The Man Within · Part I · Chapter 2 (2/2)

“Keeping you?” she said. “What do you mean?” Suddenly the footsteps which had been very faint grew distinct in a stone shifting. Andrews’s 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 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 that 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 a 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 startingly 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?”

“Why, the same as my sister’s,” Andrews replied, trying to sound amused and at his ease.

“I meant your Christian name, sir?” she went on, making rapid progress across the floor.

“Oh, Francis, of course. Hasn’t my sister spoken of me?” In the space between a sentence and a sentence, he had had time to watch the sunlight mould the girl’s face, give lightness to its somewhat heavy lines, smooth its perplexity into peace. A dark Elizabeth, he thought, watching her hair, how strange. He began to enjoy himself, the burden of his fear had dropped away and left him in the middle of a childish game in which there was no harsh reality. “Elizabeth,” he said, “have you never spoken of me to Mrs. Butler? I take it very ill, I really do. And I away at sea imagining that you thought of me.”

“Why, are you a sailor, sir?” Mrs. Butler said, not troubling to raise her eyes from the arc of floor in which her small fat arms swung. “I shouldn’t have thought it.”

“But then I’m a bad sailor,” he continued, his eyes on the sunlight or that part of it that lay across Elizabeth’s face. He was determined to make her smile. “When I heard how⁠—he was dying, I left my ship. I thought my sister would want someone else besides you to protect her. You can’t imagine, Mrs. Butler, how often I’ve read of you under the stars.” He stopped. He had won his smile.

And yet now that he had won his smile, he was ill at ease. It reminded him, perhaps, of all hopeless and unattainable things⁠—not desire then, for he was too weary for desire, but for civilisation. Civilisation meant for him the enjoyment of quiet⁠—gardens and unboisterous meals, music and the singing in Exeter Cathedral. These things were unattainable because of Carlyon. Of the others he had no fear. They could not, he felt, escape from their environment⁠—a rough, cursing, drinking life. He could escape from them in drawing rooms, but in the middle of however quiet a tea, however peaceful the lazy shadows of the fire, however soft the talk, the door might open, Carlyon enter.

Mrs. Butler cleaned on, her buttocks swaying rhythmically to the circular movement of her arms. He saw her suddenly as a hostile spy from reality, though it was not so that he would have phrased it. His fear was too sharp for abstractions. But unexpressed in conscious thought, he had felt of this house as of a cottage in a fairy-story. He had stumbled on it in a wood when blurred with sleep. It had given him shelter and a sense of mystery; it had not belonged to the world which he had known, the constant irritation and strain of the sea nor to the fear of the last few days. But Mrs. Butler had come from the town that morning. In crannies of her ears still lurked the sounds from which he had fled, the waves, fishwives’ voices, rattle of carts, “Mackerel, fresh mackerel,” gossip in the market, “Three of them escaped.”

Mrs. Butler had left the door open and through it he could see clearly in sunlight that which, when he came, had been obscured by weariness and night. He had thought of this cottage as alone in the middle of a wood. Now he could see that it stood at the edge of a mere coppice. Above the trees like a blister was the down over which he had come. “What’s that?” he said at a sound, unable to keep all sign of fear from his voice.

“Why, it’s only a cart,” the girl answered.

“A cart?” he cried and walked to a window. It was true. This cottage hidden, as he had thought, in a forest lay within a hundred yards of the high road. It was useless to tell himself that a high road was his safest place, that Carlyon, probably by now with a price upon his head, must equally fear the open. He was superstitious on the subject of Carlyon. He could not imagine Carlyon in hiding.

“A sailor?” said Mrs. Butler, her eyes fixed on the floor. “There’s sailors and sailors. There’s some as don’t like these gaugers, but I say as ’ow they be only doin’ their duty. They be paid for it same as me on this floor. And they get the worst of it most every time. Look at Tuesday.”

“What time’s this funeral?” Andrews asked, turning his back on Mrs. Butler with abrupt brutality. He was very conscious that behind his back she had raised an astonished head and was eyeing him with shrewd consideration. The girl he found had moved to the door and he followed her with a sense of relief, glad to leave behind, though only for a little, Mrs. Butler’s curiosity and her pretty, damp voice. “What time’s this funeral?” he repeated.

“They’ll be fetching him,” she said, “at eleven,” and her simple sentence cleared away the last illusion of isolation. Time was here in the cottage. Clocks ticked and hands went round as everywhere else in the world. He had a sense of time rushing past him, rushing like a Gadarene swine to destruction. Time squeaked at him as it passed at an increasing pace down a steep slope. Poets had told him over and over again that life was short. Now for the first time he knew it as a vital fact. He longed for peace and beauty, and the minutes were flying by, and he was still a fugitive, with mind muddled, obscured by fear of death.

“Shall we be alone?” he asked, his voice a mixture of longing and apprehension.

“Alone,” she repeated in a low voice, so that her voice might not reach through the splashing of a damp cloth to Mrs. Butler’s ears. “No, we shan’t be alone. You don’t know these country people. I hate them,” she added with unexpected intensity. “This is a show to them. They’ll flock to it, but I shan’t feed them. They’ll expect to be fed. They haven’t been near me since he died, and I’d have welcomed anyone for a bit of company in the evening. They never came when he was alive.”

“What do you mean?” he raised his voice in unthinking fear. “A crowd of them?” He took hold of her wrist. “If you’ve planned this,” he said.

“Need you be a fool as well as a coward?” she answered in an offhand tired fashion. “Why should I plan anything? I’m not sufficiently interested in you.” She released her hand and moved out of doors. “I don’t know why I’ve helped you as much as I have,” she added with a small shrug.

He followed still suspicious. He felt unreasonably grieved that this cottage was not the lonely woodland house, which he had imagined. “Don’t take credit for that,” he said. “I forced you to it.”

She did not look at him. Her hands were on her hips and she stared at the down over which he had come with a small wrinkle of perplexity. She seemed to be trying to puzzle out the reason behind her acts. “It was not fear,” she said, but it was not to him that she replied. “It would be a fool who’d be afraid of you,” she said and smiled as though at an amusing memory. “I suppose I was tired of being alone.”