Authors: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Little wonder then, with his sorrow from day to day expanding and glorifying, that he scarcely noticed that autumn was come, winter almost, and that the landscape was lank and discoloured and the air weighted with cold. “Still walking?” Angustias would inquire. And then, nodding her head wisely, as though agreeing with some secret interior crony, she would yawn and settle further into her chair. No one met with in his rambles stared at him now. Children no longer rushed out of the cattleman's cottage, exclaiming, “There's the Englishman!” And though no doubt he must always seem a little odd, a little grotesque, they had accepted him and took him for granted. As though I were a rhea, he said to himself, suddenly visited with the notion that he and the bird before him were very much alike. Even to an inhabitant of the pampas, his thoughts continued, the rhea cannot but seem rather odd and grotesque. Standing in its native landscape it wears the look of being a stuffed bird in a museum, as though, glancing down towards those large scaly feet, one would see the label:
Rhea, or American Ostrich. Habitat, the Argentine and Patagonia
.
Ungainly, harmless, eccentricâfor it is certainly eccentric for the male bird to be so devoted a motherâyes, I and the rhea have much in common. He had stayed his steps to think, he made no sound or movement. But as though it overheard his thought, the rhea, standing abstracted as he, suddenly turned, balancing its peaked and dipping head on its long neck, and gave him a glance. Its eye had the brightness and pathos of a glass eye. Poor creature, so dodo-like in its contours, so shabby in its colouring, wearing so unsuccessfully its furbelow of drooping feathersâthere was a kind of grandeur about it as it stood there in its lifelong unconsciousness of being a foolish figure.
It caught his fancy, his mind had made an assignation with it. Saying to himself, I can wait, I will not disturb it by going nearer, he remained for a long while looking at it; and though for some minutes his thought had floated elsewhere, forgetting its existence, he was still looking at it when that existence was brought to an end.
For a shot rang out behind him, and the rhea, fluttering with an instant's tumult of heavy wings, thudded to the ground.
With a confused impulse of compassion he rushed towards it, but even as he reached it it lay dying. The shot had entered its neck; a ruffle of loosened plumage showed where the spine was broken. Now that it lay on the ground its bulk seemed enormous, a death as portentous as a man's. And he turned to look for the murderer.
There was no need to look for the motive. Opposite slays opposite, as fire and water writhe in their combat, as lion and lamb wage their implacable enmity. Slender, fiercely erect, racked with youth and pride, the boy with the gun stood in a trance of hatred, defying a world of rheas, a world of harmlessness, dowdiness, ungainliness. There could be no mistaking his intent. Apollo could not have bent his bow with a more divine single-mindedness to destroy; and seeing him, the impulse of blame was quenched in the man's heart. One might as well have blamed a flash of lightning.
There was nothing to say. The bird was dead, the slayer justified by that complete absence of justification. I, I am of the rhea's party, he thought, standing beside the dead bird like a mourner, like a chief mourner and blood relation; and rousing in his flesh, the independent soul exclaimed, Oh, it should have been me, been me! But instead the bird had fallen, and he, alive, must carry on, willy-nilly, the warfare pledged between the ungainly and the dexterous, the harmless and the destroying.
Accepting the challenge laid on him, he looked now at the boy, who had not stirred a muscle and whose black eyes surveyed with equal disdain the man and the bird, the dead and the living. He could not be more than twelve or thirteen. But there was nothing schoolboyish about him, he was as elegant as a viper. And as a viper, reared to strike, narrows itself, nursing for an instant its premeditated volley, the boy was making ready to speak.
“Are you my grandmother's Englishman?”
Momentarily the effect was magnificent. But in truth the stroke had failed, aimed and weighted by an unerring hatred, but deflected by nothing worthier than denseness and impaired hearing. For he had spoken in Spanish, and the man, grown a little deaf, his wits sunk in inattention, had boggled at the words.
“Eh? I beg your pardon?”
Seeing his failure, contemptuously casting it from him, the boy turned away. At first he walked slowly and stiffly, gradually he quickened his pace, melting into a snake's glide, whisking through the grasses to where a horse was tethered to a rail. He loosed it, and mounted. A rider, all his sharp swagger was restored to him. Jerking the horse into a gallop he rode off towards the House of the Salutation.
It was cold, almost as cold as though a snowfall impended. The sky was overcast with a pale cloud, the landscape lay with stoicism under the shadowing, unbecoming light. With the departure of the boy and the horse life had ebbed away from the placeâa borrowed glitter of life, scornfully twitched away. A slow wind rustled the grasses, and stirred the plumage of the dead bird at his foot. I suppose this would be November in England, he thought. But the Novembers he recalled were of London, and there had been a sort of squalid cosiness, like the Chamber of Horrors, in those foggy streets, blotched with yellow lamps and the glow of butchers' shops. This was no red-plush and waxwork winter that threatened. The slow wind drifting by him dismayed his lungs by its utter absence of scent. On the island, all the year round, the air had been richly filled with strains of scent as with strains of music; and even since his exile he had seldom been for a day out of the smell of the sea. But hereâstrange that he had not noticed it till nowâthere was no smell whatever. The chilled ground locked up its odour, no tang of wood-smoke from the scattered habitations reached him where he stood. He lifted his wrist to his nose and sniffed at it; but, cold, it had no more scent than a stone. Yes, it was winter: an inland winter, impassive, rigid, unemphatic.
And suddenly he found himself ravaged with a desire to go home to tea, to tea in England. He could hear the light rattle of tea-cups, the noise of the canister opened, the blurred breathing of the kettle accumulating to the clink of the lid rising and falling upon the steam. Meanwhile he sat waiting before a cast-iron fireplace, with hobs, and inattentively his vision counted the woollen tufts along the edge of the mantel-border. Beside the grate, thirty years away, hung a toasting-fork. And then with a decisive whisk of the memory he was walking through the sober emptied streets, keeping his ears open for the muffin man's bell. Round the corner it came, a cheerful approach, and even when the muffin man had stopped before him the bell would ring faintly to itself, dangling from his wrist on a leather strap. The green baize cloth would be lifted, its under side dusty with flour...
But he stood on the pampas, half a world away, staring about him in a dusk through which no muffin man would ever come. And forgetting the rhea in his impulse of desolation he turned away without another glance at it, thinking only that he must start walking again, or for cold and misery he would perish. For a fancy, he told himself, for an imagination. And as a matter of fact I always preferred a current bun, toasted. This must be old age, so to be at the mercy of a chance recollection, so to be beckoned by the waft of a weed that chance brings floating to the surface of the mind. Age has come to me like this winter's afternoon. I can see nothing here that speaks of winter any whit more than it spoke yesterday. But winter I see and acknowledge. Well then, I am old. I was already old a quarter of an hour ago, when that boy watched me and hated me. It is a pity he is such a good shot, if it was the rhea he was after. Good shot or bad, a pity. For now, since I have not the courage to lie down and die of exposure, nor the nimble-wittedness to think of some other course, I must follow him back to the House of the Salutation, where he will hate me again.
Darkness had fallen before he reached the house. I came as a stranger, he thought; for the dogs ran out, barking. His eyes were cast down, he did not perceive Angustias coming through the yard until she spoke beside him.
“Here you are. I thought this time you must really be lost. You should not stay out so late, my friend.”
In the darkened wintry air her presence was warm and imposing. From her pale skin emanated a gentle and drowsy warmth such as undulates about those trees of lighted candles in a church. But her voice was hastened, and for the first time since he had known her she seemed unsure of herself. He forgot to answer, and she spoke again, swiftly combating the silence.
“My grandson has come, Alfredo. There is his car.”
The garage door stood open, and the remainder of light showed within a slender arrogant shape, steel-coloured, contoured like an orchid.
“I have met him,” he said. “A boy on horseback. He spoke to me.”
He thought he heard her release her breath as though on a sigh of relief.
“Yes, that was he. He is no sooner arrived than he must ride out, to have a look round. He loves this place, he comes here whenever he can. Like this, without a word of warning.
“It will be his, one day.”
She spoke as though to herself, staring down into the well, where the circle of water had not light enough, now, to mirror them.
“Where is he now?”
“Indoors, indoors. Well, we cannot stay here. Come, my friend.”
It was on his lips to say, No, I will not come. He doesn't like me. But as though overhearing his thought she turned with decision towards the lighted house and drew him after her.
The room where Angustias sat had been her husband's smoking-room, and her trail of female accessories had done little to alter its English and masculine appearance. The armchairs, rooted on rusty castors, were covered with shabby leather; a roll-top desk, so thickly littered with papers that it could not be shut, responded to the tall mahogany secretary whose glass bookshelf doors were never opened; in the shadowy end of the room stood a billiard table in a housing of crackled American cloth. Framed photographs of horses and bulls hung on the walls, and built into a corner was a gun-cupboard. To the character of this room, a permanence which Angustias' fluctuating untidiness flowed over but did not mask, he had given neither attention nor speculation. It was as much out of his reach as the dead man was, whose imprint stamped it, whose widow sat there, shaking the light ash of her cigarettes upon the Turkey carpet, turning the facets of her ruby and topaz rings before the fire. Of the two armchairs, one was certainly hers, since she always sat in it. The other, it followed, was his. And never once, seating himself, had he given a thought to him whose place, presumably, he occupied. But now, with one gesture of the impassive, customary room, one wave, as it were, of a hand that had not moved till now, the room had changed, altering its impassivity into a watchfulness, a guardianship and surveyance.
For the gun-cupboard doors were open, their glass panels waking unaccustomed flashes of light in the unvisited dark corner. But now it was unvisited no longer, for the boy stood there, cleaning a gun with an oily rag on a string.
“All these want cleaning,” he said as they entered. In his tone was reproach and proprietorship.
“Yes, I expect they do,” she answered, and the easy warmth of her voice sounded almost flippant. “It is time you came, my child. No one troubles about them but you.”
The chairs opened deep laps before the fire, they sat down in their usual places. From his corner the boy glanced at them, sharply and darkly; then, as at something better worth looking at, he squinted down the polished barrels, and took out another piece.
Hatred, infallible hatred, thought his grandmother's Englishman, however inattentive he may be, now, to convey it. Or is it, for there are no eyes so acute, no foresight so unerring, as hatred's, that he had chosen this occupation on purpose, knowing well that I know nothing about guns? And at length he looked carefully at Angustias, wondering if she were conscious of this hate as he, and what she would do about the situationâignore or face it, and if face it, how? It was worse for her than for him. But she, placid and heavily graceful as a recumbent cat, had by some meandering of conversation quitted the present, and was telling him stories of what she did when she was a little girl.
Throughout the evening, as though for a wager, she persisted in narratives of her childhood. He had never known her talk so fluently nor so well; and he, leaning upon her eloquence, became absorbed, listened, laughed, and questioned her. But even while he questioned he had the impression that she would have talked so without any abetting from him. He had always seen her sure of herself; but until tonight he had not seen her aimed; for it was as though with intention and malice that she talked as she did, raising up the past to outface and quell this silent child, to put him in his place as something young, recent, and negligible.
To the boy she spoke hardly at all, and when she addressed him it was with an indulgence that patted him down lower, telling him that the champagne they drank was in his honour, that Quita had remembered his favourite dessert, or that tomorrow he must take her out in his splendid new car. They spoke together in Spanish, he, as though matching himself to her game, answering her with a schoolboy brevity and artificiality. And presently, bestowing a smile, an approving nod, or a sweetmeat, she turned back again to English and her childhood, with an “As I was telling you.”
The situation was painful, and yet, excited by the champagne, buoyed up on her power to please and entertain, he went near to enjoying the evening. If appearances were to be trusted, she was enjoying it unreservedly. Undimmed, with half a dozen uncles and eccentrics still in hand, she rose with a feigned yawn, saying,
“Oh, but we must go to bed. It's past two, and his father does not approve of Alfredo sitting up late. His nerves are strained, poor child, with studying so hard. Do you still have those bad dreams, my dear?”