Men of Marlowe's

by Mrs. Henry Dudeney

The doctor came—a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap. He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed. Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for her to go. Her world—of forty acres or so—was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood—metallic finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many generations of birds.

Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in syrup.

Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his thought—that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had roughly rigged up for the haymakers—but who was to get the men’s tea? The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.

Jib and Zak, so much alike, with eyes and mouths twisted in consequence of life-long opposition to the glare of the sun, came into the parlor where I sat reading the local paper. They had been clumping hopelessly about in the garden. I had watched them, finding them more interesting than the price of store pigs and the sale of underwood. They had looked out wistfully at the eight-acre field, half lush, half shorn. They had looked up at Mrs. Covey’s window—a tiny window, set high in the brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral suggestion of a limp calico curtain.

We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less—work in the fields and so many children make them old long before that—sidled up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn! Zak had run to her cottage and fetched her directly his mother fell. She was always called to deathbeds. She gave a sidelong look at me and courtesied with charming grace; some of these rustic women are queens of grace. Then she spoke to the brothers, the greedy look of a vulture creeping into her violet eyes.

“I’m jest slipping home now to look after my lodger. There’s no change in her. She won’t go, bless your hearts, for pretty nigh twenty-four hour. I’ll look round after tea agen; no doubt you’ll make it worth my while.”

For nearly a week it went on; the hot, breathless days, bees buzzing in the big lime by the gate; at dusk the ringing, rattling croak of frogs in the pond, the weird voice of the night-jar. Jimmy grew more fretful. He complained that he could not sleep for the cursed nightingale. He wanted to go home; back to the Inn, to the boys, to the halls, the bars, the evening papers. He had run out of tobacco—they only sold shag at the village shop. He took my last packet of cigarette papers. But I wanted to stay—for the end, which we all knew must come before another Sunday. That window, high in the eaves, rigorously shut and curtained, fascinated me.

On the fifth day things were just as they had been on the first, each day of that week was a replica. Jib, Zak, and I were in the parlor, the local paper was more crumpled, the flowers on the window ledge drooped. Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.

“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.

“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death—but her time’s come, poor love. Help lift her. Lay her on the floor; she’ll go soon and easy then.”