Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian
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.
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.
This country starts with the second mountain range. The two are separated by a scorched and naked valley, wide and deep with sides that sheer abruptly into overhanging crags: for here the rock is granite. The harsh, crumbling micaceous schists are left behind, and with them that acid, chemical, volcanic sterility that brings to mind a slag heap, the poisoned wasteland of an industrial town. With the change of rock comes a change in vegetation; it is much richer, far more gracious. It is a country of forest trees except on the higher land where, when even the low holly and the dwarf juniper can no longer hold out against the wind, there is sweet turf like a lawn, covered with flowers. You would gasp to see them in an alpine garden, but here they are in such profusion that you cannot walk without treading on them; and then, wherever the grey and lichened rock shows through, or where the huge boulders stand uncovered, everywhere there are saxifrages crowding, cushions of delicate pink flowers, tight rows encrusting the gentle rock where they can hold a footing.
Here, in this intervening valley, there were no trees, however: the whole of it had been ravaged by a fire that burnt not only the undergrowth, the trees and every living thing that moved, but even the earth itself, searing it to the bare rock: and so it remains. The prevailing wind, the tramontane, swept over the distant ridge for all the days of the fire, and preserved the farther trees – prevented the fire from crossing the mountain. The forest reaches the top, therefore, and can be seen between the naked peaks, just overlapping into view.
The ravaged valley must be crossed: hours of break-neck scrambling and sliding down; a long traverse over the bottom; hours and hours of climbing up the other side. There is nothing but charred wood and ruin: a few blackened trees still stand, and where there is some trace of fertility left in the soil, there are blue thistles. Some wandering birds are there, that hurry through, and a few large green lizards; nothing else. But at the crest suddenly the new country shows itself and unfolds in a series of high, cut-off, unsystematic valleys, with the forest spread over all of them and running up and over all the peaks and ridges except the highest. It runs on and on, a dark green that smooths all angularities, on and away until the trees appear no larger than the smallest bushes seen from a distance; and in the end, before they are lost behind the higher mountains, they might be no more than a crop of darker grass, so uniform they are, and so united.
Once across the ridge you cannot look back and see the sea any more: it is the unknown country, and everything behind and known is cut off. There are trees before you, and on each side trees: and already you are among the first of the trees. This is the wood.
The man in the wood had crossed over the ridge that afternoon, bleeding from the thistles on his legs, striped with black where he had pushed through the rigid, scorched, dead trees, and choked with the black dust. On the ridge the trees stood wide on the turf – oak trees here – and he passed through them and down the slope, being swallowed by the wood almost before he realized that he was well in it.
He made his way down, where the oaks were thick and smaller on the steep slope, low, almost bushes, down, across the brown stream, and up again through the tall trees to the first of the downland crests, where the high timber stopped, diminished to a border of strong hollies, and those to low, neat, prickly bushes, as trim as if they had been shorn. There were little silvered junipers on the clean turf, and flowers everywhere – tiny yellow rose-shaped flowers. He had stayed up there for half an hour, standing exposed on a certain rock, and then returning he had plunged into the trees again.
He sat now on a slope above the stream, a little way inside the wood. Here it was beech wood, all beeches except for a few spindling hollies and one prodigious oak. The upper edge of the wood, with its belt of hollies and mixed lower trees was dark behind him, and in front the wood was grey.
When first he had passed through the sunlight had dappled the ground, and in the stronger light the carpet of dead brown leaves – no undergrowth, but only leaves – had shown red and umber, and a lively green had filtered through. Now the shadow of the mountainside had swept across the wood: it was light still, but the night had never wholly left the wood and by the stream it gathered there again.
It was not a deep, a thick, wood, obscure or hard to penetrate: far on each side of him the grey trunks rose solemn to an unseen burst of green, but its grey silence was quadrupled by the dead trees that stood; still stood, though dead. From the hump of moss on which he sat it seemed to him that half the company was dead: it was not so, but dead trees stood on every hand. Some lay, felled by the wind, and many were there, flayed white and blackened by the