He caught the knocker again and let it go
with a clang that seemed to startle the house to its foundations. Then he
heard bolts, very slowly drawn back, again a pause and then, stealthily the
door swung open.
A scent of rotten apples met him as the door opened, a scent so strong that
it was confused at once with his vision of the woman who stood there, she,
with her gnarled and puckered face, her brown skin and crooked nose
standing, as it were, for an actual and visible personification of all the
rotten apples that had ever been in the world.
He recognised also a sound, the drunken hesitating hiccough of the old
clock that had been there when he had come in that evening long ago ready
to receive his beating, that had kept pace with his grandfather's snorings
and mutterings and had seemed indeed, the only understanding companion that
the old man had ever had. The woman was, he saw, the arms-akimbo ferocious
cook of the old days, but now how wrinkled and infirm!--separated by so
many more years than the lapse of time allowed her from the woman of his
past appearance there. There was more in her than the mere crumbling of her
body, there was also the crumbling of her spirit, and he saw in her old
bleared eyes the sign of some fierce battle fought by her, and fought to
her own utter defeat.
In her eyes he saw the thing that his father had become.
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