The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (2 page)

‘Ah, she's in bloom,' he said.

I was wondering why he always spoke of the lily as though it were a woman, when the housekeeper, her unlaced shoes clip-clopping defiantly on the wooden cellar-steps and the brick passage, came in with a green wine-bottle, and, slapping it down on the table, went out again with her head stiffly uplifted, without a word.

‘Glasses!' yelled my Uncle Silas.

‘Bringing 'em if you can wait!' she shouted back.

‘Well, hurry then! And don't fall over yourself!'

She came back a moment or two later with the glasses, which she clapped down on the table just as she had done the wine-bottle, defiantly, without a word. She was a scraggy, frosty-eyed woman, with a tight, almost lipless mouth, and as she stalked out of the door my Uncle Silas leaned across to me and said in a whisper just loud enough for her to hear:

‘Tart as a stick of old rhubarb.'

‘What's that you're saying?' she said at once.

‘Never spoke. Never opened me mouth.'

‘I heard you!'

‘Go and put yourself in curling pins, you old straight hook!'

‘I'm leaving,' she shouted.

‘Leave!' he shouted. ‘And good riddance.'

‘Who're you talking to, eh? Who're you talking to, you corrupted old devil? You ought to be ashamed of yourself! If you weren't so old I'd warm your breeches till you couldn't sit down. I'm off.'

She flashed out, clip-clopping with her untied shoes along
the passage and upstairs while he chanted after her, in his devilish, goading voice:

‘Tart as a bit of old rhubarb! Tart as a bit of old rhubarb!'

When the house was silent again he looked at me and winked his bloodshot eye and said ‘Pour out,' and I filled the tumblers with the clear sun-coloured wine. As we drank I said, ‘You've done it now,' and he winked back at me again, knowing that I knew that she had been leaving every day for twenty years, and that they had quarrelled with each other day and night for nearly all that time, secretly loving it.

Sitting by the door, sipping the sweet, cold wine, I looked at the lily again. Its strange, scarlet, turk's-cap blossoms had just begun to uncurl in the July heat, the colour hot and passionate against the snow-coloured pinks and the cool larkspurs and the stiff spikes of the madonnas, sweet and virgin, but like white wax. Rare, exotic, strangely lovely, the red lily had blossomed there, untouched, for as long as I could remember.

‘When are you going to give me a little bulb off the lily?' I said.

‘You know what I've always told you,' he said. ‘You can have her when I'm dead. You can come and dig her up then. Do what you like with her.'

I nodded. He drank, and as I watched his skinny throat filling and relaxing with the wine I said:

‘Where did you get it? In the first place?'

He looked at the almost empty glass.

‘I pinched her,' he said.

‘How?'

‘Never mind. Give us another mouthful o' wine.'

He held out his glass, and I rose and took the wine-bottle from the table and paused with my hand on the cork. ‘Go on,' I said, ‘tell me.'

‘I forget,' he said. ‘It's been so damn long ago.'

‘How long?'

‘I forget,' he said.

As I gave him back his wine-filled glass I looked at him with a smile and he smiled back at me, half-cunning, half-sheepish, as though he knew what I was thinking. He possessed the vividest memory, a memory he often boasted about as he told me the stories of his boyhood, rare tales of prize-fights on summer mornings by isolated woods very long ago, of how he heard the news of the Crimea, of how he took a candle to church to warm his hands against it in the dead of winter, and how when the parson cried out ‘And he shall see a great light, even as I see one now!' he snatched up the candle in fear of hell and devils and sat on it. ‘And I can put my finger on the spot now.'

By that smile on his face I knew that he remembered about the lily, and after taking another long drink of the wine he began to talk. His voice was crabbed and rusty, a strong, ugly voice that had no softness or tenderness in it, and his half-shut, bloodshot eye and his wet, curled lips looked rakish and wicked, as though he were acting the villainous miser in one of those travelling melodramas of his youth.

‘I seed her over in a garden, behind a wall,' he said. ‘Big wall, about fifteen feet high. We were banging in hard a-carrying hay and I was on the top o' the cart and could see her just over the wall. Not just one—scores, common as poppies. I felt I shouldn't have no peace again until I had one. And I nipped over the wall that night about twelve o'clock and ran straight into her.'

‘Into the lily?'

‘Tah! Into a gal. See? Young gal—about my age, daughter o' the house. All dressed in thin white. “What are you doing here?” she says, and I believe she was as frit as I was. “I lost something,” I says. “It's all right. You know me.” And then she wanted to know what I'd lost, and I felt as if I didn't care what happened, and I said, “Lost my head, I reckon.” And she laughed, and then I laughed and then she said, “Ssshhh! Don't you see I'm as done as you are if we're found here? You'd better go. What did you come for, anyway?” And I told her. She wouldn't believe me. “It's right,” I says, “I just come for the lily.” And she just stared at me. “And you know what they do to people who steal?” she says. “Yes,” I says, and they were the days when you could be hung for looking at a sheep almost. “But picking flowers ain't stealing,” I says. “Ssshhh!” she says again. “What d'ye think I'm going to say if they find me here? Don't talk so loud. Come here behind these trees and keep quiet.” And we went and sat down behind some old box-trees and she kept whispering about the lily and telling me to whisper for fear anyone should come. “I'll get you the lily all right,” she says, “if you keep quiet. I'll dig it up.”'

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.

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.