“But there are also some good arguments against its being a trap. The friend was with me because I don’t like being alone. The friend shouted and struggled to get out but said nothing which could definitely prove I was not quietly following my profession and watching badgers. All the time he has been here he has not seen a sign of police, in uniform or out of it. The car which passed him on the road meant no more than any other cruising police car.
“So what is his next move in this game where he cannot see the other board, but the referee has said ‘check’? He must make up his mind by what I do. It is certain that I myself know that a murderous attack was made on me, whatever excuse I may have given to my unknown friend … Consequently I must show nervousness and run. That’s the surest way of getting him to follow.”
Ian would not listen. He became more and more regimental. He insisted on telling the whole story to the police, and that I should stay with him while they made their investigations.
“I’ve been thinking all day what would have happened if I had been forced to put a charge of shot into that fellow last night,” he said. “I know he deserves it. But the police should have known exactly what we were doing.”
“And forbidden it or wrecked it.”
“That’s their funeral.”
“Mine, too, unfortunately.”
“Very well. But it’s against common sense and it’s against my —my —”
I was certain he was going to say “orders.”
” — against my principles. I cannot help you any more, Charles, unless you allow me to keep the police informed.”
I said I had told him a dozen times why I wouldn’t. Because I would not be guarded. Because I did not want him questioned, frightened off and returning months later when I was not expecting him. Because this was a private matter between me and him.
“For which you are quite likely to be publicly sentenced to death.”
That was my own business, I replied. Would he promise to leave the police out of it if I never asked anything more from him?
He agreed to that. He was very unhappy but obstinate. It was all my fault. I should have recognized that he was not the same man as in the war, and that it had become for him, as for the rest of us, a mere episode breaking the continuity of an orderly life. Both of us, as I have indicated, found the special beastliness of that episode still too much in the present. It is hard for a man of scrupulous mercy and humanity to be forced into the morals of a ruthless gangster. But he had the pattern to carry him along — a continuity of landed gentry into army and back to landed gentry. I had no pattern.
So there was nothing for it but to go on alone. Against Ian I felt not the slightest resentment. I had most unfairly dragged him into my affairs by playing upon whatever trace of romanticism remained in him; the point at which my plan was bound to appear to him sheer irresponsibility was soon reached. But I could not help feeling rejected. What I wanted was impossible — to repeat war, to know, as it were, that at least in London I was honored and trusted. And London and Ian had been the same thing.
I did not know what to do. To mark time and be careful was all I could do. I decided to return to my cottage for the night. My opponent, whatever his source of intelligence, could hardly spot the single night I had passed with Ian; but if I stayed longer he might get onto it. I did not want him to find out that I had been accompanied by such a formidable friend at the badger sett. Ian’s past was well known.
All the surroundings of Hernsholt now seemed to me puzzling and unfriendly; they refused, like so much at the heart of England, to be defined. Forest when seen from ground level. The tamest farming country when seen from the top of a tree. How was I to go to work within these subtle enclosures of life as well as fields? I admired that cruel devil who thought that burning alive was the right death for me. He was able to find his way through subtleties singlehanded and confidently, backed by his money and — of this I was now certain — an impregnable social position.
My own affinities with Jim Melton, I reflected sourly, were probably closer than with Ian and his kind — though whether that was because I had been brought up to laugh at the middle classes and their obsession with legal forms or because I was a fish out of water, I could not decide.
The thought of Jim Melton reminded me that he was better than nothing; indeed he might be better than anything. I walked over to see Ferrin and found him building a greenhouse in the garden behind his pub when he certainly ought to have been weeding his vegetables. He was that sort of gardener.
I asked him where I could find Jim Melton.
“Predestination, that’s what it is,” he answered drily. “The more I live round here, the more I’m certain nobody has any free will except me. Blowed if I don’t write to the Church Times about it one day! Jim said to me after you left that you’d be asking for him sometime soon, and if you did I was to send you round to his cottage.”
He gave me Jim’s address. It was a yellow-brick Council house on the road to Stony Stratford. I should have expected him to live in a derelict gamekeeper’s cottage in the middle of nowhere.
“Not he!” Ferrin said. “You wouldn’t catch Jim putting up with an old-fashioned place if he could work himself into a new one with the rate-payers paying half his rent for him.”
“I want an hour or two of his time. It will be expensive, I suppose?”
“That’s for Jim to say. But I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Dennim, he’s taken a liking to you.”
“I wonder why.”
“Ever seen an animal you couldn’t get on with?”
“Lots.”
“One that was free to be got on with, if you see what I mean?”
I did. It was well put. I certainly do not offend tame animals, and I have noticed — though the observation is worthless since it cannot be measured by statistics — that by wild creatures my presence, even when it is known, seems to be easily accepted. But I do not wish to sound like some dear old lady who claims that all cats love her. Why in the world shouldn’t they?
“Well, Jim —he doesn’t think,” Ferrin went on, “not what you and I would call thinking. He believes in his comfort, mind you, and when it comes to a deal he’s sharp. But he couldn’t tell you what makes him tick any more than his jackdaw could.”
The jackdaw was first with a greeting when I opened Jim Melton’s garden gate. It furiously attacked my ankles, pecked the hand I put down and then walked straight up my arm onto my shoulder.
Two small female Meltons, who were busy filling a doll’s pram with water, regarded this with interest.
“Mind yer ear, mister,” one said.
This was suspiciously like a word of command to the jackdaw, which gave me a sharp nip.
“Didn’t say no more than damn-you,” complained the other little girl, disappointed.
“What do visitors usually say?” I asked.
I was told. I wouldn’t have inquired if I could have guessed what was going to come out of those rosebud mouths.
“Thought you might be along, Perfesser,” said Jim Melton, appearing from the back of the house.
The jackdaw danced on my shoulder and repeated the expression it had just heard. The sounds were not really intelligible, though it made a fair shot at the word “bastard.”
“And if I am, what the hell’s it got to do with you?” Jim said. “You mind yer own business! Mother!”
Mrs. Melton came out of the front door. She was oddly dressed in a very dirty but quite well-fitting coat and skirt. The coat was longer than was fashionable and faintly suggested 1914. Her gray-streaked, tan-colored hair was the same shade as her face, apart from the red on her cheekbones. The coat and the coloring strongly suggested English gipsy blood.