Day's End and Other Stories (14 page)

When they sat in the train again she fingered his brow coolly and said: ‘Your head's all sweat.' He grinned carelessly, but with the touch of her handkerchief on his face looked strangely into her eyes. Soon they began to talk of home in whispers.

That night, though dog-tired, he could not sleep and lay staring at the ceiling, thinking. At his side slept the girl and the child, breathing with a soft sound like that of the sea in the distance. Hour after hour he heard this regular rise and fall until in the end he surrendered to its delusion and lived again the joys of the week that had passed. Soon he made no attempt to sleep but lay on his back, staring in profound thought about it all.

Gradually the noise of the traffic died in the distance,
leaving over the streets a tired hush which crept into the room too. Rain no longer fell and in the clear darkness he forgot that it had ever been. The weariness and strain of the journey slipped away too and he began to know no regret or worry but only a dull longing, resembling an ache, the longing for the sea again, the warm, dark nights, and the low noise of the waves over the murmur of the crowd.

And again and again he would ask himself: ‘Will it ever come again?' and then in that strange, tired silence, lie awake and wonder.

In the early summer and spring it had been well enough: a feeling of satisfaction, of proud satisfaction, had been uppermost in him – that sense which must possess every bird that builds in a lonely tree. The nest and branches are indivisible; the wind that shakes one shakes the other, just as common afflictions bind together human souls.

Now it was autumn – almost winter when one shut the eyes and bared the cheeks to the wind. Day by day he discovered himself to be more detached, even isolated – no longer part of the landscape which appeared on the verge of complete decay. The woods, the stubble, the anæmic skies, and the sad-coloured leaves that swam through heavy air no longer fascinated him. He felt repelled, just as if the house in which he had spent summer and spring had begun suddenly to rot and its roof had dropped and grown mossy. Everywhere he sensed decay. The leaves began to pile up in red stacks which the rain soddened. Naked patches of sky were left among the trees. Only the night before last a leafless branch had begun to tap dryly at his window, a thing he
had never noticed happening in summer and spring.

It had been a spring day when he arrived, all alone. A very vivid memory remained: of platoons of green elms, a bright lemon sun, one or two bees, a plum in blossom on the house, a manure heap steaming languidly without smelling, and a bright girl of nineteen or so, the daughter of the gardener, who had held open the gate and said:

‘It's quite hot, isn't it, sir?'

This greeting had pleased him. Of the outside it had been true – the sun looked down warmly. Inside, however, there had been no heat. The monotone of the white walls had been caressingly cool to his face, which the sunny wind had burnished red. He liked the house he had leased. In the bedrooms he had heard the sound of voices, and such was the quaint arrangement of the building that he had spent some time in trying to discover whence they came. It was puzzling. Downstairs they had been audible. In the corridors, too, yet it had never been quite possible, on that first day, to conjecture correctly whence they came. But of course it had been the girl Mary, and her father. All that had been evident on her bringing in tea. He recognised the voice.

That night a flaming heap of cloud had beckoned him out. Up through the chilly air one or two spirals of smoke had reared, orange in colour where the sun fell. The village had been quiet. In the twilight he
had moved warily as if fearful of disturbing that peace and of knocking off the heads of the daisies and early buttercups.

Eventually it had seemed sacrilegious to walk about and on a patch of short grass he had reclined for more than an hour, dreaming of the house, the plum-blossom in white stars on the wall, the flies, a beetle he had seen, brownish-black, running over the threshold, the girl and her father Reuben, the cool walls, and the indefinite and far-off future.

An owl had called as he went home. Another responded, and the first became silent. It was like the call of a new life against the old, and the new triumphing. He went upstairs and, finding candles already lit in his room, did some writing till morning.

The girl woke him with three taps on his door and then went away softly. On the curtains of the deep window the sun had already constructed strange, warm shapes that threw reflections on the dark wood floor. But before noon rain had fallen. Reuben nodded sagaciously, as if he had commanded or prophesied and had had satisfaction. His master wrote joyfully.

The evening dripped into night.

‘Will you light my candles early, Mary?' he had asked of her.

‘Now, sir?'

‘Yes, now. Is it likely to rain to-morrow?'

‘Not likely, sir,' she had answered, pulling a wick straight with her fingers.

‘Your father knows?'

‘We all know, sir. Perhaps you'll be able to tell as well, if you stay long enough.'

He had laughed.

‘I don't think of going away.'

He afterwards fancied he saw her smile – it may have been so. She preceded him quietly, at any rate, with a candle in each hand. As she drew the curtains she seemed an example of that beauty which springs from some inner force and is no longer merely the beauty of lips, breast, throat, eyes, hair and demeanour. Her movements were expressive of this, and in the yellow light her dark features were one by one and then all filled with it. He could explain her beauty, he found, no more than he could explain that of the sunny or rainy day he had spent in the same house with her. So far he was obsessed only by the wonder and not the significance of it.

‘How old are you, Mary?' he asked.

‘Nineteen, sir.'

‘Yes. Draw the curtains across,' he told her in a far-away voice.

He did not hear her leave the room. In gazing pensively at the white writing-paper he saw it become her neck just as the shadow of his own head had become her hair, moving just as solemnly and thoughtfully when the wind disturbed the candle-flames. She was beautiful. He thought of nothing else, and wrote nothing.

As the days passed he felt that beauty strangely.
Though once or twice he caught some queer, indefinable glance from her eyes he felt no desire, no excitement about her. Her beauty richened, as if under the influence of the sun. It seemed that her face, growing more golden, heightened the white of her upper breast, while the brow lay firmer under the luxuriant hair. It became more and more wondrous. Sometimes when she brought in his candles late at night he had a desire to say something simple and beautiful and earnest to her, but of what it was he hadn't the faintest notion except that it must draw from her some equally touching and beautiful reply.

Night after night when she brought in his two candles he had that desire and yet said nothing.

On the finest days of that summer he lay in the orchard, reading and dozing nearly all day. At the far end a white goat was tethered, jerkily munching grass in a series of circles, never escaping from the stake, though the stake mattered little to the animal and was not necessary for its life. And this seemed like himself and Mary. The contemplation, the degree of resignation her beauty had brought him to, was like that rope, and he revolved about her just as continually as the goat about the stake, or as a human mind about a beautiful idea.

Now it was autumn. Under the trees the goat munched not only grass but apples which were half-rotten, and even the leaves under which some were already hidden. The nights were chilly and the days often wet and unpleasant. Sometimes, it was true,
the walls grew quite hot in early afternoon but the sun soon vanished. Mary began to bring his candles at seven, then six. It was all decay – a decay which never fascinated him but on the contrary seemed to infest him, so that more than a fortnight without work had already gone by.

The stagnation and loneliness were becoming unendurable! He must go away again. Progress, life in sharp, warm spasms were as essential to him as sun to a bee. In this climate, with the dead days of winter coming, all that was impossible. All day he stagnated, and what was the result? There was no sleep at night, the branches of the plum-tree tapped insistently at his window, like the call of the old life.

Mary brought up his candles each night a little earlier; but it seemed to him that she too had lost her spiritual and compelling beauty. What remained was physical: he saw her features as mere essentials to the moulding of a material thing. The pervading, fascinating air of the early days seemed to have fallen away like the leaves. She stared at him with big eyes and seemed to move about in a foolish sort of dream, only half-hearing what he said. He fancied her hair had lost its lights, and that the higher neck of her dress destroyed all the noble shape of her breast. He would ask himself, had her beauty been merely accidental, momentary, due to certain lights and summer blood, or was she sad?

But one evening he informed her suddenly: ‘I'm going away, to-morrow, I think.'

She stood regarding him.

‘I mean for the whole winter. And perhaps longer – I don't know. But it's too much for me here. It's dull. I'm lonely. There's nobody.'

He went on talking of arrangements and packing, and she answered him in quiet monotones which he sometimes did not hear but never asked her to repeat. She had all the appearance of a shadow, possessed with just enough life to wander about the room. She had no gestures. She did not even tap her brow with her hand, when perplexed, as beautiful a thing as the tap of a bird's beak on its own wing. Her face wore a continual expression of wonder, in which there lay horror and uncertainty too. It was as if she were afraid or mistrustful or bewildered. And she no longer had that compelling beauty which had excited in him the desire to tell her some moving, half-ethereal thought.

He was to depart at three, but events unforeseen delayed him an hour or two. All day a sense of relief possessed him, even though the air was warm and a blind person might have guessed it the spring instead of the autumn sun on his face.

Mary had brought up the candles for the last time; he had blown them out only to lie and watch their threads of smoke insinuate themselves into the dark air. Then the tapping of the plum-branch had kept him awake. The slightness of the interference, though it had gone on softly all night, had served to irritate him and wish he were gone.

Now he was going. Mary ran to hold the gate. He had some difficulty in steering through and scarcely noticed her there, but shouted several loud ‘Good-byes' into the air and waved a hand and drove away quickly with Reuben. The sun had gone. Already it was damp with mist under the trees. He felt glad to be gone.

Night came.

With an expression of sadness over her face, she walked upstairs slowly, the two candles in her hands. She set them down in his room unlit, and moved across the floor and back again, breathing profoundly.

She sat down, crossed her hands and dropped into a long stream of thought: this reached from the day of his arrival, when she had held open the gate for him, and she also had noticed the plum-blossom and the bees and the heat; all through the summer, the hot, languid hours and capricious scents, his lazy yet essential presence, his conversations – those fragile and precious links with him – the every-night pair of candles, his still warm bed she made in the mornings, certain gestures of his and pet phrases which no doubt meant little or nothing; through all this until he had announced his intention of going and had gone.

She remembered how that to this announcement she had been unable to reply. In her bewilderment she had gazed at him with a transfixed stare – which she had no idea irritated him – as if she had heard him say: ‘I'm going to murder you.' Her drawing
of the curtains had been mechanical: her retreat also. Afterwards she had leaned all night from her window, not a dozen feet away from him, in her grief and amazement gently shaking the plum-bough which ran just beneath her. She had heard it tap-tapping on something softly, every minute until morning, when she had a feeling of utter loneliness as one does on a bare landscape after a night of storm.

All that she had done before; for a number of nights she had sat up, swinging the plum-branch and hearing its soft tap as if on something afar off.

Now she swung it again. As she opened the window one or two gusts of a melancholy autumn breeze sprang in. She breathed quickly once or twice, as if tasting the quality of the air. Then she lit the candles and, setting them in their usual place, leaned out and met the little sharp rushes of air again. Her eyes, as she touched the branch beneath her, had the same wondering stare he had disliked.

Her preoccupation was so intense she did not notice that behind her one candle had blown out, and up into the air was trailing its smoke in a dying thread.

The afternoon sunshine fell softly on the backs of the women advancing along the hillside in a ragged line, on their bowed heads, as on the stone spire and the brown roofs obtruding from the plain below, as on the burnt hillside, the empty cornfields and the red, golden and dark leaves of the woods it lay with the quiet magic benediction of autumn.

Everywhere hung a great stillness as if a blessing were being bestowed upon those things: only the women, as if oblivious, moved beneath it, unevenly, stooping, rising and going on.

Each of the women had a sack with her. Sometimes a faint breeze played among their skirts and sent a ripple through the crooked line. Haunting the edge of the woodside, thrusting themselves into the hedges, straddling the ditches, loosening stumps of rotted wood with their feet, all the time the sound of their voices filled the clear, hushed air of the afternoon like the chatter of strange birds.

Of these women two were fat, very short of breath; thick, heavy skirts hid their feet and woollen shawls most of their heads; but like the rest their hands moved quickly, their sacks were already more than half-full. Among the others was a little, pale-faced woman wearing a man's cap, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up beyond her sharp red elbows, and above all these, in a sort of ever-vigilant, avaricious and mean dominion over them, a woman of nearly six feet strode swiftly, straddled the ditches with ease and made the deepest holes in the woodside. Her instinct seemed to take her always a little ahead of the rest, her long legs impatient of her skirts, the strings of her blouse bursting out under the immense, sudden bends of her body.