Rogue Male

by Geoffrey Household

  After Rogue Male’s narrator experiences his transcendent moment of clarity, the denouement unfolds swiftly. His prohibition against taking human life is lifted when Quive-Smith and his henchman kill the cat Asmodeus for sport and throw the body down the ventilator hole. Now that the rules of honor have been flagrantly breached, murder can be legitimized as an act of war. From the hide of his animal comrade he fashions a lethal sling-shot as his instrument of vengeance, and once this score has been settled he will decide to take on his original quarry once more and do the job properly. Offsetting this announced return to almost certain death is the good-humored in-joke with readers that closes Rogue Male (further proof, if needed, that Household himself is a member in good standing of Class X): the narrator appends a letter to his chronicle instructing his solicitor to have it “brushed up by some competent hack and marketed in his name.”

  Robert MacFarlane rightly dubs Household the heir of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, but the scale, I think, must be tipped in favor of the egalitarian Stevenson. Buchan’s Richard Hannay is a bluff South African colonial who is patriotic in a way Household would have found highly unattractive. Household’s Englishman “with no national prejudices” is a thoughtful man of action, ethical in a way hard to codify in an imperial rulebook, democratic in a way no Boer could stomach, and frankly sensual in a way no Buchan hero ever dreamed of. Household himself cites Defoe as a prime influence on his writings, and Rogue Male is indeed a kind of inland Robinson Crusoe complete with feline Friday. The limpid style and vivid intensity of the physical descriptions compare favorably with the Old English—cadenced prose of Pincher Martin, William Golding’s saga of a self-deceived Robinson Crusoe marooned on a North Atlantic island of his own invention. Household’s topographic passion for the English countryside, the loving poetic accuracy of his landscapes, replete with marvelous throwaway observations (on, for example, the “gaiety of the insect world”), holds more than a few echoes of Thomas Hardy. His confessed preference for the picaresque adds the “Latinised” flavor of the land of Lazarillo de Tormes to his very English narratives. Taking a far more radical position than his near contemporaries Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene in their tales of “abroad,” finally, Household displays a rare identification with the non-English “Other” that anticipates the cosmopolitan postcolonial sensibility of the twenty-first century.

  One suspects that Geoffrey Household, were he alive today, would be delighted by new DNA research suggesting that those of Her Majesty’s citizens whose ancestors were long-term inhabitants of the British Isles are far more genetically homogenous (forget Viking, Celt, Saxon, Norman!) than previously thought. He would be even more delighted by the likelihood that most of these people, himself included, descend from a single population of Paleolithic hunters who migrated north from the Iberian peninsula some 16,000 years ago—back in those far-off days “when men could simply walk from France, following game,” in the nostalgic words of a character in The Courtesy of Death—speaking a language, for the best and final touch, very much like that still current among his beloved Basques.* And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some future spelunker in the Mendips, taking a cue from this twentieth-century romancer, will uncover a cave painting or two that brings to life again, across three hundred generations, the timeless dance of Hunter and Hunted in Household’s native land.

  —VICTORIA NELSON

  *Granta, “The Wild Places,” September 2007.

  *In Against the Wind, Household notes significantly that his own sentiment toward Nazi Germany “had the savagery of a personal vendetta.”

  *In some respects, the predators in this novel resemble the worst sort of humans, including the Nazis in Rogue Male; they kill their own kind and kill for the pleasure of killing, acts that violate a kind of trans-species Class X code of honor.

  *Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story, quoted in Nicholas Wade, “English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest,” The New York Times, March 5, 2007.

  ROGUE MALE

  To Ben

  who knows what it feels like

  ‘The behaviour of a rogue may fairly be described as individual, separation from its fellows appearing to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts, exasperated by chronic pain or widowerhood, are occasionally found among all the larger carnivores and graminivores, and are generally male, though, in the case of hippopotami, the wanton viciousness of old cows is not to be disregarded.’

  I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear; so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. And they behaved, I think, with discretion. I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics; I might perhaps have sat for an agricultural constituency in the south of England, but that hardly counts as politics. I carried a British passport, and if I had been caught walking up to the House instead of watching it I should probably have been asked to lunch. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in an afternoon.

  They must have wondered whether I had been employed on, as it were, an official mission; but I think they turned that suspicion down. No government—least of all ours—encourages assassination. Or was I a free-lance? That must have seemed very unlikely; anyone can see that I am not the type of avenging angel. Was I, then, innocent of any criminal intent, and exactly what I claimed to be—a sportsman who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible?

  After two or three hours of their questions I could see I had them shaken. They didn’t believe me, though they were beginning to understand that a bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game might well find a perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth. But even if my explanation were true and the hunt were purely formal, it made no difference. I couldn’t be allowed to live.

  By that time I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless. I wasn’t a case you could turn loose with apologies. They would probably have given me a picturesque funeral, with huntsmen firing volleys and sounding horns, with all the big-wigs present in fancy dress, and put up a stone obelisk to the memory of a brother sportsman. They do those things well.

  As it was, they bungled the job. They took me to the edge of a cliff and put me over, all but my hands. That was cunning. Scrabbling at the rough rock would have accounted—near enough—for the state of my fingers when I was found. I did hang on, of course; for how long I don’t know. I cannot see why I wasn’t glad to die, seeing that I hadn’t a hope of living and the quicker the end the less the suffering. But I was not glad. One always hopes—if a clinging to life can be called hope. I am not too civilized to be influenced by that force which makes a rabbit run when a stoat is after him. The rabbit doesn’t hope for anything, I take it. His mind has no conception of the future. But he runs. And so I hung on till I dropped.

  I was doubtful whether I had died or not. I have always believed that consciousness remains after physical death (though I have no opinion on how long it lasts), so I thought I was probably dead. I had been such a hell of a time falling; it didn’t seem reasonable that I could be alive. And there had been a terrifying instant of pain. I felt as if the back of my thighs and rump had been shorn off, pulled off, scraped off—off, however done. I had parted, obviously and irrevocably, with a lot of my living matter.

  My second thought was a longing for death, for it was revolting to imagine myself still alive and of the consistency of mud. There was a pulped substance all around me, in the midst of which I carried on my absurd consciousness. I had supposed that this bog was me; it tasted of blood. Then it occurred to me that this soft extension of my body might really be bog; that anything into which I fell would taste of blood.

  I had crashed into a patch of marsh; small, but deep
. Now, I think that I am alive—today, that is, for I still hesitate to describe myself as alive with any permanency—because I couldn’t see or feel how much damage had been dealt. It was dark, and I was quite numb. I hauled myself out by the tussocks of grass, a creature of mud, bandaged and hidden in mud. A slope of scree rose sharply from the marsh. I had evidently grazed it in my fall. I didn’t feel the pain any longer. I could persuade myself that I was no more seriously hurt than when they put me over the cliff; so I determined to move off before they came to find my body.

  I had, though I didn’t then know it, a good deal of time to play with; they hadn’t any intention of finding my body until it was stiff and there were independent witnesses with them. The unfortunate brother sportsman would be accidentally discovered with his corpse undisturbed, and the whole history of his fate perfectly plain on the nasty sloping rock from which he had slipped.

  The country at the foot of the cliff was open woodland. I remember nothing except that there were thin shadows and thick shadows. The image in my mind is so vague that they might have been coverts or clouds or waves of the sea. I walked about a mile, I suppose, and chose a thick darkness to faint in. I came to a sort of consciousness several times during the night, but let it slide away. I wasn’t returning to this difficult world till dawn.

  When it was light, I tried to stand on my feet, but of course I couldn’t. I made no second effort. Any movement of the muscles interfered with my nice cake of mud. Whenever a crust fell off I started to bleed. No, I certainly wasn’t interfering with the mud.

  I knew where there was water. I had never seen that stream, and my certainty of its direction may have been due to a subconscious memory of the map. But I knew where water was, and I made for it. I travelled on my belly, using my elbows for legs and leaving a track behind me like that of a wounded crocodile, all slime and blood. I wasn’t going into the stream—I wouldn’t have washed off that mud for anything in the world; for all I knew, my bowels were only held in by mud—but I was going to the edge.

  This was the reasoning of a hunted beast; or rather, it was not reasoning at all. I don’t know whether a sedentary townsman’s mind would have worked the same way. I think it would, if he had been badly enough hurt. You must be badly hurt to reach the stage of extinction where you stop thinking what you ought to do, and merely do it.

  I made the trail look as if I had taken to the stream. I crawled to the edge and drank, and turned myself round in a shallow, a safe two inches deep, where the signs of my wallowing would be washed out. They could track me to the cover where I had lain up for the night, and from there to the water. Where I had gone when I left the water they would have to guess.

  Myself I had no doubt where I was going, and the decision must be credited to my useful ancestors. A deer would trot upstream or downstream and leave the water at some point that the hunter’s nose or eyes could determine. A monkey would do nothing of the sort; he would confuse his tracks and vanish into a third dimension.

  When I had turned round in the shallows, I wriggled back again—back and back along the damned snake’s track I had made. It was easy to follow; indeed it looked as definite as a country lane, for my face was only six inches above the ground. Thinking about it now, I wonder that they didn’t notice, when they followed me to the stream, that some of the grass was bent the wrong way and that I must have gone back on my tracks. But who the devil would think of that? There aren’t any laws on what print a man leaves when he’s dragging his belly—and on such a monster of a trail there was no apparent need to look for details.

  The outward journey had taken me under a stand of larch, where the earth was soft and free of undergrowth. I had brushed past the trunk of one tree which I now meant to climb. The lowest branch was within two feet of the ground; above that were another and another, sweet-smelling sooty branches as close together as the rungs of a ladder. The muscles of my hands were intact; I had gone beyond worrying about the state of surfaces.

  Until I was well above the level of a man’s eyes, I did not dare rest boots on branch; they would have left caked prints that no one could miss, I went up the first ten feet in a single burst, knowing that the longer I held on to a branch the less strength remained to reach the next. That half-minute was just a compelling of one hand above the other: two pistons shooting alternately from heaven knows what cylinder of force. My friends have sometimes accused me of taking pride in the maceration of my flesh. They are right. But I did not know that I could persuade myself to such agony as that climb.

  The rest was easier, for now I could let my feet bear my weight and pause as long as I wished before each hoist. My legs were not limp; they were immovable. That was no disadvantage. I couldn’t fall, wedged in as I was between the little branches of that prolific tree. When I climbed into the narrowing of the cone and the boughs were thicker and smaller and greener, I got jammed. That suited me well enough, so I fainted again. It was luxury, almost sin.

  When I became conscious, the tree was swaying in the light wind and smelling of peace. I felt deliciously secure, for I was not looking forward at all; I felt as if I were a parasite on the tree, grown to it. I was not in pain, not hungry, not thirsty, and I was safe. There was nothing in each passing moment of the present that could hurt me. I was dealing exclusively with the present. If I had looked forward I should have known despair, but for a hunted, resting mammal it is no more possible to experience despair than hope.

  It must have been the early afternoon when I heard the search-party. As they worked down the slope to the north of my tree I could watch them. The sun was in their eyes, and there was no risk of them spotting my face among the soft green feathers of the larch which I pushed aside. So far as I could tell, my legs were not bleeding; drops falling on the lower branches would be the only immediate sign of my presence. The slight bloodstains from my hands were there to be seen if anyone looked for them, but, on black boughs in the half-lit centre of a tree, not readily to be seen.

  Three uniformed police were trampling down the hillside: heavy, stolid fellows enjoying the sunshine and good-humouredly following a plain-clothes man who was ranging about on my trail like a dog they had taken for a walk. I recognized him. He was the House detective who had conducted the first part of my examination. He had proposed a really obscene method of dragging the truth out of me, and had actually started it when his colleagues protested. They had no objection to his technique, but they had the sense to see that it might be necessary for my corpse to be found and that it must not be found unreasonably mutilated.

  When they came nearer I could hear scraps of their conversation. The policemen were looking for me with decent anxiety. They knew nothing of the truth, and were in doubt whether I had been man or woman, and whether the case had been accident or attempted suicide. They had been notified, I gathered, that a cry or a fall was heard in the night; then, unobtrusively guided by the detective, they had found my knapsack and the disturbance in the patch of marsh. Of course I could not work out the situation at the time. I could only receive impressions. I was growing to my tree and aware of immense good nature as I listened to them. Later on, I made sense of their words.

  Seeing my reptilian trail disappear into the stand of larch, the House detective perked up and took command. He seemed certain that I should be found under the trees. He shouted to his three companions to run round to the other side in case I should escape, and himself crawled under the low boughs. He nearly gave the show away there, for I was supposed to be eagerly awaiting help; but he wanted to find me himself and alone. If I were alive, it was necessary to finish me off discreetly.

  He passed rapidly beneath my tree, and on into the open. I heard him curse when he discovered that I had not stopped in the wood. Then I heard their faint voices as they shouted to one another up and down the stream. That surprised me. I had thought of the stream, naturally, as a morning’s march away.

  I saw no more of the hunt. A few hours later there was a lot of splashing and ex
citement down by the water. They must have been dragging the pools for my body. The stream was a shallow mountain torrent, but quite fast enough to roll a man along with it until he was caught by rock or eddy.

  In the evening I heard dogs, and felt really frightened. I started to tremble, and knew pain again, aches and stabs and throbbings, all the symphony of pain, all my members fiddling away to the beat of my heart, on it or off it or half a bar behind. I had come back to life, thanks to that healing tree. The dogs might have found me, but their master, whoever he was, never gave them a chance. He wasn’t wasting time by putting them on a trail that he could follow himself; he was casting up and down the stream.

  When night fell I came down from my tree. I could stand, and, with the aid of two sticks, I could shuffle slowly forwards, flat-footed and stiff-legged. I could think, too. None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.

  I must try to make my behaviour intelligible. This confession—shall I call it?—is written to keep myself from brooding, to get down what happened in the order in which it happened. I am not content with myself. With this pencil and exercise-book I hope to find some clarity. I create a second self, a man of the past by whom the man of the present may be measured. Lest what I write should ever, by accident or intention, become public property, I will not mention who I am. My name is widely known. I have been frequently and unavoidably dishonoured by the banners and praises of the penny press.

  This shooting trip of mine started, I believe, innocently enough. Like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives. I dislike and disbelieve in cold-blooded planning, whether it be suggested of me or of anyone else. I remember asking myself when I packed the telescopic sight what the devil I wanted it for; but I just felt that it might come in handy.