Day's End and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  Since The Spring Song is featured in Day’s End and Other Stories, first published in 1928, here we unite them all for the first time as a collection of Bates’s earliest short stories.

  The autumn landscape had aged to brown. Up the open hill swept a stronger wind than for many days, piloting overhead heavy squadrons of cloud, in colour and appearance not unlike the beard of the man standing on the hill nor the smoke of the fire over which he watched. These – clouds, smoke – were blown fiercely and silently along. The skirmish of dry leaves, the sharp tinkle of dust and the quick, ravenous lick of the flames on the rubbish were the only sounds.

  Now and then, making rare intervals in his long scrutiny of the fire, the man would look up, either in stretching out a long arm for new fuel, or, more infrequently still, to search sharply the landscape, bare and unshielded as far as he could see. The sight of anything living would make him grunt into the flames; seeing nothing he might spit harshly or wet his lips.

  The afternoon went on. As the fire gorged, the man, slow and definite of movement, fed its many tongues with rubbish. To-morrow he would scatter the cold ashes. The day after that he would perhaps plough a bit – he did not know. But to-day he would simply stand and watch till the fire was no more than a red eye in the ground under dusk. There was nothing more to be done; no one to disturb his placidity, and so long as it was dry he was content in that state of serenity.

  Composedly he contemplated the flames. When an hour struck into the afternoon air he heard nothing. Under the heat of the fire he half dozed.

  “Muster Cordon!”

  He swivelled round sharply at the sound of his name.

  “Well?”

  In answer the little girl edged nearer the fire, outstretching her hands, in one of which gleamed an envelope. She shivered and said:

  “There’s a note come for you.”

  He took it. “Don’t you go an’ drop it in the fire, then,” he warned her.

  “I’m cold,” was all she whispered.

  The tissue of notepaper blew out in the wind. Cordon could not read the writing of which it was full, though the printed heading seemed strangely familiar. Approaching the fire at length, he handed the letter to the girl with a slow gesture. She took it without a tremble as if it were nothing new to her to read the letters of that grey animal, Dan Cordon.

  But as she read she noticed him growing rapidly statuesque and began to babble without thinking: “We note that … note that … you …”

  “Read that bit again,” he bellowed into her face.

  She quivered. “Where?”

  “We note …”

  “We note that … that … note you …” she babbled again.

  “Get on! We note …”

  She managed to read: “We note that you have made no reply to our fre … quent … com … munic … ations … regarding the property, known as Nine-acre Close ad … join … ing … that of our client. In view of the fact that we …”

  “God Almighty.”

  The paper disappeared into the heart of the fire. The girl crouched away from him. In his eyes the light seemed to be broken up into thousands of furiously gleaming crystals.

  “They can go to Hell!” he raved at her. “It mean they want Nine-acre Close now. That’s all. But it’ll be the flat land next, then the hill, then the paddock. When they’ve got that they won't be satisfied until they’ve got me an’ the house an’ the whole bloody ship!”

  “Will they turn us out?” whispered the girl.

  “Eh?”

  “Will they ...?” Her voice expired in a whisper.

  “Most likely, the mangy dogs. It’s robbery! It’s only robbery! But they don’t get an inch! Not a damned inch!

  The girl crossed her hands over her breast in an attitude of protection, not daring to speak. Fearfully, out of the corners of her eyes she caught sight of his, coloured red like the fire he was stoking frenziedly. She began to wish tremblingly for the time when she might run home and tell her mother: “Dan Cordon’s gone mad!”

  Mad she certainly judged him as he abruptly flung down the fork, and strode off, fiercer than the wind he met coming up the hill in damp, furious blasts.

  She watched him as if paralysed. Then: “Our Father which art in ’eaven,” she began to babble quickly.

  By the time she had finished that frenzied prayer he was far out of hearing, hands clenched fiercely in his pockets as he contemplated “the property, known as Nine-acre Close, adjoining that of our client.”

  Yes, to the eastward lay the Cowper’s land, pasture; while to the west, now nearly shrouded by rain-mist, lay land of the same ownership, pasture again. His own, like a yellow tongue, unhealthy, ill-kept, curled between the green, symbolic of trouble.

  Nevertheless, he looked and thought: “It’s better land than it looks. It’s never been worked properly. Next year I’ll – God damn it – I won’t sell! It’s good land! I won’t sell! I know what it means – first one thing …”

  Raging, be entered the house, accosted his thin wife and declared: “Cowper wants to buy Nine-acre again. By God if he comes here!—”

  “Eh?” her mouth gasped.

  “He dursan’t come. I can tell a wrong’ un. Thieving’s in him. His father stole that twenty-four acre on the hill from my old Dad, and that was good land. And this is good, too.” He finished up on an abrupt note of defiance: “We ain’t got no bad.”

  The woman watched, half philosophical, as he ate a basin of bread-thick soup. In his anger he sucked noisily at the food. She could not help thinking, with a trace of bitterness:

  Good land! It had given up, last year, a round two quarters of wheat! Next year – she sometimes wondered if there would be a next. If so, its doom was already spelt. Nothingness was already in sight. After all, what could live on that hill? – only that, which, like themselves, had been condemned to it. Something surrendered each year. How they themselves kept up that grim, fiercely silent struggle year after year she did not know.

  She remembered the day when they had owned land – real, rich land – but that also had gone little by little, always after that struggle had proved too much. Silently and grimly they had renewed effort, until now, when silence and restraint had become impossible. For weeks, in everything the man did, had lain that unceasing growl, until to-day – to-day he had begun to bark, after being tight-lipped and laconic for sixty years.

  She continued to stand over him as he devoured the soup – loosed fury in his every movement, while between the gulps he reiterated: “I won’t sell. By God it’s robbery, that’s all it is!”

  It was true, she knew. Cowper had a reputation as a driver of hard bargains that were thefts – all but in name. She recalled how the twenty-four acres on the hill had gone – the only piece of land they had possessed. For the rest they had nothing but little yellow tongues of earth in damp hollows or on the driest spots of the hill, and a square of green they called the paddock, where the lame hens followed the track of the starving horse. Suddenly incensed, she cried:

  “Stick ’em out!”

  He made no reply, but, suddenly quietened, sat gazing into his empty soup-plate, as if oblivious.

  * * *

  The Parish Council, which always met in the room above the bar of “The Bell,” was collectively warming its hands over the fire there as that same night the clock drew to seven-thirty.

  At one end of the group Robert Cowper was in low conversation with his brother Charles.

  “How many times has he been asked already?”

  “That’s nothing, merely natural shyness, reluctance to part with a possession. He’s meek. Nobody has ever heard him protest. The devilish part is to get him to speak at all.”

  “Gentlemen!” piped the clerk, “gentlemen, the minutes of the last meeting! Ready, gentlemen?”

  “He must speak.”

  In a slow, coughing, mumbling procession the Council shuffled to the table, and the clerk began the minutes, reading in a thin treble: “M
r. Chairman ...” As he piped on Cowper looked down the table. Soon that remark must be addressed to him. Sooner or later. Nothing to stop him, only a little more land, only Cordon to stop him.

  The clerk droned on, nobody attending, a few breathing with suspicious deepness. “Which was, gentlemen, unanimously carried on the motion of … Your pleasure, Mr. Chairman?”

  There was an obsequious bow. The Chairman paused, pen in hand. Suddenly the door opened with a crash. On the threshold stood a thin, grey-bearded man, an outstretched forefinger shaking like a twig in the direction of the table.

  “I won’t sell! By God it’s robbery – you robbed my father of twenty-four acres on the hill. Go to Hell! I won’t sell, I must live – It’s robbery, robbery!”

  Then abruptly pulled down by half a dozen hands appearing from the darkness of the stairs, he continued to scream out disconnected threats and curses that grew gradually fainter.

  Somebody muttered “Drunk,” a heavy word that fell on the stillness like a groan. In a feeble voice the clerk commenced his piping. “Gentlemen ...” but stopped as if his tongue had become frozen. The Council managed its breathing warily and pathetically, as if, had it been possible, they would have existed momentarily without breath. One or two had risen, only to remain standing awkwardly.

  The little fat publican appeared at the head of the stairs, feverishly wiping his hands across his aproned stomach.

  “He ain’t ’isself, gentlemen. They say he went that mad this afternoon on having a note come. Yessir, it is funny, like.”

  Somebody commented: “A quiet man.”

  “Respectable,” vouchsafed the Chairman.

  “Yessir,” said the publican obsequiously and disappeared.

  Below the raving continued. “I won’t sell! We must live! No, I can’t!” It reached the Council with distressing shrillness.

  The voice ended abruptly, bringing silence again. The Council exchanged looks, which were uneasy, and waited for the heavy tramp of feet which had begun to ascend the stairs.

  White-faced and visibly ill at ease the publican showed himself in the doorway. His voice had dropped to a whisper, awful and remote.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “He just dropped down dead, just dropped down, like. They say he went mad – mad. Yessir.”

  For a moment he paused to observe the effect of that tragic utterance, then, very quietly, the door closed. One or two members sat down, sighed heavily and were silent. There were white faces. Someone gulped at a bottle with a great sigh. After a pause the Chairman began:

  “Gentlemen, I’m sure … In view of the fact that this …” His words half-suffocated each other. “Our quiet, respected … whom we all knew and esteemed ... never heard to utter a complaint … a long life.” He wandered helplessly in a waste of disconnected speech. “This is one of those things we cannot understand. God, our Almighty Father, God ...”

  A silence descended in which the wind could be heard wandering over the leafy floor of earth, a silence with which none cared to tamper. Men held their breath. Across the table a hand trembled like a pale leaf on the black surface of a pond. The fear of death made itself visible in a hundred minute signs and it seemed as if the whole gathering gave up a great sigh as Robert Cowper expressed agreement in a heartfelt voice:

  “Hear, hear!”

  And then again, deeper and more fervent still, a certain profound richness about the grave intonation of his voice:

  “God rest his soul.”

  A Note on the Author

  H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

  Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

  His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

  During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).

  His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

  Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

  H. E. Bates was awarded the CBE in 1973, and died in 1974. He married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent.

  Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/HEBates.

  Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Day’s End and Other Stories first published in Great Britain in 1928 by Jonathan Cape

  ‘In View of the Fact That’ first published in Great Britain in 1927 by E. Archer

  Copyright © Evensford Productions Limited, 1927 and 1928

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448214907

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