Читать книгу The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard - A. E. Coppard - Страница 9

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Four or five months later the higgler’s affairs had again taken a rude turn. Marriage, alas, was not all it might be; his wife and his mother quarrelled unendingly. Sometimes he sided with the one, sometimes with the other. He could not yet afford to install his mother in a separate cottage, and therefore even Sophy had to admit that her mother-in-law had a right to be living there with them, the home being hers. Harvey hadn’t bought much of it; and though he was welcome to it all now, and it would be exclusively his as soon as she died, still, it was her furniture and you couldn’t drive any woman (even your mother) off her own property. Sophy, who wanted a home of her own, was vexed and moody, and antagonistic to her man. Business, too, had gone down sadly of late. He had thrown up the Shag Moor round months ago; he could not bring himself to go there again, and he had not been able to square up the loss by any substantial new connections. On top of it all his horse died. It stumbled on a hill one day and fell, and it couldn’t get up, or it wouldn’t—at any rate, it didn’t. Harvey thrashed it and coaxed it, then he cursed it and kicked it; after that he sent for a veterinary man, and the veterinary man ordered it to be shot. And it was shot. A great blow to Harvey Witlow was that. He had no money to buy another horse; money was tight with him, very tight; and so he had to hire at fabulous cost a decrepit nag that ate like a good one. It ate—well, it would have astonished you to see what that creature disposed of, with hay the price it was, and corn gone up to heaven nearly. In fact Harvey found that he couldn’t stand the racket much longer, and as he could not possibly buy another it looked very much as if he was in queer street once more, unless he could borrow the money from some friendly person. Of course there were plenty of friendly persons but they had no money, just as there were many persons who had the money but were not what you might call friendly; and so the higgler began to reiterate twenty times a day, and forty times a day, that he was entirely and absolutely damned and done. Things were thus very bad with him, they were at their worst—for he had a wife to keep now, as well as a mother, and a horse that ate like Satan, and worked like a gnat—when it suddenly came into his mind that Mrs. Sadgrove was reputed to have a lot of money, and had no call to be unfriendly to him. He had his grave doubts about the size of her purse, but there could be no harm in trying so long as you approached her in a right reasonable manner.

For a week or two he held off from this appeal, but the grim spectre of destitution gave him no rest, and so, near the close of a wild March day he took his desperate courage and his cart and the decrepit nag to Shag Moor. Wild it was, though dry, and the wind against them, a vast turmoil of icy air strident and baffling. The nag threw up its head and declined to trot. Evening was but an hour away, the fury of the wind did not retard it, nor the clouds hasten it. Low down the sun was quitting the wrack of storm, exposing a jolly orb of magnifying fire that shone flush under eaves and through the casements of cottages, casting a pattern of lattice and tossing boughs upon the interior walls, lovelier than dreamed-of pictures. The heads of mothers and old dames were also imaged there, recognizable in their black shadows; and little children held up their hands between window and wall to make five-fingered shapes upon the golden screen. To drive on the moor then was to drive into blasts more dire. Darkness began to fall, and bitter cold it was. No birds to be seen, neither beast nor man; empty of everything it was, except sound and a marvel of dying light, and Harvey Witlow of Dinnop with a sour old nag driving from end to end of it. At Prattle Corner dusk was already abroad: there was just one shaft of light that broached a sharp-angled stack in the rickyard, an ark of darkness, along whose top the gads and wooden pins and tilted straws were miraculously fringed in the last glare. Hitching his nag to the palings he knocked at the door, and knew in the gloom that it was Mary who opened it and stood peering forth at him.

“Good evening,” he said, touching his hat.

“Oh!” the girl uttered a cry, “higgler! What do you come for?” It was the longest sentence she had ever spoken to him; a sad frightened voice.

“I thought,” he began, “I’d call—and see Mrs. Sadgrove. I wondered ...”

“Mother’s dead,” said the girl. She drew the door farther back, as if inviting him, and he entered. The door was shut behind him, and they were alone in darkness, together. The girl was deeply grieving. Trembling, he asked the question: “What is it you tell me, Mary?”

“Mother’s dead,” repeated the girl, “all day, all day, all day.” They were close to each other, but he could not see her. All round the house the wind roved lamentingly, shuddering at doors and windows. “She died in the night. The doctor was to have come, but he has not come all day,” Mary whispered, “all day, all day. I don’t understand; I have waited for him, and he has not come. She died, she was dead in her bed this morning, and I’ve been alone all day, all day, and I don’t know what is to be done.”

“I’ll go for the doctor,” he said hastily, but she took him by the hand and drew him into the kitchen. There was no candle lit; a fire was burning there, richly glowing embers, that laid a gaunt shadow of the table across a corner of the ceiling. Every dish on the dresser gleamed, the stone floor was rosy, and each smooth curve on the dark settle was shining like ice. Without invitation he sat down.

“No,” said the girl, in a tremulous voice, “you must help me.” She lit a candle: her face was white as the moon, her lips were sharply red, and her eyes were wild. “Come,” she said, and he followed her behind the settle and up the stairs to a room where there was a disordered bed, and what might be a body lying under the quilt. The higgler stood still, staring at the form under the quilt. The girl, too, was still and staring. Wind dashed upon the ivy at the window and hallooed like a grieving multitude. A crumpled gown hid the body’s head, but thrust from under it, almost as if to greet him, was her naked lean arm, the palm of the hand lying uppermost. At the foot of the bed was a large washing-bowl, with sponge and towels.

“You’ve been laying her out! Yourself!” exclaimed Witlow. The pale girl set down the candle on a chest of drawers. “Help me now,” she said, and moving to the bed she lifted the crumpled gown from off the face of the dead woman, at the same time smoothing the quilt closely up to the body’s chin. “I cannot put the gown on, because of her arm, it has gone stiff.” She shuddered, and stood holding the gown as if offering it to the man. He lifted that dead naked arm and tried to place it down at the body’s side, but it resisted and he let go his hold. The arm swung back to its former outstretched position, as if it still lived and resented that pressure. The girl retreated from the bed with a timorous cry.

“Get me a bandage,” he said, “or something we can tear up.”

She gave him some pieces of linen.

“I’ll finish this for you,” he brusquely whispered, “you get along downstairs and take a swig of brandy. Got any brandy?”

She did not move. He put his arm around her and gently urged her to the door.

“Brandy,” he repeated, “and light your candles.”

He watched her go heavily down the stairs before he shut the door. Returning to the bed he lifted the quilt. The dead body was naked and smelt of soap. Dropping the quilt he lifted the outstretched arm again, like cold wax to the touch and unpliant as a sturdy sapling, and tried once more to bend it to the body’s side. As he did so the bedroom door blew open with a crash. It was only a draught of the wind, and a loose latch—Mary had opened a door downstairs, perhaps—but it awed him, as if some invisible looker were there resenting his presence. He went and closed the door, the latch had a loose hasp, and tiptoeing nervously back, he seized the dreadful arm with a sudden brutal energy, and bent it by thrusting his knee violently into the hollow of the elbow. Hurriedly he slipped the gown over the head and inserted the arm in the sleeve. A strange impulse of modesty stayed him for a moment: should he call the girl and let her complete the robing of the naked body under the quilt? That preposterous pause seemed to add a new anger to the wind, and again the door sprang open. He delayed no longer, but letting it remain open, he uncovered the dead woman. As he lifted the chill body the long outstretched arm moved and tilted like the boom of a sail, but crushing it to its side he bound the limb fast with the strips of linen. So Mrs. Sadgrove was made ready for her coffin. Drawing the quilt back to her neck, with a gush of relief he glanced about the room. It was a very ordinary bedroom, bed, washstand, chest of drawers, chair, and two pictures—one of deeply religious import, and the other a little pink print, in a gilded frame, of a bouncing nude nymph recumbent upon a cloud. It was queer: a lot of people, people whom you wouldn’t think it of, had that sort of picture in their bedrooms.

Mary was now coming up the stairs again, with a glass half full of liquid. She brought it to him.

“No, you drink it,” he urged, and Mary sipped the brandy.

“I’ve finished—I’ve finished,” he said as he watched her, “she’s quite comfortable now.”

The girl looked her silent thanks at him, again holding out the glass. “No, sup it yourself,” he said; but as she stood in the dim light, regarding him with her strange gaze, and still offering the drink, he took it from her, drained it at a gulp, and put the glass upon the chest, beside the candle. “She’s quite comfortable now. I’m very grieved, Mary,” he said with awkward kindness, “about all this trouble that’s come on you.”

She was motionless as a wax image, as if she had died in her steps, her hand still extended as when he took the glass from it. So piercing was her gaze that his own drifted from her face and took in again the objects in the room, the washstand, the candle on the chest, the little pink picture. The wind beat upon the ivy outside the window as if a monstrous whip were lashing its slaves.

“You must notify the registrar,” he began again, “but you must see the doctor first.”

“I’ve waited for him all day,” Mary whispered, “all day. The nurse will come again soon. She went home to rest in the night.” She turned towards the bed. “She has only been ill a week.”

“Yes?” he lamely said. “Dear me, it is sudden.”

“I must see the doctor,” she continued.

“I’ll drive you over to him in my gig.” He was eager to do that.

“I don’t know,” said Mary slowly.

“Yes, I’ll do that, soon’s you’re ready. Mary,” he fumbled with his speech, “I’m not wanting to pry into your affairs, or anything as don’t concern me, but how are you going to get along now? Have you got any relations?”

“No,” the girl shook her head, “no.”

“That’s bad. What was you thinking of doing? How has she left you—things were in a baddish way, weren’t they?”

“Oh no.” Mary looked up quickly. “She has left me very well off. I shall go on with the farm; there’s the old man and the boy—they’ve gone to a wedding today; I shall go on with it. She was so thoughtful for me, and I would not care to leave all this, I love it.”

“But you can’t do it by yourself, alone?”

“No. I’m to get a man to superintend, a working bailiff,” she said.

“Oh!” And again they were silent. The girl went to the bed and lifted the covering. She saw the bound arm and then drew the quilt tenderly over the dead face. Witlow picked up his hat and found himself staring again at the pink picture. Mary took the candle preparatory to descending the stairs. Suddenly the higgler turned to her and ventured: “Did you know as she once asked me to marry you?” he blurted.

Her eyes turned from him, but he guessed—he could feel that she had known.

“I’ve often wondered why,” he murmured, “why she wanted that.”

“She didn’t,” said the girl.

That gave pause to the man; he felt stupid at once, and roved his fingers in a silly way along the roughened nap of his hat.

“Well, she asked me to,” he bluntly protested.

“She knew,” Mary’s voice was no louder than a sigh, “that you were courting another girl, the one you married.”

“But, but,” stuttered the honest higgler, “if she knew that, why did she want for me to marry you?”

“She didn’t,” said Mary again; and again, in the pause, he did silly things to his hat. How shy this girl was, how lovely in her modesty and grief!

“I can’t make tops or bottoms of it,” he said, “but she asked me, as sure as God’s my maker.”

“I know. It was me, I wanted it.”

“You!” he cried, “you wanted to marry me!”

The girl bowed her head, lovely in her grief and modesty. “She was against it, but I made her ask you.”

“And I hadn’t an idea that you cast a thought on me,” he murmured. “I feared it was a sort of trick she was playing on me. I didn’t understand, I had no idea that you knew about it even. And so I didn’t ever ask you.”

“Oh, why not, why not? I was fond of you then,” whispered she. “Mother tried to persuade me against it, but I was fond of you—then.”

He was in a queer distress and confusion: “Oh, if you’d only tipped me a word, or given me a sort of look,” he sighed. “Oh, Mary!”

She said no more but went downstairs. He followed her and immediately fetched the lamps from his gig. As he lit the candles: “How strange,” Mary said, “that you should come back just as I most needed help! I am very grateful.”

“Mary, I’ll drive you to the doctor’s now.”

She shook her head; she was smiling.

“Then I’ll stay till the nurse comes.”

“No, you must go. Go at once.”

He picked up the two lamps and, turning at the door, said: “I’ll come again tomorrow.” Then the wind rushed into the room. “Good-bye,” she cried, shutting the door quickly behind him.

He drove away in deep darkness, the wind howling, his thoughts strange and bitter. He had thrown away a love, a love that was dumb and hid itself. By God, he had thrown away a fortune, too! And he had forgotten all about his real errand until now, forgotten all about the loan! Well; let it go; give it up. He would give up higgling; he would take on some other job; a bailiff, a working bailiff, that was the job as would suit him, a working bailiff. Of course, there was Sophy; but still—Sophy!

Fishmonger’s Fiddle (1925)