The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

by H. E. Bates

  He ceased talking, and after the sound of his harsh, uncouth racy voice the summer afternoon seemed quieter than ever, the drowsy, stumbling boom of the bees in the July flowers only deepening the hot drowsy silence. I took a drink of the strong, cool, flower-odoured wine and waited for my Uncle Silas to go on with the story, but nothing happened, and finally I looked up at him.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  For a moment or two he did not speak. But finally he turned and looked at me with a half-solemn, half-vivacious expression, one eye half-closed, and told me in a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, all and more than I had asked to know.

  ‘She gave me the lily,’ he said.

  The Revelation

  My Great-uncle Silas was a man who never washed himself. ‘God A’mighty,’ he would say, ‘why should I? It’s a waste o’ time. I got summat else to do ’sides titivate myself wi’ soap.’ For years his housekeeper washed him instead.

  Every morning, winter and summer, he sat in the high-backed chair under the window of geraniums waiting for that inexorable performance. He would sit there in a pretence of being engrossed in the newspaper of the day before, his waistcoat on but undone over his collarless blue shirt, his red neckerchief dangling on the arm of the chair, his face gloomy and long with the wretchedness of expectation. Sometimes he would lower the corner of the newspaper and squint out in the swift but faint hope that she had forgotten him. She never did. She would come out at last with the bowl of water and the rank cake of yellow soap that he would say she had been suckled on, and the rough hand-flannel that she had made up from some staunch undergarment she had at last discarded. In winter the water, drawn straight from the well, would be as bitter and stinging as ice. She never heated it. And as though her own hands had lost all feeling she would plunge them straight into it, and then rub the soap against the flannel until it lathered thinly, like snow. All the time he sat hidden behind the newspaper with a kind of dumb hope, like an ostrich. At last, before he knew what was happening, the paper would be snatched from his hands, the flannel, like a cold compress, would be smacked against his face, and a shudder of utter misery would pass through his body before he began to pour forth the first of his blasphemous protestations. ‘God damn it, woman! You want to finish me, don’t you? You want to finish me! You want me to catch me death, you old nanny-goat! I know. You want me …’ The words and their effect would be drowned and smothered by the renewed sopping of the flannel and he would be forced at last into a miserable acquiescence. It was the only time when the look of devilish vitality and wickedness left his face and never seemed likely to return.

  Once a week, also, she succeeded in making him take a bath. She gave him that, too.

  The house was very old and its facilities for bathing and washing were such that it might have been built expressly for him. There was no bathroom. My Uncle Silas had instead a small iron bath, once painted cream and never repainted after the cream had turned to the colour of earth, which resembled some ancient coracle. And once a week, generally on Fridays and always in the evening, the housekeeper would drag out the bath from among the wine-bottles in the cellar and bring it up and get it before the fire in the living-room. Once, in early summer, as though hoping it might make that miserable inquisition of bathing impossible, he had filled the bath with a pillow-case of cowslip heads and their own wine-yellow liquor. It did not deter her. She gave him his bath in a pudding-basin instead, sponging him down with water that grew cooler and colder as he stood there blaspheming and shivering.

  Very often on fine winter evenings I would walk over to see him, and once, almost forgetting that it was his bathnight, I went over on a Friday.

  When I arrived the house was oppressively warm with the heat and steam from the copper boiling up the bath-water in the little kitchen. I went in, as I always did, without knocking, and I came straight upon my Uncle Silas taking off his trousers, unconcerned, before a great fire of hazel faggots in the living-room.

  ‘Oh! It’s you,’ he said. ‘I thought for a minute it might be a young woman.’

  ‘You ought to lock the door,’ I said.

  ‘God A’mighty, I ain’t frit at being looked at in me bath.’ He held his trousers momentarily suspended, as though in deference to me. ‘Never mattered to me since that day when …’

  He broke off suddenly as the housekeeper came running in with the first bucket of boiling water for the bath, elbowing us out of her way, the water falling into the bath like a scalding waterfall. No sooner had the great cloud of steam dispersed than she was back again with a second bucket. It seemed hotter than the first.

  ‘Out of my way!’ she ordered.

  ‘Git us a glass o’ wine,’ said Silas, ‘and don’t vapour about so much.’

  ‘You’ll have no wine,’ she said, ‘until you’ve been in that bath.’

  ‘Then git us a dozen taters to roast. And look slippy.’

  She was already out of the door with the empty bucket. ‘Get ’em yourself!’ she flashed.

  ‘I got me trousers off!’ he shouted.

  ‘Then put ’em on again!’

  This relentless exchange of words went on all the time she was bringing the remaining buckets of water in and he was undoing the tapes of his pants, he shouting for the wine and the potatoes and she never wavering in her tart refusals to get them. Finally as he began to roll down his pants and she began to bring in the last buckets of water he turned to me and said:

  ‘Git a light and go down and fetch that bottle o’ wine and the taters. Bring a bottle of elderberry. A quart.’

  While I was down in the cellar, searching with a candle in the musty, wine-odoured corners for the potatoes and the bottle, I could hear the faint sounds of argument and splashing water from above. I was perhaps five minutes in the cellar, and when I went back up the stone steps, with the wine in one hand and the candle in the other and the potatoes in my pockets, the sound of voices seemed to have increased.

  When I reached the living-room Silas was standing up in the bath, stark naked, and the housekeeper was shouting:

  ‘Sit down, man, can’t you? Sit down! How can I bath you if you don’t sit down?’

  ‘Sit down yourself! I don’t want to burn the skin off me behind, if you do!’

  While he protested she seized his shoulders and tried to force him down in the bath, but his old and rugged body, looking even stronger and more imperishable in its nakedness than ever, was stiff and immovable, and he never budged except to dance a little as the water stung the tender parts of his feet.

  ‘Git the taters under!’ he said to me at last. ‘God A’mighty, I’ll want summat after this.’

  Gradually, as I was putting the potatoes in the ashes under the fire, the arguments quietened a little, and finally my Uncle Silas stooped, half-knelt in the water and then with a brief mutter of relief sat down. Almost in silence, the housekeeper lathered the flannel she had made from her petticoat and then proceeded to wash his body, scrubbing every inch of it fiercely, taking no more notice of his nakedness than if he had been a figure of wood. All the time he sat there a little abjectly, his spirit momentarily subdued, making no effort to wash himself except sometimes to dabble his hands and dribble a little water over his bony legs. He gave even that up at last, turning to me to say:

  ‘I never could see a damn lot o’ use in water.’

  Finally when she had washed him all over, she seized the great coarse towel that had been warming on the clothes-horse by the fire.

  ‘You’re coming out now,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know as I am.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said? You’re coming out!’

  ‘Damn, you were fast enough gittin’ me in—you can wait a minute. I just got settled.’

  Seizing his shoulders, she began to try to force him to stand up just as she had tried to force him, only a minute or two before, to sit down. And as before he would not budge. He sat there luxuriously
, not caring, some of the old devilish look of perversity back in his face, his hands playing with the water.

  ‘He’s just doing it on purpose,’ she said to me at last. ‘Just because you’re here. He wants us to sit here and admire him. That’s all. I know.’

  ‘Don’t talk so much!’ he said. ‘I’m getting out as fast as you’ll let me.’

  ‘Come on, then. Come on!’ she insisted. ‘Heaven knows we don’t want to look at you all night.’

  The words seemed to remind my Uncle Silas of something, and as he stood up in the bath and she began towelling his back, he said to me:

  ‘I recollect what I was going to tell you now. I was having a swim with a lot o’ chaps, once, in the mill-brook at …’

  ‘We don’t want to hear your old tales, either,’ she said. ‘We heard ’em all times anew.’

  ‘Not this one,’ he said.

  Nevertheless, her words silenced him. He stood there dumb and almost meek all the time she was towelling him dry and it was only when she vanished into the kitchen to fetch a second towel for him to dry his toes that he recollected the story he had been trying to tell me, and came to life.

  ‘I was swimming with these chaps, in the mill-brook, and we left all our clothes on the bank …’

  ‘Mind yourselves!’

  The housekeeper had returned with the towel, and my Uncle Silas, as though he had never even heard of the tale he was so anxious to tell and I was so anxious to hear, said solemnly to me:

  ‘Next year I’ll have peas where I had taters, and taters where I had carrots …’

  ‘Dry your toes!’ said the housekeeper.

  ‘Dry ’em yourself and don’t talk so much!’

  At the same moment she thrust the towel in his hand and then began to scoop the water out of the bath with an enamel basin and put it into a bucket. When the bucket was full she hastened out of the room with it, her half-laced shoes slopping noisily in her haste. Almost before she had gone through the door and long before we heard the splash of water in the sink my Uncle Silas said swiftly ‘Tot out,’ and I uncorked the wine-bottle while he found the glasses in the little cupboard above the fire.

  We were standing there drinking the wine, so red and rich and soft, Silas in nothing but his shirt, when the housekeeper returned. She refilled the bucket quickly and hastened out again. No sooner had she gone than he turned to me to continue the story, and standing there, his thick, blue-striped flannel shirt reaching below his knees, the hairs on his thin, gnarled legs standing out as stiff as the bristles on his own gooseberries, the wine-glass in one hand and the towel in the other, he looked more wicked and devilish and ugly than I ever remembered seeing him.

  Going on with the story, he had reached the point when the men, coming out of the mill-stream, had found their clothes gone, when the housekeeper returned.

  ‘I think I s’ll have peas along the side o’ the wood,’ he said serenely, while she refilled the bucket, ‘and perhaps back o’ the well.’

  ‘You get your toes dried and get dressed!’ she ordered.

  ‘And you mind your own business and get the supper. And look slippy!’

  As soon as she had left the room again, he resumed the tale, but no sooner had he begun than she returned. It went on like this, he telling a sentence of the tale, and she returning and he interspersing some angelic and airy remark about his peas and potatoes until at last she came in to spread the cloth on the table and lay the supper. She was in the room for so long, laying out the plates and the cutlery, that at last he gave it up, turning to me with an air of satanic innocence to say:

  ‘I’ll tell you the name o’ the tater when I can think of it. My memory ain’t so good as it was.’

  After that he proceeded meekly to put on his pants, tucking in the voluminous folds of his shirt before tying up the tapes. While the tail of his shirt was still hanging loose he remembered the potatoes I had put in the hot ashes under the fire and, seizing the toasting-fork, he began to prod their skins.

  ‘Damn, they’ll be done afore I get my trousers on,’ he said. And standing there, with the toasting-fork in his hand, his pants tight against his legs and the tail of his shirt protruding he looked more than anything else like the devil of tradition, prodding the roasting sinners.

  The veritable air of devilishness was still about him when, finding a moment later that the housekeeper had left the room again, he turned swiftly to me to say:

  ‘Give us another mouthful o’ wine. I’ll tell you what happened.’

  I had hardly begun to pour the wine into his glass before he began to say, in a devilish, husky voice that was hardly more than a whisper: ‘Some gals had got the clothes. They stood upon the bridge and dangled our trousers over and threatened to drop ’em in the mill-pond. What d’ye think of that? There we were swimming about wi’ nothing on and they wouldn’t give us the clothes.’

  He went on to tell me how gradually they grew tired and desperate and at last angry at the three girls dangling over the bridge while they grew colder and colder in the deep mill-pool and how finally he himself climbed out of the water and ran up to the bridge, stark naked, and frightened the girls into dropping the clothes and retreating. Long before he had finished I noticed that the housekeeper had returned and was standing in the doorway, unseen by my Uncle Silas, attentively listening.

  ‘God A’mighty, you should have seen ’em drop the clothes and run when they see me. All except one.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Run off across the meadow with my clothes under her arms. What d’ye think o’ that?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Run after her.’

  He ceased speaking, and taking a slow drink of his wine he moistened his thick, red lips with his tongue, as though the tale were not finished and he were trying to remember its end. A strange almost soft expression of reminiscence came over his face, flushed with the bath and the wine, as though he could see clearly the river, the meadow, and he himself running across the summer grass, naked, pursuing the girl running away with his clothes.

  ‘Rum un,’ he said at last. ‘I never did find out who she was. Never did find out.’

  At that moment the housekeeper came in from the doorway, moving so quietly for once that he scarcely heard her, the sound of the cheese-dish being laid on the table startling him so much that he could only turn and stare at her, fingering the tapes of his pants and at a loss for words.

  ‘Didn’t you ever find out?’ she said.

  ‘No. I was just telling the boy. It’s been so damn long ago.’

  She looked at him for a moment and then said:

  ‘I know who she was. And so do you.’

  It was the only time I ever saw him at a loss for an answer and it was almost the only time I ever saw her smile. He stood there slowly licking his lips in uneasy silence until at last she snapped at him with all the old habitual tartness:

  ‘Get yourself dressed, man! I ain’t running away with your clothes now, if I did then.’

  She began to help him on with his clothes. He still had nothing to say, but once, as she was fastening the back buttons of his trousers and he stood with his face turned away from her, he gave me a smiling but inscrutable look, rich with devilry, his eyelids lowered and his lips shining wet with the wine.

  And I began to understand then something I had not understood before.

  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 motion 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.