Short Stories 1895-1926 (64 page)

There was no Past in her dream. She stood on this dreadful wharf, beside this soundless and sluggish river under the impenetrable murk of its skies, as if in an eternal Present. And though she could scarcely move for terror, some impulse within impelled her to approach nearer to discover what these angelic yet horrifying shapes were at. And as she drew near enough to them to distinguish the faintly flaming eyes in their faces, and the straight flax-coloured hair upon their heads, even the shape of their enormous shovels, she became aware of yet another presence standing close beside her, more shadowy than they, more closely resembling her own phantom self.

But though it was beyond her power to turn and confront it, it seemed that by its influence she realized what cargo the barge had been carrying up the stream and had disgorged upon the wharf. It was a heap, sombre and terrific, of a kind of refuse. The horror of this realization shook her even now, as she knelt there, the flames of the kitchen fire lighting up her fair blonde face. For, as if through a whisper in her consciousness from the companion that stood beside her – she knew that this refuse was the souls of men; the souls not of utterly vile and evil men (if such there were; and no knowledge was given to her of where
their
souls lay or where the blessed) but of ordinary nondescript men – ‘wayfaring men, though fools'. Yet nothing but what seemed to be a sublime indifference to their laborious toil and to its object, showed on the faces of the labourers on the wharf.

Perhaps if there had been any speech among them, or if any sound – no more earthly than echo in her imagination – of their movements had reached her above the flowing of that vast, dark stealthy stream, and above the scrapings on the timbers of the shovels, almost as large as those used in an oast-house, she would have been less afraid.

But this unfathomable silence seemed to intensify the gloom as she watched; every object there became darker yet more sharply outlined, so that she could see more clearly, up above, the immense steep-walled warehouses. For now
their
walls too seemed to afford a gentle luminosity. And one thought only was repeating itself again and again in her mind: The souls, the souls, of men!
The souls, the souls, of men
!

And then, beyond human heart to bear, the secret messenger beside her let fall into consciousness another seed of thought. She realized that her poor husband's soul was there in that vast nondescript heap; and those of loved-ones gone, wayfarers, friends of her childhood, her girlhood, and of those nearer yet, valueless, neglected – being shovelled away by these gigantic, angelic beings. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear,' she was weeping within. And, as with afflicted lungs and bursting temples she continued to gaze, suddenly out of the nowhere of those skies, two or three angle-winged birds swooped down and alighting in greed nearby, covertly watched the toilers.

And one, bolder than the rest, scurried forward on scowering wing, and leapt back into the air burdened with its morsel out of that accumulation. The sight of it pierced her being in this eternity as if that morsel were her own. And suddenly one of the shapes, and not an instant too soon, had lifted its shovel, brandishing it on high above his head, with a shrill resounding cry – ‘Harpy!'

The cry shattered the silence, reverberated on and on, wharf, warehouse, starless arch, and she had awakened: had awakened to her small homely bedroom. It was bathed as if with beauty by the beams of the nightlight that shone on a small table beside her bed where used to sleep her three-year-old. It was safety, assurance, peace; and yet unreal. Unreal even her husband – his simple face perfectly still and strange in sleep – lying quietly beside her. And she – lost amid the gloom of her own mind.

Tell
that
dream – never, never! But yet now in this quiet firelight, so many cares over – and, above all, that dreary entanglement of the mind a thing of the past – what alone still kept the dream a secret was not so much its horror, but its shame. The shame not only that she should have dreamed such a dream, but that she should as it were have seen only its horror and should have become its slave.

To have believed in such a doom; to have supposed that God … But she could afford to smile indulgently now at this weakness and cowardice and infidelity. She could afford it simply because of Mr Simmonds, the farmer. That was the solemn, the really-and-truly amusing truth. It was that rather corpulent, short, red-faced Mr Simmonds who had been responsible for the very happiest moment in her life: who had saved her, had saved far more even than her ‘reason'.

Her husband, of course, knew how much they owed to his kindness. But he did not know that he owed Mr Simmonds her very heart's salvation, if that was not a conceited way of putting it. And yet it was this Mr Simmonds – she laughed softly out loud as she gazed on into the fire – it was this Mr Simmonds who had at first sight, in his old brown coat and mud-caked gaiters, reminded her of a potato! Of a potato and then an apple, one of those cobbled apples, their bright red faded a little and the skin drawn up. His smile was like that, as dry as it was sweet, like cider.

What an interminable Sunday that had been before her husband and the two children had said good-bye to her at the railway station. How that man in spectacles had stared at her over his newspaper. Then the ride in the trap, her roped box behind, and Mrs Simmonds, and the farm. Two or three times a day at least she had rushed out in imagination to drown everything in the looking-glass-like pond among the reeds not very far from the farm. And yet all the time, though Mrs Simmonds knew she was ‘queer', she could not possibly have guessed, while she was talking to her of an evening in the parlour, the things that were flaring and fleering in her mind like the noises and sights of a fair.

The doctor had said – looking at her very steadily: ‘But you won't, you must remember, be really much alone, because you will have your home and your children to think of. You will have
them
. Think as little as possible about everything else. Just rest, and be looked after.'

The consequence of which had been the suspicion that she was being not merely ‘looked after' but watched. And she would openly pretend to set out from the farm in another direction when she was bent on looking once more at her reflection in the pond. None the less she had remembered what the doctor had said, had held on to it almost as if it had been a bag she was carrying and must keep safe. And by and by in the hayfields, in the lanes by the hedges, she had begun to be a quieter companion to herself and even glad of Mrs Simmonds's company, and of talking to her plump brown-haired daughter, or to the pale skimpy dairy-maid.

It was curious though that, while passing the opening in the farm-wall she had never failed to cast a glance towards that dark distant mound with its flowers beyond the yard, she had yet never really noticed it. She had seen it, even admired its burden, but not definitely attended to it. It had taken her eye and yet not her attention. She had been far less conscious of it, for example, than of the pretty Jersey heifer that was sometimes there, and even of the tortoiseshell cat, and the cocks and hens, and of the geese in the green meadow.

All these she saw with an extraordinary clearness, as if she were looking at them from out of a window in a strange world. They quieted her mind without her being aware of it, and she would talk of them to Mrs Simmonds partly because she was interested to hear about them; partly to keep her in the room; and partly so that she might think of other things while the farmer's wife was talking. Of other things indeed! – when first and foremost, like a huge louring storm-cloud on the horizon of a sea, there never left her mind for a single moment the memory and influence of her dream. It would sweep back on her, so much distorting her face and clouding her eyes that she would be compelled to turn her head away out of the glare of the parlour lamp, in case Mrs Simmonds should notice it.

And then came that calm, sunlit afternoon. She had had quiet sleep the night before. It had been her first night at the farm untroubled by sudden galvanic leaps into consciousness and by the swarming cries and phantom faces that appeared as soon as her tired-out eyes hid themselves from the tiny radiance of the nightlight.

She had been for a walk – yes, and to the reed-pond – and had there promised her absent husband and her two children never to go there again unless she could positively bear herself no longer. She had promised; and, quieted in mind, she was coming back. She remembered even thinking with pleasure of the home-made jam that Mrs Simmonds would give her for her tea.

There was no doubt at all, then, that she had been getting better – just as before (when the dream came) she had been really, though secretly, getting worse. And as she was turning in home by the farm-gate, she saw Nellie, the heifer, there; the nimble young fawn-haired creature, with its delicate head and lustrous eyes with their long lashes; and she had advanced in her silly London fashion, with a handful of coarse grass, to make real friends with her. The animal had sidled away and then had trotted off into the farmyard, and she had followed it with an unusual effort of will.

The sun was pouring its light in abundance out of the west on the whitewashed walls and stones and living creatures in the yard; midges in the air, wagtails, chaffinches in the golden straw, a wren scolding, a cart-horse in reverie at the gate, and the deep black-shadowed holes of the byres and stables.

Still eluding her, Nellie had edged across the yard; and it was then that, lifting her eyes beyond the retreating creature, she had caught sight of that mound, now near at hand, and had realized what it was. She had realized what it was almost as if because her dream had instantly returned with it, almost as if the one thing were the ‘familiar' of the other. But the horror now was more distant. She could not even (more than vaguely like reflection in water) see those shapes with the shovels simply because what she now saw in actuality was so vivid and lovely a thing. It was a heap of old stable manure; and it must have lain there where it was for a very long time, since it was strayed over in every direction, and was lit up with the tufted colours of at least a dozen varieties of wild flowers. Her glance wandered to and fro from bell to bell and cup to cup; the harsh yet sweet odour of the yard and stables was in her nostrils: that of hay was in the air; and into the distance stretched meadow and field under the sky, their crops sprouting, their green deepening.

And as she stood, densely gazing at this heap, she herself it had seemed became nothing more than that picture in her eyes. And then Mr Simmonds had come out and across the yard, his flannel shirt-sleeves tucked up above his thick sun-burned arms, and a pitch-fork in his hand. He had touched his hat with that almost schoolboyish little gentle grin of his; then when he noticed that she was trying to speak to him, had stood beside her, leaning on his pitch-fork, his glance following the direction of her eyes.

For a moment or two she had been unable to utter a syllable for sheer breathlessness, and had turned her face aside a little under its wide-brimmed hat, stammering on, and then almost whispering, as if she were a mere breath of wind and he a dense deep-rooted oak-tree. But he had caught the word ‘flowers' easily enough.

There must have been at
least
a dozen varieties on that foster-mothering heap; complete little families of them: silver, cream, crimson, rose-pink, stars and cups and coronals, and a most marvellous green in their leaves, all standing still together there in the windless ruddying light of the sun. And Mr Simmonds had told her a few of their country names, the very sounds of them like the happy things themselves.

She had explained how exquisitely fresh they looked – not like street-flowers – though she supposed of course that to him they were mere waste – just ‘wild' flowers.

And he had replied, with his courteous ‘ma'ams' and those curiously bright blue eyes of his in his plain plump face, that it was no wonder they flourished there. And as for being ‘waste', why, they were kind of enjoying themselves, he supposed, and welcome to it.

He had been amused, too, in an almost courtly fashion at her disjointed curious questions about the heap. It was just ‘stable-mook'; and the older that is, of course, the better. It would be used all right some time, he assured her. The wild flowers, pretty creatures, wouldn't harm it; not they. They'd fade by the winter and
become
it. Some were what they called annuals, he explained, and some perennials. The birds brought the seeds in their droppings, or the wind carried them, or the roots just wandered about of themselves. You couldn't keep them out of the fields! That was another matter. ‘You see there you had other things to mind. And with that charlock over there! …'

And still she persisted, struggling as it were in the midst of the dream vaguely hanging its shrouds in her mind, as if towards a crevice of light to come out by. And Mr Simmonds had been patience and courtesy itself. He had told her about the various chemical manures they used on the crops. That was one thing. But there was, she gathered, what was called ‘nature' in
this
stuff. It was not exactly the very life of the flowers, for that came you could not tell whence, it is the ‘virtue' in it. It and the rain and the dew was just as much and as little their life-blood – their sap – as the drink and victuals of humans and animals are. ‘If you starve a lad, ma'am, keep him from his victuals, he don't exactly flourish, do he?'

Oh yes, he agreed such facts were strange, and, as you might say almost unknowledgeable. A curious thing, too, that what to some seems just filth and waste and nastiness should be the very secret of all that is most precious in the living things of the world. But then, we don't all think alike; ‘'t wouldn't do, d'ye see?' Why, he had explained and she had listened to him as quietly as a child at school, the roots of a tree will bend at right angles after the secret waters underneath. He crooked his forefinger to show her how. And the groping hair-like filaments of the shallowest weed would turn towards a richer food in the soil. ‘We farmers couldn't do without it, ma'am.' If the nature's out of a thing, it is as good as dead and gone, for ever. Wasn't it now the ‘good-nature' in a human being that made him what he was? That and what you might call his very life. ‘Look at Nellie, there! Don't her just comfort your eye in a manner of speaking?'