The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  He could not, on the few occasions when he had (almost impiously, it seemed) tried to formulate some ideas upon it, he could not even put any name to its nature, but today he was more certain than ever of its imminence. It would happen to him without any doing on his part: it was at once desirable and terrible.

  The existence of this more real life did not prevent him – never had prevented him – from living at his common level: this very afternoon he had felt a strong inclination to decline the brown holland bag that his aunt had lovingly made him for his cartridges, as a surprise; and he had been ashamed of the appearance of his gun among the lovely hammerless ejectors carried by the other guests. However, he had neither put the cloth bag down nor concealed it in his pocket, and as a penance for these impulses he had worn it until he had forgotten it. Nowadays he forgot things very quickly; even the excitement of this invitation to Langton and the near-certainty of a job on the estate, which had made such a flutter at home, had left him almost unmoved after half an hour, although but a few years ago it would have kept him in a turmoil, partly pleasant, but increasingly alarming as the day grew nearer: for Mr. Clifton’s Langton was a very grand place indeed, quite the grandest in a county full of big estates. His uncle and his three aunts (dear, kind people: he had lived in their celibate house nearly all his life) had always talked, interminably and vaguely, of great things for him; they had foreseen, foreseen. Entirely without influence themselves they attributed to it a mystic value. With significant, worldly nods they had approved his first boyish acquaintance with the children of the local magnates. ‘So suitable,’ they said to one another, pluming and settling in their upright armchairs. Few things had given them greater pleasure than the chance that made their nephew a friend of young Clifton: they had served in the same squadron, and in the short time before Clifton had been killed they had grown very much attached to one another. The invitation to shoot pigeons at Langton and the offer of some as yet undefined employment with the old agent were consequences of their friendship: the old aunts had seen it as an opening of long-closed doors.

  But all this was wonderfully remote now: Barringham and Langton seen through the wrong end of a telescope, wonderfully remote; the aunts and his uncle and the garden, little moving figures in the garden with no meaning, hardly names even. And the quiet flooded back into the wood, and his mind retreated, moved back and back and back. He sat bowed on the trestle, with his mouth open, with his eyes – wide, staring eyes – fixed on a knot: his gun lay across his knees, held inertly by a passive hand.

  There was so much quiet in the High Ash wood that even the bang of a gun away before him did not dispel it, nor the quick left and right behind. The creaking flutter of two wood-pigeons coming in to the dark pine just to the right of him pierced through to his mind, but it made no impression: the birds settled noisily, with the trunk between them and him. He was quite still, his breathing slow and shallow: his eyes did not move from the knot.

  The dusk gathered under the trees, dark pools where the peeling birch trunks showed white. They were having good sport along the edge of the wood, just inside the belt of pines, and the guns were going fast: the pigeons were moving continually up and down the long, dark tract, uneasily in flocks and swift single birds clipping fast to their night’s rest. They were filling the trees all around Grattan, heavy, fat birds that looked too big for the twigs they landed on, fat heavy wood-pigeons that walked, hopped, flapping among the twigs and branches to solid perches, and smaller stock-doves with them, many in the trees and many passing overhead.

  In some part of Grattan’s bowed head there was a picture of a pale, clear sky, quite clear above an unending floor of white cloud, and in the sky was an aeroplane falling and falling, falling for ever. It turned as it fell in its dying, broken fall, and each time it turned full to him he saw the Hackenkreuz on its wings. He went close to it, and he could see the German’s face, expressionless and closed. They were quite alone in the sky. Grattan watched impassively and said, He is not going to bail out. I think he cannot bail out.

  A trail of black smoke shot from the Messerschmitt before it plunged into the white floor of cloud, and the black plume stood, poised on a narrow foot that stayed momentarily firm in the sudden vortex of the swirling white, after the machine had disappeared; and he was saying aloud, While I live I shall never kill another living thing.

  But all this was only in the forefront of his mind; behind it he was withdrawn, and there was a very slow current of thought going on between the two: up there, above the cloud, he had known that he had been there before, knew just what the black smoke would look like over the billowing hole in the cumulus. The very words that he had said had had a used feeling and an accustomed sound: they had been formulated, like a prayer. Here, on the platform, he had known what it was going to be like. There was no box, of course; but the box had been there once. If he got up he would see the place where it had stood. But that was by the way: the déjà-vu, which had once made him so uneasy, was only a side issue, something that came at the same time as the withdrawal: all that mattered was what was coming.

  As he stirred unconsciously he made the legs of the trestle grate on the platform: now a fat wood-pigeon was staring and bending, peering at him with a round eye, bowing and staring like an alderman about to cross a road. The bird’s suspicions were confirmed, and it clattered out of the tree, followed by a cloud of others: the noise jerked Grattan into the living present, and he stood tense on the platform, with his gun ready to spring up. The light was almost gone: he could not see the tiny disturbed goldcrest that went Tzee tzee so loudly in a branch within his hand’s reach.

  A returning pigeon – some had not believed, and had only circled once – fluttered against the clear sky at the very top of a tree right before him. He had cocked his gun automatically as he stood; now he pulled both triggers, firing down into the dark shadows, and watched the horrified bird flash dodging away. The scent, delightful from old association, the scent of the powder came up as he broke the gun and dropped the smoking empty shells on the stand, stopping them from rolling off with his foot. Then he fired another two barrels, and did the same: That should do for the keeper, he said, and sat down again.

  Again the quiet came back, the curtain dropped fast, and now his mind was glowing with active suspense: it even invaded his body: his heart beat and his stomach was constrained just as it had been with him and he a young boy in his first love. Now it was here, here and coming on him.

  He stood up slowly, with his gun hanging open in his right hand and his left hand wavering to his lips.

  But it did not come. There was only the soft wind and the far-off voice of old Mr. Clifton: ‘Grattan, we’re going along now.’ The words drawn out, calling to carry, and the lights and the gentle whine of the car, that died to a throb.

  He made no reply, but turned in the darkness.

  The Passeur

  BEHIND THE TOWN there was a hill, behind the hill a mountain range; behind the range another range, behind that range an ancient wood, and in that wood there was a man.

  The little rosy town, tight like a swarm of bees, with its roofs touching everywhere and not a foot of ground to be seen from above except in the great drum of the bull-ring, all this and the brilliant sea, the pure curve of the harbour and the row of fishing boats, has been described so often that there is nothing new to say.

  The hill – the hills – behind, these too are so well known: the terraced vines, black gnarled points on a contoured, modelled chocolate pattern, a green blush, a blue-green incipient flood when they are sprayed, a full green solid mass, then gold and crimson on the hills according to the season: the olives and the pines: the gardens, flat with rigid squares wherever there are streams – the gardens with their peach trees and their apricots in the beds of green; trees like trees in samplers or on stocking legs, neat, trim, precise – these too are full of people and well known. Beyond the utmost limit of the vines, the garrigues covered with cistus and myrtle a
nd Spanish broom, false lavender and asphodel, carpeted with thyme, dry, arid, wrecked by goats; here still there are people: the garrigues are known, known as well as the cork-oak groves that stand so nobly on the higher ground, crimson-lake when the cork has left their trunks. The trees are orderly, arranged in quincunxes and numbered in white paint: men are there, if it is only twice in a year. Even beyond them, in the barren country, a few parched farmhouses keep their hordes of goats and walk them on the nearer mountain range: and that is not the end, for on the mountain live the cattle, belled but savage, and they wander free, bulls, cows and heifers, steers and calves, the whole crest of the nearer range is theirs, and the other side to the very edge of the unknown country.

  This country starts with the second mountain range. The two are separated by a scorched and naked valley, wide and deep with sides that sheer abruptly into overhanging crags: for here the rock is granite. The harsh, crumbling micaceous schists are left behind, and with them that acid, chemical, volcanic sterility that brings to mind a slag heap, the poisoned wasteland of an industrial town. With the change of rock comes a change in vegetation; it is much richer, far more gracious. It is a country of forest trees except on the higher land where, when even the low holly and the dwarf juniper can no longer hold out against the wind, there is sweet turf like a lawn, covered with flowers. You would gasp to see them in an alpine garden, but here they are in such profusion that you cannot walk without treading on them; and then, wherever the gray and lichened rock shows through, or where the huge boulders stand uncovered, everywhere there are saxifrages crowding, cushions of delicate pink flowers, tight rows encrusting the gentle rock where they can hold a footing.

  Here, in this intervening valley, there were no trees, however: the whole of it had been ravaged by a fire that burnt not only the undergrowth, the trees and every living thing that moved, but even the earth itself, searing it to the bare rock: and so it remains. The prevailing wind, the tramontane, swept over the distant ridge for all the days of the fire, and preserved the farther trees – prevented the fire from crossing the mountain. The forest reaches the top, therefore, and can be seen between the naked peaks, just overlapping into view.

  The ravaged valley must be crossed: hours of break-neck scrambling and sliding down; a long traverse over the bottom; hours and hours of climbing up the other side. There is nothing but charred wood and ruin: a few blackened trees still stand, and where there is some trace of fertility left in the soil, there are blue thistles. Some wandering birds are there, that hurry through, and a few large green lizards; nothing else. But at the crest suddenly the new country shows itself and unfolds in a series of high, cut-off, unsystematic valleys, with the forest spread over all of them and running up and over all the peaks and ridges except the highest. It runs on and on, a dark green that smooths all angularities, on and away until the trees appear no larger than the smallest bushes seen from a distance; and in the end, before they are lost behind the higher mountains, they might be no more than a crop of darker grass, so uniform they are, and so united.

  Once across the ridge you cannot look back and see the sea any more: it is the unknown country, and everything behind and known is cut off. There are trees before you, and on each side trees: and already you are among the first of the trees. This is the wood.

  The man in the wood had crossed over the ridge that afternoon, bleeding from the thistles on his legs, striped with black where he had pushed through the rigid, scorched, dead trees, and choked with the black dust. On the ridge the trees stood wide on the turf – oak trees here – and he passed through them and down the slope, being swallowed by the wood almost before he realized that he was well in it.

  He made his way down, where the oaks were thick and smaller on the steep slope, low, almost bushes, down, across the brown stream, and up again through the tall trees to the first of the downland crests, where the high timber stopped, diminished to a border of strong hollies, and those to low, neat, prickly bushes, as trim as if they had been shorn. There were little silvered junipers on the clean turf, and flowers everywhere – tiny yellow rose-shaped flowers. He had stayed up there for half an hour, standing exposed on a certain rock, and then returning he had plunged into the trees again.

  He sat now on a slope above the stream, a little way inside the wood. Here it was beech wood, all beeches except for a few spindling hollies and one prodigious oak. The upper edge of the wood, with its belt of hollies and mixed lower trees was dark behind him, and in front the wood was gray.

  When first he had passed through the sunlight had dappled the ground, and in the stronger light the carpet of dead brown leaves – no undergrowth, but only leaves – had shown red and umber, and a lively green had filtered through. Now the shadow of the mountainside had swept across the wood: it was light still, but the night had never wholly left the wood and by the stream it gathered there again.

  It was not a deep, a thick, wood, obscure or hard to penetrate: far on each side of him the gray trunks rose solemn to an unseen burst of green, but its gray silence was quadrupled by the dead trees that stood; still stood, though dead. From the hump of moss on which he sat it seemed to him that half the company was dead: it was not so, but dead trees stood on every hand. Some lay, felled by the wind, and many were there, flayed white and blackened by the lightning blast. On the ground, covering it high in some places, the branches lay, some moldering to their last decay, some fresh, but all pale: in the living trees too there were dead branches, diseased limbs of their own or the arms of other trees which, falling, had caught and had not reached the ground, huge gaunt bones hung up in chains.

  It was a wood in as natural a state as it could be, for no one had cut it, planted or touched it: it was too far, too isolated by the rocks and precipices for the charcoal burners even. But to him it looked unnatural, a wan Golgotha of a wood.

  There were ancient trees that had died where they stood, and some had fallen, bringing down others: there were ancient trees that still lived, enormous slow eruptions that had been glorious but that now were three parts dead, massive limbs that towered up beyond the screen of leaves, dead and naked in the sea of green. There were very few young trees, and even those few were gray: everything was gray now, beneath the barrier of the leaves.

  At the bottom of the slope, far down, a cataract in the stream sent up a continuous noise that made the silence stronger. He sat there, wondering if he would ever hear the trees, and he sat comfortably on his moss-buried rock, quite relaxed, leaning his head back against the broad stone, slowly drawing in fresh strength (it had been a cruel journey). His mind wandered at large; but it did not wander far, not so far that it did not return with an instant spasm when there was a sound behind him.

  It was to his left, in the higher wood behind him. With his neck rigid he kept his head still; a movement is seen when stillness is not. And the sound was crossing behind him.

  There are sounds made in spite of an intention to make no sound: they are not like common noises. There are small sounds made by large things, and they are different: a blackbird scuffling in dead leaves may make more noise, but it is not the same.

  Now it was directly behind him: it must be nearly by the hollies, he said, with all his senses sharpened to the last degree, but strained backwards and his useless eyes unseeing. His mouth was half open, and his nostrils flared; he breathed, but very faintly.

  The noise stopped. He grew more rigid, and his right hand, poised above his knee, slowly clenched to. From the first second he had known that something was in presence: now it knew; and this was the crisis now.

  Then from the centre to the right, faster, and more quietly now: it was on his right side and his eyes, forced to the corner (but his head quite rigid still) pierced with all their force. The sound, now stronger, and his head jerked round; and there fleeting among the trees, the glimpse of a tall gray form, far bigger than the dog he feared.

  Breathing normally again, and easy now against his rock, he closed his mouth: t
he tension died all over his body.

  Cold: it was growing cold, and he gathered in his warmth, sitting closer, buttoned up his coat. With the creeping shadows the naked trunks stood barer still, with a light of their own under the darkening canopy.

  Now he was leaning forwards, waiting actively: it was nearly time. He caught it at once, the low far whistle away on the right hand: he was half up, and across his field of view the tall gray wolf ran back through the trees, headed, fast but unhurried, almost noiseless.

  The whistle again, and he answered; a clear, true whistle. A distant voice, well known, carried across on the silent air. ‘Aa-oo, aa-oo,’ and ‘Aa-oo, aa-oo,’ he answered.