The Man Who Lost Himself Part 39

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 Devonshire 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 Nightshirt 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.

The other listened politely.

"I ask you for your name and address," said he. "Our lawyers will settle the other matter."

Then anger came to Jones.

"I am the Earl of Rochester," said he, "and my address is Carlton House Terrace, London. I have no cards on me."

Then the queerest sensation came to Jones, for he saw that the other had recognised him. Rochester was evidently as well known to the ordinary Englishman, by picture and repute, as Lloyd George.

"I beg your pardon," said the other, "but the fact is that my land is over-run with people from Sandbourne--sorry."

"Oh, don't mention it," replied the Earl of Rochester. "I sha'n't do any damage. Good day." They parted and he pursued his way.

A mile farther on he came upon a person with broken boots, a beery face, and clothes to match his boots. This person was seated in the sunshine under a hedge, a bundle and a tin can beside him.

He hailed Jones as "Guvernor" and requested a match.

Jones supplied the match, and they fell into conversation.

"Northbourne," said the tramp. "I'm goin' that way meself. I'll shew you the quickest way when I've had a suck at me pipe."

Jones rested for a moment by the hedge whilst the pipe was lit. The trespa.s.s business was still hot in his mind. The cave-in of the Landlord had not entirely removed the sense of outrage.

"Aren't you afraid of being held up for trespa.s.s?" asked he.

"Trespa.s.s," replied the other, "not me. I ain't afeared of no farmers."

Jones gave his experience.

"Don't you be under no bloomin' error," said the tramp, when the recital was finished. "That chap was right enough. That chap couldn't touch the likes of me, unless he lied and swore I'd broke fences, but he could touch the likes of you. I know the Lor. I know it in and out. Landlords don't know it as well as me. That chap knows the lor, else he wouldn't a' been so keen on gettin' your name and where you lived."

"But how could he have touched me if he cannot touch you?"

The tramp chuckled.

"I'll tell you," said he, "and I'll tell you what he'll do now he's got where you live. He'll go to the Co't o' Charncery and arsk for a 'junction against you to stop you goin' over his fields. You don't want to go over his fields any more, that don't matter. He'll get his 'junction and you'll have to pay the bloomin' costs--see--the bloomin'

costs, and what will that amahnt to? Gawd knows, maybe a hundred pound.

Lots of folks take it into their silly heads they can go where they want. They carnt, not if the Landlord knows his Lor, not unless they're hoofin' it like me. Lot o' use bringin' _me_ up to the Co't o'

Charncery."

"Do you mean to say that just for walking over a field a man can be had up to the court of Chancery and fined a hundred pounds?"

"He ain't fined, it's took off him in costs."

"You seem to know a lot about the law," said Jones, calling up the man of the public house last night, and coming to the conclusion that amongst the English lower orders there must be a vast fund of a peculiar sort of intelligence.