III
She had come to the outskirts of a town, and was walking towards the river down a steep alley, while the perambulator tugged at her wrists as though it were eager to tip its burden into the water. During her journey, she became aware of a hum of voices behind her back, and heard the rapid ringing of a fire-bell. She had been going to the river: but here was a fire. So she turned her perambulator; and, allowing its handle to push against her breast, ascended into the glaring dusk of a day that never had been very light.
She emerged from the mouth of the alley with her face shining. A fine scheme was forming in her head; but the countless units of her thought were like the sparks that drifted and tossed above her, brief visions that came, and went, and made room for more. She was carried along by the hurrying crowd, she was surrounded by rough, indefinite voices that asked a thousand questions at the corner of the old church of St Mary’s. And presently she looked on something that was brighter than a vision, and louder than a voice; that whirled his tortured red arms above and before her, and cracked his crimson fingers, and threaded them through the house.
A burning house. A tall house where the roof and upper windows had already fallen in. It stood upon the corner of a timber-yard; and, when she turned her head, Mrs Sayce could see that some of the falling debris was burning too.
Her fine scheme now came fully into flower. ‘Better than the river,’ she was thinking, ‘better than the river.’ She wanted to see some expression of approval crack or wrinkle the stiff, still surface of the magenta mask. There was a street that rose in a half-circle round the timber-yard, as a staircase mounts and circles the hall of a house. When she had come to the top of it, Mrs Sayce found herself in the company of children mustering their guys. Clutching at her plaid shawl, she tried to count the goblin creatures that were passing on every hand. The glow of the fire seemed to invest each one of them with a peculiar detachment: pink guys, blue guys, yellow guys, green guys, black guys and snowy guys, stout guys and starving guys, guys that were bright as a blessing, and guys that were grim as a curse; and they seemed to talk and laugh with one another, to hold deep conversation, to nod their masked and portentous faces as the wheels of the perambulators went round.
Two or three of the bolder children were moving towards the crazy wooden fence that skirted the brink of the yard. Elsewhere, she could hear the hissing of the engines, and could see their columns of stiff, glittering water, steady as beams of moonlight. Near her, two people were talking. The voices were hushed, and awed, yet tinged with shocked enjoyment; from them, she learnt that a woman had perished in the fire, whilst her boy had been saved. ‘There. Bless ’er ’eart!’ ‘Pore innercent kid.’ Mrs Sayce tightened her fingers round the handle of the perambulator, and began to cry.
She did not know that she was crying. She knew only that the goal was near. Bertie himself would have come up to this fence, searching—searching—for a gap through which he could drop his guy. A fierce light shone above the jagged top of the palings. She looked about her, and saw that the guys, riding up in their prams, and barrows, and boxes on wheels, were being hurled already (as light as straw, and a few old clothes, were they!) over the wooden fencing, and into the timber-yard below. ‘Run away, you boys! You can’t stand there!’ She heard the voices of policemen, the cries of disappointment from the boys and girls. A wind sprang up, a wisp of hair tapped her on the cheek, and Mrs Sayce shivered in her shawl. She crept away, and, mounting the street to a spot where the crowd was thinner, lifted her Guy out of its pram. There was a crimson gap in the fencing. She tried to approach nearer, but the heat stopped her. Everywhere she could hear the voices of children; the thump of the axes; men calling, and the fire hissing. In the middle of it all, a heavy footstep came, and Mrs Sayce turned her head.
When the colour of the policeman’s sharp, red face, and the stillness of his helmet, had reached into her mind, she did not know what to do. She may have been an artful one in her back-yard at home, but now all her cunning deserted her, and she did not know what to do. What could she do? She hugged her arms about the Guy. But the policeman took it from her, and the policeman lifted it up. . . .
He lifted it up, and Bertie’s mother cried in her heart: ‘If only his eyes could peep through, now! If only Bertie’s eyes could peep through the mask, and see me, for one last moment, standing here!’
But there was no one to help her. All her senses were strangely acute. She could see everything very exactly; very crimson in the light of the fire. She could hear the whole world humming, near and far. The clucking of the hen in Hannibal Terrace. Yet everything around her was very still.
Everything except this man who was standing before her; whose slight, slow movements were bringing the day to its appointed end. He lifted it up, the tiny, delusive, goblin bundle, that surely was too heavy to be stuffed with straw.
‘Oh, Mister! Mister!’
The policeman muttered: ‘Lord o’ mercy, what a heavy guy!’
‘Mister! Mister!’
‘Lord o’ mercy, what a heavy Guy!’
And as she raised her hands to Heaven, he began to take the mask off Mrs Sayce’s Guy.
Expectation of Life
‘SARAH’S a hundred. Just on.’ It sounded unbelievable. It took your breath away. ‘Three weeks from now, and Sarah will be a hundred.’ Think of it! Even Emma Trustworthy, Sarah’s sister, monstrously old herself, acknowledged that the event was an exceptional one—important—historic. Only another three weeks, and Sarah, bless her heart, will be a hundred. And there will be a bit about it in the daily papers, and merrymaking (except, perhaps, for poor old Sarah), and presents from the scattered members of the family, and—grandest of all—a telegram from the King.
After a week that seemed a hundred years, the house was saying: ‘It’s only a fortnight now.’ Old Sarah was living with her son-in-law, Bob Bartlett, whose wife Lily had insisted that Sarah’s maiden sister, Emma Trustworthy, should also make her home amongst them. ‘You’ve got your hands full, Bob!’ his friends were saying, remembering that in addition to these ancient relatives he had an ageing, ill-tempered, unmarried daughter living permanently at home, and a jolly son who stayed with them for weeks on end between his bouts of employment; but Bob only rubbed his hands together, and everybody realised at once that he was essentially a family man and that he had the situation well in hand. Young Bartlett, gone forty and looking it, was at home even now, cracking his jokes, hobnobbing with his father, bowing to Emma Trustworthy, falling in step with Lily’s simple earnestness. ‘Mother a hundred in fourteen days!’ Looking at Lily’s face (smooth and oval still, and dark-skinned, like the whole of her late father’s family), one was momentarily hurt by its sudden folds and furrows that seemed to express the anxiety with which the entire house awaited the fulfilment of Sarah’s hundredth birthday.
‘Let her sleep as much as she wants!’ they said.
‘Don’t forget her barley-water!’
‘Keep her as warm as we can, mind you!’
‘A fire in her room!’
‘A fire always burning in her room!’
Yes indeed. After all, the main thing is to look after Sarah, they said. It was winter, and Bob was lavish with his coal. Flames shot up the bedroom chimney so loudly that Emma Trustworthy, sitting with her hands on her knees beside the black, fluted chimney-piece, shuddered and muttered and was reminded of her Bible and of the world to come. ‘Mercy me, you don’t believe in that!’ cried Hilda Bartlett one evening, over her shoulder, and Bob laughed. Bob was a loud, nervous, hearty laugher, and his manner of laughing was non-committal; he showered his outbreaks of merriment equally upon the opposing parties, he even produced the effect that he was laughing at himself. Hilda, ill-tempered and ageing, did not resemble her father in any particular, except that during these endless days she, too, was strung up to breaking-point, anxiously awaiting the centenary of old Sarah. She had brought in the barley-water, and her mother’s dark, slender hands were once more smo
othing down the quilt.
Ceaselessly and extravagantly, from morning till night, the members of the Bartlett household cherished the person who was to bring them a little temporary fame. They sat and talked to her, and read to her, mouthing at the tops of their voices, and when she fell asleep they watched the rising and falling of her sunken chest. Sometimes in the small hours she was wakeful, but seldom peevish, for there were always hands to come and turn the pillow or to light the gas ring, there was never long to wait for something warm and soothing for her inside. She took her engrossing, coming event with a sly humour. ‘Like waiting for a birth!’ she told them, stretching her mouth in laughter, and exhibiting those few teeth that had resolved to see her through to the end. Then everybody laughed and said: ‘Without the danger, though! Without the danger!’ They listened several times a day to the story of her voyage to Van Diemen’s Land in a sailing-ship. Young Bartlett was always ready for that: ‘You mean Tasmania, Ma’am!’—but she insisted: ‘No! Van Diemen’s Land! Van Diemen’s Land!’
Especially her lifelong vices, tobacco and alcohol, were not withheld from old Sarah during that tense fortnight. Her daughter Lily objected to this, and searched high and low for the Medical Dictionary; but Bob had hidden the book from everyone’s eyes save his own; meanwhile young Bartlett had great pleasure in lighting his grandmother’s cigarettes, in pouring out her whisky, almost neat.
‘Don’t you worry, Ma,’ said Bob to Lil, ‘she’s used to drinking and she’s used to smoking, and if you cut ’em off she’s as dead as nits.’
To strengthen his words, he fetched his book on centenarians (centurions, he called them, humorously), and pointed out that some of them had smoked and that others had not, that some had drunk water all their lives and others whisky neat.
‘Cigarettes? Whisky? Nice red lobster?’ he declaimed.
‘La, la!’
‘They’ll be killing you with kindness, Mother!’
‘Eh?’
‘They’ll—be—killing—you—’
‘I bet ye’d like to, the whole lot of ye!’ quacked Sarah loudly, ‘when all’s over!’ There was a metallic ring about her voice that got on the nerves and ran like bell-wires through the house.
Young Bartlett was treating it all in the grand manner, drenching it with the rays of publicity. He was becoming open-handed. He took his father to the Rose and Crown, sprawled magnificently on the high pub-stool, drank from the bottom of the tankard’s heart to ‘Old Methewselah’ so that all could hear. He spoke as though he were scarcely one of the family; as though he were generously concerned in watching a friend wax impressively old. He looked and spoke like a convivial schoolmaster—an older, thinner, shrewder edition of his father.
Hilda Bartlett grew very sweet-tempered during this anxious time. ‘Poor old thing. I wonder what it feels like to be a hundred,’ she murmured, with wide, wistful eyes; in contrast to the sleeping woman in front of her, she felt romantically young.
Only Emma Trustworthy held back from these demonstrations of hope and anxiety. ‘A birth, did she say? Well, bless me soul, she’s right! You’d think it was a birth, with all this fuss going on, and “Where’s the barley-water?”, “Keep the fire in!”, and I don’t know what!’ Emma’s heavy jowls would glisten and flicker all day long in the firelight, while she sat in thought beside the chimney-piece, with her hunched shoulders draped in her shawl and her mittened hands lying in her lap. There she was, a figure of brooding, nearly as old as her sister, yet with that sufficient inferiority of years that made her a burden to the house instead of a heroine.
One day she could stand it no longer. She reminded them of the nearness of her own centenary.
‘I’m ninety-seven and a half. In less than three years I’ll be a hundred! Jest think o’ that! D’ye hear me?’ she croaked.
Hear her? Lord save us, are we all deaf? Bob Bartlett fetched a Commercial Guide from the bookcase, and read aloud to her the Mortality Table, or The Expectation of Life.
‘Now, just you listen to this, Auntie,’ he said. ‘It’s as plain as your fist. When a man reaches the age of fifty, he can expect to live another twenty years, or, in other words, he’ll die at the age of seventy; and when he’s reached the age of sixty he has another fourteen years to live—only six years less than t’other chap—and should die when he’s seventy-four; but if he reaches seventy-four—no more than fourteen years beyond sixty, mark you—he’s only got another seven years to live instead of fourteen—you see how quickly it dwindles, don’t you
‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with me!’ cried Emma Trustworthy, refusing to be bewildered by the expounding of The Mortality Table.
‘You will soon,’ said Bob, ‘it’s as clear as your fist. Now, just you listen to this, Auntie, for it concerns you and it concerns Sarah. At ninety-seven—which is what you are, isn’t it, not counting odd months?—you’ve got another year and a half to live, according to the book, so you’ll never live to see a hundred, and at a hundred—which is just on her age—Sarah’s got another year to live, so the book tells me. And what does that mean, if the book’s right? It means that you’ll be dead and buried at ninety-eight and a half, mark you, and that Sarah will live to a hundred and one, you see if she doesn’t!’
‘How can I see, if I’m dead and buried?’ snapped Emma Trustworthy.
A week before the birthday, Bob dashed off to the village where Sarah was born. ‘I’ll get the villagers to pray for her,’ he said to Lily, stooping over his thickest pair of boots and rubbing the black polish generously into the cracks; ‘I’ll get the Parson to pray that she makes it.’
At these words, the fear that had been lurking for some days in the hearts of the Bartletts now flushed up into their faces, and every eye was asking: ‘Will she make it? Will old Sarah make it?’ Yet she had never been so fit in the whole of her life, never so vivid, never so sharp on the uptake, never so graphic when telling the story of her journey under full sail to Van Diemen’s Land.
They were grouped around her—all but the absent Bob, and Emma, sitting by the chimney-corner—Lily, Hilda, young Bartlett, and three or four minor members of the family, down for the day; they were grouped around Sarah, shouting at her, laughing with her, contradicting her in the boldest and most engaging fashion, when in burst Bob, his face alight with news.
‘Well, Grannie,’ he chirruped, ‘what d’you think? What do you think?’
‘Nothing good of you, I can tell ye!’
The kettle sang on the hob.
‘You’re a hundred and one!’ he roared, blurting it; out. ‘I looked it up in the village book. A hundred and one—just on! Gosh! Did you ever hear such a thing?’
As soon as these words had passed successfully down the ear-trumpet, the very old lady struggled to the knobs of her elbows, and stared in bewilderment at the circle of major and minor Bartletts. Everyone was still, except old Emma, lost in thought, stretching out her hands to the blaze.
‘Mother’s gone!’ cried Lily Bartlett suddenly, pressing her hand to her side.
Indeed she was. The heart’s blood had refused to flow in tune with Sarah’s shifted mental current, and within an hour she was dead.
Dr Morncroft rubbed his hands together noiselessly, only too glad to be able to record on his certificate such a ripe age. Three days later they buried Sarah. They buried the coffin in flowers. Outwardly it was a fine funeral, almost a gay one; inwardly, it fell flat. She had missed a hundred; she had failed by a week to reach a hundred and one. As though ashamed, the hymns crept through the chapel; at intervals the Bartletts rocked their heads, and sang; but Emma Trustworthy, wrapped in fluttering thoughts, in calculations running far into the future, was deaf to the ceremonial voices.
Two days after Sarah’s funeral, young Bartlett found work as a seedsman’s traveller. ‘Consider the lilies of the field’ he murmured, kissing his mother, nudging his father, winking at Hilda, bowing profoundly to Emma Trustworthy, hoping that she would never, never die. It was
a dark morning, with the lights all over the house, and Emma, feeling restless and agitated after her nephew had gone, trudged into the garden, and found Bob.
‘D’ye see? D’ye see?’ she cried into the murkiness. ‘I was always too and a half years younger than pore Sarah. And so, when you found that Sarah was a year older than we all thought, why then, that brought me up a year too, didn’t it? It makes me ninety-eight and a half, Bob! Fancy that! And you said I had another year and a half to live, so I’ll reach a hundred after all!’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Bob, scratching his head. ‘Now, just you wait a minute, Auntie. Come indoors. We’ll take a squint at the book.’
There was gas in the house. The flames sang, giving out an impatient sound. Bob took down the book, and read for a space, and cleared his throat, and tapped his knuckle on the passage in question.
‘What did I tell you? Listen to what it says—it’s as clear as your fist—“Ninety-seven: expectation of life—one and a half years; ninety-eight: expectation of life—one year; and ditto up to the age of a hundred.” So you see, Auntie, you won’t reach a hundred, even now.’
‘I will! I will!’
‘Do as you like about it. But even if you live to be a hundred, what’s the use? It’s a hundred and one we want. A hundred and one, mark you, a hundred and one!’
Emma, poor body, laid it to heart; and when she goes to bed, she tosses and turns on her pillow, restlessly visualising the one over a hundred, wearing herself to a shadow, taking years off her life.
Written With My Left Hand Page 15