Colonel Julian and Other Stories (18 page)

‘What was her name?' I said.

‘Tutts,' he said.

‘It's a funny name,' I said.

‘She was a funny woman,' he said. ‘She was very near the death on me.'

Since my Uncle Silas had reached the nineties and looked, in his leathery and ruddy heartiness, good for another dozen years, it seemed a very good moment to ask how death by Miss Tutts had been avoided so long ago.

‘I give her gee-up,' he said. ‘That's how.'

It seemed a very good moment also to ask how he had given her gee-up, and if possible why and what with, but he surprised me a little when the answer came.

‘I laid her out with a Bedfordshire clanger,' he said.

I did not know what a Bedfordshire clanger was, and it occurred to me for a moment that it was an awful sort of lie. But he said:

‘Sort o' pudden. Suet. Hard as a hog's back.'

We were sitting among the gooseberry bushes at the time, by the bottom of Silas's garden, by the wood, where sun lay warm by a fringe of hazels. Gooseberries, ripe and golden-green and fat as plums, bowed down the branches of the squat trees, and now and then Silas lazily pinched one with crabbed fingers and split it open and shot its sweet jellied seeds on to his ripe and ruby tongue.

‘Kept a boarding-house,' he said.

For some moments he squirted gooseberry seeds into his mouth and chewed through what I hoped were moments of reminiscence, champing at the sourer skin. His gills seemed to laugh up and down, from the acid of the gooseberries, like the gills of an old and crusty cock.

‘Them are the ones you want to be careful on,' he said.

I bit on a gooseberry too. Silas fixed his eyes on a point somewhere far away, and I could smell the strong odour of corduroys warm in the sun.

‘Young chap at the time,' he said. ‘That's all. Apprentice. Innocent young chap.'

It has always been difficult for me to conjure up a picture of my Uncle Silas at the age of innocence, but I did not say anything and he went on:

‘Me an' Arth Sugars,' he said. ‘We boarded together.'

I wanted to know who Arth Sugars was, and he said:

‘Arth wadn't all ninepence. Had a kink somewhere. Wanted to be inventor.'

‘What did he invent?' I said.

‘Well, for a start-off nothing much,' he said. ‘But then, I got there——'

He picked another gooseberry and squashed it against his tongue and gave a great sucking sound at the bursting purse of seeds. ‘Chronic,' he said several times. ‘Chronic,' and then went on suddenly with a horrible reminiscence of that far-off boarding-house, where he and Mr. Sugars, the inventor, had starved.

‘Day in and day out,' he said, ‘the same sort of grub. No
different. Week-days and Sundays. No different. Allus the same.'

‘What grub?' I said.

‘Pudden. Just pudden.'

‘What sort?'

‘Plain.'

He shook his head with great sadness so that I, too, could feel how terrible it was.

‘Think on it,' he said. ‘Dinner—tea—supper, week in, week out, months on it. Just plain.'

‘Suet?'

He turned on me with a horrible sort of bark that made me feel ashamed. ‘It might have been suet
once'
he said. ‘But when we got it—ah! boy, it wur harder 'n prison bread.'

He paused, and at that moment I suddenly discovered a defect in all this. I could not picture Miss Tutts. I could not conceive what sort of person, physically, she was.

‘I was coming to that,' he said. ‘Whady'
think
she was?'

‘Think?'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘Fat or thin?'

‘Thin,' I said.

He cried out with a bark of triumph.

‘I knowed you'd say that. Thin, you says, eh? You think she was thin, you says. She was mean and a tartar, so she must be thin? Eh? Ain't that it?'

‘I suppose I——'

‘Well, you're supposing wrong. Fat—that's what she was. Like a twenty-score sow in pig.'

He looked at me with such an air of pained and sharp correction that I said I was sorry I had been mistaken.

‘And a good thing for you. ‘Cause now you'll
understand
better, see? Her so fat and me an' Arth so thin. It makes it worse, don't it? Makes it chronic, don't it, eh?'

I said it made it very chronic. I said something, too, about how greatly they must have suffered, and he said:

‘Suffered? We suffered till we couldn't suffer no longer.'

‘And then what did you do?'

‘Put paid to her,' he said.

I asked him how they put paid to her. Slowly he squeezed another gooseberry against his bright red tongue and said:

‘Fust of all we give her a Seidlitz powder.'

‘Wasn't she very well?' I said.

‘Oh! she was well,' he said, ‘but we jis' wanted to see what happened. We jis put the Seidlitz powder in the—well, that don't matter now. Have another gooseberry, boy. Help yourself to another gooseberry.'

I helped myself to another gooseberry and said I hated Seidlitz powders.

‘They fizz,' I said.

‘Thass it,' he said. ‘Thass just it. They fizz.'

His gills began laughing again with the droll shagginess of an old cock, and I said:

‘Didn't it make a difference?'

‘Well, it made a difference,' he said, ‘in a way. But not to us.'

‘The puddings didn't get better?'

‘Not until arterwards,' he said darkly. ‘Not until arterwards.'

My Uncle Silas relapsed into a veiled and evil sort of meditation, one eye closed. He did not speak for some time and I began to grow impatient to know what lay behind that arterwards. I was afraid for some moments that he would fall asleep there, in the warm July air among the gooseberry bushes, and never tell me.

Presently I nudged him and asked him not to go to sleep and he flickered an eye:

‘Don't whittle me, boy,' he said. ‘I'm a-recollectin' on it.'

He suddenly gave an immense and fruity chuckle, something like a joyful belch partly arrested. It was the sound I knew, long afterwards, as something always preceding the greatest lie. Then he shook his head as if it were all terribly serious and said:

‘Millions on 'em.'

‘Millions of what?' I said.

‘Puddens.'

He did not look at me. He fixed his bloodshot, wicked eye on the distance and grunted, ‘Never see nothing like it, boy, you never see nothing like it,' and then went on to tell me, between winey belches that rippled out of his corduroyed belly like waves, how he and Arth Sugars, tired of that long prison
diet of suet, decided to discover for themselves how Miss Tutts made and kept up the supply; and how they crept down to the basement at midnight, with a candle, and found there, in rows upon rows, on high shelves, enough puddings to feed an army.

‘Millions on 'em,' he said. ‘All wrapped up in old ham-bags and shimmies and shirts an'——'

‘What did you do?' I said.

‘Filled 'em.'

I asked him how they filled them and what with, and he said, airily:

‘Different flavours.'

‘Strawberry and raspberry?'

‘Ah! better'n that,' he said. ‘Some on 'em we filled with brimstone. Then we had a Seidlitz or two. A few Epsoms. Then some as Arth invented. Then I don't know as we didn't have a—well, anyway, we was half-way through the brimstones when we had company.'

‘Who?'

‘Her,' he said.

He shook his head.

‘Never see nothing like it in your life. Half-starve naked. In her nightshirt.'

‘Enough to catch her death,' I said.

‘It wur,' he said. ‘There wur we a-top of a step-ladder, and there wur Arth holdin' the candle and a'givin' me the different flavours. I wur just pickin' a pudden up when she come ravin' in——'

‘What happened?'

‘Dropped it,' he said.

‘On her?'

‘On her,' he said. ‘Give her such a clout—it jis' shows you how hard they was, jis' shows you—give her such a clout she wur cold in a couple o' seconds.'

‘That was awful,' I said. ‘What did you do?'

‘Awful,' he said. ‘Do? Arth run upstairs like a hare for a burnt feather and the smellin' salts.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘but what did you do?'

‘Kept her warm,' he said. ‘Thass what you got to do when folks are cold, ain't you? And she wur very cold, I tell you, in that there nightgown. Very cold.'

I did not speak. A little doubt assailed me. I could not in that moment reconcile the picture of my Uncle Silas keeping Miss Tutts warm in the basement at midnight with the way the story had begun. There seemed, suddenly, great discrepancies somewhere. Hadn't it begun by Miss Tutts tormenting him? Hadn't she been a terror, a plague and a tartar? It seemed very strange to me that plaguing and tormenting and pursuit could end with Miss Tutts being warmed in my Uncle Silas's arms. Strange that things could change so quickly.

‘And did things change?' I said. ‘You know—the puddens. Were they better?'

My Uncle Silas fixed his roving bloodshot eye on the distance and with a delicious spurting juicy sound, squirted the seeds of another gooseberry against his tongue.

‘Arter that,' he said, ‘I wur never in want fur the nicest bit o' pudden in the world.'

Every morning she rode the horse up through the park, by the crumbling empty mansion, through the long avenue of flowering limes. She was a big ungainly girl, tawny and flat-coloured, and somehow she looked too tall, too heavy and too uneasy even for the big sand-maned nervous horse.

‘Give him a good working, Pete,' her father would say. ‘He needs a good working. Don't let him dictate. Get hold of him. Be a man. Match him. You've got to match him, Pete, you've got to match him.'

Every morning she rode in the same way: tensely and rigidly, keyed up, until she was out of her father's sight, and the horse hammered with brittle high-strung strokes at the metal road. It was only when she got him through the scrolled iron gates and on to soft grass beneath the double mile of limes that she let him slacken into the easier, sloppier walk her father would have despised. Even then it was still she, rather than the horse, who was taut and uneasy. Her broad long legs were ungraceful in the cord breeches and brown high boots she wore instead of jodhpurs. Her heavy riding jacket was lumpish across her square solid shoulders. If she was hatless her tawny hair was screwed sharply backwards in a short close cut that coarsened and hardened the shape of her head.

They had called her Peter from the day she was born; and now, at twenty-three, she looked as if the final moments of girlhood had been beaten out of her. She had grown up in a house where even the windows, iron-framed and curtainless, seemed masculine things. Big oak doors stood propped open all day by lumps of fossil dug up from surrounding clay lands, and wind blew healthily through a house of bare wood floors. Spurs rang with military harshness on broad carpetless stairs and riding crops were hooked everywhere on picture frames. Chairs were upholstered in heavy leather, like those of a club,
and large sheep-dogs lay like gaunt rugs before the fires and rose with heavy promptitude at her father's words of command.

‘Up!' her father would bellow. ‘Heel! Up!'

Gradually it had begun to grow on her that her father really thought she was a man: that the pretence of treating her as a male, as a person to be called Peter, was not a pretence any longer. She had qualified at last for the loud, hairy stentorian masculine world.

‘Pete!' he would sometimes yell at her across the yards, ‘where the hell is Johnson? Tell him if that damned mare isn't here on the dot of ten you'll wring his neck. Pulverize him.'

At first, when he had called her Peter, it was quite charming and there was a softness about it; and then it had become Pete, curt and slung-out and metallic, and as the name hardened she herself hardened. Her father believed in exercise, a great deal of it, by horse, by foot, by work in stable-yards, and exercise had hardened her too; so that now, at twenty-three, something wooden and inflexible seemed to exist in the tall bony body under the shiny boots, the crisp shirts, the thick riding jacket: something bloodless and unawoken and dry.

It was soon after the beginning of summer, when the limes had just flowered, that she began to be really nervous about herself. She had begun to discover that she could not face people. She had got into the habit of riding as far as the mansion and then giving the horse a breather on what had once been the lawn behind the house. Huge black cedar trees rose from tall grasses, and below the garden, beyond a maze of broken hot-houses, was a stream. It had been fifteen years at least since the lawn had last been mown, the hot-houses exotically heated, the white window-shutters thrown back. Dry rot had begun to eat at the floors, and bright green crustings of moss covered most of the roof-tiles. It was dead and quiet and there was now no chance, everyone said, of anyone ever coming to live there again.

One morning a young man was walking across the lawn. Behind him he trailed a long steel tape-measure that flashed like a tinsel snake, rattling and quivering.

She did not know what to do about this and stood holding the horse where she had dismounted. For three or four minutes he did not notice her. In between pauses when he wrote down, in a notebook, the measurements he was taking, the long nervous snake of tape-measure leapt about after him, glittering and alive.

Finally he stopped, and then, as he began to wind up the tape, he saw her there. She was not really conscious of watching him; what she felt was really not a question of surprise or unreality. She did not even resent him as an intruder. It simply made her more nervous and uncertain of herself.

Winding up the tape at last, he came across to speak to her. Afterwards she sometimes felt it was that snake-like jumping length of steel, slithering and sliding through the high grasses, that made her so nervous and unsure of herself that she did not know how to speak to him.