The Woman Who Had Imagination (4 page)

‘I used to be fatter.'

‘I wish I could say that!'

She would shrug her shoulders, spread out her hands in a ballooning curve. ‘Soon I shall be like that.' And sometimes she would seize his head impulsively and draw it down and rest it on her plump shoulder, tangling his hair, patting his cheeks, kissing him, all to comfort him, to make him forget himself and Rosset.

To-day, Easter Sunday, they were going out together, alone, for a joy ride, and since they could not hope for more than two free hours they had decided to ride on a bus to Hyde Park. It was Yvette's idea: simply to walk on the grass, to see the daffodils swaying and fluttering in the cold April wind, like fluffy yellow birds, to have tea somewhere, to know the joy of being waited upon for once in their lives, to come back. The boy had no money and knew nothing of London. It was to be a treat for him, said the girl, at her expense. But within himself it had already become something more; he felt his heart pulling against his body, wild at this chance of escape.

He was afraid almost to think it: but he might even not come back to Rosset's.

It was nearly two o'clock. A thin young man, a regular customer, had been in, eaten his
hors d'œuvres
and cutlet, shaken his head at coffee and had gone. There remained only a middle-aged man, alone in one corner, masticating a steak and fried potatoes. When he had gone the waiters would shut the place, and Pierre and the girl would go too.

At last they were in the basement, washing up, bantering, almost free. Yvette washed the dishes and the boy dried them. The cook had already departed and soon the waiters came down, overcoats on, to say good-bye.

‘I do so hope you have a nice holiday,' said the girl. ‘You will write, won't you? You will be away so long!'

The waiters hobbled off, there was a sound of the restaurant door shutting, and they were alone.

‘Now you go,' she said, ‘and change your clothes and make yourself look pretty. Quick! Be ready in ten minutes.'

And as he bounded upstairs, almost frightened by the thought of even temporary freedom, she called after him:

‘Pierre, Pierre!' and when he halted, wondering sickly: ‘Don't forget to wash your ears! Ach!'

He was ready quickly and stood at the window as he put on his collar, looking at the low clouds which had begun to gather sombrely, an ugly goose-grey, over the roofs of the city. Suddenly he saw the sky and the roofs pencilled with rain and heard the quick April clatter of it on the slates above his head. As it came faster and persisted, darkening the roofs with its flood, he felt depressed to wretchedness.

He ran down a flight of stairs to the next landing and tapped at the girl's door.

‘It's raining,' he said. ‘It's raining.'

‘You know what they say in our part?' she called from the bedroom. ‘Let it!'

‘Shall we go?'

‘We'll swim.'

He stood still outside the door, listening to the rain beating heavily on a skylight above, the sound depressing him again.

‘Are you still there?' she called.

‘Yes.'

‘You can come in.'

He opened the door slowly and went in. She was sitting half-dressed before a mirror by the window, combing her hair. ‘It will soon leave off,' she said. She spoke to his reflection in the glass and watched him standing awkwardly by the door, his dark eyes seeking her and her image in the mirror diffidently, and as though she knew what his feelings must be she tilted the mirror so that he could see only a black half-moon of her hair in the glass and she saw a quick start of light in his eyes as she did so. Her hair was long, so that it took a long time to comb it straight, brush it and coil it back into the intricate knot which must rest low on her neck. Newly brushed, the hair was fine and sleek as satin. Outside the rain smashed in the window. ‘Well, if it must rain,' she said, ‘you must row me there in a boat. I will be that old man, that Anton you talk about, and we will catch fish in the Serpentine. I see you rowing — you, with those drumsticks!' Laughing, she bent her arms and began to row an imaginary boat, pulling strongly, so that her bare shoulders rippled and her breasts swelled richly upward.

As he watched the rich movement of her body he felt a sudden hot spasm in his blood, an electric start of surprised delight. In the mirror she saw his face, and half-wishing she had not asked him to come in, she rose and began to search about for her dress and stockings, the old dark mischievous look no longer in
her eyes, which she kept averted, hardly daring to meet the passionate watchfulness in his own.

Finding her stockings she sat on the side of the bed farthest from him and rippled them quickly on, looking at the rain lashing at the windows, carelessly, white and hard as a storm of hail. Once she shrugged her shoulders, fatalistically, as if to say ‘If it rains, it rains,' and the ripple of her bare shoulders, though she did not know it, made him start excitedly again. Yet he stood near the door every moment, with the curious half-eager look of youthful passion in his eyes, and something keeping him back from her.

At last there came a moment when they must decide whether to wait or go. The rain was lashing down in a flood; the light of the afternoon had been washed out.

‘Well?' she shrugged her shoulders.

He made no answer. Downstairs a clock chimed and struck three. It was a heavy black marble clock which stood in a private room, one of those rooms which Rosset kept for the convenience of special customers, on the floor below. Rosset wound it up himself every Sunday at three, timing it carefully, and was insistent about it, though the room was hardly ever used.

Suddenly the girl sprang into activity. ‘Ach! What of a little shower? Let's go now quickly. We must wind the clock as we go downstairs.'

She slipped into her dress. ‘Pierre, come and button me!' she cried, and then:

‘Ah! no, I'll manage. Go down and wind the clock. I'll come down in a moment.'

He went down reluctantly, his heart beating with excitement, his limbs curiously heavy. In the little private-room he found that his hand trembled as he searched behind the clock for the key. He was opening the round glass face of the clock when the girl came down.

‘Wind the clock with one hand,' she cried out to him, ‘and do up these buttons with the other. Only two — at the top. I've done the rest.'

She was laughing and the dark mischievous flash was back in her eyes.

As he tried to obey her, fiddling with the clock-key with one hand and the clasp of her black dress with the other, something came over him, a flush of passionate longing to touch her, and he suddenly forgot the clock and unfastened her dress instead of fastening it and ran his hands falteringly over her breasts, touching them at first very shyly, through the fine stuff of her dress, and then, because she offered no word or sign of resistance, in their warm fragrant nakedness. She could feel the shy trembling of his hands, almost in agony, as they brushed her, and later in the afternoon the gasp of ecstatic pain from him as she loved him. And knowing only too well the pain of that first love to him she put her mouth hard against his head and ran it backwards and forwards, with little caressing murmurs, to comfort him. At times he looked at her almost in fear, but with a fear which she had never seen
on his face before, the fear not of Rosset but of the strength of his own emotions.

The rain kept on all afternoon and they gave up the thought of going out unconsciously, but they remembered that they had intended to eat and they went downstairs at last and made themselves coffee in the kitchen and ate fresh bread with it. All the time she saw in his face the flash of new emotions; and there was a fresh bright strength about him, almost swaggering, which banished the old mute fear. Her love had emancipated him, renewed him. There was a tumultuous joy in her own breast, a joy both at the giving of her love and the vanquishing of his fear.

The rain went steadily on, but they were hardly conscious of it. In the little private room Rosset's clock stood open and still unwound and they made it an excuse to go up again. While they remained there she could feel him all the time rising above his old dumbness and fear and she felt blissfully happy.

Suddenly she sprang up, hearing something down below, the noise of a door being opened, and then both she and the boy leapt to their feet at the sound of Rosset's voice.

‘Who is 'ere? Where are you? Who is it who 'as made coffee? Where are you? Where are you?'

The voice, at first subdued, rose to a yell as Rosset came to the stairs. They heard him begin to come up, shouting:

‘Who is it? Where are you? Where are you? Come out!'

Like a blundering animal, he came bellowing upstairs, throwing open doors, shouting more loudly than ever into the silence of the top story. Pierre and the girl stood absolutely still, staring and listening.

‘Who is it? Where are you?' he kept shouting, more and more angry as the silence of the house met him.

Stamping and cursing he passed the door of the little room and was hastening downstairs when the marble clock struck a quarter. He turned back at once like a furious beast and burst into the room. Pierre and the girl stood there transfixed, never having moved since his first shout, and he came upon them with an exclamation of guttural joyous anger. The girl had not even buttoned her dress.

He stood for one moment glaring at them, his brows working up and down in anger, his body grunting for breath. His lips trembled violently and his little eyes fixed themselves with fury on the girl's unbuttoned frock.

‘Get out of this room!' he roared at last. ‘Get out!'

The boy, so used to obeying that voice even when he did not understand its language, came forward involuntarily. With a grunt of fury Rosset knocked him aside, pointing to the girl instead.

‘You!' he shouted. ‘You I mean. Get out of this room — this house. And don' come back — don' come back.'

As she moved forward and past him and out of the room and went upstairs he hurled after her a spout of abusive fury until he was exhausted and had no strength
even to look at the boy, standing in readiness to be abused and he hoped also, like the girl, dismissed.

Half-way downstairs Rosset remembered and there came a shout:

‘And you — down in the restaurant. I will see you.'

At the words the old sickening terror ran through the boy, sapping away completely the strength and joy the girl had given him. He stumbled downstairs, conscious only in a dazed way of what was happening.

In the evening he stood in the restaurant by the table, mutely waiting and watching the waiters peer into the dark street and Rosset marching up and down in agitation. As Rosset passed him he shrank into himself, half-swooning with fear, always expecting a torrent of abuse such as that he had flung at the girl. It did not come but, knowing it would come, in time, he fell into the old trick of staring at the opposite wall and losing himself beyond it.

Suddenly he felt again that blow at his chest, flinging him backwards.

‘Always against the wall!' Rosset's voice whispered fiercely with anger. ‘Always against the wall!'

The boy pressed himself back to the wall, so hard that there was a pain where his head touched it.

In his eyes lay an expression not only of fear and sickness. They had a queer furtive, sideways look, that half-desperate, half-hopeless look, almost criminal, that dwells in the eyes of the oppressed and persecuted, of those who cannot escape.

She is very old, a little sprig of a woman, spare and twisted. The sun is hardly past its noon. She has climbed uphill out of the town, up the hot, white road, with curious fretting footsteps, half-running, half-walking, as though afraid that some other gleaner will have come up before her. But as far as she can see, into a distance of mellow light under a sky as mild and wonderfully blue as the stray chicory-stars still blooming among the stiff yellow grasses by the roadside, the world is empty. She is alone, high up, insignificantly solitary in a world of pure untrembling light that pours straight down, washing away the summer-green gloom from the tops of the still trees. There is not even the stirring of a sheep over the land or the flickering of a bird in the sky; nothing to alarm or rival or distract her. Yet she goes on always with that fretting eagerness, as though afraid, not resting or satisfied until she sees the wheatfield before her, empty like the rest of the earth except for that downpour and flood of golden light upon its stubbled slope.

She pushes open the gate, clicks it shut behind her, flaps open her sack, takes one swift and comprehensive glance at the field, and bends her back. Her fingers are rustling like quick mice over the stubble, and the red wheat ears are rustling together in her hands before she
has taken another step forward. There is no time for looking or listening or resting. To glean, to fill her sack, to travel over that field before the light is lost; she has no other purpose than that and could understand none.

Long ago, in another century, she also came up to this same field, on just such still, light-flooded afternoons, for this same eternal and unchanging purpose. But not alone; they would glean then, in families, occasionally in villages, with handcarts and barrows, from early morning until evening, from one gleaning-bell to another. Since it meant so much, since corn was life — that law was as old as time itself — they gleaned incessantly, desperately. Every ear on the face of every field had to be gathered up, and she can remember her mother's fist in her back harrying her to glean faster, and how, in turn, she also urged her children to go on and on, never to rest until the field was clear and the light had died.

She is already away from the gate, moving quickly out into the field away from the ruts that the wagons have cut and the ears they have smashed into the sun-baked soil. She moves with incredible quickness, fretfully, almost as fearfully as she came up the hill. In her black skirt and blouse, and with her sharp white head for ever near the earth, she looks like a hungry bird, always pecking and nipping at something, never resting, never satisfied.