He stepped to the edge of the unrailed platform, and, repressing a first hint of vertigo (the platform was in gentle motion), he looked over the edge to the shadows, where the keeper still stood, the white of his upturned face showing far below: forty feet, or was it sixty? These heights were very difficult to judge: at any rate, it was high enough for the man’s face to be small, like an egg, and for his voice to come floating up strangely.
‘Mr Grattan? The horse is under the far side.’
‘Under the far side, is it?’ He did not know at all what the keeper meant, but he was not going to show his ignorance: the keeper had already glanced at his gun, an old common, long-barrelled hammer-gun it was, of Belgian make.
There were two big hooks fixed underneath, and groping under the platform Grattan found a trestle – obviously a thing to sit upon. He pulled it up, and he was setting it square on its feet when the keeper called again, telling him that the pigeons usually came in from the right. Grattan thanked him, and watched him go away: for a few paces he could see the keeper’s feet before his head and behind, fore and aft, a queer, long stride it looked, before he was under the trees and out of sight.
The trunk of the pine ran up three or four feet above the stand, and it was pleasant to have it for his back as he sat upon the trestle. The sound of the keeper’s going died away, and the returning quiet brought back with it that remoteness that had been with Grattan all day, that feeling of being at one remove from life, or rather from one’s surroundings, so that they look as little real as the back-cloth of a pantomime, and it would not be surprising if they were to sway gently with a bellying wave from behind. It was something remotely like one of the stages of drunkenness when a man seems to stand a little to one side of himself, listening to what he says and watching him, but without a great deal of interest.
All day it had been with him, but that was not remarkable for it had waited upon him now and then from boyhood, and since he had come home from the war it had been at his elbow most of the time. Nobody knew about it: he had not told anybody, and indeed if he had wanted to he would have found it very difficult to describe what it was, the thing that interposed itself between him and ordinary life, so that with an indifferent eye he saw everything strange, so that sounds and impressions came through to him as if they travelled more slowly: the something that gave him an inner life of far greater reality than that which went on around him at the same time and in which he took part with the rest of him. It was not to be defined, this inner life; it had little to do with conscious thought; it was a kind of awareness and a withdrawal to another plane of existence. And always, from the very first time that he had known it, a boy walking along the tow-path on a summer’s evening in the shadow of the heavy, dusty green of the trees, twenty years ago, always there had been something of anticipation in it. In the last year this had increased, and now, today more than ever, it was a sense of growing, inevitable crisis – something outside himself for which he was waiting. It was something that he awaited calmly, for in this everything was slow and calm, but it was of vast importance and his being was keyed up and up for it.
He could not, on the few occasions when he had (almost impiously, it seemed) tried to formulate some ideas upon it, he could not even put any name to its nature, but today he was more certain than ever of its imminence. It would happen to him without any doing on his part: it was at once desirable and terrible.
The existence of this more real life did not prevent him – never had prevented him – from living at his common level: this very afternoon he had felt a strong inclination to decline the brown holland bag that his aunt had lovingly made him for his cartridges, as a surprise; and he had been ashamed of the appearance of his gun among the lovely hammerless ejectors carried by the other guests. However, he had neither put the cloth bag down nor concealed it in his pocket, and as a penance for these impulses he had worn it until he had forgotten it. Nowadays he forgot things very quickly; even the excitement of this invitation to Langton and the near-certainty of a job on the estate, which had made such a flutter at home, had left him almost unmoved after half an hour, although but a few years ago it would have kept him in a turmoil, partly pleasant, but increasingly alarming as the day grew nearer: for Mr Clifton’s Langton was a very grand place indeed, quite the grandest in a county full of big estates. His uncle and his three aunts (dear, kind people: he had lived in their celibate house nearly all his life) had always talked, interminably and vaguely, of great things for him; they had foreseen, foreseen. Entirely without influence themselves they attributed to it a mystic value. With significant, worldly nods they had approved his first boyish acquaintance with the children of the local magnates. ‘So suitable,’ they said to one another, pluming and settling in their upright armchairs. Few things had given them greater pleasure than the chance that made their nephew a friend of young Clifton: they had served in the same squadron, and in the short time before Clifton had been killed they had grown very much attached to one another. The invitation to shoot pigeons at Langton and the offer of some as yet undefined employment with the old agent were consequences of their friendship: the old aunts had seen it as an opening of long-closed doors.
But all this was wonderfully remote now: Barringham and Langton seen through the wrong end of a telescope, wonderfully remote; the aunts and his uncle and the garden, little moving figures in the garden with no meaning, hardly names even. And the quiet flooded back into the wood, and his mind retreated, moved back and back and back. He sat bowed on the trestle, with his mouth open, with his eyes – wide, staring eyes – fixed on a knot: his gun lay across his knees, held inertly by a passive hand.
There was so much quiet in the High Ash wood that even the bang of a gun away before him did not dispel it, nor the quick left and right behind. The creaking flutter of two wood-pigeons coming in to the dark pine just to the right of him pierced through to his mind, but it made no impression: the birds settled noisily, with the trunk between them and him. He was quite still, his breathing slow and shallow: his eyes did not move from the knot.
The dusk gathered under the trees, dark pools where the peeling birch trunks showed white. They were having good sport along the edge of the wood, just inside the belt of pines, and the guns were going fast: the pigeons were moving continually up and down the long, dark tract, uneasily in flocks and swift single birds clipping fast to their night’s rest. They were filling the trees all around Grattan, heavy, fat birds that looked too big for the twigs they landed on, fat heavy wood-pigeons that walked, hopped, flapping among the twigs and branches to solid perches, and smaller stock-doves with them, many in the trees and many passing overhead.
In some part of Grattan’s bowed head there was a picture of a pale, clear sky, quite clear above an unending floor of white cloud, and in the sky was an aeroplane falling and falling, falling for ever. It turned as it fell in its dying, broken fall, and each time it turned full to him he saw the Hackenkreuz on its wings. He went close to it, and he could see the German’s face, expressionless and closed. They were quite alone in the sky. Grattan watched impassively and said, He is not going to bail out. I think he cannot bail out.
A trail of black smoke shot from the Messerschmitt before it plunged into the white floor of cloud, and the black plume stood, poised on a narrow foot that stayed momentarily firm in the sudden vortex of the swirling white, after the machine had disappeared; and he was saying aloud, While I live I shall never kill another living thing.
But all this was only in the forefront of his mind; behind it he was withdrawn, and there was a very slow current of thought going on between the two: up there, above the cloud, he had known that he had been there before, knew just what the black smoke would look like over the billowing hole in the cumulus. The very words that he had said had had a used feeling and an accustomed sound: they had been formulated, like a prayer. Here, on the platform, he had known what it was going to be like. There was no box, of course; but the box had been there once. If he got up he would see the place where it had stood. But that was by the way: the déjà-vu, which had once made him so uneasy, was only a side issue, something that came at the same time as the withdrawal: