Роберт Шеррифф - The Hopkins Manuscript

‘Good evening,’ I said.

‘Evening,’ he grunted.

Murgatroyd, the proprietor, was nowhere about – he had probably gone to the pictures at Mulcaster, and the barmaid who served me with a glass of ale was a stranger to me. I regretted more than ever the self-centred interests that had drawn me in the past few years from the village people. At one time, when first I came here, I knew them all by name, but now when I so desperately needed companionship, they were all strangers to me.

I tried to engage the girl in conversation. I thought it would be a good idea to arouse her alarm about those strangely-coloured sunsets so that I could do my duty by calming her fears with an elaborate (but untrue) explanation of them.

But I had scarcely started when someone called to her from the public bar and she turned her back on me.

I sat in a corner opposite the fat man and again attempted to begin a conversation about the sunsets. But he was a dull, surly fellow who took no interest in it whatsoever. He complained bitterly about the decay of the potato market, and when I endeavoured to interest him in my scientific theories of poultry breeding he grew violently angry. He said there wasn’t a farthing left in English eggs and a man was a damn fool who pretended there was. When I began to explain the effect of water-heated tubular metal perches upon a hen’s laying capacity, he got up and went out without saying goodnight.

My loneliness surrounded me like a shroud. The radio in the public saloon was making such a row that I could not recognise any of the voices or judge how many men were there. Nor could I summon the courage to walk in. One needed a companion when one strolled from the saloon into the public bar and in my dejected state I could not face a crowd of strangers alone. I listened for a while to the ‘plonk’ of darts and occasional rounds of laughter – then I put my glass down and left the saloon. The Fox & Hounds had failed me: my thoughts were thrown back upon that lonely hillside home of mine, and with something verging upon panic I knew that I could not face that silent, curtained library. I would walk: I would take the road towards Lullington and not return until the stroke of eight. I would go straight in to dinner and perhaps the soothing effect of a meal would help me to tolerate those dreaded hours to bedtime.

Some youths were lounging outside the general shop: they were laughing and chattering raucously together, but stopped to stare at me as I passed. One was the boy who worked for the butcher, and although he knew me quite well he made no attempt to touch his cap. The old country custom of touching caps and bidding goodnight had died out except amongst the older men and the country was rapidly becoming a drab, thin imitation of a London suburb.

Something about those aimless, chattering youths infuriated me. I longed to wheel around and lash them into silence and awed respect with my secret. I was ignored by everybody, yet I had only to stride into the Fox & Hounds, hold up my hand for silence and tell them what I knew to become the centre of amazed attention! My house would be besieged by the countryside! – group after group of round-eyed people would be ushered into my library to receive a ten-minute speech and a message of encouragement and hope! My name would be upon the lips of everybody and my house would become the Mecca of all Hampshire!

But a vow was a vow. In honour bound I must hold my tongue, but as I walked that winding lane to the ridge of the downs I began to long for the day when the Secret would be broken – when the whole village would know that for long, terrible months I carried the incredible truth so calmly that none even suspected it!

I walked for a long while in companionship with the waning moon: I stood for some moments at the edge of Cheddow Wood, looking down at the silver streak of the Arun as it wound through the water-meadows of the valley. I drew from that peaceful scene a wistful serenity that gave me courage to turn back upon my homeward journey.

Had I known of the things that lay ahead of me: had I a glimmering of the living death that was to come in place of the oblivion I expected, I believe that I should never have returned to my home that night. I believe that I should have gone down the hillside to the River Arun and died while there still remained distinction between life and death.

As if to pay compensation in advance for her approaching madness, Nature presented us with a succession of perfect autumn days. Dawn after dawn rose up in clear-skied radiance: mellowed afternoons pursued the sunset and bathed in its glow until the shadows of the beech trees were stretched like fine elastic to the full breadth of the meadow, only to be snapped with the nip of twilight.

The lovely weather helped me to recapture a semblance of my past life and habits. The moon had waned, and its passing brought relief. Time began to gather something of its normal progress and Lullington Poultry Show was upon us before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’.

The Lullington Show is amongst the most important of South Hampshire and I invariably sent my best exhibits.

I do not believe in priming my pullets artificially, but there are some exhibitors who go to what I consider unscrupulous lengths in preparing their birds for show. They give them stimulants to enrich the colour of their combs and drugs to incite an artificial jauntiness of bearing. For my own part I depend upon honesty, upon birds prepared under normal healthy conditions, and this policy never fails with judges of experience.

But at Lullington this year the judges of the Wyandotte pullets were men of the poorest quality, if not of downright dishonesty. I had entered a brood of six of the handsomest little birds that ever strutted in a judges’ ring. I had bred them from chicks and they possessed not only beauty of appearance but a wonderful esprit de corps.

But a scandalous thing happened. I had the humiliation and disgust of seeing the judges completely misled by an exhibit of palpably unhealthy, abnormal pullets. They were dull-faced, incubated chickens – totally devoid of the vivacity and character that is present only in birds raised by a mother hen. Their plumage was fluffed up to make them look like clowns: their feet and legs, I am certain, had been treated with yellow varnish and one bird gave such an exhibition of hysterical clucking that I knew it had been deliberately intoxicated.

The owner (a local man, I might mention!) carried off First Prize and a silly woman in breeches (also local and, I subsequently learned, the wife of the judge of the Bantam cockerels) was awarded Second Prize.

Never before, in a reputable show, have I been witness to such unashamed favouritism, and I told the Secretary that I would never exhibit at Lullington again.

But adversity brought a strange and touching result.

So moved was I by the plucky effort of those game little birds of mine – so stirred was I to pity by those puzzled, beady eyes that I no longer thought of them as a mere exhibit in a poultry show. They were my faithful little friends: friends that had been insulted and victimised by a local oligarchy.

I had intended to bicycle home the six miles from Lullington, but upon a sudden impulse I slung the bicycle upon the back of the carrier’s van and travelled inside with my birds.

As the van jolted through the winter sunset I pushed my finger through the crate and rubbed them one by one upon their combs and sleek white necks. I saw their eyes cocked up at me as if in apology for their defeat – as if in gratitude for my sympathy and forgiveness.

And when, in the twilight, I put them into their little home, they did not, in their usual way, wander stiffly and sleepily to their perches. Instead, they gathered in a corner and looked up at me through the wire. They stood there in a group as I walked away, and when I glanced back I saw them still as I had left them – a silent little grey cloud of friendship in the gathering twilight of the meadow.