The Woman Who Had Imagination

by H. E. Bates

  A moment later he remembered something. He wanted to take her photograph. He would take her standing on the ladder, among the pear-leaves, with the basket held just below her breast. He turned at once and called involuntarily, ‘Wait a moment’, and hurried out of the orchard into the house.

  When he returned with the camera they were trying to move the ladder. They wanted it to reach the branches where the pears were growing thickest, in the crown of the tree. He helped them move the ladder and made it firm against a branch, and when Anna took the basket and climbed up he picked up the camera and focused her. The elder girl uttered a little shriek of delight. Anna turned and saw the camera facing her. She blushed furiously, and he motioned her to come down a little and she turned and sat on a rung of the ladder, smoothing her hands quickly across her breast and skirt and hair until he was ready.

  He took a long time over the photograph. It gave him the greatest pleasure to see the clear, pale image of her in the camera and then to look up at her, sitting like an image also, watching him with an attentive half-smile, like someone listening to something very lovely and illuminating.

  He remained for a long time in the orchard with them. He took photographs of them sitting together on the ladder and another of Anna alone, half-lying in the grass among the fallen pears. After the photographs he climbed up into the highest branches of the tree, where the girls were a little afraid of venturing, and helped them to gather the pears. He liked the sensation of being far up in the tree, moving precariously from branch to branch in the sunlight, swaying the branches so that the pears swung back into his hands. He liked the stillness of the garden also, the scent of the ripe fruit, the voices of the girls breaking up the stillness, the face of Anna looking furtively up at him through the lacework of leaves.

  Somewhere about eleven o’clock Herr Müller himself came into the orchard and called them into the courtyard for a glass of wine. In the courtyard was a young peasant who had come in to see Richardson. He had been a prisoner in England and could speak a little English and it would be a great honour to meet an Englishman again.

  The wine was red and very cold and sharp. They drank it sitting at the tables or lounging in the shade of the mulberry tree. The young peasant was very shy and began protesting:

  ‘I cannot the English no more speak — not now.’

  ‘But that’s very good,’ said Richardson.

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘But it will come back.’

  ‘For ten years I do not say.’

  ‘But you remember it perfectly.’

  ‘Ja?’ He was delighted. ‘You think?’

  Gradually he lost his shyness and they talked of England, and Richardson asked him to have some beer. ‘Ein bier, Herr Müller,’ he called and everyone laughed.

  They talked English over the beer and the wine while the Müllers stood listening. The peasant had come straight from the fields. He and his mother were harvesting their wheat; he had mown enough for her to rake and band, but she was very quick and he must soon go back to her. Richardson said that he would like to go into the fields that afternoon to see him mowing and to take photographs of him and his mother among the sheaves.

  The peasant was overjoyed and began trying to explain the way Richardson must take in order to reach his land. He tried to explain in English but failed, and blushing and laughing at himself, he finally appealed to Anna. They talked together for a moment or two, and Anna nodded her head and Richardson felt his heart begin to beat excitedly even before the peasant said to him:

  ‘Anna will come with you.’

  He saw her look at him as soon as the words had been spoken. It was the same tremulous, almost frightened look he had seen on her face once or twice the night before.

  Finally they went back into the orchard. The dahlias were beginning to droop their heads in the heat of the day and the sun was fiercely hot on his head up in the branches of the tree. This time Anna did not come up into the tree. She walked about in the grass and filled her basket with fallen pears and hardly looked up into the branches.

  Whenever he looked forward to the afternoon and when finally the afternoon came and he was waiting about in the courtyard for Anna to appear, he experienced a wonderful, inarticulate happiness.

  It was still early when Anna came. She had changed her dress, as though it were something extremely important to escort him into the fields, and she was wearing a silky, cream-coloured frock which looked spotlessly preserved, as though she only wore it on great occasions.

  They smiled at each other and in silence went off through the village and soon they were in the country beyond. The road wound on through patches of wheat and rye and sometimes there were vineyards and strips of maize and tobacco, the leaves of the maize drooping and glossy in the hot sun. A little distance away the forest stood, the pines like a black, silent, gloomy barricade against the sky. On the roadside the wild yellow snapdragon was growing again, with poppies and purple knapweed and solitary blossoms of chicory. The peasants were beginning to work again after the midday rest, the men mowing, the women tying and shocking the sheaves. They paused and lifted their hands and stared as Anna and Richardson passed along the road.

  The young peasant and his mother were working a patch of red-eared wheat not far from the edge of the forest. The woman had a thin, dark-brown face with fine, deep-sunken peasant’s eyes, very shrewd and quick and watchful, but with the wonderful shining tranquillity of the sunlight in them too. Her face seemed to burn with an inexhaustible life under her white kerchief. She seemed both curiously proud and shy and was overcome with shame at the idea of being photographed in her black working skirt, with her sleeves rolled up and a sheaf in her arms. Finally she consented to stand with Anna, without the sheaf, against the corn that was still uncut. She looked very dark and awkward and embarrassed. Anna by contrast seemed to Richardson filled with a lovely composure and light.

  Afterwards he photographed the peasant and his mother and then Anna with them. At every click of the camera they laughed with relief and delight. Richardson, laughing too, promised to send them the photographs when he returned to England.

  Finally as he was folding up his camera he said to the peasant:

  ‘Is that where the forest begins — over there?’

  ‘The forest — yes.’

  ‘I should like to see it. You understand? I have never been in the forest.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You will ask Anna if she will take me? I should like to see the forest once.’

  The peasant spoke with Anna, and Anna nodded her head, looking at Richardson quickly and softly, but without a trace of apprehension or timidity.

  Richardson shook hands with the peasant and his mother and then followed Anna along the path to the road again. A little later they struck away from the road and took the path to the forest.

  Eventually they came upon the forest path itself and walked a little distance under the trees and stood still. There was a strange deathly stillness and silence everywhere, and overhead the pines made a thick dark screen which shut out the sunlight. The earth was strewn with pine-needles, faintly scented and soundless to walk upon, making a brown floor that went on infinitely, without a trace of green, into the gloomy distance of slumbering trees. Overawed by the silence, the grandeur and the primeval force of it, Richardson stood in a solemn contemplation of it until he became aware of Anna moving on again.

  He did not follow her until she was some distance ahead of him. He walked behind her at last very slowly, listening to the forest and watching her at the same time. Sometimes the sunlight filtered down through a break in the pines and she walked through the shaft of it, the flash of her light hair very rich and lovely. Walking behind her he noticed consciously for the first time how she did her hair; it was plaited into one thick coil and twisted about the back of her head in the shape of a figure eight.

  She walked on ahead until they came to an opening in the pines. The sunlight suddenly poured down up
on them again, burning through the light leaves of some overhanging birches. The silver trunks of the birches gleamed like satin in the sunshine and the earth was covered with a short soft grass and the leaves of wild strawberries.

  As they came to the birch-tree she stopped and turned and waited for him. He stopped also. She looked up at the sunlight and the birches and then at Richardson and then back to the trees again. He slipped his arm very lightly across her shoulder. He felt her body trembling and saw her breast rising and falling quickly with emotion. He looked at her uplifted face steadfastly and quietly. She seemed irresistibly lovely, her eyes marvellously blue and candid and soft, and suddenly he stooped and kissed her lightly, but with profound tenderness. The soft caressing line of her lips was familiar immediately. She uttered a little sound of pleasure, half-sighing, half-laughing, and he felt a sensation of intolerable happiness at the sound of her voice expressing her joy.

  Afterwards he kissed her again and they went on through the forest. Sometimes she stopped him and clasped him by the shoulders and began speaking slowly and hesitantly in German. There was something she longed to tell him and could not express in gestures and glances. Finally she would shake her head and laugh and give it up and let him kiss her again.

  ‘Anna, Anna,’ he would say to her softly.

  They turned and came slowly back along the forest-path. He did not want to speak to her. He was overjoyed simply by the thrilling nearness of her body, the touch of her breasts against him through her soft dress, the marvellously radiant expression on her face and the sensation of sweet, tormenting happiness in his heart.

  Finally they came out of the forest and walked down the hot road to Iben again. As they approached the village they saw someone hurrying up the road to meet them. It was Karl. Richardson involuntarily waved his hand and Karl waved back in reply.

  A moment later Richardson turned his head and discovered Anna looking at him dumbly, with a kind of timid anxiety. It was only then that he remembered they were leaving Iben in the morning and were going on to Berlin.

  V

  They were ready to depart at noon on the following day. Richardson had packed his bag and carried it up to the farm and Karl’s brothers had loaded it into a low spring cart in readiness to drive to the station. There was a station two miles away and a train left there at three o’clock. Richardson and Karl had spent the morning saying farewell to everyone who remembered Karl as a child. Everyone smiled a great deal and was very charming to them and they drank wine at every house. Over the wine the peasants would ask them about England and about the war. The talk was always the same. No one had wanted a war and why had it happened? After war they would talk of money. A peasant would talk of the days when he had taken a wagon-load of plums to market and had brought back a wagon-load of marks and how the next day the marks had become worthless. Sometimes the old people would unlock a drawer and give Richardson a note for ten million marks and ask him to keep it in memory of them. They would let him see the drawer stuffed full of money and then shrug their shoulders as if to say, ‘Of course it isn’t worth a pfennig. We just keep it out of curiosity,’ but he felt that he sometimes detected a look in their faces as though they secretly believed that everything would be changed, and that one day they would be suddenly wealthy.

  Afterwards there was a big farewell lunch at the farm, with great helpings of heavy food and bottles of hock. Richardson felt sick of wine and tried to keep up the level of his glass by pretending to drink. The day was very hot again and the food seemed sickening too.

  From his place at the table he could see across the courtyard and he remembered how he had first seen Anna hurrying across there with his bag. He had not seen Anna all day, and during the morning he had wondered where she was and if he would see her again. He had not seen her since the night before, when he had returned late to the inn and had been startled by the sound of her hurrying across the courtyard. She had rested her hands on his shoulders and had whispered to him very earnestly. From the tone of her voice he had known it was something important but he had not understood a word.

  After the lunch was over they were to go down to the inn and say farewell to the Müllers. Richardson felt that he would like to take photographs of them standing under the mulberry tree.

  At the inn Herr Müller greeted them with shouts and giggles of joy. Frau Müller and the elder sister came out, straightening their skirts and smoothing their hair. There was no sign of Anna. Richardson unfolded his camera, wondering desperately if she would come. At the sight of the camera the two women fled to change their dresses and came out again wearing frowzy white Sunday frocks with high collars. Herr Müller fetched his monkey and stood with the two women under the mulberry tree. Anna did not come. Richardson felt a kind of sickening desperation in his heart and finally he could bear it no longer and said to Karl:

  ‘Why isn’t Anna here?’

  He heard Karl speak to Müller. He bent his head over the camera and waited for the reply and presently he heard Karl say:

  ‘It is the day for her music lesson in Kreuznach.’

  He felt suddenly sick, overcome by despair. He lowered his head and focused the camera on the Müllers. The sunlight was shining full on their faces and he knew the photograph would be very poor, but he did not care. He simply held up his hand and the camera clicked and it was all over.

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Auf Wiedersehen!’ said the Müllers. ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Karl.

  ‘Goot-bye!’

  Back at the farm everyone was ready and the carts were waiting. Maria had packed up sandwiches of rye bread and sausage, enough for the whole journey to Berlin. Elsa was weeping and Karl’s mother was trying not to weep. They all crowded into the carts and drove away out of the village and along the hot white road to the station and the peasants ran out of the houses to wave at them as they passed.

  There was an oppressive stillness about the heat of the afternoon and a tremulous dark haze over the distant patches of wheat and rye. Richardson looked at everything, the peasants working among the corn, the chicory-flowers in the parched grass, the burning sky and the dark edge of the forest, with a memory of Anna. The sickening sensation in his heart had been replaced by a soft, intolerable ache, half sweet and half unhappy.

  The train was waiting in the station, hissing quietly. Karl and Richardson found a carriage and Karl’s relatives crowded about the doorway, talking and weeping and shaking hands. At the last moment Karl’s father handed Richardson a bottle of hock and made a little speech, which Karl translated.

  ‘They have been very honoured to meet you. The wine is very old and good and they would like you to have it and not forget them.’

  ‘Thank them very much,’ Richardson said. ‘I shan’t forget.’

  A moment or two later the train began to move. Everyone waved hands and shouted farewell, and Karl and Richardson leaned out of the window and waved too. The platform receded quickly and finally the station and the waving figures vanished from sight.

  Richardson sat down in the corner of the carriage without a word. The train began to pass through the forest and the sunlight came flickering into the windows between the dark shadows of the pines. Sometimes there were stretches of birch trees and the sunlight was dappled and quivering as it fell on the glass. In the forest itself there was no sunlight, but only the still, sombre gloom through which he had walked with Anna the previous day. He remembered Anna perfectly as he looked at it, her shy tremulous face, her sensitive lips, the irresistibly lovely look of joy which she had sometimes given at him. She seemed more than ever lovely in recollection and because he would never see her again.

  The train gathered speed and the forest flashed past in a dark, bewildering panorama. Richardson tried to give up thinking of Anna but she remained with him persistently, like the forest running side by side with the train. Sometimes on the edge of the forest he saw patches of pink flowers like willow-herb and tall drooping flowers like eve
ning primroses. Once he caught sight of a deer running away at the sound of the train. He thought of Anna for a long time. He had never even spoken with her and sometimes it seemed as if he had hardly known her. She had appeared briefly and wonderfully and had vanished, like the rainbow. He knew he would never see her again and he wondered if he would remember her.

  There was a break in the forest and the train stopped at a station, and then the train and the forest ran on together again.

  He wondered also if she would remember him.

  For the Dead

  A little pink-faced man, wearing a bowler hat and a mackintosh over a black suit, was hurrying towards the cemetery carrying a bunch of white chrysanthemums wrapped in newspaper and smoking a stump of cigarette that was half hidden by his greyish yellow moustache. A gentle rain was falling, a drizzling misty November rain that clung like dew to the chrysanthemums and like tiniest beads of quicksilver to the man’s moustache and his bowler hat. The afternoon would be dark early. The sky was a single vast leaden cloud; the rain was coming a little faster each moment. As the rain came faster the man increased his pace. He carried the chrysanthemums close to his side, furtively, flowers downward, uneasily conscious of them.

  The cemetery was deserted. In the distance the rain made a faint vapour, dissolving the white tombstones. The cypress trees drooped heavily and the branches of the leafless almond trees stood black against the sky, delicately laced with odd jewels of rain.