OFTEN in the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun, with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements, the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the wood, the stillness—these were poignant as they never will be again. And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would begin. Gentle and regular, at first—like the ending of a symphony rather than its birth—they would swell, then drop and fade away completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried out along a branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft, blunt flight, an owl would fly across.
Then, with a shrill, far “Mar-r-rk!” the beaters’ chorus would rise again, drowned for an instant by the crack of the keepers’ guns; louder and louder it came, rhythmically, inexorably nearer. In the ride little shivers of wind shook the drops of warm mist off the needles of the spruce, and a half-veiled sun faintly warmed and coloured everything. Stealing through heather and fern would come a rabbit, confiding in the space before him and the ride where he was wont to sun himself. At a shot he flung his mortal somersault, or disappeared into a burrow, reached too soon. To see him lie there dead in the brown-grey twilight of the trees would give one a strange pleasure—a feeling such as some casual love affair will give a man, the pleasure of a primitive virility expressed—but to watch him disappear into the earth would irritate, for he had got his death, and, dead within the earth, he would not do one any sort of credit. Nor was it nice to think that he was dying slowly, so one forbore to think.
Sometimes we did not shoot at such small stuff, but waited for the roedeer. These dun familiars of the wood were very shy, clinging to the deepest thickets, treading with gentle steps, invisible as spirits, and ever trying to break back. Now and then, leaping forward with hindquarters higher than its shoulders, one of them would face the line of beaters, and then would arise the strangest noises above the customary sounds and tappings—cries of fierce resentment that such fine “game” should thus escape the guns. When the creature crossed the line these cries swelled into a long, continuous, excited shriek; and, as the yells died out in muttering, I used to feel a hollow sense of disappointment.
When the beat was over they would collect the birds and beasts which had fulfilled their destiny, and place them all together. Half hidden by the bracken or deep heather the little bodies lay abandoned to the ground with the wonderful strange limpness of dead things. We stood looking at them in the misty air, acrid with the fragrance of the spruce-trees; and each of us would feel a vague strange thirst, a longing to be again standing in the rides with the cries of the beaters in our ears, and creatures coming closer, closer to our guns.
Often in the police-courts I have sat, while they drove another kind of “game.”
It would be quiet in there but for the whisperings and shufflings peculiar to all courts of law. Through the high-placed windows a grey light fell impartially, and in it everything looked hard and shabby. The air smelled of old clothes, and now and then, when the women were brought in, of the corpse of some sweet scent.
Through a door on the left-hand side they would drive these women, one by one, often five or six, even a dozen, in one morning. Some of them would come shuffling forward to the dock with their heads down; others walked boldly; some looked as if they must faint; some were hard and stoical as stone. They would be dressed in black, quite neatly; or in cheap, rumpled finery; or in skimped, mud-stained garments. Their faces were of every type—dark and short, with high cheek-bones; blowsy from drink; long, worn, and raddled; one here and there like a wild fruit; and many bestially insensible, devoid of any sort of beauty.
They stood, as in southern countries, one may see many mules or asses, harnessed to too-heavy loads of wood or stone, stand, utterly unmoving, with a mute submissive viciousness. Now and then a girl would turn half round towards the public, her lips smiling defiantly, but her eyes never resting for a moment, as though knowing well enough there was no place where they could rest. The next to her would seem smitten with a sort of deathlike shame, but there were not many of this kind, for they were those whom the beaters had driven in for the first time. Sometimes they refused to speak. As a rule they gave their answers in hard voices, their sullen eyes lowered; then, having received the meed of justice, went shuffling or flaunting out.
They were used to being driven, it was their common lot; a little piece of sport growing more frequent with each year that intervened between their present and that moment when some sportsman first caught sight of them and started out to bring them down. From most of them that day was now distant by many thousand miles of pavement, so far off that it was hard work to remember it. What sport they had afforded since! Yet not one of all their faces seemed to show that they saw the fun that lay in their being driven in like this. They were perhaps still grateful, some of them, at the bottom of their hearts for that first moment when they came shyly towards the hunter, who stood holding his breath for fear they should not come; unable from their natures to believe that it was not their business to attract and afford them sport. But suddenly in a pair of greenish eyes and full lips sharpened at their corners, behind the fading paint and powder on a face, one could see the huntress—the soul as of a stealing cat, waiting to flesh its claws in what it could, driven by some deep, insatiable instinct. This one too had known sport; she had loved to spring and bring down the prey just as we who brought her here had loved to hunt her. Nature had put sport into her heart and into ours; and behind that bold or cringing face there seemed to lurk this question: “I only did what you do—what nearly every man of you has done a little, in your time. I only wanted a bit of sport, like you: that’s human nature, isn’t it? Why do you bring me here, when you don’t bring yourselves! Why do you allow me in certain bounds to give you sport, and trap me outside those bounds like vermin? When I was beautiful—and I was beautiful—it was you who begged of me! I gave until my looks were gone. Now that my looks are gone, I have to beg you to come to me, or I must starve; and when I beg, you bring me here. That’s funny isn’t it, d——d funny! I’d laugh, if laughter earned my living; but I can’t afford to laugh, my fellow-sportsmen—the more there are of you the better for me until I’m done for!”
Silently we men would watch—as one may watch rats let out of a cage to be pounced upon by a terrier—their frightened, restless eyes cowed by coming death; their short, frantic rush, soon ended; their tossed, limp bodies! On some of our faces was a jeering curiosity, as though we were saying: “Ah! we thought that you would come to this.” A few faces—not used to such a show—were darkened with a kind of pity. The most were fixed and hard and dull, as of men looking at hurtful things they own and cannot do without. But in all our unmoving eyes could be seen that tightening of fibre, that tenseness, which is the mark of sport. The beaters had well done their work; the game was driven to the gun!
It was but the finish of the hunt, the hunt that we had started, one or other of us, some fine day, the sun shining and the blood hot, wishing no harm to any one, but just a little sport.