Henry Green
Concluding
Mr Rock rose with a groan. Crossing to the open bedroom window he shone his torch out on fog. His white head was gray, and white the reflected torch light on the thick spectacles he wore. He shone it up and down. It will be a fine day, a fine day in the end, he decided.
He looked down. He clicked his light out. He found there was just enough filtering through the mist which hung eighteen foot up and which did not descend to the ground, to make out Ted, his goose, about already, a dirty pallor, almost the same colour as Alice, the Persian cat, that kept herself dry where every blade of grass bore its dark, mist laden string of water. Old and deaf, half blind, Mr Rock said about himself, the air raw in his throat. Nevertheless he saw plain how Ted was not ringed in by fog. For the goose posed staring, head to one side, with a single eye, straight past the house, up into the fog bank which had made all daylight deaf beneath, and beyond which, at some clear height, Mr Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds fast winging, Ted knows where, he thought.
The old and famous man groaned again, shut the window. He began to dress. He put working clothes over the yellow woollen nightshirt. The bedroom smelled stale, packed with books not one of which he had read in years. He groaned a third time. Early morning conies hard on a man my age, he told himself for comfort, comes hard. How hard? Oh, heavy.
When he put the kettle on downstairs he did not lay out his granddaughter Elizabeth a cup because Sebastian Birt might be with her still, in the other bedroom across the landing.
Five minutes more saw him off to fetch Daisy's swill. It was lighter already, but with pockets of mist that reached to the ground. Over his shoulders he wore a yoke. The hanging buckets clanked. He wondered if he should have brought his torch, but it seemed the sun must come through any minute.
He went slowly and was overtaken by George Adams, the woodman, going up for orders.
They did not speak at once, went on together down the ride in silence, between these still invisible tops of trees beneath which loomed colourlessly one mass of flowering rhododendron after another and then the azaleas, which, without scent, pale in the fresh of early morning, had not yet begun, as they would later, to sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.
The man spoke. "It'll turn out a fine day yet," he said.
"Yes, Adams," said the other.
They walked on in silence.
"How's your wife, Adams?" Mr Rock then asked.
"Why I lost her, sir, the winter just gone."
Mr Rock said not a word to this at first. "I'm getting an old dodderer," he ventured in the end, sorry for himself at the slip.
"You're a ripe age now," George Adams agreed.
He never offered to help carry those buckets, the man reminded himself, because whatever the position Mr Rock had once held, this long-toothed gentleman did his own work now, which was to his credit.
"Yet I feel not a day older," Mr Rock boasted.
"It's my legs," the sage added, when he had no reply.
There was another silence. It was too early yet for the birds, or too thick above, because these were still.
"Nothing anyone can do for the bends," Adams said at last, out of an empty head.
At this instant, like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it, the sun came through for a moment, and lit the azaleas on either side before fog, redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window, to shut behind them a blonde princess undressing.
"It's not fair on one to grow old," Mr Rock said.
Adams made no comment.
"And how's Miss Elizabeth?" the man asked, after a time.
"Better, thank you," Mr Rock replied.
"She overtaxed her head where you put her out to work?" Adams hazarded.
"Don't they all?" the old man countered. He adored his granddaughter and, if it had not been for Birt, could have talked readily about her. "Same as those children up at the house." She was thirty-five and they between twelve and seventeen. "Breakdown from overstrain," he ended, cursing Sebastian Birt in his mind, because, although she was not working now, she would never get well while she could meet that man, he knew.
"You'll find her a blessing to have at home. Somebody by you," Adams said in self pity.
A blessing and a curse, the old man thought, then repented this last so violently that he could not be sure he had not spoken out loud.
"Why, that's strange," Adams said. "Did you hear summat?"
The sage looked blank at his companion. But it was too dark with sudden mist to read the expression on his face.
"I heard a call," Adams volunteered.
"I'm a mite deaf," Mr Rock answered.
"And I caught the echo," Adams insisted.
Which reminded Mr Rock of the argument he had had with Sebastian on this very point, not long since. "It would be from the house, then," he said in a determined voice, referring to the great sickle-shaped sweep of mansion towards which they moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.
"It's the trees throw back the sound, sir."
"Yet if you face about, Adams, call away from the place down this ride behind, you won't get a whisper in return."
"I never heard that," the woodman said, politely disbelieving.
They walked on. Then the old man took the buckets off his yoke.
"I'll have an easy now," he announced, laying the heavy object by, to one side. He put the buckets bottom upwards, and they sat on these.
"You don't want to rush it when they're full," Adams said.
I do this for Elizabeth, Mr Rock told himself, but out loud he exclaimed, "I hope I have more sense." His glasses were misted, fog still hung about, but the sun coming through once more, made it for a second so that he might have been inside a pearl strung next the skin of his beloved.
"It's what them younger ones haven't got, sense," Adams said. Elizabeth, Eliza, Liz, Mr Rock thought.
"And what age would you be, sir?"
"Seventy-six come March."
"That's a tidy sum to be still carrying swill around," the man complimented him, and noticed it a second time.
"What would that be, again?" he asked.
Mr Rock did not answer.
"I thought I caught what I heard before, twice over," Adams insisted.
"Was there an echo?" Mr Rock asked, his mind adrift.
"Not that I reckon."
"They must have faced away from the house, then," the old man said, and let his love for Elizabeth, and fear that he might lose the cottage, sap what ability was left him. Then he tried not to start on this subject, but could not help it.
"Adams," he began, "how d'you hold your house?"
The woodman stopped listening to the woods or to Mr Rock. He took in what was being said, but he had heard it so often these last ten years that he barely paid attention. From habit he answered, "The same as the rest. It goes along with the job to the estate."
"They'd like to have me away," the old man said.
"Well, I heard tell that you were goin' on your own, sir?"
"How's that?" Mr Rock demanded, turning his eyes full on Adams, with such a glare of alarm the man was startled.
"Why it might be just talk up at the house, like."
"What was?"
"Some up at the house has made out there was likely an honour for you," the woodman offered.
"Yes, and I don't doubt," Mr Rock exclaimed, with violence. "The paltry intriguers," he said. "But they didn't tell you, did they, about the other?"
"I don't follow, Mr Rock, sir."
"It's the Academy of Sciences," the sage elaborated, boasting but frantic. "There's an election yesterday or today. If they elect me, I can spend the rest of my time in their Institute, or scientific poor law sanatorium, but I can't take my girl. Otherwise I may have some money, thank you. And then, of course, I can refuse. Would you hesitate in my place?"