The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories Read online

  There was the grave too. He thought about it at intervals as he worked on at the job of rubbing down the elm throughout the afternoon, with the snow falling more thickly than ever outside and the snowlight falling more and more brightly on the wood-shavings, the tools and the elm, the snow at last standing like flowers of coral on the black branches of the plum tree. In the silence he could think of the grave without interruption, and gradually it took shape in his mind as a beautiful thing.

  He had long since decided that the grave was going to be something more than a hole in the ground. Every inch of it was going to be lined with painted tiles. There were three or four hundred of these tiles packed away in a chest upstairs: painted with flowers, birds, bits of scenery. He had watched her collect them over a period of years. He had watched her gradually collect her own grave together, and now no one in the world was going to be buried more beautifully.

  He worked at the elm until, even with the snow-light, it was impossible to see any longer. He packed up at last and went back into the house, not realizing until he crossed the yard in the three or four inches of snow how bitterly cold it still was. When he realized it he went back into the workshop and scraped up a handful of shavings and wood-chips and took them into the kitchen. The fire was dead, and he put a match to the shavings and the wood, piling a handful of leather-bits on top. He swung the kettle over the trivet, and then went upstairs again.

  It was very dark on the stairs and almost dark in the bedroom. He went into the room very quietly, greeting her with a whisper, ‘You all right? You bin to sleep?’ which she did not answer.

  He stood by the bed and looked down at her. She lay exactly as he had left her, but he knew that there was something different about her. At last he put down his hand and touched her face. Her eyes were cold and closed and he realized that she had gone to sleep and had died without waking up again.

  For some moments he stood looking at her, perfectly motionless. Then his thoughts went back to the workshop. Then gradually he came to himself and began to move with the gentle deliberation of a man who has for a long time had something deeply planned in his mind. He pulled back the horse blanket and the quilt and began to lay out her body.

  It was quite dark when he had finished, and downstairs in the kitchen he lit the tin lamp that stood on the mantelpiece. The kettle was boiling and he poured water on to the stale tea-leaves for the third time that day, adding half a spoonful of fresh leaf to the pot. He poured out a cup of tea and spread himself a slice of bread and shop lard, salting the lard, eating it standing up.

  When he had finished the tea he took the lamp and walked across the yard into the workshop. It was still snowing and again an enormous calmness closed in behind him as he shut the door, the calmness of snow and darkness and the thought of death.

  He turned up the lamp and set it on the bench and began to work straightaway at the coffin. From that moment, and on through the night, he did not know whether it snowed or not. He did not know anything except that the conception of the coffin took shape under his hands. He did not feel the crystallization of any emotion. He kept back his emotions as a policeman keeps back the crowd from the scene of a disaster.

  It was about eight o’clock next morning when he really looked up and saw that the snow had ceased, that it lay thick and frozen like years of coral-flower on the bowed branches of the plum tree. When he blew out the lamp, the strong snow-light came in at the windows, turning the almost completed coffin quite white. He worked on for just over another hour, not hungry, still not feeling any emotion, fixing the silver handles at last; and then soon after nine o’clock he slid the coffin on to his shoulders and took it into the house.

  When he moved across the yard in the foot-deep snow he heard the sound of shovels scraping on pavements as people moved the snow up and down the street. The sound whipped up in him a realization of the outside world. It died almost immediately as he went into the house. He had stopped thinking what the outside world felt or did or thought. He was alone in the house, with her, the coffin and the tiles with their flowers and birds, but he did not feel alone. They had lived alone together for a long time. The furniture and the glass had taken the place, gradually, of people and fields, friends and outside things. No one could understand how they felt, how he himself felt, about the beauty of the things for which they had starved and cheated themselves. There are different ideas of how to live, and he did not expect anybody to understand. That was why she had not wanted a strange person in the house. That was why he wanted to be alone now.

  And as he went upstairs, very slowly, bending himself almost horizontal so as to take the coffin, he felt the presence of the things about him acutely, more real than anything of the outside world had ever been. He felt the beauty of the polished wood as he steadied himself between the tables and chairs with a sudden outstretched hand.

  In the bedroom the blinds were still undrawn and the room was filled with the strong light of the snow. It melted in the shining surfaces of walnut and mahogany and hung on the ceiling like a cotton sheet. It struck brightly in his eyes after the gloom of the stairs, filling him with momentary tiredness. But he did not stop. He laid the coffin on the bed and after a time succeeded in laying her in it.

  When it was all finished he stood away from the bed, with his back to the snow, and looked at her as she lay in the new bright coffin. As he stood there the emotions he had kept back during the night gradually flooded over him. The light of the snow was very white on her face and he stood looking at her with his ugly stained hands loose at his sides and his ugly tired face sunk on his shoulders.

  With tears in his eyes he stood like that for a long time, taking in the beauty of the snow-light that was growing stronger every moment, and the beauty of the dead.

  The Bridge

  I

  The summer my father died my sister and I decided to start a guest house together. Of course we were fools, but I think we both thought it time to make something of the too-large red-brick family house where for so long there had been no family. Mother had been dead six years: and now, for the first time, we were feeling our independence.

  All through that summer the weather was lovely. My father had died in March, and we spent the whole of May, June and July re-planning and redecorating the house, putting in new baths, central heating, even a second staircase. We hoped to be ready by August, and all through these weeks of clear dry weather we had every window open and there was that fine exhilarating smell of new paint and new wood in every corner of the house. My father had been a country solicitor of a solid and careful type who felt tradition to be of supreme importance in life. For that reason the disappointment of having two daughters had shaken him greatly, and although he had borne with my sister, who is older than I by seven years, he had never really been able to bear with me. I have always done my best to understand this and not bear him any ill-will because of it. He wanted sons to follow him in a profession where sons had followed for five generations, and to have had tradition broken by a girl who grew up to be a little irresponsible, rather self-centred and highly impracticable, was a shock from which he never properly recovered. He took a sort of revenge on me, whether by conscious or unconscious means I could never tell, by showing a certain partiality towards my sister. I was hurt by this partiality, but I have since tried to understand it too. What I can’t understand is why my father did not make the most revolutionary possible break with tradition and take my sister into the solicitor’s profession with him. Dora would have made an admirable solicitor. She is utterly practical, resourceful, conscientious and in a way very ingenious. Her straight brown hair is and always has been parted directly in the middle: so straight and accurate and unchanging that it gives the feeling of being the result of a positive and ingenious mathematical calculation. In the same way her clear, rather white-skinned face has something of the same surely defined, uninspired beauty as a careful copperplate hand in a ledger.

  I do not know quite what gave
us this idea of a guest house. Parkinford is just a small pleasant country town, with a thirteenth-century church and a row of almshouses and a tiny square surrounded by sycamore trees; the river flows past one end of the town, under a stone hump-backed bridge past irregular clumps of weeping willow that hang down like disentangled water-weed, brushing the water with their pale green branches in spring and summer. There was a time when I thought it a very dull town. Then I went away from it and – well, I shall come to all that in a moment. All I wish to say now is that apart from the public-houses and a temperance commercial hotel down by the station we suddenly realized that our guest house would be the only place where a certain class of tourist could get a room for the night. The fact that there were very few tourists who wanted to stop a night in Parkinford didn’t discourage us; my sister quite rightly reasoned that it was our business to attract tourists. In time we should build up a reputation. Among other things my sister is a beautiful cook. She turns out tarts and pies and a great variety of dishes with the same ease and precise, mathematical beauty as she manipulates figures. I couldn’t cook at all, I hadn’t the slightest interest in mathematics, but I was young and, that first summer of the new boarding house, I had no doubts about my own beauty. I had very thick deeply-waved blonde hair and clear blue eyes. I was full, too, of that deep emotional energy that springs naturally with youthful beauty – my heart full of it and hurting and not knowing where to direct itself. There is a snapshot taken of me just about this time: it shows me in a short white dress standing in front of a large lime tree at the back of the house. You can see in this picture a young, eager-looking girl with a smile on her face; but what you cannot see or hear or feel are the millions of delicate blossoms on the lime, the surge of bees in them and the scented honey-dew falling on my hair and on my hands and on the brown summer grass. What this photograph does not show is the dreaming, urgent creature behind the gaiety and the beauty. It does not show how that young girl of twenty-two felt, dreaming and in love with herself and rather foolishly conscious of having a soul.

  We opened the guest house at last in the middle of August, and we started off immediately with two guests. One was a Mr. Bernard Parker, who had been my father’s clerk for twenty years and had lived in disgraceful back-room lodgings most of the time and had never married; the other was a Miss Millay, librarian at the public library, a studious sort of girl who had been friendly with my sister for many years. These would form the permanent background for casual tourists, for which of course it was really too late that year.

  Then, no sooner had we opened, than we had a considerable shock. It was announced in the papers, and soon everyone was talking about it, that a new bypass was to be constructed immediately on the south side, the river side, of Parkinford. This would not only cut out the old hump-backed bridge, but by means of a great new concrete bridge would span the river, the railway line and the meadows that were almost always flooded in winter. It was a project that had been talked of for years and the realization of which had been almost abandoned. Everyone was now very jubilant about it. It was only we who had reason to hate the thought of it. We felt that nothing could have smashed so completely our hopes of tourists and our hope for the future. My sister, less emotional than I, more balanced and more resourceful, took it with a sort of logical stoicism, but from the first I made up my mind I hated that bridge.

  The project of the new bridge had been announced about a month and preliminary work had already begun across the meadows by the river and the railway-line when something else happened. I had been down into the town shopping one evening and I came back about seven o’clock to find my sister talking to a young man in what we called the reception room. He had two large leather suitcases with him and I knew, even before my sister spoke, that we had another guest.

  ‘Oh! there you are, Linda,’ my sister said. ‘May I introduce Mr. Lawrence? Mr. Lawrence is coming to stay with us.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘For long?’

  ‘Well, for quite a time, I think,’ he said. ‘I’ve a job in the town that’ll keep me busy for about eighteen months.’

  ‘Oh! Yes,’ I said.

  He looked at me and smiled. It was a curious smile. It gave me the strangest sort of feeling: the feeling that I had been singled out to receive it. There are some people who smile with the eyes, hardly moving the lips; others who show their teeth and keep the eyes immovable. This smile came from the slightest quiver of a mouth that did not open. I did not see it then, but it was a weak mouth. It was handsome and impertinent and it seemed to me to have all sorts of subtle and compelling qualities that were not analysable at a first glance, but you could see without thinking that it was vain and passionate and in a way sensitive too. I knew that I was right about the vanity. You could see that by the way he dressed: the smart grey suit, the brown suede shoes, the silk wine-coloured tie, the soft green Homburg hat. Oh! yes, you could see that he felt himself to be somebody that was somebody.

  Instantly I didn’t like him. I said something about I hoped he would be comfortable and he said ‘I hope so’, almost mocking; and then my sister said she would show him to his room. He insisted on carrying his bags upstairs and in walking behind my sister. I must say that the back view of him was even more impressive than the front. It was curious how you got a feeling of jauntiness and class and vanity from the smooth cut of that grey suit and the even smoother sweep of his very black, oiled hair. It was curious how repellent and attractive it was.

  My sister came down again in two or three minutes, and she said at once, ‘Well, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, he certainly doesn’t undervalue himself,’ I said.

  ‘Linda,’ she said, ‘I think it ought to be our first rule not to criticize guests. We’ve set out to make a business proposition of this place, and personalities have got to be kept out.’ That was just like Dora: sound and practical and admirably logical. ‘The main point is whether he pays his bill. In any case it’s a very good let – eighteen months. It will do something to compensate us for that wretched bridge.’

  ‘I only hope we’re good enough for him,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you want my opinion,’ she said, ‘I think he’s perfectly all right.’

  ‘You didn’t ask him what his job was?’ I said.

  ‘No, I didn’t. That’s something else we ought to avoid. Inquisitiveness. We’ll find out soon enough what his job is.’

  My sister was quite right. We did find out. Every morning, before breakfast, we had our separate jobs to do. Dora cooked breakfast and took up early morning tea to the guests; I prepared the tables and tidied the dining-room. We had only one servant, Elsie, and she would be busy stoking the boiler-fire and sweeping the hall and stairs. One of my jobs was to take in the morning papers and the post. The second morning I was astonished to see the size of Mr. Lawrence’s correspondence: a dozen or more letters, one registered, and several large flat packages. One of these packages was marked Ministry of Transport: Urgent, and then I knew who and what he was.

  Soon, of course, everyone knew what I knew. Everyone knew Mr. Lawrence, the government engineer in charge of the new bridge. And everyone, including even my sister, seemed quite honoured by the presence in Parkinford of a government engineer. In fact the instant reaction in Parkinford was a sort of emotional dog-fight – half the women became at once raving jealous over him. Even Elsie and Miss Millay were jealous.

  My own instant reaction was quite simple. I disliked him intensely. At twenty-two it is possible to hate some person or object or creed with a peculiarly pure, straightforward hatred, and to gain some kind of inverse pleasure from that hatred. This is how it was with J. Eric Lawrence and I. You will notice this J. Eric Lawrence – that’s how he always styled himself: just that extra initial that put him a little above other men. I hated him more out of deliberation than out of any genuine feeling of revulsion. I cheated myself into thinking I hated him more than anything because he stood for the conception of the new bridge. He
stood for something new and aloof and outside us and I took great pleasure in hating that something, whatever it was, tremendously. I also got a special feeling of pleasure out of behaving perversely. If J. Eric Lawrence was nice to me, as he could be so easily and often was, I took great pleasure in being despicably rude and aggravating towards him. I took great pains to be contemptuous of his precious bridge, although it did not begin to take shape until the following spring. Above all I was disappointed whenever he was not there, as I had hoped, to offer himself for one of my attacks. The strange thing was that he did not mind my hatred. He accepted it with a kind of amused amiability. He accepted it with that smile of his: that very handsome, vain and important smile, with its flicker of impertinence.

  There isn’t much doubt, I think, that all this would have worn off gradually; this childish, mechanized hatred certainly couldn’t have gone on forever. But after J. Eric Lawrence had been with us about two months something else happened.

  I began to notice a remarkable change in my sister.

  II

  From the first my sister had accepted J. Eric Lawrence with a sort of frank, business-like cordiality. It was very natural that they had a great deal in common. My sister, with her mathematical, resourceful mind, could understand and be interested in and even become enthusiastic about an engineering project like a bridge. To some people arithmetic is, I suppose, a form of music, and the calculation and planning and creation of that bridge must have had the quality of music to J. Eric Lawrence. And gradually and quite naturally my sister began to take an interest in that music. It began to have the deepest and most disturbing and most beautiful effect on her mind.