The Cone Gatherers

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘It’s just one, Neil. Its legs are broken.’

  ‘And what if they are? Are you such a child you’re going to cry because a rabbit’s legs are broken in a snare? Will you never grow up, Calum? You’re a man of thirty-one, not a child of ten.’

  ‘It’s in pain, Neil.’

  ‘Haven’t I told you, hundreds of times, there’s a war? Men and women and children too, at this very minute, are having their legs blown away and their faces burnt off them.’

  Calum whimpered.

  ‘I ken you don’t like to hear about such things, Calum. Nobody does, but they are happening, and surely they’re more to worry about than a rabbit.’

  ‘Put it out of its pain, Neil.’

  ‘Am I to kill it?’ In spite of him, his question was a gibe.

  Calum had not the subtlety to explain why death, dealt in pity, was preferable to suffering and loneliness and ultimately death from fox’s teeth or keeper’s boot.

  ‘Why don’t you kill it yourself?’ persisted Neil.

  ‘I couldn’t, Neil.’

  Not only love for his brother silenced Neil then: he knew that what Calum represented, pity so meek as to be paralysed by the suffering that provoked it, ought to be regretted perhaps, but never despised.

  Nevertheless he remained thrawn.

  ‘I don’t like to do it any more than you do, Calum,’ he said. ‘It’s not my nature to seek to hurt any creature alive.’

  ‘I ken that fine, Neil.’

  ‘We’ll just have to leave it for the keeper. He’ll kill it soon enough. It’s not our business anyway. If he finds we’ve been interfering again he’ll tell the lady on us and she’ll have us sent out of the wood. Not that that would worry me much. I don’t like it here as much as you seem to. I’d far rather be back at Ardmore, cutting the bracken or clearing the drains.’

  ‘But Mr Tulloch wants us to work here, Neil. He says the cones are needed.’

  ‘The cones!’ In anger Neil snatched from his bag a fistful of cones and flung them viciously into the trees. They rattled against the branches and fell to the ground. He hated these cones, which kept them prisoners in this wood just as the snare held the rabbit. Mr Tulloch, the forester at Ardmore, where they worked, had asked them as the men most easily spared to take on this six or seven weeks’ spell of gathering larch and pine and spruce cones. The seed was necessary, as the usual imports were cut off by the war. Lady Runcie-Campbell had given permission as a patriotic duty. She managed the estate in the absence of Sir Colin, who was in the army. If they offended her so that she insisted on their being removed, Mr Tulloch, for all his kindness, might be so annoyed he would sack them altogether, and they would have to set out again in search of work, shelter, and friendliness. For five years they had been happy at Ardmore, planting trees on remote hills, living in their own cosy bothy, and bothering no one.

  Defeated by the cones, Neil took another handful and flung them, this time feebly.

  ‘It’s not the cones’ fault,’ he muttered. ‘I’m daft to blame them. I don’t ken whose fault it is. Come on, we’d better get to the hut.’

  Calum clutched him.

  ‘What about the rabbit, Neil?’ he wailed.

  Neil shook off the beseeching grasp.

  ‘Never mind it,’ he cried, as he strode away. ‘Leave it. It’ll die soon enough. Do you want to ruin us just because of a rabbit? Haven’t I told you a thousand times there’s a war in the world? Where will the likes of us ever find anybody as good and fair as Mr Tulloch’s been? He’ll not want to sack us, but there are men above him who’ll be furious if they hear we’ve offended the lady who belongs to this wood.’

  While his brother was moving away shouting, Calum was kneeling by the rabbit. He had seen it done before: grip the ears firmly, stretch the neck, and strike with the side of the hand: so simple was death. But as he touched the long ears, and felt them warm and pulsating with a life not his own, he realised he could not do the rabbit this peculiar kindness; he must leave it to the callous hand or boot of the gamekeeper.

  He rose and ran stumbling and whimpering after his brother.

  Hidden among the spruces at the edge of the ride, near enough to catch the smell of larch off the cones and to be struck by some of those thrown, stood Duror the gamekeeper, in an icy sweat of hatred, with his gun aimed all the time at the feebleminded hunchback grovelling over the rabbit. To pull the trigger, requiring far less force than to break a rabbit’s neck, and then to hear simultaneously the clean report of the gun and the last obscene squeal of the killed dwarf would have been for him, he thought, release too, from the noose of disgust and despair drawn, these past few days, so much tighter.

  He had waited for over an hour there to see them pass. Every minute had been a purgatory of humiliation: it was as if he was in their service, forced to wait upon them as upon his masters. Yet he hated and despised them far more powerfully than ever he had liked and respected Sir Colin and Lady Runcie-Campbell. While waiting, he had imagined them in the darkness missing their footing in the tall tree and coming crashing down through the sea of branches to lie dead on the ground. So passionate had been his visualising of that scene, he seemed himself to be standing on the floor of a fantastic sea, with an owl and a herd of roe-deer flitting by quiet as fish, while the yellow ferns and bronzen brackens at his feet gleamed like seaweed, and the spruce trees swayed above him like submarine monsters.

  He could have named, item by item, leaf and fruit and branch, the overspreading tree of revulsion in him; but he could not tell the force which made it grow, any more than he could have explained the life in himself, or in the dying rabbit, or in any of the trees about him.

  This wood had always been his stronghold and sanctuary; there were many places secret to him where he had been able to fortify his sanity and hope. But now the wood was invaded and defiled; its cleansing and reviving virtues were gone. Into it had crept this hunchback, himself one of nature’s freaks, whose abject acceptance of nature, like the whining prostrations of a heathen in front of an idol, had made acceptance no longer possible for Duror himself. He was humpbacked, with one shoulder higher than the other; he had no neck, and on the misshapen lump of his body sat a face so beautiful and guileless as to be a diabolical joke. He was now in the wood, protected, not to be driven out or shot at or trapped or trampled on; and with him was his brother, tall, thin, grey-haired, with an appearance of harsh meditation obviously false in a man who read no books and could only spell through a newspaper word by word. They had been brought into the wood: a greasy shed, hardly bigger than a rabbit-hutch, had been knocked together in a couple of hours, and set up in one of Duror’s haunts, a clearing amongst cypresses, where, in early summer, hyacinths had bloomed in thousands. Already, after only a week, the ground round about was filthy with their refuse and ordure. They were to be allowed to pollute every tree in the wood except the silver firs near the big house.

  Duror was alone in his obsession. No one else found their presence obnoxious; everybody accepted the forester’s description of them as shy, honest, hard-working, respectable men. Lady Runcie-Campbell, without seeing them, judging by what she had been told, had said she was sorry for them, and she had issued an order to all her employees that they were to be treated with sympathy. Her fourteen-year-old son Roderick looked on them as heroes because they climbed into the very crests of the trees; even Miss Sheila, sophisticated beyond her twelve years, had gone to admire their climbing. It was true that the children of Lendrick, the village five miles away, where the brothers visited every Saturday, shouted names after them in the street; but they did not shout with the wholehearted cruelty that children could, and their elders, the shopping housewives and the dark-jerseyed fishermen outside the hotel, reproved them instantly and sharply.

  Since childhood Duror had been repelled by anything living that had an imperfection or deformity or lack: a cat with three legs had roused pity in others, in him an ungovernable disgust. Other boys had stripped the wings
off flies, he had been compelled to squash the desecrated remnants: often he had been struck for what was considered interference or conceited pity. Nobody had guessed he had been under a compulsion inexplicable then, and now in manhood, after the silent tribulation of the past twenty years, an accumulated horror, which the arrival of these cone-gatherers seemed at last about to let loose.

  When he was sure they were too far in front to hear him he came out from the pines. For a minute or two he stood beside the rabbit, pitying it not for its terror or pain or nearness to death, but for having so recently been the victim of the hunchback’s drivelling sorrow. Anyone seeing him there, so silent and intent, might have thought he was praying, or at any rate making some kind of preparation in his mind for the taking of life. When he did kneel, on one knee, to break the rabbit’s neck with one blow, it was like an act of sacrifice, so swift, so efficient, and somehow so purposeful. When he arose his fist was clenched, and in the darkness he opened it and held it open, empty, for a few seconds.

  He went along the ride, climbed the fence, and followed the path that led by the side of a stream to the hut. Weeping ashes there gleamed paler than the rushing water. Beside the great cedar of Lebanon, the vastest tree in the wood, he paused for a minute or two, listening to what ought to have been the silence of the night accentuated rather than blemished by such noises as water’s gurgle, trees’ rustle, and a far-off seagull’s screaming. But at that high point on the path, beside this gigantic tree whose branches reached as high as the stars, and beyond into the darker haunted night of the Bible remembered from childhood, the light from the cone-gatherers’ hut could be seen. Therefore what Duror heard was a roaring within him, as if that tree of hatred and revulsion was being tossed by a gale. He was shaken physically by that onslaught and had to rest against the cedar, with his gaze upon that small gleam in the clearing below on the other side of the burn. He knew it would be more sensible and more worthy of himself to turn and go home: here there could be only further degradation and shame, with possible disaster; but in him was a force more powerful than common sense or pride. He could not name it, but it dragged him irresistibly down towards that hut.

  Amidst the bottommost branches of a cypress, curving out like hard green tusks, he stood and once again abandoned himself to that meaningless vigil.

  The hut was lit by oil-lamp. He smelled paraffin as well as woodsmoke. He knew they picked up old cones to kindle the fire, and on Sunday they had worked for hours sawing up blown timber for firewood: they had been given permission to do so. The only window was not in the wall facing him, so that he could not see inside; but he had been in their hut so often, they were in his imagination so vividly, and he was so close every sound they made could be interpreted; therefore it was easy for him to picture them as they went about making their meal. They peeled their potatoes the night before, and left them in a pot of cold water. They did not wash before they started to cook or eat. They did not change their clothes. They had no table; an upturned box did instead, with a newspaper for a cloth; and each sat on his own bed. They seldom spoke. All evening they would be dumb, the taller brooding over a days-old paper, the dwarf carving some animal out of wood: at present he was making a squirrel. Seeing it half finished that afternoon, holding it shudderingly in his hands, Duror had against his will, against indeed the whole frenzied thrust of his being, sensed the kinship between the carver and the creature whose likeness he was carving. When complete, the squirrel would be not only recognisable, it would be almost alive. To Duror it had been the final defeat that such ability should be in a half-man, a freak, an imbecile. He had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved.

  At last he roused himself and moved away. Yet, though he was going home, he felt was leaving behind him in that hut something unresolved, which would never cease to torment him. It was almost as if there were not two brothers, but three; he himself was the third. Once he halted and looked back. His fists tightened on his gun. He saw himself returning, kicking open the door, shouting at them his disgust, and then blasting them both to everlasting perdition. He felt an icy hand on his brow as he imagined that hideous but liberating fratricide. Surely they would lie there unheeded under the cypresses. Surely they were of no more consequence than the frogs which in mating time, with the smaller male on his mate’s back, crossed the public road and were crushed in their thousands under the wheels of the army trucks. Surely their deaths like the frogs’ could not be called murder.

  As he went on his way again to reach the road, he thought how incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa, and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave, intelligent men were killing one another, while in that dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection. He could not understand that, and he was sure nobody could.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Duror had walked about a quarter of a mile along the road when a motor car, with masked headlights, overtook and passed him, hooting peevishly. It drew up a short way in front, with two apologetic and welcoming toots of its horn. When he came nearer he recognised it as Dr Matheson’s car, and wished he had waited in the wood a half-hour longer.

  The old man grinned at him.

  ‘Thought I recognised your stalwart figure, Duror,’ he chuckled. ‘You’re not frightened, though, strolling along like that in the dark. Country folk these days ought to be supplied with luminous behinds. Been out on the prowl for poachers?’

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  The doctor smacked his lips. ‘Damned if I blame them,’ he said, ‘with meat as scarce as it is. You know I’m partial to a tender haunch of venison myself. Get in. I’ll take you as far as the gate.’

  Duror hesitated: he was in no mood to suffer the doctor’s inquisitive inanities.

  ‘Put your gun at the back. Hope it’s not loaded. I hate the things. If you’d your dogs with you, damned if I would have stopped. Can’t abide the brutes in a car. My wife used to have one, a brown spaniel; it would keep licking the back of my neck. She said it was only showing its affection. Queer affection, eh, to tickle me into the front of a bus. Get in, man. What are you waiting for?’

  Duror climbed in, placing his gun beside the doctor’s bag on the back seat.

  Soon they were moving on again.

  ‘Is Black still at Laggan?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Aye.’

  Black was the estate forester. He had been loaned by his mistress to the Timber Control Authorities, who were felling a wood at Laggan. He had had to accept the transfer as a national service. In the spring he would return to superintend the cutting down of his own wood.

  The doctor was smiling slyly.

  ‘So you’re the monarch of the woods?’ he asked.

  Duror said nothing.

  ‘A nice fellow, Tom Black,’ said the doctor, ‘but a shade too severe and upright for comfortable Christian intercourse. I understand he believes that every leaf that falls belongs to his master.’

  ‘So it does.’

  ‘In theory, certainly. But you and I know, as men of the world, that a wide breathing-space must be allowed between theory and practice; otherwise ordinary mortals like us would be suffocated.’

  Duror made no comment.

  ‘Shoot any deer these days?’

  ‘Now and again.’

  The doctor, sniffing hard, was not only in fancy relishing venison; he was also indicating that, in Black’s absence, deer might safely be killed and shared with a friend.

  ‘Wolf it all up at the big house, I suppose?’

  ‘Most of it goes to hospitals.’

  The doctor was surprised; he was even shocked; he whistled. ‘Is that so? Take care of the sick, and let the healthy pine.’ Uneasiness entered his laughter as Duror glanced at him. ‘
A joke, Duror,’ he added, ‘clean against all professional ethics. But all the same it is damned scun-nersome, spam, spam, spam, at every meal. One of the pleasures I thought I could look forward to in my old age was that of the palate. They tell me even as a baby in my pram I chose the choicest cherry. Why not? Fine eating’s a civilised pastime, and fine drinking too, of course. God, how scarce good whisky’s become. It’s not to be had for love nor money.’

  ‘I’d have thought a man in your position, doctor, would have a better chance than most any folk.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ The doctor was involuntarily peevish: the quest for whisky and palatable food was real, bitter, and ceaseless.

  ‘Well, you carry life and death in your bag.’

  ‘Ho,’ grunted the old man.

  ‘And you attend butchers and grocers and farmers and publicans.’

  ‘Are you insinuating I use my professional position to extort favours from my patients?’

  Duror smiled at that haughty senile indignation.

  The doctor saw that indignation was a foolish tactic. He began to cackle.

  ‘Damn your impudence, Duror,’ he said. ‘You’re a sleekit one all right. You don’t say much, but you think plenty. Well, however I fare in other directions, and I’m admitting nothing, I never see any venison. I’ve seen it on the hoof all right racing across the hillsides, but it’s a hell of a long time since I smelled it on my plate. How’s Peggy keeping these days?’

  It was an astute question. Peggy was Duror’s wife: for the past twenty years she had lain in bed and grown monstrously obese; her legs were paralysed.

  Duror’s voice was as stripped of emotion as a winter tree.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ he said.

  ‘Like myself, still eating more than’s good for her, I suppose? Well, God help us, we’ve to take our pleasures where we can; and skimpy pleasures they are today. Your Peggy’s had a raw deal from life, Duror.’

  ‘Aye.’

  The doctor, with professional interest, glanced aside at the lean, smooth, handsome, tight-lipped face. For all its composure he suspected a sort of fanaticism lurking in it. God knew how many inhibitions, repressions, and complexes were twisting and coiling there, like the snakes of damnation. God ought to know, for the human mind and its vicissitudes were more His business than a country doctor’s. Physically Duror was as strong as a bear: a fastidious man too, not any whore would suffice. Well, there used in the palmy days before the war to be a fine selection of maids to choose from in the big house. There were few now: Mars had claimed his nymphs, and paid them well.