Cut and Come Again

by H. E. Bates

  Suddenly she broke into an awful fit of coughing. When it came upon her she tried to stand up, but she only staggered forward a little and half-fell. The cat jumped away in alarm, and the potato bumped to the ground, and I saw the woman snatch it up as she darted forward to the girl.

  ‘Starlina, Starlina,’ she wailed.

  She began cramming the potato into her mouth and trying to coax the girl upright at the same time. Suddenly there was a brief spurt of blood, and the gipsy let out a wild gipsy-wail as the bright scarlet splashed her hands and the girl’s yellow shawl.

  It was all over in a moment, and as though she felt better the girl staggered to her feet. As she leaned against the woman she looked at me. Her face was full of a dazed bewilderment that was terrible.

  A moment later the woman and my grandfather were half-carrying her away. ‘Starlina, Starlina!’ the woman kept moaning as they went. It was raining faster and the wind seemed to be wilder, and half-way across the yard the girl staggered and my grandfather picked her up in his arms and carried her the rest of the way to the van out on the road, the woman running on behind, moaning and wailing, with the scarlet-splashed shawl that the wind had torn off the girl’s shoulders.

  ‘Boy, boy,’ said the gipsy to me, groping with his hands, ‘where are you, boy? Gimme yer hand, boy. That’s right. Bless you, boy, bless you.’

  I led him across the yard, and to the van. ‘Good boy,’ he kept saying to me. ‘Bless yer.’ His hands were trembling. My grandfather was coming out of the caravan as we reached the road, and from inside came the voice of the woman complaining over the girl.

  ‘Where are ye, Lukey boy?’ said the gipsy. ‘Ah, here y’are, here, y’are. Give us yer hand, Lukey, bless yer. Let’s feel th’ old thumb, Lukey. Bless yer, boy, bless yer till we see ye again.’

  The voice of the woman came wailing that they ought to be getting on, and finally the gipsy climbed up into the caravan and as the horse struggled forward against the wind his last words were:

  ‘We’ll see yer in the spring, Lukey. We’ll be back for the cart in the spring.’

  We stood for a moment watching the van swaying slowly along the road against the storm, and the rain came in invisible bitter gusts and the sky was a desolation of storm-darkness deepening into the darkness of evening. Over the fields the seagulls, no longer visible, were screeching with wilder and wilder cries against the storm.

  As we went back in the rain to the yard I kept thinking of the girl, enchanted and haunted by the memory of her as she sat stroking the cat and by the half-terror of death in her face as she stood with the blood still on her lips and looked at me. From the yard we watched the caravan struggling along the wind-lashed road and as it vanished out of sight I kept thinking of the gipsy’s words:

  ‘We’ll be seeing ye in the spring, Lukey. We’ll be back for the cart in the spring.’

  But we never saw them again.

  Bonus Stories

  The Tree

  Never before published as part of a collection, ‘The Tree’ portrays the final day in the life of a fifty-year-old elm tree. Here Bates evokes the ever-present narrative of nature – a complex and nuanced beauty, constant and often overlooked.

  The tree was an elm. It was actually no larger than a host of others grouped within sight about the hill side, but in its isolation it had the powerful appearance of a giant. Short branches and wiry twigs bristled out from the long trunk until at the head a profusion of boughs made a great crown, doubling the suggestion of power. The tree was leafless, but through the boughs, from the frail topmost structure downwards, the wind made a low noise, scarcely ever broken, like a murmur of satisfaction.

  The mid-winter day was approaching twilight. The tree had murmured constantly since dawn, the noise filtering through the boughs in a quiet flow. As dusk gathered and everything lay as if dead, the heart of the evening still gave up that murmur, descending like a sigh of content.

  In a neighbouring tower four o’clock struck with something about the notes not quite true, as if the sound had travelled through a thousand years. In the north distance rose a younger cry, with that effect of a sharp blade ripping the closing fabric of night. It died suddenly as if suffocated: the cry of a single plover travelling to shelter. Thereafter the silence expanded and seemed to cover the earth like a great hand over a mouth. Only the murmur of the tree, unchanged, escaped and rose in air. Night fell rapidly. In the west, however, touching earth, still stretched what might have been a great strip of steel, held at a sharp angle to an intense light so that the rays shot through the whole length of earth. In the north and east lay something like a dim reflection of those beams, a faint greyness, which in contrast began to ascend and advance as the strip of steel was pulled out of sight. In the darkness it was the only hint of light: there were no stars.

  Across the sky the greyness moved in great strides. The tree murmured continually. The clouds came climbing over each other, menacing, ugly, spreading ultimately to a sombre host that gradually blotted out all light from the west. Everything crouched in the silent attitude of a prisoner. And suddenly even the tree was still.

  The silence broke with a thin, frightened sound, circling above the tree: the cry of a second plover. In the blackness the shape was invisible but the cry went on, the bird drumming her wings in fear, rising and falling and dropping away at last.

  Other sounds woke. Across the road shot the dim shape of a hare, whimpering quietly. The sheep protested from a bramble hovel, and another bird cried before a surge of wind deadened all sound but that of the tree.

  The wind rose abruptly. The tree sighed above the noise of shifting leaves and the long whistling stir of grass beneath. Even the sharp, melancholy voices of a score of plovers, risen suddenly from nowhere, did not cover that sound. It knew no respite. In the storm that took its first vicious sweep down the land it leapt to a great shriek.

  For a minute after nothing happened. The calm momentarily banished all suggestion of storm. In the silence the “Cheep-cheep” of a linnet was like a tremendous shout.

  Then the silence burst. The shrieks and wails of the tree led an army of sound against the terrific wind and the dark sky which suddenly belched a storm of snow. There was no pause in the onslaught, and the tree never ceased to fight in protest. It struggled and screamed, bending towards earth and shooting back in vigorous sweeps of defiance, twisting in its nakedness, stiffening against the blast.

  The struggle went on into the night. Out of the northern sky the snow came in great rushes, with a noise as if every flake were in pain. Drifting fiercely it blurred the road-pools darkly and the whole land lightly as if by a multitude of diagonal sweeps from a silver pencil. The wind battered the tree in fury until the branches cracked in terror. Then it sprang back until the tree shook and stilled itself with a great groan. There was no rest. The retreat of the wind was over quickly. In the upper darkness it seemed to gather itself, blowing like an over wrought body before extending its infinite limbs for an advance. The snow came down in a false languor, caressing the tree with a quiet touch. The elm murmured.

  With a great roar the enormous body of wind hurled itself to earth, writhing and smiting angrily. An immense sigh, increasing to a shriek, shot through the woods and careered forlornly over the fields. The snow was whipped to a fast, icy frenzy. For a moment the tree remained stiff, as if frozen into an unconscious immobility that nothing could break. Then, as the wind declared itself again, it appeared dwarfed, half-lost in a universe of furious whiteness. But in another moment it stood entirely stark against the sky, looking greater than ever, its upmost branches stirring as if groping for an impossible support. The trunk seemed to have bulged with strength, taut and defiant, with all muscles set.

  The wind closed in from all sides, descending as if to rip open the stomach of earth itself. A low scream went up from the tree. The scream continued, rising higher and higher until it stopped, as if some vital chord had been abruptly severed. An echo of it seemed to
live on in the wind. Then from the tree came the old murmur, in crescendo, subjecting every sound.

  It seemed that the tree had over-lived the shock: a shiver of relief went through it. The wind had withdrawn for another onset, gathering strength up in the darkness. The snow had begun its old delusion, falling lazily.

  The tree nodded languidly to the south-west. High up the wind rumbled as if impatient at its own delay. The tree began slowly to fall. Its long flight to earth culminated in a great crash. Then the body lay stiffly across the snow, no sound or strength in it. The last noises of the fall had fled before the wind came down with a shriek of disappointment, angrily drifting snow against the black limbs.

  But there was no resistance of movement and no sound but a low murmur of which the wind bred in the tree. The snow began to cover the elm as it had already covered the land. There was no pause. All night the wind wandered and rushed through the body of the tree, producing mournfully and without break that murmur which for fifty years had been a life song and was now a dirge.

  The Man from Jamaica

  ‘The Man from Jamaica’ recalls a boyhood summer tending cows, in which the narrator meets a boy named Dodfish who tells him tall tales about a version of Jamaica that involves lions and ambushes. Years later, he recognises Dodfish at a dance and watches him charm an adoring partner with the same lies.

  After breakfast on fine summer mornings I used to drive my grandfather's two black cows out of the farm-yard, cracking them across their bony buttocks with an old thorn stick as black as the cows with age and use, and take them along the road-side where they could roam knee-deep in summer grass and fill their bellies for the day. The road ran from east to

  west. The village lay to the west, and away to the east stretched a great plain of open country, where windmills stood on every bit of rising ground arid villages with silver spires in every hollow, wood after wood and cornfield after cornfield patterning the land between. I hardly ever drove the cows to the west. Day after day I turned their heads towards the morning sun and let them roam downhill towards the plain, past the blackthorn scrub where the verge widened and gipsies drew up their caravans and downhill to the stream running over the road a yard of brown and silver water. The stream was the parish boundary, and there I let the cows drink before driving them back again. It was the easiest laziest work in the world. The cows could look after themselves while I looked in the hedgerows for a finch's nest or for an ash-stick to peel to fantastic patterns or while I lay on my back in the grass and looked blankly at the larks in the summer sky.

  Hardly anyone ever came along the road except perhaps a farmer driving to market in a trap, sitting with his wife under the big green sun-umbrella. Or a drover with a herd of sheep, or a gamekeeper with a dog, or a girl in a black habit taking her morning ride on a sleek brown pony as proud as herself. Sometimes the gipsies had pitched on the brow of the hill and they would be peg-making or tinkering by the fire as I drove the cows

  past, hoicking and blustering at the animals to make them go faster, afraid that the gipsies would kidnap me and hamstring the cows and take us all away in the yellow-and-emerald van with the shining brass wheel hubs and door-knobs and lanterns.

  Frightened of the gipsies one day, I drove the cows on the following morning towards the village, westward. Coming near the village I looked ahead and saw approaching me another boy, also driving a cow, a lean, red-and-white beast with narrow udders and a crippled, shambling walk.

  The cows drew level with each other, the old red cow on one side of the road, our black ones on the other, and presently the boy and I drew level with each other too. I should have gone past without speaking, but as we drew level he shouted across at me:

  ‘Tame work!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said feebly, for I thought it was fine work.

  ‘So deuced silly, cows.’ he said, swishing with his walking stick at some purple thistle-heads. ‘Anything doing the other way?’ and he pointed eastward.

  ‘Not much. Some gipsies. That's about all.’

  ‘Gipsies? Bit tame, don't you think? Anyway, I’ll keep on. Going to turn your old crocks round and come back with me?’

  ‘Your old cow isn't so fat,’ I said.

  He wasn't at all offended. Aiming at the thistle-heads again he agreed with me – a rotten old cow, an old hag, fit for nothing.

  ‘Whose cow is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Old Strawn's – doddering old fool, my uncle. Got about fifty beastly cows, but he sends me out with this cripple. Frightfully low down.’

  Old Strawn was a milkman who sold milk from a bucket, house to house, and they used to say that he watered his milk from the pond where his only cow squelched to drink and cool her legs. If he had lived for a thousand years he would never have had fifty cows, and turning our cows about, I said:

  ‘If you mean Strawn the milkman, he's only got one cow.’

  ‘Ah, until yesterday, yes. But he bought up a lot yesterday – made a good deal.'

  I did not know what to say and we walked on for a good distance, each of us cracking our cows forward, without speaking much. During this time I kept looking at the

  boy out of the corner of my eye, inexplicably fascinated by him. He spoke in a strange, high-pitched, superlatively refined voice, and he was dressed, as it were, in keeping with his voice, his neat black coat and trousers and wide starched collar and black bow all as new and sleek as his cow was old and bony, his whole demeanour as superior as she was humble.

  We let the cows roam on and we followed them down the hill and past the gipsies and down to the stream. There they drank and then stood without drinking to cool their hocks in the running water. Sometimes I had seen a kingfisher swoop up-stream in the brown shadows of the willows and alders, and while the cows drank I leaned on the white wooden bridge & watched, and suddenly I saw the bird sweep under me like a blue arrow and pierce the flicker of shadow and sunlight.

  ‘Did you see it?’ I said to the boy.

  ‘See what?’ he drawled.

  Before I could reply to his bored voice we heard an irate shout, and a toothless old man, with an angry white beard, came running down the hill, hoicking and driving our cows before him. We had let the cows wander over the parish boundary, and as he came nearer he shouted:

  ‘Take your damn cows off – take ’em off into your own parish. Who d'ye think you are? Take ’em off!’

  I ran across the brook and drove the cows back across it again, the old man shaking his fist at me, and we whacked the cows with our sticks and drove them fast up the hill again. Half-way up the hill the boy flung himself on the grass and glared back in the direction of the old man, his face supercilious and angry.

  ‘In Jamaica I’d have shot that fellow.’ he said.

  I stared, and in astonishment repeated: ‘Shot him?’

  ‘Shot him,’ he said. ‘Shot him or knifed him – probably knifed him. Quieter, the knife.’

  ‘Have you been in Jamaica, then?’ I asked, and my voice must have trembled with fear and wonder.

  ‘Born there.' he said. ‘Born and bred there. My father was a missionary. We came back on leave this year.’ As he spoke he rolled up his sleeve and showed me a mark, like a purple berry-stain, just above his wrist.

  ‘See that?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ I said.

  ‘Spear.’

  I could not speak for awe and the tight dryness of my throat.

  ‘My father was attacked – savages, of course – and we had to leave our house and flee for our lives. Terrible business. As we were running for the horses a native threw a spear. Drove straight through my arm and pinned me to the ground. I fainted, of course, but my father picked me up and leapt on his horse and rode off with me. We had to ride a hundred and fifty miles before we could get the spear out of my arm. Beastly business.’

  ‘Are there many savages?’ I asked.

  ‘Swarms – can't move for them. Daren’t go into the garden without a gun. Attack you for nothing.’
/>
  ‘They wouldn't eat you?’

  ‘Might easily! Depends. Plenty of lions for that, of course. You might be in the garden and before you knew where you were a lion would be on you.’

  I felt suddenly ashamed that I had hitherto looked upon Jamaica only as a land of banana-trees and sugar-cane, but I tried to look as if I had known all my life of the lions and savages too, though my mind was tingling with excitement at the wonder of his words and the air of subtle nonchalance with which he spoke them. We lay there in the long summer grass under the June sunshine for a long time, and he told me stories, grand, incredible impossible stories, warming up as he passed from one to another, heaping lie upon lie, though I did not know it then, as the morning went on. There was a story which he told so vividly that he seems to be telling it now, of a blazing hot afternoon on the open plain, with only isolated palm-trees providing shade, when he had gone out with his little sister, then about five, to catch some sort of lizard for her to keep as a pet when they came home to England. He became a good deal confused with his distances & sometimes it was five miles and sometimes it was fifteen that they had walked under the tropical sky without seeing the lizard, but at length they had found one, only to find at the same time

  that they were lost, and that three lions were coming towards them, angry-tailed, sniffing human flesh.

  I remembered how my heart thumped against the grass as he told, careless and nonchalant as ever, how he and his sister had climbed a palm-tree and he had shot at the lions with his revolver, killing two and wounding a third. It was a great story, and I gazed at him in a kind of giddy wonder as he told how suddenly another shot had rung out and how the lion had fallen dead, and how a horseman had ridden up, flourishing his smoking rifle, and had rescued them, only to fling them on his horse like carcasses and ride off with them into the hills where he held them to ransom. When the horseman rode up he was a Spaniard, and then in the hills he became an Indian, and when the boy stole his horse and rode off with his sister he was a Mexican, and it was the body of a dirty Portuguese that they had found on the following day, riddled with bullets from the boy's revolver. But I took no notice of these things. I listened to it all fascinated, not doubting a word.