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

darkness. He made efforts to catch it. But these efforts, like all his other struggles, though strenuous, were futile and pathetic, and the ball vanished.
    After this he felt twice his previous misery. Then the strange singing he had always connected withthese attacks began in his head again. And simultaneously with this a warm dribble of moisture ran from his lips.
    He coughed. This was consciousness. Little by little the revolving darkness ceased. A still darkness, in which he remembered what had happened, took its place. Finally he conquered this also, and opening his eyes, saw the fir-tree, the axe, the undergrowth, the dark earth dotted a little way off with primrose leaves and primrose buds.
    He staggered on rising. To him the sunshine was colder and more pitiless than the darkness had been. He suffered pain merely in walking from tree to tree and constantly shivered. Without looking at the half-hewn birch he took up the chopper and then, when out of the copse, let it fall into the grass and did not pick it up again.
    He kept shuddering. The meadows, the green corn-fields, the fallow land and the trees now and then swirled sickeningly, like a roundabout. He felt old and kept asking himself: ‘How old am I? What am I doing?’
    He never answered these questions, even though, like every sensation, the shuddering, the sickness, the fear of death in the wood, they were repeated again and again.
    This was his worst attack. Waiting till Henrietta had gone for some purpose into the orchard he crept into the house and then drank brandy heavily from the bottle in the kitchen. And suddenly withoutwarning he remembered it needed thirteen days to the sale of the land.
    VIII
    Nearly a week passed. Israel went about looking older. Now and then he thought of the sale of his land. Yet still he felt that the worst might not come. Nevertheless he caught himself unconsciously looking forward to the date of the sale, and his feeling of being a man set apart to await a fixed event remained with him. He began to feel older.
    Yet every day he rose as usual, did his milking, feeding and cleaning, and then went into the fields. In the fields he rolled his young wheat, planted potatoes, drilled roots and bush-harrowed his grass. All these things he tried to do consistently and well. At the same time he did them without spirit, did them badly, and yet did not know he was doing them badly.
    One morning Henrietta implored him: ‘Go and get the pole for the hen-roof. It’ll fall down. There’ll be such a mess.’ She looked at him with a trace of weariness. ‘How many times have I asked you? Do go.’
    â€˜I’ll go.’
    But he did not go. He did not even trouble to look for the axe in the grass.
    A succession of warm spring days came. The grass even steamed faintly in the sunshine. Israel heard the cuckoo, at first rarely, then every day, and in theafternoons the walls of the house grew quite hot and glaring. The cherry-trees began to come into blossom, and by the time the cherry petals had begun to fall, the pear-trees and apple-trees were in full bloom.
    And the thought began to grow in Israel’s mind: ‘Now the warm days have come I shan’t have these attacks. I shall be all right.’
    For a week there was no attack. Then one morning after he had been working at the fallen tree in the orchard there was a terrible one.
    He was in the kitchen. Darkness enveloped him completely, he reeled and staggered. The sound of this brought in Henrietta. There was a confused flutter of skirts and the words: ‘What has happened? what has happened?’
    He was sitting huddled in a chair. In the heart of that terrible and ghastly darkness he made no answer.
    She began to run hither and thither, bringing first water, then towels, then climbing to the cupboard for the brandy bottle. All the time she kept murmuring to herself: ‘I told him how it would be, I told him!’
    The brandy bottle was empty.