SHADOWS BEFORE
I
But in the morning memory was back, and the unquenched smouldering of passion. Easu had insulted him. Easu had insulted him, and that should never be forgiven. And he had this new, half painful, more than half painful desire to see Monica, to be near her, to touch her hand; a sort of necessity, upon him all the while which he was not used to. It made him restless, uneasy, and for the first time in his life, a little melancholy. He was used to feeling angry: a steady, almost blithe sort of anger. And beyond that he had always been able to summon up an indifference to things, cover them with oblivion: to retreat upon himself and insulate himself from contact.
Now he could no longer do this, and it fretted him, made him accessible to melancholy. The hot, hot January days, all dry flaming heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, passed over him leaving him strange even to himself. There was work, the drudging work of the farm, all the while. And one just sweated. He learned to submit to it, to the sweating all the time during the day, and the mosquitoes at night. It was like a narcotic. The old, English alertness grew darker and darker. He seemed to be moving, a dim consciousness and an unyielding will, in a dark cloud of heat, in a perspiring, dissolving body. He could feel his body, the English cool body of his being, slowly melting down and being invaded by a new tropical quality. Sometimes, he said to himself, he was sweating his soul away. That was how it felt: as if he were sweating his soul away. And he let his soul go, let it slowly melt away out of his wet, hot body.
Any man who has been in the tropics, unless he has kept all his mind and his consciousness focussed homewards, fixed towards the old people of home, will know how this feels. Now Jack did not turn homewards, back to England. He never wanted to go back. There was in him a slow, abiding anger against this same “home.” Therefore he let himself go down the dark tide of the heat. He did not cling on to his old English soul, the soul of an English gentleman. He let that dissolve out of him, leaving what residuum of a man it might leave. But out of very obstinacy he hung on to his own integrity: a small, dark, obscure integrity.
Usually he was too busy perspiring, panting, and working to think about anything. His mind also seemed dissolving away in perspiration and in the curious eucalyptus solvent of the Australian air. He was too busy and too much heat-oppressed even to think of Monica or of Easu, though Monica was a live wire in his body. Only on Sundays he seemed to come half out of his trance. And then everything went queer and strange, a little uncanny.
Dad was back again for the harvest, but his heart was no better, and a queer frightening cloud seemed over him. And Gran, they said, was failing. Somehow Gran was the presiding deity of the house. Her queer spirit controlled, even now. And she was failing. She adored Lennie, but he was afraid of her.
“Gran’s the limit,” he asserted. “She’s that wilful. Always the same with them women when they gets well on in years. I clear out from her if I can, she’s that obstropulous — tells y’t’wipe y’nose, pull up y’pants, brush y’teeth, not sniff: golly, I can’t stand it!”
Sunday was the day when you really came into contact with the family. The rule was, that each one took it in turns to get up and make breakfast, while everybody else stayed on in bed, for a much-needed rest. If it was your turn, you rolled out of bed at dawn when Timothy banged on the wall, you slipped on your shirt and pants and went to the “everlasting” fire. Raking the ashes together with a handful of sticks, you blew a blaze and once more smelt the burning eucalyptus leaves. You filled the black iron kettle at the pump, and set it over the flame. Then you washed yourself. After which you carved bread and butter: tiny bits for Gran, moderate pieces for upstairs, and doorsteps for the cubby. After which you made the tea, and holloa’d! while you poured it out. One of the girls, with a coat over her nighty and her hair in a chignon, would come barefoot to carry the trays, to Gran and to the upstairs. This was just the preliminary breakfast: the Sunday morning luxury. Just tea in bed.
Later the boys were shouting for clean shirts and towels, and the women were up. Proceeded the hair-cutting, nail-paring, button-sewing, and general murmur, all under the supervision of Ma. Then down to the sand-bagged pool for a dip. After which, clean and in clean raiment, you went to the parlour to hear Dad read the lessons.
The family Bible was carefully kept warm in the parlour, during the week, under a woollen crochet mat. A crochet mat above, and a crochet mat below. Nothing must ever stand on that book, nothing whatever. The children were quite superstitious about it.
Lennie, the Benjamin of his father Jacob, each Sunday went importantly into the drawing-room, in a semi-religious silence, and fetched the ponderous brass-bound book. He put it on the table in front of Dad. Gran came in with her stick and her lace cap, and sat in the arm-chair near the window. Mrs. Ellis and the children folded their hands like saints. Mr. Ellis wiped his spectacles, cleared his throat, looked again at the little church calendar of the lessons, found the place, and proceeded in a droning voice. Nobody looked at him, except Mrs. Ellis. Everybody looked another way. Gran usually gazed sideways at the floor. Tick, tock! went the clock. It was a little eternity.
Jack knew the Bible pretty well, as a well-brought-up nephew of his Aunts. He had no objection to the Bible. On the contrary it supplied his imagination with a chief stock of images, his ear with the greatest solemn pleasure of words, and his soul with a queer heterogeneous ethic. He never really connected the Bible with Christianity proper, the Christianity of Aunts and clergymen. He had no use for Christianity proper: just dismissed it. But the Bible was perhaps the foundation of his consciousness. Do what seems good to you in the sight of the Lord. This was the moral he always drew from Bible lore. And since the Lord, for him, was always the Lord Almighty, Almighty God, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Jesus being only a side-issue; since the Lord was always Jehovah the great and dark, for him, one might do as David did, in the sight of the Lord, or as Jacob, or as Abraham or Moses or Joshua or Isaiah, in the sight of the Lord. The sight of the Lord was a vast strange scope of vision, in the semi-dark.
Gran always listened the same, leaning on her stick and looking sideways to the ground, as if she did not quite see the stout and purple-faced Jacob, her son, as the mouthpiece of the Word. As a matter of fact, the way he read Scripture irritated her. She wished Lennie could have read the lessons. But Dad was head of the house, and she was fond of him, poor old Jacob.
And Jack always furtively watched Gran. She frightened him, and he had a little horror of her: but she fascinated him too. She was like Monica, at the great distance of her years. Her lace cap was snowy white, with little lavender ribbons. Her face was pure ivory, with fine-shaped features, that subtly arched nose, like Monica’s. Her silver hair came over her dead-looking ears. And her dry, shiny, blue-veined hand remained fixed over the pommel of her black stick. How awful, how unspeakably awful, Jack felt, to be so old! No longer human. And she seemed so little inside her clothes. And one never knew what she was thinking. But surely some strange, uncanny, dim non-human thoughts.
Sunday was full of strange, half-painful impressions of death and of life. After lessons the boys would escape to the yards, and the stables, and lounge about. Or they would try the horses, or take a gun into the uncleared bush. Then came the enormous Sunday dinner, when everyone ate himself stupid.
In the afternoon Tom and Jack wandered to the loft, to the old concertina. Up there among the hay, they squeezed and pulled the old instrument, till at last, after much practice, they could draw forth tortured hymnal sounds from its protesting internals.
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“Ha-a-appy Ho-ome! Ha-appy Ho-ome! Oh Haa-py Ho-me! Oh Haa-py Ho-me! In Paradise with thee!” |
Over and over again the same tune, till Tom would drop off to sleep, and Jack would have a go at it. And this yearning sort of hymn always sent a chill to his bowels. They were like Gran, on the brink of the grave. In fact the word Paradise made him shudder worse than the word coffin. Yet he would grind away at the tune. Till he too fell asleep.
And then they would wake in the heat to the silence of the suspended, fiercely hot afternoon. Only to feel their own sweat trickling, and to hear the horses, the draft-horses which were in stable for the day, chop-chopping underneath. So, in spite of sweat and heat, another go at the fascinating concertina.
II
One Sunday Jack strolled in an hour early for tea. He had made a mistake, as one does sometimes when one sleeps in the afternoon. Gran was sitting by a little fire in the dark living room. She had to have a little fire to look at. It was like life to her. “Come here, Jack Grant,” she said in her thin, imperious voice. He went on reluctant feet, for he had a dread of her years and her strange femaleness. What did she want of him?
“Did y’hear Mr. George get my son to promise to make a will, when y’were in Perth?”
“No, marm,” said Jack promptly.
“Well, take it from me, if he promised, he hasn’t done it. He never signed a paper in his life, unless it was his marriage register. And but for my driving, he’d never have signed that. Sit down!”
Jack sat on the edge of a chair, his heart in his boots.
“I told you before I’d ha’ married your grandfather, if he hadn’t been married already. I wonder where you’d ha’ been then! Just as well I didn’t, for he wouldn’t look at me after he took my leg off. Just come here a minute.”
Jack got up and went to her side. She put her soft, dry, dead old hand on his face and stroked it, pressing on the cheekbones.
“Ay,” she said. “I suppose those are his bones again. And my bones are in Monica. Don’t stand up, lad, take your seat.”
Jack sat down in extreme discomfort.
“Well,” she resumed, “I was very well off with old Ellis, so I won’t complain. But you’ve got your English father’s eyes. You’d have been better with mine. Those bones, those beautiful bones, and my sort of eyes.”
Gran’s eyes were queer and remote now. But they had been perhaps like Monica’s, only a darker grey, and with a darker, subtler cat look in them.
“I suppose it will be in the children’s children,” she resumed, her eyes going out like a candle. “For I married old Ellis, though to this day I never quite believe it. And one thing I do know. I won’t die in the dying room of his house. I won’t do it, not if it was the custom of a hundred families. Not if he was here himself to see me do it. I wouldn’t. Though he was kindness itself. But not if he was here himself, and had the satisfaction of seeing me do it. A dreadful room! I’d be frightened to death to die in it. I like me sheets sun-kissed, heat or no heat, and no sun ever gets into that room. But it’s better for a woman to marry, even if she marries the wrong man. I allus said so. An old maid, especially a decayed gentlewoman, is a blight on the face of the earth.”
“Why?” said Jack suddenly. The old woman was too authoritative.
“That’s why! What do you know about it,” she said contemptuously.
“I knew a nice old lady in England, who’d never been married,” he said, thinking of a really beautiful, gentle woman, who had kept all her perfume and her charm, in spite of her fifty-odd years of single blessedness. But then she had a naturally deep and religious nature, not like this pagan old cat of a Gran.
“Did you!” said Gran, eying him severely. “What do you know at your age? I’ve got three unmarried daughters, and I’m ashamed of them. If I’d married your grandfather I never should have had them. Self-centred, and old as old boots, they are. I’d rather they’d gone wrong and died in the bush, like your Aunt who had a child by Mary’s father.”
Jack made round, English eyes of amazement at this speech. He disapproved thoroughly.
“You’ve got too much of your English father in you,” she said, “and not enough of your hard-hearted grandfather. Look at Lennie, what a beautiful boy he is.”
There was a pause. Jack sat in a torment while she baited him. He was full of antagonism towards her and her years.
“But I tell you, you never realise you’re old till you see your friends slipping away. One by one they go — over the border. That’s what makes you feel old. I tell you. Nothing else. Annie Brockman died the other day. I was at school with her. She wasn’t old, though you’d have thought so.”
The way Gran said this was quite spiteful. And Jack thought to himself: “What nonsense, she was old if she was at school with Gran. If she was as old as Gran, she was awfully old.”
“No, she wasn’t old — school girls and fellows laughing in the ball room, or breathing fast after a hard ride. You didn’t know Sydney in those days. And men grown old behind their beards for want of understanding; because they’re too dense to understand what living means. Men are dense. Are ye listening?”
The question came with such queer aged force that Jack started almost out of his chair.
“Yes, marm,” he said.
“‘Yes marm!’ he says!” she repeated, with a queer little grin of amusement. “Listen to this grandfather’s chit saying ‘Yes marm!’ to me! Well, they’ll have their way. My friends are nearly all gone, so I suppose I shall soon be going. Not but what there’s plenty of amusement here.”
She looked round in an odd way, as if she saw ghosts. Jack would have given his skin to escape her.
“Listen,” she said with sudden secrecy. “I want ye to do something for me. You love Lennie, don’t ye?”
Jack nodded.
“So do I! I’m going to help him.” Her voice became sharp with secrecy. “I’ve put by a stocking for him,” she hissed. “At least it’s not a stocking, it’s a tin box, but it’s the same thing. It’s up there!” She pointed with her stick at the wide black chimney. “Dye understand?”
She eyed Jack with aged keenness, and he nodded, though his understanding was rather vague. Truth to tell, nothing she said seemed to him quite real. As if, poor Gran, her age put her outside of reason.
“That stocking is for Lennie. Tom’s mother was nobody knows who, though I’m not going to say Jacob never married her, if Jack says he did. But Tom’ll get everything. The same as Jacob did. That’s how it hits back at me. I wanted Jacob to have the place, and now it goes to Tom, and my little Lennie gets nothing. Alice has been a good woman, and a good wife to Jacob: better than he deserved. I’m going to stand by her. That stocking in there is for Lennie because he’s her eldest son. In a tin box. Y’understand?”
And she pointed again at the chimney.
Jack nodded, though he didn’t really take it in. He had a little horror of Gran at all times; but when she took on this witch-like portentousness, and whispered at him in a sharp, aged whisper, about money, hidden money, it all seemed so abnormal to him that he refused to take it for real. The queer, aged, female spirit that had schemed with money for the men-folk she chose, scheming to oust those she had not elected, was so strange and half-ghoulish, that he merely shrank from taking it in. When she pointed with her white-headed stick at the wide black mouth of the chimney, he glanced and looked quickly away again. He did not want to think of a hoard of sovereigns in a stocking — or a tin box — secreted in there. He did not want to think of the subtle, scheming, vindictive old woman reaching up into the soot, to add more gold to the hoard. It was all unnatural to him and to his generation.
But Gran despised him and his generation. It was as unreal to her as hers to him.
“Old George couldn’t even persuade that Jacob of mine to sign a marriage settlement,” she continued. “And I wasn’t going to force him. Would you believe a man could be such an obstinate fool?”
“Yes, marm,” said Jack automatically.
And Gran stamped her stick at him in sudden vicious rage.
The stamping of the stick brought Grace, and he fled.
III
That evening they were all sitting in the garden. The drawing room was thrown open, as usual on Sunday, but nobody even went in except to strum the piano. Monica was strumming hymns now. Grace came along calling Mary. Mary was staying on at Wandoo.
“Mary, Gran wants you. She feels faint. Come and see to her, will you?”
Ellie came and slipped her fat little hand into Jack’s, hanging on to him. Katie and Lennie sat surreptitiously playing cats’-cradle, on the steps: forbidden act, on the Sabbath. The twin boys wriggled their backs against the gate-posts and their toes into the earth, asking each other riddles. Harry as usual aimed stones at birds. It was a close evening, the wind had not come. And they all were uneasy, with that uncanny uneasiness that attacks families, because Gran was not well.
Harry was singing profanely, profaning the Sabbath.
“A blue jay sat on a hickory limb,
He wink at me, I wink at him.
I up with a stone, an’ hit him on the shin.
Says he, Little Nigger, don’ do that agin!
Clar de kitchen, ol’ folk, young folk!
Clar de kitchen, ol’ folk, young folk!
An’ let us dance till dawn O.”
Harry shouted out these wicked words half loud to a tune of his own that was no tune.
Jack did not speak. The sense of evening, Sunday evening, far away from any church or bell, was strong upon him. The sun was slow in the sky, and the light intensely strong, all fine gold. He went out to look. The sunlight flooded the dry, dry earth till it glowed again, and the gum-trees that stood up hung tresses of liquid shadow from trunks of gold, and the buildings seemed to melt blue in the vision of light. Someone was riding in from westward, and a cloud of pure gold-dust rose fuming from the earth about the horse and the horseman, with a vast, overwhelming gold glow of the void heavens above. The whole west was so powerful with pure gold light, coming from immense space and the sea, that it seemed like a transfiguration, and another horseman rode fuming in a dust of light as if he were coming, small and Daniel-like, out of the vast furnace-mouth of creation. Jack looked west, into the welter of yellow light, in fear. He knew again, as he had known before, that his day was not the day of all the world, there was a huger sunset than the sunset of his race. There were vaster, more unspeakable gods than the gods of his fathers. The god in this yellow fire was huger than the white men could understand, and seemed to proclaim their doom.
Out of this immense power of the glory seemed to come a proclamation of doom. Lesser glories must crumble to powder in this greater glow, as the horsemen rode trotting in the glorified cloud of the earth, spuming a glory all round them. They seemed like messengers out of the great West, coming with a proclamation of doom, the small, trotting, aureoled figures kicking up dust like sun-dust, and gradually growing larger, hardening out of the sea of light. Like sun-arrivals.
Though after all it was only Alec Rice and Tom. But they were gilded men, dusty and sun-luminous, as they came into the yard, with their brown faces strangely vague in shadow, unreal.
The sun was setting, huge and liquid, and sliding down at immense speed behind the far-off molten, wavering, long ridge towards the coast. Fearsome the great liquid sun was, stooping fiercely down like an enemy stooping to hide his glory, leaving the sky hovering and pulsing above, with a sense of wings, and a sense of proclamation, and of doom. It seemed to say to Jack: I and my race are doomed. But even the doom is a splendour.
Shadow lay very thin on the earth, pale as day, though the sun was gone. Jack turned back to the house. The tiny twins were staggering home to find their supper, their hands in the pockets of their Sunday breeches. The pockets of everyday breeches were, for some mysterious reason, always sewn up, so Sunday alone knew this swagger. Harry was being called in to bed. And Len and Katie, rarely far off at meal times, were converging towards supper too.
Monica was still drumming listlessly on the piano, and singing in a little voice. She had a very sweet voice, but she usually sang “small.” She was not singing a hymn, Jack became aware of this. She was singing, rather nervously, or irritably, and with her own queer yearning pathos:
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“Oh Jane, Oh Jane, my pretty Jane, Oh Jane, Ah never, never look so shy. But meet me, meet me in the moonlight, When the dew is on the rye.” |
Someone had lighted the piano candles, and she sat there strumming and singing in a little voice, and looking queer and lonely. His heart went hot in his breast, and then started pounding. He crossed silently, and stood just behind her. For some moments she would not notice him, but went on singing the same. And he stood perfectly still close behind her. Then at last she glanced upward at him, and his heart stood still again with the same sense of doom the sun had given him. She still went on singing for a few moments. Then she stopped abruptly, and jerked her hand from the piano.
“Don’t you want to sing?” she asked sharply.
“Not particularly.”
“What do you want then?”
“Let us go out.”
She looked at him strangely, then rose in her abrupt fashion. She followed him across the yard in silence, while he felt the curious sense of doom settling down on him.
He sat down on the step of the back-door of the barn, outside, looking southward into the vast, rapidly darkening country, and glanced up at her. She, rather petulantly, sat down beside him. He felt for her cool slip of a hand, and she let it lie in his hot one. But she averted her face.
“Why don’t you like me?” she asked petulantly.
“But I love you,” he said thickly, with shame and the sense of doom piercing his heart.
She turned swiftly and stared him in the face with a brilliant, oddly triumphant look.
“Sure?” she said.
His heart seemed to go black with doom. But he turned away his face from her glowing eyes, and put his arm round her waist, and drew her to him. His whole body was trembling like a taut string, and she could feel the painful plunging of his heart as he pressed her fast against him, pressed the breath out of her.
“Monica!” he murmured blindly, in pain, like a man who is in the dark.
“What?” she said softly.
He hid his face against her shoulder, in the shame and anguish of desire. He would have given anything, if this need never have come upon him. But the strange fine quivering of his body thrilled her. She put her cheek down caressingly against his hair. She could be very tender, very, very tender and caressing. And he grew quieter.
He looked up at the night again, hot with pain and doom and necessity. It had grown quite dark, the stars were out.
“I suppose we shall have to be married,” he said in a dismal voice.
“Why?” she laughed. It seemed a very sudden and long stride to her. He had not even kissed her.
But he did not answer, did not even hear her question. She watched his fine young face in the dark, looking sullen and doomed at the stars.
“Kiss me!” she whispered, in the most secret whisper he had ever heard. “Kiss me!”
He turned, in the same battle of unwillingness. But as if magnetised he put forward his face and kissed her on the mouth: the first kiss of his life. And she seemed to hold him. And the fierce, fiery pain of pleasure which came with that kiss sent his soul rebelling in torment to hell. He had never wanted to be given up, to be broken by the black hands of this doom. But broken he was, and his soul seemed to be leaving him, in the pain and obsession of this desire, against which he struggled so fiercely.
She seemed to be pleased, to be laughing. And she was exquisitely sweet to him. How could he be otherwise than caught, and broken.
After an hour of this love-making she blackened him again, by saying they must go in to supper. But she meant it, so in he had to go.
Only when he was alone again in the cubby did he resume the fight to recover himself from her again. To be free as he had been before. Not to be under the torment of the spell of this desire. To preserve himself intact. To preserve himself from her.
He lay awake in his bed in the cubby and thanked God he was away from her. Thanked God he was alone, with a sufficient space of loneliness around him. Thanked God he was immune from her, that he could sleep in the sanctity of his own isolation. He didn’t want even to think about her.
IV
Gran did not leave her room that week, and Tom talked of fetching the relations.
“What for?” asked Jack.
“They’d like to be present,” said Tom.
Jack felt incredulous.
Lennie came out of her room, sniffing and wiping his eyes with his knuckles.
“Poor ol’ girl!” he sniffed. “She do look frail. She’s almost like a little girl again.”
“You don’t think she’s dying, do you, Len?” asked Jack.
“I don’t think, I knows,” replied Len, with utmost scorn. “Sooner, or later she’s bound to go hence and be no more seen. But she’ll be missed, for many a day, she will.”
“But Tom,” said Jack. “Do you think Gran will like to have all the relations sniffling round her when she gets worse?”
“I should think so,” replied Tom. “Anyway, I should like to die respectable, whether you would or not.”
Jack gave it up. Some things were beyond him, and dying respectable was one of them.
“Like they do in books,” said Len, seeing that Jack disapproved, and trying to justify Tom’s position. “Even ol’ Nelson died proper. ‘Kiss me, ‘Ardy,’ he said, an’ ‘Ardy kissed him, grubby and filthy as he was. He could do no less, though it was beastly.”
Still the boys were not sent for the relations until the following Sunday, which was a rest day. Jack went to the Gum Valley Homestead, because he knew the way. He set off before dawn. The terrific heat of the New Year had already passed, and the dawn came fresh and lovely. He was happy on that ride, Gran or no Gran. And that’s what he thought would be the happiest: always to ride on at dawn, in a nearly virgin country. Always to be riding away.
The Greenlows seemed to expect him. They had been “warned.” After he had been refreshed with a good breakfast, they were ready to start, in the buggy. Jack rode in the buggy with them, his saddle under his seat and the neck-rope of the horse in his hand. The hack ran behind, and nearly jerked Jack’s arms out of their sockets, with its halts and its disinclination to trot. Almost it hauled him out of the buggy sometimes. He would much rather have ridden the animal, but he had been requested to take the buggy, to spare it.
Mr. and Mrs. Greenlow scarcely spoke on the journey; it would not have been “showing sorrow.” But Jack felt they were enjoying themselves immensely, driving in this morning air instead of being cooped up in the house, she cooking and he with the Holy Book. The sun grew furiously hot. But Gum Valley Croft was seven miles nearer to Wandoo than the Ellis’ Gum Tree Selection, so they drove into the yard, wet with perspiration, just before the mid-day meal was put on to the table. Mrs. Ellis, aproned and bare-armed, greeted them as they drove up, calling out that they should go right in, and Jack should take the horses out of the buggy.
Quite a number of strange hacks were tethered here and there in the yard, near odd, empty vehicles, sulkies dejectedly leaning forward on empty shafts, or buggies and wagonettes sturdily important on four wheels. Yet the place seemed strangely quiet.
Jack came back to the narrow verandah outside the parlour door, where Mrs. Ellis had her fuchsias, ferns, cyclamens and musk growing in pots. A table had been set there, and dinner was in progress, the girls coming round from the kitchen with the dishes. Grace saw Jack hesitate, so she nodded to him. He went to the kitchen and asked doubtfully:
“How is she?”
“Oh, bad! Poor old dear. They’re all in there to say goodbye.”
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 figure 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.