The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  She did not answer.

  ‘Please,’ he said again, wiping his hair, ‘why not? Tell me straight out what it is. Don’t you like me? Don’t you want to?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘At least, not enough.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you like me? Tell me straight out. Go on, tell me straight out. Is it because I’m not good enough?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sought desperately to find an excuse that would finish it all. ‘I don’t know.’ She suddenly looked straight at his weak, unhealthy face. ‘You don’t take enough exercise.’

  ‘Is that the honest truth?’ he said. ‘Is that what you feel? Is that all?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what I feel. You don’t take enough exercise. You go to the pictures too much.’ She tried to speak with conviction, not really believing all she said. ‘You eat too many sweet things. You smoke too much. You don’t take care of yourself physically. That’s what’s the matter.’

  Then suddenly, before she could finish speaking, Austin got up and went out of the café.

  After this incident she sometimes went to have lunch at the café alone. Austin gave up speaking to her, and then a week later she heard that he had given in his notice and had left the factory. No one knew why it was. It was now early springtime, and as she looked out of the windows of the café she saw tender green mists, deep olive and sometimes almost yellow, skeined across the sunlit branches of the street trees. Lilacs were now budded with dark red knots in the surrounding gardens and daffodils were shaking brightly against the sun in the window-boxes of the café. Looking at them and thinking of Austin, she felt that perhaps it had been foolish to speak to him as she had done. Foolish and perhaps pointless too. Because it could make no difference, as she well knew, whether a man were physically fine or not. Looking at the daffodils and thinking of Austin, she knew that she wanted something more.

  It was soon after this that she began to notice Travers; or rather she began to notice how Travers noticed her. She saw that he was in the café every Tuesday and Friday. He was a man of thirty-five or six, with bushy brown hair and rather heavy, kindly features. He seemed to her to be a man of certain fixed ideas because of his habit of coming to the café on certain days, of always sitting at the same corner table, and of remaining for a long time with his face tenderly supported by one hand, not moving, heavy blue eyes transfixed, watching her.

  One Friday she noticed that he was not there. It was as if she had looked out of the window to find, suddenly, that the branches of the trees were bare again. As she went out of the café she began to feel oppressed by an overpowering sense of emptiness.

  It vanished suddenly as she came out into the sunlight. She saw then that Travers was sitting in an old blue saloon car drawn up with a trailer at the edge of the kerb; and she knew for some reason that he was waiting for her. She stopped involuntarily on the pavement, and then he spoke. He said simply, ‘We’re always looking at each other. I thought we might meet for a change,’ and she said, ‘Yes’, and felt in a moment very friendly and liberated and glad.

  For another five minutes she stood on the pavement, in the warm spring sunlight, talking to him. She saw his hands resting on the wheel of the car. She noticed that they were fleshy, muscular, expansive hands, the hands of a working man. Watching them, she drew the conclusion that they were part of someone of calm, conclusive temperament. It did not occur to her until afterwards that they seemed too large for the rest of his body.

  Just before she went Travers asked if she would meet him on the following day. ‘We could drive out into the country,’ he said. ‘You could come and see where I live.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘I’ve got a cottage at Felmersford,’ he said, ‘up the river. Do you know the river there?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the country. It’s one of the things I want to know more about.’

  The next day Travers met her outside the office at one o’clock. He sat in the car, now without the trailer, and opened the door for her without getting out. ‘What about your lunch?’ he said. She saw his large hand resting on the quivering gear-lever. ‘I’ve had something,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry.’ The car presently moved forward through streets of sunlight.

  ‘I thought we’d go straight out into the country,’ he said. ‘We’ll get early tea.’

  She did not answer. She saw that, in the calm conclusive way of which she had already seen signs, he had planned things out. Above everything she was aware of the car going forward, as it were, to meet the spring. It was a day of light cloudless wind, and sleepy sun. Through the light frail leaves of the birch copses she saw the sunlight flickering down on the dark unflowered spears of bluebells; and everywhere, in the grass by the hedgerows or under clumps of golden hazel or in the woods that began to close in on the roadsides, she saw the falling light transform itself into fragmentary shining patches of primroses, unshaken by the light wind swinging the uppermost branches of the saplings. Looking at them, watching the blue bonnet of the car sliding forward, she was unaware of not thinking much of Travers.

  Four or five miles out of the town, Travers stopped the car. He lowered the off-side window but did not get out. She felt the light fragrant spring wind blow gently into her face. She saw, a short way ahead, a white double farm-gate and a house of pale cold yellow brick standing back from the road behind an avenue of young willow-trees.

  ‘Listen a minute,’ Travers said. ‘Listen.’

  She turned up to him her kind, serious brown eyes, puzzled.

  ‘Can’t you hear?’ he said. He smiled a little at her bewildered face until she focused the sound. Then she lifted her eyes completely and looked up and through the open roof of the car saw countless bees working with a heavy moan of sound in the olive-golden flowers of a willow-tree just in front of the gate. Travers seemed delighted at her motionless and enraptured air of quiet astonishment. ‘My bees,’ he said, and she saw him smiling as he drove the car slowly forward and through the white gates. Bees were working thickly too in the young willow-trees on either side of the track. Beyond the trees, on one side, a few sheep with young white lambs were grazing under a new orchard of slender interplanted cherries and plums, and at the foot of each plum tree a light sprinkle of white petals had fallen on the sheep-shortened grass.

  A moment or two later the car pulled up at the house. She opened the door and got out simultaneously with Travers. She stood for a moment with uplifted face, the sound of bees still audible from the long double line of willow-blossom in the quiet air. Travers too stood still, and then said, ‘Are you glad you came?’ and she said, ‘Yes. Very glad. Very very glad.’

  ‘Let’s go in then,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to meet my mother.’

  He then began to move towards her from the other side of the car, limping. She instantly became aware, for the first time, of what was wrong with him. She saw the meaning of the too-large expansive hands, the heavy, benign features. She looked at the leg quickly and then away again, as if she had not noticed it.

  Following Travers into the house, she was no longer aware of moving. She heard the sound of the wooden leg striking the ground, but it evoked no response in her. Under the stupefying effect of her shocked astonishment her face, suddenly averted, remained arrested as if she were experiencing a remembrance of sharp displeasure.

  When she began to feel and be aware of moving again she found herself in the house, shaking hands with Travers’s mother. She saw a small woman whose eyes, out of necessity, were constantly uplifted, sorrowful with a heavy compression of pity. The bony hands were hastily wiped on a pinafore before they could shake her own. The grey, anxious mouth repeated everything twice, half-smiling.

  ‘You’re welcome I’m sure, you’re welcome I’m sure, Any friend of Harry’s is welcome, any friend of Harry’s is welcome, I’m sure.’

  From these words and from things that were said once or twice during the afternoon, she gained the i
mpression that the Traverses had few friends.

  II

  During the afternoon she learned too what they were doing there. They had had the small-holding, with the house of cold bone-yellow brick, for nearly three years. In the effort to make it pay they were keeping and raising, buying and selling, practically everything they could lay hands on. Everywhere on the surrounding five acres of land she saw, or was taken to see, the marks of their enterprise. The Traverses explained how they had planted the young fruit-trees; how they had bought and bred the few lambs and sheep that were grazing under the first plum-blossom; how they had bought young store pigs, chickens, tame rabbits, a flock of geese, a mare which they used for ploughing and a dung-cart. Since they had planted the young avenue of willow-trees with branches cut from an old tree that overshadowed completely the brick courtyard at the back of the house, they had begun to keep the bees which were working the willow-flowers. She discovered the reason why she had regularly seen Travers on Tuesdays and Fridays: not because he was a man of fixed habit so much as because Tuesdays and Fridays were market days and because he then drove down into the town with the car, bringing the things he had to sell. She saw how, on a south-facing strip of land under a hawthorn hedge, they had planted twenty lines of raspberry canes. Next to them sun-dried ridges of early potatoes were edged by rows of strawed rhubarb blanched in oil-drums, and they in turn by a solitary line of daffodils, which Travers cut for market. They had no cow, but that would come, the woman said with heavy, sorrowful conviction, that would come.

  She noticed that Travers walked very quickly. He moved with intense agility, a fierce will to overcome the disability of the leg. When he moved like this, hopping about the yard to show her the tame Flemish hares and the bee-hives, or along the dry earth by the daffodils, she could not look at him. The desire to be with him at once broke up and splintered into fragments of shocked bewilderment. Yet she remained all the time aware of the gentle friendliness of his face and voice. She understood how he felt and what he was doing. She saw how he wanted to make the little farm pay its way; she knew how determined he was not to be left behind, how he wanted the things that other people had. She knew that he wanted to live and get on and make friends and ultimately make love as if the physical handicap did not exist.

  She knew that sooner or later she must hear about the leg; but it did not happen that day. She stayed on until the early evening, having tea with Travers and his mother in the sitting-room that Travers himself had painted and decorated with a remnant of old-fashioned paper of blue rose design. The room, with its harmonium and chenille tablecloth, had about it a warm, overcrowded air of friendliness; the sunlight lay on the new shiny wallpaper like segments of yellow glass. A jar of daffodils from the farm had softened and drooped in the sleepy sun in the front window. When she looked at Travers across the table she forgot the existence of the leg and saw only the same tender reflective face that had first attracted her.

  Even so she had already made up her mind, some time before this, that she was not coming again. She felt the predetermined relief of final departure as she drove away in the car with Travers that evening, holding his gift of a pot of honey and a bunch of daffodils. She felt the relief of escape from pain.

  But a week later she was back again. She had not the heart to refuse Travers’s invitation. The daffodils, in the hot April sun, were by now fully blown, and Travers had conceived the idea of selling them in bunches by the roadside. When she arrived at the white gate with Travers it was to see his mother sitting with useless immobile patience at a deal table covered with bunches and stone jam-jars of newly gathered daffodils and a piece of sheet iron ingeniously bent into a triangle, with ‘Daffs. 3d.’ daubed white on two sides.

  In the sight of Travers’s mother sitting there, lifting irresolutely the same bunch of daffodils to every passing car, she saw some of the reason for her own return. She was too kind not to be touched by their struggle for existence. She saw that they wanted friendship; she was touched because they were lonely people.

  ‘I’m so glad you come, I’m so glad you come. I said to Harry I hoped you’d come, that I did, I said to Harry.’

  ‘It’s such a lovely day,’ the girl said.

  ‘Any luck?’ Travers said to his mother.

  ‘Well, it’s early yit, it’s early. Nobody’s had their dinners much yit, nobody’s had their dinners.’

  The girl looked at the uplifted eyes, the stone-jars filled with daffodils.

  ‘Perhaps I could help?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ the woman said, ‘no. Go on with you, go on with you. I’m all right. You go with Harry, I can content meself, you go with Harry.’

  ‘I want to help,’ the girl said. ‘I’d like to.’

  Travers laughed. ‘Let her help, Mother,’ he said, ‘if she wants to.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ Travers’s mother said, ‘sit along o’ me, if you want to, sit along o’ me.’

  The girl sat at the table all the afternoon, until four o’clock. At intervals she too lifted the daffodils towards the passing cars and the sun. Cars rarely stopped; sometimes they slowed down, the occupants stared indecisively at the two women and the daffodils and the yellow house behind the rows of fading plum-blossom and then went on.

  ‘I’m glad you come, I’m glad you come because Harry’s never bin one to make friends easy,’ Travers’s mother said. ‘When we come here we never knowed a soul. Sometimes never seed a soul one week’s end to another. Never seed a soul.’

  Not speaking much, the girl waited for what she knew was coming.

  ‘I expect you wonder about Harry’s leg?’ Travers’s mother said. ‘I expect you wonder.’

  ‘The war?’

  ‘No, he wadn’t old enough for that, no it wadn’t that.’ A car approached and she held up the daffodils with a mechanical motion and remained holding them after the car had passed. ‘No, he used to work on a a road job – ganger on a road job. You seen ’em riding home o’ nights on them lorries, ain’t you, you seen ’em how they ride home? All sitting in the back of the lorry? Well, that’s how it were, that’s how it were. He got pitched off somehow, and two or three others with him. They was blood all over the road they said. I never seed it, but folks as seed it said they was blood all over the road.’

  The voice, briefly excited and then saddened by memory, quickened and ceased. Another car approached rather fast, but the woman did not see it.

  ‘Go too fast by half,’ the woman said. ‘Too fast by half.’ She laid one hand on the table-top and remained for some time looking at it in a steadfast dream.

  ‘Well, they kep him in hospital for I dunno emmany weeks, I dunno emmany weeks now. Then they took his leg off. Then it were weeks and months afore he could git about. Then they was ever such a to-do about the money part on it, you never such a to-do in your life as they made. And in th’ end he never got a penny.’

  ‘No compensation?’ the girl said. ‘But that’s wrong! That’s not right. Not to get anything.’

  ‘Well, I won’t have it said as I told a lie. He got his club-money, he did git his club-money. But that’s all he did git.’

  ‘But what about insurance? He could claim. Surely he could claim?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Travers’s mother said. ‘Yes, claim all right. But claiming and paying ain’t the same thing. You can claim, you can go on claiming. On’y he got no business riding on that lorry like that, he got no business.’ She looked up at last from the steadfast contemplation of her hands. ‘He knows that now. But that don’t git his leg back for him, does it, that don’t git his leg back?’

  The woman ceased for a moment, tired from talking but angerless, and then began to talk again, saying how at last they had come to rent the farm.

  ‘He couldn’t go back on no road job, and he’d got to do summat, he’d got to do summat. So in th’ end I lent him what mite I’d got saved and we took this ’ere place on. We got most o’ the stuff on th’ instalment. I don’t hold with it, I never did,
but Harry says it’s all right, it’s a way o’ saving money, he says.’

  She paused, trying to smile. ‘And we’re gittin’ on a bit now, be degrees, we’re gittin’ on a bit now. But it’s bin a struggle, no mistake it has.’

  The smile on her face, after a short interval of silence, became a reality. ‘We git things paid for a bit Harry’ll git a proper leg. That old thing gives him gee-up some days, but he won’t hear about a new ’un until we git things paid for, I know that. That’s jis like him. Puts ’isself last.’

  Before the voice had ceased again the girl was on her feet. A car was coming slowly out of the flat, sunlit distance, chromium glistening in the sun. Her lips were tightly and bravely set. She felt that if the car did not stop she might commit some desperate act of folly. She would seize one of the stone-jars of daffodils and hurl it at the car windows and smash them and make it stop. Then suddenly the car slowed down.

  As she went forward with the daffodils, holding them at arm’s length, proud and relieved, she began to smile. She did not realize until afterwards how happy she felt, or that she had now become part of the struggle in what the Traverses were trying to do.

  III

  She became more and more part of this struggle as the summer went on. By July the fronds of the rhubarb leaves had spread over the oil-drums like dark metallic canopies. Beyond the rows of potatoes, now in purple flower, the raspberries were fruiting for the first time, pink and ruby on the sugar-brown canes among the green and silver leaves. The land was dusty in the sun. After the office had closed on Saturday the girl, sometimes in Travers’s car, sometimes by bus, went out to the little farm to spend first the afternoon only, then the night, then the whole week-end. She began to do things naturally about the house and the yard: drawing water, making tea, digging and peeling potatoes, pulling weeds. When the raspberry season began she stayed over Sunday and helped with the picking of the berries that Travers would take into town on Monday. Travers and his mother and she would begin at the picking when the sun first began to go down. Across the flat bright land she would hear for a time the sound of bells ringing in the country churches for evening service, but silence would come down as flat and level as the land itself when the bells had ceased, leaving the summer air so quiet that she could hear the tap of thrushes breaking snails on the bricks of the courtyard of the house. They would go on picking the ripe, velvet berries until very late. Across the land the long valleys of evening shade and sunlight would stretch for great distances and sometimes vanish completely before half the canes were stripped. Once they worked on by the light of full moon, the ripe berries and the stains on their hands black in the cheese-yellow light, the stack of chip-baskets rising like a white paper pagoda on the earth before Travers at last draped it with a hay-tarpaulin for the night.