The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

by H. E. Bates

  ‘What were they doing?’ I said.

  ‘Butterin’ his belly,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘Only way to git the swellin’ down. Had to keep butterin’ on it for two more days.’

  ‘Gabriel, Gabriel!’ his housekeeper said, raising her hands again, ‘I hope you’re listening? I hope you’re taking it down?’

  ‘’Course you can use lard,’ my Uncle Silas said to me, airily, ‘but butterin’ on it’s better.’

  Calmly, one by one, he started to take the roasting potatoes from the fire. Innocently, with virtuous care, he filled his glass with warm dark wine. Solemnly he raised the glass to heaven.

  ‘Your very good health,’ he said, ‘Gabriel, me boy.’

  The Singing Pig

  My Uncle Silas once had a sow that produced a litter of sixteen three times, seventeen twice and finally one of nineteen. She could also sing very nicely. She could sing The Bluebells of Scotland and several other tunes, including one my Uncle Silas himself composed for her.

  I know all this because once, when he was staying with my grandfather and grandmother, he told me so.

  ‘Now about this ’ere tune I med up for the sow. It wur about an old gal what——’

  ‘That’s right!’ my grandmother said. ‘Fill the child’s head with more nonsense! Make up a few more tales! I’ll be burned if he won’t end up as bad as you are!’

  ‘Now look ’ere,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘it’s all very well you a-gittin’ obstropolus about it, but I’m a-tellin’ on you she could sing. And I’m a-tellin’ on you she could sing because I ’eard her sing. And so did George here. Didn’t you, George?’

  George was my grandfather. He was a very mild, gentle man, not at all given to being obstropolus, as my Uncle Silas said of my grandmother, but most anxious at all costs to keep peace with the world.

  ‘Well, I don’t——’ he started to say.

  ‘And it’s no use you a-wellin’ and a-don’tin’, George,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘because you wur there. You ’eard her as plain as I did. I ’eard her a time or two afore you did, but you wur there that night when——’

  ‘What night?’ my grandmother snapped. ‘Some night you were well soaked, I warrant. If it were one o’ them nights I shouldn’t wonder what you did hear. Old Nick a-whistlin’ down your neck very likely.’

  ‘I’m a-talkin’,’ my Uncle Silas said, with great solemnity and a certain sadness of eye, ‘if you’ll give me a chance, about the night the old gal died.’

  It was always rather touching, I felt, when my Uncle Silas revealed that certain sadness of eye. Suddenly he would draw from his breeches’ pocket his big red handkerchief, lift it to his face as if to wipe away a dewdrop or a tear and then, solemnly, slowly, sadly, let it fall to his lap.

  There was in this gesture a certain element of fatalism, a faint suggestion of the last rites. It was also rather as if my Uncle Silas knew perfectly well that he was asking you to believe in the impossible and was resigning himself to the fact that you were, at the same time, a person of pitiful, puny belief.

  ‘Arter all,’ he would say, ‘you git dogs what can dance on their hind legs an’ count numbers an’ do tricks. You git talkin’ jackdaws and performing fleas. An’ I knowed a chap at Bedford once what had talkin’ hens——’

  ‘We had a talking hen once!’ I said. ‘It used to talk when you took it corn——’

  ‘There y’are, you see,’ my Uncle Silas said with bland and wonderful innocence, ‘jist what I’m a-tellin’ you.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m standing here for, listening to your tomfool tales,’ my grandmother said in tart disgust, ‘when I’ve got starching and ironing to do——’

  After my grandmother had flounced from the room my Uncle Silas suddenly winked at my grandfather and started whispering.

  ‘George,’ he said, ‘nip out the front door and underneath the back seat o’ the trap you’ll see me medicine bottles. Two on ’em. And on your way back bring me a wine glass.’

  While my grandfather was out of the house my Uncle Silas blew his nose several times on his red handkerchief and once or twice coughed very heavily. I was quite worried by this and said:

  ‘Have you got croop? Is that what your medicine’s for?’

  ‘Well, it ain’t exactly croop, boy,’ he said, ‘an’ yit it is. I git a terrible dry ticklin’ now and then in me gizzard.’

  ‘Like hens do?’

  ‘Well, I’m an old cockerel,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘And it’s allus wuss wi’ cockerels.’

  Presently my grandfather was back with the wine glass and my Uncle Silas’s medicine. There were two kinds of medicine, one pale yellow, the other a deep tawny red.

  ‘I hate medicine,’ I said.

  ‘Quite right, boy, quite right,’ my Uncle Silas said and started pouring himself a glass of the red medicine. ‘Terrible stuff, the way it hangs round your gills.’

  A moment later the glass of red medicine disappeared with remarkable swiftness and my Uncle Silas was saying, as he smacked his lips loudly, ‘Allus git it down quick, boy, like that. Then it don’t taste so bad.’ At the same time he started pouring himself a glass of the yellow medicine and presently that too disappeared, also with remarkable speed.

  From the cunning smile on my Uncle Silas’s face and the fruity way he smacked his lips several times I somehow got the impression that the medicine was, perhaps, not quite so bad after all.

  ‘Is it nasty?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it is,’ my Uncle Silas said, ‘but I think I must be a-gittin’ used to it.’

  He then put the two bottles of medicine into his jacket pocket and hid the wine glass behind the back of the chair. Then he settled back in the chair, gave a series of ripe, rumbling belches, wiped his lips with his red handkerchief, and said blandly:

  ‘Boy, I can feel it slippin’ down and a-doin’ me a bit o’ good a’ready.’

  For a moment the crusty lids dropped over his eyes and he looked for all the world like a sleepy old cock about to drop off to sleep and I said:

  ‘Don’t go to sleep, Uncle. You said you’d tell me about the pig.’

  He cocked one eye open.

  ‘Ah, the old gal.’

  And for the second time he made that sad and regretful gesture of resignation, dropping his handkerchief on his knee.

  ‘Well, I bought her one day at Nenweald market,’ he said. ‘She wur about six weeks then and I was drivin’ her steady on back home—course you know about drivin’ pigs don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t hurry them.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Well, we jogged steady on and when we got to The Bull at Souldrop I could see she needed a rest. So I tied her up in the yard and went inside, and I wur jist about gittin’ to know what the inside of a mug looked like when a chap named Charlie Sanders come in and said “Silas, that pig o’ yourn ain’t ’arf makin’ comical noises.”’

  My Uncle Silas then went on to tell me how he went out into the pub yard and found the pig not, as he was careful to explain, exactly singing, but making a curious kind of talking noise, as if she were actually trying to tell him something.

  ‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘but she stopped it as soon as we started on home. And then I twigged as that wur what she wanted. She wur tellin’ on me, see? Talkin’ to me. It makes me feel proper queer even now when I think on it.’

  My Uncle Silas in fact felt so proper queer that he was forced, a moment later, to take another rapid dose of medicine.

  ‘But you said she did sing,’ I said.

  Smacking his lips, my Uncle Silas said gently:

  ‘Yis, yis. I know. But that wur later. Fust she started to have the litters.’ My Uncle Silas for once appealed to my grandfather for both information and support. ‘How many litters did the old gal have, George?’

  ‘Well,’ my grandfather said, ‘she had a fourteen and a fifteen and then the two sixteens. And then——’

  ‘Most onaccountable,’ my Uncle
Silas said. ‘Sixteen, then seventeen and then, dall it, I be damned if she didn’t have eighteen. Ain’t that right, George?’

  ‘That’s right,’ my grandfather said. ‘And then we thought she were goin’ to have nineteen——’

  ‘Don’t talk about it, George,’ my Uncle Silas said, and once again he used that sudden and resigned gesture of sadness, ‘it gives me a turn to think o’ the poor old gal.’

  So much of a turn did it give my Uncle Silas that suddenly, once again, he was forced to take to medicine.

  ‘But when did she sing?’ I said. ‘All the time?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘No, no, no—on’y at them times.’

  I naturally wondered about them times and I asked him what they were.

  ‘Them times,’ he said, ‘when she wur in pig. When she were a-havin’ on ’em. Ain’t that right, George?’

  ‘Well——’

  ‘Did she sing real songs?’ I said. ‘Like The Bluebells of Scotland?’

  A certain dreaminess came over my Uncle Silas’s face as, for a moment or two, he pondered on this.

  ‘Now you come to say,’ he said, ‘it sounded uncommon like that the time she had sixteen. Then the time she had seventeen it were jist like The Rosy Tree.’

  Several times during this conversation I thought how strange and queer and unlikely it was that a pig could sing but whenever I did so I remembered how true it was, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, that dogs could dance and jackdaws talk and fleas perform with little carriages, and my doubts were assailed. But what finally put an end to all my doubts was another sad, sudden dropping of the handkerchief as my Uncle Silas said:

  ‘Yis, she on’y done it at them times. When I sat up wi’ her o’ nights. There I’d be a-sittin’ all alone in the pig-sty with the lantin, a-waitin’, and all of a sudden she’d start. Then I knowed the little ’uns wur a-comin’.’

  Inquisitively and sharply I picked on what I thought was a significant phrase in this.

  ‘All alone?’

  ‘I knowed you wur goin’ t’ask that,’ he said. ‘I knowed that’s what you’d ask. And that’s what I got a-thinking. There I was all alone wi’ her and I thought perhaps I wur ’earin’ things. But no,’ he went on, ‘no.’

  Once again my Uncle Silas seemed so affected by his remembrance of things that he took another rapid dose of medicine.

  ‘But then your grandfather heard it,’ he said. ‘That night we both sat up with her and we thought she was goin’ to have nineteen. Ain’t that right, George?’

  ‘Well——’

  ‘Poor old gal,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘I shall never forgit it. Poor old gal.’

  Picking up the medicine glass, slowly filling it and holding it up to the light, he seemed to stare through it as if seeing far beyond it the dark little pig-sty lit by nothing but the light of the candle lantern, with the sow breathing her gentle song. This too was what I saw as he described how, on a late October night, he and my grandfather waited for the sow to deliver her largest and, as it turned out, her last litter.

  ‘Too much for the old gal,’ he said. ‘But she wur a good old gal. She went on singing to the end.’

  Slowly, with sadness, my Uncle Silas lifted the red handkerchief and let it fall to his knee; and if there had been a tear in his eye I should not have been surprised to see it there.

  ‘Poor old gal,’ he said and as he raised to her memory another glass of medicine I felt like crying too.

  Perhaps there are no singing pigs; and perhaps it would be silly, in any case, to cry for them if there were. But then there are a great many people, as my Uncle Silas pointed out, who can’t sing either, and I can think of quite a few who do not move me half so near to tears as my Uncle Silas’s dying sow and her gentle song.

  The Fire Eaters

  My Uncle Silas at one time knew two gentlemen named Foghorn Freeman and Narrer Quincey and between them, literally and otherwise, they set the town on fire.

  Foghorn Freeman was a big man with a voice that seemed to come, booming and hoarse, out of a cave; he wore crisp sandy military moustaches of splendid out-curving design and had lately returned—it was then some time in the early nineties—from service in India, I think the North-West Provinces, where women were two for an anna and life generally not much more expensive and where little things like setting towns on fire were, it seemed, all in the day’s work of a soldier of the Queen. ‘All Sir Garnet!’ Foghorn used to roar. ‘Catch ’em with their ambags down!’ Quincey was what my Uncle Silas called ‘a narrer-gutted man.’

  They were the days when men went off into fits of the blues for three weeks on end, fighting the devil in the shape of street lamp posts and then rushing about the town screaming, ‘Don’t let ’em git me! They’re arter me! Don’t let ’em git me!’ My Uncle Silas and Foghorn and Narrer also rushed about the town, drunk as newts, tying tin-cans to cats’ tails, fighting all-comers, wrecking pubs, putting chamber-pots on steeples, roaring hell and damnation and engaging in other harmless pursuits like letting the fire-horses out at midnight.

  ‘Allus ready for a bit o’ fun,’ my Uncle Silas said when they rolled three lighted tar-barrels into the middle of the mayor’s parade on the Sunday of the Fifty-Feasts. ‘Loved a bit o’ fun. Liked to enjoy we-selves. Wadn’t a man who could stop us either.’

  It was about this time that the parson died: an oldish, long-winded preacher, not necessarily killed, but then again not helped, by opening the Bible-class lecture on a quiet Sunday afternoon and seeing six demented ducks fly out to the tune of ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore distressed?’

  In his place came a young man, fresh from Oxford I think, earnest and high-minded and rather short-sighted and with, as my Uncle Silas said, the mouth of a proper fly-catcher. My Uncle Silas had not much use for parsons. They roused the Saxon in him, or something else of that primitive, simple, earthy nature, with a parallel hatred of mealy, fly-catching mouths. Surplices and vestments inflamed him like red rags. Chanters and psalm-singers and Bible thumpers, of which the countryside was all too full, turned him into a healthy fire-eater on the devil’s side.

  ‘’Umbuggin’ popery!’ he used to rage darkly. ‘’Umbuggin’ money-mekking game.’

  In the course of a few weeks the young new parson began to speak darkly too.

  There were, he said from the pulpit, evil forces abroad. The devil’s forces and the devil’s voices and devil’s hands were at work in the town and everywhere the devil stalked unleashed and unafraid. After my Uncle Silas and Foghorn and Narrer had let the fire-horses out again and rung the Bede House bell at midnight and tied a chamber-pot on the weather-cock he preached, with pain and sorrow, of ‘the black trident that is pointed at the heart of this little town.’

  ‘We wur the trident he meant,’ Silas said, ‘me an’ old Foghorn and narrer-gutted Quincey.’

  All this time the young new parson was to be seen flying open-mouthed across the small town square, under the chestnut trees, in vivid vestments that changed with flashing bewilderment from day to day, and even from morning to afternoon, according to the demands of the high ecclesiastical calendar. Stoles of gold and purple, glimpses of scarlet silk under long white surplices, beads and crosses—Rome, my Uncle Silas considered, had wormed its evil way into town.

  ‘Even had a hat on,’ my Uncle Silas said: as if that, above all, were the crown of popishness. ‘A black ’un. Looked like a cross between a saucepan and what we tied a-top o’ the Bede House weather-cock.’

  ‘Here’s the old gal with his ambags on!’ Foghorn would shout across the square. ‘Treacle trousers!’

  Some time after this Silas had the misfortune, as he came out of The Griffin, blood-shot eye gleaming, red lips wickedly wet and a certain absence of steering noticeable in his thick bow legs, to run into the flying figure of purple and gold and scarlet, complete with canonical chamber-pot, as it flashed across the square.

  ‘Ah! Silas, I have been wanting for some
time to buttonhole you.’

  ‘Well, ’ere’s me buttonhole,’ Silas said. ‘Now you git hold on it good an’ proper while you got the chance.’

  ‘I did not quite mean it like that. It was a sort of figure of speech—I——’

  ‘Well then,’ Silas said, ‘you jis stop figurin’ and speechin’ and git on wi’ your ’umbuggin’ fancy-work while I goo an’ ’ave a wet at The Dragon.’

  ‘I think it all too obvious you have had a wet already.’

  ‘Jis’ washed me mouth out with a drop,’ Silas said. ‘I don’t deny it.’

  He blew with magnificent and snotty indifference into his large red handkerchief and the young man said:

  ‘You are a menace to the town. You and Freeman and that Quincey fellow. People are going in terror. They dare not go out at nights.’

  ‘Dear oh! dear.’

  ‘I will not tolerate it. It has gone beyond all limits. Never the one of you is ever seen at church, in God’s house, behaving in godly fashion—you take us back to the days of bear-baiting and cock-throwing and hooliganism of that kind.’

  ‘Dear oh! dear.’

  ‘You never lift a finger to show regret or mitigation. You glory in it!—that’s worst of all.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Silas had a way, sometimes, of lowering his eyes, of drawing half over them a pair of butter-smooth lids as meek and bland as a child’s. ‘If that’s the way it is I’m very sorry, sir. What would you like us to do?’

  ‘I should not take it at all amiss if you came to church once in a while——’

  ‘Very well then, sir,’ Silas said. ‘I ain’t much of a church-going man. Nor yit ain’t Foghorn and Quincey. But if we can git over there once in a while we will.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ the young man said. ‘I truly appreciate it. It only remains to be seen——’

  ‘Yessir,’ Silas said. ‘It jis’ remains to be seen.’

  The following Sunday there were Foghorn and Quincey and my Uncle Silas sitting in the front pew at church like a row of innocent owls. ‘You never see sich ’umbuggin’ palaver in all y’ damn days,’ my Uncle Silas said. ‘A-burnin’ this and a-wavin’ that and a-waterin’ summat else. I never see sich ’umbuggin’ gooin’ on in me life. Wuss’n Sanger’s Circus.’