Read Online The Woman Who Had Imagination by H.E. Bates - Free Book Online Page A

fireplaces of cold blue-veined marble. He wondered all the time who had ever lived and slept there, contrasting it all unconsciously with the room behind the shop at home, with the cheap German silk-fronted piano, the brass gasbrackets, the cane music-rack, the broken revolving piano stool, the flashy green jars containing aspidistras whose leaves his mother counted and sponged religiously every Saturday. The place had an air of unreality. The yellow blinds, drawn to keep out the sun, threw down a strange shadowy apricot light. Here and there rents in the blinds let in streaks of dusty sunlight. When he put his hand on the walls they struck cold and damp. Across the floors henoticed trails of candle-grease dropped perhaps by some servant coming in to lower the blinds at night or let them up again in the morning. How long ago? he wondered. There was a melancholy air of the past, of vague, dead, forgotten things. There was also a curious feeling of poverty about it all in spite of that rich magnificence. The blinds were old and stained, the paint was cracked and dirty, and here and there a ceiling had crumbled away, revealing naked laths draped with black skeins of cobweb.
    Going slowly up the second flight of stairs, he stopped now and then to look at the prints on the walls. A clock in the house struck four, the notes very soft and delicate, a silver water-sound. Some visitors passed him, coming down, their voices dying away down the two flights of stairs like a vague chant. Going up, he found himself in a bare corridor.
    Walking into a room by one door and out by another he turned along a narrow corridor in order to return to the stairs, but the passage seemed contained within itself, to lead nowhere. And in a moment he was lost. Trying to go back to the room through which he had come he tried a door, but it was locked. He began to try other doors, which were also locked. It was some minutes before he found a door which opened.
    Relieved, he hurried through the room. But halfway across the floor, thinking of nothing but escaping by the opposite door, he was startled into a fresh panic by a voice:
    â€˜But unfortunately, in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship’s headdress slightly scratching the child’s neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness, such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother’s consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm. …’
    At the word alarm he stopped. The voice stopped too. He felt himself break out into a prickling sweat. Across the room, with his thin fingers outstretched to a low wood fire, sat an old man in a torn red dressing-gown. He was sunk into a kind of sick trance. By his side there was a woman, a young woman. Arrested in the act of reading, she sat with her averted head still and intense, looking across the room with the blackest eyes he had ever seen, black not only with their own richness of colour but with an illimitable darkness of sheer melancholy.
    â€˜I’m lost,’ Henry said.
    â€˜Lost?’
    She stood upright as she echoed the word, rubbing the fingers of her left hand up and down the yellow leather binding of the book. Trying to face her he was sick with confusion. The old man turned stiffly and stared at him also. The old eyes were pale and vacuous.
    Suddenly the woman smiled.
    â€˜It’s all right,’ she said.
    For some reason or other Henry could not answer her. He stood half-foolishly hypnotised by her figure, tall and wonderfully slender, her very long maroon-coloureddress, her unspeakably brilliant eyes. Her voice had in it a kind of mournful sweetness which held him fascinated.
    At last he attempted to explain himself. He had no sooner begun than she cut him short:
    â€˜I’ll show you the way,’ she said.
    He still could not answer. She turned to the old man:
    â€˜Sit still. I’ll come back.’
    â€˜Where are you going?’ he