by H. E. Bates
On the edge of the lake, on the already hot grey concrete, small children were crumbling bread and saffron-yellow buns for the ducks. Mrs. Victor was revolted. Food, always food, eating, didn’t the world do anything else? Gulls planed over and clawed the air, to swoop down and up and snatch the thrown bread before it reached the water. Their dismal crying greed set Mrs. Victor’s nerves on edge like wire scratching on glass. She bumped and panted past, out of range of gulls and children and the revolting sight of bread thrown and snatched.
She sat down on one of the green public seats. There was another thing. Now it had got so that she couldn’t sit on one of the twopenny chairs. They were made only, it seemed, for normal people, the slim and elegant. She remembered the days when she had been slim and elegant: straight as a line-prop, hardly fat enough in fact, her body its own corset.
Like the young woman on the seat. Just like her. Scarcely enough flesh, if anything. Mrs. Victor looked at the young woman who, in turn, was staring across the water: blonde, young, with shadow-pointed cheeks and small scarlet buttonhole mouth closed tight up. Mrs. Victor, looking to see if she had any stockings on at all, saw the points of stitched ladders where the legs crossed. Stockings meant she had some sort of belt on. Well, that was just for decency. She didn’t need support. It was a figure that had stepped straight out of advertisements.
Mrs. Victor looked down at her own squabbed-out thighs, like two vast aerated sausages, and felt like weeping. She could not bear it, and looked back at the girl.
Ask her if she diets. Somehow she looks as if she diets. That sort of thinness can’t be natural. There’s thinness and thinness. Somehow she looks as if she must diet.
Mrs. Victor hesitated to speak. She had seen the scorn, before now, in the faces of the young. She didn’t want to speak and then have it thrown back in her face. Then she looked again at the girl. You could have blown her away with a breath. She had the ethereal lightness you saw spoken of in advertisements. There was nothing on her.
More children had appeared on the lake-edge, with more bread, so that the air was filled with a shrieking storm of gull-wings. Mrs. Victor said:
‘Excuse me. I’ve been looking at your figure, and wondering – ’
‘Eh?’ The girl, startled, turned her extraordinarily thin face. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear for the birds.’
For a moment the birds quietened. Mrs. Victor said:
‘I hope you’ll excuse my speaking to you. I’ve been looking at your figure. Wondering if you did anything special for it. If you dieted. You see how I am.’
‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t do anything special.’
‘Oh!’
Mrs. Victor, not knowing how to go on, smiled. The girl’s profile looked as though it had been pared down by a knife.
‘I’ve got so desperate now,’ she said, ‘that I’m thinking of seriously starving.’ It did not sound right. ‘Starving seriously,’ she said.
If she thinks I’m going to sit here, the girl thought, and listen, she’s crazy. Not me. I’m going. I’ll go straight away. She sat quite still. If I get up, she thought, I think I shall fall down.
‘Really starving.’ Mrs. Victor went into an explanation of the word, moving slightly along the seat. ‘You know. Days without food.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m sick of food. Sick of it.’ Mrs. Victor began to explain who she was, how, being who she was, she had to attend dinners, functions, eating, always eating, eating until now, at last, she was utterly sick of eating. ‘Take last night. The dinner began at eight and we were still eating at half-past nine. Still eating!’
The girl sat trying to think of something to say. She could think of nothing but her suspender belt. It felt loose on her body. It will fall off, she thought, if I move. I’ve altered the hooks once already. I shall have to alter them again.
‘First there was some special sort of cheese, Norwegian or something, on rye-biscuit. As if we needed that. Then soup, consommé or crême, just the usual thing. Then fish. Fish I should have liked, but it was messed up with spaghetti and sauce and egg and I can’t think what. All fattening things. And that’s how it went on. Duck, pheasant, chicken – and I was so sick of them I tried venison. Have you ever eaten venison? My husband was having it and he said I should try it. I couldn’t eat it. I can’t explain what it tastes like – but queer, somehow. An acquired taste. You’ve never tried it?’
‘No,’ the girl said, ‘I can’t say I have.’
‘Don’t.’
I could eat an elephant, the girl thought. I could eat bacon-rind. She sat thinking of bacon-rind. People didn’t eat it. They cut it off, but if you did fry it, it jumped in the frying-pan like snakes.
‘If you multiply that by hundreds you’ll see what I have to go through in a year,’ Mrs. Victor said.
Multiply it by hundreds. Like snakes. Snakes lay eggs, hundreds of eggs. The girl remembered going, long ago, to the zoo, and then giving whole bananas to monkeys. It’s not so bad, she thought. I had a banana yesterday. I made it last forty-three minutes. With luck I could make it last an hour.
‘I’ve tried special baths. I’ve tried slimming creams and massage. I’ve tried everything,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘It costs me a fortune.’ Children were beginning to come nearer, along the edge of the lake, drawing the gulls with them as though they were kites on invisible strings. Ducks scurried round in brown skirmishing flotillas, quarrelling, diving, tails up. ‘I’ve done everything, and this morning I went over fifteen. It’s terrible. I used to be as thin as you.’
It’s no good, the girl thought, I’ve got to go down to the post office. If Harry sends the money I shall know it’s all right. If he doesn’t send it I know I’m done. Whatever happens, I’ve got to go down to the post office and see. I’ve got to be logical. I haven’t a job. I’ve got to be logical. During the war we used to eat locust beans. You never see them now. They said they had food value. We used to make them last a long time. That’s what I want, something to last a long time.
‘So I think there’s nothing for it,’ Mrs. Victor said, ‘but to try simple starvation. I shall just starve and starve.’ She laughed a little. ‘After all it must be the oldest form of losing weight in the world.’
The children had come very near, the gulls shrieking and wheeling above the flurry of ducks, white bread and yellow bunscraps flashing up in arcs against the bright sunshine.
‘You see, it wears me out. Just sitting here now, I’m so hot I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m all perspiration. I shall have to change everything when I get home.’
A small child holding a round sugar-shining bun threw it into the water in one piece.
‘It’s so humiliating. You see, don’t you? Your friends, people staring at you. When you’ve been thin, when you’ve had a nice figure. You see, don’t you?’
‘I see,’ the girl said.
‘I envy you,’ Mrs. Victor said.
Again the girl thought, if I get up I shall fall down. She stirred slightly, feeling the emptiness of her stomach send out fainting waves of weakness. Her mind slipped into silliness. If A has two shillings between her and the workhouse and there’s no letter at the post office how many bananas must A eat before A is dead?
On the edge of the lake a nurse stood on tip-toe and tried to regain the lost bun with the ferrule of a sunshade, regained it, and gave it back to the child. ‘Of course it’s all right. Of course they’ll eat it. They’ll eat anything.’
‘I know my husband won’t like it,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘But I can’t help it. He’ll say think of my position and so on. But it’s no use. I’ve got my own pride – I can’t look at myself in the glass.’
Now the small child had himself begun to eat the water-soaked bun, liking it. The nurse, grey-capped, swooped down on him like a gull herself, snatching it away, startling him to tears.
‘Why does she make that child cry? I can’t stand children crying,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘It gets on my nerves. Pe
ople think because you’re fat and easy going you’ve got no nerves. My nerves are all on edge.’
The crying of the small child against the crying of the gulls made wire-shrill discords. Nerves, the the girl thought. Nerves. Somebody had said that to her. Nerve. She remembered, saw herself mooning slowly along the street, intentionless, her mind dead. You’ve got a nerve, a voice said. Beginners on the other side of the street. When you went to the cinema this was what happened. This, as you knew, was the thing that the heroine had to face, and yet it was never mentioned. It was the most terrible thing, and in the end, by some awful irony, it was the director who saved her both from it and from herself.
‘That child,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘I can’t stand it. Why does she make it cry like that?’
The child, holding his breath, had gone from crimson to faint purple in the face, in the fury of his frustration. The waves of torturing sound beat against the great cushion of Mrs. Victor’s body and shook her nerves. She got up.
‘It’s no use, I shall have to go.’
At that moment the nurse snatched up the child, put him into a large white perambulator, snatched the bun from his hands and threw it into the lake again. In a moment, as the perambulator moved off, the screams of the child began to die away.
‘Well, that’s better,’ Mrs. Victor said. ‘Even so, I think I must go.’
I must go too, the girl thought. But if I get up I shall faint.
‘Good-bye,’ Mrs. Victor held out her hand. ‘Think of me starving.’ She held in her large moist hand the girl’s thin one. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again.’
‘Good-bye,’ the girl said.
Mrs. Victor walked away along the edge of the lake. The girl sat staring at the water. Ducks and birds and light and bread revolved like a lucky wheel against the sun.
The Machine
Every evening, up at the farm, we saw the same men go past, out towards the villages, at the same time. They were coming home from the factories down in the valley: men escaping from the machine.
And though we got to know them well by sight, first the young chaps, racing hard, with flying mufflers, then the old stagers, the old tough shoe-finishers still wearing polish-blackened aprons, then the man with the black cork-leg and only one pedal to his bicycle, there was one we knew really well. His name was Simmons. We called him Waddo.
When Waddo went past we lifted hands from hoes or rakes, or even waved a cabbage that we might be cutting, and hailed him. ‘Way up!’ we called.
‘Waddo!’ he shouted, and sailed on.
But three times a year, at hay-time, harvest and threshing, when we needed extra hands, he stopped to help us. He rode his pink-tyred semi-racing bike into the stack yard, unstrapped his dinner-basket, rolled up his sleeves and looked round at us, as we stood stacking corn or unloading hay, with a look of tolerant contempt. As though to say, ‘You poor miserable devils. Bin here since morning and all you done is stack up three ha’porth o’ hay. Well, spit on me big toe, spit on it. If you ain’t a bleedin’ limit.’ It was the look of a giant for a degenerate collection of pitch-fork pygmies. Waddo himself stood five feet three.
But when he came into that yard we were transformed. He flung himself to work with an almost daemonic fury of strength. The muscles of his small arms were tight as clock-work springs under the white factory-blanched flesh. His little head, with thin wire-brush hair worn bald at the temples, was like a bullet that might have gone off at any moment with an explosive bang of enthusiasm or disgust. He worked swiftly, with the slight puffed swagger of a man of mountainous physique, incessantly talking, always comic, spitting mouthsful of patient disgust for us who worked so hard all day and did nothing. There was some extra volcanic force in Waddo, who never tired, never gave up, and was never beaten. Coming from the machines, he was like a machine himself. ‘Waddo,’ we’d say to him, ‘blowed if you don’t go on wheels.’
‘I bleedin’ well have to,’ he’d say, ‘don’t I?’ And we knew, with his five-mile ride to work and his five miles back, his eight-hour day holding boots to the jaws of a stitcher in the factory, his seven children, his readiness to mow with his own hands, in his spare time, every blade of grass and every standing acre of corn in the parish, how true it was. ‘I got a day’s work to git through in half,’ he’d say. ‘Not like some folks.’
‘What you need on this place,’ he’d say at last, ‘is machinery.’
In any discussion of the machine Waddo held us as it were at arm’s length, in contempt. ‘Call yourself bleedin’ farmers, and ain’t got a machine on the place. No binder, no hay-turner, no root-cutter. No tater-riddler, no nothing. Blimey, spit on me big toe, spit on it. Ain’t you up to date? Here you are scrattin’ about like old hens scrattin’ for daylight, when a couple o’ machines’d bring you right bang-slap up with the times. Machines – that’s what you want. Save yourself time and money. See! They do away with the men.’
The machine was his god. It was exemplified in his racing bike, in the stitcher which he fed all day with boots like some omnivorous steel brute at the factory, in the threshing-drum we hired once every winter. Working so beautifully, swiftly and naturally with his own hands, he exalted the mechanism that could have cut out the element of man. It fed his devotion with the same daemonic energy as he worked, so that he preached at us with one hand on the futility of a machineless world and showed us, with the other, how incomparable and effective it could be. With the machinery of his two hands he swung a scythe with a masterly and precise beauty that no machine could ever have shown.
And at heart, I think, he knew it. He mowed very fast, as though carelessly, off-hand, apparently indifferent. He was often not so tall, by a foot, as the corn he cut. Head down, he had a certain air of detached dreaminess, as though the whole thing meant nothing to him at all.
Then, at the end of the swathe, he would turn and look back; and we would see, for a moment, the beauty of the work recaptured in his own eye, the small light of pleasure glinting out as though a bead of sweat had been caught in the pupil. He gazed, as we did, at the level alleys of stubble, short and straight as though the corn were sprouting up white again, the golden-white corn stalks shining as if sun-oiled, the sienna-gold sweep of ears and the straight wall of standing corn, and he must have known that he was a master hand.
But always in time, the obsession of the machine caught him up again. ‘How many acres of wheat you got here? Ten? Gonna take us a week to move it. Now with a binder – ’
We would say something about expense.
‘Expense! Spit on me big toe. You can’t see for looking. Expense! You can save the bleedin’ cost of the thing in a couple o’ years. Save money, save men. Don’t you see?’
Sometimes he would work on into the still August moonlight, tireless as a machine himself, mowing, whetting the scythe, dropping the scythe to fall flat on some escaping leveret, mowing again, still arguing, still abusing us, then biking off, at last, across the moon-dewed land with the energy of a man just beginning a cycle race.
‘Don’t you want a light?’ we’d say to him.
‘Light? Spit on me big toe, I s’ll be home and in bed with the missus afore you can strike a match.’
He abused and decried us all through harvest and hay-making. At threshing he got his reward. In the engine and drum he saw, at last, a sensible interpretation of life: a complicated system of power and steam, a miracle, a single unit doing the work of scores of men. ‘Some sense,’ he’d say, ‘at last.’
He took a day off from the factory, then, to help us, arriving at six in the morning, and we saw then that we had never seen him except as a tired man. He skidded into the yard at full speed, bounced off his bicycle, seized his pitch-fork as though ready to lift a complete corn-stack with one finger. He argued vociferously, held us at the usual arm’s length of contempt, laughed and joked and worked as always with the same casual and yet explosive and masterly rhythm. Working high up in the drum, on the edge of a maelstrom, he bawled down to us be
low with gigantic accents, though nobody could hear, feeding sheaves to the drum with the pleasure of a man feeding a favourite beast.
We threshed, one year, in November. The wind came down on us from the north-east, with intermittent bites of ice-rain, across bare land. The power of the wind roaring under the drum spouted up a terrific blast of chaff, all day long, that was like hail on the naked eyes. Above, chaff and chaff-dust were winnowed from the cracks of the drum in fierce little clouds, as though she were spitting ice vapour. Higher still, on the roof of the drum, the men caught by the full force of wind and up-blown chaff and wind-blasted straw worked all day half-blinded.
Waddo was on the drum. Exhilarant in that terrific wind, he worked as though the wind shot him new energy. He bawled down at us with a mouth that, against the roar of drum and engine and wind, was quite soundless. But we understood, we felt the words in his expression of contemptuous triumph. ‘See? Didn’t I tell you? Spit on me toe – didn’t I tell you what a machine could save you?’
That day the rats began to run out of the first stack about eleven o’clock. We pursued and hemmed and cornered them, smashing them to lumps of grey-red jelly in the wind-littered straw. From above Waddo looked down on us like a director of operations, yelling and waving his fork.
As he stood there, jack-in-the-boxing, gesticulating, laughing, a rat leapt out of a sheaf he was lifting. We saw his own leap of energetic excitement and knew the words he yelled by long habit and the shaping of his lips:
‘Spit on me big toe, spit on it! Waddo! Spit on me – ’
We saw him slip. We knew how the iron-shod boots must have slid on the loose kernels of polished grain, on the straw-smoothed roof of the drum. He lifted a wild hand and he yelled and shouted. The engine-man threw on the brakes and we heard the shriek and moan of stopped machinery.
‘Waddo!’ we yelled, ‘Waddo. For Christ’s sake! Waddo!’
There was no answer; and in a world that stood still we knew that the machine had claimed him.