Cut and Come Again

by H. E. Bates

  The man took hold of the plough handles. ‘Come on, get up there, on, get up.’ And the plough started forward, the horse slower and the share stiffer on the wet land.

  Walking by the horse’s head, on the unploughed earth, the boy had forgotten the dead man. Skylarks kept twittering up from among the coltsfoots and he kept marking the point of their rising with his eyes, thinking of nothing but the nests he might find.

  But all the time the man kept his eyes on the far distance of cloud and sunlight, as though he were lost in the memory of his dead friend.

  And the plough seemed almost to travel of its own accord.

  Jonah and Bruno

  Slowly Jonah rested his elbows on the high teacher’s desk, first one and then with the same deliberation the other, tucking his white cuffs into his jacket sleeves at the same time. He looked at the class dangerously. It was the second lesson of the morning, but the windows of the classroom were north and south, so that we had no sun, a half-glass partition on the eastern side cutting us off from Miss Salt and standard five. We could see Miss Salt’s iron-coloured hair, done up in a magnificent dome, if she moved across her room towards us, and in silent intervals we could hear her voice in haughty command, ‘Pens down, fold arms, sit straight!’ and the scuffle of obedience in answer. And sometimes Jonah or Miss Salt would write pencil notes to each other on the torn-out pages of exercise books and then hold them flat on the glass for each other to read, Miss Salt’s neck reddening, Jonah’s mouth leering up to one side under his stiff whitish moustache.

  ‘India is the central peninsula of southern Asia.’ Jonah began to articulate the words slowly and significantly, his grey eyes transfixing us. We sat still, forty of us, two to a desk, in a paralysis of attention. Jonah was about fifty, his flesh the colour of pork, a greyish white, his knuckles standing out almost like white raw bone under the drawn skin, his almost fleshless nose thin and very long, with a faint twist in it, a perpetual sneer of contempt at us. ‘Extensive irrigation is practised. The crops include wheat, maize, cotton, coffee, tea, rice …’

  ‘Pudden,’ whispered Bruno.

  ‘Opium poppy, spices, sugar-cane and so on. There are large tracts of jungle.’ Jonah went on without a pause or change of his voice.

  Bruno sat next to me, in the same narrow desk. He had hair like a lion, yellow, with tawnier streaks in it. As always, it needed cutting; it hung over his collar in fierce little curls of yellow which flopped down like a mane over his thick-skinned face whenever he bent over the desk. It was his hair that gave Bruno the untamed look as he sat sullenly listening to Jonah, his lips pouched.

  ‘Precious metals are found in the provinces of Burma and Assam. There are mines of coal, iron, manganese ore, copper …’

  ‘Nob,’ Bruno said. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, so that we could just hear. ‘Copper nob.’

  We sat tense, half-laughing inside ourselves, watching Jonah. There was no sign. He went on reciting, the tops of his fingers pressed together, forming a cage of bone. ‘Tin and other metals. Then we come to one of the most important assets of India, its forests. Its forests ——’ He paused for a moment. ‘Its forests ——’ He waited, spoke slightly louder. ‘Its forests ——’ His lips pressed themselves into the formation of a smile. ‘If God had intended our friend Clarke to look out of the back of his head he would have given him eyes there.’ Nobby came round like a shot, the blood in his face. Jonah relaxed his lips. ‘Now that our friend Clarke is listening: its forests ——’ His hands slowly unformed and then formed the cage again. ‘Characteristic trees are teak, sandalwood, ebony, rubber …’

  ‘Soles,’ Bruno whispered.

  ‘Bamboo, deodar, and the banyan tree.’ He finished speaking, made a pause. And then suddenly, like an unexpected shot:

  ‘Did I hear you say something, Bruno?’

  ‘Nosir.’

  ‘It is curious, as I think I have remarked before, how my ears deceive me. I thought you spoke.’

  ‘Nosir.’

  ‘Curious. What are the trees of Indian forests, Bruno?’

  ‘Teak, sandalwood, ebony, rubber, bamboo, deodar and the banyan tree.’ Bruno spoke fast, producing the words in a mechanical strip, like a tape machine. His head was up, bold and sullen, his yellow hair flung back.

  ‘One other tree, I think, Bruno.’

  ‘Nosir.’

  ‘I think so, Bruno.’

  ‘Nosir.’

  Jonah did not speak. He sat looking at Bruno, his fingers lightly caged, an expression of ironical sweetness on his face, his eyes like stone. The class, caught up in a new tension of fear and expectation, sat as still as tightened wire.

  Suddenly Jonah spoke again. ‘My mistake,’ he sneered. Almost simultaneously he got up quickly, went to the window behind the desk and shut it.

  It was the fatal sign; we knew it at once. When he turned back to us from the window the sweetish look had already vanished from Jonah’s face, and the irony was also beginning to vanish, melted by a rush of anger. And now when Jonah was standing, upright, away from the desk, we realised how tall he was. He stood stiff and thin and ungiving, like a post of iron.

  ‘I give you one more chance, Bruno,’ he said dangerously.

  Bruno was silent.

  ‘Very well. Stand up!’

  Bruno sat motionless. His gaze had lowered a little now; it was more sullen; the tawny lion hair hung half down in his eyes.

  ‘Stand up!’

  There was no movement that Jonah could see; but underneath the desk I could see a movement of Bruno’s hands, as they tightened on the seat of the desk.

  An instant later Jonah was down on him. He came in long strides of fury down the gangway between the desks. His face was like bone, quite bloodless, his neck-muscles hard in anger against his come-to-Jesus collar. And now for the first time his voice was lifted:

  ‘Will you stand up!’ he shouted.

  Bruno, staring now at the desk, never stirred. And suddenly Jonah seized him. He caught him at the back of the neck, by the collar of his jacket, and in one single movement of fury half-lifted him off the seat. The desk lid, caught by Bruno’s body, flapped open and shut again like a shot. ‘Stand up!’ Jonah shouted. ‘Stand up, can’t you? Stand up!’ I felt the desk lifting bodily at each of Jonah’s shouts. By this time Bruno had locked his feet round the iron stays of the desk and his fingers were like iron clamps on the seat and Jonah could not move him. The desk went up and down with a dull clanging of wood and iron, like some stubborn animal that Bruno was riding and trying to tame. And all the time Bruno’s hands were so clenched and his feet so locked that Jonah could not move him. His jacket was wrenched halfway up his back, so that I could see his shirt, but each time he came down on the seat again, locking his feet tighter.

  Then all at once Jonah hit him. He struck him full across one ear, knocking his head to one side like an Aunt Sally, and then across the other, knocking his head back again. He hit with furious frenzy, flat-handed, and Bruno, caught unawares, half raised his hands in terror. It was all that Jonah wanted. In another second he had Bruno on his feet and in another, before Bruno could make the effort to struggle back to the desk, he struck him again.

  It was a sort of half blow. It caught Bruno on the back of the neck and sent him staggering down the gangway and out into the open space in the class-front, towards Jonah’s desk and the blackboard. In a second Jonah was after him. We sat tense, in an excitement of fear and hatred. Bruno staggered back against the teacher’s desk and then out again as Jonah came down the gangway, his hair more than ever lion-like, flopping down into his eyes so that he had to shake it back again. Jonah strode down between the desks and went for him, his hand stretched. He caught Bruno by the hand, half-twisting it, swinging him out. The cane was hung on a peg behind the blackboard and Bruno knew it, so that when Jonah swung him one way he tried to swing with a furious effort the other. But Jonah had him. He could do nothing. Jonah kept swinging him outward and then round and so nea
rer and nearer the blackboard, the boy’s face puckered with the pain of it.

  And gradually Jonah fetched him round until he stood within arm’s reach of the blackboard and then of the cane hanging on the wall behind it. He held Bruno like iron with one hand and then whipped the cane off the wall with the other, the spidery arm flickering up and down and then in a flash across Bruno’s shoulders.

  ‘Now stand up! Stand up! Straight! And hold out your hand. Hold it out!’

  And Bruno stood still. He was half looking at Jonah, glinting up. We waited, tense.

  ‘Hold out your hand! Hold it out! Hold it out.’

  Slowly Bruno held it out. The cane went up. Something even more tense than our own hatred flared up in Jonah’s face, an almost demoniacal look of fury. It increased as the cane quivered and began to descend.

  It flamed up into frenzy as the cane lashed down. The cane was like lightning, but Bruno’s hand, whipped back, was quicker, and the cane whistled in the empty air like a whip.

  Somehow Jonah controlled himself. He said nothing. He held the cane back, as to an oncoming animal. He was very quiet. There was something dangerous in it. And suddenly he seized Bruno’s hand from behind his back and wrenched it out. Bruno knuckled it. Jonah held the cane high over his head and then, without warning, and with Bruno’s hand still clenched, he brought down the cane with mad force, like a guillotine.

  Bruno had no chance. He tried to tear back his hand, but Jonah had it and he crashed down the cane on the clenched knuckles with terrific power. And then, before Bruno could realise it, it went up and crashed down again and then again.

  It was going up for the fourth time when Bruno, half-weeping with rage and terror, kicked with all his force at Jonah’s shins. It was a sickening sound. The bone seemed to ring hollow and Jonah went very white, a curious stark whiteness, with the pure sickness of rage and agony.

  In another moment he dropped the cane and went for Bruno with blind madness, hitting him full across the ear with an open-hand blow that sent him staggering against the blackboard. We heard the sickening crash of Bruno’s head and then the slithering of the blackboard itself as it came off the pegs and clattered on the block floor and then the rattle of the easel as Bruno pushed it back against the iron radiator like a man pushing back a crowd in a street fight.

  Then Jonah hit Bruno again, and then again. Bruno was on the ground, kicking. Jonah lugged him up and then half knocked him down again. Bruno got up with the tears pouring down his face and his breath fluttering wildly, kicking Jonah’s shins again with all his might. Then Jonah seized the cane and hit him with that, across the shoulders and arms and even across the legs and wherever he could. The boy fell down again and Jonah seized him again by the coat collar and wrenched him up. Then Bruno tried the old trick, locking his arms about the iron stays of the front desk, and Jonah for a moment could not move him, until suddenly he seized hold of Bruno with both hands, front and back and shook him, trying to break him free.

  In another moment he stood straight up, with a sound of pain. We saw the blood start out on his hand where Bruno had bitten him and we saw it shaken off in little spatters of crimson as he rushed at Bruno to tear him away from the desk, seizing hold of Bruno’s jacket with both hands.

  Finally we heard the sound of Bruno’s jacket ripping down the seam. We saw the cloth hanging loose and the dirty grey lining pouring through the rent. Bruno scrambled up wildly, in hysteria, crying in thick blubbers of hatred and terror, going for Jonah as a half-defeated boxer goes for another in a last hope of victory, punching his body with his hands.

  And for a moment Jonah looked defeated. He stood with the momentary limpness of a man who half-mistrusts himself and his own rage. And while he stood there, limp, panting a little, the blood running down his hand, Bruno kicked him again.

  In a moment it was all over. He suddenly descended on Bruno with the terrorizing swiftness of a new rage. Bruno, seeing it, started towards the door. Jonah was after him, picking up the cane as he went, bringing it down madly on Bruno’s shoulders as he struggled with the door and finally opened it, and went half-whimpering and half-wailing down the corridor beyond.

  Jonah vanished in the corridor too. We were standing up in a moment, on the forms and half on the desks, gabbling with excitement.

  Suddenly there was a tattoo on the partition. We stood paralysed. It was Miss Salt, with an odd scared look on her greyish face, tapping on the glass.

  She stood watching over us until Jonah came back. He came into the classroom alone, his hair wild, the blood smeared now on both hands.

  He took one look at us.

  ‘Class – sit!’

  We sat.

  Presently Jonah too sat down. This time he did not cage his fingers and he forgot to tuck back the cuffs of his shirt into his sleeves. He was trembling. We could see the trembling slightly in his hands and hear it distinctly in his voice:

  ‘The Hindus are the result of a mixing of Aryans and Aborigines …’

  In the afternoon Jonah was not there after the bell had gone and Bruno’s desk was empty. For a quarter of an hour Miss Salt kept watch on us through the partition door.

  Finally Jonah came in. His face was whiter than we had ever seen it, almost as white as the bandage on his hand, and he seemed so preoccupied that he forgot to shut the classroom door behind him.

  In another moment we saw why he had forgotten to shut it. Bruno came in.

  And then, after Bruno, someone else: a soldier, a little fellow with stocky legs, a drooping yellow moustache and rather round bland eyes. He held Bruno’s torn coat in his hands, and standing at the door, he spoke to Bruno as he walked to his seat.

  ‘Y’know what I told you. If he lays half a finger on you, come and tell me.’ He looked at Jonah. ‘And y’know what I told you as well, y’big sod!’

  He went out without another word. All that afternoon and for almost another week Jonah did not even look at Bruno. And we in turn, like Bruno, could scarcely look at Jonah, and only then with fear in our hearts.

  The Bath

  As we struggled with our bags up the little German road in the August heat, leaving the camp of English soldiers-of-occupation in the valley to the left of us, we were all wondering if there would be a bath at the end of the journey. And when was the end of the journey? We must have asked that question of Karl a thousand times. ‘Soon,’ he would say carelessly, ‘soon.’ But we were afraid of mentioning the bath, for at heart we all felt that we were going into some lost and legendary German world so isolated and primitive that baths would be as unknown as Englishmen.

  It was beautiful country, lost and peaceful. The roadside was starred with many stiff blue chicory flowers and milky-yellow snapdragons and scarlet poppies, the flowers drifting thinly back into hedge-less crops of potatoes and ripening wheat and rye that had old pear trees planted among them in wide lines, the lines gapped here and there where a tree had died. Along the roadside there were again lines of pear trees, with odd apple trees interplanted, and the same breaks where a tree had gone. Beyond the crops of corn and potatoes, the land rose gently, always a pale sand colour, to the vineyards that gleamed a strange bluish-green in the straight sunlight. To the left was the valley with its broad river flowing between the many-coloured crops, and the English soldiers’ tents grouped by the water like chance mushrooms. The road climbed continually, always farther and farther away from that river where we might have bathed and on towards the vineyards that we never quite seemed to reach.

  ‘Where is this village, Karl? How much farther? Can’t we stop and rest? Let’s stop and get some beer. Karl, let’s stop.’

  But it made no difference to Karl. He and I walked in front, setting the pace, with chicory-flowers stuck in our buttonholes, while Wayford and Thomas came behind us, together, and after them the two brothers Williams. It was the Williams, the one like a little rosy pig and the other like some thin provincial photographer dressed to photograph a funeral, who wanted to rest continuall
y. It seemed that they had once spent a week in Paris and had drunk champagne there; and now it gave them a sort of melancholy amusement to compare the boulevards with the little German road winding up to the vineyards, and the champagne with the lager. But Karl was deaf. The country was his native land, the little road with the poppies and chicory flowers had not changed since his childhood, and he was the prodigal returning after many years.

  So he led us implacably on in that August heat until, very late in the afternoon, we came to his native village, a lost and beautiful place, full of old white houses with green jalousies and great courtyards shut off from the narrow shadowy streets by tall wooden doors, a forgotten place, as legendary as we had half imagined it, lying up there between the forests and the vineyards like a village out of some old German fairy tale.

  When we arrived there was great excitement, a sort of explosive excitement, all the fat German fraulein who were Karl’s sisters or aunts or cousins popping off shrieks and cackles of hysterical laughter, and the heavy German men booming thunderously in their round bellies and slapping themselves and Karl on the back in their immense joy. When we were introduced there was a great shaking of hands and a babbling of voices and a running hither and thither, together with all the pantomimic signs with hands and eyes and lips that pass between men who do not speak each other’s language. And over and above it all, hysterically and incredulously:

  ‘Karl! Karl! Karl! Karl!’

  From that moment our visit became a kind of festival. Day and night there was an incessant pouring of wine and coffee in that old farmhouse with the great courtyard, a babbling arrival and departure of visitors, a cracking and frizzling of a thousand eggs over the great wood fire in the dark and lofty kitchen. We lived for three days the luxurious and pampered life of a conquering army under the roofs of a conquered people. In the mornings we lazed about the courtyard in the hot sunshine, and in the afternoon walked up to the vineyards to watch the peasants thinning and spraying the vines for the last time; or we strolled off into the forest, the breathless pine forest that shut us off from the outer world, and then came back to photograph the peasants cutting the patches of wheat and rye with ancient reapers drawn by even more ancient oxen. We could go where we liked and do what we liked and drink what we liked. We were the English, which seemed to mean that we were the favoured, the elect. Wherever we went in that village some old man or woman or child or young girl would come out to speak and laugh with us and make all the eternal pantomimic signs of gladness and friendship. If we were tired we could walk into the nearest house and sit there and rest; and there would be wine and coffee, talk and laughter, and diffident respect and a sense of quivering happiness. Every-where there was that feeling of relief and joy that comes between two people who have quarrelled and are friends again, and want only to forget their bitterness.