The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (3 page)

‘He's just doing it on purpose,' she said to me at last. ‘Just because you're here. He wants us to sit here and admire him. That's all. I know.'

‘Don't talk so much!' he said. ‘I'm getting out as fast as you'll let me.'

‘Come on, then. Come on!' she insisted. ‘Heaven knows we don't want to look at you all night.'

The words seemed to remind my Uncle Silas of something, and as he stood up in the bath and she began towelling his back, he said to me:

‘I recollect what I was going to tell you now. I was having a swim with a lot o' chaps, once, in the mill-brook at …'

‘We don't want to hear your old tales, either,' she said. ‘We heard 'em all times anew.'

‘Not this one,' he said.

Nevertheless, her words silenced him. He stood there dumb and almost meek all the time she was towelling him dry and it was only when she vanished into the kitchen to fetch a second towel for him to dry his toes that he recollected the story he had been trying to tell me, and came to life.

‘I was swimming with these chaps, in the mill-brook, and we left all our clothes on the bank …'

‘Mind yourselves!'

The housekeeper had returned with the towel, and my Uncle Silas, as though he had never even heard of the tale he was so anxious to tell and I was so anxious to hear, said solemnly to me:

‘Next year I'll have peas where I had taters, and taters where I had carrots …'

‘Dry your toes!' said the housekeeper.

‘Dry 'em yourself and don't talk so much!'

At the same moment she thrust the towel in his hand and
then began to scoop the water out of the bath with an enamel basin and put it into a bucket. When the bucket was full she hastened out of the room with it, her half-laced shoes slopping noisily in her haste. Almost before she had gone through the door and long before we heard the splash of water in the sink my Uncle Silas said swiftly ‘Tot out,' and I uncorked the wine-bottle while he found the glasses in the little cupboard above the fire.

We were standing there drinking the wine, so red and rich and soft, Silas in nothing but his shirt, when the housekeeper returned. She refilled the bucket quickly and hastened out again. No sooner had she gone than he turned to me to continue the story, and standing there, his thick, blue-striped flannel shirt reaching below his knees, the hairs on his thin, gnarled legs standing out as stiff as the bristles on his own gooseberries, the wine-glass in one hand and the towel in the other, he looked more wicked and devilish and ugly than I ever remembered seeing him.

Going on with the story, he had reached the point when the men, coming out of the mill-stream, had found their clothes gone, when the housekeeper returned.

‘I think I s'll have peas along the side o' the wood,' he said serenely, while she refilled the bucket, ‘and perhaps back o' the well.'

‘You get your toes dried and get dressed!' she ordered.

‘And you mind your own business and get the supper. And look slippy!'

As soon as she had left the room again, he resumed the tale, but no sooner had he begun than she returned. It went on like this, he telling a sentence of the tale, and she returning and he interspersing some angelic and airy remark about his peas and potatoes until at last she came in to spread the cloth on the table and lay the supper. She was in the room for so long, laying out the plates and the cutlery, that at last he gave it up, turning to me with an air of satanic innocence to say:

‘I'll tell you the name o' the tater when I can think of it. My memory ain't so good as it was.'

After that he proceeded meekly to put on his pants, tucking in the voluminous folds of his shirt before tying up the tapes. While the tail of his shirt was still hanging loose he remembered the potatoes I had put in the hot ashes under the fire and, seizing the toasting-fork, he began to prod their skins.

‘Damn, they'll be done afore I get my trousers on,' he said. And standing there, with the toasting-fork in his hand, his pants tight against his legs and the tail of his shirt protruding he looked more than anything else like the devil of tradition, prodding the roasting sinners.

The veritable air of devilishness was still about him when, finding a moment later that the housekeeper had left the room again, he turned swiftly to me to say:

‘Give us another mouthful o' wine. I'll tell you what happened.'

I had hardly begun to pour the wine into his glass before he began to say, in a devilish, husky voice that was hardly more than a whisper: ‘Some gals had got the clothes. They stood upon the bridge and dangled our trousers over and threatened to drop 'em in the mill-pond. What d'ye think of that? There we were swimming about wi' nothing on and they wouldn't give us the clothes.'

He went on to tell me how gradually they grew tired and desperate and at last angry at the three girls dangling over the bridge while they grew colder and colder in the deep mill-pool and how finally he himself climbed out of the water and ran up to the bridge, stark naked, and frightened the girls into dropping the clothes and retreating. Long before he had finished I noticed that the housekeeper had returned and was standing in the doorway, unseen by my Uncle Silas, attentively listening.

‘God A'mighty, you should have seen 'em drop the clothes and run when they see me. All except one.'

‘What did she do?'

‘Run off across the meadow with my clothes under her arms. What d'ye think o' that?'

‘What did you do?'

‘Run after her.'

He ceased speaking, and taking a slow drink of his wine he moistened his thick, red lips with his tongue, as though the tale were not finished and he were trying to remember its end. A strange almost soft expression of reminiscence came over his face, flushed with the bath and the wine, as though he could see clearly the river, the meadow, and he himself running across the summer grass, naked, pursuing the girl running away with his clothes.

‘Rum un,' he said at last. ‘I never did find out who she was. Never did find out.'

At that moment the housekeeper came in from the doorway, moving so quietly for once that he scarcely heard her, the sound of the cheese-dish being laid on the table startling him so much that he could only turn and stare at her, fingering the tapes of his pants and at a loss for words.

‘Didn't you ever find out?' she said.

‘No. I was just telling the boy. It's been so damn long ago.'

She looked at him for a moment and then said:

‘I know who she was. And so do you.'

It was the only time I ever saw him at a loss for an answer and it was almost the only time I ever saw her smile. He stood there slowly licking his lips in uneasy silence until at last she snapped at him with all the old habitual tartness:

‘Get yourself dressed, man! I ain't running away with your clothes now, if I did then.'

She began to help him on with his clothes. He still had nothing to say, but once, as she was fastening the back buttons of his trousers and he stood with his face turned away from her, he gave me a smiling but inscrutable look, rich with devilry, his eyelids lowered and his lips shining wet with the wine.

And I began to understand then something I had not understood before.

I was seven or eight and my Great-uncle Silas nearly seventy when his only son Abel was married to a girl named Georgina, and we all drove over for the wedding in the black-and-yellow trap with the white racy-looking horse, my grandparents and parents, my aunt and I, before the dew had dried on the buttercupped grass one May morning. The air was rich and summery and the sun was a long time breaking through the mist as we drove along. The wedding had come upon us suddenly. The girl, Georgina, had arrived that springtime to be a lady's maid at the house where Abel had been a gardener for nearly twenty years. It was all over in a month; done, as my grandfather said, all of a damn pop. Nor did my grandmother like it; she was a little, pale woman, like a faded canary and as quick-tongued, and as she sat perched up on the high trap seat in her grey and purple silk I thought she looked as if she would like to peck at the creature who had seduced a solid, hard-hatted fellow like Abel with such indecent haste. Abel was nearly forty and the girl, it seemed, was only nineteen. But it was to be a great wedding.

We talked of it as we drove along. ‘I should think,' said my grandmother, ‘he's well set to work, marrying a filly like that. Nineteen!' But my grandfather had seen the girl.

‘Dall it all,' he kept saying, ‘she's flash. And don't she talk nice! Jest so. Ho dear, ho dear! I tell you she's lovely.'

‘Yes, and without a farden to bless herself with, I'll be bound. Who's paying for the flash wedding?'

‘Silas, I expect.'

‘Ah,' said my grandmother, ‘and I'd Silas him if I were Sarah Ann. I remember the last wedding we went to with Silas.'

My grandfather evidently remembered it too. He suddenly
looked embarrassed, nudged my arm, and pointed with his driving whip at a cuckoo flying fast across a field of beans, calling as it flew, its voice trembling with the motion of its flight. My grandfather followed the bird until it alighted, far off, in an ash tree, and then he nudged me again and told me to look up, straight above, at a lark breaking into passionate song, and we turned our faces to the sun-misty sky and watched the bird twittering up and up, out of sight.

‘You'll get something you don't expect,' my grandmother warned us, ‘cocking your eyes at that bird.'

‘Tchk! Tchk!' said my grandfather to the horse.

‘And
look
at you!' exclaimed my grandmother, suddenly. ‘Whoa! I never saw such a man in all my born days. You'll be hanging yourself in the reins next.'

‘Whoa!' said my grandfather gloomily.

The horse stopped and my grandmother leaned across me and seized my grandfather's collar, which had sprung away from its stud, catapulting his necktie away and releasing his white starched dicky from its top buttonhole.

‘Hold still,' urged my grandmother. ‘That comes of gaping at birds instead of driving on as you should do.' She fixed the collar, smoothed the tie and flattened the dicky, and my grandfather, looking extremely meek and ill at ease in the iron-starched collar and front and his best black clothes and hard hat, drove on again, straining his sun-tanned neck so that the guides tautened in agony. ‘Lord, man, anybody'd think you'd been hung,' said my grandmother.

As we drove on the mist began to disperse, the sun shining through at first softly and at last with the strong thundery heat of the May morning. ‘I don't know,' said my grandmother, as though in hope, ‘as that girl ain't going to have a wet ride after all.'

It was five miles to my Uncle Silas's house, and though the wedding wasn't until two o'clock, we had started the journey at ten o'clock in the morning. There was no sense, declared my
grandmother, in not making a day of it; nor, said my grandfather, did we want to wrench the guts out of the horse. So we had started early, and we drove along all the time at the same solemn pace, the horse never breaking into a trot, my grandfather never using the whip except to flick away the flies; and now and then we would stop, perhaps to admire a field of young barley, or to have a word by the roadside with a man my grandfather hadn't seen for a year, or to gaze at the bluebells staining the dark earth of the woods we passed. At every hill we stopped so that my parents and my grandmother and aunt could alight and walk up the hill. My grandfather and I remained in the trap, sitting well forward in the seat in order to relieve the strain on the horse. And once, going up a hill by a spinney, we heard a nightingale, and then another and another, singing fitfully, but with breaks of wild passion, in the young hazel trees. Cuckoos were calling continually in their full bold mocking, and when we stopped to listen it sounded as though the cuckoos were contradicting the nightingales, their monotonous cries half-drowning the others' wild spasmodic singing.

‘We must ask your Uncle Silas,' said my grandfather, ‘if he knows to a nightingale's.'

‘He'll have enough to think on,' said my grandmother, ‘with that other nightingale.'

It was nearly twelve o'clock when we arrived at my Uncle Silas's house, the little reed-thatched house standing at the top of the violet-banked lane by the spinney of pines. The lane, steep and narrow, was cobbled with white hoof-smooth stones, and at the bottom of it were all alighted, my grandfather and I leading the horse.

‘Dall it,' exclaimed my grandfather as we came within sight of the house, ‘can I see straight?'

We all stopped on the crest of the slope, and my grandmother let out an exclamation of tart astonishment:

‘A tent! What the 'nation do they want with a tent? Ain't that just like Silas?'

‘It might be Georgina's doing,' said my aunt. ‘I heard she'd got money.'

‘I'd Georgina her!' cried my grandmother as we went on.

As we came nearer the house the tent which had been erected in Uncle Silas's paddock seemed larger than ever, a big square marquee like a sort of squat steeple, the canvas as white as the moon-daisies growing thicker than the grass in the field. Little yellow and green and blue and scarlet pennants fluttered above it listlessly, and its ropes were as clean as new straw. Long trestle tables had been erected both inside it and on the surrounding grass, and waiters in shirt-sleeves were already rushing hither and thither, spreading cloths even whiter than the tent, arranging flower-vases, carrying glasses and cups and plates and cutlery, salt-silvered hams and joints of beef and roast fowls and loaves and cheese, dark bottles of wine and cases of beer and stone jars of home-made, unloading them from a wagon which had been drawn up before us by two satiny black horses with their ears in little silk nets and their tails plaited and tied with bows of white and cornflower-blue.