A NIGHT AT A COTTAGE
On the evening that I am considering I passed by some ten or twenty cosy barns and sheds without finding one to my liking: for Worcestershire lanes are devious and muddy, and it was nearly dark when I found an empty cottage set back from the road in a little bedraggled garden. There had been heavy rain earlier in the day, and the straggling fruit trees still wept over it.
But the roof looked sound, there seemed no reason why it should not be fairly dry inside - as dry, at any rate, as I was likely to find anywhere.
I decided: and with a long look up the road, and a long look down the road, I drew an iron bar from the lining of my coat and forced the door, which was only held by a padlock and two staples. Inside, the darkness was damp and heavy: I stuck a match, and with its haloed light I saw the black mouth of a passage somewhere ahead of me: and then it spluttered out. So I closed the door carefully, though I had little reason to fear passers-by at such a dismal hour in so remote a lane: and lighting another match, I crept down this passage to a little room at the far end, where the air was a bit clearer, for all that the window was boarded across. Moreover, there was a little ruested stove in this room: and thinking it too dark for any to see the smoke, I ripped up part of the wainscot with my knife, and soon was boiling my tea over a bright, small fire, and drying some of the day's rain out of me steamy clothes. Presently I piled the stove with wood to its top bar, and setting my boots where they would best dry, I stretched my body out to sleep.
I cannot have slept very long, for when I woke the fire was still burning brightly. It is not easy to sleep for long together on the level boards of a floor, for the limbs grow numb, and any movement wakes. I turned over, and was about to go again to sleep when I was startled to hear steps in the passage. As i have said, the window was boarded, and there was no other door form the little room - no cupboard even - in which to hide. It occured to me rather grimly that there was nothing to do but to sit up and face the music, and that would probably mean being haled back to Worcester jail, which I had left two bare days before, and where, for various reasons. I had no anxiety to be seen again.
The stranger did not hurry himself, but presently walked slowly down the passage, attracted by the light of the fire: and when he came in the did not seem to notice me where I lay huddled in a corner, but walked straight over to the stove and warmed his hands at it. He was dripping wet; wetter than I should have thought it possible for a man to get, even on such a rainy night; and his clothes were old and worn. The water dripped form him on to the floor: he wore no hat, and the straight hair over his eyes dripped water that sizzled spitefully on the embers.
It occured to me at once that he was no lawful citizen, but another wanderer like myself; a gentleman of the Road; so I gave him some sort of greeting, and we were presently in conversation. He complained much of the cold and the wet, and huddled himself over the fire, his teeth chattering and his face an ill white.
'No,' I said, 'it is no decent weather for the Road, this. But I wonder this cottage isn't more frequented, for it's a tidy little bit of a cottage.'
Outside the pale dead sunflowers and giant weeds stirred in the rain.
' Time was,' he answered, 'there wasn't a tighter little cot in the county, nor a purtier garden, A regular little parlour, she was. But now no folk'll live in it, and there's very few tramps will stop here either.'
There were none of the rags and tins and broken food about that you find in a place where many beggars are used to stay.
'Why's that?' I asked.
He gave a very troubled sigh before answering.
'Gho-asts,' he said; 'gho-asts. Him that lived here. It is a mighty sad tale, and I'll not tell it you: but the upshot of it was that he drowned himself, down to the mill-pond. All slimy, he was, and floating, when they pulled him out of it. There are fo-aks have seen un floating on the pond, and fo-aks have seen un set round the corner of the school, waiting for his childer. Seems as if he had forgotten, like, how they were all gone dead, and the why he drowned hisself. But there are some say he walks up and down this cottage, up and down; like whenthe smallpox had 'em, they couldn't sleep but if they heard his feet going up and down by their doors. Drownded hisself down to the pond, he did; and now he Walks.'
The stranger sighed again, and i could hear the water squelch in his boots as he moved himself.
'But it doesn't do for the like of us to get superstitious,' I answered. 'it wouldn't do for us to get seeing ghosts, or many's the wet night we'd be lying in the roadway.'
'No,' he said; 'no, it wouldn't do at all. I never had belief in Walks myself.'
I laughed.
'Nor I that,' I said. 'I never see ghosts, whoever may.'
He looked at me again in his queer melancholy fashion.
'No,' he said. 'Spect you don't ever. Some folk do-an't. It's hard enough for poor fellows to have no money to their lodging, apart from gho-asts sceering them.'
'It's the coppers, not spooks, make me sleep uneasy,' said I. 'What with coppers, and meddlesome-minded fold, it isn't easy to get a night's rest nowadays.'
The water was still oozing from his clothes all about the floor, and a dank smell went up from him.
'God! man,' I cried,'can't you NEVER get fry?'
'Dry?' He made a little coughing laughter. 'Dry? I shan't never be fry...'tisnt't the likes of us that ever get dry, be it wet OR fine, winter OR summer. See that.'
He thrust his muddy hands up to the wrist in the fire, glowering over it fiercely and madly. but I caught up my tow boots and ran crying out into the night.
From A Moment of Time
by RICHARD HUGHES
No comments:
Post a Comment