Эдвард Бенсон
David Blaize

“Oh-oh,” he said rapturously. “And what’s the name of it? Go on, though.”

Frank thought a moment.

“Can’t remember the next verse,” he said. “But it’s ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’ ”

“Oh, she’s the chap that went out hunting with her maidens,” said David confidently.

“She is. Look out, there’s a jelly-fish. All right, it’s floating by. I say, the water’s as warm as – as – I don’t know.”

“I think you’re babbling,” said David. “Go on about Atalanta. Did she have good sport?”

Maddox laughed, forgetting that he was balanced in a briny sea, and swallowed a large quantity of it.

“What’s the row?” asked David. “What did I say?”

Maddox ejected as much of the water as was accessible.

“Oh, you are such a kid,” he said, “and I keep forgetting it.”

David kicked himself into a perpendicular position and trod water.

“Well, I’m getting older as quick as I can,” he said in self-defence. “Blast! I wish it could go on for ever.”

“What?”

“As if you didn’t know! Being in the sea, and being with you, and being alive, and so on.”

“Same here,” said Frank. “Lord, but I wish I could be the sea as well.”

“Rather jam. But I don’t think I’d allow everybody to bathe in me,” said David. “Dogs, yes, and some people, not all. Or should we charge a shilling, and let anybody?”

Maddox pushed himself upright in the water.

“’Fraid we ought to come out,” he said. “It must be latish. I’ll race you to shore.”

“Right oh. Give me twenty yards start.”

“Measure them very carefully,” said Frank.

“Well, twenty strokes then,” said the wily David, shoving from Frank’s shoulder to get a movement on, and then, taking very long, slow strokes, letting his impetus exhaust itself.

“Now,” he said.

Both boys swam with the overhand side-stroke, breathing whenever their heads happened to be above water, and ploughed landwards with waves of bubble and broken water behind them. Frank overtook the other in the last thrilling ten yards, won by the length of an arm and a head, and panting, but still cool, they lay for a little in the shallow water, and then reluctantly went up over the beach to where their clothes lay. There the hot sun soon rendered superfluous the towels Frank had been at pains to fetch, and presently after they laboured up the sandy path to the house, slack and hungry and content, with the half of the wonderful day still in front of them. Once on the upward ascent David paused, his mind going back to the magic of words.

“O-o-oh,” he said again rapturously. “ ‘Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’ I shall read some more of that after lunch.”

Lunch took a considerable time, for David’s appetite, like his bones and muscles, seemed but to grow larger with the food he ate, and it was not till he had taken Frank’s evil advice and drunk a second bottle of ginger-beer that he declared himself able to turn his attention to literature again. They were going to play golf once more in half an hour, and David staggered out on to the lawn to lie on the shady terrace-bank for a short spell of Swinburne, which Frank went to fetch from his bedroom. Letters had arrived during lunch, and he found one for himself and one for David, which with Swinburne and the daily paper that would contain one important matter, namely, the result of the county match between Sussex and Surrey, he took out with him.

“There’s a letter for you,” he said, “and there’s Swinburne and the Daily Telegraph. What order of merit?”

“Oh, Telegraph first,” said David. “I bet you that Surrey – oh, this letter’s from Margery. Might just see what’s going on. I say, I know exactly how a balloon feels. But it was jolly good ginger-beer.”

Frank flopped down on the bank by him, and began opening his letter.

“What else do you expect,” he said, “if you inflate yourself with gas, as you did at lunch?”

“Don’t expect anything else,” said David thickly. “And it was you who suggested it. I think I must see what happened in the match first.”

“Well, let’s have a look too, you selfish devil,” said Maddox, putting down his half-opened letter. “Can’t you turn over, and put the paper on the grass here, so that we can read it together?”

“Lord, no,” said David. “At least it’d be a risk. But I can sit up if I do it slowly.”

Sussex, which had the good fortune to be David’s county, and for which he felt rather responsible, had done him credit on this occasion, and had won by half a dozen wickets. The rest of the paper did not seem to contain anything that mattered, and, throwing it aside, he and Frank began on their letters. Margery’s was quite short, though good of its kind, and, having finished it, David looked up, and saw that Frank was reading his, and that there was trouble in his face.

“Oh, I say, is anything wrong?” he asked.

Frank did not reply at once.

“I’ve heard from Adams,” he said at length. “There’s been a row. Some letter has been found, and Hughes isn’t to be allowed to come back in September.”

“Why? What sort of letter?” asked David.

Then, as Frank was still silent:

“Oh, something beastly, is it?” he asked. “What an ass Hughes is! He was such a nice chap, too, at my other school.”

Frank had finished reading, and was looking out over the Surrey garden, biting his lip.

“I say, Frank, what’s wrong with you?” said David.

Frank gave Adams’s letter to him.

“Read it,” he said.

David took it. It spoke of the letter written by Hughes to a boy in the house, a letter disgusting and conclusive… Then it spoke of the disgrace Hughes had brought on himself, and the misery he had brought on his father and mother. He read it and gave it back to Frank.

“Well, I’m awfully sorry, just as you are,” he said; “but if fellows will be brutes – Old Adams seems no end cut up about it. But somehow, I’d ceased to be pals with Hughes. Where’s the Swinburne?”

But still Frank did not answer, and David knitted puzzled brows.

“What’s up?” he said.

Maddox turned over on to his back, and tilted his hat over his eyes till his face was invisible.

“I might have been Hughes,” he said.

Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came into his mind.

“Oh, rot,” he said lamely, hating the subject.

Maddox was silent a moment.

“’Tisn’t quite rot,” he said. “But then there came a thing, which I dare say you’ve forgotten, only I haven’t. You came in from playing squash one wet afternoon, and you and your innocence made me suddenly see what a beast I was.”

David could not help giving a little shudder, but the moment after he was ashamed of it.

“I don’t care what you were like before,” he said. “But what I’m perfectly sure of is that since then – I remember it very well – you’ve been all right.”

“Yes.”

“There you are, then!” said David.

Frank was still lying with his hat over his face, but now he pushed it back and looked at David.

“It’s all serene for you,” he said, “because you’ve always been a straight chap. But it’s different for me. I feel just rotten.”

David scratched his head in some perplexity. The whole matter was vague and repugnant to him, and he did not want to hear more or know more. There were such heaps of jolly proper things in the world to be interested in and curious about. But he understood without any vagueness at all and with the very opposite of repulsion, that his friend was in trouble, and that he wanted sympathy with that. So the whole of his devoted little heart went out there. It was bad trouble, too, the worst trouble a fellow could have.

“It must be perfectly beastly for you,” he said, “and I’m as sorry as I can be. But you’re sorry yourself, and what more can a chap do? If you weren’t sorry it would be different. There’s another thing too, to set against what you’ve done, and that’s how you’ve behaved to me. You’ve been an absolute brick to me. You’ve kept that sort of filth away from me: I know you have.”

David paused for a moment. This morning alone on the hot beach his mind had dwelt long and eagerly on this wonderful friendship, and now, just when it was the very thing that was wanted to comfort Frank, this aspect of it struck him. He remembered how often Frank had, by a seemingly chance word, discouraged him from seeing much of certain fellows in the house; he remembered the night when Hughes came and sat on his bed, and with what extraordinary promptitude Frank had ejected him; he remembered how his dormitory had been changed, and he had been put in Frank’s, and had since then slept in the bed next him. All this with swift certainty started into his mind, and with it the policy that lay behind it. Frank had consistently kept nasty things away from him; here was his atonement.

So he went on eagerly.

“I know what you’ve done for me,” he said. “You’ve always – since then – had an eye on me, and kept filth away. I’m no end grateful. And since you’ve done that, chalk it up on the other side. You’ve made it easier for me to be decent. Oh, damn, I’m jawing.”

David suddenly became aware of this, and stopped abruptly, rolling over on to his side, with his face to his friend.

“Haven’t you been doing that on purpose?” he demanded. “I could give you heaps of instances.”

“Well, yes.”

“Then let’s chuck the whole subject,” said David.

“In a moment, I just want to tell you: I tried, instead of corrupting you, to uncorrupt myself. But you did it; it was all your doing. You made me ashamed.”

David gave a shy little wriggle towards him.

“I never heard of anything so ripping,” he said. “Though it sounds rather cheek.”

Maddox sat up.

“That’s what you’ve done,” he said. “And if it was cheeky, the other name of that is salvation.”

There was silence a moment, and probably David had never known such intense happiness as he tasted then. And, just because he was feeling so deeply, the idea of anything approaching sentiment was impossible. It had been said, and the harvest was garnered.

Frank felt that, too; they could not feel differently from each other just then, and away went the whole subject, a mountain a few minutes ago, and now light as thistledown on a summer wind.

“It’s done,” he said. “Oh, what was the other thing we brought out? ‘Atalanta in Calydon,’ wasn’t it? First chorus.”

“Yes, that would be ripping,” said David. “At the same time it’s just struck three, and we were to play golf at three.”

“Jove, so we were! How you must have jawed!”

For one second David was not quite certain whether Frank was trying to get a rise out of him or not, with such naturalness did he speak.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m afraid I did.”

Frank laughed.

“David, it’s no sport trying to get a rise out of you,” he said. “You simply rise at anything. I really didn’t think you’d rise at that.”

“Oh, all right,” said David; “then it was a nice surprise for you. Come on. If you’ll give me a stroke hole, I’ll – I’ll probably get beaten,” he added, in a sudden accession of modesty most unusual. “I say, what a ripping day it’s being.”

“’Tain’t bad. And you’re not such a bad little devil.”

This bordered on past conversation again, and he hastened away from it.

“Go and get our clubs, David,” he said. “I lost the toss about the towels this morning.”

“That’s not fair,” said David. “We tossed this morning, and that’s finished. We’ll toss again. Heads!”

“Well, then, it isn’t. It’s tails. But I’ll go if you like!”

It was still very hot, and the links, although the usual August crowd was at Naseby, were nearly deserted, since it seemed to most of the world to be the better part of wisdom to sit quiet till the heat had a little abated, and resume activities again after tea. The two boys, therefore, had an empty green before them, and since finance in both their cases happened to be precarious, and there was no need to keep their places on the green, they took no caddies. On the right along the first hole lay the sea, shimmering and still, so near that it was easily possible (to say the least of it) to slice a ball on to the beach, and in front lay the fairway of the course, stretches of velvet grass, interrupted by tossing seas of sand-dunes, fringed and bearded with coarse bents, while a flag planted thereon showed where lay the direction of the desired haven. Then came trudges through sandy places, with breathless suspense to see whether the balls had carried the last of the bunkers and in other cases the equally vivid conviction that they had done nothing of the sort, and would be found nestling in little, steep, bare hollows and be-devilled hiding-places. David, in especial, found himself frequently in amazing and awful places, of which Satan had certainly been the architect.

But, in spite of the intimate nature of all that had passed between the two so few minutes before, their unbroken solitude together did not produce in either of them the least wish to re-open the subject. It had been closed; a door had been triumphantly slammed on it, so that even if golf had not been so absorbing, they would neither of them have mentioned it again. And yet, deep down in each, and unknown to them, all that had passed had taken root, and was silently germinating, making fibre in their unconscious minds, building up the stem on which character bursts into blossom. Many words were consciously spoken, and many thoughts thought, and all the words and all the thoughts did not stray beyond the fortunes of the little white india-rubber balls.

At Marchester golf was a recognised school game, played on their own links, for the two winter halves, when it did not interfere with cricket, and Frank – it was just like him, so thought David – had become a fine player with really no trouble at all. He had only played for two years, but at school he was a scratch player, and here at Naseby had just won a medal prize, starting from four. He confessed that it had come easy to him (everything seemed to), and to David’s observant eye he did not seem to do anything particular that caused him not to top one drive, and send the next spouting in the air like a geyser. When it came to approaching, it was with the same supple ease that he flicked the ball high with a little fid of turf flying after it. It all appeared so perfectly simple: you merely hit the ball with the middle of the club. At times, if you were playing against him, the thing became almost monotonous.

Whatever could be said about David’s play, it could not be called monotonous. He gave an excellent example of his methods this afternoon at the third hole, slicing far and gorgeously from the tee out on to the sand. There had been no interest in Frank’s drive; it had merely gone straight, and a very long way, and so he came with David to walk up his ball, which was found to be lying fairly well.

“Silly ass,” he said to him as David took out an iron and prepared to play with it. “Take your niblick and make certain of getting back on to grass.”

“But I could get on to the green with an iron, if I hit it,” said David excitedly, “and then I should be there in two, and you can’t get them in less than two, and I’ve got a stroke and should win the hole off you, if I putted my first near it.”

“Right oh,” said Frank. “Never mind the ‘ifs.’ ”

“Not an atom!” said David.

The ball was not lying so very badly, and there was really a certain excuse for David. So he took his iron and hit the ball rather firmly on the head. It went about fifteen yards in an injured manner, and settled itself in the moat of what had been a child’s sand-castle.

“And it’ll take the deuce of a putt to get near the hole from there,” remarked Frank.

David, as always, took his game very seriously, and for a moment felt merely wild with rage, impotent, ineffective rage. Nobody cared.

“Hell – ” he began.

Then his admirable temper asserted itself before he settled what hell was going to do.

“Oh dear, you’re always right, Frank,” he said. “Niblick it is, and I wish it had been before. Now I’m going to take trouble.”

He shifted with his feet in the loose sand, as Frank had told him to do, till he got a firm stance. Then (which Frank had never told him to do) he took the most prodigious wipe at his ball and shut his eyes as the sand fell in showers round him.

“Didn’t see it!” he said. “What happened?”

Somehow or other he had hit the ball clean and hard and perfectly straight for the green. It wasn’t a niblick shot at all; nobody, David least of all, knew how it had happened.

“Well, of all the almighty flukes,” said Frank. “Probably on the green.”

David bubbled with laughter.

“Oh, I say, what sport!” he said. “Now I know how to play golf. If you lie rather badly, take an iron and make it worse. Then take a niblick and hit it home.”

They went back to the course to walk up Frank’s ball. It was lying impeccably twenty yards short of the shored-up bunker that guarded the green. And for once he was not monotonous; he chipped at it with a lot of back-spin, and it bounced against the boards of the bunker and fell at their feet. Thereafter he played racquets against the boards. Then he gave it up, and David, the reckless and unreasonable, was lying just a foot beyond the bunkers.

In such wise the hot, heavenly afternoon went by. Dreadful and delightful things happened. Frank, after long consideration as to whether he could get over the brook with a drive at the tenth hole, decided to play short with a cleek, and pitched full into it. David, with two strokes in hand, putted four times at the eleventh before he got down, and, both of them trying to carry the far bunker at the thirteenth, topped into the near one instead. But there were delightful incidents to balance these distressing ones: Frank holed a mashie shot at the sixteenth, and at the next David ran through two (not one) bunkers off a topped drive, and a third with his second shot. But, deep down below, the basis of their enjoyment was their friendship, and neither thought how easily that priceless possession might have foundered and been lost in quagmires..

Frank won: a wholly loathsome putt on the last green, which went into the hole not by the honest front-door, nor even with a kick at the honest back door, but with a stealthy, sideway entrance, after circling round the hole, decided the match.

“Oh, good putt,” said David politely, and instantly the politeness broke down. “Gosh, what a fluke!” he added.

“Rot! I tried to hole it, and did,” said Frank.

“Well, I said ‘good putt’ once,” said David. “And I can’t say it again. Simply can’t.”

After tea at the club-house, it seemed a necessity to play again, and this time, regardless of financial stringency, Frank treated David to a caddy, and they went forth with pomp, now playing seawards into the hazy east, now westwards into the blaze of the declining sun, absorbed in their game and yet absorbed in their friendship of boy-love, hot as fire and clean as the trickle of ice-water on a glacier. The knowledge of their talk had made Frank able to turn himself away from all the bad business of Adams’s letter, and instead of brooding on the irremediable worst of himself, he took hold of all that was best. And by his side was David, the friend of friends, now with his arm linked in his, now excitedly addressing a cupped ball with his largest driver, now brilliantly slicing among untrodden sand-hills, now dancing with exultation at the success of a shot that was wholly beyond expectation, now half whispering to him, “Oh, it’s the rippingest day.”

Then followed lawn-tennis, till it was so dark that the ball could hardly be seen at all, and in consequence David, standing at the net, got hit full on the end of his nose, which bled with extraordinary profusion. Indeed, had murder been committed that night at Naseby, as Frank said, when they went down for a hurried dip before dressing for dinner, it would have required no Sherlock Holmes to draw the certain but quite erroneous conclusion that the deed had been done in David’s bedroom, and the body carried down to the beach afterwards with the idea of its being taken away and out by the ebbing tide and the seaward current. A slop-pail with blood-stained water (analysed by Professor Pepper and found to be Mammalian) would be discovered in his bedroom, and at intervals down the path to the beach, further traces of the same incriminating gore.

The cool sea-water put an end to David’s bleeding, and as he dressed he began to feel delightfully uncomfortable (as in the attics of Baxminster) so grimly and gravely did Frank reconstruct the history of the crime with fearful imaginative details thrown in. A little way from them on the beach was something vague and black and humped up, and Frank suddenly pointed at it.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked David in a whisper.

“That black thing? No. What?”

“It’s the body,” said Frank.

Of course this was all nonsense, but David peered at it through the gloom, and Frank suddenly gave a deep and hollow groan, which startled him quite awfully.

“It wasn’t utterly dead,” he explained. “It tried to call for help, but it couldn’t call loud, as its throat was cut from ear to ear. But it just groaned. The body was that of a boy of fifteen, tall for his age, David, and well nourished.”

David could not help it; he had to run in his bare feet to where the supposed corpse lay, kicked it, and came back.

“Only seaweed,” he said. “Now the murderer did it in my room, you say, I mean he cut the well-nourished boy’s throat there, and then carried it down to the beach. That won’t do. There are only quite a few drops of blood on the way down. If its throat had been cut from ear to ear, there’d be more blood.”

“Not at all,” said Frank. “The murderer held the two edges of the wound together – no, he’d want both hands to carry the body – he pinned the edges of the wound together with – with safety pins, so that it only just leaked. He carried it down to the beach like that, and then took out the pins, because he had a saving disposition, and this let the boy bleed to death. As I said, he thought the tide would carry it away, but it didn’t, and it was found there next morning. Lobsters had got at it though, and howked pieces out of it. There’s lobster for dinner to-night. Then the police traced the bloodstains to your bedroom, and found the slop-pail, and you were kept in prison till you were sixteen, and then hung at Norwich.”

“And what did he – I – I don’t know which I am, the corpse or the murderer – ”

“You’re both,” said Frank. “The pins? They were put back in the pin-cushion on your dressing-table, where I saw them just now. There were stains on them that looked like rust. But they weren’t rust, they were – ”

“They were blood,” said David. “Mammalian.”

Frank looked hastily round for more material for horror, and saw a fisherman coming down the steep path just behind them carrying two lobster-pots. This was luck, for David had not seen him, being employed in putting his shoes on. Frank went on without pause.

“After that the beach at Naseby,” he said, “was not a place where prudent people cared to be after sunset, especially during the month of August, and particularly on – on August the tenth, which was the exact day when the murder was committed. Prudent people avoided it, for there was no doubt it was haunted. A figure was often seen coming down that steep path just behind us, carrying a ghastly burden.”

David looked quickly round with the intention of reassuring himself that there was no one there. That was a dreadful mistake. There was. Frank, after his one glance at the figure, had not looked at the path again.

“Good Lord,” said David in a whisper. “There’s something coming down it now. It’s coming straight towards us!”

Then he saw more distinctly, and gave a great cackle of laughter.

“Oh-oh-oh, it’s only a fisherman with lobster-pots,” he said. “But you did give me such a turn. You said that awfully well. When I looked round and saw that old buffer coming down I could have screamed. I say, do lobsters really eat deaders?”

“Whenever they can get them. There are a good many about now, too. The cook told me that the one we’re going to have for dinner to-night had a man’s finger in its claws when they brought it up to the house. The best ones – ”

“Oh, dry up,” shouted David. “You’ve a foul mind.”

Frank laughed.

“Oh, you kid!”

Nor was the immortal day over yet. The man-eating lobster was in turn eaten by man, and after dinner Frank read to his mother and David the neglected “Atalanta,” after which they played ridiculous games till bedtime. Frank’s room and David’s communicated with each other, and, as they undressed, further details and embellishments of horror were added to the murder story, through the open door. But to one of Frank’s most gruesome inventions there had been no response, and, looking in, he saw that David was kneeling by his bed. And at that he went back to his room again.

The silence was not of long duration, and in a moment David called to him.

“What was that last, Frank?” he said. “It sounded jolly beastly, but I wasn’t attending.”

Frank repeated it, and David squealed as he drew his bed-clothes up to his chin.

“I think that’s enough,” he said. “I shall have gory nightmares. Oh, hasn’t it been a jolly day?”

“Ripping. Good night, David.”

“Good night. What a pity it can’t be this morning again.”

Frank lay long awake that night. Before he slept he slid out of bed and followed David’s example.