by H. E. Bates
By this time my Uncle Silas had succeeded in tugging Jenny a quarter of the way upstairs when suddenly, down below, sharp and sickening above the pandemonium of voices, there was a crack like a breaking bone. Ponto Pack roared, ‘Silas, she’s hittin’ me on the coconut!’ and at the same moment Jenny had something like hysterics, whinnying terribly, and fell down on her front knees on the stairs. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Why th’ Hanover don’t you git underneath on her? She’ll be down atopt on y’!’ and for a moment I thought she was. She gave a great lurch backwards and my grandfather let out a groan. My grandmother hit Ponto another crack on the head with the swill-stick and suddenly the whole essence of the situation became, to me at any rate, splendidly clear. My Uncle Silas and Ponto were trying to get my grandfather to bed and my grandmother, in her obstinate way, was trying to stop them.
I remembered in that moment the cold Yorkshire pudding. I fetched it from my bedroom and went half-way down the stairs and held it out to Jenny, most coaxingly, in the flat of my hand.
Whether she conceived, at that moment, that I in my white nightshirt was some kind of newly-woken ghost or whether she decided she had had enough of the whole affair, I never knew. Ponto had hardly time to bawl out from the bottom of the stairs, ‘It’s most onaccountable, Silas. I can’t budge her!’ and my Uncle Silas from the top of the stairs, ‘Hold hard, Pont. The old gal’s knockin’ off fer a mite o’ pudden!’ when my grandmother, aiming another crack at Ponto’s head, hit the mare in her fury a blow above the tail.
The frenzy of her hysterical ascent up three steps of stairs and then backwards down the whole flight was something I shall not forget. My grandfather fell off the mare and the mare fell sideways on him, and then my Uncle Silas fell on the mare. The three of them fell on my grandmother and my grandmother fell on Ponto Pack. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Let ’em all come!’ and my grandmother hit Ponto twenty or thirty blows on the top of the head with the swill-stick. My grandfather fell off the horse’s back and landed with a terrible crash on the umbrella-stand, and the portrait of Gladstone fell down in the hall. The cold Yorkshire pudding fell down the stairs and I fell after it. My aunt came in the front door with a policeman, and Ponto yelled, ‘It’s onaccountable, Silas, most onaccountable!’ just as the mare broke free and charged the sideboard in the front room.
My Uncle Silas sat on the bottom of the stairs and laughed his head off, and I began to cry because I was sorry for Jenny and thought it was the end of the world.
The Flag
‘We are surrounded by the most ghastly people,’ the Captain said. All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house.
Up through the south avenue of elms, where dead trees lifted scraggy bone against spring sky, bluebells grew like thick corn, spreading into the edges of surrounding grass. The wind came softly, in a series of light circles from the west. Here and there an elm had died and on either side of it young green leaves from living trees were laced about smoke-brown brittle branches. In a quadrangle of wall and grass the great house lay below.
‘You never really see the beauty of the house until you get up here,’ the Captain said. Though still young, not more than forty-five or so, he was becoming much too fat. His ears were like thickly-veined purple cabbage leaves unfurling on either side of flabby swollen cheeks. His mouth, pink and flaccid, trembled sometimes like the underlip of a cow.
‘They have killed the elms,’ he said. ‘Finished them. They used to be absolutely magnificent.’
He stopped for a moment and I saw that he wanted to draw breath, and we looked back down the hill. Down beyond soldierly lines of trees, the tender lucent green broken here and there by the black of dead branches, I could see a flag waving in such intermittent and strengthless puffs of air that it, too, seemed dead. It was quartered in green and scarlet and flew from a small round tower that was like a grey pepperbox stuck in the western arm of the cross-shaped house.
Now I could see, too, that there were four avenues of elms, repeating in immense pattern the cross of the house below. As we stood there, the Captain making gargling noises in his throat, a cuckoo began calling on notes that were so full and hollow that it was like a bell tolling from the elms above us. Presently it seemed to be thrown on a gust of air from the tip of a tree, to float down-wind like a bird of grey paper.
‘There she goes,’ I said.
‘Tank emplacement mostly,’ the Captain said. His face shone lividly in the sun, his lip trembling. ‘The place was occupied right, left and centre. We used to have deer too, but the last battalion wiped them out.’
The breath of bluebells was overpoweringly sweet on the warm wind.
‘When we get a little higher you will see the whole pattern of the thing,’ the Captain said.
Turning to renew the ascent, he puffed in preparation, his veins standing out like purple worms on his face and neck and forehead.
‘Tired?’ he said. ‘Not too much for you? You don’t mind being dragged up here?’
‘Not at all.’
‘One really has to see it from up here. One doesn’t grasp it otherwise. That’s the point.’
‘Of course.’
‘We shall have a drink when we get back,’ he said. He laughed and the eyes, very blue but transparent in their wateriness, were sad and friendly. ‘In fact, we shall have several drinks.’
It was only another fifty yards to the crown of the hill and we climbed it in silence except for the hissing of the Captain’s breath against his teeth. All the loveliness of spring came down the hill and past us in a stream of heavy fragrance, and at the top, when I turned, I could feel it blowing past me, the wind silky on the palms of my hands, to shine all down the hill on the bent sweet grasses.
‘Now,’ the Captain said. It was some moments before he could get breath to say another word. Moisture had gathered in confusing drops on the pink lids of his eyes. He wiped it away. ‘Now you can see it all.’
All below us, across the wide green hollow in which there was not another house, I could see, as he said, the pattern of the thing. Creamy grey in the sun, the house made its central cross of stone, the four avenues of elms like pennants of pale green flying from the arms of it across the field.
‘Wonderful,’ I said.
‘Wonderful, but not unique,’ he said. ‘Not unique.’
Not angrily at first but wearily, rather sadly, he pointed about him with both arms. ‘It’s simply one of six or seven examples here alone.’
Then anger flitted suddenly through the obese watery-eyed face with such heat that the whole expression seemed to rise to a bursting fester, and I thought he was about to rush, in destructive attack at something, down the hill.
‘It was all done by great chaps,’ he said, ‘creative chaps. It’s only we of this generation who are such absolute destructive clots.’
‘Oh! I don’t know.’
‘Won’t even argue about it,’ he said. His face, turned to the sun, disclosed now an appearance of rosy calm, almost boy-like, and he had recovered his breath. ‘Once we were surrounded by the most frightfully nice people. I don’t mean to say intellectual people and that kind of thing, but really awfully nice. You know, you could talk to them. They were on your level.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now you see what I mean, they’ve gone. God knows where but they’re finished. I tell you everything is a shambles.’
Across from another avenue the cuckoo called downwind again and over the house I saw the flag lifted in a green and scarlet flash on the same burst of breeze. I wanted to ask him about the flag, but he said:
‘It’s perfectly ghastly. They’ve been hounded out. None of them left. All of them gone——’
Abruptly he seemed to give it up. He made gestures of apology, dropping his hands:
‘So sorry. Awfully boring for you, I feel. Are you thirsty? Shall we go down?’
‘When you’re ready. I’d like to see the house——’
‘Oh! please, of course. I
’d like a drink, anyway.’
He took a last wide look at the great pattern of elm and stone, breathing the deep, almost too sweet scent of the hill.
‘That’s another thing. These perishers don’t know the elements of decent drinking. One gets invited to the dreariest cocktail parties. The drinks are mixed in a jug and the sherry comes from God knows where.’ Anger was again reddening his face to the appearance of a swollen fester. ‘One gets so depressed that one goes home and starts beating it up. You know?’
I said yes, I knew, and we began to walk slowly down the hill, breathing sun-warm air deeply, pausing fairly frequently for another glance at the scene below.
‘How is it with you?’ he said. ‘In your part of the world? Are you surrounded by hordes of virgin spinsters?’
‘They are always with us,’ I said.
He laughed, and in that more cheerful moment I asked him about the flag.
‘Oh! it’s nothing much.’ He seemed inclined to belittle it, I thought. ‘It gives a touch of colour.’
‘I must look at it.’
‘Of course. We can go up to the tower. There’s a simply splendid view from there. You can see everything. But we shall have a drink first. Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
‘My wife will be there now. She will want to meet you.’
Slowly we went down to the house. About its deep surrounding walls there were no flowers and the grass had not been mown since some time in the previous summer, but old crucified peaches, and here and there an apricot, had set their flowers for fruiting and it was hot in the hollow between the walls. At the long flight of stone steps, before the front door, the Captain said something in a desultory way about the beauty of the high windows but evidently he did not expect a reply. He leapt up the last four or five steps with the rather desperate agility of a man who has won a race at last, and a moment later we were in the house.
In the large high-windowed room with its prospect of un-mown grass the Captain poured drinks and then walked nervously about with a glass in his hand. I do not know how many drinks he had before his wife appeared, but they were large and he drank them quickly.
‘Forty-six rooms and this is all we can keep warm,’ he said.
When his wife came in at last she was carrying bunches of stiff robin-orange lilies. She was very dark and her hands, folded about the lily stalks, were not unlike long blanched stalks of uprooted flowers themselves. She had a hard pallor about her face, very beautiful but in a way detached and not real, that made the Captain’s festering rosiness seem more florid than ever.
I liked the lilies, and when I asked about them she said:
‘We must ask Williams about them. I’m frightful at names. He’ll know.’
‘Williams knows everything,’ the Captain said.
He poured a drink without asking her what she wanted and she seemed to suck at the edge of the glass, drawing in her lips so that they made a tight scarlet bud.
‘Are you keen on flowers?’ she said.
I said ‘Yes,’ and she looked at me in a direct clear way that could not have been more formal. Her eyes had slits of green, like cracks, slashed across the black.
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
‘Has Williams done the cabbages?’ the Captain said.
‘What cabbages? Where?’
‘He knew damn well he had cabbages to do,’ the Captain said. ‘I told him so.’
‘How should I know what he has to do and what he hasn’t to do?’ she said.
‘How should you know,’ he said. He drank with trembling hands, trying to steady himself a little. He went to the window and stared out. The room was so large that his wife and I seemed to be contained, after his walking away, in a separate and private world bordered by the big fireless hearth and the vase where she was arranging flowers. She smiled and I looked at her hands.
‘Williams will tell you the name of the flowers if you like to come along to the conservatory before you go.’ She did not raise her voice; there was no sound except the plop of lily stalks falling softly into the water in the vase. ‘He would like it. He likes people who are interested.’
She dropped in the last of the lilies and then took off her coat and laid it on a chair. It was black and underneath she was wearing a yellow jumper of perpendicular ribbed pattern over a black skirt. It went very well with her black hair, her white long face and her green-shot eyes.
I heard the Captain pouring himself another drink, and he said:
‘What about the tower? You still want to go up?’
‘I really ought to go.’
‘Oh! Good God man, no. We’ve hardly seen a thing.’
‘He’s coming to see the conservatory, anyway,’ his wife said.
‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Well, if he’s to see everything you’d better get cracking.’
He made a jabbing kind of gesture against the air with his glass and he was so close to the window that I thought for a moment he would smash one glass against another. I could not tell if he was nervous or impatient. He covered it up by pouring himself another drink, and his wife said, with acid sweetness:
‘There are guests too, my dear.’
‘No thanks,’ I said.
‘You haven’t had anything,’ the Captain said. ‘Good God, I feel like beating it up.’
‘If you still want to see the conservatory I think we’d better go,’ she said.
I went out of the room with her and we had gone some way to the conservatory, which really turned out to be a hothouse of frilled Victorian pattern beyond the walls on the south side of the house, before I realized that the Captain was not with us.
‘Williams,’ she called several times. ‘Williams.’ Big scarlet amaryllis trumpets stared out through the long house of glass. ‘Ted!’
Presently Williams came out of the potting shed and I thought he seemed startled at the sight of me. He was a man of thirty-five or so with thick lips and carefully combed dark brown hair that he had allowed to grow into a curly pad on his neck. There was a kind of stiff correct strength about him as he stared straight back at her.
She introduced me and said: ‘We’d like to see the conservatory.’
‘Yes, madam,’ he said.
It was very beautiful in the conservatory. The pipes were still on and the air was moistly sweet and strangling. The big scarlet and pink and crimson-black amaryllis had a kind of golden frost in their throats. They were very fiery and splendid among banks of maidenhair, and when I admired them Williams said:
‘Thank you, sir. They’re not bad.’
‘Don’t be so modest,’ she said. ‘They’re absolutely the best ever.’
He smiled.
‘What we haven’t done to get them up to this,’ she said.
I walked to the far end by the house to look at a batch of young carnations, and when I turned back the Captain’s wife was holding Williams by the coat-sleeve. It was exactly as if she were absentmindedly picking a piece of dust from it, yet it was also as if she held him locked, in a pair of pincers. I heard her saying something, too, but what it was I never knew, because at that moment the fiery festering figure of the Captain began shouting down the path from the direction of the house. I could not hear what he said, either.
‘He’s worrying to get you up to the tower,’ she said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry you’re being dragged about like this.’
‘Not at all.’
Williams opened the door for me. The cuckoo was calling up the hillside, and the Captain, more rosy than ever, was coming up the path.
‘Don’t want to hurry you, but it takes longer than you think to get up there.’
At the door of the conservatory his wife stretched out her hand. ‘I’ll say goodbye,’ she said, ‘in case I don’t see you again.’ We shook hands, and her hand, in curious contrast to the moist sweet heat of the house behind her, was dry and cool. Williams did not come to say goodbye. He had hidden himself beyond the central staging of palm and fern.
>
The Captain and I walked up to the tower. Once again we could see, as from the top of the hill, the whole pattern of the thing: the four avenues of elms flying like long green pennants from the central cross of the house, the quadrangle of stone below, the corn-like bluebells wind-sheaved on the hill. The Captain staggered about, pointing with unsteady fingers at the landscape, and the flag flapped in the wind.
‘Curious thing is you can see everything and yet can’t see a damned thing,’ the Captain said. On all sides, across wide elm-patterned fields, there was still no sign of another house. Below us the conservatory glittered in the sun and it was even possible to see, huge and splendidly scarlet under the glass, the amaryllis staring back at us.
The Captain began to cry.
‘You get up here and you’d never know any difference,’ he said. His tears were simply moist negative oozings on the lids of his pink-lidded eyes. They might have been caused by the wind that up there, on the tower, was a little fresher than in the hollow below.
‘Never know it was going to pot,’ he said. ‘Everything. The whole damn thing.’
I felt I had to say something and I remembered the flag.
‘Oh! it’s simply a thing I found in an attic,’ he said. ‘Just looks well. It doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘Nothing heraldic?’
‘Oh! Good God, no. Still, got to keep the flag flying.’ He made an effort at a smile.
I said I had seen somewhere, in the papers, or perhaps it was a book, I could not remember where, that heraldry was simply nothing more than a survival of the fetish and the totem pole, and he said:
‘Evil spirits and that sort of thing? Is that so? Damn funny.’
Again, not angrily but sadly, biting his nails, with the trembling of his lower lip that was so like the lip of a cow, he stared at the green empty beautiful fields, and once again I felt all the warm sweetness of spring stream past us, stirring the green and scarlet flag, on tender lazy circles of wind.
Below us the Captain’s wife and Williams came out of the greenhouse, and I saw them talking inside the winking scarlet roof of glass.
