“The Resurrection Morning”
by
Winifred Holtby
When Mr Barrow died, none of us knew quite what to say to Mrs Barrow. ‘Deepest sympathy in your loss’ perhaps was best, because you can sympathise with fortune as well as with misfortune, and loss may be good riddance of bad rubbish.
Not that Mr Barrow was exactly bad rubbish. The obituary notices called him a ‘prominent citizen of Kingsport,’ and he had been a town councillor and a sidesman at St Agatha’s Church, and left a tidy sum invested in War Loan and corporation stock. A pious man, the vicar of St Agatha’s called him, and sent a cross two feet by one, particularly handsome. Mrs Barrow, however, was not pious. After ten years of married life she had abandoned her belief in God. Her husband could insist upon her attending church, but he could not prevent her from sitting down whenever the rest of the congregation stood up, even during the Creeds. What he said to her after the services we never knew; but Mrs Barrow told me that if the Almighty was such that He could appreciate her husband, Mr Barrow was welcome to Him.
I watched her at the funeral. She was over seventy, a worn-out little woman in her new black. But she held her chin up and her hymn book in both hands, and sang with the perfect confidence of stalwart incredulity:
‘On the resurrection morning
Soul and body meet again . . .’
Of course there was no Resurrection Morning, and there was no God, and Mr Barrow was safely hammered down into his grand mahogany coffin with brass handles.
I remembered what cause she had had for triumph. Night after night she had told me that she used to lie awake sweating beneath her woollen nightgown for fear lest she should die before him and never know her freedom. ‘And five hundred pounds was mine too,’ she would repeat.
He had married her for her little bit of money, taking her away from Anderby where she had lived on her father’s farm, and shutting her up in three little rooms over the shop in Grattan Street, Kingsport. He would not even allow her a window-box.
Her five hundred pounds went to start his business, a pork butcher’s, and although it was a sound investment, she detested it. She was one of those people who are by nature vegetarians, and had had a weak digestion since childhood; yet she was compelled to mess about all day among trotters and chitterlings and blood puddings, hating the sight and smell of them. And after the shop was closed her husband would expect enormous suppers of sausages or spare-rib. If they were not cooked to a turn, he used to point across the table with a greasy finger, scolding her, just as he scolded her for her skinny figure, for the death of her three children in infancy, and for her indigestion.
He had nearly beaten her at the end too. She was seventy-two before he went to bed with the internal complaint which killed him after six months of strenuous nursing. She used to sit by his bed clasping her hands tight and willing herself not to break down before she could spend her five hundred pounds, and the little fortune that he had made from it.
‘On that happy Easter morning
All the graves their dead restore,
Father, sister, child and mother
Meet once more.’
She opened her mouth and sang, her high, quavering soprano carolling her atheist’s triumph. Death was swallowed up in victory.
She went back to Anderby. Because most of the cottages were tied, she built her own bungalow, with half an acre of garden and hot and cold water laid on. She had a wireless, four valves, installed with a birds’ nest aerial, and kept two cats and a parrot, and a little maid called Nellie.
We used to go to her tea-parties, to sit in front of her huge unnecessary fire and eat cheese cakes flavoured with rum. Our hostess wore no mourning after the funeral, but blossomed out into purple silk and brown velvet. Like a small, malicious witch, she would lean forward in her chair telling us scandalous tales of the sort which she hoped would have shocked her husband had he been alive to hear. She did not go to church, and she took pleasure in being rude to the rector. He was a kind man and could forgive her, but he was much perturbed about her soul.
We never knew when things began to go less well with her. Her garden was a failure. Her roses would not flower and the parrot turned out to be the kind that does not talk. She could not walk out so far as the wood Winifred Holtby where the primroses used to grow, and the buses down the village street disturbed her.
She used to lie, after long sleepless nights, cold in her neat narrow bed, fretting because Nellie had not brought the tea. Though it was only half-past six and the girl was not supposed to bring it till seven, she resented those last twenty minutes bitterly. Her dressing troubled her. She never could see well without her glasses, and she was too proud to call Nellie. Her husband had shouted at her roughly, ‘Your placket-hole’s undone again,’ or ‘Can’t you see your blouse is out at the belt?’ But no one scolded her now.
Time crawled.
She found herself listening for a heavy tread in the passage, and the creak of a chair as a heavy bulk was lowered into it. Sometimes when the Morse from the North Sea interfered with her wireless, she would shut it off and sit listening eagerly, her short-sighted eyes peering into the gloom of the November evening.
One night she could bear it no longer. It was about seven o’clock, but damp or no damp, she must go out. She put on her hat with the two crimson roses, and her tartan scarf and the brown fur coat. The village street gleamed pale and muddy out of the misty darkness, and the lamplit windows glowed like orange flowers. Through open doors she caught glimpses of home-comings and greetings, and pleasant gossips.
Nobody spoke to her.
At the street corner near the bridge stood a group of Salvationists from Hardrascliffe, shuffling their feet on the muddy road and coughing into their cornets. Two or three lads and a girl stared at them apathetically. They began to sing:
‘There is no death for you and me, you and me,
Our loved ones once again we’ll see, we shall see.
By the river we shall meet
At our blessed Saviour’s feet,
On the Resurrection morning, you and me.’
Mrs Barrow, who had come up alone out of the street, listened silently through three verses, then gave a little choke and slipped down on to the ground.
The doctor told us that it was a stroke, and we all fell sorry for the poor old thing who had enjoyed her liberty for so short a time. She was helpless, and could only make inarticulate sounds instead of words, but we knew that she was worrying.
‘It’s the resurrection morning, you know,’ we told the rector. ‘The Salvationists were singing about it when she fell. It’s on her mind. She’s terrified of waking up in Heaven and meeting the old man again.’
The rector was accustomed to most human situations, and even the dying doubts of a freethinker did not much perplex him. He assured her that in the Kingdom of Heaven was neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Further, of course, he could not go. But neither his tolerance nor the sympathy of her neighbours seemed to reassure her.
It was Nellie who spoke the last word. Nellie’s mother is cleaner at the Primitives’ chapel, and Nellie had been much distressed by the rector’s perfidious compromise. Left alone with Mrs Barrow one afternoon, she decided that no soul ought to be allowed to face its Maker with a lie upon it. The agnosticism of her mistress had shocked her, but our condonation filled her with righteous anger.
‘I don’t care what you say to me,’ she told us afterwards. ‘You can call me a murderer if you like or anything else. But when the old lady began picking and grunting again like she does, you know . . .’
We knew.
‘I just up an’ said, “If you think to wriggle out of the Lord’s power by denying it, ma’am, you’re mistaken. If you was one of the elect you’d have been saved long ago, or even at the last moment by grace. But I’m thinking that the Lord’s mercy would have its work cut out to save you now, and I’m afraid that you’ve not been saved. Nor has your husband from what you tell me, either, for that matter. So I’m afraid that it’s to Hell you’ll both go, unless you get busy repenting now. So you’d better make up your mind to it and stop worriting.” And believe me or believe me not, she says to me as plain as anything, “William?” And I says, “Yes, William too, if he was the sinner you says he was. He’s probably waiting for you.” And she just gives one sort of smile, as you might say, for all the world as if she was saying “How do you do?” to some one, and goes right off, with a little sigh. And being as they were both sinners, I dare say that she’s with him again by this time.’ So right to the end we never quite understood Mrs Barrow. But we have Nellie’s word for it that she died happily.
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