Greybeard. Chapter 3. The River: Swifford Fair
III. The River: Swifford Fair
Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long.
The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.
In the sharp winter’s air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt’s pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.
In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them.
Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.
Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt’s boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.
His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.
Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher’s guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher’s ways.
Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.
Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.
“My God, the gnomes!” he exclaimed. “There’s one of them for sure!”
On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.
By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.
He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearance, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and top-knot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.