The Plague Dogs (26 page)

"The tod's left us," said Rowf. "He wouldn't come with me to look for you."

"Do you blame him?"

"It's his nature, I suppose. We'll just have to do the best we can without him. Some of what you've said may be true, for all I know. I can't understand it, really. There's no way out for us, I'm sure of that, but at least I mean to stay alive as long as I can, like the tod. And as for dying, I'll fight before I'm killed."

"They'll shoot you, Rowf. When the gun—the dark man—"

"They tried—a man standing near the white bell-car—he tried."

"The noise breaks the world to bits, like a stone dropping into the top of the water. But then it all comes together again and goes on, like the water. And that can happen again and again."

"Stop chewing that!" said Rowf fiercely. "No one'll, steal it—it'll still be there when you get back. Come with f; me, come on! Once we've found some food you'll know you're not dead."

"Hunt sheep?"

"No chance of that—-I'm exhausted. I couldn't make the kill. It'll have to be dustbins, and somewhere where V there are no dogs to give the alarm. After that, we must I decide what we're going to do."

A second time he jumped the half-door and Snitter, feeling now that sense of relief and acquiescence which often follows the telling of a grief, followed him. Slowly, with no clear sense of purpose or direction, they plodded away southward, towards the bleak summit of High Wal-lowbarrow outlined against the moonlit sky.

FIT 6

What place in all the Lakes can surpass, in grandeur and beauty, the summit of Wreynus Pass and the high solitude of the Three Shire Stone? Where, if not here, is to be found the heart of the Lakeland—

here, where the northern shoulder of the Coniston range meets the southern tip of the great Scafell horseshoe, and Langdale reaches up its arms to Dunnerdale across this desolate band of rock, turf and ling? Stand, reader, here—by the long stone itself, if you will, or at the summit of the pass—at dawn on a June morning, or at dusk of a rainy November nightfall. What, in the emptiness, do you hear, listening with closed eyes and lingers resting upon the squared edge of the stone?

Nothing that you would not have heard a thousand years ago. Down the long, bare ridges on either side sounds the wind, tugging in uneven gusts over the slopes, breaking, as strongly as round a cathedral, about the corners of -. the greater crags that oppose their masses to its force. Up from below

—from before and behind you—wavers the distant sighing of the becks, the sound coming and going on that same wind; and the occasional cry of hawk, buzzard or crow sailing on the currents in obedience to Hiehavioural instincts evolved tens of thousands of years gone by. A curlew cries,

"Whaup, whaup," and something Wetside Edge—a grazing yow or wandering fox—has put up a blackcock which rockets away, rattling in its throat with a noise like Mr. Punch about his gleeful mischief. A sheep bleats close by and little, cloven hooves—ah, here is a new sound—rattle across the metalled road. Open your eyes—unless a car comes there will be nothing else to hear except, perhaps, the thin note, now and again, of twite, pipit or shrike.

What do you see—for the wind, though sharp and bleak, is nevertheless friendly in blowing away the mist that might have enclosed you, muffling all sound, confusing north with south and compelling you to stumble your way from cairn to cairn along the tops, or to follow the course of a beck until it led you down below the mist-ceiling—what do you see? To the south, the mile-long shoulder of Wetside Edge comes curving down from Great Carrs, falling away into the dip below Rough Crags, where the river Brathay, itself no more than a beck, tumbles, cold and lonely, towards the meadows of Fell Foot and Little Langdale Tarn. To the north, the summit of Pike O'Blisco rises beyond its south face that they call the Black Crag. Behind you stands Cold Pike and between the two, on the other side of the saddle, so that you cannot see it from here, lies the little Red Tarn—barely two hundred yards long but big enough, no doubt, to cast a chill into the heart of our friend Rowf, should he ever happen upon it in his wanderings. The high, uneven ridge of the Crinkle Crags you cannot see—

not today, for over it the vapour is still lying, a grey cloud extending from Gladstone Knott right across to Adam-a-Cove and back along Shelter Crags to Three Tarns. But walk over a little way to the west, back over the crest of the pass, across this high watershed. There, below you, patters the narrow, stony stream of the infant Duddon itself, gaining from tributary beck to beck as it runs down, alongside the road but well below it, all of two miles to that bridge, that very gate where Snitter faced Mr. Ephraim on the road. Beside its course stand great tussocks of grass over which you can trip and measure your length in the soaking peat, tracts of bilberry, bog myrtle, wet moss and boulder-broken turf strewn with lichened stones; and on either side, stretching up the fell and all along the banks, the dry stone walls built of those same rocks and boulders, gathered and piled by men—whence came their patience?—

dead these two hundred years and more.

Despite their seeming emptiness, many men have in fact marked these hills—marked at least their surface, though they have not changed it, as the great fens of East Anglia have been changed or the once-forested Weald of Sussex. Beyond your view from Wreynus, away over the crest of Hard Knott, on its western slope and not far above Bootterilket, lies the Roman camp they call the Castle.

Mediobogdum the Romans called it, and here, where the rock-face falls to the grassy platform of their parade ground, the legionaries must have stood cursing as they looked out over the wet, windy heather, with lice in the tunic and a cold in the nose, all the way down the valley of the Esk to its sandy estuary at Ravenglass.

The Duddon valley was held by a Norman and its tenure is recorded in Domesday Book. Here, where you stand, a beacon burned to pass on news of the Spanish Armada. Wordsworth tramped over the Wreynus—indeed, he knew the Duddon valley from Wreynus to the sea, and late in life wrote a not-terribly-arresting sonnet sequence about it. And Arnold of Rugby and Ruskin and G. M. Trevelyan and Beatrix Potter and all the Everest climbers from Mallory to Hillary and for the matter of that, Mr.

Switchburg B. Tasker of Nebraska, for on his vacation last summer he drove over here in a hired Renault and I observe that he—or somebody—has scratched his name on the face of a nearby rock.

Never mind, Switchburg, old boy, the rain will rain and the lichen—Hypogymnia physodes, perhaps; or Parmelia conspersa, or perhaps the pretty, rust-coloured Lecidea dicksonii—will grow over the blurred place, and later on you'll be able to join the Roman and his trouble, just like A. E. Housman.

There's glory for you: well, all that you or I—or Rowf and Snitter, for that matter—are going to get, anyway.

Who is there who does not sometimes need to be alone, and who is not the poorer deprived of that strength and Solace, even though he may not himself be conscious of. his loss? This hundred years and more great Pan has been ': disdained and robbed and his boundaries diminished— Honf Knott the boundaries of a kingdom which many fear and shun, having had, no doubt, too much of it in the past against their will: the kingdom of solitude and of darkness. White stands for good and black stands for bad, we learned as children (though half the human race is black). ''If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'' said the good Lord, and so we misapply the metaphor and pray, O God, give me more light, until I come to walk in the courts—heaven help us!—of everlasting day.

And what will then become of your dreams, and of the phantasms that your own heart has summoned out of firelight and the dark; those fancies that do run in the triple Hecate's team from the passage of the sun? I would not trade them for all the golden crowns to be cast down around the crystal sea. There shall be no night there? So much the worse, for light and darkness, sons of Man, for us are complementary. Think otherwise to your harm.

Great Pan has retreated, if not fled; before the borough surveyor, that excellent and necessary man, with his street-lighting, his slide rule, duffle coat and gum-boots in the rain. And a good job, too, did I hear you say? Yes, indeed, for a hundred years ago it was a dark and lonely life for all too many, and now they are neither ignorant nor afraid, and at all events believe themselves less superstitious.

And my goodness, how mobile they are! On a fine Saturday in summer the summit of Scafell Pike may well be thick with those who have climbed it, having first journeyed towards it by train, car, motorbike and even aeroplane. No one need be alone any more, in that solitude where Socrates stood wrapped in his old cloak in the night, Jesus told Satan to get behind him and Beethoven, in his scarecrow coat, walked through the fields with the voice of God sounding like a sea in the shell-like spirals of his ruined ears. Strange paradox! In solitude great Pan confers a dignity which vanishes among crowds and many voices. Great Pan is half animal and incapable of pity as the tod, sending fear, strange fancies, even madness to trouble the lonely and ignorant. But shun him altogether, tip the balance the other way entirely and another—a vulgar, meaner—madness will come upon you—even, perhaps, without your awareness. Do you think great Pan is going to stand idly by while Dr. Boycott stabs and maims and drowns his creatures in the name of science, progress and civilization?

But wait—come back here a minute! Were you gazing v up Wetside Edge into the mist on Great Carrs, or watching '-, the buzzard sliding sideways down the north wind from { Pike O'Blisco? Look eastward into Westmorland, down :;-past Wreynus Bridge and Great Horse Crag to Little I.; Langdale and the road that comes snaking up out of the valley, nearly eight hundred feet to where we stand on this clear November morning. A car is coming up, twisting from side to side with the road; a green car

—a Triumph Toledo, I rather think—anyway, the kind of car that not infrequently goes with a job. And who, pray, is the driver? Take your binoculars to him. Yes, I thought as much. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Sir Ivor Stone's emissary! We are to be routed out in our solitude. It is indeed he! Ladies and gentlemen—Digby Driver, the urban spaceman! Let us—er—get a load of him, shall we? Digby Driver had not always been known by that name, for the very good reason that it was not his original one. He had been born about thirty years before—in some year soon after the Second World War, in fact—in a midland county borough; and at that time his name was Kevin Gumm. True, he had not been christened Kevin, for he had never been christened (which was not his fault), but he had nevertheless grown up with that name, which had been given to him by either his mother or his grandmother. We shall never know which, for not long after his birth his mother had left him in the care of his grandmother before vanishing permanently out of his life. This was partly due to the arrival of Kevin himself, for his paternity, like Ophelia's death, was doubtful and his mother's husband had laid it, most resentfully, at the door of the American G. Ls who at that time were thick on the ground in England. He certainly had some evidence tending toward this conclusion; and although his mother had denied the accusation, poor Kevin became first a casus belli between them and before long the final disrupter of a marriage-tie which had never been anything but tenuous. Mrs. Gumm began to look elsewhere and before long struck oil in the person of a sergeant from Texas, with whom she "took up,"

as the saying goes. Kevin would certainly have met with no more favour from the sergeant than he had from Mr. Gumm, and Mrs. Gumm (whose name, by the way, was Mavis), divining this intuitively (no very hard matter), took care to give the sergeant no opportunity to form a view. By the time Kevin was old enough to talk, Mavis Gumm had not been among those present for nearly two years, and since her own mother had not the least idea on which side of the Atlantic to begin to look for her, she found herself reluctantly stuck with Kevin.

William Blake remarked that the unloved cannot love, but he said nothing about the development of their intelligence. Kevin was above average. He grew up sharp enough, and very much a product of his time. Thanks to his circumstances and to various ideas current among well-meaning people in the fields of child psychology, social welfare and state education, he also grew up without respect or fear for parents (since he knew none), for God (of Whom, or of Whose Son, for that matter, he knew even less) or for the school authorities (who were prevented by law from subjecting him to any effective restraint or discipline). Consequently, he developed plenty of initiative and self-confidence. In fact, it never really occurred to him that any opinion or purpose which he had formed could be wrong, either morally or rationally. The possibility was never a consideration with Kevin, the concept not really being one which held any meaning for him. For him, the prime consideration was always practicability—whether, if he took this or that course, anyone was likely to try to frustrate him, and if so, the extent to which such opposition could be ignored, deceived, brow-beaten, terrified or, if all else failed, cajoled or bribed into submission. For his elders he grew up having about as much respect as has a baboon—that is, he respected them to the extent that they were able to harm or to exercise power, over him. One brush with the juvenile court at the age of, ten (something to do with breaking and entering a shop. kept by a seventy-two-year-old widow and threatening her With violence) taught him that on balance it was better to avoid attracting the attention of the police, less on account:"«f the possibility of punishment than because it indicated competence and involved loss of personal dignity. The following year he obtained his entry, in the eleven-plus, I D the grammar-school stream of the colossal local comprehensive school. As has been said, Kevin was no fool. And since he had the intellectual ability, once he got a [tete] of secondary education he soon began to realise the vantages to be expected from raising himself beyond origins and out of his background. The only factor in make-up likely to interfere with such progress was his lour propre and the tremendous respect which he felt for the personality of Kevin Gumm, No adult was going to tell him what to do or stop him doing anything he wanted. His grandmother had long ago given up trying. His headmaster did not come into the picture—the school was far too big and he no more knew Kevin by sight or character than he was able to know sixty per cent of his pupils. As for the form-masters, they tended to reach a modus vivendi with young Gumm, partly because he was no slacker—indeed, capable of excellent work at times—but principally because nearly all of them were afraid to take him on—not altogether physically afraid (though to some extent that came into it), but certainly afraid of friction and unpleasantness, and of getting no support, if it came to the crunch, from higher authority. The easier course was to stick to the letter of the law by helping him to develop his intellect on his own terms and leaving his character out of account. It was some time during the middle years of the sixties that Kevin obtained a state-grant-aided place to read sociology at one of the provincial universities.