The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories Read online

  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.

  Spring also began to strengthen and become very beautiful along the railway-track. There were violets now, white snowdrop-like buds in the grass and patches of dark purple and pale mauve lace all along the slanting yellow banks of primroses. The birches were showing a little leaf and the sallows had bright golden beards that trembled with bees in the sun.

  There was something else, besides the trains, the excitement and the beauty of spring breaking on the woodsides, that appeared to Alice very wonderful. It was the awakening and stilling and reawakening of many voices in the woods by the passing of the trains. If she could not speak to the man in the signal-box – and she did not see how it could ever be possible – this clamour of voices and echoes could be a kind of common speech between them: the speech of the trains which now controlled so much of both their lives, though their lives had no other contact.

  Then one day something new happened. Alice sat on in the sunshine above the bright glistening metals until six o’clock. Just before six o’clock she saw another man coming down the opposite bank. She saw him enter the signal-box and realized that it was time for the change of shift.

  She waited to see what would happen. In about a minute she saw the first man, the dark lean young man, come out of the box. She saw that he was carrying the red geranium: perhaps to take home for a window, perhaps to re-pot it, perhaps, she thought, to give it to her. And suddenly she wanted him to give it to her. She wanted him to come across the track and say something and give her the geranium. She wanted him to take the first step that would lead to friendship, perhaps affection, perhaps intimacy.

  And having come down the steps of the signal-box the signal-man paused on the edge of the track as if the same thought were in his mind. He must have been puzzled by her. He must have reasoned out for himself that it was not because of the spring or the thrill of trains or the voices in the woods that she came there smiling, but solely because of himself. He stood there for about half a minute, holding the bright red geranium, trying, it seemed, to make up his mind to come across the lines to her. Then, perhaps because he was self-consciously aware of being watched by the other man in the box, he decided against it. He turned and walked up the diagonal path of the bank.

  By the time he had reached the top of the bank Alice had got to her feet and was walking along too. They walked a little way in the same direction, as it were side by side, although separated by the tracks. This short walk produced in her a deep sense of intimacy, so deep that a train roared down the gradient and passed them before she had time to realize it had come and gone.

  A moment later the signal-man stopped and climbed a fence on the edge of the wood. For a moment Alice stopped too. Then he waved his hand. She waved her hand back to him and kept waving it as she slowly walked away.

  This same thing began to happen every evening. Gradually she knew that she was more intimate with the signal-man, to whom she never spoke and from whom she was continually separated by the tracks of a railway, than she had been or could ever be with James Pypper, now struggling with increasing desperation with all the maddening problems of the egg.

  She had become not only intimate, but she had an increasingly deep conviction that she was in love. But it was not so much that she was in love as that she herself was the loved one. The structure of both the love she was giving and the love she was being given was built on things that had nothing to do with love: on the passing of trains, the strange ringing of telegraphs in the silence of the spring afternoons, the fall and rise of signals. The emotion of the passing trains was now identified with her feelings for the signal-man, waving his hand each night before going home through the wood. She began to feel that her life was stretched out to the limitless extent of the metals; that it was so tenuous and delicate that it might suddenly snap, like bright hair-thin glass.

  Finally she could bear it no longer. One evening the sky was duller than usual and there was a heavy unkind wind blowing loudly down the empty track. She was cold and she felt that she could not go home without speaking to the signal-man at last.

  She waved her hand as usual as he reached the woodside, and then she called him.

  ‘Come over a minute!’

  The wind took her words and broke them up, so that they could not travel. He raised his hand, as though to say that he could not hear.

  ‘Come over a minute!’

  She was smiling. There was something in the smile that was like a concentration of all the remote, tenderly captivating smiles she had ever given, It went across the track with an intimate and secret swiftness that held the man momentarily spellbound.

  Then he started to run down the bank. The way he ran, not heeding anything, made it seem as if this was the moment he too had been waiting for. He ran with arms out, to steady himself, as if ready to embrace her. He was running without thinking and suddenly she knew that he could not stop himself.

  She did not exactly hear the approaching train. She felt all of a sudden the intense dramatic emotion that the approach of a train always gave her. The train was coming very fast down the gradient. She looked with great horror across the track and she saw that in a moment the man and the train would meet.

  A moment later her life lay all along the metals, an illimitable thread of glass smashed by the train that had passed. The echoes were smashing the dark woods to pieces and she could not see anything except on the lines below a splash of scarlet that might have been a red geranium.

  Some weeks later James Pypper found that he could not master the problem of making a fortune out of the egg. He sold the chickens and the chicken-houses as suddenly as he had bought them, and he and Alice moved away from the house that was like a harsh slice cut from a street in a town.

  Summer was coming on and James Pypper now had a wonderful idea. It was the idea of making a pile of quick money out of a dance-hall, in which he had bought part interest at a seaside resort. During the summer months it was bound to be a good thing, James Pypper said, a very good thing, a wonderful thing, because at some time or other everybody felt like dancing.

  Alice, who had not liked mustard and had become indifferent towards the many problems of the egg, went with him. But she had lost her way of smiling, and she did not feel like dancing now.

  Old

  The old man walked slowly up the street, pressing himself against the wind t
hat violently blew open his jacket. It was Sunday afternoon. He had once been rather a tall man, with splendid muscular hands, black hair, and long strenuous legs. Now he took little shuffling steps, and pressed the whole quivering weight of his short body on his walking-stick. He was wearing a rather faded old-fashioned bowler hat and a black muffler folded round his neck and tucked away into his armpits. When the wind struck at him with sudden bursts of violence he seemed to have no contact with the earth. It seemed as if the wind would whip him up and scatter him, as it does a piece of fragile charred paper from a fire.

  At the top of the street the wind seized him and swung him across to the other pavement. He lifted his head and looked at the numbers of the houses. The wind had beaten tears into his eyes. Presently he grasped the iron railings in front of Number 67, pulling himself up the step which was like a fresh white tomb-stone, and fumbled his way into the house.

  ‘Wipe your feet!’

  The words flew out of the front sitting-room like birds of prey. Aggie’s voice – his eldest daughter. The look in his tired wet eyes did not change, but he wiped his boots; not because they were dirty, only out of habit, automatically. Then he shuffled slowly across the passage, down which the linoleum lay like brown bright glass. He was still wearing his hat and muffler. He had not forgotten it: it was only that he liked to sit in the house with his hat and muffler on. Yes, he liked doing that. He liked doing that when they did not stop him.

  Now he opened the sitting-room door and shuffled into the room. The tears made by the wind still lay in his eyes and the room was full of people. It was Aggie’s house. Aggie had never been married. Thirty years ago they used to say of Aggie that she polished the coal before she put it on the fire. Now in the room there was a great Sunday shine of brass and porcelain. Tea was laid on the big round mahogany table that Aggie had fought so hard for when her mother died, and bright orange firelight shone on the Sunday crockery, the face of the piano, the pictures and on the faces of the family. It shone too into the tired wind-watered eyes of the old man, who saw his family as if they were figures on a bright tinsel postcard. He saw that Emma was there, with her husband, Clem. Clem was a foreman finisher. They had no family; Clem had a good job and they had saved money. Then there was Harry, his son. Once Harry and Clem and Emma hadn’t spoken for fifteen months. Then another time Clem and Emma and Gladys hadn’t spoken for six months. Clem and Emma were the mischief makers. Gladys, who was there too, was his niece. She was his brother Arthur’s daughter, and now she had a daughter herself, a child of seven, who was sitting on the hearthrug. It was quite a large party. Gladys’s husband, Albert, had a good job, travelling in washing-machines up and down the country. He had a car and did not often come home at weekends and Aggie pretty well knew for a fact that during these times he was up to no good.

  The greeting that the family started to give to the old man was silenced and snatched away by Aggie.

  ‘Well, if he hasn’t come in with his hat and muffler on I’ll never!’ she said. ‘Just like a baby!’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I want ’em on.’

  ‘Never mind what you want,’ she said, ‘go and take ’em off.’

  He went slowly back into the passage and took off his hat and muffler. Without them his neck and head felt strange and cold. While he was out of the room he heard Aggie say something about she’d bet anybody he’d been street-corner gossiping with Jim Clayton and that he was getting just like a baby again, forgetting things, forgetting his hat and muffler. Next thing they’d hear of he’d be forgetting who he was, then there’d be a nice howdy-do.

  ‘Jim Clayton’s bin bad a-bed this last week,’ he said when he came back into the room again.

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t Jim Clayton,’ she said, ‘it was somebody else. That I do know.’

  He did not ask how or why she knew it, but sat down.

  ‘You needn’t go sitting yourself down!’ she said. ‘Tea’s ready, and bin ready this ten minutes. And while you’ve bin soodlin’ along anyhow we’ve bin wasting good daylight.’

  He began to say something about grudging a penny in the gas, but the family had already begun to gather round the table, voices and chairs clattering one against another, and nobody heard him. At the table he found himself between Harry, his son, and the little girl, Jean. She had fair bobbed hair, and a face as open and fresh as a water-lily. He took out his handkerchief and spread it surreptitiously across his lap, as a napkin, and while waiting for his tea he looked out of the window. It was early November and already the daylight was dying quickly, and in the window, like pieces of fired bronze in the fire-light, there were vases of chrysanthemums.

  His cup of tea came at last and he began to stir it, tasting it loudly from his spoon, putting the spoon back into his cup.

  ‘Watch him, Harry,’ Aggie said, ‘you know what happened last week.’

  Yes, something terrible had happened last week. He had knocked over his tea on the tablecloth. It had put Aggie into a rare temper and in her anger she had said something which he felt she might have been harbouring in her mind for a long time. She had said something about having had enough, that if he couldn’t behave properly they might have to see that he was sent somewhere where he would.

  He knew what that meant. Sooner or later they would send him to the Union. He picked up a piece of bread and butter, folding it slowly in his bony hands. He suddenly felt astonishingly hungry and began to cram piece after piece of bread into his mouth, washing it down with tea.

  It was only after he had been eating for nearly five minutes that he realized what he had been doing. He had been drinking with his mouth full and more than that, with the spoon in his cup, and now all the family was watching him. They were watching him as if for some reason they felt that the very old ought not to eat and drink with so much pleasure, even perhaps as if they ought not to eat at all.

  He looked down at his plate. Like his cup, it was empty. Something now made him look at the little girl beside him. She had bitten her piece of bread and butter into the shape of a dog, and this dog was drinking tea out of her saucer. The little girl had shining yellow hair. For some reason he thought she was very like Aggie had been, and he wondered why people grew up and changed. Aggie with the fair shining hair was now Aggie with a thin soapy face, grey bunned-up hair, slight heart trouble, and a sour jealousy for the lives of others. During the last war she had been fore-woman in a clothing factory. She had saved money. This money was now invested in war-loan and the post-office bank, and everybody in turn was bitterly jealous of Aggie because nobody knew just what the amount was.

  He stopped thinking, and looked up. No one was now paying much attention to him, and he took the opportunity to help himself to a heavy slice of plum-cake.

  And now, instead of thinking, he sat listening. Emma, who always stuck out her little finger while drinking, was saying how the days dropped in and how soon it would be dark before they’d finished dinner. It was a broad hint for Aggie to light the gas, but Aggie took no notice. Instead she opened up a new line of conversation and said was anyone going to Chapel?

  Not if he knew it, Clem said.

  Because Clem paid pew-rent at High Street Congregational, and had done so for many years, the remark was a sensation. Clem spoke with a great sense of grievance. He was something of a tenor and made a great show of singing with a tune-book, though he could not read a note. Emma had held a place among the High Street sopranos for thirty years, showing during all that time a misguided passion for descant at the wrong moments.

  Well, it was something of a change to hear Clem speak like that, Aggie said.

  To which Clem said there had been changes to make him speak like that. Big changes. Changes that he never thought he’d live to see happen.

  Well, Aggie said, whatever had happened?

  Didn’t they know, Emma said, that she and Clem hadn’t sat in the choir for three weeks?

  Well, Aggie said. Well!

  Signing on new b
lood? Harry said. He spoke almost for the first time. He had always been a man of sarcastic, laconic speech, who drank a little, strictly on the q.t., and had no use for chapel.

  There was nothing to joke about, Clem said. It was no laughing matter, he went on in an unsteady, sensational voice, when he and Emma had been as good as turned neck and crop out of the choir in which they’d sat for thirty years!

  Well, Aggie said, she’d never heard a word until now. Well!

  She might well well! Emma said bitterly.

  She was about to say how and why it was that she and Clem had ceased to sing in the choir when the old man suddenly felt himself cease listening. It was as if his mind broke away from the mass of bitterness and jealously and fell down like a tired meteorite into the spaces of age, unable to keep the pace. Still hungry, he helped himself to a second slice of cake. As he did so, he looked again at the little girl. The dog made of bread and butter had gone now, to be replaced by a strange creature bitten out of a biscuit.

  ‘What d’ye call that?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a tiger,’ she said. ‘It’s very froshus.’

  He took a bite out of his cake. It was a nice game, he thought, and he called the little girl’s attention to the fact that there was now an elephant on his plate.

  ‘Is that froshus?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just a tame elephant.’

  ‘Where’s its trunk?’

  ‘I’m just making it,’ he said. ‘Here.’

  He began to squeeze some of the cake in his fingers, elongating it, making the trunk. He did not feel old or tired any longer. For some time he went on walking the elephant about his plate and the tablecloth, making it at intervals meet the tiger, until at last the conversation carried on by Clem and Aggie and the rest of the family receded to a great distance, bringing only faint echoes of conflict and bitterness out of a real and darkening world to which he did not belong.