“Who is this driving the cows?” I said. She too came out.
“It’s the boy from the next farm,” she said.
“Oh, well,” said I, “those Belgian girls! You never know where their
letters will end. And, after all, it’s his affair—you needn’t bother.”
“Oh—!” she cried, with rough scorn—“it’s not _me_ that bothers. But
it’s the nasty meanness of it—me writing him such loving letters”—she
put her hand before her face and laughed malevolently—“and sending him
parcels all the time. You bet he fed that gurrl on my parcels—I know he
did. It’s just like him. I’ll bet they laughed together over my
letters. I bet anything they did—”
“Nay,” said I. “He’d burn your letters for fear they’d give him away.”
There was a black look on her yellow face. Suddenly a voice was heard
calling. She poked her head out of the shed, and answered coolly:
“All right!” Then turning to me: “That’s his mother looking after me.”
She laughed into my face, witch-like, and we turned down the road.
When I awoke, the morning after this episode, I found the house
darkened with deep, soft snow, which had blown against the large west
windows, covering them with a screen. I went outside, and saw the
valley all white and ghastly below me, the trees beneath black and thin
looking like wire, the rock-faces dark between the glistening shroud,
and the sky above sombre, heavy, yellowish-dark, much too heavy for
this world below of hollow bluey whiteness figured with black. I felt I
was in a valley of the dead. And I sensed I was a prisoner, for the
snow was everywhere deep, and drifted in places. So all the morning I
remained indoors, looking up the drive at the shrubs so heavily plumed
with snow, at the gateposts raised high with a foot or more of extra
whiteness. Or I looked down into the white-and-black valley that was
utterly motionless and beyond life, a hollow sarcophagus.
Nothing stirred the whole day—no plume fell off the shrubs, the valley
was as abstracted as a grove of death. I looked over at the tiny,
half-buried farms away on the bare uplands beyond the valley hollow,
and I thought of Tible in the snow, of the black witch-like little Mrs.
Goyte. And the snow seemed to lay me bare to influences I wanted to
escape.
In the faint glow of the half-clear light that came about four o’clock
in the afternoon, I was roused to see a motion in the snow away below,
near where the thorn-trees stood very black and dwarfed, like a little
savage group, in the dismal white. I watched closely. Yes, there was a
flapping and a struggle—a big bird, it must be, labouring in the snow.
I wondered. Our biggest birds, in the valley, were the large hawks that
often hung flickering opposite my windows, level with me, but high
above some prey on the steep valleyside. This was much too big for a
hawk—too big for any known bird. I searched in my mind for the largest
English wild birds, geese, buzzards.
Still it laboured and strove, then was still, a dark spot, then
struggled again. I went out of the house and down the steep slope, at
risk of breaking my leg between the rocks. I knew the ground so
well—and yet I got well shaken before I drew near the thorn-trees.
Yes, it was a bird. It was Joey. It was the grey-brown peacock with a
blue neck. He was snow-wet and spent.
“Joey—Joey, de-urr!” I said, staggering unevenly towards him. He looked
so pathetic, rowing and struggling in the snow, too spent to rise, his
blue neck stretching out and lying sometimes on the snow, his eye
closing and opening quickly, his crest all battered.
“Joey dee-uur! Dee-urr!” I said caressingly to him. And at last he lay
still, blinking, in the surged and furrowed snow, whilst I came near
and touched him, stroked him, gathered him under my arm. He stretched
his long, wetted neck away from me as I held him, none the less he was
quiet in my arm, too tired, perhaps, to struggle. Still he held his
poor, crested head away from me, and seemed sometimes to droop, to
wilt, as if he might suddenly die.
He was not so heavy as I expected, yet it was a struggle to get up to
the house with him again. We set him down, not too near the fire, and
gently wiped him with cloths. He submitted, only now and then stretched
his soft neck away from us, avoiding us helplessly. Then we set warm
food by him. I _put_ it to his beak, tried to make him eat. But he
ignored it. He seemed to be ignorant of what we were doing, recoiled
inside himself inexplicably. So we put him in a basket with cloths, and
left him crouching oblivious. His food we put near him. The blinds were
drawn, the house was warm, it was night. Sometimes he stirred, but
mostly he huddled still, leaning his queer crested head on one side. He
touched no food, and took no heed of sounds or movements. We talked of
brandy or stimulants. But I realised we had best leave him alone.
In the night, however, we heard him thumping about. I got up anxiously
with a candle. He had eaten some food, and scattered more, making a
mess. And he was perched on the back of a heavy arm-chair. So I
concluded he was recovered, or recovering.
The next day was clear, and the snow had frozen, so I decided to carry
him back to Tible. He consented, after various flappings, to sit in a
big fish-bag with his battered head peeping out with wild uneasiness.
And so I set off with him, slithering down into the valley, making good
progress down in the pale shadow beside the rushing waters, then
climbing painfully up the arrested white valleyside, plumed with
clusters of young pine trees, into the paler white radiance of the
snowy, upper regions, where the wind cut fine. Joey seemed to watch all
the time with wide anxious, unseeing eye, brilliant and inscrutable. As
I drew near to Tible township he stirred violently in the bag, though I
do not know if he had recognised the place. Then, as I came to the
sheds, he looked sharply from side to side, and stretched his neck out
long. I was a little afraid of him. He gave a loud, vehement yell,
opening his sinister beak, and I stood still, looking at him as he
struggled in the bag, shaken myself by his struggles, yet not thinking
to release him.
Mrs. Goyte came darting past the end of the house, her head sticking
forward in sharp scrutiny. She saw me, and came forward.
“Have you got Joey?” she cried sharply, as if I were a thief.
I opened the bag, and he flopped out, flapping as if he hated the touch
of the snow now. She gathered him up, and put her lips to his beak. She
was flushed and handsome, her eyes bright, her hair slack, thick, but
more witch-like than ever. She did not speak.
She had been followed by a grey-haired woman with a round, rather
sallow face and a slightly hostile bearing.
“Did you bring him with you, then?” she asked sharply. I answered that
I had rescued him the previous evening.
From the background slowly approached a slender man with a grey
moustache and large patches on his trousers.
“You’ve got ’im back ’gain, ah see,” he said to his daughter-in-law.
His wife explained how I had found Joey.
“Ah,” went on the grey man. “It wor our Alfred scared him off, back
your life. He must’a flyed ower t’valley. Tha ma’ thank thy stars as ’e
wor fun, Maggie. ’E’d a bin froze. They a bit nesh, you know,” he
concluded to me.
“They are,” I answered. “This isn’t their country.”
“No, it isna,” replied Mr. Goyte. He spoke very slowly and
deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his
voice. He looked at his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and
dark, before the peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a
moment along her lap. In spite of his grey moustache and thin grey
hair, the elderly man had a face young and almost delicate, like a
young man’s. His blue eyes twinkled with some inscrutable source of
pleasure, his skin was fine and tender, his nose delicately arched. His
grey hair being slightly ruffled, he had a debonair look, as of a youth
who is in love.
“We mun tell ’im it’s come,” he said slowly, and turning he called:
“Alfred—Alfred! Wheer’s ter gotten to?”
Then he turned again to the group.
“Get up then, Maggie, lass, get up wi’ thee. Tha ma’es too much o’ th’
bod.”
A young man approached, wearing rough khaki and kneebreeches. He was
Danish looking, broad at the loins.
“I’s come back then,” said the father to the son; “leastwise, he’s bin
browt back, flyed ower the Griff Low.”
The son looked at me. He had a devil-may-care bearing, his cap on one
side, his hands stuck in the front pockets of his breeches. But he said
nothing.
“Shall you come in a minute, Master,” said the elderly woman, to me.
“Ay, come in an’ ha’e a cup o’ tea or summat. You’ll do wi’ summat,
carrin’ that bod. Come on, Maggie wench, let’s go in.”
So we went indoors, into the rather stuffy, overcrowded living-room,
that was too cosy, and too warm. The son followed last, standing in the
doorway. The father talked to me.
Maggie put out the tea-cups. The mother went into the dairy again.
“Tha’lt rouse thysen up a bit again, now, Maggie,” the father-in-law
said—and then to me: “’ers not bin very bright sin’ Alfred came whoam,
an’ the bod flyed awee. ’E come whoam a Wednesday night, Alfred did.
But ay, you knowed, didna yer. Ay, ’e comed ’a Wednesday—an’ I reckon
there wor a bit of a to-do between ’em, worn’t there, Maggie?”
He twinkled maliciously to his daughter-in-law, who was flushed,
brilliant and handsome.
“Oh, be quiet, father. You’re wound up, by the sound of you,” she said
to him, as if crossly. But she could never be cross with him.
“’Ers got ’er colour back this mornin’,” continued the father-in-law
slowly. “It’s bin heavy weather wi’ ’er this last two days. Ay—’er’s
bin northeast sin ’er seed you a Wednesday.”
“Father, do stop talking. You’d wear the leg off an iron pot. I can’t
think where you’ve found your tongue, all of a sudden,” said Maggie,
with caressive sharpness.
“Ah’ve found it wheer I lost it. Aren’t goin’ ter come in an’ sit thee
down, Alfred?”
But Alfred turned and disappeared.
“’E’s got th’ monkey on ’is back ower this letter job,” said the father
secretly to me. “Mother, ’er knows nowt about it. Lot o’ tom-foolery,
isn’t it? Ay! What’s good o’ makkin’ a peck o’ trouble over what’s far
enough off, an’ ned niver come no nigher. No—not a smite o’ use. That’s
what I tell ’er. ’Er should ta’e no notice on’t. Ty, what can y’
expect.”
The mother came in again, and the talk became general. Maggie flashed
her eyes at me from time to time, complacent and satisfied, moving
among the men. I paid her little compliments, which she did not seem to
hear. She attended to me with a kind of sinister, witch-like
graciousness, her dark head ducked between her shoulders, at once
humble and powerful. She was happy as a child attending to her
father-in-law and to me. But there was something ominous between her
eyebrows, as if a dark moth were settled there—and something ominous in
her bent, hulking bearing.
She sat on a low stool by the fire, near her father-in-law. Her head
was dropped, she seemed in a state of abstraction. From time to time
she would suddenly recover, and look up at us, laughing and chatting.
Then she would forget again. Yet in her hulked black forgetting she
seemed very near to us.
The door having been opened, the peacock came slowly in, prancing
calmly. He went near to her and crouched down, coiling his blue neck.
She glanced at him, but almost as if she did not observe him. The bird
sat silent, seeming to sleep, and the woman also sat hulked and silent,
seemingly oblivious. Then once more there was a heavy step, and Alfred
entered. He looked at his wife, and he looked at the peacock crouching
by her. He stood large in the doorway, his hands stuck in front of him,
in his breeches pockets. Nobody spoke. He turned on his heel and went
out again.