The Man Within (3 page)

‘Oh that gun,’ she laughed again, not scornfully this time but with a real merriment, ‘I haven’t an idea how to load it.’

He took a few steps towards her and looked less at her than at the open doorway behind her, which led, he saw, into the room of last night’s humiliation. He was certain that she was bluffing. She must have more than a coffin and a dead man in that room to give her the courage to face him so calmly – so impudently he styled it to himself. So he advanced a little way, widening his vision of that room beyond.

‘You mean that I can go?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t stop you,’ she answered. A note of anger was struggling with amusement in her voice and at last amusement won. ‘I didn’t invite you for the night.’

‘Don’t talk so much,’ he said angrily and flushed a little when she asked if he were listening for something. For he was listening intently and thought for a moment that he heard the squeak of a board and then again a man’s breathing. But he could not be sure. Suppose she had gone out during the night and found Carlyon…

‘Look here,’ he cried, unable to bear the suspense longer, ‘what have you done?’

‘Done?’ she said, ‘Done?’ He watched her suspiciously, hating that habit she had of turning words over like a pancake, first this side, then that.

‘Who have you fetched while I’ve been sleeping? I know your sort.’

‘You are a man, aren’t you?’ she said with sudden vehemence and was met with a purely mechanical leer and response, ‘Do you want me to prove it?’ It was as though the young man’s face were a mask to which small strings were attached. She had pulled one and the mouth had opened and the lips had twisted a little at one corner. She felt a brief wonder as to what string would work the eyes that remained watching her suspiciously, a little frightened, completely unresponsive to the lips. Andrews himself was not unaware of those strings that put his speech and mouth in servitude to others. Always a little too late he would try to recall his words, not through any shame in their purport – it would have been the same if they had been spoken in poetry, but because they had been dictated by another. So now that consciousness coming again a little too late made him try to cover up his previous words by others angrily spoken. ‘What do you mean anyway?’

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘a man ever knows a woman’s sort? If I believed that,’ she added, ‘I’d…’ she looked at him with an amazed stare almost as though he had spoken the words. ‘You can go,’ she added, ‘there’s no one to stop you. Why should I want you to stay?’

That’s all very well, he thought. Is it bluff? The girl has plenty of nerve. It seemed unlikely after the way he had broken in the night before that she should not have tried to communicate with someone. And the whole neighbourhood just at present was riddled with runners and revenue men. He was uncertain how he stood with them, and he had no trust, like Carlyon, in his own elusiveness. However, she said he could go and she stood there waiting. What a devil the woman was – forcing him to make a move. He no longer wanted to escape and stumble blindly into an unknown countryside. He wanted to lie down with his face to the wall and drowse. But she was waiting and waiting and he had to move. He moved slowly and softly towards the door, treading suspiciously like a cat in a strange house.
When
he reached the doorway he flung back the door as far as it would go lest anyone should be hiding behind it, ready to pounce on his turned back. Behind him he heard a laugh and swung round again. He felt tired and harassed and in no mood for mockery. A wave of self-pity passed across his mind and he saw himself friendless and alone, chased by harsh enemies through an uninterested world. Sympathy is all I want, he said to himself. Old white-haired women with kind wrinkled eyes stooped towards him, large laps and comfortable breasts mocked him with their absence. Little pricking tears rose to his eyes. I know I am a coward and altogether despicable, he said to himself with heavy self-depreciation, trying without much hope to underbid his real character, I know I haven’t an ounce of courage, that if Carlyon appeared now I’d go down on my knees to him, but all I want is a little sympathy. I could be made into a man if anyone chose to be interested – if someone believed in me … But here his other self took a hand. He was, he knew, embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying, desiring child and another more stern critic. If someone believed in me – but he did not believe in himself. Always while one part of him spoke, another part stood on one side and wondered, ‘Is this I who am speaking? Can I really exist like this?’

‘It’s easy for you to laugh,’ he said bitterly. But am I really bitter, the other part wondered. Am I play acting still? And if I am play acting, is it I who act or another who pulls the strings? But what a Pharisee the other part of him was. It never took control of his mouth and spoke its own words – hard, real, trustworthy. It only stood on one side and listened and taunted and questioned. So now it let his voice go on, genuine or play acting. ‘You don’t know what it feels like to be alone.’ Watching the face that still smiled at him, not with hostility but with almost a friendly mockery, he became frightened at an unintended reality in his own words. He was indeed alone. Perhaps
that
other part of him remained silent, not through self-righteousness, but because it had no words to speak. There was nothing in him but sentiment and fear and cowardice, nothing in him but negatives. How could anyone believe in him if he did not even exist?

He was surprised, deep in the maze in which he chased himself, when she answered him. ‘I’ve been alone, too, the last two nights. I don’t mind the daytime, but I get a bit scared at night now he’s dead.’ She nodded her head towards the room on the threshold of which he stood.

He looked across the room. The coffin still lay upon the kitchen table. The candles were no longer alight, but drooped in weary attitudes of self-depreciation.

‘Husband?’ he asked. She shook her head.

‘Father?’

‘Not exactly. He brought me up though. I can’t remember my father. I was fond of him,’ she nodded her head again. ‘He was kind to me in his way. It’s a bit frightening being alone.’

It was as though she had forgotten the circumstances of Andrews’ coming. They faced each other. She also seemed alone in a somewhat dark wood. She also was frightened she said, but there was a courage that added to Andrews’ shame in the candid hand she appeared to stretch through the dark to his companionship.

‘It will be worse tonight,’ she said. ‘I have to bury him today.’

‘I should have thought,’ Andrews answered, remembering the stubble on which he had nearly placed his hand, ‘it would be less – frightening without a body in the house.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘oh no,’ looking at him with puzzled eyes, ‘I wouldn’t be afraid of him.’ She came and stood in the doorway beside Andrews and looked across at the lidless coffin. ‘He must be terribly alone,’ she said, ‘but there’s the peace of God in his face. Come and look,’ she stepped across the room, and very reluctantly Andrews followed.

He could see little of the peace of which the girl had spoken in the face. The eyes were closed, and he had a sense drawn from the coarse strong skin of the lids that they must have been hard to shut. At any moment he felt the strain might become too great and the lids would turn up with a sudden click like a roller blind. Round the mouth were little cunning wrinkles that prowled outwards across the face in stealthy radiations. He looked at the girl to see if she were mocking him in her talk of God in connection with this bearded rapscallion, but she was looking down at the body with calm and passionless affection. He had a sudden inclination to say to her, ‘It’s you who have the peace of God, not he,’ but refrained. It would sound melodramatic and she would laugh at him the more. It was only to suit his own ends or his own self-pity that he allowed himself the pleasure of melodrama.

It was while he was regarding the face and the triumphant cunning of the lines, growingly conscious at the same time of the girl’s fixity of thought, like a firm comforting wall beside his own shifting waters, that he heard faint stumbling steps. It was fear that made his ears sufficiently acute, the girl behind him had not moved. He twisted his eyes up from the dead man and faced her again.

‘So you’ve been keeping me here?’ he said. He was only half aware of the foolishness of his accusation. One reasoning part of him told him that he had been with her since he woke at most a matter of minutes, but reason somehow had seemed lacking in this house since he entered it and had seen what should have been a frightened girl holding him with a calm gun between the yellow-tipped candles. And since he had come to consciousness again five or ten minutes before, he had lived over again a boy’s life in Devon and had stood, he told himself with a sudden rush of sentiment, between the cunning and yet clumsy earth and the purposeful courage of the spirit. These experiences could not be confined to the small measure of minutes, and so
with
a sense of real grievance he accused her. ‘You’ve been keeping me here?’

‘Keeping you?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’ Suddenly the footsteps which had been very faint grew distinct in a stone shifting. Andrews’ mind pierced its maze of vague thinking in a flash of fear, and he half ran across the room to the door through which he had entered the night before. A sense of overwhelming desolation passed over him, a wonder whether he would ever know peace from pursuit, and he gave an unconscious whimper like a rabbit snared. The reality of the sound seemed to acquaint the girl with the measure of his fear.

‘Don’t go out there,’ she called to him.

He hesitated with his hand upon the latch. The girl was feeling her cheek with the tips of her fingers. ‘It’s only the woman come to tidy the place,’ she said.

‘I mustn’t meet her,’ Andrews whispered, afraid that their voices would reach the path outside.

‘If you go out there,’ the girl said, ‘you’ll meet her. She’ll be coming from the well now. Better go back where you slept,’ and then as he moved across the room, ‘no.’ A slow flush crept from her neck across her face.

‘What’s the matter now?’ he asked angrily.

‘If she discovers you – hiding – she’ll think –’

‘God, you’re respectable,’ he said with a resentful amazement. It was as though the calm spirit that had watched the dead man had become tarnished by the latter’s own earthy cunning. Some yellow sunlight, clear and cold with frost, struck across the room from the window and fell across her face, belying the dull good sense of the words she spoke.

‘No, but you can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if you were in any danger.’

He came close to her and put his hands upon her arms and pulled her close to him. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘I am in danger. I’d rather kill that old woman whoever she is than
be
talked about in Shoreham. I’m a coward, do you see, and it would be easier to kill her than the man who’d be after me. Now will you let me hide?’ He loosened her and she pushed herself away from him. ‘There must be some other way,’ she said. She suddenly began to speak rapidly. ‘You are my brother, do you see? You arrived last week hearing that he was dying because you didn’t like me to be alone.’ She grimaced a little as though at a bad taste.

A splash of water from an overfull pail interrupted her. Footsteps sounded almost at the threshold of the door. ‘You must invent things,’ she said. ‘What more is there? I must have forgotten –’

‘What shall I call you? Your name?’ Andrews whispered rapidly, as with a high squeak the latch of the door rose.

‘Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘Elizabeth.’

The door opened and it seemed incongruous after the panic the footsteps had evoked to see only an old woman with a pail of water which went slip slop over the brim and splashed upon the floor. She was a little stout old woman who gave the impression of being very tightly pulled together by a great number of buttons that strayed from their normal positions and peeped out from interstices and side turnings in her voluminous clothes. She had small eyes and very faint, almost indistinguishable eyebrows. Her hair was some of it white and some of it grey and through it wandered stray strands of very pale metallic gold which looked unnecessarily flippant on an old head. When she saw Andrews standing by the girl she put down the pail on the floor and preened her mouth to whistle until it appeared but one more addition to her collection of buttons. She did not actually whistle but hovered delicately upon the point, while her eyes, which changed from surprise to questioning and last to a somewhat sly amusement, seemed to whistle instead. Under her unembarrassed amused stare Andrews fidgeted and longed for his companion to speak.

At last the old woman, waiting no longer for an invitation,
entered
. Her eyes having taken in the pair of them were no longer interested. She placed the pail down on the stone floor and then with an old and very dirty rag began to scrub. She had cleaned but a small space when she found it necessary to pull aside the table on which the coffin lay, and this she did with a complete and to Andrews an amazing unconcern. Her eyes had taken in all they desired to see, but her thoughts remained amused. She suddenly chuckled and hastily beat the water in her pail and coughed to hide the sound.

The girl smiled towards Andrews and, with a small pout of the lips that said quite plainly, ‘now for it’, spoke. ‘This is my brother, Mrs Butler,’ she said.

The voice that came from the figure kneeling on the floor was startlingly unexpected. It consorted, not with the white or the grey hairs, but with the too metallic yellow strands. It was soft, almost young, just avoided beauty. It was like a pretty, sweet cake that had been soaked in port wine. It would have been lovely, if it had had the certainty of loveliness, but it was damped all through.

‘Well now, I didn’t know that you had a brother, Miss Elizabeth,’ it said.

‘He came a week ago when he heard Mr Jennings was dying,’ the girl went on.

‘And so a brother should.’ The old woman wrung out her cloth into the pail and sat back unexpectedly on her heels. Her eyes were not soft like her voice but as sharp as they were small. Both Andrews and the girl became conscious of their stiff, unreal attitudes, standing a little apart from each other waiting for nothing. ‘You had all the looks in your family, Miss Elizabeth,’ Mrs Butler said. ‘Your brother doesn’t look very strong – or perhaps he’s tired.’ A giggle began to form like a soap bubble in either eye. It grew under almost visible constraint, until at last she let it loose to bound gaily round the room. Then she soaked her cloth again and began to scrub furiously as though she would
daunt
that spirit of rude flippancy. ‘And what’s your name, sir, if you don’t think me rude?’