The Cone Gatherers Read Online Free

and held it open, empty, for a few seconds.
    He went along the ride, climbed the fence, and followed the path that led by the side of a stream to the hut. Weeping ashes there gleamed paler than the rushing water. Beside the great cedar of Lebanon, the vastest tree in the wood, he paused for a minute or two, listening to what ought to have been the silence of the night accentuated rather than blemished by such noises as water’s gurgle, trees’ rustle, and a far-off seagull’s screaming. But at that high point on the path, beside this gigantic tree whose branches reached as high as the stars, and beyond into the darker haunted night of the Bible remembered from childhood, the light from the cone-gatherers’ hut could be seen. Therefore what Duror heard was a roaring within him, as if that tree of hatred and revulsion was being tossed by a gale. He was shaken physically by that onslaught and had to rest against the cedar, with his gaze upon that small gleam in the clearing below on the other side of the burn. He knew it would be more sensible and more worthy of himself to turn and go home:here there could be only further degradation and shame, with possible disaster; but in him was a force more powerful than common sense or pride. He could not name it, but it dragged him irresistibly down towards that hut.
    Amidst the bottommost branches of a cypress, curving out like hard green tusks, he stood and once again abandoned himself to that meaningless vigil.
    The hut was lit by oil-lamp. He smelled paraffin as well as woodsmoke. He knew they picked up old cones to kindle the fire, and on Sunday they had worked for hours sawing up blown timber for firewood: they had been given permission to do so. The only window was not in the wall facing him, so that he could not see inside; but he had been in their hut so often, they were in his imagination so vividly, and he was so close every sound they made could be interpreted; therefore it was easy for him to picture them as they went about making their meal. They peeled their potatoes the night before, and left them in a pot of cold water. They did not wash before they started to cook or eat. They did not change their clothes. They had no table; an upturned box did instead, with a newspaper for a cloth; and each sat on his own bed. They seldom spoke. All evening they would be dumb, the taller brooding over a days-old paper, the dwarf carving some animal out of wood: at present he was making a squirrel. Seeing it half finished that afternoon, holding it shudderingly in his hands, Duror had against his will, against indeed the whole frenzied thrust of his being, sensed the kinship between the carver and the creature whose likeness he was carving. When complete, the squirrel would be not only recognisable, it would be almost alive. To Duror it had been the final defeat that such ability should be in a half-man, a freak, an imbecile. He had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved.
    At last he roused himself and moved away. Yet, though he was going home, he felt was leaving behind him in that hut something unresolved, which would never cease to torment him. It was almost as if there were not two brothers, but three; he himself was the third. Once he halted and looked back. His fists tightened on his gun. He saw himself returning, kicking open the door, shouting at them his disgust, and then blasting them both to everlasting perdition. He felt an icy hand on his brow as he imagined that hideous but liberating fratricide. Surely they would lie there unheeded under the cypresses. Surely they were of no more consequence than the frogs which in mating time, with the smaller male on his mate’s back, crossed the public road and were crushed