Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

DEATH AND ROBINSON
ByK. G. BUDD
IN the dark street of a town where the houses are as like one another
as a row of printed "e's", lived a man who walked in the shadow
of a fear.
The neighbours would have told you that there was nothing that
was noticeably strange about James Robinson. In outward appearances
he was as other men. He had a devoted wife with a partiality for local
gossip, a steady, if not prosperous, position in a manufacturing firm,
ordinary clothes, and ordinary manners. But since the only thing in
this world that can be truly hidden is a troubled heart, Robinson
concealed his fear and even his few associates had not a glimpse into
the inner workings of his mind.
One night, when he was twelve years of age, this Robinson had
sat up in his bed in the darkness with the perspiration growing cold on
his forehead and terror in his heart. He had been seized with the
idea that he was soon to die. He sat there staring into the shadows
and his imagination worked so rapidly on the thought of his own
decease that he could picture with vividness his mother weeping at
his bedside, the small coffin, the dumbness of his schoolfellows when
the teacher broke the news that poor Jim Robinson had passed away.
Presently, because the perspiration was chill upon him and because also
the cheerful Voices of his parents downstairs were somewhat reassuring,
he lay down and fell asleep; but from that night Death came at
irregular intervals to peer into his mind*
The shadow did not trouble him during his later school years, but
it fell across his path on many occasions during the Great War of
1914—18. Amid the crash and horror of bursting shells, the white
faces of the men crouching near him and seeking desperately to be
^unafraid, he was entirely without fear. It was only in the lulls between
the fighting that he had time to reflect on the awfulness of sudden
extinction. He meditated on the degree of pain that was caused by a
bullet that hit one in a vital spot, on the sensation of dying slowly in
a foreign land and being conscious of the fact that life ,with all its
pleasing mixture of sorrow and joy, was being relentlessly taken away
for ever. The sight of a dead body filled him, not with pity or grief
or repentance, but with dark fear in face of the one fact of life that
no philosophy could make acceptable*
His comrades never guessed for one moment his innermost fears.