The Woman Who Had Imagination (24 page)

‘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 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.

‘Never get the bloody wood ready the rate you're
going on, never see the money back. Shift your bloody self.'

They had come to clear the timber that was left. They were half-gipsies, dealers in old-iron, rags, horses, firewood, anything to be picked up cheap and sold for quick profit. And Marko had made a bargain with the manager of the timber company, whereby for next to nothing they might have as much wood as they could clear and saw in a month. In October they would set off, in the motor-van, and run from town to town and sell the logs. There was money in it. It all depended on how hard they worked, how much wood they sawed before October. After that it was easy. Now, while the wood was dry, and the days still long, they must slave like madmen, hardly stopping to eat.

At first they brought the wood to the van, spending one day dragging out the tree boughs with ropes and the next sawing them with a cross-cut saw. The first days of rope and saw blistered their hands and the blisters split with a salty pain, leaving raw spots that would not heal. The saw-handle became like hot iron and the spray of sawdust intolerably parching. The dust seemed to get down to the lungs of the younger man, setting him coughing in dry raking fits which exhausted him but which had no effect on the insistence of his brother's perpetual torment. Were they going to saw the blasted wood or weren't they? Either they'd got to do better than this or jack up. No good going on
like it. If one could do it the other could. Half a minute? — Christ! nothing but half a minute. How many more half minutes? He would squat there in a derisive attitude of waiting, spitting rankly on his hands, the very sweat on his dark face expressive of his coarse strength, while the young man licked his dust-dry lips and tried to conceal or lessen his desperate panting for breath, his face pale with pain, his hands resting on his knees, white and strengthless, until at last the elder man, impatient of it, would mutter his black snarl and seize the saw-handle and pull it in motion, his brother's hand mechanically catching at it and pulling also, falling into the old automatic motion stupidly.

At the end of the fourth day Joe, the younger man, had an idea. It was he who drove the motor-van, and in the evenings, as he tinkered with the engine, cleaning the plugs, trying to correct some tapping in the engine, he seemed to shake off the weariness of the day and come to life.

He was alone when he had the idea that they might run a circular saw off the back wheel of the van. His brother had gone off into the wood on the prowl. There were no longer any keepers, but the life of the wood remained — foxes taking refuge in the impassable ruin of boughs, an odd pheasant, a wood-pigeon roosting in a surviving hazel-clump, a swarm of rabbits. Very often the men heard the high squeal of the stoat-bitten rabbit and could, by running towards the sound,
scare the stoat and find the rabbit before the bloodsucking had begun. If there were no rabbit by evening, Marko prowled round, lingering till darkness very often for the chance of a roosting pheasant, while Joe tinkered with the motor engine and replenished the cooking-fire. They had their last meal in the dusk, by the fire, and then slept in the van.

Across the road from the wood stood a solitary house, new-looking, of bright red brick, occupied by a thin stooping man who limped across to the wood to watch the two men sawing and to talk with them. He was an ex-soldier and limped from a wound in the leg and from time to time he would roll up his trousers and display the wound-scar, recounting the story. But the two brothers were unimpressed. They dragged in boughs, sawed them and added to the dry yellow stack of billets as though he did not exist. Only in this did they resemble each other, in their derision, unconscious and unspoken, of the outsider. They could convey that derision in a spit which left behind it a scornful silence, but derision and spit and scorn were all lost on the thin man, who would go on talking to them in a Cockneyish voice of whining familiarity, sucking at a cigarette and between the sentences, oblivious.

‘Daresay you wouldn't believe it. But there's a bullet in my leg yet. You can't see it now. It seems to disappear in dry weather and then show again when it rains. Soon as it rains again I'll show it you. See? This leg's like a weather-glass. The bullet begins to
show when there's rain about. What do you think of that?'

They would make no answer: only the silence or spit of contempt. But once the elder brother remarked: ‘You can give us the tip when it's going to rain, then, eh?' and thereafter the man came across the road each evening, smoking the perpetual stained fag-end, and turned up his trousers. There was never a sign of the bullet and the parching heat continued, the leaves of the remaining hazels curling and shrivelling, the thistles and willow-herb making a transparent silken storm of seed which floated over the scorched wood, never ceasing, in the blazing sunshine.

The man appeared, as usual, limping up the riding by the sawdust heaps, as the younger man sat by the van pondering over the new idea of the circular saw, working out the mechanics of it in his mind, deriding himself gently for not having thought of it sooner.

Hearing the footsteps, he glanced up. For the first time he was glad to see the limping man. He could hardly close his fingers for the pain of the broken blisters made by the rope and the cross-saw.

Seeing him by the van, pondering, as if in dejection, the man began: ‘Look as if you've lost something.…'

But Joe interrupted quickly: ‘D'ye know anybody what's got a circular saw? To sell or hire, don't matter. We can pay. I've been thinking how we could run one off the motor.'

‘Circular saw?' the man repeated. ‘I've got a circular
saw myself. The timber chaps left it — they used to draw water from my well and they sort of left the saw —' he seemed to become embarrassed, the tentative note in his voice an excuse in itself. ‘It wants fitting up, that's all. It's a good saw.'

‘D'ye want to sell it? Can I have a look at it?'

‘Yes, you can look at it.'

‘Now?'

‘Now if you like—it's across at my place, in a shed.'

The gipsy began to walk away eagerly, the ex-soldier limping after him, and ten minutes later they returned, with the gipsy carrying the circular saw wrapped up in sacks.

‘Then if you can fit it up,' the limping man was saying, ‘you'll borrow it and let me have enough wood for winter for the hire of it. That's it, is it?'

‘Ah,' said the gipsy, absently. He was gazing at the sun-baked ground, lost in thought.

‘You'll want a running belt,' said the man.

The gipsy was down on his knees, gazing beneath the van. Intent on the saw and the motor, he was transformed, his actions full of a fervent vitality, his mind entranced by its new idea, the limping man forgotten.

‘All right, all right,' he said once, looking up and seeing him still there, ‘we can fix it.' When he looked up again the man was limping away by the heaps of sawdust.

By noon the following day he had fixed up the saw,
the first high mournful whanging moan of the steel in the wood making strange reverberations among the dead trees. The weather was still unchanged, cloudless and oppressive, the heat striking back intolerably from the shadeless earth and the scattered sawdust. He had worked at the saw since daylight, moving the van to more level ground, jacking up the axle, worried alternately by the difficulties of the problem and by the attitude of his brother, who by spits and monosyllables and half-spoken words conveyed his contempt for the scheme, halting each time he made a journey from the wood with his load of boughs or logs, which he roped together and dragged behind him. Yet he never openly opposed the scheme; he offered no argument against it, only the half-glance or half-word of ridicule, softly bitter and provoking.

And strangely enough, at noon, when the saw was finished and whining in motion, he accepted it. Yet the old deprecating infuriating half-murmur of contempt was still there.

‘Just about hangs together, don't it? Might do. Might try it.'