The Woman Who Had Imagination

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Will you exchange this book for this magazine?’ he said to Karl.

  Karl took the book.

  ‘The Meaning of God?’ he said, faintly derisive. ‘What is the meaning of God?’

  ‘Take it, take it, please,’ urged Christopher.

  ‘I don’t want the bloody thing!’

  ‘Oh! don’t you? Can’t you just for this time?’ he pleaded.

  Karl’s generosity triumphed.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got The Meaning of God all over the place now but I’ll take it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Christopher. ‘Thank you so much.’

  As he turned to go out of the shop, carrying the magazine under his arm, Albert was shouting to George:

  ‘Jesus Christ! I said bring your wife round some evening!’

  Christopher hurried away out of reach of the voice. There was a curious feeling of exultation in his heart and he walked quickly. What was coming over him? Crossing the street he went through a passage into Lincoln’s Inn, his favourite spot in all London, and sat down and gazed at ‘La Source’ again. Tears came into his eyes suddenly because of the great beauty of the picture. He felt ridiculously happy as he looked at the dark brimming eyes of the young girl, her beautiful breasts, the heavenly whiteness of her skin. The only woman he had ever seen undressed was Ada; her limbs were hard and her skin yellowish and her breasts had never blossomed, even for her children, and they too were hard and yellow. She only nauseated him. He had no desire to see Phoebe’s body, content to feel in his imagination that she was like the young girl in ‘La Source’.

  Great clouds were flocking over from the sea, like immense grey geese flying southward, and suddenly he shut the book and gazed at them, gazing in a state of dreamy stupidity, not knowing what to do with happiness now that it had come to him.

  Presently, too excited to sit still any longer, he got up and wandered down to the Embankment and walked along by the river. The water was chopped to small fierce waves by the wind; the smoke from tugs was snatched up and torn to shreds; gulls planed and swooped and breasted the grey waves, screaming mournfully. Young girls came hurrying along the pavement under the plane trees, leaving shops and offices. Trams lurched along and stopped and people clambered aboard and were wafted away. Over the Port of London itself a young moon rode along pale and transparent, appearing and vanishing again, whenever the clouds broke, like a far-off seagull lost among the geese of the clouds.

  He stopped at a coffee-stall and bought himself a cup of tea and some biscuits. The stall-tender was a big fat man, in his shirt sleeves. A third man in dungarees came up and bought himself a sandwich and a cup of coffee. It was warm under the flap of the stall, with a smell of coffee and new meat pies, and the two men talked about the Government. ‘There ain’t enough work to go round — not if you argue till Doomsday. It’ll never come right again.’

  Christopher wanted to shout at them exultantly.

  ‘What do I care about government? What does it matter? All my life I’ve never done anything better than mend watches and review books that nobody reads, and now I’m going to do something that is worth doing.’

  He walked on again. The young girls hurrying away out of London all seemed like Phoebe. He looked at them wistfully and now and then he stopped and leaned on the stone parapet by the river and looked at ‘La Source’ again, thinking in the morning he was to take her to the station. She was to be snatched from his life. Her father, a big labouring man, had married a second time and there were eight other children, and probably he would belt her for going home, but he would keep her there simply because he could not raise the train-fare to send her back again.

  He walked about till evening and then as darkness was falling he went back to Pope’s Buildings.

  He sat down as on the previous day and had tea with Phoebe and the children.

  ‘Any luck?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I sold it,’ he lied.

  ‘Oh! I am glad.’

  When the children had gone to bed Phoebe found her bag and together they packed her belongings. ‘Oh! I shan’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I know I shan’t.’ He took the bag downstairs and left it with the caretaker, who had a room on the ground floor. They could call for it as they passed in the morning.

  When he came back Phoebe was turning over the pages of the art-magazine, which he had thrown in a chair, and as he shut the door she came upon the picture of ‘La Source’. She stared at it, confused and embarrassed. Before she could shut the book he asked:

  ‘Do you like that?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘I think it’s very wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just a girl.’

  ‘That’s not all,’ he said. ‘It’s the significance of it — the meaning.’

  ‘Why she is spilling the water?’

  He tried to explain it.

  ‘That’s the whole meaning of it — the spring of life. She’s overflowing with youth and life. She’s careless — she doesn’t know how precious her youth is. She just lets it spill.’

  ‘I don’t see it. Why does she let it spill?’

  ‘That’s the point of it — the spring of life spilling and wasting.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she hold the vase upright and not spill the water?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have meant anything.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it?’

  He went on trying to explain but she could not understand. Neither did she see, as he did, that she herself was like the young girl.

  Later, when the old woman came home, a little drunk and talkative, he took out the watch he had begun to clean the previous evening and laid out the works on a sheet of newspaper.

  ‘I saw Ada with a bloke,’ said the old woman. ‘Serves you right; serves you damn well right.’

  He said nothing. What did it matter? And he went on cleaning the watch-works, happy in his silence.

  III

  On Sunday mornings Ada and the old woman did not wake till twelve o’clock, and when they at last got up they shuffled from one room to the other, half-dressed, their hair frowzy and uncombed, the old woman’s uncorseted body rolling from side to side grossly and flabbily as she searched for the hairpins her shaking fingers let fall in trying to pin up her hair. She always over-drank on Saturday nights and in the morning her drink-sodden face and her bleary leaden eyes were full of a sombre hatred for the world and for Christopher especially. Ada, without her rouge and powder, but with the remnants of both still on her cracked lips and sallow skin, lay huddled under the bed-clothes, half-asleep and muttering while Christopher and Phoebe got breakfast and sent the two children off at ten o’clock to a Salvation Army Sunday School at the end of the street.

  The children always went into the bedroom to say ‘Good morning’ to the old woman before departing. It was her wish. And they would lean over the gross mound of flesh in the untidy bed and bid her ‘Goodbye’ and she would stir from her heavy-eyed stupor and say with a kind of bleary sanctimoniousness:

  ‘Gawd bless you. Be good children, sing nicely. That’s right! Gawd bless you, my dears, Gawd bless you!’

  Christopher woke early. The first thing he remembered was that Ada, somewhere in the middle of the night, had crawled over him as he lay in bed and had sunk down with an exhausted sigh into her place against the wall. It must have been two o’clock. Her coming not only woke him but set the bed-springs creaking with little sounds which sounded to him louder and more horrible than ever in the dead of night. By her clumsy movements and her grim and uncertain mutterings he realised that she too must be drunk. Sickened, he felt that another night in the same bed with her would drive him mad. Then he remembered Phoebe. He suddenly got out of bed and put on his jacket over his night-shirt. Everywhere was silent and he walked about the room in his bare feet and then he put on his stockings. Again and again he thought of the morning; he saw the train hissing on the platform at King’s Cross and he saw it rushing northward through the flat
country of eastern England. The thought of it all made him feel wretched and lonely, and suddenly he knelt down impulsively against the big leather arm-chair in the corner and prayed silently with his hands drawn over his face until he had exhausted his words and he could go on praying only through sheer desperation and unhappiness, his words no longer meaning anything. When he rose from his knees he felt chastened and his mind was clearer and he took off his stockings again, intending to get back into bed and try to sleep once more, but suddenly he found himself opening the door of the other room, where Phoebe and the children and the old woman slept. He opened the door impulsively by doing it with a kind of defiance against himself. In the bedroom the green blinds were drawn and it was pitch dark, but he knew the room so well he walked straight to the bed where Phoebe was asleep with the two children. The air was heavy with the silence of sleep. Phoebe, a dark image against the pillow, was sleeping on the edge of the bed and the children were huddled against the wall. All the beds in the Bonners’ two rooms were pushed against the wall. Christopher stood and listened a moment and then impulsively he stooped and kissed the girl. Except for their warmth her lips might have been dead; there was no response from them. He took one look at her pale face, hesitated and then left the room himself. He walked about the other room for a long time, the thought of getting back into the bed which he hated so much bringing all his unbalancedness back again. When he crept back into bed again he was shivering and his feet were icily cold. He could not get them warm again and they were still cold when he woke.

  He woke at ten minutes past seven. The morning was cloudy, with a sickly yellow sunrise which was reflected in the windows, all with blinds still drawn, in the houses opposite. He put on the hands of the clock to half past seven and set the kettle to boil on the gas-ring and washed himself at the sink. As he was washing he heard Phoebe moving about and then the children. The youngest child came out to fetch a jug of water for washing.

  ‘Don’t make a noise,’ he entreated her as he gave her the water.

  The train departed at half-past ten. He had put on the hands of the clock by twenty minutes in order to send away the children early. Phoebe would take the children downstairs, wait for him and he would follow.

  Phoebe came out of the bedroom with the children, and they all sat down to the breakfast table. The children chattered, but Phoebe and Christopher hardly spoke. Ada stirred uneasily in bed in the corner, fighting wakefulness.

  At ten o’clock it all happened as they proposed it should. At the back of his mind Christopher cherished a weak hope that something unexpected would happen to prevent it all, but event followed event implacably and smoothly: Ada did not wake, the children asked no questions, and as the clocks were striking a quarter to ten over London he and Phoebe walked away from Pope’s Buildings, meeting no one in the silent streets except milkmen and Sunday-paper men and children running to Sunday School. The streets of Clerkenwell were dim and frowzy and littered with orange peel and fried fish papers which floated sleepily along the pavements, the jaded relics of humanity’s Saturday night. The time seemed to pass quickly, seeming to record itself not in hours and minutes but in streets and houses, every street and every house exactly like its neighbour, drab and soulless; in the houses, which were the minutes, dwelt crowded people, which were seconds; the seconds were part of the minute and the minute part of the hour, and the hour merely a fraction of time and eternity.

  Before Christopher was aware of it, and while he was still thinking gloomily of the streets, they arrived at King’s Cross. Life was beginning to move there, and in the station with people hurrying and waiting on the platforms, and trains waiting to depart, he felt less depressed. There was some meaning in life again; people were going away; people were setting out on adventurous journeys; there was a sense of freedom and escape.

  He looked up the train on the indicator. ‘Platform four.’ He looked at Phoebe and smiled. ‘You wait at the barrier while I get your ticket,’ he told her.

  ‘Here, let me give you the money,’ she called.

  ‘No, no! That’s all right. Really, that’s all right.’

  Running to the booking-office he made himself short of breath and he was panting hard and his heart was beating with wild thumps as he asked for the ticket. This was his moment and his triumph. He put down the money, snatched the ticket from the pigeon-hole and ran off again.

  ‘Now here’s your ticket,’ he said. ‘You have it and I’ll get myself a platform ticket.’

  They entered the platform a minute later. His depressing thoughts had vanished and he felt joyfully defiant and triumphant. Then suddenly he glanced at Phoebe. Great white tears, like stormy raindrops, were running down her cheeks. He wanted to say something but all that he had wanted to say to her for the last two days surged up in him, and the words became confused, keeping him silent. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose in order to cover up her wretchedness. He wrenched open a carriage door and she got in and he settled her bag on the rack for her.

  He got out of the carriage and shut the door. They looked at each other in silence, she with the tears still glistening on her cheeks and lashes.

  At the end of the train a whistle shrieked and unexpectedly the girl spoke quietly.

  ‘I understand about the girl with the pitcher,’ she said. He saw that she was crying again. ‘You know — the girl all undressed, with the pitcher. I know what you were trying to tell me.’ Another whistle blew and there was a flash of green.

  What had he tried to tell her? He tried desperately to remember. She was weeping freely, when he said, ‘What do you mean?’ She only shook her head wretchedly, too full to speak, and a moment later the train began to move and he simply stood still, without a word of farewell, feeling too stupefied and unhappy even to wave his hand.

  He left the station and went out into the streets. What had he tried to tell her? His head began to feel heavy and the cog-wheel began to rasp slightly but implacably against the edge of his brain. He tried to think clearly and intelligently, but his mind would not respond, and time began to manifest itself again in streets which were hours and houses which were minutes, and people like himself which were the merest fractions in time and eternity.

  He walked back to Pope’s Buildings, intending to find ‘La Source’ and look at it again and recall his own words about it.

  A group of children were playing in the courtyard, four little girls swinging from a rope tied to a lamppost, singing a song he remembered singing himself as a child:

  ‘Sally go round the moon

  Sally go round the stars.’

  He crossed the courtyard as they raised their voices and swung more joyfully to the rest of the song:

  ‘Sally go round the chimney pot

  On a Sunday afternoon.’

  Suddenly something, he did not know what, made him stop. Why should he go up? Why should he ever go back? Why should he spend another night in that awful bed beside which he could not pray and in which he had been so unhappy?

  He turned and walked out of the courtyard, the children’s voices following him, the sound of their song diminishing as his resolution strengthened.

  ‘Sally go round the moon,’ they sang, fainter and fainter.

  He began to walk more quickly, never looking behind, walking as though he did not care where he went or how or why.

  The Brothers

  The two men, with their grey, weather-blistered motor-van, arrived at the wood towards the end of August. There had been no rain for many weeks. The wood had been cleared the previous spring, to the last sapling, and where the sawmill had stood a dozen high yellowish pyramids of sawdust were dotted among the disused wooden workmen’s shacks, the piles of empty petrol cans and the odds and ends of rusting machinery that the timber company had never fetched away. The riding, once a quiet and shady cantering ground for horses, had been ploughed by the wheels of lumber-carriages and tractors from end to end, and the summer had baked the slush of April to iron. In
places the furrows had been filled with hazel-faggots, cut green in spring and thrown down in the ruts of slush, where they had become crushed and withered to tinder. The men drove their motor-van as far as the piles of sawdust and left it there. It was impossible to go further. As far as they could see the big wood was like a battlefield, a desolation of fallen tree-tops lying splintered and interlocked impassably with each other, with clumps of willow-herb and seeded fox glove struggling up between, pink and brown, on long weak stems. The wood-earth was cracked and burned grey by drought, the leaves on the skeleton tops of the felled oak trees brown and brittle as scorched paper, the primrose-clumps dotted among the dead timber like rosettes of yellow rag.

  The men were brothers. They were each dressed in shirts of oily blue check, with black trousers and black knotted neck mufflers. But except for this they might have been strangers, they were so unlike each other. The elder, Marko, was a big man, about thirty-five, six feet tall, horse-limbed but sluggish of movement, with thick black curly hair that straightened itself over his low forehead; there was power and defiance in the way he shot out his spittle or put his little finger to his black-haired ear and screwed it savagely, a primitive power, at once aggressive and unconscious. He spoke frequently with a kind of sneering annoyance, and never without some growl or murmur of malevolence, as though nothing in the world were right for him. He seemed to live in a state of unnecessary aggression towards his brother, a mere youth, thin and slight, with black eyes that were weak and a little shifty, and a restless fervour about his movements and his pallid face. ‘I don’ wanna be here all my bloody life if you do!’ he would say a dozen times a day, as though blaming the younger man for the drought, the heat, the chaos of the wood, for everything. The younger man took it all with a kind of fearful serenity, in silence, without even a look of protest or a spit of defiance.