Colonel Julian and Other Stories by H.E. Bates
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 2.1 MB
Overview: ‘We are surrounded by the most ghastly people,’ the Captain said. All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house.
Up through the south avenue of elms, where dead trees lifted scraggy bone against spring sky, bluebells grew like thick corn, spreading into the edges of surrounding grass. The wind came softly, in a series of light circles from the west. Here and there an elm had died and on either side of it young green leaves from living trees were laced about smoke-brown brittle branches. In a quadrangle of wall and grass the great house lay below.
‘You never really see the beauty of the house until you get up here,’ the Captain said. Though still young, not more than forty-five or so, he was becoming much too fat. His ears were like thickly-veined purple cabbage leaves unfurling on either side of flabby swollen cheeks. His mouth, pink and flaccid, trembled sometimes like the underlip of a cow.
‘They have killed the elms,’ he said. ‘Finished them. They used to be absolutely magnificent.’
He stopped for a moment and I saw that he wanted to draw breath, and we looked back down the hill. Down beyond soldierly lines of trees, the tender lucent green broken here and there by the black of dead branches, I could see a flag waving in such intermittent and strengthless puffs of air that it, too, seemed dead. It was quartered in green and scarlet and flew from a small round tower that was like a grey pepperbox stuck in the western arm of the cross-shaped house.
Now I could see, too, that there were four avenues of elms, repeating in immense pattern the cross of the house below. As we stood there, the Captain making gargling noises in his throat, a cuckoo began calling on notes that were so full and hollow that it was like a bell tolling from the elms above us. Presently it seemed to be thrown on a gust of air from the tip of a tree, to float down-wind like a bird of grey paper.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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