LITMIR.BIZ

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close-bitten field, and out of this empty land the farm rose up with its buildings like a huddle of old, painted vessels floating in still water. White fowls went stepping discreetly through the mild sunshine and the shadow. I leaned my bicycle against the grey, silken doors of the old coach-house. The place was breathing with silence. I hesitated to knock at the open door. Emily came. She was rich as always with her large beauty, and stately now with the stateliness of a strong woman six months gone with child.

      She exclaimed with surprise, and I followed her into the kitchen, catching a glimpse of the glistening pans and the white wood baths as I passed through the scullery. The kitchen was a good-sized, low room that through long course of years had become absolutely a home. The great beams of the ceiling bowed easily, the chimney-seat had a bit of dark-green curtain, and under the high mantel-piece was another low shelf that the men could reach with their hands as they sat in the inglenook. There the pipes lay. Many generations of peaceful men and fruitful women had passed through the room, and not one but had added a new small comfort; a chair in the right place, a hook, a stool, a cushion, a certain pleasing cloth for the sofa covers, a shelf of books. The room, that looked so quiet and crude, was a home evolved through generations to fit the large bodies of the men who dwelled in it, and the placid fancy of the women. At last, it had an individuality. It was the home of the Renshaws, warm, lovable, serene. Emily was in perfect accord with its brownness, its shadows, its ease. I, as I sat on the sofa under the window, felt rejected by the kind room. I was distressed with a sense of ephemerality, of pale, erratic fragility.

      Emily, in her full-blooded beauty, was at home. It is rare now to feel a kinship between a room and the one who inhabits it, a close bond of blood relation. Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from the torture of strange, complex modern life. She was making a pie, and the flour was white on her brown arms. She pushed the tickling hair from her face with her arm, and looked at me with tranquil pleasure, as she worked the paste in the yellow bowl. I was quiet, subdued before her.

      “You are very happy?” I said.

      “Ah, very!” she replied. “And you? — you are not, you look worn.”

      “Yes,” I replied. “I am happy enough. I am living my life.”

      “Don’t you find it wearisome?” she asked pityingly.

      She made me tell her all my doings, and she marvelled, but all the time her eyes were dubious and pitiful.

      “You have George here,” I said.

      “Yes. He’s in a poor state, but he’s not as sick as he was.”

      “What about the delirium tremens?”

      “Oh, he was better of that — very nearly — before he came here. He sometimes fancies they’re coming on again, and he’s terrified. Isn’t it awful! And he’s brought it all on himself. Tom’s very good to him.”

      “There’s nothing the matter with him — physically, is there?” I asked.

      “I don’t know,” she replied, as she went to the oven to turn a pie that was baking. She put her arm to her forehead and brushed aside her hair, leaving a mark of flour on her nose. For a moment or two she remained kneeling on the fender, looking into the fire and thinking. “He was in a poor way when he came here, could eat nothing, sick every morning. I suppose it’s his liver. They all end like that.” She continued to wipe the large black plums and put them in the dish.

      “Hardening of the liver?” I asked. She nodded.

      “And is he in bed?” I asked again.

      “Yes,” she replied. “It’s as I say, if he’d get up and potter about a bit, he’d get over it. But he lies there skulking.”

      “And what time will he get up?” I insisted.

      “I don’t know. He may crawl down somewhere towards teatime. Do you want to see him? That’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

      She smiled at me with a little sarcasm, and added, “You always thought more of him than anybody, didn’t you? Ah, well, come up and see him.”

      I followed her up the back stairs, which led out of the kitchen, and which emerged straight in a bedroom. We crossed the hollow-sounding plaster-floor of this naked room and opened a door at the opposite side. George lay in bed watching us with apprehensive eyes.

      “Here is Cyril come to see you,” said Emily, “so I’ve brought him up, for I didn’t know when you’d be downstairs.”

      A small smile of relief came on his face, and he put out his hand from the bed. He lay with the disorderly clothes pulled up to his chin. His face was discoloured and rather bloated, his nose swollen.

      “Don’t you feel so well this morning?” asked Emily, softening with pity when she came into contact with his sickness.

      “Oh, all right,” he replied, wishing only to get rid of us.

      “You should try to get up a bit, it’s a beautiful morning, warm and soft —” she said gently. He did not reply, and she went downstairs.

      I looked round to the cold, whitewashed room, with its ceiling curving and sloping down the walls. It was sparsely furnished, and bare of even the slightest ornament. The only things of warm colour were the cow and horse skins on the floor. All the rest was white or grey or drab. On one side, the room sloped down so that the window was below my knees, and nearly touching the floor, on the other side was a larger window, breast high. Through it one could see the jumbled, ruddy roofs of the sheds and the skies. The tiles were shining with patches of vivid orange lichen. Beyond was the cornfield, and the men, small in the distance, lifting the sheaves on the cart.

      “You will come back to farming again, won’t you?” I asked him, turning to the bed. He smiled.

      “I don’t know,” he answered dully.

      “Would you rather I went downstairs?” I asked.

      “No, I’m glad to see you,” he replied, in the same uneasy fashion.

      “I’ve only just come back from France,” I said.

      “Ah!” he replied, indifferent.

      “I am sorry you’re ill,” I said.

      He stared unmovedly at the opposite wall. I went to the window and looked out. After some time, I compelled myself to say, in a casual manner:

      “Won’t you get up and come out a bit?”

      “I suppose I s’ll have to,” he said, gathering himself slowly together for the effort. He pushed himself up in bed.

      When he took off the jacket of his pyjamas to wash himself I turned away. His arms seemed thin, and he had bellied, and was bowed and unsightly. I remembered the morning we swam in the millpond. I remembered that he was now in the prime of his life. I looked at his bluish feeble hands as he laboriously washed himself. The soap once slipped from his fingers as he was picking it up, and fell, rattling the pot loudly. It startled us, and he seemed to grip the sides of the washstand to steady himself. Then he went on with his slow, painful toilet. As he combed his hair he looked at himself with dull eyes of shame.

      The men were coming in from the scullery when we got downstairs. Dinner was smoking on the table. I shook hands with Tom Renshaw, and with the old man’s hard, fierce left hand. Then I was introduced to Arthur Renshaw, a clean-faced, large, bashful lad of twenty. I nodded to the man, Jim, and to Jim’s wife, Annie. We all sat down to table.

      “Well, an’ ‘ow are ter feelin’ by now, like?” asked the old man heartily of George. Receiving no answer, he continued, “Tha should ‘a gor up an’ corn’ an’ gen us a ‘and wi’ th’ wheat, it ‘ud ‘a done thee good.”

      “You will have a bit of this mutton, won’t you?” Tom asked him, tapping the joint with the carving-knife. George shook his head.

      “It’s quite lean and tender,” he said gently.

      “No,

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