GAME FEATHERS.JIMMYand I once spent a month in the country together. The doctor had ordered him fresh air and good diet. We went to Farthings Farm in Sussex and boarded with old Mrs. Covey. She was an extraordinary character—narrowly religious, as these half-educated rustics so often are. You could see hell fire in the hard lines of her mouth and the cunning screw of her little gray eyes. Yet she wasn’t a bad sort. Her pious cant was amusing and quite harmless. She talked seriously to Jimmy, knowing, as she must have done, that he had not long to live. She used to say, with a half-groaning, half-chuckling sort of breath:“Ah! sir, I believe in the sacrifice inthisworld.”Jimmy returned, very politely—he was always polite:“I’m afraid I don’t quite gather your meaning.”Mrs. Covey would look at him despairingly, raise her eyes to the ceiling, shake her head, and ejaculatea long, solemn “Ah—ah!” which was very convincing.She was up at daybreak every morning; we used to hear her scolding and swilling or throwing a pet word to her cats—she had five. But on Sundays she used to lie very late—until half-past seven. She took a bath—as a pious duty. When breakfast was over, she sat in the living room, with the big Bible in front of her and her spectacles on the open page, until it was time to go to chapel. She drove there regularly every Sunday. It was a rich sight to see her with her two sons, in the shabby wagonette, sitting bolt upright in widow’s weeds, with black kid gloves, purple in the palms and much too long in the fingers. Sunday was a day of days. We fed on cold meat and salad; it was the one day on which she refused to sell milk or to spud about in her garden. In the afternoon she would walk solemnly through her meadows, never speculating on the crops or allowing her sons to do so, but holding up her black silk skirt carefully, and drawing her sour Sabbath lip.She was very kind to Jimmy—taking good careof his body, although she despaired of his soul. In her young days she had been a cook, and she tempted his flagging appetite with many dainties. There was one particular dish of candied red currants.If anyone called on her—say, between three and half-past—for milk, for advice about a sick baby, for herbal treatment of a wound, or for the simple loan of a black crock, Jib or Zak would be lurching at the house door. They were grotesquely alike, those sons of hers, with the Biblical names of Jabez and Zachary. She always called them Jib and Zak on week days; Jabez and Zachary on Sundays. They had an odd way of greeting you. They gave a nod—half sheepish, half jovial—or they raised a broad, dingy thumb to a sun-baked straw hat, according to their mood or the social status of the visitor.Their answer to all inquiries was:“Mother ’ull be down directly. Would you care to step inside out o’ the sun and set down, till you hear her draw up the clock?”That was her rule. For forty years, except when stopped by trivialities—such as a confinement—shehad drawn up the thirty-hour clock the moment before she came down from her afternoon’s cleaning.That afternoon black dress, with jet buttons! I remember the tiny, shiny silk apron, with the bead edging and the prim pockets. She never put in her false teeth until the afternoon, nor pinned on her false hair, which was three shades too light. In the mornings she slipped about the kitchen and dairy in an old skirt, a nondescript bodice, and a shawl—thick or thin, according to the direction of the wind.I remember the particular morning when she was taken ill. It was a tremendously hot day in June. Jimmy was sitting on the wooden bench by the garden door, with his thin hands spread out on his knees to bake in the sun. I was hanging about the garden, and longing to get back to the Inn. Mrs. Covey came out from the dairy with a dish clout in her hand. She began to vigorously “shoo” a fine cock from the strawberry bed. I can see her now, with her bent back in the brownish bodice and triangular-folded scarlet shawl. She went back to the house between rows of podded broad beans.When she cried out to the cock—who was a gay fellow, all brown and burnish—it was a queer, unwomanly cry. No doubt she knew the note with which to scare him. He went racing back to the yard, all tail feathers, swinging comb, and indignant cackle.An hour afterward she fell on the flagstones by the back door. She had been very busy making jelly of windfall apples. Apoplexy gripped her, and she fell, a droll-looking, lop-sided heap, on the stones.That was a long, hot, empty day. Jimmy was fretful and selfish, after the manner of chronic invalids. He missed his egg and milk, his jelly, the dozen little dainties that she prepared for him. And I think he was a trifle scared, poor chap, by the very mention of Death—Death, that unpleasant personage, with whom he already had a bowing acquaintance.The doctor came—a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap. He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed. Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for herto go. Her world—of forty acres or so—was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood—metallic finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many generations of birds.Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in syrup.Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his thought—that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had roughly rigged up for the haymakers—but who was to get the men’s tea? The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.Jib and Zak, so much alike, with eyes and mouths twisted in consequence of life-long opposition to theglare of the sun, came into the parlor where I sat reading the local paper. They had been clumping hopelessly about in the garden. I had watched them, finding them more interesting than the price of store pigs and the sale of underwood. They had looked out wistfully at the eight-acre field, half lush, half shorn. They had looked up at Mrs. Covey’s window—a tiny window, set high in the brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral suggestion of a limp calico curtain.We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less—work in the fields and so many children make them old long before that—sidled up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn! Zak had run to her cottage and fetched her directly his mother fell. She was always called to deathbeds. She gave a sidelong look at me and courtesied with charming grace; some of these rustic women are queens of grace. Then shespoke to the brothers, the greedy look of a vulture creeping into her violet eyes.“I’m jest slipping home now to look after my lodger. There’s no change in her. She won’t go, bless your hearts, for pretty nigh twenty-four hour. I’ll look round after tea agen; no doubt you’ll make it worth my while.”For nearly a week it went on; the hot, breathless days, bees buzzing in the big lime by the gate; at dusk the ringing, rattling croak of frogs in the pond, the weird voice of the night-jar. Jimmy grew more fretful. He complained that he could not sleep for the cursed nightingale. He wanted to go home; back to the Inn, to the boys, to the halls, the bars, the evening papers. He had run out of tobacco—they only sold shag at the village shop. He took my last packet of cigarette papers. But I wanted to stay—for the end, which we all knew must come before another Sunday. That window, high in the eaves, rigorously shut and curtained, fascinated me.On the fifth day things were just as they had been on the first, each day of that week was a replica. Jib, Zak, and I were in the parlor, the local paperwas more crumpled, the flowers on the window ledge drooped. Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death—but her time’s come, poor love. Help lift her. Lay her on the floor; she’ll go soon and easy then.”Jib and Zak looked at each other furtively, then each shook his head. They couldn’t lend a hand to help her die. The Vulture knew their thought—these women are full of intuition.“We’ll call Mas’r Puttick,” she said with inspiration. “And p’r’aps the gentleman would not mind lendin’ a hand.”She put her own hand to her side and took a short breath, muttering something about not being strong enough to lift.I said I’d go and fetch Puttick. He was cutting mangels in the field beyond the garden, a couple of cows following him with keen interest on the other side of the hedge. There was a wide border of white pinks to the strawberry bed; the scent was heavy. White pinks, and, on the other side of the path, broad beans in blossom.Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs; pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.” “T’ old gell” he invariably called her—behind her back—with an indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. He left his work solemnly when I spoke to him. We went to the house. Three of the five cats werelooking askance at a saucer of sour milk set in the middle of the strawberry bed—that was “t’ old gell’s” way of scaring birds from her fruit. We went up the rat-eaten oak stairs, Puttick, the Vulture, and I.There was a characteristic smell about the place: a smell of ancient garments, ropes of onions, apples on the floor of the attic, a smell garnered by closely shut casements.She was lying gaunt and straight in the bed, with its carved posts, patchwork quilt, and dirty chintz hangings. Her face was yellow, so was her unbleached nightgown, so were her hands with their curved black nails. As we went in she looked round sharply at the door—a curious look; lurid, angry, beseeching.Puttick muttered, with a thick throat and his old eyes dazed, “T’ old gell, t’ old gell.” It was grim to see her lying there with an idle tongue, with idle hands. No doubt he was feeling drearily that his time must be near too. He had been a virile young man when she had been a child. The world could not go on without old Mis’ Covey of FarthingsFarm. Shewasthe world. No one else would keep him on with odd jobs all through the winter. She must be made to live. He said, after a long pause, during which I could see that his aged brain had been working turgidly in an agony of desire to rouse her:“They blackbirds, dang ’em, was at the white-heart cherries as early as five this mornin’.”But she did not stir. She only stared from the wall and back again, with the odd, savage stare of entreaty, which none of us could understand.“I’ve seen many go, but none so hard as her. And yet she wasn’t what you’d call a worldly-minded woman. Take her under the shoulders, sir, if you kindly will, and, Mas’r Puttick, be ready to ketch her legs.”The woman put her deft hands under the bedclothes and rolled the heavy legs in a plaid shawl. Then, between us, we lifted her from the malignant bed—full of the feathers of birds that she had plucked remorselessly and who would not let her go in peace now that her time had come. We stretchedher decently on the floor near the clock and pulled the blanket close under her peaked chin.“We’ve all been young,” the Vulture said confidentially to me as we jostled together down the twisting stairs. “There’s something on her mind—a slip maybe. Them things comes up at the last and won’t let us women go. The men are harder.”Jib and Zak were still slouching in the Windsor chairs. They were helpless without their mother, great fellows of thirty-eight and forty. But she had been the mainspring. She had kept the purse-strings, kept all control. They were mechanical figures run down without her. I sat on the couch with the blue-checked cover and speculated on her secret, on some rustic story made sweet by time, some sin—a slip, as the country woman mercifully said—something which was quivering on her tied tongue and which she couldn’t give word to.Jib and Zak went slowly back to the hayfield, Puttick to his mangels. I saw him go round the house, past the sitting-room window. He kept casting guilty glances at the window overhead with the calico blind. He had lent a hand in killing her.But she obstinately wouldn’t die. Death was expected of her. The doctor had prophesied it; the Vulture knew it would come, by many ancient, foolish signs. The impress of her long bony body dented the swollen bed of feathers, but on the sixth day she was lying alive still on the floor on a rough couch of blankets, at the foot of the clock, whose brass face seemed to leer and twinkle at her victoriously when the western sun came in.She would not go. The patience of the layer-out was quite exhausted.“I must bide about the place,” she said plaintively. “It’s money out o’ pocket to me. I could be makin’ a lot in the hayfields. But I dursn’t leave. She’ll be stiff a’most as soon as the breath is out o’ her, and you can’t do nothin’ with a corpse then.”“Sure, sure,” gurgled all the other women softly.The room was full of women. I kept in the garden, but I could see and hear them through the open door. I could see and hear all: the sunny sitting room, with its broad window ledges, on which were pots of calceolarias, with spotted, pouch-like blossoms;the women, with children at their skirts or buried in their cotton bodices. All waiting and twittering in that house of death.I knew every line of the local paper. The long clay pipe which Jib in pity had bestowed on me was cool, but it hurt my throat to draw such a long way. I smoked it from sentiment. I like those long clays, but properly speaking they should go with village politics. Jimmy was on his back in the orchard, deep in grass which had not been cut yet, rolling his last cigarette with long, transparent fingers. But he was waiting like the rest of us. He started up on his elbow when the sound came. We all heard it through the closed doors of bedroom and staircase. That sound! The wheezing creak of a chain. A minute later came the clear, deliberate chime of three. Then all the women and the two sons remembered that for six days no one had thought to draw up the clock. There was then no secret, no sin; no eating, biting prick of conscience.*****She was dead by the open case, on her knees, with one crooked-out hand caught round the open door.Her eyes, wide open still, were on the softly swaying pendulum, and the heavy weight was drawn high.Jib, who had inherited his share of her practicality, and more, went up softly as soon as he was allowed to and turned the hand round to the proper place, each hour chiming in the quiet room.Four. Five. Six. Seven.It was evening. The haymakers had gone and a stifling mist was creeping across the cropped meadows. The promise of another blazing day.“Ah! to think it was onlythatshe wanted.” The layer-out extended her hand and drew down her sweetly curved mouth. “I knew there was something on her mind; there offen is with us poor women. We’ve all been young——” She broke off discreetly, in the presence of the sons. “But who’d ha’ thought of that plaguey clock? Why, any of us might ha’ drawed it up if we’d ha’ thought. I might ha’ earned good money at the hayin’ this week.”She went down the flagged path through the orchard to the gate. Jimmy, half buried again ingrass, long white daisies, and the delicate summer orchis, stared at her, and his face changed.“She reminds me of someone I used to know,” he said, and then stopped abruptly. It was the only peep he ever gave me into his inner life. But I remembered afterward.We sat out until dusk, smoking—what dust of tobacco we had—and looking up trains. Jib and Zak had gone upstairs. Their voices came down to us, through the window with the greenish glass, which was now swung back. They were discussing the coming sale.“A feather bed allus fetches money.”“There’s folk—gentry—as likes this oak.”“It’s a good goer, an’ I’ve allus liked a chain better’n a cord.”“Let’s take the 2.45, old man,” said Jimmy. “I’d like to look in at the Royal in the evening. They’ve got that big girl there—Lilian—what’s her name? The girl who sings Irish song’s so well.”The fierce summer sun had gone to bed. All the night sounds were beginning—beetles, frogs, birds.The nightingale that Jimmy so hated was tuning up on a hedge near.“Shan’t get a wink of sleep to-night,” he said dolefully, with his hard, painful cough. “Give me the cabs for a lullaby.”Jib and Zak were coming slowly downstairs. I heard them shut her door. I could imagine her: the sheet over her hard face, the clock, to whose regularity she had given her last breath, keeping her sedate company.
JIMMYand I once spent a month in the country together. The doctor had ordered him fresh air and good diet. We went to Farthings Farm in Sussex and boarded with old Mrs. Covey. She was an extraordinary character—narrowly religious, as these half-educated rustics so often are. You could see hell fire in the hard lines of her mouth and the cunning screw of her little gray eyes. Yet she wasn’t a bad sort. Her pious cant was amusing and quite harmless. She talked seriously to Jimmy, knowing, as she must have done, that he had not long to live. She used to say, with a half-groaning, half-chuckling sort of breath:
“Ah! sir, I believe in the sacrifice inthisworld.”
Jimmy returned, very politely—he was always polite:
“I’m afraid I don’t quite gather your meaning.”
Mrs. Covey would look at him despairingly, raise her eyes to the ceiling, shake her head, and ejaculatea long, solemn “Ah—ah!” which was very convincing.
She was up at daybreak every morning; we used to hear her scolding and swilling or throwing a pet word to her cats—she had five. But on Sundays she used to lie very late—until half-past seven. She took a bath—as a pious duty. When breakfast was over, she sat in the living room, with the big Bible in front of her and her spectacles on the open page, until it was time to go to chapel. She drove there regularly every Sunday. It was a rich sight to see her with her two sons, in the shabby wagonette, sitting bolt upright in widow’s weeds, with black kid gloves, purple in the palms and much too long in the fingers. Sunday was a day of days. We fed on cold meat and salad; it was the one day on which she refused to sell milk or to spud about in her garden. In the afternoon she would walk solemnly through her meadows, never speculating on the crops or allowing her sons to do so, but holding up her black silk skirt carefully, and drawing her sour Sabbath lip.
She was very kind to Jimmy—taking good careof his body, although she despaired of his soul. In her young days she had been a cook, and she tempted his flagging appetite with many dainties. There was one particular dish of candied red currants.
If anyone called on her—say, between three and half-past—for milk, for advice about a sick baby, for herbal treatment of a wound, or for the simple loan of a black crock, Jib or Zak would be lurching at the house door. They were grotesquely alike, those sons of hers, with the Biblical names of Jabez and Zachary. She always called them Jib and Zak on week days; Jabez and Zachary on Sundays. They had an odd way of greeting you. They gave a nod—half sheepish, half jovial—or they raised a broad, dingy thumb to a sun-baked straw hat, according to their mood or the social status of the visitor.
Their answer to all inquiries was:
“Mother ’ull be down directly. Would you care to step inside out o’ the sun and set down, till you hear her draw up the clock?”
That was her rule. For forty years, except when stopped by trivialities—such as a confinement—shehad drawn up the thirty-hour clock the moment before she came down from her afternoon’s cleaning.
That afternoon black dress, with jet buttons! I remember the tiny, shiny silk apron, with the bead edging and the prim pockets. She never put in her false teeth until the afternoon, nor pinned on her false hair, which was three shades too light. In the mornings she slipped about the kitchen and dairy in an old skirt, a nondescript bodice, and a shawl—thick or thin, according to the direction of the wind.
I remember the particular morning when she was taken ill. It was a tremendously hot day in June. Jimmy was sitting on the wooden bench by the garden door, with his thin hands spread out on his knees to bake in the sun. I was hanging about the garden, and longing to get back to the Inn. Mrs. Covey came out from the dairy with a dish clout in her hand. She began to vigorously “shoo” a fine cock from the strawberry bed. I can see her now, with her bent back in the brownish bodice and triangular-folded scarlet shawl. She went back to the house between rows of podded broad beans.When she cried out to the cock—who was a gay fellow, all brown and burnish—it was a queer, unwomanly cry. No doubt she knew the note with which to scare him. He went racing back to the yard, all tail feathers, swinging comb, and indignant cackle.
An hour afterward she fell on the flagstones by the back door. She had been very busy making jelly of windfall apples. Apoplexy gripped her, and she fell, a droll-looking, lop-sided heap, on the stones.
That was a long, hot, empty day. Jimmy was fretful and selfish, after the manner of chronic invalids. He missed his egg and milk, his jelly, the dozen little dainties that she prepared for him. And I think he was a trifle scared, poor chap, by the very mention of Death—Death, that unpleasant personage, with whom he already had a bowing acquaintance.
The doctor came—a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap. He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed. Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for herto go. Her world—of forty acres or so—was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood—metallic finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many generations of birds.
Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in syrup.
Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his thought—that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had roughly rigged up for the haymakers—but who was to get the men’s tea? The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.
Jib and Zak, so much alike, with eyes and mouths twisted in consequence of life-long opposition to theglare of the sun, came into the parlor where I sat reading the local paper. They had been clumping hopelessly about in the garden. I had watched them, finding them more interesting than the price of store pigs and the sale of underwood. They had looked out wistfully at the eight-acre field, half lush, half shorn. They had looked up at Mrs. Covey’s window—a tiny window, set high in the brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral suggestion of a limp calico curtain.
We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less—work in the fields and so many children make them old long before that—sidled up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn! Zak had run to her cottage and fetched her directly his mother fell. She was always called to deathbeds. She gave a sidelong look at me and courtesied with charming grace; some of these rustic women are queens of grace. Then shespoke to the brothers, the greedy look of a vulture creeping into her violet eyes.
“I’m jest slipping home now to look after my lodger. There’s no change in her. She won’t go, bless your hearts, for pretty nigh twenty-four hour. I’ll look round after tea agen; no doubt you’ll make it worth my while.”
For nearly a week it went on; the hot, breathless days, bees buzzing in the big lime by the gate; at dusk the ringing, rattling croak of frogs in the pond, the weird voice of the night-jar. Jimmy grew more fretful. He complained that he could not sleep for the cursed nightingale. He wanted to go home; back to the Inn, to the boys, to the halls, the bars, the evening papers. He had run out of tobacco—they only sold shag at the village shop. He took my last packet of cigarette papers. But I wanted to stay—for the end, which we all knew must come before another Sunday. That window, high in the eaves, rigorously shut and curtained, fascinated me.
On the fifth day things were just as they had been on the first, each day of that week was a replica. Jib, Zak, and I were in the parlor, the local paperwas more crumpled, the flowers on the window ledge drooped. Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.
“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.
“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death—but her time’s come, poor love. Help lift her. Lay her on the floor; she’ll go soon and easy then.”
Jib and Zak looked at each other furtively, then each shook his head. They couldn’t lend a hand to help her die. The Vulture knew their thought—these women are full of intuition.
“We’ll call Mas’r Puttick,” she said with inspiration. “And p’r’aps the gentleman would not mind lendin’ a hand.”
She put her own hand to her side and took a short breath, muttering something about not being strong enough to lift.
I said I’d go and fetch Puttick. He was cutting mangels in the field beyond the garden, a couple of cows following him with keen interest on the other side of the hedge. There was a wide border of white pinks to the strawberry bed; the scent was heavy. White pinks, and, on the other side of the path, broad beans in blossom.
Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs; pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.” “T’ old gell” he invariably called her—behind her back—with an indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. He left his work solemnly when I spoke to him. We went to the house. Three of the five cats werelooking askance at a saucer of sour milk set in the middle of the strawberry bed—that was “t’ old gell’s” way of scaring birds from her fruit. We went up the rat-eaten oak stairs, Puttick, the Vulture, and I.
There was a characteristic smell about the place: a smell of ancient garments, ropes of onions, apples on the floor of the attic, a smell garnered by closely shut casements.
She was lying gaunt and straight in the bed, with its carved posts, patchwork quilt, and dirty chintz hangings. Her face was yellow, so was her unbleached nightgown, so were her hands with their curved black nails. As we went in she looked round sharply at the door—a curious look; lurid, angry, beseeching.
Puttick muttered, with a thick throat and his old eyes dazed, “T’ old gell, t’ old gell.” It was grim to see her lying there with an idle tongue, with idle hands. No doubt he was feeling drearily that his time must be near too. He had been a virile young man when she had been a child. The world could not go on without old Mis’ Covey of FarthingsFarm. Shewasthe world. No one else would keep him on with odd jobs all through the winter. She must be made to live. He said, after a long pause, during which I could see that his aged brain had been working turgidly in an agony of desire to rouse her:
“They blackbirds, dang ’em, was at the white-heart cherries as early as five this mornin’.”
But she did not stir. She only stared from the wall and back again, with the odd, savage stare of entreaty, which none of us could understand.
“I’ve seen many go, but none so hard as her. And yet she wasn’t what you’d call a worldly-minded woman. Take her under the shoulders, sir, if you kindly will, and, Mas’r Puttick, be ready to ketch her legs.”
The woman put her deft hands under the bedclothes and rolled the heavy legs in a plaid shawl. Then, between us, we lifted her from the malignant bed—full of the feathers of birds that she had plucked remorselessly and who would not let her go in peace now that her time had come. We stretchedher decently on the floor near the clock and pulled the blanket close under her peaked chin.
“We’ve all been young,” the Vulture said confidentially to me as we jostled together down the twisting stairs. “There’s something on her mind—a slip maybe. Them things comes up at the last and won’t let us women go. The men are harder.”
Jib and Zak were still slouching in the Windsor chairs. They were helpless without their mother, great fellows of thirty-eight and forty. But she had been the mainspring. She had kept the purse-strings, kept all control. They were mechanical figures run down without her. I sat on the couch with the blue-checked cover and speculated on her secret, on some rustic story made sweet by time, some sin—a slip, as the country woman mercifully said—something which was quivering on her tied tongue and which she couldn’t give word to.
Jib and Zak went slowly back to the hayfield, Puttick to his mangels. I saw him go round the house, past the sitting-room window. He kept casting guilty glances at the window overhead with the calico blind. He had lent a hand in killing her.
But she obstinately wouldn’t die. Death was expected of her. The doctor had prophesied it; the Vulture knew it would come, by many ancient, foolish signs. The impress of her long bony body dented the swollen bed of feathers, but on the sixth day she was lying alive still on the floor on a rough couch of blankets, at the foot of the clock, whose brass face seemed to leer and twinkle at her victoriously when the western sun came in.
She would not go. The patience of the layer-out was quite exhausted.
“I must bide about the place,” she said plaintively. “It’s money out o’ pocket to me. I could be makin’ a lot in the hayfields. But I dursn’t leave. She’ll be stiff a’most as soon as the breath is out o’ her, and you can’t do nothin’ with a corpse then.”
“Sure, sure,” gurgled all the other women softly.
The room was full of women. I kept in the garden, but I could see and hear them through the open door. I could see and hear all: the sunny sitting room, with its broad window ledges, on which were pots of calceolarias, with spotted, pouch-like blossoms;the women, with children at their skirts or buried in their cotton bodices. All waiting and twittering in that house of death.
I knew every line of the local paper. The long clay pipe which Jib in pity had bestowed on me was cool, but it hurt my throat to draw such a long way. I smoked it from sentiment. I like those long clays, but properly speaking they should go with village politics. Jimmy was on his back in the orchard, deep in grass which had not been cut yet, rolling his last cigarette with long, transparent fingers. But he was waiting like the rest of us. He started up on his elbow when the sound came. We all heard it through the closed doors of bedroom and staircase. That sound! The wheezing creak of a chain. A minute later came the clear, deliberate chime of three. Then all the women and the two sons remembered that for six days no one had thought to draw up the clock. There was then no secret, no sin; no eating, biting prick of conscience.
*****
She was dead by the open case, on her knees, with one crooked-out hand caught round the open door.Her eyes, wide open still, were on the softly swaying pendulum, and the heavy weight was drawn high.
Jib, who had inherited his share of her practicality, and more, went up softly as soon as he was allowed to and turned the hand round to the proper place, each hour chiming in the quiet room.
Four. Five. Six. Seven.
It was evening. The haymakers had gone and a stifling mist was creeping across the cropped meadows. The promise of another blazing day.
“Ah! to think it was onlythatshe wanted.” The layer-out extended her hand and drew down her sweetly curved mouth. “I knew there was something on her mind; there offen is with us poor women. We’ve all been young——” She broke off discreetly, in the presence of the sons. “But who’d ha’ thought of that plaguey clock? Why, any of us might ha’ drawed it up if we’d ha’ thought. I might ha’ earned good money at the hayin’ this week.”
She went down the flagged path through the orchard to the gate. Jimmy, half buried again ingrass, long white daisies, and the delicate summer orchis, stared at her, and his face changed.
“She reminds me of someone I used to know,” he said, and then stopped abruptly. It was the only peep he ever gave me into his inner life. But I remembered afterward.
We sat out until dusk, smoking—what dust of tobacco we had—and looking up trains. Jib and Zak had gone upstairs. Their voices came down to us, through the window with the greenish glass, which was now swung back. They were discussing the coming sale.
“A feather bed allus fetches money.”
“There’s folk—gentry—as likes this oak.”
“It’s a good goer, an’ I’ve allus liked a chain better’n a cord.”
“Let’s take the 2.45, old man,” said Jimmy. “I’d like to look in at the Royal in the evening. They’ve got that big girl there—Lilian—what’s her name? The girl who sings Irish song’s so well.”
The fierce summer sun had gone to bed. All the night sounds were beginning—beetles, frogs, birds.The nightingale that Jimmy so hated was tuning up on a hedge near.
“Shan’t get a wink of sleep to-night,” he said dolefully, with his hard, painful cough. “Give me the cabs for a lullaby.”
Jib and Zak were coming slowly downstairs. I heard them shut her door. I could imagine her: the sheet over her hard face, the clock, to whose regularity she had given her last breath, keeping her sedate company.