Fortitude | Page 8

Stephen
gravely watched for a moment the senseless body and then sat back in
his chair, his head bowed on his chest.

The fight had not, perhaps, been like that--there must have been many
other things that happened, but that was always how Peter remembered
it. And now there was confusion--a great deal of noise and people
talking very loudly, but Stephen said nothing at all. He did not look at
the body again, but when he had recovered a little, still without a word
to any one and with his eyes grave and without expression, he moved to
the corner where his clothes lay.
"'E's not dead."
"No--give 'im room there, he's moving," and from the back of the
crowd the Fool's silly face, peering over...
Peter crept unnoticed to the door. The clocks were striking ten, and
some one in the street was singing. He pulled up his stockings and
fastened his garters, then he slipped out into the snow and saw that the
sky was full of stars and that the storm had passed.


CHAPTER II
HOW THE WESTCOTT FAMILY SAT UP FOR PETER
I
The boy always reckoned that, walking one's quickest, it took half an
hour from the door of The Bending Mule to Scaw House, where his
father lived. If a person ran all the way twenty minutes would perhaps
cover it, but, most of the time, the road went up hill and that made
running difficult; he had certainly no intention of running to-night,
there were too many things to think about. That meant, then, that he
would arrive home about half-past ten, and there would be his aunt and
his grandfather and his father sitting up waiting for him.
The world was very silent, and the snow lay on the round cobbles of
the steep street with a bright shining whiteness against the black houses

and the dark night sky. Treliss' principal street was deserted; all down
the hill red lights showed in the windows and voices could be heard,
singing and laughing, because on Christmas Eve there would be parties
and merrymakings. Peter looked a tiny and rather desolate figure
against the snow as he climbed the hill. There was a long way to go.
There would be Green Street at the top, past the post office, then down
again into the Square where the Tower was, then through winding
turnings up the hill past the gates and dark trees of The Man at Arms,
then past the old wall of the town and along the wide high road that
runs above the sea until at last one struck the common, and, hidden in a
black clump of trees (so black on a night like this), the grim grey stones
of Scaw House.
Peter was not afraid of being alone, although when snow had fallen
everything seemed strange and monstrous, the trees were like animals,
and the paths of all the world were swept away. But he was not afraid
of ghosts; he was too accustomed to their perpetual company; old
Frosted Moses and Dicky, and even men like Stephen, had seen ghosts
so often, and Peter himself could tell odd stories about the Grey
Hill--no, ghosts held no terror. But, very slowly, the shadow of all that
he must very soon go through was creeping about him. When he first
came out of The Bending Mule he still was as though he were in a
dream. Everything that had happened there that evening had been so
strange, so amazing, that it belonged to the world of dreams--it was of
the very stuff of them, and that vision of Stephen, naked, bleeding, so
huge and so terrible, was not to be easily forgotten.
But, as he climbed the steep street, Peter knew that however great a
dream that might be, there was to be no dreaming at all about his
meeting with his father, and old Frosted Moses' philosophy would be
very sadly needed. As he climbed the hill the reaction from the
excitement of his late adventure suddenly made him very miserable
indeed, so that he had an immediate impulse to cry, but he stood still in
the middle of the street and made fists with his hands and called
himself "a damned gawky idiot," words that he had admired in the
mouth of Sam Figgis some days before. "Gawky" was certainly the last
thing that he was, but it was a nice queer word, and it helped him a

great deal.
The worst of everything was that he had had a number of beatings
lately and the world could not possibly go on, as far as he was
concerned, if he had many more. Every beating made matters worse
and his own desperate attempts to be good and to merit