Bevis: The Story of a Boy
Page 94
Jupiter, and to record theprecise time by pressing a lever. One presses the lever the hundredthof a second too soon, the second the hundredth of a second too late, thethird sometimes one and sometimes the other and sometimes is preciselyaccurate. The mean of these three gives the exact time. In shootingone man pulls the trigger a fraction too soon, another a fraction toolate, a third is uncertain. If you have been doing your best to shootwell, and after some years still fail, endeavour to discover your"personal equation," and by correcting that you may succeed much better.It is a common error and unsuspected, so is blinking--you may shoot foryears and never know that you blink.
Bevis's personal equation was a second too quick. In this, as ineverything, he dashed at it. His snipes were cut down as if you hadwhipped them over: his hares were mangled; his partridges smashed. Thedot was dead on them, and a volley of lead was poured in. The governorhad a difficulty to get him to give "law" enough.
He acquired the mechanical precision so perfectly that he becamecareless and shot gracelessly. The governor lectured him and hung hisgun up for a week as a check. By degrees he got into the easy quietstyle of finished shooting.
The two learned the better and the quicker because there were two. Thegovernor went through the same drill with Mark, motion for motion, wordfor word. Then when they were out in the field the one told the other,they compared their experiences, checked each other's faults, andcommended success. They learned the better and the quicker because theyhad no keeper to find everything for them, and warn them when to expecta hare, and when a bird. They had to find it for themselves like Pan.Finally, they learned the better because at first they shot at anythingthat took their fancy, a blackbird or a wood-pigeon, and were notrestricted to one class of bird with the same kind of motion every timeit was flushed.
Long before trusted with guns they had gathered from the conversationthey constantly heard around them to aim over a bird that flies straightaway because it usually rises gradually for some distance, and betweenthe ears of the running hare. If the hare came towards them they shotat the grass before his paws. A bird flying aslant away needs the sightto be put in front of it, the allowance increasing as the angleapproaches a right angle; till when a bird crosses, straight across, youmust allow a good piece, especially if he comes with the wind.
Two cautions the governor only gave them, one to be extremely careful ingetting through hedges that the muzzles of their guns pointed away, forbranches are most treacherous, and secondly never to put the forefingerinside the trigger-guard till in the act of lifting the gun to theshoulder.
For awhile their territory was limited as the governor, who shot withMark's, did not want the sport spoiled by these beginners. But asSeptember drew to a close, they could wander almost where they liked,and in October anywhere, on promise of not shooting pheasants shouldthey come across any.
Volume Three, Chapter XVII.
AMERICAN SNAP-SHOOTING.
Meantime they taught Big Jack to swim. He came down to look at the caveon New Formosa, and Frances so taunted and tormented him because theboys could swim and he could not, that at last the giant, as it were,heaved himself up for the effort, and rode down every morning. Bevisand Mark gave him lessons, and in a fortnight he could swim four or fivestrokes to the railings. Directly he had the stroke he got on rapidly,for those vast lungs of his, formed by the air of the hills, floated himas buoyantly as a balloon. So soon as ever he could swim, Francesturned round and tormented him because the boys had taught him and nothe the boys.
Bevis and Mark could not break off the habit of bathing every morning,and they continued to do so far into October, often walking with barefeet on the hoar-frost on the grass, and breaking the thin ice at theedge of the water by tapping it with their toes. The bath was now onlya plunge and out again, but it gave them a pleasant glow all day, andhardened them as the smith hardens iron.
Up at Jack's they tried again with his little rifle, and applying whatthey had learnt from the matchlock while shooting with ball, soon foundout the rifle's peculiarities. It only wanted to be understood andcoaxed like everything else. Then they could hit anything with it up tosixty yards. Beyond that the bullet, being beaten out of shape whendriven home by the ramrod, could not be depended upon. In October theycould shoot where they pleased on condition of sparing the pheasants fortheir governors. There were no preserved covers, but a few pheasantswandered away and came there. October was a beautiful month.
One morning Tom, the ploughboy, and some time bird-keeper, came to thedoor and asked to see them. "There be a pussy in the mound," he said,with the sly leer peculiar to those who bring information about game.He "knowed" there was a hare in the mound, and yet he could not havegiven any positive reason for it. He had not actually seen the hareenter the mound, nor found the run, nor the form, neither had he Pan'sintelligent nostrils, but he "knowed" it all the same.
Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception--supersensuousperception--that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty peoplemight have passed without the least suspicion. "Go into the kitchen,"said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features,for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to acheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.
Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and theywalked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at somedistance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had notyet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagernessfor sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, andthough the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter wasapproaching. They passed an oak growing out in the field.
Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the hoarytrunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which hadstiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. Hisdress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat hadlost all colour. He was hoary like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From hisface the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan ofseventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkledface like a withered oak leaf.
Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign ofrecognition; like a dead animal's, there was no light in them, the glazewas settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seenthem in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like ahuge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years"Jumps" had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (notfar from Jack's), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hillhe was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he wasdecaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his realname, corrupted to "Jumps;" as "Jumps" he had been known for twogenerations, and he would have answered to no other.
One day it happened that "Jumps" searching for dead sticks came alongunder the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. Hewatched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or twoafterwards opened his mouth about it. "Never seed nobody do thuckafore," he said, repeating it a score of times as his class do,impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so muchiteration to impress it on them. "Never saw any one do that before."
For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once goneout of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years noone till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim.Bevis's governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. Butof the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, notone had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since theNorman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonaltyforbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them.Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search avillage from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if youfound one now he would be something of a traveller and not ahome-staying man.
Tom, the plough
boy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the otherplough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook fardown the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water,running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with thesunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wishsome one would paint them, with the brimming brook, the willowspondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and buttercups, thedistant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this wasnot swimming. "Never saw any one do that before," said the man ofseventy harvests.
Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark passed that October morning.His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, hisknees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff andcrooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed asif he had been going as a beast of