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An Ideal Craftsman
211
understand. That was just like one of Jacobs's jokes! — jokes that
usually had so violent and humourless an ending. And yet. . . . Sud-
denly the hinges of the outer door had whinnied; he jerked round
his head in alarm. It was the woman again. She had come back.
Bead-bright raindrops glittered on the black of her jacket, on her
bonnet, in her hair. That rigid awful stare of horror had come back
into her face. He could move neither hand nor foot; could only
stare at her.
'Eh, eh, now!' she was choking out at him. 'So you've
seen
now,
my fine young gentleman, have you? That's what you've done.
Then what do I say;
me\
Keep a civil tongue in your head, that's
what I say. And tell me this —' The face thrust so close down to
his had grown enormous and unspeakably dreadful. Her hot breath
enveloped him. 'Where's the gate? Where's the gate, I say? I got lost
there among them bushes. I can't get out. D'ye see? I've lost the
gate. It's dark. It's come on raining. Where's the
gate?'
Tiny beads of blood stood on her skin - she must have stumbled
into the holly hedge at the foot of the garden by the cucumber
frames. She smelt not only of her old clothes but of the night and
the rain. And still he made no answer. He had been driven back by
that awful and congealed look on her face - beyond fear. He was
merely waiting - to find
his
way: this mystery, this horror.
'Eh, now'; she had turned away, her heavy head crooked down
over one shoulder, and was speaking this time to herself: 'quiet and
silly, that's what
he
is. Nothing much anybody could get out of
him.
But see you here!' She had twisted round. 'It's no good you
playing the young innocent with me. You've seen and you know.
That's what you've done. And you just tell me this. How
could
I
have done it? how
should
I have done it? That's what I'm asking.
Just you tell me that. Haven't I come of honest people? And didn't
he promise me and promise me? And nothing but lies. And then,
"You ain't the first," he says. And me as I am! "You ain't the first,"
he says. Ay, and meant it. "What, what!" I says. And then he hit
me - here, with his clenched-up fist,
here.
"I shan't leave you," I
said, "and you can't make me." And all I wanted was just to keep
body and soul together. "And you can't make me," that's what I
said. "That's all," I said. And then he laughed. "You ain't the first,"
he says, laughing. And me as I am! . . . Oh, my God, he
won't
understand. Listen, little boy. I didn't know what I was doing;
everything went black and I couldn't see. And I put out my hands
212 Walter de la Mare
— to push him off, and my fingers went stiff and a smudge of red
came over my eyes, and next thing he fell down like a bundle and
wouldn't speak, wouldn't speak. Mind you, I say
this,
if I hadn't
drunk the beer, if I hadn't drunk the beer, if I hadn't - done -
that. . . .' She faltered, her face went blank as she swayed.
Her listener was struggling hard to understand. These broken
words told him little that was clear and definite, and yet were brim-
ming over with sinister incomprehensible meanings. He frowned at
the contorted, dark-red moving face and loose lips. One fact and
one fact alone was plain. He had nothing to fear from Jacobs.
Jacobs was not going to pounce out on him. Simply because
Jacobs was gone. Then why . . . ? He twisted about, and kneeling
down on the floor by the cupboard beside the cooling kitchen
range — with scarcely a glint of drowsy red now in its ashy coals
- he struggled with the metal tongue that held back the door.
Usually loose, it now turned stiffly and hurt his fingers. Then sud-
denly it gave way.
And the boy's first quick thought was: Why, he's quite a little
man! And the next was one of supreme relief that all this wild
meaningless talk was now over. He leaned forward and peered into
the puckered-up clay-coloured face, with its blackened lips and
leaden-lidded eyes. The chin was dinted in with the claw pin in the
cravat. A gallipot stood near - a trap for crickets - touching one
limp hand, still smeared with pink plate powder. The door-tongue
was stiff, the boy supposed, because the corner of the baize apron
had got stuck to the varnish of the frame. You'd have hardly
thought, though, there'd be room in the cupboard. But the impor-
tant thing, the illuminating, inspiring, and yet startlingly familiar
thing was the gallipot!
It had touched a spring, it had released a shutter in his mind and
set his thoughts winging back to a sooty, draughty chimney where
only a few minutes ago - minutes as vast and dark and empty as
the sea - he had hidden a book with a wedge of pie-crust on top of
it. In that book he had read of just such a gallipot as this - not as
a trap for crickets - but a gallipot with a handful of spade guineas
in it, which had belonged to an old man who had been brutally
strangled in the small hours by his two nephews. They had never
been caught either; nobody had even suspected them. They had
planned a means of escape - so vile and fantastic that even to watch
them at it had made his skin deliciously creep upon him and his
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