Peter had come up to her. He didn’t look contemptuous. He was white-lipped too. She had never seen him look scared before. He snatched the rabbit from her and killed it by one, two, three—she counted—quick blows—she didn’t see. But she had met his eyes, and they were as distressed as hers. Just for a moment.
Then he was a fifth form boy again. He examined his victim with an affectation of calm. “Too far back,” he said. “Bad shot. Mustn’t do that again.”...
The rabbit was quite still and limp now, dangling from Peter’s hand, its eye had glazed, blood dripped and clotted at its muzzle, but its rhythmic desperate kicking was still beating in Joan’s brain.
Was this to go on? Could she go on?
Peter’s gun and the pigeon were lying some yards away. He regarded them and then looked down at the rabbit he held.
“Now I know I can shoot,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
“Bring the pigeon, Joan,” he said, ending an indecision, and picked up his gun and led the way back towards the house....
“We got a pigeon and a rabbit,” Joan babbled at tea to Oswald. “Next time, Petah’s going to let me have the gun.”
Our tone was altogether sporting.
But there was no next time. There were many unspoken things between Joan and Peter, and this was to be one of them. For all the rest of their lives neither Joan nor Peter went shooting again. Men Peter was destined to slay—but no more beasts. Necessity never compelled them, and it would have demanded an urgent necessity before they would have faced the risk of seeing another little furry creature twist and wriggle and of marking how a bright eye glazes over. But they were both very bitterly ashamed of this distressing weakness. They left further shooting for “tomorrow,” and it remained always tomorrow. They said nothing about their real feelings in the matter, and Peter cleaned and oiled his new gun very carefully and hung it up conspicuously over the mantelshelf of their common room, ready to be taken down at any time—when animals ceased to betray feeling.