The Woman Who Had Imagination Page 15

  As the child approached the house he began to walk with a curious nonchalance. He squinted at something on a most distant horizon and sometimes he appeared to be searching intently for something in the grass or the sky. The house might not have existed. The child walked towards it with a serene and aimless innocence.

  Nevertheless that innocence was suspicious, for he walked in a perfect line to a point where the garden fence had broken, making a gap large enough for a dog to squeeze through under cover of the lilacs and laurels. As he approached the gap his innocence became angelic. He stooped to pick a white clover-bloom. He sniffed it languidly, plucked another and sniffed that also. He wandered in beautiful rings in the grass, ostensibly searching. All the time his eyes were upon the house, wickedly furtive and longingly alert.

  He presently sidled sleepily towards the gap. In his sleepiness he appeared to be not only innocent but blind. Nevertheless his eyes in one swift flicker took in the safe emptiness of the field behind him and of the garden ahead.

  He vanished suddenly through the hedge with a flash of white, like a rabbit. He crawled through the mass of trees and briar on his hands and knees and finally emerged into open sunlight, blinking like a man stepping out of a gloomy jungle.

  There he staggered to his feet and stopped. His eyes had lost their look of suspiciously angelic innocence. They were filled with caution and wonder, with guilt and pleasure. They gazed with a new unflickering intensity.

  Before the child stretched a plantation of raspberries, row after row of green and red luxuriance. Seeing them, he had eyes for nothing else. He seemed for one moment paralysed by the crimson burden of the tall thick canes. At home, side by side with the potatoes, his mother also had a plantation of raspberries, ripe, thick and lovely as these.

  To the child however the raspberries that his mother grew seemed suddenly despicable. Moreover she had forbidden him fearfully to touch them. The fruit before him was larger and more luscious than his mother’s could ever be and as he caught all at once the strong fragrance of the fruit and leaves in the warm sun his mouth was tortured.

  He plucked a raspberry. It melted swiftly in his mouth like snow. Once a great fish-net had covered the plantation, but the stakes had rotted away and the net had fallen into useless tangles among the canes. There was nothing to stop his progress into endless raspberry avenues. He walked at first furtively, stopping to listen, but the garden was silent and safe and deserted. Nothing but himself moved and presently he walked more boldly, rustling the leaves carelessly with his eager limbs.

  All the time he ate. He ate as though in a race against time or light. At first he swallowed, one by one, berries that were like great crimson thimbles filled with blood. Tiring of their very magnificence he gathered smaller, sharper fruit and ate it by handfuls, tossing back his head and crimsoning his lips.

  There came a moment when the taste of even the loveliest fruit seemed curiously dead. He paused and sighed heavily and licked his lips, drunk with fruit. It occurred to him to take off his hat.

  He began to walk up and down the avenues, filling it. There was still no sound or movement in the garden except his own rustlings among the leaves. The juice of many raspberries began to stain the whiteness of his sun-hat. He did not notice it. He was drunk with forbidden bliss.

  It happened suddenly that he came to the end of an avenue and there looked up. Beyond him stretched an open lawn, deserted and poppy-sown. He regarded it with the brazen indifference of reckless confidence. He plucked a raspberry and ate it with loud and careless smacking of his lips, as though to defy the last danger of the place.

  He turned to pluck another and stopped. A pale object, like a menacing vision, had appeared over the raspberry canes behind him. It was a panama hat. He gazed at it for one second with giddy astonishment. It moved. His heart leapt. A second later the panama hat bore down upon him with noises of stentorian rage.

  ‘By God, I’ll skin you!’

  The child fled. He darted down an avenue of canes with a wild terror in his heart, scratching himself and running blindly. All the time he was conscious of pursuit by the panama hat. He was terrorised by cries of rage and threats of annihilation. He stumbled and dropped his hat and dared not stay to pick it up again.

  Out in the field he paused for an agonised moment to take breath. Behind him a roar of rage was hurled like a cannon-shot from among the raspberries. Glancing back he saw his white sun-hat picked up and brandished angrily. He fled with frightened speed across the field.

  The voice of the man pursued him. He dared not glance back. He ran with unresting desperation until he could pause behind his mother’s fence with security again. But even there he could not rest. He was trembling and exhausted. Finally however he took a long breath and with a great effort nonchalantly strolled through the potatoes and by the raspberries towards the house, trying to look angelically at the sky.

  It happened that as he came from behind his mother’s raspberry canes she herself emerged from the house. She was a wide, powerful woman, with arms like clubs and a black suspicious gaze.

  Seeing her, he stopped. That pause was fatal. She swooped down upon him instantly. He remembered in that moment all the warnings she had given him about her raspberries. How many times had she not warned him that if he laid a finger on them she would flay him? She bore down on him as the panama hat had borne down on him in the other garden. He wriggled futilely to escape but this time there was no escape. He made frantic signs of innocence.

  ‘I’ll learn you!’ she shouted.

  ‘I didn’t — I never!’ he moaned.

  ‘Look at your mouth!’ she cried.

  She seized him mercilessly. His guilt was so vivid on his lips that she belaboured him until her arm whipped up and down like a threshing-flail.

  The child, as he howled his innocence of a crime he had never committed, dismally observed across the field an approaching figure.

  It was signalling terrible threats with a white hat.

  Millennium also Ran

  The young reporter walked reluctantly out of the soft morning sunshine and up the half-dark iron-shod stairs which led to the office of his paper, The Harlington Echo. In strict truth the small bare draughty room behind the frosted-glass door at the head of the staircase was hardly an office; and he himself was scarcely a reporter. The room was in reality a disused lumber-room belonging to the wine-and-spirit merchant who occupied the premises below. It was not only bare and draughty but damp and mice-ridden, and except for two chairs placed against a small deal writing table and a waste-paper basket overflowing with torn and screwed-up papers by the fireplace there was no furniture. Back-numbers of the newspaper were strewn about the floor loosely or in dust-yellowed bundles tied up with packing string. A smell of mouldering paper and printing ink mingled with the vague odour of stale spirits or wine coming up from the warehouse below. Above all these was an odour of dust, old stale dust that showered mysteriously and everlastingly like yellowish pollen on the chairs and tables and papers. It had powdered the tea-cups standing on the iron mantelshelf above the fireplace, and at times the young reporter seemed to feel it penetrating to his mind also, poisoning and deadening it. He loved the place like a mortuary.

  He arrived there a little after nine each morning. He was hardly a reporter because, except for odd cases of suicide and drunkenness, a weekly routine of weddings and funerals, births and birthday parties, there was nothing to report. The office was a branch only; he was there in readiness, an outpost who might any day be lucky enough to discover some scandalous or tragic human calamity. He came to the office every morning with the vague hope that during the night someone had shot his wife and burned the body. Without such tragedies he knew that his day, from nine o’clock in the morning to seven or eight at night, would be utterly filled with boredom, his mind soured by dust and silence and loneliness.

  He threw up the window and put his hat on the mantelpiece. It was early June; he could hardly bear to look out of the
window at the sunshine. He had bicycled in that morning from the country and he remembered almost with pain the odour of meadow-sweet, the singing of yellow-hammers, the hot strength of the sun.

  Unfolding the morning paper he sat down at the table. His first job each morning was to cut the lists of race-horses from the sporting pages of a London newspaper and then paste them on a sheet of cardboard which hung by the telephone on the wall. Two doors along the street stood the offices of a rival newspaper. In the afternoon, in order to defeat the rival, the young reporter would receive the race-winners and their starting-prices by telephone and then stamp them frenziedly in violet letters with a rubber-stamp on the stop-press columns of the early editions and deal out the papers to the newsboys who stood crowding on the dark stairs, deriding him impatiently. Sometimes he won; but often he checked the horses wrongly or printed them upside down and then lost. By four o’clock each day he was sick and tired with the frenzied haste and uncertainty of it all and the fear that at any moment, Mathers, the senior journalist, might burst in half-drunk and storm at him.

  He tore the paper-scissors from the table-drawer and then stopped. On the table lay a note for him, written on the back of an old ballot-paper in Mathers’ tipsy-looking, half-illegible handwriting.

  ‘Go round to No. 7 Salvation Terrace,’ it said, ‘and inquire why Parker hasn’t been and if he will be coming again.’ And as a kind of postscript: ‘Nose round a bit.’

  Parker was a paper-seller, a thin sharp-nosed colourless-eyed youth of eighteen or nineteen, who had failed to appear for three days. Mathers must have written the note late the previous night. He came to the office rarely, making unexpected and volcanic appearances, generally in half-drunken haste and temper, a small, ferrety, bestial man, with shifty eyes that were raw pink from constant drinking and a short ginger moustache stained a dirty yellow nearest his thin lips. Both in winter and summer he wore a greasy mackintosh, a dirty yellow woollen scarf and a grey shapeless tweed hat from under which his fair hair struggled down unkempt and tawdry. He would rush into the office, bringing a smell of liquor against which the stale odours of wine and spirits from below seemed sweet, and sitting down at the table, still in his hat and scarf and mackintosh, he would proceed to write with frenzied excitement, as though he had come straight from the scene of some fresh murder. As he wrote he turned constantly to spit heavily into the fireplace, muttering and swearing in savage undertones between the spits. Then he would jump up as volcanically and suddenly as he had come in, hurl some savage command or criticism at the young reporter, and clatter downstairs, leaving behind him the stench of his breath and the loathsome hiss of his spittle dropping into the fire. Yet there were times when he came in with a sort of lugubrious sobriety. On these occasions he would solemnly sit down and lecture the young reporter. He would talk on the beauty of obedience and integrity, on duty, on moral cleanliness, on life itself, speaking in a soft oily voice with the repellent smugness of a preacher sermonizing, his beery pink eyes contradicting both his words and his voice. The youth’s finest emotions would revolt as he listened, turning to a sickness which rose up in his throat and soured and remained there. He often could not speak for revulsion and unhappiness as he heard the suave criticisms of his conduct and work. He had come to the office in the belief that he might learn to write there. Mathers knew this and the youth’s belief would serve as a sort of text for him.

  ‘You want to learn to write, eh?’ he would say. ‘You want to cultivate style? Well, let me tell you, young man, that you won’t cultivate a style by sitting on your backside waiting for something to happen. How do you suppose the great London journalists find the stories that fill their front pages? By sitting on their backsides, like you? Don’t stare out of the window! Listen to me! Do you suppose I’m telling you this for the good of my soul? What the hell do you expect to learn by dreaming? You must get out! Go on, get out. Now. Find something to write about. Nose round a bit. And don’t come back until you’ve found something.’

  And so, this morning, he must go out and nose round a bit. He must forage among the blood and offal of human scandal and tragedy. The note seemed to mean that Mathers would not be in all day, and he finished cutting out and pasting the lists of race-horses at his leisure. While the paste was drying he read down the lists and then referred back to the paper for the tips given by the racing journalists.

  There appeared to be a big race at three o’clock. He read the names of the horses half aloud: ‘Irish Green, Sea Captain, White Rose, Moonraker, Volcano, Millennium, Double Quick, Black Tulip’. The tipsters seemed to fancy Millennium, and one wrote: ‘We have always known, of course, that he was an animal of sterling abilities as well as achievements, and I have no doubt that in to-day’s race he will add further lustre to his name. One might say, indeed, that to-day, for once, the Millennium will arrive.’

  When he had finished reading he hung up the card by the telephone, put some sheets of ballot-paper in his pocket, locked up the office and went downstairs into the sunshine.

  He walked down the street, towards the sun, past the saw-dusted steps of the wine-and-spirit merchants and the offices of his rival newspaper. Before he could nose round a bit or inquire after Parker he must perform his morning ritual: he must see the police and the coroner. These were, so to speak, his incubators, from which he hoped every morning that exciting game like rape and murder and felony and suicide had hatched.

  But on this morning, as on most others, nothing had happened. His ‘Anything doing?’ at the police-station was answered by the fat sergeant at the desk with a glance at the pile of charge-sheets, a shake of the head and a quick ‘Have you ’eard this one?’ He stopped to listen to the bawdy story and tried half-heartedly to join in with the sergeant’s deep laughter, which went echoing in hollow waves of sound up and down the glazed-brick corridors leading to the cells.

  From the police he went to the coroner. The town was small, provincial in its very odours of fish and cheap drapery. The awnings were already down over the shop-fronts. He felt with pleasure the hot sun on his neck.

  He pushed open the swing-door of the dark gauze-windowed coroner’s office and repeated to the youth sitting inside on a high round stool at a desk his daily formula:

  ‘Anything doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Which is the way to Salvation Street?’ he asked.

  The youth put his pen behind his ear and came to the door and gave the reporter directions.

  ‘Go through the churchyard and then past the canal. It’s the fourth street by the canal. Anybody will tell you.’

  He walked through the churchyard. It was nearly eleven. A bed of white pinks growing over an old grave poured out a heavenly fragrance as he passed.

  He passed through the shopping streets and the sloping alleys, like rabbit-runs, going down to the river. He smelled the morning smells of fish and drapery and watered dust changing to the odours of the canal-streets.

  He read the name of the streets by the canal, each a cul-de-sac: Lord Street, Jubilee Terrace, Charlotte’s Row, Salvation Street. The houses, squat boxes of dirty yellow brick and grey slate, had an entry to each pair, like kennels, and the railway ran side by side with the canal, bridging the streets.

  He walked up Salvation Street and knocked at the door of No. 7, and after an interval and a second knock he heard footsteps and a wriggling of the unused key in the dry lock.

  The door opened a crack. An old woman showed her face, looking very white and startled at seeing him there.

  ‘Can I have a word with Mr. Parker?’ he said. ‘I’m from the Echo.’

  He saw tears begin to roll down her cheeks almost before he had formed the words, and as she cried she shook her head feebly, making her tears tumble and fall quickly down over her black blouse.

  He tried to say something to her and excuse himself, but as suddenly as she had begun to cry she disappeared.

  Waiting, he saw through the door-crack the room within: a broken co
uch heaped with rags and old shoes, the bare floor-boards foot-worn and broken, the holes nailed over here and there with the lids of sugar-boxes and odd scraps of colourless linoleum; the wall-paper ripped and damp-rotten, the largest gaps pasted over with sheets of his own paper, The Harlington Echo.

  He was thinking of walking away when he heard the return of footsteps, and expecting to see the old woman again, he got ready to say that he had made a mistake, but the door was opened wider and he stood face to face with a young girl. She would be somewhere between seventeen or eighteen. She was in black.

  ‘Can I speak to Mr. Parker?’ he said.

  The cruel and foolish futility of his words struck him before he had finished speaking and he knew what her reply would be.

  ‘He died yesterday,’ she said, but he could hardly catch her words.

  Confused and angry with himself, he looked straight at the girl’s face in mute humility. She seemed to understand. Her face, narrow, bleak and very girlish, had a strange composure about it; she had gone beyond grief and even beyond resignation into a kind of stupidity, a sort of elevated, unemotional trance. Her eyes were dark and dry, without even the light of grief or pain, her hands hanging loosely at her side, her fingers straight and outspread, her wedding-ring gleaming bright against their pale boniness. He felt that she had said all she wished or could say. And as he wondered what to say before he took leave of her he heard the cracked sobbing of the old woman and her voice speaking from the room between the sobs.

  ‘Ask him if he’ll put it in the paper.’ Her tear-wet face appeared behind the girl’s. ‘Will you put it in the paper, eh? It was gallopin’. He was only bad three days. It’d make him that happy if you’d put it in the paper. God bless you if you’ll put it in the paper.’ And then:

  ‘Would you like to have a look at him? He looks so lovely. You can come and look at him.’