The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (7 page)

‘They'll be flooded out at the pub,' he said, ‘won't they, if this keeps on?'

‘Ah! they'll cop out. They always cop out. Did y'ever see the flood marks in the cellar? Y' ought to look at 'em. Plenty o' times six or seven feet o' water down there.'

Richardson did not speak again. Ahead, now, he could see lights and as they sprang increasingly out of the darkness the man at his side shouted.

‘Water!'

Richardson stopped the car. Flowing like a stream, clay-coloured water came up to the front wheels. The man got out, and in the beam of the headlights Richardson saw him wading ahead, calf-deep in
water. Presently he came back. ‘All right. Go on now. But steady.'

‘How far?'

‘Twenty or thirty yards. It's the water from the break. You can see the lights on the Level.'

They came slowly through the water, drove on a short distance and then stopped. They got out of the car and began to walk towards the lights. Sounds of human voices, disembodied, remote, irregularly driven across the short intervening space of darkness, became louder and more living as Richardson saw the shape of the Level, vaguely marked out by lights, a wall of earth rising thirty or forty feet above the black flat land.

It was some time later, when his eyes became used to the darkness, that he saw what was happening. Figures of men, working in the light of oil-lamps and here and there by an inspection-lamp plugged by a lead to a standing car, swarmed darkly on and about the bank like stooping ants, sucked down into heavy postures of determination by the clay they cut and shovelled and carried. He saw sometimes the steel gleam of a spade as it carved the clay that in turn caught the yellow glow of lamplight; he saw it piled on barrows and wheeled away on the plank-lines and at last effaced by the dark torrent of ceaseless rain. He watched for a time the men coming and going out
of the darkness. Then he walked up the road to the point where it bridged the Level. The wind was strong and cold. On the far side he could see for a few yards the ripple of flood-water beaten up by wind and rain, but beyond that nothing. Solid, like a wall of black clay, the darkness shut out whatever lay beyond the ripple of water.

Up there, and again when he came down to the lower point of the road, he began to be aware of the smell of water. It was cold and powerful, and with it rose the sour dead odour of clay. It seemed to rise out of the earth; it rose straight into his nostrils, biting them. He gulped it into his mouth in icy gasps of rain.

After a time he got hold of a spade and began working. At the first stroke or two of the spade the great force of suction pulled at his heart. He realized he was not used to it and made a great effort, stooping and gripping the spade with all his power. And still, even then, the clay and the water under the clay sucked at the muscles of his arms and chest and heart and even the muscles of his neck. It caught at his boots; his feet were held in a trap. For a moment he suffered a spasm of childlike terror, feeling as if something unknown and limitless and powerful were sucking him down. He felt the sudden lifting of the clay, at last, like the tearing away of a piece of his
own flesh. He was struck by shock and pain, and then by a shudder of relief, followed by a blank of stupidity.

He worked on for a long time like this, bravely and clumsily carving the grey sour clay out of the darkness, stupid, sucked down, not thinking. The clay he cut and loaded was carried away into the rain along the plank-lines to some point of danger he never saw. Farther beyond still the tide was rising. The land and the water and the darkness and himself were part of a great conflict. The rain stood like a cold sweat on his face. When he wiped it away with his hands his fingers left on his flesh the colder smeared impression of the clay.

Some hours later he struggled to his car and drove back to the ferry. As he went into the lighted bar his weariness took the form of a temporary blindness. He did not know what time it was and he stood by the bar, leaning heavily on his elbows, not seeing. The clay had partially dried on his hands, contracting the skin, so that his fingers too felt dead.

‘I'll have a whisky,' he said.

After almost half a minute he looked up to find that no one had answered him. To his surprise the bar was empty. By the clock above the bar-shelves it was seven or eight minutes to ten.

Some moments later he heard voices. They seemed
to come from somewhere in the passage behind the bar. After listening a moment he walked into the passage. He could see the light, now, coming up from the cellar; the voices were coming from there too, the voices of the two women, low, hollow, in argument, unconscious of him.

What he saw down there at the foot of the cellar steps, in the lamplight, puzzled and startled him. Water had begun to rise already in the cellar, so that the beer-barrels seemed almost to be floating. The lamplight fell with a cloudy glow on the dark barrels, the white-washed walls and on the still water itself. It cast upward the heavy shadows of the two women, who were watching. One, the big woman, was standing on the lowest of the cellar steps, which the water had not yet reached. Her body seemed more than ever huge, anxious and in some way helpless. But it was clear that what she was really watching was not the water. He knew that she must have seen that many times before: many times, and worse, much worse. He remembered the story of the marks on the wall. What she was really watching was the other woman, and it was she, dreadfully thin, thin and worn-out and obsessed by some kind of parsimonious terror, who in turn was really watching the water. And as he stood there looking down, watching the small figure sitting on one of the pub chairs in
the middle of the rising water, her feet on the rung, her body thin and frail but tight with a fanatical stubbornness, he knew that this too must have happened before, and he knew the reason for the big woman's fear and anxiety. He knew why she had not wanted him to go.

He moved at last, and the big woman, hearing him suddenly, turned her startled eyes upward. Seeing him, she scrambled heavily up the steps. Behind her, as if nothing had happened, the little woman did not move.

In the bar he saw the big brown hands trembling as they drew the whisky. ‘Won't you have one too?' he asked her.

‘No. No sir, no thanks, no thanks.'

She tried to keep her hands still by pressing them together, and he knew she was alarmed by what he had seen.

‘Is there anything I can do?' he said.

She shook her head.

‘Nothing?' he said.

‘No sir, no sir.' She stood silent again, defensive, trembling. He took a drink of whisky, and saw that it was a minute or so past ten o'clock. She realized it too and went across the bar and proceeded to draw the heavy bolts of the door, locking it afterwards.

‘You've been working on the Level,' she said as
she came back. ‘I can see you're tired. You'll want some supper, won't you?'

‘I don't think I'll have anything,' he said.

‘What time would you like breakfast?' she said. She wanted him to go. He drank his whisky, hesitating. He wanted to say to her, ‘Why does she sit down there? What makes her do that?' but somehow he couldn't. It was after all no concern of his: what they did or felt, why even they were there, why one of them should behave in that strange silent way, watching the water.

Then all at once she began to speak. She began to tell him why it was, in a voice unamazed, low, rather mechanical. While she spoke she kept her eyes lowered, and he felt sorry for her: the big hands flat on the bar, the heavy embarrassed face that could not lift itself, the difficult statement of painful words.

‘She's got some idea that there'll be a second Flood.'

He did not speak. He let her go quietly on, telling him how the other woman would sit there in the cellar, not only when rain came and the water was rising, but when there was no rain, even in summer: how she would sit there waiting, watching the flood-marks on the wall, and then how she would come up into the bar, obsessed by hours of watching these marks, and begin to make the marks he had seen on
the spirit-bottles behind the bar. She was afraid and had been afraid now for many years that the waters would rise and cover them in the night and sometimes, as on nights like this, nothing could make her go to bed. There was nothing so very strange in that, he thought. There were people who lived their lives under the oppression of just such fears, the fear of being drowned or burned or suffocated while they slept. What was so strange, he thought, was that they had not acted about it in the most simple, obvious way.

‘Why don't you move and go somewhere else?' he said.

‘Us?' she said. ‘Move?' She looked up at him at last, explaining. If the water was bad in one way it was good in another. It was their living: the ferry, the boats in summer, the fishing, the pub. ‘We couldn't move,' she said. ‘We couldn't move. What'd we do, at our age? Start again?'

‘You could sell up,' he said.

‘No,' she said. ‘We can't sell up. It's entailed. We couldn't sell up if we wanted to.'

‘But sitting down there, like that,' he said. ‘She'll be ill.'

‘She is ill,' she said.

He finished his whisky and then stood looking into the empty glass, not knowing what to say.

‘Was the water rising much up on the Level?' she said.

‘A bit. It'll be worse with the tide.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It'll be worse. And sometimes I wish it would get worse. I wish there'd be a flood. A big, second flood, like the one in the Bible. Like she wants. That'd be the end of it all.'

She had nothing to say after that, and after a moment or two he said good night and went upstairs to bed.

Long afterwards he lay listening to the sound of water. It was falling and rising everywhere about him with tremendous force. He heard it beating on the roof-tiles and the bare branches of the trees and on the raging surface of the river. He heard the constant melancholy beating of the ferry-chain as it struck against the piles of the jetty. He heard the rain roaring across the great level miles of darkness across which the tide too was coming in from the sea. And hearing it and thinking of the woman down below, he felt his heart grow cold.

Alice Woodman had a soft loving face and brown almond eyes that seemed to be always on the verge of smiling at something. At twenty-two she married a man who manufactured mustard.

A few weeks after they were married she began to go about the district with her husband, in a small 10 h.p. van marked Pypper's Prepared Mustard, trying to establish this commodity on the market. Her husband, a man of inexhaustible and changeable enthusiasm, was convinced that one-half of the world was dying to eat a really decent mustard and that the other half was dying because it did not eat mustard at all. It was quite true that former manufacturers of mustard had made fortunes out of what was left on the plate. But here was a mustard you did not leave on the plate. It was a prepared mustard, in the French manner, and it was wonderful. It kept indefinitely in the little brown stone jars of which the 10 h.p. van was always full. At forty James Pypper had been a vacuum cleaner salesman, an agent for fire-extinguishers, a traveller in boiled sweets, a door-to-door
salesman of cures and preventives for rheumatism, a partner in a firm of patent corset manufacturers. He spoke of the vacuum cleaners and the fire-extinguishers, the boiled sweets, the rheumatism and the corsets, much as he spoke of the French mustard. Every household in the Kingdom was in danger of fire. Everyone ate sweets. There were more deaths every year from rheumatism than from any other disease. Every woman wore corsets. Alice, who was slim and delicate, did not wear corsets; she had given up eating sweets and did not suffer from rheumatism. She had a warm, contemplative, loving face but she did not eat mustard.

As time went on, however, she began to be affected by the tireless enthusiasm of James Pypper for the mustard he was trying to sell to country grocers, village stores and even to public houses and wayside tea-shacks. For the first few weeks, whenever they came to a shop or some other place where the mustard might possibly be sold, Alice would sit in the car outside and wait for James Pypper to come out again. As she sat there she would look at the shop and sometimes she would see James Pypper talking with earnest rapidity to the shopman, waving his arms and striking the little brown sample pot of mustard on the counter: a man preaching a mustard sermon. This went on for several weeks; and then Alice, who at first had been shy of
doing such a thing, began to go into shops herself and try to induce people to take sample orders. To her surprise and to James Pypper's surprise she was very successful. She did not preach about the mustard, she did not wave her hands and she did not strike the pot on the counter. She would look straight at the shopkeeper with her lovable, candid eyes and say in a simple way that the mustard was beautiful. Almost immediately it was as though the shopkeeper became confused between the beauty of the mustard and the quiet, lovable beauty of the girl who was speaking. He would give an order, ‘Well, can't be no harm in trying a dozen. See if they've moved next time you come,' and he would watch her out of the shop, hoping that next time would not be long.

In this way Alice got many orders for James Pypper's brand of prepared mustard. James Pypper, however, did not notice it. When Alice returned from shops which had taken an order he would say “Knew he would. Couldn't help it. You see, I told you.' Her going and coming and her success were simple proof of his enthusiastic creed that people needed mustard. It could never occur to him that they were proof that Alice was a lovable creature; he was concerned with saleable products only.

As they drove about the countryside Alice had a way of looking, in spring time, over the heads of the
flowering chestnut trees, the cream clouds of may, the olive mountains of oak; or in summer over the long swinging distances of corn and the uniform green of distant trees. As she looked she appeared to be smiling. This supposed smile, completely unconscious, had first attracted James Pypper. He had seen Alice smiling like this at a dance, had taken it automatically to mean that she was enchanted by James Pypper, about to embark on a great enterprise. Now he was often irritated by it. ‘What on earth are you smiling at?'