The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke

Author:Jocelyn Brooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2017-10-04T14:15:48+00:00

chapter twelve

The Patch of Alexanders

During the following weeks, Reynard experienced all the symptoms of one who has suffered some severe emotional shock: he felt unduly tired by any small exertion, and was exhausted by the end of each day; yet he could not sleep at night; he found himself becoming increasingly irritable with his colleagues at the bank, and even with his mother; any small misfortune provoked him to a disproportionate emotional reaction, and to mislay a pencil, or break a match while striking it, was sufficient to bring tears to his eyes. Tiny actions became fraught with a vast, world-shaking significance; to come to any decision, however trivial, was almost an impossibility: even to choose, at lunch-time, between a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, seemed equivalent to a choice between salvation and damnation.

Gradually, however, as the weeks passed, he began to regain his equilibrium. From a doctor whom he visited on the pretext of being ‘run-down’, he obtained a prescription for Easton’s Syrup; he maintained, also, his habit of going for long walks at week-ends; and by Christmas-time he began to feel, at least physically, some improvement.

Christmas passed with, for the Langrish household, the mildest of celebrations; January came, with the first snowdrops in the garden and, in the hedgerows, the first feathering of young green. On his walks, Reynard tended more and more, perhaps from mere lack of enterprise, to take the lane which led past the plantation and over the railway; he did not again, however, penetrate so far as on that first occasion, when he had seen the soldiers at the farm: preferring to turn off to the right, beyond the railway, returning home by a different route.

The plantation at the top of the lane had been fenced in with barbed wire – a fact of which he had been made painfully aware on the night of December the first. The fence – for which there seemed no obvious explanation – was a formidable affair, and difficult to negotiate if one was anxious to trespass on what was now, apparently, private land. Reynard found the wire curiously irritating: not that he was particularly fond of the plantation, but it had become a habit with him to take a short cut through it, and he resented being deprived of the small privilege. It was one of the many trivial set-backs which, in his nervous state, were capable of making him disproportionately angry or unhappy.

One Sunday afternoon early in February, he set out for his walk earlier than usual. The weather was dull and windless; under the hedges, and along the field-borders, streaks of snow lingered from a blizzard of the previous week; and from the trees, still half-frozen, large drops fell heavily, with a sullen reluctance, upon the icebound path and the sodden hedgerows.

As he reached the top of the lane, Reynard stopped to look back at the village, which lay directly below him, strung out along the valley: an irregular, extended cluster of red-tiled roofs.

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