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.Questions, then and now: What was beetle really? What was son really? What really determined their roles?And the “really”; evidence of some standard outside the consciousness? God in disguise? God like an all-consuming alien entity from another galaxy, digesting all beetles, flowers, worms, cats, Sons, mothers, so that it could greedily experience life through all their beings?Well, that was more or less the traditional answer to the question of the mystery of life in his part of the globe.Then there was the scientific answer, but after a while that too fetched up against the blank wall of God.There was the atheist answer, that it was all blind luck, or ill luck.And a hundred other answers.Perhaps they all had the problem back to front.For a second, a dizziness that had nothing to do with his bruised head overcame Bush.It was as if he had almost laid his hand on the key to the whole matter; but he thought he remembered feeling like that before; the confusion into which he could throw himself seemed the nearest he ever got to clarity.Empty-handed, he came away from the talking girls.Outside, the sun shone, although it did not reach him.Summer hovered on the threshold of Breedale.He was standing among the poor houses that abutted the moor.In one or two of their gardens, brave efforts had been made to create beds in which to grow a few flowers or vegetables to fill the hollow cookpots; but the moorland had stubbornly resisted such economy.He wandered over the crest of the hill, staring down at Breedale as he had often done before, and saw Herbert Bush.Herbert was tacking up the hill, almost home.Bush recognized at once that the man was drunk.He ran down the slope to meet him, ran beside him, but he was a ghost, nothing, and if Herbert was psychically disturbed by his presence he showed nothing.He was red in the face and blowing, muttering to himself.For most of the afternoon, he must have been down somewhere in the village, drinking with a crony.Now it looked as if he were returning to give his wife a bit more of his mind.He flung open the back door and discovered her sprawled on the tile floor.At once Herbert shut the door behind him, so suddenly that Bush, coming close behind him, jumped back and was shut outside.He could only peer through the tiny window over the kitchen sink, a helpless, exiled, Peeping Tom.Amy had moved.She had apparently heaved herself up onto a chair, and then fallen off again as her pains crippled her.Now she sprawled foreshortened, and the chair was pulled down over her face and chest, one arm entangled with its legs.At some point, she had torn her garments aside.Her dead baby lay between her legs, not fully born.Herbert flung himself on the floor beside her.“No!” Bush gasped.He pulled back from the window, leaned his throbbing head against the glassy wall.She could not be dead! You didn’t die so simply.Oh, yes, you did, if you had suffered from long under-nourishment, if you struck yourself on the table as you fell, if you were trapped in a whole skein of adverse economic, historic, and emotional circumstances; you died fairly easily.But her life – she couldn’t have been born for this squalid end! The promise of her girlhood … her marriage even a few weeks ago she had seemed happy, despite everything.It made no difference.He was startled to find Herbert’s face glaring out of the window at him.It had lost its flush and was ashen – appeared even to have lost its shape.Bush realized that the man was not looking at him.He was seeing nothing, unless it was the mess of his life; and with one hand he was reaching up to the little shelf above the sink on which he kept his washing and shaving tackle.He brought down his long cut-throat razor.“Herbert, no, no!” Bush jumped in front of the window, tapped uselessly on the glass, which felt malleable to him.He waved, he shouted.And before his eyes Herbert Bush cut his throat, drawing the blade from his left ear almost to his right.The next moment, he appeared at the back door, razor still grasped in hand.Blood cascaded over his shirt.He took three steps into the garden, knee-high in cow parsley, and collapsed among the creamy heads of the weeds, his body half-covering Bush’s phantasmal tent.Bush was running away in terror.It was as if the tragedy that occurred in the Bush family was an historical necessity.The whole village chipped in their pennies for a fund for the children, the whole village paraded to the cemetery behind the church.Even the lord of the manor sent one of his mine managers to represent him; possibly Herbert held a good position at the pit.Some of the men spoke to the manager afterwards; the union was brought in; discussions were restarted.The ghastly deaths had jolted everyone from their sullen apathy.They were prepared to negotiate again.An agreement was reached.Only four days after Amy and Herbert Bush were buried, the men were streaming down the hill in their working clothes again, they were being carried down in the primitive cage into the earth, they were hewing away at the fossil trees that had themselves been above the ground in distant days.Bush stayed in Breedale, to see Joan take to her job as assistant in the shop, working under a man employed by the wholesalers who had bought the business, a man who rode in on a bike every morning from another village down the valley, a scrubbed, efficient, smiling man in an uncomfortable collar, a promising young man.A neighbor looked after the Bush boys during the day.Grandmother fended for herself.Now that the weather was fine, she was able to sit outside her back door in a hard chair – which she evidently resented, since neighboring grannies not cursed with grocer’s shops could sit outside their front doors, thus viewing the street and its activities.It was Bush’s main concern to watch over Joan.In a year or so she would be old enough to marry the boy who still courted her – the boy who was now working down the pit for the first time.Bush could discover no indication that she ever thought of her parents.He wondered if it ever entered her head that her father killed himself in a moment of unbalance, not from sorrow but from guilt – but if it did, she and he would be the only ones to think it.So Bush seemed to have reached a dead end, and gradually he was forced to revert to his own predicament – only to find, somewhat to his surprise, that his ego had repaired itself.He accepted that the shock of finding his mother dead, followed by the grueling military training, had temporarily occulted his reason.At the same time, shreds of moral discipline, surviving buried but unharmed from an earlier period of his life, prompted him to think that he must in the future be more a force for positive good.He believed he had been through enough bad to recognize its opposite.Which led him to understand that he must do what he could to upset the Action regime, for how far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?He used this question to stiffen his good resolutions, so overcome by the beauty and universality of it, for it embodied truths, he felt, which he had come on in Breedale, that it was some while before he recognized it as kin to an old Biblical saying his art master had often jocularly applied to his pupils’ still-life studies of apples and pears, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” All the same, he had worked round to the perception for himself, which was a promising sign.Bush’s soul had broken away from its little mud hut.It moved now in a mighty crystal palace.He felt the godlike qualities in himself.This merciful interlude in Breedale, away from the real world, had given him the opportunity to find himself.It was his forty days in the wilderness.Much of the days when he discovered this transformation of soul he spent praying; but the prayers changed shape and tone, and came winging back to him
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