by H. E. Bates
They worked steadily on and the sun began to swing round behind the ash tree and the heat began to lessen and twilight began to fall. While the two men were mowing side by side on the last strip of grass, the woman began to pack the victual-bags and put the saddle on the horse under the ash tree.
She was strapping the girth of the saddle when she heard feet in the grass and a voice said softly:
‘Any more beer?’
She turned and saw Ponto. A bottle of beer was left in the bag and she brought it out for him. He began drinking, and while he was drinking she gazed at him with rapt admiration, as though she had been mysteriously attracted out of herself by the sight of his subtle, conceited, devilish face, the memory of his embrace by the pond and the beautiful untiring motion of his arms swinging the scythe throughout the afternoon. There was something altogether trustful, foolish and abandoned about her, as though she were sublimely eager to do whatever he asked.
‘Think you’ll finish?’ she said in a whisper.
‘Easy.’
He corked the beer and they stood looking at each other. He looked at her with a kind of careless, condescending stare, half smiling. She stood perfectly still, her eyes filled with half-happy, half-frightened submissiveness.
He suddenly wiped the beer from his lips with the back of his hand and put out his arm and caught her waist and tried to kiss her.
‘Not now,’ she said desperately. ‘Not now. He’ll see. Afterwards. He’ll see.’
He gave her a sort of half-pitying smile and shrugged his shoulders and walked away across the field without a word.
‘Afterwards,’ she called in a whisper.
She went on packing the victual-bags, the expression on her face lost and expectant. The outlines of the field and the figures of the mowers became softer and darker in the twilight. The evening air was warm and heavy with the scent of the hay.
The men ceased mowing at last. The boy had gone home and the woman led the horse across the field to where the men were waiting. Her husband was tying the sack about the blade of his scythe. She looked at Ponto with a dark, significant flash of her eyes, but he took no notice.
‘You’d better finish the beer,’ she said.
He took the bottle and drank to the dregs and then hurled the bottle across the field. She tried to catch his eye, but he was already walking away over the field, as though he had never seen her.
She followed him with her husband and the horse. They came to the gate of the field and Ponto was waiting. A look of anticipation and joy shot up in her eyes.
‘Why should I damn well walk?’ said Ponto. ‘Eh? Why should I damn well walk up this lane when I can sit on your old hoss? Lemme get up.’
He laid his scythe in the grass and while the woman held the horse he climbed into the saddle.
‘Give us me scythe,’ he asked. ‘I can carry that. Whoa! mare, damn you!’
She picked up the scythe and gave it to him and he put it over his shoulder. She let her hand touch his knee and fixed her eyes on him with a look of inquiring eagerness, but he suddenly urged the horse forward and began to ride away up the lane.
She followed her husband out of the field. He shut the gate and looked back over the darkening field at the long swathes of hay lying pale yellow in the dusk. He seemed pleased and he called to Ponto:
‘I don’t know what the Hanover we should ha’ done without you, Ponto.’
Ponto waved his rein-hand with sublime conceit.
‘That’s nothing,’ he called back. ‘Me and my old dad used to mow forty-acre fields afore dark. God damn it, that’s nothing. All in the day’s work.’
He seized the rein again and tugged it and the horse broke into a trot, Ponto bumping the saddle and swearing and shouting as he went up the lane.
The woman followed him with her husband. He walked slowly, limping, and now and then she walked on a few paces ahead, as though trying to catch up with the retreating horse. Sometimes the horse would slow down into a walk and she would come almost to within speaking distance of Ponto, but each time the horse would break into a fresh trot and leave her as far behind again. The lane was dusky with twilight and Ponto burst into a song about a girl and a sailor.
‘Hark at him,’ said the husband. ‘He’s a Tartar. He’s a Tartar.’
The rollicking voice seemed to echo over the fields with soft, deliberate mocking. The woman did not speak: but as she listened her dark face was filled with the conflicting expression of many emotions, exasperation, perplexity, jealousy, longing, hope, anger.
The Hessian Prisoner
It was towards the middle of June, in the year 1917, when Jasper and Clara Bird obeyed for the first time certain instructions written out for them by a little black major presiding over the camp for prisoners of war, and harnessing their white horse and cart, drove off a little before eight o’clock one morning to fetch the German they had hired with so much misgiving in a great extremity.
They often remembered that day. It was especially lovely: the air sultry with a menace of thunder and full of the singing birds as they drove away from the farm; the clear sky was alive with larks, and blackbirds and finches and yellow buntings were piping gently about the fields and in the thick trees, which were still sopped with dew. Like bass viols in an orchestra, bees had already begun to enrich and unify those sounds into a single immense harmony, the soft, throbbing concert of perfect summer.
It was hay-time. The sound of a horse-mower or a whetstone upon a scythe would echo across the valley; and even at that early hour of the day freshly-mown swathes were already turning white under the heat of the sun.
War had forced this small tenant-farmer and his wife to a crisis in their affairs; by instinct they feared and hated war, but recently its barbarism had brought calamity upon them. In times of peace and in the early years of war, they had employed two labourers and a boy of sixteen, but suddenly the boy had drifted off to make boots in an adjoining town, and the men had failed to convince the tribunal; and then the news had come that one was dead and that the other lay stricken by some nameless incurable disease, on strange and distant territory. The hopeless and chaotic inhumanity of war then became suddenly personal; war itself assumed, as it were, a physical shape, and for that shape they gradually conceived a terrible, vindictive hatred. Besides grief there arose the problem of how to replace the men, and they discovered that men were scarcer than gems. Women, dressed foolishly in smocks and breeches, were plentiful enough but they distrusted and despised them. And so for a long time they deliberated, until at last it appeared that nothing remained for them but to act as their neighbours had done; and finally, timidly and suspiciously, they applied for a prisoner of war.
Driving to fetch him for the first time they sat in silence. Their steadfast, honest, taciturn faces seemed uneasy and plunged in gloom. Leaning his arm on the disused umbrella-basket, the man drove in a desultory, almost indifferent fashion, and beside him his wife never moved except to chew a yellow bent or to finger, abstractedly, her dark hair.
Otherwise they looked, that morning, much as usual. The man was without a jacket and his stoat-coloured corduroys were held up by two leather thongs affixed in turn by thin nails for buttons. A panama hat, ripe and ancient even before catastrophe had fallen upon them, flooded his face with a sunny orange; his mouth was concealed by an unclipped yellow moustache bristling like horned wheat; his fair brows straggled down, in tiny curls, before his blue, drowsy eyes. His wife was a neat and compact body, with hair of jet and breasts as small as teacups, and the blouse she wore was of the same blue-and-white stuff as Jasper’s shirt, cut from a cheap length picked up one day at market. Her crude boots were laced with string, and that morning her white crushable hat had fallen in cow-slime and simply through negligence or haste had not been cleaned again. With the motion of the cart their loose, brown awkward bodies jolted constantly up and down, and their eyes fixed themselves continually upon the distance, as if watching something.
They
had many doubts as to the wisdom of hiring this prisoner. Though it constantly troubled them, however, they secretly wondered what he would be like. Deeply sceptical, the man fancied a stout, spectacled, ponderous fellow who, in private life, had perhaps been a doctor or a minister of religion, a person utterly useless to him. Reminiscent of what she had so often seen in the newspapers, Clara always visualized some immense, barbaric Prussian who would terrify their lives and steal and finally escape, leaving them at the mercy of the authorities.
And as they drove up to the gates of the camp they became nervous, foreseeing the worst. Some sentries were pacing their distances under a great avenue of trees. Jasper had to present an official paper, converse a little, and then follow a soldier down the avenue out of sight.
Impassively chewing the grass and regarding the sentry with native curiosity, the woman suddenly let loose her imagination and a host of unbelievable horrors and terrors stormed through her mind, until she felt she already feared and hated the prisoner.
‘What with one thing and another, he’ll make life miserable for us,’ she thought.
In the midst of these meditations Jasper reappeared in the avenue. She looked up suddenly and seeing the prisoner between Jasper and the soldier, thought in a flash:
‘He’s a terrible great fellow!’
That was all. And before she was aware of it, all formalities were over and she was making room for him in the rear of the cart. Then events came swiftly; the prisoner climbed into the cart, weighing it heavily backward; the sentry retreated; Jasper moved the seat a couple of notches forward for better balance; and suddenly they drove away.
The man, a Hessian, was a young fellow, very tall and even fairer than Jasper, with a physique that had something godlike and splendid about it. Once or twice they heard him moving clumsily behind, and Clara, suspicious and afraid, turned to see that he was not escaping them. But it was simply that he could not adjust his huge proportions to the confined space of the cart.
During that journey they repeatedly spied upon him from the corners of their eyes. All this time his large hands lay loosely on his knees and he constantly surveyed the sky, the distant woodland, and the fresh fertile valley through which they were passing, and something docile, ingenuous, wondering, was always expressed in that stare, and sometimes he appeared to sigh, as if with profound relief.
At last the small white farmstead appeared and the pony slackened its pace.
‘Get down and open the gate,’ said Jasper almost in an undertone.
Clara stood up; and then a curious thing happened. The springs of the cart gave a sudden heave, and with an easy, cumbrous alacrity, the prisoner jumped down and flung open the gate, and before she could put her foot on the step or could recover from the astonishment, he caught the pony’s head and walked beside it until Jasper halted. Then he stood quite still, almost to attention. His large, mobile eyes seemed to reflect perfectly the heaven’s blue in the shadow of the stables as he stood, very watchful and very alert, waiting for her to alight. But when Jasper commenced in his customary deliberate way to unharness, the prisoner rapidly unloosed the belly-band, then the bridle and collar, and suddenly, almost as if impatient, seized the harness complete and bore it into the stables. There he noted with a singular air of concentration where each part was hung, nodding frequently in a way almost boyish in its vehemence, so that when Clara came in and dropped the long green cart-cushions on an orange-box, she returned the sudden stare he gave her with confusion, fear and mistrust, already resentful of his presence. Jasper, failing also to understand this adroitness and courtesy, never withdrew his eyes from him.
Shortly, in silence, they walked to the house, Jasper leading, after him the prisoner, then Clara. All their movements were provoked by fear and by distrust, so that when Clara dropped a hairpin suspicion and dread forced her to keep watch on him even as she groped for it among the straw.
It was their custom to eat first at half-past five and again at nine, and Clara began to cut pieces of bread and Jasper slices of cold bacon immediately they reached the kitchen, and some dry boughs were found and put under the kettle. All the time the Hessian leaned timidly against the lintel, as boys do at the doors of blacksmiths’ or bakers’ shops, and watched them.
‘Come in—eat—sit down!’ Jasper suddenly urged; but the Hessian did not move. ‘Eat—fodder—bread! Eh? Come—understand?—Sit down, eh?’ But there was no answer.
Clara left off cutting and stared, just in time to see Jasper, suddenly inspired, rub his paunch and laugh, and to hear the prisoner’s sudden low, ‘Ja! Ja!’ of delight.
‘Come? Understand?’ bawled Jasper with immense joy, rubbing his belly repeatedly.
‘Ja! Ja!’
And wiping his hands over his greyish-blue uniform and looking this way and that, with a little curiosity and mistrust perhaps also, the prisoner slowly crossed the threshold.
It seemed natural to them that he should eat with them. They had no children. If there had been many prisoners it would have been different; in that case a barn would have done; but about one prisoner alone in a barn there seemed something callous and altogether against their principles, and very deep within them also burned a sense of fierce responsibility, of unshakable, stolid honour, the thought that they must never lose sight of him, that they must guard him with the bravest vigilance, that they must see him safely back to the camp each evening. Failure in these things brought consequences unknown, unthinkable, and terrible.
They began to eat. Like a child in the presence of strange people the prisoner was awkward and timid and never spoke, but only once made a sound, low and inarticulate, as of gratitude, when a cup was given him, though Jasper’s sudden snap, like a dog’s, at a great slice of bacon, a crude sort of encouragement to him to do likewise without delay, brought a smile to his soft mouth and destroyed momentarily his look of astonished vacancy.
Eventually the meal was over. Leading the way into the cow-yard, Jasper was dwarfed by the magnificent bulk of the young Hessian, and something about that mere physical incongruity attracted Clara, so that she remained on the doorstep, watching, some moments after hurling the warm tea-leaves among the hens.
Jasper turned into a barn and the Hessian followed him, stooping. A curious piece of comedy began. Jasper shovelled up some dung with grave deliberation; the prisoner watched; then with an emphatic gesture, he flung the dung into the sunshine, and the prisoner nodded; almost delighted at the success of this dumb show, Jasper then made a singularly expressive gesture intended to be authoritative and at the same time knowing and good-natured, and suddenly performing a very ancient trick of his, lowering his right eyebrow and gazing heavenward as if to say, ‘None of your tricks with me,’ he thrust the shovel into the prisoner’s hands, planted himself firmly upon his legs and acted with remote resemblance to a prison-warder. Probably much too excited to note the details of all this, the Hessian began at once shovelling away dung in enormous quantities and with a pleasing competence and gusto. Jasper, plunged into agreeable reflections, stood with some pleasure meditatively scratching his back. Then by a strange coincidence the Hessian also began to scratch, and suddenly they looked at each other, with the result that, amid a great burst of laughter, the Hessian in frantic haste made a search of his person, and being apparently rewarded made an extremely clever click with his thumb and forefinger and gravely blew the imaginary louse away. Whether this was reality or only the prisoner’s foolery, Jasper never knew, but abruptly he went off into uncontrollable and prolonged laughter while the Hessian caught more fleas and disposed of them with the dexterity and callousness of great experience.
Unexpectedly the situation became worse. Jasper’s back began to itch in a most alarming way, and in an inaccessible and maddening spot. He began squirming, scratching, dancing and saying: ‘Oh, my God! this is too much, I’ll swear my oath this one’s a monster!’ until the Hessian, thinking this foolery also, went wild with delight and began punching Jasper in the small o
f the back, which produced exactly the effect of his punching a rubber squeaky doll, except that Jasper was screaming with laughter at the top of his voice, resembling more than anything the screeching of an enraged goose.
Clara had not heard that laugh for many years; now it seemed to her like some uncanny and fantastic echo of the past. She gave one immense start on hearing it, and then from the kitchen door ran across the cattle-yard as if it were a cry of pain.
At the barn, however, she stood petrified. Jasper and the prisoner looked to be wrestling or fighting. At the same time there was this uproarious, unaccountable, almost unseemly laughter.
‘What’s the matter with you, you idiots?’ she managed to call at last.
‘Eh? What?’ the laughter lessened a little.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she cried.
Her face expressed something so astounded and so incredulous that they again burst into laughter, which was prolonged some minutes, while she, impatiently or mutely again urged them to explain themselves. At last she was told:
‘We both think we’re covered in fleas! That’s all. You see he can’t explain, and neither can I.’
Suddenly she also began laughing, and her laugh caused a shy, soft and almost startled expression to flicker over the face of the prisoner, and from that moment all was different. Fear no longer troubled her, and from the way Jasper looked up at the prisoner, still laughing and occasionally squirming, she could tell that he also had passed out of reach of the same emotion.
‘It’s all right,’ she thought, ‘most likely he’s glad to be out of it. Perhaps he even knows that he’ll be happy here—at any rate we shall feed him, authorities or no authorities, and perhaps in time we shall learn not to worry him quite so much.’
Back in the house these notions increased in their peculiar persuasion, so that her suspicions also lessened, and her mind became sweet and calm.
Then Jasper came in, laughing still, but in a suppressed way, like a hen clucking with pleasure. He belched out, with evident satisfaction too, the words: