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Authors: Geoffrey Household
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to mistake a queen for a pawn.
While I was working on the alder, something disturbed the birds upstream where the banks were overgrown. I paid no attention. A couple of minutes later I went round to the other side of the badger fortress, found a place where the vegetation was thin and searched the stream with my glasses. He was there all right, and he had not come down from the firs or I would have seen him. He must have been waiting for me where the road crossed the stream — an admirable place for the temporary disposal of a body. When I turned off into the footpath I had been dangerously close.
So long as he saw me, I did not care where he saw me from. I hoped that all this preparation of the tree would not puzzle him. He looked the sort of person who would recognize a badger sett —he could take it for a fox’s earth if he liked — and would realize that I meant to watch whatever was there from the alder after sunset. It was wildly improbable that he would suspect the truth; that the alder was futile for observation and that I had chosen it because I could be stalked with such ease up the blind side of the fortress.
At last I walked away downstream, leaving him to examine at leisure what I had been up to. When I was out of his sight I broke into a trot, for I had only half an hour to reach the rendezvous with Ian, whose help was essential.
I reached the bridge in time and was just about to go down to the willow snag and clear away the tail of dead water weed undulating in the slow current when I saw old Isaac Purvis leisurely scything the young nettles on the green verge of the road. His bicycle leaned against the hedge —a marvel how the old boy could cycle for miles with the scythe wrapped in sacking over his shoulder — and he appeared to have started on a job which the Rural District Council could well have left till July.
He leaned on his scythe when he saw me hesitate at the bridge, his whole attitude an invitation to join him and talk.
“Nettles are coming on fast this year, Mr. Purvis,” I remarked.
“Grass is what I were cutting,” the old man answered, “a goodish step back, t’other side of the bridge.”
He waited with mischievous eyes to be asked why he had moved. So I did ask.
“You go on up the road, Purvis, says Colonel Parrow, and if you sees the perfesser you give ‘im this ‘ere!”
He slid into my hand a sheet torn from a notebook as neatly as if he were passing a betting slip under the eye of a policeman.
I have a feeling you may want to see me today. I shall he at the bridge about half past four. There’s another report of the stranger whom Ferrin mentioned to you, and I am trying to account for him.
“Very kind of you, Mr. Purvis,” I said.
“It was them Boers what started it,” he remarked obscurely. “Never ‘eard of ‘em again we wouldn’t, if ‘tweren’t for the Kaiser and ‘Itler.”
I had to trunk that one out. There was a sort of mad logic in it, for British insolence and weakness in the Boer War — or so I believe myself — were both partly responsible for 1914.
“You fought in South Africa?” I asked.
“Ah. Yeomanry. And me bowels never been the same since.”
I agreed that the campaign must have been frightening.
“Went down with enteric, I did, like all me troop. And I’ll tell you what cured me though you won’t ‘ardly believe it. I was ridin’ along scarcely ‘oldin’ on me ‘orse when one of them bloody Boers ups and shoots me through the guts. And when I gets to ‘ospital I ‘ear the doctor say: Well, we ain’t got to bother about perforation now, ‘e says, because ‘e’s perforated. I didn’t rightly know what ‘e meant, but I says hallelujah for me luck and I gets well. So when Colonel says to me: It’s a question of atomy, Purvis, I says: Well, they won’t get un, Colonel, not them Boers nor the Americans neither.”
It looked as if Ian had thought that a zoologist was insufficiently melodramatic for his
While I was working on the alder, something disturbed the birds upstream where the banks were overgrown. I paid no attention. A couple of minutes later I went round to the other side of the badger fortress, found a place where the vegetation was thin and searched the stream with my glasses. He was there all right, and he had not come down from the firs or I would have seen him. He must have been waiting for me where the road crossed the stream — an admirable place for the temporary disposal of a body. When I turned off into the footpath I had been dangerously close.
So long as he saw me, I did not care where he saw me from. I hoped that all this preparation of the tree would not puzzle him. He looked the sort of person who would recognize a badger sett —he could take it for a fox’s earth if he liked — and would realize that I meant to watch whatever was there from the alder after sunset. It was wildly improbable that he would suspect the truth; that the alder was futile for observation and that I had chosen it because I could be stalked with such ease up the blind side of the fortress.
At last I walked away downstream, leaving him to examine at leisure what I had been up to. When I was out of his sight I broke into a trot, for I had only half an hour to reach the rendezvous with Ian, whose help was essential.
I reached the bridge in time and was just about to go down to the willow snag and clear away the tail of dead water weed undulating in the slow current when I saw old Isaac Purvis leisurely scything the young nettles on the green verge of the road. His bicycle leaned against the hedge —a marvel how the old boy could cycle for miles with the scythe wrapped in sacking over his shoulder — and he appeared to have started on a job which the Rural District Council could well have left till July.
He leaned on his scythe when he saw me hesitate at the bridge, his whole attitude an invitation to join him and talk.
“Nettles are coming on fast this year, Mr. Purvis,” I remarked.
“Grass is what I were cutting,” the old man answered, “a goodish step back, t’other side of the bridge.”
He waited with mischievous eyes to be asked why he had moved. So I did ask.
“You go on up the road, Purvis, says Colonel Parrow, and if you sees the perfesser you give ‘im this ‘ere!”
He slid into my hand a sheet torn from a notebook as neatly as if he were passing a betting slip under the eye of a policeman.
I have a feeling you may want to see me today. I shall he at the bridge about half past four. There’s another report of the stranger whom Ferrin mentioned to you, and I am trying to account for him.
“Very kind of you, Mr. Purvis,” I said.
“It was them Boers what started it,” he remarked obscurely. “Never ‘eard of ‘em again we wouldn’t, if ‘tweren’t for the Kaiser and ‘Itler.”
I had to trunk that one out. There was a sort of mad logic in it, for British insolence and weakness in the Boer War — or so I believe myself — were both partly responsible for 1914.
“You fought in South Africa?” I asked.
“Ah. Yeomanry. And me bowels never been the same since.”
I agreed that the campaign must have been frightening.
“Went down with enteric, I did, like all me troop. And I’ll tell you what cured me though you won’t ‘ardly believe it. I was ridin’ along scarcely ‘oldin’ on me ‘orse when one of them bloody Boers ups and shoots me through the guts. And when I gets to ‘ospital I ‘ear the doctor say: Well, we ain’t got to bother about perforation now, ‘e says, because ‘e’s perforated. I didn’t rightly know what ‘e meant, but I says hallelujah for me luck and I gets well. So when Colonel says to me: It’s a question of atomy, Purvis, I says: Well, they won’t get un, Colonel, not them Boers nor the Americans neither.”
It looked as if Ian had thought that a zoologist was insufficiently melodramatic for his
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