I SAW him first on a spring day—one of those days when the limbs are lazy with delicious tiredness, the air soft and warm against the face, the heart full of a queer longing to know the hearts of other men.
He was quite a little man, with broad, high shoulders, and hardly any neck; and what was noticeable in his square, wooden-looking figure, dressed in light, shabby tweed, and patched, yellow boots, was that he seemed to have no chest. He was flat—from his white face, with its sandy hair, moustache, and eyebrows, under an old, narrow-brimmed straw hat, right down to his feet. It was as though life had planed him. His face, too, seemed to have lost all but its bones and skin of yellow-white; there were no eyelashes to his reddish-brown round eyes; there was no colour in his thin lips, compressed as though to keep the secret of a mortal fear. Save for the wheeze and rustle of his breathing, he stood very still, nervously rubbing his claw-like hands up and down his trouser-legs. His voice was hoarse and faint.
“Yes, I was a baker,” he said. “They tell me as how that’s where I’ve done myself the harm. But I never learnt another trade; I was afraid that if I give it up I wouldn’t get no other work. Bakin’s not good for——”
He laid his thin, yellow fingers where there was so little left to lay them on.
“There’s my wife and child,” he went on in his matter-of-fact voice; “I’m fair frightened. If I could give up thinking of what’s coming to them, I believe that I’d feel better. But what am I to do? All my savin’s have gone now; I’m selling off my things, an’ when I’m through with that—there we shall be.”
His unlovely little face, with its hard-bitten lips and lashless eyes, quivered all over suddenly, as though within him all his fear had risen up, seized on his features, and set them to a dance of agony; but they were soon still again. Stillness was the only possible condition for a face covering such thoughts as he had had.
“I don’t sleep for thinkin’ of it—that’s against me!”
Yes—that was against him, considering the condition of his health. Any doctor would have told him to sleep well; that sleep, in fact, was quite essential. And I seemed to see him lying on his back, staring at the darkness, with those lashless, red-rimmed eyes, trying to find in its black depths something that was not there—the wan glow of a livelihood of some kind for his wife and child.
“I gets in such a muck o’ sweat, worrying about what’s going to come to them with me like this; it quite exhausts me, it does really. You wouldn’t believe how weak I was!”
And one could not help reminding him that he ought not to worry—it was very bad for him.
“Yes, I know that; I don’t think I can last long at this rate.”
“If you could give up worrying, you would get well much quicker!”
He answered by a look of such humble and unconscious irony as one may see on the faces of the dead before their last wonder at the end has faded from them.
“They tells me up at the hospital to eat well!”
And, looking at this meagre little man, it seemed that the advice was sound. Good food, and plenty of it!
“I’ve been doing the best I can, of course.” He made this statement without sarcasm, in a voice that seemed to say: “This world I live in is, of course, a funny world; the sort of fun it likes may be first-rate, but if I were once to begin to laugh at it, where could I stop—I ask you—where?”
“Plenty of milk they tell me is the best thing I can take, but the child she’s bound to have as much as we can manage to buy. At her age, you see, she needs it. Of course, if I could get a job!—I’d take anything—I’d drive a baker’s cart!”
He lifted his little pipes of arms, and let them fall again, and God knows what he meant by such a motion, unless it were to show his strength.
“Of course, some days,” he said, “I can hardly get my breath at all, and that’s against me.”
It would be, as he said, against him; and, encouraged by a look, he added:
“I know I kep’ on too long with my profession; but you know what it is—when you’ve been brought up to a job you get to depend on it; to give it up is like chuckin’ of yourself away. And that’s what I’ve found—people don’t want such as I am now.”
And for a full half-minute we stood looking at each other; his bitten, discoloured lips twitched twice, and a faint pink warmed the paper whiteness of his cheeks.
“Up at the hospital they don’t seem to take no interest in my case any more; seems as if they thought it ’opeless.”
Unconscious that he had gone beneath the depths of human nature, shown up the human passion for definite success, illustrated human worship of the idol strength, and human scorn for what is weak—he said these simple words in an almost injured tone. Recovery might be impossible, people did not want such as he was now; but he was still interested in himself, still loth to find himself a useless bee ejected from the hive. His lashless eyes seemed saying: “I believe I could get well—I do believe I could!”
Yet he was not unreasonable, for he went on:
“When I first went there they took a lot of interest in me—but that’s a year ago. Perhaps I’ve disappointed them!”
Perhaps he had!
“They kept on telling me to take plenty of fresh air. Where I live, of course, there’s not so very much about, but I take all I can. Not bein’ able to get a job, I’ve been sitting in the Park. I take the child—they tell me not to have her too near me in the house.”
And I had a vision of this man of leisure sitting in the Park, rubbing his hand stealthily to keep them dry, and watching with red eyes the other men of leisure; too preoccupied to wonder even why his leisure was not like theirs.
“Days like this,” he said, “it’s warm enough; but I can’t enjoy them for thinking of what’s coming.”
His glance wandered to the pear-trees in the garden—they were all in blossom, and lighted by the sun; he looked down again a little hastily. A blackbird sang beyond the further wall. The little baker passed his tongue over his lips.
“I’m a countryman by birth,” he said: “it’s like the country here. If I could get a job down in the country I should pick up, perhaps. Last time I was in the country I put on ’alf a stone. But who’d take me?”
Again he raised his little pipes of arms; this time it was clearly not to show his strength. No—he seemed to say: “No one would take me! I have found that out—I have found out all there is to know. I am done for!”
“That’s about where it is,” he said; “and I wouldn’t care so much, but for the baby and my wife. I don’t see what I could ha’ done, other than what I have done. God knows I kept on at it till I couldn’t keep on no longer.”
And as though he knew that he was again near that point when a hundred times he had broken into private agony, seen by no creature but himself, he stared hard at me, and his red moustache bristled over his sunken, indrawn lips.
A pigeon flew across; settling on a tree in the next garden it began to call its mate; and suddenly there came into my mind the memory of a thrush that, some months before, had come to the garden bed where we were standing, and all day long would hide and hop there, avoiding other birds, with its feathers all staring and puffed out. I remembered how it would let us take it up, and the film that kept falling on its eyes, and its sick heart beating so faintly beneath our hands; no bird of all the other birds came near it—knowing that it could no longer peck its living, and was going to die.
One day we could not find it; the next day we found it under a bush, dead.
“I suppose it’s human nature not to take me on, seein’ the state I’m in,” the little baker said. “I don’t want to be a trouble to no one, I’m sure; I’ve always kept myself, ever since I was that high,” he put his hand out level with his waist; “and now I can’t keep myself, let alone the wife and child. It’s the coming to the end of everything—it’s the seeing of it coming. Fear—that’s what it is! But I suppose I’m not the only one.”
And for that moment he seemed comforted by this thought that there were thousands of other working creatures, on whose shoulders sat the grinning cat of mortal illness, all staring with him at utter emptiness—thousands of other working creatures who were dying because fear had made them work too long. His face brightened ever so little, as though the sun had found a way to him. But suddenly that wooden look, the only safe and perfect look, came back to his features. One could have sworn that fear had never touched him, so expressionless, so still was he!