Читать книгу Captures - John Galsworthy - Страница 11

Table of Contents

Bowden did not attend when three weeks later the baby was christened Edward Bowden. He spent the June morning in his cart with a bull-calf, taking it to market. The cart did not run well, because the weight of the calf made it jerk and dip. Besides, though used to it all his life, he had never become quite case-hardened to separating calves from their mothers. Bowden had a queer feeling for cattle, more feeling indeed than he had for human beings. He always sat sulky when there was a little red beast tied up and swaying there behind him. Somehow he felt for it, as if in some previous existence he might himself have been a red bull-calf.

Passing through a village someone called:

“’Eard the nus? They beat the Germans up proper yest’day mornin’.”

Bowden nodded. News from the war was now nothing but a reminder of how that fellow Steer had deprived him of Ned’s help and company. The war would be over some day, he supposed, but they didn’t seem to get on with it, gaining ground one day and losing it the next, and all the time passing this law and that law interfering with the land. Didn’t they know the land couldn’t be interfered with—the cuckoos? Steer, of course, was all part of this interference with the land—the fellow grew wheat where anybody could have told him it couldn’t be grown!

The day was hot, the road dusty, and that chap Steer hanging about the market like the colley he was—so that Bowden imbibed freely at ‘The Drake’ before making a start for home.

When he entered his kitchen the newly christened baby was lying in a grocery box, padded with a pillow and shawl, just out of the sunlight in which old Mrs. Bowden sat moving her hands as if weaving a spell. Bowden’s sheepdog had lodged its nose on the edge of the box, and was sniffing as if to ascertain the difference in the baby. In the background the girl Pansy moved on her varying business; she looked strong again, but pale still, and ‘daverdy,’ Bowden thought. He stood beside the box contemplating the ‘monstrous’ baby. It wasn’t like Ned, nor anything, so far as he could see. It opened its large grey eyes while he stood there. That colley Steer would never have a grandchild, not even one born like this! The thought pleased him. He clucked to the baby with his tongue, and his sheepdog jealously thrust its head, with mass of brushed-back snowy hair, under his hand.

“Hullo!” said Bowden, “what’s matter wi’ yu?”

He went out presently, in the slanting sunlight, to look at some beasts he had on the rough ground below his fields, and the dog followed. Among the young bracken and the furze not yet in bloom again, he sat down on a stone. The afternoon was glorious beyond all words, now that the sun was low, and its glamour had motion, as it were, and flight across the ash-trees, the hawthorn, and the fern. One may-tree close beside him was still freakishly in delicate flower, with a sweet and heavy scent; in the hedge the round cream-coloured heads of the elder-flower flashed, flat against the glistening air, while the rowans up the gulley were passing already from blossom towards the brown unrounded berries.

There was all the magic of transition from season to season, even in the song of the cuckoo, which flighted arrow-like to a thorn-tree up the rocky dingle, and started a shrill calling. Bowden counted his beasts, and marked the fine sheen on their red coats. He was drowsy from his hot day, from the cider he had drunk, and the hum of the flies in the fern. Unconsciously he enjoyed a deep and sensuous peace of warmth and beauty. Ned had said there was no green out there. It was unimaginable! No green—not the keep of a rabbit; not a curling young caterpillar-frond of fern; no green tree for a bird to light on! And Steer had sent him out there! Through his drowsiness that thought came flapping its black wings. Steer! Who had no son to fight, who was making money hand over fist. It seemed to Bowden that a malevolent fortune protected that stingy chap, who couldn’t even take his glass.

There were little blue flowers, speedwell and milkwort, growing plentifully in the rough grass around; Bowden noted, perhaps for the first time, those small flower luxuries of which Steer had deprived his son by sending him to where no grass grew.

He rose at length, retracing his slow-lifted tread up the lane, deep-soiled with the dried dung of his cows, where innumerable gnats danced level with the elder-blossom and the ash leaves. The village postman was leaving the yard when Bowden entered it. The man stopped in the doorway, and turned his bearded face and dark eyes blinking in the level sunlight.

“There’s a talegram for yu, Mist Bowden,” he said, and vanished.

“What’s that?” said Bowden dully, and passed in under the porch.

The ‘talegram’ lay unopened on the kitchen table, and Bowden stared at it. Very few such missives had come his way, perhaps not half a dozen in his fifty odd years. He took it up, handling it rather as he might have handled a fowl that would peck, and broke it open with his thumb.

“Greatly regret inform you your son killed in action on seventh instant. War Office.”

He read it through again and again, before he sat down heavily, dropping it on the table. His round solid face looked still and blind, its mouth just a little open. The girl Pansy came up and stood beside him.

“Here!” he said, “read that.”

The girl read it and put her hands up to her ears.

“That idn’ no yuse,” he said, with surprising quickness.

The girl’s pale face crimsoned; she uttered a little wail and ran from the room.

In the whitewashed kitchen the only moving things were the clock’s swinging pendulum and old Mrs. Bowden’s restless eyes, close to the geranium on the window-sill, where the last of the sunlight fell before passing behind the house. Minute after minute ticked away before Bowden made a movement—his head bowed, his shoulders rounded, his knees apart. Then he got up.

“God for ever darn the blasted colley,” he said slowly, gathering up the telegram. “Where’s my stick?”

Lurching blindly he walked round the room, watched by the old woman’s little dark bright eyes, and went out. He went at his unvaried gait on the path towards Steer’s, slowly climbing the two stiles and emerging from the field into Steer’s farmyard.

“Master in?” he said to the boy who stood by a cow byre.

“No.”

“Where is ’e, then?”

“Not ’ome from Bickton yet.”

“Oh! he idden! Gone in the trap, eh?”

“Ya-a-s.”

And Bowden turned up into the lane. There was a dull buzzing in his ears, but his nostrils moved, savouring the evening scents of grass, of cow-dung, dried earth, and hedgerow weeds. His nose was alive, the rest within him all knotted into a sort of bitter tangle round his heart. The blood beat in his temples, and he dwelled heavily on foot and foot. Along this road Steer must come in his cart—God for ever darn him! Beyond his own top pasture he reached the inn abutting on the road. From the bench in there under the window he could see anyone who passed. The innkeeper and two labourers were all the company as yet. Bowden took his usual mug and sat down on the window-seat. He did not speak of his loss, and they did not seem to know of it. He just sat with his eyes on the road. Now and then he responded to some question, now and then got up and had his mug refilled. Someone came in; he noted the lowering of voices. They were looking at him. They knew. But he sat on silent till the inn closed. It was still daylight when he lurched back up the road toward home, intent on not missing Steer. The sun had gone down; it was very still. He leaned against the wicket gate of his top field. Nobody passed. Twilight crept up. The moon rose. An owl began hooting. Behind him in the field from a group of beech-trees the shadows stole out ever so faint in the flowery grass, and darkened slowly as the moonlight brightened.

Bowden leaned his weight against the wood—one knee crooked and then the other—in dogged stupefaction. He had begun imagining things, but not very much. No grass, no trees, where his son had been killed, no birds, no animals; what could it be like—all murky grey in the moonlight—and Ned’s face all grey! So he would never see Ned’s face any more! That colley Steer—that colley Steer! His dead son would never see and hear and smell his home again. Vicarious home-sickness for this native soil and scent and sound—this nest of his fathers from time beyond measuring—swept over Bowden. He thought of the old time when his wife was alive and Ned was born. His wife—why! she had brought him six, and out of the lot he had only ‘saved’ Ned, and he was a twin. He remembered how he had told the doctor that he wasn’t to worry about the ‘maiden’ so long as he saved the boy. He had wanted the boy to come after him here; and now he was dead and dust! That colley Steer!