The Song of the Wren

by H. E. Bates

  ‘What else?’ he said. ‘What else?’

  ‘There’s nothing else you can see,’ she started to say, ‘unless—’

  ‘Unless what?’

  She drew her shoulders forward again, hugging them together and nearer the warmth of the fire. It was getting colder, she said, they ought to make up the fire, but he was hardly listening as she reached out with her foot to push a branch towards the flames.

  ‘What did you mean?’ he said. ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless you’d like to see the shoes I bought. I’ve been carrying them all the time. They’re gold. Did you notice? I put my old ones on for walking.’

  ‘I saw the shoes,’ he said. ‘What did you mean just now? – unless?—’

  ‘Unless I—’

  She made a sudden pretence of shyness and drew his head down and started whispering in his ear.

  ‘I’ll make up the fire,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t feel all that cold, would you, if I made up the fire?’

  ‘This is the time I need that squirrel coat,’ she said. ‘You remember the squirrel coat?’

  Her bare shoulders turned and brushed against his throat. He was not even astonished to find them warm. A moment later he started to caress the soft underflesh of her arms, warm too, and she begged him to go gently, once again as if shy:

  ‘That’s me you’re touching. Hadn’t you better make up the fire?’

  She was already half-lying down by the time he had piled fresh bark and branches on to the fire. Flame as bright as candlelight sprang from the crackling wood and shavings. The tips of her varnished nails gleamed as polished and scarlet as rose-hips as she stretched up her arms and said:

  ‘Tell me how I looked tonight. How did you like me?’

  His answer was so solemn and unexpected that she gave a laugh as he came forward and crouched down beside her.

  ‘Not like that day you come up here first time, I know that. That afternoon you forgot your coat.’

  ‘I looked a sight. Tell me. I know.’

  ‘I felt sorry for you that day.’

  All his first inexplicable uneasiness about her shoes, almost sadness, came rushing back. It was not within his power to tell her how wonderful, how unexpected or how transformed she had looked in the green dress, the black lace scarf and the gold shoes that matched her tight-curled hair. He could only say:

  ‘I wouldn’t want to see you like that again.’

  A moment later he started to draw the dress from her shoulders, but suddenly she lifted her hands, keeping him away.

  ‘How would I have looked in that squirrel coat, do you suppose? Instead of the mac?’ she said. ‘How would I have looked?’

  The entire heap of fire was a dancing mass of candle-flames that seemed to be laughing.

  ‘I’d like that coat,’ she said. ‘Buy me that coat. That squirrel one. Would you?’

  She laughed again. She let him partially catch at her breasts.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No – not until—’

  His voice started choking. His throat was so constricted that he could hardly form his words.

  ‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Anything you want. Anything – you only got to say.’

  It was typical of his mother that she said, as she cooked his breakfast next morning: ‘Somebody had a rare fire going up there on the hill last night. Wonder who that’d be? Shone in my window for hour or two. You see it?’ and equally typical of him he had nothing to say in answer except:

  ‘Off to market today?’

  ‘No, I ain’t,’ she said. ‘Not today.’

  ‘It’s Wednesday.’

  ‘I know that. I got things to do here. I got the flues to clean out for one. The stove don’t draw.’

  ‘I allus clean the flues out, don’t I?’ he said. ‘I’ll do ’em tonight.’

  ‘You’re busy o’ nights,’ she said. ‘I got plenty o’ time.’

  It was exactly as if she knew he was about to raid the cash-box. Her way of reading his thoughts through his eyes was a kind of second sight that made her say:

  ‘You going down to Ashfield today?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Just thought you might be. Might bring me a dozen candles if you do. Turning colder, don’t you think? It’s a top-coat colder ‘n yesterday.’

  ‘I never noticed it,’ he said.

  It was cunning and crafty, he thought, the way she smelt things out. The fire, the box, the idea that he might go to Ashfield, the idea that it was a top-coat colder today: she was thinking inside him all the time.

  In the afternoon he drove the wagon down to Ashfield, tied up the horse on the market place and started looking for a shop window showing furs. It was about four o’clock when he found one and in the darkening afternoon the lights were coming on.

  ‘What would a squirrel coat be? How much?’

  Well, the furrier said, a good Canadian squirrel, a nice one, that would be about two hundred pounds.

  ‘Much as that?’

  Well, the furrier said, you had to remember there would be about two hundred skins to a coat. Squirrels were small. Yes, all of two hundred skins.

  ‘Many as that, eh?’

  The furrier went on to say that he had a real beaute of a Canadian three-quarter squirrel just in. A real beaute. He could show it – no trouble at all.

  ‘I’ll drop in some other time.’

  Then, halfway to the street door, he paused, thought for a second or two and slowly came back to give expression to a thought that had been eating at the edge of his mind ever since the night before.

  ‘Nobody never brings no skins in, I’ll lay, do they?’ he said. ‘I mean—’

  ‘For making up?’ the furrier said. ‘You bet they did. All the time. Fox, badger, otter, sheep—’

  ‘Squirrels?’

  Squirrels, everything, the lot. You’d be surprised what things he had to make up sometimes. Once he even had a dog.

  ‘Tricky job, I’ll lay?’

  There, the furrier said, he’d put his finger on it. Tricky was the word. Stretching and drying the skins – that was the tricky part. If you didn’t dry them right you had trouble. Most people nailed them up the wrong way round. Fur outwards. That was wrong. It had to be skin outwards. That way they kept for ever.

  ‘Thanks, mister. I’ll drop in one day when I’m this way again.’

  ‘And don’t shoot them,’ the furrier said, laughing. ‘That’ll spoil everything. Put a bit of salt on their tails.’

  On the way home he stopped at an ironmonger’s to buy a dozen traps and before dusk on the following afternoon he was setting them about the wood. Bread was a good bait, he thought. They were used to that.

  That day the weather was already mild again. In a sudden turn of wind the air was blowing from the west. It was a soft, uneven, capricious wind and the next morning it was blowing on the fur of his first dead squirrels, four of them, as they lay among the papery chestnut leaves.

  If he had emotions of any kind as he skinned them, stretched the pelts and nailed them up to dry on the back wall of the shelter, his eyes had no way of expressing them. They remained infinitely static, bone-like as ever. At the same time a part of his mind unthinkingly repeated a catechism composed of nothing but numbers: four a day was twenty-eight a week, twenty-eight a week was over a hundred a month. In less than two months he’d have them all.

  It never seemed to occur to him that this simple and inevitable arithmetic might somewhere break down. It never crossed his mind that the squirrels themselves might at some time give out, exterminated. The entire business was like the progress of night and day. One part followed another. The coat was the inevitable end. It had to be.

  Over and above all he was determined to keep it secret. Solitude had made him a man essentially locked into himself, shut away. Now the greater part of himself was locked up even more securely, brooding on a dream that was really as vast as a mountain.

  Presently, he hoped soon, the time would c
ome to share it and that time would be a wonder. He saw himself on some not too distant day presenting his gift to the girl. In a big box was how he liked to imagine it, lined with coloured tissue paper.

  With increasing regularity he also permitted himself the experience of seeing her face as it would be when she took the coat. He had no doubt it would be all joy. She would be crazy about it. It was the thing she wanted most in the world.

  The skins stank a bit as they dried in the late November sun and there was a day when his mother, sniffing and peering about the shelter in her own ferrety way, said there must be a dead sheep laying round somewhere. She could smell something queer all the time.

  ‘It’s your nose then,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a sheep, I tell you. Else a rat. I’d find it and git rid on it if I were you afore I suffocated. I’ll be blamed if I’d put up with a stink like that.’

  ‘I don’t smell nothing.’

  ‘No? Stinks don’t come from nothing. Something starts ’em. Else somebody.’

  After that he moved the drying skins, forty-three of them now, to the far end of the wood, nailing the newest to a hurdle propped up against a tree and hanging the rest on a line, pegged there like washing.

  ‘I notice you got rid o’ the stink,’ his mother said. ‘What was it? A rat?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. Cunning, that’s what she was. Knowing and cunning. Why the hell didn’t she leave him be? ‘It poked its nose in where it didn’t belong and got caught.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it ain’t the only one as is done that.

  Now and then the girl, half-teasing, half-reproachful, would remind him of the coat. In his utterly secretive fashion he had no sensible answer to give her except that once, in an exceptional moment, almost with humour, he told her that Christmas was coming.

  ‘Christmas,’ she said. ‘Well, let’s hope it won’t be a white one. Otherwise I’ll freeze to death.’

  Then, on a calm, leafless Sunday afternoon in early December, she shocked him with a statement that struck him like a blow across the eyes.

  ‘Well, it was a nice dream, that coat, while it lasted. I know I’ve had it now. Anyway I’ll be gone in a day or two and—’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Going back home. Got a chance to start a little business with my mother if I can raise the do-ray-me. Sweets and tobacco. Plenty of profit in that.’

  ‘You can’t go!’ he suddenly started shouting. ‘You can’t go now!’

  ‘Here, here,’ she said. ‘Gently. I haven’t gone yet. Who’s doing all the shouting? I haven’t got the money yet. Can’t go without the money.’

  Desperation actually blinded him for a moment or two, so that he was aware only of shouting incoherently at an empty wood.

  She in turn was extraordinarily calm. She actually shrugged her shoulders, asking him, if he didn’t mind, to look at it her way.

  ‘I mean – I ask you. It’s hardly enough to keep a dog alive, what they pay me up there. I mean, there’s no future. If it wasn’t for the roof over my head I’d have hopped it long ago. That and what you’ve done for me.’

  ‘I’m getting you the coat,’ he found himself saying. ‘The squirrel one. It’ll be a week or two—’

  ‘Saving up?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘It’ll be just a little while—’

  ‘You’re funny,’ she said. ‘You make me laugh sometimes.’

  A second later, entirely without thought, he made an astonishing statement. He wished, he said, she’d come down the hill and live with him and his mother.

  ‘Two women in a house with one man?’ she said. ‘Not this baby. Put your thinking cap on. The old lady wouldn’t like it much either, would she?’

  ‘She don’t like much I do at all.’

  Which, the girl said, didn’t surprise her.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘How’s that?’

  He ought to take her out sometimes, that’s why. Give her a treat sometimes. How long, for instance, since he took her down to market? He couldn’t remember, could he? She betted it was years.

  ‘She wouldn’t come if I asked her,’ he said. ‘She’s like that.’

  Oh? Just let him try it. Let him take her out and buy her a cup of coffee and a bun or something one day. Give her a little treat. She was his mother, wasn’t she? Didn’t his conscience ever trouble him about his mother?

  If his conscience had never troubled him much about his mother up to that time it began to trouble him increasingly as the weeks went on. The squirrels started to trouble him too. The smoothness of life as he had known it for years began suddenly to disappear. Sometimes there were only one or two squirrels in the morning traps; sometimes none at all. They were disappearing fast; the few that remained were growing crafty.

  His attempt to bring reasoning to all this only made him more confused. And did she mean that about going away? All the business about the sweet and tobacco shop? He didn’t know; but whenever he tried to bring some sort of reasoning to this side of things he was a little more successful. She couldn’t, he knew, go away without money. So he’d be sure and take care of that side of it. There’d be no more visits to the cash-box.

  In his clumsy fashion he brooded on these things through the rapidly shortening days, through misty windless afternoons in which not even a ghost whisper of squirrels’ feet broke the wood’s uncanny silences. By this time he had killed most of the squirrels he knew by name. One by one the familiar faces had disappeared and now there was no one to talk to any longer.

  In his heart, by this time, he knew that he was never going to get the coat. The scheme was a dead failure. In spite of it he kept baiting the traps, setting them up and hoping. And all the time, in between the spells of hopefulness, he brooded, more than half helpless, wondering what to do.

  Then, as he knocked off on an afternoon darkening early under a lid of slate-dark cloud he experienced what might have been an hallucination. He heard a sudden rustling in a branch of dead oak leaves, looked up and could have sworn he saw an unfamiliar squirrel: the white one, the old albino.

  A moment later it disappeared; but not before it, too, had started to trouble him. It made him dreadfully uneasy, that quick, ghostly, unreal glimpse of it. In some way it haunted him. It might have been that it was the ghost of all the squirrels he had trapped, returned to torment him.

  The next day he knew that it was no illusion. In broad daylight he saw it three times, twice in the morning and once, in the uncanny windless minutes just before twilight, in the afternoon. Its appearance, real enough but in some way ghostlier than ever, sent him brooding even deeper.

  Quite suddenly he began to dislike the wood, even to be the slightest bit afraid of it. He was glad the next day was Sunday; he wouldn’t have to come back up there on Sunday. He wouldn’t have to be haunted for a day.

  This uneasiness and a growing feeling of guilt oppressed him so much that he made a sudden attempt to appease his conscience by doing what the girl had half-flippantly suggested he should do.

  Over tea that evening he startled his mother by saying:

  ‘Thought I might drive you down to market Wednesday. Have a bit of dinner out for a change.’

  She had never had a bit of dinner out for years. She couldn’t for the life of her remember the last time and she was so astounded that she could only think there was some sort of catch in it.

  ‘What’s come over you all of a sudden?’

  He wanted new boots, he said, a new belt and a few things. That was all. He thought they might go down together.

  ‘Well, if I get the washing ironed and aired in plenty o’ time I dessay I could git round to it.’

  On Sunday he met the girl at the top of the chalk track beyond the wood and told her with a simple eagerness that seemed also to express a mountain of trust in her:

  ‘Going to do like you said. Going to take the old lady out to market and have a bit o’ dinner Wednesday.’

  ‘Now you’re talking. N
ow you’re a good boy.’

  His brooding had many channels but one of them troubled him more than all the rest.

  ‘Not going away, are you?’

  ‘Doubt it now,’ she said. ‘That scheme’ll fall through, I think. Question of the dough-ray-me.’

  He wasn’t half glad about that, he said. Terribly glad.

  ‘See you Thursday then?’

  ‘See you Thursday.’ The next moment his arms were round her like a rope, agonisingly knotted, and his lips pressing hard against her forehead.

  The next day he stopped setting the traps. He was suddenly frightened that he might catch the albino. He was uneasy that, if he killed it, it might be some sort of omen: a thing to bring him bad luck.

  It was the albino, in fact, that finally destroyed his notion of having a coat made up from the skins of the squirrels he had killed and had once so often talked to. The idea was crazy anyway; it would be simpler and quicker, he told himself, to filch the money.

  It was Monday when he decided this and it was late afternoon when he got to the house and he saw with great relief that his mother was at the foot of the garden, taking in washing. Two pairs of sheets obscured all of her from view except her legs and he slipped into the house without her knowing it.

  Nevertheless he had hardly started to pull the box from under the bed when he heard her climbing the stairs. In that acutely suspicious way of hers she had somehow sensed his presence and as he came out of the bedroom, empty-handed, she was already halfway to the landing.

  ‘Ferreting about for summat?’ she said. ‘What’s a’ matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just going back up the hill, that’s all.’

  ‘Blamed funny way o’ doing it,’ she said. ‘Be dark anyway afore you git there.’

  ‘I got work to do,’ he said. ‘I can light the lamp.’

  ‘Else a fire,’ she said. ‘Like you did Saturday.’