The Man Within Read Online Free PDF Page B

at intervals in a dreary whine was unknown to him and meant nothing more to him than the sudden sight of a bearded face and the dart of a falling golden star.
    The girl – Elizabeth – his sister (it was hard to remember that she was his sister) had remained silent in the midst of a swiftly running current of voices. When the undertaker’s man had turned down the lid of the coffin there had been a little scurry of strange womenfolk to catch a last glimpse of the ‘deceased’. Then she had shown her one sign of feeling. She had turned to face them as though she would push them back and her mouth had twisted into an angry word which she did not speak. Then she gave a small gesture with her fingers addressed to herself. She stood aside and the undertaker’s man shut the coffin lid, casually as a man shuts a book. There was no air of finality about it, even when he drove in the nails. Andrews saw a little group of women whispering in a corner. They looked and whispered, and fear momentarily pierced his unconsciousness. He looked round him and imagined all faces turned towards him. The men disappointed of beer had nothing to do but talk and look curiously at the interior of the cottage, which they had never before entered. The women sniggered a little among themselves at the bareness and poked furtively at a chair here and a table there and made comments under their breath. Andrews thought that they were speaking of him. The men shuffled uneasily and stood massed together and fidgeted with their feet. They were annoyed with their wives for having brought them where there was no refreshment. Most of them had small farms and there was plenty of work they might have been doing. For want of other employment they looked cornerwise and carefully at the girl. They had seen her about many a time in the lanes but had been afraid to speak to her. There had been rumours – that she had been the dead man’s mistress, his natural child, a dozen contradictory tales, which united to put her outside the pale of ‘Good day’, comments on the weather or the crops, or even a nod of the head. Now death made her approachable and a little envied. They spoke of her slyly to each other in whispers, not so much to keep their comments from her as to keep them from their wives, comments on her appearance, on her potentialities as a bed-fellow, on the fun she may have afforded to the man now dead. Andrews thought that they spoke of him.
    With an effort he pulled his will erect. He saw himself standing on one side, an obvious stranger, uninterested and apart. He called ‘Elizabeth’ with forced ease across the room. He had vague ideas of convincing them that he was her brother. She paid no attention, and he could think of no more to say. His will subsided slackly. (‘For I am a stranger with thee; and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’)
    Standing there in a misty graveyard beside the dark Elizabeth, Andrews felt his first flash of sympathy towards his father. Once his father had visited him at school. Andrews was in the gravel playground. It was in the interval between two lessons and he was hastily revising some Latin grammar. He had looked up and stared with amazement at the unexpected sight of his father, a tall, heavy man with a big beard clumsily dressed, crossing the gravel with the headmaster. The headmaster was small, quick and neat with birdlike motions. His father was shy, embarrassed, conscious suddenly of his own coarse bulk. He had said, ‘I was passing through and thought I’d come and see you.’ He stopped, not knowing how to continue and stood shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Happy?’ he asked. Andrews had the instinctive cruelty of a child. He remembered his father at home, domineering, brutal, a conscious master, not chary of his blows to either child or wife. ‘Very,’ he said. His voice filled with artificial pleasure and he pronounced his words with artificial neatness. ‘We are doing Horace this term,