“If Mark has told you this…”
“Who says Mark told me?… I… I…”
The full, rather florid voice faltered and petered out.
“Indeed,” the Colonel said. “Then may I ask where you got your information?”
They stared at each other and, curiously, the look of startled conjecture which had appeared on George Lacklander’s face was reflected on the Colonel’s. “It couldn’t matter less, in any case,” the Colonel said. “Your informant, I am sure, is entirely mistaken. There’s no point in my staying. Goodbye.”
He went out. George, transfixed, saw him walk past the window. A sort of panic came over him. He dragged the telephone across his desk and with an unsteady hand dialled Colonel Cartarette’s number. A woman’s voice answered.
“Kitty!” he said. “Kitty, is that you?”
Colonel Cartarette went home by the right-of-way known as the River Path. It ran through Nunspardon from the top end of Watt’s Lane skirting the Lacklander’s private golf course. It wound down to Bottom Bridge and up the opposite side to the Cartarette’s spinney. From thence it crossed the lower portion of Commander Syce’s and Mr. Phinn’s demesnes and rejoined Watt’s Lane just below the crest of Watt’s Hill.
The Colonel was feeling miserable. He was weighed down by his responsibility and upset by his falling out with George Lacklander, who, pompous old ass though the Colonel thought him, was a lifetime friend. Worst of all, he was wretchedly disturbed by the suggestion that Rose had fallen in love with Mark and by the inference, which he couldn’t help drawing, that George Lacklander had collected this information from the Colonel’s wife.
As he walked down the hillside, he looked across the little valley into the gardens of Jacob’s Cottage, Uplands and Hammer Farm. There was Mr. Phinn dodging about with a cat on his shoulder: “like a blasted old warlock,” thought the Colonel, who had fallen out with Mr. Phinn over the trout stream, and there was poor Syce blazing away with his bow and arrow at his padded target. And there, at Hammer, was Kitty. With a characteristic movement of her hips she had emerged from the house in skintight velvet trousers and a flame-coloured top. Her long cigarette-holder was in her hand. She seemed to look across the valley at Nunspardon. The Colonel felt a sickening jolt under his diaphragm. “How I could!” he thought (though subconsciously). “How I could!” Rose was at her evening employment cutting off the deadheads in the garden. He sighed and looked up to the crest of the hill, and there plodding homewards, pushing her bicycle up Watt’s Lane, her uniform and hat appearing in gaps and vanishing behind hedges, was Nurse Kettle. “In Swevenings,” thought the Colonel, “she crops up like a recurring decimal.”
He came to the foot of the hill and to the Bottom Bridge. The bridge divided his fishing from Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s: he had the lower reaches and Mr. Phinn the upper. It was about the waters exactly under Bottom Bridge that they had fallen out. The Colonel crossed from Mr. Phinn’s side to his own, folded his arms on the stone parapet and gazed into the sliding green world beneath. At first he stared absently, but after a moment his attention sharpened. In the left bank of the Chyne near a broken-down boatshed where an old punt was moored, there was a hole. In its depths eddied and lurked a shadow among shadows: the Old ’Un. “Perhaps,” the Colonel thought, “perhaps it would ease my mind a bit if I came down before dinner. He may stay on my side.” He withdrew his gaze from the Old ’Un to find, when he looked up at Jacob’s Cottage, that Mr. Phinn, motionless, with his cat still on his shoulder, was looking at him through a pair of field-glasses.
“Ah, hell!” muttered the Colonel. He crossed the bridge and passed out of sight of Jacob’s Cottage and continued on his way home.
The path crossed a narrow meadow and climbed the lower reach of Watt’s Hill. His own coppice and Commander Syce’s spinney concealed from the Colonel the upper portions of the three demesnes. Someone was coming down the path at a heavy jog-trot. He actually heard the wheezing and puffing of this person and recognized the form of locomotion practised by Mr. Phinn before the latter appeared wearing an old Norfolk jacket and tweed hat which, in addition to being stuck about with trout-fishing flies, had Mr. Phinn’s reading spectacles thrust through the band like an Irishman’s pipe. He was carrying his elaborate collection of fishing impedimenta. He had the air of having got himself together in a hurry and was attended by Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett, who, after the manner of her kind, suggested that their association was purely coincidental.
The path was narrow. It was essential that someone should give way and the Colonel, sick of rows with his neighbours, stood on one side. Mr. Phinn jogged glassily down upon him. The cat suddenly cantered ahead.
“Hullo, old girl,” said the Colonel. He stooped down and snapped a finger and thumb at her. She stared briefly and passed him with a preoccupied air, twitching the tip of her tail.
The Colonel straightened up and found himself face-to-face with Mr. Phinn.
“Good evening,” said the Colonel.
“Sir,” said Mr. Phinn. He touched his dreadful hat with one finger, blew out his cheeks and advanced. “Thomasina,” he added, “hold your body more seemly.”
For Thomasina, waywardly taken with the Colonel, had returned and rolled on her back at his feet.
“Nice cat,” said the Colonel and added, “Good fishing to you. The Old ’Un lies below the bridge on my side, by the way.”
“Indeed?”
“As no doubt you guessed,” the Colonel added against his better judgment, “when you watched me through your field-glasses.”
If Mr. Phinn had contemplated a conciliatory position, he at once abandoned it. He made a belligerent gesture with his net. “The landscape, so far as I am aware,” he said, “is not under some optical interdict. It may be viewed, I believe. To the best of my knowledge, there are no squatter’s rights over the distant prospect of the Chyne.”
“None whatever. You can stare,” said the Colonel, “at the Chyne, or me, or anything else you fancy till you are black in the face, for all I care. But if you realized… If you…” He scratched his head, a gesture that with the Colonel denoted profound emotional disturbance. “My dear Phinn…” he began again, “if you only knew… God bless my soul, what does it matter! Good evening to you.”
He encircled Mr. Phinn and hurried up the path. “And for that grotesque,” he thought resentfully, “for that impossible, that almost certifiable buffoon I have saddled myself with a responsibility that may well make me wretchedly uncomfortable for the rest of my life.”
He mended his pace and followed the path into the Hammer coppice. Whether summoned by maternal obligations or because she had taken an inscrutable cat’s fancy to the Colonel, Thomasina Twitchett accompanied him, trilling occasionally and looking about for an evening bird. They came within view of the lawn, and there was Commander Syce, bow in hand, quiver at thigh and slightly unsteady on his feet, hunting about in the underbrush.
“Hullo, Cartarette,” he said. “Lost a damned arrow. What a thing! Missed the damned target and away she went.”
“Missed it by a dangerously wide margin, didn’t you?” the Colonel rejoined rather testily. After all, people did use the path, he reflected, and he began to help in the search. Thomasina Twitchett, amused by the rustle of leaves, pretended to join in the hunt.
“I know,” Commander Syce agreed; “rotten bad show, but I saw old Phinn and it put me off. Did you hear what happened about me and his cat? Damnedest thing you ever knew! Purest accident, but the old whatnot wouldn’t have it. Great grief, I told him, I like cats.”
He thrust his hand into a heap of dead leaves. Thomasina Twitchett leapt merrily upon it and fleshed her claws in his wrist. “Perishing little bastard,” said Commander Syce. He freed himself and aimed a spank at her which she easily avoided and being tired of their company, made for her home and kittens. The Colonel excused himself and turned up through the spinney into the open field below his own lawn.