Something Short and Sweet

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Whyn’t you look after things?’ he shouted. ‘Whyn’t you—’

  His anger was impotent, useless. It was anger in reality not against her, but against the storm, the ruin. She picked up the victual-bag. Water flowed out of it as out of a net, all over her sodden skirt and legs. She shook it. It hung in her hands like lead.

  ‘That was a good bag! Whyn’t you— The ruin of the bag seemed to hurt him more than anything else. Then his anger squibbed and died, damped out. ‘Oh! I don’ know! What’s the good? What’s the use? Oh! I don’ know. Look at it. A good bag.’

  She clung to the bag, as though in fact it had become precious. They stood and looked out on the waste of flooded water and drowned sheaves. They stood impotent. The man could think of nothing to do and nothing to say but, ‘It was a cloud bust. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say so?’ which came finally to mean nothing too.

  At last he waded and slopped across the stubble and found his scythe. He could not dry it. It dripped silver. The woman waited, clutching the useless bag in her hands.

  Then, after another look at the field, they slushed out of the gate and down the road and away, clutching scythe and bag, like two figures setting out on a pilgrimage to nowhere at all.

  Purchase’s Living Wonders

  She was about eighteen when Alfred Purchase first brought his midget circus, Purchase’s Living Wonders, to Maudit. And though she was so small, not four feet, she looked much older. She was already fully grown, and she looked mature. She had dark hair, with sloe-coloured gentle eyes and tiny pink mouth, and she was really very pretty. She was not misshapen at all, but there was something odd about her. Even when smiling she looked odd. But more than anything she was like a doll. People had in fact known her for years as Baby Doll and it was the name by which Purchase himself afterwards billed her. Her real name was Ida Moore.

  Purchase gave two performances during that visit, afternoon and evening. She went to them both. Purchase had then been touring for about ten years, but he had never been to Maudit and she had never heard of him. She had lived an absolutely unexciting life and her only real difficulty had been to get a job, or rather to keep one. She could get a job easily enough, through pity, but she could never keep it long because, for some reason, people hated being served or answered or even spoken to by a midget. She had worked in shops and offices and once as a lift-girl, but it was no use. Then she got a job in the pay-box of a cinema. It was a success. As she sat there, with only her face visible at the pigeon hole, nobody could guess that she was a midget, and she often got offers to be taken out after the show. Her box was in the cheap seat section, and being a refined girl, she was particular, almost haughty, about what she did. Even so, men would press her, and finally she would go, meeting them outside in the dark alley leading up to the pay-box after the show. It was only when they discovered who she was and what she was that they gave her the go-by. ‘But what’s the difference?’ she would say, passionately. ‘I’m a woman – a girl, same as the rest. What’s the difference?’ But it was no use. None of them fancied her.

  Then Purchase came. Although he billed his show as ‘Purchase’s Living Wonders: Greatest Midget Circus on Earth!’ it was never a circus, as such. It was more of a stage show, a variety performance, with dancing and trapeze acts and singing and a few pony acts, all done by midget men and women and midget ponies. There was no tent. Purchase hired a hall in the town. He had about twenty midgets and a dozen ponies, all cream and brown piebald. The ponies were very pretty. They seemed in fact, too pretty, almost cruelly pretty, since they were naturally small and in their way almost perfect. Whereas the midgets were all imperfect, almost all really ugly, little bearded men and strange wrinkled little ladies and bandy-legged girls, all with old big-eyed faces and an expression of forlorn mockery. And somehow the show was not very good. People came to see it simply out of curiosity or pity or wonder or even contempt.

  Ida was the only person, in Maudit at any rate, who went to see it out of pure excitement. All her life she had been an oddity. Now she was going to see twenty people who were greater oddities than herself and who were paid for being oddities into the bargain. It was the first day in her life when she felt that it was almost an honour to be what she was.

  But oddly enough, at that first performance, it was not the midgets who attracted her at all. It was Purchase. From the very first she was almost crazy about him. It may have been because Purchase was so big or because he looked more like an evangelist than a show-proprietor or because he was rather like a father to the midgets. Certainly she had never heard anyone speak of midgets as Purchase did when he came to the front of the stage before the performance and explained the show. To her he looked extraordinarily big and, with his American sombrero hat and his rather long, curly grey hair, very like a benevolent church elder about to offer up a prayer.

  But if there were any prayers it was she who felt like offering them. All Purchase did was to explain the show, but to her his words seemed like a godsend. She felt that he was the first person in her life who loved midgets, simply for what they were.

  ‘My little friends,’ he called them. ‘My little friends are here to entertain you,’ he said. ‘They don’t ask for pity. Don’t think that. They would be very angry if they felt that you were pitying them. Although they are all so small they are all normally healthy and strong and they are happy to do what they are doing. Some of them have been with me for ten years. They are all my friends.’

  Throughout the performance Purchase came at intervals to the curtain and make speeches. She was entranced. It was he who made the show a success. And to her, sitting spellbound, it was a terrific success. It was a triumph for the midgets. It was almost a triumph for herself. And long before the first performance had ended she had made up her mind what she was going to do.

  That evening she walked out of the cinema paybox without caring at all if she was sacked or not, and went to the second performance. She sat spellbound all through it. Then, at the end, she went straight round to back-stage and saw Purchase and asked for a job.

  ‘But how old are you?’ he said.

  ‘Eighteen,’ she said. ‘Nearly nineteen.’

  ‘What can you do? Singing? Dance? Have you done any stage work at all?’

  ‘I can play the piano,’ she said.

  He asked her a few other questions and then said he would consider it. She knew at once what that meant: that he was going away on the following day and that it was simply his way of getting out of it.

  ‘I want to know now,’ she said. ‘I want to know now. Tell me now.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m very busy.’

  ‘Tell me now,’ she said. ‘Tell me how much you’ll give for me.’

  ‘Give for you?’ he said. He was astonished. ‘Give for you?’

  ‘Purchase me for,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what it says outside? Purchase’s Living Wonders? You buy midgets, don’t you?’

  The tears stood in his eyes as he laughed at her. Then when he had explained she laughed too. From that minute they were friendly. And it was only then, as they stood there laughing, that he noticed something about her which he had not noticed about any other midget. He saw how good-looking she was, that she was really pretty. Every other midget he had ever seen or employed was ugly or quaint or in some way misshapen or out of proportion. All except her. Laughing, with her teeth showing gaily and her little bust arched strongly, she even went for a moment beyond prettiness, into beauty. She was sweet and almost perfect to look at. The only thing she had in common with other midgets was that she was tragic too.

  ‘Do your parents know about this?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I shall tell them to-night.’

  ‘You know if they say no that I can’t do a thing? You know that?’

  ‘You come along too,’ she said. ‘They won’t say no then. They won’t say no if you come.’

  And late that night, a little against his will, he went home with her. ‘What�
��s the use?’ he kept saying. ‘Your folks will be in bed.’ But nothing could put her off. ‘They can get up,’ she said, ‘can’t they?’

  Her mother was in bed. Her father sat almost asleep in the kitchen, in his shirt-sleeves, the day’s paper on his knees, waiting up for her as he always did. He was a boiler-engineer, an ordinary normal fellow with decent grizzly hair and steel-rimmed spectacles. He had a steady job and for years all his savings had gone into doctors’ bills and hospital bills in a desperate effort to put the girl right. She had been a great worry to them, a shock, almost a burden.

  And when he saw her with Purchase he was frightened. He thought for a minute, until the girl began to explain, that she had been doing wrong and that Purchase, perhaps, was a detective. He listened for a minute to what she had to say and then went to the foot of the stairs and called his wife. She came down in an old faded grey dressing-gown and a shawl, scared and ruffled, and as she stood in the doorway, clutching the shawl to her neck, the girl told her what she had already told her father, that she was going away with Purchase.

  They were both so upset that for a minute or two they were not coherent. Then the mother began to cry a little, and Purchase felt that it was time he spoke. So he made an explanation, an offer.

  ‘She can come for six months,’ he said, ‘and then, if she doesn’t like it, she can come back. You can have a proper agreement and you can be signatories to it. I’ll pay her three pounds a week, and fifty per cent of it can be sent straight to you. I’ll take care of her. If she isn’t happy she can come home.’

  That seemed fair, almost too fair, almost too good to be true. It gave them, for the first time, some chance of reimbursing themselves for years of expense and loss. They looked at each other for a moment and the man said: ‘Mother, what do you think?’ and finally the woman said: ‘I’ve never stood in her way and don’t want to now’, and like that it was settled she should go.

  For a month afterwards Purchase almost regretted it. Except for playing the piano there was nothing she could do. The rest of his midgets had been at the job all their lives, and though they were third rate they were professional. Whereas there was no mistaking that she was an amateur. And for a month he did not bill her at all. She simply played the piano and all the time he was thinking that he would be glad when the six months were up.

  Then he had an idea. ‘What did you say the people in Maudit used to call you?’ he said.

  ‘Baby Doll,’ she said. ‘You know the song?’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And that’s what you’re going to be! A doll! We’ll put you on as a new act.’

  Perhaps it was the summer, perhaps it was really that the show was third rate, but for weeks, until this new idea of Purchase’s, the show had been paying badly. Purchase was worried. Then he had the idea for the girl – to put her on as the baby doll, in a big box in which she would stand stiff and starched, first in the dress of one century, then when the box had shut and opened again in the dress of another, and so on and so on, from the sixteenth century down to the present day. It was really a quick-change act and Purchase was doubtful if, inexperienced as she was, the girl could do it.

  They spent hours rehearsing. It was hard to stand so stiff and immovable one minute and then, in the next and in the dark confinement of the doll’s box, to do the quick change and hand the discarded dresses out of the trap-door at the back without a sound or a mistake. But gradually she perfected it. Then when it was almost stageable, she had an idea too.

  ‘I don’t think it’s sensational enough,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Purchase said. ‘Sensational?’

  ‘Well, after the short skirts I think we ought to have two more tableaux. A bathing costume, and then a finale, almost nothing. Just two pieces of silk. It would be a sensation.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Purchase said. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No, I’ve always kept the show decent. It’s always been a clean show. I can’t do it. No.’

  ‘Try it.’

  ‘No. Purchase’s Living Wonders has got a reputation for being a decent show. And it’s going to keep it. A lot of children come to it.’

  ‘What if they do? You can call it the undressed doll or something. They’ll like that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll, rehearse it,’ she said. ‘Just try it out. Just see how I look.’

  Finally he agreed to that. And in spite of himself he was impressed. In the final tableau, when she was virtually undressed, her small body was perfect. Her breasts stood out like little tea-cups, and altogether, with the strips of pink silk toning into the colour of her body, she looked exactly like an undressed china doll. All against himself he had to admit that it transformed the act from something second-rate into a top-line sensation.

  Still he did not like it. He had cultivated the fatherly church-elder idea to perfection and the new act seemed like a cynical contradiction of it. For a long time he would not put it on. Then the summer beat him. It was so hot that the houses began to go down to nothing. He was worried and the whole show seemed stale and listless, and finally he succumbed.

  He billed her as Baby Doll: The World’s Quickest Quick-Change Midget. And because it seemed safer, he put her half-way through the bill, unobtrusively, without any sensation at all. And even then, right up to the very last, he did not like it. He was ready to take her off at the slightest complaint or hitch or unpleasantness. And also because it seemed safer he put her on at a matinée, one Friday afternoon, in a small Midland industrial town the show had never visited before. And all the time he was on edge. For more than an hour before the performance was due to begin he paced about behind the stage in a state of agitation, a man of over six feet and weighing about two hundred pounds, looking more frightened than a rabbit. ‘I don’t like it,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’

  And even the show that afternoon did not reassure him. He could not tell at all if it had been a success. The audience was thin, the theatre was stifling hot, and there was only a short hush, a desultory breath of surprise, at the last tableau of the Baby Doll act, the change from the bathing costume to next to nothing at all. Still, he was relieved. There was no opposition, no complaint.

  Then, that evening, the theatre was almost raided. Queues tailed out into the streets, the doors were almost rushed, he had more people standing than he had had sitting at any performance for two months. People sat on the balcony steps. The audience was almost all factory hands and almost all men, and they had all come to see one thing: the woman with nothing on.

  Purchase took more money at that one show than he had taken for a month. It was a god-send. He had never known anything like it.

  Nor had the audience. Nor, indeed, had Ida. If it was a sensation for the audience and a god-send for Purchase, for her it was a revolution. And strangely, she felt a little unhappy about it. Until that evening, she had been quite content. She had not wanted to be in the limelight. Success and sensation were both things she had not wanted and had not calculated to have. All that she wanted was to be near Purchase.

  He had not for a moment realised it. Otherwise he could not have acted as he did. Directly after her act, with the audience still raising a pandemonium, he went straight to her dressing-room. She stood there dazed and almost exhausted, without triumph and without being aware of the sensation she had been. She had on a red dressing-gown over the two pieces of silk, and when Purchase came in she stood there limp, the dressing-gown undone, almost ready to cry with strain and excitement.

  Purchase simply went up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Oh! you darling,’ he said. ‘You darling. It was great. The house was jammed. It was great. You’re a living wonder if you like. I could kiss you,’

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  And impulsively, with a kind of avuncular heartiness, he kissed her. She did not move. She stood with the doll-like stillness of her act, so pretty and sweet, an impassive d
oll, saying nothing. Then Purchase put his arms round her and hugged her, very much like a large bear. Her head came well below his chest. She let it rest there, with a beautiful sensation of rest and achievement that meant more to her than all the sensation of the act could ever have done. ‘Hold me a minute,’ she said. ‘I feel I shall break in half. Just hold me.’ And as he held her, in the detached tender fashion of an elderly man, she began to cry, quietly and, though he did not know it, unhappily.

  It did not surprise him at all that she should cry. He had often had it happen, to other midgets, at other and similar times of crisis. He felt that it was natural and that in time she would get over it.

  But she did not get over it, though he had no suspicion of it. To him it seemed simply that she went on doing her act, triumphantly and sensationally, wherever they went. He had no time to notice whether she had changed or was changing. The act worried him enough, without that. Twice during the next two months he had the police in, and she had to wear an extra slip in the last act. ‘The navel mustn’t show,’ the police said. Apart from that she was, as he said, a real living wonder, a sensation everywhere. Purchase raised her salary, billed her at the top, and finally gave her a contract for three more years.

  Then, in September, he had a new idea. He was travelling by train, from one show to another, with a dozen midgets in the carriage with him, reading the paper. Suddenly he struck the paper with the back of his hand.

  ‘I got it! Look here – here’s the man who made the first comics on the film telling how it was custard pies got to be thrown. You remember? Well, he says somebody threw a custard pie and everybody laughed. And that gave him his idea. If one custard pie was funny, wouldn’t two be twice as funny? And three, and four, and fifty, and so on?’ He got excited. ‘You see what I mean? If Baby Doll here is a sensation, what would a row of Baby Dolls be? They’d be a riot! Wouldn’t they? You see what I mean? I’d get all of you, all the women, and dress you all the same – all dolls, in a row of boxes.’