“This is no laissez-faire,” he replied, glancing round. “This is pulling the nipple out of your lips, and letting the milk run away sour. Look there!”
Through the thin wall of moonlit mist that slid over the hillside we could see an army of rabbits bunched up, or hopping a few paces forward, feeding.
We set off at a swinging pace down the hill, scattering the hosts. As we approached the fence that bounded the Mill fields, he exclaimed, “Hullo!” and hurried forward. I followed him, and observed the dark figure of a man rise from the hedge. It was a game-keeper. He pretended to be examining his gun. As we came up he greeted us with a calm “Good evenin’!”
George replied by investigating the little gap in the hedge. “I’ll trouble you for that snare,” he said.
“Will yer?” answered Annable, a broad, burly, black-faced fellow. “And I should like ter know what you’re doin’ on th’ wrong side th’ ‘edge?”
“You can see what we’re doing — hand over my snare — and the rabbit,” said George angrily.
“What rabbit?” said Annable, turning sarcastically to me. “You know well enough — an’ you can hand it over — or —” George replied.
“Or what? Spit it out! The sound won’t kill me —” the man grinned with contempt.
“Hand over here!” said George, stepping up to the man in a rage.
“Now don’t!” said the keeper, standing stock-still, and looking unmovedly at the proximity of George:
“You’d better get off home — both you an’ ’im. You’ll get neither snare nor rabbit — see!”
“We will see!” said George, and he made a sudden move to get hold of the man’s coat. Instantly he went staggering back with a heavy blow under the left ear.
“Damn brute!” I ejaculated, bruising my knuckles against the fellow’s jaw. Then I too found myself sitting dazedly on the grass, watching the great skirts of his velveteens flinging round him as if he had been a demon, as he strode away. I got up, pressing my chest where I had been struck. George was lying in the hedge-bottom. I turned him over, and rubbed his temples, and shook the drenched grass on his face. He opened his eyes and looked at me, dazed. Then he drew his breath quickly, and put his hand to his head.
“He — he nearly stunned me,” he said.
“The devil!” I answered.
“I wasn’t ready.”
“No.”
“Did he knock me down?”
“Ay — me too.”
He was silent for some time, sitting limply. Then he pressed his hand against the back of his head, saying, “My head does sing!!” He tried to get up, but failed. “Good God — being knocked into this state by a damned keeper!”
“Come on,” I said, “let’s see if we can’t get indoors.”
“No!” he said quickly, “we needn’t tell them — don’t let them know.”
I sat thinking of the pain in my own chest, and wishing I could remember hearing Annable’s jaw smash, and wishing that my knuckles were more bruised than they were — though that was bad enough. I got up, and helped George to rise. He swayed, almost pulling me over. But in a while he could walk unevenly.
“Am I,” he said, “covered with clay and stuff?”
“Not much,” I replied, troubled by the shame and confusion with which he spoke.
“Get it off,” he said, standing still to be cleaned.
I did my best. Then we walked about the fields for a time, gloomy, silent, and sore.
Suddenly, as we went by the pond-side, we were startled by great, swishing black shadows that swept just above our heads. The swans were flying up for shelter, now that a cold wind had begun to fret Nethermere. They swung down on to the glassy millpond, shaking the moonlight in flecks across the deep shadows; the night rang with the clacking of their wings on the water; the stillness and calm were broken; the moonlight was furrowed and scattered, and broken. The swans, as they sailed into shadow, were dim, haunting spectres; the wind found us shivering.
“Don’t — you won’t say anything?” he asked as I was leaving him.
“No.”
“Nothing at all — not to anybody?”
“No.”
“Good night.”
About the end of September, our countryside was alarmed by the harrying of sheep by strange dogs. One morning, the squire, going the round of his fields as was his custom, to his grief and horror found two of his sheep torn and dead in the hedge-bottom, and the rest huddled in a corner swaying about in terror, smeared with blood. The squire did not recover his spirits for days.
There was a report of two grey wolvish dogs. The squire’s keeper had heard yelping in the fields of Dr Collins of the Abbey, about dawn. Three sheep lay soaked in blood when the labourer went to tend the flocks.
Then the farmers took alarm. Lord, of the White House farm, intended to put his sheep in pen, with his dogs in charge. It was Saturday, however, and the lads ran off to the little travelling theatre that had halted at Westwold. While they sat open-mouthed in the theatre, gloriously nicknamed the “Blood-Tub”, watching heroes die with much writhing and heaving, and struggling up to say a word, and collapsing without having said it, six of their silly sheep were slaughtered in the field. At every house it was inquired’ of the dog; nowhere had one been loose.
Mr Saxton had some thirty sheep on the Common. George determined that the easiest thing was for him to sleep out with them. He built a shelter of hurdles interlaced with brushwood, and in the sunny afternoon we collected piles of bracken, browning to the ruddy winter-brown now. He slept there for a week, but that week aged his mother like a year. She was out in the cold morning twilight watching, with her apron over her head, for his approach. She did not rest with the thought of him out on the Common.
Therefore, on Saturday night he brought down his rugs, and took up Gyp to watch in his stead. For some time we sat looking at the stars over the dark hills. Now and then a sheep coughed, or a rabbit rustled beneath the brambles, and Gyp whined. The mist crept over the grose-bushes, and the webs on the brambles were white — the devil throws his net over the blackberries as soon as September’s back is turned, they say.
“I saw two fellows go by with bags and nets,” said George, as we sat looking out of his little shelter.
“Poachers,” said I. “Did you speak to them?”
“No — they didn’t see me. I was dropping asleep when a rabbit rushed under the blanket, all of a shiver, and a whippet dog after it. I gave the whippet a punch in the neck, and he yelped off. The rabbit stopped with me quite a long time — then it went.”
“How did you feel?”
“I didn’t care. I don’t care much what happens just now. Father could get along without me, and Mother has the children. I think I shall emigrate.”
“Why didn’t you before?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There are a lot of little comforts and interests at home that one would miss. Besides, you feel somebody in your own countryside, and you’re nothing in a foreign part, I expect.”
“But you’re going?”
“What is there to stop here for? The valley is all running wild and unprofitable. You’ve no freedom for thinking of what the other folks think of you, and everything round you keeps the same, and so you can’t change yourself — because everything you look at brings up the same old feeling, and stops you from feeling