WORLD'S END

He had heard somewhere that when people fainted you dashed cold water in their faces and slapped their hands. He tried the latter, but perhaps didn't put enough energy into it. He looked and saw buildings some distance beyond the wood, and ran toward them and found a row of cottages close together, of the sort which look picturesque in old etchings. They might have been as old as Queen Anne, or as Elizabeth; they had low thatched roofs, small windows, and doorways not quite regular, and so low that even Lanny had to bend his head to enter. He saw a woman in front of them and ran to her, calling that there was a girl lying out there on the ground. The woman was tousle-headed and red-faced, and she said, dully:

"It'll be that Higgs gel, over thurr," and pointed to one of the cottages.

Lanny ran to the place and knocked on the door. It was opened after a while by a woman with straggly hair and only three teeth visible. The English poor, whenever they had a toothache, simply pulled the tooth out; no doubt many a woman who looked like this one had been hanged or burned for a witch. "Aye, it'll be Madge," she said, with no great excitement. She got him some water in a pail, and he went running with it.

By dint of throwing handfuls in the girl's face he got her eyes open by the time the woman arrived. They lifted her to her feet and the woman helped her to the cottage, while Lanny lugged the turnips. Stooping under the doorway, they laid the girl on the bed, which consisted of a mattress stuffed with straw on a board frame. The girl's skin was transparent and looked like wax; she closed her eyes, and Lanny couldn't be sure whether she had fainted again or not.

"Hadn't you better give her something to eat?" he asked; and the reply was: "There's nowt in the house." This bewildered him. "But what do you do?" he demanded, and the woman said, dully: "The man'll bring summat when he comes, belike."

That didn't satisfy this good Samaritan. He wanted to know if there wasn't some place where he could purchase food, and the woman told him where to find a shop. It proved to be a miserable place, with flyspecked peppermints and gumdrops in the window. He bought a loaf of bread, a tin of beans, and a rusty one of salmon, his guess at a balanced diet. When he got back to the cottage he found that there was no tin-opener, and he had to break into the tins with a knife and a block of wood. When he put the food before the girl, she wolfed it like a famished animal, leaving only part of the bread.

Lanny looked about him. He had read a poem called "The Cottar's Saturday Night." He hadn't been quite sure what a "cottar" was, but now he was in the home of one. It didn't bear much resemblance to the poem. A dark-colored clay had been stuffed into chinks of the walls, and the floor was of planks, very old and worn. The fireplace was black with the smoke of ages. There was another bed like the one the girl was lying on, and a table apparently knocked together by amateur hands, and three stools, each with three peg legs. There was also a row of shelves with a few pans and dishes, and some ancient clothing hanging on the walls, and a water bucket on the floor. That was about all.

One place on the floor was wet, and the woman saw Lanny's eyes resting upon it. "It's the roof," said she. "The blurry landlord won't have it fixed." Lanny asked who was the landlord, and the reply was: "Sir Alfred." It gave the boy a start. "Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson?" The woman answered: "Aye, he's the stingy one, he'll do nowt for ye, not if the house was to blow down."

VI

So Lanny had something to think about on his short walk to The Reaches. He wasn't sure if he ought to mention the matter to his hosts, but he decided that they'd be apt to hear about it, and would think it unnatural that he had kept silence. Lanny went to Rick and told him; good old Rick, who never got embarrassed about anything. Rick said: "It's that good-for-nothing old laborer, Higgs. He's a sot that spends every penny he can get his hands on for drink. What can you do for such a family? The pater's been talking of getting rid of him for a long time, and he should have done it." Rick added that he'd tell his father; but he didn't invite Lanny to the conference. Lanny had an uncomfortable feeling, as if he had opened a closed door and a family skeleton had tumbled out.