by H. E. Bates
Very excited, he lay listening for a long time in the warm darkness of the little room. Twice he got up and stood at the window and looked out, smelling the summer night, seeing nothing to break the colour of darkness except the rosy-orange flowering of distant iron-ore furnaces on the hills beyond the river, hearing nothing to break the sound except a momentary lift of breeze stirring the pear-leaves on the house-wall under the window. For long periods he sat up in bed, eyes wide open so that they should not close altogether, and once he got up and, for the first time in his life, voluntarily washed his face. The cold water woke him afresh and after what seemed to him hours he heard the twang-clanging of the American clock, with the view of Philadelphia 1867, being wound by his Aunt Bishop in the living-room below, and then her feet on the stairs and finally the latch of her bed-room door breaking one silence and beginning another.
He waited for what he felt was five minutes and then got up and put on his jacket and tied his boots round his neck. He opened the door of his room and waited, listening. His heart seemed to pound at the darkness. He knew that the stairs creaked at every step and finally he lay on the banisters and slid down with no sound but a faint snake-like slither. The kitchen door was unlocked and he went out that way, sitting on the door-mat to put on his boots.
In the darkness his senses were so sharpened by excitement that he could feel the presence of his Uncle Bishop and Maxie before he heard the whispers of their voices. They were sitting together under the cart-shed. For a minute he did not know what to do. Then he remembered the warm kindly face of his Uncle Bishop and the favourite phrase of his aunt, ‘Can’t see nothing wrong in that boy, can you? I don’ know! You’d give him your head if he asked for it’, and he ran suddenly across the stack-yard, calling in a whisper who he was. ‘It’s all right, it’s me, it’s Alexander’, his heart bumping with guilt and excitement.
‘Be God, you’ll git me hung,’ his Uncle Bishop said.
‘Lucky for you y’aint in Kingdom Come,’ Maxie said. ‘I was half a mind to shoot.’
‘Young gallus!’ his uncle said. ‘Frightning folks to death.’
‘Can I stop?’ Alexander said.
‘Looks as y’re stopping,’ Maxie said. ‘Jis be quiet. Y’ oughta ding ’is ear,’ he said to Uncle Bishop. ‘Too soft with ’im be ’arf.’
‘I told you they were coming,’ Alexander said.
‘We don’ know as they are coming,’ Maxie said, ‘yit.’
For a long time nobody spoke again. The fields were dead silent all round the house and when Alexander looked out from the hovel he was so excited that he felt that the stars swung in their courses over the straw-stacks and the trees. His hands trembled and he pressed them between his knees to quieten them. And then he heard something. It startled him by its closeness and familiarity: the clopping of Snowy’s hoofs on the ground.
‘Where’s Snowy?’ he said.
‘In the stable,’ Maxie said. ‘We shut him up so’s they should think we’d really gone. See?’
‘Diddling ’em?’
‘Diddlin’ ’em,’ Maxie said. ‘Gotta be artful wi’ gippos. Else they diddle you.’
They sat silent for a long time again, the night broken by no sound except the occasional clop of Snowy’s hoofs and a brief whisking of wind stirring into the stacks and sometimes an odd sleepy murmur from the hens. A sort of drugged suspense took hold of Alexander, so that once he lost count of time and place and himself, as though he were asleep on his feet.
It was Maxie’s voice that sprung him back to full consciousness and excitement. ‘Ain’t that somebody moochin’ about behind the pig-sties?’
‘Somebody or summat round there. Them ’ugs ain’t rootlin’ up for nothing.’
‘Listen! Somebody’s comin’ up round the back.’
Alexander and the two men sat tense, waiting. The boy could hear the sound of someone moving in the deep nettles and grass behind the pig-sties. The sound came nearer, was in the yard itself, was translated suddenly into moving figures. Maxie moved out of the hovel. The boy knelt on his hands and knees, clawing with his finger nails at a flint embedded in the dry earth, loosening it at last and weighing it in his hand. He felt astonishingly brave and angry and excited. Down across the yard there was a sound of wood being gently splintered: of the plank, as before, being prised out of the side of the locked hen-house. As he heard it he felt the pressure of his Uncle Bishop’s hand against his chest, forcing him back a pace or two into the cart-shed. As he moved back he caught his heel against the lowered shaft of the pony cart and slipped. He groped wildly and fell against the side of the shed, the impact clattering the loose corrugated iron roof like a tin skeleton.
When he picked himself up again Maxie and his uncle were already running across the yard, shouting. He began running too. Somebody was slashing a way out through the nettles behind the pig-sties, out towards the orchard. The sows had woken up and were thundering against the sty-doors and the hens had set up a wild cluttering of terror. Alexander flung the flint wildly in the darkness. It hit the iron roof of the pig-sties like a huge explosive cap going off and the next moment, at the gate of the orchard, Maxie fired a shot. For a moment Alexander felt that he had been knocked off his feet. The shot seemed to reverberate across half the world, the boomerang of echoes came smashing back and stirred cattle and hens and pigs to hysteria in which he too was yelling madly.
He was half way across the orchard, Maxie in front, his Uncle Bishop waddling behind, the gippos already lost somewhere beyond the farthest trees, when he realised that there was a new sound of hysteria in the yard behind him. He stopped, and knew suddenly that it was Snowy, kicking the stable down.
He ran straight back, seeing better now in the darkness but still blundering against low branches of fruit-trees, barking his shins on pig-troughs in the stack-yard, brushing past the fat outspread arms of his Uncle Bishop, yelling at him to come. As he reached the stack-yard, mounting straight over the muck-hill, he heard the crack of the stable-door as it split the staple and the final frenzied hammering of Snowy’s hoofs as they beat back the swinging door again and again until Snowy himself was free. The horse swung out of the dark hole of the stable like the ghost of a flying horse on a roundabout, circling wildly out of sight behind the far stacks, making drivelling noises of terror. The boy ran to and fro in the dark yard like someone demented himself, calling his uncle, then Maxie.
‘Be God, what the nation is it? Boy, what is it? Boy, wheer the devil are y’?’
‘It’s Snowy!’ he yelled. ‘Maxie! It’s Snowy. It’s Snowy. Maxie! Uncle!’
He was almost crying now. The men were rushing about the yard. His Aunt Bishop, from an upstairs window, was shouting incomprehensible threats or questions or advice, no one listening to her.
They were listening only to Alexander, to what he had to say. ‘Which way did he go, boy? Did you see him go? Which way?’ And when he had nothing to say except ‘I saw him go by the stacks, that’s all’, they stood listening to a sound coming from far down the road, and he stood listening with them, his heart very scared, fear and excitement beating his brain dizzy.
It was a sound like the noise of a tune played on handbones: the sound of Snowy galloping on the road, far away already towards the river.
5
By nine o’clock on Sunday morning the three of them, Uncle Bishop and Maxie with Alexander riding on the carrier of Maxie’s bicycle, had reached a point where the brook ran over the road, under a white hand-rail bridge between an arch of alders, four miles upstream. Zig-zagging across the countryside, they had been riding and walking since six o’clock, asking everyone they met, a shepherd with his dog, a parson out walking before breakfast, labourers, a tramp or two: ‘Y’ ain’t seen a white horse nowhere? Got out last night. Ain’t got no bridle on nor nothing’, but no one had seen him and Alexander’s heart had begun to curl up like a small tired animal on the verge of sickness.
A small hill, not much more than a green breastwor
k, curved up from one side of the brook, and Maxie clambered up it on thick squat legs to take a squint over the surrounding land. He came down shaking his head, pressing tired heels in the slope. Sun hit the bubbling surface of the water as it lippled over the road, the dazzling quicksilver light flashing back in Alexander’s eyes, making him tired too.
‘No sign on ’im,’ Maxie said. ‘No tellin’ wheer he is got to. Rate he was runnin’ he’ll very like be half-way round England.’
‘More likely busted isself up on something. On a fence or something, barbed wire or something,’ Uncle Bishop said.
‘Well,’ Maxie said, ‘ain’t no use stannin’ about. Let’s get on as far as Shelton. We can ask Fat Sturman if he’s seed ’im.’
‘Fat Sturman?’ Uncle Bishop said. ‘It’s Sunday morning. He won’t be able to tell a white horse from a black for another twenty-four hours. Allus sozzled Saddays and Sundays, you know that.’
‘I forgot,’ Maxie said. ‘Well, we can ask somebody. Ask the fust man we meet.’
They walked despondently up the hill, pushing the bicycles. It was hot and silent everywhere, bees thick in the grass, the flat empty Sunday morning stillness seeming to Alexander to stretch far over the quivering horizon. Climbing, he looked at his boots. The lace-holes looked back at him from the pollen-yellow leather with the sad stoical eyes of Chinamen.
When he looked up again he was surprised to see an oldish woman coming down the hill, walking in a prim lardidardy way as though she had springs in the heels of her flat cloth-sided boots. On the top of an ant-hill of grey hair she had a huge fruit basket of a hat that reminded him of the glass-case of artificial grapes and pears and cherries that stood on the bible in his Aunt Bishop’s parlour. The woman was carrying a prayer-book in her hands and Alexander could see her turning to smile at the trees as she went past, as though she had hidden friends in them.
‘Shall we ask her?’ Uncle Bishop whispered.
‘Won’t know a horse from a dead donkey,’ Maxie said.
‘Never know,’ Uncle Bishop said. ‘Way she’s bouncing down the hill she might a bin a jockey.’
‘Well, you ask her. Not me.’
Half a minute later Uncle Bishop had taken off his hat and was making a little speech in a strange aristocratic voice to the old lady, who stood with hands clasped over the prayer-book, smiling with a kind of saintly beatitude. ‘Hexcuse me, madam, but hi suppose you hain’t seen a white pony nowheer? Hescaped last night. Much hobliged lady, if you seen hany sign on ’im.’
The old lady took one smiling, saintly look at the two men and Alexander.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have.’
‘My God,’ Maxie said, ‘wheer?’
The old lady looked at Maxie. ‘Did you use the name of God?’
‘Yis, but – ’
‘In front of the little boy?’
‘Yis, but – ’
‘My man, you ought to burn in hell!’
Sheepish and exasperated and at a loss, Uncle Bishop and Maxie stood looking at the ground, not knowing what to say, and the old lady suddenly began to make a strange rambling speech of reproval, preaching decency and godliness and respect for the Sabbath, her voice by turns like vinegar and honey, one hand sometimes upraised in a little gesture to the sky, until finally Alexander could stand it no longer.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘please tell us where the horse is. Something might have happened to him. He might be bad. He might be dying.’
‘Everybody is dying,’ she said.
His heart sank; tears of anger and frustration hit his eyes and sprang back. ‘Tell us where he is,’ he said. ‘Please. Tell us where he is.’
She was still smiling, saintly, slightly but rather nicely mad, and for one second the boy did not believe a word of all she had said. Then all at once she turned and pointed up the hill.
‘He’s at the top of the hill. Lying on the grass. Lying under a tree.’
Maxie and Alexander and Uncle Bishop ran up the hill. ‘God bless you,’ the old lady called, but they scarcely heard it.
The white pony was lying as the old lady had said in the shade of an ash tree at the top of the hill. As he heard footsteps and voices he lifted his head, and a small black explosion of flies rose from one eye. The boy called his name and with a great eager effort, making odd noises in his throat, the pony tried to struggle to his feet. He made the effort and sank back and Maxie knelt down by his head. ‘All right, Snowy. All right. Goo’ boy. Goo’ boy then. All right.’
‘We got to git ’im up,’ Uncle Bishop said.
‘Yis,’ Maxie said, ‘we got to git ’im up. Stan’ back, boy. Very like he’ll make a bit of a to-do. Stan’ back.’
Alexander stood back but the white pony could not rise. ‘Come on Snowy,’ the men said, ‘come on now. Come on,’ but nothing happened. It was cool under the ash tree but it seemed to the boy that the pony was held down by the heat of a great exhaustion. Each time he lifted his head the flies broke away in a small black explosion and then settled again.
They tried for almost half an hour to get the pony to his feet, but Maxie said at last: ‘It’s no good. We gotta git somebody else to look at him. You wait here and I’ll bike into Shelton and git Jeff Emery. He’s a knacker.’
‘Knacker?’ Uncle Bishop said.
‘Well, he’s a bit of a vet too. Does both. He’ll know what to do if anybody does.’
Maxie got on his bicycle and rode away up the hill. Alexander and Uncle Bishop stood and looked at the white pony. The depth of silence seemed to increase when Maxie had gone, bees moaning in the honeysuckle and the blackberry flowers, yellow hammers chipping mournful notes on the hedgerows, a bell for morning service donging a thin hole in the distance over the hill.
‘Think he’ll get up?’ the boy said.
‘He’ll get up, he’s just tired. You would be if you’d galloped about all night.’
‘Shako says he’s old. He’s not, is he?’
‘He ain’t young.’
‘You think he’s been a race-horse and the shot made him think he was in a race again?’
‘I count that’s what it was.’ Uncle Bishop took another look at the pony. ‘Well, it’s no good. I gotta see a man about a dog. You comin’?’ and he and Alexander went and stood over by the far hedge. ‘Hedge-roses out nice,’ Uncle Bishop said. ‘Grow all the better for a little water.’
When they turned again something had happened. Very quiet and looking in some way very fragile, the white pony was on his feet. The boy’s heart seemed to turn somersaults of happiness. He ran and put his hands on the pony’s head, smoothing his nose, talking softly. ‘Snowy. Good Snowy. Good boy, Snowy.’
‘You think he’s all right?’ he said.
‘You think he could walk as far as the brook? Perhaps he wants a drink?’
‘Yeh. Let him walk if he will. Don’t force him. Let him go how he likes.’
‘Come on, Snowy,’ the boy said. ‘Come on, Snowy. Good Snowy. Good boy. Come on.’
The pony walked slowly down the hill in hot sunshine. At the bottom of the hill, where the brook ran over the road, he put his lips to the water. He let the water run into and past his mouth, not really drinking. He stood like that for a long time, not moving at all.
Suddenly he went down on his fore-legs and sank into the water. Alexander and Uncle Bishop had not time to do anything before they heard a shout and saw Maxie, with a man in breeches and leggings, coming down the hill.
‘Summat we can do, Jeff, ain’t there?’ Maxie said. ‘Summat we can do?’
The man did not answer. He knelt down by the pony, pressing his hands gently on the flanks.
‘Well, there’s jis’ one thing we can do, that’s all.’
The boy stood scared and dumb, watching the water break against the body of the horse, not seeing the men’s faces.
‘All right,’ Maxie said. He took Alexander by the arm. ‘Boy, you git hold o’ my bike and take it across the bridge and put it underneath t
hat furdest ash tree, outa the sun. I don’t want the tyres bustin’.’
‘Is Snowy going to be all right?’ the boy said.
‘Yis. He’s going to be all right.’
Alexander took the bicycle and wheeled it across the bridge and along the road. The ash tree was fifty yards away. He reached it and laid the bicycle against the trunk in the shade. The bell tinkled as it touched the tree and at the same time as if the bell were a signal, he heard a sharp, dull report from the brook, and he turned in time to see the man in breeches and leggings holding a strange-looking pistol in his hand.
Running wildly back to the brook, trying to shout and not shouting, he saw the white pony’s head lying flat and limp in the water. The water was lapping over the eyes, and out of the head and mouth a long scarf of blood was slowly unwinding itself downstream. The men had their backs turned away from him as though they did not want to look at him, and he knew that the white pony had gone for ever.
What he did not know until long afterwards was that there, at that moment, in the dead silence of the summer morning, with the sun blazing down on the white pony and the crimson water and the buttercups rich as paint in the grass, some part of his life had gone for ever too.
Every Bullet has its Billet
Irma Harris was eighteen when, in 1915, Lieutenant Bronson and his wife came to be billeted on her mother. Just out of High School, a pale arch-eyed girl with great masses of reddish gold hair scrolled up behind like the twists of a golden loaf, she had got to the age when she liked sitting for long hours in her own room, alone, thinking inexpressibly sad thoughts, with her hands spread out on her lap like two pink self-conscious flowers, waiting for the dew of all sorts of confused dreams to fall on them. Lieutenant Bronson and his wife had been married six weeks, and were very happy.
Mrs. Harris was a woman whose mind was done up in curling-rags: a plain, common mind which, for forty years, she had tried to frill into superiority. On a level above the neighbours, to whom she never spoke, she thanked God for Irma: thanked God that Irma’s hair was rich and beautiful, that she had the aristocratic richness of a name like Irma and not the common poverty of a name like May or Flo, that Irma had been educated, was superior, had kept pure and would, by the Grace of God, still keep pure for a long time to come. Earlier, some years before the death of Harris, who had peddled hosiery on a basket bicycle from door to door and had somehow cheese-pared his way to saving money, she had shut Irma down under a glass case, and had then gone on polishing the glass until she could see in it not only Irma but her own face. Even then it was not her own plain, ordinary curl-ragged face, but a face with a great mass of loaf-gold hair and soft pure skin as pale as bread. She saw Irma: Irma was herself. The girl was the lost self of the woman, unrecapturable except through the glass dome of imagination. Whatever might happen to Irma would happen also to herself.
