by H. E. Bates
But when it came, in a moment, it caught her so suddenly that she cried out.
‘Oh! get somebody! Do something. Do something! Get the doctor! Oh! help me!’
‘Doctor? Gawd, how can I git a doctor? You want me to leave you by yourself?’
‘Oh! get somebody. Stop a car. Stop somebody going by. Oh! God!’
‘Lay quiet. Lay easy,’ the old woman said. ‘Lay easy now.’
She spoke more softly and as she spoke the pain too softened and the girl lay relaxed, quieter, her eyes shut in relief and something like shame at her outburst.
‘What time is Charley coming?’ she said.
‘Not afore night.’
‘I want him,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t you telephone him?’
‘How can I? What good? What could Charley do?’
‘I want him,’ the girl said. ‘Telegraph for him. He’ll come. Send him a telegram.’
‘It’s no good. Charley can’t do no good. He’s up in Camden Town. It wouldn’t be no good. Gawd, what good could Charley do?’
‘I just want him,’ the girl said. ‘That’s all. I just want him.’
She stopped speaking, held herself tight, waited for the new pain. All of a sudden it came. Wracked, she lay pressed against the wall, in brief agony, her eyes shut again.
When it had passed she began to undress herself. ‘It’s coming, they’re every three minutes now,’ she said. She undressed slowly, taking off all her things, dress and shoes and stockings and knickers, with the exception of her skirt. Her bare legs and arms were covered with goose-skin and she pulled the coat over her again, cold and scared.
‘How long will it be?’ she said.
‘The tea?’
‘No. How long will this be? How long shall I be?’
‘Gawd, I don’ know. I was all night with Charley.’
‘All night? Not all night?’
She lay silent, waiting again, afraid. Through the hut windows she could see four sections of sky, great snow-banks of cloud split with lakes of spring blue. She kept her eyes fixed on a single cloud, watching its course, thinking that if she watched the cloud she would forget the pain.
But it was an illusion. She suddenly cried out. She quivered and stretched out her legs and momentarily did not know what to do with herself for agony. She had no time or will even to shut her eyes. The old woman ran up, scared, and held her hands. ‘Pull,’ she said. ‘Pull on me. Press y’self down and pull on me, dearie.’ The girl groaned and pulled, the woman grunting for her, the two in time with each other until the spasm had gone. And finally when it had gone the girl lay bathed in a white sweat of anguish, weak and now quite terrified.
‘It can’t come,’ she said. ‘I can feel it. Something’s stopping it. It can’t come!’
‘Gawd, you ain’t started yet. You ain’t started. I’ll git you something to pull on, dearie. You ain’t half started.’
‘Get somebody,’ the girl said. ‘Stop a car. I don’t want it to be born here. I don’t want it!’
At the back of the hut the old woman found a length of clothes line. She tied it on the inside of the door-knob and the girl held the other end so that, whenever the pain came, she could pull on the rope, her feet against a box of crockery. By that time also the tea was ready. After the girl had drunk hers it came out on her body at once, in sweat. All the time the old woman grunted and moaned a little: ‘Gawd, why’d have to come jis now? Oh! Why’d have to come?’ as though the anguish were her own.
Then, in a moment, the girl was staggered by unprecedented pain. She rolled on the bare floor in an agony that stupefied her. She clenched the rope madly. She whimpered a little in distress, without words, like a dumb person. Her bare feet were hard and bitterly pressed against the box of crockery, until she could feel the splinters in the soles of her feet and baby pressing downward inside her, the pain so fierce that it drove her momentarily beyond consciousness.
When she looked up again, through the windows it seemed as though it were raining. It looked like white thunder rain. Then she saw that it was snow. And far beyond the snow and the snowclouds were blue lakes of sky, the same as ever, but now more brilliant and stormy and far distant. The girl watched the snow and pressed her feet against the box in a stupor of pain, trying hard to deliver herself and at the same time to obliterate what she felt and saw. The old woman moved about the hut in a waddle of distress, putting another kettle on the oil-stove, holding the girl’s hands, tearing up towels, ripping finally her own pinafore, crying a little. Shut up, the hut reeked of creosote and tea and the girl’s sweat. It was full also of the wailing and moaning of the woman and the girl, sounds that went on unchecked and unbroken until the shout of triumph from the woman. ‘It’s coming! It’s coming! Gawd, it’s coming. Hold me. Hold on t’me. Dearie, hold on to me. It’s coming.’
The girl held on through the blind agony of deliverance. While it was happening, the snow ceased. The sun came out fierce and brilliant on the white chalk. Clouds and sky were so sunlit that to the girl they were momentarily dazzling. So that when she looked away again and down at herself and the floor she seemed to see lakes of blood instead of lakes of cloud and sky.
Then, suddenly, she saw that it was blood. She saw it spattered on her body and skirt, on the old woman, on the box, everywhere. It was strangely scarlet and sickening. Seeing it, she felt a rush of joy. She was through it! It was all over! Then she saw the old woman with knife upraised, to cut the cord, and it was more than she could bear. Sickness and fear and weakness annihilated her.
Long afterwards she lay flat and weary and without triumph. She had only one thought. She kept repeating it. ‘Where’s the baby? Where is it? What is it? Where’s the baby?’
‘Lay still, dearie, lay still,’ the old woman would say. ‘Lay still and get some rest.’
‘Where’s the baby? I want it. Where’s the baby?’
Finally the old woman went out of the hut carrying the blood-spattered box. When she came back, empty-handed, the girl was crying. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Don’t tell me. I know.’
‘Lay still, dearie, don’t cry. It’s all right. Lay still. It’s better it’s all over,’ the old woman prattled. ‘It’s better. Better for you. Better for Charley. Better for all of us. Gawd, it’s Good Friday to-morrow. If it’s half the Good Friday it was last year – eighteen pound, ducky. Eighteen pound in one day!’ She prattled on in a long rigmarole of comfort and memory. ‘We only want it fine. Gawd love us, we only want it fine. Everything’ll be all right if it’s fine, dearie. Gawd, we’ll take some dough if it’s fine. We’ll git the place cram jam full if it’s fine.’
The girl lay still and said nothing. But a little later she raised herself on her elbows, so that she could look out of the windows. Cars going up and down the hill outside were the only moving things in the world except the snowy trees shaken in the wind.
‘Gawd, see the cars going by a’ready? See ’em? They’ll be some folks up here to-morrow. Gawd, we only want it fine. By Gawd, if only it don’t snow again.’
Far off beyond the horizon and the farthest ridge of cloud, the sky was miraculously blue.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ the girl said.
‘See the cars? Hear ’em?’ the old woman said.
The girl did not answer. She lay staring beyond the horizon. To her weak eyes it seemed farther than she had ever seen before.
Even so, it did not matter.
The Poet
Recalling Bates’s own boyhood barbershop experiences, ‘The Poet’ (first published in the Clarion, 1932, and not re-published since) hosts a cast of quaint and sensitive characters led by a narrator who, killing time before his train, decides to get a haircut. The barber in question writes doggerel but dreams of literary fame, his long-suffering wife escapes into romantic novels, and the narrator leaves ‘hacked and chopped...in the vilest way’ having endured an endless recitation of verse.
On a summer afternoon so hot that in the distance the ra
ilway lines seemed to curl and quiver like snakes in the haze of heat, I had to change trains at a country junction and there was an hour to wait for the train. The station was deserted except for porters who sat about sleepily on barrows and travelling-trunks, and silent except for the obscure tinkling of telegraph bells and the croaking of some hens cooped up in a long flat cage without water. It was early closing day for the bookstall, and there was nothing to do but go into the restaurant and have a cup of tea and read the paper until the train came.
A stifling and sickly heat, more intolerable than the heat outside, rushed at me as I opened the door of the restaurant. There was a hot smell of stewing tea, of fumes from the gas-burners under the tea-urn standing on the counter. Flies moaned in the windows and crawled on sandwiches and cakes and lay dead on the marble-topped tables, where irritable passengers had killed them. A seedy commercial traveller with an umbrella was sucking tea through his moustache in one corner, and a young girl in spectacles, looking like a terrified fly herself, was waiting for something to happen behind the counter, her lips parted as she breathed in the sickly fumes of the tea and gas-burners.
‘A cup of tea and a cake,’ I said. ‘Make the tea weak,’ I asked, ‘please.’
She turned on the tap of the urn and the tea hissed steaming into the cup, and she put a hard yellow cake on a plate and pushed both the cup and the plate across the counter.
‘Sixpence,’ she said, down her nose.
I paid, took the tea, and sat down at a table. The tea was strong and pungent, and the cake rang on the plate like a stone. I sipped the tea; it tasted of tar. I stared at the commercial traveller, and tried to eat the cake.
In my boredom it occurred to me suddenly that my hair needed cutting. Leaving the tea and the cake I went to the counter and asked the girl, who stood gazing absently at the hot sunshine beating down on the railway lines, if she could tell me the way to the nearest barbers. With a hair-pin she scratched her head drowsily and told me to walk up the street leading from the station and that the barber’s shop was on the right-hand side, five minute’s walk away.
I walked up the street and could not see the shop, but walking back again I came upon it suddenly, in a little side street. It was the only shop in the street and there was no barber’s pole outside.
A woman of perhaps thirty-three or four was reading a novelette in the box-like tobacco-shop in front of the saloon. She was dark-haired, her eyes were brilliant and vivacious, but her mouth was large and scarlet, like a wild-rose hip, and hard and common. She was reading the novelette absorbedly, her fingers playing idly with her dark hair, and she scarcely noticed me as I pushed open the glass door and went into the saloon. On the cover of the novelette, in brilliant scarlet and blue, was a picture of a moustached villain carrying off a fainting girl, lily-faced, with lovely long eye-lashes of jet, who was dressed like a nun.
A bell gonged deeply as I pushed open the door. It had a rich sound, as solemn and melodious as a bell for prayer. The saloon was empty, but purely out of habit I sat down to await my turn. In the barber’s shops of my boyhood I had grown so used to waiting that waiting in a barbers shop was second nature to me. Those shops had always been filled with horsey, swaggering men, touts and bookmakers, prize-fighters and dog-racers, runners and gamblers; there had always been talk of horse-flesh, dog-flesh, man-flesh, and very often women-flesh, too; there had always been a stench of rank tobacco and snuff and the vile oil with which the barber sprinkled his customers, and there had always been papers to read, comic papers, police papers, sporting papers, blood-and-thunders.
Here, when I saw that the saloon was empty, I sat astonished; the place was austere and clean, with little black seats, like pews, in which to sit. I stretched out my hand for a paper, but there were no papers. I stared at the reflection of the empty saloon in the mirror on the wall opposite. Where was the barber? I looked at my watch and wondered if I should go. Suddenly, in the barber’s chair, I caught sight of something to read, a paper. I picked it up. It was a sheaf of verses.
A moment later I became aware of the barber also. In the farthest corner was a kind of cubicle, divided off from the saloon by thick red curtains, and through the parting of the curtains I suddenly saw him. He was sitting at a table, writing. I coughed and made a noise with my feet. From behind the curtains came a heavy sigh, a sigh almost of exasperation, and a moment later the curtains parted and the barber appeared.
He gazed at me vaguely, as though the last thing in the world he expected to see was a customer.
‘Did you – did you want something?’ he said absently. I said I wanted a hair-cut.
‘A hair-cut, yes, yes. Oh! yes, a hair-cut. One moment – just one moment. Yes, yes.’
He turned and vanished behind the curtains, and as I sat down in the barber’s chair I could see him writing again.
Presently he reappeared, moving and staring with the same vague and absent air as before. What was it I wanted? Ah! Yes, a hair-cut, just so, a hair-cut. He stared at me with gloomy watery eyes and ran his fingers through his long greasy black hair, which kept falling untidily over his sallow face. Mumbling to himself, he searched for his scissors and could not find them, though I could see them all the time lying in the wash-basin under his nose. He looked in a curious way familiar to me. He was dressed in an astonishing fashion; he had on a velvet smoking jacket, a Byronic collar several sizes too large for him and a black artists stock which he had evidently tied with the most careful carelessness. He looked about forty-two or three. His face had a lean, almost cadaverous look, in some way artificial, as though he had cultivated it, and his flesh was like dull yellow clay and his thin lips had about them a kind of false sensitiveness. All the time he bit his nails nervously, gazed dreamily about him and ran his fingers through his oily black hair. At last he found the scissors and then, having found the scissors, he could not find the sheet. He put down the scissors in order to search for the sheet and found the sheet and then could not find the scissors again.
‘I’m in rather a hurry,’ I said.
‘Yes, yes – quite.’
But he did not trouble to hurry himself. Having found both the scissors and the sheet he took an inconceivable time to drape the sheet about me. He flourished it like some dark Spaniard flourishing a cloak; he flourished it a dozen times, making a cool wind in my face, until it settled at last in a way that pleased him and he could tuck it about my neck at his leisure, his fingers unpleasantly soft and warm with sweat.
Finally, he gave the scissors a kind of Spanish flourish also and began hacking away at my hair, not asking me courteously if I liked it long or short, but hacking and flourishing and snipping it his own way, as though I were a dummy.
Presently he began muttering to himself, aloud. I fancied I caught the beat of syllables and words that rhymed, and suddenly he dropped the scissors and vanished into the cubicle. Through the crack in the curtain I could see him scribbling desperately.
I was sitting on the sheaf of verses, and while he was writing I took it out and opened it, and I was reading a poem on spring in which the words life and strife kept rhyming and then the words breeze and trees when the barber reappeared suddenly and caught me with the poems in my hand.
With an obsequious and humble smile he said: ‘Ah, sir, if you knew how it embarrassed me.’
‘Not yours?’ I asked.
‘I acknowledge it,’ he said. ‘But no doubt you have heard of me?’
I looked at the booklet: the poet’s name was Milton Hawthorne, the book was called ‘A Hymn to Poesy,’ and the poet had published the book himself, to be sold at sixpence. I tried hard to think if I had ever heard the name of Milton Hawthorne, but at last I shook my head.
He flourished his scissors with a sort of tragic resignation. ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘You have never heard of me. But you will, you will. Some mute inglorious Milton,’ he murmured.
Was is it a pun? Thinking perhaps it might be I smiled. He stepped back at once and looked at m
e with burning eyes, with all the exaggerated tragedy and dreaminess and pain he could summon, and a great sigh of protest broke from him.
‘Ah, Sir, don’t laugh. It cuts me – cuts me to the quick. You look like a man who might understand the heart of a poet. Read before you judge. Here, let me find you a poem – here, this one, read this one, before you judge me.’
I took the book from him and read:—
“When O’er the lonely road and path
Night falls and hides the way
The little stars which god has lit
Do gleam in gold array."
The poem was very long and he stood absolutely silent while I read it all. Every verse, trite doggerel about the stars, the lovely night, the coming dawn and the ghostly moon, every rhyme tripping neatly to its place and every line scanning to its deadly beat. I did not know what to say and I stared at the verses in perplexity after I had finished reading them. It was a predicament.
But suddenly he saved me:
‘Ah, I see you are overwhelmed, you don’t know what to say!’ He cried. ‘You can’t express what you feel – ah! I know, I know. No, don’t say anything. I understand. I know by the very way you are looking that you have been impressed.’
I acquiesced. Very excited, he hacked and chopped my hair furiously. He began to talk incessantly about himself, of how the way of the poet was long and difficult, of how the road wound up-hill all the way, of how when only once in a while someone came into his life and understood, then it seemed worthwhile and he had courage enough to go on.
I understood as he talked why his shop was empty.