Death of a Huntsman (17 page)

A bird-cry, another break of silence, another suspicion of a whispered echo far away between sun-burnt roofs of rock, was enough to make him uneasy again.

‘I don't quite understand,' he said. ‘Colour?'

‘Where's my bag?' she said. ‘Can't you see my bag?'

For God's sake, he thought, the bag. Why the bag? Why did she always forget the bag?

‘No, it's not here. You can't have brought it,' he said.

‘Oh! didn't I?' She sat up, groping in the sun. Her
eyes were wide open; he saw them blue and wet, enormous with trouble. Ineffectually he searched for the bag too, knowing it wasn't there. He knew too what she was going to ask and while he was still groping about the grass she said:

‘Would you go back and get it? Would you be a dear?'

He knew suddenly that he was a fool. He was a fool and he would go down and get the bag. He was a fool and he would climb up again. In time she would lose the bag again and he would be a fool and find it once more.

‘Must you have it? Do you need it to kiss with?'

‘Don't talk like that. I'm lost without it, that's all. You can kiss me anyway.'

As she sat upright he kissed her again. He felt her give a great start of excitement, as if all the blood were leaping to the front of her body. Then she broke away and said:

‘The bag. Couldn't you get the bag?—would you please?'

‘You're not in some kind of trouble, are you?' he said.

‘No. No trouble.'

‘Tell me what it is.'

‘I'm in no trouble—honest to God I'm not in any trouble.'

‘What then?'

‘I don't know—a sort of hell,' she said. ‘Get the bag and I'll tell you about it. You made me feel better about it already.'

Suddenly where her body had been there was space.
Some trick of refraction, a twist in the glare of sun on whiteness, suppressed his power of sight. Instead of her shining body there was a naked gap on the path. As he walked down it to fetch her bag he found he could not see very well. He was aware of groping again, his canvas shoes slithering on scalding dark platters of rock, waking loose stones to curve out on flights of vicious perfection to the steaming haze below.

The infuriating whistle of Manuel brought him back to himself.

‘Have you seen Miss Vane's bag?' he shouted.

‘Yes, sir. Here it is, sir, with the lunch things.'

Manson grasped the white bag and turned to walk back up the path.

‘Aren't you going to the top, sir?'

‘Mind your own business!' he said. He stopped. ‘Oh! another thing. I think we'll be starting back tomorrow. You'd better get back and start packing.'

‘Very well, sir,' Manuel said.

High above the mountainside the sombre hypnotic buzzard had risen again to hold the sky in its claws. It woke in Manson a sudden hatred for the place. The sky of summer seemed to reflect, in a curious harsh and lifeless glare, the depressing slate-like glaze of the high naked edge of plateau. Below, the trees were fired and lost in smouldering ashen dust. From far away a glint of steel in minute winks shot from the mass of pines with the effect of blue glass-paper.

A moment or two later he heard once again that curious sound that was like the dry flap of shaken linen,
startling in the thin air. He heard it at the moment of turning the last of the spirals in the path before reaching Miss Vane. And as he heard it and turned his head he lost his sense of focus again, and a rock fell.

It fell this time from under his feet. It seemed to cross, a second later, a shadow that might have been caused by the buzzard suddenly whipping earthwards to kill. Instead he saw that it was another rock. It fell with bewildering swiftness from under his too-smooth canvas shoes, taking with it a black and slaty shower.

This shower was the entire corner of the path. As it fell it seemed to suck him down. For a second or two he was aware of a conscious effort to save himself. Then, clutching with ferocity at Miss Vane's white bag, he fell too.

His impression of coming death was sharp and instantaneous. It was a flame leaping up to meet him like the uprising ball of sun. Its inescapable extinction was like the extinction of Miss Vane's white body on the path. It was there one moment and then, in a final trick of refraction, was black and void.

He half picked himself up in a shower of slate and slate-dust, at the foot of a pine no taller than a man. His left foot was jammed by rock. His fall had ended in a kind of football tackle, not badly aimed at the feet, the roots of the pine. He struggled to free his foot, and the tree-roots, under his weight, cracked under the rock and
began to come out like slow-drawn teeth, in gristly pain. He thought he was laughing. Then he knew that he was really sucking air, enormous gasps of it, gorging at it, fighting for it in pure fright with his terrified mouth and tongue.

The last of the tree-roots were sucked out and the tree fell over, letting him down. His foot too was free. He laughed and shouted something. He did not know what it was but the very feeling of coherent air across his tongue gave him enormous hope. He felt suddenly as calm and poised as the buzzard above the valley.

He climbed slowly up on his hands and knees, aware of a slight drag in his left leg. It was not important, he thought, and when he reached the path he sat down with his back against rock and kept saying:

‘I'm all right. I'm perfectly all right. I'm absolutely and perfectly all right.'

‘Oh! my God, I'm sick,' she said. ‘Oh! my God—I'm so sick.'

‘I'll hold you. Lie against the rock,' he said.

But he found that he could not hold her. He lay against the rock too, trembling all over. The valley swam below him. Whole waves of dust-bright haze washed over him, drowning him in sweat, leaving him cold.

‘I knew I was gone,' he said. ‘I know what the end is like now.'

‘Let's go down,' she said.

His eyes were shut. His sweating face seemed to be glued against a cool bone of projecting rock.

He thought the rock moved. He discovered then
that it was her own face, terribly and drily cool. His sweat was drying too and he shuddered. Then he felt the sun burning his eyeballs through lids that were like dry thin tissue and he knew that if he did not get up and walk he would slide in weakness, like a dislodged stone, off the edge of the gorge.

They were far down on the path, at the place where they had lunched, before she said:

‘I never liked heights. I could never bear them. I hate that awful vertigo.'

He was glad to see that Manuel had taken him at his word and had started back. He was glad too that the path was at last doubly wide, so that the two of them could walk together.

The idea that something was very wrong with his left foot came to him slowly. The drag of it was heavy and finally it woke into pain.

He found himself at last sitting on the path staring into a shoe half full of blood.

‘It was all my fault,' she said. ‘I wanted to go up there.'

Half-blindly he poured blood on to the dust of the path and struggled to put on his wet, blackening shoe. Somehow he could not get it back.

Nothing of the kind, he thought. He felt tired and sick. Staring at the blood-stained shoe, he remembered clearly how she had not wanted to go. He recalled his own exultation at rising above Manuel and the bird in the sky. It seemed so ridiculous now that he could only say:

‘I didn't want to go either. I hate the damn place.'

He sat there for a long time trying to put on his shoe. He could smell the old corrupt dark smell of blood as it dried. The shoe would not go back and there was something sinister and twisted about the swollen shape of his foot. Long before he gave up trying with the shoe he knew somehow that the foot was not going to take him home.

But now, trying to be bright about things, he said:

‘They say it's an ill wind. Now you'll probably get an extra day to catch the
Alacantara
.'

She did not answer.

‘You are going to catch it, aren't you?'

‘Yes.'

He suddenly wished that something more spectacular had happened back on the path. There was nothing very dramatic after all in cutting a slice or two out of your foot.

‘I know her captain,' he said. ‘I'll see that you get fixed up.'

‘I can understand if you're bitter about me,' she said.

‘I'm not bitter.'

‘You sound bitter.'

‘Perhaps because you kissed me up there.'

Strength seemed to drain out of his body and it seemed a long time afterwards before she said:

‘Kissing isn't always the start of something. In this case it was the end.'

‘The end of what?' he said. ‘Probably me.'

‘I've been running away from something. That's all. When you kissed me it was the end of running.'

He wanted to say something like ‘Glad to have been of service, Miss Vane.' A withering breath of burning rock blew into his face. His foot pained him violently, stabbing in sickening throbs, and he did not answer.

‘You've been so sweet to me,' she said. ‘Doing what I wanted.'

‘Husband,' he said, ‘Or what?'

‘Husband.'

‘You must give him the love of a decaying shipping clerk when you get back,' he said. ‘Miss Vane.'

‘He may not be there when I get back,' she said. ‘That's the point. But I've got to try.'

Savagely the heat blew into his face again and the raw weeping soreness of his foot made him sick.

‘I'll bet he's a lousy——'

‘You might call him that,' she said. ‘But then that's sometimes how it is. Some men are lousy and they get under your skin. You know they're lousy and you can't help it. You can't fight them. But thanks to you—thanks to you I've got it worked out now. I can stop running and go back.'

‘Good God, don't thank me. That's what I'm for.'

He knew it was no use. It was no good, that way of talking. His foot seemed to enlarge and burst like a bloated blister, bringing his head up with a sharp breath of pain. Above him the sky swung and quivered. A speck that might have been dust or a buzzard or just the shadow of something fell swiftly from it and cut across his sweat-locked eyes.

She saw his pain and said:

‘I'll get Manuel. I'll get you back.'

‘Oh! God no. I can make it.'

‘I'll get Manuel. It's better.'

He tried to watch her figure going down the path. Weakly he tried to call out to her to come back. Then he was alone and it was no use. He was a darkening, dribbling figure, undramatic and strengthless, slipping down from the rock.

The worst of it, some long time later, was the sight of Manuel, coming to take him away. The correct, oiled, subservient figure. The slight bow. The glance at the foot, the shoe that was black with blood. The cool eyes, the mouth that was so well-shaped, so poised, that it might have ejected at any moment that maddening whistle:

‘I told you so.'

It was morning, about ten o'clock, when Manuel carried him out to the waiting mules. The crushed arch of his foot might have been made of cactus thorns, each thorn a nerve beating nakedly up and down to the thump of blood. His head, like the foot, seemed to have swollen and he felt the great thudding pulse of it rocking outwards, rolling and striking the sides of the valley.

‘I'm going to tie you on to the mule, sir. Just to be safe. In case you feel dizzy.'

‘Absolutely all right,' he said. ‘Where's Madam?'

He could no longer call her Miss Vane. It was madam now.

‘She's just getting the last of her things. She's going to ride with you.'

‘She's got to catch the
Alacantara
,' he said. ‘What about the car?'

‘I'm going to telephone for it, sir. Then I'll send the hammock back from the top of the road.'

‘Hammock? For Christ's sake what hammock?'

‘You'll be better in the hammock, sir.'

He found himself shaking and swaying with sickness, impotent behind the fluttering ears of the mule, the entire valley projected before him in those strong high blue lines that were again pulsations rather than shadow.

‘Much better if you let madam push on. I can manage. Let her push on.'

Presently he was aware of a slow transition of scene: rock and pine looming up, starry walls of cactus leaf dripping past, bright under springs, sunlight firing pine-needles to masses of glass-paper, ashy blue under a sickening sky.

Heat lay on the back of his neck, in spite of the towel Manuel had put there, like a burning stone. He wondered why there had been no attempt to escape the heat by starting earlier. Then he remembered not being able to sleep. Great rocks in the valley grating against each other. A far continuous thunder, a power house noise, from across the plateau. Water, a stream somewhere, drowning him, dragging him under. He remembered falling down. He had walked out to the verandah, seeing Miss Vane
there, in an attempt to show her that there was nothing wrong with his foot. He vividly remembered the band of paler hair across the black front of her head as she turned. He said, ‘Hullo' and she screamed and out of the sky at the head of the valley a wing of blackness smothered him.

‘The point is that the
Alacantara
is sometimes half a day earlier,' he said. She was riding twenty or thirty paces in front of him. Her hair was a mass of pure black, with no other colour but the outer minute sparkle of tawny fire. It was part of his sickness that his eye saw the fires of each hair with remarkable clearness, so that he felt he could touch them with his hands.

He did in fact lift his hands from the saddle. As he did so the valley swayed. He was no longer part of it. The saddle was not there to grasp, nor the quivering head of the mule, nor her dark brilliant hair.