The Woman Who Had Imagination by H.E. Bates

or where he had run a race or where he had fallen in love. The young man was stiff with sitting for long hours in trains and tired from running after trains and spending nights in strange beds from which Karl aroused him too early, so that they might catch other trains before breakfast. At first he had tried to protest but later he had no strength to protest. As he sat on the deck of the steamer he was utterly weary of travelling and there was only one thing to which he felt he could look forward. They were going into the country.
    The steamer turned a bend in the river and slowly the Rhine straightened itself out again. The sky was dark and heavy with thunder over the distant breadth of the river. The steamer and the storm seemed to be floating towards each other at the same smooth, inevitable pace. Richardson tried to establish the point where the storm and the steamer would meet but his thoughts wandered off to Iben, the place where Karl had been born. He imagined a sleepy village lying in a fertile valley in the shelter of a forest of pines, thevalley set with orchards and tobacco-fields and vine-yards and crops of wheat and rye turning white in the hot sun.
    A short German dressed in a white, pink-striped flannel suit staggered on deck with his baggage and his wife. The woman, who was eating sausage sandwiches, seemed afraid of the approaching storm. She breathed like a broken-winded horse and there were beads of yellow sweat on her large moonlike face. As she ate the sausage she picked off the circle of red skin and threw it into the Rhine and the skin floating on the greenish water had a strange scarlet brilliance in the thunderlight.
    The roofs of Bingen appeared, sharply outlined beneath the immense blue cloud of the thunderstorm. Afar off there had been a mutter of thunder and suddenly there was a louder peal which seemed to hesitate and hover in the sky before taking an angry leap into the distance, travelling away over the hills like a growl of artillery. The air was stifling. The German asked Karl if he thought they would be in Bingen before the storm came and Karl said ‘Yes’, in a tone as though the storm were a hundred miles away. The light was queer and brilliant. The vines were a wonderfully bright emerald and the river itself looked leaden and sombre under the darkening sky. The steamer slowed down its engines and drifted towards the red roofs and the storm. There was a strange stillness in the air, a hush that seemed to exist apart from the voices of the passengers, the tune of the gramophone still playing, and the quiet wash of water in thesteamer’s wake. The German stood ready with his baggage and his wife had ceased eating. Suddenly the white thunder rain came racing down the river and whipped across the deck. The passengers herded themselves below and Richardson and Karl went down into the saloon. The sun was still shining as the rain came down and the air was like a curtain of silver. Karl ordered some beer and while he was drinking it the rain ceased with a jerk and the storm-cloud seemed to split apart and let in the light again.
    Karl and Richardson went on deck again. There was a marvellous stillness in the air, and up in the black sky hung a magnificent rainbow. It made a span between the town and the hills like a vivid, exquisite bridge. There was a soft reflection of it on the water and another reflection of it higher up in the sky. Everyone came on deck to look at it and the stout German and his frau forgot to eat the sandwiches at the sight of it. Its loveliness was unearthly and transcendent.
    The steamer swung across the river and came to rest at the landing-stage. The sun was shining brilliantly again and the rainbow had begun to fade.
    Karl and Richardson went up into the town. Great pools of rain lay among the cobbles of the streets and the town looked washed and bright. Karl went into a shop for some cigars and made inquiries about a bus to Iben. There was no bus to Iben