by H. E. Bates
Another thing she did not understand was the feeling of Cartwright himself. He sat all day with his mother, watching her. He ate meals of biscuit and hot milk and did not come down into the shop. He walked about like a small boy who has lost the key of a clock-work toy and knows that the toy will not work any more. Seeing him, it occurred to her that Cartwright loved his mother. It even occurred to her now that Mrs. Cartwright might have loved her son. The curious ways of affection defeated her. She remembered the tyranny of Mrs. Cartwright at the dining-table. ‘Fred, you’re not eating enough. Take a little more, take a little more! Go on, go on. And pick up your napkin!’ She remembered the impatient despair, the domination, the refusal to see Cartwright as a man. ‘Sometimes I think you’ll never grow up.’
Now she knew that Mrs. Cartwright had never wanted her son to grow up; that the tyranny and the domination were her way of preserving an image and a dream. That too was something which seemed to her weak and ridiculous. The basis of love was not tyranny; certainly it was not illusion; certainly not a dream.
That evening, as she sat alone in the drawing-room, Cartwright came downstairs. He shut the door of the room silently and stood by the fireplace. She knew by his silence that something had happened. She sat with the white cat on her lap but she did not get up.
‘Mother has gone,’ he said.
She did not speak. He stood pitifully looking down at her, spreading out his white trembling shop-keeper’s hands.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?’
She stroked the white cat with her hands, not speaking.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything? Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry?’
She still did not speak. She went on stroking the cat and she was not sorry. Now the tyranny and the domination and the old-fashioned ways and the stupidity were at an end, and she was simply glad that they were at an end.
The following year the Great War began. Already the shop had extended a little. Already the young Mrs. Cartwright had had her first experience in buying property.
She enjoyed buying the shop next door. It was a narrow one-windowed shop kept by a single lady who sold confectionery and newspapers, and it was bought against the wishes of Cartwright. ‘Why do we want to extend? We can’t turn Miss Sturgess out, either. That would be wrong.’
‘There are plenty of places for a person like Miss Sturgess. Evensford is full of Miss Sturgesses. That’s what it’s made of.’
She enjoyed all that summer. She enjoyed the feeling of destroying a tiny piece of Evensford and putting herself in its place. She felt that it was the first time she had been happy in Evensford. She liked the feeling of being strong enough, and free enough, and having money enough, to put into execution a tiny section of a dream.
All the time, as she tried to change the shop, Cartwright was trying to preserve it as he had known it. Every change obscured by a fraction the memory of his mother. His life was measured now by the life she had governed. ‘When mother was alive,’ he would say. ‘Mother always used to say. It was mother’s way of doing things.’
She did not tell him that she felt angry about this. She did not say that she thought it foolish, that she despised it or that it made her impatient. She only said, one day in the second year of the war: ‘You seem so restless. Is it the war? Do you feel you ought to be doing something?’
‘You think I ought to go?’ he said.
‘You have to do what you think.’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think it right and sometimes I think it wrong.’
‘You only have to do what you think is right.’
‘I wonder what mother would have thought,’ he said. ‘I wonder.’
‘It would have been different if she had been alive and she was the only one to be left,’ she said. ‘But I shall be all right. I’m young. You know you can leave me and I will be all right.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘I would rather volunteer than be made to go.’
‘I would like you to volunteer,’ she said. ‘I’d like that too. It’s better.’
So at the end of the second year of the war Cartwright volunteered, and in the evenings, after the shop was closed, she was completely alone in the shop except for the maid in the kitchen and the white cat lying curled in the chair once occupied by the elder Mrs. Cartwright and later by Cartwright himself. There was nothing for her to do now except read and sometimes play the piano, and think. Twice and sometimes three times a week she walked in the evenings to the public library. One or two people spoke to her on her way. The librarian said ‘Good evening’. But no one stopped with her. She walked silently round the shelves in the library, choosing her books. The books were frowsy and tattered. Then she walked back to the shop and sat alone again, reading, sometimes with the cat on her lap. She was alone, but not lonely, and sometimes she ceased being absorbed by the book and looked up and stared into space, the grey eyes absorbed by calculation. She dreamed once again of how, after the war, the shop would grow, how completely she would revolutionize it, how it would become the foremost shop in Evensford. It did not trouble her that she had no friends or children. The shop was the only friend she needed. She would see it grow up like a child.
It did not trouble her very much when, in the fourth year of the war, Cartwright was killed. She did not cry. Miss Johnson and Miss Dickins, the elderly assistants, again annoyed her by crying a great deal. But Miss Johnson and Miss Dickins were, she thought, old now. They belonged to the past phases of the shop. It was time, too, for them to go. ‘Or you may stay on for less money,’ she said. So the two elderly, now grey-haired women stayed on for the remaining year of the war for less money than the Cartwrights had paid them for ten years, They lived in lodgings together; the war food was bad and they did not eat enough. They had feeble, quiet, courteous voices and they remembered the dresses and hats and materials that customers had bought over many years, and so customers liked to be served by them again and again. ‘But a business is a business,’ the young Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘There comes a time when we have to make changes. The two elderly assistants cried again and Miss Dickins said, ‘We have been here for twenty years. There is nowhere else for us. Nowhere. Nowhere now.’
When they had gone at last not only the customers but the travellers missed Miss Dickins and Miss Johnson. The travellers liked a joke with the two shy elderly ladies behind the counter. It had become part of the tradition of the house. It was like the ceremonious procedure of giving an order. For many years the travellers had been invited into the Cartwrights’ living-room behind the shop, and they looked forward to coming there and staying there, talking and showing their samples over a piece of ginger cake and a cup of tea. Now they were terrified by the young Mrs. Cartwright.
‘Yes, I know we’ve been buying it at six-three. But you can come down.’
‘I don’t see how I can, Mrs. Cartwright.’
‘Oh! very well. Either you want the order or you don’t want it. That’s your affair. I’ll say good afternoon.’
‘Wait a minute, Mrs. Cartwright, wait a minute.’
‘I’m rather tired of waiting minutes.’
‘Yes, but—we’ve always dealt with you fairly, Mrs. Cartwright—we’ve—I’ll tell you what—I’ll make it six. That’s a big drop. I oughtn’t to do it on my own, Mrs. Cartwright, but—’
‘All right. A hundred dozen at six.’
‘All right, Mrs. Cartwright, yes.’
‘As June 1st.’
‘But that’s three months, Mrs. Cartwright!’
‘I’m quite aware of it. Otherwise I shouldn’t say so.’
She liked the feeling of victory over the travellers. They began by being so buoyant; they ended by being so cast-down. She despised the old soft way of doing business: the cup of tea, the cake and the courtesies, the gossip, the shaken hand. She sat now behind the office desk, cold, rather stern, more dominant than the old Mrs. Cartwright had ever been, and got from the experi
ence of beating down a tired commercial traveller by a farthing a feeling of concealed exultation. She got something of the same feeling every afternoon as she walked to the bank with the day’s takings. She walked down to the bank every afternoon at the same time, carrying the black cash-bag. It would be just before three in the afternoon and the street would be fairly crowded. She knew that people watched her. She wanted them to watch her. She liked and hated the curious looks of inquisitive unfriendliness on their faces. And she knew too that they hated her because they did not know her. She knew that a little town hates everyone whose business it does not know.
At the bank they gave her all the courtesy due to a growing account. But she felt that the cashiers were snobs and that they too hated her. So she enjoyed raising her voice at them and making them jump. She liked querying a figure or demanding a pass-book late in the afternoon, when the bank was closing. She began to like more and more the feeling of power and exultation that money gave. When the books she got from the library were not what she wanted she liked to go into the office and check over and dream over the figures in the ledgers. She would be alone except for the white cat curled on the floor at her feet, and there would be no sound except the gas hissing in the burner over the desk. She liked to go back over the years and see how the business had grown. It had begun with a capital of ten pounds and in the first year the Cartwrights were happy because they made a profit of a pound a week from the sale of buttons on cards, ribbons, hat trimmings, shirt flannel and such things. The needs of Evensford were simple then. Now the turnover of the business was, in spite of war, practically five thousand a year, and it had not really begun to grow as she knew it could grow. The needs of Evensford might have been simple once; she had seen to it that they were no longer so simple.
As she sat there one evening, going over the accounts in the gaslight, she did not notice that the white cat was not in the room. The war was over now; the papers were talking loudly about an era of reconstruction. She had been in Evensford ten years; she was thirty-three; much had happened. But it was nothing, she thought, to what was going to happen. An era of reconstruction was right: her own reconstruction, the reconstruction of the shop. The reconstruction of the world outside did not matter.
As she sat there she began to hear, above the hissing of the gas, another sound. She lifted her head and listened. She heard the sound of the cat crying gently somewhere beyond the window.
She got up and went out of the side door into the alley-way. The cat was trying to crawl on its belly by the wall. It was crying with pain. She picked it up in her arms and took it from the dark alley-way into the house. It was sick in her hands as she carried it. Her heart was beating very fast with the shock of the discovery: the first time she had ever felt it beating like that since she had been in Evensford.
She washed her hands of the sickness and then washed the face of the cat with warm water. It lay in her arms, not moving for some time. Suddenly it gave violent spasmodic jerks and began to cry feebly. It jerked violently again and fell out of her lap, beating its head on the floor. She picked it up and hugged it desperately to her. She felt slightly hysterical and did not know what to do. Every time the poison lacerated the cat with pain she felt a sudden laceration inside herself. For the first time she discovered that the sufferings of another creature could hurt her terribly. As the bitter and difficult tears came into her eyes she felt more and more helpless. The cat struggled more violently. ‘Oh, please! Oh, please!’ she said. ‘Oh, please! Please God don’t let it suffer.’
She carried the cat round and round the room in her arms like a sick child, crying bitterly, feeling more and more helpless, knowing less and less what to do. Then she carried it upstairs and lay down on the bed with it, as she had done on her first night in Evensford and had done so many times since. Every time the cat struggled in her arms she felt the anguish of it tearing her own body into thin raw strips of pain.
‘Oh, please, please don’t let it! Please God don’t let it suffer. Please let it die. Please. Please God don’t let it live and suffer.’
She lay there all night with the cat in her arms. After it died she did not get up and she did not sleep, but simply lay staring in the darkness. She forgot the unlocked safe and the doors she always so carefully locked downstairs. She forgot the ledgers and the accounts and the money. They all seemed suddenly of little importance now.
She did not get over the pain of the cat’s death for quite a long time. It became part of a new kind of hatred for Evensford: as if Evensford itself had deliberately poisoned the only thing for which she cared.
She felt very lonely too. She began to get more easily angry with people. Miss Dickins and Miss Johnson had gone. Now, one by one, she found some excuse to get rid of the other assistants. She walked round the shop like a woman with an invisible dagger in her hands. She hated the giggling, whispering, dowdy girls behind the counters. She wanted to stick the dagger into someone. She hated more and more the dead little town.
The shop next door was owned by a couple named Jordan, who sold confectionery and toys. Old Mrs. Jordan suffered from asthma and sometimes you could hear the agony of her coughing in the front bedroom above the shop. Mr. Jordan treated her with great care and took her away to Bournemouth for a fortnight every summer. Both Mr. and Mrs. Jordan were thin and small, and when they walked out together they looked as if they were propping each other up. The impression was that when one went away the other would fall down.
That summer, the second after the war, Mr. Jordan did not take Mrs. Jordan to the sea. She died on a hot stifling day in August. She fought in vain and in agony for her breath in the sweltering little bedroom that lay low under the rafters of the old-fashioned shop. After her death old Mr. Jordan walked about as if he were leaning on the air and would fall over. ‘She couldn’t get her breath,’ he kept saying. ‘If only she could have got her breath. If only she could have got her breath.’
The Jordans were typical of Evensford. They did as everyone else did. Every Sunday morning Mr. Jordan took a small batter pudding, in a flat baking tin, to be cooked in the bakehouse round the corner. In the centre of the yellow batter was a small piece of red beef, and on the beef was a ticket, pinned by a long, blue-headed pin, to say whose pudding it was. While the meat and the pudding were cooking Mr. and Mrs. Jordan went to church. Mr. Jordan always took the pudding at twenty-five minutes to eleven. He was always very punctual, so that people going to church knew they were not late if they saw Mr. Jordan with the pudding.
After Mrs. Jordan’s death he did not take the pudding. It was as if he no longer had any interest in keeping alive. The day of Mrs. Jordan’s death he pinned a written notice on the shop door. ‘Temp. closed owing to decease of partner.’ It remained there a fortnight.
Towards the end of the fortnight Mrs. Cartwright called on Mr. Jordan. She called at the back door of the house. She was met by a Mr. Jordan she had never seen before. He had not shaved and his hair was uncombed and his eyes were choked with dried yellow lumps of matter. His tongue hung out a little and the nails of his hands were long and black.
He peered at her blindly through the crack of the door.
‘Uh?’ he said.
‘I came to see how you were,’ she said. ‘I came to see you about something.’
‘Uh?’
‘I came to talk to you about something.’
‘Me? You want me? Uh?’
‘Could I come in?’
Mr. Jordan opened the door very slowly and let her in. In the living-room the cloth was dirty on the table. Dirty cups and plates, bread and jam, old newspapers were scattered about it. Mr. Jordan made an attempt to pile the dirty cups and plates together, and then gave it up. He looked as if he were going to fall down.
‘Uh? Want to see me, uh?’ he said.
‘Mr. Jordan,’ she said, ‘you haven’t opened the shop. Aren’t you going to open it? Perhaps you’re not going to keep it on?’
‘Uh?’ he said.
‘The shop,’ she said. She tried to explain carefully. She was irritated by the stupidity of an old man who seemed unable to think. The house made her sick. She hated the sour stale smell of the greasy table. She had no patience with the old yellow eyes and the dirty trembling hands.
‘If you’re not going to keep it on,’ she said, ‘I would buy it.’
‘Uh?’
‘I would buy it,’ she said. She tried to explain carefully again. She was irritated because she did not know whether his head was nodding or trembling. ‘You need a rest,’ she said. ‘I’d make you a good offer if you’d sell.’
‘Sell?’
‘I’ll offer you five hundred for the freehold, and another hundred for the stock.’
‘Uh?’
He kept staring emptily at her with yellow watery eyes. She grew more and more irritated. She hated the dirty greasy little room and the smell of cheap sweets, warm and stale, that came from beyond the bead curtain in the doorway leading to the shop: just another piece of Evensford, dead, stupid, out of date. It was dead and she would tear it down.
‘It’s a good offer,’ she said.
‘She couldn’t get her breath,’ he said.
She wanted to strike the old stupefied face into understanding. ‘It’s a good offer,’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand?’
She stayed there all afternoon. She knew that he did not understand. He did not seem to care about time or understanding or even the shop. Only once he asked, as if it were an established fact that she would buy:
‘You goin’ keep it on like it is? Sweets and that? Good trade, you know. Sometimes we—’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I’ll keep it on.’
‘Like it is, uh?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like it is.’
‘Long as I know that,’ he said, ‘it’s all right.’
She felt that he had no understanding of what it was all about. She made her promises to him with grey steady eyes full of calculation. She smoothed her gloves with her fingers and then bent the fingers and admired the smoothed tight hands.