Read Online Essential Stories by V.S. Pritchett - Free Book Online Page A

a hollow out of sight of the sea, which was only half a mile away. It was a grey, rambling place of two storeys with outhouses and stables all going to pieces. It was damp, leaky and neglected and barely furnished. There were fuchsia bushes growing right up to the windows, beating against them and blinding them in the gales, pressed close as people in the night. The garden was feet deep in grasses, the gravel drive had become two grass ruts, and for a gate there was an iron hurdle propped against a gap in the stone wall. From the hill above Ballady Charlie and Micky had made out its slate roof silvery in the light, the ribs of the roofless stable, like a shining skeleton.
    “The way it is,” the Yank explained when he went in to Ballady alone for a drink now and then. “The poor bloody brother he’s after having a breakdown.” The Yank was a wild, tall, lean, muscular fellow, straight and springy as a whip, with eyes like dark pools, with bald brows, lips loose and thin, and large ears protruding from his bony skull. His black hair stood up straight and was cropped close like a convict’s, so that the skin could be seen through it; his nose was straight and his face was reddened by the wind. He went about with a cigarette in the corner of lips askew in a conquering grin, and carried a gun all day. A breezy, sporting chap. He wandered up and down the bog and the fields or lay in the dunes waiting; then, bang went his gun, the sea-birds screamed over the sand and up he got from his knees to pick up a rabbit or a bird. The sun burned him, the wind cut him, the squalls pitted him like shot. He had no secrets from anyone. Fifteen years of Canada, he told them, four years of war and now for a good time while his money lasted. Then, he said publicly to all, he would go back. All he wanted now was a bit of rough country, a couple of drinks, and a gun; and he had got them. It was what he had always wanted. He was out for the time of his life.
    How different Charlie was, slight and wiry, nervous and private as a silvery fish. His hair was fair, almost white, and his eyes were a keen dark blue in the pupils and a fairer blue was ringed round them. His features were sharp and he kept his lips together and his head down as he walked, glancing nervously about him. He looked like a man walking in his thoughts. If, when he returned from the sea, he saw someone in his path, he dodged away and made a long detour back to the house. If taken by surprise and obliged to talk to a stranger, he edged away murmuring something. His voice was quiet, his look shrill, pleading and shy. He was absorbed in the most private of all pieties, the piety of fear to which his imagination devoted a rich and vivid ritual.
    He did not badger his brother with speech. He followed him about the house, standing near him, asking with his eyes for the virtue of his brother’s strength, courage, company and protection. He asked no more than his physical presence and to watch. In the mornings at first, after they had established themselves in the house, there was always this situation: Micky restless, burning to be out with his gun and Charlie’s eyes silently asking him not to go. Micky bursting to be free, Charlie worrying to hold him. Sometimes Micky would be melted by an unguarded glance at his brother. For a moment he would forget his own strength and find himself moved by an awed tenderness for this clever man who had passed examinations, stayed in the Old Country, worked his way up in a bank and then, when the guns had started to popple, and “the troubles” began, had collapsed.
    Micky was kind and humoured him. They would sit for hours together in the house, with the Spring growing in the world outside, while Charlie cajoled him with memories of their boyhood together, or listened to Micky’s naive and boasting tales of travel. In those hours Charlie forgot the awful years, or he would have the illusion of forgetting. For the two surrounded themselves