with adjectives or showed a depraved disregard for the cæsura. But for once he did not wear his heart upon his sleeve, or in his austere eyes and distended nostrils; his very shoulders, as Jan followed them through the wood, looked laden with fate inexorable. A composure so alien and abnormal is at least as terrible as the wrath that is slow to rise; it chilled Jan’s blood, but it also gave him time to see things, and to make up his mind.

In the wood and in the ride Haigh did not even turn his head to see that he was being duly followed; but in the lower meadow he stopped short, and waited sombrely for Jan.

“There’s nothing to be said, Rutter, as between you and me, except on one small point that doesn’t matter to anybody else. I gathered just now that you were not particularly surprised at being caught by me– that it’s what you would have expected of me – playing the spy! Well, I have played it during the last hour; but I never should have dreamt of doing so if your own rashness had not thrust the part upon me.”

“I suppose you saw me get into the fly?” said Jan, with a certain curiosity in the incidence of his frustration.

“I couldn’t help seeing you. I had called for this myself, and was in the act of bringing it to you for your – splitting head!”

Haigh had produced an obvious medicine bottle sealed up in white paper. Jan could not resent his sneer.

“I’m sorry you had the trouble, sir. There was nothing the matter with my head.”

“And you can stand there – ”

Haigh did not finish his sentence, except by dashing the medicine bottle to the ground in his disgust, so that it broke even in that rank grass, and its contents soaked the smooth white paper. This was the old Adam, but only for a moment. Jan could almost have done with more of him.

“I know what you must think of me, sir,” he said. “I had to meet a blackmailer at his own time and place. But that’s no excuse for me.”

“I’m glad you don’t make it one, I must say! I was going on to tell you that I followed the fly, only naturally, as I think you’ll agree. But it wasn’t my fault you didn’t hear me in the wood before you saw me, Rutter. I made noise enough, but you were so taken up with your – boon companion!”

Jan resented that; but he had made up his mind not even to start the dangerous game of self-defence.

“He exaggerated that part of it,” was all that Jan said, dryly.

“So I should hope. It’s not my business to ask for explanations – ”

“And I’ve none to give, sir.”