His fingers passed over the body: there, sticking in the breast, was a
cangiar which Isaac, in his panic, had left, and Frankl's hand rested on
the handle; if he did not consciously press the knife home, very heavily
his hand rested on it, eyes blazing, beard shaking....
Then he drew out the knife carefully, to hide it in the carriage,
listened again close, felt sure now that death was there, and now
scuttled, as if from plague, guiltily hissing: “Putrid dog...!”
Presently he led his carriage to the station, and made a deposition of
the murder.
Asked if he had any suspicion as to the culprit, he said: “Not the
least: I left the man alone with the carriage, and who could have had
any motive for killing him beats me.”
VII
THE ELM
Hogarth, meantime, had made his way to the front of the room, then
vomiting its throng, discovered Loveday, and, deciding to walk home,
they were soon on the cliffs.
And suddenly Loveday: “To-morrow will conclude my fifth week in
Westring. What, do you suppose, has made me stay?”
“I have wondered”.
“I work better here...Hogarth, you inspirit me”.
“Is that so?”
“It is, yes. Merely your presence is for me a freshness and an
enthusiasm: I catch in the turn of your body hints of adventurous
Columbuses, Drakes, nimble Achilles; and sibylline meanings in some
glance of yours infect my fancy with images of Moses, blind old
Homers--prophet, lawgiver, poet--”
They were passing along a stretch of sand, with some lights of Lowestoft
in sight, arm in arm; and Hogarth said: “Well, you speak some big words.
But my life, you understand, has been as simple and small as possible.
I will tell you: my father sent me to an extraordinary school--where he
got the coin I could never find out--Lancing College at Shoreham. There
I did very well--only that I was continually _getting_ it! What was
the matter with me when a boy I can't understand: I was the devil. One
summer vacation (I was fourteen) I stole three pounds from the old
man, and ran away one Sunday night. Passed through London and soon was
apprentice in a blacksmith's shop in a Kent village called Bigham. But
in six months I had the forge at my fingers' ends, and was off: nothing
could hold me long. One day I turned up before the Recruiting Office
of Marines in Bristol--just of the right age for what they call
'second-class boys'--and decided upon the sea--that sea there--which,
from the moment I saw it at the age of four, caused me a swelling of
the breast with which, to this day, it afflicts me. Well, I got the
birth-certificate of another boy, scraped through, was entered into a
District Ship, and finally sailed in the _St. Vincent_ to the Pacific
Station.
“However, my trial of His Majesty's ships was not a success: twice I was
in irons, once leapt into mid-ocean; nor could the battleship hold me
when she had nothing to teach me; so I did to the King what I had done
to the old man--cut and ran.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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