Mild & Bitter

THE DAFFODIL SKY (256 pp.)--H. E. Bates--Little, Brown ($3.50).

Like the clipped and guarded conversations overheard on British trains, the short stories of H. E. Bates are calculated to baffle the eavesdropper.

Long acknowledged as a master craftsman in an exacting trade, Bates writes with an English sense of place and social pattern; his prose often carries the gleam of England's pale sunlight. The title story is a neatly cut account of murder, told obliquely and in retrospect. A farmer kills the man he suspects of seducing his bride. Returning home after serving his sentence, the farmer finds his daughter now almost the same age his wife had been when he killed her lover. Slowly, and by indirection, the reader becomes aware that the daughter, too, could be seduced, and the pattern repeated.

In story after story, the cut of the waistcoat or the shape of a vowel is used--as it can be used only in a caste-conscious country--to indicate character. The U.S. reader may be baffled by the careful way in which, in The Evolution of Saxby, Bates makes clear that Saxby is the sort of man who, if it were not wartime, would be wearing a rosebud in his buttonhole. But a dozen other tales--of love glimpsed suddenly across a roomful of dreadful people, of a glint of bitterness in an ill-mated couple on a journey, of remembered death--have power to move the heart.

Yet the stories have the disappointment of an interrupted journey. Bates remains faithful to the British conviction that, while it is interesting to hear things about one's neighbors, it doesn't do to get too close to them.

"How do you do?" asks one Englishman of another. "How do you do?" answers the other. They are not questions, and yet a writer, who is both introducer and the introduced, must try to answer them. Bates never does.

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