Volume Three—Chapter Seventeen.
Meantime they taught Big Jack to swim. He came down to look at the cave on New Formosa, and Frances so taunted and tormented him because the boys could swim and he could not, that at last the giant, as it were, heaved himself up for the effort, and rode down every morning. Bevis and Mark gave him lessons, and in a fortnight he could swim four or five strokes to the railings. Directly he had the stroke he got on rapidly, for those vast lungs of his, formed by the air of the hills, floated him as buoyantly as a balloon. So soon as ever he could swim, Frances turned round and tormented him because the boys had taught him and not he the boys.
Bevis and Mark could not break off the habit of bathing every morning, and they continued to do so far into October, often walking with bare feet on the hoar-frost on the grass, and breaking the thin ice at the edge of the water by tapping it with their toes. The bath was now only a plunge and out again, but it gave them a pleasant glow all day, and hardened them as the smith hardens iron.
Up at Jack’s they tried again with his little rifle, and applying what they had learnt from the matchlock while shooting with ball, soon found out the rifle’s peculiarities. It only wanted to be understood and coaxed like everything else. Then they could hit anything with it up to sixty yards. Beyond that the bullet, being beaten out of shape when driven home by the ramrod, could not be depended upon. In October they could shoot where they pleased on condition of sparing the pheasants for their governors. There were no preserved covers, but a few pheasants wandered away and came there. October was a beautiful month.
One morning Tom, the ploughboy, and some time bird-keeper, came to the door and asked to see them. “There be a pussy in the mound,” he said, with the sly leer peculiar to those who bring information about game. He “knowed” there was a hare in the mound, and yet he could not have given any positive reason for it. He had not actually seen the hare enter the mound, nor found the run, nor the form, neither had he Pan’s intelligent nostrils, but he “knowed” it all the same.
Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception—supersensuous perception—that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty people might have passed without the least suspicion. “Go into the kitchen,” said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features, for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to a cheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.
Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and they walked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at some distance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had not yet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagerness for sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, and though the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter was approaching. They passed an oak growing out in the field.
Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the hoary trunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which had stiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. His dress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat had lost all colour. He was hoary like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From his face the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan of seventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkled face like a withered oak leaf.
Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign of recognition; like a dead animal’s, there was no light in them, the glaze was settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seen them in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like a huge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years “Jumps” had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (not far from Jack’s), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hill he was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he was decaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his real name, corrupted to “Jumps;” as “Jumps” he had been known for two generations, and he would have answered to no other.
One day it happened that “Jumps” searching for dead sticks came along under the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. He watched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or two afterwards opened his mouth about it. “Never seed nobody do thuck afore,” he said, repeating it a score of times as his class do, impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so much iteration to impress it on them. “Never saw any one do that before.”
For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis’s governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, not one had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since the Norman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonalty forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller and not a home-staying man.
Tom, the ploughboy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the other plough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook far down the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water, running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with the sunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wish some one would paint them, with the brimming brook, the willows pondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and buttercups, the distant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this was not swimming. “Never saw any one do that before,” said the man of seventy harvests.
Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark passed that October morning. His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, his knees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff and crooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed as if he had been going as a beast of the field upon all fours and had hoisted himself upright with difficulty. Something in the position, in the hoary tree, and the greyish hue of his dress gave the impression of an arboreal animal.
But against the tree there leaned also a long slender pole, “teeled up” as “Jumps” would have said, and at the end of the pole was a hook. The old man had permission to collect the dead wood, and the use of his crook was to tear down the decaying branches for which he was now looking. A crook is a very simple instrument—the mere branch of a tree will often serve as a crook—but no arboreal animal has ever used a crook. Ah! “Jumps,” poor decaying “Jumps,” with lengthened narrow experience like a long footpath, with glazing eyes, crooked knee, and stiffened back, there was a something in thee for all that, the unseen difference that is all in all, the wondrous mind, the soul.
Up in the sunshine a lark sung fluttering his wings; he arose from the earth, his heart was in the sky. Shall not the soul arise?
Past the oak Bevis and Mark walked beside the hedge upon their way. Frost, and sunshine after had reddened the hawthorn sprays, and already they could see through the upper branches—red with haws—for the grass was strewn with the leaves from the exposed tops of the bushes. On the orange maples there were bunches of rosy-winged keys. There was a gloss on the holly leaf, and catkins at the tips of the leafless birch. As the leaves fell from the horse-chestnut boughs the varnished sheaths of the buds for next year appeared; so there were green buds on the willows, black tips to the ash saplings, green buds on the sycamores. They waited asleep in their sheaths till Orion strode the southern sky and Arcturus rose in the East.
Slender larch boughs were coated with the yellow fluff of the decaying needles. Brown fern, shrivelled rush tip, grey rowen grass at the verge of the ditch showed that frost had wandered thither in the night. By the pond the brown bur-marigolds drooped, withering to seed, their dull disks like lesser sunflowers without the sunflower’s colour. There was a beech which had been orange, but was now red from the topmost branch to the lowest, redder than the squirrels which came to it. Two or three last buttercups flowered in the grass, and on a furze bush there were a few pale yellow blossoms not golden as in spring, but pale.
Thin threads of gossamer gleamed, the light ran along their loops as they were lifted by the breeze, and the sky was blue over the buff oaks. Jays screeched in the oaks looking for acorns, and there came the muffled tinkle of a sheep-bell. A humble-bee buzzed across their path, warmed into aimless life by the sun from his frost-chill of the night—buzzed across and drifted against a hawthorn branch. There he clung and crept about the branch, his raft in the sunshine, as men chilled at sea cling and creep about their platform of beams in the waste of waves. His feeble force was almost spent.
The sun shone and his rays fell on red hawthorn spray, on yellow larch bough, on brown fern, rush tip, and grey grass, on red beech and yellow gorse, on broad buff oaks and orange maple, and on the gleaming pond. Wheresoever there was the least colour the sun’s rays flew like a bee to a flower, and drew from it a beauty as they drew the song from the lark.
The wind came from the blue sky with drifting skeins of mist in it like those which curled in summer’s dawn over the waters of the New Sea, the wind came and their blood glowed as they walked. King October reigned, and the wind of his mantle as he drew it about him puffed the leaves from the trees. June is the queen of the months, and October is king. “Busk ye and bowne ye my merry men all:” sharpen your arrows and string your bows; set ye in order and march, march to the woods away.
The wind came and rippled their blood into a glow, as it rippled the water. A lissom steely sense strung their sinews; their backs felt like oak-plants, upright, sturdy but not rigid; their frames charged with force. This fierce sense of life is like the glow in the furnace where the draught comes; there’s a light in the eye like the first star through the evening blue.
Afar above a flock of rooks soared, winding round and round a geometrical staircase in the air, with outstretched wings like leaves upborne and slowly rotating edge first. The ploughshare was at work under them planing the stubble and filling the breeze with the scent of the earth. Over the ploughshare they soared and danced in joyous measure.
Upon the tops of the elms the redwings sat—high-flying thrushes with a speck of blood under each wing—and called “kuck—quck” as they approached. When they came to the mound Bevis went one side of the hedge and Mark the other. Then at a word Pan rushed into the mound like a javelin, splintering the dry hollow “gix” stalks, but a thorn pierced his shaggy coat and drew a “yap” from him.
At that the hare waited no longer, but lightly leaped from the mound thirty yards ahead. Bound! Bound! Bevis poised his gun, got the dot on the fleeting ears, and the hare rolled over and was still. So they passed October, sometimes seeing a snipe on a sandy shallow of the brook under a willow as they came round a bend. The wild-fowl began to come to the New Sea, but these were older and wilder, and not easy to shoot.
One day as they were out rowing in the Pinta they saw the magic wave, and followed it up, till Mark shot the creature that caused it, and found it to be a large diving bird. Several times Bevis fired at herons as they came over. Towards the evening as they were returning homewards now and then one would pass, and though he knew the height was too much he could not resist firing at such a broad mark as the wide wings offered. The heron, perhaps touched, but unharmed by the pellets whose sting had left them, almost tumbled with fright, but soon recovered his gravity and resumed his course.
Somewhat later the governor having business in London took Bevis and Mark with him. They stayed a week at Bevis’s grandpa’s, and while there, for Bevis’s special pleasure, the governor went with them one evening to see a celebrated American sportsman shoot. This pale-face from the land of the Indians quite upset and revolutionised all their ideas of how to handle a gun.
The perfection of first-rate English weapons, their accuracy and almost absolute safety, has obtained for them pre-eminence over all other fire-arms. It was in England that the art of shooting was slowly brought to the delicate precision which enables the sportsman to kill right and left in instantaneous succession. But why then did this one thing escape discovery? Why have so many thousands shot season after season without hitting upon it? The governor did not like his philosophy of the gun upset in this way; his cherished traditions overthrown.
There the American stood on the stage as calm as a tenor singer, and every time the glass ball was thrown up, smash! a single rifle-bullet broke it. A single bullet, not shot, not a cartridge which opens out and makes a pattern a foot in diameter, but one single bullet. It was shooting flying with a rifle. It was not once, twice, thrice, but tens and hundreds. The man’s accuracy of aim seemed inexhaustible.
Never was there any exhibition so entirely genuine: never anything so bewildering to the gunner bred in the traditionary system of shooting. A thousand rifle-bullets pattering in succession on glass balls jerked in the air would have been past credibility if it had not been witnessed by crowds. The word of a few spectators only would have been disbelieved.
“It is quite upside down, this,” said the governor. “Really one would think the glass balls burst of themselves.”
“He could shoot partridges flying with his rifle,” said Mark.
Bevis said nothing but sat absorbed in the exhibition till the last shot was fired and they rose from their seats, then he said, “I know how he did it!”
“Nonsense.”
“I’m sure I do: I saw it in a minute.”
“Well, how then?”
“I’ll tell you when we get home.”
“Pooh!”
“Wait and see.”
Nothing more was said till they reached home, when half scornfully they inquired in what the secret lay?
“The secret is in this,” said Bevis, holding out his left arm. “That’s the secret.”
“How? I don’t see.”
“He puts his left arm out nearly as far as he can reach,” said Bevis, “and holds the gun almost by the muzzle. That’s how he does it. Here, see—like this.”
He took up his grandfather’s gun which was a muzzle-loader and had not been shot off these thirty years, and put it to his shoulder, stretching out his left arm and grasping the barrels high up beyond the stock. His long arm reached within a few inches of the muzzle.
“There!” he said.
“Well, it was like that,” said Mark. “He certainly did hold the gun like that.”
“But what is the difference?” said the governor. “I don’t see how it’s done now.”
“But I do,” said Bevis. “Just think: if you hold the gun out like this, and put your left arm high up as near the muzzle as you can, you put the muzzle on the mark directly instead of having to move it about to find it. And that’s it, I’m sure. I saw that was how he held it directly, and then I thought it out.”
“Let me,” said Mark. He had the gun and tried, aiming quickly at an object on the mantelpiece. “So you can—you put the barrels right on it.”
“Give it to me,” said the governor. He tried, twice, thrice, throwing the gun up quickly.
“Keep your left hand in one place,” said Bevis. “Not two places—don’t move it.”
“I do believe he’s right,” said the governor.
“Of course I am,” said Bevis in high triumph. “I’m sure that’s it.”
“So am I,” said Mark.
“Well, really now I come to try, I think it is,” said the governor.
“It’s like a rod on a pivot,” said Bevis. “Don’t you see the left hand is the pivot: if you hold it out as far as you can, then the Long part of the rod is your side of the pivot, and the short little piece is beyond it—then you’ve only got to move that little piece. If you shoot in our old way then the long piece is the other side of the pivot, and of course the least motion makes such a difference. Here, where’s some paper—I can see it, if you can’t.”
With his pencil he drew a diagram, being always ready to draw maps and plans of all kinds. He drew it on the back of a card that chanced to lie on the table.
“There, that long straight stroke, that’s the line of the gun—it’s three inches long—now, see, put A at the top, and B at the bottom like they do in geometry. Now make a dot C on the line just an inch above B. Now suppose B is where the stock touches your shoulder, and this dot C is where your hand holds the gun in our old way at home. Then, don’t you see, the very least mistake at C, ever so little, increases at A—ratio is the right word, increases in rapid ratio, and by the time the shot gets to the bird it’s half a yard one side.”
“I see,” said Mark. “Now do the other.”
“Rub out the dot at C,” said Bevis. “I haven’t got any indiarubber, you suppose it’s rubbed out: now put the dot, two inches above B, and only one inch from the top of the gun at A. That’s how he held it with his hand at this dot, say D.”
“I think he did,” said the governor.
“Now you think,” said Bevis. “It takes quite a sweep, quite a movement to make the top A incline much out of the perpendicular. I mean if the pivot, that’s your hand, is at D a little mistake does not increase anything like so rapidly. So its much more easy to shoot straight quick.”
They considered this some while till they got to understand it. All the time Bevis’s mind was working to try and find a better illustration, and at last he snatched up the governor’s walking-stick. The knob or handle he held in his right hand, and that represented the butt of the gun which is pressed against the shoulder. His right hand he rested on the table, keeping it still as the shoulder would be still. Then he took the stick with the thumb and finger of his left hand about one third of the length of the stick up. That was about the place where a gun would be held in the ordinary way.
“Now look,” he said, and keeping his right hand firm, he moved his left an inch or so aside. The inch at his hand increased to three or four at the point of the stick. This initial error in the aim would go on increasing till at forty yards the widest spread of shot would miss the mark.
“And now this way,” said Bevis. He slipped his left hand up the stick to within seven or eight inches of the point. This represented the new position. A small error here—or lateral motion of the hand—only produced a small divergence. The muzzle, the top of the stick, only varied from the straight line the amount of the actual movement of the left hand. In the former case a slight error of the hand multiplied itself at the muzzle. This convinced them.
“How we shall shoot!” said Mark. “We shall beat Jack hollow!”
They returned home two days afterwards, and immediately tried the experiment with their double-barrels. It answered perfectly. As Bevis said, the secret was in the left arm.
When about to shoot grasp the gun at once with the left hand as high up the barrel as possible without inconveniently straining the muscles, and so bring it to the shoulder. Push the muzzle up against the mark, as if the muzzle were going to actually touch it. The left hand aims, positively putting the muzzle on the game. All is centred in the left hand. The left hand must at once with the very first movement take hold high up, and must not be slid there, it must take hold high up as near the muzzle as possible without straining. The left hand is thrust out, and as it were put on the game. Educate the left arm; teach it to correspond instantaneously with the direction of the glance; teach it to be absolutely stable for the three necessary seconds; let the mind act through the left wrist. The left hand aims.
This is with the double-barrel shot gun; with the rifle at short sporting ranges the only modification is that as there is but one pellet instead of two hundred, the sight must be used and the dot put on the mark, while with the shot gun in time you scarcely use the sight at all. With the rifle the sight must never be forgotten. The left hand puts the sight on the mark, and the quicker the trigger is pressed the better, exactly reversing tradition. A slow deliberative rifleman was always considered the most successful, but with the new system the fire cannot be delivered too quickly, the very instant the sight is on the mark, thus converting the rifleman into a snap-shooter. Of course it is always understood that this applies to short sporting ranges, the method is for sporting only, and does not apply to long range.
One caution is necessary in shooting like this with the double-barrel. Be certain that you use a first-class weapon, quite safe. The left hand being nearly at the top of the barrel, the left hand itself, and the whole length of the left arm are exposed in case of the gun bursting. I feel that some cheap guns are not quite safe. With a good gun by a known maker there is no danger.
The American has had many imitators, but no one has reached his degree of excellence in the new art which he invented. Perhaps it is fortunate that it is not every one who can achieve such marvellous dexterity, for such shooting would speedily empty every cover in this country.
Big Jack learned the trick from them in a very short time. His strong left arm was as steady as a rock. He tried it with his little rifle, and actually killed a hare, which he started from a furze bush, as it ran with a single bullet. But the governor though convinced would not adopt the new practice. He adhered to the old way, the way he had learned as a boy. What we learn in youth influences us through life.
But Bevis and Mark, and Big Jack used it with tremendous effect in snap-shooting in lanes where the game ran or flew across, in ferreting when the rabbits bolted from hole to hole, in snipe shooting, in hedge-hunting, one each side—the best of all sport, for you do not know what may turn out next, a hare, a rabbit, a partridge from the dry ditch, or a woodcock from the dead leaves.