by H. E. Bates
A rabbit scuttled away noisily among the dead wood and undergrowth as we came to a standstill. I stooped and looked between the undergrowth at the fox-burrows: the wind was blowing our scent towards them and the mound was deserted. Irene moved her feet and cracked an ash-twig and a young rabbit made off wildly from under a tangle of old honeysuckle wood. I looked at her quickly and she smiled. She had never yet seen a fox-cub or even an old fox; she had gathered anemones, as we had come up through the wood, and her hands were full of them and she had put a dark violet in her mouth. She smiled with her lips closed, sucking the sweetness of the violet-stem at the same time. The air was elusively fragrant with the scent of the flowers she was holding and of the thousands of primroses lying everywhere like pools of yellow and green.
I moved cautiously forward for a pace or two until I was level with the shooting-hut. A young fox came suddenly up from a burrow and gazed at me as though puzzled, head sideways and ears cocked, and another trotted noiselessly over the brow of the mound towards the pool.
Irene came up behind me and I pointed out the cub, drawing down her head so that her line of sight should be level with mine. Her hair brushed my cheek. We stood motionless and the fox was motionless too, his eyes impish and bright and filled with a wise mistrust of us. He watched us for a minute and then without haste turned tail and vanished down the burrow again.
‘You saw him?’ I whispered.
She nodded.
‘You see they are timid,’ I said. ‘If we could skirt the wood and come up on the far side of the pond we should see them better.’
‘Shall we go then?’ she whispered.
There was a gate at the end of the riding, and we had only to climb it and walk across a piece of pasture land and skirt a corner of the wood. I was moving towards the gate when suddenly I heard a faint cough and a second later a voice saying:
‘I should hardly do that if I were you. You were quite right. They are very timid today.’
We turned at once and looked towards the shooting-hut. The voice was very quiet and dignified, and had about it also something tremulous and faded, as though it belonged to someone very old. We stood still for one moment. I could see nothing and suddenly the voice spoke again.
‘Come in, won’t you? There’s plenty of room. I shan’t eat you.’
We walked towards the shooting-hut, glancing at each other rapidly every second or two, until we stood in the doorway. The sunlight made an angle of light across the dry earth floor, and beyond the sunlight—on a rough seat of split hazel sticks running along the back of the hut—an old man was sitting, with a double-barrel sporting gun across his knees. It was difficult to believe that he had ever spoken to us. He seemed at once voiceless and spiritless. He looked incredibly old and he sat as immobile as a mountain, the skin of his long, sunken face the colour of a dead corn-husk and more transparent, so that the veins shone softly through it like a fragile network of lavender threads, so faint in colour that the dead shining yellowness of the flesh itself was hardly broken. He was dressed in an old pepper-and-salt sporting jacket with breeches to match and coarse green stockings that hung loosely on his thin legs, like moss on an old stick; he looked as if he had long ago lost even the strength to dress himself; his knee-buttons were half undone and his jacket hung open, showing underneath it a waistcoat of faded canary yellow with the ends of a thick green silk neckerchief drooping across it and tucked away into the armpits. His hat was an old square grey bowler; he wore it at a slight angle towards his right ear, showing a wisp, like a mere silver petal, of his thin hair. The jaunty poise of the hat and the eyes looking at us from underneath it were both symbols of life. The eyes were wonderful. His body was like an aged tree, and his eyes were like two miraculous young leaves. They looked at us as we came to the door of the hut with a vivid expression almost naive in its intense brightness; they did not move, except to lift themselves the finest fraction in order to watch our faces; the light falling upon them redoubled their life, illuminating their colour until it shone like melting ice, infinitely blue and more beautifully vivid; they were like the eyes of a child or of a young girl, full of unquenchable life and curiosity and wonder.
He looked at us in silence for perhaps ten seconds or more; it seemed a long time; and then he made a slight gesture with one hand, lifting two or three fingers from the stock of his gun.
‘Come inside, come inside,’ he repeated.
His voice and his simple gesture of the upraised fingers were full of a profound courtesy. We walked into the hut. His eyes rested on us steadily and attentively, and then he moved a fraction along the seat. We had been his guests from the moment of entering.
‘Sit down, won’t you? Sit down. You can look straight across at the foxes from here—good view of ’em,’ he went on. ‘Sit one on each side of me. That’s right, that’s right,’ he murmured. ‘It’s a clear view if they come. But I doubt if they will—I doubt it. Wrong wind. They’re getting older too.’
He spoke very slowly, pausing between the phrases, his wet, strengthless red lips quivering in the act of finding his words. He stared into the wood while talking; the sunshine as it fell through the half-leaved branches was broken up into endless flakes of quivering yellow light; he seemed to be watching their inexhaustible dance on the dark earth covered with flowers and bright green flower-leaves. He was not lost however, and he never forgot that we were there; the extreme courtesy of his voice made us feel that there was nothing in all the world he would rather do than sit and talk to us.
Suddenly he ceased gazing into the wood and turned to Irene and remarked, reflecting:
‘Anemones and foxes,’ repeating the words two or three times. ‘Anemones and foxes, anemones and foxes.’ Finally he put out his hand towards the anemones and said: ‘Excuse me; may I take one?’
His hand faltered weakly among the bunch and a few anemones were loosened and some fell to the ground. I bent down at once but he was already stooping and saying ‘I insist, I insist.’ His body was as dry and stiff as old leather. He picked up the anemones one by one, breathing with little distressful gasps and bending as though his joints had been locked together. At last he straightened himself with the anemones quivering in his fingers. His face was colourless and his eyes were moist with tears of exhaustion, which began to creep down his cheeks like drops of thin oil. His breath was dry and dead and he sat for a long time with his hands resting heavily on the gun across his knees, with the bluish, sagging lids of his eyes closed, his whole frame struggling to be calm again.
Finally he opened his eyes and made a gesture of beautiful, tired courtesy towards Irene and said:
‘You must forgive me.’
She smiled. He smiled also, and then as though it were simply the natural excuse for his clumsiness he said quietly:
‘I’m afraid I’m dying. Damn it.’
He spoke as though he bitterly hated the thought of dying and there was a kind of defiant life in his words. I did not look at him. I sat looking instead at the gun lying across his knees; it resembled him—old, worn, polished, aristocratic, and I wondered why he had brought it up there, out of season, with the wood full of mating birds and animals and their young.
He saw me looking at the gun. He glanced at me for a second and his bright eyes seemed to take in all my thoughts.
‘You are wondering what makes me carry a gun in spring,’ he said. He looked slightly ashamed of himself, as though he were a boy and we suspected him of hiding eggs in his cap.
‘I wanted a shot,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been a sportsman all my life. You know how it is—something you’ve always done—can’t leave it alone. I had to come up. I’ve been in bed for a God-forsaken month. I had a room overlooking the orchard and they let me sit up in bed and shoot sparrows through the open window with an air-gun. I used to wait until they settled on the plum-bloom. Kill about a bird a day if I was lucky. I got bored to death. I like the open country and something worth shooting, like snipe, you understand.’
He turned his head and looked at us in turn. There was a gay light in his eyes—that light which always comes into the eyes of old men when they talk to children. ‘I dare say you think it’s wrong to shoot?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong in it? All sentimentality—nonsense, a great deal of nonsense. It’s only a law,—the strong preying on the weak. Yes, it’s nonsense—a lot of talk by people who probably wouldn’t know a tit from a hawk, and who wouldn’t care if they did. Life won’t stop because I shoot a pigeon.’
He broke off, a little exhausted by talking, and leaned back his head against the wall of the hut and let his gaze rest again on the bright green wood and the flakes of trembling sunlight. It was warm and sheltered in the hut, and the breeze came in at the doorway full of the sweetness of the wood breaking into life again.
There was a silence. I looked over towards the fox-holes; the mound was still deserted. I heard a sigh. And suddenly, out of his meditation, the old man was saying:
‘When I look at this wood I have immortal longings in me.’
A moment later he went on, muttering to himself, as though he had forgotten we were there:
‘The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired.’
He broke off and lifted his hand from the stock of his gun and said with a tremor of excitement in his voice:
‘I used to know it all. A long time ago—sixty years ago. A young girl I knew was Cleopatra. I didn’t act, but I knew the part. I used to shut myself up and learn it.’
A young fox suddenly trotted over the mound, sniffing among the elder-bushes, and I watched him until he disappeared by the pool. The old man went on talking again, telling us of the girl who had taken the part of Cleopatra. He talked of her gently and meditatively, half to himself, sometimes quite absently, and then a little shyly when he recalled suddenly that we were there. She had been a dark, brilliant, capricious creature, with all the eager, passionate, irresponsible gaiety of a young girl just opening her eyes to life. He talked of her for a long time, breaking off, forgetting, meditating—his voice by turns dreamy and tremulous with the effort of remembrance; sometimes he repeated a line or two of a speech, and sometimes he moved his hands and tried to describe to us how beautifully she had acted. There were things he remembered perfectly, such as a yellow silk dress she had worn, a certain way in which she would stand and click her fingers when angry or perplexed; a winter afternoon when he had stood on his head in the snow again and again, just in order to amuse her. He had forgotten how long the play had run, but at the end of it they had run away to the Continent together. There had been days of sweet, hectic happiness. He spoke of her always as Cleopatra, as though too shy to mention her name, and he went on for a long time unfolding his tale, losing the thread and picking it up again uncertainly, until it was like some old picture, sewn in silk, of another century.
His voice trailed off at last; he traced over the pattern of the gun-breach with his long, bony forefinger. The girl was dead; he did not want to talk of her again. We sat silent, listening to the silence of the wood broken now and then by the crack of a twig, a blackbird singing, the soft, halting coo of a pigeon—almost a summer sound.
The old man sat sunk in meditation, his chin dropping towards the anemone he had threaded in his buttonhole. He suddenly looked older than ever, an immemorial figure, overburdened by the weight of a thousand years, the wrinkles of his face eternal. Suddenly he turned and looked at me wonderfully, his blue eyes alert and twinkling, as though his whole being had come to life in them.
‘You find it difficult to believe I was once a young man?’ he said.
I had been trying to make myself believe. Before I could answer he said:
‘An old man looks permanent—inevitable—as though he had been born an old man, isn’t that it?’
‘I think that’s it.’
‘Are you glad you are not old?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d like to remain young? No? You want to go on growing, but whatever happens you want to keep life, don’t you? I know, I know. One of these days I shall snap in half like a damn twig, but I still want life. I’d like time for another shot or two. I want to hang on a bit longer—a bit longer. It’s nice to think of summer coming on. I see the oaks are breaking bud. I’ve great faith in that. But I haven’t heard the cuckoo yet, have you? It seems late this year.’
He went on talking again, talking of the past, his youth, his shooting days—a time when he had shot a hundred snipe; he had been a gay bird; he had lived joyously and he wanted to go on living; he knew that he was dying and he hated the thought of death. He made long pauses and rested and breathed carefully as he spoke, as though trying to sustain the life in him a little longer. A young fox came over the mound and trotted away in the shadow and sunlight under the trees; he saw it and pointed it out with his thin white forefinger, and we watched it vanish by the pool.
‘I should like as many more years to live as foxes I’ve helped to kill,’ he said. ‘You’re young. I envy you.’
He talked a little longer; he seemed to grow tired and presently we rose to go. He rose also. He stood amazingly straight and tall, only bending his head a little, like a great hollyhock. He shook hands, holding our hands in his bone-cold fingers for a long time.
‘It has been a great pleasure,’ he said.
‘It has been charming,’ I said. ‘I hope you will get a shot.’
‘Thank you. I shall probably miss in any case.’
We said goodbye.
‘Goodbye.’ He gave us a slight bow, leaning on his gun. He smiled at Irene with his wonderful entrancingly bright eyes, full of gallantry and life. Finally, just as we were going, he said:
‘I hope you don’t mind if I say something to you—a little advice. If you wish to do anything, do it. Do what you feel you must do. Don’t listen to other people. You’re young. Let them go to the devil. It’s your life, not theirs. If I listened to other people I shouldn’t be up here this afternoon. I should be in bed. Goodbye.’
He took off his hat; his thin, silver-yellow hair shone beautifully; he came to the doorway of the hut to watch us depart. We walked down the riding, and once we turned and saw him still standing there, still hatless, but when we turned a second time he had vanished into the hut again. We said a few words about him, and I thought again of his intense blue eyes, his perfect courtesy, the story of the girl who had been Cleopatra, the way he had learned her lines by heart, and the way he still longed for summer to come. I thought of him lying in bed and shooting sparrows through the open window, and of how he could not bear to lie there and had dragged himself up into the wood for another shot before he died.
We struck away from the riding and walked diagonally through the wood along a narrow path. We came upon the shell of a sucked blackbird’s egg, and Irene picked it up and walked with it in her hand, admiring its colours.
There was suddenly the report of a shot in the wood. We stopped. The shot went racing through the trees and rattled the air. A blackbird screamed, and we heard the rabbits scuttling away to hiding, rustling the dry leaves. The shot spent itself at last and the wood was calm with a silence that was like death.
We listened for the sound of the second barrel, but it never came. We walked on again and came out of the wood, and crossing a field of young wheat we heard the cuckoo calling for the first time that spring.
I wondered if the old man had heard it too and how often he would hear it again.
Sheep
One silent winter afternoon, in an outlying turnip-field sheltered on one side by a copse of young white birches, a small shock-headed boy sat crouching under the stuffed-straw hurdles of a sheep-pen, burying his hands in his breast against the cold. He was alone except for an old grey-and-blue sheep dog curled up at his side into a mere bundle of shaggy hair, and a flock of sixty or seventy sheep, huddled together under the north side of the pen, where they stood feeding methodically off some turnips he had unpitted and scattered among them. Their breath
rose and hovered over them in a thin, cold cloud. A delicate fall of snow had sprinkled their backs, so that they seemed hardly to belong to earth, but looked ineffably pure and white, contrasting strangely with the dark grey sky spreading low overhead, threatening and sombre.
The boy had nothing to do but watch the sheep, and think. The shepherd had gone off to the farm, behind the birch copse, over the hillside.
The loneliness, however, did not oppress him. It was only the cold he hated. The frost seemed to bite into his bones, under his finger-nails, into his jaws and ears and under his hair and into the joints of his body, and at times it pierced to his teeth and through his wide grey eyes, until he felt the saltness start from them.
Occasionally he had to jump to his feet and stamp on the iron earth and beat his breast or sport with the dog. Then they would crouch under the hurdle again, with the boy gazing into the beast’s dark, fond eyes and whispering ‘Caesar, Caesar!’ and gradually lowering his face to the dog’s, to be licked at last by its warm tongue.
He was deeply fond of the dog. It was so old and understanding and sagacious. He knew it was also a special favourite of his master’s, a giant-limbed, violent-tempered brute of a man, and for that reason he was always watchful and careful of it, never letting it stray from sight.
A long time seemed to pass, the birch trees scarcely trembled and the ominous winter silence seemed deeper. And then it struck the boy that the sheep seemed restless. He thought the shepherd must be returning and stood up and looked towards the birch copse. But no one was coming, not a branch had moved, and thinking it seemed more bitterly cold than ever, he sat down again and wrapped his overcoat about his head until he could see nothing but a grey chink of sky.
All at once the sheep-dog leapt to its feet. Alarmed and wondering, the boy sprang up also. The dog, with its nostrils trembling, stood tense and listening, looking at the sheep.