Day's End and Other Stories (9 page)

When he could curb his restlessness no longer he would ascend to the room where the light was. There he remained for long periods talking in low whispers to the straight, pallid figure, barely in womanhood, but on the verge of motherhood, who lay and looked at him in the candle-glare.

That figure would continually question him in whispers:

‘Has he come yet?'

‘No.'

‘You think young Jabez told him?'

‘I writ a note,' he would say.

At that perhaps she would sigh in the stillness and then ask: ‘Look an' see.'

He generally obeyed her with something like fierceness, as if remembering what existed beyond the window-glass.

‘You can't see. It's snowing – little bits.'

‘Snowing?' she echoed.

If ever he approached her the whole bed and its occupant came under a great shadow. The face into which he poured the whole content of his fear was scarcely visible to him.

‘Are you cold? You don't want nothing? It ain't too bad? Sure?'

She smiled, and observing his persistent attitude on
the edge of the bed, told him: ‘Go and get your supper now.'

But he lingered near her, eyeing acutely her dried-up face, half-ghastly in the yellow light, in which the eyes, full of a sort of deep, savage patience, seemed the only things alive.

‘I ain't hungry,' he growled without malice.

‘Hadn't you better get summet anyway?' she quietly suggested.

‘I'll see.'

‘I don't mind being by myself.' Her eyes darted fearless glances through the room. Observing, however, he made no move for the door, they alighted on his figure in a pitying stare as if he had been the child for which she was lying prostrate.

‘Go and get something,' she begged him.

He went suddenly, as if having caught some unexpected gleam in the glance she gave him. Downstairs he threw more wood on the fire, and bending nearly low enough to have his face licked by the flames, ate silently. The food vanished methodically, producing no more expression in him than words on a deaf man. Occasionally, when a stillness fell on the room he heard the noises of the storm exploring the woods and hollows in low growls like those of dissatisfied dogs.

Having eaten the shepherd pushed open the door an inch or two: beyond the patch of earth sheltered by the house he could see the grass, already bitten grey by the wind, getting whiter and whiter. Out
there transient, dark shapes seemed to spring from the pale breast of earth and twine about each other with moans. Above the snow lay a heavy darkness, under the oppression of which the light from the upper window was suffocated, its chance of existence swamped almost as completely as the cries of the sheep and lambs in the hovels behind.

The man retreated quickly against the blast, cold enough to have turned his face to a lump of ice.

He ascended again. ‘He ain't coming,' he said. His eyes shone icily as he bent over her face, which he thought whiter than the snow that had mercilessly battered his own.

‘All right?' he whispered.

In reply, she smiled as if to convey: ‘It's no worse, it's no worse.' Something, however, warned him of the imaginative nature of the smile, which was painful, too. He became alarmed, and went suddenly to the window, where he burst out:

‘I'm going.'

Beyond a short murmur, which might have been a sound of protest suppressed by some unconscious force, she made no sound, but watched him viciously rub his hand across the window before repeating his intention.

‘I'm going.'

This time she nodded. There was a silence.

‘Will it be all right?' he whispered into her face.

‘I don't know,' she faltered.

‘You?'

‘I think so.' She began to rub playful fingers across her breast as if to dispel her fear.

‘I'm going then.' He lumbered out.

Alone, she listened to the sound of his retreating footsteps with a growing hope that he might meet the doctor on the doorstep. For a long time she remained thus, attentively silent, making only one movement, a restless play of her fingers over her breast, which seemed to have progressed mechanically ever since his decision to leave her.

Outside the wind had leapt from moanings to terrific shrieks. Borne down on swift gusts of frozen air the noises assailed the shepherd as loudly as if a hundred yelling mouths had been thrust into his face. Stepping from the murky-warm atmosphere of the kitchen he met the furious inrush of air with something like a shout of panic, which, however, the wind swept away before it became audible to ears other than his own. With a hand at his throat he stood for a moment cringing and squinting. Even so it was impossible to see beyond the yellow square in the snow. He pushed blindly into open space, his feet swishing heavily in the snow-laden grass.

Clear of the shelter of the walls the wind beset him at every point. Once again he was forced to a standstill. About his head he wrapped a pair of frantic arms in order to shield his eyes. But the snow forced itself through the crevices of his cramped hands until he despaired and bent down, finally crouching on the ground to feel for the road. He discovered everywhere
choked with snow. Suddenly enraged he began to kick desperately at the dead earth, but beneath the snow found it grassy and water-logged.

Then he found his vision strengthening. To his right lay the hollow of trees, black as a cavern, to his left more trees, clinging to the side of the hill, and before him the only unbroken space, across which the wind tore as if driven to that frenzy by a greater, invisible force behind.

A sort of sombre anger, deepening with every blast of wind, possessed him as he stumbled stiffly downhill. He discovered he needed every breath in his body. In consequence he drew his mouth into a thin line that had all the appearance of both attack and defence against the storm. Now and then, as brutally as if it had been the face of an enemy, he wiped his face with a drenched sleeve. That swift movement seemed to have purpose enough to crush every feature he possessed, though after it the eyes only held their resentment and the lips their impenetrability more tenaciously. In that way he pushed himself against the body of the storm. Already he seemed to have spent hours in doing nothing else. Sometimes, however, he found time to shoot a rapid glance or two in the direction of the great masses of trees below, searching for any glimmer of light the storm had not annihilated. But every rush of the wind seemed to render his chance of success more remote. He was forced again into that position with hands across his chest and face bent to earth. He saw nothing but the
slightly luminous snow, into which his feet dropped with a great slip-slopping sound. A sense of futility seized him: the road seemed endless. His body felt like an empty sack hung out for the wind to blow through. He tried to hurry, but already the limbs seemed to have come under the spell of a mechanism not only powerful but irresistible.

With a ‘God damn it,' he threw himself savagely forward. The ground appeared to rise and touch his face. He actually felt the dead-cold contact of it against one cheek. For a second or two he lay still – flat-stomached against the snow, wondering. For the first time there was an utter calm. His fall seemed to have clapped greater mufflers both over his ears and the voice of the storm. He could just detect a faraway moan, that was all.

He leapt up. The thought of his wife negatived completely any idea of bodily hurt in himself. After removing the snow from his head by a number of dog-like shakes he bent his face to the ground and started off at a half-run. A vision of the room in which the steadiness of the spiky candle-flame was matched only by the immobility of the woman on the bed was enough to carry him some distance without a stop.

The ground now began to slant steeply under his feet. He was placed in the predicament of forging against the storm on the one hand and holding himself in check on the other. He had no desire to repeat his sprawl in the snow. The attitude he took up,
therefore, was one of extreme awkwardness, in which the body was held rigidly backward instead of at a low forward hunch. Thus he continued to descend warily until the lowest point of the road was reached. There he commenced to run. Above his head the branches swayed and shrieked as if they had been spectators to some fantastic comedy of which his progress was part. But he ran on.

He discovered himself to be shortly knee-deep in the overflow of a stream he had forgotten in his haste. The water was intensely cold and thick with snow, of which great lumps would constantly float past, grazing his trembling shins. At the first shock of being half-submerged he stood utterly still. He had no idea as to what lay ahead. The flood might extend or deepen beyond his experience – he did not know. It had once covered the hedge-tops.

Shuddering in great gasps he waded steadily across. On the other side, soaked to his buttocks, he shook himself like a half-drowned dog. Beginning miserably to walk the short distance between himself and the village he once or twice paused and turned round. There, as if wedged permanently in the hillside, the light in his cottage remained steadily visible. Reassured, he went on, and then slowly, almost shyly, out of the blackness ahead, other lights came and met him.

‘The doctor has this minute gone,' a voice informed him.

‘Gone?'

‘This minute.'

‘You couldn't say where?'

The maid pondered, retreated, and could be heard distantly questioning. The shepherd stood and shivered. It seemed years before the return of the voice.

‘He has gone to the shepherd's,' he heard.

‘Ah!'

‘And he went the long way round. They do say the other is flooded.'

He uttered a half-laugh and went.

A second time he waded a passage through the flood which had diverted the course of the doctor's trap. All those former sensations – the grating of the lumps of snow, the mighty gasping, the dragging out of his miserable body, the shaking and uncontrollable limbs – all came again. It was like the return of an old dream.

Behind him the lights retreated into blackness. Snow continued to fall, still in a perverse wind that hit him at every step up the hill, at the top of which his own light still shone, uncrossed by shadow. In that return journey he neither encountered nor heard a living thing. The light ahead alone prevented a belief that the only existing creature on the face of the earth was himself. A sense of miserable desolation replaced all others, and he came to think of the wind and snow as mere monotonies where they had once been afflictions. Thus, in a mood of what, in other circumstances and men, might have been
one of proud indifference, he drew gradually nearer the light.

The neighing of a horse reached him. Pushing open the door he sensed another presence; something foreign lay in a chair near the dying fire. It was a man's cap.

With relief he sat opposite it, occupying himself for what seemed an age by throwing handfuls of wood into the fire and watching it smoke damply. Intermittently the sound of muffled steps reached him from overhead: an ominous sound. Time passed, and the red heart of the fire shrank.

It needed another hour for morning when a voice from the cavernous stairs assailed him.

‘That you, Shepherd?'

‘Yessir.' His emotions were many.

‘Shepherd?'

‘Yessir. All right?'

A long pause, full of fear it seemed to him.

‘I'm afraid the little one – Shepherd; I'm afraid so.'

He began his sympathies. The wife would be all right. The Shepherd watched him dully as he caved his hands over the red bottom of the fire. His dark form stood up like a beam, barring every inch of glow. Minutes went silently through the dark room.

Two ‘Good-nights' made a little gap in the stillness. The distant moan and the near patter on the window-panes went on. There was a sound of wheels,
growing fainter. Mechanically the Shepherd ascended the stairs and sat down softly by the bed. Something in a little white bundle at his side made him afraid of setting up a sound, and in silence he watched absorbedly that other face not yet conscious of his presence, until long after a sound awoke in the snow outside, then another and another, rising and calling him with all the insistency of a new life.

Then he rose and walked stiffly to the window. The lambs cried afresh from the whitened hovels, and as he stood there dawn came greyly over the snow, like a thing stirring from sleep.

And turning suddenly he saw that that other figure had awoken to its light.

Suddenly, across the empty seats of the church, the two women caught sight of each other. One of them, Helena, the young doctor's wife, crouched on the altar steps in the middle of a little sea of wood-anemones and daffodils, for it was Easter Sunday, and in an hour the service would begin. The other, an older woman with a gray scarf tied over her head, sat far back in great shadows which made her features indistinguishable. It was just possible to tell she was staring at Helena, nothing more.

Having allowed herself what seemed a hasty glimpse, Helena bent her head away again and began putting anemones with daffodils in artistic bunches. On her moving the flowers the altar became full of spring scents; sunlight fell in a great beam across the floor, and from the stones a sweet coolness rose up through her limbs.

All at once she shivered. Why was it the woman was so early for the service, which did not begin for an hour? She shifted her position a little and was able to take other looks at the dark figure, which sat with a sort of desperation about the hang of the head,
as if trying not to faint or fall asleep. She was quite motionless. Soon afterwards a pinkish glow from one of the windows fell on her, and lighting up her face, made her look like a picture of one of the saints.

Under some unconquerable impulse Helena went down and along the nave to where the woman sat sunk in thought. In silence the two faced each other, until, half-ashamed of her erectness, Helena sat suddenly on the seat in front and blinked in an ashamed way.