The Woman Who Had Imagination (28 page)

“And now, gentlemen, what will you say for this very fine pair of double-barrel, hammerless guns, by Joseph Lang, complete in their case?—the finest memento of our friend, the late doctor, any one of you may wish to have!”

“Ten pounds! Thank you. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen.” There was much excitement. Such guns were eagerly coveted by those who were sportsmen. To those who did not understand such things, it was all astounding.

“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty! Guineas!” A pause.

“Twenty guineas only I am offered for this pair of superb hammerless, double-barrelled guns! Twenty guineas!” Very scandalised, he began protesting, gasping, expostulating, cajoling, threatening, manoeuvring. “Twenty guineas! I shan't sell them at the figure. I couldn't sell them. It's an insult to the memory of the doctor. Twenty guineas! Well, gentlemen, you really do——”

Then suddenly a timid, nervous, emotional voice called: “Twenty-one.”

People started, looked at each other, craned their necks. It was the voice of a woman.

“Did I hear twenty-one?”

Twenty-one! A woman? Where was she? He tried, without success, to lengthen his neck, and he suddenly resembled a little pig straining at the trough. “Twenty-two, twenty-three. Twenty-five!” It was the woman again. “Twenty-five!” From his upraised desk he tried to detect her. He could see others, too, darting curious glances, sharp as rats, hither and thither. What could a woman want with guns? He noted the faces of sportsmen and gamekeepers puffed out in disgust. “Twenty-five!” he called. Now the clothes women were leaning over their piles of dirty linen and bolsters in their anxiety to find that reclusive, mysterious figure. He followed their eyes. Could that be her? A tall, mannish-looking creature in tweed, with a pheasant cockade in her felt? “Twenty-five! Twenty-five pounds only I am bid for these fine Joseph Lang hammer-less guns!” He gazed everywhere with his small grey eyes as he shouted:

“Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.” The sportsmen, as if from a sense of outrage, were bidding briskly. Many a man that morning had fancied himself awaiting the birds with those guns at a copse-edge, in the quiet, balmy Autumn air. “Twenty-seven pounds I am bid, gentlemen! Twenty-seven pounds only I am bid for a pair of guns that cost a hundred and fifty if they cost a penny.”

“Twenty-eight!”

Again it was the woman. And this time, trained over many years to catch the faintest nod, the lightest flutter among a crowd of heads, he saw her.

She stood far back among a crowd of indifferent loafers, a little woman, mouse-like, insignificant, nondescript. Blushing violently she grasped an umbrella—and one almost gathered from that umbrella her age, her characteristics, her religion. A costume of greenish tweed, a high-throated collar, a pair of ascetic, almost ecclesiastical brown eyes, seemed to stamp her indubitably as one of those obscure creatures, past middle-age, whose gentle lives are wrapped up in charity.

“Twenty-eight!” Excited, nonplussed, he searched for bids. From the corner of his eye he observed the umbrella. “Twenty-nine, thirty! Thirty pounds! He leaned forward, cajoling: “Gentlemen, I assure you that the chance of such guns will never come your way again!”

“Guineas!”

“Thirty guineas!” he shouted.

The little woman, after delivering the word, remained mouth-open, anxiously watching him.

“Thirty-one! Thirty-two! Thirty-two pounds, gentlemen. The guns are worth double!” he bawled.

Then her lips worked. “Thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five! Thirty-five. Going at thirty-five? Going at thirty-five? Going? Going” And suddenly some intuition made him bring down his pencil sharply. He saw the little woman stretched with pathetic, desperate tension.

“Gone!” he said.

He scribbled, wiped his brow and called aloud: “Name, please?”

It was whispered to the clerk and in turn whispered to him. He closed the polished case. There were resentful, half-angry glances at him. He wrote down: “Miss Julia Atherley.”

And shortly he saw the woman, carrying the guns with difficulty, pass from beneath the inquisitous, censorious eyes of the crowd. She had a bicycle, on the carrier of which she now strapped the case. Quiet and inscrutable, she then wheeled her cycle from the cattle-yard. One or two women stretched their necks for a last glimpse of her. Already men were asking:

“Who bought the guns?”

“A little whippet of a woman with a bicycle,” they were told.

Meanwhile she herself was riding into open country. There, larks were carolling, blackthorn stretched like silken lace upon dark twigs. Sun-shine warmed and illumined everything. Often her bicycle bell flashed up a silver beam which dazzled her.

The guns were heavy. In spite of her sixty-five years she bicycled tirelessly, walking only at the hills. She would, at intervals, glance round in order to satisfy herself that the guns were safe.

She alighted, eventually, at the gates of a small house flanked on all sides by woodland. A dog began barking joyously. No other sign of life, except the yellow bill of a blackbird flying among the thorn, greeted her. The woods seemed to impose upon the house a great silence.

Carrying the doctor's guns under one arm and the umbrella beneath the other, she entered the house. Entering her drawing-room she set the guns on a table and sat down a trifle wearily. Then she existed for a few moments in a state of tranquil, entranced repose. Through the window was visible a green riding, where some young rabbits were hopping to and fro. She kept her eyes fixed upon this, aware, apparently, of nothing else.

Soon, however, a kind of curiosity awoke in her. She aroused herself and unlatching the gun-case, took a long look at the slender barrels, the en-graved breaches, the shining stocks, smooth as walnut to her touch. To her these instruments of death were, like snakes, terrifying and fascinating. They seemed too, incredibly costly. Furthermore she did not understand them and trying to afix them, she failed hopelessly. As for shooting with them, she had never fired a shot in her life. A gun-shot close at hand would cause her heart, like an imprisoned creature, to hurl itself at the walls of her breast.

And so sometimes the faintest sense of misgiving or of guiltiness at the thought of her thirty-five pounds would make her ask herself why she had bought them.

She had bought them, in the words of the auctioneer, as a memento of her friend, the doctor.

Twenty years before he had torn his foot in a poacher's trap and had dragged himself along the riding to her house. Gruff and laconic, he had instructed her how to tend his wound. Bewildered and affrighted, she had managed the dressing badly, and apparently only a glass of sherry had succeeded in soothing his pain and temper.

Subsequently, once a week, for twenty years, he had appeared in the riding with his dogs, or on horseback. In the shooting season he often brought for her a brace of pheasants or snipe, or failing these, a young hare.

Cursory exchanges about the weather, birds, creatures of the woods he had under observation, his dogs and his horse—very little more than this had passed between them. She had, at first, cherished some thoughts of marriage, but she had discovered his principles and had stifled these notions abruptly. Whenever he came she gave him a glass of sherry.

She had grown very fond of him. His personality had unfolded itself before her like a tapestry, rough, gloomy, picturesque, the threads of his stoicism, his atheism, his love, his moodiness woven to a fabric which was for her indestructible in its nobility and strength.

Finally, at his death, she had awoken suddenly to the realisation that she possessed nothing, except the ephemeral pictures of memory, by which to remember him. What property he had besides his dogs, his horse and his guns she did not know. She was faced with a problem. A clause in the Will, however, solved it for her, and when the horse and the dogs had been destroyed, she began to go about with nothing but the thought of guns in her head.

To-day she had satisfied herself. She had purchased, for an incredible sum, the privilege of cherishing two objects which, in use or out of use, repelled and terrified her. She could not couple them. She could not fire them off. It taxed her strength even to lift them.

As she stood above them, however, she was at rest, more than guilty, and she felt in her unobtrusive way triumphant. Suddenly she ran her fingers over the smooth metal and wood and velvet, and then closed the box. Presently she rang a bell. Her only servant, Kathleen, appeared.

“Kathleen,” she said, “I want you to go upstairs, and open all the doors for me as I come.”

The girl retired, and upstairs, along passages, up more stairs, the woman followed her struggling with the gun-case.

“That will do,” she said presently, and she was panting.

She entered a small room, and when the girl had vanished set the guns on the floor and knelt beside them. Now the beat of her heart, after the long climb, was painful. When it subsided repose fell lightly upon her again, and she opened the gun-case, and taking out a barrel, used it as the auctioneer had done for a telescope.

From the window, for a moment or two, she enjoyed a miniature view of the spring woods, the lovely riding, the white gate through which her friend the doctor had always come.

But shortly, as if fatigued by it all, she snapped down the lid, and pulling out the heavy drawer of a chest bestowed the guns beneath a confusion of disused, camphorated linen, and locked the drawer with a small key.

Having descended again, she said: “I will have tea now. Against the window,” she added.

As she waited, fixing her gaze, as if through long custom, upon the green track parting the woodland, she became tranquil again, thinking. And it gratified her deeply to think that no farmer or keeper had bought the guns and that no other hand would ever fondle them or take aim with them at a living creature.

Some young rabbits hopped out upon the grass. In future whenever she saw a rabbit, a pheasant, or a hare, she would be reminded of him. And now, touched at the appearance of the rabbits, she began to cry. Her tears were small, light, like a child's beads, and they bounced off her cheeks.

But suddenly she ceased to cry. She seemed to realise abruptly that tears would not immortalise her remembrance or express her strange, half-triumphant joy.

“What nonsense!” she thought.

And when the servant brought in her tea she was sitting upright, sunk into tranquillity, and nothing remained to indicate that she had just come through the ordeal of hiding away the very soul of that godless stoic, that bluff sportsman, that most lovable man, her friend the doctor.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950). Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HEBates
.

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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

The Woman Who Had Imagination
first published in Great Britain in 1934 by Jonathan Cape Ltd