The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  Suddenly the little girl got tired of the elephant and the tiger and began to eat the tiger. He came to himself too and began to eat the elephant. For an instant he felt tired, but then the little girl began talking again. She said how much she liked his hair.

  ‘It’s nice and white,’ she said. ‘I’d like to brush it.’

  ‘You eat your tea,’ he said, automatically, not knowing why he said it.

  ‘Can I brush it?’ she said. ‘Can I? Can I?’

  He was about to say something else when he saw her slip down from the table. She went out of the room, and he was left to himself. For a few seconds reality beat upon him out of the darkening room. The chrysanthemums were colourless now except in the winks of the firelight. Out in the street the lamps were not yet lit and he could not see very clearly the faces of his family. Aggie was asking if anyone wanted another cup and Clem was saying that it was not as if he and Emma asked for favours or that they grudged anyone else having a chance, but in his opinion some of the old ones could still sing some of the young ones inside out. Anyway, he was saying finally, it had cured him for a bit. If that was chapel and religion, he said, then he’d stop at home.

  Funny sort of religion, Harry said.

  The remark was taken as a kind of heresy, and Aggie pounced on Harry, starting an argument, so that no one saw the little girl come back into the room. In the confusion of voices the old man pushed his chair back from the table. The little girl sat on his knee and he bent down his head to her. She had found a small white hair-brush, and now she began very gently and slowly to brush his hair. She went on brushing his hair for a long time, talking to him, telling him as if he were a child to keep still, to hold his head this way and that. The repeated, soothing motions of her brushing produced on him a kind of mesmeric peace. There appeared on his face a look of lost and beautiful tranquillity, his eyes no longer wet or tired, his hands placidly at rest.

  About him the conversation that he no longer wanted to follow was going on more bitterly. Emma and Harry were arguing loudly as to whether you went to church to worship the minister or whether you went to worship God Almighty, and Gladys, who had not spoken much, was trying to keep the peace. Harry, replying to Aggie, was saying warmly that it would be more sense if someone lit the gas. It was too dark to see your way to your mouth, he said, but Aggie flared back that if he couldn’t see he must feel. His mouth was big enough.

  Outside in the street, by this time, the lamps were alight. The bright greenish beams of light were coming into the window, turning the edges of the chrysanthemums to curls of tarnished silver. The old man sat staring at the flowers with a gaze of profound stillness, while the little girl tirelessly brushed his thin white hair.

  In the conflict of voices no one seemed to be taking any notice of him now. In the falling darkness no one could tell what he was thinking.

  The Banjo

  Uncle and Clarkey were travelling with the baby’s pram over hilly country, in the heat of July, making their way towards the coast. In the fields the standing wheat was rapidly turning a bright olive colour. The hot light beat down strongly on the oats, so that they shimmered opal on the crests of the distances. On either side of the tyre-worn track of the bypass, smooth as alabaster, long swinging lines of scarlet poppies seemed to jump back off the ground, stabbing the eyes.

  One wheel of the pram had lost its tyre and Clarkey’s feet were hurting. The constant sawing of the iron wheel-rim on the concrete was like jagged glass on the fibres of his mind.

  ‘Ain’t no use, Uncle,’ Clarkey kept saying. ‘I gotta git some new shoes afore the day’s gone. I gotta cadge a new pair somehow.’

  ‘H’mph.’

  ‘Either I git em too big or too little. Never git ’em right.’ Clarkey’s eyes lifted themselves from the hypnotic glare of the poppies and rested, almost dreamy, on the cooler spaces of corn. ‘One day I’ll git a pair o’ shoes right, I know. I see I git a nice pair o’ patent, I see I do. I’ll go in a shop and put the money down and be measured.’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said.

  They had been together now for almost six months and got some sort of living travelling along the coast with the baby’s pram, grinding knives and scissors. When there were no scissors to grind they collected rags from children and gave back gay coloured windmills of their own manufacture. When this was done Uncle played a little tune on the banjo.

  The banjo lay under the sacking cover of the pram with the hand-worked grindstone, a pile of odd rags and half a loaf of bread wrapped in newspaper. All except the banjo they shared on an equal basis. The banjo belonged to Uncle. He was a big slommacking fellow with heavy placid eyes and large shell-backed hands from which his crabbed fingers spread out with slow diffidence, like the shy feet of tortoises. When he had played one tune on the banjo he began to play what seemed to be another but which it became evident, after a time, was only the first, played a little differently. The tune had no beginning and no end, but seemed to swing like a spider’s web out of nowhere. Uncle had picked it up somewhere on the African veldt, thirty years before, as a soldier in the Boer campaign. Perhaps it was Dutch. Uncle did not know. He did not know the name of his tune or if there were words to it, and he did not know any other.

  Sometimes as they went along the pram hit a stone or a flaw in the concrete and the banjo, suddenly jolted, would give out a little melancholy twang of sound.

  For a long time this sudden mournful little sound had been playing, like the glare of the poppies, the shoes and the scraping of the tyre-less pram-wheel, on Clarkey’s mind. For a time it had been only a source of irritation. Now it began to mean something. It began to crystallize into a desire to possess the banjo.

  With the banjo, Clarkey reasoned, he could buy new shoes. His eyes were small and dark and excitable and he had a way of walking springing on the toes of his feet, so that he looked almost like a lady. He seemed to take three steps to Uncle’s one, like a dark-eyed ferret running behind a large dog, and as the concrete struck through to the soles of his feet, paining them, there was a resultant pain in his mind, the pain of an awakening envy against Uncle, the pain of wanting the banjo for himself.

  The more he thought about this, as they went on in the heat of the afternoon, the more it seemed to him that he had struck a great idea. With the banjo he could cancel out the things that were troubling him. He could get away from Uncle, start on his own, be free. Easy to pick up a pram somewhere, learn a jazz tune or two on the banjo. A banjo must be easy to play. Easy as pie. Easy was the word for all of it. With the banjo there would be no more pram-wheels scouring the edge off his brain, no more concrete bouncing white hot pain into the soles of his feet.

  As he was thinking this, his mind becoming set in a track of fanatically simple ideas, they came up to a large roadside tea-house with a fleet of orange long-distance coaches parked across the concrete pull-in outside. It was the chance they had waited for all afternoon.

  ‘Goin’ to give ’em a tune, ain’t we?’ Clarkey said. ‘Ain’t we?’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said.

  Uncle pushed the pram on to the grass verge opposite the tea-house, and there got out the banjo from under the covering of sacks. He slung the banjo over his shoulder and with huge ponderous steps that suddenly maddened Clarkey by their slowness walked across the road and took up a stand. People were now coming out of the tea-house and were standing about among the coaches, talking, wiping the tea-sweat off their faces.

  Presently Uncle’s fingers uncurled themselves, like tortoise feet, and began to play the slow melancholy tune on the banjo. After Uncle had played the tune once and had begun to play it again Clarkey walked among the people with his cap, ‘Something to help us on the road ma’am, thank you ma’am, thank you, much obliged I’m sure, yes ma’am hot’s the word’, his voice like the twangling of a wire spring in the hot air, his feet purposely dragged with pain across the concrete.

  ‘Six and eight pence,’ he said, ten minutes later, half a mil
e along the road. ‘Ain’t bad, eh? Ain’t bad?’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said. ‘Ain’t bad.’

  Clarkey counted out half the money and gave it to Uncle, and Uncle put it in his pocket, not speaking. The poppies, which had ceased for a short distance each side the tea-house, had now begun again, huge trails of blood following the white-painted edge of the road. His eyes and feet hurting again, Clarkey lifted his gaze to the cool fields of olive-yellow corn, thinking of the money. He thought of the amount, the whole amount, six and eight pence. A lot of money. A hell of a lot. Made in five minutes. Made by a scrap of a tune on a banjo. Down on the coast there were second-hand clothes shops where he could get a pair of shoes for that money. A week with the banjo and he could get shoes and a pram, meat for dinner, fags, live like a lord, with a proper kip at nights. Live easy, play the banjo on the esplanade of some seaside town, live easy and make money. No more slugging on bypasses.

  They had not sharpened a pair of scissors or a knife all that day, but an hour later they came to a house surrounded by heavy clumps of spruce and pine where, once or twice before, they had had a little cutlery to grind.

  ‘Want me to go in and see if they got a thing or two to sharpen?’ Clarkey said.

  ‘H’mph.’

  To Clarkey there was something suddenly maddening about this repeated grunt. As he went up the drive of the house under the cool black pines it seemed suddenly as if the man who could talk like that, and never say anything but that, hadn’t much place in the world. Like the banjo all he had was one tune: one word, a grunt that did for everything. A man like that might just as well not be alive. Might just as well be dead.

  Clarkey came down the drive, two or three minutes later, with a kitchen knife in his hand. It was a short knife, black handled, with a triangular blade coming to a point. ‘Take your time over it,’ the kitchen maid said. ‘We use it for cutting the rind off the bacon in the mornings.’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ Clarkey said. ‘Take our time and make a good job of it, betcha life. How soon you want it?’

  ‘The cook’s been swearing about it for a month,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t bring it back till it cuts some sense.’

  ‘About half an hour?’ Clarkey said.

  ‘Any time, so long as it cuts.’

  ‘Right,’ Clarkey said. ‘About half an hour. May be a bit more.’

  Outside on the roadside grass Uncle fitted up the little hand grindstone. Clarkey held the knife. ‘Shall I sharpen it?’

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said.

  He began to turn the grindstone, moistening it with a little water that they carried about with them in a screw-stoppered beer bottle. Clarkey held the knife lightly in his hands, horizontal, with the tips of his fingers. For a small man his hands were very long, quite white, and they seemed exceedingly flexible. They were never still. They seemed as if charged with a kind of ladylike electricity, recoiling with a little quiver of shock as the knife blade made its contact with the stone. In this way it seemed sometimes that the knife leapt up from the stone, of its own volition, beyond his control. A moment later Clarkey would have it back again, holding it in his light, ladylike fashion, almost caressing stone with steel, generating a little firework of sparks that was scarcely visible in the glare of sunshine.

  ‘Gotta take my time over it,’ Clarkey said. ‘Ain’t had a stone on it for a year.’

  ‘H’mph.’

  Uncle did not change or relax his movements, but turned the little grindstone like a man turning the handle of a musical instrument and producing the same harsh melody. To Clarkey this sound brought back and became identical with the sound of the tyre-less pram-wheel on the road that afternoon. It brought back in turn the glare of heat and poppies, the sudden useless twang of the banjo, the pointless maddening little tune that was the only tune that Uncle could play. Under the renewed contact of all this Clarkey was hit by a new and insane impression. He felt as if his mind were the soft revolving circle of stone, that the fine edge of all the circumstances of the day was being held against it, wearing it away. As he watched the knife silvered and fined to a razor edge under his own hand he felt his mind sharpened in the same way to a fine edge of frenzy.

  When he finally got to his feet with the knife he felt the hot afternoon spin swiftly about him, rocking his brain. He walked away towards the drive of the house slowly, not thinking. Up to that moment he had not grasped that the knife might have its own significance.

  Then suddenly he saw it. He was walking along with the knife in his right hand. He was under the dark trees, out of the sunshine, and the knife had in his hand no more than the appearance of a blade of light. When he turned the knife very slightly in his ladylike fingers the light went out. In that moment he saw the significance of the knife. He stood still and looked back. The pine trees had cut him off from the road. In the same way, as he looked forward again, he saw that they separated him from the house. He took several paces off the gravel drive and stood behind a tree. He stood there for three or four minutes, waiting and listening. He did not move at all except once. It was to give the knife a little twist of his fingers before putting it in his pocket, like a light that is switched out.

  When he walked back to the road again, out of the black shadows of the thick pine trees into the sunlight, he was no longer thinking. Thought had been transmuted into a repeated current of sensation. It was already driving through him like a charge of electrified madness.

  This single sensation was so strong that it had the effect of nullifying all the others that had troubled him that afternoon: the pain of his feet, the filing away of the broken pram-wheel, the heat, the hard glare in his eyes of concrete and poppies, the maddening sound of the banjo making its mournful twang under the sacking in the pram.

  It drove him along all the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, replacing the machinery of physical effort and thought, so that he became no longer tired. He had no sort of plan of action. He had ceased thinking. His plan was the sensation itself. At some culminative moment something would happen. His hand touched the knife in his pocket. The knife now lay dead, but at some point it would spring to life, like the filament of a lamp when the current is turned on.

  His first return to reality was when he realized that Uncle had stopped with the pram. The poppies had ceased, and now woods were thick on both sides of the verge. Above the gap made by the road between the trees he became aware of a strangely elevated clarity in the sky. He realized a moment later that they had come almost to the sea.

  For the first time it was Uncle who opened the conversation. His speech was soft, almost on one note, and tired.

  ‘This is th’ old place,’ he said. ‘Remember it, don’t you? Brook down on the other side of the wood. Plenty o’ water, remember?’ He pushed the pram off the road and into a track going down into the woods. ‘I reckon I’ll wash my feet.’

  Clarkey did not speak. But once in the wood, under the trees, he began to remember the place. It was very quiet. In the heart of the wood it was quite dark, but at the far end the evening sun was pouring down between the trees in long bright trumpets of horizontal light. He caught the strong odour of sunless earth, of rank elder.

  The path widened out eventually to a forty-foot track. Uncle parked the pram under a large sloe-bush, and began to go about at once looking for wood.

  ‘Goin’ wash your feet afore we eat?’ Clarkey said.

  ‘H’mph,’ Uncle said. ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘Christ, I’ll be glad to get my feet in water too.’

  They ate a meal of bread and cheese, with tea stewed over the fire in a can. All through it Clarkey was very silent. The sensation, the insane pain generated by the idea of the knife, had now left him. He was thinking again, but the process of his thought was no longer in any way chaotic. It had become very simplified. He didn’t want any trouble. Uncle was a big man, slow but enormous, and had been a soldier. No need to knock the house down to get the cash-box. No need for trouble. All he had to do
was walk away with the banjo. Uncle always played the little tune on it last thing at night, before they dossed. Clarkey could walk away with it in the night. They were now about four miles from the sea. In an hour he could be down in the town, get a night’s doss, and lay low for a bit. In a week he could be away somewhere down the coast, where Uncle would never think of going. After that, no more slugging with a pram, no more torn, aching feet. He’d live easy and get himself a pair of shoes to measure.

  The plan was so simple that he lay on his back, thinking it out, trying to find a weakness in it, all the time that Uncle had gone into the field beyond the wood, to wash his feet. He went over it in his mind as a man goes over a problem in arithmetic, working it out in different ways, getting always the same answer.

  It was already twilight when Uncle came back. He seemed larger, more cumbrous and more simple than ever in the falling darkness. To Clarkey’s questions he grunted always with the old soft monosyllable of content.

  Lying on his back, Clarkey watched Uncle get the banjo out of the pram. He watched with motionless, half-closed eyes. He saw Uncle tune up the banjo and then saw the slow tortoise-feet hands uncurl themselves and strike the strings.

  Without being affected by it he heard the strange little tune mournfully strike the quiet air. He heard it again and saw the figure of Uncle sink into a still lower attitude in the darkening grass. Already, over the colourless fringe of trees, the stars were pricking out, dim above the reddish afterglow of heat and light still suspended in the direction of the sea. All the time no part of Uncle moved except the slow crude hands, heavily striking out the tune.

  Clarkey heard the tune twice and then it began gradually to get on his nerves again. He turned restlessly in the grass. He began to feel the frayed ends of his patience sticking into his mind like raw ends of wire.

  ‘Can’t yer play some other tune?’ Clarkey said.

  Uncle did not speak; the little tune mournfully went on.