Cut and Come Again

by H. E. Bates

  Swinging viciously at the starting handle Hartop shouted: ‘When I swing, shove that little switch forward. Forward! Christ. Forward! I never seen anything to touch it. Never. Forward! Now try. Can’t you bloody well hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then act like it. God, they say there’s no peace for the wicked. Forward!’

  Then when the engine spluttered, fired, and at last was revolving and the van travelling on and the women were able to hear again, Hartop kept repeating the words in a kind of comforting refrain. No peace for the wicked. No bloody peace at all. He’d had enough. Just about a bellyful. What with one thing – Christ, what was the use of talking to folks who were deaf and dumb? Jack up. Better by half to jack up. Bung in. No darn peace for the wicked.

  And suddenly, listening gloomily to him, the woman realised that the road was strange to her. She saw trees, then turns and gates and hedges that she did not know.

  ‘Jos, where are we going?’ she said.

  Hartop was silent. The mystery comforted him. And when at last he stopped the van and switched off the engine it gave him great satisfaction to prolong the mystery, to get down from the van and disappear without a word.

  Free of his presence, the two women came to life. Alice half rose from the seat and shook her mackintosh and skirt and said, ‘Where have we stopped?’ Mrs. Hartop was looking out of the side window, peering with eyes screwed-up. She could see nothing. The world outside, cut off by blackness and rain, was strange and unknown. Then when Mrs. Hartop sat down again the old state of negation and silence returned for a moment until Alice spoke. It seemed to Alice that she could hear something, a new sound, quite apart from the squalling of wind and rain; a deeper sound, quieter, and more distant.

  The two women listened. Then they could hear the sound distinctly, continuously, a roar of water.

  Suddenly Mrs. Hartop remembered. ‘It’s a mill,’ she said. She got up to look through the window again. ‘We’ve stopped at Holland’s Mill.’ She sat down slowly. ‘What’s he stopped here for? What’ve we ——?’

  Then she seemed to remember something else. Whatever it was seemed to subdue her again, sealing over her little break of loquacity, making her silent once more. But now her silence had a new quality. It was very near anxiety. She would look quickly at Alice and then quickly away again.

  ‘Is there any tea left?’ Alice said finally.

  Mrs. Hartop bent down at once and looked under the seat. She took out a thermos flask, two teacups and an orange. Then Alice held the cups while her mother filled them with milky tea. Then Mrs. Hartop peeled and quartered the orange and they ate and drank, warming their fingers on the tea-cups.

  They were wiping their juice-covered fingers and putting away the tea-cups when Hartop returned. He climbed into the cab, slammed the door, and sat down.

  ‘What you been to Hollands’ for?’ the woman said.

  Hartop pressed the self-starter. It buzzed, but the engine was silent. The two women waited. Then Hartop spoke.

  ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you start in service at Hollands’ Monday morning. His wife’s bad. And he told me last Wednesday he wanted a gal about to help. Five shillin’ a week and all found.’

  ‘Jos!’

  But the noise of the self-starter and then the engine firing drowned what the women had to say. And as the van moved on she and Alice sat in silence, without a sound of protest or acquiescence, staring at the rain.

  II

  At night, though so near, Alice had seen nothing of the mill, not even a light. On Monday morning, from across the flat and almost treeless meadows, she could see it clearly. It was a very white three-storied building, the whitewash dazzling, almost incandescent, against the wintry fields in the morning sunshine.

  Going along the little by-roads across the valley she felt extraordinarily alone, yet not lonely. She felt saved from loneliness by her little leather bag; there was comfort in the mere changing of it from hand to hand. The bag contained her work-apron and her nightgown, and she carried it close to her side as she walked slowly along, not thinking. ‘You start in good time,’ Hartop had said to her, ‘and go steady on. The walk’ll do you good.’ It was about five miles to the mill, and she walked as though in obedience to the echo of her father’s command. She had a constant feeling of sharp expectancy, not quite apprehension, every time she looked up and saw the mill. But the feeling never resolved itself into thought. She felt also a slight relief. She had never been by herself, so far from home. And every now and then she found herself looking back, seeing the house she had left behind, the blank side-wall gas-tarred, the wooden shack in the back-yard where Hartop kept the motor-van, the kitchen where she and her mother bunched the chrysanthemums or sorted the oranges. It seemed strange not to be doing those things: she had sorted oranges and had bunched whatever flowers were in season for as long as she could remember. She had done it all without question, with instinctive obedience. Now, suddenly, she was to do something else. And whatever it was she knew without thinking that she must do it with the same unprotesting obedience. That was right. She had been brought up to it. It was going to be a relief to her father, a help. Things were bad and her going might better them. And then – five shillings a week. She thought of that with recurrent spasms of wonder and incredulity. Could it be true? The question crossed her mind more often than her bag crossed from hand to hand, until it was mechanical and unconscious also.

  She was still thinking of it when she rapped at the back door of the mill. The yard was deserted. She could hear no sound of life at all except the mill-race. She knocked again. And then, this time, as she stood waiting, she looked at the yard more closely. It was a chaos of derelict things. Everything was derelict: derelict machinery, old iron, derelict motor cars, bedsteads, wire, harrows, binders, perambulators, tractors, bicycles, corrugated iron. The junk was piled up in a wild heap in the space between the mill-race and the backwater. Iron had fallen into the water. Rusty, indefinable skeletons of it had washed up against the bank-reeds. She saw rust and iron everywhere, and when something made her look up to the mill-windows she saw there the rusted fly-wheels and crane-arms of the mill machinery, the whitewashed wall stained as though with rusty reflections of it.

  When she rapped on the door again, harder, flakes of rust, little reddish wafers, were shaken off the knocker. She stared at the door as she waited. Her eyes were large, colourless, fixed in vague penetration. She seemed to be listening with them. They were responsive to sound. And they remained still, as though of glass, when she heard nothing.

  And hearing nothing she walked across the yard. Beyond the piles of rusted iron a sluice tore down past the mill-wall on a glacier of green slime. She stooped and peered down over the stone parapet at the water. Beyond the sluice a line of willows were shedding their last leaves, and the leaves came floating down the current like little yellow figs. She watched them come and surge through the grating, and then vanish under the water-arch. Then, watching the fish-like leaves, she saw a real fish, dead, caught in the rusted grating, thrown there by the force of descending water. Then she saw another, and another. Her eyes registered no surprise. She walked round the parapet, and then, leaning over and stretching, she picked up one of the fish. It was cold, and very stiff, like a fish of celluloid, and its eyes were like her own, round and glassy. Then she walked along the path, still holding the fish and occasionally looking at it. The path circled the mill pond and vanished, farther on, into a bed of osiers. The mill-pond was covered in duck-weed, the green crust split into blackness here and there by chance currents of wind or water. The osiers were leafless, but quite still in the windless air. And standing still, she looked at the tall osiers for a moment, her eyes reflecting their stillness and the strange persistent absence of all sound.

  And then suddenly she heard a sound. It came from the osiers. A shout:

  ‘You lookin’ for Mus’ Holland?’

  She saw a man’s face in the osiers. She called back to it: ‘Yes.’<
br />
  ‘He ain’t there.’

  She could think of nothing to say.

  ‘If you want anythink, go in. She’s there. A-bed.’ A shirt-sleeve waved and vanished. ‘Not that door. It’s locked. Round the other side.’

  She walked back along the path, by the sluice and the machinery and so past the door and the mill-race to the far side of the house. A stretch of grass, once a lawn and now no more than a waste of dead grass and sedge, went down to the backwater from what she saw now was the front door.

  At the door she paused for a moment. Why was the front door open and not the back? Then she saw why. Pushing open the door she saw that it had no lock; only the rusty skeleton pattern of it remained imprinted on the brown sun-scorched paint.

  Inside, she stood still in the brick-flagged passage. It seemed extraordinarily cold; the damp coldness of the river air seemed to have saturated the place.

  Finally she walked along the passage. Her lace-up boots were heavy on the bricks, setting up a clatter of echoes. When she stopped her eyes were a little wider and almost white in the lightless passage. And again, as outside, they registered the quietness of the place, until it was broken by a voice:

  ‘Somebody there? Who is it?’ The voice came from upstairs. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me.’

  A silence. Alice stood still, listening with wide eyes. Then the voice again:

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me. Alice.’

  Another silence, and then:

  ‘Come up.’ It was a light voice, unaggressive, almost friendly. ‘Come upstairs.’

  The girl obeyed at once. The wooden stairs were steep, and carpetless. She tramped up. The banister, against which she rubbed her sleeve, was misted over with winter wetness. She could smell the dampness everywhere. It seemed to rise and follow her.

  On the top stairs she halted. ‘In the end bedroom,’ the voice called. She went at once along the wide half-light landing in the direction of the voice. The panelled doors had at one time been painted white and blue, but now the white was blue and the blue the colour of greenish water. The doors had old-fashioned latches of iron and when she lifted the end latch she could feel the first thin leaf of rust on it ready to crumble and fall. She hesitated a moment before touching the latch, but as she stood there the voice called again and she opened the door.

  Then, when she walked into the bedroom, she was almost surprised. She had expected to see Mrs. Holland in bed. But the woman was kneeling on the floor, by the fireplace. She was in her nightgown. The gown had come unbuttoned and Alice could see Mrs. Holland’s drooping breasts. They seemed curiously swollen, as though by pregnancy, or some dropsical complaint. The girl saw that Mrs. Holland was trying to light a fire. Faint acrid paper-smoke hung about the room and stung her eyes. She could hear the tin-crackle of burnt paper. There was no flame. The smoke rose up the chimney and then, in a moment, puthered down again, the paper burning with little running sparks that extinguished themselves and then ran on again.

  ‘I’m Alice,’ the girl said. ‘Alice Hartop.’

  She stared fixedly at the big woman sitting there with her nightgown unbuttoned and a burnt match in her hands and her long pigtail of brown hair falling forward over her shoulders almost to the depths of her breasts. Her very largeness, her soft dropsical largeness, and the colour of that thick pigtail were somehow comforting. They were in keeping with the voice she had heard, the voice which spoke to her quite tenderly again now:

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Alice, I am so glad.’

  ‘Am I late?’ Alice said. ‘I walked.’

  Then she stopped. Mrs. Holland had burst out laughing. The girl stood vacant, at a loss, her mouth fallen open. The woman gathered her nightgown in her hands and held it tight against her breasts, as though she feared that the laughter might suddenly flow out of them like milk. And the girl stared until the woman could speak:

  ‘In your hand! Look, look. In your hand. Look!’

  Then Alice saw. She still had the fish in her hand. She was clutching it like a little silver-scaled purse.

  ‘Oh dear! oh dear!’ she said. She spoke the words as one word: a single word of unsurprised comment on the unconscious folly of her own act. Even as she said it Mrs. Holland burst out laughing again. And as before the laughter seemed as if it must burst liquidly or fall and run over her breasts and hands and her nightgown. The girl had never heard such laughter. It was far stranger than the fish in her own hand. It was almost too strange. It had a strangeness that was only a shade removed from hysteria, and only a little further from inanity. ‘She’s a bit funny,’ the girl thought. And almost simultaneously Mrs. Holland echoed her thought:

  ‘Oh! Alice, you’re funny.’ The flow of laughter lessened and then dried up. ‘Oh, you are funny.’

  To Alice that seemed incomprehensible. If anybody was funny it was Mrs. Holland, laughing in that rich, almost mad voice. So she continued to stare. She still had the fish in her hand. It added to her manner of uncomprehending vacancy.

  Then suddenly a change came over her. She saw Mrs. Holland shiver. That brought back at once her sense of almost subservient duty.

  ‘Hadn’t you better get dressed and let me light the fire?’ she said.

  ‘I can’t get dressed. I’ve got to get back into bed.’

  ‘Well, you get back. You’re shivering.’

  ‘Help me.’

  Alice put down her bag on the bedroom floor and laid the fish on top of it. Mrs. Holland tried at the same moment to get up. She straightened herself until she was kneeling upright. Then she tried to raise herself. She clutched the bedrail. Her fat, almost transparent-fleshed fingers would not close. They were like thick sausages, fat jointless lengths of flesh which could not bend. And there she remained in her helplessness, until Alice put her arms about her and took the weight of her body.

  ‘Yes, Alice, you’ll have to help me. I can’t do it myself any longer. You’ll have to help me.’

  So gradually Alice got her back to bed. And Alice, as she helped her, could feel the curious swollen texture of Mrs. Holland’s flesh. The distended breasts would fall out of her unbuttoned nightgown, her heavy thighs would lumber their weight against her own, by contrast so weak and thin and straight. And then when Mrs. Holland was in bed, at last, propped up by pillows, Alice had time to look at her face. It had that same heavy water-blown brightness of flesh under the eyes and in the cheeks and in the soft parts of the neck. And the gentle dark brown eyes were sick. They looked out with a kind of gentle sick envy on Alice’s young movements as she straightened the bedclothes and then cleaned the fireplace and finally as she laid and lighted the fire itself.

  And then when her eyes had satisfied themselves Mrs. Holland began to talk again, to ask questions.

  ‘How old are you, Alice?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Would you rather be here with me than at home?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t you like it at home?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Is the fire all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you’ve done the grate will you go down and git the taters ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s cold mutton. Like cold mutton, Alice?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Then, in turn, the girl had a question herself.

  ‘Why ain’t the mill going?’ she asked.

  ‘The mill? The mill ain’t been going for ten years.’

  ‘What’s all that iron?’

  ‘That’s the scrap. What Fred buys and sells. That’s his trade. The mill ain’t been worked since his father died. That’s been ten year. Fred’s out all day buying up iron like that, and selling it. Most of it he never touches, but what he don’t sell straight off comes back here. He’s gone off this morning. He won’t be back till night-time. You’ll have to get his tea when he comes back.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You must do all you can fo
r him. I ain’t much good to him now.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You can come up again when you’ve done the taters.’

  Downstairs Alice found the potatoes in a wet mould-green sack and stood at the sink and pared them. The kitchen window looked out on the mill-stream. The water foamed and eddied and kept up a gentle bubbling roar against the wet stone walls outside. The water-smell was everywhere. From the window she could see across the flat valley: bare willow branches against bare sky, and between them the bare water.

  Then as she finished the potatoes she saw the time by the blue tin alarum clock standing on the high smoke-stained mantelpiece. It was past eleven. Time seemed to have flown by her faster than the water was flowing under the window.

  III

  It seemed to flow faster than ever as the day went on. Darkness began to settle over the river and the valley in the middle afternoon: damp, still November darkness preceded by an hour of watery half-light. From Mrs. Holland’s bedroom Alice watched the willow trees, dark and skeleton-like, the only objects raised up above the flat fields, hanging half-dissolved by the winter mist, then utterly dissolved by the winter darkness. The afternoon was very still; the mist moved and thickened without wind. She could hear nothing but the mill-race, the everlasting almost mournful machine-like roar of perpetual water, and then, high above it, shrieking, the solitary cries of seagulls, more mournful even than the monotone of water. They were sounds she had heard all day, but had heard unconsciously. She had had no time for listening, except to Mrs. Holland’s voice calling downstairs its friendly advice and desires through the open bedroom door: ‘Alice, have you put the salt in the potatoes? You’ll find the onions in the shed, Alice. The oil-man calls today, ask him to leave the usual. When you’ve washed up you can bring the paper up, Alice, and read bits out to me for five minutes. Has the oilman been? Alice, I want you a minute, I want you.’ So it had gone on all day. And the girl, gradually, began to like Mrs. Holland; and the woman, in turn, seemed to be transported into a state of new and stranger volatility by Alice’s presence. She was garrulous with joy. ‘I’ve been lonely. Since I’ve been bad I ain’t seen nobody, only Fred, one week’s end to another. And the doctor. It’s been about as much as I could stan’.’ And the static, large-eyed, quiet presence of the girl seemed to comfort her extraordinarily. She had someone to confide in at last. ‘I ain’t had nobody I could say a word to. Nobody. And nobody to do nothing for me. I had to wet the bed one day. I was so weak I couldn’t get out. That’s what made Fred speak to your dad. I couldn’t go on no longer.’