The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (23 page)

When the nurse came back past the bed again she saw the little jeweller lying with closed eyes and the palms of his small, shrunken hands upturned across the bed. His lips were moving very slightly, but with her casual glance she did not notice them.

Nor could she hear what he was saying now. ‘Take me away. Take me away, please. O Lord! take me away.'

After a tough, poverty-stricken childhood, Obadiah's scheme to make his fortune begins with a pig.

He wanted neither children nor romance, but a partner in business, so when he meets a widow with similar values, he wins her over in what becomes a comic sketch of a bickering couple - a rare and brilliant piece of caricature in Bates's canon. Published in the
New Clarion
(1933), and not republished since.

Obadiah Tooks was the craftiest, meanest man in his neighbourhood. Every corner of his crabbed body, from his squinting black slits of eyes and his twisted mouth to his squat legs that took him gliding and scurrying along like a weasel, was filled with cunning. He was harder than a Jew, and had none of the Jew's redeeming virtues.

Obadiah was the eldest son of some poor labourers who managed to scrape a living from an acre of land behind the village. His childhood had been very poverty stricken. Nothing ever went right or prospered. It was an accepted thing that the roof of the house should fall in every winter and that another child should be born every spring. When the Tooks had a little good luck, the money was spent in paying off their debts. When the bad luck came again, in the shape of illness or blight or death or another baby, Obadiah was sent with a note to a dealer in the village, and the next day the dealer came and offered his parents a paltry sum for the corn-drill or the horse's harness, so that life could go on again.

Obadiah was hard, close, and old headed before he was out of boyhood. By the age of sixteen his soul was eaten up with a desire to drag himself free from poverty and make money. He had many schemes for making his fortune, but he began with a pig. For next to nothing he picked up a young white sow from a widow. The sow was thin and ill-fed, but he saw that she was treated properly, and in due course she farrowed.

To the astonishment of Obadiah and his parents she bore a litter of fifteen. When the pigs grew up a dealer came and scratched, and poked their backs with a stick and offered a price for them.

‘I don't want to sell,' said Obadiah.

‘Blasted fool!' thundered his father.

‘Why not? Ain't that a good price?'

‘Oh, yes,' said Obadiah. ‘But I can wait. There'll be a better.'

He waited; it became his greatest maxim to wait. He called it sitting tight, and he learned to sit tight, regardless of everything, until his opportunity fell like a ripe pear in his lap. At intervals his sow farrowed again; she brought him litters of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and even nineteen. She became the most desirable pig in the countryside, and Obadiah prospered.

By the time he was twenty-three he owned some land and pigs enough to employ all his brothers and sister; he dealt in everything from scrap iron to horses, and he found himself in a position to marry.

He often considered the matter, but when he looked at the women about him they seemed silly or romantic or soft or anxious for children, and Obadiah wanted neither children nor romance, but a partner in business. In time he bought up, one by one, a street of houses, until he owned all but one. In spite of many ruses he could not buy the last. It was owned and occupied by a widow, a sharp, resolute, experienced woman of nearly fifty. Obadiah had made many offers for the house, but the answer was always the same.

‘I don't want to sell,' she would say.

As time passed he raised his price, little by little. The answer was still the same. Gradually his price grew ridiculously high, and he was puzzled. Suddenly it struck him that he had discovered at last a woman of principles, unshakable, unsentimental, and armed with a patience and shrewdness that matched his own.

Delighted, just as if he were buying an animal, he quickly ran over her points. She was a widow, which was very good. Since he had no time to waste on wooing; she was probably past having children, which was even better; and also she had sense and money, which surrounded her with a peculiar seductive glamour which alone, of all things, could turn his head.

Soon he began to pay her attentions, and after putting his case dispassionately in terms of pounds and pence he married her.

The marriage was a great success. What artifices Obadiah did not think of his wife did. Each widened the sphere of cunning and profit for the other, and they prospered rapidly.

Obadiah admired and trusted his wife and was always congratulating himself on having chosen such an acute, artful woman. When they had been married three or four years he succeeded in bringing off a deal which, without her craftiness and resource, he dared not have risked. The profit staggered him. He gloated upon it, scheming how he could protect it against failure and loss.

Then he remembered that he had heard of men who, by making over their whole possessions to their wives had even been able to become bankrupts without losing a penny. All his deepest cunning was stirred by this idea, and in order to outwit the law a deed was drawn up making over this whole property and means to his wife.

Everything went well. Obadiah felt safe and cunningly satisfied, as if he had outwitted fate itself.

Shortly afterwards he observed that his wife was spending money very freely on herself. He protested. She revealed an ill-temper he had never suspected, and he also grew angry, and they quarrelled violently. She still continued to spend. Hadn't he made the money over to her? He flew into a rage and struck her. But when he was calm again he could see that he had done something foolish, and gradually he conceived a fierceness of hatred for her which took him beyond control.

When he flew into a temper one day and flung a bottle at her and cut her cheek, she retaliated with a torrent of angry threats which filled him with fear.

‘Behave yourself, you snipe, or I'll turn you out of the house! And who'll prevent me? You? And what can you do? You've got nothing. The house isn't even your own. You behave yourself, or I'll have you kicked out in the gutter.'

Utterly humiliated, he lay quiet for a time, but soon the hopelessness of his case struck him again, and he flew at her like a savage. But gradually he saw that unless he behaved and was peaceful she could treat him like a child. The very moment he thought of it he was filled with madness. He tried to stroke her with a candlestick, but she evaded him and ran to the door and shouted that he was murdering her.

The very next day, when he came home, the doors of the house were locked on him. It was the end. And as he walked away, powerless, outwitted, defeated, an angry woman's voice shouted after him:-

‘And don't come back! If I care to send you an allowance, I shall. But if I don't, you miserable little son of a sweater, I don't! You can wait! Do you hear? I've stood enough from you, and now you can wait!"'

And Obadiah waited.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950).

Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates
.

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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

First published in Great Britain in 1940 by Jonathan Cape Ltd

‘Obadiah – A Man Who Met His Match' first published in Great Britain in 1933 in the
New Clarion

This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 1933, 1940 Evensford Productions Limited

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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eISBN: 9781448215119

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