After the incident in the wood that autumn night he not infrequently climbs up to the near edge of the wood and deliberately rolls head over heels down the bracken slope.
The cook sees him one late afternoon.
You’ll break your neck, she says.
My neck won’t break.
TAKING A FALL
He saw the branch as though it were created to sweep him from his pony. All consequential reasoning, all the speculation which pertains to being able to choose among possibilities, was swept away in the same moment that it became clear to him that the branch must inevitably sweep him off the pony.
Time is measured not by numerals on a clock face but by the incidence of our apprehended possibilities. Without these—in face of the branch already above the galloping pony’s ears, time suffers an extraordinary change. The slowness of it cannot be imagined.
The boy lies on a bed in a farm-labourer’s cottage, calm, waiting for the pace of time to revert to normal. When it does, he may moan.
The old man moves about the room. It is like an outhouse with a bed in it. There is a window with very green leaves outside it: on the sill is a candle. The bed on which he is lying is covered with rags and an old horse blanket. It smells of damp foul cloth.
The old man is lighting a fire beneath a blackened kettle. The ceiling of the room is stained brown and in places the plaster has fallen off and the laths are visible. The brown of the ceiling is the colour of tea. The old man moves slowly and with difficulty. The boy believes that he is an old man of whom he has heard his uncle speak. His uncle said that he would die in the Workhouse.
He can feel how swollen his mouth is. With his tongue, cautiously, he feels the holes from which his teeth have been knocked out. (What will come to be known as his leer has been born.) The pain in his chest breathes in and out like the old man blowing into the fire on his knees.
Who are you? he asks the old man.
The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.
What the old man says I do not know.
What the boy says in reply I do not know.
To pretend to know would be to schematize.
Meanwhile development is so retarded, progress and consequence so slow that the determination not to cry out is left inviolate. It can endure for hours.
The branch struck him on the chest and face. It may be like this at the instant of being shot. The violence of the impact is so great that the self withdraws from all further contact. This is not the same phenomenon as unconsciousness. He was conscious, but suddenly his own body, its sensations and acquired memories became a vast estate in which he could wander without concern about his means of locomotion. Far away from where he was in his estate he saw a dark mass, composed of stone surfaces and water. He was approaching it fast. He entered it as his back struck the pony’s haunches. He lay vertical in a fissure of a cloud-like substance as his feet shot up into the air above the pony’s withers. When he hit the ground, curtains of whole fields were drawn back to reveal the blue sky without any land but him beneath it. Then he lost consciousness.
His courage on the bed, when he regains consciousness, derives from his original decision, when he first saw the branch, not to cry out. That was an hour ago and before the old man found him. On the bed he is still deciding. In time as he now experiences it, sustaining his decision is not what demands courage: on the contrary, it is the making of the decision which never ends.
(It is in order to break and destroy the concession of this experience of time which the body invents to protect itself, that torturers alternate torture with comfort.)
Everything you write is a schema. You are the most schematic of writers. It is like a theorem.
Not beyond a certain point.
What point?
Beyond the point where the curtains are drawn back.
Come back to the boy.
Who says that?
The old man does.
What does the boy feel?
Ask the old man.
Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.
The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.
The boy is not dying.
But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.
In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.
The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.
They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.
But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.
That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.
Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.
I don’t want to move.
You can’t stay here can you?
Why not? Whose is it?
Whose what?
Whose bed is this I’m on?
It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.
Whose home is it?
He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!
Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?
What else did you do?
I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.
Am I badly hurt?
Nothing that won’t mend itself.
It hurts when I talk.
Don’t fret.
Stay with me.
The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.
He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.
His uncle lifts the blanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.