Before Sunrise [2]

The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted with screams human and inhuman through the hill-gullies. He slept on his camp-bed in a frightening dream; under the blanket-layers of sleep, Herculean he tried to move a finger. With a sense of strain he woke. Lay staring in content at the canvas roof through which flooded diffuse light.

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He sat up and the stretcher creaked: his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor. This was wild earth, he thought, we have tamed it within walls. He pulled off his pyjamas; on with bathing- trunks. He was sixteen.

Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside, but the birds chattered and flew in the fir-plantation; On the thread of a bird’s voice is the pendulous earth hung. The mountain-shadow lay still half-way from their bases to the camping-ground. The sky was one-coloured except that it was darker to the west and bright above the neat mountains. There are mountains upon mountains, they are gashed by sword-strokes of the rising sun, they are awake at early dawn before I walk stiffly with bare feet to bathe before sunrise; and grasses are wet to the skin, stones and thorns knock at the gates of flesh, but I am the animal unsad and blood-aware.

As he climbed over the fence on the path to the lake he felt cold, wished he had gone to sleep again. His eyes were stiff still, one eye saw blurred. He crossed a water-course with willows and cutty-grass and felt through the trees the first chill of the lake-wind. He crossed his arms on his chest and hunched his shoulders to offer less area to the wind.

Remembering sleep he thought. Tent-bedded I lie safe in body and cloak of memory but behind my musing eyes, beyond walls of bone, is reality not of me, where the sea in dark hills cupped whose waves are death or longing

. . . slap rotted wood in multitudinous strife and quiet. He came out on the shingle-banks of the lake-shore, picking his way between thorn-bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky had grown very bright; shaking bladed tracks of sunlight were reflected on the water. The lake was about three miles wide: he stood at the lower end of it and looked as far as he could see over its length, twelve miles perhaps in all but hidden by the feet and heavy shoulders of the mountains.

It is air and water in the vast lands of silten rivers, thought he: swollen and swift from the lake, home of the abyss-monsters yet calm in surface save to the blades of glinting wind.

He walked into the small waves at the edge of the lake, down over shelves of sand and shingle; then came out again and walked along the shore to a skeleton jetty where shingle had been scooped out to a depth of about twenty feet and the water showed faintly blue and very deep. He climbed the bank at the top of the beach and ran out on the jetty. The grey boards splintered and worn with gravel were solid under his feet. It seemed much more than ten feet down to the water. He hesitated; sat on the low bevelled parapet and hung his legs over; felt for leverage; then stood up, held his nose, and jumped.

The shock as always enveloped him, cutting off all thought, as if shock were an element like water. He doubled up with eyes shut and rose slowly till his back broke surface some way out from the jetty. He swam back and held on to the slippery beams of its scaffolding, slippery with fine weed, washedpage 6 by waves. When his blood had cooled to the temperature of the water he clambered onto the beam and dived again quickly. Even less than before his brain, bound to the single purpose of holding his breath, could form consecutive thought: I swim down under water where the lake floor lies out of perspective; pressure blankets me fish-like; are there coins below? Under the wooden girders I swim, below sea-storm, my mer-hair swims suspended and rippling; I reach in the unknown element, see secrets unnameable, then rise by the rotted quay – beware snags – to the flash of sunrising.

Slowly he swam back to the shore: throwing his face under water rippling to see the hollow bottom (shallow at all points save that of direct vision) slope out to the deeper lake. As he swam he remembered the rabbit.

By the dry shingle-plain; he walked over dead rivers whose bones, with dried weed often, crunched under his sandals. His father shot the rabbit, behind the cemetery.

It shrieks, it is agony, the sound cuts my eyes. I run and it crawls to its burrow . . . child, you have slept in quiet earth and played in grasses, who are we to kill you? I run, balancing over the pipe-line across the gully, the pipe that feeds the sluices, rusty and the tar blisters from it. I run and hold the rabbit. It head droops and wobbles at the rabbit-punch; like corn rain- flattened its white belly-fur and brown side draggled where blood drips. Blood drips from its mouth but the eyes are brown and deeply sad. I hit with a stone on the neck, for it might still be alive. I walk back over the grass-floor through the plantation and the rabbit hangs heavy. Then the skinned rabbit skinned under the willows, bruised blue, speckled on the bare flesh with the rock. Guts thrown on the ground. Rain comes in the night hill-hidden while spiders drop from the tent-roof.

Purification, he thought, and swam out again. Further he swam, diving continually and bringing up weeds to examine. The weeds grew tougher as depth increased, and at last over twenty feet deep he came to a belt of mussel- shells. He carried them in with him, weeds and mussel-shells, all kinds. Cramp seized him as his feet touched bottom; disregarding it, swam in fast in panic, feeling that something malevolent had touched him. He dropped what he had brought in, thinking; I have brought them to the warmth of sun and man from their loneliness. He walked out stumbling and dizzy.

The willow-trees stood, roots in shingle: the light-green willow-trees in shingle planted and laved by the lake, of gnarled and broken bark but O leaves delicate and light-green. Yet are then the maledictory fists of bitterness clenched toward heaven that darkens, as time flows out from the land, as the sun dies.

. . . He walked limpingly up the shore dripping. The cramp eased as he stepped on the grass again. He had cut his ankle on a stone at the edge of the lake; he arched his instep to avoid walking on it. If I had been drowned, he thought, they would not have known: pity of his parents, not self-pity. As hepage 7 crossed the road under high leaves rustling and still pale with sleep, he saw the sun like molten steel, its rim over the mountains.

Growing hungry, he hurried over the grass running quickly on the side of his cut foot, grass sticking to the unhealed gash. Why worry over a rabbit? He thought. Thousands are killed every day in the world. I’ll see if I can shoot one tonight. It only hinders to feel with what you hurt.

A lorry had come into the camping-ground and was unloading packing- cases. The tents had lost their solid white sameness, had become shells and houses: a woman washed her hair under a tent-flap . . . a man crossed over the long grass carrying torn branches of broom . . . smoke rose in hieroglyphs above a frying-pan on a fireplace made of blackened rocks.

He rounded the tent and undid the flap. His father was dressing and his mother sat up in bed. ‘Been for a bathe?’ said his father.

‘Yes, in the lake.’

‘What was it like? – his mother. ‘A bit cold.’

The smell of frying bacon came in the door. The sun had risen. Dew evaporated on the furry leaves of the blue flannel-flowers. Gulls flew overhead; their feathers glistening, their cries calm music.

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