Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

The move left Gregory standing alone. His happy expression disappeared. For a moment Newman felt sorry for Gregory, who now looked quite forlorn. And yet, thought Newman, I cannot find the old, old man of Dingley Dell if this Outlander boy is to be tagging along at my side. I must choose a place to slip away and I must keep long enough to myself so that the hard-looking man will not know where I’ve gone.

However, Gregory would not be so easily dismissed: “Hey!” he called. “Come back over here ! I want to shew you the monkey pen I got at the Bronx Zoo!”

“Anon!” Newman called back, though he couldn’t be certain that he’d been heard over the echoing babble of the other children. In the next instant, Newman felt the presence of someone standing next to him. He raised his eyes to behold the face of another of the employees of Clive and Clare’s Reptilarium: a young woman with blond hair and a pretty smile.

Thinking quickly, Newman said to the woman, “My stomach hurts. I must go to the privy. Pray, could you direct me to the nearest privy?”

The woman, who seemed for a moment slightly confounded by Newman’s Dinglian manner of address (including his previous use of the Dinglian “anon!” for “just a moment!”), collected herself and replied, “The restrooms are around that corner and down the hall. Hurry, though. The tour’s about to start.”

Newman thanked the young woman with a cordial nod and followed her directions. Although seeking directions to the privy was merely the expedient by which Newman could absent himself from this room, there seemed no good reason for why his search for the old Dinglian man should not begin in this very place of hasty resort, and though he was a boy, he nonetheless pushed open the swinging door upon which had been stenciled the word men.

The room for men was brightly lit and there were fixtures inside not that dissimilar to those he had seen and used in the house where he had lived alone for a week and in the Ryersbach house as well. But there were also ceramic bowls mounted low upon one wall, which were unfamiliar to him, and a rounded ceramic box upon the wall with a circular mesh upon it.

“Halloa, halloa! Is there an old man in here?” Newman asked the room. The empty room gave back its silent reply.

Newman let out a young boy’s singsong groan of disappointment. He went to one of the mirrors that had been set into the wall above what appeared to be rectangular hand-laving washbowls. He studied his reflection in the bright electrical lighting. He did not look well: his face was pale and pasty beneath a thin crust of dirt. His hair was stringy and matted. There was a swelling and a redness to his eyes that made him look as if he had long been crying.

“You look as if you’ve climbed out of a cave,” said Newman to the reflected image of himself in the modern looking glass. “I don’t know why someone doesn’t take you and put you away with all the jungle animals out there, for you’re not fit in your present state to live in this world.” Newman, who had known despondency at other moments since he had embarked upon this adventure, now found himself sliding into the deepest trough of despair he had yet to experience. “You’re doomed,” he said to the reflection of himself. “They’ll find you and kill you, just as the nurse had said they would. You should have gone with her. She had a kind face. She wasn’t a witch at all.”

At just that moment the door swung silently open and a young man entered the lavatory. He wore the employee uniform of Clive and Clare’s Reptilarium, with that name and his own name, Roy, stitched upon the shirt pocket. He greeted Newman with a humming smile and went to stand before one of the other mirrors where he picked at his teeth a little with a fingernail.

Suddenly, he turned to Newman and said, “Look at what I have.” He put his hand under the spigot of water, turned the knob with his other hand and drenched the first hand with water. Then he inserted the dripping hand into his pocket and extracted a small animal using his finger and thumb. It was an amphibious creature of some sort, which wriggled its short legs and darted its head back and forth in the bright light.

“It’s a newt,” said the man named Roy. “Can you guess his name?”

“If I had a newt,” replied Newman, “I should name him Newton.”

“Bingo! Great minds think alike,” said the man, pocketing his wet pet. “Are you with the school group out there? You’d better hurry up or they’ll leave you behind.”

“Thank you. I will,” said Newman, advancing in small hesitant steps to the door.

“But—” Newman drew a deep breath, for what followed was a bold gambit on his part and it required momentary steeling. “But may I ask you, Mr. — um — Roy, if there is an old man here in this animal place — a very old man who comes from a place called Dingley Dell?”

“Dingley Dell?”

“Yes.”

The young man considered the query for a moment. “Hmm. There’s nobody by that description on the payroll here, but one of our volunteers— hey you know… ” Roy scratched his head. “I think he’s here to-day — Mr. Rugg. He’s a snake handler. Mr. Peller lets him come in and help with the snakes, but only the non-venomous ones. He’s old, you see, and one slip of a shaky hand — well, there’s a big, fat lawsuit.”

“He handles snakes?”

“That’s right. And he’s also a weirdo. A real, you know, kook .”

“A kook?”

“Uh oh. He’s not your grandfather or anything, is he?”

Newman shook his head. “Why do you call him a weirdo and a kook?”

“Well, most snake handlers are religious nutcases. Goes with the territory. Something in the Bible having to do with ‘taking up snakes.’ But maybe it isn’t a religious thing with him at all. Maybe he just likes to play with snakes. Weird, okay? But, like, who am I to talk? I carry a pet newt around in my pocket. But no, Rugg’s been a part of the family around here for, like, years. Everybody’s used to him, and of course Mr. Peller — that’s Clive to you — he really likes him. How do you know the old man?”

“I don’t. But I want to meet him. I want to hear him talk about Dingley Dell.”

The man nodded and half-smiled. “Right. Dingley Dell. He does talk about that place every now and then, come to think of it. It’s a made-up place, you know. It’s all — you know—” The man named Roy now spun his index finger in little circles round his ear in a gesture that Newman assumed had something to do with having queer fancies.

Seconds later the door opened. Into the bright lavatory room stepped the man from the omnibus who had looked at Newman in such a disconcerting way.

“There you are,” said the man to Newman in a very casual tone. The relaxed way in which the words were delivered could easily serve to make one — in this case, Roy — think that he was on familiar terms with Newman. “Everyone’s been waiting on you, Newman,” the man continued in his artificially cheerful manner, “but I told them to go on ahead, so that you and I could talk.” The man turned to the young employee of Clive and Clare’s Reptilarium. Now he frowned. “Newman did a bad thing, didn’t you, Newman? Newman has forfeited his chance to see the giant turtles.”

“They’re called tortoises ,” corrected Roy, bristling a bit at the mis-denomination. “ Aldabra tortoises from the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles. What bad thing did Newman do?”

“He can tell you,” said the man. “Tell him, Newman. Tell Roy here what you did to lose your field trip privileges to-day.”

Newman was too frightened to speak. He was too frightened even to shrug his shoulders. He knows my name , thought Newman. The man knows who I am.