At length, with a tremendous effort, he gulped down the cheese in three rapid mouthfuls. It nearly made him vomit, but his thirst was now partly quenched by the rain which drifted across his face and trickled down his cheeks. Although he found himself shivering with cold he began to feel stronger and less faint. His dizziness was as a matter of fact rapidly giving way to feverishness; and the more the fever grew upon him the more exalted and less wretched his mood became.
He must have remained under that hedge about half an hour when he became conscious of a melancholy bleating carried on the wind towards him from across the Downs.
Over and over again he heard it; and at last its reiteration got upon his nerves.
He rose up, stiff and shivering, from his huddled position, and listened intently. Yes — it came from the direction of West Horthing and it was quite different from the ordinary sound of a sheepfold. It was the cry of a solitary animal in great distress.
He crept through the hedge by the same hole he had come by, and when he rose to his feet on the other side he recognized that Canyot’s bit of cheese had considerably restored to him his powers of movement. ‘It was simply want of food,’ he said to himself. ‘What an idiot I was!’
It was almost completely dark. The driving rain, lashing against his face, was like the palpable force of some huge hostile elemental being.
He heard that pitiful bleating very clearly now, and he made his way across the ploughland, a little northward of where he had come, until he reached the turf of the Downs.
He could see no more than a few yards in front of him, but the bleating sound was so clear a guide that he had only, as it seemed to him, stumbled up the slope of the hill about a hundred yards when he came upon the cause of it.
He found himself in collision with some low wooden railings. Leaning over these he made out a shimmering whiteness below and then a grey level circle into which the rain hissed, water falling upon water. He had been long enough in Sussex to know exactly what he had found. It was one of those mysteriously constructed dew-ponds upon the secret of which whole books had been written, none of which really solved the problem of how the thing was made.
The books agreed upon one point, that whatever the secret of these places was, it had been totally lost.
There were no new dew-ponds. The circular basin upon which Richard now gazed through the darkness was about twenty feet in diameter. The whiteness which struck his eye was the slippery sloping surface of the pond’s steep banks, made up of chalky mud.
In the summer such a place was the resort for all manner of Down birds, such as the wheatear and the whinchat, and at all seasons those banks were trodden into slippery mud by the great sheep flocks that came there to drink.
Richard remembered how Nelly’s father had once brought him to one of these places, perhaps to the very one he was now scanning, and how the old naturalist had pointed out to him the great orange-bellied water lizards or newts, as they basked in the June heat at the top of the water.
Richard remembered lying once on his back below the circle of those banks, just a few days before they sailed for America, and how he had loved the effect of the white chalk against the blue sky.
He knew very well now, as he waited to make out exactly where that pitiful cry came from, what was the matter down there. It was some luckless sheep that had slipped down in the rain and darkness and was now imprisoned by those slippery banks.
It was some while before he could locate its exact position. When he did so he lost no time in sliding down the slope and in wading through the water until he got hold of the woolly derelict.
To get hold of it was one thing, however; to get it out of the pond was another matter.
Desperate were Richard’s struggles to get the animal up those slippery banks. With the rain hissing into the pond below him and lashing his face in driving gusts as the wind whirled it round within that enclosed circle, he pulled and tugged and wrestled with that bleating mass of drenched wool until at last, with a superhuman effort, he got it safely over the brink.
He placed the thing on its feet, pushed it under the railings and clambered over them himself.
To his annoyance and surprise, instead of trotting off as he had expected, the animal fell over on its side, uttering once more a long-drawn pitiful bleat.
Now it became clear that either in its own struggles to escape, or in his struggles to help it, the unfortunate beast had broken or seriously injured one of its legs.
Richard sat down beside the bleating sheep and uttered a wild laugh. He lifted up his face to the sky and was met by the whirling downpour of merciless rain. He began to be alarmed lest Canyot’s two hours should have passed and the young man, returning with some conveyance, should find him gone.
With this thought in his mind he took a few steps down the slope of the hill in the direction he fancied the ploughland to commence. But the miserable bleating of the wretched sheep, apparently realizing its desertion, brought him to a standstill. No! He could not leave it there — even to meet the messenger who brought the deciding of his fate.
Hurrying back to where the creature lay, he stood regarding it, uttering once more a wild chuckling laugh.
The fever in his veins was running high by this time, giving him an unnatural strength. His one instinct was to convey this animal to some sort of shelter, if it were only the inadequate shelter of that hawthorn hedge! Once there, if Canyot came with some kind of conveyance, both himself and the sheep could be rescued together.
If Canyot came!
On Canyot’s appearance, with the message he brought, everything in the world at that moment seemed to depend.
‘Nelly, my darling!’ These words seemed to the man who uttered them aloud into the wind and rain, to issue from some other being than himself — some stronger, braver, nobler being at whose imperious bidding the shivering exhausted wretch who called himself Richard was now compelled to act.
He bent down, and after two or three hopeless struggles he succeeded in getting the sheep upon his back, its belly round his neck and its feet held tightly in both his hands.
Burdened thus, and swaying under the creature’s weight, he staggered down the slope in the direction in which he supposed the hawthorn hedge to lie.
As he went, with the rain whirling round him as if the darkness itself were one great river of water, all manner of strange ideas passed through his mind. It seemed to him as though he were carrying on his back the burden of his great unfinished poem, the poem which he had so often changed in character — and which had now taken the form of a sheep!
Then it seemed to him as if he were arguing with Nelly’s father about the existence of God. It seemed as though God too, like his poetry, had turned into a heavy woolly sheep that bleated pitifully into his ear.
Then he suddenly, thought of Karmakoff the Russian; and he imagined himself putting the question to him as to whether they would have slaughter houses in an ideal state!
And he thought of Elise dancing, dancing on the edge of a great grey sea swept by hurricanes of rain …
He knew he must be getting near the hedge, because of the feel of ploughed-up land under his feet. It was just then that he stumbled and bent low under the weight he carried and something seemed to snap in his heart.
After that he saw nothing at all — nothing but darkness, dense black rainy darkness, that seemed full of bleating cries, cries, that called upon him for help.
‘All right! It’s all right!’ Was it he who uttered those words?
Something pricked his face. The hedge! The hedge!