‘All I see is that you’ll have to go on forgetting it!’
And, as though to clinch matters and to end wavering, the young man whipped out his case and handed Ben the promised pound-note.
Ben clutched the note, but his soul was not soothed. The thing he had forgotten was important. More important, even, than a pound-note.
‘It’s a letter,’ said Ben.
‘Write it from London,’ answered the young man.
‘That might be too late, see,’ replied Ben, doggedly. ‘It might miss the person.’
‘Who is the person?’ asked the young man.
Ben hesitated. He didn’t feel inclined to admit that the person was a girl he had left in Spain, who wouldn’t know where to connect up with him when she got back to England unless she found a note waiting for her at Southampton Post Office. Such an admission, besides treading on sacred ground, would reinforce the young man’s proposal that the note should be sent from London, since it was hardly likely that Molly Smith would reach Southampton hot upon Ben’s heels.
‘Yus, but she might,’ reflected Ben, ‘and I ain’t takin’ no charnces! Lunnon’s a long way orf, and while I’m ’ere I’m ’ere!’
So he told the young man that the person was a bloke wot owed him a fiver and that he wasn’t going to waste no time in getting after it.
This story, coupled with the queer doggedness by which Ben occasionally got his way at unexpected moments, produced a halt of two minutes outside a small stationer’s shop. In these two minutes, while the young man waited in the taxi, Ben bought a sheet of paper and an envelope and a penny-halfpenny stamp, borrowed a pen, wrote: ‘Dere Molly i’m ere graystones north lane wimbledon Common,’ stuffed it in the envelope, addressed it to ‘Miss Molly Smith, Post Orfis, Southamton,’ thumped on the stamp, and posted the lot in a pillar-box.
‘’Ow’s that fer quick?’ he exclaimed, as he got back into the taxi.
The young man made no reply.
‘Oi! I ses ’ow’s that fer quick?’ repeated Ben.
The young man still made no reply. Suddenly, Ben looked at him.
As a rule, Ben moved slowly. His motto was that you never got nowhere, so why ’urry? But, at chosen moments, he moved with a rapidity that baffled logic. He could get down three flights of stairs in two seconds, and round two corners in one. He had never got down stairs or round corners, however, with half the rapidity at which he now got out of the taxi. The driver was still in first gear, driving a dead man to a station, while Ben was legging it four blocks away.
And on Ben’s head was a cap, and in his pocket was a pound-note, which the dead man had given him.
‘Now, you!’ exclaimed a voice in his ear.
A hand grabbed his coat. With a yelp, he wrenched himself free. And, as he did so, he wondered why Fate never gave him a decent deal, and why the hand he had wrenched himself away from was not an ordinary hand, but bore a livid red scar.
Ben did not possess many accomplishments, but he could run away, probably, better than anybody else in the world, and since he spent half his life running away he was never out of practice. This gave him an advantage over the owner of the hand with the livid red scar, and before the hand could make a second grab at him there only remained thin air to grab at.
In the next sixty seconds Ben knocked three people over. Two of them were men and the other was a small boy. The two men had to pick themselves up, but Ben risked life and liberty to replace the small boy in a standing position, and he also made a funny grimace in the hope that this would restore the small boy’s faith in a somewhat violent world. He always had a fellow feeling for small boys because to him, as to them, everything looked so big.
Then followed sixty more successful seconds. He improved his steering, and all he bumped into was a lamppost. Even that proved helpful, in a way, because he bumped into it at such speed that he bounced off round a corner without the trouble of turning.
Then he paused. You have to after a hundred and twenty non-stop seconds. You pause to find out whether you are still alive—to discover whether all the pumping and thumping inside you is going on in this world or in the next. If you’re dead you stop and wait for an angel. But, if you’re not, you probe your bursting brain to remember what you are running away from. You see, you’ve been running so fast that you’ve forgotten. And then, when you remember what you are running away from, you start off again for another hundred and twenty seconds.
Ben ran away for considerably longer than he had any immediate need for, and he might have gone on running away indefinitely if it had not suddenly occurred to the remnants of his brain that he did not know in what direction he was running, and that, for all he could say, he might be running back again. Then he sat down on a post to think about it.
For several seconds, however, thought was impossible. He felt sick, felt better, felt sick, was sick, and felt better.
After which sequence of emotional events he wiped his clammy forehead, shoved his new cap back on his head, and endeavoured to work out his geographical and spiritual position.
Fust, where was ’e?
He gathered from the road’s loneliness that he was somewhere in the outskirts of Southampton. That was good! And when he was out of the outskirts, that would be better! Southampton, recently a Mecca, was now an inferno. Ben desired most keenly to shake the dust of the port for ever from his holy boots.
‘Meanin’, o’ corse, with ’oles in,’ he told himself.
Away to the right lay the city he was flying from. Gloaming cloaked, blessedly, the road. There was no sight of Southampton’s activity from this peaceful spot, no throb of its distant sound. The only sounds were immediate sounds—of wind blowing in fitful gusts as it played hide-and-seek with itself round corners, of dead leaves indignantly awakened by the game, of a little dog barking behind a wall, of a sign creaking somewhere. Each of these sounds was capable of striking terror into any soul, for the heart of sound is its association; but, to Ben regaining his breath on his post, the sounds were sweet, because they had nothing to do with dead men in taxi-cabs and hands with livid red scars.
In front of him was the wall beyond which the little dog barked. It divided Ben from a thousand other stories, even the little dog’s, but Ben was only interested in his own. To the left, a faint light glimmered, contending for supremacy against the waning day. The sign creaked above it. That meant a drink.
Well, this was where he was. Now the next question arose. What was he going to do?
Ben worked on this for a long time. Longer than, during the actual inoperative process, he realised. He only began to realise it when he found himself sitting on the ground and wondered how he had got there. Apparently, instead of working on the question, he had worked off the post.
All right. Stay where you find yourself. That was as good a motto as any. Ben did most of his thinking from the bottom level.
But, after another lapse of time, he discovered that his thinking wasn’t leading anywhere. So he cut the question into two—(1) what should he do presently in a general way, and (2) what should he do now in a specific way—threw the former, more difficult half over the wall to the dog, and concentrated on the second, simpler half. The second half was simple because its solution was clearly indicated by the creaking sign.
‘Yer brine’s no good while yer throat’s arskin’ fer it,’ he decided.