The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  And then, as far as he could hear, there was no sound of voices from the house any more; he thought he might creep back very gently and see if he could get into the kitchen without being noticed. He got up from the grass, and walked as slowly as he could past the barn where the pigeons were clapping, under the ladder with his fingers crossed, into the yard towards the kitchen door. The voices had stopped. There was no sound at all from the house, except the buzzing of flies over the dog’s bone and a hen picking at a plate. The hen did not flutter as he passed it. He crossed out of the sunlight of the door into the dark coolness of the passage. Uncle Ben’s guns were gleaming on the wall. Then he crept into the low, warm room.

  It was very dark, and he could see no one in it at first. But a quick flash of white by the window showed Aunt Helen snatching up a newspaper and pretending to read it with a magnifying glass; and a deep breath from a corner by the fireplace showed Uncle Ben standing with heavy legs wide apart in the shadow, tapping his gaiters with his whip. His grey head, with the tawny, bald circle at the crown, nearly touched the beam. Aunt Helen’s face was sharp and red and glittering, and her white hair was pulled back tightly. She had thin, dark eyebrows. Her mouth was very long and low in her face. She looked as sly and quick as a lizard. The boy crept into a corner near the clock, but he was afraid to look at it. His heart was bumping loudly with fear of the stillness of the room.

  Aunt Helen broke the silence at last, and said in a high unnatural voice, but as though nothing at all had happened:

  “Here’s a terrible commotion in Hitton Wold. The doctor shot his wife dead with a rabbit gun and cut her up in pieces and hid them under the flagstones of the coal-cellar floor.”

  And the boy saw her tap the kitchen floor with her foot.

  Uncle Ben took no notice.

  “There’s a hue and cry,” said Aunt Helen.

  Uncle Ben merely stared at the rug.

  “They’ll get him,” she said.

  The boy listened greedily. Hue and cry, hue and cry—the words made a whistling in his head.

  “Eh, that’s a lesson for you,” said Aunt Helen, and turned quickly to the boy.

  “Everyone knew they had words all the time,” she said. “They had their suspicions, the neighbours had.”

  Uncle Ben stood a long time silent. There was a strong odour of goose roasting in the oven, and it was a long time before the boy heard Uncle Ben’s voice.

  “By gum, then, give thanks ye’ve no neighbours here,” he burst out suddenly. “I …” but he ceased.

  His violet eye went as small as a star and twinkled, but his glass eye stayed amazed as though he had seen some tragic, horrible sight, some appalling temptation, and the fine silky coils of hair in his red ears and his wide nostrils seemed electrified.

  Then suddenly he started to see the boy sitting on his stool. He stared hard at him, and the black lines of his face filled with light, and a spot of saliva that had come suddenly on his lips shone out. His face shuddered and his fingers struggled in his hands. He seemed to be fighting and throwing back an enemy. The boy’s grey eyes filled with tears because his uncle stared at him so. Then he saw Uncle Ben walk slowly across the room in a dazed way, and out into the hall. He heard him handling something there, taking something down from the walls, and when he walked slowly back again into the room with one of his guns in his hand, the boy curled his legs round the stool in terror. “Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill!” he longed for the courage to cry out, but his voice had dried up suddenly. Even Aunt Helen was watching Uncle Ben curiously over the edge of her newspaper.

  “Come here, will ye, boy,” said Uncle Ben thickly.

  “No, uncle,” the boy pleaded.

  “Come here,” he repeated and, very sternly, “I’m speaking to ye, boy.”

  “Go along,” said his aunt sharply; and, to soften it, “Pull up your stockings. Ye don’t want the policeman to get ye.”

  Uncle Ben commanded him in a great crumbling voice as though he were broken up inside. He towered above the boy, stuck out his chin and showed his teeth grimly.

  “The boy’d best learn his lesson, he had,” he said. “I don’t want a nephew of mine to be hanged up by a rope for aught in Hodbymoor gaol. That man once was a lad like you.”

  “Whist,” said Aunt Helen. “Now let the bairn be.”

  “I’m going to show him what that man did. He’s got his lesson t’learn, has t’lad,” Uncle Ben said, not taking his eyes from the boy, not looking at Aunt Helen. The child looked at the gun with a confused sense of importance and sickness.

  “Best learn his lesson. Thou shalt do no murder,” Uncle Ben said, but it was as though he were speaking to himself and not to the boy The boy saw this.

  “Now, you hold it like this. First, Ready! Then, Present. Heed the trigger. Eh? Now if I pull that one, off it goes and she’s a dead ’un. Fire … click; did ye mark it, boy. Ay, that’s it.”

  The child took the gun reluctantly from his uncle, but he could lift it only with difficulty. He was afraid of Uncle Ben’s violet eye, but he was even more afraid of the glass one, as though the bullet that had shot it was still buried there and was waiting to fly out.

  “Now, Ready … Present … that’s the way.”

  “Oh, Uncle, it’s—”

  “Fire! Ah, did you see?” exclaimed Uncle Ben. “She’s dead.” He was almost jovial.

  Then Aunt Helen went over to the range and knelt down to the oven and took out the frizzling goose to baste it. A change came over Uncle Ben’s face. The light went out of it, and it seemed heavy and dead. Never had he seemed so terrifying. Never had the veins on his head seemed so swollen and tangled, almost every hair of his cropped head as distinct as a spike. He looked as scarred and marked as a cliff that is resisting a storm. The only sound the boy heard that had not been as it were stunned into silence, was the gay rapid ticking of the cuckoo clock on its way to noon.

  “Whist, lad,” Uncle Ben said to the boy, with his fingers to his lips, indicating that he must not tell his aunt, whose back was turned, and, tiptoeing over to the dresser, he took a red cartridge out of the drawer. He loaded the gun and, chuckling, winked at the boy. But Uncle Ben was very white and excited, and his hand was shaking.

  “Can’t ye hold it? Don’t swing it about like that,” he said hoarsely.

  “I’m not,” said the boy, but Uncle Ben gave him a push so that he pointed it involuntarily to where Aunt Helen was.

  “Ready!” said Uncle Ben.

  “Present!” said Uncle Ben.

  Perspiration sprang out on his forehead.

  Terror sprang out of the earth into the boy, poured through him and came out of him with a shout: “N-no! Thou shalt not kill, Uncle! Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill! No, Uncle.”

  “Nay, silence, y’ little fool!” roared Uncle Ben. “I mean no harm.”

  But at this there was the buzz of a spring on the wall, the snap of a fretwork door, and out popped the cuckoo on the first note of twelve. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!! The boy started and swung round, knocked his uncle’s right elbow, and off went the gun. There was a breaking of glass, a shriek from Aunt Helen, who dropped a pan of gravy on the rug, a shout from Uncle Ben, a scream from the child. The cuckoo clock stopped and slid down the wall with a crash. The boy dropped the gun and stood screaming. Uncle Ben stumbled across the room to the clock.

  “God in heaven, the little fool! I’ll thrash him. The boy’s smashed your clock,” he shouted.

  But Aunt Helen was sitting on the carpet rocking to and fro and holding her hand to her heart.

  “Oh, you wicked old man! Oh, you wicked old man!” she was saying, very quietly and slowly, getting her breath. “God forgive you, you wicked old man!” And there was the basted goose crackling in the dish and the fat soaking into the rug.

  “No! No! No! Uncle,” the little boy was moaning, as though a rain of blows was striking him. He could not move from where he stood. Satan was coiling in his heart. The black adder was bo
ring its way inside him and creeping up to his throat until he choked and choked. “No, Uncle.”

  Then, he did not know when, a sudden pity calmed the house. It seemed to spring like fountain water into the air. His aunt was holding him with her cold hands, he seemed to be carried somewhere with the room and ceiling circling slowly around him as he moved. Aunt Helen laid him on a bed and went quietly away.

  “Oh, please God, don’t let them tell anyone I smashed the cuckoo,” he prayed.

  Early in the evening Aunt Helen came up the stairs. “There, there, there,” she said kindly, and her sharp eyes shone softly at him. “Never mind. We’ll get another cuckoo,” she said, “I’ll go into Kirby and buy another on Tuesday’s market. There, there, little lad.”

  He knelt on the bed and said his prayers on her neck, repeating the words after her. He felt the bareness of her chin, and her long, hard finger on his shoulders. Suddenly she held him at arm’s length and searched him curiously, straight in the face, as if to catch some thought unawares.

  “It was all naughty Uncle Ben’s fault. He was only having a game with us. You didn’t think he was going to shoot poor Auntie—not really, did you?”

  At last, when the darkness came, he slept. He dreamed he was walking in an orchard of cherry blossom, and the wind was blowing the blossom down. But as he stooped to pick it up it blew away from him like the surf of the sea till only one petal was left, and it became a little shrivelled-up dead cuckoo with all its feathers off.

  The Gnats

  Lunch is over. The unpeaceful rain has thinned away to nothing. At the first signs of sun I leave the ladies sitting on the terrace of the big house and wander about the desmesne. Heaven knows where my pestering cousin has gone; he took his gun and went out muttering as usual something about the damned women minding their own business. Shortly, I suppose, the butler will appear on the terrace like an ecclesiastic and will beat a nasal cathedral prayer out of the tea-gong. Well, tea is pleasant; I like the society of ladies; and for the last two hours I have been alone in a Paradise. I think this is the most beautiful and peaceful place on earth, and in it my spirit has risen above its troubled waters as that heron—there he is now!—rises out of this lake. The lake is a bland tree-smiling grace of water half out of sight of the house, sensitive to the quick insistences and events of the sky’s life. Over it the birds fly; out of the elms, the crows; out of the platooned beeches on the hills, the pigeons. Swans turn slowly like big lilies under the silver-haired willows. Noiseless rooks burgle the walnut trees and bear the nuts away, and a gap of sky too, between their beaks. Black ducks pelt upwards, necks outstretched, and seagulls have flown twenty miles inland because of the stormy seas outside. There is peace here, and after the rain the earth is spangled with life. Rats and rabbits drub about the paths of the desmesne. Squirrels bounce up the trees. Beyond the beeches there are deer rippling like the passage of brook water, barely visible in the thicket.

  An earthly paradise—except that the sun has brought the gnats out and they tune like a cloud of infinitesimal violins, stinging music about my neck, my forehead and my hands. Fleeing from them, my clumsy treading among the thickets and the reeds sends water-fowl splintering the water like glass. Any moment the gong may go.

  Damn! I hear my cousin’s voice from behind a rain-trampled fir-tree.

  “Hullo! Ssh!” he says. “I’m watching for that heron.”

  My heron that comes to feed on the lake! Excitable, murderous cousin! His angry feet crunch the wet gravel. Looking upwards—for he is a tall man and as thin as the gun itself—I see the barrels of his sloped gun, his bony hands with the red hairs picked out on them, his patchy red face and his little stinging eyes and angry bones that cut under his skin and whiten it.

  “Don’t make a row!” he says. “I’m going to do a murder. I’m going to get that bird. He’s for it.”

  It is curious I should have said the only trouble in this paradise was the gnats. The Gnat—that is my cousin’s nickname! Everybody uses it. He enjoys it. He is always buzzing, nipping, stinging about somewhere. He pings and pricks. Every bit of him annoys, darts, pops, glints, like a cloud of gnats when you are with him. You feel him all over you tuning and pricking, digging into you. He speaks in fierce little darts and gasps.

  “I’ll get him,” he stings. “He’s for it. He’s for funeral fatigue. Feeds down at that spring. Damn him. Eats up the fish. The best. Worse than twenty cormorants. I’ve been here five days trying for him. I haven’t had a chance with him yet. But he’s marked. He’s tabbed. He’s got his orders. He’s cooked.”

  I stand there unmoving. I cannot go back. It is impossible to escape the Gnat, from his eyes, his tongue, his hands, his mind; he whirs about me.

  “Of course. You know! Yes, I can see it,” he spurts, each sentence like a striking match. “I know and you know, eh? Same everywhere. Eh? Yes! Women,” he gasps, eyes pricking away, pinning me down to it so that I am bound to confess. “Now you are married,” he persists, until I agree that, yes, women as he says rightly, are at the bottom of every trouble in the world. Anything for peace.

  “You find that too. I know. Yes!” he cries excitedly. “My wife and yours and the others up there! Women! You know the dope. ‘Kill that beautiful heron. Oh, you mustn’t. Unnecessary.’” He squeaks in imitation of a woman’s voice. “They don’t know. They’re fools. If that stinker had his way there’d be no damn fish left. All that dope. You know. I know, the fools!” His white bones are working away. “They’ve frightened the beast off twice already when I had him. Had him there, marked. Oh yes, tabbed …” he tunes. “This way.”

  Meekly, without a will, I follow. How is it that in all the hundreds of acres of paradise I have met this fellow! My ear leans to every sound, hopes for the releasing gong, listening for sounds of escape. We half crawl through the laurels and the bark dust filters down into my eyes. I do this, I suppose, because I hate to be thought womanish, but that is what I am. The beautiful heron!

  The Gnat goes cursing on in from within a hundred yards of the spring where the silver willows pour down like silent waterfalls. We sit down and wait on a mossy stone. I am soaking. The Gnat lights a cigarette. I am ashamed that I do not smoke.

  “There are some people in this world I’d like to have just two minutes with,” sparks the Gnat, looking into the breech. “God! Some women. Did you ever know a woman …?”

  I didn’t.

  It crumples a prayer over the terrace, the French garden, among the statues lichen-breasted, the flight of lawns and the lake. The releasing gong!

  “Tea. Let’s go,” I shout, liberated, and rising to my feet.

  But he will not let me go.

  “Ssh! For God’s sake sit down, man,” he mutters. “Ssh! Wait, wait, wait! Look, do you see, do you see? Look! What do you see, eh?” his voice insinuates. The heron is circling the islands. “Do you see, do you see? Look, look, LOOK!” he is getting his breath. The heron, sketch of slender grey flight, ecstatic, eager and afraid like the soaring soul departing from the sweet body of the water. The Gnat’s eyes draw the bird nearer and nearer over the water, its reflection rising swiftly to meet it as it falls and falls, and my poor fearful heart is hammering anvil blows that will throw me over. Clearly I should have been a woman.

  “My Lord. Oh, my Lord!” gasps my cousin, leaning forward. “We must move up. Quick! He’s gone down to that other spring.”

  So we crawl deadly quiet, though what it has all got to do with me I do not know; I watching the shining wet nails of my cousin’s sliding boots. Nearer, right and then left, they slide like two pistons. “Oh God!” my little spirit squeaks, “take us back to tea, push us back, drive the heron away. God, make him miss the heron.” I am so afraid. I am sure I hear horrible pursuing footsteps as the twigs click back behind me. I dare not take my gaze off his creeping, shining boots.

  We are near the second spring. It is half hidden by a sinking hulk of laurel. The footsteps! It is agony for me. The poor heron i
s above the laurel. His shadow jumps sharply up to meet him. The Gnat is ready with his slim gun raised. My eyes are shaking like water. I turn my head—and there behind me is my wife following.

  “Ha! Ha! Caught you! You thought you’d run away, did you? I’ve caught you both at it,” she cries out.

  The startled heron leaps into the air and flops over the laurel. There are two late shots, and the sky that was so warm and bright with its own solitude is shadowed by the cries of hundreds of woody, cold echoes. And there is my cousin shouting.

  “Hell! Missed him again! Blast him! Damnation take these women! Why the blazes … They won’t let you alone. Never, never, never any peace.…”

  He fumes at a sky that is as loud as rain with fleeing birds.

  A Note on the Author

  Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in 1900 over a toyshop and, much to his everlasting distaste, was named after Queen Victoria. A writer and critic, his is widely reputed to be one of the best short story writers of all time, with the rare ability to capture the extraordinary strangeness of everyday life. He died in 1997.

  Discover books by V.S. Pritchett published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/V.S.Pritchett

  A Careless Widow and Other Stories

  A Man of Letters