“It’s easy for you to laugh,” he said bitterly. But am I really bitter, the other part wondered. Am I play acting still? And if I am play acting, is it I who act or another who pulls the strings? But what a Pharisee the other part of him was. It never took control of his mouth and spoke its own words—hard, real, trustworthy. It only stood on one side and listened and taunted and questioned. So now it let his voice go on, genuine or play acting or dictated. “You don’t know what it feels like to be alone.” Watching the face that still smiled at him, not with hostility but with almost a friendly mocking, he became frightened at an unintended reality in his own words. He was indeed alone. Perhaps that other part of him remained silent, not through self-righteousness, but because it had no words to speak. There was nothing in him but sentimentality and fear and cowardice, nothing in him but negatives. How could anyone believe in him if he did not even exist?
He was surprised, deep in the maze in which he chased himself, when she answered him. “I’ve been alone, too, the last two nights. I don’t mind the daytime, but I get a bit scared at night now he’s dead.” She nodded her head towards the room on the threshold of which he stood.
He looked across the room. The coffin still lay upon the kitchen table. The candles were no longer alight, but drooped in weary attitudes of self-depreciation.
“Husband?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Father?”
“Not exactly. He brought me up though. I can’t remember my father. I was fond of him,” she nodded her head again. “He was kind to me in his way. It’s a bit frightening being alone.”
It was as though she had forgotten the circumstances of Andrews’s coming. They faced each other. She also seemed alone in a somewhat dark wood. She also was frightened she said, but there was a courage that added to Andrews’s shame in the candid hand she appeared to stretch through the dark to his companionship.
“It will be worse tonight,” she said. “I have to bury him today.”
“I should have thought,” Andrews answered, remembering the stubble on which he had nearly placed his hand, “it would be less—frightening without a body in the house.”
“Oh no,” she said, “oh no,” looking at him with puzzled eyes. “I wouldn’t be afraid of him.” She came and stood in the doorway beside Andrews and looked across at the lidless coffin. “He must be terribly alone,” she said, “but there’s the peace of God in his face. Come and look,” she stepped across the room, and very reluctantly Andrews followed.
He could see little of the peace of which the girl had spoken in the face. The eyes were closed, and he had a sense, drawn from the coarse strong skin of the lids, that they must have been hard to shut. At any moment he felt the strain might become too great and the lids would turn up with a sudden click like a roller blind. Round the mouth were little cunning wrinkles that prowled outwards across the face in stealthy radiations. He looked at the girl to see if she were mocking him in her talk of God in connection with this bearded rapscallion, but she was looking down at the body with calm and passionless affection. He had a sudden inclination to say to her, “It’s you who have the peace of God, not he,” but refrained. It would sound melodramatic and she would laugh at him the more. It was only to suit his own ends or his own self-pity that he allowed himself the pleasure of melodrama.
It was while he was regarding the face and the triumphant cunning of the lines, growingly conscious at the same time of the girl’s fixity of thought, like a firm comforting wall beside his own shifting waters, that he heard faint stumbling steps. It was fear that made his ears sufficiently acute, the girl behind him had not moved. He twisted his eyes up from the dead man and faced her again.
“So you’ve been keeping me here?” he said. He was only half aware of the foolishness of his accusation. One reasoning part of him told him that he had been with her since he woke at most a matter of minutes, but reason somehow had seemed lacking in this house since he had entered it and seen what should have been a frightened girl holding him with a calm gun between the yellow-tipped candles. And since he had come to consciousness again five or ten minutes before, he had lived over again a boy’s life in Devon and had stood, he told himself with a sudden rush of sentiment, between the cunning and yet clumsy
