by H. E. Bates
I Am Not Myself
1
It was summer when the Arnoldsons first asked me to go and stay with them. I could not go. I did not go until the following winter, on January 5th. It was bitterly cold that day, with thin drifts of snow whipped up from the ground like fierce white sandstorms, and there was snow on the ground almost every day until I left, four days later.
The Arnoldsons lived about seven miles from the nearest town. The house is quite ordinary: plain red brick, double-fronted, with large bay-windows and a large brass-knockered front door and a spotless white doorstep. It is the colour of a new flower-pot and at the back in the garden there is a long pergola of bay-trees which is like a tunnel leading to nowhere.
Before that day in January I did not know any of the Arnoldsons except Laurence. We were at school together but we had not seen each other for fifteen years. He was an architect and I had written a letter to a paper about country architecture and he had seen it and that was how the invitation to stay with them had come about. Laurence Arnoldson is a man of medium height with straight dark hair brushed back. He wears plain ascetic looking gold spectacles and is a man of meticulous habits; always paring his finger-nails, polishing his glasses, splitting life into millimetres. His craze for exactitude and his contempt for people who have no time for it have made him a prig. He holds his head very high and you can see him looking down his nose at the world. The best thing about him is his eyes: they are weak but they are a deep, rather strange shade of brown. There is something remote about them.
Laurence met me at the station that day in a fairly old but carefully kept Morris-Oxford, a four-seater. His father was with him. He sat in the front seat, huddled in a black rug, with a large shaggy grey scarf muffled round his head. The scarf covered almost all of his face except his eyes. As Laurence introduced me I saw that his father’s eyes had exactly the same deep remote brownness as the son’s. It was snowing a little at the time and Laurence had left the windscreen wiper working and I could see the man’s eyes mechanically following its pendulum motions. They slid to and fro like two brown ball-bearings moving in grey oil, fascinated by the clear glass arc made by the wiper in the furred snow.
Laurence’s father did not speak to me and neither he nor Laurence exchanged a word as we drove slowly out into the frozen country. Their silence depressed me. I felt it had something to do with myself. Now and then I made a remark and once, about half a mile from the house, we passed a pond frozen over and I said something about skating and Laurence said:
‘Oh! Yes. That’s the pond where my sister saw a fox walk across the ice yesterday.’
The Arnoldson’s house stands on what was formerly a private estate and there is a private gravel road half a mile long leading up to it through fenceless fields that are planted with groups of elm and lime.
There is no Mrs. Arnoldson. She has been dead for thirteen years, and the house has been run for all that time by her sister, aunt Wilcox. It was aunt Wilcox who met us at the front door that afternoon, a dumpy woman with white hair scraped back sharply from her soap-polished face. She came out of the house briskly, shook hands with me without waiting to be introduced and then helped Mr. Arnoldson out of the car. I thought at first he had been ill, but then as he stood upright I could see that there was nothing wrong with him and that he was really a big and rather powerful man. His hands were very large-boned and his head, hugely swathed in the great scarf, had a kind of ill-balanced power about it. It swayed slightly to and fro as he walked, as though it were loose on the spine. He did not speak to me.
Aunt Wilcox spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent. The Arnoldsons themselves are Yorkshire people and the house is furnished in Yorkshire fashion: a rocking-chair in every room, big dressers, patchwork cushions, heavy pink-and-gold tea services. In the large drawing-room the curtains are of some claret-coloured woollen material, with plush bobbles, and they hang from great mahogany rods by mahogany rings that are like the rings on a hoop-la. On the mantelpiece stand two large china dogs, spaniels, black and white. They face each other and they appear to be looking at the same thing. They are extraordinarily lifelike.
I had been upstairs to unpack my things and had come down again and was looking at these dogs when Laurence came in to say that tea was ready. We went across the hall into the opposite room. It was about four o’clock and the white reflected light of the fallen snow was prolonging by a few minutes the fall of darkness. We sat down to tea in this strange snow-twilight, aunt Wilcox and Mr. Arnoldson opposite each other at the ends of the table, Laurence and I opposite, I myself opposite the window. The room was the exact reflection of the other. At the windows were the same sort of heavy woollen-bobbled curtains and on the mantelpiece stood what might have been the same pair of china spaniels watching with extraordinary lifelike fixedness some invisible object between them.
We sat there eating and drinking, without saying much. Aunt Wilcox poured tea from a huge electroplated pot that might have held a gallon. The cups were like pink and gold basins.
I drink my tea very hot and suddenly, as aunt Wilcox was taking my empty cup, I saw someone coming up the road towards the house. I knew at once, somehow, that it was Laurence’s sister. She was wearing a big brown coat, but no hat. Every now and then she stepped off the road on to the grass and wandered off, as though looking for something. She was like someone playing follow-my-leader with herself. Once she wandered farther off than usual and in the half-darkness I lost her for a moment. Then I saw her again. She was running. She was running quite fast and all at once she fell down on her knees in the snow and then ran on again. She was still running when she came to the house.
Two minutes later she came in. Her knees and the fringe of her coat were covered with snow where she had fallen down and there was a small salt-sprinkling of snow on her hair. She was about twenty-three, but she looked much younger, and I shall never forget how she came in, out of breath, to look at us with the same remote brown eyes as Laurence’s, intensely excited, with a stare that had nothing to do with earth at all.
‘I saw him again,’ she said.
For a moment no one spoke. Then Laurence said:
‘Who? The fox?’
‘Yes. I saw him run over the pond again and then I chased him up through the park and then just as I got near the house I lost him.’
No one spoke a word.
2
That evening, after supper, she told me more about the fox. She described him: how bright he was and how good-coloured and how it was only in snowy or frosty weather that she saw him, and as she described him I saw him, bright, quiet, his back feet slipping from under him a little as he sloped across the ice on the small pond. I saw him as she saw him, as she wanted me to see him.
She told me about the fox in two or three minutes. She talked rather quickly, but all her impressions were in reality created with her eyes; the images of fox and snow and frozen pond were thrown up in them with untarnishable clarity. Unlike a great many people she looked straight at me while talking. Her eyes were full of great candour. They looked straight forward, with natural ardour. You felt that they could never look sideways. They had in them an unblemished honesty that was very beautiful and also very convincing, but also, in some way, empty.
For those two or three minutes we were alone. We had all had supper and we were going to play cribbage. Laurence had gone into his room to finish a letter and aunt Wilcox was in the kitchen. Mr. Arnoldson had gone upstairs to find a new pack of cards.
‘I’d like to come out in the morning,’ I said, ‘and see this fox.’
She did not say anything.
In a little while first Laurence, and then Mr. Arnoldson and then aunt Wilcox came back, and we made arrangements to play. Cribbage was the only card game all of us knew and we decided to play in two pairs, for a shilling a horse, man out scoring. We cut the cards, ace high, lowest out, and aunt Wilcox said:
‘It’s you, Christiana. Mind now, no edging.’
The g
irl had cut a two of hearts, and I realised suddenly that it was the first time I had heard her name.
Aunt Wilcox and I played together. We were both rather quick, downright players, quick to sense a hand. We always had the pips counted before we put them on the table. This was not the Arnoldson way. Deliberation, to me an increasingly irritating deliberation, marked everything Laurence and his father did. They weighed up their hands guardedly and put on poker expressions, giving nothing away. Just as the girl spoke with her eyes, they played with their eyes. Between the counting of the hands they did not speak a word.
The game was a near thing and it looked, for a moment, as if aunt Wilcox and I might die in the hole, but we got home and I noticed aunt Wilcox pocketing the shilling. The Arnoldsons were not at all satisfied, and Laurence went over the last hand again, architect fashion, checking up, before giving in.
Mr. Arnoldson looked at Christiana. I forgot to say that he had a large grey sheep-dog moustache. The expression of his mouth was thus hidden. The whole expression of his face was compressed into his eyes. They shone very brightly, with a rather queer glassy look of excitement.
For the second game aunt Wilcox dropped out and Christiana took her place, playing with me. She was the quickest player I had ever seen. Every player gets now and then a hand he cannot make up his mind about, but that never happened to her. She played by instinct, second sight. She hardly looked at the cards. She kept her eyes on me. Yet she made up her mind before we began. I felt that, in some miraculous way, she could see through the cards.
All through the game she sat with her eyes on me. This constant but completely passionless stare had me beaten. It was hypnotic, so that whenever I looked away from her I was conscious of being drawn back. At first I thought it was deliberate, that she was simply trying hard to attract me. Then I got into the way of accepting her stare, of returning it. But where there should have been some response, there was only an unchanged anonymity, a beautiful brown wateriness filled with a remote, quietly hypnotic strength. I saw her as one of those composite pictures of two people. Two personalities are fused and there remains no personality, only some discomforting anonymity that fascinates.
During the game the tension between Christiana and her father increased. She was constantly one leap ahead of us all. She knew; we guessed. She had good cards, twice a hand of twenty-four. All the time I could see Mr. Arnoldson fidgeting, his eyes generating new phases of resentment.
Aunt Wilcox seemed to understand this. The Christmas decorations were still hanging up in the house, sprays of holly, withering now, stuck up behind the pictures, and a wand or two of box and fir. Suddenly aunt Wilcox said:
‘Twelfth day to-morrow. We mustn’t forget the decorations.’
‘Pancakes,’ Christiana said.
‘Fifteen two and a pair’s four and three’s seven,’ I said. ‘Pancakes?’
‘A north-country custom,’ aunt Wilcox said. ‘You fry the pancakes with a fire of the evergreens.’
‘I think,’ Laurence said, ‘I have a pair.’ He slowly laid out his cards. ‘Mind you don’t set the chimney on fire.’
Suddenly Christiana’s hand was on the table. She counted it like a parrot saying something by heart. She had three sixes and a nine and a three was up and she rattled it off, running the words together, making eighteen. Eighteen was quite right, but Mr. Arnoldson sprang to his feet, as though he had not heard it.
‘Nineteen, nineteen, you can’t score nineteen!’ he shouted. ‘It’s not possible in crib!’
‘I said eighteen!’
‘Eighteen is right,’ I began.
‘She said nineteen. I heard her. I distinctly heard her. You think I don’t know her voice?’
‘Eighteen!’ she said.
‘You said nineteen and now you’re lying on top of it!’
He was on his feet, shouting at her, grey with anger. Suddenly he began to shake violently and I knew he had lost control. He turned round and picked up the heavy mahogany Yorkshire chair he had been sitting in and swung it about, over his head. Aunt Wilcox got hold of Christiana and half pushed, half dragged her out of the room, and I automatically went after her, shouting after her as she ran upstairs in the darkness.
When I went back into the room, a moment later, Mr. Arnoldson was lying on the hearth-rug, on his back, in a fit. The chair was lying smashed on the table where he had brought it down. He was clenching in his hands some bits of withered holly he had torn down from one of the pictures. His hands were bleeding and it was a long time before we could get them open again.
3
The next morning Laurence, aunt Wilcox, Christiana and I sat down to a large and healthy breakfast, plates of porridge, lumps of rather fat beef-steak with fried mashed potatoes and eggs, thick toast and very strong marmalade, with the usual basins of tea. It was all very solid, very real. Unlike the behaviour of Mr. Arnoldson on the previous night it was something you could get your hands on and understand. Mr. Arnoldson did not appear at breakfast and no one said anything about him.
During breakfast Laurence read his letters and said he had a couple of hours’ work to do and would I mind amusing myself? In the afternoon we could go and look at some houses; there were one or two good stone mansions in the neighbourhood. It was still bitterly cold that morning, but there had been no more snow. The snow of yesterday had been driven, like white sand, into thin drifts, leaving exposed black islands of ice.
I decided to go for a walk, and after breakfast I asked Christiana to come with me. ‘We could look for the fox,’ I said.
Except for refusing, she did not say much. She was going to help aunt Wilcox. About the fox she was very evasive. It might not have existed. She might not have seen it.
‘I’ll have a look for it myself,’ I said.
She looked at me emptily, not speaking. Her eyes had lost completely the natural ardour and candour, both very child-like, which had infused the picture of the fox with reality and which had made me believe in both it and her. At that moment she could not have made me believe in anything.
I got my overcoat and gloves and went out. It was an east wind, steady, bitter, the sky a dull iron colour, without sun. In the fields the grass had been driven flat by wind. The earth was like rock. In a scoop of the land a small stream flowed down between squat clumps of alder, catkins wind-frozen, cat-ice jagging out like frosted-glass from the fringe of frost-burnt rushes on both banks. Farther on a flock of pigeons clapped up from a field of white kale, clattering wings on steel leaves, spiralling up, gathering, separating again like broken bits of the dead sky.
I went on until I found the pond. I knew it at once because, a field away, I could see the road, and because of what Christiana had said about it. She had described the black sloe bushes barricading one side, the speared army of dead rushes, and a broken-down, now half-submerged cattle-trough on which the fox, she said, had leapt and sat and stared at her. The pond was covered with ice and the ice in turn with the fine salt snow swept in a succession of smooth drifts across it.
I stood and looked at the pond. Then I walked round it. At the opposite point, by the cattle-trough, I stood and looked at it again. On the cattle-trough the light snow crusts were unbroken, and on two sides of it, away from the water, snow had drifted in long arcs, rippled and firm as lard. On the trough and in the snow drifted round it and all across the pond there were no marks of any fox at all.
4
When I got back to the house, about twelve, aunt Wilcox and Christiana were taking down the decorations. Most of the evergreens had been hung up in the hall, holly behind the pictures, sheaves of yew tied to the newel-posts of the polished pine staircase, and a very dry spray of mistletoe hung from the big brass oil-lamp. Aunt Wilcox and Christiana were putting the evergreens into a zinc bath-tin.
‘You’re just in time,’ Christiana said.
‘Last come must last kiss,’ aunt Wilcox said.
‘And what does that mean?’ I said.
‘You’ve got
to kiss us both.’
Laughing, aunt Wilcox stood under the mistletoe and I kissed her. Her lips were solid and sinewy, like beefsteak, and lukewarm wet. As she clasped me round the waist I felt her coopered, with stays, like a barrel. Then Christiana stood under the mistletoe and I kissed her. Just before I kissed her she looked at me for a moment. Her eyes had the same remote anonymity as on the previous day, the same tranquil but disturbing candour. As I kissed her she was quite still, without fuss. Kissing her was like kissing someone who was not there. It was a relationship of ghosts. For one moment I felt I was not there myself. The recollection of this unreal lightness of touch was something I carried about with me for the rest of the day.
That afternoon Laurence and I went for a walk. I asked after his father and he said he was better, but resting. We talked about him for a short time. He told me how he had begun as a pit-boy in a Yorkshire colliery, but had worked himself up, and had later become a schoolmaster. Then the war broke out and he felt suddenly that he was wasted in the classroom and had gone back to the pit, to become under-manager. After about six months there was a disaster in the pit, an explosion that had brought down a vast roof-fall, entombing thirty-five men. Arnoldson went down for rescue work. For two days he could hear the voices of the entombed men quite clearly, then for a whole day he could hear them intermittently, then they ceased. But though they ceased Arnoldson fancied all the time he could still hear them, the voices of the dead, of men he had known, screaming or whispering in his mind more sharply than in life. He went on hearing these voices for weeks, the voices of people who were not there, until they broke him down. Christiana had been born about a year later.
Laurence spoke of his father with a slight impatience. He spoke as though, occupied himself with concrete things, the small matter of voices disturbing the spirit of another man had no material importance for him. It was clear that he did not believe in voices. From the subject of his father we went on to the subject of himself. I walked with head slightly down, mouth set against the wind, saying yes and no, not really listening, my thoughts in reality a long way behind me, like a kite on a string.
