The Woman Who Had Imagination Read Free

her over in a garden, behind a wall,’ he said. ‘Big wall, about fifteen feet high. We were banging in hard a-carrying hay and I was on the top o’ the cart and could see her just over the wall. Not just one — scores, common as poppies. I felt I shouldn’t have no peace again until I had one. And I nipped over the wall that night about twelve o’clock and ran straight into her.’
    â€˜Into the lily?’
    â€˜Tah! Into a gal. See? Young gal — about my age, daughter o’ the house. All dressed in thin white. “What are you doing here?” she says, and I believe she was as frit as I was. “I lost something,” I says. “It’s all right. You know me.” And then she wanted to know what I’d lost, and I felt as if I didn’t care what happened, and I said, “Lost my head, I reckon.” And she laughed, and then I laughed and then she said, “Ssshhh! Don’t you see I’m as done as you are if we’re found here? You’d better go. What did you come for anyway?” And I told her. She wouldn’t believe me. “It’s right,” I says, “I just come for the lily.” And she just stared at me. “And you know what they do to people who steal?” she says. “Yes,” I says, and they were the days when you could be hung for looking at a sheep almost. “But picking flowers ain’t stealing,” I says. “Ssshhh!” she says again. “What d’ye think I’m going to say if they find me here? Don’ttalk so loud. Come here behind these trees and keep quiet.” And we went and sat down behind some old box-trees and she kept whispering about the lily and telling me to whisper for fear anyone should come. “I’ll get you the lily all right,” she says, “If you keep quiet. I’ll dig it up”.’
    He ceased talking, and after the sound of his harsh, uncouth racy voice the summer afternoon seemed quieter than ever, the drowsy, stumbling boom of the bees in the July flowers only deepening the hot drowsy silence. I took a drink of the strong cool flower-odoured wine and waited for my uncle Silas to go on with the story, but nothing happened, and finally I looked up at him.
    â€˜Well?’ I said.
    For a moment or two he did not speak. But finally he turned and looked at me with a half-solemn, half-vivacious expression, one eye half-closed, and told me in a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, all and more than I had asked to know.
    â€˜She gave me the lily,’ he said.

The Story Without an End
I
    The Restaurant Rosset, which had once been painted a prosperous white, was now dingy and cheap; so thickly freckled were its windows with the black dust of London that from the outside nothing within was visible except the ghostly white circles that were the tables and the even more ghostly white blobs which were the shirt-fronts of the waiters. It looked like the kind of place into which unhappy lovers would go to talk over some misfortune and come to a decision about their lives. On the second floor were rooms which other lovers, having a different purpose, might have used also. Pierre Moreau had been learning to be a waiter there all winter.
    He was fifteen: a thin, gawky boy with long black hair, heavy southern lips that he hardly ever opened and dark mute eyes that stood out with sombre dreaminess from his sallow face. He had been growing paler and thinner throughout the winter and he now looked like a plant that had been tied up in darkness and blanched. When there was nothing to do in the restaurant, when no one wanted wine or coffee, which it was his duty to pour out, he stood with his back to the wall and staredat the opposite wall as though he were staring at something beyond it — and beyond it hopelessly.
    It was April, and spring was late. He had come over from France the previous November, alone, with his