Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du mal.
AS HENRY LAMSON looked from the gate of his brother’s farm on the outskirts of Pire he noticed that someone was walking along the lane in his direction. Although it did nothing to disconcert him at the time, he did wonder, as he bid farewell to the silhouetted figures in the doorway, before setting off for his bus stop, why someone should have been coming back from the moors at this time of the night, especially when it had been pouring down with rain all day.
Shrugging his shoulders, Lamson pulled his raincoat collar up high about his neck against the drizzle and picked his way as carefully as he could between the puddles in the deeply rutted lane. He wished now, as his feet sank in the half hidden mud, that he had thought to bring a torch with him when he came on his visit, since the moon, though full, only faintly showed through the clouds, and the lane was for the most part in shadow.
Engrossed as he was in finding a reasonably dry route along the lane, he did not notice until a few minutes later, when the lights of his brother’s farm had disappeared beyond the hedgerow, that the figure he had seen was nearing him quickly. Already he could hear his footsteps along the lane.
Petulantly pausing to disentangle a snapped thorn branch that had caught on his trouser leg, he turned to watch the hunched figure hobbling towards him. A threadbare overcoat of an indeterminate colour swayed from about his body. In one hand he grasped a worn flat cap, while the other was thrust in his overcoat pocket for warmth.
When he finally succeeded in freeing himself of the twig, Lamson made to continue on his way; the man was obviously nothing more than a tramp, and an old one at that. As he started off, though, he heard him call out in a cracked bellow that rose and died in one breath:
‘’Arf a mo’ there!’
Irritated already at the drizzle that was soaking inexorably through his coat, Lamson sighed impatiently. As the tramp hurried towards him through the gloom, he slowly made out his bristly, coarse and wrinkled face, whose dirt-grained contours were glossy with rain.
The old man stumbled to a halt and raucously coughed a volley of phlegm on the ground. The pale grey slime merged in with the mud. Lamson watched him wipe his dribbling mouth with the top of his cap. Disgusted at the spectacle, Lamson asked him what was the matter.
‘Are you feeling ill?’ He hoped that he wasn’t. The last thing he wanted was to be burdened with someone like this.
‘Ill?’ The old man laughed smugly. ‘Ne’er ’ad a day’s illness in my life. Ne’er!’
He coughed and spat more phlegm on the ground. Lamson looked away from it.
Perhaps mistaking the reason for this action, the tramp said: ‘But I don’t want to ’old you up. I’ll walk alon’ with you, if you don’t mind me doin’. That’s all I called you for. It’s a lonely place to be by yoursel’. Too lonely, eh?’
Lamson was uncertain as to whether this was a question or not. Relieved that the man was at least not against continuing down the lane, he nodded curtly and set off, the old man beside him.
‘A raw night, to be sure,’ the old man said, with a throaty chuckle.
Lamson felt a wave of revulsion sweep over him as he glanced at the old man’s face in the glimmering light of one of the few lampposts by the lane. He had never before seen anyone whose flesh gave off such an unnatural look of roughness. Batrachian in some indefinable way, with thick and flaccid lips, a squat nose and deeply sunken eyes, he had the appearance of almost complete depravity. Lamson stared at the seemingly scaly knuckles of his one bare hand.
‘Have you come far?’ Lamson asked.
‘Far?’ The man considered the word reflectively. ‘Not really far, I s’ppose,’ he conceded, with a further humourless chuckle. ‘And you,’ he asked in return, ‘are you goin’ far, or just into Pire?’
Lamson laughed. ‘Not walking, I’m not. Just on to the bus stop at the end of the lane, where I should just about catch the seven fifty-five for the centre.’ He looked across at a distant farm amidst the hills about Pire; its tiny windows stood out in the blackness like feeble fireflies through the intervening miles of rain. He glanced at his watch. Another eight minutes and his bus would be due. As he looked up, Lamson was relieved to see the hedgerow end, giving way at a junction to the tarmac road that ran up along the edge of the moors from Fenley. The bus shelter stood beside a dry-stone wall, cemented by Nature with tangled tussocks of grass. Downhill, between the walls and lines of trees, were the pinpointed lines of streetlights etched across the valley floor. It was an infallibly awe-inspiring sight, and Lamson felt as if he had passed through the sullen voids of Perdition and regained Life once more.
On reaching the shelter he stepped beneath its corrugated roof out of the rain. Turning round as he nudged a half empty carton of chips to one side he saw that the man was still beside him.
‘Are you going into Pire as well,’ Lamson asked. He tried, not too successfully, to keep his real feelings out of his voice. Not only did he find the tramp’s company in itself distasteful, but there was a foetid smell around him which was reminiscent in some way of sweat and of seaweed rotting on a stagnant beach. It was disturbing in that it brought thoughts, or half thoughts, of an unpleasant type to his mind. Apparently unaware of the effect he was having on Lamson, the tramp was preoccupied in staring back at the moors. Willows and shrubs were thrown back and forth in the gusts, intensifying his feelings of loneliness about the place.
Finally replying to Lamson’s inquiry, the tramp said:
‘There’s nowhere else a body can go, is there? I’ve got to sleep. An’ I can’t sleep out in this.’ His flat, bristly, toad-like head turned round. There was a dim yellow light in his eyes. ‘I’ll find a doss somewhere.’
Lamson looked back to see if the bus was in sight, though there were another four minutes to go yet before it was due. The empty expanse of wet tarmac looked peculiarly lonely in the jaundiced light of the sodium lamps along the road.
Fidgeting nervously beside him, the old man seemed to have lost what equanimity he’d had before. Every movement he made seemed to cry out the desire to be on his way once more. It was as if he was morbidly afraid of something on the moors behind him. Lamson was bewildered. What could there be on the moors to worry him? Yet, whether there was really something there for him to worry about or not, there was no mistaking the relief which he showed when they at last heard the whining roar of the double-decker from Fenley turning the last bend in the slope uphill, its headlights silhouetting the bristling shrubs along the road and glistening the droplets of rain. A moment later it drew up before them, comfortingly bright against the ice-grey hills and sky. Climbing on board, Lamson sat down beside the nearest window, rubbing a circle in the misted glass to look outside.
The tramp slumped down beside him.
He was dismayed when, in the smoke-staled air, the smell around the old man became even more noticeable than before, whilst his cold, damp body seemed to cut him off from the warmth he had welcomed on boarding the bus.
Apparently unconcerned by such matters, the tramp grinned sagaciously, saying that it was good to be moving once more. His spirits were blatantly rising and he ceased looking back at the moors after a couple of minutes, seemingly satisfied.