Bevis Part 103

He saw his frame arched forward, his back bent, his shoulders drawn together, the collar of his coat up to his poll behind, the entire position cramped and awkward. Now he understood how unsightly it looked, and how difficult it is to shoot well in that way. Many good sportsmen by dint of twenty years' cramping educate their awkwardness to a successful pitch. It needs many years to do it: but you can stand upright at once.

He altered his posture in a moment, looked, and saw himself standing easily, upright but easily, and found that his heart beat without vibrating the barrel as it will if the chest be contracted, and that breathing did not throw the gun out of level. Instead of compressing himself to the gun, the gun fitted to him. The gun had been his master and controlled him, now he was the master of the gun.

Next he had to practise the bringing of the gun to the shoulder--the act of lifting it--and to choose the position from which he would usually lift it. He had his free choice, but was informed that when once he had selected it he must adhere to it. Some generally carry the gun on the hollow of the left arm with the muzzle nearly horizontal to the left.

Some under the right arm with the left hand already on the stock. Some with the muzzle upwards aslant with both hands also. Now and then one waits with the b.u.t.t on his hip: one swings his gun anyhow in one hand like an umbrella: a third tosses it over his shoulder with the hammers down and the trigger-guard up, and jerks the muzzle over when the game rises. Except in snap-shooting, when the gun must of necessity be held already half-way to the shoulder, it matters very little which the sportsman does, nor from what position he raises his gun.

But the governor insisted that it did matter everything that the position should be habitual. That in order to shoot with success, the gun must not be thrown up now one way and now another, but must almost invariably, certainly as a rule, be lifted from one recognised position.

Else so many trifling circ.u.mstances interfere with the precision without which nothing can be done, a crease of the coat, a b.u.t.ton, the sleeve, or you might, forgetting yourself, knock the barrel against a bough.

To avoid these you must take your mind from the game to guide your gun to the shoulder. If you took your mind from the game the continuity of the glance was broken, and the aim snapped in two, not to be united.

Therefore, he insisted on Bevis choosing a position in which he would habitually carry his gun when in the presence of game.

Bevis at once selected that with the gun in the hollow of his left arm, the muzzle somewhat upwards; this was simply imitation, because the governor held it in that way. It is, however, a good position, easy for walking or waiting for ground game or for game that flies, for hare or snipe, for everything except thick cover or brushwood, or moving in a double mound, when you must perforce hold the gun almost perpendicular before you to escape the branches. This being settled, and the governor having promised him faithfully that if he saw him carry it any other way he would lock the gun up for a week each time, they proceeded to practise the bringing of the gun up to the shoulder, that is, to the present.

The left hand should always grasp the stock at the spot where the gun balances, where it can be poised on the palm like the beam of weights and scales. Instead of now taking it just in front of the trigger-guard, now on the trigger-guard, now six or seven inches in front, carelessly seizing it in different places as it happens, the left hand should always come to the same spot. It will do so undeviatingly with a very little practice and without thought or effort, as your right hand meets your friend's to shake hands.

If it comes always to the same spot the left hand does not require shifting after the b.u.t.t touches the shoulder. The necessary movements are reduced to a minimum. Grasping it then at the balance lift it gently to the shoulder, neither hastily nor slowly, but with quiet ease.

Bevis was particularly taught not to throw the b.u.t.t against his shoulder with a jerk, he was to bring it up with the deliberate motion of "hefting."

"Hefting" is weighing in the hands--you are asked to "heft" a thing--to take it and feel by raising it what you think it weighs.

With this considerate ease Bevis was to "heft" his gun to the shoulder, and only to press it there sufficiently to feel that the b.u.t.t touched him. He was not to hold it loosely, nor to pull it against his shoulder as if he were going to mortice it there. He was just to feel it. If you press the gun with a hard iron stiffness against the shoulder you cannot move it to follow the flying bird: you pull against and resist yourself. On the other hand, if loosely held the gun is apt to shift.

The b.u.t.t must touch his shoulder at the same place every time. Those who have not had this pointed out to them frequently have the thick or upper part of the b.u.t.t high above the shoulder, and really put nothing but the narrow and angular lower part against the body. At another time, throwing it too low, they have to bend and stoop over the gun to get an aim. Or it is pitched up to the chest, and not to the shoulder at all--to the edge of the chest, or again to the outside of the shoulder on the arm. They never bring it twice to the same place and must consequently change the inclination of the head at every shot. A fresh effort has, therefore, to be gone through each time to get the body and the gun to fit.

Bevis was compelled to bring the b.u.t.t of his gun up every time to the same spot well on his shoulder, between his chest and his arm, with the hollow of the b.u.t.t fitting, like a ball in its socket. One of the great objects of this mechanical training was that he should not have to pay the least attention to the breech of the gun in aiming. All that he had to do with was the sight. His gun, when he had thus practised, came up exactly level at once.

It required no shifting, no moving of the left hand further up or lower down the stock, no pushing of the b.u.t.t higher up the shoulder, or to this side or that. His gun touched his shoulder at a perfect level, as straight as if he had thrust out his hand and pointed with the index finger at the bird. Not the least conscious effort was needed, there was nothing to correct, above all there was not a second's interruption of the continuity of glance--the look at the game. The breech was level with the sight instantly; all he had further to do with was the sight.

With both eyes open he never lost view of the bird for the tenth of a second. The governor taught him to keep his eyes, both open, on the bird as it flew, and his gun came up to his line of sight. The black dot at the end of the barrel--as the sight appears in the act of shooting--had then only to cover the bird, and the finger pressed the trigger. Up to the moment that the black dot was adjusted to the mark all was automatic.

The governor's plan was first to reduce the movements to a minimum; secondly, to obtain absolute uniformity of movement; thirdly, to secure by this absolute uniformity a perfect unconsciousness of effort of movement at all; in short, automatic movement; and all this in order that the continuity of glance, the look at the game, might not be interrupted for the merest fraction of a second. That glance was really the aim, the gun fitted itself to the gaze just as you thrust out your index finger and point, the body really did the work of aiming itself.

All the mind had to do was to effect the final adjustment of the black dot of the sight. Very often when the gun was thus brought up no such adjustment was necessary, it was already there, so that there was nothing to do but press the trigger. It then looked as if the gun touched the shoulder and was discharged instantaneously.

He was to look at the bird, to keep both eyes on it, to let his gun come to his eyes, still both open, adjust the dot and fire. There was no binocular trouble because he was never to stay to run his eyes up the barrels--that would necessitate removing his glance from the game, a thing strictly forbidden. Only the dot. He saw only the dot, and the dot gave no binocular trouble. The barrels were entirely ignored; the body had already adjusted them. Only the dot. The sight--this dot--is the secret of shooting.

The governor said if you shut the left eye you cannot retain your glance on the bird, the barrels invariably obscure it for a moment, and the mind has to catch itself again. He would not let Bevis take his eyes off it--he would rather he missed. Bevis was also to be careful not to let his right hand hang with all the weight of his arm on the stock, a thing which doubles the labour of the left arm as it has to uphold the weight of the gun and of the right arm too, and thus the muzzle is apt to be depressed.

He was not to blink, but to look through the explosion. Hundreds of sportsmen blink as they pull the trigger. He was to let his gun smoothly follow the bird, even in the act of the explosion, exactly as the astronomer's clockwork equatorial follows a star. There was to be continuity of glance; and thus at last he brought down his snipes right and left, as it seemed, with a sweep of the gun.

The astronomers discovered "personal equation." Three men are set to observe the occultation of a satellite by Jupiter, and to record the precise time by pressing a lever. One presses the lever the hundredth of a second too soon, the second the hundredth of a second too late, the third sometimes one and sometimes the other and sometimes is precisely accurate. The mean of these three gives the exact time. In shooting one man pulls the trigger a fraction too soon, another a fraction too late, a third is uncertain. If you have been doing your best to shoot well, and after some years still fail, endeavour to discover your "personal equation," and by correcting that you may succeed much better.

It is a common error and unsuspected, so is blinking--you may shoot for years and never know that you blink.

Bevis's personal equation was a second too quick. In this, as in everything, he dashed at it. His snipes were cut down as if you had whipped them over: his hares were mangled; his partridges smashed. The dot was dead on them, and a volley of lead was poured in. The governor had a difficulty to get him to give "law" enough.

He acquired the mechanical precision so perfectly that he became careless and shot gracelessly. The governor lectured him and hung his gun up for a week as a check. By degrees he got into the easy quiet style of finished shooting.

The two learned the better and the quicker because there were two. The governor went through the same drill with Mark, motion for motion, word for word. Then when they were out in the field the one told the other, they compared their experiences, checked each other's faults, and commended success. They learned the better and the quicker because they had no keeper to find everything for them, and warn them when to expect a hare, and when a bird. They had to find it for themselves like Pan.

Finally, they learned the better because at first they shot at anything that took their fancy, a blackbird or a wood-pigeon, and were not restricted to one cla.s.s of bird with the same kind of motion every time it was flushed.

Long before trusted with guns they had gathered from the conversation they constantly heard around them to aim over a bird that flies straight away because it usually rises gradually for some distance, and between the ears of the running hare. If the hare came towards them they shot at the gra.s.s before his paws. A bird flying aslant away needs the sight to be put in front of it, the allowance increasing as the angle approaches a right angle; till when a bird crosses, straight across, you must allow a good piece, especially if he comes with the wind.

Two cautions the governor only gave them, one to be extremely careful in getting through hedges that the muzzles of their guns pointed away, for branches are most treacherous, and secondly never to put the forefinger inside the trigger-guard till in the act of lifting the gun to the shoulder.

For awhile their territory was limited as the governor, who shot with Mark's, did not want the sport spoiled by these beginners. But as September drew to a close, they could wander almost where they liked, and in October anywhere, on promise of not shooting pheasants should they come across any.

Volume Three, Chapter XVII.

AMERICAN SNAP-SHOOTING.

Meantime they taught Big Jack to swim. He came down to look at the cave on New Formosa, and Frances so taunted and tormented him because the boys could swim and he could not, that at last the giant, as it were, heaved himself up for the effort, and rode down every morning. Bevis and Mark gave him lessons, and in a fortnight he could swim four or five strokes to the railings. Directly he had the stroke he got on rapidly, for those vast lungs of his, formed by the air of the hills, floated him as buoyantly as a balloon. So soon as ever he could swim, Frances turned round and tormented him because the boys had taught him and not he the boys.

Bevis and Mark could not break off the habit of bathing every morning, and they continued to do so far into October, often walking with bare feet on the h.o.a.r-frost on the gra.s.s, and breaking the thin ice at the edge of the water by tapping it with their toes. The bath was now only a plunge and out again, but it gave them a pleasant glow all day, and hardened them as the smith hardens iron.

Up at Jack's they tried again with his little rifle, and applying what they had learnt from the matchlock while shooting with ball, soon found out the rifle's peculiarities. It only wanted to be understood and coaxed like everything else. Then they could hit anything with it up to sixty yards. Beyond that the bullet, being beaten out of shape when driven home by the ramrod, could not be depended upon. In October they could shoot where they pleased on condition of sparing the pheasants for their governors. There were no preserved covers, but a few pheasants wandered away and came there. October was a beautiful month.

One morning Tom, the ploughboy, and some time bird-keeper, came to the door and asked to see them. "There be a p.u.s.s.y in the mound," he said, with the sly leer peculiar to those who bring information about game.

He "knowed" there was a hare in the mound, and yet he could not have given any positive reason for it. He had not actually seen the hare enter the mound, nor found the run, nor the form, neither had he Pan's intelligent nostrils, but he "knowed" it all the same.

Rude as he looked he had an instinctive perception--supersensuous perception--that there was a hare on that mound, which twenty people might have pa.s.sed without the least suspicion. "Go into the kitchen,"

said Bevis, and Tom went with a broad smile of content on his features, for he well knew that to be sent into the kitchen was equivalent to a cheque drawn on the cellar and the pantry.

Bevis and Mark took their guns, Pan followed very happily, and they walked beside the hedges down towards the place, which was at some distance. The keenness of the morning air, from which the sun had not yet fully distilled the frost of the night, freshened their eagerness for sport. A cart laden with swedes crossed in front of them, and though the sun shone the load of roots indicated that winter was approaching. They pa.s.sed an oak growing out in the field.

Under the tree there stood an aged man with one hand against the h.o.a.ry trunk, and looking up into the tree as well as his bowed back, which had stiffened in its stoop, and his rounded shoulders would let him. His dress was old and sober tinted, his smock frock greyish, his old hat had lost all colour. He was h.o.a.ry like the lichen-hung oak trunk. From his face the blood had dried away, leaving it a dull brown, the tan of seventy harvest fields burned into the skin, a sapless brown wrinkled face like a withered oak leaf.

Though he looked at them, and Bevis nodded, his eyes gave no sign of recognition; like a dead animal's, there was no light in them, the glaze was settling. In the evening it might occur to him that he had seen them in the morning. His years pressed heavy on him, very heavy like a huge bundle of sticks; he was lost under his age. All those years "Jumps" had never once been out of sight of the high Down yonder (not far from Jack's), the landmark of the place. Within sight of that hill he was born, within such radius he had laboured, and therein he was decaying, slowly, very slowly, like an oak branch. James was his real name, corrupted to "Jumps;" as "Jumps" he had been known for two generations, and he would have answered to no other.

One day it happened that "Jumps" searching for dead sticks came along under the sycamore-trees and saw Jack, and Bevis and Mark swimming. He watched them some time with his dull glazing eyes, and a day or two afterwards opened his mouth about it. "Never seed n.o.body do thuck afore," he said, repeating it a score of times as his cla.s.s do, impressing an idea on others by reiteration, as it takes so much iteration to impress it on them. "Never saw any one do that before."

For seventy harvests he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim.

Bevis's governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about those waters, not one had learned to swim. Very likely no one had learned since the Norman conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonalty forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them.

Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer, and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller and not a home-staying man.

Tom, the ploughboy and bird-keeper, with his companions, the other plough-lads and young men, sometimes bathed in summer in the brook far down the meadows, splashing like blackbirds in the shallow water, running to and fro on the sward under the grey-leaved willows with the sunshine on their limbs. I delight to see them, they look Greek; I wish some one would paint them, with the br.i.m.m.i.n.g brook, the willows pondering over it, the pointed flags, the sward, and b.u.t.tercups, the distant flesh-tints in the sunlight under the grey leaves. But this was not swimming. "Never saw any one do that before," said the man of seventy harvests.

Under the oak he stood as Bevis and Mark pa.s.sed that October morning.

His hand was like wood upon wood, and as he leaned against the oak, his knees were bent one way and his back the other, and thus stiff and crooked and standing with an effort supported by the tree, it seemed as if he had been going as a beast of the field upon all fours and had hoisted himself upright with difficulty. Something in the position, in the h.o.a.ry tree, and the greyish hue of his dress gave the impression of an arboreal animal.

But against the tree there leaned also a long slender pole, "teeled up"

as "Jumps" would have said, and at the end of the pole was a hook. The old man had permission to collect the dead wood, and the use of his crook was to tear down the decaying branches for which he was now looking. A crook is a very simple instrument--the mere branch of a tree will often serve as a crook--but no arboreal animal has ever used a crook. Ah! "Jumps," poor decaying "Jumps," with lengthened narrow experience like a long footpath, with glazing eyes, crooked knee, and stiffened back, there was a something in thee for all that, the unseen difference that is all in all, the wondrous mind, the soul.

Up in the sunshine a lark sung fluttering his wings; he arose from the earth, his heart was in the sky. Shall not the soul arise?

Past the oak Bevis and Mark walked beside the hedge upon their way.

Frost, and sunshine after had reddened the hawthorn sprays, and already they could see through the upper branches--red with haws--for the gra.s.s was strewn with the leaves from the exposed tops of the bushes. On the orange maples there were bunches of rosy-winged keys. There was a gloss on the holly leaf, and catkins at the tips of the leafless birch. As the leaves fell from the horse-chestnut boughs the varnished sheaths of the buds for next year appeared; so there were green buds on the willows, black tips to the ash saplings, green buds on the sycamores.

They waited asleep in their sheaths till Orion strode the southern sky and Arcturus rose in the East.