Untimely Death

CHAPTER VI. At Fault

Are you all right, Percy?” asked Mr. Olding anxiously.

Percy said nothing for a moment. He stood there, in the centre of the little group of mounted men, his red face twitching, his breath coming and going.

“Am I all right?” he burst out finally. “My godfathers! What the hell do you expect me to be? All right! I like that!”

He broke into what was evidently intended to be derisive laughter, but which turned into a fit of coughing.

“This gentleman said you was dead,” said Tom.

“This gentleman,” bellowed Percy, “stole my horse.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Pettigrew protested.

“If you didn’t, I’d like to know what you’re doing on him now.”

“That at least is easily remedied,” said Pettigrew in as dignified a tone as he could summon up. With an immense effort he lifted a leg which felt like solid wood over the pony’s back and got down to the ground.

“Thank you,” said Percy in a voice heavy with sarcasm and took the pony’s reins.

Pettigrew was about to say something further, but it was clear that for the time being any words would be wasted on Percy. He was fully occupied in trying to get into the saddle. Quite evidently, the pony, which had been meekness itself when Pettigrew mounted it, had a personal dislike to Percy. No sooner was his foot in the stirrup than it began a rapid circular movement with its forelegs for centre and its hindquarters for circumference, leaving a blaspheming Percy to hop uncomfortably after it. Olding came up alongside in an endeavour to help, but his own horse, hitherto perfectly staid, immediately began to plunge and rear, finishing the performance by kicking the pony smartly in the ribs. The spectacle came to an end only when Tom, who had dismounted, walked across and held the pony firmly by the bridle. It should have been funny, Pettigrew reflected, but he was beyond being amused. He could not even muster a smile at the spectacle of Percy, at last in the saddle, trying to control a restive animal with one hand while shortening his stirrup leathers with the other. Everything that had happened since he began his fatal walk towards Bolter’s Tussock had been so completely alien to what he normally knew as real life that he began to wonder whether the whole thing was not a bad dream. Only the aches and pains that now possessed his every limb were actual enough.

“Stole my horse!” Percy repeated. After manoeuvres covering about half an acre of moor he had at last got his mount and tackle under control. “Damn it, I saw him in the act.”

“Did you, by Jove!” said Mr. Olding. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“Stop him? Look here, I came down just this side of Tucker’s Barrows-the bloody pony got away with me and put his foot in a peat cutting if you want to know. All right. He went on, across the Tussock, just as I knew he would, making for home. Right, Tom?”

“Yassur. He allus does.”

“All right. I knew I’d pick him up at the gate to your field, if not sooner. So I followed on. Right?”

Mr. Olding gravely nodded. Clearly it was all right by him.

“Then the next thing I know, here’s this fellow on the pony, cantering across the top as though the whole place belonged to him. I shouted at him-I waved- and what does he do? Turns round like a flash and rides lickety split down hill as hard as he can go after the hounds. All right. If that isn’t stealing I’d like to know what is.”

“A person steals who, without the consent of the owner…” As a pious man in extremity will say a prayer, so Pettigrew murmured to himself the opening words of the Larceny Act, 1916. The familiar phrases comforted him. Not only did they assure him of his own innocence in law; they represented something solid and substantial to cling to at a moment when he was beginning to doubt the evidence of his senses. He had got to the stage of feeling that if the others went on discussing him as though he wasn’t there, he would soon begin to question his own identity.

“And then,” Olding was saying, “he turns up at the kill with a cock-and-bull story about finding your bleeding carcase with the pony standing over it.”

“All right. That proves it, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, rather, I should say it did.”

“… fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith…”

“You’ll give evidence about it, if they want you to?”

“Oh, I say, Percy, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it? I mean, that sort of thing isn’t going to do the Hunt any good, and you’ve got the pony back.”

“All right, if you say so, Olding. It seems a pity to let the blighter off scot free, though. What I can’t get over is his saying I was dead. Such blasted cheek.”

“… takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen…”

“He went on saying it right up to the end. Took me to the very place where he said you’d be. I was led right up the garden path. Absolutely, I can tell you.”

“Extraordinary thing to do. Do you think he’s quite-?”

For the first time the two men seemed to be aware that Pettigrew was listening to their conversation. They did not stop talking, but walked their mounts out of earshot.

“… with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof,” Pettigrew concluded defiantly. Let anyone suggest he was out of his mind after that!

“Did you say something, sir?”

He looked round. Tom was speaking to him, and speaking, moreover, in a surprisingly friendly tone. Moreover, he was standing at Pettigrew’s elbow and not talking down at him from the vantage point of a saddle.

The fact encouraged Pettigrew to treat him as a man and a brother. At the same time it puzzled him.

“What have you done to your horse?” he asked.

Tom grinned, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Looking past him, Pettigrew saw the horse standing where Tom had left it when he dismounted to help Percy. It was quite motionless, its head up, its ears pricked, looking towards its master as though waiting for orders. “That’s a well-trained animal,” said Pettigrew. “Better behaved than your pony,” he added with a feeble laugh.

“I can’t afford a disobedient animal in my job,” Tom replied. “He’ll stay there all day if I tell him to, and come when he’s called.”

Tired as he was, Pettigrew looked with interest at this equine phenomenon. He was no judge of horseflesh, but he thought it a very plain-looking animal, a stocky dun-coloured beast, with powerful quarters and a distinctly roman nose. He approached it and its ears went flat back on its head while a set of very ugly teeth champed in his direction.

“Don’t go too close,” Tom called out. “He’s not safe with strangers.”

Pettigrew turned back. Tom was vaguely poking about in the heather with his hunting-crop, a look of scepticism on his face.

“Somewhere about here, you thought he was?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Pettigrew. “I don’t know whether you think me mad or not, but there was a man lying here.”

Tom nodded gravely. “ ’Twasn’t Mr. Percy, though,” he remarked.

“Obviously not, if he came down at Tucker’s Barrows. It was someone else.”

“And he’s not there now.”

“And he’s not there now. That’s what’s so extraordinary.”

“What did he look like, exactly?” Tom asked.

Pettigrew closed his eyes for a moment, the better to concentrate. The picture that he saw in his mind’s eye was absolutely clear. The man was lying on his back, his head slightly askew on the narrow shoulders, the face upturned, looking very white and sharp against the ground, like a piece of paper. The pony all but trod on him, so that Pettigrew was thrown forward and only saved himself from falling by holding on to his mane…

He suddenly realized something, and with the realization his head began to swim. Tom’s pony had a severely hogged mane. Nobody could possibly have held on to that. He was confusing it with the far smaller pony that he had ridden as a boy, which had sported a long, flowing chestnut mane. And the dead face that he had just been seeing so clearly in his mind’s eye was part of the same vivid memory. He must think again. But try as he might, he could not summon up any precise picture of what he had seen that afternoon. The whole episode was hopelessly blurred in his mind.

He shook his head.

“I’m afraid I can’t say what he looked like,” he said lamely.

“But you saw him?”

“Oh yes. I saw him all right.”

“Ah.” Tom said nothing more for an appreciable time. “A funny old place, the Tussock,” he remarked at last. “There’s no knowing what you mightn’t see up here. Night times, especially. Of course, there is those as can see by day.”

“Do you mean the place is-haunted?”

Tom shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not saying it is,” he said. “But there’s them as do.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Pettigrew protested. But even as he spoke, doubts assailed him. After all, the Tussock was haunted for him, and in a very particular way. The conditions for a hallucination were ideal. He had been all day obsessed with the recollections of the past, of which this one, because so long suppressed, had become by far the most powerful. Given the coincidence of the pony’s sudden swerve at precisely the right time and place to fit in with his thoughts, was it not possible that an optical illusion might follow? And people who were prone to optical illusions of this nature might be called, as Percy put it, “not quite…”

He felt strongly the necessity of impressing upon someone his sanity and respectability, if only to convince himself that he was, in spite of everything, sane and respectable. “I’m afraid I may have done your pony some damage,” he went on quickly. “If you think you ought to call in a vet, you must do it at my expense. There’ll be the shoeing to pay for anyway, and I dare say you feel I ought to give you something for my ride.”

Tom looked at, him seriously and not unkindly. “That’s a fair offer, sir,” he said. “I tell you what- you’ve not got a bad seat on a horse-better than Mr. Percy’s, if you want to know. What do you say if I was to find you something a bit quieter, more suitable to a man of your age, like? I’d forget about the other matter then. What do you say?” Pettigrew shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Thank you for the compliment but quite definitely No.”

Tom shrugged his shoulders and looked round to where the other two men were now approaching. Then he gave a whistle, and his horse trotted obediently up to where he stood. He climbed easily into the saddle. “Shall I let you know about the pony, then?” he asked. “Do, please. My name is Pettigrew and I am staying at Sallowcombe.”

“Oh.” The friendliness in the man’s face faded as the colour in a Japanese lantern fades when the candle inside is blown out. He turned his horse’s head away. “Well, Mr. Olding,” he called out, “we’d best be getting along home.”

Pettigrew stared after the three men as they rode away across the moor in a mood of gloomy resignation. He was too tired even to feel resentment at the brutally sudden change of front. It seemed, in any case, all of a piece with the illogical sequence of disasters that had marked the afternoon. No doubt there was an explanation, but it was not worth while looking for one. Just now he was concerned only with how he, Pettigrew, was to get along home from where he was.

The sound of motor traffic close at hand reminded him that Bolter’s Tussock was no longer the remote spot that it once had been. He moved wearily but thankfully towards the road.

The first vehicle that approached him pulled up at his frantic signals. With an extraordinary sense of returning to reality from a world of dreams, he opened the door and climbed in beside his wife.

“Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now? ”

But Frank was already fast asleep.