Day's End and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

alone, set apart, simply to await the climax of a certain destiny.
    VII
    It was morning. Israel had done the usual things: lighted a fire, milked his cow and turned her out to graze, unbolted the hens and fed his three sows. At breakfast Henrietta, as if nothing unusual had happened, said:
    â€˜I’ve told you already – get a pole and prop the roof of the hen-house up. Any day it might fall down.’
    He only nodded and afterwards went to the henhouse just to see if the corrugated iron roof had sunken. He found it very low. Then he remembered it had happened in the snow-storm and that Henrietta had been telling him of it ever since.
    When he started for the copse a little later sunshine flooded everything, the ground was soft and springy, and all over the hill dandelions, celandines and daisies were looking at the sun with tiny yellow and white eyes. When nearly half-way up the hill, he remembered his axe and had to return for it.
    Going back he hurried more than usual and broke into a sweat. In the copse, while looking for a young sapling to cut down, he suddenly felt tired and sat down on a fallen trunk. Through the trees he watched the river coiling through the meadows, the bluish smoke curling over the village, his white house among the trees. As he sat there Henrietta appeared, hung out some washing in the orchard and thenvanished. In an odd way he recognised his shirt on the line. And at this he was filled with a strange pleasure and began smiling to himself.
    Soon afterwards he got to his feet and began to look once again for a sapling. There were saplings of ash, beech, elm and fir in the copse. Now and then he stopped and shook one. Frightened by the noise blackbirds would charge out and, screeching, vanish into undergrowth again.
    In the heart of the copse Israel came suddenly on a tall young fir-tree, standing alone. The air was still but this tree swayed its head lightly and proudly. Some trees, like the hawthorn and elm, were already in leaf. The blackthorn was still in blossom. The rest of the copse seemed asleep. But this tree seemed neither waking nor sleeping.
    Israel ran a hand up its trunk and calculated its height. It was tall but the trunk was slender and strong and of the right thickness. He laid down the axe, took off his coat, and picked up the axe again, and stood looking at the tree.
    Then suddenly he dropped the axe, clutched at his heart and grew pale. All this happened suddenly, as if he were trying to seize something before it seized him. But from his pallor, his shrunken features, his difficult breathing and doubled body it was plain it had come too swiftly. He sank to his knees, lay half on his side and clutched himself strongly. But his strength seemed to do nothing but squeeze out of him a deathly perspiration. Yet he kept up thisclutching, as though to wring himself dry, and sank all the time lower and lower.
    There suddenly crossed his mind the thought: ‘I shall never get up again.’
    He struggled to get up. He was like the weight at the end of a stick. Again he thought: ‘I shall never get up, I shall never get up.’ His struggles became desperate. All of a sudden he ceased struggling, fell, and lay stretched on the ground.
    Some time passed. The fir-tree, the birds and all the trees kept still. On the dark, loamy earth Israel’s head rolled gently to and fro like a ball of paper in a wind, then became still too.
    The thought that he would not rise again became separated from him by a chasm of blackness. This blackness revolved and in revolving blew upon him draughts of a ghastly dampness. And the purpose of all his struggles, mental or otherwise, became only to avoid or stop this. Nothing else was visible, audible or sensible to him.
    Once the thought raced by: ‘What if I do die here? Does anyone know where I have come? Would they find me?’
    At this thought, for no reason at all, a red ball he used to play with as a child rolled past in the