Death of a Huntsman (5 page)

It was a pigtail-less, hatless, horseless Valerie Whittington, waving her hand.

‘I thought it must be you,' she said and even he was not too stupid to know that she must have been waiting for him there.

‘Where's your pony?' he said.

‘I've stopped riding.'

‘Oh?'

It was all he could think of to say as he raised his cap, dismounted and stood beside her.

He saw at once that she was wearing lipstick. She had also managed to bunch up her hair into thick brown curls and to make an effort to match the colour of her face to the puce pink of the blouse. Except for the evening at the cottage he had not seen her in skirts before and now he saw that her legs were long, well-shaped and slender.

‘Given up riding?' he said. ‘How is that?'

‘I've just given up riding,' she said.

Even from the tone of this remark he saw that she had changed a great deal. Like her voice, her face was grave, almost solemn. Her eyes seemed queer and distant.

‘Have you time to walk a little way?' she said.

He said yes, he had time, and they walked slowly, in cool sunshine, he leading the horse, to where he could see once again the entire valley of oak-woods and pasture below. In a few weeks he would be hunting across it, drinking the first sharp draughts of winter.

‘I'm afraid I behaved like a fool up here the other day,' she said, ‘and I'm sorry about the other night.'

He said he couldn't think why.

‘Well, it's all over now,' she said, ‘but I just wanted to say.'

Exactly what, he asked, was all over now?

‘Me,' she said. ‘I'm leaving home. I'm going away.'

It was instantly typical of him to ask her if she thought that was wise.

‘Wise or not,' she said, ‘I'm going.'

Everybody wanted to run away when they were young, he said, but it was like measles. You got over it in time and you were probably all the better for having been through the wretched thing.

‘Yes, I'm better,' she said. ‘Because I know where I'm going now. Thanks to you.'

He couldn't think what he possibly had to do with it and she said:

‘I like being with you. I grow up when I'm with you. Somehow you never take me away from myself.'

This odd, solemn little pronouncement of hers affected him far more than her tears had ever done and he glanced quickly at her face. It was full of another,
different kind of tearfulness, dry and barren, with a pinched sadness that started dragging at his heart.

‘You know what I've been doing since last Sunday?' she said.

‘No.'

‘Coming up here,'

‘Yes?'

‘Every day,' she said. ‘Walking. Not with the pony—I haven't ridden the pony since that day. Just walking. I think I know every path here now. There's a wonderful one goes down past the holly-trees. You come to a little lake at the bottom with quince trees on an island—at least I think they're quince trees.'

If he had time, she went on, she wanted him to walk down there. Would he? Did he mind?

He tethered his horse to a fence and they started to walk along a path that wound down, steeply in places, through crackling curtains of bracken, old holly trees thick with pink-brown knots of berry and more clumps of birch trees sowing in absolute silence little yellow pennies of leaves.

At the bottom there was, as she had said, a small perfectly circular lake enclosed by rings of alder, willow and hazel trees. In the still air its surface was thick with floating shoals of leaves. In absolute silence two quince trees, half-bare branches full of ungathered golden lamps of fruit, shone with apparent permanent candescence on a little island in the glow of noon.

‘This is it,' she said.

Neither then, nor later, nor in fact at any other time,
did they say a word about her mother. They stood for a long time without a word about anything, simply watching the little lake soundlessly embalmed in October sunlight, the quince-lamps setting the little island half on fire.

‘I don't think you should go away,' he said.

‘Why not?'

He answered her in the quiet, totally uncomplex way that, as everyone so often remarked, was so much part of him, so much the typical Harry Barnfield.

‘I don't want you to,' he said.

She started to say something and then stopped. He looked at her face. He thought suddenly that it had lost the dry, barren tearfulness. Now it looked uncomplicated, alight and free. The big glowing brown eyes seemed to embrace him with a wonderful look of gratitude.

‘What were you going to say?' he said.

‘Nothing.'

‘You were.'

‘I was,' she said, ‘but now it doesn't matter.'

All at once she laid her hands on his shoulders, drawing them slowly down until, quite nervously, she plucked at the lapels of his jacket. In shyness she could not look at him. She could only stare at her own fingers as she drew them slowly up and down.

Suddenly she let them fly up to his uncertain, spectacled, honest face with a breaking cry.

‘Oh! my God, hold me,' she said. ‘Hold me—just hold me, will you?—for God's sake please just hold me——'

In a stupid daze Harry Barnfield held her; and from
across the lake the sound of a duck's wing flapping somewhere about the island of quinces reached him, long afterwards, like the echo of a stone dropping far away at the bottom of a well.

Soon, as the autumn went on, his friends the city gentlemen began to notice a strange, unforetold change in his habits. No longer was it possible, several days a week, to wait with expectation and cheers to put the grappling hooks on Harry Barnfield as he ran, spectacled and panting, to catch the evening train.

The reason for this was a simple one: Harry Barnfield was, on these evenings, not there to be grappled.

By the time the train departed he was already away in the country, saying goodbye to the girl on the hillside or, in bad weather, as they sat in his car by the road. A train at two-thirty gave him an hour or more before, at six o'clock, he watched her, with a dry twist in his heart, walk away into twilights filled more and more with storms of blowing leaves.

Earlier in the afternoon they walked by the little lake. As late as the first week in November the lamps of the quinces hung miraculously suspended from the grey central islands of boughs and then gradually, one by one, dropped into the frosted reeds below.

By the middle of November there remained, on the south side of the island, where the sun caught it full in the early afternoons, one quince, the last of the autumn
lanterns, and as Harry Barnfield and the girl came down the path through thinning alder-trees she got into the way of running on ahead of him to the edge of the lake, always giving the same little cry:

‘Look, Harry, our quince is still there!'

For about a week longer they watched, as if it were some marvellously suspended planet glowing above the wintry stretches of water where thin ice sometimes lingered white all day in the thickest shadow of reeds, the last remaining quince, suspended bare and yellow on frost-stripped boughs.

‘When it falls I shall feel the summer has gone completely,' the girl said.

Soon Harry Barnfield felt as she did: that this was the last of summer poured into a single phial of honey. When it fell and split at last he knew he would hear, dark and snapping, the breath of winter.

By the fifteenth day of the month the quince, looking bigger and more golden than ever in an afternoon of pure, almost shrill blue sky already touched on the horizon by the coppery threat of frost, still remained.

‘Look, Harry!' the girl said, ‘our quince is still there!'

For some time they walked slowly by the lake. In the breathless blue afternoon the one remaining globe of fruit glowed more than ever like the distillation of all the summer.

‘It's nearly two months now,' the girl said, ‘since we first came down here. Have you been happy?'

He started to say that he had never been so happy in his life but she cut him short and said:

‘What made you happy?'

He could not think what had made him happy except, perhaps, that he had been freed, at last, from the shackles of his daily ride in the train, the banterings of the city gentlemen and above all from evening crackle of Katey's voice calling that she hoped to God he hadn't forgotten the gin. But before he had time to reply the girl said:

‘I'll tell you why it is. It's because you've made someone else happy. Me, in fact.'

‘I'm glad about that,'

‘You see,' she said, ‘it's like shining a light. You shine it and it reflects back at you.'

‘But supposing,' he said in his simple, straightforward way, ‘there's nothing to reflect back from?'

‘Oh! but there is,' she said, ‘there's me.'

He smiled at this and a moment later she stopped, touched his arm and said:

‘I wonder if you feel about it the same way as I do? I feel in a wonderful way that you and I have been growing up together.'

He hadn't a second in which to answer this odd remark before, across the lake, the quince fell with a thud, almost a punch, into the reeds below. The sound startled the girl so much that she gave a sudden dismaying gasp:

‘Oh! Harry, it's gone! Our quince has gone—oh! Harry, look, it's empty without it!'

He stared across to the island and saw that it was, as she said, quite empty.

‘Now,' she said, ‘it's winter.'

He thought he caught for the briefest possible moment
a colder breath of air rising from the lake, but it was in fact her shadow crossing his face, shutting out the sun, as she turned and looked at him.

‘The quince has gone and it's winter,' she said. ‘The week has gone and tomorrow it's Friday. Have you forgotten?'

‘Friday?' he said. ‘Forgotten?'

‘Friday,' she said, ‘is the Hunt Ball.'

‘Good God, I'd forgotten,' he said.

Now it was her turn to smile and she said:

‘Whatever you do you mustn't forget. You simply mustn't. You're coming to fetch us. Will you dance with me?'

‘If——' He was about to say ‘If your mother will let you,' but he checked himself in time and said, ‘If you don't mind being trodden on. It's some time since I danced, especially to modern things.'

‘I've a new dress,' she said.

There crossed his mind the picture of her coming home, as he vividly remembered it, from the birthday party: the dress long, straight and blue under the blue school mackintosh; and he felt his heart once again start to ache for her, afraid of what she would wear.

‘Nobody has seen it,' she said.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Not even——' when he checked himself again and she said:

‘I hope you'll like me in it. Nobody knows about it. I bought it alone, by myself. It's the colour of—No, I won't tell you after all. You'll see it tomorrow and then you can tell me if it reminds you of something.'

Suddenly she stretched up her arms in a short delightful gesture.

‘You will dance with me?' she said, ‘won't you? A lot?'

‘I warn you——' he said, and then: ‘I'm pretty awful.'

‘I don't believe it,' she said. ‘Show me. Dance with me now.'

For the second time she held up her arms. She put her left arm lightly on his shoulder and he took her other hand.

‘I'll hum the tune,' she said. ‘Listen carefully.'

She started humming something but although he listened carefully he could not recognize at all what tune it was.

‘You'll have to guide me,' she said. ‘My eyes are shut. I always dance with my eyes shut. And by the way next week I'm twenty. Ancient. Had you forgotten?'

He had forgotten about that too.

‘You dance nicely—very nicely—we go together—nicely—very nicely together——'

She started to sing the words to the tune she was humming, the tune he did not recognize, and as he danced to it, steering her about the frost-bared path along the lake, he remembered the sound of the quince dropping into the reeds, the last vanishing phial of the summer's honey, filling his mind like a golden ominous echo.

When he called alone at the keeper's cottage next evening about half past eight he saw at once that all his
fears were justified. It was she who opened the door; and already, as he saw, she was wearing the blue school mackintosh. He even thought he caught, as she turned her head, a glimpse of two pig-tails tucked inside the half-turned-up collar at the back.

Nervously picking first at his silk evening scarf and then his black homburg hat he stood in the little sitting room and wished, for once, that Edna was there.

‘Mother will be a few minutes yet,' the girl said. ‘She always takes an awful time. She said I was to give you sherry. Or is there something else you'd rather have?'

He was about to say that sherry would suit him perfectly when she smiled, leaned close to him and said:

‘This, for instance?'

She kissed him lightly. Her lips, not made up, with that curious undressed brownish look about them, rested on his mouth for no more than a second or two and then drew away.

‘How many dances,' she said, ‘are you going to dance with me?'

‘Well——'

‘Dance with me all evening.'

‘I shall have to dance with your mother——'

‘Dance once with mother and then all the rest with me.' Again she kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘All night. For ever. Dance with me for ever.'

Miserably, a few moments later, he took the glass of sherry she poured out for him.

‘I'm not allowed to drink,' she said. ‘But I'm going to. Mother will be ages.'

With increasing wretchedness he saw her pour another glass of sherry, hold it up to him and say: