The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  He came home again, nearly thirty years old, but naïve and inexperienced as a boy, only with a silence about him that was new: a sort of dumb humility before life, a fear of living. He was almost quite chaste. A strong sensitiveness had kept him from women. Sexual talk was all very well among men, but somehow it had no application to living women. There were two things for him, the idea of women, with which he sometimes debauched himself, and real women, before whom he felt a deep uneasiness, and a need to draw away. He shrank and defended himself from the approach of any woman. And then he felt ashamed. In his innermost soul he felt he was not a man, he was less than the normal man. In Genoa he went with an under officer to a drinking house where the cheaper sort of girl came in to look for lovers. He sat there with his glass, the girls looked at him, but they never came to him. He knew that if they did come he could only pay for food and drink for them, because he felt a pity for them, and was anxious lest they lacked good necessities. He could not have gone with one of them: he knew it, and was ashamed, looking with curious envy at the swaggering, easy-passionate Italian whose body went to a woman by instinctive impersonal attraction. They were men, he was not a man. He sat feeling short, feeling like a leper. And he went away imagining sexual scenes between himself and a woman, walking wrapt in this indulgence. But when the ready woman presented herself, the very fact that she was a palpable woman made it impossible for him to touch her. And this incapacity was like a core of rottenness in him.

  So several times he went, drunk, with his companions, to the licensed prostitute houses abroad. But the sordid insignificance of the experience appalled him. It had not been anything really: it meant nothing. He felt as if he were, not physically, but spiritually impotent: not actually impotent, but intrinsically so.

  He came home with this secret, never changing burden of his unknown, unbestowed self torturing him. His navy training left him in perfect physical condition. He was sensible of, and proud of his body. He bathed and used dumb-bells, and kept himself fit. He played cricket and football. He read books and began to hold fixed ideas which he got from the Fabians. He played his piccolo, and was considered an expert. But at the bottom of his soul was always this canker of shame and incompleteness: he was miserable beneath all his healthy cheerfulness, he was uneasy and felt despicable among all his confidence and superiority of ideas. He would have changed with any mere brute, just to be free of himself, to be free of this shame of self-consciousness. He saw some collier lurching straight forward without misgiving, pursuing his own satisfactions, and he envied him. Anything, he would have given anything for this spontaneity and this blind stupidity which went to its own satisfaction direct.

  IX

  He was not unhappy in the pit. He was admired by the men, and well enough liked. It was only he himself who felt the difference between himself and the others. He seemed to hide his own stigma. But he was never sure that the others did not really despise him for a ninny, as being less a man than they were. Only he pretended to be more manly, and was surprised by the ease with which they were deceived. And, being naturally cheerful, he was happy at his work. He was sure of himself there. Naked to the waist, hot and grimy with labour, they squatted on their heels for a few minutes and talked, seeing each other dimly by the light of the safety lamps, while the black coal rose jutting round them, and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low, black, very dark temple. Then the pony came and the gang-lad with a message from Number 7, or with a bottle of water from the horse-trough or some news of the world above. The day passed pleasantly enough. There was an ease, a go-as-you-please about the day underground, a delightful camaraderie of men shut off alone from the rest of the world, in a dangerous place, and a variety of labour, holing, loading, timbering, and a glamour of mystery and adventure in the atmosphere, that made the pit not unattractive to him when he had again got over his anguish of desire for the open air and the sea.

  This day there was much to do and Durant was not in humour to talk. He went on working in silence through the afternoon.

  ‘Loose-all’ came, and they tramped to the bottom. The whitewashed underground office shone brightly. Men were putting out their lamps. They sat in dozens round the bottom of the shaft, down which black, heavy drops of water fell continuously into the sump. The electric lights shone away down the main underground road.

  ‘Is it raining?’ asked Durant.

  ‘Snowing,’ said an old man, and the younger was pleased. He liked to go up when it was snowing.

  ‘It’ll just come right for Christmas,’ said the old man.

  ‘Ay,’ replied Durant.

  ‘A green Christmas, a fat churchyard,’ said the other sententiously.

  Durant laughed, showing his small, rather pointed teeth.

  The cage came down, a dozen men lined on. Durant noticed tufts of snow on the perforated, arched roof of the chain, and he was pleased. He wondered how it liked its excursion underground. But already it was getting soppy with black water.

  He liked things about him. There was a little smile on his face. But underlying it was the curious consciousness he felt in himself.

  The upper world came almost with a flash, because of the glimmer of snow. Hurrying along the bank, giving up his lamp at the office, he smiled to feel the open about him again, all glimmering round him with snow. The hills on either side were pale blue in the dusk, and the hedges looked savage and dark. The snow was trampled between the railway lines. But far ahead, beyond the black figures of miners moving home, it became smooth again, spreading right up to the dark wall of the coppice.

  To the west there was a pinkness, and a big star hovered half revealed. Below, the lights of the pit came out crisp and yellow among the darkness of the buildings, and the lights of Old Aldecross twinkled in rows down the bluish twilight.

  Durant walked glad with life among the miners, who were all talking animatedly because of the snow. He liked their company, he liked the white dusky world. It gave him a little thrill to stop at the garden gate and see the light of home down below, shining on the silent blue snow.

  X

  By the big gate of the railway, in the fence, was a little gate, that he kept locked. As he unfastened it, he watched the kitchen light that shone on to the bushes and the snow outside. It was a candle burning till night set in, he thought to himself. He slid down the steep path to the level below. He liked making the first marks in the smooth snow. Then he came through the bushes to the house. The two women heard his heavy boots ring outside on the scraper, and his voice as he opened the door:

  ‘How much worth of oil do you reckon to save by that candle, mother?’ He liked a good light from the lamp.

  He had just put down his bottle and snap-bag and was hanging his coat behind the scullery door, when Miss Louisa came upon him. He was startled, but he smiled.

  His eyes began to laugh – then his face went suddenly straight, and he was afraid.

  ‘Your mother’s had an accident,’ she said.

  ‘How?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘In the garden,’ she answered. He hesitated with his coat in his hands. Then he hung it up and turned to the kitchen.

  ‘Is she in bed?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Louisa, who found it hard to deceive him. He was silent. He went into the kitchen, sat down heavily in his father’s old chair, and began to pull off his boots. His head was small, rather finely shapen. His brown hair, close and crisp, would look jolly whatever happened. He wore heavy moleskin trousers that gave off the stale, exhausted scent of the pit. Having put on his slippers, he carried his boots into the scullery.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, afraid.

  ‘Something internal,’ she replied.

  He went upstairs. His mother kept herself calm for his coming. Louisa felt his tread shake the plaster floor of the bedroom above.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s nothing, my lad,’ said the old woman, rather hard. ‘It’s nothing. You needn’t fret, m
y boy, it’s nothing more the matter with me than I had yesterday, or last week. The doctor said I’d done nothing serious.’

  ‘What were you doing?’ asked her son.

  ‘I was pulling up a cabbage, and I suppose I pulled too hard; for, oh – there was such a pain—’

  Her son looked at her quickly. She hardened herself.

  ‘But who doesn’t have a sudden pain sometimes, my boy. We all do.’

  ‘And what’s it done?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I don’t suppose it’s anything.’

  The big lamp in the corner was screened with a dark green screen, so that he could scarcely see her face. He was strung tight with apprehension and many emotions. Then his brow knitted.

  ‘What did you go pulling your inside out at cabbages for,’ he asked, ‘and the ground frozen? You’d go on dragging and dragging, if you killed yourself.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to get them,’ she said.

  ‘You needn’t do yourself harm.’

  But they had reached futility.

  Miss Louisa could hear plainly downstairs. Her heart sank. It seemed so hopeless between them.

  ‘Are you sure it’s nothing much, mother?’ he asked, appealing, after a little silence.

  ‘Ay, it’s nothing,’ said the old woman, rather bitter.

  ‘I don’t want you to – to – to be badly – you know.’

  ‘Go an′ get your dinner,’ she said. She knew she was going to die: moreover, the pain was torture just then. ‘They’re only cosseting me up a bit because I’m an old woman. Miss Louisa’s very good – and she’ll have got your dinner ready, so you’d better go and eat it.’

  He felt stupid and ashamed. His mother put him off. He had to turn away. The pain burned in his bowels. He went downstairs. The mother was glad he was gone, so that she could moan with pain.

  He had resumed the old habit of eating before he washed himself. Miss Louisa served his dinner. It was strange and exciting to her. She was strung up tense, trying to understand him and his mother. She watched him as he sat. He was turned away from his food, looking in the fire. Her soul watched him, trying to see what he was. His black face and arms were uncouth, he was foreign. His face was masked black with coal-dust. She could not see him, she could not even know him. The brown eyebrows, the steady eyes, the coarse, small moustache above the closed mouth – these were the only familiar indications. What was he, as he sat there in his pit-dirt? She could not see him, and it hurt her.

  She ran upstairs, presently coming down with the flannels and the bran-bag, to heat them, because the pain was on again.

  He was half-way through his dinner. He put down the fork, suddenly nauseated.

  ‘They will soothe the wrench,’ she said. He watched, useless and left out.

  ‘Is she bad?’ he asked.

  ‘I think she is,’ she answered.

  It was useless for him to stir or comment. Louisa was busy. She went upstairs. The poor old woman was in a white, cold sweat of pain. Louisa’s face was sullen with suffering as she went about to relieve her. Then she sat and waited. The pain passed gradually, the old woman sank into a state of coma. Louisa still sat silent by the bed. She heard the sound of water downstairs. Then came the voice of the old mother, faint but unrelaxing:

  ‘Alfred’s washing himself – he’ll want his back washing—’

  Louisa listened anxiously, wondering what the sick woman wanted.

  ‘He can’t bear if his back isn’t washed—’ the old woman persisted, in a cruel attention to his needs. Louisa rose and wiped the sweat from the yellowish brow.

  ‘I will go down,’ she said soothingly.

  ‘If you would,’ murmured the sick woman.

  Louisa waited a moment. Mrs Durant closed her eyes, having discharged her duty. The young woman went downstairs. Herself, or the man, what did they matter? Only the suffering woman must be considered.

  Alfred was kneeling on the hearthrug, stripped to the waist, washing himself in a large panchion of earthenware. He did so every evening, when he had eaten his dinner; his brothers had done so before him. But Miss Louisa was strange in the house.

  He was mechanically rubbing the white lather on his head, with a repeated, unconscious movement, his hand every now and then passing over his neck. Louisa watched. She had to brace herself to this also. He bent his head into the water, washed it free of soap, and pressed the water out of his eyes.

  ‘Your mother said you would want your back washing,’ she said.

  Curious how it hurt her to take part in their fixed routine of life! Louisa felt the almost repulsive intimacy being forced upon her. It was all so common, so like herding. She lost her own distinctness.

  He ducked his face round, looking up at her in what was a very comical way. She had to harden herself.

  ‘How funny he looks with his face upside down,’ she thought. After all, there was a difference between her and the common people. The water in which his arms were plunged was quite black, the soap-froth was darkish. She could scarcely conceive him as human. Mechanically, under the influence of habit, he groped in the black water, fished out soap and flannel, and handed them backward to Louisa. Then he remained rigid and submissive, his two arms thrust straight in the panchion, supporting the weight of his shoulders. His skin was beautifully white and unblemished, of an opaque, solid whiteness. Gradually Louisa saw it: this also was what he was. It fascinated her. Her feeling of separateness passed away: she ceased to draw back from contact with him and his mother. There was this living centre. Her heart ran hot. She had reached some goal in this beautiful, clear, male body. She loved him in a white, impersonal heat. But the sun-burnt, reddish neck and ears: they were more personal, more curious. A tenderness rose in her, she loved even his queer ears. A person – an intimate being he was to her. She put down the towel and went upstairs again, troubled in her heart. She had only seen one human being in her life – and that was Mary. All the rest were strangers. Now her soul was going to open, she was going to see another. She felt strange and pregnant.

  ‘He’ll be more comfortable,’ murmured the sick woman abstractedly, as Louisa entered the room. The latter did not answer. Her own heart was heavy with its own responsibility. Mrs Durant lay silent awhile, then she murmured plaintively:

  ‘You mustn’t mind, Miss Louisa.’

  ‘Why should I?’ replied Louisa, deeply moved.

  ‘It’s what we’re used to,’ said the old woman.

  And Louisa felt herself excluded again from their life. She sat in pain, with the tears of disappointment distilling her heart. Was that all?

  Alfred came upstairs. He was clean, and in his shirt-sleeves. He looked a workman now. Louisa felt that she and he were foreigners, moving in different lives. It dulled her again. Oh, if she could only find some fixed relations, something sure and abiding.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he said to his mother.

  ‘It’s a bit better,’ she replied wearily, impersonally. This strange putting herself aside, this abstracting herself and answering him only what she thought good for him to hear, made the relations between mother and son poignant and cramping to Miss Louisa. It made the man so ineffectual, so nothing. Louisa groped as if she had lost him. The mother was real and positive – he was not very actual. It puzzled and chilled the young woman.

  ‘I’d better fetch Mrs Harrison?’ he said, waiting for his mother to decide.

  ‘I suppose we shall have to have somebody,’ she replied.

  Miss Louisa stood by, afraid to interfere in their business. They did not include her in their lives, they felt she had nothing to do with them, except as a help from outside. She was quite external to them. She felt hurt and powerless against this unconscious difference. But something patient and unyielding in her made her say:

  ‘I will stay and do the nursing: you can’t be left.’

  The other two were shy, and at a loss for an answer.

  ‘Wes’ll manage to get somebody,’ said the
old woman wearily. She did not care very much what happened, now.

  ‘I will stay until tomorrow, in any case,’ said Louisa. ‘Then we can see.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve no right to trouble yourself,’ moaned the old woman. But she must leave herself in any hands.

  Miss Louisa felt glad that she was admitted, even in an official capacity. She wanted to share their lives. At home they would need her, now Mary had come. But they must manage without her.

  ‘I must write a note to the vicarage,’ she said.

  Alfred Durant looked at her inquiringly, for her service. He had always that intelligent readiness to serve, since he had been in the Navy. But there was a simple independence in his willingness, which she loved. She felt nevertheless it was hard to get at him. He was so deferential, quick to take the slightest suggestion of an order from her, implicitly, that she could not get at the man in him.

  He looked at her very keenly. She noticed his eyes were golden brown, with a very small pupil, the kind of eyes that can see a long way off. He stood alert, at military attention. His face was still rather weather-reddened.

  ‘Do you want pen and paper?’ he asked, with deferential suggestion to a superior, which was more difficult for her than reserve.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

  He turned and went downstairs. He seemed to her so self-contained, so utterly sure in his movement. How was she to approach him? For he would take not one step towards her. He would only put himself entirely and impersonally at her service, glad to serve her, but keeping himself quite removed from her. She could see he felt real joy in doing anything for her, but any recognition would confuse him and hurt him. Strange it was to her, to have a man going about the house in his shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his throat bare, waiting on her. He moved well, as if he had plenty of life to spare. She was attracted by his completeness. And yet, when all was ready, and there was nothing more for him to do, she quivered, meeting his questioning look.