The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Read online

  The huntsman paused to light his cigar with a trembling hand.

  ‘The thing comes back to me very vividly. The love and gratitude which I felt for my broad and striding chestnut; the thrill and fear of the fading quarry and the fading day; the sensation that anything might give at any moment, the horse, the hounds, the wolf or the daylight; the indescribable agony of possibility. Well, everything went; almost within five minutes. First the scent gave out, just as I viewed the wolf. I went mad and lifted the hounds to view, as if I had been doing that sort of thing all my life. And they were as mad as I was, for they rallied to me as if I had always been the Master, and followed where I madly capped them on and shouted. We came to view as the light failed, and the hounds raised a husky cheer just at the moment when my horse gave in. He stood still at a stile which I was trying to put him at, trembled and dropped his head. I left him where he stood, and ran after the hounds like a frantic man, with my spurs biting into my ankles. Then it seemed to get dark almost at a blow, and there was a village with lights in the windows, and a man with a lantern swinging by a barn, and a furious uproar from the hounds, varied by a melancholy cry. I found them by the barn wall, scrumming up against it like a wall game at Eton College, and two hounds seemed to be dead, and a grey leg was cocked upwards above the heaving backs, which drew it to and fro in a terrific worry. The deep-chested savagery of their note was splendid in the lantern-light, terrible, cruel I daresay, but true in kind. They chopped him with an exultant brutality, dragging his entrails, tugging with heads together and heaving shoulders and bloody mouths. But the awful thing, gentlemen, the thing which lost me my place with the Burstall when I reported it, was that the wolf was trying to articulate. Against the background of their full-blooded ferocity there was a thin and guttural note, a human supplication, an enunciation on the borders of the English tongue. The werewolf’s leg, gentlemen, that was cocked above the scrummage, turned pink, grew hairless, convulsed itself like a kicking frog’s: and Challenger was trotting round the outside of the circus, with a hand of human fingers in his mouth.’

  The Professor said, in a hushed voice: ‘Well, Frosty, you take the biscuit.’

  The huntsman touched his forehead with a pleased smile.

  ‘It isn’t,’ continued the Professor, ‘that I don’t know how to loose the arrow a little on the far side myself. I could have told you quite a good story about the Hunt Cup at Cheltenham, in which Mr Siegfried Sassoon ran a horse called Pegasus, that was disqualified because it was found to have wings. But, after a werewolf, what’s the use?’

  LESLIE HALWARD

  Old Sweat

  He was over six feet in height, grey-haired, thin as a lath, square-shouldered, with dangling long arms like an ape’s. His eyes were bloodshot and his temples sunk in. He kept leaning forward over the table and fixing somebody, anybody, everybody in turn, with the most terrifying expression, as if he hated everybody and would like to kill them all one at a time.

  But they all knew he was harmless and took no notice of his expression, only kept laughing and joking among themselves and urging him to sing. Every now and then he laughed, too, about half a minute after somebody had said something he thought funny. Every time somebody said, ‘Go on, George, give us one o’ the od ’uns,’ he said, ‘I can’t sing.’ Somebody said, ‘We know you can’t bloody well sing, but you can kick up a row,’ and they all laughed at that for a long time.

  At last he got to his feet and stood swaying, his long ape’s arms dangling, sticking his head forward and looking at first one and then another with that terrifying expression as if he would like to kill them all, and then grinning sheepishly and hanging his head as if affected with modesty, and saying like a shy girl: ‘I can’t sing.’ They kept saying: ‘Go on, George, give us one,’ and all at once he began to sing in a thick, drunken voice, running all the words into one and all the notes into each other, so that nobody could tell what the song was about. In the middle of it he stopped and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and said: ‘I can’t sing,’ and picked up his pint glass and took three or four great gulps out of it and put it down on the table empty.

  But they wouldn’t let him sit down, and he stood there swaying and grinning and saying he couldn’t sing, and looking at everybody as if he would like to kill them all, and then somebody said: ‘How about the wenches in the trenches?’ He looked at the speaker for ten seconds, and then laughed and shook his head, and said: ‘Ah! The wenches in the trenches! We had some!’ Somebody said: ‘We musta been in the wrong bloody trenches!’ and he laughed and shook his head again and said: ‘We had some!’

  Then somebody who had heard him sing the song before and knew some of it, started to sing it to egg him on, and after a bit he started to sing himself in a quavering voice like a very old man’s:

  Oh, the wenches

  In the trenches …

  and then he stopped and said: ‘We had some!’ and laughed and shook his head again. Somebody said: ‘Go on, let’s hear the rest on it,’ and he said, ‘I can’t sing,’ and then suddenly started again and sang,

  They stole our wenches

  From us

  In the trenches …

  and then stopped and wiped his eyes and his face as if somebody had thrown some water over him. And while they were shouting at him to go on, he held his hands in front of him as if he were holding a rifle, and started doing movements as if he were stabbing somebody with a bayonet. He stood in front of one of them, doing these movements, his eyes bloodshot and his head stuck forward and that terrifying expression on his face as if he hated the man who was sitting in front of him, and would like to kill him. He started cursing and raving and shouting orders and saying they were coming, and he pranced up and down and sweated and dribbled, and pretended to thrust his bayonet, and said: ‘Hold that, you—!’ All the other men sat and looked at him with the grins stuck on their faces as if the flesh had frozen. The landlord said, ‘Here, see if you can quiet him, Charlie,’ and Charlie got up and went to George and said something in his ear, and George pushed him away and shouted they were coming, and went on prancing about and pretending to stab the man who sat in front of him. He kept saying; ‘Hold that, you—!’ Sweat was pouring down his face and dripping off the end of his chin, his mouth was twisted and his eyes were glaring. The man he was pretending to stab was as white as a sheet, and he gripped the edge of the table and didn’t take his eyes off George’s face. The landlord said, ‘Here, we can’t have this,’ and one of the younger men croaked, ‘He’s gone bleedin’ barmy,’ and Charlie said, ‘I should think that’s about enough,’ and he went up to George and hit him on the jaw and knocked him flat on his back. Charlie and another man picked him up and the landlord said: ‘You’d better get him home, I should think.’ And between them they half-dragged, half-carried him out of the place. And after a bit one of the men said, ‘I never seen him go off like that before.’ Another said, ‘We was only having a bit of fun with him.’ And an old gentleman seated at one of the tables blew his nose loudly, and said: ‘It’s a great pity some fellows haven’t the sense to know when they’ve taken enough.’

  JULIAN MACLAREN-ROSS

  Death of a Comrade

  One of the boys in our battalion died the other day. He got drowned.

  Nothing dramatic: he went bathing in the river one Sunday and never came back. Two of his mates were with him, fellows from the signal section; they told me about it in the evening.

  ‘Heard about old Lennox?’

  ‘Lennox,’ I said; ‘Who’s Lennox?’

  ‘You know, Lennox. In our lot. Fair-haired kiddy from Cambridge. He got drowned today.’

  ‘Drowned?’

  ‘They ain’t found the body yet.’

  ‘Good lord. How’d it happen?’

  They told me. They didn’t even notice he was gone, at first; he must have sunk quite suddenly, like a stone. Weeds, the current, cramp; might have been any of them. Down he went, not a trace. Gone.

 
‘Fair shook me, it did,’ one of the signallers said, and: ‘You hear about this bloke that got drowned?’ the orderly sergeant asked me back in the office. ‘One of the signals. Went out bathing, drowned himself in the river. Current got him, I reckon. He didn’t ought to’ve done no bathing in there: it’s too bleeding deep.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s too late to stop him now.’

  ‘Too bleeding true it is,’ the orderly sergeant said.

  ‘Lennox,’ I said. ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Blowed if I remember.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  And it worried me, not being able to remember. Working in the army Office I must have seen him scores of times on telephone duty; the signallers had charge of the ’phone.

  Lennox, Lennox – I knew the name from typing out nominal rolls, but I couldn’t fit it to any face. There were several ‘fair-haired kiddies’ in the Signal Section, and any of them might have come from Cambridge. Was Lennox the blond, rather tough-looking boy whom I’d last seen at the baths, sitting on a bucket talking about his tart; or was he the other short, cissy-looking one with curly hair, who’d been a barber in civvy street?

  Next day the body still hadn’t turned up, but a telegram was sent off to Lennox’s father, and then, as Company Clerk, I had to compose a letter of condolence, which the Company Commander signed. That night it appeared in orders: ‘The Commanding Officer regrets to announce the death …’ and underneath: ‘A Court of Enquiry will assemble as under to determine the cause of death of 6526854 …’

  The notice announcing the death had a black border typed in around it. I could imagine the orderly room clerk cursing when he had to take out the stencil and re-insert it twice to get the black line level on either side. With wax costing sixpence a sheet you had to be careful not to make a muck of it; it’s quite an undertaking. A death gives a lot of trouble, one way and another, in a battalion. Luckily we don’t have many; only three in the last year or so. The sergeant who set fire to his tent, the batman who shot himself cleaning a revolver, the bloke who broke his neck on P.T.

  The colour sergeant came in with a sack. ‘More work,’ he said. ‘Lennox’s personal kit. Give us a hand to sort it out, will you?’ – a suit of service dress, civvy shoes, a pack of cards, an old cigarette case with a broken clasp, two photos of naked girls torn from a six-penny magazine, a bundle of letters, a book: What a Young Husband Ought to Know.

  ‘Was he getting hitched?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Here’s a letter, from his girl’. S.W.A.L.K. on the back of the envelope: ‘Dear Dick, why have you not wrote lately. I haven’t heard nothing of you for a fortnight now.’

  ‘Not much good sending ’em that,’ the colour sergeant said. He threw it in the salvage bag, the pack of cards and the naked girls followed; they were retrieved later by one of the runners.

  ‘What about, this?’

  A pencilled scrawl dated Sunday. He must have been writing it on the river bank just before he dived in.

  ‘Dear Mum, thank you for the parcel and the P.O. I haven’t any news, but I owe you a letter, so I am writing this …’

  ‘What d’you think? Send it?’

  ‘No. Only brings things home more, I reckon.’

  ‘Yeh. No sense in that.’ And at last the stuff was sorted out in two piles on the floor, ready to send off.

  Did his life flash before him as they say it does when you’re drowning, and was this it: the greasy cards, ‘Dear Mum’, the girl’s bare breasts, S.W.A.L.K., What a Young Husband Ought to know? (‘I’ll take care of that,’ the sergeant-major said, walking out with the book tucked under his arm.)

  ‘What sort of a fellow was Lennox?’ I asked the signal sergeant, who’d just come in.

  ‘Lennox? Smart kid. Knew his stuff backwards. But you seen him, surely? On the phone?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember.’

  It seemed wrong somehow, not to remember a man who’d died like that. Supposing I died myself, would someone say: ‘You know him, big tall bloke, used a fag-holder, half-crown voice,’ and would the answer be: ‘I don’t remember’? It seemed to me quite likely.

  Service dress and civvy shoes, a bundle of letters, an annoyance to the orderly room clerk, more work for the colour-sergeant; a man dying ought to leave behind him more than that. And so when Lennox’s father arrived the next day I tried hard to find in the small, grey-haired man in the dark suit who stood waiting awkwardly downstairs, a raincoat over his arm, some resemblance to a face I must have seen quite often: in the Naffy, or the cookhouse, or in the office, answering a call from the Adjutant. But there was none: he didn’t look like anyone I knew.

  ‘Can I see your Commanding Officer?’ he said. ‘My name’s Lennox.’

  ‘If you’ll come this way, please,’ I said.

  He followed me down the long cold stone corridor of the hotel we were billeted in.

  ‘I was very sorry to hear of your loss, Mr Lennox,’ I said to him. ‘We were all very sorry. We all liked him a lot.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said; ‘Yes,’ absently, and then: ‘You knew him?’ with sudden interest; ‘My son?’

  ‘Of course I knew him,’ I said. ‘He was a great pal of mine. We used to go about together.’

  ‘He got on all right? With the others?’

  ‘He got on well with everyone.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘Good. I’m glad. He wasn’t a bad lad.’

  And I said: ‘One of the best.’

  The C.O. was in his office, standing with his back to the empty fireplace; the other officers sat round the long table with a crimson cloth on it; the Court of Enquiry had just been concluded.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Mr Lennox, sir,’ I said, and stood back closing the door as the C.O. came forward with outstretched hand and the correct look of commiseration in his face.

  In the Company Office, the signaller on phone duty said: ‘That his father?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Poor blighter. They still ain’t found the body, y’know.’

  And they didn’t find it till five days later; it’d floated nearly twenty miles: amazing. The current of that river must have been certainly strong; it’s out of bounds to all ranks now.

  Then they had the funeral, with all the signallers attending, and the signal corporal and the signal sergeant, and another sergeant to play the Last Post as they lowered the coffin into the grave.

  And today I wrote off the last of him, typing a letter and posting a parcel to the Officer i/c Records:

  Late 6526854 Pte. Lennox, R., Personal Effects of, forwarded on receipt from Civil Police:

  One black leather diary dated 1941.

  One piece of broken mirror.

  One comb.

  One bronze medallion.

  One key.

  5s. 1d. in cash.

  ALUN LEWIS

  Private Jones

  Dafis the post came down the lane to Siencyn’s cottage earlier to-day than usual. He walked his bicycle through the stony muddy ruts, ringing his bell to call them out. Siencyn was still in bed, but Marged, his wife, had been up a couple of hours, feeding the wild chickens that nested in the apple trees and gorse bushes and mixing some swill for Granny the sow.

  ‘It’s come, Marged fach, it’s come,’ Dafis shouted, his excitement at a gleeful pitch. ‘Siencyn’s notice is come.’

  He brandished a small brown envelope.

  Marged straightened her heavy body, wiped her wet hands in her sack apron, showed nothing.

  ‘Diw mawr,’ she said to herself, thinking that something important was happening inside her.

  ‘Siencyn!’ Dafis called, leaning his bicycle with its tied-on parcels against the crumbled wall of the cottage. ‘Your calling-up notice I got for you. Look alive, boy.’

  Siencyn poked his long head out of the tiny bedroom window, his hair the colour of swedes. He was in his flannel nightshirt.

  ‘Coming now, Dafis,’
he said cheerily and withdrew. He pulled his trousers and clogs on, and came downstairs buckling his leather belt across a handful of trousers, very excited.

  Dafis opened the letter, Marged looking over his shoulder. She was twice his size.

  ‘Printed matter,’ Dafis said. ‘There for you. Instructions, look. Railway travel voucher. Free trip, see?’

  ‘In the train?’ Siencyn asked.

  ‘Third class,’ Dafis said. ‘From Cardigan station, Great Western Railway, to Talcen station, ditto. East Wales Fusiliers it is for you, Siencyn bach, poor dab. Plenty of V.C.’s they got already. Watch out, you.’