The Man Within

there had been a little scurry of strange womenfolk to catch a last glimpse of the “deceased.” Then she had shown her one sign of feeling. She had turned to face them as though she would push them back and her mouth had twisted into an angry word which she did not speak. Then she gave a small gesture with her fingers addressed to herself. She stood aside and the undertaker’s man shut the coffin lid, casually as a man shuts a book. There was no air of finality about it, even when he drove in the nails. Andrews saw a little group of women whispering in a corner. They looked and whispered, and fear momentarily pierced his unconsciousness. He looked round him and imagined all faces turned towards him. The men disappointed of beer had nothing to do but talk and look curiously at the interior of the cottage, which they had never before entered. The women sniggered a little among themselves at the bareness and poked furtively at a chair here and a table there and made comments under their breath. Andrews thought that they were speaking of him. The men shuffled uneasily and stood massed together and fidgeted with their feet. They were annoyed with their wives for having brought them where there was no refreshment. Most of them had small farms and there was plenty of work they might have been doing. For want of other employment they looked cornerwise and carefully at the girl. They had seen her about many a time in the lanes but had been afraid to speak to her. There had been rumours⁠—that she had been the dead man’s mistress, his natural child, a dozen contradictory tales, which united to put her outside the pale of “Good day,” comments on the weather or the crops, or even a nod of the head. Now death made her approachable and a little envied. They spoke of her slyly to each other in whispers, not so much to keep their comments from her as to keep them from their wives, comments on her appearance, on her potentialities as a bedfellow, on the fun she may have afforded to the man now dead. Andrews thought that they spoke of him.

With an effort he pulled his will erect. He saw himself standing on one side, an obvious stranger, uninterested and apart. He called “Elizabeth” with forced ease across the room. He had vague ideas of convincing them that he was her brother. She paid no attention, and he could think of no more to say. His will subsided slackly. (“For I am a stranger with thee; and a sojourner as all my fathers were.”)

Standing there in a misty graveyard beside the dark Elizabeth, Andrews felt his first flash of sympathy towards his father. Once his father had visited him at school. Andrews was in the gravel playground. It was in the interval between two lessons and he was hastily revising some Latin grammar. He had looked up and stared with amazement at the unexpected sight of his father, a tall, heavy man with a big beard clumsily dressed, crossing the gravel with the headmaster. The headmaster was small, quick and neat with birdlike motions. His father was shy, embarrassed, conscious suddenly of his own coarse bulk. He had said, “I was passing through and thought I’d come and see you.” He stopped, not knowing how to continue and stood shifting from one foot to the other. “Happy?” he asked. Andrews had the instinctive cruelty of a child. He remembered his father at home, domineering, brutal, a conscious master, not chary of his blows to either child or wife. “Very,” he said. His voice filled with artificial pleasure and he pronounced his words with artificial neatness. “We are doing Horace this term, father,” he said, “and Sophocles.” The headmaster beamed. His father murmured incoherently that he must go now, disappeared across the gravel, his heavy boots sounding self-consciously.

Andrews did not know then what kept his father away from home for short and frequent periods of blessed peace. He never knew the cause of that particular unfortunate visit. Perhaps he was on his way to the coast and a sudden realisation that his career must end sooner or later in death made him anxious to see his only idea of immortality. The voyage which followed must have reached its normal, successful end, for a few weeks later, when holidays fetched Andrews home, his father was there, dominant, easily aroused, as ready as ever with the whip, which he seemed to keep more for his family than for his hounds. A year later, while the child was at school and the father at sea, the mother died with the serene faithfulness of a completely broken will.

The shambling priest was reading the lesson in a meaningless drawl muffled by the mist and his increasing cold. The words meant no more to him than did the dead man. It was a mechanic ritual less conscious than the act of brushing teeth.

“I speak this to your shame but some men will say, how are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.”

The coffin had been carried from the cottage in a farm cart. Elizabeth beside him he had walked into a wall of white that at every step melted before him and closed behind him. The villagers and their wives followed after, their footsteps sounding no louder than the drip of misty rain that fell from trees and bushes along their road. The silence was greater for the regular small tap tap of feet and drip drop of water. They could see the back of the cart which they followed but not the horse that drew it. Andrews looked behind him and saw a ghostly platoon. Faces and hands thrown forward in front of invisible bodies appeared and disappeared. He felt suddenly that all danger had been