Read Online Cut and Come Again by H.E. Bates - Free Book Online Page B

wondering what he meant. Then suddenly he was squeezing her breasts, in a bungling effort of tenderness. The motion hurt her. ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I shan’t do nothing. Let’s have a look at you, Alice. I don’t want to do nothing, Alice. All right. I don’t want to hurt you. Undo your dress, Alice.’ And the girl, mechanically, to his astonishment, put her hands to the buttons. As they came undone he put his hands on her chest and then on her bare breasts in clumsy and agitated efforts to caress her. She sat rigid, staring, not fully understanding. Every time Holland squeezed her he hurt her. But the mute and fixed look on her face and the grey flat as though motionless stare in her eyes never changed. She listened only vaguely to what Holland said.
    â€˜Come on, Alice. You lay down. You lay down on the couch. I ain’t going to hurt you, Alice. I don’t want to hurt you.’
    For a moment she did not move. Then she remembered, flatly, Mrs. Holland’s injunction: ‘You do all you can for Mr. Holland,’ and she got up and went over to the American leather couch.
    â€˜I’ll blow the lamp out,’ Holland said. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’
    VI
    â€˜Don’t you say nothing, Alice. Don’t you go and tell nobody.’
    Corn for Mrs. Holland’s chickens, a wooden potato-tub of maize and another of wheat, was kept in a loftabove the mill itself, and Alice would climb the outside loft-ladder to fill the chipped enamel corn-bowl in the early winter afternoons. And standing there, with the bowl empty in her hands, or with a scattering of grain in it or the full mixture of wheat and maize, she stared and thought of the words Holland said to her almost every night. The loft windows were hung with skeins of spider-webs, and the webs in turn were powdered with pale and dark grey dust, pale flour-dust never swept away since the mill had ceased to work, and a dark mouse-coloured dust that showered constantly down from the rafters. The loft was always cold. The walls were clammy with the river damp and the windows misty with wet. But Alice always stood there in the early afternoons and stared through the dirty windows across the wet flat valley. Seagulls flew wildly above the floods that filled the meadows after rain. Strings of wild swans flew over, and sometimes came down to rest with the gulls on the waters or the islands of grass. They were the only moving things in the valley. But Alice stared at them blankly, hardly seeing them. She saw Holland instead; Holland turning out the lamp, fumbling with his trousers, getting up and relighting the lamp with a tight scared look on his face. And she turned his words over and over in her mind. ‘Don’t you say nothing. Don’t you say nothing. Don’t you go and tell nobody.’ They were words not of anger, not threatening, but of fear. But she did not see it. She turned his words slowly over and over in her mind as she might have turned a ball or an orange over and over in her hands, over and over, round and round, the surface always the same, the shape the same, for ever recurring, a circle with no end to it. She reviewed them without surprise and without malice. She never refused Holland. Onceonly she said, suddenly scared: ‘I don’t want to, not tonight. I don’t want to.’ But Holland cajoled, ‘Come on, Alice, come on. I’ll give you something. Come on. I’ll give y’ extra sixpence with your money, Friday, Alice. Come on.’
    And after standing a little while in the loft she would go down the ladder with the corn-bowl to feed the hens that were cooped up behind a rusty broken-down wire-netting pen across the yard, beyond the dumps of iron. ‘Tchka! Tchka! Tchka!’ She never varied the call. ‘Tchka! Tchka!’ The sound was thin and sharp in the winter air. The weedy fowls, wet-feathered, scrambled after the yellow corn as she