The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (11 page)

‘That's fine,' the young man said. ‘I'll put up a couple o' quid stake. Go on.'

So they settled it there and then that Goffy and Silas should run a race in three weeks' time, on a Sunday morning, between Carlton and Solbrook, on the top road above the river.

‘I don't want to be hard on you, Silas,' Goffy said. ‘So I'll give you a mile start.'

‘No,' Silas said. ‘But I'll tell you what. You can give me five minutes' start. All right?'

‘Anything you like,' Goffy said.

‘And everybody off the track. No bikes. Nobody. That all right?'

‘Anything you like,' Goffy said.

They shook hands on it and the young man in the pullover put down his money with the landlord, and the next day Goffy went into training. He put on a sweater and rubber shoes and trotted through the village every morning. In the evenings, at the pub, he drank ginger ale and slapped his chest and let allcomers feel how his legs were coming on.

All the time my Uncle Silas did not do anything. He did not go into training and he could see no sense in drinking ginger ale. He did not boast at all, but three days later he gave out that he couldn't sleep at nights for sciatica.

‘Sciatica?' they said. ‘That ain't much good for running, is it?'

‘No,' he said. ‘No. And I get cramp too. Chronic.'

By that time everybody was talking about the race and there was already a lot of money on it, too. When the word went round that my Uncle Silas wasn't training and that he was suffering from cramp and sciatica the odds against him lengthened to 10 to 1.

That night he talked it over with Walter Hawthorn, and the next day Walter gave it out that Silas was suffering from a strained groin and rheumatics in the knee joint, and one or two other minor ailments, like gum-boils.

Altogether everybody thought that Silas was in a very poor way indeed, and that day Walter Hawthorn got a lot of money on him at 20 to 1. The night before the race Uncle Silas threw a fit, so next morning the starting price was 33 to 1.

The race was due to start at ten o'clock from The King's Head in Carlton. Goffy turned up looking like an ostrich in white drawers, and did a lot of fancy exercises, loosening-up, in front of the pub. My Uncle Silas was in just his shirt and trousers and a pair of rubber shoes, and had an ash-bough in his hand to keep the flies away.

At ten o'clock my Uncle Silas went trotting off, looking just like a squat little pig that can't and won't be hurried.

My Uncle Silas trotted on for five minutes and then calmly lay down in the middle of the road. He lay there for a few minutes, fairly comfortable, resting, getting his wind back, and then Goffy came ostriching out of the distance, wheezing like a harmonium.

Goffy hadn't then got his second wind, and he was trying to go very hard when he saw Silas lying flat in the road as if he were dead.

He bent over my Uncle Silas. ‘Silas,' he said, ‘are you all right? Y'ain't done for?'

My Uncle Silas, who was lying on his back, gave a groan somewhere between a bellyache and the sound of a priest intoning for a lost soul.

‘Can I do anythink, Silas?' Goffy said. ‘Can I do anythink?'

‘In my hip-pocket,' Silas whispered. ‘There's a bottle in me hip-pocket.'

Goffy lifted Silas upright, and then found the bottle and put it to Silas's lips. ‘What is it, Silas?' he said.

‘Whisky,' Silas said in a slobbing sort of voice. ‘Have a drop.'

By this time Goffy was feeling badly about things. He kept thinking about Silas's sciatica and rheumatics and the fit he
had thrown, and he took a long, sudden drink of whisky to steady himself.

‘Goffy,' my Uncle Silas said, ‘it might be the last time I shall see you. If it is, I want you know you ain't to blame.'

Goffy, who had eaten nothing since six o'clock that morning, and had drunk nothing stronger than ginger ale for a fortnight, took another smack at the whisky.

‘You think you can carry me to the house back there?' Silas said. ‘Carry me if you can, Goffy.'

Goffy looked up and saw a house about half a mile back along the road. His heart sank. ‘It's too far,' he said. ‘But I'll run back. I'll run back as quick as I can and get somebody.' Then he took another swig at the whisky and pelted back along the road.

My Uncle Silas let him get safely round the first bend in the road and then he got up and trotted steadily on. He knew that he had almost a mile start and he knew something that Goffy didn't know. The whisky was a mixture of whisky, brandy, and rum in equal parts.

A mile farther on, as he passed a house, a man named Arthur Watkins rushed out, yelling:

‘Hey, where's Goffy?'

‘Miles back,' Silas said. ‘In a bad way. You ought to give him a drink of summat when he comes by.'

Fifteen minutes later, when Goffy came by feeling as if he were running upstairs and his head knocking on the ceiling, Arthur Watkins rushed out with a tumbler of elderberry wine.

Goffy took hold of the elderberry wine and killed it in one smack, and then went on with his eyes bulging out of his head like boss-marbles. He was mad with Silas and mad with himself. He couldn't see straight, and half a mile farther on a man rushed out of a row of cottages with a glass of parsnip wine eight years old. Goffy drank it in one blow and then rushed off again, feeling as if he were on a roundabout.

‘Hey! Not that way,' the man said. ‘You're going back.'

By the time Goffy got as far as the bridge at Filmersham, and was lying down on the river bank, bathing his head in the water, my Uncle Silas was sitting in The Swan with Two Nicks having a pint of draught ale with bread and cheese and a bunch of spring onions.

Everybody was very mad with Goffy, because the odds were extremely painful, and for many years Goffy was very mad with my Uncle Silas. Indeed, from that time onwards he never talked about races at all.

Races, on the other hand, appeared to interest my Uncle Silas more than ever.

‘Goffy,' he would say, ‘I know you ain't a reading man. But some day you ought to read about a race between the tortoise and the hare.'

When I heard that my Great-uncle Silas was dying, I did not believe it. He was so old that it had always been hard for me to realise that he had ever been born. It had always seemed to me that he had simply turned up, very old and imperishable, with his crimson neckerchief and his bloodshot eye as bright as the neckerchief, his earth-coloured breeches, his winey breath, and that huskily devilish voice that had told me so many stories and had left as many tantalizingly half-told. Yet I remember how he would often tell me that he could recollect—the word was his own—standing on a corn-sheaf, in his frocks, and sucking at the breast his mother slipped out of her dress and held down for him in the harvest-field. ‘They had the titty, them days, till they were damn near big enough to reap and tie.' Though he might very well have made it up. ‘I was allus tidy thirsty,' he would say at the end of that story, or in fact at the end of any story. ‘Mouthful o' wine?' he would say. It was his favourite phrase.

It was early autumn, in the middle of harvest, when I heard that he was dying. If it had been winter, or even spring, I might have believed it. But in autumn, and at harvest, it was unthinkable, absurd. His late peas would be coming into pod: for seventy years he had reckoned on them, without fail, for a last blow-out, with a goose and a dish of apple-sauce made from his own first cookers, on Michaelmas Sunday. Who would pick the peas and gather the apples and lard the goose if he were to die? His potatoes would be dead ripe, the pears would be dropping into the golden orchard as mellow as honey, the elderberries would be drooping over the garden hedge in grape-dark bunches, ripe for wine. What would happen to them if Silas died? What could happen? No one else could dig those potatoes or garner those pears or work that wine as he did. The very
words ‘Silas is dying' seemed fantastic. Moreover I had heard them before. Hearing them once, I had hurried over to see him for the last time, only to find him up a ladder, pruning his apple trees with a jack-knife, all of a muck-sweat, with his jacket off, in the winter wind. ‘I heard you were dead,' I said. He hawked and spat with a sort of gay ferocity. ‘Ever hear the tale of the old gal who heard I was dead and buried, and then
seed
me in The Swan? She never touched another drop.'

When the news again came that he was dying I thought of his words. And I did not trouble to go over to see him. In imagination I saw him digging his potatoes in the hot September sun or mowing the half-acre of wheat he grew every other year at the end of the paddock, ‘just so as I shan't forget how to swing a scythe'. The wheat kept him in bread, which he baked himself. He sent me a loaf sometimes, its crust as crisp as a wheat-husk and a dark earth-colour, and I often went over to help him band and carry the wheat. Even when I heard he was dying I expected every day to hear he had mown the wheat and was ready for me. I took as little notice of the news as that.

But unexpectedly there came other news:

‘They say Silas doesn't know what he's doing half the time.'

Not ‘Silas is ill', or ‘Silas is dying', or even ‘Silas is unconscious', but ‘Silas doesn't know what he's doing'. The words were ominous, a contradiction of my Uncle Silas's whole life, his principles, his character, his amazing cunning, his devilish vitality. They perturbed me, for they could mean so much. They might mean that my Uncle Silas had so changed that he now no longer knew beer from water or wheat from beans; that he had dug his potatoes under-ripe or carried his wheat wet or made his wine from green elderberries. If it meant these things then it also meant the end. For what separated my Uncle Silas from other men was exactly this. He knew what he was doing. How often had I heard him say with a cock of his bloodshot eye and the most devilish darkness: ‘I know what I'm doing, me boyo. I know what I'm doing.'

The day after hearing the news I went over to see him. His little stone reed-thatched house, squatting close under the shelter of the spinney of pines, was visible from afar off. There was always a puff of wood-smoke rising from the chimney, very blue against the black pines, winter and summer alike, if my Uncle Silas were at home. It was lovely September weather, the air breathless, the sunshine very soft and the pale amber colour of new wheat straw, and I saw the smoke rising up as straight as the pines themselves as I walked up the lane to the house.

It was a good sign. If the smoke were rising my Uncle Silas was at home; if he were at home it was a thousand to one, in summer-time, that he was in the paddock or the garden, or if not there, by his chair at the window, his mole-coloured head and his scarlet neckerchief just visible among the very old, sweet-leaved white and mauve geraniums.

But that afternoon he was not in the paddock, where the wheat stood ripe and half-mown, and I could not see him in the garden, where the pears lay wasp-sucked and rotting in the yellowing grass. Walking up the garden path, with the rank marigolds and untidy chrysanthemum stalks swishing heavily against my legs, I frightened a jay off the pea-rows. I stopped at once. But my Uncle Silas did not appear. The jay squawked in the wood. A jay on the pea-rows, and no sign from my Uncle Silas! I did not even look for him at the window, among the geraniums.

As I reached the door of the house I heard the clopping of the housekeeper's untied shoes coming along the stone passages to meet me. Before she appeared, I stepped over the threshold and looked into the room. The house was the same as ever, with the same eternal smell of earth and tea, of wood-smoke and balm, of geranium-leaves and wine. There was even the faint earth-smell of my Uncle Silas himself. But his chair was empty.

The housekeeper appeared a moment later, as scrawny and
frigid as ever, and more straight-lipped, in the same black skirt and grey shirt-blouse and iron corsets that she seemed to have worn ever since my Uncle Silas had first engaged her, bringing with her as she had done for so many years, that smell of carbolic soap which had so often made him say, ‘I do believe you were suckled on soap.' But that afternoon she looked tired, she seemed relieved to see me, and she broke out at once:

‘Oh! dear, he'll wear me out.'

There was a sort of melancholy affection for him in her voice, and I knew at once that there must be something wrong.

‘Where is he?' I asked.

But before she could reply his own cracked voice called suddenly:

‘I'm here, me boyo, in here.'

‘Where's that?' I called.

‘In the parlour,' the housekeeper whispered.

‘All among the fol-di-dols,' called my Uncle Silas. ‘Come in.'

As I walked across the passage between the two rooms the housekeeper entreated me in another whisper, ‘The doctor says you mustn't tire him.'

The doctor! My Uncle Silas not to be tired! He who could have mown a forty-acre field and not be tired! It was all over, I thought, as I pushed open the parlour-door and went in and met the stale antimacassar odour of the closed room.

And there, under the window, on an old black couch of American leather, with a green horse-rug over him and his sun-brown arms lying uselessly over the rug, lay my Uncle Silas. By his side was the night commode, and a little bamboo table with two wine-glasses and two bottles of lemon-coloured and blackish medicine on it.

‘Now don't go and talk and tire yourself,' said the housekeeper.

‘Go and wring yourself out, y'old wet sheet!' he croaked.

‘What's that? If you ain't careful, I'll pack me bag and leave you lying there. So I'll tell you!'

‘Pack it! And good riddance.'

‘Ah, and I will!' She flashed off to the door.

It was the old game: she was always leaving and never leaving; my Uncle Silas was always dismissing her and always keeping her.