by H. E. Bates
Her only habit of untidiness was that sometimes, as she sat at the bar, she let one or both of her yellow sandals fall off. After that she often staggered about the verandah with one shoe on and one in her hand; or with both shoes off, carrying them and saying:
‘Whose bloody shoes are these? Anybody know whose bloody shoes these are?’
Soon, when she got to know me a little better, she would slap one of her sandals on the seat of the bar-stool next to her and say:
‘Here, England, come and sit here.’ She always called me England. ‘Come and sit down and talk to me. I’m British too. Come and sit down. Nice to meet someone from the old country in this lousy frog-crowd. What do you make of Tahiti?’
I had never time to tell her what I thought of Tahiti before, licking brandy from her lips, she would say something like:
‘Swindle. The big myth. The great South-sea bubble. The great South-sea paradise. Not a decent hotel in the place. All the shops owned by Chinks. Everybody bone-lazy. Takes you all day to cash a cheque at the bank. Hot and dirty. Still, what else do you expect with the Froggies running the show?’
Presently, after another brandy or two, she would begin to call me dear.
‘You’ve seen the travel posters, haven’t you, dear? Those nice white sands and the Polynesian girls with naked bosoms climbing the palms? All a myth, dear. All a bloody swindle. All taken in the Cook Islands, hundreds of miles away.’
Talking of the swindle of white sands and Polynesian girls she would point with her well-kept hands to the shore:
‘Look at the beach, dear. Just look at it. I ask you. Black sand, millions of sea-eggs, thousands of those liverish-looking sea-snakes. Coral island, my foot. I can bear most things, England, but not black sand. Not a beach that looks like a foundry yard.’
It was true that the beaches of Tahiti were black, that the sea, where shallow, was thick with sea-eggs and at low tide with creatures looking like inert lumps of yellow intestine. But there were also shoals of blue and yellow fish, like delicate underwater sails, with sometimes a flying fish or a crowd of exquisite blue torpedoes flashing in bluest water.
It occurred to me that something, perhaps, had made her ignore these things.
‘How long have you been here now?’ I said.
‘Ever been to Australia?’ she said. ‘That’s the place for beaches. Miles of them. Endless. You’ve seen the Cook Islands? White as that. Me? Six months, dear. Nearly seven months now.’
‘Why don’t you take the sea-plane and get out,’ I said, ‘if you hate it so much?’
‘Long story, England,’ she said. ‘Bloody complicated.’
Every afternoon she staggered away, slept in her room and re-appeared about six, in time for sunset. By that time she had changed her shorts for a dress, generally something very simple in cotton or silk that, from a distance or behind, with her brief lean figure, made her look attractive, fresh and quite young.
I noticed that, in the evening, she did not go at once to the bar. For perhaps ten minutes or a quarter of an hour she would stand in silence at the rail of the verandah, gazing at the sunset.
The sunsets across the lagoon at Tahiti, looking towards the great chimneys of Moorea, are the most beautiful in the world. As the sun dips across the Pacific the entire sky behind the mountains opens up like a blast furnace, flaming pure and violent fire. Over the upper sky roll clouds of scarlet petal, then orange, then yellow, then pink, and then swan-white as they sail away, high, and slowly, over the ocean to the north. In the last minutes before darkness there is left only a thunderous purple map of smouldering ash across the sky.
‘It’s so beautiful, England dear,’ she said to me. ‘God, it’s so beautiful it takes your breath away. I always want to cry.’
Once or twice she actually did cry but soon, when sunset was over and the enormous soft southern stars were breaking the deep black sky, she would be back to brandy and the bar. Once again her eyes would take on the appearance of swollen prawns. One by one her shoes would fall off, leaving her to grope bare-footed, carrying her shoes about the verandah, not knowing whose they were.
‘Sweet people,’ she said once. ‘Very sweet people, you and Mrs England. Good old England. That’s a sweet dress she has on. What would you say, Mrs England, if you wanted to marry someone here and they wouldn’t let you?’
She laughed. From much brandy her skin was hot and baggy. Her eyes, looking as if they were still in tears from the sunset, could no longer focus themselves.
‘A Froggy too,’ she said, ‘which I call damn funny. Rather a nice Froggy too.’
Her voice was thick and bitter.
‘Rather funny,’ she said. ‘I come all this way from Australia to meet him here and then find they’ve sent him to New Caledonia. Administrative post. Administrative trick, dear, see?’
I said something about how simple it was, nowadays, to fly from one side of the Pacific to the other, and she said:
‘Can’t get permission, dear. Got to get permission from the Froggies to go to Froggy territory,’ she went on. ‘Of course he’ll come back here in time.’
I said something about how simple it was to wait here, in Tahiti, where she was, and she said:
‘Can’t get permission, dear. Got to get permission from the Froggies to stay in Froggy territory. Froggy red tape, dear. Can’t stay here, can’t go there. Next week my permit expires.’
I made some expression of sympathy about all this and she said:
‘All a trick, dear. Complete wangle. His father’s a friend of the governor. Father doesn’t like me. Governor doesn’t like me. Undesirable type, dear. Divorced and drink too much. Bad combination. British too. They don’t want the British here. Leaves more Tahitian girls for the Froggies to set up fancy house with.’
There were, as my friend the doctor said, only two general types in Tahiti: those who took one look at the island, wanted to depart next day and never set eyes on it again; and those who, from the first moment, wanted to stay there for ever. Now I had a met a third.
‘Going to make my last appeal for an extension of my permit tomorrow,’ Mrs Eglantine said. ‘Suppose you wouldn’t like to write it for me, would you, England dear? It’ll need to be bloody well put, that’s sure.’
‘Where will you go?’ I said. ‘If you have to go?’
‘Nearest British possession, dear. Cook Islands. Wait there.’
The Cook Islands are very beautiful. Across a long, shallow, sharkless lagoon flying-boats glide down between soft fringes of palm and purest hot white coral sand. At the little rest-house, by the anchorage, the prettiest and friendliest of Polynesian girls serve tea and cakes, giggling constantly, shaking back their long loose black hair.
‘Yes, it’s very lovely,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have a better place to go than that. That’s a paradise.’
‘And a dry one,’ she said, ‘in case you didn’t know it. Worse than prohibition. They allow you a bottle of something stronger than lime-juice once a month, dear, and you even need a permit for that.’
We left her under the moth-charged lights of the verandah groping for her shoes.
‘Dormez bien, dears,’ she said. ‘Which is more than I shall do.
‘She must have been very pretty once,’ my wife said.
‘She’s pretty now,’ I said, ‘sweet and rather pretty.’
Five days later she flew out with us on the morning plane. Half way to the Cook Islands I brought her breakfast and she said, as she knocked it back, ‘Bless you, England dear.’
In the lagoon, by the anchorage, a little crowd of Polynesians, mostly women and girls, sat under the shade of palm-trees, out of the pure blistering heat of white coral sand, singing songs of farewell to a young man leaving by the plane.
The songs of Polynesia have a great sadness in them that is very haunting. A few of the women were weeping. Then at the last moment a girl rushed on bare feet along the jetty towards the waiting launch, wringing her hands in sorrow, her long hair
flying, bitterly weeping final words of goodbye.
On the scalding white coral beach, under the palms, Mrs Eglantine was nowhere to be seen. And presently, as the launch moved away, I could no longer hear the songs of sad farewell or the haunting voice of the girl who was weeping. But only, running through my head, haunting too:
‘The Sweet-briar, or the Vine, or the twisted Eglantine.’
Thelma
The place where she was born was eighty miles from London. She was never to go to London in all her life except in dreams or in imagination, when she lay awake in the top bedroom of the hotel, listening to the sound of wind in the forest boughs.
When she first began to work at The Blenheim Arms she was a plump short girl of fourteen, with remarkably pale cream hands and a head of startling hair exactly the colour of autumn beech leaves. Her eyes seemed bleached and languid. The only colour in their lashes was an occasional touch of gold that made them look like curled paint brushes that were not quite dry.
She began first as a bedroom maid, living in and starting at five in the morning and later taking up brass cans of hot shaving water to the bedrooms of gentlemen who stayed overnight. These gentlemen—any guest was called a gentleman in those days—were mostly commercial travellers going regularly from London to the West country or back again and after a time she got to know them very well. After a time she also got to know the view from the upper bedroom windows very well: southward to the village, down the long wide street of brown-red houses where horses in those days were still tied to hitching posts and then westward and northward and eastward to the forest that sheltered the houses like a great horseshoe of boughs and leaves. She supposed there were a million beech-trees in that forest. She did not know. She only knew, because people said so, that you could walk all day through it and never come to the other side.
At first she was too shy and too quiet about her work in the bedrooms. She knocked on early morning doors too softly. Heavy sleepers could not be woken by the tap of her small soft hands and cans of hot water grew cold on landings while other fuming frowsy men lay awake, waiting for their calls. This early mistake was almost the only one she ever made. The hotel was very old, with several long back stair-cases and complicated narrow passages and still more flights of stairs up which she had to lug, every morning to attic bedrooms, twenty cans of water. She soon learned that it was stupid to lug more than she need. After two mornings she learned to hammer hard with her fist on the doors of bedrooms and after less than a week she was knocking, walking in, putting the can of hot water on the wash-stand, covering it with a towel and saying in a soft firm young voice:
‘Half-past six, sir. You’ve got just an hour before your train.’
In this way she grew used to men. It was her work to go into bedrooms where men were frequently to be startled in strange attitudes, half-dressed, unshaved, stupid with sleep and sometimes thick-tongued and groping. It was no use being shy about it. It was no use worrying about it either. She herself was never thick-tongued, stupid or groping in the mornings and after a time she found she had no patience with men who had to be called a second time and then complained that their shaving water was cold. Already she was speaking to them as if she were an older person, slightly peremptory but not unkind, a little vexed but always understanding:
‘Of course the water’s cold, sir. You should get up when you’re called. I called you twice. Do you expect people to call you fifty times?’
Her voice was slow and soft. The final syllables of her sentences went singing upward on a gentle and inquiring scale. It was perhaps because of this that men were never offended by what she had to say to them even as a young girl and that they never took exception to remarks that would have been impertinent or forward in other girls.
‘I know, Thelma,’ they would say. ‘That’s me all over, Thelma. Never could get the dust out of my eyes. I’ll be down in five shakes—four and a half minutes for the eggs, Thelma. I like them hard.’
Soon she began to know not only the names of travellers but exactly when they had to be called, what trains they had to catch and how they liked their eggs boiled. She knew those who liked two cans of shaving water and a wad of cotton wool because they always cut themselves. She was ready for those who groped to morning life with yellow eyes:
‘Well, you won’t be told, sir. You know how it takes you. You take more than you can hold and then you wonder why you feel like death the morning after.’
‘I know, Thelma, I know. What was I drinking?’
‘Cider most of the time and you had three rum and ports with Mr Henderson.’
‘Rum and port!—Oh! my lord, Thelma——’
‘That’s what I say—you never learn. People can tell you forty times, can’t they, but you never learn.’
Once a month, on Sunday, when she finished work at three o’clock, she walked in the forest. She was very fond of the forest. She still believed it was true, as people said, that you could walk through it all day and never come to the farther side of it but she did not mind about that. She was quite content to walk some distance into it and, if the days were fine and warm, sit down and look at the round grey trunks of the countless shimmering beeches. They reminded her very much of the huge iron-coloured legs of a troupe of elephants she had once seen at a circus and the trees themselves had just the same friendly sober air.
When she was eighteen a man named George Furness, a traveller in fancy goods and cheap lines of cutlery, came to stay at the hotel for a Saturday night and a Sunday. She did not know quite how it came about but it presently turned out in the course of casual conversation that Furness was quite unable to believe that the nuts that grew on beech-trees were just as eatable as the nuts that grew on hazel or walnut trees. It was a silly, stupid thing, she thought, for a grown man to have to admit that he didn’t know about beech-nuts.
‘Don’t kid me,’ Furness said. ‘They’re no more good to eat than acorns.’
For the first time, in her country way, she found herself being annoyed and scornful by someone who doubted the truth of her words.
‘If you don’t believe me,’ she said, ‘come with me and we’ll get some. The forest is full enough of them. Come with me and I’ll show you—I’ll be going there tomorrow.’
The following day, Sunday, she walked with Furness in the forest, through the great rides of scalded brilliant beeches. In the October sunshine her hair shone in a big coppery bun from under the back of her green straw Sunday hat. Furness was a handsome, light-hearted man of thirty-five with thickish lips and dark oiled hair and a short yellow cane which he occasionally swished, sword-fashion, at pale clouds of dancing flies. These flies, almost transparent in the clear October sun, were as light and delicate as the lashes of Thelma’s fair bleached eyes.
For some time she and Furness sat on a fallen tree-trunk while she picked up beech-nuts, shelled them for him and watched him eat them. She did not feel any particular sense of triumph in having shown a man that beech-nuts were good to eat but she laughed once or twice, quite happily, as Furness threw them gaily into the air, caught them deftly in his mouth and said how good they were. His tongue was remarkably red as it stiffened and flicked at the nuts and she noticed it every time. What was also remarkable was that Furness did not peel a single nut himself. With open outstretched hand and poised red tongue he simply sat and waited to be fed.
‘You mean you really didn’t know they were good?’ she said.
‘To tell you the honest,’ Furness said, ‘I never saw a beech-tree in my life before.’
‘Oh! go on with you,’ she said. ‘Never?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Honest. Cut my throat. I wouldn’t know one if I saw one anyway.’
‘Aren’t there trees in London?’
‘Oh! plenty,’ Furness said. ‘Trees all over the place.’
‘As many as this?’ she said. ‘As many as in the forest?’
‘Oh! easy,’ Furness said, ‘only more scattered. Scattered about in big par
ks—Richmond, Kew, Hyde Park, places like that—miles and miles. Scattered.’
‘I like to hear you talk about London.’
‘You must come up there some time,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you round a bit. We’ll have a day on the spree.’
He laughed again in his gay fashion and suddenly, really before she knew what was happening, he put his arms round her and began to kiss her. It was the first time she had ever been kissed by anyone in that sort of way and the lips of George Furness were pleasantly moist and warm. He kissed her several times again and presently they were lying on the thick floor of beech-leaves together. She felt a light crackle of leaves under her hair as George Furness pressed against her, kissing her throat, and then suddenly she felt afraid of something and she sat up, brushing leaves from her hair and shoulders.
‘I think we ought to go now,’ she said.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Come on. What’s the hurry, what’s the worry? Come on, Thelma, let’s have some fun.’
‘Not here. Not today——’
‘Here today, gone tomorrow,’ Furness said. ‘Come on, Thelma, let’s make a little hay while the sun shines.’
Suddenly, because Furness himself was so gay and light-hearted about everything, she felt that perhaps she was being over-cautious and stupid and something made her say:
‘Perhaps some other day. When are you coming back again?’
‘Well, that’s a point,’ he said. ‘If I go to Bristol first I’ll be back this way Friday. If I go to Hereford first I’ll stay in Bristol over the weekend and be back here Monday.’
Sunlight breaking through thinning autumn branches scattered dancing blobs of gold on his face and hands as he laughed again and said:
‘All right, Thelma? A little hay-making when I come back?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Is that a promise?’
