by H. E. Bates
‘Couldn’t it swim?’ I said.
‘Oh! it was asleep. Never woke. It just went a belly-flopper and was done for.’
Another time we had venison. I knew what that was. ‘A deer,’ I said. ‘Did that fall down the well?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I shot it. With a bow and arrow.’
‘With what?’ I said. ‘How?’
‘Bow and arrow. One o’ these days I’ll show you.’ And he did. I badgered and bothered him until, one summer Sunday afternoon, he made an ash-bow standing as high as himself and cut arrows out of flower-canes. ‘You don’t believe me. Do you?’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll show you.’ He tipped the arrows with old shoe-awls and bits of filed wire and anything handy. ‘’Course they ain’t no venisons about,’ he said. ‘But I’ll show you.’ Then we went into the field beyond the house and Silas stalked an old cow. Finally he stood about ten yards away from her and shot her in the backside. The cow leapt up about ten feet in the air and tore about the field as though she were heat-crazy. ‘That’s how I done the venison,’ Silas said. ‘Only it was a bigger bow and a bigger arrow and I hit it a bit harder.
‘Now you know when Silas tells y’ anything it’s right, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You know Silas don’t tell lies, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You know Silas don’t stuff you with any old tale?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know now.’
It must have been some time after this that he told me the story of the nails, the stewed nails, because it was at some time when I had extra faith in him. I forget how it came up. Perhaps it was duck eggs; it may have been the sow. I know he said: ‘You kids—blimey, hair and teeth!—you don’ know what it is to go without grub. Look at me. I can eat anything. Had to. Look at that time I lived on stewed nails for a week.’
I just stared.
‘That’s one for you, ain’t it? That makes your eyes pop, don’t it? Stewed nails. For a week. And glad to.’
‘Didn’t they … didn’t they … weren’t you bad?’ I said.
‘Oh! they was just old nails. I had pepper and salt on ’em, too.’
I asked him how it happened, and when. I remember having no fear at all that he would tell me. We were alone, sprawling under the elders beyond the bean-rows, in the shade. He could tell me anything if we were alone. It was only in the presence of others that, sometimes, he was not so sure.
‘Oh, about fifty years ago. I was only a kid. About thirty.’ He stopped, eyed me seriously, squinted. ‘You ain’t goin’ tell nobody about this if I tell you?’
‘No. Oh, no!’
‘Thass right. There’s a policeman at the bottom o’ this. I don’t want to git into trouble. You cork it in.’
‘I will.’
‘Sure? You promise?’
‘Finger wet, finger dry,’ I said.
‘Thass right. And cut my throat if I tell a lie. This what I’m telling y’ is true.’
He took a quick look round, spoke lower, dropped an eyelid at me, and said: ‘I’d gone up to Sam Tilley’s to take the old sow to the boar. Sam was a policeman. His wife was a young gal about twenty. She was fiery an’ all. Nice gal. I knew her. Sometimes Sam was on nights and sometimes he was on days. That time he was on days. Well, it was a hot day and after the boar had finished she said: “If you’re tired, come in and sit down a bit.” So I went in and she said she was tired too. So I made no more to do. “Don’t wear a chair out,” I said. “Sit on my knee.” So she did. She was as light as a chicken, lovely.’ He paused, recollecting, licking his loose red lips, going off into a momentary trance. Oh! and then—dall it, what happened then? Where was I?’
‘She was tired … she was resting on your knee,’ I said.
‘Ah! Thass it. And then … oh! I know. We started playing with her duck eggs.’
‘What duck eggs?’
‘Oh! She kept ducks. Didn’t I say that? She had some lovely ducks. And she used to let me have eggs sometimes. I forgot how it was, but we started fooling about with her duck eggs. She kept hiding ’em and I had to find ’em … you know. Just fooling about.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Like hide the thimble,’
‘Thass it. Like hide the thimble. Like that. Only these was duck eggs.’
‘Where’d she hide ’em?’ I said.
‘Oh! In … where what? Oh! all over the show. Upstairs, downstairs. Everywhere. In the oven. In bed. Oh, she was a Tartar. She was hot.’
‘With running about so much?’
‘Ah, thass it! Running about so much. And then …’ He looked hard at me, without a twinkle. ‘You goin’ to cork this in? Keep it secret all right?’
I promised faithfully to cork it in, and he went on:
‘Well, then he turned up. Sam. All of a sudden she looks out of the window and there he is coming up the garden path. By God, that give me a turn.’
He made motions of a man in a variety of agonies, sweat, thirst, fright, more thirst. I could see he must have been a good deal upset.
‘What did you do?’ I said.
‘Oh! I never done anything. I couldn’t. I was scared stiff. It was her who done it. “Here, quick,” she says, “in the cellar.” And there I was. And there I stopped.’
‘How long for?’ I said.
‘For a week!’
‘A week! Why didn’t she let you out?’
‘She forgot! Forgot all about me. Didn’t I tell you how forgetful she was? Oh, she was shocking! Sometimes I’d go up for a dozen duck eggs and she’d bring the boar out and then I’d go for apples and she’d bring me duck eggs. You see?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see. But why did she lock you in at all? You were all right. You weren’t doing anything.’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You go up to the house and in the corner cupboard you’ll see a bottle marked liniment. You bring it. I want to rub my back. It gives me what’ho! every time I stir.’
So I went to fetch the bottle and after that, for some reason, perhaps because he kept drinking the liniment instead of rubbing his back with it, the tale warmed up. He began to tell me how he lay in the cellar night and day, in complete darkness, not daring to shout out and wondering what would happen to him. But what I wanted to know most was how he had lived—what he had had to eat.
‘Eat!’ he said. ‘Eat? I never had a mossel. Not a mossel. All I’d got was a mite o’ pepper and salt screwed up in a mite o’ paper in my westcit pocket.’
‘You must have got down to skin and bone,’ I said.
‘Skin and bone … you’re right,’ he said. ‘Thass about all I was. And shouldn’t have been that if it hadn’t been for the nails.’
He went on to tell me, then, how after the third or fourth day, after he had searched every inch of the cellar, floor and ceiling, on his hands and knees, he got so desperate that he began to prise out the nails of the floor boards and how after that there was nothing for it but to eat them and how he made a fire of his pocket linings and splinters of floor board and anything handy and lit it with the only match he had and how he collected water off the damp walls in a tobacco tin and how at last he put the nails in and stewed them.
‘Stewed ’em,’ he said. ‘All one night and all one day. And then ate ’em. I had to. It was either that or snuff it.’
‘By golly!’ I said. ‘What did they taste like?’
‘’Course it’s been a long time ago,’ he said. ‘They tasted like … oh, I don’t know. I had plenty o’ pepper and salt on ’em. That took the taste out a bit.’
I sat silent, thinking it over.
‘’Course it’s the iron what done it,’ he said. ‘Iron’s good for you. Ain’t it? It was only the iron what done it.’
I still sat silent. It was a fine story, but somehow it seemed, as I sat there in the hot shade of the elders, with their thick, sourish smell rank in the sun, almost too good. I couldn’t swallow it. I believed all about the duck eggs and the woman and the cellar and everything—all except the nails. Stew
ed nails! I kept turning it over in my mind and wondering.
And he must have seen my unbelief. Because suddenly he said:
‘You don’ believe me now,’ he said. ‘Do you? You think I’m stuffin’ you?’
He looked at me long and hard, with a gaze from which the habitual devilry had been driven out by a marvellous innocence.
‘Look at that then.’
He seemed suddenly to have had an inspiration. He opened his mouth, baring his teeth. They were old and broken and stained by the yellow and brown of decay.
‘See ’em?’ he said. ‘That’s rust. Nail rust. It got into my teeth.’ He spoke with impressive reverence. ‘It got into my teeth eating them nails and I never been able to get it out again.’
He gave a sigh, as though burdened with the telling of too much truth.
‘That’s where women land you,’ he said.
A Funny Thing
My Uncle Silas and my Uncle Cosmo belonged to different worlds; but they were men of identical kidney. Uncle Cosmo was a small man of dapper appearance with waxed moustaches who wore a gold ring on his right hand and a wine-coloured seal on his gold watch-chain, and a green homburg hat. He carried a saucy silver-topped walking stick and smoked cigars and looked exactly what he was: a masher. If Uncle Silas was the black sheep of one side of the family, Uncle Cosmo was the black sheep of the other. He habitually did an awful thing for which, I think, nobody ever forgave him; he spent his winters abroad. He sent us picture-postcards, then, of orange-trees in Mentone, the bay at Naples, Vesuvius, the gondolas of Venice, of himself in a straw hat on Christmas Day at Pompeii, and wrote, airily: ‘On to Greece and Port Said to-morrow, before the final jaunt to Ceylon.’ He was reputed, though nobody ever said so, to have a fancy lady in Nice, and there was something about a scandal in Colombo. Returning home in the spring of every year, he brought us oranges fresh from the bough, Sicilian pottery, Oriental cushions, shells from the South Seas, lumps of gold-starred quartz and the war axes of aboriginal chieftains, and advice on how to eat spaghetti. He twiddled his seal and told amazing stories of hot geysers on remote southern islands and bananas at twenty a penny and how he had almost fought a duel with a Prussian in Cairo. Cosmopolitan, debonair, a lady-killer, Uncle Cosmo was altogether very impressive.
The only person not impressed by Cosmo was my Uncle Silas.
‘You bin a long way, Cosmo,’ he would say, ‘but you ain’t done much.’
‘Who hasn’t? I’ve travelled over half the globe, Silas, while you sit here and grow prize gooseberries.’
‘I dare say,’ Silas said, ‘I dare say. But we only got your word for it. For all we know you might stop the winter in a boardin’ house at Brighton.’
‘Silas,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘I could tell you stories of places between here and Adelaide that would make your liver turn green. Places——’
‘Well, tell us then. Nobody’s stoppin’ you.’
‘I’m telling you. Here’s just one thing. There’s a desert in Assyria that’s never been trodden by the foot of man and that’s so far across it would take you three years to cross it on a camel. Now, one day——’
‘You ever bin across this desert?’
‘No, but——’
‘Then how the hell d’ye know it takes three years to cross?’
‘Well, it’s——’
‘What I thought,’ Silas said. ‘Just what I thought. You hear these things, Cosmo, you hear a lot, and you’ve bin a long way, but you ain’t done much. Now take women.’
‘Ah!’
‘What about this fancy affair in Nice?’
‘I haven’t got a fancy affair in Nice!’
‘There you are. Just what I thought. Big talk and nothing doing.’
‘She lives in Monte Carlo!’
‘Well, that ain’t so wonderful.’
His pride wounded, Uncle Cosmo took a deep breath, drank a mouthful of my Uncle Silas’s wine as though it were rat poison, pulled his mouth into shape again and said: ‘You don’t seem to grasp it. It’s not only one woman, Silas, in Monte Carlo. There’s another in Mentone and another in Marseilles and two in Venice. I’ve got another who lives in an old palace in Naples, two I can do what I like with in Rome, a Grecian girl in Athens, and two little Syrians in Port Said. They all eat out of my hand. Then, there’s a piece of a Viscount in Colombo and a Norwegian girl in Singapore, and I forget whether it’s four or five French girls in Shanghai. Then, of course, in Japan——’
‘Wait a minute,’ Silas said. ‘I thought you went abroad for your health?’
‘Then in Hong Kong there’s a Russian girl who’s got a tortoise tattoed on her——’
‘Well, there ain’t nothing wonderful in that, either. Down at The Swan in Harlington there used to be a barmaid with a cuckoo or something tattoed on——’
‘Yes, it was a cuckoo,’ Uncle Cosmo said. ‘I know, because I got her to have it done. She liked me. Yes, it was a cuckoo. And that’s why they always used to say you could see the cuckoo earlier in Harlington than anywhere else in England.’
My Uncle Silas was not impressed. He took large sardonic mouthfuls of wine, cocked his bloodshot eye at the ceiling and looked consistently sceptical, wicked, and unaffected. When Uncle Cosmo then proceeded to relate the adventure of the two nuns in Bologna, my Uncle Silas capped it with the adventure of the three Seventh Day Adventists in a bathing hut in Skegness. When Uncle Cosmo told the story of how, in his shirt, he had been held up at the point of a pistol by a French husband in Biarritz, my Uncle Silas brought out the chestnut of how a gamekeeper had blown his hat off with a double-barrelled gun in Bedfordshire. The higher my Uncle Cosmo flew, the better my Uncle Silas liked it. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ Uncle Cosmo said, ‘of the three weeks I spent in a château in Arles with the wife of a French count?’
‘No,’ Silas said. ‘But did I ever tell you of the month I spent with the duchess’s daughter in Stoke Castle? The Hon. Lady Susannah. You can remember her?’
‘Well, I—how long ago was this?’
‘This was the winter of ninety-three. You ought to remember her. She used to ride down to Harlington twice a week, with a groom in a dogcart. Used to wear a black coat with a splashed red lining.’
‘Dark girl?’
‘That’s her. Black. Long black hair and black eyes and long black eyelashes. A dazzler.’
‘Well, Silas, now you come to say, I——’
‘Now wait a minute, Cosmo. You know what they used to say about this girl?’
‘Well——’
‘Never looked at a man in her life.’ My Uncle Silas went on: ‘Never wanted to. Cold as a frog. Nobody couldn’t touch her. Chaps had been after her from everywhere—London, all over the place. Never made no difference, Cosmo. She just sat in the castle and looked out of the window and painted pictures. See?’
‘Well, I——’
‘You know the castle at Stoke? Stands down by the river.’
‘Oh, yes, Silas. Very well, very well.’
‘The grounds run right down to the river,’ Silas said. ‘Well, that winter I’d been doing a little river-poaching down there—eel lines and jack-snaring. You know? And about six o’clock one morning I was coming along under the castle wall with about thirty eels in a basket when she copped me.’
‘Who?’
‘Her. The gal. She was sitting in a gateway in the wall with her easel, painting. It was just gettin’ light and she told me afterwards she was painting the dawn over the river. “You been poaching,” she said. Well, what could I say? I was done. She had me red-handed and she knew it.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Well, Cosmo, she done a funny thing. She says, “I won’t say nothing about this business if you’ll come up to the castle and let me paint your picture just as you are. Old clothes and eels and everything.” So I says, “It’s a go,” and we went up to the castle and she began to paint the picture straight away that morning. “The whole family’s away abroad for the
winter, and I’m all alone here except for the groom and butler,” she says. “And after to-day you come along every morning and catch your eels and then come up to the castle and let me paint you.”’
And my Uncle Silas went on to relate, between wry mouthfuls of wine, how for more than a week he had done as she said, trapping the eels in the early morning and going up to the castle and slipping in by a side door and letting the girl paint him in her room. Until at last something happened. It rained torrentially for a whole day and the succeeding night and when he went down to the river on the following morning he found the floods up and the small stone cattle bridge leading over to the castle smashed by water. It meant a detour of six miles and it was almost eight o’clock by the time he reached the castle. He slipped in by the side door as usual and went upstairs and into the girl’s room, and there, standing before a cheval mirror, the girl was painting a picture of herself in the nude.
‘And that just about finished it?’ Cosmo said.
‘No, Cosmo, that just about begun it.’
‘Well,’ Cosmo said, ‘what did she do?’
‘A funny thing, Cosmo,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘a funny thing. She just went on painting. “I thought you weren’t coming,” she says, “so I got on with this picture of myself. You like it?” Well, I was standing so as I could see the back of her in the flesh, the sideways of her in the picture and the front of her in the mirror, and I was flummoxed. “Well,” she says, “perhaps you don’t like it because it isn’t finished? Let me put my clothes on and let’s have some fried eels and you tell me what you think of it.”’
So my Uncle Silas went on to say they had fried eels and talked about the picture and he said something about not being able to judge the picture on such short acquaintance with the model. ‘You’ll see me again to-morrow,’ she said, and so it went on: she painting herself in the nude, Silas watching, until at last, as Silas himself said, a month had gone by and he’d caught almost every eel in the river.
‘You heard me say she was cold?’ he said. ‘Never looked at a man and never wanted one? That’s a fairy tale, Cosmo. Don’t you believe it. It’s true she never looked at men. But she looked at one man. And you know who that was.’
