The pain cleared his brain with the suddenness of an unseen hand wrenching a curtain aside. He looked behind him and found himself staring into a heavy bearded face, over which three other candles sent a straying luminance.
“But …” he cried, and never knew what he meant to add. He backed away in disgust from the body where it lay in its unlidded and unvarnished coffin. He had never met death before so startlingly face to face. His mother he had never seen in death, for his father had huddled her quickly away in earth with a cross and a bunch of flowers, and his father had been killed in a running fight at sea and dropped unobtrusively over the side, while he was learning to decline oikia at his school in Devon. He was frightened and disgusted and sick and somehow ashamed. It was, he felt remotely, indecorous to broil thus over a coffin, even though the coffin were of unvarnished deal. His eyes searched a deepening darkness, flickering with gold points where the candles shone, until they found a face which seemed now white rather with weariness than serenity. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then the lights were all extinguished.
II
Over a toppling pile of green vegetables two old women were twittering. They pecked at their words like sparrows for crumbs. “There was a fight, and one of the officers was killed.” “They’ll hang for that. But three of them escaped.” The vegetables began to grow and grow in size, cauliflowers, cabbages, carrots, potatoes. “Three of them escaped, three of them escaped,” one of the cauliflowers repeated. Then the whole pile fell to the ground, and Carlyon was walking towards him. “Have you heard this one?” he said. “Three of them escaped, three of them escaped.” He came nearer and nearer and his body grew in size, until it seemed as though it must burst like a swollen bladder. “Have you heard this one, Andrews?” he said. Andrews became aware that somewhere behind him a gun was being levelled, and he turned, but there were only two men, whose faces he could not see, laughing together. “Old Andrews, we won’t see his like again. Do you remember the time …” “Oh, shut up, shut up,” he called, “he was only a brute, I tell you. My father was a brute.” “Ring-a-ring-a-roses,” his father and Carlyon were dancing round him, holding hands. The ring got smaller and smaller and he could feel their breath, Carlyon’s cool and scentless, his father’s stale, tobacco-laden. He was gripped round the waist, and someone called out, “Three of them escaped.” The arms began to drag him away. “I didn’t do it,” he cried. “I didn’t do it.” Tears ran down his cheeks. He struggled and struggled against the pulling arms.
He emerged slowly into a grey dispersing mist, cut by jagged edges. They grew towards his sight and became boxes, old trunks, dusty lumber. He found that he was lying upon a pile of sacking and there was a stale smell in the room of earthen mould. A pile of gardening implements leant up against one wall, and one upturned lidless trunk was full of little shrivelled bulbs. At first he thought that he was in the potting shed of his home. Outside should be a lawn and a tall pine, and presently he would hear the shuffling footsteps of the gardener. The old man always dragged his left foot behind him, so that there was no regular cadence to his steps. They had to be counted like an owl’s cry—one twoooo—one twoooo. How it was that he came to be lying in the potting shed in the grey light of early morning Andrews did not question. He knew very well the unwisdom of questioning it—half indeed he was aware in what place he lay. I will play a little longer, he thought, and turned over and lay with his face to the wall, so that he might not notice the unfamiliar details of the room, shed, whatever it might be. Then he shut his eyes, because the wall he faced was stone and it should have been wood.
With his eyes shut all was well. He sniffed the warm scent of the mould comfortingly.
The old man would grumble at his presence, complain that he had shifted a hoe, a spade, a fork. Then as certainly as night closed day he would take up a box lid full of seeds, rattle the seeds back and forth with a noise like small, quick hailstones and murmur, “Winkle dust.” Andrews screwed his eyes tighter, sniffed deeper. He remembered how the old man had been standing once beneath the pine at the end of the lawn. He was feeling his chin thoughtfully and staring up at the tapering dark slimness above him. “Three hundred years,” he was saying slowly to himself, “three hundred years.” Andrews had commented on the sweet elusive smell that came sifting through the air. “That’s age,” said the old man, “that’s age.” He spoke with such conviction that Andrews half expected to see him vanish himself into a faint perfume formed out of bulbs and damp turned earth. “They make coffins out of pines,” the old man continued, “coffins, that’s why you get the smell sometimes where there ain’t no pines. Up through the ground you see.”
The thought of coffins jerked Andrews’s eyes open. He saw again the candle fall and the bearded face looking up at him. It was sheer chance that he had not placed his hand full on that dead stubble. Three years swept past; the present scratched at his nerves. He jumped up and looked round. How long had he slept? What had that girl been doing in the meanwhile? He had been a weak fool to collapse and a sentimental fool to dream into the past.
