by H. E. Bates
‘Here! – who the devil is that? Who the blazes are you –?’ And then he saw me. ‘Oh! hullo, Richardson. So plum awful dark I couldn’t see. I thought it was some damn poacher. We’ve had a hell of a lot of it this winter.’
‘Knight was telling me.’
‘They’re getting confounded cheeky with it too. Plum awful. Bloody soon we’ll have to have chains on the pheasants.’
‘Knight was telling me they came one night in a van.’
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Gang of damn shoe-making chaps, factory blokes. Can’t leave a thing alone that isn’t theirs. Damn Bolshies – everybody nowadays is a damn Bolshie.’
‘This has always been a poaching town,’ I said. ‘Back to the old days –’
‘I don’t know what it used to be like,’ he said, ‘but it’s plum awful now.’ Streaks of whiskied breath went past me on the mild air. He straightened his flattish broad-checked cap, swinging his short malacca cane at the dark. ‘You know what I’m beginning to think?’
I waited to hear.
‘I think the whole bloody show is going to pieces,’ he said. ‘That’s what. There soon won’t be any people left like us.’
Chapter Four
It did not really occur to me until long afterwards that Alex might have been in love with her; I did not properly grasp that his anger at Blackie, his drunkenness or his moods were all part of his complexity about denying it to himself, to me and, because of me, to Lydia herself. Even after the dance at Milton Posnett I was so completely obsessed by fondness for him that I could not even begin to see these things.
The dance at Milton Posnett was the last before Lent that year. I had hoped, once or twice, that Lydia had forgotten about it, but sooner or later she always brought it up again. But I had learned, at least, one thing: that it was stupid with her, as with children, to say Don’t or No or Must you? It was better to give way to her, sooner rather than later, on the assumption that very soon she would forget what it was you had had to give away.
Milton Posnett turned out to be a scrubby riverside village in Huntingdonshire, low on the edge of fens. High rows of black elms grew on either side of the yellow stucco school-house, where the dance was. All of us were strangers there – except, as it turned out, Blackie – and when we went into the low school-room, still hung with its scarlet and white and green and gold festoons and even a little dusty tinsel from Christmas, I thought there was a sort of glazed hostility, blank rather than in any way aggressive, in the eyes of the big-boned country boys who were hauling their girls about the dusty floor. A four-piece band of men in red top-hats was playing a slow lugubrious fox-trot, and there was a stumping of village feet that was like a barrack-room parade.
Alex took one morose look at all this. He had occasional fits of depression that coincided with attacks of catarrh, so that a kind of despondent ferocity developed in him, and then he said:
‘I’m going to get a drink. I’ve got to have a drink before I can face that.’ He was breathing heavily.
The girls were changing their shoes and brushing their hair in what I imagined was the infants’ cloakroom; there was a smell of dust and face-powder and sweat and, oddly enough, of spilt ink-bottles everywhere; and in a sudden fit of depression I followed Alex into the street under the elms outside.
‘I can’t think whatever possessed us to come here,’ I said.
‘Can’t you?’ he said. The catarrh had already brought an unlovable, bellicose look of resentful pain to his eyes. ‘Blackie comes from here – that’s why.’
I think I was mystified by that, but not troubled. Then Alex said:
‘Come on – we’re going to have a couple of blinders before the pubs close. My head thumps like a press.’
‘You go,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll go back – I’ll come along later.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll order a few up for you in case they call time.’
When I got back to the school-room Lydia was dancing with Tom, and Nancy was waiting for me. Mrs Sanderson had not come with us that night. Alex had decided that village hops in school-rooms had nothing to offer her smart and dignified elegance. He had brought as his partner a girl named Nora Jepson, a thin, smooth-haired, serpentine girl whose dancing had about it a shining felicity that was thrilling and uncanny. It was my impression that Nora never wore anything but shoes and stockings and a georgette dress. Her figure was as lithe and plain as a boy’s. She danced with a tense feline beauty that looked voluptuous but that was, in fact, passionately academic. She was one of those people who dance for dancing’s sake – which was perhaps, after all, why Alex had brought her, since all evening he did not dance with her once and he must have known she would not care.
The band played in deadly off-rhythms and across the floor village boys clamped about, raising dust, like horses.
‘This is pretty awful,’ I said.
‘Oh? I think it’s rather nice,’ Nancy said. ‘Don’t be so uppish. It’s just an ordinary Saturday village dance – the sort we always went to before Lydia came. I think it’s good for us. We were all getting so far up in the air I thought we were never coming down.’
I clenched her about the corsets and swung her across the floor, impotent with annoyance, and she said:
‘Lydia’s waving to you and you’re not looking. Wave.’
Turning, I saw Lydia.
‘Don’t gape,’ Nancy said. ‘We’ve all gaped – try to be different, do.’
Lydia was wearing a long silk dress of black and scarlet that reached down to the floor. It was low in the bodice and had no sleeves. A broad black band at the waistline pulled across her body perfectly smooth and flat, giving the impression that she was wearing only a scarlet skirt and a scarlet blouse, leaving the middle of her body a stretch of bare black skin. I had never seen this dress before; she seemed to have chosen it a fraction, perhaps a size, too small for her. For some reason – perhaps because the bodice was so low and her bare shoulders so high and arched – it gave the impression that she was taller than she was. It seemed to make her stand out, tall and aristocratic and rather dashing, above all the others in the room.
She waved the tips of her fingers at me above Tom’s shoulder, and I waved in reply.
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ Nancy said.
‘I think it’s wonderful.’
‘You would.’
‘It’s the nicest thing she’s ever had on,’ I said. ‘It suits her.’
‘She brought it to show off,’ Nancy said. ‘Really, you men are all alike. You never even begin to see why women do things, do you?’
‘That’s because they try to blind us with the things they do,’ I said.
She snorted at me. Her pleasant padded bosom heaved as she took a deep resentful breath.
‘I don’t know whether that’s clever or not,’ she said. ‘I shall have to think it out.’
At this moment the dance ended, and Lydia began clapping her hands, twice as loud as anyone else, throwing back her head. When she did so her black hair fell loosely away, and she clapped her hands above it.
‘She makes me feel so small when I look at her,’ Nancy said. ‘So terribly small and ordinary. I don’t know quite why –’
‘That’s because you never begin to see why women do things,’ I said.
She was not very pleased with me for saying that and when I turned to her again, after staring a second or two longer at Lydia, she was making excuses and going away to the cloakroom.
Only a moment later Lydia left Tom and came sweeping and sliding across the half-empty floor to me. When she came I could feel a flicker of wall-flower faces, all round the room, that was like the white flutter of the pages of a book.
‘Darling!’ she said in a loud voice – it was a kind of throaty half-suppressed scream, and I saw one or two village men gawp as if her entire dress had fallen away – ‘Where’s Nancy? Where’s Alex? Where’s everybody?’
She laughed and held up her face to me an
d said: ‘Come on – let’s have this one!’ and over my shoulder she called something to the band about playing another tune.
They too were gawping at her. They were not ready to play, but suddenly she clapped her hands again in that extravagant way that made almost a loop above her head, and the band started up. We had been twice round the floor, I think, before it occurred to me that no one else was going to dance that number. She realized it too and threw back her head laughing. This gesture of hers – it was something new and she was pleased with the neat extravagance of it, as if it had been something she had perfected after a lot of practice – threw the middle of her body forward against me. I was stirred and embarrassed, and I think a little baffled, and as we turned across the empty floor she said:
‘Everybody staring?’
‘Everybody,’ I said.
Suddenly I felt nothing but embarrassment. I was cold and contracted with the stupidity of dancing out there alone.
‘Come on, it’s awful, let’s cut it,’ I said. ‘Lydia, let’s get off the floor –’
‘Oh! don’t be so conventional’ – she bit her lips. She seemed to want a stronger word and abruptly it came – ‘don’t be so plebian –’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘And anyway it’s the wrong word.’
‘Oh! Words, words, words, you and your words,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever feel? – feelings, feelings – don’t you ever have feelings?’
I think, in that moment, I realized two things about her. The first was that she was growing not exactly tired but impatient of me. The second I did not really grasp for a long time, although the beginnings of it were there as she turned and snapped at me about my feelings or the feelings she suspected I never had. It was the idea that she was one of those people who, as they rush into maturity, really think less and less and less. Thought is driven out by a growing automatism of instinct and feeling and blood. More and more, half-consciously, blood drives and governs and pushes them along.
But she hardly gave me time for more than a flicker of both these things to cross my mind. She took a swift look round the room and said:
‘Is Alex there? Where’s Alex?’
Feelings of which she had no kind of suspicion whipped through me as she said that. I felt a mixture of unhappiness and impatience and impotence and a small corrupting bitterness against a friend I loved very much. It was on the tip of my tongue to make one of the swift lashing remarks that hurt Nancy so much, but I managed to hold it back and I said:
‘Alex’s got one of his attacks. He’s stuffed with catarrh and he’s gone to have a drink or two.’
‘He mustn’t do that,’ she said. ‘Go and find him and tell him to come dancing. Tell him to come down on the floor and forget his self-pity.’
‘Whatever gave you the idea of self-pity?’ I said.
‘Well, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Everybody knows how sorry men are for themselves if they get half a pin-prick or a snoffle. By this time he’s full of gin and self-pity.’
I tried to think of something to say.
‘And if it comes to that so are you,’ she said. ‘I can feel it by that injured look in your eyes’ – and I noticed the word ‘feel’ again, and it hurt me more than anything she said.
Finally that long awful dance came to an end. When we walked off the floor like two entertainers, facing a wall-flower square of staring, gawping faces, everybody was dumb and I was miserable and tired.
And then in a second she dispelled it all. She took my arm in the sweetest possible fashion and said quietly:
‘Be a dear and fetch Alex. It isn’t nice to bring a girl to a dance and then spend all the time drinking. Is it? And you know how Alex is.’
‘All right,’ I said.
She puckered her face at me, delightfully: her voice was soft. ‘And don’t be short with me. Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry,’ I said.
I went away to find Alex. It was exactly as she had said: Alex, glaring and catarrhal and miserable, half-blind with the soggy encrustation of his wretched complaint, sat sorrily drinking at the bar. She was also, in a way, right about me. That night there was a good deal of self-pity in both of us, and it did us a little good to exchange it over a drink or two.
‘Lydia sent a message,’ I said. It was not quite true; but I think perhaps I had an idea it would cheer him up. ‘She wants you to come and dance with her.’
‘Down the hatch!’ Alex said. ‘Barman, this is Mr Richardson.’ The barman said good-evening and Alex said: ‘Take for another one for yourself, barman. Have another. Cheers.’
‘Not just now, thank you, sir.’
‘Well, here’s looking at you!’ Alex said. It was impossible to tell whether he was three-parts drunk or merely fogged by a sort of catarrhal cloud. ‘What was that about Lydia?’
‘She sent a special message for you to come and dance with her.’
He knotted one hand painfully across his forehead.
‘It’ll do you good,’ I said. ‘It’ll take you out of yourself.’
‘You danced with her?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s wearing a terrific dress. She’s got them all stunned down there. She’s on top form.’
‘Blackie there?’
‘Oh! For Christ’s sake shut up about Blackie,’ I said. I was very tired of Alex’s stubborn notion that Blackie was a kind of evil ghost sent to haunt us all.
‘Drink up,’ I said. ‘You’re keeping Lydia waiting.’
I don’t know why I kept up the myth that Lydia was waiting. Having started it I could do nothing else, I suppose, but pretend that it was true. Then, because Alex was stubborn and because I was tired of the complexity of self-pity and catarrh and what I thought was an obsession about Blackie I even began to magnify it.
‘It’ll soon be midnight and the damn dance will be over and you’ll never have had one dance with her,’ I said. ‘She’ll be furious. Come on, Alex, let’s get back –’
‘Let’s have another bloody good round,’ he said. ‘Eh? – Barman!’
‘Never mind that,’ I said. ‘Lydia wants you. She’s waiting.’
In this way, at last, I got him out of the bar. I don’t think he was drunk. Self-pity and catarrh and talk and gin had stiffened and confused his mood. He was trying to understand something that oppressed him. He blew his nose a lot as we walked down the village street, and once he shook his head violently and said:
‘Do you know, old boy, I can hardly hear.’
‘You don’t need to hear,’ I said. ‘Girls are there to be looked at.’
At the door of the school-room I pushed him in towards the streamered lights. ‘Go and find her,’ I said, ‘before it’s too late.’ He stumbled in, vague and half-blind. I had to keep it up to the end, and I followed him.
The first thing I saw was that Lydia was dancing with Blackie. I felt a sour, griping sensation in my throat as I first saw her, tall, dark, and scarlet, head thrown back, waltzing round with him. Then I looked at Alex. His mouth was parted a little as he tried to catch his breath. It gave him the cruelly afflicted, groping look of someone who could neither hear nor see very clearly.
I stood like this through the dance, waiting, watching the two of them through my blurred and growing confusion. I felt sick. In part I hated myself. When the dance ended I saw Alex move a step forward – ‘they’re all alike to me,’ he had said once, when on some occasion or other I had been too shy to ask a strange girl to dance with me, ‘mow in, old boy, one’s just like another’ – and then at that moment Lydia began clapping her hands. It was that same loud extravagant overhead gesture I had seen her use earlier in the evening. She flaunted rather than clapped her hands, tossing her hair back from her face once or twice with a lovely haughty sort of flick at the same time.
By the time I looked at Alex again the band had started the same dance a second time. I noticed now that Lydia and Blackie were not really dancing the orthodox steps of the waltz; they were walking it in the s
low, sidling fashion that was popular in those days.
By now I could look at neither them nor Alex any more, and I went outside. There were no stars. The air had a rawness as it came in across misty fields from dark low fenlands. I suppose I walked up and down, under the elms in the school-yard, for about five minutes, feeling all the time more cold and more stupid, before suddenly I heard a girl scream.
Afterwards I was never sure if it was Lydia who screamed, but when I got back into the hall Alex was hitting Blackie for the second time. It was exactly the sort of punch you would expect from a man like Alex, part drunk, part miserable, part frenzied. He seemed to strike sightlessly, with both hands. One blow hit Blackie in the mouth and then Blackie, with an odd twist of surprise on his face, hit Alex. Then Alex rushed in again and fell down. Then as he scrambled up he clutched Blackie wildly about the body. Something about that rush of his must have hurt Blackie, because suddenly he clenched both fists and began beating them down on Alex’s head like hammers.
I shouted and rushed across the floor. Two or three girls screamed, running towards the cloakroom. I heard Alex snorting with breathless pain. A table fell over, smashing several glasses. And a girl screamed: ‘Glass! glass! glass! Mind the glass!’ and the leader of the dance band stood up in a chair, yelling. In the centre of the floor there was a tangle of men’s bodies where Alex and Blackie had fallen down together, with more men fighting on top of them, shouting and tugging to wrench them free.
I got hold of Lydia’s arm and pulled her away. She seemed, I think, the calmest person there – not perhaps really calm, but stiffened and transfixed. She seemed as if fascinated by the sheer pointlessness of Alex and Blackie kicking and struggling there on the floor. Tom was there too, and I shouted to him:
‘Take Lydia, Tom, and find Nancy and Nora. I’ll go back and get Alex.’
By the time I got back to the floor Alex and Blackie had been separated. It was all over. There was a great deal of glaring and dusting of trousers, and Alex was quivering terribly all over as he gasped for his catarrh-choked breath. He shouted some pointless remark at Blackie, who shouted another back, but at that same moment the dance band started up again, very loudly, drowning everything, and I dragged Alex away.