Читать книгу What Necessity Knows - L. Dougall - Страница 9

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The girl lifted the latch of the house-door, and went in. She was in the living-room. The old woman sat in a chair that was built of wood against the log wall. She was looking discontentedly before her at an iron stove, which had grown nearly cold for lack of attention. Some chairs, a table, a bed, and a ladder which led to the room above, made the chief part of the furniture. A large mongrel dog, which looked as if he had some blood of the grey southern sheep dog in him rose from before the stove and greeted the in-comer silently.

The dog had blue eyes, and he held up his face wistfully, as if he knew something was the matter. The old woman complained of cold. It was plain that she did not remember anything concerning death or tears.

There was one other door in the side of the room which led to the only inner chamber. The girl went into this chamber, and the heed she gave to the dog's sympathy was to hold the door and let him follow her. Then she bolted it. There were two narrow beds built against the wall; in one of these the corpse of a grey-haired man was lying. The dog had seen death before, and he evidently understood what it was. He did not move quickly or sniff about; he laid his head on the edge of the winding-sheet and moaned a little.

The girl did not moan. She knelt down some way from the bed, with a desire to pray. She did not pray; she whispered her anger, her unhappiness, her desires, to the air of the cold, still room, repeating the same phrases again and again with clenched hands and the convulsive gestures of half-controlled passion.

The reason she did not pray was that she believed that she could only pray when she was "good," and after falling on her knees she became aware that goodness, as she understood it, was not in her just then, nor did she even desire it. The giving vent to her misery in half-audible whispers followed involuntarily on her intention to pray. She knew not why she thus poured out her heart; she hardly realised what she said or wished to say; yet, because some expression of her helpless need was necessary, and because, through fear and a rugged sense of her own evil, she sedulously averted her mind from the thought of God, her action had, more than anything else, the semblance of an invocation to the dead man to arise and save her, and take vengeance on her enemy.

Daylight was in the room. The girl had knelt at first upright; then, as her passion seemed to avail nothing, but only to weary her, she sank back, sitting on her feet, buried her locked hands deeply in her lap, and with head bowed over them, continued to stab the air with short, almost inaudible, complaints. The dead man lay still. The dog, after standing long in subdued silence, came and with his tongue softly lapped some of the snow-water from her hair.

After that, she got up and went with him back into the kitchen, and lit the fire, and cooked food, and the day waned.

There is never in Nature that purpose to thwart which man in his peevishness is apt to attribute to her. Just because he desired so much that the winter should hold off a few days longer, Bates, on seeing the snow falling from the white opaque sky, took for granted that the downfall would continue and the ice upon the lake increase. Instead of that, the snow stopped falling at twilight without apparent cause, and night set in more mildly.

Darkness fell upon the place, as darkness can only fall upon solitudes, with a lonesome dreariness that seemed to touch and press. Night is not always dark, but with this night came darkness. There was no star nor glimmer of light; the pine-clad hills ceased to have form; the water in the lake was lost to all sense but that of hearing; and upon nearer objects the thinly sprinkled snow bestowed no distinctness of outline, but only a weird show of whitish shapes. The water gave forth fitful sobs. At intervals there were sounds round the house, as of stealthy feet, or of quick pattering feet, or of trailing garments—this was the wind busy among the drifting leaves.

The two men, who had finished the coffin by the light of a lantern, carried it into the house and set it up against the wall while they ate their evening meal. Then they took it to a table in the next room to put the dead man in it. The girl and the dog went with them. They had cushioned the box with coarse sacking filled with fragrant pine tassels, but the girl took a thickly quilted cloth from her own bed and lined it more carefully. They did not hinder her.

"We've made it a bit too big," said Saul; "that'll stop the shaking."

The corpse, according to American custom, was dressed in its clothes—a suit of light grey homespun, such as is to be bought everywhere from French-Canadian weavers. When they had lifted the body and put it in the box, they stopped involuntarily to look, before the girl laid a handkerchief upon the face. There lay a stalwart, grey-haired man—dead. Perhaps he had sinned deeply in his life; perhaps he had lived as nobly as his place and knowledge would permit—they could not tell. Probably they each estimated what they knew of his life from a different standpoint. The face was as ashen as the grey hair about it, as the grey clothes the body wore. They stood and looked at it—those three, who were bound to each other by no tie except such as the accident of time and place had wrought. The dog, who understood what death was, exhibited no excitement, no curiosity; his tail drooped; he moaned quietly against the coffin.

Bates made an impatient exclamation and kicked him. The kick was a subdued one. The wind-swept solitude without and the insistent presence of death within had its effect upon them all. Saul looked uneasily over his shoulder at the shadows which the guttering candle cast on the wall. Bates handled the coffin-lid with that shrinking from noise which is peculiar to such occasions.

"Ye'd better go in the other room," said he to Sissy. "It's unfortunate we haven't a screw left—we'll have to nail it."

Sissy did not go. They had made holes in the wood for the nails as well as they could, but they had to be hammered in. It was very disagreeable—the sound and the jar. With each stroke of Saul's hammer it seemed to the two workmen that the dead man jumped.

"There, man," cried Bates angrily; "that'll do."

Only four nails had been put in their places—one in each side. With irritation that amounted to anger against Saul, Bates took the hammer from him and shoved it on to a high shelf.

"Ye can get screws at the village, ye know," he said, still indignantly, as if some fault had appertained to Saul.

Then, endeavouring to calm an ill-temper which he felt to be wholly unreasonable, he crossed his arms and sat down on a chair by the wall. His sitting in that room at all perhaps betokened something of the same sensation which in Saul produced those glances before and behind, indicating that he did not like to turn his back upon any object of awe. In Bates this motive, if it existed, was probably unconscious or short-lived; but while he still sat there Saul spoke, with a short, silly laugh which was by way of preface.

"Don't you think, now, Mr. Bates, it 'ud be better to have a prayer, or a hymn, or something of that sort? We'd go to bed easier."

To look at the man it would not have been easy to attribute any just notion of the claims of religion to him. He looked as if all his motions, except those of physical strength, were vapid and paltry. Still, this was what he said, and Bates replied stiffly:

"I've no objections."

Then, as if assuming proper position for the ceremony that was to ease his mind, the big lumberman sat down. The girl also sat down.

Bates, wiry, intelligent Scot that he was, sat, his arms crossed and his broad jaw firmly set, regarding them both with contempt in his mind. What did they either of them know about the religion they seemed at this juncture to feel after as vaguely as animals feel after something they want and have not? But as for him, he understood religion; he was quite capable of being priest of his household, and he felt that its weak demand for a form of worship at this time was legitimate. In a minute, therefore, he got up, and fetching a large Bible from the living-room he sat down again and turned over its leaves with great precision and reverence.

He read one of the more trenchant of the Psalms, a long psalm that had much in it about enemies and slaughter. It had a very strong meaning for him, for he put himself in the place of the writer. The enemies mentioned were, in the first place, sins—by which he denoted the more open forms of evil; and, in the second place, wicked men who might interfere with him; and under the head of wicked men he classed all whom he knew to be wicked, and most other men, whom he supposed to be so. He was not a self-righteous man—at least, not more self-righteous than most men, for he read with as great fervour the adjurations against sins into which he might fall as against those which seemed to him pointed more especially at other sinners who might persecute him for his innocence. He was only a suspicious man made narrower by isolation, and the highest idea he had of what God required of him was a life of innocence. There was better in him than this—much of impulse and action that was positively good; but he did not conceive that it was of the workings of good that seemed so natural that God took account.

Upon Saul also the psalm had adequate effect, for it sounded to him pious, and that was all he desired.

The girl, however, could not listen to a word of it. She fidgeted, not with movement of hands or feet, but with the restlessness of mind and eyes. She gazed at the boards of the ceiling, at the boards of the floor, at the log walls on which each shadow had a scalloped edge because of the form of tree-trunks laid one above another. At length her eyes rested on the lid of the coffin, and, with nervous strain, she made them follow the grain of the wood up and down, up and down. There was an irregular knothole in the lid, and on this her eyes fixed themselves, and the focus of her sight seemed to eddy round and round its darkened edge till, with an effort, she turned from it.

The boards used for making the coffin had been by no means perfect. They were merely the best that could be chosen from among the bits of sawn lumber at hand. There was a tiny hole in one side, at the foot, and this larger one in the lid above the dead man's breast, where knots had fallen out with rough handling, leaving oval apertures. The temptation Sissy felt to let her eyes labour painfully over every marking in the wood and round these two holes—playing a sort of sad mechanical game therewith—and her efforts to resist the impulse, made up the only memory she had of the time the reading occupied.

There was a printed prayer upon a piece of paper kept inside the lid of the Bible, and when Bates had read the psalm, he read this also. He knelt while he did so, and the others did the same. Then that was finished.

"I'll move your bed into the kitchen, Sissy," said Bates.

He had made the same offer the night before, and she had accepted it then, but now she replied that she would sooner sleep in that room than near the stove. He was in no mood to contest such a point with her. Saul went out to his shed. Bates shut the house door, and went up the ladder to his loft. Both were soon in the sound slumber that is the lot of men who do much outdoor labour.

The girl helped the old woman to bed in the kitchen. Then she went back and sat in the chamber of death.