Chapter 3

That summer old Mrs. Backfield became completely bedridden. The gratefulness of sunshine to her old bones was counteracted by the clammy fogs that streamed up every night round the farm. It was an exceptionally wet and misty summer—a great deal of Reuben's wheat rotted in the ground, and he scarcely took any notice when Tilly announced one morning that grandmother was too ill to come downstairs.

When the struggle on the lower slopes of Boarzell between the damp earth and the determined man had ended in the earth's sludgy victory and a pile of rotten straw which should have been the glory of the man—then Reuben had time to think of what was going on in the house. He sent for the doctor—not Dr. Espinette, but a Cockney successor who boiled his instruments and washed his hands in carbolic—and heard from him that Mrs. Backfield's existence was no longer justified. She could not expect to work again.
 
Reuben was grieved, but not so much grieved as if she had been cut down in her strength—for a long time she had been pretty useless on the farm. He handed her over to the nursing of the girls, though they were too busy to do more for her than the barest necessities. Now and then he went up himself and sat by her bed, restlessly cracking his fingers, and fretting to be out again at his work.

Sometimes Harry would sit by her. He had wandered in one day when she was feeling especially ill and lonely, and in her desperation she had begged him to stay. At all events he was someone—a human being, or very nearly so. He shuffled restlessly round and round the room, fingering her little ornaments and pictures, and muttering to himself, "Stay wud me, Harry."

He liked her room, for she had a dozen things he could finger and play with—little vases with flowers modelled over them, woolly mats, a velvet pincushion, and other survivals of her married life, all very dusty and faded now. Soon she began to find a strange comfort in having him there; the uneasiness and vague repulsion with which he had filled her, died down, and she began to see in him something of the old Harry whom she had loved so much better than Reuben in days gone by.

As the summer wore on she grew steadily worse. She lay stiff and helpless, through the long August days, watching the sunlight creep up the wall, slip along the ceiling, and then vanish into the pale, heat-washed sky that gleamed with it even after the stars had come. She did not fret much, or think much—she watched things. She watched the sunshine from its red kindling to its red scattering, she watched the moon slide across the window, and haunt the mirror after it had passed—or the sign of the Scales dangling in the black sky. Sometimes the things she looked at seemed to fade, and she would see a room in which she and her husband were sitting or a lane along which they were walking ...[Pg 201] but just as she had begun to wonder whether she were not really still young and happy and married and this vision the fact and the sickness and loneliness the dream, then suddenly everything would pass away like smoke, and she would be back in her bed, watching the travelling sun, or the haunting moon, or the hanging stars.

In October a steam-thresher came to Odiam. The wheat had been bad, but there was still plenty of grain to thresh, and for a whole day the machine sobbed and sang under the farmhouse walls—"Urrr-um—Urrr-um—Urrr-um."

Mrs. Backfield lay listening to it. She felt very ill, but everyone was too busy to come to her—Reuben was out in the yard feeding his monster, while the boys gathered up and sacked what it vomited out; Caro and Tilly were washing blankets. Harry had gone off on some trackless errand of his own.

The afternoon was very still and soft. It was full of the smell of apples—of apples warm and sunny on the trees, of apples fallen and rotting in the grass, of apples dry and stored in the loft. There were little apples on the walls of the house, and their skins were warm and bursting in the heat.

The thresher purred and panted under the window—"Urrr-um—Urrr-um." Now and then Reuben would call out sharply, "Now then! mind them genuines—they're mixing wud the seconds!" or "Kip them sacks closed, Beatup." But for most of the afternoon the stillness was broken only by the hum of the machine which sometimes almost seemed a part of it.

Mrs. Backfield according to her custom watched the sun. It bathed the floor at first, but gradually she saw the square of the window paint itself on the wall, and then slide slowly up towards the ceiling. Her eyes mechanically followed it; then suddenly it blazed, filmed, flowed out into a wide spread of light, in the midst of which she saw the kitchen at Odiam as it used[Pg 202] to be, with painted fans on the chimney-piece and pots of flowers on the window-sill. Her husband sat by the fire, smoking his pipe, while Harry was helping her tidy her workbasket.

"There now!" she said to him, "I knew as it really wur a dream."

"Wot?" he asked her, and she, in her dream, felt a spasm of delight, for it was all happening so naturally—it must be true.

"About f?ather being dead, and you being blind, and Ben having the farm."

"Of course it's a dream—f?ather ?un't dead, and I ?un't blind, and Ben's picking nuts over at Puddingcake."

"You couldn't spik to me lik this if it wur a dream, Harry—could you, dear?"

He didn't answer—and then suddenly he turned on her and shouted:

"Sack your chaff, now—can't you sack your chaff?"

"Harry! Harry!" she cried, and came to herself in the little sun-smouldering room, while outside Reuben stormed at his boys to "sack their chaff," and the machine purred and sang—"Urrr-um—Urrr-um."

A sudden terrible lucidity came to Mrs. Backfield.

"It's machines as he wants," she said to herself, "it's machines as he wants...."

Then a gentle darkness stole upon her eyes, as her overworked machine of flesh and blood ran down and throbbed slowly into stillness and peace.

Outside the great fatigueless machine of steel and iron sang on—"Urrr-um—Urrr-um—Urrr-um."