Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

The Fox-11

‘You won’t refuse me, sir, will you?’ he asked gravely.

‘It depends what it is.’

‘Can I have twenty-four hours’ leave?’

‘No, you’ve no business to ask.’

‘I know I haven’t. But I must ask you.’

‘You’ve had your answer.’

‘Don’t send me away, Captain.’

There was something strange about the boy as he stood there so everlasting in the doorway. The Cornish captain felt the strangeness at once, and eyed him shrewdly.

‘Why, what’s afoot?’ he said, curious.

‘I’m in trouble about something. I must go to Blewbury,’ said the boy.

‘Blewbury, eh? After the girls?’

‘Yes, it is a woman, Captain.’ And the boy, as he stood there with his head reaching forward a little, went suddenly terribly pale, or yellow, and his lips seemed to give off pain. The captain saw and paled a little also. He turned aside.

‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘But for God’s sake don’t cause any trouble of any sort.’

‘I won’t, Captain, thank you.’

He was gone. The captain, upset, took a gin and bitters. Henry managed to hire a bicycle. It was twelve o’clock when he left the camp. He had sixty miles of wet and muddy crossroads to ride. But he was in the saddle and down the road without a thought of food.

At the farm, March was busy with a work she had had some time in hand. A bunch of Scotch fir trees stood at the end of the open shed, on a little bank where ran the fence between two of the gorse-shaggy meadows. The farthest of these trees was dead — it had died in the summer, and stood with all its needles brown and sere in the air. It was not a very big tree. And it was absolutely dead. So March determined to have it, although they were not allowed to cut any of the timber. But it would make such splendid firing, in these days of scarce fuel.

She had been giving a few stealthy chops at the trunk for a week or more, every now and then hacking away for five minutes, low down, near the ground, so no one should notice. She had not tried the saw, it was such hard work, alone. Now the tree stood with a great yawning gap in his base, perched, as it were, on one sinew, and ready to fall. But he did not fall.

It was late in the damp December afternoon, with cold mists creeping out of the woods and up the hollows, and darkness waiting to sink in from above. There was a bit of yellowness where the sun was fading away beyond the low woods of the distance. March took her axe and went to the tree. The small thud-thud of her blows resounded rather ineffectual about the wintry homestead. Banford came out wearing her thick coat, but with no hat on her head, so that her thin, bobbed hair blew on the uneasy wind that sounded in the pines and in the wood.

‘What I’m afraid of,’ said Banford, ‘is that it will fall on the shed and we sh’ll have another job repairing that.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said March, straightening herself and wiping her arm over her hot brow. She was flushed red, her eyes were very wide open and queer, her upper lip lifted away from her two white, front teeth with a curious, almost rabbit look.

A little stout man in a black overcoat and a bowler hat came pottering across the yard. He had a pink face and a white beard and smallish, pale-blue eyes. He was not very old, but nervy, and he walked with little short steps.

‘What do you think, father?’ said Banford. ‘Don’t you think it might hit the shed in falling?’

‘Shed, no!’ said the old man. ‘Can’t hit the shed. Might as well say the fence.’

‘The fence doesn’t matter,’ said March, in her high voice.

‘Wrong as usual, am I!’ said Banford, wiping her straying hair from her eyes.

The tree stood as it were on one spelch of itself, leaning, and creaking in the wind. It grew on the bank of a little dry ditch between the two meadows. On the top of the bank straggled one fence, running to the bushes up-hill. Several trees clustered there in the corner of the field near the shed and near the gate which led into the yard. Towards this gate, horizontal across the weary meadows, came the grassy, rutted approach from the high road. There trailed another rickety fence, long split poles joining the short, thick, wide-apart uprights. The three people stood at the back of the tree, in the corner of the shed meadow, just above the yard gate. The house, with its two gables and its porch, stood tidy in a little grassed garden across the yard. A little, stout, rosy-faced woman in a little red woollen shoulder shawl had come and taken her stand in the porch.

‘Isn’t it down yet?’ she cried, in a high little voice.

‘Just thinking about it,’ called her husband. His tone towards the two girls was always rather mocking and satirical. March did not want to go on with her hitting while he was there. As for him, he wouldn’t lift a stick from the ground if he could help it, complaining, like his daughter, of rheumatics in his shoulder. So the three stood there a moment silent in the cold afternoon, in the bottom corner near the yard.

They heard the far-off taps of a gate, and craned to look. Away across, on the green horizontal approach, a figure was just swinging on to a bicycle again, and lurching up and down over the grass, approaching.

‘Why, it’s one of our boys — it’s Jack,’ said the old man.

‘Can’t be,’ said Banford.

March craned her head to look. She alone recognized the khaki figure. She flushed, but said nothing.

‘No, it isn’t Jack, I don’t think,’ said the old man, staring with little round blue eyes under his white lashes.

In another moment the bicycle lurched into sight, and the rider dropped off at the gate. It was Henry, his face wet and red and spotted with mud. He was altogether a muddy sight.

‘Oh!’ cried Banford, as if afraid. ‘Why, it’s Henry!’

‘What?’ muttered the old man. He had a thick, rapid, muttering way of speaking, and was slightly deaf. ‘What? What? Who is it? Who is it, do you say? That young fellow? That young fellow of Nellie’s? Oh! Oh!’ And the satiric smile came on his pink face and white eyelashes.

Henry, pushing the wet hair off his steaming brow, had caught sight of them and heard what the old man said. His hot, young face seemed to flame in the cold light.

‘Oh, are you all there!’ he said, giving his sudden, puppy’s little laugh. He was so hot and dazed with cycling he hardly knew where he was. He leaned the bicycle against the fence and climbed over into the corner on to the bank, without going into the yard.

‘Well, I must say, we weren’t expecting YOU,’ said Banford laconically.

‘No, I suppose not,’ said he, looking at March.

She stood aside, slack, with one knee drooped and the axe resting its head loosely on the ground. Her eyes were wide and vacant, and her upper lip lifted from her teeth in that helpless, fascinated rabbit look. The moment she saw his glowing, red face it was all over with her. She was as helpless as if she had been bound. The moment she saw the way his head seemed to reach forward.

‘Well, who is it? Who is it, anyway?’ asked the smiling, satiric old man in his muttering voice.

‘Why, Mr Grenfel, whom you’ve heard us tell about, father,’ said Banford coldly.

‘Heard you tell about, I should think so. Heard of nothing else practically,’ muttered the elderly man, with his queer little jeering smile on his face. ‘How do you do,’ he added, suddenly reaching out his hand to Henry.

The boy shook hands just as startled. Then the two men fell apart.

‘Cycled over from Salisbury Plain, have you?’ asked the old man.

‘Yes.’

‘Hm! Longish ride. How long d’it take you, eh? Some time, eh? Several hours, I suppose.’

‘About four.’

‘Eh? Four! Yes, I should have thought so. When are you going back, then?’

‘I’ve got till tomorrow evening.’

‘Till tomorrow evening, eh? Yes. Hm! Girls weren’t expecting you, were they?’

And the old man turned his pale-blue, round little eyes under their white lashes mockingly towards the girls. Henry also looked round. He had become a little awkward. He looked at March, who was still staring away into the distance as if to see where the cattle were. Her hand was on the pommel of the axe, whose head rested loosely on the ground.

‘What were you doing there?’ he asked in his soft, courteous voice. ‘Cutting a tree down?’

March seemed not to hear, as if in a trance.

‘Yes,’ said Banford. ‘We’ve been at it for over a week.’

‘Oh! And have you done it all by yourselves then?’

‘Nellie’s done it all, I’ve done nothing,’ said Banford.

‘Really! You must have worked quite hard,’ he said, addressing himself in a curious gentle tone direct to March. She did not answer, but remained half averted staring away towards the woods above as if in a trance.

‘NELLIE!’ cried Banford sharply. ‘Can’t you answer?’

‘What — me?’ cried March, starting round and looking from one to the other. ‘Did anyone speak to me?’

‘Dreaming!’ muttered the old man, turning aside to smile. ‘Must be in love, eh, dreaming in the daytime!’

‘Did you say anything to me?’ said March, looking at the boy as from a strange distance, her eyes wide and doubtful, her face delicately flushed.

‘I said you must have worked hard at the tree,’ he replied courteously.

‘Oh, that! Bit by bit. I thought it would have come down by now.’

‘I’m thankful it hasn’t come down in the night, to frighten us to death,’ said Banford.

‘Let me just finish it for you, shall I?’ said the boy.

March slanted the axe-shaft in his direction.

‘Would you like to?’ she said.

‘Yes, if you wish it,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m thankful when the thing’s down, that’s all,’ she replied, nonchalant.

‘Which way is it going to fall?’ said Banford. ‘Will it hit the shed?’

‘No, it won’t hit the shed,’ he said. ‘I should think it will fall there — quite clear. Though it might give a twist and catch the fence.’

‘Catch the fence!’ cried the old man. ‘What, catch the fence! When it’s leaning at that angle? Why, it’s farther off than the shed. It won’t catch the fence.’

‘No,’ said Henry, ‘I don’t suppose it will. It has plenty of room to fall quite clear, and I suppose it will fall clear.’

‘Won’t tumble backwards on top of US, will it?’ asked the old man, sarcastic.

‘No, it won’t do that,’ said Henry, taking off his short overcoat and his tunic. ‘Ducks! Ducks! Go back!’

A line of four brown-speckled ducks led by a brown-and-green drake were stemming away downhill from the upper meadow, coming like boats running on a ruffled sea, cockling their way top speed downwards towards the fence and towards the little group of people, and cackling as excitedly as if they brought news of the Spanish Armada.

‘Silly things! Silly things!’ cried Banford, going forward to turn them off. But they came eagerly towards her, opening their yellow-green beaks and quacking as if they were so excited to say something.

‘There’s no food. There’s nothing here. You must wait a bit,’ said Banford to them. ‘Go away. Go away. Go round to the yard.’

They didn’t go, so she climbed the fence to swerve them round under the gate and into the yard. So off they waggled in an excited string once more, wagging their rumps like the stems of little gondolas, ducking under the bar of the gate. Banford stood on the top of the bank, just over the fence, looking down on the other three.

Henry looked up at her, and met her queer, round-pupilled, weak eyes staring behind her spectacles. He was perfectly still. He looked away, up at the weak, leaning tree. And as he looked into the sky, like a huntsman who is watching a flying bird, he thought to himself: ‘If the tree falls in just such a way, and spins just so much as it falls, then the branch there will strike her exactly as she stands on top of that bank.’

He looked at her again. She was wiping the hair from her brow again, with that perpetual gesture. In his heart he had decided her death. A terrible still force seemed in him, and a power that was just his. If he turned even a hair’s breadth in the wrong direction, he would lose the power.

‘Mind yourself, Miss Banford,’ he said. And his heart held perfectly still, in the terrible pure will that she should not move.

‘Who, me, mind myself?’ she cried, her father’s jeering tone in her voice. ‘Why, do you think you might hit me with the axe?’