The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (23 page)

‘And I suppose you,' his housekeeper said, ‘sat there as cool as a cucumber and watched them do it?'

‘I did,' he said, ‘there wur nothing wrong wi' me.'

He leaned forward to poke at the roasting potatoes and
as the poker touched the first of them I could hear the crackle of the crisp burnt jacket.

‘Well, I say I sat there,' he said. ‘I did until I got a chance to nip the bag down the cellar steps——'

‘Gabriel, Gabriel!' his housekeeper said, raising her hands to heaven, ‘Gabriel, I hope you're listening!'

‘Then I went outside,' Silas said, ‘and there wur Joey, laid out cold.'

‘Dead?' I said.

‘Half-way,' he said.

He paused for a few moments, shaking his head sadly, taking the opportunity to refresh himself again with a slow mouthful of wine.

‘Fust time I ever see what they wur a-doin' to poor old Joey that day.'

‘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.'

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.

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.