TWO MEN
Descending to the house at dusk through the wood above the beech trees. An autumn evening. Puddles. A red sky. Smoke rising straight from the chimneys. The wooden noise of a pigeon flying from one copse to another. Cold rising from the ground: now at waist level. Having a dog with him changes his sense of distance. Objects and events impinge less persistently. There is more space around him. The dog, circling him, charges and worries the frontier of the unknown back: the opposite to what a dog does when it herds sheep together. The unknown is persistent. What is it that cannot happen? And the child answers himself: Nothing. What is it that can happen? And the adult answers himself: Nothing. He is a child and he walks through the wood like a child.
Twenty yards ahead of him the dog starts to bark. Poachers poaching? As with much else at this stage of his learning, the idea of poachers has led to a mystery. His uncle speaks of them as of murderous criminals: beings with whom and for whom there is no mercy because they stop at nothing. (Poachers are the equivalent in his uncle’s code of public danger to the city mob in Umberto’s.) Yet listening to the farm-hands talk and being quick to interpret their winks and sign-language laughter, he has learnt that some of their friends are poachers. A man said: If the magistrates had ever gone hungry … The boy asks himself, are all poachers hungry?
But the notion of being hungry, of being so hungry that you poach, is the most mysterious of all. Dogs jerk their heads eating when they are hungry. In the dusk he sees the possibility of men jerking their heads when they eat to satisfy their extreme hunger. He refuses either to run or to slow down. He knows the fear is inside him. He is carrying it like a full jug. Above all it must not be spilt, for then it will be uncontained and will flow over everything.
The dog stops barking and stands quite still, ears pricked, one front paw raised. There is the unmistakable wood-noise of a booted, two-legged walk: twigs, wet leaves, roots record the sound in their own manner. Two men appear. They have sacks draped over their heads and tied round their waists. In places the sackcloth is damp and dark. They are men he has never seen before. One of them has a bottle in his hands. Sonny! one of them shouts, and the other tells the boy there is no need to be frightened.
He stands absolutely still lest the jug spills. They have square heavy faces like the ones carved on the two top front corners of the wardrobe in the room where the dairymaids sleep. They ask him to come with them. We shan’t hurt you, the one with the bottle says. They speak to him as to a child. In this there is a certain kind of security. What is your name? they ask him. He tells them. They walk on. Nothing that has so far happened to him has prepared him for this walk through the wood beside the men in sackcloth: yet he is uncertain about how exceptional it really is. Will it turn out to be an incident that his uncle or his tutor will explain to him? Or is it already beyond their power to explain? Where are we going? he asks. The man with the bottle says: We have something to show you. We want you to see something. It is too dark to distinguish the faces of the two men.
Stop. Wait. One of the men goes off and comes back with an unlit lamp, like a carriage lamp. The man with the bottle pours from it into the lamp. The boy can smell the paraffin. When the lamp is lit and turned up they continue walking. The dog disappears whimpering into the darkness further along the track. Nobody says a word. The light from the moving lamp appears to cast shadows upwards into the sky.
The man in front stops and holds his lamp up above his head. What can you see? Peering into the darkness, the boy makes out three branches lopped from a tree, laid across the track; but the shape of these branches is entirely familiar and it is this which frightens him. He has already recognized them. They are horses’ legs. The man’s arm moves a little and one edge of a horse-shoe catches the light, like a nail in the branch. The legs are entirely still. What do you see? A horse on the ground. Only one? asks the man with the bottle whose voice is always gentler than his companion’s. I don’t know.
Come on, says the other man, what are you stopping for? He climbs up on to a bank and holds the lamp still higher. There are two horses, both on their sides. Massive dray horses. Their positions contorted, as though they had fallen on to their knees, broken their legs and then rolled over. The only sound now is the dog Sniffing at one of their mouths. Are they dead? asks the boy? The man with the bottle, the man with the gentler voice says: Wait. What do you mean? demands the one with the lamp. You were always a fool, says the other and turns to the boy. Look, sonny, I’m going to kill them now. You can see they can’t get up can’t you. So I’m going to kill them.
The man on the bank lowers the lamp. You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased, and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying again.
We will take you back now, says the man, and if anybody asks you, you tell them what you saw me do. We’ll light you back with the lamp.
Can I go? says the boy.
We’ll take you back, sonny.
I know my way, says the boy, even at night.
No terror on the way can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him: it is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.
Can I go?
Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.
Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.
His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger, revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I can think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.
He emerges from the wood at the top of an incline above the farmhouse. The slope, far too steep to plough, has been left uncultivated and is overgrown with bracken. As he comes down it in the dark his foot catches in a skein of bracken and he falls forward. Unhurt, he begins to roll down the slope. It would be simple for him to stop himself; he has only to grasp at some roots. But he has no wish to. He will roll to the bottom. Each time his legs come over his head it is as though for an instant the side of the hill is a flat plain and the lights in the windows of the farmhouse below are mysteriously large lights on the distant horizon. Each time his head comes off the ground it is as though he is falling across the sky. The dog, running behind him, begins to bark excitedly and to nose the ground. Each turn is like a door opening and shutting. Plain shut sky shut plain shut sky and the smell of the wet bracken on either side of the door. Bang, shut, bang, shut. The level. The sound of hosing in the dairy.