The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  It was very strange how I first noticed this. My sister has never been given to very easy self-expression. Any other girl would have begun to express reactions of love and happiness as soon as the cause of them became clear to her. But my sister is abnormally passive. She is capable of feeling but not of demonstrating any great emotion: so that it is easy for anyone who does not know her to conclude that she is almost incapable of feeling emotion at all. Also she takes after my father, who was a negative, unattractive man with colourless, bony features. She has the trim, practical appearance of a cloth-bound book. In consequence she has no means of expressing by physical beauty any great depth of emotion, however beautiful it is in itself. It is beyond her to fall in love actively. Her way would be to fall in love with dismal passivity, quietly, tragically, out of sight.

  There are women who would have found another quite simple way of expressing their feelings, but my sister could not even do that. She could not even cook her way to J. Eric Lawrence’s heart. She was too practical for that. All our guests, unless they asked specially, ate the same food. It was against all my sister’s principles to make an exception even of J. Eric Lawrence – yet one of her special smoked salmon omelettes, which were delicious and which she only turned out on rare occasions, must have shown him that she had some positive, individual feeling for him. But she couldn’t even do that.

  No: my sister’s way of showing that she was in love with J. Eric Lawrence was to go for a walk every evening. That was an old habit of hers: a walk into the town to post some letters, or as far as the common, or down to the public library to meet Miss Millay. She had always varied her route. But now it became obvious that her walk every evening was in the same direction and to the same place. She went down to J. Eric Lawrence’s bridge.

  It did not strike me until later how odd it was that for me the bridge was a means of hatred, whereas for my sister it was exactly the opposite. It was odd how that inanimate and at that time almost non-existent object – there was very little to be seen except huge piles of timber, iron and concrete lying about the meadows – should have affected our lives so much. Of course we were fools. There was I cheating myself into hating the man because I hated the bridge; and there was my sister, too inhibited and passive to express her love, going out every night, wet or fine, to gaze on a pile of raw materials lying in a field and a line of red signal lamps where the road had begun. Can you imagine anything sillier than that?

  Perhaps that is what made me so angry. It all seemed so silly and irrational and pointless. It was Miss Millay who first told us about it. ‘Dora always used to meet me out of the library two nights a week,’ she said. ‘Now she never does. I can’t understand it.’ I couldn’t understand it either. Then gradually we found out where she was going, and I began to understand.

  Without waiting to think it over, I felt terribly angry. Although I had never been directly angry with J. Eric Lawrence I felt my antagonism suddenly shift from him towards my sister. I found all sorts of reasons for my feelings. There is nothing a woman dislikes more than to see another woman running after a man, and it seemed to me that this was what my sister was doing. Another thing, it seemed cheap; it also seemed very clumsy and, in such a calm, rational person as my sister, very absurd and very childish. No: it did not once occur to me that perhaps she was deeply, terribly, mortally unhappy.

  Then I began to notice something else. My sister began to display the strangest and most comprehensive knowledge of bridge construction. It was winter now, and sometimes J. Eric Lawrence spent the evening playing chess with Mr. Parker in the drawing room. One evening I went into the room just in time to hear my sister say:

  ‘Isn’t the chief object of steel in reinforced concrete to resist tensile stresses?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said.

  ‘And the concrete, I suppose, offers resistance to compression?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, and smiled a little: the old, handsome smile with its captivating impertinence.

  I was staggered to hear my sister talk like this. To me a bridge was a bridge; it had never occurred to me that there was a science of bridge-making, and when my sister began to use terms like the theory of the resolution of forces, elastic deformation, the neutral axis and the relationship of stress to strain I saw I was listening to a new form of love-attraction. She was trying to express her love for J. Eric Lawrence by her knowledge of something dear to him, by her brains and her ingenuity. There was something pathetic and absurd about it, and again I was strangely angry.

  For a time J. Eric Lawrence was very interested in this talk of my sister’s. He was very clever, naturally, very clever; he had once said that even as a boy he ate and slept and dreamed mathematics. I could well believe it. But a passion for mathematics is not inexhaustible, and a woman who elects to talk of tensile stresses has only herself to blame if after a time she becomes very boring. And gradually, that night, I saw J. Eric Lawrence becoming more and more bored by the dry, desperate, mathematical mind of my sister.

  All this time I had been sitting by the fire, not saying anything. I could see his face. It was the sort of restless, sensuous, self-indulgent face that needs and is always looking for an emotionally responsive face of its own kind. A large part of the mind behind it had no interest in tensile stresses; it was bored by all thought of such things as weight of steel in superstructure. It depended for its existence on emotion, warmth, excitable beauty. I saw him look at the clock, down at his hands, at the chess-board. Yes, he was bored, bored by the talk, the game, insufferably bored above all by my sister, and I felt glad about it. Then suddenly he looked up at me. It was just a repetition of an habitual look, quick, attractive, rather impertinent. But now there was something else about it too. It had a kind of confidential softness in it – but I had not time to analyse it or do anything before he hurriedly got up from the chess-board.

  ‘I knew there was something I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘I knew there was something. I’d meant to see Garbo in that film at the Ritz, and to-night is the only possible night I can go. I knew there was something.’

  He looked at my sister. Of course it was a weak excuse. He must have known that she never went to the cinema. She had always kept away on principle: thought it rather silly. He must have known that. Yet he said, ‘How about coming too?’

  ‘Me?’ she said. ‘Oh! no.’ Her face began to colour deeply. ‘Oh! no, no thanks, I never go. I’d rather not.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘What about you, Linda? You’ll come, won’t you?’

  I got up. ‘Yes,’ I said. I spoke without thinking. ‘Yes. I love Garbo.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘How many hours will it take you to get ready?’

  ‘Two minutes,’ I said. ‘I just have to run upstairs.’

  ‘All right, I’ll get my coat,’ he said.

  I went upstairs and he went into the cloakroom to get his coat. After two or three minutes I came down again, and at the same moment he came out of the cloakroom.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll just say good night to Dora,’ I said. ‘In case we’re late.’

  Opening the drawing room door, I began to say, ‘I’ll just say good night, Dora, just in case – ’ when I saw that Mr. Parker was sitting there alone. ‘Oh! where’s Dora?’ I said.

  ‘I think she went out for her walk,’ he said.

  I did not say anything. But as I went out into the darkness with J. Eric Lawrence I felt a rush of jealousy, hatred and triumph combine in an intolerable feeling of excitement in my heart.

  At precisely that moment there began a new antagonism against my sister.

  III

  All that winter the building of the bridge, of course, went on; and all that winter the feeling of antagonism against my sister deepened and got stronger. The two structures were gradually built up together.

  The construction of a bridge is a slow process: similarly the building up of a certain state of emotion, like deep affecti
on or revenge, needs time. My early feeling of hatred towards J. Eric Lawrence was superficial; I did not know him then. Yes, it was superficial, and it might have gone on being superficial if it had not been for my sister. If my sister had not fallen in love with him I might not have acted as I did. For the plain fact is that all that winter, and on into the next spring, I set myself to fall in love with J. Eric Lawrence purposely, simply in order to spite my sister.

  I have already said that my father had always shown great partiality towards my sister, and had seemed to take an unconscious or conscious revenge on me. It may be that this lay behind what I felt or did. I don’t know. I only know that I took a despicable delight in doing what I did – in taking J. Eric Lawrence away from her, in appealing to the side of his nature that was foreign to her, in throwing at him all my youthful, excitable beauty and greatly rejoicing in it.

  All this did not happen suddenly. It was accomplished slowly, by little things – things like visits to the movies together, glances, a dance or two, by our coming into the dark, quiet house very late at night, I in a flimsy dress with bare arms, and both of us warm and excited, and once by the snow lying in light soft flakes on my fur coat and on my gloves and my hair and he standing in the lighted hall and telling me how much I looked like something off a Christmas tree, in just the flattering, sentimental way that a young girl would love, whether she admitted it or not.

  Yet all that winter there was no feeling of permanence about what was happening. I had the feeling first of not giving the best part of myself, then of not trusting him. At the first opportunity I felt he would drop me and run. All the time I felt I wanted something much more secure and beautiful.

  It wasn’t until the next summer that anything important happened. Then one evening J. Eric Lawrence and I were walking round the garden. For some reason or other we stopped under the lime-tree. I have already spoken about this lime-tree. It was quite large and must have been fairly old, and it overshadowed completely the west side of the house. Already that summer the grass had stopped growing underneath it and already in the warm early June evening it was possible to breathe the almost intolerably sweet scent of the first lime-flowers.

  We stood underneath the tree and then J. Eric Lawrence suddenly began to say something about the roots of such a large tree must be having a damaging effect on the foundations of the house. ‘You ought to do something about it,’ he said.

  ‘What could we do?’ I said.

  ‘Well, if it were mine,’ he said, ‘I should have it down.’

  At that moment I turned and saw my sister coming along the path from the house. That was rather her way: coming upon us suddenly, as if she couldn’t leave us alone together. The evening was beautifully clear and calm, and she must have heard what J. Eric Lawrence had said.

  ‘So you want to cut down the lime-tree, Mr. Lawrence?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m only speaking from a practical point of view,’ he said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It probably keeps the house damper than it should be,’ he said, ‘and it certainly shuts out light and air. And I should think it adversely affects the foundations.’

  Well, that was practical enough – just the sort of practical, sober reasoning that ought normally to have appealed to my sister. But she wouldn’t have it. She suddenly showed that she had an enormous sentimental attachment to that tree. She flushed hotly and said:

  ‘You may want it down but I don’t. I don’t, and I never shall!’

  ‘I think Mr. Lawrence is right,’ I said.

  I spoke quickly. The reaction was instinctive. If I had thought a moment I should have realized how much I myself loved that tree, which with its first lovely olive-green leaves, the honey-fragrant blossom and the masses of claret-coloured branches in winter was the most beautiful thing in our overgrown, neglected garden. Yes, it was a beautiful thing, but suddenly I wanted it down. I wanted to be against my sister; I wanted to show her that J. Eric Lawrence and I were on one side and she on another. I wanted to be able to revel in an aggravated sense of triumphant superiority.

  ‘After all,’ I said, ‘the tree is no good to us.’

  ‘All the same, I love it and I’d rather die,’ she said, ‘than have it down.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to come over all sentimental about it.’

  ‘Perhaps I am sentimental,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps!’ I said. ‘Just hark at her,’ I said to J. Eric Lawrence. ‘She must think we’re a pretty hard-bitten pair.’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ she said. ‘I’m only saying what I feel.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘you’re not obliged to cry over it.’

  That was a bitter thing to say and she did not answer it. Instead she turned and walked back into the house. In that moment, as I now see it, a break was made between us: she on one side, J. Eric Lawrence and I on the other. When she had gone it seemed suddenly very silent. It was growing dark and the leaves of the lime-tree were wonderfully still. By the trunk of the tree there was an old iron seat and we sat down on it. For some time we sat without saying anything. There are evenings in summer when it never grows cool and the nectar keeps rising in all the flowers in the warm darkness, until the darkness itself is inexpressibly deep with scent. You feel it would be good to sit there all night long and it was like that as we sat there under the lime-tree. My mind, young and excitable and at its best deeply sensitive, suddenly took a new direction. I felt very moved by the evening, the silence, the strange atmosphere of protectiveness given out by the lime-tree spreading itself above me.

  We sat there for a long time. The lights in the house began to go out, and when the last one had completed the darkness J. Eric Lawrence turned to me and asked whose it was and I said it was my sister’s.

  ‘Is your room on the other side?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I had made up my mind what I wanted now. ‘You know it’s just at the top of the new staircase,’ I said, ‘where it comes up from the kitchen.’

  IV

  He used to come to my room very often that summer and autumn, using the second staircase, until the bridge was finished. I don’t know if my sister knew about it. She may have done; she may not. She knew that he was in the habit of working very late at night, at correspondence and plans and such things, and it is possible that she never suspected.

  The odd thing is that I was not afraid of her knowing. On the contrary I was afraid of her not knowing. I wanted her to know. I wanted to confront her with the whole thing, to show her that what I felt for J. Eric Lawrence was something more real and more exciting and splendid than anything she could feel on that solitary nightly walk of hers down to the bridge. How often she walked down to that bridge I don’t know. I cannot begin to think what she felt for it, unless it was that in her level-headed, practical way she could never let herself fall in love with a person directly, but only with something symbolic of that person, like J. Eric Lawrence’s bridge. I only know that she was in love with him, very deeply, very passively, at a distance, a sort of love by remote control, and I only knew that later.

  Then in October that year, my sister had a great shock. She could not have been more greatly shocked if she had walked into my room one night and found J. Eric Lawrence there.

  One morning, when she took J. Eric Lawrence’s coffee and eggs into the dining room, she found Mr. Parker and Miss Millay shaking him enthusiastically by the hand.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘is it a birthday or something?’

  ‘No,’ Miss Millay said, very excited, ‘it’s better than that. Better than that. It’s the bridge. The bridge.’

  ‘The bridge?’ my sister said.

  ‘Yes!’ Miss Millay said, ‘it’s to be opened on November the fifteenth.’

  ‘The fifteenth?’ my sister said. ‘But that’s only three weeks away.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Mr. Parker said, ‘that’s the date.’

  My sister looked at J. Eric Lawrence. ‘But it was to
take eighteen months,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly been fifteen.’

  ‘We had special orders from the Ministry some weeks ago to get a move on,’ he said. ‘We’re anxious to get the new road open before there’s any chance of flooding on the old one. I’m told it floods very easily down there.’

  ‘Then it means you’ll soon be going?’ my sister said.

  ‘Yes, soon now,’ he said.

  It was Miss Millay who told me how my sister reacted to that simple and, as it seemed, purposely abrupt statement. She went deathly white. There are women who would have rushed out of the room, made a demonstration. But there was only one demonstration my sister could make. It was the simple, silent demonstration that she was terribly sick at heart. I do not suppose J. Eric Lawrence noticed anything. That would be like him. Nor was I upset by the news that the bridge would soon be finished and that by the beginning of December J. Eric Lawrence would have gone away. My reason for not being upset was quite simple. I was determined that if he went away I should go with him.

  That night I made him promise that. For him, as I see it now, it must have been a very simple thing to promise. I was very young, very excitable and in a dangerously credulous state of mind. In the darkness of the bedroom I could not of course see his face. All I wanted was a simple answer. All he had to say was ‘Yes, you can come with me’, and that, of course, is exactly what he did say.

  It was the next day when I realized that there was just one thing more that I wanted.

  ‘If we’re going away we ought to tell Dora,’ I said.

  ‘Must we? It’ll be several weeks yet.’

  ‘We ought to tell her,’ I said. ‘I want to tell her.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. He smiled at me in the old, completely captivating way. ‘Let’s wait until the bridge is finished. Won’t that do?’