by H. E. Bates
He began with equal care to unlock drawers, take out papers and read through them. Here were details, often in Henrietta’s handwriting, of sales and dealings, the Government and Local Authority orders relating to swine-fever, particulars of lime, the depth of the pit, the correct method of burial, the statement of compensation he had received, long envelopes with official marks on them; sealing-wax, old pens and string; dust that rose and settled elsewhere in a brownish bloom. The smell he most disliked, that of old papers, mould, decay and dust, escaped from everything. There would be stillness, then a rustle of papers, then stillness again. And all the time he would think how distasteful and unnecessary all accounts and papers were.
He looked up at the dark sky. Everything had a still dignified and beautiful appearance. In the candle-light his face was yellow and looked ill. Yet he did not feel either ill, sleepy or depressed.
As soon as he became inactive questions assailed him again.
‘Have you provided for Henrietta? How much is there?’
‘There should be a hundred and fifteen pounds,’ he thought in answer to this.
From the bottom of the bureau he took out a bag. A hundred and fifteen pounds – it was something. On such a sum he had first rented the farm. He felt an odd pleasure at the remembrance of this. Then suddenly it struck him that never since the death of his father had he possessed more than this sum. Often it had been less, but never more. And now, at the end of his life, it was still the same.
He emptied the money from its leather bag, spread it out in the candlelight and began to count it. At ‘forty-two … forty-three,’ he stopped to listen, and whether because of this break or not he found suddenly, at ‘eighty-four … eighty-five’ that the end of the notes had come. He thought at once: ‘Eighty-five! There’s some mistake. I’ve counted wrong. It can’t be!’
He commenced to recount the notes and this time, though a chill had seized him and his fingers quivered, counted without a break. But still at eighty-five the notes ended. He pushed the candle brusquely further away from him and crouched over the bureau.
As he counted, his thin, greyish legs, protruding like bones from beneath his night-shirt, tottered; his hands could not move fast enough; his wet lips stuttered pathetically.
And again and again the end of the notes would come at eighty-five, even at eighty-seven, but never more.
And each time he would tell himself, ‘There’s some mistake,’ or ‘Henrietta’s kept some back, she has hidden it!’
Doubt, anger, fear, and then misery and dejection overcame him. When he had woken up in the darkness he had been afraid, like a child, of mysterious and menacing shapes of which the meaning was unknown. Now he was afraid of something realistic and undeniable.
‘I have not provided for Henrietta, what have I been thinking about?’
He began to grope for something by which to justify this negligence, but only fell to abusing himself. ‘You are an old fool! All this while you’ve lived there’s nothing saved – now you’re to come out and do God knows what to keep yourself alive.’
Alive! How long must this be! How long must he wait?
His hands were clammy and cold, draughts blew beneath his shirt. What was all this about death, why did he think of it now? In this room it was cold, silent; he was shut in, as if buried, with the records of his slovenly business, his failures and the calm, as if critical, portraits of his wife, his relatives and himself staring at him. What would his wife have thought, what would he himself as he was in that photograph, have thought of this old, shrunken and hopeless figure in nightshirt and stockings, in the candlelight? And again what would this figure think if it could see the figure of the future? And he imagined himself lying on the bed, shrunken and faded, the white hair and the white beard still, as he had heard it said, growing a little after death, but the rest of him, the soul of him, vanished, evaporated and forgotten.
His eyes fell on the money. Stroking his beard with damp fingers he kept asking himself: ‘What mistake have I made?’
And then in this position of cold, weary despondency it seemed to him that all he had done or even tried to do was a mistake, his life was a mistake. He had worked hard but had managed everything badly. Twice his wheat had been blighted, his potatoes had had a disease, he lost two horses and swine-fever had visited him.
‘I haven’t done a thing, I haven’t provided for Henrietta. I have lost twenty-five pounds and the farm. I’m worn out.’
He became conscious suddenly of the thought of illness lurking in the not far distance. He got up – he must go back to bed. What time was it? How long since he woke?
He swayed on his feet and the thought of illness came into the near distance. From this he felt himself shrink as from something cold and ghastly. Signs of what was about to happen were evident in an ominous shudder of the candle-flame, the reeling sky, the distorted faces looking out of the portraits on the walls.
He felt he must be sick. With equal certainty he felt that he must open the door, get back to bed and wait for the spasm to pass. Yet he did neither. Suddenly blackness, like all his former blacknesses, damp and revolving, came and enveloped him like a sack.
To struggle against this blackness Israel clutched the bureau, made a choking sound, looked with upturned, whitish eyes at the dark sky and the portraits on the walls, and then sank to his knees. His breathing became a rattle, and as in the orchard and under the birch-tree he was cold all over and could not lift his head.
Once more the red ball of his childhood rolled by; this time it seemed hot, though he never caught it, and only once came near it. And this was when it turned upon him like an animal when pursued, and attacked him. It struck his forehead and there, for the rest of his existence, in darkness or not, continued to burn a pain against which he kept crying appealingly, but in vain:
‘Let me alone! Let me alone, for God’s sake!’
These same words were on his lips when Henrietta found him in the morning. It was daylight when she found him, the sun was shining through the window and the candle was burning in the sunshine.
XII
It was evening. On the meadows, on the hillside, the orchard, the roofs and the spire, in the village, the sun was still shining. A gentle suffused light lay also over the pale walls, the ceiling, the red counterpane of the bed in which Israel lay waiting for death.
The sun was creeping across one corner of the room. All that Israel could see of nature was this sunshine, the heads of some tall poplars through the window, and the dim, blue sky of evening. And on each of these, in turn, his eyes came wearily to rest. His pale, naive-looking eyes wandered tirelessly.
It was silent. At length footsteps approached, and in a moment Henrietta, alone, came in. He turned his washed-out gaze upon her. She returned this stare by a look which it seemed to him said: ‘Why didn’t you listen to me?’
He turned away, thought feebly: ‘Why must she look at me like that?’ and then asked in a whisper:
‘What day is it?’
‘It’s Sunday,’ she answered.
‘Why haven’t you gone to church?’
There was no answer. Having listened for a long time, he asked himself: ‘Why didn’t she answer me?’ or was it that she did answer but that he heard nothing?
It did not matter, he hated church. He fell to watching the sun on the walls again, playing with a button on his shirt and listening. Henrietta moved about the foot of the bed. Presently it seemed to him that he heard something, and he said:
‘Who’s down there?’
‘It’s Timothy Cooper,’ she said.
‘The carpenter?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What does he want?’
Towards the end of each conversation his voice and hearing grew perceptibly feebler, a blank came, and he lay fencing with the pain the ball had made when striking his head. Whenever the two faculties returned it seemed to him that he must at once ask some question. This time he asked:
‘W
ho else is there?’
‘Nobody else.’
‘I heard somebody. Who’s been?’ he persisted.
She came to him, touched his hair, and said: ‘You must keep quiet. Only Mark Summers has been, and Sep Thomas and his wife.’
‘Why have they been?’
‘They came to see you.’
‘I don’t want them.’
And he thought: ‘When I was all right they never used to come. Nobody used to come. Now when it’s no use they all come.’
All this he intended saying and with bitterness, but the words never reached his lips. Instead he watched the sun, the poplars, the pattern of Henrietta’s pinafore and the sky. All this was done feebly, spiritlessly, only his eyes turning.
His breathing was heavy. He kept licking his lips. What thoughts he had were like these two movements – laboured and repeated again and again. Sometimes they were confused and were of fallen trees, bottles of brandy, letters, harness, a chopper and a silver-birch. Often they were meaningless.
One thought like the pain the scorching ball had made never went away. This was of the money he had got up and counted in the middle of the night. He came to think of this money as being more important, more agonising than even the pain was. In his feeble manner he tried to reproach himself, kept failing, could not remember why he wished to be reproachful, and fretted because he could not remember.
At last he thought: ‘I’ve left it long enough. I must do something.’ He tried to catch sight of Henrietta’s face at the window, and when he did catch sight of it found that she gazed at him absently, with full, shining eyes out of which she tried to smile. But her smile was pathetic and in vain. He felt sorry for her.
‘She’s blaming herself,’ he thought. ‘But no one’s to blame. If I’d taken notice of her and been careful it wouldn’t have been any different.’
At that very moment he recalled, for no reason at all, the fir-tree standing alone in the middle of the copse, and he muttered: ‘That fir-tree – did anyone fetch it down?’
Henrietta came near, shaking her head, and he saw her eyes were shining with something wet. He gazed at her and repeated:
‘That fir-tree?’
As soon as he said this he forgot it again. The thought of the money began to return, to obsess, to fret him, finally to hurt him. He longed to be set free from it as he had never wished to be freed from anything.
Yet he knew that it was inevitable, that he had brought it upon himself and now must face it. So he said, in a low voice:
‘There’s something in the next room. I want to look at it.’
He thought she would understand. He watched her depart, listened for the sounds of the door, her feet, the bureau-spring. How long she seemed! Just so long and dreary seemed the days and the nights through which he had lain there, his beard growing whiter and longer over the coverlet, and just so endlessly long seemed his life.
All his sufferings were condensed into the few moments during which, his eyes fixed on the gliding patches of sunshine, he waited for Henrietta’s return. At last, when he heard her hand on the latch of the door, he felt weakened by waiting, by a desire to cry, and by the fear of what she would say if she were to see him cry.
She came in. He watched her come – watched her bright pinafore, her red elbows, her troubled face, She was carrying something and in a moment he saw that she carried not what he had tried to ask for, the leather money-bag, but all the faded photographs, with their faded frames and dusty cords, which had hung in that room, and that she was wiping them with the edge of her pinafore.
He tried to say something, but the thought of protesting was itself wearisome. He merely watched Henrietta sit down, put the photographs on the red coverlet, and scratch off the fly-marks with the end of her finger-nail. He tried to appear pleased and stretching out his hand, tookup a red plush frame containing one of these portraits, and gazed at it.
Three men, one with a stupid, another with a bored, and a third with a fierce bristling expression, each of them wearing high-buttoned jackets and wide collars, gazed back at him. Something familiar in their looks stirred him. Yet by his blank, silent expression it was plain he recognised no one, and when Henrietta said: ‘You know who that is, don’t you?’ he only shook his head, laid the photographs on his chest, and looked away.
Then Henrietta said:
‘It’s Uncle Joe, and Sam Houghton and Tom Chambers.’
He fancied he remembered now and nodded. Henrietta took away these photographs and replaced them by others. One, in a wooden frame, was of an elderly man, with gruff, expansive features partly hidden by a grey beard. Here the sense of familiarity was stronger, almost hurt him and made him screw up his brow so that the pain in the centre burned sharper.
‘It’s Grandfather Rentshaw,’ he heard Henrietta say.
‘Yes. He’s a Shetsoe man,’ he said. ‘I know him.’
He was filled with a sensation of softness, of something soothing and warm, as when he had sometimes looked at Henrietta with a desire for her compassion. When other photographs were put into his hands he was glad, whether they were women dressed in black and lace, men he had known, or wedding-groups grown dim, out-of-date and ridiculous. And while looking at them the mistake in the money gradually slipped his memory.
The sun receded across the walls. Shadows began to fill in the corners, the sky grew paler, and across the sky, just behind the poplars, suddenly sailed, like a ship, a cloud edged with pink and gold.
Israel held one photograph after another, filled all the time with a sense of softness and comfort. For the moment neither pain nor fear troubled him. At one time he had looked much into the future, but now when he felt that the future might end in a day, a minute or even a second, he wanted only to gaze into the past, through these portraits, and to hold on to the present by Henrietta’s fingers.
Some photographs he would pick up twice or even three times. At one of these he shook his head and murmured: ‘Who’s that, wearing that big brooch?’
‘That’s mother.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s mother. This is the same brooch.’
He saw her finger the brooch on her dress, yet he did not understand. She looked dismayed, weary and ready to cry. He took the other photograph she held out to him.
It was of himself, he could see as much. What black hair, what a look of something solid and contented, what a buttonhole he had! And for a moment he reflected how he had loved flowers and in the early days had grown, in spring, daffodils, crocuses and primroses of different colours, and in summer larkspur, sunflowers, stocks, columbine and a lily which had had petals looking like drops of blood.
What had become of that lily? Where was it? And suddenly he wanted to ask Henrietta, but he only said:
‘I’m thirsty. Some water.’
He was given some water – and so it seemed to him – that some one impersonal and unknown gave him the water. A confusion spread over him. He wanted to ask: ‘Who are you? Why are you waiting? Why am I here?’
Instead he motioned feebly with his head and said:
‘Leave me alone. Take them away.’
He closed his eyes and there was for a long time no sound, no pain either in his head or at his heart.
XIII
He awoke and opened his eyes, the lids of which felt sad and drooping. It was dark and he could no longer see the poplars. Right across the window stretched the Milky Way, in a sky of deep, sombre blue.
His head was full of dreams, uppermost of which was an odd dream of a money-bag tied to a tall arm of a fir-tree. His efforts to reach this bag were all in vain. He could not jump high enough, the bag would not shake off, and though he chopped constantly at the tree it never fell. And so he was miserable, agitated and in despair when he woke.
Suddenly in the darkness he said: ‘Where are you?’
There was silence. He began to ask himself: ‘Where is Henrietta? Why have I been left alone? How long have I been alone?’
&nb
sp; To all this no answer came. Outside, except for the poplars sighing over the duck-pond, it was silent too. He lay listening, looking at the Milky Way.
He felt tired. How long was life to last? How long had it lasted? How long since he had lain here?
These questions were not answered either. His mind wandered off to thinking of the orchard, of the number of sacks in the corn-loft, of all the photographs Henrietta had showed him that day. A taste of frumenty, which he had not tasted since boyhood, came suddenly into his mouth, and this taste produced memories of the days when he had been a young man, had chased rats in the river, got drunk at fairs, and caught eels in summer before dawn.
He felt sad. In sadness he invariably reproached himself. Now he began to belittle his own life, feeling contemptuous in a feeble way of his lack of foresight, decision and achievement. He chided himself.
‘I have done nothing. I have not provided for Henrietta.’
How this thought troubled him, how his brow ached with it. He saw once again the fir-tree with the money-bag in its branches. He thought of how he must shake it down and his frame trembled as if he were really shaking it.
His despair grew deeper. In his despair the Milky Way seemed to reel backwards and forwards across the bluish sky.
Suddenly Israel pulled himself upright, tried to push back the bedclothes, failed, tried once more, and succeeding at length, put his tottering legs to the floor.
As he tried to walk he too seemed to reel. He seemed to smell something burning, yet it was cold, he shivered and the latch of the door was like ice. In order to walk he had to strain his shoulders, his heart, his stomach, and most of all his legs, which did not seem to belong to him.
Droves of stars, like sheep, kept flocking before his eyes. When he reached the room where he had left the money a horrible greenness prevented his seeing anything. Then when this passed a clear, transparent blue came, like a summer sky, and he was able to see the window and the bureau with its littered papers and the leather-bag.