When the Green Woods Laugh

by H. E. Bates

‘In the spring,’ Pop said airily. ‘In the spring.’

  Presently a horn flashed copper in the morning sun, signal to remind Pop that the hunt would soon be away and that therefore there was precious little time left in which to get outside a snifter.

  ‘Come and have one,’ he said. ‘We’ll get the Brigadier in too.’

  He took Angela softly by the arm, steering her through a thickening crowd of people, cars, bicycles, horses, and horseboxes to the door of The Hare and Hounds, at the same time tapping the Brigadier on the shoulder as he passed him.

  ‘Going to buy you a drink, General old boy’ he said. ‘Come on. Angela’s here,’ and was surprised for the briefest moment not to hear the Brigadier’s customary grunt of polite refusal in reply.

  Nor had the Brigadier the slightest intention of giving it. A storm of volcanic emotions had swept over him at the mere sight of Angela Snow’s lips pressing themselves on Pop’s. He knew only too well what that felt like. He could once again feel his hand gyrating on Angela’s pulsating naked back. He was overwhelmed by a returning rush of every detail of that stormy session on the hearthrug. If ever he needed a drink, he thought, it was now.

  ‘First you’re coming. Then you’re not coming. Fickle man.’

  A languorous hand held Pop in check three or four yards from the lounge bar door. It was Corinne Perigo, looking at him in a pretence of friendly calm not confirmed by the fact her nostrils were dilating with unusual quickness.

  ‘Couldn’t manage it.’ Pop said. ‘Business to do.’

  ‘And here am I changing my hair appointment.’

  For the life of him Pop couldn’t think what that had to do with him and was almost ready to say so when she went on:

  ‘And who’s the tall blonde piece? Haven’t seen her before.’

  ‘Old flame.’

  Pop didn’t laugh as he said this, but Mrs Perigo did.

  ‘Old I suppose is right. Still, I see she appeals to the Brigadier too. The poor old thing was having palpitations.’

  Pop, suddenly tired of a conversation in which his nearest and dearest friends were being put through a mincer, turned abruptly and went into the bar, leaving a stunned Corinne Perigo standing in lethal silence, alone.

  Inside the pub he decided he had a call to pay before joining Angela and the General at the bar. It took him only a couple of minutes to pay it, but meanwhile the Brigadier was glad of even that short respite. It gave him a chance to recall the shattering experience on the hearthrug.

  ‘Rather an evening we had.’

  ‘Momentous.’

  Ever since that time an important gap in his memory had bothered the Brigadier very greatly and with a sudden rush of courage he decided that this was as good a moment as any to fill it in.

  ‘I found myself on the bed,’ he said, ‘and you not there.’

  ‘A girl has to go home sometime.’

  The Brigadier said he knew. But it was the time before she went home he was now referring to.

  ‘You were asleep, darling. Very asleep.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I was having that brandy you promised me. I needed it too.’

  My God, the Brigadier said, half on fire, had the whole affair had that sort of effect on her?

  ‘Devastating, dear boy.’

  The Brigadier, completely on fire now, pitched his voice in a low whispered key, expressing everything in a single cryptic but palpitating sentence.

  ‘Folly to repeat it?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Angela said and gave him a long, languid smile.

  The Brigadier was saved the necessity of answering this enigmatical question by the breezy entrance of Pop, who floated up to the bar, called the barmaid his little Jenny Wren, ordered himself a double Johnnie Walker and urged Angela and the Brigadier to knock theirs back and quick. The hunt would soon be moving away.

  ‘Wish you were coming,’ Angela said. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ the Brigadier said, ‘my hunting days are over.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said and laughed on high, belling notes. ‘Must have been rather something when you were in full cry.’

  The Brigadier felt suddenly half way to heaven again. A late peacock butterfly, roused by the warmth of autumn sun, fluttered at the bar window, danced among the bottles and flew across the room. The Brigadier watched it settle and cling delicately, wing-eyes brilliant, to the edges of a curtain. Nobody could have felt more like a peacock than himself at that moment and it was in a dream that he heard the barmaid say:

  ‘Sounds as if they’re moving off, sir. Yes, they are.’

  ‘One for the road,’ Pop said and pulled a roll of fivers from his pocket about the size of a pint mug. ‘Double for the General. Large Madeira for Miss Snow. Another double for me.’

  Already horses were moving off” outside. Cars were starting up. A couple of pink coats flashed by. The peacock flew again and Pop said:

  ‘Madeira. Don’t think I ever tasted it. Any good?’

  ‘Sweet. And warm without being sordid.’

  The Brigadier laughed, alternately watching the butterfly and the edges of Angela Snow’s extremely fine smooth hair. The two of them were so beautiful that it positively hurt him to look at them and as he sipped his whisky he wished to God his hunting days weren’t over. But, dammit, it was no use, they were; he was past pretending; and he knew the best he would get for the rest of the day would be the far cry of hounds and that queer tugging bleat of a horn being blown across bright autumn fields.

  ‘Well, cheers,’ Pop said. ‘Down the hatch. Have a wonderful day. Even if you don’t kill nothing, I mean.’

  It was soon after three o’clock in the afternoon that Mr Jerebohm, with growing discomfort, decided that he was far from having a wonderful day. He thought it was developing, on the contrary, into a hellishly unpleasant day. Unlike the Brigadier, he was beginning to wish his hunting days were over. As rain began to fall, at first in mere biting spits, then in a steady chilling downpour, he even started to wish they had never begun.

  It wasn’t merely that the countryside, under teeming rain, looked and felt more uncharitable with every step he took. The hunt wasn’t running very true to form either.

  He knew perfectly well what a hunt ought to look like. He had seen it so often in old prints, on Christmas cards and in advertisements for whisky. It was gay; it positively bounced with cheerful life. Against charming rural backgrounds of woodland and pasture, in winter weather always crisp and beautiful, riders and hounds galloped at full invigorated stretch, all together, well-drilled as an army, in pursuit of a small red animal framed against the far blue sky. The pink coats were as bright as holly-berries at Christmastime and the laughing tails of the hounds as happy as children at play.

  But today there was nothing cheerful or well-drilled or invigorating about it. Not only was the rain becoming colder, drearier, and heavier every moment; there was something very wrong with his horse. He had bought it under the impression that it was a hunter; he had paid what he thought was a stiffish price for it; he liked its colour.

  Pinkie liked its colour too; she even thought it handsome. There had even been a time, a day or two since, when Mr Jerebohm had thought it handsome too, but now he could have cheerfully hit it with a shovel.

  All day the animal had behaved like an engine without steam; it continually lacked the power to pull itself off dead centre. After desultory canters of thirty or forty yards or so it would suddenly draw up, give a congested cough in its throat and then release breath in hollow bursts of pain. Afterwards it stood for some time staring with cautious eyes at the dripping hedgerows, autumn woods, and bare, sloppy stubbles before, with amazing instinct, turning for home.

  It had been, in fact, turning for home all day. Three times during the morning Mr Jerebohm had been blisteringly cursed with words such as ‘If you can’t keep up bloody well keep out of the way!’ From time to time he found himself several hundred yards, even half a mile, behind the pack.
He was continually losing hounds behind distant woods, where they wailed like lost souls, mocking him. Several times he got off and walked. It seemed quicker that way.

  By half-past three in the afternoon he knew, with miserable certainty, that he was lost. Pack and riders were nowhere to be seen. It was raining more and more fiercely on a driving wind and his horse held its blowing frame like a sieve to the rain. Mr Jerebohm, in fact, felt like a sieve himself. The rain was driving large holes through his face, chest, legs, shoulders, and buttocks, and the wind, colder every moment, followed the rain.

  A growing conviction that the countryside was one big evilly devised swindle started to come over him as he turned his horse to the west, the direction where he thought home lay. The supposed pastoral nature of it was a ghastly myth. The deer, pheasant, wild duck, hares, and snipe were all a myth too. The fox itself was a myth. There was no such animal. It was extinct, like the dodo. People rode to hounds merely in the hope of seeing the resurrected ghost of one.

  Soaked to his chest, he crossed an unfamiliar piece of country that seemed like a barren land, a heath with neither hedgerows nor fences, roads, nor telegraph wires. Occasionally Pop Larkin cantered over it with Mariette, it was open and quiet and Pop thought it perfick. Groups of pine covered the farthest slopes. Young birches, yellow with late autumn now, had sown themselves among brown acres of bracken. In summer cotton grass blew like snow among pink and purple heather.

  Travelling across it on his breathless horse, Mr Jerebohm merely thought it harsh and uncivilized. It was another part of the great country swindle. It was wild, miserable, and shelterless. Oh! for a hot bath, he kept thinking, God, for a hot bath.

  On a road at last, under the civilized protection of telegraph wires, he heard a car coming up behind him in the rain. A second later his horse reared, gave a skyward flip and threw him. He landed heavily on a grass verge that, though soft and sodden with rain, felt as hard as a cliff of rock.

  It was Pop Larkin who ran forward, hailed him, got him to his feet and tried to comfort him with the words:

  ‘Lucky you fell on grass, Mr Jerebohm. Might have been a bit hard if you’d gone the other way. Had a good day?’

  Dispirited and shaken, Mr Jerebohm merely groaned.

  ‘Better come in to my place and have a drink,’ Pop said. ‘It’s only just down the road. I’ll mix you an Old King Cole.’

  What the hell, Mr Jerebohm asked himself and then Pop, was an Old King Cole?

  ‘New drink I found the other day,’ Pop said. ‘Mostly rum. It’ll put fire into you.’

  Mr Jerebohm groaned again. He didn’t want fire put into him. In terrible pain, he was sure his back was split in two. He was convinced his kidneys were ruptured and that his spleen was not where it ought to be. Trying to limp back to his horse he felt one leg give a crack underneath him and could have sworn that it was broken.

  In sympathy Pop said: ‘Tell you what. You drive the Rolls back. It’s perfickly easy-gears are as smooth as butter. I’ll ride the horse.’

  Mr. Jerebohm, too far gone in agony to argue with this or any other solution, merely dragged his creaking body into the Rolls and let Pop recapture the horse, which reared again in ugly fashion as he did so.

  ‘See you in five minutes,’ Pop said. ‘Ma’s there.’

  He seized the bridle and looked the horse firmly in the face. Not only was it an uncharitable animal to look at he thought, it was downright ugly. It wanted teaching a sharp lesson. It needed a damn good clout and he promptly gave it one, so that the horse, enormously surprised, at once calmed down.

  ‘Nothing but a bag o’ horse meat,’ Pop said. ‘D’ye hear me?’

  At the house he found Mr Jerebohm standing in front of the kitchen fire, a glass of rum in his hand, steaming gently. Ma had also given him a good big wedge of cheese and bacon tart, on which he was now chewing slowly but with silent gratitude. Ma had been deeply sympathetic about the fall. She thought she didn’t like the look of him all that much and she was just saying, as Pop came in:

  ‘You look a bit peaky, Mr Jerebohm. It’s shaken you up. Why don’t you sit down?’

  Mr Jerebohm knew he couldn’t sit down. He felt that if he did sit down he would never get up again. His bones would lock.

  ‘Shall I telephone the doctor?’ Ma said. ‘I think I ought.’

  In low murmurs Mr Jerebohm said no, he didn’t think so; he merely wanted to go home.

  ‘Get outside that one,’ Pop said, looking into Mr Jerebohm’s glass, ‘and I’ll mix you another.’

  Gratefully Mr Jerebohm got outside the remainder of his Old King Cole. He was steaming more noticeably every moment. His riding boots were half full of water. His ribs ached every time he drew breath and only Pop’s large rum cocktail, mixed double as usual to save time, gave him any sort of comfort.

  It was the warm rum too that started his brain slowly working again and presently caused him to remember something. It was probably just one more example of the big country swindle, he thought, but he would soon find out.

  ‘Most grateful to you, Larkin,’ he said. ‘By the way, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

  ‘Pick away,’ Pop said. ‘Perfickly all right.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me when I bought Gore Court,’ Mr Jerebohm said, ‘that there was a boat on the lake?’

  ‘Perfickly true,’ Pop said, laughing. ‘But it ain’t there now.’

  ‘Oh? So you know? Then where is it?’

  ‘In my boathouse,’ Pop said. ‘Just before you took over the house Montgomery found a gang of kids throwing bricks at it, so we rowed it up the lake, carried it over the sluice-gates and brought it up the river. It’s safer under cover. I meant to have told you.’

  Mr Jerebohm listened in silence, but nevertheless didn’t want to seem ungrateful. The rum was marvellously comforting.

  ‘I’ll row it back in the spring,’ Pop said. ‘I daresay Montgomery’ll give it a coat of varnish in the meantime.’

  Overwhelmed with kindness, Mr Jerebohm could still find nothing to say. Nor, for another moment or two, had he any words to answer another remark of Pop’s, who presently disappeared into the pantry and came out holding a brace of pheasants.

  ‘Little present for you,’ he said. ‘Knocked ’em off in the medder last Monday afternoon. They’ll want hanging a couple o’ days.’

  Searching for words, Mr Jerebohm felt he could have wept. ‘Wonderfully kind,’ was all he managed to mutter. ‘Very, very kind.’

  ‘Make a nice change from pills and diets,’ Ma said, ‘won’t they? I don’t hold with all those pills. The world takes too many pills by half.’

  It damn well did too, Mr Jerebohm thought, it damn well did too.

  Blessed with pheasants and rum and Pop’s final injunction ‘to clout the bounder if he plays up again,’ he managed to ride slowly home in the dying light of an afternoon across which, at last, the rain was slackening.

  There was even a break of light in the west and as he rode past The Hare and Hounds, with the pheasants slung across the saddle, he could distinctly see the faces of Corinne Perigo and Bertie Fanshawe as they cantered slowly past him.

  ‘Good night!’ they called and he said ‘Good night’ in reply, having just enough strength to raise a hand in courtesy to his hat.

  ‘By God,’ Bertie Fanshawe said to Mrs Perigo, ‘they shoot ’em from horseback now, do they?’ The unexpected vision of a man riding home from a fox-hunt with a brace of pheasants slung across his horse was altogether too much to bear. Dammit, it wasn’t the thing. ‘Next thing you know we’ll be having electric hounds and mechanical horses or some damn lark.’

  Mr Jerebohm, if he could have heard, might well have thought it a good idea, especially about the horses. As it was he merely limped on towards home, silently aching from boots to collar, wind-stung eyes on the sky.

  Unfamiliar though he was with the passage and change of country seasons he knew perfectly well that it was winter that now stared at him out of a c
old watery sunset, and that it looked, if possible, even more uncharitable than the rain, his horse, and the darkening countryside.

  7

  Walking slowly along the lakeside on a shimmering afternoon in late April, the warmest so far of the year, Pinkie Jerebohm saw in the middle distance across the water a floating object, pale primrose in colour, to which for some moments she was unable to give a name.

  After staring at it steadfastly for some time, just as incapable as Mr Jerebohm of detecting the difference between one bird and another, she finally decided that it must be, of all things, a yellow swan. She had always supposed that swans were white, but perhaps they turned yellow in the mating season or something of that sort. You never knew with nature.

  A few moments later, to her intense surprise, the yellow swan started waving a hand. A sudden impulse made her wave in reply and it took her only a few seconds longer to realize that whatever changes of colour nature might effect in swans at springtime it worked no such miracles on Pop Larkin.

  Pop, gay in a yellow sports shirt, hatless, and fully ready to greet the first fresh burst of spring, was rowing Mr Jerebohm’s promised boat, gay itself with new golden varnish, across the middle of the lake. The day was absolutely perfick for the job, as he had told himself over and over again that morning. It couldn’t possibly have been more perfick: cuckoos calling everywhere, the sky quivering with larks, the woods rich with blackbird song, his favourite of all except the nightingale’s. Even the wood-doves were talking softly away on those wooing notes that were the first true voice of summer.

  ‘Afternoon, Mrs Jerebohm!’ Pop’s voice was quick as a leaping fish as it crossed the water. ‘Perfick day. Decided I’d bring the Queen Mary back. Sorry to have been so long.’

  It was most kind of him, Pinkie lisped as she watched him ship oars and let the boat drift into the bank. But there really hadn’t been that much of a hurry. You couldn’t say it had been much like boating weather, could you?

  ‘Perfickly true,’ Pop said. ‘It is today, though. You’ll have to get Mr Jerebohm to give you a trip round the lake before dark.’