Nicky-Nan, Reservist | Page 8

one night, tacking out towards the fishing-grounds against a stiffish
southerly breeze, as he ran forward to tend the fore-sheet his leg gave
way under him as if it had been stabbed, and he rolled into the scuppers
in intolerable anguish. For a week after this Nicky-Nan nursed himself
ashore, and it was given out that he had twisted his knee-cap. He did
not call in a doctor, although the swelling took on a red and angry hue.
As a fact, no medical man now resided within three miles of Polpier.
(When asked how they did without one, the inhabitants answered
gravely that during the summer season, when the visitors were about,
Dr Mant came over twice a-week from St Martin's; in the winter they
just died a natural death.)
At any rate Nicky-Nan, because he was poor, would not call in a doctor;
and, because he was proud, would not own to anything worse than a
twisted knee, even when his neighbours on the Quay, putting their
heads together, had shaken them collectively and decided that "the poor
man must be suff'rin' from something chronic."
Then followed a bitter time, as his savings dwindled. He made more
than a dozen brave attempts to resume his old occupation. But in the
smallest lop of a sea he was useless, so that it became dangerous to take

him. Month by month he fell further back in arrears of rent.
And now the end seemed to have arrived with Mr Pamphlett's notice of
ejectment. Nicky-Nan, of course, held that Mr Pamphlett had a personal
grudge against him. Mr Pamphlett had nothing of the sort. In ordinary
circumstances, knowing Nicky-Nan to be an honest man, he would
have treated him easily. But he wanted to "develope" Polpier to his own
advantage: and his scheme of development centred on the old house by
the bridge. He desired to pull it down and transfer the Bank to that
eligible site. He had a plan of the proposed new building, with a fine
stucco frontage and edgings of terra-cotta.
Mr Pamphlett saw his way to make this improvement, and was quite
resolute about it; and Nicky-Nan, by his earlier reception of notices to
quit, had not bettered any chance of resisting. Still--had Nicky-Nan
known it--Mr Pamphlett, like many another bank manager, had been
caught and thrown in a heap by the sudden swoop of War. Over the
telephone wires he had been in agitated converse all day with his
superiors, who had at length managed to explain to him the working of
the financial Moratorium.
So Mr Pamphlett, knowing there must be War, had clean forgotten the
Ejectment Order, until Nicky-Nan inopportunely reminded him of it;
and in his forgetfulness, being testy with overwork, had threatened
execution on Monday--which would be the 3rd: August Bank Holiday,
and a dies non.
Somehow Nicky-Nan had forgotten this too. It did not occur to him
until after he had supped on boiled potatoes with a touch of butter,
pepper and salt, washed down with water, a drink he abhorred. When it
occurred to him, he smote his thigh and was rewarded with a twinge of
pain.
He had all Sunday and all Monday in which to lay his plans before the
final evacuation, if evacuation there must be. The enemy had
miscalculated. He figured it out two or three times over, made sure he
was right, and went to bed in his large gaunt bedroom with a sense of
triumph.

Between now and Tuesday a great many things might happen.
A great many things were, in fact, happening. Among them, Europe--
wire answering wire--was engaged in declaring general War.
Nicky-Nan, stretched in the four-post bed which had been the Old
Doctor's, recked nothing of this. But his leg gave him considerable pain
that night, He slept soon, but ill, and awoke before midnight to the
sound--as it seemed--of sobbing. Something was wrong with the
Penhaligon's children? Yet no . . . the sound seemed to come rather
from the chamber where Mr and Mrs Penhaligon slept. . . . It ceased,
and he dropped off to sleep again.
Oddly enough he awoke--not having given it a thought before--with a
scare of War upon him.
In his dream he had been retracing accurately and in detail a small
scene of the previous morning, at the moment quite without
significance for him. Limping back from his cliff-patch with a basket of
potatoes in one hand and with the other using the shaft of his mattock
(or "visgy" in Polpier language) for a walking-staff, as he passed the
watch-house he had been vaguely surprised to find coastguardsman
Varco on the look-out there with his glass, and halted.
"Hallo, Bill Varco! Wasn't it you here yesterday? Or has my memory
lost count 'pon the days