Lennie, who was sitting on the floor under the kitchen window, put his head down on his arms and sobbed from a sort of nervousness, wailing:
“Oh, my poor ol’ Gran! Oh, poor ol’ dear!”
Jack, though upset, almost grinned. Poor Gran indeed, with that ghastly swarm of relations. He sat there on a chair, his nerves all on edge, noticing little things acutely, as he always did when he was strung up: the flies standing motionless on the chopping-block just outside the window, the smooth-tramped gravel walk, the curious surface of the mud floor in the kitchen, the smoky rafters overhead, the oven set in brick below the “everlasting” fire, the blackness of the pots and kettles above the horizontal bars . . .
“Do you mind sitting in the parlour, Jack, in case they want anything?” Mrs. Ellis asked him.
Jack minded, but he went and sat in the parlour, like a chief lackey, or a buffer between all the relations and the outer world.
The house had become more quiet. Monica had gone over to the Reds with clean overalls for the little boys, who had been bundled off there. Jack got this piece of news from Grace, who was constantly washing more dishes and serving more relations. A certain anger burned in him as he heard, but he took no notice. Mary was lying down upstairs: she had been up all night with Gran. Tom was attending to the horses. Katie and Mrs. Ellis had gone upstairs with Baby and Ellie, and Mr. Ellis was also upstairs. Lennie had slipped away again. So Jack had track of all the family. He was always like that, wanting to know where they all were.
Mrs. Greenlow came in from Gran’s inner room.
“Mary? Where’s Mary?” she asked hurriedly.
Jack shook his head, and she passed on. She had left the door of Gran’s room open, so Jack could see in. All the relations were there, horrible, the women weeping and perspiring, and wiping tears and perspiration away together, the men in their waistcoats and shirt-sleeves, perspiring and looking ugly. A Methodist parson son-in-law was saying prayers in an important monotone.
At last Mary came, looking anxious.
“Yes, Gran? Did you want me?” Jack heard her voice, and saw her by the bed.
“I felt so overcome with all these people,” said Gran, in a curiously strong, yet frightened voice. “What do they all want?”
“They’ve come to see you. Come — ” Mary hesitated “ — to see if they can do anything for you.”
“To frighten the bit of life out of me that I’ve got. But they’re not going to. Get me some beef tea, Mary, and don’t leave me alone with them.”
Mary went out for the beef tea. Then Jack saw Gran’s white hand feebly beckon.
“Ruth!” she said. “Ruth!”
The eldest daughter went over and took the hand, mopping her eyes. She was the parson’s wife.
“Well, Ruth, how are you!” said Gran’s high, quavering voice in a conversational tone.
“I’m well, Mother. It’s how are you?” replied Ruth dismally.
But Gran was again totally oblivious of her. So at length Ruth dropped away embarrassed from the bedside, shaking her head.
Again Gran lifted her head on the pillow.
“Where’s Jacob?”
“Upstairs, mother.”
“The only one that has the decency to leave me alone.” And she subsided again. Then after a while she asked, without lifting her head from the pillow, in a distant voice:
“And are the foolish virgins here?”
“Who, mother?”
“The foolish virgins. You know who I mean.”
Gran lay with her eyes shut as she spoke.
There was an agitation among the family. It was the brothers-in-law who pushed the three Miss Ellises forward. They, the poor things, wept audibly.
Gran opened her eyes at the sound, and said, with a ghost of a smile on her yellow, transparent old face:
“I hope virginity is its own reward.”
Then she remained unmoved until Mary came with the soup, which she took and slowly sipped, as Mary administered it in a spoon. It seemed to revive her.
“Where’s Lennie and his mother?” she asked, in a firmer tone.
These also were sent for. Mrs. Ellis sat by the bed and gently patted Gran’s arm; but Lennie, “skeered stiff,” shivered at the door. His mother held out her hand to him, and he came in, inch by inch, watching the fragile old Gran, who looked transparent and absolutely unreal, with a fascination of horror.
“Kiss me, Lennie,” said Gran grimly: exactly like Nelson.
Lennie shrank away. Then, yielding to his mother’s pressure he laid his dark, smooth head and his brown face on the pillow next to Gran’s face, but he did not kiss her.
“There’s my precious!” said Gran softly, with all the soft, cajoling gentleness that had made her so lovely, at moments, to her men.
“Alice, you’ve been good to my Jacob,” she said, as if remembering something. “There’s the stocking. It’s for you and Lennie.” She still managed to say the last words with a caress, though she was fading from consciousness again.
Lennie drew away and hid behind his mother. Gran lay still, exactly as if dead. But the laces of her eternal cap still stirred softly, to show she breathed. The silence was almost unbearable.
To break it, the Methodist son-in-law sank to his knees, the others followed his example, and he prayed in a low, solemn, extinguished voice. When he had said Amen the others whispered it and rose from their knees. And by one consent they glided from the room. They had had enough deathbed for the moment.
Mary closed the inner door when they had gone, and remained alone in the room with Gran.
V
The sons-in-law all melted through the parlour and out on to the verandah, where they helped themselves from the decanter on the table, filling up from the canvas water-bag that swung in the draught to keep cool. The daughters sat down by the table and wept, lugubriously and rather angrily. The sons-in-law drank and looked afflicted. Jack remained on duty in the parlour, though he would dearly have liked to decamp.
But he was now interested in the relations. They began to weep less, and to talk in low, suppressed, vehement voices. He could only catch bits. — ”It’s a question if he ever married Tom’s mother. I doubt if Tom’s legitimate. I don’t even doubt it, I’m sure. We’ve suffered from that before. Where’s the stocking? Stocking! Stocking — saved up — bought Easu out. Mother should know better. If she’s made a will — Jacob’s first marriage — children to educate and provide for. Unmarried daughters — first claim — stocking — ” And then quite plainly from Ruth: “It’s hard on our husbands if they have to support mother’s unmarried daughters.” This said with dignity.
Jack glanced at the three Miss Ellises, to see if they minded, and inwardly he vowed that if he ever married Monica, for example, and Grace was an unmarried sister, he’d find some suitable way of supporting her, without making her feel ashamed. But the three Miss Ellises did not seem to mind. They were busy diving into secret pockets among their clothing, and fetching out secret little packages. Someone dropped the glass stopper out of a bottle of smelling salts, and spilled the contents on the floor. The pungent odour penetrated throughout the house. Jack never again smelt lavender salts without having a foreboding of death, and seeing mysterious little packets. The three Miss Ellises were surreptitiously laying out bits and tags of black braid, crape, beading, black cloth, black lace; all black, wickedly black, on the table edge. Smoothing them out. For as a matter of fact they kept a little shop. And everybody was looking with interest. Jack felt quite nauseated at the sight of these black blotches, the row of black patches.
Mary came out of Gran’s room, going to the kitchen with the cup. She did not pass the verandah, so nobody noticed her. They were all intent on the muttering gloom of their investigation of those scraps of mourning patterns.
Jack felt the door of Gran’s room slowly open. Mary had left it just ajar. He looked round and his hair rose on his head. There stood Gran, all white save for her eyes, like a yellow f
igure of aged female Time, standing with her hand on the door, looking across the parlour at the afternoon and the preoccupied party on the verandah. Her face was absolutely expressionless, timeless and awful. It frightened him very much. The inexorable female! He uttered an exclamation, and they all looked up, caught.
CHAPTER XI
BLOWS
I
Jack managed to escape. When the rooks were fluttered by the sight of that ghostly white starling, he just ran. He ran in disgust from the smell of lavender salts, the tags of mourning patterns, respectable dying, and these awful people. Surely there was something rotten at the bottom of people, he thought, to make them behave as they did. And again came over him the feeling he had often had, that he was a changeling, that he didn’t belong to the so-called “normal” human race. Nor, by Jupiter, did he want to. The “normal” human race filled him with unspeakable repulsion. And he knew they would kill him if they found out what he was. Hence that unconscious dissembling of his innocent face.
He ran, glad to get into a sweat, glad to sweat it all out of himself. Glad to feel the sun hot on his damp hands, and then the afternoon breeze, just starting, cool on his wet skin. When he reached the sand-bagged pool, he took off his clothes and spread them in the sun, while he wallowed in the lukewarm water. Ay! if one could wash off one’s associations! If one could but be alone in the world.
After bathing he sat in the sun awhile to dry, then dressed and walked off to look at the lower dam pump. Tom had said it needed attending to. And anyway it led him away from the house.
The pump was all right. There had been a March shower that had put water in the dam. So after looking round at the sheep, he turned away.
Which way? Not back home. Not yet.
The land breeze had lifted and the sea breeze had come, clearing the hot dry atmosphere as if by magic, and replacing the furnace breath by tender air. Which way?
At the back of his mind was the thought of Monica not home yet from the Reds’ place, and evening coming on, another of the full golden evenings when the light seemed fierce with declaration of another eternity, a different eternity from ours.
Last Sunday, on such an evening, he had kissed her. And much as he wanted to avoid her, the desire to kiss her again drove him as if the great yellowing light were a wind that blew him, as a butterfly is blown twinkling out to sea. He drifted towards the trail from the Reds’ place. He walked slowly, listening to the queer evening noise of the magpies, and the more distant screeching of flying parrots. Someone had disturbed the parrots beyond the Black Barn gums. So as if by intuition he walked that way, slightly off the trail.
And suddenly he heard the sound his spirit expected to hear: Monica crying out in expostulation, anger, and fear. It was the fear in her voice that made his face set. His first instinct was not to intrude on their privacy. Then again came the queer, magpie noise of Monica, this time with an edge of real hatred to her fear. Jack pushed through the bushes. He could smell the warm horses already.
Yes, there was Lucy standing by a tree. And Monica, in a long skirt of pink-sprigged cotton, with a frill at the bottom, trying to get up into the side-saddle. While Easu, in his Sunday black reach-me-downs and white shirt and white rubber-soled cricketing boots, every time she set her foot in the stirrup, put his hand round her waist and spread his fingers on her body, and lifted her down again, lifted her on one hand in a childish and ridiculous fashion, and held her in a moment’s embrace. She, in her long cotton riding-dress with the close-fitting bodice, did indeed look absurd, hung like a child on Easu’s hand, as he lifted her down and held her struggling against him, then let her go once more, to mount her horse. Lucy was shifting uneasily, and Easu’s big black horse, tethered to a tree, was jerking its head with a jingle of the bit. The girth hung loose. Easu had evidently dismounted to adjust it.
Monica was becoming really angry, really afraid, and really blind with dismay, feeling for the first time her absolute powerlessness. To be powerless drove her mad, and she would have killed Easu if she could, without a qualm. But her hate seemed to rouse the big Easu to a passion of desire for her. He put his two big hands round her slender body and compassed her entirely. She gave a loud, strange, uncanny scream. And Jack came out of the bushes, making the black horse plunge. Easu glanced round at the horse, and saw Jack. And at the same time our hero planted a straight, vicious blow on the bearded chin. Easu, unprepared, staggered up against Lucy, who began to jump, while Monica, tangled in her long skirt, fell to her knees on the ground.
Quite a picture! Jack said it himself. Even he saw himself standing there, like Jack the Giant-killer. And of course he saw Monica on her knees, with tumbled hair and scarlet cheeks, unspeakably furious at being caught, angrily hitching herself out of her long cotton riding-skirt and pressing her cheeks to make them less red. She was silent, with averted face, and she seemed small. He saw Easu in the Sunday white shirt and rather tight Sunday breeches, facing round in unspeakable disgust and fury. He saw himself in a readymade cotton suit and cheap brown canvas shoes, bought at the local store, standing awaiting an onslaught.
The onslaught did not come. Instead, Easu said, in a tone of unutterable contempt:
“Why, what’s up with you, you little sod!”
Jack turned to Monica. She had got on to her feet, and was pushing her hair under her hat.
“Monica,” he said, “you’d better get home. Gran’s dying.” She looked at him, and a slow, wicked smile of amusement came over her face. Then she broke into a queer, hollow laugh, at the bottom of which was rage and frustration. Then her laugh rose higher.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” she laughed. “Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ha-ha-ha! Ah! ! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ha-ha-ha! Ah! ! ! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah ! ha-ha! Ha! Ah! Gran’s dying! Ha-ha ha! Is she really? Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! No, I don’t mean it. But it seems so funny! Ah! ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah! Ha-ha-ha!”
She smothered herself into a confused bubbling. The two men stood aghast, shuddering at the strange; hysterical woman’s laughter that went shrilling through the bush. They were horrified lest someone else should hear.
Monica, in her cotton frock and long sweeping skirt, stood pushing her handkerchief in her mouth, and trying in vain to stifle the hysterical laughter that still shook her slender body. Occasionally a strange peal, like mad bells, would break out. And then she ended with a passionate sobbing.
“I know! I know!” she sobbed, like a child. “Gran’s dying, and you won’t let me go home.”
“You can go home,” Jack said. “You can go home. But don’t go with your face all puffed up with crying.”
She gradually gained control of herself, and turned away to her horse. Jack went to help her mount. She got into the saddle, and he gave her the reins. She kept her face averted, and Lucy began to move away slowly, towards the home track.
Easu still stood there, planted with his feet apart, his head a little dropped, and a furious, contemptuous, revengeful hate of the other two in his light blue eyes. He had his head down, ready for an attack. Jack saw this, and waited.
“Going to take your punishment?” said Easu, in a nasty voice.
“Ready when you are,” said Jack.
Ugh! How he hated Easu’s ugly, jeering, evil eyes, how he would love to smash them out of his head. In the long run, hate was an even keener ecstasy than love, and the battle of hate, the fight with blood in the eyes, an orgasm of deadly gratification keener than any passionate orgasm of love.
Easu slowly threw his hat on the ground. Jack did the same, and started to pull off his coat. Easu glanced round to see if Monica was going. She was. Her back was already turned, and Lucy was stepping gingerly through the bushes. He lifted his chin, unknotted his tie, and threw it in his hat. Then he unbuttoned his shirt-cuffs, and pulled off his shirt, and hitched his belt. He was now naked to the waist. He had a very white skin with reddish hair at the breast, and an angular kind of force. His reddish-haired brawny arms were burnt brown-red, as was his neck. For the rest his ski
n was pure white, with the dazzle of absolute health. Yet he was ugly rather than beautiful. The queer angularity of his brawn, the sense of hostile mechanical power. The sense of the mechanism of power in him made him like some devil fallen into a lower grade.
Jack’s torso was rather absurdly marked by the sun-burnt scallops of his vest-lines, for he worked a good deal in a vest. Easu always wore a shirt and no vest. And Jack, in spite of the thinness of youth, seemed to have softer lines and a more human proportion, more grace. And there was a warmth in his white skin, making it much less conspicuous than the really dazzling brilliance of Easu. Easu was a good deal bigger, but Jack was more concentrated, and a born fighter. He fought with all his soul.
He shaped up to Easu, and Easu made ready, when they were interrupted by a cry from Monica, in a high, hysterical voice. They looked up. She had reined in her horse among the bushes, and was looking round at them with a queer sharp, terrified face, from the distance. Her shrill voice cried:
“Don’t forget he saved Herbert’s life.”
Both men faced round and looked at her as if she had committed an indecency. She quailed in her saddle. Easu, with a queer jerk of the head, motioned to her to go. She sank a little forward in her saddle, and hurriedly urged her horse through the bush, out of sight, without ever looking round, leaving the men, as she knew, to their heart’s desire.
They waited for a while. Then they lifted their fists again, and drew near. Jack began the light, subtle, harmonious dancing which preceded his attack. He always attacked, no matter whom he fought. He could not fight unless he took the initiative. So now he danced warily, subtly before Easu, and Easu stood ready to side-step. Easu was bigger, harder, much more powerful than Jack, and built in hard mechanical lines: the kind that is difficult to knock out, if you have not much weight behind your blow.
“Are y’ insured?” sneered Easu.
But Jack did not listen. He had always fought with people bigger and older than himself. But he had never before had this strange lust dancing in his blood, the lust of rage dancing for its consummation in blows. He had known it before, as a sort of game. But now the lust bit into his very soul, and he was quivering with accumulated desire, the desire to hit Easu hard, hit him till he knocked him out. He wanted to hit him till he knocked him out.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 401