Love
Three Pages from a Hunter’s Diary
I have just read, in a news item, a Drama of Passion. He killed her, then he killed himself—therefore he loved her. What do they matter, He and She? Their love alone has value; and it interests me not so much because I am moved or astonished by it or because it irritates me or makes me think, but because it brings back to me a memory of my youth, a strange reminiscence of my hunting days when Love was made manifest to me, much as in the days of the Early Christians the Cross appeared in the sky.
I was born with all the instincts and feelings of a primitive man, tempered by the reasoning and spiritual growth of the civilised. I love hunting above all things: to see the beast bleeding, blood on its fur, or on my hands, makes my heart contract until it almost stops breathing.
That year, late in the autumn, the cold weather set in suddenly, and I was summoned by one of my cousins, Karl de Rauville, to go and shoot duck with him in the marshes at daybreak.
My cousin, a jolly fellow of about forty, red-faced, strong and heavily bearded, was a country gentleman. He was half like a good-tempered animal, a cheerful soul endowed with a native French wit that raised him above mediocrity. He lived in a sort of manor farm in a wide valley through which flowed a stream. Woods covered the slopes on the right and left side, lordly old woods full of superb trees, where one found the rarest game of all this part of France. They caught eagles there sometimes; and birds of passage (such as are seldom to be found in our overpopulated country) never failed to stop in those ancient branches as if they had seen in them or had recognised in them a little corner of the forests of the old days kept to serve them for a shelter in their short bivouac at night.
In the valley were large pasture lands, drained by ditches and separated by hedges. The river, which in that part was navigable, overflowed further on into a great marsh. This marsh, the best hunting-area that I have ever seen, was the great pride of my cousin, who kept it up like a park. Across the immense colony of rushes which, rustling and swelling like the waves of the sea, made it like a living thing, he had had dug narrow canals on which flat-bottomed boats, urged and directed by poles, passed silent over the stagnant water, fluttering the reeds, scattering the swiftly swimming fishes towards the rushes, and making the wild birds whose black and pointed heads disappeared so briskly, dive into the water.
I love water madly—I love the sea, too great, too restless, impossible of possession though it be; the pleasant rivers which pass, hurrying on, and are gone; above all, the marsh quivering with the secret life of aquatic creatures. Marsh life is a world within a world, a world to itself—a world living its own life with its own home-keeping citizens, its passing travellers, voices, sounds, and, most of all, its own mysteriousness. Nothing is more disturbing, more agitating, more terrifying even than marsh lands. Whence comes this fear that lurks on these low water-covered plains? Is it the vague murmur of the rushes, the strange will-o’-the-wisp, the uncanny silence that wraps them round on calm nights? Or is it the peculiar mists that hang round the reeds like a shroud, or perhaps even more the vague lapping, so soft and gentle, but perhaps more terrifying than cannon of man or the thunder of God, that makes the marsh unreal, like a country in a dream, like some fearful land that hides an arcane fatal secret?
No. There is more in it than that: another mystery, more profound, more solemn, flows in its thick fog. It is, perhaps, the wonder of creation itself. For was it not in water, stagnant and muddy, in the dark mugginess of a world weeping under the heat of the sun, the first germ of life moved, stirred and saw the light of day?
I reached my cousin’s house in the evening. The very stones seemed frozen.
During dinner—in the great dining room whose sideboards, walls, and ceiling were covered with stuffed birds, some with their wings extended, some perched on branches supported by nails, among them sparrow-hawks, herons, owls, goatsuckers, buzzards, vultures, falcons and birds of prey of all sorts—my cousin, looking himself like a strange animal from some colder region, in his sealskin coat, was telling me the plans he had made for that very night. We were to start at half past three in the morning so that we should reach the point chosen for the morning’s shoot at about half past four. There was at this spot a hut that had been built of pieces of glass to afford us a little shelter against the terrible wind which comes at daybreak—that icy wind which tears the flesh like a saw; which cuts into one like the blade of a knife; pricking like a poisoned arrow, biting like forceps, burning like fire.
My cousin rubbed his hands together.
“I have never seen such a frost,” he said. “We were twelve degrees below zero at six o’clock this evening.”
I threw myself on my bed immediately the meal was over and fell asleep with the light from the great fire blazing in my chimney. As the clock struck three they woke me. I, too, put on a sheepskin and found my cousin Karl wrapt up in a bearskin. We both gulped down two cups of burning coffee and a couple of glasses of good champagne, and then set out accompanied by a keeper and our dogs Plongeon and Pierrot.
Directly I took the first step outside, I felt frozen to the marrow. It was one of those nights when the world seems to have died of the cold. The frozen air seems to become solid and tangible, so savagely cold it is. Not a puff of wind stirs: it is congealed, motionless. It bites, cuts, numbs, kills trees, plants, insects, even the little birds: they fall from the branches on to the hard soil, and become as if in the bitter clutch of the frost. The moon was in the last quarter: she lay on her back, pale and swooning in midair, so feeble that she could climb no further; as if she stayed there, arrested, paralysed by the harsh spaces of the sky.
She shed a barren, mournful light on the earth—that pale funeral light with which she celebrates each month the end of her resurrection.
We went side by side, Karl and I, our backs bent, hands in our pockets, and guns under our arms. Our boots, covered with felt to prevent our slipping on the frozen river, gave back no sound. I watched the breath of our dogs that was like a white smoke.
Soon we were at the edge of the marsh, and we followed one of the little paths which cut across this miniature forest.
Our shoulders, grazing long tattered leaves, left behind us a light rustling and I felt as I have never felt before that passionate and extraordinary emotion which marshy land begets in me. It was dead, that marsh, frozen to death while we were walking over it, among its crowd of withered reeds.
All at once, at a turn in the path, I discovered the small glass cabin that had been built to shelter us. I went in and as we had still nearly an hour to wait until these wild birds should be awake I rolled myself in my cloak to try to get warm.
Then, lying on my back, I began looking at the diminished moon; it had four horns seen through the dimly transparent walls of this polar house.
But the bitter cold of the frozen marsh, the cold of these walls, the cold dropping from the firmament affected me soon, so badly that I began to cough.
My cousin Karl became anxious.
“It will be a sell if we don’t shoot anything today,” he said. “I don’t want you to catch cold. We’d better make a fire.”
And he told the keeper to cut some rushes.
We made a heap in the middle of the hut that had a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. When the red flame leaped between the translucent crystal wells they began to run with water, gently, unperceptibly, as if these glassy stones were sweating. Karl, who had stayed outside, cried out to me: “Come here. Just come and see this.”
I went out and was overcome with astonishment. Our cabin, shaped like a cone, looked like an enormous diamond with a fiery heart that had risen suddenly out of the frozen water of the marsh. Inside we could see two fantastic figures—those of our dogs, who were trying to get warm.
Suddenly a cry rang out above our heads, a strange, mournful, savage cry. The gleam of our fire had wakened the wild birds.
Nothing moves me so much as this first signal of life when nothing is visible. It stabs the darkness, so swiftly, and so far off, before even the first ray of daylight has appeared on the horizon. It seems to me in this glacial hour of dawn that this flying sound, carried on the wings of a bird, is a sigh from the very heart of the world.
Karl spoke. “Put out the fire. This must be daybreak.”
Indeed at that moment the sky began to lighten and flights of wild duck fled over the heavens, like lines drawn in swift sweeping strokes and quickly effaced. There was a flash in the darkness: Karl had just fired; the two dogs rushed out. Then the two of us fired in rapid succession, as soon as there appeared above the rushes the shadow of a flying tribe. Pierrot and Plongeon, panting and happy, brought the birds to us, bleeding. Sometimes their eyes still seemed to be observing us.
Daylight came at last, a day clear and blue. The sun came out at the bottom of the valley and we were just thinking of going back when two birds, with necks outstretched and wings extended, shot quickly over our heads. I fired. One of them fell right at our feet. It was a silver-breasted teal. Then from the sky above me, a voice, a bird’s voice cried. It was a lament, short and repeated, heartbreaking. The bird, the little bird who had escaped, began to wheel round against the blue of the sky above us, staring at his dead comrade whom I held in my hands.
Karl, on his knees, bright-eyed, his gun lifted, peered at her, waiting until she was near enough.
“You have killed the female,” he said. “The male won’t go away.”
My goodness! He certainly would not.
He wheeled round and round, all the time crying above us. Never has bitterness of grief so torn my heart as this desolate call, the mournful reproach of this poor bird lost in space.
Sometimes he fled from the menace of the guns that followed his flight. Sometimes he seemed ready to continue his journey across the sky by himself. But he could not make up his mind to it, and would come back again a moment later to look for his mate.
“Leave her on the ground,” said Karl. “He’ll come at once then.”
He did come, indeed, quite careless of any danger, drawn by his bird’s love for the other whom I had killed.
Karl took aim; it was as if someone had cut a string which held the bird suspended. I saw something, a black, tumbling creature; I heard among the rushes the noise of a fall. Then Pierrot brought him to me.
I put them, already cold, into the same grave—and I departed that same day for Paris.