Part 39 (1/2)

Hoover's hand shot out to grasp his prey. What happened then was described by Mr. Shonts, the German draper across the way, to a friend.

”The thin man hit Mr. Hoover in the stomack, who sat down, but lifted himself at wance and pursued him.”

Jones ran. After him followed a constable, sprung from nowhere, boys, a dog that seemed running for exercise, and Hoover.

He reached the house of Mrs. Henshaw, pulled the latch key from his pocket, plunged it in the lock, opened the door and shut it. So close was the pursuit on him that the ”bang-bang” of the knocker followed at once on the bang of the door.

Then the bell went, peal after peal.

Jones made for the kitchen stairs and bolted down them, found a pa.s.sage leading to the back door, and, disregarding the bewildered Mrs. Henshaw, who was coming out of the kitchen with her hands all over flour, found the back yard.

A blank wall lay before him, another on the right, and another on the left. The left and right walls divided the Henshaw back yard from the yards of the houses on either side, the wall immediately before him divided it from the back yard of a house in Minerva Terrace, which was parallel to the High Street.

Jones chose this wall. A tenantless dog kennel standing before it helped him, and next moment he was over, shaken up with a drop of twelve feet and facing a clothes line full of linen. He dived under a sheet and almost into the back of a broad woman hanging linen on a second clothes line, found the back door of the house, which the broad woman had left open, ran down a pa.s.sage, up a kitchen stairs and into a hall. An old gentleman in list slippers, coming out of a room on the right, asked him what he wanted. Jones, recalling the affair later, could hear the old gentleman's voice and words.

He did not pause to reply. He opened the hall door, and the next moment he was in Minerva Terrace. It was fortunately deserted. He ran to the left, found a bye way and a terrace of artisans' dwellings, new, hideous, and composed of yellow brick. In front of the terrace lay fields. A gate in the hedge invited him, he climbed over it, crossed a field, found another gate which led him to another field, and found himself surrounded by the silence of the country, a silence pierced and thrilled by the songs of larks. Larks make the sea lands of the south and east coasts insufferable. One lark in a suitable setting, and, for a while, is delightful, but twenty larks in all grades of ascent and descent, some near, some distant, make for melancholy.

Jones crouched in a hedge for a while to get back his breath. He was lost. Road maps were not much use to him here. The larks insisted on that, jubilantly or sorrowfully according to the stage of their flight.

Then something or someone immediately behind him on the other side of the hedge breathed a huge sigh, as if lamenting over his fate. He jumped up. It was a cow. He could see her through the brambles and smell her too, sweet as a Devons.h.i.+re dairy.

Then he sat down again to think and examine the map, which he had fortunately placed in his pocket. The roads were there but how to reach them was the problem, and the London road, to which he had pinned his faith, was now impossible. It would be surely watched. He determined, after a long consultation with himself, to make for Northbourne, striking across the fields straight ahead, and picking up the cliff road somewhere on its course.

He judged, and rightly enough, that Hoover would hunt for him, not along the coast but inland. Northbourne was not the road to London, even though a train might be caught from Northbourne. The whole business was desperate, but this course seemed the least desperate way out of it. And he need not hurry, speed would be of no avail in this race against Fate.

He took the money from his pocket and counted it. Out of the nine pounds he started with from Hoover's there remained only five pounds eleven and ninepence.

He had spent as follows:

Mrs. Henshaw 2 0 0 Panama 6 11 Nights.h.i.+rt 3 11 Coat 15 0 Public House 10 Shave and Newspaper 7 Road Map 1 0 ---------- 3 8 3

He went over these accounts and checked them in his head. Then he put the money back in his pocket and started on his way across the fields.

Despite all his worries this English country interested him, it also annoyed him. Fields, the size of pocket handkerchiefs, divided one from the other by monstrous hedges and deep ditches. To cross this country in a straight line one would want to be a deer or a bounding kangaroo.

Gates, always at corners and always diagonal to his path, gave him access from one field to the other. Trees there were none. The English tree has an antipathy to the sea, and keeps away from it, but the hedge has no sensitiveness of this sort. These hedges seemed to love the sea, to judge by their size.

He was just in the act of clambering over one of the innumerable gates when a voice hailed him. He looked back. A young man in leggings, who had evidently been following him unperceived, raised a hand. Jones finished his business with the gate, and then, with it between him and the stranger, waited. He was well dressed in a rough way, evidently a superior sort of farmer, and physically a person to be reckoned with. He was also an exceedingly cantankerous looking individual.

”Do you know that you are trespa.s.sing?” asked he, when they were within speaking distance.

”No,” said Jones.

”Well, you are. I must ask you for your name and address, please.”

”What on earth for--what harm am I doing your old fields?” Jones had forgotten his position, everything, before the outrage on common sense.

”You are trespa.s.sing, that's all. I must ask you for your name and address.”

Now to Jones came the recollection of something he had read somewhere. A statement, that in England there was no law of trespa.s.s in the country places, and that a person might go anywhere to pick mushrooms or wild flowers, and no landlord could interfere so long as no damage was done.

”Don't you know the law?” asked Jones. He recited the law accordingly, to the Unknown.