by H. E. Bates
When we got back to the house, about four o’clock, I noticed a curious thing as we went past the dining-room. The door of the room was open and I could see that one of the china spaniel dogs was missing from the mantelpiece. At the time I did not take much notice of this. I went upstairs to wash my hands and came down and went into the drawing-room. Christiana sat reading by the fire, but for about half a minute I did not look at her. One of the china dogs was missing from the mantelpiece.
It was only about ten seconds after this that I heard Laurence coming downstairs. His way of coming downstairs was unmistakable. I heard his feet clipping the edges of the stairs with the precision of an engine firing in all its cylinders: the assured descent of a man who knew he could never fall down.
As he came down into the hall Christiana suddenly went to the door and said in a loud voice:
‘Tea’s ready. You’re just right.’
We went straight into the dining-room. Christiana was last. She shut the door of the drawing-room after her. On the mantelpiece of the dining-room the two china dogs sat facing each other.
All through tea I sat looking at Christiana. She sat looking at me, but without any relationship between the eyes and the mind. Her eyes rested on me with a stare of beautiful emptiness. It might have been a stare of wonder or distrust or adoration or appeal: I could not tell. There was no way of telling. For the first time I saw some connection between this expressive vacancy and the voices that Mr. Arnoldson had heard in his mind. Sitting still, eyes dead straight but not conscious, she looked as though she also were listening to some voices very far away.
Just as we were finishing tea, aunt Wilcox said to me: ‘I hope you didn’t get cold this afternoon. You look a bit peaked.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘But I never really got my feet warm.’
‘Why don’t you go and put on your slippers?’ Christiana said.
‘I’d like to,’ I said.
So I went upstairs to put on my slippers, while Laurence went to write his evening letters, and aunt Wilcox and Christiana cleared the table. It was Sunday and aunt Wilcox was going to chapel.
I came downstairs again in less than five minutes. Christiana was sitting by the fire in the drawing-room. The two china dogs sat on the mantelpiece. I looked at the dogs, then at Christiana, with double deliberation. She must have seen I was trying to reason it out, that perhaps I had reasoned it out, but she gave no sign.
I sat down and we began to talk. It was warm; the small reading lamp imprisoned us, as it were, in a small world of light, the rest of the room an outer darkness. I tried to get her to talk of the fox. There was no response. It was like pressing the buttons of a dead door-bell. Once I said something about her father. ‘He’s asleep,’ she said. That was all. We went on to talk of various odd things. She lay back in the chair, facing the light, looking quietly at me. I fixed my eyes on hers. I had a feeling, very strong after a few minutes, that she wanted me to touch her. All at once she asked me had I ever been abroad? I said: ‘Yes, to France once, and Holland once. That’s all. Holland is lovely.’ She did not say anything at once. She looked slowly away from me, down at the floor, as though she could see something in the darkness beyond the ring of light. Suddenly she said: ‘I’ve been to Mexico, that’s all.’ I asked her for how long. She looked up at me. Without answering my question she began to tell me about Mexico. She told me about it as she had told me about the fox, speaking rather quickly, telling me where she had been, reciting the beautiful names of the places, talking about the food, the colour, the women’s dresses. I had a feeling of travelling through a country in a train, in a hurry, getting the vivid transient panoramic effect of fields and villages, sun and trees, of faces and hands suddenly uplifted. She described everything quickly, her voice certain and regular, like a train passing over metals. She described an episode about Indians, how she had gone up into the mountains, to a small town where there was a market, where thin emaciated Indians came down to sell things, squatting close together on the ground in the cold, with phlegmatic and degenerate eyes downcast. There a woman had tried to sell her a few wizened tomatoes, holding them out with blue old veined hands, not speaking, simply holding the tomatoes out to her. Then suddenly, because the girl would not have them, the woman had squeezed one of them in a rage until seeds and juice ran out like reddish-yellow blood oozing out of the fissure between her frozen knuckles. As the girl told it, I felt rather than saw it. I felt the bitter coldness of the little town cut by mountain winds and the half-frozen juice of the tomato running down my own hands.
She went on talking, with intervals, for about an hour. After a time, some time after she had told me about the Indian woman, I had again the feeling that she wanted me to touch her. Her hands were spread out on her lap. I watched the light on them. I could see the slight upheaval of the white fingers, regular and intense, as she breathed, and this small but intense motion radiated a feeling of inordinate and almost fearful strength. The effect on me was as though I were looking down into very deep, not quite still water: an effect slightly hypnotic, slightly pleasurable, quietly governed by fear. I felt afraid to take my eyes away from her and I felt, after a time, that she did not want me to take them away.
After a time I did something else I knew she wanted me to do. I went and sat by her, in the same chair. I put my arms round her, not speaking a word. As I held her I could feel her listening. Perhaps she is listening, I thought, for someone to come. She did not speak. I could feel her fingers, outspread, clutching my back, as though she were falling into space. After a time she spoke.
‘What did you say?’ she said. I sat silent. ‘What did you say?’ she said. ‘I thought I heard you say something.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t speak.’
‘Perhaps it was someone else?’ she said.
I sat still. I did not say anything. Her breathing was slightly deeper. All the time I could feel her listening, as though waiting for the echo of some minute explosion on the other side of the earth.
‘Don’t you ever think you hear the voices of people who are not here?’
‘Everybody does that,’ I said.
‘I mean you.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Often?’
‘Not often.’
The small reading lamp stood on a table between the chair and the fireplace. I felt her stretch out her hand towards it. About us, for one moment the house seemed dead still. She put out the light. I heard the small click of the switch freeing us, as it were, from the restriction of light. She put her hands on my face, held it. I remember wondering suddenly what sort of night it was, if it were starlight, whether there was snow.
‘Can you see me?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘I can see you.’
I felt her withdraw herself very slightly from me. Then I knew why she could see me. I was sitting facing the window and through the slits of the dark curtains I could see blurred snow-white chinks of moonlight.
5
We did not have supper, that night, until nine o’clock. We had Yorkshire ham and pork pie, cold apple tart with red cheese, mincepies and cheesecakes, with large basins of strong tea. Aunt Wilcox had pickles and towards the end of the meal we pulled half a dozen crackers that had been left over from Christmas. Out of her cracker Christiana had a tall white paper hat in the twelfth-century style, pointed, like a cone. As she put it on I got an instant impression that the dark brown eyes, under the white cap, looked darker than ever, and that they were slightly strange, not quite real, and for the first time it hurt me to look at them.
This impression continued until the following day. The moonlight was very strong nearly all night and I did not sleep well. All through the next morning I wanted to be alone with Christiana, but the chance did not seem to come. Mr. Arnoldson came downstairs and sat all day in front of the drawing-room fire, wrapped in rugs, so that the drawing-room was never empty. The two china dogs sat on the mantelpiece there and were no
t, as on the previous day, changed at all. Once I heard the voices of aunt Wilcox and Christiana coming from the kitchen. They were talking about the dogs. ‘It’s in my room,’ Christiana said. ‘I’ve stuck it with seccotine.’ I sat most of that morning in Laurence’s study, reading. He went in mostly for technical books and towards the end of the morning I got bored and asked him if he had any books of travel. He said there were a few in his bedroom. I went up to his room and there, on his chest of drawers, I found a book on Mexico. I took it downstairs and in five minutes I was reading the episode about the tomato and the Indian woman in the little cold mountain town.
In the night there had been another fall of snow, but it was a little warmer. The sun was very brilliant on the snow and out of Laurence’s study window I could see, high up, peewits flashing like semaphores, white and dark against the very blue winter sky. I felt I had to get out.
I went out and walked across the fields, in the snow, past the brook and over towards the pond. The white of the snow was dazzling and I felt a slightly dazed effect, the light too sharp for my eyes. Along by the brook the snow was beginning to melt a little on the branches of the alders, bringing down showers of bright ice rain. I could see everywhere where rabbits had loped about in the early morning snow and there were many prints of moorhens, but there was nothing that looked at all like the mark of a fox.
The snow had covered everything of the pond and the surface was smoother than water. I stood and looked at it for a moment and then went on. A little farther on I picked up the brook again and I did not come back for half an hour.
Coming back I saw Christiana. I could see where she had walked in the snow. She had walked round the pond and now she was about half a field away, going back towards the house. I called and she turned and waited for me, standing against the sun. She stood with her arms folded, her big coat lapped heavily over her. Her face was white with the strong upward reflection of snow.
We walked on together. She walked with her arms continually folded. ‘Have you seen the fox?’ I said.
She did not answer. I knew I did not expect her to answer. Farther on we had to cross the brook by a small wooden bridge. On the bridge I stopped her, holding her coat. I put my arms round her and held her for a moment. Holding her, I could feel, then, why she walked with her arms folded. She had something under her coat. She kissed me without speaking. All the time I could feel her holding some object under her coat, as hard as stone.
We stood there, above the sun-shining water, slightly dazzled by the world of snow, for about five minutes, and I kissed her again. She was acquiescent, but it was an acquiescence that was stronger, by a long way, than all the strange remote activity of her spirit had ever been. It was normal. I felt for the first time that she was there, very young, very sweet, very real, perhaps a little frightened. Up to that time we had said nothing at all about affection. I had not thought of it. Now I wanted her. It seemed very natural, an inevitable part of things.
‘You like me, don’t you?’ I said. It was all I could think of saying.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Very much?’
‘Very much.’
She smiled very quietly. I did not know what to do except to smile back. We walked on. Out in the open snow I stopped and, before she could do or say anything, kissed her again.
‘Someone will see us.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said.
I was very happy. At that moment, out in the snow, walking away from the sun, watching our two blue shadows climbing before us up the slight slope to the house, I had no doubts about her. Half an hour before I had wanted to tell her that I knew there was no fox, that she had never been to Mexico, that all that she had told me was an imposture. Now it did not seem to matter. And the voices? They did not seem to matter either. Many people hear the voices of people who are not there, who have never been there. There is nothing strange in that.
I was worried only by one thing: what she was carrying under her coat. Then, when we went in for lunch I knew, for certain, that it was the china dog. And that night I knew why it was.
Mr. Arnoldson went to bed very early that night, about half-past seven, and aunt Wilcox went upstairs with him, to see that he was all right. Laurence had gone down to the post office and I was sitting in the drawing-room, reading the morning paper. From the dining-room, suddenly, I could hear voices.
They went on for five minutes and I could not understand it. At last I got up and opened the drawing-room door. Across the hall the dining-room door was open a little and Christiana was sitting at the dining table, talking to a china dog.
‘The fox,’ she was saying, ‘the fox!’
I stood looking. She was jabbering quite fast to the dog, strangely excited, her fingers tense.
‘Christiana,’ I said.
She did not hear me.
‘Christiana.’
She got the dog by the neck and ran it across the mahogany table, towards a glass fruit dish, in crazy pursuit of something, jabbering, laughing a little, until I could see that the dog had the fox by the neck and that they were tearing each other to bits in the snow.
I saw it quite clearly for a moment, like a vision: the mahogany changed to snow, the fruit dish to fox, the china dog to a dog in reality, and in that moment, for the first time, I felt a little mad myself.
I went away on the following afternoon. Laurence drove me to the station. Nothing much happened. It was snowing fast and Christiana did not come outside to see us off. She stood at the window of the drawing-room, staring out. Except that her face was white with the reflection of the snow, she looked quite normal, quite herself. No one would have noticed anything. But as we drove away I saw her, for one second, as someone imprisoned, cut off from the world, shut away.
We had not much time for the train and Laurence drove rather fast. ‘You look a bit queer,’ he said at the station. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are you sure? Let me carry your bag. You don’t look quite yourself.’
I could not speak. No, I thought, I am not myself.
The Flying Goat
What? the man in the saloon said to me, you never heard of Jethro Watkins’s flying goat? Well, there was a chap in this town, once, who made himself a pair of straw wings; strapped them on his shoulders, jumped off the top of a house and broke his neck. Then there was another chap who made himself a bicycle with wings; he called it a flycycle, and he flycycled over the top of a precipice and broke his neck. But Jethro Watkins had a flying goat. I don’t mean a goat that flew with wings. I mean a goat that flew without wings. And when I say flew I mean flew. I don’t mean it jumped over some three-foot railings and flew by mistake. It flew regularly. It flew all over England. Surely, he said, you must have heard of Jethro Watkins’s flying goat?
‘No,’ I told him, ‘I never heard of it.’
Well, that’s funny, he said. You mean you never heard about the time it flew off the tower at Blackpool?
‘No,’ I told him, ‘I can’t say I did.’
No? he said. Then you must have heard about the time it flew fifteen times round the tent in Wombwell’s circus?
‘No,’ I told him, ‘I can’t say I heard about that either.’
I don’t know, he said, I’m sure. It’s funny. Nowadays nobody seems to have heard about anything.
‘Well, who was this Jethro Watkins?’ I said.
Well, in the first place he was a very religious chap, he said. He was in the Salvation Army. Used to play the euphonium. And then he was very fat – weighed fifteen, perhaps sixteen stone – and by trade he was a thatcher, – you know what I mean, he thatched roofs and stacks. Always up on a ladder, catching every bit of wind. Well, Jethro told me how what with being a euphonium player and a thatcher and always being concerned with wind one way or another he began to study wind. Up there, on his ladder, he used to see what wind could do – toss birds about, toss whole armsful of straw about, almost lift a roof off before
he got it pegged down. You know how powerful a big wind is – blows trees down, even blows houses down. Well, Jethro had been studying all that years before he got this idea of a flying goat.
‘And how,’ I said, ‘did he get this idea of a flying goat?’
Like all big ideas, he said. By accident. Just like that. All of a pop. He saw some posters about a menagerie and one of the items was a flying ape and Jethro went to see it. Well, there wasn’t much in it. Just a big grey-looking ape that did a big trapeze jump and they called it flying. Well, Jethro thought it was a swindle. He went home in disgust and he went and stood in his back-yard and looked at his goats. Did I tell you he kept goats? No? Well, he’d kept goats for years – bred and raised them. One of the things that made him such a strong, big fat man was goats’ milk. He’d drunk it twice a day for years. And suddenly he had this big idea – a flying goat. If a monkey could fly, why not a goat? And if a man could make money out of a flying ape, why couldn’t he make money out of a flying goat? The thatching trade had been going down steadily for years, and just about that time it had got down almost to a standstill. So this idea of a flying goat was a godsend. Providence. According to Jethro’s idea it was God stretching down a helping hand.
‘Now you’re going to tell me,’ I said, ‘that he taught the goat to fly until it could fly well enough to fly round a circus?’
Well, no, he said. That’s what he tried to do. But it didn’t come off. He got one of his goats and started to train it in the back-yard – you know, put it first on a beer-barrel and made it jump off, then on two beer-barrels, and then on a painter’s trestle about fifteen feet high. But it was no good. He could see he’d made a mistake.
‘Now don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘that this is all a mistake?’