“Won’t you let me in?” he asked. “You needn’t be afraid,” and when she laughed ironically, he began to speak rapidly. “I did all that you told me,” he said. “I got rid of all those wretched villagers.”
“Was it necessary to come here to tell me that?” she asked.
“I want shelter,” he said with despairing simplicity. He heard her leave the window and unbolt the door. “Come in then if you must,” she called to him.
He came and moved at once to the fire, his momentary sentiment drowned in the mere desire to be warm, to drink heat with every pore of his body. He felt that he could with small encouragement have lifted the burning coals and pressed them to his breast. He twisted his figure into odd distorted shapes, so that every part of him might receive a blessing from gracefully gesticulating hands of flame.
“Have you any food?” he asked. With the cold acquiescence which he had feared she went and fetched a loaf of bread, and would have placed it on the table had he not stretched out his hands for it. Still crouching over the fire he broke off portions with his fingers. Only when his hunger was partly satisfied something uneasily stirring in his mind made him apologise.
“I haven’t had food for fifteen hours,” he said. “I was hungry and cold out there. It’s good of you …”
She came into the circle of firelight. “There’s no reason why I should shut you out,” she said. “I’ve been alone. You are better than no one, even you.”
Warmed by the fire, hunger quenched by bread, he began to grow jocular.
“You oughtn’t to find any difficulty in getting company,” he laughed. “And who was it you expected to find outside the window?”
“We’ve buried him,” she said. “I don’t suppose that he’ll return.”
Andrews looked up in astonishment at a pale, set face, touched with a reluctant grief. “You don’t mean,” he asked in awestruck astonishment, “that you thought …”
“Why shouldn’t I think that?” she asked, not with indignation but with candid questioning. “He’s only a few days dead.”
“But they don’t rise again,” Andrews said in the kind of solemn whisper which he had used as a boy in the school chapel.
“Their spirits do,” she answered, and her white, still face continued to question him.
“Do you believe in all that?” he asked, not in mockery, but in a curiosity tinctured with longing.
“Of course; you can read it in the Bible.”
“Then,” he hesitated a moment, “if men are not quite dead, when we bury them, we can still hurt them, make them suffer, revenge ourselves.”
“You must be bad,” she said fearfully, “to think of that. But don’t forget that they can hurt us, too.”
She came up to the fire and stood beside him, and he shifted a little under the clear, courageous gaze of her eyes. “I’m not afraid of you now,” she said, “because you are just a person I know, but when you came last night you were a stranger and I was afraid. But then I thought to myself that he,” and she pointed to the table as though the coffin still lay there, “would not let me be harmed. He was a bad man, but he wanted me, and he’d never let anyone else get me.”
“I never meant any harm to you,” Andrews muttered, and then added with a convulsive pleading, “It was only fear that made me come. You other people never seem to understand fear. You expect everyone to be brave like yourself. It’s not a man’s fault whether he’s brave or cowardly. It’s all in the way he’s born. My father and mother made me. I didn’t make myself.”
“I never blamed you,” she protested. “But you always seem to leave out God.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s all on a par with your spirits. I don’t believe in that stuff. Though I’d like to believe in the spirits, that we could still hurt a man who is dead,” he added with a mixture of passion and wistfulness.
“You can’t if they are in heaven,” she commented.
“There’s no danger of that with the man I hate,” Andrews laughed angrily. “It’s curious, isn’t it, how one can hate the dead. It makes one almost believe your stuff. If they are transparent like the air, perhaps we breathe them in.” He screwed up his mouth as though at a bad taste.
She watched him curiously. “Tell me,” she said, “where have you been since we buried him?”
He began to speak with resentful anger. “I told you it was only fear that drove me to you last night, didn’t I? Well, I don’t want to trouble you any more.”
“And fear brought you back again?”
“Yes—at least, not entirely.” Looking down at her dark hair, pale face and calm eyes seemed to infuriate him. “You women,” he said, “you are all the same. You are always on your guard against us. Always imagine that we are out to get you. You don’t know what a man wants.”
“What do you want?” she asked and added with a practicality which increased his meaningless anger, “Food? I have some more bread in a cupboard.”
He made a despairing motion with his hand, which she interpreted as a refusal. “We get tired of our own kind,” he said, “the coarseness, hairiness—you don’t understand. Sometimes I’ve paid street women simply to talk to them, but they are like the rest of you. They don’t understand that I don’t want their bodies.”
“You’ve taught us what to think,” she interrupted with a faint bitterness breaking the peace of her mind.
He took no notice of what she said. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “a reason why I came back. You can laugh at me. I was homesick for here.”
He turned his back on her. “I’m not making love to you. It wasn’t you. It was just the place. I slept here and I hadn’t slept before for
