by Rebecca West
As we passed through the door which divided the older and the newer parts of the inn, we came on Uncle Len, who said, ‘That’s another fuse gone, I’ll be bound. Many and many a time I’ve said I was potty to have had the electric light put in that wing, but if you saw the state the Anglers’ Club gets into every year when it has its annual banquet in the Assembly Room - funny thing fishing never goes with water - you’d understand why I don’t fancy having oil lamps about over there. Wait a minute, chicks, I’ll give you the good candlesticks from the sitting-room. Why, whatever?’ The bell-box on the wall had broken into a continuous ear-piercing buzz. ‘Get the candlesticks yourselves, chicks, they’re on the mantelpiece,’ he sighed, ‘got to go.’ He lumbered along the passage towards the public bar, keeping his head down and sideways, like a sad old bull that sees the need for giving battle once again. We followed him, for we knew what the buzz meant. Uncle Len had had an electric bell set in the floor behind the bar so that whoever was serving could keep her foot on it if a customer was giving trouble.
We hated the bar on Saturday night. Then it was crowded with people from the village and from the near-by farms: all men, of course, for in those days no woman ever went into a country pub. The room was full of a disgusting smell. It was a compound made up of the smell of the beer the men were drinking, the smell of their bodies and their clothes (for such people washed far less than they do now and never sent their clothes to the cleaners at all) and the smell of the cheap tobacco they were smoking; and through the windows came the smell of the lavatories in the yard. That every seven days part of the Dog and Duck should be deprived of its puritan cleanliness and turned into a cube of stench revolted us as much as our own periodical need to excrete offensive matter which we would never have chosen to manufacture had we been given the choice; and we thought of both degradations as little as we could. But this time we felt we had to go into the loathsome place because Uncle Len might need our help, and indeed it was apparent that something horrid was happening. All the customers were standing quite still and nobody was saying anything. Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips. All these blank but not empty faces were looking through the smoke at the bar, where Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily were standing side by side, both with their hands on their hips, and both with a vague, troubled expression on their faces, as if they thought they might be going to be sick but were not sure. Facing them was a whippy little man in a check suit, long in the jacket and tight in the trouser, with a ginger-brown bowler set far back on the close crimps of his blue-black hair. He looked spruce but dirty. It was odd that anybody should take so much trouble over his appearance and yet not think of trying what washing might do for it. ‘All I’m asking,’ he was saying, ‘is my change. It’s legal tender, this note is, you can’t refuse to take it, the law’s the law, and there it is. So you take the money for my drinks and give me my change.’ He got a whine into the word ‘change’ but all the rest was brassy.
‘Go on with you,’ said Milly, ‘a five pound note ain’t legal tender, not for a matter of shillings,’ and Aunt Lily interrupted as if she were the second voice in a round, ‘Go on with you, how could this be legal tender when it ain’t legal in the first place? This five pound note’s like the cakes we give our teas, Home-made, that’s what it is.’
‘You dare say that and I’ll have the law on you,’ said the spruce and dirty man, and then he saw Uncle Len. ‘Why, here’s the boss. Well, you get your missus to give me my change - she is your missus now, ain’t she? Well, you get her to give me my change. Me and my four friends, we had twelve whiskies, and I’m paying for them with a five pound note, and I’m asking you, missus - she is your missus, ain’t she - to take the money and give me my change. And let me tell you, my four friends are outside in my motor-car, and they could come back in a jiff if I called ’em.’
‘Pick up that note and put down the price of twelve whiskies in the King’s silver,’ said Uncle Len. ‘Six shillings, that is. And when we’ve spun each coin and heard that there aren’t none of them home-made like your note, you can go out and join your four friends in your nasty stinking little motor-car.’
‘I got no silver,’ said the spruce and dirty man. ‘I run clear out of silver, that’s why I give your missus this note. And what you got against me, that you won’t take my five pound note? You know me well, Len Darcy. You knew me when you couldn’t be so choosy.’
‘I don’t know you so well,’ said Uncle Len. ‘You was a tictac man when I was one myself, but that’s no great link, and anyway it was a long time ago. I think your name’s Benny something or other, but I can’t rightly call it to mind, and I don’t want to. We wasn’t friends then, and we ain’t that now. What I can’t stand about you is that you’re trying to make a fool of me for the third time. You been here twice before in your nasty stinking little motor-car. I’m not for progress, it’s the law of nature, but I don’t like some of the parties that’s travelling in these motor-cars. Some’s all right but there’s others shouldn’t be travelling in anything but the Black Maria, that’s the law of nature as it works out with them, and Black Maria it’ll be for them again, I’ll be bound. Well, you come here in your nasty stinking little motor-car last Whitsun, and my wife changed your five pound note and it was a dud, and this year just after Easter you done the same thing with Miss Lily, and that was a dud too. You ain’t going to do that to me again, chum. You pick up that five pound note,’ he said gently, ‘and you put down your silver, or I’ll call the coppers. The station’s just round the corner.’
‘And how many coppers might you have in your nasty stinking little station?’ asked the spruce but dirty man. ‘Not as many as I got friends in my motor-car. You ain’t got four policemen in your nasty stinking little station. I got four friends in my motor-car.’
‘You got four friends with four knuckledusters out in your nasty stinking little car, I don’t doubt,’ said Uncle Len. ‘But you pore ignorant ’eathen, ain’t you never heard of insurance? I’m insured with the Pru. I got all the money of the Pru behind me. I’d have the place set right for me even if you smashed it up before I smashed you up, which ain’t going to happen, that’s against the law of nature, that is. I’d have every penny spent that needs spending without me putting my hand in my pocket if the law of nature lay down on its job. But I tell you it won’t. I ain’t forgotten how to create a fair masterpiece of a fight.’ He looked at himself in the glass behind the bar and smoothed his hair. ‘I’m cunning,’ he said placidly, ‘and unscrupulous. You say you know me better than I know you, and at that you ought to know there’s been some people I’ve taken against who ain’t never been the same since. Pick up that note and put down your silver.’
The spruce but dirty man said nothing, but he turned a slow leer on Uncle Len; and Uncle Len lost his smoothness. ‘Gawd,’ he cried, ‘you ’aven’t forgotten what I’m like?’
There was a desperate appeal in his voice. The other lost his leer and seemed to be listening to an echo of those words.
‘If you knew me so well,’ insisted Uncle Len, ‘you must remember what I’m like?’ The sweat was standing on his forehead.
All the customers stirred and shifted on their feet, and though their faces remained blank and flat, they moved a little closer to the spruce and dirty man. He spun round and faced them, the light flashing from a jewelled pin in his tie and a thick swag of gold watch-chain across his red waistcoat. He stared at these unornamented people and seemed to notice something about them which he had not seen before, and wavered, and spun back to Uncle Len. ‘Have it your own bloody silly way then,’ he said, ‘I suppose you haven’t got the change for a fiver in your rotten little till.’ He dug slowly in his pockets for the silver and dropped it on the counter.
‘Gawd,’ sighed Uncle Len, wiping his brow, ‘I’m glad you seen reason. Spin ’em girls.’ And so Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily did, while the spruce and dirty man leaned over the counter so that the people
in the bar could not see, shrugging his shoulders and twirling his moustache and humming. When the last coin had rolled and fallen Uncle Len said, ‘Now you can go, Benny.’
But when the dirty man turned about he could not bear all the clay-coloured grins that met him. He jerked back and said, ‘Well, goodbye, Len Darcy, and be damned to you for a diddacoy.’
He found he could not leave. He was held by his tie. Uncle Len’s right hand had shot out and gripped it by the knot, pressing back and up, against the Adam’s apple behind it. At the same time Uncle Len’s left hand, acting as if it were on its own, stretched out to the counter, picked up a tumbler by its base, and cracked it on the wood so that the rim was shattered. Then that left hand, holding the broken tumbler, came to rest above his right. The jagged edge of glass must have been touching Benny’s throat. The two hands stayed there still as stone. If we could have seen Uncle Len’s face we might have known whether he meant to bring the glass that final fraction of an inch nearer. But from the doorway we had only an oblique view of him, we saw only the hunched downland of his shoulders, those still hands, his head slewed away from us. But we could see Benny well enough; and he believed he was going to die. His face had turned into a horse’s head, his eyes were rolling and his nostrils snorted, his lips had lifted over long yellow teeth. I felt sure that Uncle Len was doing the right thing, but I hoped that in this instance the right thing was not murder. The silence lasted and I felt faint. I was conscious again of the horrible male smell of the room. I looked towards the two women at the bar, who better than anyone would know whether Uncle Len was going to kill Benny. Astonishingly, Aunt Lily had become a black column, a veiled Eastern woman. She had thrown her skirt over her head. Milly’s eyes looked through me; her face meant nothing but that she felt as I did, that whatever Uncle Len did would be right, but that it might be terrible.
Uncle Len dropped his hands. ‘Why, Benny, Benny!’ he said in tones of gentle reproof. ‘You been and wet your trousers. Wet your trousers, and you such a big boy!’ The silence endured another second. Then again the clay-coloured faces of all the customers were cleft with grins, grins that widened till the room had the huge clownish look of the Man in the Moon, and there surged out of them rolling laughter like a vulgar sort of thunder. ‘Got a cloth handy, Milly?’ asked Uncle Len. ‘Just throw it over. Now, Benny, get down on your knees and wipe up that puddle at your feet.’ The clay-coloured grins gave out their open-mouthed roar again; it pulsed, as if it was shaken out of them by a giant hand. ‘That’s a good boy, get down to it, right down,’ said Uncle Len. As Benny stiffly fell to his knees his ginger-brown bowler tipped off, and Uncle Len caught it, clicking his tongue in indulgent reproach. ‘Now, careful, Benny, you don’t want everything you got messed up,’ he said, and the roar swelled again, it was as if the Man in the Moon had come close to earth, as if he were all that there is to know. A breeze blew in the curtains at the open window, blew in the stench of the lavatories from the yard.
Uncle Len looked down on Benny as he swabbed the floor, and said benevolently, seeming to be unaware of the laughter but speaking loud enough to be heard through it, ‘That’s right. You can work well enough when you get your orders from a better man.’ Presently he laid his hand on Benny’s head and kept it there. A shudder ran through the kneeling man and he became a waxwork. ‘What you stop working for?’ asked Uncle Len, kindly. ‘What you stop working for, Benny boy?’ Absently he let his hand play with the greasy crimps of blue-black hair, and still Benny was rigid, though one could hear his sobbing breath. Then Uncle Len lifted his hand. ‘That’s enough now,’ he said. ‘One more good swab and we’ll say the job’s done. Right. Now run along, Benny boy. And take that cloth with you and show it to your friends outside in that nasty stinking little motor-car. And remember that something funnier still will happen to you when you’re hanged. Better remind your friends outside about that too. And now goodnight, Benny. Goodnight. Goodnight for always.’
As the door closed there was a sudden burst of talk, but Uncle Len held up his left hand. It was still holding the tumbler with the jagged edge. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘See if they start up the motor-car. They’re a silly lot. They might be foolish enough to come back.’ He eased the tumbler into the hollow of his palm to get a better grip, and we all listened.
Presently the whirring and the spluttering began, and Uncle Len put down the glass on the bar, saying, ‘I thought they’d see reason. And here’s asking everybody’s pardon. You know this is as well-conducted a house as you can find in the country, and such a thing never happened here before, at least not in my time, and pray God it don’t happen again.’ He turned towards the bar and said formally, as if Milly and Lily were strangers to him, ‘Beg pardon, ladies.’ He had discarded his everyday bearing, and was carrying himself with the public dignity of a ringmaster in a circus, which is a real dignity in its way. Then he faced his customers again and cleared his throat. ‘My name’s Darcy,’ he told them, ‘and no man alive can call me diddacoy.’ There was an instant when it seemed as if his words had struck a blank wall. It might have been that most of the customers had no more idea of what he meant than I had. But there was an approving murmur, and Uncle Len acknowledged it with a bow, then wheeled about. Then he saw us.
He groaned and said to Richard Quin, ‘Why did you let the two girls come in here? That there wasn’t fit for them to see, it truly wasn’t.’
Richard Quin made no answer. His lips turned up at the corners as if he were going to smile, then drooped again. Usually, when life became disagreeable, he found a teasing comment which moved what had happened nearer to what one would have liked to happen. But this time the disliked event could not be changed. Uncle Len’s words angered me. There was no difference in courage between men and women, if what had happened wasn’t fit for me it wasn’t fit for men to see either. But Rosamund spoke sharply for me: ‘Why should we not have been here? Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily are here. Anyway we came down for candles and matches. Don’t you remember?’ she asked harshly, as if she were recalling him to his real duties. ‘The electric light has gone in the other part of the house.’
‘Why, dearie, so it has,’ said Uncle Len. ‘But this nasty business put everything else out of my head. Come along to the sitting-room.’
There he handed Rosamund a pair of three-branched candlesticks and gave me another, and lit the candles and sent us on our way, telling Richard Quin to come with him to the stables and he would find him a lantern which would be safer in the loft. But as the door between the two parts of the inn swung behind us I said, ‘I think we’d better blow these candles out. Fire, you know.’ I had such a sense of general and pervasive danger that I imagined a wind springing up even there, in the heart of the house, and setting our skirts blazing. Had Rosamund been her ordinary self, she would have stammered, ‘N-n-no, R-r-rose, if we carry them carefully it will be all right,’ but now she instantly bent down and blew on the six lights with an angry mouth. For a minute or two we stood still, breathing hard, as if the darkness were a shelter we had gained by running. But we heard hawking voices from the bar, and a great retch of laughter, and to get further from them we felt our way up the creaking staircase, hanging on to the banister lest we fell at the sharp turn, and once in our room we shut the door, longing to lock it, but the others would have noticed, and Rosamund set the two candlesticks on the chimneypiece and lit them. As the flames swelled and steadied Cordelia and Mary turned over in their beds and blinked at the brightness.
‘Oh, have we been terribly long?’ I asked, busy with the wicks. Both Rosamund and I were being clumsy with them, our hands were still shaking. ‘I am so sorry, we couldn’t help it, we really couldn’t.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mary. ‘You haven’t been more than five minutes, we’ve been all right.’
Surely it had not happened as quickly as that.
‘What’s gone wrong?’ said Mary, sitting up in bed.
I could not possibly tell her the truth, an
d Rosamund did not want to. She was taking off her clothes quickly and disdainfully, as if she wanted to be alone with her bare, dissociate body. But though I could not talk candidly about what had happened, I had to talk about it. I was still enclosed in the bar, in the smell and the smoke, in the fear of murder and the loathing of our indecent bodies; my breath insisted on turning into words referring to my imprisonment. I said, ‘There has been a hateful scene in the bar. A dreadful man tried to get Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily to change a forged five pound note.’
‘Wasn’t Uncle Len there?’ asked Mary, as though that should have settled everything.
