The Dancing Druids

Chapter One

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‘The young man set out with this letter, but missed his way, and came in the evening to a dark wood.’

The Brothers Grimm (The Giant with the Three Golden Hairs)

A handsome young man in dirty white running-vest and shorts paused for a moment at the crossroads of a little market town in the south-west of England and then trotted on past the obelisk which commemorated the end of the Boer War. He turned down a narrow street and encountered a child of eight or nine years of age.

‘Soppy runner!’ said the child. The young man checked, smiled, glanced behind him, and then nodded as he thrust the damp hair from his brow and looked down at his bramble-scratched shins.

‘I believe you,’ he cordially responded. He then ran on again, heading south for the sea, and, immediately he had disappeared, round a bend came a straggle of eight or ten other young men who seemed in pursuit of the first.

With an instinct to support, as he thought, the weaker side, the child pointed to an alley which ran eastward, under a Tudor arch, and cried excitedly (for he was unused to telling lies, and found the experience exhilarating):

‘That way! He run that way! I seen him go by!’

With one exception, the pursuers swung off to the left and vanished beneath the archway. The last of the group, however, ran blindly on, a long, thin, black-haired youth with a long, thin, freckled face, deep-set, intelligent eyes and a Spartan, kingly jowl.

He was, in point of fact, descended from kings, and occasionally, although not often (for most of the kingliness had been educated out of him) he reacted to the call of his blood. He settled down very easily, however, after one of these infrequent, atavistic outbreaks, to the easy mediocrity of democratic behaviour, and was behaving democratically now, for it was not a desire for princely solitude which had caused him to run in the right direction while all his companions took the wrong one. It was that he had a fair knowledge of the countryside and also of the psychology of the hare, who happened to be his cousin, and this knowledge he was prepared to place at the disposal of his team of hounds.

In the direction towards which he was heading there was an ancient hill-fort. From the top of it he proposed to survey the countryside, locate the hare, and, unless they were too far off, give the view halloo to the hounds.

This altruistic scheme was doomed to disappointment. Encouraged by what they regarded as a heaven-sent bit of information, the hounds streamed away to the east, and found themselves involved in a kind of suburb of the town from which nothing was visible but houses, more alleys, some mean factories and a tributary of the river. Undismayed, they ran on, until good luck brought them on to a major road which, acting on the directions of a signpost, they followed in what was roughly the right direction—that is, in the direction taken by their quarry; in other words, to the resort called Welsea Beaches.

Meanwhile the solitary hound, whose name was O’Hara, ran on until he came out past the cattle market and the station, and on to a road which forked south-east on one prong and south-west on the other, past what had been, in early history, a third-century Roman amphitheatre. The high, grassy banks of this ancient monument would afford, he thought, a preliminary view of the road which his cousin might have taken, so he turned aside through an iron gate and ran on to the stiff green grass. In three leaps which did credit to the iron muscles of his thin, long legs, he was up on the mound which surrounded the open space of the amphitheatre, and was looking about him.

Men were scything the grass below him, and he paused to consider their work. Before the Romans came, the amphitheatre had been a place of assembly of a different kind, a place of worship, a Neolithic or early Bronze Age meeting-place, a place of sanctuary, sacrifice (or coronation, maybe), mysterious, holy, horrible, and something of its departed glory clung about it as bright and soluble clouds will cling round the afternoon sun.

O’Hara lifted his eyes from the three men with their scythes, and, walking along the top of the mound, he looked ahead of him to where the road forked west and south and the railway kept a course as straight as a yard-stick towards the sea. He could see no sign of the hare.

‘Gone to ground; foxing us, perhaps,’ thought O’Hara; for it was what he himself would have done in his cousin’s place. ‘He’s going to throw us off his track and then run round us. But I’ll spot him all right from the fort.’

He descended the bank where the old Roman gateway had been, ran out from the enclosure through the modern iron swing-gate, and then took the road to his right, away from the railway. He crossed a hump-backed bridge, and for a quarter of a mile he followed the main road. After that he swung further to the right, and trotted along a narrow, sandy lane. At the main-road end of it were houses, but further on, past these, the road narrowed into a track, which, appearing to lead to a bell-barrow, turned southwards in a half-mile semicircle, and led, instead, to the hill-fort, grim and gloomy, and shadowed by heavy cloud, which he had chosen as the real objective from which to survey his route and spot the hare.

The track became a footpath ascending the hill. Soon it was very steep. O’Hara could do no more than drop into a walk as the slope of the hill grew shorter, for the gradient sharpened abruptly into something resembling a cliff-face, or a test hill in the Tourist Trophy race.

He saw a shepherd with his flock and dog on the western shoulder of the hill, but when these had gone, the hillside was deserted and desolate, and the young man, pausing a moment to look about him, instinctively shrugged from his shoulders the weight of its lonely vastness. Around him he saw nothing but the sky and the towering hill-top, and, between the two and defying them, the scowling mounds and ditches of primitive man’s defence against his enemies.

O’Hara climbed the fifty-foot banking and walked along the outer walls of the fort. From the top of these Cyclopean battlements he looked abroad over miles of rolling country. Below him was a bell-barrow, to his right the deep, dark ditches of the inner defences. Ahead of him, miles away, he could see the surrounding hills, and, between and among them, the little winding roads, like strings of dirty tape, along one of which he thought his Cousin Gascoigne must be running. But although he gazed long and carefully, he could still see no sign of his cousin, and, glancing once more towards the inner earthworks of the castle, it occurred to him how strange it was that, on a fair afternoon, the fort should remain so gloomy. So unpleasantly persistent did this thought become (as did the one which followed it of how lonely the situation was) that he was obliged, in self-defence, to project his mind very strongly on to the object of his search, the valiant hare, who seemed to have disappeared (another uncomfortable thought from which he soon recoiled) without leaving a clue to guide the pursuers.

‘Hang it!’ thought O’Hara, forcing himself to return to the circumstances of logic. ‘He must have cut off towards the golf course and gone to Horston! Why didn’t I think of that before! I shouldn’t spot him from here!’

He had a last look for the hounds, and picked them out away to the east. Only a hawk-eyed person would have seen them at all, and only one who knew what to look for would have recognized them for what they were, for they were almost blurred by distance into forming part of the landscape. The sight of them put an end to his morbid fancies, and, not too well satisfied (for, although he had now worked out another route which the solitary hare might have taken, he had no proof that Gascoigne was really, after all, on the Horston road), O’Hara turned in his tracks, reached the ancient entrance to the fort between monumental bastions of earth (now well grassed on top of the chalk), and descended to a stony little path which circumscribed the hill-fort instead of mounting it. He struck off to the south, then bore eastward. Suddenly he obtained a glimpse of a runner in white making for a gap in the hills, and not more than three hundred yards ahead.

‘Wonder what’s happened?’ thought O’Hara. ‘Gerry ought to be further on than that! However, it looks as though I’ve got him!’

The track, having dropped from the hundred-foot contour to something nearer sea-level, degenerated into a ditch. O’Hara, running too confidently, turned his ankle on loose pebbles, but still limped on until he reached a secondary road, which broke out of the ditch and went alongside a small, shallow brook.

His ankle hurt sharply at first, but gradually settled to a dull pain which, without being unbearable, considerably slowed him up. In spite of this, he still had hopes of catching up with the hare.

‘He’ll go wrong after Horston,’ he thought. ‘He’ll take the wrong way across the golf course. I’ll get up to him, or, anyway, head him off, somewhere this side of Little Welsea. It’ll be a close call, but I know it round there and he doesn’t.’

The road beneath his feet grew firmer, the pain in his ankle slightly less. He would have liked to sit down on the grassy verge and rub his foot, but he did not want to lose time, and he felt, too, that so long as he kept on the move, the ankle would stand no chance of stiffening.

His pace was not more than a jog-trot, and he was limping along until he could see where the sandy road terminated, when he met a man in a car. The road they were in was so narrow that the car pulled up and O’Hara dropped into a walk. The man in the car leaned out. He was a middle-aged, shrewd-eyed fellow with a brisk voice.

‘Like a lift?’ he asked. ‘I see you’re limping a bit.’

‘It’s nothing,’ O’Hara replied. ‘Thanks, all the same, but I think I can manage all right. There’s plenty of grass alongside the main road ahead. Perhaps I’ll be better on that.’

‘I see,’ said the man. ‘What is it—a cross-country run?’

‘More or less. Hare and hounds. We don’t use scent, that’s all.’

‘Is the hare a tall fellow with fair hair?’

‘Yes,’ said O’Hara, beginning to feel impatient, and prevented by his native courtesy from showing it.

‘Take the footpath immediately opposite when you get on to the main road, then. That’s the way he took. I saw him turn off. I’m afraid you won’t catch him, all the same. He was going very strongly when I passed him.’

‘I thought he’d make for the golf course,’ said O’Hara, who could not see why his cousin should have taken the way the man said.

‘I don’t know, I’m sure, about that, but this fellow was taking the footpath I’m telling you of. I stopped to see him go by, and waited about a quarter of an hour to see whether there were any more behind him, but no more turned up, so on I came. You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’

‘Better late than never,’ said O’Hara.

The man eyed him doubtfully.

‘Very late, aren’t you?’ he said, in a curiously impressive tone of voice.

‘I don’t think so,’ O’Hara replied. ‘But I’d better get on if I’m to catch him. Thanks very much for the tip!’

He broke into a lumbering trot, annoyed to find that his ankle had stiffened after all. When he reached the main road and glanced back he could still see the car. The man was standing in the road gazing after him, interested, no doubt, to see whether his advice would be followed.

Strong in this innocent assumption, O’Hara soon came in sight of the railway, and, following the footpath, crossed the main line by a footbridge. If the hare had passed that way, there was no other track he could have taken, but O’Hara, feeling dubiously that he had been sent on a wild-goose chase, found himself in another sandy lane. Two hundred yards along it he entered a wood, or, rather, not a natural wood but a plantation. It was gloomy, and, to his Celtic imagination, slightly frightening. Although the trees were young the atmosphere was heavy with a kind of mental thunder, as though ancient wrong had been done there and the land remembered it.

It was difficult to combat the suggestion of evil, and O’Hara, much oppressed by this, lengthened his stride and so quickened his pace that soon he was through the plantation and almost up to the house to which it belonged.

The detour he had made had added five miles already to the distance roughly estimated by the runners. An hour of precious time had gone, and the light was waning. O’Hara was now in a part of the country he did not know at all thoroughly, and this he found disconcerting, for, before embarking upon this ambitious heading-off of the hare, he had had, as he imagined, the landscape mapped out in his mind.

‘I wonder what place this is?’ he thought. ‘And how far Gerry really has led us up the garden? I think that fellow must have been wrong. Still, I’m in for it now. I can’t go back all that way. All the same, I wish I’d had another look at the map. This house… what a beastly place! And yet… what’s wrong with it?’

He slowed to look at it. The house stared back at him so oddly, sulkily and uncomfortably that he stopped, as though to meet a challenge. Then, with some idea of asking his way— for it seemed foolish to feel frightened by a house—he began to limp up to the gates.

These were wide open. There was no lodge, and yet this seemed to be the main entrance. A broad but weed-grown drive led straight as an arrow to the front door, which was like the door of a church except that it had an incongruous nineteenth-century porch to shield it from the weather. A stained and almost indecipherable notice just inside the gateway, and attached to a lichened post, said, with enviable curtness :

KEEP OUT.

Nothing was further from O’Hara’s thoughts by this time than to go in, and he remained gazing, in the fascination of horror, at the house. It was eerily still, and he thought at first that it might be uninhabited, for the blank and staring windows seemed to be without curtains and the place had a deserted, ghostly look, as though no human being ever went near it. It led, O’Hara fancied, a life of its own, apart from human life and antagonistic to it. It was not at this house that he would ask to be directed on his way.

Just as he was thinking thus, an old man, wheeling a barrow, came round the side of the house and, in doing so, broke the spell. O’Hara grinned to himself in contempt of his own foolish thoughts, and entered the grounds. At sight of him, however, the old man dropped the handles of the barrow, waved him off, and then scuttled into some bushes at the side of the building, rather in the manner of a surprised hen taking cover from a boisterous puppy.

‘Well; I’m damned!’ said O’Hara aloud; and turned back towards the road.

The blue mist was dimming the woods, and he thought, as he ran, of the hotel to which he was going; of the pleasures of a bath and a change of clothes—for the team had sent baggage on ahead of them and some were staying the night and would remain over Sunday in the seaside town, spending the morning swimming and the afternoon perhaps sailing on the bay. He groaned, half-humorously, and tried to quicken his pace.

‘Lucky if I get to Welsea in time for breakfast!’ he thought, as he eyed the deepening evening.

The road made a right-angle bend to pass by the side of the house. Four trees stood in a clearing among some rhododendron and holly bushes. There were an elm, a beech, an oak and a hornbeam. The trees were dead. Their stark branches, paper-grey, stuck out like the ribs of skeletons. They might have been gibbets, thought O’Hara, each with its dead man hanging and keeping the sheep by moonlight. The late afternoon was chilly. The young man shivered and ran on.

The road crossed a little stone bridge, and led past the lodge of the house, which was situated, curiously, at what seemed a secondary entrance. Behind the house was a paddock, but beyond it, and as far as O’Hara could see, the countryside, lonely and vast in the dusk which was now descending, stretched like an unmapped continent, uninviting, hilly, and sad.

His ankle was stiffening badly and hurt a good deal. His only object now was to reach his destination, and that as soon as he could. He was certain, by this time, that he had been misdirected, and he cursed himself for having taken any notice of the information given by the man in the car.

Of the golf-course, to which at one time his thoughts had been directed, there was now no promise, for he had left it far away to the west. Beside him there loomed a hill; beyond him there rose another. The road had the horrid unendingness of a dream of frustration and longing, but there seemed nothing to do except follow it to its end, and hope to find a village or a farm at which he could ask the way. Even a lift would not be out of the question. He was doing his ankle no good by keeping on his feet for so long.

Suddenly from the clouds which had rested on the hills and of which he had become increasingly conscious as they blotted out the last of the daylight, great drops of rain began to fall.

‘That’s the last straw,’ thought O’Hara. ‘I don’t mind getting wet, and I don’t much mind being lost, but the two together are too much. Why the devil did I listen to that fellow? I might have been in Welsea by now!’

As he indulged in these thoughts the road began to drop fairly steeply and to become much narrower. Far from being perturbed by these signs, he felt a sense of relief.

‘A farm,’ he thought. ‘They can put me upon my way.’ The road now entered a gloomy route between hedges, and trailed out into a wood. O’Hara decreased his pace and dropped into a walk. The rain came down fairly fast but he was saved from the worst of the downpour by the overhanging trees.

At last the road bent to the left and he saw some buildings. Behind them the trees were thick, and a round-roofed hut of military pattern seemed to shoulder its way in amongst them. A little beyond it was a cottage, but this was in ruins. In the dusk O’Hara had been about to knock when he saw that the cottage had no door.

‘Oh, well, where’s the farm?’ he thought; and, as though to answer the question, further on, and among the trees, a light sprang up.