The Town House Read Online Free PDF

other’s arms.
V
    The next four or five days – that is so long as the food lasted – were the happiest in my whole life. I can look back and see them, set apart, glowing with something more than sunshine. Since then I have never pitied idiots; for during that time Kate and I were touched by idiocy, not set free from the dangers and cares of ordinary living but somehownot properly concerned. It was as though we had ceased to be Kate, daughter of the shepherd, Walter, son of the smith, and become people in some minstrel’s song, walking through the greenwood, loving one another. ‘All for love.’
    The nature of the woods changed; the clear-floored beech trees ended and we came to the thick forest, with undergrowth of hazels, brambles and bracken, all closely woven. Sometimes we could turn aside to seek easier passage, sometimes I had to go ahead, hacking a way through with my knife. Still we moved on, careful to keep the sun upon our left hand until it was high, walking into its eye for an hour and then keeping it upon our right until it sank. We were sparing of our poor provisions, eking them out with blackberries and unripe hazel nuts, with sloes and crab-apples that soured our mouths, but even so we came to an end and were face to face with the eternal problem of the poor, brought back to earth by the question which is for all but the rich the first and the last question – How shall we eat today? We learned, soon enough, that love is a business for those with full bellies. No, maybe there I wrong Kate and through her, all women; I think they care more for love and less for their bellies than men do. She stayed cheerful long after I had begun to fret; she spoke gently and lovingly while my words grew few and sharp from hunger.
    We say, lightly enough, the words ‘starve to death’. Put like that it sounds easy and brief enough, a man ceases to eat and he dies. The truth is that he does not immediately die. Death by starvation has many unpleasant stages. There is the belly pain, as though, within you, some strange animal hungered and lacking other sustenance, gnawed at your vitals with sharp fangs. There is, following the pain, a constant desire to vomit, as though you would turn your empty belly inside out, like a beggar proving his pocket to be coinless. There is a shakiness in the bones, your hands fumble and grow clumsy, your knees give way. There is a ringing in your ears, as though bees hived there.
    As our need to get out of the forest grew greater we made less progress. We were weaker and we were forced to hunt. From the cord I made a rabbit snare and we wasted hours sitting somewhere near, but out of sight, fretting over the loss of time and yet glad enough to have reason for inaction. I caught nothing.
    Kate bore up bravely until we ate the hawthorn berries. They were plump and red and ripe and looked to us, in our hunger, as good as cherries. ‘Birds eat them,’ we told one another; and we ate them, inquantities. They did me no harm at all, but they turned Kate’s bowels to water. Soon she was stumbling along, doubled over with pain and looking so wan that I was frightened. Up to that point we had been careful to make as little of ourselves as possible, but now I began calling as we went forward, cupping my hands to my mouth and uttering loud cries. Wood-cutters, charcoal-burners and gamewardens lived in the forest and now that we were starving the hope of falling in with some man with a heart of Christian charity loomed larger than our fear. Nothing answered me but my own voice, bouncing back from the trees. In all that time we saw nothing but one red deer which flickered away like something seen in a dream.
    We found no more hawthorn berries, but Kate’s infirmity persisted; the time came when she could no longer walk at all, so I carried her; and I did not go straight forward, I took the easiest way. She never weighed much, but now she was variable. I’d pick her up and it was like lifting a