The Woman Who Had Imagination (10 page)

‘Look at the storm,' he said.

The other took the glasses and became engrossed in the Rhine unfolding itself ahead and the blue haze or the gathering storm beyond. There was a brief silence and at last the young man spoke.

‘What time shall we be in Iben?' he said.

The other did not answer and presently the young man repeated:

‘Karl, what time shall we be in Iben?'

‘Soon.'

‘Before night?'

‘Naturally.'

‘You think so? No humbug this time?'

‘Naturally.'

The tone of the answers was nonchalant and evasive, and the young man regarded his friend in silence. He was a man of thirty-five or six, tall, dark, angular, with a large arresting head covered with a crop of thick black hair that strayed over his ears and neck in tiny black curls. His broad heavy nose, his deep forehead and the large angle of his chin, all created an impression of great strength. By contrast his eyes were soft and timid and at moments he resembled strikingly some picture of the traditional Christ.

Karl had run away from Germany in order to go to London twenty years before. He was going back to his native village for the first time and the young man was going with him. He was a bookseller, carrying on his trade in a little shop like a rabbit-hutch in a street
off Lincoln's Inn. He spoke English fluently and by a half-fierce, half-gentle personality, an extremely blasphemous and entertaining speech and a gift for friendship he had made friends with every kind of person in every quarter of London. He lived with a fierce, tireless energy, rushing from place to place without rest, existing on nothing but his books, occasional ham sandwiches and snatched cups of tea. Every day he bicycled about the streets of London in order to buy his stock; the bicycle was rusty and broken and had cost him eighteenpence in an East End market; Karl rode it furiously, with a kind of half-athletic, half-religious diligence, using his feet for brakes. He was never tired and he never rested. On the night-boat from Gravesend to Rotterdam he had kept the young man awake with wild stories and readings from strange poets and fantastic blasphemies whenever the ship rolled. After leaving Holland, where fields of scarlet dahlias and the first asters were coming into bloom, he had insisted on travelling long distances by train into the heart of Germany, so that the young man had grown too tired and too hungry even to look at the passing forest or the fields of harvesters, gay in scarlet skirts and embroidered blouses, working among the ripe corn in the blazing sunshine. Sometimes it happened that they changed trains at a country station; there would be a red-roofed village set among wooded hills rising on either side, and the platform would be thronged with fat, gentle-eyed peasant women dressed
in countless snow-white petticoats and black velvet bodices, carrying baskets of cheeses wrapped in muslin, and live geese and eggs and wine. It would have been a sublime relief to have left the train and rested there. But the sight of his native land had filled Karl with the inexhaustible eagerness of a tourist. In four days they had travelled over half the country, riding third and fourth class in trains that crawled like caterpillars. They had seen all the towns where Karl had been apprenticed or where he had run a race or where he had fallen in love. The young man was stiff with sitting for long hours in trains and tired from running after trains and spending nights in strange beds from which Karl aroused him too early, so that they might catch other trains before breakfast. At first he had tried to protest but later he had no strength to protest. As he sat on the deck of the steamer he was utterly weary of travelling and there was only one thing to which he felt he could look forward. They were going into the country.

The steamer turned a bend in the river and slowly the Rhine straightened itself out again. The sky was dark and heavy with thunder over the distant breadth of the river. The steamer and the storm seemed to be floating towards each other at the same smooth, inevitable pace. Richardson tried to establish the point where the storm and the steamer would meet but his thoughts wandered off to Iben, the place where Karl had been born. He imagined a sleepy village lying in a fertile valley in the shelter of a forest of pines, the
valley set with orchards and tobacco-fields and vine-yards and crops of wheat and rye turning white in the hot sun.

A short German dressed in a white, pink-striped flannel suit staggered on deck with his baggage and his wife. The woman, who was eating sausage sandwiches, seemed afraid of the approaching storm. She breathed like a broken-winded horse and there were beads of yellow sweat on her large moonlike face. As she ate the sausage she picked off the circle of red skin and threw it into the Rhine and the skin floating on the greenish water had a strange scarlet brilliance in the thunderlight.

The roofs of Bingen appeared, sharply outlined beneath the immense blue cloud of the thunderstorm. Afar off there had been a mutter of thunder and suddenly there was a louder peal which seemed to hesitate and hover in the sky before taking an angry leap into the distance, travelling away over the hills like a growl of artillery. The air was stifling. The German asked Karl if he thought they would be in Bingen before the storm came and Karl said ‘Yes', in a tone as though the storm were a hundred miles away. The light was queer and brilliant. The vines were a wonderfully bright emerald and the river itself looked leaden and sombre under the darkening sky. The steamer slowed down its engines and drifted towards the red roofs and the storm. There was a strange stillness in the air, a hush that seemed to exist apart from the voices of the passengers, the tune of the gramophone still playing, and the quiet wash of water in the
steamer's wake. The German stood ready with his baggage and his wife had ceased eating. Suddenly the white thunder rain came racing down the river and whipped across the deck. The passengers herded themselves below and Richardson and Karl went down into the saloon. The sun was still shining as the rain came down and the air was like a curtain of silver. Karl ordered some beer and while he was drinking it the rain ceased with a jerk and the storm-cloud seemed to split apart and let in the light again.

Karl and Richardson went on deck again. There was a marvellous stillness in the air, and up in the black sky hung a magnificent rainbow. It made a span between the town and the hills like a vivid, exquisite bridge. There was a soft reflection of it on the water and another reflection of it higher up in the sky. Everyone came on deck to look at it and the stout German and his frau forgot to eat the sandwiches at the sight of it. Its loveliness was unearthly and transcendent.

The steamer swung across the river and came to rest at the landing-stage. The sun was shining brilliantly again and the rainbow had begun to fade.

Karl and Richardson went up into the town. Great pools of rain lay among the cobbles of the streets and the town looked washed and bright. Karl went into a shop for some cigars and made inquiries about a bus to Iben. There was no bus to Iben but there was a bus in fifteen minutes that would drop them within three miles of it. They hurried across the town and through
some public gardens. There was no time to eat. In the gardens some children under a mulberry tree were searching among the grass for the mulberries that the storm had beaten down. Richardson felt famished. He went across to a child and held out his hand. He could not speak a word of German. The child put a mulberry into his hand. He ate it and held out his hand again and the child gave him four mulberries more.

The mulberries tasted of rain and the taste of them was still in his mouth as he climbed into the bus and sat down.

Finally, when the bus started and they drove away out of the town, he turned and looked back. He could see the children and the mulberry tree and the hills beyond the Rhine but the rainbow had vanished from the sky.

It was late afternoon when they left the bus and began to walk along the road to Iben. The road travelled along for a mile in the shelter of a wooded rise and curved at last into an expanse of open country. There were fruit trees growing among the patches of wheat and rye and sometimes copses of birch broke up the line of the land gently rising and falling away to the horizon where the forest began. Where the corn was ripe and heavy the thunderstorm had flattened it to the earth in broad waves. The sun was hot and brilliant again but the air was fresh and sweetly scented
after the storm and the roadside was gay with beds of wild yellow snapdragon and scarlet poppies and stars of chicory washed very pure and shining by the rain.

The road turned sharply and mounted another spur of rising ground and beyond lay another valley and in the valley there were the red roofs and the spire of Iben.

They walked down into the village without speaking. The road was lined witn trees of apple and pear and the rain had battered the ripe fruit to the earth. Richardson picked up a pear and ate it and Karl fixed his eyes on the village ahead. A solitary old woman in a white kerchief working on a patch of maize lifted her head and shaded her eyes in wonder and suspicion and watched them out of sight. They came down into Iben without seeing another soul. The street was steep and long and the houses rose up immense and gaunt on either side, rather forbidding and gloomy except for the bright green jalousies thrown back against the walls of dark stone and the little painted white balconies at the bedroom windows. The street was shadowy and deserted and the high wooden doors of the courtyards were shut. A stream of water flowed down the street, washing the cobbles a pale yellow. Nothing else moved. They came to a halt before a tall house with a great courtyard and high doors and a grape-vine spreading massive branches over the walls.

Richardson felt a sense of relief and he turned to look back as Karl walked towards the doors of the courtyard. He was astonished to find that the silence
and solitude of the street had vanished. Every door and window was crowded with gaping peasants and the street was suddenly all life and curiosity and excitement. He took one look at the chattering heads and turned to speak to Karl, but Karl had already opened the wicket of the house with the grape-vine.

He walked after him and stepped into the courtyard. The peasants came hurrying down the street to take a last look at him. Karl shut the door. The courtyard was flanked on one side by the south face of the house and on the other by stone cow-barns and open sheds under which a litter of sandy-coloured pigs were feeding. A big manure heap stood steaming in the centre of the yard and red and white hens were pecking about it in the sunshine. On the steps of the house a fair-haired girl of thirteen or fourteen was stirring something in a big brown bowl. She looked up with a start. She stared at Karl and Richardson with an expression of absolute wonderment, momentarily petrified. Then suddenly she dropped the bowl on the steps and ran like a wild creature into the house.

‘They don't expect me,' said Karl. ‘I didn't trouble to write.'

They heard the girl talking excitedly in the house and they walked a few paces forward. Suddenly she returned. A thin, deep-eyed peasant woman, sixty or so, was coming after her, timid and bewildered as a child, and behind her two other women of thirty or thirty-five, stout and moon-faced and astonished. The
old woman hesitated for one moment at the sight of Karl and then ran forward and began kissing him. She cried and laughed a little together and the other women came forward and kissed him and laughed, too. The young girl hung back and stared with wide eyes, and the wicket gate was pushed open and a little group of peasants came and stood in the courtyard and looked timidly on at it all.

‘My mother,' said Karl. ‘My sister Maria and my sister Elsa.'

Richardson shook hands with the three women. They looked at him shyly and worshipfully. The young girl ran like wildfire across the courtyard and scattered the peasants and vanished into the street, slamming the wicket behind her. Everyone talked excitedly. There was a light of joyful astonishment on the faces of the three women as they led the way into the house and made Karl and Richardson sit on an old horsehair sofa in the kitchen, while they themselves ran hither and thither and clattered crockery and ground coffee and broke eggs and chattered as though the sight of Karl after twenty years had driven them mad.

The kitchen was large and dim, with a long scrubbed wooden table in the centre of it, a life-size picture of Hindenburg on one wall and a fireplace raised up, like a blacksmith's forge, in one corner. The old woman brought a great blue bowl to the table and broke eggs into it while she gazed and chattered at Karl like a child. He returned her gaze with absolute bewilderment,
as though like her unable to believe in his presence there. The old woman seemed to break eggs enough for an army, and at every egg she made a long excited speech. Richardson sat still, not understanding a word. The kitchen was fragrant with coffee. The young girl came back and talked excitedly and took the bowl from the old woman and finished beating the eggs. When Richardson looked at her she flushed crimson and bent her head over the bowl. The two sisters ran backwards and forwards as though lost, coming to snatch away the bowl of eggs and lay the cloth on the table and set out cups and plates and wine glasses. Maria ran in with a bottle of wine. Finally the wine was poured out, a soft rose-coloured wine, clouding the glasses, and the old woman and Karl and Richardson stood up and drank. The wine was strong and sharp and as cold as snow. Richardson, glad of it, drank quickly and Maria pounced on the bottle and filled his glass immediately.

Elsa ran in with a dish filled with a single enormous omelette big enough for ten men and Maria with a tall green-patterned coffee-pot and long loaves of wheat and rye bread. Richardson sat at the table with Karl and ate. The three women hovered about them and talked inexhaustibly. The omelette was good. He had never tasted an omelette like it, very delicate and rich after the icy sharpness of the wine.

While they were eating there was a commotion in the yard outside. The women began fluttering and
Karl stood up. A man of fifty-five or sixty appeared at the doorway and after him two boys of eighteen and twenty. The man was dark and moustached, with the same soft grey eyes as Karl, the same broad forehead, and the same impression of gentleness and strength. He was dressed in working clothes and a full peaked cap. He looked like any small English tenant-farmer who has worked and struggled. The sun had dried his face into a thousand wrinkles and the soil seemed to have eaten eternally into the wrinkles, as though it could never wear away again.