Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ to left. Brown could recognize him by the yellow waterproof jacket that he was wearing. He ran to the wall at the end of the wood and stood by the gate.

      Brown’s heart went out to him in a kind of envy and a desperate longing to be down there. The thought of shouting came to his mind: on a still day like this he might make himself heard down there. But he dismissed the thought, and in a few moments the whole pack came running fast along the wall toward Gonville; Brown flushed at the sight and stood up to watch them tear along the top of the wood and vanish on his right. By the time he sat down again Gonville had disappeared.

      He relapsed into the same dull, marooned feeling; he repeated that it would not be possible to go down the way he had come up, but he did not care very much. Time dropped slowly on and on, and nothing at all happened: no change, no movement.

      Two ravens flew out above him from Lliwedd over the lake, flying with steady wing-beats whose sound came down to him. The front one was almost silent, but the second bird spoke all the time in a guttural monotone, gaak gaak gaak: occasionally the front bird replied, deeply, gaak. They flew straight away from him in an undeviating line for his home.

      The warmth of the sun was grateful to him: in spite of the sodden coldness of his clothes his spirits rose under it, and presently he was aware of being alive again, with an active mind and his apathy gone.

      When he made his great discovery he felt a fool; he could have blushed for it. Ever since the sun had come round the shoulder of Wenallt it had been melting the snow fast. The snow-line on the horrible slope, his chief dread, had been retreating steadily for a great deal of the time that he had been climbing – had crept up after him. Inexplicably, when he had looked down he had never looked for it nor seen it. But by now the slope was free from snow almost to the foot of the crags. A vast sense of relief, of ignominious anticlimax filled him. Without waiting, he let himself down from his place, he let himself down like a sack and he fell safely. He slid and scrambled recklessly down the shale and it submitted to this. He defied the black rocks now and in minutes he threw away the height that he had won with such pain. Twice he slid deliberately down long stretches of snow, squatting on his two feet; the first time he pulled himself up on a rock on the calculated edge of destruction; the second time he let himself go down the last snow of the horrible slope and did not stop until he was on the clean grass. He kicked the last snow from under his boots and ran down the grassy innocent slope laughing like a boy, down to the thorn trees and down safe and happier than Lazarus to the lovely wood and the lake with the blue sky over them, and in ten minutes the real knowledge of naked fear had left him again.

The Little Death

      HE HAD NEVER FELT that sense of having been there before so strongly: climbing up the ladder to the platform, he knew perfectly well that the top rungs would be scaly and harsh, and that there would be a box, a dark green box on top of it.

      There was no box.

      He pushed up the trap door at the top and awkwardly, holding the gun in his left hand, clawed up on to the bare rectangle of planks: there was no box. However, the newness of being up there carried his mind directly on, and he looked eagerly about.

      For years he had wanted to see what it would be like from the platform, and it was pleasant to find that the reality surpassed his old expectation. He was among the tree tops, up in the delicate, gently waving part of the trees, and all the branches tended up, reaching towards him. There, to his right, was the sharp white ribbon of the road seen at intervals through the dark pines, and there was the shooting-brake in the gateway: on his left were the ordinary trees of the wood; some, like the birches immediately under him, were shorter than the truncated pine that supported his stand, and these he could see from top to bottom, wonderfully graceful and delicate, although their leaves were going. Most of the trees on the left hand were about the same height as the platform, or a little higher, but here and there a tall beech or one of the noble ashes for which the wood was named rose high above the rest.

      He stepped to the edge of the unrailed platform, and, repressing a first hint of vertigo (the platform was in gentle motion), he looked over the edge to the shadows, where the keeper still stood, the white of his upturned face showing far below: forty feet, or was it sixty? These heights were very difficult to judge: at any rate, it was high enough for the man’s face to be small, like an egg, and for his voice to come floating up strangely.

      ‘Mr Grattan? The horse is under the far side.’

      ‘Under the far side, is it?’ He did not know at all what the keeper meant, but he was not going to show his ignorance: the keeper had already glanced at his gun, an old common, long-barrelled hammer-gun it was, of Belgian make.

      There were two big hooks fixed underneath, and groping under the platform Grattan found a trestle – obviously a thing to sit upon. He pulled it up, and he was setting it square on its feet when the keeper called again, telling him that the pigeons usually came in from the right. Grattan thanked him, and watched him go away: for a few paces he could see the keeper’s feet before his head and behind, fore and aft, a queer, long stride it looked, before he was under the trees and out of sight.

      The trunk of the pine ran up three or four feet above the stand, and it was pleasant to have it for his back as he sat upon the trestle. The sound of the keeper’s going died away, and the returning quiet brought back with it that remoteness that had been with Grattan all day, that feeling of being at one remove from life, or rather from one’s surroundings, so that they look as little real as the back-cloth of a pantomime, and it would not be surprising if they were to sway gently with a bellying wave from behind. It was something remotely like one of the stages of drunkenness when a man seems to stand a little to one side of himself, listening to what he says and watching him, but without a great deal of interest.

      All day it had been with him, but that was not remarkable for it had waited upon him now and then from boyhood, and since he had come home from the war it had been at his elbow most of the time. Nobody knew about it: he had not told anybody, and indeed if he had wanted to he would have found it very difficult to describe what it was, the thing that interposed itself between him and ordinary life, so that with an indifferent eye he saw everything strange, so that sounds and impressions came through to him as if they travelled more slowly: the something that gave him an inner life of far greater reality than that which went on around him at the same time and in which he took part with the rest of him. It was not to be defined, this inner life; it had little to do with conscious thought; it was a kind of awareness and a withdrawal to another plane of existence. And always, from the very first time that he had known it, a boy walking along the tow-path on a summer’s evening in the shadow of the heavy, dusty green of the trees, twenty years ago, always there had been something of anticipation in it. In the last year this had increased, and now, today more than ever, it was a sense of growing, inevitable crisis – something outside himself for which he was waiting. It was something that he awaited calmly, for in this everything was slow and calm, but it was of vast importance and his being was keyed up and up for it.

      He could not, on the few occasions when he had (almost impiously, it seemed) tried to formulate some ideas upon it, he could not even put any name to its nature, but today he was more certain than ever of its imminence. It would happen to him without any doing on his part: it was at once desirable and terrible.

      The existence of this more real life did not prevent him – never had prevented him – from living at his common level: this very afternoon he had felt a strong inclination to decline the brown holland bag that his aunt had lovingly made him for his cartridges, as a surprise; and he had been ashamed of the appearance of his gun among the lovely hammerless ejectors carried by the other guests. However, he had neither put the cloth bag down nor concealed it in his pocket, and as a penance for these impulses СКАЧАТЬ