“Then light me a candle, for the land’s sake,” she said pettishly.
He took a tin candle-stick with a tallow candle, blew the fire and made a yellow light. She looked like a carved ivory Chinese figure, almost grotesque, among her pillows.
“Yes, y’r like y’r grandfather: a stocky, stubborn man as didn’t say much, but dare do anything. And never had a son. — Hard as nails the man was.”
“More family!” thought Jack wearily, disapproving of Gran’s language thoroughly.
“Had two daughters though, and disowned the eldest. Your mother was the youngest. The eldest got herself into trouble and he turned her out. Regular obstinate fool, and no bowels of compassion. That’s how men are when y’ let ‘em. You’re the same.”
Jack was so sleepy, so sleepy, and the words of the old woman seemed like something pricking him.
“I’d have stood by her — but I was her age, and what could I do? I’d have married her father if I could, for he was a widower. But he married another woman for his second, and I went by ship to Melbourne, and then I took poor old Ellis.”
What on earth made her say these things, he didn’t know, for he was dead sleepy, and if he’d been wide awake he wouldn’t have wanted her to unload this sort of stuff on him. But she went on, like the old demon she was:
“Men are fools, and women make ‘em what they are. I followed your Aunt Lizzie up, years after. She married a man in the mounted police, and he sent the boy off. The boy was a bit weak-minded, and the man wouldn’t have him. So the lad disappeared into the bush. They say he was canny enough about business and farming, but a bit off about people. Anyway he was Mary’s half-brother: you met Mary in Perth. Her scamp of a father was father of that illegitimate boy. But she’s an orphan now, poor child: like that illegitimate half-brother of hers.”
Jack looked up pathetically. He didn’t want to hear. And Gran suddenly laughed at him, with the sudden daring, winsome laugh, like Lennie.
“Y’re a bundle of conventions, like y’r grandfather,” she said tenderly. “But y’ve got a kinder heart. I suppose that’s from y’r English father. Folks are tough in Australia: tough as whit-leather: Y’ll be tempted to sin, but y’wont be tempted to condemn. And never you mind. Trust yourself, Jack Grant. Earn a good opinion of yourself, and never mind other folks. You’ve only got to live once. You know when you’re spirit glows — trust that. That’s you! That’s the spirit of God in you. Trust in that, and you’ll never grow old. If you knuckle under, you’ll grow old.”
She paused for a time.
“Though I don’t know that I’ve much room to talk,” she ruminated on. “There was my son Esau, he never knuckled under, and though he’s dead, I’ve not much good to say of him. But then he never had a kind heart: never. Never a woman loved Esau, though some feared him. I was not among ‘em. Not I. I feared no man, not even your grandfather: except a little. But look at Dad here now. He’s got a kind heart: as kind a heart as ever beat. And he’s gone old. And he’s got heart disease. And he knuckled under. Ay, he knuckled under to me, he did, poor lad. And he’ll go off sudden, when his heart gives way. That’s how it is with kind-hearted men. They knuckle under, and they die young. Like Dad here. He’ll never make old bones. Poor lad!”
She mused again in silence.
“There’s nothing to win in life, when all’s said and done, but a good opinion of yourself. I’ve watched and I know. God is y’rself. Or put it the other way if you like: y’rself is God. So win a good opinion of yourself, and watch the glow inside you.”
Queer, thought Jack, that this should be an old woman’s philosophy. Yourself is God! Partly he believed it, partly he didn’t. He didn’t know what he believed. — Watch the glow inside you. That he understood.
He liked Gran. She was so alone in life, amid all her children. He himself was a lone wolf too: among the lambs of the family. And perhaps Red Easu was a lone wolf.
“But what was I telling you?” Gran resumed. “About your illegitimate cousin. I followed him up too. He went back beyond Atherton, and took up land. He’s got a tidy place now, and he’s never married. He’s wrong in his head about people, but all right about the farm. I’m hoping that place’ll come to Mary one day, for the child’s got nothing. She’s a good child — a good child. Her mother was a niece of mine.”
She seemed to be going to sleep. But like Herbert, she roused again.
“Y’d better marry Mary. Make up your mind to it,” she said.
And instantly he rebelled against the thought. Never.
“Perhaps I’d ought to have said: ‘The best in yourself is God,’“ she mused. “Perhaps that’s more it. The best in yourself is God. But then who’s going to say what is the best in yourself. A kind man knuckles under, and thinks it’s the best in himself. And a hard man holds out, and thinks that’s the best in himself. And its not good for a kind man to knuckle under, and it’s not good for a hard-hearted man to hold out. What’s to be done, deary-me, what’s to be done. And no matter what we say, people will be as they are. — You can but watch the glow.”
She really did doze off. And Jack stole away to the other side of the screen to escape her, leaving the candle burning.
VIII
He sat down thankfully on the hard chair by Herbert’s side, glad to get away from women. Glad to be with men, if it was only Herbert. Glad to doze and feel alone: to feel alone.
He awoke with a jerk and a cramped neck, and there was Tom peeping in. Tom? They must be back. Jack’s chair creaked as he made a movement to get up. But Tom only waved his hand and disappeared. Mean of Tom.
They must be back. The twins must be back. The family was replenished. He stared with sleepy eyes, and a heavy, sleepy, sleepy head.
And the next thing he heard was a soft, alert voice saying: “Hello, Bow!” Queer how it echoed in his dark consciousness as he slept, this soft “Hello, Bow!”
There they were, both laughing, fresh with the wind and rain. Grace standing just behind Monica, Monica’s hair all tight crisp with rain, blond at the temples, darker on the head, and her fresh face laughing, and her yellow eyes looking with that long, meaningful look that had no meaning, peering into his sleepy eyes. He felt something stir inside him.
“Hello, Bow!” she said again, putting her fingers on his sleeve, “We’ve got back.” And still in his sleep-stupor he stared without answering a word.
“You aren’t awake!” she whispered, putting her cold hand suddenly on his face, and laughing as he started back. A new look came into his eyes as he stared startled at her, and she bent her head, turning aside.
“Poo! Smells of stinking candles in here!” whispered Grace.
Someone else was there. It was Red Easu in the doorway, saying in a hoarse voice:
“Want me to take a spell with Herbert?”
Monica glanced back at him with a strange look. He loomed weird and tall, with his rather long, red neck and glistening beard and quick blue eyes. A certain sense of power came with him.
“Hello, girls, got back!” he added to the twins, who watched him without speaking.
“Who’s there?” said Gran’s voice from the other side of the screen. “Is it the girls back? Has Mary come with you?”
As if in answer to the summons, Mary appeared in the doorway, wearing a white apron. She glanced first at Jack, with her black eyes, and then at Gran. Monica was watching her with a sideways lynx look, and Grace was looking at everybody with big blue eyes, while Easu looked down from his uncouth, ostrich height.
“Hello, Gran!” said Mary, going to the other side of the screen to kiss the old lady. The twins followed suit.
“Want me to take a spell in here?” said Easu, jerking his thumb at the sleeping Herbert. Easu wore black trousers hitched up high with braces over a dark-grey flannel shirt, and leather leggings, but no boots. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up from his sinewy brown arms. His reddish fair hair was thick and rather long. He spoke in a deep gruff voice, that he made as q
uiet as possible, and he seemed to show a gruff sort of submissiveness to Jack, at the moment.
“No, Easu,” replied Gran, “I can’t do with you, Jack Grant will manage.”
The sick man was sleeping through it all like the dead.
“I can take a turn,” said Mary’s soft, low, insidious voice.
“No, not you either, Mary. You go to sleep after that drive. Go, all of you, go to bed. I can’t do with you all in here. Has Dr. Rackett come?”
“No,” said Easu.
“Then go away, all of you. I can’t do with you,” said Gran.
Mary came round the screen and shook hands with Jack, looking him full in the eyes with her black eyes, so that he was uncomfortable. She made him more uncomfortable than Monica did. Monica had slunk also round the screen, and was standing with one foot trailing, watching. She watched just as closely when Mary shook hands with the embarrassed Easu.
They all retreated silently to the door. Grace went first. And with her big, dark-blue eyes she glanced back inquisitively at Jack. Mary went next — she too turning in the door to give him a look and an intimate, furtive-seeming smile. Then came Monica, and like a wolf she lingered in the door looking back with a long, meaningful, meaningless sidelong look before she took her departure. Then on her heels went Easu, and he did not look back. He seemed to loom over the girls.
“Blow the light out,” said Gran.
He went round to blow out the candle. Gran lay there like an old angel. Queer old soul — framed by pillow frills.
“Yourself is God!”
Jack thought of that with a certain exultance.
He went over and made up the fire. Then he sat in the arm-chair. Herbert was moving. He went over to soothe him. The sick man moaned steadily for some time, for a long time, then went still again. Jack slept in the hard chair.
He woke up cramped and cold, and went round to the armchair by the fire. Gran was sleeping like an inert bit of ivory. He softly attended to the fire and sat down in the arm-chair.
He was riding a horse a long, long way, on a journey that would never end. He couldn’t stop the horse till it stopped of itself. And it would never stop. A voice said: What has he done? And a voice answered: Conquered the world. — But the horse did not stop. And he woke and saw shadows on the wall, and slept again. Things had all turned to dough — his hands were heavy with dough. He woke and looked at his hands to see if it were so. How loudly and fiercely the clock ticked!
Not dough, but boxing gloves. He was fighting inside a ring, fighting with somebody who was and who wasn’t Easu. He could beat Easu — he couldn’t beat Easu. Easu had knocked him down; he was lying writhing with pain and couldn’t rise, while they were counting him out. In three more seconds he would be counted out! Horror!
He woke, it was midnight and Herbert was writhing.
“Did I sleep a minute, Herbert?” he whispered.
“My head! My head! It jerks so!”
“Does it, old man? Never mind.”
And the next thought was: “There must have been gunpowder in that piece of wood, in the fire.”
IX
It was half-past one, and Mary unexpectedly appeared with tray and lighted candle, and cocoa-milk for Jack and arrowroot for Herbert. She fed Herbert with a spoon, and he swallowed, but made no sign that he understood.
“How did he get the accident?” Jack whispered.
“His horse threw him against a tree.”
“Wish Rackett would come,” whispered Jack.
Mary shook her head and they were silent.
“How old are you, Mary?” Jack asked.
“Nineteen.”
“I’m eighteen at the end of this month.”
“I know. — But I’m much older than you.”
Jack looked at her queer dark muzzle. She seemed to have a queer, humble complacency of her own.
“She” — Jack nodded his head towards Gran — ”says that knuckling under makes you old.”
Mary laughed suddenly.
“Then I’m a thousand,” she said.
“What do you knuckle under for?” he asked.
She looked up at him slowly, and again something quick and hot stirred in him, from her dark, queer, humble, yet assured face.
“It’s my way,” she said, with an odd smile.
“Funny way to have,” he replied, and suddenly he was embarrassed. And he thought of Monica’s dare-devil way.
He felt embarrassed.
“I must have my own way,” said Mary, with another odd, beseeching, and yet darkly confident smile.
“Yourself is God,” thought Jack. — But he said nothing, because he felt uncomfortable.
And Mary went away with the tray and the light, and he was glad when she was gone.
X
The worst part of the night. Nothing happened — and that was perhaps the worst part of it. Fortified by the powers of darkness, the slightest sounds took on momentous importance, but nothing happened. He expected something — but nothing came.
Gran asleep there, in all the fixed motionlessness of her years, a queer white clot. And young Herbert asleep or unconscious, sending wild vibrations from his brain.
The thought of Monica seemed to flutter subjectively in Jack’s soul, the thought of Mary objectively. That is, Monica was somehow inside him, in his blood, like a sister. And Mary was outside him, like a black-boy. Both of them engaging his soul. And yet he was alone, all alone in the universe. These two only beset him. Or did he beset them?
The oppossums made a furious bombilation as they ran up and down, back and forth between the roof and ceiling, like an army moving. And suddenly, shatteringly a nut would come down on the old shingle roof from the Moreton Bay fig outside, with a crash like a gun, while the branches dangled and clanked against the timber walls. An immense, uncanny strider! And him alone in the lonely, uncanny, timeless core of the night.
Slowly the night went by. And weird things awoke in the boy’s soul, things he could never quite put to sleep again. He felt as if this night he had entered into a dense, impenetrable thicket. As if he would never get out. He knew he would never get out.
He awoke again with a start. Was it the first light? Herbert was stirring. Jack went quickly to him.
Herbert opened dazed eyes, and mutely looked at Jack. A look of intelligence came, and as quickly passed. He groaned, and the torment came over him once more. Whatever was the matter with him? He writhed and struggled, groaning — then relapsed into a cold, inert silence. It was as if he were dying. As if he, or something in him, had decided to die.
Jack was terribly startled. In terror, he mixed a little brandy and milk, and tried to pour spoonfuls down the unresisting throat. He quickly fetched a hot stone from the fire, wrapped it in a piece of blanket, and put it in the bed.
Then he sat down and took the young man’s hand softly in his own and whispered intensely: “Come back, Herbert! Come back! Come back!”
With all his will he summoned the inert spirit. He was terribly afraid the other would die. He sat and watched with a fixed, intent will. And Herbert relaxed again, the life came round his eyes again.
“Oh, God!” thought Jack. “I shall die. I shall die myself. What sort of a life have I got to live before I die? Oh, God, what sort of a life have I got between me and when I die?”
And it all seemed a mystery to him. The God he called on was a dark, almost fearful mystery. The life he had to live was a kind of doom. The choice he had was no choice. “Yourself is God.” It wasn’t true. There was a terrible God somewhere else. And nothing else than this.
Because, inside himself, he was alone, without father or mother or place or people. Just a separate living thing. And he could not choose his doom of living nor his dying. Somewhere outside himself was a terrible God who decreed.
He was afraid of the thicket of life, in which he found himself like a solitary, strange animal. He would have to find his way through: all the way to death. But what sort of way? What
sort of life? What sort of life between him and death?
He didn’t know. He only knew that something must be. That he was in a strange bush, and by himself. And that he must find his way through.
CHAPTER VI
IN THE YARD.
I
Ah, good to be out in the open air again! Beyond all telling good! Those indoor rooms were like coffins. To be dead, and to writhe unreleased in the coffin, that was what those indoor rooms were like.
“God, when I die, let me pass right away,” prayed Jack. “Lord, I promise to live my life right out, so that when I die I pass over and don’t lie wriggling in the coffin!”
Mary had come as soon as it was light, and found Herbert asleep and Jack staring at him in a stupor.
“You go to sleep now, Bow,” said Mary softly, laying her hand on his arm.
He looked at her in a kind of horror, as if she were part of the dark interior. He didn’t want to go to sleep. He wanted to wake. He stood in the yard and stared around stupefied at the early morning. Then he went and hauled Lennie and the twins out of their bunks. Tom was already up. Then he went, stripped to the waist, to the pump.
“Pump over my nut, Lennie,” he shouted, holding his head at the pump spout. Oh, ‘twas so good to shout at somebody. He must shout.
And Lennie pumped away like a little imp.
When Jack looked out of the towel at the day, he saw the sky fresh with yellow light, and some red still on the horizon above the grey gum-trees. It all seemed crisp and snappy. It was life.
“Ain’t yer goin’ ter do any of yer monkey trickin’ this morning?” shouted Lennie at him.
Jack shook his head, and rubbed his white young shoulders with the towel. Lennie, standing by the wash-tin in his little undervest and loose little breeches, was watching closely.
“Can you answer me a riddle, Lennie?” asked Jack.
“I’ll try,” said Len briskly, and Og and Magog jumped up in gay expectation.
“What is God, anyhow?” asked Jack.
“Y’d better let my father hear y’,” replied Lennie, with a dangerous nod of the head.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 392