Day's End and Other Stories Read Free Page B

brandy.’
    In the inn and afterwards, as he stood blinking at the sunshine in the village street, he kept impressing upon the other:
    â€˜Don’t say anything. Don’t breathe a word. Henrietta, you understand – you’ll frighten her, she’ll be upset.’
    In the afternoon he slept, but it was a poor, pitiful sleep. At the end of it, sitting up, he thought he heard voices, and after listening a moment it seemed to him they were children’s voices. Then he came out and saw Henrietta selling milk to three children at the door.
    He heard these words:
    â€˜And please how is Mister Rentshaw?’
    â€˜He’s all right. Why? He’s asleep,’ said Henrietta.
    â€˜Because my father wants to know, because this morning he wasn’t well.’
    â€˜Who wasn’t well?’
    â€˜Your dad.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Down by the river, I reckon.’ And another child broke in: ‘Yes, down by the river it was, I heard my dad telling my mother so.’
    And suddenly, hearing all this, Israel went back and sat down again, hating deeply and unreasonably everybody and everything, especially Henrietta, Sam Houghton and his children, despising himself for being ill and failing to keep it secret, loathing the thought of explanations, lies and compromises with Henrietta, and then when some unsatisfactory explanation had been given her, shrinking from her close, mistrustful looks until he felt an aversion for her, just as he had begun to feel, for the first time, an aversion for his wretched land, his thin, worn horses, the grotesque-looking barns smelling of damp and rottenness and for the pond into which the poplars had all his life stood endlessly looking and whispering.
    VI
    One Sunday it was Henrietta’s birthday and at dinner there was a fowl with white sauce, bread stuffing, potatoes and a plum-pudding Henrietta had kept from Christmas; and at tea-time pickled cherries, damson-cheese and a cake with caraway seeds.
    But both at dinner and tea Israel felt no appetite and left pieces of fowl, plum-pudding and caraway cake on his plate. And Henrietta noticed all this and began to appeal to him:
    â€˜Think how long you’ve been at it. It’s too much foryou. You know yourself everything’s poor, things are always going wrong. There’s no profit. And you’re seventy, you’re not fit for it. Give it up – pay one year’s rent and give it up.’
    Whether because of his sudden dislike for his land, his lack of appetite or his fear of illness he could not tell, but this appeal touched him. And he was silent. And then, after tea, Henrietta, to make it worse, began showing him accounts and notes she had kept, proving the dreariness and ineffectuality of their struggle beyond all doubt.
    He did not know what to do. Each item of expenditure increased his misery and helplessness. He could not look into Henrietta’s face.
    But Henrietta looked at him and said: ‘Sooner or later we shall have to give it up.’
    There was a note of sadness in her voice too. And half against his will he murmured: ‘Yes.’
    By this time he did not mean to say, ‘We will give up at once,’ but to convey something like: ‘I see how things are, I understand.’
    Whether she understood this or not he did not know, but he suddenly could not bear to remain with her any longer and went out, gave his horses a brushing, turned out the cow, set up the pig-troughs to dry in the sun, doing all this with the odd resolution and care which comes after sadness, as a relief.
    Next morning he went to the orchard and began once more sawing, chopping and stacking the little branches of the fallen elm. It was fine. Hazy shapesof blue floated in the sky, puffed by a soft, warm wind. By the house some daffodils in the grass kept nodding, as if going off to sleep. Up above fresh green buds would swing and nudge each other and the smoke from the house shape