Jib and Zak looked at each other furtively, then each shook his head. They couldn’t lend a hand to help her die. The Vulture knew their thought—these women are full of intuition.
“We’ll call Mas’r Puttick,” she said with inspiration. “And p’r’aps the gentleman would not mind lendin’ a hand.”
She put her own hand to her side and took a short breath, muttering something about not being strong enough to lift.
I said I’d go and fetch Puttick. He was cutting mangels in the field beyond the garden, a couple of cows following him with keen interest on the other side of the hedge. There was a wide border of white pinks to the strawberry bed; the scent was heavy. White pinks, and, on the other side of the path, broad beans in blossom.
Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs; pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.” “T’ old gell” he invariably called her—behind her back—with an indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. He left his work solemnly when I spoke to him. We went to the house. Three of the five cats were looking askance at a saucer of sour milk set in the middle of the strawberry bed—that was “t’ old gell’s” way of scaring birds from her fruit. We went up the rat-eaten oak stairs, Puttick, the Vulture, and I.
There was a characteristic smell about the place: a smell of ancient garments, ropes of onions, apples on the floor of the attic, a smell garnered by closely shut casements.
She was lying gaunt and straight in the bed, with its carved posts, patchwork quilt, and dirty chintz hangings. Her face was yellow, so was her unbleached nightgown, so were her hands with their curved black nails. As we went in she looked round sharply at the door—a curious look; lurid, angry, beseeching.
Puttick muttered, with a thick throat and his old eyes dazed, “T’ old gell, t’ old gell.” It was grim to see her lying there with an idle tongue, with idle hands. No doubt he was feeling drearily that his time must be near too. He had been a virile young man when she had been a child. The world could not go on without old Mis’ Covey of Farthings Farm. She was the world. No one else would keep him on with odd jobs all through the winter. She must be made to live. He said, after a long pause, during which I could see that his aged brain had been working turgidly in an agony of desire to rouse her:
“They blackbirds, dang ’em, was at the white-heart cherries as early as five this mornin’.”
But she did not stir. She only stared from the wall and back again, with the odd, savage stare of entreaty, which none of us could understand.