Benita had little interest in horses. She could ride, of course. The local pony club had seen to that before she was twelve — leaving her at the same time with a lasting dislike of the revivalist religion of the horse and its female pastors. Aunt Georgina, with her matter-of-fact nineteenth-century attitude, had been an exception. Georgina shrugged her shoulders at enthusiasm and simply laid down the law that a person of sense should know exactly what was going on in his or her stables just as the modern car driver ought to (but doesn’t) know enough to give precise orders to his garage.
So in the country Benita walked. In London, I gathered, never. I could not avoid these casual strolls without inexplicable surliness, and I did not want to. But she very soon spotted my preference for the open, windswept tops of the Cots wolds.
She put down my manner to a curious life and a dangerous war. Georgina had told her that much. Whether she thought I needed an exorcist or a psychiatrist I was not sure, and I don’t think she was.
One afternoon she said to me quietly:
“There is nothing behind you, Charles.”
I had looked back twice when passing along the bottom of a dry valley. The steep sides were clothed with patches of gorse, intersected by runways of silent turf. It was easy to come down from the top in short rushes quite unseen, until the range had closed to ten yards and that intent, dark face was smiling at my back. What went on ahead of me I did not care. The birds would give me warning.
I apologized for my restlessness.
“But you look as if you really expected something,” she said.
“A naturalist always does. The watcher begins to resemble the watched.”
“Are animals afraid all the time?”
I answered that I did not think so — not in our sense of the word anyway — but that fear was never far from the surface, was acceptable and might even be enjoyable. Everything which preserves must in theory be enjoyable: mating, the satisfaction of hunger and the feeding of the young. A hare, for example, obviously triumphs in a narrow escape; you can see self-confidence in the easy gallop. Extreme danger is pleasurable to a few soldiers — even civilized, sensitive soldiers. And aren’t there young idiots in America who drive cars at each other down the center of the road to see who will get out of the way first?
“All the time, all around us,” I said, “Death is making his reconnaissance.”
“But it’s life which you are afraid of,” Benita replied.
“Because I look behind me?” I laughed.
She accepted that as just an unconscious gesture. I behaved as if I were haunted, she said, only because I was continually looking back into my life instead of forward. There was enough truth in the accusation for me to accept it without awkwardness.
But God knew the haunting was real enough! I had always the impression that I was being watched, though I now believe that at the moment I was not. Physically, that is. Death was at his headquarters, collecting the intelligence reports.
Only Benita saw anything wrong with me; her father did not. There was no reason why he should. The link between us —all the link I was admitting — was Nur Jehan. Since the horse fought Georgina and Benita, and Gillon when on his back was too indulgent, only I could begin to school him.
It was never fair to call the vicar impractical. What he lacked was capital, not common sense. He was a most lovable man, unaffected, fully able to hold the respect of his parishioners outside the church and their attention within it. His only worry —a severe worry —was Chipping Marton vicarage, which he could not even keep in proper repair. He was rightly determined that at least the garden should bring in an income to pay for the house.
“My dear Dennim,” he said to me once, “you are a man of the world. You would probably agree that I should be fully justified in turning the vicarage into a guesthouse or in using my leisure, such as it is, to practice some harmless form of commerce or home industry.”
I did not agree —and since I knew that he didn’t either, I said so.
“The limit of the permissible,” he went on. “Yes, one soon arrives at it. Two hundred years ago the Vicar of Chipping Marton worked the land and fed his family. We clergy of today have not the time and probably not the skill. Yet to produce, to make grow, to create — that much I feel is allowable to a servant of the Creator. I have given my spare time to specialties with some success. You will find Gloxinia Rev. Matthew Gillon in most nurserymen’s catalogues, though I doubt if I made fifty pounds out of it. I grew tomatoes and strawberries for seed. Admiral Cunobel was unconvinced, but I was able materially to assist Benita in London until it appeared that the varieties which had been recommended to me were very subject to disease. I feel that Nur Jehan is in that category of innocent creation which I permit myself. My conscience insists that to keep so beautiful an animal at stud is a valuable service to the community.”
The real trouble was that Gillon never saw or couldn’t afford to see that capital was essential to consolidate the results of his industry. But, granted a run of luck, it might not have been. The admiral, though ribald, had never discouraged his parson until the arrival of Nur Jehan. At least strawberries and tomatoes could not career down the village street looking for affection, or roll luxuriously in an angry neighbor’s uncut hay.
Matthew Gillon was unnecessarily grateful and always very conscious that I might be sacrificing my interests to his affairs. He made a point of collecting nature notes from his parishioners in case they might be of use to me, and he pressed his daughter, who was very properly inarticulate about everything she really valued, to show me the secret places of her childhood.
Benita, however, rather resented my profession, since she ascribed to it the sudden fits of distraction which interrupted conversation. In any case she wasn’t interested in causes, only in effects. If you can catch with your pencil the essential mechanics of a bird’s wing and the subtle change of shading which marks on an open down the transition from one grass to another, mere words are dull and the microscope irrelevant.
She did sometimes condescend to pass on facts in the sort of voice which you would expect from a nymph surprised by a zoologist in dark glasses. One afternoon when her father and I were mucking out the stable and she was soaping leather, she remarked:
“There are squirrels in the Wen Acre Plantation if you want to watch them.”
The plantation was of mixed conifers and beech at the head of the dry valley where Benita and I had walked — an early and most successful experiment of the Forestry Commission which belonged to its countryside as honestly as any other Cotswold wood. It deserved to lose its artificial name and be called the Wen Acre Hanger.
“How blind we are!” Gillon exclaimed. “I have driven along that road once a week for eight years.”
I suggested that he was not likely to see squirrels from a car when passing along the upper end of the plantation.
“And anyway, Daddy,” Benita added, “they weren’t there last summer.”
“Weren’t they indeed? Well, the little imps have found the perfect home. Bless me, I haven’t seen a red squirrel since before the war! I shall certainly stop when I pass tomorrow.”
When I saw him the following evening he was full of triumph and humility. He had started early for the weekly visit to a bedridden old shepherd which took him past the top of the plantation, and had spent an hour wandering under the trees.