I Shall Not Want

by Norman Collins

  John Marco was about to say something when the figure in the bed interrupted him. There was a rattling intake of breath, and he spoke.

  “You’re not Mr. Tuke,” he said. “Someone’s playing tricks on me again.”

  “No one’s playing tricks on you,” John Marco answered. “Mr. Tuke couldn’t come.”

  But the old man wouldn’t listen to him.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  John Marco took a step into the bedroom and faced him.

  “I’m John Marco,” he said. “Mr. Tuke is at Service. He asked me to take his place until he could get here.”

  Mr. Trackett bared his teeth; the lined, yellow face suddenly wrinkled up and revealed them.

  “You can’t deceive me,” he said. “They’ve tried it too long. All of them.”

  “I’ve got nothing to deceive you about,” John Marco replied. “If I can be of no service to you I shall go.”

  He felt angry within himself as he said it. Ever since the touch of the woman in the Chapel he had felt himself being drawn deeper and deeper into the affair of Mr. Trackett and his confidential message. It was a secret that he had not asked to share; it had been forced upon him against his will. He wanted to turn his back on them all and walk out of the house forever.

  His words, however, had roused the woman by the bed. She had got quickly to her feet and was moving in the direction of the door as though to cut him off.

  “No, don’t go, Mr. Marco,” she said. “Please don’t leave me here alone again.”

  He turned and stared at her. It was that hard, impersonal stare of his. But she did not flinch under it. Her own dark eyes returned it, unwaveringly. He could recognise now the down-trodden creature who used to accompany Mr. Trackett to Sunday Chapel. But she no longer looked suppressed. In her attitude as she stood there, the palms of her hands pressed flat against the door behind her almost as though they were nailed to it, there was something of desperation about her. She was colourless and sallow-skinned, but a single spot of red burned in the centre of each cheek.

  John Marco paused.

  “I’ll stay if Mr. Trackett wants me,” he said.

  “Who told you my name?” the old man asked.

  “The woman you sent to the chapel,” John Marco told him.

  “You sent her,” said Mr. Trackett, bitterly, turning to the girl again. “You told her—to bring—this man.”

  He dragged the words out of himself with difficulty; they came in quick, jerky rushes. And in between them was the painful, clumsy breathing. It was as though having once got the air inside him, his lungs no longer knew what to do with it.

  “Then send for Emmy yourself and ask her.” The girl passed her hand wearily across her forehead. “Send for her and stop accusing me.”

  “It’s no use,” Mr. Trackett answered in a low voice, almost as though he were talking to himself. “It’s no use sending for anyone. You’ve got them all in your power. They’re afraid of you.”

  He lay back against the pillows and began gasping. He was gulping at the air as though trying to eat it. His hands which were spread out on the bed-clothes, kept clenching and unclenching. John Marco could see the miserable little body under the counterpane writhing under the strain of keeping itself alive.

  The girl regarded him for a moment without moving and then crossed over to the small table beside the bed. There was a dark bottle standing there. She poured some of the mixture from the bottle into a medicine phial and held it to Mr. Trackett’s lips. But the old man only shook his head and kept his mouth pursed closely together. He was shaking all over. As soon as the spasm subsided he pushed his phial away altogether. The gesture was so violent that some of the dark drops were splashed onto the sheet.

  “I won’t touch it,” he said in a whisper. “You’re poisoning me.”

  John Marco then did what he believed Mr. Tuke would have had him do; what Mr. Tuke himself might have done if he had been there. He went over to the side of the bed and bent over the sick man.

  “Mr. Trackett,” he said. “We are in God’s presence. He overhears every word we say. You would not do well to meet Him with those words on your lips.”

  The speech seemed to have a sobering effect on the invalid. He did not attempt to answer. He lay back, without speaking. His eyes, too, closed for a moment as though even sight were becoming too much of an effort for him. When he opened his eyes again he no longer looked on John Marco as an enemy.

  “Are you a minister?” he asked.

  John Marco shook his head.

  “I’m a lay teacher,” he answered.

  “Help me to pray,” said the old man, “I’m dying.”

  John Marco looked doubtfully at the girl for a moment; he wondered what kind of a prayer was expected of him.

  But the girl merely nodded her head.

  “Start any prayer you like,” she said. “It’s his only comfort.”

  John Marco prayed extempore; he prayed as he had heard other Amosites pray. Kneeling at the table beside the bed, with the huddle of bottles and the old man’s spectacles upon it, he put his hand over his eyes.

  “O Lord,” he began, “now that the darkness is closing around our brother be Thou a light to guide him, a hand for his support. Help him to throw off all earthly thoughts like raiment, so that he stands before you naked like a little child. Be Thou beside him at this bed and, at the other side, waiting for him before the gates. Empty his heart of all unkindness and fill it with Thy divine love. And in Thine infinite mercy let the last awful moment be gentle as a kiss.”

  The spirit no longer moved him and he rose, blinking into the darkness around him. The girl rose at the same moment from the other side of the bed. They both looked down at the old man they had prayed over. But he was past noticing. His jaw had dropped and he was asleep. He was lolling there, oblivious. It was not a pretty sleep, however. Each breath that he took still shook him.

  “You pray beautifully,” said the girl. “Beautifully.”

  “I was moved,” said John Marco simply.

  They did not speak again for some minutes. John Marco walked across the room and sat himself down in a chair to wait for Mr. Tuke. It was a rocking chair. It tossed him gently to and fro with an idiotic peacefulness of its own. The room was very quiet now except for the sound of Mr. Trackett’s breathing, and John Marco’s thoughts began to wander idly back through the events of the evening. He saw Mary Kent again with her fair head bent under the anointing cup of Mr. Baptist Tuke; he heard the words of the Psalm: “I shall not want . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever”; he felt the touch of the drabbish servant on his arm in the Tabernacle; he entered the house again, and came into the sick-room for a second time.

  There was a movement from the bed and John Marco turned. The girl beside the bed was staring at him, her hot, devouring eyes fixed full on him. But she, too, turned away and bent over to hear what the old man was saying.

  At first, the words were jammed inside him. Then Mr. Trackett managed to force them out of himself.

  “Why doesn’t—anyone—get—me—something to eat?” he asked. “They’re starving me.”

  The girl crossed to the mantelpiece and pulled at the bell handle: there was a creaking of wires and somewhere down in the basement a bell jangled.

  “He’s very difficult,” she said. “He probably won’t touch it when it comes.”

  “Give me food,” said the old man. “I’m dying.”

  “He’s been like this for weeks,” said the girl. “Earlier this evening I really thought he was passing.”

  “I won’t touch it unless you eat some, too,” said Mr. Trackett suspiciously. “Eat it where I can see you.”

  The heavy footsteps of the servant came up the stairs and stopped outside the door. There was a bump as she thrust her knee against the door; she was evidently carrying something.

  “I’ve
brought him his gruel,” she said.

  There was a weariness in her voice as she said it, a kind of dull, familiar disappointment. John Marco guessed how many times she must have climbed those stairs carrying up a tray to someone who was as difficult as a sick child. She turned and dragged her feet out of the room again as sullenly as she had entered.

  The girl put the bowl of gruel in front of the fire and began propping the old man up. The effect on him was remarkable: he kept twisting his head round to see the gruel. There he was in his seventy-sixth year becoming as excited about food as a baby. His mouth began to water.

  John Marco looked at his watch. There was still another quarter of an hour before Mr. Tuke could be along, another fifteen minutes of this suffocating sick-room. The girl was staring at him again, sitting quietly in her chair not taking her eyes off him.

  The crash as old Mr. Trackett dropped his spoon startled them both. The spoon simply slipped out of his fingers and his hand fell with it. The fingers closed themselves and would not open again. Mr. Trackett turned his eyes down and regarded that withered, twisted fist that would no longer obey him.

  His two eyes were all that he could move. His head was now fixed immovably on his shoulders. He tried to tell them that it was a stroke, that one side of his body was dead already; but, though his mouth was open, no words would come.

  The girl slipped the pillows away from under him and laid him back on the bed. He was quite stiff to move; it was like handling a dummy. In a way it even seemed rather absurd to be tucking him up so carefully. The paralysed arm lay rigid and useless across the counterpane. Only the eyes continued to be alive. They were casting desperately around the room, peering after the vanished gruel.

  “I think it’s come at last,” said the girl. “It’s what we were expecting.”

  “Send out for the doctor,” said John Marco. “There may still be some hope.”

  The girl shook her head.

  “It’s no use,” she said.

  “You can’t let him lie there like that.”

  The girl looked first at Mr. Trackett and then at John Marco.

  “There’s no one can help him but himself,” she said. “He’s finished.”

  But before she had finished uttering the words they both knew that she was wrong. There were still waves of life passing through the object on the bed. The dummy managed at last to move its tongue; and with the tip of it proceeded very slowly to moisten its lips. It was evidently preparing to say something.

  Mr. Trackett whispered the word when he did say it, as though speech were not a thing on which the breath of living could be wasted; they had both to bend over him to catch what the one word was. And as he stood there John Marco was suddenly aware that even though the girl’s head was bent forward like his own she was still regarding him. He kept his own eyes deliberately averted.

  “Doctor!”

  It was difficult to say whether Mr. Trackett had actually spoken at all; it was rather as though he had moved his lips and had imprinted the pattern of the word on the air.

  “Doctor!” he said again just as noiselessly.

  The girl went over to the mantel and rang the bell again. There was the same scraping of wires, the same peal, the same interval and the servant appeared in the same weary fashion.

  “Go and get Dr. Preece,” said the girl. “Mr. Trackett wants him.”

  The servant paused and dropped her voice.

  “The doctor said not to bring him again until the old gentleman was unconscious,” she said.

  “Go and get him,” said the girl. “Bring him here at once.”

  There was a suggestion of temper concealed somewhere within her as she said it.

  The woman shrugged her shoulders.

  “Very well,” she said. “But he won’t like paying for it.”

  She went out of the room still complaining, and the girl turned to John Marco.

  “He’s been like this for months,” she said by way of explanation.

  John Marco made no answer. He pulled out his watch. It showed eight-thirty. No Immersion service ever went on much longer than that. Allowing time for Mr. Tuke to rub down and dress and drink a cup of the Mission tea, prepared by the deaconess, and get round here, he ought not to be more than about another twenty minutes. The doctor would be there, too, by then, and John Marco could slip quietly away, leaving Mr. Tuke to walk, bland and imperturbable, through this particular valley of the shadow.

  But the figure on the bed was endeavouring to speak again. The tongue and the lips were both moving. John Marco and the girl bent low over him for the second time.

  It was a name this time that he uttered as silently as before.

  But the girl shook her head.

  “You don’t need him,” she said. “To-morrow will do.”

  The eyes in the stiff face flickered for a moment; they hardened and then grew pleading again.

  “Now,” he said.

  The girl looked at him grimly and dispassionately.

  “Now,” the lips soundlessly repeated.

  “What does he want?” John Marco asked.

  “It’s his lawyer,” the girl explained. “He wants him.”

  “Shall I go for him?” John Marco asked.

  “No,” the girl replied hastily. “You stop here in case anything happens.”

  The lips repeated the same name again; the eyes seemed to be giving the message, too.

  “I’ll go myself,” the girl said angrily. “There’ll be no peace till we bring him here.”

  John Marco half rose to his feet as she said it.

  “You mean me to stay here with him?” he asked.

  The idea suddenly frightened him; he was not used to death, at least not used to it so close that he could feel the breath of it on his brow. There was something terrifying in the thought of staying there and seeing the life choked slowly out of that desiccated little idol in the bed in front of him.

  But the girl did not seem to notice his hesitation.

  “I’ve only got to go as far as Sussex Villas,” she said. “He’ll be no trouble to you. He can’t move.” She spoke with the callousness that comes of close association with a long illness. “Let Mr. Tuke in if he comes,” she added. “I’ll leave the door open so that you can hear him. There’s a book on the table if you want to read.”

  John Marco drew himself up; he remembered whose deputy he was.

  “I shall pray,” he said. “I shall pray for God’s mercy towards contrite sinners.”

  “He’d like it better if you prayed out loud,” the girl answered.

  She picked up her coat, which was lying thrown across a chair, and put it on. Then she found her hat. It was an old, slatternly affair with half the ribbon torn and hanging down over the brim. There was a bunch of flowers on it that had been bright once; now they were torn and dirty. They were like flowers that might have been picked up in the roadway. But the girl put on this objectionable hat with the finicky grace of a cocotte. She even arranged for a sweep of her dark, lustreless hair to come down across her forehead and break the hard line of the brow. Then she stood in front of John Marco almost as though asking him to admire her.

  “I shan’t be long,” she said. “You start praying.”

  John Marco waited while she went downstairs. He heard her footsteps descending and then there was the slam of the heavy front door. He crossed over to the table beside the bed and went down on his knees again. The house seemed unnaturally silent. Great blankets of stillness wrapped up everything in it; a clock ticking away on the mantelshelf seemed like an intruder from a noisier world. John Marco did not pray aloud at once; instead, he addressed himself privately to God and waited for the spirit to move him for a second time. He was still kneeling there in prayer when he felt a touch on the back of his neck, a touch as cold and damp as death itself, and as unexpected.

  He sprang back on to his feet, trembling all over. It was then that he saw that Mr. Trackett had edged himself inch by inch towards h
im; he had crawled across that expanse of tumbled bedclothes as noiselessly as a snail. And, having arrived within striking distance, he had jerked out his useless arm like a stick and touched John Marco.

  “What do you want?” John Marco asked. “Speak to me.”

  Mr. Trackett drew up his living arm, the arm that still belonged to him, and beckoned. The crooked forefinger motioned John Marco towards him. John Marco regarded him for a moment with repugnance and then bent over him. He could feel the stale, sickly breath of the old man on his face.

  “What is it?” he repeated. “What do you want?”

  Mr. Trackett’s lips still moved with difficulty. They seemed to become rubbery and unreliable. The words slurred into each other and became continuous. But he could speak again. And apparently there was something desperate and urgent that he wanted to say.

  “It’s the box under the bed,” he said. “The black metal box.”

  “Do you want it?” John Marco asked.

  The old man nodded. There was impatience in his face as he lay there; it was as though whatever this thing was that he wanted to do he was afraid that he would not be given time to finish it.

  John Marco paused for a moment. Then he went down on all fours and raised the overhang of the counterpane. The box faced him. It was a large, battered tin box of the kind in which lawyers keep their documents; a holy of holies with the grime of years upon it. As he dragged it out onto the carpet he felt the old man in the bed begin to stir in anticipation.

  “Open it,” Mr. Trackett gasped.

  He began fumbling inside the collar of his nightshirt and disclosed a soiled noose of tape that was about his neck. On the end of it was a key.

  He tried to lean forward and John Marco removed the noose from his neck. As he did so his fingers touched the withered flesh and he shuddered. But the dying man’s impatience was urging him on again.

  The lid of the box squeaked on its hinges as he opened it. It was so stiff that he had to force it open with both hands.