The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  Time to Kill

  He inquired at the station if they knew anyone named Edwards, but at first they did not know. Then a second porter came and stood thoughtfully looking up the empty single track, where the bright spring evening sun flashed on the metals and on the slanting sallow trees that broke with grey and silver the bare monotony of the cutting beyond the coal-yards.

  ‘Y’see there’s so many folks name Edwards.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘Same all round. At Hardwick it’s nothing but Baxters. Over at Stanford they’re all Drages or Bowens. Here it’s all Edwardses.’

  Hanson began to wish he hadn’t come.

  ‘But wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You might know them if I tell you who the woman was before she was married. Her name was Claridge.’

  ‘Ah well,’ the porter said. ‘Well. Now I know who you mean. Now I know. You mean Clem Edwards. Got a milk-round. Comes round in a three-wheeler. That’s who you mean.’

  ‘Where do they live?’ Hanson said. ‘I haven’t got much time.’

  ‘Well, without you go across fields it’s a dinkin long way round. Place called Ash Trees. It’s no naughty walk if you go round by road.’

  ‘Which way do I go by field?’

  The porter began to tell him the field way, pointing an arm over the tracks. Hanson turned to look and felt the north-east wind slice his face from across the low flat land, cutting away the thin warmth of the sun. When the porter had finished Hanson said, ‘Does that give me time to get back for the 7.47?’

  ‘Just about,’ the porter said. ‘Only it’s 7.53 now. Been altered.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Hanson said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  He walked away up the platform and over the iron footbridge and took the gravel path that went beyond the coal-yards and the last few houses of the town. The March sunlight was sharp and low on the level fields, making the young wind-pressed shoots of corn gleam like wire. In the naked ash trees that broke the lines of the hedges thrushes were singing high up against the sun, wild and clear in the bright wind. When he looked ahead Hanson could see the path quite clearly marked out, clay-brown in the young wheat, brighter green in the pasture.

  He walked about a mile and a half before coming within sight of the house. A little distance off he stopped and looked at it. It was a small farm, a square, flat-windowed house of light red brick with a roof of blue slate that somebody had once left like a forgotten box on the flat land. He could see no ash trees, but above and beyond the outhouses and the wire fences a group of high black poplars were swinging heavily to and fro in the wind.

  Coming into the farm-yard he saw a man standing under a cart-shed, watching him. He held a spanner in his hand. He was small, with the high sharp cheekbones of the district, rounded shoulders, and steady hostile eyes.

  ‘Want somebody?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hanson said. ‘Can I see Mrs. Edwards?’

  ‘You can go and try.’

  He stood weighing the spanner in his hand, hostile, intent, slightly puzzed.

  ‘If it’s got anything to do wi’ insurance we don’t want none.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Hanson said. ‘It’s not that.’

  He walked on across the yard towards the house, uneasy, aware of the man still watching him. About the dry earth hens’ feathers were being bounced by the wind among the many dark claret poplar catkins that had fallen from the trees.

  Round the corner of the house, out of sight of the figure watching him, he knocked at the back door and waited. The voices of children crying in a room upstairs broke for a moment and then began again and in the short interval of silence he heard the beat of footsteps.

  The face of the young woman who opened the door was not quite what he had expected. She stood shocked too, her dark bleak eyes beaten dead by the moment of astonishment. She stood looking at him with brief, inert silence, and then suddenly she came to herself and began to pull her stained torn pinafore over her head, ruffling her black short hair and then smoothing it, almost beating it down with her small narrow hands.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said. ‘Arthur, whatever made you come up here?’

  ‘I had some time to kill at the junction,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d just have time to come up on the branch. Just to see you.’

  She did not speak.

  ‘You didn’t answer my Christmas card,’ he said. ‘You didn’t send one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wondered if you were all right.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. Unconsciously, in perplexity, she had screwed up the pinafore like a bundle of rag. ‘You’d better come in, hadn’t you?’

  She stood back from the door, which had dropped on its hinges and would not open any further. He went into the kitchen. A cold sour odour of milk, a stale breath of boiled onions, met him. Milk pans, waiting to be scoured, stood about the brick floor of the kitchen and the small dairy place leading off from it. Beyond, in the living room, tea was partly laid on a deal table. Thick slices of white bread were waiting to be toasted on the hearth, where socks and napkins were drying on a line below the mantelshelf. More clothes were hanging diagonally across the lamp-darkened ceiling, by the staircase door. The wind rattled the window on the east side.

  She asked him to sit down. She had dropped her pinafore in the kitchen and now stood with empty hands. If there was some slight hostility in the way she kept standing it was unconscious and he did not notice it. He looked hastily round the room, taking in the details, and saw through the windows the edges of the great poplars beating against the sky. A moment later he looked back at her and suddenly saw her, uneasy, untidy, taken unawares, as the remnant of the girl he had decided not to marry, for some trivial reason, six years before.

  A child began crying upstairs before either of them could speak.

  ‘Is it two children you’ve got?’ he said, knowing it quite well.

  ‘Two,’ she said.

  The child cried loudly. Outside, the cries seemed to be reproduced in the short hollow sounds of a spanner beating on metal.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ he said. The crying of the child had on him an effect of nervous distraction.

  ‘It’s earache,’ she said. ‘I’d better go up. Take your coat off.’ She looked at him with unhappy, disturbed eyes. ‘You’ll have a cup of tea when I come down again?’

  ‘Only if it’s ready,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it specially.’

  ‘It’s our tea-time, now,’ she said, in a dead voice.

  When she had gone upstairs he sat staring at the tea-table without having taken off his coat. He tried to remember what things had been like six or seven years before, but the details were at first dead and would not revive in the oppressive ugly little room. Only the girl herself at once came back, involuntarily recalled in sudden, time-sharpened images. In those days they had both lived in the town. She was a school-teacher and belonged to one of those large, boisterous, clannish families who always stick and die together. There were five sisters and two brothers, all dark and rather self-willed, the girls very pretty, with small, proud faces. Several times a year the Claridges managed to find an excuse for a party, a coming-of-age, a wedding, New Year, in the big draughty local drill-hall. It was at one of these parties that Hanson, attending as the local reporter, had met Kitty Claridge. He remembered what a bright, impulsive, argumentative creature she had been: how she had argued with him all that evening, with militant smiles of triumph, on the merits of some writer whose name he had long ago forgotten, how every dance had been an exhausting, fascinating affair of beauty and conflict. After that they could never see enough of each other. On summer evenings, when there was little doing on the local paper, they would hire a boat and go on the river and float downstream between the willow trees to villages beyond the town, and in time the peace of the evening would be broken by the question of his going away and working on a larger paper. It gradually became apparent that she had no ambition to live anywhere bu
t in the small, branch-line town, with the one tired newspaper, the flat countryside parched to concrete by the spring sea-winds, and the little river with the waving willow trees; it seemed that all she wanted was to remain, even after marriage, part of the large, proud, boisterous family, as if there were no other life and she would get all the emotion and excitement and beauty she needed in their way and not his.

  The end of it was that they had broken up on some such point as this, quite trivial in itself, but really part of the larger question of his also marrying the family, which at heart he disliked intensely. He remembered that the Claridges were very affronted at the affair, and never spoke to his own family again. Shortly afterwards he got another job and gladly moved out of the circle of small-town family hatred. But with Kitty it was different. They had kept up a correspondence which after a time had dwindled down to a Christmas card: but he knew all the same that the correspondence of the mind, with its half-captured passages of warm, regretful thought, had gone on.

  She had been married four or five years now. He did not know how it had come about. At the back of his mind lay the uneasy thought, dropped there by something he had heard, that the family no longer had anything to do with her. For some reason the boisterous, proud loyalty had been broken.

  He was once more beginning to wonder about the oppressive little room, the isolated farm with the sea-winds striking at the poplars, and the man with the spanner outside, when she herself came downstairs again.

  He was unaware of it until that moment, but the crying of the child had already ceased. For one moment the window ceased rattling, and he stood up, looking at her in the sudden silence. He wanted to say something to her: about the child, the weather, to tell her that she was not to make tea for him specially. But for some time he did not say anything, and she came over to the fireplace and began mechanically to remove the drying clothes, folding them and pressing them into a small heap with her hands.

  ‘Don’t move them for me,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

  In this one word it seemed to him that he heard the indirect echo of antagonism, but when he looked up at her, quite sharply, there was nothing on her face but the same look of bleak surprise. She was rather thin and he saw that she found it difficult to keep her eyes quite still. They were weak and dark with nervous pain.

  After the clothes were folded she went away for a moment, into the kitchen, coming back with empty hands. She came to the fire for the kettle, to make tea, her dark head bent down. Abruptly the window rattled like a machine-gun.

  ‘I had an idea your husband was a mechanic,’ he said. ‘How did you come up here?’

  ‘His chest was weak.’

  She set the metal tea-pot in the hearth, afterwards turning away to the table. He looked after her and suddenly saw her come momentarily to life, setting the things on the table straight, moving cups, smoothing the cloth, her pride rising.

  ‘The doctor ordered it. There was this little milk-round, so we took it – until something better turns up. We’re not stopping here.’ She turned round and spoke for a moment with defensive pride, holding up her head. ‘It’s only something temporary. We shan’t stop another winter.’

  Behind the pride he could detect the fear of it all in her voice; she seemed to know this and all of a sudden said something in a hurried whisper and then went out. He heard the outer door grating against the bricks as she tugged it open and afterwards, above the wind, he thought he heard her calling.

  After two or three minutes she came back. Her hair was ragged from the wind, and in her hands she was clasping a bunch of coloured primroses, washed-blue and pink and red, tangled with scraps of leaf and grass, that she had hastily snatched up from somewhere. She put them into a cup of water which she set in the centre of the table, her face turned away from him as she did so.

  And for a minute it was painful for him to look at her. He saw in the bland, soft glowing flowers the inexpressible recollection of other things. He again wanted to say something to her, but it was no use. He hated suddenly the flat drabness of the little room thrown into relief by the small glowing centrepiece of flowers. He was driven to hatred of the drying clothes under the ceiling, the rattling window, the sour smell of milk, the slight whimpering of the child which had again begun overhead.

  He was saved from expressing or hiding what he felt by the noise of someone entering the kitchen, and a minute later the man with the spanner came into the living room. He changed the spanner from one oil-greased hand to another as the woman spoke. ‘This is my husband – Mr. Hanson,’ she said.

  ‘You’re the paper bloke,’ the man said.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘You want tell ’em to write some sense in some o’ the papers.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yeh, you do an’ all!’

  He wiped his oily palms on the flanks of his trousers and sat down at the table.

  ‘Will you sit here?’ she said to Hanson, and he sat down too. He heard the husband give a short laugh as he cut himself a lump of cheese, leaving on the wedge the greenish imprint of a finger.

  ‘Flower show early, ain’t it?’ He pointed the cheese at the cup of primroses, ironically. ‘Well, well. Very nice. Very nice.’

  As she poured out tea the woman gave no sign. Upstairs the short whimpered cries of the child became fused into a single unbroken cry, and the father lifted his head.

  ‘What’s up wi’ Jean?’

  ‘Earache again.’

  ‘Then why the bleedin’ hell don’t you fetch her down?’ He ceased gnawing at the cheese with small chimbling bites like those of a rat. ‘Sittin’ here jawin’ and lettin’ the kid bawl.’

  ‘I’ll fetch her,’ she said.

  ‘You neent bother!’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch her meself. I’ll fetch her.’

  He went with a show of temper out of the room, and she stood for a moment in silence, looking painfully down at her hands, not able to speak.

  ‘I think I’ll go,’ Hanson said.

  ‘I – ’

  Her words would not come, and she made instead a brief, stupefied gesture towards the cups and the food. Before he could reply he could hear footsteps on the stairs, and then for a second her voice came to life. ‘Don’t take too much notice. He’s not strong. It’s because he’s not really well. He can’t hold his temper. It’s just when strangers come.’

  Hanson could not speak.

  ‘It’s nothing. I get used to it, I get used to it,’ she said.

  A second later the man came in with the child, a girl of three, in his arms. At the sight of a stranger the child turned away her puffed tear-damp face. The man brought her to the table, holding her on his knee, talking to her in a new, wheedling, tender voice, pouring out tea for her in a saucer and then sopping into it lumps of broken cake. ‘Make old ear better, won’t it? Dad make old ear better?’

  In the few minutes before Hanson got up to go the father continued to hold the child apart, in a kind of alliance with himself against the mother and even, Hanson thought, against him. During all this time the child did not speak. In the silences the window broke into the renewed chattering of a machine-gun, and sometimes the echo of the sea itself could be heard in the mournful beating of the poplars.

  ‘If I’m to get that train,’ Hanson said, ‘I ought to go.’

  He got up from the table, saying goodbye to the child, who did not answer. Without holding out his hand, he said good afternoon to the father, who grunted in answer something about getting the newspapers to write the truth about things. They were at the root, he said, of everything, damn near everything. One way or another you could trace it all to the newspapers.

  Hanson said a final good afternoon and went into the kitchen and so outside, the woman going with him. In the strong March wind her hair was flung torturously about her cold face. For a moment she stood gazing at the earth and then said, ‘I’ll walk as far as the gate with you,’ and they walked together across the wind-dried yard with its s
torm-driven litter of feathers and straw and golden-claret catkins. All the time it appeared to him as if she were about to stop and say something. She wanted perhaps to express regret for things: or she wanted to get off her mind some oppressive, tortured explanation.

  Whatever she wanted to say was never spoken. She halted by the gate in the wire fence and said goodbye, holding out her hand. The wind had beaten her hair unmercifully, giving her face a wild, bloodless look. He searched it in vain for a sign of pride or vivacity, but the eyes that were lifted up to him were quite dark and cold, and strangely repressed, as if they had got into the habit of not looking far.

  After walking away at last he turned and looked back. She was walking back to the house, pressing her body against the wind and at the same time gazing down at the earth. He halted a moment in the hope that she would turn round, but nothing happened and he went on.

  When he turned again she had disappeared altogether and nothing moved against the dead little house except the high sunless poplars beaten by the sea-wind.

  The Little Jeweller

  I

  Mr. Elisha Peacock woke suddenly at four o’clock in the morning, in the dead of darkness, feeling very ill. For some moments immediately before waking he was aware of a strange sound of tinkling glass, of his whole body fighting a violent constriction in his chest. When he woke at last it was some time before he realized that the sound was that of the night wind shaking the coloured glass chandelier above his head, that the conflict in his body was in reality a wire of pain boring down into his heart.

  It was then that he realized he was very ill. In the moment of realization he suddenly heard too the striking of ten or a dozen clocks downstairs in the small jeweller’s shop he had kept for thirty-five years. The sounds, not quite simultaneous, at first clear and then discordantly confused, rolled over and over his half-wakened mind in waves of metallic tumult. He managed at last to struggle up on one elbow. The pain, as if a hot gimlet were being turned slowly down into his chest, had now slightly lessened. The clocks had ceased. In the night silence he could hear no sound except the small renewed clash of the glass hangings above his head, and there was only one thought in his mind. It was the strange, painful thought that he, Elisha Peacock, after sixty-eight years of tranquil living, had reached the point where he must die in the night, alone, frightened like a child by the silence and the darkness, before anyone could reach him or he could get downstairs to the telephone.