The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (14 page)

It was my Uncle Silas's custom, and my grandmother knew it and knew it only too well, not only to arrive late for that dinner but never to arrive alone. He had a habit of arriving with strange men with names like Tig Flawn and Fiddler Bollard and Slob Johnson and Tupman Jarvis. That day he arrived, about two o'clock, when most of the meat had gone and the last of the yellow plums were cooling in the dish, with a man named Ponto Pack. I always wanted him to arrive with Queenie White and see what my grandmother thought of that, but he never did and I was always rather disappointed. Whenever he did arrive my grandmother always looked as if she could hit him over the head with the pastry-board or some other suitable instrument, and that day, when I looked out of the window and saw Silas and the man Ponto, like some gigantic blond sow, falling out of the trap, I felt the carving knife would hardly have been too much.

‘Let 'em all come!' my Uncle Silas roared and gave
prodigious beery winks from a bloodshot eye that was like a fire in a field of poppies.

‘You're late,' my grandmother said. ‘Get your dinner and stop shouting as if you were in Yardley Open Fields.'

‘Got hung up,' Silas said. ‘Belly-band broke.'

My grandmother gave my grandfather such a killing and merciless look that he went out at once to give Jenny a rub down and a drink of water, and Ponto made strange strangled noises with whole potatoes, and said, for the first of several times:

‘Onaccountable. Most onaccountable.'

He was such a large man, bulging flesh as tight as bladdered lard into his suit of green-faded Sunday black, that when the rest of us had left the table it still seemed full. His eyes, pink-edged, beery, almost colourless, were uncannily like the eyes of a blond and farrowing sow. He had nothing to say all day but:

‘Onaccountable, George,' or ‘Onaccountable, Silas. Most onaccountable.'

In the afternoon it was very hot and everyone, including Silas, went to sleep in the front parlour or under the laurel trees, and I played giving Jenny lumps of sugar off the top of my head in the little paddock at the back of the house. I was giving her the seventh or eighth lump of sugar and wondering whether she ever did go to bed with my Uncle Silas or whether it was just another story, when my grandmother rapped on the window and said:

‘Come you in out of that sun. You'll never stay awake tonight without you get some rest.'

She must have known what was coming. About half-past six my Uncle Silas and my grandfather and Ponto Pack had another jug of beer in the shade of the laurel trees and my Uncle Silas, wet-lipped, bloodshot eye
wickedly cocked, began to talk about ‘gittin' the belly-band mended while we think on it.' It did not seem to me to be a thing that wanted thinking on at all, and I do not think my grandmother thought so either. She had put on her grey silk dress with the parma violet stitching at the collar and her little high hat with michaelmas daisies on the brim, and it was time now to be thinking of ‘walking up street.' To walk up street on the Sunday of Nenweald Fair was a gentle, ponderous, respectable, long-winded custom, and it was something about which neither my Uncle Silas, my grandfather nor Ponto Pack seemed, I thought, very enthusiastic.

‘You goo steady on up,' Silas said. ‘We'll come on arter we git the belly-band mended.'

‘If everything was as right as that belly-band nobody would hurt much,' she said.

‘It's too 'nation hot yit for traipsing about,' Silas said.

‘Onaccountable hot,' Ponto said. ‘Most onaccountable.'

Ten minutes later the trap went jigging past us up the street, my Uncle Silas wearing his black-and-white deerstalker sideways on, so that the peaks stuck out like ears, and Ponto, bowler hat perched on the top of his head like a cannon ball, looking more than ever like some pink-eyed performing pig. My grandfather pretended not to see us and my grandmother said:

‘What one doesn't think of, the other will. The great fool things.'

We seemed to take longer than ever that sultry evening to make the tour under the chestnut trees about the crowded market-place. I always got very bored with the gossiping Sunday-starched crowd of bowler hats and parasols and I kept thinking how nice it would be if my Uncle Silas were to come back with Jenny and I could do my trick of giving her sugar, in full view of everybody, off the top of my head. But Silas never came and by ten o'clock I was yawning and my grandmother had even stopped saying darkly, whenever there was something nice to listen to, ‘Little pigs have got big ears,' as if I hadn't the vaguest idea of what she meant by that.

I went to bed with a piece of cold Yorkshire pudding to eat and fell asleep with it in my hands. It is hard to say now what time I woke up, but what woke me was like the thunder of one crazy dream colliding with another somewhere at the foot of the stairs. The piece of cold Yorkshire pudding was like a frog crawling on my pillow, and I remember wanting to shriek about it just at the moment I heard my Uncle Silas roaring in the front passage:

‘Git up, old gal! Git up there! Pull up, old gal!'

A terrifying sound as of madly-beaten carpets greeted me at the top of the stairs. It was my grandmother beating Ponto Pack across the backside with what I thought was the stick we used for stirring pig-swill. She could not get at my Uncle Silas because Silas was leading Jenny up the stairs; and she could not get at my grandfather because he was lying like a sack of oats on Jenny's back. Ponto was pushing Jenny with his round black backside sticking out like a tight balloon and my Uncle Silas kept bawling:

‘Git underneath on her, Ponto. You ain't underneath on her.'

Every time Ponto seemed about to git underneath on her my grandmother hit him again with the swill-stick. I thought he did not seem to mind very much. He laughed every time my grandmother hit him and then pushed himself harder than ever against Jenny's hindquarters and called with pig-like fruitiness to my Uncle Silas, tugging at the bridle on the stairs:

‘Can't budge the old gal, Silas. Most aggravatin' onaccountable.'

‘Get that mare out of my house, you drunken idiots!' my grandmother shrieked.

‘Gotta git George to bed fust,' Silas said. ‘Must git George to bed.'

‘Get that horse off my stair-carpet!'

‘Gotta git George to bed. Good gal!' Silas said. ‘Come on now, good gal. Tchck, tchck! Up, mare! That's a good gal.'

By this time my Uncle Silas had succeeded in tugging Jenny a quarter of the way upstairs when suddenly, down below, sharp and sickening above the pandemonium of
voices, there was a crack like a breaking bone. Ponto Pack roared, ‘Silas, she's hittin' me on the coconut!' and at the same moment Jenny had something like hysterics, whinnying terribly, and fell down on her front knees on the stairs. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Why th' Hanover don't you git underneath on her? She'll be down atop on y'!' and for a moment I thought she was. She gave a great lurch backwards and my grandfather let out a groan. My grandmother hit Ponto another crack on the head with the swill-stick and suddenly the whole essence of the situation became, to me at any rate, splendidly clear. My Uncle Silas and Ponto were trying to get my grandfather to bed and my grandmother, in her obstinate way, was trying to stop them.

I remembered in that moment the cold Yorkshire pudding. I fetched it from my bedroom and went halfway down the stairs and held it out to Jenny, most coaxingly, in the flat of my hand.

Whether she thought, at that moment, that I in my white nightshirt was some kind of newly-woken ghost or whether she decided she had had enough of the whole affair, I never knew. Ponto had hardly time to bawl out from the bottom of the stairs, ‘It's most onaccountable, Silas. I can't budge her!' and my Uncle Silas from the top of the stairs, ‘Hold hard, Pont. The old gal's knockin' off for a mite o' pudden!' when my grandmother, aiming another crack at Ponto's head, hit the mare in her fury a blow above the tail.

The frenzy of her hysterical ascent up three steps of stairs and then backwards down the whole flight was something I shall not forget. My grandfather fell off the mare and the mare fell sideways on him, and then my Uncle Silas fell on the mare. The three of them fell on
my grandmother and my grandmother fell on Ponto Pack. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Let 'em all come!' and my grandmother hit Ponto twenty or thirty blows on the top of the head with the swill-stick. My grandfather fell off the horse's back and landed with a terrible crash on the umbrella-stand, and the portrait of Gladstone fell down in the hall. The cold Yorkshire pudding fell down the stairs and I fell after it. My aunt came in the front door with a policeman, and Ponto yelled, ‘It's onaccountable, Silas, most onaccountable!' just as the mare broke free and charged the sideboard in the front room.

My Uncle Silas sat on the bottom of the stairs and laughed his head off, and I began to cry because I was sorry for Jenny and thought it was the end of the world.

My Uncle Silas was very fixed and very firm in the notion that women were no good to you. ‘They're allus arter you, boy,' he said. ‘Allus arter you.'

I was, at the time, very small, and it was much too soon for me to point out that Silas, on the contrary, was always arter them.

‘Like her,' he said. ‘Take her. Allus arter me.'

At the age of ninety-one my Uncle Silas still had something of the look of a crusty farmyard cock. He gave a great sniffing sort of sigh, fixed his bloodshot eye on me in cunning reminiscence and whipped a dewdrop off his nose.

‘She wadn' half a tartar,' he said. ‘Everlastin' arter me. Night and day.'

‘Doing what?' I said.

‘Plaguing on me.'

‘For what?'

‘Tormentin' on me,' he said. ‘Whittlin' me to death.'

His bloodshot eye had a crack of scarlet glee across it.

‘What was her name?' I said.

‘Tutts,' he said.

‘That's a funny name.'

‘She wur a funny woman,' he said. ‘She wur 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, under 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?'

‘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 o' grub. No different. Week-days and Sundays. No different. Allus the same.'

‘What grub?'

‘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 wur 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 wur thin, you says. She wur 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 wur. 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.