Day's End and Other Stories (15 page)

She had once advanced far from the rest. In her swift, impatient manner she set down her sack, clutched it between her knees and pinned her fallen hair in a makeshift coil at the back of her neck. Then, taking the last pin from her mouth she shouted back to the others:

‘Ain't you ever coming? Good God, dark'll be atop of us soon!'

There was returned a hasty babble of voices and at last the clear protest:

‘We're coming as fast as we can! We have to wait for Rebecca all the time, though. She can't get along.'

The tall woman darted swift eyes beyond her three friends and then to the two other figures
advancing slowly, laboriously, almost imperceptibly behind, shouted in a tremendous voice:

‘Come on, for God's sake – come on, come on!'

But the pace of these others, as if frustrated by something much more powerful than this voice, did not increase. One of them indeed actually paused, lifted up her face and then turned her head to the others. She seemed to speak, listen for a reply that never came and then lifted her face again.

‘It's Rebecca!' she called back. ‘We'll catch up soon!'

The tall woman gave up this reply with a motion and a word or two of impatience and disgust, tossing her dark head. To the rest she called suddenly, once more, with increased contemptuousness, and then picking up her sack strode on without another look at them.

The two belated stragglers came on behind as slowly as ever. Sometimes the first would pause, pick up a stick or two and cast a glance back at the other. Her very girlish face had no impatience, no anger, no meanness on it, but looking at the other figure she would sometimes sigh strangely, as if to express something between tolerance and weariness of its decrepitude, its shuffling feet, its worn, trembling hands and shoulders. Looking patiently at this face, draped like a faded yellow image in its black shawl, she would call quietly ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,'
until, receiving nothing but silence in answer, she would turn and go slowly on again, following the rest.

As if having heard nothing, as if unaware of the existence of the other women, this old figure, bent always very low, followed the girl with tiny steps. The sack she carried had only the faintest bulge at its very foot. Her hands grasped it feebly yet desperately, like some cherished possession. She now and then set it with scrupulous care on the grass and with her hands explored the grass beneath the trees, fumbling beneath the crisp leaves that had already half covered it, and again carefully, almost secretly putting whatever she found into her sack. Her hands were very quick in closing it again. Going on once more, muttering yet unperturbed, she would muse abstractedly on what she had seen there: on the beech-nuts, leaves, wood-nuts, the sheep's wool, the few dry twigs and the single magpie's feather lying there, like an arrow of black and white. This brief, sometimes confused memory would make her cease muttering, smile and glance into the sky. The sun, falling into her eyes, would cause them to shine like very old jewels of some blue colour. It gave her an expression of such dreaminess, softness and content that she seemed to belong momentarily to another existence, cut off from the women far ahead and even from the girl loitering somewhere between.

These strange actions, pauses and her day-dreams
made her journey along the woodside a long one. Reaching the end of the wood at last she found the women grouped there in conference, the girl already with them.

The voice of the tall woman reached her first.

‘What we get outside the wood ain't nothing to what we'll get in,' she observed. ‘There's wood there ain't been touched for ten years. Nobody'll see us. Are you coming? It'll be all right – in the middle, in the dark part,' she urged.

The little woman for her answer threw her sack into the ditch and drew another empty one from a great pocket in her skirt.

‘Ain't you coming too?' The tall woman addressed this question to the others. One of the fat women began apologetically in reply:

‘I'd be about done at the end. I can't get my breath.'

‘We can sit down – take our time – needn't go all over,' contemptuously urged the tall one. ‘You can't go back with only one stinking sackful!'

‘I can't carry two – not how I am,' declared the other. ‘I can't!'

‘Pah! can't you send Amos for it to-night?'

The scorn in her voice seemed to give her impetus enough to stride the ditch, mount the fence on the other side and scramble into the wood before the other opened her mouth again. ‘I ain't coming,' she tried to begin. But suddenly, never finishing this half-hearted sort of protest, she set down her sack and
crawled laboriously over the fence into the wood. The tall woman pulled her over with impatient hands while the other fat woman waddled across the ditch and stood ready to be helped too. Presently only the girl and the old woman remained outside the wood.

The eyes of the four women eyed those two for some time in silence, at first expectantly, then suspiciously, and at last with a trace of contempt. Suddenly the big woman leaned over the fence and mouthed:

‘What are you standing there for? Ain't you coming?'

The old woman, engaged in fumbling among the leaves at her feet, did not hear this sharp demand and did not lift her head. But the girl, very immobile, her eyes wide open, a faint flush on her cheeks, replied instead, in a low voice:

‘It's Rebecca. We'd never get along in there with her.'

Her eyes lowered themselves to the unconscious head bent near her feet, then suddenly jerked themselves upward at the sound of the tall woman's voice.

‘Take no notice of her!' she was urged. ‘She won't know you've gone. Your mother'll want firing bad enough. Don't your roof leak now, like it used to? Come on!'

‘I'll stay with Rebecca,' said the girl.

The tall figure laughed with faint derision. ‘You're
frightened of being caught, perhaps? Your fine Johnny might hear about it, or perhaps you're too proud to come in the wood and gather sticks with the like of us – and your roof leaking. Come on!'

An expression of confusion, of injury, of piteousness covered the girl's face at these words. ‘It's not that,' she tried to stammer, ‘only I don't want to leave Rebecca. And I've got enough. My sack's nearly full. I can just go steady on with Rebecca.'

‘Oh! it's your fine Johnny, that's all,' taunted the big woman. ‘It ain't the wood you're afraid of. Oh! I saw you come out of the wood last night, didn't I? You weren't frightened then, because your fine Johnny had his arm round your neck and was looking at you – ain't that right?' She paused, picked up her sack and turning threw over her shoulder the swift parting taunt: ‘You weren't picking sticks in there with your fine one, were you?'

She ended all this abruptly on a harsh laugh with which the rest joined in, less loud but with the same air of insensitive derision, before turning and leading them through the fading undergrowth into the gloomy heart of the wood. For a long time after they had disappeared and could be heard only by faint sounds and remote echoes soon lost in the tangled arches of the great trees the girl stood looking after them, a pained flush dying unwillingly on her cheeks,
her eyes misty and trembling, her long dark lashes shining and heavy with unfallen tears. Her lips sometimes moved faintly, as if to utter some reproach or protest, but no sound ever came. Suddenly, as if finding this task of watching and reflecting too much for her, she turned away, let her sack slip from her hands and sat on the grass by Rebecca in the sunshine.

For a long time it seemed that the clear warmth of the autumn air was the only kind and compassionate thing on the hillside. Rebecca did not move except to grope among the leaves and put odd, useless things into her sack, and never looked at the girl. But what the other women had said seemed to fill the silence over and over again, bitterly depressing her. Their hardness of heart for the things very dear to her, their reproaches, the tall woman's coarse wit and laughter, the moanings of the stout ones, the thin snarl of the little woman, and in all of them the same avariciousness and meanness in some degree, cowed the girl briefly with unhappiness and misery.

Suddenly, when it seemed to her that her tears must fall instead of drying up in the sunshine, she felt Rebecca put out her hand and touch her. The trembling gaze of the old woman met the eyes of the girl with a kind of dim but very warm assurance and compassion.

‘What are you crying for, eh?' she murmured.

The girl only blinked her eyes in the sunshine.
This movement did not seem to escape the soft gaze of the woman and in a moment she made another murmur.

‘You are crying, aren't you?' she said.

This time the young girl, as if instinctively, nodded quickly, parted her lips and tried to smile into Rebecca's face. This smile fading suddenly she tried to whisper something, but her voice only choked and lost itself. As if knowing what to expect, as if understanding everything to the utmost, the old woman sat silent, watching the girl's few tears fall and make little silver lines in the red of her cheeks, listening to her faint sobs, and holding in her own unsteady fingers the warm, young hands. At last the sobbing and the tears ended; then Rebecca spoke again.

‘How old are you, eh?' she asked.

‘Fifteen,' whispered the girl. ‘Last spring.'

‘You're Rachel Blackwell's little un, ain't you?'

‘Yes.' The girl nodded too.

The woman sat silent for a moment, as if lost again. ‘Yes, yes,' she began to murmur presently again. ‘I know them all – Rachel, Mary, Till, Lizzie, Jabez – I know all your family – all of them. Don't you cry any more,' she urged suddenly. ‘Sit along o' me. Did they laugh at you? It seemed as if I heard them laughing.'

The girl, staring into the sunshine, gulped before speaking. ‘Yes. They wanted us to go in there. I didn't want to go – I don't like them, none of them
– so they laughed at me. They laughed at me about—about—'

Her voice trailed off, never finishing its last sentence, until her lips trembled and cleared again, and again the old woman, as if understanding everything, as if with perfect insight, knowledge and compassion, kept silent, shaking her head slowly, caressing the girl's hand, gazing with her shining eyes. She had been conscious of much that had happened in the woodside, of some things the women had said, of their greed, their coarse laughter, and like the girl she had mused on this, stoically, quietly, saying nothing, only gathering together her odd nuts, leaves and grasses, late flowers and fallen feathers in silence except for the rustle of her feet in the grass. The faint emotions she did not speak made themselves felt in tiny tremors across her breast and visible in the pale lustre of her eyes. She knew that she, like the girl, hated and longed to be away from the other women, but to none of their eyes was this hatred or desire visible. To the girl especially it seemed that during her long silences she sat on the grass dreaming of nothing, lost and enchanted simply by the sight of the empty sky. But when she spoke the girl liked the comforting sound of her voice and the trembling, almost as if shy, glances of her nearly transparent eyes.

These things set her at rest while listening to Rebecca murmuring on and on, sometimes in a curious, disjointed way, sometimes soft and musing,
now and then clear and with words which made the girl smile again.

‘Don't you go in the wood if you don't want,' she said once. ‘Don't go after them. They'll come back. In a little while you can go back to your mother, only wait a little bit more, along o' me. I shall be going down soon.'

With these words in her ears the girl seemed to become content to watch the plain below, with its dry, empty cornfields, its houses and trees, with the spire of the church to which she went every Sunday rising brown and gleaming in the sunshine. The old woman fell silent too. Gradually the sun slipped across the plain, slanting long shadows across the green hillside.

‘Rebecca,' said the young girl suddenly, ‘they don't seem to come back.'

‘They'll come soon.'

‘Perhaps they won't come.'

Rebecca, without shifting her gaze, said, ‘I shall be going down soon. I shan't be long.'

‘Mother sent me with them. But I don't care,' said the girl. ‘I'll come with you.'

She waited at the side of the old woman for a long time after saying this, watching the plain with far-off eyes, eating a few beech-nuts and with a faint pain still in her breast thinking, constantly thinking. Sometimes, as if overcome, she shut her eyes, seeing in the darkness the face of a boy and relinquishing this only after a long time, a struggle, a sigh. The
other women did not return and under this new influence she ceased to suffer the pain their words had caused her. The face of the boy began to appear in the sunlight, the trees, over the plain. Suddenly she jumped to her feet, staring at the village beneath and cried:

‘It's getting late. I must go home. Let me help you get up.'

The old woman, motioning with her pale hands, shook her head. ‘It's early,' she said, ‘you needn't go.'

But the girl, naively eager, watching the village from the corners of her bright eyes, repeated:

‘I must go. We've sat here a long time.' She saw that Rebecca did not move. ‘Baint you coming?' she asked quickly, as if with a sudden, fresh kind of hope.

Almost as if detecting this new note in her voice the woman shook her head and said, ‘You go, you go. I can come down soon. Your legs are younger than mine. You go.'

The girl seemed to hesitate, opened her mouth and stood watching her. The woman only repeated:

‘Go, go, my dear. I'll stay a little longer, in the sun.'

Murmuring some words indistinctly the girl glanced over the hillside, then down at the village again and at the dipping autumn sun. ‘I'll go then,' she said suddenly in a louder voice. She picked up her sack. ‘I'll go – I must go.'