Demelza (50 page)

They were in a huge crowd stretching right up the valley and shouting. 'Our rights be bread t'eat an' corn to buy at a fair an' proper price. We want corn to live by, an' corn we'll have, whether or no!'

And she realized that the only bread she could give them was her own child...

Beside her was Sanson, the miller; and Verity and Andrew Blamey were talking in the corner, but they were too lost in each other to notice her. She wept in an agony of fear. For the miners were crazy for bread. In a minute they would set fire to the house.

She turned to look for Ross, and when she turned back to the window the massed, staring tiny faces were already fading behind dense columns of white smoke.

'Look,' said Jane Gimlett, 'it is snowing again.'

'Snowing!' she tried to say. 'Don't you see, it is not snow but smoke. The house is on fire and we shall be smothered to death!' She saw Sanson fall and then felt the smoke getting into her own breath.

Choking, she put up a hand to her throat and found that someone else's hand was already there.

On the morning of January the fourth the wind broke and it began to snow in earnest. By midday, when the fall ceased, the fields and the trees were thick and heavy with it. Branches bowed and thick floes drifted down the stream. John Gimlett splitting wood in the yard had to tug at the logs to get them apart, for the cold had bound them tight. Gimlett's nine ducks padding laboriously towards the water looked dirty and jaundiced in this purity. On Hendrawna Beach the tide was out and the great waves leaped and roared in the distance. The ice and foam and yellow scum which had covered the beach for a week was itself overlaid by the cloth of snow. Sand hills were mountain ranges, and in the distance the dark cliffs brooded over the scene, wearing their new dress like a shroud.

The hush everywhere was profound. After the fanatic ravings of the gale it was as if a blanket had fallen on the world. Nothing stirred and a dog's bark echoed round the valley. The roar of the sea was there but had somehow become lost in the silence and could only be heard by an effort of thought.

Then at two the clouds broke up and the sun came out dazzlingly brilliant, forcing a brief thaw. Branches and bushes dripped, and small avalanches of snow, already part thawed from within, began to slip down the roof. Dark stains showed on one or two of the fields, and a robin, sitting among the feathery snow of an apple branch, began to sing to the sun.

But the break had come late in the day, and soon the valley was streaked with shadow and the frost had set in again.

About four o'clock, as it was getting dark, Demelza opened her eyes and looked up at the wooden ceiling of the bed. She felt different from before, calmer and quite separate. She was no longer the child of nightmare. There was only the one reality and that was of this moment of waking to the long smooth shadows in the room, to the livid glimmering paleness of the ceiling, to the curtains drawn back from the latticed windows, to Jane Gimlett nodding sleepily in the glow of an old peat fire.

She wondered what day it was, what time of day, what kind of weather. Some noise had stopped; was it in her head or out in the world? Everything was very peaceful and unemphatic, as if she looked at it from a distance, no longer belonged to it. All life and energy was spent. Was she too spent? Where was Ross? And Julia? Had they all been ill? She was not clear on that. She would have liked to speak but somehow was afraid to try. In speaking she either broke the shell of quiet in which she lay, or stayed within it for ever. That was at the very heart of the choice. She did not know and was afraid to try. And Jud and Prudie, and her father and Verity and Francis… No, no, stop; that way, down that turning lay the nightmare.

Just then some of the peat fell in and caused a sharp glow and heat to fall on Jane Gimlett's face. She woke, sighed and yawned, put on more fuel. Presently she got up from her seat and came over to the bed to glance at the patient. What she saw there made her leave the room in search of Ross.

She found him slumped in his chair in the parlour staring into the fire. They came back together and Ross went over alone to the bed. Demelza's eyes were closed, but after a moment she seemed to feel the shadow across her face. She looked up and saw Ross. Jane Gimlett came to the bed with a candle and put it on the bedside table.

'Well, my love,' said Ross.

Demelza tried to smile, and after a moment's frightened hesitancy took the risk of trying her voice.

'Well, Ross…'

The shell was broken. He had heard. Somehow she knew then she was going to get better.

She said something that he did not catch; he bent to hear it and again could not.

Then she said quite clearly: 'Julia . .

'All right, my darling,' he said. 'But not now. Tomorrow. When you're stronger. You shall see her then.' He bent and kissed her forehead. 'You must sleep now.

'Day?' she said.

'You've been ill a day or two,' he said. 'It has been snowing and is cold. Go to sleep now. Dwight is coming to see you again this evening and we want you to show improvement. Go to sleep, Demelza.'

'Julia,' she said.

'Tomorrow. See her then, my love. Go to sleep.' Obedient, she closed her eyes and presently began to breathe more deeply and more slowly than he had seen her do for five days. He went over and stood by the window, wondering if he had done right to lie to her.

For Julia had died the night before.

THEY BURIED THE child two days later. The weather had stayed quiet and cold and heaps of snow lay in sheltered corners about the fields and lanes. A great number of people turned out for the funeral. Six young girls dressed in white - two Martins, Paul Daniel's daughters, and two of Jim Carter's younger sisters - carried the small coffin the whole of the mile and a half to Sawle Church, and all the way along the route were people who stood silently by and then quietly fell in behind the other followers to the church. Sawle choir, uninvited, met the procession halfway, and each time the six girls stopped to rest they sang a psalm, in which the mourners joined.

Dwight Enys walked with Ross, and behind them were John Treneglos and Sir Hugh Bodrugan. Harry Blewett and Richard Tonkin had come, and Harris Pascoe had sent his eldest son. Captain and Mrs Henshawe followed Joan Teague with one of the cousins Tremenheer. Behind them were Jud and Prudie Paynter, all the rest of the Martins and Daniels and Carters, the Viguses and the Nanfans, and then followed a great mass of ragged miners and their wives, small farmers and farm labourers, spallers, wheelwrights, fishermen. The sound of all these people singing psalms in the still, frosty air was very impressive. When they finished and before the shuffling movement of the procession began again, there was each time a brief hush when everyone heard the distant roar of the sea. In the end Mr Odgers found he had to read the burial service before more than three hundred and fifty people, overflowing the church and standing silent in the churchyard.

It was this unexpected tribute that broke Ross up. He had hardened himself to all the rest. Not being a religious man, he had no resources to meet the loss of the child except his own resentful will. Inwardly he railed against Heaven and circumstance, but the very cruelty of the blow touched his character at its toughest and most obstinate.

That Demelza was likely to live did not in this early stage strike him as cause for thankfulness. The one loss had shocked and shaken him too much. When his mother had taken him to church as a child he had repeated a psalm which said: 'To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.' But when his mother died, even while he was crying, something within him had risen up; a barrier to shield off his weakness and tenderness and frailty. He had thought: All right, then, I've lost her and I'm alone. All right then. To-day the adult impulse followed the childish.

But the curious silent testimony of respect and affection given today by all these ordinary working or half-starving neighbours of his, turning out from field and farm and mine, had somehow slipped through his defences.

That night the gale blew up again from the north, and all the evening he sat with Demelza. After a collapse when they broke the news to her yesterday she was slowly regaining the lost ground. It was as if nature, bent on its own survival, had not allowed her tired brain strength to dwell on her loss. The one thing it was concerned with was preserving her body. When the serious illness was really over, when the convalescence began, then would be the testing time.

About nine Dwight came again and after he had seen Demelza they sat in the parlour for a time. Ross was brooding, inattentive, did not seem to follow the simplest remark. He kept on repeating how sorry he was he had not asked the mourners in for food and wine after the funeral. It was the custom in this part of the world, he explained, as if Dwight did not know, to give people food to eat and wine to drink and plenty of it at a funeral. The whole countryside had turned out today, he couldn't get over that; he had not expected it at all and hoped they would see that with Demelza still so ill, things couldn't be done as they should have been.

Dwight thought he had been drinking. In fact he was wrong. Since the third day of their illness Ross had lost the taste. The only physical thing wrong with him was lack of sleep.

There was something mentally wrong with him, but Dwight could do nothing for that. Only time or chance or Ross himself could set things to rights there. He could find no submission in defeat. If he was to regain his balance there must be some recoil of the spring of his nature, which had been pressed back within itself unbearably.

Dwight said: 'Ross, I have not said this before, but I feel I must say it sometime. It is how acutely I feel that I was not able to save - her.'

Ross said: 'I had not expected to see Sir Hugh today. He has more compassion in him than I thought.'

'I feel I should have tried something else - anything. You brought me into this district. You have been a good friend all through. If I could have repaid that…'

'There was none from Trenwith at the funeral,' said Ross. 'I expect they are all still unwell.'

'Oh, if they have had this they will not be out for weeks. I have seen so much of this during last summer and autumn. I wish so much... Choake will no doubt say it was due to some neglect on my part. He will say that he saved Geoffrey Charles…'

'Demelza saved Geoffrey Charles,' Ross said, 'and gave Julia in his place.'

The gale buffeted tremendously against the house.

Dwight got up. 'You must feel that. I'm sorry.'

'God, how this wind blows!' Ross said savagely.

'Would you like me to stay tonight?'

'No. You need the sleep also and need your strength for tomorrow. I can spend all this year at recovery. Take a hot drink and then go.'

Ross put a kettle on the fire and had soon mixed a jug of grog, which they drank together.

Ross said: 'They were a poor lot at the funeral, Dwight. I wish I could have fed and wined them after. They needed it.'

'You could not be expected to victual the better part of three villages,' Dwight said patiently.

There was a tap on the door.

'Beg pardon, sir,' said Jane Gimlett, 'but Mistress is asking for you to come and see her.'

'Is anything wrong?'

'No, sur.'

When Dwight had gone Ross went into the bedroom. Demelza looked very slight and pale in the big bed. She stretched out her hand and he took it and sat on the chair beside her. Two candles flickered on the table, and the fire smouldered and glowed in the grate.

Ross tried to find something to say. 'We had a letter from Verity this forenoon. I don't know what has become of it.'

'Is - she - well?'

'Seems so, yes. I will read it you when it comes to light. She was enquiring for Francis and family. She had only just heard that there was some sort of sickness in the house.'

'And us?'

'... She had not heard about us.'

'You - must write, Ross. An' tell her.'

'I will.'

'How are they… Ross? Elizabeth and…'

'Ill, but improving.' He nearly added: 'Even Geoffrey Charles,' but killed his bitterness. Above all, there must never be any of that. He leaned his head against the wooden side of the bed and tried to forget all that had passed in these last weeks, all the frustration and the pain, tried to think himself back to the happy days of a year ago. So they sat for a long time. The wind was backing a little, would probably blow itself out in the north-west. The fire sank lower, and now and then the candles ducked and trembled.

He moved his hand a little, and at once she caught it more firmly in hers.

'I was not leaving you,' he said, 'except to stir the fire.'

'Let it stay, Ross. Don't go just now. Don't leave me.'

'What is it?' he asked. 'I was…only thinking.'

'What?'

'That Julia - will be lonely. She always so hated the wind.'

Ross stayed beside the bed all night. He did not sleep much but dozed fitfully off and on, while the wind buffeted and screamed. Awake and asleep the same thoughts lived in his brain. Frustration and bereavement. Jim Carter and the Warleggans and Julia. Failure and loss. His father dying untended in this same room. His own return from America, his disappointment over Elizabeth and happiness with Demelza. Was all that last joy gone? Perhaps not, but it would have changed its tone, and would be edged with memories. And his own life; what did it add up to? A frenzied futile struggle ending in failure and near bankruptcy. He would be thirty in a few weeks' time. No great age, but a part of his life was ended, a phase, an epoch, a turning, and he could not see himself starting again along the same track. What had ended with this phase? Was it his youth?

How would he feel tonight if everything had happened different, if he had triumphed over the prison authorities and the Warleggans and disease and was not bereaved and beaten, lightheaded and tired to death? He would have been asleep and safe from these thoughts. Yet would the phase have ended just the same? He did not know and was too down to care. It did not seem just then that success in anything had ever been possible or that anything would ever be possible again. Failure was the end of life, all effort was dust, necessary and complete. All roads led to the bleak parapet of death. In the cold gale of the early morning he fetched more wood, piled the fire high and then drank several glasses of neat brandy to keep out the chill. When he sat down again beside the bed the spirit seemed to set fire to his brain and he fell asleep.