Free Essential Stories by V.S. Pritchett Page A

featherless bird. Then Charlie changed. He hunched his shoulders, narrowing himself and cowering round his heart, hardening himself against the world, and his eyes shot out suspicions, jealousies, reproaches, the weapons of a sharp mind.
    “ ’Tis the schoolmaster has been putting you against me,” he said.
    Micky ridiculed the idea.
    “Ye knew as well as I did, dammit, when we took the place, that I’d be going now,” he said. Yes, this was true, Charlie had known it.
    Micky took the matter to his friend the schoolmaster. He was a stout, hard-drinking old man with a shock of curly grey hair. His manner was theatrical and abrupt.
    “ ’Tis the poor bloody brother,” Micky said. “What am I to do with him at all?”
    “Ye’ve no more money,” said the schoolmaster.
    “Ye’ve been with him for years,” he went on. He paused again.
    “Ye can’t live on him.”
    “And he must live with you.”
    He glowered at Micky and then his fierce look died away.
    “Sure there’s nothing you can do. Nothing at all,” said the schoolmaster.
    Micky filled their glasses again.
    He continued his life. The Summer glided down like a beautiful bird scooping the light. The peasants stood in their long shadows in the fields and fishermen left their boats for the harvest. Micky was sad to be leaving this beautiful isolation.
    But he had to return to the question. He and Charlie began to argue it continually day and night. Sometimes Charlie was almost acquiescent, but at last always retired within himself. Since he could not sit in the safety of the old talk, his cleverness found what comfort it could for him in the new. Soon it was clear to Micky that Charlie encouraged the discussion, cunningly played with it, tortured him with vacillations, cunningly played on his conscience. But to Charlie it seemed that he was struggling to make his brother aware of him fully; deep in the piety of his fear he saw in Micky a man who had never worshipped at its icy altars. He must be made to know. So the struggle wavered until one night it came out loudly into the open.
    “God Almighty,” cried out Micky as they sat in the lamplight. “If you’d been in France you’d have had something to cry about. That’s what’s wrong with this bloody country. All a pack of damn cowards, and ye can see it in their faces when they stare at you like a lot of bleating sheep.”
    “Oh, is that it?” said Charlie gripping the arms of his chair. “Is that what you’re thinking all these years? Ye’re saying I’m afraid, is it? You’re saying I’m a coward. Is that what you were thinking when you came home like a red lord out of hell in your uniform, pretending to be glad to see me and the home? But thinking in your own heart I’m a coward not to be in the British army. Oh, is that it?”
    His voice was quiet, high and monotonous in calculated contrast to Micky’s shouting anger. But his body shook. A wound had been opened. He
was
a coward. He
was
afraid. He was terrified. But his clever mind quickly closed the wound. He was a man of peace. He desired to kill no one. He worshipped the great peace of God. This was why he had avoided factions, agreed with all sides, kept out of politics and withdrawn closer and closer into himself. At times it had seemed to him that the only place left in the world for the peace of God was in his own small heart.
    And what had Micky done? In the middle of the war he had come home, the Destroyer. In five minutes by a few reckless words in the drink shop and streets of the town he had ruined the equilibrium Charlie had tended for years and had at last attained. In five minutes Charlie had become committed. He was no longer “Mr. Lough the manager,” a man of peace. No, he was the brother of “that bloody pro-British Yank.” Men were boycotted for having brothers in the British army, they were threatened, they were even shot. In an hour a village as innocent-looking as a green and white place in a postcard had become