by H. E. Bates
She said nothing to the boy, and he was dumb.
‘Let’s pay you,’ Spike said.
‘A shilling for you, and ninepence for the salad,’ she said.
‘Salad’s cheaper,’ Spike said. ‘I’ll remember that. What about the plums?’
‘The plums are thrown in.’
They paid her. Then she stood on the shack steps while they crunched across the pull-in and climbed up into the cab, the bright red sign flashing above her.
‘That sign’s a treat,’ Spike called. ‘You could see it miles off.’
‘I’m glad you like it,’ she called. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night!’
Spike started up, and almost before the boy could realise it the lorry was swinging out into the road, and the station was beginning to recede. He sat for some moments without moving. Then the lorry began to make speed and the smell of corn and plums and the summer land began to be driven out by the smells of the cab, the petrol and oil and the heat of the engine running. But suddenly he turned and looked back.
‘The light’s out,’ he said.
Spike put his head out of the cab and glanced back. The sign was still flashing but the shack itself was in darkness.
‘She’s sitting in the dark,’ he said. ‘She always does. She says it saves her eyes and the light and she likes it better.’
‘Why?’
‘Better ask her.’ Spike put a plum in his mouth. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What’s her husband doing, letting her run the place at night, and sit there in the dark?’
‘It’s her own idea. It’s a paying game an’ all, you bet your life it is.’
The boy took a plum from his pocket and bit it slowly, licking the sweet juice from his lips as it ran down. He was still trembling.
And glancing back again he could see nothing of the station but the red sign flashing everlastingly out and on, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing at all.
The House with the Apricot
The sun was setting behind me as I came over the hill, my body itching and clammy from the sweat of the long day’s walking. I was looking for a place to sleep and from the crest of the hill I could see the village lying below me, half in and half out of the slanting sunlight, a drift of stone cottages fringing a thin trout stream, and a squat-towered church with a still weathercock catching the full gold of the evening light. Beyond it the hills continued again, folding and unfolding into the northern distance, yellow with corn, drab-green with sun-scorched pasture, and behind the church, high up, a binder was still working in a square of wheat, its white sails flickering like a child’s windmill and the machine prattling like an old loom, the sound flat and wooden in the still air.
The road went down the hill steeply, narrow between the two grass banks which rose up sheerly, crowned on either side with woods that had been thinned a year or two before. In the open spaces left between the thin young ash-trees there were pink lakes of willow-herb as soft and delicate as drifts of early campion. All day, growing finer and richer as the hills grew higher and wilder, the flowers had been a delight. Wherever I walked there were blue multitudes of harebells, lemon drifts of rock-rose and cinquefoil, scabious which paled and darkened from place to place, butter-yellow mulleins and wild blue geraniums and always thyme in the full sweetness of its flowering.
I went down the hill and turned at the bottom to look back. Against the summer-darkness of the woods the patches of willow-herb stood out like countries on a map, territories of loveliest pink like the pink of an evening sky.
Later I walked about the village, looking for somewhere to sleep. It was one of those villages that have an inn and a public-house. At the inn the beds were full and at the public-house there were no beds, and I wandered about disconsolately, at a loss, wondering if I should go on.
At the street corner, deliberating, I stood and looked at an old stone house across the street. Over the front wall of the house grew an apricot, an old tree, beautifully and carefully trained, the branches steered and twisted strictly between the windows so that the light should not be kept out. It was a fine tree and I went across the street to look at it more closely. After looking at it a moment or two I saw something which interested me more than the tree, a card in the window, a correspondence card printed with neat letters: ‘GUESTS’. It looked as though someone had been ashamed to put it there.
I opened the gate, went into the front garden and knocked at the door. There was no answer. I noticed an iron bell-pull and I pulled it but the bell did not ring and I knocked again. There was dead silence in the house. I gave it up.
Walking away to the gate I heard a sudden voice in the house.
‘Angela! Angela! Angela!’
After a brief silence, during which I went back to the door, it came again, louder:
‘Angela! Don’t you hear? Angela! Angela?’
It was a frightened voice, the voice of a man old and quavering. I listened. There were footsteps in the house. They too were old and afraid. They hurried fretfully away, were dead, and then seemed to return again, lighter and quicker, like the footsteps of another person.
A woman opened the door. Her hands were agitated.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She put her hands behind her back when she saw me looking at them.
‘I thought you might have a room,’ I said.
‘For you? – just you alone?’ she asked. She spoke quickly, in a half-whisper.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘All right.’ She smiled softly, timidly, without opening her lips. ‘Yes, it will be all right.’
She stood back from the door, opening it wider as she did so. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I walked into the house, and she shut the door quietly behind me, as quietly as though she were afraid of waking a sleeper.
‘I will show you the room,’ she said.
Out of the dark hall I followed her upstairs, slipping my knapsack from my shoulders and carrying it in my hand. With only a momentary glimpse of her face as she turned the angles in the stairs it was hard for me to say how old she was, but her body was slim and supple and though she moved always with a strange quietness, as silent as a bird on grass, her steps were light and vital. She was rather tall and straight and she was wearing a loose summer dress of light pink, the very colour of the willow-herb on the hillsides as it would be in a week or two, when the sun had bleached it. I remember it had some vague pattern of leaves and flowers on it, a little prim, and that it had faded and that its lightness contrasted vividly with the darkness of the twisting staircase. It contrasted even more with her black hair, which was brushed a little severely, so that it lay smooth and straight, showing the shape of her head beautifully. Evidently her hair was very long, for at the back it was coiled up intricately, like a nest of black snakes, and low down on her neck it grew into a mass of tiny curls like jet black tendrils. Always, as I followed her, I was trying to guess how old she could be, and it was her hair which made me think at last that she was still young, not more than thirty-three or four, ten years younger than she had looked when she opened the door to me and hid her agitated hands.
She took me finally along a landing, up another short flight of stairs and to a door which she opened without a sound. I felt her watching me as I looked at the room and touched the cool bed-sheets with my hand.
Didn’t I like it? she wondered. Her voice was distant and shy.
Oh! Yes. I liked it. It was very nice. I would take it.
For how long? she wondered. It would help her if she knew.
I didn’t know. It depended. Would it do if I told her in the morning?
That would do. It was only that she must get extra food if I were staying long, and to-morrow was Sunday.
In that case I would stay, I told her.
It was very nice of me. The village was so small and isolated. And she would kill a fowl if she knew I were staying. She could go and kill it now if I would excuse her. Oh, no, it was no
trouble.
The window of the room overlooked the garden and I could see white beehives at the far end of it beyond groups of fruit trees and stone terraces for flowers. It looked cool and restful, and as though divining my thoughts she went to the door.
There would be something ready to eat in half an hour, she told me. And would I mind – she wondered if I would mind very much taking my meals with them? There were only two of them. It would be easier. But of course, if I objected …
All the time while talking to me she had seemed shy and nervous, and now she became agitated again, folding and unfolding her hands and hiding them with embarrassment, the colour rising up into her throat and flushing her face very slightly pink, no deeper than the colour of her dress.
It would be all right, I told her. And about the food itself – I wasn’t particular about that either.
It was very nice of me, it was very considerate.
I didn’t answer: the agitation of her hands and the flickering embarrassment of her eyes had begun to trouble me and I wanted her to go. And suddenly, after saying that she would ring the bell downstairs when supper was ready, she went, and she went so silently, without the noise of a footfall, without a breath, that I could hardly believe she had moved from outside the door, and I opened it and looked out to satisfy myself. The passage was empty.
But before I had time to shut the door again I heard her voice, below.
‘It’s a young man – a guest, that’s all. No, no. Not him at all. Nothing like Abie at all. No, I won’t! In half an hour. Can’t you sit still and close your eyes till then? No, no, it’s not him. In a little while you’ll see for yourself.’
Her voice had the same low softness as when she had spoken to me, but it had lost its accent of embarrassment and now there was something faintly peremptory in it, something firm but gentle, and at the very end it seemed tired. I shut the door.
It was a fine room she had given me. As I changed my clothes I kept looking round it in wonder – in wonder at the bed of pale old mahogany with its green silk spread and the lace on the pillow-slips, at the heavy green curtains with long tassel-ropes at the window, at the chairs and the chest-of-drawers and a writing-desk in one corner, all of mahogany and all old and beautiful. There was a strange half-sweet, half-musty smell about the room that for a long time I couldn’t define. It was not until the bell rang for supper and I went downstairs and breathed it again that I knew it. It was the smell of prosperity.
Down in the hall it seemed stronger than ever. It was a rich and pungent odour that must have been flowing for countless years out of the fine wood of the long clocks and chests and chairs, the dark velvet curtains and the old silent carpets of which the house was full. It was the house of someone who had no need to display cards in the window that asked for guests, a house of tradition and beauty, the kind of house which a man does not throw open to strangers. It was full of the peace and sweet seclusion of prosperity. Why then the card in the window and why the agitation of the woman to please me, as though her life and livelihood depended on me and on the coming of people like me?
She met me in the hall, her hands folding and unfolding with the old agitation still.
‘Supper is ready. Will you come this way?’
‘I ought to tell you my name,’ I began, and when I had told her she said:
‘Oh! Yes, yes. And ours, Jefferson.’
A moment later she turned away hurriedly and I followed her down the hall and into the dining-room.
It was a long room, with a long mahogany dining-table that shone black in the summer dusk standing in the centre of it. Three places were laid for supper, and at one of these places, his white hands resting on the edge of the table as though he were saying a silent grace and his eyes straining at the bowl of white and purple stocks standing in the centre of the glass and silver, sat an old man. I discovered a moment later that his hands were not at rest, but were crumbling with a kind of methodical inanity a piece of bread, crumbling it by the tiniest movement of the tips of his forefingers into fine white crumbs that were like birdseed. Beyond that infinitesimal movement of his fingers he sat as though he were praying or asleep. He did not even lift his head at our arrival.
But the woman was at his side immediately, shaking him gently, insisting softly.
‘You mustn’t crumble your bread. No, no. You mustn’t do that.’
‘Birds,’ he muttered. ‘You know I feed them every morning.’
‘But it’s evening. Now then. You mustn’t.’
He caught sight of me at that moment and began to get up out of his chair, uncertainly. As I went forward the woman said, ‘This is my father,’ and he held out his hand and I took it. Although the air was still warm and oppressive after the long hot day his hand was bone cold, making me start with its almost death-coldness as I touched it.
‘Good morning,’ he said.
Partly from embarrassment and partly because as soon as he had spoken the woman looked at me with that half-desperate, half-smiling look of someone craving indulgence or understanding for someone else, I said nothing, and the old man slipped back into his chair, his hands fell listlessly to his lap, and we began the meal with him sitting like that, staring at the flowers again, the idiot-apathy of his body more painful and difficult to bear than the silence of the woman herself, who could hide her suffering of mind by silence no more than she could hide the agitation of her hands by putting them behind her back. I could not look at either of them directly and all I could do was sometimes to glance at them furtively and away again, taking in all I needed of their silent painfulness of expression in a flicker of an eyelid. Between those glances, which were always against my will, dragged from me by the sheer force of silence, I stared at the food, the reflection swimming like silver light in the black mahogany of the table. The food was delicious: veal, tender and soft as butter, and a potato-salad, and bread that had been made, I thought, of full-meal flour, and baked in a faggot-oven, in the old way. The food and the table were all in keeping with the luxury of the bedrooms, the staircase and the hall, and after having eaten my meals under haystacks and hedgerows and in inns where they had no more imagination than tea and eggs-and-bacon from morning till night, I sat and ate in wonder, uneasy only because I could not fathom the luxury and the silence of it. And finally when I had begun to think that that silence would never be broken, the old man leaned across the table, took the earthenware water-pitcher in his bony hands, held it poised over my glass and said:
‘Let me give you some wine?’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you, Angela?’
Slowly, with distressing, trembling slowness, he poured out the water into the three glasses, and as he poured it he seemed also to pour away his idiocy and weakness. When it was all over he sat back in his chair and gazed at me for the first time with consciousness, strength and complete intelligence. It was as though a miracle had been worked in him by the pouring of that water.
‘You must have come a long way,’ he said. His voice was normal, strong, unfaltering. And the change in him wrought a change in the woman too. She sat with bright eyes, her face flooded with the light of relief.
‘Which way did you come?’ she said. ‘Over the hill, from the Roman villa?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you saw some flowers?’
I told her about them, how I had followed them all day, up and up from the valleys, of the constancy of the harebells and wild scabious, which had blossomed everywhere, of the thickening of the flowers and the coming of the rock-roses as I climbed higher and higher, and finally of that hill, from which I had seen the village, with its festival of blossom on the banks of the roadside and the willow-herb thick as corn.
‘Did you see the anemone, the mauve one?’ said the old man. ‘It’s called pasque-flower by some people.’
‘But not in summer, father,’ said the woman. ‘He wouldn’t see it now. It’s over long ago. That would be in the spring.’
‘Yes, yes. But has he ever seen it?’ He turned to me, making a cup of his frail hands. ‘That shape, and pale mauve, like the scabious. Beautiful, a beautiful thing. You’ve seen it?’
‘In gardens,’ I said.
‘But not wild, not wild? Up on the hills it grows so much smaller. It’s so frail and so aristocratic. The Romans brought it over – they could make a dye from it. And wherever the Romans have been there’s a chance that you’ll find it.’
He began to talk rapidly, a little excited, but now always with control of his words and actions and with the light of understanding in his eyes, and he went on to tell me that it was the pasque-flower, the little wild mauve anemone, that he loved better than all English flowers, and how in the spring I might find it up there, on the hillsides, beyond the woods through which I had come that day.
‘You must come and see us again then,’ he said. ‘You must come and I will take you up there.’
They were both a little excited by my love of flowers and as we sat eating the fresh raspberries and cream that the woman had fetched while the old man was talking, I excited them even more by saying that in the morning I thought of climbing the hills again and searching for rare species, for orchids perhaps and new campanulas. I asked them the way they thought I should go.
‘He must go up behind the woods, mustn’t he, Angela? He’ll find orchids there all right,’ said the old man.
‘Oh, no, you’re mixing it up, father. He’d find anemones there, but –’ and she turned to me – ‘if you want orchids you must go the other way. And campanulas too.’
She began to give me directions but I was confused, not knowing the place, and at last she saw it and said:
‘If you’ve finished we could go out into the garden and I’d show you the roads going up the hill.’
We left the old man at the table, staring again. Out in the garden it was between light and twilight. The formal terraces of white stone rising up from the house to reach the final level of the fruit trees stood out with strange whiteness. The scent of the day-blooming flowers, carnations and late pinks and stocks, had begun to mingle with the heavy exotic fragrance of the evening-scented things, tobacco-plants and night-scented stocks and evening primroses. We climbed the terraces. The beds were neat and formal and she told me how she had built the terraces and steps with her own hands, using the stone of an old barn that had collapsed in a blizzard. Where the barn had stood she now grew roses, in a square raised-up bed edged with a little wall of stone, all that was left of the barn and its foundations. On the highest terrace she had planted a long bed of pink and blood-coloured carnations and she wanted to take slips of them but she hardly knew how and asked me if I knew. I bent down and tore off a grey shoot and slit the stem with my penknife and found a pebble no larger than a grain of wheat and slipped it in the cut I had made.
