The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Oh! no, no,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘We wouldn’t dream of it. No, no, no.’

  ‘No?’ Floater said. ‘Up to you.’

  With a certain air of hesitation underlined by a sort of dreamy sadness he looked fondly at the ring and then gazed for some moments out of the window, remarking with almost tearful politeness what a lovely day it had been: real grand. All the ghastly accumulated recollections of lunch, of wild-boar, mutton style, sauce espagnole, dandelion beer, home-made cheese and potato cake were well behind him now. He wasn’t even bothered by that little crook Henry any more: the little bastard, no more manners than a stray tom-cat snitching butter. Floater’s Ma would have belted merry hell out of him for manners like that, no two ways about it.

  ‘Very kind of you to have me, Mr. Barclay,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. It’s a nice friendly atmosphere here. Real nice and friendly. You feel free.’

  ‘Free, do you hear?’ Mr. Barclay said with immense enthusiasm. ‘Free? Splendid.’ He resisted an impulse to clap Floater firmly on the back and merely put his hand on his shoulder instead. ‘Absolutely splendid—if only those busy-bodies at the school—Oh! well, ignore them, Floater. Forget them. We trust you, and it’s trust that matters. It’s the mutual confidence that tells.’

  Floater, with a beaming grin, said not half it wasn’t and a moment later was shaking hands with strenuous warmth all round. He’d certainly come again, he told them, in answer to a trilling invitation from Mrs. Barclay. He’d like to. In fact with any luck at all he’d be dropping in tomorrow.

  ‘Tomorrow indeed!’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Splendid. We shall look forward to that.’

  ‘Me too!’ Floater said and gave a last flashing, disarming wave of his hand. ‘I don’t half like this nice friendly atmosphere.’

  When the plum-coloured suit, the canary shirt and the white tie with its galaxy of naked girls had finally disappeared, Mr. Barclay went back into the dining-room to finish his beer and help Mrs. Barclay with the dishes.

  ‘I like him,’ she said. ‘I really like him.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘He’s a good fellow. The right material’s there. You feel it. Once prejudice is ignored and mutual trust established—’

  ‘I meant to ask him if he liked Wagner,’ Philippa said. ‘He looked sort of Wagnerish to me.’

  ‘Oh! no,’ Michaela said. ‘Wagner is sinister.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in that sort of way. I meant he looked sort of operatic—’

  ‘My God, three months in Spain,’ Mr. Barclay said. ‘Let’s all go into the garden and smell the air.’

  ‘I liked what he said about feeling free here,’ Mrs. Barclay said. ‘About the nice friendly atmosphere.’

  Mr. Barclay said he did too. He followed Mrs. Barclay and the children into the garden. Over against the cherry tree Henry was still throwing stones at invisible bull-finches, yelling:

  ‘I’ll murder you! I’ll whack your brains out, you little bastards!—I’ll murder every one of you!’

  Mr. and Mrs. Barclay, almost as if pleased with what they heard, smiled at each other.

  ‘I knew there was something—isn’t there a ring round Uranus? Mrs. Barclay said. ‘That was what I meant about the omen.’

  ‘Saturn,’ Michaela said.

  ‘I knew it was one or other,’ Mrs. Barclay said.

  Over by the cherry tree Henry started yelling murder again and Philippa called:

  ‘It’s jackdaws you should kill. They’re the ones that steal.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Michaela said. ‘Let’s all go and kill jackdaws.’

  ‘You can make jackdaws talk too if you cut their tongues.’

  ‘All right, let’s cut their tongues,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve got an old razor blade. Come on, let’s cut their tongues with an old razor blade.’

  ‘Well, let’s kill something first,’ Philippa said and started running ferociously across the lawn, followed by Michaela and Henry, whooping blood-thirstily. ‘I’m bored.’

  As if in echo a cuckoo called in the near distances and somewhere farther away a solitary woodpecker laughed on hollow, almost idiotic notes, seeming to mock at it, as in fact it had done for most of the day.

  The Lotus Land

  The road ran black and straight and shining between tall plantations of coconut palms, through which was sometimes visible, a few hundred yards away, the black sand of the shore. Beyond that, a mile or more out to sea, great jagged white waves burst on the coral reef, tossed into air like waves of gigantic horses rearing in the sun.

  ‘Probably a good thing you didn’t bring your wife,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s bound to stink a bit down there.’

  The doctor, an American, had a long face of loose indiarubber flesh, with shaggy brown eyebrows and a kindliness of demeanour that was also preoccupied. Our friendship sprang from the fact that I had helped him to look after a parcel of bugs as we came to Tahiti, across the Pacific, by seaplane. These bugs were larvae of a very large mosquito, an African species of cannibalistic habits that preyed on other mosquitoes, and it was the doctor’s hope that presently they would also begin to prey on the mosquitoes of Tahiti.

  ‘And will that help the elephantiasis?’ I said.

  ‘It might do. It’s a chance,’ he said. ‘I believe in taking all the chances.’

  When we got out of the car, some time later, the road had narrowed to a track of hot grey dust in the sun. Under the palms lay many fallen coconuts, each a green football with a hole in it, neatly bored.

  ‘It is an interesting cycle,’ the doctor said. We paused in the scalding sun and looked at the many punctured coconuts. ‘The rat climbs the coconut palm and eats a hole in the coconut. The coconut falls and rain fills the hole with water. Mosquitoes breed in the water and fly off and bite an elephantiasis subject. Then they fly off again and bite someone who is not an elephantiasis subject but who, thanks to the mosquito, very soon will be.’

  We began walking along a narrow path bordered on both sides by hedges of orange and crimson hibiscus, overlaid here and there with allamanda creepers bearing the softest yellow bells. At one place the flowers grew high enough to flash with brilliance against the far tossing white waves of the coral reef and suddenly sea, palms and flowers looked enchanting in the sun.

  ‘The island is really very beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘An absolute lotus land.’

  Presently there were no flowers: only occasional ragged banana trees and dusty bronze and yellow crotons with panting dogs lying in the dust beneath them.

  ‘There are so many damned paths down here,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m never sure of the right one.’

  Wooden shacks roofed mostly with palm frond but occasionally with pink corrugated iron began to appear everywhere under the coconut palms.

  ‘This is it,’ the doctor said. ‘I always remember because of the bridge.’

  The bridge was a single plank leading over an oozing grey-brown sewage gutter.

  I followed the doctor across it and called: ‘Who are you going to see here, doctor? Tahitians or Chinese?’

  ‘Chinese,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to get a man to take his pills.’

  We were sitting, presently, in the compound of a wooden house in which there were several shallow water tanks. In the tanks three Chinese, two men and a woman, were washing vegetables. The woman was trimming spinach. When she had trimmed the spinach she dropped it into the tank and then paddled her bare feet in the water. The men paddled their feet in other tanks, one filled with watercress, the other with lettuces.

  ‘I’ve always heard the Chinese were good at vegetables,’ I began to say.

  ‘Institut Filariasis,’ the doctor said.

  He said this loudly, several times, addressing the Chinaman who was paddling his feet in watercress. The man wore a pair of shorts the colour of an oil-rag from a garage but was otherwise naked except for a flat straw hat.

  He grinned several times and nodded, showing the remains of three yell
ow teeth in a mouth that was so thin and so fleshless that it looked almost skeletonised.

  ‘Institut Filariasis,’ the doctor said.

  He said it several times in French, and then in English, in a strong American accent, as if he hoped that this would serve him better.

  The Chinaman nodded impassively, paddling in watercress.

  ‘Pills,’ the doctor said. He said that too in French and then, more emphatically, in English.

  The Chinaman paddled water and stared.

  ‘He’s promised to take the pills fifteen times already,’ the doctor said to me. ‘Last week he promised to take them today.’

  The doctor took out of his trouser pocket a bottle of white capsules and began to unscrew the stopper. Seeing the capsule, the Chinaman, in a sort of pidgin French, began speaking very quickly. He stopped paddling his feet and made several gestures with skinny hands towards the sea. All the time the doctor sat watching him with a sort of ponderous sadness.

  ‘What does he say?’ I said.

  ‘He is afraid to take the pills because he is fishing tonight. He says the pills will make him sick and he will faint and fall overboard.’ He raised his voice and spoke in French to the Chinaman. ‘The pills will not make you sick!’

  The Chinaman let his mouth fall open, scratching his ribs at the same time.

  ‘It is impossible for the pills to make you sick so that you will fall overboard,’ the doctor said.

  From out of the spinach tank the woman padded across the dust and hen-droppings of the compound to fetch, from under a tree, another basket of leaves. As she came back, tipped the spinach into the tank and paddled her feet in it once more I had a sudden impression, deep in my throat, that the steaming air had sickened.

  ‘Look,’ the doctor said. He poured two capsules into the palm of his hand and held them up to the Chinaman. ‘Take them now. They will not make you sick. Let me see you take them now.’

  The Chinaman stood up to his calves in watercress, staring, and did not move. By the tap above the tank stood a cup. The doctor picked it up, turned on the tap and filled the cup with water. Then he held out the capsules in one hand and the cup in the other.

  ‘It is very important,’ he said in French. ‘It is impossible for me to go until you take them.’

  The Chinaman said something very quickly again.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He says the big chief over at Bora-Bora wouldn’t take them and if the chief is not obliged to take them why should he?’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  His face was sweating now. His pouched indiarubber skin had flagged a little under the scalding sun. His air of slightly sad and preoccupied patience had left him for a moment and now he snapped at the Chinaman with a dozen cryptic words.

  A moment later the Chinaman had the capsules in his hands. Then before putting them into his mouth he took the cup of water, drank it quickly and then filled it up again. The tortured skeleton of his face sucked at the water greedily and then suddenly he threw back his head and took the pills.

  From the spinach tank the woman, in the high-pitched Chinese way, began laughing. The other man began laughing too, splashing water over his arms and calves at the same time. The Chinaman with the pills in his mouth stood for a moment impassively watching and then, filling and re-filling the cup, began swilling his mouth with water.

  The woman with her high-pitched voice began giggling again and then took up, from beside the tank, a tin kettle, speaking for the first time to the doctor, who turned to me.

  ‘They wish us to have tea,’ he said. ‘Would you care to have tea?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I have to get out,’ the doctor said.

  The air was full of a smell of thickening hot decay. We shook hands with the three Chinese and said goodbye several times, first in French and then in English. The man and the woman who had not taken the pills stood respectively in lettuce and spinach, grinning. The man who had taken the pills looked at us with implacid downcast eyes.

  At the top of the path, where air moved more freely among the talls palms, the hibiscus and the yellow creeper bells, I said to the doctor:

  ‘Well, that was a win for you. You triumphed there.’

  ‘He was holding them under his tongue all the time,’ he said, ‘the way they always do.’

  Two minutes later we were driving along the black shining road beneath the palms. By the roadside there were many hedges of hibiscus and sometimes in the gardens tall forests of ginger-lily, like stiff gigantic ears of crimson corn.

  As we drove along the doctor put his head out of the window and drank in deep draughts of cooler, rushing air.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is Tahiti.’ He drew in his head at last and waved one arm expressively, with slight sadness, towards the palms. ‘What will you tell them when you get back?’

  I looked beyond the palms and the black sand of the shore to where, far out, waves were bursting on the reef like the gigantic manes of thundering snow-white horses.

  ‘I shall tell them,’ I said, ‘about the lotus land.’

  Bonus Story

  The Electric Christ

  First published in John O'London's Weekly in 1935, and never before seen in any collection, ‘The Electric Christ’ is a tale of a retired Reverend who becomes enamoured with a statue of Christ with an electric halo, and goes to great lengths to buy and install it in his home.

  When the Reverend Hezekiah Jordan first saw the Christ with the electric halo the trees about St. Paul’s were mournfully dripping with winter rain, evening had fallen very early, and Cheapside was a tunnel of shining blackness. As he stood on the pavement waiting for a bus, his head like a fragile eggshell under his wide black hat, he was not thinking about anything at all and he was not looking at anything much but the rain. Then suddenly he saw the Christ, and from that moment he could think of nothing else.

  As soon as the traffic had cleared he hurried across the street, the bus forgotten, his eyes fixed on the Christ in the shop-window. Half-stumbling in the pavement, his umbrella up, he looked like a little old man landing awkwardly in a black parachute. And having landed, he stood quite still, his shining eyes on the shining halo of the Christ.

  The Christ was blue. It stood in the centre of the window, among many massive brass lecterns and prie-dieux and paintings depicting the crucifixion, and altar-candlesticks—all the holy paraphernalia of brass and blood. Beside them, the Christ was most delicate, the blue skirt-folds carved as softly as the fissures on stones by water, the deep sleeves weeping quietly down from the folded hands, the face full of the heavenly gentleness of tradition. And then, above all, the halo, shining like a young moon.

  It was the halo which touched and fascinated him. He was sixty-nine, and he remembered a good many other Christ’s and he could not conceal from himself that he had always thought them a little artificial, the haloes especially. Haloes had always been a difficulty with him—a flaw in the fabric of his belief. He had generally been inclined to put them with the more embarrassing of the miracles, and if he were asked to explain them he would get out of it by saying that the meaning of heavenly things was not always clear to earthly eyes. In good time haloes would be explained. He had never any doubt at all about that.

  And here, in the shop-window, it seemed as though they were, if not explained, at least justified at last. Haloes in his experience were always of gilt, or at the best, gold leaf, and when they shone it was with a surface light. They had no depth or spirituality or life. Now he was looking at a halo that was light itself, a remarkable light. Gazing at it, he began to see for the first time some reason for twenty centuries of fuss over a shining circle on a holy head.

  Suddenly, he made up his mind to go into the shop.

  ‘The halo,’ he said, inside. ‘How is that worked?’

  ‘Electric,’ they said. They switched it off for him, and leaning over the back window curtains he saw the wire
connecting the back of the Christ’s head and how the head itself, the halo, had become a circle of complete darkness. He was quite horrified.

  ‘Switch it on again, please,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  The light flashed on again. From the back the halo was not so impressive, but still it was there, a shining reality, a great comfort.

  He thanked them very much, and went out into the street again. Then, in the wintry darkness, the halo seemed more lovely than before. It struck him as being not only something of great beauty, but of great power, too. It was a symbol. He was not quite sure what it was a symbol of, but a feeling of extreme joy came over him as he looked at it, and after a moment or two he doddered back into the shop.

  ‘The figure of Our Lord,’ he said, ‘how much would it be?’

  ‘The Christus? Complete with halo and wiring, sixty-five guineas.’

  ‘Sixty-five guineas?’

  ‘That’s less a special discount to clergymen in living. We’ll look it up. What’s your voltage?’

  He had no idea, and as he was not in living the discount was not applicable to him. Sixty-five guineas! It was a lot of money for a Christ—no, no he did not mean that. It was very remiss of him to say that. Nothing was too much for Christ. He did not mean it quite like that. He felt very guilty.

  And afterwards he was very inclined to think that it was his guilt, as much as his joy, which made him have the Christ sent down to him at the rectory in Hampshire. It did not arrive for three days, and in the meantime he had the plug-point fixed up in his study. The study windows overlooked the lawn, a thick plantation of sweet-chestnut shut out the world.

  And when the Christ arrived, well packed up, carriage paid, and with twelve extra yards of flex for emergency use, he felt strangely glad of the solitude. He unpacked the Christ himself while his housekeeper was shopping in the village, and twilight was falling before he had cleared up the litter of nails and shavings and the Christ was standing by the wall between the window and his bureau. And at first he was not satisfied. The Christ stood only four feet six, and against the tall window and the massive bureau it seemed in some way stunted. Finally, he put four volumes of Henry Bible on the carpet and then gently lifted the Christ and stood it on them. The effect was altogether better. Later, he thought, he could have an oak stand made for the figure instead. The Christ, carved in wood, was beautifully light, and he lifted it like a child, and all the time he could smell the wood itself, a sweet aromatic wood, like cedar—a cedar of Lebanon itself perhaps, he thought. Who knew?