The Man Within · Part I · Chapter 3 (1/2)

III

“And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.”

The priest was tall and thin and stooping and he suffered from a running cold. He snuffled between each phrase as he took long, loping strides through the graveyard. It was a raw day and he appeared anxious to get through with a dreary business. Between every phrase he snuffled and at the end of every sentence he gave a hasty furtive wipe at his nose with a corner of his surplice that blew out in the wind like a banner. He strode, not concealing his hatred of the cold, but those that followed after, a large straying band of intense villagers, walked as slowly as he allowed them, seemed almost to hold him back by the flapping end of his surplice. They refused to be cheated of a funeral. Their cheeks and noses were scarlet and their eyes sparkled like frost and peered avariciously after the wooden coffin.

It means nothing to them at all, the girl thought with acidity, sonorous words floating with strange lightness for their bulk over her head. They were here because a funeral was something to see, because, when rightly managed, it meant beer and cakes and because the long eddy of words that gathered together at regular intervals to rise and burst in a great ninth phrase (“Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live”) made them feel important. She would not give them beer and cakes, for she had been fond of the spirit that had inhabited the body carried before them. Yet because she had had no love for the body itself, which when she was small had beaten her and when she grew older had made strange crude gestures blindly towards her and repelled her, she felt unmoved. She was accustomed now to the absence of the cursing, unhappy, perplexed spirit. She had loved that with a quiet steady warmth. It had fed her and sheltered her and she was grateful, and when towards the end she had seen it putting up the best fight it was able against its own groping, sneering body, she had pitied it.

“For I am a stranger with thee; and a sojourner as all my fathers were. O spare me a little that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.”

Andrews stirred a little. They were the first words that had reached his consciousness since the fear of many persons had dumbed his heart. He was afraid when the villagers had arrived, the women to inspect the corpse and the men to look in vain for beer. Each new face had been a stab of anxiety and when unrecognised a faint relief, until the steady alternating currents of fear and comfort had lulled his mind asleep. He had been helped, turning his back on the chattering women, by the sight of the sea mist that poised itself for a moment on the top of the down over which he had come. Blown by a breeze behind, too faint to disperse it, it tottered for a moment drunkenly on the edge, and then fell in swathe after swathe into the valley. Its coming brought a sense of secrecy and of what he knew at heart was a false security. His unconsciousness held nothing but a dim irony and a perception of farce. He was the brother of the chief mourner, but the ceremony was to him only a solemn mummery. The man they put into the ground and for whom all these persons sang at intervals in a dreary whine was unknown to him and meant nothing more to him than the sudden sight of a bearded face and the dart of a falling golden star.

The girl⁠—Elizabeth⁠—his sister (it was hard to remember that she was his sister) had remained silent in the midst of a swiftly running current of voices. When the undertaker’s man had turned down the lid of the coffin there had been a little scurry of strange womenfolk to catch a last glimpse of the “deceased.” Then she had shown her one sign of feeling. She had turned to face them as though she would push them back and her mouth had twisted into an angry word which she did not speak. Then she gave a small gesture with her fingers addressed to herself. She stood aside and the undertaker’s man shut the coffin lid, casually as a man shuts a book. There was no air of finality about it, even when he drove in the nails. Andrews saw a little group of women whispering in a corner. They looked and whispered, and fear momentarily pierced his unconsciousness. He looked round him and imagined all faces turned towards him. The men disappointed of beer had nothing to do but talk and look curiously at the interior of the cottage, which they had never before entered. The women sniggered a little among themselves at the bareness and poked furtively at a chair here and a table there and made comments under their breath. Andrews thought that they were speaking of him. The men shuffled uneasily and stood massed together and fidgeted with their feet. They were annoyed with their wives for having brought them where there was no refreshment. Most of them had small farms and there was plenty of work they might have been doing. For want of other employment they looked cornerwise and carefully at the girl. They had seen her about many a time in the lanes but had been afraid to speak to her. There had been rumours⁠—that she had been the dead man’s mistress, his natural child, a dozen contradictory tales, which united to put her outside the pale of “Good day,” comments on the weather or the crops, or even a nod of the head. Now death made her approachable and a little envied. They spoke of her slyly to each other in whispers, not so much to keep their comments from her as to keep them from their wives, comments on her appearance, on her potentialities as a bedfellow, on the fun she may have afforded to the man now dead. Andrews thought that they spoke of him.

With an effort he pulled his will erect. He saw himself standing on one side, an obvious stranger, uninterested and apart. He called “Elizabeth” with forced ease across the room. He had vague ideas of convincing them that he was her brother. She paid no attention, and he could think of no more to say. His will subsided slackly. (“For I am a stranger with thee; and a sojourner as all my fathers were.”)

Standing there in a misty graveyard beside the dark Elizabeth, Andrews felt his first flash of sympathy towards his father. Once his father had visited him at school. Andrews was in the gravel playground. It was in the interval between two lessons and he was hastily revising some Latin grammar. He had looked up and stared with amazement at the unexpected sight of his father, a tall, heavy man with a big beard clumsily dressed, crossing the gravel with the headmaster. The headmaster was small, quick and neat with birdlike motions. His father was shy, embarrassed, conscious suddenly of his own coarse bulk. He had said, “I was passing through and thought I’d come and see you.” He stopped, not knowing how to continue and stood shifting from one foot to the other. “Happy?” he asked. Andrews had the instinctive cruelty of a child. He remembered his father at home, domineering, brutal, a conscious master, not chary of his blows to either child or wife. “Very,” he said. His voice filled with artificial pleasure and he pronounced his words with artificial neatness. “We are doing Horace this term, father,” he said, “and Sophocles.” The headmaster beamed. His father murmured incoherently that he must go now, disappeared across the gravel, his heavy boots sounding self-consciously.

Andrews did not know then what kept his father away from home for short and frequent periods of blessed peace. He never knew the cause of that particular unfortunate visit. Perhaps he was on his way to the coast and a sudden realisation that his career must end sooner or later in death made him anxious to see his only idea of immortality. The voyage which followed must have reached its normal, successful end, for a few weeks later, when holidays fetched Andrews home, his father was there, dominant, easily aroused, as ready as ever with the whip, which he seemed to keep more for his family than for his hounds. A year later, while the child was at school and the father at sea, the mother died with the serene faithfulness of a completely broken will.

The shambling priest was reading the lesson in a meaningless drawl muffled by the mist and his increasing cold. The words meant no more to him than did the dead man. It was a mechanic ritual less conscious than the act of brushing teeth.

“I speak this to your shame but some men will say, how are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.”

The coffin had been carried from the cottage in a farm cart. Elizabeth beside him he had walked into a wall of white that at every step melted before him and closed behind him. The villagers and their wives followed after, their footsteps sounding no louder than the drip of misty rain that fell from trees and bushes along their road. The silence was greater for the regular small tap tap of feet and drip drop of water. They could see the back of the cart which they followed but not the horse that drew it. Andrews looked behind him and saw a ghostly platoon. Faces and hands thrown forward in front of invisible bodies appeared and disappeared. He felt suddenly that all danger had been remitted until the funeral was over. Disembodied faces, hands that swam unattached in a white sea could not hurt him. He longed⁠—not passionately, his mind was too asleep for passion⁠—but with a small elusive ache that they would never reach the graveyard. This ache had crept into his sleep and also a sense of friendship with the girl who paced slowly beside him. He was asleep and longed a little that he might not awake. In his sleep one lay with him who would be gone when there was daylight in the brain.

They reached the burying place, and as the service went on fatigue grew and threatened to strip away his unconsciousness. He became aware that somewhere, as yet outside his mind but ready, opportunity given, to leap within, lay the fear to which he had grown accustomed. He held it at bay outside himself, but the struggle, as the minutes passed and the priest’s voice droned on, grew more intense.

They had taken the coffin to the edge of the grave, and the service must be drawing to an end. The priest’s voice grew rapid like the feet of a horse when its head is turned to home, faster and faster with the faintest trace of excitement at the thought of food and a rest from journeying: “O holy and merciful Saviour thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not at our last hour for any pains of death to fall from thee.” They had lowered the coffin into the grave and began laboriously to shovel earth upon it. Spades slipped on the ground which was hard with cold. To Andrews the falling clods were a measurement of time, recording the vanishing moments of his peace. He would be happy to stand in the cold and the mist through eternity watching the shovelling spades. Fear was pressing in upon his mind. He could not keep it outside himself for long.

Bundles of mist disintegrated. A low chatter of voices began replete with the blessing which had just been pronounced and moved towards the grave. Farmers stood in a ring and stared with interest at a hillock of earth judging its points. The women watched the chief mourner. By the rules of village life Elizabeth should now break down. Then after a brief struggle for the privilege one would put her arm round the girl and weep with her. Later they would be asked to accompany her back for refreshment. Their suspicions regarding Elizabeth’s birth and her moral character were confirmed when she abruptly turned her back on the grave.

She said to Andrews in a voice like frozen straw, “For God’s sake get rid of these people. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.” The mist opened a little, closed again and she was gone.

Andrews stood alone. He wanted to turn and run and put a wall of mist between him and that gathering of amazed eyes. Loneliness and fear were like the emptiness of hunger to his belly. If he took six steps away he would be lost to all the world in a blanket of white wool. He could find a childish comfort, bury his head beneath the bedclothes and fear no more the creaking of old furniture, deep in a darkness within a darkness. Why should any man be plagued as he had ever been plagued, with all the instincts⁠—desires, fears, comforts⁠—of a child and yet possess the wisdom of the man? In these moments of crisis he felt physically drawn in two⁠—an agonising stretch of the nerves. One part of him said, “Hide yourself in this mist. You will see no one and nothing can hurt you. You will be comforted.” The other part said, “Fool! How they would talk.” He was the girl’s brother. He must act a little longer as her brother. That was the only safe way.

He said to them⁠—yet not to them but only to those amazed and offended eyes, “My sister’s upset. Forgive us if we don’t invite you back. She must be alone for a little. You will understand that it has been a great shock.” Very unconvincing and stiff his voice sounded to himself. He watched for any relaxation of the inquiry in the ring of eyes. Then he waited no longer but walked away. He stumbled as he went on a stone, which had fallen before its time from a gravedigger’s spade.

When he had walked a dozen yards he struck against an iron railing and the chill of the metal brought him part of the way towards consciousness. He felt his way along the rail gingerly with the tips of his fingers, finding relief in the slight pain he suffered from the stinging cold. When his feet, groping through an invisible gap, felt the broken ruts of the road beneath them, he waited. He had but to follow it half a mile to his left hand, so he calculated, to come upon the lights of the cottage. Yet there was no possible excuse to return. He should be thankful for the shelter of a night and the bare charity that had left him free. Bare charity enough, he thought, growing slowly aware of hunger. He had had no food for more than fifteen hours. There was little breeding left in him under the double influence of fear and hunger, but the small relic made him unwilling to thrust himself back as an unwanted guest. That she would accept him with an uninterested acquiescence deterred him. If she would only meet him again with resistance, he would be happy to seize shelter by force. He knew how easily he could work himself into a righteous anger and forget himself. It’s this damned Christianity, he thought, or else not enough of it. He would welcome her as an enemy, or as a friend who would pity him and understand his fear. It was her cold neutrality he hated.

With unexpected resolution he turned his back on the way he had come that morning and half ran as it were into an obscure future. The more he thought of the girl the more he hated her and pitied himself. If I had been a cat, he considered, she’d have given me something to eat. That he had not been offered food was the idea that now grated on his mind. The thought of her became so hateful, such an incarnation of inhuman indifference, that he nearly turned back to find her. He wanted to give her pain, beat her, make her cry out. She doesn’t know what it is to be alone and frightened, he thought. If I had been a cat⁠ ⁠… A tree brushed his face with a branch of wet twigs; even inanimate nature seemed to treat him with casual scorn. “I can’t be a coward, not altogether a coward,” he pleaded in a carefully hushed whisper. It needed courage to write that letter and go on living with them. And it was on the side of justice, he added, before his mind could murmur of jealousy.