FEAR
V
Fear
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.