The Death of Grass

THIRTEEN

Into this room he had come with David, side by side, their fingers locked together to calm each other’s fear and uncertainty before the mystery of death, to see the corpse of Grandfather Beverley. The room had changed very little in a score of years. David had never had any desire to modernize his surroundings.

Ann said: “Darling, I’m sorry—for what I said last night.” He did not answer. “It is going to be different now. You were right.”

And in the afternoon of that far-away day, the solicitor had come up from Lepeton, and there had been the reading of the will, and David’s embarrassment and guilt when they learned that all had been left to him—money as well as land, because a good farmer will never, if he can help it, separate the two. Well, he thought, I got it in the end.

“It’s not your fault,” Ann said. “You mustn’t think it is.”

His mother had said: “You don’t feel badly about it, do you, darling? It doesn’t mean that Grandfather didn’t like you, you know. He was very fond of you. He told me all about this. He knew David wanted to be a farmer, and that you didn’t. It means that all my money goes to you—all that your father left. You will be able to have the very best training an engineer could have. You do see that, don’t you?”

He had said yes, more bewildered by his mother’s seriousness than anything else. He had always expected that Blind Gill would go to David; neither property nor money counted for anything against his one overwhelming feeling of distaste, repugnance, for the fact and presence of his grandfather’s death. Now that the funeral was over and the blinds had gone up again, he wanted only to forget that grimness and shadow.

“You will have quite enough, darling,” his mother had said. He had nodded impatiently, eager to be free of this conversation which was a last link with the unpleasantness of death. He took as little note of the urgency of his mother’s tone as he had done of her increasing pallor and thinness in the past year. He did not know, as she did, that her own life had only a short time to run.

“Johnny,” Ann said. She came and put her hands on his shoulders. “You must snap out of it.”

And after that, he thought, the holidays with aunts, and his comradeship with David, all the deeper for their shared isolation. Had there been, beneath all that, a resentment of what his brother had—a hatred concealed even from himself? He could not believe it, but the thought nagged him and would not be quieted.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” Ann said. “The children can grow up here in peace, even if the world is in ruins. Davey will farm the valley land.” She glanced at the body lying on the bed. “David wanted that more than anything.”

John spoke then. “He’ll do more than farm it, won’t he? He will own it It’s a nice bit of land. Not as much as Cain^{144} left to Enoch^{145}, though.”

“You mustn’t talk like that And it wasn’t you who killed him—it was Pirrie.”

“Was it? I don’t know. We’ll blame Pirrie, shall we? And Pirrie is gone, washed away with the river, and so the land flows with milk and honey^{146} again, and with innocence. Is that all right?”

“John! It was Pirrie.”

He looked at her, “Pirrie gave me his gun—he must have known, then, that he was finished. And when I saw that he had gone under, I thought of throwing it after him—that was the gun which brought us here to the valley, killing its way across England. I could have got to the shore more easily without it, and I was deadly tired. But I hung on to it.”

“You can still throw it away,” she said. “You don’t have to keep it.”

“No. Pirrie was right. You don’t throw away a good weapon.” He looked at the rifle, resting against the dressing-table. “It will be Davey’s, when he is old enough.”

She shrank a little. “No! He won’t need it. It will be peace then.”

“Enoch was a man of peace,” John said. “He lived in the city which his father built for him. But he kept his father’s dagger in his belt.”

He went to the bed, bent down, and kissed his brother’s face.

He had kissed another dead face only a few days before, but centuries lay between the two salutations. As he turned away towards the door, Ann asked:

“Where are you going?”

“There’s a lot to do,” he said. “A city to be built.”