by H. E. Bates
‘Get ready!’ Effie called from the car. ‘You know what the Williamsons are!’ and laughed with high infectious scales so that her mother and father began laughing too.
After the car had driven away she bolted the door and switched off the front shop bell. She went upstairs and put on her dressing-gown and tried to think once again of the song the young man had wanted. She played over several songs on the piano, singing them softly.
At nine o’clock something was thrown against the sidestreet window and she heard Freddy Williamson bawling:
‘Who isn’t coming to the party? Open the window.’
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain and stood looking down. Freddy Williamson stood in the street below and threw his driving gloves at her.
‘Get dressed! Come on!’
She opened the window.
‘Freddy, be quiet. People can hear.’
‘I want them to hear. Who isn’t coming to whose party? I want them to hear.’
He threw the driving gloves up at the window again.
‘Everybody is insulted!’ he said. ‘Come on.’
‘Please,’ she said.
‘Let me in then!’ he bawled. ‘Let me come up and talk to you.’
‘All right,’ she said.
She went downstairs and let him in through the shop and he came up to the music room, shivering, stamping enormous feet. ‘Getting colder,’ he kept saying. ‘Getting colder.’
‘You should put on an overcoat,’ she said.
‘Never wear one,’ he said. ‘Can’t bear to be stuffed up.’
‘Then don’t grumble because you’re starved to death.’
He stamped up and down the room, a square-boned young man with enormous lips and pink flesh and small poodle-like eyes, pausing now and then to rub his hands before the fire.
‘The Mater sends orders you’re to come back with me,’ he said, ‘and she absolutely won’t take no for an answer.’
‘I’m not coming,’ she said.
‘Of course you’re coming! I’ll have a drink while you get ready.’
‘I’ll pour you a drink,’ she said, ‘but I’m not coming. What will you have?’
‘Gin,’ he said. ‘Clara, sometimes you’re the most awful bind.’
She poured the drink, not answering. Freddy Williamson lifted the glass and said:
‘Sorry, didn’t mean that. Happy Christmas. Good old Clara.’
‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.
‘Good old Clara. Come on, let’s have one for Christmas.’
Freddy Williamson put clumsy hands across her shoulders, kissing her with lips rather like those of a heavy wet dog.
‘Good old Clara,’ he said again. ‘Good old girl.’
Songs kept crossing and recrossing her mind, bewildering her into moments of dreamy distraction. She had the feeling of trying to grasp something that was floating away.
‘Don’t stand there like a dream,’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘Put some clothes on. Come on.’
‘I’m going to tie up Christmas presents and then go to bed.’
‘Oh! Come on, Clara, come on. Millions of chaps are there, waiting.’
She stood dreamily in the centre of the room, thinking of the ardent shy young man who could not remember the song.
‘You’re such a dream,’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘You just stand there. You’ve got to snap out of yourself.’
Suddenly he pressed himself against her in attitudes of muscular, heavier love, grasping her about the waist, partly lifting her from the floor, his lips wet on her face.
‘Come on, Clara,’ he kept saying, ‘let the blinds up. Can’t keep the blinds down for ever.’
‘Is it a big party?’
‘Come on, let the blinds up,’ he said.
‘How can I come to the party if you keep holding me here?’
‘Let the blinds up and come to the party too,’ he said. ‘Eh?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Well, one more kiss,’ he said. He smacked at her lips with his heavy dog-like mouth, pressing her body backwards. ‘Good old Clara. All you got to do is let yourself go. Come on—let the blinds up. Good old Clara.’
‘All right. Let me get my things on,’ she said. ‘Get yourself another drink while you’re waiting.’
‘Fair enough. Good old Clara.’
While she went away to dress he drank gin and stumped about the room. She came back in her black coat with a black and crimson scarf on her head and Freddy Williamson said: ‘Whizzo. That’s better. Good old Clara,’ and kissed her again, running clumsy ruffling hands over her face and neck and hair.
When they went downstairs someone was tapping lightly on the glass of the street door. ‘Police for the car,’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘No lights or some damn thing,’ but when she opened the door it was the young man who could not remember the song. He stood there already raising his hat:
‘I’m terribly sorry. Oh! you’re going out. Excuse me.’
‘Did you remember it?’ she said.
‘Some of it,’ he said. ‘The words.’
‘Come in a moment,’ she said.
He came in from the street and she shut the door. It was dark in the shop, and he did not seem so nervous. He began to say: ‘It goes rather like this—I can’t remember it all. But something like this—Leise flehen meine Lieder—Liebchen, komm zu mir——’
‘It is by Schubert,’ she said.
She went across the shop and sat down at one of the pianos and began to sing it for him. She heard him say, ‘That’s it. That’s the one,’ and Freddy Williamson fidgeted with the latch of the shop door as he kept one hand on it, impatient to go.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ the young man said. ‘It’s not a Christmas song, but somehow——’
Freddy Williamson stamped noisily into the street, and a second or two later she heard him start up the car. The door-catch rattled where he had left it open and a current of cold air blew into the dark shop.
She had broken off her singing because, after the first verse, she could not remember the words. Softly plead my songs——Loved one, come to me—— she was not sure how it went after that.
‘I’m sorry I can’t remember the rest,’ she said.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. The door irritated her by banging on its catch. She went over and shut it and out in the street Freddy Williamson blew impatiently on the horn of the car.
‘Was it the record you wanted?’ she said. ‘There is a very good one——’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘I think I can find it,’ she said. ‘I’ll put on the light.’
As she looked for the record and found it, she sang the first few bars of it again. ‘There is great tenderness in it,’ she began to say. ‘Such a wonderful tenderness,’ but suddenly it seemed as if the young man was embarrassed. He began fumbling in his pocket-book for his money, but she said, ‘Oh! no. Pay after Christmas. Pay any time,’ and at the same moment Freddy Williamson opened the door of the shop and said:
‘What goes on? After hours, after hours. Come on.’
‘I’m just coming,’ she said.
‘I’ll say good night,’ the young man said. ‘I’m very grateful. I wish you a Happy Christmas.’
‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.
Outside the stars were green and sharp in a sky without wind; the street had dried except for dark prints of frost on pavements.
‘Damn cool,’ Freddy Williamson kept saying. ‘Damn cool.’
He drove rather fast, silent and a little sulky, out towards the high ground overlooking the river. Rain had been falling everywhere through all the first weeks of December and now as the car came out on the valley edge she could see below her a great pattern of winter floodwater, the hedgerows cutting it into rectangular lakes glittering with green and yellow lights from towns on the far side.
‘I’d have told him to go to hell,’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘I call it da
mn cool. Damn cool.’
‘See the floods,’ she said. ‘There’ll be skating.’
‘The damn cheek people have,’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘Damn cheek.’
He drove the car with sulky abandon into the gravel drive of the big Edwardian house. Dead chestnut leaves swished away on all sides, harsh and brittle, and she could see frost white on the edges of the big lawn.
‘One before we go in,’ Freddy Williamson said. She turned away her mouth but he caught it with clumsy haste, like a dog seizing a bird. ‘Good old Clara. Let the blinds up. It’s Christmas Eve.’
‘Put the car away and I’ll wait for you,’ she said.
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Anything you say. Good old Clara. Damn glad you came.’
She got out of the car and stood for a few moments looking down the valley. She bent down and put her hands on the grass. Frost was crisp and hard already, and she could see it sparkling brightly on tree branches and on rain-soaked stems of dead flowers. It made her breath glisten in the house-lights coming across the lawn. It seemed to be glittering even on the long wide floodwaters, so that she almost persuaded herself the valley was one great river of ice already, wonderfully transformed.
Standing there, she thought of the young man, with his shy ardent manner, his umbrella and his raised hat. The song he had not been able to remember began to go through her head again—Softly plead my songs—— Loved one, come to me——; but at that moment Freddy Williamson came blundering up the drive and seized her once again like a hungry dog.
‘One before we go in,’ he said. ‘Come on. Good old Clara. One before we go in. Good show.’
Shrieks of laughter came suddenly from the house as if someone, perhaps her sister, had ignited little fires of merriment that were crackling at the windows.
‘Getting worked up!’ Freddy Williamson said. ‘Going to be good!’
She felt the frost crackling under her feet. She grasped at something that was floating away. Leise flehen meine Lieder—— Oh! my loved one—how did it go?
The Frontier
Twice a month, going back to the tea-garden in the north, he took the Darjeeling night mail out of the heat of Calcutta; seldom without meeting on the station as he departed some returning English nurse with a basket of primroses fresh from the hills, but never, for some reason, seeing these same nurses go. Calcutta, with its vast and sticky heat, its air charged with post-war doom, shrivelled them in the moment of departure into nonentity. The hills revived and reshaped them, so that they returned, carrying their little native baskets of yellow and pink and purple primula, shaded with fern, northern and cool as English spring, like strangers coming in from another world.
He arrived at the last junction of the broad-gauge line at six in the morning, in a cool dawn of exquisite dusty mistiness through which in the dry season the snows were rarely visible. He longed always to see these snows, cloud-like or icy-blue or at their most wonderful like vast crests of frozen sea-foam, and was disappointed whenever he stepped from the cinder-dusted night train on to a platform of seething dhotis and smoke-brown faces, to find that he could not see them in the northern sky. He envied always those travellers who were going further north and would, from their bedroom windows, see Kangchenjunga as they shaved. He thought jealously of the little nurses and the last wartime service girls he never saw on their way to Darjeeling, but only, refreshed and snow-cool, as they came down to the Delta again, carrying their mountain flowers.
Whenever he appeared along the line, especially at the terminus where he drank a cup of milkless tea before driving out in the lorry the sixty miles to the tea-garden, there was a respect for him that was friendly. He had been travelling up and down there, in the same way, for twenty years. He had a long lean figure and a pale face, rather dreamy and prematurely grey and in very hot weather blue-lipped, that had become almost Indianized, giving him a look of Asiatic delicacy. He had learned, very early, that in the East time is an immensity that does not matter; that it is better not to get excited; that what does not happen today will happen tomorrow and that death, it is very probable, will come between. His chief concern was not to shout, not to worry, not to get excited, but to grow and manufacture a tolerably excellent grade of tea.
There was a clubhouse at the junction, deliciously shaded with large palms and peepul trees, an old white house with exceptionally lofty open rooms through which birds flew freely, where he sometimes shaved in the mornings after the more hideous train journeys and then had a quick breakfast before driving on to the plantation. There was also an army station near, and during the war the club had become a mere transit camp, with both English and Indian officers piling bed-rolls in the doorway, and rather noisy behaviour in the compounds. There were often girls there too, and once he had seen an Indian girl, in khaki uniform, of the very highest type, having cocktails with a bunch of wartime subalterns who belonged to some dismal section of army accountancy and were in consequence behaving like abandoned invaders. It upset him a little. He looked at her with envious deep feeling for a long time. She had a pale, aloof, high-cheeked beauty, with smoky brown shadows of the eyes and purple depth of hair, that he had never grown used to; and he longed to talk to her. But she, too, was going southward at a moment when he was coming north; she was simply one of those entrancing, maddening figures that war threw up for a few illuminating seconds before it snuffed them out again; and in the end he went on to the plantation alone.
He always went on to the plantation alone. In the misty distances of the Dooar country there was a curious tranquillity and it entranced and bored him at the same time. It entranced him by the beauty of its remoteness. It had the strange tenseness, amplified in daylight by heat haze and at night by the glow of forest fires in the Bhutan hills, of a country at the foot of great mountains that were themselves a frontier. There was an intense and overshadowed hush about it. He felt always, both on the long truck journey across recurrent dried or flooded river beds and then on the green orderly tea plantation itself, that something wonderful and dramatic was about to happen there.
And nothing ever did. His boredom sprang from a multitude of cheated moments. The place was a great let-down. It was like coming down to a meal, day after day, year in, year out, and finding the same tablecloth, impeccably ironed and spread, white in perfect invitation. There was about to be a wonderful meal on it, and there never was.
His visits to the plantation were like that. He expected something wonderful to dramatize itself out of the hazy fire-shot hills, the uneasy nearness of a closed frontier, the deep Mongol distances lost so often in sublime sulphur haze. And he expected Kangchenjunga. The days when he saw the snows of the mountain always compensated him, in a wonderful way, for the humdrum parochial business of going the rounds of the plantation, visiting the MacFarlanes on the adjoining estate, talking of Dundee, doling out the Sunday issue of rice and oils to his workers, and eating about a dozen chickens, skinny and poorly cooked, between Friday and Monday afternoon. He also conceived that he had a sense of duty to the place. He had rather a touching pride in an estate he had taken over as derelict and that was now a place with thirty or forty miles of metalled road, with hardly a weed, and with every tea-pruning neatly burned, every bug neatly captured by yellow pot-bellied children, every worker devoted and contented. And, though he was not aware of it, he was bored by that too.
And then something upset him. One of his workers got drunk on rice-beer, ran madly about the plantation for a day, and then raped and murdered a woman over by the MacFarlane boundary.
When he got down to the plantation on his next visit the murderer, armed with a stolen rifle, was still roaming about the low bamboo-forest country along the river. Everybody was stupidly excited, and it was impossible to get the simplest accurate report. The affair had developed into a gorgeous and monstrous Indian mess, everybody at clamorous cross-purposes, sizzling with rumour and cross-rumour and revived malice, seething with that maddening Indian fatalism that sucks fun ou
t of disaster and loves nothing better than prolonging it by lying and lamentation.
After he had organized search parties and sent out rumour-grubbing scouts, putting on a curfew for the women and children, he spent most of the weekend driving wildly about his thirty-five miles of metalled road in pursuit of false reports. In the tiring excitement of it he forgot to look for Kangchenjunga, only remembering it when he was far back in the heart of Bengal, in the hot and cinder-blackened train.
When he came back on his next visit, a week earlier than normal, the murderer had not been found. He was worried about it all and did not sleep well in the hot train, with its noisy midnight dislocations. It was a blow to his pride and he was angry that it had ever happened.
Then he fell asleep, to be woken suddenly by the sound of frantic arguments. The train had stopped and he put on the light. He let down the gauze window and saw, in the light of the station outside, a mass of seething dhotis clamouring at each other with brown antennae, like moths. He shouted angrily for everybody to shut up. A bubble of surprise among the dhotis, with explanatory sing-song inflexions, was followed by someone shouting back, in English:
‘Shut up yourself! You’re lucky. You’ve got a compartment. They won’t let me on.’
‘I’ll be out in a moment!’ he said.
‘Oh! don’t worry.’
He slipped his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and went out on to the platform, really no more than a length of cinder track running past the metals, and pushed his way among the fluttering dhotis. He heard the English voice again and then saw, among the crowd, under the low station lights, what seemed to him an incredibly unreal thing.
Standing there was one of the nurses he had so often seen coming back to Calcutta on the south-bound train. She was very young and she was waving angry hands.
‘Something I can do?’ he said.
‘Yes, you can shut these people up!’
Her eyes had the dark brightness of nervous beetles. Her hair, parted in the middle, was intensely black and smoothed.
‘May I look at your ticket?’
