An Aspidistra in Babylon by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

A Prospect of Orchards

1

Many years ago I belonged to a young men’s club where I used to play chess, read magazines and also box quite frequently, though not very seriously, with a man named Arthur Templeton. We must have been, I think, eighteen or nineteen at the time.

Templeton was a shortish leaden-footed man with weak brown eyes whose responses were those of a duck with its legs tied. His jaw was babyish, smooth and hairless, like a pale pink egg. I had taken up boxing because once, at school, in a playful scuffle, a young ox of a farmer’s son had struck me on the chest with a blow of such short-armed ferocity that I was convinced my heart had stopped beating. Soon afterwards I found a friendly ex-policeman who gave me lessons, taught me that the essential art of the game lay in footwork and in a maxim of six short words: hit, stop, jab and get away. Presently I was practising these principles on Arthur Templeton, to whose pink hairless jaw I sent so many unresisted straight lefts that it became intolerably embarrassing—so embarrassing indeed that I presently became profoundly sorry for him and gave up boxing altogether.

The friendships of youth are so often impermanent that it is perhaps not surprising that Arthur Templeton’s pale pink jaw presently faded from my life with no tremor either of interest or regret. There had been no pleasure whatsoever in boxing with Arthur Templeton, exactly as there can be no pleasure in catching over and over again the same gullible gudgeon from a brook. Arthur Templeton was what is known, popularly, as a glutton for punishment and if I had any reason to be glad about anything between us it was solely because I had decided that the punishment was not, if I could help it, coming from me.

Twenty-five years later I was travelling home on a cold April evening in a train that entered a tunnel and then emerged, some minutes later, into a bright stretch of downland dried stark white by the long drought of spring.

A dazzle of sunlight after the murk of the tunnel suddenly woke life into the eyes of the man sitting opposite me. He inclined towards me a head of pinkish baldness, half holding out his hand.

‘I rather think we know each other,’ he said, ‘don’t we?’

I hesitated; there was, for me, no hope of any clue of recognition except in the brown retiring eyes and the egg-like shaven jaw.

‘Templeton. Arthur,’ he said.

‘Good Heavens, of course,’ I said. ‘We used to box together.’

It is a curious and not uncommon characteristic of rather short men that they seem, if anything, to grow shorter as time goes on. Arthur Templeton, who had entirely ignored my reference to boxing, seemed not merely to have grown shorter; he had grown baldish and fleshy, with the same superciliousness of lip that frequently goes not only with men of short build but also with very fat girls who desperately attempt to

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