by H. E. Bates
That was the right way, I told her.
She laughed. And must she go searching about on her hands and knees for the tiny pebble every time?
It was the right way, I said.
Again she laughed. It might be right but she had no patience to do it. She trusted to luck. If a thing died it died, if it lived it lived. But she had no patience.
I would do it for her, I offered, in the morning, after I had been up to the hills, if she would let me.
It was very kind. She went up the last of the terrace steps hastily, as though she suddenly wanted to have done with it all.
I followed slowly, wondering, not knowing until I had caught up with her that she was embarrassed, almost frightened by what I had said. Her face was flushed, foolishly, like a girl’s. I said nothing and we went in under the fruit trees, in silence, in a conscious, strained silence of common embarrassment.
At the highest point of the long garden stood a walnut tree, and reaching it she paused and looked back over the house and pointed out the road to me lying like a piece of dirty string on the opposite hills.
I was to go up there, as far as I could see the road now, and then turn off to the right, across the bare hill. In the hollow was a farmhouse, where the road branched. I was to go left by the house.
As she was speaking, I picked off a walnut leaf and crushed it in my fingers, smelling the strange walnut-sweet fragrance. She stood very straight, with one arm outstretched, pointing to the hills, her head uplifted. In that moment she looked extremely young, her face very pale now in the twilight against her black hair, and her breast curving out strong and clear, as she stood so straight and lifted her arm.
Back in the house I had made up my mind about her. She cleared away the supper things and brought in the lamp and set it on the bare black table. Just as we had left him, the old man sat there, staring, back in the old mood of half-idiocy.
She brought some sewing and sat at the corner of the table, her face in the half-light, her hands in the full glow of the lamp, she herself silent and absorbed in the work. With my eyes half on her, half on her work basket, a long beautiful basket of pale yellow straw lined with rich green silk and with a hundred silk-lined compartments for her reels and needles and thimbles, I told myself over and over again that I knew all about her. It was so obvious, so easy to see I thought. All her life and her happiness had been tied by the old man. Without him she would have been eligible; the men would have run after her not only for the money but because she was good looking; but no one would want the old man, the idiot, and she would simply go on living out her life until he died and all her chance for love and even her desire for it had gone. It was an old story; and what had at first seemed strange and mysterious was now just common. It was simply her destiny to sit there, sewing and waiting upon the chance guests that she took in to relieve the boredom of it, until he died, and then to sit there again, alone, until she herself died too.
She was sewing a length of lace round the collar of a dress of green velvet. It was a beautiful pale brown colour, as though dipped in coffee. I leaned forward to look at it.
Was it pillow lace? I wondered.
No, she didn’t think so. She didn’t know.
Had she ever seen them making it, with the pillow and the coloured bobbins?
No. She did not lift her head.
It was fascinating. She should learn to do it. I had always liked to see old women doing it.
She looked up at once, startled, a bright pin-light of pain in her eyes. Instantly I knew that I touched her, that I had drawn my finger harshly, as it were, over her heart at a tender place. She was not old, but it was the stupid unthinking inference in my words that had wounded her. After one moment of unconcealed pain her face brightened. All the time she had been a little distant with me, we had talked impersonally, but now she suddenly retreated even further into herself. Her pain and her anger against me were too fresh and sharp to conceal, but presently they were withdrawn, leaving a blankness of silence that was worse than all reproach.
To my relief the old man stirred himself. He seemed to wake up from a sort of trance and presently he got up and went to a cabinet by the fireplace and took out an oblong box.
Putting the box on the table he asked me if I would be so kind as to play him a game of dominoes?
‘It’s years since I played,’ I said.
‘No matter. Threes and fives?’
‘Just as you like.’
‘And stakes? You would like to play for something?’
He had already opened the box and was fingering the dominoes. Before I could answer him I felt the woman looking at me and involuntarily I turned my head towards her. Her anger against me had vanished and she was shaking her head, beseechingly, frowning a little.
‘I’ll play for love,’ I said.
There was something almost sinister about the glance he gave me as he began to spread out the dominoes on the table, each sharp flick of wood against wood a sound of disgust. We divided, I picking up a domino with each hand, he stretching out two thin white fingers of one hand and drawing his pieces sharply across the ice-smooth mahogany. In silence I set up my dominoes in rows, making a triangle. With furtive glances at me, in which I could catch the half-sinister, half-childish glint of idiocy, he faced his own flat against the table, very slowly, as though memorizing every pip. I noticed also that he had kept the pegboard by his left hand; it was a beautiful board of some pale red wood inlaid with green and golden parallelograms and squares, and fine rings of jet about the peg-holes; the pegs themselves were of crimson and white ivory, very small and delicately carved like chessmen. He mistrusted every glance I made at him, the board and the dominoes. The quivering of his hands was pathetic.
When he saw that I had the double-nine his agitation nearly broke into tears, and cautiously, with fear, he lifted a dozen dominoes before he found the nine-blank. Having found it and played it his face broke into a strange slow smile, half-inane, half-cunning.
‘I thought I remembered,’ he said. ‘I thought I remembered.’
All the time I could feel the woman watching us, looking up from her lace. I wondered if she also played dominoes with him and if she did how she endured, night after night, year after year, his suspicions and fears and imbecilities. I wanted to look round and catch the look in her eyes, but presently she put her workcase on the table and left the room. It was a warm, breathless night and I could hear her walking about in the garden, catching the sound of her dress as it brushed sometimes against an overdrooping bush or flower.
In a little while she came back, watched us for a moment, saw that I was losing and went away again. Then she came back and stood watching us for a moment and again retreated. She came back finally as the game was ending. I had let the old man win, and I heard her give a sigh, like someone who had waited for the passing of a crisis, as she saw him pegging himself home.
‘Angela, my dear, I won! I’ve beaten your friend here. I’ve won. Angela, I’ve won. You see?’ He was like a child.
‘Yes.’ She treated him like a child. ‘All right. Now you must go to bed.’
‘Another game, another game,’ he entreated her.
‘No!’ She began to gather up the dominoes into stacks, as though she were counting up money, her lips tight and wintry against him and all his entreaties. She did not speak again and at last he slouched from the room like an awkward boy, muttering to himself about her.
When she had followed him I went out and walked in the garden. The warm summer half-darkness was drenched with the fragrance of the evening-scented flowers, exquisite and intoxicating. It was very quiet. The sun seemed to have burnt up even the tiniest breath of air, leaving only a thick dusk of flower fragrance. The stone of the housewall by the apricot was still warm to the touch. On the house, in the flower-beds and up in the orchard the leaves were black and motionless.
I was looking at the apricot tree when I heard her footsteps coming. When she came round the corner
of the house and saw me, she was startled. ‘Oh, there you are!’ There were times when her voice was girlish, with its sudden breathless timidity.
She had only come to ask me when I would like breakfast, she said. Her breath was agitated, as though she had been running to find me.
Would eight o’clock be too early for them? I wondered.
Oh, no. And would I like to have it in the garden?
It was very nice – but wasn’t it a great trouble to her?
Oh, no, no. She would be up very early herself, and her father never came down till after ten.
Then I should like it very much, I said.
She stood silent, twisting her hands, more timid than ever, as though she wanted to ask me something embarrassing and difficult. But she didn’t speak and at last I asked her about the apricot tree.
It was very old, I said. Did it bear?
It had been planted, she thought, when the house had been built, in 1795. But it never bore anything. There had never been an apricot as far as she remembered.
I looked at the tree, up and down. It was a beautiful tree, strong and well-shaped, the thick branches making a perfect candelabrum up the long wall of the house.
She watched me. It was pruned, she said. It wasn’t that. It had been pruned and shaped every year she could remember.
Had it ever been root-pruned?
What was that? She didn’t understand.
It was simple. It was only that the tree was making wood instead of flower-buds. There was a long taproot which went straight down, too deep, and sucked up a richness from the earth which made the wood but not the blossom. It was the little surface-roots which mattered. The tap-root would have to be severed, so that the flow of sap would be checked, or it could be done by ringing the bark, by making a ring that did not meet by an inch or two about the trunk.
We went on talking for a long time about the tree. From the very first moment together we had talked as it were inarticulately, with a kind of distant embarrassment, impersonally. Her shyness was so conscious and painful that it was infectious. We never looked at each other. Now, in the summer darkness, we began to talk more easily. I often looked at her directly and she would return the look unquiveringly for perhaps half a minute and would let her glance flicker away again with only the faintest unsteadiness or embarrassment. Talking of the tree we grew almost intimate. She even raised her voice a little. Quite soon there were times when it sounded light and gay, the voice of a different woman. At last she broke off in the middle of a sentence, with abrupt anxiety, and looked up at the bedroom window. For a moment or two she listened acutely and then, aware of my looking and listening too, suddenly desisted.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said in answer to my question. ‘I was wondering about my father.’ Her voice trembled a little with the old shyness, but she steadied it quickly. ‘He’s a little tiresome sometimes.’ She paused, but I said nothing. ‘I hope nothing annoyed you – I mean about supper or the dominoes?’
‘Not at all. I enjoyed them both.’
‘You saw me look at you? I mean when he wanted to play for money? I hope you understood?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And you didn’t mind? You see …’ she gave a sudden curious shrug of her shoulders, quick, a little impatient and with something bitter in its very brevity. It was a gesture at once of protest and resignation, at once stoical and cynical. It was scarcely perceptible and gone in a moment, but in it, I thought, was her whole life, the loneliness, and drabness of it, in the middle of luxury, the trial and suffering with the old man, the deadly dreariness of waiting for him to die, the bitter consciousness that it was growing more and more pointless. Like the apricot tree, she was both rich and barren, strong and useless, and the old man, like the tap root, fed her with his riches but kept her starved of joy. A moment later the faintest smile crossed her face and vanished as quickly as the shrug of her shoulders had done. It was so secure and serene, as though she were deep in the preoccupation of some inner joy, that I began to feel that I had been mistaken about her.
In the morning she gave me my breakfast in the garden, on a patch of grass running along the highest terrace. The eggs were under a heavy silver cover and the coffee in a tall silver pot. There were little china dishes of quince jelly and white honey and lemon marmalade. It was all delicious. She had set the table full in the sunlight, so that silver and jelly and honey winked and gleamed with clean flashes of light.
As I sat down at the table she fluttered up the terrace. I could see she was nervous by the way she was folding and unfolding her hands.
Was it all right? She wanted to know. Had I got what I liked?
It was perfect, I said.
That was so nice of me. She was so glad. And had I slept well?
Very well. I didn’t think I had even turned over.
She was so glad. I was sure I hadn’t heard anything in the night?
Nothing. Not a sound.
Hurrying up the steps and across the lawn in the bright early sunlight she had looked tired and old and a little haggard, as though she had not slept well. As I spoke the look of relief in her face was startling. It rejuvenated her. She smiled again with that serene security which had surprised me in the half-darkness the night before. Remembering her words, ‘Sometimes he is a little tiresome’, I could guess at the reason for her tired face, but the smile was a mystery. It was as though something precious and comforting which she had forgotten had flashed across her mind again, startling her into joy. Without another word she went across the terrace and down the steps to the flower-beds, where I could not see her. But later I could hear the snip of her scissors at the flowers and the sound of her voice, almost girlish, singing tranquilly.
After breakfast I was walking upon the terraces, looking at her carnations, when she came up to find me, as timid as ever again, with a note in her hand.
If I were going upon the hills, she said, in the old timid voice, would I mind very much dropping in this note at the house, the farmhouse she had told me about, where the road branched? There wouldn’t be an answer and I needn’t even wait to see anyone. I could just slip the note into the letter-box in the front door.
I took the note and promised to deliver it and before I departed she gave me a packet of sandwiches and some little yellow summering apples. I had told her that I should walk all day and not come back till evening.
‘If you bring back any flowers,’ she said in her calmer, natural voice, ‘I’ll show you how to press them and keep their natural colours.’ And as I finally went off through the garden gate she called, ‘It’s a lovely day for you.’
I thought there was relief in her voice and that perhaps she was glad to be rid of me. When I turned to shut the gate and say ‘Good-bye’ she had gone.
Down in the village and along the road winding gradually up to the hills beyond it there was a strange empty Sunday silence over everything. The earth was still fresh and sweet, though the sun was lifting up clear and hot, burning the dew away quickly except where the trees and the stone walls of the roadside threw wet shadows. In the sunlight the dewless campanulas were like little bells of blue transparent glass. The big wild geraniums were opened flat as blue pennies, and the little yellow snapdragon spikes growing on the walls and in the sun-parched grass were as clear and pure as daffodils. As the road climbed up the flowers grew thicker and finer, the harebells more exquisite, their hair-stems frailer and finer and the colour of the flowers themselves changing from place to place like the blue of the sea. On the hills behind the village the willow-herb lay in vast patches, as soft as pink clouds between the dark young trees.
In a dip of the land before the hill climbed finally up I found the farmhouse. I opened the iron gate and went across the deserted cowyard. Nothing stirred.
The house itself looked empty. It was a large, three-storied place of dark stone, early Victorian, with a blue slate roof and tall sash-windows set in regimental lines in the high flat walls, green with many dam
p-stains where the roof-spout had leaked. A strip of garden had once been laid out before the front door, but the wooden palings had rotted and fallen and patches of nettle and sunflower had grown up and obliterated them. Rabbits had left their dung-tracks over what had once been the flower-beds and where nothing now bloomed except the rank sunflowers. The place was dead and rotten, and the silence of it alone lived on with something sinister and rotten about it also. The door had no letter-box and with the letter in my hand I hesitated. And wondering what to do I looked for the first time at the name, ‘Mr. Abel Skinner’, written in large, clear, candid handwriting across the full width of the envelope. Finally I put the envelope under the door and walked away across the deserted yard and up the road again without having seen or heard a soul.
High up, on the bare sun-baked hillside, the morning was wonderful. The heat of the August sun was strong and naked, the stone walls of the cornfields already shadowless, the shadows of the trees gradually shrivelling also to black spots, the leaves above them drooped and motionless.
Half-way up the road I struck away across the bare downland, and climbed to the spine of the hill and walked westward along the ridge. Up the road, across the field, and along the crest of the hill itself, wherever I went, the harebells went with me, pure and ineffably lovely, as unstained and perfect as though it were the first morning of the world, the very beginning of flowers and light.