Wintry Peacock | Page 5

rise,
his blue neck stretching out and lying sometimes on the snow, his eyes
closing and opening quickly, his crest all battered.
"Joey dee-urr! Dee-urr!" I said caressingly to him. And at last he lay
still, blinking, in the surged and furrowed snow, whilst I came near and
touched him, stroked him, gathered him under my arm. He stretched his
long, wetted neck away from me as I held him, none the less he was
quiet in my arm, too tired, perhaps, to struggle. Still he held his poor,
crested head away from me, and seemed sometimes to droop, to wilt, as
if he might suddenly die.
He was not so heavy as I expected, yet it was a struggle to get up to the
house with him again. We set him down, not too near the fire, and
gently wiped him with cloths. He submitted, only now and then
stretched his soft neck away from us, avoiding us helplessly. Then we
set warm food by him. I put it to his beak, tried to make him eat. But he
ignored it. He seemed to be ignorant of what we were doing, recoiled
inside himself inexplicably. So we put him in a basket with cloths, and
left him crouching oblivious. His food we put near him. The blinds
were drawn, the house was warm, it was night. Sometimes he stirred,
but mostly he huddled still, leaning his queer crested head on one side.
He touched no food, and took no heed of sounds or movements. We
talked of brandy or stimulants. But I realised we had best leave him
alone.
In the night, however, we heard him thumping about. I got up
anxiously with a candle. He had eaten some food, and scattered more,
making a mess. And he was perched on the back of a heavy arm-chair.

So I concluded he was recovered, or recovering.
The next day was clear, and the snow had frozen, so I decided to carry
him back to Tible. He consented, after various flappings, to sit in a big
fish-bag with his battered head peeping out with wild uneasiness. And
so I set off with him, slithering down into the valley, making good
progress down in the pale shadows beside the rushing waters, then
climbing painfully up the arrested white valley-side, plumed with
clusters of young pine-trees, into the paler white radiance of the snowy
upper regions, where the wind cut fine. Joey seemed to watch all the
time with wide, anxious, unseeing eyes, brilliant and inscrutable. As I
drew near to Tible township, he stirred violently in the bag, though I do
not know if he had recognised the place. Then, as I came to the sheds,
he looked sharply from side to side, and stretched his neck out long. I
was a little afraid of him. He gave a loud, vehement yell, opening his
sinister beak, and I stood still, looking at him as he struggled in the bag,
shaken myself by his struggles, yet not thinking to release him.
Mrs. Goyte came darting past the end of the house, her head sticking
forward in sharp scrutiny. She saw me, and came forward.
"Have you got Joey?" she cried sharply, as if I were a thief.
I opened the bag, and he flopped out, flapping as if he hated the touch
of the snow, now. She gathered him up and put her lips to his beak. She
was flushed and handsome, her eyes bright, her hair slack, thick, but
more witch-like than ever. She did not speak.
She had been followed by a grey-haired woman with a round, rather
sallow face and a slightly hostile bearing.
"Did you bring him with you, then?" she asked sharply. I answered that
I had rescued him the previous evening.
From the background slowly approached a slender man with a grey
moustache and large patches on his trousers.
"You've got 'im back 'gain, Ah see," he said to his daughter-in-law. His

wife explained how I had found Joey.
"Ah," went on the grey man. "It wor our Alfred scarred him off, back
your life. He must 'a' flyed ower t' valley. Tha ma' thank thy stars as 'e
wor fun, Maggie. 'E'd a bin froze. They a bit nesh, you know," he
concluded to me.
"They are," I answered. "This isn't their country."
"No, it isna," replied Mr. Goyte. He spoke very slowly and deliberately,
quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. He looked at
his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and dark, before the
peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a moment along her
lap. In spite of his grey moustache and thin grey hair, the elderly man
had a face young and almost delicate, like a young man's.