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  APE’S FACE

  a Novel

  Marion L. Fox

  APE’S FACE

  ISBN: 1553100913

  Published by Christopher Roden

  for Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  Table of Contents

  I Ape’s Face

  II The House

  III A Story of the House: Isabella of the Downs

  IV Green Growth

  V The Story of the Church: A Sermon which need not be read

  VI Strange Conversation Between Two Chairs

  VII The Story of the Stone

  VIII The Red Summer

  IX The Drylches

  X Boots

  XI At the Window

  XII The Woman in the Tree

  XIII Brothers

  XIV Animated Dust

  XV Christmas Eve and an Obituary Notice

  Prelude

  THAT IS BLUE OF THE SKY: this is blue of the downs, where a thousand deep and bright-hued milkworts glow in the cropped grasses. Ring beyond ring and line across line the bowed backs of the downs shine green under the sunlight. There is not a humped back among them that does not pay tribute to the new-blown summer with a light burden of blossom. The garlanded swathings of the cold chalk, now warming in the heat, had consoled the tired feet of a certain wayfarer as he climbed from crest to crest over the terraced lynchets. Old vineyards, old plough-lands, whatever they may have been, these curving platforms carved like an amphitheatre upon the hillsides are significant, dignified, alluring. They invite, moreover, to a long repose.

  Clean out of sight a lark sang. These birds are the uplifted echo of all the kind and winsome things that grow in this Wiltshire country—and just as irrelevant. Their very selflessness is our consolation. Over a hundred sacrifices, battles, sorrows, these sounds, these sights continue, the evidence of other life than the mere human. You can rest your mind on that.

  The wayfaring man was not precisely a tramp. He was merely continuing the youthful game of pretending to be what you are not. He was nothing half so much food for speculation; but just a very young man, with no particular aim or business, on a walking-tour—one, moreover, who had lost his way, without greatly caring. This would not have much to do with the matter in hand except that he was to see it again in later days, and yet have lost the memory of this June afternoon, even with the recurrence of the feeling which it evoked.

  He lay crouched into a fold of lynchets, they being singularly adapted to the repose of mankind. A few white cows, spotted brown, came now and again to peer at him. Also there was a green-backed beetle that crawled around his person. A ladybird settled on his hand. Otherwise there was no disturbance except the fragrance of the air.

  But in that part of the downs there is no rest. A certain strife and restlessness is in the bones of the place, so to speak. The fierce emotions of many peoples cry aloud even above the summer peace.

  The long procession of clouds in passing, visible as in few other places from root to crown, is just as serene as bird or flower or sunlight. This harmoniousness is strangely marked by contrast with the sensation of conflict.

  The pseudo-tramp was aware of it all: but at the moment those ancient unavailing struggles had small appeal for him. He rose up again and climbed into the sunshine out of reach of the prevailing discords. The bird was still singing, or it may have been another. A linked succession of lark-songs continued from hollow to hollow and from height to height. Along the broad saddle of the ridge the plough-land showed green with new-springing corn. Already it could ripple and eddy under breezes with that motion of stirred waters. The whole place was astir and aflicker. The least clod of earth, the smallest blade was a mirror to the sun: the living lustre of green growth reflected it on every side.

  A man passing through this transparency of radiance showed himself dense and black, and for that reason almost lifeless, along the road which cut across the first wayfarer’s path at right angles. The latter, having completely lost his bearings, was anxious to accost the one human being in this wilderness.

  He hastened his steps, shouting to the man at the same moment. His voice sounded extraordinarily small and meaningless across the radiant spaces. In response the man upon the roadway halted, waiting for the wayfarer to come abreast of him. On asking the nearest way to Shaftesbury he was answered in a half-educated voice, wholly free from any touch of Wiltshire dialect. The man himself wore clothes of an uncompromisingly town-bred cut, ill-according with the countryside. His face, cast in a somewhat sober and even morose design of feature and expression, seemed to brighten at the stranger’s appearance.

  ‘You’re a stranger to these parts, sir?’ he asked, standing still to survey his companion with a sort of curious satisfaction. The other noticed the extreme solidity of the man’s figure, the square honesty of his face, and a certain wise shrewdness traced in lines about his eyes.

  ‘I am walking from Amesbury to Shaftesbury,’ the wayfarer said. ‘I did not take much notice of my road and here I am, though where that is I do not know.’

  ‘And not much the worse off for that,’ returned the man. ‘I wish I were in your shoes and walking away from the place just the same.’

  The wayfarer looked a trifle astonished at the man’s vehemence, for there was a concentrated fury of hatred underlying his words.

  ‘You live here?’ he asked the man.

  ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘but I come from Buckinghamshire,’ and at that his face brightened and then gloomed again; it had extraordinarily benevolent in the brighter moment. ‘Do you know that county, sir, by any chance?’

  Armstrong, for such was the wayfarer’s name, confessed his ignorance regretfully, and at that the man’s face became yet more dejected.

  ‘A fine county, sir,’ said he; ‘I was born and bred there, and Providence send I die there.’

  ‘You do not care so much for this place then?’ asked Armstrong.

  The man looked at him in scorn, silently; and whilst he remained speechless, Armstrong seemed to see the vision of a different, better county pass across the man’s mind—a kindly place of low-bosomed, well-watered and well-wooded, lapped generously in good earth. As he watched, the man’s stern face twitched, his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Those downs,’ he cried, and shook his fist at them. ‘Curse them!’ he said, and in his voice were both anger and fear. He turned from Armstrong without another word, and vanished through a gate into a plantation at a curve of the road below.

  Armstrong stood looking at the bright shining spaces that lay all about him. A few moments passed. The downs shimmered and the sun rose higher, glowed more resplendently. The translucence of the place became emphasised.

  Again there rose a dark figure out of the radiance—one more dense shape of humanity. It came running beside the vivid green of the new corn, a little black creature, a small girl-child in a black frock. She cried out as she ran, the tears oozing in large d
rops from wide, frightened eyes. A wizened, dark thing she was; old and terribly young at the same time.

  ‘Mr gardener,’ she screamed, ‘Mr gardener!’ and her terrified child’s shriek echoed down to the plantation. She looked over her shoulder, as for something in pursuit. Far and near Armstrong could see nothing moving on the whole face of the downs. Panting, weeping, the child passed him, swerved at sight of him, with a flicker from her wide eyes—dark against their distended whiteness—then she too vanished into the plantation.

  Armstrong, aware of a curious terror amongst these sun-consecrated places, passed down into the winding road which leads to Shaftesbury.

  Twenty-eight years pass.

  I

  Ape’s Face

  I DON’T FEAR THE DARK.’ The words echoed upon Armstrong out of the blueness of nightfall, early descended over the countryside; then the iron park-gates clanged portentously behind the carriage in which he sat, the carriage door was banged to abruptly with an inrush of cold night air, and he was left alone in the slow-moving vehicle.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said to himself, settling comfortably down amongst the somewhat worn cushions, and lowering one of the windows, the strap coming away in his hand as he did so. For the last half-hour he had sacrificed his feelings on the altar of politeness, and they had come to the point of snapping, much as the strap had done: perpetual strain upon material none too solid shows this result. Armstrong was no boor, he assured himself that he was no boor, he reassured himself on this point, and then dismissed it from his mind. A scrupulous irritation refused to be thus easily assuaged. That scrupulousness was like a dog on a hot scent, it would not be called back once on the track. It had served him well in his career, helped him to success, so, recognising some kind of grateful debt, he left the scruple to this hunter’s instinct. It began at the moment when he had emerged on to the platform of Down End station, under a sky mottled with clouds and sprinkled with stars, bereft of porters, luggage, passengers—everything in fact which seems to denote a station, or suggest the motive for a train. Here there appeared to be nothing but the presence of night and wind. However, a porter did at length emerge from the shadows, gathered up his baggage, and having watched the last orange sparks from the engine burn themselves into darkness, crossed the line with Armstrong meekly following. At the other side of the station-offices a brougham waited. By the light of the solitary lamp Armstrong noticed the disconsolate droop of the horse’s head, and the coachman nodding on the box behind. There was a certain forlornness in the equipage, stranded alone in the midst of shadows, which reminded him forcibly of Napoleon’s coach at Madame Tussaud’s—a long-forgotten relic that once held infinite possibilities.

  Upon a vague form moving inside the vehicle, he had discovered it to be already occupied by a woman; and being inured to this kind of doubtful surprise he ensconced himself beside her with some formal banality of fearing to have kept her waiting. (Her entire form being plunged in shadow he could frame no idea of age or appearance.) The woman replied drily that her train had arrived from the opposite direction some twenty minutes before, and consequently she expected to be kept waiting. The reassurance was couched in so unbenevolent a form as to diminish the sources of conversation.

  Armstrong, considering within himself that perhaps she was young and shy, and that shyness sometimes took upon itself shapes to startle or dismay, tried to assume the benevolence denied him. He entered upon a mildly humorous description of some late fellow-passengers, discoursed gallantly for five minutes on the humours of travelling in general, and then finding his companion as unresponsive as at the commencement of his efforts, relapsed into a discomfited truism and fell silent.

  ‘I wonder you travel at all,’ said the abrupt voice beside him, deep and ever so little husky, obliterating traces of either youth or age.

  ‘I hope you don’t take my remarks quite seriously,’ he had rejoined.

  She gave a curious, small laugh that rasped as it came. ‘Oh no,’ she said,

  ‘but I’m no use at small-talk myself.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Armstrong had returned, feeling he had rolled a heavy weight up-hill for nothing; the brougham toiled as laboriously on through the shining lanes, bordered with thick hedges in which the wind made low twittering sounds. The country, so far as could be seen under racing clouds, rolled gently away on their left to a darker line on the horizon suggesting woodland.

  ‘You know this country well, I suppose?’ he suggested presently with a determined sense of duty, leaving no stone unturned.

  ‘I suppose so,’ the woman rejoined, ‘I’ve passed most of my life here.

  Perhaps you would like to know who I am?’ Here she laughed again. Armstrong felt inclined to tell her not to trouble. ‘I’m Josephine Delane-Morton, and it’s my father you are coming to stay with.’

  Armstrong had suppressed a groan.

  ‘It was very good of Mr Delane-Morton to invite me,’ he said; ‘when I asked permission to read the collection of Elizabethan letters in his possession, I fully intended lodging in the village.’

  ‘I do not know what papa thought when he got your letter—I was away at the time—but I expect he is jubilant at the idea of talking to you about them all.’

  There was a dryness in her tone that suggested infinite contempt of the matter in hand. ‘I suppose you are a great authority on that kind of thing?’

  she added.

  ‘It depends upon what you call an authority,’ he had answered.

  ‘Oh, some one who studies in books and rooms with other people who do the same,’ she rejoined.

  ‘Well,’ Armstrong conceded, feeling inwardly truculent, ‘I must confess to having done so now and then.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she said. There had ensued a silence which no one tried to break for some time, whilst the wheels squirted mud and water in succulent manner upon the roadside grasses. The silence lasted a long while, when suddenly the woman gave a deep sigh and remarked: ‘I ought still to be in Italy.’

  Armstrong had repressed an inclination to make no response, but, after an inward struggle, vouchsafed a passably interested ‘Indeed’, which she did not seem to require. Whereupon silence had again intervened; whereupon the brougham pulled up at a lodge and some iron gates; whereupon he was frustrated in another laudable effort by his companion leaping quickly out and shouting in more gentle accents than hitherto: ‘I shall walk up, I don’t fear the dark.’ He was left alone as before described. His punctilio satisfied also, he now turned his entire attention to more pleasing pursuits.

  Perhaps it were as well to say here that Armstrong’s name is to be found amongst the list of worthies in Who’s Who, but with more foundation, it may be, in the truth that posterity will echo, than some of his associates possess.

  Much of his work in historical biography will survive the test of time with equanimity as standards on their subjects. It is no easy thing to put old and well-known figures in a light as truthful as new, so perhaps this that he had done gained him a well-earned fame though no popularity. For that matter he was not one of those who work with one eye on the public, and that the most widely opened, since his books were written for seekers and scholars like himself.

  At the moment he was wandering along one of the by-paths of antiquity, after a figure little known, but suggestive to those who had caught glimpses of him behind others more outstanding—an Elizabethan gentleman of some repute amongst his contemporaries for learning, swordsmanship, and a certain curious book on the immortality of the soul—now only found in musty corners of second-hand book-shops, and read by lovers of the remote or strange. It seemed that Mr Delane-Morton owned some of this Elizabethan’s letters and manuscript writings, inherited or acquired along with the house to which Armstrong now found himself travelling. Mr Delane-Morton had written words to that effect in the correspondence pages of the Spectator; and Armstong, though not by nature one of that periodical’s most diligent readers, had chanced upon the name. Delane-Morton,
Burton Hall, Wiltshire—such was the address. He had written a suave if formal reply to Armstrong’s letter of enquiry, proffering an invitation for a fortnight’s stay to the ‘eminent biographer’ early in the month of December. Armstrong accepted three nights from the 20th of that month. And so things come about.

  Armstrong knew little or nothing of the country beyond the fact that it lay on the more distant verge of Salisbury Plain, that the railway did not approach it within six or seven miles, and that none of his acquaintance who professed knowledge of the country seemed to have any knowledge of it.

  Hence all the more pleasure in plunging into the obscure. A singularity of temperament, a natural distaste for the polite restrictions of visiting, would have made him hesitate to intrude so long upon strangers. But again the hunting instinct had gripped him, and gripped him forcibly.

  There was little enough to be seen of the surroundings to the house, only a drive that twisted palely amongst a line of dismembered elms jagged and tortured by the winds. The drive, on taking one more than usually erratic turn westward, disclosed a density of blackness humped against the sky which now looked white by contrast; the trees which stood between it and him seemed to shrink and shrivel in a moment like veins in a skeleton leaf, until he became aware through them of the vast leviathan-like sweep of the downs. They rose above the flatter grass-lands with no compromise of slope or gradual descent, but like ramparts of a castle, like the old cliffs of the ancient sea-shore that they were, they looked beetling down across the night and the country, unbroken, unbending. The light, gathered about their rounded outlines at the summit, spread down a little way, showing in the gloom how they curved forward in a horse-shoe shape around a kind of bay or long drained-off lakelet, then ended in a pointed spur of land to curve back again in one long ridge that vanished out of sight. There was a freshening of the cold air, an intensifying of cloud spaces that unexpectedly became apparent, as if the ocean had suddenly disclosed itself to view; all the immensities of Nature seemed to call to one another and rush together with a soundlessness and suddenness that was all the more forceful.