and Other Stories
A little bird was asked: Why are your songs so short? He replied: I have many songs to sing, and I should like to sing them all.
Anton Tchehov
CONSTABLE & CO. LTD, London 1924
Something Childish and Other Stories
How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
[The text follows the first Constable & Co. edition.]
To
H. M. TOMLINSON
Most of the stories and sketches in this collection were written in the years between the publication of Katherine Mansfield’s first book, “In a German Pension,” in 1911 and the publication of her second, “Bliss and other Stories,” in 1920. There are a few exceptions. The first story, The Tiredness of Rosabel, was written in 1908 when Katherine Mansfield was nineteen years old, and the three stories following also were written before “In a German Pension” was published: while Sixpence and Poison were written after Bliss had appeared. Sixpence was excluded from “The Garden-Party and Other Stories” by Katherine Mansfield because she thought it “sentimental”; Poison was excluded because I thought it was not wholly successful. I have since changed my mind: it now seems to me a little masterpiece.
I have no doubt that Katherine Mansfield, were she still alive, would not have suffered some of these stories to appear. When she was urged to allow “In a German Pension” to be republished, she would always reply: “Not now; not yet—not until I have a body of work done and it can be seen in perspective. It is not true of me now: I am not like that any more. When the time for a collected edition comes—” she would end, laughing. The time has come.
The stories are arranged in chronological order.
[1] At the corner of Oxford Circus Rosabel bought a bunch of violets, and that was practically the reason why she had so little tea—for a scone and a boiled egg and a cup of cocoa at Lyons are not ample sufficiency after a hard day’s work in a millinery establishment. As she swung on to the step of the Atlas ’bus, grabbed her skirt with one hand and clung to the railing with the other, Rosabel thought she would have sacrificed her soul for a good dinner—roast duck and green peas, chestnut stuffing, pudding with brandy sauce—something hot and strong and filling. She sat down next to a girl very much her own age who was reading Anna Lombard in a cheap, paper-covered edition, and the rain had tear-spattered the pages. Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers’ shops seen through this, were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet, and she knew the bottom of her skirt and [2] petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. There was a sickening smell of warm humanity—it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the ’bus—and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them. How many times had she read these advertisements—“Sapolio Saves Time, Saves Labour”—“Heinz’s Tomato Sauce”—and the inane, annoying dialogue between doctor and judge concerning the superlative merits of “Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline.” She glanced at the book which the girl read so earnestly, mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time that she turned the page. She could not see very clearly; it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders. Oh, Heavens! Rosabel stirred suddenly and unfastened the two top buttons of her coat … she felt almost stifled. Through her half-closed eyes the whole row of people on the opposite seat seemed to resolve into one fatuous, staring face….
And this was her corner. She stumbled a little on her way out and lurched against the girl next her. “I beg your pardon,” said Rosabel, but the girl did not even look up. Rosabel saw that she was smiling as she read.
Westbourne Grove looked as she had always imagined Venice to look at night, mysterious, dark, even the hansoms were like gondolas [3] dodging up and down, and the lights trailing luridly—tongues of flame licking the wet street—magic fish swimming in the Grand Canal. She was more than glad to reach Richmond Road, but from the corner of the street until she came to No. 26 she thought of those four flights of stairs. Oh, why four flights! It was really criminal to expect people to live so high up. Every house ought to have a lift, something simple and inexpensive, or else an electric staircase like the one at Earl’s Court—but four flights! When she stood in the hall and saw the first flight ahead of her and the stuffed albatross head on the landing, glimmering ghost-like in the light of the little gas jet, she almost cried. Well, they had to be faced; it was very like bicycling up a steep hill, but there was not the satisfaction of flying down the other side….
Her own room at last! She closed the door, lit the gas, took off her hat and coat, skirt, blouse, unhooked her old flannel dressing-gown from behind the door, pulled it on, then unlaced her boots—on consideration her stockings were not wet enough to change. She went over to the wash-stand. The jug had not been filled again to-day. There was just enough water to soak the sponge, and the enamel was coming off the basin—that was the second time she had scratched her chin.
It was just seven o’clock. If she pulled the [4] blind up and put out the gas it was much more restful—Rosabel did not want to read. So she knelt down on the floor, pillowing her arms on the window-sill … just one little sheet of glass between her and the great wet world outside!
She began to think of all that had happened during the day. Would she ever forget that awful woman in the grey mackintosh who had wanted a trimmed motor-cap—“something purple with something rosy each side”—or the girl who had tried on every hat in the shop and then said she would “call in to-morrow and decide definitely.” Rosabel could not help smiling; the excuse was worn so thin….
But there had been one other—a girl with beautiful red hair and a white skin and eyes the colour of that green ribbon shot with gold they had got from Paris last week. Rosabel had seen her electric brougham at the door; a man had come in with her, quite a young man, and so well dressed.
“What is it exactly that I want, Harry?” she had said, as Rosabel took the pins out of her hat, untied her veil, and gave her a hand-mirror.
“You must have a black hat,” he had answered, “a black hat with a feather that goes right round it and then round your neck and ties in a bow under your chin, and the ends tuck into your belt—a decent-sized feather.”
[5] The girl glanced at Rosabel laughingly. “Have you any hats like that?”
They had been very hard to please; Harry would demand the impossible, and Rosabel was almost in despair. Then she remembered the big, untouched box upstairs.
“Oh, one moment, Madam,” she had said. “I think perhaps I can show you something that will please you better.” She had run up, breathlessly, cut the cords, scattered the tissue paper, and yes, there was the very hat—rather large, soft, with a great, curled feather, and a black velvet rose, nothing else. They had been charmed. The girl had put it on and then handed it to Rosabel.
“Let me see how it looks on you,” she said, frowning a little, very serious indeed.
Rosabel turned to the mirror and placed it on her brown hair, then faced them.
“Oh, Harry, isn’t it adorable,” the girl cried, “I must have that!” She smiled again at Rosabel. “It suits you, beautifully.”
A sudden, ridiculous feeling of anger had seized Rosabel. She longed to throw the lovely, perishable thing in the girl’s face, and bent over the hat, flushing.
“It’s exquisitely finished off inside, Madam,” she said. The girl swept out to her brougham, and left Harry to pay and bring the box with him.
“I shall go straight home and put it on [6] before I come out to lunch with you,” Rosabel heard her say.
The man leant over her as she made out the bill, then, as he counted the money into her hand—“Ever been painted?” he said.
“No,” said Rosabel, shortly, realising the swift change in his voice, the slight tinge of insolence, of familiarity.
“Oh, well you ought to be,” said Harry. “You’ve got such a damned pretty little figure.”
Rosabel did not pay the slightest attention. How handsome he had been! She had thought of no one else all day; his face fascinated her; she could see clearly his fine, straight eyebrows, and his hair grew back from his forehead with just the slightest suspicion of crisp curl, his laughing, disdainful mouth. She saw again his slim hands counting the money into hers … Rosabel suddenly pushed the hair back from her face, her forehead was hot … if those slim hands could rest one moment … the luck of that girl!
Suppose they changed places. Rosabel would drive home with him, of course they were in love with each other, but not engaged, very nearly, and she would say—“I won’t be one moment.” He would wait in the brougham while her maid took the hat-box up the stairs, following Rosabel. Then the great, white and pink bedroom with roses everywhere in dull [7] silver vases. She would sit down before the mirror and the little French maid would fasten her hat and find her a thin, fine veil and another pair of white suède gloves—a button had come off the gloves she had worn that morning. She had scented her furs and gloves and handkerchief, taken a big muff and run down stairs. The butler opened the door, Harry was waiting, they drove away together…. That was life, thought Rosabel! On the way to the Carlton they stopped at Gerard’s, Harry bought her great sprays of Parma violets, filled her hands with them.
“Oh, they are sweet!” she said, holding them against her face.
“It is as you always should be,” said Harry, “with your hands full of violets.”
(Rosabel realised that her knees were getting stiff; she sat down on the floor and leant her head against the wall.) Oh, that lunch! The table covered with flowers, a band hidden behind a grove of palms playing music that fired her blood like wine—the soup, and oysters, and pigeons, and creamed potatoes, and champagne, of course, and afterwards coffee and cigarettes. She would lean over the table fingering her glass with one hand, talking with that charming gaiety which Harry so appreciated. Afterwards a matinee, something that gripped them both, and then tea at the “Cottage.”
[8] “Sugar? Milk? Cream?” The little homely questions seemed to suggest a joyous intimacy. And then home again in the dusk, and the scent of the Parma violets seemed to drench the air with their sweetness.
“I’ll call for you at nine,” he said as he left her.
The fire had been lighted in her boudoir, the curtains drawn, there were a great pile of letters waiting her—invitations for the Opera, dinners, balls, a week-end on the river, a motor tour—she glanced through them listlessly as she went upstairs to dress. A fire in her bedroom, too, and her beautiful, shining dress spread on the bed—white tulle over silver, silver shoes, silver scarf, a little silver fan. Rosabel knew that she was the most famous woman at the ball that night; men paid her homage, a foreign Prince desired to be presented to this English wonder. Yes, it was a voluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders….
But she became very tired. Harry took her home, and came in with her for just one moment. The fire was out in the drawing-room, but the sleepy maid waited for her in her boudoir. She took off her cloak, dismissed the servant, and went over to the fireplace, and stood peeling off her gloves; the firelight shone on her hair, Harry came across the room and caught her in his arms—“Rosabel, Rosabel, [9] Rosabel” … Oh, the haven of those arms, and she was very tired.
(The real Rosabel, the girl crouched on the floor in the dark, laughed aloud, and put her hand up to her hot mouth.)
Of course they rode in the park next morning, the engagement had been announced in the Court Circular, all the world knew, all the world was shaking hands with her….
They were married shortly afterwards at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and motored down to Harry’s old ancestral home for the honeymoon; the peasants in the village curtseyed to them as they passed; under the folds of the rug he pressed her hands convulsively. And that night she wore again her white and silver frock. She was tired after the journey and went upstairs to bed … quite early….
The real Rosabel got up from the floor and undressed slowly, folding her clothes over the back of a chair. She slipped over her head her coarse, calico nightdress, and took the pins out of her hair—the soft, brown flood of it fell round her, warmly. Then she blew out the candle and groped her way into bed, pulling the blankets and grimy “honeycomb” quilt closely round her neck, cuddling down in the darkness….
So she slept and dreamed, and smiled in her sleep, and once threw out her arm to feel for something which was not there, dreaming still.
[10] And the night passed. Presently the cold fingers of dawn closed over her uncovered hand; grey light flooded the dull room. Rosabel shivered, drew a little gasping breath, sat up. And because her heritage was that tragic optimism, which is all too often the only inheritance of youth, still half asleep, she smiled, with a little nervous tremor round her mouth.
[Collier’s, February 9, 1924; written 1908]
[11] Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth, and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it—like a cloud—like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads, and both of them carried a big flax basket of ferns. They had no shoes and stockings on, and they came walking along, slowly, because they were so fat, and talking to each other and always smiling. Pearl stopped swinging, and when they saw her they stopped walking. They looked and looked at her and then they talked to each other, waving their arms and [12] clapping their hands together. Pearl began to laugh.
The two women came up to her, keeping close to the hedge and looking in a frightened way towards the House of Boxes.
“Hallo, little girl!” said one.
Pearl said, “Hallo!”
“You all alone by yourself?”
Pearl nodded.
“Where’s your mother?”
“In the kitching, ironing-because-its-Tues-day.”
The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. “Oh,” she said, “haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.”
The dark women laughed, and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. “What’s your name?” they asked her.
“Pearl Button.”
“You coming with us, Pearl Button? We got beautiful things to show you,” whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up, and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes.
They walked a long way. “You tired?” asked one of the women, bending down to Pearl. Pearl shook her head. They walked [13] much further. “You not tired?” asked the other woman. And Pearl shook her head again, but tears shook from her eyes at the same time and her lips trembled. One of the women gave over her flax basket of ferns and caught Pearl Button up in her arms, and walked with Pearl Button’s head against her shoulder and her dusty little legs dangling. She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell—a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it….
They set Pearl Button down in a log room full of other people the same colour as they were—and all these people came close to her and looked at her, nodding and laughing and throwing up their eyes. The woman who had carried Pearl took off her hair ribbon and shook her curls loose. There was a cry from the other women, and they crowded close and some of them ran a finger through Pearl’s yellow curls, very gently, and one of them, a young one, lifted all Pearl’s hair and kissed the back of her little white neck. Pearl felt shy but happy at the same time. There were some men on the floor, smoking, with rugs and feather mats round their shoulders. One of them made a funny face at her and he pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and set it on the floor, and flicked it with his finger as though it were a marble. It rolled right over to her. Pearl picked it up. “Please can I eat it?” she [14] asked. At that they all laughed and clapped their hands, and the man with the funny face made another at her and pulled a pear out of his pocket and sent it bobbling over the floor. Pearl laughed. The women sat on the floor and Pearl sat down too. The floor was very dusty. She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places, and she ate the fruit, the juice running all down her front.
“Oh!” she said in a very frightened voice to one of the women, “I’ve spilt all the juice!”
“That doesn’t matter at all,” said the woman, patting her cheek. A man came into the room with a long whip in his hand. He shouted something. They all got up, shouting, laughing, wrapping themselves up in rugs and blankets and feather mats. Pearl was carried again, this time into a great cart, and she sat on the lap of one of her women with the driver beside her. It was a green cart with a red pony and a black pony. It went very fast out of the town. The driver stood up and waved the whip round his head. Pearl peered over the shoulder of her woman. Other carts were behind like a procession. She waved at them. Then the country came. First fields of short grass with sheep on them and little bushes of white flowers and pink briar rose baskets—then big trees on both sides of the road—and nothing to be seen except big trees. Pearl tried [15] to look through them but it was quite dark. Birds were singing. She nestled closer in the big lap. The woman was warm as a cat, and she moved up and down when she breathed, just like purring. Pearl played with a green ornament round her neck, and the woman took the little hand and kissed each of her fingers and then turned it over and kissed the dimples. Pearl had never been happy like this before. On the top of a big hill they stopped. The driving man turned to Pearl and said, “Look, look!” and pointed with his whip.
And down at the bottom of the hill was something perfectly different—a great big piece of blue water was creeping over the land. She screamed and clutched at the big woman, “What is it, what is it?”
“Why,” said the woman, “it’s the sea.”
“Will it hurt us—is it coming?”
“Ai-e, no, it doesn’t come to us. It’s very beautiful. You look again.”
Pearl looked. “You’re sure it can’t come,” she said.
“Ai-e, no. It stays in its place,” said the big woman. Waves with white tops came leaping over the blue. Pearl watched them break on a long piece of land covered with garden-path shells. They drove round a corner.
There were some little houses down close to the sea, with wood fences round them and gardens inside. They comforted her. Pink and [16] red and blue washing hung over the fences, and as they came near more people came out, and five yellow dogs with long thin tails. All the people were fat and laughing, with little naked babies holding on to them or rolling about in the gardens like puppies. Pearl was lifted down and taken into a tiny house with only one room and a verandah. There was a girl there with two pieces of black hair down to her feet. She was setting the dinner on the floor. “It is a funny place,” said Pearl, watching the pretty girl while the woman unbuttoned her little drawers for her. She was very hungry. She ate meat and vegetables and fruit and the woman gave her milk out of a green cup. And it was quite silent except for the sea outside and the laughs of the two women watching her.
“Haven’t you got any Houses of Boxes?” she said. “Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?”
They took off her shoes and stockings, her pinafore and dress. She walked about in her petticoat and then she walked outside with the grass pushing between her toes. The two women came out with different sorts of baskets. They took her hands. Over a little paddock, through a fence, and then on warm sand with brown grass in it they went down to the sea. Pearl held back when the sand grew wet, but the women coaxed, “Nothing to hurt, very [17] beautiful. You come.” They dug in the sand and found some shells which they threw into the baskets. The sand was wet as mud pies. Pearl forgot her fright and began digging too. She got hot and wet, and suddenly over her feet broke a little line of foam. “Oo, oo!” she shrieked, dabbling with her feet, “Lovely, lovely!” She paddled in the shallow water. It was warm. She made a cup of her hands and caught some of it. But it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing….
Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats—little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings—a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes.
[Rhythm, September 1912; written 1910]
[18] “You got three-quarters of an hour,” said the porter. “You got an hour mostly. Put it in the cloak-room, lady.”
A German family, their luggage neatly buttoned into what appeared to be odd canvas trouser legs, filled the entire space before the counter, and a homoeopathic young clergyman, his black dicky flapping over his shirt, stood at my elbow. We waited and waited, for the cloak-room porter could not get rid of the German family, who appeared by their enthusiasm and gestures to be explaining to him the virtue of so many buttons. At last the wife of the party seized her particular packet and started to undo it. Shrugging his shoulders, the porter turned to me. “Where for?” he asked.
“Ostend.”
“Wot are you putting it in here for?”
I said, “Because I’ve a long time to wait.”
He shouted, “Train’s in 2.20. No good bringing it here. Hi, you there, lump it off!”
[19] My porter lumped it. The young clergyman, who had listened and remarked, smiled at me radiantly. “The train is in,” he said, “really in. You’ve only a few moments, you know.” My sensitiveness glimpsed a symbol in his eye. I ran to the book-stall. When I returned I had lost my porter. In the teasing heat I ran up and down the platform. The whole travelling world seemed to possess a porter and glory in him except me. Savage and wretched I saw them watch me with that delighted relish of the hot in the very much hotter. “One could have a fit running in weather like this,” said a stout lady, eating a farewell present of grapes. Then I was informed that the train was not yet in. I had been running up and down the Folkstone express. On a higher platform I found my porter sitting on the suit case.
“I knew you’d be doin’ that,” he said, airily.
“I nearly come and stop you. I seen you from ’ere.”
I dropped into a smoking compartment with four young men, two of whom were saying good-bye to a pale youth with a cane. “Well, good-bye, old chap. It’s frightfully good of you to have come down. I knew you. I knew the same old slouch. Now, look here, when we come back we’ll have a night of it. What? Ripping of you to have come, old man.” This from an enthusiast, who lit a cigar as the train [20] swung out, turned to his companion and said, “Frightfully nice chap, but—lord—what a bore!” His companion, who was dressed entirely in mole, even unto his socks and hair, smiled gently. I think his brain must have been the same colour: he proved so gentle and sympathetic a listener. In the opposite corner to me sat a beautiful young Frenchman with curly hair and a watch-chain from which dangled a silver fish, a ring, a silver shoe, and a medal. He stared out of the window the whole time, faintly twitching his nose. Of the remaining member there was nothing to be seen from behind his luggage but a pair of tan shoes and a copy of The Snark’s Summer Annual.
“Look here, old man,” said the Enthusiast, “I want to change all our places. You know those arrangements you’ve made—I want to cut them out altogether. Do you mind?”
“No,” said the Mole, faintly. “But why?”
“Well, I was thinking it over in bed last night, and I’m hanged if I can see the good of us paying fifteen bob if we don’t want to. You see what I mean?” The Mole took off his pince-nez and breathed on them. “Now I don’t want to unsettle you,” went on the Enthusiast, “because, after all, it’s your party—you asked me. I wouldn’t upset it for anything, but—there you are—you see—what?”
Suggested the Mole: “I’m afraid people will be down on me for taking you abroad.”
[21] Straightway the other told him how sought after he had been. From far and near, people who were full up for the entire month of August had written and begged for him. He wrung the Mole’s heart by enumerating those longing homes and vacant chairs dotted all over England, until the Mole deliberated between crying and going to sleep. He chose the latter.
They all went to sleep except the young Frenchman, who took a little pocket edition out of his coat and nursed it on his knee while he gazed at the warm, dusty country. At Shorncliffe the train stopped. Dead silence. There was nothing to be seen but a large white cemetery. Fantastic it looked in the late afternoon sun, its full-length marble angels appearing to preside over a cheerless picnic of the Shorncliffe departed on the brown field. One white butterfly flew over the railway lines. As we crept out of the station I saw a poster advertising the Athenaeum. The Enthusiast grunted and yawned, shook himself into existence by rattling the money in his trouser pockets. He jabbed the Mole in the ribs. “I say, we’re nearly there! Can you get down those beastly golf-clubs of mine from the rack?” My heart yearned over the Mole’s immediate future, but he was cheerful and offered to find me a porter at Dover, and strapped my parasol in with my rugs. We saw the sea. “It’s going to be beastly rough,” said the Enthusiast, [22] “Gives you a head, doesn’t it? Look here, I know a tip for sea-sickness, and it’s this: You lie on your back—flat—you know, cover your face, and eat nothing but biscuits.”
“Dover!” shouted a guard.
In the act of crossing the gangway we renounced England. The most blatant British female produced her mite of French: we “S’il vous plaît’d” one another on the deck, “Merci’d” one another on the stairs, and “Pardon’d” to our heart’s content in the saloon. The stewardess stood at the foot of the stairs, a stout, forbidding female, pockmarked, her hands hidden under a businesslike-looking apron. She replied to our salutations with studied indifference, mentally ticking off her prey. I descended to the cabin to remove my hat. One old lady was already established there.
She lay on a rose and white couch, a black shawl tucked round her, fanning herself with a black feather fan. Her grey hair was half covered with a lace cap and her face gleamed from the black drapings and rose pillows with charming old-world dignity. There was about her a faint rustling and the scents of camphor and lavender. As I watched her, thinking of Rembrandt and, for some reason, Anatole France, the stewardess bustled up, placed a canvas stool at her elbow, spread a newspaper upon it, and banged down a receptacle rather like a baking tin….
[23] I went up on deck. The sea was bright green, with rolling waves. All the beauty and artificial flower of France had removed their hats and bound their heads in veils. A number of young German men, displaying their national bulk in light-coloured suits cut in the pattern of pyjamas, promenaded. French family parties—the female element in chairs, the male in graceful attitudes against the ship’s side—talked already with that brilliance which denotes friction! I found a chair in a corner against a white partition, but unfortunately this partition had a window set in it for the purpose of providing endless amusement for the curious, who peered through it, watching those bold and brave spirits who walked “for’ard” and were drenched and beaten by the waves. In the first half-hour the excitement of getting wet and being pleaded with, and rushing into dangerous places to return and be rubbed down, was all-absorbing. Then it palled—the parties drifted into silence. You would catch them staring intently at the ocean—and yawning. They grew cold and snappy. Suddenly a young lady in a white woollen hood with cherry bows got up from her chair and swayed over to the railings. We watched her, vaguely sympathetic. The young man with whom she had been sitting called to her.
“Are you better?” Negative expressed.
[24] He sat up in his chair. “Would you like me to hold your head?”
“No,” said her shoulders
“Would you care for a coat round you? … Is it over? … Are you going to remain there?” … He looked at her with infinite tenderness. I decided never again to call men unsympathetic, and to believe in the all-conquering power of love until I died—but never put it to the test. I went down to sleep.
I lay down opposite the old lady, and watched the shadows spinning over the ceilings and the wave-drops shining on the portholes.
In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more—you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging. The light faded.
I fell asleep, to wake to find the stewardess shaking me. “We are there in two minutes,” said she. Forlorn ladies, freed from the embrace of Neptune, knelt upon the floor and searched for their shoes and hairpins—only the old and dignified one lay passive, fanning herself. She looked at me and smiled.
“Grâce de Dieu, c’est fini,” she quavered in a voice so fine it seemed to quaver on a thread of lace.
I lifted up my eyes. “Oui, c’est fini!”
[25] “Vous allez à Strasbourg, Madame?”
“No,” I said. “Bruges.”
“That is a great pity,” said she, closing her fan and the conversation. I could not think why, but I had visions of myself perhaps travelling in the same railway carriage with her, wrapping her in the black shawl, of her falling in love with me and leaving me unlimited quantities of money and old lace…. These sleepy thoughts pursued me until I arrived on deck.
The sky was indigo blue, and a great many stars were shining: our little ship stood black and sharp in the clear air. “Have you the tickets? … Yes, they want the tickets…. Produce your tickets!” … We were squeezed over the gangway, shepherded into the custom house, where porters heaved our luggage on to long wooden slabs, and an old man wearing horn spectacles checked it without a word. “Follow me!” shouted the villainous-looking creature whom I had endowed with my worldly goods. He leapt on to a railway line, and I leapt after him. He raced along a platform, dodging the passengers and fruit wagons, with the security of a cinematograph figure. I reserved a seat and went to buy fruit at a little stall displaying grapes and greengages. The old lady was there, leaning on the arm of a large blond man, in white, with a flowing tie. We nodded.
[26] “Buy me,” she said in her delicate voice, “three ham sandwiches, mon cher!”
“And some cakes,” said he.
“Yes, and perhaps a bottle of lemonade.”
“Romance is an imp!” thought I, climbing up into the carriage. The train swung out of the station; the air, blowing through the open windows, smelled of fresh leaves. There were sudden pools of light in the darkness; when I arrived at Bruges the bells were ringing, and white and mysterious shone the moon over the Grand’ Place.
[New Age, August 24, 1911; written 1910]
[27] The little town lies spread before the gaze of the eager traveller like a faded tapestry threaded with the silver of its canals, made musical by the great chiming belfry. Life is long since asleep in Bruges; fantastic dreams alone breathe over tower and mediaeval house front, enchanting the eye, inspiring the soul and filling the mind with the great beauty of contemplation.”
I read this sentence from a guide-book while waiting for Madame in the hotel sitting-room. It sounded extremely comforting, and my tired heart, tucked away under a thousand and one grey city wrappings, woke and exulted within me … I wondered if I had enough clothes with me to last for at least a month. “I shall dream away whole days,” I thought, “take a boat and float up and down the canals, or tether it to a green bush tangling the water side, and absorb mediaeval house fronts. At evensong I shall lie in the long grass of the Béguinage meadow and look up at the elm trees[28]—their leaves touched with gold light and quivering in the blue air—listening the while to the voices of nuns at prayer in the little chapel, and growing full enough of grace to last me the whole winter.”
While I soared magnificently upon these very new feathers Madame came in and told me that there was no room at all for me in the hotel—not a bed, not a corner. She was extremely friendly and seemed to find a fund of secret amusement in the fact; she looked at me as though expecting me to break into delighted laughter. “To-morrow,” she said, “there may be. I am expecting a young gentleman who is suddenly taken ill to move from number eleven. He is at present at the chemist’s—perhaps you would care to see the room?”
“Not at all,” said I. “Neither shall I wish to-morrow to sleep in the bedroom of an indisposed young gentleman.”
“But he will be gone,” cried Madame, opening her blue eyes wide and laughing with that French cordiality so enchanting to English hearing. I was too tired and hungry to feel either appreciative or argumentative. “Perhaps you can recommend me another hotel?”
“Impossible!” She shook her head and turned up her eyes, mentally counting over the blue bows painted on the ceiling. “You see, it is the season in Bruges, and people do not [29] care to let their rooms for a very short time”—not a glance at my little suit case lying between us, but I looked at it gloomily, and it seemed to dwindle before my desperate gaze—become small enough to hold nothing but a collapsible folding tooth-brush.
“My large box is at the station,” I said coldly, buttoning my gloves.
Madame started. “You have more luggage…. Then you intend to make a long stay in Bruges, perhaps?”
“At least a fortnight—perhaps a month.” I shrugged my shoulders.
“One moment,” said Madame. “I shall see what I can do.” She disappeared, I am sure not further than the other side of the door, for she reappeared immediately and told me I might have a room at her private house—“just round the corner and kept by an old servant who, although she has a wall eye, has been in our family for fifteen years. The porter will take you there, and you can have supper before you go.”
I was the only guest in the dining-room. A tired waiter provided me with an omelette and a pot of coffee, then leaned against a sideboard and watched me while I ate, the limp table napkin over his arm seeming to symbolise the very man. The room was hung with mirrors reflecting unlimited empty tables and watchful waiters and solitary ladies finding sad comfort in [30] omelettes, and sipping coffee to the rhythm of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song played over three times by the great chiming belfry.
“Are you ready, Madame?” asked the waiter. “It is I who carry your luggage.”
“Quite ready.”
He heaved the suit case on to his shoulder and strode before me—past the little pavement cafés where men and women, scenting our approach, laid down their beer and their post-cards to stare after us, down a narrow street of shuttered houses, through the Place van Eyck, to a red-brick house. The door was opened by the wall-eyed family treasure, who held a candle like a minature frying-pan in her hand. She refused to admit us until we had both told the whole story.
“C’est ça, c’est ça,” said she. “Jean, number five!”
She shuffled up the stairs, unlocked a door and lit another minature frying-pan upon the bed-table. The room was papered in pink, having a pink bed, a pink door and a pink chair. On pink mats on the mantelpiece obese young cherubs burst out of pink eggshells with trumpets in their mouths. I was brought a can of hot water; I shut and locked the door. “Bruges at last,” I thought as I climbed into a bed so slippery with fine linen that one felt like a fish endeavouring to swim over an ice pond, and this quiet house with the old [31] “typical” servant,—the Place van Eyck, with the white statue surrounded by those dark and heavy trees,—there was almost a touch of Verlaine in that….
Bang! went a door. I started up in terror and felt for the frying-pan, but it was the room next to mine suddenly invaded. “Ah! home at last,” cried a female voice. “Mon Dieu, my feet! Would you go down to Marie, mon cher, and ask her for the tin bath and some hot water?”
“No, that is too much,” boomed the answer. “You have washed them three times to-day already.”
“But you do not know the pain I suffer; they are quite inflamed. Look only!”
“I have looked three times already; I am tired. I beg of you come to bed.”
“It would be useless; I could not sleep. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, how a woman suffers!” A masculine snort accompanied by the sounds of undressing.
“Then, if I wait until the morning will you promise not to drag me to a picture gallery?”
“Yes, yes, I promise.”
“But truly?”
“I have said so.”
“Now can I believe you?”
A long groan.
“It is absurd to make that noise, for you [32] know yourself the same thing happened last evening and this morning.”
… There was only one thing to be done. I coughed and cleared my throat in that unpleasant and obtrusive way of strange people in next door bedrooms. It acted like a charm, their conversation sifted into a whisper for female voice only! I fell asleep.
“Barquettes for hire. Visit the Venice of the North by boat. Explore the little known and fascinating by-ways.” With the memory of the guide book clinging about me I went into the shop and demanded a boat. “Have you a small canoe?”
“No, Mademoiselle, but a little boat—very suitable.”
“I wish to go alone and return when I like.”
“Then you have been here before?”
“No.”
The boatman looked puzzled. “It is not safe for Mademoiselle to go without a guide for the first time.”
“Then I will take one on the condition that he is silent and points out no beauties to me.”
“But the names of the bridges?” cried the boatman—“the famous house fronts?”
I ran down to the landing stage. “Pierre, Pierre!” called the waterman. A burly young Belgian, his arms full of carpet strips and red velvet pillows, appeared and tossed his spoil into an immense craft. On the bridge above [33] the landing stage a crowd collected, watching the proceedings, and just as I took my seat a fat couple who had been hanging over the parapet rushed down the steps and declared they must come too. “Certainly, certainly,” said Pierre, handing in the lady with charming grace. “Mademoiselle will not mind at all.” They sat in the stern, the gentleman held the lady’s hand, and we twisted among these “silver ribbons” while Pierre threw out his chest and chanted the beauties of Bruges with the exultant abandon of a Latin lover. “Turn your head this way—to the left—to the right—now, wait one moment—look up at the bridge—observe this house front. Mademoiselle do you wish to see the Lac d’Amour?”
I looked vague; the fat couple answered for me.
“Then we shall disembark.”
We rowed close into a little parapet. We caught hold of a bush and I jumped out. “Now, Monsieur,” who successfully followed, and, kneeling on the bank, gave Madame the crook of his walking-stick for support. She stood up, smiling and vigorous, clutched the walking-stick, strained against the boat side, and the next moment had fallen flat into the water. “Ah! what has happened—what has happened!” screamed Monsieur, clutching her arm, for the water was not deep, reaching only to her waist mark. Somehow or other we fished [34] her up on to the bank where she sat and gasped, wringing her black alpaca skirt.
“It is all over—a little accident!” said she, amazingly cheerful.
But Pierre was furious. “It is the fault of Mademoiselle for wishing to see the Lac d’Amour,” said he. “Madame had better walk through the meadow and drink something hot at the little café opposite.”
“No, no,” said she, but Monsieur seconded Pierre.
“You will await our return,” said Pierre, loathing me. I nodded and turned my back, for the sight of Madame flopping about on the meadow grass like a large, ungainly duck, was too much. One cannot expect to travel in upholstered boats with people who are enlightened enough to understand laughter that has its wellspring in sympathy. When they were out of sight I ran as fast as I could over the meadow, crawled through a fence, and never went near the Lac d’Amour again. “They may think me as drowned as they please,” thought I, “I have had quite enough of canals to last me a lifetime.”
In the Béguinage meadow at evensong little groups of painters are dotted about in the grass with spindle-legged easles which seem to possess a separate individuality, and stand rudely defying their efforts and returning their long, [35] long gaze with an unfinished stare. English girls wearing flower-wreathed hats and the promise of young American manhood, give expression to their souls with a gaiety and “camaraderie,” a sort of “the world is our shining playground” spirit—theoretically delightful. They call to one another, and throw cigarettes and fruit and chocolates with youthful naïveté, while parties of tourists who have escaped the clutches of an old woman lying in wait for them in the shadow of the chapel door, pause thoughtfully in front of the easels to “see and remark, and say whose?”
I was lying under a tree with the guilty consciousness of no sketch book—watching the swifts wheel and dip in the bright air, and wondering if all the brown dogs resting in the grass belonged to the young painters, when two people passed me, a man and a girl, their heads bent over a book. There was something vaguely familiar in their walk. Suddenly they looked down at me—we stared—opened our mouths. She swooped down upon me, and he took off his immaculate straw hat and placed it under his left arm.
“Katherine! How extraordinary! How incredible after all these years!” cried she. Turning to the man: “Guy, can you believe it?—It’s Katherine, in Bruges of all places in the world!”
[36] “Why not?” said I, looking very bright and trying to remember her name.
“But, my dear, the last time we met was in New Zealand—only think of the miles!”
Of course, she was Betty Sinclair; I’d been to school with her.
“Where are you staying; have you been here long? Oh, you haven’t changed a day—not a day. I’d have known you anywhere.”
She beckoned to the young man, and said, blushing as though she were ashamed of the fact, but it had to be faced, “This is my husband.” We shook hands. He sat down and chewed a grass twig. Silence fell while Betty recovered breath and squeezed my hand.
“I didn’t know you were married,” I said stupidly.
“Oh, my dear—got a baby!” said Betty. “We live in England now. We’re frightfully keen on the Suffrage, you know.”
Guy removed the straw. “Are you with us?” he asked, intensely.
I shook my head. He put the straw back again and narrowed his eyes.
“Then here’s the opportunity,” said Betty. “My dear, how long are you going to stay? We must go about together and have long talks. Guy and I aren’t a honeymoon couple, you know. We love to have other people with us sometimes.”
[37] The belfry clashed into See the Conquering Hero Comes!
“Unfortunately I have to go home quite soon. I’ve had an urgent letter.”
“How disappointing! You know Bruges is simply packed with treasures and churches and pictures. There’s an out-door concert to-night in the Grand’ Place, and a competition of bell ringers to-morrow to go on for a whole week.”
“Go I must,” I said so firmly that my soul felt imperative marching orders, stimulated by the belfry.
“But the quaint streets and the Continental smells, and the lace makers—if we could just wander about—we three—and absorb it all.” I sighed and bit my underlip.
“What’s your objection to the vote?” asked Guy, watching the nuns wending their way in sweet procession among the trees.
“I always had the idea you were so frightfully keen on the future of women,” said Betty. “Come to dinner with us to-night. Let’s thrash the whole subject out. You know, after the strenuous life in London, one does seem to see things in such a different light in this old world city.”
“Oh, a very different light indeed,” I answered, shaking my head at the familiar guide book emerging from Guy’s pocket.
[New Age, September 7, 1911; written 1910]
[38] Mrs. Carsfield and her mother sat at the dining-room table putting the finishing touches to some green cashmere dresses. They were to be worn by the two Misses Carsfield at church on the following day, with apple-green sashes, and straw hats with ribbon tails. Mrs. Carsfield had set her heart on it, and this being a late night for Henry, who was attending a meeting of the Political League, she and the old mother had the dining-room to themselves, and could make “a peaceful litter” as she expressed it. The red cloth was taken off the table—where stood the wedding-present sewing machine, a brown work-basket, the “material,” and some torn fashion journals. Mrs. Carsfield worked the machine, slowly, for she feared the green thread would give out, and had a sort of tired hope that it might last longer if she was careful to use a little at a time; the old woman sat in a rocking chair, her skirt turned back, and her felt-slippered feet on a hassock, tying the machine threads [39] and stitching some narrow lace on the necks and cuffs. The gas jet flickered. Now and again the old woman glanced up at the jet and said, “There’s water in the pipe, Anne, that’s what’s the matter,” then was silent, to say again a moment later, “There must be water in that pipe, Anne,” and again, with quite a burst of energy, “Now there is—I’m certain of it.”
Anne frowned at the sewing machine. “The way mother harps on things—it gets frightfully on my nerves,” she thought. “And always when there’s no earthly opportunity to better a thing…. I suppose it’s old age—but most aggravating.” Aloud she said: “Mother, I’m having a really substantial hem in this dress of Rose’s—the child has got so leggy, lately. And don’t put any lace on Helen’s cuffs; it will make a distinction, and besides she’s so careless about rubbing her hands on anything grubby.”
“Oh there’s plenty,” said the old woman. “I’ll put it a little higher up.” And she wondered why Anne had such a down on Helen—Henry was just the same. They seemed to want to hurt Helen’s feelings—the distinction was merely an excuse.
“Well,” said Mrs. Carsfield, “you didn’t see Helen’s clothes when I took them off to-night, Black from head to foot after a week. And when I compared them before her eyes with Rose’s she merely shrugged, you know that [40] habit she’s got, and began stuttering. I really shall have to see Dr. Malcolm about her stuttering, if only to give her a good fright. I believe it’s merely an affectation she’s picked up at school—that she can help it.”
“Anne, you know she’s always stuttered. You did just the same when you were her age, she’s highly strung.” The old woman took off her spectacles, breathed on them, and rubbed them with a corner of her sewing apron.
“Well, the last thing in the world to do her any good is to let her imagine that,” answered Anne, shaking out one of the green frocks, and pricking at the pleats with her needle. “She is treated exactly like Rose, and the Boy hasn’t a nerve. Did you see him when I put him on the rocking-horse to-day, for the first time? He simply gurgled with joy. He’s more the image of his father every day.”
“Yes, he certainly is a thorough Carsfield,” assented the old woman, nodding her head.
“Now that’s another thing about Helen,” said Anne. “The peculiar way she treats Boy, staring at him and frightening him as she does. You remember when he was a baby how she used to take away his bottle to see what he would do? Rose is perfect with the child—but Helen …”
The old woman put down her work on the table. A little silence fell, and through the silence the loud ticking of the dining-room clock. She wanted to speak her mind to Anne [41] once and for all about the way she and Henry were treating Helen, ruining the child, but the ticking noise distracted her. She could not think of the words and sat there stupidly, her brain going tick, tick, to the dining-room clock.
“How loudly that clock ticks,” was all she said.
“Oh there’s mother—off the subject again—giving me no help or encouragement,” thought Anne. She glanced at the clock.
“Mother, if you’ve finished that frock, would you go into the kitchen and heat up some coffee, and perhaps cut a plate of ham. Henry will be in directly. I’m practically through with this second frock by myself.” She held it up for inspection. “Aren’t they charming? They ought to last the children a good two years, and then I expect they’ll do for school—lengthened, and perhaps dyed.”
“I’m glad we decided on the more expensive material,” said the old woman.
Left alone in the dining-room Anne’s frown deepened, and her mouth drooped—a sharp line showed from nose to chin. She breathed deeply, and pushed back her hair. There seemed to be no air in the room, she felt stuffed up, and it seemed so useless to be tiring herself out with fine sewing for Helen. One never got through with children, and never had any gratitude from them—except Rose—[42]who was exceptional. Another sign of old age in mother was her absurd point of view about Helen, and her “touchiness” on the subject. There was one thing, Mrs. Carsfield said to herself. She was determined to keep Helen apart from Boy. He had all his father’s sensitiveness to unsympathetic influences. A blessing that the girls were at school all day!
At last the dresses were finished and folded over the back of the chair. She carried the sewing machine over to the book-shelves, spread the table-cloth, and went over to the window. The blind was up, she could see the garden quite plainly: there must be a moon about. And then she caught sight of something shining on the garden seat. A book, yes, it must be a book, left there to get soaked through by the dew. She went out into the hall, put on her goloshes, gathered up her skirt, and ran into the garden. Yes, it was a book. She picked it up carefully. Damp already—and the cover bulging. She shrugged her shoulders in the way that her little daughter had caught from her. In the shadowy garden that smelled of grass and rose leaves, Anne’s heart hardened. Then the gate clicked and she saw Henry striding up the front path.
“Henry!” she called.
“Hullo,” he cried, “what on earth are you doing down there…. Moon-gazing, Anne?” She ran forward and kissed him.
[43] “Oh, look at this book,” she said. “Helen’s been leaving it about, again. My dear, how you smell of cigars!”
Said Henry: “You’ve got to smoke a decent cigar when you’re with these other chaps. Looks so bad if you don’t. But come inside, Anne; you haven’t got anything on. Let the book go hang! You’re cold, my dear, you’re shivering.” He put his arm round her shoulder. “See the moon over there, by the chimney? Fine night. By jove! I had the fellows roaring to-night—I made a colossal joke. One of them said: ‘Life is a game of cards,’ and I, without thinking, just straight out….” Henry paused by the door and held up a finger. “I said … well I’ve forgotten the exact words, but they shouted, my dear, simply shouted. No, I’ll remember what I said in bed to-night; you know I always do.”
“I’ll take this book into the kitchen to dry on the stove-rack,” said Anne, and she thought, as she banged the pages, “Henry has been drinking beer again, that means indigestion to-morrow. No use mentioning Helen to-night.”
When Henry had finished the supper, he lay back in the chair, picking his teeth, and patted his knee for Anne to come and sit there.
“Hullo,” he said, jumping her up and down, “what’s the green fandangles on the chair back? What have you and mother been up to, eh?” [44] Said Anne, airily, casting a most careless glance at the green dresses, “Only some frocks for the children. Remnants for Sunday.”
The old woman put the plate and cup and saucer together, then lighted a candle.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” she said, cheerfully.
“Oh, dear me, how unwise of Mother,” thought Anne. “She makes Henry suspect by going away like that, as she always does if there’s any unpleasantness brewing.”
“No, don’t go to bed yet, mother,” cried Henry, jovially. “Let’s have a look at the things.” She passed him over the dresses, faintly smiling. Henry rubbed them through his fingers.
“So these are the remnants, are they, Anne? Don’t feel much like the Sunday trousers my mother used to make me out of an ironing blanket. How much did you pay for this a yard, Anne?”
Anne took the dresses from him, and played with a button of his waistcoat.
“Forget the exact price, darling. Mother and I rather skimped them, even though they were so cheap. What can great big men bother about clothes …? Was Lumley there, to-night?”
“Yes, he says their kid was a bit bandylegged at just the same age as Boy. He told me of a new kind of chair for children that the draper has just got in—makes them sit with [45] their legs straight. By the way, have you got this month’s draper’s bill?”
She had been waiting for that—had known it was coming. She slipped off his knee and yawned.
“Oh, dear me,” she said, “I think I’ll follow mother. Bed’s the place for me.” She stared at Henry, vacantly. “Bill—bill did you say, dear? Oh, I’ll look it out in the morning.”
“No, Anne, hold on.” Henry got up and went over to the cupboard where the bill file was kept. “To-morrow’s no good—because it’s Sunday. I want to get that account off my chest before I turn in. Sit down there—in the rocking-chair—you needn’t stand!”
She dropped into the chair, and began humming, all the while her thoughts coldly busy, and her eyes fixed on her husband’s broad back as he bent over the cupboard door. He dawdled over finding the file.
“He’s keeping me in suspense on purpose,” she thought. “We can afford it—otherwise why should I do it? I know our income and our expenditure. I’m not a fool. They’re a hell upon earth every month, these bills.” And she thought of her bed upstairs, yearned for it, imagining she had never felt so tired in her life.
“Here we are!” said Henry. He slammed the file on to the table.
“Draw up your chair….”
[46] “Clayton: Seven yards green cashmere at five shillings a yard—thirty-five shillings.” He read the item twice—then folded the sheet over, and bent towards Anne. He was flushed and his breath smelt of beer. She knew exactly how he took things in that mood, and she raised her eyebrows and nodded.
“Do you mean to tell me,” stormed Henry, “that lot over there cost thirty-five shillings—that stuff you’ve been mucking up for the children. Good God! Anybody would think you’d married a millionaire. You could buy your mother a trousseau with that money. You’re making yourself a laughing-stock for the whole town. How do you think I can buy Boy a chair or anything else—if you chuck away my earnings like that? Time and again you impress upon me the impossibility of keeping Helen decent; and then you go decking her out the next moment in thirty-five shillings worth of green cashmere….”
On and on stormed the voice.
“He’ll have calmed down in the morning, when the beer’s worked off,” thought Anne, and later, as she toiled up to bed, “When he sees how they’ll last, he’ll understand….”
A brilliant Sunday morning. Henry and Anne quite reconciled, sitting in the dining-room waiting for church time to the tune of Carsfield junior, who steadily thumped the [47] shelf of his high-chair with a gravy spoon given him from the breakfast table by his father.
“That beggar’s got muscle,” said Henry, proudly. “I’ve timed him by my watch. He’s kept that up for five minutes without stopping.”
“Extraordinary,” said Anne, buttoning her gloves. “I think he’s had that spoon almost long enough now, dear, don’t you? I’m so afraid of him putting it into his mouth.”
“Oh, I’ve got an eye on him.” Henry stood over his small son. “Go it, old man. Tell Mother boys like to kick up a row.”
Anne kept silence. At any rate it would keep his eye off the children when they came down in those cashmeres. She was still wondering if she had drummed into their minds often enough the supreme importance of being careful and of taking them off immediately after church before dinner, and why Helen was fidgety when she was pulled about at all, when the door opened and the old woman ushered them in, complete to the straw hats with ribbon tails.
She could not help thrilling, they looked so very superior—Rose carrying her prayer-book in a white case embroidered with a pink woollen cross. But she feigned indifference immediately, and the lateness of the hour. Not a word more on the subject from Henry, even with the thirty-five shillings worth walking hand in hand before him all the way to church. Anne decided that was really generous and [48] noble of him. She looked up at him, walking with the shoulders thrown back. How fine he looked in that long black coat, with the white silk tie just showing! And the children looked worthy of him. She squeezed his hand in church, conveying by that silent pressure, “It was for your sake I made the dresses; of course you can’t understand that, but really, Henry.” And she fully believed it.
On their way home the Carsfield family met Doctor Malcolm, out walking with a black dog carrying his stick in its mouth. Doctor Malcolm stopped and asked after Boy so intelligently that Henry invited him to dinner.
“Come and pick a bone with us and see Boy for yourself,” he said. And Doctor Malcolm accepted. He walked beside Henry and shouted over his shoulder, “Helen, keep an eye on my boy baby, will you, and see he doesn’t swallow that walking-stick. Because if he does, a tree will grow right out of his mouth or it will go to his tail and make it so stiff that a wag will knock you into kingdom come!”
“Oh, Doctor Malcolm!” laughed Helen, stooping over the dog, “Come along, doggie, give it up, there’s a good boy!”
“Helen, your dress!” warned Anne.
“Yes, indeed,” said Doctor Malcolm. “They are looking top-notchers to-day—the two young ladies.”
“Well, it really is Rose’s colour,” said Anne.
[49] “Her complexion is so much more vivid than Helen’s.”
Rose blushed. Doctor Malcolm’s eyes twinkled, and he kept a tight rein on himself from saying she looked like a tomato in a lettuce salad.
“That child wants taking down a peg,” he decided. “Give me Helen every time. She’ll come to her own yet, and lead them just the dance they need.”
Boy was having his mid-day sleep when they arrived home, and Doctor Malcolm begged that Helen might show him round the garden. Henry, repenting already of his generosity, gladly assented, and Anne went into the kitchen to interview the servant girl.
“Mumma, let me come too and taste the gravy,” begged Rose.
“Huh!” muttered Doctor Malcolm. “Good riddance.”
He established himself on the garden bench—put up his feet and took off his hat, to give the sun “a chance of growing a second crop,” he told Helen.
She asked, soberly: “Doctor Malcolm, do you really like my dress.”
“Of course I do, my lady. Don’t you?”
“Oh yes, I’d like to be born and die in it, But it was such a fuss—tryings on, you know, and pullings, and ‘don’ts.’ I believe mother would kill me if it got hurt. I even knelt on [50] my petticoat all through church because of dust on the hassock.”
“Bad as that!” asked Doctor Malcolm, rolling his eyes at Helen.
“Oh, far worse,” said the child, then burst into laughter and shouted, “Hellish!” dancing over the lawn.
“Take care, they’ll hear you, Helen.”
“Oh, booh! It’s just dirty old cashmere—serve them right. They can’t see me if they’re not here to see and so it doesn’t matter. It’s only with them I feel funny.”
“Haven’t you got to remove your finery before dinner.”
“No, because you’re here.”
“O my prophetic soul!” groaned Doctor Malcolm.
Coffee was served in the garden. The servant girl brought out some cane chairs and a rug for Boy. The children were told to go away and play.
“Leave off worrying Doctor Malcolm, Helen,” said Henry. “You mustn’t be a plague to people who are not members of your own family.” Helen pouted, and dragged over to the swing for comfort. She swung high, and thought Doctor Malcolm was a most beautiful man—and wondered if his dog had finished the plate of bones in the back yard. Decided to go and see. Slower she swung, then took a flying leap; her tight skirt caught on a nail—[51]there was a sharp, tearing sound—quickly she glanced at the others—they had not noticed—and then at the frock—at a hole big enough to stick her hand through. She felt neither frightened nor sorry. “I’ll go and change it,” she thought.
“Helen, where are you going to?” called Anne.
“Into the house for a book.”
The old woman noticed that the child held her skirt in a peculiar way. Her petticoat string must have come untied. But she made no remark. Once in the bedroom Helen unbuttoned the frock, slipped out of it, and wondered what to do next. Hide it somewhere—she glanced all round the room—there was nowhere safe from them. Except the top of the cupboard—but even standing on a chair she could not throw so high—it fell back on top of her every time—the horrid, hateful thing. Then her eyes lighted on her school satchel hanging on the end of the bed post. Wrap it in her school pinafore—put it in the bottom of the bag with the pencil case on top. They’d never look there. She returned to the garden in the every-day dress—but forgot about the book.
“A-ah,” said Anne, smilingironically. “What a new leaf for Doctor Malcolm’s benefit! Look, Mother, Helen has changed without being told to.”
[52] “Come here, dear, and be done up properly.” She whispered to Helen: “Where did you leave your dress?”
“Left it on the side of the bed. Where I took it off,” sang Helen.
Doctor Malcolm was talking to Henry of the advantages derived from public school education for the sons of commercial men, but he had his eye on the scene, and watching Helen, he smelt a rat—smelt a Hamelin tribe of them.
Confusion and consternation reigned. One of the green cashmeres had disappeared—spirited off the face of the earth—during the time that Helen took it off and the children’s tea.
“Show me the exact spot,” scolded Mrs. Carsfield for the twentieth time. “Helen, tell the truth.”
“Mumma, I swear I left it on the floor.”
“Well, it’s no good swearing if it’s not there. It can’t have been stolen!”
“I did see a very funny-looking man in a white cap walking up and down the road and staring in the windows as I came up to change.” Sharply Anne eyed her daughter.
“Now,” she said. “I know you are telling lies.”
She turned to the old woman, in her voice something of pride and joyous satisfaction. “You hear, Mother—this cock-and-bull story?”
[53] When they were near the end of the bed Helen blushed and turned away from them. And now and again she wanted to shout “I tore it, I tore it,” and she fancied she had said it and seen their faces, just as sometimes in bed she dreamed she had got up and dressed. But as the evening wore on she grew quite careless—glad only of one thing—people had to go to sleep at night. Viciously she stared at the sun shining through the window space and making a pattern of the curtain on the bare nursery floor. And then she looked at Rose, painting a text at the nursery table with a whole egg cup full of water to herself….
Henry visited their bedroom the last thing. She heard him come creaking into their room and hid under the bedclothes. But Rose betrayed her.
“Helen’s not asleep,” piped Rose.
Henry sat by the bedside pulling his moustache.
“If it were not Sunday, Helen, I would whip you. As it is, and I must be at the office early to-morrow, I shall give you a sound smacking after tea in the evening…. Do you hear me?”
She grunted.
“You love your father and mother, don’t you?”
No answer.
Rose gave Helen a dig with her foot.
[54] “Well,” said Henry, sighing deeply, “I suppose you love Jesus?”
“Rose has scratched my leg with her toe nail,” answered Helen.
Henry strode out of the room and flung himself on to his own bed, with his outdoor boots on the starched bolster, Anne noticed, but he was too overcome for her to venture a protest. The old woman was in the bedroom too, idly combing the hairs from Anne’s brush. Henry told them the story, and was gratified to observe Anne’s tears.
“It is Rose’s turn for her toe-nails after the bath next Saturday,” commented the old woman.
In the middle of the night Henry dug his elbow into Mrs. Carsfield.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Malcolm’s at the bottom of this.”
“No … how … why … where … bottom of what?”
“Those damned green dresses.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” she managed to articulate, thinking, “imagine his rage if I woke him up to tell him an idiotic thing like that!”
“Is Mrs. Carsfield at home,” asked Doctor Malcolm.
“No, sir, she’s out visiting,” answered the servant girl.
[55] “Is Mr. Carsfield anywhere about?”
“Oh, no, sir, he’s never home midday.”
“Show me into the drawing-room.”
The servant girl opened the drawing-room door, cocked her eye at the doctor’s bag. She wished he would leave it in the hall—even if she could only feel the outside without opening it…. But the doctor kept it in his hand.
The old woman sat in the drawing-room, a roll of knitting on her lap. Her head had fallen back—her mouth was open—she was asleep and quietly snoring. She started up at the sound of the doctor’s footsteps and straightened her cap.
“Oh, Doctor—you did take me by surprise.
I was dreaming that Henry had bought Anne five little canaries. Please sit down!”
“No, thanks. I just popped in on the chance of catching you alone…. You see this bag?”
The old woman nodded.
“Now, are you any good at opening bags?”
“Well, my husband was a great traveller and once I spent a whole night in a railway train.”
“Well, have a go at opening this one.”
The old woman knelt on the floor—her fingers trembled.
“There’s nothing startling inside?” she asked.
“Well, it won’t bite exactly,” said Doctor Malcolm.
[56] The catch sprang open—the bag yawned like a toothless mouth, and she saw, folded in its depths—green cashmere—with narrow lace on the neck and sleeves.
“Fancy that!” said the old woman mildly. “May I take it out, Doctor?” She professed neither astonishment nor pleasure—and Malcolm felt disappointed.
“Helen’s dress,” he said, and bending towards her, raised his voice. “That young spark’s Sunday rig-out.”
“I’m not deaf, Doctor,” answered the old woman. “Yes, I thought it looked like it. I told Anne only this morning it was bound to turn up somewhere.” She shook the crumpled frock, and looked it over. “Things always do if you give them time; I’ve noticed that so often—it’s such a blessing.”
“You know Lindsay—the postman? Gastric ulcers—called there this morning…. Saw this brought in by Lena, who’d got it from Helen on her way to school. Said the kid fished it out of her satchel rolled in a pinafore, and said her mother had told her to give it away because it did not fit her. When I saw the tear I understood yesterday’s ‘new leaf,’ as Mrs. Carsfield put it. Was up to the dodge in a jiffy. Got the dress—bought some stuff at Clayton’s and made my sister Bertha sew it while I had dinner. I knew what would be happening this end of the line—and I knew [57] you’d see Helen through for the sake of getting one in at Henry.”
“How thoughtful of you, Doctor!” said the old woman. “I’ll tell Anne I found it under my dolman.”
“Yes, that’s your ticket,” said Doctor Malcolm.
“But of course Helen would have forgotten the whipping by to-morrow morning, and I’d promised her a new doll….” The old woman spoke regretfully.
Doctor Malcolm snapped his bag together. “It’s no good talking to the old bird,” he thought, “she doesn’t take in half I say. Don’t seem to have got any forrader than doing Helen out of a doll.”
[Rhythm, October 1912]
[58] All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies. The horses stumbled along, coughing and chuffing. The pack horse was sick—with a big, open sore rubbed under the belly. Now and again she stopped short, threw back her head, looked at us as though she were going to cry, and whinnied. Hundreds of larks shrilled; the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass, patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs.
Jo rode ahead. He wore a blue galatea shirt, corduroy trousers and riding boots. A white handkerchief, spotted with red—it looked as though his nose had been bleeding on it—was [59] knotted round his throat. Wisps of white hair straggled from under his wideawake—his moustache and eyebrows were called white—he slouched in the saddle, grunting. Not once that day had he sung
“I don’t care, for don’t you see,
My wife’s mother was in front of me!”
It was the first day we had been without it for a month, and now there seemed something uncanny in his silence. Jim rode beside me, white as a clown; his black eyes glittered, and he kept shooting out his tongue and moistening his lips. He was dressed in a Jaeger vest, and a pair of blue duck trousers, fastened round the waist with a plaited leather belt. We had hardly spoken since dawn. At noon we had lunched off fly biscuits and apricots by the side of a swampy creek.
“My stomach feels like the crop of a hen,” said Jo. “Now then, Jim, you’re the bright boy of the party—where’s this ’ere store you kep’ on talking about. ‘Oh, yes,’ you says, ‘I know a fine store, with a paddock for the horses and a creek runnin’ through, owned by a friend of mine who’ll give yer a bottle of whisky before ’e shakes hands with yer.’ I’d like ter see that place—merely as a matter of curiosity—not that I’d ever doubt yer word—as yer know very well—but …”
Jim laughed. “Don’t forget there’s a woman [60] too, Jo, with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’ll promise you something else before she shakes hands with you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“The heat’s making you balmy,” said Jo. But he dug his knees into the horse. We shambled on. I half fell asleep, and had a sort of uneasy dream that the horses were not moving forward at all—then that I was on a rocking-horse, and my old mother was scolding me for raising such a fearful dust from the drawing-room carpet. “You’ve entirely worn off the pattern of the carpet,” I heard her saying, and she gave the reins a tug. I snivelled and woke to find Jim leaning over me, maliciously smiling.
“That was a case of all but,” said he. “I just caught you. What’s up? Been bye-bye?”
“No!” I raised my head. “Thank the Lord we’re arriving somewhere.”
We were on the brow of the hill, and below us there was a whare roofed with corrugated iron. It stood in a garden, rather far back from the road—a big paddock opposite, and a creek and a clump of young willow trees. A thin line of blue smoke stood up straight from the chimney of the whare; and as I looked a woman came out, followed by a child and a sheep dog—the woman carrying what appeared to me a black stick. She made gestures at us.
The horses put on a final spurt, Jo took off his [61] wideawake, shouted, threw out his chest, and began singing, “I don’t care, for don’t you see….” The sun pushed through the pale clouds and shed a vivid light over the scene. It gleamed on the woman’s yellow hair, over her flapping pinafore and the rifle she was carrying. The child hid behind her, and the yellow dog, a mangy beast, scuttled back into the whare, his tail between his legs. We drew rein and dismounted.
“Hallo,” screamed the woman. “I thought you was three ’awks. My kid comes runnin’ in ter me. ‘Mumma,’ says she, ‘there’s three brown things comin’ over the ‘ill,’ says she. An’ I comes out smart, I can tell yer. ‘They’ll be ’awks,’ I says to her. Oh, the ’awks about ’ere, yer wouldn’t believe.”
The “kid” gave us the benefit of one eye from behind the woman’s pinafore—then retired again.
“Where’s your old man?” asked Jim.
The woman blinked rapidly, screwing up her face.
“Away shearin’. Bin away a month. I suppose yer not goin’ to stop, are yer? There’s a storm comin’ up.”
“You bet we are,” said Jo. “So you’re on your lonely, missus?”
She stood, pleating the frills of her pinafore, and glancing from one to the other of us, like a hungry bird. I smiled at the thought of [62] how Jim had pulled Jo’s leg about her. Certainly her eyes were blue, and what hair she had was yellow, but ugly. She was a figure of fun. Looking at her, you felt there was nothing but sticks and wires under that pinafore—her front teeth were knocked out, she had red pulpy hands, and she wore on her feet a pair of dirty Bluchers.
“I’ll go and turn out the horses,” said Jim. “Got any embrocation? Poi’s rubbed herself to hell!”
“’Arf a mo!” The woman stood silent a moment, her nostrils expanding as she breathed. Then she shouted violently. “I’d rather you didn’t stop…. You can’t, and there’s the end of it. I don’t let out that paddock any more. You’ll have to go on; I ain’t got nothing!”
“Well, I’m blest!” said Jo, heavily. He pulled me aside. “Gone a bit off ’er dot,” he whispered. “Too much alone, you know,” very significantly. “Turn the sympathetic tap on ’er, she’ll come round all right.”
But there was no need—she had come round by herself.
“Stop if yer like!” she muttered, shrugging her shoulders. To me—“I’ll give yer the embrocation if yer come along.”
“Right-o, I’ll take it down to them.” We walked together up the garden path. It was planted on both sides with cabbages. They smelled like stale dish-water. Of flowers there [63] were double poppies and sweet-williams. One little patch was divided off by pawa shells—presumably it belonged to the child—for she ran from her mother and began to grub in it with a broken clothes-peg. The yellow dog lay across the doorstep, biting fleas; the woman kicked him away.
“Gar-r, get away, you beast … the place ain’t tidy. I ’aven’t ’ad time ter fix things to-day—been ironing. Come right in.”
It was a large room, the walls plastered with old pages of English periodicals. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee appeared to be the most recent number. A table with an ironing board and wash tub on it, some wooden forms, a black horsehair sofa, and some broken cane chairs pushed against the walls. The mantelpiece above the stove was draped in pink paper, further ornamented with dried grasses and ferns and a coloured print of Richard Seddon. There were four doors—one, judging from the smell, let into the “Store,” one on to the “backyard,” through a third I saw the bedroom. Flies buzzed in circles round the ceiling, and treacle papers and bundles of dried clover were pinned to the window curtains.
I was alone in the room; she had gone into the store for the embrocation. I heard her stamping about and muttering to herself: “I got some, now where did I put that bottle? … It’s behind the pickles … no, it ain’t.” I [64] cleared a place on the table and sat there, swinging my legs. Down in the paddock I could hear Jo singing and the sound of hammer strokes as Jim drove in the tent pegs. It was sunset. There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Sitting alone in the hideous room I grew afraid. The woman next door was a long time finding that stuff. What was she doing in there? Once I thought I heard her bang her hands down on the counter, and once she half moaned, turning it into a cough and clearing her throat. I wanted to shout “Buck up!” but I kept silent.
“Good Lord, what a life!” I thought. “Imagine being here day in, day out, with that rat of a child and a mangy dog. Imagine bothering about ironing. Mad, of course she’s mad! Wonder how long she’s been here—wonder if I could get her to talk.”
At that moment she poked her head round the door.
“Wot was it yer wanted?” she asked.
“Embrocation.”
“Oh, I forgot. I got it, it was in front of the pickle jars.”
She handed me the bottle.
“My, you do look tired, you do! Shall I knock yer up a few scones for supper! There’s [65] some tongue in the store, too, and I’ll cook yer a cabbage if you fancy it.”
“Right-o.” I smiled at her. “Come down to the paddock and bring the kid for tea.”
She shook her head, pursing up her mouth.
“Oh no. I don’t fancy it. I’ll send the kid down with the things and a billy of milk. Shall I knock up a few extry scones to take with yer ter-morrow?”
“Thanks.”
She came and stood by the door.
“How old is the kid?”
“Six—come next Christmas. I ’ad a bit of trouble with ’er one way an’ another. I ’adn’t any milk till a month after she was born and she sickened like a cow.”
“She’s not like you—takes after her father?” Just as the woman had shouted her refusal at us before, she shouted at me then.
“No, she don’t! She’s the dead spit of me. Any fool could see that. Come on in now, Else, you stop messing in the dirt.”
I met Jo climbing over the paddock fence.
“What’s the old bitch got in the store?” he asked.
“Don’t know—didn’t look.”
“Well, of all the fools. Jim’s slanging you. What have you been doing all the time?”
“She couldn’t find this stuff. Oh, my shakes, you are smart!”
Jo had washed, combed his wet hair in a line [66] across his forehead, and buttoned a coat over his shirt. He grinned.
Jim snatched the embrocation from me. I went to the end of the paddock where the willows grew and bathed in the creek. The water was clear and soft as oil. Along the edges held by the grass and rushes, white foam tumbled and bubbled. I lay in the water and looked up at the trees that were still a moment, then quivered lightly, and again were still. The air smelt of rain. I forgot about the woman and the kid until I came back to the tent. Jim lay by the fire, watching the billy boil.
I asked where Jo was, and if the kid had brought our supper.
“Pooh,” said Jim, rolling over and looking up at the sky. “Didn’t you see how Jo had been titivating? He said to me before he went up to the whare, ‘Dang it! she’ll look better by night light—at any rate, my buck, she’s female flesh!’”
“You had Jo about her looks—you had me, too.”
“No—look here. I can’t make it out. It’s four years since I came past this way, and I stopped here two days. The husband was a pal of mine once, down the West Coast—a fine, big chap, with a voice on him like a trombone. She’d been barmaid down the Coast—as pretty as a wax doll. The coach used to come this [67] way then once a fortnight, that was before they opened the railway up Napier way, and she had no end of a time! Told me once in a confidential moment that she knew one hundred and twenty-five different ways of kissing!”
“Oh, go on, Jim! She isn’t the same woman!”
“Course she is…. I can’t make it out. What I think is the old man’s cleared out and left her: that’s all my eye about shearing. Sweet life! The only people who come through now are Maoris and sundowners!”
Through the dark we saw the gleam of the kid’s pinafore. She trailed over to us with a basket in her hand, the milk billy in the other. I unpacked the basket, the child standing by.
“Come over here,” said Jim, snapping his fingers at her.
She went, the lamp from the inside of the tent cast a bright light over her. A mean, undersized brat, with whitish hair, and weak eyes. She stood, legs wide apart and her stomach protruding.
“What do you do all day?” asked Jim.
She scraped out one tear with her little finger, looked at the result and said, “Draw.”
“Huh! What do you draw? Leave your ears alone!”
“Pictures.”
“What on?”
[68] “Bits of butter paper an’ a pencil of my Mumma’s.”
“Boh! What a lot of words at one time!” Jim rolled his eyes at her. “Baa-lambs and moo-cows?”
“No, everything. I’ll draw all of you when you’re gone, and your horses and the tent, and that one”—she pointed to me—“with no clothes on in the creek. I looked at her where she couldn’t see me from.”
“Thanks very much. How ripping of you,” said Jim. “Where’s Dad?”
The kid pouted. “I won’t tell you because I don’t like yer face!” She started operations on the other ear.
“Here,” I said. “Take the basket, get along home and tell the other man supper’s ready.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll give you a box on the ear if you don’t,” said Jim, savagely.
“Hie! I’ll tell Mumma. I’ll tell Mumma.” The kid fled.
We ate until we were full, and had arrived at the smoke stage before Jo came back, very flushed and jaunty, a whisky bottle in his hand.
“’Ave a drink—you two!” he shouted, carrying off matters with a high hand. “’Ere, shove along the cups.”
“One hundred and twenty-five different ways,” I murmured to Jim.
[69] “What’s that? Oh! stow it!” said Jo. “Why ’ave you always got your knife into me. You gas like a kid at a Sunday School beano. She wants us to go up there to-night, and have a comfortable chat. I”—he waved his hand airily—“I got ’er round.”
“Trust you for that,” laughed Jim. “But did she tell you where the old man’s got to?”
Jo looked up. “Shearing! You ’eard ’er, you fool!”
The woman had fixed up the room, even to a light bouquet of sweet-williams on the table. She and I sat one side of the table, Jo and Jim the other. An oil lamp was set between us, the whisky bottle and glasses, and a jug of water. The kid knelt against one of the forms, drawing on butter paper; I wondered, grimly, if she was attempting the creek episode. But Jo had been right about night time. The woman’s hair was tumbled—two red spots burned in her cheeks—her eyes shone—and we knew that they were kissing feet under the table. She had changed the blue pinafore for a white calico dressing jacket and a black skirt—the kid was decorated to the extent of a blue sateen hair ribbon. In the stifling room, with the flies buzzing against the ceiling and dropping on to the table, we got slowly drunk.
“Now listen to me,” shouted the woman, [70] banging her fist on the table. “It’s six years since I was married, and four miscarriages. I says to ’im, I says, what do you think I’m doin’ up ’ere? If you was back at the coast, I’d ’ave you lynched for child murder. Over and over I tells ’im—you’ve broken my spirit and spoiled my looks, and wot for—that’s wot I’m driving at.” She clutched her head with her hands and stared round at us. Speaking rapidly, “Oh, some days—an’ months of them—I ’ear them two words knockin’ inside me all the time—‘Wot for!’ but sometimes I’ll be cooking the spuds an’ I lifts the lid off to give ’em a prong and I ’ears, quite suddin again, ‘Wot for!’ Oh! I don’t mean only the spuds and the kid—I mean—I mean,” she hiccoughed—“you know what I mean, Mr. Jo.”
“I know,” said Jo, scratching his head.
“Trouble with me is,” she leaned across the table, “he left me too much alone. When the coach stopped coming, sometimes he’d go away days, sometimes he’d go away weeks, and leave me ter look after the store. Back ’e’d come—pleased as Punch. ‘Oh, ’allo, ’e’d say. ’Ow are you gettin’ on. Come and give us a kiss.’ Sometimes I’d turn a bit nasty, and then ’e’d go off again, and if I took it all right, ’e’d wait till ’e could twist me round ’is finger, then ’e’d say, ‘Well, so long, I’m off,’ and do you think I could keep ’im?—not me!”
“Mumma,” bleated the kid, “I made a [71] picture of them on the ’ill, an’ you an’ me, an’ the dog down below.”
“Shut your mouth!” said the woman.
A vivid flash of lightning played over the room—we heard the mutter of thunder.
“Good thing that’s broke loose,” said Jo. “I’ve ’ad it in me ’ead for three days.”
“Where’s your old man now?” asked Jim, slowly.
The woman blubbered and dropped her head on to the table. “Jim, ’e’s gone shearin’ and left me alone again,” she wailed.
“’Ere, look out for the glasses,” said Jo. “Cheer-o, ’ave another drop. No good cryin’ over spilt ’usbands! You Jim, you blasted cuckoo!”
“Mr. Jo,” said the woman, drying her eyes on her jacket frill, “you’re a gent, an’ if I was a secret woman, I’d place any confidence in your ’ands. I don’t mind if I do ’ave a glass on that.”
Every moment the lightning grew more vivid and the thunder sounded nearer. Jim and I were silent—the kid never moved from her bench. She poked her tongue out and blew on her paper as she drew.
“It’s the loneliness,” said the woman, addressing Jo—he made sheep’s eyes at her—“and bein’ shut up ’ere like a broody ’en.” He reached his hand across the table and held hers, and though the position looked most uncomfortable [72] when they wanted to pass the water and whisky, their hands stuck together as though glued. I pushed back my chair and went over to the kid, who immediately sat flat down on her artistic achievements and made a face at me.
“You’re not to look,” said she.
“Oh, come on, don’t be nasty!” Jim came over to us, and we were just drunk enough to wheedle the kid into showing us. And those drawings of hers were extraordinary and repulsively vulgar. The creations of a lunatic with a lunatic’s cleverness. There was no doubt about it, the kid’s mind was diseased. While she showed them to us, she worked herself up into a mad excitement, laughing and trembling, and shooting out her arms.
“Mumma,” she yelled. “Now I’m going to draw them what you told me I never was to—now I am.”
The woman rushed from the table and beat the child’s head with the flat of her hand.
“I’ll smack you with yer clothes turned up if yer dare say that again,” she bawled.
Jo was too drunk to notice, but Jim caught her by the arm. The kid did not utter a cry. She drifted over to the window and began picking flies from the treacle paper.
We returned to the table—Jim and I sitting one side, the woman and Jo, touching shoulders, the other. We listened to the thunder, saying [73] stupidly, “That was a near one,” “There it goes again,” and Jo, at a heavy hit, “Now we’re off,” “Steady on the brake,” until rain began to fall, sharp as cannon shot on the iron roof.
“You’d better doss here for the night,” said the woman.
“That’s right,” assented Jo, evidently in the know about this move.
“Bring up yer things from the tent. You two can doss in the store along with the kid—she’s used to sleep in there and won’t mind you.”
“Oh Mumma, I never did,” interrupted the kid.
“Shut yer lies! An’ Mr. Jo can ’ave this room.”
It sounded a ridiculous arrangement, but it was useless to attempt to cross them, they were too far gone. While the woman sketched the plan of action, Jo sat, abnormally solemn and red, his eyes bulging, and pulling at his moustache.
“Give us a lantern,” said Jim, “I’ll go down to the paddock.” We two went together. Rain whipped in our faces, the land was light as though a bush fire was raging. We behaved like two children let loose in the thick of an adventure, laughed and shouted to each other, and came back to the whare to find the kid already bedded in the counter of the store.
[74] The woman brought us a lamp. Jo took his bundle from Jim, the door was shut.
“Good-night all,” shouted Jo.
Jim and I sat on two sacks of potatoes. For the life of us we could not stop laughing. Strings of onions and half-hams dangled from the ceiling—wherever we looked there were advertisements for “Camp Coffee” and tinned meats. We pointed at them, tried to read them aloud—overcome with laughter and hiccoughs. The kid in the counter stared at us. She threw off her blanket and scrambled to the floor, where she stood in her grey flannel night-gown, rubbing one leg against the other. We paid no attention to her.
“Wot are you laughing at?” she said, uneasily.
“You!” shouted Jim. “The red tribe of you, my child.”
She flew into a rage and beat herself with her hands. “I won’t be laughed at, you curs—you.” He swooped down upon the child and swung her on to the counter.
“Go to sleep, Miss Smarty—or make a drawing—here’s a pencil—you can use Mumma’s account book.”
Through the rain we heard Jo creak over the boarding of the next room—the sound of a door being opened—then shut to.
“It’s the loneliness,” whispered Jim.
“One hundred and twenty-five different ways—alas! my poor brother!”
[75] The kid tore out a page and flung it at me.
“There you are,” she said. “Now I done it ter spite Mumma for shutting me up ’ere with you two. I done the one she told me I never ought to. I done the one she told me she’d shoot me if I did. Don’t care! Don’t care!”
The kid had drawn the picture of the woman shooting at a man with a rook rifle and then digging a hole to bury him in.
She jumped off the counter and squirmed about on the floor biting her nails.
Jim and I sat till dawn with the drawing beside us. The rain ceased, the little kid fell asleep, breathing loudly. We got up, stole out of the whare, down into the paddock. White clouds floated over a pink sky—a chill wind blew; the air smelled of wet grass. Just as we swung into the saddle Jo came out of the whare—he motioned to us to ride on.
“I’ll pick you up later,” he shouted.
A bend in the road, and the whole place disappeared.
[Rhythm, Spring 1912; written 1911]
[76] To Anne Estelle Rice
Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. He carried a black umbrella in one hand, in the other a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted into a lump. He wore a black peaked cap like a pilot; gold rings gleamed in his ears and his little eyes snapped like two sparks. Like two sparks they glowed in the smoulder of his bearded face. On one side of the hill grew a forest of pines from the road right down to the sea. On the other side short tufted grass and little bushes of white manuka flower. The pine-trees roared like waves in their topmost branches, their stems creaked like the timber of ships; in the windy air flew the white manuka flower. “Ah-k!” shouted Ole Underwood, shaking his umbrella at the wind bearing down upon him, beating him, half strangling him with his black cape. “Ah-k!” shouted the wind a hundred times as loud, and filled his mouth and nostrils with dust. Something inside Ole Underwood’s breast beat like [77] a hammer. One, two—one, two—never stopping, never changing. He couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t loud. No, it didn’t make a noise—only a thud. One, two—one, two—like some one beating on an iron in a prison, some one in a secret place—bang—bang—bang—trying to get free. Do what he would, fumble at his coat, throw his arms about, spit, swear, he couldn’t stop the noise. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Ole Underwood began to shuffle and run.
Away below, the sea heaving against the stone walls, and the little town just out of its reach close packed together, the better to face the grey water. And up on the other side of the hill the prison with high red walls. Over all bulged the grey sky with black web-like clouds streaming.
Ole Underwood slackened his pace as he neared the town, and when he came to the first house he flourished his umbrella like a herald’s staff and threw out his chest, his head glancing quickly from right to left. They were ugly little houses leading into the town, built of wood—two windows and a door, a stumpy verandah and a green mat of grass before. Under one verandah yellow hens huddled out of the wind. “Shoo!” shouted Ole Underwood, and laughed to see them fly, and laughed again at the woman who came to the door and shook a red, soapy fist at him. A little girl stood [78] in another yard untwisting some rags from a clothes-line. When she saw Ole Underwood she let the clothes-prop fall and rushed screaming to the door, beating it, screaming “Mumma—Mumma!” That started the hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart. Mum-ma—Mum-ma! He saw an old face with a trembling chin and grey hair nodding out of the window as they dragged him past. Mumma—Mum-ma! He looked up at the big red prison perched on the hill and he pulled a face as if he wanted to cry.
At the corner in front of the pub some carts were pulled up, and some men sat in the porch of the pub drinking and talking. Ole Underwood wanted a drink. He slouched into the bar. It was half full of old and young men in big coats and top boots with stock whips in their hands. Behind the counter a big girl with red hair pulled the beer handles and cheeked the men. Ole Underwood sneaked to one side, like a cat. Nobody looked at him, only the men looked at each other, one or two of them nudged. The girl nodded and winked at the fellow she was serving. He took some money out of his knotted handkerchief and slipped it on to the counter. His hand shook. He didn’t speak. The girl took no notice; she served everybody, went on with her talk, and then as if by accident shoved a mug towards him. A great big jar of red pinks stood on the bar counter. Ole Underwood stared at them as he [79] drank and frowned at them. Red—red—red—red! beat the hammer. It was very warm in the bar and quiet as a pond, except for the talk and the girl. She kept on laughing. Ha! Ha! That was what the men liked to see, for she threw back her head and her great breasts lifted and shook to her laughter.
In one corner sat a stranger. He pointed at Ole Underwood. “Cracked!” said one of the men. “When he was a young fellow, thirty years ago, a man ’ere done in ’is woman, and ’e foun’ out an’ killed ’er. Got twenty years in quod up on the ’ill. Came out cracked.”
“Oo done ’er in?” asked the man.
“Dunno. ’E dunno, nor nobody. ’E was a sailor till ’e marrid ’er. Cracked!” The man spat and smeared the spittle on the floor, shrugging his shoulders. “’E’s ’armless enough.”
Ole Underwood heard; he did not turn, but he shot out an old claw and crushed up the red pinks. “Uh-Uh! You ole beast! Uh! You ole swine!” screamed the girl, leaning across the counter and banging him with a tin jug. “Get art! Get art! Don’ you never come ’ere no more!” Somebody kicked him: he scuttled like a rat.
He walked past the Chinamen’s shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and [80] slushed a pail of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile. He looked and looked, pressing his face against the glass and sniggering. They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons. Some of them had knives in their belts, and one old man sat by himself on the floor plaiting his long crooked toes together. The Chinamen didn’t mind Ole Underwood. When they saw him they nodded. He went to the door of a shop and cautiously opened it. In rushed the wind with him, scattering the cards. “Ya-Ya! Ya-Ya!” screamed the Chinamen, and Ole Underwood rushed off, the hammer beating quick and hard. Ya-Ya! He turned a corner out of sight. He thought he heard one of the Chinks after him, and he slipped into a timber-yard. There he lay panting….
Close by him, under another stack there was a heap of yellow shavings. As he watched them they moved and a little grey cat unfolded herself and came out waving her tail. She trod delicately over to Ole Underwood and rubbed against his sleeve. The hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart beat madly. It pounded up into his throat, and then it seemed to half stop and beat very, very faintly. “Kit! Kit! Kit!” That was what she used to call [81] the little cat he brought her off the ship—“Kit! Kit! Kit!”—and stoop down with the saucer in her hands. “Ah! my God! my Lord!” Ole Underwood sat up and took the kitten in his arms and rocked to and fro, crushing it against his face. It was warm and soft, and it mewed faintly. He buried his eyes in its fur. My God! My Lord! He tucked the little cat in his coat and stole out of the woodyard, and slouched down towards the wharves. As he came near the sea, Ole Underwood’s nostrils expanded. The mad wind smelled of tar and ropes and slime and salt. He crossed the railway line, he crept behind the wharf-sheds and along a little cinder path that threaded through a patch of rank fennel to some stone drain pipes carrying the sewage into the sea. And he stared up at the wharves and at the ships with flags flying, and suddenly the old, old lust swept over Ole Underwood. “I will! I will! I will!” he muttered.
He tore the little cat out of his coat and swung it by its tail and flung it out to the sewer opening. The hammer beat loud and strong. He tossed his head, he was young again. He walked on to the wharves, past the wool-bales, past the loungers and the loafers to the extreme end of the wharves. The sea sucked against the wharf-poles as though it drank something from the land. One ship was loading wool. He heard a crane rattle and the shriek of a [82] whistle. So he came to the little ship lying by herself with a bit of a plank for a gangway, and no sign of anybody—anybody at all. Ole Underwood looked once back at the town, at the prison perched like a red bird, at the black webby clouds trailing. Then he went up the gangway and on to the slippery deck. He grinned, and rolled in his walk, carrying high in his hand the red and white handkerchief. His ship! Mine! Mine! Mine! beat the hammer. There was a door latched open on the lee-side, labelled “State-room.” He peered in. A man lay sleeping on a bunk—his bunk—a great big man in a seaman’s coat with a long fair beard and hair on the red pillow. And looking down upon him from the wall there shone her picture—his woman’s picture—smiling and smiling at the big sleeping man.
[Rhythm, January 1913; written 1912]
[83] To the little girl he was a figure to be feared and avoided. Every morning before going to business he came into the nursery and gave her a perfunctory kiss, to which she responded with “Good-bye, father.” And oh, the glad sense of relief when she heard the noise of the buggy growing fainter and fainter down the long road!
In the evening, leaning over the banisters at his home-coming, she heard his loud voice in the hall. “Bring my tea into the smoking-room…. Hasn’t the paper come yet? Have they taken it into the kitchen again? Mother, go and see if my paper’s out there—and bring me my slippers.”
“Kezia,” mother would call to her, “if you’re a good girl you can come down and take off father’s boots.” Slowly the girl would slip down the stairs, holding tightly to the banisters with one hand—more slowly still, across the hall, and push open the smoking-room door.
By that time he had his spectacles on and [84] looked at her over them in a way that was terrifying to the little girl.
“Well, Kezia, get a move on and pull off these boots and take them outside. Been a good girl to-day?”
“I d-d-don’t know, father.”
“You d-d-don’t know? If you stutter like that mother will have to take you to the doctor.”
She never stuttered with other people—had quite given it up—but only with father, because then she was trying so hard to say the words properly.
“What’s the matter? What are you looking so wretched about? Mother, I wish you would teach this child not to appear on the brink of suicide…. Here, Kezia, carry my teacup back to the table—carefully; your hands jog like an old lady’s. And try to keep your handkerchief in your pocket, not up your sleeve.”
“Y-y-yes, father.”
On Sundays she sat in the same pew with him in church, listening while he sang in a loud, clear voice, watching while he made little notes during the sermon with the stump of a blue pencil on the back of an envelope—his eyes narrowed to a slit—one hand beating a silent tattoo on the pew ledge. He said his prayers so loudly she was certain God heard him above the clergyman.
He was so big—his hands and his neck, [85] especially his mouth when he yawned. Thinking about him alone in the nursery was like thinking about a giant.
On Sunday afternoons grandmother sent her down to the drawing-room, dressed in her brown velvet, to have a “nice talk with father and mother.” But the little girl always found mother reading The Sketch and father stretched out on the couch, his handkerchief on his face, his feet propped on one of the best sofa pillows, and so soundly sleeping that he snored.
She, perched on the piano-stool, gravely watched him until he woke and stretched, and asked the time—then looked at her.
“Don’t stare so, Kezia. You look like a little brown owl.”
One day, when she was kept indoors with a cold, the grandmother told her that father’s birthday was next week, and suggested she should make him a pincushion for a present out of a beautiful piece of yellow silk.
Laboriously, with a double cotton, the little girl stitched three sides. But what to fill it with? That was the question. The grandmother was out in the garden, and she wandered into mother’s bedroom to look for “scraps.” On the bed table she discovered a great many sheets of fine paper, gathered them up, shredded them into tiny pieces, and stuffed her case, then sewed up the fourth side.
That night there was a hue and cry over the [86] house. Father’s great speech for the Port Authority had been lost. Rooms were ransacked—servants questioned. Finally mother came into the nursery.
“Kezia, I suppose you didn’t see some papers on a table in our room?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I tore them up for my s’prise.”
“What!” screamed mother. “Come straight down to the dining-room this instant.”
And she was dragged down to where father was pacing to and fro, hands behind his back.
“Well?” he said sharply.
Mother explained.
He stopped and stared in a stupefied manner at the child.
“Did you do that?”
“N-n-no,” she whispered.
“Mother, go up to the nursery and fetch down the damned thing—see that the child’s put to bed this instant.”
Crying too much to explain, she lay in the shadowed room watching the evening light sift through the Venetian blinds and trace a sad little pattern on the floor.
Then father came into the room with a ruler in his hands.
“I am going to whip you for this,” he said.
“Oh, no, no!” she screamed, cowering down under the bedclothes.
He pulled them aside.
[87] “Sit up,” he commanded, “and hold out your hands. You must be taught once and for all not to touch what does not belong to you.”
“But it was for your b-b-birthday.”
Down came the ruler on her little, pink palms.
Hours later, when the grandmother had wrapped her in a shawl and rocked her in the rocking-chair the child cuddled close to her soft body.
“What did Jesus make fathers for?” she sobbed.
“Here’s a clean hanky, darling, with some of my lavender water on it. Go to sleep, pet; you’ll forget all about it in the morning. I tried to explain to father, but he was too upset to listen to-night.”
But the child never forgot. Next time she saw him she whipped both hands behind her back, and a red colour flew into her cheeks.
The Macdonalds lived in the next-door house. Five children there were. Looking through a hole in the vegetable garden fence the little girl saw them playing “tag” in the evening. The father with the baby Mac on his shoulders, two little girls hanging on to his coat tails, ran round and round the flower beds, shaking with laughter. Once she saw the boys turn the hose on him—turn the hose on him—and he made a great grab at them, tickling them until they got hiccoughs.
[88] Then it was she decided there were different sorts of fathers.
Suddenly, one day, mother became ill, and she and grandmother drove into town in a closed carriage.
The little girl was left alone in the house with Alice, the “general.” That was all right in the daytime, but while Alice was putting her to bed she grew suddenly afraid.
“What’ll I do if I have nightmare?” she asked. “I often have nightmare, and then grannie takes me into her bed—I can’t stay in the dark—it all gets ‘whispery.’… What’ll I do if I do?”
“You just go to sleep, child,” said Alice, pulling off her socks and whacking them against the bedrail, “and don’t you holler out and wake your poor pa.”
But the same old nightmare came—the butcher with a knife and a rope who grew nearer and nearer, smiling that dreadful smile, while she could not move, could only stand still, crying out, “Grandma, Grandma!” She woke shivering, to see father beside her bed, a candle in his hand.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Oh, a butcher—a knife—I want grannie.” He blew out the candle, bent down and caught up the child in his arms, carrying her along the passage to the big bedroom. A newspaper was on the bed—a half-smoked cigar balanced [89] against his reading-lamp. He pitched the paper on the floor, threw the cigar into the fireplace, then carefully tucked up the child. He lay down beside her. Half asleep still, still with the butcher’s smile all about her, it seemed, she crept close to him, snuggled her head under his arm, held tightly to his pyjama jacket.
Then the dark did not matter; she lay still.
“Here, rub your feet against my legs and get them warm,” said father.
Tired out, he slept before the little girl. A funny feeling came over her. Poor father! Not so big, after all—and with no one to look after him…. He was harder than the grandmother, but it was a nice hardness…. And every day he had to work and was too tired to be a Mr. Macdonald…. She had torn up all his beautiful writing…. She stirred suddenly, and sighed.
“What’s the matter?” asked father. “Another dream?”
“Oh,” said the little girl, “my head’s on your heart; I can hear it going. What a big heart you’ve got, father dear.”
[Rhythm, October 1912; written 1912]
[90] Millie stood leaning against the verandah until the men were out of sight. When they were far down the road Willie Cox turned round on his horse and waved. But she didn’t wave back. She nodded her head a little and made a grimace. Not a bad young fellow, Willie Cox, but a bit too free and easy for her taste. Oh, my word! it was hot. Enough to fry your hair!
Millie put her handkerchief over her head and shaded her eyes with her hand. In the distance along the dusty road she could see the horses, like brown spots dancing up and down, and when she looked away from them and over the burnt paddocks she could see them still—just before her eyes, jumping like mosquitoes. It was half-past two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue sky like a burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue mountains quivered and leapt like sea.
Sid wouldn’t be back until half-past ten. He had ridden over to the township with four [91] of the boys to help hunt down the young fellow who’d murdered Mr. Williamson. Such a dreadful thing! And Mrs. Williamson left all alone with all those kids. Funny! she couldn’t think of Mr. Williamson being dead! He was such a one for a joke. Always having a lark. Willie Cox said they found him in the barn, shot bang through the head, and the young English “johnny” who’d been on the station learning farming—disappeared. Funny! she couldn’t think of anyone shooting Mr. Williamson, and him so popular and all. My word! when they caught that young man! Well, you couldn’t be sorry for a young fellow like that. As Sid said, if he wasn’t strung up where would they all be? A man like that doesn’t stop at one go. There was blood all over the barn. And Willie Cox said he was that knocked out he picked a cigarette up out of the blood and smoked it. My word! he must have been half dotty.
Millie went back into the kitchen. She put some ashes on the stove and sprinkled them with water. Languidly, the sweat pouring down her face, and dropping off her nose and chin, she cleared away the dinner, and going into the bedroom, stared at herself in the fly-specked mirror, and wiped her face and neck with a towel. She didn’t know what was the matter with herself that afternoon. She could have a good cry—just for nothing—and then [92] change her blouse and have a good cup of tea. Yes, she felt like that!
She flopped down on the side of the bed and stared at the coloured print on the wall opposite, Garden Party at Windsor Castle. In the foreground emerald lawns planted with immense oak trees, and in their grateful shade, a muddle of ladies and gentlemen and parasols and little tables. The background was filled with the towers of Windsor Castle, flying three Union Jacks, and in the middle of the picture the old Queen, like a tea cosy with a head on top of it. “I wonder if it really looked like that.” Millie stared at the flowery ladies, who simpered back at her. “I wouldn’t care for that sort of thing. Too much side. What with the Queen an’ one thing an’ another.”
Over the packing-case dressing-table there was a large photograph of her and Sid, taken on their wedding day. Nice picture that—if you do like. She was sitting down in a basket chair, in her cream cashmere and satin ribbons, and Sid, standing with one hand on her shoulder, looking at her bouquet. And behind them there were some fern trees, and a waterfall, and Mount Cook in the distance, covered with snow. She had almost forgotten her wedding day; time did pass so, and if you hadn’t any one to talk things over with, they soon dropped out of your mind. “I wunner why we never had no kids …” She shrugged her shoulders—gave [93] it up. “Well, I’ve never missed them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sid had, though. He’s softer than me.”
And then she sat quiet, thinking of nothing at all, her red swollen hands rolled in her apron, her feet stuck out in front of her, her little head with the thick screw of dark hair drooped on her chest. Tick-tick went the kitchen clock, the ashes clinked in the grate, and the venetian blind knocked against the kitchen window. Quite suddenly Millie felt frightened. A queer trembling started inside her—in her stomach—and then spread all over to her knees and hands. “There’s somebody about.” She tiptoed to the door and peered into the kitchen. Nobody there; the verandah doors were closed, the blinds were down, and in the dusky light the white face of the clock shone, and the furniture seemed to bulge and breathe … and listen, too. The clock—the ashes—and the venetian—and then again—something else, like steps in the back yard. “Go an’ see what it is, Millie Evans.”
She darted to the back door, opened it, and at the same moment some one ducked behind the wood pile. “Who’s that?” she cried, in a loud, bold voice. “Come out o’ that! I seen yer. I know where y’are. I got my gun. Come out from behind of that wood stack!” She was not frightened any more. She was furiously angry. Her heart banged like a drum. [94] “I’ll teach you to play tricks with a woman,” she yelled, and she took a gun from the kitchen corner, and dashed down the verandah steps, across the glaring yard to the other side of the wood stack. A young man lay there, on his stomach, one arm across his face. “Get up! You’re shamming!” Still holding the gun she kicked him in the shoulders. He gave no sign. “Oh, my God, I believe he’s dead.” She knelt down, seized hold of him, and turned him over on his back. He rolled like a sack. She crouched back on her haunches, staring; her lips and nostrils fluttered with horror.
He was not much more than a boy, with fair hair, and a growth of fair down on his lips and chin. His eyes were open, rolled up, showing the whites, and his face was patched with dust caked with sweat. He wore a cotton shirt and trousers, with sandshoes on his feet. One of the trousers was stuck to his leg with a patch of dark blood. “I can’t,” said Millie, and then, “You’ve got to.” She bent over and felt his heart. “Wait a minute,” she stammered, “wait a minute,” and she ran into the house for brandy and a pail of water. “What are you going to do, Millie Evans? Oh, I don’t know. I never seen anyone in a dead faint before.” She knelt down, put her arm under the boy’s head and poured some brandy between his lips. It spilled down both sides of his mouth. She dipped a corner of her apron [95] in the water and wiped his face and his hair and his throat, with fingers that trembled. Under the dust and sweat his face gleamed, white as her apron, and thin, and puckered in little lines. A strange dreadful feeling gripped Millie Evans’ bosom—some seed that had never flourished there, unfolded and struck deep roots and burst into painful leaf. “Are yer coming round? Feeling all right again?” The boy breathed sharply, half choked, his eyelids quivered, and he moved his head from side to side. “You’re better,” said Millie, smoothing his hair. “Feeling fine now again, ain’t you?” The pain in her bosom half suffocated her. “It’s no good you crying, Millie Evans. You got to keep your head.” Quite suddenly he sat up and leaned against the wood pile, away from her, staring on the ground. “There now!” cried Millie Evans, in a strange, shaking voice.
The boy turned and looked at her, still not speaking, but his eyes were so full of pain and terror that she had to shut her teeth and clench her hands to stop from crying. After a long pause he said in the little voice of a child talking in his sleep, “I’m hungry.” His lips quivered. She scrambled to her feet and stood over him. “You come right into the house and have a sit down meal,” she said. “Can you walk?” “Yes,” he whispered, and swaying he followed her across the glaring yard to the verandah. [96] At the bottom step he paused, looking at her again. “I’m not coming in,” he said. He sat on the verandah step in the little pool of shade that lay round the house. Millie watched him. “When did yer last ’ave anythink to eat?” He shook his head. She cut a chunk off the greasy corned beef and a round of bread plastered with butter; but when she brought it he was standing up, glancing round him, and paid no attention to the plate of food. “When are they coming back?” he stammered.
At that moment she knew. She stood, holding the plate, staring. He was Harrison. He was the English johnny who’d killed Mr. Williamson. “I know who you are,” she said, very slowly, “yer can’t fox me. That’s who you are. I must have been blind in me two eyes not to ’ave known from the first.” He made a movement with his hands as though that was all nothing. “When are they coming back?” And she meant to say, “Any minute. They’re on their way now.” Instead she said to the dreadful, frightened face, “Not till ’arf past ten.” He sat down, leaning against one of the verandah poles. His face broke up into little quivers. He shut his eyes and tears streamed down his cheeks. “Nothing but a kid. An’ all them fellows after ’im. ’E don’t stand any more of a chance than a kid would.” “Try a bit of beef,” said Millie. “It’s the food you want. Somethink to steady your [97] stomach.” She moved across the verandah and sat down beside him, the plate on her knees. “’Ere—try a bit.” She broke the bread and butter into little pieces, and she thought, “They won’t ketch him. Not if I can ’elp it. Men is all beasts. I don’ care wot ’e’s done, or wot ’e ’asn’t done. See ’im through, Millie Evans. ’E’s nothink but a sick kid.”
• • • • • •
Millie lay on her back, her eyes wide open, listening. Sid turned over, hunched the quilt round his shoulders, muttered “Good-night, ole girl.” She heard Willie Cox and the other chap drop their clothes on to the kitchen floor, and then their voices, and Willie Cox saying, “Lie down, Gumboil. Lie down, yer little devil,” to his dog. The house dropped quiet. She lay and listened. Little pulses tapped in her body, listening, too. It was hot. She was frightened to move because of Sid. “’E must get off. ’E must. I don’ care anythink about justice an’ all the rot they’ve bin spoutin’ to-night,” she thought, savagely. “’Ow are yer to know what anythink’s like till yer do know. It’s all rot.” She strained to the silence. He ought to be moving…. Before there was a sound from outside, Willie Cox’s Gumboil got up and padded sharply across the kitchen floor and sniffed at the back door. Terror started up in Millie. “What’s that dog doing? Uh! What a fool that young fellow is with a dog [98] ’anging about. Why don’t ’e lie down an’sleep.” The dog stopped, but she knew it was listening.
Suddenly, with a sound that made her cry out in horror the dog started barking and rushing to and fro. “What’s that? What’s up?” Sid flung out of bed. “It ain’t nothink. It’s only Gumboil. Sid, Sid!” She clutched his arm, but he shook her off. “My Christ, there’s somethink up. My God!” Sid flung into his trousers. Willie Cox opened the back door. Gumboil in a fury darted out into the yard, round the corner of the house. “Sid, there’s some one in the paddock,” roared the other chap. “What is it—what’s that?” Sid dashed out on to the front verandah. “’Ere, Millie, take the lantin. Willie, some skunk’s got ’old of one of the ’orses.” The three men bolted out of the house, and at the same moment Millie saw Harrison dash across the paddock on Sid’s horse and down the road. “Millie, bring that blasted lantin.” She ran in her bare feet, her nightdress flicking her legs. They were after him in a flash. And at the sight of Harrison in the distance, and the three men hot after, a strange mad joy smothered everything else. She rushed into the road—she laughed and shrieked and danced in the dust, jigging the lantern. “A—ah! Arter ’im, Sid! A—a—a—h! Ketch him, Willie. Go it! Go it! A—ah, Sid! Shoot ’im down. Shoot ’im!”
[Blue Review, June 1913]
[99] The servant who opened the door was twin sister to that efficient and hideous creature bearing a soup tureen into the First French Picture. Her round red face shone like freshly washed china. She had a pair of immense bare arms to match, and a quantity of mottled hair arranged in a sort of bow. I stammered in a ridiculous, breathless fashion, as though a pack of Russian wolves were behind me, rather than five flights of beautifully polished French stairs.
“Have you a room?” The servant girl did not know. She would ask Madame. Madame was at dinner.
“Will you come in, please?”
Through the dark hall, guarded by a large black stove that had the appearance of a headless cat with one red all-seeing eye in the middle of its stomach, I followed her into the salon.
“Please to sit down,” said the servant girl, closing the door behind her. I heard her list slippers shuffle along the corridor, the sound [100] of another door opening—a little clamour—instantly suppressed. Silence followed.
The salon was long and narrow, with a yellow floor dotted with white mats. White muslin curtains hid the windows: the walls were white, decorated with pictures of pale ladies drifting down cypress avenues to forsaken temples, and moons rising over boundless oceans. You would have thought that all the long years of Madame’s virginity had been devoted to the making of white mats—that her childish voice had lisped its numbers in crochet-work stitches. I did not dare to begin counting them. They rained upon me from every possible place, like impossible snowflakes. Even the piano stool was buttoned into one embroidered with P.F.
I had been looking for a resting place all the morning. At the start I flew up innumerable stairs as though they were major scales—the most cheerful things in the world—but after repeated failures the scales had resolved into the minor, and my heart, which was quite cast down by this time, leapt up again at these signs and tokens of virtue and sobriety. “A woman with such sober passions,” thought I, “is bound to be quiet and clean, with few babies and a much absent husband. Mats are not the sort of things that lend themselves in their making to cheerful singing. Mats are essentially the fruits of pious solitude. I shall certainly take a room here.” And I began to dream of unpacking [101] my clothes in a little white room, and getting into a kimono and lying on a white bed, watching the curtains float out from the windows in the delicious autumn air that smelled of apples and honey … until the door opened and a tall thin woman in a lilac pinafore came in, smiling in a vague fashion.
“Madame Séguin?”
“Yes, Madame.”
I repeated the familiar story. A quiet room, removed from any church bells, or crowing cocks, or little boys’ schools, or railway stations.
“There are none of such things anywhere near here,” said Madame, looking very surprised. “I have a very beautiful room to let, and quite unexpectedly. It has been occupied by a young gentleman from Buenos Ayres whose father died, unfortunately, and implored him to return home immediately. Quite natural, indeed.”
“Oh, very!” said I, hoping that the Hamlet-like apparition was at rest again and would not invade my solitude to make certain of his son’s obedience.
“If Madame will follow me.”
Down a dark corridor, round a corner I felt my way. I wanted to ask Madame if this was where Buenos Ayres père appeared unto his son, but I did not dare to.
“Here—you see. Quite away from everything,” said Madame.
[102] I have always viewed with a proper amount of respect and abhorrence those penetrating spirits who are not susceptible to appearances. What is there to believe in except appearances? I have nearly always found that they are the only things worth enjoying at all, and if ever an innocent child lays its head upon my knee and begs for the truth of the matter, I shall tell it the story of my one and only nurse, who, knowing my horror of gooseberry jam, spread a coat of apricot over the top of the jam jar. As long as I believed it apricot I was happy, and learning wisdom, I contrived to eat the apricot and leave the gooseberry behind. “So, you see, my little innocent creature,” I shall end, “the great thing to learn in this life is to be content with appearances, and shun the vulgarities of the grocer and philosopher.”
Bright sunlight streamed through the windows of the delightful room. There was an alcove for the bed, a writing table was placed against the window, a couch against the wall. And outside the window I looked down upon an avenue of gold and red trees and up at a range of mountains white with fresh fallen snow.
“One hundred and eighty francs a month,” murmured Madame, smiling at nothing, but seeming to imply by her manner, “Of course this has nothing to do with the matter.” I said, “That is too much. I cannot afford more than one hundred and fifty francs.”
[103] “But,” explained Madame, “the size! the alcove! And the extreme rarity of being overlooked by so many mountains.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And then the food. There are four meals a day, and breakfast in your room if you wish it.”
“Yes,” I said, more feebly.
“And my husband a Professor at the Conservatoire—that again is so rare.”
Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.
“One hundred and sixty,” I said.
“If you agree to take it for two months I will accept,” said Madame, very quickly. I agreed.
Marie helped to unstrap my boxes. She knelt on the floor, grinning and scratching her big red arms.
“Ah, how glad I am Madame has come, “she said. “Now we shall have some life again. Monsieur Arthur, who lived in this room—he was a gay one. Singing all day and sometimes dancing. Many a time Mademoiselle Ambatielos would be playing and he’d dance for an hour without stopping.”
“Who is Mademoiselle Ambatielos?” I asked.
“A young lady studying at the Conservatoire,” said Marie, sniffing in a very friendly fashion. “But she gives lessons too. Ah, mon [104] Dieu, sometimes when I am dusting in her room I think her fingers will drop off. She plays all day long. But I like that—that’s life, noise is. That’s what I say. You’ll hear her soon. Up and down she goes!” said Marie, with extreme heartiness.
“But,” I cried, loathing Marie, “how many other people are staying here?”
Marie shrugged. “Nobody to speak of. There’s the Russian gentleman, a priest he is, and Madame’s three children—and that’s all. The children are lively enough,” she said, filling the wash-stand pitcher, “but then there’s the baby—the boy! Ah, you’ll know about him, poor little one, soon enough!” She was so detestable I would not ask her anything further.
I waited until she was gone, and leaned against the window sill, watching the sun deepen in the trees until they seemed full and trembling with gold, and wondering what was the matter with the mysterious baby.
All through the afternoon Mademoiselle Ambatielos and the piano warred with the Appassionata Sonata. They shattered it to bits and re-made it to their heart’s desire—they unpicked it—and tried it in various styles. They added a little touch—caught up something. Finally they decided that the only thing of importance was the loud pedal. The mysterious baby, hidden behind [105] Heaven knows how many doors, cried with such curious persistence that I had to strain my ears, wondering if it was a baby or an engine or a far-off whistle. At dusk Marie, accompanied by the two little girls, brought me a lamp. My appearance disturbed these charming children to such an extent that they rushed up and down the corridor in a frenzied state for half-an-hour afterwards, bumping themselves against the walls, and shrieking with derisive laughter.
At eight the gong sounded for supper. I was hungry. The corridor was filled with the warm, strong smell of cooked meat. “Well,” I thought, “at any rate, judging by the smell, the food must be good.” And feeling very frightened I entered the dining-room.
Two rows of faces turned to watch me. M. Séguin introduced me, rapped on the table with the soup spoon, and the two little girls, impudent and scornful, cried: “Bon soir, Madame,” while the baby, half washed away by his afternoon’s performance, emptied his cup of milk over his head while Madame Séguin showed me my seat. In the confusion caused by this last episode, and by his being carried away by Marie, screaming and spitting with rage, I sat down next to the Russian priest and opposite Mademoiselle Ambatielos. M. Séguin took a loaf of bread from a three-legged basket at his elbow and carved it against his chest. [106] Soup was served—with vermicelli letters of the alphabet floating in it. These were last straws to the little Séguin’s table manners.
“Maman, Yvonne’s got more letters than me.”
“Maman, Hélène keeps taking my letters out with her spoon.”
“Children! Children! Quiet, quiet!” said Madame Séguin gently. “No, don’t do it.”
Hélène seized Yvonne’s plate and pulled it towards her.
“Stop,” said M. Séguin, who was like a rat, with spectacles all misted over with soup steam. “Hélène, leave the table. Go to Marie.” Exit Hélène, with her apron over her head.
Soup was followed by chestnuts and Brussels sprouts. All the time the Russian priest, who wore a pale blue tie with a buttoned frock coat and a moustache fierce as a Gogol novel, kept up a flow of conversation with Mademoiselle Ambatielos. She looked very young. She was stout, with a high firm bust decorated with a spray of artificial roses. She never ceased touching the roses or her blouse or hair, or looking at her hands—with a smile trembling on her mouth and her blue eyes wide and staring. She seemed half intoxicated with her fresh young body.
“I saw you this morning when you didn’t see me,” said the priest.
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
[107] “He didn’t, did he, Madame?”
Madame Séguin smiled, and carried away the chestnuts, bringing back a dish of pears.
“I hope you will come into the salon after dinner,” she said to me. “We always chat a little—we are such a family party.” I smiled, wondering why pears should follow chestnuts.
“I must apologise for baby,” she went on. “He is so nervous. But he spends his day in a room at the other end of the apartment to you. You will not be troubled. Only think of it! He passes whole days banging his little head against the floor and walls. The doctors cannot understand it at all.”
M. Séguin pushed back his chair, said grace. I followed desperately into the salon. “I expect you have been admiring my mats,” said Madame Séguin, with more animation than she had hitherto shown. “People always imagine they are the product of my industry. But, alas, no! They are all made by my friend, Madame Kummer, who has the pension on the first floor.”
[Blue Review, May 1913, as “Epilogue I: Pension Seguin”; written 1913]
[108] “I met a young virgin
Who sadly did moan …”
There is a very unctuous and irritating English proverb to the effect that “Every cloud has a silver lining.” What comfort can it be to one steeped to the eyebrows in clouds to ponder over their linings, and what an unpleasant picture-postcard seal it sets upon one’s tragedy—turning it into a little ha’penny monstrosity with a moon in the left-hand corner like a vainglorious threepenny bit! Nevertheless, like most unctuous and irritating things, it is true. The lining woke me after my first night at the Pension Séguin and showed me over the feather bolster a room bright with sunlight as if every golden-haired baby in Heaven were pelting the earth with buttercup posies. “What a charming fancy!” I thought. “How much prettier than the proverb! It sounds like a day in the country with Katharine Tynan.”
And I saw a little picture of myself and [109] Katharine Tynan being handed glasses of milk by a red-faced woman with an immensely fat apron, while we discussed the direct truth of proverbs as opposed to the fallacy of playful babies. But in such a case imaginary I was ranged on the side of the proverbs. “There’s a lot of sound sense in ’em,” said that coarse being. “I admire the way they put their collective foot down upon the female attempt to embroider everything. ‘The pitcher that goes too often to the well gets broken.’ Also gut. Not even a loophole for a set of verses to a broken pitcher. No possible chance of the well being one of those symbolic founts to which all hearts in the form of pitchers are carried. The only proverb I disapprove of,” went on this impossible creature, pulling a spring onion from the garden bed and chewing on it, “is the one about a bird in the hand. I naturally prefer birds in bushes.” “But,” said Katharine Tynan, tender and brooding, as she lifted a little green fly from her milk glass, “but if you were Saint Francis, the bird would not mind being in your hand. It would prefer the white nest of your fingers to any bush.”
I jumped out of bed and ran over to the window and opened it wide and leaned out. Down below in the avenue a wind shook and swung the trees; the scent of leaves was on the lifting air. The houses lining the avenue [110] were small and white. Charming, chaste-looking little houses, showing glimpses of lace and knots of ribbon, for all the world like country children in a row, about to play ‘Nuts and May.” I began to imagine an adorable little creature named Yvette who lived in one and all of these houses…. She spends her morning in a white lace boudoir cap, worked with daisies, sipping chocolate from a Sèvres cup with one hand, while a faithful attendant polishes the little pink nails of the other. She spends the afternoon in her tiny white and gold boudoir, curled up, a Persian kitten on her lap, while her ardent, beautiful lover leans over the back of the sofa, kissing and kissing again that thrice fascinating dimple on her left shoulder…. When one of the balcony windows opened, and a stout servant swaggered out with her arms full of rugs and carpet strips. With a gesture expressing fury and disgust she flung them over the railing, disappeared, re-appeared again with a long-handled cane broom and fell upon the wretched rugs and carpets. Bang! Whack! Whack! Bang! Their feeble, pitiful jigging inflamed her to ever greater effort. Clouds of dust flew up round her, and when one little rug escaped and flopped down to the avenue below, like a fish, she leaned over the balcony, shaking her fist and the broom at it.
[111] Lured by the noise, an old gentleman came to a window opposite and cast an eye of approval upon the industrious girl and yawned in the face of the lovely day. There was an air of detachment and deliberation about the way he carefully felt over the muscles of his arms and legs, pressed his throat, coughed, and shot a jet of spittle out of the window. Nobody seemed more surprised at this last feat than he. He seemed to regard it as a small triumph in its way, buttoning his immense stomach into a white piqué waistcoat with every appearance of satisfaction. Away flew my charming Yvette in a black and white check dress, an alpaca apron, and a market basket over her arm.
I dressed, ate a roll and drank some tepid coffee, feeling very sobered. I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly or otherwise, and countrysides, which are always heavenly.
With these reflections, both pious and smug, I put on my hat, groped my way along the dark passage, and ran down the five flights of stairs into the Rue St. Léger. There was a garden on the opposite side of the street, through which one walked to the University and the more pretentious avenues fronting the [112] Place du Théâtre. Although autumn was well advanced, not a leaf had fallen from the trees, the little shrubs and bushes were touched with pink and crimson, and against the blue sky the trees stood sheathed in gold. On stone benches nursemaids in white cloaks and stiff white caps chattered and wagged their heads like a company of cockatoos, and, up and down, in the sun, some genteel babies bowled hoops with a delicate air. What peculiar pleasure it is to wander through a strange city and amuse oneself as a child does, playing a solitary game!
“Pardon, Madame, mais voulez-vous …” and then the voice faltered and cried my name as though I had been given up for lost times without number; as though I had been drowned in foreign seas, and burnt in American hotel fires, and buried in a hundred lonely graves. “What on earth are you doing here?” Before me, not a day changed, not a hairpin altered, stood Violet Burton. I was flattered beyond measure at this enthusiasm, and pressed her cold, strong hand, and said, “Extraordinary!”
“But what are you here for?”
“… Nerves.”
“Oh, impossible, I really can’t believe that.”
“It is perfectly true,” I said, my enthusiasm waning. There is nothing more annoying to a woman than to be suspected of nerves of iron.
[113] “Well, you certainly don’t look it,” said she, scrutinising me, with that direct English frankness that makes one feel as though sitting in the glare of a window at breakfast-time.
“What are you here for?” I said, smiling graciously to soften the glare. At that she turned and looked across the lawns, and fidgetted with her umbrella like a provincial actress about to make a confession.
“I”—in a quiet affected voice—“I came here to forget…. But,” facing me again, and smiling energetically, “don’t let’s talk about that. Not yet. I can’t explain. Not until I know you all over again.” Very solemnly—“Not until I am sure you are to be trusted.”
“Oh, don’t trust me, Violet!” I cried. “I’m not to be trusted. I wouldn’t if I were you.” She frowned and stared.
“What a terrible thing to say. You can’t be in earnest.”
“Yes, I am. There’s nothing I adore talking about so much as another person’s secret.” To my surprise, she came to my side and put her arm through mine.
“Thank you,” she said, gratefully. “I think it’s awfully good of you to take me into your confidence like that. Awfully. And even if it were true … but no, it can’t be true, otherwise you wouldn’t have told me. I mean it can’t be psychologically true of the same [114] nature to be frank and dishonourable at the same time. Can it? But then … I don’t know. I suppose it is possible. Don’t you find that the Russian novelists have made an upheaval of all your conclusions?” We walked, bras dessus bras dessous, down the sunny path.
“Let’s sit down,” said Violet. “There’s a fountain quite near this bench. I often come here. You can hear it all the time.” The faint noise of the water sounded like a half-forgotten tune, half sly, half laughing.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” breathed Violet. “Like weeping in the night.”
“Oh, Violet,” said I, terrified at this turn. “Wonderful things don’t weep in the night. They sleep like tops and know nothing more till again it is day.”
She put her arm over the back of the bench and crossed her legs.
“Why do you persist in denying your emotions? Why are you ashamed of them?” she demanded.
“I’m not. But I keep them tucked away, and only produce them very occasionally, like special little pots of jam, when the people whom I love come to tea.”
“There you are again! Emotions and jam! Now, I’m absolutely different. I live on mine. Sometimes I wish I didn’t—but then again I would rather suffer through them—suffer intensely, [115] I mean; go down into the depths with them, for the sake of that wonderful upward swing on to the pinnacles of happiness.” She edged nearer to me.
“I wish I could think where I get my nature from,” she went on. “Father and mother are absolutely different. I mean—they’re quite normal—quite commonplace.” I shook my head and raised my eyebrows. “But it is no use fighting it. It has beaten me. Absolutely—once and for all.” A pause, inadequately filled by the sly, laughing water. “Now,” said Violet, impressively, “you know what I meant when I said I came here to forget.”
“But I assure you I don’t, Violet. How can you expect me to be so subtle? I quite understand that you don’t wish to tell me until you know me better. Quite!”
She opened her eyes and her mouth.
“I have told you! I mean—not straight out. Not in so many words. But then—how could I? But when I told you of my emotional nature, and that I had been in the depths and swept up to the pinnacles … surely, surely you realised that I was telling you, symbolically. What else can you have thought?”
No young girl ever performs such gymnastic feats by herself. Yet in my experience I had always imagined that the depths followed the pinnacles. I ventured to suggest so.
[116] “They do,” said Violet, gloomily. “You see them, if you look, before and after.”
“Like the people in Shelley’s Skylark,” said I.
Violet looked vague, and I repented. But I did not know how to sympathise, and I had no idea of the relative sizes.
“It was in the summer,” said Violet. “I had been most frightfully depressed. I don’t know what it was. For one thing I felt as though I could not make up my mind to anything. I felt so terribly useless—that I had no place in the scheme of things—and worst of all, nobody who understood me…. It may have been what I was reading at the time … but I don’t think … not entirely. Still one never knows. Does one? And then I met … Mr. Farr, at a dance—”
“Oh, call him by his Christian name, Violet. You can’t go on telling me about Mr. Farr and you … on the heights.”
“Why on earth not? Very well—I met—Arthur. I think I must have been mad that evening. For one thing there had been a bother about going. Mother didn’t want me to, because she said there wouldn’t be anybody to see me home. And I was frightfully keen. I must have had a presentiment, I think. Do you believe in presentiments? … I don’t know, we can’t be certain, can we? Anyhow, I went. And he was there.” She turned a deep scarlet [117] and bit her lip. Oh, I really began to like Violet Burton—to like her very much indeed.
“Go on,” I said.
“We danced together seven times and we talked the whole time. The music was very slow,—we talked of everything. You know … about books and theatres and all that sort of thing at first, and then—about our souls.”
“… What?”
“I said—our souls. He understood me absolutely. And after the seventh dance … No, I must tell you the first thing he ever said to me. He said, ‘Do you believe in Pan?’ Quite quietly. Just like that. And then he said, ‘I knew you did.’ Wasn’t that extra-or-din-ary! After the seventh dance we sat out on the landing. And … shall I go on?”
“Yes, go on.”
“He said, ‘I think I must be mad. I want to kiss you,’—and—I let him.”
“Do go on.”
“I simply can’t tell you what I felt like. Fancy! I’d never kissed out of the family before. I mean—of course—never a man. And then he said: ‘I must tell you—I am engaged.’”
“Well?”
“What else is there? Of course I simply rushed upstairs and tumbled everything over in the dressing-room and found my coat and went home. And next morning I made Mother [118] let me come here. I thought,” said Violet, “I thought I would have died of shame.”
“Is that all?” I cried. “You can’t mean to say that’s all?”
“What else could there be? What on earth did you expect. How extraordinary you are—staring at me like that!”
And in the long pause I heard again the little fountain, half sly, half laughing—at me, I thought, not at Violet.
[Blue Review, June 1913, as “Epilogue II”; written 1913]
[119] “Third storey—to the left, Madame,” said the cashier, handing me a pink ticket. “One moment—I will ring for the elevator.” Her black satin skirt swished across the scarlet and gold hall, and she stood among the artificial palms, her white neck and powdered face topped with masses of gleaming orange hair—like an over-ripe fungus bursting from a thick, black stem. She rang and rang. “A thousand pardons, Madame. It is disgraceful. A new attendant. He leaves this week.” With her fingers on the bell she peered into the cage as though she expected to see him, lying on the floor, like a dead bird. “It is disgraceful.” There appeared from nowhere a tiny figure disguised in a peaked cap and dirty white cotton gloves. “Here you are?” she scolded. “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” For answer the figure hid its face behind one of the white cotton gloves and sneezed twice. “Ugh! Disgusting! Take Madame to the third storey!” The midget stepped aside, bowed, entered after me and [120] clashed the gates to. We ascended, very slowly, to an accompaniment of sneezes and prolonged, half whistling sniffs. I asked the top of the patent-leather cap: “Have you a cold?” “It is the air, Madame,” replied the creature, speaking through its nose with a restrained air of great relish, “one is never dry here. Third floor—if you please,” sneezing over my ten-centime tip.
I walked along a tiled corridor decorated with advertisements for lingerie and bust improvers—was allotted a tiny cabin and a blue print chemise and told to undress and find the Warm Room as soon as possible. Through the matchboard walls and from the corridor sounded cries and laughter and snatches of conversation.
“Are you ready?”
“Are you coming out now?”
“Wait till you see me!”
“Berthe—Berthe!”
“One moment! One moment! Immediately!”
I undressed quickly and carelessly, feeling like one of a troupe of little schoolgirls let loose in a swimming-bath.
The Warm Room was not large. It had terra cotta painted walls with a fringe of peacocks, and a glass roof, through which one could see the sky, pale and unreal as a photographer’s background screen. Some round tables strewn with shabby fashion journals, a [121] marble basin in the centre of the room, filled with yellow lilies, and on the long, towel enveloped chairs, a number of ladies, apparently languid as the flowers … I lay back with a cloth over my head, and the air, smelling of jungles and circuses and damp washing made me begin to dream … Yes, it might have been very fascinating to have married an explorer … and lived in a jungle, as long as he didn’t shoot anything or take anything captive. I detest performing beasts. Oh … those circuses at home … the tent in the paddock and the children swarming over the fence to stare at the waggons and at the clown making up, with his glass stuck on the waggon wheel—and the steam organ playing the Honeysuckle and the Bee much too fast … over and over. I know what this air reminds me of—a game of follow my leader among the clothes hung out to dry….
The door opened. Two tall blonde women in red and white check gowns came in and took the chairs opposite mine. One of them carried a box of mandarins wrapped in silver paper and the other a manicure set. They were very stout, with gay, bold faces, and quantities of exquisite whipped fair hair.
Before sitting down they glanced round the room, looked the other women up and down, turned to each other, grimaced, whispered something, and one of them said, offering the [122] box, “Have a mandarin?” At that they started laughing—they lay back and shook, and each time they caught sight of each other broke out afresh.
“Ah, that was too good,” cried one, wiping her eyes very carefully, just at the corners. “You and I, coming in here, quite serious, you know, very correct—and looking round the room—and—and as a result of our careful inspection—I offer you a mandarin. No, it’s too funny. I must remember that. It’s good enough for a music hall. Have a mandarin?”
“But I cannot imagine,” said the other, “why women look so hideous in Turkish baths—like beef-steaks in chemises. Is it the women—or is it the air? Look at that one, for instance—the skinny one, reading a book and sweating at the moustache—and those two over in the corner, discussing whether or not they ought to tell their non-existent babies how babies come—and … Heavens! Look at this one coming in. Take the box, dear. Have all the mandarins.”
The newcomer was a short stout little woman with flat, white feet, and a black mackintosh cap over her hair. She walked up and down the room, swinging her arms, in affected unconcern, glancing contemptuously at the laughing women, and rang the bell for the attendant. It was answered immediately by Berthe, half [123] naked and sprinkled with soapsuds. “Well, what is it, Madame? I’ve no time …”
“Please bring me a hand towel,” said the Mackintosh Cap, in German.
“Pardon? I do not understand. Do you speak French?”
“Non,” said the Mackintosh Cap.
“Ber-the!” shrieked one of the blonde women, “have a mandarin. Oh, mon Dieu, I shall die of laughing.”
The Mackintosh Cap went through a pantomime of finding herself wet and rubbing herself dry. “Verstehen Sie?”
“Mais non, Madame,” said Berthe, watching with round eyes that snapped with laughter, and she left the Mackintosh Cap, winked at the blonde women, came over, felt them as though they had been a pair of prize poultry, said “You are doing very well,” and disappeared again.
The Mackintosh Cap sat down on the edge of a chair, snatched a fashion journal, smacked over the crackling pages and pretended to read, while the blonde women leaned back eating the mandarins and throwing the peelings into the lily basin. A scent of fruit, fresh and penetrating, hung on the air. I looked round at the other women. Yes, they were hideous, lying back, red and moist, with dull eyes and lank hair, the only little energy they had vented in shocked prudery at the behaviour of the two [124] blondes. Suddenly I discovered Mackintosh Cap staring at me over the top of her fashion journal, so intently that I took flight and went into the hot room. But in vain! Mackintosh Cap followed after and planted herself in front of me.
“I know,” she said, confident and confiding, “that you can speak German. I saw it in your face just now. Wasn’t that a scandal about the attendant refusing me a towel? I shall speak to the management about that, and I shall get my husband to write them a letter this evening. Things always come better from a man, don’t they? No,” she said, rubbing her yellowish arms, “I’ve never been in such a scandalous place—and four francs fifty to pay! Naturally, I shall not give a tip. You wouldn’t, would you? Not after that scandal about a hand towel…. I’ve a great mind to complain about those women as well. Those two that keep on laughing and eating. Do you know who they are?” She shook her head. “They’re not respectable women—you can tell at a glance. At least I can, any married woman can. They’re nothing but a couple of street women. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. Laughing at me, mind you! The great big fat pigs like that! And I haven’t sweated at all properly, just because of them. I got so angry that the sweat turned in instead of out; it does in excitement, you know, sometimes, [125] and now instead of losing my cold I wouldn’t be surprised if I brought on a fever.”
I walked round the hot room in misery pursued by the Mackintosh Cap until the two blonde women came in, and seeing her, burst into another fit of laughter. To my rage and disgust Mackintosh Cap sidled up to me, smiled meaningly, and drew down her mouth. “I don’t care,” she said, in her hideous German voice. “I shouldn’t lower myself by paying any attention to a couple of street women. If my husband knew he’d never get over it. Dreadfully particular he is. We’ve been married six years. We come from Pfalzburg. It’s a nice town. Four children I have living, and it was really to get over the shock of the fifth that we came here. The fifth,” she whispered, padding after me, “was born, a fine healthy child, and it never breathed! Well, after nine months, a woman can’t help being disappointed, can she?”
I moved towards the vapour room. “Are you going in there?” she said. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Those two have gone in. They may think you want to strike up an acquaintance with them. You never know women like that.” At that moment they came out, wrapping themselves in the rough gowns, and passing Mackintosh Cap like disdainful queens. “Are you going to take your chemise off in the vapour room?” asked she. “Don’t mind [126] me, you know. Woman is woman, and besides, if you’d rather, I won’t look at you. I know—I used to be like that. I wouldn’t mind betting,” she went on savagely, “those filthy women had a good look at each other. Pooh! women like that. You can’t shock them. And don’t they look dreadful? Bold, and all that false hair. That manicure box one of them had was fitted up with gold. Well, I don’t suppose it was real, but I think it was disgusting to bring it. One might at least cut one’s nails in private, don’t you think? I cannot see,” she said, “what men see in such women. No, a husband and children and a home to look after, that’s what a woman needs. That’s what my husband says. Fancy one of these hussies peeling potatoes or choosing the meat! Are you going already?”
I flew to find Berthe, and all the time I was soaped and smacked and sprayed and thrown in a cold water tank I could not get out of my mind the ugly, wretched figure of the little German with a good husband and four children, railing against the two fresh beauties who had never peeled potatoes nor chosen the right meat. In the ante-room I saw them once again. They were dressed in blue. One was pinning on a bunch of violets, the other buttoning a pair of ivory suède gloves. In their charming feathered hats and furs they stood talking. “Yes, there they are,” said a voice at my elbow.
[127] And there was Mackintosh Cap, transformed, in a blue and white check blouse and crochet collar, with the little waist and large hips of the German woman and a terrible bird nest, which Pfalzburg doubtless called Reisehut, on her head. “How do you suppose they can afford clothes like that? The horrible, low creatures. No, they’re enough to make a young girl think twice.” And as the two walked out of the ante-room, Mackintosh Cap stared after them, her sallow face all mouth and eyes, like the face of a hungry child before a forbidden table.
[Blue Review, July 1913; written 1913]