by H. E. Bates
In a podgy kind of way, Lieutenant Bronson was handsome, heavily built, with aristocratically tender feet which suffered terribly on the route marches. He came from the real aristocracy: estates in Cornwall, a house in Grosvenor Square, and at the outbreak of the war had been toying away time, on a pretence of working at oil, in Mexico. Yet he had a quality of self-effacement about him, a retreating charm of manner that was quite humble. The men liked him. He had a way of hushing up, as it were, his aristocratic identity. His wife was a little thing, a woman of whipped cream, delicate and sweet, all pretty froth and hardly tangible. An aristocrat also, she had not quite come to her senses after the tremendous crash of war and marriage coming almost at the same time, and she painted water-colours in the Harris’s front room, in the real pre-war aristocratic mode, still nursing the idea that painting was a necessary accomplishment. Bronson adored her, and she was only bored when route-marches and parades and mess-duty claimed him too long. Then she painted hard, or wrote letters, or, on desperate days, went into the kitchen and prepared the anchovies or mayonnaise. On still more desperate days she invited Irma into the front room, to talk to her, while she painted.
The two girls liked each other. Only the thinnest veil of breeding and self-consciousness kept them apart, sometimes miles apart. Virginal, under the glass-case, Irma looked up to the older girl, envying the strange state of marriage, in which freedom and stability were so miraculously combined. Whirling round on an axis which marriage and war had sent crazy, Mrs. Bronson looked down, with slight envy, on what she felt to be Irma’s state of emotional rest.
Mrs. Bronson painted with timid accurate talent, creating nothing. The delicate water-colours cost her no emotion. She copied flowers, did a bowl of Gloire de Dijon roses that Irma brought in from the garden, and another of white lilies. She was always washing her hands. She used a strange soap, after which her hands gave off a remotely exotic scent. To Irma, gradually, this scent began to stand for Mrs. Bronson: her frothy prettiness, her painting, the miraculous marital state.
In this way the natural heroine-worship sprang up. Just as Mrs. Harris saw herself in Irma, so Irma began to wish that she could see herself in Mrs. Bronson. She wanted to be able to do the things Mrs. Bronson did: to paint water-colours, to mix extraordinary oils for salad, to speak with her accent, to wash with that same remarkable soap. She did her best to dress a little like Mrs. Bronson. Instead of sitting with her hands outspread, like flowers, she began to sit with her arms crossed and her hands on their opposite shoulders, in the same bemused pretty attitude as Mrs. Bronson did.
All the time Mrs. Harris was watching. Years of financial alertness, of swift concentration against the remote chance of mistaking sixpence for a farthing, had left her eyes virtually lidless. She missed nothing. Her concentration on money was part instinctive, part habitual, part a fear of Harris’s memory. Built up on farthings, Harris’s financial success, by which he had been able to invest in the rows of working-class houses from which Irma and she now drew income, reproached her. Inspired in this way, she missed less than Harris himself. Her concentration on money had become a creed.
Similarly her concentration on Irma was becoming a disease. For years it had been a kind of nervousness, some sort of chronic palsied illusion. As she saw Irma begin to model herself on Mrs. Bronson, it began to grow infinitely worse, more vicious, aggravated by the fact that, for once in her life, Irma was doing something outside the rule of the glass case. Having worshipped Irma all her life, it seemed beyond her comprehension that Irma could be guilty of worship in turn.
Mrs. Harris could not understand. She saw any affection between the two girls as beyond and without reason. She saw Irma captured by someone else, taken away from her. There was something unusual, fishy, not straight about it. In a fit of jealousy she tried to stop it.
‘If I were you, I shouldn’t bother Mrs. Bronson so much. You see, well, people like to be private. I don’t think she wants you in there from morning to night.’
In meek obedience, Irma stopped going into Mrs. Bronson’s room. Mrs. Bronson at once noticed it.
‘Why doesn’t Irma come in to see me?’
Mrs. Harris was in a quandary. No use offending Mrs. Bronson. She didn’t want to lose the Bronsons. An officer and his wife were better than three privates. It would pay her to be nice to Mrs. Bronson.
So Irma went back, and the natural friendship seemed if anything a little stronger, more easy, so that Irma tried apeing Mrs. Bronson not only in things like soap and dresses, but in thought and mannerisms. They naturally talked about Bronson, and once or twice Irma went in to have supper with them, and once Bronson teased her about her hair.
‘You’ve got so much hair you ought to dish it out to the officers. One lock, one officer. You know, to put in his Bible next to his heart. It’s not fair, one girl having enough hair for a regiment and keeping it.’
It was just Bronson’s joke, and they all enjoyed it.
Then, once or twice, Bronson and his wife took Irma for a walk after supper. They felt a little sorry for her, sensing the situation, seeing her under the domination of the mother, the scrubbed house, the fusty passages. ‘The poor kid’s never had a chance. I feel a bit sorry for her,’ Mrs. Bronson said. And the three of them would walk out as far as the park, in the summer dusk, under the limes, and once Mrs. Bronson, who wore no hat, said she could feel the honey-dew falling from the lime leaves down on her hair. ‘Just trying to make it curl like Irma’s,’ Bronson teased.
To Mrs. Harris it was all incomprehensible. Fretted by jealousy, her mind could not rest. It remained nervous, discontented, without power to do anything.
Then she saw what she took to be an extraordinary thing. Irma and the Bronsons had been for an evening walk. Five minutes after they were back, she saw Irma’s straw hat and Bronson’s cap lying in the same chair in the hall.
Not hung up, but thrown down, and together. Not Mrs. Bronson’s hat. Irma’s hat. With Bronson’s thrown down in a hurry. At night, under cover of darkness.
Her mind gathered the nervous power and the direction it had lacked and shot off, before she could do anything, straight to Bronson. It seemed to hit Bronson with its extraordinary charge of suspicion, and then recoil back, leaving Mrs. Harris with the hot shell of staggered conviction in her hands.
It was Mr. Bronson. Not Mrs. Bronson. Mr. Bronson. Bronson! Her mind juggled with the red-hot conviction as a man juggles with the potato too hot to hold. Tossing it up and down, lacking the nerve to hold it, she was too distraught, that night, to do anything about it, and she kept up her distressed juggling performance all night, not knowing whether to be ashamed for Irma or enraged with Bronson, or both.
In the morning she had decided. For various reasons she would speak to Irma. There was the reason of money, the necessity of not offending the Bronsons. Then there was the reason that was much nearer Irma. Something had happened to Irma and it was very likely that Irma, a young girl, did not fully understand it.
‘Irma,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to you.’ Then at the moment of crisis she felt her courage crumble. She felt that she could not say what she had to say in bare words, all pat, like a speech.
At this moment she remembered Harris. He, like the Lord, had had a weakness for speaking in parables. She would speak in a parable, and her idea of a parable was to say:
‘Irma, you want to keep yourself to yourself.’
Distress unexpectedly charged her voice with passion. The girl was wide-eyed, not understanding. She did not speak.
Mrs. Harris took silence for guilt. Her mind seized the hot charge of conviction and held it painfully but in spite of pain.
‘Irma! Irma!’
‘But mother, what’s the matter?’
‘What’s the matter! That’s a nice thing. As if you don’t know. Oh! Irma, Irma. After all I’ve done for you, after the way I’ve brought you up.’ And then suddenly the plain accusation, final and incontrovertible, as if she needed nothing more t
han the two hats, Irma’s and Bronson’s, on a chair, and the girl’s silence.
‘Irma, you’re running after Lieutenant Bronson! I won’t have it. I’ve seen it! I know. I won’t have it!’
The girl was still silent. To Mrs. Harris it seemed only like a confession, and in a way she was glad that it was all over so simply.
‘That’s all I’ve got to say – now. But I’d be ashamed of myself, Irma Harris. I would. I’d be utterly ashamed of myself.’
Irma began to go about vaguely, for the first time in her life caught up by a dream of substantial reality. Up to that time she had not thought of Bronson. It was only Mrs. Bronson. She felt excitably affectionate towards Mrs. Bronson, virginally, tenderly, longing to be like her. Bronson had not touched her.
She began now to think of Bronson. What had her mother seen? She must have seen something. Knowing that she had never looked at Bronson, the girl could only wonder if Bronson had looked at her.
She began to try to figure it out for herself, in bed at night. She took the false premise of her mother, the accusation, and built up about it the arguments for one side and another, singling out the moments when she felt that there might have been something in Bronson’s way of looking at her. She tried to argue it out impartially with herself, trying to prove there was nothing in it. And gradually, all the time, she was aware of an increasing feeling that it would be nice if it could be proved the other way. Then she wanted it proved the other way. She wanted to feel that Bronson had looked at her. She wanted to know, and even if necessary against all reason, that there was something in it after all.
Then all at once she thought of the things Bronson had said about her hair. Said jokingly, they suddenly took on the weight of great importance. She was staggered by them. Where they had seemed very trivial, not to be taken seriously, they now began to seem not only extraordinarily important, but very beautiful. As she lay stretched out in bed, she felt that all argument had ceased to have meaning. There was now no argument, no complexity. It was all different. The street lamp was still shining on the ceiling from outside, and looking up at it, she felt herself flooded by waves and waves of incandescent beauty. Borne on light, they were at the same time like intransient cadences of prolonged music. Sentimentally and passively she let them wash over her, and then recede, leaving her mind as clear-washed as a shore after a tide, smoothed and quiet, animated only by the faint phosphorescence of an absurd sort of rapture.
Subsequently she became almost awfully aware of Bronson’s nearness. She went upstairs and met him coming down; took in the Bronsons’ meals and stood while he took the dishes from her, almost touching her. She was aware on those occasions of flashes of extraordinarily electric emotion, part pleasure, part pain, and at nights she put on, in her mind, the gramophone record of things he had said to her or about her, letting herself be passively swirled away from the eternal revolutions of repeated thought.
Then Mrs. Harris noticed something else: the soap. Irma’s soap was the same, she suddenly discovered, as Mrs. Bronson’s soap.
That could only mean one thing.
It was an awful, outrageous thing. Soap, scent, the scent of hands and body and face: together they drove her to the edge of impossible conjecture.
She rushed straight up to Irma’s bedroom, only to find the girl standing there by the window, looking at Bronson, drilling No. 3 Platoon farther down the street. For a moment Mrs. Harris could not speak. It was a moment of both humiliation and triumph. She felt enraged and yet quite strengthless. Then, before she could speak, Irma turned away from the window, lifted up her head and walked out of the room. She was a little flushed, but quite calm, and she did not speak.
Irma’s look of unsubmissive tranquillity, her air of touch-me-not complacency, so beautiful and self-conscious and infuriating, aroused in Mrs. Harris a curious sort of enmity. Her synonymity with Irma was shattered. Irma had become another being, separate, unacknowledgeable, behaving with a self-confessed awful immorality that was a condemnation of Mrs. Harris herself.
Going downstairs, she followed Irma about, arguing, basing everything on that point. ‘What about me? What do you think I feel? After all I’ve done for you. Don’t you see how I must feel? Don’t you ever think of me? Don’t you see how it affects me?’
The girl could not say anything. In so intangible an affair, where so much was only the fiction of the mind, there was nothing much she could do except be silent.
It was in silence that Mrs. Harris saw guilt. She blamed Irma bitterly, but only Irma, seeing her part in the affair as active, not passive. Irma was committing – staring out of the window, aping Mrs. Bronson, using the same soap – a wilful and stupid folly, a slight against parental decency. ‘Your father would have been ashamed of you.’ But it had not occurred to her that the Lieutenant might be condoning it.
Pushed farther into secrecy, Irma enlarged in her mind the small fiction of herself and Bronson. She was pushed back into an inward loneliness, in which she made a structure of one improbability built on another. These improbabilities, as they grew up pagoda-fashion, she began to see as solid truths, lighting them up with the shimmering adolescent light of her own fancy. In this beautiful abstract fashion, she persuaded herself into an intense belief in the reality of Bronson’s affection for her, suffering with a certain pleasure, believing in the aspects of its tragedy as readily as she believed in its extraordinary ecstasy.
In the Bronsons’ room downstairs there was a large black tin case. Here Bronson kept his full-dress uniform, sword and various accoutrements. One night Irma cut off some of her hair and went downstairs, intending to put the hair into the breast-pocket of one of Bronson’s tunics. In the darkness the lid of the box slipped out of her hands and crashed.
The Bronsons’ bedroom was immediately above, and Bronson heard the crash and came downstairs. He switched on the electric light and saw Irma standing beside the box, in her nightgown. He had come down hurriedly, without a dressing-gown, and for a moment he was too embarrassed to speak. Irma stood trembling. Then just as he was going to speak he heard a door open upstairs, and he knew Mrs. Harris was coming down.
Something made him put out the light. In complete silence, he and the girl stood in the darkness, trying to deny each other’s existence. They heard Mrs. Harris shuffle downstairs in her carpet slippers, and after about thirty seconds Bronson felt her hand stab at the light.
The words were ready on Mrs. Harris’s lips, like bullets waiting to be fired. They exploded straight at Bronson, rapid-firing: ‘I got you. I caught you. I got you, I caught you.’
Neither Bronson nor Irma could speak. Mrs. Harris took silence for guilt. She swivelled round and fired a double shot upstairs:
‘Mrs. Bronson! Mrs. Bronson!’
Bronson stood white, tragically silent. He heard his wife’s voice in reply and her movements as she came downstairs. He stood quiet, more nervous than Irma, still not saying anything, aware of his predicament and yet doing nothing, seeing himself only as the victim of some unhappy and apparently unchaste circumstance over which he had no control.
Mrs. Harris fired a fusillade of bitter triumph as Mrs. Bronson came and stood in the light of the doorway:
‘They ain’t moved, they ain’t said nothing. That’s how I found ’em. In their nightgowns. That’s how I found ’em. I knew it had been going on for a long time, but not like this, not like this!’
Irma began to cry. Bronson and his wife stood with a kind of paste-board rigidity, stiffened by some inherent aristocratic impulse not to give way before people out of their class. They knew they had nothing to fear, yet they saw themselves confronted by the iron suspicion of Mrs. Harris as by a firing squad. In Mrs. Harris’s small distracted grey eyes there was a touch of madness, inspired by triumph. She spoke with the rapid incoherence of someone sent slightly insane by a terrible discovery. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I know what I’m going to do. I know and I’m going to do it. If you’re not ashamed, I am.
I’m ashamed. I’m – ’
At this moment Irma fainted.
‘No wonder! No wonder! Gettin’ her down here in her nightgown, on the sly. Gettin’ her down here – ’
The insane dangerous stupidity of it all only struck the Bronsons into dead silence. And in silence, as never before, Mrs. Harris saw guilt.
The next afternoon the Bronsons moved to other quarters. Irma, shut up in her room, heard Lieutenant Bronson’s large tin box go clanking out of the hall like a coffin.
In less than a month there was hardly a soldier left in the town. In the papers Irma read about the regiment going to the Dardanelles, and read Bronson’s name, a little later, among the killed.
More than two years later she read how Mrs. Bronson too had been killed. In Mexico, where she had gone to clear up some of Bronson’s affairs, she had been hit, while sitting in a café, by a stray bullet in a local revolution.
Irma envied Mr. and Mrs. Bronson, the dead. She began to feel that she was going about with a bullet in her own heart, and was only gradually beginning to understand, by the pain of longer silences between herself and her mother, who had fired it.
