by H. E. Bates
‘I don’t know a thing about horses. Is he good?’
‘He’s quite good. Don’t you ride?’
‘Good God, no.’
He resented the suggestion quite cheerfully, with small amiable flickerings of fair-haired brows and a graceful and slightly ironic upward gesture of both hands. In doing so he parted the sandwich and a piece of duck fell out.
‘That comes of showing off,’ he said.
It was because of this small pantomime of the breaking sandwich that she noticed the flexibility and grace of his hands. They were long-fingered and narrow, more like the hands of a girl.
He offered another sandwich. ‘Go on. I’ve got plenty. We had two ducks yesterday. It was my mother’s birthday.’
‘What are you doing with the mansion?’ She took the second sandwich while he stared up at the shuttered windows.
‘I have to do a rough survey for a plan.’
‘Is someone moving in?’
‘Doubtful,’ he said. ‘It’s much more likely they’ll pull it down. Bang goes another bit of England.’
He abruptly ceased bothering about the house. Instead he began to take deep inquisitive breaths of air.
‘All morning there’s been that marvellous scent—I simply can’t think what it is——’
‘Limes,’ she said. ‘They’re beginning to flower.’
‘It’s a most exquisite scent,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so?’
She did not know what to say; she had not thought of it. In the masculine world of which she was part, no one troubled to discuss the exquisite nature of limes.
He took another long breath of lime-scented air, filling his lungs slowly, eyes half-closed; and it then occurred to her, for the first of several times, that he had taken infinitely more notice of the horse, the mansion, the sandwiches and the scent of limes than of anything about her. And suddenly her nervousness expanded. It became a full self-conscious anxiety about the clumsiness of her body. She was aware of being too large and too awkward in the heavy riding jacket, the big boots, the breeches that gave her legs the grossness of huge fawn hams. Beside her, dressed only in a white shirt and light grey trousers, he had a terse and quite delicate lightness.
‘How long will the survey take?’
‘Oh! depends. Two or three days. Depends how lazy I am.’
‘I can’t think you’re lazy.’
‘Terribly. I’ll probably go to sleep this afternoon.’
She thought of her father: ‘Give him a good working, Pete. Watch him, Pete. Be a man, Pete. Tell that bastard Johnson you’ll wring his neck. Pulverize him.’ She had been brought up under the incontestable notion that the male was not lazy. It did not sleep in the afternoons. It behaved like a physical steam-roller, flattening and crushing all.
‘I ought to go,’ she said. ‘My horse is restless.’
‘Have another sandwich.’
‘No, really, thank you.’ She stood up and she saw him then, for the first time, look full at her. He looked away immediately. It was as if he had looked through a telescope and been surprised, perhaps bored, if not horrified, by what he saw.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘If you come up again don’t be surprised to find me having a siesta under the tree. This is a hot spell we’re having.’
‘Yes. Goodbye.’
When she came up through the park on the following morning she rode past the house, through the chestnut copse, as far as the deserted gate-lodge, before she could bring herself to ride across, as she always did, to the overgrown lawn behind the mansion. For some time she had been bored by that same ride, taken in the same way, past the deserted mansion to the deserted gate-lodge, and had not known it. She had been driven by the dull notion that it was the thing to do. ‘Ride him hard, Pete. Give him a good working. Don’t let him dictate! Match him, Pete, match him.’ An urgent stentorian masculine world of habit, breezy with open air and harsh-odoured with horse and dog, had pressed her forward with commands she had not thought of refusing. Now because of the steel snake of a tape-measure flicking through summer grass she was aware of being unbearably lonely, more and more unsure.
The young man had worked his way down across the overgrown lawns to where, in the direction of the river, there was an abandoned swimming pool. She found him only because, even from the mansion, she could hear the tinkling of his steel tape on the glazed waterless tiles.
‘Hullo,’ he called.
The pool was empty and he was standing down in it, peering at the feed-pipe in the deep end. All along the rectangular basin dry white tiles glittered hotly in the sun.
‘Just thinking of filling it,’ he said. ‘Nothing comes, though. It’s probably turned off at the main.’
‘They used to have parties. They say it used to be lovely,’ she said.
‘Do you swim?’
‘Yes.’
He climbed out of the pool by a half-rotten wooden ladder.
Frost had lifted many of the tiles on the bottom and he said:
‘Probably never hold water, anyway.’ He made the little tossing gesture of abandon that had fascinated her the previous day: the hands graceful as they surrendered into air the notion of filling the pool.
‘Pity,’ he said. ‘It’s hotter than ever. It would have been nice to swim.’
‘There’s a swimming-place in the stream,’ she said. ‘They used to swim a lot there.’
‘Stream?’
‘Down there.’ She pointed down the field that lay, bright yellow with late buttercups and white with islands of rising clover, beyond the pool. A long line of alders, spreading away tawny purple along the stream, sheltered a few brown and white cattle that lay panting in the shade. On the low hill beyond them a glassy line of heat pulsated like a transparent flame under the deep blue line of sky.
‘I’ve half a mind to bring my things.’ He stood looking down at the alders that concealed, from so far up, the deep black-shaded pools of the stream. ‘It’s worth it. I’ve got another day.’
‘It must have been lovely here when they had parties.’
‘Would you swim?’ he said suddenly. ‘Would you bring your things if I did?’
‘Oh! I don’t know——’
‘It would be awful fun,’ he said.
She did not know what to do or say. Another recollection of her father urging her to work the horse hard, to give Johnson hell, to be a man, destroyed all the self-confidence she had. She felt an extraordinary downward stab of alarmed uneasiness, in the form of a hot and solid wave, go clean through her body; and then she began to walk away up the hill.
He came striding after her.
‘I’m awfully sorry if I said something I ought not to have said.’
‘Oh! you didn’t.’ She felt even more all the hideous flapping ugliness of her muscular body, it’s impossible ham-like legs, its bolster-like bust under the hot jacket. ‘I simply didn’t think you meant it——’
‘Of course I meant it. I think it would be awful fun.’ He smiled in his free, amiable, languid way, with trembling fair eyebrows, making once again the friendly gesture of his graceful hands. ‘Why not?’ he said.
‘I’ll see,’ she said. ‘It’s not very likely——’
‘Well, I shall go in,’ he said. ‘You can come and watch me.’
In the morning she rode the horse another way, outside the park; she could not bring herself to face the hot deserted garden, the amiable careless young man, the unbearable sweetness of limes. It was not until afternoon that she rode up to the house; and then she did not take her costume.
It was some time before she heard the steel tape-measure clinking in the hot afternoon. She heard it at last trailing in its tinny snake-like way over gravel paths down by the empty hot-houses. Soon, too, she saw the young man, bare to the waist now, jotting down measurements in his notebook beside the scalding white roofs of glass.
‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘how about the swim? I had one already at lunch-time.’
‘I couldn’t f
ind my costume. I spent all morning trying——’
‘Bad luck,’ he said. ‘It’s terrific down there.’
Today it was so much hotter that she had ridden up without her jacket, in a white silk shirt, mannish but soft, with black necktie, and she hoped he would notice it. He did not notice it, and she said:
‘How does the survey go?’
‘Almost finished. About five minutes and I’m taking another swim.’
Old peach trees, reverting to suckers, had here and there pushed their way up through broken hot-house roofs. Nettles grew in the vast derelict waste of vine-houses. She could smell an arid blistering of old paint, a hot breath of baked air from under glass. The tin snake of the steel measure did its last clicking squirm along the path and the young man said:
‘Survey finished. Thank God. Coming down?’
Some minutes later she sat under the alders, watching him making a series of dives that ended in joyous duck-paddling about the pool. His flesh was smooth, startlingly white in the alder-shadow. She sat simply without thought, watching. He had something of the delicacy of a stork, whitely poised on the pool edge, before the flashing spring of each dive. From the back there was nothing by which to tell that he was not a girl, compact and slim-hipped, and it was only when he stood beyond the dark water, grinning, ready to dive again, that the masculine shape of him was startling, beautifully revealed.
He came out at last to lie in the sun.
‘Marvellous. Absolutely wonderful.’ Panting softly, face and body beaded with glittering iridescent drops of water, he lay for some time staring at the sky. ‘Pity you couldn’t make it. Simply marvellous.’ He was struck by a sudden, idle thought. ‘By the way, what’s your name?’
‘Peter.’
‘Suits you. Who thought that one up?’
If there was any pain in her face he did not see it; she in turn did not answer, and he remained held in languid fascination by the sky.
‘Wonderful sky. It seems terribly hot before, but after you’ve been in it’s cool. Just right.’ He spoke to her without troubling to look at her. ‘Why don’t you go in?’
She shut her eyes, impelled by a stupid notion that if she did nothing, did not even look at anything or speak, he would come to her out of pure curiosity. She heard a kingfisher whistle like a bullet upstream and the voice of the young man, like the bird’s, seemed now to be drawn thinly away into the spaces of the hot afternoon.
‘Go in while I pack my things,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go up to the house again. Swim while I’ve gone.’
She did not speak.
‘You’re quite safe with a name like Peter.’
Her tears of anger and frustration seemed, in the moment of breaking, to turn back into her body, flooding her. She heard the kingfisher repeat its thin sharp whistle upstream, thread-drawn, fading instantly. She felt the impenetrable alder-shadow unexpectedly cold on her body. For a few moments the longing to move into sun, combined with the longing to be touched, to be spoken to and to be comforted, was almost too much for her. Her only movement was to let the palm of one hand lie in the sun and for some time it burned there like a coal while the rest of her body, cold in the dense alder shade, waited.
‘Absolutely wonderful to do nothing,’ the young man said. ‘Just nothing. Lie here and do nothing, nothing at all.’
She felt her inarticulate and clumsy body drown again in an ebb of tears. Another thought of her father brought the recollection that he had hated tears. ‘Got to learn not to cry. I can’t bear it. Be a man. I won’t have snivelling.’ Now that she wanted to cry it was not possible and once again, far off in the hot silence, she heard the kingfisher, briefly and shrilly, almost plaintively, calling along the water.
When she opened her eyes at last it was to be struck with the brutal sharpness of black leaves against blue hot sky. Her eyes seemed to be shocked into fresh alertness.
‘Where will you go after this?’ she said.
‘Thought you were asleep.’
‘No, awake,’ she said. ‘I’m awake.’
‘Oh! here, there and everywhere,’ he said. ‘Up, down and round. I take it as it comes. I go where they send me.’
‘Don’t you mind where?’
‘Couldn’t care less.’
She lay for a little longer, waiting. This time she did not hear any sound of the kingfisher and there was no sound from the young man except a long sigh, and then presently:
‘All I ask for is this. Lying here with nothing on my mind. Nothing to bother about. Nothing at all. I’m a lazy hound.’
Some time later she stood up to say goodbye. She saw that he was lying on his face. For one moment the slim spare body was lithe and graceful, and then he turned over. He heaved his chest against the sun and she saw the muscles of his thighs cramp and ripple as the legs thrust themselves outward, white and shadowless, in the long meadow grass.
‘I’ll have to be going,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Swim made me terribly drowsy. I think I’ll have a sleep,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’
She walked away up the field. She walked by the empty hot-houses, through the empty deserted gardens and past the empty house. She walked slowly, with long mannish strides, her head up. She was too far away now to hear the kingfisher, so like a small shrill echo of the tape-measure in the grass, and although her eyes were clear and quite awake, she did not seem to notice the emptiness and the silence everywhere. She was aware only of her heavy limbs on the flanks of the horse; and all along the avenue, unbearably sweet, the great scent of full summer in the limes.
The Major of Hussars
That summer we lived in the hotel on the lake below the mountains, and Major Martineau, the Major of Hussars, lived on the floor below us, in a room with a eucalyptus tree on the balcony.
The weather was very hot, and in the sunlight the lake sparkled like crusty golden glass and in the late afternoon the peaks of the Blümlisalp and the whole range of the Jungfrau glistened in the fine mountain air with fiery rosy snow. The major was very interested in the mountains, and we in turn were very interested in the major, a spare spruce man of nearly sixty who wore light shantung summer suits and was very studious of his appearance generally, and very specially of his smooth grey hair. He also had three sets of false teeth, of which he was very proud: one for mornings, one for evenings, and one for afternoons.
We used to meet the major everywhere: on the terrace, where lunch was served under a long pergola of crimson and yellow roses, and from which you got a magnificent view of the snow caps; and then under the dark shade of chestnut trees on the lake edge, where coffee was served; and then at the tram terminus, where the small yellow trams started their journeys along the hot road by the lake and then on the white steamers that came up and down the lake, calling at all the little towns with proud peeps of the funnel whistle, several times a day. At all of these places there was the major, very spruce in cool shantung and always wearing the correct set of false teeth for the time of day, looking very correct, very English, and, we thought, very alone.
It must have been at the second or third of these meetings that he told us of his wife. ‘She’ll be out from England any day now.’ And at the fifth or sixth that he told us of his false teeth. ‘After all, one has several suits. One has several pairs of shoes. All excellent for rest and change. Why not different sets of teeth?’ It did not occur to me then that the teeth and his wife had anything to do with each other.
Sometimes as we walked along the lake we could see a figure marching briskly towards us in the distance.
‘The major,’ I would say.
‘It can’t be,’ my wife would say. ‘It looks much too young.’
But always, as he came nearer, we could see that it was the major, sparkling and smart and spruce with all the shine and energy of a younger man. ‘Sometimes you’d take him for a man of forty,’ my wife would say.
Whenever we met on these occasions we would talk briefly of the major’s wife; then
of the lake, the food, the delicious summer weather, the alpine flowers, the snow on the mountains and how we loved Switzerland. The major was very fond of them all and we got the impression, gradually, that his wife was very fond of them too.
‘Ah!’ he would say, ‘she will adore all this. She will simply adore it.’ His correct blue eyes would sparkle delightfully.
‘And when do you expect her?’
‘Well,’ he would say, ‘in point of fact she was to have been here this week. But there seems to have been some sort of hitch somewhere. Bad staff work.’
‘I hope she’ll soon be able to come.’
‘Oh! any day now.’
‘Good. And oh! by the way,’ I said, ‘have you been up to the Jungfrau yet? The flowers are very lovely now on the way up.’
‘The Virgin?’ the major would say. ‘Oh! not yet. I’m leaving all the conquest of that sort of thing till my wife gets here,’ and he would laugh very heartily at the joke he made.
‘It’s just as well,’ I said.
But the next day, on the steamer, we saw the major making a conquest of the girl who brought the coffee. She had a beautiful Swiss head, with dark coiled hair, and she was wearing a very virginal Bernese bodice in black and white and a skirt striped in pink and blue. She was very young and she laughed very much at whatever it was the major was saying to her. On the voyage the major drank eight cups of coffee and ate four ham rolls. There was so much ham in the rolls that it hung over the side like pink spaniel’s ears, and the major had a wonderful time with his afternoon false teeth, his best pair, champing it in.
‘The major is conquering the Jungfrau,’ I said.
‘You take a low view of life,’ my wife said. ‘He’s alone and he’s simply being friendly.’
‘Queer how he doesn’t notice us today.’
The major, in fact, did not notice us; he did not notice us in fact for two days, and I wondered if I had said something to offend him. But when at last we met him again under the chestnut tree at noon, with a glass of lager at his table in the shade, he seemed more friendly, more sparkling and more cheerful than ever. The yellow beer, the light shantung suit and the gleaming white teeth were all alight with the trembling silver reflections that sprang from the sunlight on the water.
