by H. E. Bates
‘Did you see him?’
‘Yes. I gave it to him.’
She whispered, ‘Thank you.’ She looked frightened in the silence which followed her words. Then she broke out:
‘Did he read it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Did he say anything? What did he say? What did he do?’
Her words seemed to confuse each other in their struggle for supremacy. I remained silent. Suddenly she burst out, womanishly, straight to the point:
‘There’s something you won’t tell me!’
I couldn’t answer her. Then a repetition of the words seemed to strike my heart like a blow. I looked once again at that simple, piteous face waiting for me to blurt out a piece of information which I felt she hadn’t the courage to endure without weeping. But no longer able to bear her repeated cry I told her with abrupt ingenuousness:
‘He tore it up.’
She started wildly. A few broken sounds escaped from her and fled up among the branches. Then there was no sound but that of the languid leaves and a bird or two among them. On her face a few tears glistened and dried. The lips opened in their old expectant way, but her eyes were sombre and dilated, as if she hadn’t slept for weeks. I had to ask:
‘Doesn’t he care about you?’
Her face wore an expression of wonder then of miserable resignation. Then she whispered slowly:
‘They say – in the village they say I haven’t a chance against Thomasin Dean.’
In another moment I was conscious of a figure retreating among the trees. Then silence took her place. Until long after I stood gazing at the ground, crushing slowly and earnestly beneath my foot a piece of wood scarlet with ants, as if expecting to gain consolation from that deadly serious task. The sun began to go down as I stood there. A few shadows assembled darkly like a picket ready for patrol. The birds fluttered noisily among the leaves. Suddenly I caught the sweet vanilla scent of may borne in from the hedges on a faint wind. I held up my head and at once all the sensations of all the springs of my life seemed to assail me as I breathed that unexpected fragrance. The next moment I saw, soberly and calmly, that for me the significance and magic of a woman’s beauty must likewise lie in a single impression of a face beneath an umbrella in the gloom of a storm. It was like a revelation.
I remember throwing up my arms with a faint sigh as I resigned myself to this soothing thought. As I walked slowly from the wood I wasn’t conscious of the faintest tremor of sadness or regret. Outside the evening was still and quiet, as if at a prayer. Faint and intoxicating the scent of may followed me over the darkening fields until my head was singing with joy.
Somewhere in the east, deceptively close and loud, a cuckoo called on and on, as if it were noon, and I laughed in return.
The Mother
Sometimes she is actually awakened at four or five by the muffled bumps of his feet on the wooden stairs, but more often than not she sleeps on, only a sigh or the slightest tremor of her body unconsciously marking her recognition of his rising.
She sleeps peaceably enough. Neither the jangle of crocks and spoons nor the hiss of the thick slices of bacon disturbs her. Whatever song her son bellows or whistles out above the frying-pan she does not hear. The clatter of his boots on the red floor has no effect. She hears nothing; sleeps through everything.
But when, three-quarters of an hour later he shuts the door behind his back and stamps or shuffles his way over a yard of embedded stones and mud, she wakes. Her whole body is awake. The nature of the sounds he makes on going out into the morning does not matter. Only the quick, double movement of the door is important, never failing to bring her to consciousness.
From that moment she cannot sleep. In winter she lies staring blankly until day makes slits of light in the blackness and an odd sparrow chirps. In summer he has no sooner gone than she is at the threshold over which he has a moment before passed. Her body though old, is alight from years of sun. She stands and looks quietly, then disappears to eat and wash, her mind dwelling on him.
Knowing she cannot expect to see him before six in the evening, or in autumn, nine or ten, she keeps some sort of communion, in the cottage in winter, or under the sunlight outside when summer comes. Thus, always, her head full of shy, half-coloured thoughts, she will wait for the return of her son. He is her youngest, the last at home, unmarried and past thirty. His cheeks, brown and level, proclaim his breed no less than his tallness, his black hair, and his trousers tied below the knee with odd, dirty pieces of string.
Her body will scarcely stir through the hot summer hours. Astute, wise in matters of quietness, she is utterly silent. Her face has a strange pallor as she listens to the birds in the wooded hollow or the bees moaning up and down the dark, red-flowered bean rows. Very often she eats nothing. Her strength seems to lie within her, conserved by that quiet wisdom of the very old. With a regularity which does not perturb her, hours of thought, shadows, little noises, great quietnesses, clouds and sun go softly past her.
Evening comes, the currant bushes lie in shadow. She closes her eyes, which, behind their placid feint of sleep, begin to dance with sharp-coloured lights, green, orange and red. Her hands twitch, her body behaves in a restless, unwise way that sucks her strength. The bees and birds cease to interest her. The light scents of stocks and columbine and the pungent whiffs of dry grasses are lost on her. With eyes shut she inhabits a delicious warm darkness, anticipant, trembling.
‘Abel!’ she suddenly calls. Abel!’
He arrives. At the window or her seat in the late sunshine she watches, trembling more than ever, her hands keeping a continual play against each other, nervous and pitiful, and sometimes she will use them to deaden the sudden rise of her shallow bosom that seems to swell up and up, beyond her strength.
Neither a sound nor movement of his escapes her. She is absorbed in the spectacle of his slushing among half a dozen swine, suddenly hungrily rampant after a quiescent day of sun. Every step of his through the dark, dung-wet earth is recorded. Her ears dwell on the sound of his voice. ‘Blast you! Keep still!’ and the storm of feet that precedes and follows it. The squeals from the lissom, dirty, pinkish-yellow draws a smile or two from her. Her body feels warm. She sniffs air, scentless to her except for that animal smell she will associate with him for ever. The suck-suck of the pigs seems to have ended. There are no sounds except those of his feet, tramping dully, and of his voice, humming abstractly some tune. On his advancing figure her watch is continuous. He slouches nearer, by no means handsome, and in every way awkward, dull, unclean, reeking thickly of the sties. But she watches. Again that uprising of her breast asserts itself sharply. But she watches. The warmth rises, delicious, then again painful and heavy.
He comes nearer. The warmth conquers her breast and throat. It assails her head. She is numb. She wonders dully why it is she can no longer see him.
Fear
On the horizon three separate thunderstorms talked darkly to each other.
The hut where little Richard and his grandfather had taken shelter was already green with darkness, its air stifling and warm, and the trees that surrounded it purple and heavy with whispers. When the boy heard sounds coming from the wood he would turn upwards a pair of great eyes, faint-yellow with fear, stroke his face, and ask in an awed way:
‘What’s the matter, Grandfather? What makes it dark?’
At one time the man would scratch his beard and say nothing, at another grunt and say, ‘Don’t you worry yourself,’ and at a third, ‘You ain’t frightened are you? You’re too big a boy to be frightened. You sit still. You’ll wear your breeches out.’
But the child would never cease to cast his great swollen eyes about the hut, fidget on trembling haunches and show that he was afraid of the dark and oppressive silence and the growls of thunder which dropped into it, reminding him dreadfully of the voices of cows and dogs. So he saw nothing tiresome in repeating:
‘What’s the matter, Grandfather? What makes it dark?’
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Each time he said this it seemed that there was less to be seen in the hut, and not much outside either, where the three thunderstorms grew angrier and angrier with each other, and that in the wood the trees were beginning to open their arms in readiness to catch the approaching rain. And when this did not come the old man wetted his soft lips, told the boy he would sing him something and began a ballad.
Beyond the first note or two, however, the boy did not listen, and in a few moments the thin tune gave up its exploration of the stagnant air and the man said again:
‘You sit still. There’s nothing to hurt.’
‘What’s it dark for, then?’ persisted the boy.
‘It’s going to rain,’ he was told.
This he could not understand.
‘Yesterday it rained and the sun shone,’ he said. ‘Why doesn’t the sun shine now?’
‘The sun ain’t here.’
‘Then where’s it gone?’ he naively asked.
‘Don’t you worry.’
And again it thundered, the boy could scarcely see his grandfather and when all was silent went to the door and peered out. On coming back he caught a smell like bad fish from the dirty floor of the hut, wondered why it smelt like that and before long began to cry.
‘What makes the sky green?’ he asked.
‘It ain’t green!’ his grandfather declared.
‘It is,’ he persisted, blubbering. ‘It’s green like Nancy’s hat. What makes it green?’
‘It’s going to rain,’ was the answer. ‘That’s all. You be quiet.’
He wept again in reply. As he looked up through the window the film of his tears made it seem as if the black sky was pushing the trees down on the hut and that before very long would crush it and bury him. ‘I want to go home,’ he whispered, but the man did not answer and for a long while there was a sultry silence. The boy felt himself sweating, could not see his grandfather and wanted to find him desperately but dare not move an inch. And as he stood there it began to rain, at first desultorily, then thickly and with a great hissing sound.
‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ He wept and ran at last between the man’s dark knees. ‘Grandfather!’ he whimpered.
There were sleepy grunts in reply.
‘Wake up!’ the little one whispered. ‘It’s raining. I want to go home. Wake up!’
When the old man aroused himself it was to hear immense shaking rolls of thunder, the boy’s voice in tears and the rain throwing itself against the window in a sort of grey passion.
‘I want to go home!’ the boy cried. ‘It’s night. Mamma’ll have gone to bed.’
‘You be quiet,’ comforted the man. ‘It ain’t night.’
‘Then what time is it?’
Like a white eye a watch came out in the gloom, a bluish match-flame spurted over it and for a minute the boy was unafraid, gazed awfully at the leaf-shaped light, its reflections on his grandfather’s face, the watch and the roof of the hut and forgot the storm and his fear.
‘It’s only eight o’clock,’ his grandfather growled without ill-will. ‘You sit quiet.’
But at that moment the flame seemed to get swallowed by the darkness and as if by some malicious miracle next moment appear again in a frenzied light that gave the sky a yellow wound which in turn spilt yellow blood on the wood and the dark floor of the hut. There came thunder, as if a great beast sat roaring on the roof. The hot peaceable air seemed to cry out like a sensitive child, the trees were distressed, the great confusion made the boy’s head thick and hot with terror.
He buried his head in the friendly cavern between the man’s thighs and there groaned and wept in darkness.
And as the thunder and lightning made their terrifying duet above his head, he tried to think of his home, his mother’s cool face, the windows where there were blinds and harmless moths, but managed it all vaguely and felt that what prevented him was the storm, which was something black and cunning and old, and against which he had no chance. Only if he remained half-eaten up by the shadows and were mistaken for a dog or sack might he perhaps escape. And so he crouched there, very still, trying not to listen but hearing everything in a greater tumult than ever, and knew that the storm went on without heeding his fear.
Nearly an hour passed: often the boy wanted to cry out but felt as if choked by fear and darkness and kept silent. His knees grew cold, one leg fell into a tingling sleep, only his head was warm and throbbed madly like an old clock. Once there was a smell of burning from the wood, but it passed and the boy forgot it in wondering if animals were terrified as he was, and where all the birds had gone and why they were silent. Then by some lucky chance he caught the silvery ticks of his grandfather’s watch and was comforted.
So it grew quiet and a clear darkness came. The boy got up and opened his eyes. The rain no longer growled and soon the thunder passed off. Outside the cobwebs hung like ropes of leaden beads and the ground was covered with great shadow-printed pools over which the man lifted the boy. From the edge of the wood were visible the blue storms, retreated far off in a mist, and a star or two in the course they had used.
‘There’s the cuckoo!’ the man said.
It was true, and as the boy listened he forgot the last of his fear. When he tried to walk he discovered his legs were stiff, and that when he set it down one foot tingled as if a thousand pins had been pressed into it, and he laughed.
For diversion the man told old stories, which the child heard vaguely, and when that grew stale, held the boy’s forefinger in his own rugged palm and counted the stars.
‘Fifty-one, fifty-two.’
And though once or twice lightning came there was no thunder, and because of the increasing stars it seemed to the boy that the storm had lost all terror for him, that perhaps he had been asleep when the most terrible flashes came and that soon the village would come and from then onwards no fear.
‘I’m not frightened, Grandfather,’ he said a dozen times.
Then, as it struck nine o’clock and the boy listened to the notes roaming about the dark fields, he saw a star shoot.
‘A star fell down! A star fell down!’ he immediately cried. ‘Oh! it fell like—’
He was seized with joy, punched the man’s legs, jumped into a pool and cried again:
‘A star fell down!’
But his grandfather said nothing.
In the superstition that a falling star means death the man did not wholly believe, but for some reason he could not help recalling it suddenly. As he went down the hill his mind became restive, and he thought of his wife, of her death, then of his own age, his stale limbs and the possibility of his dying. And gradually it seemed he was doomed to die soon and he began to sweat, as the boy had done, and was oppressed by the idea of something terrible and black waiting in readiness to crush the life from him, and that against it all he had no chance but felt weak and depressed in body and soul.
One or two birds began to chirp and the boy heard them, but like the man, thought only of the star. He remembered he must ask why in the hut there was a smell of fish, if animals were afraid and where birds hid during the storm, but looking up into his grandfather’s face saw it serious with fearful shadows and gleams and dared only say:
‘Did you see the star fall?’
There was no reply. As they walked down the hill the man, becoming more and more stricken by the fear of death, could not hold himself still. But the boy would only laugh and while watching for other stars to shoot, wonder with perplexity why his grandfather looked stern and miserable, hurried along as if it were going to rain again, and never spoke to him.
The Dove
The cage where the dove sat looking at the children had been hung just beyond reach of the almond tree, at a point where it caught the sun from early morning to late afternoon. Standing alternately on a stool they had laboriously dragged out there the children spent long hours with their faces close to the wires, their fingers seeking to touch with gentle timidity the breast of the dove,
their wondrous gazes fixed upon its shy eyes.
Now and then, in voices which did not disturb the warm silence of the summer afternoon, they spoke softly to the motionless bird sitting far back in the corner of the cage. They carried on their conversations with supreme care, with unintelligible words which it seemed to them the dove must understand. They whispered names, whistled softly and clicked their tongues in order not to lose for a moment the attention of its still, bright eyes. Then for long intervals they spoke some much more subtle language, with their eyes alone, as if seeking to understand the silence and shyness of the dove, as if to arouse it to some faint flutter or cry.
The patience of the boy often succumbed. ‘It never moves!’ he would say. And he would give up his place on the stool with a despairing sigh.
For the girl there was none of this weariness. Much more endearing, much less puzzled and desperate than the boy, she had many words and signs that even he did not understand. Her murmurs were as if echoed from the language of the dove itself. This was instinctive in her: in its two days of captivity she had not once heard even the faintest cooing from this head lolled always a little to one side, as if baffled or weary.
Like the boy she brought it things to eat. At the bottom of the cage lay the wheat and pale-green peas that had fallen there with a harsh sound, without ever being taken up again. This did not trouble the girl as much as her brother. If only the dove would move, if only it would talk to her, she thought, she would be content. And she would whisper questions designed in the softness and sweetness of their seductiveness to draw from it some word unawares, some sign given against its melancholy will.
It was the dove’s sadness which also troubled the girl. For her it deadened the purple and grey of the bird’s head, the green and silver of its breast gleaming in the sunshine. Once or twice she sought to banish it by thrusting a lock of her hair through the wires, as if with a sort of shy faith in her own beauty.
