Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ it. Nowadays he forgot things very quickly; even the excitement of this invitation to Langton and the near-certainty of a job on the estate, which had made such a flutter at home, had left him almost unmoved after half an hour, although but a few years ago it would have kept him in a turmoil, partly pleasant, but increasingly alarming as the day grew nearer: for Mr Clifton’s Langton was a very grand place indeed, quite the grandest in a county full of big estates. His uncle and his three aunts (dear, kind people: he had lived in their celibate house nearly all his life) had always talked, interminably and vaguely, of great things for him; they had foreseen, foreseen. Entirely without influence themselves they attributed to it a mystic value. With significant, worldly nods they had approved his first boyish acquaintance with the children of the local magnates. ‘So suitable,’ they said to one another, pluming and settling in their upright armchairs. Few things had given them greater pleasure than the chance that made their nephew a friend of young Clifton: they had served in the same squadron, and in the short time before Clifton had been killed they had grown very much attached to one another. The invitation to shoot pigeons at Langton and the offer of some as yet undefined employment with the old agent were consequences of their friendship: the old aunts had seen it as an opening of long-closed doors.

      But all this was wonderfully remote now: Barringham and Langton seen through the wrong end of a telescope, wonderfully remote; the aunts and his uncle and the garden, little moving figures in the garden with no meaning, hardly names even. And the quiet flooded back into the wood, and his mind retreated, moved back and back and back. He sat bowed on the trestle, with his mouth open, with his eyes – wide, staring eyes – fixed on a knot: his gun lay across his knees, held inertly by a passive hand.

      There was so much quiet in the High Ash wood that even the bang of a gun away before him did not dispel it, nor the quick left and right behind. The creaking flutter of two wood-pigeons coming in to the dark pine just to the right of him pierced through to his mind, but it made no impression: the birds settled noisily, with the trunk between them and him. He was quite still, his breathing slow and shallow: his eyes did not move from the knot.

      The dusk gathered under the trees, dark pools where the peeling birch trunks showed white. They were having good sport along the edge of the wood, just inside the belt of pines, and the guns were going fast: the pigeons were moving continually up and down the long, dark tract, uneasily in flocks and swift single birds clipping fast to their night’s rest. They were filling the trees all around Grattan, heavy, fat birds that looked too big for the twigs they landed on, fat heavy wood-pigeons that walked, hopped, flapping among the twigs and branches to solid perches, and smaller stock-doves with them, many in the trees and many passing overhead.

      In some part of Grattan’s bowed head there was a picture of a pale, clear sky, quite clear above an unending floor of white cloud, and in the sky was an aeroplane falling and falling, falling for ever. It turned as it fell in its dying, broken fall, and each time it turned full to him he saw the Hackenkreuz on its wings. He went close to it, and he could see the German’s face, expressionless and closed. They were quite alone in the sky. Grattan watched impassively and said, He is not going to bail out. I think he cannot bail out.

      A trail of black smoke shot from the Messerschmitt before it plunged into the white floor of cloud, and the black plume stood, poised on a narrow foot that stayed momentarily firm in the sudden vortex of the swirling white, after the machine had disappeared; and he was saying aloud, While I live I shall never kill another living thing.

      But all this was only in the forefront of his mind; behind it he was withdrawn, and there was a very slow current of thought going on between the two: up there, above the cloud, he had known that he had been there before, knew just what the black smoke would look like over the billowing hole in the cumulus. The very words that he had said had had a used feeling and an accustomed sound: they had been formulated, like a prayer. Here, on the platform, he had known what it was going to be like. There was no box, of course; but the box had been there once. If he got up he would see the place where it had stood. But that was by the way: the déjà-vu, which had once made him so uneasy, was only a side issue, something that came at the same time as the withdrawal: all that mattered was what was coming.

      As he stirred unconsciously he made the legs of the trestle grate on the platform: now a fat wood-pigeon was staring and bending, peering at him with a round eye, bowing and staring like an alderman about to cross a road. The bird’s suspicions were confirmed, and it clattered out of the tree, followed by a cloud of others: the noise jerked Grattan into the living present, and he stood tense on the platform, with his gun ready to spring up. The light was almost gone: he could not see the tiny disturbed goldcrest that went Tzee tzee so loudly in a branch within his hand’s reach.

      A returning pigeon – some had not believed, and had only circled once – fluttered against the clear sky at the very top of a tree right before him. He had cocked his gun automatically as he stood; now he pulled both triggers, firing down into the dark shadows, and watched the horrified bird flash dodging away. The scent, delightful from old association, the scent of the powder came up as he broke the gun and dropped the smoking empty shells on the stand, stopping them from rolling off with his foot. Then he fired another two barrels, and did the same: That should do for the keeper, he said, and sat down again.

      Again the quiet came back, the curtain dropped fast, and now his mind was glowing with active suspense: it even invaded his body: his heart beat and his stomach was constrained just as it had been with him and he a young boy in his first love. Now it was here, here and coming on him.

      He stood up slowly, with his gun hanging open in his right hand and his left hand wavering to his lips.

      But it did not come. There was only the soft wind and the far-off voice of old Mr Clifton: ‘Grattan, we’re going along now.’ The words drawn out, calling to carry, and the lights and the gentle whine of the car, that died to a throb.

      He made no reply, but turned in the darkness.

The Passeur

      BEHIND THE TOWN there was a hill, behind the hill a mountain range; behind the range another range, behind that range an ancient wood, and in that wood there was a man.

      The little rosy town, tight like a swarm of bees, with its roofs touching everywhere and not a foot of ground to be seen from above except in the great drum of the bull-ring, all this and the brilliant sea, the pure curve of the harbour and the row of fishing boats, has been described so often that there is nothing new to say.

      The hill – the hills – behind, these too are so well known: the terraced vines, black gnarled points on a contoured, modelled chocolate pattern, a green blush, a blue-green incipient flood when they are sprayed, a full green solid mass, then gold and crimson on the hills according to the season: the olives and the pines: the gardens, flat with rigid squares wherever there are streams – the gardens with their peach trees and their apricots in the beds of green; trees like trees in samplers or on stocking legs, neat, trim, precise – these too are full of people and well known. Beyond the utmost limit of the vines, the garrigues covered with cistus and myrtle and Spanish broom, false lavender and asphodel, carpeted with thyme, dry, arid, wrecked by goats; here still there are people: the garrigues are known, known as well as the cork-oak groves that stand so nobly on the higher ground, crimson-lake when the cork has left their trunks. The trees are orderly, arranged in quincunxes and numbered in white paint: men are there, if it is only twice in a year. Even beyond them, in the barren country, a few parched farmhouses keep their hordes of goats and walk them on the nearer mountain range: and that is not the end, for on the mountain live the cattle, belled but savage, and they wander free, bulls, cows and heifers, steers and calves, the whole crest of the nearer range is theirs, and the other side to the very edge of the unknown country.

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