But I resisted. ‘I want to stay with Uncle Claybrook.’
My seniors exchanged glances.
‘Well, we can’t stop here arguing,’ remarked my mother coolly. She released my hand and stepped into the train. ‘Good-bye, my dear,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Be a good boy.’
Even these tactics did not move me, and now my Uncle Claybrook intervened and put an end to the matter. He shut the door on my mother. She let down the window and leaned out to us.
‘That’s right,’ said he, grinning down at me. ‘You stay with me, my ancient friend, and give Mother a holiday.’
She glanced at me, half amused, half nettled. ‘But, Frank, won’t he be a bother?’
‘You’re off,’ said my uncle. ‘Good-bye, Essie. We’ll look after him. Well, Claudie, aren’t you going to wave good-bye to your mother?’
Relief and the beginning of misery waged war in me. With a blank face I looked up and waved at the retreating train. But my mother was no longer at the window. I could hardly believe it. I had got my way, and I was going back with Uncle Claybrook to the farm. But as the white roads slipped under the wheels of the trap a sense of disaster began working in me. I was ashamed and afraid. A bond was broken, a gulf fixed. I had let my mother go without me. And now, when I wanted nothing so much as to assure her that I wanted her back, she was beyond reach and call. I sat like an image beside my uncle in the trap, stared at the broad buttocks and twitching tail of the pony, and struggled to maintain the dignity of a five-year-old. But within me was a frightened child, beating with small fists against the doors of silence.
Chapter XVI
Not till I had put some distance between myself and that burning house did I remember that my mother lay dangerously ill, and even then, so wild was my excitement, the fact at first meant little to me. Pausing to look back at the light in the sky that was the reflection of Mr Fleer’s funeral pyre, I could not repress a thought of exultation. And in that moment the idea burst upon me that perhaps, now that Mr Fleer was dead, my mother would get better. Mrs Pring had scuttled off to the nearest neighbour, to spread the alarm in the village, leaving me to my own devices. And I—I wished to have no further part in the affair. The spectacle of that writhing man was bitten deep into my mind; the nightmare horror was still upon me. Nevertheless I did not pretend to myself to regret his fate. He was consumed in his own flame; he was ended; I could hate him no more. And I was content, more than content, that the house should be burned to the ground, now that it harboured no living soul. But indeed I could think of nothing but my own escape; and, if I sobbed a little as I ran, it was with a grief of the flesh, a purely physiological operation belying the fierce joy of my spirit. A tremendous thing had happened to me, and I was still alive: that was enough.
As I burst into the house, with my story on my lips, I must have presented a startling spectacle to the eyes of Calamy.
‘Mr Fleer’s dead,’ I announced importantly. ‘And his house is burnt down.’
‘Eh?’ said Calamy, lifting dazed eyes to mine.
‘I was there. I saw everything. You can see the blaze in the sky—come and look, Dad!’
Calamy stared at me without speaking for a moment. Then he asked mildly: ‘Where have you been, my boy? You look like a sweep.’ But he did not listen to my answer.
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, in sudden fear. ‘Is Mother … is she worse?’
Calamy bowed his head. ‘There’s a nurse looking after her for the night. The doctor’s not very pleased with the way things are going. There’s poison got into the blood.’ He raised his eyes and met mine; and it was as if in that moment he became aware of me, for kindness came into his scrutiny. ‘Ah, Claud, you mustn’t mind too much. Your mother’s not knowing us just at the moment. She’s delirious, as they say. But not in pain. The nurse assures me she’s not in any pain. And maybe she’ll be herself again in the morning.’ After a moment’s silence he’ added, with an absent smile: ‘I’m sure I hope so.’
We talked jerkily for a few minutes, and then he sent me to bed. I undressed and lay down, and was asleep at once, but woke in the dead hour of the night, and heard my mother’s voice, boyishly clear and penetrating, and all but continuous. At first it was almost with a sense of eavesdropping that I listened; but presently wonder took hold of me, and awe. Forgetting the existence of the nurse, I supposed myself to be the only waking soul in that dark house, the only witness of a majestic and terrible event. My mother’s life was summing itself up; in the theatre of her dream (I surmised) scenes from that drama were being lived again; and broken fragments of meaning, phrases from the music that life had made of her, went floating past me on the rippling tide of her talk.
Towards morning, when I fell into an uneasy sleep, that clear articulation invaded my dreams. I was walking with noiseless tread down an endless corridor between two high brick walls. Ahead of me was Mr Fleer carrying a lamp, and I knew that it was my doom to follow where it led, though I could hear, at intervals, my mother’s voice laughing, pleading, calling me back.…
I woke to find Calamy standing at my bedside.
‘She’s gone, Claud. No pain now.’
The words meant nothing to me. I considered them, and found them stupid. But Calamy spoke again, and my resistance broke. Yet before the grief could gather in my throat, before my eyes went blind, I had time to travel ten years away, and to recall, by a freak of memory and in an anguish of remorse, that moment on Lutterthorpe Station when I stubbornly parted from my mother: the mother that I should now never see again.
Part Five
Calamy’s Dream
Chapter XVII
My Uncle Claybrook and his Bertha came for the funeral, and I met them at the station.
‘And how is your poor father?’ asked my aunt, so soon as the first greetings were over. She plucked at my arm to give urgency to the question.
‘We’d better get a cab, hadn’t we?’ I said quickly. And not until we were all three seated in the cab did I attempt to answer her. I dreaded the thought of an emotional scene on the platform, and it may be that I wanted, too, to make the most of my drama. I had suffered intensely and was still suffering; but in adolescence, if at no other time, to be at the centre of tragic events ministers to one’s self-importance. I was still a child, when all is said; I had been so wrought upon by the terrors of the past few days as to be within an ace of hysteria; and now, with some measure of relief at hand, with friends come who were willing and eager to take something of the monstrous burden from my shoulders, it was only this small flicker of vanity, this consciousness of the spotlight playing on my face, that saved me from wild weeping.
My Claybrooks sat in the cab opposite me, and their eyes never left my face.
‘Well!’ said my uncle. ‘How is he?’
‘Be quick, child! You’re frightening us,’ put in my aunt.
To hesitate, now, was no part of my calculations. Rather was I ashamed of having delayed so long, and embarrassed by the tension that that delay had created. Yet hesitate I did. For a moment something like stage-fright held me tongue-tied, while my mind raced this way and that in its cage, seeking an opening; and it was with a weak smile of apology that I at length blurted out my news.
‘He’s not really very well. He’s rather funny.’
‘Funny?’ asked my uncle. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’ll hardly say a word to anyone. Won’t eat. Wouldn’t see the people, the—undertakers. I had to do all that.’
‘You poor child!’ cried Aunt Bertha. She clutched my hand, and by so doing filled my eyes with tears. I remembered, with a shudder, the professional politeness of the undertaker’s man. ‘It’s a shame, Frank!’ she cried, turning to her husband. ‘And didn’t the neighbours come to your help, dearie?’
I hesitated, and glanced at my uncle sheepishly, trying to ask how much this innocent knew of our situation at Broad Green.
‘Surely,’ said my aunt, ‘at such a time … ’
‘Oh, the
neighbours weren’t so bad,’ I told her. ‘Mr Wiccombe especially. He was quite decent. But, you see, I didn’t tell him anything about Father Calamy, except that he wasn’t very well.’
‘Why not?’ asked my uncle.
I looked at him in surprise. ‘Well … I didn’t like to.’
‘Do you mean to tell us,’ said my uncle almost angrily, ‘that poor old Bob’s gone out of his mind?’
I stared unhappily out of the window at the flowing landscape. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered, unwilling to commit myself to anything so definite. Yet it happened that that everyday metaphor expressed my thought more aptly than Uncle Claybrook could know. Calamy, as I saw the matter, had indeed gone away, gone somewhere into hiding. The world was too much with him: he would have no more of it.
It was a comfort to have these staunch friends with me. More—it was salvation. Yet my first sight of them, as they stepped from the train, had been a disappointment from which I was only just beginning to recover. Their telegram this morning (‘We arrive four thirty to-day fondest love Auntie Claybrook’) had been like a trumpet to my fearful heart—or, to speak more precisely to the point, it had been like the voice of Chantecleer in that daydream of mine so many years ago, for it set the whole joyous panorama of Lutterthorpe moving before me again. No words can describe the lyrical quality of that moment, the lifting of the heavy pall, the sudden leap of my darkened spirit as from the dead. Almost it was as if Mother herself were coming back—yes, as if Mother, having died and gone to Lutterthorpe in lieu of Heaven, were about to be restored to me by Uncle Claybrook, my kind and powerful genie. And, though I could not for more than an instant yield to so fond a fancy as that, I felt it to be true, in sober fact, that he would bring me at least something of what I had lost: he would bring me a golden ghost for companion, a glad unsullied memory of love, and make an end of this mortuary nightmare in which my days and nights were spent. (The days had turned warm and—‘The weather’s all against you,’ murmured the undertaker, with a deprecating smile.) And, even if all else were lacking, my Uncle Claybrook could not fail to fill the house with his genial animal warmth, nor to evoke, by his presence, pictures of field and barn and procreant earth.
Not these thoughts, but their sensational equivalent, had quickened me with new life when that telegram came. Already, in anticipation, I renewed my pleasure in his brown tweeds, the loud checks of his riding breeches, the sheen and scent of his leather gaiters, to say nothing of his ruddy, finely-wrinkled, weather-beaten face, and his copious gushing whiskers with that hint of fire in their brown. And so, when he stepped from the train, and handed my aunt out, I was hard put to it to hide my dismay at finding my ministering angels swathed in mourning black from head to foot. My poor uncle, with his tall silk hat, his stock, his frock coat, his carefully rolled umbrella, would be a figure of fun could we see him to-day; and even then, to me who had looked for so different a figure, there was something pathetic as well as repellent in this pompous disguise. He and my aunt were evidently resolved to ‘show respect’ in no uncertain manner, but this thought came to me later: at the time it seemed to me in my bitterness that the tribute was paid rather to Death than to my mother, and I was in no mood to propitiate that exalted personage, whom, in my fancy, I identified with the Bethelite God. How my mother would have teased him, had she seen Uncle Claybrook now; and perhaps she can see him, I thought suddenly; perhaps she’s with us all the time, wondering at our foolishness yet sharing our pain. But I did not believe it, for I had seen her dead; and though my heart cried out that it was not Mother that lay there marbled and still, no consolatory belief could outface the stark fact that I saw.
But now, sitting with them in the trundling cab, I was reassured to see that despite their fantastic ceremonial garb these kindly souls were still, after all, themselves. And when my aunt said, in her practical way, ‘Haven’t you got any proper clothes, dear?’, I shrugged my shoulders almost tolerantly, almost without resentment of the sartorial transformation in store for me, a matter to which, hitherto, having no elders at hand to instruct me, I had given no thought.
‘I suppose,’ said my uncle reflectively, ‘an arm-band wouldn’t be enough for the lad, seeing he is a lad? And a pair of black gloves, of course,’ he added hastily.
‘Oh, Frank! What can you be thinking of?’ She was shocked, poor woman. Her god had been blasphemed. ‘And him the chief mourner too!’
‘Well, you know best,’ said my uncle, looking as though he wished he hadn’t spoken. ‘But as for chief mourner—what about Bob?’
‘Ah,’ said my aunt, with tragic unction. ‘That’s what we all want to know. I’m sure I don’t know what to think, after what Claud has told us.’
We knew as little what to think when we reached the house, and having entered with my latchkey by the house door (the shop being shut), went from room to room in search of Calamy. We called: at first softly, then less softly. But there was no response. Upstairs there was a locked room, of which I had the key. I hoped that Calamy was not there.
At last we found him in the shop. In shirtsleeves, with his cobbler’s apron tied round his waist, he sat in his accustomed chair, deep in thought. We crowded in at the door and stood staring.
‘Here’s Uncle Claybrook and Aunt Bertfia,’ I ventured after a while. He did not answer, so I went up to him and touched him.
He raised his head and looked, though not at me. ‘Leave me alone. You’re all dead, every one of you. Fleer, Jarnders … it’s funny to see them still walking about. But don’t be afraid, Essie. They’re all dead but us.’
My uncle came forward. ‘Hullo, Bob, old friend. Won’t you say How-do to us?’
Calamy stared dazedly at the brawny outstretched hand; then shook his head, as if dismissing a fancy, and fell again into pensive-ness. And presently, as we watched him, he stooped down from where he sat, and with his finger wrote on the ground.
Chapter XVIII
My aunt had thought for other things than the insignia of mourning. Within an hour of her entry she had transformed that charnel house into something like the home it once had been, cleaning our lamps for us, lighting fires in several rooms for the sake of the cheerfulness they might help to impart, and stocking our sadly depleted larder with fresh provisions. Distressed though she was, she did not allow our consciousness of Calamy’s strange condition to dominate the conversation, though she could not prevent its providing a dark undercurrent to our thoughts. ‘He’ll be all right presently,’ she said, speaking as of a child. ‘Won’t you, Bob?’ At nine o’clock she had us all, even Calamy who could not believe in our substantial existence, sitting down to a hot supper, for which, from a brisk shopping expedition in which I had joined her, she had even gone so far as to provide a bottle of grocer’s wine. ‘Yes, you’re to have some, Claud, even though you don’t want it. It’ll do you good, ducky.’ I conceived that evening a passionate regard for my Aunt Bertha, and I was quite at a loss to understand how this powerful common sense of hers, this simple and beautiful humanity, left room in her mind for merely conventional anxieties. Next morning, however, her first care was to take me to Farringay and have me fitted up with a ready-made suit of black: a process to which I submitted with as good a grace as I could command. That Calamy would be himself again presently was a statement often on her lips; and we knew, my uncle and I, that by ‘presently’ she meant ‘after the funeral’, that much dreaded and much longed-for event which would put a term to this particular chapter of our misery and set us free, not from sorrow, but from our preoccupation with the gross physiology of death. The presence of a dead body in the house oppressed me as the ugly irrelevance it was; and that this body must be disposed of with solemn pomp, and after a ‘reverent’ interval, as though it were indeed my mother herself that lay coffined in that lily-laden room, affected me as a blasphemy against all I held dear.
The hour came at last. Half-past one. Spring, careless of our mourning, presented her fairest aspect. There was gold and bird-so
ng in the air outside, and within the house were four mortals for whom that beauty could have, as yet, no meaning except a bitter one. With my uncle and aunt I stood in the parlour, trying to force my moist fingers into those new black gloves, and averting my eyes from the window lest they should have sight of the hearse that stood at our door. Yet my glance was drawn there in spite of myself, and I could not but see the four black-clothed strangers with wooden faces and tall broad-banded hats who had come to knock at our door. My aunt slipped out of the room; I heard the men enter, heard their boots on the stairs, and waited in an agony for what should follow. Still working desperately at my gloved fingers, I stared at the worn carpet. Overhead were shuffling footsteps; and soon they were descending the stairs, and with a changed rhythm. Must I be dragged from my sweet and poignant memories to listen to that? And, having listened, must I step out into the intolerable sunshine and ride in a carriage to Suthergate with a sniffling old woman and a red-faced black-coated clown for companions? But I could not, for all my trying, spend much bitterness on my uncle and aunt; it was easier to hate the chance-met strangers who stood, with lifted hats, to see our carriage pass; and my heart warmed to Uncle Claybrook when he suddenly woke me from my abstraction with a tap on the knee and said in a very secular matter-of-fact tone, ‘When this business is over, Claud, you and I must see about putting poor Bob to rights.’
I nodded. ‘I don’t believe he’s had any sleep at all for the last four days. Why has the carriage stopped, uncle? Are we there?’
I could not bring myself to look out of the window to see what delayed us. But my uncle had no such scruples.
‘Yes, we’ve arrived,’ he said. ‘But there’s another funeral in front of us by the look of it. Lot of people, too. Very bad management that. Disgraceful.’
The Quick and the Dead Page 10
