when she chimes the little silver bell she does it in a mechanical
way, and all the time he holds her one hand to his breast. When the
mass is read and the extreme unction administered, the little priest
reads the prayers for the dying. He listens attentively, and she
listens too, with eyes dry as horn, and tightened lips. She scarcely
hears what he reads:--
"My feet have gone astray in the paths of vanity and sin, now let me
walk in the way of Thy commandments.... Forgive me, O Lord, all the
sins which I have committed by my disordered steps--"
"'Steps!' that means feet; 'eyes seen vanities,' that means sight;
'tongue hath in many ways offended,' speech. Why, he is going through
all the seven senses, or is it seven, or five?" She must give him the
envelope with the check in it before he leaves. She hasn't a black
frock, not one; he liked her in colors, light girlish colors, with a
silken waist-band to match. Must she wire for a coffin? What a beast
she is to think like this! But how can she help it? Her tear-bags--what
is their right name, lachrymal glands?--are exhausted, even her lashes
have thinned; yet she never shed a tear, at least only inwardly, with
a choke.
He sobs, and she looks up; the tears are trickling down his cheeks; she
puts up her free hand and wipes them off gently.
"To Thee I resign my heart! Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my
spirit!" reads the priest in broken English; and when the, from its
point of view, beautiful prayer has drawn to a solemn close, the man
sobs out in genuine, heartfelt conviction with a force of epithet that
is habit not irreverence,--
"That is a damn nice prayer! I was always afraid of death, always [with
a sob] a coward; but when it comes to the point, that vanishes too!"
And the boyish priest purses his check and takes it with him, and
leaves his blessing instead, and follows in the wake of the town doctor.
"Send Johann to me, dearums; let me get dressed; I'll have a try to die
in the sunshine. Get your own little bed carried down to the veranda,
and your own little white pillow,--mind, the one you put your head on
last,--and lend them to me for this turn."
And so the maids take it down, and she stands at the head of the
stairs as they carry it, two at the head, and two at the foot; and
as she hears their cautious backward steps and the rest at the turn,
she fancies it sounds like the bearing out of a coffin. And then he
follows slowly out, leaning on his big stick, and his beard divides
into patches and shows the purplish skin, and his breathing is labored,
but he steps more firmly than he has done for a long time past. And
he leans on her frail shoulders, and when they reach the dining-room
he calls in the maids and the men who serve him, and bids them charge
their glasses; and he thanks them, and says he is sorry for all the
trouble he has given them, and shakes hands with each one, and they
courtesy and say "Skaal!" a salutation when drinking, and troop out
crying. They are mostly women, and women forgive easily and forget
everything--to a man! Only the cow-girl stops behind, crouched near the
door, crying, "O-ah, o-ah!" And he fills his own glass with champagne
and sips it; but nature sets a limit to the alcohol a man may absorb,
and he has passed it. He cannot get it down; so he lays his hand on
her head and smooths it gently, and says:--
"Your luck, little one, your very good luck! Oh, my poor little one,
I am afraid for you! I ought to have--well, it's no good regretting;"
and with a last flame of the old fierce fire he cries, "I have had my
last drink, and no man shall drink after me;" and he shivers the glass
against the wall, and purple shadows, the "skreigh" of another dawn,
chase one another over his swollen face, and he leans heavily on her
and says faintly, "Lay me down, I am tired!"
When they reach the veranda, the leaves of the virgin-vine are strewn
in dancing shadow-leaves and fluttering tendrils at their feet. He
looks at them and mutters, "Shadows--only shadows!"
Suddenly he searches her face intently and asks, "Is there no hope,
little one,--none?" He reads the answer in her wistful eyes. "When?
Don't you be afraid to tell me,--when did he say?"
"Inside twenty-four hours."
There is a long silence, and the shadow-leaves dance, and the bees
whirl buzzing past, and the strong young life of midsummer mocks
dissolution in a subtle, arrogant way.
"One good clean year, one clean year, one year's home for a finish!
Just as I learnt to know what it meant, to leave it all! It's hard to
look on a day like this [sob], and know that to-morrow I rot. A long
life as lives go, and nothing to show for it! Well, I always wanted to
die in the sunshine, with the birds singing, and, since I knew you,
with you near me,--oh, my dear, my poor, dear little one!"
He reels, and she clutches him; but he steadies himself by a supreme
effort, and says through his ground teeth: "Now I am going to say
good-by to the world, and, by God! I'll say it standing. I have had
good days in it,--wild, glad days, drunk with the lust of love and
wine; but I never saw good or beauty in it till you showed me how. Oh,
oh, oh! Let no man write my epitaph!"
He stands leaning on her shoulders, looking sea-ward, drinking his
fill of sun and sea,--sea that was a rapture to him, that he loved as
the greatest and strongest and cruelest thing he knew; the only thing
that responded to the wild moods in his soul, and struck a rushing
strain of song in his stormy heart that made him rejoice with a fierce
delight. The tears fall and splash on her hands, and then she helps
him to lie down; and she feels his feet, and they bring hot bottles,
for they are getting cold, and he lies with his eyes closed. The
village doctor comes and goes; but nothing can be done, the sands are
running out fast. "If the Lord be merciful [the sermon is working in
him] He will take him before morning, otherwise he will suffer much,"
he whispers to her. She does not answer, only kneels silently at his
side, and he holds her hand. There is a strange smell that has a chill
uncleanness in its breath about them.
The people pass by on the road above and peer down through the palings.
The maids give audience to inquisitive or interested callers at the
back. The housekeeper is busy at the linen press, sorting out sheets
and things that may be needed; and as she moves about with noiseless
tread, and folds and lays aside, she mentally remodels her wardrobe. If
she take out the flower in her black summer hat, and put in some curled
tips, it will serve nicely. Mistress will surely bring her a dress from
England, and the merino they hang the rooms with (she will get it cut
the proper lengths) will do for the maids. Uf! that nasty wine gave her
a headache; she will get some fresh beans roasted, and have a good cup
with fresh cream,--that will do her good. How Gudrun [the cow-girl]
takes on! He was a devil to serve, but there were advantages,--ay,
many pickings that would not fall to one's share in a better regulated
Christian household, not to speak of the distinct comfort of having a
mistress whose time is taken up elsewhere. Poor thing! Well, it's best
for her; she has money, she'll marry again. But _that_ Gudrun! it is
odd. Why should she carry on so? Or could there be a reason? He always
took great notice of Gudrun; she used to laugh and grin and go on when
he went out in the yard, and never was afraid; and then there was that
anonymous letter the mistress got. Uf! Men folk, God save us! Even with
a leg in the grave it's hard to trust them! There's no smoke without
fire, that's sure. There, that's all ready. "Well! what is it?"
This to the second housemaid. She is a fat girl, with a restless twitch
about her mouth and half-closed eye-lids, that curl upward at the
outer corners. One gets the impression somehow that her solid physique
is but a mask to cover an emotional soul with a dangerous sense of
humor.
"The Bible reader, Morten Ring, wants to know if he may read for a
while, now that the Popish priest has gone and left the dying sinner
without any one to direct his thoughts heavenward."
There is an imitative note in her voice, and a mocking gleam shoots
from her eyes.
"Uf! is he here again? That's the third time. Mistress told him no
before, and strong enough too; I should think that ought to have been
more than enough for him."
"Yes, but he says the whole village thinks it shocking, and he is like
sent up, and that you might put it to her!"
"Indeed, then I won't! When I did last time, she told me to tell him
to go down to the weighing place on the wharf and ring a bell, and
call the population together, and read out to them all the places in
the Bible that refer to hypocrisy, lying, and scandal, the sins of
adultery, fornication, and the begetting of bastards; that she'd be
willing to pay him treble his fee for the charity of it, they need
it so much. It might teach them to begin at home and let other folks
alone."
"Shall I tell him that?" eagerly.
"Are you mad? No, tell him Mistress is reading herself, and ask him
to stay and have a good cup of coffee and sweet rusks. I want to get
the truth out of him about the magistrate's girl's illness; he was up
there, and I don't believe a sniff in her sprained foot--"
And down below the rose-buds opened into roses, and nodded with the
effrontery of assured beauty to the sun-god; and the birds hushed them
for their noon siesta; and he lay with shut eyes and held her hand
tightly; and sometimes he spoke to her, and sometimes he muttered to
himself (she caught the words) a line of his favorite Mangan:--
"Sleep! no more the dupe of hopes and schemes,
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow!
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!"
The odd unpleasant smell seems to hang about them as if too heavy to
diffuse itself in the thin, clear air; the smell of cow-sheds that
clings to the cow-girl's clothes is perfume to it. It attracted the
flies, and they gathered like swarming bees on the window-panes and
door-posts, and buzzed and hummed and stung like Bushmen carousing over
a find of dead meat; and they crept over the bed and stuck in his hair,
and she tried to keep them off his face; and when one of them crawled
up her own with tickling, clinging feet, she paled and shuddered. The
cow-girl stepped out of her clogs, and went into the drawing-room and
brought out a gayly painted palm-leaf fan, and stationing herself at
the head of the bed set it in motion. His breathing is getting labored,
and at times an ugly flush crosses his face. Once when it is deeper
than usual, the girl cries,--
"O Lord God! Lord God!"
He hears her and looks up. "Ah, Gudrun, is that you? Good girl, good
girl!"
She sinks on to her knees, and moans and rocks herself; and then she
looks at his closed eyes and says to her: "Mistress, may I? It can't
harm you!"
She nods her head wearily; she is fanning awkwardly with her left
hand, and she says with her tired, tender voice: "Gudrun wants to say
good-by, dear!"
He opens his eyes, and for a moment the charm of his rare smile
returns. The girl stoops and leaves a kiss upon his forehead, and then
rushes away and flings herself down on the long lush grass, that is
never cut, under a big chestnut-tree.
He looks at her and lifts her hand to his lips: "Always a big heart,
always a great little woman [with a groan]! and now I am to lose
you, and it is the best thing could happen to you. Ay, there's the
sting,--leave you to some brute, that is my punishment. O little one!
don't you think too hardly of me," he talks with effort; "I meant to
be better than I was to you. You'll never find another man love you as
I did; remember that, and forget all the rest if you can. You _have_
forgotten all, I might have known you would! Where am I drifting to? No
man ever came back to say. Do you believe in hell [eagerly], do _you_
believe in it?"
She looks at him pityingly, with a flash of past energy in the lift
of her head, and a curl of scorn on her pale lips: "The hell of the
priests or parson? No, I do not. Is that worrying you? Don't you let
it, old man, don't you let it! Wherever you are going, whatever after
existence your poor troubled soul is fighting its way to, it _is not to
their hell_!"
The girl has come back and taken up her former position, and fans
steadily, for the flies are gathering in greater numbers every hour.
The veranda seems airless and close, and uncanny with unseen things;
the doctor comes and goes; the servants peep out, and the hours seem to
hold many hours in their embrace. She seems to live all her life over
again. Things she has forgotten completely come vividly back to her. An
old Maori man, who used to sell sweet potatoes and quaint ring-shells
for napkin rings to the Pakeha lady in Tauranga Bay, floats before
her inward vision as tangible as if he were next her; and a soldier
servant, she can hear his voice, he used to sing as he pipe-clayed,--
"But kaipoi te waipero, Kaipoi te waiena;
For Rangatira Sal, Bob Walker sold his pal,
But he's now at the bottom o' the harbor!"
Why did the stupid chorus come back to her now; what chink of brain did
it lie in all these years? Oh what a brute she is and how callous! She
ought to read prayers, or say things; in a few hours it will be too
late ever to say a word more. She finds herself beating time with her
foot to a jig tune, a bizarre accompaniment to the words "too late."
She would give all she possesses to cry, yet she cannot; and so the day
wears on.
Later on she bends her head to him and asks: "Are you dozing or are you
thinking? What are you thinking of?"
He smiles. "Of zoo, dearums, of zoo!"
"Have you said your prayers? Shall I read you any?"
"Finished them long ago! I am just waiting; lying thinking of you,
dearie, thinking of you. Happier than ever I was since I left off 'taw
in the lay' and pegging tops."
Her question was a concession to a past religious conscience; she feels
as she puts it that as for herself, if she would die as she sits there,
she would not trouble to pray; it would be well to drift out.
There is another weary hour's silence; then he looks up at her and
shivers slightly, and tightens his clasp of her hand. "Kiss me,
duckums, kiss me! Now lay your little old phiz on the pillow close to
mine, you dearest and best in the world! Close, close to mine."
The wind is changing, and the sun hides his face decently behind a
great white cloud. There is a hoarse rattle in his throat, and his
breathing is difficult. The doctor comes and stands quietly behind her;
the crowd at the gate above gets denser; the servants huddle together
in the dining-room and cry. The Swedish gardener pats them all in
turn, but most gently the fat housemaid. A sudden blast of wind blows
a strand of her hair loose and it touches his lips, and he mutters,
"My little one!" She lifts her face and looks at him; a strange purple
color vibration is waving over his face, and she calls affrightedly,--
"Dear, oh dear man, look at me! Can you see me, do you know me?"
He lifts his heavy lids and looks at her steadily with half-dead eyes,
and says with stiff, barely articulate speech: "Of course I do, my
dearie! I'm all rig--"
She feels his fingers close more tightly over hers,--once, twice,--then
relax; his chin falls, and the doctor passes his hand over his eye-lids
and puts a handkerchief to his lips; and the cow-girl drops with a cry
to the ground and throws her apron over her head; and at the gate above
a child calls "Mammy!" in frightened tones; and the lad who has been
sitting up on the slope at the foot of the flag-staff slides the Union
Jack half-mast; and the big white house is without a master.
* * * * *
She is sitting in an old garden, a retired place in the village, right
on the fjord. They have driven her down there away from the house that
seems haunted by his spirit, infected with the loathsome odor of rapid
dissolution that nothing can overcome, that seems to ooze out and taint
the very flowers. And then the myriad flies that crawl and creep, as
if sick or drunk, over everything, and make one loathe and turn from
the very sight of food and drink, for dread of where they have been;
make one long to scream hysterically to drown their hateful buzzing,
and rush away and plunge into the sea,--were it not that it too seems
to whisper in undertones of dead men and lost sweethearts, drowned
mariners with swollen gray-green faces and tangled locks floating like
sea-sedge behind them, as they toss on the swift undercurrents beneath
its treacherous smiling surface.
It is with her, sitting there, as it is with most men, that when
numbed in mind and heart by some great trouble her senses are more
alive to outward sounds and scenes. It is as if when one's inner self
is working with some emotion, wrestling with some potential moral
enemy, crying out under the crucifixion of some soul-passion, eyes and
ears, and above all sense of smell, are busy receiving impressions and
storing them up, as a phonograph records a sound, to reproduce them
with absolute fidelity if any of the senses be touched in the same
way by the subtile connection between perfume and memory. She will,
in all time to come, never forget that old garden. She is rocking
unconsciously to and fro. Her thoughts, and the emotions belonging to
them, cross one another rapidly, flash past as the landscape seen from
a mail train, so that she cannot fasten any of them. The weary vigils
of many months, the details of days and hours, are ticked off as the
events on a tape. The look in his eyes, press of his fingers; the quiet
face with the awful look of peace; the rapid changes to a thing to be
hidden away as swiftly as hands can coffin it; the clasped fingers,
never to be lifted in tender caress or angry gesture; the future to
face without even the rough protection of his passionate, wayward
affection;--all these conflicting images and reasonings dash through
her brain, and yet not a detail of her surroundings escapes her,--the
strips of blue fjord, with the pilot boats with their numbered sails
in the immediate foreground, and the prams turned bottom up on the
miniature wharf for a fresh coat of paint; the dip of the white sail of
a pleasure-boat in the distance, and the gleam of the scarlet cap of a
girl steering; bright flecks on the black-green shadows of the trees in
the near background, that stand out distinctly from the misty blue of
the distant mountains, misty with the purple light that only clothes
the northern heights.
Not a detail of the quaint garden escapes her. It is a garden of
surprises. Fruit-trees from strange lands, dwarf shrubs of foreign
birth, curious shells gathered on the beach of far-away islands,
flourish promiscuously with indigenous plants. A painted lady (the
figure-head of some effete sailing-craft), who has cloven the storms
through many seas with her mighty breasts, and commanded the rising
waves with her upraised hand, and faced the storm with a smile ghastly
in its wooden fixity, has come here to rest. She leans next to an old
sun-dial in the shade of an ancient lilac-bush. The sense of beauty,
and the bump of utility of successive owners, is manifested at every
turn. The even drills of potatoes are disturbed by the tombstone of
a favorite dog; a plaster Mercury, and a shrub, cut in the form of a
bulgy tea-pot, spoil the symmetry of a bed of carrots; strawberries
carrying their ripe, red fruit right bravely fill the background of
one bed, and a tangled profusion of pinks, pansies, and gilly-flowers,
forget-me-nots, and fragrant lavender spikes have a long straight line
of leeks running amid their sweet irregularity as a pungent line in
a dainty sheaf of verse. She is conscious of a vague pleasure as she
notes these things, and a sort of wondering pity at the pathos of her
own quiet figure. She fingers her black cashmere gown and the heavy
silk fringe of her shawl. She never wore a shawl before; they had
nothing else black. Her mother used to wear a shawl, a white Indian
silk with raised flowers. Her shoulders sloped too, like Eugenie's.
Funny to wear a shawl like an old lady! She has a bag with money,
papers, certificate of death for the customs. What a nuisance all these
formalities are! "Lum tum, te tum, te tum,"--the dead march in Saul!
no, she mustn't hum that. She remembers once in the long ago, before
the flood, her flood, she had a sweetheart, a boy officer,--she wonders
did he get fat; they always chaffed and said he would. Once she was
humming it, when he stopped her saying, "Oh, don't! when any one hums
that, a poor soldier dies somewhere." Superstition, of course; but she
won't hum it, all the same, just for the old sake's sake. Why should
she kill a soldier? She used to like all soldiers. "Tum tum!" Is she
going mad? How does one go mad?
She turns her head in relief at an approaching step. The little
doctor stands bowing, hat in hand. She notices that he is wearing his
dress-suit, and adds mentally, "They wear dress clothes on solemn
occasions, christenings, weddings, funerals. Why, of course it's the
funeral!" She even smiles at the conjunction of a swallow-tail with
elastic side-leather boots with high heels. His trousers too must have
been made before he grew stout; they ruck up at the knees, and show
the end line of his under-drawers quite plainly. She feels inclined to
laugh. She hasn't really laughed for a long time; well, why shouldn't
she laugh?
"Will Fruen come now?" he queries.
There is a subtile blending of the soothing professional tone he uses
to lady patients and the gravity befitting a solemn occasion.
She takes up her bag, gathers her shawl mechanically into graceful
folds over her arms, and follows him. They go up through the wood, past
the poor-house, to a side entrance. She notices as she looks down over
the town that the flags are all half-way down the staffs, and that the
village is crowded with folk; and that outside the house there are
groups of black-coated men, like ants crawling about a white stone, she
thinks. The little housekeeper meets her at the door; the other girls
are crying. She bows to people without recognizing them. Then there is
a tramping of feet, and some one leads her out; the bell is tolling
up from the church, and she sees that they have covered the gray
cobs with black palls, and attached a black canopy to the cart, and
outlined the spokes of the wheels with fir needles, and smothered the
rest of it with branches and flowers, wreaths and crosses, and harps
and lyres: he hated music too! The coffin--what an ugly black thing,
with an exaggerated stomach and garished silver ornaments!--is resting
upon the Union Jack. A crowd of faces that she does not know meets
her. She places herself behind the cart, and the maids follow her, and
all the dogs gather round her, but never growl once as they move on;
and the crowd follows. She can see the green road; they have covered
it according to custom with branches of fir and pine,--a green river,
a grass-green river, winding to the left. And the sea, the sea he
loved,--it seems to her that there is a cadence of pity in the eternal
note of its quiet sadness. How tired her feet are! It's quite half a
mile yet. She has no ankles, how funny! Just stilts made of her will.
She trips. The cow-girl pushes past the housekeeper, and watches her
steps.
"Lord God, how stony-faced she is!" whispers the doctor's wife, "and
she never cried once."