Chapter 8
That beginning all over again, day after day, at the same work; all that busy stir of men and stones, now high in the air, now deep below; that incessant climbing up and down those swaying ladders: all this had made such a deep impression on him, had implanted itself into him so firmly that at the first sight of it he felt smitten with impotence, with a mechanical discouragement that gripped his whole being and made him work throughout the day as though urged by an all-ruling deity set there in the symbolic shape of that giant colossus at which he toiled. It seemed to him that he was an indispensable little part of that great building, a small moving thing with but a tiny atom of intelligence--sometimes--and fatally dragged along in that whirling circle, under the behest of the masters, who knew their way through every stroke and line of the great plan, who had all that great work in their heads and on paper and who possessed the power to bring all that complicated machine into operation. And he just went to work like a dog, set going by the mournful knocking of the stone-chopper, the shrill screech of the toothless iron marble-saw and all the banging and knocking and hewing up yonder at the top of things. He took his wooden hod, filled it with bricks and slowly climbed the ladder. He was once more the dismal noodle of last week, the hypnotized bag-o’-nerves that let himself be swept along in the whirlwind of habit and vexation, dazed by that awful hugeness which he was helping to complete and driven on by the ever-pursuing pair of eyes of his strict foreman. And his head ached so; and he felt so sick; and his legs bent under the load.
On he had to go and on. His head no longer took part in the work; his legs kept on going up and down the rungs with those bricks, those everlasting bricks: he did not know how many, just hauled them up, without stopping.
It seemed to him sometimes that the whole mass of walls and scaffolding, labourers and foremen made but a single being: a sort of fearsome deity, something like an unwieldy monster with inhuman, cruel feelings, something which had to be fed with all that workmen’s sweat; and all this feverish activity seemed to him the whirling along of a crowd of unfortunates who had stepped into the fatal circle marked out for them, never to leave it again. Everything seemed so unsteady to-day: those walls on which he had to walk tottered; and he took such a pleasure in looking, in looking for a long time down below, yonder where the men and women were like ants and the great blocks of freestone became little bricks. It gave him such a delicious wriggling in the bowels, a tickling in his blood; and he felt his hair tingling on his head. Was not this the way to obtain release from that hard labour, to get out of that brain-racking circle?
Then he held on to a post until he recovered his senses; and he went down again for more bricks. It came from all that beer.
Yesterday had been a holiday. The wooden framework of the roof was finished; and they had nailed the May-bough to the top, the joyous emblem of difficulties vanquished. It showed up grandly there, with its bright green leaves so high in the air. The masters had granted the men a day off and given them plenty of beer. All that warm day they had made merry, drinking and singing and loafing about the streets like happy savages. He too had revelled with the rest, had been overcome by the drink and joined in everything, from the horseplay in the open air to the bestial amusements in those dark holes where the populace seeks its pleasure, that stimulant for the work of the morrow. Then that brutal drunkenness had come, with the loss of all his senses, till he found himself, dog-tired, sick and feverish, up in his garret under the tiles.
To-day the work was twice as irksome. That rising warmth which, in the morning, while it is still cool, forebodes the stifling, paralysing heat of the scorching noon-day, tortured his throat and his bowels; he couldn’t go on.
“Slacker!” was the first word flung at his head. He stood on the high gable-steps and set down his load of bricks. That “Slacker!” played about in his head like the smarting pain of a lash. He stood looking aimlessly into space, indifferent to all that moved and lived around him. A shudder ran through his body. The wall tottered ... and he was so high up, all alone, seen by nobody: such a small creature in that blue sky, in that endless space. In a clear vision he saw his own figure in all its lean wretchedness, cut out like a paper silhouette, standing out sharply against the sky, such a miserable little object: two thin legs, like laths, a little stomach, two little sticks of arms and that small, everyday, vulgar head. Was that he, that tiny atom of this mighty, colossal building, that ant on the back of this behemoth ... which had only to move to shake him off, ever so low down!
Ah, here’s that delicious wriggling in the bowels again! He has looked down. Once more. That’s capital: something like a feeling of wanting to jump down, such an airy, irresponsible joy, like flying in a dense, blue sky, falling very gently and slowly--oh, what fun!--and then being rid of all one’s troubles!... And yet there was a certain fear about it. He mustn’t look any more. Or just this once ... that was grand! Once more that awful depth, with all those tiny figures, yawned below him; and it was the little wall that kept him up there so high, only that little wall.... One movement, the least little yielding, the least bending over: oh, what bliss ... and how frightful!... He became drunk with delight, filled with the pleasure of it; he gasped, his eyes became unseeing; it was like being wafted along, a gentle flight through the air and ... he fell.
Bumping against a scaffold, clutching with hands and feet; a breaking plank, a ghastly yell ... and then a body with arms and legs outspread in space, a thunderbolt ... a thud as of a bag of earth ... and there he lay, stretched at full length, like a man asleep. That scream of distress, that terrible shriek, that farewell cry of one who is going away for good had sent something like an electric shock through all around; work ceased and they scrambled down and stood in a great circle around that body ... looking. And a great silence followed, that silence which is so heavy and oppressive after the sudden stop of so much activity. People came rushing up, pushing to get closer ... and to see. They tore the poor devil’s clothes open to find out where he was hurt, others ran for help, while fresh swarms of folk came crowding up and the silence died in an uproar of questions and tramping and the wailing of women. He lay there, with his peaceful face turned to one side, lay on his back, seemingly uninjured; a few drops of blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes were closed like those of a man asleep.
“Such a height to fall!... So young, only a boy!”
Others stood chattering loudly, indifferently, as though about an everyday occurrence, or looked up at the wall and showed one another from where he had tumbled down.
There was a sudden movement in the crowd; people jostled one another.
“His mother’s coming!” somebody whispered.
They pressed closer and closer to watch the effect upon her, the women with an anguished consciousness of what she must be suffering, that mother-pain which they understood so well. The men pushed to see what happened, because everybody was looking. All eyes were fixed on the little woman who came running along, with those elderly little hurried steps, those two anxious eyes which showed all the dread of the tragedy they suspected. The people made way respectfully, as before one who is privileged to approach and look upon what is hers. Those who could not move back she dragged away mercilessly, gripping them with her hooked fingers, which she thrust out at every side in order to see closer. It was her ... her ... her son lying there, her own son; and she must get to him.
She saw him. He lay there and he was dead, the son, the child whom she had seen leaving that morning alive and well. She stood aghast, out of breath after the great effort of hurrying, her throat pinched with distress and sorrow and shock, her soul filled with all the pent-up tempest that was seeking an outlet. Her flat chest heaved and all her thin, frail little body quivered; her legs shook beneath her. Slowly and painfully the sobs came welling up.
The people waited in silence, more or less disappointed, saddened by all that silent grief. Her eyes, the eyes of a mother, stared at the dead body; and he did not look at her and he slept on and ... and he was asleep for ever, gone for ever: he would never see her again! This last cut into her soul; a shrill scream came from her throat, she flung her lean brown hands together high above her head, wrung the crooked, gnarled fingers convulsively and then, with her fists clenched in her lap, sank impotently to her knees, with her head against his.
“Oh, it’s such a pity, oh, it’s such a pity!” she moaned; and the words contained all the awful depth of her woe, all the concentrated sorrow. “Oh, it’s such a pity, such a pity!” she kept on repeating, finding no other words to express her grief and lending them power by force of repetition.
He remained lying there ... and she remained kneeling; and all that crowd of people stood silently looking on, startled and impressed by that sacred, solemn mourning. And the impressive hush, the silence of all those people, the desperate helplessness of those folk, she alone suffering and crying and unable to help her child and the people unwilling to help him: that impotence pierced her soul; and the patient suffering changed into a frenzied madness, a raging fury. With a terrible scream, like that of a goaded beast, a hoarse yell that came grating out of her parched throat, she thrust her arms, stiff with pain, like two steel rods, under the arms of that limp corpse and, with a superhuman effort, with Herculean strength exalted by suffering, she lifted the corpse, pressed it to her body, raised it with her outstretched arms and dragged it, with its legs trailing behind it, hurrying along at a mad pace, with the one idea of getting home with her child, her only child, away, far away from that callous crowd which desecrated her sorrow: there she would weep, sob out all her grief and find words, sweet words which must throb through her child and wake him and bring him back to life!
All that packed crowd had first followed her with their eyes, struck by the sudden outburst of that mad rage; and then they had gone after her, inquisitively. And it did not last long before the police-constables--those phlegmatic posts with which any outbreak of undue human emotion must always in the end collide--stopped them; they pulled those bony arms from round the corpse and took the little mother, now hanging slack and limp, one on either side by the arm and led her away. The body was carried to the mortuary.
With a resounding oath the foreman drove his folk back to work and set all that rolling activity going once more.
The passers-by hastened away; and the saw screeched, the chisel tapped, the hammer banged, the bricks were hauled up on high and the gorgeous building, the pride of a metropolis, stood resplendent in the glaring white mid-day sun, as if nothing had happened.
X. WHITE LIFE
Her life flowed on as a little brook flows under grass on a Sunday noon in summer, flowed on in calm seclusion, far from the bustle of the crowd, secretly, steadily, uninterrupted save by ever-recurring little incidents, peacefully approaching old age. She sat in her little white room, behind the muslin curtains, making lace. Her cottage stood a little way back from the street, shining behind a neatly-raked flower-garden.
The door was always shut and the curtains carefully drawn. Inside, everything was very clean: smooth, bare walls and the ceiling washed with milk-white chalk through which shone a soft touch of blue; and this bright cleanliness contrasted soberly with the things that hung on the wall. The chairs and furniture stood placed with care, as though nailed to the floor; over the mantel hung the copper Christ, a thin, elongated figure of Our Lord, with its sharp projections which shone when the sun touched them: a little figure which, so long dead, hung there so firmly nailed and looked so calmly from out of the small dark shadow-lines of its face.
The stove stood freshly blackened, with the waved white sand on its polished pipe.[10] Over the door of the bedroom steps hung the glass case with the waxen image of Our Lady, a girlish figure clad in broad white folds, with bright-red, cherry cheeks, smiling sweetly upon a doll which she carried in her arms. On the other wall was a glaring framed print, in which a Child Jesus romped with curly-headed angels in a motley green wood, with behind it a sunny perspective gleaming with paradisian delights.
[10] The Flemish stove is connected with the chimney by a flat pipe, on which the plates and other utensils are heated. On Sundays, the stove, the pipe and all are blacked and polished with black-lead and turpentine; and it is an old custom of neat house-wives to powder the stove-pipe with white sand from the dunes. The sand is allowed to run through a little opening in the hand in a series of fine wavy lines, forming a delicate pattern on the black pipe.
From the ceiling, in a white cage, hung the canary, which hopped from one perch to the other, all day long, without ever singing. On the window-seat, behind the little curtains, blossomed tall geraniums and phlox, which, through the mesh of the muslin curtains, sent a blissful fragrance through the room.
Life went its monotonous gait, measured by the slow tick of the hanging clock, that big, stupid, laughing face which so pitilessly turned its two unequal fingers round and round. Outside, close by, went the steel blows of the smith’s hammer or the biting file that grated against her wall.
The sun that laughed so pleasantly through the windows and came and put all those things in a white gleaming light beamed right through into her little white soul: it was yet like that of a child, had remained innocent, never been soiled or troubled; and, now that the bad storm-time was over, it lay still in the passionless restfulness of waning life, quite taken up with all manner of harmless occupations, devotions and acquired ways of an old, god-fearing woman-person. Her face, which was wreathed in a round white goffered cap, had the smooth, yellow, waxen pallor of the statue of Our Lady, in church, and her features the severe, sober kindliness of nuns’. She was dressed in modest, stiffly-falling folds of unrumpled lilac silk, like the queens in old prints.
She spent those long, quiet days at her lace-pillow. That was her only amusement, her treasure: this half-rounded arch of smooth, blue paper on the wooden pillow-stool, occupied by a swarm of copper pins, with coloured-glass heads, and of finely-turned wooden bobbins, with slender necks and notched bodies, hanging side by side from fine white threads or heaped up behind a steel bodkin. All this array of pins, holes, drawers and trays had for her its own form and meaning, a small world in which she knew her way so well. Her deft white fingers knew how to throw, change, catch and pick up those bobbins so nimbly, so swiftly; she stuck her pins, which were to give the thread its lie and form, so accurately and surely; and, under her hand, the lace grew slowly and imperceptibly into a light thread network, grew with the leaves and flowers of her geraniums and phlox and the silent course of time.
‘Twas quite a feast when, in the evening, she wound off the ravelled end and carefully examined the white web. She closely followed all the knots, curves and twists of those transparent little veins; and ‘twas with regret that she rolled up the lace again and put it away in the drawer.
When all her peaceful thoughts had been fully pondered, when all that life of every day, all that even round of happenings, like little white flakes floating in the sunny sky, had drifted by through the thought-chambers of her soul and when the light began to fail out of doors and in, she took her rosary and prayed, for hours on end, slowly telling the smooth beads between her fingers until, when it grew quite dark, she started awake and became aware that for some time she had been telling the strokes of the smith’s hammer on the other side of the wall. Then she laid herself between the white sheets and tried to sleep.
Two days ago the grid of her stove broke and today she had taken it to be mended; she had been to the smith’s and now she could not get out of her mind what she had seen there: a black cave, like an oven, down three steps; a dark hole hung and filled on every side with black iron tools; and, amid all this jumble, an anvil and, in the red glow from the dancing light of the smithy fire, a small, stunted, black little fellow, hidden out of knowledge in that gloom; a bent, thin little man wound in a leathern apron and with a black face, from which a pair of good-humoured eyes peered out at her, through the shining glasses of his copper-rimmed spectacles, like two little lights in the dark. She had gone down those three steps, looking round shyly, afraid of getting dirty; had explained her business to that impish little chap; and had then hastily fled from that hell. Now it seemed to her that those two eyes had looked at her so kindly; and she wondered how any one could live in such a hole and be a Christian creature ... and yet that smith looked as if he had a good heart.
Next day, she was thinking again of the little man and his dark, haunted hole; and she sniffed the scent of her geraniums with a new pleasure and looked with more gladness at her trim little dwelling and her lace-pillow. She now enjoyed, realized, with all the sensual luxury of her soul, that peaceful life of hers, something like that of the yellow, waxen Virgin high up there on the wall, under her glass shade. And yet she was sorry for her good neighbour: it must be so dreary alone, amid all that dirt.... She worked at her lace, prayed and tried to think of nothing more.
He brought the new grid home himself. At first, she was shy with the man: she got up, went to the stove, turned back again and only now and then dared look at the smith from under her eyes. He was wrapped up in his work, stood bending over the stove, trying to fix the grid. Seen like that in the light, the little chap looked quite different to her eyes: he was no longer young, his breath came quickly; but in all that he did there was something so friendly, so kindly, something almost well-mannered, that went oddly with his dirty clothes and his black face. The little smith was known in the village as a lively person, who led a lonely life, but who was able also to divert a company: he knew his customers and knew how to manage them all. Here he took good care not to dirty the floor: he spat his tobacco-juice into the coal-box and touched nothing with his hands. When at last the grid was fixed, he stayed talking a little: he spoke of her nice little life among all those white things; paid her a compliment on her pretty flowers and shining copper; and then came close to look at her lace-pillow. Lastly, seeing that she was not at her ease, that she answered his remarks so shortly and hesitatingly, he gave a push to his cap, refused to say what she owed him and was gone with a skip and a jump.
One Sunday, after vespers, he came again, bowed politely, fetched a bit of paper out of his waistcoat-pocket and sat down on a chair by the stove. This visit annoyed her: with the quickness with which small-minded people weigh and think over a matter, her eyes went to the window to see if anybody had observed him come in and was likely to set evil tongues a-clacking. It was almost bound to be so; and, to keep her honour safe, she opened her door, mumbling something about “warm weather” and “the tobacco-smoke which made her cough.”
She went to her room, fetched some money and paid the bill. The smith sat where he was, knocked out his little stone pipe and put it in his inside pocket; he did not look at his money and, in his hoarse little voice, began to talk of quite common things: of wind and weather and the current news of the village; always chatting in the same tone, a jumble of long, breathless statements. From this he went on to his dreary, lonely life, the monotonous quiet of it and the danger of thieves, sickness and sudden death. She said not a word, but, against the bright window-curtains, the sharp, heavy profile of her face, together with the flutes of her white cap, went up and down in a continual nodding assent to everything he said. At the end, she took pleasure in hearing him talk, nor now looked upon that clean-washed face of his as at all so ugly. It even did her good to see some one sitting there who came to enliven the monotony of that long Sunday evening. By her leave, he had lighted a fresh pipe; and she now sat sniffing up that unaccustomed smell, which rose in little puffs from behind the stove and floated round the room, filling it with long rows of blue curls. ‘Twas as if she were overcome by that quite new smell of tobacco and she felt inclined to sleep; she stood up, to get rid of that slackness, shut the front-door and, without thinking what she was doing, asked if he would have some coffee. He nodded, gladly.
She put the kettle on and got the coffee-pot ready, fetched out her best cups and spoons and the white sugar. When the steam came rushing from the spout, she poured water on the coffee and they sat down, one on each side of the table, to sip the savoury drink in tiny draughts. ‘Twas long since she had felt so comfortable and for the first time she thought with dislike of her lonely life. ‘Twas late when he went home; she came with him to the door ... and saw black figures that strolled past in the street and perhaps had seen him leave. She had bad dreams all night: the people pointed their fingers at her and slanderous tongues spread ugly things about her. The whole of the next day her thoughts were in the smithy; she swept the pavement more carefully and farther than usual, went now and then and looked out of window; and her little curtains were left open with a split in the middle. Yesterday, she had forgotten to give the canary fresh water to drink. The people looked at her in the street; two or three god-fearing gossips had let her walk home alone. This gave her great pain; ‘twas as though a heavy load were weighing day and night on her breast; and yet she was not sorry for what had happened. All these trifles could not make her forget her content. She said her prayers and performed her little duties with as much care as before and lived on, alone.