The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins

pass. Every minute had been a purgatory of humiliation: it was as if he was in their service, forced to wait upon them as upon his masters. Yet he hated and despised them far more powerfully than ever he had liked and respected Sir Colin and Lady Runcie-Campbell. While waiting, he had imagined them in the darkness missing their footing in the tall tree and coming crashing down through the sea of branches to lie dead on the ground. So passionate had been his visualising of that scene, he seemed himself to be standing on the floor of a fantastic sea, with an owl and a herd of roe-deer flitting by quiet as fish, while the yellow ferns and bronzen brackens at his feet gleamed like seaweed, and the spruce trees swayed above him like submarine monsters.

      He could have named, item by item, leaf and fruit and branch, the overspreading tree of revulsion in him; but he could not tell the force which made it grow, any more than he could have explained the life in himself, or in the dying rabbit, or in any of the trees about him.

      This wood had always been his stronghold and sanctuary; there were many places secret to him where he had been able to fortify his sanity and hope. But now the wood was invaded and defiled; its cleansing and reviving virtues were gone. Into it had crept this hunchback, himself one of nature’s freaks, whose abject acceptance of nature, like the whining prostrations of a heathen in front of an idol, had made acceptance no longer possible for Duror himself. He was humpbacked, with one shoulder higher than the other; he had no neck, and on the misshapen lump of his body sat a face so beautiful and guileless as to be a diabolical joke. He was now in the wood, protected, not to be driven out or shot at or trapped or trampled on; and with him was his brother, tall, thin, grey-haired, with an appearance of harsh meditation obviously false in a man who read no books and could only spell through a newspaper word by word. They had been brought into the wood: a greasy shed, hardly bigger than a rabbit-hutch, had been knocked together in a couple of hours, and set up in one of Duror’s haunts, a clearing amongst cypresses, where, in early summer, hyacinths had bloomed in thousands. Already, after only a week, the ground round about was filthy with their refuse and ordure. They were to be allowed to pollute every tree in the wood except the silver firs near the big house.

      Duror was alone in his obsession. No one else found their presence obnoxious; everybody accepted the forester’s description of them as shy, honest, hard-working, respectable men. Lady Runcie-Campbell, without seeing them, judging by what she had been told, had said she was sorry for them, and she had issued an order to all her employees that they were to be treated with sympathy. Her fourteen-year-old son Roderick looked on them as heroes because they climbed into the very crests of the trees; even Miss Sheila, sophisticated beyond her twelve years, had gone to admire their climbing. It was true that the children of Lendrick, the village five miles away, where the brothers visited every Saturday, shouted names after them in the street; but they did not shout with the wholehearted cruelty that children could, and their elders, the shopping housewives and the dark-jerseyed fishermen outside the hotel, reproved them instantly and sharply.

      Since childhood Duror had been repelled by anything living that had an imperfection or deformity or lack: a cat with three legs had roused pity in others, in him an ungovernable disgust. Other boys had stripped the wings off flies, he had been compelled to squash the desecrated remnants: often he had been struck for what was considered interference or conceited pity. Nobody had guessed he had been under a compulsion inexplicable then, and now in manhood, after the silent tribulation of the past twenty years, an accumulated horror, which the arrival of these cone-gatherers seemed at last about to let loose.

      When he was sure they were too far in front to hear him he came out from the pines. For a minute or two he stood beside the rabbit, pitying it not for its terror or pain or nearness to death, but for having so recently been the victim of the hunchback’s drivelling sorrow. Anyone seeing him there, so silent and intent, might have thought he was praying, or at any rate making some kind of preparation in his mind for the taking of life. When he did kneel, on one knee, to break the rabbit’s neck with one blow, it was like an act of sacrifice, so swift, so efficient, and somehow so purposeful. When he arose his fist was clenched, and in the darkness he opened it and held it open, empty, for a few seconds.

      He went along the ride, climbed the fence, and followed the path that led by the side of a stream to the hut. Weeping ashes there gleamed paler than the rushing water. Beside the great cedar of Lebanon, the vastest tree in the wood, he paused for a minute or two, listening to what ought to have been the silence of the night accentuated rather than blemished by such noises as water’s gurgle, trees’ rustle, and a far-off seagull’s screaming. But at that high point on the path, beside this gigantic tree whose branches reached as high as the stars, and beyond into the darker haunted night of the Bible remembered from childhood, the light from the cone-gatherers’ hut could be seen. Therefore what Duror heard was a roaring within him, as if that tree of hatred and revulsion was being tossed by a gale. He was shaken physically by that onslaught and had to rest against the cedar, with his gaze upon that small gleam in the clearing below on the other side of the burn. He knew it would be more sensible and more worthy of himself to turn and go home: here there could be only further degradation and shame, with possible disaster; but in him was a force more powerful than common sense or pride. He could not name it, but it dragged him irresistibly down towards that hut.

      Amidst the bottommost branches of a cypress, curving out like hard green tusks, he stood and once again abandoned himself to that meaningless vigil.

      The hut was lit by oil-lamp. He smelled paraffin as well as woodsmoke. He knew they picked up old cones to kindle the fire, and on Sunday they had worked for hours sawing up blown timber for firewood: they had been given permission to do so. The only window was not in the wall facing him, so that he could not see inside; but he had been in their hut so often, they were in his imagination so vividly, and he was so close every sound they made could be interpreted; therefore it was easy for him to picture them as they went about making their meal. They peeled their potatoes the night before, and left them in a pot of cold water. They did not wash before they started to cook or eat. They did not change their clothes. They had no table; an upturned box did instead, with a newspaper for a cloth; and each sat on his own bed. They seldom spoke. All evening they would be dumb, the taller brooding over a days-old paper, the dwarf carving some animal out of wood: at present he was making a squirrel. Seeing it half finished that afternoon, holding it shudderingly in his hands, Duror had against his will, against indeed the whole frenzied thrust of his being, sensed the kinship between the carver and the creature whose likeness he was carving. When complete, the squirrel would be not only recognisable, it would be almost alive. To Duror it had been the final defeat that such ability should be in a half-man, a freak, an imbecile. He had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved.

      At last he roused himself and moved away. Yet, though he was going home, he felt was leaving behind him in that hut something unresolved, which would never cease to torment him. It was almost as if there were not two brothers, but three; he himself was the third. Once he halted and looked back. His fists tightened on his gun. He saw himself returning, kicking open the door, shouting at them his disgust, and then blasting them both to everlasting perdition. He felt an icy hand on his brow as he imagined that hideous but liberating fratricide. Surely they would lie there unheeded under the cypresses. Surely they were of no more consequence than the frogs which in mating time, with the smaller male on his mate’s back, crossed the public road and were crushed in their thousands under the wheels of the army trucks. Surely their deaths like the frogs’ could not be called murder.

      As he went on his way again to reach the road, he thought how incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa, and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave, intelligent men were killing one another, while in that dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection. He could not understand that, and he was sure nobody could.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Duror had walked about a quarter of a mile along the road when a motor car, with masked headlights, overtook and