Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

by Barbara Comyns

  “I’m a mass murderer,” he thought, as he sat on an empty sack by his empty bins. “There is no good smell of baking bread coming from my ovens because I’ve caused such dreadful and sinister things to come about. I who have always been gentle and meek and never mis-called my wife for her goings on, and never took birds’ eggs as a boy or caught lizards and put them in little boxes to die. I never felt much anger towards any man or struck a blow that I can remember; but I’ve caused more suffering than any man alive, I shouldn’t wonder.” And so his thoughts went round under his limp brown hair, and he almost hoped the villagers would mob together and burn him to death as they had Old Toby. The previous evening, after the medical officer of health had left, he had stuffed his mouth with bitter rye flour and tried to choke it down. It was so dry it was impossible to swallow; but he managed to eat a considerable amount by mixing it with water and stuffing it down his throat with his hand. Yet he felt no sign of the burning pains in his stomach, just a dreadful, sick tiredness. He longed to share the pain that he had inflicted; but now there was no more ergot-contaminated bread or flour for him to push down his unwilling throat. He left his sack and wandered round his bakery to sadly examine his ovens, which were almost cold. He opened the doors and looked at the awful emptiness inside, and he examined the empty tins already floured and prepared to receive their share of dough. In the sink there were bowls, which had contained sugar-icing of various colours, waiting to be washed. He noticed a trap with a crushed mouse spread upon it. There was a bead of blood upon its mouth and he turned away for a moment and then forced himself to look at it. Who was he to turn from a murdered mouse, when he was responsible for so many deaths? He carefully freed the stiff little creature and held it in his hand, wondering what to do with it. He put it in a box which had once contained coloured birthday candles, and placed some silver leaves on top.

  “I must bury you, sometime,” he murmured, and then noticed a speck of blood on his hand. He went to the sink to wash it away, although he felt it was not right to do so when he had so much death on him already. On the window-sill he saw the sun streaming purple through a bottle of carbolic. He held the hand with the smear of blood upon it in the purple ray, and then he took the bottle and uncorked it, and the fierce, clean smell came out.

  The baker knelt on the stone floor and whispered, “Please God, forgive me; but let me suffer for ever and ever.” Then he emptied as much of the contents of the bottle as he could before he fell choking to the ground, consumed by burning pains more terrible than any that had been suffered in that village.

  During the afternoon Ives went to Grandmother Willoweed, who was sunning herself in a basket chair on the top path.

  “Baker’s dead, ma’m,” he shouted down her trumpet, “and Mrs. Fig’s got the madness or else it’s the D.T.’s, and the little old peacock’s dead too; we haven’t got one now. But my ducks is alright,” and he turned away towards the river to make sure this was still so.

  - CHAPTER XIV -

  DENNIS CRIED that he was hot, and then said cold waves were coming over him, and Emma sat by his bed and almost cried too. Late in the afternoon she asked her grandmother to send for the doctor; but the old lady said she was sure he was being tiresome. She did consent to take his temperature and clumped off to her bedroom to find the thermometer, an object seldom used in Willoweed House. It was eventually discovered in a shoe box with Dennis’s birth certificate and a receipt for calves’ feet jelly. The grandmother was not quite sure how it worked and shook it about franticly for about five minutes before putting it in Dennis’s mouth. He asked, “Will it hurt dreadfully?” and, when at last it was in his mouth, was surprised that nothing happened except that it tasted of dust. After about ten minutes it was taken out with great ceremony; but then there was the difficulty of reading it. “There is a mark for normal somewhere, but I can’t see it. If the boy’s really ill the quicksilver shows above that!” They both peered at the thermometer and at last Emma discovered the silver line ended at 96.8, well below normal, and they were both reassured; he really must be in very good health to have a temperature as low as that.

  “I think you are just pretending,” Grandmother Willoweed said rather crossly as she swept from the room, holding the thermometer before her like a wand and looking very like the bad fairy in a pantomime. Dennis felt he was in disgrace for feigning illness, and as he lay shivering in bed said, “All the same, Emma, if being extra well feels like this, it isn’t very pleasant. I’d rather be ill any day.”

  In the scullery Norah was preparing the vegetables for the evening meal, and Eunice sat huddled up on a three-legged stool by the copper.

  “Do you know what day it is, Norah?” she asked in a depressed voice.

  “I can’t say I do,” her sister replied as she cut an overlarge new potato in half.

  “Well, it’s the 22nd of June, and there is a great Coronation going on all over England except here, where we are so downhearted. King George will be wearing his crown today and the flags will be waving in the wind and people drinking out of their Coronation mugs. Don’t you remember we were going to drive in the village in decorated carts?”

  “I can’t remember anyone asking me to go in a decorated cart; but they may have wanted you because you’re so pretty. But fancy forgetting all about it. Fig was telling me that some people from the village were going all the way to Evesham to celebrate and they were going into the gardens there to make merry under a great arch which is really the jaw bone of a whale. Oh, I would have liked to have gone; but Fig’s mother is ill now and things are so sad.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” her sister replied dolefully, “and you can’t think how my stomach hurts now I’m having a baby.”

  When Emma went to bed that night she could see fireworks in the distance, and she watched them for a few moments until she remembered the dreadful burning of Old Toby’s cottage. She hurried to bed, and was just drifting into sleep when she heard Dennis calling her. She stumbled out into the darkness, ran to his room and found him crying that he couldn’t sleep and that his insides were on fire. She tried to soothe him before she went down to the deserted kitchens and warmed him milk over an oil stove; but it was almost cold before she could get him to drink it. All through the night the little boy tossed and turned and cried about the burning pains inside him. And then the sheets became dirty, and Emma had to change them and hide the dirty ones so that her grandmother would not be angry. When at last it was dawn and the birds began to sing, they hoped the terrible night was over; but it was hardly four o’clock and there were several more frightful hours to be lived through.

  At last Emma heard one of the maids wrestling with the kitchen range, and she went down to find a grey-faced Norah wearing a coat over her flannel nightgown.

  “Excuse me being like this, Miss, but I’m so worried about my sister. She’s been ill all night with burning pains and no sleep at all. Oh, it’s been so dreadful to watch her suffering so, and there is little I can do to ease her. It is the bread poisoning, I know it is!”

  “Norah, that is just how Dennis has been. I’ve been with him all the night; but he’s no better. Do come and look at him and tell me what you think.”

  The two girls went to Dennis’s room and examined the little boy, who certainly looked extremely ill in the bright morning light. His face was grey, and he was bathed in perspiration and seemed hardly conscious; and, although his eyes were open, they did not appear to focus properly. Norah was shocked at the change in the child and said the doctor should be sent for immediately.

  “But Norah, I’m sure my grandmother will be angry if I call in the doctor without her permission; and if I wake her up she will be even more angry. I’m so tired, I can’t bear one of her scenes. Do you think Father would come and look at Dennis? And then he might send for the doctor or even go for him himself. Norah, do go and tell him how ill Dennis is. He will believe it more serious if it comes from you.”

  So Norah called Ebin Willoweed, a
nd after a considerable amount of grumbling he consented to come and look at his son. When he did he could hardly believe that wan little figure was Dennis. Even as he watched the boy suddenly doubled up in the bed and cried in a weak, small voice that he was burning, and in his pain he tried to sit up, but fell back fainting.

  “Good God!” his father cried, “Dennis are you alright, Dennis?” and he caught one clammy little arm and almost shook him. As soon as he showed a sign of consciousness, Ebin dressed and rushed from the house to fetch Doctor Hatt. On the way there he kept remembering the many times he had been impatient and, worse still, so bullying with Dennis. He always regretted it later and would determine to be kinder to the boy; but it never lasted. He remembered with shame how he used to lose his temper when he was teaching him to swim and how he had banged his hands with a paddle when he tried to hold on to the boat. He could almost see the hands now, small and shaking and blue with cold, clutching the varnished wood of the boat. “I expect the boy almost hates me,” he thought dejectedly, as he rang the brass bell with “Day” engraved on it.

  Doctor Hatt came to Willoweed House unshaven and hollow-eyed. He pronounced Dennis and Eunice both to be suffering from ergot poisoning; but with Dennis the attack was more severe. He suggested that a nurse should be sent for immediately; and, before night came again, a Nurse Fenwick with a black moustache was installed and the whole house was in a state of upheaval. Grandmother Willoweed was overcome by her grandson’s horrifying illness and spent hours in her room brewing disgusting concoctions which she thought would help the boy. The nurse discovered her trying to put cut-up black threads down the child’s throat, which she insisted were a cure for worms and other foreign bodies in the stomach. She also boiled a mouse in an eggshell, and declared it was an unfailing cure for whooping cough and most likely to cure other more unusual afflictions.

  She bitterly resented the nurse; but she even more resented Eunice’s illness at such an inconvenient time, and instead of getting extra help from the village made Norah do the work of two as well as looking after her sister. From time to time the angry old face would appear round Eunice’s door and she would shout, “Get up girl, get up you lazy slut. There is nothing wrong with you, you are not even screaming!” Poor Eunice would lie there bathed in pain and perspiration, and in terror in case the doctor told her tormentor her secret and she would be sent home to an angry father with her illness and disgrace upon her. She lay in her tumbled bed limp and wan, and, when the burning pains seemed to be consuming her, she felt it was the punishment for her sin and she was sure she was dying. But when the pains were not so fierce she begged her sister to bring Joe to see her. “Just to see him once more so that I can remember him when I’m lonely in my grave,” she entreated. But Norah knew it would be impossible to smuggle Joe into the house and up the back staircase into her sister’s bedroom, and in any case it would be most improper. Even if it was Eunice’s dying wish, she could not bring herself to encourage such goings on. Then, when Norah was preparing the breakfast, she heard screams coming from above and left the bacon to burn and ran to her sister’s aid, expecting to find the madness had started and that she would do herself some injury. In a panic she remembered she had left the windows open to air the room. There was Eunice crouched at one end of the bed with an expression of horror on her face, and when she saw Norah she pointed to the bed and said, “Look there’s blood everywhere!”

  “Yes, yes, dear, come and lie down,” she said soothingly; and then she saw that it was indeed true and the sheets were all blood-stained and terrible. For a moment she thought Eunice was about to die; and then she remembered her condition and hoped it was only a miscarriage, and she was able to calm the terrified girl. She changed the sheets and made her comfortable and promised she would bring the doctor to her as soon as he came. She was hiding the stained sheets in a closet when Grandmother Willoweed stumped past the door muttering about burning bacon. Then they heard her footsteps pass again and she returned to her room.

  When Doctor Hatt came to the house he examined Eunice and pronounced that she had suffered a miscarriage. Norah begged him not to tell the old lady, and he muttered something about it ‘not being necessary’ and went to join his assistant Philip Andrew, who was already waiting for him in Dennis’s bedroom.

  - CHAPTER XV -

  THE YOUNG doctor stood looking down at the almost unconscious Dennis, who lay quite still except for a trembling of the hands. Emma sat beside him so exhausted she did not hear him enter the room and was startled when he asked her to fetch the nurse. She looked at him with her heavy brown eyes, too large for her narrow, white, dreaming face. “She is like an El Greco Madonna,” he thought, “except for the hair; but, if that was covered with blue drapery—but then it’s so beautiful. She is perfect as she is.” He collected himself and said:

  “Miss Willoweed, the nurse, if you tell the nurse Doctor Hatt is here to see your brother—”

  “Oh yes, of course, you are one of the doctors. I’ll tell the nurse,” and she crept from the dark little room as Doctor Hatt entered it.

  “That poor girl is taking her brother’s illness very badly,” he said as he closed the door preparatory to telling his assistant about Eunice’s miscarriage.

  “I’ll have to make a report; but there is no need to let the old lady know. The nurse can keep an eye on her. Ah, here she is!”

  The nurse entered the room with a rustle of starch and her mouth coyly smiling under her moustache, and the examination of Dennis began.

  When the two doctors left the room they found Ebin Willoweed standing on the landing under some stags’ horns, biting his nails. He looked at their grave faces and followed them downstairs with a dreadful sinking of his heart. Francis Hatt was surprised to observe how acutely his friend was suffering from his boy’s illness and put his hand on his arm for a moment as he said, “I’m afraid he’s very ill indeed, and I can give you little hope. Would you be willing to send him to hospital, where I think he would stand a better chance?”

  But Ebin would not agree to Dennis being sent to hospital, and shook the doctor’s hand from his arm and hurried upstairs to see his son for himself. The nurse was just leaving the room as he entered and she pushed past him rather impatiently, but was punished for her rudeness by meeting Grandmother Willoweed on the landing. The old woman was in a dreadful state because she thought she could hear a death-watch beetle in her wardrobe; and she insisted on the nurse coming to listen. The nurse turned down her mouth at the evil-smelling room, and stood stiffly as the old woman bent by the cupboard straining to hear through her ear trumpet.

  “It’s a mouse,” she declared crossly. “Don’t you know a mouse when you hear one? You should get a trap or cat and get rid of the disgusting creature.”

  “But my cat’s dead,” wailed the old woman, “that wicked woman the baker’s wife squashed it, and now I have to have mice in my room. It’s too unjust!”

  The nurse turned and left the room, but, suddenly remembering that Grandmother Willoweed would be the one to pay her for her services, she opened the door a chink and shouted, “Such a pity about your cat!”

  As the doctors left the house together they saw Norah and Fig talking. He had just told Norah that his mother had died in a muscular spasm which followed a violent attack of delirium, and he seemed greatly distressed at losing his disreputable parent. “How strange that he should grieve for that dirty old woman!” thought Norah. “But he was a good son, and they say good sons make even better husbands.” So she said suitably comforting words to him, hoping that he would not know they were insincere.

  As the day passed Dennis grew worse, and hallucinations came to him in the form of dreadful animals and strange fires. The poor child’s cries could be heard through the house, and Grandmother Willoweed became hysterical and thought the end of the world had come and it was Revelations that were happening. Hattie and her father went to the river and sat in one of the moored boats, two unhappy humped figures in the su
n. The nurse turned Emma from the room; but she sat under her brother’s window in the dark front garden and leant against the ivy-covered walls that smelt of bitter dust. She listened to her brother’s terrified cries, and even when they ceased they seemed to echo in her head. She saw the doctors come again through the green gates and later heard their voices droning from the window above, and she heard the nurse’s bright little laugh and then Dennis’s shrill voice, high and strained, describing some fabulous vision. She sat so still a baby robin, brown and very round, settled on her shoe and gave a plaintive chirp and she shook her foot as she said, “Go away, you beastly bird”; for she remembered the maids telling her that birds, usually robins, came into the house when death was expected. Once Old Ives had told her that, when his young brother was dying, a dove with one broken wing had come into the kitchen and flown about the dresser, breaking the blue plates, and his father had wrung its neck.

  It began to grow dark, and Ebin and Hattie left the boat and crept back to the house. In the dusky hall the clock sounded loudly in the stillness; but upstairs there was the sound of great snores from Grandmother Willoweed, who had been drugged without her knowledge. Ebin paused by his son’s door and then opened it a little way, half dreading what he would see; but all he saw was Dennis lying very still and Philip Andrew intently watching beside him.