From London Far (26 page)

And here Meredith found he had hit upon a very interesting speculation, and one to which he was able to give an altogether objective regard. For the simple truth was that not even the Aretino of the
Sonnets
– and certainly not Don Perez Sierra y Campo himself – could hold a candle in all this to Meredith’s virtuous old Romans once they were in their slippered and smoking-room vein. Meredith therefore (who had thought he might be obliged, like Dr Johnson on a substantially different occasion, to remove his mind and think of Tom Thumb) found himself listening to Don Perez with substantial, if academic, interest. It was like watching a slightly inferior examination candidate cover familiar ground – not an absorbing activity, but one offering reasonable scope for the exercise of the judgement.

Don Perez seemed presently to feel that this Temptation of St Anthony was not going too well. Imperceptibly, he abandoned the more curious and esoteric aspects of his subject. It was as if the chambering and perverse whispering, the little lurid fires of a score of deviant lusts, faded on the air and left it warm and golden: Giorgione’s or Titian’s or Palma Vecchio’s air – that or the air of Arcady. And now the theme was pagan – carnal and innocent at once – and the evocation all of the eternal pursuit of beauty through the groves. Here, said Don Perez, was the archetypal and sovereign activity of the male, immortally enshrined in the exquisite mythology of Greece. Apollo hunting Daphne, Syrinx fleeing from Pan: here is the basic pattern of human life, where all pleasure lies in man’s triumphant pursuit and capture of the loath and trembling maid.

Don Perez had got so far when Meredith became aware of some altogether untoward disturbance in his host’s well-regulated house. A moment later the door from the offices burst open and there bounded into the room his late companion Shamus – a Shamus juvenile, dishevelled, panic-stricken, disrobed. And behind in hot pursuit, blind as if through some maened frenzy to all propriety of demeanour and place, poured the so-lately decorous maidservants of the Laird of Carron.

Not Apollo and Daphne, not Zeus and Semele, not the Rape of the Sabines, Meredith thought. Not this but the rout of Thracian women about to rend their Orpheus limb from limb and send his gory visage down the burn, down the swift Carron to the Moila shore. Here was that with which the Celtic eye of Shamus had conversed, here was the riddle of his disappearance solved, and here was tumultuous evidence that the precocious lad, dispersedly amorous, had mixed his dates or bitten off more than he could chew. The archetypal male, thought Meredith – and was aware of himself as adding to the uproar his own largest laughter. Shamus made for the farther door, the Bacchantes streamed behind with rumpled aprons and flying hair. And Meredith realized that by this outrageous intrusion of fact upon phantasy Don Perez Sierra y Campo was for the moment utterly distracted. The opportunity, then, had come. He ran for a window, tore aside its curtains, thrust up a sash, and leapt over into darkness below.

Since he knew that Don Perez’s dining-room was on the first floor, and had indeed made careful calculations as to its height from the ground, this leap – Meredith thought as he fell through space – was a sadly amateur affair. Presently he would be picked up with a broken leg. And because he had rejected the allurements of the living Aphrodite he would be put in a sack and consigned to the waves from which the offended goddess sprang.

This classical thought (which was certainly the result of Don Perez’s table-talk) had scarcely run its course when Meredith discovered with some surprise that he was running too. Over his right hand there was trickling what he guessed to be blood; his right knee hurt; in his right side there was an uncomfortable sensation of twist or sprain. These inconveniences were the price of having forgotten to lower himself at full length before dropping: an elementary art which he had been taught (he now remembered) when commencing fire-fighting not many years ago. But he could get along fast enough – faster than in pitch darkness, it was at all judicious to go. But then if Macbeth’s physician did, in fact, ever get
from Dunsinane away and clear
he most assuredly made for cover in the remains of Birnam Wood with a haste which little regarded the chances of taking a tumble in the heather.

Meredith ran. Remembering what he had been taught by games masters at his private school, he ran without looking over his shoulder. His speed was the better because he was going downhill, and because he derived from this an elementary sense of direction. A downward slope must lead him to the burn. And the burn, he knew, headed for the sea in what was roughly the neighbourhood of Moila.

There was no moon, and in a wide deep arc to the west the sky was overcast; only behind him, and trailing southwards from the Great Square of Pegasus, ran a broad river of stars unimpeded by cloud. Don Perez’s dining-room had been brightly lit; for a time the darkness seemed absolute; and Meredith was brought up hard and painfully by what must be the stone wall bounding the garden of Carron Lodge. He scaled this and was among larches. The soft carpeting of their needles felt beneath his feet and their dark mass overhead gave him a momentary sense of security. Then their trunks gathered round him like the bars of some maze-like cage traversed in dream; at first so many stationary presences dimly discerned, they seemed to take motion to themselves as he zigzagged gropingly among them; soon they were a nightmare machine of obliquely gliding perpendicular bars, designed to advance, to buffet and to withdraw. The larches hit out at him and hit again. He dodged one only to find another coming up in flank or from behind. For a bewildering space he was both Meredith and the lad Shamus – Shamus with the maenad women menacingly about him. By an immense effort of the will he stopped dead and considered the fact – which somehow seemed altogether surprising – that he had momentarily lost his head. He could not recall that this had ever happened to him before, even in childhood. But had he not embarked on this mad adventure on the theory that a man does well at fifty to find what new worlds of experience he can? Provided, of course, that he is capable or coping with them in a reasonably efficient way. Which meant, for the present, eschewing reflection in favour of a precise use of the senses. Meredith listened.

The burn could not be far away. Beneath its dominant monotonous flow it harboured a myriad tiny accidents of sound, of varying ripple and eddy, and these were like an urgent whispering pitched just beyond the range of an anxious ear. To imagine in this nocturnal murmuring a sinister purposefulness, a network of menacing dispositions stealthily made, was easy enough. It is only civilization and security that rob the face of nature of an abundant and fearsome animism: demons yelling in the storm, slumbering giants in the swelling contours that ring a familiar plain. Meredith listened once more. A man’s voice called out somewhere behind him and there was an answering shout from farther back. The pursuit had begun.

Carron Lodge (as had been startlingly evident) held several women servants. These, although not without well-developed hunting instincts of their own, were unlikely to join effectively in a chase over the heather, or to be at all in the confidence of the International Society. Of menservants Meredith had seen only one, and there was a limit to the number that Don Perez (or Properjohn) could colourably maintain in an establishment of so moderate a size. And the night was dark and the moors were wide. Unless the headquarters of the Society ran to bloodhounds – and to bloodhounds altogether more pertinacious than Bubear’s had been – it seemed to Meredith that he had a chance of getting clean away. And the chance would be strongest if he moved inland. By turning away from any sustained ascent, he could avoid going dangerously high on Ben Carron; and by walking through the remainder of the night he could make himself into a mere needle in a haystack so far as any immediate power of search could extend.

And yet Meredith felt he had better aim for Moila. It was true that the enemy, by a swift deployment of part of his forces, could easily enough cut his own uncertain route to the coast. But, even so, the Sound was long, the island beyond it sizeable, and there seemed no reason to regard a successful return to the castle as hopeless. How, then, should he proceed? The burn was his only guide, and this the enemy knew. Assuredly, then, they would press down it with all the speed they could contrive. This meant that there were two feasible plans.

He could
follow
. That was to say, he could go off downstream with sufficient disturbance and definiteness to set his pursuers well on that track, and then he could double back and become the cautious pursuer himself. Or he could
keep up
, moving away from the burn on one side or the other until almost out of earshot, and guiding himself by its murmur or by whatever noise the enemy made. Meredith decided on this second course. And he decided – this with some idea of bloodhounds in his mind – that he would begin by crossing the burn. He would then move westward at whatever seemed the best distance from its southern bank.

He was still in the larch wood. And again there were voices, this time on the edge of it. He moved quickly through the last fringe of trees, and it seemed to him that he now avoided their unyielding trunks less by sight or touch than by the exercise of an emergency sense summoned for the purpose. He climbed a wire fence that twanged alarmingly in the stillness as he too-abruptly let it go. At once there was a shout from the larch wood. But he knew now, with the confidence of a former visual impression sharply recalled, that before him lay broken but unprecipitous ground falling straight to the murmuring Carron. He would wade some fifty yards in water and then make the climb from the farther bank. For the first time he looked behind him and saw that he had already dropped a considerable distance. A bright glow showed where several lights must be burning in Don Perez’s stronghold, but the house itself was invisible behind the trees. If he saw it again he hoped it would be in company with the assembled strength of the county constabulary. And Meredith ran for the burn.

Bounding o’er the heather is an athletic exercise frequently described in song. The actuality is not easy, even in daylight. And darkness makes a tumble certain every so many yards. The stuff is either curiously elastic and acts like a smooth but swift pneumatic brake, or it is absolutely strong-rooted and resistant, bringing one down at once. Meredith, by trial and error, quickly found the sort of out-thrusting, high-stepping stride best suited to this invisible terrain; it was no doubt the kind of movement that Captain Maxwell of the
Oronsay
described as
louping
. And presumably his pursuersr could
loup
too; moreover, they would have torches to light them on their way.

Again he looked behind him. And, sure enough, some two hundred yards back several short beams of light flickered here and there, probing the heather. The Lodge had come into sight again as a row of dull lights behind Properjohn’s absurd tartan curtains, with here and there a brighter shaft from some unguarded window. But it was another and fainter illumination that held Meredith’s gaze – one faintly suffusing the eastern sky, cloudless and starry in a great band across the moor. There could be no doubt of it. The lowest stars were paling. Presently there would rise an untimely midnight moon.

And a moon, Meredith remembered, something like three quarters full. Unless the eastern heavens clouded over, visibility would presently be substantial. This, surely, must be far more in favour of pursuers than pursued. It robbed him of what had hitherto been an almost certain last resource, that of simply staying put and moving no farther than was required to avoid one wandering torch or another. But meanwhile there was perhaps half an hour to go before the actual moonlight came. And already he had gained the burn. He was wading in it something more than ankle-deep.

Suddenly, and in the middle of speculations wholly cool and confident, he found that his sense of direction had left him. The bank was steep; neither stars nor hint of moon nor Lodge was here visible; he was standing in this brawling little stream and could feel the stir and thrust of it about his calves – nevertheless he was unable to tell which way it flowed, or even in which direction lay its banks.

He cursed his own confused and urban senses. He bent and experimented with dipping first one and then another finger in the water. No certainty resulted. It was like that sort of sudden waking-up in which his bed or bedroom was for seconds mysteriously disorientated and he had a disconcerting sense of the universe as turned inside-out. Meredith wondered if he was losing his head again – and even as he did so direction returned to him. The burn thrust strongly against his legs with a prompting there was no mistaking. He turned and moved off downstream. But only to halt – more abruptly than he had done yet.

Fifty yards below him a great beam of light had sprung into being against the darkness. It looked like a small searchlight. Perhaps it was only one of those peculiarly powerful spot-lights which form part of the equipment of large cars. However this might be, the shaft of light cut the burn like a knife and ran far up the farther bank. There was no road that way.

He turned – half expecting what he saw. At an equal distance upstream another great beam spanned the water. Meredith saw that the situation was very bad. And where he had before been merely cool he was now angry as well. He was furious at the odds against him – at the resources the rascally Society could bring to bear against a single law-abiding citizen in these solitary recesses. There were voices again now – incisive, almost triumphant – and among them he could recognize the cultivated accents of Don Perez – the same that had discoursed on the violets of Catullus and the vine-leaves of Anacreon. And at this memory Meredith’s indignation against the pretentious and spurious scoundrel mounted even higher. But indignation, he told himself grimly, is not in itself an adequate reply to rifles, revolvers and searchlights. Where did his best chance lie?