It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  He saw him stooping over what perhaps were the tracks of an otter’s feet on the mud beside the stones. The huntsman then looked up under an arch, below which lay the bed of the flume from the mill-wheel hidden in the darkness of the tunnel. The huntsman crept up the tunnel, and soon returned under the arch. Climbing up the bank, he went to the Master and touched his hat.

  Phillip waited until Lucy and her party had moved away; then crossing the bridge, he slid down the track in the grass beyond the end of the parapet and stood beside the river, seeing in the mud under the bank the track of the otter’s pads. One seal, beside the mark of dragging rudder, was imperfect. Peering low over the scour of mud, with beating heart, he saw what he had dreaded, but not believed he would see: every fourth seal held the print of three claws instead of five. He remained bending down, appalled, until he felt strong enough to climb up again.

  The huntsman, waiting above, said cheerfully, “I fancy the otter is lying up on the water-wheel, sir. We’ll soon know when they start up again after lunch.”

  Phillip waited: unable to tell his fears to the Master: unable to leave the scene.

  *

  Four hours later the otter was lying in a long shallow pool some miles below the bridge. When the hatch had been raised to allow the weights of water from the leat above to fill the wooden troughs of the wheel, the trundling had flung off the otter. It was seen going down into the river with the renewed gush of water. There it rested and looked up at the faces lining the bridge above. It stared at Phillip, who recognised Lutra as the hounds splashed baying into the water.

  O why had he not spoken to the Master, he cried again and again within himself as he sat on the bank of the long shallow pool half a mile below the weir and watched hounds swimming, one occasionally baying, in the scarcely moving water. It was too late now.

  The otter had shown what was called good sport after entering the river from the flume. Given two minutes law, it had gone down, down with the current, emerging at the stony shallows to gallop amidst its own splashings over thin, rapid streams running between banks of stones and gravel, to enter deeper, slower water beyond, there to swim submerged for fifty yards or so, as revealed by the bubbles-a-vent, from one bank to the other bank, finally to hide among the thick pointed leaves of flag-lilies until disturbed by hounds. Then down, down, down again—under oaks and alders and ash trees on the banks of the long weir-pool until it came to the sycamore holt above the weir.

  It had been driven by a terrier from that underwater fastness and made straight for the weir, crawling out to shake itself, to look around on the concrete barrier as though seeking the face of its master; then over the weir in sunlight, in water just covering its dark brown body sleek to shapelessness, to be tossed in the turmoil below and then down the rapid current, the beginning of one of the best salmon beats on the river.

  Down, down, down in the fast water it went, hounds racing after it, following by scent which they appeared to lap as they ran. Men and women followed, Phillip ahead, just behind the huntsman. Constantly the horn sounded, huntsman running hard, scooping with his grey pot hat to urge on his hounds.

  Three hundred yards above the tide-head, with its mud-stained rushes, the otter vanished. There followed searchings under the banks, patiently, for the afternoon was hot. Below, at the tail of the pool, across the breaking wavelets of a stony ridge stood a stickle—a line—of men and women with water over their boots and shoes, waiting to turn back the quarry with crossed poles should it try to get down to the tide-head.

  Phillip saw, with some relief, that Lucy was not among them.

  Then he saw her, sitting a couple of yards back from the bank, beside Mr. Sufford Chychester.

  The Master walked down to the line of men and women standing on the flat stones which made the stickle of breaking fast water. Phillip followed. He heard the Master saying that the otter was probably lying up in the reeds somewhere. Tom the huntsman would find it, when it might make for the stickle in an attempt to get down to salt water.

  The Master looked at his watch. “It’s high water at Bideford Bridge now,” he said. “If the otter gets through hounds won’t be able to follow him, for as you know tide-water carries no scent.”

  Phillip made up his mind to go into the water and rescue Lutra if he went down to the stickle and found his way barred.

  *

  Across the pool ripples flickered with the sun now in the western arc of the sky. Look-outs on the bank were leaning on their poles. Patiently the huntsman moved with his hounds, covering every yard of both banks, below which grew flag-lilies, musk, watercress, and other plants. Was the musk scent overlaying the scent of the otter? he heard someone say; and the reply that surely musk scent ended, all over the world, in 1914?

  “Wasn’t it only the garden varieties of Muscari?”

  In the centre of the pool lay a dark length of sodden branch, left there by a past flood. A dragonfly was hovering over the pool, dropping eggs around the length of the branch. They would hatch, and the prehensile underwater nymphs would hunt the frailer nymphs and creepers of the ephemeral flies—the innocent beauties of the river, who lived but a day, with mouths sealed against feeding or drinking, hatching to arise into air for love, and so to find—death.

  He watched the blue dragonfly hovering. It lit on the water, then flew up as though alarmed. He saw ripples spreading away, delicately. From what? Staring, he saw the thin nostrils of the otter, and when the dragonfly alighted on them he saw the scratch of its whiskers. He saw that Lucy had seen the otter too, betrayed by its sneeze. The nostrils were half an inch above the surface. Lutra was hanging down in the water, one paw holding, below the surface, to the sodden branch.

  Phillip saw that Lucy’s cheeks had flushed, that her eyes were downheld. Mr. Chychester had been looking at the water, too, but he had not connected the ripples with the alarm of the dragonfly, which was now darting over the water, perhaps seeking flies to eat while waiting to drop more eggs. It hovered near the branch; it flew low; it settled. There was the sound of a sneeze again, the shake of ahead.

  Mr. Chychester saw it this time. Phillip heard him say, “Ah!” then he was getting to his feet with difficulty.

  He removed and held aloft his grey hat.

  “Bubbles-a-vent!”

  “O faithless Libellula!” said Phillip aloud, hoping that Lucy would hear.

  The otter was hemmed in. It swam across, was turned back, to swim underwater again and again, in shorter and shorter journeys, always betrayed by the chain of bubbles rising in straight line along the surface. It swam about the pool, slower and slower. The time came when it could swim hardly more than a yard without rising to breathe and rest. The huntsman was now in the water to his waist, softly speaking to hounds by name. They were confused, they hunted by scent, which was all about them: even when Lutra was lying, head out of water, looking at them from less than a yard away.

  “He’s dead beat,” said the Master.

  Hearing these words Phillip slid down the bank and waded close to the huntsman.

  “Don’t move, sir,” said Tom, respectfully. “Let hounds hunt him, sir.”

  “I think this may be my escaped otter!”

  How feeble his voice sounded—the wind-risp of a dry reed.

  “Lutra! Lu-Lu-Lu!”

  At the sound of the voice Lutra stared up at his face. The otter’s mouth opened, as though in appeal.

  “This is my escaped tame otter!”

  “Stand still, please, sir,” replied the huntsman. “I don’t want my hounds to riot. Stand still, please, sir.”

  Phillip knew the danger of hounds rioting: if he tried to pick up the otter he might be attacked, dragged down, and killed. He did not care. Lutra sank down; a hound, pounding slowly and heavily by, its stern flinging drops of water in arcs, saw the head look up again and with a plunging leap chopped at it. Baying loudly, hounds massed for the worry.

  Phillip groped with his hands and grasped Lutra’s hind legs, dropp
ing them as a hound leapt upon him. Lutra came into shallow water, following him as he waded to the stony edge of the river.

  “It’s my tame otter! Make way, make way!” he cried to the figures across the stickle. Pushing through, he kept an open place for Lutra to slip past him. On the fast stream the brown body was carried away into the deeper water of the tide-head.

  Hounds were swimming aimlessly in the pool, others baying about the broken stickle. The huntsman was talking to the Master. The look-out from the bank below, hurrying upriver to the uniformed figures, said that the head of the otter, its mouth open, was going down with the tide.

  There remained for Phillip a duty almost as hard to face as his act of interference in the water. He went to the Master to apologise.

  That gentleman listened to what he said with great courtesy, and then replied, “I am glad that we did not kill your otter, Maddison.”

  “Thank you, sir. I feel greatly ashamed for not having spoken to you about it at Mill Bridge.”

  The Master saw that his hands were trembling. Mildly he went on, “As it happened it turned out better than it might have done.”

  “Yes, Master. I blame myself entirely.”

  “I am happy that no harm was done to you,” said the Master, kindly, as he leant on his pole taller than himself: a ground ash, three parts covered by silver rings on which were engraved places and dates of old kills, with zodiacal sign of dog or bitch on each. He wore a dark blue jacket with a yellow waistcoat and white breeches, with coarse blue worsted stockings and a labourer’s heavy boots. The yellow hair of his head and drooping moustaches was turning white; gold-framed spectacles sat on his nose, adding to a mild and amiable expression.

  Raising his cap, Phillip set off up-river; his motor-bicycle had been left at Mill Bridge. Through the hedge of the next meadow he glanced back, and saw Lucy with her uncle and other friends moving away in the distance. It was her last day; she was going home that evening; he had disgraced himself; if hounds had worried him it would have reacted badly for the Hunt, whose guest he had been; never, never, never again would he mix with people; he was no good.

  *

  But the incident did not, as he had imagined in his black mood, mark him as an outsider, or a ‘mere humanitarian’, at least in the eyes of the Master, who wrote him a brief note saying that he accepted his apology, and regarded his action for what it was, a rash but brave act made without regard for personal safety. He hoped that he would come out with them regularly, to instruct him (the Master) when he considered that he had seen the spoor of his tame otter, ‘and so allow us to give him law to follow his own devices’.

  The search for Lutra now became a major aim of Phillip’s life. Not only did he attend every meet of the home pack, but studied also the lists of meets of the Dartmoor pack and the Quantock pack in local papers; he travelled far on the Norton, bumping down sunken lanes and up unmade rocky tracks to higher fields whence to search for distant dark figures under riverside oaks and alders, the familiar otter-hunters wearing grey bowler hats and uniform jackets of navy blue serge with white breeches. Always aloof, peering and listening, often envious of laughter and friendship; sometimes at the end of a long day near to despair; ever rehearsing the moment when he would save Lutra as it left water for the land, the last refuge of an otter; or lay in a pool with no strength to run, able to swim only a few strokes underwater before rising to lie still once more and watch the faces of big white, black, and tan hounds so near, their baying so loud upon the final moment of being overborne, seized, lifted, dragged and torn from life.

  *

  One morning on the banks of the Taw a brown-faced athletic man came up to him as though in a hurry and cried, “How are you! I met you in the Crusader office before you went to the Pyrenees with Rowley Meek and Bevan Swann.”

  “Of course! You are Martin Beausire!”

  “What are you doing in my country?” demanded the other, his face assuming blankness at the evident delight in Phillip’s face. “Now tell me, you know much more about these things than I do, are we going to find an otter today?” He looked around, apparently needing no reply, for the next moment he said, “My God, I see we’ve been invaded by the portly pole-carriers of Sussex, where for my sins I am living now. The entire whisky trade appears to have followed me—and I’ve travelled two hundred miles to avoid them!”

  This address, beginning with what seemed enthusiasm, ended with a growl at the sight of several bulky men, all dressed alike, coming nearer. With a muttered ‘Don’t go away’, Beausire strode off with pressure upon large muscular calves below dark blue running shorts worn with a thick white jersey with the letters O U A C woven across the chest.

  Phillip wondered what reason Beausire had for avoiding the group of ‘portly pole carriers’ as he disappeared among the crowd of waiting people; then to his surprise he heard Beausire’s sudden cackling laughter on the river-bank, and there he was, addressing first one then another of the Sussex ‘invaders’ with loud geniality. There were a half-dozen of them, all looking the same, with big heads and bodies; thick-necked men with rolls of fat visible whenever a head, crowned by a size 8 or possibly 8½ grey bowler, was turned. The pot hat of the local hunt was grey, too, but with a more curly brim; the hats of the Sussex men had wide level brims which emphasised the thickness of the Dunwhiddle family head.

  “‘Whisky’ Dunwhiddles,” remarked Beausire, returning to Phillip’s side. “Four brothers and two cousins. I wrote an article about them in my paper, and they objected to being called ‘the portly pole-carriers of Sussex’. But if they aren’t that, what in God’s name are they?”

  “Perhaps it was the word ‘port’ they object to, if they are whisky.”

  “You have a point there,” conceded Beausire over his shoulder, as he hurried away to talk to someone else.

  During the luncheon interval Phillip saw him standing on the bonnet of an immensely long touring Bugatti drawn up beside the road—which followed the river at that place—under the shade of oak trees. Apparently this very expensive motor car belonged to the clan, for the six were sitting around it, eating. From his stance on the bonnet Beausire was addressing them while gnawing what looked to be the leg of a cold turkey.

  “You’re the sort of people who should be hanged from the nearest lamp-post!” he was saying, genially. “You are the natural patrons of the Arts, Big Business having replaced every country house in England,” as he gnawed the drumstick bare before hurling it away and bending down to take another from the plate offered by the uniformed chauffeur. While stripping this of flesh with rapid bites he saw Phillip, and with a wave of the bone said rapidly to the company; “D’you know Phillip Maddison’s work? May I present him—General Dunwhiddle—Colonel Dunwhiddle—Major Dunwhiddle—Captain Dunwhiddle—Lieutenant Dunwhiddle—Private Dunwhiddle—this is Captain Maddison who is Nimrod, W. H. Hudson, and Surtees all rolled into one. Now I’ve got to write my blasted article. See you all later!” as he jumped off the bonnet.

  The Sussex Scotsmen were kind, quietly-spoken. He was offered food and drink, but declined, while wondering what to say after such a sporadic introduction.

  “Got your pipe?” asked one, offering a cloth bag of John Cotton tobacco.

  “I don’t smoke, thank you, sir.”

  “Breezy chap, Beausire,” said a second.

  “Yes.”

  “Not much water,” said a third.

  “No.”

  The cloth bag of John Cotton was passed round from pipe to pipe, each one thick-bowled and charred at the top. Phillip noted that the two fattest wore celluloid collars, apparently against the sweats of walking: an odd detail, since, according to jokes in Punch, only those fancying ready-made bow-ties wore such things.

  He made an excuse to follow Beausire, finding him sitting on a fallen tree, writing rapidly on pink sheets of paper.

  “I must get this on the London train,” he said, without looking up. “It slows down through Morchard Road Station, where I�
��ve arranged to give it to the guard. Can you take me there on your stink-bike? When? Now, of course, you blasted ass! Haven’t you been in Fleet Street? We’ll be there and back by the time hounds cast off again. Don’t talk.”

  He scribbled fast.

  “My bike is two miles down the river, I’m afraid.”

  “The Dunwhiddles’ motor will be going back to Umberleigh soon, we’ll get a lift,” said Beausire, still writing furiously. After a few minutes he stood up. “Why aren’t you ready?” he demanded, to Phillip, who was sitting down.

  “Oh, by the way, a motor-bike is a bit bumpy, you know——” said Phillip, getting to his feet.

  “Good God, d’you think I don’t know that? What d’you suppose I’ve been doing all my life, sitting in a bath chair?”

  Beausire thrust his copy into an envelope, drew the gummed flap through his mouth, and said in a rapid mutter, “If I can go down the Cresta Run backwards with a drunken brakesman from the House of Lords on top of me at midnight at seventy miles an hour d’you think I can’t sit on the back of your stinking machine on a tarred road? Come on, you gazing genius!” He took Phillip’s arm and led him back to the Dunwhiddles smoking in a row as they sat among plants of wild garlic beside the drawn-up grand-tourisme Bugatti.

  “If your shover is going back to Umberleigh, would you mind giving us a lift there, Jumbo?”

  Beausire rapidly swallowed a glass of Dunwhiddle whisky before jumping in.

  *

  That evening Phillip took him to Exeter, where his parents were staying at the Malmesbury Arms. As soon as they arrived in the drawing-room Beausire took up a length of galley proof and lay full length on a sofa with eyes shut and mouth open, apparently in collapse. His mother drew Phillip aside to explain that her son undertook far too much while living under stress, due to ‘that wretched girl Ursula’.