The situation was plainly impossible. On the one hand, Hunt could not be made to buy himself new clothes if he had no money. On the other, he was as plainly an eyesore in the present coat – and Mr Borlase had by his own act destroyed it. He was a man of quick decisions. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Mr Peters! Take the floor please,’ and he pushed Hunt by the elbow to the staircase which led to the upper storeys.
The first floor was occupied by Mr Borlase and his family. At the end of a corridor was a wide hanging-cupboard, with sliding doors. Searching in this, Mr Borlase found a long-discarded frock-coat of his own. ‘Put that on,’ he said sternly. ‘And don’t let me see you disgracing my shop any more. How many men do you think would take the coat off their own backs to clothe you?’
Hunt broke into thanks: it is likely that this simple fellow was actually grateful for the thing thus flung to him. He walked homeward buoyantly at tea time, full of excitement and eager to show this great acquisition to Mary.
But something chilled him as he opened the door. Mary would have been in the passage at the first sound of his latch-key, ordinarily. The place was empty, now, and a strange hat hung on a walking-stick leaning against the casing of the parlour door.
So the hour had come, and the guinea was wanted already! He ran hurriedly upstairs to the bedroom. The doctor pushed him from the door, and came out on the landing with him. ‘You can’t come in, just yet,’ he said.
‘When was she “taken”?’ John asked.
‘About two o’clock, I understand. The woman happened to be with her, and has just fetched me.’
‘How long—’
‘Oh, an hour more yet I expect. All very nicely: no cause for alarm. Just keep quiet, and don’t disturb her, there’s a good fellow: it’s all you can do.’
He pushed the reluctant John to the stair-head and re-entered the bedroom with a quick movement. Hunt crept downstairs, and choked over his tea: then rushed back to the shop. He had brought the old coat on his arm, and laid it carefully over the stair-railing. It could still be mended, and would do for house wear.
He made several mistakes that night: but as this concerned only himself (who had to ferret out and rectify them) it had no other effect than to keep him a little later than nine o’clock before he could leave. He ran home, and arrived panting. The frowsy charwoman met him in the passage.
‘There, it’s a good job you’ve come,’ she said. ‘She’s been a-askin’ for you. It’s a boy. You can come up and speak to her, a minute, but you mustn’t stop long. She’s got to have her sleep. Then you can go and get me my beer. There isn’t a drop in the ’ouse.’
Mary only lifted her eyes when he pressed his lips to her damp brow. She did not speak.
‘Let me see him,’ he whispered.
She turned back a corner of the quilt, where a shapeless face, inconceivably small, inconceivably red, lay on her arms. John stooped and kissed the scant, silky, black hair. The child threw up a tiny open hand, seizing the finger with which he touched it. A great emotion mastered and silenced him, and he stooped to kiss the baby finger-nails. Mary smiled again and closed her eyes.
V
Hunt fared irregularly during the next few days. His work, as it happened, was rather heavy – heavier than usual – and the accident saved him some anxious thoughts, for full hours are short hours. Every now and then, though, as he moved on some errand of his labour, came a new experience – the joy of sudden recollection. There was a baby! The remembrance gave him a fresh thrill of happiness each time that it recurred. An hour, each night, he sat alone with his wife in the bed-room, gazing silently at the little head, just hidden by the flannel it was wrapped in. They dared not speak, lest the child should rouse – and indeed, Mary was hardly strong enough to talk yet, though she described herself, in a whisper, as ‘getting on famous’.
The charwoman departed early in each evening, now, and John slept, secretly, on the landing, that he might hear his wife’s call, if she should need him in the night. He was supposed to lie on a couch in that mathematical-looking parlour, the use of which was so rigidly confined to Sunday afternoons: but this was a myth, loyally concealed by the charwoman, who was spared the trouble of a bed-making by the inscrutable whim of her patient’s husband. He caught a severe cold in the process, which was not surprising.
Mary’s progress did not satisfy the doctor. Ten days showed little or no recovery of strength. He ordered beef tea, and John provided it. But no success attended this time-honoured prescription. Possibly it was not skillfully prepared: anyway the patient grew worse. On Wednesday at dinner time, John found the doctor waiting for him. ‘I don’t like the looks of your wife, Mr Hunt,’ he said, bluntly. ‘She isn’t picking up as fast as we should wish. I should like her to have some beef essence – a small quantity, every two hours.’
‘What, Liebig?’ asked John.
‘No, no, not Liebig: essence, not extract. It is a kind of jelly. You get it at the chemists: lot of nourishment in a small space – very easily assimilated, you know.’
John didn’t know, but he neglected his dinner and hurried to the drug stores. ‘Fifteen pence,’ said the man at the counter; and John’s heart sank at the smallness of the tin that was handed him. On his return he met the landlord, demanding the rent. Three more visits to the chemists, at one and threepence, left him, by Thursday night, with an empty pocket; and there was only enough food in the house for the charwoman’s meals next day. At noon on Friday he found the doctor in the house again.
‘She has had no beef to-day I find,’ said the man of science in reply to John’s interrogative look. ‘And she is sinking, besides. She must have a teaspoonful of brandy every two hours, as well as the essence: if you can, give her a few grapes.’ He hurried off before John could recover his self-possession: for many shilling visits must be comprised in a day, by the small general practitioner who would make a living in Camberwell.
John sat down on the stairs in blank misery. He had not a farthing; and Mary was upstairs – perhaps – perhaps dying! He leaned on the wall for support – being weak with hunger himself – and his hat fell off. This reminded him that he was sitting on his coat tails, which would be creased, and he rose, unsteadily. The coat! It was his only removable asset; and Mary was dying. They had never used the pawnshop; but the coat had been a good one, and would certainly fetch a loan – half a sovereign, perhaps, thought the inexperienced John. He went into the kitchen, took down his old coat from its nail, and with needle and cotton hastily repaired the torn binding. Then he ran to the pawnbrokers, whence he emerged, after an interval rich in contumely, with three shillings (less a penny for the ticket) extracted with difficulty from the scornful Hebrew in the little box. But two and elevenpence produced two tins of beef, half a quartern of brandy, and a half-penny roll; the situation, for the moment, was saved.
He was late at the shop and was rebuked for it. Mr Borlase had been awaiting him, having an official appointment to keep. He had to meet his fellow Guardians and the Watch Committee.
VI
Mrs Hunt had rallied a little by night fall, and was reported ‘decidedly better’ by the doctor next morning. John began to be more hopeful; and he had breakfasted, also, the charwoman having brought in a loaf.
After dinner-time John took up his duties (this being Saturday) as shop walker, privately resolving to make the most of tea at Borlase’s. Presently the customary rush of business set in, absorbing all his attention. He did not see that Mr Borlase was eyeing him with a puzzled air, as if he missed something. He did not see either that the fat woman who had gone empty away a fortnight since, entered the shop, and that the sight of her woke up a sudden recollection in his proprietor, who looked over her substantial shoulders at John with a highly unfriendly eye.
VII
A few hours later, he was at home, in the bare kitchen – his chin resting on one hand and his vacant glance fixed on the window opposite.
He had sat there an hour – his mind blank, save for
the one dull impression of misery. The detail of his trouble was absent from his thoughts: only the dull, aching consequence of it remained.
Mr Borlase has paid the assistants as usual, checked the cash and received the accounts in silence. But when the shop was empty and dark he had turned upon Hunt in fury.
‘What the devil do you mean, by turning up on a Saturday again, in those scarecrow clothes?’ he had asked. ‘Eh? What the hell do you mean by it? Didn’t I take my coat off my own back to give you, eh? And you, you ungrateful hound, you come to me that figure, to disgrace me! What do you mean by it? Where’s my coat?’
‘I’m very sorry, sir, I shall have it—’
‘Where’s my coat, I ask you?’
‘If you’ll let me explain, sir, I – you see my wife—’
‘Where’s my coat?’
‘I was about to explain, sir. I—’
‘Where’s my coat?’
‘I – I’ve put it away sir: I have pledged it.’
Mr Borlase staggered.
‘You pledged it! You pledged my coat! You—’
‘My wife was dying, sir: and I had to get—’
‘You pledged my coat! The coat I gave you! … Not a word! Not a word! You have stolen my coat. That is what it amounts to. I’ve a great mind to give you into custody. It’s a gross breach of confidence. A great many men would have given you into custody before this. Well, well! So it has come to this! Very well, Mr Blasted Hunt. You have pawned my property; well, this is the end. You can take a week’s notice, and go: go, you THIEF!’ It was with difficulty that the angry Borlase abstained from physical assault.
Hunt had slunk away, the disgraceful epithet burning in his ears. But the scene, that he had lived over again and again in the interval, was almost forgotten now. In a week he would be out of work. In a week, Mary must starve; this was the one dull agony that obscured all other consciousness. A leaking gutter-spout outside dripped – dop – dop – dop – on the stones; the recurrent sound impressed itself dully on his brain. Even the questions: ‘How can I tell her? How long can I keep it from her?’ had passed away. His mind was empty of thought – it could only ache.
The dog crept up to him and licked his hand. He started up. Yes! In two weeks’ time they would be parted; they would have to go into the workhouse.
And Mr Borlase was a Guardian of the Poor.
Joseph Conrad
Amy Foster
Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay. The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which defends it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes use of the anchoring-ground a mile and a half due north from you as you stand at the back door of the Ship Inn in Brenzett. A dilapidated windmill nearby lifting its shattered arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish-heap, and a Martello tower squatting at the water’s edge half a mile to the south of the Coast-guard cottages, are familiar to the skippers of small craft. These are the official sea-marks for the patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend ‘mud and shells’ over all.
The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice – from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery.
A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds – thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting high in the dog-cart, I could hear Kennedy’s laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive eyes. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales.
One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low brick cottage, with diamond panes in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed, long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge: ‘How’s your child, Amy?’
I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
‘He’s well, thank you.’
We trotted again. ‘A young patient of yours,’ I said; and the doctor, flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, ‘Her husband used to be.’
‘She seems a dull creature,’ I remarked listlessly.
‘Precisely,’ said Kennedy. ‘She is very passive. It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind – an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She’s the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father – a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads – over all our heads …’
The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportio
ns. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter’s whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed.
‘She’s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs Smith, the tenant’s wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don’t know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs Smith, to Mr Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs Smith’s grey parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith’s well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties. If it’s true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 52