The Woman Who Had Imagination (20 page)

‘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 couch 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.'

All the time the old woman was speaking, the girl's
face was changing and hardening into a consciousness of bitterness and pain. Her eyes awoke and became filled with an icy white light of hatred for the old woman and her garrulous sobbing. The old woman tried to open the door wide enough for him to enter but the girl held it, clenching it with her white hand and jamming her foot against it.

‘I must go if I'm to get it into the paper,' said the reporter.

‘Come and look at him,' moaned the old woman. ‘He looks lovely. You wouldn't think he was dead.'

But encouraged by the bitterness in the girl's eyes, he ignored the old woman.

‘Is there anything I can do?' he said to the girl.

She shook her head.

‘I'll put it in the paper, if you like.'

She shook her head again.

‘Oh! have it put in,' moaned the old woman. ‘It'd make me happy if you put it in.'

The girl was shaking her head and biting her lips vehemently.

‘There may be some money to come from the paper,' said the reporter.

‘I don't want the money!' the girl cried.

‘Oh! you silly silly!' moaned the old woman. ‘Oh! she don't know what she's saying. She's all upset. Don't take no notice of her. She ain't got a penny — not a penny I tell yer. We ain't got enough to pay for a decent coffin for him. Don't listen to her.'

‘If there's any money I'll send it,' he said, half-walking away.

‘Oh! she'll be glad of every halfpenny!'

‘Oh! be quiet! Be quiet!' shouted the girl.

As she shouted the words she pushed the old woman furiously behind her with one hand and slammed the door shut with the other. Before moving away he heard her cries echoing distractedly in the house, mingling with the weary complaint of the old woman trying to comfort her. A woman with a wet-patched sack-apron over her black skirt and a man's cap hat-pinned to her thin grey hair hurried past him as he walked down the street, wiping her soapy hands on her apron and her sharp nose on her hand. He heard her voice also mingled with the voices in the house where the dead youth lay:

‘Anything I can do, my gal? Mrs. Parker, anything I can do?'

Finally he could hear no more. He walked under the railway bridge, along the canal and so back to the town. Should he put it in the paper? The scene hurt and depressed him, persisting vividly in his mind. Ought he to put it in? Wasn't this where he became a reporter? Half against himself he strung the phrases of a paragraph tentatively together. ‘After an illness of only three days, James Parker, 19, yesterday succumbed to … Deceased, who had for some time acted in the capacity of newsman to this office, leaves a wife and …' The trite easy phrases condemned
themselves and seemed to reproach him. He began to think that instead he would write an article, an impassioned account of the filthy house, the garrulous old woman, the tragic young wife. He would describe it all with vivid indignation and emotion, asking rhetorically if this were civilization, if poverty were any less a crime because it was also a tragedy? In imagination he saw the article, with impassioned headlines, given a prominent place in the paper, and he half-imagined an editorial comment upon it: ‘We draw the attention of our readers to the report, given on another page, of what we feel is not only a sad and distressing case but an indictment of the social conditions under which we live and for which, in a sense, we are also responsible.' His mind hammered out the words angrily. He would write a report that would stir the consciousness of all who read it. His desire to write flamed up so powerfully that he found himself walking along in an agitation of rage and anxiety.

Back at the office he sat down and took up some sheets of ballot-paper and began to write. He was ashamed when the old easy phrases began to form themselves and not the passionate words of righteous accusation he had planned. ‘After an illness of only three days' duration …' He began to tear up the sheets, trying fresh beginnings. ‘Housed in a jerry-built hovel on the banks of a canal which stinks in summer and floods in winter, I to-day found Mrs. Parker …' He knew that this was too strong and
he tore up the sheet, beginning again and again. At last he desisted and went downstairs and across the road to the eating-house opposite, bringing back the cup of tea which he allowed himself every day with his sandwiches.

He drank and ate a little and then, feeling calmer, began to write again. He succeeded in describing the street, the house and the conditions under which he had found the girl and the old woman living. Then, warming up to his subject, he covered several pages, eating and drinking as he wrote, his sense of time deadened.

But coming to the girl herself, he could not go on. He saw clearly enough her dumb negation, her look of unemotional immobility, and he could hear with painful clarity her voice crying reproachfully, ‘I don't want the money! Be quiet! Be quiet!' but he could not put the words describing it on paper. He could not convey the sense of her grief, her youth, her unspoken bitterness. And he went on watching her face, as it were, in his mind, without being able to describe it, until he heard clumsy feet on the stairs below and the sound of the newsmen's voices talking about the afternoon's races.

He was surprised to find that it was nearly three o'clock. He put his written sheets aside and opened the table-drawer and took out the rubber-stamping apparatus in readiness for stop-pressing the results.

Heavy feet came up the stairs as he was doing so
and the glass door opened. A bundle of newspapers was flung on the floor inside and a dirty-capped head appeared in the door crack and a hoarse news-voice whispered:

‘Remember what I told yer?'

‘No.'

‘What? Didn't I tell yer it was a gift — Millennium? Ah! yer don't know a good thing when I give yer one. It
can't
lose — unless it falls over. If that ain't a winner I don't know a mare from a cock-sparrow.'

Suddenly something occurred to the reporter:

‘Is it too late now?' he said.

‘Well, you don't hurt. What d'ye want on? Put your top-hat on?'

It had occurred to the reporter that he might back Millennium, using Parker's money and giving the winnings to his widow. If the horse lost he himself would stand the loss; and hastily he found the sales-book, checked the sales to Parker, and a moment later the newsman was clattering downstairs with five shillings for the bet.

The reporter sat back in his chair to wait for the telephone call. As he sat there he played idly with the rubber-stamp and its letters, setting up Millennium and printing it on the blotting-paper. In imagination he saw the girl's face as it would be if the horse won, contrasting it with the grief-stupid tragic mask he could recall so perfectly but could not describe. And suddenly he remembered also the vehement shaking
of her head in reply to his ‘I'll put it in the paper if you like', and he suddenly seized the sheets he had written with so much struggle and tore them up.

His heart leapt as the telephone rang. As he stood with the receiver to his ear, waiting, he could hear the hush of the news-boys as they listened on the stairs.

A voice on the telephone gave him the horses. He wrote them down before the consciousness of his failure struck him:

‘Volcano, Double Quick, White Rose.'