by H. E. Bates
She got up. ‘How long can you wait? I’ll just change my dress and tell mother.’
‘No hurry at all,’ I said, and she ran upstairs.
I have said nothing about how old she was. In the kimono she looked about twenty, and in the white dress about the same age, perhaps a little younger. When she came down again that evening she looked nearer twenty-six or twenty-seven. She looked big and mature. She had changed from the white dress into a startling yellow affair with a sort of black coatee cut away at the hips. It was so flashy that I felt uneasy. It was very tight too: the skirt so tight that I could see every line of her body, the bodice filled tight in turn with her big breasts. I forget what her hat was like. I rather fancy I thought it was rather silly. But later she took it off.
‘Well, where shall we go?’ she said.
‘I thought of going up West and eating and perhaps dropping in to hear some music.’
‘Music. Isn’t that rather dull?’
‘Well, a play then.’
‘I say,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s go up West. Let’s go down to the East End instead. We can have some fun. It’ll do you good to see how the Jews live. If you’re going to work for a firm of Jews you ought to know something about them. We might have some Jewish food. I know a nice place.’
So we took a bus and went. In the Mile End Road we had a meal. I didn’t like it. The food didn’t smell very nice. It was spiced and strong and rather strange to eat. But Blanche liked it. Finally she said she was thirsty. ‘Let’s go out of here and have a drink somewhere else,’ she said. ‘I know a place where you can get beautiful wine, cheap.’ So we went from that restaurant to another. We had some cheese and a bottle of wine – asti, I think it was. The place was Italian. The evening was stifling and everywhere people were drinking heavily and fanning themselves limply against the heat. After the wine I began to feel rather strange. I wasn’t used to it and I hardly knew what I was doing. The cheese was rather salt and made me thirsty. I kept drinking almost unconsciously and my lips began to form syllables roundly and loosely. I kept staring at Blanche and thinking of her in the kimono. She in turn would stare back and we played a kind of game, carrying on a kind of conversation with glances, burning each other up, until at last she said:
‘What’s your name? You haven’t told me yet.’
‘Arthur,’ I said. ‘Arthur Lawson.’
‘Arthur.’
The way she said it set my heart on fire. I just couldn’t say anything: I simply sat looking at her. There was an intimacy then, at that moment, in the mere silences and glances between us, that went far beyond anything I had known with Hilda.
Then she saw something on the back of the menu that made her give a little cry.
‘Oh, there’s a circus! Oh, let’s go! Oh, Arthur, you must take me.’
So we went there too. I forget the name of the theatre and really, except for some little men and women with wizened bird faces and beards, there is nothing I remember except one thing. In the middle of the show was a trapeze act. A girl was swinging backwards and forwards across the stage in readiness to somersault and the drum was rolling to rouse the audience to excitement. Suddenly the girl shouted ‘I can’t do it!’ and let loose. She crashed down into the stalls and in a minute half the audience were standing up in a pandemonium of terror.
‘Oh! Arthur, take me out.’
We went out directly. In those days women fainted more often and more easily than they do now, and I thought Blanche would faint too. As we came out into the street she leaned against me heavily and clutched my arm.
‘I’ll get a cab and take you home,’ I said.
‘Something to drink first.’
I was a bit upset myself. We had a glass of port in a public house. It must have been about ten o’clock. Before long, after the rest and the port, Blanche’s eyes were quite bright again.
Soon after that we took the cab and drove home. ‘Let me lean against you,’ she said. I took her and held her. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Hold me. Hold me tight.’ It was so hot in the cab that I could hardly breathe and I could feel her face hot and moist too. ‘You’re so hot,’ I said. She said it was her dress. The velvet coatee was too warm. ‘I’ll change it as soon as I get home,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll have a drink. Some ice-cream in lemonade. That’ll be nice.’
In the cab I looked down at her hair. It was amazingly black. I smiled at it softly. It was full of odours that were warm and voluptuous. But it was the blackness of it that was so wonderful and so lovely.
‘Why do they call you Blanche?’ I said. ‘When you’re so black. Blanche means white.’
‘How do you know I’m not white underneath?’ she said.
I could not speak. No conversation I had ever had with a woman had ever gone within miles of that single sentence. I sat dazed, my heart racing. I did not know what to do. ‘Hold me tight,’ she said. I held her and kissed her.
I got out of the cab mechanically. In the shop she went straight upstairs. I kept thinking of what she had said. I was wild with a new and for me a delicious excitement. Downstairs the shop was in darkness and finally I could not wait for her to come down again. I went quietly upstairs to meet her.
She was coming across the landing as I reached the head of the stairs. She was in the kimono, in her bare feet.
‘Where are you?’ she said softly. ‘I can’t see you.’ She came a second later and touched me.
‘Just let me see if mother has turned your bed back,’ she whispered.
She went into my bedroom. I followed her. She was leaning over the bed. My heart was racing with a sensation of great longing for her. She smoothed the bed with her hands and, as she did so, the kimono, held no longer, fell right apart.
And as she turned again I could see, even in the darkness, that she had nothing on underneath it at all.
III
On the following Monday morning I saw Kersch and Co. again and in the afternoon I went back to Nottingham. I had been given the job.
But curiously, for a reason I could not explain, I was no longer excited. I kept thinking of Blanche. I suppose, what with my engagement to Hilda Brownson and so on, I ought to have been uneasy and a little conscience-stricken. I was uneasy, but it was a mad uneasiness and there was no conscience at all in it. I felt reckless and feverish, almost desperate. Blanche was the first woman I had known at all on terms of intimacy, and it shattered me. All my complacent values of love and women were smashed. I had slept with Blanche on Saturday night and again on Sunday and the effect on me was one of almost catastrophic ecstasy.
That was something I had never known at all with Hilda. I had never come near it. I am not telling this, emphasizing the physical side of it and singling out the more passionate implications of it, merely for the sake of telling it. I want to make clear that I had undergone a revolution: a revolution brought about, too, simply by a kimono and a girl’s bare body underneath it. And since it was a revolution that changed my whole life it seems to me that I ought to make the colossal effect of it quite clear, now and for always.
I know, now, that I ought to have broken it off with Hilda at once. But I didn’t. She was so pleased at my getting the Kersch job that to have told her would have been as cruel as taking away a doll from a child. I couldn’t tell her.
A month later we were married. My heart was simply not in it. I was not there. All the time I was thinking of and, in imagination, making love to Blanche. We spent our honeymoon at Bournemouth in September. Kersch and Co. had been very nice and the result was that I was not to take up the new appointment until the twenty-fifth of the month.
I say appointment. It was the word the Brownsons always used. From the very first they were not very much in love with my going to work in London at all and taking Hilda with me. I myself had no parents, but Hilda was their only child. That put what seemed to me a snobbish premium on her. They set her on a pedestal. My job was nothing beside Hilda. They began to dictate what we should do and how and
where we ought to live, and finally Mrs. Brownson suggested that we all go to London and choose the flat in which we were to live. I objected. Then Hilda cried and there was an unpleasant scene in which Pa Brownson said that he thought I was unreasonable and that all Mrs. Brownson was trying to do was to ensure that I could give Hilda as good a home as she had always had. He said something else about God guiding us as He had always guided them. We must put our trust in God. But God or no God, I was determined that if we were going to live in a flat in London the Brownsons shouldn’t choose it. I would choose it myself. Because even then I knew where, if it was humanly possible, I wanted it to be.
In the end I went to London by myself. I talked round Hilda, and Hilda talked round her mother, and her mother, I suppose, talked round her father. At any rate I went. We decided on a flat at twenty-five shillings a week if we could get it. It was then about the twentieth of September.
I went straight from St. Pancras to Blanche. It was a lovely day, blue and soft. It was a pain for me merely to be alive. I got to the shop just as Blanche was going out. We almost bumped into each other.
‘Arthur!’
The way she said it made me almost sick with joy. She had on a tight fawn costume and a little fussy brown hat. ‘Arthur! I was just going out. You just caught me. But mother can go instead. Oh! Arthur.’ Her mother came out of the back room and in a minute Blanche had taken off her hat and costume and her mother had gone out instead of her, leaving us alone in the shop.
We went straight upstairs. There was no decision, no asking, no consent in it at all. We went straight up out of a tremendous equal passion for each other. We were completely in unison, in desire and act and consummation and everything. Someone came in the shop and rang the bell loudly while we were upstairs, but it made no difference. We simply existed for each other. There was no outside world. She seemed to me then amazingly rich and mature and yet sweet. She was like a pear, soft and full-juiced and overflowing with passion. Beside her Hilda seemed like an empty eggshell.
I stayed with the Hartmans that night and the next. There were still three days to go before the Kersch job began. Then I stayed another night. I telegraphed Hilda, ‘Delayed. Returning certain to-morrow’.
I never went. I was bound, heart and soul, to Blanche Hartman. There was never any getting away from it. I was so far gone that it was not until the second day of that second visit that I noticed the name Hartman at all.
‘I’m going to stay here,’ I said to Blanche. ‘Lodge here and live with you. Do you want me?’
‘Arthur, Arthur.’
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’ I simply couldn’t bear the repetition of my name. It awoke every sort of fierce passion in me.
Then after a time I said: ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘About another girl. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hear. I could tell you about other men.’
‘No, but listen,’ I said. ‘I’m married.’ I told her all about Hilda.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It makes no difference. You could be a Mormon and it wouldn’t matter.’
And after that, because it mattered nothing to her, it mattered nothing to me. There is no conscience in passion. When I did think of Hilda and the Brownsons it was like the squirt of a syphon on to a blazing furnace. I really had no conscience at all. I walked out of one life into another as easily as from one room into another.
The only difficulty was Kersch and Co. It was there that Hilda would inquire for me as soon as I failed to turn up.
Actually I got out of the Kersch difficulty as easily as I got out of the rest. I didn’t go back there either.
IV
I went on living with Blanche until the war broke out. I got another job. Electrical engineers were scarcer in those days. Then, as soon as the war broke out, I joined up.
In a way it was almost a relief. Passion can go too far and one can have too much of it. I was tired out by a life that was too full of sublimity. It was not that I was tired of Blanche. She remained as irresistible to me as when I had first seen her in the green and orange kimono. It was only that I was tired of the constant act of passion itself. My spirit, as it were, had gone stale and I needed rest.
The war gave it me. As soon as I came home for my first leave I knew it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Blanche and I went straight back to the almost unearthly plane of former intimacy. It was the old almost catastrophic ecstasy.
I say almost catastrophic. Now, when I think of it, I see that it was really catastrophic. One cannot expect a woman to feed off the food of the gods and then suddenly, because one man among a million is not there, to go back on a diet of nothing at all. I am trying to be reasonable about this. I am not blaming Blanche. It is the ecstasy between us that I am blaming. It could not have been otherwise than catastrophic.
I always think it odd that I did not see the catastrophe coming before it did. But perhaps if I had seen it coming it would have ceased to be a catastrophe. I don’t know. I only know that I came home in 1917, unexpectedly, and found that Blanche was carrying on with another man.
I always remembered that Mrs. Hartman looked extraordinarily scared as I walked into the shop that day. She was an assured, masterful woman and it was not at all like her to be scared. After a minute or so I went upstairs and in my bedroom a man was just buttoning up his waistcoat. Blanche was not there, but I understood.
I was furious, but the fury did not last. Blanche shattered it. She was a woman to whom passion was as essential as bread. She reminded me of that. But she reminded me also of something else. She reminded me that I was not married to her.
‘But the moral obligation!’ I raged.
‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s no more than kissing to me. Don’t be angry, honey. If you can’t take me as I am you’re not bound to take me at all.’
And in the end she melted my fury. ‘What’s between us is different from all the rest,’ she said. I believed her and she demonstrated it to me too. And I clung to that until the end of the war.
But when I came home finally it had gone farther than that. There was more than one man. They came to the shop, travellers in the sweet-trade, demobilised young officers with cars. They called while I was at my job.
I found out about it. This time I didn’t say anything. I did something instead. I gave up what the Brownsons would have called my appointment.
‘But what have you done that for?’ Blanche said.
‘I can’t stand being tied by a job any more,’ I said. ‘I’ll work here. We’ll develop the shop. There’s money in it.’
‘Who’s going to pay for it?’
‘I will.’
Just before I married Hilda I had nearly a hundred and fifty pounds in the bank. I had had it transferred to a London branch and it was almost all of it still there. I drew it out and in the summer of 1919 I spent nearly £80 of it on renovating the Hartmans’ shop. Blanche was delighted. She supervised the decorations and the final colour scheme of the combined shop and café was orange and green.
‘Like your kimono,’ I said. ‘You remember it? That old one?’
‘Oh! Arthur. I’ve still got it.’
‘Put it on,’ I said.
She went upstairs and put it on. In about a minute I followed her. It was like old times. It brought us together again.
‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘That first day, when I came in. You hadn’t anything on underneath, had you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d just had a bath and it was all I had time to slip on.’
‘By God, kiss me.’
She kissed me and I held her very tight. Her body was thicker and heavier now, but she was still lovely. It was all I asked. I was quite happy.
Then something else happened. I got used to seeing men in the shop. Most of them shot off now when they saw me, but one day when I came back from the bank there was a man in the living-room.
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He was an oldish chap, with pepper and salt hair cut rather short.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘what’s eating you?’ I got to be rather short with any man I saw hanging about the place.
‘Nothing’s eating me,’ he said. ‘It’s me who wants something to eat.’
‘Oh! Who are you?’
‘My name’s Hartman,’ he said.
I looked straight at his hair. It was Blanche’s father. And in a minute I knew that he was out of prison.
I don’t know why, but it was more of a shock to me than Blanche’s affairs with other men. Blanche and I could fight out the question of unfaithfulness between ourselves, but the question of a criminal in the house was different.
‘He isn’t a criminal,’ Blanche said. ‘He’s easily led and he was led away by others. Be kind to him, honey.’
Perhaps I was soft. Perhaps I had no right to do anything. It was not my house, it was not my father. Blanche was not even my wife. What could I possibly do but let him stay?
That summer we did quite well with the new café. We made a profit of nine and very often ten or eleven pounds a week. Hartman came home in May. In July things began to get worse. Actually, with the summer at its height, they ought to have been better. But the takings dropped to six and even five pounds. Blanche and her mother kept saying that they couldn’t understand it.
But I could. Or at least I could after a long time. It was Hartman. He was not only sponging on me, but robbing the till too. All the hard-earned savings of the shop were being boozed away by Hartman.
I wanted to throw him out. But Blanche and her mother wouldn’t hear of it. ‘He’s nothing but a damned scoundrel,’ I shouted.
‘He’s my father,’ Blanche said.
That was the beginning of it. I date the antagonism between us and also the estrangement between us from that moment. It was never the same afterwards. I could stand Blanche being nothing more or less than a whore, but it was the thought of the old man and the thought of my own stupidity and folly that enraged me and finally almost broke me up.