by H. E. Bates
We took snuff together, holding the pinches delicately in our hands, his own strong and pink, the sniff of his nostrils urgent and deep.
‘I shan’t forget you,’ he said. ‘I keep a diary. I shall put you in it.’
We sat silent. I felt suddenly very close to him, as though I had known him a long time. He looked out of the window, at the travelling blackness, then at me again.
‘Where am I going?’ he said, like a child.
‘To Ham Street. Don’t you remember?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes! I remember.’
We talked a little more, I blew the snuff down my nose, and then I saw lights flashing past, increasing, in the darkness, and the train began to slow down.
I got up. ‘I’ll get the wreath down for you,’ I said.
I reached up and got down the wreath and the suit-case. I held the wreath by the little handle of string looped at one end. ‘I’ll carry it and find out about your train,’ I said.
‘It’s very nice of you.’
When the train stopped at the junction we got out and I found out about his train and then took him to where it was waiting, in the opposite platform. He got into the carriage and I followed him and settled his things for him, putting the wreath on the rack above his head.
‘You know where you’re going?’ I said.
‘Yes. I haven’t forgotten.’
We said good-bye and shook hands and slowly, in a little while, the train moved off. He waved his beautiful pink hands out of the window and the wreath trembled above his head.
Elephant’s Nest in a Rhubarb Tree
The summer I had the scarlet fever the only boy I could play with, during and after the scarlet fever, was Arty Whitehead. Arty had some buttons off and he lived with his uncle. His uncle had an elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.
It was very hot that summer. As I leaned from the bedroom window and looked down on the street of new brick houses and waited for Arty to come and play with me the window-sill would scorch my elbows like hot sand-paper. On the wall of our house my father had planted a Virginia creeper. That summer, under the heat, it went mad. It pressed new shoots forward every day and they ran over the house and the house next door and then the house on the corner like bright green and wine-red lizards with tiny hands. One of the games I played was to watch how far the creeper grew in a week, sometimes how far it grew in a day. After three or four weeks it grew round the corner of the street and I could no longer see the new little lizards glueing their hands on the wall. So I would send Arty round the corner to look instead. ‘How far’s it grown now, Arty?’ Arty would stand by the green railings of our house and look up. He had simple, tender eyes and his hair grew down in his neck and over his ears and he always talked with a smile, loosely. ‘Growed right up to mother Kingsley’s! Yeh, yeh! Growed up to the shop,’ he’d say. Mother Kingsley’s was a hundred yards up the next street. But I was only six, I couldn’t see round the corner, and either I had to believe in Arty or believe in nobody. And gradually, as the summer went on, I got into the way of believing in Arty.
Arty came to play with me every day. Another game I played was blowing soap bubbles with a clay pipe. They floated down from the open window and Arty ran about the street, trying to catch them with his hands. One day I blew a bubble as big as a melon, the biggest bubble I’d ever seen, the biggest bubble that anyone would ever have seen if there’d been anyone in the street to see it. But there was no one but Arty. This great melon bubble floated slowly down in the hot sunshine and then along the scorched empty street. The funny thing about it was that it wouldn’t burst. It floated beautifully away like a glass balloon polished by sun, keeping about as high as the windows of the houses. When it got to the street-corner a puff of wind caught it and it turned the corner and disappeared. I called to Arty to run after it and he ran like mad after it with his cap in his hand. It was then about two o’clock in the afternoon but Arty didn’t come back until six that evening.
When he came back again his lips were tired and looser than ever and I could see that he’d been a long way. ‘Where you been?’ I said.
‘Arter the balloon.’
‘All this time? Didn’t it bust?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it never busted. Just kept like that. Just went on. Never busted.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘How far?’
‘Went right up past the school and over Collins’s pond and over the fields. Right out to Newton. Past our farm.’
‘Whose farm?’
‘Our farm. Went right over. Never busted.’
‘I never knew you had a farm,’ I said.
‘Yeh, yeh,’ Arty said. ‘My uncle gotta farm. Big farm.’
‘Where?’
‘Out there,’ Arty said. ‘Just out there. Great big farm. Catch foxes. Catch wild animals.’
‘What wild animals?’
‘Foxes. All sorts,’ Arty said. ‘All sorts. Elephants.’
‘Not elephants,’ I said.
‘Yeh, yeh,’ Arty said. ‘Yeh! Catch elephants. My uncle found elephant’s nest one day.’ His eyes were pale and excited. ‘Yeh! Elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.’
That was the first I ever heard about it. In the beginning I had to believe Arty about the Virginia creeper, then I had to take his word for the bubble, which no one but Arty and I had ever seen. Then I did something else. Perhaps it was the after effects of the fever, the result of being shut up for nearly eight weeks in a bedroom which was almost like a boiler-house in the late afternoons; perhaps it was because I had temporarily forgotten what the world of reality, school and fields and sweetshops and trains, was like. Perhaps it was having Arty to talk to, and only Arty to play with. But gradually, from that day, I began to take his word too for the elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.
After that, I began to ask him to tell me what it was like, but he never gave me the same description twice. ‘Yeh,’ he would say. ‘It’s big. Ever so big. Big rhubarb.’ And then another day it was different. ‘It’s jus’ a little squatty tree. Nest like a sparrow’s. That’s all. Little squatty tree.’ Finally I was not sure what to believe in: whether the rhubarb tree was like a chestnut or an oak, with a nest of elephants like a haystack in the branches, or whether it was just rhubarb, just ordinary rhubarb, the rhubarb you eat, and it was a nest like a sparrow’s, with little elephants, little shiny black elephants, like the ebony elephants that stood on my grandmother’s piano. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to go with Arty and see it for myself as soon as I got better.
It was early August when I came downstairs again and about the middle of August before I could walk any distance. When I went out into the street everything seemed strange. I had not walked on the earth for eight weeks. Now, when I walked on it, it seemed to bounce under my feet. The things I had thought were ordinary seemed suddenly odd. The streets I had not seen for eight weeks seemed far stranger than the thought of the elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.
One of the first things I did when I got downstairs was to go and see how far the Virginia creeper had gone. When I got round the street-corner I saw that someone had cut that part of it down. The little wine and green lizards had been slashed with a knife; they were withered by sun and the tendril-fingers were dead and fixed to the wall. As I looked at it I was not only hurt but I also knew that there was no longer any means of believing whether Arty had been right about it or wrong. I had to take his word again.
Then about three weeks later Arty and I set off one morning to find the elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree on his uncle’s farm. Arty was about twelve years old, with big sloppy legs and thick golden hair all over his face, so that he looked almost, to me, like a grown man. All the time I had a feeling of being sorry for him, of knowing that he was simple, and yet of trusting him. I wanted too to make a discovery that I felt my father and mother and sister and perhaps other people had never made. I wanted to go home with a story of something impossible made possible.
It was ver
y hot as we walked through the bare wheatfields out of the town. Heat danced like water on the distant edges of the white stubbles. We walked about a mile and then I asked Arty how much farther it was.
‘Ain’t much farther. Little way. Two three more fields. Little way, that’s all.’
I saw a farm in the near distance, against the woods. ‘Is that your uncle’s farm?’
‘Yeh,’ Arty said. ‘That’s it. That’s it.’
‘Where’s the nest?’ I said. ‘This side the farm or the other?’
‘Other side,’ he said. ‘Just other side. Just little way other side, that’s all.’
We walked on for another half-hour and then when we reached the farm Arty said he’d made a mistake. His uncle’s farm was the next farm. We walked on again and when we reached the next farm he said the same thing. Then the same thing again; then again. Finally I knew that it was time to turn back, that we were never going to see the thing we had come to see. As we walked back across the fields the heat of midday struck down on us as though it came through glass. Clear and direct and sickening on the sun-baked stubbles, it seemed to take away my strength and turn the tears of disappointment sour inside me.
When I got home I felt pale and weak and my feet were blistered and I felt like crying. Then when my mother asked me where I had been I said, ‘With Arty Whitehead, to find an elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree’ they all burst out laughing. ‘Why, Arty isn’t all there! That’s all it is,’ they said, and I knew that they were right, and because I knew that they were right, and that what I had hoped to see never existed, I began crying at last.
Since that day, twenty-five years ago, a good deal has happened to me, but nothing at all has happened to Arty Whitehead. I no longer live in the same town; I have been across the world and I have grown up. But Arty still lives in the same town; he has never been anywhere and he has never grown up. And now he never will grow up. He is now a man of nearly forty but he is still the boy who ran after the bubble as big as a melon.
For the last twenty years Arty has worked for a baker. All he does is sit in the cart and hold the reins and tell the horse to stop and go. He does something that a boy of six could do. At the end of the week the baker gives him a shilling or two and every night he gives him a loaf of bread. Arty understands that. He understands the most fundamental thing about living: a loaf of bread. He understands perhaps all that anyone needs to understand.
Sometimes when I go back home I go to have my hair cut. Occasionally, as I sit in the barber’s shop, Arty comes in. ‘Arty,’ the men say as they greet him, and I say ‘Arty,’ too, but Arty does not recognise me. I have grown up, whereas Arty’s face is still the face of a boy. His eyes are still simple and remote and tender and as the men in the barber’s shop talk Arty does not listen. He does not need to listen. They talk about Hitler, war in China, Mussolini, the cup-ties, the newspapers, women. Arty does not know who Hitler is; he does not know where China is or what is happening to China; he does not know anything about women. He understands that he wants his hair cut. He understands a loaf of bread.
And there is also one other thing he understands. I sometimes see him walking out of the town. His glassy simple eyes are fixed on and perhaps beyond the distance. He does not walk very fast but he looks very happy. And because I know where he is going there is no doubt in my mind that he is very happy. He understands the most fundamental thing about living, a loaf of bread, and he also understands the most wonderful.
It seems to me that Arty understands what perhaps the rest of the world is trying to get at. He understands the elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.
The Ox
1
The Thurlows lived on a small hill. As though it were not high enough, the house was raised up, as on invisible stilts, with a wooden flight of steps to the front door. Exposed and isolated, the wind striking at it from all quarters, it seemed to have no part with the surrounding landscape. Empty ploughed lands, in winter-time, stretched away on all sides in wet steel curves.
At half-past seven every morning Mrs. Thurlow pushed her great rusty bicycle down the hill; at six every evening she pushed it back. Loaded, always, with grey bundles of washing, oilcans, sacks, cabbages, bundles of old newspaper, boughs of wind-blown wood, and bags of chicken food, the bicycle could never be ridden. It was a vehicle of necessity. Her relationship to it was that of a beast to a cart. Slopping along beside it, flat heavy feet pounding painfully along under mudstained skirts, her face and body ugly with lumpy angles of bone, she was like a beast of burden.
Coming out of the house, raised up even above the level of the small hill, she stepped into a country of wide horizons. This fact meant nothing to her. The world into which she moved was very small: from six to nine she cleaned for the two retired sisters, nine to twelve for the retired photographer, twelve-thirty to three for the poultry farm, four to six for the middle-aged bachelor. She did not think of going beyond the four lines which made up the square of her life. She thought of other people going beyond them, but this was different. Staring down at a succession of wet floors, working always for other people, against time, she had somehow got into the habit of not thinking about herself.
She thought much, in the same stolid pounding way as she pushed the bicycle, of other people: in particular of Thurlow, more particularly of her two sons. She had married late; the boys were nine and thirteen. She saw them realizing refined ambitions, making their way as assistants in shops, as clerks in offices, even as butlers. Heavily built, with faces having her own angular boniness, they moved with eyes on the ground. She had saved money for them. For fifteen years she had hoarded the scrubbing-and-washing money, keeping it in a bran bag under a mattress in the back bedroom. They did not know of it; she felt that no one, not even Thurlow, knew of it.
Thurlow had a silver plate in his head. In his own eyes it set him apart from other men. ‘I got a plate in me head. Solid silver. Enough silver to make a dozen spoons and a bit over. Solid. Beat that!’ Wounded on the Marne, and now walking about with the silver plate in his head, Thurlow was a martyr. ‘I didn’t ought to stoop. I didn’t ought to do nothing. By rights. By rights I didn’t ought to lift a finger.’ He was a hedge cutter. ‘Lucky I’m tall, else that job wouldn’t be no good to me.’ He had bad days and good days, even days of genuine pain. ‘Me plate’s hurting me! It’s me plate. By God, it’ll drive me so’s I don’t know what I’m doing! It’s me plate again.’ And he would stand wild and vacant, rubbing his hands through his thin black hair, clawing his scalp as though to wrench out the plate and the pain.
Once a week, on Saturdays or Sundays, he came home a little tipsy, in a good mood, laughing to himself, riding his bicycle up the hill like some comic rider in a circus. ‘Eh? Too much be damned. I can ride me bike, can’t I? S’ long as I can ride me bike I’m all right.’ In the pubs he had only one theme, ‘I got a plate in me head. Solid silver,’ recited in a voice challenging the world to prove it otherwise.
All the time Mrs. Thurlow saved money. It was her creed. Sometimes people went away and there was no cleaning. She then made up the gap in her life by other work: picking potatoes, planting potatoes, dibbing cabbages, spudding roots, pea picking, more washing. In the fields she pinned up her skirt so that it stuck out behind her like a thick stiff tail, making her look like some bony ox. She did washing from five to six in the morning, and again from seven to nine in the evening. Taking in more washing, she tried to wash more quickly, against time. Somehow she succeeded, so that from nine to ten she had time for ironing. She worked by candlelight. Her movements were largely instinctive. She had washed and ironed for so long, in the same way, at the same time and place, that she could have worked in darkness.
There were some things, even, which could be done in darkness; and so at ten, with Thurlow and the sons in bed, she blew out the candle, broke up the fire, and sat folding the clothes or cleaning boots, and thinking. Her thoughts, like her work, went always along the same lines, towards the fu
ture, out into the resplendent avenues of ambitions, always for the two sons. There was a division in herself, the one part stolid and uncomplaining in perpetual labour, the other fretful and almost desperate in an anxiety to establish a world beyond her own. She had saved fifty-four pounds. She would make it a hundred. How it was to be done she could not think. The boys were growing, the cost of keeping them was growing. She trusted in some obscure providential power as tireless and indomitable as herself.
At eleven she went to bed, going up the wooden stairs in darkness, in her stockinged feet. She undressed in darkness, her clothes falling away to be replaced by a heavy grey nightgown that made her body seem still larger and more ponderous. She fell asleep almost at once, but throughout the night her mind, propelled by some inherent anxiety, seemed to work on. She dreamed she was pushing the bicycle down the hill, and then that she was pushing it up again; she dreamed she was scrubbing floors; she felt the hot stab of the iron on her spittled finger and then the frozen bite of icy swedes as she picked them off unthawed earth on bitter mornings. She counted her money, her mind going back over the years throughout which she had saved it, and then counted it again, in fear, to make sure, as though in terror that it might be gone in the morning.
2
She had one relaxation. On Sunday afternoons she sat in the kitchen alone, and read the newspapers. They were not the newspapers of the day, but of all the previous week and perhaps of the week before that. She had collected them from the houses where she scrubbed, bearing them home on the bicycle. Through them and by them she broke the boundaries of her world. She made excursions into the lives of other people: tragic lovers, cabinet ministers, Atlantic flyers, suicides, society beauties, murderers, kings. It was all very wonderful. But emotionally, as she read, her face showed no impression. It remained ox-like in its impassivity. It looked in some way indomitably strong, as though little things like beauties and suicides, murderers and kings, could have no possible effect on her. About three o’clock as she sat reading, Thurlow would come in, lumber upstairs, and sleep until about half-past four.