The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (8 page)

‘I don't think I was smiling at anything.'

‘Think? Don't you know? Don't you know whether you smile or not?'

‘Yes. But perhaps I wasn't thinking.'

At times Alice would wonder whether James Pypper really did or really ever had loved her; then it became obvious that there were more important things on his mind than Alice's love, her almond eyes and her smile. It became obvious that the mustard was failing. It became obvious, by September, that the world did not eat mustard at all.

Up to this time Alice and James Pypper had lived in the middle of the town; theirs was a big, ill-proportioned house of ugly white brick with grey iron railings round it. The mustard was made in a little two-storied factory, formerly a warehouse, farther
down the street. James Pypper had begun by employing three men and a boy, then one man and two boys, and then, as the mustard began to fail, a boy and an old man. He was just about to ask Alice if she too would leave the house and come to help retrieve the fortunes of the factory when something happened. James Pypper was in a grocer's shop one day when a man walked in with two huge baskets of white and brown eggs. James Pypper looked at them casually, then with a sudden jump of interest and then realized all at once that he was seeing eggs for the first time in his life. He asked the man how many eggs there could be in a basket. ‘About ten score each basket,' the man said. James Pypper wanted to know how many days' laying that represented and the man said: ‘That's two days' lay. Eggs are falling off a bit.' James Pypper went out of the shop impelled by a terrific idea: the stunning, cataclysmic, revolutionary idea of the egg.

As he rushed home to tell Alice of this, his mind worked out like an arithmetical machine the whole scheme of egg production, egg distribution, egg profit. He realized that he had got hold of something truly stupendous. He couldn't think why he, and indeed anyone else, had never thought of it before. He was seized with a primitive fever of simple wonder for one of the basic forces of the universe: the egg.

As he told it to Alice it was like a daydream worked
out by figures. The mustard was forgotten now, but the story of the egg was literally the story of the mustard over again.

‘Don't you see? Every man, woman and child in the country must eat an average of one egg per day. You wouldn't call that an extravagant estimate, would you? Eggs for breakfast, eggs in puddings, eggs for tea, omelettes, custards, cakes, thousands of things. One egg per day per person,' James Pypper said, striking one hand into another. ‘That's forty million eggs a day. In round figures that's fifteen thousand million eggs a year. Just think of it. The average price of an egg is twopence. That means that roughly £125,000,000 are spent on eggs annually in this country. Think of it. It's colossal! It's almost pitiful.'

Alice sat staring into the distance, seeming to smile.

‘You're not listening?' James Pypper said.

‘Yes, I am listening. I am.'

‘You're not only not listening. You're laughing about it too.'

‘Oh, no!'

‘It's not a laughing matter!' James Pypper said. ‘It's colossal! There's a fortune in it. All big fortunes have been made out of something very simple, like this. We must get started on it. The thing's so infernally simple. We must.'

Nearly a week later James Pypper had closed down
the mustard business. He rushed home to Alice one day to say that he had rented a house and four acres of land out in the country. That afternoon he and Alice drove out in the 10 h.p. van to see the house and land.

When she saw the house Alice was too appalled to say anything. It stood on high exposed ground like a slice cut out of a working-class street. It seemed as if it had been cut out of a strange impoverished town, dumped down and that the occupants had hastily fled because of the raw hideousness of the place, because they were miles from anybody or anywhere, because of some bleak, sour quality of loneliness in the surrounding land. Then Alice saw another reason why they had fled. Out of the distance came the sound of a train. It came shrieking and piping up a deep cutting fifty yards from the house, its long line of white smoke rising, hanging for a few moments and then vanishing in the clear sunny autumn air.

A few minutes later, while James Pypper was enthusiastically pacing up and down on the neglected patch of grass adjoining the house, Alice walked the short distance along the road to the railway cutting. She was surprised to find it very deep. At the track the road made a dead end. There was no bridge, but steps went down the cutting, and over the single set of metals there was a wooden foot-crossing.

Alice climbed the stile in the hedge and went down the wooden steps towards the permanent way. Along the railways banks yellow flags of ragwort, torn about by early autumn winds, waved between bright pink patches of late willow herb. Now that the train had passed the air was at rest, with settled echoes. Alice walked down the steps, stood still at the bottom of them, and gazed up and down the line with her habitual expression of unconsciously smiling repose. The lines, chromium bright in the sun, stretched away dead straight on either side. The train that had passed had come down a long steep gradient and farther up the slope deep woods closed in on both sides of the track. Beyond this wooded gulley, at the crest of the gradient, stood a white signal-box. As Alice stood looking at it the track became so quiet that small companies of rabbits began to come and feed on the grass and wood pigeons began to moan softly in the woods, the low sounds coming down the lines like softly telegraphed messages.

Alice stood looking up the line for almost five minutes, before James Pypper's voice, calling her name from the vicinity of the house, aroused her. All this time her brown almond eyes had been fixed on the signal box, with remote and disquieted thoughtfulness, as though she were thinking deeply about something or even not thinking at all.

For some time, on into the beginning of the next year, things went fairly well with James Pypper's simple scheme for making a fortune out of the egg. Neat rows of expensive mobile chicken-houses covered the field by the house, and sometimes the broken ruminative talk of two or three hundred brown and white hens was the only sound Alice heard, except the sound of the trains, on the dark quiet winter afternoons. Sometimes, when James Pypper left early to go to one market or another with the crates of eggs that now replaced the pots of mustard in the 10 h.p. van, it was the only sound she heard all day. After a time it seemed that she did not hear the trains. At first they had shaken and disturbed her, shaking crockery in the house, shaking the windows so that she did not sleep at nights. They had shaken and broken the days by their shrieking and clamour into harsh sections that made her so nervous that she felt sometimes that the north-bound trains, expressing down the gradient, were coming straight into the house. Then gradually she grew used to them, gradually forgot them.

On some days the only living soul she saw was the boy who cleaned the chicken-houses and collected the eggs and made himself generally useful. Working out
in the raw open air of the bare hillside she became strong and healthy, her breasts and arms filling out, her face warmly fresh. But her brown almond eyes still retained their disquieting habit of smiling at inconceivably remote distances or simply at nothing at all and soon, twice or three times a week, they were smiling or seeming to smile at the men who drove up the road and turned into the gateway with lorry loads of chicken feed or peat-litter or simply with the vans delivering meat and groceries. By the simple and unconscious habit of appearing to smile she seemed to confer on each of them a special sort of affection. She had another habit by which she curled her left arm completely over her head, so that she could play softly with the lobe of her right ear. Standing like this, against the door-post, the shape of one breast and one arm beautifully exposed, she had an air of serene and disturbing invitation. In a gentle sort of way she was very fascinating and soon the men were driving up the dead-end road on the pretext of having forgotten an order or on no pretext whatsoever. Sometimes on cold mornings, as she gave them cups of hot tea and lumps of bread and cheese, treating them all equally at various times, they would remind her of things she might have forgotten – ‘Any corn, Mrs. Pypper, any sausages, any coke this time?' – and she would say, perhaps, ‘No, not this time, perhaps next time', and
like the men behind the grocers' counters they would hope that next time would not be long. And as signs of spring began to show themselves in the longer days and the stronger light over the claret-coloured buds of the birch trees that fringed the woods on the railway line, there would be greetings like ‘Beautiful morning, Mrs. Pypper, lovely day', and again it would seem as if the beauty of the day became confused in the men's minds with the charming lovable beauty of the girl leaning on the door-post, playing with her ear and smiling at the fresh spring sky.

But occasionally, in the afternoons, she was not there to answer the door. As spring came on she began to find more and more pleasure in walking along the banks of the railway. Beyond the hedge a path ran along the crest of the bank and she gradually got into the habit of walking there for an hour or so on fine spring afternoons.

By this time, on the sheltered part of the bank, under the woods, primroses were making soft yellow rosettes in the wintry grass, and wands of silvery wine pussy-willow were pushing out from the mass of darker leafless trees. Except for the trains and an occasional plate-layer walking below her by the line and the dainty patter of pheasants' feet on the dry leaves under the birch trees in the woods there would be scarcely a sound or movement during the whole of her walk up
the track and back again. It was not only out of this secluded sort of quietness and the primroses and the sight of the young birch trees that she got a happiness that she did not ever experience with James Pypper, but out of the mere sight and nearness of the endless lines of steel running below her. In the shining metals, running away into the distances, her vague smile into space seemed to find its foundation. It seemed to be able to follow the lines to some point of permanence and reality.

One afternoon she walked as far as the signal-box. She had primroses in her hand and as she sat down opposite the box she kept touching her face with the flowers, disturbing velvety breaths of scent.

She sat and looked at the signal-box. She could see the signal-man working inside it, pulling levers. She heard the ringing of the telegraphs, strange urgent sounds in the silence of the track, and she could see a tall red geranium flowering in one of the windows.

For a long time she sat there fascinated. She could see for miles up and down the empty metals, and presently she realized that the signal-box was on the highest point of the gradient and that, by watching, she could see the signals give their responses to the levers.

In about five minutes she heard the sound of a train coming uphill from the north. Though it was an
express it came fairly slowly, forcing its way up the gradient laboriously. As it came nearer she felt a curious rising emotion, an advance of a moment of dramatic power. With the approach of the great double-engined train she began to tremble, and she realized that the moment would come when the train passed the signal-box. The intensity of her feeling was sharpened because the train came slowly. It had the effect of drawing out her emotion like a thread of bright hot glass.

In the middle of feeling all this she saw that the signalman had opened the window of his box and was leaning out, watching the approaching train. She had just time to note that he was a lean dark young man in his shirt sleeves before the train rose to the high point of the gradient and passed the box. At this moment the hot glass thread of her emotions seemed to solidify, become brittle and splinter violently. She was aware of being suddenly relieved and happy: the sort of feeling that might have followed the aversion of a catastrophe. She discovered that she was smiling, really smiling this time, and was waving her hand. To add to her delight the signal-man was waving his hand too.

When the train had finally gone by there was an interval of about half a minute before the signal-man went back into his box. In this moment he looked up
at her. She was still smiling and it seemed for a second as if he smiled too.

She remained there for another hour, watching the trains and between the trains watching the shadowy figure of the signalman at work in the box below. Each train produced in her the same effect of drawn-out emotion, as of hot glass drawing out, hardening and smashing explosively into relief and happiness. She knew that the signal-man must have been aware of her sitting there, yet he did not appear at the window again.

The next day she walked up the track at the same time and sat down in the same place and remained for about the same length of time. She saw the same train come laboriously up the gradient again, and experienced the same deep emotion, terrifying in its peculiar and too-fine ecstasy. Once again she had primroses in her hand, and once again she waved her hand and smiled at the man in the signal-box and it seemed again as if he smiled too.

The next day she was there again. And that day she had no doubt that the signal-man was very aware of her presence. He came several times to the window, and once to the door of the signal-box. He looked up at her and she smiled. It was now a real smile, its true perspective fixed, its direction and object fully conscious. She felt that nothing could have been more
soothing and beautiful than this fully realized moment of her smile and its return from a man she did not know and perhaps could never speak to.

After this she began to go up to the signal-box almost every afternoon. She complained to James Pypper, when he asked why she left the chickens, that the oil from the incubators gave her a headache and that the walk would do her good. James Pypper did not protest. Spring was coming on and there were a million eggs too many in the world and he was preoccupied by all the problems that an egg can raise.