Greybeard

“You’re a regular old poacher, Jeff,” Charley said. “Unlike the rest of us, you’ve never had to change your job.”

“What do you mean? Me never had to change my job? You’re daft, Charley Samuels! I spent most of my life in a stinking machine tool factory before the revolution and all that. Not that I wasn’t always keen on nature — but I never reckoned I’d get it at such close quarters, as you might say.”

“You’re a real old man of the woods now, anyhow.”

“Think I don’t know you’re laughing at me? I’m no fool, Charley, whatever you may think to yourself. But

I reckon it’s terrible the way us town people have been turned into sort of half-baked country bumpkins, don’t you? What’s there left to life? All of us in rags and tatters, full of worms and the toothache! Where’s it all going to end, eh, I’d like to know? Where’s it all going to end?” He turned to scrutinize the woods again.

“We’re doing okay,” Greybeard said. It was his invariable answer to the invariable question. Charley also had his invariable answer.

“It’s the Lord’s plan, Jeff, and you don’t do any good by worrying over it. We cannot say what he has in mind for us.”

“After all he’s done to us this last fifty years,” Jeff said, “I’m surprised you’re still on speaking terms with him.”

“It will end according to His will,” Charley said. Pitt gathered up all the wrinkles of his face, spat, and passed on with his dead otter.

Where could it all end, Greybeard asked himself, except in humiliation and despair? He did not ask the question aloud. Though he liked Charley’s optimism, he had no more patience than old Pitt with the too easy answers of the belief that nourished that optimism.

They walked on. Charley began to discuss the various accounts of people who claimed to have seen gnomes and little men, in the woods, or on roof tops, or licking the teats of the cows. Greybeard answered automatically; old Pitt’s fruitless question remained with him. Where was it all going to end? The question, like a bit of gristle in the mouth, was difficult to get rid of; yet increasingly he found himself chewing on it.

When they had walked right round the perimeter, they came again to the Thames at the western boundary, where it entered their land. They stopped and stared at the water.

Tugging, fretting, it moved about a countless number of obstacles on its course — oh yes, that it took as it has ever done! — to the sea. Even the assuaging power of water could not silence Greybeard’s mind.

“How old are you, Charley?” he asked. “I’ve given up counting the years. Don’t look so glum! What’s suddenly worrying you? You’re a cheerful man, Greybeard; don’t start fretting about the future. Look at that water — it’ll get where it wants to go, but it isn’t worrying.”

“I don’t find any comfort in your analogy.”

“Don’t you, now? Well then, you should do.” Greybeard thought how tiresome and colourless Charley was, but he answered patiently. “You are a sensible man, Charley. Surely we must think ahead? This is getting to be a pensioners’ planet.

You can see the danger signs as well as I can. There are no young men and women any more. The number of us capable of maintaining even the present low standard of living is declining year by year. We-“

“We can’t do anything about it. Get that firmly into your mind and you’ll feel better about the whole situation. The idea that man can do anything useful about his fate is an old idea — what do I mean? Yes, a fossil. It’s something from another period… We can’t do anything. We just get carried along, like the water in this river.”

“You read a lot of things into the river,” Greybeard said, half-laughing. He kicked a stone into the water. A scuttling and a plop followed, as some small creature — possibly a water rat, for they were on the increase again — dived for safety.

They stood silent, Charley’s shoulders a little bent. When he spoke again, it was to quote poetry.

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burden to the ground, Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath -“

Between the heavy prosaic man reciting Tennyson and the woods leaning across the river lay an incongruity. Laboriously, Greybeard said, “For a cheerful man, you know some depressing poetry.”

“That was what my father brought me up on. I’ve told you about that mouldy little shop of his…” One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backwards in time.

“I’ll leave you to get on with your patrol,” Charley said, but Greybeard clutched his arm. He had caught a noise upstream distinct from the sound of the water.

He moved forward to the water’s edge and looked. Something was coming downstream, though overhanging foliage obscured details. Breaking into a trot, Greybeard made for the stone bridge, with Charley following at a fast walk behind him.