The Grotesque Read Free Page B

the lake, and was casting my eye idly over the gray, wind-furrowed water, that I noticed a bulky horned object half-submerged in a bed of reeds close by. I splashed forward through the shallows to investigate, and discovered to my astonishment that it was a dead cow. I poked at it with my walking stick, then with the crook of the stick I hooked its horn and dragged it further into the shallows, and as I did so I caused the head to rise and water poured from its empty eye sockets as though from a fountain. Then the great body began to turn, began to go belly-up, and suddenly a foul, nauseating stench was released into the air and a pike, a big one, four feet long, slid out of the cow’s belly and gazed at me for an instant, its gills quietly lapping, before gliding away into the depths of the lake.
    Not so extraordinary, you will say; but have you ever seen a pike? They have narrow, pointed snouts, and a projecting lower jaw crammed with sharp teeth, and they seem to grin at you; and this one was very big, and very old. The construction of their heads is an instance of natural functional design, no more than that, but it tends to make one think them malevolent; and when this one appeared with such sinister suddenness from inside the bloated and foul-smelling corpse of the cow, the gaze of its cold killer’s eyes (and pike will eat anything, even their own kind) seemed so charged with malice and evil that my hair, for a moment, quite literally froze on my head. I did not, as I say, take the incident very seriously at the time, beyond, that is, describing it in detail at dinner that night; but often in recent days the picture of that wicked old pike sliding out of the cow’s belly has come into my mind, without any apparent pretext.
    Just to finish the story, it occurred to me that the dead cow would make good feed for George’s pigs, so I tramped off across the marsh in a northeasterly direction, to Ceck’s Bottom, and told him about it. And as far as I know it was George’s pigs that got the rest of that cow, not the old pike.
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    I soon made the acquaintance of Doris Fledge, she of the crowlike features and red-tipped nose. In those early days of autumn she cooked us solid, unpretentious meals that always came hot to the table, and I was well satisfied. Maybe Harriet had been right about the Fledges, I thought. Like Darwin I do not care what I eat as long as it’s the same every day, and I had been used to depend on old Mrs. Dome (when her rheumatism wasn’t “playing up”) to put square, English meals before me, meat and vegetables unadulterated by sauces, spices, or savories. Mrs. Fledge was apparently in the same culinary tradition, and this permitted me to devote my mealtimes to reading the Times , or thinking about my lecture, or tormenting Sidney Giblet, with no anxieties about what would appear on my plate.
    One morning, feeling particularly jaunty before going out to the barn, I decided on impulse to visit the kitchen, and inquire of Mrs. Fledge what was for lunch, and say a kind word or two—a kind word from the master never goes amiss, with servants. I had been out in the vegetable garden with George, who was building a bonfire of dead leaves and other garden rubbish, and as I remember it was a fine, crisp day, which was why I was feeling jaunty. Crossing the yard toward the back door, I glimpsed Mrs. Fledge in the kitchen; she had her back to the window, and was occupied with something at the large oak dresser that fills one entire wall of the room. Even from halfway across the yard there was an unmistakably furtive character to the woman’s movements, and I remembered a hunch I’d formed about her the first time I clapped eyes on her. Well, I advanced briskly across the yard, my leather-soled brogues ringing out sharp and clear on the dry stones, and she must have heard me, for she quickly moved away from the dresser, and over to the sink, where I found her washing up the breakfast dishes when I came