Death of a Huntsman

by H. E. Bates

  ‘That’s because I have a tiny touch of mayonnaise and red pepper put on them,’ he said. ‘How observant you are.’

  He started to pour tea from a conical silver pot, afterwards filling up the pot with hot water from a little silver spirit kettle.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever eaten caterpillars of any sort, have you?’ he said.

  Here we were, I thought, back in the mad-house. It was obviously going to be too screamingly funny for words.

  Then he began to explain. He started to remind me of the day I had first found him in the garden, talking to the caterpillar, Miss Carfax and the hedge.

  ‘That was a caterpillar of the goat-moth,’ he said. ‘It seems the Romans ate them. Considered them quite a delicacy. I suppose in the category of frogs and snails. Or grasshoppers perhaps. What they ate them with is another matter.’

  ‘Perhaps mayonnaise,’ I said.

  There was nothing, I thought, like playing up on these occasions.

  ‘Well, and why not?’ he said. ‘I suppose if you were brought up on Cossus ligniperda and mayonnaise you would think no more of it, in the end, than eating winkles with vinegar and a pin.’

  ‘What is Cossus ligniperda?’

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the goat-moth.’

  Once or twice before and after this lunatic piece of conversation he remarked on what a charming companion I was and how glad he was that I had been able to come over.

  ‘You are wearing such a pretty dress,’ he said. ‘It goes well with your dark complexion.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  The dress was a bright clear green, lighter and softer than emerald, with short, yellow-trimmed sleeves and a yellow collar. With it I was wearing the yellow shoes that Ewart Mackeson had made for my mother. She didn’t like them after all and now, in consequence, I thought they were rather smart on me.

  ‘What material is it?’ he said. He fingered one of the sleeves. His hand brushed my bare upper arm and drew away. ‘A kind of silk?’

  I said I thought it was rayon. By this time, however, he was looking at my shoes. He seemed entranced by them too and he peered at them a long time with absorbed brilliant blue eyes.

  ‘You have wonderful taste,’ he said, ‘to get shoes to match like that.’

  This was, as best as I can give it, the general tone of the afternoon. It was poised somewhere between lunacy and flattery, with a curious over-tone of charm. The way he poured tea for me, helped me to sandwiches and finally to dish after dish of large dark ruby strawberries completely immersed in cream—all these things were, I suppose, quite enough to counteract, for a young girl with a fairly high opinion of herself and her beauty, a feeling that she was simply the guest of a hopeless eccentric who didn’t know what day it was.

  I never intended, of course, to pay another visit. That would have been too much. The idea of striking up a friendship with an elderly man who seriously thought that goat-moths and mayonnaise were a solemn gastronomic possibility was altogether too ludicrous for words.

  And it is possible, I think, that I never should have paid another visit if it had not been for an incident that occurred after tea was over and I suddenly got up, now rather bored by that stuffy yellow-shaded drawing room and its too oppressive fragrance of maddona lilies, and said that I ought to go.

  ‘Oh! no, please. I want you to meet Miss Carfax,’ he said. ‘Miss Carfax is coming over.’

  The life of Frederick Fielding-Brown and that of Miss Carfax were, as I was to discover later, about as ludicrously bound up with each other as he himself was with the business of moths and butterflies.

  Every Wednesday afternoon, for example, Frederick Fielding-Brown handed in his card to the house next door and formally went to tea with Miss Carfax; every Sunday afternoon Miss Carfax handed in her card at his house and took tea with him. During the rest of the week they corresponded with each other by a series of daily notes taken to each house by hand, in his case by the garden-boy, in hers by the chauffeur.

  These notes pulsated warmly with urgent and stunning discoveries in the world of entomology. Sometimes they were accompanied, in Miss Carfax’s case, by little perforated cardboard boxes.

  ‘Is it treasure?’ she would write. ‘I trust so. I found it in the raspberry canes.’

  In a return note he would tell her that her treasure was, after all, no more than a Painted Lady, a Red Admiral, a Tortoiseshell or something of that sort, common to all our counties.

  Miss Carfax was, however, never discouraged. Tending her garden, snipping at rambler roses, walking along meadow-paths, by the river, she kept up a great vigilance for things that would interest him, secretly hoping that she would one day come upon something of rare and stupefying importance, such as a Feathered Prominent, a Purple Emperor or a Brixton Beauty.

  In turn he wrote notes of discoveries whose detection she apparently found to be nothing short of magical. There would be illuminating occasions like those of the goat-moth, which had made me laugh so much, or the woolly case-bearer, a moth of which, as he explained to me and no doubt also to Miss Carfax, the virgin females sometimes lay fruitful eggs.

  The way in which these two elderly people twittered backwards and forwards to each other’s houses, taking tea, writing notes, exchanging larvae and so on, prattling passionately through the garden hedge, tremulous with discovery, was of course just the thing that a young girl would find amusing and fatuous. For the life of me I simply couldn’t, I’m afraid, see what all the fuss was for.

  That was why I thought Miss Carfax looked quite pathetic, almost imbecile with excitement, as she came rushing into the drawing room that afternoon, carrying with trembling care a little cardboard box, saying:

  ‘I really think I have something, Frederick, I really think I’ve something for you at last.’

  I ought to explain that, just before this happened, he had been trying to persuade me to come to tea another day. We were sitting on a narrow sofa. It was in a kind of French marquetry style and it was too high for comfort. It reminded me very much of the seat by the river and once again he started patting my hands.

  ‘Come again, will you? While this beautiful weather lasts? Do you like raspberries?’

  If you can imagine an elderly man shyly patting your hand, looking intensely into your eyes and saying, ‘Do you like raspberries?’ you will know something of what I felt that afternoon just before Miss Carfax burst in.

  Then he said:

  ‘Come early. We’ll take the punt on the river. We’ll go down to where the water-lilies are.’

  Suddenly, at the mention of water-lilies, I felt quite differently about the whole affair. He seemed to me suddenly very sweet, in that avuncular attentive way of his; he was full of eager, tender charm.

  ‘I should love to see the water-lilies,’ I said. ‘From the road they look like ducks——’

  ‘Then you will?’ he said. ‘You——’

  I hadn’t time to answer before the maid was knocking on the door and, a moment later, showing Miss Carfax into the room.

  ‘I really think I have something——’

  Her hands fluttered, but I noticed that he did not seem to be looking either at them or at the little box they were holding. Instead he gave me an engaging, pitying little smile—pitying, that is, for Miss Carfax, who was so absorbed in taking the lid off the box that she didn’t even know I was there.

  ‘My dear,’ he said gently, ‘allow me to introduce Miss Burnett. Miss Carfax—Miss Burnett.’

  In her fluttering struggle with the box Miss Carfax managed to acknowledge me with a kind of unsmiling grin. I ought to have explained that she was of course old too—that is, fifty-six or fifty-seven I should say—with long angular teeth, straight as piano keys.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘There!’

  ‘Miss Burnett and I have had a most delightful tea together,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we ate more strawberries than were good for us, but some things are irresistible when the season’s so short
——’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look, Frederick. Please look, will you?’

  He was, during all this time, looking at me. Now he gave a cursory glance at the box, just in time to see a large brown-pink moth fly upwards, towards the light, and attach itself to one of the Venetian blinds.

  ‘Oh! it’s gone!—it’s out——’

  ‘Why don’t you use the cyanide I gave you?’ he said sharply. ‘Either that or keep the lid on.’

  Her eyes seemed to give a pained grey jolt as he said this. Her hands flapped helplessly and she said:

  ‘Can we catch it? What kind is it, Frederick? It’s so huge. I thought it might be a Great Brocade——’

  He laughed and it seemed to stun her. She stood mute in the middle of the room.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ he said. ‘I’m really surprised at you, dear. I think even Miss Burnett would know our common Privet Hawk.’

  Soon, after all her excitement, she seemed to become slack and baggy. She sat down and we talked a bit. I can’t think what about—more moths, I think, and how good the strawberries were. I could see, however, that she was never really listening. Her bemused eyes wandered sometimes to where the moth was folded on the venetian blinds and sometimes she sucked at her big teeth and swallowed hard so that her Adam’s apple quivered.

  Then, after she had gone, he actually laughed at her.

  ‘A Great Brocade,’ he said. ‘If she lives to be a hundred she’ll never find a Great Brocade.’

  Then I said what I suppose was rather a foolish thing.

  ‘That doesn’t give her very much time, does it?’

  Of course that was clever and quick and I must say he absolutely loved it too. ‘Most amusing,’ he said. ‘But naughty. Very naughty.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘isn’t it nice to be naughty sometimes?’

  It was that, I suppose, that set the tone for the rest of the afternoon and the future. We sat on the little sofa again and he squeezed my hand. His fingers were hot and sticky. Then I crossed my legs and pulled my skirt down over my knees and he said:

  ‘What about tea again? Which day? We’ll have masses of raspberries and cream and go to see the water-lilies afterwards.’

  ‘Which day would you like me to come?’

  ‘Whichever day you wish,’ he said. ‘All days are your days. Tomorrow—Friday, Saturday, Sunday—they’re all yours. Just say.’

  ‘Sunday,’ I said.

  So, without thinking, I went over again on Sunday. It was a warm breezy afternoon and we ate many dishes of raspberries for tea—very special, beautiful yellow ones, I remember, as well as the ordinary red kind—and afterwards, as he had promised, we took the punt and paddled slowly down the river to where the water-lilies were.

  Perhaps it was the warm sleepy wind, perhaps it was the sight of occasional pairs of lovers lying in the long grasses by the waterside, or it may have been merely that funny, sensuous sort of feeling that floating on water gives you—I don’t know, but that afternoon I began to lead him on a little, just for fun.

  ‘You look very hot, paddling all the time,’ I said once. ‘Why don’t we tie up the punt for a while?’

  So we tied up the punt and got out and I lay down on the river-bank in the tall whitening August grasses. They were so high, these grasses, as high as oats and almost the same gold-white ripe colour, with bowed feathery heads of seed, that they made a wall round me where I lay on my back, staring at the sky.

  Before long, as I lay there, he leaned over and, for the first time, kissed me. I didn’t mind very much; nor was I very excited—that, I suppose, describes it fairly accurately. If a man of sixty wanted to kiss me on a hot July afternoon I thought that, on the one hand, it was silly to be prim about it. On the other hand it wasn’t an experience that I’d have sought deliberately as a means of pleasure.

  At the same time some pretence of approval or disapproval had to be made and I said:

  ‘Naughty. You know that was very naughty, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re so very lovely,’ he said. ‘So absolutely lovely.’

  ‘Flatterer.’

  He started to try to kiss me again, but this time I bit my lips and made a face at him.

  ‘You’re not eating strawberries and raspberries now,’ I said, ‘and taking second helpings. It’s not good for you.’

  ‘But I feel it’s rather like that,’ he said. ‘I feel the season might be so short.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And who said the season might be short?’

  Like that I teased and taunted him for the rest of the afternoon. It was great fun altogether. Sometimes I refused to let him kiss me for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes at a time and then it was marvellous to see how terribly downcast he was. Then I would pretend I wanted to go home and he would start protesting in awful dismay until I teased him another way and laughed in his face and said:

  ‘I might as well go home as lie here and do nothing. I thought you wanted to kiss me so much?—goodness, you don’t even try.’

  In that way, playing and kissing in the grasses, we spent the rest of the afternoon. By the time we paddled back to the house he was in a sort of daze. He had the air of a man in a mild state of intoxication. I felt a little heady too—warm from lying in the sun in breezy meadows, from the smell of water and meadowsweet, and with grains of grass seed in my hair.

  Probably that was why neither of us saw Miss Carfax until the punt was actually turning round under the balsam poplars, towards the landing stage.

  ‘Isn’t that Miss Carfax?’ I said.

  She was standing in the shade of the river path, in a white sun-hat, staring towards us. When she saw us she turned sharply on her heel and fairly bolted away.

  ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Where?’

  ‘She’s gone now,’ I said. ‘She just opened her gate and disappeared.’

  ‘Oh! my God,’ he said suddenly. ‘I just remembered. She always comes to tea with me on Sundays.’

  After that I suppose I went over to the house perhaps another dozen times or more. Twice I went to dinner. The great thing was, of course, that it took me out of myself. It was fun. I wasn’t bored or sulky any more.

  The second time I went to dinner it was already September. The mild misty evenings were drawing in. The weather was soft and humid. There were mushrooms in the meadows. I mention this because, earlier that evening, we actually went down to the fields and gathered mushrooms which were afterwards served on toast, as a savoury. After that we ate pears for dessert, the lovely Marie Louise variety, peeling the smooth red skin with a little pearl-handled silver knives.

  ‘September is a good month for moths,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go out after dinner and see what we can find?’

  So presently we were walking with a torch through the mullein wilderness, past the choked raspberry canes. He stood quite still once or twice, steadily shining the torch into the darkness under fruit boughs. A desultory moth or two began to dance in the light and he said:

  ‘I didn’t bring the cyanide bottle. It’s hardly worth it. Mostly what you can see are common Noctuae.’

  Soon I thought he seemed nervous. He kept switching on the torch and then suddenly putting it off again. One moment the air was dancing with a crowd of small light wings and the next I was groping, half-blinded, for the path among the grasses.

  Suddenly he put out the light for the sixth or seventh time, stopped abruptly and took me by the shoulders.

  ‘I want to ask you to marry me,’ he said. His hands were shaking dreadfully. ‘Will you? I know there is a great difference—but would you? Would you consider it please?’

  I simply wanted to laugh outright at him.

  ‘Now I see,’ I told him, ‘what moth it was you hoped to find out here. The rare nocturnal Laura, eh?’

  Nervously he started panting, breathing hard.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. It’s simply—well, I’ve been trying to say this for some time. Would you?—would you marry me?’
/>   ‘It’s very sweet of you, but——’

  ‘Would you think it over? Think it over and give me an answer another day?’

  It was quite ludicrous; he was breathing hard on me, as if blowing on a hot potato.

  ‘Oh! no, really,’ I started to say. ‘Thank you, but——’ After all what sort of encouragement had I given him to get him to the point of asking me this?

  ‘You’ve kissed me very often. You’ve given me such a lot of pleasure,’ he said. ‘It’s been six weeks since you kissed me that Sunday afternoon——’

  ‘Yes, but kissing,’ I said. ‘Kissing is kissing and there’s a great deal of difference between kissing and getting married. You’re old enough to know that.’

  ‘Yes, but you see I don’t know.’ He sounded sad and dithering. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know about these things.’

  ‘Then,’ I teased him, ‘it’s time you learned.’ Suddenly, in a way, I felt sorry for him. I linked my arm in his and we started to walk back to the house. He did not shine the torch any more. He seemed to have forgotten it. I simply felt him groping forward intensely in the September darkness.

  ‘I’m so fond of you. I love you so much,’ he said, ‘I can’t explain how much I love you.’

  ‘Yes and I’m fond of you,’ I said. ‘But——’

  ‘I’m old. I know,’ he said. ‘I’m too old for you. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ I said and suddenly I arrived again at another of youth’s splendid moments of tactfulness. ‘After all I’m only seventeen and I’ve got my life to think of——’

  ‘Seventeen?’ he said. ‘You told me you were nineteen. You see, I was thinking that if you were nineteen it wouldn’t be long before you came of age. The difference wouldn’t seem so great then——’

  ‘Seventeen,’ I said. ‘I was just teasing you.’

  He was absolutely silent for the rest of the way back to the house. We had hardly arrived there before the maid, Mabel, came in with a note on a silver salver.

  ‘With Miss Carfax’s compliments, sir,’ she said.

  He read the note, crumpled it up and threw it in the fireplace.