Something Short and Sweet

by H. E. Bates

  She went on hoeing. Lorn did not come out of the house. For a time Breeze did not take much notice; then half an hour passed, an hour, and it was almost noon. Breeze began to get more and more impatient, hoeing fiercely, chopping the hoe hard against the soft dry earth, raising dust. What was Lorn doing? Why didn’t she come out, just to say Hullo? Hungry, Breeze remembered then that it was Lorn’s turn to cook. That explained it. Even so, she felt inexplicably and persistently angry, against her will. She hoed until her shoes and legs were soot-powdered with dust and her body muck-sweaty and her insides weak with hunger.

  Then at twelve-thirty she dropped the hoe and went into the house. She registered, at once, a number of unpleasant impressions: no smell of dinner, no table laid, no Lorn, nothing. Wherever was Lorn? She wrenched open the stairs door and shouted her name.

  ‘Lorn! Lorn! For goodness sake!’

  And at once Lorn replied, easily, almost sweetly: ‘Yes? Want anything?’

  In vacant fury, Breeze stood at the foot of the stairs. ‘I thought it was your turn to cook? What have you been doing? You’ve been back from Lyndhurst hours.’

  ‘I know. Come up a second. I want to tell you something.’

  Breeze went upstairs, into Lorn’s bedroom. Lorn was sitting at her dressing-table in new peach-coloured skirt and knickers, making up. She had a clean huckaback towel over her shoulders and was rubbing a white skin-cream over her face; then, as Breeze came in, she took the towel off her shoulders and wiped her hands and, very carefully, her lips. Bare again, her shoulders looked heavy and coarse, without grace. Breeze stood still, at the door; she could see Lorn’s face in the mirror. She did not know what to do or say or what to make of it. Emotion and face-cream had made Lorn’s face somehow shining and puffed. It looked faintly gross: not Lorn’s face at all, but the face of some absurd obese stranger.

  ‘What’s come over you?’ Breeze said.

  ‘He’s coming down this afternoon,’ Lorn said, ‘by the four o’clock.’

  ‘How do you know? I thought you telegraphed.’

  ‘I telephoned. I telephoned the hotel instead. I spoke to him.’

  ‘Is that why you were gone so long?’

  ‘Not altogether. I had to get something.’ She was unscrewing a cylinder of lipstick. ‘She doesn’t know how to hold it,’ Breeze thought. ‘She holds it like a stick of kid’s rock. What’s come over her?’

  Lorn’s thick strong fingers grasped the lipstick crudely and she began to rub it clumsily, to and fro, on her lips. ‘She uses it like an indiarubber. She’s got no idea. She’s never done it before.’ The lips grew orange, greasy. ‘She’s got the wrong colour. She’s daubing it on. She can’t know. She’s like a kid.’ All of this continual creation of impressions was unconscious, in some way against her will. It ceased when Lorn said:

  ‘Then I had to order the taxi.’

  ‘Taxi?’

  ‘He said order a taxi. It could call for me here, then bring us both back from the station. He said he didn’t fancy a tramp with luggage.’

  ‘He’s staying?’

  ‘Well, I should think so.’ She was pushing out her lips towards the mirror, in an orange pout; she drew them back, pursed them; she twitched the corners, smiling a little. The lips seemed enamelled, brittle, like snakeskin. Satisfied, Lorn set them in what she felt was a line of tenderness, naturally. ‘She looks hopeless, awful,’ Breeze thought. ‘She looks pathetic. She’s got pimples on her face. She can’t know how awful she looks.’ Suddenly she could not bear it. ‘Lorn, let me do it,’ she said. ‘Let me touch it up. You’re too heavy.’

  She took the lipstick: the tinfoil was warm and sweaty where Lorn had held it in her hot hands, the stick already soft beneath.

  ‘What made you get orange?’

  ‘He likes it.’

  ‘It’s not your colour.’

  ‘I know. I wanted cerise. But he likes flame. He always liked it.’

  Breeze looked at the stick. Flame-coloured, kiss-proof, it was a symbol of some kind of fatuous hope. She wiped Lorn’s lips, until they were clean again except for fissures of orange in the cracks of the skin; then she began all over again, painting them delicately, bringing the mouth into softer, longer line. All the time Lorn was trembling.

  V

  That afternoon, while Lorn had gone to the station in her taxi, there was a storm. It broke with warm stickiness and a great beat of thick rain that flashed white against the summery dark background of forest. It drove Breeze indoors. She sat miserable, waiting and listening for the taxi beyond the sound of rain and the huge sudden blunderings of thunder. The air was hot and oppressive and the rain, smashing down grass and plants and flowers, made small floods among the flattened rows of herbs. By mid-afternoon the garden looked a desolation, its grace gone, its colours washed out, the forest beyond it a gloomy wall of solid leaf and rain. Waiting, miserable, she felt it to be almost the worst thing that could have happened. The place looked mean and small and dead.

  The taxi came at half-past three. Going to the window to watch, Breeze had in her mind her preconceived picture of the man: blond, aloof, coldly medical, about thirty, with the skinny and aloof halo of his mother shining, inexplicably, in the background. She had waited for his arrival with a kind of remote arrogance, in a determination to be aloof also, her preconceived image part of a preconceived hatred.

  Looking across the garden, to the gate, she had a great shock. There appeared with Lorn, under her grey umbrella, a man of more than fifty. She could not believe it. She stood and stared at him in a conflict of pain: the pain of unbelief, amazement and the shock of a momentary and stupid terror. Her image of him went black, like a fused light, the halo of the mother fluttering out behind it like a silly candle.

  She had not time to think. In a moment he was standing before her, grey-haired, lean, flesh yellow with sun, with the air of some decaying and dictatorial professor, nose slightly askew, eyes having some curious affliction of twitching, so that she could not look at him.

  ‘So this’, he said, shaking hands with her, ‘is Breeze Anstey?’

  His voice was nasal, meticulous, a little superior. It was a voice accustomed to speaking obliquely, in innuendoes. She did not trust it. Hearing it, she felt the conception of her hatred of him harden more firmly than ever. At that moment it was the only thing of which she felt quite sure.

  Foolishly she said: ‘I’m sorry it rained like this – I mean in this tropical way.’

  ‘Tropical. This?’ He was very amused. Greatly. Tropical? Very, very funny. Did she understand, dear young lady, quite what tropical meant? He looked at her with oblique superiority, with a maddening amusement and a thin nasal sneer which she was to discover, later, was habitual.

  Explaining to her what tropical rain was really like, he addressed her again as ‘Dear young lady’. She felt furious. She stared at him with crude dislike, openly. All the time Lorn was smiling, openmouthed, teeth gay and white against her absurd lipstick. It was a smile in which there was something like a giddiness of adoration: the smile of utterly silly, uncritical feminine delight. She was in heaven.

  It went on all through tea. It was like the functioning of some cheap machine into which Lorn kept pressing unseen coins in order to keep it working. To Breeze it was incomprehensible. It could not be genuine. She could not conceive of it as anything else but forced, the desperate mechanical reaction to the occasion.

  The doctor talked. To Breeze he was an old man. He framed his sentences with the slow care of experience, searching for his words, as though engaged on some careful and perpetual diagnosis.

  ‘When I first had – er – intimation of – of this – this project of yours, my dear, I had – er – some notion that you had taken – taken a place of some size.’

  ‘It doesn’t look big, dear,’ Lorn said, ‘but you try to work it and see.’

  ‘But you said – you said a farm.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘But this is – just a garden.’
>
  ‘We call it a farm. It couldn’t very well be bigger because of the forest.’

  ‘The – the forest?’

  He looked out of the window with a kind of amazed contempt, at their small confined and now rain-flattened plot of earth, with the barricade of trees beyond and the heavy English sky pressing down on it all and giving it some air of civilised meanness. He looked in silence. Then he began laughing. It was, to Breeze, an extraordinary laugh, almost silent, impersonal and yet selfish, as though the joke were for himself alone and yet on them. He laughed for fully two minutes before finally saying anything. Then he repeated ‘Forest, forest’, in the tone of a man who, though knowing everything, has a little pity for the rest of the world.

  Breeze understood. She caught the accent, almost the sneer, of pity: pity for them, pity for their so-called farm, for their ideals, for two silly too-earnest Englishwomen with their pretence of ambition. Without saying it, he hinted that there were lives of which they knew nothing, forests beside which their own miserable affair was a shrubbery. He seemed to say: ‘You may believe in it, but is it worth believing in? It can’t be serious. It can’t mean anything. And now that I’ve come it can’t go on.’

  Almost as though she heard it, Breeze said, frankly:

  ‘You came home in a hurry, Dr. Bentley.’

  He looked at her, then at Lorn, obliquely. ‘I had business,’ he said. He kept looking at Lorn, still obliquely, with a soft and almost crafty smile of adoration, until Lorn at last lifted her eyes and smiled back in a confusion of happiness. Their eyes, in silence, telegraphed secrets which were not secrets at all. ‘Yes,’ the doctor said, ‘I had business. It’s not – not for me to say how – important – it is. But I had business. That is so – eh, Lorn?’

  The system of telegraphy, once begun, went on. After tea, and on into the misty heavy evening, the doctor and Lorn sat about in the little sitting-room and, whenever Breeze was there, sent each other messages of what was almost adolescent adoration. They spoke in riddles: restless, obvious riddles of which they were only too anxious that Breeze should know the meaning. They held out their love to her, as it were, on a plate, like some piece of juicy steak, inviting her to admire and, while indicating that it was not for her, to envy. She responded by muteness. She did not know what to say. Dumbly she sat and waited for the time when she could decently go to bed.

  ‘Tempus fugit,’ the doctor said, once.

  ‘Yes, but slowly,’ Lorn said, ‘when you’re waiting.’

  ‘Everything comes,’ the doctor said, ‘to him who waits.’

  At eight Breeze pleaded excuses and went up to bed. After lying awake, listening to the slow summer drip of rain from the branches outside, she heard, at nine, the shutting and locking of doors, footsteps on the stairs, whispers, the small shufflings and rustling of retirement. She waited for Lorn to come into her, as always, to say good-night. They would sit together, talk, confide, discuss the happenings of one day and their plans for another. She cherished the moment jealously.

  She waited. Nothing happened. Then, towards ten, she heard a door, footsteps. They approached and went past. She heard the opening and shutting of another door, then silence.

  She listened for a long time. There was no other sound. The rain had ceased and she could hear the silence, could feel it as something hard and tangible about her, as a crystallization of emptiness into solidity, into something as light and sharp as a knife, cutting her off from Lorn completely.

  VI

  By innuendoes, half-phrases, gestures of superiority, and above all by the sly oblique smile of pity, the doctor poured contempt on the little farm. For almost a week Lorn, bewildered by the pull of opposing emotions, wavered between the man and the ideal she and Breeze had set themselves. As though aware of it, the doctor said, at last:

  ‘I suppose you two – young things know that this – this place – isn’t healthy? It isn’t doing either of you any good.’

  This was a shock; and Breeze at once resented it.

  ‘Who said it wasn’t healthy?’

  The doctor was patient: which aroused her still more. She detested the assured enamel superiority of the man. Honest, decent anger, resentment, bitterness, had no place in his make-up. He presented only an assured too-smooth egg-like coldness. Her own anger, like some feeble Lilliputian pin, could not even scratch the iron shell of his supreme priggishness. It was all hopelessly beyond her. Lorn and this man, this man for a lover.

  Another time he said to her: ‘Do you feel well?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As well as I ever did.’

  ‘Which means?’ He paused, waiting for a reply which did not come. ‘You feel tired?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sleepy? No – no energy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oppressed?’

  ‘No.’

  She was lying. He knew it and she, in a moment, knew that he was aware of it. ‘Lorn tells me – quite – quite otherwise,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not Lorn,’ she said.

  ‘Lorn says you are both tired – er – continually – and can’t understand it.’

  ‘We work hard.’

  ‘Perhaps so. But that would not account for this – this extraordinary enervation. The trouble is that there are too many trees in this place. They suck up the air.’

  ‘That’s your opinion. I like the trees.’

  ‘May I take your pulse?’ he said.

  Before she could resist he had taken her hand, had his thumb on her wrist. It was as though she were held in a clasp of pure dead bone. In the feel of his hands she felt, as it were, the whole essence of his nature: hard, bony, dead, the expression of man seeing life as something to be perpetually diagnosed, the delicacy of human nature as something needing eternal probing and some ultimate interesting operation.

  He dropped her hand. She felt, for a few seconds, the small cool point of the thumb’s contact. She stood waiting, resentfully, in silence. What had he to do with her? Why did he trouble with her? It was beyond her, this damnable solicitude, and she did not want it.

  ‘You’ll be telling me next,’ she said, ‘that I’ve got galloping consumption.’

  For a moment he did not reply. They were in the little sitting-room. Lorn had gone to cut lettuces for the evening salad. It was a sultry, still evening, breathless.

  ‘No, it’s not that you’ve got,’ he said. ‘Will you sit down?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just sit down. I want to ask you the same – er – questions as I asked Lorn.’

  ‘What questions?’

  ‘Well – er – just—’

  ‘You’re going to ask me to sleep with you perhaps?’ she said. She raised her voice, spoke without thinking, the words out of her mouth before she could prevent them. ‘You’re going to ask me to wait seven years for you perhaps? No thank you! Not to-day, thank you! No thank you!’

  He looked at her, smiling, the small chill oblique smile of professional reticence, as one accustomed to such ill-mannered outbursts. He did not speak. She set her teeth, waiting, meaning the words she had spoken with all her heart, yet wishing, now, that she had not spoken them. She stood poised somewhere between anger and embarrassment.

  At that moment Lorn came in, carrying the already dew-wet lettuces.

  ‘Hullo, you two,’ she said. ‘Quarrelling?’

  ‘Yes!’ Breeze said.

  ‘Breeze!’

  ‘He’s got as far as taking my pulse – but that isn’t far enough.’

  Her anger quickened again, fired up in her face.

  ‘He’s not satisfied with coming here and taking you away. That isn’t enough. He wants to prove the place isn’t healthy. He wants to get me out of it.’

  ‘Breeze, Breeze, I won’t have it! I won’t have it.’

  ‘It’s true. He’s smashed our life.’

  ‘You can’t say it. I won’t have you saying it.’

  ‘Why isn’t it true? Before he came rushing home like a lovesick
boy we were quite happy here. The farm was our whole life. You know that. We’d planned and schemed and banked on it. We’d arranged for the organiser to come down. Now he comes rushing home and it all means nothing.’

  ‘You mean you mean nothing!’

  ‘Well, what difference? What difference whether it’s me or the farm? He’s trying to make you believe it’s unhealthy. That means he either wants you to give me up or me to give up the farm. Well, I’ll give up the farm.’

  ‘Oh! Breeze, please. Please, not now.’

  ‘I’ll give it up, I tell you! You don’t want me! What point in my staying? I’ll clear out now – before I can change my mind.’

  Suddenly she looked from Lorn to the man. He was smiling and the smile had that perpetual as though engraved mockery in it, the slightly oblique sneer of condescension, and she knew that he was not only laughing at her physical self, her behaviour, but her ideals, her anger and the very preciousness of her affection.

  Suddenly rage burned up in her to a point when she could not control it. She went across to him and hit him full across the face. For a moment nothing happened. The smile did not change. It remained, like some rotten and yet imperishable engraving of his whole nature. Beside herself, almost crying, she struggled with a terrific desire to hit it again, to smash it out of existence. Then, suddenly, the smile, the rage, the reason for it all had no meaning. She went very weak. She had just strength enough to lift her voice and half shout:

  ‘I’ll get out in the morning. I’ll go! There’s not room for all of us.’