by H. E. Bates
He stood on one side of the street, holding the bicycles, while the girl knocked at a door on the other. He looked up and down the street. Nothing was happening except that a man and a boy were shuffling up the gutter. The boy had no shoes or stockings, and he was very adept at turning the dirty papers over with his feet. Sometimes the man bent down and picked up a paper.
On the opposite side of the street the girl was talking to a woman. The woman leaned on the door-post, thin, dark, lifting her hands with occasional gestures of tired protest. He saw the number on the door and remembered it: sixty-seven. The man and the boy came up the street.
Suddenly they became aware of Franklin, holding the bicycles. They stopped searching the papers. Only the boy, as from habit, rustled them with his feet. And as they came nearer Franklin looked at his feet. They were very thin and long, and the toes, dirty and hooked, were curiously rapacious. The boy whirled them and turned the papers each time with a little savage movement, and then clipped them aside. In this way they came slowly up the street. They saw Franklin, and then he knew that it was not himself they were really looking at, but the bicycles. He heard the boy say something to the man. The man wore brown canvas slippers; he was quite young and very smooth on his feet. The boy was wearing a woman’s red jumper and dirty grey trousers; the pouched, once-filled bust was loose on the haggard chest. And as they came along, the man sometimes looking back up the empty street, they stared at the bicycles as if they were very hungry and were seeing their first food for a long time. Finally they saw Franklin’s arm.
A moment later the girl went into the house. Franklin watched the closed door with a sense of desolation; it was as if he were never going to see her again. In the gutter, about ten feet from him, the man and the boy had stopped. They were looking straight at him and he knew what they were thinking: two bicycles, a man with one arm, and no one in the street. They were very good bicycles. Two persons with four good arms against one person trying to hold two bicycles with one arm: there was nothing to stop it. The wind curled a little dust, with a few dirty papers, out of the sun.
Franklin stood waiting. He was not sure what to do. If he started fighting a gendarme would probably come round the corner and that would be the end. They would probably hit him in any case on the stump of his arm. The bastards could do that, he thought. That’s just what they would do.
He decided to spit. He worked the saliva in his mouth, sucking it with his tongue into a solid ball. Spitting spit was part of a universal language. He looked at the man and the boy for about half a minute. They did not move. The spittle was hard in his mouth, and suddenly he shot it out. It whipped off his tongue with a brisk sound of contempt and hit the dust of the gutter in a white ball.
For some moments the man and the boy looked at it and did not move. All right, you bastards, Franklin thought. Come on. The eyes of the boy, very narrow in the head, seemed consumptive. As they flashed sick and wild in the evening sun he said something to the man, and the man moved nearer Franklin. As he moved, the boy walked into the middle of the street, looking up and down. ‘All right!’ he said, and the man moved nearer Franklin, putting his right hand in his pocket.
All right, Franklin thought. He felt extraordinarily vicious and calm. He turned his body so that it was behind the bicycles, and the stump of his arm away from the man.
The girl came out of the house a moment later. He saw the boy skittle back across the street and begin to shuffle his feet in the papers. The man had not time to move, and the girl came across the street.
Suddenly she looked frightened. She looked at the man and the boy and said: ‘Who are they?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘What do they want? Who are they?’
‘Take no notice,’ he said.
‘This is a bad town,’ she said. ‘Things are very bad here. We must get out.’
The man and the boy did not move. A little wind, harsh with coarse street dust, blew among the papers.
‘What about Pierre’s sister?’ he said.
‘She has left here. She lives in Marseilles now.’
‘Then let’s get out,’ he said.
‘This was a bad town to come to,’ she said. ‘There is a bad class of people here. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t stop to apologize,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out.’
The girl took hold of her bicycle and turned it in the street. Franklin grasped the handlebars of his own and turned to look at the man and the boy. They had not finished yet. On their faces was still the waiting hungry look, the eyes cast low against the sun.
Franklin and the girl pushed the bicycles down the street. A curling wind flattened a piece of paper against the spokes of a wheel. It flapped like a flag, and Franklin stooped to take it out. As he stooped and turned he looked back down the street.
The man and the boy were coming. He got on to the bicycle. In front the girl was riding round the corner. He pedalled sharply. Then as he turned the corner himself he once more looked back. The boy was shouting now and running hard the other way.
He pedalled level with the girl. ‘Have they gone?’ she said.
‘They were running the other way.’
‘Running?’
He knew that they might be running to cut them off. He felt grim and angry. He felt nauseated by the little town, the filthy dust, the prideless, staring people. They rode on again through half-built lots on the edge of the town, where the concrete had cracked on the pavement and the walls were scrawled and plastered with slogans in dirty chalk, and where men sat on the edge of the gutters, squinting against the evening sun, idle, pathetic, not caring. Every hundred yards or so Franklin looked back. The man and the boy were not coming. He wondered if they could come another way. ‘It’s a bad town,’ the girl kept saying. ‘There is no food, and last week they had riots. It’s a bad town.’
They passed the gasworks on the far edge of the town. The gasometer was at half level, with the evening sun low behind it and the shadow huge on the dusty road. The wind as it blew across the yards brought a thick odour of coal smoke and gas and steam, but it was a cleaner smell, to Franklin, than the smell of the town, where the sun had burned the life from the dust and defeat had soured the life of the people. That smell was something he breathed in with his mind and could not eject again.
He looked back for the last time. The boy and the man were not coming, and the road was empty. He still felt angry. He felt the insult of the moment in the street flaring up in his mind.
‘I am humiliated about what happened,’ the girl said.
‘Humiliated?’
‘I did not want you to see that sort of France. That sort of people.’
He looked at her and saw her face twisted and very thoughtful, sad in the evening sun. He did not know what to say. The last of the houses had gone now and there were fields by the roadside, with clean strips of ploughed land between late root crops and clover, and in one field a woman was untethering a white cow and leading it slowly in for the night.
‘You see what I meant,’ the girl said. ‘We have not finished yet. We have some way to go.’
CHAPTER 20
IT was already November when they came down to Marseilles. The weather was fine and mild and a warm wind blew in from the sea. It seemed to blow from Franklin’s mind the last sour breath of the ugly little town.
He wondered all the time if there were an English clergyman in Marseilles. Ever since the moment in the street when the youth and the man had watched him while the girl disappeared he had had a curious premonition about losing her. This feeling increased as time went on. Pierre’s sister kept a small greengrocery shop on the north-west side of the city. The shop was very small, with only a single room at the back and two bedrooms above. Pierre’s sister and her husband slept in one room, with Françoise in the other. They arranged a room for Franklin in a small hotel one street away. It was very safe, they said. He did not like the hotel. It was clean and empty and desolate, and brought
on him a sense of loneliness and separation. The carpet had been taken up from the floors and the stairs, and the feet of himself and the few visitors going up and down made hard and hollow sounds that echoed. It seemed as if everyone were ready to run away.
Three times a day he and the girl took their meals at a small restaurant farther up the street. Every evening, after saying good night, he went up to his room with a feeling of loneliness and lay down on the bed. He never wanted to sleep very much, and for some time he would lie there, without the light on, and wonder if there were an English parson in Marseilles and how soon they could find him and get married and leave for Spain; or he would lie there, with the light on, and try to read the papers he had bought during the day. They were always French papers, censored by Vichy, and it was impossible to tell from them how the war was going on. The French language, very roundabout and formal and well-dressed, lacking the flexibility of English, seemed more than ever like the wrong language for a newspaper. Its stiffness gave him the impression that the same man wrote all the articles in all the newspapers: an aggrieved, indignant, perplexed person holding out his hands, appealing to be better understood. After a time Franklin got completely bored with the papers and would lie on his back, with the light still on, staring at the ceiling. The nights were very quiet, and in all Marseilles there was hardly any sound of street traffic, and in the hotel any sound but the occasional hollow echoes of feet on the stairs, and all the time, in the next bedroom, the small irregular noise of someone using a typewriter.
At first he did not take much notice of this sound. Then after a few nights he listened for it consciously. He got the impression of a French office clerk, working late in his spare time, earning a little extra money. Every few moments he heard the noise of the typewriter and the tinkling of the bell. Long after the feet on the bare stairs had become quiet the sound would go on. After a night or two the sound became for Franklin more than part of the life of the hotel. It became a personal thing. Sometimes he would go to sleep and wake again. Once as he woke he heard a clock in the town striking one o’clock, and then, in the silence, the sound in the next bedroom still going on. Half asleep, he lay listening to it for a long time, wondering.
In the mornings, when he got up and went out to have breakfast with Françoise at the restaurant up the street, there was no sound from the next room. He got the impression of the clerk getting up early and going off to his work. Franklin woke about nine o’clock and took about half an hour to dress himself. He had now become very adept at knotting his tie by holding the end of it shut in a chest of drawers. He tied the laces of his shoes in the same way, but only in a knot. The knot held until he got to the restaurant, when the girl untied the laces and tied them again in a bow. One morning Franklin came out of his room and at the top of the stairs met a small Frenchman of about fifty. He wore a black trilby hat and a dark grey suit with black stripes; he carried a thin brown walking cane over his arm, and it seemed very possible that he was the clerk who worked in the bedroom. They stood at the top of the stairs, waiting for each other to pass. They both said ‘Pardon’ at the same time, and the Frenchman made a short bow. He seemed to make it a deference to the amputated arm. Then as he bowed he saw Franklin’s shoes, with the laces tied in knots. He bent down and laid his walking-stick on the top of the stairs and began to tie up the shoe-laces. Franklin did not know what to say or do as the little Frenchman carefully tied the laces into small neat bows. The Frenchman kneeled for some moments on the carpetless stairs, running his fingers over Franklin’s shoes. Then he smiled and looked up. ‘They are very fine shoes,’ he said. ‘They are very beautiful shoes. It has been some time since I saw shoes like that.’ He looked at the shoes very enviously again and then picked up his cane and got up. Dust from the carpetless floor had made a grey patch on the left knee of his trousers. He brushed it off with his handkerchief. ‘You will excuse me for passing a remark about the shoes,’ he said. ‘They have the quality one was formerly used to.’
Franklin said ‘Of course’, and bowed. He was afraid the Frenchman would notice his English accent.
‘You have lost the arm in the war?’
‘Yes,’ Franklin said.
‘It is a very great pity.’ He was gravely sympathetic. ‘If there is some small thing I can do for you at any time?’ He smiled and made a small movement of his hand. Franklin did not speak.
‘Such as the necessary papers?’
In the eyes of the little Frenchman there was now quite a different look. It had a quality of crystalline sharpness that dissolved away the charm as he looked up and down the stairs.
‘I already have papers,’ Franklin said.
‘Are they adequate?’ the Frenchman said. ‘For you, I mean? For your particular case?’
‘They have been adequate so far,’ Franklin said. He was very guarded. The front door of the hotel was open at the foot of the stairs, and now and then he could see the shadows of people sliding past the entrance in the morning sun. He put his hand on the banisters of the stairs as if to go down.
‘I have helped many Englishmen,’ the little Frenchman said. The words were not abrupt. He spoke obliquely, as if to no one in particular, looking down also at the shadows passing the door in the sun.
Franklin knew suddenly that it was no use pretending. It seemed altogether surprising that no one had hitherto challenged his identity, unless it was that they were too tired or bored or disillusioned to care. Now he did not care himself. He felt the Englishness of himself passively waiting, phlegmatic, not going out to the moment of crisis, but letting the crisis, if it were a crisis, come to him. Then as he stood there still holding the banisters he remembered something.
He remembered how he had wanted to find an English padre. The little Frenchman put his left hand, then his right, into the inside pocket of his jacket, searching for something.
‘If you have no use for papers,’ he said, ‘perhaps there is something else?’
He took out of his pocket a brown leather address book. He opened it and began to write in it quickly, with pencil. The pencil was silver, and Franklin watched the lead screw forward, a small black spot, before the Frenchman began to write.
‘If there is anything you want in Marseilles go to this address. Anything at all.’
He folded the page of the address book very neatly and tore it down the fold. He folded it again between his fingers, and then again, holding it like a flat cigarette.
‘If you get into some difficulty. If you want something.’ He held out the paper towards Franklin, smiling, and Franklin took it, looking straight down into the crystalline polite eyes. They struck him suddenly as being quite fearless, quite irreproachable, in their steady and brittle clarity. He said slowly:
‘There was something I wanted.’
‘Yes?’
‘Something I don’t suppose it is possible to find now. An English padre.’
The Frenchman sucked at his lower lip. It became white and then red as the blood receded under the pressure of his small white teeth.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is something I don’t know. But at the address they will know. They will know or they will find out for you. Go there. They have helped other Englishmen.’
‘How do I get there?’
‘You go down towards –’ He began to give directions, lifting his walking-stick, pointing down the stairs. ‘You will see the Quai de la Joliette. It is behind there. Don’t get lost.’
‘Thank you,’ Franklin said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You are going now? Don’t thank me.’
‘I shall go this afternoon.’
‘Go as soon as you can. I hope you will have success. Don’t get lost.’
He smiled and lifted his walking-stick. The swing of it in the air seemed suddenly to unbalance him, so that he seemed to trip downstairs. As he floated through the hotel doorway into the sunshine, small and dapper and almost unreal in his sharp neatness, Franklin followed him slowly down.
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nbsp; It began to rain slightly in the late afternoon in short spits whipped in by the wind coming from the sea, as Franklin walked down past the cathedral to find the address. It seemed like the first sharp cold rain of early winter. It spat into his face, never continuous, but like short bursts of misdirected cold gunfire before the wind blew it away. The sky was low with grey cloud, and it seemed as he walked between the old tall houses as if the whole of Marseilles were closing in on him like a trap. Walking there in the rain he felt extraordinarily alone: even as if the girl, to whom he had said nothing about what he was doing, did not exist. It was a kind of loneliness that seemed to exaggerate his personal self: so that he felt that the wind, the cold sea-spit of rain and the streets that he did not know were all against him. He caught once, as he turned into a street that ran down at right angles to the docks, the smell of locomotive smoke, together with the sound from a train shunting wagons somewhere down on the quay. The smell was no longer friendly, and he no longer had the feeling of security brought about by being a stranger in a strange town. He felt the loneliness and the strangeness become part of a queer hostility. They became one with the rain, spitting out of the sea-wind into his face.
He was within sight of the dock, walking along by the railway track, when he decided to turn back. He suddenly did not care about the address, the padre, and whoever it was who helped Englishmen. The hostility of the streets in which the smell of rain and coal-smoke and sea was alternately thick and sharp became merged into a single heavy nausea that was something like a sickness – a sickness to be home, in England, safe, away from it all. He longed bitterly and sickly to be out of France, and walked along for some distance, with his head down against the wind beside a stationary line of trucks, black against the grey sky. The wind bored in compressed gusts that lifted low clouds of sharp coal dust that hit his face. He heard the buffers of trucks far down on the quay as they clocked against each other like a line of repeated gun-shots. He heard from farther away still the boom of a ship, hollow and borne away over the sea by the rainy wind. He kept his head down, utterly sick for England and home, for the fields of Worcestershire and the sight and sound of his own people.
