by H. E. Bates
Hurrying, the man went past the public water-tap and the watering-cans and along the wet devious paths among the graves. He walked as though it were all very distasteful to him — the rain, the deserted cemetery, the very thought of placing the flowers on the grave of his dead wife. Yet there was a kind of indifference also in his very irritation, as though he hardly cared whether the flowers were put there or not. He began to walk even faster, anxious to have done with it all.
He came at last to his wife’s grave, a rectangle of white marble enclosing a mound of neglected grass, and without taking off his hat and still sucking the cigarette through his wet moustache he took the chrysanthemums from their wrapping of newspaper, shook them and dropped them carelessly on the wet grass. On the grass, in a half-rusty green tin vase, stood the chrysanthemums he had put there a fortnight before. Once white, they were now shrivelled and blackened by frost and rain. Straddling the grave he seized the tin, wrenched out the old flowers and dropped them too on the wet grass.
Picking up the new chrysanthemums he hesitated. The tin was empty of water. He stood for a moment wondering if he should walk back across the cemetery to the water-tap. And then, impatiently, he decided against it. It was a long way in the rain. What did it matter? A lot of trouble, a lot of trouble for nothing. The flowers would die in any case. He wanted to get it over.
He hastily picked up the new white bunch of chrysanthemums. But stooping with them he again hesitated.
Down the path, also at a grave, was another man. He was a thin stooping figure and with his black bowler hat and his black overcoat he had the almost ascetic respectability of a tired shopwalker. Like the small man he was middle-aged, and like him also he was arranging a bunch of white chrysanthemums hastily, as though it were distasteful and he wanted to escape from the cemetery and the rain.
They noticed each other simultaneously and could not avoid speaking.
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Ah, good afternoon.’
They were slightly acquainted and they spoke deferentially, their voices a little embarrassed, and they stood for a moment hesitant, not knowing what to do or what also to say.
Then casually the smaller man glanced up at the sky. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it rained all night,’ he remarked.
Then, as he lowered his eyes, he saw that the other man had removed his hat and was staring dismally at the rain, as though in thought.
‘Ah!’ he said heavily. ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’ The small man glanced at the other man with secret annoyance for having removed his hat.
There was a silence, then, after a moment, the small man unobtrusively took off his hat also. His head, very bald, like a bladder of pink lard, seemed to stand out strangely large in the colourless rainy air. Then, as he stood with his head half-bowed, the little man remembered his cigarette. It seemed suddenly disrespectful and he let it fall from his mouth and it dropped on the wet grass, hissing faintly until he put his foot on it.
They stood there with their hats in their hands and with the rain drizzling on their bare heads until the tall man spoke again.
‘You haven’t a drop of water to spare,’ he said, ‘have you?’
The little man shook his head. ‘But I was just going to the tap,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring a can.’
‘Oh no, I was going myself.’
‘It seems a pity for us both to go.’
The tall man smiled and shook his head with a heavy and deliberate pretence of mournfulness.
‘One day we shall have to go,’ he said.
The little man nodded. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, heavily also.
Almost before they were aware of it they were walking down the path together, leaving their flowers on the wet grass. They walked at a slow almost solemn pace, with their hats still in their hands, as though to a funeral. Now and then they shot furtive glances of secret impatience at each other, each irritably wondering when the other would put on his hat. But neither made a sign, and they walked to the water-tap and back to the graves again without a change of pace, each with a can of water in one hand and his hat still in the other.
Stooping over the graves they arranged their flowers with a kind of deliberate reverence, filling the tin vases carefully, touching the flower petals with a perceptible show of tenderness. At intervals they half glanced up at each other, each as though wondering if the other were looking and what he were thinking.
At last they were finished and they stood upright. The thin man had been kneeling and he brushed his hands across his wet knees. The little man could feel the rain falling in larger drops on his bald head and collecting into even larger drops that rolled suddenly, like little balls of ice, down his neck.
They stood in silence, a pace or two back from the graves, their heads a trifle bowed in a pretence of grief. They stood there for what seemed to both of them a long time, secretly impatient, staring heavily into space, as though reflecting regretfully on the past and the dead. They had no longer any need to pretend wretchedness. The rain was coming down each moment faster and colder, dripping swiftly down from the wintry branches to the glistening marble tombs and the yellowish muddy paths. Once or twice the tall man ran his hand in concern across his damp knees and the other shook his head slightly, shivering miserably under the cold rain.
At last the tall man gave a sigh as though reluctant to depart, and picked up his watering-can.
‘Well, it’s no use standing here,’ he said mournfully. He shook his head as he spoke. ‘No use standing here.’
The little man shook his head in melancholy agreement, sighing also.
A moment later, with secret relief, they were walking away together down the path. Unobtrusively the tall man put on his hat and then the small man put on his too. They walked deferentially, in silence, until they reached the water-tap, where they left their watering-cans.
At the gates they stood for a moment and then parted. The rain was falling heavily, the mist and the darkness together hid the farthest tombs and trees from sight, and the two men hurried away from each other with angry relief and impatience, as though they never wished to see each other again.
The Wedding
I was seven or eight and my great-uncle Silas nearly seventy when his only son Abel was married to a girl named Georgina, and we all drove over for the wedding in the black-and-yellow trap with the white racy-looking horse, my grandparents and parents, my aunt and I, before the dew had dried on the buttercupped grass one May morning. The air was rich and summery and the sun was a long time breaking through the mist as we drove along. The wedding had come upon us suddenly. The girl, Georgina, had arrived that springtime to be a lady’s maid at the house where Abel had been a gardener for nearly twenty years. It was all over in a month; done, as my grandfather said, all of a damn pop. Nor did my grandmother like it; she was a little, pale woman, like a faded canary and as quick-tongued, and as she sat perched up on the high trap seat in her grey and purple silk I thought she looked as if she would like to peck at the creature who had seduced a solid, hard-hatted fellow like Abel with such indecent haste. Abel was nearly forty and the girl, it seemed, was only nineteen. But it was to be a great wedding.
We talked of it as we drove along. ‘I should think,’ said my grandmother, ‘he’s well set to work, marrying a filly like that. Nineteen!’ But my grandfather had seen the girl.
‘Dall it all,’ he kept saying, ‘she’s flash. And don’t she talk nice! Jest so. Ho dear, ho dear! I tell you she’s lovely.’
‘Yes, and without a farden to bless herself with, I’ll be bound. Who’s paying for the flash wedding?’
‘Silas, I expect.’
‘Ah,’ said my grandmother, ‘and I’d Silas him if I were Sarah Ann. I remember the last wedding we went to with Silas.’
My grandfather evidently remembered it too. He suddenly looked embarrassed, nudged my arm, and pointed with his driving whip at a cuckoo flying fast across a field of beans, calling as it flew, its voice trembling with the mot
ion of its flight. My grandfather followed the bird until it alighted, far off, in an ash tree, and then he nudged me again and told me to look up, straight above, at a lark breaking into passionate song, and we turned our faces to the sun-misty sky and watched the bird twittering up and up, out of sight.
‘You’ll get something you don’t expect,’ my grandmother warned us, ‘cocking your eyes at that bird.’
‘Tchk! Tchk!’ said my grandfather to the horse.
‘And look at you!’ exclaimed my grandmother, suddenly. ‘Whoa! I never saw such a man in all my born days. You’ll be hanging yourself in the reins next.’
‘Whoa!’ said my grandfather gloomily.
The horse stopped and my grandmother leaned across me and seized my grandfather’s collar, which had sprung away from its stud, catapulting his necktie away and releasing his white starched dicky from its top buttonhole.
‘Hold still,’ urged my grandmother. ‘That comes of gaping at birds instead of driving on as you should do.’ She fixed the collar, smoothed the tie and flattened the dicky, and my grandfather, looking extremely meek and ill at ease in the iron-starched collar and front and his best black clothes and hard hat, drove on again, straining his sun-tanned neck so that the guides tautened in agony. ‘Lord, man, anybody’d think you’d been hung,’ said my grandmother.
As we drove on the mist began to disperse, the sun shining through at first softly and at last with the strong thundery heat of the May morning. ‘I don’t know,’ said my grandmother, as though in hope, ‘as that girl ain’t going to have a wet ride after all.’
It was five miles to my uncle Silas’s house, and though the wedding wasn’t until two o’clock, we had started the journey at ten o’clock in the morning. There was no sense, declared my grandmother, in not making a day of it; nor, said my grandfather, did we want to wrench the guts out of the horse. So we had started early, and we drove along all the time at the same solemn pace, the horse never breaking into a trot, my grandfather never using the whip except to flick away the flies; and now and then we would stop, perhaps to admire a field of young barley, or to have a word by the roadside with a man my grandfather hadn’t seen for a year, or to gaze at the bluebells staining the dark earth of the woods we passed. At every hill we stopped so that my parents and my grandmother and aunt could alight and walk up the hill. My grandfather and I remained in the trap, sitting well forward in the seat in order to relieve the strain on the horse. And once, going up a hill by a spinney, we heard a nightingale, and then another and another, singing fitfully, but with breaks of wild passion, in the young hazel trees. Cuckoos were calling continually in their full bold mocking, and when we stopped to listen it sounded as though the cuckoos were contradicting the nightingales, their monotonous cries half-drowning the others wild spasmodic singing.
‘We must ask your uncle Silas,’ said my grandfather, ‘if he knows to a nightingale’s.’
‘He’ll have enough to think on,’ said my grandmother, ‘with that other nightingale.’
It was nearly twelve o’clock when we arrived at my uncle Silas’s house, the little reed-thatched house standing at the top of the violet-banked lane by the spinney of pines. The lane, steep and narrow, was cobbled with white hoof-smooth stones, and at the bottom of it we all alighted, my grandfather and I leading the horse.
‘Dall it,’ exclaimed my grandfather as we came within sight of the house, ‘can I see straight?’
We all stopped on the crest of the slope, and my grandmother let out an exclamation of tart astonishment:
‘A tent! What the ’nation do they want with a tent? Ain’t that just like Silas?’
‘It might be Georgina’s doing,’ said my aunt. ‘I heard she’d got money.’
‘I’d Georgina her!’ cried my grandmother as we went on.
As we came nearer the house the tent which had been erected in Uncle Silas’s paddock seemed larger than ever, a big square marquee with a sort of squat steeple, the canvas as white as the moon-daisies growing thicker than the grass in the field. Little yellow and green and blue and scarlet pennants fluttered above it listlessly, and its ropes were as clean as new straw. Long trestle tables had been erected both inside it and on the surrounding grass, and waiters in shirt-sleeves were already rushing hither and thither, spreading cloths even whiter than the tent, arranging flower-vases, carrying glasses and cups and plates and cutlery, salt-silvered hams and joints of beef and roast fowls and loaves and cheese, dark bottles of wine and cases of beer and stone-jars of home-made, unloading them from a wagon which had been drawn up before us by two satiny black horses with their ears in little silk nets and their tails plaited and tied with bows of white and cornflower-blue.
‘It’s a licker,’ said my grandfather, who seemed, I thought, to be not so much astonished as delighted. ‘Look at them bottles!’
‘You look at what you’re doing,’ said my grandmother.
And very slowly we all walked on to the house, marvelling at the tent and the food-laden tables and the sweating waiters.
Just as we drew up behind the wagon an extraordinary figure in yellow corduroy trousers, a blue shirt, a red waistcoat and a squashed brown panama, came rushing excitedly out of the house carrying a tray of glasses and bottles with one hand and trying to keep up his trousers with the other. He was waddling on his thick bowed legs across the paddock, chuckling wickedly, when my grandmother arrested him.
‘Silas!’ she shouted. ‘Do you want to blind us all?’
‘Lord a’ mighty,’ said my uncle Silas, ‘I never seed you.’ He stopped abruptly and, still holding up his trousers, came rolling back across the paddock towards us.
I whispered to my mother, ‘Why can’t he walk straight?’
‘Sshh!’ she said. ‘It’s the heavy bottles.’
From the way in which my grandmother began to address my uncle Silas it seemed as if it were the heavy bottles.
‘Silas,’ she said, ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself at twelve o’clock in the morning.’
‘I am,’ he said wickedly.
‘And what’s happened to your trousers?’
‘They’ll be down any minute.’
‘Silas, you’re not responsible! Where’s Sarah Ann?’
‘Gone down to church to titivate the altar.’
‘I’ll titivate you in a minute!’ she threatened, and before Silas could move or speak she was off towards the house, nipping along in her inexorable, quick, bird-like fashion.
When she returned a moment or two later my uncle Silas was already totting out for the waiters and my grandfather and himself, the beer in the glasses shining a rich tawny dandelion-gold in the noon sunlight. He was standing at one end of the long trestle-tables, pouring out beer with one hand and still holding up his trousers with the other, when she arrived behind him. He had no chance with her. ‘Stand still,’ she said, seizing his trousers. ‘It’s a darning needle,’ and with her lips set tartly she proceeded to sew on his lost buttons, her hands spider-quick and neat with the thread. ‘I’m surprised at you, Silas,’ she would say. ‘And if you touch that glass I’ll prick you.’
My uncle Silas stood with a sort of meek wickedness, winking at the waiters.
‘And what about this girl?’ said my grandmother. ‘Didn’t waste no time, did she?’
‘Nor did you.’
‘I said what about her?’
‘Lovely.’
‘And who’s paying for all this — this tent an’ all?’
‘A markwee,’ my uncle Silas corrected her. ‘A markwee.’
‘Well, whatever it is. You ain’t paying for it, I hope?’
‘Lord Henry and Lady Hester,’ said my uncle Silas, ‘are paying for every mite and mossel.’
‘Everything?’
‘Every drop and crumb.’
‘And the tent?’
‘And the markwee.’
My grandmother had no more to say. She was finished. She put the final stitch into my uncle Silas’s trousers an
d stuck the needle into some invisible place among her skirts. My uncle Silas drank his beer at one draught, and my grandmother seemed to be so flabbergasted that she did not see him pour out another, not only for himself, but for my grandfather too.
She stalked off into the house, and my parents and my aunt followed her. My grandfather and I stayed with Uncle Silas and the waiters, marvelling at the meat and drink that the men kept unloading from the wagons. The heavy summer air, fragrant already with the scents of grass and roses and the old lilac trees near the garden, was thick also with the smell of meat and beer and new warm bread.
‘I never seed hams like ’em,’ marvelled my grandfather.
‘No, and you never will again,’ said my uncle Silas.
We went into the marquee and marvelled again at the joints, the roast ducks and chickens, the salads and wines, the bright sherried trifles, the wine jellies, the strange sauces and cakes and finicking tit-bits and sweets all arranged on the long white tables.
‘Is there any mortal thing in the eatin’ line as you ain’t got, Silas?’ said my grandfather.
‘Nothing,’ said my uncle Silas.
‘And where’s Abel?’
‘Skulking upstairs like a young leveret. Frit to death.’
When we left the marquee and went across the paddock towards the house my uncle Silas bawled out:
‘Abel!’
An upstairs window opened and Abel put his head out. Abel looked as though he had been carved crudely out of raw beef; he had a thick black wig of hair and the eyes of a mournful cow. There was something sleepy, simple, and pathetic about him. I believe my uncle Silas was eternally ashamed of him.
‘Damn it, man,’ said my uncle Silas, sharply, ‘there’s half the guests here a’ready and you still a-bed!’
‘I ain’t a-bed,’ said Abel. ‘I’m buttoning me shoes up.’
It was more than my uncle Silas could stand. ‘Buttoning me shoes up,’ he muttered, waddling off. ‘Buttoning me belly button.’