Chapter C: H. Bretherton

Dec. 6, 1916.

The Last Cock-Pheasant

Splendour, whom lately on your glowing flight
Athwart the chill and cheerless winter-skies
I marked and welcomed with a futile right,
And then a futile left, and strained my eyes
To see you so magnificently large,
Sinking to rest beyond the fir-wood's marge--

Not mine, not mine the fault; despise me not
In that I missed you; for the sun was down,
And the dim light was all against the shot;
And I had booked a bet of half-a-crown.
My deadly fire is apt to be upset
By many causes--always by a bet.

Or had I overdone it with the sloes,
Snared by their home-picked brand of ardent gin
Designed to warm a shivering sportsman's toes
And light a fire his reckless head within?
Or did my silly loader put me off
With aimless chatter with regard to golf?

You too, I think, displayed a lack of nerve;
You did not quite--now did you?--play the game;
For when you saw me you were seen to swerve,
Doubtless in order to disturb my aim.
No, no, you must not ask me to forgive
A swerve because you basely planned to live.

At any rate, I missed you, and you went,
The last day's absolutely final bird,
Scathless, and left me very ill content;
And someone (was it I?) pronounced a word,
A word which rather forcible than nice is,
A little word which does not rhyme with Isis.

Farewell! I may behold you once again
When next November's gales have stripped the leaf.
Then, while your upward flight you grandly strain,
May I be there to add you to my sheaf;
And may they praise your tallness, saying "This
Was such a bird as men are proud to miss!"

R. C. LEHMANN.
Jan. 25, 1911.

Labuntur Anni

[To a Chital Head on the Wall of a London Club.]

Light in the East, the dawn wind singing,
Solemn and grey and chill,
Rose in the sky, with Orion swinging
Down to the distant hill;
The grass dew-pearled and the _mohwa_ shaking
Her scented petals across the track,
And the herd astir to the new day breaking--
Gods! How it all comes back.

So it was, and on such a morning
Somebody's bullet sped,
And you, as you called to the herd a warning,
Dropped in the grasses dead;
And some stout hunter's heart was brimming
For joy that the gods of sport were good--
With a lump in his throat and his eyes a-dimming,
As the eyes of sportsmen should;--

As mine have done in the springtime running,
As mine in the halcyon days
Ere trigger-finger had lapsed from cunning
Or foot from the forest ways,
When I'd wake with the stars and the sunrise meeting
In the dewy fragrance of myrrh and musk,
Peacock and spurfowl sounding a greeting
And the jungle mine till dusk.

You take me back to the valleys of laughter,
The hills that hunters love,
The sudden rain and the sunshine after,
The cloud and the blue above,
The morning mist and creatures crying,
The beat in the drowsy afternoon,
Clear-washed eve with the sunset dying,
Night and the hunter's moon.

Not till all trees and jungles perish
Shall we go back that way
To those dear hills that the hunters cherish,
Where the hearts of the hunters stay;
So you dream on of the ancient glories,
Of water-meadows and hinds and stags,
While I and my like tell old, old stories...
Ah! but it drags--it drags.