The Woman Who Had Imagination (5 page)

Her sleeves are rolled up, showing her thin, corn-coloured
arms, with the veins knotty and stiff about her bony wrists. Her hands seem to be still young in their quickness and vitality, like the young tips of an old tree, and the intent yet tranquil look on her face is eternal. It is a little, sharp, fleshless, million-wrinkled face; it is like a piece of wood, worn down by time, carved down pitilessly and relentlessly, the softness of the cheeks and mouth and eyes scooped out to make deep hollows, the bone of the cheeks and chin and forehead left high and sharp as knots in the wood. As though years of sun-flooded days in gleaning fields had stained it, the flesh is a soft, shining corn colour. Even the blue dimness of her eyes has become touched by the faintest drop of this corn-coloured radiance — the colour of age, of autumn, of dying, almost of death itself.

In the open field the sun is very hot. Beating down from an autumn angle the force of its light and heat falls full on her back or into her eyes as she zigzags up and down or across the stubble-rows. She appears to move carelessly, without method, gleaning chance ears as she sees them; she moves, in reality, by instinct, to some ancient and inborn system, unconsciously, but surely as a bird. Miraculously she misses scarcely an ear. She moves incessantly, she looks tireless. Sometimes she glances quickly over her shoulder, across the field, into the sky, with brief unconscious anxiety about something, but the world is empty.

It is as though there is no one in the world except
herself who gleans any longer. She is not merely alone: she is the last of the gleaners, the last survivor of an ancient race. Nevertheless, moving across the field under the mellow sun, nipping up the ears in her quick hands, shaking her sack, dragging it over the stubble, she looks eternal. She is doing something that has been done since the beginning of time and is not conscious of it; she is concerned only with the ears, the straws, the length of the stubble, the way she must go. She scarcely notices even the flowers, ground blooming and creeping flowers that the binder cannot touch, little mouse-carpets of periwinkle and speedwell, purple coronets of knapweed, trumpets of milk-coloured and pink convolvulus, a scabious bursting a mauve bud, bits of starry camomile. Occasionally she is impatient at something — at the straggling length of the stubble, the riot of thistle and coltsfoot that chokes the rows. Nowadays the binder leaves the straw so long and shaggy. Nobody hoes any longer, nobody gleans, nobody troubles. The crop is poor and uneven, and she comes across wastes of thin straw and much green rank twitch where the earth is barren of corn and she scarcely picks an ear, though she never straightens her back and never ceases that mouse-quick searching with her brown hands.

But later, in the heat of the afternoon, with her sack filling up and the sun-heat and bright light playing unbrokenly upon her, she begins unconsciously to move more slowly, a little tired, like a child that has played
too long. She will not cover the field, and as she moves there, always solitary, up and down the stubble, empty except for herself and a rook or two, she begins to look smaller and the field larger and larger about her.

At last she straightens her back. It is her first conscious sign of weariness. She justifies it by looking into the sky and over the autumn-coloured land sloping away to the town; briefly she takes in the whole soft-lighted world, the effulgence of wine-yellow light on the trees and the dove-coloured roofs below and a straggling of rooks lifting heavily off the stubble and settling farther on again.

She stoops and goes on once more; and then soon, another rest, another glance into the sky, and then another beginning. Very soon there is a thistle pricking her hand, and she is glad to stop and pull it out and suck the place with her thin lips.

Ahead of her there is a hedge of hawthorn and blackberry, with great oaks that throw balloons of shadow across the field. She moves into the oak shade with relief; it is cool, like a drink of water, like a clean white sheet; and the coolness fills her with a new vitality, so that she goes on gleaning for a long time without needing to rest.

By and by she is working along the hedge. Straws have been plaited and twisted by wind among the hawthorn and blackberry and wild clematis and sloe, and she goes along picking them off, twisting them together and dropping them into her sack, her body upright.
It is easier. She can smell the darkening blackberries, the first dying odour of leaves. She stops to gather and eat a dewberry, squeezing it against her palate like a dark grape; to rub the misty purple-green bloom off a sloe with her fingers.

There are many straws on the hedge. The sack is heavy. She walks very slowly, dragging it, wondering all the time why she does not lift it to her shoulder and start for home, but something stronger than herself keeps her picking and gleaning, missing nothing.

It is not until the light begins to fail that she thinks of departing. She has begun to carry the sack in her arms, hugging it to her chest, setting it down at intervals and gleaning the stubble about it. There is no need to go on, but some inherent, unconscious, eternal impulse keeps her moving perpetually. But still she glances up sometimes with the old fear, wondering if some other gleaner will come.

She has worked towards the gate and there she sets down the sack and rests a moment. It is late afternoon; dark crowds of starlings are flying over and gathering in invisible trees, making a great murmuration in the late quietness. Before she can depart she must lift the sack to her back or lift it to the gate and bend her back beneath it. She is very tired. She might leave the sack under the hedge; she might come again to-morrow; but she suddenly catches the sack in her arms, hoists it to the gate with an immense effort as though her life depended upon it.

Her strength is not enough. The sack, very full, half falls back upon her, but in a moment she makes a tremendous effort and, as she makes it, lifting the sack slowly upright again, she feels her eyes, for some reason, fill with the stupid tears of age and weakness.

In a moment it is all over, forgotten. She makes a great effort to lift up the sack. She succeeds. The sack falls across her back, bearing her down, and she catches at its mouth, holds it and staggers away.

Her tears have stopped and she has not thought of wiping them away, and as she staggers off down the road towards the sunset they roll down among her million wrinkles and find their way to her mouth. She goes on without resting. She looks more than ever eternal, an earth-figure, as old and ageless and primitive as the corn she carries.

As she goes on, the light dies rapidly until there is only an orange glow in the western sky like the murky light of a candle. The air is cool, still, autumnal. Her tears have dried on her cheeks, and now and then she can taste the salt of them still on her lips: the salt of her own body, the salt of the earth.

The yellow brake climbed slowly uphill out of the town, leaving behind it the last ugly red houses; the two white horses broke into an abrupt trot along the level road, the brasses tinkling softly and winking brilliantly in the noon sunshine, and all the passengers who had leaned forward up the bill to ease the strain on the horses leaned back with relief and then lurched forward again with the sudden onward jerk of the brake, the men's straw boaters knocking against the wide sunshades and the big flowered hats of the giggling women. There were many shouts of mock alarm and laughter: ‘Whoops! What ho, she bumps! Whoa! mare! Want to throw us out? Whoa! Get off my lap! Stop the brake, me voice's slipped down me trousers' leg! What's the matter? Horses going to a fire or something? Oh Lord, me bandeau's slipped! Get off my lap I tell you! Whoops! Steady! How d'ye think we're going to sing after this? Stop 'em, me voice's crawling up me other leg! Oh, ain't he a case? Oh dear! Ain't he a caution? What ho! Now we're off! Oh, don't he say some bits? Now we're off! Altogether! Whoops! Dearie! Altogether!'

Gradually the parasols became still and circumspect,
the women gave their hatpins little tidying pushes and smoothed their dresses, and the horses fell automatically into a smoother pace, the sound of running wheels and the click-clocking of hoofs becoming an unchanged and sleepy rhythm in the still midsummer air.

At the rear of the brake, wedged closely in between a hawking fishmonger who still gave off an odour of red herrings, and a balloon of a woman who was sucking rosebud cachous and wheezing for breath as though she had swallowed a button-whistle, sat a youth of twenty. At the height of the giggling and banting and shouting he sat in unsmiling silence. He looked proud and bored. The brake was filled with the Orpheus Male Voice Glee Singers and their wives and sweethearts. That afternoon and again in the evening they were to sing on the lawns of a big house, in competition with a score of other choirs, ten miles on in the heart of the country. Aloof and sensitive, the youth had made up his mind that he was above such things.

‘Like a cachou, 'Enry?' said the stout woman.

‘No thanks,' he said.

‘Real rose. Make your breath smell beautiful.'

‘No thanks.'

He had come on the outing against his will. And now — cachous! He looked about him with a kind of bored disgust in which there was also something unhappy. The whole brake was tittering and chattering with a gaiety that seemed to him puerile and maddening. The strong odours of violet and lavender perfumes
and the stout woman's rose-scented cachous mingled with the hot smell of horses and sun-scorched varnish and men's cheap hair-oil. He caught now and then a breath of some dark carnation from a buttonhole, but the clove-sweetness would become mixed with the odour of stale red herrings. At the front of the brake he could see his father, a little man dressed in a straw hat cocked on the back of his head and a dapper grey suit with the jacket thrown wide open in order to show off a pale yellow waistcoat with pearl buttons. Opposite his father sat his mother, plump, double-chinned, with big adoring brown eyes, dressed in a lavender-grey dress and hat to match his father's suit. Round her neck she wore a thin band of black velvet. The very latest! No other woman in the brake sported a band of black velvet. Yet he thought his mother looked hot and uncomfortable, as though the black velvet were strangling her, and his father sat as though she never existed, bobbing constantly up and down to call to someone in the rear of the brake, talking excitedly to anyone and everyone but her.

It was solely because of his father that Henry Solly had come on the outing. Solly! What a name! His father was conductor of the choir, a sort of musical Napoleon, very small and absurdly vain, who wanted to conquer the world with the sound of his own voice. Stout, excitable, electric, he was like a little Napoleonic Jack-in-the-box, with tiny cocksure blue eyes, a fair, sharp-waxed moustache, and a kind of clockwork
chattering voice that changed as though by a miracle, when he sang, into a bass of magnificent tone, warm, rich and strong. By profession he was a draper, but the shop was gloomily unattractive and poorly patronised, so that Alfred found a good deal of time to sit in the back living-room and practice hymns and oratorio and part-songs on the American organ while Henry attended the shop. It was a boring, passionless, depressing existence. ‘When you grow up, Henry,' his father had been fond of saying, ‘you'll have to wait in the shop.' He often wondered and sometimes still continued to wonder what it was he must wait for? Already he had now been seven years in the shop, waiting. And he had begun to feel now that he would go on for another twenty, thirty, perhaps even fifty years, still waiting and still wondering what he was waiting for. There he would be, fifty years hence, still dusting and re-arranging the thick flannel shirts, pants, waistcoats, corduroy trousers, body-belts, patent collar fasteners, stiff cuffs and starched white dickies; still writing the little white cards to pin on the frowzy articles in the window,
Solly for Style
—
Solly for Smartness — Solly for Shirts
—
Socks — Suits
—
Studs and Suspenders
—
Solly for Everything
; still dusting and setting out the window every Monday morning, carrying in the absurd naked dummies, dressing them and pinning on them, as he did now, a card saying
The Latest for
1902, only changing the style of the dresses and the date as he grew older. He saw himself as some
fatuous patriarchal draper grown half-idiotic from years behind a counter, his mind starved and enfeebled by lack of the commonest pleasures of the world. And there he would be, still waiting, with the certainty of achieving nothing but death. He felt sometimes as if he could hurl a dummy through the shop window on some dead and empty Monday morning and then walk out and never come back again. Or if only one of those grey, naked ladies' dummies would come to life!

At the same smooth and now monotonous pace the brake went on into the heart of the country. All the time he sat silent and contemplative. He was fair-haired, with a pale, almost nervously sensitive face that had something attractive in its very pallor and in the intensity of the blue eyes and the small mobile mouth. His body, slight and undeveloped from years of waiting in the ill-ventilated and gloomy shop, had something restless and almost anxious about it even as he sat still and stared from the faces in the brake to the fields and woods, quivering and bright in the noon heat, that travelled smoothly past like some slowly unwound sun-golden panorama. It had about it also something stiff and unsatisfied and unhappy. His straw hat was fastened with a black silk guard to the lapel of his coat; it was his mother's idea: as though on that windless, burning day his straw hat would blow off! And just as his straw hat was tied to him he felt tied to the brake, the absurd giggling passengers and the monotony of his own thoughts. As he sat there, unhappily wishing
he had never come, he thought dismally of the afternoon ahead — singing, tea in a noisy marquee, more singing on the lawns in the summer twilight, refreshments, more singing, the ride home, and more singing again. Singing! It would have been different if the word had meant anything to him. But he couldn't sing a single note correctly or in tune. How often had his father offered him half a crown if he could sing, without going sharp or flat, one verse of ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended.' He had never succeeded.