‘What do you see beyond the garden, Tom?’ Hatty whispered up to him, her curiosity having overcome her fears.
‘If you were up here yourself to see …’ Tom said; and his words floated high over the whole garden.
He could not tell her—could not hope to convey to her, without her seeing it, the distance. In a flat countryside—as this was—even a slight eminence gives a commanding view, as from a mountain peak. Tom, before, had known only the garden, and a very little beyond its limits; now, from his wall-top, he saw what seemed to be the whole world.
‘Tell me what you see,’ Hatty pleaded.
‘Well, from the top of the wall you can see the river,’ Tom began, ‘and if you follow the river with your eye—’
‘Yes? Yes?’ whispered Hatty.
Tom did not finish what he was saying, for at that moment Abel came round the corner of the trees. He was running; he rushed straight at Hatty; he set his hands upon her shoulders and pressed down, so that Tom saw her suddenly crumple to the ground in a kneeling position. Then he thrust something into her hand, and, standing over her, began speaking in a lowered, quick voice. Tom heard Hatty’s voice replying: she sounded frightened. He could not hear what either of them said.
In haste Tom retraced his steps along the wall and climbed down again into the garden. By that time, Hatty was alone.
‘What on earth was the matter?’ Tom asked.
‘Abel thought I was going to walk along the top of the wall, as James did,’ said Hatty. ‘He wanted to stop me because of the danger.’
‘I thought he was going to beat you.’
‘He made me kneel down on the path and swear on his Bible—swear never to climb the sundial wall and walk along it.’
‘Was he very angry?’ asked Tom.
Hatty said slowly: ‘No. I think—somehow—he was frightened.’
‘Frightened?’ Tom frowned. ‘You mean that you were frightened; he was angry.’
‘No. I was frightened a little, just because he was so quick and strong; but I’m sure he was frightened too, and much more frightened. When he made me take the Bible, his hand was all clammy and it shook.’
‘Why did he suddenly think you might try to climb the wall?’ asked Tom.
‘Because he saw me looking up at it in that way, I suppose.’
‘No, that couldn’t be the reason,’ said Tom. ‘He was running when he came round the corner of the trees; he must have been running with his Bible in his hand before ever he came within sight of you.’
‘Perhaps he heard me talking to you on the top of the wall.’
‘No: you only whispered; and he couldn’t have heard me.’ By that Tom did not mean that he had spoken very quietly, for he had not; he meant that, even if he had shouted with all his strength, his voice could never have been heard by Abel.
‘Well, then,’ said Hatty, ‘perhaps Susan saw me from a bedroom window, and came down and told him of it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Tom. ‘I saw Susan at a window.’ But he was not satisfied with the explanation.
At about this time, Hatty and Tom started on the building of the tree-house, and they soon forgot Abel’s strange behaviour in their absorption in the work.
XVI
The Tree-House
In a letter to his brother, Tom wrote: ‘… I am glad your measles are over. I wish you were here. We are building a tree-house in the Steps of St Paul’s.’ Peter read the letter, and then burnt it, as he must burn all Tom’s correspondence now. He went sombrely out into the Longs’ little back-garden and began to put in some half-hearted work at a construction in the apple-tree.
Mrs Long, watching from the kitchen-window, called: ‘I wish Tom were home to help you.’ She spoke uneasily. She had told herself again and again that she completely trusted Gwen and Alan with the boy; and indeed she did. Nevertheless, she sensed something unusual and mysterious in the air, and it troubled her.
The Kitsons were better off than the Longs—there is all the difference, in expense, between having two children and having none at all. Tom might have been made discontented with his home by the luxury he was experiencing away from it; but he was not—Mrs Long had to admit that. Tom’s letters to his parents contained nothing but brief, dry reports of a dull life spent almost entirely in the company of his aunt and uncle. He did not seem to find any pleasure in it—not even in the meals, now. Yet he had asked more than once to be allowed to stay on.
‘There are no other children there,’ Mrs Long pointed out to her husband that evening; ‘and Tom never seems to go anywhere very special. Does he tell you more, Peter, in his letters to you? They seem long enough.’
Peter looked at the ground. ‘I think he just likes staying in that flat.’
‘Well, he’ll get out of mooning about indoors alone, when he comes home,’ said Mr Long cheerfully. ‘Won’t he, Peter?’
‘I suppose he’ll have to come home for school, anyway,’ said Peter. ‘He missed the end of the summer term because of my measles, but he’ll have to be home when school starts again.’
‘When the autumn term starts!’ cried Mrs Long in alarm. ‘Why, we must have him home before that, Peter!’ Peter looked doubtful, so Mrs Long said: ‘You surely don’t want to spend all this summer without Tom?’
‘I suppose—’ said Peter, and waited for them to ask him what he supposed.
‘Well?’
‘I suppose that, if Tom doesn’t want to come away from Aunt Gwen’s yet, I couldn’t go there too, and stay there with him …’
Mrs Long stared at her son, almost frightened; but Mr Long laughed: ‘What on earth would two boys do in a poky flat without a garden?’
‘I’d like to be there with Tom,’ said Peter, stubbornly.
‘You surely mean,’ said his father, ‘that you’d like to be here with Tom. You want him to come home.’
‘You can’t really want to go and stay with him in that flat,’ said his mother.
‘I do then!’ said Peter. ‘I do! I lie awake at night and wish I were there; and then I fall asleep and dream that I am there. I want to go—I do! I do!’
‘But why, Peter, why?’ asked his mother. Peter only cast his eyes down and repeated in a flat, obstinate voice that he knew that he would like it.
There the conversation was left, without conclusion. That night Mrs Long crept upstairs to the room that Peter shared with Tom. The door was ajar as usual, and she looked in: Peter was still awake. By the light of the street-lamp outside she could see that his eyes were open, staring across the room at the picture-postcard from Tom, that he had propped up on the mantelpiece. Mrs Long stole away, but came again later, and again. On the third occasion, Peter was asleep. She went right into the bedroom and stood over him, looking down at him. He must have been dreaming of something, for the expression on his face changed a little, even in sleep. Once he smiled, and then sighed; and once such a far-away look came into his face that his mother bent over him in an impulse to wake him and recall him to her. She restrained herself, and left him.
On her way downstairs from the bedroom, Mrs Long passed the tiny landing-window that looked over the back-garden: she saw black projections from the apple-tree there—the timbers of Peter’s tree-house. His construction was certainly not as advanced as the one in the Steps of St Paul’s—although Mrs Long, of course, was not in a position to make that comparison. Tom’s tree-house, anyway, already had the start of Peter’s—a start by as long as it takes for a letter to be written, delivered, read and then burnt.
‘Hatty works very hard at the tree-house,’ Tom had written to Peter. ‘She likes the idea of it.’ There he understated her feelings: Hatty was deeply excited about the tree-house, to a degree that quite surprised Tom. For one thing, she thought of it as her house in a way the big house was not: that was her aunt’s house, and her cousins’, and she was there only on sufferance. This tree-house, however, could be her own house and home, and she talked wildly of furnishing it with her doll’s tea-set and e
ven with objects filched from the spare bedrooms of the big house. Tom, in alarm, had to reason her into some sense.
Then, again, Hatty loved the tree-house because it was the best of all her hiding-places in the garden. ‘Nobody would ever suspect it was here,’ she said, ‘unless they had seen it being built. None of the cousins know.’
‘Has Abel seen it?’ asked Tom.
‘He’s never seen me carrying stuff or climbing up or even coming in this direction. I’ve been very careful to keep out of his sight.’
‘I haven’t bothered about that,’ said Tom; ‘but, of course, he’s never seen me, anyway.’
‘Of course not,’ agreed Hatty; and then they changed the subject hurriedly, for their quarrel about ghosts and which of them was one was still fresh in their minds.
However, as it turned out, Abel certainly must have known about the tree-house.
That afternoon he was working in the garden, netting the strawberry beds: Hatty and Tom knew that, because they always liked to locate Abel and anybody else in the garden, before they went up into their tree-house. This time they made sure that only Abel was about, and that he was some way away. Then they climbed up.
By now, the house was finished, but Hatty still had ambitions. ‘If it’s to be anything like a real house,’ she said, ‘it should have windows—not just accidental gaps in the walls.’ The windows must be oblong in shape, Hatty said, like those of the big house.
‘You’re expecting too much,’ Tom grumbled; and in the end Hatty herself had to make the windows—such as they were. There were two of them.
They were still more like ragged holes than windows. Hatty worked patiently from the inside and then from the outside, plaiting twigs along the window-edges, trying to make them straight and firm.
Tom was not helping. He hoped that Hatty would tire of the idea of house-windows and a house—although that did not seem likely at present. Then he would suggest a more interesting possibility: that the windows, after all, were portholes, and that this was the captain’s cabin on a ship at sea.
Hatty never finished her windows. She was humming as she moved from one bough to another outside the wall of the tree-house; then she stopped to call to Tom: ‘Tom, there’s a cracked bough this side—is it all right? Have you ever sat on it?’
‘A cracked bough?’ said Tom. ‘Oh, yes, I’ve been out on that one.’ Hatty’s humming was resumed, jerkily, as she began to move again. ‘Only,’ Tom began to add, ‘I daresay I’m different: I wouldn’t advise you—’
He did not see it happen, but the cracked bough must have begun to break at once, even at the first pressure of Hatty’s slight weight. He heard the cracking, tearing sound; he heard Hatty’s little ‘Oh!’ of surprise that lasted only a part of a second before it became a scream, as she felt herself falling.
Hatty’s cry was a thin, high one that pierced through all the garden. Birds rose and scattered at the sound; a red squirrel that was running along the nut stub tops froze to a branch; and Abel—Abel flung down his armful of strawberry net and began running in the direction of the Steps of St Paul’s.
Tom had jumped the whole height of the tree and had landed—more weightless than a cat—beside Hatty. She lay on the ground, dumb now, and still: her body was curved round, and—in falling—her pinafore had been flung up so that now it partly covered her face. Where the fabric touched her forehead, there was a bloodstain that crept along the fibres.
Tom was still standing helplessly beside her, when Abel thudded up. Abel saw the blood and groaned aloud; he picked Hatty up in his arms and began to carry her towards the house. Tom went with them.
Then Abel stopped suddenly. He half-turned round, so that he faced the spot where Tom was. Through all the numbness of his horror at what had happened, Tom realized that Abel was looking at him, not through him; and now he was beginning to speak to him. ‘Get you gone!’ said Abel, hoarsely.
Tom stared back at him; neither of them budged.
‘Get you back to Hell, where you come from! I know you. I’ve seen you always, and thought best not to see you; and heard you and thought best to seem deaf; but I’ve known you, and known you for what you are!’
Tom ignored all, except that Abel could hear him and therefore could answer him. ‘Oh!’ he cried, ‘do you know—is Hatty alive, or is she dead?’
‘Aye,’ said Abel, ‘you’ve tried to kill her often enough—her that had neither mother nor father nor home here—nothing but her innocence, against your devilry with bow and arrows and knives and high places. Now, I say, get you gone!’
Tom did not go; but Abel, still carrying Hatty, began to back away, across the lawn and towards the house. As he went, he repeated in a loud voice that prayer which Tom had thought to be only a grace after meat: ‘ … May the Lord keep me from all the works of the Devil, that he hurt me not.’ Abel’s voice shook; and he stumbled with his burden as he felt his way ever backwards, with his eyes fixed upon Tom, up the garden doorstep, and through the garden door. The garden door was slammed, and Tom heard the sound of the bolt going home.
Then Tom woke from amazement. He ran forward to the door and flung himself upon it, wildly beating his fist on the wood, and calling first upon Abel to let him in, and then upon Hatty. The door remained shut; his crying and knocking brought no one. Of those that might have heard him and let him in, it seemed that one would not, and the other could not.
XVII
In Search of Hatty
At the end of his first frenzy of battery upon the outside of the garden door, Tom leaned against it, sobbing for breath. From inside he heard the grandfather clock coolly striking the hour, and a distant upstairs noise of voices and hurried feet.
He could not open the door, and, he now realized, he had exhausted the strength of body and will that might have carried him through it. He was shut out from Hatty; and he was also shut out from his own bed in the Kitsons’ flat. But the fear for Hatty remained greater than the fear for himself.
Tom withdrew across the lawn into one of the yew-alcoves. All he could do was wait.
It seemed a long time before the garden door opened and Abel walked out. Tom went across to him at once, and addressed him: ‘Abel, please, how is Hatty?’
Tom thought that he had prepared himself for anything from Abel: if Abel believed him to be a demon from Hell, disguised as a boy and intent upon bringing misfortune to Hatty—if he believed that, then he would hate Tom and rail against him, cursing him and banning him with exorcism of prayers and the Bible. The one thing that Tom had not been prepared for was that Abel should go back to his safeguard of refusing to see or hear Tom at all.
‘Abel—Abel—Abel,’ Tom begged, ‘she’s not dead, is she? She’s not dead?’ At last he saw Abel’s eyelids flicker, and that for a moment he allowed himself to see Tom. Tom’s face had the dirt of tree-climbing upon it, and two clean tracks through the dirt, from eyes to chin, where tears of exhaustion and terror had made their way. Altogether, there was about Tom something so like a boy and so unlike a demon that Abel was trapped, for the last time, into speaking directly to him.
‘No,’ said Abel, ‘she’s alive’; and he fixed his eyes straight ahead again, took a deep breath, and walked deliberately through the side of Tom’s body and on towards the potting-shed.
Abel had left the garden door open behind him—as it always stood in these days of summer. Tom’s thought was at once to go into the house again, though whether to get himself to bed or to find out more about Hatty, he did not think out.
The matter was settled for him. This time, the furniture did not dissolve in front of him as he advanced up the hall: the stuffed creatures held their ground, and stared at him firmly with their glass eyes through the glass sides of their cases; he had time to notice the mercury in the barometer and to see that it reached to Very Dry. He saw everything, clear and solid, as he passed it. He came to the grandfather clock; he saw that its fingers were pointing to eleven minutes to five, and saw again the design be
hind the fingers. Even in his anxiety for Hatty, his attention was arrested by it: there was nothing new to be seen, and yet he seemed to be seeing everything freshly. He still did not know who or what was the angel creature painted there, striding on sea and land, with open book; but he felt that he almost knew the meaning; one day, soon, he might know.
Now he turned from the grandfather clock and towards the staircase: he saw it carpeted. Each carpet-tread was held in place by a shining brass rod, and, tread by tread, the carpet mounted softly and steadily upstairs.
Tom took a step towards the staircase and then halted, wondering at what he was about to do. Behind him he was leaving that garden-kingdom of Hatty’s where he and Hatty and Abel were the only three inhabitants—and Abel had even denied that there were more than two. He was leaving that and going forward into the Melbournes’ house: already the Melbournes and their lives seemed to be pressing round upon him. At the foot of the stairs, to the right, was a row of pegs from which hung Melbourne hats and caps and coats and capes. Next to these was a boot cupboard: Tom knew it was a boot cupboard because the door was ajar and he could see the shelves inside, and, standing upon them, all the Melbourne boots and shoes and slippers and pumps and gaiters and waders and spats. Opposite the coat-pegs, on Tom’s left, was another of the brackets, and on it had been left two marbly-backed ledgers and a little safety inkwell and an old-fashioned round ruler of ebony: which Melbourne did they belong to? There was a door next to the bracket—the door through which Susan had once come with her kindling wood and matches; now, from the other side of it, Tom heard a murmur of women’s voices. He couldn’t hear what they were saying; he couldn’t hear who they were, although he imagined that one voice sounded like Susan’s.