The Complete Uncle Silas Stories

The Complete Uncle Silas Stories Read Free Page A

Book: The Complete Uncle Silas Stories Read Free
Author: H.E. Bates
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no bathroom. My Uncle Silas had instead a small iron bath, once painted cream and never repainted after the cream had turned to the colour of earth, which resembled some ancient coracle. And once a week, generally on Fridays and always in the evening, the housekeeper would drag out the bath from among the wine-bottles in the cellar and bring it up and get it before the fire in the living-room. Once, in early summer, as though hoping it might make that miserable inquisition of bathing impossible, he had filled the bath with a pillow-case of cowslip heads and their own wine-yellow liquor. It did not deter her. She gave him his bath in a pudding-basin instead, sponging him down with water that grew cooler and colder as he stood there blaspheming and shivering.
    Very often on fine winter evenings I would walk over to see him, and once, almost forgetting that it was his bathnight, I went over on a Friday.
    When I arrived the house was oppressively warm with the heat and steam from the copper boiling up the bath-water in the little kitchen. I went in, as I always did, without knocking, and I came straight upon my Uncle Silas taking off his trousers, unconcerned, before a great fire of hazel faggots in the living-room.
    â€˜Oh! It’s you,’ he said. ‘I thought for a minute it might be a young woman.’
    â€˜You ought to lock the door,’ I said.
    â€˜God A’mighty, I ain’t frit at being looked at in me bath.’ He held his trousers momentarily suspended, as though indeference to me. ‘Never mattered to me since that day when …’
    He broke off suddenly as the housekeeper came running in with the first bucket of boiling water for the bath, elbowing us out of her way, the water falling into the bath like a scalding waterfall. No sooner had the great cloud of steam dispersed than she was back again with a second bucket. It seemed hotter than the first.
    â€˜Out of my way!’ she ordered.
    â€˜Git us a glass o’ wine,’ said Silas, ‘and don’t vapour about so much.’
    â€˜You’ll have no wine,’ she said, ‘until you’ve been in that bath.’
    â€˜Then git us a dozen taters to roast. And look slippy.’
    She was already out of the door with the empty bucket. ‘Get ’em yourself!’ she flashed.
    â€˜I got me trousers off!’ he shouted.
    â€˜Then put ’em on again!’
    This relentless exchange of words went on all the time she was bringing the remaining buckets of water in and he was undoing the tapes of his pants, he shouting for the wine and the potatoes and she never wavering in her tart refusals to get them. Finally as he began to roll down his pants and she began to bring in the last buckets of water he turned to me and said:
    â€˜Git a light and go down and fetch that bottle o’ wine and the taters. Bring a bottle of elderberry. A quart.’
    While I was down in the cellar, searching with a candle in the musty, wine-odoured corners for the potatoes and the bottle, I could hear the faint sounds of argument and splashing water from above. I was perhaps five minutes in the cellar, and when I went back up the stone steps, with the wine in one hand and the candle in the other and the potatoes in my pockets, the sound of voices seemed to have increased.
    When I reached the living-room Silas was standing up in the bath, stark naked, and the housekeeper was shouting:
    â€˜Sit down, man, can’t you? Sit down! How can I bath you if you don’t sit down?’
    â€˜Sit down yourself! I don’t want to burn the skin off me behind, if you do!’
    While he protested she seized his shoulders and tried to force him down in the bath, but his old and rugged body, looking even stronger and more imperishable in its nakedness than ever, was stiff and immovable, and he never budged except to dance a little as the water stung the tender parts of his feet.
    â€˜Git the taters under!’ he said to me

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