The Cone Gatherers

by Robin Jenkins

  They heard the scrapes and thumps of his nailed boots on the rungs and then on the branches. A branch cracked suddenly. He exclaimed as if in anger, and paused for a full minute. When he resumed he climbed even more slowly than before. Soon he stopped again. He was still a long way below.

  They waited, but he did not start to climb again. For three or four minutes they waited. Still he remained motionless and silent. One of the dogs barked unhappily.

  They thought he must have climbed as high as he wished, and now was admiring the view of the loch. After all, the tree was not private just because they happened to be in it; the ladder, too, belonged to the estate. At the same time Neil felt curiously embarrassed and could not think to start gathering cones again. Calum kept shivering.

  They were far from guessing the truth, that Duror had ceased to climb because of fear; that, weak and dizzy and full of shame, he was clinging with ignominious tightness; that the dread of the descent was making him sick; and that he had almost forgotten his purpose in ascending to them.

  At last Neil had to end the suspense.

  ‘Hello, Mr Duror,’ he called. ‘It’s a grand day, isn’t it?’

  No reply came.

  Neil tried again.

  ‘Do you want to talk to us about something?’ he shouted.

  This time, after another long delay, there was a reply. They were surprised by the mildness of his voice. It was so faint too they had to strain to hear it.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said.

  ‘A message? Is it from Mr Tulloch?’

  There was a pause. ‘Aye, from him.’

  ‘Have we to go back home, to Ardmore?’ cried Neil hopefully.

  ‘You know these woods belong to Lady Runcie-Campbell?’

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘She wants you as beaters in a deer drive this afternoon.’

  Neil was shocked.

  ‘But we’re here to gather cones,’ he yelled. ‘She can’t order us about. She’s not our mistress.’

  ‘She telephoned Tulloch. He said you’ve to work for her this afternoon.’

  ‘How could he? Didn’t he tell us we’d to gather every cone we could? Didn’t he ask us to work as much overtime as we liked? What’s the good of all that if we’re to be taken away for deer drives.’ Neil’s voice grew hoarse with indignation. ‘My brother’s never asked to take part in deer hunts,’ he shouted. ‘Mr Tulloch knows that. I don’t believe he knows anything about this. It’s just a trick to get us to work for the lady.’

  Duror was silent. His triumph was become a handful of withered leaves. When he had seen the ladder, he had thought how gratifying it would be to deliver the deadly message to them in the eyrie where they fancied themselves safe. He had not anticipated this lightheadedness, this heaving of the stationary tree, this treachery of nature, this sickening of his very will to hate. He had never dreamed that he would not be able to do once only what the hunchback did several times a day. It seemed to him that he must therefore be far more ill and decayed than he had thought. He was like a tree still straight, still showing green leaves; but underground death was creeping along the roots.

  As he clung, he tried to remember whether as a boy or youth he had had a good head for climbing; but his memories too were giddy and he could not sort them out.

  ‘If my brother is excused deer drives in the forest,’ Neil was shouting, ‘why should he be made to take part in one here? I’m sure Mr Tulloch never gave any such order. It’s a trick, that’s what it is.’

  When no answer came, he went on in a passion of anger.

  ‘Who does the lady think she is, that she orders us about like dogs? But if we were dogs, she’d treat us better than she does. Aren’t the kennels at the big house bigger than our hut?’

  He had never seen the kennels at the big house, and he knew the lady had nothing to do with the size of their hut. Mr Tulloch was responsible for that. All the lady had done was to stipulate that it be built far away from her own house. His faith in his employer snapped. He believed the order to take part in the deer drive had been given. If they disobeyed it they would be sacked and would have to leave Ardmore for ever. Yet how could Calum take part in the drive? Not only might he break a leg in his stumbles and falls, but he might easily be driven out of his mind if there were cries, shots, and the squeals and bleeding of a deer.

  Duror had been bracing himself for the descent.

  ‘You’ve to be at the lilypond behind the garden at two,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ shouted Neil, ‘no, no. We’ll not be there. We don’t know where it is anyway. We’re strangers here, and I wish we had never come.’

  Duror no longer heeded. He was slowly climbing down.

  ‘Go and tell the lady,’ yelled Neil, ‘that we’re free men, we’re not at her beck and call. It was beneath her to give us the beach hut to live in although it’s to be pulled down after the war. Does she think she can treat us like dirt one day, and the next order us about?’

  Duror had reached the ladder, but his confidence did not revive. As soon as he touched earth he staggered and had to sink down on his knees, unable to stand up against the weight of a burden of misery as crushing as the tree itself. There was an insect hurrying on its own business in the grass, inches from his hand which could kill it with the lightest touch; he felt, without self-pity, that this insignificant transitory creature was happier than he and infinitely more at home.

  His gun was close by; he thought that, salvation being impossible, it offered at least an end. Then his dogs, urged forward by affection and loyalty against the curb of discipline, shyly approached, nudged him, licked his wrists, and whimpered in sympathy. It was enough for them to sense that he was ill; they did not analyse the nature of that illness, or pass judgment, or give advice; so much so that he was able to find within him sufficient strength and gratitude to murmur their names.

  Up in the tree Neil was knocking his head in despair against the trunk.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he muttered. ‘I just don’t know.’

  He was sure Mr Tulloch had betrayed them: rather than displease the wealthy lady he had sacrificed them because they were humble and poor and homeless. Yet there could be no satisfaction in accusing him; he had always been their friend.

  Calum’s own fears were removed by love. He tugged at his brother’s jacket.

  ‘Never mind, Neil,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll drive the deer.’

  Neil kept his face hidden.

  ‘You know you can’t, Calum,’ he said. ‘You know how clumsy you are. You’d catch on every thorn, you’d break your leg or your neck, you’d blind yourself among briers.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ promised Calum eagerly.

  ‘And what if there were deer shot? What would you do then?’

  Calum frowned. ‘I would shut my eyes,’ he said.

  Neil was silent: he had imagined the worst, now he tried to imagine the best. If Calum could be given a fairly clear stretch, he might struggle through with only a few scratches and bruises; and there might be no deer killed at all.

  But as he gazed down and saw the gamekeeper slowly walk away through the wood he did not shout after him that they would be at the lilypond at two o’clock.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On the edge of the pond, near the stone Cupid with mossy hair and corroded nose, sat Harry the gardener apprentice playing cheerful tunes on his mouth organ. Beside him, chewing gum and breaking into song occasionally, was Betty the landgirl. They were dressed for the deer drive, he in a tunic of camouflage colours, and she in her official khaki. Over her head, however, she had wrapped a red-white-and-blue scarf.

  It was so peaceful by the pond that, in the midst of the music, could be heard such sounds as the drone of a late bee, the plop of a frog, and the rasp of Erchie Graham’s nails along his midge-tormented scalp.

  Always irascible, the old handyman that afternoon was furious. His proper task should have been to sweep fallen
leaves from the paths about the big house. He had looked forward to it, with spits of relish. There would have been no one to superintend him, except a squirrel perhaps or a jenny wren, at which he might have winked. Not a drop of sweat would have been shed, and at his age, sixty-nine, sweat must be hoarded like blood and breath. Now all that bliss had been blasted by this order to take part in the deer drive; the dignity of old age, smoking at leisure in the sunshine in the company of mellow trees, was to be outraged by a sweating roaring helter-skelter race through brambles, briers, and nettles, over marshes and burns, up hills and down precipices, all in pursuit of deer that had never done him any harm and that, as venison, he did not like. Even if the deer were shot at the finish, they were luckier than he: they at least would be put out of the pain of tortured lungs and racked limbs.

  ‘And by God,’ he said to Charlie, Adamson’s labourer, who sat beside him, ‘there’s no guarantee I’ll not be shot. Your boss once had a damned good try. He put a couple of slugs into me.’ He slapped his left rump. ‘But for a tree that got in the road, it’s doubtful if I ever again would have enjoyed what’s every free man’s privilege, a seat in comfort.’

  Charlie neither agreed nor disagreed: he just puffed at his pipe; he was as deaf as Cupid.

  Betty, moved by the tranquillity and loveliness of the scene, asked for something sad. Harry wasn’t sure he knew anything.

  ‘Loch Lomond,’ suggested Betty, with wide slow meditative chews of her gum.

  Harry tried, but could not keep cheerfulness out. The lovers of the song mourned their eternal separation with admirable jauntiness.

  Betty was displeased. She even took the gum out to demonstrate, in a Glasgow accent as buoyant as it was raucous, how the sadness of true love ought to be rendered.

  Grinning, Harry played sadly.

  Graham, scowling at them, informed Charlie he was lucky he was deaf.

  Then they were all appalled into silence.

  From amongst the rhododendrons came a shout of anguish: ‘Peggy! Peggy!’ And as they all, except Charlie who kept staring at a frog in the pond, turned in that direction they saw Duror rise up with his hand at his head and stagger about as if he was drunk or had just wakened from a nightmare.

  In that nightmare Peggy had been sleeping in the garden. It was spring, for the gean tree in the corner by the elm was in glorious white blossom, and many birds were singing. He had helped her mother to dress her, handling with care and love her legs pale and swollen like monstrous slugs. Then he had wheeled her out into the garden which was more beautiful than he had ever seen it before. She had quickly fallen asleep. A thrush, speckled and alert, had hopped around her as if to protect her from insects. Cold cream had been smeared on her face lest the sun burn her skin, pale as mushroom; the garden was full of that fragrance. Suddenly everything had turned dark. There was a tremendous fluttering and chirping. Thousands of thrushes were flying out of the gean tree straight towards Peggy, until they were round her as multitudinous as midges. When he had made to rush forward to drive them away, he had been unable; and it was in the terror of that paralysis that he had wakened.

  Harry waited, with the mouth organ still at his lips. Betty nudged him as a warning to mind his manners. Graham stared at Charlie’s frog, as if it was as much his business as a gamekeeper with a whale for his wife.

  The gum was at rest in Betty’s mouth.

  ‘Is there onything the maitter, Mr Duror?’ she asked.

  As he gazed about him the actual scene, with the girl in the bright scarf, the boy with the mouth organ, the two old men smoking, and the pond dotted with lily leaves, became confused in his vision with that imaginary one of his garden invaded by inimical thrushes and his wife pecked to pieces.

  Shaking his head like a sick dog, he tried to shake off that hallucination; but though he could tell himself its cause was his lack of sleep over the past months, and lack of food that day, he still could not banish it. Horror of its possible permanence was gripping him more and more suffocatingly when he saw slipping through the bushes on the other side of the pond the two cone-gatherers; and he could not be sure whether they were really there in the actual world or had entered the garden. Never had the smaller one looked so like a monkey, as he came shuffling along, his hands close to the ground, his head without a neck turned up towards his brother, and his shoulders humped so grotesquely. Above them in the distance soared the wood, with the sun bright on its many crests of green and bronze and orange; and above those, gigantic cloud-castles with their turrets gleaming. He himself seemed to have shrunken to the tininess of the insect he had watched at the foot of the larch: yet the concept of unattainableness in his mind was as vast and as high as the heavens themselves.

  ‘Here are the cone-men now,’ shouted Betty.

  She rose, and the rest rose with her. Whatever it was that had disturbed their leader in his doze, here had arrived the men for whom they had been waiting. The deer drive could now proceed.

  Betty gave a shiver as she looked at the hunchback.

  ‘God forgie me,’ she muttered, ‘but he fair gies me the creeps.’

  ‘I saw a picture once,’ whispered Harry. ‘A jungle picture. There was a man in it had a pet ape; he led it about on a silver chain. It looked just like him.’

  ‘Shut your mouths,’ snarled Graham. ‘The man’s working for his keep.’

  Charlie studied the cone-gatherers without bias; he gave them a nod each.

  They reported to Duror.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got no watch,’ replied Neil truculently. ‘I had to go by the sun. Before I agree to go on this deer drive, Mr Duror, there’s something you’ll have to promise.’

  Duror said nothing.

  ‘If there’s a clear stretch,’ went on Neil fiercely, ‘my brother’s got to have it.’ He turned and glared at his fellow-drivers.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Graham, ‘the stretch is his; but, mind you, there’s none easy.’

  Betty and Harry nodded. Charlie, who did not understand, also nodded; his was a confirming salutation.

  ‘And I would like,’ said Neil, ‘to be put next to Calum.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ grunted Graham, and indicated he was speaking for them all.

  Could that dream have had any meaning? thought Duror. Was Peggy dead? Suddenly it was as if the burden of misery was lifted from him. He began to laugh.

  ‘Are you all ready?’ he cried, and set off towards the dead ash where the drive would begin.

  They hurried after him.

  ‘What the hell’s he got to be jolly about?’ grumbled Graham. ‘And what’s the big hurry for?’

  Betty and Harry found the quick pace a relief; it exercised their legs after the seat on the stone edge of the pond, and it enabled them to keep ahead of the cone-gatherers. Harry played ‘Tipperary’ on his mouth organ. To Graham, Neil confided his worries about Calum.

  The old sour-faced handyman glanced at the hunchback, who was smiling like a child.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘his lack of height will be to his advantage.’

  There was no sarcasm in the observation; only much fellow-feeling and considerable envy.

  ‘About the size of a stoat,’ he said, ‘is the right size for a deer drive through a wood.’

  They had now entered the wood, in whose immense unassailable silence Harry’s music sounded forlorn and Graham’s grumbles seemed as inconsequential as the squeaks of mice. Nevertheless he persevered with them.

  Duror’s light-footed speed particularly annoyed him.

  ‘Has he no mind I could give him twenty years?’ he demanded of the tall trunks he passed. ‘It’s a wonder he doesn’t expect us to catch the damned things by the tails and drag them up to the guns.’

  He turned to Neil and Calum.

  ‘Let me give you some advice,’ he said grimly. ‘When we get near the guns, drop down on your face as if you were praying for your life; and that’s exactly
what you will be doing, for there’s a man yonder with a gun that’s as blind as a mole and shouldn’t be trusted with a peashooter. He damned near shot the arse off me. I didn’t even see the deer. I was too busy finding breath and picking bramble hooks out of my hands. The guns started banging as if I’d wandered into the middle of the war itself. I did what any sensible man would have done. I ran for the nearest tree, but this blind character took me for a deer and banged away at me. Damned if he missed too. Now you would think that that man would never be trusted with a gun again as long as he, or anybody else, lived. You’d think, in a sensible world, nobody would allow him another chance for murder. Well, I’m warning you that he’s yonder, at the far end, waiting, with a gun and an itching finger, to let fly at any living thing, deer or man, that bursts out of the wood. There are men getting medals for far less than what we’re going to face.’

  The dead ash clawed at the sky with branches white as bones. Under it Duror, pale but smiling, issued orders. Somehow he seemed to find it difficult to express himself clearly, or even to pronounce individual words distinctly; he was like a man talking in his sleep. His subordinates were surprised. These vague yet eager mumbles contrasted with his usual cool instructions: just as his bleary anxious unshavenness was so unlike his customary smooth inscrutability. They thought he must be ill; but none cared to ask.

  The part of the wood to be beaten for deer sloped all the way from the roadside to the loch. Near the water the ground was gashed by deep gullies, overgrown with wild birches, bracken, and brambles. Harry, imagining himself a commando in the jungle, volunteered for this most perilous section. It was Graham who accepted his offer and packed him off, with the advice that if he met any wolves or tigers there, which was likely, it was better to run up a tree than to jump into the loch. Indeed, it turned out to be Graham who, like a lieutenant, disposed the forces; Duror stood by, smiling, and making an occasional not very relevant remark. Betty at her own request was placed next to Harry; she sauntered off to her station, chewing nonchalantly and letting loose some practice yodels. Her neighbour was Charlie, who was informed by a series of roars fit – so Graham said, in a hoarse parenthesis – to make any sensitive deer drop dead. As they watched him plod away with the deliberation of a man sent to stand upon a particular square foot of the wood, Graham prophesied that even if the drive was successful and deer were quickly shot the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening would have to be spent in searching for Charlie, who would be found miles away in another wood altogether.