by John Masters
When he opened his eyes, Stella was there beside the bed. The pupils of her eyes were pinpoints, and her whole being radiated warmth, excitement. She was still on the heroin, and had probably taken a double dose. She held a pink telegraph envelope in her hand and said, ‘Oh darling, this came this morning … Shall I read it to you?’ John nodded and she held up the paper, moving it back and forth in front of her eyes to get it in focus. Then – ‘Chee Shush Benally killed by train Gallup Tuesday – Hakis Benally.’
‘That’s his eldest brother,’ John said.
‘Poor old Chee,’ Stella said brightly, smiling wide. ‘Gone to the happy hunting grounds, eh? That’s what Red Indians say, isn’t it?’
John did not answer, feeling sick, and just as exhausted as before his sleep, and now experiencing a return of the pain in his eyes. Killed by a train. He did not have to ask what had happened. He knew Gallup – had been there with his parents and sister several years on summer vacations. Richard had described it, very well. Chee had gone into Gallup for his monthly bout with drink … though he had also been managing to smuggle some liquor into the reservation, from time to time, according to Richard … and he had staggered out from one of those Main Street bars and across the Santa Fe tracks as a train was pulling in … or perhaps he’d tripped over the rails, and just lain there, dead drunk, until a train came, cutting him up … he shivered, thinking of the corpses by the guns, after the big German shelling attacks on the Chemin des Dames. Chee had gone … probably wearing his Medal of Honour … with no mourners, no bugles, no decorated caissons. And no help from those whom he had helped – Americans, his countrymen.
April was the breeding month for the pheasants. All the hens had been trampled by the cocks, and were laying. There was an old shed across the yard from the head gamekeeper’s cottage of Walstone Park, and there the eggs were hatched, partly by incubators and partly by ordinary broody hens. The hen pheasants seldom sat themselves, because they were careless and after laying a batch of a dozen eggs didn’t seem to care very much whether they hatched or not. But the broodies, when Probyn could get them, sat patiently and with intuitive skill and care, turning the eggs under themselves every twelve hours, never breaking any with their own weight, never allowing one to roll away from under and grow cold in a corner of the nest, or worse, roll on to the open boards between one nest and the next.
Probyn had started making the nests late in March, to be ready for the hatching, cutting out bowls of turf and lining each with hay, the bowl not too steep-sided and not shallow – all designed to give the eggs the best chance, and the hen the best chance of hatching them. The incubators were heated by oil lamps, but Probyn did not like them. There was always the risk of fire, which would have destroyed all the eggs and chicks, and with them a whole shooting season for His Lordship and his friends … right funny it had been, at the end of the season, to see Florinda, his granddaughter, out there with the guns, wearing a tweed skirt and jacket, sitting on a shooting stick behind that young Bidford fellow as though she’d been doing it all her life. She’d given him a big wink first time he passed her but he just touched his cap and said, ‘Good morning, milady.’ She was a marchioness and just as good as plenty of others that had the title. She was a Gorse.
He was turning the eggs in the incubators now. Next, he’d give grain and water to the broodies. Then … better go over to Beighton and see if he could find some more broodies there. There was so much damn money about that a working man didn’t need to be given a pheasant or a rabbit – he could go and buy one: so it was hard to persuade men who kept hens to sell a broody …
His grandson Fletcher came in, preceded by his shadow falling through the open door and across the incubators. Probyn said nothing, while Fletcher, leaning against the doorjamb, watched, equally silent.
At length Fletcher said, ‘I found four eggs in the laying pen. Got ’em here.’
Probyn grunted. They’d have to be cleaned, washed, and put in the trays for transfer either to the incubator or a broody. One thing at a time. Fletcher said, ‘There was a broken egg, too. Half-eaten.’
‘Crow?’ Probyn said.
‘Maybe. But a crow would have eaten the lot. ’Twas most likely one of the layers.’
Without a word Probyn reached up on the wooden shelf over the incubators and felt inside a cardboard shoe box. It contained half a dozen cold eggs – last year’s eggs, that for one reason or another had not hatched. He picked out one and gave it to Fletcher, who went out, opened the gate into the wired laying pen, put the egg on the ground close to where he had found the broken egg. Soon the hen pheasant which had probably by accident pecked the first egg – and found food in it – would find this, and this time peck deliberately … to have its beak buried in the foul, black, stinking slime of the year-old egg. It would not break any more pheasant eggs …
Fletcher returned to the shed and said, ‘I’m going away for a bit, Granddad.’
Probyn grunted. Fletcher had been back from the army near three months, living in Probyn’s old cottage by the Scarrow. The roof had burned off, but Fletcher had thatched it again, fresh; and put chicken wire over the thatch to stop starlings from nesting in it; and cleaned and painted the place up … worked like a nigger he had, all those weeks. Now Probyn hardly recognised the cottage when he went by, or dropped in to have a talk with his grandson. Fletcher had got everything a man could want – his own rabbit nets and snares, wire for running loops, fishing spears, a pair of ferrets … but no dog. And he didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do, ’cept spend his bounty. The American girl had been there sometimes, evenings and weekends, and Fletcher had been up to London and all over. He had money.
Fletcher said, ‘I’m going to France … Spain …’
‘Thought you’d ’a seen enough of them places, in the war. You said they was right greedy folks.’
‘That was the Frogs,’ Fletcher said. ‘Betty says they’re different in Spain. She’s never been there, either, but she knows Spanish … learned it when she was a kid, on holidays somewhere … We’ll be married afore we come home.’
Probyn grunted again. The girl was going with him, then. Good thing. Better take your own woman on a long trip than get into trouble finding one. That got their men angry, and besides, you didn’t know what you was getting. As to the marriage … well, wait and see.
Fletcher said, ‘I came through Earl’s Wood. You had two traps there, and a big log tied to them.’
Probyn grunted. He had two steel-jawed traps in Earl’s Wood that had to be taken out before the hunting season, in case a horse trod in one. But the rest of the year, especially now when the pheasants were laying, the foxes had to be kept off by any means. Those traps were agin the law, but every keeper used them … not tied to a stake, for a strong fox in its desperation might jerk the line so hard as to break it, or even pull the stake out; but tied to a heavy log, that the fox could drag, but not far, and only with great effort.
Fletcher said, ‘One wasn’t there … So I followed the trail … broken bracken, earth scratched … found it a hundred yards away.’
‘A hundred yards!’ Probyn cried. ‘That’s … !’
‘With a vixen in the jaws,’ Fletcher said. ‘In milk. She’d pulled that thing a hundred yards, with two legs practically off … She wasn’t dead, either. I bashed her head in … We’re leaving tomorrow. Back in a month.’
Probyn grunted and Fletcher left, easing himself off the doorjamb and striding leopardlike, his movements flowing one into another, across the yard and out on to the back drive, behind the bulk of Walstone Park.
In the shed, Probyn straightened his back and stretched. He felt restless. This job was too easy … and it wasn’t as much fun as poaching, to tell the truth. There was something wrong, too, about a Gorse preserving some man’s game, instead of taking it. The poachers nowadays were ruddy useless.
He yawned … never used to yawn. Probyn Gorse, gamekeeper. Well, it was better than pleaching hedges … and ther
e weren’t no damn women doing it, either.
On Beighton Down it was a perfect spring day, two earlier showers having passed over to the east, leaving the short grass pearled with drops of moisture that imprisoned the sun, dappling the down with points of fire. The clouds overhead moved like lazy sheep, and between them the sky was pale blue; but now there were no real sheep on the Down, as there used to be before the war. The economics of sheep rearing in this part of the world, where the flocks had never been very large because the amount of open space was not large, had destroyed the industry. Hedlington Sheep Fair was to be revived this coming July; but there would be no buying or selling of sheep, no competitions of skill among sheep dogs and their masters … The air was slightly hazy as it is in so many Canalettos and Constables, the Weald spread out below like such another vision as that vouchsafed to Christ on the mountain … a vale flowing with the riches of earth, dense green, well watered, spaced with great mansions, oast houses, cattle sheds, tithe barns, and the towers of Saxon and Norman churches. Far to the east lay Canterbury … to the west, Hedlington – the twin capitals of this ancient kingdom.
John Merritt walked beside his sister, swinging an ash plant in his hand. It was eleven days since the fever of his influenza had broken, and most of his strength had returned, brought back by steady and careful exercise, the right food, plenty of sleep, and some suitable medicines. Stella had relapsed, as soon as the crisis was over, to her place as a gently smiling presence, doing nothing … only frowning, and so becoming real, in the space between one dose of her drug and the next.
Betty said, ‘Tomorrow Fletcher and I are going to Spain for a month.’
John had only been back at the factory one day, but Ginger Keble-Palmer had mentioned nothing of this, thinking, presumably, that as it was his own sister she would have told him.
She said, ‘There’s nothing for me to do now that the modifications to the Buffalo for passenger and goods service have been completely worked out … We’re well advanced on the one Guy’s going to use in June. It’s been registered as G-BGR … Fletcher and I need to be together, and alone, for at least a month.’
‘Are you going to marry him before you go?’
‘No. But before we come back, probably … I’ve learned what he wants to do, or be, at least. Poet Laureate of England.’
John said, ‘Are you sure that’s not what you want him to be?’
She hesitated, then said, ‘I suppose there’s some of that in it … What he has to have before he can achieve that, or any other goal as a poet, is education. Oh, I don’t mean that Oxford or Harvard sort of education. He doesn’t need that, any more than Isaac Rosenberg did … He has to realise what this world he lives in, is – not just the Weald and soldiers and the war. He has to meet all sorts of men and women, feel their lives … miners, dons, fishermen, milliners, bankers. He needs a guide in that world.’
‘And you’re going to be it? Married or not?’
She said, ‘Yes. And when we come back, we’ll be living in London for a time. So I’m leaving the HAC. I’ve spoken to Richard about it.’
A skylark burst from the grass at their feet and towered into the sky, rising, pouring out its song against the moving clouds above.
John said, ‘I think you’re doing the right thing, Sis. Anything I can do to help … I will.’
He walked on. He was feeling a little weary already; he would be very tired by the time they got back to the Cottage, in a couple of hours’ time.
He said, ‘I’ve made up my mind, too. I’m going to take Stella to America.’
‘Oh!’ his sister cried. ‘Good! … You may have some trouble getting her to agree. And I suppose Father Christopher will be sad.’
‘I’ll do whatever is necessary,’ he said grimly, his mouth shutting like a trap. ‘She is my wife. I have talked to doctors, friends, relatives, an alienist. I am sure that this is the only course that might lead to a cure. I don’t think Father Christopher will be upset. He understands.’
‘They have good alienists in New York,’ Betty said.
‘I’m not going to New York,’ John said, ‘except to see Dad and make some arrangements. I’m going to join the Indian Service, and work for the Navajos.’
After a long pause she said, ‘Is this anything to do with the death of your Indian friend?’
John said, ‘Yes. All the time I was in that bed … all the time I was walking round and round the garden, up and down the road … I was thinking. At length I knew what I had to do. I had to devote the rest of my life to those people, for Chee’s sake. He saved my life, a couple of times, in France. I couldn’t save his. But I can try to save his people.’
‘Stella’s going to find Fort Defiance pretty lonely,’ Betty said dubiously. ‘She’ll be lonelier even than she was here, while you were working so hard.’
‘She’s my wife,’ he said, ‘and she must share my life. We’re not going to be in Fort Defiance any longer than I can help. We’ll go out to whatever post I can find among the Navajo … I want to take my help to them, not have them come into Fort Defiance to beg it from us.’
‘Stella …’ she began.
John interrupted curtly – ‘I am selling the Cottage, and we are leaving England, for good. We will start a new life, in a new world, among new people, new customs, religion, air, water – everything. The Navajo country, and the Navajo people, can cure her, if anyone can. This will either make her or break her. And if it breaks her, she might as well be dead … as she is now …’
As soon as he came into the room he knew that her nerves were on edge, her body palpitating, aching for the next dose. It would have been easier if he had caught her after she had had it; she would smile then, and agree; but the spell would not last long enough for him to take her even to Liverpool, let alone across the Atlantic and most of the United States. It was a sign of improvement that she was fighting, watching the clock but not surrendering. It would be so easy for her to shorten the wait, take the dose, stay for all the time in that warm, floating world. But now she had to be told, and conquered; and now was the time.
She was sitting up in a chair by the fire, which was not lit, staring into the empty, cold grate, smoking a cigarette, puffing at it with quick, nervous puffs, taking it out of her mouth, exhaling a little stream of grey-blue smoke, putting it back, puffing. He said, ‘I am resigning from Hedlington Aircraft. Ginger is taking over from me. I have cabled my father that we are sailing for New York on Monday. We have a first-class cabin on the main deck.’
For a time she did not appear to hear, then she threw the cigarette into the grate and snapped, ‘Don’t be silly, John.’
He stood opposite her, looking down. She looked so vulnerable that his will almost failed him. How could he really know, after all, what was best for her?
He steeled himself again, and said, ‘I have consulted everyone who knows about your position – they all agree that you must make a complete break with your past, both the near and the distant. Your father …’
‘He wants me to go? I don’t believe it!’
‘Of course he doesn’t want you to go. He thinks you must, for your sake … and mine. Dr Irwin will give me a six months’ supply of heroin for you as long as I promise to see that it is guarded, and given to you only in the doses he is prescribing for you now. Betty …’
‘What does Betty know about me? She’s not my keeper!’
‘She loves you,’ John said. ‘And she has been watching you for several years now, hasn’t she? She understands you better than I do … she is a woman, after all. She is sure it’s best for you to break away.’
‘I don’t care. I’m not going.’
‘Dr Deerfield …’
‘You saw Charles … Dr Deerfield?’
John nodded – ‘Yes. He didn’t want me to tell you – because he knew you socially, I suppose … but now I feel it’s important for you to understand that an alienist, who had known you, agrees that the only way you might be cured is to mak
e a clean break.’
She began to laugh, at first quietly, soon maniacally, loud, shrieking, stuffing her clenched fists into her mouth, at last rolling out of the chair on to the floor and there kicking, biting, coughing, and beating the carpet with her fists. John stooped and pulled her upright. She was having a hysterical fit. He slapped her across the face, not gently. She fell silent at once, breathing deeply from her exertions, crimson in the face and neck.
Without warning, she attacked him, kicking out with her pointed shoes, scratching and clawing at his face with her nails. He struggled to enfold her in his arms, so that she would have no room to strike. She was as strong as a little horse, lithe as a jaguar, hissing now with fury. The eyes, the pupils dilated, glared close into his, the open mouth slavered and shrieked. She lunged forward unexpectedly and buried her teeth in his neck. With difficulty he brought a hand up and pressed it over her nostrils so that she could not breathe. After a long minute she fell back, sucking air into her lungs. The blood ran down John’s neck on to his collar and down his shirt. He ran at her, grabbed her, threw her to the floor and knelt astride her – ‘You’re coming home!’ he shouted. ‘Home! Your husband’s home! Your home!’ He had her by the throat, hard enough to check her breathing, shaking her to and fro, every now and then banging her head on the carpet. ‘You’re going to keep house for me in the Arizona desert … raise Peace to be a man among the Navajo … protect him from rattlesnakes and dust storms and Black Widow spiders … learn to weave … to speak Navajo and Hopi … understand sand paintings … work, work, fight for the Navajo – men and women … fight the elders, the government, anyone we have to fight … do you understand? DO … YOU … UNDERSTAND?’
She said nothing for a long time, her teeth locked together, eyes glaring up at him, like a caged, furious animal. Then she went limp and said, ‘I understand. I’ll come. I’ll try … Now, can I have my dose? It’s time.’
