Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

The Fox-4

One or two days went by, and the youth stayed on at the farm. Banford was quite charmed by him. He was so soft and courteous in speech, not wanting to say much himself, preferring to hear what she had to say, and to laugh in his quick, half-mocking way. He helped readily with the work — but not too much. He loved to be out alone with the g*n in his hands, to watch, to see. For his sharp-eyed, impersonal curiosity was insatiable, and he was most free when he was quite alone, half-hidden, watching.

Particularly he watched March. She was a strange character to him. Her figure, like a graceful young man’s, piqued him. Her dark eyes made something rise in his soul, with a curious elate excitement, when he looked into them, an excitement he was afraid to let be seen, it was so keen and secret. And then her odd, shrewd speech made him laugh outright. He felt he must go further, he was inevitably impelled. But he put away the thought of her and went off towards the wood’s edge with the g*n.

The dusk was falling as he came home, and with the dusk, a fine, late November rain. He saw the fire-light leaping in the window of the sitting-room, a leaping light in the little cluster of the dark buildings. And he thought to himself it would be a good thing to have this place for his own. And then the thought entered him shrewdly: Why not marry March? He stood still in the middle of the field for some moments, the dead rabbit hanging still in his hand, arrested by this thought. His mind waited in amazement — it seemed to calculate — and then he smiled curiously to himself in acquiescence. Why not? Why not indeed? It was a good idea. What if it was rather ridiculous? What did it matter? What if she was older than he? It didn’t matter. When he thought of her dark, startled, vulnerable eyes he smiled subtly to himself. He was older than she, really. He was master of her.

He scarcely admitted his intention even to himself. He kept it as a secret even from himself. It was all too uncertain as yet. He would have to see how things went. Yes, he would have to see how things went. If he wasn’t careful, she would just simply mock at the idea. He knew, sly and subtle as he was, that if he went to her plainly and said: ‘Miss March, I love you and want you to marry me,’ her inevitable answer would be: ‘Get out. I don’t want any of that tomfoolery.’ This was her attitude to men and their ‘tomfoolery’. If he was not careful, she would turn round on him with her savage, sardonic ridicule, and dismiss him from the farm and from her own mind for ever. He would have to go gently. He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. It’s no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: ‘Please fall to my gun.’ No, it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home. When you are REALLY worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don’t then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own WILL which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet’s flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.

He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck in a regiment. And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. So he gathered himself subtly together, seemed to withdraw into a kind of invisibility. He was not quite sure how he would go on. And March was suspicious as a hare. So he remained in appearance just the nice, odd stranger-youth, staying for a fortnight on the place.

He had been sawing logs for the fire in the afternoon. Darkness came very early. It was still a cold, raw mist. It was getting almost too dark to see. A pile of short sawed logs lay beside the trestle. March came to carry them indoors, or into the shed, as he was busy sawing the last log. He was working in his shirt-sleeves, and did not notice her approach; she came unwillingly, as if shy. He saw her stooping to the bright-ended logs, and he stopped sawing. A fire like lightning flew down his legs in the nerves.

‘March?’ he said in his quiet, young voice.

She looked up from the logs she was piling.

‘Yes!’ she said.

He looked down on her in the dusk. He could see her not too distinctly.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said.

‘Did you? What was it?’ she said. Already the fright was in her voice. But she was too much mistress of herself.

‘Why’ — his voice seemed to draw out soft and subtle, it penetrated her nerves — ‘why, what do you think it is?’

She stood up, placed her hands on her hips, and stood looking at him transfixed, without answering. Again he burned with a sudden power.

‘Well,’ he said, and his voice was so soft it seemed rather like a subtle touch, like the merest touch of a cat’s paw, a feeling rather than a sound.’ Well — I wanted to ask you to marry me.’

March felt rather than heard him. She was trying in vain to turn aside her face. A great relaxation seemed to have come over her. She stood silent, her head slightly on one side. He seemed to be bending towards her, invisibly smiling. It seemed to her fine sparks came out of him.

Then very suddenly she said:

‘Don’t try any of your tomfoolery on me.’

A quiver went over his nerves. He had missed. He waited a moment to collect himself again. Then he said, putting all the strange softness into his voice, as if he were imperceptibly stroking her:

‘Why, it’s not tomfoolery. It’s not tomfoolery. I mean it. I mean it. What makes you disbelieve me?’

He sounded hurt. And his voice had such a curious power over her; making her feel loose and relaxed. She struggled somewhere for her own power. She felt for a moment that she was lost — lost — lost. The word seemed to rock in her as if she were dying. Suddenly again she spoke.

‘You don’t know what you are talking about,’ she said, in a brief and transient stroke of scorn. ‘What nonsense! I’m old enough to be your mother.’

‘Yes, I do know what I’m talking about. Yes, I do,’ he persisted softly, as if he were producing his voice in her blood. ‘I know quite well what I’m talking about. You’re not old enough to be my mother. That isn’t true. And what does it matter even if it was. You can marry me whatever age we are. What is age to me? And what is age to you! Age is nothing.’

A swoon went over her as he concluded. He spoke rapidly — in the rapid Cornish fashion — and his voice seemed to sound in her somewhere where she was helpless against it. ‘Age is nothing!’ The soft, heavy insistence of it made her sway dimly out there in the darkness. She could not answer.

A great exultance leaped like fire over his limbs. He felt he had won.

‘I want to marry you, you see. Why shouldn’t I?’ he proceeded, soft and rapid. He waited for her to answer. In the dusk he saw her almost phosphorescent. Her eyelids were dropped, her face half-averted and unconscious. She seemed to be in his power. But he waited, watchful. He dared not yet touch her.

‘Say then,’ he said, ‘say then you’ll marry me. Say — say!’ He was softly insistent.

‘What?’ she asked, faint, from a distance, like one in pain. His voice was now unthinkably near and soft. He drew very near to her.

‘Say yes.’

‘Oh, I can’t,’ she wailed helplessly, half-articulate, as if semiconscious, and as if in pain, like one who dies. ‘How can I?’

‘You can,’ he said softly, laying his hand gently on her shoulder as she stood with her head averted and dropped, dazed. ‘You can. Yes, you can. What makes you say you can’t? You can. You can.’ And with awful softness he bent forward and just touched her neck with his mouth and his chin.

‘Don’t!’ she cried, with a faint mad cry like hysteria, starting away and facing round on him. ‘What do you mean?’ But she had no breath to speak with. It was as if she was killed.

‘I mean what I say,’ he persisted softly and cruelly. ‘I want you to marry me. I want you to marry me. You know that, now, don’t you? You know that, now? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

‘What?’ she said.

‘Know,’ he replied.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know you say so.’

‘And you know I mean it, don’t you?’

‘I know you say so.’

‘You believe me?’ he said.

She was silent for some time. Then she pursed her lips.

‘I don’t know what I believe,’ she said.

‘Are you out there?’ came Banford’s voice, calling from the house.

‘Yes, we’re bringing in the logs,’ he answered.

‘I thought you’d gone lost,’ said Banford disconsolately. ‘Hurry up, do, and come and let’s have tea. The kettle’s boiling.’

He stooped at once to take an armful of little logs and carry them into the kitchen, where they were piled in a corner. March also helped, filling her arms and carrying the logs on her breast as if they were some heavy child. The night had fallen cold.

When the logs were all in, the two cleaned their boots noisily on the scraper outside, then rubbed them on the mat. March shut the door and took off her old felt hat — her farm-girl hat. Her thick, crisp, black hair was loose, her face was pale and strained. She pushed back her hair vaguely and washed her hands. Banford came hurrying into the dimly-lighted kitchen, to take from the oven the scones she was keeping hot.

‘Whatever have you been doing all this time?’ she asked fretfully. ‘I thought you were never coming in. And it’s ages since you stopped sawing. What were you doing out there?’

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘we had to stop that hole in the barn to keeps the rats out.’

‘Why, I could see you standing there in the shed. I could see your shirt-sleeves,’ challenged Banford.

‘Yes, I was just putting the saw away.’

They went in to tea. March was quite mute. Her face was pale and strained and vague. The youth, who always had the same ruddy, self-contained look on his face, as though he were keeping himself to himself, had come to tea in his shirt-sleeves as if he were at home. He bent over his plate as he ate his food.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ said Banford spitefully. ‘In your shirtsleeves.’

He looked up at her, with his chin near his plate, and his eyes very clear, pellucid, and unwavering as he watched her.

‘No, I’m not cold,’ he said with his usual soft courtesy. ‘It’s much warmer in here than it is outside, you see.’

‘I hope it is,’ said Banford, feeling nettled by him. He had a strange, suave assurance and a wide-eyed bright look that got on her nerves this evening.

‘But perhaps,’ he said softly and courteously, ‘you don’t like me coming to tea without my coat. I forgot that.’