Read The Woman Who Had Imagination for Free Online Page B

and coltsfoot that chokes the rows. Nowadays the binder leaves the straw so long and shaggy. Nobody hoes any longer, nobody gleans, nobody troubles. The crop is poor and uneven, and she comes across wastes of thin straw and much green rank twitch where the earth is barren of corn and she scarcely picks an ear, though she never straightens her back and never ceases that mouse-quick searching with her brown hands.
    But later, in the heat of the afternoon, with her sack filling up and the sun-heat and bright light playing unbrokenly upon her, she begins unconsciously to move more slowly, a little tired, like a child that has playedtoo long. She will not cover the field, and as she moves there, always solitary, up and down the stubble, empty except for herself and a rook or two, she begins to look smaller and the field larger and larger about her.
    At last she straightens her back. It is her first conscious sign of weariness. She justifies it by looking into the sky and over the autumn-coloured land sloping away to the town; briefly she takes in the whole soft-lighted world, the effulgence of wine-yellow light on the trees and the dove-coloured roofs below and a straggling of rooks lifting heavily off the stubble and settling farther on again.
    She stoops and goes on once more; and then soon, another rest, another glance into the sky, and then another beginning. Very soon there is a thistle pricking her hand, and she is glad to stop and pull it out and suck the place with her thin lips.
    Ahead of her there is a hedge of hawthorn and blackberry, with great oaks that throw balloons of shadow across the field. She moves into the oak shade with relief; it is cool, like a drink of water, like a clean white sheet; and the coolness fills her with a new vitality, so that she goes on gleaning for a long time without needing to rest.
    By and by she is working along the hedge. Straws have been plaited and twisted by wind among the hawthorn and blackberry and wild clematis and sloe, and she goes along picking them off, twisting them together and dropping them into her sack, her body upright.It is easier. She can smell the darkening blackberries, the first dying odour of leaves. She stops to gather and eat a dewberry, squeezing it against her palate like a dark grape; to rub the misty purple-green bloom off a sloe with her fingers.
    There are many straws on the hedge. The sack is heavy. She walks very slowly, dragging it, wondering all the time why she does not lift it to her shoulder and start for home, but something stronger than herself keeps her picking and gleaning, missing nothing.
    It is not until the light begins to fail that she thinks of departing. She has begun to carry the sack in her arms, hugging it to her chest, setting it down at intervals and gleaning the stubble about it. There is no need to go on, but some inherent, unconscious, eternal impulse keeps her moving perpetually. But still she glances up sometimes with the old fear, wondering if some other gleaner will come.
    She has worked towards the gate and there she sets down the sack and rests a moment. It is late afternoon; dark crowds of starlings are flying over and gathering in invisible trees, making a great murmuration in the late quietness. Before she can depart she must lift the sack to her back or lift it to the gate and bend her back beneath it. She is very tired. She might leave the sack under the hedge; she might come again to-morrow; but she suddenly catches the sack in her arms, hoists it to the gate with an immense effort as though her life depended upon it.
    Her strength is not enough. The sack, very full, half falls back upon her, but in a moment she makes a tremendous effort and, as she makes it, lifting the sack slowly upright again, she feels her eyes, for some reason, fill with the stupid tears of age and weakness.
    In a moment it is all over, forgotten. She makes a great effort to lift up the sack. She succeeds. The sack falls across her back, bearing