AMY FOSTER (part 2)

11


‘He was a mountaineer of appalling memory, he came from the eastern ranges of the Carpathians, and the vessel that had sunk the night before in the bay was an emigrant-ship from Hamburg on its way to America.
A few months later we read in the papers the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies' among the Slovenian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of these poor ignorant people's homesteads and land they had in league with a scattering of local’s to help them. They exported their victims to America through Hamburg mostly.
As for the state of the ships used, I can only tell you about this particular one as I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close, hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart just off the left of the Coastguard station.
I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood out dark and worn on a background of threatening slate grey clouds. During that evening the wind got up even worse by midnight I could hear, while laying in my bed, the horrendous gusts of the wind and the sounds of the driving deluge of the rain.
About that same time the Coastguards thought they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-ground. Just as suddenly it had vanished. But it is clear that another vessel of some sort trying to find shelter in the bay on that awful, stormy night, had rammed the German ship amidships, a breach as one of the divers told me afterwards that you could sail a Thames barge through. The vessel that had rammed the German ship must have then gone out either without a scratch or damaged, who shall say.
In whatever state remains unknown but it left the bay unseen, more than likely to perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
Completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterized this murderous disaster, which as you may remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The Hamburg ship would have filled with water almost immediately capsizing as she sank. At daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water.
She was missed of course, and at first the Coastguard surmised that she had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been blown back out to sea. Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies. A child’s body, a little fair-haired girl in a red frock was washed ashore to the east of the coastguards cottage.
By mid afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam and rough-looking men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried stiff and dripping on stretchers on anything that would carry them even ladders, in a long procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Village Church.’


12


‘Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock was the first thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the seafaring population who unofficially tell a different story. I was led to believe by them that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after their nets hauled up on the beach, found a good way from the village an ordinary ship's hen coop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hen coop was split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible and I surmise that a man who happened to have been on deck at the time of the accident might have floated ashore on that hen coop. Might he not?
I admit it is improbable, but then there was the stranger, for days, no for weeks it didn't enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt better, after the ship had anchored, I presume. The darkness, the wind and the rain would have taken his breath away. We must assume also that he had been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn't forget he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea sick and battened down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening to him.
The rain, the wind and the darkness he knew, he also understood the bleating of the sheep. With heartbroken astonishment he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery, wounded that his plight was neither seen nor understood. His dismay at finding all the men so angry and all the women scared cut to the very core of his being. He had approached them as a beggar it is true, he told us later, but in his country they spoke gently to beggars even if they gave nothing.
The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion. Smith's strategy overcame him completely. The woodshed represented the horrible aspect of a dungeon. What would be done to him next? No wonder than that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes to be like an angel of light.


The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door of the woodshed ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread, 'such bread as the rich eat in my country,' he told us much later.’


13


‘Suspiciously he slowly and stiffly uncoiled himself from amongst the rubbish he had been laying in. He trembled with hunger and fear, feeling totally miserable, and in great doubt about his future.
“Can you eat this?” Amy asked in her soft and timid voice. He surely must have taken her for a great and gracious lady. He devoured the offered bread ferociously while his tears fell on the crust. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a kiss on her hand. For whatever reason Amy was not frightened, through his forlorn bedraggled condition she had seen the real him seen the beauty under the dirt. Smiling down at him she handed him a big mug of milk then shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen. Later that evening she told Mrs. Smith, who shuddered at the mere thought of being touched by that creature.

Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. It was an experience he never forgot, never.
That very same morning old Mr. Hastings the Smith's nearest neighbour, came over to give his advice, and ended by taking our stranger off with him. He stood, unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked from head to toe in half-dried mud, while the two men Hastings and Smith talked around him in a language he was unable to comprehend. Mrs. Smith had refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises and Amy Foster, from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door. He obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability.
But Smith was full of mistrust. “Mind yourself now, sir! It may be all his cunning,” he cried repeatedly in warning tones. When Mr. Hastings started the mare at a gentle walk the deplorable being sitting humbly by his side on the buggy, through weakness, nearly fell out over the back. Hastings took him straight to his home it is there that I come upon the scene.
I happened to be driving past that day and was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to me with his forefinger. He stood by the picket fence surrounding his small but very neat house. I got down, of course and walked over to him.
“I've got something here I wish you to look at for me,” he mumbled, leading the way to an outhouse a short distance from the house and his other farm-buildings.
It was there that I first saw him, he was lying on his back on a straw pallet, they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder of his strength in the exertion of trying to cleaning himself. He was

almost speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild animal caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Hastings stood silently by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine but before leaving I naturally made some inquiries as to who the man was and where he had come from.


14


‘Smith caught him in the Haystack at New Barns,’ said the old chap in his deliberate, abrupt manner, as if our stranger had indeed been a sort of wild animal. ‘That's how I came by him, quite a curiosity, isn't he? Now tell me doctor, you've been all over the world, don't you think that he may be a Hindu that we've got hold of here.’
‘Surprised at this observation I took another look at my new patient. His long black hair scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque. It didn't necessarily follow that he should understand Spanish but I tried him with the few words I know. He did not seem to understand I unsuccessfully tried some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly.
That afternoon two young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years) came to see Miss Hastings. They reluctantly tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated swiftly scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them.
Confused they admitted that though the sound of his language was pleasant, soft and musical and but in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling. It sounded so excitable and so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard.
The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Hastings was going to do with him.
He simply kept him.
Hastings would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. Everyone who knew him will tell you that Hastings is the type of man who was used to sitting up late at night to read books. His door would be always be open to anyone in need of his help or advise they will tell you also that he has been known to write a check for an undisclosed amount without thinking twice about it and handed it quietly to a deserving person.
He himself would tell you that the Hastings had owned land around these parts for over three hundred years. He must be at least eighty-five today, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep but deals extensively in cattle. He still attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat and with a green plaid rug round his legs.
The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-shaved, his lips thin and sensitive something rigid and monachal in the set of his

features lends a certain elevation to the character of his face. He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody's garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls outlandish.
Perhaps it was that very outlandishness of our stranger or was it only an inexplicable caprice that influenced old Hastings. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of our stranger digging in Hastings kitchen garden. They had found out he could use a spade. He dug barefooted.’





15


‘His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Hastings who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he still wore the national brown cloth trousers in which he had been washed ashore fitting to his legs almost like tights. To hold them up he wore a broad leather belt studded with little brass discs.
The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a landowner's house the size of the horses struck him with astonishment. The roads resembled garden walks and the aspect of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence to him.
He wondered sadly what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He received his food at the back door, carried it in both hands ever so carefully to his little bungalow and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he slept.
Whenever he saw old Hastings he would bow with veneration from the waist and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Hastings, who frugally kept house for her father. Mandy Hastings is a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five she always wore dresses with big pockets that held the many keys from locked doors around the property. Both her and her father were church going people belonging to the local Baptist church.
Mandy Hastings always dressed severely in black, with a big silver cross around her waist, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradley’s of the area to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago. He was a young farmer who after three years of being engaged broke his neck when he was out hunting on the eve of their wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf and spoke very seldom. Her lips, thin like her father's, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.
These were the people to whom he owed allegiance and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sunshine. All the faces around him were sad. He could talk to no one and almost gave up hope of ever understanding anybody.

I often wondered why he did not go insane during that time.
He had no idea where he was all he knew was that he was somewhere very far away from his mountains, somewhere over the water. Was this America, he wondered?’


16


‘If it hadn't been for the steel cross at Mandy Hastings belt he would not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted.
There was nothing the same here as in his country! The water and the very earth were different. There were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside. The grass was different and the trees, all except for the three old Norway pines on the small lawn in front of Hastings house, those reminded him of his country.
He had been spotted once, after dusk, with his forehead against the trunk of one of them softly sobbing and talking to himself. They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed, everything else was strange. Can you imagine the kind of an existence he had, overshadowed and oppressed by the everyday material appearances, as if he was living in a horror nightmare?
At night, when he could not sleep, he thought of the girl who had given him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed with knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living.
I wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from ending it all. But there! I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life, which takes all the strength of an uncommon despair to overcome.
He did the work that was given him with an intelligence that surprised old Hastings. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help with the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up the odd word here and there as well and fast.
One fine morning in spring while he was about his work, was only just in time to rescue a grandchild of old Hastings from an untimely death.
Hastings younger daughter married to Andrew Moorsen, the solicitor and village clerk. Regularly, twice a year, they come to stay with the old man for a few days.
Their only child, a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone dressed in her little white pinafore toddled across the grass of the terraced garden scrambled herself over a low wall head first into the water trough in the yard below.’


17



‘Our man was out with the wagon and the plough in the field nearest to the house and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh furrow he saw, through the gap of the gate, what seemed a mere flutter of something white. Leaving the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible disgust of the wagon, he bounded off, bare footed over the ploughed ground in long leaps and before anyone had any idea what had happened he appeared before the mother, thrust the crying child into her arms, and strode away.
The pond was not very deep but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have perished, suffocating in the foot or so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Hastings walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, looked the man up and down then without saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table even though at first Miss Hastings would come and stand in the doorway of the living room to see him make the sign of the cross before he started eating. I believe it was from that day too that Hastings began to pay him regular wages.
I can't follow step by step his development but over the next weeks he had his hair cut short and was seen in the village and along the road going to and from his work like any other man. Children ceased to shout after and hassle him.
He became aware of social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He also couldn't understand why they were kept shut up on weekdays after all there was nothing to steal in them, and who would do that anyway. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion.
They could not however break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer, in incomprehensible words. He recited it in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, every evening of his life.
All though he wore corduroys at work, and a hand made suit on Sundays, strangers would turn around to look after him as he passed them by on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. People were starting to get used to seeing him, but they never quite became used to him. His rapid skimming walk, his swarthy complexion or the way he wore his hat cocked on the left ear.
His habit on warm evenings of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman. All these peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and offense to the inhabitants of the village. They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields singing dismal tunes. Many times I heard his high-pitched voice from behind the ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, his voice light and soaring like a lark's, but with a melancholy that defied reason. It startled me as well as anyone else who heard him.
Ah! He was different, innocent of heart and full of good will, which nobody wanted. This castaway who, like a man transplanted onto another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

His quick, fervent utterance positively shocked everybody. “An excitable devil,” they called him. One evening, in the main bar of the Coach and Horse Inn, having had a number of whiskeys, he upset them all by singing a love song from his homeland. They hooted him down and he was visibly pained but Preble, the lame wheelwright, and Vincent the fat blacksmith, to mention just a few wanted to drink their evening beer in peace.
On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor, he leaped straight up amongst the tables struck his heels together, squatted on one heel in front of old Preble while shooting out the other leg straight in front of him, uttering wild and exulting cries. Suddenly he would jumped up to whirl on one foot, snapping his fingers above his head, a strange carter who was having a drink in there began to swear, and cleared off outside still with his half-pint in his hand. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn't want any “acrobat tricks in the bar.”
They laid their hands on him. Trying to drag him down off the tables but having had a glass or two, Hastings foreigner tried to expostulate he was ejected forcibly from the bar receiving a black eye in the process.’


18


‘I believe he felt the hostility of his new surroundings, but he was tough, tough in spirit as well as in body. The only thing that still haunted him was the memory of the sea, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream. His home was far away and he did not now have any desire to go on to America.
I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready just to be picked up without trouble, a lot of hard work and heartache. I told him that most men digging for gold left their families and homes died penniless never to return to their families.
“How then?” He’d asked me, could he ever return home with empty hands when they had sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his journey? His eyes would fill with tears and averting them from the immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the grass.
But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold in Amy Foster's heart. “A heart which was a golden heart and soft to people's misery,” he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.
He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer or what sounded sounding in the dialect of his country like Goral to us, that’s how he came to get his surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands, Yanko Goral, in the rector's own handwriting. The crooked cross made by the castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.

His courtship had lasted some time, ever since he got his precarious footing in the community. It began by his buying a green satin ribbon for Amy Foster’s hair. This is how the courting was done back in his country. You bought a ribbon usually at a Jew's stall on a market day and only after gaining the permission of the girl’s father would you hand her the ribbon. I don't suppose Amy really knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable intentions could not be mistaken and because she had accepted the ribbon she had made him a promise of betrothal.
It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons, how shall I say odious he was to all and sundry in the area.
Every old woman in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near his farm, promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
Smith however told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand she would even leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence and run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing.
She said nothing at all to anybody and went on her way as if she had been deaf. She and I were the only ones it seems that could see his very real beauty see the man for what he was. He was indeed very good-looking and most graceful in his bearing, with a hint of something wild as of a woodland creature.
Her mother ranted and raved to her dismally whenever the girl came to see her on her day off. Her father was surly, pretending not to have anything to do with it at all. Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that 'this man, my dear will do you some harm some day you heed my words.'
And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery consisting of her grey dress, black feather, stout boots and prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away. He, with his coat slung picturesquely over one shoulder, pacing by her side gallant of bearing and casting tender glances upon the girl with the golden heart.
I wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever seen, he had not the power to judge or perhaps he was seduced by the divine quality of her pity.’


19


‘Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you acquire the aid an old man as a go between in the arrangements of a marriage. He did not know where to go or how to proceed. He had been promoted to second in charge, of the sheep, under Foster. One day in the middle of tending to the sheep in a field he took off his hat to the father and declared himself humbly. “I daresay she's fool enough to marry you at.” Having said that he gave Yanko a look of pure hate almost as if he wanted

to cut his throat whistles the dogs and goes off leaving Yanko to do the remaining work for the day.
The Fosters of course, didn't like to lose the wages the girl earned Amy was used to giving all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster also a very genuine aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a damn fool and anyone knows these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes you just cant trust them.
Perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere or sometime in the future just take off himself. It was just not safe he preached to his daughter why the man might ill-use her in some horrible way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was quite an excitement, and the two went on stepping out together in the face of all opposition.
Then something unexpected happened.
I don't know whether old Hastings ever understood how much he was regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the relationship was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an interview with him and the Miss too, (he always called the severe and deaf Miss Hastings simply Miss) it was to obtain their permission to marry. Hastings heard him out unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the intelligence into his daughters best ear. She showed no surprise and only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, “he certainly won't get any other girl to marry him.”
It is Miss Hastings who has all the credit of the munificence but only a very few days later it came known that if was old Hastings himself had presented Yanko with a cottage, the very cottage you've seen this morning and something like an acre of ground to go with it. It had all been signed over and made legal by the Hastings solicitor Wilcox. I remember him telling me how it had given him great pleasure in making it ready. It recited: In consideration of saving the life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Wilcox.
Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting married. Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the evening. She could be seen staring with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where he was expected to appear. Walking freely, with a swing from the hip, and humming one of the love tunes of his country he would casually walk towards her and as he drew near she would simply fall into step with him.’




20


‘When the boy was born, he once again drank a few at the Coach and Horses and once again broke out into song and dance and was again ejected.
People expressed their commiseration for any woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care and nor did she. There was a man now (he told me boastfully)

to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
But I don't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt but it seems to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
One day I met him on the footpath in the village. He told me that women were strange creatures. I had already heard of the domestic trouble between them. People were saying that Amy was beginning to find out what sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child back in his own country.
I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he said. And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she had a good heart. She not hard, not fierce but open to compassion and charitable to the poor!’


21


‘I walked away thoughtfully wondering whether his difference, his strangeness had begun to upset the delicate balance of their love for each other.
The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
‘Physiologically,’ he said, turning away abruptly, ‘it is possible. It is very possible.’
Kennedy remained silent for some time then went on…
‘at any rate, the next time I saw him he was very ill lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not acclimatized as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter and of course, no matter how tough you are we all have fits of homesickness when we are far away. A state of depression will make anyone vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a downstairs couch.
A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting steam on the stove, and some child's linen hung drying on a small rack. The room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.
He was very feverish and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred eyes.
I asked her why she didn’t have in a bed upstairs and with a start and a confused stammer she said, “Oh! No! I couldn't sit with him upstairs Sir.”
I gave her certain directions and going outside, I said again that he ought to be in

bed upstairs. She wrung her hands.
“I couldn't. I just couldn't. He keeps on saying things, I don't know what.”
With the memory of all the talk against the man that had been planted into her head I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her short-sighted eyes, at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape but seemed staring at me now to see nothing at all. But I saw she was uneasy.
"What's the matter with him?” she asked in a sort of vacant trepidation. “He doesn't look very ill. I never did see anybody look like this before...”
'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, ' that he is shamming?'



22


‘I can't help it, sir,’ she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped her hands and looked right and left. ‘Then there's the baby, I am so frightened, he wanted me now just to give him the baby. I can't understand what he says to the boy.’
‘Can't you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?’ I asked her.
‘Please Sir, nobody seems to care to come to this house,’ she muttered, dully resigned to that fact.
‘I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care and then had to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter and I still had many to see that day.’
‘Oh, I hope he won't talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
‘I don't know how it is I did not see - but I didn't. And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door very still as if meditating a flight up the road away from there away from it all, anything but to have to go back inside.
During the night his fever increased.
He tossed, moaned now and then muttered a complaint. She sat with the table between her and the couch on which he lay, watching every movement and every sound. She sat there with a terror, the unreasonable terror of that man she could not understand, creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct and that unaccountable fear.
Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently, ‘Water! Give me water!’
She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He spoke to her, and his passionate protesting only increased her fear of this strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time, entreating, wondering, pleading and ordering yet getting nowhere. She says she bore it as long as she could then suddenly a wave of rage came over him.
He sat up and called out one word, some word she did not know what the word was but it made her scared. He got up as though he hadn't been ill at all, she said. And while in fevered dismay, indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She

heard him call after her twice down the road in a terrible voice but she fled...
Ah! You should have seen stirring behind the dull, blurred glance of these eyes the specter of the fear which had hunted her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster's cottage! I did the next day, she still had that look in her eyes.’


23


‘It was I who found him lying face down his body in a puddle of mud, just outside the little green picket gate.
I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open. My assistant at the time helped me to carry him in and we laid him on the couch. The lamp still smoked but the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheerless yellow paper on the wall.
'Amy! Amy!' I called out loud; my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a desert. With difficulty he opened his eyes. “Gone!” he said distinctly.
‘I had only asked for water, only for a little water…’
‘He was covered in mud. I covered him up as best I could and stood waiting in silence, catching a painfully gasped word now and then. The words were no longer in his old language.
The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. With his heaving breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild creature caught under a net, of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him she had left him sick, helpless and thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul.’
‘Why?’ He cried in the penetrating and indignant voice of a man calling to his responsible Maker.
‘A gust of wind and a swish of rain answered. As I turned away to shut the door I clearly heard him say the word ‘Merciful!’
Then died.
‘Eventually I certified heart failure as the immediate cause of death. His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away. Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.’
‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.
‘I sure do!’ He cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit, frightening a poor woman like this.’
‘He won't frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’
‘He struck with his stick at the mud.
‘And there's the child.’
Then, after thinking deeply for some time.
‘I don't know that it isn't for the best.’


24


‘That's what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word about him, not one word ever. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure and his singing voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen.
She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Hastings. She is Amy Foster again to everybody and the child is Amy Foster's boy.
She calls him Johnny meaning Little John.
It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot in the very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened by me but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. Looking down at him I seemed to see again the other one, the father Yanko, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.’