Essential Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Ready?” he called. “Fine!”

  I had the feeling that inside him there must be a gramophone record going round and round, stopping at that word.

  He stepped into the punt and took charge.

  “Now I just want you to paddle us over to the far bank,” he said, “and then I’ll show you how to punt.”

  Everything Mr. Timberlake said still seemed unreal to me. The fact that he was sitting in a punt, of all commonplace material things, was incredible. That he should propose to pole us up the river was terrifying. Suppose he fell into the river? At once I checked the thought. A leader of our Church under the direct guidance of God could not possibly fall into a river.

  The stream is wide and deep in this reach, but on the southern bank there is a manageable depth and a hard bottom. Over the clay banks the willows hang, making their basket-work print of sun and shadow on the water, while under the gliding boats lie cloudy, chloride caverns. The hoop-like branches of the trees bend down until their tips touch the water like fingers making musical sounds. Ahead in midstream, on a day sunny as this one was, there is a path of strong light which is hard to look at unless you half close your eyes and down this path on the crowded Sundays, go the launches with their parasols and their pennants; and also the rowing boats with their beetle-leg oars, which seem to dig the sunlight out of the water as they rise. Upstream one goes, on and on between the gardens and then between fields kept for grazing. On the afternoon when Mr. Timberlake and I went out to settle the question of the origin of evil, the meadows were packed densely with buttercups.

  “Now,” said Mr. Timberlake decisively when I had paddled to the other side. “Now I’ll take her.”

  He got over the seat into the well at the stern.

  “I’ll just get you clear of the trees,” I said.

  “Give me the pole,” said Mr. Timberlake standing up on the little platform and making a squeak with his boots as he did so. “Thank you, sir. I haven’t done this for eighteen years but I can tell you, brother, in those days I was considered some poler.”

  He looked around and let the pole slide down through his hands. Then he gave the first difficult push. The punt rocked pleasantly and we moved forward. I sat facing him, paddle in hand, to check any inward drift of the punt.

  “How’s that, you guys?” said Mr. Timberlake looking round at our eddies and drawing in the pole. The delightful water sished down it.

  “Fine,” I said. Deferentially I had caught the word.

  He went on to his second and his third strokes, taking too much water on his sleeve, perhaps, and uncertain in his steering, which I corrected, but he was doing well.

  “It comes back to me,” he said. “How am I doing?”

  “Just keep her out from the trees,” I said.

  “The trees?” he said.

  “The willows,” I said.

  “I’ll do it now,” he said. “How’s that? Not quite enough? Well, how’s this?”

  “Another one,” I said. “The current runs strong this side.”

  “What? More trees?” he said. He was getting hot.

  “We can shoot out past them,” I said. “I’ll ease us over with the paddle.”

  Mr. Timberlake did not like this suggestion.

  “No, don’t do that. I can manage it,” he said. I did not want to offend one of the leaders of our Church, so I put the paddle down; but I felt I ought to have taken him farther along away from the irritation of the trees.

  “Of course,” I said. “We could go under them. It might be nice.”

  “I think,” said Mr. Timberlake, “that would be a very good idea.”

  He lunged hard on the pole and took us towards the next archway of willow branches.

  “We may have to duck a bit, that’s all,” I said.

  “Oh, I can push the branches up,” said Mr. Timberlake.

  “It is better to duck,” I said.

  We were gliding now quickly towards the arch, in fact I was already under it.

  “I think I should duck,” I said. “Just bend down for this one.”

  “What makes the trees lean over the water like this?” asked Mr. Timberlake. “Weeping willows—I’ll give you a thought there. How Error likes to make us dwell on sorrow. Why not call them laughing willows?” discoursed Mr. Timberlake as the branch passed over my head.

  “Duck,” I said.

  “Where? I don’t see them,” said Mr. Timberlake turning round.

  “No, your head,” I said. “The branch,” I called.

  “Oh, the branch. This one?” said Mr. Timberlake finding a branch just against his chest and he put out a hand to lift it. It is not easy to lift a willow branch and Mr. Timberlake was surprised. He stepped back as it gently and firmly leaned against him. He leaned back and pushed from his feet. And he pushed too far. The boat went on, I saw Mr. Timberlake’s boots leave the stern as he took an unthoughtful step backwards. He made a last minute grasp at a stronger and higher branch, and then, there he hung a yard above the water, round as a blue damson that is ripe and ready, waiting only for a touch to make it fall. Too late with the paddle and shot ahead by the force of his thrust, I could not save him.

  For a full minute I did not believe what I saw; indeed our religion taught us never to believe what we saw. Unbelieving I could not move. I gaped. The impossible had happened. Only a miracle, I found myself saying, could save him.

  What was most striking was the silence of Mr. Timberlake as he hung from the tree. I was lost between gazing at him and trying to get the punt out of the small branches of the tree. By the time I had got the punt out there were several yards of water between us and the soles of his boots were very near the water as the branch bent under his weight. Boats were passing at the time but no one seemed to notice us. I was glad about this. This was a private agony. A double chin had appeared on the face of Mr. Timberlake and his head was squeezed between his shoulders and his hanging arms. I saw him blink and look up at the sky. His eyelids were pale like a chicken’s. He was tidy and dignified as he hung there, the hat was not displaced and the top button of his coat was done up. He had a blue silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. So unperturbed and genteel he seemed that as the tips of his shoes came nearer and nearer to the water, I became alarmed. He could perform what are called miracles. He would be thinking at this moment that only in an erroneous and illusory sense was he hanging from the branch of the tree over six feet of water. He was probably praying one of the closely reasoned prayers of our faith which were more like conversations with Euclid than appeals to God. The calm of his face suggested this. Was he, I asked myself, within sight of the main road, the town Recreation Ground and the landing-stage crowded with people, was he about to re-enact a well-known miracle? I hoped that he was not. I prayed that he was not. I prayed with all my will that Mr. Timberlake would not walk upon the water. It was my prayer and not his that was answered.

  I saw the shoes dip, the water rise above his ankles and up his socks. He tried to move his grip now to a yet higher branch—he did not succeed—and in making this effort his coat and waistcoat rose and parted from his trousers. One seam of shirt with its pant-loops and brace-tabs broke like a crack across the middle of Mr. Timberlake. It was like a fatal flaw in a statue, an earthquake crack which made the monumental mortal. The last Greeks must have felt as I felt then, when they saw a crack across the middle of some statue of Apollo. It was at this moment I realised that the final revelation about man and society on earth had come to nobody and that Mr. Timberlake knew nothing at all about the origin of evil.

  All this takes long to describe, but it happened in a few seconds as I paddled towards him. I was too late to get his feet on the boat and the only thing to do was to let him sink until his hands were nearer the level of the punt and then to get him to change hand-holds. Then I would paddle him ashore. I did this. Amputated by the water, first a torso, then a bust, then a mere head and shoulders, Mr. Timberlake, I noticed, looked sad and lonely as he sank.
He was a declining dogma. As the water lapped his collar—for he hesitated to let go of the branch to hold the punt—I saw a small triangle of deprecation and pathos between his nose and the corners of his mouth. The head resting on the platter of water had the sneer of calamity on it, such as one sees in the pictures of a beheaded saint.

  “Hold on to the punt, Mr. Timberlake,” I said urgently. “Hold on to the punt.”

  He did so.

  “Push from behind,” he directed in a dry businesslike voice. They were his first words. I obeyed him. Carefully I paddled him towards the bank. He turned and, with a splash, climbed ashore. There he stood, raising his arms and looking at the water running down his swollen suit and making a puddle at his feet.

  “Say,” said Mr. Timberlake coldly, “we let some Error in that time.”

  How much he must have hated our family.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Timberlake,” I said. “I am most awfully sorry. I should have paddled. It was my fault. I’ll get you home at once. Let me wring out your coat and waistcoat. You’ll catch your death . . .”

  I stopped. I had nearly blasphemed. I had nearly suggested that Mr. Timberlake had fallen into the water and that to a man of his age this might be dangerous.

  Mr. Timberlake corrected me. His voice was impersonal, addressing the laws of human existence, rather than myself.

  “If God made water it would be ridiculous to suggest He made it capable of harming his creatures. Wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I murmured hypocritically.

  “OK,” said Mr. Timberlake. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ll soon get you across,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I mean let’s go on. We’re not going to let a little thing like this spoil a beautiful afternoon. Where were we going? You spoke of a pretty landing-place farther on. Let’s go there.”

  “But I must take you home. You can’t sit there soaked to the skin. It will spoil your clothes.”

  “Now, now,” said Mr. Timberlake. “Do as I say. Go on.”

  There was nothing to be done with him. I held the punt into the bank and he stepped in. He sat like a bursting and sodden bolster in front of me while I paddled. We had lost the pole of course.

  For a long time I could hardly look at Mr. Timberlake. He was taking the line that nothing had happened and this put me at a disadvantage. I knew something considerable had happened. That glaze, which so many of the members of our sect had on their faces and persons, their minds and manners, had been washed off. There was no gleam for me from Mr. Timberlake.

  “What’s the house over there?” he asked. He was making conversation. I had steered into the middle of the river to get him into the strong sun. I saw steam rise from him.

  I took courage and studied him. He was a man, I realised, in poor physical condition, unexercised and sedentary. Now the gleam had left him one saw the veined empurpled skin of the stoutish man with a poor heart. I remembered he had said at lunch:

  “A young woman I know said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful. I can walk thirty miles in a day without being in the least tired.’ I said, ‘I don’t see that bodily indulgence is anything a member of the Church of the Last Purification should boast about.’ ”

  Yes, there was something flaccid, passive and slack about Mr. Timberlake. Bunched in swollen clothes, he refused to take them off. It occurred to me, as he looked with boredom at the water, the passing boats and the country, that he had not been in the country before. That it was something he had agreed to do but wanted to get over quickly. He was totally uninterested. By his questions—what is that church? Are there any fish in this river? Is that a wireless or a gramophone?—I understood that Mr. Timberlake was formally acknowledging a world he did not live in. It was too interesting, too eventful a world. His spirit, inert and preoccupied, was elsewhere in an eventless and immaterial habitation. He was a dull man, duller than any man I have ever known; but his dullness was a sort of earthly deposit left by a being whose diluted mind was far away in the effervescence of metaphysical matters. There was a slightly pettish look on his face as (to himself, of course) he declared he was not wet and that he would not have a heart attack or catch pneumonia.

  Mr. Timberlake spoke little. Sometimes he squeezed water out of his sleeve. He shivered a little. He watched his steam. I had planned when we set out to go up as far as the lock but now the thought of another two miles of this responsibility was too much. I pretended I wanted to go only as far as the bend which we were approaching, where one of the richest buttercup meadows was. I mentioned this to him. He turned and looked with boredom at the field. Slowly we came to the bank.

  We tied up the punt and we landed.

  “Fine,” said Mr. Timberlake. He stood at the edge of the meadow just as he had stood at the landing-stage—lost, stupefied, uncomprehending.

  “Nice to stretch our legs,” I said. I led the way into the deep flowers. So dense were the buttercups there was hardly any green. Presently I sat down. Mr. Timberlake looked at me and sat down also. Then I turned to him with a last try at persuasion. Respectability, I was sure, was his trouble.

  “No one will see us,” I said. “This is out of sight of the river. Take off your coat and trousers and wring them out.”

  Mr. Timberlake replied firmly:

  “I am satisfied to remain as I am.”

  “What is this flower?” he asked to change the subject.

  “Buttercup,” I said.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  I could do nothing with him. I lay down full length in the sun; and, observing this and thinking to please me, Mr. Timberlake did the same. He must have supposed that this was what I had come out in the boat to do. It was only human. He had come out with me, I saw, to show me that he was only human.

  But as we lay there I saw the steam still rising. I had had enough.

  “A bit hot,” I said getting up.

  He got up at once.

  “Do you want to sit in the shade,” he asked politely.

  “No,” I said. “Would you like to?”

  “No,” he said. “I was thinking of you.”

  “Let’s go back,” I said. We both stood up and I let him pass in front of me. When I looked at him again I stopped dead. Mr. Timberlake was no longer a man in a navy blue suit. He was blue no longer. He was transfigured. He was yellow. He was covered with buttercup pollen, a fine yellow paste of it made by the damp, from head to foot.

  “Your suit,” I said.

  He looked at it. He raised his thin eyebrows a little, but he did not smile or make any comment.

  The man is a saint, I thought. As saintly as any of those gold-leaf figures in the churches of Sicily. Golden he sat in the punt; golden he sat for the next hour as I paddled him down the river. Golden and bored. Golden as we landed at the town and as we walked up the street back to my uncle’s house. There he refused to change his clothes or to sit by a fire. He kept an eye on the time for his train back to London. By no word did he acknowledge the disasters or the beauties of the world. If they were printed upon him, they were printed upon a husk.

  Sixteen years have passed since I dropped Mr. Timberlake in the river and since the sight of his pant-loops destroyed my faith. I have not seen him since, and today I heard that he was dead. He was fifty-seven. His mother, a very old lady with whom he had lived all his life, went into his bedroom when he was getting ready for church and found him lying on the floor in his shirt-sleeves. A stiff collar with the tie half inserted was in one hand. Five minutes before, she told the doctor, she had been speaking to him.

  The doctor who looked at the heavy body lying on the single bed saw a middle-aged man, wide rather than stout and with an extraordinarily box-like thick-jawed face. He had got fat, my uncle told me, in later years. The heavy liver-coloured cheeks were like the chaps of a hound. Heart disease, it was plain, was the cause of the death of Mr. Timberlake. In death the face was lax, even coarse and degenerate. It was a miracle, the doctor said, that he had lived as long. Any
time during the last twenty years the smallest shock might have killed him.

  I thought of our afternoon on the river. I thought of him hanging from the tree. I thought of him, indifferent and golden in the meadow. I understood why he had made for himself a protective, sedentary blandness, an automatic smile, a collection of phrases. He kept them on like the coat after his ducking. And I understood why—though I had feared it all the time we were on the river—I understood why he did not talk to me about the origin of evil. He was honest. The ape was with us. The ape that merely followed me was already inside Mr. Timberlake eating out his heart.

  THE WHEELBARROW

  “Robert,” Miss Freshwater’s niece called down from the window of the dismantled bedroom, “when you have finished that, would you mind coming upstairs a minute? I want you to move a trunk.”

  And when Evans waved back from the far side of the rumpled lawn where he was standing by the bonfire, she closed the window to keep out the smoke of slow-burning rubbish—old carpeting, clothes, magazines, papers, boxes—which hung about the waists of the fir trees and blew towards the house. For three days the fire had been burning and Evans, red-armed in his shirt sleeves and sweating along the seams of his brow, was prodding it with a garden fork. A sudden silly tongue of yellow flame wagged out: some inflammable piece of family history— who knew what?—perhaps one of her aunt’s absurd summer hats or a shocking year of her father’s day-dream accountancy was having its last fling. She saw Evans pick up a bit of paper from the outskirts of the fire and read it. What was it? Miss Freshwater’s niece drew back her lips and opened her mouth expectantly. At this stage all family privacy had gone. Thirty, forty, fifty years of life were going up in smoke.