Read The Woman Who Had Imagination for Free Online

and listening.
    â€˜Who is it? Where are you?’ he kept shouting, more and more angry as the silence of the house met him.
    Stamping and cursing he passed the door of the little room and was hastening downstairs when the marble clock struck a quarter. He turned back at once like a furious beast and burst into the room. Pierre and the girl stood there transfixed, never having moved since his first shout, and he came upon them with an exclamation of guttural joyous anger. The girl had not even buttoned her dress.
    He stood for one moment glaring at them, his brows working up and down in anger, his body grunting for breath. His lips trembled violently and his little eyes fixed themselves with fury on the girl’s unbuttoned frock.
    â€˜Get out of this room!’ he roared at last. ‘Get out!’
    The boy, so used to obeying that voice even when he did not understand its language, came forward involuntarily. With a grunt of fury Rosset knocked him aside, pointing to the girl instead.
    â€˜You!’ he shouted. ‘You I mean. Get out of this room — this house. And don’ come back — don’ come back.’
    As she moved forward and past him and out of the room and went upstairs he hurled after her a spout of abusive fury until he was exhausted and had no strengtheven to look at the boy, standing in readiness to be abused and he hoped also, like the girl, dismissed.
    Half-way downstairs Rosset remembered and there came a shout:
    â€˜And you — down in the restaurant. I will see you.’
    At the words the old sickening terror ran through the boy, sapping away completely the strength and joy the girl had given him. He stumbled downstairs, conscious only in a dazed way of what was happening.
    In the evening he stood in the restaurant by the table, mutely waiting and watching the waiters peer into the dark street and Rosset marching up and down in agitation. As Rosset passed him he shrank into himself, half-swooning with fear, always expecting a torrent of abuse such as that he had flung at the girl. It did not come but, knowing it would come, in time, he fell into the old trick of staring at the opposite wall and losing himself beyond it.
    Suddenly he felt again that blow at his chest, flinging him backwards.
    â€˜Always against the wall!’ Rosset’s voice whispered fiercely with anger. ‘Always against the wall!’
    The boy pressed himself back to the wall, so hard that there was a pain where his head touched it.
    In his eyes lay an expression not only of fear and sickness. They had a queer furtive, sideways look, that half-desperate, half-hopeless look, almost criminal, that dwells in the eyes of the oppressed and persecuted, of those who cannot escape.

The Gleaner
    She is very old, a little sprig of a woman, spare and twisted. The sun is hardly past its noon. She has climbed uphill out of the town, up the hot, white road, with curious fretting footsteps, half-running, half-walking, as though afraid that some other gleaner will have come up before her. But as far as she can see, into a distance of mellow light under a sky as mild and wonderfully blue as the stray chicory-stars still blooming among the stiff yellow grasses by the roadside, the world is empty. She is alone, high up, insignificantly solitary in a world of pure untrembling light that pours straight down, washing away the summer-green gloom from the tops of the still trees. There is not even the stirring of a sheep over the land or the flickering of a bird in the sky; nothing to alarm or rival or distract her. Yet she goes on always with that fretting eagerness, as though afraid, not resting or satisfied until she sees the wheatfield before her, empty like the rest of the earth except for that downpour and flood of golden light upon its stubbled slope.
    She pushes open the gate, clicks it shut behind her, flaps open her sack, takes one swift and comprehensive glance at the field, and bends her back. Her