by H. E. Bates
‘I’ve left him to himself.’
And in that utterance reposed an essence of something daring, reckless, almost impossible, and as if it had been the utterance of a mischievous infant, Jasper chuckled again.
Before evening, by a repetition of certain acts of courtesy, he had become to the woman the embodiment of grace and trust, and to the man, who ruminated constantly upon his competence with tools, beasts, and machines, not only a great wit, but a Hercules, a man with a head on his shoulders, indeed the very masterpiece of a man; and though much too cautious ever to commit themselves, they began to look forward to hay-time with his help as an event of fine expectation and great promise.
A few weeks elapsed. During that time the prisoner, whose name was Johann, acquired from the camp and the farm a little English, which led first to a brief exchange of words of the simplest meaning, and then to conversations of a more subtle nature, and gradually to a language which effected in their lives a deep, indescribable harmony.
In their taciturn way they became delighted at his presence on the farm with them. It became shortly nothing but Johann this, Johann that; and when, for reasons obscurely imposed by the authorities, he remained away on Sundays, they missed acutely his huge, ruddy flaxen-haired figure and the sound of his voice, and the work he habitually did seemed to fall with unbearable heaviness upon them. Johann was a great worker; for trivial or important tasks he was a glutton—adaptable, conscientious, courteous, indefatigable, clever with implements, sagacious concerning crops, full of notions on domestic subjects. He was devoted to animals, calling the cows by name and bestowing upon one heavy-maned chestnut mare all the happy compassion and fidelity of a lover.
During hay-time he had been no less than a miracle. All the heaviest labour, including the building of ricks, he had taken upon himself. His great strength, his astuteness, his quick, inflexible and scientific organization, amazed them.
They discovered much about him—that he had been severely wounded and would bleed violently from his nose, and that he was young enough to have been their son. All these things drove out the last of suspicion and fear concerning him. They began to regard him as a boy, tireless, genuine, lovable. Then, when it became not unusual for him to remain alone in the fields, they discovered that he could sing. The depth, the richness of his voice, stirred them deeply; and he sang repeatedly melodies of his boyhood, of the time when (they thought) he must have known country surroundings—quiet happiness, a lover, and the old, irresponsible days of peace; and his voice would re-create for him the essence of that felicitous, wonderful, incomparable time.
When hay-time had passed there arrived that time of lingering, of expectation, of the promise of harvest, resembling the last months of a pregnancy.
It was the custom, on hot days, to sit out for meals under the large walnut tree spreading to the south of the farmhouse. Propped up against the bole, the Birds ate their dinner of bread, meat, and cheese, with beer, in a matter-of-fact, contented way. Sometimes when stirred to an unusual degree of indignation by fresh and more terrible news of fighting, Jasper would launch forth on a discussion on war, hotly maintaining that all sides were mad, callous, inhuman, declaring that only the innocent suffered, pointing out the monstrous folly of that state which could spend millions on saving its people from small-pox, cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, merely that they might be thrown, like worthless scraps, into the belly of war.
Johann used to squat with an ash-stave between his knees, feeling and smoothing it and uttering approving murmurs. These moments of unexpected indignation—of futile rage against the inevitable—found an eager response in him. Much of the argument would escape him; as to the rest, he could only passionately agree, and each argument and display of indignation brought him closer to the Birds.
On one of these occasions he brought out a photograph to show them. It showed a kind-eyed, middle-aged and rather handsome German woman, dressed all in black except for a white kerchief over her head. When he began explaining, rapidly, piteously, almost unintelligibly, that this was his mother, tears started quickly to Clara’s eyes and Jasper fell to biting his lips. And when he suddenly declared in broken language how like the affection of motherhood her own affection seemed, she ran away and wept bitterly.
‘That’s the most we could have done for him, poor child. His mother would know that.’
From that moment she went about with a sense of elation. Having no children, nothing in her life, she felt, had touched her so tenderly or happily as this comparison, this devoted trust in her; and whenever Johann called ‘Clara!’ across the yard or the fields, a little blood reddened her cheeks, the blood of a woman embarrassed or delighted, the blood of an awakened affection.
Harvest came. Over the bleached ripe fields seemed to float small mauve and scarlet fleets of scabious and poppies, and the heat came in stifling waves across the corn.
Once again his boisterous, never-sleeping strength, his exuberance, his unselfishness, made them ask themselves:
‘What should we have done without him?’
It was late September before they erected the last stack. When they brought up the last wagon and began filling in the roof it was evening, growing cool, and the horses were restless. Johann was in a careless mood and was laughing and singing as he took up the sheaves.
Suddenly, in the midst of all this, the horses jerked on and a wagon-wheel scraped against the ladder on which Johann was standing. Almost at once the ladder toppled and slid slowly across the smooth straw, and in a second or two, almost before the terrible ‘Johann! Johann!’ had sprung from their lips, the prisoner was flung over the terrified horses’ heads and thrown violently to earth.
‘Johann! Johann!’ they continued to call against each other in terror. ‘Good God! Oh, good God!’
In terror they became helpless and pathetic. It was inconceivably hard for them to climb out of the wagon, to run and to watch that prostrate figure, and to endure the agonies of uncertainty. Again they were like children. They were numb. But the sight of the Hessian crawling slowly to his feet filled them with a strange, boundless, almost intoxicating joy, and they began without hesitation to fuss about him with little cries, with desperation, with hands trembling with anxiety to touch, to soothe, to set at rest the last doubts.
Meanwhile the prisoner was violently shaking his head and repeating, ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ with great excitement.
‘What? Not hurt? Nowhere?’
‘Nein! Nein! Noding, noding!’
And though still in terror, they ran their hands over his great limbs, much as men do when they buy a prime beast.
Further consternation followed, for Jasper in a sudden rage strode up to the horses and struck them, first with his fist, and then harder, with his knees, in their bellies, until the prisoner, as if strangely upset by this attack, fainted. That was the last straw. Disaster, fear of death, had paralysed them. Johann’s fainting fit set them running, like two clockwork dolls, into all conceivable holes and corners, wherever by chance, fate might have left remedies. Then, having revived him, they searched him for wounds and bruises, only to find that, apart from one bluish mark, there was nothing; he was unblemished.
Some weeks elapsed. Harvest was over; a little yellow sprinkled the elms. Jasper and the prisoner found amusement in splashing walnuts, but though the Hessian was extremely active, at moments he appeared to wince, as if suffering some acute stab of pain. Apart from this the days were tranquil, ineffably at peace, and transcended, like those of a woman delivered at last, and there spread over the farm great broodings and quietnesses broken only by occasional visits of commissioners of food and supplies who bullied and shouted patriotic nonsense, or by the halting of a battalion not far off, and its men coming in for water and lingering about the well, talking and smoking.
But, whatever happened, the affection and harmony which united them did not change except to increase and to bind them closer.
It was towards November that the prison
er began to cause them uneasiness. He became less active, and moved laboriously, as if his legs were weighted, and the tasks he had once performed like a Samson, boisterously and with singing, suddenly seemed to intimidate him.
What was wrong with him? They speculated, argued, questioned him. Secretly proud of his strength, however, he would divulge nothing. One morning his nose bled violently, and they began to fear that some complication might arise from his wound and the fall, and they urged him to report himself to the prisoners’ doctor.
‘Ach!’—and that was enough to convey how disgusting that idea was to him.
His appearance presented at first no change. At times he even recaptured his boisterousness and again worked with the old, miraculous strength. But many relapses occurred, and by the end of November his face had become like that of an anaemic woman.
They saw a strange drooping about his shoulders. They began to reason with him; he was adamant, would not listen, and half-swaggeringly drew off his shirt and invited them to examine his clear brown flesh, and when they could discover no blemish, turned on them with a sort of angry pity:
‘Ach, you thought dere was something, but there is nothing, hein?’
They were repelled by this attitude, and preserved silence until one afternoon of cold rain, winds and storms of yellow and rusty leaves, when they were sacking potatoes in the barn. The sacks were filled by Jasper and Clara and, though it was against their wishes, Johann built them in a mound against the wall. As the mound grew, sweat poured down his face, and he struggled in a way which hurt them. But he would hear nothing, though their reproofs were gentle, and the strength of his resolution and resistance grew like some half-fanatical religion, filling his eyes with a consuming light.
Nevertheless, striving to heave a full sack above his head some moments later, the strength in him, as if cut off as suddenly and effectually as an electric current, failed utterly. The sack dropped like a stone. Potatoes were disgorged bouncing in all directions. He remained immovable, dumb, stupid, as if regarding them as so many comic balls dancing about his feet.
‘Johann! Johann!’ they cried. They too stared at the potatoes. They began to stammer reproaches.
‘You should have reported as we told you, directly you felt anything after that fall! Look what a way you fell. Oh, why didn’t you go? … and now!—You see, it’s perhaps inside you—here! And the wound!—God alive, how you can keep on? Why didn’t you go? why didn’t you go a month back?’ and so on, despairing or reasoning, until the woman launched at him a different cry.
‘Your mother would want you to go!’
At those words he gave a violent start, and tears of hatred and remorse sprang into his eyes, and when he tried to answer their reproaches he failed miserably, which made him even more inexorable, more fanatical in the notion of carrying out his will. He stood in the midst of the scattered potatoes resembling an animal that has wounded itself but will die rather than suffer hands laid upon it, and nothing would induce him to surrender that defiant attitude.
Thus they passed through a period of mystification and trial, torn between tenderness, anger, and despair at the sight of him wasting and suffering before their eyes. Their distress was piteous. They became practical, insistent upon his accepting their aid, their ointments from herbs, their poultices and country decoctions. They administered with great faith. They cherished tenderly and jealously the dream of his being cured by their devoted skill and solicitude.
They had great hope in him. The work he did, however, was negligible, and it became difficult for him to carry a faggot or take a bucket to the well. Sometimes they caught him with his head buried in his hands or standing pale and still, with a vacant expression, like a ghost, in the first attitudes of voluntary subjection and despair.
And then, late one afternoon, Clara came crying across the farmyard for Jasper. He was chopping wood in the orchard. She halted some yards from him, called his name and began stamping her feet and wringing her hands in terror.
‘My God, what is it?’ he shouted.
‘It’s Johann! It’s Johann!’
He dropped his axe and, following her, kept asking:
‘What is it? What’s the boy done?’
‘Oh! I don’t know. He’s fallen … he just lies there.’
When they reached him he was lying upon his side, in the twilit stable, beneath the belly of a horse he had been grooming, the horse-comb was clenched in his hand; the horse stood motionless. As they dragged him away and propped him against some sacks of corn he gave a groan. He was revolting to see; he had been bleeding heavily from the nose, and to Jasper he seemed already moribund; his eyes bore a strange, glassy look as if he had been crying when he fell. He lay still; nor did he reply to their entreaties:
‘Johann, Johann, what happened? How did you come to fall? My boy, what’s the matter? Tell us, what’s the matter? Tell us what it is, tell us, my boy?’
But he was silent; and then, before they had summoned courage or thought, and while the woman was still too curious and frightened for grief and the man too shocked to act, he began a brief stirring and there was a rustling in his throat, as if he wished to speak to them; and when this had ceased, leaving, as it were, its echo in a prolonged and agonizing sigh, his face seemed suddenly softened and chastened and his head fell softly back upon the corn-sacks, and he died.
Hopelessness, and panic seized them. They tried to lift him and take him away, and their bungling movements seemed to scare the horses who, smelling death, began stamping restlessly in their stalls. Darkness was falling rapidly, making the young prisoner’s face ghostly, and lighting a stable lantern they set it beside the corpse, which their last efforts had given a strange dignity, and stared at each other with sad eyes.
And then the thought entered their minds:
‘We’re responsible for him—shouldn’t we send a message or else take him back to the camp again?’
Except themselves they had no one by whom to send a message, and suddenly their old fear of regulations, soldiers, and authorities returned with overwhelming force, and they began to harness the horse in order to take him away.
‘Take the feet,’ said Jasper.
‘Oh! I can’t lift him. What’s shall we do?’
‘Try, woman, try. Again.’
‘Oh! dear Lord, I can’t do it.’
They struggled, but beside him they seemed old and feeble, and in dying he seemed to have become a giant. And then, as if this were not enough, Jasper knocked over the lantern, and in terror they dropped the body and groped and ran against each other, the woman crying and the man swearing violently.
Finally it was done, and they prepared to drive off. Objects in the darkness, familiar little sounds and obscure movements caused them to recall his life with them.
The cart lurched into the high-road. It was dark. They drove slowly, not speaking. On either side rose the gaunt skeletons of trees, and on the road their feeble, shaded cart-lamps threw two tiny gleams, which ran steadily, everlastingly on beside the horse. Suddenly, without warning, it seemed bitterly cold, with a smell of autumnal decay.
As they began to drive downhill into the valley it seemed that they were descending into a black pit of great depth, and at that point, with the increased jolting of the cart, the prisoner’s head began to beat like a dull mallet against the woodwork of the cart.
As if unable to bear that sound, Clara stooped at once, half-knelt and then took the head in her hands and for what seemed unending moments held it without moving. At last, without deliberating and impelled by some obscure desire, she planted softly between his eyes a brief kiss, and there crept into her grief at once a sense of peace, of elation, a feeling of nobility, a sensation of jealousy resembling that of a mother. And all along the road she remained holding the head, at times with all the fierce instincts of her womanhood, at times with tenderness, as if he knew of her touch on him, and sometimes for long periods without a movement, without a thought, listening mechanicall
y to the sound of wheels and hoofs, the dry cracking of Jasper’s whip, and of her own weeping, the low sound of which broke from her with great sorrow, and expanding infinitely, seemed to fill the increasing darkness.
Death in Spring
We had walked up the wood for the second time to look at the young foxes. It was lovely April weather, windless and sunny in the wood under the leafless oak trees and the slender black ashlings. The old hazels were yellow with catkins and the primroses made drifty yellow distances wherever we turned to look; the bluebells were darkly budded and the first purple orchids had unfolded and the first oxlips. The riding ran through the wood from east to west, smooth and green and wide enough for ten horses to canter abreast; it was flooded with sunlight and out of the shelter of the trees we could feel the west wind very soft on our faces, blowing straight from the corner of the wood where the foxes were.
At the end of the riding we stood still and listened. We had walked up slowly and quietly, without speaking. To the right of us stood an old shooting-hut built of straw and hurdles, and on the left was a long mound of earth burrowed with foxholes, and bare except for young nettles and a clump or two of elder. On the far side of the mound was a pond, the trees growing down to the edge of it, making the water black with the motionless reflections of their thick trunks and branches. A day or two before I had come upon ten or twelve fox-cubs playing in and out of the bushes of elder. An east wind had been blowing and they had not scented me. They were pretty, amusing, impish things, a little lighter in colour than earth, their soft hair ruffled in the wind like the feathers of birds. Sometimes they trotted down to the edge of the pool and looked at the water and sometimes they roamed off into the wood itself, through the dark green stretches of dog’s-mercury to where the tide of primroses began. Wherever they went they moved quite soundlessly, with a fine, fox-like assurance and a grace of movement more beautiful than in all other young woodland creatures.