4 of

You are browsing the full text of the article: The Grasshopper. A Short Story

 

 

Click here to go back to the list of articles for Issue: Volume: 1 of The New Coterie

 

The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 8
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
GERALD BULLETT

THE GRASSHOPPER. A SHORT STORY
 
“And the grasshopper shall he a burden, and desire shall fail …"

 

TO walk from one side of the room to another was now as hazardous an undertaking for Paul Stevenage as it had been ninety years before when first he had stood erect upon this whirling globe; and he regretted the queer impulse that had prompted him to bolt his cottage door last night, when, on the eve of his birthday, he had been visited by an intimation, the first of its kind, that the weakness as well as the pride of age was descended upon him. Bodily weakness he had been long familiar with; but this misgiving, this pang of loneliness, presented a strange face. Chewing a long cud of memories, living in a past more real to him than the sunshine that was urgent at his window, more real than the beardless generation passing his door, what should he know of loneliness? Yet now a kind of fear whispered in his mind. “That’s gone, that’s past,” ran the message, “and I ’m left here alone.” He was more than ever alone, now that the common delights were failing him. For years past he had sat in his doorway, every fine day, and watched the comings and goings in the little lane; but increasingly, of late, he had found the air too cool, even in summer, or the sun too strident in its brightness. Sunlight quivering on the chalky road was like a loud noise; the patter of raindrops on the windowpane made him wince; and the village children seemed rowdier every day. The outer world, indeed, was at once more clamorous and less significant, less intelligible, than it had been in former times. It was always knocking at his door, and to no good purpose. It was knocking now, with an iteration that seemed hostile and induced in him, as he made the slow difficult journey across the room, an answering hostility.
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 9
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
A voice outside announced, somewhat impatiently: “Postman!”

Breathless from bending to unfasten the bolt, he had no greeting for the postman, but received without a word the packet thrust into his hands. He let the door remain open, and returned to his chair to think things over. It was his birthday. Yesterday, until the moment of that tremor in the soul, he had conceived it as a day of triumph; had in fancy received over and over again the congratulations of his neighbours. He knew himself to be a prodigy, being, in spite of his feebleness, still able to see and hear as well as any youngster of sixty. He knew himself for a wonderful old man; but, greatly as he had enjoyed the part in the past, he was now a little tired of it. The day was begun; in a short while the curtain would go up on what had promised to be the finest scene in the play; but there would be no performance. Paul, his courage at the ebb, felt in his bones that he would never be a wonderful old man again. There were so many difficult things to do. There was, for example, when he remembered it, this packet to open. It was tied with string and sealed with red wax. The prospect of opening his jack-knife, cutting the string, unfolding the brown paper, and examining the contents of the packet. This in anticipation so cruelly fretted him that he wished he had stayed in bed and slept through the postman’s knocking. From time to time he would forget the thing altogether and lose himself agreeable in reverie, but always, in the end, he came back to it, lying there in his lap, demanding attention. Finally, by a prodigious effort of the will, he set to work. The knife was in his trousers pocket, to reach which he had to uncross his legs and straighten his body from the hip downwards — a tedious business. Then the knife must be opened and the string cut. He went over the process three times in fancy before he achieved it in fact: three several times, divided by intervals of dreaming and of washing it were over and done with. At last, with the sense of having got through a day’s work and more than a day’s worry, he came to the heart of the matter. From the piece of cardboard that his tired fingers held, a pretty girl of about seventeen looked pertly up at him. He returned her gaze, at first dully, without interest, and then, as recognition half-dawned, with a faint wonder stirring at his heart. Some chord in him was touched but not awakened, and he vaguely felt,
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 10
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
rather than thought, that somewhere in the remote past this face had been known to him. There was a letter accompanying the photograph:

Just a lines to wish you hapy reterns and a liknis of our grandorter daisy who you of never seen our dear son George quit a scolard as writen this letter i shall soon be 81 of age dear Paul from dear Dot.

He was greatly puzzled by this letter, which gave hints of a story to which he had somehow lost the key. Dot he remembered, because he had seen her as recently as fifteen years ago, in her native village ten miles distant from his own, and it was of her, he supposed, that the young woman in the photograph had reminded him. But the phrase “our dear son George” was meaningless to the old man; and, fatigued by the brief effort to understand it, he allowed the letter to fall unheeded to the floor, and his mind drifted on to other thoughts.

He was roused by the entry of young Mrs. Haycock, the brisk and comfortable woman of fifty who occupied the adjoining cottage, and came in each day to get his meals for him. This morning she was radiant with consciousness of the great occasion.

“Well, there you are”! she cried, rubbing her hands on her apron. “Ninety-two to-day. Many ’appy returns, I ’m sure, Granfer!”

Paul mumbled an acknowledgment; then, pointing accusingly at the latter, which he happened at that moment to catch sight of on the floor, he said accusingly: “Our dear son, George, she says. What can she mean be that, eh?”

Mrs. Haycock, having picked up the letter and mastered its contents, began laying the breakfast table in silence, as though she had quite lost interest in the subject. But presently she remarked, in the tone one uses to a child: “George? Why that must be George Robins, your own son, if all accounts be true. You know your son George, him that come to see you a year or two back. You must know ’im. Old George Robins. Why, everybody knows George.”

She did not appear to expect any reply, but presently, having slowly digested her information, he remarked: “My son, George Robins? Yes, I mind ’im.” After a silence he added pettishly: “But what’s George to do with Dot?”

Mrs. Haycock approached with a steaming cup of tea. “She’s ’is mother by the look of things, though it’s none of
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 11
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
my business. And this pretty gel’s ’is daughter.” She bent over the photograph, and, having gazed her fill, summed up her admiration of it in one long sigh.

“Ah,” said Paul, sipping his tea reflectively, “Dot were young George’s mother, so she were. I’d got ’im mixed up with another gel.” He creased up his face in a strange show of mirth, and a chuckle that was all but silent shook his frail frame. “Eh, but that’ll be sixty year ago, I’ll lay.”

Paying little or no heed to this remark, Mrs. Haycock said, with loud, sickroom cheerfulness: “If you eat your breakfast nicely, Granfer, I ’ve got a little surprise for you.” She paused at the door to repeat: “A little surprise I ’m fetching for you.”

“I aint deaf,” answered Paul, bending over his plate. “What makes gels so bloody noisy”? he inquired, of the world at large. But when Mrs. Haycock reappeared a moment later, carrying her “little surprise” with her, the old man remembered his manners in time to say: “Thank ye kindly, me dear. Very thoughtful and nice.” He did not as yet know what form the gift was taking, but he was eager to get his thanks said without delay, lest subsequent events should put them out of his mind. He watched, with a curiosity that threatened to become irritation, while Mrs. Haycock, mysteriously smiling, placed a large square parcel on the brick floor. “Now you’ll see”! she promised him. With these words she spat a long nail into her hand, whipped a hammer from her apron pocket, and, with these preparations made, eyed appraisingly the oak beam that ran across the ceiling. “That’s the place for it,” said Mrs. Haycock, after due deliberation. “But you’ll have to mind not to knock your head on it, Grandfer.”

Her assault, with hammer and nail, upon his home was more than Paul could bear without protest; but he was appeased when her intention became clear; and when at last the bird in its cage was safely suspended from the ceiling, he was moved to say, in all sincerity: “That’s a martal pretty bird, me dear.” It was, indeed, the prettiest creature that Paul had ever seen: sleek, plump, bright-eyed, in form the embodiment of grace, in colour the most delicate satin green. “And do he sing”? asked Paul.

Mrs. Haycock was eloquent in its praise, but it was the bird itself, after she had gone, that — in a burst of golden song — answered Paul’s question. He was startled with joy by the
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 12
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
suddenness with which the room filled with passion and beauty. Sunlight and green fields and running water were in that bird’s voice, so that Paul, listening, felt springtime quicken in his veins and the heart lifted out of him in ardour and aspiration. When silence fell he cried: “Sweet sweet”! , trying by conventional bird language to coax from the lovely creature another song. And so it sang again and again, recreating in a shimmer of intricate melody the paradise from which it was exiled, and of which the sunshine, entering the open doorway, brought thrilling intimations. The old man listened, first in delight, then sadly. Sadness gave place to the realisation that he was weary of this incessant noise; it was too loud, it was shouting words inside his head, and if he could not get relief from it, he must cry with vexation. “It’s nesting time, don’t you see,” Mrs. Haycock had complacently said, “so of course the lil thing be full of song.” He recalled this saying, muttering it to himself without being quite aware of its meaning, while he laboriously rose from his chair and faltered across the room to where the caged bird hung. He approached the bird with intention, but forgot the intention before it could be fulfilled, its place in his mind being smoothly stealthily appropriated by moments of the past: of himself as a child catching and killing the flies on a cow’s back; chance glimpses of meadow and sky; boys in a brook, splashing and fighting; a strange summer night spent in Venner’s Wood with a girl whose face he had long forgotten; and of ploughing, ploughing, with the broad equine buttocks swaying in front of him, and the tail twitching, and the furrows multiplying, and heat beating tangibly from the sky and rising visibly in a quivering glaze from the ground, and the soft thud of hooves, the gliding furrow, the smell of the newly-sliced earth all mingling in his senses. These things came to him neither vivid nor dim; they were clear and bright, but they lacked the sharpness that made so troublesome the actual and present world, their light being veiled as by silk, their sounds muffled, their outlines softened by distance and uncertainty. The little rivers of this country soundlessly enamelled their pebbly beds; its sun did not scorch, nor its cold winds bite. Kisses kindled no fire, and the mingling of limbs meant neither pleasure nor regret. Everything was subdued to the quality of quiet daydreaming, particular memories being rare and few in a stream made up for the most part of images without form and
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 13
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
echoes without sound. The outer world intruded but little into this reverie, so quick was the mind to translate the intruder into terms of the subtler medium; the breath of honeysuckle that entered the room set stirring in Paul’s heart a symphony of springtime to which numerous vanished and unremembered seasons contributed; and this very bird, even while he gazed at it, was lost for a while in the anonymous multitude of sensations that its singing evoked.

But now the green bird, with shrill cries, began beating itself against the wires of its cage, and Paul’s dreams scattered suddenly under this assault of reality. The noise and violence hurt him; every nerve in his frail body was unendurably jarred; his head filled with screaming and mirthless laughter. Into this pandemonium there flashed the thought, beautiful as the promise of salvation, that if he could not silence the creature in any other way, he could at least twist its damned neck; and at once his fingers quivered to be at their murderous work. Dizzy with the effort to stand up straight, dangerously swaying on his feet like a little child, he yet maintained his precarious balance long enough to be able to touch the cage with fumbling hands. But the cage-door so cunningly resisted his attempts to open it that a feeble fury shook him — tears of vexation rose in his throat, shooting pains darted in and out of his eyes, and it was as if a band of hot steel had been clamped about his throbbing temples. Had he had but the power he would have torn the cage from the ceiling and trampled it madly under foot. In imagination he saw himself doing so, and this picture of his former strength distracted him a little from his present anger; for, whatever he was now become, he had been a tidy enough chap in his day, as the village girls, in terror and delight, freely admitted when a mad dog came snapping and snarling down the street to be neatly strangled by fingers that were now too weak to open a birdcage.

Having lost himself again in memories, he woke with surprise to the knowledge that the cage-door was open and the bird gone. But the sound of its singing still vibrated in the sunlit room, and he looked round in time to see a green light circle once round the room, with agitated wings, before finding its way to freedom through the open door. After seeing the bird vanish, the old man stood motionless for a moment, as though bathing his spirit in the pool of this supervening silence, his eyes staring at the sunlit picture of spring which the doorway framed for him.
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 14
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
Then, with a sigh, he struggled back to his chair and sank down, wondering where the green bird would have led him if he had followed it. Perhaps into a singing forest and over the green hills that lay beyond; perhaps, indeed, to Venner’s Wood itself, or along the grass-grown Roman road that ran round the bases of the three hills, down Cuffield way. The better to picture such adventuring, Paul closed his eyes; and the sun streamed down upon him, and the white road was solid under his feet. His sight was keen and clear, his step was elastic, and he smiled with satisfaction to feel the vigour that pulsed in his veins. The light streaming up from the road delighted his eyes without dazzling them; he felt confident, equal to anything; and, as he ran his fingers through the noble white beard that now stretched as far as the lowest button of his waistcoat, he chuckled and cried aloud: “I be a wonderful old man, there’s no denying”! He became aware, then, of a powerful thirst raging within him, and at the same moment, by a happy chance, he reached the summit of the hill and found himself staring at an old tavern sign, which he spelled out to himself letter by letter: The King of Heaven. It was a heartening sight, this tavern, beautiful and ancient in design, mellow in colouring, fragrant with the suggestion of harvest and sunset and that quiet good fellowship which the heart desires after a long and lonely journey; a heartening sight, and to a thirsty man like Paul more than heartening. In a trice he had lifted the latch of the door and stepped in. The interior of the tavern warmed his heart with sudden pleasure; he felt intensely at home; yet he was aware that to all the old familiar things that his eyes now gratefully encountered, in their slow wondering scrutiny of the place, there was added a something at once very beautiful and a little strange that he had not expected to find there. A curious light, as of an eternal morning, filled this tavern; and it was perhaps the quality of this light that made him forget for a moment that he must quench that fine thirst of his. At his entry a comely and kindly young woman rose to greet him with a smile of old friendship. An aureole of light encircled her dark head, and her eyes were bluer than a fair sky in June, so that Paul, meeting their glance, lost himself for a while in those heavenly distances. But at last, scratching his head in bewilderment, he asked respectfully:

“Can I get a drop o’ mild here, ma’am?”
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 15
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
“Surely,” said the girl, with a laugh. She reached down a tankard, saying: “A quart”? It was wonderful the way she understood him. He began going through his pockets in search of coins, but she, observing the movement, remarked quietly: “There’s nothing to pay here, you know. Like a bit of cheese with it?”

With his tankard in one hand and his plate of bread and cheese in the other, Paul made his way to the black, high-backed settle, and sat down. Over the pewter brim, as he emerged from his first draught, so deep and cool and satisfying, he saw the face of Dan Thatcher smiling at him. The two men nodded to each other, and, without need of words, everything was as it had been three score years before.

“Warm today,” mumbled Paul, through a mouthful of cheese.

“Ay,” said Dan. “But a smart little bit of wind on the ’ill ’ere.”

There followed a long and comfortable silence, at the end of which Dan Thatcher rose, saying: “Well, cricket saternoon, spose”? Without waiting for an answer he stamped his way out of the room.

Paul, remembering his age, grinned ruefully, and stroked his beard in protest. For the first time in this blessed place the wings of melancholy brushed him, but at that moment his attention was attracted by the sound of a lifted latch, and, turning in his seat, he saw the inner door of the taproom open, and heard the girl’s voice saying: “Paul’s come to see us at last.” There came into view, round the door’s edge, the head and shoulders of an ancient, white-bearded man, whose radiant face lit up with a new pleasure at sight of Paul. As the stranger came into the room, carrying a newspaper in his hand, Paul knew him at once for what he was, and stood up humbly, with bowed head. After a moment of anguish and exultation he felt his two arms seized in a friendly grip; and, looking upon the face of God the Father, he saw such age as made himself the veriest child, such youth as he had never known, a power that terrified him, and a charity that made him weep.

“Well, old friend,” said God the Father. “Sit down again and let’s take a drink together.”

Paul, obeying, could only stammer out: “Where am I, Lord? Am I in heaven?”
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 4  Autumn, 1926  Page: 16
 
 The Grasshopper. A Short Story By Gerald Bullett
Zoom:
 100% 200% Full Size
Brightness:
Contrast:
Saturation:
 
“Where else”? said God the Father. He smiled at Paul; he smiled at the girl; and Paul became suddenly aware of a picture that hung on the wall at her back, a picture glowing with green fields and sparkling water in which moved all the beloved figures of his past. Springing up to examine it more closely he saw that it was indeed no picture. It was a window that looked out upon the veritable kingdom of happiness. But while he stood, with held breath, and gazed, peace like an everlasting anthem flooding his heart, he heard a discordant screaming, and the walls of his cottage grew up darkly about him. Mrs. Haycock was stroking his temples, saying cheerfully: “That’s better now! Why, you give me quite a turn”! Looking past her, Paul could see the green bird standing pertly in the doorway; and, filled with old alarm, he cried out in a cracked, quavering voice: “Don’t let the lil bird come back, missus. He do sing so loud, I can’t bear un.”