As Red Roderick was drunk perhaps the advantage given him by relative youth was to a certain extent cancelled. There was however no doubt that he wished to kill the old man, so enraged was he, so frustrated by the life that tortured him. As they swung their scythes towards each other ponderously, it looked at first as if they could do little harm, and indeed it was odd to see them, as if each was trying to cut corn. However, after some time – while the face of the old man gradually grew more demoniac in a renewal of his youth – he succeeded at last in cutting his son-in-law’s left leg so that he fell to the ground, his wife running towards him like an old hen, her skirts trailing the ground like broken wings.
But that was not what I meant to tell since the fight in itself, though unpleasant, was not evil. No, as I stood in the ring with the others, excited and horrified, I saw on the edge of the ring young William with his paint-brush and canvas and easel painting the fight. He was sitting comfortably on a chair which he had taken with him and there was no expression on his face at all but a cold clear intensity which bothered me. It seemed in a strange way as if we were asleep. As the scythes swung to and fro, as the faces of the antagonists became more and more contorted in the fury of battle, as their cheeks were suffused with blood and rage, and their teeth were drawn back in a snarl, he sat there painting the battle, nor at any time did he make any attempt to pull his chair back from the arena where they were engaged.
I cannot explain to you the feelings that seethed through me as I watched him. One feeling was partly admiration that he should be able to concentrate with such intensity that he didn’t seem able to notice the danger he was in. The other feeling was one of the most bitter disgust as if I were watching a gaze that had gone beyond the human and which was as indifferent to the outcome as a hawk’s might be. You may think I was wrong in what I did next. I deliberately came up behind him and upset the chair so that he fell down head over heels in the middle of a brush-stroke. He turned on me such a gaze of blind fury that I was reminded of a rat which had once leaped at me from a river bank, and he would have struck me but that I pinioned his arms behind his back. I would have beaten him if his mother hadn’t come and taken him away, still snarling and weeping tears of rage. In spite of my almost religious fear at that moment, I tore the painting into small pieces and scattered them about the earth. Some people have since said that what I wanted to do was to protect the good name of the village but I must in all honesty say that that was not in my mind when I pushed the chair over. All that was in my mind was fury and disgust that this painter should have watched this fight with such cold concentration that he seemed to think that the fight had been set up for him to paint, much as a house exists or an old wall.
It is true that after this no one would speak to our wonderful painter; we felt in him a presence more disturbing that that of Red Roderick who did after all recover. So disturbed were we by the incident that we would not even retain the happy paintings he had once painted and which we had bought from him, those of the snow and the harvest, but tore them up and threw them on the dung heap. When he grew up the boy left the village and never returned. I do not know whether or not he has continued as a painter. I must say however that I have never regretted what I did that day and indeed I admire myself for having had the courage to do it when I remember that light, brooding with thunder, and see again in my mind’s eye the varying expressions of lust and happiness on the faces of our villagers, many of whom are in their better moments decent and law-abiding men. But in any case it may be that what I was worried about was seeing the expression on my own face. Perhaps that was all it really was. And yet perhaps it wasn’t that alone.
In Church
Lieutenant Colin Macleod looked up at the pure blue sky where there was a plane cruising overhead. He waved to the helmeted pilot. Here behind the lines the sound of the gunfire was faint and one could begin to use one’s ears again, after the tremendous barrages which had seemed to destroy hearing itself. Idly he registered that the plane was a Vickers Gun Bus and he could see quite clearly the red, white and blue markings. The smoke rising in the far distance seemed to belong to another war. He had noticed often before how unreal a battle might become, how a man would suddenly spin round, throwing up his arms as if acting a part in a play: as in the early days when they had driven almost domestically to the front in buses, the men singing, so that he looked out the window to see if there were any shops at the side of the road. Released for
