Day's End and Other Stories (7 page)

‘It's Sinclair. It's Sinclair!'

Janet held her breath. The spot of green rose higher, flashing in the sunshine, never slackening, until the vast cluster of trees at the summit took it into its breast. Around her the chatter of the women and children went on. Those who had come farthest began to eat bread and meat and pies. Sometimes a bottle, poised motionlessly, would catch the sunlight and glitter like a star. The baker stuffed his mouth with bread again. To his grunts of invitation she shook her head vehemently. It was as if in its breathless passage up the hill the green trap had snatched away her hunger like a thief.

For the rest of the journey she did not speak. Her eyes remained staring ahead, as if she had some grievance with the horizon already shimmering with heat.

By noon they had erected their stall in the fairground. The great spiral brasses of the shows glared fiercely in the sun. The sky, like a hard blue gem, immovable and dispassionate, seemed to imprison the heat beneath itself. From the earth rose a dust of cinders and fine straw, thick with the smell of paraffin oil, which began to settle on the stacks of
bread and pastry under the awning. In the relentless blue heat of afternoon Janet and her husband worked on and on, selling desperately. The very breath of the man, hissing quickly, seemed avaricious.

‘Wish we'd baked more. Wish we'd baked more,' he whispered.

She flung a handful of coins into a bowl and bit her lips in silence.

‘Wish we'd baked more,' the voice hissed on, ‘Wish we'd baked more.'

Sweat whisked from his forehead when he leaned forward, falling on the bread in shining golden drops, like sovereigns. The bowl grew heavy with money. The sight of its immense pool of silver and copper dazzled her. Filling up the empty spaces in the black trays she glared bitterly at the streak of sunlight just edging across them, the first timorous hint of evening. It crawled slowly as if sick of its own heat.

Then into that oppressiveness fell a vision of the green trap dashing up the long, tiring hillside. A breath of the fresh summer dawn seemed to rush under the awning, revolutionise her whole expression, and for a moment give her an air of girlish expectancy and grace. Then at her side her husband rubbed his hands noisily, winked and said:

‘Ah! Ah! A-a-a-ah!'

It was his harvest. Her own visions succumbed beneath its weight without a murmur.

Evening came at last. A double paraffin lamp shot out its smoky flame over some red and white game of
chance long before it was dark. In the still, light air it burned steadily. It was a sign of opulence. By and by others flashed out, too. Some magic flung a dazzling circlet of blue, green and red and gold about the shadowy head of a great roundabout. A siren screamed into the sky, as if proclaiming that miracle of wonder. The harsh, returning echo seemed to bring down the twilight.

The baker tried to light his own battered lamp, but a fierce blue flame darted out at him like a snake and he gave up the attempt with words:

‘See well enough, can't we? See by the lights each side. Plenty of light.'

And when she complained that she had difficulty in seeing the change, he snarled: ‘Paraffin might drop on the bread. Might ruin us. I can see – surely you can.'

His harvest went on. In the three years of her married life with him there had been no better. He gloated over the diminishing heaps of bread, over the pool of silver and copper in the bowl, over everything that passed through his hands. His only regret was a constant hissing through his teeth: ‘Wish we'd baked more. Wish we'd baked more.'

Suddenly she missed the sound of his voice. She discovered herself alone in the stall. Lifting the flap of the awning she called ‘Jack! Jack!' in the direction of the cart, but he did not come. She called again. Sitting down on a box she resigned herself after the bitter reflection:

‘It happened last year. Now it's the same again.'

She ate a piece of bread and took a drink of stale water from the bucket under the counter. Too tired to light the lamp, she watched the bright river of faces moving tumultuously past her. The last of the pastries vanished. The single remaining roll she tried to eat, but it fell from her hands into the bucket, floating there forlornly. She sat staring at it, astounded at her own wastefulness. Fear swept over her face, then regret, then suddenly and without warning, that same joyous grace of once earlier in the day, transforming her as the dew had transformed the oat-stalks, the grasses, the leaves and even the stones in the sunny dawn. Strange bluish lights seemed to laugh among her hair. Her hands played restlessly across her breast, as if solacing some painful ecstasy there. Her head dropped to her hands and both became still, as if she were lost in the remembrance of an immense wonder.

Aroused at last by the sound of a voice, she could not immediately banish this frame of mind. The brassy jangle of the organs reasserted itself like a pain. There seemed to her no reason why she should suffer its infliction, why she should relinquish her moments of poignant reflection, even why she should answer the voice asking questions above her head.

Nevertheless she raised her head at last. For a moment she did not move again. Then she stumbled against the bowl of money as she got up hastily and
gestured pitifully to the figure of Sinclair asking for bread.

Her voice was a whisper: ‘We've sold it all.'

‘All? But you can find me something?'

She shook her head with a wan smile. They stood looking at each other, Janet's eyes uneasy, the man's in a profound stare fixed on her face. Then a whisper passed between them:

‘Where is your husband?'

Her hands sprang to her mouth, as if to suppress a cry.

‘He's gone – he's gone somewhere. Do you want him? Why do you ask like that? Why do you ask?'

In answer he beat a perplexed tattoo on one of the trays with his swagger-cane. His eyes lowered. At once her own swept up and fed on the changing expressions of his face, on his piercing eyes. Next moment he glanced up and caught her fully in this excited act. Her glance fell at once to his breast, to the smart check of the coat, the tip of the yellow bandana peeping from the pocket, the gold scarf-pin, to a medal for shooting on his watch-chain, and to his brown muscular fingers.

‘You say you've no bread?'

‘It's all gone.'

‘And your husband – he's gone too?'

‘Yes.'

His glance swept in a half circle towards the lights. She saw their reflections run in a coloured panorama across his black eyes. Suddenly they swung back and
stopped, utterly motionless, transfixed, as if fascinated by some magical thread in the coarse grey awning hung just behind her head. He bombarded her with a fusillade of whispers, of which the last seemed to strike her with deadly effect:

‘You have not forgotten?'

Her lips hung a little apart, poignant, perplexed. The word ‘forgotten' burned in her head, actually as she imagined a bullet would have done. Its painfulness, sometimes usually warm, at others stabbing violently, left her utterly still. The jingle of mechanical music reached her as the sound of a hymn might reach a dying man – the faint remembrance of a detached existence, irritable, pointless, remote.

She snatched up a roll of striped awning suddenly, holding it across her breast, as if for a protection.

He caught the words ‘Impossible – going to shut up – a long journey.'

She vanished. Reappearing, she stretched out the canvas and hung it across the front of the stall. Her actions, quick, unpremeditated, flabbergasted him. His hands hung motionlessly at his side. She muttered disjointed things: ‘Close – be here half the night – darkness.'

And within the stall, where he found himself following her irresistibly, there was literally darkness like the strange dense air of just before dawn, still, expectant, inscrutable.

And there was a smell of paraffin which he forgot abruptly in locating her figure. A heavy jingle of
money reached him. With outstretched fingers he groped towards it. ‘Janet! Janet!'

She sat on the box at his feet and buried her face in her hands. ‘Oh, if you knew what it was like! I'm tired. Last night I didn't go to bed until twelve, and this morning I got up in darkness. And the heat this afternoon! Then he grows meaner every day and expects me to be mean, too.'

She poured out her grief, quietly, regretfully, into his breast, talking about the dreariness, the drudgery, the mournfulness of her life in that oppressive bake-house, the avariciousness of her husband, overwhelming him with secret confidences, the full, unrestrained speech of a woman suddenly aroused to the magnanimity and wonder of a past lover. And gradually her head sank to his breast. There she could smell the fine freshness of his clothes, feel the coolness of the watch-chain against her neck, and hear even the thump of his heart and the tick of the minutes. And it seemed to her, as he caressed her listless head, that their love-affair of three or four years before was the only worthy, beautiful thing in her life, and her quarrel with him and her marriage, in a fit of desperation and spite to the baker, the most foolish and deadly. She remembered how he had lavished gifts upon her, given her books to read, made her sing, until it seemed that she would become a cultured, refined and beautiful woman. But now she had forgotten the songs, had no time to read anything, and never went anywhere. She remembered, too, and
with silent bursts of ecstasy like those of the earlier day, evenings on his farm, afternoons in the wood, by the river, and a single Easter Sunday when they had lolled all day under the damson-trees, just coming out in blossom, in his long orchard sloping towards the sun, listening to each other's voices, with the larks keeping up a perpetual anthem far up in the serene sky; and Amos, the old servant, had brought food to her very lap, and talked to her about her mother.

Now in the gloominess of the shut-in stall, she let him embrace and kiss her. She could not remember when she had been kissed last, and she held his head against hers for a long time.

‘How old are you?' he whispered.

‘Twenty-seven. In a year or two I shall be thirty. Sometimes I cry up in the hay-loft, then come down and talk with the horse, because I think he's tired, too.'

Her voice trailed off. It seemed to both that the only fortification against her existence was silence; and at last they let their fingers fall from each other's shoulders. Suddenly the thought of the baker brought them both to their feet.

‘He'll have to be found,' she said. ‘I'll get the money together. Go and harness the horse.'

They rode out of the fair-ground in silence, Sinclair driving. Up the wide streets of the town swam dark streams of people. In the market square a torchlight procession was forming up, throwing a smoky
light into the windows and on the bright faces of the girls and their men. Above them gaudy strings of triangular flags dipped from tree to tree. Noisy crowds of men and women sat drinking beer in the sultry air outside the inns. Now and then a rocket would scratch the black summer sky with its swift white point before bursting into green and vermilion stars.

The baker was sprawled across a table under an inn archway when they found him. His head rested calmly in a pool of beer. Some one had crowned him with a straw-hat no bigger than a saucer, and an arrogant blue feather was stuck in his button-hole. As Janet approached, a white-faced barmaid lifted up his head, wiped away the beer with a towel, then let it fall again and vanished with the air of one having performed the last rites.

‘Who's that?' mumbled the baker. ‘Eh?'

‘It's Janet.'

‘Come take me home?' he muttered.

‘Yes.'

‘You're a good gal. You're a good gal. You are.' He groped unsuccessfully for her arm. ‘You catch hold of me arm, catch hold, good gal; can't manage without – catch hold! Got th' money? That's all right. Bit dark now, now ain't it? Catch hold. Good gal.'

‘It's a long journey. Mind the step.'

They pushed him up into the trap. He sank down without grace or spirit, silent except for a groan or two.

She whispered into the face of the farmer when he began to condole with her. ‘It happened last year, and the year before. He doesn't often get drunk, only now and again. That's all.'

The sorrowfulness of the words seemed to pass into her eyes and reflect itself in his face.

‘You can't do anything.' Suddenly she caught his sleeve and poured out a torrent of beseeching whispers: ‘Now go away. Go away. I can't bear to see you stand there looking as if you'd lost something. Go away. It's a long journey, and we must go. He'll sleep all the way home, and I shall think of nothing but you.'

‘Every day I walk in the woods—'

She muttered as when they had first met: ‘Impossible – work, work – I could never come. It's all over.'

‘Forgive me.'

Her lips parted. Astonishment made her eyes larger and more beautiful. ‘Don't speak like that.' Her words became disjointed again. ‘It's too late, it's awful, everything's gone, it's lost, there's nothing.'

‘I could give you anything, I'll send you things—'

She sprang up into the cart and drove away with feverish haste among the crowd, past the torch-light procession, and clear of the town. In the cool night air her husband fell into a doze. The image of Sinclair, as she had last seen him, troubled and pained in the glow of the inn lights, travelled with her like the sound of the horse's feet. Glancing back at the
great circle of light lying in a soft arch over the town, she remembered the clean smell of his clothes, the tick of his watch, the panorama of lights in his eyes and his attentive silence to all the outpouring of her grief. She recalled, too, their quarrel, its tragically insignificant cause – a swift word or two, the Easter day beneath the damson-trees, and all her life of three, four and five years past.