§ 2
Bobby discovered that the village of Cummerdown lies nearly two miles away from the asylum, and does its best very successfully to have as little to do with it as possible. It nestles among trees just off the high-road to Ashford and Hastings, and has one cramped little inn that gave him a bleak bedroom and accommodated his machine and side-car in an open outhouse crowded with two carts and a Ford and populous with hens. The day was still young, and after he had deposited the elderly rucksac in which he had brought his “things” upstairs, he set out with a walking-stick and an air of detached interest to reconnoitre the asylum and develop his plans for the rescue of Sargon. That golden autumn was still holding out; the pleasant lane he followed to the high-road was patterned with green and yellow chestnut leaves and the trees overhead were full of sunshine. It was a reassuring day. It encouraged him. It took him with a kindly seriousness and made him feel that rescuing people from lunatic asylums was the sort of work the sun could shine upon and nature welcome.
It had needed a great effort to get down from London. He had felt then like a midget setting out to attack an embattled universe. Amidst the Croydon traffic he had been half-minded to go back, but he had felt that he could not face Tessy until he had been at least definitely defeated. It was delightful to note an increased assurance within himself as he drew nearer to his enterprise. He felt much more on the scale of the powers he attacked. After all, what were laws and regulations but just things patched up by men like himself? What were prison walls but the slow work of shirking bricklayers and evasive contractors? The attendants and custodians, the superintendents and so forth he was setting out to circumvent, were all as fallible as himself. And the thing was urgent and outrageous, this seizure of a harmless little fantastic, this frightful imprisonment. It had to be fought. The world would be intolerable unless such things were fought.
Queer world it was! Such beauty on these tree-stems, such a glow, and the delightfulness of rustling one’s feet through these leaves! But all that was by the way; the real business of life was to fight evil things.
He came out from between the trees and saw the wide downs opening out before him and the blocked masses of the asylum with its broad bare grounds and walls, an eyesore. This was his objective. In that place somewhere was Sargon, and he had to be released.
He seated himself on a convenient stile and inspected that heavy architecture and tried to frame a plan. That white building in the centre looked like a gaunt Georgian private house. That was probably the nucleus of the whole place. Two men were visible in front of it mowing the grass—patients perhaps. The wall and railings along the road looked implacable. Two stern-looking lodges there were, no doubt with a testy janitor lurking within, and there were iron gates—one open. A van was coming out, a furniture dealer’s van. For a time Bobby’s mind ran on the possibility of becoming a tradesman with parcels or a crate to deliver.... Many difficulties that way....
“But why a frontal attack?” said Bobby with an effect of discovery. The place fell away behind, down-hill. He would inspect the rear. If he worked round by the open down to the right, he would probably get on to slopes commanding a view of the asylum grounds.
An hour later Bobby was sitting on a heap of flints by the side of a minor road which ran over the rising ground behind the asylum. He found the rear of the place much more hopeful and much more interesting than the front. There were fields with a number of men working in them, and at one place near the buildings a row of men seemed to be digging a trench under the supervision of an attendant. There was quite a lot of movement closer to the buildings, under a sort of open shed half a dozen men seemed to be taking exercise by walking up and down. It vexed Bobby to think that any one of these figures might be his Sargon. If only he had the elementary common sense to bring a field-glass, he reproached himself, he might have been able to make out his little friend’s features. “No clearness of thought,” he whispered. “No decision.” A lot of these people seemed to be going about very freely, carrying gardening implements and so forth. One he noted, walking about and gesticulating as if he talked to himself; he was manifestly a patient and quite unattended.
The wall bounding the asylum on this side had none of the austerity of the front wall. It seemed to be an old estate wall; in several places it was covered with ivy and here and there it was overhung with trees. The ground dropped away to his right, there was a little stream which ran out of the asylum grounds at the lowest corner; the corner was shaded by trees and seemed to be left to the trees and undergrowth; the stream ran under a low arch in the wall and went on down a widening valley towards London. The seclusion and shade of this corner appealed to Bobby very strongly. It seemed to him exactly the point at which Sargon ought to be got out of the place. He decided that presently he would stroll down and examine its possibilities as precisely as possible. If one could get Sargon to come down there——
He found the details difficult. He meant to have a plan worked out in every detail and to communicate it to Sargon on the next visiting day, but it was very hard to fit this plan together. He did not know when it would be most convenient for Sargon to attempt to slip away, whether this was to be a daylight or a night affair. He saw before him a great vista of inquiries to be made and suspicious people to be faced. “Damn!” said Bobby, and for a time he was again for abandoning the attempt.
Why couldn’t one go in at these gates, boldly and overwhelmingly, and say, “There is a sane man here and I have come to set him free?” A superman might do that, or an archangel. How splendid it would be to be a sort of Archangel-Knight-Errant, a great flaming presence of light and winged power, righting wrongs, reproving oppressors, liberating every kind of captive creature. Then one might do things. Bobby lapsed into a childish day-dream.
Presently he roused himself, stood up and went down towards the exit of the stream. The wall struck him as quite climbable—even by a little old gentleman. The stream came out meandering among pebbles through a short tunnel. One could have got into the asylum grounds or out of them quite easily over the wall by the ivy or through the culvert. He resolved to come again at twilight and—just to satisfy himself about his own pluck among other things—get into the asylum premises and walk about a little.
Yes. He would do that.
He tried to imagine himself assisting Sargon over the wall. One could get on the top of the wall and reach down to his hands. A cripple could do it. The motor bicycle would have to be waiting up there in the lane. And then? Where would he take him?
This was a new consideration. For a time Bobby’s mind was appalled and paralyzed by the complexities of his enterprise. He had not thought of taking him anywhere in particular.
The days that intervened before visiting day seemed at once interminable and frightfully swift. He had been to Dymchurch in the summer with the Malmesburys, and liked the landlady of his lodgings very much; he wired to her “Can I come with a relation not ill but overworked for week or so you will remember me last summer Roothing the Feathers Cummerdown” and had got a reply, “Glad to see you any time.” So that was all right. But the rest of the plan failed very largely to materialize. He made his nocturnal visit to the asylum grounds without misadventure.
The morning of visiting day found him with half a dozen plans, and they all had gaps and none seemed much better or worse than the others. And he had walked round the asylum grounds at various discreet distances, by night and day just twenty-three times, not counting loops, returns and visits to particular points of interest. Fortunately asylums are much preoccupied with their internal affairs, and do not keep look-out men upon the battlements. They do not reckon with rescuers from outside.
Bobby made his final decision among these conflicting projects over his breakfast bacon. With a resolute sang-froid and his nerves all a-tingle, he set out for the asylum to see Sargon and begin the work of rescue as he had thought it out. First he had to find out what freedom of movement was permitted Sargon, when it might be possible for him to get away to the corner by the culvert, and he had to arrange a time for that meeting. Then he would have to provide also for alternative times if Sargon failed to keep his first appointment. Bobby would be waiting under the wall and the motor bicycle and side-car would be hidden among the bushes up by the road. In a trice Sargon would be over the wall. After that they could laugh at pursuit. Off they would go to Dymchurch, and there, safe and untrackable, Sargon would keep indoors until the fifteen days needed to make him legally a sane man again had passed. And then Bobby could find out those relations of his and talk the matter over with them, and get things on a proper footing. So Bobby planned it out.
Just at the lodge gates he decided upon an assumed name. He wasn’t quite clear why he didn’t give his own name, but an assumed name seemed to him to be more in the spirit of the adventure.