Two days before the 12th of August he would take his guns and wife to Scotland, where he rented annually a piece of ground inhabited by grouse.
On arriving he would have a bath, then go out with his keeper and a ferret to “get his eye in”; and his first remark was always this: “Well, McNab, and how are you? Afraid I’m a bit above myself!” And his old keeper would answer thus: “Aye, I’m no saying but ye’ll be as well for a day on the hill.”
Each evening on returning from the moors he would cause the dead facts to be turned out of the pony’s paniers and laid in rows before him, and, touching them with the end of a stick so as to make sure, he would count them up; and the more there were of them the better he was pleased. Then, when they were removed and hung, he would enter their numbers in a book. And as these numbers grew, he compared them day by day and week by week with the numbers of each former year; thus, according to whether they were more or less, he could tell at any moment how much he was enjoying life.
On his return to London he would say: “First-class year—five hundred brace.” Or, shake his head and murmur: “Two hundred and thirty brace—a wretched year!”
Any particularly fine creature that he shot he would have stuffed, so that the fact might be remarked for ever.
Once, or perhaps twice, each year, malaise would come on him, a feeling that his life was not quite all he wished, a desire for something that he could not shape in words, a conviction that there were facts which he was missing. At these times he was almost irritable, and would say: “Mistake for a man to marry, depend on it—narrows his life.” And suddenly one day he would know what he wanted, and, under pretext perhaps of two days’ sport, would go to Paris. The fact accomplished, of irregularity, that he would not have committed in England for the world—was of advantage to his soul, and he would return, more regular than ever.
For he was a man who must be doing, who respected only the thing done. He had no use for schemes of life, theories, dreams, or fancies. Ideas were “six a penny,” he would say. And the fact that facts without ideas were “six a ha’penny” was perhaps the only fact that he did not appreciate. He was made, in fact, for laying trains of little facts, in almost perfect order, in almost all directions. Forced by his nature to start laying without considering where they led to, he neither knew nor cared when or what they would blow up; and when in fact they blew up something unexpected, or led into a cul de sac, he would start at once laying them again in the first direction that seemed open. Thus actively employed, he kept from brooding, thinking, and nonsense of all kinds, so busy that he had no time to look ahead and see where he was going; and since, if he had got there he would not have known it, this was just as well.
Beyond everything, he believed in freedom; he never saw the things that his way of acting prevented him from doing, and so believed his life to be the freest in the world.
Nothing occasioned him a more unfeigned surprise than to tell him his ways were typical of the country where he lived. He answered with a stare, knowing well enough that no such likeness could be shown him as a fact. It was not his habit to be conscious; he was neither conscious of himself nor of his country, and this enabled him to be the man he was.
When he met himself about the town (which hourly happened) he had no knowledge that it was himself; on the contrary he looked on himself as specially designed, finding most other people “rather funny.”