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.This was the Bush household.In the days and weeks that followed, Bush came to know his namesakes well.He learned their names slowly.The expectant mother, who ran the shop, was Amy, as the sign in her window declared.When the old grandmother hobbled down the hill to the post office, Bush read from her pension book that her name was Alice Bush, Widow.When his namesake stood in the dole queue and thrust his cards through a window for stamping, the ghostly Bush peering through his shoulder discovered that this was Herbert William Bush.The girl’s name was Joan.The two older boys were Derek and Tommy.Bush never discovered the youngest child’s name.He soon found that the village was called Breedale.A Darlington newspaper, blowing fitfully downhill in the wind gave him the date: March 1930.He had mind-traveled to within 163 years of the time he found it convenient to refer to as “the present.” Here he would be unlikely to find Silverstone; equally, he would never be found by any Gleason agents, should they come looking for him.So there was safety here, but he wondered again at what sort of direction-finding device had brought him here.It was the aspect of mind-travel that most baffled him; something equivalent to the migratory instinct in birds had delivered him to 1930, and he had yet to fathom its function.The over-riding preoccupation of his mind was neither this purpose nor his safety, but something to which it reverted continually without Bush’s being able to contain it.This preoccupation was like an eddy in a stream, to which everything passing by is attracted and eventually becomes trapped there.Whatever he thought, whatever scene in Breedale he mingled with, his attention was drawn back to the brutal way in which he had beaten Lenny up with the golf clubs.That white room in the barracks was always with him.He saw the high blind window, heard the thud-crack as his iron connected with the rib cage, felt the impact of Lenny’s heel on his shin as the tersher rolled over in agony, saw the blood souse over the floor.He recalled the over-heated look on Stanhope’s face, as well as the look of disdain on Howes’ as the latter left him at the door of the torture room.He knew he was degraded; although he had never thought in theological terms, he saw himself being in a state of sin.Breedale was self-exile.This state remained with him over the ensuing weeks like a dirty taste in the mouth.He would have been an outcast in Breedale because of it, even had he not been isolated behind the entropy barrier.He made no attempt to redeem himself from his own beastliness.It was like a tangible thing.He could carry it about like a hump and be satisfied that it was a burden.What he had done had been the worst act of his life – and he preferred, in his present self-condemnatory mood, to regard it as the climax of his life rather than an aberration following his bout of military training – as something that really deserved the day of exile in the garden, when the red-hot pokers had overtopped him and his mother had proved she did not love him.That punishment fitted this crime.Typical that they should be reversed in order, as if he symbolically lived his life backwards, muddled in spirit from start to finish! In his tent in the 1930 garden, he sometimes tried to weep; but a sense that to offer any token of softness would be spurious in someone who so gladly had beaten up his victim checked the tears, leaving his eyes dry and hard like a window pane.In front of that pane, the inhabitants of Breedale performed their own individual dramas.He thought it as well he could see only the outside of them.For some while, in an incurious way, Bush was baffled to know what the people did by way of a living; they seemed as much divorced from reality as he was.He drew out his answer like the dole, by bits.Only after he had mooned about the village for several days did he realize the function of the grim collection of buildings on the other side of the railway lines.It was a revelation to realize that this was a coal mine.In his own day, coal mines still operated in various corners of the world, but they bore little superficial resemblance to this crude site.A path wound behind the mine.One day when the spring came, Bush followed young Joan along it.She had a boy with her, a youngster almost as pale as she, who held her hand when they were out of sight of the railway station.They walked past the gaunt and silent mine, in which no one left or came, and a few sparrows round the pithead quarreled over the shortage of nesting materials.The path led to a river; the scenery became beautiful.Trees grew here, putting out their greenest leaves; one hung over a stone bridge, a grey bridge that carried the path across the river to fairer banks beyond.Here Joan suffered her boy to kiss her.They remained for a moment in time, staring with hope and love into each other’s eyes.Bush thought with longing hunger of the Permian, where the early amphibians crawled about like wounded things, so free from the love and hope and hurt that clogged human centuries.Overcome with shyness at their daring, the boy and girl walked on.They spoke with some animation; their observer was pleased he did not hear what they said.The path led to a stone wall and meandered along beside it.Joan and the boy stopped here, leaning on the wall and smiling at each other.After five minutes, they turned back the way they had come.Bush remained where he was; he did not wish to see them kiss again, as if kisses were golden pledges.He was, after all, at an age when the certainties of youth had left him.He looked over the stone wall at a fine house set amid park and garden, well situated in the valley.The wall had stood for so long that he had to climb it to get into the grounds.He walked through ample and well-tended vegetable gardens, and arrived at the rear of the house.So he came to the local manor, and discovered the Winslade family which, at this period of its history, was almost as subdued in its manner as the inhabitants of the village.Wandering like a phantom about their grandly appointed house, he gradually realized that they owned the mine.The knowledge affronted his common sense, since he was badly read in human history and could not understand how one man or family could possess such a natural product of the Earth as coal.The days fell away.Bedeviled by his own guilt, Bush was slow to realize that the whole neighborhood was crippled by a strike of long-standing.The rust on the padlock of the main gate of the mine was a symbol of the general paralysis.Although life moved, making more pronounced the bulge under Amy Bush’s apron and softening the winds across the moors, the affairs of men were at a complete standstill.Now Bush thought he knew why he had arrived here; it was a case of empathy.He settled in the garden behind the grocer’s, living frugally on his food concentrates, and the weeds grew high, unhindered by the shadowy substance of his tent.The grocer’s shop was well situated for custom.Neighbors from the stone-built houses came here, while it attracted the custom of all the flimsier houses over the ridge above it, whose occupants preferred not to bother to walk down to the larger shop near the pub at the foot of the hill.But there was little custom now; the customers were increasingly short of money as the strike dragged on, and the Bushes were more and more unable to extend credit; they had to pay their wholesalers.Bush understood that Herbert was a miner in better times; Amy ran the shop on her own.When he first came on Herbert, the man went cheerily into the shop, helped clean it, whiled away long strike hours talking to his wife’s customers.In a few weeks, however, the customers became less talkative and clearly vexed at being allowed to have nothing on account.Herbert began to smile less, and took to staying away from the shop [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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