The Trouble With Harry by Jack Trevor Story Read Free Book Online Page A

easily have been stalking big game instead of new angles.
    Soon Sam Marlow came upon the dead hedgehog. There was a solitary bluebottle settled on the bullet wound and when Sam lunged his foot towards it the bluebottle leapt sideways after the manner of bluebottles and zoomed away into a wide spiral, its greedy, bulbous eyes still fixed on the blood it had left.
    Sam turned the hedgehog over gently with his sandal. He heard a tiny commotion in the bracken nearby and he walked across and looked down intently. He saw the baby hedgehogs moving around and crying gently to each other. Sam was filled with a vast and overwhelming sorrow. He lay down his painting equipment and took the small creatures in his hands. He looked into their small, pointed faces and he rubbed their soft bellies with his forefinger. Pretty soon he had them wrapped in bracken and canvas while their mother lay beneath the leaf-mould under a gorse bush.
    The bluebottle watched him, angrily buzzingaround his head and making as if to attack, but Sam took no notice. When all was done and the babies had joined his pack of paints and brushes he turned as if to go. But before he actually moved he swung around with great violence and slapped the bluebottle into the ground in one vicious gesture, quickly stamping out its sickly life against the soft grass.
    Sam moved on through the maze of paths, trying to think of a good song to sing. Through his head leapt ‘The Invitation to the Waltz’ and other wonderful tunes, but he let them remain there, for there were times when the singing in his head was more wondrous than anything to which he could give voice.
    The body of the man called Harry came as a complete surprise to Sam Marlow, though not as a tragedy, as the hedgehog had been. He thought what a queer thing it was, on an afternoon like this, to find a man’s body without shoes. First a dead hedgehog with two live babies, then a dead man with two bare feet. Surely here was a sign of some kind. Surely it all meant something. Sam felt strangely full. Mysterious emotions moved about deep down inside him. Heknew, he was certain, that he was supposed to paint something. Perhaps the picture of his life. The strange affair of Miss Graveley’s hair; the dead hedgehog; and now this lonely corpse – surely they were a symbol of life and death? Joy and sorrow. Good and evil. Then there was the bluebottle.
    Sam lay down his paints, the easel and the baby hedgehogs and he dragged the corpse into a nearby patch of sunlight, for it was screened from the sun by the rhododendron. When the model was suitably illuminated Sam set up his easel and his stool and sat down to paint.
    The dead face of the dead man had given him the inspiration he needed. The dead face of this man held the millions and millions of dead faces of all the centuries. In that dead face lay all dead humanity; all cold history; all the odd attitudes and mistakes. He would paint the faces of the world that had been. All the thousands of faces massed together. All the staring eyes of the people as they stood wondering, laughing, weeping, and dull with misunderstanding and ignorance. The faces of the Jews and the Gentiles, the Romans and the Egyptians and theGreeks. And beyond them he would paint the people who watched across the years and the centuries; the children at scripture; the teachers; the monks and the politicians; the publicans; the people of every day in every country, all standing looking and not knowing.
    Sam Marlow, his eyes fixed on the face of the dead man, mixed his colours and then began to paint. He roughed in a hazy background. A background of one tremendous, gargantuan human face, more dead than the face of the corpse which lay in front of him. So intent was he on his task that he did not notice another human face which slowly materialised amongst the evergreen leaves of the rhododendron. There was nothing dead about this face; this was the face of living humanity; brown,