The Rendezvous and Other Stories Read online

  It was a great mistake, a bleeding error: I had none of the local sureness of a man of those parts, one who knew his way among the ditches and whose knowledge would have given him an assured countenance even through the back of his head. I had hardly begun my uncertain blundering through the reeds before I turned from a spectator to a quarry.

  There was no overt move for a little while and indeed the knowledge of the situation did not spread to all minds and to all levels of awareness without a considerable delay. Besides there was a gap in time, a parenthesis, in which they shot a magpie (they shot at everything that moved), winged it, and thrashed about after it as it ran, hopped and fluttered, sometimes, poor bird, skimming to a moment’s safety in the reeds on the far side of a broad ditch.

  But soon enough there I was, going faster and faster along my predetermined chord while one straggling line of youths hurried shouting along the towpath and another, more compact, launched out across the marsh on a course that would intercept mine unless I either ran or deviated to the left. I deviated, all right. My chord became a curve, and the curve sharpened sensibly as the gleam of gun-barrels in the fading light caught my eye. At some point, unseen by me, the sun must have sunk into a band of haze low over the trees beyond the river, and now the white light of the evening was shining from all the water in the bog. Steadily on, with the marsh-smell rising to my nose and the marsh-mud (viscous, dark) packing into the gap between the sole and upper of my shoe, working under the arch of my foot. On, on. What dreadful galvanic energy possessed those youths, what superabundant activity, unnecessary life!

  In front of me stretched a surface far wider than I had expected: this was the canal that drained the middle of the bog; and it looked very deep. Some ditches I had leapt, without too great an air of flight (I thought) and some I had crossed on planks. But here was no bridge that I could make out, and if I were seen attempting to jump it – it might just be done – then there would be no disguising the situation. The leap would be an open acknowledgement that the thing had turned into a hunt and myself into a legitimate prey. Besides, I did not know which side of the canal they were: they might have crossed it by the bridge that must certainly exist at the far end, where the canal fell into the Seine. Staring round did me no good, for here I was among the reeds, and their feathery heads cut off my view. An irresolute step took me away to the left along the canal, and here, just past a low-spreading willow-tree, there rose up an enormous shape. Straight up into the air it rose and after a stab of pure terror I recognized the broad wings and shape and colour of a heron: at once the shape diminished to a natural size. The slow beating flight rose and turned into the evening breeze from the river, mounting languidly, as herons will.

  Then came the double bang-bang of the gun and the heron slanted down in a long glide towards the river-bank. There was a confused shouting and bellowing of orders, raucous, ugly, near-hysterical, and then another shot. I made my way fast along the canal, keeping down among the reeds and the willows, and at length I paddled my way into a particularly dense clump of bulrushes that stood around a little subsidiary pond. Here I squatted on a tussock of that wiry grass which stands dry in the wettest places. There was the best part of the shell of some bird’s egg under the tussock next to mine, and one could still see the bent-lined hollow in which it had been laid. ‘Tranquillity,’ I said; and I noticed that the light was too dim to make out the colour of the shell. To some degree I was still unwilling fully to admit that I was hiding; but in reply to the commonplace observation ‘these things just don’t happen – you are upset, nervous, all on edge’ my memory produced details of gratuitous acts of this very nature and repeated them over a long period. And when I heard movements and voices again in front of me – that is to say further along the canal than the point I had reached – my whole being at once acquiesced and compressed itself into a smaller space, eyes glaring, ears and nostrils stretched: no doubt it also emitted a quarry’s smell. And I was surprised to find my hand creeping towards my wad of notes: I had not consciously thought of them since the train, so very long ago. There was the faintest wetness still to be detected in their heart.

  ‘There! In there!’ shouted a voice, and someone threw a clod of earth into the rushes and the water: but it was twenty or thirty yards away. Still, this full admission was very bitter, and beneath the humiliation I felt a surly glow begin go rise.

  It might have grown into something very rough and careless in time or with a sudden emergency, but it had certainly not reached that point yet, and I lay as close as a hare. As far as I could tell they were scattered promiscuously over the marsh – some of them shouting a great way off – and they seemed to be skirmishing about in twos and threes. What I could not make out was where the gun might be.

  Nor, when at last I came out of my hiding-place, could I make out which way round I was. West I could tell, for there was the remaining yellow glow; but the closer lie of the land escaped me – the canal no longer seemed to be running in the right direction, and the chess-board ditches (as far as they could be seen at all in this dying glimmer, faintly helped by a weak-backed moon) had been slewed round so that they no longer pointed out my way. There were a few voices still to be heard, mostly quite far off. They no longer had the fierce zeal of the earlier stage, but still I went on cautiously, working in what I thought was the direction of the river; and when I heard a cry of’Look out! There he is!’ I turned at once.

  The frightened tone was cordial to me, so was the sight of shadowy figures fleeting away from me over the marsh; but still I edged off into cover, since they might be running straight to their friends.

  Now there was a great deal of that foolish ululating oo-ooh that townspeople keep up so in the country: but quite common-place now, none of that implacable passionate intensity that you hear when hounds hit off the line – silly human beings was all. And I supposed, as I sat on my heels in a hollow, that they had gathered again, at least into two bands; though there was some isolated whistling and bawling over to the left.

  The weak moon had gathered spirit: it had put out the Pleiades and it shone on every watery stretch. A heavy dew was falling: wet piled upon wet.

  ‘If only I had a piece of string,’ I said, ‘how much easier it would be.’ My sole was now a true drooping sole. I had to raise my foot six inches higher than I should ordinarily have done, to prevent it from stubbing on the ground; and at every step I grasped with my toes – a useless, unnecessary, and (after a thousand repetitions) a very tiring action.

  My direction was unsure – quite vague. I had thought of making my way back to those allotments and thence to my hypothetical village, but on reflexion I preferred the towpath, and it seemed to me that if I kept on a general westerly course I must come to it in the end. It must surely be over there; and yet here was a metalled road, a meaningless road, if ever I had seen one. What was my right course now? On the far side, beyond still another ditch, stood a sign-post. I could have sworn that even a newspaper would have been legible in this brilliant moon – at least the headlines – but when I walked across (the road-grit sharp under my ridiculous foot) I found that I could not make out a single word. By now I was not going to leap another ditch with my shoe in that shape merely to learn, perhaps, that I might not deposit ordure there, so I considered for a while; and seeing that the road seemed to slope a little to the right, I went down it: in a quarter of a mile it brought me to a raised bank, and as soon as I had walked over it there was the Seine, there were the lights of some great installation far over on the other side, and between this bank and that two boats crossing on the black water. They hooted gently to each other as they passed, and their washes crossed reciprocally, the ripples showing in the light. The river was flowing the way I had expected it to flow – how comforting – and where I stood the metalled road ended in a gravelly place with a small ferry, just large enough for a single car. And here was the towpath: I started along it – so much easier than the broken surface of the bog, and presently th
e whole ludicrous, painful incident, which had already diminished wonderfully, dwindled into a foolishness long past.

  It did not revive even when my mind was jerked from its mild inward rambling by a sound that it told me was caused by a bullock churning about in a wet pasture, frightened by its own shadow. But it did revive in all its full strength, it did shock my heart to a momentary halt and wring my stomach tight again when I saw the youth bolt upright by the mast of a fish-trap. The moon was shining full upon him. Was he dim-sighted, half-witted, a nyctalope, to suppose himself invisible? Had he read in a book that if you stand quite still you cannot be seen?

  Quite still he stood, and as I came closer I could see the moon shining blue upon his teeth – a black hole of mouth and then these teeth. In that light his face seemed drained, eyeless, and sweating cold, for what could be seen did also glisten.

  My foot had made the smallest pause when I saw him, hardly measurable it was so small, because I knew that the entire situation was reversed, utterly reversed; and I came on with my awkward lame-duck gait.

  ‘Have you a piece of string?’ I said.

  No answer. No movement. The line of barges that had been following me passed by and I saw him silhouetted against the navigation lights.

  ‘Have you a piece of string?’

  His eyes showed in the moonlight, a sudden gleam (had they been closed?), and in an abrupt harsh rush he said, ‘Yes, a whole ball of string. A whole ball of string. Twine.’

  ‘Why does he carry a whole ball of twine with him?’ I wondered as I sat down. I said, ‘What is the name of the next village?’

  ‘Bougival,’ he answered gently, very soft.

  ‘Bougival,’ I said, seeing the map quite clearly now. ‘Ah, Bougival. Why, yes, of course, it must be Bougival, the place where lettuces are grown. I shall telephone from there.’

  The Stag at Bay

  EDWIN, as the long and briefless years trailed on, devoted himself more and more to lecturing and journalism. At the moment he was labouring over an article on marriage for a women’s magazine – ‘Let it be chatty and smart. And rather profound – human: you know what I mean? And you can be wistful if you like: old, battered, experienced. But not more than fifteen hundred words.’

  The article was proving much more difficult than he had expected. It was not for lack of raw material – pinned to the wall in front of him was a list of smart things that had already been said about marriage – and it was not for lack of experience or thought. Marriage was a subject that he had thought about a great deal, deeply, and he had supposed that the profound part of the article would be the easiest: yet although he was in the right mood, costive and solemn, the words would not form themselves into an orderly and harmonious procession. They remained in his head, swirling in grand but indeterminate shapes; or if they had any concrete existence at all it was in the form of scrappy notes, odd words jotted down: marriage iceberg – sunk – top quarrels – corruption in state.

  Not from lack of experience: he was married himself and at this time he felt more than usually married, for not only was he immersed in this article, but Julia had left him again, had gone back to her mother, and he was conscious of this all the time, if for no other reason than that the place was in such a mess. He never cleared it up on these occasions, partly on what he called principle and partly because it gave him such a moral advantage to be found in a slum, with every crock and pot unwashed and dishes piled on the floor, bed unmade, laundry sprawling abroad. He would not deliberately make a hole in his sock; but he would not prevent it, either. And yet he would not consciously welcome the hole; he would say tut-tut over it and inspect it with distaste: still less would he acknowledge that he piled the dishes in an unnecessarily picturesque confusion. His recognition of his moral advantage took place on some remote and not very savoury level of awareness: the piling of the dishes was traditional in the helpless male – any comic strip would bear that out, and besides there was the principle Man works not in House – and it was quite unconscious when it was quite fair: it was quite fair of course because Julia was in the wrong; therefore it was totally unconscious.

  Marriage iceberg. Somewhere he had read that seven-eighths of an iceberg is always submerged and that it is only the remaining eighth that one sees; and this he meant to liken to marriage, the visible berg corresponding to the squabbles and superficial disharmony and the vast unseen majority serving as a figure for the profound unity and deep affection that must always subsist, etc. A church-going expression covered his face: he nodded gravely, and bending over his desk he began to write.

  His pen stopped, started again, faltered and limped: he crossed out the whole paragraph and began afresh. He must make it quite plain about the underneath of the iceberg being really there.

  Slow, slow. The cat, which standing at the door had asked three times to go out, now paced deliberately into his bedroom.

  It was a slow article to write. Julia had slammed the door behind her just after the smart pieces had all been collected and as the first words were being written, ‘We all know Mr Punch’s advice about marriage …’ Yet the first section, the chatty part, had scarcely been completed before she had given Edwin grounds for divorce, and she was not by habit a flibbertigibbet, a fly-by-night, an itching palmer; neither loose nor fast. Her motives had been mixed: sizzling vexation of spirit, a conviction that nothing mattered; but also curiosity. She wanted to know, to really know, what adultery was like.

  The article was still bogged down in the second, or human, part when, pursuing her research with an ardour that could no longer be attributed to revenge or a spirit of inquiry, she increased his grounds to a most liberal extent – to expansive and park-like grounds in which the horned beasts could be seen wandering at large.

  At the beginning of the profound section she was in bed with horrible old Anthony Limberham, her cousin, to whose busy prayer she had yielded at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. She was quite accustomed by now to his faintly incestuous sheets – to their moral significance, that is – but not to the flagrant luxury of their hem-stitching, nor to the sinful depth of the carpet that met her feet when she got up. The unashamed magnificence of Anthony’s flat, his delighted pursuit of the sins of the flesh, the huge and beautiful meals (no shopping, cooking, washing-up) they both ate so greedily, the flowers, the scent, the lovely clothes, all these refreshed her soul like rain after drought. She sloughed the anxiously contriving housewife, dropped ten years from her appearance, and responded to his cheerful obscenity with an assured impudence that no longer shocked her inner mind. Her eyes shone; she looked pink, virginal and inviting; her hair curled naturally; in all her life she had never felt so well.

  Her sense of fun, much discouraged by life with Edwin and the hundred best books on the seventh floor of a cold-water walk-up, came suddenly to life again, and Anthony, scarlet in the face and wheezing, watered it with gin. She was going to the dogs – such agreeable dogs.

  In the morning the tide of washing-up reached Edwin’s desk itself, and at eleven a little congealed bacon-fat obscured his views on the state. These views had got into the article because they seemed to him to follow naturally after the piece about icebergs: he had expressed them forcibly, at some length, and with particular feeling today. He found them satisfactory and comforting even now, although the bacon-fat had reduced them to a kind of aphoristic précis: ‘… corruption in state, however bad, always occurs over basis of working integrity – unseen, unheard, taken for granted. – Crime not crime if normal; and once it becomes normal, unthinkable dissolution of the state.’

  Scraping some of the grease off with the paper-knife he commended himself for not being angry. He thought of ringing up his mother-in-law’s house and telling Julia that she was for-given: he thought of clearing everything away completely. But he sickened at the prospect of the actual effort; and then it really would be too Quixotic to throw away so much advantage. Magnanimity had its limits: and after all he had not been …
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br />   What exactly had he meant to forgive her for? His memory, usually so very precise in such matters, could not supply the grievance at once, and even after bungling about among the files for some time it could come up with nothing better than general disrespect, inattention, or answering back. There was no heinous crime, like the unmended drawers of the last great row. The prefect-Edwin was inclined to mercy; fright and the possibility of dismay were beginning to creep through the levels of consciousness and he was growing less absolute. But there was such a great deal of washing-up.

  ‘Or we have a very fine oryx, sir,’ said the shopman.

  They looked thoughtfully at the noble, leaping symmetry of the polished horns. ‘No,’ said Anthony, after a moment, ‘What I really want is a stag, and, to be precise, a royal with at least twelve points.’

  ‘Don’t be pedantic, Anthony,’ murmured Julia, with a blush. She turned away and gazed under the arm of a polar-bear at the hurrying traffic. ‘… a long way before you find a royal, sir. We used to see them often in the old King’s time, but now I’m afraid you’ll have to go a long way …’ the shopman said, bowing them out.

  A long way, a long way, but they found it at last in the limbo of an auctioneer’s back room.

  ‘A very fine ‘ed, if I may say so,’ said the warehouseman, hurr-ing on the stag’s eye and shining it with his handkerchief: it gleamed, brilliant among the dust and cobwebs that veiled the long muzzle, as bright and expectant as a natural in a bus. ‘A very fine ‘ed, sir,’ repeated the warehouseman, polishing the other eye, ‘And I dare say it was his pride in his days of life.’

  He stood aside to watch Anthony, who had borrowed a clothes-brush, and who was busily grooming the stag with it, going shshsh-shshsh like an ostler. The preposterous old satyr, purple as he bent to polish the antler, winking at Julia through the tangle of tines, made the warehouseman nervous and talkative. ‘A very fine ’ed and worth every penny of two, twelve, six which I couldn’t take a penny less – the horn alone is worth twice the sum named for the manufacture of fancy goods – penknife handles, sir, carving forks. And when ground is used for the cure of certain female ailments as no doubt your good lady knows, sir: I am a married man myself, ahem. Oh sir, you may say “Oh, it is a very old article.” Why, yes, sir, it is an old article and who denies it? But a horned stag is a very old article by nature. In its nature, sir, a stag is an old article.’