The Woman Who Had Imagination (25 page)

He looked it over, feeling the vibration of the saw on the wooden framework, watching the driving-belt. The younger brother, worried at first by the problem of the belt and the saw-frame, had searched among the odds and ends of machinery by the workmen's huts and had found the old saw-frame and some lengths of broken belt which he had riveted together. And now
he was so proud of the work which had sweated him into a state of weariness that as before the derision of his brother was lost on him. His idea had been conceived, the work done. Nothing else seemed to matter.

Tired, he switched off the engine, the saw sighed to stillness, and he turned to look in the van for something to eat. But the voice of Marko arrested him:

‘Ah, what yer switching off for? Go on, switch it on again. I want to try it.'

Joe, leaning across the driving wheel, obediently started up the engine again. A moment later, with a loaf in his hands, he heard the whanging moan of saw cutting into wood. Sitting down on the earth, he watched his brother testing the saw with log after log while he himself ate the bread with lumps of cold bacon.

When he had finished eating he got up, ready to take his brother's place. But the chance did not come. Deliberate, arrogant, Marko never moved from the saw. He fed it with a kind of contemptuous zest, as though ridiculing it, yet keeping the young man from working it. At his feet the pile of sawn yellowish logs was growing quickly. He held the wood to the saw with immense strength, never pausing or relaxing, as implacable and powerful as the saw itself.

Soon, too, the heap of uncut boughs began to dwindle. The younger man sidled about, watching the saw, the motor, and his brother by turns, ill at ease,
fidgeting, eager for his turn at the saw. But Marko never relaxed.

Finally came a sudden shout above the clatter and whine of the saw and the motor:

‘Get some bloody wood along, can't you? — go on, quick! Go on!'

The brother hesitated, half-stubborn, half-afraid, and Marko raised the billet in his hand as if to hurl it.

‘Want me to knock your bleeding head off?'

There was a moment's pause, like a flicker of defiance, but in another moment the boy was walking towards the wood with the rope in his hands.

The whine of the saw continued all afternoon, with melancholy echoes. The ex-soldier limped across the road to watch and smoke the eternal fag-end and offer approval: ‘That's better beer, eh?' while Marko fed the saw with the boughs that Joe dragged in from the wood. The heap of billets and the pale pyramid of sawdust grew wonderfully.

It was the same on the following day, and all through the next. The saw ran unceasingly, Marko working it, Joe dragging in the boughs, the ex-soldier looking on, the piles of billets and dust growing rapidly. For ten minutes, on the second day, the saw broke down and Joe hurried down the riding, dragging the faggot of boughs, to put it right. Then the racket and whine went on again, breaking harshly the strange stillness that had come down over the wood in the pause. The still sunshine and the drought continued also. ‘The
old bullet'll die of thirst if this keeps on,' said the ex-soldier, but the brothers offered no remark. They scarcely spoke, now, to each other. When the saw had been repaired Marko offered not a single word of approval or satisfaction; and Joe said nothing. He walked back to the wood with the rope in silence, as if he no longer cared.

The following evening, the third of working the new saw, a cart and pony drove unexpectedly down the road and up the riding, swaying and pitching over the sun-baked wheel-ruts, halting just beyond the motor-van before the men were aware of it, the sound of its coming drowned under the rattle and moan of the saw.

In the cart was a woman, black-haired, youngish, hatless, with a white shawl crossed gipsy-fashion over her pink blouse.

She stood up in the cart and throwing the reins on the horse's back shouted at the men. The racket of the saw drowned her voice so that they did not hear.

‘Hey-up! Hey-up!' she called again.

It was the boy who heard and noticed her first.

‘Marko, Marko,' he said quickly. ‘It's the wife.'

He went to the van to shut off the engine, Marko threw down the billet he had sawn, and together they walked towards the cart. The woman was climbing down from the cart.

‘Ye never told us,' muttered Marko.

‘How could I tell you?' she flashed. ‘How was I to let you know? I been all over the damn place.'

‘All right, all right,' he muttered. ‘You're here now.'

The flash of antagonism, their only greeting, died down quickly again. They exchanged another word or two, of commonplace things, the younger brother throwing in an odd remark, and then the woman began to unharness the pony and the men went back to the saw, as though nothing had happened.

The men worked on in the warm evening, the woman busy about the fire, watching them, sometimes, with her hands on her hips, her strong, big-boned face shrewd even in its preoccupation, her eyes alert even in their immobility, the trembling ear-rings under the thick black loops of hair giving her a flashy air, half-beautiful. At first she was too occupied to notice much, to see anything more than Marko at the saw and Joe dragging the loads of boughs down the riding. There was nothing significant in that, but she wondered idly once or twice about the saw, wondering where they had picked it up, how they had made it work, and she was faintly astonished at the stack of billets.

But suddenly, standing idle, she sensed it all in a flash. Coming in once from the wood Joe threw down the rope and put one hand to his mouth and licked the palm, slowly and luxuriously, so that she saw instantly the pain and relief in his face. And in a moment she half-divined that the idea of the saw was his. He alone had the machine-sense. Marko could never have done it. A second later, still not quite sure, she walked across to Marko, watching him, to ask carelessly:

‘Whose idea was it — the saw?'

‘Joe's,' said Marko. ‘He fixed it up.' His voice was flat, expressionless.

She said no more. But in the evening, when the saw was silent and they sat round the fire, eating, she looked at Joe's hands and saw the great crimson blisters, kept raw by the rope and boughs, that would not heal.

‘What's the matter with your hands?' she said.

‘What's up with his hands?' mocked Marko. ‘What's up with them?'

Joe curled up his hands and would not show them and was silent.

But Marko extended his palms, with a sort of aggressive contempt. They also were scarred with red skinless patches.

‘Poor Marko's hands,' he muttered.

The derision was directed through her to the boy. She tried to neutralise it at once by a flash in return.

‘Yes, yes,' she said bitterly. ‘Poor Marko's hands. Poor Marko.'

Joe said nothing. He had heard them quarrel often enough. And the derision he accepted with meekness, too weak to sustain even the thought of anger and retaliation.

In the morning the woman spoke to Joe, alone.

‘Why don't you work the saw?'

‘Marko works it.'

‘I never asked you that. I said why don't you work it?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Don't you want to work it then?'

‘I don't care.'

She gave it up, shrugging her shoulders:

‘Well, you know best.'

But all through the morning, as she peeled potatoes and cooked and washed out the men's oily blue-check shirts, she kept an eye on him. It was necessary, now, for Joe to go farther and farther back into the wood for timber, so that the journeys were longer and the saw often ate through one load of boughs long before another arrived. It meant that the saw must run empty or be shut off, and that Marko must wait empty-handed, furious. When the boy arrived at last the hot spit of that fury met him.

‘Why the hell don' you shift yourself! I don' wanna be here all winter! Shift yourself!'

And never a word or gesture of retaliation from the boy. She marvelled at his silence and filled each time with anger and disgust.

In the afternoon, after his first journey into the wood, she said carelessly:

‘I'll give a hand with that wood.'

She followed Joe up the riding and into the wood, through the ruin of dead boughs and withered thistle-stalks and white-feathered willow-herb, along the path his constant journeys had made through the parched undergrowth. They gathered a load of oak boughs together, not speaking much, and Joe dragged it out of the wood while she prepared another load.
Expectantly, she listened to Marko's voice, and a little later she heard it, deriding the boy, with half-direct, taunting words, because he had allowed her to help him.

She was furious now also.

‘I should think you're going to stand that, I should think so,' she said when Joe returned.

‘It's all right,' he said.

‘All right, all right,' she whispered bitterly. ‘All right when he talks to you like that? Your own brother? I should think so.'

‘I'm used to it.'

‘Used to it! Used to it!' she half raised her hands. ‘He don't talk to me like it, I see. You're hopeless.'

But she would not let him rest. Whenever they were alone together she urged him to retaliate, to show his spirit, to defy Marko. ‘I can see myself letting him say the things he says to you, I'm sure. Do something, boy. Do something.' And she would argue, rationally, too.

‘Didn't you fit the saw up? Wasn't it your idea? You're his brother ain't you? You're as good as he is? If it hadn't been for you we shouldn't have been nowhere. Nowhere. Ah! I tell you boy, I tell you, you're a fool, you're a fool!'

She kept on in this way all afternoon, lugging savagely at the boughs as she spoke and so giving a strange compulsion and strength to her words. At last he began to take notice, half-agreeing, half-seeing the reason of her words, and catching as it were the
reflected fire of her passionate indignation. He'd half a mind to do something. He could see now. He'd half a mind …

‘That's it, do something. Show him you don't stand that.'

But he did nothing. He would work himself up, nervously, tensely, in order to offer a word or a gesture of defiance to his brother, but the act itself was too much for him.

‘I'll do it—just give me a chance, that's all. I'll do it.'

Half-detesting, half-pitying his weakness, she continued to work him up, a sense of right impelling her at first, then a curious illogical, fitful desire to witness a crisis between them. Her own passion for Marko was dried up. She no longer cared, neither one way or another. She satisfied something in herself as she whipped the boy into a state of vengeance.

‘Go on. The longer you let it go on the longer it will.'

By the evening he had worked himself into a strange state of revengeful anger, an agitation that had about it also the trembling terror of cowardice. He'd do something, he'd do something all right, he'd do something. She was a little afraid. Where he had been too weak to urge himself to anger he was likewise too weak to sustain the sudden fury she had whipped up in him. His white sweaty face was burnt up with fatigue and anger, his hands were quivering, he did not know what to do with the fury that had leapt up, volatile and terrible, within him.

She calmed him down a little:

‘Don't get excited. He'll notice. Wait till he gives you the chance. Calm down a bit.' Her voice, touched with pity, soothed him.

In the evening, as they sat about the fire, eating, the ex-soldier limped over the road and up the riding, to talk with them.

‘The old bullet's showed up,' he told them. ‘Might be a storm.' He rolled up his trousers and showed his thin, pallid hairy leg, with the faint bluish shadow of what might have been the bullet under the flesh.

‘Clear the air,' said Marko.

The woman looked at him quickly as he spoke. He was half-glancing at his brother, significantly, darkly. She wondered if he suspected. But the boy, staring at the ground, brooding with his own anger, had noticed nothing.

The ex-soldier limped home early. The bullet hurt him very much, and the sky, filling with darkish oppressive heat-clouds, seemed to promise the storm too. The air was still and tense.

‘It'll blow over,' said the woman, trying to speak casually.

‘I ain't so sure,' said Marko. ‘I'll have a look at the nag anyway.'

He rose abruptly and began to walk away, towards the road, where they had tethered the nag on the parched road-grass. Instantly, as he turned his back, the boy leapt up behind him, silent, wild with passion,
with a long billet in his hand. Before the woman could speak, he took one step forward, raising his arm, and stood poised as if to bring down the billet madly, with all his force on the head of his brother. His arm actually lowered. His face was watery with sweat and white in its fury. He became for one moment filled with the diabolical strength of pure cowardice.

And suddenly it left him. His arm dropped, his body seemed to go cold with weakness, and in a second or two his brother was down the riding, out of reach.

The woman, afraid, angry, began to whisper furiously:

‘God, what d'ye think you're doing. What made you do that? God, he'd smash you! He'd smash you!'

He took no notice.

‘I shall do it, I shall do it,' he said, tensely.

‘You're a fool!' she cried. She was afraid; she no longer pitied him. ‘Ah! you're a fool. He'll smash you, I tell you, he'll smash you.'

‘Leave me alone!' the boy cried. ‘Leave me alone, I tell you!'

He began to walk away, still clenching the billet, the force of his fury and hatred flowing back through his weak body again, inflaming his white face and eyes with its frenzy. As he retreated towards the wood she threw up her arms with a gesture of fatalistic abandonment:

‘Well, you do it!' she whispered. ‘You do it. I'm finished. You do it. I ain't responsible. I'm finished.'