by H. E. Bates
‘What is it?’ the boy whispered. ‘Caesar, what is it?’
The sheep-dog started a low barking, and the boy observed that the sheep had ceased eating, and that a few had scattered, lumbering away from the hurdles, bleating and jostling each other.
He took his stick and advanced towards them, curious and puzzled, trying meanwhile to quieten the dog’s suspicious and angry noises. But the dog was too excited, and barked on.
The sheep showed signs of agitation. In twos and threes they were loping stiffly away from the hurdles. Each animal kept up the same mournful, protesting bleat. Suddenly they scuffled madly, their scurrying feet hammering on the frozen earth with distress, leaving a clear space scattered with white fragments of half-eaten turnips. A black shape showed itself through a gap in the hurdles a second later.
It shook itself and stood upright. The flock scattered, wild and afraid. The boy saw an enormous and formidable dog, something like a hound, regarding him with a sort of disdainful ferocity, its black flanks heaving rapidly, its long red tongue hanging quivering from its great, angular, upraised head. There was something fearful and sinister about its intense motionlessness, as if it were about to spring, and the boy felt faintly afraid. The dog at his side had ceased barking and stood with its eyes immovably fixed on the strange dog, its body excited and quivering.
The black hound presently lowered its head, and, as if ignoring them both, sniffed the earth in sweeping circles. It then began to move forward, with a sort of cunning indifference, without raising its head, to where the sheep were huddled in a foolish, bleating crowd.
Almost a minute passed. The hound moved a little each second, sniffing the snow till it rose in delicate white powder, while the boy remained as if transfixed, not daring to stir.
Presently the sheep-dog began a low guttural growl. At once the hound shot up its head and glared, erect and vicious, growing more antagonistic as the growling became fiercer. His teeth began to gleam from beneath his black, sneering upper lip. His eyes filled with little curious crystal fires. But he never moved. Similarly there was no stir from the sheep-dog, and the two seemed to wait for each other.
The boy waited too. Half a minute later he was shaken from his immobility by the two dogs springing simultaneously forward at each other, screaming and yelping. The first contact flung the sheep-dog violently into the air. He fell sprawling on his back in the snow, kicking and howling with wild cries. He was not nimble in recovering his feet, and while he still struggled the hound leapt at his throat, amazing in its swift savagery. The sheep-dog uttered a scream, threw off the hound with a tremendous effort, stood erect again and suddenly sprang completely over the other’s great black head. He landed perfectly, and while the hound stood baffled flung himself at his hind-quarters, swivelling him about like a toy. In return, with a great snarl of astonished fury, the black dog arched himself for one second into an immense bow, seemed to stiffen and then shot into air, hovering and quivering like flexible steel. Then he descended. The sheep-dog was stunned and smothered, and could not resist the hound tearing at the soft skin of his throat with a wild lust, as if he had gone mad. Only after scratching at the hound’s soft snout and eyes could he manage to roll over. There was blood on the light hair under his throat. He shook himself, gaining time by rapid cunning feints at the hound’s fore-feet, while the black dog howled and prepared to attack again. At last they fell on each other with terrible fury, rolling over and over in the snow, ripping blood from each other, more and more appalling each moment in their naked passion and primitive madness.
The boy stood as if petrified. Now and then the dogs came hurling together until they almost touched his feet. Occasionally he lashed the air with his stick. When he saw blood on his dog’s white throat he opened his lips and shouted wildly with unintelligible horror.
The sheep in their terror ceased bleating and huddled themselves afar off, silently, like children. The boy in a sort of panic began to think it would never end.
He observed however that the sheep-dog’s resistance grew gradually more desperate, and that at times, pitifully old and weak, he allowed himself to be outwitted without a murmur. There was a distressful weariness about him. At last the hound flung him against the hurdles and buried his teeth in his scarred throat until the blood came teeming and reddened the froth on his jaws.
‘Caesar! Caesar!’ the boy began to shout. ‘Caesar!’
In obedience the dog made supreme efforts, scratching with strange power, until the hound relaxed. There was a brief respite, but when the sheep-dog struggled up, with his blood staining the snow, and the dogs stood for a moment regarding each other, he looked piteous and exhausted while the hound with its great head flaunted upwards looked magnificent and terrible.
Suddenly the hound made a spring, striking the sheep-dog in the flank, and by the force of the blow rolled him over and over until he stretched against the hurdle again, defenceless and unresisting except for a feeble snapping of his jaws and a weak (as if playful) parrying and clawing with his feet.
‘Caesar!’ the boy urged. ‘Up, Caesar! up! up! Caesar, Caesar!’
The hound however buried his jaws again, the blood spouted once more and the eyes of the old dog, already bloodshot and glassy, gradually enlarged with a hopeless terror, and their remaining light seemed slowly to contract, flicker feebly and retreat until at last it perished, and the head drooped, as if severed, without a sound.
As though unconscious of this, the hound did not release the sheep-dog’s throat until the boy, possessed with sudden courage, began to shout again. Then he looked at the boy with a kind of triumphant malice, after which he made off with long, drooping strides, scattering the sheep again as he clambered over the hurdles.
A strange numbness immediately possessed the boy. Not daring to move, he could only gaze from the dog to the stream of blood winding into powdery snow, and back again to the dog, and then to the blood again, backwards and forwards, until the blood began to darken and freeze.
A horrible sickness came over him, and simultaneously the thought that he must run and tell what had happened. Running towards the birch copse he remembered the dog’s master and hesitated. It was growing twilight. A little snow had begun to float down, no larger than bird-seed. He went on, gradually more afraid of his own thoughts, past the birch copse. There was a little fretting sound among the slender young trees, and their dark catkins had begun to quiver.
Someone was coming up the hill, a bearded man, with a long coat and a stick in his hand. He called out to demand as he saw the boy:
‘What the devil? What’s wrong? Why ain’t you over along o’ the sheep?’
The boy did not move. He only whispered: ‘Summat’s been an’ killed the dog. I was coming to tell.’
‘Summat?’ he repeated angrily. ‘What do you mean? Killed him? What’s happened? The dog?’
‘Yes, the dog. Caesar,’ the boy said, looking afraid. ‘There’s been another dog after sheep-worrying, a big black ‘un, and Caesar went for him. They had a set-to. But Caesar was no good, not from the first. He bit his throat out. He hadn’t a chance.’
‘And you let him? My God! And you let him?’
‘What could I do? They were mad as mad. I couldn’t! I daren’t! Go and tell him, you go and tell him.’
‘Yes. It’s a nice thing to tell, ain’t it?’ he sneered, but the boy persisted, driven by fear:
‘Yes, but you go and tell, you go and tell. He’d smash me.’
The man stood asking more questions, very unwilling. But presently, with repeated curses, he began slowly to retrace his steps. The snowflakes, as large now and as hard as grains of wheat, beat his face as he ran, in haste to relate what had happened. But soon he fell into a walk, then ran, and then walked again. And gradually he, too, began to reason that it would not be pleasant to face the sheep-dog’s master, and that it would not be easy to convince that brutal, violent-tempered man of the dog’s death. The snow began to fall on the frozen hedges
like hail. What would he say? How would he explain it? How would he resist that inevitable passionate fury? He could only find one answer:
‘He’ll smash me. My God! He’ll smash me, he’ll rip me to pieces.’
The Russian Dancer
Rain was shooting in cold streaks up the railway lines from the south-west. It beat in lashing gusts under the glass roofs of the platforms and tortured the steam of passing engines to fantastic shreds. Occasionally it drove down under the platform-roofs clouds of greenish-white smoke against which the passengers hunched their shoulders and groped briefly as though in a fog. It was half-past three in the afternoon and the Sunday express for the north was due in twenty minutes.
The door of the station restaurant was constantly opening and shutting and often the wind would snatch the door from a passenger’s hand and close it with a crash. The door was massive and hung on a powerful spring, and the sound of it shutting made an empty, melancholy echo.
A man and a woman were drinking tea at a table in a corner of the restaurant. The woman often bit her lips and waited for the crash of the door to come as though waiting for a blow, and once she began a complaint in a voice that was loud and husky;
‘That door’ll drive me dotty. Why don’t everybody have to work back-stage for a month? I only slammed a door once and that was in O’Neill’s revue—the old O’Neill, you wouldn’t remember him. I was only a kid myself. Just my luck, the manager happened to be walking past the dressing-room. Talk about hair off! I was only a kid. O’Neill told me I could dance and that was all I thought about. Charlie Mace was manager then—don’t suppose you’d remember him either. His wife shot herself—she was jealous of a tart Charlie was sweet on, and she wanted to show off I suppose.
‘But that was afterwards. I’d been Olga Ivanovna a good while then, four years or more. It had to be temper or nothing with old Charlie. He came in and chalked me off till I cried my heart out. I was in the chorus in those days—two shows a night and two matinees, and living in a bed-sitting room at that and no jam on it. I couldn’t sing for a week after what Charlie said. I just used to open my mouth. I thought my heart would break.’
She ceased talking and picked up her cup and drank. She looked somewhere between forty-five and fifty and her skin, heavily powdered, hung in wrinkled, bluish-grey pouches under her chin and eyes. Age and hard work and indulgence had worn her lips until they were loose and drooping. She had tried to paint them into a firm line again, but the colour of the rouge was vivid and artificial, and the lips themselves were hard and pathetic in their falsity. She was wearing a cheap fur coat which she had thrown back over her heavy shoulders, showing a bright crimson dress stretched tight over her heavy bosom. She did not look like a dancer. Her hair had been dyed a light red colour and a wisp or two of it had fallen from under her black hat, half hiding her long scarlet ear-rings. Sometimes she shook her head in a quick curious way and the ear-rings danced, making her look both absurdly coquettish and a little more vulgar. When she sat still and talked, or when she drank and forgot herself, she looked as though she were worried by something and very tired.
‘Mind you, I ain’t saying that chorus work wasn’t good for me,’ she went on. ‘I was only a kid, and it was the best thing for me. I was all silly kids’ dreams when I first began dancing. You know—sort of thing that’s no good to you or to anybody else either, only a nuisance. You like another cup of tea? I’ll ’ave another myself then if you won’t. It’s in the pot.’ She poured out the tea and looked at the rain slanting incessantly beyond the buffet windows.
‘Might as well be wet inside and out, what do you say? Seen your bags all safe?’
‘Oh! yes.’
‘Costs you a pretty penny for kit, I’ll bet, don’t it!’
The man did not answer. He was young, sleek and unusually elegant; his clothes seemed to have been sewn very tightly to his body, giving the impression that they could never crease or slip a fraction out of place; beside him the woman with her cheap fur coat, her loud-coloured frock and her dyed hair, looked like a caricature in unkind colours. He had listened to her long garrulous speeches without a change in his expression of frozen boredom. He looked as though oblivious of her, and when he felt that someone was looking at him he succeeded in looking even more oblivious. He stared for long intervals at the rain on the windows and at the waitresses polishing glasses and serving tea behind the counter. She had come into the buffet for a cup of tea and quite by chance she had seen him sitting there. He was a conjuror and they had appeared for three nights at the same theatre; he had topped the bill and she, together with a low comedy duo, had been at the bottom. He performed all his tricks in absolute silence; it was profoundly impressive and he knew it; he walked on and performed and walked off again with an air of sublime indifference that held the world spellbound and breathless. By the time Olga Ivanovna came on, the audience had become tired and critical. She had herself billed as the world-renowned Russian Ballet-Danseuse and Operatic Contralto; she began her turn by flitting briefly to and fro about the stage like a corpulent spirit, and then, because it tired her to dance for very long, she skipped from the stage, quick-changed into a deep-necked dress of crimson velvet, and swept grandly to the footlights and said: ‘I veel now zing you a few selections from zee grand operas.’ She sang something by Tosti and Gounod, and sometimes when she felt that she had missed her audience she sang ‘Just a Song at Twilight.’ Her voice was heavy and quavering and melodramatic, but sometimes the audience would fall for her and then she would go home to her lodgings and her supper of chops or fried fish with a feeling of elation and triumph. She had sung the ‘Song at Twilight’ the night before and suddenly she turned to the young man and said:
‘You heard me give ’em “Just a Song at Twilight” last night, didn’t you? They gave me a nice encore. Hear ’em whistling?’ She paused and drained her cup and leaned forward on her elbows and said intimately:
‘You know what fetches ’em don’t you? It’s the name—the Russian touch. If I was plain Lily Miller they wouldn’t look at me. Thanks, I don’t mind if I do.’ The young man dangled a cigarette case in front of her, and she took a cigarette and lit it and puffed a cloud of smoke into the air. ‘And do you know what? You know what I should do if I were you? I’d be Italian—Mariano, something like that. It’s your style. You’re young—you ought to change now before you make your name. Think of Mariano in big letters on the Coliseum. See what I mean? It’s romantic. It fetches ’em. It pays too. You don’t want to be drifting round the provinces all your life, do you? You can be clever and all that, but if your name don’t catch you’re nowhere. Look at me. Ever see a photo of me when I was a kid?—with a face like I had I ought to have been in Royal commands. Instead I never had a ghost until I changed from Lily Miller to Olga Ivanovna. Half a minute, I’ll show you that photo of me as a kid. The train ain’t due, is it?’
The young man looked at the watch on his wrist and then looked at the rain and then at the dancer, all without answering. He felt bored to exasperation. Her voice was loud and coarse, and he wondered if she would ever stop talking. The train was not due for ten more minutes. The dancer put her cigarette in a saucer and searched through her handbag. He kept thinking how unlucky it was that she should have chanced to come into the restaurant and see him sitting there, and he felt that he detested her. He looked at her as she searched through her handbag for the photograph and he felt suddenly that she looked less like a dancer than an old prostitute, over-dressed and over-painted, worn out by more years of giving herself than perhaps she herself could remember. He looked at his watch again and at the same moment she raised her eyes and reached for her cigarette and put it between her lips. She had found the photograph.
‘Don’t rush off,’ she begged him. ‘The train ain’t coming, is it? Pity we ain’t goin’ north together, I’ve got another half an hour to wait. Well, that’s me. I was only a kid then.’
She began to powder her face with a big white puff,
spilling a white sprinkle of powder over the big arch of her bosom. While she looked at her face in the mirror of her handbag he accepted the photograph casually, holding it for some moments in his hands while contemplating the rain everlastingly sweeping in grey streaks along the railway lines.
‘I was eighteen when that was took. I’d been in old O’Neill’s show a week and I had that done out of my first week’s screw.’
He looked at the photograph. For a whole minute he regarded it without raising his eyes.
‘You’re talkative, ain’t you: I don’t think,’ she said.
He did not answer. He sat looking at the photograph steadfastly. It was the photograph of a young girl in a stiff-frilled dancing-dress standing quietly and unassumingly with her hands clasped before her. She was staring straight at him. He did not know what to think or to say. There was something marvellously enraptured and credulous about her gaze, as though she were really watching some shy and tiny bird in the eye of the camera. It was an unexpectedly thrilling and lovely face, delicate and proud, the big vivacious dark-brown eyes warm and soft as bees and the skin as white and fresh as the peel of a young mushroom. He did not recognize the dancer. Her figure was very slight and slender; the shoulders were round and sloping, and the breasts were swelling firmly to life against her dress. Under the photograph was written in black ink ‘Lily Miller, 1903.’ She had the tiny waist of the period, and the dim tropical palms and ferns in the background had begun to yellow and fade.
She finished powdering her nose and spoke to him again but he did not answer, and at the same moment the porters on the platform outside began to shout the arrival of the train. He suddenly took a final look at the photograph and gave it back to the dancer. The thick fresh white powder on her face made her seem more than ever cheap and weary.
‘Not bad, is it?’ she said. ‘I was only a kid, don’t forget. But you see what I mean?—a pretty kid don’t stand a chance without a name. A name’s everything. You can’t afford to be yourself in our profession. I was a pretty kid, but what chance did I stand with a name like Lily Miller? I changed my name and look at me.’