The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (11 page)

‘H'mph.'

Uncle did not change or relax his movements, but turned the little grindstone like a man turning the handle of a musical instrument and producing the same harsh melody. To Clarkey this sound brought back and became identical with the sound of the tyre-less pram-wheel on the road that afternoon. It brought back in turn the glare of heat and poppies, the sudden useless twang of the banjo, the pointless maddening little tune that was the only tune that Uncle could play. Under the renewed contact of all this Clarkey was hit by a new and insane impression. He felt as if his mind were the soft revolving circle of stone, that the fine edge of all the circumstances of the day was being held against it, wearing it away. As he watched the knife silvered and fined to a razor edge under his own hand he felt his mind sharpened in the same way to a fine edge of frenzy.

When he finally got to his feet with the knife he felt the hot afternoon spin swiftly about him, rocking his brain. He walked away towards the drive of the house slowly, not thinking. Up to that moment he had not grasped that the knife might have its own significance.

Then suddenly he saw it. He was walking along with the knife in his right hand. He was under the
dark trees, out of the sunshine, and the knife had in his hand no more than the appearance of a blade of light. When he turned the knife very slightly in his ladylike fingers the light went out. In that moment he saw the significance of the knife. He stood still and looked back. The pine trees had cut him off from the road. In the same way, as he looked forward again, he saw that they separated him from the house. He took several paces off the gravel drive and stood behind a tree. He stood there for three or four minutes, waiting and listening. He did not move at all except once. It was to give the knife a little twist of his fingers before putting it in his pocket, like a light that is switched out.

When he walked back to the road again, out of the black shadows of the thick pine trees into the sunlight, he was no longer thinking. Thought had been transmuted into a repeated current of sensation. It was already driving through him like a charge of electrified madness.

This single sensation was so strong that it had the effect of nullifying all the others that had troubled him that afternoon: the pain of his feet, the filing away of the broken pram-wheel, the heat, the hard glare in his eyes of concrete and poppies, the maddening sound of the banjo making its mournful twang under the sacking in the pram.

It drove him along all the rest of the afternoon and
into the evening, replacing the machinery of physical effort and thought, so that he became no longer tired. He had no sort of plan of action. He had ceased thinking. His plan was the sensation itself. At some culminative moment something would happen. His hand touched the knife in his pocket. The knife now lay dead, but at some point it would spring to life, like the filament of a lamp when the current is turned on.

His first return to reality was when he realized that Uncle had stopped with the pram. The poppies had ceased, and now woods were thick on both sides of the verge. Above the gap made by the road between the trees he became aware of a strangely elevated clarity in the sky. He realized a moment later that they had come almost to the sea.

For the first time it was Uncle who opened the conversation. His speech was soft, almost on one note, and tired.

‘This is th' old place,' he said. ‘Remember it, don't you? Brook down on the other side of the wood. Plenty o' water, remember?' He pushed the pram off the road and into a track going down into the woods. ‘I reckon I'll wash my feet.'

Clarkey did not speak. But once in the wood, under the trees, he began to remember the place. It was very quiet. In the heart of the wood it was quite dark, but at the far end the evening sun was pouring down
between the trees in long bright trumpets of horizontal light. He caught the strong odour of sunless earth, of rank elder.

The path widened out eventually to a forty-foot track. Uncle parked the pram under a large sloe-bush, and began to go about at once looking for wood.

‘Goin' wash your feet afore we eat?' Clarkey said.

‘H'mph,' Uncle said. ‘Afterwards.'

‘Christ, I'll be glad to get my feet in water too.'

They ate a meal of bread and cheese, with tea stewed over the fire in a can. All through it Clarkey was very silent. The sensation, the insane pain generated by the idea of the knife, had now left him. He was thinking again, but the process of his thought was no longer in any way chaotic. It had become very simplified. He didn't want any trouble. Uncle was a big man, slow but enormous, and had been a soldier. No need to knock the house down to get the cash-box. No need for trouble. All he had to do was walk away with the banjo. Uncle always played the little tune on it last thing at night, before they dossed. Clarkey could walk away with it in the night. They were now about four miles from the sea. In an hour he could be down in the town, get a night's doss, and lay low for a bit. In a week he could be away somewhere down the coast, where Uncle would never think of going. After that, no more slugging with a pram, no more torn, aching
feet. He'd live easy and get himself a pair of shoes to measure.

The plan was so simple that he lay on his back, thinking it out, trying to find a weakness in it, all the time that Uncle had gone into the field beyond the wood, to wash his feet. He went over it in his mind as a man goes over a problem in arithmetic, working it out in different ways, getting always the same answer.

It was already twilight when Uncle came back. He seemed larger, more cumbrous and more simple than ever in the falling darkness. To Clarkey's questions he grunted always with the old soft monosyllable of content.

Lying on his back, Clarkey watched Uncle get the banjo out of the pram. He watched with motionless, half-closed eyes. He saw Uncle tune up the banjo and then saw the slow tortoise-feet hands uncurl themselves and strike the strings.

Without being affected by it he heard the strange little tune mournfully strike the quiet air. He heard it again and saw the figure of Uncle sink into a still lower attitude in the darkening grass. Already, over the colourless fringe of trees, the stars were pricking out, dim above the reddish afterglow of heat and light still suspended in the direction of the sea. All the time no part of Uncle moved except the slow crude hands, heavily striking out the tune.

Clarkey heard the tune twice and then it began gradually to get on his nerves again. He turned restlessly in the grass. He began to feel the frayed ends of his patience sticking into his mind like raw ends of wire.

‘Can't yer play some other tune?' Clarkey said.

Uncle did not speak; the little tune mournfully went on.

Then Clarkey remembered another question. It had troubled him for a long time.

‘What do they call yer Uncle for? Are yer Uncle to somebody special or summat?'

Uncle gave a sort of negative grunt, barely audible above the sound of the banjo, in answer.

‘Ain't yer Uncle to nobody?'

‘No,' Uncle said. The tune had ended for the third time, his voice low but audible now.

‘Ain't yer got no folks then?' Clarkey said.

‘No,' Uncle said. ‘I ain't got nobody.'

‘Nobody nowhere?'

‘H'mph,' Uncle said, and now the tune, which seemed to have on Uncle an almost intoxicant effect, began again, fining the raw edges of Clarkey's impatience so that he turned swiftly in the grass.

‘Can't yer give the music a rest now? I wanna get some sleep. It's bin a hell of a hot day.'

‘H'mph, this ain't hot,' Uncle said. ‘When we was
out there, in Africa, it was a hundred and ten sometimes. And still with it. Quiet. Terrible still and quiet at nights. You got so's you slept easy and woke easy.'

‘You git over it later?'

‘No. I never got over it. I sleep as light as a kid now.'

Clarkey lay tense, thinking. Now he had an idea. He began to unlace his boots. The sound of the banjo had ceased and it was silent and dark now, the figure of Uncle like a quiet and expressionless shadow as he moved across to put away the banjo in the pram.

‘I think I'll change my mind,' Clarkey said, ‘and go and wash my feet. They hurt like hell.'

He shuffled across the grass in his unlaced boots, then stopped and turned.

‘You goin' get some sleep now?'

‘H'mph,' Uncle said. ‘Perhaps I will.'

Clarkey went down the track and into the field. He sat down on the edge of the small stream, low now after days of heat, and then took off his boots and socks and let his feet rest in the water. As he sat there, in the now almost full summer darkness, with the water stinging his feet, he could hear nothing at all but the occasional rush of a car passing on the road beyond the wood.

Then he heard something else. It was the little tune being played once again by Uncle. The sound of
it maddened him, and the edges of his impatience were stripped raw again as he waited for it to end.

It ended after a moment or two and he waited tensely for it to begin again, his feet out of the water now, his sharp face turned upward, listening. He waited for three or four minutes, but there was no sound. He dried his feet on the handkerchief that he wore round his neck and then put on his socks and waited again. He knew how easily Uncle slept. He would be asleep in ten minutes, perhaps less. He put on his boots and laced them and then stood up. His feet felt light and cool and his hands were slightly stretched forward, ready to give him direction in the darkness.

He gave Uncle twenty minutes, as near as he could tell. Then he walked out of the field and back along the track, with his habitual ladylike springing steps exaggerated by the need for quietness. He reached the place under the sloe-bushes where the solid shadows of the pram and Uncle were just distinguishable, side by side. He listened and it seemed to him that Uncle was asleep. He stood for a moment and then lifted the sacking of the pram. With the tips of his fingers he grasped the banjo and took it out. He knew that he had not made a single sound, that no single sound would now be necessary. Listening, he stood for a moment longer, and then moved away.

As he moved, the edge of his jacket very slightly struck the pram. Unbalanced on its three good wheels, the pram rocked a little, creaking the rusty springs.

A moment later he knew that Uncle was awake. He stirred and grunted and Clarkey, suddenly very frightened, began to run. He had not moved five yards before Uncle was lumbering after him.

In the instant that Uncle grabbed at him by the shoulders in the darkness it seemed to Clarkey that he reached the culminative point of all the day's impatience and anger, the extreme limit of pain. It was as if the long lines of poppies rose up again out of the darkness and struck him on the eyes. He felt his body flare up to a sort of frightened fury. Without knowing what he was doing he was swinging the knife.

He had not swung it more than once or twice before he felt the enormous cumbersome arms of Uncle close round him from behind. He had already dropped the banjo. Now he tried desperately to drop the knife. He could not do it because of the strength of Uncle's arms, which seemed to be crushing in his ribs, and suddenly he felt the knife force its way into his chest.

The huge powerful arms of Uncle went on squeezing him until he dropped, his breath choked so that he could make only a queer falling dribble of sound. As he fell and lay in the grass, Uncle stood away from
him, bewildered, not fully knowing what had happened.

It occurred to him after a time to light a match. In its light he saw Clarkey lying at his feet. He did not know what to do. He stood with his heavy mournful eyes fixed on Clarkey and his slow tortoise hands suspended with dumb bewilderment and pain.

Finally he moved. He shuffled heavily forward. The match had gone out and in the darkness his feet struck against the banjo, lying in the grass.

As he did so he heard it give out a little mournful and ghastly twang of sound, like a dying complaint, that recalled for him the voice of his dead friend.

In the days when he lived with his father and mother in the little Midland town, among the chapels and the factories, he would lie awake on hot summer nights and listen to the sound of late voices beating on the streets below like an uneven tide. In those days, before the wars, life was more robust, more physical, and yet in a sense more serene.

One summer, while he was still a boy, there was a great scandal about a woman named Anderson. He first knew that she was a scandalous woman because people, and also his father and mother, talked of her as if she had no name. They did not call her Lily Anderson or even Miss Anderson, but always her or she. She was a soprano singer. When she was about eighteen or nineteen she would take a solo every Sunday in the chapel choir: something very heavily moving like ‘Ave Maria' or ‘Abide with Me', or very tender, like ‘With Verdure Clad'. But in a little provincial choir it is not singing that takes first place. In those days there was a great struggle among the female singers to get, and keep, a place in the front row of the choir stalls, so that sometimes the choir looked, from the pews below, like a great barricade of entrenched
bosoms defending their hard-won positions. The arrival of Lily Anderson in the middle of the front row was an assault on those positions that created a great jealousy.

Up to that time there had been nothing very remarkable about Lily Anderson except that she was a nice singer. She was still only a girl, with black-brown eyes and hair and a rather solid little figure. Only her mouth seemed mature: heavier and riper than the rest of her body.

Then the scandal began. The minister of that day was a young man named Hadfield who was unmarried. He lived all alone in the manse with no help except a daily woman who came in to cook his breakfast and left in the early evenings. In a little provincial town it is a good thing for a minister to know, and cultivate, the right kind of people. The Reverend Hadfield ate the dull cold suppers of the local leather merchants and manufacturers and avoided treading on the toes of the Church Council. There was a family named Pendleton, a leather factor and his wife and their one daughter, who as standards went in the district were very rich. The daughter had pale green flabby eyes like grapes that have lost their texture, and she wore brown stockings. It had been taken for granted, in an inconclusive kind of way, that in time he would marry her, but things turned out rather differently.