The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922 9781399504140

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 2

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 1: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898–1915, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 2: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith Volume 4: The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith

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The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922

Edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan

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Introduction, Arrangement and Editorial matter © Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan © The Estate of Katherine Mansfield for copyright in the stories held by the Estate © Margaret Scott and Daphne Brasell Associates for copyright in The Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield not otherwise held by the Estate of Katherine Mansfield © Random House, Inc. for copyright in the stories held in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright 1920, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1937 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Reprinted 2014 Typeset in 10.5/12 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4275 5 (hardback)

The New Zealand Society

New Zealand Link Foundation

The New Zealand Universities Graduates’ Association

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Contents

Abbreviations and Textual Note

ix

Fiction 1916–1922 1916 That Woman Last Words to Youth The Laurels

3 4 5

1917 The Lost Battle Toots Two Tuppenny Ones, Please Late at Night The Black Cap In Confidence The Common Round A Pic-Nic Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day Prelude Feuille d’Album A Dill Pickle Love-Lies-Bleeding

10 13 22 24 27 31 36 42 49 56 93 97 103

1918 Je ne parle pas français Sun and Moon Bliss The Boy with the Jackdaw To the Last Moment Carnation Love in Autumn ‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown’

112 136 141 153 156 160 163 164

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‘A stupid, silly poem’ Keeping Up ‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous’

165 166 168

1919 A Suburban Fairy Tale ‘It was neither dark nor light in the cabin’ See-Saw Pictures ‘R’s first husband was a pawnbroker’

170 173 175 178 185

1920 Late Spring This Flower Psychology The Man Without a Temperament The Wrong House Revelations The Escape A Dance at the – – – Bank Holiday The Wind Blows The Young Girl The Singing Lesson The Stranger Miss Brill Poison The Lady’s Maid The Daughters of the Late Colonel There is No Answer You Love Me – Still? Tea on the Train

188 190 193 199 210 213 218 222 223 226 230 235 240 250 255 261 266 284 287 289

1921 Life of Ma Parker ‘After a succession’ Mr and Mrs Dove Susannah Such a Sweet Old Lady Sixpence An Ideal Family Hat with a Feather Her First Ball Marriage à la Mode

292 297 300 307 309 311 317 322 324 330

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Widowed At the Bay The Voyage A Married Man’s Story Second Violin All Serene! By Moonlight The Garden Party The Doll’s House Six Years After Weak Heart Daphne ‘I suppose doctor’ ‘Carriages are not allowed’ ‘It fell so softly, so gently’ ‘On her way back to the garden’ ‘What was there about that little house’ The Pessimist The Sisters ‘Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker’ Honesty

338 342 372 379 391 394 398 401 414 421 426 429 434 434 435 436 437 438 442 443 444

1922 The Doves’ Nest A Cup of Tea Taking the Veil Mr and Mrs Williams The Fly Confidences The New Baby ‘Have you seen my cosmias dear?’ A Man and His Dog Honeymoon ‘It was the late afternoon’ A Family Dance ‘Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hôtel’ Father and the Girls My Darling The Lily Our Hilda ‘One great advantage’ ‘There are certain human beings’ A Bad Idea The Canary

448 461 467 472 476 480 481 484 486 488 493 496 497 498 502 503 504 505 507 509 511

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Appendix A: Attributed Stories The Breidenbach Family in England (1911) The Mating of Gwendolyn (1911) A Flirtation (1912) The Wild Rabbit: A Fantasy of the Future (1913)

516 516 519 523 529

Bibliography Index of First Lines Index of Stories

533 535 539

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Abbreviations and Textual Note

Aloe

The Aloe with Prelude, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Wellington: Port Nicholson, 1982) Alpers The Stories of Katherine Mansfield – Definitive Edition, ed. Antony Alpers (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984) ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington BJK B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) BOS Bliss and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1920) CLKM The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984–2008) DNOS The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1923) GPOS The Garden Party and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1922) IGP In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911) JMM John Middleton Murry Journal, 1927 Journal, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1927) Journal, 1954 Journal, Definitive Edition, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1954) KM Katherine Mansfield KMN The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997) Life Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980) LJMM Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913–1922, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1951) MS Manuscript ix

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abbreviations and textual note

NLC Poems SCOS Scrapbook TS U

Newberry Library, Chicago Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1924) The Scrapbook, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1939) Typescript Not published in KM’s lifetime

Our intention with this edition has been to retain KM’s own texts as far as possible, without aiming for facsimile. The notes following each story indicate source of text, first publication, and where first collected. With those stories published in her lifetime, we have followed the last printing which she corrected or approved. With work that appeared posthumously, and was taken from MS or TS, we have removed the titles sometimes invented by JMM, returning to the working title if KM had arrived at one, and in other cases, heading the text with the first phrase of the story or fragment placed in inverted commas. (JMM’s titles however are given in footnotes.) We have silently emended slips of the pen, but retained KM’s rare idiosyncratic spellings, and supplied minor omissions such as obviously required commas, full stops and apostrophes, expanded ampersands, and provided quotation marks where direct speech clearly required them. In dramatic sketches, the characters’ names have been conventionalised to capital letters. Quotations from her letters, and personal entries in the notebooks, however, follow the published texts. KM frequently used ellipses in both her fiction and personal writing. To avoid confusion, editorial omissions are indicated by ellipses in square brackets. We have not reproduced those sections of the notebooks or MSS which KM herself clearly cancelled. Key words in foreign languages have been translated. It is appropriate to note again how much the editors are indebted to the monumental work on KM’s notebooks by Margaret Scott, which we have so constantly drawn on with her kind permission; also to the late Antony Alpers, the pre-eminent and ground-breaking Mansfield scholar. The Society of Authors has allowed us – invaluably – to draw on several of the texts he established in his 1984 edition of her stories, while his annotations to that edition, like his magisterial The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980), remain a quarry and an inspiration for later scholars. It is also fair to say that it is inconceivable for any presentday Mansfield scholar not to be indebted to B. J. Kirkpatrick’s A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield.

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FICTION

1916–1922

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1916

That Woman Sitting astride the low window ledge, smelling the heliotrope – or was it the tea? – half of Kezia was in the garden and half of her in the room. ‘Have you put down the Harcourts?’ ‘Yes, Mrs Phil and Mrs Charlie.’ ‘And the Fields?’ ‘Mrs and the Misses Field.’ ‘And Rose Conway?’ ‘Yes, and that Melbourne girl staying with her.’ ‘Old Mrs Grady?’ ‘Do you think – necessary?’ ‘My dear, she does so love a good old cackle.’ ‘Oh, but that way she has of dipping everything in her tea! Iced chocolate cake and the ends of her feather boa dipped in tea . . .’ ‘How marvellously that ribbon has lasted, Harrie. Marvellously.’ That was Aunt Beryl’s voice. She, Aunt Harrie and Mother sat at the round table with big shallow tea cups in front of them. In the dusky light, in their white, puffed-up muslin blouses with wing sleeves, they were three birds at the edge of a lily pool. Beyond them the shadowy room melted into the shadow; the gold picture frames were braced upon the air; the cut-glass door knob glittered – a song, a white butterfly with wings outspread, clung to the ebony piano. Aunt Harrie’s plaintive, singing tones: ‘It’s very faded, really, if you look into it. I don’t think it can possibly stand another ironing.’ ‘If I were rich’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘with real money to spend – not save . . .’ Mother: ‘What about – what about asking that Gibbs woman?’ ‘Linda!’ ‘How can you suggest such a thing!’ ‘Well, why not? She needn’t come. But it must be so horrid not to be asked anywhere!’ 3

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last words to youth

‘But, good heavens, whose fault is it? Who could ask her?’ ‘She’s nobody but herself to blame.’ ‘She’s simply flown in people’s faces.’ ‘And it must be so particularly dreadful for Mr Gibbs.’ ‘But Harrie dear, he’s dead.’ ‘Of course, Linda. That’s just it. He must feel so helpless, looking down.’ Kezia heard her mother say: ‘I never thought of that. Yes, that might be . . . very maddening!’ Aunt Beryl’s cool little voice gushed up and overflowed: ‘It’s really nothing to laugh at, Linda. There are some things one really must draw the line at laughing at.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 90–1. Dated 1916 by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 39–41.

•

Last Words to Youth There was a woman on the station platform. A tall scrag of a woman wearing a little round hat with a brown feather that dropped in a draggled fringe over her eyes. She was dressed in a brown jacket and a narrow brown skirt and in her bare hands she clutched a broken down looking leather bag – the outside pockets bulging with what looked like old torn up envelopes. Round her neck some indescribable little dead animal bit its own tail, its fur standing up wet and sticky like the fur of a drowned kitten. Brown button boots showed under the skirt and an end of white petticoat dabbled with mud. The toss and tumble, the hurrying threading rush of movement left her high and dry. She stood as though she were part of the furniture of the station and had been there for years – an old automatic machine that nobody dreamed of slipping a coin into, or even troubled to glance at to find out what once it contained – whether a drop of white rose perfume or a cachet or deux cigarettes à la reine d’Egypte. Even the porters seemed to accept her right to stand there, and all the people climbing out of the train, the pale women bunched up in furs, the stout unshaven men buttoned up in overcoats simply did not see her, but met their friends and lovers and kissed and chattered

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and squabbled under her very nose. There is something revolting about her – something humble and resigned, almost idiotic, thought Marion, and she sat down on her hat box, waiting for that mysterious porter who had appeared and disappeared to find a truck to trundle her things into the cloakroom. I wish he would come – I’m cold, I really am quite dangerously cold. She clutched her muff tight, tight against her to stop the strange trembling shivers that rippled over her whole body. But she could not control two little muscles in her cheek bones that moved up and down like tiny pistons. ‘No, I never sleep in trains,’ she said to nobody at all, ‘and my dear, you have no conception of the heat in that carriage – the windows simply ran. There was a strange pale female opposite to me, too, all wrapped up in black shawls which she called her chiffons. In the middle of the night when everybody was asleep she rooted among her baggage, spread a white handkerchief on her lap, produced what I try to believe was the end of a cold rabbit, tearing at the little legs, cracking up the bones and swaying about in the swinging half dark as she munched, like the portrait of a mad baby farmer by that Belgian – what is his name? Wirz . . . Yes, it was a very sinister, blackish little meal,’ said Marion, and she smiled, thinking – with half affected dismay – heavens! I seem to be haunted by mad women – that woman last night and now this mad one this morning. A mad woman at night is a sailor’s delight, a mad woman in the morning is a sailor’s warning – and she looked up to see the draggled bird moving towards her. Yes, she certainly was very ominous indeed – – Heavens! What was she wearing? How absurd how preposterous. Pinned [to] her jacket a knot of faded ribbon set off a large heart-shaped shield inscribed The representative of the society for the Protection of Young Girls – – – Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 74–5. Scrapbook, pp. 89–91. The fragment is written in Notebook 13, ATL, next to a diary entry JMM dates November 1916.

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The Laurels1 Lytton – – – – Dr Keit Carrington – – his grandchild, Muriel Dash

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Mansfield – – Aldous – – – – Maria – – – – Murry – – – –

Florence Kaziany Balliol Dodd Jane Ivan Tchek

(Act I Scene I. Breakfast room. Ivan enters, pours out a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette, stamps on the cigarette, says) IVAN: And so it goes on. (And walks out, wrapped in gloom. Enter JANE who clears away and resets the table etc., brushes away cigarette ash and goes to the door and calls) JANE: Miss Muriel. MURIEL: (in the distance) Just coming. (She comes in with a bird in a cage, takes off cover and hangs the bird in the window, saying) Now you can look out and sing and see the sun (sighs profoundly) shining on the land. JANE: Mr Tchek has had his breakfast Miss. It’s all ready for the master. MURIEL: Oh, very well Jane. I’ll call him. (Looks at Jane) What’s the matter Jane? You’ve been crying. JANE: (at table) Oh, don’t notice me, Miss Muriel. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. MURIEL: (Shocked) Whatever do you mean Jane? (Jane puts her hand over her eyes and sobs.) MURIEL: (taking the hand away) Poor Jane and you do look so dreadful. (Brightly) Tell me then [?] JANE: Oh Miss if you knew what I feel about – It seems funny don’t it Miss – things happen like that. When I saw ’is boots in the passage this morning – those black button ones with the brown tops – I felt I could bear it no longer. I felt quite wild Miss, in the kitchen jest now. Oh Mother what ’ave you been and gone and done. And it’s not as though it’s my fault Miss. That’s what makes it so hard to bear. MURIEL: Bewildering – what on earth are you talking about Jane? JANE: Oh Miss – it’s Mr Tchek – the Russian gentleman. MURIEL: Are you in love with him Jane? JANE: Oh Miss – MURIEL: But whatever is there to cry about in that Jane? Oh Jane – you lucky girl. Just to be in love – isn’t that enough? Oh how I envy you, how I envy you. I’ve nobody – nobody to be in love with except (she points) my canary, and there comes a time Jane (taking the cage) when even a canary isn’t half enough. One seems somehow to want more. Oh Jane – JANE: But you don’t understand Miss. If I was like you, with my Pa and me Ma in a lovely double frame on the dressing table, it’d be

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alright. But there – I’ve got to tell somebody. (Beats her breast) I’m a love child, I am. MURIEL: (Claps her hands) A love child, Jane? How too divine. What is it? How pretty it sounds. (dreamily) A love child. JANE: (leaning towards her curiously) Do you mean to say you don’t know, Miss? It means I haven’t got no Father. MURIEL: But oh, Jane, how perfect. Just like the Virgin Mary. JANE: (Furious) You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Miss Muriel, that you ought. Don’t you know it’s the most horrible thing that can happen to anybody – not to have a Father. Don’t you know, Miss, that’s the reason what young girls like me jump off buses and in front of trains and eat rat poison and swoller acids and often murder themselves? Just because they ’aven’t got a Father, Miss. MURIEL: Does it mean . . . GRANDFATHER: Muriel. (Enters room, rather feebly, kisses Muriel on forehead and then looks about him, murmuring faintly, gently.) And how is my little yellow bird this morning – how is my little darling canary? MURIEL: Very well thank you, Grandfather. Won’t you have an egg and some bread? (Cuts up loaf.) GRANDFATHER: And what is my little granddaughter going to do today? Is she going to warm her wings in the pretty garden and sit and read the newspaper to her grandfather – all about the bad wicked people and the bad world outside The Laurels? MURIEL: The world outside The Laurels. (Covers her face with her hands and bursts into tears.) GRANDFATHER: Muriel – my child – what is it? MURIEL: Oh Grandfather I do so want to go out into the world. GRANDFATHER: What! My little bird to leave the nest and try to fly over the tall laurels? My little violet to peep from its leaf for prying hands to gather? My little Muriel to leave her old grandfather to wander quite abandoned on the dusty road? (Puts his hand to his heart and exclaims) Ugh! MURIEL: Grandfather, Grandfather. GRANDFATHER: My heart, A chair. (He sits down[?]. Puts Muriel’s hand over his heart.) Feel – scarcely at all. MURIEL: Oh Grandfather, can it be my fault? GRANDFATHER: (Takes her face in his hands) Happy child! Careless water sprite. One day when little Muriel is older she will understand how she made Grandfather suffer, and the old wounds here closed, open again. MURIEL: (clasps her hands) And must I never never go, Grandfather? GRANDFATHER: Never, little mouse. (Muriel drifts towards the door) Where are you going to child?

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MURIEL: (solemnly) I am going to look at my father’s photograph. GRANDFATHER: Achk! (Mysteriously) Fatal. Fatal child. But if the bloom must disappear let mine be the tender hands. Come here Muriel. (Muriel kneels beside him, clasps her hands and gazes at him.) The time has come then when my little Muriel must know why it would be useless for her to go out into the world, and why the world will have none of her roses and violets and pretty pretty parsley, but must hide with Grandfather within the Laurels, under the laurels. (standing) The man in the double frame is not your father, Muriel. Draw closer. How the little hands tremble – those shining eyes. (Mysteriously) Mr Tchek is not our first lodger Muriel. Once upon a time another lived in Mr Tchek’s room – the first that ever burst. You follow me, Beating Heart? MURIEL: Yes Grandfather. GRANDFATHER: And your mother was just the same age as you – just as tender to the old man who was not so old then, Muriel, but only getting on, getting on. Time passed until one fine day Florence and the first lodger went away and after a long time when Grandfather was all alone he found (groans) – how shall I tell her – a basket under the laurel hedge, with a baby and a bottle and a bonnet in it. MURIEL: (radiant, flings her arms round him) The baby was me Grandfather. GRANDFATHER: (clasping her to his heart) My treasure is a love child. MURIEL: (awed) Just like Jane. (leaves his arm) But did Mother never come back Grandfather? GRANDFATHER: Never. Other grass was green and water flowed. Never came back. (They sway to and fro, clasped in each other’s arms. Suddenly the door opens and FLORENCE bursts in in a travelling cape, followed by Jane carrying a bag.) FLORENCE: (to Jane) Pay my taxi. (rushes forward) Father! GRANDFATHER: (horrified) Florence! FLORENCE: No, don’t get up my old feeble broken white-headed old Father. MURIEL: (very embarrassed) Good afternoon Mother. I am your daughter Muriel. FLORENCE: (as to a child) Well, my little darling. (turns to grandfather) How old you have become, my poor Father. I should have warned you before I came. I had no right – I didn’t realise how old you were, how feeble, how almost – (shakes her head at him) It was high time. GRANDFATHER: (trying to ‘carry it off’) I have never been better in my life, Florence.

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FLORENCE: ( [. . .] fully) There there. (She unbuttons her cape and Muriel takes it from her and stands holding the cape in her hands) How hot and stuffy it is in here. (Walks over to the window) Hemmed in by Laurels – Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 76–9. 1. What remains of the play KM wrote for Lady Ottoline Morrell’s guests at Garsington, Christmas 1916. As Alpers writes: At last, on the evening of Boxing Day, came the play that Katherine had devised, a ‘kind of Ibsen–Russian play,’ as Carrington told her brother, ‘marvellously witty and good.’ Or as Aldous Huxley told his brother Julian: ‘We performed a superb play invented by Katherine, improvising as we went along. It was a huge success, with Murry as a Dostoevsky character and Lytton as an incredibly wicked old grandfather’. (Life, p. 227) Alpers also points out that no one but KM would have been alert to the dark humour of the character she herself played, an unmarried mother whose name drew on Floryan Sobienowski, her Polish lover during her time in Bavaria, and Kaziany, a woman violinist they had known together. The cast, as well as KM and JMM, included Lady Ottoline’s regular guests, the biographer and critic Lytton Strachey, the painter Dora Carrington, the novelist Aldous Huxley and his future wife, the ballet dancer Maria Nys.

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1917

The Lost Battle Was it simply her own imagination or could there be any truth in this feeling that waiters – waiters especially and hotel servants – adopted an impertinent, arrogant and slightly amused attitude towards a woman who travelled alone? Was it just her wretched female selfconsciousness? No, she really did not think it was. For even when she was feeling at her happiest, at her freest, she would become aware, quite suddenly, of the ‘tone’ of the waiter or the hotel servant. And it was extraordinary how it wrecked her sense of security, how it made her feel that something malicious was being plotted against her and that everybody and everything – yes, even to inanimate objects like chairs or tables – was secretly ‘in the know’, waiting for that ominous infallible thing to happen to her, which always did happen, which was bound to happen, to every woman on earth who travelled alone! The waiter prodded a keyhole with a bunch of keys, wrenched one round, flung the grey-painted door open and stood against it, waiting for her to pass in. He held his feather duster upright in his hand as though it were a smoky torch he carried. ‘Here is a nice little room for Madame,’ said the waiter insinuatingly. As she entered he brushed past her, opened the groaning window, and unhooked the shutters, letting a cold shadowless light flow into the hideous slip of a room, with the Hotel Rules and Police Regulations framed over the washstand, and narrow shiny furniture that looked as if it were afraid that one fine night both walls would clap together like butter-pats and squeeze it. She crossed to the window and looked out over a court on to the back of another tall building, with strangely crooked windows hung with tattered washing, like the windows of a house in a comic picture. ‘A very nice little room for madame,’ said the waiter, and moving to the bed he slapped it and gave the mattress a pinch which did not seem to be merely professional. ‘Very clean, you see Madame. Very comfortable, with electric light and running water.’ 10

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She could hardly suppress a cold shiver of horror. She said dully: ‘No, I do not like this room at all. And besides it has not got a good table. I must have a good table in my room.’ ‘A table, Madame!’ said the waiter, and as he straightened up his very feather duster seemed to be printed on his blue linen apron like a big exclamation mark of astonishment. ‘A table! But Madame desires a bed? Madame desires a bed as well as a table. N’est-ce pas, Madame?’ She did not reply to the fool. ‘Show me a large room!’ she said. As he took some sliding, gliding steps to the door, she had the fancy that he was about to waltz down the passage in a frenzy of delighted amusement. ‘Mais voilà une belle chambre!’ said the waiter, stopping in front of another grey-painted door, and laying across the palm of his hand the bunch of jingling keys. He cocked his head on one side, selecting the right one. ‘But it’s dear, you understand. It costs six francs a day, and without breakfast! You understand, Madame? Six francs.’ And to make his meaning perfectly clear he held up six keys arranged like a fan. At that moment she would have paid sixty just to be rid of that grinning ape, just to have the right to shut the door upon him. But it really was a very charming room. Big – square – with windows on two sides. A white wallpaper, pink carpet and curtains. A little pink settee and an armchair, with a dab of white crochet lace on its back and a dab on either arm – yellow waxen fruits on a table covered in a blue cloth. Very nice – very nice indeed. She put her hands on the table. It was steady as a rock. ‘Madame is pleased?’ said the waiter. ‘Yes.’ She told him she would take the room, and he was to have her luggage sent immediately. When he had gone, and the door really was shut, she behaved quite wildly for a minute or two, and ran about, flinging up her arms and crying ‘Oh, oh!’ as though she had just been rescued from a shipwreck or a burning house. Between the charming net curtains, through one window she could see across a square to the railing of what looked like a park, full of yellowing trees. The other looked over a street of little cafés half hidden under striped awnings, and enchanting little shops. One was a confectioner’s shop with a big white shoe in the window filled with silver chocolates, and one was a florist’s. A woman knelt on the step outside over flat yellow baskets of flowers. Then there was a tiny hat shop filled with black hats and crêpe veils. How funny the people looked, as she peered down upon them – so squat and broad! They scuttled from side to side like black crabs. And what absurd noises the drivers made. Really, this room was almost perfect in its way – absolutely,

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scrupulously clean. She would be very happy here; this was exactly what she had imagined. . . . With flowers, with her books arranged, and one or two odd pieces of bright silk that she always travelled with, and her lovely embroidered shawl flung over the settee, and her writing things out on the table – really. . . . There came a bang at the door, followed by a little red-haired boy staggering under the weight of her suitcases. He was very pale, with big splashes of freckles on his nose and under his eyes, and so out of breath that he could not ask her where she wanted the luggage put, but stood, his head craned forward, his mouth open, to suck in the unaccustomed air. She over-paid him, and he went away. But with the generous coin she seemed to have given to him all her excitement and her delight. The door shut upon it. It was free. The sound of it died away. In the mirror she saw again that strange watchful creature who had been her companion on the journey, that woman with white cheeks and dark eyes and lips whose secret she shared, but whose air of stealthy desperation baffled and frightened her, and seemed somehow quite out of her control. She said to herself as she stroked her muff, ‘Keep calm!’ But it was too late. She had no more power over herself. She stammered: ‘I must, you know . . . I must have love . . . I can’t live without love, you know . . . it’s not. . . . ’ At the words that block of ice which had become her bosom melted into warm tears, and she felt those tears in great warm ripples flowing over her whole body. Yes, she wept as it were from head to foot. She bowed herself over her darling familiar muff and felt that she would dissolve away in tears. It was all over – all over. What was all over? Everything. The battle was lost. Notes U Text: Alpers, pp. 199–201.1 Scrapbook, pp. 61–5. 1. Alpers retains the name JMM gave this incomplete story, but corrects and expands that version from a MS fragment called ‘Geneva / Chapter IV’, which is dated ‘January 1st 1917’, while KM was living at 3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, and from another fragment in Notebook 32, ATL. See Alpers, p. 556.

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Toots1 TOOTS: (puts down her tea cup and begins to rock gently) But really, as time goes on I seem to become more and more selfish. I feel I want nothing and nobody except my own home and my own children within hail. Nice for the poor children! The extraordinary thing is that when they were children I never realised they’d grow up and marry and leave the nest. No. I always imagined us as one large family party, living here or travelling about – of course each of them living their own individual lives – but all of them coming down to breakfast in the morning and pulling their Pa-man’s beard2 . . . Don’t you know? . . . (She smiles at Bee absently and hands her a plate of biscuits, saying in an absent voice) Have an almond finger, dear, won’t you? They’re awfully good – so short and nutty! (But before Bee has time to take one she puts the plate down and gets up and begins to walk slowly about the room) Of course no outsider could know – not even you, Bee dear – how united we were, how happy! What jokes we had, what rare old giggles! How we used to kick each other under the table and make faces when the Pa-man would persist in reading out long lists of figures about frozen meat or wool or something.3 And how they used to come and sit in my room at night after I had gone to bed and while their Pa-man was massaging his last remaining hairs and would not go – until they were simply chased out with a hairbrush. Long after they were grown up, I mean . . . Yes – – I can see them now – – Margot undoing those two lovely rich silky plaits, Irene manicuring her beautiful little nails, Pip smelling all the pots on my dressing table, and Laura mooning over at the window. (She sits down again and blows her nose.) Then came that fatal trip to England when Margot married Duncan Henderson. Of course he is a delightful person and desirable in every way and would have been a charming friend for her to correspond with and keep in touch with – – don’t you know? But why – why go to the lengths of marrying him and starting the break up of it all. No, I shall never forget my feelings at having to leave that darling child so many thousands of miles away. Of course I had to keep up for Stanley’s sake but I had barely got over it when my precious Irene was snatched from me – before my very eyes – whirled off the very deck of the ship, so to speak, by Jimmy Curwen. (Stretches out her arms) There again – what was there to be said? A delightful person, desirable in every way, rich,

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handsome, a Southern American – and they are always so perfect to their women . . . Before I could look round another child was gone. I fully expected to arrive home here and find that Laura was engaged at least and Pip an old married man . . . BEE: (puts down her cup. Takes a needle out of her bodice and threads it, screwing up her eyes) I took good care that nothing of that sort should happen! TOOTS: Oh, I don’t suppose it needed such frightfully good care. They are so wrapped up in each other, those two. Pip understands Laura far better than I do and a million times better than her father ever could. BEE: (dryly) She is difficult, very! TOOTS: Oh, I – don’t – know – Of course at times I think she is simply intolerable, but then one can’t expect all one’s children to be alike. Margot and Irene never passed through these phases but I suppose there are hundreds of other brainy brilliant girls just like Laura. She’s too clever, really, and far too intense. Intense isn’t the word, my dear! She never can take a decent respectable interest in anything; she’s always head over ears before one can say fruit knife. When she is good – what I call good – I’m not saying this because I’m her mother, I’m speaking quite impersonally – she’s fascinating, irresistable! But then she so very seldom is what I call good. BEE: I think she has got very handsome lately – don’t you? TOOTS: Yes, hasn’t she! In the evenings, my dear, sometimes I can’t take my eyes off her. She looks like some wonderful little foreign princess. And then perhaps next morning she’ll come down in an old black blouse, a bit of black ribbon round her neck, obviously no stays, bags under her eyes, and ask in a hollow voice for coffee without any milk. On those occasions when I go up to her room I always find either Tolstoi under her pillow or that other man, the man with the impossible name – Dosty-something – Dostyosti I always call him. Poor child! How it maddens her! BEE: I think it is a very good thing for Laura that Margot is coming out here to live. It ought to steady her very much, having Margot here and the interest of Margot’s life. TOOTS: Yes, I expect you’re right. I hadn’t really thought what it would mean to anybody except to me. Think of it! I haven’t seen the dear child for six months, and she always was – such a mother’s baby. BEE: I shouldn’t be surprised if she were feeling more of a mother’s baby than ever just now. TOOTS: Why? What do you mean by just now? BEE: Isn’t there any talk of a family? TOOTS: (energetically) Good Heavens! I hope not! She’s never

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breathed a word to me. I think it’s the greatest mistake for young married people to rush into having children. When you’re young and with the whole of your life before you surely it’s the height of folly to sit down calmly and have baby after baby. Besides it’s so easily prevented now-a-days. Certainly if I had my time over again I’d never lead off with a baby. A baby is one of the last cards I should play. Besides there can’t be anything of that sort in the wind. If there had been I don’t think Duncan would have left her to travel by herself. He’d have waited for her. He never would have come on a month ahead like this. BEE: Quite frankly – of course it’s no affair of mine – I still can’t understand why he has rushed on ahead like this and left her to settle up all their affairs. Of course he had his appointment but his appointment could surely have waited a month. It seems to me odd. No doubt I’m old fashioned and behind these independent times. TOOTS: No, I agree. I think it is odd, very odd, but I’m afraid – typical. I had a feeling from the first moment that I saw them together that he didn’t appreciate the treasure he had got and that he was bound to take advantage of her angelic unselfishness. I only hope I’m wrong. I only hope he is all that she imagines he is. That’s why I shall be very glad to have him under my eye for a month and really get to know him without her. I’ve put him in the Bachelor’s Quarters, beside Pip’s rooms. He ought to be very snug there all to himself. (The clock strikes five) By Jove! It’s five already! They ought to be here in half an hour. Stanley is going down to the wharf but he has to go straight back to the office for a board meeting so Pip will drive up with Duncan. I’d better tell the faithful lunatic to put a kettle on. They are sure to be dying for a cup of tea. (She rings and crosses to the window) Heavens! The wind! What a vile day! Just the kind of day one would not choose to arrive anywhere. The garden will be blown to ribbons by tomorrow morning. (Enter Jennie with her cap on crooked.) JENNIE: Did you ring, Mrs Brandon? TOOTS: (vaguely) Er – yes – Jennie – I did take that liberty for once. Would you put on a kettle and have some tea ready for when Mr Henderson arrives. And – Jennie – where is the gardener – I can’t see a hint of him in the garden. He’s not blown away by any chance is he? JENNIE: Oh, no, Mrs Brandon. He’s having a nice ’ot cup of tea in the kitching with me. TOOTS: But Jennie he can’t still be drinking that nice hot cup of tea; he was at it two hours ago!

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JENNIE: Oh, Lor no, Mrs Brandon! That was ’is cup with ’is dinner. TOOTS: Well, you might just ask him from me not to forget all about the garden, will you? He might just occasionally look at it out of the kitchen window at any rate . . . And Jennie – put a can of really hot water covered with a towel in Mr Henderson’s room. (Jennie nods and goes.) I don’t want the poor soul to feel that he has fallen amongst absolute Maoris. BEE: (very pink, folding up her work) I must say I do disapprove, my dear, of the way you treat your servants. I had Jennie in the most perfect order while you were away. She was like a little machine about the house. And now she answers back – she’s got all her wretched Colonial habits again. TOOTS: I know – it’s my fault. It’s my weakness for human beings. If ever I feel that a servant is turning into a machine I always have to give her something to turn her back again – a petticoat that I haven’t finished with, or a pair of shoes that I love my own feet in, or a ticket for the theatre. Hark! Do you hear? That’s the cab, isn’t it? BEE: (flustered) My dear, I must go. TOOTS: No, why should you? Stay and meet Duncan. Of course. I meant you to stay. (There is the sound of a big door opening, and laughing voices. The door gives a terrific slam. Someone calls excitedly ‘Toots!’) TOOTS: (calling) In the morning room! (She runs to the door but it is opened. Duncan and Philip enter in big coats and caps, pulling off their gloves. Their noses are red with the cold wind. Duncan stuffs his gloves and cap into his pocket, comes forward and takes Toots by the elbows. Bends and kisses her. Pip looks on with merry eyes.) DUNCAN: My dear little Mater! TOOTS: My dear Duncan – welcome to our hearth! How splendid you are looking and how cold – you poor huge creature. Such a day to arrive! (She leads him forward) Bee dear, here he is. Duncan, this is my old friend Miss Wing. DUNCAN: (very cordial) How do you do, Miss Wing. I’m delighted! PIP: (runs forward. He is bursting with laughter and keeps shaking his head as though he had just come out of the sea.) Here, let me give you a hand with your coat – may I? (To Toots) You haven’t got an idea of what the weather is like on the wharf, my dear! It’s simply too awful, isn’t it? DUNCAN: It certainly is one of the roughest days I’ve ever struck. PIP: (laughing all the while) And if you’d only seen the poor old Pa-man staggering along the railway lines with me, holding on his

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hat with the crook of his umbrella. I told him to tie his handkerchief over his hat and fasten it in a neat knot under his chin – but he wouldn’t hear of it. And when we got to the place where the lighter should have been – the wind simply playing the fiddle with his sciatic nerves – and when the lighter did come and we watched it going up and down – But going up and down, my dear . . . And I thought that in two Ts we’d be going up and down with it I never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life. But of course he stuck to it like a Trojan and all the way out to the ship he pretended he liked it and said he used to go fishing down the Sounds4 in just that kind of weather. TOOTS: Poor old darling. I hope he has a good nip of brandy when he gets back to the office. I’ve a great mind to phone and tell him to. PIP: No, of course don’t do anything of the kind, silly. He’d be furious with me. (Duncan and Bee have been talking together. They raise their voices.) BEE: But what on earth can she have done it for? DUNCAN: That’s what puzzled me. It really did seem too dangerous a thing to do for the mere fun of it. I thought there must be some Prince Charming on board but I had a good look round and nobody appeared to be signalling. (Turns to Toots) As I was telling Miss Wing, Mater – While we were waiting for the lighter I was looking through my glasses at the shore and I saw a girl walking along a stone embankment by the edge of the sea. A frightfully dangerous place it looked! She was simply blown about in the wind like a little woollen ball. More than once she was blown right over – right on to the rocks. But she got up again each time and came on until she reached a kind of platform or something. PIP: Yes, where the people fish from. DUNCAN: And there she stood, waving at the ship. Just not being blown into the sea! TOOTS: (who hasn’t heard a word but has been warming Pip’s hands in hers – holding one hand against her breast and rubbing it and then holding the other, says in her absent voice) Fan-cy! (waking up) Tell me, how did you leave Margot? DUNCAN: Splendid – simply splendid! Of course she sent all kinds of loving messages to you all. I wish, for many reasons, that she could have come with me – but it wasn’t possible. For one thing she had so much that she wanted to settle and for another I had a very special piece of writing on hand and I felt a quiet voyage would be just the place to do it in. TOOTS: (dryly) Oh, I am sure it was much the wisest plan. I thought it most sensible and modern of you both. Personally I think it’s a great mistake at the best of times to travel with one’s husband – or any man, for the matter of that.

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PIP: Pooh! I like that – what about me! You’d give your eyes if I’d fly off with you. TOOTS: Even if I would – that’s got nothing to do with it. You’re not a man; you’re nothing but a child. PIP: (warmly) And what are you I should like to know. You’re nothing but an infant in arms. I could put you in a basket and tuck you under my arm – and only lift the lid and let you sit on my knee when it came out sunny. (Puts his arm round Toots’ shoulder and chuckles) We know what Bee is thinking, don’t we Toots. (mimics) I may be old fashioned and behind the times but it does seem to me odd that a child should speak so to its parent. (He shades his eyes with his hand and pretends to stagger back a step) Good Heavens! Do I see aright? A new black velvet blouse trimmed with a neat red and white glace check?? I’m surprised at you Bee! I wouldn’t have believed it! Or (goes over to Miss Bee, takes her hand and kissing it says to her ardently and warmly) was it for me? Am I the happy man? BEE: Let me go this instant, Philip! (Pip tries to put his arm around her waist) TOOTS: Philip, behave yourself, this instant, sir! I don’t know what you will be thinking of us Duncan. DUNCAN: (cordial to a fault) Ah, Mater, don’t apologise. I like it – it makes me feel like one of the family. TOOTS: (strangely) That’s splendid! (quickly) Wouldn’t you boys like some tea? Pip – show Duncan his rooms while the tea is coming. You don’t have to go back to the office today, do you? PIP: No, darling. TOOTS: Well, put your slippers on, my son. PIP: Oui, ma mère. (He puts his hand on Duncan’s shoulder) This way, old boy. (At the door) Mother – where is Laura? TOOTS: At the Library reading the Chinese Classics. PIP: Clever Dick! Avanti, signor. Observe with what ease the young Colonial rolls the foreign tongue. (They go out.) TOOTS: (at the door) If there is no hot water in Duncan’s room – just curse down the kitchen stairs, will you? (She comes back into the room and very deliberately shuts the door.) BEE: (who has been rearranging herself) Now I really must go, Toots dear. TOOTS: (pays no attention) Well, what do you think of him? BEE: He’s far better looking than his photograph made him out to be. TOOTS: (reluctantly) Yes, I suppose he is what you’d call good looking. BEE: And his voice is charming – a charming English voice. TOOTS: (naively) Isn’t it strange that I can’t take to him? Somehow

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he doesn’t seem to be in the least one of us – not to belong in the very faintest degree to our tribe if you know what I mean. But I really haven’t got any right to say that about him just now – the moment he has arrived and I dare say feels his nose is red and is dying to – – – wash his hands and part his hair. In fact I think it’s beastly of me to shut the door on him and begin criticising like that. I take back what I said, Bee. I really am unscrupulous – just as bad as the children. BEE: (kissing her) My dear Toots, you may always be certain that anything you ever tell me never goes the length of my little finger further. TOOTS: Oh, that’s not what I care about at all. Goodbye, dear. I’ll come with you to the door. And while I remember I’ll get you the pot of my new cape gooseberry jam before I forget. (The stage is empty. It gets dusky. The wind is heard rushing and hooting. Someone wrenches open the french windows and comes through, shutting them after her as though she were being pursued by the furious wind. It is Laura. She wears a big black coat, a scarf round her neck and a white woollen cap pulled over her ears. When she has shut the windows she staggers forward, her hands clasped at the back of her head, panting and laughing silently, and saying in a breathless whisper ‘How marvellous it was. How marvellous.’ She crosses her arms over her breast, hugging her shoulders. ‘And how terrified I was! How absolutely terrified!’ She stands quite still for a moment and then blurts out angrily ‘And the joke was that some arrogant fool actually thought I was waving to him and started waving back!’ It is quite dusky. Only the shapes of things are seen and Laura’s white wool cap. The door opens, letting in a bright light from the hall. Duncan enters, hesitates. Laura goes up to him and says in a shy soft voice ‘Good evening. I am Laura. And you’re my new brother-in-law Duncan, aren’t you.’ She puts out her hand and as he clasps hers and is about to speak she says with a strong American accent: ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Henderson.’ And walks out.) Quick Curtain End of Act I. Act II [A small ink sketch of a stage set, with the props lettered and listed at the side, thus:] A. – door. B. – french windows. C. – leather sofa.

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D. – piano (upright). E. – deep corner couch covered in chintz. F. – fireplace and leather seat in front of it. G. – revolving bookcase. H. – bookshelves above writing table. I. – two armchairs covered in same chintz as couch and a low table between them for tea or work. J. – writing table. The Morning Room as before. Mr. Brandon lies on the leather sofa against the back wall to the right of the door. Pip sprawls over the table cutting open and tearing the wrappers from a big packet of new English and American magazines. He wears white flannel trousers, white boots and a white flannel shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. Mrs Brandon walks about the room, now giving herself a glance in the mirror over the mantelpiece, now pulling the blinds half an inch lower, now bending over the back of Pip’s chair and looking at the pictures with him. She is dressed in black muslin with a grey ostrich feather scarf dropping from her shoulders. Mr Brandon’s hands are folded over his belly – he has spread his handkerchief over his face and very occasionally he gives a loud beatificsounding snore. Although the blinds are more than halfway down one realises it is an exquisite hot Sunday afternoon. PIP: I can’t think why it is but I always feel the need of a sweet toothful on Sunday afternoons – do you? Have you got a chocolate button tucked away in the drawer of the sewing machine or do you think there is by any chance an odd, rather gritty jujube at the bottom of your workbag darling? TOOTS: No, I know there isn’t. There’s nothing except a chip of that awful liquorice the Pa-man bought for his cold mixed up with the sealing wax in the pen tray. Any good? PIP: (shudders and says in a hollow voice) No good! Come here, Toots. Don’t you think that girl is awfully pretty? TOOTS: Lovely! What a tragedy it is that actresses so often look like Princesses and Princesses so seldom look like actresses. (She bends over him smelling his hair.) How delicious your hair smells, child – like fresh pineapple. PIP: (leans against her smiling with half shut eyes) Oh, Mother . . . Do you ever get a feeling, for no reason at all, just out of the blue – a feeling of such terrific happiness that it’s almost unbearable. You feel that it’s all bottled up here (puts his hand on his breast) and that if you don’t give it to somebody or get rid of it somehow – tear it out of yourself – you’ll simply die – of – bliss . . . And at the same time, you feel as though you can do anything you want to – anything. Fly, knock down a mountain, or any darned thing.

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Just the moment you said my hair smelled of pineapples I got one of those waves – you see for no reason – and if I hugged you now I’d break all your little bones. I couldn’t help it. I’m a giant . . . Do you know what I mean? (Mr Brandon gives a long snore.) PIP: (sotto voce, very sentimental, sings) Sleep darling sleep the day-light Di-i-ies down in the gold-olden west!5

TOOTS: Sh-sh! Don’t wake him. He’ll make me rush off for a walk and I’m so much happier here. PIP: Shall I take him out instead of you. TOOTS: My dear! The skies would fall. PIP: Oh well I don’t want to particularly. I’m booked to play tennis at the Graces. How awfully quiet the house is. Where’s everybody. TOOTS: Duncan is writing letters and Laura hasn’t come down yet. I can’t think what has come over the child. She has simply stayed in bed today. I took her up some fruit after lunch and she said she was getting up then. She didn’t look a scrap tired. On the contrary she looked marvellously well. How did she get on last night? Was she a success? Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 101–8. 1. The title is taken from the draft, although KM had another title in mind when she wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell on 17 May 1917, and had completed rather more than survives: ‘My play, which is called “A Ship in the Harbour”, is at its Third Act. I hope it will be good. I know the idea is good. But there is an unthinkable amount of pruning to be done before one can liberate one’s people in a play’ (CLKM, 1, p. 306). KM’s ‘people’ are clearly based on memories of her family in Wellington, particularly her mother and brother, and with Laura, as later in ‘The Garden Party’, partly a depiction of herself. Mrs Laura Kate Bright, a close friend of her mother, whom Harold Beauchamp married after his wife’s death, was known as ‘Bee’. 2. To act in a ‘Pa’-like fashion was a Beauchamp family expression for quirky, eccentric but typical elderly male behaviour. ‘Pa-man’ could also be a term of affection when KM was well disposed towards her father. As she had written to JMM in early May 1913, ‘I feel towards my Pa man like a little girl. I want to jump and stamp on his chest and cry “youve got to love me”. When he says he does, I feel quite confident that God is on my side’ (CLKM, 1, p. 120).

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3. Harold Beauchamp wrote official annual reports on New Zealand trade and economy, which he sent to his daughter. 4. The Marlborough Sounds, at the eastern tip of the South Island, where there were several Beauchamp relatives, and where KM spent holidays with her grandparents. 5. ‘A Song of Sleep’ (1903), words and music by Lord Henry Somerset.

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Two Tuppenny Ones, Please LADY: Yes, there is, dear; there’s plenty of room. If the lady next to me would move her seat and sit opposite. . . . Would you mind? So that my friend may sit next to me. . . . Thank you so much! Yes, dear, both the cars on war work; I’m getting quite used to ’buses. Of course, if we go to the theatre, I ’phone Cynthia. She’s still got one car. Her chauffeur’s been called up. . . . Ages ago. . . . Killed by now, I think. I can’t quite remember. I don’t like her new man at all. I don’t mind taking any reasonable risk, but he’s so obstinate – he charges everything he sees. Heaven alone knows what would happen if he rushed into something that wouldn’t swerve aside. But the poor creature’s got a withered arm, and something the matter with one of his feet, I believe she told me. I suppose that’s what makes him so careless. I mean – well! . . . Don’t you know! . . . FRIEND: . . . . ? LADY: Yes, she’s sold it. My dear, it was far too small. There were only ten bedrooms, you know. There were only ten bedrooms in that house. Extraordinary! One wouldn’t believe it from the outside – would one? And with the governesses and the nurses – and so on. All the menservants had to sleep out. . . . You know what that means. FRIEND: . . . !! CONDUCTOR: Fares, please. Pass your fares along. LADY: How much is it? Tuppence, isn’t it? Two tuppenny ones, please. Don’t bother – I’ve got some coppers, somewhere or other. FRIEND: . . . ! LADY: No, it’s all right. I’ve got some – if only I can find them. CONDUCTOR: Parse your fares, please. FRIEND: . . . ! LADY: Really? So I did. I remember now. Yes, I paid coming. Very well, I’ll let you, just this once. War time, my dear. CONDUCTOR: ’Ow far do you want ter go?

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LADY: To the Boltons. CONDUCTOR: Another ’a’penny each. LADY: No – oh, no! I only paid tuppence coming. Are you quite sure? CONDUCTOR (savagely): Read it on the board for yourself. LADY: Oh, very well. Here’s another penny. (To friend): Isn’t it extraordinary how disobliging these men are? After all, he’s paid to do his job. But they are nearly all alike. I’ve heard these motor ’buses affect the spine after a time. I suppose that’s it. . . . You’ve heard about Teddie – haven’t you? FRIEND: . . . . LADY: He’s got his. . . . He’s got his. . . . Now what is it? Whatever can it be? How ridiculous of me! FRIEND: . . . ? LADY: Oh, no! He’s been a Major for ages. FRIEND: . . . ? LADY: Colonel? Oh, no, my dear, it’s something much higher than that. Not his company – he’s had his company a long time. Not his battalion. . . . FRIEND: . . . ? LADY: Regiment! Yes, I believe it is his regiment. But what I was going to say is he’s been made a . . . Oh, how silly I am! What’s higher than a Brigadier-General? Yes, I believe that’s it. Chief of Staff. Of course, Mrs T.’s frightfully gratified. FRIEND: . . . ! LADY: Hasn’t he? He’s been most lucky – most mercifully spared . . . so far. But he’s back again, you know, and ‘over the top’ every day. FRIEND: . . . LADY: Oh, my dear, everybody goes over the top nowadays. Whatever his position may be. And Teddy is such a sport, I really don’t see how. . . . Too dreadful – isn’t it! FRIEND: . . . LADY: Didn’t you know? She’s at the War Office, and doing very well. I believe she got a rise the other day. She’s something to do with notifying the deaths, or finding the missing. I don’t know exactly what it is. At any rate, she says it is too depressing for words, and she has to read the most heart-rending letters from parents, and so on. Happily, they’re a very cheery little group in her room – all officers’ wives, and they make their own tea, and get cakes in turn from Stewart’s. She has one afternoon a week off, when she shops or has her hair waved. Last time she and I went to see Yvette’s Spring Show. FRIEND: . . . ? LADY: No, not really. I’m getting frightfully sick of these coat-frocks, aren’t you? I mean, as I was saying to her, what is the use of paying an enormous price for having one made by Yvette, when you really

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can’t tell the difference, in the long run, between it and one of those cheap ready-made ones. Of course, one has the satisfaction for oneself of knowing that the material is good, and so on – but it looks nothing. No; I advised her to get a good coat and skirt. For, after all, a good coat and skirt always tells. Doesn’t it? FRIEND: . . . ! LADY: Yes, I didn’t tell her that – but that’s what I had in mind. She’s much too fat for those coat-frocks. She goes out far too much at the hips. I have ordered a rather lovely indefinite blue one for myself, trimmed with the new lobster red . . . I’ve lost my good Kate, you know. FRIEND: . . . ! LADY: Yes, isn’t it annoying! Just when I got her more or less trained. But she went off her head, like they all do nowadays, and decided that she wanted to go into munitions. I told her when she gave notice that she would go on the strict understanding that if she got a job (which I think is highly improbable), she was not to come back and disturb the other servants. CONDUCTOR (savagely): Another penny each, if you’re going on. LADY: Oh, we’re there. How extraordinary! I never should have noticed. . . . FRIEND: . . . ? LADY: Tuesday? Bridge on Tuesday? No, dear, I’m afraid I can’t manage Tuesday. I trot out the wounded every Tuesday you know. I let cook take them to the Zoo, or some place like that – don’t you know. Wednesday – I’m perfectly free on Wednesday. CONDUCTOR: It’ll be Wednesday before you get off the ’bus if you don’t ’urry up. LADY: That’s quite enough, my man. FRIEND: . . . !! Notes Text: New Age, 21: 1, 3 May 1917, pp. 13–14. SCOS.

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Late at Night (Virginia is seated by the fire. Her outdoor things are thrown on a chair; her boots are faintly steaming in the fender.)

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VIRGINIA: (laying the letter down): I don’t like this letter at all – not at all. I wonder if he means it to be so snubbing – or if it’s just his way. (Reads). ‘Many thanks for the socks. As I have had five pairs sent me lately, I am sure you will be pleased to hear I gave yours to a friend in my company.’ No; it can’t be my fancy. He must have meant it; it is a dreadful snub. Oh, I wish I hadn’t sent him that letter telling him to take care of himself. I’d give anything to have that letter back. I wrote it on a Sunday evening, too – that was so fatal. I never ought to write letters on Sunday evenings – I always let myself go so. I can’t think why Sunday evenings always have such a funny effect on me. I simply yearn to have someone to write to – or to love. Yes, that’s it; they make me feel sad and full of love. Funny, isn’t it!1 I must start going to church again; it’s fatal sitting in front of the fire and thinking. There are the hymns, too; one can let oneself go so safely in the hymns. (She croons) ‘And then for those our Dearest and our Best’1 – (but her eye lights on the next sentence in the letter). ‘It was most kind of you to have knitted them yourself.’ Really! Really, that is too much! Men are abominably arrogant! He actually imagines that I knitted them myself. Why, I hardly know him; I’ve only spoken to him a few times. Why on earth should I knit him socks? He must think I am far gone to throw myself at his head like that. For it certainly is throwing oneself at a man’s head to knit him socks – if he’s almost a stranger. Buying him an odd pair is a different matter altogether. No; I shan’t write to him again – that’s definite. And, besides, what would be the use? I might get really keen on him and he’d never care a straw for me. Men don’t. I wonder why it is that after a certain point I always seem to repel people. Funny, isn’t it! They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them – even give them a hint – that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear. I suppose I shall get embittered about it later on. Perhaps they know somehow that I’ve got so much to give. Perhaps it’s that that frightens them. Oh, I feel I’ve got such boundless, boundless love to give to somebody – I would care for somebody so utterly and so completely – watch over them – keep everything horrible away – and make them feel that if ever they wanted anything done I lived to do it. If only I felt that somebody wanted me, that I was of use to somebody, I should become a different person. Yes; that is the secret of life for me – to feel loved, to feel wanted, to know that somebody leaned on me for everything absolutely – for ever. And I am strong, and far, far richer than most women. I am sure that most women

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don’t have this tremendous yearning to – express themselves. I suppose that’s it – to come into flower, almost. I’m all folded and shut away in the dark, and nobody cares. I suppose that is why I feel this tremendous tenderness for plants and sick animals and birds – it’s one way of getting rid of this wealth, this burden of love. And then, of course, they are so helpless – that’s another thing. But I have a feeling that if a man were really in love with you he’d be just as helpless, too. Yes, I am sure that men are very helpless. . . . I don’t know why, I feel inclined to cry to-night. Certainly not because of this letter; it isn’t half important enough. But I keep wondering if things will ever change or if I shall go on like this until I am old – just wanting and wanting. I’m not as young as I was even now. I’ve got lines, and my skin isn’t a bit what it used to be. I never was really pretty, not in the ordinary way, but I did have lovely skin and lovely hair – and I walked well. I only caught sight of myself in a glass to-day – stooping and shuffling along. . . . I looked dowdy and elderly. Well, no; perhaps not quite as bad as that; I always exaggerate about myself. But I’m faddy about things now – that’s a sign of age, I’m sure. The wind – I can’t bear being blown about in the wind now; and I hate having wet feet. I never used to care about those things – I used almost to revel in them – they made me feel so one with Nature in a way. But now I get cross and I want to cry and I yearn for something to make me forget. I suppose that’s why women take to drink. Funny, isn’t it! The fire is going out. I’ll burn this letter. What’s it to me? Pooh! I don’t care. What is it to me? The five other women can send him socks! And I don’t suppose he was a bit what I imagined. I can just hear him saying, ‘It was most kind of you, to have knitted them yourself.’ He has a fascinating voice. I think it was his voice that attracted me to him – and his hands; they looked so strong – they were such man’s hands. Oh, well, don’t sentimentalise over it; burn it! . . . No, I can’t now – the fire’s gone out. I’ll go to bed. I wonder if he really meant to be snubbing. Oh, I am tired. Often when I go to bed now I want to pull the clothes over my head – and just cry. Funny, isn’t it! Notes Text: New Age, 21: 2, 10 May 1917, p. 38. SCOS. 1. And then for these, our dearest and our best. By this prevailing presence we appeal [. . .] William Bright, ‘And now, O Father, mindful of our love,’ (1874).

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•

The Black Cap1 (A lady and her husband are seated at breakfast. He is quite calm, reading the newspaper and eating; but she is strangely excited, dressed for travelling, and only pretending to eat.) SHE: Oh, if you should want your flannel shirts, they are on the righthand bottom shelf of the linen press. HE (at a board meeting of the Meat Export Company): No. SHE: You didn’t hear what I said. I said if you should want your flannel shirts, they are on the right-hand bottom shelf of the linen press. HE: (positively): I quite agree! SHE: It does seem rather extraordinary that on the very morning that I am going away you cannot leave the newspaper alone for five minutes. HE (mildly): My dear woman, I don’t want you to go. In fact, I have asked you not to go. I can’t for the life of me see. . . . SHE: You know perfectly well that I am only going because I absolutely must. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, and the dentist said last time. . . . HE: Good! Good! Don’t let’s go all over the ground again. We’ve thrashed it all out pretty thoroughly, haven’t we? SERVANT: Cab’s here, m’m. SHE: Please put my luggage in. SERVANT: Very good, m’m. (She gives a tremendous sigh.) HE: You haven’t got too much time if you want to catch that train. SHE: I know. I’m going. (In a changed tone.) Darling, don’t let us part like this. It makes me feel so wretched. Why is it that you always seem to take a positive delight in spoiling my enjoyment? HE: I don’t think going to the dentist is so positively enjoyable. SHE: Oh, you know that’s not what I mean. You’re only saying that to hurt me. You know you are begging the question. HE (laughing): And you are losing your train. You’ll be back on Thursday evening, won’t you? SHE (in a low, desperate voice): Yes, on Thursday evening. Good-bye, then. (Comes over to him, and takes his head in her hands.) Is there

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anything really the matter? Do at least look at me. Don’t you – care – at – all? HE: My darling girl! This is like an exit on the cinema. SHE (letting her hands fall): Very well. Good-bye. (Gives a quick tragic glance round the dining-room and goes.) (On the way to the station.) SHE: How strange life is! I didn’t think I should feel like this at all. All the glamour seems to have gone, somehow. Oh, I’d give anything for the cab to turn round and go back. The most curious thing is that I feel if he really had made me believe he loved me it would have been much easier to have left him. But that’s absurd. How strong the hay smells. It’s going to be a very hot day. I shall never see these fields again. Never, never! But in another way I am glad that it happened like this; it puts me so finally, absolutely in the right for ever! He doesn’t want a woman at all. A woman has no meaning for him. He’s not the type of man to care deeply for anybody except himself. I’ve become the person who remembers to take the links out of his shirts before they go to the wash – that is all! And that’s not enough for me. I’m young – I’m too proud. I’m not the type of woman to vegetate in the country and rave over ‘our’ own lettuces. . . . What you have been trying to do, ever since you married me is to make me submit, to turn me into your shadow, to rely on me so utterly that you’d only to glance up to find the right time printed on me somehow, as if I were a clock. You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul. No; you wanted me to settle down to your peaceful existence. Oh! how your blindness has outraged me – how I hate you for it! I am glad – thankful – thankful to have left you! I’m not a green girl; I am not conceited, but I do know my powers. It’s not for nothing that I’ve always longed for riches and passion and freedom, and felt that they were mine by right. (She leans against the buttoned back of the cab and murmurs.) ‘You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.’ (She smiles at her little royal hands.) I wish my heart didn’t beat so hard. It really hurts me. It tires me so and excites me so. It’s like someone in a dreadful hurry beating against a door. . . . This cab is only crawling along; we shall never be at the station at this rate. Hurry! Hurry! My love, I am coming as quickly as ever I can. Yes, I am suffering just like you. It’s dreadful, isn’t it unbearable – this last half-hour without each other. . . . Oh, God! the horse has begun to walk again. Why doesn’t he beat the great strong brute of a thing. . . . Our wonderful life! We shall travel all over the world together. The whole world shall be ours because of our love. Oh,

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be patient! I am coming as fast as I possibly can. . . . Ah, now it’s downhill; now we really are going faster. (An old man attempts to cross the road.) Get out of the way, you old fool! He deserves to be run over. . . . Dearest – dearest; I am nearly there. Only be patient! (At the station.) Put it in a first-class smoker. . . . There’s plenty of time after all. A full ten minutes before the train goes. No wonder he’s not here. I mustn’t appear to be looking for him. But I must say I’m disappointed. I never dreamed of being the first to arrive. I thought he would have been here and engaged a carriage and bought papers and flowers. . . . How curious! I absolutely saw in my mind a paper of pink carnations. . . . He knows how fond I am of carnations. But pink ones are not my favourites. I prefer dark red or pale yellow. He really will be late if he doesn’t come now. The guard has begun to shut the doors. Whatever can have happened? Something dreadful. Perhaps at the last moment he has shot himself. . . . I could not bear the thought of ruining your life. . . . But you are not ruining my life. Ah, where are you? I shall have to get into the carriage. . . . Who is this? That’s not him! It can’t be – yes, it is. What on earth has he got on his head? A black cap. But how awful! He’s utterly changed. What can he be wearing a black cap for? I wouldn’t have known him. How absurd he looks coming towards me, smiling, in that appalling cap! HE: My darling, I shall never forgive myself. But the most absurd, tragic-comic thing happened. (They get into the carriage.) I lost my hat. It simply disappeared. I had half the hotel looking for it. Not a sign! So finally, in despair, I had to borrow this from another man who was staying there. (The train moves off.) You’re not angry. (Tries to take her in his arms.) SHE: Don’t! We’re not even out of the station yet. HE (ardently): Great God! What do I care if the whole world were to see us? (Tries to take her in his arms.) My wonder! My joy! SHE: Please don’t! I hate being kissed in trains. HE (profoundly hurt): Oh, very well. You are angry. It’s serious. You can’t get over the fact that I was late. But if you only knew the agony I suffered. . . . SHE: How can you think I could be so small-minded? I’m not angry at all. HE: Then why won’t you let me kiss you? SHE (laughing hysterically): You look so different somehow – almost a stranger. HE (jumps up and looks at himself in the glass anxiously, and fatuously, she decides): But it’s all right, isn’t it?

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SHE: Oh, quite all right; perfectly all right. Oh, oh, oh! (She begins to laugh and cry with rage.) (They arrive.) SHE (while he gets a cab): I must get over this. It’s an obsession. It’s incredible that anything should change a man so. I must tell him. Surely it’s quite simple to say: Don’t you think now that you are in the city you had better buy yourself a hat? But that will make him realise how frightful the cap has been. And the extraordinary thing is that he doesn’t realise it himself. I mean if he has looked at himself in the glass, and doesn’t think that cap too ridiculous, how different our points of view must be. . . . How deeply different. I mean, if I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that. I couldn’t even have got to know him. He isn’t my style at all. (She looks round.) Everybody is smiling at it. Well, I don’t wonder! The way it makes his ears stick out, and the way it makes him have no back to his head at all. HE: The cab is ready, my darling. (They get in.) HE (tries to take her hand): The miracle that we two should be driving together, so simply, like this. (She arranges her veil.) HE (tries to take her hand; very ardent): I’ll engage one room, my love. SHE: Oh, no! Of course you must take two. HE: But don’t you think it would be wiser not to create suspicion? SHE: I must have my own room (To herself.) You can hang your cap behind your own door! (She begins to laugh hysterically.) HE: Ah! thank God! My queen is her happy self again! (At the hotel.) MANAGER: Yes, Sir, I quite understand. I think I’ve got the very thing for you, Sir. Kindly step this way. (He takes them into a small sitting-room, with a bedroom leading out of it.) This would suit you nicely, wouldn’t it? And if you liked, we could make you up a bed on the sofa. HE: Oh, admirable! Admirable! (The Manager goes.) SHE (furious): But I told you I wanted a room to myself. What a trick to play upon me! I told you I did not want to share a room. How dare you treat me like this? (She mimics.) Admirable! Admirable! I shall never forgive you for that! HE (overcome): Oh, God, what is happening! I don’t understand –

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I’m in the dark. Why have you suddenly, on this day of days, ceased to love me? What have I done? Tell me! SHE (sinks on the sofa): I’m very tired. If you do love me, please leave me alone. I – I only want to be alone for a little. HE (tenderly): Very well. I shall try to understand. I do begin to understand. I’ll go out for half an hour, and then, my love, you may feel calmer. (He looks round, distracted.) SHE: What is it? HE: My heart – you are sitting on my cap. (She gives a positive scream and moves into the bedroom. He goes. She waits for a moment, and then puts down her veil, and takes up her suitcase.) (In the taxi.) SHE: Yes, Waterloo. (She leans back.) Ah, I’ve escaped – I’ve escaped! I shall just be in time to catch the afternoon train home. Oh, it’s like a dream – I’ll be home before supper. I’ll tell him that the city was too hot or the dentist away. What does it matter? I’ve a right to my own home. . . . It will be wonderful driving up from the station; the fields will smell so delicious. There is cold fowl for supper left over from yesterday, and orange jelly. . . . I have been mad, but now I am sane again. Oh, my husband! Notes Text: New Age, 21: 3, 17 May 1917, pp. 62–3. SCOS. 1. Although KM had considered including this story in BOS, she wrote to JMM on 2 February 1920, ‘I think the Black Cap had better not be included’ (CLKM, 3, p. 203).

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In Confidence (Five young gentlemen are having no end of an argument in a big, shadowy drawing-room. They are tremendously at their ease. One is playing with the ears and kissing the top of the head of a blue Persian cat, two are sitting on the floor hugging their knees, the fourth sprawls on a sofa, one leg doubled under him, cutting a French book with a jade paper-knife, and the fifth droops over the gleaming grand piano. Marigold is curled up in a black chair. Now and again she murmurs ‘How true that is’ or ‘Do you really think so?’ Isobel sits on the arm of her chair, smiling faintly.)

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4TH GENTLEMAN: But look here, all I wanted to say is that the lack of prudery in France merely seems to me to prove that the French do believe that man is au fond a rational animal. You don’t dispute that, do you? I mean – well – damn it all! their literature’s based on it. Isn’t it? 2ND GENTLEMAN: And that, according to you, explains why they seek their inspiration, their very inspiration, in realism. Does it? 4TH GENTLEMAN (superbly): Of course it does. Absolutely. How else are you going to explain it? 1ST GENTLEMAN: Then a nation that’s ‘got prudery’, as the Americans would say, is a nation that believes man is not a rational animal? 5TH GENTLEMAN (very bitterly): There are things, say the English, which are not to be talked about. Fermez la porte, s’il vous plaît. 3RD GENTLEMAN (greatly excited): But look here – half a minute – don’t go too fast; this is damned interesting. Now we really are getting at something. If what you say is true, then prudery is a step towards real art – what? For what do we mean by prudery? Prudery is false shame, the negative to real shame, which again is, as it were, the negative to reverence. Reverence being the positive quality, the thing that great art’s got to have – what? 5TH GENTLEMAN (extremely bitterly): I heard a good bit of Bowery slang the other day. (With a strong Yankee drawl.) Put sand on your boots, kid; you’re sliding. 4TH GENTLEMAN: Oh, shut up. If you don’t want to talk, go and play croquet. Yes, that’s what I was more or less driving at. 2ND GENTLEMAN: And that, according to you, explains why the English seek their inspiration, their very inspiration, in idealism, does it? 4TH GENTLEMAN: Precisely. And also why the English must of necessity beat the French at this art game all the time. 1ST GENTLEMAN: Therefore it’s all a question of values – a sense of moralities. . . . 3RD GENTLEMAN: And puts the stopper finally and irrevocably on old man Kant – what? (They burst out laughing. Under cover of their laughter Marigold lays her hand in Isobel’s lap: ‘Shall we slip away?’ Isobel smiles assent.) (In the hall.) MARIGOLD (puts her arms round Isobel and lays her head against Isobel’s shoulder): Oh, I couldn’t have stood that for another moment; could you? Aren’t men extraordinary? Don’t they ever grow out of that kind of thing? No; never. They have an insatiable

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hunger for hunting after something that nine out of ten women would have captured without troubling to lift a finger. Too absurd! They remind me of those big woolly dogs who love to pretend to lose and pursue and bark after and chase and root out the bone you’ve thrown under their very noses. What on earth makes them do it? Vanity, my dear, and the masculine delight in showing off. Can’t you see them in about an hour’s time thumping their tails and licking their chops and saying more or less aloud: ‘Well, we had a pretty stiff argument!’ Bother them! Let’s forget them. Look at the heavenly afternoon that we’re wasting. Won’t you come out for a little walk with me? I don’t seem to have had you to myself a moment yet. And there are so many things I want to ask you. (Isobel smiles.) MARIGOLD: I’ll just run up and put on a hat, and you must, too, darling. The sun is so strong, and you are not to get any more freckles on your nose, you bad child! The freckles that you have got are very charming – very sweet; but you can have too many, don’t you think? And I never can see why one should look like a milkmaid simply because one lives in the country; can you? I’ve got some lovely cream; I’ll give you a little to put on tonight. (They separate. Marigold goes up to her room, powders her face, smears a little rouge on her lips and a little black on each eyelid; puts on a string of big green beads and takes them off again; puts on a string of huge yellow beads and takes them off again; puts on a string of carved stones and lets them lie. Pins on an immense straw hat that looks to have been pelted with its little bunches of cherries, and ties it under her chin with some wide tulle. Says to the person in the glass: ‘Emma, Lady Hamilton’,1 and then bends her head forward and shoots out her under-lip a little, and murmurs: ‘Mrs Siddons’.2 The person in the glass agrees. Roots in a drawer full of dead white gloves, and drifts downstairs.) (On the road to the village.) MARIGOLD: Oh, the relief to be out in the sun and among simple ardent things like fields and trees and cattle. But you’re not very fond of the country, are you? My dear, why should you be? You feel more yourself in cafés and restaurants and among crowds of people, and I feel more at home in wet woods and dim fields or walking by the sea. Neither is more right or higher than the other. It’s just a question of one’s own individual psychology; don’t you agree? And, curiously enough, about ten years ago I had just the same feelings that you have – the same burning curiosity about life, the same desire to experience everything, no matter what, even to throw myself away rather than be out of anything. I think that all

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women of personality are bound to go through that phase – for it is a phase, Isobel, at any rate for women of real personality. And I am sure the moment will come to you as it did to me when you won’t be able to understand what on earth you saw in that kind of life . . . when the things of the spirit . . . when one is so infinitely content to have Shelley for a friend rather than. . . . You know what I mean? (Isobel smiles.) MARIGOLD: Of course, I don’t know at all what your life is. It may be tremendously rich; I have an idea that it is. Curious, isn’t it, how little we do know of each other. Do you know me at all? How hard it is to break the ice and melt towards each other as one does so long to melt – doesn’t one? Why are we so shy of each other? Have you real intimate women friends? I am sure you haven’t. And is it for the same reason that I haven’t either? One simply can’t get over this feeling of distrust, and Heaven knows one has cause enough to feel it. Women are such traitors to one another, aren’t they? One can feel that one is everything to another woman, her dearest friend – her closest – and the most commonplace little man has only to come along and lift a finger for her to betray you, to let you down! It’s very strange and awfully distressing, too – don’t you feel? For, after all, Isobel, one does not always want to have one’s hand held by a man, does one? And women might be so wonderful together. . . . I often feel I could appreciate a woman far better than any man could – understand her so exquisitely – sympathise so perfectly. But where is the woman who wants my friendship? Who will confide in me? . . . Let us stand for a minute under this lovely tree. It might be the one that Blake3 saw the angels in. (Isobel looks up into the branches, and smiles.) MARIGOLD: Perhaps you and I are going to be great friends – what do you feel? Sometimes I think you like me – sometimes I am not so sure. Strange little secret person! Do you think that anything you could tell me about your life and your experience could shock me? You would not, my dear. I burn to know and sympathise and understand. I feel so strangely that we two are very alike in a way. At any rate, we will have courage, Isobel, and that is very rare. Perhaps we even want the same things. What do you really want to happen, Isobel? What do you want from life? (Isobel shakes her head, and smiles.) MARIGOLD: Yes, you do; but you still shrink a little. You are still a little bit wild with me. Ah, my dear, you have no need to be. Trust me – you really may! It’s getting late; we must rush back for tea. It’s been lovely – lovely, this talk; hasn’t it? Cleared the air so, and made everything so simple and ardent. The heavenly sky full of little Poussin4 cherubs. Isobel, dearest!

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(They arrive.) MAID: I’ve just taken in the tea, m’m. MARIGOLD (pressing Isobel’s hand): Run and take off your shoes. I must go and feed the famishing horde. (In the dining-room one young gentleman hovers over the table; one wasp over the jam-pot.) MARIGOLD (holding back a curtain with one hand: a portrait by Manet,5 she decides): Where are the others? YOUNG GENTLEMAN: The others have all gone for a walk; they followed you over the fields. MARIGOLD: Oh, we missed them! Isobel will be down in a moment; she’s just changing her shoes. Do you like her? Very attractive, don’t you think? YOUNG GENTLEMAN: Well – I find it rather a trial, don’t you know, to keep at that level. MARIGOLD (looks at him a long moment too sweetly for words): Do you, really? That comforts me. I had thought it must have been my fault. (In confidence.) We have had the most ‘intense’ talk you can imagine. I tried to listen with my mind, but all the while I have been feeling my soul, like one of those little air balloons at the end of a string, tugging and pulling to be off . . . simply to float away into the blue and bob against nothing. (Unties her hat strings, throws her hat away, and runs her flashing fingers through her hair.) I feel quite worn out. No; I shall not ask Isobel again in the summer; Isobel is a winter friend. One can sit down and tackle her then with even a kind of appropriate enthusiasm as one wades through a suet pudding! I’m very wicked to talk like this. . . . But you know I never feel that her seriousness is quite sincere – do you? I often feel that if a man were to absolutely ignore it and were to approach her really cleverly. . . . (Isobel enters.) MARIGOLD: Ah, here you are, dearest. Sit by me. Lovely you look in that black scarf; doesn’t she? YOUNG GENTLEMAN (with his mouth full of scone): Lovely. (Isobel looks at her tea, and smiles.) Notes Text: New Age, 21: 4, 24 May 1917, pp. 88–9. 1. Recalling the painting of Emma, Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson, in a large straw hat, by George Romney (1782).

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2. The actress Mrs Sarah Siddons also was painted numerous times, most notably by Sir Joshua Reynolds as ‘The Tragic Muse’ (1784). 3. As a boy, the painter and poet William Blake saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. As related in Chapter 1, Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake Pictor Ignotus (1863). 4. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), court painter to Louis XIII. 5. Édouard Manet (1832–83), a key figure in the development of both French realism and Impressionism.

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The Common Round1 Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lies in a black iron bedstead, staring up at the ceiling. Her room, a Bloomsbury top floor back, smells of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before. MISS MOSS: Oh dear, I am cold. I wonder why it is I always wake up so cold in the mornings now. My knees and my feet and my back – especially my back; it’s like a sheet of ice. And I always was such a one for being warm in bed in the old days. It’s not as if I was skinny – I’m just the same full figure that I used to be. No; it’s because I don’t have a good hot dinner in the evenings. (Pageant of Good Hot Dinners passes across the ceiling, all of them accompanied by a bottle of Nourishing Stout.) Even if I were to get up now and have a sensible, substantial breakfast. . . . (Pageant of Sensible, Substantial Breakfasts, but shepherded by an enormous, white, uncut ham. Miss Moss shudders and disappears under the bed clothes. The Landlady bounces in.) LANDLADY: Letter for you, Miss Moss. MISS MOSS (far too friendly): Oh, thank you very much, Mrs. Pine. It’s very good of you, I’m sure, to take the trouble. LANDLADY: No trouble at all. I thought perhaps it was the letter you’d been expecting. MISS MOSS (brightly): Why, yes; perhaps it is. (Puts her head on one side, and smiles vaguely at the letter.) I shouldn’t be surprised. LANDLADY: Well, I should, Miss Moss, and that’s how it is. And I’ll trouble you to open it, if you please. Many is the lady in my place as would have done it for you and been within her rights. For things can’t go on like this, Miss Moss; no indeed they can’t. What with

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week in week out and first you’ve got it and then you haven’t and then it’s another letter lost in the post or another manager down at Brighton but will be back on Tuesday for certain – I’m fair sick and tired and I won’t stand it no more. Why should I, Miss Moss, I ask you, at a time like this with prices flying up in the air and my poor dear lad at the front? My sister Eliza was only saying to me yesterday – Minnie, she says, you’re too soft-hearted. You could have let that room time and time again, she says, and if people won’t look after themselves in times like these, nobody else will, says she. She may have had a college education and sung at West End concerts, she says, but if your Lizzie says what’s true, she says, and she washing her own wovens and drying them on the towel-rail, it’s easy to see where the finger’s pointing. And it’s high time you had done with it, says she. MISS MOSS (tears open letter. Reads: ‘Dear Madam, – Yours to hand. Am not producing at present, but have filed photo for future ref. – Yours truly, Backwash Film Co.’): Well, Mrs. Pine, I think you’ll be sorry for what you said. This letter is from a manager asking me to be there with evening dress at ten o’clock next Saturday morning. LANDLADY (swoops and secures letter): Oh, is it? Is it, indeed! MISS MOSS (who can’t get out of bed because her nightdress is slit down the back): Give me back that letter. Give it back to me at once, you bad, wicked woman! Give me back my private letter. LANDLADY: So it’s come to this, has it? Well, Miss Moss, if I don’t get my rent at eight o’clock to-night, we’ll see who’s a bad wicked woman – that’s all. And I’ll keep this letter. (Mysterious.) It will be a pretty little bit of evidence. (Sepulchral.) My lady! (Bounces out.) MISS MOSS: Cockroach! That’s what she is. She’s a cockroach. I could have her up for snatching my letter – I’m sure I could. (Begins to dress.) Oh, if I could only pay that woman, I’d give her a piece of my mind that she wouldn’t forget. I’d tell her off properly. (Sees herself in the glass; gives a vague smile and shakes her head.) Well, old girl, you are up against it this time, and no mistake. (The person in the glass makes an ugly face at her.) You silly thing! Now what’s the good of crying; you’ll only make your nose red. No; you get dressed and go out and try your luck – that’s what you’ve got to do. (Roots in vanity bag.) I’ll have a nice hot cup of tea at an A.B.C.2 shop to settle me before I go anywhere. I’ve got one and threepence. (Shakes the bag and turns it inside out.) Yes; just one and three. (A stout lady in blue serge, with a bunch of artificial ‘parmas’ at her bosom, a black hat covered with purple pansies, white gloves, boots with white uppers, and a vanity bag containing one and three, sings in a low contralto voice:

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‘Sweet-heart remember when days are forlorn It al-ways is dark-est before the dawn.’

But the person in the glass makes a face at her, and Miss Moss goes out.) (At the A.B.C. Dozens of chairs perch on the table. A waitress is doing her hair.) WAITRESS (to Cashier): My boy came home on leave last night. CASHIER: How topping for you! WAITRESS: Yes, wasn’t it. He brought me a sweet little brooch. Look, it’s got ‘Dieppe’ written on it. CASHIER: Oh, I say – how topping! WAITRESS: Yes, isn’t it. O-oh, he is brahn! Hullo, I said; hullo, old mahogany! CASHIER: Oh, I say – you are a treat! MISS MOSS: Can I have a cup of tea, Miss? WAITRESS (very surprised): Oh, we’re not open yet. (To Cashier): Are we, dear? CASHIER: Oh, no! (Miss Moss goes out.) MISS MOSS: I’ll go to Charing Cross. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. But I won’t have a cup of tea. No; I’ll have a coffee. There’s more of a tonic in coffee. Cheeky, those girls are! Her boy came home last night; he brought her a brooch with ‘Dieppe’ written on it. . . . TAXIDRIVER: Look out, Fattie; don’t go ter sleep! MISS MOSS: No; I won’t go to Charing Cross. I’ll go to Kig and Kadgit. They’re open at nine. If I get there early Mr. Kadgit may have something by the morning’s post. . . . I’m very glad you turned up so early, Miss Moss. I’ve just heard from a manager who wants a lady to play . . . I think you’ll just suit him. I’ll give you a card to go and see him. It’s three pounds a week and all found. If I were you I’d hop round as fast as I could. Lucky you turned up so early! . . . (At Kig and Kadgit’s.) CHAR: Nobody’s here yet, Miss. MISS MOSS: Oh, isn’t Mr. Kadgit here? Well, I’ll just wait a moment, if I may. CHAR: You can’t wait in there, Miss. I ’aven’t done the room yet. Mr. Kadgit’s never ’ere before eleven thirty Saturdays. Sometimes he don’t come at all. MISS MOSS: Dear me – how silly of me! I forgot it was Saturday. CHAR: Mind your feet, please, Miss.

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(At Belt and Bithem’s.) MISS MOSS (knows everybody; very gay): Hullo! Here we are again. SAUCY BOY (playing the banjo on his walking-stick): Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.3 MISS MOSS: Mr. Bithem here yet? CHORUS: Oh, he’s been here for ages. We’ve all been waiting for more than an hour. MISS MOSS: Dear me! Anything doing, do you think? SAUCY BOY: Oh, a few jobs going for South Africa, you know. Hundred and fifty a week for two years. CHORUS: Oh, Mr. Clayton, you are weird! Isn’t he a cure? Oh, Mr. Clayton; you do make me laugh! Isn’t he a comic! DARK MOURNFUL GIRL: I just missed a lovely job yesterday. Six weeks in the provinces, and then the West End. The manager said I would have got it for certain if only I’d been robust enough. He said if my figure had been fuller, the part was made for me. MISS MOSS (very indifferent): Oh, dear, that was hard lines. And what was it, if I may ask? D. M. GIRL: Oh, no good to you, my dear. He wanted someone young, you know – a dark Spanish type – my style, but more figure, that was all. (Mr. Bithem appears in his shirt sleeves.) MR. BITHEM: Look here, ladies; it’s no good waiting this morning. Come back Monday; I’m expecting several calls on Monday. MISS MOSS (desperate): Mr. Bithem, I wonder if you’ve heard from. . . . MR. BITHEM (who has seen her hundreds of times): Now let me see – now who are you? MISS MOSS: Miss Ada Moss. MR. BITHEM: Oh, yes, yes; of course, my dear. Not yet, my dear. Now I had a call for twenty-eight ladies to-day, but they had to be young and able to hop it a bit – see? And I had another call for sixteen – but they had to know sand-dancing. Look here, my dear, I’m up to the eyebrows this morning. Come back on Monday week; it’s no good coming before then. (Pats her fat back.) Hearts of oak, dear lady; hearts of oak! (North-East Film Company.) MISS MOSS: What a crowd! Anything special on? JUVENILE: Didn’t you know, dear? There was a call at nine-thirty for ‘attractive girls.’ We’ve all been waiting for hours. Have you played for this company? MISS MOSS: No; I don’t think I have. . . .

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JUVENILE: They’re a lovely company to play for. A friend of mine has a friend who gets thirty pounds a day. . . . Have you arcted much for the fillums? MISS MOSS: Well, I’m not an actress by profession; I’m a contralto singer. But things have been so bad lately that I’ve been doing a little. JUVENILE: It’s like that – isn’t it, dear! MISS MOSS: I had a splendid education at a College of Music, and I got a silver medal for singing. I’ve often sung at West End concerts. But I thought, for a change, I’d try my luck. . . . JUVENILE: Yes; it’s like that – isn’t it, dear! (Cinema Typist enters.) TYPIST: Are you waiting for the North-East call? CHORUS: Yes. TYPIST: Well, it’s all off. I’ve just had a ’phone through. VOICE: But look here – what about our expenses? TYPIST: Oh, you weren’t to have been paid. The North-East never pay their crowds. (At the Bitter Orange Company.) MISS MOSS: Can I see the producer a moment, please? LOVELY LADY: Fill up the form! MISS MOSS (reads): Can you aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buck jump – shoot – . . . (In the Square Gardens.) MISS MOSS (takes out mirror to powder her nose. The person in the glass makes a hideous face at her. Has a good cry.): Well, that’s over. It’s one comfort to be off my feet. And my nose will soon get cool in the air . . . It’s very nice in here. Look at the sparrows. Cheep! cheep! How close they come. I expect somebody feeds them. No; I’ve nothing for you, you cheeky little things. . . . Café de Madrid. . . . My goodness, what a smack that child came down. Poor little mite. Never mind – up again! By eight o’clock to-night. . . . Café de Madrid. I could just go in and sit there and have a coffee – that’s all. It’s such a place for artistes, too. I might just have a stroke of luck. . . . A dark handsome gentleman in a fur coat comes in with a friend, and sits down at my table. ‘No, old chap; I’ve searched London for a contralto, and I can’t find a soul. You see, the music is difficult; have a look at it.’ ‘Excuse me, I happen to be a contralto, and I have sung that part many times.’ Extraordinary! ‘Come back to my studio, and I’ll try your voice now.’ . . . Ten pounds a week! Why should I feel nervous? It’s not nervousness. Why shouldn’t I go

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to the Café de Madrid? I’m a respectable woman – I’m a contralto singer. And I’m only trembling because I haven’t had a great deal to eat to-day. . . . ‘A nice little piece of evidence, my lady.’ . . . Very well, Mrs. Pine. Café de Madrid. They have concerts there in the evenings. ‘Why don’t they begin?’ ‘The contralto has not arrived.’ ‘Excuse me, I happen to be a contralto; I have sung that music many times.’ (In the Café.) (A very stout gentleman, wearing a very small felt hat that floats on the top of his head like a little yacht, flops into the chair opposite.) STOUT GENTLEMEN: Good evening. MISS MOSS: Good evening. STOUT GENTLEMEN: Fine night. MISS MOSS: Yes, very fine. Quite a treat, isn’t it? STOUT GENTLEMEN: (to waiter): Bring me a large whisky. (To Miss Moss) What’s yours?’ MISS MOSS: Well, I think I’ll take a brandy, if it’s all the same. (Five minutes later.) STOUT GENTLEMEN (leans over the table and blows a puff of cigar smoke full in her face): That’s a tempting bit of ribbon. MISS MOSS (blushing until a pulse at the top of her head that she never felt before pounds away): I always was one for pink. (Miss Moss, to her great surprise, gives a loud snigger.) (Five minutes later.) STOUT GENTLEMAN: Well, am I goin’ your way, or are you comin’ mine? MISS MOSS: Oh, well, that depends. . . . (She sails after the little yacht out of the café.) Notes Text: New Age, 21: 5, 31 May 1917, pp. 113–15. 1. KM had experience of the milieu of actors and extras in the film industry, writing to Bertrand Russell, 16 January 1917, ‘Tomorrow I am acting for the movies – an “exterior scene in walking dress”. Doesn’t that sound awfully strange to you?’ A few days later, 21 January 1917, she added, ‘Will the sun ever shine again? My last day with the “movies” – walking about in a big bare studio in what the American producer calls “slap up evening dress” has laid me low ever since’ (CLKM, 1, p. 293, p. 294.) Two years later KM would recast this dialogue into conventional short story form as ‘Pictures’ (see pp. 178–85).

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2. The ABC (Aerated Bread Company) was a chain of cafes whose massproduced bread was advertised as additive-free. 3. ‘Waiting for the Robert E. Lee’, a song from 1913, music by Lewis F. Muir, words by L. Wolfe Gilbert.

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A Pic-Nic1 (The Evening Before) (Miranda Richmond, laden with parcels, is fighting her way out of the tram.) MIRANDA: Oh, dear, it’s simply impossible. People won’t move. They seem to be hypnotised. Let me pass, please. Excuse me. I want to get out. Now, I dropped one; I knew I should. (A young man picks it up. It is Andrew Gold, the artist.) MIRANDA (to herself): What a surprise! I never noticed him. (Smiles sweetly.) Thank you so much. GOLD: I’m getting out, too. Don’t worry. I’ll give it to you when we’re safe ashore. (In the streets. The lamps are just lighted. A fine evening.) MIRANDA: Now give me that wretched parcel. What a relief to be out of that car. I didn’t notice you until you came to my rescue. GOLD: No? I got in when you did. I knew you didn’t see me. You were awfully deep in thought. MIRANDA (who had been wondering whether it was safe to fry that fish, or if it had better be boiled): Was I? Heaven knows what I was thinking about. My horror of crowds, I expect. . . . I’ve just two fingers for the parcel. GOLD: Please let me carry it. I am going your way. Give me some more. Give me this, and this and this. MIRANDA: Yes, I will, then. I hate parcels. I am always on the point of simply throwing them away. (Sees herself, a charming, naughty child, throwing them away, and stamping an adorable little foot.) GOLD: Ha! I know what this one is. It’s a pineapple. MIRANDA: Yes, I love pineapples – don’t you? Not only the taste, but the colour and shape of them – their solidity. They are so really

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barbaric – don’t you think? (A pause.) The first painting I ever saw of yours was a dish of nectarines and black grapes. (Smiles.) I never forgot it. GOLD: Oh, yes. I think I know the one you mean. (Doesn’t he, just!) Awfully glad you liked it. It was one of my favourites. I had rather a feeling that I had brought it off. MIRANDA: Well, this is my gate. (They stop.) Isn’t it a divine evening! (Little Dickie in the garden gathering snails in a tin pail.) DICKIE: Mummy! Mummy! MIRANDA (charmingly tender): Well, my little sweet. DICKIE: Jennie is awfully cross. She been waitin’ an’ waitin’ for that fish. MIRANDA (hands him a wettish paper bag): Run with it into the kitchen, my precious. (To Gold): I’m not going to ask you to come in. Houses are so absurd on a night like this – aren’t they. Stifling! One only wants to walk about and breathe the lovely air. GOLD (ardently): I only wish you would. MIRANDA (shakes her head, smiling into his eyes): Alas! (Has a happy thought): We’re all going for a pic-nic to Days Bay, to-morrow. Won’t you come? GOLD: But I’d love to. MIRANDA: Do, then. Good-bye (shyly) until to-morrow. GOLD (fervently): Until to-morrow. (Stands bareheaded until she disappears.) My God! She’s a gorgeous woman. She’s wonderful. And to think she’s wasted on that ass of a Richmond. She’s such an amazing type to find in a place like this. Awfully primitive. Extraordinarily barbaric. (He sees himself in a strange country, dressed as a hunter, striding back to the camp fire at evening. A woman crouches over the fireglow.) WOMAN: Andrew! HUNTER: Miranda! (On the wharf by the ferry boat. The women look quite charming in their summer dresses, with wide hats and coloured parasols; the men, very disreputable in old flannel trousers and sweaters. Dear little Dickie rushes up and down the gangway, tumbles over coils of rope, balances himself on one leg on the edge of the wharf, piping: – ‘Look at me. Look! Look what I’m doing now!’) MRS HILL: Who are we waiting for? Aren’t we all here? Oh, your husband’s not come yet, has he? MIRANDA: No, he had to go to the office first. But he promised to be here in good time.

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MRS HILL: Oh, he does have to work hard – doesn’t he! What a shame it is! My dear, why on earth has Mrs Barker brought her mother? She’s such an old bore; she always wants to do what everybody else does. She actually bathed last year, my dear, in an immense chemise. And do you see what she’s carrying over her arm? An air-cushion. Isn’t she too disgusting! MIRANDA: Dreadful. I wish Frank would come. MRS HILL: Good gracious! Look who’s coming. Andrew Gold. My dear, who ever can have invited him? I’m sure I didn’t. MIRANDA: I haven’t the least idea. MRS HILL: But how mysterious. He’s evidently come for the pic-nic. I wonder who invited him. I must ask. (She rushes away and asks each separate lady.) It really is too mysterious for words. (Gold comes up to Miranda. Raises his hat, and is just about to speak, when the siren blows a terrific blast.) MR HILL (taking command): Now, then – all aboard! We can’t wait any longer. Come on, everybody. Stow the lunch-baskets on the upper deck. MRS HILL: But poor Mr Richmond, Harry! (Cries of ‘Here he is! Here he comes! Don’t pull up the gangway!’ Frank Richmond dashes down the wharf, and leaps on board, panting and perspiring.) RICHMOND: By Jove, that was a narrow shave. I couldn’t manage to get away a moment before. Morning, everybody! Grand day! (Shouts to Captain.) Let her go, Captain! (He feels triumphant; he feels like a King’s Messenger arriving.) Had to answer an important letter by this morning’s mail. Just managed to get it off in time. OLD MRS BARKER (with great relish): He’ll catch his death of cold out on the water in that state of perspiration. RICHMOND (very hearty): Oh, don’t you mind me, Mrs Barker. I can afford to take a risk or two at my age. HILL (to Richmond): Just a word, ole man. (Leads him away mysteriously): Have a nip of whiskey. I’ve got a drop of the very best. How’s that – eh? RICHMOND: O.K., ole man. I say, who invited that chap, Gold? HILL: Deuce knows. Bit of a wet blanket – isn’t he? RICHMOND: I can’t stick the fellow. He’s one of those lopeared artist chaps. Slippery as an eel. Never know when you’ve got him. GOLD: How lovely she looks under that yellow umbrella. The Yellow Umbrella – portrait by Andrew Gold. One thousand guineas. And sold the day the exhibition opened. . . . What on earth have I been doing ever since I came to this rotten little town? I never seemed

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to see her until last night when she made that remark about the pineapple. She’s utterly unlike all the women here. I must get her to myself for a bit. I must talk to her. Why can’t we give these people the slip when we get off the boat. . . . Would she? MIRANDA: Isn’t it a divine morning? GOLD (looks a trifle dashed): Er – yes. MIRANDA (perceiving it): I don’t know if you are like me. I really feel that climate is almost the only thing that matters. If the sun comes out one expands and becomes a human being, and – anything seems possible. And when the sun goes in I want to creep into a hollow tree and die. . . . GOLD (enthusiastically): I understand absolutely what you mean. Yes, I am just like that myself. I feel more and more strongly. . . . DICKIE: Mummy, kin I have a be-nana? MIRANDA: Not now, darling; run away. (To Gold): Yes, so do I. Everything else seems to be such a false complexity. People seem to take a huge delight in denying the simple richness of life – don’t you feel? GOLD: But of course I do. It’s so extraordinary that you should say that. It’s my creed, absolutely. DICKIE: Mummy, why can’t I have a be-nana now? MIRANDA (hands him one as if it were a lily): Run and play with Bobbie Hill, sweetheart. (To Gold): And, after all, one’s life is lived in such strange places, that one is simply forced to cling to what is really ultimate. . . . The sun, the sea – the earth (laughs) they’re the only Gods I pray to. (They lean over the side.) GOLD: You must be very lonely here. MIRANDA (looks at him, smiling bravely): Yes, I am. Very lonely. GOLD: Couldn’t we escape from these people after we arrive, and have a real talk – (very low) – you and I? MIRANDA (simply): I should like to. (They arrive.) MR HILL (still in command): Come along, now, everybody. Bathing is the first item on the programme. You ladies can undress behind the rocks, and we’ll go among the sand hills. MIRANDA: I don’t think I’ll bathe, Frank. RICHMOND: Why, of course you will, my dear girl. What the hell’s the good of a pic-nic if you’re afraid of getting your feet wet. MRS HILL: Oh, Mrs Richmond! We won’t bathe if you don’t. YOUNG MRS BARKER: No, indeed, we won’t. MR HILL: Now, then, Mrs Richmond, don’t spoil the party.

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MIRANDA (to Gold): Later, then. . . . GOLD (bows and makes for the sand hills). (In the water.) MIRANDA (swims away from the others: Gold follows): Isn’t it divine! (To herself): Why on earth do I keep on saying ‘divine’? That’s the third time since I met him last night. GOLD: Try and escape from the others when this is over. Will you? MIRANDA (to herself): I feel as light as a feather. How lovely it is to be lifted, lifted by these lovely waves. (She cries to him: like a mermaid, she thinks): Yes, I will escape. I will! (To herself): What a good thing it is that I can swim so well. For I do swim very well. So smoothly and gracefully. We are like creatures of another world, he and I. For surely, I am in my way an artist, too. He makes me feel one. It is strange how when I am with him, everything I see seems to turn into a picture. What is going to happen? What does it matter. . . . I will escape – I will! (A cold hand clasps her ankle and drags her under.) RICHMOND: Ha! Ha! Ha! That gave you a good surprise, didn’t it. Ha! Ha! Ha! Did you see that, Hill? (After the bathe.) HILL: Now, then, ladies, look sharp. Don’t mind your back hair. We’re all married men, except Gold, and he’s an artist, and don’t count. Get a move on with those sandwiches. MIRANDA: Oh, what am I doing among these vulgar people? I never realised until to-day how far, far away I was from them. Why can’t we simply disappear? I, too, feel that we’ve something to say to each other. He makes me feel so myself in the truest sense. . . . MRS HILL: Will you butter, Mrs Richmond, while I mustard, or will you mustard, while I butter? MIRANDA: Certainly, Mrs Hill. (They have lunch.) MR HILL (opening bottles): Now, then, ladies. We’ll soon have you twinkling. RICHMOND: Pass your glass along, Gold. I suppose you’re accustomed to this kind of thing. Pic-nic every day of the year, if you want one – what. By Jove, you can’t think what it means to a chap like me, who spends his life sweating in an office – eh, Hill? OLD MRS BARKER (tartly): I’ll have an-other glass of wine.

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YOUNG MRS B. (warningly): Mother! GOLD: Will you have an almond-biscuit, Mrs Richmond? Try and escape after this – will you? MIRANDA (meaningly): Yes, I will! (After lunch.) MIRANDA: What a wonderful view there must be from the top of that hill. (Very skittish.) I’m going up there. GOLD (very gay): May I come, too, Mrs Richmond? MIRANDA: Yes, if you promise not to faint by the way. (They go.) MRS HILL (to young Mrs B.): Now I know who asked young Mr Gold. (They climb.) MIRANDA (standing on the top of the hill, facing the wind): Oh, it’s perfectly div – wonderful! GOLD: I should like to paint you, just like that. MIRANDA (archly): Well, why don’t you? GOLD: Seriously? MIRANDA (gravely): I’d be only too proud. GOLD: Let us sit down here. Thank God we’ve escaped. Mrs Richmond – Miranda! (Old Mrs Barker crashes through the bushes.) OLD MRS B. (trumpeting): Well, I wasn’t so far behind you, after all. I always was one for pre-cip-i-tous hills! (At tea.) DICKIE: Daddie, there’s a sailor coming at us. RICHMOND: Great Scott! So there is. What the dickens can he want! SAILOR: Captain says we’ll have to start at once. There’s a big storm blowing up. GOLD: Let us escape from the others on the boat. We must talk. MIRANDA: Yes, I will. I will. MR HILL: Now, then, ladies and gentlemen (etc., etc.). (On the boat.) GOLD: They won’t follow us here. My God if they do, I’ll kill the first person who comes along. Miranda! MIRANDA (turning pale): I can’t stay here; one feels the motion so.

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(The boat rocks, quivers, dives. It gets very cold). GOLD: Let us stand behind a funnel. Miranda! MIRANDA (paler): I can’t stay here. There is such a smell of oil. (The boat gives a tremendous roll. Miranda is hurled across the deck against the railings. Gold disappears). MIRANDA (sobbing): Why doesn’t somebody look after me. Why am I always utterly alone! (Two minutes later.) MIRANDA: Oh, Frank, why didn’t you come before? I’m all alone. I feel horribly ill. I’m so cold. RICHMOND: Great Scott! I thought Gold was looking after you. My poor little pole cat, you are a sight! Here, take my coat. I don’t want the damned thing. Come over here. Sit down. You won’t feel the motion so much. Lean on me. That’s right. Your poor little hat’s all crooked. That’s the ticket. MIRANDA (feeling death is near): Where is our Dickie? RICHMOND: Old mother Barker’s got him. He’s all right. MIRANDA (a trifle warmer): Isn’t it dreadful! RICHMOND: Oh, nothing much. Bit of a swell on. MIRANDA (to herself): He really is brave. And he holds me so beautifully. I don’t feel the motion half so much. I like leaning against him. And he gave me his coat – without a thought – so simply – beautifully even. Yes, beautifully. (A trifle warmer): Frank. RICHMOND: Yes? MIRANDA: Do you remember I used to call you Big Bear? RICHMOND: No. Clean forgotten. MIRANDA: I love him even for that – for forgetting. (To Richmond): Is there any danger? RICHMOND: Good Lord, no, little woman. Can I get you anything? A nip of whiskey? MIRANDA: No, no, don’t move. Stay there. Hold me. Don’t let me go. Don’t leave me. (Feels his shoulder shake): Are you – laughing? RICHMOND: I’m wondering what you’ll feel like when this is all over, old girl. MIRANDA (fervently: the past a dream): Just as I do now! RICHMOND (sees Hill appear. Tips him a wink and leans over Miranda): There – there – little woman. Nearly there, now! Notes Text: New Age, 21: 6, 7 June 1917, pp. 136–8. 1. Although the story is set in Wellington, it was republished in Germany, without KM’s permission, in the English-language Continental Times, 22

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July 1918, with the title ‘An English Pic-Nic, A Study of the Middle Class Mind.’

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Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day If there was one thing that he hated more than another it was the way she had of waking him in the morning. She did it on purpose, of course. It was her way of establishing her grievance for the day, and he was not going to let her know how successful it was. But really, really, to wake a sensitive person like that was positively dangerous! It took him hours to get over it – simply hours. She came into the room buttoned up in an overall, with a handkerchief over her head – thereby proving that she had been up herself and slaving since dawn – and called in a low, warning voice: ‘Reginald!’ ‘Eh! What! What’s that? What’s the matter?’ ‘It’s time to get up; it’s half-past eight.’ And out she went, shutting the door quietly after her, to gloat over her triumph, he supposed. He rolled over in the big bed, his heart still beating in quick, dull throbs, and with every throb he felt his energy escaping him, his – his inspiration for the day stifling under those thudding blows. It seemed that she took a malicious delight in making life more difficult for him than – Heaven knows – it was, by denying him his rights as an artist, by trying to drag him down to her level. What was the matter with her? What the hell did she want? Hadn’t he three times as many pupils now as when they were first married, earned three times as much, paid for every stick and stone that they possessed, and now had begun to shell out for Adrian’s kindergarten? . . . And had he ever reproached her for not having a penny to her name? Never a word – never a sign! The truth was that once you married a woman she became insatiable, and the truth was that nothing was more fatal for an artist than marriage, at any rate until he was well over forty. . . . Why had he married her? He asked himself this question on an average about three times a day, but he never could answer it satisfactorily. She had caught him at a weak moment, when the first plunge into reality had bewildered and overwhelmed him for a time. Looking back, he saw a pathetic, youthful creature, half child, half wild untamed bird, totally incompetent to cope with bills and creditors and all the sordid details of existence. Well – she had done her best to clip his wings, if that was any satisfaction for her, and she could congratulate herself on the success of

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this early morning trick. One ought to wake exquisitely, reluctantly, he thought, slipping down in the warm bed. He began to imagine a series of enchanting scenes which ended with his latest, most charming pupil putting her bare, scented arms round his neck, and covering him with her long, perfumed hair. ‘Awake, my love!’ . . . As was his daily habit, while the bath water ran, Reginald Peacock tried his voice. When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, Looping up her laces, tying up her hair,

he sang, softly at first, listening to the quality, nursing his voice until he came to the third line: Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded . . .1

and upon the word ‘wedded’ he burst into such a shout of triumph that the tooth-glass on the bathroom shelf trembled and even the bath tap seemed to gush stormy applause. . . . Well, there was nothing wrong with his voice, he thought, leaping into the bath and soaping his soft, pink body all over with a loofah shaped like a fish. He could fill Covent Garden with it! ‘Wedded,’ he shouted again, seizing the towel with a magnificent operatic gesture, and went on singing while he rubbed as though he had been Lohengrin tipped out by an unwary Swan and drying himself in the greatest haste before that tiresome Elsa came along. . . .2 Back in his bedroom, he pulled the blind up with a jerk, and standing upon the pale square of sunlight that lay upon the carpet like a sheet of cream blotting-paper, he began to do his exercises – deep breathing, bending forward and back, squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs – for if there was one thing he had a horror of it was of getting fat, and men in his profession had a dreadful tendency that way. However, there was no sign of it at present. He was, he decided, just right, just in good proportion. In fact, he could not help a thrill of satisfaction when he saw himself in the glass, dressed in a morning coat, dark grey trousers, grey socks and a black tie with a silver thread in it. Not that he was vain – he couldn’t stand vain men – no; the sight of himself gave him a thrill of purely artistic satisfaction. ‘Voilà tout!’ said he, passing his hand over his sleek hair. That little, easy French phrase blown so lightly from his lips, like a whiff of smoke, reminded him that someone had asked him again, the evening before, if he was English. People seemed to find it impossible to believe that he hadn’t some Southern blood. True, there was an emotional quality in his singing that had nothing of the John Bull in

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it. . . . The door-handle rattled and turned round and round. Adrian’s head popped through. ‘Please, father, mother says breakfast is quite ready, please.’ ‘Very well,’ said Reginald. Then, just as Adrian disappeared: ‘Adrian!’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘You haven’t said “good morning”.’ A few months ago Reginald had spent a weekend in a very aristocratic family, where the father received his little sons in the morning and shook hands with them. Reginald thought the practice charming, and introduced it immediately, but Adrian felt dreadfully silly at having to shake hands with his own father every morning. And why did his father always sort of sing to him instead of talk? . . . In excellent temper, Reginald walked into the dining-room and sat down before a pile of letters, a copy of The Times, and a little covered dish. He glanced at the letters and then at his breakfast. There were two thin slices of bacon and one egg. ‘Don’t you want any bacon?’ he asked. ‘No, I prefer a cold baked apple. I don’t feel the need of bacon every morning.’ Now, did she mean that there was no need for him to have bacon every morning, either, and that she grudged having to cook it for him? ‘If you don’t want to cook the breakfast,’ said he, ‘why don’t you keep a servant? You know we can afford one, and you know how I loathe to see my wife doing the work. Simply because all the women we have had in the past have been failures, and utterly upset my regime, and made it almost impossible for me to have any pupils here, you’ve given up trying to find a decent woman. It’s not impossible to train a servant – is it? I mean, it doesn’t require genius?’ ‘But I prefer to do the work myself; it makes life so much more peaceful. . . . Run along, Adrian darling, and get ready for school.’ ‘Oh no, that’s not it!’ Reginald pretended to smile. ‘You do the work yourself, because, for some extraordinary reason, you love to humiliate me. Objectively, you may not know that, but, subjectively, it’s the case.’ This last remark so delighted him that he cut open an envelope as gracefully as if he had been on the stage. . . . ‘Dear Mr Peacock, I feel I cannot go to sleep until I have thanked you again for the wonderful joy your singing gave me this evening. Quite unforgettable. You make me wonder, as I have not wondered since I was a girl, if this is all. I mean, if this ordinary world is all. If there is not, perhaps, for those of us who understand, divine beauty and richness awaiting us if we only have the courage to see it. And to make it ours. . . . The house is so quiet. I wish

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you were here now that I might thank you in person. You are doing a great thing. You are teaching the world to escape from life! Yours, most sincerely, ÆNONE FELL. P.S. – I am in every afternoon this week. . . . ’

The letter was scrawled in violet ink on thick, handmade paper. Vanity, that bright bird, lifted its wings again, lifted them until he felt his breast would break. ‘Oh well, don’t let us quarrel,’ said he, and actually flung out a hand to his wife. But she was not great enough to respond. ‘I must hurry and take Adrian to school,’ said she. ‘Your room is quite ready for you.’ Very well – very well – let there be open war between them! But he was hanged if he’d be the first to make it up again! He walked up and down his room, and was not calm again until he heard the outer door close upon Adrian and his wife. Of course, if this went on, he would have to make some other arrangement. That was obvious. Tied and bound like this, how could he help the world to escape from life? He opened the piano and looked up his pupils for the morning. Miss Betty Brittle, the Countess Wilkowska and Miss Marian Morrow. They were charming, all three. Punctually at half-past ten the door-bell rang. He went to the door. Miss Betty Brittle was there, dressed in white, with her music in a blue silk case. ‘I’m afraid I’m early,’ she said, blushing and shy, and she opened her big blue eyes very wide. ‘Am I?’ ‘Not at all, dear lady. I am only too charmed,’ said Reginald. ‘Won’t you come in?’ ‘It’s such a heavenly morning,’ said Miss Brittle. ‘I walked across the Park. The flowers were too marvellous.’ ‘Well, think about them while you sing your exercises,’ said Reginald, sitting down at the piano. ‘It will give your voice colour and warmth.’ Oh, what an enchanting idea! What a genius Mr Peacock was. She parted her pretty lips, and began to sing like a pansy. ‘Very good, very good, indeed,’ said Reginald, playing chords that would waft a hardened criminal to heaven. ‘Make the notes round. Don’t be afraid. Linger over them, breathe them like a perfume.’ How pretty she looked, standing there in her white frock, her little blonde head tilted, showing her milky throat. ‘Do you ever practise before a glass?’ asked Reginald. ‘You ought to, you know; it makes the lips more flexible. Come over here.’

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They went over to the mirror and stood side by side. ‘Now sing moo-e-koo-e-oo-e-a!’ But she broke down, and blushed more brightly than ever. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I can’t. It makes me feel so silly. It makes me want to laugh. I do look so absurd!’ ‘No, you don’t. Don’t be afraid,’ said Reginald, but laughed, too, very kindly. ‘Now, try again!’ The lesson simply flew, and Betty Brittle quite got over her shyness. ‘When can I come again?’ she asked, tying the music up again in the blue silk case. ‘I want to take as many lessons as I can just now. Oh, Mr. Peacock, I do enjoy them so much. May I come the day after to-morrow?’ ‘Dear lady, I shall be only too charmed,’ said Reginald, bowing her out. Glorious girl! And when they had stood in front of the mirror, her white sleeve had just touched his black one. He could feel – yes, he could actually feel a warm glowing spot, and he stroked it. She loved her lessons. His wife came in. ‘Reginald, can you let me have some money? I must pay the dairy. And will you be in for dinner to-night?’ ‘Yes, you know I’m singing at Lord Timbuck’s at half-past nine. Can you make me some clear soup, with an egg in it?’ ‘Yes. And the money, Reginald. It’s eight and sixpence.’ ‘Surely that’s very heavy – isn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s just what it ought to be. And Adrian must have milk.’ There she was – off again. Now she was standing up for Adrian against him. ‘I have not the slightest desire to deny my child a proper amount of milk,’ said he. ‘Here is ten shillings.’ The door-bell rang. He went to the door. ‘Oh,’ said the Countess Wilkowska, ‘the stairs. I have not a breath.’ And she put her hand over her heart as she followed him into the music-room. She was all in black, with a little black hat with a floating veil – violets in her bosom. ‘Do not make me sing exercises, to-day,’ she cried, throwing out her hands in her delightful foreign way. ‘No, to-day, I want only to sing songs. . . . And may I take off my violets? They fade so soon.’ ‘They fade so soon – they fade so soon,’ played Reginald on the piano. ‘May I put them here?’ asked the Countess, dropping them in a little vase that stood in front of one of Reginald’s photographs. ‘Dear lady, I should be only too charmed!’ She began to sing, and all was well until she came to the phrase: ‘You love me. Yes, I know you love me!’ Down dropped his hands from the keyboard, he wheeled round, facing her.

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‘No, no; that’s not good enough. You can do better than that,’ cried Reginald ardently. ‘You must sing as if you were in love. Listen; let me try and show you.’ And he sang. ‘Oh, yes, yes. I see what you mean,’ stammered the little Countess. ‘May I try it again?’ ‘Certainly. Do not be afraid. Let yourself go. Confess yourself. Make proud surrender!’ he called above the music. And she sang. ‘Yes; better that time. But I still feel you are capable of more. Try it with me. There must be a kind of exultant defiance as well – don’t you feel?’ And they sang together. Ah! now she was sure she understood. ‘May I try once again?’ ‘You love me. Yes, I know you love me.’ The lesson was over before that phrase was quite perfect. The little foreign hands trembled as they put the music together. ‘And you are forgetting your violets,’ said Reginald softly. ‘Yes, I think I will forget them,’ said the Countess, biting her underlip. What fascinating ways these foreign women have! ‘And you will come to my house on Sunday and make music?’ she asked. ‘Dear lady, I shall be only too charmed!’ said Reginald. Weep ye no more, sad fountains Why need ye flow so fast?3

sang Miss Marian Morrow, but her eyes filled with tears and her chin trembled. ‘Don’t sing just now,’ said Reginald. ‘Let me play it for you.’ He played so softly. ‘Is there anything the matter?’ asked Reginald. ‘You’re not quite happy this morning.’ No, she wasn’t; she was awfully miserable. ‘You don’t care to tell me what it is?’ It really was nothing particular. She had those moods sometimes when life seemed almost unbearable. ‘Ah, I know,’ he said; ‘if I could only help!’ ‘But you do; you do! Oh, if it were not for my lessons I don’t feel I could go on.’ ‘Sit down in the arm-chair and smell the violets and let me sing to you. It will do you just as much good as a lesson.’ Why weren’t all men like Mr Peacock? ‘I wrote a poem after the concert last night – just about what I felt. Of course, it wasn’t personal. May I send it to you?’ ‘Dear lady, I should be only too charmed!’ By the end of the afternoon he was quite tired and lay down on a

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sofa to rest his voice before dressing. The door of his room was open. He could hear Adrian and his wife talking in the dining-room. ‘Do you know what that teapot reminds me of, Mummy? It reminds me of a little sitting-down kitten.’ ‘Does it, Mr Absurdity?’ Reginald dozed. The telephone bell woke him. ‘Ænone Fell is speaking. Mr Peacock, I have just heard that you are singing at Lord Timbuck’s to-night. Will you dine with me, and we can go on together afterwards?’ And the words of his reply dropped like flowers down the telephone. ‘Dear lady, I should be only too charmed.’ What a triumphant evening! The little dinner tête-à-tête with Ænone Fell, the drive to Lord Timbuck’s in her white motor-car, when she thanked him again for the unforgettable joy. Triumph upon triumph! And Lord Timbuck’s champagne simply flowed. ‘Have some more champagne, Peacock,’ said Lord Timbuck. Peacock, you notice – not Mr Peacock – but Peacock, as if he were one of them. And wasn’t he? He was an artist. He could sway them all. And wasn’t he teaching them all to escape from life? How he sang! And as he sang, as in a dream he saw their feathers and their flowers and their fans, offered to him, laid before him, like a huge bouquet. ‘Have another glass of wine, Peacock.’ ‘I could have any one I liked by lifting a finger,’ thought Peacock, positively staggering home. But as he let himself into the dark flat his marvellous sense of elation began to ebb away. He turned up the light in the bedroom. His wife lay asleep, squeezed over to her side of the bed. He remembered suddenly how she had said when he had told her he was going out to dinner: ‘You might have let me know before!’ And how he had answered: ‘Can’t you possibly speak to me without offending against even good manners?’ It was incredible, he thought, that she cared so little for him – incredible that she wasn’t interested in the slightest in his triumphs and his artistic career. When so many women in her place would have given their eyes. . . . Yes, he knew it. . . . Why not acknowledge it? . . . And there she lay, an enemy, even in her sleep. . . . Must it ever be thus? he thought, the champagne still working. Ah, if we only were friends, how much I could tell her now! About this evening; even about Timbuck’s manner to me, and all that they said to me and so on and so on. If only I felt that she was here to come back to – that I could confide in her – and so on and so on. In his emotion he pulled off his evening boot and simply hurled it in the corner. The noise woke his wife with a terrible start. She sat up, pushing back her hair. And he suddenly decided to have one more try

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to treat her as a friend, to tell her everything, to win her. Down he sat on the side of the bed, and seized one of her hands. But of all those splendid things he had to say, not one could he utter. For some fiendish reason, the only words he could get out were: ‘Dear lady, I should be so charmed – so charmed!’ Notes Text: BOS. New Age, 21: 7, 14 June 1917, pp. 158–61. 1. George Meredith, ‘Love in the Valley’ (1851). 2. In Act I of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850), the hero, champion of Elsa who is falsely accused of murder, arrives in a boat drawn by a swan. 3. An anonymous poem set by John Dowland, The Third Booke of Songes or Aires (1603).

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Prelude1 I There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handy-man on the driver’s seat. Hold-alls, bags and boxes were piled upon the floor. ‘These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,’ said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement. Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round solemn eyes first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother. ‘We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off,’ said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back against the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes, her lips trembling with laughter. Happily at that moment Mrs Samuel Josephs, who had been watching the scene from behind her drawing-room blind, waddled down the garden path. ‘Why nod leave the chudren with be for the afterdoon, Brs Burnell?

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They could go on the dray with the storeban when he comes in the eveding. Those thigs on the path have to go, dod’t they?’ ‘Yes, everything outside the house is supposed to go,’ said Linda Burnell, and she waved a white hand at the tables and chairs standing on their heads on the front lawn. How absurd they looked! Either they ought to be the other way up, or Lottie and Kezia ought to stand on their heads, too. And she longed to say: ‘Stand on your heads, children, and wait for the storeman.’ It seemed to her that would be so exquisitely funny that she could not attend to Mrs Samuel Josephs. The fat creaking body leaned across the gate, and the big jelly of a face smiled. ‘Dod’t you worry, Brs Burnell. Loddie and Kezia can have tea with by chudren in the dursery, and I’ll see theb on the dray afterwards.’ The grandmother considered. ‘Yes, it really is quite the best plan. We are very obliged to you, Mrs Samuel Josephs. Children, say “thank you” to Mrs Samuel Josephs.’ Two subdued chirrups: ‘Thank you, Mrs Samuel Josephs.’ ‘And be good little girls, and – come closer –’ they advanced, ‘don’t forget to tell Mrs Samuel Josephs when you want to. . . . ‘No, granma.’ ‘Dod’t worry, Brs Burnell.’ At the last moment Kezia let go Lottie’s hand and darted towards the buggy. ‘I want to kiss my granma good-bye again.’ But she was too late. The buggy rolled off up the road, Isabel bursting with pride, her nose turned up at all the world, Linda Burnell prostrated, and the grandmother rummaging among the very curious oddments she had put in her black silk reticule at the last moment, for something to give her daughter. The buggy twinkled away in the sunlight and fine golden dust up the hill and over. Kezia bit her lip, but Lottie, carefully finding her handkerchief first, set up a wail. ‘Mother! Granma!’ Mrs Samuel Josephs, like a huge warm black silk tea cosy, enveloped her. ‘It’s all right, by dear. Be a brave child. You come and blay in the dursery!’ She put her arm round weeping Lottie and led her away. Kezia followed, making a face at Mrs Samuel Josephs’ placket, which was undone as usual, with two long pink corset laces hanging out of it. . . . Lottie’s weeping died down as she mounted the stairs, but the sight of her at the nursery door with swollen eyes and a blob of a nose gave great satisfaction to the S. J.’s, who sat on two benches before a long table covered with American cloth and set out with immense plates of bread and dripping and two brown jugs that faintly steamed.

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‘Hullo! You’ve been crying!’ ‘Ooh! Your eyes have gone right in.’ ‘Doesn’t her nose look funny.’ ‘You’re all red-and-patchy.’ Lottie was quite a success. She felt it and swelled, smiling timidly. ‘Go and sit by Zaidee, ducky,’ said Mrs Samuel Josephs, ‘and Kezia, you sid ad the end by Boses.’ Moses grinned and gave her a nip as she sat down; but she pretended not to notice. She did hate boys. ‘Which will you have?’ asked Stanley, leaning across the table very politely, and smiling at her. ‘Which will you have to begin with – strawberries and cream or bread and dripping?’ ‘Strawberries and cream, please,’ said she. ‘Ah-h-h-h.’ How they all laughed and beat the table with their teaspoons. Wasn’t that a take in! Wasn’t it now! Didn’t he fox her! Good old Stan! ‘Ma! She thought it was real.’ Even Mrs Samuel Josephs, pouring out the milk and water, could not help smiling. ‘You bustn’t tease theb on their last day,’ she wheezed. But Kezia bit a big piece out of her bread and dripping, and then stood the piece up on her plate. With the bite out it made a dear little sort of a gate. Pooh! She didn’t care! A tear rolled down her cheek, but she wasn’t crying. She couldn’t have cried in front of those awful Samuel Josephs. She sat with her head bent, and as the tear dripped slowly down, she caught it with a neat little whisk of her tongue and ate it before any of them had seen. II After tea Kezia wandered back to their own house. Slowly she walked up the back steps, and through the scullery into the kitchen. Nothing was left in it but a lump of gritty yellow soap in one corner of the kitchen window sill and a piece of flannel stained with a blue bag in another. The fireplace was choked up with rubbish. She poked among it but found nothing except a hair-tidy with a heart painted on it that had belonged to the servant girl. Even that she left lying, and she trailed through the narrow passage into the drawing-room. The Venetian blind was pulled down but not drawn close. Long pencil rays of sunlight shone through and the wavy shadow of a bush outside danced on the gold lines. Now it was still, now it began to flutter again, and now it came almost as far as her feet. Zoom! Zoom! a blue-bottle knocked against the ceiling; the carpet-tacks had little bits of red fluff sticking to them.

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The dining-room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore. Was that really Lottie? Kezia was not quite sure until she had looked through the ordinary window. Upstairs in her father’s and mother’s room she found a pill box black and shiny outside and red in, holding a blob of cotton wool. ‘I could keep a bird’s egg in that,’ she decided. In the servant girl’s room there was a stay-button stuck in a crack of the floor, and in another crack some beads and a long needle. She knew there was nothing in her grandmother’s room; she had watched her pack. She went over to the window and leaned against it, pressing her hands against the pane. Kezia liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot palms, and she liked to watch the funny white tops that came on her fingers when she pressed them hard against the pane. As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark crept the wind snuffling and howling. The windows of the empty house shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly. Kezia was suddenly quite, quite still, with wide open eyes and knees pressed together. She was frightened. She wanted to call Lottie and to go on calling all the while she ran downstairs and out of the house. But IT was just behind her, waiting at the door, at the head of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs, hiding in the passage, ready to dart out at the back door. But Lottie was at the back door, too. ‘Kezia!’ she called cheerfully. ‘The storeman’s here. Everything is on the dray and three horses, Kezia. Mrs Samuel Josephs has given us a big shawl to wear round us, and she says to button up your coat. She won’t come out because of asthma.’ Lottie was very important. ‘Now then, you kids,’ called the storeman. He hooked his big thumbs under their arms and up they swung. Lottie arranged the shawl ‘most beautifully’ and the storeman tucked up their feet in a piece of old blanket. ‘Lift up. Easy does it.’ They might have been a couple of young ponies. The storeman felt over the cords holding his load, unhooked the brakechain from the wheel, and whistling, he swung up beside them. ‘Keep close to me,’ said Lottie, ‘because otherwise you pull the shawl away from my side, Kezia.’

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But Kezia edged up to the storeman. He towered beside her big as a giant and he smelled of nuts and new wooden boxes. III It was the first time that Lottie and Kezia had ever been out so late. Everything looked different – the painted wooden houses far smaller than they did by day, the gardens far bigger and wilder. Bright stars speckled the sky and the moon hung over the harbour dabbling the waves with gold. They could see the lighthouse shining on Quarantine Island, and the green lights on the old coal hulks. ‘There comes the Picton boat,’ said the storeman, pointing to a little steamer all hung with bright beads. But when they reached the top of the hill and began to go down the other side the harbour disappeared, and although they were still in the town they were quite lost. Other carts rattled past. Everybody knew the storeman. ‘Night, Fred.’ ‘Night O,’ he shouted. Kezia liked very much to hear him. Whenever a cart appeared in the distance she looked up and waited for his voice. He was an old friend; and she and her grandmother had often been to his place to buy grapes. The storeman lived alone in a cottage that had a glasshouse against one wall built by himself. All the glasshouse was spanned and arched over with one beautiful vine. He took her brown basket from her, lined it with three large leaves, and then he felt in his belt for a little horn knife, reached up and snapped off a big blue cluster and laid it on the leaves so tenderly that Kezia held her breath to watch. He was a very big man. He wore brown velvet trousers, and he had a long brown beard. But he never wore a collar, not even on Sunday. The back of his neck was burnt bright red. ‘Where are we now?’ Every few minutes one of the children asked him the question. ‘Why, this is Hawk Street, or Charlotte Crescent.’ ‘Of course it is,’ Lottie pricked up her ears at the last name; she always felt that Charlotte Crescent belonged specially to her. Very few people had streets with the same name as theirs. ‘Look, Kezia, there is Charlotte Crescent. Doesn’t it look different?’ Now everything familiar was left behind. Now the big dray rattled into unknown country, along new roads with high clay banks on either side, up steep, steep hills, down into bushy valleys, through wide shallow rivers. Further and further. Lottie’s head wagged; she drooped, she slipped half into Kezia’s lap and lay there. But Kezia could not open her eyes wide enough. The wind blew and she shivered; but her cheeks and ears burned.

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‘Do stars ever blow about?’ she asked. ‘Not to notice,’ said the storeman. ‘We’ve got a nuncle and a naunt living near our new house,’ said Kezia. ‘They have got two children, Pip, the eldest is called, and the youngest’s name is Rags. He’s got a ram. He has to feed it with a nenamuel teapot and a glove top over the spout. He’s going to show us. What is the difference between a ram and a sheep?’ ‘Well, a ram has horns and runs for you.’ Kezia considered. ‘I don’t want to see it frightfully,’ she said. ‘I hate rushing animals like dogs and parrots. I often dream that animals rush at me – even camels – and while they are rushing, their heads swell e-enormous.’ The storeman said nothing. Kezia peered up at him, screwing up her eyes. Then she put her finger out and stroked his sleeve; it felt hairy. ‘Are we near?’ she asked. ‘Not far off, now,’ answered the storeman. ‘Getting tired?’ ‘Well, I’m not an atom bit sleepy,’ said Kezia. ‘But my eyes keep curling up in such a funny sort of way.’ She gave a long sigh, and to stop her eyes from curling she shut them. . . . When she opened them again they were clanking through a drive that cut through the garden like a whip lash, looping suddenly an island of green, and behind the island, but out of sight until you came upon it, was the house. It was long and low built, with a pillared verandah and balcony all the way round. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast. And now one and now another of the windows leaped into light. Someone was walking through the empty rooms carrying a lamp. From a window downstairs the light of a fire flickered. A strange beautiful excitement seemed to stream from the house in quivering ripples. ‘Where are we?’ said Lottie, sitting up. Her reefer cap was all on one side and on her cheek there was the print of an anchor button she had pressed against while sleeping. Tenderly the storeman lifted her, set her cap straight, and pulled down her crumpled clothes. She stood blinking on the lowest verandah step watching Kezia who seemed to come flying through the air to her feet. ‘Ooh!’ cried Kezia, flinging up her arms. The grandmother came out of the dark hall carrying a little lamp. She was smiling. ‘You found your way in the dark?’ said she. ‘Perfectly well.’ But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step. Kezia,’ said the grandmother, ‘can I trust you to carry the lamp?’

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‘Yes, my granma.’ The old woman bent down and gave the bright breathing thing into her hands and then she caught up drunken Lottie. ‘This way.’ Through a square hall filled with bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp. ‘Be very quiet,’ warned the grandmother, putting down Lottie and opening the dining-room door. ‘Poor little mother has got such a headache.’ Linda Burnell, in a long cane chair, with her feet on a hassock, and a plaid over her knees, lay before a crackling fire. Burnell and Beryl sat at the table in the middle of the room eating a dish of fried chops and drinking tea out of a brown china teapot. Over the back of her mother’s chair leaned Isabel. She had a comb in her fingers and in a gentle absorbed fashion she was combing the curls from her mother’s forehead. Outside the pool of lamp and firelight the room stretched dark and bare to the hollow windows. ‘Are those the children?’ But Linda did not really care; she did not even open her eyes to see. ‘Put down the lamp, Kezia,’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘or we shall have the house on fire before we are out of the packing cases. More tea, Stanley?’ ‘Well, you might just give me five-eighths of a cup,’ said Burnell, leaning across the table. ‘Have another chop, Beryl. Tip-top meat, isn’t it? Not too lean and not too fat.’ He turned to his wife. ‘You’re sure you won’t change your mind, Linda darling?’ ‘The very thought of it is enough.’ She raised one eyebrow in the way she had. The grandmother brought the children bread and milk and they sat up to the table, flushed and sleepy behind the wavy steam. ‘I had meat for my supper,’ said Isabel, still combing gently. ‘I had a whole chop for my supper, the bone and all and Worcester Sauce. Didn’t I, father?’ ‘Oh, don’t boast, Isabel,’ said Aunt Beryl. Isabel looked astounded. ‘I wasn’t boasting, was I, Mummy? I never thought of boasting. I thought they would like to know. I only meant to tell them.’ ‘Very well. That’s enough,’ said Burnell. He pushed back his plate, took a tooth-pick out of his pocket and began picking his strong white teeth. ‘You might see that Fred has a bite of something in the kitchen before he goes, will you, mother?’ ‘Yes, Stanley.’ The old woman turned to go. ‘Oh, hold on half a jiffy. I suppose nobody knows where my

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slippers were put? I suppose I shall not be able to get at them for a month or two – what?’ ‘Yes,’ came from Linda. ‘In the top of the canvas hold-all marked “urgent necessities”.’ ‘Well you might get them for me will you, mother?’ ‘Yes, Stanley.’ Burnell got up, stretched himself, and going over to the fire he turned his back to it and lifted up his coat tails. ‘By Jove, this is a pretty pickle. Eh, Beryl?’ Beryl, sipping tea, her elbows on the table, smiled over the cup at him. She wore an unfamiliar pink pinafore; the sleeves of her blouse were rolled up to her shoulders showing her lovely freckled arms, and she had let her hair fall down her back in a long pig-tail. ‘How long do you think it will take to get straight – couple of weeks – eh?’ he chaffed. ‘Good heavens, no,’ said Beryl airily. ‘The worst is over already. The servant girl and I have simply slaved all day, and ever since mother came she has worked like a horse, too. We have never sat down for a moment. We have had a day.’ Stanley scented a rebuke. ‘Well, I suppose you did not expect me to rush away from the office and nail carpets – did you?’ ‘Certainly not,’ laughed Beryl. She put down her cup and ran out of the dining-room. ‘What the hell does she expect us to do?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sit down and fan herself with a palm leaf fan while I have a gang of professionals to do the job? By Jove, if she can’t do a hand’s turn occasionally without shouting about it in return for. . . .’ And he gloomed as the chops began to fight the tea in his sensitive stomach. But Linda put up a hand and dragged him down to the side of her long chair. ‘This is a wretched time for you, old boy,’ she said. Her cheeks were very white but she smiled and curled her fingers into the big red hand she held. Burnell became quiet. Suddenly he began to whistle ‘Pure as a lily, joyous and free’ – a good sign. ‘Think you’re going to like it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to tell you, but I think I ought to, mother,’ said Isabel. ‘Kezia is drinking tea out of Aunt Beryl’s cup.’ IV They were taken off to bed by the grandmother. She went first with a candle; the stairs rang to their climbing feet. Isabel and Lottie lay in a room to themselves, Kezia curled in her grandmother’s soft bed. ‘Aren’t there going to be any sheets, my granma?’

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‘No, not to-night.’ ‘It’s tickly,’ said Kezia, ‘but it’s like Indians.’ She dragged her grandmother down to her and kissed her under the chin. ‘Come to bed soon and be my Indian brave.’ ‘What a silly you are,’ said the old woman, tucking her in as she loved to be tucked. ‘Aren’t you going to leave me a candle?’ No. Sh-h. Go to sleep.’ ‘Well, can I have the door left open?’ She rolled herself up into a round but she did not go to sleep. From all over the house came the sound of steps. The house itself creaked and popped. Loud whispering voices came from downstairs. Once she heard Aunt Beryl’s rush of high laughter, and once she heard a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose. Outside the window hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her – but she was not frightened. Lottie was saying to Isabel: ‘I’m going to say my prayers in bed to-night.’ ‘No you can’t, Lottie.’ Isabel was very firm. ‘God only excuses you saying your prayers in bed if you’ve got a temperature.’ So Lottie yielded: Gentle Jesus meek anmile, Look pon a little chile. Pity me, simple Lizzie Suffer me to come to thee.

And then they lay down back to back, their little behinds just touching, and fell asleep. Standing in a pool of moonlight Beryl Fairfield undressed herself. She was tired, but she pretended to be more tired than she really was – letting her clothes fall, pushing back with a languid gesture her warm, heavy hair. ‘Oh, how tired I am – very tired.’ She shut her eyes a moment, but her lips smiled. Her breath rose and fell in her breast like two fanning wings. The window was wide open; it was warm, and somewhere out there in the garden a young man, dark and slender, with mocking eyes, tip-toed among the bushes, and gathered the flowers into a big bouquet, and slipped under her window and held it up to her. She saw herself bending forward. He thrust his head among the bright waxy flowers, sly and laughing. ‘No, no,’ said Beryl. She turned from the window and dropped her nightgown over her head. ‘How frightfully unreasonable Stanley is sometimes,’ she thought,

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buttoning. And then, as she lay down, there came the old thought, the cruel thought – ah, if only she had money of her own. A young man, immensely rich, has just arrived from England. He meets her quite by chance. . . . The new governor is unmarried. . . . There is a ball at Government house. . . . Who is that exquisite creature in eau de nil satin? Beryl Fairfield. . . . ‘The thing that pleases me,’ said Stanley, leaning against the side of the bed and giving himself a good scratch on his shoulders and back before turning in, ‘is that I’ve got the place dirt cheap, Linda. I was talking about it to little Wally Bell to-day and he said he simply could not understand why they had accepted my figure. You see land about here is bound to become more and more valuable . . . in about ten years’ time . . . of course we shall have to go very slow and cut down expenses as fine as possible. Not asleep – are you?’ ‘No, dear, I’ve heard every word,’ said Linda. He sprang into bed, leaned over her and blew out the candle. ‘Good night, Mr Business Man,’ said she, and she took hold of his head by the ears and gave him a quick kiss. Her faint far-away voice seemed to come from a deep well. ‘Good night, darling.’ He slipped his arm under her neck and drew her to him. ‘Yes, clasp me,’ said the faint voice from the deep well. Pat the handy man sprawled in his little room behind the kitchen. His sponge-bag, coat and trousers hung from the door-peg like a hanged man. From the edge of the blanket his twisted toes protruded, and on the floor beside him there was an empty cane bird-cage. He looked like a comic picture. ‘Honk, honk,’ came from the servant girl. She had adenoids. Last to go to bed was the grandmother. ‘What. Not asleep yet?’ ‘No, I’m waiting for you,’ said Kezia. The old woman sighed and lay down beside her. Kezia thrust her head under the grandmother’s arm and gave a little squeak. But the old woman only pressed her faintly, and sighed again, took out her teeth, and put them in a glass of water beside her on the floor. In the garden some tiny owls, perched on the branches of a lacebark tree, called: ‘More pork; more pork.’ And far away in the bush there sounded a harsh rapid chatter: ‘Ha-ha-ha . . . Ha-ha-ha.’ V Dawn came sharp and chill with red clouds on a faint green sky and drops of water on every leaf and blade. A breeze blew over the garden,

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dropping dew and dropping petals, shivered over the drenched paddocks, and was lost in the sombre bush. In the sky some tiny stars floated for a moment and then they were gone – they were dissolved like bubbles. And plain to be heard in the early quiet was the sound of the creek in the paddock running over the brown stones, running in and out of the sandy hollows, hiding under clumps of dark berry bushes, spilling into a swamp of yellow water flowers and cresses. And then at the first beam of sun the birds began. Big cheeky birds, starlings and mynahs, whistled on the lawns, the little birds, the goldfinches and linnets and fantails flicked from bough to bough. A lovely kingfisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich beauty, and a tui sang his three notes and laughed and sang them again. ‘How loud the birds are,’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green paddock sprinkled with daisies. Suddenly he bent down and parted the grasses and showed her a tiny ball of fluff just at her feet. ‘Oh, Papa, the darling.’ She made a cup of her hands and caught the tiny bird and stroked its head with her finger. It was quite tame. But a funny thing happened. As she stroked it began to swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile knowingly at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it and she dropped it into her apron. It had become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird-mouth, opening and shutting. Her father broke into a loud clattering laugh and she woke to see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the Venetian blind up to the very top. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Didn’t wake you, did I? Nothing much wrong with the weather this morning.’ He was enormously pleased. Weather like this set a final seal on his bargain. He felt, somehow, that he had bought the lovely day, too – got it chucked in dirt cheap with the house and ground. He dashed off to his bath and Linda turned over and raised herself on one elbow to see the room by daylight. All the furniture had found a place – all the old paraphernalia – as she expressed it. Even the photographs were on the mantelpiece and the medicine bottles on the shelf above the wash-stand. Her clothes lay across a chair – her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it. Looking at them she wished that she was going away from this house, too. And she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving. Back came Stanley girt with a towel, glowing and slapping his thighs. He pitched the wet towel on top of her hat and cape, and standing firm in the exact centre of a square of sunlight he began to do his exercises. Deep breathing, bending and squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs. He was so delighted with his firm,

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obedient body that he hit himself on the chest and gave a loud ‘Ah.’ But this amazing vigour seemed to set him worlds away from Linda. She lay on the white tumbled bed and watched him as if from the clouds. ‘Oh, damn! Oh, blast!’ said Stanley, who had butted into a crisp white shirt only to find that some idiot had fastened the neck-band and he was caught. He stalked over to Linda waving his arms. ‘You look like a big fat turkey,’ said she. ‘Fat. I like that,’ said Stanley. ‘I haven’t a square inch of fat on me. Feel that.’ ‘It’s rock – it’s iron,’ mocked she. ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Stanley, as though this were intensely interesting, ‘at the number of chaps at the club who have got a corporation. Young chaps, you know – men of my age.’ He began parting his bushy ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass, his knees bent, because the dressing table was always – confound it – a bit too low for him. ‘Little Wally Bell, for instance,’ and he straightened, describing upon himself an enormous curve with the hairbrush. ‘I must say I’ve a perfect horror. . . .’ ‘My dear, don’t worry. You’ll never be fat. You are far too energetic.’ ‘Yes, yes, I suppose that’s true,’ said he, comforted for the hundredth time, and taking a pearl pen-knife out of his pocket he began to pare his nails. ‘Breakfast, Stanley.’ Beryl was at the door. ‘Oh, Linda, mother says you are not to get up yet.’ She popped her head in at the door. She had a big piece of syringa stuck through her hair. ‘Everything we left on the verandah last night is simply sopping this morning. You should see poor dear mother wringing out the tables and the chairs. However, there is no harm done –’ this with the faintest glance at Stanley. ‘Have you told Pat to have the buggy round in time? It’s a good six and a half miles to the office.’ ‘I can imagine what this early start for the office will be like,’ thought Linda. ‘It will be very high pressure indeed.’ ‘Pat, Pat.’ She heard the servant girl calling. But Pat was evidently hard to find; the silly voice went baa-baaing through the garden. Linda did not rest again until the final slam of the front door told her that Stanley was really gone. Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie’s stolid, compact little voice cried: ‘Ke - zia. Isa - bel.’ She was always getting lost or losing people only to find them again, to her great surprise, round the next tree or the next corner. ‘Oh, there you are after all.’ They had been turned out after breakfast and told not to come back to the house until they were called. Isabel wheeled a neat pramload of

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prim dolls and Lottie was allowed for a great treat to walk beside her holding the doll’s parasol over the face of the wax one. ‘Where are you going to, Kezia?’ asked Isabel, who longed to find some light and menial duty that Kezia might perform and so be roped in under her government. ‘Oh, just away,’ said Kezia. . . . Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time, but in the morning it was intolerable. She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with priests attending. . . . For there were some tassels that did not dance at all but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest. ‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? She had forgotten. But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves. Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right because THEY were there; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty, she knew as she clicked the door to that THEY were filling it. And there were times in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly escape from them. Then she could not hurry, she could not hum a tune; if she tried to say ever so carelessly – ‘Bother that old thimble’ – THEY were not deceived. THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. What Linda always felt was that THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen. ‘It’s very quiet now,’ she thought. She opened her eyes wide, and she heard the silence spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed; she scarcely had to breathe at all.

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Yes, everything had come alive down to the minutest, tiniest particle, and she did not feel her bed, she floated, held up in the air. Only she seemed to be listening with her wide open watchful eyes, waiting for someone to come who just did not come, watching for something to happen that just did not happen. VI In the kitchen at the long deal table under the two windows old Mrs Fairfield was washing the breakfast dishes. The kitchen window looked out on to a big grass patch that led down to the vegetable garden and the rhubarb beds. On one side the grass patch was bordered by the scullery and wash-house and over this whitewashed lean-to there grew a knotted vine. She had noticed yesterday that a few tiny corkscrew tendrils had come right through some cracks in the scullery ceiling and all the windows of the lean-to had a thick frill of ruffled green. ‘I am very fond of a grape vine,’ declared Mrs Fairfield, ‘but I do not think that the grapes will ripen here. It takes Australian sun.’ And she remembered how Beryl when she was a baby had been picking some white grapes from the vine on the back verandah of their Tasmanian house and she had been stung on the leg by a huge red ant. She saw Beryl in a little plaid dress with red ribbon tie-ups on the shoulders screaming so dreadfully that half the street rushed in. And how the child’s leg had swelled! ‘T – t – t – t!’ Mrs Fairfield caught her breath remembering. ‘Poor child, how terrifying it was.’ And she set her lips tight and went over to the stove for some more hot water. The water frothed up in the big soapy bowl with pink and blue bubbles on top of the foam. Old Mrs Fairfield’s arms were bare to the elbow and stained a bright pink. She wore a grey foulard dress patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and a high cap shaped like a jelly mould of white muslin. At her throat there was a silver crescent moon with five little owls seated on it, and round her neck she wore a watch-guard made of black beads. It was hard to believe that she had not been in that kitchen for years; she was so much a part of it. She put the crocks away with a sure, precise touch, moving leisurely and ample from the stove to the dresser, looking into the pantry and the larder as though there were not an unfamiliar corner. When she had finished, everything in the kitchen had become part of a series of patterns. She stood in the middle of the room wiping her hands on a check cloth; a smile beamed on her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory. ‘Mother! Mother! Are you there?’ called Beryl. ‘Yes, dear. Do you want me?’ ‘No. I’m coming,’ and Beryl rushed in, very flushed, dragging with her two big pictures.

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‘Mother, whatever can I do with these awful hideous Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It’s absurd to say that they are valuable, because they were hanging in Chung Wah’s fruit shop for months before. I can’t make out why Stanley wants them kept. I’m sure he thinks them just as hideous as we do, but it’s because of the frames,’ she said spitefully. ‘I suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something some day or other.’ ‘Why don’t you hang them in the passage?’ suggested Mrs Fairfield; ‘they would not be much seen there.’ ‘I can’t. There is no room. I’ve hung all the photographs of his office there before and after building, and the signed photos of his business friends, and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on the mat in her singlet.’ Her angry glance swept the placid kitchen. ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll hang them here: I will tell Stanley they got a little damp in the moving so I have put them in here for the time being.’ She dragged a chair forward, jumped on it, took a hammer and a big nail out of her pinafore pocket and banged away. ‘There! That is enough! Hand me the picture, mother.’ ‘One moment, child.’ Her mother was wiping over the carved ebony frame. ‘Oh, mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those little holes.’ And she frowned at the top of her mother’s head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother’s deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily. At last the two pictures were hung side by side. She jumped off the chair, stowing away the little hammer. ‘They don’t look so bad there, do they?’ said she. ‘And at any rate nobody need gaze at them except Pat and the servant girl – have I got a spider’s web on my face, mother? I’ve been poking into that cupboard under the stairs and now something keeps tickling my nose.’ But before Mrs Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away. Someone tapped on the window: Linda was there, nodding and smiling. They heard the latch of the scullery door lift and she came in. She had no hat on; her hair stood up on her head in curling rings and she was wrapped up in an old cashmere shawl. ‘I’m so hungry,’ said Linda: ‘where can I get something to eat, mother? This is the first time I’ve been in the kitchen. It says “mother” all over; everything is in pairs.’ ‘I will make you some tea,’ said Mrs Fairfield, spreading a clean napkin over a corner of the table, ‘and Beryl can have a cup with you.’ ‘Beryl, do you want half my gingerbread?’ Linda waved the knife at her. ‘Beryl, do you like the house now that we are here?’ ‘Oh yes, I like the house immensely and the garden is beautiful, but

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it feels very far away from everything to me. I can’t imagine people coming out from town to see us in that dreadful jolting bus, and I am sure there is not anyone here to come and call. Of course it does not matter to you because –’ ‘But there’s the buggy,’ said Linda. ‘Pat can drive you into town whenever you like.’ That was a consolation, certainly, but there was something at the back of Beryl’s mind, something she did not even put into words for herself. ‘Oh, well, at any rate it won’t kill us,’ she said dryly, putting down her empty cup and standing up and stretching. ‘I am going to hang curtains.’ And she ran away singing: How many thousand birds I see That sing aloud from every tree . . .

‘. . . birds I see That sing aloud from every tree. . . .’ But when she reached the dining-room she stopped singing, her face changed; it became gloomy and sullen. ‘One may as well rot here as anywhere else,’ she muttered savagely, digging the stiff brass safety-pins into the red serge curtains. The two left in the kitchen were quiet for a little. Linda leaned her cheek on her fingers and watched her mother. She thought her mother looked wonderfully beautiful with her back to the leafy window. There was something comforting in the sight of her that Linda felt she could never do without. She needed the sweet smell of her flesh, and the soft feel of her cheeks and her arms and shoulders still softer. She loved the way her hair curled, silver at her forehead, lighter at her neck, and bright brown still in the big coil under the muslin cap. Exquisite were her mother’s hands, and the two rings she wore seemed to melt into her creamy skin. And she was always so fresh, so delicious. The old woman could bear nothing but linen next to her body and she bathed in cold water winter and summer. ‘Isn’t there anything for me to do?’ asked Linda. ‘No, darling. I wish you would go into the garden and give an eye to your children; but that I know you will not do.’ ‘Of course I will, but you know Isabel is much more grown up than any of us.’ ‘Yes, but Kezia is not,’ said Mrs Fairfield. ‘Oh, Kezia has been tossed by a bull hours ago,’ said Linda, winding herself up in her shawl again. But no, Kezia had seen a bull through a hole in a knot of wood in the paling that separated the tennis lawn from the paddock. But she had not liked the bull frightfully, so she had walked away back

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through the orchard, up the grassy slope, along the path by the lace bark tree and so into the spread tangled garden. She did not believe that she would ever not get lost in this garden. Twice she had found her way back to the big iron gates they had driven through the night before, and then had turned to walk up the drive that led to the house, but there were so many little paths on either side. On one side they all led into a tangle of tall dark trees and strange bushes with flat velvet leaves and feathery cream flowers that buzzed with flies when you shook them – this was the frightening side, and no garden at all. The little paths here were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them like the marks of big fowls’ feet. But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edges and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. The camellias were in bloom, white and crimson and pink and white striped with flashing leaves. You could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. The roses were in flower – gentlemen’s button-hole roses, little white ones, but far too full of insects to hold under anyone’s nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark they seemed to turn black as they fell, and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright scarlet leaves. There were clumps of fairy bells, and all kinds of geraniums, and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelagoniums with velvet eyes and leaves like moths’ wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but pansies – borders of double and single daisies and all kinds of little tufty plants she had never seen before. The red-hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing hard at first it made a nice seat. But how dusty it was inside! Kezia bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose. And then she found herself at the top of the rolling grassy slope that led down to the orchard. . . . She looked down at the slope a moment; then she lay down on her back, gave a squeak and rolled over and over into the thick flowery orchard grass. As she lay waiting for things to stop spinning, she decided to go up to the house and ask the servant girl for an empty match-box. She wanted to make a surprise for the grandmother. . . . First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet lying on it, then she would put a very small white picotee, perhaps, on each side of the violet, and then she would sprinkle some lavender on the top, but not to cover their heads. She often made these surprises for the grandmother, and they were always most successful.

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‘Do you want a match, my granny?’ ‘Why, yes, child, I believe a match is just what I’m looking for.’ The grandmother slowly opened the box and came upon the picture inside. ‘Good gracious, child! How you astonished me!’ ‘I can make her one every day here,’ she thought, scrambling up the grass on her slippery shoes. But on her way back to the house she came to that island that lay in the middle of the drive, dividing the drive into two arms that met in front of the house. The island was made of grass banked up high. Nothing grew on the top except one huge plant with thick, greygreen, thorny leaves, and out of the middle there sprang up a tall stout stem. Some of the leaves of the plant were so old that they curled up in the air no longer; they turned back, they were split and broken; some of them lay flat and withered on the ground. Whatever could it be? She had never seen anything like it before. She stood and stared. And then she saw her mother coming down the path. ‘Mother, what is it?’ asked Kezia. Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from, it might have had claws instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something; the blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it. ‘That is an aloe, Kezia,’ said her mother. ‘Does it ever have any flowers?’ ‘Yes, Kezia,’ and Linda smiled down at her, and half shut her eyes. ‘Once every hundred years.’ VII On his way home from the office Stanley Burnell stopped the buggy at the Bodega, got out and bought a large bottle of oysters. At the Chinaman’s shop next door he bought a pineapple in the pink of condition, and noticing a basket of fresh black cherries he told John to put him a pound of those as well. The oysters and the pine he stowed away in the box under the front seat, but the cherries he kept in his hand. Pat, the handy-man, leapt off the box and tucked him up again in the brown rug. ‘Lift yer feet, Mr Burnell, while I give yer a fold under,’ said he. ‘Right! Right! First-rate!’ said Stanley. ‘You can make straight for home now.’ Pat gave the grey mare a touch and the buggy sprang forward. ‘I believe this man is a first-rate chap,’ thought Stanley. He liked the look of him sitting up there in his neat brown coat and brown bowler.

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He liked the way Pat had tucked him in, and he liked his eyes. There was nothing servile about him – and if there was one thing he hated more than another it was servility. And he looked as if he was pleased with his job – happy and contented already. The grey mare went very well; Burnell was impatient to be out of the town. He wanted to be home. Ah, it was splendid to live in the country – to get right out of that hole of a town once the office was closed; and this drive in the fresh warm air, knowing all the while that his own house was at the other end, with its garden and paddocks, its three tip-top cows and enough fowls and ducks to keep them in poultry, was splendid too. As they left the town finally and bowled away up the deserted road his heart beat hard for joy. He rooted in the bag and began to eat the cherries, three or four at a time, chucking the stones over the side of the buggy. They were delicious, so plump and cold, without a spot or a bruise on them. Look at those two, now – black one side and white the other – perfect! A perfect little pair of Siamese twins. And he stuck them in his button-hole. . . . By Jove, he wouldn’t mind giving that chap up there a handful – but no, better not. Better wait until he had been with him a bit longer. He began to plan what he would do with his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays. He wouldn’t go to the club for lunch on Saturday. No, cut away from the office as soon as possible and get them to give him a couple of slices of cold meat and half a lettuce when he got home. And then he’d get a few chaps out from town to play tennis in the afternoon. Not too many – three at most. Beryl was a good player, too. . . . He stretched out his right arm and slowly bent it, feeling the muscle. . . . A bath, a good rub-down, a cigar on the verandah after dinner. . . . On Sunday morning they would go to church – children and all. Which reminded him that he must hire a pew, in the sun if possible and well forward so as to be out of the draught from the door. In fancy he heard himself intoning extremely well: ‘When thou did overcome the Sharpness of Death Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all Believers.’2 And he saw the neat brass-edged card on the corner of the pew – Mr Stanley Burnell and family. . . . The rest of the day he’d loaf about with Linda. . . . Now they were walking about the garden; she was on his arm, and he was explaining to her at length what he intended doing at the office the week following. He heard her saying: ‘My dear, I think that is most wise.’ . . . Talking things over with Linda was a wonderful help even though they were apt to drift away from the point. Hang it all! They weren’t getting along very fast. Pat had put the

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brake on again. Ugh! What a brute of a thing it was. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach. A sort of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home. Before he was well inside the gate he would shout to anyone within sight: ‘Is everything all right?’ And then he did not believe it was until he heard Linda say: ‘Hullo! Are you home again?’ That was the worst of living in the country – it took the deuce of a long time to get back. . . . But now they weren’t far off. They were on the top of the last hill; it was a gentle slope all the way now and not more than half a mile. Pat trailed the whip over the mare’s back and he coaxed her: ‘Goop now. Goop now.’ It wanted a few minutes to sunset. Everything stood motionless bathed in bright, metallic light and from the paddocks on either side there streamed the milky scent of ripe grass. The iron gates were open. They dashed through and up the drive and round the island, stopping at the exact middle of the verandah. ‘Did she satisfy yer, Sir?’ said Pat, getting off the box and grinning at his master. ‘Very well indeed, Pat,’ said Stanley. Linda came out of the glass door; her voice rang in the shadowy quiet. ‘Hullo! Are you home again?’ At the sound of her his heart beat so hard that he could hardly stop himself dashing up the steps and catching her in his arms. ‘Yes, I’m home again. Is everything all right?’ Pat began to lead the buggy round to the side gate that opened into the courtyard. ‘Here, half a moment,’ said Burnell. ‘Hand me those two parcels.’ And he said to Linda, ‘I’ve brought you back a bottle of oysters and a pineapple,’ as though he had brought her back all the harvest of the earth. They went into the hall; Linda carried the oysters in one hand and the pineapple in the other. Burnell shut the glass door, threw his hat down, put his arms round her and strained her to him, kissing the top of her head, her ears, her lips, her eyes. ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ said she. ‘Wait a moment. Let me put down these silly things,’ and she put the bottle of oysters and the pine on a little carved chair. ‘What have you got in your buttonhole – cherries?’ She took them out and hung them over his ear. ‘Don’t do that, darling. They are for you.’ So she took them off his ear again. ‘You don’t mind if I save them. They’d spoil my appetite for dinner. Come and see your children. They are having tea.’ The lamp was lighted on the nursery table. Mrs Fairfield was cutting and spreading bread and butter. The three little girls sat up to

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table wearing large bibs embroidered with their names. They wiped their mouths as their father came in ready to be kissed. The windows were open; a jar of wild flowers stood on the mantelpiece, and the lamp made a big soft bubble of light on the ceiling. ‘You seem pretty snug, mother,’ said Burnell, blinking at the light. Isabel and Lottie sat one on either side of the table, Kezia at the bottom –the place at the top was empty. ‘That’s where my boy ought to sit,’ thought Stanley. He tightened his arm round Linda’s shoulder. By God, he was a perfect fool to feel as happy as this! ‘We are, Stanley. We are very snug,’ said Mrs Fairfield, cutting Kezia’s bread into fingers. ‘Like it better than town – eh, children?’ asked Burnell. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the three little girls, and Isabel added as an after-thought: ‘Thank you very much indeed, father dear.’ ‘Come upstairs,’ said Linda. ‘I’ll bring your slippers.’ But the stairs were too narrow for them to go up arm in arm. It was quite dark in the room. He heard her ring tapping on the marble mantelpiece as she felt for the matches. ‘I’ve got some, darling. I’ll light the candles.’ But instead he came up behind her and again he put his arms round her and pressed her head into his shoulder. ‘I’m so confoundedly happy,’ he said. ‘Are you?’ She turned and put her hands on his breast and looked up at him. ‘I don’t know what has come over me,’ he protested. It was quite dark outside now and heavy dew was falling. When Linda shut the window the cold dew touched her finger tips. Far away a dog barked. ‘I believe there is going to be a moon,’ she said. At the words, and with the cold wet dew on her fingers, she felt as though the moon had risen – that she was being strangely discovered in a flood of cold light. She shivered; she came away from the window and sat down upon the box ottoman beside Stanley. *

*

*

In the dining-room, by the flicker of a wood fire, Beryl sat on a hassock playing the guitar. She had bathed and changed all her clothes. Now she wore a white muslin dress with black spots on it and in her hair she had pinned a black silk rose. Nature has gone to her rest, love, See, we are alone. Give me your hand to press, love, Lightly within my own.

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She played and sang half to herself, for she was watching herself playing and singing. The firelight gleamed on her shoes, on the ruddy belly of the guitar, and on her white fingers. . . . ‘If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck,’ thought she. Still more softly she played the accompaniment – not singing now but listening. . . ‘The first time that I ever saw you, little girl – oh, you had no idea that you were not alone – you were sitting with your little feet upon a hassock, playing the guitar. God, I can never forget. . . . ’ Beryl flung up her head and began to sing again: Even the moon is aweary . . .

But there came a loud bang at the door. The servant girl’s crimson face popped through. ‘Please, Miss Beryl, I’ve got to come and lay.’ ‘Certainly, Alice,’ said Beryl, in a voice of ice. She put the guitar in a corner. Alice lunged in with a heavy black iron tray. ‘Well, I have had a job with that oving,’ said she. ‘I can’t get nothing to brown.’ ‘Really!’ said Beryl. But no, she could not stand that fool of a girl. She ran into the dark drawing-room and began walking up and down. . . . Oh, she was restless, restless. There was a mirror over the mantel. She leaned her arms along and looked at her pale shadow in it. How beautiful she looked, but there was nobody to see, nobody. ‘Why must you suffer so?’ said the face in the mirror. ‘You were not made for suffering. . . . Smile!’ Beryl smiled, and really her smile was so adorable that she smiled again – but this time because she could not help it. VIII ‘Good morning, Mrs Jones.’ ‘Oh, good morning, Mrs Smith. I’m so glad to see you. Have you brought your children?’ ‘Yes, I’ve brought both my twins. I have had another baby since I saw you last, but she came so suddenly that I haven’t had time to make her any clothes, yet. So I left her. . . . How is your husband?’ ‘Oh, he is very well, thank you. At least he had a nawful cold but Queen Victoria – she’s my godmother, you know – sent him a case of pineapples and that cured it immediately. Is that your new servant?’ ‘Yes, her name’s Gwen. I’ve only had her two days. Oh, Gwen, this is my friend, Mrs Smith.’

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‘Good morning, Mrs Smith. Dinner won’t be ready for about ten minutes.’ ‘I don’t think you ought to introduce me to the servant. I think I ought to just begin talking to her.’ ‘Well, she’s more of a lady-help than a servant and you do introduce lady-helps, I know, because Mrs Samuel Josephs had one.’ ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,’ said the servant, carelessly, beating up a chocolate custard with half a broken clothes peg. The dinner was baking beautifully on a concrete step. She began to lay the cloth on a pink garden seat. In front of each person she put two geranium leaf plates, a pine needle fork and a twig knife. There were three daisy heads on a laurel leaf for poached eggs, some slices of fuchsia petal cold beef, some lovely little rissoles made of earth and water and dandelion seeds, and the chocolate custard which she had decided to serve in the pawa shell she had cooked it in. ‘You needn’t trouble about my children,’ said Mrs Smith graciously. ‘If you’ll just take this bottle and fill it at the tap – I mean at the dairy.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ said Gwen, and she whispered to Mrs Jones: ‘Shall I go and ask Alice for a little bit of real milk?’ But someone called from the front of the house and the luncheon party melted away, leaving the charming table, leaving the rissoles and the poached eggs to the ants and to an old snail who pushed his quivering horns over the edge of the garden seat and began to nibble a geranium plate. ‘Come round to the front, children. Pip and Rags have come.’ The Trout boys were the cousins Kezia had mentioned to the storeman. They lived about a mile away in a house called Monkey Tree Cottage. Pip was tall for his age, with lank black hair and a white face, but Rags was very small and so thin that when he was undressed his shoulder blades stuck out like two little wings. They had a mongrel dog with pale blue eyes and a long tail turned up at the end who followed them everywhere; he was called Snooker. They spent half their time combing and brushing Snooker and dosing him with various awful mixtures concocted by Pip, and kept secretly by him in a broken jug covered with an old kettle lid. Even faithful little Rags was not allowed to know the full secret of these mixtures. . . . Take some carbolic tooth powder and a pinch of sulphur powdered up fine, and perhaps a bit of starch to stiffen up Snooker’s coat. . . . But that was not all; Rags privately thought that the rest was gun-powder. . . . And he never was allowed to help with the mixing because of the danger. . . . ‘Why if a spot of this flew in your eye, you would be blinded for life,’ Pip would say, stirring the mixture with an iron spoon. ‘And there’s always the chance – just the chance, mind you – of it exploding if you whack it hard enough. . . . Two spoons of this in

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a kerosene tin will be enough to kill thousands of fleas.’ But Snooker spent all his spare time biting and snuffling, and he stank abominably. ‘It’s because he is such a grand fighting dog,’ Pip would say. ‘All fighting dogs smell.’ The Trout boys had often spent the day with the Burnells in town, but now that they lived in this fine house and bonzer garden they were inclined to be very friendly. Besides, both of them liked playing with girls – Pip, because he could fox them so, and because Lottie was so easily frightened, and Rags for a shameful reason. He adored dolls. How he would look at a doll as it lay asleep, speaking in a whisper and smiling timidly, and what a treat it was to him to be allowed to hold one. . . . ‘Curve your arms round her. Don’t keep them stiff like that. You’ll drop her,’ Isabel would say sternly. Now they were standing on the verandah and holding back Snooker who wanted to go into the house but wasn’t allowed to because Aunt Linda hated decent dogs. ‘We came over in the bus with Mum,’ they said, ‘and we’re going to spend the afternoon with you. We brought over a batch of our gingerbread for Aunt Linda. Our Minnie made it. It’s all over nuts.’ ‘I skinned the almonds,’ said Pip. ‘I just stuck my hand into a saucepan of boiling water and grabbed them out and gave them a kind of pinch and the nuts flew out of the skins, some of them as high as the ceiling. Didn’t they, Rags?’ Rags nodded. ‘When they make cakes at our place,’ said Pip, ‘we always stay in the kitchen, Rags and me, and I get the bowl and he gets the spoon and the egg beater. Sponge cake’s best. It’s all frothy stuff, then.’ He ran down the verandah steps to the lawn, planted his hands on the grass, bent forward, and just did not stand on his head. ‘That lawn’s all bumpy,’ he said. ‘You have to have a flat place for standing on your head. I can walk round the monkey tree on my head at our place. Can’t I, Rags?’ ‘Nearly,’ said Rags faintly. ‘Stand on your head on the verandah. That’s quite flat,’ said Kezia. ‘No, smarty,’ said Pip. ‘You have to do it on something soft. Because if you give a jerk and fall over, something in your neck goes click, and it breaks off. Dad told me.’ ‘Oh, do let’s play something,’ said Kezia. ‘Very well,’ said Isabel quickly, ‘we’ll play hospitals. I will be the nurse and Pip can be the doctor and you and Lottie and Rags can be the sick people.’ Lottie didn’t want to play that, because last time Pip had squeezed something down her throat and it hurt awfully.

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‘Pooh,’ scoffed Pip. ‘It was only the juice out of a bit of mandarin peel.’ ‘Well, let’s play ladies,’ said Isabel. ‘Pip can be the father and you can be all our dear little children.’ ‘I hate playing ladies,’ said Kezia. ‘You always make us go to church hand in hand and come home and go to bed.’ Suddenly Pip took a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket. ‘Snooker! Here, sir,’ he called. But Snooker, as usual, tried to sneak away, his tail between his legs. Pip leapt on top of him, and pressed him between his knees. ‘Keep his head firm, Rags,’ he said, and he tied the handkerchief round Snooker’s head with a funny knot sticking up at the top. ‘Whatever is that for?’ asked Lottie. ‘It’s to train his ears to grow more close to his head – see?’ said Pip. ‘All fighting dogs have ears that lie back. But Snooker’s ears are a bit too soft.’ ‘I know,’ said Kezia. ‘They are always turning inside out. I hate that.’ Snooker lay down, made one feeble effort with his paw to get the handkerchief off, but finding he could not, trailed after the children, shivering with misery. IX Pat came swinging along; in his hand he held a little tomahawk that winked in the sun. ‘Come with me,’ he said to the children, ‘and I’ll show you how the kings of Ireland chop the head off a duck.’ They drew back – they didn’t believe him, and besides, the Trout boys had never seen Pat before. ‘Come on now,’ he coaxed, smiling and holding out his hand to Kezia. ‘Is it a real duck’s head? One from the paddock?’ It is,’ said Pat. She put her hand in his hard dry one, and he stuck the tomahawk in his belt and held out the other to Rags. He loved little children. ‘I’d better keep hold of Snooker’s head if there’s going to be any blood about,’ said Pip, ‘because the sight of blood makes him awfully wild.’ He ran ahead dragging Snooker by the handkerchief. ‘Do you think we ought to go?’ whispered Isabel. ‘We haven’t asked or anything. Have we?’ At the bottom of the orchard a gate was set in the paling fence. On the other side a steep bank led down to a bridge that spanned the creek, and once up the bank on the other side you were on the fringe of the paddocks. A little old stable in the first paddock had been turned into a fowl house. The fowls had strayed

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far away across the paddock down to a dumping ground, in a hollow, but the ducks kept close to that part of the creek that flowed under the bridge. Tall bushes overhung the stream with red leaves and yellow flowers and clusters of blackberries. At some places the stream was wide and shallow, but at others it tumbled into deep little pools with foam at the edges and quivering bubbles. It was in these pools that the big white ducks had made themselves at home, swimming and guzzling along the weedy banks. Up and down they swam, preening their dazzling breasts, and other ducks with the same dazzling breasts and yellow bills swam upside down with them. ‘There is the little Irish navy,’ said Pat, ‘and look at the old admiral there with the green neck and the grand little flagstaff on his tail.’ He pulled a handful of grain from his pocket and began to walk towards the fowl-house, lazy, his straw hat with the broken crown pulled over his eyes. ‘Lid. Lid – lid – lid – lid –’ he called. ‘Qua. Qua – qua– qua – qua –’ answered the ducks, making for land, and flapping and scrambling up the bank they streamed after him in a long waddling line. He coaxed them, pretending to throw the grain, shaking it in his hands and calling to them until they swept round him in a white ring. From far away the fowls heard the clamour and they too came running across the paddock, their heads thrust forward, their wings spread, turning in their feet in the silly way fowls run and scolding as they came. Then Pat scattered the grain and the greedy ducks began to gobble. Quickly he stooped, seized two, one under each arm, and strode across to the children. Their darting heads and round eyes frightened the children – all except Pip. ‘Come on, sillies,’ he cried, ‘they can’t bite. They haven’t any teeth. They’ve only got those two little holes in their beaks for breathing through.’ ‘Will you hold one while I finish with the other?’ asked Pat. Pip let go of Snooker. ‘Won’t I? Won’t I? Give us one. I don’t mind how much he kicks.’ He nearly sobbed with delight when Pat gave the white lump into his arms. There was an old stump beside the door of the fowl-house. Pat grabbed the duck by the legs, laid it flat across the stump, and almost at the same moment down came the little tomahawk and the duck’s head flew off the stump. Up the blood spurted over the white feathers

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and over his hand. When the children saw the blood they were frightened no longer. They crowded round him and began to scream. Even Isabel leaped about crying: ‘The blood! The blood!’ Pip forgot all about his duck. He simply threw it away from him and shouted, ‘I saw it. I saw it,’ and jumped round the wood block. Rags, with cheeks as white as paper, ran up to the little head, put out a finger as if he wanted to touch it, shrank back again and then again put out a finger. He was shivering all over. Even Lottie, frightened little Lottie, began to laugh and pointed at the duck and shrieked: ‘Look, Kezia, look.’ ‘Watch it!’ shouted Pat. He put down the body and it began to waddle – with only a long spurt of blood where the head had been; it began to pad away without a sound towards the steep bank that led to the stream. . . . That was the crowning wonder. ‘Do you see that? Do you see that?’ yelled Pip. He ran among the little girls tugging at their pinafores. ‘It’s like a little engine. It’s like a funny little railway engine,’ squealed Isabel. But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms round his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees. ‘Put head back! Put head back!’ she screamed. When he stooped to move her she would not let go or take her head away. She held on as hard as she could and sobbed: ‘Head back! Head back!’ until it sounded like a loud strange hiccup. ‘It’s stopped. It’s tumbled over. It’s dead,’ said Pip. Pat dragged Kezia up into his arms. Her sun-bonnet had fallen back, but she would not let him look at her face. No, she pressed her face into a bone in his shoulder and clasped her arms round his neck. The children stopped screaming as suddenly as they had begun. They stood round the dead duck. Rags was not frightened of the head any more. He knelt down and stroked it, now. ‘I don’t think the head is quite dead yet,’ he said. ‘Do you think it would keep alive if I gave it something to drink?’ But Pip got very cross: ‘Bah! You baby.’ He whistled to Snooker and went off. When Isabel went up to Lottie, Lottie snatched away. ‘What are you always touching me for, Isabel?’ ‘There now,’ said Pat to Kezia. ‘There’s the grand little girl.’ She put up her hands and touched his ears. She felt something. Slowly she raised her quivering face and looked. Pat wore little round gold ear-rings. She never knew that men wore ear-rings. She was very much surprised. ‘Do they come on and off?’ she asked huskily.

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X Up in the house, in the warm tidy kitchen, Alice, the servant girl, was getting the afternoon tea. She was ‘dressed’. She had on a black stuff dress that smelt under the arms, a white apron like a large sheet of paper, and a lace bow pinned on to her hair with two jetty pins. Also her comfortable carpet slippers were changed for a pair of black leather ones that pinched her corn on her little toe something dreadful. . . . It was warm in the kitchen. A blow-fly buzzed, a fan of whity steam came out of the kettle, and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled. The clock ticked in the warm air, slow and deliberate, like the click of an old woman’s knitting needle, and sometimes – for no reason at all, for there wasn’t any breeze – the blind swung out and back, tapping the window. Alice was making water-cress sandwiches. She had a lump of butter on the table, a barracouta loaf, and the cresses tumbled in a white cloth. But propped against the butter dish there was a dirty, greasy little book, half unstitched, with curled edges, and while she mashed the butter she read: ‘To dream of black-beetles drawing a hearse is bad. Signifies death of one you hold near or dear, either father, husband, brother, son, or intended. If beetles crawl backwards as you watch them it means death from fire or from great height such as flight of stairs, scaffolding, etc. ‘Spiders. To dream of spiders creeping over you is good. Signifies large sum of money in near future. Should party be in family way an easy confinement may be expected. But care should be taken in sixth month to avoid eating of probable present of shell fish. . . .’ How many thousand birds I see.

Oh, life. There was Miss Beryl. Alice dropped the knife and slipped the Dream Book under the butter dish. But she hadn’t time to hide it quite, for Beryl ran into the kitchen and up to the table, and the first thing her eye lighted on were those greasy edges. Alice saw Miss Beryl’s meaning little smile and the way she raised her eyebrows and screwed up her eyes as though she were not quite sure what that could be. She decided to answer if Miss Beryl should ask her: ‘Nothing as belongs to you, Miss.’ But she knew Miss Beryl would not ask her. Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she had the most marvellous retorts ready for questions that she knew would never be put to her. The composing of them and the turning of them over and over

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in her mind comforted her just as much as if they’d been expressed. Really, they kept her alive in places where she’d been that chivvied she’d been afraid to go to bed at night with a box of matches on the chair in case she bit the tops off in her sleep, as you might say. Oh, Alice,’ said Miss Beryl. ‘There’s one extra to tea, so heat a plate of yesterday’s scones, please. And put on the Victoria sandwich as well as the coffee cake. And don’t forget to put little doyleys under the plates – will you? You did yesterday, you know, and the tea looked so ugly and common. And, Alice, don’t put that dreadful old pink and green cosy on the afternoon teapot again. That is only for the mornings. Really, I think it ought to be kept for the kitchen – it’s so shabby, and quite smelly. Put on the Japanese one. You quite understand, don’t you?’ Miss Beryl had finished. That sing aloud from every tree . . .

she sang as she left the kitchen, very pleased with her firm handling of Alice. Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was that she made her feel low. She talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there; and she never lost her temper with her – never. Even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything important Miss Beryl seemed to have expected it to happen. ‘If you please, Mrs Burnell,’ said an imaginary Alice, as she buttered the scones, ‘I’d rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but. . . .’ This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper. ‘The only thing to do,’ she heard, as she opened the dining-room door, ‘is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders instead. . . .’ XI The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that night. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on a blue dish – its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it. It was hard to say which of the two, Alice or the duck, looked the

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better basted; they were both such a rich colour and they both had the same air of gloss and strain. But Alice was fiery red and the duck a Spanish mahogany. Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife. He prided himself very much upon his carving, upon making a first-class job of it. He hated seeing a woman carve; they were always too slow and they never seemed to care what the meat looked like afterwards. Now he did; he took a real pride in cutting delicate shaves of cold beef, little wads of mutton, just the right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision. . . . ‘Is this the first of the home products?’ he asked, knowing perfectly well that it was. ‘Yes, the butcher did not come. We have found out that he only calls twice a week.’ But there was no need to apologise. It was a superb bird. It wasn’t meat at all, but a kind of very superior jelly. ‘My father would say,’ said Burnell, ‘this must have been one of those birds whose mother played to it in infancy upon the German flute. And the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind. . . . Have some more, Beryl? You and I are the only ones in this house with a real feeling for food. I’m perfectly willing to state, in a court of law, if necessary, that I love good food.’ Tea was served in the drawing-room, and Beryl, who for some reason had been very charming to Stanley ever since he came home, suggested a game of crib. They sat at a little table near one of the open windows. Mrs Fairfield disappeared, and Linda lay in a rocking-chair, her arms above her head, rocking to and fro. ‘You don’t want the light – do you, Linda?’ said Beryl. She moved the tall lamp so that she sat under its soft light. How remote they looked, those two, from where Linda sat and rocked. The green table, the polished cards, Stanley’s big hands and Beryl’s tiny ones, all seemed to be part of one mysterious movement. Stanley himself, big and solid, in his dark suit, took his ease, and Beryl tossed her bright head and pouted. Round her throat she wore an unfamiliar velvet ribbon. It changed her, somehow – altered the shape of her face – but it was charming, Linda decided. The room smelled of lilies; there were two big jars of arums in the fire-place. ‘Fifteen two – fifteen four – and a pair is six and a run of three is nine,’ said Stanley, so deliberately, he might have been counting sheep. ‘I’ve nothing but two pairs,’ said Beryl, exaggerating her woe because she knew how he loved winning. The cribbage pegs were like two little people going up the road together, turning round the sharp corner, and coming down the road again. They were pursuing each other. They did not so much want to

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get ahead as to keep near enough to talk – to keep near, perhaps that was all. But no, there was always one who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up, and would not listen. Perhaps the white peg was frightened of the red one, or perhaps he was cruel and would not give the red one a chance to speak. . . . In the front of her dress Beryl wore a bunch of pansies, and once when the little pegs were side by side, she bent over and the pansies dropped out and covered them. ‘What a shame,’ said she, picking up the pansies. ‘Just as they had a chance to fly into each other’s arms.’ ‘Farewell, my girl,’ laughed Stanley, and away the red peg hopped. The drawing-room was long and narrow with glass doors that gave on to the verandah. It had a cream paper with a pattern of gilt roses, and the furniture, which had belonged to old Mrs Fairfield, was dark and plain. A little piano stood against the wall with yellow pleated silk let into the carved front. Above it hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised looking clematis. Each flower was the size of a small saucer, with a centre like an astonished eye fringed in black. But the room was not finished yet. Stanley had set his heart on a Chesterfield and two decent chairs. Linda liked it best as it was. . . . Two big moths flew in through the window and round and round the circle of lamplight. ‘Fly away before it is too late. Fly out again.’ Round and round they flew; they seemed to bring the silence and the moonlight in with them on their silent wings. . . . ‘I’ve two kings,’ said Stanley. ‘Any good?’ ‘Quite good,’ said Beryl. Linda stopped rocking and got up. Stanley looked across. ‘Anything the matter, darling?’ ‘No, nothing. I’m going to find mother.’ She went out of the room and standing at the foot of the stairs she called, but her mother’s voice answered her from the verandah. The moon that Lottie and Kezia had seen from the storeman’s wagon was full, and the house, the garden, the old woman and Linda – all were bathed in dazzling light. ‘I have been looking at the aloe,’ said Mrs Fairfield. ‘I believe it is going to flower this year. Look at the top there. Are those buds, or is it only an effect of light?’ As they stood on the steps, the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.

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‘Do you feel it, too,’ said Linda, and she spoke to her mother with the special voice that women use at night to each other as though they spoke in their sleep or from some hollow cave – ‘Don’t you feel that it is coming towards us?’ She dreamed that she was caught up out of the cold water into the ship with the lifted oars and the budding mast. Now the oars fell striking quickly, quickly. They rowed far away over the top of the garden trees, the paddocks and the dark bush beyond. Ah, she heard herself cry: ‘Faster! Faster!’ to those who were rowing. How much more real this dream was than that they should go back to the house where the sleeping children lay and where Stanley and Beryl played cribbage. ‘I believe those are buds,’ said she. ‘Let us go down into the garden, mother. I like that aloe. I like it more than anything here. And I am sure I shall remember it long after I’ve forgotten all the other things.’ She put her hand on her mother’s arm and they walked down the steps, round the island and on to the main drive that led to the front gates. Looking at it from below she could see the long sharp thorns that edged the aloe leaves, and at the sight of them her heart grew hard. . . . She particularly liked the long sharp thorns. . . . Nobody would dare to come near the ship or to follow after. ‘Not even my Newfoundland dog,’ thought she, ‘that I’m so fond of in the daytime.’ For she really was fond of him; she loved and admired and respected him tremendously. Oh, better than anyone else in the world. She knew him through and through. He was the soul of truth and decency, and for all his practical experience he was awfully simple, easily pleased and easily hurt. . . . If only he wouldn’t jump at her so, and bark so loudly, and watch her with such eager, loving eyes. He was too strong for her; she had always hated things that rush at her, from a child. There were times when he was frightening – really frightening. When she just had not screamed at the top of her voice: ‘You are killing me.’ And at those times she had longed to say the most coarse, hateful things. . . . ‘You know I’m very delicate. You know as well as I do that my heart is affected, and the doctor has told you I may die any moment. I have had three great lumps of children already. . . .’ Yes, yes, it was true. Linda snatched her hand from mother’s arm. For all her love and respect and admiration she hated him. And how tender he always was after times like those, how submissive, how thoughtful. He would do anything for her; he longed to serve her. . . . Linda heard herself saying in a weak voice:

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‘Stanley, would you light a candle?’ And she heard his joyful voice answer: ‘Of course I will, my darling,’ and he leapt out of bed as though he were going to leap at the moon for her. It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings for him, sharp and defined, one as true as the other. And there was this other, this hatred, just as real as the rest. She could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that. . . . She hugged her folded arms and began to laugh silently. How absurd life was – it was laughable, simply laughable. And why this mania of hers to keep alive at all? For it really was a mania, she thought, mocking and laughing. ‘What am I guarding myself for so preciously? I shall go on having children and Stanley will go on making money and the children and the gardens will grow bigger and bigger, with whole fleets of aloes in them for me to choose from.’ She had been walking with her head bent, looking at nothing. Now she looked up and about her. They were standing by the red and white camellia trees. Beautiful were the rich dark leaves spangled with light and the round flowers that perch among them like red and white birds. Linda pulled a piece of verbena and crumpled it, and held her hands to her mother. ‘Delicious,’ said the old woman. ‘Are you cold, child? Are you trembling? Yes, your hands are cold. We had better go back to the house.’ ‘What have you been thinking about?’ said Linda. ‘Tell me.’ ‘I haven’t really been thinking of anything. I wondered as we passed the orchard what the fruit trees were like and whether we should be able to make much jam this autumn. There are splendid healthy currant bushes in the vegetable garden. I noticed them to-day. I should like to see those pantry shelves thoroughly well stocked with our own jam. . . .’ XII ‘My Darling Nan, Don’t think me a piggy wig because I haven’t written before. I haven’t had a moment, dear, and even now I feel so exhausted that I can hardly hold a pen. Well, the dreadful deed is done. We have actually left the giddy whirl of town, and I can’t see how we shall ever go back again, for my brother-in-law has bought this house “lock, stock and barrel”, to use his own words.

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In a way, of course, it is an awful relief, for he has been threatening to take a place in the country ever since I’ve lived with them – and I must say the house and garden are awfully nice – a million times better than that awful cubby-hole in town. But buried, my dear. Buried isn’t the word. We have got neighbours, but they are only farmers – big louts of boys who seem to be milking all day, and two dreadful females with rabbit teeth who brought us some scones when we were moving and said they would be pleased to help. But my sister who lives a mile away doesn’t know a soul here, so I am sure we never shall. It’s pretty certain nobody will ever come out from town to see us, because though there is a bus it’s an awful old rattling thing with black leather sides that any decent person would rather die than ride in for six miles. Such is life. It’s a sad ending for poor little B. I’ll get to be a most awful frump in a year or two and come and see you in a mackintosh and a sailor hat tied on with a white china silk motor veil. So pretty. Stanley says that now we are settled – for after the most awful week of my life we really are settled – he is going to bring out a couple of men from the club on Saturday afternoons for tennis. In fact, two are promised as a great treat to-day. But, my dear, if you could see Stanley’s men from the club . . . rather fattish, the type who look frightfully indecent without waistcoats – always with toes that turn in rather – so conspicuous when you are walking about a court in white shoes. And they are pulling up their trousers every minute – don’t you know – and whacking at imaginary things with their rackets. I used to play with them at the club last summer, and I am sure you will know the type when I tell you that after I’d been there about three times they all called me Miss Beryl. It’s a weary world. Of course mother simply loves the place, but then I suppose when I am mother’s age I shall be content to sit in the sun and shell peas into a basin. But I’m not – not – not. What Linda thinks about the whole affair, per usual, I haven’t the slightest idea. Mysterious as ever. . . . My dear, you know that white satin dress of mine. I have taken the sleeves out entirely, put bands of black velvet across the shoulders and two big red poppies off my dear sister’s chapeau. It is a great success, though when I shall wear it I do not know.’ Beryl sat writing this letter at a little table in her room. In a way, of course, it was all perfectly true, but in another way it was all the greatest rubbish and she didn’t believe a word of it. No, that wasn’t true. She felt all those things, but she didn’t really feel them like that. It was her other self who had written that letter. It not only bored, it rather disgusted her real self.

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‘Flippant and silly,’ said her real self. Yet she knew that she’d send it and she’d always write that kind of twaddle to Nan Pym. In fact, it was a very mild example of the kind of letter she generally wrote. Beryl leaned her elbows on the table and read it through again. The voice of the letter seemed to come up to her from the page. It was faint already, like a voice heard over the telephone, high, gushing, with something bitter in the sound. Oh, she detested it to-day. ‘You’ve always got so much animation,’ said Nan Pym. ‘That’s why men are so keen on you.’ And she had added, rather mournfully, for men were not at all keen on Nan, who was a solid kind of girl, with fat hips and a high colour – ‘I can’t understand how you can keep it up. But it is your nature, I suppose.’ What rot. What nonsense. It wasn’t her nature at all. Good heavens, if she had ever been her real self with Nan Pym, Nannie would have jumped out of the window with surprise. . . . My dear, you know that white satin of mine. . . . Beryl slammed the letter-case to. She jumped up and half unconsciously, half consciously she drifted over to the looking-glass. There stood a slim girl in white – a white serge skirt, a white silk blouse, and a leather belt drawn in very tightly at her tiny waist. Her face was heart-shaped, wide at the brows and with a pointed chin – but not too pointed. Her eyes, her eyes were perhaps her best feature; they were such a strange uncommon colour – greeny blue with little gold points in them. She had fine black eyebrows and long lashes – so long, that when they lay on her cheeks you positively caught the light in them, someone or other had told her. Her mouth was rather large. Too large? No, not really. Her underlip protruded a little; she had a way of sucking it in that somebody else had told her was awfully fascinating. Her nose was her least satisfactory feature. Not that it was really ugly. But it was not half as fine as Linda’s. Linda really had a perfect little nose. Hers spread rather – not badly. And in all probability she exaggerated the spreadiness of it just because it was her nose, and she was so awfully critical of herself. She pinched it with a thumb and first finger and made a little face. . . . Lovely, lovely hair. And such a mass of it. It had the colour of fresh fallen leaves, brown and red with a glint of yellow. When she did it in a long plait she felt it on her backbone like a long snake. She loved to feel the weight of it dragging her head back, and she loved to feel it loose, covering her bare arms. ‘Yes, my dear, there is no doubt about it, you really are a lovely little thing.’ At the words her bosom lifted; she took a long breath of delight, half closing her eyes.

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But even as she looked the smile faded from her lips and eyes. Oh God, there she was, back again, playing the same old game. False – false as ever. False as when she’d written to Nan Pym. False even when she was alone with herself, now. What had that creature in the glass to do with her, and why was she staring? She dropped down to one side of her bed and buried her face in her arms. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I am so miserable – so frightfully miserable. I know that I’m silly and spiteful and vain; I’m always acting a part. I’m never my real self for a moment.’ And plainly, plainly, she saw her false self running up and down the stairs, laughing a special trilling laugh if they had visitors, standing under the lamp if a man came to dinner, so that he should see the light on her hair, pouting and pretending to be a little girl when she was asked to play the guitar. Why? She even kept it up for Stanley’s benefit. Only last night when he was reading the paper her false self had stood beside him and leaned against his shoulder on purpose. Hadn’t she put her hand over his, pointing out something so that he should see how white her hand was beside his brown one. How despicable! Despicable! Her heart was cold with rage. ‘It’s marvellous how you keep it up,’ said she to the false self. But then it was only because she was so miserable – so miserable. If she had been happy and leading her own life, her false life would cease to be. She saw the real Beryl – a shadow . . . a shadow. Faint and unsubstantial she shone. What was there of her except the radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she. Beryl could almost remember every one of them. At those times she had felt: ‘Life is rich and mysterious and good, and I am rich and mysterious and good, too.’ Shall I ever be that Beryl for ever? Shall I? How can I? And was there ever a time when I did not have a false self? . . . But just as she had got that far she heard the sound of little steps running along the passage; the door handle rattled. Kezia came in. ‘Aunt Beryl, mother says will you please come down? Father is home with a man and lunch is ready.’ Botheration! How she had crumpled her skirt, kneeling in that idiotic way. ‘Very well, Kezia.’ She went over to the dressing table and powdered her nose. Kezia crossed too, and unscrewed a little pot of cream and sniffed it. Under her arm she carried a very dirty calico cat. When Aunt Beryl ran out of the room she sat the cat up on the dressing table and stuck the top of the cream jar over its ear. ‘Now look at yourself,’ said she sternly. The calico cat was so overcome by the sight that it toppled over and

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bumped and bumped on to the floor. And the top of the cream jar flew through the air and rolled like a penny in a round on the linoleum – and did not break. But for Kezia it had broken the moment it flew through the air, and she picked it up, hot all over, and put it back on the dressing table. Then she tip-toed away, far too quickly and airily. . . . Notes Text: BOS. Prelude, Hogarth Press, July 1918. 1. KM returned to the MS of The Aloe after an invitation from Virginia Woolf to send a story for her and Leonard’s recently established Hogarth Press. During the summer of 1917, while living at 141A Church Street, Chelsea, she reshaped and shortened the earlier work into the twelve discrete sections of Prelude. By mid-August she could tell Woolf: ‘My story I have sent to the typist who lets me have it back on Thursday. I couldn’t cope with the bloody copying: I’ve been so “ill” ’ (CLKM, 1, p. 324). It was further revised before she delivered the story in its final form, with its title suggested by JMM, in mid-October 1917. As she told Dorothy Brett, 11 October 1917, the day after she received proofs of the first pages, and anticipating the mood of ‘At the Bay’ quite as much as describing Prelude: I threw my darling to the wolves and they ate it and served me up so much praise in such a golden bowl that I couldn’t help feeling gratified. I did not think they would like it all and I am still astounded that they do. What form is it? you ask. Ah, Brett, its so difficult to say. As far as I know its more or less my own invention. And how have I shaped it? This is about as much as I can say about it. You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. [. . .] Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at beam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops – (When you ran over the dewy grass you positively felt that your feet tasted salt.) I tried to catch that moment – with something of its sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again. (CLKM, 1, pp. 330–1) The first of the hand-set sheets were printed by November, but production was slow, with KM telling Lady Ottoline Morrell on 2 February 1918, ‘I think the Woolfs must have eaten the Aloe root and branch or made jam of it’ (CLKM, 2, p. 87). Three months later on 12 May she wrote, again to Brett, that

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My poor dear Prelude is still piping away in their little cage and not out yet. I read some pages of it & scarcely knew it again. It all seems so once upon a time. [. . .] And won’t the “Intellectuals” just hate it. They’ll think its a New Primer for Infant Readers. Let ’em’. (CLKM, 2, p. 169) It was published, in a run of 300 copies, on 11 July 1918. 2. From the ‘Te Deum’, also known as the Ambrosian hymn.

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Feuille d’Album He really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether. With absolutely nothing to say for himself. And such a weight. Once he was in your studio he never knew when to go, but would sit on and on until you nearly screamed, and burned to throw something enormous after him when he did finally blush his way out – something like the tortoise stove. The strange thing was that at first sight he looked most interesting. Everybody agreed about that. You would drift into the café one evening and there you would see, sitting in a corner, with a glass of coffee in front of him, a thin, dark boy, wearing a blue jersey with a little grey flannel jacket buttoned over it. And somehow that blue jersey and the grey jacket with the sleeves that were too short gave him the air of a boy that has made up his mind to run away to sea. Who has run away, in fact, and will get up in a moment and sling a knotted handkerchief containing his nightshirt and his mother’s picture on the end of a stick, and walk out into the night and be drowned. . . . Stumble over the wharf edge on his way to the ship, even. . . . He had black close-cropped hair, grey eyes with long lashes, white cheeks and a mouth pouting as though he were determined not to cry. . . . How could one resist him? Oh, one’s heart was wrung at sight. And, as if that were not enough, there was his trick of blushing. . . . Whenever the waiter came near him he turned crimson – he might have been just out of prison and the waiter in the know. . . . ‘Who is he, my dear? Do you know?’ ‘Yes. His name is Ian French. Painter. Awfully clever, they say. Someone started by giving him a mother’s tender care. She asked him how often he heard from home, whether he had enough blankets on his bed, how much milk he drank a day. But when she went round to his studio to give an eye to his socks, she rang and rang, and though she could have sworn she heard someone breathing inside, the door was not answered. . . . Hopeless!’

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Someone else decided that he ought to fall in love. She summoned him to her side, called him ‘boy’, leaned over him so that he might smell the enchanting perfume of her hair, took his arm, told him how marvellous life could be if one only had the courage, and went round to his studio one evening and rang and rang. . . . Hopeless!’ ‘What the poor boy really wants is thoroughly rousing,’ said a third. So off they went to cafés and cabarets, little dances, places where you drank something that tasted like tinned apricot juice, but cost twentyseven shillings a bottle and was called champagne, other places, too thrilling for words, where you sat in the most awful gloom, and where some one had always been shot the night before. But he did not turn a hair. Only once he got very drunk, but instead of blossoming forth, there he sat, stony, with two spots of red on his cheeks, like, my dear, yes, the dead image of that rag-time thing they were playing, like a ‘Broken Doll’. But when she took him back to his studio he had quite recovered, and said ‘good night’ to her in the street below, as though they had walked home from church together. . . . Hopeless. After heaven knows how many more attempts – for the spirit of kindness dies very hard in women – they gave him up. Of course, they were still perfectly charming, and asked him to their shows, and spoke to him in the café, but that was all. When one is an artist one has no time simply for people who won’t respond. Has one? ‘And besides I really think there must be something rather fishy somewhere . . . don’t you? It can’t all be as innocent as it looks! Why come to Paris if you want to be a daisy in the field? No, I’m not suspicious. But –’ He lived at the top of a tall mournful building overlooking the river. One of those buildings that look so romantic on rainy nights and moonlight nights, when the shutters are shut, and the heavy door, and the sign advertising ‘a little apartment to let immediately’ gleams forlorn beyond words. One of those buildings that smell so unromantic all the year round, and where the concierge lives in a glass cage on the ground floor, wrapped up in a filthy shawl, stirring something in a saucepan and ladling out tit-bits to the swollen old dog lolling on a bead cushion. . . . Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful view. The two big windows faced the water; he could see the boats and the barges swinging up and down, and the fringe of an island planted with trees, like a round bouquet. The side window looked across to another house, shabbier still and smaller, and down below there was a flower market. You could see the tops of huge umbrellas, with frills of bright flowers escaping from them, booths covered with striped awning where they sold plants in boxes and clumps of wet gleaming palms in terra-cotta jars. Among the flowers the old women scuttled from side to side, like crabs. Really there was no need for him

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to go out. If he sat at the window until his white beard fell over the sill he still would have found something to draw. . . . How surprised those tender women would have been if they had managed to force the door. For he kept his studio as neat as a pin. Everything was arranged to form a pattern, a little ‘still life’ as it were – the saucepans with their lids on the wall behind the gas stove, the bowl of eggs, milk jug and teapot on the shelf, the books and the lamp with the crinkly paper shade on the table. An Indian curtain that had a fringe of red leopards marching round it covered his bed by day, and on the wall beside the bed on a level with your eyes when you were lying down there was a small neatly printed notice: GET UP AT ONCE. Every day was much the same. While the light was good he slaved at his painting, then cooked his meals and tidied up the place. And in the evenings he went off to the café, or sat at home reading or making out the most complicated list of expenses headed: ‘What I ought to be able to do it on’, and ending with a sworn statement . . . ‘I swear not to exceed this amount for next month. Signed, Ian French.’ Nothing very fishy about this; but those far-seeing women were quite right. It wasn’t all. One evening he was sitting at the side window eating some prunes and throwing the stones on to the tops of the huge umbrellas in the deserted flower market. It had been raining – the first real spring rain of the year had fallen – a bright spangle hung on everything, and the air smelled of buds and moist earth. Many voices sounding languid and content rang out in the dusky air, and the people who had come to close their windows and fasten the shutters leaned out instead. Down below in the market the trees were peppered with new green. What kind of trees were they? he wondered. And now came the lamplighter. He stared at the house across the way, the small, shabby house, and suddenly, as if in answer to his gaze, two wings of windows opened and a girl came out on to the tiny balcony carrying a pot of daffodils. She was a strangely thin girl in a dark pinafore, with a pink handkerchief tied over her hair. Her sleeves were rolled up almost to her shoulders and her slender arms shone against the dark stuff. ‘Yes, it is quite warm enough. It will do them good,’ she said, putting down the pot and turning to some one in the room inside. As she turned she put her hands up to the handkerchief and tucked away some wisps of hair. She looked down at the deserted market and up at the sky, but where he sat there might have been a hollow in the air. She simply did not see the house opposite. And then she disappeared. His heart fell out of the side window of his studio, and down to the balcony of the house opposite – buried itself in the pot of daffodils under the half-opened buds and spears of green. . . . That room with

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the balcony was the sitting-room, and the one next door to it was the kitchen. He heard the clatter of the dishes as she washed up after supper, and then she came to the window, knocked a little mop against the ledge, and hung it on a nail to dry. She never sang or unbraided her hair, or held out her arms to the moon as young girls are supposed to do. And she always wore the same dark pinafore and the pink handkerchief over her hair. . . . Whom did she live with? Nobody else came to those two windows, and yet she was always talking to someone in the room. Her mother, he decided, was an invalid. They took in sewing. The father was dead. . . . He had been a journalist – very pale, with long moustaches, and a piece of black hair falling over his forehead. By working all day they just made enough money to live on, but they never went out and they had no friends. Now when he sat down at his table he had to make an entirely new set of sworn statements. . . . Not to go to the side window before a certain hour: signed, Ian French. Not to think about her until he had put away his painting things for the day: signed, Ian French. It was quite simple. She was the only person he really wanted to know, because she was, he decided, the only other person alive who was just his age. He couldn’t stand giggling girls, and he had no use for grown-up women. . . . She was his age, she was – well, just like him. He sat in his dusky studio, tired, with one arm hanging over the back of his chair, staring in at her window and seeing himself in there with her. She had a violent temper; they quarrelled terribly at times, he and she. She had a way of stamping her foot and twisting her hands in her pinafore . . . furious. And she very rarely laughed. Only when she told him about an absurd little kitten she once had who used to roar and pretend to be a lion when it was given meat to eat. Things like that made her laugh. . . . But as a rule they sat together very quietly; he, just as he was sitting now, and she with her hands folded in her lap and her feet tucked under, talking in low tones, or silent and tired after the day’s work. Of course, she never asked him about his pictures, and of course he made the most wonderful drawings of her which she hated, because he made her so thin and so dark. . . . But how could he get to know her? This might go on for years. . . . Then he discovered that once a week, in the evenings, she went out shopping. On two successive Thursdays she came to the window wearing an old-fashioned cape over the pinafore, and carrying a basket. From where he sat he could not see the door of her house, but on the next Thursday evening at the same time he snatched up his cap and ran down the stairs. There was a lovely pink light over everything. He saw it glowing in the river, and the people walking towards him had pink faces and pink hands. He leaned against the side of his house waiting for her and he had

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no idea of what he was going to do or say. ‘Here she comes,’ said a voice in his head. She walked very quickly, with small, light steps; with one hand she carried the basket, with the other she kept the cape together. . . . What could he do? He could only follow. . . . First she went into the grocer’s and spent a long time in there, and then she went into the butcher’s where she had to wait her turn. Then she was an age at the draper’s matching something, and then she went to the fruit shop and bought a lemon. As he watched her he knew more surely than ever he must get to know her now. Her composure, her seriousness and her loneliness, the very way she walked as though she was eager to be done with this world of grown-ups all was so natural to him and so inevitable. ‘Yes, she is always like that,’ he thought proudly. ‘We have nothing to do with these people.’ But now she was on her way home and he was as far off as ever. . . . She suddenly turned into the dairy and he saw her through the window buying an egg. She picked it out of the basket with such care – a brown one, a beautifully shaped one, the one he would have chosen. And when she came out of the dairy he went in after her. In a moment he was out again, and following her past his house across the flower market, dodging among the huge umbrellas and treading on the fallen flowers and the round marks where the pots had stood. . . . Through her door he crept, and up the stairs after, taking care to tread in time with her so that she should not notice. Finally, she stopped on the landing, and took the key out of her purse. As she put it into the door he ran up and faced her. Blushing more crimson than ever, but looking at her severely he said, almost angrily: ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you dropped this.’ And he handed her an egg. Notes Text: BOS. First published as ‘An Album Leaf’, New Age, 21: 21, 20 September 1917, pp. 450–2.

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A Dill Pickle And then, after six years, she saw him again. He was seated at one of those little bamboo tables decorated with a Japanese vase of paper

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daffodils. There was a tall plate of fruit in front of him, and very carefully, in a way she recognized immediately as his ‘special’ way, he was peeling an orange. He must have felt that shock of recognition in her for he looked up and met her eyes. Incredible! He didn’t know her! She smiled; he frowned. She came towards him. He closed his eyes an instant, but opening them his face lit up as though he had struck a match in a dark room. He laid down the orange and pushed back his chair, and she took her little warm hand out of her muff and gave it to him. ‘Vera!’ he exclaimed. ‘How strange. Really, for a moment I didn’t know you. Won’t you sit down? You’ve had lunch? Won’t you have some coffee?’ She hesitated, but of course she meant to. ‘Yes, I’d like some coffee.’ And she sat down opposite him. ‘You’ve changed. You’ve changed very much,’ he said, staring at her with that eager, lighted look. ‘You look so well. I’ve never seen you look so well before.’ ‘Really?’ She raised her veil and unbuttoned her high fur collar. ‘I don’t feel very well. I can’t bear this weather, you know.’ ‘Ah, no. You hate the cold. . . .’ ‘Loathe it.’ She shuddered. ‘And the worst of it is that the older one grows. . . .’ He interrupted her. ‘Excuse me,’ and tapped on the table for the waitress. ‘Please bring some coffee and cream.’ To her: ‘You are sure you won’t eat anything? Some fruit, perhaps. The fruit here is very good.’ ‘No, thanks. Nothing.’ ‘Then that’s settled.’ And smiling just a hint too broadly he took up the orange again. ‘You were saying – the older one grows –’ ‘The colder,’ she laughed. But she was thinking how well she remembered that trick of his – the trick of interrupting her – and of how it used to exasperate her six years ago. She used to feel then as though he, quite suddenly, in the middle of what she was saying, put his hand over her lips, turned from her, attended to something different, and then took his hand away, and with just the same slightly too broad smile, gave her his attention again. . . . Now we are ready. That is settled. ‘The colder!’ He echoed her words, laughing too. ‘Ah, ah. You still say the same things. And there is another thing about you that is not changed at all – your beautiful voice – your beautiful way of speaking.’ Now he was very grave; he leaned towards her, and she smelled the warm, stinging scent of the orange peel. ‘You have only to say one word and I would know your voice among all other voices. I don’t

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know what it is – I’ve often wondered – that makes your voice such a – haunting memory. . . . Do you remember that first afternoon we spent together at Kew Gardens? You were so surprised because I did not know the names of any flowers. I am still just as ignorant for all your telling me. But whenever it is very fine and warm, and I see some bright colours – it’s awfully strange – I hear your voice saying: ‘Geranium, marigold and verbena.’ And I feel those three words are all I recall of some forgotten, heavenly language. . . . You remember that afternoon?’ ‘Oh, yes, very well.’ She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bear. Yet, what had remained in her mind of that particular afternoon was an absurd scene over the tea table. A great many people taking tea in a Chinese pagoda, and he behaving like a maniac about the wasps – waving them away, flapping at them with his straw hat, serious and infuriated out of all proportion to the occasion. How delighted the sniggering tea drinkers had been. And how she had suffered. But now, as he spoke, that memory faded. His was the truer. Yes, it had been a wonderful afternoon, full of geranium and marigold and verbena, and – warm sunshine. Her thoughts lingered over the last two words as though she sang them. In the warmth, as it were, another memory unfolded. She saw herself sitting on a lawn. He lay beside her, and suddenly, after a long silence, he rolled over and put his head in her lap. ‘I wish,’ he said, in a low, troubled voice, ‘I wish that I had taken poison and were about to die – here now!’ At that moment a little girl in a white dress, holding a long, dripping water lily, dodged from behind a bush, stared at them, and dodged back again. But he did not see. She leaned over him. ‘Ah, why do you say that? I could not say that.’ But he gave a kind of soft moan, and taking her hand he held it to his cheek. ‘Because I know I am going to love you too much – far too much. And I shall suffer so terribly, Vera, because you never, never will love me.’ He was certainly far better looking now than he had been then. He had lost all that dreamy vagueness and indecision. Now he had the air of a man who has found his place in life, and fills it with a confidence and an assurance which was, to say the least, impressive. He must have made money, too. His clothes were admirable, and at that moment he pulled a Russian cigarette case out of his pocket. ‘Won’t you smoke?’ ‘Yes, I will.’ She hovered over them. ‘They look very good.’ ‘I think they are. I get them made for me by a little man in St. James’s Street. I don’t smoke very much. I’m not like you – but when

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I do, they must be delicious, very fresh cigarettes. Smoking isn’t a habit with me; it’s a luxury – like perfume. Are you still so fond of perfumes? Ah, when I was in Russia. . . .’ She broke in: ‘You’ve really been to Russia?’ ‘Oh, yes. I was there for over a year. Have you forgotten how we used to talk of going there?’ ‘No, I’ve not forgotten.’ He gave a strange half laugh and leaned back in his chair. ‘Isn’t it curious. I have really carried out all those journeys that we planned. Yes, I have been to all those places that we talked of, and stayed in them long enough to – as you used to say, ‘air oneself’ in them. In fact, I have spent the last three years of my life travelling all the time. Spain, Corsica, Siberia, Russia, Egypt. The only country left is China, and I mean to go there, too, when the war is over.’ As he spoke, so lightly, tapping the end of his cigarette against the ash-tray, she felt the strange beast that had slumbered so long within her bosom stir, stretch itself, yawn, prick up its ears, and suddenly bound to its feet, and fix its longing, hungry stare upon those far away places. But all she said was, smiling gently: ‘How I envy you.’ He accepted that. ‘It has been,’ he said, ‘very wonderful – especially Russia. Russia was all that we had imagined, and far, far more. I even spent some days on a river boat on the Volga. Do you remember that boatman’s song that you used to play?’1 ‘Yes.’ It began to play in her mind as she spoke. ‘Do you ever play it now?’ ‘No, I’ve no piano.’ He was amazed at that. ‘But what has become of your beautiful piano?’ She made a little grimace. ‘Sold. Ages ago.’ ‘But you were so fond of music,’ he wondered. ‘I’ve no time for it now,’ said she. He let it go at that. ‘That river life,’ he went on, ‘is something quite special. After a day or two you cannot realize that you have ever known another. And it is not necessary to know the language – the life of the boat creates a bond between you and the people that’s more than sufficient. You eat with them, pass the day with them, and in the evening there is that endless singing.’ She shivered, hearing the boatman’s song break out again loud and tragic, and seeing the boat floating on the darkening river with melancholy trees on either side. . . . ‘Yes, I should like that,’ said she, stroking her muff. ‘You’d like almost everything about Russian life,’ he said warmly. ‘It’s so informal, so impulsive, so free without question. And then the peasants are so splendid. They are such human beings – yes, that is

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it. Even the man who drives your carriage has – has some real part in what is happening. I remember the evening a party of us, two friends of mine and the wife of one of them, went for a picnic by the Black Sea. We took supper and champagne and ate and drank on the grass. And while we were eating the coachman came up. ‘Have a dill pickle,’ he said. He wanted to share with us. That seemed to me so right, so – you know what I mean?’ And she seemed at that moment to be sitting on the grass beside the mysteriously Black Sea, black as velvet, and rippling against the banks in silent, velvet waves. She saw the carriage drawn up to one side of the road, and the little group on the grass, their faces and hands white in the moonlight. She saw the pale dress of the woman outspread and her folded parasol, lying on the grass like a huge pearl crochet hook. Apart from them, with his supper in a cloth on his knees, sat the coachman. ‘Have a dill pickle,’ said he, and although she was not certain what a dill pickle was, she saw the greenish glass jar with a red chili like a parrot’s beak glimmering through. She sucked in her cheeks; the dill pickle was terribly sour. . . . ‘Yes, I know perfectly what you mean,’ she said. In the pause that followed they looked at each other. In the past when they had looked at each other like that they had felt such a boundless understanding between them that their souls had, as it were, put their arms round each other and dropped into the same sea, content to be drowned, like mournful lovers. But now, the surprising thing was that it was he who held back. He who said: ‘What a marvellous listener you are. When you look at me with those wild eyes I feel that I could tell you things that I would never breathe to another human being.’ Was there just a hint of mockery in his voice or was it her fancy? She could not be sure. ‘Before I met you,’ he said, ‘I had never spoken of myself to anybody. How well I remember one night, the night that I brought you the little Christmas tree, telling you all about my childhood. And of how I was so miserable that I ran away and lived under a cart in our yard for two days without being discovered. And you listened, and your eyes shone, and I felt that you had even made the little Christmas tree listen too, as in a fairy story.’ But of that evening she had remembered a little pot of caviare. It had cost seven and sixpence. He could not get over it. Think of it – a tiny jar like that costing seven and sixpence. While she ate it he watched her, delighted and shocked. ‘No, really, that is eating money. You could not get seven shillings into a little pot that size. Only think of the profit they must make. . . .’ And he had begun some immensely complicated calculations. . . . But

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now good-bye to the caviare. The Christmas tree was on the table, and the little boy lay under the cart with his head pillowed on the yard dog. ‘The dog was called Bosun,’ she cried delightedly. But he did not follow. ‘Which dog? Had you a dog? I don’t remember a dog at all.’ ‘No, no. I mean the yard dog when you were a little boy.’ He laughed and snapped the cigarette case to. ‘Was he? Do you know I had forgotten that. It seems such ages ago. I cannot believe that it is only six years. After I had recognized you to-day – I had to take such a leap – I had to take a leap over my whole life to get back to that time. I was such a kid then.’ He drummed on the table. ‘I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote to me as you did – although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever – such a true picture of me.’ He glanced up. ‘You’re not going?’ She had buttoned her collar again and drawn down her veil. ‘Yes, I am afraid I must,’ she said, and managed a smile. Now she knew that he had been mocking. ‘Ah, no, please,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t go just for a moment,’ and he caught up one of her gloves from the table and clutched at it as if that would hold her. ‘I see so few people to talk to nowadays, that I have turned into a sort of barbarian,’ he said. ‘Have I said something to hurt you?’ ‘Not a bit,’ she lied. But as she watched him draw her glove through his fingers, gently, gently, her anger really did die down, and besides, at the moment he looked more like himself of six years ago. . . . ‘What I really wanted then,’ he said softly, ‘was to be a sort of carpet – to make myself into a sort of carpet for you to walk on so that you need not be hurt by the sharp stones and the mud that you hated so. It was nothing more positive than that – nothing more selfish. Only I did desire, eventually, to turn into a magic carpet and carry you away to all those lands you longed to see.’ As he spoke she lifted her head as though she drank something; the strange beast in her bosom began to purr . . . ‘I felt that you were more lonely than anybody else in the world,’ he went on, ‘and yet, perhaps, that you were the only person in the world who was really, truly alive. Born out of your time,’ he murmured, stroking the glove, ‘fated.’ Ah, God! What had she done! How had she dared to throw away her happiness like this. This was the only man who had ever understood her. Was it too late? Could it be too late? She was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . .

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‘And then the fact that you had no friends and never had made friends with people. How I understood that, for neither had I. Is it just the same now?’ ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘Just the same. I am as alone as ever.’ ‘So am I,’ he laughed gently, ‘just the same.’ Suddenly with a quick gesture he handed her back the glove and scraped his chair on the floor. ‘But what seemed to me so mysterious then is perfectly plain to me now. And to you, too, of course. . . . It simply was that we were such egoists, so self-engrossed, so wrapped up in ourselves that we hadn’t a corner in our hearts for anybody else. Do you know,’ he cried, naive and hearty, and dreadfully like another side of that old self again, ‘I began studying a Mind System when I was in Russia, and I found that we were not peculiar at all. It’s quite a well known form of. . . .’ She had gone. He sat there, thunder-struck, astounded beyond words. . . . And then he asked the waitress for his bill. ‘But the cream has not been touched,’ he said. ‘Please do not charge me for it.’ Notes Text: BOS. New Age, 21: 23, 4 October 1917, pp. 489–91. See Life, pp. 119–22, for a discussion of KM’s affair in 1912 with Francis Heinemann, a fellow enthusiast for Russian life, which the story seems to draw on. 1. ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen,’ a Russian barge-hauler’s shanty.

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Love-Lies-Bleeding1 At half past two the servant girl stumped along the narrow passage from the kitchen to the dining room, thrust her head in at the door and shouted in her loud, impudent voice: ‘Well, I’m off, Mrs Eichelbaum. I’ll be here tomorrow, Mrs Eichelbaum.’ Muffi waited until she heard the servant’s steps crunch down the gravel path, heard the gate creak and slam, listened until those steps died away quite, and silence, like a watchful spider began to spin its silent web over the little house . . . Everything changed. The white curtains bulged and blew out as though to the first breath of some

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mysterious breeze, blowing from nowhere; the dark furniture swelled with rich, important life; all the plates on the sideboard, the pictures and ornaments gleamed as if they shone through water; even the lilies, the faded lilies flung all over the green wallpaper, solemnly uncurled again, and she could hear the clock, ticking away, trotting away, galloping away - a rider with a dark plume round his hat riding on a white horse down a lonely road in the moonlight. Stealthy as a little cat Muffi crept into the kitchen, up the stairs into their bedroom and the children’s room down again and into the study to make sure that nobody was there, and then she came back to the dining room and folded herself up on the shabby sofa before the window, her feet tucked under her, her hands shut in her lap. The window of the dining room looked out on to a paddock covered with long grass and ragged bushes. In one corner lay a heap of timber, in another a load of bricks was tumbled. Round three sides of the paddock there reared up three new houses, white, unsubstantial, puffed up in the air like half baked meringues. A fourth was being built; only the walls and criss cross beams showed. Everything that afternoon was blurred by a thick sea mist, and somewhere, in the paddock, out of sight, a man was playing the cornet. He must have been walking about while he played, for sometimes the notes sounded loud and harsh, full of despair and threatening anger, sometimes they came from far away, bubbles of melancholy sound floating on the swaying mist. Ta-ta-ta Tiddle-um tiddle-um Ta tiddley-um tum-ta! There was nobody to be seen and nothing to be heard except that cornet and the tap of hammers in the hollow house. ‘It’s autumn!’ thought Muffi. Her lips trembled, tasting the mist and the cold air. ‘Yes, it’s autumn!’ Not that she felt sad. No, she merely ‘responded’, just as she held up her face to the sun and wrapped herself together against the rain. It was not Muffi’s nature to rebel against anything. Why should she? What good could it do? She accepted life with ‘cowlike female stupidity’ as Max put it. ‘And you are like all women,’ he would sneer. ‘You love to make men believe that you are rare beings, more delicately attuned than they. ‘Nothing surprises me’ Max would squeak in a mincing voice, flirting his fat hand, ‘nothing alarms me! I knew that it was going to rain, I knew that we were going to miss the train, I knew that my children would catch cold. I have my celestial messengers! When any man old enough to shave himself knows that your divine calm is simply your lack of imagination, and that no woman ever feels anything – once she is out of bed!’ The children loved their father when he began to talk like that. He

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would walk up and down the room, holding up his coat tails for a skirt, laughing and jeering at women and at their imbecile unbelievable vanity. The children used to sit at the table and bang with their fists and clap their hands and jump up and down. ‘Ah, Papa! Ah, my Papa! My darling, clever little Papa!’ Rudi would cry, but Katerina who was eleven years old and quite a woman realised that Papa really meant Muffi when he tip toed and squeaked, and therein lay her joy. Muffi smiled too, and when Rudi, quite overcome, would fling himself upon her, squeezing her, crying breathlessly: ‘Isn’t he wonderful, my Papa!’ she would answer: ‘Yes he is wonderful!’ What did it matter! Ta-ta-ta Tiddle-um tiddle-um Ta tiddley-um tum ta! went the cornet. She had never heard him before. She hoped he was not going to be there every afternoon. Perhaps it was only the sea mist that had ‘brought him out’. What was he like? He was an old man, wearing a peaked cap and his grey beard was hung with a web of bright drops. She smiled; he stood before her, the cornet under his arm, wiping his face with a coloured handkerchief that smelled of tar . . . ‘Tell me, why do you play the cornet?’ No, he was gone again, sitting perhaps behind the heap of timber, far away, and playing more forlornly than ever. She stirred and sighed and stretched herself. ‘What shall I do this afternoon,’ thought Muffi. Every day she asked herself the same question, and every day it ended in her doing just the same thing – nothing at all. In the winter she lay in front of the fire, staring at the bright dazzle; in summer she sat at the open window and watched the breeze skim through the long gleaming grass (and then those ragged bushes were covered with tiny cream flowers) and in autumn and winter she sat there, too, only then the window was shut, and some days a sea mist covered everything, and other days the wild hooting south wind blew as if it meant to tear everything off the earth, tear everything up by its roots and send it spinning. She did not even think or dream. No, as she sat there, ever so faintly smiling with something mocking in the way her eyelids lay upon her eyes, she looked like a person waiting for a train that she knew would not come, never would by any chance carry her away – didn’t even exist. During the afternoon the baker’s boy came and left a loaf on the kitchen window sill. The round basket on his back always reminded her of a snail’s shell. ‘Here comes the snail,’ she would say. Three times a week an awful butcher, a man so raw and red and willing to oblige that she always felt if he hadn’t the pound and a half of steak

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in his cart he’d be quite willing to cut it off his own person and never notice the difference. And very, very rarely two shabby old nuns wheeling a perambulator knocked at her door and asked her if she had any scraps or bits of things for the orphan children at Lyall Bay.2 No, she never had, but she liked very much seeing them at her door, smiling so gently, their hands tucked in their sleeves. They made her feel so small somehow, so small and young, so like an orphan child herself. One of them always talked and one kept silent. ‘You’re not married, are you?’ asked the talkative nun, on one occasion. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Muffi. ‘Glory be!’ cried the old nun, and seemed positively to wring her hands in horror. ‘You’ve no children?’ she asked, her old mouth falling open. ‘Yes, I’ve a little boy of seven.’ ‘Mother of God!’ cried the old nun, and that day they went away, pushing the perambulator very slowly as if it were weighted down with the incredible news. Any time after five o’clock the children came home from school . . . Five o’clock struck. Muffi got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. She was bending over the stove when someone tapped at the window. Rudi. Yes, there he was, tapping on the window, smiling and nodding. Ah, the darling! He was home early! She flew to the back door and just had time to open it. She held out her arms and in he tumbled. ‘You’re early. You darling. You’re home so soon – you’re so beautifully early,’ she stammered, kissing and hugging him. How wet and cold his cheeks and fingers were; even his fringe was damp. ‘I’m simply sopping from this mist,’ said Rudi, in his self contained deliberate little way. ‘Feel my cap, Muffi. Drenched!’ ‘Drenched!’ said she, kneeling down to take off his reefer jacket. ‘Oh I’m so out of breath,’ he cried, stamping and wriggling his way out of the jacket. ‘I simply flew home.’ ‘Let me jump you on to the table and take off your boots, my precious.’ ‘Oh no.’ He was quite shocked. ‘I can take off my own boots, Muffi. I always do.’ ‘Ah no, let me,’ she pleaded. ‘Just this once. Just for a treat.’ At that he threw back his head and looked at her, his eyes dancing. ‘Well, you have got funny ideas of a treat.’ ‘Yes’, said she. ‘I know I have. Awfully funny ideas . . . Now the other foot, my son.’ When she had finished he sat on the table edge and swung his legs, pouting, frowning, and showing off just a tiny bit. He knew, as he

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sat there, that he was the most loved little boy in the world, the most admired, the most cherished, and Muffi let him know it. They were alone together so seldom; they couldn’t afford to ‘pretend’, to waste a moment. He seemed to realise that. He said: ‘Katerina will be home in a minute. I passed her on my way, dawdling along with Lilly Tar. I can’t stand Lilly Tar, Muffi. She’s always got her arm round someone and she’s always whispering.’ ‘Don’t bother about her’ said Muffi, as much as to say: ‘if Lilly Tar dares to get in your way I shall see that she is destroyed instantly.’ Lilly Tar was gone. He looked down at his red little paws. ‘My fingers are so stiff,’ he said, ‘I’ll never be able to practise.’ ‘Sit on the hassock here by the fire and give them a good warm.’ ‘It’s very nice down here,’ he decided after a moment. ‘I love being down low and looking up at things, don’t you? At people moving, and the legs of chairs and tables and the shadows on the floor.’ His voice tailed off, dreamy, absorbed. She let him be. She thought: ‘He is getting back to himself after that horrible rowdy school.’ But a moment later the front door slammed and Katerina came into the kitchen. ‘Hullo,’ said she, very airy. ‘Why did you tear home so, Rudi. Lilly and I couldn’t help screaming at the way you were rushing along.’ ‘I heard you,’ said Rudi. ‘I know you meant me to hear, didn’t you.’ At that she opened her big velvety eyes at him, and laughed. ‘What a baby you are.’ ‘But you did. Didn’t you?’ he protested. ‘Of course not,’ jeered Katerina. ‘We were laughing at something quite different.’ ‘But you said you were laughing at me, Katerina.’ ‘Oh, only in a way,’ she drawled. Rudi jumped up. ‘Oh Katerina,’ he wailed, ‘why do you tell such awful stories.’ Muffi’s back was turned, so Katerina made a hideous face at him and sat down at the table. All the while she was eating her tea Katerina could not help smiling her strange little cat smile. The lids fell over her eyes as though she were basking before some mysterious warm secret that she would never share with a baby boy. When she helped herself to jam, holding the jam spoon high up in the air and letting the jam fall in red blobs on her bread, Rudi hated her so much he gave a great shudder of horror and pushed back his chair. Again she opened those big pansy velvet eyes and again the wide surprised stare. ‘What is the matter now?’ asked Katerina. But that was too much for Rudi. He couldn’t understand it, no, he couldn’t. ‘Muffi, why does she do it? How can she?’ But Muffi gave barely a sign. ‘Don’t tease him so, Katerina!’ she

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said. She poured some warm water into a basin and gave Rudi a thin shave of soap. And as he washed his hands he turned to her. . . . II. ‘I’m going, children’ called Muffi. She stood in the hall, buttoning her gloves. From the dining room came the sound of Rudi’s fiddle. Katerina, supposed to be doing her home work in the kitchen, gave no sign. She stood a moment, listening; she must not go in and disturb him. Up he climbed, up the little bright ladder, firmly and quickly, and down he came as though enchanted with what he had seen. He flew up again to look once more and again he ran down laughing. Then up he stole, slowly, sobbing up a little dark ladder, in vain, and down he crept to die. He would go up once again – but no, it was all in vain. He crept back in despair. ‘Katerina, I’m going’ called Muffi. ‘Also gut,’ came from Katerina. Muffi had a little black astrachan jacket with a collar that stood up to the tips of her ears and the point of her chin. On Saturday afternoon Max did not go to the University. He came into her room while she dressed. He was not still for a moment – popping from the side of the bed to a chair, fingering everything, smelling her hair brushes, talking, begging her to hurry. ‘Can I find anything for you Muffi – your gloves? Do you want your umbrella? Shall I give you your shoes?’ It was late afternoon, leaves were falling off the trees – large gold leaves that fell slowly dropping on them as they passed. The air tasted cold and bitter like wild cherries. In the distance upon the tall mountain tops the snow was stained with rose. It was very cold. Rudi put his hands in his pockets, his teeth chattered, his breath blew out in a white fan and Muffi held her black muff up to her face. But they were both so happy that even this sharp cold seemed something special, something they had not tasted before – something to do with the fair. The bell rumbled. ‘Can I go?’ said Rudi, putting down his spoon and slipping off his chair. Muffi nodded. ‘Yes, run.’ ‘Ah,’ wailed Lisa [Katerina], ‘it’s not fair it’s not fair. It was my turn Muffi, wasn’t it Papa. Pooh!’ Max shook his head in disgust. ‘Don’t be such a little fool. Either run to the door in front of Rudi or hold your tongue.’ ‘But Papa,’ wailed Lisa. ‘Enough!’ Max reached across the table and rapped her knuckles with his spoon.

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[sic] and then we went to a shop where everything played a tune – yes everything. The man gave me a plate with two greengages on it and it began to play ‘ach du liebe Augustine’. And Muffi sat down on a little chair and it played Verlassen Verlassen.3 He jumped up and down with the bollon [?] loaf in his hands. ‘Papa has gone away,’ said Rudi. ‘He has gone to Dresden today and he has taken Lisa. Muffi and I are alone. I have married her I am her husband. He has gone!’ said Buffon and he turned sharply and leaned on the bridge beside Muffi. He could not keep out of his voice an immense incredulous joy. ‘He has gone Madame.’ She leaned her arms on the stone wall and put her hands on either side of her face as though she were frightened and could not bear to hear what he was going to say. The big impatient birds flew closer and closer about their heads. The little black one seemed to be diving after the long quivering lights of the lake. Then he said, as though it were at the end of a long conversation – ‘You know that I love you. I must see you alone. Can I come to you?’ She signed ‘no’ with a little shake of her head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what am I to do. Help me?’ At that she turned and looked at him. He saw her strange pallor and the serious long glance of her eyes. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked in a faint voice.4 It was evening again. The little flat was sealed for the night. The shutters were shut, the lighted lamp stood in the middle of the round table and in the pool of light Rudi and his father sat working. Max had a brown leather bag on the table stuffed full of essays and as he corrected them with a stump of blue pencil he would mutter ‘God’ or ‘idiot’ under his breath, or give a long windy sigh, or read in silence, scratching his head or laying one finger to the side of his nose breathing down one nostril and then down the other in a way he had. Opposite him sat Rudi with a book of French poetry covered in black American cloth open at a poem of Victor Hugo. ‘Mon père ce héros au sourire si doux.’ He bent over it wearily[?] and then he lifted his head, shut his eyes as his lips moved quickly. Then down went his head again. ‘Suivit d’un grand hussard qu’il amait entre tous’ and up again. He looked like a little bird drinking at a pool. If he held the book for a long time his fingers stuck to the American cloth and when he pulled them off they left strange little marks that gradually blotted out – he breathed on the cover and wrote R. then he began to learn again. ‘Pour sa grande bravoure and pour sa haute taille.’5 On the sofa very languid and pale with dark marks under her eyes

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lay Katerina. She was not feeling quite well but she was very proud of her illness and she wondered as she smelt her handkerchief sprinkled with eau de cologne, if she would grow a bosom now. Oh she would love to stick out in front like Lilli Tar did and Lilli was only thirteen. Feel me here said Lilli, smiling proudly and laying Katerina’s hand on the right place and I’m not filling myself out a bit. Katerina walked on to the platform in a white silk dress pulled down very tightly in front. A perfect sigh went up from everybody. What a lovely figure! She wore the buttonhole Harold Buffon had given her pinned in the middle. It went up and down as she sang – – – Oh, what bliss! ‘I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it!’ thought Muffi. She laid down Katerina’s pinafore that she was darning and bent over the froth of white in her lap trying to bear this pain in her heart that was unbearable. She saw herself wring her hands and rock to and fro, moving like an old woman and she saw herself fling away this heap of white and start up and rush out of the flat down the stairs into the dark, away away, and she saw herself stagger down the corridor of a train that went so fast and swayed about so that she was banged this side and that, peering in all the carriages until she came to the one where Harold was. Ah! She could not open the heavy door. She beat on the glass – open it quickly quickly. But just as he wrenched it open Rudi rubbed her jacket gently under the table. ‘Papa!’ he whispered, bubbling with laughter – ‘Look! Look! Muffi’s asleep!’ She raised her head. She even managed to smile at him and she said – ‘Silence!’ said Max sternly. ‘Finish your work,’ and he drew a heavy blue line down a whole page. There is a three cornered tear in Katerina’s pinafore. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 113–20. Published in part by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 65–78. 1. This incomplete story is a curious mix of memories and details from Wellington, a German family whose father teaches in a university, a maid who speaks French, and a love entanglement that is only hinted at. 2. The Home of Compassion in Island Bay, established in 1907 by the French nun, Mother Mary-Joseph Aubert, Maori missionary and founder of the Sisters of Compassion. In an abandoned letter c. 1908, KM wrote: ‘J’ai reçu une lettre de mon ami Mère St. Joseph Aubert’ (KMN, 1, p. 89). The sisters were a familiar sight in Wellington, pushing the prams in which they collected gifts for the orphanage.

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3. ‘Ach du lieber Augustin’, a Viennese song by Marx Augustin (1697): ‘Verlassen, Verlassen, / Verlassen bin ich’, an Austrian folk song. 4. At this point KM wrote on the MS, ‘wants all re-writing. “It’s all over the garden wall” at present. Re-read February 13th 1918 [?].’ 5. KM quotes the opening three lines from ‘Après la bataille’, Victor Hugo’s celebration of his father Léopold, in La Légende des siècles, first series (1859).

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Je ne parle pas français1 I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It’s dirty and sad, sad. It’s not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others – it hasn’t; or as if the same strange types came here every day, whom one could watch from one’s corner and recognise and more or less (with a strong accent on the less) get the hang of. But pray don’t imagine that those brackets are a confession of my humility before the mystery of the human soul. Not at all; I don’t believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteaux – packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle. . . . Not but what these portmanteaux can be very fascinating. Oh, but very! I see myself standing in front of them, don’t you know, like a Customs official. ‘Have you anything to declare? Any wines, spirits, cigars, perfumes, silks?’ And the moment of hesitation as to whether I am going to be fooled just before I chalk that squiggle, and then the other moment of hesitation just after, as to whether I have been, are perhaps the two most thrilling instants in life. Yes, they are, to me. But before I started that long and rather far-fetched and not frightfully original digression, what I meant to say quite simply was that there are no portmanteaux to be examined here because the clientele of this café, ladies and gentlemen, does not sit down. No, it stands at the counter, and it consists of a handful of workmen who come up from the river, all powdered over with white flour, lime or something, and a few soldiers, bringing with them thin, dark girls with silver rings in their ears and market baskets on their arms. Madame is thin and dark, too, with white cheeks and white hands. In certain lights she looks quite transparent, shining out of her black 112

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shawl with an extraordinary effect. When she is not serving she sits on a stool with her face turned, always, to the window. Her darkringed eyes search among and follow after the people passing, but not as if she was looking for somebody. Perhaps, fifteen years ago, she was; but now the pose has become a habit. You can tell from her air of fatigue and hopelessness that she must have given them up for the last ten years, at least. . . . And then there is the waiter. Not pathetic – decidedly not comic. Never making one of those perfectly insignificant remarks which amaze you so coming from a waiter (as though the poor wretch were a sort of cross between a coffee-pot and a wine bottle and not expected to hold so much as a drop of anything else). He is grey, flat-footed and withered, with long, brittle nails that set your nerves on edge while he scrapes up your two sous. When he is not smearing over the table or flicking at a dead fly or two, he stands with one hand on the back of a chair, in his far too long apron, and over his other arm the three-cornered dip of dirty napkin, waiting to be photographed in connection with some wretched murder. ‘Interior of Café where Body was Found.’ You’ve seen him hundreds of times. Do you believe that every place has its hour of the day when it really does come alive? That’s not exactly what I mean. It’s more like this. There does seem to be a moment when you realize that, quite by accident, you happen to have come on to the stage at exactly the moment you were expected. Everything is arranged for you – waiting for you. Ah, master of the situation! You fill with important breath. And at the same time you smile, secretly, slyly, because Life seems to be opposed to granting you these entrances, seems indeed to be engaged in snatching them from you and making them impossible, keeping you in the wings until it is too late, in fact. . . . Just for once you’ve beaten the old hag.I enjoyed one of these moments the first time I ever came in here. That’s why I keep coming back, I suppose. Revisiting the scene of my triumph, or the scene of the crime where I had the old bitch by the throat for once and did what I pleased with her. Query: Why am I so bitter against Life? And why do I see her as a rag-picker on the American cinema, shuffling along wrapped in a filthy shawl with her old claws crooked over a stick? Answer: The direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind. Anyhow, the ‘short winter afternoon was drawing to a close’, as they say, and I was drifting along, either going home or not going home, when I found myself in here, walking over to this seat in the corner. I hung up my English overcoat and grey felt hat on that same peg

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behind me, and after I had allowed the waiter time for at least twenty photographers to snap their fill of him, I ordered a coffee. He poured me out a glass of the familiar, purplish stuff with a green wandering light playing over it, and shuffled off, and I sat pressing my hands against the glass because it was bitterly cold outside. Suddenly I realized that quite apart from myself, I was smiling. Slowly I raised my head and saw myself in the mirror opposite. Yes, there I sat, leaning on the table, smiling my deep, sly smile, the glass of coffee with its vague plume of steam before me and beside it the ring of white saucer with two pieces of sugar. I opened my eyes very wide. There I had been for all eternity, as it were, and now at last I was coming to life. . . . It was very quiet in the café. Outside, one could just see through the dusk that it had begun to snow. One could just see the shapes of horses and carts and people, soft and white, moving through the feathery air. The waiter disappeared and reappeared with an armful of straw. He strewed it over the floor from the door to the counter and round about the stove with humble, almost adoring gestures. One would not have been surprised if the door had opened and the Virgin Mary had come in, riding upon an ass, her meek hands folded over her big belly. . . . That’s rather nice, don’t you think, that bit about the Virgin? It comes from the pen so gently; it has such a ‘dying fall’. I thought so at the time and decided to make a note of it. One never knows when a little tag like that may come in useful to round off a paragraph. So, taking care to move as little as possible because the ‘spell’ was still unbroken (you know that?), I reached over to the next table for a writing pad. No paper or envelopes, of course. Only a morsel of pink blottingpaper, incredibly soft and limp and almost moist, like the tongue of a little dead kitten, which I’ve never felt. I sat – but always underneath, in this state of expectation, rolling the little dead kitten’s tongue round my finger and rolling the soft phrase round my mind while my eyes took in the girls’ names and dirty jokes and drawings of bottles and cups that would not sit in the saucers, scattered over the writing pad. They are always the same, you know. The girls always have the same names, the cups never sit in the saucers; all the hearts are stuck and tied up with ribbons. But then, quite suddenly, at the bottom of the page, written in green ink, I fell on to that stupid, stale little phrase: Je ne parle pas français. There! it had come – the moment – the geste! And although I was so ready, it caught me, it tumbled me over; I was simply overwhelmed. And the physical feeling was so curious, so particular. It was as if

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all of me, except my head and arms, all of me that was under the table, had simply dissolved, melted, turned into water. Just my head remained and two sticks of arms pressing on to the table. But, ah! the agony of that moment! How can I describe it? I didn’t think of anything. I didn’t even cry out to myself. Just for one moment I was not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony. Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: ‘Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely unconscious! I hadn’t a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was swept off my feet! I didn’t even try, in the dimmest way, to put it down!’ And up I puffed and puffed, blowing off finally with: ‘After all I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling so . . . purely.’ The waiter has touched a spill at the red stove and lighted a bubble of gas under a spreading shade. It is no use looking out of the window, Madame; it is quite dark now. Your white hands hover over your dark shawl. They are like two birds that have come home to roost. They are restless, restless. . . . You tuck them, finally, under your warm little armpits. Now the waiter has taken a long pole and clashed the curtains together. ‘All gone’, as children say. And besides, I’ve no patience with people who can’t let go of things, who will follow after and cry out. When a thing’s gone, it’s gone. It’s over and done with. Let it go then! Ignore it, and comfort yourself, if you do want comforting, with the thought that you never do recover the same thing that you lose. It’s always a new thing. The moment it leaves you it’s changed. Why, that’s even true of a hat you chase after; and I don’t mean superficially – I mean profoundly speaking. . . . I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can’t get it into shape; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in. Looking back, of course, is equally fatal to Art. It’s keeping yourself poor. Art can’t and won’t stand poverty. Je ne parle pas français. Je ne parle pas français. All the while I wrote that last page my other self has been chasing up and down out in the dark there. It left me just when I began to analyse my grand moment, dashed off distracted, like a lost dog who thinks at last, at last, he hears the familiar step again. ‘Mouse! Mouse! Where are you? Are you near? Is that you leaning from the high window and stretching out your arms for the wings of the shutters? Are you this soft bundle moving towards me through

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the feathery snow? Are you this little girl pressing through the swingdoors of the restaurant? Is that your dark shadow bending forward in the cab? Where are you? Where are you? Which way must I turn? Which way shall I run? And every moment I stand here hesitating you are farther away again. Mouse! Mouse!’ Now the poor dog has come back into the café, his tail between his legs, quite exhausted. ‘It was a . . . false . . . alarm. She’s nowhere . . . to . . . be seen.’ ‘Lie down then! Lie down! Lie down!’ My name is Raoul Duquette. I am twenty-six years old and a Parisian, a true Parisian. About my family – it really doesn’t matter. I have no family; I don’t want any. I never think about my childhood. I’ve forgotten it. In fact, there’s only one memory that stands out at all. That is rather interesting because it seems to me now so very significant as regards myself from the literary point of view. It is this. When I was about ten our laundress was an African woman, very big, very dark, with a check handkerchief over her frizzy hair. When she came to our house she always took particular notice of me, and after the clothes had been taken out of the basket she would lift me up into it and give me a rock while I held tight to the handles and screamed for joy and fright. I was tiny for my age, and pale, with a lovely little half-open mouth – I feel sure of that. One day when I was standing at the door, watching her go, she turned round and beckoned to me, nodding and smiling in a strange secret way. I never thought of not following. She took me into a little outhouse at the end of the passage, caught me up in her arms and began kissing me. Ah, those kisses! Especially those kisses inside my ears that nearly deafened me. And then with a soft growl she tore open her bodice and put me to her. When she set me down she took from her pocket a little round fried cake covered with sugar and I reeled along the passage back to our door. As this performance was repeated once a week it is no wonder that I remember it so vividly. Besides, from that very first afternoon, my childhood was, to put it prettily, ‘kissed away’. I became very languid, very caressing, and greedy beyond measure. And so quickened, so sharpened, I seemed to understand everybody and be able to do what I liked with everybody. I suppose I was in a state of more or less physical excitement, and that was what appealed to them. For all Parisians are more than half – oh, well, enough of that. And enough of my childhood, too. Bury it under a laundry basket instead of a shower of roses and passons oultre.2

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I date myself from the moment that I became the tenant of a small bachelor flat on the fifth floor of a tall, not too shabby house, in a street that might or might not be discreet. Very useful, that. . . . There I emerged, came out into the light and put out my two horns with a study and a bedroom and a kitchen on my back. And real furniture planted in the rooms. In the bedroom a wardrobe with a long glass, a big bed covered with a yellow puffed-up quilt, a bed table with a marbled top and a toilet set sprinkled with tiny apples. In my study – English writing table with drawers, writing chair with leather cushions, books, arm-chair, side table with paper-knife and lamp on it and some nude studies on the walls. I didn’t use the kitchen except to throw old papers into. Ah, I can see myself that first evening, after the furniture men had gone and I’d managed to get rid of my atrocious old concierge – walking about on tip-toe, arranging and standing in front of the glass with my hands in my pockets and saying to that radiant vision: ‘I am a young man who has his own flat. I write for two newspapers. I am going in for serious literature. I am starting a career. The book that I shall bring out will simply stagger the critics. I am going to write about things that have never been touched before. I am going to make a name for myself as a writer about the submerged world. But not as others have done before me. Oh, no! Very naively, with a sort of tender humour and from the inside, as though it were all quite simple, quite natural. I see my way quite perfectly. Nobody has ever done it as I shall do it because none of the others have lived my experiences. I’m rich – I’m rich.’ All the same I had no more money than I have now. It’s extraordinary how one can live without money. . . . I have quantities of good clothes, silk underwear, two evening suits, four pairs of patent leather boots with light uppers, all sorts of little things, like gloves and powder boxes and a manicure set, perfumes, very good soap, and nothing is paid for. If I find myself in need of right-down cash – well, there’s always an African laundress and an outhouse, and I am very frank and bon enfant about plenty of sugar on the little fried cake afterwards. . . . And here I should like to put something on record. Not from any strutting conceit, but rather with a mild sense of wonder. I’ve never yet made the first advances to any woman. It isn’t as though I’ve known only one class of woman – not by any means. But from little prostitutes and kept women and elderly widows and shop girls and wives of respectable men, and even advanced modern literary ladies at the most select dinners and soirées (I’ve been there), I’ve met invariably with not only the same readiness, but with the same positive invitation. It surprised me at first. I used to look across the table and

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think ‘Is that very distinguished young lady, discussing le Kipling with the gentleman with the brown beard, really pressing my foot?’ And I was never really certain until I had pressed hers. Curious, isn’t it? Why should I be able to have any woman I want? I don’t look at all like a maiden’s dream. . . . I am little and light with an olive skin, black eyes with long lashes, black silky hair cut short, tiny square teeth that show when I smile. My hands are supple and small. A woman in a bread shop once said to me: ‘You have the hands for making fine little pastries.’ I confess, without my clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow. But, wait! Isn’t it strange I should have written all that about my body and so on? It’s the result of my bad life, my submerged life. I am like a little woman in a café who has to introduce herself with a handful of photographs. ‘Me in my chemise, coming out of an eggshell. . . . Me upside down in a swing, with a frilly behind like a cauliflower. . . .’ You know the things. If you think what I’ve written is merely superficial and impudent and cheap you’re wrong. I’ll admit it does sound so, but then it is not all. If it were, how could I have experienced what I did when I read that stale little phrase written in green ink, in the writing-pad? That proves there’s more in me and that I really am important, doesn’t it? Anything a fraction less than that moment of anguish I might have put on. But no! That was real. ‘Waiter, a whisky.’ I hate whisky. Every time I take it into my mouth my stomach rises against it, and the stuff they keep here is sure to be particularly vile. I only ordered it because I am going to write about an Englishman. We French are incredibly old-fashioned and out of date still in some ways. I wonder I didn’t ask him at the same time for a pair of tweed knickerbockers, a pipe, some long teeth and a set of ginger whiskers. ‘Thanks, mon vieux. You haven’t got perhaps a set of ginger whiskers?’ ‘No, monsieur,’ he answers sadly. ‘We don’t sell American drinks.’ And having smeared a corner of the table he goes back to have another couple of dozen taken by artificial light. Ugh! The smell of it! And the sickly sensation when one’s throat contracts. ‘It’s bad stuff to get drunk on,’ says Dick Harmon, turning his little glass in his fingers and smiling his slow, dreaming smile. So he gets drunk on it slowly and dreamily and at a certain moment begins to sing very low, very low, about a man who walks up and down trying to find a place where he can get some dinner.

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Ah! how I loved that song, and how I loved the way he sang it, slowly, slowly, in a dark, soft voice There was a man Walked up and down To get a dinner in the town . . .3

It seemed to hold, in its gravity and muffled measure, all those tall grey buildings, those fogs, those endless streets, those sharp shadows of policemen that mean England. And then – the subject! The lean, starved creature walking up and down with every house barred against him because he had no ‘home’. How extraordinarily English that is. . . . I remember that it ended where he did at last ‘find a place’ and ordered a little cake of fish, but when he asked for bread the waiter cried contemptuously, in a loud voice: ‘We don’t serve bread with one fish ball.’ What more do you want? How profound those songs are! There is the whole psychology of a people; and how un-French – how un-French! ‘Once more, Deeck, once more!’ I would plead, clasping my hands and making a pretty mouth at him. He was perfectly content to sing it for ever. There again. Even with Dick. It was he who made the first advances. I met him at an evening party given by the editor of a new review. It was a very select, very fashionable affair. One or two of the older men were there and the ladies were extremely comme il faut. They sat on cubist sofas in full evening dress and allowed us to hand them thimbles of cherry brandy and to talk to them about their poetry. For, as far as I can remember, they were all poetesses. It was impossible not to notice Dick. He was the only Englishman present, and instead of circulating gracefully round the room as we all did, he stayed in one place leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets, that dreamy half smile on his lips, and replying in excellent French in his low, soft voice to anybody who spoke to him. ‘Who is he?’ ‘An Englishman. From London. A writer. And he is making a special study of modern French literature.’ That was enough for me. My little book, False Coins, had just been published. I was a young, serious writer who was making a special study of modern English literature. But I really had not time to fling my line before he said, giving himself a soft shake, coming right out of the water after the bait, as

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it were: ‘Won’t you come and see me at my hotel? Come about five o’clock and we can have a talk before going out to dinner.’ ‘Enchanted!’ I was so deeply, deeply flattered that I had to leave him then and there to preen and preen myself before the cubist sofas. What a catch! An Englishman, reserved, serious, making a special study of French literature. . . . That same night a copy of False Coins with a carefully cordial inscription was posted off, and a day or two later we did dine together and spent the evening talking. Talking – but not only of literature. I discovered to my relief that it wasn’t necessary to keep to the tendency of the modern novel, the need of a new form, or the reason why our young men appeared to be just missing it. Now and again, as if by accident, I threw in a card that seemed to have nothing to do with the game, just to see how he’d take it. But each time he gathered it into his hands with his dreamy look and smile unchanged. Perhaps he murmured: ‘That’s very curious.’ But not as if it were curious at all. That calm acceptance went to my head at last. It fascinated me. It led me on and on till I threw every card that I possessed at him and sat back and watched him arrange them in his hand. ‘Very curious and interesting. . . . ’ By that time we were both fairly drunk, and he began to sing his song very soft, very low, about the man who walked up and down seeking his dinner. But I was quite breathless at the thought of what I had done. I had shown somebody both sides of my life. Told him everything as sincerely and truthfully as I could. Taken immense pains to explain things about my submerged life that really were disgusting and never could possibly see the light of literary day. On the whole I had made myself out far worse than I was – more boastful, more cynical, more calculating. And there sat the man I had confided in, singing to himself and smiling. . . . It moved me so that real tears came into my eyes. I saw them glittering on my long silky lashes – so charming. After that I took Dick about with me everywhere, and he came to my flat, and sat in the arm-chair, very indolent, playing with the paperknife. I cannot think why his indolence and dreaminess always gave me the impression he had been to sea. And all his leisurely slow ways seemed to be allowing for the movement of the ship. This impression was so strong that often when we were together and he got up and left a little woman just when she did not expect him to get up and leave her, but quite the contrary, I would explain: ‘He can’t help it,

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Baby. He has to go back to his ship.’ And I believed it far more than she did. All the while we were together Dick never went with a woman. I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t completely innocent. Why didn’t I ask him? Because I never did ask him anything about himself. But late one night he took out his pocket-book and a photograph dropped out of it. I picked it up and glanced at it before I gave it to him. It was of a woman. Not quite young. Dark, handsome, wildlooking, but so full in every line of a kind of haggard pride that even if Dick had not stretched out so quickly I wouldn’t have looked longer. ‘Out of my sight, you little perfumed fox-terrier of a Frenchman,’ said she. (In my very worst moments my nose reminds me of a fox-terrier’s.) ‘That is my Mother,’ said Dick, putting up the pocket-book. But if he had not been Dick I should have been tempted to cross myself, just for fun. This is how we parted. As we stood outside his hotel one night waiting for the concierge to release the catch of the outer door, he said, looking up at the sky: ‘I hope it will be fine to-morrow. I am leaving for England in the morning.’ ‘You’re not serious.’ ‘Perfectly. I have to get back. I’ve some work to do that I can’t manage here.’ ‘But – but have you made all your preparations?’ ‘Preparations?’ He almost grinned. ‘I’ve none to make.’ ‘But – enfin, Dick, England is not the other side of the boulevard.’ ‘It isn’t much farther off,’ said he. ‘Only a few hours, you know.’ The door cracked open. ‘Ah, I wish I’d known at the beginning of the evening!’ I felt hurt. I felt as a woman must feel when a man takes out his watch and remembers an appointment that cannot possibly concern her, except that its claim is the stronger. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He put out his hand and stood, lightly swaying upon the step as though the whole hotel were his ship, and the anchor weighed. ‘I forgot. Truly I did. But you’ll write, won’t you? Good night, old chap. I’ll be over again one of these days.’ And then I stood on the shore alone, more like a little fox-terrier than ever. . . . ‘But after all it was you who whistled to me, you who asked me to come! What a spectacle I’ve cut wagging my tail and leaping round you, only to be left like this while the boat sails off in its slow, dreamy way. . . . Curse these English! No, this is too insolent altogether. Who do you imagine I am? A little paid guide to the night pleasures

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of Paris? . . . No, monsieur. I am a young writer, very serious, and extremely interested in modern English literature. And I have been insulted – insulted.’ Two days after came a long, charming letter from him, written in French that was a shade too French, but saying how he missed me and counted on our friendship, on keeping in touch. I read it standing in front of the (unpaid for) wardrobe mirror. It was early morning. I wore a blue kimono embroidered with white birds and my hair was still wet; it lay on my forehead, wet and gleaming. ‘Portrait of Madame Butterfly,’ said I, ‘on hearing of the arrival of ce cher Pinkerton.’4 According to the books I should have felt immensely relieved and delighted. ‘. . . Going over to the window he drew apart the curtains and looked out at the Paris trees, just breaking into buds and green. . . . Dick! Dick! My English friend!’ I didn’t. I merely felt a little sick. Having been up for my first ride in an aeroplane I didn’t want to go up again, just now. That passed, and months after, in the winter, Dick wrote that he was coming back to Paris to stay indefinitely. Would I take rooms for him? He was bringing a woman friend with him. Of course I would. Away the little fox-terrier flew. It happened most usefully, too; for I owed much money at the hotel where I took my meals, and two English people requiring rooms for an indefinite time was an excellent sum on account. Perhaps I did rather wonder, as I stood in the larger of the two rooms with Madame, saying ‘Admirable,’ what the woman friend would be like, but only vaguely. Either she would be very severe, flat back and front, or she would be tall, fair, dressed in mignonette green, name – Daisy, and smelling of rather sweetish lavender water. You see, by this time, according to my rule of not looking back, I had almost forgotten Dick. I even got the tune of his song about the unfortunate man a little bit wrong when I tried to hum it. . . . I very nearly did not turn up at the station after all. I had arranged to, and had, in fact, dressed with particular care for the occasion. For I intended to take a new line with Dick this time. No more confidences and tears on eyelashes. No, thank you! ‘Since you left Paris,’ said I, knotting my black silver-spotted tie in the (also unpaid for) mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘I have been very successful, you know. I have two more books in preparation, and then I have written a serial story, Wrong Doors, which is just on the point

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of publication and will bring me in a lot of money. And then my little book of poems,’ I cried, seizing the clothes-brush and brushing the velvet collar of my new indigo-blue overcoat, ‘my little book – Left Umbrellas – really did create,’ and I laughed and waved the brush, ‘an immense sensation!’ It was impossible not to believe this of the person who surveyed himself finally, from top to toe, drawing on his soft grey gloves. He was looking the part; he was the part. That gave me an idea. I took out my notebook, and still in full view, jotted down a note or two. . . . How can one look the part and not be the part? Or be the part and not look it? Isn’t looking – being? Or being – looking? At any rate who is to say that it is not? . . . This seemed to me extraordinarily profound at the time, and quite new. But I confess that something did whisper as, smiling, I put up the notebook: ‘You – literary? you look as though you’ve taken down a bet on a racecourse!’ But I didn’t listen. I went out, shutting the door of the flat with a soft, quick pull so as not to warn the concierge of my departure, and ran down the stairs quick as a rabbit for the same reason. But ah! the old spider. She was too quick for me. She let me run down the last little ladder of the web and then she pounced. ‘One moment. One little moment, Monsieur,’ she whispered, odiously confidential. ‘Come in. Come in.’ And she beckoned with a dripping soup ladle. I went to the door, but that was not good enough. Right inside and the door shut before she would speak. There are two ways of managing your concierge if you haven’t any money. One is – to take the high hand, make her your enemy, bluster, refuse to discuss anything; the other is – to keep in with her, butter her up to the two knots of the black rag tying up her jaws, pretend to confide in her, and rely on her to arrange with the gas man and to put off the landlord. I had tried the second. But both are equally detestable and unsuccessful. At any rate whichever you’re trying is the worse, the impossible one. It was the landlord this time. . . . Imitation of the landlord by the concierge threatening to toss me out. . . . Imitation of the concierge by the concierge taming the wild bull. . . . Imitation of the landlord rampant again, breathing in the concierge’s face. I was the concierge. No, it was too nauseous. And all the while the black pot on the gas ring bubbling away, stewing out the hearts and livers of every tenant in the place. ‘Ah!’ I cried, staring at the clock on the mantelpiece, and then, realizing that it didn’t go, striking my forehead as though the idea had

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nothing to do with it. ‘Madame, I have a very important appointment with the director of my newspaper at nine-thirty. Perhaps to-morrow I shall be able to give you. . . .’ Out, out. And down the métro and squeezed into a full carriage. The more the better. Everybody was one bolster the more between me and the concierge. I was radiant. ‘Ah! pardon, Monsieur!’ said the tall charming creature in black with a big full bosom and a great bunch of violets dropping from it. As the train swayed it thrust the bouquet right into my eyes. ‘Ah! pardon, Monsieur!’ But I looked up at her, smiling mischievously. ‘There is nothing I love more, Madame, than flowers on a balcony.’ At the very moment of speaking I caught sight of the huge man in a fur coat against whom my charmer was leaning. He poked his head over her shoulder and he went white to the nose; in fact his nose stood out a sort of cheese green. ‘What was that you said to my wife?’ Gare Saint Lazare saved me. But you’ll own that even as the author of False Coins, Wrong Doors, Left Umbrellas, and two in preparation, it was not too easy to go on my triumphant way. At length, after countless trains had steamed into my mind, and countless Dick Harmons had come rolling towards me, the real train came. The little knot of us waiting at the barrier moved up close, craned forward, and broke into cries as though we were some kind of many-headed monster, and Paris behind us nothing but a great trap we had set to catch these sleepy innocents. Into the trap they walked and were snatched and taken off to be devoured. Where was my prey? ‘Good God!’ My smile and my lifted hand fell together. For one terrible moment I thought this was the woman of the photograph, Dick’s mother, walking towards me in Dick’s coat and hat. In the effort – and you saw what an effort it was – to smile, his lips curled in just the same way and he made for me, haggard and wild and proud. What had happened? What could have changed him like this? Should I mention it? I waited for him and was even conscious of venturing a fox-terrier wag or two to see if he could possibly respond, in the way I said: ‘Good evening, Dick! How are you, old chap? All right?’ ‘All right. All right.’ He almost gasped. ‘You’ve got the rooms?’ Twenty times, good God! I saw it all. Light broke on the dark waters and my sailor hadn’t been drowned. I almost turned a somersault with amusement. It was nervousness, of course. It was embarrassment. It was the

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famous English seriousness. What fun I was going to have! I could have hugged him. ‘Yes, I’ve got the rooms,’ I nearly shouted. ‘But where is Madame?’ ‘She’s been looking after the luggage,’ he panted. ‘Here she comes, now.’ Not this baby walking beside the old porter as though he were her nurse and had just lifted her out of her ugly perambulator while he trundled the boxes on it. ‘And she’s not Madame,’ said Dick, drawling suddenly. At that moment she caught sight of him and hailed him with her minute muff. She broke away from her nurse and ran up and said something, very quick, in English; but he replied in French: ‘Oh, very well. I’ll manage.’ But before he turned to the porter he indicated me with a vague wave and muttered something. We were introduced. She held out her hand in that strange boyish way Englishwomen do, and standing very straight in front of me with her chin raised and making – she too – the effort of her life to control her preposterous excitement, she said, wringing my hand (I’m sure she didn’t know it was mine), Je ne parle pas français. ‘But I’m sure you do,’ I answered, so tender, so reassuring, I might have been a dentist about to draw her first little milk tooth. ‘Of course she does.’ Dick swerved back to us. ‘Here, can’t we get a cab or taxi or something? We don’t want to stay in this cursed station all night. Do we?’ This was so rude that it took me a moment to recover; and he must have noticed, for he flung his arm round my shoulder in the old way, saying: ‘Ah, forgive me, old chap. But we’ve had such a loathsome, hideous journey. We’ve taken years to come. Haven’t we?’ To her. But she did not answer. She bent her head and began stroking her grey muff; she walked beside us stroking her grey muff all the way. ‘Have I been wrong?’ thought I. ‘Is this simply a case of frenzied impatience on their part? Are they merely ‘in need of a bed’, as we say? Have they been suffering agonies on the journey? Sitting, perhaps, very close and warm under the same travelling rug?’ and so on and so on while the driver strapped on the boxes. That done – ‘Look here, Dick. I go home by métro. Here is the address of your hotel. Everything is arranged. Come and see me as soon as you can.’ Upon my life I thought he was going to faint. He went white to the lips. ‘But you’re coming back with us,’ he cried. ‘I thought it was all settled. Of course you’re coming back. You’re not going to leave us.’ No, I gave it up. It was too difficult, too English for me. ‘Certainly, certainly. Delighted. I only thought, perhaps. . . .’

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‘You must come!’ said Dick to the little fox-terrier. And again he made that big awkward turn towards her. ‘Get in, Mouse.’ And Mouse got in the black hole and sat stroking Mouse II and not saying a word. Away we jolted and rattled like three little dice that life had decided to have a fling with. I had insisted on taking the flap seat facing them because I would not have missed for anything those occasional flashing glimpses I had as we broke through the white circles of lamplight. They revealed Dick, sitting far back in his corner, his coat collar turned up, his hands thrust in his pockets, and his broad dark hat shading him as if it were a part of him – a sort of wing he hid under. They showed her, sitting up very straight, her lovely little face more like a drawing than a real face – every line was so full of meaning and so sharp cut against the swimming dark. For Mouse was beautiful. She was exquisite, but so fragile and fine that each time I looked at her it was as if for the first time. She came upon you with the same kind of shock that you feel when you have been drinking tea out of a thin innocent cup and suddenly, at the bottom, you see a tiny creature, half butterfly, half woman, bowing to you with her hands in her sleeves. As far as I could make out she had dark hair and blue or black eyes. Her long lashes and the two little feathers traced above were most important. She wore a long dark cloak such as one sees in old-fashioned pictures of Englishwomen abroad. Where her arms came out of it there was grey fur – fur round her neck, too, and her close-fitting cap was furry. ‘Carrying out the mouse idea,’ I decided. Ah, but how intriguing it was – how intriguing! Their excitement came nearer and nearer to me, while I ran out to meet it, bathed in it, flung myself far out of my depth, until at last I was as hard put to it to keep control as they. But what I wanted to do was to behave in the most extraordinary fashion – like a clown. To start singing, with large extravagant gestures, to point out of the window and cry: ‘We are now passing, ladies and gentlemen, one of the sights for which notre Paris is justly famous’; to jump out of the taxi while it was going, climb over the roof and dive in by another door; to hang out of the window and look for the hotel through the wrong end of a broken telescope, which was also a peculiarly ear-splitting trumpet.

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I watched myself do all this, you understand, and even managed to applaud in a private way by putting my gloved hands gently together, while I said to Mouse: ‘And is this your first visit to Paris?’ ‘Yes, I’ve not been here before.’ ‘Ah, then you have a great deal to see.’ And I was just going to touch lightly upon the objects of interest and the museums when we wrenched to a stop. Do you know – it’s very absurd – but as I pushed open the door for them and followed up the stairs to the bureau on the landing I felt somehow that this hotel was mine. There was a vase of flowers on the window sill of the bureau and I even went so far as to re-arrange a bud or two and to stand off and note the effect while the manageress welcomed them. And when she turned to me and handed me the keys (the garçon was hauling up the boxes) and said: ‘Monsieur Duquette will show you your rooms’ – I had a longing to tap Dick on the arm with a key and say, very confidentially: ‘Look here, old chap. As a friend of mine I’ll be only too willing to make a slight reduction. . . .’ Up and up we climbed. Round and round. Past an occasional pair of boots (why is it one never sees an attractive pair of boots outside a door?). Higher and higher. ‘I’m afraid they’re rather high up,’ I murmured idiotically. ‘But I chose them because. . . .’ They so obviously did not care why I chose them that I went no further. They accepted everything. They did not expect anything to be different. This was just part of what they were going through – that was how I analysed it. ‘Arrived at last.’ I ran from one side of the passage to the other, turning on the lights, explaining. ‘This one I thought for you, Dick. The other is larger and it has a little dressing-room in the alcove.’ My ‘proprietary’ eye noted the clean towels and covers, and the bed linen embroidered in red cotton. I thought them rather charming rooms, sloping, full of angles, just the sort of rooms one would expect to find if one had not been to Paris before. Dick dashed his hat down on the bed. ‘Oughtn’t I to help that chap with the boxes?’ he asked – nobody. ‘Yes, you ought,’ replied Mouse, ‘they’re dreadfully heavy.’ And she turned to me with the first glimmer of a smile: ‘Books, you know.’ Oh, he darted such a strange look at her before he rushed out. And he not only helped, he must have torn the box off the garçon’s back, for he staggered back, carrying one, dumped it down and then fetched in the other.

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‘That’s yours, Dick,’ said she. ‘Well, you don’t mind it standing here for the present, do you?’ he asked, breathless, breathing hard (the box must have been tremendously heavy). He pulled out a handful of money. ‘I suppose I ought to pay this chap.’ The garçon, standing by, seemed to think so too. And will you require anything further, Monsieur?’ ‘No! No!’ said Dick impatiently. But at that Mouse stepped forward. She said, too deliberately, not looking at Dick, with her quaint clipped English accent: ‘Yes, I’d like some tea. Tea for three.’ And suddenly she raised her muff as though her hands were clasped inside it, and she was telling the pale, sweaty garçon by that action that she was at the end of her resources, that she cried out to him to save her with ‘Tea. Immediately!’ This seemed to me so amazingly in the picture, so exactly the gesture and cry that one would expect (though I couldn’t have imagined it) to be wrung out of an Englishwoman faced with a great crisis, that I was almost tempted to hold up my hand and protest. ‘No! No! Enough. Enough. Let us leave off there. At the word – tea. For really, really, you’ve filled your greediest subscriber so full that he will burst if he has to swallow another word.’ It even pulled Dick up. Like someone who has been unconscious for a long long time he turned slowly to Mouse and slowly looked at her with his tired, haggard eyes, and murmured with the echo of his dreamy voice: ‘Yes. That’s a good idea.’ And then: ‘You must be tired, Mouse. Sit down.’ She sat down in a chair with lace tabs on the arms; he leaned against the bed, and I established myself on a straight-backed chair, crossed my legs and brushed some imaginary dust off the knees of my trousers. (The Parisian at his ease.) There came a tiny pause. Then he said: ‘Won’t you take off your coat, Mouse?’ ‘No, thanks. Not just now.’ Were they going to ask me? Or should I hold up my hand and call out in a baby voice: ‘It’s my turn to be asked.’ No, I shouldn’t. They didn’t ask me. The pause became a silence. A real silence. ‘. . . Come, my Parisian fox-terrier! Amuse these sad English! It’s no wonder they are such a nation for dogs.’ But, after all – why should I? It was not my ‘job’, as they would say. Nevertheless, I made a vivacious little bound at Mouse. ‘What a pity it is that you did not arrive by daylight. There is such

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a charming view from these two windows. You know, the hotel is on a corner and each window looks down an immensely long, straight street.’ ‘Yes,’ said she. ‘Not that that sounds very charming,’ I laughed. ‘But there is so much animation – so many absurd little boys on bicycles and people hanging out of windows and – oh, well, you’ll see for yourself in the morning. . . . Very amusing. Very animated.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said she. If the pale, sweaty garçon had not come in at that moment, carrying the tea-tray high on one hand as if the cups were cannon-balls and he a heavy weight lifter on the cinema. . . . He managed to lower it on to a round table. ‘Bring the table over here,’ said Mouse. The waiter seemed to be the only person she cared to speak to. She took her hands out of her muff, drew off her gloves and flung back the old-fashioned cape. ‘Do you take milk and sugar?’ ‘No milk, thank you, and no sugar.’ I went over for mine like a little gentleman. She poured out another cup. ‘That’s for Dick.’ And the faithful fox-terrier carried it across to him and laid it at his feet, as it were. ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Dick. And then I went back to my chair and she sank back in hers. But Dick was off again. He stared wildly at the cup of tea for a moment, glanced round him, put it down on the bed-table, caught up his hat and stammered at full gallop: ‘Oh, by the way, do you mind posting a letter for me? I want to get it off by to-night’s post. I must. It’s very urgent. . . .’ Feeling her eyes on him, he flung: ‘It’s to my mother.’ To me: ‘I won’t be long. I’ve got everything I want. But it must go off to-night. You don’t mind? It . . . it won’t take any time.’ ‘Of course I’ll post it. Delighted.’ ‘Won’t you drink your tea first?’ suggested Mouse softly. . . . Tea? Tea? Yes, of course. Tea. . . . A cup of tea on the bedtable. . . . In his racing dream he flashed the brightest, most charming smile at his little hostess. ‘No, thanks. Not just now.’ And still hoping it would not be any trouble to me he went out of the room and closed the door, and we heard him cross the passage. I scalded myself with mine in my hurry to take the cup back to the table and to say as I stood there: ‘You must forgive me if I am impertinent . . . if I am too frank. But Dick hasn’t tried to disguise it – has he? There is something the matter. Can I help?’

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(Soft music. Mouse gets up, walks the stage for a moment or so before she returns to her chair and pours him out, oh, such a brimming, such a burning cup that the tears come into the friend’s eyes while he sips – while he drains it to the bitter dregs. . . .) I had time to do all this before she replied. First she looked in the teapot, filled it with hot water, and stirred it with a spoon. ‘Yes, there is something the matter. No, I’m afraid you can’t help, thank you.’ Again I got that glimmer of a smile. ‘I’m awfully sorry. It must be horrid for you.’ Horrid, indeed! Ah, why couldn’t I tell her that it was months and months since I had been so entertained? ‘But you are suffering,’ I ventured softly, as though that was what I could not bear to see. She didn’t deny it. She nodded and bit her under-lip and I thought I saw her chin tremble. ‘And there is really nothing I can do?’ More softly still. She shook her head, pushed back the table and jumped up. ‘Oh, it will be all right soon,’ she breathed, walking over to the dressing-table and standing with her back towards me. ‘It will be all right. It can’t go on like this.’ ‘But of course it can’t.’ I agreed, wondering whether it would look heartless if I lit a cigarette; I had a sudden longing to smoke. In some way she saw my hand move to my breast pocket, half draw out my cigarette case and put it back again, for the next thing she said was: ‘Matches . . . in . . . candlestick. I noticed them.’ And I heard from her voice that she was crying. ‘Ah! thank you. Yes. Yes. I’ve found them.’ I lighted my cigarette and walked up and down, smoking. It was so quiet it might have been two o’clock in the morning. It was so quiet you heard the boards creak and pop as one does in a house in the country. I smoked the whole cigarette and stabbed the end into my saucer before Mouse turned round and came back to the table. ‘Isn’t Dick being rather a long time?’ ‘You are very tired. I expect you want to go to bed,’ I said kindly. (And pray don’t mind me if you do, said my mind.) ‘But isn’t he being a very long time?’ she insisted. I shrugged. ‘He is, rather.’ Then I saw she looked at me strangely. She was listening. ‘He’s been gone ages,’ she said, and she went with little light steps to the door, opened it, and crossed the passage into his room. I waited. I listened too, now. I couldn’t have borne to miss a word. She had left the door open. I stole across the room and looked

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after her. Dick’s door was open, too. But – there wasn’t a word to miss. You know I had the mad idea that they were kissing in that quiet room – a long comfortable kiss. One of those kisses that not only puts one’s grief to bed, but nurses it and warms it and tucks it up and keeps it fast enfolded until it is sleeping sound. Ah! how good that is. It was over at last. I heard some one move and tip-toed away. It was Mouse. She came back. She felt her way into the room carrying the letter for me. But it wasn’t in an envelope; it was just a sheet of paper and she held it by the corner as though it was still wet. Her head was bent so low – so tucked in her furry collar that I hadn’t a notion – until she let the paper fall and almost fell herself on to the floor by the side of the bed, leaned her cheek against it, flung out her hands as though the last of her poor little weapons was gone and now she let herself be carried away, washed out into the deep water. Flash! went my mind. Dick has shot himself, and then a succession of flashes while I rushed in, saw the body, head unharmed, small blue hole over temple, roused hotel, arranged funeral, attended funeral, closed cab, new morning coat. . . . I stooped down and picked up the paper and would you believe it – so ingrained is my Parisian sense of comme il faut – I murmured ‘pardon’ before I read it. ‘Mouse, my little Mouse, It’s no good. It’s impossible. I can’t see it through. Oh, I do love you. I do love you, Mouse, but I can’t hurt her. People have been hurting her all her life. I simply dare not give her this final blow. You see, though she’s stronger than both of us, she’s so frail and proud. It would kill her – kill her, Mouse. And, oh God, I can’t kill my mother! Not even for you. Not even for us. You do see that – don’t you. It all seemed so possible when we talked and planned, but the very moment the train started it was all over. I felt her drag me back to her – calling. I can hear her now as I write. And she’s alone and she doesn’t know. A man would have to be a devil to tell her and I’m not a devil, Mouse. She mustn’t know. Oh, Mouse, somewhere, somewhere in you don’t you agree? It’s all so unspeakably awful that I don’t know if I want to go or not. Do I? Or is Mother just dragging me? I don’t know. My head is too tired. Mouse, Mouse – what will you do? But I can’t think of that, either. I dare not. I’d break down. And I must not break down. All I’ve got to do is – just to tell you this and go. I couldn’t have gone off without telling you. You’d have been frightened. And you must not be frightened. You won’t – will you? I can’t bear – but no more of that. And don’t write. I should not

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have the courage to answer your letters and the sight of your spidery handwriting – – – Forgive me. Don’t love me any more. Yes. Love me. Love me. Dick.’ What do you think of that? Wasn’t that a rare find? My relief at his not having shot himself was mixed with a wonderful sense of elation. I was even – more than even with my ‘that’s very curious and interesting’ Englishman. . . . She wept so strangely. With her eyes shut, with her face quite calm except for the quivering eyelids. The tears pearled down her cheeks and she let them fall. But feeling my glance upon her she opened her eyes and saw me holding the letter. ‘You’ve read it?’ Her voice was quite calm, but it was not her voice any more. It was like the voice you might imagine coming out of a tiny, cold sea-shell swept high and dry at last by the salt tide. . . . I nodded, quite overcome, you understand, and laid the letter down. ‘It’s incredible! incredible!’ I whispered. At that she got up from the floor, walked over to the wash-stand, dipped her handkerchief into the jug and sponged her eyes, saying: ‘Oh, no. It’s not incredible at all.’ And still pressing the wet ball to her eyes she came back to me, to her chair with the lace tabs, and sank into it. ‘I knew all along, of course,’ said the cold, salty little voice. ‘From the very moment that we started. I felt it all through me, but I still went on hoping –’ and here she took the handkerchief down and gave me a final glimmer – ‘as one so stupidly does, you know.’ ‘As one does.’ Silence. ‘But what will you do? You’ll go back? You’ll see him?’ That made her sit right up and stare across at me. ‘What an extraordinary idea!’ she said, more coldly than ever. ‘Of course I shall not dream of seeing him. As for going back – that is quite out of the question. I can’t go back.’ ‘But. . . .’ ‘It’s impossible. For one thing all my friends think I am married.’ I put out my hand – ‘Ah, my poor little friend.’ But she shrank away. (False move.) Of course there was one question that had been at the back of my mind all this time. I hated it. ‘Have you any money?’

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‘Yes, I have twenty pounds – here,’ and she put her hand on her breast. I bowed. It was a great deal more than I had expected. ‘And what are your plans?’ Yes, I know. My question was the most clumsy, the most idiotic one I could have put. She had been so tame, so confiding, letting me, at any rate spiritually speaking, hold her tiny quivering body in one hand and stroke her furry head – and now, I’d thrown her away. Oh, I could have kicked myself. She stood up. ‘I have no plans. But – it’s very late. You must go now, please.’ How could I get her back? I wanted her back, I swear I was not acting then. ‘Do feel that I am your friend,’ I cried. ‘You will let me come tomorrow, early? You will let me look after you a little – take care of you a little? You’ll use me just as you think fit?’ I succeeded. She came out of her hole . . . timid . . . but she came out. ‘Yes, you’re very kind. Yes. Do come to-morrow. I shall be glad. It makes things rather difficult because –’ and again I clasped her boyish hand – ‘je ne parle pas français.’ Not until I was half-way down the boulevard did it come over me – the full force of it. Why, they were suffering . . . those two . . . really suffering. I have seen two people suffer as I don’t suppose I ever shall again. . . . And. . . . ‘Good-night, my little cat,’ said I, impudently, to the fattish old prostitute picking her way home through the slush. . . . I didn’t give her time to reply. Of course you know what to expect. You anticipate, fully, what I am going to write. It wouldn’t be me, otherwise. I never went near the place again. Yes, I still owe that considerable amount for lunches and dinners, but that’s beside the mark. It’s vulgar to mention it in the same breath with the fact that I never saw Mouse again. Naturally, I intended to. Started out – got to the door – wrote and tore up letters – did all those things. But I simply could not make the final effort. Even now I don’t fully understand why. Of course I knew that I couldn’t have kept it up. That had a great deal to do with it. But you would have thought, putting it at its lowest, curiosity couldn’t have kept my fox-terrier nose away. . . . Je ne parle pas français. That was her swan song for me. But how she makes me break my rule. Oh, you’ve seen for yourself, but I could give you countless examples.

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. . . Evenings, when I sit in some gloomy café, and an automatic piano starts playing a ‘mouse’ tune (there are dozens of tunes that evoke just her) I begin to dream things like. . . . A little house on the edge of the sea, somewhere far, far away. A girl outside in a frock rather like Red Indian women wear, hailing a light, bare-foot boy who runs up from the beach. ‘What have you got?’ ‘A fish.’ I smile and give it to her. . . . The same girl, the same boy, different costumes – sitting at an open window, eating fruit and leaning out and laughing. ‘All the wild strawberries are for you, Mouse. I won’t touch one.’ . . . A wet night. They are going home together under an umbrella. They stop on the door to press their wet cheeks together. And so on and so on until some dirty old gallant comes up to my table and sits opposite and begins to grimace and yap. Until I hear myself saying: ‘But I’ve got the little girl for you, mon vieux. So little . . . so tiny. And a virgin.’ I kiss the tips of my fingers – ‘A virgin’ – and lay them upon my heart. ‘I give you my word of honour as a gentleman, a writer, serious, young, and extremely interested in modern English literature.’ I must go. I must go. I reach down my coat and hat. Madame knows me. ‘You haven’t dined yet?’ she smiles. ‘No, not yet, Madame.’ I’d rather like to dine with her. Even to sleep with her afterwards. Would she be pale like that all over? But no. She’d have large moles. They go with that kind of skin. And I can’t bear them. They remind me somehow, disgustingly, of mushrooms. Notes Text: Je ne parle pas français, The Heron Press, 1919. BOS. 1. KM’s first hint of the story was her writing to JMM from Bandol, 1 February 1918, I am rather diffident about telling you because so many sham wolves have gone over the bridge – that I am working & have been for two days. It looks to me the real thing. But one never knows. I’ll keep quiet about it until it is finished. Two days later she explained how what she is now writing is:

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a cry against corruption [. . .]. Not a protest – a cry, and I mean corruption in the widest sense of the word, of course – I am at present fully launched [. . .]. I may not be able to ‘make my passage’ – I may have to put back & have another try, that’s why I don’t want to talk about it. (CLKM, 2, p. 51, p. 54) When she posted JMM ‘the first chapter’ on 3–4 February, she expanded: It needs perhaps some explanation. The subject I mean lui qui parle is of course taken from – Carco & Gertler & God knows who. It has been more or less in my mind ever since I first felt strongly about the french. But I hope youll see (of course you will) that I am not writing with a sting. Im not, indeed! I read the fair copy just now and couldn’t think where the devil I had got the bloody thing from – I cant even now. It’s a mystery. Theres so much less taken from life than anybody would credit. The African laundress I had a bone of – but only a bone – Dick Harmon of course is partly is [her breaking off tactfully leaves it to JMM to provide his own name as part model at least for the Englishman]. Oh God – is it good? I am frightened. For I stand or fall by it. Its as far as I can get at present and I have gone for it, bitten deeper & deeper & deeper than ever I have before. (CLKM, 2, p. 56) When JMM read the pages she had sent him, he assured her in a letter dated 8 February: my sensation is like that which I had when I read Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld. [. . .] Here you seem to have begun to drag the depths of your consciousness. [. . .] Ordinarily what you express and satisfy is your desire to write, because you are a born writer, and a writer born with a true vision of the world. Now you express and satisfy some other desire, perhaps because for a moment you doubt or have not got the other vision. The world is shut out. You are looking into yourself. (C. A. Hankin, ed., The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield (1983), p. 114, p. 115) KM herself considered the story a turning point in her writing, telling JMM on 10 February 1918, ‘what [I] felt so curiously as I wrote it was – ah! I am in a way grown up as a writer’. And again, on 14 February, Trouble is I feel I have found an approach to a story now which I must apply to everything. Is that nonsense? I read what I wrote before that last & I feel: no this is all once removed: it wont do. And it wont. Ive got to reconstruct everything. (CLKM, 2, p. 66, pp. 71–2)

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The story was handset and printed by JMM’s younger brother Richard on his private press in Hampstead. When KM came to include it in BOS, Constable’s editor, JMM’s friend Michael Sadleir, insisted that what he took to be dubious sexual references be deleted. Mainly for financial reasons – £40 immediately available once the changes were made and the volume went to press – KM agreed, but later regretted her decision. ‘I wish I hadn’t. I was wrong – very wrong’ (6 December 1920, CLKM, 4, p. 137). The result was that KM’s original version was not generally available until the Heron Press text was restored in Alpers. Alpers also provides an account of the story’s composition, as well as its bowdlerising – see pp. 559–61. 2. A famous phrase from François Rabelais, Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). 3. Traditional blues song. 4. Giacomo Puccini, Madame Butterfly (1904), an opera based on the love of a Japanese geisha for Pinkerton, an American naval officer.

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Sun and Moon1 In the afternoon the chairs came, a whole big cart full of little gold ones with their legs in the air. And then the flowers came. When you stared down from the balcony at the people carrying them the flower pots looked like funny awfully nice hats nodding up the path. Moon thought they were hats. She said: ‘Look. There’s a man wearing a palm on his head.’ But she never knew the difference between real things and not real ones. There was nobody to look after Sun and Moon. Nurse was helping Annie alter Mother’s dress which was much-too-long-and-tightunder-the-arms and Mother was running all over the house and telephoning Father to be sure not to forget things. She only had time to say: ‘Out of my way, children!’ They kept out of her way – at any rate Sun did. He did so hate being sent stumping back to the nursery. It didn’t matter about Moon. If she got tangled in people’s legs they only threw her up and shook her till she squeaked. But Sun was too heavy for that. He was so heavy that the fat man who came to dinner on Sundays used to say: ‘Now, young man, let’s try to lift you.’ And then he’d put his thumbs under Sun’s arms and groan and try and give it up at last saying: ‘He’s a perfect little ton of bricks!’ Nearly all the furniture was taken out of the dining-room. The big

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piano was put in a corner and then there came a row of flower pots and then there came the goldy chairs. That was for the concert. When Sun looked in a white faced man sat at the piano – not playing, but banging at it and then looking inside. He had a bag of tools on the piano and he had stuck his hat on a statue against the wall. Sometimes he just started to play and then he jumped up again and looked inside. Sun hoped he wasn’t the concert. But of course the place to be in was the kitchen. There was a man helping in a cap like a blancmange, and their real cook, Minnie, was all red in the face and laughing. Not cross at all. She gave them each an almond finger and lifted them up on to the flour bin so that they could watch the wonderful things she and the man were making for supper. Cook brought in the things and he put them on dishes and, trimmed them. Whole fishes, with their heads and eyes and tails still on, he sprinkled with red and green and yellow bits; he made squiggles all over the jellies, he stuck a collar on a ham and put a very thin sort of a fork in it; he dotted almonds and tiny round biscuits on the creams. And more and more things kept coming. ‘Ah, but you haven’t seen the ice pudding,’ said Cook. ‘Come along.’ Why was she being so nice, thought Sun as she gave them each a hand. And they looked into the refrigerator. Oh! Oh! Oh! It was a little house. It was a little pink house with white snow on the roof and green windows and a brown door and stuck in the door there was a nut for a handle. When Sun saw the nut he felt quite tired and had to lean against Cook. ‘Let me touch it. Just let me put my finger on the roof,’ said Moon, dancing. She always wanted to touch all the food. Sun didn’t. ‘Now, my girl, look sharp with the table,’ said Cook as the housemaid came in. ‘It’s a picture, Min,’ said Nellie. ‘Come along and have a look.’ So they all went into the dining-room. Sun and Moon were almost frightened. They wouldn’t go up to the table at first; they just stood at the door and made eyes at it. It wasn’t real night yet but the blinds were down in the diningroom and the lights turned on – and all the lights were red roses. Red ribbons and bunches of roses tied up the table at the corners. In the middle was a lake with rose petals floating on it. ‘That’s where the ice pudding is to be,’ said Cook. Two silver lions with wings had fruit on their backs, and the salt cellars were tiny birds drinking out of basins. And all the winking glasses and shining plates and sparkling knives and forks – and all the food. And the little red table napkins made into roses. . . . ‘Are people going to eat the food?’ asked Sun.

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‘I should just think they were,’ laughed Cook, laughing with Nellie. Moon laughed, too; she always did the same as other people. But Sun didn’t want to laugh. Round and round he walked with his hands behind his back. Perhaps he never would have stopped if Nurse hadn’t called suddenly: ‘Now then, children. It’s high time you were washed and dressed.’ And they were marched off to the nursery. While they were being unbuttoned Mother looked in with a white thing over her shoulders; she was rubbing stuff on her face. ‘I’ll ring for them when I want them, Nurse, and then they can just come down and be seen and go back again,’ said she. Sun was undressed, first nearly to his skin, and dressed again in a white shirt with red and white daisies speckled on it, breeches with strings at the sides and braces that came over, white socks and red shoes. ‘Now you’re in your Russian costume,’ said Nurse, flattening down his fringe. ‘Am I?’ said Sun. ‘Yes. Sit quiet in that chair and watch your little sister.’ Moon took ages. When she had her socks put on she pretended to fall back on the bed and waved her legs at Nurse as she always did, and every time Nurse tried to make her curls with a finger and a wet brush she turned round and asked Nurse to show her the photo in her brooch or something like that. But at last she was finished too. Her dress stuck out, with fur on it, all white; there was even fluffy stuff on the legs of her drawers. Her shoes were white with big blobs on them. ‘There you are, my lamb,’ said Nurse. ‘And you look like a sweet little cherub of a picture of a powder-puff.’ Nurse rushed to the door. ‘Ma’am, one moment.’ Mother came in again with half her hair down. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘What a picture!’ ‘Isn’t she,’ said Nurse. And Moon held out her skirts by the tips and dragged one of her feet. Sun didn’t mind people not noticing him – much. . . . After that they played clean tidy games up at the table while Nurse stood at the door, and when the carriages began to come and the sound of laughter and voices and soft rustlings came from down below she whispered: ‘Now then, children, stay where you are.’ Moon kept jerking the table cloth so that it all hung down her side and Sun hadn’t any – and then she pretended she didn’t do it on purpose. At last the bell rang. Nurse pounced at them with the hair brush, flattened his fringe, made her bow stand on end and joined their hands together. ‘Down you go!’ she whispered.

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And down they went. Sun did feel silly holding Moon’s hand like that but Moon seemed to like it. She swung her arm and the bell on her coral bracelet jingled. At the drawing-room door stood Mother fanning herself with a black fan. The drawing-room was full of sweet smelling, silky, rustling ladies and men in black with funny tails on their coats – like beetles. Father was among them, talking very loud, and rattling something in his pocket. ‘What a picture!’ cried the ladies. ‘Oh, the ducks! Oh, the lambs! Oh, the sweets! Oh, the pets!’ All the people who couldn’t get at Moon kissed Sun, and a skinny old lady with teeth that clicked said: ‘Such a serious little poppet,’ and rapped him on the head with something hard. Sun looked to see if the same concert was there, but he was gone. Instead, a fat man with a pink head leaned over the piano talking to a girl who held a violin at her ear. There was only one man that Sun really liked. He was a little grey man, with long grey whiskers, who walked about by himself. He came up to Sun and rolled his eyes in a very nice way and said: ‘Hullo, my lad.’ Then he went away. But soon he came back again and said: ‘Fond of dogs?’ Sun said: ‘Yes.’ But then he went away again, and though Sun looked for him everywhere he couldn’t find him. He thought perhaps he’d gone outside to fetch in a puppy. ‘Good night, my precious babies,’ said Mother, folding them up in her bare arms. ‘Fly up to your little nest.’ Then Moon went and made a silly of herself again. She put up her arms in front of everybody and said: ‘My Daddy must carry me.’ But they seemed to like it, and Daddy swooped down and picked her up as he always did. Nurse was in such a hurry to get them to bed that she even interrupted Sun over his prayers and said: ‘Get on with them, child, do.’ And the moment after they were in bed and in the dark except for the nightlight in its little saucer. ‘Are you asleep?’ asked Moon. ‘No,’ said Sun. ‘Are you?’ ‘No,’ said Moon. A long while after Sun woke up again. There was a loud, loud noise of clapping from downstairs, like when it rains. He heard Moon turn over. ‘Moon, are you awake?’ ‘Yes, are you?’ ‘Yes. Well, let’s go and look over the stairs.’ They had just got settled on the top step when the drawing-room door opened and they heard the party cross over the hall into the dining-room. Then that door was shut; there was a noise of ‘pops’

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and laughing. Then that stopped and Sun saw them all walking round and round the lovely table with their hands behind their backs like he had done. . . . Round and round they walked, looking and staring. The man with the grey whiskers liked the little house best. When he saw the nut for a handle he rolled his eyes like he did before and said to Sun: ‘Seen the nut?’ ‘Don’t nod your head like that, Moon.’ ‘I’m not nodding. It’s you.’ ‘It is not. I never nod my head.’ ‘O-oh, you do. You’re nodding it now.’ ‘I’m not. I’m only showing you how not to do it.’ When they woke up again they could only hear Father’s voice very loud, and Mother, laughing away. Father came out of the diningroom, bounded up the stairs, and nearly fell over them. ‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘By Jove, Kitty, come and look at this.’ Mother came out. ‘Oh, you naughty children,’ said she from the hall. ‘Let’s have ’em down and give ’em a bone,’ said Father. Sun had never seen him so jolly. ‘No, certainly not,’ said Mother. ‘Oh, my Daddy, do! Do have us down,’ said Moon. ‘I’m hanged if I won’t,’ cried Father. ‘I won’t be bullied. Kitty – way there.’ And he caught them up, one under each arm. Sun thought Mother would have been dreadfully cross. But she wasn’t. She kept on laughing at Father. ‘Oh, you dreadful boy!’ said she. But she didn’t mean Sun. ‘Come on, kiddies. Come and have some pickings,’ said this jolly Father. But Moon stopped a minute. ‘Mother – your dress is right off one side.’ ‘Is it?’ said Mother. And Father said ‘Yes’ and pretended to bite her white shoulder, but she pushed him away. And so they went back to the beautiful dining-room. But – oh! oh! what had happened? The ribbons and the roses were all pulled untied. The little red table napkins lay on the floor, all the shining plates were dirty and all the winking glasses. The lovely food that the man had trimmed was all thrown about, and there were bones and bits and fruit peels and shells everywhere. There was even a bottle lying down with stuff coming out of it on to the cloth and nobody stood it up again. And the little pink house with the snow roof and the green windows was broken – broken – half melted away in the centre of the table. ‘Come on, Sun,’ said Father, pretending not to notice. Moon lifted up her pyjama legs and shuffled up to the table and stood on a chair, squeaking away.

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‘Have a bit of this ice,’ said Father, smashing in some more of the roof. Mother took a little plate and held it for him; she put her other arm round his neck. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ shrieked Moon. ‘The little handle’s left. The little nut. Kin I eat it?’ And she reached across and picked it out of the door and scrunched it up, biting hard and blinking. ‘Here, my lad,’ said Father. But Sun did not move from the door. Suddenly he put up his head and gave a loud wail. I think it’s horrid – horrid – horrid!’ he sobbed. ‘There, you see!’ said Mother. ‘You see!’ ‘Off with you,’ said Father, no longer jolly. ‘This moment. Off you go!’ And wailing loudly, Sun stumped off to the nursery. Notes Text: BOS. Athenaeum, 4718, 1 October 1920, pp. 430–2. 1. KM wrote to JMM on 10 February 1918: I dreamed a short story last night even down to its name which was Sun & Moon. It was very light. I dreamed it all – about children. I got up at 6.30 & made a note or two because I knew it would fade. Ill send it sometime this week. Its so nice. I didn’t dream that I read it. No I was in it part of it & it played round invisible me. But the hero is not more than 5. In my dream I saw a supper table with the eyes of 5. It was awfully queer – especially a plate of half melted icecream. . . (CLKM, 2, p. 66) By the end of the year, however, KM had quite gone off the story, instructing JMM not to send it to the journal Art and Letters, as she thought they would not want to publish it, and ‘I feel far away from it’ (CLKM, 3, p. 147).

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Bliss1 Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the

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air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply. What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . . Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle? ‘No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,’ she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key – she’d forgotten it, as usual – and rattling the letter-box. ‘It’s not what I mean, because – Thank you, Mary’ – she went into the hall. ‘Is Nurse back?’ ‘Yes, M’m.’ ‘And has the fruit come?’ ‘Yes, M’m. Everything’s come.’ ‘Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I’ll arrange it before I go upstairs.’ It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment, and the cold air fell on her arms. But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place – that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror – but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something . . . divine to happen . . . that she knew must happen . . . infallibly. Mary brought in the fruit on a tray and with it a glass bowl, and a blue dish, very lovely, with a strange sheen on it as though it had been dipped in milk. ‘Shall I turn on the light, M’m?’ ‘No, thank you. I can see quite well.’ There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk; some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. These last she had bought to tone in with the new dining-room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really why she had bought them. She had thought in the shop: ‘I must have some purple ones to bring the carpet up to the table.’ And it had seemed quite sense at the time. When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids of

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these bright round shapes, she stood away from the table to get the effect – and it really was most curious. For the dark table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air. This, of course in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful. . . . She began to laugh. ‘No, no. I’m getting hysterical.’ And she seized her bag and coat and ran upstairs to the nursery. Nurse sat at a low table giving Little B her supper after her bath. The baby had on a white flannel gown and a blue woollen jacket, and her dark, fine hair was brushed up into a funny little peak. She looked up when she saw her mother and began to jump. ‘Now, my lovey, eat it up like a good girl,’ said Nurse, setting her lips in a way that Bertha knew, and that meant she had come into the nursery at another wrong moment. ‘Has she been good, Nanny?’ ‘She’s been a little sweet all the afternoon,’ whispered Nanny. ‘We went to the park and I sat down on a chair and took her out of the pram and a big dog came along and put its head on my knee and she clutched its ear, tugged it. Oh, you should have seen her.’ Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn’t rather dangerous to let her clutch at a strange dog’s ear. But she did not dare to. She stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll. The baby looked up at her again, stared, and then smiled so charmingly that Bertha couldn’t help crying: ‘Oh, Nanny, do let me finish giving her her supper while you put the bath things away.’ ‘Well, M’m, she oughtn’t to be changed hands while she’s eating,’ said Nanny, still whispering. ‘It unsettles her; it’s very likely to upset her.’ How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be kept – not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle – but in another woman’s arms? ‘Oh, I must!’ said she. Very offended, Nanny handed her over. ‘Now, don’t excite her after her supper. You know you do, M’m. And I have such a time with her after!’ Thank heaven! Nanny went out of the room with the bath towels. ‘Now I’ve got you to myself, my little precious,’ said Bertha, as the baby leaned against her. She ate delightfully, holding up her lips for the spoon and then waving her hands. Sometimes she wouldn’t let the spoon go; and sometimes, just as Bertha had filled it, she waved it away to the four winds.

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When the soup was finished Bertha turned round to the fire. ‘You’re nice – you’re very nice!’ said she, kissing her warm baby. ‘I’m fond of you. I like you.’ And, indeed, she loved Little B so much – her neck as she bent forward, her exquisite toes as they shone transparent in the firelight – that all her feeling of bliss came back again, and again she didn’t know how to express it – what to do with it. ‘You’re wanted on the telephone,’ said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B. Down she flew. It was Harry. ‘Oh, is that you, Ber? Look here. I’ll be late. I’ll take a taxi and come along as quickly as I can, but get dinner put back ten minutes – will you? All right?’ ‘Yes, perfectly. Oh, Harry!’ ‘Yes?’ What had she to say? She’d nothing to say. She only wanted to get in touch with him for a moment. She couldn’t absurdly cry: ‘Hasn’t it been a divine day!’ ‘What is it?’ rapped out the little voice. ‘Nothing. Entendu,’ said Bertha, and hung up the receiver, thinking how more than idiotic civilization was. They had people coming to dinner. The Norman Knights – a very sound couple – he was about to start a theatre, and she was awfully keen on interior decoration, a young man, Eddie Warren, who had just published a little book of poems and whom everybody was asking to dine, and a ‘find’ of Bertha’s called Pearl Fulton. What Miss Fulton did, Bertha didn’t know. They had met at the club and Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them. The provoking thing was that, though they had been about together and met a number of times and really talked, Bertha couldn’t yet make her out. Up to a certain point Miss Fulton was rarely, wonderfully frank, but the certain point was there, and beyond that she would not go. Was there anything beyond it? Harry said ‘No.’ Voted her dullish, and ‘cold like all blond women, with a touch, perhaps, of anæmia of the brain’. But Bertha wouldn’t agree with him; not yet, at any rate. ‘No, the way she has of sitting with her head a little on one side, and smiling, has something behind it, Harry, and I must find out what that something is.’ ‘Most likely it’s a good stomach,’ answered Harry.

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He made a point of catching Bertha’s heels with replies of that kind . . . ‘liver frozen, my dear girl’, or ‘pure flatulence’, or ‘kidney disease’, . . . and so on. For some strange reason Bertha liked this, and almost admired it in him very much. She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire; then, picking up the cushions, one by one, that Mary had disposed so carefully, she threw them back on to the chairs and the couches. That made all the difference; the room came alive at once. As she was about to throw the last one she surprised herself by suddenly hugging it to her, passionately, passionately. But it did not put out the fire in her bosom. Oh, on the contrary! The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony overlooking the garden. At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn’t help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver. ‘What creepy things cats are!’ she stammered, and she turned away from the window and began walking up and down. . . . How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room. Too strong? Oh, no. And yet, as though overcome, she flung down on a couch and pressed her hands to her eyes. ‘I’m too happy – too happy!’ she murmured. And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life. Really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really good pals. She had an adorable baby. They didn’t have to worry about money. They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden. And friends – modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions – just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the summer, and their new cook made the most superb omelettes. . . . ‘I’m absurd. Absurd!’ She sat up; but she felt quite dizzy, quite drunk. It must have been the spring. Yes, it was the spring. Now she was so tired she could not drag herself upstairs to dress. A white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and stockings. It

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wasn’t ‘intentional’. She had thought of this scheme hours before she stood at the drawing-room window. Her petals rustled softly into the hall, and she kissed Mrs Norman Knight, who was taking off the most amusing orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem and up the fronts. ‘. . . Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy – so utterly without a sense of humour! My dear, it’s only by a fluke that I am here at all – Norman being the protective fluke. For my darling monkeys so upset the train that it rose to a man and simply ate me with its eyes. Didn’t laugh – wasn’t amused – that I should have loved. No, just stared – and bored me through and through.’ ‘But the cream of it was,’ said Norman, pressing a large tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle into his eye, ‘you don’t mind me telling this, Face, do you?’ (In their home and among their friends they called each other Face and Mug.) ‘The cream of it was when she, being full fed, turned to the woman beside her and said: ‘Haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?’ ‘Oh, yes!’ Mrs Norman Knight joined in the laughter. ‘Wasn’t that too absolutely creamy?’ And a funnier thing still was that now her coat was off she did look like a very intelligent monkey – who had even made that yellow silk dress out of scraped banana skins. And her amber ear-rings; they were like little dangling nuts. ‘This is a sad, sad fall!’ said Mug, pausing in front of Little B’s perambulator. ‘When the perambulator comes into the hall –’ and he waved the rest of the quotation away. The bell rang. It was lean, pale Eddie Warren (as usual) in a state of acute distress. ‘It is the right house, isn’t it?’ he pleaded. ‘Oh, I think so – I hope so,’ said Bertha brightly. ‘I have had such a dreadful experience with a taxi-man; he was most sinister. I couldn’t get him to stop. The more I knocked and called the faster he went. And in the moonlight this bizarre figure with the flattened head crouching over the lit-tle wheel. . . .’ He shuddered, taking off an immense white silk scarf. Bertha noticed that his socks were white, too – most charming. ‘But how dreadful!’ she cried. ‘Yes, it really was,’ said Eddie, following her into the drawingroom. ‘I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.’ He knew the Norman Knights. In fact, he was going to write a play for N. K. when the theatre scheme came off. ‘Well, Warren, how’s the play?’ said Norman Knight, dropping his monocle and giving his eye a moment in which to rise to the surface before it was screwed down again.

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And Mrs Norman Knight: ‘Oh, Mr Warren, what happy socks?’ ‘I am so glad you like them,’ said he, staring at his feet. ‘They seem to have got so much whiter since the moon rose.’ And he turned his lean sorrowful young face to Bertha. ‘There is a moon, you know.’ She wanted to cry: ‘I am sure there is – often – often!’ He really was a most attractive person. But so was Face, crouched before the fire in her banana skins, and so was Mug, smoking a cigarette and saying as he flicked the ash: ‘Why doth the bridegroom tarry?’ ‘There he is, now.’ Bang went the front door open and shut. Harry shouted: ‘Hullo, you people. Down in five minutes.’ And they heard him swarm up the stairs. Bertha couldn’t help smiling; she knew how he loved doing things at high pressure. What, after all, did an extra five minutes matter? But he would pretend to himself that they mattered beyond measure. And then he would make a great point of coming into the drawing-room, extravagantly cool and collected. Harry had such a zest for life. Oh, how she appreciated it in him. And his passion for fighting – for seeking in everything that came up against him another test of his power and of his courage – that, too, she understood. Even when it made him just occasionally, to other people, who didn’t know him well, a little ridiculous perhaps. . . . For there were moments when he rushed into battle where no battle was. . . . She talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had come in (just as she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not turned up. ‘I wonder if Miss Fulton has forgotten?’ ‘I expect so,’ said Harry. ‘Is she on the ’phone?’ ‘Ah! There’s a taxi, now.’ And Bertha smiled with that little air of proprietorship that she always assumed while her women finds were new and mysterious. ‘She lives in taxis.’ ‘She’ll run to fat if she does,’ said Harry coolly, ringing the bell for dinner. ‘Frightful danger for blond women.’ ‘Harry – don’t,’ warned Bertha, laughing up at him. Came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing and talking, just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware. And then Miss Fulton, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blond hair, came in smiling, her head a little on one side. ‘Am I late?’ ‘No, not at all,’ said Bertha. ‘Come along.’ And she took her arm and they moved into the dining-room. What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan – fan – start blazing – blazing – the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?

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Miss Fulton did not look at her; but then she seldom did look at people directly. Her heavy eyelids lay upon her eyes and the strange half smile came and went upon her lips as though she lived by listening rather than seeing. But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most intimate look had passed between them – as if they had said to each other: ‘You, too?’ – that Pearl Fulton, stirring the beautiful red soup in the grey plate, was feeling just what she was feeling. And the others? Face and Mug, Eddie and Harry, their spoons rising and falling – dabbing their lips with their napkins, crumbling bread, fiddling with the forks and glasses and talking. ‘I met her at the Alpha show – the weirdest little person. She’d not only cut off her hair, but she seemed to have taken a dreadfully good snip off her legs and arms and her neck and her poor little nose as well.’ ‘Isn’t she very liée with Michael Oat?’ ‘The man who wrote Love in False Teeth?’ ‘He wants to write a play for me. One act. One man. Decides to commit suicide. Gives all the reasons why he should and why he shouldn’t. And just as he has made up his mind either to do it or not to do it – curtain. Not half a bad idea.’ ‘What’s he going to call it – “Stomach Trouble”?’ ‘I think I’ve come across the same idea in a lit-tle French review, quite unknown in England.’ No, they didn’t share it. They were dears – dears – and she loved having them there, at her table, and giving them delicious food and wine. In fact, she longed to tell them how delightful they were, and what a decorative group they made, how they seemed to set one another off and how they reminded her of a play by Tchekof! Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his – well, not his nature, exactly, and certainly not his pose – his – something or other – to talk about food and to glory in his ‘shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster’ and ‘the green of pistachio ices – green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian dancers’. When he looked up at her and said: ‘Bertha, this is a very admirable soufflée!’ she almost could have wept with child-like pleasure. Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world to-night? Everything was good – was right. All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss. And still, in the back of her mind, there was the pear tree. It would be silver now, in the light of poor dear Eddie’s moon, silver as Miss Fulton, who sat there turning a tangerine in her slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them. What she simply couldn’t make out – what was miraculous – was how she should have guessed Miss Fulton’s mood so exactly and so

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instantly. For she never doubted for a moment that she was right, and yet what had she to go on? Less than nothing. ‘I believe this does happen very, very rarely between women. Never between men,’ thought Bertha. ‘But while I am making the coffee in the drawing-room perhaps she will “give a sign”.’ What she meant by that she did not know, and what would happen after that she could not imagine. While she thought like this she saw herself talking and laughing. She had to talk because of her desire to laugh. ‘I must laugh or die.’ But when she noticed Face’s funny little habit of tucking something down the front of her bodice – as if she kept a tiny, secret hoard of nuts there, too – Bertha had to dig her nails into her hands – so as not to laugh too much. It was over at last. And: ‘Come and see my new coffee machine,’ said Bertha. ‘We only have a new coffee machine once a fortnight,’ said Harry. Face took her arm this time; Miss Fulton bent her head and followed after. The fire had died down in the drawing-room to a red, flickering ‘nest of baby phoenixes’, said Face. ‘Don’t turn up the light for a moment. It is so lovely.’ And down she crouched by the fire again. She was always cold . . . ‘without her little red flannel jacket, of course,’ thought Bertha. At that moment Miss Fulton ‘gave the sign’. ‘Have you a garden?’ said the cool, sleepy voice. This was so exquisite on her part that all Bertha could do was to obey. She crossed the room, pulled the curtains apart, and opened those long windows. ‘There!’ she breathed. And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed – almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon. How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands? For ever – for a moment? And did Miss Fulton murmur: ‘Yes. Just that.’ Or did Bertha dream it? Then the light was snapped on and Face made the coffee and Harry

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said: ‘My dear Mrs Knight, don’t ask me about my baby. I never see her. I shan’t feel the slightest interest in her until she has a lover,’ and Mug took his eye out of the conservatory for a moment and then put it under glass again and Eddie Warren drank his coffee and set down the cup with a face of anguish as though he had drunk and seen the spider. ‘What I want to do is to give the young men a show. I believe London is simply teeming with first-chop, unwritten plays. What I want to say to ’em is: “Here’s the theatre. Fire ahead.” ’ ‘You know, my dear, I am going to decorate a room for the Jacob Nathans. Oh, I am so tempted to do a fried-fish scheme, with the backs of the chairs shaped like frying pans and lovely chip potatoes embroidered all over the curtains.’ ‘The trouble with our young writing men is that they are still too romantic. You can’t put out to sea without being seasick and wanting a basin. Well, why won’t they have the courage of those basins?’ ‘A dreadful poem about a girl who was violated by a beggar without a nose in a lit-tle wood. . . .’ Miss Fulton sank into the lowest, deepest chair and Harry handed round the cigarettes. From the way he stood in front of her shaking the silver box and saying abruptly: ‘Egyptian? Turkish? Virginian? They’re all mixed up,’ Bertha realized that she not only bored him; he really disliked her. And she decided from the way Miss Fulton said: ‘No, thank you, I won’t smoke,’ that she felt it, too, and was hurt. ‘Oh, Harry, don’t dislike her. You are quite wrong about her. She’s wonderful, wonderful. And, besides, how can you feel so differently about someone who means so much to me. I shall try to tell you when we are in bed to-night what has been happening. What she and I have shared.’ At those last words something strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha’s mind. And this something blind and smiling whispered to her: ‘Soon these people will go. The house will be quiet – quiet. The lights will be out. And you and he will be alone together in the dark room – the warm bed. . . . She jumped up from her chair and ran over to the piano. ‘What a pity someone does not play!’ she cried. ‘What a pity somebody does not play.’ For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband. Oh, she’d loved him – she’d been in love with him, of course, in every other way, but just not in that way. And, equally, of course, she’d understood that he was different. They’d discussed it so often. It had worried her dreadfully at first to find that she was so cold, but

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after a time it had not seemed to matter. They were so frank with each other – such good pals. That was the best of being modern. But now – ardently! ardently! The word ached in her ardent body! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to? But then, then – ‘My dear,’ said Mrs Norman Knight, ‘you know our shame. We are the victims of time and train. We live in Hampstead. It’s been so nice.’ ‘I’ll come with you into the hall,’ said Bertha. ‘I loved having you. But you must not miss the last train. That’s so awful, isn’t it?’ ‘Have a whisky, Knight, before you go?’ called Harry. ‘No, thanks, old chap.’ Bertha squeezed his hand for that as she shook it. ‘Good night, good-bye,’ she cried from the top step, feeling that this self of hers was taking leave of them for ever. When she got back into the drawing-room the others were on the move. ‘. . . Then you can come part of the way in my taxi.’ ‘I shall be so thankful not to have to face another drive alone after my dreadful experience.’ ‘You can get a taxi at the rank just at the end of the street. You won’t have to walk more than a few yards.’ ‘That’s a comfort. I’ll go and put on my coat.’ Miss Fulton moved towards the hall and Bertha was following when Harry almost pushed past. ‘Let me help you.’ Bertha knew that he was repenting his rudeness – she let him go. What a boy he was in some ways – so impulsive – so – simple. And Eddie and she were left by the fire. ‘I wonder if you have seen Bilks’ new poem called Table d’Hôte,’ said Eddie softly. ‘It’s so wonderful. In the last Anthology. Have you got a copy? I’d so like to show it to you. It begins with an incredibly beautiful line: “Why Must it Always be Tomato Soup?” ’ ‘Yes,’ said Bertha. And she moved noiselessly to a table opposite the drawing-room door and Eddie glided noiselessly after her. She picked up the little book and gave it to him; they had not made a sound. While he looked it up she turned her head towards the hall. And she saw . . . Harry with Miss Fulton’s coat in his arms and Miss Fulton with her back turned to him and her head bent. He tossed the coat away, put his hands on her shoulders and turned her violently to him. His lips said: ‘I adore you,’ and Miss Fulton laid her moonbeam fingers on his cheeks and smiled her sleepy smile. Harry’s nostrils quivered; his lips curled back in a hideous grin while he whispered: ‘To-morrow,’ and with her eyelids Miss Fulton said: ‘Yes.’

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‘Here it is,’ said Eddie. ‘“Why Must it Always be Tomato Soup?” It’s so deeply true, don’t you feel? Tomato soup is so dreadfully eternal.’ ‘If you prefer,’ said Harry’s voice, very loud, from the hall, ‘I can phone you a cab to come to the door.’ ‘Oh, no. It’s not necessary,’ said Miss Fulton, and she came up to Bertha and gave her the slender fingers to hold. ‘Good-bye. Thank you so much.’ ‘Good-bye,’ said Bertha. Miss Fulton held her hand a moment longer. ‘Your lovely pear tree!’ she murmured. And then she was gone, with Eddie following, like the black cat following the grey cat. ‘I’ll shut up shop,’ said Harry, extravagantly cool and collected. ‘Your lovely pear tree – pear tree – pear tree!’ Bertha simply ran over to the long windows. ‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’ she cried. But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still. Notes Text: BOS. English Review, 27, August 1918, pp. 108–19. 1. KM wrote ‘Bliss’ in Bandol during the second half of February 1918, following ‘Je ne parle pas français’. She told JMM on 26 February, ‘I’ll make no END of an effort to finish this story called Bliss. I hope youll like it. Its different again’, and two days later: Ive just finished this new story [. . .] my God! I have enjoyed writing it [. . .] One extraordinary thing has happened to me since I came over here! Once I start them [the stories] they haunt me, pursue me and plague me until they are finished and as good as I can do. You will again ‘recognise’ some of the people. Eddie of course is a fish out of the Garsington2 pond (which gives me joy) and Henry is touched with W. L. G.3 Miss Fulton is ‘my own invention’. (CLKM, 2, p. 94, pp. 97–8) KM was paid six guineas for the story, the most she had yet received, when it appeared in the most reputable journal so far to take her work. 2. Garsington Manor, near Oxford, was the home of her friend Lady Ottoline Morrell, where writers, artists, pacifists and intellectuals were frequent guests.

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3. The novelist W. L. George (1882–1936) had introduced KM to JMM in late 1911.

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The Boy with the Jackdaw II. So he sat and smoked his cigarette, looking at the empty fire-place, the frill of paper inside the grate, and the irons, inside too, heaped in a bundle. ‘Put a match to them and get a blaze if you can, but that’s all the fire you’ll get in my house.’ Very cheering. Very hospitable. But then the cigarette was three quarter parts smoked he thought miserably. That’s just about what I feel like. That’s a complete picture of myself at this moment. It couldn’t be truer. She sat at the table her hands just touching the long paper of mixed flowers that the landlady had given her to take home. They were mixed. Canterbury bells, sweet william like velvet pincushions, irises, silly flaring poppies, snapdragon and some roses that smell sweetly in water lay half spoiled with greenfly. She was not going to take them home. She had no vases to fit them and besides – she didn’t want them. No, she would leave them in the rack of the railway carriage. If only some officious fool wouldn’t run after. ‘Excuse me Madame – you’ve left your flowers.’ ‘Oh no they were there when we came into the carriage.’ In a few hours the ugly room which did not belong to them or to anybody would be emptied of them for ever and tomorrow morning or this evening perhaps the card labelled Apartments would be stuck in the window. After they had gone the landlady and Blackie, her grandson would come in and sneak and pry about looking for pickings. Had they left anything? Nothing but half a bottle of thoroughly bad ink and yes that bowl of dog daisies and sorrel on the mantelpiece. She’d throw away that wild trash. She’d chuck the daisies in to the dustbin and then empty the tea leaves on to them while they were yet alive. And she’d say: ‘She was as nice and pleasant spoken a young woman as you could wish to find, but he was a cool fishblooded young man, and terrible hard to please sometimes I reckon. Oh yes!’ – and then she’d worry about whether she couldn’t have charged them a bit more for something they’d never had – and then they’d be forgotten.

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He flicked the cigarette end on to the hearth and slowly turned towards her but didn’t look, saying in a cool unnatural voice, ‘Well, aren’t you coming out?’ For it had been agreed between them before this last quarrel that when the packing was done they would sit on the beach for half an hour and then come back to tea and wait for the cab that was to take them to the station. That voice! How she hated it! And how it insulted her. How dared he speak to her like that? And the worst of it was it was so put on – so affected. He had a way, after they’d been quarrelling, or even in the middle of a quarrel, of speaking down to her as much as to say – Of course you haven’t understood a word of what’s happened, but this sort of thing – Shall we have tea, shall we go out – you can understand and you can reply to. She sat up and drew in her chin making her throat longer, very free and soft. She glanced with hot quick eyes and darted the words at him. ‘I’m certainly not going.’ But he saw none of this. Very listless and tired he rolled out of the chair and pulled on his hat. ‘Oh very well, please yourself!’ But she didn’t want to stay in that ugly room looking at those hideous flowers. The landlady would come in too and want to talk and think it funny that she hadn’t gone with him. And she hated walking by herself in this strange village and she didn’t want him to be down there on the stony beach all alone – a little speck among all the others – lost, unconscious of her, forgetting her. She didn’t trust him. He might do something idiotic. He might forget all about the time, he might hire a boat – say he rowed while the tea grew cold and the cab waited and she stood at the window in an anguish of exasperation – dying of it simply! He was at the door. ‘Yes, I will come after all.’ Was he smiling? Had he known that she would ‘come round’? He gave no sign at all. Staring at the floor in the same listless, tired way: ‘I’ll wait here while you put on your hat.’ ‘I’ve got it on,’ said she. And they passed out of the ugly room into the hideous hall. There the landlady caught them: she had the door of the kitchen open on purpose. Out she bounced. ‘Oh Mrs Tressle, I was wondering whether you care to take back a lobster. My cousin the fishmonger has just brought it across to me boiled and all.’ She was back in the kitchen and out again with the strange red thing on a white dish – offering it to Miriam. Instead of helping her to get rid of this fool of a woman, instead of even doing his share, he sauntered out of the house and stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets, looking down the road, leaving

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it, as usual, all to her. This she realized beyond words while she was pleasant and gay and grateful to the landlady. ‘It’s awfully kind of you Mrs Trefoyle but my husband’ – ‘Don’t care for them,’ said the landlady, smiling her knowing smile, which Miriam pretended not to see. ‘They don’t agree with him,’ she said regretfully, making a little murmur of regret at the loathsome red thing in the dish; ‘I wish they did – it does look a beauty.’ ‘Oh well, there’s likes and there’s dislikes,’ said the landlady – and Miriam went out to join him. It was hot and fine. The air quivered. You would have fancied the whole round world lay open like a flower to the sun, and behind everything, underneath all the little noises there was a stillness, a profound calm, a surrender so blissful that even human beings were moved by it and walked along, easy and confident. The cats lay asleep on the window sills. A row of sea gulls perched on a roof tile. Marble birds. Nobody saw the queer ugly child dragging between them, clutching a hand of each as they walked side by side down the road. Obstinate, ugly and heavy – their only child, the child of their love. The only thing that held them together and kept them alive to each other. He knew it – he felt it pulling, but just for the moment he did not care. As always happened after their quarrelling, folded in upon himself, sealed up, he died for the time being, like a sea anemone that has been prodded with a stone. He hadn’t even got to the stage where the stone is rejected. No, there it lay . . . and he covered it and was still. She, on the contrary, after the quarrels, always felt so strong so dreadfully full of life. She wanted to snatch the ugly brat up to shake it at him, to cry:– ‘See what you’ve made me bear! It’s yours. It’s yours. It’s all your fault! I never quarrelled with anybody before I met you. People used to say that I simply radiated happiness and wellbeing. And it was true – it was true. I was made to be happy and to make other people happy, and now you’re killing me – killing me. You won’t let me be myself even for a single moment. No, all you really want to do – your only real desire in life – is to drag me down, to make me somehow or other as wretched as yourself, to force me to crawl to the office with you every day and endure the torture, and crawl back again.’ Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 146–8. Dated ‘9.VI.18’. Published as ‘The Quarrel’ by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 104–9.

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To the Last Moment1 Chapter I. He was just in time. They were pulling down the blinds in the Post Office when he burst in, pushing his way through the swing doors with a kind of extravagant breast-stroke, and:– ‘I can still send a telegram, can’t I?’ he cried to snappy little Miss Smythe who rapped out:– ‘If it’s very important you may. Not otherwise!’ ‘Oh it is important – frightfully!’ said he, giving her such a radiant unexpected beam that it shook two faded old banners into her cheeks. But he did not notice. He wrote in his beautiful flowing hand which even in that blissful moment he couldn’t help admiring:– ‘Got it arrive by morning boat tomorrow cheers’ and pushed it under the netting. ‘It will go off tonight, won’t it!’ he asked counting out a whole handful of pennies. ‘Yes. I’ll send it now,’ said she, and her dry little pencil hopped over the form. ‘Is the last word cheese?’ ‘Oh, no.’ Again that beam lighting up the dingy little woman; even her Kruger-sovereign brooch seemed to glow with it. ‘It’s cheers – three cheers – you know – Musical cheers – no, that’s wrong . . .’ He was out again and swinging along the street (about two foot up in the air) swinging along the street that he’d never seen before. Glorious place! Such happy, splendid people hurrying home, their faces and hands a deep pink colour in the sunset light. Native women, big, dark, and bright like dahlias, lolling on the benches outside the Grand Hotel. The carts and waggons, even the immense two-horse cabs went spanking by as though every horse’s head was turned towards home. And then – the shops – fruit shops, a flare of gold – fish shops, a blaze of silver! As for the smell coming off the flower jars that the florist was spraying before he carried them inside for the night – it nearly knocked you over! That hand, too, hovering in the jeweller’s window, taking out the little boxes and trays. Just a hand – so mysterious, so beautiful. To whom could it belong? And then a rolling navvy bumped into him and said:– ‘Sorry – my lad!’ ‘My lad!’ He wanted to fling his arms round the chap for it. Although there was everything to be done he couldn’t go home yet. He must walk this off a bit, first. He must climb a hill. Well, that wasn’t difficult. The whole place was nothing but hills. So he chose the steepest and up and up he went, getting warm, then getting his

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second wind and simply floating on it to the very top – to a white painted rail against which he leaned and looked over. For the first time, yes, positively for the first time he saw the town below him – the red roofed houses set in plumy, waving gardens, the absurd little city quarter, ‘built in American style’, the wharves, the tarred wharf sheds and behind these black masses two cranes that looked, somehow, from this distance, like two gigantic pairs of scissors, stuck on end. And then the deep, brimming harbour, shaped like a crater, in a curving brim of hills, just broken in one jagged place to let the big ships through. For a moment, while he looked, it lay all bathed in brightness – so clear he could have counted the camellias on the trees – and then, without any warning, it was dark, quite dark, and lights began to appear, flowering in the soft hollows like sea anemones. His eyelids smarted. His throat ached; he could have wept. He could have flung out his arms and cried:– ‘Oh my darling, darling little town!’ And all because he was going to leave it in a week’s time – because he was off to Europe and God knows – if he’d ever see it again! But instead of the fling he took a deep breath and in that breath he discovered how hungry he was. He was starving – quite faint with it. Marching down the hill his knees shook like an old woman’s. Down and down he went. There was nobody about now because it was supper time. But the lighted houses in their plumy gardens were full of life; they could not hold so much. It broke from them, in voices and laughter, and scattered over the flowers and trees. ‘Children! Children! Come in at once!’ called a woman. And – ‘Oh, Mother!’ answered the children. Ah, how well he understood what they were feeling, poor little beggars. It was no time at all since he and Isobel had answered just like that. The garden gate was clammy and cold. As he walked up the path a bough of syringa brushed his face wetting his cheeks and lips. And he smiled, with a strange little shiver of delight; he felt that the plant was playing with him . . . Two oblong pieces of light lay on the grass below the french windows of the dining room. He leapt on to the verandah and looked in. There he saw his brother-in-law, Kenneth, sitting at the table, eating, with a book propped up against a glass jug. ‘Hullo, old boy,’ said Henry. ‘Hullo’ said Kenneth, and he stared at Henry in the solemn, absent way that Henry loved. ‘You’re late. Had supper?’ ‘Good God – no!’ Henry came in and began wiping the dew and the pollen off his cheeks. ‘Been crying?’ asked Kenneth. ‘Big boy hit you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Lamb?’

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Kenneth’s glance wandered over the table. Finally he took a water biscuit, broke it in half, put one half in his book for a marker and began to carve. And Henry stood beside him looking at the glorified table. It was an immense relief to have his hand on Kenneth’s shoulder. It rested him. But what was there so lovable about that little tuft of hair that always stood up and wouldn’t lie down on the top of Kenneth’s head. It was such a part of his personality. Whatever he said – there it stood, waving away. Henry gave the shoulder a hard squeeze. ‘I can imagine Isobel marrying him for that,’ he thought. ‘Stir the mint sauce well,’ said Kenneth. ‘All what Maisie calls the “nice grittay part” is at the bottom.’ Henry sat down, stirred and stirred and pushed the mint sauce away. He leaned back in his chair and tried not to smile, tried to carry it off, frowned at his plate and then said:– ‘Oh, I heard this afternoon I’ve got that Scholarship.’ He couldn’t resist it; he had to look up at Kenneth – who didn’t give a sign, but rubbed the side of his nose in a way he had. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I knew you would. It was inevitable.’ Henry gulped. ‘Have a drink.’ Kenneth pushed the glass jug across. ‘Don’t swallow the cherries. The stones disembody, settle in the appendix, fertilise, and send out shoots which have, sooner or later, to be snipped off. When do you sail?’ ‘A week from tomorrow.’ Kenneth was silent. Then he opened his book and ate the book marker. ‘This is all about whales’ he explained, blowing off the crumbs. ‘It’s extraordinarily unpleasant. I shouldn’t advise anyone to read it. There’s a description of sharks, too, how when they are attacked – in the middle of the fight – they switch round and eat their own entrails2 – Sickening! . . . I suppose you wired Isobel.’ ‘Yes, I’m going over to her by the morning boat. You know I promised, if this came off, that we’d spend our last week together.’ ‘But what about packing – or aren’t you going to take anything. Just a change of socks and a rook rifle.’ ‘I’m going to do all that tonight,’ said Henry. And then he smiled, a blissful, childish smile. ‘I couldn’t sleep, you know,’ and reached over for the salad. ‘Look out for the cowcumber,’ said Kenneth. ‘It sticks to the side of the vessel by some curious process of suction, I believe. Well – I’m coming across to the Bay tomorrow afternoon. It’s Saturday – you remember – or don’t remember. We’ll have the weekend together.’ ‘That will be frightfully –’ began Henry. ‘Only I wish to God,’ Kenneth went on, ‘that I wasn’t reading this

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book. I’ll never be able to bathe again. The sea is simply teeming with horrors.’ He got up and filled his pipe. ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to smoke on the verandah.’ But Henry couldn’t be left alone. Besides he wasn’t hungry after all. He chose a big orange and followed after. They walked into the warm, velvet dark and into another world. Kenneth stood with his hands in his pockets looking over the garden – at all those shapes and shadows built up in the air. As he stared they seemed to move gently, flowing together under a rolling wave. ‘Those gardens under the sea,’ he murmured, ‘must be the very devil!’ Henry sat on the verandah edge, eating his orange and looking at the clematis flowers. Wide open, dazzling, they lay – as if waiting in rapture for the moon. It was strange how frightfully they added to his excitement. He began to quiver all over. He thought, absurdly:– ‘The top of my head feels just like one of those flowers’ – and a hundred miles away Kenneth murmured:– ‘Well, I’m glad it’s you who are going and not me. I’ve no desire at all to rush into this affair that they call Life. No, my job is to hide in a doorway, or squeeze under a porch until it is all over – only issuing forth – if I must issue forth – with Isobel for my Supreme Umbrella or Maisie for my small, coming-on, emergency umbrella – or ‘Sunnyshade’, as she calls it. That’s one reason why I’m in favour of having large numbers of children – that they may be a kind of tent to me in my old age . . .’ Henry went off to do his packing. He got into his pyjamas just for the sake of coolness, for of course he wasn’t going to bed. But by one o’clock everything was done and his feet were cold so he just sat up in bed and decided to smoke until it was time to get up. After one cigarette he lay down on his side, curled up, one hand under his cheek, thinking. He felt himself smiling down to his very toes. Yes, every little toe, now that it was warm, had a basking smile on it. And this was so ridiculous that he began to laugh, cuddling down, burying his face in the pillow. And away the little boat floated . . . He woke, but did not move. Warm and solemn he lay, wide open troubled eyes, pouting a little, almost frowning for one long moment. In that long moment he sprang out of bed, bathed, dressed, reached the wharf, boarded the ferry boat, crossed the harbour and waving – waving to Isabel and Maisie who stood there, waiting for him on the pier. A tall young sailor standing near him threw a coil of tarred rope and it fell in a long loop over a landing post. Beautifully done . . . And all this moment, vision, was so clear and bright and tiny, he might with his flesh and pout and solemn eyes have been a baby watching a bubble. I’m there – I’m there. Why do I have to start and do it all slowly all over again. But as he thought he moved and the

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bubble vanished and was forgotten. He sat up in bed smiling, pulling down his pyjama sleeves. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 121–4. Published by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 93–100, without the final two paragraphs, and retitled ‘The Scholarship’. 1. It was possibly this abandoned story KM had in mind when she told JMM, on 23 May 1918, that ‘I have started working – another member of the Je ne Parle pas family, I fondly dream – It’s a devastating idea.’ On 2 June she sent him ‘the first little chapter of my big story’, which he acknowledged as receiving ‘the first bit of “To the Last Moment” ’ (CLKM, 2, p. 188, p. 189, n.4). 2. A reference to Herman Melville, Ch. 66, Moby Dick (1851). After decades of neglect, there was a revival of interest in Melville as his centenary in 1919 approached.

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Carnation1 On those hot days Eve – curious Eve – always carried a flower. She snuffed it and snuffed it, twirled it in her fingers, laid it against her cheek, held it to her lips, tickled Katie’s neck with it, and ended, finally, by pulling it to pieces and eating it, petal by petal. ‘Roses are delicious, my dear Katie,’ she would say, standing in the dim cloak room, with a strange decoration of flowery hats on the pegs behind her – ‘but carnations are simply divine! They taste like – like – ah well!’ And away her little thin laugh flew, fluttering among those huge, strange flower heads on the wall behind her. (But how cruel her little thin laugh was! It had a long sharp beak and claws and two bead eyes, thought fanciful Katie.) To-day it was a carnation. She brought a carnation to the French class, a deep, deep red one, that looked as though it had been dipped in wine and left in the dark to dry. She held it on the desk before her, half shut her eyes and smiled. ‘Isn’t it a darling!’ said she. But – ‘Un peu de silence, s’il vous plaît,’ came from M. Hugo. Oh, bother! It was too hot! Frightfully hot! Grilling simply! The two square windows of the French Room were open at the bottom and the dark blinds drawn half way down. Although no air

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came in, the blind cord swung out and back and the blind lifted. But really there was not a breath from the dazzle outside. Even the girls, in the dusky room, in their pale blouses, with stiff butterfly-bow hair ribbons perched on their hair, seemed to give off a warm, weak light, and M. Hugo’s white waistcoat gleamed like the belly of a shark. Some of the girls were very red in the face and some were white. Vera Holland had pinned up her black curls à la japonaise with a penholder and a pink pencil; she looked charming. Francie Owen pushed her sleeves nearly up to the shoulders, then she inked the little blue vein in her elbow, shut her arm together and looked to see the mark it made; she had a passion for inking herself; she always had a face drawn on her thumb nail with black, forked hair. Sylvia Mann took off her collar and tie, took them off, simply, and laid them on the desk beside her, as calm as if she were going to wash her hair in her bedroom at home. She had a nerve! Jennie Edwards tore a leaf out of her notebook and wrote ‘Shall we ask old Hugo-Wugo to shout us2 a thrippenny vanilla on the way home!!!’ and passed it across to Connie Baker, who turned absolutely purple and nearly burst out crying. All of them lolled and gaped, staring at the round clock, which seemed to have grown paler, too; the hands scarcely crawled. ‘Un peu de silence, s’il vous plaît,’ came from M. Hugo. He held up a puffy hand. ‘Ladies, as it is so ’ot we will take no more notes to-day, but I will read you,’ and he paused and smiled a broad, gentle smile, ‘a little French poetry.’ ‘Go – od God!’ moaned Francie Owen. M. Hugo’s smile deepened. ‘Well, Mees Owen, you need not attend. You can paint yourself. You can ’ave my red ink as well as your black one.’ How well they knew the little blue book with red edges that he tugged out of his coat tail pocket! It had a green silk marker embroidered in forget-me-nots. They often giggled at it when he handed the book round. Poor old Hugo-Wugo! He adored reading poetry. He would begin, softly and calmly, and then gradually his voice would swell and vibrate and gather itself together, then it would be pleading and imploring and entreating and then rising, rising triumphant, until it burst into light, as it were, and then – gradually again, it ebbed, it grew soft and warm and calm and died down into nothingness. The great difficulty was, of course, if you felt at all feeble, not to get the most awful fit of the giggles. Not because it was funny, really, but because it made you feel uncomfortable, queer, ‘silly’, and somehow ashamed for old Hugo-Wugo. But – oh dear! – if he was going to inflict it on them in this heat . . . ! ‘Courage, my pet,’ said Eve, kissing the languid carnation.

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He began, and most of the girls fell forward, over the desks; their heads on their arms, dead at the first shot. Only Eve and Katie sat upright and still. Katie did not know enough French to understand, but Eve sat listening, her eyebrows raised, her eyes half veiled, and a smile that was like the shadow of her cruel little laugh, like the wing shadows of that cruel little laugh fluttering over her lips. She made a warm, white cup of her fingers – the carnation inside. Oh, the scent! It floated across to Katie. It was too much. Katie turned away to the dazzling light outside the window. Down below, she knew, there was a cobbled courtyard with stable buildings round it. That was why the French Room always smelled faintly of ammonia. It wasn’t unpleasant; it was even part of the French language for Katie – something sharp and vivid and – and – biting! Now she could hear a man clatter over the cobbles and the jingjang of the pails he carried. And now Hoo-hor-her! Hoo-hor-her! as he worked the pump, and a great gush of water followed. Now he was flinging the water over something, over the wheels of a carriage, perhaps. And she saw the wheel, propped up, clear of the ground, spinning round, flashing scarlet and black, with great drops glancing off it. And all the while he worked the man kept up a high bold whistling, that skimmed over the noise of the water as a bird skims over the sea. He went away – he came back again leading a cluttering horse. Hoo-hor-her! Hoo-hor-her! came from the pump. Now he dashed the water over the horse’s legs and then swooped down and began brushing. She saw him simply – in a faded shirt, his sleeves rolled up, his chest bare, all splashed with water – and as he whistled, loud and free, and as he moved, swooping and bending, Hugo-Wugo’s voice began to warm, to deepen, to gather together, to swing, to rise – somehow or other to keep time with the man outside (Oh, the scent of Eve’s carnation!) until they became one great rushing, rising, triumphant thing, bursting into light, and then – The whole room broke into pieces. ‘Thank you, ladies,’ cried M. Hugo, bobbing at his high desk, over the wreckage. And ‘Keep it, dearest,’ said Eve. ‘Souvenir tendre,’ and she popped the carnation down the front of Katie’s blouse. Notes Text: Nation, 23: 23, 7 September 1918, pp. 595–6. MS NLC dated 27 May 1918. SCOS.

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1. KM is drawing on her memories of French classes at Queen’s College, and her teacher M. Huguenet. As she wrote to JMM on 29 May 1918, ‘I meant it to be “delicate” – just that.’ But by 4 July she doubted that H. W. Massingham, the radical journalist and editor of the Nation, to whom the story was sent, would find it to his taste. ‘I bet £100 Massingham wont print Carnation [. . .]. I know he would hate my mind’ (CLKM, 2, p. 203, p. 218). She chose not to include the story in either BOS or GPOS. 2. A New Zealand expression for ‘to treat’.

•

Love in Autumn1 The leaves are falling on Hampstead Heath, lifting, spinning, flying, tossing, dancing, chasing, but falling falling. It is very cold; the grass looks grey, and the pond is wrinkled and dark. Where the Heath joins the road an old man in a straw hat tries to tidy up the leaves with a broom – tries to sweep them into little heaps. But they won’t be tidied. Away they fly – he might as well try to heap up into a neat pile all the years of his life. A soldier and a girl come walking. He swings along, solid and strong, but she in her high heels trips over the grass like a running bird. Where are they going to so eagerly? It is too cold to sit down on the bench under the tree. Down they sit, and he puts his arm along the back of it and she comes up close. They are so still – they might be having their photographs taken – before he goes back to France. Me and ’er under a tree like – you can see him handing it round. But the wind blows and big clouds pull over the pale sky, silver clouds, purplish ones – they pass in sober silence over the trees and the grey grass and soldier and the girl. Only the pond sees them. It is going to rain. If they were a little boy and a little girl sitting out there now how their mothers would call – ‘Children, children come in at once. You will catch your deaths. Come in immediately.’ Does he ever think that she was once a little girl in a pink pinafore fastening with a tape? And she ever think of him [in] a tiny sailor suit with a flannel dicky? Now his arm is right round. But oh dear – her hat. It’s not that it’s so big either but . . . – ‘Won’t it come off?’

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‘No Mr Clever Dick.’ And she throws it on the grass. There it lies, the last bouquet of the year, round and bright, at their feet. There is a loud roaring in the trees, and away the leaves fly. She catches one and shuts it up in her fist and he opens the little hand finger by finger and there is the leaf inside. At sight of the little hand outspread with the leaf on it his heart grows big. ‘You’ve got small hands,’ says he – and she, seeing his big round fingers close over hers, feels her heart grow tender. ‘Well not so big as yours,’ says she. ‘Listen – do you hear? That’s a bird. That’s a bird making that noise.’ The silver clouds have turned grey. The pond trembles. Down comes the rain. ‘Do come on, it’s raining. Put on yer ’at.’ And she pins on the bright bouquet. He stands up, pulling down his jacket, ready to go, and she, leaning against the swaying tree, her feet hidden [in] the grass, the pond behind her, the changing clouds above and [the] tree and the leaves – gently he bends down and fastens her coat together with a long warm kiss. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 148–9. Dated ‘8.10.18’. 1. KM and JMM moved into 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, London, in late August 1918 (nicknamed ‘The Elephant’ on account of its tall, grey exterior).

•

‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown’ ‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown with a dark red piping,’ she asked. ‘No, he was dressed.’ ‘Oh! Then I suppose he was very dressed, he always is.’ That made her think, suddenly, of another friend of his – a young fattish man who, wore spectacles and was extremely serious with a kind of special fatness that she had noticed went with just that kind of seriousness. She saw him standing by a wash table drying his neck, and she saw his braces – tight, and the neckband of his shirt. His hair was, as usual, too long. She smiled. ‘How awful S. must be without a collar.’ ‘Without a collar.’ He looked at her; he almost gaped.

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‘Yes, in a shirt and trousers.’ ‘In a shirt and trousers,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve never seen him in them.’ ‘No – but – oh – well –’ He positively fixed her at that. ‘How extraordinarily inconsequential you are!’ And all in a minute she was laughing. ‘Men, she said, men are – – –’ And she looked out of the window at the tall poplar with its whispering leaves, with its beautiful top gold in the last sunlight. On the wall of the kitchen there was a shadow, shaped like a little mask with two gold slits for eyes. It danced up and down. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 138. Published by JMM as ‘Inconsequence’, Journal, 1954, pp. 145–6 and dated as 1918.

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‘A stupid, silly poem’ A stupid, silly poem that she had read years ago, when she was a schoolgirl and marked in the margin with two crosses and written ‘how true’ underneath somehow or other came back to her as she sat there, crept back into her memory, washed back on reluctant waves of memory, tossed through her brain, now showing a forlorn ghastly face, now half hidden. ‘Look in my face, my name is Might Have Been. I am also called Too Late, No More, Farewell –’1 ‘You are not too cold?’ asked Yelski, bending towards her, half smiling, and he put out his hand and stroked her muff. ‘Strange’ he said, ‘how women love fur!’ She was! She was bitterly cold. She shivered, her knees, pressed tight together, her hands clenched inside the little muff, and long strange shivers shook her so violently that she felt that she might break, simply break to pieces – ‘Look in my face, my name is Might Have Been.’ ‘Yes, give me a cigarette,’ she said. ‘I will smoke one cigarette and then I must go.’ He lit a match and made a cup of his hands for her to light it by –

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It began to grow quite dark. She saw the lamplighter with his long pole swing by outside the railings and then under the lamps, under the round pools of light, little knots of people. The clang clang of the trams sounded clear and sharp in the dusky air. Bright squares of lovely light showed in the dark houses. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 124. 1. KM quotes the opening two lines from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The House of Life’, Sonnet 97, ‘A Superscription’, Ballads and Sonnets (1881).

•

Keeping Up Just as she put her suitcase down on the landing and turned the bunch of keys to find the outdoor one she heard steps coming up the stairs. And at the sound, although she herself knew it was absurd, her heart, her stupid heart made, as it were, one great sickening plunge into some deep trembling water . . . But nonsense, it couldn’t be – and they were large, deliberate steps, the steps of a heavy elderly person. Heavy elderly men don’t carry them – except once . . . at night – in the rain . . . in a mackintosh . . . an old old man with a lantern who pronounced their name wrong. She picked up the suitcase and began walking down the stairs. And after all it was someone she knew; it was Mr Penridden, stumping up, blowing, out of breath. ‘Hullo,’ he said kindly, too kindly, in the voice she was beginning to learn to expect, the voice that men reserved for little children – little children who had fallen down or were being taken to the doctor for the first time. ‘Now if I’d been a minute later I’d have missed you. I was just coming to ask you if you’d come and have a quiet little dinner with me tonight.’ He stood before her, stout, ruddy in his tight grey suit, bowler hat, thick shoes. In one hand he grasped a massive umbrella with a thick strap of gold round the handle; in the other he balanced a paper bag. ‘Figs,’ he said, smiling and nodding at her. ‘I remembered your fondness for them. Fresh figs – and the pick of the season. Just look at them.’ He crooked the umbrella in the stair rail, undid a pinched corner of the bag and half drew out a plaited basket. ‘They’re just ready to burst’ said he.

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‘It’s very kind of you very kind indeed,’ she [said.] The man who bought figs in a basket – that man’s an odd man. ‘But I’m so sorry. I’m just on my way to the station. I’ve promised to spend the weekend with my sister Carrie at her hospital for officers. You see I can’t possibly hear anything until Monday – not possibly – and at any rate they are on the telephone.’ His flushed face fell at the mention of it, sympathising. ‘It’s a very good idea,’ said he. ‘It’ll do you good. Take your mind off and bring the roses back into your little cheeks. I’ll come with [you] to the station if you don’t mind and these figs will just be the very thing for the train.’ ‘Oh no, don’t trouble to do that,’ said she. ‘It’s no trouble at all. It’s a pleasure. Wait now while I get you a taxi.’ And she waited in the dark cold hall while he slipped through the double doors into the sunny glare. There was a wind blowing. It blew his trousers tight against his thick legs, blew his coat back from his round belly. He held up the umbrella and suddenly stepped into the road and roared. A cab drew up and stopped and he came back to her triumphant and radiant. ‘I don’t know how it is,’ he cried in his normal reckless voice, ‘I’ve the devil’s own luck with taxis. Come on now.’ He put his hand on her arm, and his voice changed again. ‘My God!’ said he, ‘your little arm’s wasting away. You mustn’t let that happen you know. You must keep your flesh at all costs.’ And to the driver, ‘You’ll take us to Waterloo Station.’ Down he plumped beside her; the seat bounced. The precious figs he still held – tenderly. ‘You wouldn’t care to try one – in the car,’ he said. ‘No one will see you. Do now!’ She knew how it would please him and yet she just couldn’t. ‘I think I’d rather keep them for the train,’ she said, smiling. Her dark eyes begged him not to urge her. ‘Oh, there’s plenty for you to eat then,’ he cried, ‘see, look – here’s a beauty.’ Yes, she would have to. Better submit at once. She couldn’t bear even a little scene. He was holding out an envelope to her to keep her dress clean, and she put it on her lap and drew off her gloves and took the fig while he watched her, his big eyes popping with delight. ‘My God. Look at that. It’s full of honey!’ he cried, almost awed, as she broke open the fig. ‘You needn’t bother to skin it. You can eat it all. It’s as clean as the back of my hand.’ Could she eat it – could she – cold malignant glistening thing. Yes one can do anything, anything. Anxious, eager, he watched every mouthful. ‘That’ll do you good,’ he said. In some strange way he seemed to be

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eating the fig with her, tasting as she tasted. ‘You’ve got a touch of a relaxed throat haven’t you? I can hear it in your voice. Have another.’ ‘Oh no thank you Mr Penridden,’ and she wiped her fingers and drew on her gloves again. They were driving very fast. Suddenly, ‘Look out you bloody fool’ from the driver and the taxi gave a great swerve flinging Mr Penridden against her like a sack of grain. ‘What the Hell,’ said he, heaving himself back. ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ ‘No not at all.’ Her suitcase, too, fell across her feet. ‘My God! that must have been a narrow shave,’ said Mr Penridden, and he gave in his excitement a loud chuckle. ‘It would have looked very black, really if we’d been taken to the hospital with one suitcase between us and on our way to Waterloo on a Saturday afternoon.’ She tried to smile. ‘Eh, poor little woman, you’re not in the humour for jokes’ said he contritely and he covered her hand with one of his swollen freckled paws and patted it. ‘Don’t you give up heart’ said he, ‘it’ll come alright – you just keep up. Why a poor woman came to the office this morning: her husband had been on the staff and she’d just had the news he’d been blown to pieces – not even a button to pick up and send to her,’ said Mr Penridden, feeling in his pocket for change for the taxi. ‘What does the Clock say Kitty? Your eyes are sharper than mine.’ ‘Five and fourpence’ said she. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 152–3. Signed ‘1918’.

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‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous’ ‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous,’ she said, ‘to have just one person in one’s life to whom one could tell everything?’ She bent forward, put down her cup, but stayed bent forward touching the spoon against the saucer. She looked up. ‘Or is it just childish of me – just absurd to want such a thing? . . . All the same,’ she leaned back, smiling, ‘childish or not, how wonderful it would be – how wonderful! to feel, from this person, this one person I really don’t need to hide anything.

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‘It would be such heavenly happiness!’ she cried, suddenly, ‘it would make Life so . . .’ She got up, went to the window, looked out vaguely and turned round again. She laughed. ‘It’s a queer thing’ she said, ‘I’ve always believed in the possibility, and yet – in reality . . . Take R. and me, for instance.’ And here she flung back in a chair and leaned back, still she was laughing but her body leaned to the chair as though exhausted. ‘I tell him everything. You know we’re – rather different from most people. What I mean is – don’t laugh! – we love each other simply tremendously – we’re everything to each other! In fact, he’s the one person on earth for me – and yet,’ and she shut her eyes and bit her lip as though she wanted to stop laughing herself: ‘try, try try as I can, there’s always just one secret – just one – that never can be told, that mocks me.’ And then for a moment she lay still . . . Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 161. Journal, 1954, p. 175. The sketch appears immediately above a notebook entry for 31 December 1918.

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A Suburban Fairy Tale1 Mr. and Mrs. B. sat at breakfast in the cosy red dining-room of their ‘snug little crib just under half-an-hour’s run from the City.’ There was a good fire in the grate – for the dining-room was the living-room as well – the two windows overlooking the cold empty garden patch were closed, and the air smelled agreeably of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Now that this rationing business was really over Mr. B. made a point of a thoroughly good tuck-in before facing the very real perils of the day. He didn’t mind who knew it – he was a true Englishman about his breakfast – he had to have it; he’d cave in without it, and if you told him that these Continental chaps could get through half the morning’s work he did on a roll and a cup of coffee – you simply didn’t know what you were talking about. Mr. B. was a stout youngish man who hadn’t been able – worse luck – to chuck his job and join the Army; he’d tried for four years to get another chap to take his place, but it was no go. He sat at the head of the table reading the Daily Mail. Mrs B. was a youngish plump little body, rather like a pigeon. She sat opposite, preening herself behind the coffee set and keeping an eye of warning love on little B. who perched between them, swathed in a napkin and tapping the top of a soft-boiled egg. Alas! Little B. was not at all the child that such parents had every right to expect. He was no fat little trot, no dumpling, no firm little pudding. He was undersized for his age, with legs like macaroni, tiny claws, soft, soft hair that felt like mouse fur and big wide-open eyes. For some strange reason everything in life seemed the wrong size for Little B. – too big and too violent. Everything knocked him over, took the wind out of his feeble sails and left him gasping and frightened. Mr. and Mrs. B. were quite powerless to prevent this; they could only pick him up after the mischief was done – and try to set him going again. And Mrs. B. loved him as only weak children are 170

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loved – and when Mr. B. thought what a marvellous little chap he was too – thought of the spunk of the little man, he – well he – by George – he . . . ‘Why aren’t there two kinds of eggs?’ said Little B. ‘Why aren’t there little eggs for children and big eggs like what this one is for grown-ups?’ ‘Scotch hares,’ said Mr. B. ‘Fine Scotch hares for 5s. 3d. How about getting one, old girl?’ ‘It would be a nice change, wouldn’t it?’ said Mrs. B. ‘Jugged.’ And they looked across at each other and there floated between them the Scotch hare in its rich gravy with stuffing balls and a white pot of red-current jelly accompanying it. ‘We might have had it for the week-end,’ said Mrs. B. ‘But the butcher has promised me a nice little sirloin and it seems a pity’ . . . Yes, it did, and yet . . . Dear me, it was very difficult to decide. The hare would have been such a change – on the other hand, could you beat a really nice little sirloin? ‘There’s hare soup, too,’ said Mr. B., drumming his fingers on the table. ‘Best soup in the world!’ ‘O-oh!’ cried Little B. so suddenly and sharply that it gave them quite a start – ‘Look at the whole lot of sparrows flown onto our lawn’ – he waved his spoon. ‘Look at them,’ he cried. ‘Look!’ And while he spoke, even though the windows were closed, they heard a loud shrill cheeping and chirping from the garden. ‘Get on with your breakfast like a good boy, do,’ said his mother, and his father said, You stick to the egg, old man, and look sharp about it.’ ‘But look at them – look at them all hopping,’ he cried. They don’t keep still not for a minute. Do you think they’re hungry, father?’ Cheek-a-cheep-cheep-cheek! cried the sparrows. ‘Best postpone it perhaps till next week,’ said Mr. B., ‘and trust to luck they’re still to be had then.’ ‘Yes, perhaps that would be wiser,’ said Mrs. B. Mr. B. picked another plum out of his paper. ‘Have you bought any of those controlled dates yet?’ ‘I managed to get two pounds yesterday,’ said Mrs. B. ‘Well, a date pudding’s a good thing,’ said Mr. B. And they looked across at each other and there floated between them a dark round pudding covered with creamy sauce. ‘It would be a nice change, wouldn’t it?’ said Mrs. B. Outside on the grey frozen grass the funny eager sparrows hopped and fluttered. They were never for a moment still. They cried, flapped their ungainly wings. Little B., his egg finished, got down, took his bread and marmalade to eat at the window.

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‘Do let us give them some crumbs,’ he said. ‘Do open the window, father, and throw them something. Father, please!’ ‘Oh, don’t nag, child,’ said Mrs. B., and his father said – ‘Can’t go opening windows, old man. You’d get your head bitten off.’ ‘But they’re hungry,’ cried Little B., and the sparrows’ little voices were like ringing of little knives being sharpened. Cheek-a-cheepcheep-cheek! they cried. Little B. dropped his bread and marmalade inside the china flowerpot in front of the window. He slipped behind the thick curtains to see better, and Mr. and Mrs. B. went on reading about what you could get now without coupons – no more ration books after May – a glut of cheese – a glut of it – whole cheeses revolved in the air between them like celestial bodies. Suddenly as Little B. watched the sparrows on the grey frozen grass, they grew, they changed, still flapping and squeaking. They turned into tiny little boys, in brown coats, dancing, jigging outside, up and down outside the window squeaking, ‘Want something to eat, want something to eat!’ Little B. held with both hands to the curtain. ‘Father,’ he whispered, ‘Father! They’re not sparrows. They’re little boys. Listen, Father!’ But Mr. and Mrs. B would not hear. He tried again. ‘Mother,’ he whispered. ‘Look at the little boys. They’re not sparrows, Mother!’ But nobody noticed his nonsense. ‘All this talk about famine,’ cried Mr. B., ‘all a Fake, all a Blind.’ With white shining faces, their arms flapping in the big coats, the little boys danced. ‘Want something to eat, want something to eat.’ ‘Father,’ muttered Little B. ‘Listen, Father! Mother, listen, please!’ ‘Really!’ said Mrs. B. ‘The noise those birds are making! I’ve never heard such a thing.’ ‘Fetch me my shoes, old man,’ said Mr. B. Cheek-a-cheep-cheep-cheek! said the sparrows. Now where had that child got to? ‘Come and finish your nice cocoa, my pet,’ said Mrs. B. Mr. B. lifted the heavy cloth and whispered, ‘Come on, Rover,’ but no little dog was there. ‘He’s behind the curtain,’ said Mrs. B. ‘He never went out of the room,’ said Mr. B. Mrs. B. went over to the window and Mr. B. followed. And they looked out. There on the grey frozen grass, with a white, white face, the little boy’s thin arms flapping like wings, in front of them all, the smallest, tiniest was Little B. Mr. and Mrs. B. heard his voice above all the voices. ‘Want something to eat, want something to eat.’ Somehow, somehow, they opened the window. ‘You shall! All of you. Come in at once. Old man! Little man!’

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But it was too late. The little boys were changed into sparrows again, and away they flew – out of sight – out of call. Notes U Text: SCOS. MS dated ‘15 iii 1919’. 1. Alpers notes, ‘evidently a comment on the famine suffered in Germany after the First World War’ (p. 562).

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‘It was neither dark nor light in the cabin’1 Chapter I It was neither dark nor light in the cabin. The ring of the porthole shone very bright and cold like the eye of some huge dead bird. In that eye you saw an immense stretch of grey waving water, a vague sky above, and between, a few huge live birds flying so aimless and uncertain they didn’t look like birds at all, but like bits of wave, torn off, or just shadows . . . Shadows, too, birds of shadow, flew across the cabin ceiling – across its whiteness, iron girders, splashes of rust, big nails coated with paint, paint blisters. There was a strange gleam on the walls. A tiny day seemed to be breaking all on its own in the mirror above the washstand and another tide rose and fell in the thick bottle. It was cold. The damp air smelled of paint and rubber and sea water. The only thing of life in the silent cabin was the little doll-like curtain hanging at the porthole. In the quiet it lifted – lifted – fluttered – then blew out straight and stiff, tugging at the rings. And then gently, gently it fell again. Again it folded, drooped, only to begin puff puffing out once more, filling, swelling, stretching out stiff with only a quiver, dancing a secret dance as it were while those birds of silence chased over the ceiling. The minute day deepened very slowly in the mirror, and in the thick bottle rose and ebbed the heavy tide. ‘. . . But my dear child it’s no earthly use simply to say that you’ve lost it. That won’t help you. How can it? You must stir yourself, rouse yourself, begin looking for it. It must be somewhere. Things don’t simply disappear, vanish into thin air. You know that as well as I do. Pull yourself together. Concentrate. Now when did you last have it? When did you first realise it was gone. When did you feel that terrific shock, that – Good Heavens – where on earth – don’t you know? You

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must remember that. And Oh! don’t mind me laughing, darling, but you look so tragic. I can’t help saying it is so exactly like you. So just the sort of thing that would be bound to happen to you of all people. One might almost say that you’ve been working up to it, don’t you know, all your life. ‘Lost Stolen or Strayed. We shall have to advertise. Three shillings a line for the first two lines and something enormous a word afterwards. You don’t think I’m cruel, do you, pet? Everything has its funny side, hasn’t it? And if one can bring one’s sense of humour to bear upon a thing – what can be better? Don’t you agree? Of course I’m a philosopher. I don’t believe there’s a single thing that we aren’t really better without, but I can’t expect you to agree with that. Cheer up! We’ve only one life after all. That’s cheap I know – but you could not say a truer thing – not even if you were willing to spend millions on it. And here’s what I would do. If I were you I should put it all out of my mind – make a fresh start, behave as though it was not. Ah, I know that sounds hard to you now, girlie (you don’t mind me calling you girlie and just patting your hand as I do. I enjoy it – and the tremor you can get on girlie – marvellous) but Time heals all. Not with his scythe dear, no – with his egg timer – my facetious way of saying his hour glass. Ha! Ha! Ha! You hate me I know. Well I’m just going. But one day if you are honest with yourself you will remember and you will say “Yes, she was right and I was wrong – she was wise and I was foolish.” ’ The odious little creature who had been sitting on the edge of the lower berth drew on a pair of dirty white kid gloves, tucked her tail under her arm, gave a loud high cackle and vanished. The figure on the bunk gave no sign. She lay on her back, her arms stretched down by her sides, her feet just touching the wooden rim at the end of the berth, the sheet up to her chin. Very pale, frowning, she stared at the spot where little monkey had been sitting, shut her eyes, opened them, looked again – nobody was there. And the night was over. It was too late to expect anybody else. She shut her eyes again – a great loud pulse beat in her body or was it in the ship? In the ship. She had no body – she just had hands feet and a head, nothing else at all. Of course they were joined together by something, but not more than the stars in the Southern Cross were joined together. How otherwise could she feel so light – so light. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 177–8. Published by JMM as ‘Strange Visitors’, Scrapbook, pp. 73–6.

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1. Entered in Notebook 46, immediately after KM assesses her own reviewing, dated 18 April 1919.

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See-Saw1 Spring. As the people leave the road for the grass their eyes become fixed and dreamy like the eyes of people wading in the warm sea. There are no daisies yet, but the sweet smell of the grass rises, rises in tiny waves the deeper they go. The trees are in full leaf. As far as one can see there are fans, hoops, tall rich plumes of various green. A light wind shakes them, blowing them together, blowing them free again; in the blue sky floats a cluster of tiny white clouds like a brood of ducklings. The people wander over the grass – the old ones inclined to puff and waddle after their long winter snooze; the young ones suddenly linking hands and making for that screen of trees in the hollow or the shelter of that clump of dark gorse tipped with yellow – walking very fast, almost running, as though they had heard some lovely little creature caught in the thicket crying to them to be saved. On the top of a small green mound there is a very favourite bench. It has a young chestnut growing beside it shaped like a mushroom. Below the earth has crumbled, fallen away, leaving three or four clayey hollows – caves – caverns – and in one of them two little people had set up house with a minute pickaxe, an empty match-box, a blunted nail and a shovel for furniture. He had red hair cut in a deep fringe, light-blue eyes, a faded pink smock and brown button shoes. Her flowery curls were caught up with a yellow ribbon and she wore two dresses – her this week’s underneath and her last week’s on top. This gave her rather a bulky air. ‘If you don’t get me no sticks for my fire,’ said she, ‘there won’t be no dinner.’ She wrinkled her nose and looked at him severely. ‘You seem to forget I’ve got a fire to make.’ He took it very easy, balancing on his toes – ‘Well – where’s I to find any sticks?’ ‘Oh,’ said she – flinging up her hands – ‘anywhere of course –’ And then she whispered just loud enough for him to hear, ‘they needn’t be real ones – you know.’ ‘Ooh,’ he breathed. And then he shouted in a loud distinct tone: ‘Well, I’ll just go an’ get a few sticks.’ He came in a moment with an armful.

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‘Is that a whole pennorth?’ said she, holding out her skirts for them. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I don’t know, because I had them give to me by a man that was moving.’ ‘Perhaps they’re bits of what was broke,’ said she. ‘When we moved, two of the pictures was broken and my Daddy lit the fire with them, and my Mummy said – she said –’ a tiny pause – ‘soldier’s manners!’ ‘What’s that?’ said he. ‘Good gracious!’ She made great eyes at him. ‘Don’t you know?’ ‘No,’ said he. ‘What does it mean?’ She screwed up a bit of her skirt, scrunched it, then looked away – ‘Oh, don’t bother me, child,’ said she. He didn’t care. He took the pickaxe and hacked a little piece out of the kitchen floor. ‘Got a newspaper?’ He plucked one out of the air and handed it to her. Ziz, ziz, ziz! She tore it into three pieces – knelt down and laid the sticks over. ‘Matches, please.’ The real box was a triumph, and the blunted nails. But funny – Zip, zip, zip, it wouldn’t light. They looked at each other in consternation. ‘Try the other side,’ said she. Zip. ‘Ah! that’s better.’ There was a great glow – and they sat down on the floor and began to make the pie. To the bench beside the chestnut came two fat old babies and plumped themselves down. She wore a bonnet trimmed with lilac and tied with lilac velvet strings; a black satin coat and a lace tie – and each of her hands, squeezed into black kid gloves, showed a morsel of purplish flesh. The skin of his swollen old face was tight and glazed – and he sat down clasping his huge soft belly as though careful not to jolt or alarm it. ‘Very hot,’ said he, and he gave a low, strange trumpeting cry with which she was evidently familiar, for she gave no sign. She looked into the lovely distance and quivered: ‘Nellie cut her finger last night.’ ‘Oh, did she?’ said the old snorter. Then – ‘How did she do that?’ ‘At dinner,’ was the reply, ‘with a knife.’ They both looked ahead of them – panting – then, ‘Badly?’ The weak worn old voice, the old voice that reminded one somehow of a piece of faintly smelling dark lace, said, ‘Not very badly.’ Again he gave that low strange cry. He took off his hat, wiped the rim and put it on again. The voice beside him said with a spiteful touch: ‘I think it was carelessness’ – and he replied, blowing out his cheeks: ‘Bound to be!’

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But then a little bird flew on to a branch of the young chestnut above them – and shook over the old heads a great jet of song. He took off his hat, heaved himself up, and beat in its direction in the tree. Away it flew. ‘Don’t want bird muck falling on us,’ said he, lowering his belly carefully – carefully again. The fire was made. ‘Put your hand in the oven,’ said she, ‘an’ see if it’s hot.’ He put his hand in, but drew it out again with a squeak, and danced up and down. ‘It’s ever so hot,’ said he. This seemed to please her very much. She, too, got up and went over to him and touched him with a finger. ‘Do you like playing with me?’ And he said, in his small solid way, ‘Yes, I do.’ At that she flung away from him and cried, ‘I’ll never be done if you keep on bothering me with these questions.’ As she poked the fire he said: ‘Our dog’s had kittens.’ ‘Kittens!’ She sat back on her heels – ‘Can a dog have kittens?’ ‘Of course they can,’ said he. ‘Little ones, you know.’ ‘But cats have kittens,’ cried she. ‘Dogs don’t, dogs have –’ she stopped, stared – looked for the word – couldn’t find it – it was gone. ‘They have –’ ‘Kittens,’ cried he. ‘Our dog’s been an’ had two.’ She stamped her foot at him. She was pink with exasperation. ‘It’s not kittens,’ she wailed, ‘it’s –’ ‘It is – it is – it is –’ he shouted, waving the shovel. She threw her top dress over her head and began to cry. ‘It’s not – it’s – it’s . . .’ Suddenly, without a moment’s warning, he lifted his pinafore and made water. At the sound she emerged. ‘Look what you’ve been an’ done,’ said she, too appalled to cry any more. ‘You’ve put out my fire.’ ‘Ah, never mind. Let’s move. You can take the pickaxe and the match-box.’ They moved to the next cave. ‘It’s much nicer here,’ said he. ‘Off you go,’ said she, ‘and get me some sticks for my fire.’ The two old babies above began to rumble, and obedient to the sign they got up without a word and waddled away. Notes U Text: SCOS.

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1. Another cameo of Hampstead Heath written while KM lived in 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road. The story, originally called ‘Little Primitives’, was sent to the Nation on 24 June 1919, but not accepted.

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Pictures Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lay in a black iron bedstead, staring up at the ceiling. Her room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before. ‘Oh, dear,’ thought Miss Moss, ‘I am cold. I wonder why it is that I always wake up so cold in the mornings now. My knees and feet and my back – especially my back; it’s like a sheet of ice. And I always was such a one for being warm in the old days. It’s not as if I was skinny – I’m just the same full figure that I used to be. No, it’s because I don’t have a good hot dinner in the evenings.’ A pageant of Good Hot Dinners passed across the ceiling, each of them accompanied by a bottle of Nourishing Stout. . . . ‘Even if I were to get up now,’ she thought, ‘and have a sensible substantial breakfast. . . .’ A pageant of Sensible Substantial Breakfasts followed the dinners across the ceiling, shepherded by an enormous, white, uncut ham. Miss Moss shuddered and disappeared under the bedclothes. Suddenly, in bounced the landlady. ‘There’s a letter for you, Miss Moss.’ ‘Oh,’ said Miss Moss, far too friendly, ‘thank you very much, Mrs Pine. It’s very good of you, I’m sure, to take the trouble.’ ‘No trouble at all,’ said the landlady. ‘I thought perhaps it was the letter you’d been expecting.’ ‘Why,’ said Miss Moss brightly, ‘yes, perhaps it is.’ She put her head on one side and smiled vaguely at the letter. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’ The landlady’s eyes popped. ‘Well, I should, Miss Moss,’ said she, ‘and that’s how it is. And I’ll trouble you to open it, if you please. Many is the lady in my place as would have done it for you and have been within her rights. For things can’t go on like this, Miss Moss, no indeed they can’t. What with week in and week out and first you’ve got it and then you haven’t, and then it’s another letter lost in the post or another manager down at Brighton but will be back on Tuesday for certain – I’m fair sick and tired and I won’t stand it no more. Why

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should I, Miss Moss, I ask you, at a time like this, with prices flying up in the air and my poor dear lad in France? My sister Eliza was only saying to me yesterday – “Minnie,” she says, “you’re too softhearted. You could have let that room time and time again,” says she, “and if people won’t look after themselves in times like these, nobody else will,” she says. “She may have had a College eddication and sung in West End concerts,” says she, “but if your Lizzie says what’s true,” she says, “and she’s washing her own wovens and drying them on the towel rail, it’s easy to see where the finger’s pointing. And it’s high time you had done with it,” says she.’ Miss Moss gave no sign of having heard this. She sat up in bed, tore open her letter and read: ‘Dear Madam, Yours to hand. Am not producing at present, but have filed photo for future ref. Yours truly, BACKWASH FILM CO.’

This letter seemed to afford her peculiar satisfaction; she read it through twice before replying to the landlady. ‘Well, Mrs Pine, I think you’ll be sorry for what you said. This is from a manager, asking me to be there with evening dress at ten o’clock next Saturday morning.’ But the landlady was too quick for her. She pounced, secured the letter. ‘Oh, is it! Is it indeed!’ she cried. ‘Give me back that letter. Give it back to me at once, you bad, wicked woman,’ cried Miss Moss, who could not get out of bed because her nightdress was slit down the back. ‘Give me back my private letter.’ The landlady began slowly backing out of the room, holding the letter to her buttoned bodice. ‘So it’s come to this, has it?’ said she. ‘Well, Miss Moss, if I don’t get my rent at eight o’clock to-night, we’ll see who’s a bad, wicked woman – that’s all.’ Here she nodded, mysteriously. ‘And I’ll keep this letter.’ Here her voice rose. ‘It will be a pretty little bit of evidence!’ And here it fell, sepulchral, ‘My lady.’ The door banged and Miss Moss was alone. She flung off the bed clothes, and sitting by the side of the bed, furious and shivering, she stared at her fat white legs with their great knots of greeny-blue veins. ‘Cockroach! That’s what she is. She’s a cockroach!’ said Miss Moss. ‘I could have her up for snatching my letter – I’m sure I could.’ Still keeping on her nightdress she began to drag on her clothes. ‘Oh, if I could only pay that woman, I’d give her a piece of my

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mind that she wouldn’t forget. I’d tell her off proper.’ She went over to her chest of drawers for a safety-pin, and seeing herself in the glass she gave a vague smile and shook her head. ‘Well, old girl,’ she murmured, ‘you’re up against it this time, and no mistake.’ But the person in the glass made an ugly face at her. ‘You silly thing,’ scolded Miss Moss. ‘Now what’s the good of crying: you’ll only make your nose red. No, you get dressed and go out and try your luck – that’s what you’ve got to do.’ She unhooked her vanity bag from the bedpost, rooted in it, shook it, turned it inside out. ‘I’ll have a nice cup of tea at an A B C to settle me before I go anywhere,’ she decided. ‘I’ve got one and thrippence – yes, just one and three.’ Ten minutes later, a stout lady in blue serge, with a bunch of artificial ‘parmas’ at her bosom, a black hat covered with purple pansies, white gloves, boots with white uppers, and a vanity bag containing one and three, sang in a low contralto voice: Sweet-heart, remember when days are forlorn It al-ways is dar-kest before the dawn.

But the person in the glass made a face at her, and Miss Moss went out. There were grey crabs all the way down the street slopping water over grey stone steps. With his strange, hawking cry and the jangle of the cans the milk boy went his rounds. Outside Brittweiler’s Swiss House he made a splash, and an old brown cat without a tail appeared from nowhere, and began greedily and silently drinking up the spill. It gave Miss Moss a queer feeling to watch – a sinking – as you might say. But when she came to the A B C she found the door propped open; a man went in and out carrying trays of rolls, and there was nobody inside except a waitress doing her hair and the cashier unlocking the cash-boxes. She stood in the middle of the floor but neither of them saw her. ‘My boy came home last night,’ sang the waitress. ‘Oh, I say – how topping for you!’ gurgled the cashier. ‘Yes, wasn’t it,’ sang the waitress. ‘He brought me a sweet little brooch. Look, it’s got “Dieppe” written on it.’ The cashier ran across to look and put her arm round the waitress’ neck. ‘Oh, I say – how topping for you.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it,’ said the waitress. ‘O-oh, he is brahn. “Hullo,” I said, “hullo, old mahogany.” ’ ‘Oh, I say,’ gurgled the cashier, running back into her cage and

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nearly bumping into Miss Moss on the way. ‘You are a treat!’ Then the man with the rolls came in again, swerving past her. ‘Can I have a cup of tea, Miss?’ she asked. But the waitress went on doing her hair. ‘Oh,’ she sang, ‘we’re not open yet.’ She turned round and waved her comb at the cashier. ‘Are we, dear?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the cashier. Miss Moss went out. ‘I’ll go to Charing Cross. Yes, that’s what I’ll do,’ she decided. ‘But I won’t have a cup of tea. No, I’ll have a coffee. There’s more of a tonic in coffee. . . . Cheeky, those girls are! Her boy came home last night; he brought her a brooch with “Dieppe” written on it.’ She began to cross the road. . . . ‘Look out, Fattie; don’t go to sleep!’ yelled a taxi driver. She pretended not to hear. ‘No, I won’t go to Charing Cross,’ she decided. ‘I’ll go straight to Kig and Kadgit. They’re open at nine. If I get there early Mr Kadgit may have something by the morning’s post. . . . I’m very glad you turned up so early, Miss Moss. I’ve just heard from a manager who wants a lady to play. . . . I think you’ll just suit him. I’ll give you a card to go and see him. It’s three pounds a week and all found. If I were you I’d hop round as fast as I could. Lucky you turned up so early. . . .’ But there was nobody at Kig and Kadgit’s except the charwoman wiping over the ‘lino’ in the passage. ‘Nobody here yet, Miss,’ said the char. ‘Oh, isn’t Mr Kadgit here?’ said Miss Moss, trying to dodge the pail and brush. ‘Well, I’ll just wait a moment, if I may.’ ‘You can’t wait in the waiting-room, Miss. I ’aven’t done it yet. Mr Kadgit’s never ’ere before ’leven-thirty Saturdays. Sometimes ’e don’t come at all.’ And the char began crawling towards her. ‘Dear me – how silly of me,’ said Miss Moss. ‘I forgot it was Saturday.’ ‘Mind your feet, please, Miss,’ said the char. And Miss Moss was outside again. That was one thing about Beit and Bithems; it was lively. You walked into the waiting-room, into a great buzz of conversation, and there was everybody; you knew almost everybody. The early ones sat on chairs and the later ones sat on the early ones’ laps, while the gentlemen leaned negligently against the walls or preened themselves in front of the admiring ladies. ‘Hello,’ said Miss Moss, very gay. ‘Here we are again!’ And young Mr Clayton, playing the banjo on his walking-stick, sang: ‘Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.’ ‘Mr Bithem here yet?’ asked Miss Moss, taking out an old dead powder puff and powdering her nose mauve.

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‘Oh, yes, dear,’ cried the chorus. ‘He’s been here for ages. We’ve all been waiting here for more than an hour.’ ‘Dear me!’ said Miss Moss. ‘Anything doing, do you think?’ ‘Oh, a few jobs going for South Africa,’ said young Mr Clayton. ‘Hundred and fifty a week for two years, you know.’ ‘Oh!’ cried the chorus. ‘You are weird, Mr Clayton. Isn’t he a cure? Isn’t he a scream, dear? Oh, Mr Clayton, you do make me laugh. Isn’t he a comic?’ A dark, mournful girl touched Miss Moss on the arm. ‘I just missed a lovely job yesterday,’ she said. ‘Six weeks in the provinces and then the West End. The manager said I would have got it for certain if only I’d been robust enough. He said if my figure had been fuller, the part was made for me.’ She stared at Miss Moss, and the dirty dark red rose under the brim of her hat looked, somehow, as though it shared the blow with her, and was crushed, too. ‘Oh, dear, that was hard lines,’ said Miss Moss trying to appear indifferent. ‘What was it – if I may ask?’ But the dark, mournful girl saw through her and a gleam of spite came into her heavy eyes. ‘Oh, no good to you, my dear,’ said she. ‘He wanted someone young, you know – a dark Spanish type – my style, but more figure, that was all.’ The inner door opened and Mr Bithem appeared in his shirt sleeves. He kept one hand on the door ready to whisk back again, and held up the other. ‘Look here, ladies –’ and then he paused, grinned his famous grin before he said ‘ – and bhoys.’ The waiting-room laughed so loudly at this that he had to hold both hands up. ‘It’s no good waiting this morning. Come back Monday; I’m expecting several calls on Monday.’ Miss Moss made a desperate rush forward. ‘Mr Bithem, I wonder if you’ve heard from. . . .’ ‘Now let me see,’ said Mr Bithem slowly, staring; he had only seen Miss Moss four times a week for the past – how many weeks? ‘Now, who are you?’ ‘Miss Ada Moss.’ ‘Oh, yes, yes; of course, my dear. Not yet, my dear. Now I had a call for twenty-eight ladies to-day, but they had to be young and able to hop it a bit – see? And I had another call for sixteen – but they had to know something about sand-dancing. Look here, my dear, I’m up to the eyebrows this morning. Come back on Monday week; it’s no good coming before that.’ He gave her a whole grin to herself and patted her fat back. ‘Hearts of oak, dear lady,’ said Mr Bithem, ‘hearts of oak!’

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At the North-East Film Company the crowd was all the way up the stairs. Miss Moss found herself next to a fair little baby thing about thirty in a white lace hat with cherries round it. ‘What a crowd!’ said she. ‘Anything special on?’ ‘Didn’t you know, dear?’ said the baby, opening her immense pale eyes. ‘There was a call at nine-thirty for attractive girls. We’ve all been waiting for hours. Have you played for this company before?’ Miss Moss put her head on one side. ‘No, I don’t think I have.’ ‘They’re a lovely company to play for,’ said the baby. ‘A friend of mine has a friend who gets thirty pounds a day. . . . Have you arcted much for the fil-lums?’ ‘Well, I’m not an actress by profession,’ confessed Miss Moss. ‘I’m a contralto singer. But things have been so bad lately that I’ve been doing a little.’ ‘It’s like that, isn’t it, dear?’ said the baby. ‘I had a splendid education at the College of Music,’ said Miss Moss, ‘and I got my silver medal for singing. I’ve often sung at West End concerts. But I thought, for a change, I’d try my luck. . . .’ ‘Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it, dear?’ said the baby. At the moment a beautiful typist appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Are you all waiting for the North-East call?’ ‘Yes!’ cried the chorus. ‘Well, it’s off. I’ve just had a phone through.’ ‘But look here! What about our expenses?’ shouted a voice. The typist looked down at them, and she couldn’t help laughing. ‘Oh, you weren’t to have been paid. The North-East never pay their crowds.’ There was only a little round window at the Bitter Orange Company. No waiting-room – nobody at all except a girl, who came to the window when Miss Moss knocked, and said: ‘Well?’ ‘Can I see the producer, please?’ said Miss Moss pleasantly. The girl leaned on the window-bar, half shut her eyes and seemed to go to sleep for a moment. Miss Moss smiled at her. The girl not only frowned; she seemed to smell something vaguely unpleasant; she sniffed. Suddenly she moved away, came back with a paper and thrust it at Miss Moss. ‘Fill up the form!’ said she. And banged the window down. ‘Can you aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buck-jump – shoot?’ read Miss Moss. She walked along the street asking herself those questions. There was a high, cold wind blowing; it tugged at her, slapped her face, jeered; it knew she could not answer them. In the Square Gardens she found a little wire basket to drop the form into. And then she sat down on one of the benches to powder her nose. But the person in the pocket mirror made a hideous face at her, and

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that was too much for Miss Moss; she had a good cry. It cheered her wonderfully. ‘Well, that’s over,’ she sighed. ‘It’s one comfort to be off my feet. And my nose will soon get cool in the air. . . . It’s very nice in here. Look at the sparrows. Cheep. Cheep. How close they come. I expect somebody feeds them. No, I’ve nothing for you, you cheeky little things. . . .’ She looked away from them. What was the big building opposite – the Café de Madrid? My goodness, what a smack that little child came down! Poor little mite! Never mind – up again. . . . By eight o’clock to-night . . . Café de Madrid. ‘I could just go in and sit there and have a coffee, that’s all,’ thought Miss Moss. ‘It’s such a place for artists too. I might just have a stroke of luck. . . . A dark handsome gentleman in a fur coat comes in with a friend, and sits at my table, perhaps. “No, old chap, I’ve searched London for a contralto and I can’t find a soul. You see, the music is difficult; have a look at it.” ’ And Miss Moss heard herself saying: ‘Excuse me, I happen to be a contralto, and I have sung that part many times. . . . Extraordinary! “Come back to my studio and I’ll try your voice now.” . . . Ten pounds a week. . . . Why should I feel nervous? It’s not nervousness. Why shouldn’t I go to the Café de Madrid? I’m a respectable woman – I’m a contralto singer. And I’m only trembling because I’ve had nothing to eat to-day. . . . ‘A nice little piece of evidence, my lady.’ . . . Very well, Mrs Pine. Café de Madrid. They have concerts there in the evenings. . . . “Why don’t they begin?” “The contralto has not arrived.” . . . “Excuse me, I happen to be a contralto; I have sung that music many times.” ’ It was almost dark in the café. Men, palms, red plush seats, white marble tables, waiters in aprons, Miss Moss walked through them all. Hardly had she sat down when a very stout gentleman wearing a very small hat that floated on the top of his head like a little yacht flopped into the chair opposite hers. ‘Good evening!’ said he. Miss Moss said, in her cheerful way: ‘Good evening!’ ‘Fine evening,’ said the stout gentleman. ‘Yes, very fine. Quite a treat, isn’t it?’ said she. He crooked a sausage finger at the waiter – ‘Bring me a large whisky’ – and turned to Miss Moss. ‘What’s yours?’ ‘Well, I think I’ll take a brandy if it’s all the same.’ Five minutes later the stout gentleman leaned across the table and blew a puff of cigar smoke full in her face. ‘That’s a tempting bit o’ ribbon!’ said he. Miss Moss blushed until a pulse at the top of her head that she never had felt before pounded away. ‘I always was one for pink,’ said she.

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The stout gentleman considered her, drumming with her fingers on the table. ‘I like ’em firm and well covered,’ said he. Miss Moss, to her surprise, gave a loud snigger. Five minutes later the stout gentleman heaved himself up. ‘Well, am I goin’ your way, or are you comin’ mine?’ he asked. ‘I’ll come with you, if it’s all the same,’ said Miss Moss. And she sailed after the little yacht out of the café. Notes Text: BOS. Initially composed in dialogue form as ‘The Common Round’ for the New Age in May 1917 (see pp. 36–41), rewritten as a story, ‘The Pictures’, in Art and Letters, 2: 2, Autumn 1919, pp. 153–6, 159–62, and again revised before inclusion in BOS.

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‘R’s first husband was a pawnbroker’1 R’s first husband was a pawnbroker. He learned his trade from her uncle with whom she lived and was more like her big brother than anything else from the age of thirteen. After he had married her they prospered. He made a perfect pet of her, they used to say. His sisters put it that he made a perfect fool of himself over her. When their children were fifteen and nine he urged his employers to take a man into their firm – a great friend of his, and persuaded them – really went security for this man. When Ralph saw the man she went over cold. She said, ‘Mark me you’ve not done right. No good will come of this.’ But he laughed it off. Time passed – the man proved a villain. When they came to take stock they found all the stock was false; he’d sold everything. This preyed on her husband’s mind, went on preying, kept him up at night, made a changed man of him, he went mad as you might say, over figures, worrying. One evening, sitting in his chair – well it was very late – he died of a clot of blood on the brain. She was left. Her big boy was old enough to go out but the little one was still not more than a baby: he was so nervous and delicate. The doctors had never let him go to school. One day her brother-in-law came to see her and advised her to sell up her home, and get some work.

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‘All that keeps you back,’ he said, ‘is little Bert. Now I’d advise you to place a certain sum with your solicitors for him and put him out – in the country.’ He said he’d take him. I did as he advised. But funny! [I] never heard a word from the child after he’d gone. I used to ask why he didn’t write and they said when he can write a decent letter you shall have it – not before. That went on for a twelvemonth and I found after he’d been writing all the time, grieving to be took away and they’d never sent his letters. Then, quite sudden, his uncle wrote and said he must be taken away. He’d done the most awful things – things I couldn’t find you a name for – he’d turned vicious, he was a little criminal! What his uncle said was I’d spoiled the child and he was going to make a man of him – and he’d beaten him and half starved him and when he was frightened at night and screamed he turned him out into the new forest and made him sleep under the branches. My big boy went down to see him. ‘Mother, he says, you wouldn’t know little Bert. He can’t speak. He won’t come near anybody. He starts off if you touch him; he’s like a little beast.’ And oh dear! the things he’d done. Well, you hear of children doing those things before they’re put into orphanages but when I heard that and thought it was the same little baby his father used to carry into Regents Park bathed and dressed of a sudden morning, well, I felt my religion was going from me. I had a terrible time trying to get him into an orphanage. I begged for three months before they’d take him. Then he was sent to Bisley. But after I’d been to see him there – in his funny clothes and all – I could see his misery. I was in a nice place at the time, cook to a butcher in a large way in Kensington, but that poor child’s eyes – they used to follow me – and a sort of shivering that came over him when people went near. Well, I had a friend kept a boarding house in Kensington. I used to visit her and a friend of hers, a big well set up fellow, quite the gentleman, an engineer who worked in a garage, came there very often. She used to joke, say he wanted to walk me out. I laughed it off until one day she was very serious. She said ‘you’re a very silly woman. He earns good money; he’d give you a home and you could have your little boy.’ Well, he was to speak to me next day and I made up my mind to listen. Well, he did and he couldn’t have put it nicer. ‘I can’t give you a house to start with,’ he said, ‘but you shall have three good rooms and the kid and I’m earning good money and shall be more.’ A week after he come to me, ‘I can’t give you any money this week,’ he says. ‘There’s things to pay from when I was single. But I daresay you’ve got a bit put by.’ And I was a fool, you know, I didn’t think it funny.

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‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll manage.’ Well so it went on for three weeks. We’d arranged not to have little Bert for a month because he said he wanted me to himself and he was so fond of him – a big fellow, he used to cling to me like a child and call me mother – – After three weeks was up I hadn’t a penny. I’d been taking my jewellery and best clothes to put away to pay for him until he was straight but one night I said – ‘where’s my money?’ He just up and gave me such a smack in the face I thought my head would burst. And that began it. Every time I asked him for money he beat me. As I said, I was very religious at the time, used to wear a crucifix under my clothes and couldn’t go to bed without kneeling by the side and saying my prayers – no, not even the first week of my marriage. Well I went to see a clergyman and told him everything and he said ‘My child, he said, I am very sorry for you, but with God’s help,’ he said, ‘it’s your duty to make him a better man. You say your first husband was so good. Well, perhaps God has kept this trial for you until now.’ I went home – and that very night he tore my crucifix off and hit me on the head when I knelt down. He said he wouldn’t have me say my prayers; it made him wild. I had a little dog at the time I was very fond of, and he used to pick it up and shout ‘I’ll teach it to say its prayers,’ and beat it before my eyes – until – well, such was the man he was. Then one night he came in the worse for drink and wet the bed. I couldn’t stand it. I began to cry. He gave me a hit on the ear and I fell down striking my head on the fender. When I come to he was gone. I ran out into the street just as I was. I ran as fast as I could, not knowing where I was going – just dazed – my nerves were gone. And a lady found me and took me to her home and I was there three weeks. And after that I never went back. I never even told my people – I found work – and not till months after I went to see my sister. ‘Good gracious’ she says, ‘we all thought you was murdered.’ And I never seen him since . . . Those were dreadful times. I was so ill I could scarcely hardly work and of course I couldn’t get my little boy out. He had to grow up in it. And so I had to start all over again. I had nothing of his, nothing of mine. I lost it all, except my marriage lines. Somehow I remembered them just as I was running out that night and put them in my body – sort of an instinct, as you might say. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 169–71. Published by JMM as ‘The Cook’s Story’, Journal, 1954, pp. 162–5. 1. In Notebook 16, the story appears immediately before a note dated ‘10. XI. 1919’.

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Late Spring1 ‘. . . But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety’.2

The doctor – for Roy, of course, unable to resist the smallest dramatic opportunity, had obtained a rather shady Bloomsbury address from the man in whom he always confided everything, who, although he’d never met her knew ‘all about them’ – did not show the least surprise when she said in her untroubled soft voice, ‘Do you mind not mentioning anything of this to Mr King.’ He was, on these occasions, inclined to be jocular – to swagger a bit – to make it an affair of – he and she across the table with the secret between them, to clinking glasses, tossing it down, to ‘alright, little lady, don’t you worry. You leave it to me, my dear. I’ll tell him you’ve swallowed the kitten and want a bit of sea air to drown it in.’ But the whole surroundings in which he found himself and particularly the owner of the untroubled soft voice had thrown him clean off his beat. Why the Hell had they knocked him up. Standing in the middle of the exquisite fragrant room he was so nervous he broke into a sweat and it was only while he mopped his forehead and moustaches that he discovered he’d still got his stethoscope slung round his neck. ‘If you’d tell him I’m a little run down and that my heart wants a rest. For I have been complaining about my heart.’ He hadn’t time to reply when there was a soft knock at the door. ‘Come in’ [he] cried, and Roy – he really did look pale – smiling his half-smile, came in and asked the doctor what he had to say. ‘Well!’ said the doctor, stowing away the stethoscope with hands that positively shook, ‘all I think Mrs – hm – Madam wants is a bit of a change. She’s a bit run down. Her heart wants a bit of a rest.’ In the street a barrel organ struck up something gay, laughing, mocking, with little trills, shakes, jumbles of notes. It finished him. [It] made him feel like a sick cat. ‘That’s about it’ he said, taking up 188

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his bag which lay on a white enamelled table and looked somehow like a broken old brown canvas shoe. She saw over her shoulder Roy’s smile deepen, his eyes took fire. He gave a little ‘ah’ of relief and happiness. And just for one second he allowed himself to gaze at her, without caring a jot whether the doctor saw or not, drinking her in as she stood tying the pale ribbons of her camisole, stooping for her little purple cloth jacket. That purple cloth against the pale tea-rose of her arms and bosom! He jerked back to the doctor. ‘She shall go away. She shall go away to the sea at once,’ said he. ‘And about her food?’ He saw her in the long mirror, buttoning her jacket and laughing at him – oh so charmingly – in the way that delighted him. ‘That’s all very well’ he protested, laughing back at her and at the unfortunate doctor who tried a grin and couldn’t manage it. ‘But if I didn’t manage her food, doctor, she’d never eat anything at all except caviare sandwiches and – and – white grapes. About wine – ought she to have wine?’ ‘Wine’ll do her no harm’ said the doctor. ‘Champagne?’ The doctor cocked his eye at Roy. Was this a joke? But Roy appeared to be hanging upon the answer. ‘Oh yes champagne,’ he stammered, and then with an immense effort, ‘She can have a brandy and soda with her lunch every day if she fancies it,’ he brought out. Roy loved that. It tickled him immensely. ‘Do you fancy a brandy and soda with your lunch, Marina?’ he asked her solemnly, blinking and sucking in his cheeks to keep from laughing out. The blarsted barrel organ burst into ‘All night Long you Call me’ and the doctor snatched his hat. Roy went with him to settle his fee. She heard the front door close and then rapid steps down the passage. He was back, in her room – she was in his arms – crushed up small while he kissed her quickly, quickly – warm quick kisses – until she was half stifled and cried for mercy. But still he kept his arms round her and she leant against his shoulder as though quite exhausted. He was laughing too, and she felt as though his laughter were running in her veins. ‘How beautiful you are, you little beauty. Look up at me, my darling, my delight.’ And she looked up at the face bent over her – at the tanned skin with a reddish light on the cheek bones, the short clipped auburn moustaches, the eyes like blue fire and the rust coloured hair as smooth as paint. He pleased her – oh but immeasurably – and he knew it. ‘What is it,’ he whispered, bending down to her. ‘What is it, my treasure?’

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But ‘nothing’ said she, shaking her head. Then ‘You smell very nice. Not of cigars . . .’ ‘Of nuts?’ he laughed. That was peculiarly his kind of joke. But she did not mind it. She let him pull her down gently into the deep chair between the windows. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 246–7. 1. KM made a notebook entry, 5 January 1920, that she had read Henry IV, and ‘started my story Late Spring (KMN, 2, p. 187). JMM followed another MS version, called ‘This Flower’, which he printed in SCOS. The subtle differences between the two versions, with the emphasis on the female character’s reactions in one, and on the male’s in the other, justify printing both versions. 2. Henry IV Part I, II, iii, 11. It seems curious that JMM later chose this quotation, which KM placed at the head of her enigmatic story about the fear of pregnancy, and possible abortion, to have inscribed on her grave in Avon cemetery, Fontainebleau.

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This Flower ‘. . . But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety’.2

As she lay there, looking up at the ceiling, she had her moment – yes, she had her moment! And it was not connected with anything she had thought or felt before, not even with those words the doctor had scarcely ceased speaking. It was single, glowing, perfect; it was like – a pearl, too flawless to match with another. . . . Could she describe what happened? Impossible. It was as though, even if she had not been conscious (and she certainly had not been conscious all the time) that she was fighting against the stream of life – the stream of life indeed! – she had suddenly ceased to struggle. Oh, more than that! She had yielded, yielded absolutely, down to every minutest pulse and nerve, and she had fallen into the bright bosom of the stream and it had borne her . . . She was part of her room – part of the great bouquet of southern anemones, of the white net curtains that blew in stiff against the light breeze, of the mirrors, the white silky rugs; she

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was part of the high, shaking, quivering clamour, broken with little bells and crying voices that went streaming by outside – part of the leaves and the light. Over. She sat up. The doctor had reappeared. This strange little figure with his stethoscope still strung round his neck – for she had asked him to examine her heart – squeezing and kneading his freshly washed hands, had told her . . . It was the first time she had ever seen him. Roy, unable, of course, to miss the smallest dramatic opportunity, had obtained his rather shady Bloomsbury address from the man in whom he always confided everything, who, although he’d never met her, knew ‘all about them.’ ‘My darling,’ Roy had said, ‘we’d better have an absolutely unknown man just in case it’s – well, what we don’t either of us want it to be. One can’t be too careful in affairs of this sort. Doctors do talk. It’s all damned rot to say they don’t.’ Then, ‘Not that I care a straw who on earth knows. Not that I wouldn’t – if you’d have me – blazon it on the skies, or take the front page of the Daily Mirror and have our two names on it, in a heart, you know – pierced by an arrow.’ Nevertheless, of course; his love of mystery and intrigue, his passion for ‘keeping our secret beautifully’ (his phrase!) had won the day, and off he’d gone in a taxi to fetch this rather sodden-looking little man. She heard her untroubled voice saying, ‘Do you mind not mentioning anything of this to Mr. King? If you’d tell him that I’m a little run down and that my heart wants a rest. For I’ve been complaining about my heart.’ Roy had been really too right about the kind of man the doctor was. He gave her a strange, quick, leering look, and taking off the stethoscope with shaking fingers he folded it into his bag that looked somehow like a broken old canvas shoe. ‘Don’t you worry, my dear,’ he said huskily. ‘I’ll see you through.’ Odious little toad to have asked a favour of! She sprang to her feet, and picking up her purple cloth jacket, went over to the mirror. There was a soft knock at the door, and Roy – he really did look pale, smiling his half-smile – came in and asked the doctor what he had to say. ‘Well,’ said the doctor, taking up his hat, holding it against his chest and beating a tattoo on it, ‘all I’ve got to say is that Mrs. – h’m – Madam wants a bit of a rest. She’s a bit run down. Her heart’s a bit strained. Nothing else wrong.’ In the street a barrel-organ struck up something gay, laughing, mocking, gushing, with little trills, shakes, jumbles of notes. That’s all I got to say, to say, That’s all I got to say,

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it mocked. It sounded so near she wouldn’t have been surprised if the doctor were turning the handle. She saw Roy’s smile deepen; his eyes took fire. He gave a little ‘Ah!’ of relief and happiness. And just for one moment he allowed himself to gaze at her without caring a jot whether the doctor saw or not, drinking her up with that gaze she knew so well, as she stood tying the pale ribbons of her camisole and drawing on the little purple cloth jacket. He jerked back to the doctor, ‘She shall go away. She shall go away to the sea at once,’ said he, and then, terribly anxious, ‘What about her food?’ At that, buttoning her jacket in the long mirror, she couldn’t help laughing at him. ‘That’s all very well,’ he protested, laughing back delightfully at her and at the doctor. ‘But if I didn’t manage her food, doctor, she’d never eat anything but caviare sandwiches and – and white grapes. About wine – oughtn’t she to have wine?’ Wine would do her no harm. ‘Champagne,’ pleaded Roy. How he was enjoying himself! ‘Oh, as much champagne as she likes,’ said the doctor, ‘and a brandy and soda with her lunch if she fancies it.’ Roy loved that; it tickled him immensely. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked solemnly, blinking and sucking in his cheeks to keep from laughing. ‘Do you fancy a brandy and soda?’ And, in the distance, faint and exhausted, the barrel-organ: A brandy and so-da, A brandy and soda, please! A brandy and soda, please!

The doctor seemed to hear that, too. He shook hands with her, and Roy went with him into the passage to settle his fee. She heard the front door close and then – rapid, rapid steps along the passage. This time he simply burst into her room, and she was in his arms, crushed up small while he kissed her with warm quick kisses, murmuring between them, ‘My darling, my beauty, my delight. You’re mine, you’re safe.’ And then three soft groans. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! the relief!’ Still keeping his arms round her he leant his head against her shoulder as though exhausted. ‘If you knew how frightened I’ve been,’ he murmured. ‘I thought we were in for it this time. I really did. And it would have been so – fatal – so fatal!’ Notes U Text: SCOS. See n.1 to ‘Late Spring’.

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•

Psychology1 When she opened the door and saw him standing there she was more pleased than ever before, and he, too, as he followed her into the studio, seemed very very happy to have come. ‘Not busy?’ ‘No. Just going to have tea.’ ‘And you are not expecting anybody?’ ‘Nobody at all.’ ‘Ah! That’s good.’ He laid aside his coat and hat gently, lingeringly, as though he had time and to spare for everything, or as though he were taking leave of them for ever, and came over to the fire and held out his hands to the quick, leaping flame. Just for a moment both of them stood silent in that leaping light. Still, as it were, they tasted on their smiling lips the sweet shock of their greeting. Their secret selves whispered: ‘Why should we speak? Isn’t this enough?’ ‘More than enough. I never realized until this moment. . . .’ ‘How good it is just to be with you. . . .’ ‘Like this. . . .’ ‘It’s more than enough.’ But suddenly he turned and looked at her and she moved quickly away. ‘Have a cigarette? I’ll put the kettle on. Are you longing for tea?’ ‘No. Not longing.’ ‘Well, I am.’ ‘Oh, you.’ He thumped the Armenian cushion and flung on to the sommier. ‘You are a perfect little Chinee.’ ‘Yes, I am,’ she laughed. ‘I long for tea as strong men long for wine.’ She lighted the lamp under its broad orange shade, pulled the curtains and drew up the tea table. Two birds sang in the kettle; the fire fluttered. He sat up clasping his knees. It was delightful – this business of having tea – and she always had delicious things to eat – little sharp sandwiches, short sweet almond fingers, and a dark, rich cake tasting of rum – but it was an interruption. He wanted it over, the table pushed away, their two chairs drawn up to the light, and the moment came when he took out his pipe, filled it, and said, pressing the tobacco tight into the bowl: ‘I have been thinking over what you said last time and it seems to me. . . .’

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Yes, that was what he waited for and so did she. Yes, while she shook the teapot hot and dry over the spirit flame she saw those other two, him, leaning back, taking his ease among the cushions, and her, curled up en escargot in the blue shell arm-chair. The picture was so clear and so minute it might have been painted on the blue teapot lid. And yet she couldn’t hurry. She could almost have cried: ‘Give me time.’ She must have time in which to grow calm. She wanted time in which to free herself from all these familiar things with which she lived so vividly. For all these gay things round her were part of her – her offspring – and they knew it and made the largest, most vehement claims. But now they must go. They must be swept away, shooed away – like children, sent up the shadowy stairs, packed into bed and commanded to go to sleep – at once – without a murmur! For the special thrilling quality of their friendship was in their complete surrender. Like two open cities in the midst of some vast plain their two minds lay open to each other. And it wasn’t as if he rode into hers like a conqueror, armed to the eyebrows and seeing nothing but a gay silken flutter – nor did she enter his like a queen walking soft on petals. No, they were eager, serious travellers, absorbed in understanding what was to be seen and discovering what was hidden – making the most of this extraordinary absolute chance which made it possible for him to be utterly truthful to her and for her to be utterly sincere with him. And the best of it was they were both of them old enough to enjoy their adventure to the full without any stupid emotional complication. Passion would have ruined everything; they quite saw that. Besides, all that sort of thing was over and done with for both of them – he was thirty-one, she was thirty – they had had their experiences, and very rich and varied they had been, but now was the time for harvest – harvest. Weren’t his novels to be very big novels indeed? And her plays. Who else had her exquisite sense of real English Comedy? . . . Carefully she cut the cake into thick little wads and he reached across for a piece. ‘Do realize how good it is,’ she implored. ‘Eat it imaginatively. Roll your eyes if you can and taste it on the breath. It’s not a sandwich from the hatter’s bag – it’s the kind of cake that might have been mentioned in the Book of Genesis. . . . And God said: “Let there be cake. And there was cake. And God saw that it was good.” ’ ‘You needn’t entreat me,’ said he. ‘Really you needn’t. It’s a queer thing but I always do notice what I eat here and never anywhere else. I suppose it comes of living alone so long and always reading while I feed . . . my habit of looking upon food as just food . . . something

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that’s there, at certain times . . . to be devoured . . . to be . . . not there.’ He laughed. ‘That shocks you. Doesn’t it?’ ‘To the bone,’ said she. ‘But – look here –’ He pushed away his cup and began to speak very fast. ‘I simply haven’t got any external life at all. I don’t know the names of things a bit – trees and so on – and I never notice places or furniture or what people look like. One room is just like another to me – a place to sit and read or talk in – except,’ and here he paused, smiled in a strange naive way, and said, ‘except this studio.’ He looked round him and then at her; he laughed in his astonishment and pleasure. He was like a man who wakes up in a train to find that he has arrived, already, at the journey’s end. ‘Here’s another queer thing. If I shut my eyes I can see this place down to every detail – every detail. . . . Now I come to think of it – I’ve never realized this consciously before. Often when I am away from here I revisit it in spirit – wander about among your red chairs, stare at the bowl of fruit on the black table – and just touch, very lightly, that marvel of a sleeping boy’s head.’ He looked at it as he spoke. It stood on the corner of the mantelpiece; the head to one side down-drooping, the lips parted, as though in his sleep the little boy listened to some sweet sound. . . . ‘I love that little boy,’ he murmured. And then they both were silent. A new silence came between them. Nothing in the least like the satisfactory pause that had followed their greetings – the ‘Well, here we are together again, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on from just where we left off last time.’ That silence could be contained in the circle of warm, delightful fire and lamplight. How many times hadn’t they flung something into it just for the fun of watching the ripples break on the easy shores. But into this unfamiliar pool the head of the little boy sleeping his timeless sleep dropped – and the ripples flowed away, away – boundlessly far – into deep glittering darkness. And then both of them broke it. She said: ‘I must make up the fire,’ and he said: ‘I have been trying a new. . . .’ Both of them escaped. She made up the fire and put the table back, the blue chair was wheeled forward, she curled up and he lay back among the cushions. Quickly! Quickly! They must stop it from happening again. ‘Well, I read the book you left last time.’ ‘Oh, what do you think of it?’ They were off and all was as usual. But was it? Weren’t they just a little too quick, too prompt with their replies, too ready to take each other up? Was this really anything more than a wonderfully good imitation of other occasions? His heart beat; her cheek burned and the stupid thing was she could not discover where exactly they were

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or what exactly was happening. She hadn’t time to glance back. And just as she had got so far it happened again. They faltered, wavered, broke down, were silent. Again they were conscious of the boundless, questioning dark. Again, there they were – two hunters, bending over their fire, but hearing suddenly from the jungle beyond a shake of wind and a loud, questioning cry. . . . She lifted her head. ‘It’s raining,’ she murmured. And her voice was like his when he had said: ‘I love that little boy.’ Well. Why didn’t they just give way to it – yield – and see what will happen then? But no. Vague and troubled though they were, they knew enough to realize their precious friendship was in danger. She was the one who would be destroyed – not they – and they’d be no party to that. He got up, knocked out his pipe, ran his hand through his hair and said: ‘I have been wondering very much lately whether the novel of the future will be a psychological novel or not. How sure are you that psychology qua psychology has got anything to do with literature at all?’ ‘Do you mean you feel there’s quite a chance that the mysterious non-existent creatures – the young writers of to-day – are trying simply to jump the psycho-analyst’s claim?’ ‘Yes, I do. And I think it’s because this generation is just wise enough to know that it is sick and to realize that its only chance of recovery is by going into its symptoms – making an exhaustive study of them – tracking them down – trying to get at the root of the trouble.’ ‘But oh,’ she wailed. ‘What a dreadfully dismal outlook.’ ‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘Look here. . . .’ On the talk went. And now it seemed they really had succeeded. She turned in her chair to look at him while she answered. Her smile said: ‘We have won.’ And he smiled back, confident: ‘Absolutely.’ But the smile undid them. It lasted too long; it became a grin. They saw themselves as two little grinning puppets jigging away in nothingness. ‘What have we been talking about?’ thought he. He was so utterly bored he almost groaned. ‘What a spectacle we have made of ourselves,’ thought she. And she saw him laboriously – oh, laboriously – laying out the grounds and herself running after, putting here a tree and there a flowery shrub and here a handful of glittering fish in a pool. They were silent this time from sheer dismay. The clock struck six merry little pings and the fire made a soft flutter. What fools they were – heavy, stodgy, elderly – with positively upholstered minds. And now the silence put a spell upon them like solemn music. It

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was anguish – anguish for her to bear it and he would die – he’d die if it were broken. . . . And yet he longed to break it. Not by speech. At any rate not by their ordinary maddening chatter. There was another way for them to speak to each other, and in the new way he wanted to murmur: ‘Do you feel this too? Do you understand it at all?’ . . . Instead, to his horror, he heard himself say: ‘I must be off; I’m meeting Brand at six.’ What devil made him say that instead of the other? She jumped – simply jumped out of her chair, and he heard her crying: ‘You must rush, then. He’s so punctual. Why didn’t you say so before?’ ‘You’ve hurt me; you’ve hurt me! We’ve failed!’ said her secret self while she handed him his hat and stick, smiling gaily. She wouldn’t give him a moment for another word, but ran along the passage and opened the big outer door. Could they leave each other like this? How could they? He stood on the step and she just inside holding the door. It was not raining now. ‘You’ve hurt me – hurt me,’ said her heart. ‘Why don’t you go? No, don’t go. Stay. No – go!’ And she looked out upon the night. She saw the beautiful fall of the steps, the dark garden ringed with glittering ivy, on the other side of the road the huge bare willows and above them the sky big and bright with stars. But of course he would see nothing of all this. He was superior to it all. He – with his wonderful ‘spiritual’ vision! She was right. He did see nothing at all. Misery! He’d missed it. It was too late to do anything now. Was it too late? Yes, it was. A cold snatch of hateful wind blew into the garden. Curse life! He heard her cry ‘au revoir’ and the door slammed. Running back into the studio she behaved so strangely. She ran up and down lifting her arms and crying: ‘Oh! Oh! How stupid! How imbecile! How stupid!’ And then she flung herself down on the sommier thinking of nothing – just lying there in her rage. All was over. What was over? Oh – something was. And she’d never see him again – never. After a long long time (or perhaps ten minutes) had passed in that black gulf her bell rang a sharp quick jingle. It was he, of course. And equally, of course, she oughtn’t to have paid the slightest attention to it but just let it go on ringing and ringing. She flew to answer. On the doorstep there stood an elderly virgin, a pathetic creature who simply idolized her (heaven knows why) and had this habit of turning up and ringing the bell and then saying, when she opened the door: ‘My dear, send me away!’ She never did. As a rule she asked her in and let her admire everything and accepted the bunch

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of slightly soiled looking flowers – more than graciously. But to-day. . . . ‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ she cried. ‘But I’ve got someone with me. We are working on some wood-cuts. I’m hopelessly busy all evening.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, darling,’ said the good friend. ‘I was just passing and I thought I’d leave you some violets.’ She fumbled down among the ribs of a large old umbrella. ‘I put them down here. Such a good place to keep flowers out of the wind. Here they are,’ she said, shaking out a little dead bunch. For a moment she did not take the violets. But while she stood just inside, holding the door, a strange thing happened. . . . Again she saw the beautiful fall of the steps, the dark garden ringed with glittering ivy, the willows, the big bright sky. Again she felt the silence that was like a question. But this time she did not hesitate. She moved forward. Very softly and gently, as though fearful of making a ripple in that boundless pool of quiet she put her arms round her friend. ‘My dear,’ murmured her happy friend, quite overcome by this gratitude. ‘They are really nothing. Just the simplest little thrippenny bunch.’ But as she spoke she was enfolded – more tenderly, more beautifully embraced, held by such a sweet pressure and for so long that the poor dear’s mind positively reeled and she just had the strength to quaver: ‘Then you really don’t mind me too much?’ ‘Good night, my friend,’ whispered the other. ‘Come again soon.’ ‘Oh, I will. I will.’ This time she walked back to the studio slowly, and standing in the middle of the room with half-shut eyes she felt so light, so rested, as if she had woken up out of a childish sleep. Even the act of breathing was a joy. . . . The sommier was very untidy. All the cushions ‘like furious mountains’ as she said; she put them in order before going over to the writing-table. ‘I have been thinking over our talk about the psychological novel,’ she dashed off, ‘it really is intensely interesting.’ . . . And so on and so on. At the end she wrote: ‘Good night, my friend. Come again soon.’ Notes Text: BOS. 1. Sometimes read as drawing on KM’s friendship with Bertrand Russell in 1916, and, more obviously, on Ida Baker’s devotion. It is first mentioned in a list of stories in a letter to JMM, 26 January 1920 (CLKM, 3, p. 198). It is not possible to date the story more accurately.

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•

The Man Without a Temperament1 He stood at the hall door turning the ring, turning the heavy signet ring upon his little finger while his glance travelled coolly, deliberately, over the round tables and basket-chairs scattered about the glassed-in verandah. He pursed his lips – he might have been going to whistle – but he did not whistle – only turned the ring – turned the ring on his pink, freshly washed hands. Over in the corner sat The Two Topknots, drinking a decoction they always drank at this hour – something whitish, greyish, in glasses, with little husks floating on the top – and rooting in a tin full of paper shavings for pieces of speckled biscuit, which they broke, dropped into the glasses and fished for with spoons. Their two coils of knitting, like two snakes, slumbered beside the tray. The American Woman sat where she always sat against the glass wall, in the shadow of a great creeping thing with wide open purple eyes that pressed – that flattened itself against the glass, hungrily watching her. And she knoo it was there – she knoo it was looking at her just that way. She played up to it; she gave herself little airs. Sometimes she even pointed at it, crying: ‘Isn’t that the most terrible thing you’ve ever seen! Isn’t that ghoulish!’ It was on the other side of the verandah, after all . . . and besides it couldn’t touch her, could it, Klaymongso?2 She was an American Woman, wasn’t she Klaymongso, and she’d just go right away to her Consul. Klaymongso, curled in her lap, with her torn antique brocade bag, a grubby handkerchief, and a pile of letters from home on top of him, sneezed for reply. The other tables were empty. A glance passed between the American and the Topknots. She gave a foreign little shrug; they waved an understanding biscuit. But he saw nothing. Now he was still, now from his eyes you saw he listened. ‘Hoo-e-zip-zoo-oo!’ sounded the lift. The iron cage clanged open. Light dragging steps sounded across the hall, coming towards him. A hand, like a leaf, fell on his shoulder. A soft voice said: ‘Let’s go and sit over there – where we can see the drive. The trees are so lovely.’ And he moved forward with the hand still on his shoulder, and the light, dragging steps beside his. He pulled out a chair and she sank into it, slowly, leaning her head against the back, her arms falling along the sides. ‘Won’t you bring the other up closer? It’s such miles away.’ But he did not move. ‘Where’s your shawl?’ he asked.

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‘Oh!’ She gave a little groan of dismay. ‘How silly I am, I’ve left it upstairs on the bed. Never mind. Please don’t go for it. I shan’t want it, I know I shan’t.’ ‘You’d better have it.’ And he turned and swiftly crossed the verandah into the dim hall with its scarlet plush and gilt furniture – conjuror’s furniture – its Notice of Services at the English Church, its green baize board with the unclaimed letters climbing the black lattice, huge ‘Presentation’ clock that struck the hours at the half-hours, bundles of sticks and umbrellas and sunshades in the clasp of a brown wooden bear, past the two crippled palms, two ancient beggars at the foot of the staircase, up the marble stairs three at a time, past the life-size group on the landing of two stout peasant children with their marble pinnies full of marble grapes, and along the corridor, with its piled-up wreckage of old tin boxes, leather trunks, canvas hold-alls, to their room. The servant girl was in their room, singing loudly while she emptied soapy water into a pail. The windows were open wide, the shutters put back, and the light glared in. She had thrown the carpets and the big white pillows over the balcony rails; the nets were looped up from the beds; on the writing table there stood a pan of fluff and matchends. When she saw him her small impudent eyes snapped and her singing changed to humming. But he gave no sign. His eyes searched the glaring room. Where the devil was the shawl! ‘Vous désirez, Monsieur?’ mocked the servant girl. No answer. He had seen it. He strode across the room, grabbed the grey cobweb and went out, banging the door. The servant girl’s voice at its loudest and shrillest followed him along the corridor. ‘Oh, there you are. What happened? What kept you? The tea’s here, you see. I’ve just sent Antonio off for the hot water. Isn’t it extraordinary? I must have told him about it sixty times at least, and still he doesn’t bring it. Thank you. That’s very nice. One does just feel the air when one bends forward.’ ‘Thanks.’ He took his tea and sat down in the other chair. ‘No, nothing to eat.’ ‘Oh do! Just one, you had so little at lunch and it’s hours before dinner.’ Her shawl dropped off as she bent forward to hand him the biscuits. He took one and put it in his saucer. ‘Oh, those trees along the drive,’ she cried, ‘I could look at them for ever. They are like the most exquisite huge ferns. And you see that one with the grey-silver bark and the clusters of cream coloured flowers, I pulled down a head of them yesterday to smell and the scent’ – she shut her eyes at the memory and her voice thinned away, faint, airy – ‘was like freshly ground nutmegs.’ A little pause. She turned to him and smiled. ‘You do know what nutmegs smell like – do you, Robert?’

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And he smiled back at her. ‘Now how am I going to prove to you that I do?’ Back came Antonio with not only the hot water – with letters on a salver and three rolls of paper. ‘Oh, the post! Oh, how lovely! Oh, Robert, they mustn’t be all for you! Have they just come, Antonio?’ Her thin hands flew up and hovered over the letters that Antonio offered her, bending forward. ‘Just this moment, Signora,’ grinned Antonio. ‘I took-a them from the postman myself. I made-a the postman give them for me.’ ‘Noble Antonio!’ laughed she. ‘There – those are mine, Robert; the rest are yours.’ Antonio wheeled sharply, stiffened, the grin went out of his face. His striped linen jacket and his flat gleaming fringe made him look like a wooden doll. Mr Salesby put the letters into his pocket; the papers lay on the table. He turned the ring, turned the signet ring on his little finger and stared in front of him, blinking, vacant. But she – with her teacup in one hand, the sheets of thin paper in the other, her head tilted back, her lips open, a brush of bright colour on her cheek-bones, sipped, sipped, drank . . . drank. . . . ‘From Lottie,’ came her soft murmur. ‘Poor dear . . . such trouble . . . left foot. She thought . . . neuritis . . . Doctor Blyth . . . flat foot . . . massage. So many robins this year . . . maid most satisfactory . . . Indian Colonel . . . every grain of rice separate . . . very heavy fall of snow.’ And her wide lighted eyes looked up from the letter. ‘Snow, Robert! Think of it!’ And she touched the little dark violets pinned on her thin bosom and went back to the letter. . . . Snow. Snow in London. Millie with the early morning cup of tea. ‘There’s been a terrible fall of snow in the night, Sir.’ ‘Oh, has there, Millie?’ The curtains ring apart, letting in the pale, reluctant light. He raises himself in the bed; he catches a glimpse of the solid houses opposite framed in white, of their window boxes full of great sprays of white coral. . . . In the bathroom – overlooking the back garden. Snow – heavy snow over everything. The lawn is covered with a wavy pattern of cat’s paws; there is a thick, thick icing on the garden table; the withered pods of the laburnum tree are white tassels; only here and there in the ivy is a dark leaf showing. . . . Warming his back at the dining-room fire, the paper drying over a chair. Millie with the bacon. ‘Oh, if you please, Sir, there’s two little boys come as will do the steps and front for a shilling, shall I let them?’ . . . And then flying lightly, lightly down the stairs – Jinnie. ‘Oh, Robert, isn’t it wonderful! Oh, what a pity it has to melt. Where’s the pussy-wee?’ ‘I’ll get him from Millie’ . . . ‘Millie, you might just hand me up the kitten if

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you’ve got him down there.’ ‘Very good, Sir.’ He feels the little beating heart under his hand. ‘Come on, old chap, your Missus wants you.’ ‘Oh, Robert, do show him the snow – his first snow. Shall I open the window and give him a little piece on his paw to hold? . . .’ ‘Well, that’s very satisfactory on the whole – very. Poor Lottie! Darling Anne! How I only wish I could send them something of this,’ she cried, waving her letters at the brilliant, dazzling garden. ‘More tea, Robert? Robert dear, more tea?’ ‘No, thanks, no. It was very good,’ he drawled. ‘Well mine wasn’t. Mine was just like chopped hay. Oh, here comes the Honeymoon Couple.’ Half striding, half running, carrying a basket between them and rods and lines, they came up the drive, up the shallow steps. ‘My! have you been out fishing?’ cried the American Woman. They were out of breath, they panted: ‘Yes, yes, we have been out in a little boat all day. We have caught seven. Four are good to eat. But three we shall give away. To the children.’ Mrs Salesby turned her chair to look; the Topknots laid the snakes down. They were a very dark young couple – black hair, olive skin, brilliant eyes and teeth. He was dressed ‘English fashion’ in a flannel jacket, white trousers and shoes. Round his neck he wore a silk scarf; his head, with his hair brushed back, was bare. And he kept mopping his forehead, rubbing his hands with a brilliant handkerchief. Her white skirt had a patch of wet; her neck and throat were stained a deep pink. When she lifted her arms big half-hoops of perspiration showed under her arm-pits; her hair clung in wet curls to her cheeks. She looked as though her young husband had been dipping her in the sea, and fishing her out again to dry in the sun and then – in with her again – all day. ‘Would Klaymongso like a fish?’ they cried. Their laughing voices charged with excitement beat against the glassed-in verandah like birds, and a strange saltish smell came from the basket. ‘You will sleep well to-night,’ said a Topknot, picking her ear with a knitting needle while the other Topknot smiled and nodded. The Honeymoon Couple looked at each other. A great wave seemed to go over them. They gasped, gulped, staggered a little and then came up laughing – laughing. ‘We cannot go upstairs, we are too tired. We must have tea just as we are. Here – coffee. No – tea. No – coffee. Tea – coffee, Antonio!’ Mrs Salesby turned. ‘Robert! Robert!’ Where was he? He wasn’t there. Oh, there he was at the other end of the verandah, with his back turned, smoking a cigarette. ‘Robert, shall we go for our little turn?’

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‘Right.’ He stumped the cigarette into an ashtray and sauntered over, his eyes on the ground. ‘Will you be warm enough?’ ‘Oh, quite.’ ‘Sure?’ ‘Well,’ she put her hand on his arm, ‘perhaps’ – and gave his arm the faintest pressure – ‘it’s not upstairs, it’s only in the hall – perhaps you’d get me my cape. Hanging up.’ He came back with it and she bent her small head while he dropped it on her shoulders. Then, very stiff, he offered her his arm. She bowed sweetly to the people on the verandah while he just covered a yawn, and they went down the steps together. ‘Vous avez voo ça’ said the American Woman. ‘He is not a man,’ said the Two Topknots, ‘he is an ox. I say to my sister in the morning and at night when we are in bed, I tell her – No man is he, but an ox!’ Wheeling, tumbling, swooping, the laughter of the Honeymoon Couple dashed against the glass of the verandah. The sun was still high. Every leaf, every flower in the garden lay open, motionless, as if exhausted, and a sweet, rich, rank smell filled the quivering air. Out of the thick, fleshy leaves of a cactus there rose an aloe stem loaded with pale flowers that looked as though they had been cut out of butter; light flashed upon the lifted spears of the palms; over a bed of scarlet waxen flowers some big black insects ‘zoomed-zoomed’; a great gaudy creeper, orange splashed with jet, sprawled against a wall. ‘I don’t need my cape after all,’ said she. ‘It’s really too warm.’ So he took it off and carried it over his arm. ‘Let us go down this path here. I feel so well to-day – marvellously better. Good heavens – look at those children! And to think it’s November!’ In a corner of the garden there were two brimming tubs of water. Three little girls, having thoughtfully taken off their drawers and hung them on a bush, their skirts clasped to their waists, were standing in the tubs and tramping up and down. They screamed, their hair fell over their faces, they splashed one another. But suddenly, the smallest, who had a tub to herself, glanced up and saw who was looking. For a moment she seemed overcome with terror, then clumsily she struggled and strained out of her tub, and still holding her clothes above her waist. ‘The Englishman! The Englishman!’ she shrieked and fled away to hide. Shrieking and screaming, the other two followed her. In a moment they were gone; in a moment there was nothing but the two brimming tubs and their little drawers on the bush. ‘How – very – extraordinary!’ said she. ‘What made them so frightened? Surely they were much too young to. . . .’ She looked up at him.

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She thought he looked pale – but wonderfully handsome with that great tropical tree behind him with its long, spiked thorns. For a moment he did not answer. Then he met her glance, and smiling his slow smile, ‘Très rum!’ said he. Très rum! Oh, she felt quite faint. Oh, why should she love him so much just because he said a thing like that. Très rum! That was Robert all over. Nobody else but Robert could ever say such a thing. To be so wonderful, so brilliant, so learned, and then to say in that queer, boyish voice. . . . She could have wept. ‘You know you’re very absurd, sometimes,’ said she. ‘I am,’ he answered. And they walked on. But she was tired. She had had enough. She did not want to walk any more. ‘Leave me here and go for a little constitutional, won’t you? I’ll be in one of these long chairs. What a good thing you’ve got my cape; you won’t have to go upstairs for a rug. Thank you, Robert, I shall look at that delicious heliotrope. . . . You won’t be gone long?’ ‘No – no. You don’t mind being left?’ ‘Silly! I want you to go. I can’t expect you to drag after your invalid wife every minute. . . . How long will you be?’ He took out his watch. ‘It’s just after half-past four. I’ll be back at a quarter past five.’ ‘Back at a quarter past five,’ she repeated, and she lay still in the long chair and folded her hands. He turned away. Suddenly he was back again. ‘Look here, would you like my watch?’ And he dangled it before her. ‘Oh!’ She caught her breath. ‘Very, very much.’ And she clasped the watch, the watch, watch, the darling watch in her fingers. ‘Now go quickly.’ The gates of the Pension Villa Excelsior were open wide, jammed open against some bold geraniums. Stooping a little, staring straight ahead, walking swiftly, he passed through them and began climbing the hill that wound behind the town like a great rope looping the villas together. The dust lay thick. A carriage came bowling along driving towards the Excelsior. In it sat the General and the Countess; they had been for his daily airing. Mr Salesby stepped to one side but the dust beat up, thick, white, stifling like wool. The Countess just had time to nudge the General. ‘There he goes,’ she said spitefully. But the General gave a loud caw and refused to look. ‘It is the Englishman,’ said the driver, turning round and smiling. And the Countess threw up her hands and nodded so amiably that he spat with satisfaction and gave the stumbling horse a cut. On – on – past the finest villas in the town, magnificent places,

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palaces, worth coming any distance to see, past the public gardens with the carved grottoes and statues and stone animals drinking at the fountain, into a poorer quarter. Here the road ran narrow and foul between high lean houses, the ground floors of which were scooped and hollowed into stables and carpenters’ shops. At a fountain ahead of him two old hags were beating linen. As he passed them they squatted back on their haunches, stared, and then their ‘A-hak-kak-kak!’ with the slap, slap, of the stone on the linen sounded after him. He reached the top of the hill; he turned a corner and the town was hidden. Down he looked into a deep valley with a dried up river bed at the bottom. This side and that was covered with small dilapidated houses that had broken stone verandahs where the fruit lay drying, tomato canes in the garden, and from the gates to the doors a trellis of vines. The late sunlight, deep, golden, lay in the cup of the valley; there was a smell of charcoal in the air. In the gardens the men were cutting grapes. He watched a man standing in the greenish shade, raising up, holding a black cluster in one hand, taking the knife from his belt, cutting, laying the bunch in a flat boat-shaped basket. The man worked leisurely, silently, taking hundreds of years over the job. On the hedges on the other side of the road there were grapes small as berries, growing wild, growing among the stones. He leaned against a wall, filled his pipe, put a match to it. . . . Leaned across a gate, turned up the collar of his mackintosh. It was going to rain. It didn’t matter, he was prepared for it. You didn’t expect anything else in November. He looked over the bare field. From the corner by the gate there came the smell of swedes, a great stack of them, wet, rank coloured. Two men passed walking towards the straggling village. ‘Good day!’ ‘Good day!’ By Jove! he had to hurry if he was going to catch that train home. Over the gate, across a field, over the stile, into the lane, swinging along in the drifting rain and dusk. . . . Just home in time for a bath and then a change before supper. . . . In the drawing-room; Jinnie is sitting pretty nearly in the fire. ‘Oh, Robert, I didn’t hear you come in. Did you have a good time? How nice you smell! A present?’ ‘Some bits of blackberry I picked for you. Pretty colour.’ ‘Oh, lovely, Robert! Dennis and Beaty are coming to supper.’ Supper – cold beef, potatoes in their jackets, claret, household bread. They are gay – everybody’s laughing. ‘Oh, we all know Robert,’ says Dennis, breathing on his eyeglasses and polishing them. ‘By the way, Dennis, I picked up a very jolly little edition of. . . .’ A clock struck. He wheeled sharply. What time was it. Five? A quarter past? Back, back the way he came. As he passed through the gates he

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saw her on the look-out. She got up, waved and slowly she came to meet him, dragging the heavy cape. In her hand she carried a spray of heliotrope. ‘You’re late,’ she cried gaily. ‘You’re three minutes late. Here’s your watch, it’s been very good while you were away. Did you have a nice time? Was it lovely? Tell me. Where did you go?’ ‘I say – put this on,’ he said taking the cape from her. ‘Yes, I will. Yes, it’s getting chilly. Shall we go up to our room?’ When they reached the lift she was coughing. He frowned. ‘It’s nothing. I haven’t been out too late. Don’t be cross.’ She sat down on one of the red plush chairs while he rang and rang, and then, getting no answer, kept his finger on the bell. ‘Oh, Robert, do you think you ought to?’ ‘Ought to what?’ The door of the salon opened. ‘What is that? Who is making that noise?’ sounded from within. Klaymongso began to yelp. ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ came from the General. A Topknot darted out with one hand to her ear, opened the staff door, ‘Mr Queet! Mr Queet!’ she bawled. That brought the manager up at a run. ‘Is that you ringing the bell, Mr Salesby? Do you want the lift? Very good, Sir. I’ll take you up myself. Antonio wouldn’t have been a minute, he was just taking off his apron –’ And having ushered them in, the oily manager went to the door of the salon. ‘Very sorry you should have been troubled, ladies and gentlemen.’ Salesby stood in the cage, sucking in his cheeks, staring at the ceiling and turning the ring, turning the signet ring on his little finger. . . . Arrived in their room he went swiftly over to the washstand, shook the bottle, poured her out a dose and brought it across. ‘Sit down. Drink it. And don’t talk.’ And he stood over her while she obeyed. Then he took the glass, rinsed it and put it back in its case. ‘Would you like a cushion?’ ‘No, I’m quite all right. Come over here. Sit down by me just a minute, will you, Robert? Ah, that’s very nice.’ She turned and thrust the piece of heliotrope in the lapel of his coat. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is most becoming.’ And then she leaned her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm round her. ‘Robert –’ her voice like a sigh – like a breath. ‘Yes –’ They sat there for a long while. The sky flamed, paled; the two white beds were like two ships. . . . At last he heard the servant girl running along the corridor with the hot water cans, and gently he released her and turned on the light. ‘Oh, what time is it? Oh, what a heavenly evening. Oh, Robert, I was thinking while you were away this afternoon. . . .’

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They were the last couple to enter the dining-room. The Countess was there with her lorgnette and her fan, the General was there with his special chair and the air cushion and the small rug over his knees. The American Woman was there showing Klaymongso a copy of the Saturday Evening Post. . . . ‘We’re having a feast of reason and a flow of soul.’ The Two Topknots were there feeling over the peaches and the pears in their dish of fruit, and putting aside all they considered unripe or overripe to show to the manager, and the Honeymoon Couple leaned across the table, whispering, trying not to burst out laughing. Mr Queet, in everyday clothes and white canvas shoes, served the soup, and Antonio, in full evening dress, handed it round. ‘No,’ said the American Woman, ‘take it away, Antonio. We can’t eat soup. We can’t eat anything mushy, can we, Klaymongso?’ ‘Take them back and fill them to the rim!’ said the Topknots, and they turned and watched while Antonio delivered the message. ‘What is it? Rice? Is it cooked?’ The Countess peered through her lorgnette. ‘Mr Queet, the General can have some of this soup if it is cooked.’ ‘Very good, Countess.’ The Honeymoon Couple had their fish instead. ‘Give me that one. That’s the one I caught. No it’s not. Yes, it is. No it’s not. Well, it’s looking at me with its eye so it must be. Tee! Hee! Hee!’ Their feet were locked together under the table. ‘Robert, you’re not eating again. Is anything the matter?’ ‘No. Off food, that’s all.’ ‘Oh, what a bother. There are eggs and spinach coming. You don’t like spinach, do you. I must tell them in future. . . .’ An egg and mashed potatoes for the General. ‘Mr Queet! Mr Queet!’ ‘Yes, Countess.’ ‘The General’s egg’s too hard again.’ ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ ‘Very sorry, Countess. Shall I have you another cooked, General?’ . . . They are the first to leave the dining-room. She rises, gathering her shawl and he stands aside, waiting for her to pass, turning the ring, turning the signet ring on his little finger. In the hall Mr Queet hovers. ‘I thought you might not want to wait for the lift. Antonio’s just serving the finger bowls. And I’m sorry the bell won’t ring, it’s out of order. I can’t think what’s happened.’ ‘Oh, I do hope. . . . ’ from her. ‘Get in,’ says he. Mr Queet steps after them and slams the door. . . . . . . ‘Robert, do you mind if I go to bed very soon? Won’t you go

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down to the salon or out into the garden? Or perhaps you might smoke a cigar on the balcony. It’s lovely out there. And I like cigar smoke. I always did. But if you’d rather. . . .’ ‘No, I’ll sit here.’ He takes a chair and sits on the balcony. He hears her moving about in the room, lightly, lightly, moving and rustling. Then she comes over to him. ‘Good night, Robert.’ ‘Good night.’ He takes her hand and kisses the palm. ‘Don’t catch cold.’ The sky is the colour of jade. There are a great many stars; an enormous white moon hangs over the garden. Far away lightning flutters – flutters like a wing – flutters like a broken bird that tries to fly and sinks again and again struggles. The lights from the salon shine across the garden path and there is the sound of a piano. And once the American Woman, opening the French window to let Klaymongso into the garden, cries: ‘Have you seen this moon?’ But nobody answers. He gets very cold sitting there, staring at the balcony rail. Finally he comes inside. The moon – the room is painted white with moonlight. The light trembles in the mirrors; the two beds seem to float. She is asleep. He sees her through the nets, half sitting, banked up with pillows, her white hands crossed on the sheet. Her white cheeks, her fair hair pressed against the pillow, are silvered over. He undresses quickly, stealthily and gets into bed. Lying there, his hands clasped behind his head. . . . . . . In his study. Late summer. The virginia creeper just on the turn. . . . ‘Well, my dear chap, that’s the whole story. That’s the long and the short of it. If she can’t cut away for the next two years and give a decent climate a chance she don’t stand a dog’s – h’m – show. Better be frank about these things.’ ‘Oh, certainly. . . .’ ‘And hang it all, old man, what’s to prevent you going with her? It isn’t as though you’ve got a regular job like us wage earners. You can do what you do wherever you are –’ ‘Two years.’ ‘Yes, I should give it two years. You’ll have no trouble about letting this house you know. As a matter of fact. . . .’ . . . He is with her. ‘Robert, the awful thing is – I suppose it’s my illness – I simply feel I could not go alone. You see – you’re everything. You’re bread and wine, Robert, bread and wine. Oh, my darling – what am I saying? Of course I could, of course I won’t take you away. . . .’ He hears her stirring. Does she want something? ‘Boogies?’

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Good Lord! She is talking in her sleep. They haven’t used that name for years. ‘Boogies. Are you awake?’ ‘Yes, do you want anything?’ ‘Oh, I’m going to be a bother. I’m so sorry. Do you mind? There’s a wretched mosquito inside my net – I can hear him singing. Would you catch him? I don’t want to move because of my heart.’ ‘No, don’t move. Stay where you are.’ He switches on the light, lifts the net. ‘Where is the little beggar? Have you spotted him?’ ‘Yes, there, over by the corner. Oh, I do feel such a fiend to have dragged you out of bed. Do you mind dreadfully?’ ‘No, of course not.’ For a moment he hovers in his blue and white pyjamas. Then, ‘got him,’ he said. ‘Oh, good. Was he a juicy one?’ ‘Beastly.’ He went over to the washstand and dipped his fingers in water. ‘Are you all right now? Shall I switch off the light?’ ‘Yes, please. No. Boogles! Come back here a moment. Sit down by me. Give me your hand.’ She turns his signet ring. ‘Why weren’t you asleep? Boogles, listen. Come closer. I sometimes wonder – do you mind awfully being out here with me?’ He bends down. He kisses her. He tucks her in, he smoothes the pillow. ‘Rot!’ he whispers. Notes Text: BOS. Art and Letters, 3: 2, Spring 1920, pp. 10–14, 17–22, 25. 1. KM made a notebook jotting on 10 January 1920, while staying at Ospedaletti: ‘Thought out The Exile. Appalling night of misery, deciding that J. had no more need of our love.’ The story, whose title she changed to ‘The Man without a Temperament’, was written the next day: ‘Worked from 9.30 a.m. to a quarter after midnight only stopping to eat. Finished the story. [. . .] These are the worst days of my whole life’ (KMN, 2, p. 188). That her widowed father had just remarried may have added to her depression, as his warm behaviour as a husband she at times set against JMM’s patent failings and his emotional distance. The pervading distress of her recent notebook entries and letters variously contributed to this story of an ill wife and a painfully dutiful husband, with the penetrating, bitter punning of its last line. She was particularly anxious that when the story appeared it follow her copy exactly. As she instructed JMM on 2 February 1920, she must have the proofs sent to her: ‘I cant afford mistakes. Another word wont do. I chose every single word’ (CLKM, 3, p. 204).

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2. Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), Prime Minister of France 1906–9, and again from 1917 to 1920, noted for his retaliatory policy against Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, following World War One.

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The Wrong House1 Miss Lavinia Bean sat at the dining room window finishing another pink vest for the mission. She was crocheting up the sides and after that there was the long tie of chain stitch to make and then it was done. The day was chill. She liked to lie in the bath and very gently swish the water over her white jellified old body. As she lay there, her arms at her sides, her legs straight out, she thought this is how I shall look, this is how they will arrange me in my coffin. And it seemed [to] her as she gazed down at herself terribly true that people were made to fit coffins – made in the shape of coffins. Just then she saw her wet shining toes as they were pressed against the end of the bath. They looked so gay, so unconscious of their fate. They seemed really to be smiling all in a row – the little toe so small. ‘Oh!’ She gave the sponge a tragic squeeze. ‘Two purl – two plain – woolinfrontoftheneedle – and knit two together.’ Like an old song, like a song that she had sung so often that only to breathe was to sing it, she murmured the knitting pattern. Another vest was nearly finished for the mission parcel. ‘It’s your vests, Mrs. Bean, that are so acceptable. Look at these poor little mites without a shred!’ And the churchwoman showed her a photograph of repulsive little black objects with bellies shaped like lemons. . . . ‘Two purl – two plain.’ Down dropped the knitting on to her lap; she gave a great long sigh, stared in front of her for a moment and then picked the knitting up and began again. What did she think about when she sighed like that? Nothing. It was a habit. She was always sighing. On the stairs, particularly, as she went up and down, she stopped, holding her dress up with one hand, the other hand on the banister, staring at the steps – sighing. ‘Woolinfrontoftheneedle. . . .’ She sat at the dining-room window facing the street. It was a bitter autumn day; the wind ran in the street like a thin dog; the houses opposite looked as though they had been

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cut out with a pair of ugly steel scissors and pasted on to the grey paper sky. There was not a soul to be seen. ‘Knit two together!’ The clock struck three. Only three? It seemed dusk already; dusk came floating into the room, heavy, powdery dusk settling on the furniture, filming over the mirror. Now the kitchen clock struck three – two minutes late – for this was the clock to go by and not the kitchen clock. She was alone in the house. Dollicas was out shopping; she had been gone since a quarter to two. Really, she got slower and slower! What did she do with the time? One cannot spend more than a certain time buying a chicken. . . . And oh, that habit of hers of dropping the stove-rings when she made up the fire! And she set her lips, as she had set her lips for the past thirty-five years, at that habit of Dollicas’. There came a faint noise from the street, a noise of horses’ hooves. She leaned further out to see. Good gracious! It was a funeral. First the glass coach, rolling along briskly with the gleaming, varnished coffin inside (but no wreaths), with three men in front and two standing at the back, then some carriages, some with black horses, some with brown. The dust came bowling up the road, half hiding the procession. She scanned the houses opposite to see which had the blinds down. What horrible-looking men, too! laughing and joking. One leaned over to one side and blew his nose with his black glove – horrible! She gathered up the knitting, hiding her hands in it. Dollicas surely would have known. . . . There, they were passing. . . . It was the other end. . . . What was this? What was happening? What could it mean? Help, God! Her old heart leaped like a fish and then fell as the glass coach drew up outside her door, as the outside men scrambled down from the front, swung off the back, and the tallest of them, with a glance of surprise at the windows, came quickly, stealthily, up the garden path. ‘No!’ she groaned. But yes, the blow fell, and for the moment it struck her down. She gasped, a great cold shiver went through her, and stayed in her hands and knees. She saw the man withdraw a step, and again – that puzzled glance at the blinds – and then – ‘No!’ she groaned, and stumbling, catching hold of things, she managed to get to the door before the blow fell again. She opened it, her chin trembled, her teeth clacked; somehow or other she brought out, ‘The wrong house!’ Oh! he was shocked. As she stepped back she saw behind him the black hats clustered at the gate. ‘The wrong ’ouse!’ he muttered. She could only nod. She was shutting the door again when he fished out of the tail of his coat a black, brassbound notebook and swiftly opened it. ‘No. 20 Shuttleworth Crescent?’ ‘S-street! Crescent round the corner.’ Her hand lifted to point, but shook and fell.

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He was taking off his hat as she shut the door and leaned against it, whimpering in the dusky hall, ‘Go away! Go away!’ Clockety-clock-clock. Cluk! Cluk! Clockety-clock-cluk! sounded from outside, and then a faint Cluk! Cluk! and then silence. They were gone. They were out of sight. But still she stayed leaning against the door, staring into the hall, staring at the hall-stand that was like a great lobster with hat-pegs for feelers. But she thought of nothing; she did not even think of what had happened. It was as if she had fallen into a cave whose walls were darkness. . . . She came to herself with a deep inward shock, hearing the gate bang and quick, short steps crunching the gravel; it was Dollicas hurrying round to the back door. Dollicas must not find her there; and wavering, wavering like a candle-flame, back she went into the dining-room to her seat by the window. Dollicas was in the kitchen. Klang! went one of the iron rings into the fender. Then her voice, ‘I’m just putting on the tea-kettle, ’m.’ Since they had been alone she had got into the way of shouting from one room to another. The old woman coughed to steady herself. ‘Please bring in the lamp,’ she cried. ‘The lamp!’ Dollicas came across the passage and stood in the doorway. ‘Why, it’s only just on four, ’m.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Mrs. Bean dully. ‘Bring it in!’ And a moment later the elderly maid appeared, carrying the gentle lamp in both hands. Her broad soft face had the look it always had when she carried anything, as though she walked in her sleep. She set it down on the table, lowered the wick, raised it, and then lowered it again. Then she straightened up and looked across at her mistress. ‘Why, ’m, whatever’s that you’re treading on?’ It was the mission vest. ‘T’t! T’t!’ As Dollicas picked it up she thought, ‘The old lady has been asleep. She’s not awake yet.’ Indeed the old lady looked glazed and dazed, and when she took up the knitting she drew out a needle of stitches and began to unwind what she had done. ‘Don’t forget the mace,’ she said. Her voice sounded thin and dry. She was thinking of the chicken for that night’s supper. And Dollicas understood and answered, ‘It’s a lovely young bird!’ as she pulled down the blind before going back to her kitchen. . . . Notes U Text: First two paragraphs, KMN, 2, p. 182, rest from SCOS. 1. KM noted on 16 January 1920, ‘In the evening began my new story, “A Strange Mistake”’ (KMN, 2, p. 188). The title was changed by JMM.

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•

Revelations From eight o’clock in the morning until about half-past eleven Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours were – agonizing, simply. It was not as though she could control them. ‘Perhaps if I were ten years younger. . . .’ she would say. For now that she was thirty-three she had a queer little way of referring to her age on all occasions, of looking at her friends with grave, childish eyes and saying: ‘Yes, I remember how twenty years ago. . . .’ or of drawing Ralph’s attention to the girls – real girls – with lovely youthful arms and throats and swift hesitating movements who sat near them in restaurants. ‘Perhaps if I were ten years younger. . . .’ ‘Why don’t you get Marie to sit outside your door and absolutely forbid anybody to come near your room until you ring your bell?’ ‘Oh, if it were as simple as that!’ She threw her little gloves down and pressed her eyelids with her fingers in the way he knew so well. ‘But in the first place I’d be so conscious of Marie sitting there, Marie shaking her finger at Rudd and Mrs Moon, Marie as a kind of cross between a wardress and a nurse for mental cases! And then, there’s the post. One can’t get over the fact that the post comes, and once it has come, who – who – could wait until eleven for the letters?’ His eyes grew bright; he quickly, lightly clasped her. ‘My letters, darling?’ ‘Perhaps,’ she drawled, softly, and she drew her hand over his reddish hair, smiling too, but thinking: ‘Heavens! What a stupid thing to say!’ But this morning she had been awakened by one great slam of the front door. Bang. The flat shook. What was it? She jerked up in bed, clutching the eiderdown; her heart beat. What could it be? Then she heard voices in the passage. Marie knocked, and, as the door opened, with a sharp tearing rip out flew the blind and the curtains, stiffening, flapping, jerking. The tassel of the blind knocked – knocked against the window. ‘Eh-h, voilà!’ cried Marie, setting down the tray and running. ‘C’est le vent, Madame. C’est un vent insupportable.’ Up rolled the blind; the window went up with a jerk; a whiteygreyish light filled the room. Monica caught a glimpse of a huge pale sky and a cloud like a torn shirt dragging across before she hid her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Marie! the curtains! Quick, the curtains!’ Monica fell back into the

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bed and then ‘Ring-ting-a-ping-ping, ring-ting-a-ping-ping.’ It was the telephone. The limit of her suffering was reached; she grew quite calm. ‘Go and see, Marie.’ ‘It is Monsieur. To know if Madame will lunch at Princes’ at onethirty to-day.’ Yes, it was Monsieur himself. Yes, he had asked that the message be given to Madame immediately. Instead of replying, Monica put her cup down and asked Marie in a small wondering voice what time it was. It was half-past nine. She lay still and half closed her eyes. ‘Tell Monsieur I cannot come,’ she said gently. But as the door shut, anger – anger suddenly gripped her close, close, violent, half strangling her. How dared he? How dared Ralph do such a thing when he knew how agonizing her nerves were in the morning! Hadn’t she explained and described and even – though lightly, of course; she couldn’t say such a thing directly – given him to understand that this was the one unforgivable thing. And then to choose this frightful windy morning. Did he think it was just a fad of hers, a little feminine folly to be laughed at and tossed aside? Why, only last night she had said: ‘Ah, but you must take me seriously, too.’ And he had replied: ‘My darling, you’ll not believe me, but I know you infinitely better than you know yourself. Every delicate thought and feeling I bow to, I treasure. Yes, laugh! I love the way your lip lifts’ – and he had leaned across the table – ‘I don’t care who sees that I adore all of you. I’d be with you on a mountain-top and have all the searchlights of the world play upon us.’ ‘Heavens!’ Monica almost clutched her head. Was it possible he had really said that? How incredible men were! And she had loved him – how could she have loved a man who talked like that. What had she been doing ever since that dinner party months ago, when he had seen her home and asked if he might come and ‘see again that slow Arabian smile’? Oh, what nonsense – what utter nonsense – and yet she remembered at the time a strange deep thrill unlike anything she had ever felt before. ‘Coal! Coal! Coal! Old iron! Old iron! Old iron!’ sounded from below. It was all over. Understand her? He had understood nothing. That ringing her up on a windy morning was immensely significant. Would he understand that? She could almost have laughed. ‘You rang me up when the person who understood me simply couldn’t have.’ It was the end. And when Marie said: ‘Monsieur replied he would be in the vestibule in case Madame changed her mind,’ Monica said: ‘No, not verbena, Marie. Carnations. Two handfuls.’ A wild white morning, a tearing, rocking wind. Monica sat down before the mirror. She was pale. The maid combed back her dark hair – combed it all back – and her face was like a mask, with pointed eyelids and dark red lips. As she stared at herself in the blueish

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shadowy glass she suddenly felt – oh, the strangest, most tremendous excitement filling her slowly, slowly, until she wanted to fling out her arms, to laugh, to scatter everything, to shock Marie, to cry: ‘I’m free. I’m free. I’m free as the wind.’ And now all this vibrating, trembling, exciting, flying world was hers. It was her kingdom. No, no, she belonged to nobody but Life. ‘That will do, Marie,’ she stammered. ‘My hat, my coat, my bag. And now get me a taxi.’ Where was she going? Oh, anywhere. She could not stand this silent flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly, quiet, feminine interior. She must be out; she must be driving quickly – anywhere, anywhere. ‘The taxi is there, Madame.’ As she pressed open the big outer doors of the flats the wild wind caught her and floated her across the pavement. Where to? She got in, and smiling radiantly at the cross, cold-looking driver, she told him to take her to her hairdresser’s. What would she have done without her hairdresser? Whenever Monica had nowhere else to go to or nothing on earth to do she drove there. She might just have her hair waved, and by that time she’d have thought out a plan. The cross, cold driver drove at a tremendous pace, and she let herself be hurled from side to side. She wished he would go faster and faster. Oh, to be free of Princes’ at one-thirty, of being the tiny kitten in the swansdown basket, of being the Arabian, and the grave, delighted child and the little wild creature. . . . ‘Never again,’ she cried aloud, clenching her small fist. But the cab had stopped, and the driver was standing holding the door open for her. The hairdresser’s shop was warm and glittering. It smelled of soap and burnt paper and wallflower brilliantine. There was Madame behind the counter, round, fat, white, her head like a powder-puff rolling on a black satin pin-cushion. Monica always had the feeling that they loved her in this shop and understood her – the real her – far better than many of her friends did. She was her real self here, and she and Madame had often talked – quite strangely – together. Then there was George who did her hair, young, dark, slender George. She was really fond of him. But to-day – how curious! Madame hardly greeted her. Her face was whiter than ever, but rims of bright red showed round her blue bead eyes, and even the rings on her pudgy fingers did not flash. They were cold, dead, like chips of glass. When she called through the walltelephone to George there was a note in her voice that had never been there before. But Monica would not believe this. No, she refused to. It was just her imagination. She sniffed greedily the warm, scented air, and passed behind the velvet curtain into the small cubicle. Her hat and jacket were off and hanging from the peg, and still

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George did not come. This was the first time he had ever not been there to hold the chair for her, to take her hat and hang up her bag, dangling it in his fingers as though it were something he’d never seen before – something fairy. And how quiet the shop was! There was not a sound even from Madame. Only the wind blew, shaking the old house; the wind hooted, and the portraits of Ladies of the Pompadour Period1 looked down and smiled, cunning and sly. Monica wished she hadn’t come. Oh, what a mistake to have come! Fatal. Fatal. Where was George? If he didn’t appear the next moment she would go away. She took off the white kimono. She didn’t want to look at herself any more. When she opened a big pot of cream on the glass shelf her fingers trembled. There was a tugging feeling at her heart as though her happiness – her marvellous happiness – were trying to get free. ‘I’ll go. I’ll not stay.’ She took down her hat. But just at that moment steps sounded, and, looking in the mirror, she saw George bowing in the doorway. How queerly he smiled! It was the mirror of course. She turned round quickly. His lips curled back in a sort of grin, and – wasn’t he unshaved? – he looked almost green in the face. ‘Very sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he mumbled, sliding, gliding forward. Oh, no, she wasn’t going to stay. ‘I’m afraid,’ she began. But he had lighted the gas and laid the tongs across, and was holding out the kimono. ‘It’s a wind,’ he said. Monica submitted. She smelled his fresh young fingers pinning the jacket under her chin. ‘Yes, there is a wind,’ said she, sinking back into the chair. And silence fell. George took out the pins in his expert way. Her hair tumbled back, but he didn’t hold it as he usually did, as though to feel how fine and soft and heavy it was. He didn’t say it ‘was in a lovely condition.’ He let it fall, and, taking a brush out of a drawer, he coughed faintly, cleared his throat and said dully: ‘Yes, it’s a pretty strong one, I should say it was.’ She had no reply to make. The brush fell on her hair. Oh, oh, how mournful, how mournful! It fell quick and light, it fell like leaves; and then it fell heavy, tugging like the tugging at her heart. ‘That’s enough,’ she cried, shaking herself free. ‘Did I do it too much?’ asked George. He crouched over the tongs. ‘I’m sorry.’ There came the smell of burnt paper – the smell she loved – and he swung the hot tongs round in his hand, staring before him. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if it rained.’ He took up a piece of her hair, when – she couldn’t bear it any longer – she stopped him. She looked at him; she saw herself looking at him in the white kimono like a nun. ‘Is there something the matter here? Has

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something happened?’ But George gave a half shrug and a grimace. ‘Oh, no, Madame. Just a little occurrence.’ And he took up the piece of hair again. But, oh, she wasn’t deceived. That was it. Something awful had happened. The silence – really, the silence seemed to come drifting down like flakes of snow. She shivered. It was cold in the little cubicle, all cold and glittering. The nickel taps and jets and sprays looked somehow almost malignant. The wind rattled the window-frame; a piece of iron banged, and the young man went on changing the tongs, crouching over her. Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the loneliness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away. The tugging feeling seemed to rise into her throat. It ached, ached; she longed to cry. ‘That will do,’ she whispered. ‘Give me the pins.’ As he stood beside her, so submissive, so silent, she nearly dropped her arms and sobbed. She couldn’t bear any more. Like a wooden man the gay young George still slid, glided, handed her her hat and veil, took the note, and brought back the change. She stuffed it into her bag. Where was she going now? George took a brush. ‘There is a little powder on your coat,’ he murmured. He brushed it away. And then suddenly he raised himself and, looking at Monica, gave a strange wave with the brush and said: ‘The truth is, Madame, since you are an old customer – my little daughter died this morning. A first child’ – and then his white face crumpled like paper, and he turned his back on her and began brushing the cotton kimono. ‘Oh, oh,’ Monica began to cry. She ran out of the shop into the taxi. The driver, looking furious, swung off the seat and slammed the door again. ‘Where to?’ ‘Princes’,’ she sobbed. And all the way there she saw nothing but a tiny wax doll with a feather of gold hair, lying meek, its tiny hands and feet crossed. And then just before she came to Princes’ she saw a flower shop full of white flowers. Oh, what a perfect thought. Lilies-of-the-valley, and white pansies, double white violets and white velvet ribbon. . . . From an unknown friend. . . . From one who understands. . . . For a Little Girl. . . . She tapped against the window, but the driver did not hear; and, anyway, they were at Princes’ already. Notes Text: BOS. Athenaeum, 4702, 11 June 1920, pp. 758–9. Early draft can be found in KMN, 2, pp. 211–15, dated I.V.1920. 1. The period of refined taste and fashion named after Madame de Pompadour (1721–64), mistress of Louis XV and patron of Voltaire.

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The Escape1 It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they had missed the train. What if the idiotic hotel people had refused to produce the bill? Wasn’t that simply because he hadn’t impressed upon the waiter at lunch that they must have it by two o’clock? Any other man would have sat there and refused to move until they handed it over. But no! His exquisite belief in human nature had allowed him to get up and expect one of those idiots to bring it to their room. . . . And then, when the voiture did arrive, while they were still (Oh, Heavens!) waiting for change, why hadn’t he seen to the arrangement of the boxes so that they could, at least, have started the moment the money had come? Had he expected her to go outside, to stand under the awning in the heat and point with her parasol? Very amusing picture of English domestic life. Even when the driver had been told how fast he had to drive he had paid no attention whatsoever – just smiled. ‘Oh,’ she groaned, ‘if she’d been a driver she couldn’t have stopped smiling herself at the absurd, ridiculous way he was urged to hurry.’ And she sat back and imitated his voice: ‘Allez, vite, vite’ – and begged the driver’s pardon for troubling him. . . . And then the station – unforgettable – with the sight of the jaunty little train shuffling away and those hideous children waving from the windows. ‘Oh, why am I made to bear these things? Why am I exposed to them? . . . The glare, the flies, while they waited, and he and the stationmaster put their heads together over the time-table, trying to find this other train, which, of course, they wouldn’t catch. The people who’d gathered round, and the woman who’d held up that baby with that awful, awful head. . . . ‘Oh, to care as I care – to feel as I feel, and never to be saved anything – never to know for one moment what it was to . . . to. . . .’ Her voice had changed. It was shaking now – crying now. She fumbled with her bag, and produced from its little maw a scented handkerchief. She put up her veil and, as though she were doing it for somebody else, pitifully, as though she were saying to somebody else: ‘I know, my darling,’ she pressed the handkerchief to her eyes. The little bag, with its shiny, silvery jaws open, lay on her lap. He could see her powder-puff, her rouge stick, a bundle of letters, a phial of tiny black pills like seeds, a broken cigarette, a mirror, white ivory tablets with lists on them that had been heavily scored through. He thought: ‘In Egypt she would be buried with those things.’

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They had left the last of the houses, those small straggling houses with bits of broken pot flung among the flower-beds and half-naked hens scratching round the doorsteps. Now they were mounting a long steep road that wound round the hill and over into the next bay. The horses stumbled, pulling hard. Every five minutes, every two minutes the driver trailed the whip across them. His stout back was solid as wood; there were boils on his reddish neck, and he wore a new, a shining new straw hat. . . . There was a little wind, just enough wind to blow to satin the new leaves on the fruit trees, to stroke the fine grass, to turn to silver the smoky olives – just enough wind to start in front of the carriage a whirling, twirling snatch of dust that settled on their clothes like the finest ash. When she took out her powder-puff the powder came flying over them both. ‘Oh, the dust,’ she breathed, ‘the disgusting, revolting dust.’ And she put down her veil and lay back as if overcome. ‘Why don’t you put up your parasol?’ he suggested. It was on the front seat, and he leaned forward to hand it to her. At that she suddenly sat upright and blazed again. ‘Please leave my parasol alone! I don’t want my parasol! And anyone who was not utterly insensitive would know that I’m far, far too exhausted to hold up a parasol. And with a wind like this tugging at it. . . . Put it down at once,’ she flashed, and then snatched the parasol from him, tossed it into the crumpled hood behind, and subsided, panting. Another bend of the road, and down the hill there came a troop of little children, shrieking and giggling, little girls with sun-bleached hair, little boys in faded soldiers’ caps. In their hands they carried flowers – any kind of flowers – grabbed by the head, and these they offered, running beside the carriage. Lilac, faded lilac, greeny-white snowballs, one arum lily, a handful of hyacinths. They thrust the flowers and their impish faces into the carriage; one even threw into her lap a bunch of marigolds. Poor little mice! He had his hand in his trouser pocket before her. ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t give them anything. Oh, how typical of you! Horrid little monkeys! Now they’ll follow us all the way. Don’t encourage them; you would encourage beggars’; and she hurled the bunch out of the carriage with, ‘Well, do it when I’m not there, please.’ He saw the queer shock on the children’s faces. They stopped running, lagged behind, and then they began to shout something, and went on shouting until the carriage had rounded yet another bend. ‘Oh, how many more are there before the top of the hill is reached? The horses haven’t trotted once. Surely it isn’t necessary for them to walk the whole way.’

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‘We shall be there in a minute now,’ he said, and took out his cigarette-case. At that she turned round towards him. She clasped her hands and held them against her breast; her dark eyes looked immense, imploring, behind her veil; her nostrils quivered, she bit her lip, and her head shook with a little nervous spasm. But when she spoke, her voice was quite weak and very, very calm. ‘I want to ask you something. I want to beg something of you,’ she said. ‘I’ve asked you hundreds and hundreds of times before, but you’ve forgotten. It’s such a little thing, but if you knew what it meant to me. . . .’ She pressed her hands together. ‘But you can’t know. No human creature could know and be so cruel.’ And then, slowly, deliberately, gazing at him with those huge, sombre eyes: ‘I beg and implore you for the last time that when we are driving together you won’t smoke. If you could imagine,’ she said, ‘the anguish I suffer when that smoke comes floating across my face. . . .’ ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I won’t. I forgot.’ And he put the case back. ‘Oh, no,’ said she, and almost began to laugh, and put the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘You couldn’t have forgotten. Not that.’ The wind came, blowing stronger. They were at the top of the hill. ‘Hoy-yip-yip-yip,’ cried the driver. They swung down the road that fell into a small valley, skirted the sea coast at the bottom of it, and then coiled over a gentle ridge on the other side. Now there were houses again, blue-shuttered against the heat, with bright burning gardens, with geranium carpets flung over the pinkish walls. The coast-line was dark; on the edge of the sea a white silky fringe just stirred. The carriage swung down the hill, bumped, shook. ‘Yi-ip,’ shouted the driver. She clutched the sides of the seat, she closed her eyes, and he knew she felt this was happening on purpose; this swinging and bumping, this was all done – and he was responsible for it, somehow – to spite her because she had asked if they couldn’t go a little faster. But just as they reached the bottom of the valley there was one tremendous lurch. The carriage nearly overturned, and he saw her eyes blaze at him, and she positively hissed, ‘I suppose you are enjoying this?’ They went on. They reached the bottom of the valley. Suddenly she stood up. ‘Cocher! Cocher! Arrêtez-vous!’ She turned round and looked into the crumpled hood behind. ‘I knew it,’ she exclaimed. ‘I knew it. I heard it fall, and so did you, at that last bump.’ ‘What? Where?’ ‘My parasol. It’s gone. The parasol that belonged to my mother. The parasol that I prize more than – more than. . . .’ She was simply beside herself. The driver turned round, his gay, broad face smiling. ‘I, too, heard something,’ said he, simply and gaily. ‘But I thought as Monsieur and Madame said nothing. . . .’

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‘There. You hear that. Then you must have heard it too. So that accounts for the extraordinary smile on your face. . . .’ ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘it can’t be gone. If it fell out it will be there still. Stay where you are. I’ll fetch it.’ But she saw through that. Oh, how she saw through it! ‘No, thank you.’ And she bent her spiteful, smiling eyes upon him, regardless of the driver. ‘I’ll go myself. I’ll walk back and find it, and trust you not to follow. For’ – knowing the driver did not understand, she spoke softly, gently – ‘if I don’t escape from you for a minute I shall go mad.’ She stepped out of the carriage. ‘My bag.’ He handed it to her. ‘Madame prefers. . . .’ But the driver had already swung down from his seat, and was seated on the parapet reading a small newspaper. The horses stood with hanging heads. It was still. The man in the carriage stretched himself out, folded his arms. He felt the sun beat on his knees. His head was sunk on his breast. ‘Hish, hish,’ sounded from the sea. The wind sighed in the valley and was quiet. He felt himself, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as it were, of ashes. And the sea sounded, ‘Hish, hish.’ It was then that he saw the tree, that he was conscious of its presence just inside a garden gate. It was an immense tree with a round, thick silver stem and a great arc of copper leaves that gave back the light and yet were sombre. There was something beyond the tree – a whiteness, a softness, an opaque mass, half-hidden – with delicate pillars. As he looked at the tree he felt his breathing die away and he became part of the silence. It seemed to grow, it seemed to expand in the quivering heat until the great carved leaves hid the sky, and yet it was motionless. Then from within its depths or from beyond there came the sound of a woman’s voice. A woman was singing. The warm untroubled voice floated upon the air, and it was all part of the silence as he was part of it. Suddenly, as the voice rose, soft, dreaming, gentle, he knew that it would come floating to him from the hidden leaves and his peace was shattered. What was happening to him? Something stirred in his breast. Something dark, something unbearable and dreadful pushed in his bosom, and like a great weed it floated, rocked . . . it was warm, stifling. He tried to struggle to tear at it, and at the same moment – all was over. Deep, deep, he sank into the silence, staring at the tree and waiting for the voice that came floating, falling, until he felt himself enfolded. *

*

*

In the shaking corridor of the train. It was night. The train rushed and roared through the dark. He held on with both hands to the brass rail. The door of their carriage was open.

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‘Do not disturb yourself, Monsieur. He will come in and sit down when he wants to. He likes – he likes – it is his habit. . . . Oui, Madame, je suis un peu souffrante. . . . Mes nerfs. Oh, but my husband is never so happy as when he is travelling. He likes roughing it. . . . My husband. . . . My husband. . . .’ The voices murmured, murmured. They were never still. But so great was his heavenly happiness as he stood there he wished he might live for ever. Notes Text: BOS. Athenaeum, 4706, 9 July 1920, pp. 38–9. 1. In a letter to Sydney and Violet Schiff on 2 May 1920, KM mentioned ‘I have nearly finished the story I wrote for you’, and again on 10 May, referred to ‘my story about your tree’ (CLKM, 4, p. 4, p. 10). The Schiffs’ home in Roquebrune, close to Menton, was called ‘Big Tree Villa’, which presumably suggested the quasi-mystical ‘epiphany’ near the end of the story.

•

A Dance at the – – – ‘Is Life going to be all like this?’ thought Laura. And she lay down in bed and put her arms round the pillow and the pillow whispered, ‘Yes – this is what Life is going to be like – only always more and more splendid, more and more marvellous!’ ‘But supposing,’ said Laura, speaking very fast with the greatest possible earnestness, ‘supposing you were terrifically successful and were married to the person you adored and you had every single thing you wanted and – and your first child was just born (that’s supposed to be a marvellous moment, isn’t it?) would you be really happier than you are now?’ They stared hard at each other a moment. ‘Then no,’ said Laurie. ‘I simply couldn’t be.’ At his words Laura gave a beaming smile, a great sigh, and squeezed her brother’s arm. ‘Oh what a relief!’ she said. ‘Neither could I – not possibly!’ ‘Laura, Laurie. What are you doing up there? Come down at once. The Ns have arrived.’ Laura stooped down and kissed her grandmother.

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‘You’re by far the most beautiful girl in the room, my little precious,’ she whispered. As Grandma passed on, the Major and Laura suddenly turned round to catch her eye. She raised her eyebrows in a very curious astounded way, and sucked in her cheek. The old woman actually blushed. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 232–3. Scrapbook, pp. 141–2. The sketch is written in Notebook 9, ATL, a few pages from a reference to KM’s review of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue, published in the Athenaeum, 4705, 2 July 1920, p. 11.

•

Bank Holiday A stout man with a pink face wears dingy white flannel trousers, a blue coat with a pink handkerchief showing, and a straw hat much too small for him, perched at the back of his head. He plays the guitar. A little chap in white canvas shoes, his face hidden under a felt hat like a broken wing, breathes into a flute; and a tall thin fellow, with bursting over-ripe button boots, draws ribbons – long, twisted, streaming ribbons – of tune out of a fiddle. They stand, unsmiling, but not serious, in the broad sunlight opposite the fruit-shop; the pink spider of a hand beats the guitar, the little squat hand, with a brassand-turquoise ring, forces the reluctant flute, and the fiddler’s arm tries to saw the fiddle in two. A crowd collects, eating oranges and bananas, tearing off the skins, dividing, sharing. One young girl has even a basket of strawberries, but she does not eat them. ‘Aren’t they dear!’ She stares at the tiny pointed fruits as if she were afraid of them. The Australian soldier laughs. ‘Here, go on, there’s not more than a mouthful.’ But he doesn’t want her to eat them, either. He likes to watch her little frightened face, and her puzzled eyes lifted to his: ‘Aren’t they a price!’ He pushes out his chest and grins. Old fat women in velvet bodices – old dusty pin-cushions – lean old hags like worn umbrellas with a quivering bonnet on top; young women, in muslins, with hats that might have grown on hedges, and high pointed shoes; men in khaki, sailors, shabby clerks, young Jews in fine cloth suits with padded shoulders and wide trousers, ‘hospital boys’ in blue – the sun discovers them

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– the loud, bold music holds them together in one big knot for a moment. The young ones are larking, pushing each other on and off the pavement, dodging, nudging; the old ones are talking: ‘So I said to ’im, if you wants the doctor to yourself, fetch ’im, says I.’ ‘An’ by the time they was cooked there wasn’t so much as you could put in the palm of me ’and!’ The only ones who are quiet are the ragged children. They stand, as close up to the musicians as they can get, their hands behind their backs, their eyes big. Occasionally a leg hops, an arm wags. A tiny staggerer, overcome, turns round twice, sits down solemn, and then gets up again. ‘Ain’t it lovely?’ whispers a small girl behind her hand. And the music breaks into bright pieces, and joins together again, and again breaks, and is dissolved, and the crowd scatters, moving slowly up the hill. At the corner of the road the stalls begin. ‘Ticklers! Tuppence a tickler! ’Ool ’ave a tickler? Tickle ’em up, boys.’ Little soft brooms on wire handles. They are eagerly bought by the soldiers. ‘Buy a golliwog! Tuppence a golliwog!’ ‘Buy a jumping donkey! All alive-oh!’ ‘Su-perior chewing gum. Buy something to do, boys.’ ‘Buy a rose. Give ’er a rose, boy. Roses, lady?’ ‘Fevvers! Fevvers!’ They are hard to resist. Lovely, streaming feathers, emerald green, scarlet, bright blue, canary yellow. Even the babies wear feathers threaded through their bonnets. And an old woman in a three-cornered paper hat cries as if it were her final parting advice, the only way of saving yourself or of bringing him to his senses: ‘Buy a three-cornered ’at, my dear, an’ put it on!’ It is a flying day, half sun, half wind. When the sun goes in a shadow flies over; when it comes out again it is fiery. The men and women feel it burning their backs, their breasts and their arms; they feel their bodies expanding, coming alive . . . so that they make large embracing gestures, lift up their arms, for nothing, swoop down on a girl, blurt into laughter. Lemonade! A whole tank of it stands on a table covered with a cloth; and lemons like blunted fishes blob in the yellow water. It looks solid, like a jelly, in the thick glasses. Why can’t they drink it without spilling it? Everybody spills it, and before the glass is handed back the last drops are thrown in a ring. Round the ice-cream cart, with its striped awning and bright brass cover, the children cluster. Little tongues lick, lick round the cream trumpets, round the squares. The cover is lifted, the wooden spoon plunges in; one shuts one’s eyes to feel it, silently scrunching.

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‘Let these little birds tell you your future!’ She stands beside the cage, a shrivelled ageless Italian, clasping and unclasping her dark claws. Her face, a treasure of delicate carving, is tied in a green-andgold scarf. And inside their prison the love-birds flutter towards the papers in the seed-tray. ‘You have great strength of character. You will marry a red-haired man and have three children. Beware of a blonde woman. Look out! Look out! A motor-car driven by a fat chauffeur comes rushing down the hill. Inside there is a blonde woman, pouting, leaning forward – rushing through your life – beware! beware!’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am an auctioneer by profession, and if what I tell you is not the truth I am liable to have my licence taken away from me and a heavy imprisonment.’ He holds the licence across his chest; the sweat pours down his face into his paper collar; his eyes looked glazed. When he takes off his hat there is a deep pucker of angry flesh on his forehead. Nobody buys a watch. Look out again! A huge barouche comes swinging down the hill with two old, old babies inside. She holds up a lace parasol; he sucks the knob of his cane, and the fat old bodies roll together as the cradle rocks, and the steaming horse leaves a trail of manure as it ambles down the hill. Under a tree, Professor Leonard, in cap and gown, stands beside his banner. He is here ‘for one day’, from the London, Paris and Brussels Exhibition, to tell your fortune from your face. And he stands, smiling encouragement, like a clumsy dentist. When the big men, romping and swearing a moment before, hand across their sixpence, and stand before him, they are suddenly serious, dumb, timid, almost blushing as the Professor’s quick hand notches the printed card. They are like little children caught playing in a forbidden garden by the owner, stepping from behind a tree. The top of the hill is reached. How hot it is! How fine it is! The public-house is open, and the crowd presses in. The mother sits on the pavement edge with her baby, and the father brings her out a glass of dark, brownish stuff, and then savagely elbows his way in again. A reek of beer floats from the public-house, and a loud clatter and rattle of voices. The wind has dropped, and the sun burns more fiercely than ever. Outside the two swing-doors there is a thick mass of children like flies at the mouth of a sweet-jar. And up, up the hill come the people, with ticklers and golliwogs, and roses and feathers. Up, up they thrust into the light and heat, shouting, laughing, squealing, as though they were being pushed by something, far below, and by the sun, far ahead of them – drawn up into the full, bright, dazzling radiance to . . . what?

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Notes Text: GPOS. Athenaeum, 4710, 6 August 1920, pp. 166–7.

•

The Wind Blows Suddenly – dreadfully – she wakes up. What has happened? Something dreadful has happened. No – nothing has happened. It is only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows, banging a piece of iron on the roof and making her bed tremble. Leaves flutter past the window, up and away; down in the avenue a whole newspaper wags in the air like a lost kite and falls, spiked on a pine tree. It is cold. Summer is over – it is autumn – everything is ugly. The carts rattle by, swinging from side to side; two Chinamen lollop along under their wooden yokes with the straining vegetable baskets – their pigtails and blue blouses fly out in the wind. A white dog on three legs yelps past the gate. It is all over! What is? Oh, everything! And she begins to plait her hair with shaking fingers, not daring to look in the glass. Mother is talking to grandmother in the hall. ‘A perfect idiot! Imagine leaving anything out on the line in weather like this. . . . Now my best little Teneriffe-work teacloth is simply in ribbons. What is that extraordinary smell? It’s the porridge burning. Oh, heavens – this wind!’ She has a music lesson at ten o’clock. At the thought the minor movement of the Beethoven begins to play in her head, the trills long and terrible like little rolling drums. . . . Marie Swainson runs into the garden next door to pick the ‘chrysanths’ before they are ruined. Her skirt flies up above her waist; she tries to beat it down, to tuck it between her legs while she stoops, but it is no use – up it flies. All the trees and bushes beat about her. She picks as quickly as she can, but she is quite distracted. She doesn’t mind what she does – she pulls the plants up by the roots and bends and twists them, stamping her foot and swearing. ‘For heaven’s sake keep the front door shut! Go round to the back,’ shouts someone. And then she hears Bogey: ‘Mother, you’re wanted on the telephone. Telephone, Mother. It’s the butcher.’ How hideous life is – revolting, simply revolting. . . . And now her

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hat-elastic’s snapped. Of course it would. She’ll wear her old tam and slip out the back way. But Mother has seen. ‘Matilda. Matilda. Come back im-me-diately! What on earth have you got on your head? It looks like a tea cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair on your forehead.’ ‘I can’t come back, Mother. I’ll be late for my lesson.’ ‘Come back immediately!’ She won’t. She won’t. She hates Mother. ‘Go to hell,’ she shouts, running down the road. In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr Bullen’s gate she can hear the sea sob: ‘Ah! . . . Ah! . . . Ah-h!’ But Mr Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave. The windows are closed, the blinds half pulled, and she is not late. The-girl-before-her has just started playing MacDowell’s ‘To an Iceberg’. Mr Bullen looks over at her and half smiles. ‘Sit down,’ he says. ‘Sit over there in the sofa corner, little lady.’ How funny he is. He doesn’t exactly laugh at you . . . but there is just something. . . . Oh, how peaceful it is here. She likes this room. It smells of art serge and stale smoke and chrysanthemums . . . there is a big vase of them on the mantelpiece behind the pale photograph of Rubinstein . . . à mon ami Robert Bullen. . . . Over the black glittering piano hangs ‘Solitude’ – a dark tragic woman draped in white, sitting on a rock, her knees crossed, her chin on her hands. ‘No, no!’ says Mr Bullen, and he leans over the other girl, puts his arms over her shoulders and plays the passage for her. The stupid – she’s blushing! How ridiculous! Now the-girl-before-her has gone; the front door slams. Mr Bullen comes back and walks up and down, very softly, waiting for her. What an extraordinary thing. Her fingers tremble so that she can’t undo the knot in the music satchel. It’s the wind. . . . And her heart beats so hard she feels it must lift her blouse up and down. Mr Bullen does not say a word. The shabby red piano seat is long enough for two people to sit side by side. Mr Bullen sits down by her. ‘Shall I begin with scales,’ she asks, squeezing her hands together. ‘I had some arpeggios, too.’ But he does not answer. She doesn’t believe he even hears . . . and then suddenly his fresh hand with the ring on it reaches over and opens Beethoven. ‘Let’s have a little of the old master,’ he says. But why does he speak so kindly – so awfully kindly – and as though they had known each other for years and years and knew everything about each other.

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He turns the page slowly. She watches his hand – it is a very nice hand and always looks as though it had just been washed. ‘Here we are,’ says Mr Bullen. Oh, that kind voice – Oh, that minor movement. Here come the little drums. . . . ‘Shall I take the repeat?’ ‘Yes, dear child.’ His voice is far, far too kind. The crotchets and quavers are dancing up and down the stave like little black boys on a fence. Why is he so . . . She will not cry – she has nothing to cry about. . . . ‘What is it, dear child?’ Mr Bullen takes her hands. His shoulder is there – just by her head. She leans on it ever so little, her cheek against the springy tweed. ‘Life is so dreadful,’ she murmurs, but she does not feel it’s dreadful at all. He says something about ‘waiting’ and ‘marking time’ and ‘that rare thing, a woman’, but she does not hear. It is so comfortable . . . for ever. . . . Suddenly the door opens and in pops Marie Swainson, hours before her time. ‘Take the allegretto a little faster,’ says Mr Bullen, and gets up and begins to walk up and down again. ‘Sit in the sofa corner, little lady,’ he says to Marie. The wind, the wind. It’s frightening to be here in her room by herself. The bed, the mirror, the white jug and basin gleam like the sky outside. It’s the bed that is frightening. There it lies, sound asleep. . . . Does Mother imagine for one moment that she is going to darn all those stockings knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes? She’s not. No, Mother. I do not see why I should. . . . The wind – the wind! There’s a funny smell of soot blowing down the chimney. Hasn’t anyone written poems to the wind? . . . ‘I bring fresh flowers to the leaves and showers.’ . . . What nonsense. ‘Is that you, Bogey?’ ‘Come for a walk round the esplanade, Matilda. I can’t stand this any longer.’ ‘Right-o. I’ll put on my ulster. Isn’t it an awful day!’ Bogey’s ulster is just like hers. Hooking the collar she looks at herself in the glass. Her face is white, they have the same excited eyes and hot lips. Ah, they know those two in the glass. Good-bye, dears; we shall be back soon. ‘This is better, isn’t it?’ ‘Hook on,’ says Bogey. They cannot walk fast enough. Their heads bent, their legs just

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touching, they stride like one eager person through the town, down the asphalt zigzag where the fennel grows wild and on to the esplanade. It is dusky – just getting dusky. The wind is so strong that they have to fight their way through it, rocking like two old drunkards. All the poor little pahutukawas on the esplanade are bent to the ground. ‘Come on! Come on! Let’s get near.’ Over by the breakwater the sea is very high. They pull off their hats and her hair blows across her mouth, tasting of salt. The sea is so high that the waves do not break at all; they thump against the rough stone wall and suck up the weedy, dripping steps. A fine spray skims from the water right across the esplanade. They are covered with drops; the inside of her mouth tastes wet and cold. Bogey’s voice is breaking. When he speaks he rushes up and down the scale. It’s funny – it makes you laugh – and yet it just suits the day. The wind carries their voices – away fly the sentences like the narrow ribbons. ‘Quicker! Quicker!’ It is getting very dark. In the harbour the coal hulks show two lights – one high on a mast, and one from the stern. ‘Look, Bogey. Look over there.’ A big black steamer with a long loop of smoke streaming, with the portholes lighted, with lights everywhere, is putting out to sea. The wind does not stop her; she cuts through the waves, making for the open gate between the pointed rocks that leads to. . . . It’s the light that makes her look so awfully beautiful and mysterious. . . . They are on board leaning over the rail arm in arm. ‘. . . Who are they?’ ‘. . . Brother and sister.’ ‘Look, Bogey, there’s the town. Doesn’t it look small? There’s the post office clock chiming for the last time. There’s the esplanade where we walked that windy day. Do you remember? I cried at my music lesson that day – how many years ago! Good-bye, little island, good-bye. . . . Now the dark stretches a wing over the tumbling water. They can’t see those two any more. Good-bye, good-bye. Don’t forget. . . . But the ship is gone, now. The wind – the wind. Notes Text: BOS.1 Athenaeum, 4713, 27 August 1920, pp. 262–3. 1. The extensively revised version of ‘Autumns II’, published in the Signature, 1, 4 October 1915. See Vol. 1, pp. 454–8.

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The Young Girl1 In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up as though for the first time – pinned up to be out of the way for her flight – Mrs Raddick’s daughter might have just dropped from this radiant heaven. Mrs Raddick’s timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring glance looked as if she believed it, too; but the daughter didn’t appear any too pleased – why should she? – to have alighted on the steps of the Casino. Indeed, she was bored – bored as though Heaven had been full of casinos with snuffy old saints for croupiers and crowns to play with. ‘You don’t mind taking Hennie?’ said Mrs Raddick. ‘Sure you don’t? There’s the car, and you’ll have tea and we’ll be back here on this step –right here – in an hour. You see, I want her to go in. She’s not been before, and it’s worth seeing. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to her.’ ‘Oh, shut up, mother,’ said she wearily. ‘Come along. Don’t talk so much. And your bag’s open; you’ll be losing all your money again.’ ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ said Mrs Raddick. ‘Oh, do come in! I want to make money,’ said the impatient voice. ‘It’s all jolly well for you – but I’m broke!’ ‘Here – take fifty francs, darling, take a hundred!’ I saw Mrs Raddick pressing notes into her hand as they passed through the swing doors. Hennie and I stood on the steps a minute, watching the people. He had a very broad, delighted smile. ‘I say,’ he cried, ‘there’s an English bulldog. Are they allowed to take dogs in there?’ ‘No, they’re not.’ ‘He’s a ripping chap, isn’t he? I wish I had one. They’re such fun. They frighten people so, and they’re never fierce with their – the people they belong to.’ Suddenly he squeezed my arm. ‘I say, do look at that old woman. Who is she? Why does she look like that? Is she a gambler?’ The ancient, withered creature, wearing a green satin dress, a black velvet cloak and a white hat with purple feathers, jerked slowly, slowly up the steps as though she were being drawn up on wires. She stared in front of her, she was laughing and nodding and cackling to herself; her claws clutched round what looked like a dirty boot-bag. But just at that moment there was Mrs Raddick again with – her – and another lady hovering in the background. Mrs Raddick rushed

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at me. She was brightly flushed, gay, a different creature. She was like a woman who is saying ‘good-bye’ to her friends on the station platform, with not a minute to spare before the train starts. ‘Oh, you’re here, still. Isn’t that lucky! You’ve not gone. Isn’t that fine! I’ve had the most dreadful time with – her,’ and she waved to her daughter, who stood absolutely still, disdainful, looking down, twiddling her foot on the step, miles away. ‘They won’t let her in. I swore she was twenty-one. But they won’t believe me. I showed the man my purse; I didn’t dare to do more. But it was no use. He simply scoffed. . . . And now I’ve just met Mrs MacEwen from New York, and she just won thirteen thousand in the Salle Privée – and she wants me to go back with her while the luck lasts. Of course I can’t leave – her. But if you’d –’ At that ‘she’ looked up; she simply withered her mother. ‘Why can’t you leave me?’ she said furiously. ‘What utter rot! How dare you make a scene like this? This is the last time I’ll come out with you. You really are too awful for words.’ She looked her mother up and down. ‘Calm yourself,’ she said superbly. Mrs Raddick was desperate, just desperate. She was ‘wild’ to go back with Mrs MacEwen, but at the same time. . . . I seized my courage. ‘Would you – do you care to come to tea with – us?’ ‘Yes, yes, she’ll be delighted. That’s just what I wanted, isn’t it darling? Mrs MacEwen . . . I’ll be back here in an hour . . . or less . . . I’ll –’ Mrs R. dashed up the steps. I saw her bag was open again. So we three were left. But really it wasn’t my fault. Hennie looked crushed to the earth, too. When the car was there she wrapped her dark coat round her – to escape contamination. Even her little feet looked as though they scorned to carry her down the steps to us. ‘I am so awfully sorry,’ I murmured as the car started. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said she. ‘I don’t want to look twenty-one. Who would – if they were seventeen! It’s’ – and she gave a faint shudder – ‘the stupidity I loathe, and being stared at by fat old men. Beasts!’ Hennie gave her a quick look and then peered out of the window. We drew up before an immense palace of pink-and-white marble with orange-trees outside the doors in gold-and-black tubs. ‘Would you care to go in?’ I suggested. She hesitated, glanced, bit her lip, and resigned herself. ‘Oh well, there seems nowhere else,’ said she. ‘Get out, Hennie.’ I went first – to find the table, of course – she followed. But the worst of it was having her little brother, who was only twelve, with us. That was the last, final straw – having that child, trailing at her heels.

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There was one table. It had pink carnations and pink plates with little blue tea-napkins for sails. ‘Shall we sit here?’ She put her hand wearily on the back of a white wicker chair. ‘We may as well. Why not?’ said she. Hennie squeezed past her and wriggled on to a stool at the end. He felt awfully out of it. She didn’t even take her gloves off. She lowered her eyes and drummed on the table. When a faint violin sounded she winced and bit her lip again. Silence. The waitress appeared. I hardly dared to ask her. ‘Tea – coffee? China tea – or iced tea with lemon?’ Really she didn’t mind. It was all the same to her. She didn’t really want anything. Hennie whispered, ‘Chocolate!’ But just as the waitress turned away she cried out carelessly, ‘Oh, you may as well bring me a chocolate, too.’ While we waited she took out a little, gold powder-box with a mirror in the lid, shook the poor little puff as though she loathed it, and dabbed her lovely nose. ‘Hennie,’ she said, ‘take those flowers away.’ She pointed with her puff to the carnations, and I heard her murmur, ‘I can’t bear flowers on a table.’ They had evidently been giving her intense pain, for she positively closed her eyes as I moved them away. The waitress came back with the chocolate and the tea. She put the big, frothing cups before them and pushed across my clear glass. Hennie buried his nose, emerged, with, for one dreadful moment, a little trembling blob of cream on the tip. But he hastily wiped it off like a little gentleman. I wondered if I should dare draw her attention to her cup. She didn’t notice it – didn’t see it – until suddenly, quite by chance, she took a sip. I watched anxiously; she faintly shuddered. ‘Dreadfully sweet!’ said she. A tiny boy with a head like a raisin and a chocolate body came round with a tray of pastries – row upon row of little freaks, little inspirations, little melting dreams. He offered them to her. ‘Oh, I’m not at all hungry. Take them away.’ He offered them to Hennie. Hennie gave me a swift look – it must have been satisfactory – for he took a chocolate cream, a coffee éclair, a meringue stuffed with chestnut and a tiny horn filled with fresh strawberries. She could hardly bear to watch him. But just as the boy swerved away she held up her plate. ‘Oh well, give me one,’ said she. The silver tongs dropped one, two, three – and a cherry tartlet. ‘I don’t know why you’re giving me all these,’ she said, and nearly smiled. ‘I shan’t eat them; I couldn’t!’ I felt much more comfortable. I sipped my tea, leaned back, and

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even asked if I might smoke. At that she paused, the fork in her hand, opened her eyes and really did smile. ‘Of course,’ said she. ‘I always expect people to.’ But at that moment a tragedy happened to Hennie. He speared his pastry horn too hard, and it flew in two, and one half spilled on the table. Ghastly affair! He turned crimson. Even his ears flared, and one ashamed hand crept across the table to take what was left of the body away. ‘You utter little beast!’ said she. Good heavens! I had to fly to the rescue. I cried hastily, ‘Will you be abroad long?’ But she had already forgotten Hennie. I was forgotten, too. She was trying to remember something. . . . She was miles away. ‘I – don’t – know,’ she said slowly, from that far place. ‘I suppose you prefer it to London. It’s more – more –’ When I didn’t go on she came back and looked at me, very puzzled. ‘More – ?’ ‘Enfin – gayer,’ I cried, waving my cigarette. But that took a whole cake to consider. Even then, ‘Oh well, that depends!’ was all she could safely say. Hennie had finished. He was still very warm. I seized the butterfly list off the table. ‘I say – what about an ice, Hennie? What about tangerine and ginger? No, something cooler. What about a fresh pineapple cream?’ Hennie strongly approved. The waitress had her eye on us. The order was taken when she looked up from her crumbs. ‘Did you say tangerine and ginger? I like ginger. You can bring me one.’ And then quickly, ‘I wish that orchestra wouldn’t play things from the year One. We were dancing to that all last Christmas. It’s too sickening!’ But it was a charming air. Now that I noticed it, it warmed me. ‘I think this is rather a nice place, don’t you, Hennie?’ I said. Hennie said: ‘Ripping!’ He meant to say it very low, but it came out very high in a kind of squeak. Nice? This place? Nice? For the first time she stared about her, trying to see what there was. . . . She blinked; her lovely eyes wondered. A very good-looking elderly man stared back at her through a monocle on a black ribbon. But him she simply couldn’t see. There was a hole in the air where he was. She looked through and through him. Finally the little flat spoons lay still on the glass plates. Hennie looked rather exhausted, but she pulled on her white gloves again. She had some trouble with her diamond wrist-watch; it got in her way. She tugged at it – tried to break the stupid little thing – it

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wouldn’t break. Finally, she had to drag her glove over. I saw, after that, she couldn’t stand this place a moment longer, and, indeed, she jumped up and turned away while I went through the vulgar act of paying for the tea. And then we were outside again. It had grown dusky. The sky was sprinkled with small stars; the big lamps glowed. While we waited for the car to come up she stood on the step, just as before, twiddling her foot, looking down. Hennie bounded forward to open the door and she got in and sank back with – oh – such a sigh! ‘Tell him,’ she gasped, ‘to drive as fast as he can.’ Hennie grinned at his friend the chauffeur. ‘Allie veet!’ said he. Then he composed himself and sat on the small seat facing us. The gold powder-box came out again. Again the poor little puff was shaken; again there was that swift, deadly-secret glance between her and the mirror. We tore through the black-and-gold town like a pair of scissors tearing through brocade. Hennie had great difficulty not to look as though he were hanging on to something. And when we reached the Casino, of course Mrs Raddick wasn’t there. There wasn’t a sign of her on the steps – not a sign. ‘Will you stay in the car while I go and look?’ But no – she wouldn’t do that. Good heavens, no! Hennie could stay. She couldn’t bear sitting in a car. She’d wait on the steps. ‘But I scarcely like to leave you,’ I murmured. ‘I’d very much rather not leave you here.’ At that she threw back her coat; she turned and faced me; her lips parted. ‘Good heavens – why! I – I don’t mind it a bit. I – I like waiting.’ And suddenly her cheeks crimsoned, her eyes grew dark – for a moment I thought she was going to cry. ‘L – let me, please,’ she stammered, in a warm, eager voice. ‘I like it. I love waiting! Really – really I do! I’m always waiting – in all kinds of places. . . .’ Her dark coat fell open, and her white throat – all her soft young body in the blue dress – was like a flower that is just emerging from its dark bud. Notes Text: GPOS. Athenaeum, 4722, 29 October 1920, pp. 575–7. 1. The first story KM wrote after renting the Villa Isola Bella in Menton from mid-September 1920. As she wrote to JMM on 7 October, when she posted him the story, ‘As usual I am in a foolish panic about it. [. . .] You know how I choose my words; they can’t be changed. And if you don’t like it or think it wrong just as it is, I’d rather you didn’t print it. [. . .] It

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was one of my queer hallucinations, I wrote it straight off’ (CLKM, 4, p. 66). She also told him about the young girl: ‘she’s not “little” [. . .]; in fact I saw her big, slender, like a colt’ (CLKM, 4, p. 119).

•

The Singing Lesson With despair – cold, sharp despair – buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife, Miss Meadows, in cap and gown and carrying a little baton, trod the cold corridors that led to the music hall. Girls of all ages, rosy from the air, and bubbling over with that gleeful excitement that comes from running to school on a fine autumn morning, hurried, skipped, fluttered by; from the hollow classrooms came a quick drumming of voices; a bell rang; a voice like a bird cried, ‘Muriel.’ And then there came from the staircase a tremendous knock-knock-knocking. Someone had dropped her dumbbells. The Science Mistress stopped Miss Meadows. ‘Good mor-ning,’ she cried, in her sweet, affected drawl. ‘Isn’t it cold? It might be win-ter.’ Miss Meadows, hugging the knife, stared in hatred at the Science Mistress. Everything about her was sweet, pale, like honey. You would not have been surprised to see a bee caught in the tangles of that yellow hair. ‘It is rather sharp,’ said Miss Meadows, grimly. The other smiled her sugary smile. ‘You look fro-zen,’ said she. Her blue eyes opened wide; there came a mocking light in them. (Had she noticed anything?) ‘Oh, not quite as bad as that,’ said Miss Meadows, and she gave the Science Mistress, in exchange for her smile, a quick grimace and passed on. . . . Forms Four, Five, and Six were assembled in the music hall. The noise was deafening. On the platform, by the piano, stood Mary Beazley, Miss Meadows’ favourite, who played accompaniments. She was turning the music stool. When she saw Miss Meadows she gave a loud, warning ‘Sh-sh! girls!’ and Miss Meadows, her hands thrust in her sleeves, the baton under her arm, strode down the centre aisle, mounted the steps, turned sharply, seized the brass music stand, planted it in front of her, and gave two sharp taps with her baton for silence. ‘Silence, please! Immediately!’ and, looking at nobody, her glance

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swept over that sea of coloured flannel blouses, with bobbing pink faces and hands, quivering butterfly hair-bows, and music-books outspread. She knew perfectly well what they were thinking. ‘Meady is in a wax.’ Well, let them think it! Her eyelids quivered; she tossed her head, defying them. What could the thoughts of those creatures matter to some one who stood there bleeding to death, pierced to the heart, to the heart, by such a letter – . . . ‘I feel more and more strongly that our marriage would be a mistake. Not that I do not love you. I love you as much as it is possible for me to love any woman, but, truth to tell, I have come to the conclusion that I am not a marrying man, and the idea of settling down fills me with nothing but –’ and the word ‘disgust’ was scratched out lightly and ‘regret’ written over the top. Basil! Miss Meadows stalked over to the piano. And Mary Beazley, who was waiting for this moment, bent forward; her curls fell over her cheeks while she breathed, ‘Good morning, Miss Meadows,’ and she motioned towards rather than handed to her mistress a beautiful yellow chrysanthemum. This little ritual of the flower had been gone through for ages and ages, quite a term and a half. It was as much part of the lesson as opening the piano. But this morning, instead of taking it up, instead of tucking it into her belt while she leant over Mary and said, ‘Thank you, Mary. How very nice! Turn to page thirty-two,’ what was Mary’s horror when Miss Meadows totally ignored the chrysanthemum, made no reply to her greeting, but said in a voice of ice, ‘Page fourteen, please, and mark the accents well.’ Staggering moment! Mary blushed until the tears stood in her eyes, but Miss Meadows was gone back to the music stand; her voice rang through the music hall. ‘Page fourteen. We will begin with page fourteen. “A Lament”. Now, girls, you ought to know it by this time. We shall take it all together; not in parts, all together. And without expression. Sing it, though, quite simply, beating time with the left hand.’ She raised the baton; she tapped the music stand twice. Down came Mary on the opening chord; down came all those left hands, beating the air, and in chimed those young, mournful voices: Fast! Ah, too Fast Fade the Ro-o-ses of Pleasure; Soon Autumn yields unto Wi-i-nter Drear. Fleetly! Ah, Fleetly Mu-u-sic’s Gay Measure Passes away from the Listening Ear.1

Good Heavens, what could be more tragic than that lament! Every note was a sigh, a sob, a groan of awful mournfulness. Miss

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Meadows lifted her arms in the wide gown and began conducting with both hands. ‘. . . I feel more and more strongly that our marriage would be a mistake. . . .’ she beat. And the voices cried: Fleetly! Ah, Fleetly. What could have possessed him to write such a letter! What could have led up to it! It came out of nothing. His last letter had been all about a fumed-oak bookcase he had bought for ‘our’ books, and a ‘natty little hall-stand’ he had seen, ‘a very neat affair with a carved owl on a bracket, holding three hat-brushes in its claws’. How she had smiled at that! So like a man to think one needed three hat-brushes! From the Listening Ear, sang the voices. ‘Once again,’ said Miss Meadows. ‘But this time in parts. Still without expression.’ Fast! Ah, too Fast. With the gloom of the contraltos added, one could scarcely help shuddering. Fade the Roses of Pleasure. Last time he had come to see her, Basil had worn a rose in his buttonhole. How handsome he had looked in that bright blue suit, with that dark red rose! And he knew it, too. He couldn’t help knowing it. First he stroked his hair, then his moustache; his teeth gleamed when he smiled. ‘The headmaster’s wife keeps on asking me to dinner. It’s a perfect nuisance. I never get an evening to myself in that place.’ ‘But can’t you refuse?’ ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t do for a man in my position to be unpopular.’ Music’s Gay Measure, wailed the voices. The willow trees, outside the high, narrow windows, waved in the wind. They had lost half their leaves. The tiny ones that clung wriggled like fishes caught on a line. ‘. . . I am not a marrying man. . . .’ The voices were silent; the piano waited. ‘Quite good,’ said Miss Meadows, but still in such a strange, stony tone that the younger girls began to feel positively frightened. ‘But now that we know it, we shall take it with expression. As much expression as you can put into it. Think of the words, girls. Use your imaginations. Fast! Ah, too Fast,’ cried Miss Meadows. ‘That ought to break out – a loud, strong forte – a lament. And then in the second line, Winter Drear, make that Drear sound as if a cold wind were blowing through it. Dre-ear!’ said she so awfully that Mary Beazley, on the music stool, wriggled her spine. ‘The third line should be one crescendo. Fleetly! Ah, Fleetly Music’s Gay Measure. Breaking on the first word of the last line, Passes. And then on the word, Away, you must begin to die . . . to fade . . . until The Listening Ear is nothing more than a faint whisper. . . . You can slow down as much as you like almost on the last line. Now, please.’ Again the two light taps; she lifted her arms again. Fast! Ah, too Fast. ‘. . . and the idea of settling down fills me with nothing but disgust –’ Disgust was what he had written. That was as good

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as to say their engagement was definitely broken off. Broken off! Their engagement! People had been surprised enough that she had got engaged. The Science Mistress would not believe it at first. But nobody had been as surprised as she. She was thirty. Basil was twentyfive. It had been a miracle, simply a miracle, to hear him say, as they walked home from church that very dark night, ‘You know, somehow or other, I’ve got fond of you.’ And he had taken hold of the end of her ostrich feather boa. Passes away from the Listening Ear. ‘Repeat! Repeat!’ said Miss Meadows. ‘More expression, girls! Once more!’ Fast! Ah, too Fast. The older girls were crimson; some of the younger ones began to cry. Big spots of rain blew against the windows, and one could hear the willows whispering, ‘. . . not that I do not love you. . . .’ ‘But, my darling, if you love me,’ thought Miss Meadows, ‘I don’t mind how much it is. Love me as little as you like.’ But she knew he didn’t love her. Not to have cared enough to scratch out that word ‘disgust’, so that she couldn’t read it! Soon Autumn yields unto Winter Drear. She would have to leave the school, too. She could never face the Science Mistress or the girls after it got known. She would have to disappear somewhere. Passes away. The voices began to die, to fade, to whisper . . . to vanish. . . . Suddenly the door opened. A little girl in blue walked fussily up the aisle, hanging her head, biting her lips, and twisting the silver bangle on her red little wrist. She came up the steps and stood before Miss Meadows. ‘Well, Monica, what is it?’ ‘Oh, if you please, Miss Meadows,’ said the little girl, gasping, ‘Miss Wyatt wants to see you in the mistress’s room.’ ‘Very well,’ said Miss Meadows. And she called to the girls, ‘I shall put you on your honour to talk quietly while I am away.’ But they were too subdued to do anything else. Most of them were blowing their noses. The corridors were silent and cold; they echoed to Miss Meadows’ steps. The head mistress sat at her desk. For a moment she did not look up. She was as usual disentangling her eyeglasses, which had got caught in her lace tie. ‘Sit down, Miss Meadows,’ she said very kindly. And then she picked up a pink envelope from the blotting-pad. ‘I sent for you just now because this telegram has come for you.’ ‘A telegram for me, Miss Wyatt?’ Basil! He had committed suicide, decided Miss Meadows. Her hand flew out, but Miss Wyatt held the telegram back a moment. ‘I hope it’s not bad news,’ she said, no more than kindly. And Miss Meadows tore it open.

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‘Pay no attention to letter must have been mad bought hatstand to-day Basil,’ she read. She couldn’t take her eyes off the telegram. ‘I do hope it’s nothing very serious,’ said Miss Wyatt, leaning forward. ‘Oh, no, thank you, Miss Wyatt,’ blushed Miss Meadows. ‘It’s nothing bad at all. It’s’ – and she gave an apologetic little laugh – ‘it’s from my fiancé saying that . . . saying that –’ There was a pause. ‘I see,’ said Miss Wyatt. And another pause. Then – ‘You’ve fifteen minutes more of your class, Miss Meadows, haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, Miss Wyatt.’ She got up. She half ran towards the door. ‘Oh, just one minute, Miss Meadows,’ said Miss Wyatt. ‘I must say I don’t approve of my teachers having telegrams sent to them in school hours, unless in case of very bad news, such as death,’ explained Miss Wyatt, ‘or a very serious accident, or something to that effect. Good news, Miss Meadows, will always keep, you know.’ On the wings of hope, of love, of joy, Miss Meadows sped back to the music hall, up the aisle, up the steps, over to the piano. ‘Page thirty-two, Mary,’ she said, ‘page thirty-two,’ and, picking up the yellow chrysanthemum, she held it to her lips to hide her smile. Then she turned to the girls, rapped with her baton: ‘Page thirty-two, girls. Page thirty-two.’ We come here To-day with Flowers o’erladen, With Baskets of Fruit and Ribbons to boot, To-oo Congratulate. . . .

‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Miss Meadows. ‘This is awful. This is dreadful.’ And she beamed at her girls. ‘What’s the matter with you all? Think, girls, think of what you’re singing. Use your imaginations. With Flowers o’erladen. Baskets of Fruit and Ribbons to boot. And Congratulate.’ Miss Meadows broke off. ‘Don’t look so doleful, girls. It ought to sound warm, joyful, eager. Congratulate. Once more. Quickly. All together. Now then!’ And this time Miss Meadows’ voice sounded over all the other voices – full, deep, glowing with expression. Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 23 April 1921, pp. 96, ii [sic]. As JMM’s note pointed out, KM’s remark in her letter to him on 5 November 1920, ‘Send no more Basil, please love,’ was probably a reference to the telegram Basil sends in the story, which presumably was written shortly before (LJMM, p. 585). 1. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), ‘Herbslied,’ opus 63 (1845).

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The Stranger1 It seemed to the little crowd on the wharf that she was never going to move again. There she lay, immense, motionless on the grey crinkled water, a loop of smoke above her, an immense flock of gulls screaming and diving after the galley droppings at the stern. You could just see little couples parading – little flies walking up and down the dish on the grey crinkled tablecloth. Other flies clustered and swarmed at the edge. Now there was a gleam of white on the lower deck – the cook’s apron or the stewardess perhaps. Now a tiny black spider raced up the ladder on to the bridge. In the front of the crowd a strong-looking, middle-aged man, dressed very well, very snugly in a grey overcoat, grey silk scarf, thick gloves and dark felt hat, marched up and down, twirling his folded umbrella. He seemed to be the leader of the little crowd on the wharf and at the same time to keep them together. He was something between the sheep-dog and the shepherd. But what a fool – what a fool he had been not to bring any glasses! There wasn’t a pair of glasses between the whole lot of them. ‘Curious thing, Mr Scott, that none of us thought of glasses. We might have been able to stir ’em up a bit. We might have managed a little signalling. Don’t hesitate to land. Natives harmless. Or: A welcome awaits you. All is forgiven. What? Eh?’ Mr Hammond’s quick, eager glance, so nervous and yet so friendly and confiding, took in everybody on the wharf, roped in even those old chaps lounging against the gangways. They knew, every manjack of them, that Mrs Hammond was on that boat, and he was so tremendously excited it never entered his head not to believe that this marvellous fact meant something to them too. It warmed his heart towards them. They were, he decided, as decent a crowd of people – Those old chaps over by the gangways, too – fine, solid old chaps. What chests – by Jove! And he squared his own, plunged his thick-gloved hands into his pockets, rocked from heel to toe. ‘Yes, my wife’s been in Europe for the last ten months. On a visit to our eldest girl, who was married last year. I brought her up here, as far as Auckland, myself. So I thought I’d better come and fetch her back. Yes, yes, yes.’ The shrewd grey eyes narrowed again and searched anxiously, quickly, the motionless liner. Again his overcoat was unbuttoned. Out came the thin, butter-yellow watch again, and for the twentieth – fiftieth –hundredth time he made the calculation.

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‘Let me see, now. It was two fifteen when the doctor’s launch went off. Two fifteen. It is now exactly twenty-eight minutes past four. That is to say, the doctor’s been gone two hours and thirteen minutes. Two hours and thirteen minutes! Whee-ooh!’ He gave a queer little halfwhistle and snapped his watch to again. ‘But I think we should have been told if there was anything up – don’t you, Mr Gaven?’ ‘Oh, yes, Mr Hammond! I don’t think there’s anything to – anything to worry about’, said Mr Gaven, knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. ‘At the same time –’ ‘Quite so! Quite so!’ cried Mr Hammond. ‘Dashed annoying!’ He paced quickly up and down and came back again to his stand between Mr and Mrs Scott and Mr Gaven. ‘It’s getting quite dark, too’, and he waved his folded umbrella as though the dusk at least might have had the decency to keep off for a bit. But the dusk came slowly, spreading like a slow stain over the water. Little Jean Scott dragged at her mother’s hand. ‘I wan’ my tea, mammy!’ she wailed. ‘I expect you do,’ said Mr Hammond. ‘I expect all these ladies want their tea.’ And his kind, flushed, almost pitiful glance roped them all in again. He wondered whether Janey2 was having a final cup of tea in the saloon out there. He hoped so; he thought not. It would be just like her not to leave the deck. In that case perhaps the deck steward would bring her up a cup. If he’d been there he’d have got it for her – somehow. And for a moment he was on deck, standing over her, watching her little hand fold round the cup in the way she had, while she drank the only cup of tea to be got on board. . . . But now he was back here, and the Lord only knew when that cursed Captain would stop hanging about in the stream. He took another turn, up and down, up and down. He walked as far as the cab-stand to make sure his driver hadn’t disappeared; back he swerved again to the little flock huddled in the shelter of the banana crates. Little Jean Scott was still wanting her tea. Poor little beggar! He wished he had a bit of chocolate on him. ‘Here, Jean!’ he said. ‘Like a lift up?’ And easily, gently, he swung the little girl on to a higher barrel. The movement of holding her, steadying her, relieved him wonderfully, lightened his heart. ‘Hold on,’ he said, keeping an arm round her. ‘Oh, don’t worry about Jean, Mr Hammond!’ said Mrs Scott. ‘That’s all right, Mrs Scott. No trouble. It’s a pleasure. Jean’s a little pal of mine, aren’t you, Jean?’ ‘Yes, Mr Hammond,’ said Jean, and she ran her finger down the dent of his felt hat. But suddenly she caught him by the ear and gave a loud scream. ‘Lo-ok, Mr Hammond! She’s moving! Look, she’s coming in!’

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By Jove! So she was. At last! She was slowly, slowly turning round. A bell sounded far over the water and a great spout of steam gushed into the air. The gulls rose; they fluttered away like bits of white paper. And whether that deep throbbing was her engines or his heart Mr Hammond couldn’t say. He had to nerve himself to bear it, whatever it was. At that moment old Captain Johnson, the harbour-master, came striding down the wharf, a leather portfolio under his arm. ‘Jean’ll be all right,’ said Mr Scott. ‘I’ll hold her.’ He was just in time. Mr Hammond had forgotten about Jean. He sprang away to greet old Captain Johnson. ‘Well, Captain,’ the eager, nervous voice rang out again, ‘you’ve taken pity on us at last.’ ‘It’s no good blaming me, Mr Hammond,’ wheezed old Captain Johnson, staring at the liner. ‘You got Mrs Hammond on board, ain’t yer?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ said Hammond, and he kept by the harbour-master’s side. ‘Mrs Hammond’s there. Hul-lo! We shan’t be long now!’ With her telephone ring-ringing, the thrum of her screw filling the air, the big liner bore down on them, cutting sharp through the dark water so that big white shavings curled to either side. Hammond and the harbour-master kept in front of the rest. Hammond took off his hat; he raked the decks – they were crammed with passengers; he waved his hat and bawled a loud, strange ‘Hul-lo!’ across the water, and then turned round and burst out laughing and said something – nothing – to old Captain Johnson. ‘Seen her?’ asked the harbour-master. ‘No, not yet. Steady – wait a bit!’ And suddenly, between two great clumsy idiots – ‘Get out of the way there!’ he signed with his umbrella – he saw a hand raised – a white glove shaking a handkerchief. Another moment, and – thank God, thank God! – there she was. There was Janey. There was Mrs Hammond, yes, yes, yes – standing by the rail and smiling and nodding and waving her handkerchief. ‘Well, that’s first class – first class! Well, well, well!’ He positively stamped. Like lightning he drew out his cigar-case and offered it to old Captain Johnson. ‘Have a cigar, Captain! They’re pretty good. Have a couple! Here’ – and he pressed all the cigars in the case on the harbour-master – ‘I’ve a couple of boxes up at the hotel.’ ‘Thenks, Mr Hammond!’ wheezed old Captain Johnson. Hammond stuffed the cigar-case back. His hands were shaking, but he’d got hold of himself again. He was able to face Janey. There she was, leaning on the rail, talking to some woman and at the same time watching him, ready for him. It struck him, as the gulf of water closed, how small she looked on that huge ship. His heart was wrung with such a spasm that he could have cried out. How little she looked

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to have come all that long way and back by herself! Just like her, though. Just like Janey. She had the courage of a – – And now the crew had come forward and parted the passengers; they had lowered the rails for the gangways. The voices on shore and the voices on board flew to greet each other. ‘All well?’ ‘All well.’ ‘How’s mother?’ ‘Much better.’ ‘Hello, Jean!’ ‘Hillo, Aun’ Emily!’ ‘Had a good voyage?’ ‘Splendid!’ ‘Shan’t be long now!’ ‘Not long now.’ The engines stopped. Slowly she edged to the wharf-side. ‘Make way there – make way – make way!’ And the wharf hands brought the heavy gangways along at a sweeping run. Hammond signed to Janey to stay where she was. The old harbour-master stepped forward; he followed. As to ‘ladies first’, or any rot like that, it never entered his head. ‘After you, Captain!’ he cried genially. And, treading on the old man’s heels, he strode up the gangway on to the deck in a bee-line to Janey, and Janey was clasped in his arms. ‘Well, well, well! Yes, yes! Here we are at last!’ he stammered. It was all he could say. And Janey emerged, and her cool little voice – the only voice in the world for him – said, ‘Well, darling! Have you been waiting long?’ No; not long. Or, at any rate, it didn’t matter. It was over now. But the point was, he had a cab waiting at the end of the wharf. Was she ready to go off? Was her luggage ready? In that case they could cut off sharp with her cabin luggage and let the rest go hang until to-morrow. He bent over her and she looked up with her familiar half-smile. She was just the same. Not a day changed. Just as he’d always known her. She laid her small hand on his sleeve. ‘How are the children, John?’ she asked. (Hang the children!) ‘Perfectly well. Never better in their lives.’ ‘Haven’t they sent me letters?’ ‘Yes, yes – of course! I’ve left them at the hotel for you to digest later on.’ ‘We can’t go quite so fast,’ said she. ‘I’ve got people to say good-bye to – and then there’s the Captain.’ As his face fell she gave his arm a small understanding squeeze. ‘If the Captain comes off the bridge I

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want you to thank him for having looked after your wife so beautifully.’ Well, he’d got her. If she wanted another ten minutes – As he gave way she was surrounded. The whole first-class seemed to want to say good-bye to Janey. ‘Good-bye, dear Mrs Hammond! And next time you’re in Sydney I’ll expect you.’ ‘Darling Mrs Hammond! You won’t forget to write to me, will you?’ ‘Well, Mrs Hammond, what this boat would have been without you!’ It was as plain as a pikestaff that she was by far the most popular woman on board. And she took it all – just as usual. Absolutely composed. Just her little self – just Janey all over; standing there with her veil thrown back. Hammond never noticed what his wife had on. It was all the same to him whatever she wore. But to-day he did notice that she wore a black ‘costume’ – didn’t they call it? – with white frills, trimmings he supposed they were, at the neck and sleeves. All this while Janey handed him round. ‘John, dear!’ And then: ‘I want to introduce you to –’ Finally they did escape, and she led the way to her state-room. To follow Janey down the passage that she knew so well – that was so strange to him; to part the green curtains after her and to step into the cabin that had been hers gave him exquisite happiness. But – confound it! – the stewardess was there on the floor, strapping up the rugs. ‘That’s the last, Mrs Hammond,’ said the stewardess, rising and pulling down her cuffs. He was introduced again, and then Janey and the stewardess disappeared into the passage. He heard whisperings. She was getting the tipping business over, he supposed. He sat down on the striped sofa and took his hat off. There were the rugs she had taken with her; they looked good as new. All her luggage looked fresh, perfect. The labels were written in her beautiful little clear hand – ‘Mrs. John Hammond’. ‘Mrs John Hammond!’ He gave a long sigh of content and leaned back, crossing his arms. The strain was over. He felt he could have sat there for ever sighing his relief – the relief at being rid of that horrible tug, pull, grip on his heart. The danger was over. That was the feeling. They were on dry land again. But at that moment Janey’s head came round the corner. ‘Darling – do you mind? I just want to go and say good-bye to the doctor.’ Hammond started up. ‘I’ll come with you.’ ‘No, no!’ she said. ‘Don’t bother. I’d rather not. I’ll not be a minute.’

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And before he could answer she was gone. He had half a mind to run after her; but instead he sat down again. Would she really not be long? What was the time now? Out came the watch; he stared at nothing. That was rather queer of Janey, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t she have told the stewardess to say goodbye for her? Why did she have to go chasing after the ship’s doctor? She could have sent a note from the hotel even if the affair had been urgent. Urgent? Did it – could it mean that she had been ill on the voyage – she was keeping something from him? That was it! He seized his hat. He was going off to find that fellow and to wring the truth out of him at all costs. He thought he’d noticed just something. She was just a touch too calm – too steady. From the very first moment – – – The curtains rang. Janey was back. He jumped to his feet. ‘Janey, have you been ill on this voyage? You have!’ ‘Ill?’ Her airy little voice mocked him. She stepped over the rugs, came up close, touched his breast, and looked up at him. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘don’t frighten me. Of course I haven’t! Whatever makes you think I have? Do I look ill?’ But Hammond didn’t see her. He only felt that she was looking at him and that there was no need to worry about anything. She was here to look after things. It was all right. Everything was. The gentle pressure of her hand was so calming that he put his over hers to hold it there. And she said: ‘Stand still. I want to look at you. I haven’t seen you yet. You’ve had your beard beautifully trimmed, and you look – younger, I think, and decidedly thinner! Bachelor life agrees with you.’ ‘Agrees with me!’ He groaned for love and caught her close again. And again, as always, he had the feeling he was holding something that never was quite his – his. Something too delicate, too precious, that would fly away once he let go. ‘For God’s sake let’s get off to the hotel so that we can be by ourselves!’ And he rang the bell hard for some one to look sharp with the luggage. *

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Walking down the wharf together she took his arm. He had her on his arm again. And the difference it made to get into the cab after Janey – to throw the red-and-yellow striped blanket round them both – to tell the driver to hurry because neither of them had had any tea. No more going without his tea or pouring out his own. She was back. He turned to her, squeezed her hand, and said gently, teasingly, in the ‘special’ voice he had for her: ‘Glad to be home again, dearie?’ She smiled; she didn’t even bother to answer, but gently she drew his hand away as they came to the lighted streets.

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‘We’ve got the best room in the hotel,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be put off with another. And I asked the chambermaid to put in a bit of a fire in case you felt chilly. She’s a nice, attentive girl. And I thought now we were here we wouldn’t bother to go home to-morrow, but spend the day looking round and leave the morning after. Does that suit you? There’s no hurry, is there? The children will have you soon enough. . . . I thought a day’s sight-seeing might make a nice break in your journey – eh, Janey?’ ‘Have you taken the tickets for the day after?’ she asked. ‘I should think I have!’ He unbuttoned his overcoat and took out his bulging pocket-book. ‘Here we are! I reserved a first-class carriage to Napier. There it is –“Mr and Mrs John Hammond”. I thought we might as well do ourselves comfortably, and we don’t want other people butting in, do we? But if you’d like to stop here a bit longer – ?’ ‘Oh, no!’ said Janey quickly. ‘Not for the world! The day after to-morrow, then. And the children –’ But they had reached the hotel. The manager was standing in the broad, brilliantly-lighted porch. He came down to greet them. A porter ran from the hall for their boxes. ‘Well, Mr Arnold, here’s Mrs Hammond at last!’ The manager led them through the hall himself and pressed the elevator-bell. Hammond knew there were business pals of his sitting at the little hall tables having a drink before dinner. But he wasn’t going to risk interruption; he looked neither to the right nor the left. They could think what they pleased. If they didn’t understand, the more fools they – and he stepped out of the lift, unlocked the door of their room, and shepherded Janey in. The door shut. Now, at last, they were alone together. He turned up the light. The curtains were drawn; the fire blazed. He flung his hat on to the huge bed and went towards her. But – would you believe it! – again they were interrupted. This time it was the porter with the luggage. He made two journeys of it, leaving the door open in between, taking his time, whistling through his teeth in the corridor. Hammond paced up and down the room, tearing off his gloves, tearing off his scarf. Finally he flung his overcoat on to the bedside. At last the fool was gone. The door clicked. Now they were alone. Said Hammond: ‘I feel I’ll never have you to myself again. These cursed people! Janey’ – and he bent his flushed, eager gaze upon her – ‘let’s have dinner up here. If we go down to the restaurant we’ll be interrupted, and then there’s the confounded music’ (the music he’d praised so highly, applauded so loudly last night!). ‘We shan’t be able to hear each other speak. Let’s have something up here in front of the fire. It’s too late for tea. I’ll order a little supper, shall I? How does the idea strike you?’

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‘Do, darling!’ said Janey. ‘And while you’re away – the children’s letters –’ ‘Oh, later on will do!’ said Hammond. ‘But then we’d get it over,’ said Janey. ‘And I’d first have time to –’ ‘Oh, I needn’t go down!’ explained Hammond. ‘I’ll just ring and give the order . . . you don’t want to send me away, do you?’ Janey shook her head and smiled. ‘But you’re thinking of something else. You’re worrying about something,’ said Hammond. ‘What is it? Come and sit here – come and sit on my knee before the fire.’ ‘I’ll just unpin my hat,’ said Janey, and she went over to the dressing-table. ‘A-ah!’ She gave a little cry. ‘What is it?’ ‘Nothing, darling. I’ve just found the children’s letters. That’s all right! They will keep. No hurry now!’ She turned to him, clasping them. She tucked them into her frilled blouse. She cried quickly, gaily: ‘Oh, how typical this dressing-table is of you!’ ‘Why? What’s the matter with it?’ said Hammond. ‘If it were floating in eternity I should say “John!” ’ laughed Janey, staring at the big bottle of hair tonic, the wicker bottle of eau-deCologne, the two hair-brushes, and a dozen new collars tied with pink tape. ‘Is this all your luggage?’ ‘Hang my luggage!’ said Hammond; but all the same he liked being laughed at by Janey. ‘Let’s talk. Let’s get down to things. Tell me’ – and as Janey perched on his knees he leaned back and drew her into the deep, ugly chair – ‘tell me you’re really glad to be back, Janey.’ Yes, darling, I am glad,’ she said. But just as when he embraced her he felt she would fly away, so Hammond never knew – never knew for dead certain that she was as glad as he was. How could he know? Would he ever know? Would he always have this craving – this pang like hunger, somehow, to make Janey so much part of him that there wasn’t any of her to escape? He wanted to blot out everybody, everything. He wished now he’d turned off the light. That might have brought her nearer. And now those letters from the children rustled in her blouse. He could have chucked them into the fire. ‘Janey,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, dear?’ She lay on his breast, but so lightly, so remotely. Their breathing rose and fell together. ‘Janey’!’ ‘What is it?’ ‘Turn to me,’ he whispered. A slow, deep flush flowed into his forehead. ‘Kiss me, Janey! You kiss me!’

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It seemed to him there was a tiny pause – but long enough for him to suffer torture – before her lips touched his, firmly, lightly – kissing them as she always kissed him, as though the kiss – how could he describe it? – confirmed what they were saying, signed the contract. But that wasn’t what he wanted; that wasn’t at all what he thirsted for. He felt suddenly, horribly tired. ‘If you knew,’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘what it’s been like – waiting to-day. I thought the boat never would come in. There we were, hanging about. What kept you so long?’ She made no answer. She was looking away from him at the fire. The flames hurried – hurried over the coals, flickered, fell. ‘Not asleep, are you?’ said Hammond, and he jumped her up and down. ‘No,’ she said. And then: ‘Don’t do that, dear. No, I was thinking. As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘one of the passengers died last night – a man. That’s what held us up. We brought him in – I mean, he wasn’t buried at sea. So, of course, the ship’s doctor and the shore doctor –’ ‘What was it?’ asked Hammond uneasily. He hated to hear of death. He hated this to have happened. It was, in some queer way, as though he and Janey had met a funeral on their way to the hotel. ‘Oh, it wasn’t anything in the least infectious!’ said Janey. She was speaking scarcely above her breath. ‘It was heart.’ A pause. ‘Poor fellow!’ she said. ‘Quite young.’ And she watched the fire flicker and fall. ‘He died in my arms,’ said Janey. The blow was so sudden that Hammond thought he would faint. He couldn’t move; he couldn’t breathe. He felt all his strength flowing –flowing into the big dark chair, and the big dark chair held him fast, gripped him, forced him to bear it. ‘What?’ he said dully. ‘What’s that you say?’ ‘The end was quite peaceful,’ said the small voice. ‘He just’ – and Hammond saw her lift her gentle hand – ‘breathed his life away at the end.’ And her hand fell. ‘Who – else was there?’ Hammond managed to ask. ‘Nobody. I was alone with him.’ Ah, my God, what was she saying! What was she doing to him! This would kill him! And all the while she spoke: ‘I saw the change coming and I sent the steward for the doctor, but the doctor was too late. He couldn’t have done anything, anyway.’ ‘But – why you, why you?’ moaned Hammond. At that Janey turned quickly, quickly searched his face. ‘You don’t mind, John, do you?’ she asked. ‘You don’t – It’s nothing to do with you and me.’

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Somehow or other he managed to shake some sort of smile at her. Somehow or other he stammered: ‘No – go – on, go on! I want you to tell me.’ ‘But, John darling –’ ‘Tell me, Janey!’ ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said, wondering. ‘He was one of the first-class passengers. I saw he was very ill when he came on board. . . . But he seemed to be so much better until yesterday. He had a severe attack in the afternoon – excitement – nervousness, I think, about arriving. And after that he never recovered.’ ‘But why didn’t the stewardess –’ ‘Oh, my dear – the stewardess!’ said Janey. ‘What would he have felt? And besides . . . he might have wanted to leave a message . . . to –’ ‘Didn’t he?’ muttered Hammond. ‘Didn’t he say anything?’ ‘No, darling, not a word!’ She shook her head softly. ‘All the time I was with him he was too weak . . . he was too weak even to move a finger. . . .’ Janey was silent. But her words, so light, so soft, so chill, seemed to hover in the air, to rain into his breast like snow. The fire had gone red. Now it fell in with a sharp sound and the room was colder. Cold crept up his arms. The room was huge, immense, glittering. It filled his whole world. There was the great blind bed, with his coat flung across it like some headless man saying his prayers. There was the luggage, ready to be carried away again, anywhere, tossed into trains, carted on to boats. . . . ‘He was too weak. He was too weak to move a finger.’ And yet he died in Janey’s arms. She – who’d never – never once in all these years – never on one single solitary occasion – No; he mustn’t think of it. Madness lay in thinking of it. No, he wouldn’t face it. He couldn’t stand it. It was too much to bear! And now Janey touched his tie with her fingers. She pinched the edges of the tie together. ‘You’re not – sorry I told you, John darling? It hasn’t made you sad? It hasn’t spoilt our evening – our being alone together?’ But at that he had to hide his face. He put his face into her bosom and his arms enfolded her. Spoilt their evening! Spoilt their being alone together! They would never be alone together again. Notes Text: GPOS. London Mercury, 3: 15, January 1921, pp. 259–68. 1. KM’s initial title, ‘The Interloper’, was changed in her final version. The story was based on an incident in 1909, when KM’s mother comforted

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a dying fellow passenger on board ship, before she arrived in Hobart to meet Harold Beauchamp. Alpers expands on how the widowed Beauchamp’s remarriage when he arrived back in Auckland after his visit to Europe in 1919, was in KM’s mind at this time (p. 564). Alpers also argues for restoring the geographic names which KM altered from the story’s magazine publication for GPOS, possibly to avoid parental disapproval, but this edition retains KM’s final decision. When KM finished the story she told JMM on 3 November 1920: What a QUEER business writing is. I don’t know. I don’t believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while Im working. [. . .] Ive been this man been this woman. Ive stood for hours on the Auckland Wharf. Ive been out in the stream waiting to be berthed. Ive been a seagull hovering at the stern and a hotel porter whistling through his teeth. It isn’t as though one sits and watches the spectacle. That would be thrilling enough, God knows. But one IS the spectacle for a time. (CLKM, 4, p. 97) She also told JMM on 23 November 1920: About the punctuation in The Stranger. [. . .] No, my dash isn’t quite a feminine dash (certainly when I was young it was). But it was intentional in that story. I was trying to do away with the three dots. They have been so abused by female & male writers that I fight shy of them – much tho’ I need them. The truth is – punctuation is infernally difficult. If I had time Id like to write an open letter to the A. [Athenaeum] on it. Its boundaries need to be enlarged. But I wont go into it now. Ill try however to remember commas. Its a fascinating subject, ça, one that Id like to talk over with you. (CLKM, 4, p. 118–19) 2. Janey was an affectionate nickname KM at times used for her mother.

•

Miss Brill1 Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques – Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you

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sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting – from nowhere, from the sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes. ‘What has been happening to me?’ said the sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from the red eiderdown! . . . But the nose, which was of some black composition, wasn’t at all firm. It must have had a knock, somehow. Never mind – a little dab of black sealing-wax when the time came – when it was absolutely necessary. . . . Little rogue! Yes, she really felt like that about it. Little rogue biting its tail just by her left ear. She could have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it. She felt a tingling in her hands and arms, but that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and sad – no, not sad, exactly – something gentle seemed to move in her bosom. There were a number of people out this afternoon, far more than last Sunday. And the band sounded louder and gayer. That was because the Season had begun. For although the band played all the year round on Sundays, out of season it was never the same. It was like some one playing with only the family to listen; it didn’t care how it played if there weren’t any strangers present. Wasn’t the conductor wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped with his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their cheeks and glared at the music. Now there came a little ‘flutey’ bit – very pretty! – a little chain of bright drops. She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled. Only two people shared her ‘special’ seat: a fine old man in a velvet coat, his hands clasped over a huge carved walking-stick, and a big old woman, sitting upright, with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron. They did not speak. This was disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her. She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon. Last Sunday, too, hadn’t been as interesting as usual. An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots. And she’d gone on the whole time about how she ought to wear spectacles; she knew she needed them; but that it was no good getting any; they’d be sure to break and they’d never keep on. And he’d been so patient. He’d suggested everything – gold rims, the kind that curved round your ears, little pads inside the bridge. No, nothing

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would please her. ‘They’ll always be sliding down my nose!’ Miss Brill had wanted to shake her. The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch. To and fro, in front of the flowerbeds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them, swooping and laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins, little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and lace. And sometimes a tiny staggerer came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as suddenly sat down ‘flop’, until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen, rushed scolding to its rescue. Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and – Miss Brill had often noticed – there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even – even cupboards! Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds. Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! tiddle-um! tum tiddley-um tum ta! blew the band. Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and they laughed and paired and went off arm-in-arm. Two peasant women with funny straw hats passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-coloured donkeys. A cold, pale nun hurried by. A beautiful woman came along and dropped her bunch of violets, and a little boy ran after to hand them to her, and she took them and threw them away as if they’d been poisoned. Dear me! Miss Brill didn’t know whether to admire that or not! And now an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she’d bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw. Oh, she was so pleased to see him – delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she’d been – everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming – didn’t he agree? And wouldn’t he, perhaps? . . . But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face, and, even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than ever. But even the band seemed to know what she was feeling

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and played more softly, played tenderly, and the drum beat, ‘The Brute! The Brute!’ over and over. What would she do? What was going to happen now? But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque turned, raised her hand as though she’d seen some one else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more quickly, more gaily than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill’s seat got up and marched away, and such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast. Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted? But it wasn’t till a little brown dog trotted on solemn and then slowly trotted off, like a little ‘theatre’ dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was that made it so exciting. They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she’d never thought of it like that before! And yet it explained why she made such a point of starting from home at just the same time each week – so as not to be late for the performance – and it also explained why she had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling her English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons. No wonder! Miss Brill nearly laughed out loud. She was on the stage. She thought of the old invalid gentleman to whom she read the newspaper four afternoons a week while he slept in the garden. She had got quite used to the frail head on the cotton pillow, the hollowed eyes, the open mouth and the high pinched nose. If he’d been dead she mightn’t have noticed for weeks; she wouldn’t have minded. But suddenly he knew he was having the paper read to him by an actress! ‘An actress!’ The old head lifted; two points of light quivered in the old eyes. ‘An actress – are ye?’ And Miss Brill smoothed the newspaper as though it were the manuscript of her part and said gently: ‘Yes, I have been an actress for a long time.’ The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill – a something what was it? – not sadness – no, not sadness – a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole company, would begin singing. The young ones, the laughing ones who were moving together, they would begin, and the men’s voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches – they would come in with a

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kind of accompaniment – something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful – moving. . . . And Miss Brill’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we understand, we understand, she thought – though what they understood she didn’t know. Just at that moment a boy and a girl came and sat down where the old couple had been. They were beautifully dressed; they were in love. The hero and heroine, of course, just, arrived from his father’s yacht. And still soundlessly singing, still with that trembling smile, Miss Brill prepared to listen. ‘No, not now,’ said the girl.’ Not here, I can’t.’ ‘But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?’ asked the boy. ‘Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?’ ‘It’s her fu-fur which is so funny,’ giggled the girl. ‘It’s exactly like a fried whiting.’ ‘Ah, be off with you!’ said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: ‘Tell me, ma petite chère –’ ‘No, not here,’ said the girl. ‘Not yet.’ *

*

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On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present – a surprise – something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way. But to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room – her room like a cupboard – and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying. Notes Text: GPOS. Athenaeum, 4726, 26 November 1920, pp. 722–3. 1. KM wrote to JMM on 13 November 1920: Last night I walked about and saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms & the lights in the water & the hollow pools full of stars – and lamented there was no God. But I came in and wrote Miss Brill instead, which is my insect magnificat now & always.

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A week later she told him, ‘I am very glad you liked Miss Brill. I liked her too. One writes (one reason why is) because one does care so passionately that one must show it – one must declare ones love’ (CLKM, 4, p. 109, p. 116). She later explained to her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, on 17 January 1921: Its a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple. In Miss Brill I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence – I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her – and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After Id written it I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her. Don’t think Im vain about the little sketch. Its only the method I wanted to explain. [. . .] If a thing has really come off it seems to me there mustn’t be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out. That’s how I AIM at writing. It will take some time to get anywhere near there. (CLKM, 4, p. 165)

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Poison1 The post was very late. When we came back from our walk after lunch it still had not arrived. ‘Pas encore, Madame,’ sang Annette, scurrying back to her cooking. We carried our parcels into the dining-room. The table was laid. As always, the sight of the table laid for two – for two people only – and yet so finished, so perfect, there was no possible room for a third, gave me a queer, quick thrill as though I’d been struck by that silver lightning that quivered over the white cloth, the brilliant glasses, the shallow bowl of freesias. ‘Blow the old postman! Whatever can have happened to him?’ said Beatrice. ‘Put those things down, dearest.’ ‘Where would you like them . . . ?’ She raised her head; she smiled her sweet, teasing smile. ‘Anywhere – Silly.’ But I knew only too well that there was no such place for her, and I would have stood holding the squat liqueur bottle and the sweets for months, for years, rather than risk giving another tiny shock to her exquisite sense of order.

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‘Here – I’ll take them.’ She plumped them down on the table with her long gloves and a basket of figs. ‘The Luncheon Table. Short story by – by –’ She took my arm. ‘Let’s go on to the terrace –’ and I felt her shiver. ‘Ça sent,’ she said faintly, ‘de la cuisine. . . .’ I had noticed lately – we had been living in the south for two months – that when she wished to speak of food, or the climate, or, playfully, of her love for me, she always dropped into French. We perched on the balustrade under the awning. Beatrice leaned over gazing down – down to the white road with its guard of cactus spears. The beauty of her ear, just her ear, the marvel of it was so great that I could have turned from regarding it to all that sweep of glittering sea below and stammered: ‘You know – her ear! She has ears that are simply the most. . . .’ She was dressed in white, with pearls round her throat and lilies-ofthe valley tucked into her belt. On the third finger of her left hand she wore one pearl ring – no wedding ring. ‘Why should I, mon ami? Why should we pretend? Who could possibly care?’ And of course I agreed, though privately, in the depths of my heart, I would have given my soul to have stood beside her in a large, yes, a large, fashionable church, crammed with people, with old reverend clergymen, with The Voice that breathed o’er Eden,2 with palms and the smell of scent, knowing there was a red carpet and confetti outside, and somewhere, a wedding-cake and champagne and a satin shoe to throw after the carriage – if I could have slipped our wedding-ring on to her finger. Not because I cared for such horrible shows, but because I felt it might possibly perhaps lessen this ghastly feeling of absolute freedom, her absolute freedom, of course. Oh, God! What torture happiness was – what anguish! I looked up at the villa, at the windows of our room hidden so mysteriously behind the green straw blinds. Was it possible that she ever came moving through the green light and smiling that secret smile, that languid, brilliant smile that was just for me? She put her arm round my neck; the other hand softly, terribly, brushed back my hair. ‘Who are you?’ Who was she? She was – Woman. . . . On the first warm evening in Spring, when lights shone like pearls through the lilac air and voices murmured in the fresh-flowering gardens, it was she who sang in the tall house with the tulle curtains. As one drove in the moonlight through the foreign city hers was the shadow that fell across the quivering gold of the shutters. When the lamp was lighted, in the new-born stillness her steps passed your door. And she looked out into the autumn twilight, pale in her furs, as the automobile swept by. . . .

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In fact, to put it shortly, I was twentyfour at the time. And when she lay on her back, with the pearls slipped under her chin, and sighed ‘I’m thirsty, dearest. Donne-moi un orange,’ I would gladly, willingly, have dived for an orange into the jaws of a crocodile – if crocodiles ate oranges. ‘Had I two little feathery wings And were a little feathery bird . . .’3

sang Beatrice. I seized her hand. ‘You wouldn’t fly away?’ ‘Not far. Not further than the bottom of the road.’ ‘Why on earth there?’ She quoted: ‘He cometh not, she said. . . .’4 ‘Who? The silly old postman? But you’re not expecting a letter.’ ‘No, but it’s maddening all the same. Ah!’ Suddenly she laughed and leaned against me. ‘There he is – look – like a blue beetle.’ And we pressed our cheeks together and watched the blue beetle beginning to climb. ‘Dearest,’ breathed Beatrice. And the word seemed to linger in the air, to throb in the air like the note of a violin. ‘What is it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she laughed softly. ‘A wave of – a wave of affection, I suppose.’ I put my arm round her. ‘Then you wouldn’t fly away?’ And she said rapidly and softly: ‘No! No! Not for worlds. Not really. I love this place. I’ve loved being here. I could stay here for years, I believe. I’ve never been so happy as I have these last two months, and you’ve been so perfect to me, dearest, in every way.’ This was such bliss – it was so extraordinary, so unprecedented, to hear her talk like this that I had to try to laugh it off. ‘Don’t! You sound as if you were saying good-bye.’ ‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense. You mustn’t say such things even in fun!’ She slid her little hand under my white jacket and clutched my shoulder. ‘You’ve been happy, haven’t you?’ ‘Happy? Happy? O, God – if you knew what I feel at this moment. . . . Happy! My Wonder! My Joy!’ I dropped off the balustrade and embraced her, lifting her up in my arms. And while I held her lifted I pressed my face in her breast and muttered: ‘You are mine?’ And for the first time in all the desperate months I’d known her, even counting the last month of – surely – Heaven – I believed her absolutely when she answered: ‘Yes, I am yours.’

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The creak of the gate and the postman’s steps on the gravel drew us apart. I was dizzy for the moment. I simply stood there, smiling, I felt, rather stupidly. Beatrice walked over to the cane chairs. ‘You go – go for the letters,’ said she. I – well – I almost reeled away. But I was too late. Annette came running. ‘Pas de lettres,’ said she. My reckless smile in reply as she handed me the paper must have surprised her. I was wild with joy. I threw the paper up into the air and sang out: ‘No letters, darling!’ as I came over to where the beloved woman was lying in the long chair. For a moment she did not reply. Then she said slowly as she tore off the newspaper wrapper: ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot.’5 There are times when a cigarette is just the very one thing that will carry you over the moment. It is more than a confederate, even; it is a secret, perfect little friend who knows all about it and understands absolutely. While you smoke you look down at it – smile or frown, as the occasion demands; you inhale deeply and expel the smoke in a slow fan. This was one of those moments. I walked over to the magnolia and breathed my fill of it. Then I came back and leaned over her shoulder. But quickly she tossed the paper away on to the stone. ‘There’s nothing in it,’ said she. ‘Nothing. There’s only some poison trial. Either some man did or didn’t murder his wife, and twenty thousand people have sat in court every day and two million words have been wired all over the world after each proceeding.’ ‘Silly world!’ said I, flinging into another chair. I wanted to forget the paper, to return, but cautiously, of course, to that moment before the postman came. But when she answered I knew from her voice the moment was over for now. Never mind. I was content to wait – five hundred years, if need be – now that I knew. ‘Not so very silly,’ said Beatrice. ‘After all it isn’t only morbid curiosity on the part of the twenty thousand.’ ‘What is it, darling?’ Heavens knows I didn’t care. ‘Guilt!’ she cried.’ Guilt! Didn’t you realise that? They’re fascinated like sick people are fascinated by anything – any scrap of news about their own case. The man in the dock may be innocent enough, but the people in court are nearly all of them poisoners. Haven’t you ever thought’ – she was pale with excitement – ‘of the amount of poisoning that goes on: It’s the exception to find married people who don’t poison each other – married people and lovers. Oh,’ she cried, ‘the number of cups of tea, glasses of wine, cups of coffee that are just tainted. The number I’ve had myself, and drunk, either knowing or

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not knowing – and risked it. The only reason why so many couples’ – she laughed – ‘survive, is because the one is frightened of giving the other the fatal dose. That dose takes nerve! But it’s bound to come sooner or later. There’s no going back once the first little dose has been given. It’s the beginning of the end, really – don’t you agree? Don’t you see what I mean?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer. She unpinned the lilies-of-thevalley and lay back, drawing them across her eyes. ‘Both my husbands poisoned me,’ said Beatrice. ‘My first husband gave me a huge dose almost immediately, but my second was really an artist in his way. Just a tiny pinch, now and again, cleverly disguised – Oh, so cleverly! – until one morning I woke up and in every single particle of me, to the ends of my fingers and toes, there was a tiny grain. I was just in time. . . .’ I hated to hear her mention her husbands so calmly, especially to-day. It hurt. I was going to speak, but suddenly she cried mournfully: ‘Why! Why should it have happened to me? What have I done? Why have I been all my life singled out by. . . . It’s a conspiracy.’ I tried to tell her it was because she was too perfect for this horrible world – too exquisite, too fine. It frightened people. I made a little joke. ‘But I – I haven’t tried to poison you.’ Beatrice gave a queer small laugh and bit the end of a lily stem. ‘You!’ said she. ‘You wouldn’t hurt a fly!’ Strange. That hurt, though. Most horribly. Just then Annette ran out with our apéritifs. Beatrice leaned forward and took a glass from the tray and handed it to me. I noticed the gleam of the pearl on what I called her pearl finger. How could I be hurt at what she said? ‘And you,’ I said, taking the glass, ‘you’ve never poisoned anybody.’ That gave me an idea; I tried to explain. ‘You – you do just the opposite. What is the name for one like you who, instead of poisoning people, fills them – everybody, the postman, the man who drives us, our boatman, the flower-seller, me – with new life, with something of her own radiance, her beauty, her –’ Dreamily she smiled; dreamily she looked at me. ‘What are you thinking of – my lovely darling?’ ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘whether, after lunch, you’d go down to the post-office and ask for the afternoon letters. Would you mind, dearest? Not that I’m expecting one – but – I just thought, perhaps – it’s silly not to have the letters if they’re there. Isn’t it? Silly to wait till to-morrow.’ She twirled the stem of the glass in her fingers. Her beautiful head was bent. But I lifted my glass and drank, sipped rather

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– sipped slowly, deliberately, looking at that dark head and thinking of – postmen and blue beetles and farewells that were not farewells and. . . . Good God! Was it fancy? No, it wasn’t fancy. The drink tasted chill, bitter, queer. Notes U Text: TS NLC. SCOS. 1. KM mentioned on 18 November 1920, that she was sending ‘another story’ to JMM (CLKM, 4, p. 115). Both the story itself, and JMM’s choosing not to publish it in the Athenaeum, are enmeshed in the biographical details of JMM’s flirtation in London with Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, and KM’s bitterness and loneliness as she waited for mail to arrive at Menton (see Life, Ch. XVIII, ‘Conquest of the Personal’, pp. 307–33). In this depiction of what she calls ‘promiscuous love’, KM makes the woman the liar in her relationship with a younger man. She wrote at greater length on what she intended in this story than she did with any other piece of her fiction, when she explained to JMM on 23 November 1920: And about Poison. I could write about that for pages. But Ill try & condense what Ive to say. The story is told by (evidently) a worldly, rather cynical (not wholly cynical) man against himself (but not altogether) when he was so absurdly young. You know how young by his idea of what woman is. She has been up till now only the vision, only she who passes. You realise that? And here he has put all his passion into this Beatrice. Its promiscuous love not understood as such by him, perfectly understood as such by her. But you realise the vie de luxe they are living – the very table, sweets, liqueurs, lilies, pearls. And you realise? she expects a letter from someone calling her away? Fully expects it? which accounts for her farewell & her declaration. And when it doesn’t come even her commonness peeps out – the newspaper touch of such a woman. She can’t disguise her chagrin. She gives herself away . . . He of course laughs at it now, and laughs at her. Take what he says about her ‘sense of order’ & the crocodile. But he also regrets the self who dead privately would have been young enough to have actually wanted to Marry such a woman. But I meant it to be light – tossed off, and yet through it – oh – subtly – the lament for youthful belief. There are the rapid confessions one receives sometimes from a glove or a cigarette or a hat. I suppose I haven’t brought it off in ‘Poison’. It wanted a light, light hand – and then with that newspaper a sudden . . . let me see lowering of it all – just what happens in promiscuous love after passion. A glimpse of staleness. And the story is told by a man who gives himself away & hides his traces at the same moment. (CLKM, 4, p. 119)

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KM seems to have gone along with JMM’s not caring for the story, and excluded it from GPOS. By the time he included it SCOS, JMM had come to regard it as ‘a little masterpiece’ (SCOS, p. ix). 2. A hymn by John Keble (1857), sung at the beginning of a wedding ceremony. 3. KM’s memory of lines from the first stanza of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Something Childish, But Very Natural’ (1800): If I had but two little wings And were a little feathery bird To you I’d fly, my dear! 4. From Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Mariana’ (1830): She only said, ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’ 5. ‘How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot’: Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), ll. 207–8

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The Lady’s Maid1 Eleven o’clock. A knock at the door. . . . I hope I haven’t disturbed you, madam. You weren’t asleep – were you? But I’ve just given my lady her tea, and there was such a nice cup over, I thought, perhaps. . . . . . . Not at all, madam. I always make a cup of tea last thing. She drinks it in bed after her prayers to warm her up. I put the kettle on when she kneels down and I say to it, ‘Now you needn’t be in too much of a hurry to say your prayers.’ But it’s always boiling before my lady is half through. You see, madam, we know such a lot of people, and they’ve all got to be prayed for – every one. My lady keeps a list of the names in a little red book. Oh dear! whenever some one new has been to see us and my lady says afterwards, ‘Ellen, give me my little red book,’ I feel quite wild, I do. ‘There’s another,’ I think, ‘keeping her out of her bed in all weathers.’ And she won’t have a cushion, you know, madam; she kneels on the hard carpet. It fidgets me something dreadful to see her, knowing her as I do. I’ve tried to cheat her; I’ve spread out the eiderdown.

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But the first time I did it – oh, she gave me such a look – holy it was, madam. ‘Did our Lord have an eiderdown, Ellen?’ she said. But – I was younger at the time – I felt inclined to say, ‘No, but our Lord wasn’t your age, and he didn’t know what it was to have your lumbago.’ Wicked – wasn’t it? But she’s too good, you know, madam. When I tucked her up just now and seen – saw her lying back, her hands outside and her head on the pillow – so pretty – I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Now you look just like your dear mother when I laid her out!’ . . . Yes, madam, it was all left to me. Oh, she did look sweet. I did her hair, soft-like, round her forehead, all in dainty curls, and just to one side of her neck I put a bunch of most beautiful purple pansies. Those pansies made a picture of her, madam! I shall never forget them. I thought to-night, when I looked at my lady, ‘Now, if only the pansies was there no one could tell the difference.’ . . . Only the last year, madam. Only after she’d got a little – well – feeble as you might say. Of course, she was never dangerous; she was the sweetest old lady. But how it took her was – she thought she’d lost something. She couldn’t keep still, she couldn’t settle. All day long she’d be up and down, up and down; you’d meet her everywhere – on the stairs, in the porch, making for the kitchen. And she’d look up at you, and she’d say – just like a child, ‘I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it.’ ‘Come along,’ I’d say, ‘come along, and I’ll lay out your patience for you.’ But she’d catch me by the hand – I was a favourite of hers – and whisper, ‘Find it for me, Ellen. Find it for me.’ Sad, wasn’t it? . . . No, she never recovered, madam. She had a stroke at the end. Last words she ever said was – very slow, ‘Look in – the – Look – in –’ And then she was gone. . . . No, madam, I can’t say I noticed it. Perhaps some girls. But you see, it’s like this, I’ve got nobody but my lady. My mother died of consumption when I was four, and I lived with my grandfather, who kept a hairdresser’s shop. I used to spend all my time in the shop under a table dressing my doll’s hair – copying the assistants, I suppose. They were ever so kind to me. Used to make me little wigs, all colours, the latest fashions and all. And there I’d sit all day, quiet as quiet – the customers never knew. Only now and again I’d take my peep from under the tablecloth. . . . But one day I managed to get a pair of scissors and – would you believe it, madam? I cut off all my hair; snipped it off all in bits, like the little monkey I was. Grandfather was furious! He caught hold of the tongs – I shall never forget it – grabbed me by the hand and shut my fingers in them. ‘That’ll teach you!’ he said. It was a fearful burn. I’ve got the mark of it to-day.

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. . . Well, you see, madam, he’d taken such pride in my hair. He used to sit me up on the counter, before the customers came, and do it something beautiful – big, soft curls and waved over the top. I remember the assistants standing round, and me ever so solemn with the penny grandfather gave me to hold while it was being done. . . . But he always took the penny back afterwards. Poor grandfather! Wild, he was, at the fright I’d made of myself. But he frightened me that time. Do you know what I did, madam? I ran away. Yes, I did, round the corners, in and out, I don’t know how far I didn’t run. Oh, dear, I must have looked a sight, with my hand rolled up in my pinny and my hair sticking out. People must have laughed when they saw me . . . . . . No, madam, grandfather never got over it. He couldn’t bear the sight of me after. Couldn’t eat his dinner, even, if I was there. So my aunt took me. She was a cripple, an upholstress. Tiny! She had to stand on the sofas when she wanted to cut out the backs. And it was helping her I met my lady . . . . . . Not so very, madam. I was thirteen, turned. And I don’t remember ever feeling – well – a child, as you might say. You see there was my uniform, and one thing and another. My lady put me into collars and cuffs from the first. Oh yes – once I did! That was – funny! It was like this. My lady had her two little nieces staying with her – we were at Sheldon at the time – and there was a fair on the common. ‘Now, Ellen,’ she said, ‘I want you to take the two young ladies for a ride on the donkeys.’ Off we went; solemn little loves they were; each had a hand. But when we came to the donkeys they were too shy to go on. So we stood and watched instead. Beautiful those donkeys were! They were the first I’d seen out of a cart – for pleasure as you might say. They were a lovely silver-grey, with little red saddles and blue bridles and bells jing-a-jingling on their ears. And quite big girls – older than me, even – were riding them, ever so gay. Not at all common, I don’t mean, madam, just enjoying themselves. And I don’t know what it was, but the way the little feet went, and the eyes – so gentle – and the soft ears – made me want to go on a donkey more than anything in the world! . . . Of course, I couldn’t. I had my young ladies. And what would I have looked like perched up there in my uniform? But all the rest of the day it was donkeys – donkeys on the brain with me. I felt I should have burst if I didn’t tell some one; and who was there to tell? But when I went to bed – I was sleeping in Mrs James’s bedroom, our cook that was, at the time – as soon as the lights was out, there they were, my donkeys, jingling along, with their neat little feet and sad eyes. . . . Well, madam, would you believe it, I waited for a long time

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and pretended to be asleep, and then suddenly I sat up and called out as loud as I could, ‘I do want to go on a donkey. I do want a donkeyride!’ You see, I had to say it, and I thought they wouldn’t laugh at me if they knew I was only dreaming. Artful – wasn’t it? Just what a silly child would think. . . . . . . No, madam, never now. Of course, I did think of it at one time. But it wasn’t to be. He had a little flower-shop just down the road and across from where we was living. Funny – wasn’t it? And me such a one for flowers. We were having a lot of company at the time, and I was in and out of the shop more often than not, as the saying is. And Harry and I (his name was Harry) got to quarrelling about how things ought to be arranged – and that began it. Flowers! you wouldn’t believe it, madam, the flowers he used to bring me. He’d stop at nothing. It was lilies-of-the-valley more than once, and I’m not exaggerating! Well, of course, we were going to be married and live over the shop, and it was all going to be just so, and I was to have the window to arrange. . . . Oh, how I’ve done that window of a Saturday! Not really, of course, madam, just dreaming, as you might say. I’ve done it for Christmas – motto in holly, and all – and I’ve had my Easter lilies with a gorgeous star all daffodils in the middle. I’ve hung – well, that’s enough of that. The day came he was to call for me to choose the furniture. Shall I ever forget it? It was a Tuesday. My lady wasn’t quite herself that afternoon. Not that she’d said anything, of course; she never does or will. But I knew by the way that she kept wrapping herself up and asking me if it was cold – and her little nose looked . . . pinched. I didn’t like leaving her; I knew I’d be worrying all the time. At last I asked her if she’d rather I put it off.’ Oh no, Ellen,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t mind about me. You mustn’t disappoint your young man.’ And so cheerful, you know, madam, never thinking about herself. It made me feel worse than ever. I began to wonder . . . then she dropped her handkerchief and began to stoop down to pick it up herself – a thing she never did. ‘Whatever are you doing!’ I cried, running to stop her. ‘Well,’ she said, smiling, you know, madam, ‘I shall have to begin to practise.’ Oh, it was all I could do not to burst out crying. I went over to the dressing-table and made believe to rub up the silver, and I couldn’t keep myself in, and I asked her if she’d rather I . . . didn’t get married. ‘No, Ellen,’ she said –2 that was her voice, madam, like I’m giving you – ‘No, Ellen, not for the wide world!’ But while she said it, madam – I was looking in her glass; of course, she didn’t know I could see her – she put her little hand on her heart just like her dear mother used to, and lifted her eyes. . . . Oh, madam! When Harry came I had his letters all ready, and the ring and a ducky little brooch he’d given me – a silver bird it was, with a chain

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in its beak, and on the end of the chain a heart with a dagger. Quite the thing! I opened the door to him. I never gave him time for a word. ‘There you are,’ I said. ‘Take them all back,’ I said, ‘it’s all over. I’m not going to marry you,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave my lady.’ White! he turned as white as a woman. I had to slam the door, and there I stood, all of a tremble, till I knew he had gone. When I opened the door – believe me or not, madam – that man was gone! I ran out onto the road just as I was, in my apron and my house-shoes, and there I stayed in the middle of the road . . . staring. People must have laughed if they saw me. . . . . . . Goodness gracious! – What’s that? It’s the clock striking! And here I’ve been keeping you awake. Oh, madam, you ought to have stopped me. . . . Can I tuck in your feet? I always tuck in my lady’s feet, every night, just the same. And she says, ‘Good night, Ellen. Sleep sound and wake early!’ I don’t know what I should do if she didn’t say that, now. . . . Oh dear, I sometimes think . . . whatever should I do if anything were to. . . . But, there, thinking’s no good to anyone – is it, madam? Thinking won’t help. Not that I do it often. And if ever I do I pull myself up sharp, ‘Now then, Ellen. At it again – you silly girl! If you can’t find anything better to do than to start thinking! . . .’ Notes Text: GPOS. Athenaeum, 4730, 24 December 1920, pp. 858–9. 1. KM wrote to JMM, 6 December 1920: I’ve just finished a story called The Ladies Maid [. . .]. I do hope you will care to print it. Its what I meant when I said a Xmas story. Dear knows Xmas doesn’t come in it after all and you may think I’m a fraud. But I think, all the same, people might like to read it at Xmas time. The number of letters Ive had about Miss Brill! I think I am very fortunate to have people like my stories – don’t you? But I must say it does surprise me. This one I’d like you and de la Mare to like – other people don’t matter. (CLKM, 4, p. 136) KM felt deeply affectionate towards the poet and fiction writer, Walter de la Mare, noting on 20 January 1922 how, ‘I think of W.J.D.’ and a few other friends ‘every day. They are part of my life’ (KMN, 2, p. 318). 2. At this point, Alpers inserted the words ‘that was her voice, madame, like I’m giving you’, from a TS in NLC. Again, as KM corrected proofs for GPOS, our text follows her own final decision.

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The Daughters of the Late Colonel1 I The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking things over, wondering, deciding, trying to remember where. . . . Constantia lay like a statue, her hands by her sides, her feet just overlapping each other, the sheet up to her chin. She stared at the ceiling. ‘Do you think father would mind if we gave his top-hat to the porter?’ ‘The porter?’ snapped Josephine. ‘Why ever the porter? What a very extraordinary idea! ‘Because,’ said Constantia slowly, ‘he must often have to go to funerals. And I noticed at – at the cemetery that he only had a bowler.’ She paused. ‘I thought then how very much he’d appreciate a tophat. We ought to give him a present, too. He was always very nice to father.’ ‘But,’ cried Josephine, flouncing on her pillow and staring across the dark at Constantia, ‘father’s head!’ And suddenly, for one awful moment, she nearly giggled. Not, of course, that she felt in the least like giggling. It must have been habit. Years ago, when they had stayed awake at night talking, their beds had simply heaved. And now the porter’s head, disappearing, popped out, like a candle, under father’s hat. . . . The giggle mounted, mounted; she clenched her hands; she fought it down; she frowned fiercely at the dark and said ‘Remember’ terribly sternly. ‘We can decide to-morrow,’ she said. Constantia had noticed nothing; she sighed. ‘Do you think we ought to have our dressing-gowns dyed as well?’ ‘Black?’ almost shrieked Josephine. ‘Well, what else?’ said Constantia. ‘I was thinking – it doesn’t seem quite sincere, in a way, to wear black out of doors and when we’re fully dressed, and then when we’re at home –’ ‘But nobody sees us,’ said Josephine. She gave the bedclothes such a twitch that both her feet came uncovered, and she had to creep up the pillows to get them well under again. ‘Kate does,’ said Constantia. ‘And the postman very well might.’ Josephine thought of her dark-red slippers, which matched her

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dressing-gown, and of Constantia’s favourite indefinite green ones which went with hers. Black! Two black dressing-gowns and two pairs of black woolly slippers, creeping off to the bath-room like black cats. ‘I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary,’ said she. Silence. Then Constantia said, ‘We shall have to post the papers with the notice in them to-morrow to catch the Ceylon mail. . . . How many letters have we had up till now?’ ‘Twenty-three.’ Josephine had replied to them all, and twenty-three times when she came to ‘We miss our dear father so much’ she had broken down and had to use her handkerchief, and on some of them even to soak up a very light-blue tear with an edge of blotting-paper. Strange! She couldn’t have put it on – but twenty-three times. Even now, though, when she said over to herself sadly ‘We miss our dear father so much,’ she could have cried if she’d wanted to. ‘Have you got enough stamps?’ came from Constantia. ‘Oh, how can I tell?’ said Josephine crossly. ‘What’s the good of asking me that now?’ ‘I was just wondering,’ said Constantia mildly. Silence again. There came a little rustle, a scurry, a hop. ‘A mouse,’ said Constantia. ‘It can’t be a mouse because there aren’t any crumbs,’ said Josephine. ‘But it doesn’t know there aren’t,’ said Constantia. A spasm of pity squeezed her heart. Poor little thing! She wished she’d left a tiny piece of biscuit on the dressing-table. It was awful to think of it not finding anything. What would it do? ‘I can’t think how they manage to live at all,’ she said slowly. ‘Who?’ demanded Josephine. And Constantia said more loudly than she meant to, ‘Mice.’ Josephine was furious. ‘Oh, what nonsense, Con!’ she said. ‘What have mice got to do with it? You’re asleep.’ ‘I don’t think I am,’ said Constantia. She shut her eyes to make sure. She was. Josephine arched her spine, pulled up her knees, folded her arms so that her fists came under her ears, and pressed her cheek hard against the pillow. II Another thing which complicated matters was they had Nurse Andrews staying on with them that week. It was their own fault; they had asked her. It was Josephine’s idea. On the morning – well, on the last morning, when the doctor had gone, Josephine had said

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to Constantia, ‘Don’t you think it would be rather nice if we asked Nurse Andrews to stay on for a week as our guest?’ ‘Very nice,’ said Constantia. ‘I thought,’ went on Josephine quickly, ‘I should just say this afternoon, after I’ve paid her, ‘My sister and I would be very pleased, after all you’ve done for us, Nurse Andrews, if you would stay on for a week as our guest.’ I’d have to put that in about being our guest in case –’ ‘Oh, but she could hardly expect to be paid!’ cried Constantia. ‘One never knows,’ said Josephine sagely. Nurse Andrews had, of course, jumped at the idea. But it was a bother. It meant they had to have regular sit-down meals at the proper times, whereas if they’d been alone they could just have asked Kate if she wouldn’t have minded bringing them a tray wherever they were. And meal-times now that the strain was over were rather a trial. Nurse Andrews was simply fearful about butter. Really they couldn’t help feeling that about butter, at least, she took advantage of their kindness. And she had that maddening habit of asking for just an inch more bread to finish what she had on her plate, and then, at the last mouthful, absent-mindedly – of course it wasn’t absent-mindedly – taking another helping. Josephine got very red when this happened, and she fastened her small, bead-like eyes on the tablecloth as if she saw a minute strange insect creeping through the web of it. But Constantia’s long, pale face lengthened and set, and she gazed away – away – far over the desert, to where that line of camels unwound like a thread of wool. . . . ‘When I was with Lady Tukes,’ said Nurse Andrews, ‘she had such a dainty little contray-vance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the – on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork. And when you wanted some buttah you simply pressed his foot and he bent down and speared you a piece. It was quite a gayme.’ Josephine could hardly bear that. But ‘I think those things are very extravagant’ was all she said. ‘But whey?’ asked Nurse Andrews, beaming through her eyeglasses. ‘No one, surely, would take more buttah than one wanted – would one?’ ‘Ring, Con,’ cried Josephine. She couldn’t trust herself to reply. And proud young Kate, the enchanted princess, came in to see what the old tabbies wanted now. She snatched away their plates of mock something or other and slapped down a white, terrified blancmange. ‘Jam, please, Kate,’ said Josephine kindly. Kate knelt and burst open the sideboard, lifted the lid of the jam-pot, saw it was empty, put it on the table, and stalked off.

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‘I’m afraid,’ said Nurse Andrews a moment later, ‘there isn’t any.’ ‘Oh, what a bother!’ said Josephine. She bit her lip. ‘What had we better do?’ Constantia looked dubious. ‘We can’t disturb Kate again,’ she said softly. Nurse Andrews waited, smiling at them both. Her eyes wandered, spying at everything behind her eye-glasses. Constantia in despair went back to her camels. Josephine frowned heavily – concentrated. If it hadn’t been for this idiotic woman she and Con would, of course, have eaten their blancmange without. Suddenly the idea came. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Marmalade. There’s some marmalade in the sideboard. Get it, Con.’ ‘I hope,’ laughed Nurse Andrews, and her laugh was like a spoon tinkling against a medicine-glass – ‘I hope it’s not very bittah marmalayde.’ III But, after all, it was not long now, and then she’d be gone for good. And there was no getting over the fact that she had been very kind to father. She had nursed him day and night at the end. Indeed, both Constantia and Josephine felt privately she had rather overdone the not leaving him at the very last. For when they had gone in to say good-bye Nurse Andrews had sat beside his bed the whole time, holding his wrist and pretending to look at her watch. It couldn’t have been necessary. It was so tactless, too. Supposing father had wanted to say something – something private to them. Not that he had. Oh, far from it! He lay there, purple, a dark, angry purple in the face, and never even looked at them when they came in. Then, as they were standing there, wondering what to do, he had suddenly opened one eye. Oh, what a difference it would have made, what a difference to their memory of him, how much easier to tell people about it, if he had only opened both! But no – one eye only. It glared at them a moment and then . . . went out. IV It had made it very awkward for them when Mr Farolles, of St John’s, called the same afternoon. ‘The end was quite peaceful, I trust?’ were the first words he said as he glided towards them through the dark drawing-room. ‘Quite,’ said Josephine faintly. They both hung their heads. Both of them felt certain that eye wasn’t at all a peaceful eye. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ said Josephine. ‘Thank you, Miss Pinner,’ said Mr Farolles gratefully. He folded his coat-tails and began to lower himself into father’s arm-chair, but

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just as he touched it he almost sprang up and slid into the next chair instead. He coughed. Josephine clasped her hands; Constantia looked vague. ‘I want you to feel, Miss Pinner,’ said Mr Farolles, ‘and you, Miss Constantia, that I’m trying to be helpful. I want to be helpful to you both, if you will let me. These are the times,’ said Mr Farolles, very simply and earnestly, ‘when God means us to be helpful to one another.’ ‘Thank you very much, Mr Farolles,’ said Josephine and Constantia. ‘Not at all,’ said Mr Farolles gently. He drew his kid gloves through his fingers and leaned forward. ‘And if either of you would like a little Communion, either or both of you, here and now, you have only to tell me. A little Communion is often very help – a great comfort,’ he added tenderly. But the idea of a little Communion terrified them. What! In the drawing-room by themselves – with no – no altar or anything! The piano would be much too high, thought Constantia, and Mr Farolles could not possibly lean over it with the chalice. And Kate would be sure to come bursting in and interrupt them, thought Josephine. And supposing the bell rang in the middle? It might be somebody important – about their mourning. Would they get up reverently and go out, or would they have to wait . . . in torture? ‘Perhaps you will send round a note by your good Kate if you would care for it later,’ said Mr Farolles. ‘Oh yes, thank you very much!’ they both said. Mr Farolles got up and took his black straw hat from the round table. ‘And about the funeral,’ he said softly. ‘I may arrange that – as your dear father’s old friend and yours, Miss Pinner – and Miss Constantia?’ Josephine and Constantia got up too. ‘I should like it to be quite simple,’ said Josephine firmly, ‘and not too expensive. At the same time, I should like –’ ‘A good one that will last,’ thought dreamy Constantia, as if Josephine were buying a nightgown. But of course Josephine didn’t say that. ‘One suitable to our father’s position.’ She was very nervous. ‘I’ll run round to our good friend Mr Knight,’ said Mr Farolles soothingly. ‘I will ask him to come and see you. I am sure you will find him very helpful indeed.’ V Well, at any rate, all that part of it was over, though neither of them could possibly believe that father was never coming back. Josephine

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had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. ‘Buried. You two girls had me buried!’ She heard his stick thumping. Oh, what would they say? What possible excuse could they make? It sounded such an appallingly heartless thing to do. Such a wicked advantage to take of a person because he happened to be helpless at the moment. The other people seemed to treat it all as a matter of course. They were strangers; they couldn’t be expected to understand that father was the very last person for such a thing to happen to. No, the entire blame for it all would fall on her and Constantia. And the expense, she thought, stepping into the tight-buttoned cab. When she had to show him the bills. What would he say then? She heard him absolutely roaring, ‘And do you expect me to pay for this gimcrack excursion of yours?’ ‘Oh,’ groaned poor Josephine aloud, ‘we shouldn’t have done it, Con!’ And Constantia, pale as a lemon in all that blackness, said in a frightened whisper, ‘Done what, Jug?’ ‘Let them bu-bury father like that,’ said Josephine, breaking down and crying into her new, queer-smelling mourning handkerchief. ‘But what else could we have done?’ asked Constantia wonderingly. ‘We couldn’t have kept him, Jug – we couldn’t have kept him unburied. At any rate, not in a flat that size.’ Josephine blew her nose; the cab was dreadfully stuffy. ‘I don’t know,’ she said forlornly. ‘It is all so dreadful. I feel we ought to have tried to, just for a time at least. To make perfectly sure. One thing’s certain’ – and her tears sprang out again – ‘father will never forgive us for this – never!’ VI Father would never forgive them. That was what they felt more than ever when, two mornings later, they went into his room to go through his things. They had discussed it quite calmly. It was even down on Josephine’s list of things to be done. Go through father’s things and settle about them. But that was a very different matter from saying after breakfast: ‘Well, are you ready, Con?’ ‘Yes, Jug – when you are.’ ‘Then I think we’d better get it over.’ It was dark in the hall. It had been a rule for years never to disturb father in the morning, whatever happened. And now they were going

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to open the door without knocking even. . . . Constantia’s eyes were enormous at the idea; Josephine felt weak in the knees. ‘You – you go first,’ she gasped, pushing Constantia. But Constantia said, as she always had said on those occasions, ‘No, Jug, that’s not fair. You’re eldest.’ Josephine was just going to say – what at other times she wouldn’t have owned to for the world – what she kept for her very last weapon, ‘But you’re tallest,’ when they noticed that the kitchen door was open, and there stood Kate. . . . ‘Very stiff,’ said Josephine, grasping the door-handle and doing her best to turn it. As if anything ever deceived Kate! It couldn’t be helped. That girl was. . . . Then the door was shut behind them, but – but they weren’t in father’s room at all. They might have suddenly walked through the wall by mistake into a different flat altogether. Was the door just behind them? They were too frightened to look. Josephine knew that if it was it was holding itself tight shut; Constantia felt that, like the doors in dreams, it hadn’t any handle at all. It was the coldness which made it so awful. Or the whiteness – which? Everything was covered. The blinds were down, a cloth hung over the mirror, a sheet hid the bed; a huge fan of white paper filled the fire-place. Constantia timidly put out her hand; she almost expected a snowflake to fall. Josephine felt a queer tingling in her nose, as if her nose was freezing. Then a cab klop-klopped over the cobbles below, and the quiet seemed to shake into little pieces. ‘I had better pull up a blind,’ said Josephine bravely. ‘Yes, it might be a good idea,’ whispered Constantia. They only gave the blind a touch, but it flew up and the cord flew after, rolling round the blind-stick, and the little tassel tapped as if trying to get free. That was too much for Constantia. ‘Don’t you think – don’t you think we might put it off for another day?’ she whispered. ‘Why?’ snapped Josephine, feeling, as usual, much better now that she knew for certain that Constantia was terrified. ‘It’s got to be done. But I do wish you wouldn’t whisper, Con.’ ‘I didn’t know I was whispering,’ whispered Constantia. ‘And why do you keep on staring at the bed?’ said Josephine, raising her voice almost defiantly. ‘There’s nothing on the bed.’ ‘Oh, Jug, don’t say so!’ said poor Connie. ‘At any rate, not so loudly.’ Josephine felt herself that she had gone too far. She took a wide swerve over to the chest of drawers, put out her hand, but quickly drew it back again. ‘Connie!’ she gasped, and she wheeled round and leaned with her back against the chest of drawers.

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‘Oh, Jug – what?’ Josephine could only glare. She had the most extraordinary feeling that she had just escaped something simply awful. But how could she explain to Constantia that father was in the chest of drawers? He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neck-ties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away – just behind the door-handle – ready to spring. She pulled a funny old-fashioned face at Constantia, just as she used to in the old days when she was going to cry. ‘I can’t open,’ she nearly wailed. ‘No, don’t, Jug,’ whispered Constantia earnestly. ‘It’s much better not to. Don’t let’s open anything. At any rate, not for a long time.’ ‘But – but it seems so weak,’ said Josephine, breaking down. ‘But why not be weak for once, Jug?’ argued Constantia, whispering quite fiercely. ‘If it is weak.’ And her pale stare flew from the locked writing-table – so safe – to the huge glittering wardrobe, and she began to breathe in a queer, panting way. ‘Why shouldn’t we be weak for once in our lives, Jug? It’s quite excusable. Let’s be weak – be weak, Jug. It’s much nicer to be weak than to be strong.’ And then she did one of those amazingly bold things that she’d done about twice before in their lives; she marched over to the wardrobe, turned the key, and took it out of the lock. Took it out of the lock and held it up to Josephine, showing Josephine by her extraordinary smile that she knew what she’d done, she’d risked deliberately father being in there among his overcoats. If the huge wardrobe had lurched forward, had crashed down on Constantia, Josephine wouldn’t have been surprised. On the contrary, she would have thought it the only suitable thing to happen. But nothing happened. Only the room seemed quieter than ever, and bigger flakes of cold air fell on Josephine’s shoulders and knees. She began to shiver. ‘Come, Jug,’ said Constantia, still with that awful callous smile, and Josephine followed just as she had that last time, when Constantia had pushed Benny into the Round Pond. VII But the strain told on them when they were back in the dining-room. They sat down, very shaky, and looked at each other. ‘I don’t feel I can settle to anything,’ said Josephine, ‘until I’ve had something. Do you think we could ask Kate for two cups of hot water?’ ‘I really don’t see why we shouldn’t,’ said Constantia carefully. She

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was quite normal again. ‘I won’t ring. I’ll go to the kitchen door and ask her.’ ‘Yes, do,’ said Josephine, sinking down into a chair. ‘Tell her, just two cups, Con, nothing else – on a tray.’ ‘She needn’t even put the jug on, need she?’ said Constantia, as though Kate might very well complain if the jug had been there. ‘Oh no, certainly not! The jug’s not at all necessary. She can pour it direct out of the kettle,’ cried Josephine, feeling that would be a labour-saving indeed. Their cold lips quivered at the greenish brims. Josephine curved her small red hands round the cup; Constantia sat up and blew on the wavy steam, making it flutter from one side to the other. ‘Speaking of Benny,’ said Josephine. And though Benny hadn’t been mentioned Constantia immediately looked as though he had. ‘He’ll expect us to send him something of father’s, of course. But it’s so difficult to know what to send to Ceylon.’ ‘You mean things get unstuck so on the voyage,’ murmured Constantia. ‘No, lost,’ said Josephine sharply. ‘You know there’s no post. Only runners.’ Both paused to watch a black man in white linen drawers running through the pale fields for dear life, with a large brown-paper parcel in his hands. Josephine’s black man was tiny; he scurried along glistening like an ant. But there was something blind and tireless about Constantia’s tall, thin fellow, which made him, she decided, a very unpleasant person indeed. . . . On the verandah, dressed all in white and wearing a cork helmet, stood Benny. His right hand shook up and down, as father’s did when he was impatient. And behind him, not in the least interested, sat Hilda, the unknown sister-in-law. She swung in a cane rocker and flicked over the leaves of the Tatler. ‘I think his watch would be the most suitable present,’ said Josephine. Constantia looked up; she seemed surprised. ‘Oh, would you trust a gold watch to a native?’ ‘But of course I’d disguise it,’ said Josephine. ‘No one would know it was a watch.’ She liked the idea of having to make a parcel such a curious shape that no one could possibly guess what it was. She even thought for a moment of hiding the watch in a narrow cardboard corset-box that she’d kept by her for a long time, waiting for it to come in for something. It was such beautiful firm cardboard. But, no, it wouldn’t be appropriate for this occasion. It had lettering on it: Medium Women’s 28. Extra Firm Busks. It would be almost too much of a surprise for Benny to open that and find father’s watch inside.

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‘And of course it isn’t as though it would be going – ticking, I mean,’ said Constantia, who was still thinking of the native love of jewellery. ‘At least,’ she added, ‘it would be very strange if after all that time it was.’ VIII Josephine made no reply. She had flown off on one of her tangents. She had suddenly thought of Cyril. Wasn’t it more usual for the only grandson to have the watch? And then dear Cyril was so appreciative, and a gold watch meant so much to a young man. Benny, in all probability, had quite got out of the habit of watches; men so seldom wore waistcoats in those hot climates. Whereas Cyril in London wore them from year’s end to year’s end. And it would be so nice for her and Constantia, when he came to tea, to know it was there. ‘I see you’ve got on grandfather’s watch, Cyril.’ It would be somehow so satisfactory. Dear boy! What a blow his sweet, sympathetic little note had been! Of course they quite understood; but it was most unfortunate. ‘It would have been such a point, having him,’ said Josephine. ‘And he would have enjoyed it so,’ said Constantia, not thinking what she was saying. However, as soon as he got back he was coming to tea with his aunties. Cyril to tea was one of their rare treats. ‘Now, Cyril, you mustn’t be frightened of our cakes. Your Auntie Con and I bought them at Buszard’s this morning. We know what a man’s appetite is. So don’t be ashamed of making a good tea.’ Josephine cut recklessly into the rich dark cake that stood for her winter gloves or the soling and heeling of Constantia’s only respectable shoes. But Cyril was most unmanlike in appetite. ‘I say, Aunt Josephine, I simply can’t. I’ve only just had lunch, you know.’ ‘Oh, Cyril, that can’t be true! It’s after four,’ cried Josephine. Constantia sat with her knife poised over the chocolate-roll. ‘It is, all the same,’ said Cyril. ‘I had to meet a man at Victoria, and he kept me hanging about till . . . there was only time to get lunch and to come on here. And he gave me – phew’ – Cyril put his hand to his forehead – ‘a terrific blow-out,’ he said. It was disappointing – today of all days. But still he couldn’t be expected to know. ‘But you’ll have a meringue, won’t you, Cyril?’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘These meringues were bought specially for you. Your dear father was so fond of them. We were sure you are, too.’ ‘I am, Aunt Josephine,’ cried Cyril ardently. ‘Do you mind if I take half to begin with?’

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‘Not at all, dear boy; but we mustn’t let you off with that.’ ‘Is your dear father still so fond of meringues?’ asked Auntie Con gently. She winced faintly as she broke through the shell of hers. ‘Well, I don’t quite know, Auntie Con,’ said Cyril breezily. At that they both looked up. ‘Don’t know?’ almost snapped Josephine. ‘Don’t know a thing like that about your own father, Cyril?’ ‘Surely,’ said Auntie Con softly. Cyril tried to laugh it off. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘it’s such a long time since –’ He faltered. He stopped. Their faces were too much for him. ‘Even so,’ said Josephine. And Auntie Con looked. Cyril put down his teacup. ‘Wait a bit,’ he cried. ‘Wait a bit, Aunt Josephine. What am I thinking of?’ He looked up. They were beginning to brighten. Cyril slapped his knee. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it was meringues. How could I have forgotten? Yes, Aunt Josephine, you’re perfectly right. Father’s most frightfully keen on meringues.’ They didn’t only beam. Aunt Josephine went scarlet with pleasure; Auntie Con gave a deep, deep sigh. ‘And now, Cyril, you must come and see father,’ said Josephine.’ He knows you were coming to-day.’ ‘Right,’ said Cyril, very firmly and heartily. He got up from his chair; suddenly he glanced at the clock. ‘I say, Auntie Con, isn’t your clock a bit slow? I’ve got to meet a man at – at Paddington just after five. I’m afraid I shan’t be able to stay very long with grandfather.’ ‘Oh, he won’t expect you to stay very long!’ said Aunt Josephine. Constantia was still gazing at the clock. She couldn’t make up her mind if it was fast or slow. It was one or the other, she felt almost certain of that. At any rate, it had been. Cyril still lingered. ‘Aren’t you coming along, Auntie Con?’ ‘Of course,’ said Josephine, ‘we shall all go. Come on, Con.’ IX They knocked at the door, and Cyril followed his aunts into grandfather’s hot, sweetish room. ‘Come on,’ said Grandfather Pinner. ‘Don’t hang about. What is it? What’ve you been up to?’ He was sitting in front of a roaring fire, clasping his stick. He had a thick rug over his knees. On his lap there lay a beautiful pale yellow silk handkerchief.

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‘It’s Cyril, father,’ said Josephine shyly. And she took Cyril’s hand and led him forward. ‘Good afternoon, grandfather,’ said Cyril, trying to take his hand out of Aunt Josephine’s. Grandfather Pinner shot his eyes at Cyril in the way he was famous for. Where was Auntie Con? She stood on the other side of Aunt Josephine; her long arms hung down in front of her; her hands were clasped. She never took her eyes off grandfather. ‘Well,’ said Grandfather Pinner, beginning to thump, ‘What have you got to tell me?’ What had he, what had he got to tell him? Cyril felt himself smiling like a perfect imbecile. The room was stifling, too. But Aunt Josephine came to his rescue. She cried brightly, ‘Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues, father dear.’ ‘Eh?’ said Grandfather Pinner, curving his hand like a purple meringue-shell over one ear. Josephine repeated, ‘Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues.’ ‘Can’t hear,’ said old Colonel Pinner. And he waved Josephine away with his stick, then pointed with his stick to Cyril. ‘Tell me what she’s trying to say,’ he said. (My God!) ‘Must I?’ said Cyril, blushing and staring at Aunt Josephine. ‘Do, dear,’ she smiled.’ It will please him so much.’ ‘Come on, out with it!’ cried Colonel Pinner testily, beginning to thump again. And Cyril leaned forward and yelled, ‘Father’s still very fond of meringues.’ At that Grandfather Pinner jumped as though he had been shot. ‘Don’t shout!’ he cried. ‘What’s the matter with the boy? Meringues! What about ’em?’ ‘Oh, Aunt Josephine, must we go on?’ groaned Cyril desperately. ‘It’s quite all right, dear boy,’ said Aunt Josephine, as though he and she were at the dentist’s together. ‘He’ll understand in a minute.’ And she whispered to Cyril, ‘He’s getting a bit deaf, you know.’ Then she leaned forward and really bawled at Grandfather Pinner, ‘Cyril only wanted to tell you, father dear, that his father is still very fond of meringues.’ Colonel Pinner heard that time, heard and brooded, looking Cyril up and down. ‘What an esstrordinary thing!’ said old Grandfather Pinner. ‘What an esstrordinary thing to come all this way here to tell me!’ And Cyril felt it was. ‘Yes, I shall send Cyril the watch,’ said Josephine.

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‘That would be very nice,’ said Constantia.’ I seem to remember last time he came there was some little trouble about the time.’ X They were interrupted by Kate bursting through the door in her usual fashion, as though she had discovered some secret panel in the wall. ‘Fried or boiled?’ asked the bold voice. Fried or boiled? Josephine and Constantia were quite bewildered for the moment. They could hardly take it in. ‘Fried or boiled what, Kate?’ asked Josephine, trying to begin to concentrate. Kate gave a loud sniff. ‘Fish.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you say so immediately?’ Josephine reproached her gently. ‘How could you expect us to understand, Kate? There are a great many things in this world, you know, which are fried or boiled.’ And after such a display of courage she said quite brightly to Constantia, ‘Which do you prefer, Con?’ ‘I think it might be nice to have it fried,’ said Constantia. ‘On the other hand, of course boiled fish is very nice. I think I prefer both equally well. . . . Unless you. . . . In that case –’ ‘I shall fry it,’ said Kate, and she bounced back, leaving their door open and slamming the door of her kitchen. Josephine gazed at Constantia; she raised her pale eyebrows until they rippled away into her pale hair. She got up. She said in a very lofty, imposing way, ‘Do you mind following me into the drawingroom, Constantia? I’ve something of great importance to discuss with you.’ For it was always to the drawing-room they retired when they wanted to talk over Kate. Josephine closed the door meaningly. ‘Sit down, Constantia,’ she said, still very grand. She might have been receiving Constantia for the first time. And Con looked round vaguely for a chair, as though she felt indeed quite a stranger. ‘Now the question is,’ said Josephine, bending forward, ‘whether we shall keep her or not.’ ‘That is the question,’ agreed Constantia. ‘And this time,’ said Josephine firmly, ‘we must come to a definite decision.’ Constantia looked for a moment as though she might begin going over all the other times, but she pulled herself together and said, ‘Yes, Jug.’ ‘You see, Con,’ explained Josephine, ‘everything is so changed now.’ Constantia looked up quickly. ‘I mean,’ went on Josephine,

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‘we’re not dependent on Kate as we were.’ And she blushed faintly. ‘There’s not father to cook for.’ ‘That is perfectly true,’ agreed Constantia. ‘Father certainly doesn’t want any cooking now whatever else –’ Josephine broke in sharply, ‘You’re not sleepy, are you, Con?’ ‘Sleepy, Jug?’ Constantia was wide-eyed. ‘Well, concentrate more,’ said Josephine sharply, and she returned to the subject. ‘What it comes to is, if we did’ – and this she barely breathed, glancing at the door – ‘give Kate notice’ – she raised her voice again – ‘we could manage our own food.’ ‘Why not?’ cried Constantia. She couldn’t help smiling. The idea was so exciting. She clasped her hands. ‘What should we live on, Jug?’ ‘Oh, eggs in various forms!’ said Jug, lofty again. ‘And, besides, there are all the cooked foods.’ ‘But I’ve always heard,’ said Constantia, ‘they are considered so very expensive.’ ‘Not if one buys them in moderation,’ said Josephine. But she tore herself away from this fascinating bypath and dragged Constantia after her. ‘What we’ve got to decide now, however, is whether we really do trust Kate or not.’ Constantia leaned back. Her flat little laugh flew from her lips. ‘Isn’t it curious, Jug,’ said she, ‘that just on this one subject I’ve never been able to quite make up my mind?’ XI She never had. The whole difficulty was to prove anything. How did one prove things, how could one? Suppose Kate had stood in front of her and deliberately made a face. Mightn’t she very well have been in pain? Wasn’t it impossible, at any rate, to ask Kate if she was making a face at her? If Kate answered ‘No’ – and of course she would say ‘No’ – what a position! How undignified! Then again Constantia suspected, she was almost certain that Kate went to her chest of drawers when she and Josephine were out, not to take things but to spy. Many times she had come back to find her amethyst cross in the most unlikely places, under her lace ties or on top of her evening Bertha. More than once she had laid a trap for Kate. She had arranged things in a special order and then called Josephine to witness. ‘You see, Jug?’ ‘Quite, Con.’ ‘Now we shall be able to tell.’ But, oh dear, when she did go to look, she was as far off from a proof as ever! If anything was displaced, it might so very well have happened as she closed the drawer; a jolt might have done it so easily.

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‘You come, Jug, and decide. I really can’t. It’s too difficult.’ But after a pause and a long glare Josephine would sigh, ‘Now you’ve put the doubt into my mind, Con, I’m sure I can’t tell myself.’ ‘Well, we can’t postpone it again,’ said Josephine. ‘If we postpone it this time –’ XII But at that moment in the street below a barrel-organ struck up. Josephine and Constantia sprang to their feet together. ‘Run, Con,’ said Josephine. ‘Run quickly. There’s sixpence on the –’ Then they remembered. It didn’t matter. They would never have to stop the organ-grinder again. Never again would she and Constantia be told to make that monkey take his noise somewhere else. Never would sound that loud, strange bellow when father thought they were not hurrying enough. The organ-grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump. It never will thump again, It never will thump again,

played the barrel-organ. What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn’t be going to cry. ‘Jug, Jug,’ said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. ‘Do you know what day it is? It’s Saturday. It’s a week to-day, a whole week.’ A week since father died, A week since father died,

cried the barrel-organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came – and stayed, deepened – until it shone almost golden. ‘The sun’s out,’ said Josephine, as though it really mattered. A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered. Constantia lifted her big, cold hands as if to catch them, and then her hands fell again. She walked over to the mantelpiece to her favourite Buddha. And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always

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gave her such a queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed to-day to be more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. ‘I know something that you don’t know,’ said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what could it be? And yet she had always felt there was . . . something. The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed its light over the furniture and the photographs. Josephine watched it. When it came to mother’s photograph, the enlargement over the piano, it lingered as though puzzled to find so little remained of mother, except the ear-rings shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa. Why did the photographs of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As soon as a person was dead their photograph died too. But, of course, this one of mother was very old. It was thirty-five years old. Josephine remembered standing on a chair and pointing out that feather boa to Constantia and telling her that it was a snake that had killed their mother in Ceylon. . . . Would everything have been different if mother hadn’t died? She didn’t see why. Aunt Florence had lived with them until they had left school, and they had moved three times and had their yearly holiday and . . . and there’d been changes of servants, of course. Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the window-ledge. Yeep – eyeep – yeep. But Josephine felt they were not sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little crying noise. Yeep – eyeep – yeep. Ah, what was it crying, so weak and forlorn? If mother had lived, might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to marry. There had been father’s Anglo-Indian friends before he quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even if they’d met them, how could they have got to know men well enough to be more than strangers? One read of people having adventures, being followed, and so on. But nobody had ever followed Constantia and her. Oh yes, there had been one year at Eastbourne a mysterious man at their boarding-house who had put a note on the jug of hot water outside their bedroom door! But by the time Connie had found it the steam had made the writing too faint to read; they couldn’t even make out to which of them it was addressed. And he had left next day. And that was all. The rest had been looking after father, and at the same time keeping out of father’s way. But now? But now? The thieving sun touched Josephine gently. She lifted her face. She was drawn over to the window by gentle beams. . . . Until the barrel-organ stopped playing Constantia stayed before the Buddha, wondering, but not as usual, not vaguely. This time her

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wonder was like longing. She remembered the times she had come in here, crept out of bed in her nightgown when the moon was full, and lain on the floor with her arms outstretched, as though she was crucified. Why? The big, pale moon had made her do it. The horrible dancing figures on the carved screen had leered at her and she hadn’t minded. She remembered too how, whenever they were at the seaside, she had gone off by herself and got as close to the sea as she could, and sung something, something she had made up, while she gazed all over that restless water. There had been this other life, running out, bringing things home in bags, getting things on approval, discussing them with Jug, and taking them back to get more things on approval, and arranging father’s trays and trying not to annoy father. But it all seemed to have happened in a kind of tunnel. It wasn’t real. It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? She turned away from the Buddha with one of her vague gestures. She went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important, about – about the future and what. . . . ‘Don’t you think perhaps –’ she began. But Josephine interrupted her. ‘I was wondering if now –’ she murmured. They stopped; they waited for each other. ‘Go on, Con,’ said Josephine. ‘No, no, Jug; after you,’ said Constantia. ‘No, say what you were going to say. You began,’ said Josephine. ‘I . . . I’d rather hear what you were going to say first,’ said Constantia. ‘Don’t be absurd, Con.’ ‘Really, Jug.’ ‘Connie!’ ‘Oh, Jug!’ A pause. Then Constantia said faintly, ‘I can’t say what I was going to say, Jug, because I’ve forgotten what it was . . . that I was going to say.’ Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, ‘I’ve forgotten too.’ Notes Text: GPOS. London Mercury, 4: 19, May 1921, pp. 15–30.

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1. The first mention of the story was KM telling JMM on 27 November 1920, I have a long story here – very long which I want to get published serially. Its supremely suitable for such a purpose. And it would bring me in money. Its form is the form of The Prelude BUT written today – not then. The Prelude is a child’s story. (CLKM, 4, p. 123) As she then told Richard Murry on 1 January 1921, ‘Its the outcome of the Prelude method – it just unfolds and opens. But I hope its an advance on Prelude. In fact I know its that because the technique is stronger’ (CLKM, 4, p. 156). The story was completed on 13 December 1920. Its first tentative title was ‘The Non-Compounders’, a term used at Queen’s College, London, for girls who attended only some of the college’s courses, or those who were not boarders but lived at home, as did Ida Baker, whose middle name was Constance, and on whom Constantia is based. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ was a common expression of Ida’s. The name ‘Jug’ for the other sister in the story was the nickname for KM’s cousin Sylvia Payne, another fellow pupil at Queen’s College. The story also preserves something of the Baker family circumstances at that time, when Ida and her sister May lived with their widowed and dominating father, a doctor who had served in Burma. KM later told her protégé, the young novelist William Gerhardi, on 23 June 1921: While I was writing that story I lived for it but when it was finished, I confess I hoped very much that my readers would understand what I was trying to express. But very few did. They thought it was ‘cruel’; they thought I was ‘sneering’ at Jug and Constantia; they thought it was ‘drab’. And in the last paragraph I was ‘poking fun at the poor old things’. Its almost terrifying to be so misunderstood. There was a moment when I first had ‘the idea’ when I saw the two sisters as amusing; but the moment I looked deeper (let me be quite frank) I bowed down to the beauty that was hidden in their lives and to discover that was all my desire . . . All was meant, of course, to lead up to that last paragraph,2 when my two flowerless ones turned with that timid gesture, to the sun. ‘Perhaps now’. And after that, it seemed to me, they died as truly as Father was dead. (CLKM, 4, pp. 248–9) 2. Gerhardi had written about the story, ‘I think it is, and in particular the last long paragraph towards the end, of quite amazing beauty. [. . .] I don’t remember ever reading anything so intolerably real – stifling – since [Chekhov’s] “The Three Sisters” ’ (CLKM, 4, p. 249, n.2).

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There Is No Answer1 Certainly it was cold, very cold. When she opened her lips and drew in a breath she could taste the cold air on her tongue, like a piece of ice. But though she shivered so and held her muff tightly pressed against her to stop the strange uneasy trembling in her stomach she was glad of the cold. It made her feel, in those first strange moments, less strange and less alone; it allowed her to pretend in those first really rather terrifying moments that she was a tiny part of the life of the town, that she could, as it were, join in the game without all the other children stopping to stare and to point at the entirely new little girl. True, there had been two seconds when she was a forlorn little creature, conspicuous and self-conscious, stuffing her luggage ticket into her glove and wondering where to go next, but then, from nowhere, she was pelted with that incredible snowball of cold air, and she started walking away from the station, quickly, quickly . . . In all probability those simple people passing, so stout and red, those large, cheerful bundles with a friendly eye for her, imagined that she was some young wife and mother who had arrived home unexpectedly because she could not bear to be away another moment. And while she walked down the station hill, quickly, quickly she smiled. She saw herself mounting a flight of shallow, waxed stairs, pulling an old fashioned red velvet bell cord, putting her finger to her lips when the ancient family servant (her old nurse, of course) would have cried the house about her, and rustling into the breakfast room where her husband sat drinking coffee and her little son stood in front of him with his hands behind his back, reciting something in French. But now her husband grew long ears and immense boney knuckles, and now she was Anna, kneeling on the floor and raising her veil the better to embrace and clasp her darling Serozha.1 Which was all very well, but what a time and place to choose for this nonsensical dreaming! She had better find a café where she could have breakfast and devour the hotel list with her coffee. By now she was right ‘in the town’ and walking down a narrow street full of half open shops. She bought a newspaper from an old hag squatting beside a kiosk, her skirt turned back over her knees, munching a mash of bread and soup, and was just going into a discreet ‘suitablelooking’ café when she saw a lovely flower stall. The flower seller knelt on the pavement surrounded by a litter of flat yellow baskets. She took out and shook, and held up to the critical light bunch after

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bunch of round, bright flowers. Jonquils and anemones, roses and marigolds, plumes of mimosa, lilies-of-the-valley in a bed of wool, stocks, a strange pink like the eyes of white rabbits, and purple and white violets that one longed not only to smell but to press against one’s lips and almost to eat. Oh! how she loved flowers! What a passion she had for them and how much they meant to her. Yes, they meant almost everything. And while she watched the woman arrange her wares in tin cups and glasses and round china jars she was strangely conscious of the early morning life of this foreign town. She heard it, she felt it flowing about her as though she and the flowers stood together on an island in the middle of a quick flowing river – but the flowers were more real. And the crowning joy and wonder [was] that she was perfectly free to look at them, to ‘take them in’ for just as long as she liked . . . For the first time she drank a long heady draught of this new wine, freedom. There was no-one at her elbow to say: ‘But my dear, this is not the moment to rave about flowers’, no-one to tell her that hotel bedrooms were more important than marigolds, not a soul who simply by standing there could make her realise that she was in all probability in an abnormal, hysterical state through not having slept all night. So, she drank the cup to the sweet dregs and bought an armful of mixed beauties and carried them into the café with her. They were heaped on the table beside her and their scent mingled with the delicious smell of the coffee, and the cigarette she smoked was too sweet, too exciting to bear. She almost felt that the flowers, in some fairy fashion, changed into wreaths and garlands and lay on her lifting bosom and pressed on her brow until she bent her head, gazing with half shut eyes at the white ring of the cup and the white ring of the saucer, the round, white shape of the pot and jug and the four crossed pieces of sugar on a white dish on the bluey white marble table, at the cigarettes, spilled out of a yellow wrapper and her little hands, folded together so mysteriously, as though they held a butterfly. ‘Daisy! Daisy! giv me your onze heures, do!’2 sang someone. She looked up. A young man in a light tweed cap stood against the counter, playing with a black kitten. Except for the flat-footed old waiter who shuffled among the tables at the far end like a forlorn aged crab, she and the young man were quite alone in the café. The kitten was very tiny; it could not even walk yet. It knew all about what to do with the front half of itself but its two little back legs were the trouble. They wanted to jump along, or to bound along in a kind of minute absurd galop. How very confusing it was! But the young man leaning over the counter and singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ hadn’t a grain of pity in him. He threw the kitten over, rolled it into a ball,

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tickled it, held it up by its front paws and made it dance, let it almost escape and then pounced on it again and made it bite its own tail. ‘Give me your onze heures do!’ he sang, in his swaggering, over-emphasised fashion. She decided he knew perfectly well that someone was watching and listening . . . But how wonderfully ‘at home’ he looks, she thought. How lazily, how lightly he leans and stretches, as though it were impossible for anything to upset his easy balance, and as though if he chose, he could play with life just like he played with the kitten, tumble it over, tickle it, stand it on its hind legs and make it dance for him. Quite suddenly the young man threw the kitten away, caught up his glass of dark purplish coffee, and facing her he began to sip and stare. Cool, cool beyond measure, he took his time, narrowed his eyes, crossed his feet and had a good, good look at her. Well – why not? She took another cigarette, tapped it on the table and lighted it, but for all her manner a malignant little voice in her brain warned her: ‘Keep calm!’ She felt his eyes travel over her big bunch of flowers, over her muff and gloves and handbag, until they rested finally upon her, where she sat with her purple veil thrown back and her travelling cape with the fur collar dropping off her shoulders. Her heart beat up hot and hard; she pressed her knees together like a frightened girl and the malignant little voice mocked: ‘If you were perfectly certain that he was admiring you you would not mind at all. On the contrary.’ Then just as suddenly as he had turned he wheeled round again and stood with his back towards her. Again he began to sing: ‘Daisy, Daisy, giv me your onze heures do.’ Was it just her fancy or did she really detect in his shoulders and in his twanging voice real, laughing contempt. Wasn’t he singing again just to show her that he had looked and seen quite enough, ‘thank you’. But what did he matter – an insolent underbred boy! What on earth had she to do with him! She tapped with her spoon for the waiter, paid, gathered up her flowers, her muff, her bag, and keeping her eyes fixed on the café door as though she was not perfectly certain whether it was the door or not, she walked out into the street. It had positively grown colder while she was in that café. The sun was hidden for a moment behind a wing of cloud and the clatter and rattle of the morning traffic pouring over the cobbles sounded so loud and harsh that it bruised her nerves. How tired she was – very tired! She must find a room and escape from this street immediately. It was ridiculous to walk about like this after a racking night in the train. She longed to take off her tired clothes, and to lie in a hot bath smelling of carnation crystals. At the thought of gliding between incredibly smooth gleaming sheets she gave a nervous shiver of delight. ‘But what has happened to your blissful happiness of half an hour

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ago?’ mocked the tiny voice. No, no, she wouldn’t listen! . . . If only she could get rid of this absurd bunch of flowers. They made her look ridiculous, feel ridiculous, feel like a gushing schoolgirl returned from a school picnic. What would the hotel people think when she arrived without any luggage but ‘simply’ carrying flowers. ‘Very touching! Dear me – really!’ she stormed; ‘you might have waited!’ If only she could find some place to throw them away! ‘Do not throw us away!’ pleaded the flowers. No, she couldn’t be so cruel. But how she hated them! And she hid them under her cape, like a lady in a melodrama trying to hide a baby, she thought, as she pushed through the swing doors of an hotel. II Late afternoon. She woke, she opened her eyes but did not move – did not move a finger. She lay so still that she tricked her body into believing that she was still asleep. All warm and relaxed it lay, breathing deeply and beating with slow, soft pulses. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 205–8. Scrapbook, pp. 78–93. This edition opts for a later date than Murry’s. 1. KM imagines a scene between Anna and her son, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–77). 2. ‘Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do,’ from ‘Daisy Bell’ by Henry Dacre (1892).

•

You Love Me – Still? As Gertie the parlour-maid passed through the green-baize door that led from the kitchen regions, she nearly dropped the tray of dinner silver she was carrying. For there, beyond the stairs, in the very middle of the big dim hall stood Miss Cassandra – Mrs. Brook – wearing a little black hat with a thick black veil, a long black cape, and clasping her hands as if she was praying. Oh, she did give Gertie a turn, coming on her so sudden, and all in black, too, and standing there so strange. But immediately she saw Gertie, Miss Cassandra came to life, darted forward and said in her sweet husky voice – the servants loved Miss Cassandra’s – Mrs. Brook’s – voice: ‘Oh, good evening, Gertie. Where is Mother?’

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‘Good evening, Miss – Ma’am. In her room. She must have just about finished dressing.’ ‘Is Father with her?’ asked Cassandra, putting her hand on the banister. ‘No, Miss. It’s Wednesday. One of his late nights, you know.’ ‘Oh, yes, I forgot.’ Then Cassandra said quickly: ‘Where are the others?’ ‘Miss Jinnie’s in the drawing-room and Mr. Jack’s in his dark-room.’ ‘Thank you, Gertie. Then I’ll run up.’ And run she did – skimmed rather, like a bird. She knocked at the big cream-panelled door and turned the glass handle. ‘Mother, it’s me. Can I come in?’ ‘Cassandra!’ cried her mother. ‘Do, darling. Of course. What a surprise! What a strange hour!’ Mrs. Sheridan sat at the dressing-table, clasping her pearls. As she spoke, she settled them, and drew down her daughter’s little dark head and kissed her. The black veil only came to Cassandra’s nose. Her mother noticed that her lips were hot, and through the thick mesh her eyes looked dark – enormous. But that meant nothing with Cassandra. The child had been to a concert, or she’d been reading, or star-gazing simply, or tracking down a crying kitten. Anything threw Cassandra into a fever. ‘Do you know how late it is, my child?’ she said tenderly.’ It’s just on dinner-time. And I thought Richard only got back to-day.’ ‘Yes, he did,’ said Cassandra. ‘This afternoon.’ She gave a little gasp. ‘Then why didn’t you –’ Her mother broke off. ‘But before we begin talking, darling, you’ll stay to dinner, of course. I’ll just let Cook know. She’ll be so furious if I don’t.’ And she moved towards the bell beside the fireplace before Cassandra stopped her. ‘No, mother, don’t! I’m not stopping to dinner. I don’t want any dinner.’ Suddenly she threw back her cape and with that gesture she seemed to reveal all her excitement and agitation. ‘I’ve only come to speak to you – to tell you something. Because I must, I simply must’ – and here Cassandra clasped her hands as she had in the hall below – ‘confide in somebody.’ ‘My precious child, don’t be so tragic!’ said her mother. ‘You’re frightening me. You’re not going to have a baby, are you? Because I’m no good at that kind of thing. What is it? And don’t begin crying if you can help it. It’s so exhausting!’ She was too late. Cassandra had begun. Pressing her little handkerchief to her eyes, she sobbed. ‘I can’t talk in this room. I’m afraid we’ll be interrupted. Come into my old room, Mother!’ And away she sped down the passage into her bedroom-that-was, next to the nursery. The door of the cold, dim little room was shut behind them. Cassandra almost sprang upon her mother. ‘Mother!’ she cried. ‘I’ve been betrayed – I’ve been wickedly, cruelly, deceived – Richard’s been false to me. But so false!’ cried Cassandra, walking away from Mrs. Sheridan and shaking her little

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fist at the ceiling. ‘But so false! So utterly, abominably false!’ ‘Child – what are you saying?’ cried Mrs. Sheridan. She really was taken aback by this. ‘It can’t be true. Richard – of all people! How? When? With whom?’ Instead of replying Cassandra ran back to her mother and, half-shutting her eyes, smiling like an actress, she declaimed in low passionate tones: ‘Dearest, you love me – still? Ah, my dear one,’ pleaded Cassandra, flinging out her hand to her astonished mother. ‘Don’t forget to end each of our daily letters with “Yes, I love you still” as well as “Bless you”, and don’t forget’ – and here Cassandra raised her hand – ‘do listen to this bit, Mother,’ she implored – as though her mother was not listening – ‘that though I bask, I gloat in the fact that I so perfectly understand your silence, I have a jigsaw of longing to hear you speak. . . .’ After this extraordinary oration Cassandra smiled again and simply stared at her mother. Mrs. Sheridan really thought the child had become unbalanced – – – ‘But what does it mean?’ she said. ‘Did you hear this? Did someone say it to him?’ ‘No,’ said Cassandra. She gave a little wave and almost laughed. ‘I found it – and it’s a mild specimen, my dear – in his collar-bag!’ Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 244–5. Published by JMM as ‘Cassandra’ and dated 1920, Scrapbook, pp. 157–61.

•

Tea on the Train A man poked his head in at the door and said tea was served. ‘Tea! Dear me!’ she fussed at once. ‘Would you care to go . . . Shall we do you think. On the other hand I have some tea here. I’m afraid it will not be very good. Tea that is not fresh and then there is that [. . .] water – what it is I do not know but – Shall we care to try it?’ ‘Might as well.’ ‘In that case dear perhaps you would not mind lifting down my suitcase. I am sorry to say the tea is in there. Such a bother. These racks are so very high. I think they are decidedly higher than English racks. Mind! Do take care! Oh!’

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He: ‘Ugh!’ Finally she spread out a piece of paper, put on it a little cup and an odd saucer, the top of the thermos flask, a medicine bottle of milk, and some sugar in a lozenge tin. ‘I am very much afraid,’ said she. ‘Would you like me to try it first?’ He looked over the top of his paper and said drily, ‘Pour it out.’ She poured it out and gave him the cup and saucer of course, while she filled the most uncomfortable little drinking cup in the world for herself, and sipped and anxiously watched. ‘Is it so very . . .’ ‘Might be worse!’ Fidgeting in her handbag, first she pulled out a powder puff, then a nice substantial handkerchief, then a paper parcel that held a very large wedge of cake, of the kind known as Dundee. This she cut with a penknife while he watched with some emotion. ‘This is the last of our precious Dundee,’ said she, shaking her head over it and cutting it so tenderly that her gesture almost seemed an act of cannibalism. ‘That’s one thing I have learned,’ said he, ‘and that is never to come abroad without one of Buszard’s Dundees.’1 Oh how she agreed. And each taking a large wedge they bit into it and ate solemnly with round astonished eyes like little children in a confectionery shop who are allowed to eat sitting up to the counter. ‘More tea dear?’ ‘No thanks.’ ‘Sure?’ A glance. (I sympathise with his glance for reply.) ‘I think I will just have a cup,’ said she gaily, so relieved to have a sip after all. Another dive into her bag and chocolate was produced. Chocolate. I had never realised before that chocolate is offered playfully. It is not a solemn food. It’s as though one thought it rather absurd, but then who knows? Perhaps. ‘What,’ said he and peered over the paper. ‘No, no’ – dismissing the chocolate. She had thought as much. And having torn up little shreds of paper and wiped the cup the saucer and the knife clean she packed all tight again. But a final rummage in her bag produced an oval shaped paper, which, unwrapped, was an egg! This sight seemed to fill her with amazement. But she must have known the egg was there. She did not look as though she had. Bright eyed, her head on one side, she stared, and I fancied I heard an interrogatory clucking . . .

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Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 233–4. Dated 1920 by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 148–50. 1. A traditional Scottish fruit cake, in this case purchased from Buszard’s, a superior London tea rooms.

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Life of Ma Parker1 When the literary gentleman, whose flat old Ma Parker cleaned every Tuesday, opened the door to her that morning, he asked after her grandson. Ma Parker stood on the doormat inside the dark little hall, and she stretched out her hand to help her gentleman shut the door before she replied. ‘We buried ’im yesterday, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh, dear me! I’m sorry to hear that,’ said the literary gentleman in a shocked tone. He was in the middle of his breakfast. He wore a very shabby dressing-gown and carried a crumpled newspaper in one hand. But he felt awkward. He could hardly go back to the warm sitting-room without saying something – something more. Then because these people set such store by funerals he said kindly, ‘I hope the funeral went off all right.’ ‘Beg parding, sir?’ said old Ma Parker huskily. Poor old bird! She did look dashed. ‘I hope the funeral was a – a – success,’ said he. Ma Parker gave no answer. She bent her head and hobbled off to the kitchen, clasping the old fish bag that held her cleaning things and an apron and a pair of felt shoes. The literary gentleman raised his eyebrows and went back to his breakfast. ‘Overcome, I suppose,’ he said aloud, helping himself to the marmalade. Ma Parker drew the two jetty spears out of her toque and hung it behind the door. She unhooked her worn jacket and hung that up too. Then she tied her apron and sat down to take off her boots. To take off her boots or to put them on was an agony to her, but it had been an agony for years. In fact, she was so accustomed to the pain that her face was drawn and screwed up ready for the twinge before she’d so much as untied the laces. That over, she sat back with a sigh and softly rubbed her knees. . . . ‘Gran! Gran!’ Her little grandson stood on her lap in his button boots. He’d just come in from playing in the street. 292

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‘Look what a state you’ve made your gran’s skirt into – you wicked boy!’ But he put his arms round her neck and rubbed his cheek against hers. ‘Gran, gi’ us a penny!’ he coaxed. ‘Be off with you; Gran ain’t got no pennies.’ ‘Yes, you ’ave.’ ‘No, I ain’t.’ ‘Yes, you ‘ave. Gi’ us one!’ Already she was feeling for the old, squashed, black leather purse. ‘Well, what’ll you give your gran?’ He gave a shy little laugh and pressed closer. She felt his eyelid quivering against her cheek. ‘I ain’t got nothing,’ he murmured. . . . The old woman sprang up, seized the iron kettle off the gas stove and took it over to the sink. The noise of the water drumming in the kettle deadened her pain, it seemed. She filled the pail, too, and the washing-up bowl. It would take a whole book to describe the state of that kitchen. During the week the literary gentleman ‘did’ for himself. That is to say, he emptied the tea leaves now and again into a jam jar set aside for that purpose, and if he ran out of clean forks he wiped over one or two on the roller towel. Otherwise, as he explained to his friends, his ‘system’ was quite simple, and he couldn’t understand why people made all this fuss about housekeeping. ‘You simply dirty everything you’ve got, get a hag in once a week to clean up, and the thing’s done.’ The result looked like a gigantic dustbin. Even the floor was littered with toast crusts, envelopes, cigarette ends. But Ma Parker bore him no grudge. She pitied the poor young gentleman for having no one to look after him. Out of the smudgy little window you could see an immense expanse of sad-looking sky, and whenever there were clouds they looked very worn, old clouds, frayed at the edges, with holes in them, or dark stains like tea. While the water was heating, Ma Parker began sweeping the floor. ‘Yes,’ she thought, as the broom knocked, ‘what with one thing andanother I’ve had my share. I’ve had a hard life.’ Even the neighbours said that of her. Many a time, hobbling home with her fish bag she heard them, waiting at the corner, or leaning over the area railings, say among themselves, ‘She’s had a hard life, has Ma Parker.’ And it was so true she wasn’t in the least proud of it. It was just as if you were to say she lived in the basement-back at Number 27. A hard life! . . .

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At sixteen she’d left Stratford and come up to London as kitchingmaid. Yes, she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare, sir? No, people were always arsking her about him. But she’d never heard his name until she saw it on the theatres. Nothing remained of Stratford except that ‘sitting in the fire-place of a evening you could see the stars through the chimley,’ and ‘Mother always ’ad ’er side of bacon ’anging from the ceiling.’ And there was something – a bush, there was – at the front door, that smelt ever so nice. But the bush was very vague. She’d only remembered it once or twice in the hospital, when she’d been taken bad. That was a dreadful place – her first place. She was never allowed out. She never went upstairs except for prayers morning and evening. It was a fair cellar. And the cook was a cruel woman. She used to snatch away her letters from home before she’d read them, and throw them in the range because they made her dreamy. . . . And the beedles! Would you believe it? – until she came to London she’d never seen a black beedle. Here Ma always gave a little laugh, as though – not to have seen a black beedle! Well! It was as if to say you’d never seen your own feet. When that family was sold up she went as ‘help’ to a doctor’s house, and after two years there, on the run from morning till night, she married her husband. He was a baker. ‘A baker, Mrs Parker!’ the literary gentleman would say. For occasionally he laid aside his tomes and lent an ear, at least, to this product called Life. ‘It must be rather nice to be married to a baker!’ Mrs Parker didn’t look so sure. ‘Such a clean trade,’ said the gentleman. Mrs Parker didn’t look convinced. ‘And didn’t you like handing the new loaves to the customers?’ ‘Well, sir,’ said Mrs Parker, ‘I wasn’t in the shop above a great deal. We had thirteen little ones and buried seven of them. If it wasn’t the ’ospital it was the infirmary, you might say!’ ‘You might, indeed, Mrs Parker!’ said the gentleman, shuddering, and taking up his pen again. Yes, seven had gone, and while the six were still small her husband was taken ill with consumption. It was flour on the lungs, the doctor told her at the time. . . . Her husband sat up in bed with his shirt pulled over his head, and the doctor’s finger drew a circle on his back. ‘Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs Parker,’ said the doctor, ‘you’d find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good fellow!’ And Mrs Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dear husband’s lips . . . But the struggle she’d had to bring up those six little children and

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keep herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old enough to go to school her husband’s sister came to stop with them to help things along, and she hadn’t been there more than two months when she fell down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker had another baby – and such a one for crying! – to look after. Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her; the two boys emigrimated, and young Jim went to India with the army, and Ethel, the youngest, married a goodfor-nothing little waiter who died of ulcers the year little Lennie was born. And now little Lennie – my grandson. . . . The piles of dirty cups, dirty dishes, were washed and dried. The ink-black knives were cleaned with a piece of potato and finished off with a piece of cork. The table was scrubbed, and the dresser and the sink that had sardine tails swimming in it. . . . He’d never been a strong child – never from the first. He’d been one of those fair babies that everybody took for a girl. Silvery fair curls he had, blue eyes, and a little freckle like a diamond on one side of his nose. The trouble she and Ethel had had to rear that child! The things out of the newspapers they tried him with! Every Sunday morning Ethel would read aloud while Ma Parker did her washing. ‘Dear Sir, – Just a line to let you know my little Myrtil was laid out for dead. . . . After four bottils . . . gained 8 lbs. in 9 weeks, and is still putting it on.’ And then the egg-cup of ink would come off the dresser and the letter would be written, and Ma would buy a postal order on her way to work next morning. But it was no use. Nothing made little Lennie put it on. Taking him to the cemetery, even, never gave him a colour; a nice shake-up in the bus never improved his appetite. But he was gran’s boy from the first. . . . ‘Whose boy are you?’ said old Ma Parker, straightening up from the stove and going over to the smudgy window. And a little voice, so warm, so close, it half stifled her – it seemed to be in her breast under her heart – laughed out, and said, ‘I’m gran’s boy!’ At that moment there was a sound of steps, and the literary gentleman appeared, dressed for walking. ‘Oh, Mrs Parker, I’m going out.’ ‘Very good, sir.’ ‘And you’ll find your half-crown in the tray of the inkstand.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ‘Oh, by the way, Mrs Parker,’ said the literary gentleman quickly, ‘you didn’t throw away any cocoa last time you were here – did you?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Very strange. I could have sworn I left a teaspoonful of cocoa in the tin.’ He broke off. He said softly and firmly, ‘You’ll always tell

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me when you throw things away – won’t you, Mrs Parker?’ And he walked off very well pleased with himself, convinced, in fact, he’d shown Mrs Parker that under his apparent carelessness he was as vigilant as a woman. The door banged. She took her brushes and cloths into the bedroom. But when she began to make the bed, smoothing, tucking, patting, the thought of little Lennie was unbearable. Why did he have to suffer so? That’s what she couldn’t understand. Why should a little angel child have to arsk for his breath and fight for it? There was no sense in making a child suffer like that. . . . From Lennie’s little box of a chest there came a sound as though something was boiling. There was a great lump of something bubbling in his chest that he couldn’t get rid of. When he coughed the sweat sprang out on his head; his eyes bulged, his hands waved, and the great lump bubbled as a potato knocks in a saucepan. But what was more awful than all was when he didn’t cough he sat against the pillow and never spoke or answered, or even made as if he heard. Only he looked offended. ‘It’s not your poor old gran’s doing it, my lovey,’ said old Ma Parker, patting back the damp hair from his little scarlet ears. But Lennie moved his head and edged away. Dreadfully offended with her he looked – and solemn. He bent his head and looked at her sideways as though he couldn’t have believed it of his gran. But at the last . . . Ma Parker threw the counterpane over the bed. No, she simply couldn’t think about it. It was too much – she’d had too much in her life to bear. She’d borne it up till now, she’d kept herself to herself, and never once had she been seen to cry. Never by a living soul. Not even her own children had seen Ma break down. She’d kept a proud face always. But now! Lennie gone – what had she? She had nothing. He was all she’d got from life, and now he was took too. Why must it all have happened to me? she wondered. ‘What have I done?’ said old Ma Parker. ‘What have I done?’ As she said those words she suddenly let fall her brush. She found herself in the kitchen. Her misery was so terrible that she pinned on her hat, put on her jacket and walked out of the flat like a person in a dream. She did not know what she was doing. She was like a person so dazed by the horror of what has happened that he walks away – anywhere, as though by walking away he could escape. . . . It was cold in the street. There was a wind like ice. People went flitting by, very fast; the men walked like scissors; the women trod like cats. And nobody knew – nobody cared. Even if she broke down, if at last, after all these years, she were to cry, she’d find herself in the lock-up as like as not.

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But at the thought of crying it was as though little Lennie leapt in his gran’s arms. Ah, that’s what she wants to do, my dove. Gran wants to cry. If she could only cry now, cry for a long time, over everything, beginning with her first place and the cruel cook, going on to the doctor’s, and then the seven little ones, death of her husband, the children’s leaving her, and all the years of misery that led up to Lennie. But to have a proper cry over all these things would take a long time. All the same, the time for it had come. She must do it. She couldn’t put it off any longer; she couldn’t wait any more. . . . Where could she go? ‘She’s had a hard life, has Ma Parker.’ Yes, a hard life, indeed! Her chin began to tremble; there was no time to lose. But where? Where? She couldn’t go home; Ethel was there. It would frighten Ethel out of her life. She couldn’t sit on a bench anywhere; people would come arsking her questions. She couldn’t possibly go back to the gentleman’s flat; she had no right to cry in strangers’ houses. If she sat on some steps a policeman would speak to her. Oh, wasn’t there anywhere where she could hide and keep herself to herself and stay as long as she liked, not disturbing anybody, and nobody worrying her? Wasn’t there anywhere in the world where she could have her cry out – at last? Ma Parker stood, looking up and down. The icy wind blew out her apron into a balloon. And now it began to rain. There was nowhere. Notes Text: GPOS. Nation and the Athenaeum,2 28: 22, 26 February 1921, pp. 742–3. 1. The last of the stories KM wrote at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton. ‘Ma Parker’ is drawn from Mrs Bates, a London charwoman KM was fond of, while ‘the literary gentleman’ again derives aspects from JMM. 2. JMM resigned as editor of the Athenaeum in early February 1921, and the paper then amalgamated with the Nation. KM ceased reviewing for the paper, but continued to send it stories.

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‘After a succession’1 After a succession of idle, careless, or clumsy, or unwilling little boys had passed through the office, after horrid little boys that the typists

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couldn’t bear to come near them: ‘Stand further off, please’, or clumsy young idiots who tripped on the Boss’s doormat every time they came to him with a message, the appearance of Charlie Parker on the scene was more than a relief – it was hailed with positive pleasure by everybody. His mother was good old ma Parker, the office cleaner, whose husband, a chimney sweep, had died in a chimney! Really – the poor seem to go out of their way to find extraordinary places to die in! Charlie was the eldest of goodness knows how many little Ps – so many, in fact, that the clergyman’s wife who was tired of delivering parcels of flannelette at the tiny house with the black brush over the gate, said that she didn’t believe Mr Parker’s death had made the slightest difference to Mrs Parker. ‘I don’t believe anything will stop her. I am sure there has been a new one since I was there last. I believe it has simply become pure habit and she will go on and on – eating into the maternity Bag,’ said the clergyman’s wife crossly. ‘I confess my dear, I find you slightly difficult to follow’ said her husband. Well, if they were all like Charlie it wasn’t greatly to be wondered at. What trouble could he have given his mother? He was one of those children who must have been a comfort ever since he found his legs. At fourteen he was a firm, upstanding little chap – on the slender side perhaps, but quite a little man, with bright blue eyes, shining brown hair, good teeth that showed when he smiled – he was always smiling – and a fair baby skin that turned crimson when the typists teased him. But that wasn’t all. He was so neat, so careful of his appearance, so – brushed and combed. There was never a speck on his blue serge suit. When you looked at his tie you wanted to smile, you could see how solemnly that knot had been drawn just so. Beams came from his hair and his boots, and his childish hands were a deep pink colour as though he’d just finished drying them. From his first day at the office Charlie found his place as though he had been dreaming all his life what he would do when he was an office boy. He changed the blotting paper on the desks, kept the ink pots clean and filled, saw that there were fresh nibs, carried wire baskets of letters from the typists room to the Boss, to the Acting Manager, to Mr Tonks of the Wholesale Order Department, went to the post office, bought immense quantities of different kinds of stamps, asked the various callers who it was they wished to see, answered the store room phone. And at four o’clock when Miss Wickens, the head typist, had boiled the kettle on the electric heater she was so proud of, he took in the Boss’s tea. A knock at the door.

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‘Come in.’ Enter Charlie, with the tea tray, very serious and yet trying not to smile. He walks so straight that his knees rub together and if as much as a saucer clatters he draws in his breath and frowns . . . ‘Ah Charlie!’ The Boss leans back. ‘That my tea.’ ‘Yes Sir.’ And very carefully the tray is lowered and a pink hand reaches out and ventures to move back a paper or two. Then Charlie stands upright like a soldier on parade, and glaring at the sugar as if he dared it to take wings and fly he says: ‘Have you everything you want, Sir?’ ‘Yes I think so Charlie’ says the Boss, easy and genial. Charlie turns to go. ‘Oh one moment Charlie.’ And the little boy turns round and looks full at the Boss, and the Boss looks back into those candid innocent eyes.’ You might – you might tell Miss Wickens to come in to me in half an hour.’ ‘Very good, Sir’ says Charlie. And he is gone. But the Boss pours out his tea and the tea tastes wonderfully good. There is something especially crisp about the biscuits too and there’s no doubt afternoon tea is refreshing – he’s noticed it particularly lately. It was extraordinary the difference one little boy made in the office. ‘’E couldn’t be made more fuss of if ’e was a little dog,’ said the storeman. ‘It’s like ’aving a pet in the ’ouse, that’s what it is.’ And he was right. To have someone who was always eager and merry and ready to play – someone to whom you could say silly things if you wanted to – someone who, if you did say a kind word, as good as jumped into the air for joy. But why wasn’t he spoilt. That was what the typists couldn’t understand. When everybody went out of their way to be nice, to be kind to him – when even the Boss made a favourite of him why didn’t he become an odious little horror? Mystery . . . However . . . One October afternoon, blustery, chill, with a drizzle of saltish rain . . . Once they’re found out – once the taint’s discovered, you might as well and get rid of a touch of the tar brush . . . ‘No,’ he thought, staring at a drowned leaf that bobbed against the edge of the cup, ‘it’s no good, it won’t work. Charlie must go.’ . . . And now, thinking over Charlie’s cleanliness and cheerfulness and good temper, it seemed to him that it had all been acting. An astonishing example in so young a boy of criminal cleverness. What else could it have been? Look how, even after he had been forgiven and the whole thing wiped out, after he’d been allowed to get off ‘Scott free’

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Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 252–3, p. 252. Published by JMM as ‘The Office Boy’, Scrapbook, pp. 227–31. 1. There is no way to date this story accurately, although JMM assigned it to 1922, Scrapbook. It seems reasonable to place it here, because of its clearly being related to Ma Parker. At the end of the MS KM wrote ‘This story won’t do. It is a silly story.’

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Mr and Mrs Dove1 Of course he knew – no man better – that he hadn’t a ghost of a chance, he hadn’t an earthly. The very idea of such a thing was preposterous. So preposterous that he’d perfectly understand it if her father – well, whatever her father chose to do he’d perfectly understand. In fact, nothing short of desperation, nothing short of the fact that this was positively his last day in England for God knows how long, would have screwed him up to it. And even now. . . . He chose a tie out of the chest of drawers, a blue and cream check tie, and sat on the side of his bed. Supposing she replied, ‘What impertinence!’ would he be surprised? Not in the least, he decided, turning up his soft collar and turning it down over the tie. He expected her to say something like that. He didn’t see, if he looked at the affair dead soberly, what else she could say. Here he was! And nervously he tied a bow in front of the mirror, jammed his hair down with both hands, pulled out the flaps of his jacket pockets. Making between £500 and £600 a year on a fruit farm in – of all places – Rhodesia. No capital. Not a penny coming to him. No chance of his income increasing for at least four years. As for looks and all that sort of thing, he was completely out of the running. He couldn’t even boast of top-hole health, for the East Africa business had knocked him out so thoroughly that he’d had to take six months’ leave. He was still fearfully pale – worse even than usual this afternoon, he thought, bending forward and peering into the mirror. Good heavens! What had happened? His hair looked almost bright green. Dash it all, he hadn’t green hair at all events. That was a bit too steep. And then the green light trembled in the glass; it was the shadow from the tree outside. Reggie turned away, took out his cigarette case, but remembering how the mater hated him to smoke in his

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bedroom, put it back again and drifted over to the chest of drawers. No, he was dashed if he could think of one blessed thing in his favour, while she. . . . Ah! . . . He stopped dead, folded his arms, and leaned hard against the chest of drawers. And in spite of her position, her father’s wealth, the fact that she was an only child and far and away the most popular girl in the neighbourhood; in spite of her beauty and her cleverness – cleverness! – it was a great deal more than that, there was really nothing she couldn’t do; he fully believed, had it been necessary, she would have been a genius at anything – in spite of the fact that her parents adored her, and she them, and they’d as soon let her go all that way as. . . . In spite of every single thing you could think of, so terrific was his love that he couldn’t help hoping. Well, was it hope? Or was this queer, timid longing to have the chance of looking after her, of making it his job to see that she had everything she wanted, and that nothing came near her that wasn’t perfect – just love? How he loved her! He squeezed hard against the chest of drawers and murmured to it, ‘I love her, I love her!’ And just for the moment he was with her on the way to Umtali. It was night. She sat in a corner asleep. Her soft chin was tucked into her soft collar, her gold-brown lashes lay on her cheeks. He doted on her delicate little nose, her perfect lips, her ear like a baby’s, and the goldbrown curl that half covered it. They were passing through the jungle. It was warm and dark and far away. Then she woke up and said, ‘Have I been asleep?’ and he answered, ‘Yes. Are you all right? Here, let me –’ And he leaned forward to. . . . He bent over her. This was such bliss that he could dream no further. But it gave him the courage to bound downstairs, to snatch his straw hat from the hall, and to say as he closed the front door, ‘Well, I can only try my luck, that’s all.’ But his luck gave him a nasty jar, to say the least, almost immediately. Promenading up and down the garden path with Chinny and Biddy, the ancient Pekes, was the mater. Of course Reginald was fond of the mater and all that. She – she meant well, she had no end of grit, and so on. But there was no denying it, she was rather a grim parent. And there had been moments, many of them, in Reggie’s life, before Uncle Alick died and left him the fruit farm, when he was convinced that to be a widow’s only son was about the worst punishment a chap could have. And what made it rougher than ever was that she was positively all that he had. She wasn’t only a combined parent, as it were, but she had quarrelled with all her own and the governor’s relations before Reggie had won his first trouser pockets. So that whenever Reggie was homesick out there, sitting on his dark verandah by starlight, while the gramophone cried, ‘Dear, what is Life but Love?’ his only vision was of the mater, tall and stout, rustling down the garden path, with Chinny and Biddy at her heels. . . .

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The mater, with her scissors outspread to snap the head of a dead something or other, stopped at the sight of Reggie. ‘You are not going out, Reginald?’ she asked, seeing that he was. ‘I’ll be back for tea, mater,’ said Reggie weakly, plunging his hands into his jacket pockets. Snip. Off came a head. Reggie almost jumped. ‘I should have thought you could have spared your mother your last afternoon,’ said she. Silence. The Pekes stared. They understood every word of the mater’s. Biddy lay down with her tongue poked out; she was so fat and glossy she looked like a lump of half-melted toffee. But Chinny’s porcelain eyes gloomed at Reginald, and he sniffed faintly, as though the whole world were one unpleasant smell. Snip, went the scissors again. Poor little beggars; they were getting it! ‘And where are you going, if your mother may ask?’ asked the mater. It was over at last, but Reggie did not slow down until he was out of sight of the house and half-way to Colonel Proctor’s. Then only he noticed what a top-hole afternoon it was. It had been raining all the morning, late summer rain, warm, heavy, quick, and now the sky was clear, except for a long tail of little clouds, like ducklings, sailing over the forest. There was just enough wind to shake the last drops off the trees; one warm star splashed on his hand. Ping! – another drummed on his hat. The empty road gleamed, the hedges smelled of briar, and how big and bright the hollyhocks glowed in the cottage gardens. And here was Colonel Proctor’s – here it was already. His hand was on the gate, his elbow jogged the syringa bushes, and petals and pollen scattered over his coat sleeve. But wait a bit. This was too quick altogether. He’d meant to think the whole thing out again. Here, steady. But he was walking up the path, with the huge rose bushes on either side. It can’t be done like this. But his hand had grasped the bell, given it a pull, and started it pealing wildly, as if he’d come to say the house was on fire. The housemaid must have been in the hall, too, for the front door flashed open, and Reggie was shut in the empty drawingroom before that confounded bell had stopped ringing. Strangely enough, when it did, the big room, shadowy, with some one’s parasol lying on top of the grand piano, bucked him up – or rather, excited him. It was so quiet, and yet in one moment the door would open, and his fate be decided. The feeling was not unlike that of being at the dentist’s; he was almost reckless. But at the same time, to his immense surprise, Reggie heard himself saying, ‘Lord, Thou knowest, Thou hast not done much for me. . . .’ That pulled him up; that made him realise again how dead serious it was. Too late. The door handle turned. Anne came in, crossed the shadowy space between them, gave

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him her hand, and said, in her small, soft voice, ‘I’m so sorry, Father is out. And mother is having a day in town, hat-hunting. There’s only me to entertain you, Reggie.’ Reggie gasped, pressed his own hat to his jacket buttons, and stammered out, ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve only come . . . to say good-bye.’ ‘Oh!’ cried Anne softly – she stepped back from him and her grey eyes danced – ‘what a very short visit!’ Then, watching him, her chin tilted, she laughed outright, a long, soft peal, and walked away from him over to the piano, and leaned against it, playing with the tassel of the parasol. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘to be laughing like this. I don’t know why I do. It’s just a bad ha-habit.’ And suddenly she stamped her grey shoe, and took a pocket-handkerchief out of her white woolly jacket.’ I really must conquer it, it’s too absurd,’ said she. ‘Good heavens, Anne,’ cried Reggie, ‘I love to hear you laughing! I can’t imagine anything more –’ But the truth was, and they both knew it, she wasn’t always laughing; it wasn’t really a habit. Only ever since the day they’d met, ever since that very first moment, for some strange reason that Reggie wished to God he understood, Anne had laughed at him. Why? It didn’t matter where they were or what they were talking about. They might begin by being as serious as possible, dead serious – at any rate, as far as he was concerned – but then suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, Anne would glance at him, and a little quick quiver passed over her face. Her lips parted, her eyes danced, and she began laughing. Another queer thing about it was, Reggie had an idea she didn’t herself know why she laughed. He had seen her turn away, frown, suck in her cheeks, press her hands together. But it was no use. The long, soft peal sounded, even while she cried, ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing.’ It was a mystery. . . . Now she tucked the handkerchief away. ‘Do sit down,’ said she. ‘And smoke, won’t you? There are cigarettes in that little box beside you. I’ll have one too.’ He lighted a match for her, and as she bent forward he saw the tiny flame glow in the pearl ring she wore. ‘It is to-morrow that you’re going, isn’t it?’ said Anne. ‘Yes, to-morrow as ever is,’ said Reggie, and he blew a little fan of smoke. Why on earth was he so nervous? Nervous wasn’t the word for it. ‘It’s – it’s frightfully hard to believe,’ he added. ‘Yes – isn’t it?’ said Anne softly, and she leaned forward and rolled the point of her cigarette round the green ash-tray. How beautiful she looked like that! – simply beautiful – and she was so small in that immense chair. Reginald’s heart swelled with tenderness, but it was

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her voice, her soft voice, that made him tremble. ‘I feel you’ve been here for years,’ she said. Reginald took a deep breath of his cigarette. ‘It’s ghastly, this idea of going back,’ he said. ‘Coo-roo-coo-coo-coo,’ sounded from the quiet. ‘But you’re fond of being out there, aren’t you?’ said Anne. She hooked her finger through her pearl necklace. ‘Father was saying only the other night how lucky he thought you were to have a life of your own.’ And she looked up at him. Reginald’s smile was rather wan. ‘I don’t feel fearfully lucky,’ he said lightly. ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo,’ came again. And Anne murmured, ‘You mean it’s lonely.’ ‘Oh, it isn’t the loneliness I care about,’ said Reginald, and he stumped his cigarette savagely on the green ash-tray. ‘I could stand any amount of it, used to like it even. It’s the idea of –’ Suddenly, to his horror, he felt himself blushing. ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo-coo!’ Anne jumped up. ‘Come and say good-bye to my doves,’ she said. ‘They’ve been moved to the side veranda. You do like doves, don’t you, Reggie?’ ‘Awfully,’ said Reggie, so fervently that as he opened the french window for her and stood to one side, Anne ran forward and laughed at the doves instead. To and fro, to and fro over the fine red sand on the floor of the dove house, walked the two doves. One was always in front of the other. One ran forward, uttering a little cry, and the other followed, solemnly bowing and bowing. ‘You see,’ explained Anne, ‘the one in front, she’s Mrs Dove. She looks at Mr Dove and gives that little laugh and runs forward, and he follows her, bowing and bowing. And that makes her laugh again. Away she runs, and after her,’ cried Anne, and she sat back on her heels, ‘comes poor Mr Dove, bowing and bowing . . . and that’s their whole life. They never do anything else, you know.’ She got up and took some yellow grains out of a bag on the roof of the dove house. ‘When you think of them, out in Rhodesia, Reggie, you can be sure that is what they will be doing. . . .’ Reggie gave no sign of having seen the doves or of having heard a word. For the moment he was conscious only of the immense effort it took to tear his secret out of himself and offer it to Anne. ‘Anne, do you think you could ever care for me?’ It was done. It was over. And in the little pause that followed Reginald saw the garden open to the light, the blue quivering sky, the flutter of leaves on the veranda poles, and Anne turning over the grains of maize on her palm with one finger. Then slowly she shut her hand, and the new world faded as she murmured slowly, ‘No, never in that way.’ But he had scarcely time

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to feel anything before she walked quickly away, and he followed her down the steps, along the garden path, under the pink rose arches, across the lawn. There, with the gay herbaceous border behind her, Anne faced Reginald. ‘It isn’t that I’m not awfully fond of you,’ she said. ‘I am. But’ – her eyes widened – ‘not in the way’ – a quiver passed over her face – ‘one ought to be fond of –’ Her lips parted, and she couldn’t stop herself. She began laughing. ‘There, you see, you see,’ she cried, ‘it’s your check t-tie. Even at this moment, when one would think one really would be solemn, your tie reminds me fearfully of the bow-tie that cats wear in pictures! Oh, please forgive me for being so horrid, please!’ Reggie caught hold of her little warm hand. ‘There’s no question of forgiving you,’ he said quickly. ‘How could there be? And I do believe I know why I make you laugh. It’s because you’re so far above me in every way that I am somehow ridiculous. I see that, Anne. But if I were to –’ ‘No, no.’ Anne squeezed his hand hard. ‘It’s not that. That’s all wrong. I’m not far above you at all. You’re much better than I am. You’re marvellously unselfish and . . . and kind and simple. I’m none of those things. You don’t know me. I’m the most awful character,’ said Anne. ‘Please don’t interrupt. And besides, that’s not the point. The point is’ – she shook her head – ‘I couldn’t possibly marry a man I laughed at. Surely you see that. The man I marry –’ breathed Anne softly. She broke off. She drew her hand away, and looking at Reggie she smiled strangely, dreamily. ‘The man I marry –’ And it seemed to Reggie that a tall, handsome, brilliant stranger stepped in front of him and took his place – the kind of man that Anne and he had seen often at the theatre, walking on to the stage from nowhere, without a word catching the heroine in his arms, and after one long, tremendous look, carrying her off to anywhere. . . . Reggie bowed to his vision. ‘Yes, I see,’ he said huskily. ‘Do you?’ said Anne. ‘Oh, I do hope you do. Because I feel so horrid about it. It’s so hard to explain. You know I’ve never –’ She stopped. Reggie looked at her. She was smiling. ‘Isn’t it funny?’ she said.’ I can say anything to you. I always have been able to from the very beginning.’ He tried to smile, to say ‘I’m glad.’ She went on. ‘I’ve never known anyone I like as much as I like you. I’ve never felt so happy with anyone. But I’m sure it’s not what people and what books mean when they talk about love. Do you understand? Oh, if you only knew how horrid I feel. But we’d be like . . . like Mr and Mrs Dove.’ That did it. That seemed to Reginald final, and so terribly true that he could hardly bear it. ‘Don’t drive it home,’ he said, and he turned away from Anne and looked across the lawn. There was

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the gardener’s cottage, with the dark ilex-tree beside it. A wet, blue thumb of transparent smoke hung above the chimney. It didn’t look real. How his throat ached! Could he speak? He had a shot. ‘I must be getting along home,’ he croaked, and he began walking across the lawn. But Anne ran after him. ‘No, don’t. You can’t go yet,’ she said imploringly. ‘You can’t possibly go away feeling like that.’ And she stared up at him frowning, biting her lip. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Reggie, giving himself a shake. ‘I’ll . . . I’ll –’ And he waved his hand as much as to say ‘get over it’. ‘But this is awful,’ said Anne. She clasped her hands and stood in front of him. ‘Surely you do see how fatal it would be for us to marry, don’t you?’ ‘Oh, quite, quite,’ said Reggie, looking at her with haggard eyes. ‘How wrong, how wicked, feeling as I do. I mean, it’s all very well for Mr and Mrs Dove. But imagine that in real life – imagine it!’ ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Reggie, and he started to walk on. But again Anne stopped him. She tugged at his sleeve, and to his astonishment, this time, instead of laughing, she looked like a little girl who was going to cry. ‘Then why, if you understand, are you so un-unhappy?’ she wailed. ‘Why do you mind so fearfully? Why do you look so aw-awful?’ Reggie gulped, and again he waved something away. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a blow. If I cut off now, I’ll be able to –’ ‘How can you talk of cutting off now?’ said Anne scornfully. She stamped her foot at Reggie; she was crimson. ‘How can you be so cruel? I can’t let you go until I know for certain that you are just as happy as you were before you asked me to marry you. Surely you must see that, it’s so simple.’ But it did not seem at all simple to Reginald. It seemed impossibly difficult. ‘Even if I can’t marry you, how can I know that you’re all that way away, with only that awful mother to write to, and that you’re miserable, and that it’s all my fault?’ ‘It’s not your fault. Don’t think that. It’s just fate.’ Reggie took her hand off his sleeve and kissed it. ‘Don’t pity me, dear little Anne,’ he said gently. And this time he nearly ran, under the pink arches, along the garden path. ‘Roo-coo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo-coo!’ sounded from the verandah. ‘Reggie, Reggie,’ from the garden. He stopped, he turned. But when she saw his timid, puzzled look, she gave a little laugh. ‘Come back, Mr Dove,’ said Anne. And Reginald came slowly across the lawn.

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Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 86: 1125, 13 August 1921, pp. 172–3. 1. KM made the following notebook entry: July. I finished Mr and Mrs Dove yesterday. I am not altogether pleased with it. It’s a little bit made up. It’s not inevitable. I mean to imply that those two may not be happy together – that that is the kind of reason for which a young girl marries. But have I done so? I don’t think so. Besides it’s not strong enough. I want to be nearer, far, far nearer than that. I want to use all my force even when I am tracing a fine line. And I have a sneaking notion that I have, at the end, used the doves unwarrantably. Tu sais ce que je veux dire. I used them to round off something, didn’t I? Is that quite my game? No, it’s not. It’s not quite the kind of truth I’m after. (KMN, 2, p. 278)

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Susannah1 Of course there would have been no question of their going to the exhibition if Father had not had the tickets given to him. Little girls cannot expect to be given treats that cost extra money when only to feed them, buy them clothes, pay for their lessons and the house they live in takes their kind generous Father all day and every day working hard from morning till night – ‘except Saturday afternoons and Sundays,’ said Susannah. ‘Susannah!’ Mother was very shocked. ‘But do you know what would happen to your poor Father if he didn’t have a holiday on Saturday afternoons and Sundays?’ ‘No,’ said Susannah. She looked interested. ‘What?’ ‘He would die,’ said their mother impressively. ‘Would he?’ said Susannah, opening her eyes. She seemed astounded, and Sylvia and Phyllis, who were four and five years older than she, chimed in with, ‘Of course,’ in a very superior tone. What a little silly-billy she was not to know that! They sounded so convinced and cheerful that their mother felt a little shaken and hastened to change the subject. . . . ‘So that is why,’ she said a little vaguely, ‘you must each thank Father separately before you go.’

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‘And then will he give us the money?’ asked Phyllis. ‘And then I shall ask him for whatever is necessary,’ said their mother firmly. She sighed suddenly and got up.’ ‘Run along, children and ask Miss Wade to dress you and get ready herself and then to come down to the dining-room. And now, Susannah, you are not to let go Miss Wade’s hand from the moment you are through the gates until you are out again.’ ‘Well – what if I go on a horse?’ inquired Susannah. ‘Go on a horse – nonsense, child! You’re much too young for horses! Only big girls and boys can ride.’ ‘There’re roosters for small children,’ said Susannah undaunted. ‘I know, because Irene Heywood went on one and when she got off she fell over.’ ‘All the more reason why you shouldn’t go on,’ said her mother. But Susannah looked as though falling over had no terrors for her. On the contrary. About the exhibition, however, Sylvia and Phyllis knew as little as Susannah. It was the first that had ever come to their town. One morning, as Miss Wade, their lady help, rushed them along to the Heywoods’, whose governess they shared, they had seen carts piled with great long planks of wood, sacks, what looked like whole doors, and white flagstaffs, passing through the wide gate of the Recreation Ground. And by the time they were bowled home to their dinners, there were the beginnings of a high thin fence, dotted with flag-staffs, built all round the railings. From inside came a tremendous noise of hammering, shouting, clanging; a little engine, hidden away, went Chuff-chuff-chuff. Chuff! And round, woolly balls of smoke were tossed over the palings. First it was the day after the day after tomorrow, then plain day after to-morrow, then to-morrow, and at last, the day itself. When Susannah woke up in the morning, there was a little gold spot of sunlight watching her from the wall; it looked as though it had been there for a long time, waiting to remind her: ‘It’s to-day – you’re going to-day – this afternoon. Here she is!’ (Second Version) That afternoon they were allowed to cut jugs and basins out of a draper’s catalogue, and at tea-time they had real tea in the doll’s tea set on the table. This was a very nice treat, indeed, except that the doll’s tea-pot wouldn’t pour out even after you’d poked a pin down the spout and blown into it. But the next afternoon, which was Saturday, Father came home in high feather. The front door banged so hard that the whole house shook, and he shouted to Mother from the hall.

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‘Oh, how more than good of you, darling!’ cried Mother, ‘but how unnecessary too. Of course, they’ll simply love it. But to have spent all that money! You shouldn’t have done it, Daddy dear! They’ve totally forgotten all about it. And what is this! Half a crown?’ cried Mother. ‘No! Two shillings, I see,’ she corrected quickly, ‘to spend as well. Children! Children! Come down, downstairs!’ Down they came, Phyllis and Sylvia leading, Susannah holding on. ‘Do you know what Father’s done?’ And Mother held up her hand. What was she holding? Three cherry tickets and a green one.’ ‘He’s bought you tickets. You’re to go to the circus, this very afternoon, all of you, with Miss Wade. What do you say to that?’ ‘Oh, Mummy! Lovely! Lovely!’ cried Phyllis and Sylvia. ‘Isn’t it?’ said Mother. ‘Run upstairs. Run and ask Miss Wade to get you ready. Don’t dawdle. Up you go! All of you.’ Away flew Phyllis and Sylvia, but still Susannah stayed where she was at the bottom of the stairs, hanging her head. ‘Go along,’ said Mother. And Father said sharply, ‘What the devil’s the matter with the child?’ Susannah’s face quivered. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she whispered. ‘What! Don’t want to go to the Exhibition! After Father’s – You naughty, ungrateful child ! Either you go to the Exhibition, Susannah, or you will be packed off to bed at once.’ Susannah’s head bent low, lower still. All her little body bent forward. She looked as though she was going to bow down, to bow down to the ground, before her kind generous Father and beg for his forgiveness. . . . Notes U Text: DNOS. 1. The day after she finished ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, KM noted, ‘Now for Susannah. All must be deeply felt’ (KMN, 2, p. 278).

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Such a Sweet Old Lady Why did old Mrs. Travers wake so early nowadays? She would like to have slept for another three hours at least. But no, every morning at almost precisely the same time, at half-past four, she was wide awake. For – nowadays, again – she woke always in the same way,

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with a slight start, a small shock, lifting her head from the pillow with a quick glance as if she fancied someone had called her, or as if she were trying to remember for certain whether this was the same wallpaper, the same window she had seen last night before Warner switched off the light. . . . Then the small, silvery head pressed the white pillow again and just for a moment, before the agony of lying awake began, old Mrs. Travers was happy. Her heart quietened down, she breathed deeply, she even smiled. Yet once more the tide of darkness had risen, had floated her, had carried her away; and once more it had ebbed, it had withdrawn, casting her up where it had found her, shut in by the same wallpaper, stared at by the same window – still safe – still there! Now the church clock sounded from outside, slow, languid, faint, as if it chimed the half hour in its sleep. She felt under the pillow for her watch; yes, it said the same. Half-past four. Three and a half hours before Warner came in with her tea. Oh dear, would she be able to stand it? She moved her legs restlessly. And, staring at the prim, severe face of the watch, it seemed to her that the hand – the minute hand especially – knew that she was watching them and held back – just a very little – on purpose. . . . Very strange, she had never got over the feeling that watch hated her. It had been Henry’s. Twenty years ago, when standing by poor Henry’s bed, she had taken it into her hands for the first time and wound it, it had felt cold and heavy. And two days later, when she undid a hook of her crape bodice and thrust it inside, it had lain in her bosom like a stone. . . . It had never felt at home there. Its place was – ticking, keeping perfect time, against Henry’s firm ribs. It had never trusted her, just as he had never trusted her in those ways. And on the rare occasions when she had forgotten to wind it, she had felt a pang of almost terror, and she had murmured as she fitted the little key: ‘Forgive me, Henry!’ Old Mrs. Travers sighed, and pushed the watch under the pillow again. It seemed to her that lately this feeling that it hated her had become more definite. . . . Perhaps that was because she looked at it so often, especially now that she was away from home. Foreign clocks never go. They are always stopped at twenty minutes to two. Twenty minutes to two! Such an unpleasant time, neither one thing nor the other. If one arrived anywhere lunch was over and it was too early to expect a cup of tea. . . . But she mustn’t begin thinking about tea. Old Mrs. Travers pulled herself up in the bed, and like a tired baby, she lifted her arms and let them fall on the eiderdown. The room was gay with morning light. The big french window on to the balcony was open and the palm outside flung its quivering spider-like shadow over the bedroom walls. Although their hotel

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did not face the front, at this early hour you could smell the sea, you could hear it breathing, and flying high on golden wings sea-gulls skimmed past. How peaceful the sky looked, as though it was tenderly smiling! Far away – far away from this satin-stripe wallpaper, the glass-covered table, the yellow brocade sofa and chairs, and the mirrors that showed you your side view, your back view, your three-quarters view as well. Ernestine had been enthusiastic about this room. ‘It’s just the very room for you, Mother! So bright and attractive and non-depressing! With a balcony, too, so that on wet days you can still have your chair outside and look at those lovely palms. And Gladys can have the little room adjoining, which makes it so beautifully easy for Warner to keep her eye on you both. . . . You couldn’t have a nicer room, could you, Mother? I can’t get over that sweet balcony! So nice for Gladys! Cecil and I haven’t got one at all. . . .’ But all the same, in spite of Ernestine, she never sat on that balcony. For some strange reason that she couldn’t explain she hated looking at palms. Nasty foreign things, she called them in her mind. When they were still they drooped, they looked draggled like immense untidy birds, and when they moved, they reminded her always of spiders. Why did they never look just natural and peaceful and shady like English trees? Why were they forever writhing and twisting or standing sullen? It tired her even to think of them, or in fact of anything foreign . . . Notes U Text: MS NLC. Dated ‘10 vii 1921’. DNOS.

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Sixpence1 Children are unaccountable little creatures. Why should a small boy like Dicky, good as gold as a rule, sensitive, affectionate, obedient, and marvellously sensible for his age, have moods when, without the slightest warning, he suddenly went ‘mad dog’, as his sisters called it, and there was no doing anything with him? ‘Dicky, come here! Come here, sir, at once! Do you hear your mother calling you? Dicky!’

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But Dicky wouldn’t come. Oh, he heard right enough. A clear, ringing little laugh was his only reply. And away he flew; hiding, running through the uncut hay on the lawn, dashing past the woodshed, making a rush for the kitchen garden, and there dodging, peering at his mother from behind the mossy apple trunks, and leaping up and down like a wild Indian. It had begun at tea-time. While Dicky’s mother and Mrs Spears, who was spending the afternoon with her, were quietly sitting over their sewing in the drawing-room, this, according to the servant girl, was what had happened at the children’s tea. They were eating their first bread and butter as nicely and quietly as you please, and the servant girl had just poured out the milk and water, when Dicky had suddenly seized the bread plate, put it upside down on his head, and clutched the bread knife. ‘Look at me!’ he shouted. His startled sisters looked, and before the servant girl could get there, the bread plate wobbled, slid, flew to the floor, and broke into shivers. At this awful point the little girls lifted up their voices and shrieked their loudest. ‘Mother, come and look what he’s done!’ ‘Dicky’s broke a great big plate!’ ‘Come and stop him, mother!’ You can imagine how mother came flying. But she was too late. Dicky had leapt out of his chair, run through the French windows on to the verandah, and, well – there she stood – popping her thimble on and off, helpless. What could she do? She couldn’t chase after the child. She couldn’t stalk Dicky among the apples and damsons. That would be too undignified. It was more than annoying, it was exasperating. Especially as Mrs Spears, Mrs Spears of all people, whose two boys were so exemplary, was waiting for her in the drawing-room. ‘Very well, Dicky,’ she cried, ‘I shall have to think of some way of punishing you.’ ‘I don’t care,’ sounded the high little voice, and again there came that ringing laugh. The child was quite beside himself. . . . ‘Oh, Mrs Spears, I don’t know how to apologise for leaving you by yourself like this.’ ‘It’s quite all right, Mrs Bendall,’ said Mrs Spears, in her soft, sugary voice, and raising her eyebrows in the way she had. She seemed to smile to herself as she stroked the gathers. ‘These little things will happen from time to time. I only hope it was nothing serious.’ ‘It was Dicky,’ said Mrs Bendall, looking rather helplessly for her only fine needle. And she explained the whole affair to Mrs Spears. ‘And the worst of it is, I don’t know how to cure him. Nothing when he’s in that mood seems to have the slightest effect on him.’

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Mrs Spears opened her pale eyes. ‘Not even a whipping?’ said she. But Mrs Bendall, threading her needle, pursed up her lips. ‘We never have whipped the children,’ she said. ‘The girls never seem to have needed it. And Dicky is such a baby, and the only boy. Somehow. . . .’ ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mrs Spears, and she laid her sewing down. ‘I don’t wonder Dicky has these little outbreaks. You don’t mind my saying so? But I’m sure you make a great mistake in trying to bring up children without whipping them. Nothing really takes its place. And I speak from experience, my dear. I used to try gentler measures’ – Mrs Spears drew in her breath with a little hissing sound – ‘soaping the boys’ tongues, for instance, with yellow soap, or making them stand on the table for the whole of Saturday afternoon. But no, believe me,’ said Mrs Spears, ‘there is nothing, there is nothing like handing them over to their father.’ Mrs Bendall in her heart of hearts was dreadfully shocked to hear of that yellow soap. But Mrs Spears seemed to take it so much for granted, that she did too. ‘Their father,’ she said. ‘Then you don’t whip them yourself?’ ‘Never.’ Mrs Spears seemed quite shocked at the idea. ‘I don’t think it’s the mother’s place to whip the children. It’s the duty of the father. And, besides, he impresses them so much more.’ ‘Yes, I can imagine that,’ said Mrs Bendall, faintly. ‘Now my two boys,’ Mrs Spears smiled kindly, encouragingly, at Mrs Bendall, ‘would behave just like Dicky if they were not afraid to. As it is. . . .’ ‘Oh, your boys are perfect little models,’ cried Mrs Bendall. They were. Quieter, better-behaved little boys, in the presence of grown-ups, could not be found. In fact, Mrs Spears’ callers often made the remark that you never would have known that there was a child in the house. There wasn’t – very often. In the front hall, under a large picture of fat, cheery old monks fishing by the riverside, there was a thick, dark horsewhip that had belonged to Mr Spears’ father. And for some reason the boys preferred to play out of sight of this, behind the dog-kennel or in the tool-house, or round about the dustbin. ‘It’s such a mistake,’ sighed Mrs Spears, breathing softly, as she folded her work, ‘to be weak with children when they are little. It’s such a sad mistake, and one so easy to make. It’s so unfair to the child. That is what one has to remember. Now Dicky’s little escapade this afternoon seemed to me as though he’d done it on purpose. It was the child’s way of showing you that he needed a whipping.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ Mrs Bendall was a weak little thing, and this impressed her very much.

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‘I do; I feel sure of it. And a sharp reminder now and then,’ cried Mrs Spears in quite a professional manner, ‘administered by the father, will save you so much trouble in the future. Believe me, my dear.’ She put her dry, cold hand over Mrs Bendall’s. ‘I shall speak to Edward the moment he comes in,’ said Dicky’s mother firmly. The children had gone to bed before the garden gate banged, and Dicky’s father staggered up the steep concrete steps carrying his bicycle. It had been a bad day at the office. He was hot, dusty, tired out. But by this time Mrs Bendall had become quite excited over the new plan, and she opened the door to him herself. ‘Oh, Edward, I’m so thankful you have come home,’ she cried. ‘Why, what’s happened?’ Edward lowered the bicycle and took off his hat. A red angry pucker showed where the brim had pressed. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Come – come into the drawing-room,’ said Mrs Bendall, speaking very fast. ‘I simply can’t tell you how naughty Dicky has been. You have no idea – you can’t have at the office all day – how a child of that age can behave. He’s been simply dreadful. I have no control over him – none. I’ve tried everything, Edward, but it’s all no use. The only thing to do,’ she finished, breathlessly, ‘is to whip him – is for you to whip him, Edward.’ In the corner of the drawing-room there was a what-not, and on the top shelf stood a brown china bear with a painted tongue. It seemed in the shadow to be grinning at Dicky’s father, to be saying, ‘Hooray, this is what you’ve come home to!’ ‘But why on earth should I start whipping him?’ said Edward, staring at the bear. ‘We’ve never done it before.’ ‘Because,’ said his wife, ‘don’t you see, it’s the only thing to do. I can’t control the child. . . .’ Her words flew from her lips. They beat round him, beat round his tired head. ‘We can’t possibly afford a nurse. The servant girl has more than enough to do. And his naughtiness is beyond words. You don’t understand, Edward; you can’t, you’re at the office all day.’ The bear poked out his tongue. The scolding voice went on. Edward sank into a chair. ‘What am I to beat him with?’ he said weakly. ‘Your slipper, of course,’ said his wife. And she knelt down to untie his dusty shoes. ‘Oh, Edward,’ she wailed, ‘you’ve still got your cycling clips on in the drawing-room. No, really –’ ‘Here, that’s enough,’ Edward nearly pushed her away. ‘Give me that slipper.’ He went up the stairs. He felt like a man in a dark net.

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And now he wanted to beat Dicky. Yes, damn it, he wanted to beat something. My God, what a life! The dust was still in his hot eyes, his arms felt heavy. He pushed open the door of Dicky’s slip of a room. Dicky was standing in the middle of the floor in his night-shirt. At the sight of him Edward’s heart gave a warm throb of rage. ‘Well, Dicky, you know what I’ve come for,’ said Edward. Dicky made no reply. ‘I’ve come to give you a whipping.’ No answer. ‘Lift up your nightshirt.’ At that Dicky looked up. He flushed a deep pink. ‘Must I?’ he whispered. ‘Come on, now. Be quick about it,’ said Edward, and, grasping the slipper, he gave Dicky three hard slaps. ‘There, that’ll teach you to behave properly to your mother.’ Dicky stood there, hanging his head. ‘Look sharp and get into bed,’ said his father. Still he did not move. But a shaking voice said, ‘I’ve not done my teeth yet, Daddy.’ ‘Eh, what’s that?’ Dicky looked up. His lips were quivering, but his eyes were dry. He hadn’t made a sound or shed a tear. Only he swallowed and said, huskily, ‘I haven’t done my teeth, Daddy.’ But at the sight of that little face Edward turned, and, not knowing what he was doing, he bolted from the room, down the stairs, and out into the garden. Good God! What had he done? He strode along and hid in the shadow of the pear tree by the hedge. Whipped Dicky – whipped his little man with a slipper – and what the devil for? He didn’t even know. Suddenly he barged into his room – and there was the little chap in his nightshirt. Dicky’s father groaned and held on to the hedge. And he didn’t cry. Never a tear. If only he’d cried or got angry. But that ‘Daddy’! And again he heard the quivering whisper. Forgiving like that without a word. But he’d never forgive himself – never. Coward! Fool! Brute! And suddenly he remembered the time when Dicky had fallen off his knee and sprained his wrist while they were playing together. He hadn’t cried then, either. And that was the little hero he had just whipped. Something’s got to be done about this, thought Edward. He strode back to the house, up the stairs, into Dicky’s room. The little boy was lying in bed. In the half light his dark head, with the square fringe, showed plain against the pale pillow. He was lying quite still, and even now he wasn’t crying. Edward shut the door and leaned against it. What he wanted to do was to kneel down by Dicky’s bed and cry

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himself and beg to be forgiven. But, of course, one can’t do that sort of thing. He felt awkward, and his heart was wrung. ‘Not asleep yet, Dicky?’ he said lightly. ‘No, Daddy.’ Edward came over and sat down on his boy’s bed, and Dicky looked at him through his long lashes. ‘Nothing the matter, little chap, is there?’ said Edward, half whispering. ‘No-o, Daddy,’ came from Dicky. Edward put out his hand, and carefully he took Dicky’s hot little paw. ‘You – you mustn’t think any more of what happened just now, little man,’ he said huskily. ‘See? That’s all over now. That’s forgotten. That’s never going to happen again. See?’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’ ‘So the thing to do now is to buck up, little chap,’ said Edward, ‘and to smile.’ And he tried himself an extraordinary trembling apology for a smile. ‘To forget all about it – to – eh? Little man. . . . Old boy. . . .’ Dicky lay as before. This was terrible. Dicky’s father sprang up and went over to the window. It was nearly dark in the garden. The servant girl had run out, and she was snatching, twitching some white cloths off the bushes and piling them over her arm. But in the boundless sky the evening star shone, and a big gum tree, black against the pale glow, moved its long leaves softly. All this he saw, while he felt in his trouser pocket for his money. Bringing it out, he chose a new sixpence and went back to Dicky. ‘Here you are, little chap. Buy yourself something,’ said Edward softly, laying the sixpence on Dicky’s pillow. But could even that – could even a whole sixpence – blot out what had been? Notes Text: Sphere, 86: 1124, 6 August 1921, p. 144, ii [sic]. SCOS. 1. KM at first intended to include ‘Sixpence’ in GPOS, but on 29 November 1921 she wrote from Montana-sur-Sierre to Michael Sadleir, her editor at Constable: if there is still time, if the printers have not got so far would you – could you extract a story called Sixpence from near the end of my book & throw it away? I have not a copy by me but I have a horrible feeling it is sentimental and should not be there. (CLKM, 4, p. 327)

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An Ideal Family1 That evening for the first time in his life, as he pressed through the swing door and descended the three broad steps to the pavement, old Mr Neave felt he was too old for the spring. Spring – warm, eager, restless – was there, waiting for him in the golden light, ready in front of everybody to run up, to blow in his white beard, to drag sweetly on his arm. And he couldn’t meet her, no; he couldn’t square up once more and stride off, jaunty as a young man. He was tired and, although the late sun was still shining, curiously cold, with a numbed feeling all over. Quite suddenly he hadn’t the energy, he hadn’t the heart to stand this gaiety and bright movement any longer; it confused him. He wanted to stand still, to wave it away with his stick, to say, ‘Be off with you!’ Suddenly it was a terrible effort to greet as usual – tipping his wide-awake with his stick – all the people whom he knew, the friends, acquaintances, shop-keepers, postmen, drivers. But the gay glance that went with the gesture, the kindly twinkle that seemed to say, ‘I’m a match and more for any of you’ – that old Mr Neave could not manage at all. He stumped along, lifting his knees high as if he were walking through air that had somehow grown heavy and solid like water. And the homeward-going crowd hurried by, the trams clanked, the light carts clattered, the big swinging cabs bowled along with that reckless, defiant indifference that one knows only in dreams. . . . It had been a day like other days at the office. Nothing special had happened. Harold hadn’t come back from lunch until close on four. Where had he been? What had he been up to? He wasn’t going to let his father know. Old Mr Neave had happened to be in the vestibule, saying good-bye to a caller, when Harold sauntered in, perfectly turned out as usual, cool, suave, smiling that peculiar little half-smile that women found so fascinating. Ah, Harold was too handsome, too handsome by far; that had been the trouble all along. No man had a right to such eyes, such lashes and such lips; it was uncanny. As for his mother, his sisters, and the servants, it was not too much to say they made a young god of him; they worshipped Harold, they forgave him everything; and he had needed some forgiving ever since the time when he was thirteen and he had stolen his mother’s purse, taken the money, and hidden the purse in the cook’s bedroom. Old Mr Neave struck sharply with his stick upon the pavement edge. But it wasn’t only his family who

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spoiled Harold, he reflected, it was everybody; he had only to look and to smile, and down they went before him. So perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at that he expected the office to carry on the tradition. H’m, h’m! But it couldn’t be done. No business – not even a successful, established, big paying concern – could be played with. A man had either to put his whole heart and soul into it, or it went all to pieces before his eyes. . . . And then Charlotte and the girls were always at him to make the whole thing over to Harold, to retire, and to spend his time enjoying himself. Enjoying himself! Old Mr Neave stopped dead under a group of ancient cabbage palms outside the Government buildings! Enjoying himself! The wind of evening shook the dark leaves to a thin airy cackle. Sitting at home, twiddling his thumbs, conscious all the while that his life’s work was slipping away, dissolving, disappearing through Harold’s fine fingers, while Harold smiled. . . . ‘Why will you be so unreasonable, father? There’s absolutely no need for you to go to the office. It only makes it very awkward for us when people persist in saying how tired you’re looking. Here’s this huge house and garden. Surely you could be happy in – in – appreciating it for a change. Or you could take up some hobby.’ And Lola the baby had chimed in loftily, ‘All men ought to have hobbies. It makes life impossible if they haven’t.’ Well, well! He couldn’t help a grim smile as painfully he began to climb the hill that led into Harcourt Avenue. Where would Lola and her sisters and Charlotte be if he’d gone in for hobbies, he’d like to know? Hobbies couldn’t pay for the town house and the seaside bungalow, and their horses, and their golf, and the sixty-guinea gramophone in the music-room for them to dance to. Not that he grudged them these things. No, they were smart, good-looking girls, and Charlotte was a remarkable woman; it was natural for them to be in the swim. As a matter of fact, no other house in the town was as popular as theirs; no other family entertained so much. And how many times old Mr Neave, pushing the cigar box across the smokingroom table, had listened to praises of his wife, his girls, of himself even. ‘You’re an ideal family, sir, an ideal family. It’s like something one reads about or sees on the stage.’ ‘That’s all right, my boy,’ old Mr Neave would reply. ‘Try one of those; I think you’ll like them. And if you care to smoke in the garden, you’ll find the girls on the lawn, I dare say.’ That was why the girls had never married, so people said. They could have married anybody. But they had too good a time at home. They were too happy together, the girls and Charlotte. H’m, h’m! Well, well! Perhaps so. . . .

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By this time he had walked the length of fashionable Harcourt Avenue; he had reached the corner house, their house. The carriage gates were pushed back; there were fresh marks of wheels on the drive. And then he faced the big white-painted house, with its wideopen windows, its tulle curtains floating outwards, its blue jars of hyacinths on the broad sills. On either side of the carriage porch their hydrangeas – famous in the town –were coming into flower; the pinkish, bluish masses of flower lay like light among the spreading leaves. And somehow, it seemed to old Mr Neave that the house and the flowers, and even the fresh marks on the drive, were saying, ‘There is young life here. There are girls –’ The hall, as always, was dusky with wraps, parasols, gloves, piled on the oak chests. From the music-room sounded the piano, quick, loud and impatient. Through the drawing-room door that was ajar voices floated. ‘And were there ices?’ came from Charlotte. Then the creak, creak of her rocker. ‘Ices!’ cried Ethel. ‘My dear mother you never saw such ices. Only two kinds. And one a common little strawberry shop ice, in a sopping wet frill.’ ‘The food altogether was too appalling,’ came from Marion. ‘Still, it’s rather early for ices,’ said Charlotte easily. ‘But why, if one has them at all. . . .’ began Ethel. ‘Oh, quite so, darling,’ crooned Charlotte. Suddenly the music-room door opened and Lola dashed out. She started, she nearly screamed, at the sight of old Mr Neave. ‘Gracious, father! What a fright you gave me! Have you just come home? Why isn’t Charles here to help you off with your coat?’ Her cheeks were crimson from playing, her eyes glittered, the hair fell over her forehead. And she breathed as though she had come running through the dark and was frightened. Old Mr Neave stared at his youngest daughter; he felt he had never seen her before. So that was Lola, was it? But she seemed to have forgotten her father; it was not for him that she was waiting there. Now she put the tip of her crumpled handkerchief between her teeth and tugged at it angrily. The telephone rang. A-ah! Lola gave a cry like a sob and dashed past him. The door of the telephone-room slammed, and at the same moment Charlotte called, ‘Is that you, father?’ ‘You’re tired again,’ said Charlotte reproachfully, and she stopped the rocker and offered him her warm plum-like cheek. Bright-haired Ethel pecked his beard; Marion’s lips brushed his ear. ‘Did you walk back, father?’ asked Charlotte. ‘Yes, I walked home,’ said old Mr Neave, and he sank into one of the immense drawing-room chairs.

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‘But why didn’t you take a cab?’ said Ethel. ‘There are hundreds of cabs about at that time.’ ‘My dear Ethel,’ cried Marion, ‘if father prefers to tire himself out, I really don’t see what business of ours it is to interfere.’ ‘Children, children!’ coaxed Charlotte. But Marion wouldn’t be stopped. ‘No, mother, you spoil father, and it’s not right. You ought to be stricter with him. He’s very naughty.’ She laughed her hard, bright laugh and patted her hair in a mirror. Strange! When she was a little girl she had such a soft, hesitating voice; she had even stuttered, and now, whatever she said – even if it was only ‘Jam, please, father’ – it rang out as though she were on the stage. ‘Did Harold leave the office before you, dear?’ asked Charlotte, beginning to rock again. ‘I’m not sure,’ said old Mr Neave. ‘I’m not sure. I didn’t see him after four o’clock.’ ‘He said –’ began Charlotte. But at that moment Ethel, who was twitching over the leaves of some paper or other, ran to her mother and sank down beside her chair. ‘There, you see,’ she cried. ‘That’s what I mean, mummy. Yellow, with touches of silver. Don’t you agree?’ ‘Give it to me, love,’ said Charlotte. She fumbled for her tortoiseshell spectacles and put them on, gave the page a little dab with her plump small fingers, and pursed up her lips. ‘Very sweet!’ she crooned vaguely; she looked at Ethel over her spectacles. ‘But I shouldn’t have the train.’ ‘Not the train!’ wailed Ethel tragically. ‘But the train’s the whole point.’ ‘Here, mother, let me decide.’ Marion snatched the paper playfully from Charlotte. ‘I agree with mother,’ she cried triumphantly. ‘The train overweights it.’ Old Mr Neave, forgotten, sank into the broad lap of his chair, and, dozing, heard them as though he dreamed. There was no doubt about it, he was tired out; he had lost his hold. Even Charlotte and the girls were too much for him to-night. They were too . . . too. . . . But all his drowsing brain could think of was – too rich for him. And somewhere at the back of everything he was watching a little withered ancient man climbing up endless flights of stairs. Who was he? ‘I shan’t dress to-night,’ he muttered. ‘What do you say, father?’ ‘Eh, what, what?’ Old Mr Neave woke with a start and stared across at them. ‘I shan’t dress to-night,’ he repeated. ‘But, father, we’ve got Lucile coming, and Henry Davenport, and Mrs Teddie Walker.’

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‘It will look so very out of the picture.’ ‘Don’t you feel well, dear?’ ‘You needn’t make any effort. What is Charles for?’ ‘But if you’re really not up to it,’ Charlotte wavered. ‘Very well! Very well!’ Old Mr Neave got up and went to join that little old climbing fellow just as far as his dressingroom. . . . There young Charles was waiting for him. Carefully, as though everything depended on it, he was tucking a towel round the hotwater can. Young Charles had been a favourite of his ever since as a little red-faced boy he had come into the house to look after the fires. Old Mr Neave lowered himself into the cane lounge by the window, stretched out his legs, and made his little evening joke, ‘Dress him up, Charles!’ And Charles, breathing intensely and frowning, bent forward to take the pin out of his tie. H’m, h’m! Well, well! It was pleasant by the open window, very pleasant – a fine mild evening. They were cutting the grass on the tennis court below; he heard the soft churr of the mower. Soon the girls would begin their tennis parties again. And at the thought he seemed to hear Marion’s voice ring out, ‘Good for you, partner. . . . Oh, played, partner. . . . Oh, very nice indeed.’ Then Charlotte calling from the veranda, ‘Where is Harold?’ And Ethel, ‘He’s certainly not here, mother.’ And Charlotte’s vague, ‘He said –’ Old Mr Neave sighed, got up, and putting one hand under his beard, he took the comb from young Charles, and carefully combed the white beard over. Charles gave him a folded handkerchief, his watch and seals, and spectacle case. ‘That will do, my lad.’ The door shut, he sank back, he was alone. . . . And now that little ancient fellow was climbing down endless flights that led to a glittering, gay dining-room. What legs he had! They were like a spider’s – thin, withered. ‘You’re an ideal family, sir, an ideal family.’ But if that were true, why didn’t Charlotte or the girls stop him? Why was he all alone, climbing up and down? Where was Harold? Ah, it was no good expecting anything from Harold. Down, down went the little old spider, and then, to his horror, old Mr Neave saw him slip past the dining-room and make for the porch, the dark drive, the carriage gates, the office. Stop him, stop him, somebody! Old Mr Neave started up. It was dark in his dressing-room; the window shone pale. How long had he been asleep? He listened, and through the big, airy, darkened house there floated far-away voices, far-away sounds. Perhaps, he thought vaguely, he had been asleep for a long time. He’d been forgotten. What had all this to do with him

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– this house and Charlotte, the girls and Harold –what did he know about them? They were strangers to him. Life had passed him by. Charlotte was not his wife. His wife! . . . A dark porch, half hidden by a passion-vine, that drooped sorrowful, mournful, as though it understood. Small, warm arms were round his neck. A face, little and pale, lifted to his, and a voice breathed, ‘Good-bye, my treasure.’ My treasure! ‘Good-bye, my treasure!’ Which of them had spoken? Why had they said good-bye? There had been some terrible mistake. She was his wife, that little pale girl, and all the rest of his life had been a dream. Then the door opened, and young Charles, standing in the light, put his hands by his side and shouted like a young soldier, ‘Dinner is on the table, sir!’ ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ said old Mr Neave. Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 86: 1126, 20 August 1921, pp. 196–7. 1. The story initially was called ‘Goodbye, my treasure’, words ‘which movingly close Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece, “A Dreary Story”, when the old professor privately addresses them to his departing adoptive daughter Katya’ (Alpers, p. 569), although there is no similarity between the stories. KM noted on 23 July 1921: Finished An Ideal Family yesterday. It seems to me better than the ‘Doves’ but still it’s not good enough. I worked at it hard though, God knows and yet I feel I didn’t get the deepest truth out of the idea, even once. What is this feeling? I feel again that this kind of knowledge is too easy for me; it’s even a kind of trickery. I know so much more. This looks and smells like a story but I wouldn’t buy it. I don’t want to possess it – to live with it. NO. Once I have written 2 more I shall tackle something different - a long story – At the Bay with more difficult relationships. That’s the whole problem. (KMN, 2, p. 279)

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Hat with a Feather Claire replied most enthusiastically.

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My dear how extraordinary that we should be unbeknown within reach of each other after all this time! I shall love to come to tea on Sunday. It’s ages since I’ve had a real talk with a fellow-creature. I am lunching with a Mrs Beaver at the Royal and shall come on from there by tram. My carriage days are over! Lucky you, to have managed to snare a small villa. As soon as I can get the present people out I am moving into a minute one myself. I loathe hotels, and as to pensions! . . . Until Sunday alors. Lovingly Claire. P.S. Hannah C. told me your news. Ought I to be sorry? I am – because you must have suffered. Otherwise I can’t help being wickedly glad that another of them has been found out!

Isobel read the letter over twice. It was curious how important letters became when you lived by yourself. They seemed to be somehow much more than written words on a page. They breathed, they spoke, they brought the person before you, and – was it fancy – Isobel heard a sharp note in Claire’s gay childlike voice, and something careless. Not careless exactly, reckless was more the word – that was quite new. And yet, after all, perhaps it was just her imagination. One dashed down a little note like that in some hotel writing-room with people asking for a loan of your blotting-paper or whether there was such a thing as an uncrossed nib in your pen-tray. But what could it be? ‘It’s so charming; it’s like a portrait: “Hat with a Feather”.’ Claire turned pink with pleasure. She smiled a little special smile to suit the hat. ‘Really? I’m so glad you like it. I got it in, – of all places, my dear – Monaco. But I was motoring through one day with the David Shetlings and suddenly: There it was! You know how one recognizes a hat, – so strange, isn’t it? So I stopped the car, pinned it on and took my old one away in a paper bag.’ ‘But I was only thinking the other night in bed love is really absolute torment for anybody. One is never at peace, one is always thinking about the person, worrying over them, or being worried over, which is just as bad. Whereas now I have time for myself. I haven’t the constant feeling of a man in the background. Not that one doesn’t like a man in the background now and again,’ said Claire, laughing and pulling at her fur. ‘But not seriously. Just a little affair to keep one keen on one’s appearance, otherwise one is apt to get grumpy and eccentric.’

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‘But I can see, my dear,’ said Claire, and she put her arms round Isobel and gave her a quick strained hug, ‘you’re not out of the wood yet. You’re still in danger. Oh yes.’ She slipped away from Margaret [Isobel] and pulled on white suede gloves with quick little twitchy tugs, looking down at her hands. When she looked up her eyes were narrowed and cold, though her lips smiled. ‘You’ve got to harden your heart my dear, said Claire. That’s the whole secret. Harden your heart! Keep it hard.’ Margaret [Isobel] said something, it might have been anything, went with Claire to the door. The day was over – the air blew cold and under the light sound of Claire’s footsteps running over the gravel path to the road she heard the long slow pull of the cold sea. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 281–2, pp. 273–4. Dated ‘23. vii.1921’ (KMN, 2, p. 345.) Published by JMM as ‘Harden Your Heart’, Scrapbook, pp. 187–9.

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Her First Ball1 Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say. Perhaps her first real partner was the cab. It did not matter that she shared the cab with the Sheridan girls and their brother. She sat back in her own little corner of it, and the bolster on which her hand rested felt like the sleeve of an unknown young man’s dress suit; and away they bowled, past waltzing lamp-posts and houses and fences and trees. ‘Have you really never been to a ball before, Leila? But, my child, how too weird’ – cried the Sheridan girls. ‘Our nearest neighbour was fifteen miles,’ said Leila softly, gently opening and shutting her fan. Oh, dear, how hard it was to be indifferent like the others! She tried not to smile too much; she tried not to care. But every single thing was so new and exciting. . . . Meg’s tuberoses, Jose’s long loop of amber, Laura’s little dark head, pushing above her white fur like a flower through snow. She would remember for ever. It even gave her a pang to see her cousin Laurie throw away the wisps of tissue paper he pulled from the fastenings of his new gloves. She would like to

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have kept those wisps as a keepsake, as a remembrance. Laurie leaned forward and put his hand on Laura’s knee. ‘Look here, darling,’ he said. ‘The third and the ninth as usual. Twig?’ Oh, how marvellous to have a brother! In her excitement Leila felt that if there had been time, if it hadn’t been impossible, she couldn’t have helped crying because she was an only child, and no brother had ever said ‘Twig?’ to her; no sister would ever say, as Meg said to Jose that moment, ‘I’ve never known your hair go up more successfully than it has to-night!’ But, of course, there was no time. They were at the drill hall already; there were cabs in front of them and cabs behind. The road was bright on either side with moving fan-like lights, and on the pavement gay couples seemed to float through the air; little satin shoes chased each other like birds. ‘Hold on to me, Leila; you’ll get lost,’ said Laura. ‘Come on, girls, let’s make a dash for it,’ said Laurie. Leila put two fingers on Laura’s pink velvet cloak, and they were somehow lifted past the big golden lantern, carried along the passage, and pushed into the little room marked ‘Ladies’. Here the crowd was so great there was hardly space to take off their things; the noise was deafening. Two benches on either side were stacked high with wraps. Two old women in white aprons ran up and down tossing fresh armfuls. And everybody was pressing forward trying to get at the little dressing-table and mirror at the far end. A great quivering jet of gas lighted the ladies’ room. It couldn’t wait; it was dancing already. When the door opened again and there came a burst of tuning from the drill hall, it leaped almost to the ceiling. Dark girls, fair girls were patting their hair, tying ribbons again, tucking handkerchiefs down the fronts of their bodices, smoothing marble-white gloves. And because they were all laughing it seemed to Leila that they were all lovely. ‘Aren’t there any invisible hair-pins?’ cried a voice. ‘How most extraordinary! I can’t see a single invisible hair-pin.’ ‘Powder my back, there’s a darling,’ cried some one else. ‘But I must have a needle and cotton. I’ve torn simply miles and miles of the frill,’ wailed a third. Then, ‘Pass them along, pass them along!’ The straw basket of programmes was tossed from arm to arm. Darling little pink-and-silver programmes, with pink pencils and fluffy tassels. Leila’s fingers shook as she took one out of the basket. She wanted to ask some one, ‘Am I meant to have one too?’ but she had just time to read: ‘Waltz 3. Two, Two in a Canoe. Polka 4. Making the Feathers Fly,’ when Meg cried,

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‘Ready, Leila?’ and they pressed their way through the crush in the passage towards the big double doors of the drill hall. Dancing had not begun yet, but the band had stopped tuning, and the noise was so great it seemed that when it did begin to play it would never be heard. Leila, pressing close to Meg, looking over Meg’s shoulder, felt that even the little quivering coloured flags strung across the ceiling were talking. She quite forgot to be shy; she forgot how in the middle of dressing she had sat down on the bed with one shoe off and one shoe on and begged her mother to ring up her cousins and say she couldn’t go after all. And the rush of longing she had had to be sitting on the verandah of their forsaken up-country home, listening to the baby owls crying ‘More pork’ in the moonlight, was changed to a rush of joy so sweet that it was hard to bear alone. She clutched her fan, and, gazing at the gleaming, golden floor, the azaleas, the lanterns, the stage at one end with its red carpet and gilt chairs and the band in a corner, she thought breathlessly, ‘How heavenly; how simply heavenly!’ All the girls stood grouped together at one side of the doors, the men at the other, and the chaperones in dark dresses, smiling rather foolishly, walked with little careful steps over the polished floor towards the stage. ‘This is my little country cousin Leila. Be nice to her. Find her partners; she’s under my wing,’ said Meg, going up to one girl after another. Strange faces smiled at Leila – sweetly, vaguely. Strange voices answered, ‘Of course, my dear.’ But Leila felt the girls didn’t really see her. They were looking towards the men. Why didn’t the men begin? What were they waiting for? There they stood, smoothing their gloves, patting their glossy hair and smiling among themselves. Then, quite suddenly, as if they had only just made up their minds that that was what they had to do, the men came gliding over the parquet. There was a joyful flutter among the girls. A tall, fair man flew up to Meg, seized her programme, scribbled something; Meg passed him on to Leila. ‘May I have the pleasure?’ He ducked and smiled. There came a dark man wearing an eyeglass, then cousin Laurie with a friend, and Laura with a little freckled fellow whose tie was crooked. Then quite an old man – fat, with a big bald patch on his head – took her programme and murmured, ‘Let me see, let me see!’ And he was a long time comparing his programme, which looked black with names, with hers. It seemed to give him so much trouble that Leila was ashamed. ‘Oh, please don’t bother,’ she said eagerly. But instead of replying the fat man wrote something, glanced at her again. ‘Do I remember this bright little face?’ he said softly. ‘Is it known to me of yore?’ At that moment the band began playing; the

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fat man disappeared. He was tossed away on a great wave of music that came flying over the gleaming floor, breaking the groups up into couples, scattering them, sending them spinning. . . . Leila had learned to dance at boarding school. Every Saturday afternoon the boarders were hurried off to a little corrugated iron mission hall where Miss Eccles (of London) held her ‘select’ classes. But the difference between that dusty-smelling hall – with calico texts on the walls, the poor terrified little woman in a brown velvet toque with rabbit’s ears thumping the cold piano, Miss Eccles poking the girls’ feet with her long white wand – and this was so tremendous that Leila was sure if her partner didn’t come and she had to listen to that marvellous music and to watch the others sliding, gliding over the golden floor, she would die at least, or faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars. ‘Ours, I think –’ Some one bowed, smiled, and offered her his arm; she hadn’t to die after all. Some one’s hand pressed her waist, and she floated away like a flower that is tossed into a pool. ‘Quite a good floor, isn’t it?’ drawled a faint voice close to her ear. ‘I think it’s most beautifully slippery,’ said Leila. ‘Pardon!’ The faint voice sounded surprised. Leila said it again. And there was a tiny pause before the voice echoed, ‘Oh, quite!’ and she was swung round again. He steered so beautifully. That was the great difference between dancing with girls and men, Leila decided. Girls banged into each other, and stamped on each other’s feet; the girl who was gentleman always clutched you so. The azaleas were separate flowers no longer; they were pink and white flags streaming by. ‘Were you at the Bells’ last week?’ the voice came again. It sounded tired. Leila wondered whether she ought to ask him if he would like to stop. ‘No, this is my first dance,’ said she. Her partner gave a little gasping laugh. ‘Oh, I say,’ he protested. ‘Yes, it is really the first dance I’ve ever been to.’ Leila was most fervent. It was such a relief to be able to tell somebody. ‘You see, I’ve lived in the country all my life up till now. . . .’ At that moment the music stopped, and they went to sit on two chairs against the wall. Leila tucked her pink satin feet under and fanned herself, while she blissfully watched the other couples passing and disappearing through the swing doors. ‘Enjoying yourself, Leila?’ asked Jose, nodding her golden head. Laura passed and gave her the faintest little wink; it made Leila wonder for a moment whether she was quite grown up after all.

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Certainly her partner did not say very much. He coughed, tucked his handkerchief away, pulled down his waistcoat, took a minute thread off his sleeve. But it didn’t matter. Almost immediately the band started, and her second partner seemed to spring from the ceiling. ‘Floor’s not bad,’ said the new voice. Did one always begin with the floor? And then, ‘Were you at the Neaves’ on Tuesday?’ And again Leila explained. Perhaps it was a little strange that her partners were not more interested. For it was thrilling. Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. Up till now it had been dark, silent, beautiful very often – oh, yes – but mournful somehow. Solemn. And now it would never be like that again – it had opened dazzling bright. ‘Care for an ice?’ said her partner. And they went through the swing doors, down the passage, to the supper room. Her cheeks burned, she was fearfully thirsty. How sweet the ices looked on little glass plates, and how cold the frosted spoon was, iced too! And when they came back to the hall there was the fat man waiting for her by the door. It gave her quite a shock again to see how old he was; he ought to have been on the stage with the fathers and mothers. And when Leila compared him with her other partners he looked shabby. His waistcoat was creased, there was a button off his glove, his coat looked as if it was dusty with French chalk. ‘Come along, little lady;’ said the fat man. He scarcely troubled to clasp her, and they moved away so gently, it was more like walking than dancing. But he said not a word about the floor. ‘Your first dance, isn’t it?’ he murmured. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Ah,’ said the fat man, ‘that’s what it is to be old!’ He wheezed faintly as he steered her past an awkward couple. ‘You see, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for the last thirty years.’ ‘Thirty years?’ cried Leila. Twelve years before she was born! ‘It hardly bears thinking about, does it?’ said the fat man gloomily. Leila looked at his bald head, and she felt quite sorry for him. ‘I think it’s marvellous to be still going on,’ she said kindly. ‘Kind little lady,’ said the fat man, and he pressed her a little closer, and hummed a bar of the waltz. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you can’t hope to last anything like as long as that. No-o,’ said the fat man, ‘long before that you’ll be sitting up there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet. And these pretty arms will have turned into little short fat ones, and you’ll beat time with such a different kind of fan – a black bony one.’ The fat man seemed to shudder. ‘And you’ll smile away like the poor old dears up there, and point to your daughter, and tell the elderly lady next to you how some dreadful man tried to

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kiss her at the club ball. And your heart will ache, ache’ – the fat man squeezed her closer still, as if he really was sorry for that poor heart – ‘because no one wants to kiss you now. And you’ll say how unpleasant these polished floors are to walk on, how dangerous they are. Eh, Mademoiselle Twinkletoes?’ said the fat man softly. Leila gave a light little laugh, but she did not feel like laughing. Was it – could it all be true? It sounded terribly true. Was this first ball only the beginning of her last ball after all? At that the music seemed to change; it sounded sad, sad; it rose upon a great sigh. Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn’t happiness last for ever? For ever wasn’t a bit too long. ‘I want to stop,’ she said in a breathless voice. The fat man led her to the door. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t go outside. I won’t sit down. I’ll just stand here, thank you.’ She leaned against the wall, tapping with her foot, pulling up her gloves and trying to smile. But deep inside her a little girl threw her pinafore over her head and sobbed. Why had he spoiled it all? ‘I say, you know,’ said the fat man, ‘you mustn’t take me seriously, little lady.’ ‘As if I should!’ said Leila, tossing her small dark head and sucking her underlip. . . . Again the couples paraded. The swing doors opened and shut. Now new music was given out by the bandmaster. But Leila didn’t want to dance any more. She wanted to be home, or sitting on the verandah listening to those baby owls. When she looked through the dark windows at the stars, they had long beams like wings. . . . But presently a soft, melting, ravishing tune began, and a young man with curly hair bowed before her. She would have to dance, out of politeness, until she could find Meg. Very stiffly she walked into the middle; very haughtily she put her hand on his sleeve. But in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel. And when her next partner bumped her into the fat man and he said, ‘Pardon,’ she smiled at him more radiantly than ever. She didn’t even recognize him again. Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 87: 1140, 28 November 1921, pp. 15, 25. 1. JMM quotes from a MS now missing where KM writes in the middle of ‘Her First Ball’ on 25 July 1921, ‘All this! All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea. It’s a kind of playing. I want to put all my force behind it, but somehow, I cannot!’ (Journal, 1954, p. 258).

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Marriage à la Mode On his way to the station William remembered with a fresh pang of disappointment that he was taking nothing down to the kiddies. Poor little chaps! It was hard lines on them. Their first words always were as they ran to greet him, ‘What have you got for me, daddy?’ and he had nothing. He would have to buy them some sweets at the station. But that was what he had done for the past four Saturdays; their faces had fallen last time when they saw the same old boxes produced again. And Paddy had said, ‘I had red ribbing on mine bee-fore!’ And Johnny had said, ‘It’s always pink on mine. I hate pink.’ But what was William to do? The affair wasn’t so easily settled. In the old days, of course, he would have taken a taxi off to a decent toyshop and chosen them something in five minutes. But nowadays they had Russian toys, French toys, Serbian toys – toys from God knows where. It was over a year since Isabel had scrapped the old donkeys and engines and so on because they were so ‘dreadfully sentimental’ and ‘so appallingly bad for the babies’ sense of form.’ ‘It’s so important,’ the new Isabel had explained, ‘that they should like the right things from the very beginning. It saves so much time later on. Really, if the poor pets have to spend their infant years staring at these horrors, one can imagine them growing up and asking to be taken to the Royal Academy.’ And she spoke as though a visit to the Royal Academy was certain immediate death to anyone. . . . ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said William slowly. ‘When I was their age I used to go to bed hugging an old towel with a knot in it.’ The new Isabel looked at him, her eyes narrowed, her lips apart. ‘Dear William! I’m sure you did!’ She laughed in the new way. Sweets it would have to be, however, thought William gloomily, fishing in his pocket for change for the taxi-man. And he saw the kiddies handing the boxes round – they were awfully generous little chaps – while Isabel’s precious friends didn’t hesitate to help themselves. . . . What about fruit? William hovered before a stall just inside the station. What about a melon each? Would they have to share that, too? Or a pineapple for Pad, and a melon for Johnny? Isabel’s friends could hardly go sneaking up to the nursery at the children’s mealtimes. All the same, as he bought the melon William had a horrible

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vision of one of Isabel’s young poets lapping up a slice, for some reason, behind the nursery door. With his two very awkward parcels he strode off to his train. The platform was crowded, the train was in. Doors banged open and shut. There came such a loud hissing from the engine that people looked dazed as they scurried to and fro. William made straight for a first-class smoker, stowed away his suit-case and parcels, and taking a huge wad of papers out of his inner pocket, he flung down in the corner and began to read. ‘Our client moreover is positive. . . . We are inclined to reconsider . . . in the event of –’ Ah, that was better. William pressed back his flattened hair and stretched his legs across the carriage floor. The familiar dull gnawing in his breast quietened down. ‘With regard to our decision –’ He took out a blue pencil and scored a paragraph slowly. Two men came in, stepped across him, and made for the farther corner. A young fellow swung his golf clubs into the rack and sat down opposite. The train gave a gentle lurch, they were off. William glanced up and saw the hot, bright station slipping away. A redfaced girl raced along by the carriages, there was something strained and almost desperate in the way she waved and called. ‘Hysterical!’ thought William dully. Then a greasy, black-faced workman at the end of the platform grinned at the passing train. And William thought, ‘A filthy life!’ and went back to his papers. When he looked up again there were fields, and beasts standing for shelter under the dark trees. A wide river, with naked children splashing in the shallows, glided into sight and was gone again. The sky shone pale, and one bird drifted high like a dark fleck in a jewel. ‘We have examined our client’s correspondence files. . . .’ The last sentence he had read echoed in his mind. ‘We have examined. . . .’ William hung on to that sentence, but it was no good; it snapped in the middle, and the fields, the sky, the sailing bird, the water, all said, ‘Isabel’. The same thing happened every Saturday afternoon. When he was on his way to meet Isabel there began those countless imaginary meetings. She was at the station, standing just a little apart from everybody else; she was sitting in the open taxi outside; she was at the garden gate; walking across the parched grass; at the door, or just inside the hall. And her clear, light voice said, ‘It’s William,’ or ‘Hillo, William!’ or ‘So William has come!’ He touched her cool hand, her cool cheek. The exquisite freshness of Isabel! When he had been a little boy, it was his delight to run into the garden after a shower of rain and shake the rose-bush over him. Isabel was that rose-bush, petal-soft, sparkling and cool. And he was still that little boy. But there was no

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running into the garden now, no laughing and shaking. The dull, persistent gnawing in his breast started again. He drew up his legs, tossed the papers aside, and shut his eyes. ‘What is it, Isabel? What is it?’ he said tenderly. They were in their bedroom in the new house. Isabel sat on a painted stool before the dressing-table that was strewn with little black and green boxes. ‘What is what, William?’ And she bent forward, and her fine light hair fell over her cheeks. ‘Ah, you know!’ He stood in the middle of the strange room and he felt a stranger. At that Isabel wheeled round quickly and faced him. ‘Oh, William!’ she cried imploringly, and she held up the hairbrush. ‘Please! Please don’t be so dreadfully stuffy and – tragic. You’re always saying or looking or hinting that I’ve changed. Just because I’ve got to know really congenial people, and go about more, and am frightfully keen on – on everything, you behave as though I’d –’ Isabel tossed back her hair and laughed – ‘killed our love or something. It’s so awfully absurd’ – she bit her lip – ‘and it’s so maddening, William. Even this new house and the servants you grudge me.’ ‘Isabel!’ ‘Yes, yes, it’s true in a way,’ said Isabel quickly. ‘You think they are another bad sign. Oh, I know you do. I feel it,’ she said softly, ‘every time you come up the stairs. But we couldn’t have gone on living in that other poky little hole, William. Be practical, at least! Why, there wasn’t enough room for the babies even.’ No, it was true. Every evening when he came back from chambers it was to find the babies with Isabel in the back drawing-room. They were having rides on the leopard skin thrown over the sofa back, or they were playing shops with Isabel’s desk for a counter, or Pad was sitting on the hearthrug rowing away for dear life with a little brass fire-shovel, while Johnny shot at pirates with the tongs. Every evening they each had a pick-a-back up the narrow stairs to their fat old Nanny. Yes, he supposed it was a poky little house. A little white house with blue curtains and a window-box full of petunias. William met their friends at the door with ‘Seen our petunias? Pretty terrific for London, don’t you think?’ But the imbecile thing, the absolutely extraordinary thing was that he hadn’t the slightest idea that Isabel wasn’t as happy as he. God, what blindness! He hadn’t the remotest notion in those days that she really hated that inconvenient little house, that she thought the fat Nanny was ruining the babies, that she was desperately lonely, pining for new people and new music and pictures and so on. If they hadn’t gone to that studio party at Moira Morrison’s – if Moira Morrison hadn’t said as they were leaving, ‘I’m going to rescue your wife, selfish

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man. She’s like an exquisite little Titania’1 – if Isabel hadn’t gone with Moira to Paris – if – if. . . . The train stopped at another station. Bettingford. Good heavens! They’d be there in ten minutes. William stuffed the papers back into his pockets; the young man opposite had long since disappeared. Now the other two got out. The late afternoon sun shone on women in cotton frocks and little sunburnt, barefoot children. It blazed on a silky yellow flower with coarse leaves which sprawled over a bank of rock. The air ruffling through the window smelled of the sea. Had Isabel the same crowd with her this week-end, wondered William? And he remembered the holidays they used to have, the four of them, with a little farm girl, Rose, to look after the babies. Isabel wore a jersey and her hair in a plait; she looked about fourteen. Lord! how his nose used to peel! And the amount they ate, and the amount they slept in that immense feather bed with their feet locked together. . . . William couldn’t help a grim smile as he thought of Isabel’s horror if she knew the full extent of his sentimentality. *

*

*

‘Hillo, William!’ She was at the station after all, standing just as he had imagined, apart from the others, and – William’s heart leapt – she was alone. ‘Hullo, Isabel!’ William stared. He thought she looked so beautiful that he had to say something, ‘You look very cool.’ ‘Do I?’ said Isabel.’ I don’t feel very cool. Come along, your horrid old train is late. The taxi’s outside.’ She put her hand lightly on his arm as they passed the ticket collector. ‘We’ve all come to meet you,’ she said. ‘But we’ve left Bobby Kane at the sweet shop, to be called for.’ ‘Oh!’ said William. It was all he could say for the moment. There in the glare waited the taxi, with Bill Hunt and Dennis Green sprawling on one side, their hats tilted over their faces, while on the other, Moira Morrison, in a bonnet like a huge strawberry, jumped up and down. ‘No ice! No ice! No ice!’ she shouted gaily. And Dennis chimed in from under his hat. ‘Only to be had from the fishmonger’s.’ And Bill Hunt, emerging, added, ‘With whole fish in it.’ ‘Oh, what a bore!’ wailed Isabel. And she explained to William how they had been chasing round the town for ice while she waited for him. ‘Simply everything is running down the steep cliffs into the sea, beginning with the butter.’ ‘We shall have to anoint ourselves with the butter,’ said Dennis.’ May thy head, William, lack not ointment.’2

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‘Look here,’ said William, ‘how are we going to sit? I’d better get up by the driver.’ ‘No, Bobby Kane’s by the driver,’ said Isabel. ‘You’re to sit between Moira and me.’ The taxi started. ‘What have you got in those mysterious parcels?’ ‘De-cap-it-ated heads!’ said Bill Hunt, shuddering beneath his hat. ‘Oh, fruit!’ Isabel sounded very pleased. ‘Wise William! A melon and a pineapple. How too nice!’ ‘No, wait a bit,’ said William, smiling. But he really was anxious. ‘I brought them down for the kiddies.’ ‘Oh, my dear!’ Isabel laughed, and slipped her hand through his arm. ‘They’d be rolling in agonies if they were to eat them. No’ – she patted his hand – ‘you must bring them something next time. I refuse to part with my pineapple.’ ‘Cruel Isabel! Do let me smell it!’ said Moira. She flung her arms across William appealingly. ‘Oh!’ The strawberry bonnet fell forward: she sounded quite faint. ‘A Lady in Love with a Pineapple,’ said Dennis, as the taxi drew up before a little shop with a striped blind. Out came Bobby Kane, his arms full of little packets. ‘I do hope they’ll be good. I’ve chosen them because of the colours. There are some round things which really look too divine. And just look at this nougat,’ he cried ecstatically, ‘just look at it! It’s a perfect little ballet!’ But at that moment the shopman appeared. ‘Oh, I forgot. They’re none of them paid for,’ said Bobby, looking frightened. Isabel gave the shopman a note, and Bobby was radiant again. ‘Hullo, William! I’m sitting by the driver.’ And bare-headed, all in white, with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, he leapt into his place. ‘Avanti!’ he cried. . . . After tea the others went off to bathe, while William stayed and made his peace with the kiddies. But Johnny and Paddy were asleep, the rose-red glow had paled, bats were flying, and still the bathers had not returned. As William wandered downstairs, the maid crossed the hall carrying a lamp. He followed her into the sitting-room. It was a long room, coloured yellow. On the wall opposite William some one had painted a young man, over life-size, with very wobbly legs, offering a wide-eyed daisy to a young woman who had one very short arm and one very long, thin one. Over the chairs and sofa there hung strips of black material, covered with big splashes like broken eggs, and everywhere one looked there seemed to be an ash-tray full of cigarette ends. William sat down in one of the arm-chairs. Nowadays, when one felt with one hand down the sides, it wasn’t to come upon a sheep with three legs or a cow that had lost one horn, or a very fat

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dove out of the Noah’s Ark. One fished up yet another little papercovered book of smudged-looking poems. . . . He thought of the wad of papers in his pocket, but he was too hungry and tired to read. The door was open; sounds came from the kitchen. The servants were talking as if they were alone in the house. Suddenly there came a loud screech of laughter and an equally loud ‘Sh!’ They had remembered him. William got up and went through the french windows into the garden, and as he stood there in the shadow he heard the bathers coming up the sandy road; their voices rang through the quiet. ‘I think it’s up to Moira to use her little arts and wiles.’ A tragic moan from Moira. ‘We ought to have a gramophone for the week-ends that played “The Maid of the Mountains”.’ ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ cried Isabel’s voice. ‘That’s not fair to William. Be nice to him, my children! He’s only staying until tomorrow evening.’ ‘Leave him to me,’ cried Bobby Kane. ‘I’m awfully good at looking after people.’ The gate swung open and shut. William moved on the terrace; they had seen him. ‘Hallo, William!’ And Bobby Kane, flapping his towel, began to leap and pirouette on the parched lawn. ‘Pity you didn’t come, William. The water was divine. And we all went to a little pub afterwards and had sloe gin.’ The others had reached the house. ‘I say, Isabel,’ called Bobby, ‘would you like me to wear my Nijinsky3 dress to-night?’ ‘No,’ said Isabel, ‘nobody’s going to dress. We’re all starving. William’s starving, too. Come along, mes amis, let’s begin with sardines.’ ‘I’ve found the sardines,’ said Moira, and she ran into the hall, holding a box high in the air. ‘A Lady with a Box of Sardines,’ said Dennis gravely. ‘Well, William, and how’s London?’ asked Bill Hunt, drawing the cork out of a bottle of whisky. ‘Oh, London’s not much changed,’ answered William. ‘Good old London,’ said Bobby, very hearty, spearing a sardine. But a moment later William was forgotten. Moira Morrison began wondering what colour one’s legs really were under water. ‘Mine are the palest, palest mushroom colour.’ Bill and Dennis ate enormously. And Isabel filled glasses, and changed plates, and found matches, smiling blissfully. At one moment she said, ‘I do wish, Bill, you’d paint it.’ ‘Paint what?’ said Billy loudly, stuffing his mouth with bread. ‘Us,’ said Isabel, ‘round the table. It would be so fascinating in twenty years’ time.’ Bill screwed up his eyes and chewed. ‘Light’s wrong,’ he said rudely,

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‘far too much yellow’; and went on eating. And that seemed to charm Isabel, too. But after supper they were all so tired they could do nothing but yawn until it was late enough to go to bed. . . . *

*

*

It was not until William was waiting for his taxi the next afternoon that he found himself alone with Isabel. When he brought his suit-case down into the hall, Isabel left the others and went over to him. She stooped down and picked up the suit-case. ‘What a weight!’ she said, and she gave a little awkward laugh. ‘Let me carry it! To the gate.’ ‘No, why should you?’ said William. ‘Of course not. Give it to me.’ ‘Oh, please do let me,’ said Isabel. ‘I want to, really.’ They walked together silently. William felt there was nothing to say now. ‘There,’ said Isabel triumphantly, setting the suit-case down, and she looked anxiously along the sandy road. ‘I hardly seem to have seen you this time,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It’s so short, isn’t it? I feel you’ve only just come. Next time –’ The taxi came into sight. ‘I hope they look after you properly in London. I’m so sorry the babies have been out all day, but Miss Neil had arranged it. They’ll hate missing you. Poor William, going back to London.’ The taxi turned. ‘Goodbye!’ She gave him a little hurried kiss; she was gone. Fields, trees, hedges streamed by. They shook through the empty, blind-looking little town, ground up the steep pull to the station. The train was in. William made straight for a first-class smoker, flung back into the corner, but this time he let the papers alone. He folded his arms against the dull, persistent gnawing, and began in his mind to write a letter to Isabel. *

*

*

The post was late as usual. They sat outside the house in long chairs under coloured parasols. Only Bobby Kane lay on the turf at Isabel’s feet. It was dull, stifling; the day drooped like a flag. ‘Do you think there will be Mondays in Heaven?’ asked Bobby childishly. And Dennis murmured, ‘Heaven will be one long Monday.’ But Isabel couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the salmon they had for supper last night. She had meant to have fish mayonnaise for lunch and now. . . . Moira was asleep. Sleeping was her latest discovery. ‘It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious.’ When the old ruddy postman came beating along the sandy road on his tricycle one felt the handle-bars ought to have been oars. Bill Hunt put down his book. ‘Letters,’ he said complacently, and

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they all waited. But, heartless postman – O malignant world! There was only one, a fat one for Isabel. Not even a paper. ‘And mine’s only from William,’ said Isabel mournfully. ‘From William – already?’ ‘He’s sending you back your marriage lines as a gentle reminder.’ ‘Does everybody have marriage lines? I thought they were only for servants.’ ‘Pages and pages! Look at her! A Lady reading a Letter,’ said Dennis. My darling, precious Isabel. Pages and pages there were. As Isabel read on her feeling of astonishment changed to a stifled feeling. What on earth had induced William . . . ? How extraordinary it was. . . . What could have made him . . . ? She felt confused, more and more excited, even frightened. It was just like William. Was it? It was absurd, of course, it must be absurd, ridiculous. ‘Ha, ha, ha! Oh dear!’ What was she to do? Isabel flung back in her chair and laughed till she couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Do, do tell us,’ said the others. ‘You must tell us.’ ‘I’m longing to,’ gurgled Isabel. She sat up, gathered the letter, and waved it at them. ‘Gather round,’ she said. ‘Listen, it’s too marvellous. A love-letter!’ ‘A love-letter! But how divine!’ Darling, precious Isabel. But she had hardly begun before their laughter interrupted her. ‘Go on, Isabel, it’s perfect.’ ‘It’s the most marvellous find.’ ‘Oh, do go on, Isabel!’ God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness. ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ ‘Sh! sh! sh!’ And Isabel went on. When she reached the end they were hysterical: Bobby rolled on the turf and almost sobbed. ‘You must let me have it just as it is, entire, for my new book,’ said Dennis firmly. ‘I shall give it a whole chapter.’ ‘Oh, Isabel,’ moaned Moira, ‘that wonderful bit about holding you in his arms!’ ‘I always thought those letters in divorce cases were made up. But they pale before this.’ ‘Let me hold it. Let me read it, mine own self,’ said Bobby Kane. But, to their surprise, Isabel crushed the letter in her hand. She was laughing no longer. She glanced quickly at them all; she looked exhausted. ‘No, not just now. Not just now,’ she stammered. And before they could recover she had run into the house, through the hall, up the stairs into her bedroom. Down she sat on the side of the bed. ‘How vile, odious, abominable, vulgar,’ muttered Isabel.

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She pressed her eyes with her knuckles and rocked to and fro. And again she saw them, but not four, more like forty, laughing, sneering, jeering, stretching out their hands while she read them William’s letter. Oh, what a loathsome thing to have done. How could she have done it! God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness. William! Isabel pressed her face into the pillow. But she felt that even the grave bedroom knew her for what she was, shallow, tinkling, vain. . . . Presently from the garden below there came voices. ‘Isabel, we’re all going for a bathe. Do come!’ ‘Come, thou wife of William!’ ‘Call her once before you go, call once yet!’4 Isabel sat up. Now was the moment, now she must decide. Would she go with them, or stay here and write to William. Which, which should it be? ‘I must make up my mind.’ Oh, but how could there be any question? Of course she would stay here and write. ‘Titania!’ piped Moira. ‘Isa-bel?’ No, it was too difficult. ‘I’ll – I’ll go with them, and write to William later. Some other time. Later. Not now. But I shall certainly write,’ thought Isabel hurriedly. And, laughing in the new way, she ran down the stairs. Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 87: 1145, 31 December 1921, pp. 364–5. MS dated ‘11 August 1921’. 1. Titania, Queen of the Fairies, Midsummer Night’s Dream. 2. ‘May thy garments be always white; and thy head lack no ointment’: Ecclesiastes, 9: 8. 3. Vaslav Nijinsky (1890–1950), dancer and choreographer with the celebrated Ballets Russes. 4. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (1849).

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Widowed They came down to breakfast next morning absolutely their own selves. Rosy, fresh, and just chilled enough by the cold air blowing through the bedroom windows to be very ready for hot coffee.

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‘Nippy.’ That was Geraldine’s word as she buttoned on her orange coat with pink-washed fingers. ‘Don’t you find it decidedly nippy?’ And her voice, so matter-of-fact, so natural, sounded as though they had been married for years. Parting his hair with two brushes (marvellous feat for a woman to watch) in the little round mirror, he had replied, lightly clapping the brushes together, ‘My dear, have you got enough on?’ and he, too, sounded as though well he knew from the experience of years her habit of clothing herself underneath in wisps of chiffon and two satin bows . . . Then they ran down to breakfast, laughing together and terribly startling the shy parlour-maid who, after talking it over with Cook, had decided to be invisible until she was rung for. ‘Good-morning, Nellie, I think we shall want more toast than that,’ said the smiling Geraldine as she hung over the breakfast table. She deliberated. ‘Ask Cook to make us four more pieces, please.’ Marvellous, the parlour-maid thought it was. And as she closed the door she heard the voice say, ‘I do so hate to be short of toast, don’t you?’ He was standing in the sunny window. Geraldine went up to him. She put her hand on his arm and gave it a gentle squeeze. How pleasant it was to feel that rough man’s tweed again – Ah, how pleasant! She rubbed her hand against it, touched it with her cheek, sniffed the smell. The window looked out on to flower beds, a tangle of michaelmas daisies, late dahlias, hanging heavy, and shaggy little asters. Then there came a lawn strewn with yellow leaves with a broad path beyond and a row of gold-fluttering trees. An old gardener, in woollen mitts, was sweeping the path, brushing the leaves into a neat little heap. Now, the broom tucked in his arm he fumbled in his coat pocket, brought out some matches, and scooping a hole in the leaves he set fire to them. Such lovely blue smoke came breathing into the air through those dry leaves, there was something so calm and orderly in the way the pile burned that it was a pleasure to watch. The old gardener stumped away and came back with a handful of withered twigs. He flung them on and stood by, and little light flames began to flicker. ‘I do think,’ said Geraldine, ‘I do think there is nothing nicer than a real satisfactory fire.’ ‘Jolly, isn’t it,’ he murmured back, and they went to their first breakfast. Just over a year ago, thirteen months, to be exact, she had been standing before the dining room window of the little house in Sloane Street. It looked over the railed gardens. Breakfast was over, cleared away and done with . . . she had a fat bunch of letters in her hand that

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she meant to answer, snugly, over the fire. But before settling down, the autumn sun, the freshness had drawn her to the window. Such a perfect morning for the Row. Jimmie had gone riding. ‘Goodbye, dear thing.’ ‘Goodbye, Gerry mine.’ And then the morning kiss, quick and firm. He looked so handsome in his riding kit. She imagined him as she stood there . . . riding. Geraldine was not very good at imagining things. But there was mist, a thud of hooves and Jimmie’s moustache was damp. From the garden there sounded the creak of a gardener’s barrow. An old man came into sight with a load of leaves and a broom lying across. He stopped; he began to sweep. ‘What enormous tufts of irises grew in London gardens,’ mused Geraldine. ‘Why?’ And now the smoke of a real fire ascended. ‘There is nothing nicer,’ she thought, ‘than a really satisfactory fire.’ Just at that moment the telephone bell rang. Geraldine sat down at Jimmie’s desk to answer it. It was Major Hunter. ‘Good morning, Major. You’re a very early bird!’ ‘Good morning, Mrs. Howard. Yes. I am.’ (Geraldine made a little surprised face at herself. How odd he sounded.) ‘Mrs. Howard I’m coming round to see you . . . now. . . . I’m taking a taxi. . . . Please don’t go out. And – and –’ the voice stammered, ‘p-please don’t let the servants go out.’ ‘Par-don?’ This last was so very peculiar, though the whole thing had been peculiar enough, that Geraldine couldn’t believe what she heard. But he was gone. He had rung off. What on earth – and putting down the receiver she took up a pencil and drew what she always drew when she sat down before a piece of blotting paper – the behind of a little cat with whiskers and tail complete. Geraldine must have drawn that little cat hundreds of times, all over the world, in hotels, in clubs, at steamer desks, waiting at the Bank. The little cat was her sign, her mark. She had copied it from a little girl at school when she thought it most wonderful. And she never tried anything else. She was . . . not very good at drawing. This particular cat was drawn with an extra firm pen and even its whiskers looked surprised. ‘Not to let the servants go out?’ But she had never heard anything so peculiar in her life. She must have made a mistake. Geraldine couldn’t help a little giggle of amusement. And why should he tell her he was taking a taxi? And why – above all – should he be coming to see her at that hour of the morning? Then – it came over her – like a flash she remembered Major Hunter’s mania for old furniture. They had been discussing it at the Carlton the last time they lunched together. And he had said something to Jimmie about some – Jacobean or Queen Anne – Geraldine knew nothing about these things – something or other. Could he possibly be

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bringing it round? But of course. He must be. And that explained the remark about the servants. He wants them to help getting it into the house. What a bore! Geraldine did hope it would tone in. And really, she must say she thought Major Hunter was taking a good deal for granted to produce a thing that size at that hour of the day without a word of warning. They hardly knew him well enough for that. Why make such a mystery of it, too? Geraldine hated mysteries. But she had heard his head was rather troublesome at times ever since the Somme affair. Perhaps this was one of his bad days. In that case, a pity Jimmie was not back. She rang. Mullins answered. ‘Oh Mullins I’m expecting Major Hunter in a few moments. He’s bringing something rather heavy. He may want you to help with it. And Cook had better be ready, too.’ Geraldine’s manner was slightly lofty with her servants. She enjoyed carrying things off with a high hand. All the same Mullins did look surprised. She seemed to hover for a moment before she went out. It annoyed Geraldine greatly. What was there to be surprised at? What could have been simpler, she thought, sitting down to her batch of letters, and the fire and the clock and her pen began to whisper together. There was the taxi – making an enormous noise at the door. She thought she heard the driver’s voice, too, arguing. It took her a long moment to clasp her writing-case and to get up out of the low chair. The bell rang. She went straight to the dining-room door – And there was Major Hunter in his riding kit, coming quickly towards her, and behind him, through the open door at the bottom of the steps she saw something big, something grey. It was an ambulance – ‘There’s been an accident,’ cried Geraldine sharply. ‘Mrs. Howard.’ Major Hunter ran forward. He put out his ice cold hand and wrung hers. ‘You’ll be brave, won’t you,’ he said, he pleaded. But of course she would be brave. ‘Is it serious?’ Major Hunter nodded gravely. He said the one word ‘Yes.’ ‘Very serious?’ Now he raised his head. He looked her full in the eyes. She’d never realised until that moment that he was extraordinarily handsome though in a melodrama kind of way. ‘It’s as bad as it can be, Mrs. Howard,’ said Major Hunter simply. ‘But – go in there,’ he said hastily and he almost pushed her into her own dining room. ‘We must bring him in – where can we –’ ‘Can he be taken upstairs?’ asked Geraldine. ‘Yes, yes of course.’ Major Hunter looked at her so strangely so painfully.

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‘There’s his dressing room,’ said Geraldine.’ It’s on the first floor. I’ll lead the way, and she put her hand on the Major’s arm. ‘It’s quite all right, Major,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to break down –’ and she actually smiled, a confident brilliant smile. To her amazement as Major Hunter turned away he burst out with, ‘Ah, my God! I’m so sorry.’ Poor man. He was quite overcome. Brandy afterwards, thought Geraldine. Not now of course. It was a painful moment when she heard those measured deliberate steps in the hall. But Geraldine, realising this was not the moment and there was nothing to be gained by it refrained from looking. ‘This way, Major.’ She skimmed on in front, up the stairs along the passage; she flung open the door of Jimmie’s gay living breathing dressing room and stood to one side – for Major Hunter for the two stretcher-bearers. Only then she realised that it must be a scalp wound – some injury to the head. For there was nothing to be seen of Jimmie; the sheet was pulled right over. . . . Notes U Text: MS ATL. Dated ‘August 1921’. DNOS.

•

At the Bay1 I Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bushcovered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling – how far?

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Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again. . . . Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else – what was it? – a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening. Round the corner of Crescent Bay, between the piled-up masses of broken rock, a flock of sheep came pattering. They were huddled together, a small, tossing, woolly mass, and their thin, stick-like legs trotted along quickly as if the cold and the quiet had frightened them. Behind them an old sheep-dog, his soaking paws covered with sand, ran along with his nose to the ground, but carelessly, as if thinking of something else. And then in the rocky gateway the shepherd himself appeared. He was a lean, upright old man, in a frieze coat that was covered with a web of tiny drops, velvet trousers tied under the knee, and a wide-awake with a folded blue handkerchief round the brim. One hand was crammed into his belt, the other grasped a beautifully smooth yellow stick. And as he walked, taking his time, he kept up a very soft light whistling, an airy, far-away fluting that sounded mournful and tender. The old dog cut an ancient caper or two and then drew up sharp, ashamed of his levity, and walked a few dignified paces by his master’s side. The sheep ran forward in little pattering rushes; they began to bleat, and ghostly flocks and herds answered them from under the sea. ‘Baa! Baaa!’ For a time they seemed to be always on the same piece of ground. There ahead was stretched the sandy road with shallow puddles, the same soaking bushes showed on either side and the same shadowy palings. Then something immense came into view; an enormous shock-haired giant with his arms stretched out. It was the big gum-tree outside Mrs Stubbs’s shop, and as they passed by there was a strong whiff of eucalyptus. And now big spots of light gleamed in the mist. The shepherd stopped whistling; he rubbed his red nose and wet beard on his wet sleeve and, screwing up his eyes, glanced in the direction of the sea. The sun was rising. It was marvellous how quickly the mist thinned, sped away, dissolved from the shallow plain, rolled up from the bush and was gone as if in a hurry to escape; big twists and curls jostled and shouldered each other as the silvery beams broadened. The far-away sky – a bright, pure blue – was reflected in the puddles, and the drops, swimming along the telegraph wires, flashed into points of light. Now the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it. The shepherd drew a pipe, the bowl as small as an acorn, out of his breast pocket, fumbled for a chunk of speckled tobacco, pared off a few shavings

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and stuffed the bowl. He was a grave, fine-looking old man. As he lit up and the blue smoke wreathed his head, the dog, watching, looked proud of him. ‘Baa! Baaa!’ The sheep spread out into a fan. They were just clear of the summer colony before the first sleeper turned over and lifted a drowsy head; their cry sounded in the dreams of little children . . . who lifted their arms to drag down, to cuddle the darling little woolly lambs of sleep. Then the first inhabitant appeared; it was the Burnells’ cat Florrie, sitting on the gatepost, far too early as usual, looking for their milk-girl. When she saw the old sheep-dog she sprang up quickly, arched her back, drew in her tabby head, and seemed to give a little fastidious shiver. ‘Ugh! What a coarse, revolting creature!’ said Florrie. But the old sheepdog, not looking up, waggled past, flinging out his legs from side to side. Only one of his ears twitched to prove that he saw, and thought her a silly young female. The breeze of morning lifted in the bush and the smell of leaves and wet black earth mingled with the sharp smell of the sea. Myriads of birds were singing. A goldfinch flew over the shepherd’s head and, perching on the tiptop of a spray, it turned to the sun, ruffling its small breast feathers. And now they had passed the fisherman’s hut, passed the charred-looking little whare where Leila the milk-girl lived with her old Gran. The sheep strayed over a yellow swamp and Wag, the sheep-dog, padded after, rounded them up and headed them for the steeper, narrower rocky pass that led out of Crescent Bay and towards Daylight Cove. ‘Baa! Baaa!’ Faint the cry came as they rocked along the fast-drying road. The shepherd put away his pipe, dropping it into his breast-pocket so that the little bowl hung over. And straightway the soft airy whistling began again. Wag ran out along a ledge of rock after something that smelled, and ran back again disgusted. Then pushing, nudging, hurrying, the sheep rounded the bend and the shepherd followed after out of sight. II A few moments later the back door of one of the bungalows opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil. Splish-Splosh! Splish-Splosh! The water bubbled round his legs as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual! He’d beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his head and neck. ‘Hail, brother! All hail, Thou Mighty One!’ A velvety bass voice came booming over the water.

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Great Scott! Damnation take it! Stanley lifted up to see a dark head bobbing far out and an arm lifted. It was Jonathan Trout – there before him! ‘Glorious morning!’ sang the voice. ‘Yes, very fine!’ said Stanley briefly. Why the dickens didn’t the fellow stick to his part of the sea? Why should he come barging over to this exact spot? Stanley gave a kick, a lunge and struck out, swimming overarm. But Jonathan was a match for him. Up he came, his black hair sleek on his forehead, his short beard sleek. ‘I had an extraordinary dream last night!’ he shouted. What was the matter with the man? This mania for conversation irritated Stanley beyond words. And it was always the same – always some piffle about a dream he’d had, or some cranky idea he’d got hold of, or some rot he’d been reading. Stanley turned over on his back and kicked with his legs till he was a living waterspout. But even then. . . . ‘I dreamed I was hanging over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to some one below.’ You would be! thought Stanley. He could stick no more of it. He stopped splashing. ‘Look here, Trout,’ he said, ‘I’m in rather a hurry this morning.’ ‘You’re WHAT?’ Jonathan was so surprised – or pretended to be – that he sank under the water, then reappeared again blowing. ‘All I mean is,’ said Stanley, ‘I’ve no time to – to – to fool about. I want to get this over. I’m in a hurry. I’ve work to do this morning – see?’ Jonathan was gone before Stanley had finished. ‘Pass, friend!’ said the bass voice gently, and he slid away through the water with scarcely a ripple. . . . But curse the fellow! He’d ruined Stanley’s bathe. What an unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea again, and then as quickly swam in again, and away he rushed up the beach. He felt cheated. Jonathan stayed a little longer in the water. He floated, gently moving his hands like fins, and letting the sea rock his long, skinny body. It was curious, but in spite of everything he was fond of Stanley Burnell. True, he had a fiendish desire to tease him sometimes, to poke fun at him, but at bottom he was sorry for the fellow. There was something pathetic in his determination to make a job of everything. You couldn’t help feeling he’d be caught out one day, and then what an almighty cropper he’d come! At that moment an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there came another. That was the way to live – carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself. He got on to his feet and began to wade towards the shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand. To take things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it – that was what was needed. It was this tension that was all wrong. To live – to live! And

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the perfect morning, so fresh and fair, basking in the light, as though laughing at its own beauty, seemed to whisper, ‘Why not?’ But now he was out of the water Jonathan turned blue with cold. He ached all over; it was as though some one was wringing the blood out of him. And stalking up the beach, shivering, all his muscles tight, he too felt his bathe was spoilt. He’d stayed in too long. III Beryl was alone in the living-room when Stanley appeared, wearing a blue serge suit, a stiff collar and a spotted tie. He looked almost uncannily clean and brushed; he was going to town for the day. Dropping into his chair, he pulled out his watch and put it beside his plate. ‘I’ve just got twenty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘You might go and see if the porridge is ready, Beryl?’ ‘Mother’s just gone for it,’ said Beryl. She sat down at the table and poured out his tea. ‘Thanks!’ Stanley took a sip. ‘Hallo!’ he said in an astonished voice, ‘you’ve forgotten the sugar.’ ‘Oh, sorry!’ But even then Beryl didn’t help him; she pushed the basin across. What did this mean? As Stanley helped himself his blue eyes widened; they seemed to quiver. He shot a quick glance at his sister-in-law and leaned back. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’ he asked carelessly, fingering his collar. Beryl’s head was bent; she turned her plate in her fingers. ‘Nothing,’ said her light voice. Then she too looked up, and smiled at Stanley. ‘Why should there be?’ ‘O-oh! No reason at all as far as I know. I thought you seemed rather –’ At that moment the door opened and the three little girls appeared, each carrying a porridge plate. They were dressed alike in blue jerseys and knickers; their brown legs were bare, and each had her hair plaited and pinned up in what was called a horse’s tail. Behind them came Mrs Fairfield with the tray. ‘Carefully, children,’ she warned. But they were taking the very greatest care. They loved being allowed to carry things. ‘Have you said good morning to your father?’ ‘Yes, grandma.’ They settled themselves on the bench opposite Stanley and Beryl. ‘Good morning, Stanley!’ Old Mrs Fairfield gave him his plate. ‘Morning, mother! How’s the boy?’ ‘Splendid! He only woke up once last night. What a perfect morning!’ The old woman paused, her hand on the loaf of bread, to gaze out of the open door into the garden. The sea sounded. Through

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the wide-open window streamed the sun on to the yellow varnished walls and bare floor. Everything on the table flashed and glittered. In the middle there was an old salad bowl filled with yellow and red nasturtiums. She smiled, and a look of deep content shone in her eyes. ‘You might cut me a slice of that bread, mother,’ said Stanley. ‘I’ve only twelve and a half minutes before the coach passes. Has anyone given my shoes to the servant girl?’ ‘Yes, they’re ready for you.’ Mrs Fairfield was quite unruffled. ‘Oh, Kezia! Why are you such a messy child!’ cried Beryl despairingly. ‘Me, Aunt Beryl?’ Kezia stared at her. What had she done now? She had only dug a river down the middle of her porridge, filled it, and was eating the banks away. But she did that every single morning, and no one had said a word up till now. ‘Why can’t you eat your food properly like Isabel and Lottie?’ How unfair grownups are! ‘But Lottie always makes a floating island, don’t you, Lottie?’ ‘I don’t,’ said Isabel smartly. ‘I just sprinkle mine with sugar and put on the milk and finish it. Only babies play with their food.’ Stanley pushed back his chair and got up. ‘Would you get me those shoes, mother? And, Beryl, if you’ve finished, I wish you’d cut down to the gate and stop the coach. Run in to your mother, Isabel, and ask her where my bowler hat’s been put. Wait a minute – have you children been playing with my stick?’ ‘No, father!’ ‘But I put it here,’ Stanley began to bluster. ‘I remember distinctly putting it in this corner. Now, who’s had it? There’s no time to lose. Look sharp! The stick’s got to be found.’ Even Alice, the servant-girl, was drawn into the chase. ‘You haven’t been using it to poke the kitchen fire with by any chance?’ Stanley dashed into the bedroom where Linda was lying. ‘Most extraordinary thing. I can’t keep a single possession to myself. They’ve made away with my stick, now!’ ‘Stick, dear? What stick?’ Linda’s vagueness on these occasions could not be real, Stanley decided. Would nobody sympathize with him? ‘Coach! Coach, Stanley!’ Beryl’s voice cried from the gate. Stanley waved his arm to Linda. ‘No time to say good-bye!’ he cried. And he meant that as a punishment to her. He snatched his bowler hat, dashed out of the house, and swung down the garden path. Yes, the coach was there waiting, and Beryl, leaning over the open gate, was laughing up at somebody or other just as if nothing had happened. The heartlessness of women! The way they took it for granted it was your job to slave away for them while

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they didn’t even take the trouble to see that your walking-stick wasn’t lost. Kelly trailed his whip across the horses. ‘Good-bye, Stanley,’ called Beryl, sweetly and gaily. It was easy enough to say good-bye! And there she stood, idle, shading her eyes with her hand. The worst of it was Stanley had to shout good-bye too, for the sake of appearances. Then he saw her turn, give a little skip and run back to the house. She was glad to be rid of him! Yes, she was thankful. Into the living-room she ran and called ‘He’s gone!’ Linda cried from her room: ‘Beryl! Has Stanley gone?’ Old Mrs Fairfield appeared, carrying the boy in his little flannel coatee. ‘Gone?’ ‘Gone!’ Oh, the relief, the difference it made to have the man out of the house. Their very voices were changed as they called to one another; they sounded warm and loving and as if they shared a secret. Beryl went over to the table. ‘Have another cup of tea, mother. It’s still hot.’ She wanted, somehow, to celebrate the fact that they could do what they liked now. There was no man to disturb them; the whole perfect day was theirs. ‘No, thank you, child,’ said old Mrs Fairfield, but the way at that moment she tossed the boy up and said ‘a-goos-a-goos-a-ga!’ to him meant that she felt the same. The little girls ran into the paddock like chickens let out of a coop. Even Alice, the servant-girl, washing up the dishes in the kitchen, caught the infection and used the precious tank water in a perfectly reckless fashion. ‘Oh, these men!’ said she, and she plunged the teapot into the bowl and held it under the water even after it had stopped bubbling, as if it too was a man and drowning was too good for them. IV ‘Wait for me, Isa-bel! Kezia, wait for me!’ There was poor little Lottie, left behind again, because she found it so fearfully hard to get over the stile by herself. When she stood on the first step her knees began to wobble; she grasped the post. Then you had to put one leg over. But which leg? She never could decide. And when she did finally put one leg over with a sort of stamp of despair – then the feeling was awful. She was half in the paddock still and half in the tussock grass. She clutched the post desperately and lifted up her voice. ‘Wait for me!’ ‘No, don’t you wait for her, Kezia!’ said Isabel. ‘She’s such a little silly. She’s always making a fuss. Come on!’ And she tugged Kezia’s jersey. ‘You can use my bucket if you come with me,’ she said kindly.

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‘It’s bigger than yours.’ But Kezia couldn’t leave Lottie all by herself. She ran back to her. By this time Lottie was very red in the face and breathing heavily. ‘Here, put your other foot over,’ said Kezia. ‘Where?’ Lottie looked down at Kezia as if from a mountain height. ‘Here where my hand is.’ Kezia patted the place. ‘Oh, there do you mean?’ Lottie gave a deep sigh and put the second foot over. ‘Now – sort of turn round and sit down and slide,’ said Kezia. ‘But there’s nothing to sit down on, Kezia,’ said Lottie. She managed it at last, and once it was over she shook herself and began to beam. ‘I’m getting better at climbing over stiles, aren’t I, Kezia?’ Lottie’s was a very hopeful nature. The pink and the blue sunbonnet followed Isabel’s bright red sunbonnet up that sliding, slipping hill. At the top they paused to decide where to go and to have a good stare at who was there already. Seen from behind, standing against the skyline, gesticulating largely with their spades, they looked like minute puzzled explorers. The whole family of Samuel Josephs was there already with their lady-help, who sat on a camp-stool and kept order with a whistle that she wore tied round her neck, and a small cane with which she directed operations. The Samuel Josephs never played by themselves or managed their own game. If they did, it ended in the boys pouring water down the girls’ necks or the girls trying to put little black crabs into the boys’ pockets. So Mrs S. J. and the poor lady-help drew up what she called a ‘brogramme’ every morning to keep them ‘abused and out of bischief’. It was all competitions or races or round games. Everything began with a piercing blast of the lady-help’s whistle and ended with another. There were even prizes – large, rather dirty paper parcels which the lady-help with a sour little smile drew out of a bulging string kit. The Samuel Josephs fought fearfully for the prizes and cheated and pinched one another’s arms – they were all expert pinchers. The only time the Burnell children ever played with them Kezia had got a prize, and when she undid three bits of paper she found a very small rusty button-hook. She couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss. . . . But they never played with the Samuel Josephs now or even went to their parties. The Samuel Josephs were always giving children’s parties at the Bay and there was always the same food. A big washhand basin of very brown fruit-salad, buns cut into four and a washhand jug full of something the lady-help called ‘Limmonadear’. And you went away in the evening with half the frill torn off your frock

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or something spilled all down the front of your open-work pinafore, leaving the Samuel Josephs leaping like savages on their lawn. No. They were too awful. On the other side of the beach, close down to the water, two little boys, their knickers rolled up, twinkled like spiders. One was digging, the other pattered in and out of the water, filling a small bucket. They were the Trout boys, Pip and Rags. But Pip was so busy digging and Rags was so busy helping that they didn’t see their little cousins until they were quite close. ‘Look!’ said Pip. ‘Look what I’ve discovered.’ And he showed them an old, wet, squashed-looking boot. The three little girls stared. ‘Whatever are you going to do with it?’ asked Kezia. ‘Keep it, of course!’ Pip was very scornful. ‘It’s a find – see?’ Yes, Kezia saw that. All the same. . . . ‘There’s lots of things buried in the sand,’ explained Pip. ‘They get chucked up from wrecks. Treasure. Why – you might find –’ ‘But why does Rags have to keep on pouring water in?’ asked Lottie. ‘Oh, that’s to moisten it,’ said Pip, ‘to make the work a bit easier. Keep it up, Rags.’ And good little Rags ran up and down, pouring in the water that turned brown like cocoa. ‘Here, shall I show you what I found yesterday?’ said Pip mysteriously, and he stuck his spade into the sand. ‘Promise not to tell.’ They promised. ‘Say, cross my heart straight dinkum.’ The little girls said it. Pip took something out of his pocket, rubbed it a long time on the front of his jersey, then breathed on it and rubbed it again. ‘Now turn round!’ he ordered. They turned round. ‘All look the same way! Keep still! Now!’ And his hand opened; he held up to the light something that flashed, that winked, that was a most lovely green. ‘It’s a nemeral,’ said Pip solemnly. ‘Is it really, Pip?’ Even Isabel was impressed. The lovely green thing seemed to dance in Pip’s fingers. Aunt Beryl had a nemeral in a ring, but it was a very small one. This one was as big as a star and far more beautiful. V As the morning lengthened whole parties appeared over the sandhills and came down on the beach to bathe. It was understood that

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at eleven o’clock the women and children of the summer colony had the sea to themselves. First the women undressed, pulled on their bathing dresses and covered their heads in hideous caps like sponge bags; then the children were unbuttoned. The beach was strewn with little heaps of clothes and shoes; the big summer hats, with stones on them to keep them from blowing away, looked like immense shells. It was strange that even the sea seemed to sound differently when all those leaping, laughing figures ran into the waves. Old Mrs Fairfield, in a lilac cotton dress and a black hat tied under the chin, gathered her little brood and got them ready. The little Trout boys whipped their shirts over their heads, and away the five sped, while their grandma sat with one hand in her knitting-bag ready to draw out the ball of wool when she was satisfied they were safely in. The firm compact little girls were not half so brave as the tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering, crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel, who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn’t follow at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again. ‘Here, mother, keep those for me, will you?’ Two rings and a thin gold chain were dropped into Mrs Fairfield’s lap. ‘Yes, dear. But aren’t you going to bathe here?’ ‘No-o,’ Beryl drawled. She sounded vague. ‘I’m undressing farther along. I’m going to bathe with Mrs Harry Kember.’ ‘Very well.’ But Mrs Fairfield’s lips set. She disapproved of Mrs Harry Kember. Beryl knew it. Poor old mother, she smiled as she skimmed over the stones. Poor old mother! Old! Oh, what joy, what bliss it was to be young. . . . ‘You look very pleased,’ said Mrs Harry Kember. She sat hunched up on the stones, her arms round her knees, smoking. ‘It’s such a lovely day,’ said Beryl, smiling down at her. ‘Oh, my dear!’ Mrs Harry Kember’s voice sounded as though she knew better than that. But then her voice always sounded as though she knew something more about you than you did yourself. She was a long, strange-looking woman with narrow hands and feet. Her face, too, was long and narrow and exhausted-looking; even her fair curled fringe looked burnt out and withered. She was the only woman at the

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Bay who smoked, and she smoked incessantly, keeping the cigarette between her lips while she talked, and only taking it out when the ash was so long you could not understand why it did not fall. When she was not playing bridge – she played bridge every day of her life – she spent her time lying in the full glare of the sun. She could stand any amount of it; she never had enough. All the same, it did not seem to warm her. Parched, withered, cold, she lay stretched on the stones like a piece of tossed-up driftwood. The women at the Bay thought she was very, very fast. Her lack of vanity, her slang, the way she treated men as though she was one of them, and the fact that she didn’t care twopence about her house and called the servant Gladys ‘Glad-eyes’, was disgraceful. Standing on the veranda steps Mrs Kember would call in her indifferent, tired voice, ‘I say, Glad-eyes, you might heave me a handkerchief if I’ve got one, will you?’ And Glad-eyes, a red bow in her hair instead of a cap, and white shoes, came running with an impudent smile. It was an absolute scandal! True, she had no children, and her husband. . . . Here the voices were always raised; they became fervent. How can he have married her? How can he, how can he? It must have been money, of course, but even then! Mrs Kember’s husband was at least ten years younger than she was, and so incredibly handsome that he looked like a mask or a most perfect illustration in an American novel rather than a man. Black hair, dark blue eyes, red lips, a slow sleepy smile, a fine tennis player, a perfect dancer, and with it all a mystery. Harry Kember was like a man walking in his sleep. Men couldn’t stand him, they couldn’t get a word out of the chap; he ignored his wife just as she ignored him. How did he live? Of course there were stories, but such stories! They simply couldn’t be told. The women he’d been seen with, the places he’d been seen in . . . but nothing was ever certain, nothing definite. Some of the women at the Bay privately thought he’d commit a murder one day. Yes, even while they talked to Mrs Kember and took in the awful concoction she was wearing, they saw her, stretched as she lay on the beach; but cold, bloody, and still with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth. Mrs Kember rose, yawned, unsnapped her belt buckle, and tugged at the tape of her blouse. And Beryl stepped out of her skirt and shed her jersey, and stood up in her short white petticoat, and her camisole with ribbon bows on the shoulders. ‘Mercy on us,’ said Mrs Harry Kember, ‘what a little beauty you are!’ ‘Don’t!’ said Beryl softly; but, drawing off one stocking and then the other, she felt a little beauty. ‘My dear – why not?’ said Mrs Harry Kember, stamping on her own petticoat. Really – her underclothes! A pair of blue cotton

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knickers and a linen bodice that reminded one somehow of a pillowcase. . . . ‘And you don’t wear stays, do you?’ She touched Beryl’s waist, and Beryl sprang away with a small affected cry. Then ‘Never!’ she said firmly. ‘Lucky little creature,’ sighed Mrs Kember, unfastening her own. Beryl turned her back and began the complicated movements of some one who is trying to take off her clothes and to pull on her bathing-dress all at one and the same time. ‘Oh, my dear – don’t mind me,’ said Mrs Harry Kember. ‘Why be shy? I shan’t eat you. I shan’t be shocked like those other ninnies.’ And she gave her strange neighing laugh and grimaced at the other women. But Beryl was shy. She never undressed in front of anybody. Was that silly? Mrs Harry Kember made her feel it was silly, even something to be ashamed of. Why be shy indeed! She glanced quickly at her friend standing so boldly in her torn chemise and lighting a fresh cigarette; and a quick, bold, evil feeling started up in her breast. Laughing recklessly, she drew on the limp, sandy-feeling bathingdress that was not quite dry and fastened the twisted buttons. ‘That’s better,’ said Mrs Harry Kember. They began to go down the beach together. ‘Really, it’s a sin for you to wear clothes, my dear. Somebody’s got to tell you some day.’ The water was quite warm. It was that marvellous transparent blue, flecked with silver, but the sand at the bottom looked gold; when you kicked with your toes there rose a little puff of gold-dust. Now the waves just reached her breast. Beryl stood, her arms outstretched, gazing out, and as each wave came she gave the slightest little jump, so that it seemed it was the wave which lifted her so gently. ‘I believe in pretty girls having a good time,’ said Mrs Harry Kember. ‘Why not? Don’t you make a mistake, my dear. Enjoy yourself.’ And suddenly she turned turtle, disappeared, and swam away quickly, quickly, like a rat. Then she flicked round and began swimming back. She was going to say something else. Beryl felt that she was being poisoned by this cold woman, but she longed to hear. But oh, how strange, how horrible! As Mrs Harry Kember came up close she looked, in her black waterproof bathing-cap, with her sleepy face lifted above the water, just her chin touching, like a horrible caricature of her husband. VI In a steamer chair, under a manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away. She did nothing. She looked up at the dark, close, dry leaves of the manuka, at the chinks of blue between, and now and again a tiny yellowish

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flower dropped on her. Pretty – yes, if you held one of those flowers on the palm of your hand and looked at it closely, it was an exquisite small thing. Each pale yellow petal shone as if each was the careful work of a loving hand. The tiny tongue in the centre gave it the shape of a bell. And when you turned it over the outside was a deep bronze colour. But as soon as they flowered, they fell and were scattered. You brushed them off your frock as you talked; the horrid little things got caught in one’s hair. Why, then, flower at all? Who takes the trouble – or the joy – to make all these things that are wasted, wasted. . . . It was uncanny. On the grass beside her, lying between two pillows, was the boy. Sound asleep he lay, his head turned away from his mother. His fine dark hair looked more like a shadow than like real hair, but his ear was a bright, deep coral. Linda clasped her hands above her head and crossed her feet. It was very pleasant to know that all these bungalows were empty, that everybody was down on the beach, out of sight, out of hearing. She had the garden to herself; she was alone. Dazzling white the picotees shone; the golden-eyed marigolds glittered; the nasturtiums wreathed the veranda poles in green and gold flame. If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness, time to know them! But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the underside of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away. And lying in her cane chair, Linda felt so light; she felt like a leaf. Along came Life like a wind and she was seized and shaken; she had to go. Oh dear, would it always be so? Was there no escape? . . . Now she sat on the veranda of their Tasmanian home, leaning against her father’s knee. And he promised, ‘As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we’ll cut off somewhere, we’ll escape. Two boys together. I have a fancy I’d like to sail up a river in China.’ Linda saw that river, very wide, covered with little rafts and boats. She saw the yellow hats of the boatmen and she heard their high, thin voices as they called. . . . ‘Yes, papa.’ But just then a very broad young man with bright ginger hair walked slowly past their house, and slowly, solemnly even, uncovered. Linda’s father pulled her ear teasingly, in the way he had. ‘Linny’s beau,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, papa, fancy being married to Stanley Burnell!’ Well, she was married to him. And what was more she loved him. Not the Stanley whom every one saw, not the everyday one; but a timid, sensitive, innocent Stanley who knelt down every night to say his prayers, and who longed to be good. Stanley was simple. If he believed in people – as he believed in her, for instance – it was with

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his whole heart. He could not be disloyal; he could not tell a lie. And how terribly he suffered if he thought anyone – she – was not being dead straight, dead sincere with him! ‘This is too subtle for me!’ He flung out the words, but his open quivering, distraught look was like the look of a trapped beast. But the trouble was – here Linda felt almost inclined to laugh, though Heaven knows it was no laughing matter – she saw her Stanley so seldom. There were glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm, but all the rest of the time it was like living in a house that couldn’t be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day. And it was always Stanley who was in the thick of the danger. Her whole time was spent in rescuing him, and restoring him, and calming him down, and listening to his story. And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children. Linda frowned; she sat up quickly in her steamer chair and clasped her ankles. Yes, that was her real grudge against life; that was what she could not understand. That was the question she asked and asked, and listened in vain for the answer. It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through child-bearing. And what made it doubly hard to bear was, she did not love her children. It was useless pretending. Even if she had had the strength she never would have nursed and played with the little girls. No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them. As to the boy – well, thank Heaven, mother had taken him; he was mother’s, or Beryl’s, or anybody’s who wanted him. She had hardly held him in her arms. She was so indifferent about him that as he lay there. . . . Linda glanced down. The boy had turned over. He lay facing her, and he was no longer asleep. His dark-blue, baby eyes were open; he looked as though he was peeping at his mother. And suddenly his face dimpled; it broke into a wide, toothless smile, a perfect beam, no less. ‘I’m here!’ that happy smile seemed to say. ‘Why don’t you like me?’ There was something so quaint, so unexpected about that smile that Linda smiled herself. But she checked herself and said to the boy coldly, ‘I don’t like babies.’ ‘Don’t like babies?’ The boy couldn’t believe her. ‘Don’t like me?’ He waved his arms foolishly at his mother. Linda dropped off her chair on to the grass. ‘Why do you keep on smiling?’ she said severely. ‘If you knew what I was thinking about, you wouldn’t.’ But he only squeezed up his eyes, slyly, and rolled his head on the pillow. He didn’t believe a word she said.

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‘We know all about that!’ smiled the boy. Linda was so astonished at the confidence of this little creature. . . . Ah no, be sincere. That was not what she felt; it was something far different, it was something so new, so. . . . The tears danced in her eyes; she breathed in a small whisper to the boy, ‘Hallo, my funny!’ But by now the boy had forgotten his mother. He was serious again. Something pink, something soft waved in front of him. He made a grab at it and it immediately disappeared. But when he lay back, another, like the first, appeared. This time he determined to catch it. He made a tremendous effort and rolled right over. VII The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea. The sun beat down, beat down hot and fiery on the fine sand, baking the grey and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through and through the sand-hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers. Pit-pit-pit! They were never still. Over there on the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin like a silver coin dropped into each of the small rock pools. They danced, they quivered, and minute ripples laved the porous shores. Looking down, bending over, each pool was like a lake with pink and blue houses clustered on the shores; and oh! the vast mountainous country behind those houses – the ravines, the passes, the dangerous creeks and fearful tracks that led to the water’s edge. Underneath waved the sea-forest – pink thread-like trees, velvet anemones, and orange berry-spotted weeds. Now a stone on the bottom moved, rocked, and there was a glimpse of a black feeler; now a thread-like creature wavered by and was lost. Something was happening to the pink waving trees; they were changing to a cold moonlight blue. And now there sounded the faintest ‘plop’. Who made that sound? What was going on down there? And how strong, how damp the seaweed smelt in the hot sun. . . . The green blinds were drawn in the bungalows of the summer colony. Over the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back window seemed to have a pair of sandshoes on the sill and some lumps of rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered in a haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts’ dog Snooker, who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was turned up, his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional desperate-sounding puff, as much as

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to say he had decided to make an end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along. ‘What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort of staring at the wall?’ Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma’s bed, and the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at the window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table for instance, was a packingcase in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice place for a watch to curl up in. ‘Tell me, grandma,’ said Kezia. The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew the bone needle through. She was casting on. ‘I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling,’ she said quietly. ‘My Australian Uncle William?’ said Kezia. She had another. ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘The one I never saw?’ ‘That was the one.’ ‘Well, what happened to him?’ Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted to be told again. ‘He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died,’ said old Mrs Fairfield. Kezia blinked and considered the picture again. . . . A little man fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole. ‘Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?’ She hated her grandma to be sad. It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To look after them as a woman does, long after they were out of sight. Did it make her sad? No, life was like that. ‘No, Kezia.’ ‘But why?’ asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw things in the air. ‘Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn’t old.’ Mrs Fairfield began counting the stitches in threes. ‘It just happened,’ she said in an absorbed voice.

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‘Does everybody have to die?’ asked Kezia. ‘Everybody!’ ‘Me?’ Kezia sounded fearfully incredulous. ‘Some day, my darling.’ ‘But, grandma.’ Kezia waved her left leg and waggled the toes. They felt sandy. ‘What if I just won’t?’ The old woman sighed again and drew a long thread from the ball. ‘We’re not asked, Kezia,’ she said sadly. ‘It happens to all of us sooner or later.’ Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant she would have to leave here, leave everywhere, for ever, leave – leave her grandma. She rolled over quickly. ‘Grandma,’ she said in a startled voice. ‘What, my pet!’ ‘You’re not to die.’ Kezia was very decided. ‘Ah, Kezia’ – her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head – ‘don’t let’s talk about it.’ ‘But you’re not to. You couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t not be there.’ This was awful. ‘Promise me you won’t ever do it, grandma,’ pleaded Kezia. The old woman went on knitting. ‘Promise me! Say never!’ But still her grandma was silent. Kezia rolled off the bed; she couldn’t bear it any longer, and lightly she leapt on to her grandma’s knees, clasped her hands round the old woman’s throat and began kissing her, under the chin, behind the ear, and blowing down her neck. ‘Say never . . . say never . . . say never –’ She gasped between the kisses. And then she began, very softly and lightly, to tickle her grandma. ‘Kezia!’ The old woman dropped her knitting. She swung back in the rocker. She began to tickle Kezia. ‘Say never, say never, say never,’ gurgled Kezia, while they lay there laughing in each other’s arms. ‘Come, that’s enough, my squirrel! That’s enough, my wild pony!’ said old Mrs Fairfield, setting her cap straight. ‘Pick up my knitting.’ Both of them had forgotten what the ‘never’ was about. VIII2 The sun was still full on the garden when the back door of the Burnells’ shut with a bang, and a very gay figure walked down the path to the gate. It was Alice, the servant-girl, dressed for her afternoon out. She wore a white cotton dress with such large red spots on it, and so many that they made you shudder, white shoes and a leghorn turned up under the brim with poppies. Of course she wore gloves, white ones, stained at the fastenings with iron-mould, and

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in one hand she carried a very dashed-looking sunshade which she referred to as her perishall. Beryl, sitting in the window, fanning her freshly-washed hair, thought she had never seen such a guy. If Alice had only blacked her face with a piece of cork before she started out, the picture would have been complete. And where did a girl like that go to in a place like this? The heart-shaped Fijian fan beat scornfully at that lovely bright mane. She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible common larrikin and they’d go off into the bush together. Pity to make herself so conspicuous; they’d have hard work to hide with Alice in that rig-out. But no, Beryl was unfair. Alice was going to tea with Mrs Stubbs, who’d sent her an ‘invite’ by the little boy who called for orders. She had taken ever such a liking to Mrs Stubbs ever since the first time she went to the shop to get something for her mosquitoes. ‘Dear heart!’ Mrs Stubbs had clapped her hand to her side. ‘I never seen anyone so eaten. You might have been attacked by canningbals.’ Alice did wish there’d been a bit of life on the road though. Made her feel so queer, having nobody behind her. Made her feel all weak in the spine. She couldn’t believe that some one wasn’t watching her. And yet it was silly to turn round; it gave you away. She pulled up her gloves, hummed to herself and said to the distant gum-tree, ‘Shan’t be long now.’ But that was hardly company. Mrs Stubbs’s shop was perched on a little hillock just off the road. It had two big windows for eyes, a broad veranda for a hat, and the sign on the roof, scrawled MRS. STUBBS’S, was like a little card stuck rakishly in the hat crown. On the veranda there hung a long string of bathing-dresses, clinging together as though they’d just been rescued from the sea rather than waiting to go in, and beside them there hung a cluster of sandshoes so extraordinarily mixed that to get at one pair you had to tear apart and forcibly separate at least fifty. Even then it was the rarest thing to find the left that belonged to the right. So many people had lost patience and gone off with one shoe that fitted and one that was a little too big. . . . Mrs Stubbs prided herself on keeping something of everything. The two windows, arranged in the form of precarious pyramids, were crammed so tight, piled so high, that it seemed only a conjuror could prevent them from toppling over. In the left-hand corner of one window, glued to the pane by four gelatine lozenges, there was – and there had been from time immemorial – a notice. LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH SOLID GOLD ON OR NEAR BEACH REWARD OFFERED

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Alice pressed open the door. The bell jangled, the red serge curtains parted, and Mrs Stubbs appeared. With her broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand. Alice was welcomed so warmly that she found it quite difficult to keep up her ‘manners’. They consisted of persistent little coughs and hems, pulls at her gloves, tweaks at her skirt, and a curious difficulty in seeing what was set before her or understanding what was said. Tea was laid on the parlour table – ham, sardines, a whole pound of butter, and such a large johnny cake that it looked like an advertisement for somebody’s baking-powder. But the Primus stove roared so loudly that it was useless to try to talk above it. Alice sat down on the edge of a basket-chair while Mrs Stubbs pumped the stove still higher. Suddenly Mrs Stubbs whipped the cushion off a chair and disclosed a large brown-paper parcel. ‘I’ve just had some new photers taken, my dear,’ she shouted cheerfully to Alice. ‘Tell me what you think of them.’ In a very dainty, refined way Alice wet her finger and put the tissue back from the first one. Life! How many there were! There were three dozzing at least. And she held hers up to the light. Mrs Stubbs sat in an arm-chair, leaning very much to one side. There was a look of mild astonishment on her large face, and well there might be. For though the arm-chair stood on a carpet, to the left of it, miraculously skirting the carpet-border, there was a dashing water-fall. On her right stood a Grecian pillar with a giant fern-tree on either side of it, and in the background towered a gaunt mountain, pale with snow. ‘It is a nice style, isn’t it?’ shouted Mrs Stubbs; and Alice had just screamed ‘Sweetly’ when the roaring of the Primus stove died down, fizzled out, ceased, and she said ‘Pretty’ in a silence that was frightening. ‘Draw up your chair, my dear,’ said Mrs Stubbs, beginning to pour out. ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, as she handed the tea, ‘but I don’t care about the size. I’m having an enlargemint. All very well for Christmas cards, but I never was the one for small photers myself. You get no comfort out of them. To say the truth, I find them dis’eartening.’ Alice quite saw what she meant. ‘Size,’ said Mrs Stubbs. ‘Give me size. That was what my poor dear husband was always saying. He couldn’t stand anything small. Gave him the creeps. And, strange as it may seem, my dear’ – here Mrs Stubbs creaked and seemed to expand herself at the memory – ‘it was dropsy that carried him off at the larst. Many’s the time they drawn one and a half pints from ’im at the ’ospital. . . . It seemed like a judgmint.’

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Alice burned to know exactly what it was that was drawn from him. She ventured, ‘I suppose it was water.’ But Mrs Stubbs fixed Alice with her eyes and replied meaningly, ‘It was liquid, my dear.’ Liquid! Alice jumped away from the word like a cat and came back to it, nosing and wary. ‘That’s ’im!’ said Mrs Stubbs, and she pointed dramatically to the life-size head and shoulders of a burly man with a dead white rose in the button-hole of his coat that made you think of a curl of cold mutting fat. Just below, in silver letters on a red cardboard ground, were the words, ‘Be not afraid, it is I.’3 ‘It’s ever such a fine face,’ said Alice faintly. The pale-blue bow on the top of Mrs Stubbs’s fair frizzy hair quivered. She arched her plump neck. What a neck she had! It was bright pink where it began and then it changed to warm apricot, and that faded to the colour of a brown egg and then to a deep creamy. ‘All the same, my dear,’ she said surprisingly, ‘freedom’s best!’ Her soft, fat chuckle sounded like a purr. ‘Freedom’s best,’ said Mrs Stubbs again. Freedom! Alice gave a loud, silly little titter. She felt awkward. Her mind flew back to her own kitching. Ever so queer! She wanted to be back in it again. IX A strange company assembled in the Burnells’ washhouse after tea. Round the table there sat a bull, a rooster, a donkey that kept forgetting it was a donkey, a sheep and a bee. The washhouse was the perfect place for such a meeting because they could make as much noise as they liked, and nobody ever interrupted. It was a small tin shed standing apart from the bungalow. Against the wall there was a deep trough and in the corner a copper with a basket of clothes-pegs on top of it. The little window, spun over with cobwebs, had a piece of candle and a mouse-trap on the dusty sill. There were clothes-lines criss-crossed overhead and, hanging from a peg on the wall, a very big, a huge, rusty horseshoe. The table was in the middle with a form at either side. ‘You can’t be a bee, Kezia. A bee’s not an animal. It’s a ninseck.’ ‘Oh, but I do want to be a bee frightfully,’ wailed Kezia. . . . A tiny bee, all yellow-furry, with striped legs. She drew her legs up under her and leaned over the table. She felt she was a bee. ‘A ninseck must be an animal,’ she said stoutly.’ It makes a noise. It’s not like a fish.’ ‘I’m a bull, I’m a bull!’ cried Pip. And he gave such a tremendous bellow – how did he make that noise? – that Lottie looked quite alarmed.

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‘I’ll be a sheep,’ said little Rags. ‘A whole lot of sheep went past this morning.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Dad heard them. Baa!’ He sounded like the little lamb that trots behind and seems to wait to be carried. ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’ shrilled Isabel. With her red cheeks and bright eyes she looked like a rooster. ‘What’ll I be?’ Lottie asked everybody, and she sat there smiling, waiting for them to decide for her. It had to be an easy one. ‘Be a donkey, Lottie.’ It was Kezia’s suggestion. ‘Hee-haw! You can’t forget that.’ ‘Hee-haw!’ said Lottie solemnly. ‘When do I have to say it?’ ‘I’ll explain, I’ll explain,’ said the bull. It was he who had the cards. He waved them round his head. ‘All be quiet! All listen!’ And he waited for them. ‘Look here, Lottie.’ He turned up a card. ‘It’s got two spots on it – see? Now, if you put that card in the middle and somebody else has one with two spots as well, you say “Hee-haw,” and the card’s yours.’ ‘Mine?’ Lottie was round-eyed. ‘To keep?’ ‘No, silly. Just for the game, see? Just while we’re playing.’ The bull was very cross with her. ‘Oh, Lottie, you are a little silly,’ said the proud rooster. Lottie looked at both of them. Then she hung her head; her lip quivered. ‘I don’t not want to play,’ she whispered. The others glanced at one another like conspirators. All of them knew what that meant. She would go away and be discovered somewhere standing with her pinny thrown over her head, in a corner, or against a wall, or even behind a chair. ‘Yes, you do, Lottie. It’s quite easy,’ said Kezia. And Isabel, repentant, said exactly like a grown-up, ‘Watch me, Lottie, and you’ll soon learn.’ ‘Cheer up, Lot,’ said Pip. ‘There, I know what I’ll do. I’ll give you the first one. It’s mine, really, but I’ll give it to you. Here you are.’ And he slammed the card down in front of Lottie. Lottie revived at that. But now she was in another difficulty. ‘I haven’t got a hanky,’ she said; ‘I want one badly, too.’ ‘Here, Lottie, you can use mine.’ Rags dipped into his sailor blouse and brought up a very wet-looking one, knotted together. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned her. ‘Only use that corner. Don’t undo it. I’ve got a little starfish inside I’m going to try and tame.’ ‘Oh, come on, you girls,’ said the bull. ‘And mind – you’re not to look at your cards. You’ve got to keep your hands under the table till I say “Go.” ’ Smack went the cards round the table. They tried with all their

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might to see, but Pip was too quick for them. It was very exciting, sitting there in the washhouse; it was all they could do not to burst into a little chorus of animals before Pip had finished dealing. ‘Now, Lottie, you begin.’ Timidly Lottie stretched out a hand, took the top card off her pack, had a good look at it – it was plain she was counting the spots – and put it down. ‘No, Lottie, you can’t do that. You mustn’t look first. You must turn it the other way over.’ ‘But then everybody will see it the same time as me,’ said Lottie. The game proceeded. Mooe-ooo-er! The bull was terrible. He charged over the table and seemed to eat the cards up. Bss-ss! said the bee. Cock-a-doodle-do! Isabel stood up in her excitement and moved her elbows like wings. Baa! Little Rags put down the King of Diamonds and Lottie put down the one they called the King of Spain. She had hardly any cards left. ‘Why don’t you call out, Lottie?’ ‘I’ve forgotten what I am,’ said the donkey woefully. ‘Well, change! Be a dog instead! Bow-wow!’ ‘Oh yes. That’s much easier.’ Lottie smiled again. But when she and Kezia both had a one Kezia waited on purpose. The others made signs to Lottie and pointed. Lottie turned very red; she looked bewildered, and at last she said, ‘Hee-haw! Ke-zia.’ ‘Ss! Wait a minute!’ They were in the very thick of it when the bull stopped them, holding up his hand. ‘What’s that? What’s that noise?’ ‘What noise? What do you mean?’ asked the rooster. ‘Ss! Shut up! Listen!’ They were mouse-still. ‘I thought I heard a – a sort of knocking,’ said the bull. ‘What was it like?’ asked the sheep faintly. No answer. The bee gave a shudder. ‘Whatever did we shut the door for?’ she said softly. Oh, why, why had they shut the door? While they were playing, the day had faded; the gorgeous sunset had blazed and died. And now the quick dark came racing over the sea, over the sand-hills, up the paddock. You were frightened to look in the corners of the washhouse, and yet you had to look with all your might. And somewhere, far away, grandma was lighting a lamp. The blinds were being pulled down; the kitchen fire leapt in the tins on the mantelpiece. ‘It would be awful now,’ said the bull, ‘if a spider was to fall from the ceiling on to the table, wouldn’t it?’ ‘Spiders don’t fall from ceilings.’

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‘Yes, they do. Our Min told us she’d seen a spider as big as a saucer, with long hairs on it like a gooseberry.’ Quickly all the little heads were jerked up; all the little bodies drew together, pressed together. ‘Why doesn’t somebody come and call us?’ cried the rooster. Oh, those grown-ups, laughing and snug, sitting in the lamp-light, drinking out of cups! They’d forgotten about them. No, not really forgotten. That was what their smile meant. They had decided to leave them there all by themselves. Suddenly Lottie gave such a piercing scream that all of them jumped off the forms, all of them screamed too. ‘A face – a face looking!’ shrieked Lottie. It was true, it was real. Pressed against the window was a pale face, black eyes, a black beard. ‘Grandma! Mother! Somebody!’ But they had not got to the door, tumbling over one another, before it opened for Uncle Jonathan. He had come to take the little boys home. X He had meant to be there before, but in the front garden he had come upon Linda walking up and down the grass, stopping to pick off a dead pink or give a top-heavy carnation something to lean against, or to take a deep breath of something, and then walking on again, with her little air of remoteness. Over her white frock she wore a yellow, pink-fringed shawl from the Chinaman’s shop. ‘Hallo, Jonathan!’ called Linda. And Jonathan whipped off his shabby panama, pressed it against his breast, dropped on one knee, and kissed Linda’s hand. ‘Greeting, my Fair One! Greeting, my Celestial Peach Blossom!’ boomed the bass voice gently. ‘Where are the other noble dames?’ ‘Beryl’s out playing bridge and mother’s giving the boy his bath. . . . Have you come to borrow something?’ The Trouts were for ever running out of things and sending across to the Burnells’ at the last moment. But Jonathan only answered, ‘A little love, a little kindness;’ and he walked by his sister-in-law’s side. Linda dropped into Beryl’s hammock under the manuka tree, and Jonathan stretched himself on the grass beside her, pulled a long stalk and began chewing it. They knew each other well. The voices of children cried from the other gardens. A fisherman’s light cart shook along the sandy road, and from far away they heard a dog barking; it was muffled as though the dog had its head in a sack. If you listened you could just hear the soft swish of the sea at full tide sweeping the pebbles. The sun was sinking.

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‘And so you go back to the office on Monday, do you, Jonathan?’ asked Linda. ‘On Monday the cage door opens and clangs to upon the victim for another eleven months and a week,’ answered Jonathan. Linda swung a little. ‘It must be awful,’ she said slowly. ‘Would ye have me laugh, my fair sister? Would ye have me weep?’ Linda was so accustomed to Jonathan’s way of talking that she paid no attention to it. ‘I suppose,’ she said vaguely, ‘one gets used to it. One gets used to anything.’ ‘Does one? Hum!’ The ‘Hum’ was so deep it seemed to boom from underneath the ground. ‘I wonder how it’s done,’ brooded Jonathan; ‘I’ve never managed it.’ Looking at him as he lay there, Linda thought again how attractive he was. It was strange to think that he was only an ordinary clerk, that Stanley earned twice as much money as he. What was the matter with Jonathan? He had no ambition; she supposed that was it. And yet one felt he was gifted, exceptional. He was passionately fond of music; every spare penny he had went on books. He was always full of new ideas, schemes, plans. But nothing came of it all. The new fire blazed in Jonathan; you almost heard it roaring softly as he explained, described and dilated on the new thing; but a moment later it had fallen in and there was nothing but ashes, and Jonathan went about with a look like hunger in his black eyes. At these times he exaggerated his absurd manner of speaking, and he sang in church – he was the leader of the choir – with such fearful dramatic intensity that the meanest hymn put on an unholy splendour. ‘It seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,’ said Jonathan, ‘as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one’s life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody’s ledger! It’s a queer use to make of one’s . . . one and only life, isn’t it? Or do I fondly dream?’ He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. ‘Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner. The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody’s ever going to let me out. That’s a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I’d been – pushed in, against my will – kicking, even – once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder’s steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I’m like an insect that’s flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that

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moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, “The shortness of life! The shortness of life!” I’ve only one night or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.’ ‘But, if you feel like that, why –’ began Linda quickly. ‘Ah!’ cried Jonathan. And that ‘Ah!’ was somehow almost exultant. ‘There you have me. Why? Why indeed? There’s the maddening, mysterious question. Why don’t I fly out again? There’s the window or the door or whatever it was I came in by. It’s not hopelessly shut – is it? Why don’t I find it and be off? Answer me that, little sister.’ But he gave her no time to answer. ‘I’m exactly like that insect again. For some reason’ – Jonathan paused between the words – ‘it’s not allowed, it’s forbidden, it’s against the insect law, to stop banging and flopping and crawling up the pane even for an instant. Why don’t I leave the office? Why don’t I seriously consider, this moment, for instance, what it is that prevents me leaving? It’s not as though I’m tremendously tied. I’ve two boys to provide for, but, after all, they’re boys. I could cut off to sea, or get a job up-country, or –’ Suddenly he smiled at Linda and said in a changed voice, as if he were confiding a secret, ‘Weak . . . weak. No stamina. No anchor. No guiding principle, let us call it.’ But then the dark velvety voice rolled out: Would ye hear the story How it unfolds itself . . .4

and they were silent. The sun had set. In the western sky there were great masses of crushed-up rose-coloured clouds. Broad beams of light shone through the clouds and beyond them as if they would cover the whole sky. Overhead the blue faded; it turned a pale gold, and the bush outlined against it gleamed dark and brilliant like metal. Sometimes when those beams of light show in the sky they are very awful. They remind you that up there sits Jehovah, the jealous God, the Almighty, Whose eye is upon you, ever watchful, never weary. You remember that at His coming the whole earth will shake into one ruined graveyard; the cold, bright angels will drive you this way and that, and there will be no time to explain what could be explained so simply. . . . But to-night it seemed to Linda there was something infinitely joyful and loving in those silver beams. And now no sound came from the sea. It breathed softly as if it would draw that tender, joyful beauty into its own bosom. ‘It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong,’ came the shadowy voice of Jonathan. ‘It’s not the scene, it’s not the setting for . . . three stools, three desks, three inkpots and a wire blind.’

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Linda knew that he would never change, but she said, ‘Is it too late, even now?’ ‘I’m old – I’m old,’ intoned Jonathan. He bent towards her, he passed his hand over his head. ‘Look!’ His black hair was speckled all over with silver, like the breast plumage of a black fowl. Linda was surprised. She had no idea that he was grey. And yet, as he stood up beside her and sighed and stretched, she saw him, for the first time, not resolute, not gallant, not careless, but touched already with age. He looked very tall on the darkening grass, and the thought crossed her mind, ‘He is like a weed.’ Jonathan stooped again and kissed her fingers. ‘Heaven reward thy sweet patience, lady mine,’ he murmured. ‘I must go seek those heirs to my fame and fortune. . . .’ He was gone. XI Light shone in the windows of the bungalow. Two square patches of gold fell upon the pinks and the peaked marigolds. Florrie, the cat, came out on to the veranda, and sat on the top step, her white paws close together, her tail curled round. She looked content, as though she had been waiting for this moment all day. ‘Thank goodness, it’s getting late,’ said Florrie. ‘Thank goodness, the long day is over.’ Her greengage eyes opened. Presently there sounded the rumble of the coach, the crack of Kelly’s whip. It came near enough for one to hear the voices of the men from town, talking loudly together. It stopped at the Burnells’ gate. Stanley was half-way up the path before he saw Linda. ‘Is that you, darling?’ ‘Yes, Stanley.’ He leapt across the flower-bed and seized her in his arms. She was enfolded in that familiar, eager, strong embrace. ‘Forgive me, darling, forgive me,’ stammered Stanley, and he put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to him. ‘Forgive you?’ smiled Linda. ‘But whatever for?’ ‘Good God! You can’t have forgotten,’ cried Stanley Burnell. ‘I’ve thought of nothing else all day. I’ve had the hell of a day. I made up my mind to dash out and telegraph, and then I thought the wire mightn’t reach you before I did. I’ve been in tortures, Linda.’ ‘But, Stanley,’ said Linda, ‘what must I forgive you for?’ ‘Linda!’ – Stanley was very hurt – ‘didn’t you realize – you must have realized – I went away without saying good-bye to you this morning? I can’t imagine how I can have done such a thing. My confounded temper, of course. But – well’ – and he sighed and took her in his arms again – ‘I’ve suffered for it enough to-day.’

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‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’ asked Linda.’ New gloves? Let me see.’ ‘Oh, just a cheap pair of wash-leather ones,’ said Stanley humbly. ‘I noticed Bell was wearing some in the coach this morning, so, as I was passing the shop, I dashed in and got myself a pair. What are you smiling at? You don’t think it was wrong of me, do you?’ ‘On the con-trary, darling,’ said Linda, ‘I think it was most sensible.’ She pulled one of the large, pale gloves on her own fingers and looked at her hand, turning it this way and that. She was still smiling. Stanley wanted to say, ‘I was thinking of you the whole time I bought them.’ It was true, but for some reason he couldn’t say it. ‘Let’s go in,’ said he. XII Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late – it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one. And what is this queer sensation that you’re a conspirator? Lightly, stealthily you move about your room. You take something off the dressingtable and put it down again without a sound. And everything, even the bed-post, knows you, responds, shares your secret. . . . You’re not very fond of your room by day. You never think about it. You’re in and out, the door opens and slams, the cupboard creaks. You sit down on the side of your bed, change your shoes and dash out again. A dive down to the glass, two pins in your hair, powder your nose and off again. But now – it’s suddenly dear to you. It’s a darling little funny room. It’s yours. Oh, what a joy it is to own things! Mine – my own! ‘My very own for ever?’ ‘Yes.’ Their lips met. No, of course, that had nothing to do with it. That was all nonsense and rubbish. But, in spite of herself, Beryl saw so plainly two people standing in the middle of her room. Her arms were round his neck; he held her. And now he whispered, ‘My beauty, my little beauty!’ She jumped off her bed, ran over to the window and kneeled on the window-seat, with her elbows on the sill. But the beautiful night, the garden, every bush, every leaf, even the white palings, even the stars, were conspirators too. So bright was the moon that the flowers were bright as by day; the shadow of the nasturtiums, exquisite lily-like leaves and wide-open flowers, lay across the silvery veranda. The manuka tree, bent by the southerly winds, was like a bird on one leg stretching out a wing.

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But when Beryl looked at the bush, it seemed to her the bush was sad. ‘We are dumb trees, reaching up in the night, imploring we know not what,’ said the sorrowful bush. It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time. ‘Beryl!’ ‘Yes, I’m here. I’m Beryl. Who wants me?’ ‘Beryl!’ ‘Let me come.’ It is lonely living by oneself. Of course, there are relations, friends, heaps of them; but that’s not what she means. She wants some one who will find the Beryl they none of them know, who will expect her to be that Beryl always. She wants a lover. ‘Take me away from all these other people, my love. Let us go far away. Let us live our life, all new, all ours, from the very beginning. Let us make our fire. Let us sit down to eat together. Let us have long talks at night.’ And the thought was almost, ‘Save me, my love. Save me!’ . . . ‘Oh, go on! Don’t be a prude, my dear. You enjoy yourself while you’re young. That’s my advice.’ And a high rush of silly laughter joined Mrs Harry Kember’s loud, indifferent neigh. You see, it’s so frightfully difficult when you’ve nobody. You’re so at the mercy of things. You can’t just be rude. And you’ve always this horror of seeming inexperienced and stuffy like the other ninnies at the Bay. And – and it’s fascinating to know you’ve power over people. Yes, that is fascinating. . . . Oh why, oh why doesn’t ‘he’ come soon? If I go on living here, thought Beryl, anything may happen to me. ‘But how do you know he is coming at all?’ mocked a small voice within her. But Beryl dismissed it. She couldn’t be left. Other people, perhaps, but not she. It wasn’t possible to think that Beryl Fairfield never married, that lovely fascinating girl. ‘Do you remember Beryl Fairfield?’ ‘Remember her! As if I could forget her! It was one summer at the Bay that I saw her. She was standing on the beach in a blue’ – no, pink – ‘muslin frock, holding on a big cream’ – no, black – ‘straw hat. But it’s years ago now.’ ‘She’s as lovely as ever, more so if anything.’ Beryl smiled, bit her lip, and gazed over the garden. As she gazed, she saw somebody, a man, leave the road, step along the paddock

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beside their palings as if he was coming straight towards her. Her heart beat. Who was it? Who could it be? It couldn’t be a burglar, certainly not a burglar, for he was smoking and he strolled lightly. Beryl’s heart leapt; it seemed to turn right over, and then to stop. She recognized him. ‘Good evening, Miss Beryl,’ said the voice softly. ‘Good evening.’ ‘Won’t you come for a little walk?’ it drawled. Come for a walk – at that time of night! ‘I couldn’t. Everybody’s in bed. Everybody’s asleep.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice lightly, and a whiff of sweet smoke reached her. ‘What does everybody matter? Do come! It’s such a fine night. There’s not a soul about.’ Beryl shook her head. But already something stirred in her, something reared its head. The voice said, ‘Frightened?’ It mocked, ‘Poor little girl!’ ‘Not in the least,’ said she. As she spoke that weak thing within her seemed to uncoil, to grow suddenly tremendously strong; she longed to go! And just as if this was quite understood by the other, the voice said, gently and softly, but finally, ‘Come along!’ Beryl stepped over her low window, crossed the veranda, ran down the grass to the gate. He was there before her. ‘That’s right,’ breathed the voice, and it teased, ‘You’re not frightened, are you? You’re not frightened?’ She was; now she was here she was terrified, and it seemed to her everything was different. The moonlight stared and glittered; the shadows were like bars of iron. Her hand was taken. ‘Not in the least,’ she said lightly. ‘Why should I be?’ Her hand was pulled gently, tugged. She held back. ‘No, I’m not coming any farther,’ said Beryl. ‘Oh, rot!’ Harry Kember didn’t believe her. ‘Come along! We’ll just go as far as that fuchsia bush. Come along!’ The fuchsia bush was tall. It fell over the fence in a shower. There was a little pit of darkness beneath. ‘No, really, I don’t want to,’ said Beryl. For a moment Harry Kember didn’t answer. Then he came close to her, turned to her, smiled and said quickly, ‘Don’t be silly! Don’t be silly!’ His smile was something she’d never seen before. Was he drunk? That bright, blind, terrifying smile froze her with horror. What was she doing? How had she got here? The stern garden asked her as the gate pushed open, and quick as a cat Harry Kember came through and snatched her to him.

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‘Cold little devil! Cold little devil!’ said the hateful voice. But Beryl was strong. She slipped, ducked, wrenched free. ‘You are vile, vile,’ said she. ‘Then why in God’s name did you come?’ stammered Harry Kember. Nobody answered him. XIII5 A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still. Notes Text: GPOS. First published in the London Mercury, 5: 27, January 1922, pp. 239–65. 1. KM wrote of the story she was working on to Dorothy Brett on 4 August 1921: Its called At the Bay & its (I hope) full of sand and seaweed and bathing dresses hanging over verandahs & sandshoes on window sills, and little pink “sea” convolvulus, and rather gritty sandwiches and the tide coming in. And it smells (oh I DO hope it smells) a little bit fishy. (CLKM, 4, p. 261) She also worked on other stories before she again told Brett on 12 September: Ive finished my new book. Finished last night at 10.30. Laid down the pen after writing ‘Thanks be to God.’ I wish there was a God. I am longing to (1) praise him (2) thank him. The title is At the Bay. That’s the name of the very long story in it, a continuation of ‘Prelude’. Its about 60 pages. Ive been at it all last night. My precious children have sat in here playing cards. Ive wandered about all sorts of places – in and out. I hope it is good. It is as good as I can do and all my heart and soul is in it – every single bit. Oh God, I hope it gives pleasure to someone . . . It is so strange to bring the dead to life again. Theres my grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting, there stalks my uncle over the grass. I feel as I write, ‘you are not dead my darlings. All is remembered. I bow down to you. I efface myself so that you may live again through me in your richness and beauty.’ And one feels possessed. And then the place where it all happens. I have tried to make it as familiar to ‘you’ as it is to me. You know the marigolds? You know those pools in the

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the voyage rocks? You know the mousetrap on the wash house window sill? And too, one tries to go deep – to speak to the secret self we all have – to acknowledge that. I mustn’t say any more about it. (CLKM, 4, p. 278)

More broadly, she had told the writer Marie Belloc-Lowndes on 26 May 1921, I long, above everything, to write about family love – the love between growing children, and the love of a mother for her son, and the father’s feeling – But warm, vivid, intimate – not ‘made up’ – not self conscious. (CLKM, 4, pp. 241–2) And she worried her agent, J. B. Pinker, about details: There is no chance – is there? – of the typist correcting my spelling in the long story At the Bay. There are several words which appear to be spelt wrong – i.e. emeral for emerald, ninseck for insect and so on. [. . .] But my hand on my heart I mean every spelling mistake! It interferes with the naturalness of childrens’ or servants’ speech if one isolates words with commas or puts them in italics. That’s my reason for leaving them plain. (CLKM, 4, p. 286) 2. KM had reservations about what she considered the weak section of the story. As she wrote to the novelist Bertha Ruck on 24 March 1922, ‘You say scarcely anything about the big black holes in my book (like the servant’s afternoon out)’ (CLKM, 5, p. 126). 3. ‘But straightway Jesus spoke unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid’: Matthew, 14: 27. 4. Ruggiero Leoncavello, Prologue, Pagliacci (1892). 5. The story was divided into twelve sections when it appeared in GPOS, but before the American edition went to press, KM set off the last few lines as section XIII.

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The Voyage1 The Picton boat2 was due to leave at half-past eleven. It was a beautiful night, mild, starry, only when they got out of the cab and started to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella’s hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the

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little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself. Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast that she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry. . . . Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white woolly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream. Then suddenly, so suddenly that Fenella and her grandma both leapt, there sounded from behind the largest wool shed, that had a trail of smoke hanging over it, Mia-oo-oo-O-O! ‘First whistle,’ said her father briefly, and at that moment they came in sight of the Picton boat. Lying beside the dark wharf, all strung, all beaded with round golden lights, the Picton boat looked as if she was more ready to sail among stars than out into the cold sea. People pressed along the gangway. First went her grandma, then her father, then Fenella. There was a high step down on to the deck, and an old sailor in a jersey standing by gave her his dry, hard hand. They were there; they stepped out of the way of the hurrying people, and standing under a little iron stairway that led to the upper deck they began to say good-bye. ‘There, mother, there’s your luggage!’ said Fenella’s father, giving grandma another strapped-up sausage. ‘Thank you, Frank.’ ‘And you’ve got your cabin tickets safe?’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘And your other tickets?’ Grandma felt for them inside her glove and showed him the tips. ‘That’s right.’ He sounded stern, but Fenella, eagerly watching him, saw that he looked tired and sad. Mia-oo-oo-O-O! The second whistle blared just above their heads, and a voice like a cry shouted, ‘Any more for the gangway?’ ‘You’ll give my love to father,’ Fenella saw her father’s lips say. And her grandma, very agitated, answered. ‘Of course I will, dear. Go now. You’ll be left. Go now, Frank. Go now.’

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‘It’s all right, mother. I’ve got another three minutes.’ To her surprise Fenella saw her father take off his hat. He clasped grandma in his arms and pressed her to him. ‘God bless you, mother!’ she heard him say. And grandma put her hand, with the black thread glove that was worn through on her ring finger, against his cheek, and she sobbed, ‘God bless you, my own brave son!’ This was so awful that Fenella quickly turned her back on them, swallowed once, twice, and frowned terribly at a little green star on a mast head. But she had to turn round again; her father was going. ‘Good-bye, Fenella. Be a good girl.’ His cold, wet moustache brushed her cheek. But Fenella caught hold of the lapels of his coat. ‘How long am I going to stay?’ she whispered anxiously. He wouldn’t look at her. He shook her off gently, and gently said, ‘We’ll see about that. Here! Where’s your hand?’ He pressed something into her palm. ‘Here’s a shilling in case you should need it.’ A shilling! She must be going away for ever! ‘Father!’ cried Fenella. But he was gone. He was the last off the ship. The sailors put their shoulders to the gangway. A huge coil of dark rope went flying through the air and fell ‘thump’ on the wharf. A bell rang; a whistle shrilled. Silently the dark wharf began to slip, to slide, to edge away from them. Now there was a rush of water between. Fenella strained to see with all her might. ‘Was that father turning round?’ – or waving? – or standing alone? – or walking off by himself? The strip of water grew broader, darker. Now the Picton boat began to swing round steady, pointing out to sea. It was no good looking any longer. There was nothing to be seen but a few lights, the face of the town clock hanging in the air, and more lights, little patches of them, on the dark hills. The freshening wind tugged at Fenella’s skirts; she went back to her grandma. To her relief grandma seemed no longer sad. She had put the two sausages of luggage one on top of the other, and she was sitting on them, her hands folded, her head a little on one side. There was an intent, bright look on her face. Then Fenella saw that her lips were moving and guessed that she was praying. But the old woman gave her a bright nod as if to say the prayer was nearly over. She unclasped her hands, sighed, clasped them again, bent forward, and at last gave herself a soft shake. ‘And now, child,’ she said fingering the bow of her bonnet-strings, ‘I think we ought to see about our cabins. Keep close to me, and mind you don’t slip.’ ‘Yes, grandma!’ ‘And be careful the umbrellas aren’t caught in the stair rail. I saw a beautiful umbrella broken in half like that on my way over.’

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‘Yes, grandma.’ Dark figures of men lounged against the rails. In the glow of their pipes a nose shone out, or the peak of a cap, or a pair of surprisedlooking eyebrows. Fenella glanced up. High in the air, a little figure, his hands thrust in his short jacket pockets, stood staring out to sea. The ship rocked ever so little, and she thought the stars rocked too. And now a pale steward in a linen coat, holding a tray high in the palm of his hand, stepped out of a lighted doorway and skimmed past them. They went through that doorway. Carefully over the high brass-bound step on to the rubber mat and then down such a terribly steep flight of stairs that grandma had to put both feet on each step, and Fenella clutched the clammy brass rail and forgot all about the swan-necked umbrella. At the bottom grandma stopped; Fenella was rather afraid she was going to pray again. But no, it was only to get out the cabin tickets. They were in the saloon. It was glaring bright and stifling; the air smelled of paint and burnt chop-bones and indiarubber. Fenella wished her grandma would go on, but the old woman was not to be hurried. An immense basket of ham sandwiches caught her eye. She went up to them and touched the top one delicately with her finger. ‘How much are the sandwiches?’ she asked. ‘Tuppence!’ bawled a rude steward, slamming down a knife and fork. Grandma could hardly believe it. ‘Twopence each?’ she asked. ‘That’s right,’ said the steward, and he winked at his companion. Grandma made a small, astonished face. Then she whispered primly to Fenella. ‘What wickedness!’ And they sailed out at the further door and along a passage that had cabins on either side. Such a very nice stewardess came to meet them. She was dressed all in blue, and her collar and cuffs were fastened with large brass buttons. She seemed to know grandma well. ‘Well, Mrs Crane,’ said she, unlocking their washstand. ‘We’ve got you back again. It’s not often you give yourself a cabin.’ ‘No,’ said grandma. ‘But this time my dear son’s thoughtfulness –’ ‘I hope –’ began the stewardess. Then she turned round and took a long mournful look at grandma’s blackness and at Fenella’s black coat and skirt, black blouse, and hat with a crêpe rose. Grandma nodded. ‘It was God’s will,’ said she. The stewardess shut her lips and, taking a deep breath, she seemed to expand. ‘What I always say is,’ she said, as though it was her own discovery, ‘sooner or later each of us has to go, and that’s a certingty.’ She paused. ‘Now, can I bring you anything, Mrs Crane? A cup of tea?

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I know it’s no good offering you a little something to keep the cold out.’ Grandma shook her head. ‘Nothing, thank you. We’ve got a few wine biscuits, and Fenella has a very nice banana.’ ‘Then I’ll give you a look later on,’ said the stewardess, and she went out, shutting the door. What a very small cabin it was! It was like being shut up in a box with grandma. The dark round eye above the washstand gleamed at them dully. Fenella felt shy. She stood against the door, still clasping her luggage and the umbrella. Were they going to get undressed in here? Already her grandma had taken off her bonnet, and, rolling up the strings, she fixed each with a pin to the lining before she hung the bonnet up. Her white hair shone like silk; the little bun at the back was covered with a black net. Fenella hardly ever saw her grandma with her head uncovered; she looked strange. ‘I shall put on the woollen fascinator your dear mother crocheted for me,’ said grandma, and, unstrapping the sausage, she took it out and wound it round her head; the fringe of grey bobbles danced at her eyebrows as she smiled tenderly and mournfully at Fenella. Then she undid her bodice, and something under that, and something else underneath that. Then there seemed a short, sharp tussle, and grandma flushed faintly. Snip! Snap! She had undone her stays. She breathed a sigh of relief, and sitting on the plush couch, she slowly and carefully pulled off her elastic-sided boots and stood them side by side. By the time Fenella had taken off her coat and skirt and put on her flannel dressing-gown grandma was quite ready. ‘Must I take off my boots, grandma? They’re lace.’ Grandma gave them a moment’s deep consideration. ‘You’d feel a great deal more comfortable if you did, child,’ said she. She kissed Fenella. ‘Don’t forget to say your prayers. Our dear Lord is with us when we are at sea even more than when we are on dry land. And because I am an experienced traveller,’ said grandma briskly, ‘I shall take the upper berth.’ ‘But, grandma, however will you get up there?’ Three little spider-like steps were all Fenella saw. The old woman gave a small silent laugh before she mounted them nimbly, and she peered over the high bunk at the astonished Fenella. ‘You didn’t think your grandma could do that, did you?’ said she. And as she sank back Fenella heard her light laugh again. The hard square of brown soap would not lather, and the water in the bottle was like a kind of blue jelly. How hard it was, too, to turn down those stiff sheets; you simply had to tear your way in. If everything had been different, Fenella might have got the giggles. . . . At last she was inside, and while she lay there panting, there sounded

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from above a long, soft whispering, as though some one was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something. It was grandma saying her prayers. . . . A long time passed. Then the stewardess came in; she trod softly and leaned her hand on grandma’s bunk. ‘We’re just entering the Straits,’ she said. ‘Oh!’ ‘It’s a fine night, but we’re rather empty. We may pitch a little.’ And indeed at that moment the Picton boat rose and rose and hung in the air just long enough to give a shiver before she swung down again, and there was the sound of heavy water slapping against her sides. Fenella remembered she had left that swan-necked umbrella standing up on the little couch. If it fell over, would it break? But grandma remembered too, at the same time. ‘I wonder if you’d mind, stewardess, laying down my umbrella,’ she whispered. ‘Not at all, Mrs Crane.’ And the stewardess, coming back to grandma breathed, ‘Your little granddaughter’s in such a beautiful sleep.’ ‘God be praised for that!’ said grandma. ‘Poor little motherless mite!’ said the stewardess. And grandma was still telling the stewardess all about what happened when Fenella fell asleep. But she hadn’t been asleep long enough to dream before she woke up again to see something waving in the air above her head. What was it? What could it be? It was a small grey foot. Now another joined it. They seemed to be feeling about for something; there came a sigh. ‘I’m awake, grandma,’ said Fenella. ‘Oh, dear, am I near the ladder?’ asked grandma. ‘I thought it was this end.’ ‘No, grandma, it’s the other. I’ll put your foot on it. Are we there?’ asked Fenella. ‘In the harbour,’ said grandma. ‘We must get up, child. You’d better have a biscuit to steady yourself before you move.’ But Fenella had hopped out of her bunk. The lamp was still burning, but night was over, and it was cold. Peering through that round eye, she could see far off some rocks. Now they were scattered over with foam; now a gull flipped by; and now there came a long piece of real land. ‘It’s land, grandma,’ said Fenella, wonderingly, as though they had been at sea for weeks together. She hugged herself; she stood on one leg and rubbed it with the toes of the other foot; she was trembling. Oh, it had all been so sad lately. Was it going to change? But all her grandma said was, ‘Make haste, child. I should leave your nice

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banana for the stewardess as you haven’t eaten it.’ And Fenella put on her black clothes again, and a button sprang off one of her gloves and rolled to where she couldn’t reach it. They went up on deck. But if it had been cold in the cabin, on deck it was like ice. The sun was not up yet, but the stars were dim, and the cold pale sky was the same colour as the cold pale sea. On the land a white mist rose and fell. Now they could see quite plainly dark bush. Even the shapes of the umbrella ferns showed, and those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons. . . . Now they could see the landing-stage and some little houses, pale too, clustered together, like shells on the lid of a box. The other passengers tramped up and down, but more slowly than they had the night before, and they looked gloomy. And now the landing-stage came out to meet them. Slowly it swam towards the Picton boat, and a man holding a coil of rope, and a cart with a small drooping horse and another man sitting on the step, came too. ‘It’s Mr Penreddy, Fenella, come for us,’ said grandma. She sounded pleased. Her white waxen cheeks were blue with cold, her chin trembled, and she had to keep wiping her eyes and her little pink nose. ‘You’ve got my –’ ‘Yes, grandma.’ Fenella showed it to her. The rope came flying through the air, and ‘smack’ it fell on to the deck. The gangway was lowered. Again Fenella followed her grandma on to the wharf over to the little cart, and a moment later they were bowling away. The hooves of the little horse drummed over the wooden piles, then sank softly into the sandy road. Not a soul was to be seen; there was not even a feather of smoke. The mist rose and fell, and the sea still sounded asleep as slowly it turned on the beach. ‘I seen Mr Crane yestiddy,’ said Mr Penreddy. ‘He looked himself then. Missus knocked him up a batch of scones last week.’ And now the little horse pulled up before one of the shell-like houses. They got down. Fenella put her hand on the gate, and the big, trembling dew-drops soaked through her glove-tips. Up a little path of round white pebbles they went, with drenched sleeping flowers on either side. Grandma’s delicate white picotees were so heavy with dew that they were fallen, but their sweet smell was part of the cold morning. The blinds were down in the little house; they mounted the steps on to the verandah. A pair of old bluchers was on one side of the door, and a large red watering-can on the other. ‘Tut! tut! Your grandpa,’ said grandma. She turned the handle. Not a sound. She called, ‘Walter!’ And immediately a deep voice that sounded half stifled called back, ‘Is that you, Mary?’ ‘Wait, dear,’ said grandma. ‘Go in there.’ She pushed Fenella gently into a small dusky sitting-room.

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On the table a white cat, that had been folded up like a camel, rose, stretched itself, yawned, and then sprang on to the tips of its toes. Fenella buried one cold little hand in the white, warm fur, and smiled timidly while she stroked and listened to grandma’s gentle voice and the rolling tones of grandpa. A door creaked. ‘Come in, dear.’ The old woman beckoned, Fenella followed. There, lying to one side of an immense bed, lay grandpa. Just his head with a white tuft, and his rosy face and long silver beard showed over the quilt. He was like a very old wide-awake bird. ‘Well, my girl!’ said grandpa. ‘Give us a kiss!’ Fenella kissed him. ‘Ugh!’ said grandpa. ‘Her little nose is as cold as a button. What’s that she’s holding? Her grandma’s umbrella?’ Fenella smiled again, and crooked the swan neck over the bed-rail. Above the bed there was a big text in a deep-black frame: – – – Lost! One Golden Hour Set with Sixty Diamond Minutes. No Reward Is Offered For It Is GONE FOR EVER!

‘Yer grandma painted that,’ said grandpa. And he ruffled his white tuft and looked at Fenella so merrily she almost thought he winked at her. Notes Text: GPOS. Sphere, 87: 1144, 24 December 1921, pp. 340–1. Dated 14 August 1921 on the NLC MS, with the initial title, ‘Going to Stay with her Granma’ changed to the story’s present name. 1. KM noted on 11 August, before she began work on ‘The Voyage’, ‘I don’t know how I may write this next story. It’s so difficult. But I suppose I shall. The trouble is I am so infernally cold!’ (KMN, 2, p. 273). 2. The voyage was on the overnight boat from Wellington to Picton, a small port at the top of the South Island of New Zealand.

•

A Married Man’s Story1 It is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold dining room; we have come back to the sitting room where there is a fire. All is as

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usual. I am sitting at my writing table which is placed across a corner so that I am behind it, as it were, and facing the room. The lamp with the green shade is alight; I have before me two large books of reference, both open, a pile of papers. . . . All the paraphernalia, in fact, of an extremely occupied man. My wife, with our little boy on her lap, is in a low chair before the fire. She is about to put him to bed before she clears away the dishes and piles them up in the kitchen for the servant girl to-morrow morning. But the warmth, the quiet, and the sleepy baby, have made her dreamy. One of his red woollen boots is off; one is on. She sits, bent forward, clasping the little bare foot, staring into the glow, and as the fire quickens, falls, flares again, her shadow – an immense Mother and Child – is here and gone again upon the wall. . . . Outside it is raining. I like to think of that cold drenched window behind the blind, and beyond, the dark bushes in the garden, their broad leaves bright with rain, and beyond the fence, the gleaming road with the two hoarse little gutters singing against each other, and the wavering reflections of the lamps, like fishes’ tails. . . . While I am here, I am there, lifting my face to the dim sky, and it seems to me it must be raining all over the world – that the whole earth is drenched, is sounding with a soft quick patter or hard steady drumming, or gurgling and something that is like sobbing and laughing mingled together, and that light playful splashing that is of water falling into still lakes and flowing rivers. And all at one and the same moment I am arriving in a strange city, slipping under the hood of the cab while the driver whips the cover off the breathing horse, running from shelter to shelter, dodging someone, swerving by someone else. I am conscious of tall houses, their doors and shutters sealed against the night, of dripping balconies and sodden flower pots, I am brushing through deserted gardens and peering into moist smelling summer-houses (you know how soft and almost crumbling the wood of a summer-house is in the rain), I am standing on the dark quayside, giving my ticket into the wet red hand of the old sailor in an oilskin – How strong the sea smells! How loudly those tied-up boats knock against one another! I am crossing the wet stackyard, hooded in an old sack, carrying a lantern, while the house-dog, like a soaking doormat, springs, shakes himself over me. And now I am walking along a deserted road – it is impossible to miss the puddles and the trees are stirring – stirring. . . . But one could go on with such a catalogue for ever – on and on – until one lifted the single arum lily leaf and discovered the tiny snails clinging, until one counted . . . and what then? Aren’t those just the signs, the traces of my feeling? The bright green streaks made by someone who walks over the dewy grass? Not the feeling itself. And as I think that, a mournful glorious voice begins to sing in my bosom.

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Yes, perhaps that is nearer what I mean. What a voice! What power! What velvety softness! Marvellous! Suddenly my wife turns round quickly. She knows – how long has she known? – that I am not ‘working’! It is strange that with her full, open gaze, she should smile so timidly – and that she should say in such a hesitating voice: ‘What are you thinking?’ I smile and draw two fingers across my forehead in the way I have. ‘Nothing,’ I answer softly. At that she stirs, and, still trying not to make it sound important, she says: ‘Oh, but you must have been thinking of something!’ Then I really meet her gaze, meet it fully, and I fancy her face quivers. Will she never grow accustomed to these simple – one might say – everyday little lies? Will she never learn not to expose herself – or to build up defences? ‘Truly, I was thinking of nothing!’ There! I seem to see it dart at her. She turns away, pulls the other red sock off the baby – sits him up, and begins to unbutton him behind. I wonder if that little soft rolling bundle sees anything, feels anything? Now she turns him over on her knee, and in this light, his soft arms and legs waving, he is extraordinarily like a young crab. A queer thing is I can’t connect him with my wife and myself; I’ve never accepted him as ours. Each time when I come into the hall and see the perambulator, I catch myself thinking: ‘H’m, someone has brought a baby.’ Or, when his crying wakes me at night, I feel inclined to blame my wife for having brought the baby in from outside. The truth is, that though one might suspect her of strong maternal feelings, my wife doesn’t seem to me the type of woman who bears children in her own body. There’s an immense difference! Where is that . . . animal ease and playfulness, that quick kissing and cuddling one has been taught to expect of young mothers? She hasn’t a sign of it. I believe that when she ties its bonnet she feels like an aunt and not a mother. But of course I may be wrong; she may be passionately devoted. . . . I don’t think so. At any rate, isn’t it a trifle indecent to feel like this about one’s own wife? Indecent or not, one has these feelings. And one other thing. How can I reasonably expect my wife, a broken-hearted woman, to spend her time tossing the baby? But that is beside the mark. She never even began to toss when her heart was whole. And now she has carried the baby to bed. I hear her soft deliberate steps moving between the dining room and the kitchen, there and back again, to the tune of the clattering dishes. And now all is quiet. What is happening now? Oh, I know just as surely as if I’d gone to see – she is standing in the middle of the kitchen, facing the rainy window. Her head is bent, with one finger she is tracing something

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– nothing – on the table. It is cold in the kitchen; the gas jumps; the tap drips; it’s a forlorn picture. And nobody is going to come behind her, to take her in his arms, to kiss her soft hair, to lead her to the fire and to rub [her] hands warm again. Nobody is going to call her or to wonder what she is doing out there. And she knows it. And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down, she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could embrace that dark, dark deceit, rather than live – like this. To live like this. . . . I write those words, very carefully, very beautifully. For some reason I feel inclined to sign them, or to write underneath – Trying a New Pen. But seriously, isn’t it staggering to think what may be contained in one innocent-looking little phrase? It tempts me – it tempts me terribly. Scene. The supper-table. My wife has just handed me my tea. I stir it, lift the spoon, idly chase and then carefully capture a speck of tea-leaf, and having brought it ashore, I murmur, quite gently, ‘How long shall we continue to live – like – this?’ And immediately there is that famous ‘blinding flash and deafening roar. Huge pieces of débris (I must say I like débris) are flung into the air . . . and when the dark clouds of smoke have drifted away. . . .’ But this will never happen; I shall never know it. It will be found upon me ‘intact’ as they say. ‘Open my heart and you will see. . . .’2 Why? Ah, there you have me! There is the most difficult question of all to answer. Why do people stay together? Putting aside ‘for the sake of the children’, and ‘the habit of years’ and ‘economic reasons’ as lawyers’ nonsense – it’s not much more – if one really does try to find out why it is that people don’t leave each other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can’t; they are bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bands that bind them except those two. Am I being obscure? Well, the thing itself isn’t so frightfully crystal clear, is it? Let me put it like this. Supposing you are taken, absolutely, first into his confidence and then into hers. Supposing you know all there is to know about the situation. And having given it not only your deepest sympathy but your most honest impartial criticism, you declare, very calmly (but not without the slightest suggestion of relish – for there is – I swear there is – in the very best of us –something that leaps up and cries ‘A-ahh!’ for joy at the thought of destroying), ‘Well, my opinion is that you two people ought to part. You’ll do no earthly good together. Indeed, it seems to me, it’s the duty of either to set the other free.’ What happens then? He – and she – agree. It is their conviction too. You are only saying what they have been thinking all last night. And away they go to act on your advice, immediately. . . . And the next time you hear of them they are still together. You see – you’ve reckoned without the unknown

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quantity – which is their secret relation to each other – and that they can’t disclose even if they want to. Thus far you may tell and no further. Oh, don’t misunderstand me! It need not necessarily have anything to do with their sleeping together. . . . But this brings me to a thought I’ve often half entertained. Which is, that human beings, as we know them, don’t choose each other at all. It is the owner, the second self inhabiting them, who makes the choice for his own particular purposes, and – this may sound absurdly far-fetched – it’s the second self in the other which responds. Dimly – dimly – or so it has seemed to me – we realise this, at any rate to the extent that we realise the hopelessness of trying to escape. So that, what it all amounts to is – if the impermanent selves of my wife and me are happy – tant mieux pour nous – if miserable – tant pis. . . . But I don’t know, I don’t know. And it may be that it’s something entirely individual in me – this sensation (yes, it is even a sensation) of how extraordinarily shell-like we are as we are – little creatures, peering out of the sentry-box at the gate, ogling through our glass case at the entry, wan little servants, who never can say for certain, even, if the master is out or in. . . . The door opens. . . . My wife. She says: ‘I am going to bed.’ And I look up vaguely, and vaguely say: ‘You are going to bed.’ ‘Yes.’ A tiny pause. ‘Don’t forget – will you? – to turn out the gas in the hall.’ And again I repeat: ‘The gas in the hall.’ There was a time – the time before – when this habit of mine (it really has become a habit now – it wasn’t one then) was one of our sweetest jokes together. It began, of course, when, on several occasions, I really was deeply engaged and I didn’t hear. I emerged only to see her shaking her head and laughing at me, ‘You haven’t heard a word!’ ‘No. What did you say?’ Why should she think that so funny and charming? She did; it delighted her. ‘Oh, my darling, it’s so like you! It’s so – so –.’ And I knew she loved me for it – knew she positively looked forward to coming in and disturbing me, and so – as one does – I played up. I was guaranteed to be wrapped away every evening at 10.30 p.m. But now? For some reason I feel it would be crude to stop my performance. It’s simplest to play on. But what is she waiting for to-night? Why doesn’t she go? Why prolong this? She is going. No, her hand on the door-knob, she turns round again, and she says in the most curious, small, breathless voice, ‘You’re not cold?’ Oh, it’s not fair to be as pathetic as that! That was simply damnable. I shudder all over before I manage to bring out a slow ‘No-o,’ while my left hand ruffles the reference pages.

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She is gone; she will not come back again to-night. It is not only I who recognise that; the room changes, too. It relaxes, like an old actor. Slowly the mask is rubbed off; the look of strained attention changes to an air of heavy, sullen brooding. Every line, every fold breathes fatigue. The mirror is quenched; the ash whitens; only my shy lamp burns on. . . . But what a cynical indifference to me it all shows! Or should I perhaps be flattered? No, we understand each other. You know those stories of little children who are suckled by wolves and accepted by the tribe, and how for ever after they move freely among their fleet grey brothers? Something like that has happened to me. But wait – that about the wolves won’t do. Curious! Before I wrote it down, while it was still in my head, I was delighted with it. It seemed to express, and more, to suggest, just what I wanted to say. But written, I can smell the falseness immediately and the . . . source of the smell is in that word fleet. Don’t you agree? Fleet, grey brothers! ‘Fleet.’ A word I never use. When I wrote ‘wolves’ it skimmed across my mind like a shadow and I couldn’t resist it. Tell me! Tell me! Why it is so difficult to write simply – and not only simply but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No fine effects – no bravuras. But just the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it. I light a cigarette, lean back, inhale deeply – and find myself wondering if my wife is asleep. Or is she lying in her cold bed, staring into the dark with those trustful, bewildered eyes? Her eyes are like the eyes of a cow that is being driven along a road. ‘Why am I being driven – what harm have I done?’ But I really am not responsible for that look; it’s her natural expression. One day, when she was turning out a cupboard, she found a little old photograph of herself, taken when she was a girl at school. In her confirmation dress, she explained. And there were the eyes, even then. I remember saying to her: ‘Did you always look so sad?’ Leaning over my shoulder, she laughed lightly. ‘Do I look sad? I think it’s just . . . me.’ And she waited for me to say something about it. But I was marvelling at her courage at having shown it to me at all. It was a hideous photograph! And I wondered again if she realised how plain she was, and comforted herself with the idea that people who loved each other didn’t criticise but accepted everything, or if she really rather liked her appearance and expected me to say something complimentary. Oh, that was base of me! How could I have forgotten all the countless times when I have known her turn away, avoid the light, press her face into my shoulders. And above all, how could I have forgotten the afternoon of our wedding day, when we sat on the green bench in the Botanical Gardens and listened to the band, how, in an interval between two pieces, she suddenly turned to me and said in the voice in which one says: ‘Do you

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think the grass is damp?’ or ‘Do you think it’s time for tea?’ . . . ‘Tell me – do you think physical beauty is so very important?’ I don’t like to think how often she had rehearsed that question. And do you know what I answered? At that moment, as if at my command, there came a great gush of hard bright sound from the band. And I managed to shout above it – cheerfully – ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ Devilish! Wasn’t it? Perhaps not wholly. She looked like the poor patient who hears the surgeon say, ‘It will certainly be necessary to perform the operation – but not now!’ But all this conveys the impression that my wife and I were never really happy together. Not true! Not true! We were marvellously, radiantly happy. We were a model couple. If you had seen us together, any time, any place, if you had followed us, tracked us down, spied, taken us off our guard, you still would have been forced to confess, ‘I have never seen a more ideally suited pair.’ Until last autumn. But really to explain what happened then I should have to go back and back, I should have to dwindle until my tiny hands clutched the bannisters, the stair-rail was higher than my head, and I peered through to watch my father padding softly up and down. There were coloured windows on the landings. As he came up, first his bald head was scarlet; then it was yellow. How frightened I was! And when they put me to bed, it was to dream that we were living inside one of my father’s big coloured bottles. For he was a chemist. I was born nine years after my parents were married; I was an only child, and the effort to produce even me – small, withered bud I must have been – sapped all my mother’s strength. She never left her room again. Bed, sofa, window, she moved between the three. Well I can see her, on the window days, sitting, her cheek in her hand, staring out. Her room looked over the street. Opposite there was a wall plastered with advertisements for travelling shows and circuses and so on. I stand beside her, and we gaze at the slim lady in a red dress hitting a dark gentleman over the head with her parasol, or at the tiger peering through the jungle while the clown, close by, balances a bottle on his nose, or at a little golden-haired girl sitting on the knee of an old black man in a broad cotton hat. . . . She says nothing. On sofa days there is a flannel dressing-gown that I loathe, and a cushion that keeps on slipping off the hard sofa. I pick it up. It has flowers and writing sewn on. I ask what the writing says, and she whispers, ‘Sweet Repose!’ In bed her fingers plait, in tight little plaits, the fringe of the quilt, and her lips are thin. And that is all there is of my mother, except the last queer ‘episode’ that comes later. . . . My father – curled up in the corner on the lid of a round box that held sponges, I stared at my father so long it’s as though his image,

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cut off at the waist by the counter, has remained solid in my memory. Perfectly bald, polished head, shaped like a thin egg, creased creamy cheeks, little bags under the eyes, large pale ears like handles. His manner was discreet, sly, faintly amused and tinged with impudence. Long before I could appreciate it I knew the mixture. . . . I even used to copy him in my corner, bending forward, with a small reproduction of his faint sneer. In the evening his customers were, chiefly, young women; some of them came in every day for his famous fivepenny pick-me-up. Their gaudy looks, their voices, their free ways, fascinated me. I longed to be my father, handing them across the counter the little glass of bluish stuff they tossed off so greedily. God knows what it was made of. Years after I drank some, just to see what it tasted like, and I felt as though someone had given me a terrific blow on the head; I felt stunned. One of those evenings I remember vividly. It was cold; it must have been autumn, for the flaring gas was lighted after my tea. I sat in my corner and my father was mixing something; the shop was empty. Suddenly the bell jangled and a young woman rushed in, crying so loud, sobbing so hard, that it didn’t sound real. She wore a green cape trimmed with fur and a hat with cherries dangling. My father came from behind the screen. But she couldn’t stop herself at first. She stood in the middle of the shop and wrung her hands, and moaned. I’ve never heard such crying since. Presently she managed to gasp out, ‘Give me a pick-me-up.’ Then she drew a long breath, trembled away from him and quavered: ‘I’ve had bad news!’ And in the flaring gaslight I saw the whole side of her face was puffed up and purple; her lip was cut, and her eyelid looked as though it was gummed fast over the wet eye. My father pushed the glass across the counter, and she took her purse out of her stocking and paid him. But she couldn’t drink; clutching the glass, she stared in front of her as if she could not believe what she saw. Each time she put her head back the tears spurted out again. Finally she put the glass down. It was no use. Holding the cape with one hand, she ran in the same way out of the shop again. My father gave no sign. But long after she had gone I crouched in my corner, and when I think back it’s as though I felt my whole body vibrating – ‘So that’s what it is outside,’ I thought. ‘That’s what it’s like out there.’ Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvellous accounts by writers who declare that they remember ‘everything, everything’. I certainly don’t. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard. Now and again, when the sun shone, a careless hand thrust me out on to the windowsill, and a careless hand whipped me in again – and that was all. But

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what happened in the darkness – I wonder? Did one grow? Pale stem . . . timid leaves . . . white, reluctant bud. No wonder I was hated at school. Even the masters shrank from me. I somehow knew that my soft hesitating voice disgusted them. I knew, too, how they turned away from my shocked, staring eyes. I was small and thin, and I smelled of the shop; my nickname was Gregory Powder.3 School was a tin building stuck on the raw hillside. There were dark red streaks like blood in the oozing clay banks of the playground. I hide in the dark passage, where the coats hang, and am discovered there by one of the masters. ‘What are you doing there in the dark?’ His terrible voice kills me; I die before his eyes. I am standing in a ring of thrustout heads; some are grinning, some look greedy, some are spitting. And it is always cold. Big crushed up clouds press across the sky; the rusty water in the school tank is frozen; the bell sounds numb. One day they put a dead bird in my overcoat pocket. I found it just when I reached home. Oh, what a strange flutter there was at my heart, when I drew out that terribly soft, cold little body, with the legs thin as pins and the claws wrung. I sat on the back door step in the yard and put the bird in my cap. The feathers round the neck looked wet and there was a tiny tuft just above the closed eyes that stood up too. How tightly the beak was shut; I could not see the mark where it was divided. I stretched out one wing and touched the soft, secret down underneath; I tried to make the claws curl round my little finger. But I didn’t feel sorry for it – no! I wondered. The smoke from our kitchen chimney poured downwards, and flakes of soot floated – soft, light in the air. Through a big crack in the cement yard a poor-looking plant with dull reddish flowers had pushed its way. I looked at the dead bird again. . . . And that is the first time that I remember singing, rather . . . listening to a silent voice inside a little cage that was me. But what has all this to do with my married happiness? How can all this affect my wife and me? Why – to tell what happened last autumn – do I run all this way back into the Past? The Past – what is the Past? I might say the star-shaped flake of soot on a leaf of the poor-looking plant, and the bird lying on the quilted lining of my cap, and my father’s pestle and my mother’s cushion, belong to it. But that is not to say they are any less mine than they were when I looked upon them with my very eyes, and touched them with these fingers. No, they are more; they are a living part of me. Who am I, in fact, as I sit here at this table, but my own past? If I deny that, I am nothing. And if I were to try and divide my life into childhood, youth, early manhood and so on, it would be a kind of affectation; I should know I was doing it just because of the pleasantly important sensation it gives one to rule lines, and to use green ink for childhood, red for the next stage,

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and purple for the period of adolescence. For, one thing I have learnt, one thing I do believe is, Nothing Happens Suddenly. Yes, that is my religion, I suppose. . . . My mother’s death, for instance. Is it more distant from me to-day than it was then? It is just as close, as strange, as puzzling, and in spite of all the countless times I have recalled the circumstances, I know no more now than I did then whether I dreamed them or whether they really occurred. It happened when I was thirteen and I slept in a little strip of a room on what was called the Half Landing. One night I woke up with a start to see my mother, in her nightgown, without even the hated flannel dressing-gown, sitting on my bed. But the strange thing which frightened me was, she wasn’t looking at me. Her head was bent; the short thin tail of hair lay between her shoulders; her hands were pressed between her knees, and my bed shook; she was shivering. It was the first time I had ever seen her out of her own room. I said, or I think I said, ‘Is that you, mother?’ And as she turned round I saw in the moonlight how queer she looked. Her face looked small – quite different. She looked like one of the boys at the school baths, who sits on a step, shivering just like that, and wants to go in and yet is frightened. ‘Are you awake?’ she said. Her eyes opened; I think she smiled. She leaned towards me. ‘I’ve been poisoned,’ she whispered. ‘Your father’s poisoned me.’ And she nodded. Then, before I could say a word, she was gone, and I thought I heard the door shut. I sat quite still; I couldn’t move. I think I expected something else to happen. For a long time I listened for something; there wasn’t a sound. The candle was by my bed, but I was too frightened to stretch out my hand for the matches. But even while I wondered what I ought to do, even while my heart thumped – everything became confused. I lay down and pulled the blankets round me. I fell asleep, and the next morning my mother was found dead of failure of the heart. Did that visit happen? Was it a dream? Why did she come to tell me? Or why, if she came, did she go away so quickly? And her expression – so joyous under the frightened look – was that real? I believed it fully the afternoon of the funeral, when I saw my father dressed up for his part, hat and all. That tall hat so gleaming black and round was like a cork covered with black sealing-wax, and the rest of my father was awfully like a bottle, with his face for the label – Deadly Poison. It flashed into my mind as I stood opposite him in the hall. And Deadly Poison, or old D.P., was my private name for him from that day. Late, it grows late. I love the night. I love to feel the tide of darkness rising slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over, lifting,

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floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that lies hid in rocky hollows. I love, I love this strange feeling of drifting – whither? After my mother’s death I hated to go to bed. I used to sit on the window-sill, folded up, and watch the sky. It seemed to me the moon moved much faster than the sun. And one big, bright green star I chose for my own. My star! But I never thought of it beckoning to me or twinkling merrily for my sake. Cruel, indifferent, splendid – it burned in the airy night. No matter – it was mine! But growing close up against the window there was a creeper with small, bunched up pink and purple flowers. These did know me. These, when I touched them at night, welcomed my fingers; the little tendrils, so weak, so delicate, knew I would not hurt them. When the wind moved the leaves I felt I understood their shaking. When I came to the window, it seemed to me the flowers said among themselves, ‘The boy is here.’ As the months passed, there was often a light in my father’s room below. And I heard voices and laughter. ‘He’s got some woman with him,’ I thought. But it meant nothing to me. Then the gay voice, the sound of the laughter, gave me the idea it was one of the girls who used to come to the shop in the evenings – and gradually I began to imagine which girl it was. It was the dark one in the red coat and skirt, who once had given me a penny. A merry face stooped over me – warm breath tickled my neck – there were little beads of black on her long lashes, and when she opened her arms to kiss me, there came a marvellous wave of scent! Yes, that was the one. Time passed, and I forgot the moon and my green star and my shy creeper – I came to the window to wait for the light in my father’s window, to listen for the laughing voice, until one night I dozed and I dreamed she came again – again she drew me to her, something soft, scented, warm and merry hung over me like a cloud. But when I tried to see, her eyes only mocked me, her red lips opened and she hissed, ‘Little sneak! Little sneak!’ But not as if she were angry, as if she understood, and her smile somehow was like a rat . . . hateful! The night after, I lighted the candle and sat down at the table instead. By and by, as the flame steadied, there was a small lake of liquid wax, surrounded by a white, smooth wall. I took a pin and made little holes in this wall and then sealed them up faster than the wax could escape. After a time I fancied the candle flame joined in the game; it leapt up, quivered, wagged; it even seemed to laugh. But while I played with the candle and smiled and broke off the tiny white peaks of wax that rose above the wall and floated them on my lake, a feeling of awful dreariness fastened on me – yes, that is the word. It crept up from my knees to my thighs, into my arms; I ached all over with misery. And I felt so strangely that I couldn’t move. Something bound me there by the table – I couldn’t even let the pin drop that I

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held between my finger and thumb. For a moment I came to a stop, as it were. Then the shrivelled case of the bud split and fell, the plant in the cupboard came into flower. ‘Who am I?’ I thought. ‘What is all this?’ And I looked at my room, at the broken bust of the man called Hahnemann4 on top of the cupboard, at my little bed with the pillow like an envelope. I saw it all, but not as I had seen before. . . . Everything lived, but everything. But that was not all. I was equally alive and – it’s the only way I can express it – the barriers were down between us – I had come into my own world! The barriers were down. I had been all my life a little outcast; but until that moment no one had ‘accepted’ me; I had lain in the cupboard – or the cave forlorn. But now – I was taken, I was accepted, claimed. I did not consciously turn away from the world of human beings; I had never known it; but I from that night did beyond words consciously turn towards my silent brothers. . . . Notes U Text: MS NLC. DNOS. Alpers (p. 572) establishes the approximate date of this unfinished story as 23 August 1921, from a letter JMM wrote to Sydney Schiff: K. is in the middle of the longest and last of her stories for her new book which is to be called (I believe, but this is confidential) ‘A Married Man’ and other stories. [. . .] I think it is an amazing piece of work. There is no evidence for why KM failed to complete it. 1. JMM included a cancelled fragment of the story as ‘Silence’, Scrapbook, pp. 190–1: Little children run in and out of this world, never knowing the danger; and sick persons feel it slowly building up about them, trying to thrust its way into the place of the other. That is why they have such a horror of being alone . . . anything to break the silence; and lonely people, rather than face it, walk the streets, gape at shows, drink. Why did she put his chair in the window always? Sun or no sun, she stuck him in the window as if he had been a canary! 2. Robert Browning, De Gustibus, st. 2 (1855). 3. A popular nineteenth-century laxative, its name derived from its Scottish promoter, Dr James Gregory. 4. Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), the German founder of homeopathy.

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•

Second Violin1 A February morning, windy, cold, with chill-looking clouds hurrying over a pale sky and chill snowdrops for sale in the grey streets. People look small and shrunken as they flit by; they look scared as if they were trying to hide inside their coats from something big and brutal. The shop doors are closed, the awnings are furled, and the policemen at the crossings are lead policemen. Huge empty vans shake past with a hollow sound; and there is a smell of soot and wet stone staircases, a raw, grimy smell. . . . Flinging her small scarf over her shoulder again, clasping her violin, Miss Bray darts along to orchestra practice. She is conscious of her cold hands, her cold nose and her colder feet. She can’t feel her toes at all. Her feet are just little slabs of cold, all of a piece, like the feet of china dolls. Winter is a terrible time for thin people – terrible! Why should it hound them down, fasten on them, worry them so? Why not, for a change, take a nip, take a snap at the fat ones who wouldn’t notice? But no! It is sleek, warm, cat-like summer that makes the fat one’s life a misery. Winter is all for bones. . . . Threading her way, like a needle, in and out and along, went Miss Bray, and she thought of nothing but the cold. She had just come out of her kitchen, which was pleasantly snug in the morning, with her gas-fire going for her breakfast and the window closed. She had just drunk three large cups of really boiling tea. Surely, they ought to have warmed her. One always read in books of people going on their way warmed and invigorated by even one cup. And she had had three! How she loved her tea! She was getting fonder and fonder of it. Stirring the cup, Miss Bray looked down. A little fond smile parted her lips, and she breathed tenderly, ‘I love my tea.’ But all the same, in spite of the books, it didn’t keep her warm. Cold! Cold! And now as she turned the corner she took such a gulp of damp, cold air that her eyes filled. Yi-yi-yi, a little dog yelped; he looked as though he’d been hurt. She hadn’t time to look round, but that high, sharp yelping soothed her, was a comfort even. She could have made just that sound herself. And here was the Academy. Miss Bray pressed with all her might against the stiff, sulky door, squeezed through into the vestibule hung with pallid notices and concert programmes, and stumbled up the dusty stairs and along the passage to the dressing-room. Through the open door there came such shrill loud laughter, such high, indifferent

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voices that it sounded like a play going on in there. It was hard to believe people were not laughing and talking like that . . . on purpose. ‘Excuse me – pardon – sorry,’ said Miss Bray, nudging her way in and looking quickly round the dingy little room. Her two friends had not yet come. The First Violins were there; a dreamy, broad-faced girl leaned against her ’cello; two Violas sat on a bench, bent over a music book, and the Harp, a small grey little person, who only came occasionally, leaned against a bench and looked for her pocket in her underskirt. . . . It happened that Alexander and his friend missed the Sunday morning train that all the company travelled by. The only other for them to catch so as to be at their destination in time for the rehearsal on Monday morning was one that left London at midnight. The devil of a time! And the devil of a train, too. It stopped at every station. ‘Must have been carrying the London milk into the country,’ said Alexander bitterly. And his friend who thought that there was no one like him said, ‘That’s good, that is. Extremely good! You could get a laugh for that on the halls, I should say.’ They spent the evening with their landlady in her kitchen. She was fond of Alexander; she thought him quite the gentleman. ‘I’ve a run of three twice, ducky,’ said Ma, ‘a pair of queens make eight, and one for his nob makes nine.’ With an awful hollow groan Alexander, curling his little finger high, pegged nine for Ma. And ‘Wait now, wait now,’ said she, and her quick short little hands snatched at the other cards. ‘My crib, young man!’ She spread them out, leaned back, twitched her shawl, put her head on one side. ‘H’m, not so bad! A flush of four and a pair!’ ‘Betrayed! Betrayed!’ moaned Alexander, bowing his dark head over the cribbage board, ‘and by a woo-man.’ He sighed deeply, shuffled the cards and said to Ma, ‘Cut for me, my love!’ Although of course he was only having his joke like all professional young gentlemen, something in the tone in which he said ‘my love!’ gave Ma quite a turn. Her lips trembled as she cut the cards, she felt a sudden pang as she watched those long slim fingers dealing. Ma and Alexander were playing cribbage in the basement kitchen of number 9 Bolton Street. It was late, it was on eleven, and Sunday night, too – shocking! They sat at the kitchen table that was covered with a worn art serge cloth spotted with candle grease. On one corner of it stood three glasses, three spoons, a saucer of sugar lumps and a bottle of gin. The stove was still alight, and the lid of the kettle had just begun to lift, cautiously, stealthily, as though there was someone inside who wanted to have a peep and pop back again. On the

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horse-hair sofa against the wall by the door, the owner of the third glass lay asleep, gently snoring. Perhaps because he had his back to them, perhaps because his feet poked out from the short overcoat covering him, he looked forlorn, pathetic, and the long fair hair covering his collar looked forlorn and pathetic, too. ‘Well, well,’ said Ma, sighing as she put out two cards and arranged the others in a fan, ‘such is life. I little thought when I saw the last of you this morning that we’d be playing a game together to-night.’ ‘The caprice of destiny,’ murmured Alexander. But, as a matter of fact, it was no joking matter. By some infernal mischance that morning he and Rinaldo had missed the train that all the company travelled by. That was bad enough. But being Sunday, there was no other train until midnight, and as they had a full rehearsal at 10 o’clock on Monday it meant going by that, or getting what the company called the beetroot. But God! what a day it had been. They had left the luggage at the station and come back to Ma’s, back to Alexander’s frowsy bedroom with the bed unmade and water standing about. Rinaldo had spent the whole day sitting on the side of the bed swinging his leg, dropping ash on the floor and saying, ‘I wonder what made us lose that train. Strange we should have lost it. I bet the others are wondering what made us lose it, too.’ And Alexander had stayed by the window gazing into the small garden that was so black with grime even the old lean cat who came and scraped seemed revolted by it, too. It was only after Ma had seen the last of her Sunday visitors. . . . And the friend opposite gazed at him thinking what an attractive mysterious fellow he was. And the train sped on. Flashy and mean – It was spouting with rain yet there was that feeling of spring in the air which makes everything bearable. The big sprays of flowers. What on earth He shot out his legs, flung up his arms, stretched, then sat up with a jerk and felt in his pocket for the yellow packet of cigarettes. As he felt for them a weak strange little smile played on his lips. His friend opposite was watching it. He knew it. Suddenly he raised his head; he looked his friend full in the eyes. ‘That was a queer thing to happen,’ he said softly and meaningly. ‘What?’ asked the friend, curious. Alexander kept him waiting for the answer. Practised liar that he was, the

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Notes U Text: MSS ATL, NLC, KMN, p. 296. Dated ‘16 ix 1921’. DNOS, Scrapbook, pp. 193–4. 1. KM listed on 27 October 1921, ‘Stories for my new book’, and included ‘Second Violin: Alexander and his friend in the train. Spring – spouting rain.’ Another proposed story was ‘One Kiss. Arnold Alexander and his friend in the train. Wet lilac’ (KMN, 2, pp. 296–7). In DNOS, JMM followed the MS of ‘Second Violin’, which is concerned only with Miss Bray, and with the section of Alexander playing cards with his landlady, but omitted the paragraphs of the friends on the train, which he placed as ‘One Kiss’ in Scrapbook, pp. 193–4. The present text includes all fragments. While the Miss Bray and Alexander sections seem unrelated, KM’s own notes, and her titled MS, nevertheless suggest a connection of some kind was intended.

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All Serene! At breakfast that morning they were in wonderfully good spirits. Who was responsible – he or she? It was true she made a point of looking her best in the morning; she thought it part of her duty to him – to their love, even, to wear charming little caps, funny little coats, coloured mules at breakfast time, and to see that the table was perfect as he and she – fastidious pair! – understood the word. But he, too, so fresh, well-groomed and content, contributed his share. . . . She had been down first, sitting at her place when he came in. He leaned over the back of her chair, his hands on her shoulders; he bent down and lightly rubbed his cheek against hers murmuring gently but with just enough pride of proprietorship to make her flush with delight. ‘Give me my tea, love.’ And she lifted the silver teapot that had a silver pear modelled on the lid and gave him his tea. ‘Thanks . . . You know you look awfully well this morning!’ ‘Do I?’ ‘Yes. Do that again. Look at me again. It’s your eyes. They’re like a child’s. I’ve never known anyone have such shining eyes as you.’ ‘Oh, dear!’ She sighed for joy. ‘I do love having sweet things said to me!’ ‘Yes, you do – spoilt child! Shall I give you some of this?’

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‘No, thank you . . . Darling!’ Her hand flew across the table and clasped his hand. ‘Yes?’ But she said nothing only ‘Darling!’ again. There was the look on his face she loved – a kind of sweet jesting. He was pretending he didn’t know what she meant, and yet of course he did know. He was pretending to be feeling ‘Here she is – trust a woman – all ready for a passionate love scene over the breakfast table at nine o’clock in the morning.’ But she wasn’t deceived. She knew he felt just the same as she did. That amused tolerance, that mock despair was part of the ways of men – no more. ‘May I be allowed to use this knife please – or to put it down?’ Really! Mona had never yet got accustomed to her husband’s smile. They had been married for three years. She was in love with him for countless reasons, but apart from them all, a special reason all to itself, was because of his smile. If it hadn’t sounded nonsense she would have said she fell in love at first sight over and over again when he smiled. Other people felt the charm of it, too. Other women – she was certain. Sometimes she thought that even the servants watched for it. . . . ‘Don’t forget we’re going to the theatre to-night.’ ‘Oh, good egg! I had forgotten. It’s ages since we went to a show.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it. I feel quite thrilled.’ ‘Don’t you think we might have a tiny small celebration at dinner?’ (‘Tiny small’ was one of her expressions. But why did it sound so sweet when he used it?) ‘Yes, let’s. You mean champagne?’ And she looked into the distance, she said in a faraway voice: ‘Then I must revise the sweet.’ At that moment the maid came in with the letters. There were four for him, three for her. No, one of hers belonged to him, too, rather a grimy little envelope with a dab of sealing wax on the back. ‘Why do you get all the letters?’ she wailed, handing it across. ‘It’s awfully unfair. I love letters and I never get any.’ ‘Well, I do like that!’ said he. ‘How can you sit there and tell such awful bangers? It’s the rarest thing on earth for me to get a letter in the morning. It’s always you who get those mysterious epistles from girls you were at college with or fading aunts. Here, have half my pear – it’s a beauty.’ She held out her plate. The Rutherfords never shared their letters. It was her idea that they should not. He had been violently opposed to it at first. She couldn’t help laughing; he had so absolutely misunderstood her reason. ‘Good God! my dear. You’re perfectly welcome to open any letters of mine that come to the house – or to read any letters of mine that may be lying about. I think I can promise you . . .’

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‘Oh no, no, darling, that’s not what I mean. I don’t suspect you.’ And she put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him quickly. He looked like an offended boy. ‘But so many of mother’s old friends write to me – confide in me – don’t you know? – tell me things they wouldn’t for the world tell a man. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to them. Don’t you see?’ He gave way at last. But ‘I’m old fashioned,’ he said, and his smile was a little rueful. ‘I like to feel my wife reads my letters.’ ‘My precious dear! I’ve made you unhappy.’ She felt so repentant; she didn’t know quite about what. ‘Of course I’d love to read . . .’ ‘No, no! That’s all right. It’s understood. We’ll keep the bond.’ And they had kept it. He slit open the grimy envelope. He began to read. ‘Damn!’ he said and thrust out his under lip. ‘Why, what is it? Something horrid?’ ‘No – annoying. I shall be late this evening. A man wants to meet me at the office at six o’clock.’ ‘Was that a business letter?’ She sounded surprised. ‘Yes, why?’ ‘It looked so awfully unbusinesslike. The sealing wax and the funny writing – much more like a woman’s than a man’s.’ He laughed. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket and picked up the envelope. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is queer, isn’t it. I shouldn’t have noticed. How quick you are! But it does look exactly like a woman’s hand. That capital R, for instance’ – he flipped the envelope across to her. ‘Yes, and that squiggle underneath. I should have said a rather uneducated female . . .’ ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Hugh, ‘he’s a mining engineer.’ And he got up, began to stretch and then stopped. ‘I say, what a glorious morning! Why do I have to go to the office instead of staying at home and playing with you?’ And he came over to her and locked his arms round her neck. ‘Tell me that, little lovely one.’ ‘Oh,’ she leaned against him, ‘I wish you could. Life’s arranged badly for people like you and me. And now you’re going to be late this evening.’ ‘Never mind,’ said he. ‘All the rest of the time’s ours. Every single bit of it. We shan’t come back from the theatre to find –’ ‘Our porch black with mining engineers.’ She laughed. Did other people – could other people – was it possible that any one before had ever loved as they loved? She squeezed her head against him – she heard his watch ticking – precious watch! ‘What are those purple floppy flowers in my bedroom?’ he murmured.

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‘Petunias.’ ‘You smell exactly like a petunia.’ And he raised her up. She drew towards him. ‘Kiss me,’ said he. It was her habit to sit on the bottom stair and watch his final preparations. Strange it should be so fascinating to see someone brush his hat, choose a pair of gloves, and give a last quick look in the round mirror. But it was the same when he was shaving. Then she loved to curl up on the hard little couch in his dressing room; she was as absorbed, as intent as he. How fantastic he looked, like a pierrot, like a mask, with those dark eyebrows, liquid eyes and the brush of fresh colour on his cheek-bones above the lather! But that was not her chief feeling. No, it was what she felt on the stairs, too. It was, ‘So this is my husband, so this is the man I’ve married, this is the stranger who walked across the lawn that afternoon swinging his tennis racket and bowed, rolling up his shirt-sleeves. This is not only my lover and my husband but my brother, my dearest friend, my playmate, even at times a kind of very perfect father too. And here is where we live. Here is his room – and here is our hall.’ She seemed to be showing their house and him to her other self, the self she had been before she had met him. Deeply admiring, almost awed by so much happiness that other self looked on . . . ‘Will I do?’ He stood there smiling, stroking on his gloves. But although he wouldn’t like her to say the things she often longed to say about his appearance, she did think she detected that morning just the very faintest boyish showing off. Children who know they are admired look like that at their mother. ‘Yes, you’ll do. . . .’ Perhaps at that moment she was proud of him as a mother is proud; she could have blessed him before he went his way. Instead she stood in the porch thinking, ‘There he goes. The man I’ve married. The stranger who came across the lawn.’ The fact was never less wonderful . . . It was never less wonderful, never. It was even more wonderful if anything and the reason was – Mona ran back into the house into the drawing room and sat down to the piano. Oh, why bother about reason – She began to sing, See, love, I bring thee flowers To charm thy pain!

But joy – joy breathless and exulting thrilled in her voice, on the word ‘pain’ her lips parted in such a happy – dreadfully unsympathetic smile that she felt quite ashamed. She stopped playing, she turned round on the piano stool facing the room. How different it

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looked in the morning, how severe and remote. The grey chairs with the fuchsia coloured cushions, the black and gold carpet, the bright green silk curtains might have belonged to anybody. It was like a stage setting with the curtain still down. She had no right to be there – and as she thought that a queer little chill caught her; it seemed so extraordinary that anything, even a chair, should turn away from, should not respond to her happiness. ‘I don’t like this room in the morning, I don’t like it at all,’ she decided, and she ran upstairs to finish dressing. Ran into their big shadowy bedroom . . . and leaned over the starry petunias. Notes U Text: Notebook 28, ATL. Dated September 1921, BJK, p. 315. DNOS.

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By Moonlight1 Dinner was over. There was a whiff of Father’s cigar from the hall and then the door of the smoking room shut, clicked. Mother went rustling to and fro, to and fro – to the dining room door, speaking to Zaidee who was clearing away, giving Hans, who was helping Zaidee, his orders for tomorrow, to the music room speaking to the girls. ‘Francie, darling, run upstairs and get me my cream feather boa will you? My cream one. On the top of the tall wardrobe. Come here, child, how beautifully you have done your hair!’ ‘Really dearest? It was simply thrown up. I was in such a hurry.’ ‘How mysterious it is that if one really tries to get that effect . . .’ ‘Yes, isn’t it!’ There came a soft chain of sound from the music room as though Meg had flung a bright loop and snared the dreaming piano. ‘We’re going to try over Francie’s new song’ said she. ‘This Life is Weary.’2 ‘This Life is Weary,’ cried Mother. ‘Oh dear, is it another tragic one? I can’t understand why all these modern songs are so depressing. It seems so unnecessary. Why can’t one for a change . . .’ ‘Oh, but it’s fascinating!’ said Meg. ‘Listen.’ And softly she played ‘This Life is We-ary.’ ‘You can’t say you like Cupid at the Ferry better than that?’

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‘I do’ said Mother.’ I like songs about primroses and cheerful normal birds and – spring and so on.’ But Francie came floating down the stairs with the feather boa. ‘It wasn’t on the tall wardrobe, you little story,’ said she, winding her Mother up in it. ‘It was among your hats. And then you always pretend to be so tidy and so unlike us.’ ‘If you don’t speak to me with more respect,’ said Mother, ‘I shall go straight off and tell your Father. Thank you, darling child.’ Francie’s little wooden heels tapped over the parquet floor of the music room. ‘Shut the door while we’re practising, will you please, Mother?’ The door shut and the piano seemed to have been waiting until it was alone with them, it burst out so passionately ‘This Life is Weary.’ Silence from the hall. Mother was still, her head bent, turning her rings. What was she thinking of? She looked up. The double doors on to the porch were open and the light in the glass lantern flickered faintly. Dreamily she went over to the hall stand and picked something up. ‘Why’, she murmured aloud, ‘is there always one odd glove. Where does it come from?’ Then she went into the smoking room. Down the passage, through the green baize door that led to the kitchen regions sailed Zaidee with her trays of trembling glass and winking silver and moon white plates. And Hans followed with the finger bowls, with the fruit dishes, and the plates piled with curls of tangerine peel and shavings of pineapple-outside. The last tray was carried; the heavy baize door swung to with a ‘whoof’. There came a faint, ghostly chatter from the kitchen. Very far away it sounded. Where was Laurie? He’d gone straight off to his dark-room after dinner. She wouldn’t disturb him – no! But all the same Laura slid off the landing window-sill, parted the embroidered velvet curtains that hid her so beautifully and coming on to the stairs leaned her arms along the bannisters. What was she to do? ‘This Life is We-ary! A Tear – a Sigh A Love that Chang-es!’

sang Francie. And suddenly from that far away kitchen there sounded a shrill little peal of laughter . . . How much bigger the house felt at night, thought Laura. All the lighted rooms and the passages that were dark and the cupboards and the front and back stairs. As to the cupboard under the stairs – Laura’s eyes widened at the very thought of it . . . She saw herself, suddenly, exploring it with a candle end. There was the old croquet

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set, last year’s goloshes, the shelf of dead lamps, and the buffalo horns tied up with ribbons. It was like exploring a cave. Big – big and empty. No, not empty, exactly, but awfully strange. For though the lights were up everywhere through the open windows the darkness came flowing in from outside. It was the darkness that so gently breathed in the curtains, gathered in pools under the tables, and hid in the folds even of the coats down there in the hall. And the stairs! Stairs at night were utterly different to what they were by day, and people went up and down them quite differently. They were much more important, somehow; they might have led to anywhere. But just as Laura thought that, she had an idea that someone on the top landing was looking down at her. Someone had suddenly appeared from nowhere and with a brilliant round white face was staring! Oh, how awful! And it was shameful, too, to have such ideas at her age. She even decided the face was a chinaman’s before she had time to look up. What nonsense! It was the moon shining through the top landing window. And now there were moonbeam fingers on the bannisters. Laura walked up the stairs slowly but for some reason she tried not to make a sound and looking down at her satin shoes she pretended they were little birds tiptoeing up a dark branch. ‘But now we’re at the top of the tree’ she told them. And she stood with her head bent and her arms by her sides, waiting for someone . . . ‘It’s only because people don’t know she’s there that they don’t come,’ thought Laura. ‘She is wearing a white tulle dress with a black velvet sash – very nice!’ ‘Charming! I say, Laurie, introduce me to your sister!’ And someone came forward stroking his white kid gloves. Laura was so delighted she gave a little jump for joy and forgetting all about her resolve she ran across the landing, down the passage, past the American bathroom and knocked on the dark-room door. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 224–5. Published by JMM, Scrapbook, pp.180–4, and subsequently dated by him, September 1921 in Journal, 1954, p. 262. 1. The MS has the dedication ‘To W.J.D.’, Walter John de la Mare. (An earlier version of this story appears in the same Notebook 25, ATL, KMN, 2, pp. 222–4.) Where the MS breaks off, KM writes: This isn’t bad, but at the same time it’s not good. It’s too easy . . . I wish I could go back to N.Z. for a year. But I can’t possibly just now. I don’t see why not in two years time though. I am stuck beyond words – and again it seems to me that what I am

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doing has no form! I ought to finish my book of stories first and then when it’s gone get down to my novel Karori. Why I should be so passionately determined to disguise this I don’t quite know. But here I lie pretending, as heaven knows how often I have done before, to write. Supposing I were to give up the pretence and really try? Supposing I only wrote a page in a day – it would be a page to the good, and I would at least be training my mind to get into the habit of regular performance. As it is every day sees me further off my goal, and once I had this book finished I’m free to start the real one. And it’s a question of money. But my idea, even of the short story, has changed rather, lately. (KMN, 2, p. 226) 2. ‘This Life is Weary’, for voice and piano, by Ellen Wright (d. 1904), words by Edward Teschemaker, from the French of Leon Montenaecken.

•

The Garden Party1 And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels. Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee. ‘Where do you want the marquee put, mother?’ ‘My dear child, it’s no use asking me. I’m determined to leave everything to you children this year. Forget I am your mother. Treat me as an honoured guest.’ But Meg could not possibly go and supervise the men. She had washed her hair before breakfast, and she sat drinking her coffee in a green turban, with a dark wet curl stamped on each cheek. Jose, the butterfly, always came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.

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‘You’ll have to go, Laura, you’re the artistic one.’ Away Laura flew, still holding her piece of bread-and-butter. It’s so delicious to have an excuse for eating out of doors, and besides, she loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else. Four men in their shirt-sleeves stood grouped together on the garden path. They carried staves covered with rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They looked impressive. Laura wished now that she was not holding that piece of bread-andbutter, but there was nowhere to put it, and she couldn’t possibly throw it away. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them. ‘Good morning,’ she said, copying her mother’s voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl, ‘Oh – er – have you come – is it about the marquee?’ ‘That’s right, miss,’ said the tallest of the men, a lanky, freckled fellow, and he shifted his tool-bag, knocked back his straw hat and smiled down at her. ‘That’s about it.’ His smile was so easy, so friendly, that Laura recovered. What nice eyes he had, small, but such a dark blue! And now she looked at the others, they were smiling too. ‘Cheer up, we won’t bite,’ their smile seemed to say. How very nice workmen were! And what a beautiful morning! She mustn’t mention the morning; she must be business-like. The marquee. ‘Well, what about the lily-lawn? Would that do?’ And she pointed to the lily-lawn with the hand that didn’t hold the bread-and-butter. They turned, they stared in the direction. A little fat chap thrust out his under-lip, and the tall fellow frowned. ‘I don’t fancy it,’ said he. ‘Not conspicuous enough. You see, with a thing like a marquee,’ and he turned to Laura in his easy way, ‘you want to put it somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me.’ Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye. But she did quite follow him. ‘A corner of the tennis-court,’ she suggested. ‘But the band’s going to be in one corner.’ ‘H’m, going to have a band, are you?’ said another of the workmen. He was pale. He had a haggard look as his dark eyes scanned the tennis-court. What was he thinking? ‘Only a very small band,’ said Laura gently. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind so much if the band was quite small. But the tall fellow interrupted.

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‘Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees. Over there. That’ll do fine.’ Against the karakas.2 Then the karaka-trees would be hidden. And they were so lovely, with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit. They were like trees you imagined growing on a desert island, proud, solitary, lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour. Must they be hidden by a marquee? They must. Already the men had shouldered their staves and were making for the place. Only the tall fellow was left. He bent down, pinched a sprig of lavender, put his thumb and forefinger to his nose and snuffed up the smell. When Laura saw the gesture she forgot all about the karakas in her wonder at him caring for things like that – caring for the smell of lavender. How many men that she knew would have done such a thing. Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these. It’s all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped up or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part, she didn’t feel them. Not a bit, not an atom. . . . And now there came the chockchock of wooden hammers. Some one whistled, some one sang out, ‘Are you right there, matey?’ ‘Matey!’ The friendliness of it, the – the – Just to prove how happy she was, just to show the tall fellow how at home she felt, and how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread-and-butter as she stared at the little drawing. She felt just like a work-girl. ‘Laura, Laura, where are you? Telephone, Laura!’ a voice cried from the house. ‘Coming!’ Away she skimmed, over the lawn, up the path, up the steps, across the veranda, and into the porch. In the hall her father and Laurie were brushing their hats ready to go to the office. ‘I say, Laura,’ said Laurie very fast, ‘you might just give a squiz at my coat before this afternoon. See if it wants pressing.’ ‘I will,’ said she. Suddenly she couldn’t stop herself. She ran at Laurie and gave him a small, quick squeeze. ‘Oh, I do love parties, don’t you?’ gasped Laura. ‘Ra-ther,’ said Laurie’s warm, boyish voice, and he squeezed his sister too, and gave her a gentle push. ‘Dash off to the telephone, old girl.’ The telephone. ‘Yes, yes; oh yes. Kitty? Good morning, dear. Come to lunch? Do, dear. Delighted of course. It will only be a very scratch meal – just the sandwich crusts and broken meringue-shells

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and what’s left over. Yes, isn’t a perfect morning? Your white? Oh, I certainly should. One moment – hold the line. Mother’s calling.’ And Laura sat back. ‘What, mother? Can’t hear.’ Mrs Sheridan’s voice floated down the stairs. ‘Tell her to wear that sweet hat she had on last Sunday.’ ‘Mother says you’re to wear that sweet hat you had on last Sunday. Good. One o’clock. Bye-bye.’ Laura put back the receiver, flung her arms over her head, took a deep breath, stretched and let them fall. ‘Huh,’ she sighed, and the moment after the sigh she sat up quickly. She was still, listening. All the doors in the house seemed to be open. The house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices. The green baize door that led to the kitchen regions swung open and shut with a muffled thud. And now there came a long, chuckling absurd sound. It was the heavy piano being moved on its stiff castors. But the air! If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this? Little faint winds were playing chase in at the tops of the windows, out at the doors. And there were two tiny spots of sun, one on the inkpot, one on a silver photograph frame, playing too. Darling little spots. Especially the one on the inkpot lid. It was quite warm. A warm little silver star. She could have kissed it. The front door bell pealed, and there sounded the rustle of Sadie’s print skirt on the stairs. A man’s voice murmured; Sadie answered, careless, ‘I’m sure I don’t know. Wait. I’ll ask Mrs Sheridan.’ ‘What is it, Sadie?’ Laura came into the hall. ‘It’s the florist, Miss Laura.’ It was, indeed. There, just inside the door, stood a wide, shallow tray full of pots of pink lilies. No other kind. Nothing but lilies – canna lilies, big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems. ‘O-oh, Sadie!’ said Laura, and the sound was like a little moan. She crouched down as if to warm herself at that blaze of lilies; she felt they were in her fingers, on her lips, growing in her breast. ‘It’s some mistake,’ she said faintly. ‘Nobody ever ordered so many. Sadie, go and find mother.’ But at that moment Mrs Sheridan joined them. ‘It’s quite right,’ she said calmly. ‘Yes, I ordered them. Aren’t they lovely?’ She pressed Laura’s arm. ‘I was passing the shop yesterday, and I saw them in the window. And I suddenly thought for once in my life I shall have enough canna lilies. The garden party will be a good excuse.’ ‘But I thought you said you didn’t mean to interfere,’ said Laura. Sadie had gone. The florist’s man was still outside at his van. She put her arm round her mother’s neck and gently, very gently, she bit her mother’s ear.

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‘My darling child, you wouldn’t like a logical mother, would you? Don’t do that. Here’s the man.’ He carried more lilies still, another whole tray. ‘Bank them up, just inside the door, on both sides of the porch, please,’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘Don’t you agree, Laura?’ ‘Oh, I do, mother.’ In the drawing-room Meg, Jose and good little Hans had at last succeeded in moving the piano. ‘Now, if we put this chesterfield against the wall and move everything out of the room except the chairs, don’t you think?’ ‘Quite.’ ‘Hans, move these tables into the smoking-room, and bring a sweeper to take these marks off the carpet and – one moment, Hans –’ Jose loved giving orders to the servants, and they loved obeying her. She always made them feel they were taking part in some drama. ‘Tell mother and Miss Laura to come here at once.’ ‘Very good, Miss Jose.’ She turned to Meg. ‘I want to hear what the piano sounds like, just in case I’m asked to sing this afternoon. Let’s try over “This life is Weary”.’ Pom! Ta-ta-ta Tee-ta! The piano burst out so passionately that Jose’s face changed. She clasped her hands. She looked mournfully and enigmatically at her mother and Laura as they came in. This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear – a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear – a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, And then . . . Good-bye!

But at the word ‘Good-bye’, and although the piano sounded more desperate than ever, her face broke into a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile. ‘Aren’t I in good voice, mummy?’ she beamed. This Life is Wee-ary, Hope comes to Die. A Dream – a Wa-kening.

But now Sadie interrupted them. ‘What is it, Sadie?’ ‘If you please, m’m, cook says have you got the flags for the sandwiches?’

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‘The flags for the sandwiches, Sadie?’ echoed Mrs Sheridan dreamily. And the children knew by her face that she hadn’t got them. ‘Let me see.’ And she said to Sadie firmly, ‘Tell cook I’ll let her have them in ten minutes.’ Sadie went. ‘Now, Laura,’ said her mother quickly, ‘come with me into the smoking-room. I’ve got the names somewhere on the back of an envelope. You’ll have to write them out for me. Meg, go upstairs this minute and take that wet thing off your head. Jose, run and finish dressing this instant. Do you hear me, children, or shall I have to tell your father when he comes home to-night? And – and, Jose, pacify cook if you do go into the kitchen, will you? I’m terrified of her this morning.’ The envelope was found at last behind the dining-room clock, though how it had got there Mrs Sheridan could not imagine. ‘One of you children must have stolen it out of my bag, because I remember vividly – cream-cheese and lemon-curd. Have you done that?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Egg and –’ Mrs Sheridan held the envelope away from her. ‘It looks like mice. It can’t be mice, can it?’ ‘Olive, pet,’ said Laura, looking over her shoulder. ‘Yes, of course, olive. What a horrible combination it sounds. Egg and olive.’ They were finished at last, and Laura took them off to the kitchen. She found Jose there pacifying the cook, who did not look at all terrifying. ‘I have never seen such exquisite sandwiches,’ said Jose’s rapturous voice. ‘How many kinds did you say there were, cook? Fifteen?’ ‘Fifteen, Miss Jose.’ ‘Well, cook, I congratulate you.’ Cook swept up crusts with the long sandwich knife, and smiled broadly. ‘Godber’s has come,’ announced Sadie, issuing out of the pantry. She had seen the man pass the window. That meant the cream puffs had come. Godber’s were famous for their cream puffs. Nobody ever thought of making them at home. ‘Bring them in and put them on the table, my girl,’ ordered cook. Sadie brought them in and went back to the door. Of course Laura and Jose were far too grown-up to really care about such things. All the same, they couldn’t help agreeing that the puffs looked very attractive. Very. Cook began arranging them, shaking off the extra icing sugar. ‘Don’t they carry one back to all one’s parties?’ said Laura.

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‘I suppose they do,’ said practical Jose, who never liked to be carried back. ‘They look beautifully light and feathery, I must say.’ ‘Have one each, my dears,’ said cook in her comfortable voice. ‘Yer ma won’t know.’ Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream. ‘Let’s go into the garden, out by the back way,’ suggested Laura. ‘I want to see how the men are getting on with the marquee. They’re such awfully nice men.’ But the back door was blocked by cook, Sadie, Godber’s man and Hans. Something had happened. ‘Tuk-tuk-tuk,’ clucked cook like an agitated hen. Sadie had her hand clapped to her cheek as though she had toothache. Hans’s face was screwed up in the effort to understand. Only Godber’s man seemed to be enjoying himself; it was his story. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’ ‘There’s been a horrible accident,’ said cook. ‘A man killed.’ ‘A man killed! Where? How? When?’ But Godber’s man wasn’t going to have his story snatched from under his very nose. ‘Know those little cottages just below here, miss?’ Know them? Of course, she knew them. ‘Well, there’s a young chap living there, name of Scott, a carter. His horse shied at a traction-engine, corner of Hawke Street this morning, and he was thrown out on the back of his head. Killed.’ ‘Dead!’ Laura stared at Godber’s man. ‘Dead when they picked him up,’ said Godber’s man with relish. ‘They were taking the body home as I come up here.’ And he said to the cook, ‘He’s left a wife and five little ones.’ ‘Jose, come here.’ Laura caught hold of her sister’s sleeve and dragged her through the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door. There she paused and leaned against it. ‘Jose!’ she said, horrified, ‘however are we going to stop everything?’ ‘Stop everything, Laura!’ cried Jose in astonishment. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Stop the garden party, of course. ‘Why did Jose pretend? But Jose was still more amazed. ‘Stop the garden party? My dear Laura, don’t be so absurd. Of course we can’t do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don’t be so extravagant.’ ‘But we can’t possibly have a garden party with a man dead just outside the front gate.’

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That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went. ‘And just think of what the band would sound like to that poor woman,’ said Laura. ‘Oh, Laura!’ Jose began to be seriously annoyed. ‘If you’re going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life. I’m every bit as sorry about it as you. I feel just as sympathetic.’ Her eyes hardened. She looked at her sister just as she used to when they were little and fighting together. ‘You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental,’ she said softly. ‘Drunk! Who said he was drunk?’ Laura turned furiously on Jose. She said just as they had used to say on those occasions, ‘I’m going straight up to tell mother.’ ‘Do, dear,’ cooed Jose. ‘Mother, can I come into your room?’ Laura turned the big glass door-knob. ‘Of course, child. Why, what’s the matter? What’s given you such a colour?’ And Mrs Sheridan turned round from her dressing-table. She was trying on a new hat. ‘Mother, a man’s been killed,’ began Laura. ‘Not in the garden?’ interrupted her mother. ‘No, no!’ ‘Oh, what a fright you gave me!’ Mrs Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees. ‘But listen, mother,’ said Laura. Breathless, half-choking, she told the dreadful story. ‘Of course, we can’t have our party, can we?’ she pleaded. ‘The band and everybody arriving. They’d hear us, mother; they’re nearly neighbours!’ To Laura’s astonishment her mother behaved just like Jose; it was

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harder to bear because she seemed amused. She refused to take Laura seriously. ‘But, my dear child, use your common sense. It’s only by accident we’ve heard of it. If some one had died there normally – and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes – we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?’ Laura had to say ‘yes’ to that, but she felt it was all wrong. She sat down on her mother’s sofa and pinched the cushion frill. ‘Mother, isn’t it really terribly heartless of us?’ she asked. ‘Darling!’ Mrs Sheridan got up and came over to her, carrying the hat. Before Laura could stop her she had popped it on. ‘My child!’ said her mother, ‘the hat is yours. It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me. I have never seen you look such a picture. Look at yourself!’ And she held up her hand-mirror. ‘But, mother,’ Laura began again. She couldn’t look at herself; she turned aside. This time Mrs Sheridan lost patience just as Jose had done. ‘You are being very absurd, Laura,’ she said coldly. ‘People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us. And it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now.’ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Laura, and she walked quickly out of the room into her own bedroom. There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon. Never had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? she thought. And now she hoped her mother was right. Am I being extravagant? Perhaps it was extravagant. Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. I’ll remember it again after the party’s over, she decided. And somehow that seemed quite the best plan. . . . Lunch was over by half-past one. By half-past two they were all ready for the fray. The green-coated band had arrived and was established in a corner of the tennis-court. ‘My dear!’ trilled Kitty Maitland, ‘aren’t they too like frogs for words? You ought to have arranged them round the pond with the conductor in the middle on a leaf.’ Laurie arrived and hailed them on his way to dress. At the sight of him Laura remembered the accident again. She wanted to tell him. If Laurie agreed with the others, then it was bound to be all right. And she followed him into the hall. ‘Laurie!’ ‘Hallo!’ He was half-way upstairs, but when he turned round and saw Laura he suddenly puffed out his cheeks and goggled his eyes at

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her. ‘My word, Laura! You do look stunning,’ said Laurie. ‘What an absolutely topping hat!’ Laura said faintly ‘Is it?’ and smiled up at Laurie, and didn’t tell him after all. Soon after that people began coming in streams. The band struck up; the hired waiters ran from the house to the marquee. Wherever you looked there were couples strolling, bending to the flowers, greeting, moving on over the lawn. They were like bright birds that had alighted in the Sheridans’ garden for this one afternoon, on their way to – where? Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who all are happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes. ‘Darling Laura, how well you look!’ ‘What a becoming hat, child!’ ‘Laura, you look quite Spanish. I’ve never seen you look so striking.’ And Laura, glowing, answered softly, ‘Have you had tea? Won’t you have an ice? The passion-fruit ices really are rather special.’ She ran to her father and begged him. ‘Daddy darling, can’t the band have something to drink?’ And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed. ‘Never a more delightful garden party. . . .’ ‘The greatest success. . . .’ ‘Quite the most. . . .’ Laura helped her mother with the good-byes. They stood side by side in the porch till it was all over. ‘All over, all over, thank heaven,’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘Round up the others, Laura. Let’s go and have some fresh coffee. I’m exhausted. Yes, it’s been very successful. But oh, these parties, these parties! Why will you children insist on giving parties!’ And they all of them sat down in the deserted marquee. ‘Have a sandwich, daddy dear. I wrote the flag.’ ‘Thanks.’ Mr Sheridan took a bite and the sandwich was gone. He took another. ‘I suppose you didn’t hear of a beastly accident that happened to-day?’ he said. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs Sheridan, holding up her hand, ‘we did. It nearly ruined the party. Laura insisted we should put it off.’ ‘Oh, mother!’ Laura didn’t want to be teased about it. ‘It was a horrible affair all the same,’ said Mr Sheridan. ‘The chap was married too. Lived just below in the lane, and leaves a wife and half a dozen kiddies, so they say.’ An awkward little silence fell. Mrs Sheridan fidgeted with her cup. Really, it was very tactless of father. . . . Suddenly she looked up. There on the table were all those sandwiches, cakes, puffs, all un-eaten, all going to be wasted. She had one of her brilliant ideas.

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‘I know,’ she said.’ Let’s make up a basket. Let’s send that poor creature some of this perfectly good food. At any rate, it will be the greatest treat for the children. Don’t you agree? And she’s sure to have neighbours calling in and so on. What a point to have it all ready prepared. Laura!’ She jumped up. ‘Get me the big basket out of the stairs cupboard.’ ‘But, mother, do you really think it’s a good idea?’ said Laura. Again, how curious, she seemed to be different from them all. To take scraps from their party. Would the poor woman really like that? ‘Of course! What’s the matter with you to-day? An hour or two ago you were insisting on us being sympathetic, and now –’ Oh well! Laura ran for the basket. It was filled, it was heaped by her mother. ‘Take it yourself, darling,’ said she. ‘Run down just as you are. No, wait, take the arum lilies too. People of that class are so impressed by arum lilies.’ ‘The stems will ruin her lace frock,’ said practical Jose. So they would. Just in time. ‘Only the basket, then. And, Laura!’ – her mother followed her out of the marquee – ‘don’t on any account –’ ‘What mother?’ No, better not put such ideas into the child’s head! ‘Nothing! Run along.’ It was just growing dusky as Laura shut their garden gates. A big dog ran by like a shadow. The road gleamed white, and down below in the hollow the little cottages were in deep shade. How quiet it seemed after the afternoon. Here she was going down the hill to somewhere where a man lay dead, and she couldn’t realize it. Why couldn’t she? She stopped a minute. And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else. How strange! She looked up at the pale sky, and all she thought was, ‘Yes, it was the most successful party.’ Now the broad road was crossed. The lane began, smoky and dark. Women in shawls and men’s tweed caps hurried by. Men hung over the palings; the children played in the doorways. A low hum came from the mean little cottages. In some of them there was a flicker of light, and a shadow, crab-like, moved across the window. Laura bent her head and hurried on. She wished now she had put on a coat. How her frock shone! And the big hat with the velvet streamer – if only it was another hat! Were the people looking at her? They must be. It was a mistake to have come; she knew all along it was a mistake. Should she go back even now? No, too late. This was the house. It must be. A dark knot of

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people stood outside. Beside the gate an old, old woman with a crutch sat in a chair, watching. She had her feet on a newspaper. The voices stopped as Laura drew near. The group parted. It was as though she was expected, as though they had known she was coming here. Laura was terribly nervous. Tossing the velvet ribbon over her shoulder, she said to a woman standing by, ‘Is this Mrs Scott’s house?’ and the woman, smiling queerly, said, ‘It is, my lass.’ Oh, to be away from this! She actually said, ‘Help me, God,’ as she walked up the tiny path and knocked. To be away from those staring eyes, or to be covered up in anything, one of those women’s shawls even. I’ll just leave the basket and go, she decided. I shan’t even wait for it to be emptied. Then the door opened. A little woman in black showed in the gloom. Laura said, ‘Are you Mrs Scott?’ But to her horror the woman answered, ‘Walk in, please, miss,’ and she was shut in the passage. ‘No,’ said Laura, ‘I don’t want to come in. I only want to leave this basket. Mother sent –’ The little woman in the gloomy passage seemed not to have heard her. ‘Step this way, please, miss,’ she said in an oily voice, and Laura followed her. She found herself in a wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp. There was a woman sitting before the fire. ‘Em,’ said the little creature who had let her in. ‘Em ! It’s a young lady.’ She turned to Laura. She said meaningly, ‘I’m ’er sister, miss. You’ll excuse ’er, won’t you?’ ‘Oh, but of course!’ said Laura.’ Please, please don’t disturb her. I – I only want to leave –’ But at that moment the woman at the fire turned round. Her face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible. She seemed as though she couldn’t understand why Laura was there. What did it mean? Why was this stranger standing in the kitchen with a basket? What was it all about? And the poor face puckered up again. ‘All right, my dear,’ said the other. ‘I’ll thenk the young lady.’ And again she began, ‘You’ll excuse her, miss, I’m sure,’ and her face, swollen too, tried an oily smile. Laura only wanted to get out, to get away. She was back in the passage. The door opened. She walked straight through into the bedroom where the dead man was lying. ‘You’d like a look at ’im, wouldn’t you?’ said Em’s sister, and she brushed past Laura over to the bed. ‘Don’t be afraid, my lass,’ – and now her voice sounded fond and sly, and fondly she drew down the

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sheet – ‘’e looks a picture. There’s nothing to show. Come along, my dear.’ Laura came. There lay a young man, fast asleep – sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy . . . happy. . . . All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content. But all the same you had to cry, and she couldn’t go out of the room without saying something to him. Laura gave a loud childish sob. ‘Forgive my hat,’ she said. And this time she didn’t wait for Em’s sister. She found her way out of the door, down the path, past all those dark people. At the corner of the lane she met Laurie. He stepped out of the shadow. ‘Is that you, Laura?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Mother was getting anxious. Was it all right?’ ‘Yes, quite. Oh, Laurie!’ She took his arm, she pressed up against him. ‘I say, you’re not crying, are you?’ asked her brother. Laura shook her head. She was. Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said in his warm, loving voice. ‘Was it awful?’ ‘No,’ sobbed Laura. ‘It was simply marvellous. But, Laurie –’ She stopped, she looked at her brother. ‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life –’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie. Notes Text: GPOS. An edited version was published in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in three parts: 4 February 1922, pp. 9–10; 11 February 1922, p. 10; 18 February 1922, pp. 16–17. 1. KM wrote to her agent, J. B. Pinker, on 10 October 1921, What I want very much to do, if its possible, is to add a story Im finishing called The Garden Party & to have the book called by that rather

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the doll’s house than At the Bay. I feel the book needs one more substantial story & a title that is solid. (CLKM, 4, p. 293)

She completed the story on her birthday, 14 October, and the NLC MS has at its end the judgement, ‘This is a moderately successful story – and that’s all. It’s somehow, in the episode at the lane, scamped’ (KMN, 2, p. 294). She wrote too of how difficult it had been to start on something new after ‘At the Bay’. But I could not get away from the sound of the sea and Beryl fanning her hair at the window. These things would not die down. But now I am not at all sure about that story. It seems to me it’s a little ‘wispy’ – not what it might have been. The G.P. is better. But that is not good enough either. (KMN, 2, p. 290) She explained something of ‘what I tried to convey in The Garden Party’ in writing to William Gerhardi on 11 March 1922, about The diversity of life and how we try to fit in everything, Death included. That is bewildering for a person Laura’s age. She feels things ought to happen differently. First one and then another. But life isn’t like that. We haven’t the ordering of it. Laura says ‘But all these things must not happen at once’ and Life answers ‘Why not? How are they divided from each other.’ And they do all happen, it is inevitable. And it seems to me that there is beauty in that inevitability. (CLKM, 5, p. 101) The story, with its names Jose, Laurie and Meg taken from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), is set in the large family house at 75 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, where the Beauchamps lived from late 1894 until the sisters sailed to England in January 1903. 2. Corynocarpus laevigatus, a coastal tree with broad glossy leaves and orange-yellow berries.

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The Doll’s House1 When dear old Mrs Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll’s house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door. No

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harm could come to it; it was summer. And perhaps the smell of paint would have gone off by the time it had to be taken in. For, really, the smell of paint coming from that doll’s house (‘Sweet of old Mrs Hay, of course; most sweet and generous!’) – but the smell of paint was quite enough to make anyone seriously ill, in Aunt Beryl’s opinion. Even before the sacking was taken off. And when it was. . . . There stood the doll’s house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge. But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness. ‘Open it quickly, someone!’ The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat prised it open with his penknife, and the whole house-front swung back, and – there you were, gazing at one and the same moment into the drawing-room and dining-room, the kitchen and two bedrooms. That is the way for a house to open! Why don’t all houses open like that? How much more exciting than peering through the slit of a door into a mean little hall with a hatstand and two umbrellas! That is – isn’t it? – what you long to know about a house when you put your hand on the knocker. Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . . . ‘O-oh!’ The Burnell children sounded as though they were in despair: It was too marvellous; it was too much for them. They had never seen anything like it in their lives. All the rooms were papered. There were pictures on the walls, painted on the paper, with gold frames complete. Red carpet covered all the floors except the kitchen; red plush chairs in the drawing-room, green in the dining-room; tables, beds with real bedclothes, a cradle, a stove, a dresser with tiny plates and one big jug. But what Kezia liked more than anything, what she liked frightfully, was the lamp. It stood in the middle of the dining-room table, an exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe. It was even filled all ready for lighting, though of course you couldn’t light it. But there was something inside that looked like oil and that moved when you shook it. The father and mother dolls, who sprawled very stiff as though they had fainted in the drawing-room, and their two little children asleep upstairs, were really too big for the doll’s house. They didn’t look as though they belonged. But the lamp was perfect. It seemed to smile at Kezia, to say, ‘I live here.’ The lamp was real.

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The Burnell children could hardly walk to school fast enough the next morning. They burned to tell everybody, to describe, too – well – to boast about their doll’s house before the school-bell rang. ‘I’m to tell,’ said Isabel, ‘because I’m the eldest. And you two can join in after. But I’m to tell first.’ There was nothing to answer. Isabel was bossy, but she was always right, and Lottie and Kezia knew too well the powers that went with being eldest. They brushed through the thick buttercups at the road edge and said nothing. ‘And I’m to choose who’s to come and see it first. Mother said I might.’ For it had been arranged that while the doll’s house stood in the courtyard they might ask the girls at school, two at a time, to come and look. Not to stay to tea, of course, or to come traipsing through the house. But just to stand quietly in the courtyard while Isabel pointed out the beauties, and Lottie and Kezia looked pleased. . . . But hurry as they might, by the time they had reached the tarred palings of the boys’ playground the bell had begun to jangle. They only just had time to whip off their hats and fall into line before the roll was called. Never mind. Isabel tried to make up for it by looking very important and mysterious and by whispering behind her hand to the girls near her, ‘Got something to tell you at playtime.’ Playtime came and Isabel was surrounded. The girls of her class nearly fought to put their arms round her, to walk away with her, to beam flatteringly, to be her special friend. She held quite a court under the huge pine trees at the side of the playground. Nudging, giggling together, the little girls pressed up close. And the only two who stayed outside the ring were the two who were always outside, the little Kelveys. They knew better than to come anywhere near the Burnells. For the fact was, the school the Burnell children went to was not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen if there had been any choice. But there was none. It was the only school for miles. And the consequence was all the children of the neighbourhood, the Judge’s little girls, the doctor’s daughters, the store-keeper’s children, the milkman’s, were forced to mix together. Not to speak of there being an equal number of rude, rough little boys as well. But the line had to be drawn somewhere. It was drawn at the Kelveys. Many of the children, including the Burnells, were not allowed even to speak to them. They walked past the Kelveys with their heads in the air, and as they set the fashion in all matters of behaviour, the Kelveys were shunned by everybody. Even the teacher had a special voice for them, and a special smile for the other children when Lil Kelvey came up to her desk with a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers. They were the daughters of a spry, hard-working little washer-

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woman, who went about from house to house by the day. This was awful enough. But where was Mr Kelvey? Nobody knew for certain. But everybody said he was in prison. So they were the daughters of a washerwoman and a jailbird. Very nice company for other people’s children! And they looked it. Why Mrs Kelvey made them so conspicuous was hard to understand. The truth was they were dressed in ‘bits’ given to her by the people for whom she worked. Lil, for instance, who was a stout, plain child, with big freckles, came to school in a dress made from a green art-serge table-cloth of the Burnells’, with red plush sleeves from the Logans’ curtains. Her hat, perched on top of her high forehead, was a grown-up woman’s hat, once the property of Miss Lecky, the postmistress. It was turned up at the back and trimmed with a large scarlet quill. What a little guy she looked! It was impossible not to laugh. And her little sister, our Else, wore a long white dress, rather like a nightgown, and a pair of little boy’s boots. But whatever our Else wore she would have looked strange. She was a tiny wishbone of a child, with cropped hair and enormous solemn eyes – a little white owl. Nobody had ever seen her smile; she scarcely ever spoke. She went through life holding on to Lil, with a piece of Lil’s skirt screwed up in her hand. Where Lil went, our Else followed. In the playground, on the road going to and from school, there was Lil marching in front and our Else holding on behind. Only when she wanted anything, or when she was out of breath, our Else gave Lil a tug, a twitch, and Lil stopped and turned round. The Kelveys never failed to understand each other. Now they hovered at the edge; you couldn’t stop them listening. When the little girls turned round and sneered, Lil, as usual, gave her silly shamefaced smile, but our Else only looked. And Isabel’s voice, so very proud, went on telling. The carpet made a great sensation, but so did the beds with real bedclothes, and the stove with an oven door. When she finished Kezia broke in. ‘You’ve forgotten the lamp, Isabel.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Isabel, ‘and there’s a teeny little lamp, all made of yellow glass, with a white globe that stands on the dining-room table. You couldn’t tell it from a real one.’ ‘The lamp’s best of all,’ cried Kezia. She thought Isabel wasn’t making half enough of the little lamp. But nobody paid any attention. Isabel was choosing the two who were to come back with them that afternoon and see it. She chose Emmie Cole and Lena Logan. But when the others knew they were all to have a chance, they couldn’t be nice enough to Isabel. One by one they put their arms round Isabel’s waist and walked her off. They had something to whisper to her, a secret. ‘Isabel’s my friend.’

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Only the little Kelveys moved away forgotten; there was nothing more for them to hear. Days passed, and as more children saw the doll’s house, the fame of it spread. It became the one subject, the rage. The one question was, ‘Have you seen Burnells’ doll’s house? Oh, ain’t it lovely!’ ‘Haven’t you seen it? Oh, I say!’ Even the dinner hour was given up to talking about it. The little girls sat under the pines eating their thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter. While always, as near as they could get, sat the Kelveys, our Else holding on to Lil, listening too, while they chewed their jam sandwiches out of a newspaper soaked with large red blobs. . . . ‘Mother,’ said Kezia, ‘can’t I ask the Kelveys just once?’ ‘Certainly not, Kezia.’ ‘But why not?’ ‘Run away, Kezia; you know quite well why not.’ At last everybody had seen it except them. On that day the subject rather flagged. It was the dinner hour. The children stood together under the pine trees, and suddenly, as they looked at the Kelveys eating out of their paper, always by themselves, always listening, they wanted to be horrid to them. Emmie Cole started the whisper. ‘Lil Kelvey’s going to be a servant when she grows up.’ ‘O-oh, how awful!’ said Isabel Burnell, and she made eyes at Emmie. Emmie swallowed in a very meaning way and nodded to Isabel as she’d seen her mother do on those occasions. ‘It’s true – it’s true – it’s true,’ she said. Then Lena Logan’s little eyes snapped. ‘Shall I ask her?’ she whispered. ‘Bet you don’t,’ said Jessie May. ‘Pooh, I’m not frightened,’ said Lena. Suddenly she gave a little squeal and danced in front of the other girls. ‘Watch! Watch me! Watch me now!’ said Lena. And sliding, gliding, dragging one foot, giggling behind her hand, Lena went over to the Kelveys. Lil looked up from her dinner. She wrapped the rest quickly away. Our Else stopped chewing. What was coming now? ‘Is it true you’re going to be a servant when you grow up, Lil Kelvey?’ shrilled Lena. Dead silence. But instead of answering, Lil only gave her silly shamefaced smile. She didn’t seem to mind the question at all. What a sell for Lena! The girls began to titter.

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Lena couldn’t stand that. She put her hands on her hips; she shot forward. ‘Yah, yer father’s in prison!’ she hissed, spitefully. This was such a marvellous thing to have said that the little girls rushed away in a body, deeply, deeply excited, wild with joy. Someone found a long rope, and they began skipping. And never did they skip so high, run in and out so fast, or do such daring things as on that morning. In the afternoon Pat called for the Burnell children with the buggy and they drove home. There were visitors. Isabel and Lottie, who liked visitors, went upstairs to change their pinafores. But Kezia thieved out at the back. Nobody was about; she began to swing on the big white gates of the courtyard. Presently, looking along the road, she saw two little dots. They grew bigger, they were coming towards her. Now she could see that one was in front and one close behind. Now she could see that they were the Kelveys. Kezia stopped swinging. She slipped off the gate as if she was going to run away. Then she hesitated. The Kelveys came nearer, and beside them walked their shadows, very long, stretching right across the road with their heads in the buttercups. Kezia clambered back on the gate; she had made up her mind; she swung out. ‘Hullo,’ she said to the passing Kelveys. They were so astounded that they stopped. Lil gave her silly smile. Our Else stared. ‘You can come and see our doll’s house if you want to,’ said Kezia, and she dragged one toe on the ground. But at that Lil turned red and shook her head quickly. ‘Why not?’ asked Kezia. Lil gasped, then she said, ‘Your ma told our ma you wasn’t to speak to us.’ ‘Oh, well,’ said Kezia. She didn’t know what to reply. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can come and see our doll’s house all the same. Come on. Nobody’s looking.’ But Lil shook her head still harder. ‘Don’t you want to?’ asked Kezia. Suddenly there was a twitch, a tug at Lil’s skirt. She turned round. Our Else was looking at her with big imploring eyes; she was frowning; she wanted to go. For a moment Lil looked at our Else very doubtfully. But then our Else twitched her skirt again. She started forward. Kezia led the way. Like two little stray cats they followed across the courtyard to where the doll’s house stood. ‘There it is,’ said Kezia. There was a pause. Lil breathed loudly, almost snorted; our Else was still as a stone. ‘I’ll open it for you,’ said Kezia kindly. She undid the hook and they looked inside.

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‘There’s the drawing-room and the dining-room, and that’s the –’ ‘Kezia!’ Oh, what a start they gave! ‘Kezia!’ It was Aunt Beryl’s voice. They turned round. At the back door stood Aunt Beryl, staring as if she couldn’t believe what she saw. ‘How dare you ask the little Kelveys into the courtyard?’ said her cold, furious voice. ‘You know as well as I do you’re not allowed to talk to them. Run away, children, run away at once. And don’t come back again,’ said Aunt Beryl. And she stepped into the yard and shooed them out as if they were chickens. ‘Off you go immediately!’ she called, cold and proud. They did not need telling twice. Burning with shame, shrinking together, Lil huddling along like her mother, our Else dazed, somehow they crossed the big courtyard and squeezed through the white gate. ‘Wicked, disobedient little girl!’ said Aunt Beryl bitterly to Kezia, and she slammed the doll’s house to. The afternoon had been awful. A letter had come from Willie Brent, a terrifying, threatening letter, saying if she did not meet him that evening in Pulman’s Bush, he’d come to the front door and ask the reason why! But now that she had frightened those little rats of Kelveys and given Kezia a good scolding, her heart felt lighter. That ghastly pressure was gone. She went back to the house humming. When the Kelveys were well out of sight of Burnells’, they sat down to rest on a big red drainpipe by the side of the road. Lil’s cheeks were still burning; she took off the hat with the quill and held it on her knee. Dreamily they looked over the hay paddocks, past the creek, to the group of wattles where Logans’ cows stood waiting to be milked. What were their thoughts? Presently our Else nudged up close to her sister. By now she had forgotten the cross lady. She put out a finger and stroked her sister’s quill; she smiled her rare smile. ‘I seen the little lamp,’ she said, softly. Then both were silent once more. Notes Text: Nation and the Athenaeum, 30: 19, 4 February 1922. DNOS. 1. Alpers (p. 573), gives a detailed account of the stages of composition, and KM’s own dating, ‘October 24/30 1921’. Before settling on her title, she had variously considered ‘The Washerwoman’s Children’ and ‘At Karori’. The little lamp was an image that had fascinated KM for some years, while the Kelveys were based on an actual family she had known in Karori.

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Mr Kelvie was the scandal of the neighbourhood. He drove a fish cart, when he was out of prison or out of the hospital. For he was such a hopeless drunkard that the wonder is he could sit in the cart at all – he never did for long. . . . Happily there were only two little Kelveys. (KMN, 2, p. 297)

•

Six Years After1 It was not the afternoon to be on deck – on the contrary. It was exactly the afternoon when there is no snugger place than a warm cabin, a warm bunk. Tucked up with a rug, a hot-water bottle and a piping hot cup of tea she would not have minded the weather in the least. But he – hated cabins, hated to be inside anywhere more than was absolutely necessary. He had a passion for keeping, as he called it, above board, especially when he was travelling. And it wasn’t surprising, considering the enormous amount of time he spent cooped up in the office. So, when he rushed away from her as soon as they got on board and came back five minutes later, to say he had secured two deck chairs on the lee side and the steward was undoing the rugs, her voice through the high sealskin collar murmured ‘Good’; and because he was looking at her, she smiled with bright eyes and blinked quickly, as if to say, ‘Yes, perfectly all right – absolutely.’ And she meant it. ‘Then we’d better –’ said he, and he tucked her hand inside his arm and began to rush her off to where their chairs stood. But she just had time to breathe, ‘Not so fast, Daddy, please,’ when he remembered too and slowed down. Strange! They had been married twenty-eight years, and it still was an effort to him, each time, to adapt his pace to hers. ‘Not cold, are you?’ he asked, glancing sideways at her. Her little nose, geranium pink above the dark fur, was answer enough. But she thrust her free hand into the velvet pocket of her jacket and murmured gaily, ‘I shall be glad of my rug.’ He pressed her tighter to his side – a quick, nervous pressure. He knew, of course, that she ought to be down in the cabin; he knew that it was no afternoon for her to be sitting on deck, in this cold and raw mist, lee side or no lee side, rugs or no rugs, and he realised how she must be hating it. But he had come to believe that it really was easier for her to make these sacrifices than it was for him. Take their present case, for instance. If he had gone down to the cabin with

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her, he would have been miserable the whole time, and he couldn’t have helped showing it. At any rate she would have found him out. Whereas, having made up her mind to fall in with his ideas, he would have betted anybody she would even go so far as to enjoy the experience. Not because she was without personality of her own. Good Lord! She was absolutely brimming with it. But because . . . but here his thoughts always stopped. Here they always felt the need of a cigar, as it were. And, looking at the cigar-tip, his fine blue eyes narrowed: it was a law of marriage, he supposed. . . . All the same, he always felt guilty when he asked these sacrifices of her. That was what that quick pressure meant. His being said to her being: ‘You do understand, don’t you?’ and there was an answering tremor of her fingers, ‘I understand.’ Certainly, the steward – good little chap – had done all in his power to make them comfortable. He had put up their chairs in whatever warmth there was and out of the smell. She did hope he would be tipped adequately. It was on occasions like this (and her life seemed to be full of such occasions) that she wished it was the woman who controlled the purse. ‘Thank you, steward. That will do beautifully.’ ‘Why are stewards so often delicate-looking?’ she wondered, as her feet were tucked under. ‘This poor little chap looks as though he’d got a chest, and yet one would have thought . . . the sea air. . . .’ The button of the pigskin purse was undone. The tray was tilted. She saw sixpences, shillings, halfcrowns. ‘I should give him five shillings,’ she decided, ‘and tell him to buy himself a good nourishing –’ He was given a shilling, and he touched his cap and seemed genuinely grateful. Well, it might have been worse. It might have been sixpence. It might, indeed. For at that moment Father turned towards her and said, half-apologetically, stuffing the purse back, ‘I gave him a shilling. I think it was worth it, don’t you?’ ‘Oh, quite! Every bit!’ said she. It is extraordinary how peaceful it feels on a little steamer once the bustle of leaving port is over. In a quarter of an hour one might have been at sea for days. There is something almost touching, childish, in the way people submit themselves to the new conditions. They go to bed in the early afternoon, they shut their eyes and ‘it’s night’ like little children who turn the table upside down and cover themselves with the tablecloth. And those who remain on deck – they seem to be always the same, those few hardened men travellers – pause, light their pipes, stamp softly, gaze out to sea, and their voices are subdued as they walk up and down. The long-legged little girl chases after

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the red-cheeked boy, but soon both are captured; and the old sailor, swinging an unlighted lantern, passes and disappears. . . . He lay back, the rug up to his chin and she saw he was breathing deeply. Sea air! If anyone believed in sea air, it was he. He had the strongest faith in its tonic qualities. But the great thing was, according to him, to fill the lungs with it the moment you came on board. Otherwise, the sheer strength of it was enough to give you a chill. . . . She gave a small chuckle, and he turned to her quickly. ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s your cap,’ she said. ‘I never can get used to you in a cap. You look such a thorough burglar.’ ‘Well, what the deuce am I to wear?’ He shot up one grey eyebrow and wrinkled his nose. ‘It’s a very good cap, too. Very fine specimen of its kind. It’s got a very rich white satin lining.’ He paused. He declaimed, as he had hundreds of times before at this stage, ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore.’2 But she was thinking he really was childishly proud of the white satin lining. He would like to have taken off his cap and made her feel it. ‘Feel the quality!’ How often had she rubbed between finger and thumb his coat, his shirt cuff, tie, sock, linen handkerchief, while he said that. She slipped down more deeply into her chair. And the little steamer pressed on, pitching gently, over the grey, unbroken, gently-moving water, that was veiled with slanting rain. Far out, as though idly, listlessly, gulls were flying. Now they settled on the waves, now they beat up into the rainy air, and shone against the pale sky like the lights within a pearl. They looked cold and lonely. How lonely it will be when we have passed by, she thought. There will be nothing but the waves and those birds and rain falling. She gazed through the rust-spotted railing along which big drops trembled, until suddenly she shut her lips. It was as if a warning voice inside her had said, ‘Don’t look!’ ‘No, I won’t,’ she decided. ‘It’s too depressing, much too depressing.’ But immediately, she opened her eyes and looked again. Lonely birds, water lifting, white pale sky – how were they changed? And it seemed to her there was a presence far out there, between the sky and the water; someone very desolate and longing watched them pass and cried as if to stop them – but cried to her alone. ‘Mother!’ ‘Don’t leave me,’ sounded in the cry. ‘Don’t forget me! You are forgetting me, you know you are!’ And it was as though from her own breast there came the sound of childish weeping. ‘My son – my precious child – it isn’t true!’ Sh! How was it possible that she was sitting there on that quiet

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steamer beside Father and at the same time she was hushing and holding a little slender boy – so pale – who had just waked out of a dreadful dream? ‘I dreamed I was in a wood – somewhere far away from everybody – and I was lying down and a great blackberry vine grew over me. And I called and called to you – and you wouldn’t come – you wouldn’t come – so I had to lie there for ever.’ What a terrible dream! He had always had terrible dreams. How often, years ago, when he was small, she had made some excuse and escaped from their friends in the dining-room or the drawing-room to come to the foot of the stairs and listen. ‘Mother!’ And when he was asleep, his dream had journeyed with her back into the circle of lamplight; it had taken its place there like a ghost. And now – Far more often – at all times, in all places, like now, for instance – she never settled down, she was never off her guard for a moment but she heard him. He wanted her. ‘I am coming as fast as I can! As fast as I can!’ But the dark stairs have no ending, and the worst dream of all – the one that is always the same – goes for ever and ever uncomforted. This is anguish! How is it to be borne? Still, it is not the idea of her suffering which is unbearable – it is his. Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been – Nothing! . . . But softly without a sound the dark curtain has rolled down. There is no more to come. That is the end of the play. But it can’t end like that – so suddenly. There must be more. No, it’s cold, it’s still. There is nothing to be gained by waiting. But – did he go back again? Or, when the war was over, did he come home for good? Surely, he will marry – later on – not for several years. Surely, one day I shall remember his wedding and my first grandchild – a beautiful dark-haired boy born in the early morning – a lovely morning – spring! ‘Oh, Mother, it’s not fair to me to put these ideas into my head! Stop, Mother, stop! When I think of all I have missed, I can’t bear it.’ ‘I can’t bear it!’ She sits up breathing the words and tosses the dark rug away. It is colder than ever, and now the dusk is falling, falling like ash upon the pallid water. And the little steamer, quietly determined, throbbed on, pressed on, as if at the end of the journey there waited. . . . [Fragment of earlier draft] And then finally there is his first leave. She does not go to the station to meet him. Daddy goes alone. As a matter of fact she is

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frightened to go. The shock may upset her and spoil their joy. So she tries to bear it at home – Late afternoon. The lights on. Gorgeous fires everywhere – in his bedroom too, of course. She goes to see it too often, but each time there is something to be done – the curtains to be drawn – or she makes sure he has enough blankets. For some reason there is no place for the girls in this memory; they might be unborn. She is alone in that warm breathing bright house except for the servants. Each time she comes into the hall she hears that distant twitter from the kitchen, or the race of steps down the area. They are on the lookout. And at this point she always remembers his favourite dinner: roast chicken – asparagus – meringues – champagne. And then – Oh God help me bear this moment! There’s the taxi. It’s turned into the square. Is it slowing now? ‘Here it is ’m.’ ‘No, Nellie – I don’t think so.’ Yes – yes – it is. Courage! Be brave. It’s stopping. Is that Father’s glove at the window? Oh, the door is open, she is on the step. Father’s voice rings out, ‘Here he is.’ And all at one and the same moment the taxi stops, and bursts open. A young muffled figure bounds up the steps. ‘Mummy!’ ‘My precious, precious son!’ But here it’s no use. Here she must break down. Just a moment – just one. Pressing her head against the cold buttons of his British warm. ‘Child!’ He holds her. And his father is behind him grabbing his shoulder, and his laugh rings out – ‘Well, you’ve got him. Are you satisfied?’ The door is shut. He is pulling off his gloves, and scarf and coat, and pressing them on to the chest in the hall. The old familiar quick shot back of his head while he looks at her, laughing, while he describes how he spotted Daddy immediately – and Father absolutely refused to recognise him. Notes U Text: DNOS. The copy JMM used, from November 1921, does not survive, although there is part of an earlier draft, Notebook 41, ATL, dated October 1921. Alpers inserts this fragment into the published text (p. 509), but as KM did not include it in her own later version, it is printed here separately, after the DNOS text.

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1. The story imagines KM’s parents six years after the death of their son Leslie in October 1915, and how they may have coped with their grief. The first notes for the story were of ‘A wife and husband on board a steamer. They see someone who reminds them’, and the detail ‘The cold buttons’ (KMN, 2, p. 297). 2 Thomas Moore, from Irish Melodies (1808).

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Weak Heart1 I Although it sounded all the year round, although it rang out sometimes as early as half-past six in the morning, sometimes as late as half-past ten at night, it was in the spring, when Bengel’s violet patch just inside the gate was blue with flowers that that piano . . . made the passers-by not only stop talking, but slow down, pause, look suddenly – if they were men – grave, even stern, and if they were women – dreamy, even sorrowful. Tarana Street was beautiful in the spring; there was not a single house without its garden and trees and a plot of grass big enough to be called ‘the lawn’. Over the low painted fences, you could see, as you ran by, whose daffys were out, whose wild snowdrop border was over and who had the biggest hyacinths, so pink and white, the colour of coconut ice. But nobody had violets that grew, that smelled in the spring sun like Bengel’s. Did they really smell like that? Or did you shut your eyes and lean over the fence because of Edie Bengel’s piano? A little wind ruffles among the leaves like a joyful hand looking for the finest flowers; and the piano sounds gay, tender, laughing. Now a cloud, like a swan, flies across the sun, the violets shine cold, like water, and a sudden questioning cry rings from Edie Bengel’s piano. . . . Ah, if life must pass so quickly, why is the breath of these flowers so sweet? What is the meaning of this feeling of longing, of sweet trouble – of flying joy? Goodbye! Farewell! The young bees lie half awake on the slender dandelions, silver are the pink tipped arrowy petals of the daisies; the new grass shakes in the light. Everything is beginning again, marvellous as ever, heavenly fair. ‘Let us stay! Let us stay!’ pleads Edie Bengel’s piano. II It is the afternoon, sunny and still. The blinds are down in the front to save the carpets, but upstairs the slats are open and in the golden light

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little Mrs Bengel is feeling under her bed for the square bonnet box. She is flushed. She feels timid, excited, like a girl. And now the tissue paper is parted, her best bonnet, the one trimmed with a jet butterfly, which reposes on top, is lifted out and solemnly blown upon. Dipping down to the glass she tries it with fingers that tremble. She twitches her dolman round her slender shoulders, clasps her purse and before leaving the bedroom kneels down a moment to ask God’s blessing on her ‘goings out’. And as she kneels there quivering, she is rather like a butterfly herself, fanning her wings before her Lord. When the door is open the sound of the piano coming up through the silent house is almost frightening, so bold, so defiant, so reckless it rolls under Edie’s fingers. And just for a moment the thought comes to Mrs Bengel and is gone again, that there is a stranger with Edie in the drawing-room, but a fantastic person, out of a book, a – a – villain. It’s very absurd. She flits across the hall, turns the door handle and confronts her flushed daughter. Edie’s hands drop from the keys. She squeezes them between her knees, her head is bent, her curls are fallen forward. She gazes at her mother with brilliant eyes. There is something painful in that glance, something very strange. It is dusky in the drawing-room, the top of the piano is open. Edie has been playing from memory; it’s as though the air still tingles. ‘I’m going, dear,’ said Mrs Bengel softly, so softly it is like a sigh. ‘Yes, Mother,’ came from Edie. ‘I don’t expect I shall be long.’ Mrs Bengel lingers. She would very much like just a word, of sympathy, of understanding, even from Edie, to cheer her on her way. But Edie murmurs, ‘I’ll put the kettle on in half an hour.’ ‘Do, dear!’ Mrs Bengel grasped at that even. A nervous little smile touched her lips. ‘I expect I shall want my tea.’ But to that Edie makes no reply; she frowns, she stretches out a hand, quickly unscrews one of the piano candle-sticks, lifts off a pink china ring and screws all tight again. The ring has been rattling. As the front door bangs softly after her mother Edie and the piano seem to plunge together into deep dark water, into waves that flow over both, relentless. She plays on desperately until her nose is white and her heart beats. It is her way of getting over her nervousness and her way too of praying. Would they accept her? Would she be allowed to go? Was it possible that in a week’s time she would be one of Miss Farmer’s girls, wearing a red and blue hat band, running up the broad steps leading to the big grey painted house that buzzed, that hummed as you went by? Their pew in Church faced Miss Farmer’s boarders. Would she at last know the names of the girls she had looked at so often? The pretty pale one with red hair, the dark one with a fringe,

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the fair one who held Miss Farmer’s hand during the sermon? . . . But after all. . . . It was Edie’s fourteenth birthday. Her father gave her a silver brooch with a bar of music, two crotchets, two quavers and a minim headed by a very twisted treble clef. Her mother gave her blue satin gloves and two boxes for gloves and handkerchiefs, hand-painted the glove box with a sprig of gold roses tying up the capital G. and the handkerchief box with a marvellously lifelike butterfly quivering on the capital H. From the aunts in. . . . There was a tree at the corner of Tarana Street and May Street. It grew so close to the pavement that the heavy boughs stretched over, and on that part of the pavement there was always a fine sifting of minute twigs. But in the dusk, lovers parading came into its shade as into a tent. There, however long they had been together, they greeted each other again with long kisses, with embraces that were sweet torture, agony to bear, agony to end. Edie never knew that Roddie ‘loved’ it, Roddie never knew that it meant anything to Edie. Roddie, spruce, sleek with water, bumped his new bike down the wooden steps, through the gate. He was off for a spin, and looking at that tree, dark in the glow of evening, he felt the tree was watching him. He wanted to do marvels, to astonish, to shock, to amaze it. . . . Roddie had a complete new outfit for the occasion. A black serge suit, a black tie, a straw hat so white it was almost silver, a dazzling white straw hat with a broad black band. Attached to the hat there was a thick guard that somehow reminded one of a fishing line and the little clasp on the brim was like a fly. . . . He stood at the graveside, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped, and watched Edie being lowered into the grave – as a half-grown boy watches anything, a man at work, or a bicycle accident, or a chap cleaning a spring-carriage wheel – but suddenly as the men drew back he gave a violent start, turned, muttered something to his father and dashed away, so fast that people looked positively frightened, through the cemetery, down the avenue of dripping clay banks into Tarana Road, and started pelting for home. His suit was very tight and hot. It was like a dream. He kept his head down and his fists clenched, he couldn’t look up, nothing could have made

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him look higher than the tops of the fences – What was he thinking of as he pressed along? On, on until the gate was reached, up the steps, in at the front door, through the hall, up to the drawing-room. ‘Edie!’ called Roddie. ‘Edie, old girl!’ And he gave a low strange squawk and cried ‘Edie!’ and stared across at Edie’s piano. But cold, solemn, as if frozen, heavily the piano stared back at Roddie. Then it answered, but on its own behalf, on behalf of the house and the violet patch, the garden, the velvet tree at the corner of May Street, and all that was delightful: ‘There is nobody here of that name, young man!’ Notes U Text: MS NLC. DNOS. 1. Among the proposed new stories for a new collection KM drew up on ‘27.X.1921’ was ‘A Weak Heart: Ronnie [Roddie] on his bike in the evening, with his hands in his pockets doing marvels by that dark tree at the corner of May Street’ (KMN, 2, p. 297). Then on 21 November she wrote: Today I began to write, seriously, ‘The Weak Heart’, a story which fascinates me deeply. What I feel it needs so peculiarly is a very subtle variation of ‘tense’ from the present to the past and back again. And softness, lightness, and the feeling that all is in bud, with a play of humour over the character of Ronnie, and the feeling of the Thorndon Baths, the wet, moist, oozy . . . no, I know how it must be done. May I be found worthy to do it! Lord make me crystal clear for Thy light to shine through. (KMN, 2, p. 290)

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Daphne I had been in Port Willin six months when I decided to give a one-man show. Not that I was particularly keen but little Field the picture shop man, had just started a gallery and he wanted me – he begged me – to kick off for him. He was a decent little chap; I hadn’t the heart to refuse. And besides, as it happened I had a good deal of old stuff that I felt it would be rather fun to palm off on any one who was fool enough to buy it. So with these high aims I had the cards printed,

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the pictures framed in plain white frames and God knows how many cups and saucers ordered for the Private View. What was I doing in Port Willin? Oh well – why not? I’ll own it does sound an unlikely spot but when you are an impermanent movable as I am it’s just those unlikely spots that have a trick of holding you. I arrived, intending to stay a week and go on to Fiji. But I had letters to one or two people, and the morning of my arrival, hanging over the side of the ship while we were waiting in the stream, I took an extraordinary fancy to the look of the place. It’s a small town, you know, planted at the edge of a fine deep harbour like a lake. Behind it, on either side there are hills. The houses are built of light-painted wood. They have iron roofs coloured red. And there are big dark trees, massed together, breaking up those light shapes, giving a depth, a warmth – making a composition of it well worth looking at. . . . And the first days after my arrival, walking, or driving out in one of the big swinging, open cabs, I took an equal fancy to the people. Not to quite all of them. The men left me cold. Yes, I must say, Colonial men are not the brightest specimens. But I’ve never struck a place where the average of female attractiveness was so high. You can’t help noticing it, for a peculiarity of Port Willin is the number of its tea shops and the vast quantity of tea absorbed by the inhabitants. Not tea only – sandwiches, cream cakes, ices, fruit salad with fresh pine-apple. From eleven o’clock in the morning you meet with couples, and groups, of girls and young married women hurrying off to their first tea. It was a real eleven o’clock function. Even the business men knocked off and went to a cafe. And the same thing happened in the afternoon; the streets were gay as a garden. Which reminds me it was early spring when I arrived and the town smelled of moist earth and the first flowers. Wherever one went one got a strong whiff, like the whiff of violets in a wood, which was enough in itself to make one feel like lingering. . . . There was a theatre, too, a big bare building plastered over with red and blue bills which gave it an oriental look in that blue air, and a touring company was playing ‘San Toy.’1 I went my first evening. I found it fearfully exciting. The inside smelled of gas, of glue. Whistling draughts cut along the corridors; a strong wind among the orchestra kept the palms trembling, and now and again the curtain blew out and there was a glimpse of a pair of large feet walking rapidly away. But what women! What girls in muslin dresses with velvet sashes and little caps edged with swansdown. In the intervals long ripples of laughter sounded from the stalls and the dress-circle. I leaned against a pillar that looked as though it was made of wedding cake icing – and fell in love with whole rows at a time.

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Then I presented my cards, I was asked out to dine, and I met these charmers in their own homes. That decided it. They were something I had never known before – so gay, so friendly, so impressed with the idea of one’s being an artist! It was rather like finding oneself in the play ground of an extremely attractive girls’ school. I painted the premier’s daughter, a dark beauty, against a tree hung with long bell-like flowers, as white as wax. I painted a girl with a pig tail curled up on a white sofa playing with a pale-red fan . . . and a little blonde in a black jacket with big pearl-grey gloves . . . I painted like fury. I’m fond of women. As a matter of fact I’m a great deal more at my ease with women than I am with men. Because I’ve cultivated them, I suppose. You see it’s like this with me. I’ve always had enough money to live on and the consequence is I have never had to mix with people more than I wished. And I’ve equally always had – well, I suppose you might call it a passion for painting. Painting is far and away the most important thing in life – as I see it. But – my work’s my own affair. It’s the separate compartment which is me. No strangers allowed in. I haven’t the smallest desire to explain what it is I’m after – or to hear other men. If people like my work I’m pleased. If they don’t – well if I was a shrugging person – I’d shrug. This sounds arrogant. It isn’t; I know my limitations. But the truth about oneself always sounds arrogant, as no doubt you have observed. But women – well, I can only speak for myself – I find the presence of women, the consciousness of women, an absolute necessity. I know they are considered a distraction, that the very Big Pots seal themselves in their hives to keep away. All I can say is work without women would be to me like dancing without music or food without wine or a sailing boat without a breeze. They just give me that – – what is it? Stimulus is not enough – inspiration is far too much – that – well, if I knew what it is, I should have solved a bigger problem than my own! And problems aren’t in my line. I expected a mob at my private view, and I got it, too. What I hadn’t reckoned on was that there were no men. It was one thing to ask a painter fellow to knock you up something of your wife or your daughter to the tune of fifty guineas, but it was quite another to make an ass of yourself staring. The Port Willin men would as soon have gazed into shops. True, when you came to Europe, you visited the galleries, but then you shop-gazed too. It didn’t matter what you did in Europe. You could walk about for a week without being recognised. So there were little Field and I absolutely alone among all that loveliness. It frightened him out of his life, but I didn’t mind; I thought it rather fun. Especially as the sightseers didn’t hesitate to find my

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pictures amusing. Not that I’m by any means an out and out modern, as they say; people like violins and landscapes of telegraph poles leave me cold. But Port Willin is still trying to swallow Rossetti,2 and Hope by Watts3 is looked upon as very advanced. The fat old lady mayoress became quite hysterical. She drew me over to one drawing, she patted my arm with her fan and we were introduced. ‘I don’t wonder you drew her slipping out,’ she gurgled. ‘And how depressed she looks! The poor dear never could have sat down in it. It’s much too small. There ought to be a little cake of Pears’ Soap on the floor.’ And overcome by her own joke, she flopped on the little double bench that ran down the middle of the room, and even her fan seemed to laugh. At that moment two girls passed in front of us. One I knew, a big fair girl called May Pollock, pulled her companion by the sleeve. ‘Daphne!’ she said. ‘Daphne!’ And the other turned towards her, then towards us, smiled and was born, christened part of my world from that moment. ‘Daphne!’ Her quick beautiful smile answered. . . . Saturday morning was gloriously fine. When I woke up and saw the sun streaming over the polished floor I felt like a little boy who has been promised a pic-nic. It was all I could do not to telephone Daphne. Was she feeling the same? It seemed somehow such a terrific lark that we should be going off together like this, just with a couple of rucksacks and our bathing suits. I thought of other week-ends, the preparation, the emotional tension, the amount of managing they’d needed. But I couldn’t really think of them, I couldn’t be bothered, they belonged to another life. . . . It seemed to me suddenly so preposterous, that two people should be as happy as we were and not be happier. Here we were, alone, miles away from everybody, free as air, and in love with each other. I looked again at Daphne, at her slender shoulders, her throat, her bosom and, passionately in love, I decided, with fervour. Wouldn’t it be rather absurd then to behave like a couple of children? Wouldn’t she even, in spite of all she had said, be disappointed if we did? And I went off at a tremendous pace, not because I thought she’d run after me, but I did think she might call, or I might look round. . . . It was one of those still, hushed days when the sea and the sky seem to melt into one another and it is long before the moisture dries on the leaves and grasses. One of those days when the sea smells strong and there are gulls standing in a row on the sand. The smoke from

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our wood fire hung in the air and the smoke of my pipe mingled with it. I caught myself staring at nothing. I felt dull and angry. I couldn’t get over the ridiculous affair. You see, my amour propre was wounded. Monday morning was grey, cloudy, one of those mornings peculiar to the sea-side when everything, the sea most of all, seems exhausted and sullen. There had been a very high tide, the road was wet – on the beach there stood a long line of sickly-looking gulls . . . When we got on board she sat down on one of the green benches and, muttering something about a pipe, I walked quickly away. It was intolerable that we should still be together after what had happened. It was indecent. I only asked – I only longed for one thing – to be free of this still, unsmiling and pitiful – that was the worst of it – creature who had been my playful Daphne. For answer I telephoned her at once and asked if I might come and see her that evening. Her voice sounded grave, unlike the voice I remembered and she seemed to deliberate. There was a long pause before she said ‘Yes – perhaps that would be best.’ ‘Then I shall come at half-past six.’ ‘Very well.’ And we went into a room full of flowers and very large art photographs of the Harbour by Night, A Misty Day, Moonrise over the Water, and I wondered immediately if she admired them. ‘Why did you send me that letter?’ ‘Oh, but I had to,’ said Daphne. ‘I meant every word of it. I only let you come to-night to – No, I know I shall disappoint you. I’m wiser than you are for all your experience. I shan’t be able to live up to it. I’m not the person for you. Really I’m not!’ Notes U Text: MSS NLC, ATL. November 1921.4 DNOS. 1. San Toy, or The Emperor’s Own (1899), a musical comedy, score by Sidney Jones. 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), who with others of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, had been among KM’s enthusiasms in her own Wellington days. 3. George Frederic Watts (1817–1904). Among his many allegorical paintings, the most celebrated was Hope, 1885, with its image of a blindfolded girl holding a lyre, sitting slumped on a globe representing the world. By the time the story is set, Watts was regarded as the epitome of unfashionable Victorian taste. 4. KM noted on 26 November 1921, ‘I have progressed – a little. I have realised what it is to be done – the strange barrier to be crossed from thinking it and writing it . . . Daphne’ (KMN, 2, p. 291).

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‘I suppose doctor’ ‘I suppose doctor,’ my patients are fond of saying, for patients flatter their doctors you know, just as much as doctors flatter their patients – ‘the reason why you always look so very stern in your car and never glance to the right or left is that you know so many people. I mean if once you began to recognise anybody it would be – a – a kind of royal procession from door to door. Too dreadfully boring!’ I more than smile – I fling back my head, wrinkle my eyes and give my famous silent little laugh. Then I spring to my feet lightly, almost youthfully, incline towards the patient, take that confiding little hand in mine and say as I press it reassuringly, ‘But it needs the most dreadful discipline you know – sometimes – goodbye!’ And I am gone before the patient has done thinking, ‘Then he did see me that day – after all that, I was right.’ But the patient is wrong, of course. Not that it is a matter of any importance. But what really happens is – I emerge from the hotel, chateau, villa – whatever it is. The grey car is drawn up to the pavement edge and the figure of Giovanni leaps to attention on the instant. I cross rapidly, pause one moment, my foot on the step, and not looking at Giovanni but looking over his shoulder, give him the next address, and then leap in, light an Egyptian cigarette, thrust my hands into my pockets so as to be ready, at the very first movement, at the very first gliding motion of the car, to relax, to lean back, to give myself up, to let myself be carried, without a thought or a feeling or an emotion . . . Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 254. Dated 1921 and published by JMM as ‘The Doctor’, Scrapbook, pp. 175–6.

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‘Carriages are not allowed’ Carriages are not allowed to drive up to the doors of the clinique because of the noise. They stop at the iron gates. Then comes a

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little walk – on the level it is true, but still quite a walk, before the yellow glass porch is reached. But there is a compensation, if only the patients would realise it. On either side of the gravel are flowerbeds full of purple and pink stocks, wallflowers, forget me nots and creamy freezias with their spears of tender green like the green of young bamboos. The front of the clinique is hung with heliotrope, banksia roses and pink ivy geranium. And there is such a coming and going of brown bees and white butterflies, the air smells so sweet, there is such a sense of delicate trembling life that however ill anyone might be it was impossible surely not to be cheered and distracted. ‘Look. Look how lovely,’ said the plain girl, pointing them out to her companion. But the young man in a black double breasted jacket put his hand to his ribs and breathed[?] ‘a-huh a-huh’ – as if he were playing trains. ‘How pretty they are – how very pretty!’ said the sentimental old mother, wagging her head at them and glancing at her daughter. But the pale daughter stared back at her spitefully, very spitefully, and flung the end of her shawl over her shoulder. Now a bath chair is pushed along carrying an old man. In his stiff, much too big overcoat with his hat squeezed down to his ears he looks marvellously like a Guy Fawkes. The nurse stops the chair and says ‘flowers’ as one says flowers to a baby. But there is no response at all; she smiles and wheels it on again . . . Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 310. Dated 1921 and published by JMM as ‘The Clinic Garden’, Scrapbook, pp. 177–8.

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‘It fell so softly, so gently’ It fell so softly, so gently it seemed to him that even tenderly it fell. It floated through the air as if it were sorry about something and wanted to reassure him, to comfort him. ‘Forget! Forget! All is blotted out, all is hidden – long ago,’ said the snow. ‘Nothing can ever bring it back – nothing can ever torture you again. There is no trace left. All is as if it never had been. Your footsteps and hers are long since covered over. If you were to look for her you never would find her. If she were

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to come seeking you it would be in vain. You have your wish, your wish!’ whispered the snow. ‘You are safe, hidden, at peace. Free.’ At that moment, upon that word a clock struck one loud single stroke. It was so loud, so mournful, so like a despairing groan that the feathery snowflakes seemed to shiver, to hesitate an instant, to fall again faster than ever as though something had frightened them – – – Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 254. Dated 1921 by JMM and published as ‘Snow’, Scrapbook, pp. 173–4.

•

‘On her way back to the garden’ On her way back to the garden Susannah sat down on the hall chair for a minute to take a pebble out of her shoe. And she heard her mother say: ‘No, I can’t possibly do that. I can’t possibly turn that dear good Mr Taylor out of the house simply to make room for this Skeritt girl.’ It was a little difficult to explain the facts of the case to the Reverend Mr Taylor, and Mrs Downing hated having to do so. It seemed so unreasonable to ask him to turn out of the spare room for an unknown girl for the night when he was their regular guest, as it were, for the whole Synod and so appreciative – poor lonely upcountry man – of the spare room double bed. But there was nothing else to be done. In that extraordinary way men have Harry Downing had rung up from the office to tell her that a Netta Skeritt had called on him that morning. She was passing through Wellington on her way to Nelson and though neither of the Downings had ever seen her before, simply because her father and Harry Downing had known each other in the old days, Harry had immediately asked her to stay the night with them. ‘And you really won’t mind Susannah’s bed for the night, Mr Taylor?’ said Mrs Downing anxiously, pouring him out a second cup of tea. ‘Not at all Mrs Downing. I shall be as happy as a king,’ said good cheerful Mr Taylor. At that moment Susannah herself came in from the garden. She leaned her elbows upon the round walnut table, crossed her legs, and

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cupped her burning cheeks in her hands. But Susannah’s eyes opened very wide. Her lips parted. She stared first at her Mother and then at Mr Taylor’s black coat, gleaming collar and big yellow hands. ‘Is Mr Taylor going to sleep in my bed, Mother?’ said she, astounded. ‘Yes dear but only for tonight,’ said her mother, absently folding a piece of bread and butter. Mr Taylor smiled his broad smile. She imagined him lying in her bed, his head tilted back, snoring like he snored on Sunday afternoons. How awful. ‘With me,’ she asked, horrified. Mother flushed faintly and Mr Taylor gave a loud snort that might have been laughter. ‘Don’t be such a silly little girl, Susannah. Of course not. You are going to sleep in the spare room with Miss Skeritt.’ This was more mysterious still. Oh dear! Why were grownups like this? She had only run in for a piece of bread and butter. She wanted to get back to the garden and here they were sitting in this dark room – it looked very dark and the white cups shone on the walnut table like lilies on a lake after the bright outside. *

*

*

A moment later and there was nothing left of Netta Skeritt but a dent in the pillow and one long – much too long – blue black hairpin gleaming on the pale carpet. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 226–7. Dated 1921 by JMM and published as ‘The Skeritt Girl’, Scrapbook, pp. 194–6.

•

‘What was there about that little house’ What was there about that little house at the corner which made you feel sure a widow lived there. In the tiny sloping garden there grew candytuft, mignonette, pansies, star of Bethlehem. A narrow asphalt path led to the door. But there was something about the windows – something quenched, expressionless. They had nothing to hide, nothing to reveal. And there was something about the door that

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made you know when you rang the door would not be answered at once. There would be an interval of strange dead quiet and then there would come a faint rustling . . . Sophie Bean sat at the dining room window in her black dress, hemming pillow slips. She was pale but in the dusky room a whiteness came from the pillow slips with the whiteness of snow and made her paler. Her hands moved slowly – sewing depressed her – but it had to be done. Nevertheless she very often put it down and looked out of the window at the drooping trees, the heavy trams dragging along and the people who passed by, stooping and hurrying as though there was a secret reason why they should not be seen . . . All that day – Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 259–60. Dated 1921 by JMM and published as ‘Sophie Bean’, Scrapbook, pp. 164–5.

•

The Pessimist1 After luncheon the weather was so enchanting (enchanting was the word that weekend: it had been brought from town by Moyra Moore and everybody was using [it]) the day was so perfectly enchanting that they wandered into the garden and coffee was served on the lawn under the – yes actually – wasn’t it too wonderful! – spreading chestnut tree! The three pekes and the baby pekums who had just had their dinners of underdone steak mixed with a morsel of heart and the merest dash of liver (their favourite combination) started a kind of intricate game of chase in and out of people’s ankles which was slightly bewildering. But nobody really minded except the Cabinet Minister who was terrified of dog bites; he shook his finger at the little loves and said – ‘Not so fast my young friends,’ in a would-be playful tone which didn’t deceive a soul. It certainly didn’t deceive the pekes . . . Standing at the table pouring out the coffee in a yellow muslin dress with a green silk hat, green stockings and black satin shoes, the hostess felt wonderfully like somebody in the Russian ballet. She lifted the pots with strange little angular gestures and when she had

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filled a thimble-like cup she held it up high in the air and cried ‘Coffee! Coffee!’ as though she were summoning her little negro page . . . Moyra Moore, kneeling on the grass before a tulip – she always knelt before the flowers she admired – (could one do less) – murmured: ‘It’s quite as good as a Matisse you know – I mean the line is quite as strange! Real flowers [are] often so dreadfully cosy looking.’ And the young gentleman of the moment who was trying dreadfully hard to live up to this and couldn’t, heard himself say, but couldn’t stop himself: ‘Roses are very nice, aren’t they!’ On the garden bench under the round billowing tree sat a little lady with a fan and such a large comb in her hair that every time you looked at her it gave you [a] fresh small shock. Was it as big as that last time. Beside her sat a fair woman with that trembling perfect smile that hovers on the lips of young mothers; as a matter of fact she had just published a first novel – it was just out, as she told everybody, staring into the distance as if she seemed to see it being wheeled away in a white perambulator. And at the end of the bench a very dark young man stretched his legs and made rings of smoke. His play Freud Among the Ruins had been accepted by the Stage Society though they had given him no definite date as yet – but in time. Hovering under the tree and looking up through the branches there was a very young poet. The hostess did wish he would sit down – one couldn’t really look as vague as that. And besides it would give the Cabinet Minister such a wrong impression. ‘Coffee, Spenser, your coffee is here,’ she cried gayly. What was there about that publishing couple in cane chairs on the other side of the table. He was tall, lean, with a long clean-shaven face that looked dreamy. And she was one of those women – one of those women who still exist in spite of everything. Then they are rare, but were they ever anything but rare? Where do they come from and what happens to them? Have they ever been girls? Do they ever become old ladies? One cannot imagine them except between thirty and forty. They are exquisite, elusive, flawless-looking, with slow movements and perfect hands, perfect hair. When they travel their luggage is a paper of parma violets or a few long-stemmed yellow roses – and in the background hovers the ideal maid with the Russian leather dressing case and the fur coat tied with oyster brocade. Their jewel is pearls – pearl earrings, a string of pearls, pearls on their fingers. And the curious thing is that whatever they say – and they seldom say anything very remarkable – ‘I always sleep in my pearls,’ or ‘I am afraid I know very little about modern music,’ or ‘I always think it’s

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so clever to be able to write,’ – one feels charmed, gratified, and even a little carried away. Why? ‘Dearest,’ said Moyra Moore, moving over to the hostess and stroking her cheek with a poor pale tulip, ‘do tell me about the spreading chestnut tree – was it before my time or after?’ ‘Oh you wicked child,’ said the hostess, looking regretfully at the tulip. But the poet piped: ‘It was a poem by Longfellow!’2 At that the dark young man sat up suddenly and stopped making rings. ‘Goldsmith, please!’ he said shortly – as though Goldsmith was a friend of his and that really was a bit too steep. The young poet looked as if he was going to cry. ‘Oh come now,’ said the Cabinet Minister pleasantly – and the hostess sighed with relief that they had begun to talk about something simple enough for him to join in. ‘Surely it was Longfellow? It was certainly Longfellow in my young days.’ And because he was a Cabinet Minister they all smiled kindly as though he had said something quite amusing! All but the dark young man – who looked terrible! ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands.’

said the lady with the fan.’ I’ve always wanted to ask and I’ve never dared to – was he the same smith as that dreadful harmonious one that one used to have to practise on a cold piano in the early morning?’ ‘Varats3 by Handel,’ murmured the lady novelist. The dark young man spoke again. ‘Haydn, please,’ said he loudly[?]. At that the Cabinet Minister looked quite distressed. What a bother it was, thought the hostess, they were really worrying him. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, still quite pleasantly, ‘you’re not quite right in your facts. I fancy – in fact I feel quite certain on this point – the name was Handel.’ But this time the young man refused to be subdued. ‘I thought Samuel Butler had proved that Handel didn’t exist.’4 ‘Samuel Butler!’ cried the Cabinet Minister – but he was obviously staggered. ‘Then how on earth – how on earth does he account for the Messiah?’5 ‘The Messiah!’ cried Moyra Moore and she waved the tulip like a wandering angel. But this was too much for the hostess. She ran to the rescue of the Cabinet Minister.

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‘You must come – you must come and see my asparagus,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s so wonderful this year.’ The Cabinet Minister was delighted and away they wandered. Then the little lady with the fan tinkled with laughter. ‘Do – do look at his trousers,’ she cried. ‘They are just like crackers – Chinese crackers after a funeral. If only the ends were cut into fringes!’ The couple in the cane chairs stirred, too. ‘Do you care’ – he murmured. ‘I should like to,’ murmured she and they too wandered away across the brilliant green lawn. ‘I wonder what they are saying about me,’ said the tall man gloomily. The pearl lady opened her grey sunshade and smiled faintly. ‘It’s quite hot,’ said she. At her words he put his hand to his head with a look of alarm. ‘Hot! My God, so it is! Do you mind waiting here for a moment while I get my hat?’ And he said something about the heat being fatal as he strode away. She bent towards a huge creamy magnolia flower and smelled it with that distrait expression with which women smell a cake of soap or a sachet while waiting at the chemist’s shop. Back he came really adorned with a wide silver grey hat. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite know,’ said the hostess vaguely. ‘He used to ride with my brothers – years ago. I remember he once had an extraordinary accident – well hardly an accident. But they were all dismounting and his foot got jammed in the stirrup. He’d no idea it was caught and he fell off – exactly like the White Knight,6 and there he lay with one foot in the air . . .’ ‘But how too odd for words!’ said the lady with the fan. ‘And he doesn’t look at all the type those things happen to,’ mused the pearl lady. ‘Did you notice at lunch he upset his wine?’ said an animated young thing who seemed to belong to nobody and to thirst to be adopted – by somebody, anybody. ‘No! Did he. How too tiresome!’ wailed the hostess. ‘My lovely cloth!’ ‘Yes and he said,’ cried the young thing, revelling in her success, ‘I dreamed last night I was going to do this – – –’ ‘If poetry is an overwhelming emotion – –’ At that moment there came a sharp pit-pat on the crown of his hat. ‘Good Lord,’ he said.’ A drop of rain. How extraordinary. ‘But when he took off his hat to see, he laughed bitterly. That’s done it, he said – that’s finished it completely. And a tiny bird that had been perched on

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the tree just above their heads flew away and its wings sounded like breathless laughing. But the weather was still enchanting! Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 260–3. Published as ‘The Pessimist’, Scrapbook, pp. 83–9. 1. See Scott, KMN, 2, p. 260, n. 1. This edition opts for 1921. 2. H. W. Longfellow, ‘The Village Blacksmith’ (1841). 3. Presumably an abbreviation for ‘Variations’. 4. A joke at the expense of the author and scholar Samuel Butler (1835– 1902), whose obsession with Handel led to his composing cantatas in the style of his hero. 5. G. F. Handel, The Messiah (1741). 6. In Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), Chapter 8, the White Knight frequently falls from his horse.

•

The Sisters Just as they reached the gate, Agnes turned back. ‘Where are you going to now, my dear?’ said Gertrude quickly. ‘The sun’s so boiling, I must have my parasol.’ ‘Oh, well, bring mine too, will you?’ And Gertrude waited. In her pink dress, with one hand on the half-open gate, she felt like a picture. But, unfortunately, there was no one to see except the florid butcher spanking past in his yellow cart. ‘Well, even a butcher is somebody,’ she thought, as Agnes came running back over the small blue gravel. ‘Thanks! It is boiling. I had no idea.’ ‘Roasting – isn’t it?’ said dark Agnes. And, putting up their parasols, off they sailed down the Avenue, on the way to the Misses Phipps to try on their new evening dresses. ‘There they go,’ thought Gertrude, and ‘there they go,’ thought Agnes, – the daughters of rich parents, young and attractive, one fair, one dark, one a soprano, one a contralto, with all the really thrilling things in life still to happen to them. And just then Major Trapp on his big chestnut horse turned into the Avenue, and dashing past salutes them; and they both bowed, charmingly, graciously like swans. ‘He’s out very early,’ said Gertrude.

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‘Very!’ came from Agnes. ‘I’ve not got my hat too far forward, have I?’ asked Gertrude anxiously. ‘I don’t think so,’ answered wicked Agnes. *

*

*

By great good fortune the tram was empty. The sisters had it all to themselves. Feeling grand, down they sat in one of the small wooden pens. The conductor blew his whistle, the driver banged his bell, the fat small horses started forward and away they swung. Merrily danced the pink bobbles on the fringes of the cotton blinds, and gaily the sunlight raced under the arched roof. ‘But what on earth am I to do with this?’ cried Gertrude, gazing with exaggerated scorn and horror at the bouquet which old Mr. Phipps had cut and bound together so lovingly. Agnes screwed up her eyes and smiled at the unearthly white and gold arum lily and the dove-blue columbines. ‘I don’t know,’ said she.’ You can’t possibly cart it about with you. It’s like a barmaid’s wedding bouquet.’ And she laughed and put her hand to her glorious coil of thick hair. Gertrude tossed it on to the floor, and kicked it under the seat. Just in time, as it happened. Notes U Text: Scrapbook, pp. 198–9. Dated 1921 by JMM, from a now partly missing MS. Second part to be found in KMN, 2, p. 301.

•

‘Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker’ Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker. They lived in the village with the big church down in the valley. It was a very big church, it was enormous; it had two towers like horns. On misty days when you climbed the hill and looked down and you heard the great bell jangle it reminded you of a large pale cow. Lucien was nine years old. He was not like other boys. For one thing he had no father; and for another he did not go to school, but stayed at home all day with his mother. He was delicate. When he was very small his head had gone so soft, so soft, like a jelly, that his mother had had to clap two boards to it

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to prevent it from shaking. It was quite hard now but the shape was a little bit queer and his hair was fine like down rather than real hair. But he was a good child, gentle, quiet, giving no trouble, and handy with his needle as a girl of twelve. The customers did not mind him. The big, blousy peasant women who came to his mother’s room to try on, unhooked their bodices and stood in their stays scratching their red arms and shouting at his mother without so much as a glance at him. And he could be trusted to go to shop. (With what a sigh his mother rummaged in the folds of her petticoat, brought out her shabby purse with a clasp and counted and thumbed the coins before she dropped them into his little claw.) He could be trusted to leave at the right houses large bulky newspaper parcels held together with long rusty pins. In these excursions Lucien talked to nobody and seldom stopped to look. He trotted along like a little cat out-of-doors, keeping close to the fences, darting into the shop and out again, and only revealing himself fully when he had to stand tiptoe on the top step of a house and reach up to the high knocker. This moment was terrifying to him. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 284. Dated 1921 by JMM and published as ‘Lucien’, Scrapbook, pp. 197–8.

•

Honesty 1 There was an expression Rupert Henderson was very fond of using: ‘If you want my honest opinion. . . .’ He had an honest opinion on every subject under the sun, and nothing short of a passion for delivering it. But Archie Cullen’s pet phrase was ‘I cannot honestly say. . . .’ Which meant that he had not really made up his mind. He had not really made up his mind on any subject whatsoever. Why? Because he could not. He was unlike other men. He was minus something – or was it plus? No matter. He was not in the least proud of the fact. It depressed him – one might go so far as to say – terribly, at times. Rupert and Archie lived together. That is to say Archie lived in Rupert’s rooms. Oh, he paid his share, his half in everything; the arrangement was a purely, strictly business arrangement. But perhaps

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it was because Rupert had invited Archie that Archie remained always – his guest. They each had a bedroom, there was a common sittingroom, and a largeish bathroom which Rupert used as a dressing-room as well. The first morning after his arrival Archie had left his sponge in the bath-room. And a moment after there was a knock at his door and Rupert said, kindly but firmly, ‘Your sponge, I fancy.’ The first evening Archie had brought his tobacco jar into the sitting room and placed it on a corner of the mantelpiece. Rupert was reading the newspaper. It was a round china jar, the surface painted and roughened to represent a sea-urchin. On the lid was a spray of china seaweed with two berries for a knob. Archie was excessively fond of it. But after dinner when Rupert took out his pipe and pouch he suddenly fixed his eyes on this object, blew through his moustaches, gasped, and said in a wondering, astonished voice ‘I say! Is that yours or Mrs. Head’s.’ Mrs. Head was their landlady. ‘It’s mine,’ said Archie, and he blushed and smiled just a trifle timidly. ‘I say!’ said Rupert again – this time very meaningly. ‘Would you rather I’ said Archie, and he moved in his chair to get up. ‘No, no! Certainly not! On no account!’ answered Rupert, and he actually raised his hand. ‘But perhaps’ and here he smiled at Archie and gazed about him ‘Perhaps we might find some spot for it that was a trifle less conspicuous.’ The spot was not decided on, however, and Archie nipped his sole personal possession into his bedroom as soon as Rupert was out of the way. But it was chiefly at meals however that the attitude of host and guest was most marked. For instance, on each separate occasion, even before they sat down Rupert said ‘Would you mind cutting the bread, Archie?’ Had he not made such a point of it it is possible that Archie in a moment of abstractedness might have grasped the bread knife. . . . An unpleasant thought! Again, Archie was never allowed to serve. Even at breakfast the hot dishes and the tea both were dispensed by Rupert. True, he had half apologised about the tea; he seemed to feel the necessity of some slight explanation, there. ‘I’m rather a fad about my tea,’ said he. ‘Some people – females especially – pour in the milk first. Fatal habit for more reasons than one. In my opinion the cup should be filled just so and the tea then coloured. Sugar, Archie?’ ‘Oh, please,’ said Archie, almost bowing over the table. Rupert was so very impressive. ‘But I suppose,’ said his friend, ‘you don’t notice any of these little things.’

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And Archie answered vaguely, stirring, ‘No, I don’t suppose I do.’ Rupert sat down and unfolded his napkin. ‘It would be very inconsistent with your character and disposition,’ said he genially, ‘if you did! Kidneys, bacon? Scrambled eggs? Either? Both? Which?’ Poor Archie hated scrambled eggs, but, alas! he was practically certain that scrambled eggs were expected of him too. This ‘psychological awareness’ as Rupert called it which existed between them, might, after a time make things a trifle difficult. He felt a little abject as he murmured ‘Eggs, please.’ And he saw by Rupert’s expression that he had chosen right. Rupert helped him to eggs largely. 2 Psychological awareness . . . perhaps it was that which explained their intimacy. One might have been tempted to say it was a case of mutual fascination. But whereas Archie’s reply to the suggestion would have been a slow ‘Poss-ibly!’ Rupert would have flouted it at once. ‘Fascination! The word’s preposterous in this connection. What on earth would there be in Cullen to fascinate me even if I was in the habit of being fascinated by my fellow creatures, which I certainly am not. No, I’ll own I am deeply interested. I confess my belief is I understand him better than anybody else. And if you want my honest opinion, I am certain that my – my –hm – influence over – sympathy for – him – call it what you like – is all to the good. There is a psychological awareness. . . . Moreover as a companion, instinctively, I find him extremely agreeable. He stimulates some part of my mind which is less active without him. But fascination – wide of the mark, my dear – wide!’ But supposing one remained unconvinced? Supposing one still played with the idea. Wasn’t it possible to see Rupert and Archie as the python and the rabbit keeping house together? Rupert that handsome well-fed python with his moustaches, his glare, his habit of uncoiling before the fire and swaying against the mantle piece, pipe and pouch in hand – and Archie, soft hunched timid, sitting in the lesser armchair, there and not there, flicking back into the darkness at a word but emerging again at a look – with sudden wholly unexpected starts of playfulness (instantly suppressed by the python)? Of course there was no question of anything so crude and dreadful as the rabbit being eaten by his house mate. Nevertheless it was a strange fact, after a typical evening the one looked immensely swelled benign and refreshed and the other, pale, small and exhausted. . . . And more often than not, Rupert’s final comment was – ominous this – as he doused his whisky with soda: ‘This has been very absorbing, Archie.’ And Archie gasped out, ‘Oh, very!’

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3 Archie Cullen was a journalist and the son of a journalist. He had no private money, no influential connections, scarcely any friends. His father had been one of those weak, disappointed, unsuccessful men who see in their sons a weapon for themselves. He would get his own back on life through Archie. Archie would show them the stuff he – his father was made of. Just you wait until my son comes along! This, though highly consoling to Mr. Cullen père, was terribly poor fun for Archie. At two and a half his infant nose was put to the grindstone and even on Sundays it was not taken off. Then his father took him out walking and improved the occasion by making him spell the shop signs, count the yachts racing in the harbour, divide them by four and multiply the result by three. But the experiment was an amazing success. Archie turned away from the distractions of life, shut his ears, folded his feet, sat over the table with his book and when the holidays came he didn’t like them; they made him uneasy so he went on reading for himself. He was a model boy. On prize-giving days his father accompanied him to school, carried the great wad of stiff books home for him and flinging them on the dining room table he surveyed them with an exultant smile. My prizes. The little sacrifice stared at them too, through his spectacles, as other little boys stared at puddings. He ought, of course, at this juncture to have been rescued by a doting mother who though cowed herself, rose on the . . . Notes U Text: MS NLC. DNOS.

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The Doves’ Nest1 After lunch Milly and her mother were sitting as usual on the balcony beyond the salon, admiring for the five hundredth time the stocks, the roses, the small, bright grass beneath the palms, and the oranges against a wavy line of blue, when a card was brought them by Marie. Visitors at the Villa Martin were very rare. True, the English clergyman, Mr Sandiman, had called, and he had come a second time with his wife to tea. But an awful thing had happened on that second occasion. Mother had made a mistake. She had said ‘More tea, Mr Sandybags?’ Oh, what a frightful thing to have happened! How could she have done it? Milly still flamed at the thought. And he had evidently not forgiven them; he’d never come again. So this card put them both into quite a flutter. Mr Walter Prodger, they read. And then an American address, so very much abbreviated that neither of them understood it. Walter Prodger? But they’d never heard of him. Mother looked from the card to Milly. ‘Prodger, dear?’ she asked mildly, as though helping Milly to a slice of a never-before-tasted pudding. And Milly seemed to be holding her plate back in the way she answered ‘I – don’t – know, Mother.’ ‘These are the occasions,’ said Mother, becoming a little flustered, ‘when one does so feel the need of our dear English servants. Now if I could just say, “What is he like, Annie?” I should know whether to see him or not. But he may be some common man, selling something – one of those American inventions for peeling things, you know, dear. Or he may even be some kind of foreign sharper.’ Mother winced at the hard, bright little word as though she had given herself a dig with her embroidery scissors. But here Marie smiled at Milly and murmured, ‘C’est un très beau Monsieur.’ ‘What does she say, dear?’ 448

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‘She says he looks very nice, Mother.’ ‘Well, we’d better –’ began Mother. ‘Where is he now, I wonder.’ Marie answered ‘In the vestibule, Madame.’ In the hall! Mother jumped up, seriously alarmed. In the hall, with all those valuable little foreign things that didn’t belong to them scattered over the tables. ‘Show him in, Marie. Come, Milly, come dear. We will see him in the salon. Oh, why isn’t Miss Anderson here?’ almost wailed Mother. But Miss Anderson, Mother’s new companion, never was on the spot when she was wanted. She had been engaged to be a comfort, a support to them both. Fond of travelling, a cheerful disposition, a good packer and so on. And then, when they had come all this way and taken the Villa Martin and moved in, she had turned out to be a Roman Catholic. Half her time, more than half, was spent wearing out the knees of her skirts in cold churches. It was really too. . . . The door opened. A middle-aged, clean-shaven, very well dressed stranger stood bowing before them. His bow was stately. Milly saw it pleased Mother very much; she bowed her Queen Alexandra bow back. As for Milly, she never could bow. She smiled, feeling shy, but deeply interested. ‘Have I the pleasure,’ said the stranger very courteously, with a strong American accent, ‘of speaking with Mrs Wyndham Fawcett?’ ‘I am Mrs Fawcett,’ said Mother, graciously, ‘and this is my daughter, Mildred.’ ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss Fawcett.’ And the stranger shot a fresh, chill hand at Milly, who grasped it just in time before it was gone again. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ said Mother, and she waved faintly at all the gilt chairs. ‘Thank you, I will,’ said the stranger. Down he sat, still solemn, crossing his legs, and, most surprisingly, his arms as well. His face looked at them over his dark arms as over a gate. ‘Milly, sit down, dear.’ So Milly sat down, too, on the Madame Récamier2 couch, and traced a filet lace flower with her finger. There was a little pause. She saw the stranger swallow; Mother’s fan opened and shut. Then he said ‘I took the liberty of calling, Mrs Fawcett, because I had the pleasure of your husband’s acquaintance in the States when he was lecturing there some years ago. I should like very much to renoo our – well – I venture to hope we might call it friendship. Is he with you at present? Are you expecting him out? I noticed his name was not mentioned in the local paper. But I put that down to a foreign custom, perhaps – giving precedence to the lady.’

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And here the stranger looked as though he might be going to smile. But as a matter of fact it was extremely awkward. Mother’s mouth shook. Milly squeezed her hands between her knees, but she watched hard from under her eyebrows. Good, noble little Mummy! How Milly admired her as she heard her say, gently and quite simply, ‘I am sorry to say my husband died two years ago.’ Mr Prodger gave a great start. ‘Did he?’ He thrust out his under lip, frowned, pondered. ‘I am truly sorry to hear that, Mrs Fawcett. I hope you’ll believe me when I say I had no idea your husband had . . . passed over.’ ‘Of course.’ Mother softly stroked her skirt. ‘I do trust,’ said Mr Prodger, more seriously still, ‘that my inquiry didn’t give you too much pain.’ ‘No, no. It’s quite all right,’ said the gentle voice. But Mr Prodger insisted. ‘You’re sure? You’re positive?’ At that Mother raised her head and gave him one of her still, bright, exalted glances that Milly knew so well. ‘I’m not in the least hurt,’ she said, as one might say it from the midst of the fiery furnace. Mr Prodger looked relieved. He changed his attitude and continued. ‘I hope this regrettable circumstance will not deprive me of your –’ ‘Oh, certainly not. We shall be delighted. We are always so pleased to know any one who –’ Mother gave a little bound, a little flutter. She flew from her shadowy branch on to a sunny one. ‘Is this your first visit to the Riviera?’ ‘It is,’ said Mr Prodger. ‘The fact is I was in Florence until recently. But I took a heavy cold there –’ ‘Florence so damp,’ cooed Mother. ‘And the doctor recommended I should come here for the sunshine before I started for home.’ ‘The sun is so very lovely here,’ agreed Mother, enthusiastically. ‘Well, I don’t think we get too much of it,’ said Mr Prodger, dubiously, and two lines showed at his lips. ‘I seem to have been sitting around in my hotel more days than I care to count.’ ‘Ah, hotels are so very trying,’ said Mother, and she drooped sympathetically at the thought of a lonely man in an hotel. . . . ‘You are alone here?’ she asked, gently, just in case . . . one never knew . . . it was better to be on the safe, the tactful side. But her fears were groundless. ‘Oh, yes, I’m alone,’ cried Mr Prodger, more heartily than he had spoken yet, and he took a speck of thread off his immaculate trouser leg. Something in his voice puzzled Milly. What was it? ‘Still, the scenery is so very beautiful,’ said Mother, ‘that one really does not feel the need of friends. I was only saying to my daughter

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yesterday I could live here for years without going outside the garden gate. It is all so beautiful.’ ‘Is that so?’ said Mr Prodger, soberly. He added, ‘You have a very charming villa.’ And he glanced round the salon. ‘Is all this antique furniture genuine, may I ask?’ ‘I believe so,’ said Mother. ‘I was certainly given to understand it was. Yes, we love our villa. But of course it is very large for two, that is to say three, ladies. My companion, Miss Anderson, is with us. But unfortunately she is a Roman Catholic, and so she is out most of the time.’ Mr Prodger bowed as one who agreed that Roman Catholics were very seldom in. ‘But I am so fond of space,’ continued Mother, ‘and so is my daughter. We both love large rooms and plenty of them – don’t we, Milly?’ This time Mr Prodger looked at Milly quite cordially and remarked, ‘Yes, young people like plenty of room to run about.’ He got up, put one hand behind his back, slapped the other upon it and went over to the balcony. ‘You’ve a view of the sea from here,’ he observed. The ladies might well have noticed it; the whole Mediterranean swung before the windows. ‘We are so fond of the sea,’ said Mother, getting up, too. Mr Prodger looked towards Milly. ‘Do you see those yachts, Miss Fawcett?’ Milly saw them. ‘Do you happen to know what they’re doing?’ asked Mr Prodger. What they were doing? What a funny question! Milly stared and bit her lip. ‘They’re racing!’ said Mr Prodger, and this time he did actually smile at her. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ stammered Milly. ‘Of course they are.’ She knew that. ‘Well, they’re not always at it,’ said Mr Prodger, goodhumouredly. And he turned to Mother and began to take a ceremonious farewell. ‘I wonder,’ hesitated Mother, folding her little hands and eyeing him, ‘if you would care to lunch with us – if you would not be too dull with two ladies. We should be so very pleased.’ Mr Prodger became intensely serious again. He seemed to brace himself to meet the luncheon invitation. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Fawcett. I should be, delighted.’ ‘That will be very nice,’ said Mother, warmly. ‘Let me see. To-day is Monday – isn’t it, Milly? Would Wednesday suit you?’

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Mr Prodger replied, ‘It would suit me excellently to lunch with you on Wednesday, Mrs Fawcett. At mee-dee, I presume, as they call it here.’ ‘Oh, no! We keep our English times. At one o’clock,’ said Mother. And that being arranged, Mr Prodger became more and more ceremonious and bowed himself out of the room. Mother rang for Marie to look after him, and a moment later the big, glass hall-door shut. ‘Well!’ said Mother. She was all smiles. Little smiles like butterflies, alighting on her lips and gone again. ‘That was an adventure, Milly, wasn’t it, dear? And I thought he was such a very charming man, didn’t you?’ Milly made a little face at Mother and rubbed her eye. ‘Of course you did. You must have, dear. And his appearance was so satisfactory – wasn’t it?’ Mother was obviously enraptured. ‘I mean he looked so very well kept. Did you notice his hands? Every nail shone like a diamond. I must say I do like to see. . . .’ She broke off. She came over to Milly and patted her big collar straight. ‘You do think it was right of me to ask him to lunch – don’t you, dear?’ said Mother pathetically. Mother made her feel so big, so tall. But she was tall. She could pick Mother up in her arms. Sometimes, rare moods came when she did. Swooped on Mother who squeaked like a mouse and even kicked. But not lately. Very seldom now. . . . ‘It was so strange,’ said Mother. There was the still, bright, exalted glance again. ‘I suddenly seemed to hear Father say to me “Ask him to lunch”. And then there was some – warning. . . . I think it was about the wine. But that I didn’t catch – very unfortunately,’ she added, mournfully. She put her hand on her breast; she bowed her head. ‘Father is still so near,’ she whispered. Milly looked out of the window. She hated Mother going on like this. But of course she couldn’t say anything. Out of the window there was the sea and the sunlight silver on the palms, like water dripping from silver oars. Milly felt a yearning – what was it? – it was like a yearning to fly. But Mother’s voice brought her back to the salon, to the gilt chairs, the gilt couches, sconces, cabinets, the tables with the heavy-sweet flowers, the faded brocade, the pink-spotted Chinese dragons on the mantelpiece and the two Turks’ heads in the fireplace that supported the broad logs. ‘I think a leg of lamb would be nice, don’t you, dear?’ said Mother. ‘The lamb is so very small and delicate just now. And men like nothing so much as plain roast meat. Yvonne prepares it so nicely, too, with

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that little frill of paper lace round the top of the leg. It always reminds me of something – I can’t think what. But it certainly makes it look very attractive indeed.’ Wednesday came. And the flutter that Mother and Milly had felt over the visiting card extended to the whole villa. Yes, it was not too much to say that the whole villa thrilled and fluttered at the idea of having a man to lunch. Old, flat-footed Yvonne came waddling back from market with a piece of gorgonzola in so perfect a condition that when she found Marie in the kitchen she flung down her great basket, snatched the morsel up and held it, rustling in its paper, to her quivering bosom. ‘J’ai trouvé un morceau de gorgonzola,’ she panted, rolling up her eyes as though she invited the heavens themselves to look down upon it. ‘J’ai un morceau de gorgonzola ici pour un prr-ince, ma fille.’ And hissing the word ‘ppr-ince’ like lightning, she thrust the morsel under Marie’s nose. Marie, who was a delicate creature, almost swooned at the shock. ‘Do you think,’ cried Yvonne, scornfully, ‘that I would ever buy such cheese pour ces dames? Never. Never. Jamais de ma vie.’ Her sausage finger wagged before her nose, and she minced in a dreadful imitation of Mother’s French, ‘We have none of us large appetites, Yvonne. We are very fond of boiled eggs and mashed potatoes and a nice, plain salad.’ ‘Ah-Bah!’ With a snort of contempt she flung away her shawl, rolled up her sleeves, and began unpacking the basket. At the bottom there was a flat bottle which, sighing, she laid aside. ‘De quoi pour mes cors,’ said she. And Marie, seizing a bottle of Sauterne and bearing it off to the dining-room murmured, as she shut the kitchen door behind her, ‘Et voilà pour les cors de Monsieur!’ The dining-room was a large room panelled in dark wood. It had a massive mantelpiece and carved chairs covered in crimson damask. On the heavy, polished table stood an oval glass dish decorated with little gilt swags. This dish, which it was Marie’s duty to keep filled with fresh flowers, fascinated her. The sight of it gave her a frisson. It reminded her always, as it lay solitary on the dark expanse, of a little tomb. And one day, passing through the long windows on to the stone terrace and down the steps into the garden she had the happy thought of so arranging the flowers that they would be appropriate to one of the ladies on a future tragic occasion. Her first creation had been terrible. Tomb of Mademoiselle Anderson in black pansies, lily-of-the-valley, and a frill of heliotrope. It gave her a most intense, curious pleasure to hand Miss Anderson the potatoes at lunch, and at

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the same time to gaze beyond her at her triumph. It was like (O ciel!), it was like handing potatoes to a corpse. The Tomb of Madame was on the contrary almost gay. Foolish little flowers, half yellow, half blue, hung over the edge, wisps of green trailed across, and in the middle there was a large scarlet rose. Cœur saignant, Marie had called it. But it did not look in the least like a cœur saignant. It looked flushed and cheerful, like Mother emerging from the luxury of a warm bath. Milly’s, of course, was all white. White stocks, little white rosebuds, with a sprig or two of dark box edging. It was Mother’s favourite. Poor innocent! Marie, at the sideboard, had to turn her back when she heard Mother exclaim, ‘Isn’t it pretty, Milly? Isn’t it sweetly pretty? Most artistic. So original.’ And she had said to Marie, ‘C’est très joli, Marie. Très original.’ Marie’s smile was so remarkable that Milly, peeling a tangerine, remarked to Mother, ‘I don’t think she likes you to admire them. It makes her uncomfortable.’ But to-day – the glory of her opportunity made Marie feel quite faint as she seized her flower scissors. Tombeau d’un beau Monsieur. She was forbidden to cut the orchids that grew round the fountain basin. But what were orchids for if not for such an occasion? Her fingers trembled as the scissors snipped away. They were enough; Marie added two small sprays of palm. And back in the dining-room she had the happy idea of binding the palm together with a twist of gold thread deftly torn off the fringe of the dining-room curtains. The effect was superb. Marie almost seemed to see her beau Monsieur, very small, very small, at the bottom of the bowl, in full evening dress with a ribbon across his chest and his ears white as wax. What surprised Milly, however, was that Miss Anderson should pay any attention to Mr Prodger’s coming. She rustled to breakfast in her best black silk blouse, her Sunday blouse, with the large, painfullooking crucifix dangling over the front. Milly was alone when Miss Anderson entered the dining-room. This was unfortunate, for she always tried to avoid being left alone with Miss Anderson. She could not say exactly why; it was a feeling. She had the feeling that Miss Anderson might say something about God, or something fearfully intimate. Oh, she would sink through the floor if such a thing happened; she would expire. Supposing she were to say ‘Milly, do you believe in our Lord?’ Heavens! It simply didn’t bear thinking about. ‘Good-morning, my dear,’ said Miss Anderson, and her fingers, cold, pale, like church candles, touched Milly’s cheeks. ‘Good-morning, Miss Anderson. May I give you some coffee?’ said Milly, trying to be natural.

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‘Thank you, dear child,’ said Miss Anderson, and laughing her light, nervous laugh, she hooked on her eyeglasses and stared at the basket of rolls. ‘And is it to-day that you expect your guest?’ she asked. Now why did she ask that? Why pretend when she knew perfectly well? That was all part of her strangeness. Or was it because she wanted to be friendly? Miss Anderson was more than friendly; she was genial. But there was always this something. Was she spying? People said at school that Roman Catholics spied. . . . Miss Anderson rustled, rustled about the house like a dead leaf. Now she was on the stairs, now in the upstairs passage. Sometimes, at night, when Milly was feverish, she woke up and heard that rustle outside her door. Was Miss Anderson looking through the key-hole? And one night she actually had the idea that Miss Anderson had bored two holes in the wall above her head and was watching her from there. The feeling was so strong that next time she went into Miss Anderson’s room her eyes flew to the spot. To her horror a large picture hung there. Had it been there before? . . . ‘Guest?’ The crisp breakfast roll broke in half at the word. ‘Yes, I think it is,’ said Milly, vaguely, and her blue, flower-like eyes were raised to Miss Anderson in a vague stare. ‘It will make quite a change in our little party,’ said the much-toopleasant voice. ‘I confess I miss very much the society of men. I have had such a great deal of it in my life. I think that ladies by themselves are apt to get a little – h’m – h’m. . . .’ And helping herself to cherry jam, she spilt it on the cloth. Milly took a large, childish bite out of her roll. There was nothing to reply to this. But how young Miss Anderson made her feel! She made her want to be naughty, to pour milk over her head or make a noise with a spoon. ‘Ladies by themselves,’ went on Miss Anderson, who realised none of this, ‘are very apt to find their interests limited.’ ‘Why?’ said Milly, goaded to reply. People always said that; it sounded most unfair. ‘I think,’ said Miss Anderson, taking off her eyeglasses and looking a little dim, ‘it is the absence of political discussion.’ ‘Oh, politics!’ cried Milly, airily. ‘I hate politics. Father always said –’ But here she pulled up short. She crimsoned. She didn’t want to talk about Father to Miss Anderson. ‘Oh! Look! Look! A butterfly!’ cried Miss Anderson, softly and hastily. ‘Look, what a darling!’ Her own cheeks flushed a slow red at the sight of the darling butterfly fluttering so softly over the glittering table. That was very nice of Miss Anderson – fearfully nice of her. She

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must have realised that Milly didn’t want to talk about Father and so she had mentioned the butterfly on purpose. Milly smiled at Miss Anderson as she never had smiled at her before. And she said in her warm, youthful voice, ‘He is a duck, isn’t he? I love butterflies. I think they are great lambs.’ The morning whisked away as foreign mornings do. Mother had half decided to wear her hat at lunch. ‘What do you think, Milly? Do you think as head of the house it might be appropriate? On the other hand one does not want to do anything at all extreme.’ ‘Which do you mean, Mother? Your mushroom or the jampot?’ ‘Oh, not the jampot, dear.’ Mother was quite used to Milly’s name for it. ‘I somehow don’t feel myself in a hat without a brim. And to tell you the truth I am still not quite certain whether I was wise in buying the jampot. I cannot help feeling that if I were to meet Father in it he would be a little too surprised. More than once lately,’ went on Mother quickly, ‘I have thought of taking off the trimming, turning it upside down, and making it into a nice little workbag. What do you think, dear? But we must not go into it now, Milly. This is not the moment for such schemes. Come on to the balcony. I have told Marie we shall have coffee there. What about bringing out that big chair with the nice, substantial legs for Mr Prodger? Men are so fond of nice, substantial. . . . No, not by yourself, love! Let me help you.’ When the chair was carried out Milly thought it looked exactly like Mr Prodger. It was Mr Prodger admiring the view. ‘No, don’t sit down on it. You mustn’t,’ she cried hastily, as Mother began to subside. She put her arm through Mother’s and drew her back into the salon. Happily, at that moment there was a rustle and Miss Anderson was upon them. In excellent time, for once. She carried a copy of the Morning Post. ‘I have been trying to find out from this,’ said she, lightly tapping the newspaper with her eyeglasses, ‘whether Congress is sitting at present. But unfortunately, after reading my copy right through, I happened to glance at the heading and discovered it was five weeks’ old.’ Congress! Would Mr Prodger expect them to talk about Congress? The idea terrified Mother. Congress! The American parliament, of course, composed of senators – grey-bearded old men in frock coats and turn-down collars, rather like missionaries. But she did not feel at all competent to discuss them. ‘I think we had better not be too intellectual,’ she suggested,

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timidly, fearful of disappointing Miss Anderson, but more fearful still of the alternative. ‘Still, one likes to be prepared,’ said Miss Anderson. And after a pause she added softly, ‘One never knows.’ Ah, how true that is! One never does. Miss Anderson and Mother seemed both to ponder this truth. They sat silent, with head bent, as though listening to the whisper of the words. ‘One never knows,’ said the pink-spotted dragons on the mantelpiece and the Turks’ heads pondered. Nothing is known – nothing. Everybody just waits for things to happen as they were waiting there for the stranger who came walking towards them through the sun and shadow under the budding plane trees, or driving, perhaps, in one of the small, cotton-covered cabs. . . . An angel passed over the Villa Martin. In that moment of hovering silence something timid, something beseeching seemed to lift, seemed to offer itself, as the flowers in the salon, uplifted, gave themselves to the light. Then Mother said, ‘I hope Mr Prodger will not find the scent of the mimosa too powerful. Men are not fond of flowers in a room as a rule. I have heard it causes actual hayfever in some cases. What do you think, Milly? Ought we perhaps –’ But there was no time to do anything. A long, firm trill sounded from the hall door. It was a trill so calm and composed and unlike the tentative little push they gave the bell that it brought them back to the seriousness of the moment. They heard a man’s voice; the door clicked shut again. He was inside. A stick rattled on the table. There was a pause, and then the door handle of the salon turned and Marie, in frilled muslin cuffs and an apron shaped like a heart, ushered in Mr Prodger. Only Mr Prodger after all? But whom had Milly expected to see? The feeling was there and gone again that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see somebody quite different, before she realised this wasn’t quite the same Mr Prodger as before. He was smarter than ever; all brushed, combed, shining. The ears that Marie had seen white as wax flashed as if they had been pink enamelled. Mother fluttered up in her pretty little way, so hoping he had not found the heat of the day too trying to be out in . . . but happily it was a little early in the year for dust. Then Miss Anderson was introduced. Milly was ready this time for that fresh hand, but she almost gasped; it was so very chill. It was like a hand stretched out to you from the water. Then together they all sat down. ‘Is this your first visit to the Riviera?’ asked Miss Anderson, graciously, dropping her handkerchief. ‘It is,’ answered Mr Prodger composedly, and he folded his arms as before. ‘I was in Florence until recently, but I caught a heavy cold –’

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‘Florence so –’ began Mother, when the beautiful brass gong, that burned like a fallen sun in the shadows of the hall, began to throb. First it was a low muttering, then it swelled, it quickened, it burst into a clash of triumph under Marie’s sympathetic fingers. Never had they been treated to such a performance before. Mr Prodger was all attention. ‘That’s a very fine gong,’ he remarked approvingly. ‘We think it is so very oriental,’ said Mother. ‘It gives our little meals quite an Eastern flavour. Shall we. . . .’ Their guest was at the door bowing. ‘So many gentlemen and only one lady,’ fluttered Mother. ‘What I mean is the boot is on the other shoe. That is to say – come, Milly, come, dear.’ And she led the way to the dining-room. Well, there they were. The cold, fresh napkins were shaken out of their charming shapes and Marie handed the omelette. Mr Prodger sat on Mother’s right, facing Milly, and Miss Anderson had her back to the long windows. But after all – why should the fact of their having a man with them make such a difference? It did; it made all the difference. Why should they feel so stirred at the sight of that large hand outspread, moving among the wine glasses? Why should the sound of that loud, confident ‘Ah-hm!’ change the very look of the dining-room? It was not a favourite room of theirs as a rule; it was overpowering. They bobbed uncertainly at the pale table with a curious feeling of exposure. They were like those meek guests who arrive unexpectedly at the fashionable hotel, and are served with whatever may be ready, while the real luncheon, the real guests lurk important and contemptuous in the background. And although it was impossible for Marie to be other than deft, nimble and silent, what heart could she have in ministering to that most uninspiring of spectacles – three ladies dining alone? Now all was changed. Marie filled their glasses to the brim as if to reward them for some marvellous feat of courage. These timid English ladies had captured a live lion, a real one, smelling faintly of eau de cologne, and with a tip of handkerchief showing, white as a flake of snow. ‘He is worthy of it,’ decided Marie, eyeing her orchids and palms. Mr Prodger touched his hot plate with appreciative fingers. ‘You’ll hardly believe it, Mrs Fawcett,’ he remarked, turning to Mother, ‘but this is the first hot plate I’ve happened on since I left the States. I had begun to believe there were two things that just weren’t to be had in Europe. One was a hot plate and the other was a glass of cold water. Well, the cold water one can do without; but a hot plate is more difficult. I’d got so discouraged with the cold wet ones I encountered everywhere that when I was arranging with Cook’s Agency

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about my room here I explained to them “I don’t mind where I go to. I don’t care what the expense may be. But for mercy’s sake find me an hotel where I can get a hot plate by ringing for it.” ’ Mother, though outwardly all sympathy, found this a little bewildering. She had a momentary vision of Mr Prodger ringing for hot plates to be brought to him at all hours. Such strange things to want in any numbers. ‘I have always heard that American hotels are so very well equipped,’ said Miss Anderson. ‘Telephones in all the rooms and even tape machines.’ Milly could see Miss Anderson reading that tape machine. ‘I should like to go to America awfully,’ she cried, as Marie brought in the lamb and set it before Mother. ‘There’s certainly nothing wrong with America,’ said Mr Prodger, soberly. ‘America’s a great country. What are they? Peas? Well, I’ll just take a few. I don’t eat peas as a rule. No, no salad, thank you. Not with the hot meat.’ ‘But what makes you want to go to America?’ Miss Anderson ducked forward, smiling at Milly, and her eyeglasses fell into her plate, just escaping the gravy. Because one wants to go everywhere, was the real answer. But Milly’s flower-blue gaze rested thoughtfully on Miss Anderson as she said, ‘The ice-cream. I adore ice-cream.’ ‘Do you?’ said Mr Prodger, and he put down his fork; he seemed moved. ‘So you’re fond of ice-cream, are you, Miss Fawcett?’ Milly transferred her dazzling gaze to him. It said she was. ‘Well,’ said Mr Prodger quite playfully, and he began eating again, ‘I’d like to see you get it. I’m sorry we can’t manage to ship some across. I like to see young people have just what they want. It seems right, somehow.’ Kind man! Would he have any more lamb? Lunch passed so pleasantly, so quickly, that the famous piece of gorgonzola was on the table in all its fatness and richness before there had been an awkward moment. The truth was that Mr Prodger proved most easy to entertain, most ready to chat. As a rule men were not fond of chat as Mother understood it. They did not seem to understand that it does not matter very much what one says; the important thing is not to let the conversation drop. Strange! Even the best of men ignored that simple rule. They refused to realise that conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want it to keep on smiling. What could be simpler? But even Father. . . . Mother winced away from memories that were not as sweet as memories ought to be.

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All the same she could not help hoping that Father saw what a successful little lunch party it was. He did so love to see Milly happy, and the child looked more animated than she had done for weeks. She had lost that dreamy expression, which, though very sweet, did not seem natural at her age. Perhaps what she wanted was not so much Easton’s Syrup as taking out of herself. ‘I have been very selfish,’ thought Mother, blaming herself as usual. She put her hand on Milly’s arm; she pressed it gently as they rose from the table. And Marie held the door open for the white and the grey figure; for Miss Anderson, who peered shortsightedly, as though looking for something; for Mr Prodger who brought up the rear, walking stately, with the benign air of a Monsieur who has eaten well. Beyond the balcony, the garden, the palms and the sea lay bathed in quivering brightness. Not a leaf moved; the oranges were little worlds of burning light. There was the sound of grasshoppers ringing their tiny tambourines, and the hum of bees as they hovered, as though to taste their joy in advance, before burrowing close into the warm wide-open stocks and roses. The sound of the sea was like a breath, was like a sigh. Did the little group on the balcony hear it? Mother’s fingers moved among the black and gold coffee-cups; Miss Anderson brought the most uncomfortable chair out of the salon and sat down. Mr Prodger put his large hand on the yellow stone ledge of the balcony and remarked gravely, ‘This balcony rail is just as hot as it can be.’ ‘They say,’ said Mother, ‘that the greatest heat of the day is at about half-past two. We have certainly noticed it is very hot then.’ ‘Yes, it’s lovely then,’ murmured Milly, and she stretched out her hand to the sun. ‘It’s simply baking!’ ‘Then you’re not afraid of the sunshine?’ said Mr Prodger, taking his coffee from Mother. ‘No, thank you. I won’t take any cream. Just one lump of sugar.’ And he sat down balancing the little, chattering cup on his broad knee. ‘No, I adore it,’ answered Milly, and she began to nibble the lump of sugar. . . . Notes U Text: TS NLC. DNOS. 1. KM noted on 1 January 1922, Wrote The Doves Nest this afternoon. I was in no mood to write: it seemed impossible, yet when I had finished three pages they were ‘alright’. This is a proof (never to be too often proved) that once one has thought out a story nothing remains but the labour. (KMN, 2, p. 312)

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2. Juliette Récamier (1777–1849) was an early nineteenth-century French society hostess. Her portrait by Jacques-Louis David (1800) featured her semi-reclined on a chaise longue.

•

A Cup of Tea1 Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces. . . . But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people and . . . artists – quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing. Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter – Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: ‘ I want those and those and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses in the jar. No, no lilac. I hate lilac. It’s got no shape.’ The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this was only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. ‘Give me those stumpy little tulips. Those red and white ones.’ And she was followed to the car by a thin shop-girl staggering under an immense white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes. . . . One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in Curzon Street. It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually had it to oneself. And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his hands; he was so gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was something . . . ‘You see, madam,’ he would explain in his low respectful tones, ‘I love my things. I would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare. . . .’ And, breathing deeply he unrolled a tiny square

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of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale fingertips. To-day it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody as yet. An exquisite little enamel box with a glaze so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowery tree, and a more minute creature still had her arms round his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch; it had green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads. Rosemary took her hands out of her long gloves. She always took off her gloves to examine such things. Yes, she liked it very much. She loved it; it was a great duck. She must have it. And, turning the creamy box, opening and shutting it, she couldn’t help noticing how charming her hands were against the blue velvet. The shopman, in some dim cavern of his mind, may have dared to think so too. For he took a pencil, leant over the counter, and his pale bloodless fingers crept timidly towards those rosy, flashing ones, as he murmured gently: ‘If I may venture to point out to madam, the flowers on the little lady’s bodice.’ ‘Charming!’ Rosemary admired the flowers. But what was the price? For a moment the shopman did not seem to hear. Then a murmur reached her. ‘Twenty-eight guineas, madam.’ ‘Twenty-eight guineas.’ Rosemary gave no sign. She laid the little box down; she buttoned her gloves again. Twenty-eight guineas. Even if one is rich . . . She looked vague. She stared at a plump teakettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her voice was dreamy as she answered: ‘Well, keep it for me – will you? I’ll . . .’ But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever. The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people hurried by, hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. Of course, the car was there. She’d only to cross the pavement. But still she waited. There are moments, horrible moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. But at the very instant of thinking that, a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy – where had she come from? – was standing at Rosemary’s

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elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob, breathed: ‘Madam, may I speak to you a moment?’ ‘Speak to me?’ Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water. ‘M-madam,’ stammered the voice. ‘Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea?’ ‘A cup of tea?’ There was something simple, sincere in that voice; it wasn’t in the least the voice of a beggar. ‘Then have you no money at all?’ asked Rosemary. ‘None, madam,’ came the answer. ‘How extraordinary!’ Rosemary peered through the dusk, and the girl gazed back at her. How more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing on the stage, what would happen? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying afterwards to the amazement of her friends: ‘I simply took her home with me,’ as she stepped forward and said to that dim person beside her: ‘Come home to tea with me.’ The girl drew back startled. She even stopped shivering for a moment. Rosemary put out a hand and touched her arm. ‘I mean it,’ she said, smiling. And she felt how simple and kind her smile was. ‘Why won’t you? Do. Come home with me now in my car and have tea.’ ‘You – you don’t mean it, madam,’ said the girl, and there was pain in her voice. ‘But I do,’ cried Rosemary. ‘I want you to. To please me. Come along.’ The girl put her fingers to her lips and her eyes devoured Rosemary. ‘You’re – you’re not taking me to the police station?’ she stammered. ‘The police station!’ Rosemary laughed out. ‘Why should I be so cruel? No, I only want to make you warm and to hear – anything you care to tell me.’ Hungry people are easily led. The footman held the door of the car open, and a moment later they were skimming through the dusk. ‘There!’ said Rosemary. She had a feeling of triumph as she slipped her hand through the velvet strap. She could have said, ‘Now I’ve got you,’ as she gazed at the little captive she had netted. But of course she meant it kindly. Oh, more than kindly. She was going to prove to this girl that – wonderful things did happen in life, that – fairy godmothers were real, that – rich people had hearts, and that women

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were sisters. She turned impulsively, saying: ‘Don’t be frightened. After all, why shouldn’t you come back with me? We’re both women. If I’m the more fortunate, you ought to expect . . .’ But happily at that moment, for she didn’t know how the sentence was going to end, the car stopped. The bell was rung, the door opened, and with a charming, protecting, almost embracing movement, Rosemary drew the other into the hall. Warmth, softness, light, a sweet scent, all those things so familiar to her she never even thought about them, she watched that other receive. It was fascinating. She was like the rich little girl in her nursery with all the cupboards to open, all the boxes to unpack. ‘Come, come upstairs,’ said Rosemary, longing to begin to be generous. ‘Come up to my room.’ And, besides, she wanted to spare this poor little thing from being stared at by the servants; she decided as they mounted the stairs she would not even ring for Jeanne, but take off her things by herself. The great thing was to be natural! And ‘There!’ cried Rosemary again, as they reached her beautiful big bedroom with the curtains drawn, the fire leaping on her wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the primrose and blue rugs. The girl stood just inside the door; she seemed dazed. But Rosemary didn’t mind that. ‘Come and sit down,’ she cried, dragging her big chair up to the fire, ‘in this comfy chair. Come and get warm. You look so dreadfully cold.’ ‘I daren’t, madam,’ said the girl, and she edged backwards. ‘Oh, please,’ – Rosemary ran forward – ‘you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t, really. Sit down, and when I’ve taken off my things we shall go into the next room and have tea and be cosy. Why are you afraid?’ And gently she half pushed the thin figure into its deep cradle. But there was no answer. The girl stayed just as she had been put, with her hands by her sides and her mouth slightly open. To be quite sincere, she looked rather stupid. But Rosemary wouldn’t acknowledge it. She leant over her, saying: ‘Won’t you take off your hat? Your pretty hair is all wet. And one is so much more comfortable without a hat, isn’t one?’ There was a whisper that sounded like ‘Very good, madam,’ and the crushed hat was taken off. ‘And let me help you off with your coat, too,’ said Rosemary. The girl stood up. But she held on to the chair with one hand and let Rosemary pull. It was quite an effort. The other scarcely helped her at all. She seemed to stagger like a child, and the thought came and went through Rosemary’s mind, that if people wanted helping they must respond a little, just a little, otherwise it became very difficult

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indeed. And what was she to do with the coat now? She left it on the floor, and the hat too. She was just going to take a cigarette off the mantelpiece when the girl said quickly, but so lightly and strangely: ‘I’m very sorry, madam, but I’m going to faint. I shall go off, madam, if I don’t have something.’ ‘Good heavens, how thoughtless I am!’ Rosemary rushed to the bell. ‘Tea! Tea at once! And some brandy immediately!’ The maid was gone again, but the girl almost cried out.’ No, I don’t want no brandy. I never drink brandy. It’s a cup of tea I want, madam.’ And she burst into tears. It was a terrible and fascinating moment. Rosemary knelt beside her chair. ‘Don’t cry, poor little thing,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry.’ And she gave the other her lace handkerchief. She really was touched beyond words. She put her arm round those thin, bird-like shoulders. Now at last the other forgot to be shy, forgot everything except that they were both women, and gasped out: ‘I can’t go on no longer like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. I shall do away with myself. I can’t bear no more.’ ‘You shan’t have to. I’ll look after you. Don’t cry any more. Don’t you see what a good thing it was that you met me? We’ll have tea and you’ll tell me everything. And I shall arrange something. I promise. Do stop crying. It’s so exhausting. Please!’ The other did stop just in time for Rosemary to get up before the tea came. She had the table placed between them. She plied the poor little creature with everything, all the sandwiches, all the bread and butter, and every time her cup was empty she filled it with tea, cream and sugar. People always said sugar was so nourishing. As for herself she didn’t eat; she smoked and looked away tactfully so that the other should not be shy. And really the effect of that slight meal was marvellous. When the tea-table was carried away a new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes, lay back in the big chair in a kind of sweet languor, looking at the blaze. Rosemary lit a fresh cigarette; it was time to begin. ‘And when did you have your last meal?’ she asked softly. But at that moment the door-handle turned. ‘Rosemary, may I come in?’ It was Philip. ‘Of course.’ He came in. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ he said, and stopped and stared. ‘It’s quite all right,’ said Rosemary smiling. ‘This is my friend, Miss –’ ‘Smith, madam,’ said the languid figure, who was strangely still and unafraid.

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‘Smith,’ said Rosemary. ‘We are going to have a little talk.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Philip. ‘Quite,’ and his eye caught sight of the coat and hat on the floor. He came over to the fire and turned his back to it. ‘It’s a beastly afternoon,’ he said curiously, still looking at that listless figure, looking at its hands and boots, and then at Rosemary again. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Rosemary enthusiastically. ‘Vile.’ Philip smiled his charming smile. ‘As a matter of fact,’ said he, ‘I wanted you to come into the library for a moment. Would you? Will Miss Smith excuse us?’ The big eyes were raised to him, but Rosemary answered for her. ‘Of course she will.’ And they went out of the room together. ‘I say,’ said Philip, when they were alone. ‘Explain. Who is she? What does it all mean?’ Rosemary, laughing, leaned against the door and said: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. Really. She’s a real pick-up. She asked me for the price of a cup of tea, and I brought her home with me.’ ‘But what on earth are you going to do with her?’ cried Philip. ‘Be nice to her,’ said Rosemary quickly. ‘Be frightfully nice to her. Look after her. I don’t know how. We haven’t talked yet. But show her – treat her – make her feel –’ ‘My darling girl,’ said Philip, ‘you’re quite mad, you know. It simply can’t be done.’ ‘I knew you’d say that,’ retorted Rosemary. ‘Why not? I want to. Isn’t that a reason? And besides, one’s always reading about these things. I decided –’ ‘But,’ said Philip slowly, and he cut the end of a cigar, ‘she’s so astonishingly pretty.’ ‘Pretty?’ Rosemary was so surprised that she blushed. ‘Do you think so? I – I hadn’t thought about it.’ ‘Good Lord!’ Philip struck a match. ‘She’s absolutely lovely. Look again, my child. I was bowled over when I came into your room just now. However . . . I think you’re making a ghastly mistake. Sorry, darling, if I’m crude and all that. But let me know if Miss Smith is going to dine with us in time for me to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.’ ‘You absurd creature!’ said Rosemary, and she went out of the library, but not back to her bedroom. She went to her writing-room and sat down at her desk. Pretty! Absolutely lovely! Bowled over! Her heart beat like a heavy bell. Pretty! Lovely! She drew her chequebook towards her. But no, cheques would be no use, of course. She opened a drawer and took out five pound notes, looked at them, put two back, and holding the three squeezed in her hand, she went back to her bedroom.

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Half an hour later Philip was still in the library, when Rosemary came in. ‘I only wanted to tell you,’ said she, and she leaned against the door again and looked at him with her dazzled exotic gaze, ‘Miss Smith won’t dine with us to-night.’ Philip put down the paper. ‘Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement?’ Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. ‘She insisted on going,’ said she, ‘so I gave the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I?’ she added softly. Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little, and put on her pearls. She put up her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks. ‘ Do you like me?’ said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him. ‘I like you awfully,’ he said, and he held her tighter. ‘Kiss me.’ There was a pause. Then Rosemary said dreamily. ‘I saw a fascinating little box to-day. It cost twenty-eight guineas. May I have it?’ Philip jumped her on his knee. ‘You may, little wasteful one,’ said he. But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say. ‘Philip,’ she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, ‘am I pretty?’ Notes Text: Story-Teller, May 1922, pp. 121–5. DNOS. 1. KM noted on 11 January 1922: ‘Wrote and finished A Cup of Tea. It took about 4–5 hours’ (KMN, 2, p. 315).

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Taking the Veil1 It seemed impossible that anyone should be unhappy on such a beautiful morning. Nobody was, decided Edna, except herself. The windows were flung wide in the houses. From within there came the sound of pianos, little hands chased after each other and ran away from each other, practising scales. The trees fluttered in the sunny gardens, all bright with spring flowers. Street boys whistled, a little

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dog barked; people passed by, walking so lightly, so swiftly, they looked as though they wanted to break into a run. Now she actually saw in the distance a parasol, peach-coloured, the first parasol of the year. Perhaps even Edna did not look quite as unhappy as she felt. It is not easy to look tragic at eighteen, when you are extremely pretty, with the cheeks and lips and shining eyes of perfect health. Above all, when you are wearing a French blue frock and your new spring hat trimmed with cornflowers. True, she carried under her arm a book bound in horrid black leather. Perhaps the book provided a gloomy note, but only by accident; it was the ordinary Library binding. For Edna had made going to the Library an excuse for getting out of the house to think, to realise what had happened, to decide somehow what was to be done now. An awful thing had happened. Quite suddenly, at the theatre last night, when she and Jimmy were seated side by side in the dress-circle, without a moment’s warning – in fact, she had just finished a chocolate almond and passed the box to him again – she had fallen in love with an actor. But – fallen – in – love. . . . The feeling was unlike anything she had ever imagined before. It wasn’t in the least pleasant. It was hardly thrilling. Unless you can call the most dreadful sensation of hopeless misery, despair, agony and wretchedness, thrilling. Combined with the certainty that if that actor met her on the pavement after, while Jimmy was fetching their cab, she would follow him to the ends of the earth, at a nod, at a sign, without giving another thought to Jimmy or her father and mother or her happy home and countless friends again. . . . The play had begun fairly cheerfully. That was at the chocolate almond stage. Then the hero had gone blind. Terrible moment! Edna had cried so much she had to borrow Jimmy’s folded, smooth-feeling handkerchief as well. Not that crying mattered. Whole rows were in tears. Even the men blew their noses with a loud trumpeting noise and tried to peer at the programme instead of looking at the stage. Jimmy, most mercifully dry-eyed – for what would she have done without his handkerchief? – squeezed her free hand, and whispered ‘Cheer up, darling girl!’ And it was then she had taken a last chocolate almond to please him and passed the box again. Then there had been that ghastly scene with the hero alone on the stage in a deserted room at twilight, with a band playing outside and the sound of cheering coming from the street. He had tried – ah, how painfully, how pitifully! – to grope his way to the window. He had succeeded at last. There he stood holding the curtain while one beam of light, just one beam, shone full on his raised sightless face, and the band faded away into the distance. . . .

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It was – really, it was absolutely – oh, the most – it was simply – in fact, from that moment Edna knew that life could never be the same. She drew her hand away from Jimmy’s, leaned back, and shut the chocolate box for ever. This at last was love! Edna and Jimmy were engaged. She had had her hair up for a year and a half; they had been publicly engaged for a year. But they had known they were going to marry each other ever since they walked in the Botanical Gardens with their nurses, and sat on the grass with a wine biscuit and a piece of barley-sugar each for their tea. It was so much an accepted thing that Edna had worn a wonderfully good imitation of an engagement-ring out of a cracker all the time she was at school. And up till now they had been devoted to each other. But now it was over. It was so completely over that Edna found it difficult to believe that Jimmy did not realise it too. She smiled wisely, sadly, as she turned into the gardens of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and mounted the path that led through them to Hill Street. How much better to know it now than to wait until after they were married! Now it was possible that Jimmy would get over it. No, it was no use deceiving herself; he would never get over it! His life was wrecked, was ruined; that was inevitable. But he was young. . . . Time, people always said, Time might make a little, just a little difference. In forty years when he was an old man, he might be able to think of her calmly – perhaps. But she – what did the future hold for her? Edna had reached the top of the path. There under a new-leafed tree, hung with little bunches of white flowers, she sat down on a green bench and looked over the Convent flower-beds. In the one nearest to her there grew tender stocks, with a border of blue, shelllike pansies, with at one corner a clump of creamy freezias, their light spears of green criss-crossed over the flowers. The Convent pigeons were tumbling high in the air, and she could hear the voice of Sister Agnes who was giving a singing lesson. Ah-me, sounded the deep tones of the nun, and Ah-me, they were echoed . . . If she did not marry Jimmy, of course she would marry nobody. The man she was in love with, the famous actor – Edna had far too much common-sense not to realise that would never be. It was very odd. She didn’t even want it to be. Her love was too intense for that. It had to be endured, silently; it had to torment her. It was, she supposed, simply that kind of love. ‘But, Edna,’ cried Jimmy. ‘Can you never change? Can I never hope again?’ Oh, what sorrow to have to say it, but it must be said. ‘No, Jimmy, I will never change.’

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Edna bowed her head and a little flower fell on her lap, and the voice of Sister Agnes cried suddenly Ah-no, and the echo came, Ah-no. . . . At that moment the future was revealed. Edna saw it all. She was astonished; it took her breath away at first. But, after all, what could be more natural? She would go into a convent. . . . Her father and mother do everything to dissuade her, in vain. As for Jimmy, his state of mind hardly bears thinking about. Why can’t they understand? How can they add to her suffering like this? The world is cruel, terribly cruel! After a last scene when she gives away her jewellery and so on to her best friends – she so calm, they so broken-hearted – into a convent she goes. No, one moment. The very evening of her going is the actor’s last evening at Port Willin. He receives by a strange messenger a box. It is full of white flowers. But is there no name, no card, nothing? Yes, under the roses, wrapped in a white silk handkerchief, Edna’s last photograph with, written underneath – – – The world forgetting, by the world forgot.2

Edna sat very still under the trees; she clasped the black book in her fingers as though it were her missal. . . . She takes the name of Sister Angela. Snip, snip! All her lovely hair is cut off. Will she be allowed to send one curl to Jimmy? It is contrived somehow. And in a blue gown with a white head-band Sister Angela goes from the convent to the chapel, from the chapel to the convent with something unearthly in her look, in her sorrowful eyes, and in the gentle smile with which she greets the little children who run to her. A saint! She hears it whispered as she paces the chill, wax-smelling corridors. A saint! And visitors to the chapel are told of the nun whose voice is heard above the other voices, of her youth, her beauty, of her tragic, tragic love. ‘There is a man in this town whose life is ruined. . . .’ A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freezia, and the delicate flower leaned over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were laughing. Happy, careless flower! Sister Angela looked at it and said, ‘Now it is winter.’ One night, lying in her icy cell she hears a cry. Some stray animal is out there in the garden, a kitten or a lamb or – well, whatever little animal might be there. Up rises the sleepless nun. All in white, shivering but fearless, she goes and brings it in. But next morning, when the bell rings for matins, she is found tossing in high fever – in delirium – and she never recovers. In three days all is over. The service has been said in the chapel, and she is buried in the corner of the cemetery reserved for the nuns, where there are plain little crosses of wood. Rest in Peace, Sister Angela. . . .

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Now it is evening. Two old people leaning on each other come slowly to the grave and kneel down sobbing, ‘Our daughter! Our only daughter!’ Now there comes another. He is all in black; he comes slowly. But when he is there and lifts his black hat, Edna sees to her horror his hair is snow-white. Jimmy! Too late, too late! The tears are running down his face; he is crying now. Too late, too late! The wind shakes the leafless trees in the churchyard. He gives one awful bitter cry. Edna’s black book fell with a thud to the garden path. She jumped up, her heart beating. My darling! No, it’s not too late. It’s all been a mistake, a terrible dream. Oh, that white hair! How could she have done it? She has not done it. Oh, heavens! Oh, what happiness! She is free, young, and nobody knows her secret. Everything is still possible for her and Jimmy. The house they have planned may still be built, the little solemn boy with his hands behind his back watching them plant the standard roses may still be born. His baby sister. . . . But when Edna got as far as his baby sister, she stretched out her arms as though the little love came flying through the air to her, and gazing at the garden, at the white sprays on the tree, at those darling pigeons blue against the blue, and the Convent with its narrow windows, she realised that now at last for the first time in her life – she had never imagined any feeling like it before – she knew what it was to be in love, but – in – love! Notes Text: Sketch, 117: 1517, 22 February 1922, p. 296. DNOS. 1. KM told Dorothy Brett from Montana-sur-Sierre on 26 January 1922: I wrote & finished a story yesterday for The Sketch. The day after that happens is always a day when one feels like a leaf on the ground – one can’t even flutter. At the same time there is a feeling of joy that another story is finished. I put it in such a lovely place, too, the grounds of a Convent in spring with pigeons flying up in the blue and big bees climbing in and out of the freezias below. If I lived in the snow long enough I should become very opulent. (CLKM, 5, p. 23) The story was partly set in the convent close to where KM had lived in Thorndon. KM wrote in a diary entry for 24 January 1922: It took me about 3 hours to write finally. But I had been thinking over the décor and so on for weeks – nay – months, I believe. I can’t say how thankful I am to have been born in N.Z., to know Wellington as I do and to have it to range about in. Writing about the convent seemed so

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mr and mrs williams natural. I have not been in the grounds more than twice. But it is one of the places that remain as vivid as ever. (KMN, 2, pp. 319–20)

2. See p. 261, n. 5.

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Mr and Mrs Williams 1 That winter Mr. and Mrs. Williams of The Rowans, Wickenham, Surrey, astonished their friends by announcing that they were going for a three weeks’ holiday to Switzerland. Switzerland! How very enterprising and exciting! There was quite a flutter in Wickenham households at the news. Husbands coming home from the city in the evening were greeted immediately with ‘My dear, have you heard the news about the Williams?’ ‘No! What’s up now?’ ‘They’re off to Switzerland.’ ‘Switzerland! What the dickens are they going there for?’ That, of course, was only the extravagance of the moment. One knew perfectly well why people went. But nobody in Wickenham ever plunged so far away from home at that time of year. It was not considered ‘necessary’ as golf, bridge, a summer holiday at the sea, an account at Harrods’ and a small car as soon as one could afford it, were considered necessary . . . ‘Won’t you find the initial expenditure very heavy?’ asked stout old Mrs. Prean meeting Mrs. Williams quite by chance at their nice obliging grocer’s. And she brushed the crumbs of a sample cheese biscuit off her broad bosom. ‘Oh, we shall get our equipment over there,’ said Mrs. Williams. ‘Equipment’ was a word in high favour among the Wickenham ladies. It was left over from the war of course with ‘cheery,’ ‘washout,’ ‘Hun,’ ‘Boche,’ and ‘Bolshy.’ As a matter of fact, Bolshy was post-war. But it belonged to the same mood. (‘My dear, my housemaid is an absolute little Hun, and I’m afraid the cook is turning Bolshy . . .’) There was a fascination in those words. To use them was like opening one’s Red Cross cupboard again and gazing at the remains of the bandages, body-belts, tins of anti-insect and so on. One was stirred, one got a far-away thrill, like the thrill of hearing

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a distant band. It reminded you of those exciting, busy, of course anxious, but tremendous days when the whole of Wickenham was one united family. And, although one’s husband was away, one had for a substitute three large photographs of him in uniform. One in a silver frame on the table by the bed, one in the regimental colours on the piano, and one in leather to match the dining-room chairs. ‘Cook strongly advised us to buy nothing here,’ went on Mrs. Williams. ‘Cook!’ cried Mrs. Prean, greatly astounded. ‘What can –’ ‘Oh – Thomas Cook, of course I mean,’ said Mrs. Williams, smiling brightly. Mrs. Prean subsided. ‘But you will surely not depend upon the resources of a little Swiss village for clothes?’ she persisted, deeply interested, as usual, in other people’s affairs. ‘Oh no, certainly not.’ Mrs. Williams was quite shocked. ‘We shall get all we need in the way of clothes from Harrods’.’ That was what Mrs. Prean had wished to hear. That was as it should be. ‘The great secret, my dear’ (she always knew the great secret), ‘the great secret’, and she put her hand on Mrs. Williams’ arm and spoke very distinctly, ‘is plenty of long-sleeved woven combies!’ ‘Thank you, m’m.’ Both ladies started. There at their side was Mr. Wick, the nice grocer, holding Mrs. Prean’s parcel by a loop of pink string. Dear me – how very awkward! He must have . . . he couldn’t possibly not have . . . In the emotion of the moment Mrs. Prean, thinking to tactfully gloss it over nodded significantly at Mrs. Williams and said, accepting the parcel ‘And that is what I always tell my dear son!’ But this was too swift for Mrs. Williams to follow. Her embarrassment continued and ordering the sardines she just stopped herself from saying ‘Three large pairs, Mr. Wick, please,’ instead of ‘Three large tins.’ 2 As a matter of fact it was Mrs. Williams’ Aunt Aggie’s happy release which had made their scheme possible. Happy release it was! After fifteen years in a wheel chair issuing in and out of the little house at Ealing she had, to use the nurse’s expression ‘just glided away at the last.’ Glided away . . .1 it sounded as though Aunt Aggie had taken the wheel chair with her. One saw her, in her absurd purple velvet, steering carefully among the stars and whimpering faintly, as was her terrestrial wont when the wheel jolted over a particularly large one. Aunt Aggie had left her dear niece Gwendolen two hundred and fifty pounds. Not a vast sum by any means, but quite a nice little

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windfall. Gwendolen, in that dashing mood that only women know decided immediately to spend it – part of it on the house and the rest on a treat for Gerald. And the lawyer’s letter happening to come at tea-time together with a copy of the Sphere full of the most fascinating, thrilling photographs of holiday-makers at Mürren and St. Moritz and Montana, the question of the treat was settled. ‘You would like to go to Switzerland, wouldn’t you, Gerald?’ ‘Very much.’ ‘You’re – awfully good at skating and all that kind of thing – aren’t you?’ ‘Fairly.’ ‘You do feel it’s a thing to be done – don’t you?’ ‘How do you mean?’ But Gwendolen only laughed. That was so like Gerald. She knew, in his heart of hearts he was every bit as keen as she was. But he had this horror of showing his feelings, like all men. Gwendolen understood it perfectly and wouldn’t have had him different for the world . . . ‘I’ll write to Cook’s at once and tell them we don’t want to go to a very fashionable place and we don’t want one of those big jazzy hotels! I’d much prefer a really small out of the way place where we could really go in for the sports seriously.’ This was quite untrue, but, like so many of Gwendolen’s statements, it was made to please Gerald. ‘Don’t you agree?’ Gerald lit his pipe for reply. As you have gathered, the Christian names of Mr. and Mrs. Williams were Gwendolen and Gerald. How well they went together! They sounded married. Gwendolen-Gerald. Gwendolen wrote them, bracketed, on bits of blotting paper, on the backs of old envelopes, on the Stores’ catalogue. They looked married. Gerald, when they were on their honeymoon had made an awfully good joke about them. He had said one morning ‘I say, has it ever struck you that both our names begin with G? Gwendolen-Gerald. You’re a G’ and he had pointed his razor at her – he was shaving, ‘and I’m a G. Two Gs. Gee-Gee. See?’ Oh, Gwendolen saw immediately. It was really most witty. Quite brilliant! And so – sweet and unexpected of him to have thought of it. Gee-Gee. Oh, very good! She wished she could have told it to people. She had an idea that some people thought Gerald had not a very strong sense of humour. But it was a little too intimate. All the more precious for that reason, however. ‘My dear, did you think of it at this moment? I mean – did you just make it up on the spot?’ Gerald, rubbing the lather with a finger nodded. ‘Flashed into my mind while I was soaping my face,’ said he seriously. ‘It’s a

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queer thing’, and he dipped the razor into the pot of hot water, ‘I’ve noticed it before. Shaving gives me ideas.’ It did, indeed, thought Gwendolen. *

*

*

It was not at all difficult for the Williamses to leave home. They had no children and their two servants, scotch girls, sisters (such a point, that, if they do happen to get on well together. On the other hand – but in this case they did) were perfectly capable of looking after the house and Busby the Belgian griffon who most fortunately got on with them too. Dear little chap. He was devoted to Annie. And loved going to the post with Harriet which just gave him the little run he needed into the bargain. As for the garden (Mrs W. was a passionate gardener) all was in apple pie order – one could not have chosen a more satisfactory moment to leave it. And perhaps if the truth were known the garden breathed a deep soft sigh of relief at the blissful thought of three weeks freedom from being weeded and turned over and raked out and examined – even from being stared at . . . So, the endless preparations over at last, one soft mist-dripping morning, one of those damp typical English mornings when the newspaper arrives damp and smelling like a mushroom, off they went to the Station with their 2 large suitcases, one small, one hat box, one roll of rugs, the Fuller tea basket, and a copy of Punch which they had neither of them had time to look at that week. Both of them sat bolt upright in the taxi, both of them wore new, very practical kid gloves which smelt extraordinarily strong, and both in their own way [were] deeply excited. Gwendolen showed it by her high colour, and by her continually fingering her bag to make sure her keys and ticket were in the inside pocket, and Gerald showed it by a quick distracted glance of his large pale blue eyes and by a slightly increased tempo in his whistling . . . Notes U Text: MS NLC, KMN, 2, p. 156. DNOS. Published by JMM in DNOS without the final section (‘It was not all difficult . . .’), now added from KMN, 2. 1. Writing to William Gerhardi, 8 February 1922, KM mentioned I had just been writing a bath chair myself and poor old Aunt Aggie who had lived in one & died in one, glided off, so that one saw her in her purple velvet steering carefully among the stars and whimpering faintly as was her terrestrial wont when the wheel jolted over a particularly large one. (CLKM, 5, p. 55)

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The Fly1 ‘Y’are very snug in here,’ piped old Mr Woodifield, and he peered out of the great, green leather armchair by his friend the boss’s desk as a baby peers out of its pram. His talk was over; it was time for him to be off. But he did not want to go. Since he had retired, since his . . . stroke, the wife and the girls kept him boxed up in the house every day of the week except Tuesday. On Tuesday he was dressed and brushed and allowed to cut back to the City for the day. Though what he did there the wife and girls couldn’t imagine. Made a nuisance of himself to his friends, they supposed. . . . Well, perhaps so. All the same, we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves. So there sat old Woodifield, smoking a cigar and staring almost greedily at the boss, who rolled in his office chair, stout, rosy, five years older than he, and still going strong, still at the helm. It did one good to see him. Wistfully, admiringly, the old voice added, ‘It’s snug in here – upon my word!’ ‘Yes, it’s comfortable enough,’ agreed the boss, and he flipped the Financial Times with a paper-knife. As a matter of fact he was proud of his room; he liked to have it admired, especially by old Woodifield. It gave him a feeling of deep, solid satisfaction to be planted there in the midst of it in full view of that frail old figure in the muffler. ‘I’ve had it done up lately,’ he explained, as he had explained for the past – how many? – weeks. ‘New carpet,’ and he pointed to the bright red carpet with a pattern of large white rings. ‘New furniture,’ and he nodded towards the massive bookcase and the table with legs like twisted treacle. ‘Electric heating!’ He waved almost exultantly towards the five transparent, pearly sausages glowing so softly in the tilted copper pan. But he did not draw old Woodifield’s attention to the photograph over the table of a grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers’ parks with photographers’ stormclouds behind him. It was not new. It had been there for over six years. ‘There was something I wanted to tell you,’ said old Woodifield, and his eyes grew dim remembering. ‘Now what was it? I had it in my mind when I started out this morning.’ His hands began to tremble, and patches of red showed above his beard. Poor old chap, he’s on his last pins, thought the boss. And, feeling kindly, he winked at the old man, and said jokingly, ‘I tell you what.

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I’ve got a little drop of something here that’ll do you good before you go out into the cold again. It’s beautiful stuff. It wouldn’t hurt a child.’ He took a key off his watch-chain, unlocked a cupboard below his desk, and drew forth a dark, squat bottle. ‘That’s the medicine,’ said he. ‘And the man from whom I got it told me on the strict Q.T. it came from the cellars at Windsor Cassel.’ Old Woodifield’s mouth fell open at the sight. He couldn’t have looked more surprised if the boss had produced a rabbit. ‘It’s whisky, ain’t it?’ he piped, feebly. The boss turned the bottle and lovingly showed him the label. Whisky it was. ‘D’you know,’ said he, peering up at the boss wonderingly, ‘they won’t let me touch it at home.’ And he looked as though he was going to cry. ‘Ah, that’s where we know a bit more than the ladies,’ cried the boss, swooping across for two tumblers that stood on the table with the water-bottle, and pouring a generous finger into each. ‘Drink it down. It’ll do you good. And don’t put any water with it. It’s sacrilege to tamper with stuff like this. Ah!’ He tossed off his, pulled out his handkerchief, hastily wiped his moustaches, and cocked an eye at old Woodifield, who was rolling his in his chaps. The old man swallowed, was silent a moment, and then said faintly, ‘It’s nutty!’ But it warmed him; it crept into his chill old brain – he remembered. ‘That was it,’ he said, heaving himself out of his chair. ‘I thought you’d like to know. The girls were in Belgium last week having a look at poor Reggie’s grave, and they happened to come across your boy’s. They’re quite near each other, it seems.’ Old Woodifield paused, but the boss made no reply. Only a quiver in his eyelids showed that he heard. ‘The girls were delighted with the way the place is kept,’ piped the old voice. ‘Beautifully looked after. Couldn’t be better if they were at home. You’ve not been across, have yer?’ ‘No, no!’ For various reasons the boss had not been across. ‘There’s miles of it,’ quavered old Woodifield, ‘and it’s all as neat as a garden. Flowers growing on all the graves. Nice broad paths.’ It was plain from his voice how much he liked a nice broad path. The pause came again. Then the old man brightened wonderfully. ‘D’you know what the hotel made the girls pay for a pot of jam?’ he piped. ‘Ten francs! Robbery, I call it. It was a little pot, so Gertrude says, no bigger than a half-crown. And she hadn’t taken more than a spoonful when they charged her ten francs. Gertrude brought the pot away with her to teach ’em a lesson. Quite right, too; it’s trading on our feelings. They think because we’re over there having a look

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round we’re ready to pay anything. That’s what it is.’ And he turned towards the door. ‘Quite right, quite right!’ cried the boss, though what was quite right he hadn’t the least idea. He came round by his desk, followed the shuffling footsteps to the door, and saw the old fellow out. Woodifield was gone. For a long moment the boss stayed, staring at nothing, while the grey-haired office messenger, watching him, dodged in and out of his cubby hole like a dog that expects to be taken for a run. Then: ‘I’ll see nobody for half an hour, Macey,’ said the boss. ‘Understand? Nobody at all.’ ‘Very good, sir.’ The door shut, the firm heavy steps recrossed the bright carpet, the fat body plumped down in the spring chair, and leaning forward, the boss covered his face with his hands. He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep. . . . It had been a terrible shock to him when old Woodifield sprang that remark upon him about the boy’s grave. It was exactly as though the earth had opened and he had seen the boy lying there with Woodifield’s girls staring down at him. For it was strange. Although over six years had passed away, the boss never thought of the boy except as lying unchanged, unblemished in his uniform, asleep for ever. ‘My son!’ groaned the boss. But no tears came yet. In the past, in the first months and even years after the boy’s death, he had only to say those words to be overcome by such grief that nothing short of a violent fit of weeping could relieve him. Time, he had declared then, he had told everybody, could make no difference. Other men perhaps might recover, might live their loss down, but not he. How was it possible? His boy was an only son. Ever since his birth the boss had worked at building up this business for him; it had no other meaning if it was not for the boy. Life itself had come to have no other meaning. How on earth could he have slaved, denied himself, kept going all those years without the promise for ever before him of the boy’s stepping into his shoes and carrying on where he left off? And that promise had been so near being fulfilled. The boy had been in the office learning the ropes for a year before the war. Every morning they had started off together; they had come back by the same train. And what congratulations he had received as the boy’s father! No wonder; he had taken to it marvellously. As to his popularity with the staff, every man jack of them down to old Macey couldn’t make enough of the boy. And he wasn’t in the least spoilt. No, he was just his bright, natural self, with the right word for everybody, with that boyish look and his habit of saying, ‘Simply splendid.’

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But all that was over and done with as though it never had been. The day had come when Macey had handed him the telegram that brought the whole place crashing about his head. ‘Deeply regret to inform you. . . .’ And he had left the office a broken man, with his life in ruins. Six years ago, six years. . . . How quickly time passed! It might have happened yesterday. The boss took his hands from his face; he was puzzled. Something seemed to be wrong with him. He wasn’t feeling as he wanted to feel. He decided to get up and have a look at the boy’s photograph. But it wasn’t a favourite photograph of his; the expression was unnatural. It was cold, even stern-looking. The boy had never looked like that. At that moment the boss noticed that a fly had fallen into his broad inkpot, and was trying feebly but desperately to clamber out again. Help! help! said those struggling legs. But the sides of the inkpot were wet and slippery; it fell back again and began to swim. The boss took up a pen, picked the fly out of the ink, and shook it on to a piece of blotting-paper. For a fraction of a second it lay still on the dark patch that oozed round it. Then the front legs waved, took hold, and, pulling its small, sodden body up it began the immense task of cleaning the ink from its wings. Over and under, over and under, went a leg along a wing, as the stone goes over and under the scythe. Then there was a pause, while the fly, seeming to stand on the tips of its toes, tried to expand first one wing and then the other. It succeeded at last, and, sitting down, it began, like a minute cat, to clean its face. Now one could imagine that the little front legs rubbed against each other lightly, joyfully. The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; it was ready for life again. But just then the boss had an idea. He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings down came a great heavy blot. What would it make of that? What indeed! The little beggar seemed absolutely cowed, stunned, and afraid to move because of what would happen next. But then, as if painfully, it dragged itself forward. The front legs waved, caught hold, and, more slowly this time, the task began from the beginning. He’s a plucky little devil, thought the boss, and he felt a real admiration for the fly’s courage. That was the way to tackle things; that was the right spirit. Never say die; it was only a question of. . . . But the fly had again finished its laborious task, and the boss had just time to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the new-cleaned body yet another dark drop. What about it this time? A painful moment of suspense followed. But behold, the front legs were again waving; the boss felt a rush of relief. He leaned over the fly and said to it tenderly, ‘You artful little b. . . .’ And he actually had the brilliant notion of

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breathing on it to help the drying process. All the same, there was something timid and weak about its efforts now, and the boss decided that this time should be the last, as he dipped the pen deep into the inkpot. It was. The last blot fell on the soaked blotting-paper, and the draggled fly lay in it and did not stir. The back legs were stuck to the body; the front legs were not to be seen. ‘Come on,’ said the boss. ‘Look sharp!’ And he stirred it with his pen – in vain. Nothing happened or was likely to happen. The fly was dead. The boss lifted the corpse on the end of the paper-knife and flung it into the waste-paper basket. But such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt positively frightened. He started forward and pressed the bell for Macey. ‘Bring me some fresh blotting-paper,’ he said, sternly, ‘and look sharp about it.’ And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was. . . . He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar. For the life of him he could not remember. Notes Text: Nation and the Athenaeum, 30: 25, 18 March 1922, pp. 896–7. DNOS. 1. Writing from Paris, KM mentioned to Dorothy Brett on 14 February 1922 that she would finish the story that day, but then recorded in her notebook on 20 February, ‘Finished “The Fly” ’. As she told William Gerhardi on 14 June 1922, ‘I hated writing it’ (CLKM, 5, p. 62, p. 206).

•

Confidences ‘You know, my dear,’ said Kitty, standing in the middle of the drawing room and stripping off her white gloves, ‘your house is too lovely for words. But too lovely!’ She had just arrived, a little out of breath as usual, but so charmingly breathless, her eyes wide, her lips half open, and the parma violets agitated in the front of her gown. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she went on gaily, ‘but one always has the feeling it’s so alive.’ And she turned quickly towards her friend. ‘You know what I mean. Don’t you feel it too?’

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But Eva, who was lighting a cigarette, made no reply for a moment. She took a puff, breathed deeply, and then fixing her eyes on the lighted tip of the cigarette, she said, rather queerly, ‘Yes, I certainly used to feel that.’ Used to? Why used to? Now that Kitty looked at her closely she fancied Eva was pale. Her expression changed (she was a marvellously sympathetic little thing) and lifting her hands to her violets she sank into a chair and said softly ‘This weather’s awfully trying – don’t you agree?’ Eva sat down too. But still she did not look at her friend. With her finger tip she flattened the tobacco in her cigarette and in the same unnatural voice she murmured ‘Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve not been out. I haven’t noticed.’ This seemed to Kitty so strange that quickly she leaned forward and laid her hand on her friend’s silken knee. ‘You’re not ill, darling, are you’ she asked tenderly. But Eva as quickly drew back. ‘Oh please please don’t touch me’ she pleaded, waving Kitty away, ‘don’t be too nice to me.’ And now there was no doubt about it. There were tears in her eyes, her lids were trembling. ‘I shall make a fool of myself if you do. I . . . I ought not to have seen anybody this afternoon . . . Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 309–10, MS ATL dated ‘21.ii.1922’. Journal, 1954, pp. 307–8.

•

The New Baby1 At half past ten the yacht steamed into the Sound, slowed down. ‘Hullo’ said someone, ‘we’ve stopped.’ For a moment, and it seemed like a long moment, everybody was silent. They heard the crying of little waves on the distant beach, they felt the moist soft breath of the large wind breathing so gently from the boundless sea. And looking up at the sky one fancied that even those merrily-burning stars accepted the fact that they were anchored for the night. Then ‘Come on girls, let’s have another,’ cried the genial old mayor. And Gertrude Pratt began to bang out ‘The Honeysuckle and The Bee’ on the squat, tinny little piano. As the whole party had sung the same song every night for the last three weeks the noise was

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considerable, but very pleasant. It was an extraordinary relief after the long dazzling day to lie out on deck and sing at the top of one’s voice ‘I love you dearly dearly and I Want you to love me!’2

You couldn’t say these things. And yet you felt them. Not for anybody in particular, for everybody, for the lamp even, hanging from the deck awning, for Tanner the steward’s hand as he stroked the guitar. And they came away thinking ‘What a life!’ All very well to land there for an hour or two on a glorious morning but imagine being stuck there month in – year in year out. With nothing to look at but the sea with for one’s greatest excitement getting fresh ferns for the fireplace! ‘Christ what a life!’ thought the men pacing up and down the deck waiting for the lunch bell, and ‘My dear, just imagine it,’ thought the ladies powdering their noses in the flat cabin mirrors. And lunch in the bright saloon with the portholes open and the stewards flying to and fro in their linen jackets always seemed particularly good, particularly delicious, afterwards. the sun flowing through the saloon porthole . . . They asked them questions, had a good look at everything, ate the fruit or whatever they were offered and took photographs. If there was a swing – and there was usually an old fashioned one hanging from a branch in the orchard, the girls got the men to push them. Out they flew, their gossamer veils streaming, while the mayor sat on the verandah talking to their host and the older ladies had a quiet chat somewhere within doors. ‘Father!’ ‘We – my wife that is –’ but it would not do. He began to smile and it seemed he could not smile . . . simple . . . childish . . . yes – ‘as a matter of fact our first kid turned up this morning at half past three. A fine boy.’ The mayor stopped and dug his sun umbrella into the sand. He didn’t quite grasp it for the moment. ‘You mean – was born?’ said he. ‘That’s it,’ said the other nodding. ‘Great Scott!’ said the mayor and he turned back and called his wife. ‘Mother they’ve got a new baby!’ The flowers in the garden look like it. So do the little wet shells on the beach. So does the house. All seems to breathe freshness, peace. I especially see those shells – so naive looking . . . ‘Take them,’ he said gently and bending down he ruffled the leaves and began to gather the fruit.

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‘Stop! Stop!’ she said shocked. ‘You’re cutting them all. You’ll have none on the bush.’ ‘Why not?’ he said simply. ‘You’re welcome.’ *

*

*

As the little steamer rounded the point and came into the next bay, they noticed the flag was flying from Putnam’s Pier. That meant there were passengers to bring off. The Captain swore. They were half an hour late already and he couldn’t bear not to be up to time. But Putnam’s flag, cherry-red against the green bush on this brilliant morning, jigged gaily, to show it didn’t care a flick for the Captain’s feelings. There were three people and an old sheep-dog waiting. One was a little old woman, nearing seventy perhaps, very spry, with a piece of lilac in her bonnet and pale lilac strings. She carried a bundle wrapped in a long shawl, white as a waterfall. Beside her stood the young parents. He was tall, broad, awkward in a stiff black suit with banana-yellow shoes and a light blue tie, and she looked soft and formless in a woollen coat; her hat was like a child’s with its wreath of daisies, and she carried a bag like a child’s school-kit, stuffed very full and covered with a cloth. As the steamer drew near, the old sheep-dog ran forward and made a sound that was like the beginning of a bark, but he turned it off into an old dog’s cough, as though he had decided that the little steamer wasn’t worth barking about. The coil of rope was thrown, was looped; the one-plank gangway was spanned across, and over it tripped the old woman, running and bridling like a girl of eighteen. ‘Thank you, Captain!’ said she, giving the Captain a bird-like, impudent little nod. ‘That’s all right, Mrs. Putnam,’ said old Captain Reid, who had known her for the last forty years. After her came the sheep-dog, then the young woman, looking lost, and she was followed by the young man, who seemed terribly ashamed about something. He kept his head bent, he walked stiff as wood in his creaking shoes, and a long brown hand twisted away, twisted away at his fair moustache. Old Captain Reid winked broadly at the passengers. He stuffed his hands in his short jacket, drew in a breath as if he was going to sing. ‘Morning, Mr. Putnam!’ he roared. And the young man straightened himself with an immense effort and shot a terrified glance at the Captain. ‘Morning, Cap’n!’ he mumbled. Captain Reid considered him, shaking his head. ‘It’s all right, my lad,’ he said. ‘We’ve all been through it. Jim here’ – and he jerked his head at the man at the wheel – ‘had twins last time, hadn’t you, Jim?’

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‘That’s ri’, Cap’n,’ said Jim, grinning broadly at the passengers. The little steamer quivered, throbbed, started on her way again, while the young man, in an agony, not greeting anyone, creaked off to the bows, and the two women – they were the only women on board – sat themelves down on a green bench against the white deck-rail. As soon as they had sat down, ‘There, Mother, let me take him!’ said the young woman anxiously, quietly. She tossed the kit away. But Gran didn’t want to give him up. ‘Now don’t you go tiring yourself,’ said she. ‘He’s as nice as can be where he is.’ Torture! The young woman gave a gasp like a sob. ‘Give him to me!’ she said, and she actually twitched at her motherin-law’s sleeve. The old woman knew perfectly well what she was feeling. Little channels for laughter showed in her cheeks. ‘My goodness gracious me!’ she pretended to scold. ‘There’s impatience for you.’ But even while she spoke she swung the baby gently, gently into its mother’s arms. ‘There now!’ said Gran, and she sat up sharp and gave the bow of her bonnet strings a tweak, as though she was glad to have her hands free after all. It was an exquisite day. It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent, you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 346–7, pp. 348–9. MS dated ‘26 ii 1922’. Published by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 206–9 as ‘The New Baby’, and pp. 233–6 as ‘At Putnam’s Pier’. 1. KM made several attempts at the beginning of the story, as well as later paragraphs, without arriving at an apparent sequence. 2. ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee,’ Bluebell in Fairyland (1901), by William Penn and Albert Fitz.

•

‘Have you seen my cosmias dear?’1 ‘Have you seen my cosmias dear? Have you noticed my cosmias today? Really, even though they are mine I must say I’ve never seen so fine a show. Everybody remarks on them. People stop to stare. I think

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it’s so marvellous of the children not to pick them now that they show over the fence. ‘Those mauve ones. Did you ever see anything so delicate! Such an uncommon colour, too. And when I think all that beauty came out of one little 3d packet from the D.I.C!’2 Frail as butterflies the petals of the cosmias fluttered like wings in the gently breathing air. They were moon white, mauve, pale pink, and lemon yellow. And peering through the delicate green you could still see in the garden bed, the little soiled seed packet stuck in a cleft stick. Kezia remembered the day when she had watched Aunt Fan tear off a corner, shake the seed, like minute canary seed, then pat the fine earth over. And afterwards they had stood together, just as they were standing now, gazing at nothing but seeing – just what they looked at this very minute. What was the difference really? It was too hard to understand. She said ‘They are most lovely, Aunt Fan.’ ‘Look at that bee Kezia. Look at that great velvety fellow.’ They watched him. When he clung to a cosmia the flower leaned over, swung, quivered – it seemed to be teasing him. And when he flew away the petals moved as though they were laughing. ‘But I really must go, Aunt Fan.’ ‘One moment darling. I’ll just get my kitchen scissors and snip off a dead head or two while you’re here.’ She was there and back again on the instant, and before Kezia realised what was happening, quickly, lavishly, Aunt Fan had begun cutting her finest largest flowers. ‘Oh Aunt Fan what are you doing!’ Kezia was horrified. ‘Stop! I don’t want them. Why will you always give everything away. We’ve millions and billions of flowers at home. The vases were only done yesterday. Oh Aunt Fan.’ ‘Only these, Kezia. Only this little selection for your own vase in your room.’ She thrust them into Kezia’s hand and squeezed the reluctant fingers. ‘They flower all the better for being cut. You know that’s true.’ Yes that was comforting. Kezia smiled at an exquisite half-open bud, the petals springing from the centre like the feathers of a tiny shuttlecock. ‘Well – goodbye, Aunt Fan.’ She turned. Aunt Fan took her in her arms, held her close, looked, just an instant, intently and gravely at her before she gave her a quick light kiss. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 292. March 1922. Published by JMM as ‘Aunt Fan’, Journal, 1954, pp. 311–13.

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1. KM advised the South African novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin, early March 1922, on the triviality of metropolitan literary life, and the need to write about what matters most deeply to one. ‘It’s about my Aunt Fan who lived up the road I really want to write’ (CLKM, 5, p. 80). 2. Direct Importing Company, a large store on Lambton Quay, Wellington.

•

A Man and His Dog To look at Mr. Potts one would have thought that there at least went someone who had nothing to boast about. He was a little insignificant fellow with a crooked tie, a hat too small for him and a coat too large. The brown canvas portfolio that he carried to and from the Post Office every day was not like a business man’s portfolio. It was like a child’s school satchel; it did up even with a round-eyed button. One imagined there were crumbs and an apple core inside. And then there was something funny about his boots, wasn’t there? Through the laces his coloured socks peeped out. What the dickens had the chap done with the tongues? ‘Fried ’em,’ suggested the wit of the Chesney bus. ‘Poor old Potts!’ ‘More likely buried ’em in his garden.’ Under his arm he clasped an umbrella. And in wet weather when he put it up, he disappeared completely. He was not. He was a walking umbrella – no more – the umbrella became his shell. Mr. Potts lived in a little bungalow on Chesney Flat. The bulge of the water tank to one side gave it a mournful air, like a little bungalow with the toothache. There was no garden. A path had been cut in the paddock turf from the gate to the front door, and two beds, one round, one oblong, had been cut in what was going to be the front lawn. Down that path went Potts every morning at half-past eight and was picked up by the Chesney bus; up that path walked Potts every evening while the great kettle of a bus droned on. In the late evening, when he crept as far as the gate, eager to smoke a pipe – he wasn’t allowed to smoke any nearer to the house than that – so humble, so modest was his air, that the big, merrily-shining stars seemed to wink at each other, to laugh, to say, ‘Look at him! Let’s throw something!’ When Potts got out of the tram at the Fire Station to change into the Chesney bus he saw that something was up. The car was there

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all right, but the driver was off his perch; he was flat on his face half under the engine, and the conductor, his cap off, sat on a step rolling a cigarette and looking dreamy. A little group of business men and a woman clerk or two stood staring at the empty car; there was something mournful, pitiful about the way it leaned to one side and shivered faintly when the driver shook something. It was like someone who’d had an accident and tries to say: ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! Don’t hurt me!’ But all this was so familiar – the cars had only been running to Chesney the last few months – that nobody said anything, nobody asked anything. They just waited on the off chance. In fact, two or three decided to walk it as Potts came up. But Potts didn’t want to walk unless he had to. He was tired. He’d been up half the night rubbing his wife’s chest – she had one of her mysterious pains – and helping the sleepy servant girl heat compresses and hot-water bottles and make tea. The window was blue and the roosters had started crowing before he lay down finally with feet like ice. And all this was familiar, too. Standing at the edge of the pavement and now and again changing his brown canvas portfolio from one hand to the other Potts began to live over the night before. But it was vague, shadowy. He saw himself moving like a crab, down the passage to the cold kitchen and back again. The two candles quivered on the dark chest of drawers, and as he bent over his wife her big eyes suddenly flashed and she cried: ‘I get no sympathy – no sympathy. You only do it because you have to. Don’t contradict me. I can see you grudge doing it.’ Trying to soothe her only made matters worse. There had been an awful scene ending with her sitting up and saying solemnly with her hand raised: ‘Never mind, it will not be for long now.’ But the sound of these words frightened her so terribly that she flung back on the pillow and sobbed, ‘Robert! Robert!’ Robert was the name of the young man to whom she had been engaged years ago, before she met Potts. And Potts was very glad to hear him invoked. He had come to know that meant the crisis was over and she’d begin to quieten down. . . . By this time Potts had wheeled round; he had walked across the pavement to the paling fence that ran beside. A piece of light grass pushed through the fence and some slender silky daisies. Suddenly he saw a bee alight on one of the daisies and the flower leaned over, swayed, shook, while the little bee clung and rocked. And as it flew away the petals fluttered as if joyfully . . . Just for an instant Potts dropped into the world where this happened. He brought from it the timid smile with which he walked back to the car. But now everybody had disappeared except one young girl who stood beside the empty car reading.

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At the tail of the procession came Potts in a cassock so much too large for him that it looked like a night-shirt and you felt that he ought to be carrying not a hymn and a prayer book but a candle. His voice was a very light plaintive tenor. It surprised everybody. It seemed to surprise him, too. But it was so plaintive that when he cried ‘for the wings, for the wings of a dove’ the ladies in the congregation wanted to club together and buy him a pair. Lino’s nose quivered so pitifully, there was such a wistful, timid look in his eyes, that Potts’ heart was wrung. But of course he would not show it. ‘Well,’ he said sternly, ‘I suppose you’d better come home.’ And he got up off the bench. Lino got up, too, but stood still, holding up a paw. ‘But there’s one thing,’ said Potts, turning and facing him squarely, ‘that we’d better be clear about before you do come. And it’s this.’ He pointed his finger at Lino who started as though he expected to be shot. But he kept his bewildered wistful eyes upon his master. ‘Stop this pretence of being a fighting dog,’ said Potts more sternly than ever. ‘You’re not a fighting dog. You’re a watch dog. That’s what you are. Very well. Stick to it. But it’s this infernal boasting I can’t stand. It’s that that gets me.’ In the moment’s pause that followed while Lino and his master looked at each other it was curious how strong a resemblance was between them. Then Potts turned again and made for home. And timidly, as though falling over his own paws, Lino followed after the humble little figure of his master. . . . Notes U Text: MS NLC dated ‘29 March 1922’. DNOS.

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Honeymoon And when they came out of the lace shop there was their own driver and the cab they called their own cab waiting for them under a plane tree. What luck! Wasn’t it luck? Fanny pressed her husband’s arm. These things seemed always to be happening to them ever since they – came abroad. Didn’t he think so too? But George stood on the pavement edge, lifted his stick, and gave a loud ‘Hi!’ Fanny sometimes felt

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a little uncomfortable about the way George summoned cabs, but the drivers didn’t seem to mind, so it must have been all right. Fat, goodnatured, and smiling, they stuffed away the little newspaper they were reading, whipped the cotton cover off the horse, and were ready to obey. ‘I say,’ George said as he helped Fanny in, ‘suppose we go and have tea at the place where the lobsters grow. Would you like to?’ ‘Most awfully,’ said Fanny, fervently, as she leaned back wondering why the way George put things made them sound so very nice. ‘R-right, bien.’ He was beside her. ‘Allay,’ he cried gaily, and off they went. Off they went, spanking along lightly, under the green and gold shade of the plane trees, through the small streets that smelled of lemons and fresh coffee, past the fountain square where women, with water-pots lifted, stopped talking to gaze after them, round the corner past the cafe, with its pink and white umbrellas, green tables, and blue siphons, and so to the sea front. There a wind, light, warm, came flowing over the boundless sea. It touched George, and Fanny it seemed to linger over while they gazed at the dazzling water. And George said, ‘Jolly, isn’t it?’ And Fanny, looking dreamy, said, as she said at least twenty times a day since they – came abroad: ‘Isn’t it extraordinary to think that here we are quite alone, away from everybody, with nobody to tell us to go home, or to – to order us about except ourselves?’ George had long since given up answering ‘Extraordinary!’ As a rule he merely kissed her. But now he caught hold of her hand, stuffed it into his pocket, pressed her fingers, and said, ‘I used to keep a white mouse in my pocket when I was a kid.’ ‘Did you?’ said Fanny, who was intensely interested in everything George had ever done. ‘Were you very fond of white mice?’ ‘Fairly,’ said George, without conviction. He was looking at something, bobbing out there beyond the bathing steps. Suddenly he almost jumped in his seat. ‘Fanny!’ he cried. ‘There’s a chap out there bathing. Do you see? I’d no idea people had begun. I’ve been missing it all these days.’ George glared at the reddened face, the reddened arm, as though he could not look away. ‘At any rate,’ he muttered, ‘wild horses won’t keep me from going in to-morrow morning.’ Fanny’s heart sank. She had heard for years of the frightful dangers of the Mediterranean. It was an absolute death-trap. Beautiful, treacherous Mediterranean. There it lay curled before them, its white, silky paws touching the stones and gone again. . . . But she’d made up her mind long before she was married that never would she be the kind of woman who interfered with her husband’s pleasures, so all

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she said was, airily, ‘I suppose one has to be very up in the currents, doesn’t one?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said George. ‘People talk an awful lot of rot about the danger.’ But now they were passing a high wall on the land side, covered with flowering heliotrope, and Fanny’s little nose lifted. ‘Oh George,’ she breathed. ‘The smell! The most divine. . . .’ ‘Topping villa,’ said George. ‘Look, you can see it through the palms.’ ‘Isn’t it rather large?’ said Fanny, who somehow could not look at any villa except as a possible habitation for herself and George. ‘Well, you’d need a crowd of people if you stayed there long,’ replied George. ‘Deadly, otherwise. I say, it is ripping. I wonder who it belongs to.’ And he prodded the driver in the back. The lazy, smiling driver, who had no idea, replied, as he always did on these occasions, that it was the property of a wealthy Spanish family. ‘Masses of Spaniards on this coast,’ commented George, leaning back again, and they were silent until, as they rounded a bend, the big, bone-white hotel-restaurant came into view. Before it there was a small terrace built up against the sea, planted with umbrella palms, set out with tables, and at their approach, from the terrace, from the hotel, waiters came running to receive, to welcome Fanny and George, to cut them off from any possible kind of escape. ‘Outside?’ Oh, but of course they would sit outside. The sleek manager, who was marvellously like a fish in a frock coat, skimmed forward. ‘Dis way, sir. Dis way, sir. I have a very nice little table,’ he gasped. ‘Just the little table for you, sir, over in de corner. Dis way.’ So George, looking most dreadfully bored, and Fanny, trying to look as though she’d spent years of life threading her way through strangers, followed after. ‘Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,’ coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table, and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, ‘This all right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there?’ And he nodded to a table right over the other side. What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was to sit down and look like everybody else. ‘I – I like this,’ said she.

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‘Right,’ said George, hastily, and he sat down almost before Fanny, and said quickly, ‘Tea for two and chocolate éclairs.’ ‘Very good, sir,’ said the manager, and his mouth opened and shut as though he was ready for another dive under the water. ‘You will not ’ave toasts to start with? We ’ave very nice toasts, sir.’ ‘No,’ said George, shortly. ‘You don’t want toast, do you, Fanny?’ ‘Oh, no, thank you, George,’ said Fanny, praying the manager would go. ‘Or perhaps de lady might like to look at de live lobsters in de tank while de tea is coming?’ And he grimaced and smirked and flicked his serviette like a fin. George’s face grew stony. He said ‘No’ again, and Fanny bent over the table, unbuttoning her gloves. When she looked up the man was gone. George took off his hat, tossed it on to a chair, and pressed back his hair. ‘Thank God,’ said he, ‘that chap’s gone. These foreign fellows bore me stiff. The only way to get rid of them is simply to shut up as you saw I did. Thank Heaven!’ sighed George again, with so much emotion that if it hadn’t been ridiculous Fanny might have imagined that he had been as frightened of the manager as she. As it was she felt a rush of love for George. His hands were on the table, brown, large hands that she knew so well. She longed to take one of them and squeeze it hard. But, to her astonishment, George did just that thing. Leaning across the table, he put his hands over hers, and said, without looking at her, ‘Fanny, darling Fanny!’ ‘Oh, George!’ It was in that heavenly moment that Fanny heard a twing-twing-tootle-tootle, and a light strumming. There’s going to be music, she thought, but the music didn’t matter just then. Nothing mattered except love. Faintly smiling she gazed into that faintly smiling face, and the feeling was so blissful that she felt inclined to say to George, ‘Let us stay here – where we are – at this little table. It’s perfect, and the sea is perfect. Let us stay.’ But instead her eyes grew serious. ‘Darling,’ said Fanny. ‘I want to ask you something fearfully important. Promise me you’ll answer. Promise.’ ‘I promise,’ said George, too solemn to be quite as serious as she. ‘It’s this.’ Fanny paused a moment, looked down, looked up again. ‘Do you feel,’ she said, softly, ‘that you really know me now? But really, really know me?’ It was too much for George. Know his Fanny? He gave a broad, childish grin. ‘I should jolly well think I do,’ he said, emphatically. ‘Why, what’s up?’ Fanny felt he hadn’t quite understood. She went on quickly: ‘What I mean is this. So often people, even when they love each other, don’t

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seem to – to – it’s so hard to say – know each other perfectly. They don’t seem to want to. And I think that’s awful. They misunderstand each other about the most important things of all.’ Fanny looked horrified. ‘George, we couldn’t do that, could we? We never could.’ ‘Couldn’t be done,’ laughed George, and he was just going to tell her how much he liked her little nose, when the waiter arrived with the tea and the band struck up. It was a flute, a guitar, and a violin, and it played so gaily that Fanny felt if she wasn’t careful even the cups and saucers might grow little wings and fly away. George absorbed three chocolate éclairs, Fanny two. The funny-tasting tea – ‘Lobster in the kettle,’ shouted George above the music – was nice all the same, and when the tray was pushed aside and George was smoking, Fanny felt bold enough to look at the other people. But it was the band grouped under one of the dark trees that fascinated her most. The fat man stroking the guitar was like a picture. The dark man playing the flute kept raising his eyebrows as though he was astonished at the sounds that came from it. The fiddler was in shadow. The music stopped as suddenly as it had begun. It was then she noticed a tall old man with white hair standing beside the musicians. Strange she hadn’t noticed him before. He wore a very high, glazed collar, a coat green at the seams, and shamefully shabby button boots. Was he another manager? He did not look like a manager, and yet he stood there gazing over the tables as though thinking of something different and far away from all this. Who could he be? Presently, as Fanny watched him, he touched the points of his collar with his fingers, coughed slightly, and half-turned to the band. It began to play again. Something boisterous, reckless, full of fire, full of passion, was tossed into the air, was tossed to that quiet figure, which clasped its hands, and still with that far-away look, began to sing. ‘Good Lord!’ said George. It seemed that everybody was equally astonished. Even the little children eating ices stared, with their spoons in the air. . . . Nothing was heard except a thin, faint voice, the memory of a voice singing something in Spanish. It wavered, beat on, touched the high notes, fell again, seemed to implore, to entreat, to beg for something, and then the tune changed, and it was resigned, it bowed down, it knew it was denied. Almost before the end a little child gave a squeak of laughter, but everybody was smiling – except Fanny and George. Is life like this too? thought Fanny. There are people like this. There is suffering. And she looked at that gorgeous sea, lapping the land as though it loved it, and the sky, bright with the brightness before evening. Had she and George the right to be so happy? Wasn’t it cruel? There must be something else in life which made all these things possible. What was it? She turned to George.

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But George had been feeling differently from Fanny. The poor old boy’s voice was funny in a way, but, God, how it made you realise what a terrific thing it was to be at the beginning of everything, as they were, he and Fanny! George, too, gazed at the bright, breathing water, and his lips opened as if he could drink it. How fine it was! There was nothing like the sea for making a chap feel fit. And there sat Fanny, his Fanny, leaning forward, breathing so gently. ‘Fanny!’ George called to her. As she turned to him something in her soft, wondering look made George feel that for two pins he would jump over the table and carry her off. ‘I say,’ said George, rapidly, ‘let’s go, shall we? Let’s go back to the hotel. Come. Do, Fanny darling. Let’s go now.’ The band began to play. ‘Oh, God!’ almost groaned George. ‘Let’s go before the old codger begins squawking again.’ And a moment later they were gone. Notes Text: Nation and the Athenaeum, 31: 5, 29 April 1922, pp. 156–7. DNOS.

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‘It was the late afternoon’1 It was the late afternoon when Mrs Sheridan after having paid Heaven knows how many calls turned towards home. ‘Thank Heaven that’s all over!’ she sighed as she clicked the last gate to, and stuffed her little Chinese card-case into her handbag. But it was not all over. Although she hadn’t the faintest desire to remember her afternoon, her mind, evidently, was determined she should not forget it. And so she walked along seeing herself knocking at doors, crossing dim halls into large pale drawing rooms, she heard herself saying no, she would not have any tea, thank you. Yes, they were all splendidly well. No, they had not seen it yet. The children were going tonight. Yes, fancy, he had arrived. Young and goodlooking too! Quite an asset! Oh dear no! She was determined not to allow any of her girls to marry. It was quite unnecessary nowadays, and such a risk! And so on and so on. What nonsense calling is! What a waste of time! I have never met a single woman yet who even

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pretended to like it. Why keep it up then? Why not decide once and for all. Mock orange. And Mrs Sheridan woke out of her dream to find herself standing under a beautiful mock orange bush that grew against the white palings of old Mr Phipps’ garden. The little spongelike fruit – flowers? which were they? – shone burning-bright in the late afternoon sun. They are like little worlds, she thought, peering up through the large crumpled leaves and she put out her hand and touched one gently. The feel of things is so strange, so different: one never seems to know a thing until one has felt it – at least that is true of flowers. Roses for instance – who can smell a rose without kissing it. And pansies – little darlings they are! People don’t pay half enough attention to pansies. Now her glove was all brushed with yellow. But it didn’t matter. She was glad, even. ‘I wish you grew in my garden,’ she said regretfully to the mock orange bush, and she went on, thinking I wonder why I love flowers so much. None of the children inherit it from me – Laura, perhaps. But even then it’s not the same – she’s too young to feel as I do. I love flowers more than people – except my own family of course. But take this afternoon for instance. The only that really remains is that mock orange.2 *

*

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Now her white glove was all brushed with yellow. But it did not matter. She was glad, even. Why don’t you grow in my garden, she said regretfully to the mock orange bush. And she went on, thinking I wonder why I love flowers so much. I love them more than people – except my own family of course. But take this afternoon for instance. The only that really remains is that mock orange. I mean, when I was standing under that bush it was the only moment when I felt in touch with something. These things are very difficult to explain. But the fact remains I never feel the need of anybody – apart from Claude and the children. If the rest of the world was swept away tomorrow Return again! Come. It was an agony to Mr Sheridan to be late, or to know that others were late. It had always been so. Talking with his wife in the garden – the stillness, the lightness, the steps on the gravel, the dark trees, the flowers, the night scented stocks – what happiness it was to walk with him here. What he said did not really matter so very much. But she felt she had him to herself in a way that no other occasion granted her. She felt his ease and although he never looked at what she pointed out to him it did not matter. His ‘very nice, dear’ was enough. He was always planning, always staring towards the future, ‘I should like, later on’. But she – she did not in the least, the present was all she loved and dwelt in.

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Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 306–7. Published by JMM, Scrapbook, pp. 219–24, together with ‘A Family Dance’ below, under the general title of ‘The Sheridans’. 1. KM planned, but did not write, a series of stories for Clement Shorter, editor of the Sphere, which would develop the Sheridan family from ‘The Garden Party’. As she wrote on 3 May: I must begin writing for Clement Shorter today. 12 ‘spasms’ of 2000 words each. I thought of the Burnells but no, I don’t think so . . . Much better the Sheridans – the three girls and the brother and the Father and Mother and so on, ending with a long description of Meg’s wedding to Keith Fenwick. [. . .] But the point is – where shall I begin? One certainly wants to dash. Meg was playing. I don’t think I ought to begin with that. It seems to me the mother’s coming home ought to be the first chapter. The other can come later. And in that playing chapter what I want to stress chiefly is: which is the real life – that or this – late afternoon, these thoughts, the garden, the beauty, how all things pass . . . and how the end seems to come so soon. (KMN, 2, pp. 292–3) 2. At this point KM interrupted the narrative with a long digression on how she believed the story should evolve: But this is not expanded enough or rich enough. I think still a description of the house and the place should come first and then the light should fall on the figure of Mrs S. on her way home. Really I can allow myself to write a great deal – to describe it all – the baths, the avenue, the people in the gardens, the chinaman under the tree in May Street. But in that case she won’t be conscious of these things. That’s bad. They must be seen and felt by her as she wanders home. The sense of flowing in and out of houses – going and returning like the tide. To go and not to return – how terrible! The father in his dressing room, the familiar talk. His using her hair brushes, his passion for things that wear well. The children sitting round the table, the light outside, the silver. Her feeling as she sees them all gathered together, her longing for them always to be there. (Yes, I’m getting nearer all this. I now remember S.W. and see that it must be written with love – real love. All the same the difficulty is to get it all within focus, to introduce the young doctor and bring him continually nearer and nearer until finally he is part of the Sheridan family, until finally he has taken away Meg . . . That is by no means easy. . . . (KMN, 2, p. 307)

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A Family Dance The excitement began first thing that morning by their father suddenly deciding that, after all, they could have champagne. What! Impossible! Mother was joking! A fierce discussion had raged on this subject ever since the invitations were sent out, Father pooh-poohing and refusing to listen, and Mother, as usual, siding with him when she was with him (‘Of course, darling: I quite agree’) and siding with them when she was with them (‘Most unreasonable. I more than see the point.’). So that by [this] time they had definitely given up all hope of champagne, and had focussed all their attention on the hock cup instead. And now, for no reason whatever, with nobody saying a word to him – so like Father! – he had given in. ‘It was just after Zaidee had brought in our morning tea. He was lying on his back, you know, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly he said: “I don’t want the children to think I am a wet blanket about this dance affair. If it’s going to make all that difference to them; if it’s a question of the thing going with a swing or not going with a swing, then I’m inclined to let them have champagne. I’ll call in and order it on my way to the Bank.” ’ ‘My dear! What did you say!’ ‘What could I say? I was overcome. I said: “That’s very generous of you, Daddy dear,” and I placed the entire plate of cut bread and butter on his chest. As a kind of sacrifice to the darling. I felt he deserved it and he does so love those thin shaves of bread and butter.’ ‘Can’t you see the plate,’ cried Laurie, ‘gently rising and falling on his pyjama jacket.’ They began to laugh, but it really was most thrilling. Champagne did make all the difference – didn’t it? Just the feeling it was there gave such a different . . . Oh, absolutely! Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 308–9. Published in Scrapbook, pp. 223–4, as part of JMM’s compiled story titled ‘The Sheridans’, presumably also written in May 1922.

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‘Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hôtel’1 Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hôtel, as the prospectus said – there was an immense stretch of gently rising turf dotted with clumps of pine and fir trees. Beyond was the forest, threaded with green paths and hoarse, quick tumbling little streams. Dark blue mountains streaked with white rose above the forest and higher still there was another range, bright silver floating across the still, transparent sky. What could be more pleasant, after the long terribly cold winter, than to sit outside on a fine Spring afternoon and to talk, slowly, softly, at one’s ease. Nothing has happened, and yet there seems so much to say. In the winter one can go for weeks without saying a word more than is necessary. But now, in the warmth and light there is such a longing to talk that it is hard to wait for one’s turn . . . It was hot in the sun. Auntie Marie had a newspaper over her head, Auntie Rose a handkerchief, but little Anna’s father, whose hair was thick like fur, refused to cover himself. They sat the three of them in a row on canvas chairs outside the back door [of] the hotel and little Anna danced now before them now behind now from side to side like a gnat. Little Anna and her father had come up from the valley by the funicular to spend the day with the Aunties who owned this immense, airy hotel with its wide windows and wider balconies and glassed-in verandah lounge. What! All this was owned by these two insignificant little grey haired creatures in their black shift dresses. They themselves seemed to realise how dreadfully inappropriate it was and hurriedly explained in almost a horrified whisper that it had been left to them. And as they could never sell it or let it they tried to make a living out of it. But very very few people came. It was too quiet for young people – there was no dancing or golf, nothing on earth to do but to stare at the view. And, thank Heaven, they hadn’t come to that yet! And it was too quiet for old people. There was no chemist, no doctor within call. As for the view, when one did stare at it one felt inclined to whimper, the mountains looked so cruelly unsympathetic. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, p. 299. Published by JMM as ‘Mountain Hotel’, Scrapbook, pp. 239–41.

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1. KM follows this sketch with a long paragraph on the difficulty she found writing at present: Sometimes I think my brain is going. But no! I know the real reason. It’s because I am still suffering from a kind of nervous prostration caused by my life in Paris. [. . .] I felt at the mercy of everything. Tchekhov, by the way, felt this disenchantment exactly. And who could not feel it who lives with a pessimist. (KMN, 2, p. 300) Both the story and the note were written when KM and JMM returned from Paris to Switzerland, this time to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, Randognesur-Sierre, from 4 June to the end of the month.

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Father and the Girls I At midday, Ernestine, who had come down from the mountains with her mother to work in the vineyards belonging to the hotel, heard the faint, far-away chuff-chuff of the train from Italy. Trains were a novelty to Ernestine; they were fascinating, unknown, terrible. What were they like as they came tearing their way through the valley, plunging between the mountains as if not even the mountains could stop them? When she saw the dark, flat breast of the engine, so bare, so powerful, hurled as it were towards her, she felt a weakness; she could have sunk to the earth. And yet she must look. So she straightened up, stopped pulling at the blue-green leaves, tugging at the long, bright-green, curly suckers, and, with eyes like a bird, stared. The vines were very tall. There was nothing to be seen of Ernestine but her beautiful, youthful bosom buttoned into a blue cotton jacket and her small, dark head covered with a faded cherry-coloured handkerchief. Chiff-chuff-chaff. Chiff-chuff-chaff sounded the train. Now a wisp of white smoke shone and melted. Now there was another and the monster itself came into sight and snorting horribly drew up at the little, toy-like station five minutes away. The railway ran at the bottom of the hotel garden which was perched high and surrounded by a stone wall. Steps cut in the stone led to the terraces where the vines were planted. Ernestine, looking out from the leaves like a bright bird, saw the terrible engine and looked beyond it at doors swinging open, at strangers stepping down. She would never know who they were or where they had come from. A moment ago they

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were not here; perhaps by to-morrow they would be gone again. And looking like a bird herself, she remembered how, at home, in the late autumn, she had sometimes seen strange birds in the fir tree that were there one day and gone the next. Where from? Where to? She felt an ache in her bosom. Wings were tight-folded there. Why could she not stretch them out and fly away and away . . . II From the first-class carriage tall, thin Emily alighted and gave her hand to Father whose brittle legs seemed to wave in the air as they felt for the iron step. Taller, thinner Edith followed, carrying Father’s light overcoat, his field-glasses on a strap, and his new Baedeker. The blond hotel porter came forward. Wasn’t that nice? He could speak as good English as you or me. So Edith had no trouble at all in explaining how, as they were going on by the morning train to-morrow, they would only need their suit-cases, and what was left in the compartment. Was there a carriage outside? Yes, a carriage was there. But if they cared to walk there was a private entrance through the hotel gardens . . . No, they wouldn’t walk. ‘You wouldn’t care to walk, would you, Father dear?’ ‘No, Edith, I won’t walk. Do you girls wanna walk?’ ‘Why no, Father, not without you, dear.’ And the blond hotel porter leading, they passed through the little knot of sturdy peasants at the station gate to where the carriage waited under a group of limes. ‘Did you ever see anything as big as that horse, Edith!’ cried Emily. She was always the first to exclaim about things. ‘It is a very big horse,’ sang Edith, more sober. ‘It’s a farm horse, from the look of it and it’s been working. See how hot it is.’ Edith had so much observation. The big, brown horse, his sides streaked with dark sweat, tossed his head and the bells on his collar set up a loud jangling. ‘Hu-yup!’ called the young peasant driver warningly, from his seat on the high box. Father, who was just about to get in, drew back, a little scared. ‘You don’t think that horse will run away with us, do you, Edith?’ he quavered. ‘Why no, Father dear,’ coaxed Edith. ‘That horse is just as tame as you or me.’ So, in they got, the three of them. And as the horse bounded forward, his ears seemed to twitch in surprise at his friend the driver. Call that a load? Father and the girls weighed nothing. They might have been three bones, three broomsticks, three umbrellas bouncing up and down on the hard seats of the carriage. It was a mercy the hotel was so close. Father could never have stood that for more than a minute, especially at the end of a journey. Even as it was

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his face was quite green when Emily helped him out, straightened him, and gave him a little pull. ‘It’s shaken you, dear, hasn’t it?’ she said tenderly. But he refused her arm into the hotel. That would create a wrong impression. ‘No, no, Emily. I’m all right. All right,’ said Father, as staggering a little he followed them through big glass doors into a hall as dim as a church and as chill and as deserted. My! Wasn’t that hall cold! The cold seemed to come leaping at them from the floor. It clasped the peaked knees of Edith and Emily; it leapt high as the fluttering heart of Father. For a moment they hesitated, drew together, almost gasped. But then out from the Bureau a cheerful young person, her smiling face spotted with mosquito bites, ran to meet them, and welcomed them with such real enthusiasm (in English too) that the chill first moment was forgotten. ‘Aw-yes. Aw-yes. I can let you ave very naice rooms on de firs floor wid a lif. Two rooms and bart and dressing-room for de chentleman. Beautiful rooms wid sun but nort too hot. Very naice. Till to-morrow. I taike you. If you please. It is dis way. You are tired wid the churney? Launch is at half-pas tvelf. Hort worter? Aw-yes. It is wid de bart. If you please.’ Father and the girls were drawn by her cheerful smiles and becks and nods along a cloister-like corridor, into the lift and up, until she flung open a heavy, dark door and stood aside for them to enter. ‘It is a suite,’ she explained. ‘Wid a hall and tree doors.’ Quickly she opened them. ‘Now I gaw to see when your luggage is gum.’ And she went. ‘Well!’ cried Emily. Edith stared. Father craned his thin, old neck, looking, too. ‘Did you – ever see the like, Edith?’ cried Emily, in a little rush. And Edith softly clasped her hands. Softly she sang ‘No, I never did, Emily. I’ve never seen anything just like this before.’ ‘Sims to me a nice room,’ quavered Father, still hovering.’ Do you girls wanna change it?’ Change it! ‘Why, Father dear, it’s just the loveliest thing we’ve ever set eyes on, isn’t it, Emily? Sit down, Father dear, sit down in the armchair.’ Father’s pale claws gripped the velvet arms. He lowered himself, he sank with an old man’s quick sigh. Edith still stood, as if bewitched, at the door. But Emily ran over to the window and leaned out, quite girlish . . . For a long time now – for how long? – for countless ages – Father and the girls had been on the wing. Nice, Montreux, Biarritz, Naples, Mentone, Lake Maggiore, they had seen them all and many many

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more. And still they beat on, beat on, flying as if unwearied, never stopping anywhere for long. But the truth was – Oh, better not enquire what the truth was. Better not ask what it was that kept them going. Or why the only word that daunted Father was the word – home . . . Home! To sit around, doing nothing, listening to the clock, counting up the years, thinking back . . . thinking! To stay fixed in one place as if waiting for something or somebody. No. no. Better far to be blown over the earth like the husk, like the withered pod that the wind carries and drops and bears aloft again. ‘Are you ready, girls?’ ‘Yes, Father dear.’ ‘Then we’d better be off if we’re to make that train.’ But Oh, it was a weariness, it was an unspeakable weariness. Father made no secret of his age; he was eighty-four. As for Edith and Emily – well, he looked now like their elder brother. An old, old brother and two ancient sisters, so the lovely room might have summed them up. But its shaded brightness, its beauty, the flutter of leaves at the creamy stone windows seemed only to whisper ‘Rest. Stay.’ Edith looked at the pale, green-panelled walls, at the doors that had lozenges and squares of green picked out in gold. She made the amazing discovery that the floor had the same pattern in wood that was traced on the high, painted ceiling. But the colour of the shining floor was marvellous; it was like tortoiseshell. In one corner there was a huge, tiled stove, milky white and blue. The low wooden bed, with its cover of quilted yellow satin, had sheaves of corn carved on the bed posts. It looked to fanciful, tired Edith – yes, – that bed looked as if it were breathing, softly, gently breathing. Outside the narrow, deep-set windows, beyond their wreaths of green, she could see a whole, tiny landscape bright as a jewel in the summer heat. ‘Rest. Stay.’ Was it the sound of the leaves outside? No, it was in the air; it was the room itself that whispered joyfully, shyly. Edith felt so strange that she could keep quiet no longer. ‘This is a very old room, Emily,’ she warbled softly. ‘I know what it is. This hotel has not always been a hotel. It’s been an old chateau. I feel as sure of that as that I’m standing here.’ Perhaps she wanted to convince herself that she was standing there. ‘Do you see that stove?’ She walked over to the stove. ‘It’s got figures on it. Emily,’ she warbled faintly, ‘it’s 1623.’ ‘Isn’t that too wonderful!’ cried Emily. Even Father was deeply moved. ‘1623? Nearly three hundred years old.’ And suddenly, in spite of his tiredness, he gave a thin, airy, old man’s chuckle. ‘Makes yer feel quite a chicken, don’t it?’ said Father. Emily’s breathless little laugh answered him; it too was gay.

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‘I’m going to see what’s behind that door,’ she cried. And half running to the door in the middle wall she lifted the slender steel catch. It led into a larger room, into Edith’s and her bedroom. But the walls were the same and the floor and there were the same deep-set windows. Only two beds instead of one stood side by side with blue silk quilts instead of yellow. And what a beautiful old chest there was under the windows. ‘Oh,’ cried Emily, in rapture. ‘Isn’t it all too perfectly historical for words, Edith! It makes me feel –’ She stopped, she looked at Edith who had followed her and whose thin shadow lay on the sunny floor. ‘Queer!’ said Emily, trying to put all she felt into that one word. ‘I don’t know what it is.’ Perhaps if Edith, the discoverer, had had time, she might have satisfied Emily. But a knock sounded at the outer door; it was the luggage [boy]. And while he brought in their suit-cases there came from downstairs the ringing of the luncheon bell. Father mustn’t be kept waiting. Once a bell had gone he liked to follow it up right then. So without even a glance at the mirror – they had reached the age when it is as natural to avoid mirrors as it is to peer into them when one is young – Edith and Emily were ready. ‘Are you ready, girls?’ ‘Yes, Father dear.’ And off they went again, to the left, to the right, down a stone staircase with a broad, worn balustrade, to the left again, finding their way as if by instinct – Edith first, then Father, and Emily close behind. But when they reached the salle à manger, which was as big as a ball-room, it was still empty. All gay, all glittering, the long French windows open on to the green and gold garden, the salle à manger stretched before them. And the fifty little tables with the fifty pots of dahlias looked as if they might begin dancing with Notes U Text: TS NLC. Dated late July 1922 by BJK, p. 318. DNOS.

•

My Darling Well, who could have believed it – who could have imagined it? What a marvellous, what a miraculous thing has happened! I’m trembling, I feel quite . . . But I mustn’t get too excited; one must keep one’s sense of proportion. Be calm!

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I can’t. I can’t! Not just for the moment. If you could feel my heart! It’s not beating very fast, not racing, as they say, but it’s simply quivering – an extraordinary sensation – and if I am quite sincere, I feel such a longing to kneel down. Not to pray. I scarcely know what for. To say ‘Forgive me!’ To say ‘My darling!’ But I should cry if I said it. My darling! My darling! Do you know I’ve never known anyone well enough to call them that. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it? And one puts out one’s hand when one says it and just touches the other . . . No, no. It’s fatal to think such things. One mustn’t let oneself go. Here I am – back in my room. I should like to go over to the window and open it wide. But I daren’t yet. Supposing he were looking out of his and he saw; it might seem marked. One can’t be too careful. I will stay where I am for the present until my – my excitement dies down a little. No. 134. That is the number of my room. I only realized at that moment that I am still holding my big flat door-key. What is his number? Oh, I have wondered that so often. Shall I ever know? Why should I? And yet what has just happened. . . . If a flash-light photograph had been taken at that moment, or a fire had broken out, and we had been unable to move and only our charred bodies found, it would have been the most natural thing in the world for people to suppose we were – together. We must have looked exactly like the other couples. Even his reading the newspaper and not speaking to me seemed to make it more natural. . . . This tenderness, this longing. This feeling of waiting for something. What is it? Come! Come! And then one goes out, and there are new leaves on the trees, the light shakes on the grass and everywhere there is a gentle stirring. I have never been very good at imagining things. Some people have so much imagination. They make up long stories about the future. Notes U Text: Scrapbook, pp. 212–13. Dated 1922 by JMM.

•

The Lily As old Mr Rendall sat at the window with the rug over his knees, with his spectacles, folded handkerchief, medicine and newspaper on

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a little table beside him; as he sat there, looking out, he saw a large, strange cat bound on to the fence and jump right into the very middle of his lawn. Old Mr R. hated cats. The sight of this one, so bold, so carefree, roving over the grass, sniffing, chewing at a blade of something as though the whole place belonged to it, sent a quiver of rage through him. He shifted his feet in the felt slippers, his hands lifted, trembled, and grasped the knobs of his chair. ‘Tss!’ he said, glaring spitefully at the cat. But it was a small feeble sound; of course the cat did not hear. What was to be done? His yellowish old eyes glanced round the parlour for something to throw. But even supposing there had been something, a shell off the mantelpiece or a glass paperweight from the centre table, surely old Mr R. knew he could no more throw it at the cat than the cat could throw it back at him. Ah, the hateful beast! It was a large tabby with a thin tail and a round flat face like a penny bun. Now, folding its paws it squatted down exactly opposite the parlour window and it was impossible not to believe that its bold gaze was directed expressly at him. It knew how he hated it. Much it cared. It had come into his world without asking; it would stay there as long as it chose and go again when the fancy seized it. A cold snatch of wind raked the grass, blew in the fur of the tabby, rattled the laburnum and sent the kitchen smoke spinning downwards over the stony little garden. High up in the air there sounded a loud hooting and shrieking as the wind raced by. And it seemed to old Mr Rendall that the wind was against him, too, was in league with the cat and made that shrill sound on purpose to defy him. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 300–1. Dated 1922 by JMM and published as ‘Mr Rendall and the Cat’, Scrapbook, pp. 216–17.

•

Our Hilda On a fine spring morning, one of those delicious spotless mornings when one feels that celestial housemaids have been joyfully busy all through the night, Mrs Quill locked the back door, the pantry window, and the front door and set off for the railway station.

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‘Good-bay, wee house!’ said she, as she shut the gate, and she felt the house heard and loved her. It was not quite empty. In her bedroom, in his cradle Chi-chi lay sleeping his morning sleep. But the blind was down and he was so beautifully trained. She counted on him not waking up until they were back. At that hour, all the little houses in Tyrell Street basked in the radiant light; all the canaries in their little houses hanging from the verandah poles, sang their shrillest. It was difficult to understand how the infants in perambulators who shared the verandahs with the canaries slept through the din. But they apparently did; no sound came from them. Up and down spanked the important-looking light yellow butcher’s cart, and in and out of the back gates went the baker’s boy with his basket clamped to his back, like a big shell. It had rained in the night. There were still puddles – broken stars – on the road. But the pavement was beautifully dry. What a pleasure it was to walk on the nice clean pavement! Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 288–9. Dated 1922 by JMM and published as ‘Spring in Tyrrell Street’, Scrapbook, p. 218.

•

‘One great advantage’ One great advantage in having your clothes made by Miss Phillips was that you had to go through the garden to get to the house. Perhaps it was the only advantage for Miss Phillips was a strange, temperamental dressmaker with ever a surprise up her – no, indeed – in your own sleeve for you. Sleeves were her weakness, her terror. I fancy she looked upon them as devils, to be wrestled with but never overcome. Now a ‘body’, once she had tried it on first in newspaper, then in unbleached calico and finally in the lining she would make a very pretty fit to the figure. She liked to linger over her bodies, to stroke them, to revolve round them, hissing as was her wont, faintly. But the moment she dreaded came at last. ‘Have you cut out the sleeves, Miss Phillips?’ ‘Yes, Miss, I ’ave. One moment Miss. If you please.’ And with a look half peevish, half desperate, the strange funnel shaped thing was held up for your arm to be thrust into.

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‘The armhole is very tight, Miss Phillips.’ ‘They’re wearing them very small this seasing, Miss.’ ‘But I can’t get my hand near my head.’ ‘Near your read, Miss’ echoed Miss Phillips, as though it was the first time she had ever heard of this gymnastic feat being attempted. Finally she repinned it and raised it on the shoulder. ‘But now it’s much too short, Miss Phillips.’ I wanted a lo-ong sleeve. I wanted a point over the hand. Points over the hand always seemed to me – still seem to me – excessively romantic.’ ‘Oh Miss!’ The big scissors that went ‘sneep sneep’ like a bird on a cold morning cut out a brown paper cuff and Miss Phillips fixed it on with fingers that trembled; while I frowned at the top of her head and even made faces at her in my rage. Her hair was so strange. It was grey, all in little tufts. It reminded you of a sheepskin hearthrug. And there were always threads, minute triangles of stuff, pieces of fluff sticking to it. It didn’t want brushing, I thought, so much as sweeping and a shaking out of windows. In person Miss Phillips was extremely thin and squeezed in so tightly that every breath creaked, and at moments of emotion she sounded like a ship at sea. She invariably wore the same black alpaca apron, frilled, and on her left breast – oh how cruel, how sinister it looked to me – a tight little red plush heart pierced all over with needles and pins and a malignant looking safety pin or two to stab deeper – ‘If you please Miss while I unpin you.’ Her small hard hands flew up, perched, gripped like claws. She had a thin nose with just one dab of red at the tip as though some wicked child with a paint brush had caught her sleeping. ‘Thank you Miss Phillips. And you’ll let me have it on Saturday?’ ‘Satterday for certing, Miss’ hissed Miss Phillips through a bristling mouthful. While I dressed in front of the long mirror that had spots on the side like frosted finger prints I loved to discover again that funny little room. In the corner by the fireplace stood the ‘middle’ covered in red sateen. Its solidity ended at the hips in wire rings that reminded one of a dove’s egg beater. But what a model it was. What shoulders, what a bosom, what curves, and no horrible arms to be clothed in sleeves, no head to be reached up to. It was Miss Phillips’ god. It was also, I decided, a perfect lady. Thus and thus only do perfect ladies appear in the extreme privacy of their apartments. But above all – it was godlike. I saw Miss Phillips, alone, abstracted, laying her stuffs upon that imperturbable altar. Perhaps her failures were to be excused. They were all part of a frenzy for sacrifice . . .

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Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 302–3. Dated 1922 by JMM and published as ‘The Dressmaker’, Scrapbook, pp. 231–3.

•

‘There are certain human beings’ There are certain human beings on this earth who do not care a safety-pin whether their loved one is beautiful or pretty or youthful or rich. One thing only they ask of her and that [is] that she should smile. ‘Smile! Smile now!’ their eyes, their fingers, their toes and even their tiny jackets say. In fact, the tassel of little Jean’s cap, which was much too big for him and hung over one eye with a drunken effect, said it loudest of all. Every time his mother swooped forward to put it straight it was all she could do not to lift him out of the pram and press him – squeeze him to her shoulder while she rubbed her cheek against his white cheek and told him what she thought of him. Jean’s cheeks were white because he lived in a basement. He was, however, according to his mother, a perfectly healthy child, and good, lovely. He had merry, almost cunning little eyes.’ Smile!’ said Jean’s eyebrows, which were just beginning to show. On a perfect spring afternoon he and his mother set off for the Jardins Publiques together. It was his first spring. A year ago he had been of course much too young – six months only! – to be in the open air for any length of time. Even now his mother wheeled him out in the teeth of his grandmother’s awful prophecies and the neighbours’ solemn warnings. The open air is so weakening for a baby and the sun, as everyone knows, is very very dangerous. One catches fever from sitting in the sun, colds in the head, weeping eyes. Jean’s gran, before daring to face its rays, plugged her ears with wool, wrapped herself round in an extra black shawl, gave a final twist which hid her mouth and her pale beak-like nose, and pulled black woollen mitts over her cotton ones. Thus attired, with a moan of horror she scuttled away to the bread shop and having scuttled back she drank something blue out of a bottle as an extra precaution . . . But there was a wicked recklessness about his mother. First she had made up her mind to buy a pram and then she had bought one second hand. Then she had set her heart on taking Jean to the Jardins Publiques, and here they were!

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It is lovely in the public gardens; it is full spring. The lilac is in flower and the [. . .] the new grass quivers in the light, and the trees, their delicate leaves gold in the sun, stand with branches outspread as if in blessing . . . Up the path go Jean and his mother. She is extremely proud of him and then proud of herself for having managed to bring him there. The wheel of the pram squeaks and this delights her, too, for she thinks everybody will notice it and look at Jean. But nobody does. Mothers, nurses, babies, lovers, students go by in a stream. A little boy tugs his grandfather’s hand. Run, he says – run. And they stagger off together. It is hard to say which will fall down first. But all this is absolutely mysterious to little Jean. First he looks one side, then he looks the other. Then he stares at his mother who nods and says cuckoo! But how does cuckoo explain anything. For a moment he wonders if he ought to cry. But there seems to be nothing to cry about, so he jumps up and down instead and tries to burst out of some of the tight hot little coats and shawls that are half smothering him. The heat in the pram is terrible. He is sitting on a blanket, a broad strap cuts across his legs, and on either side, at his feet and there behind his head, there are large newspaper parcels which contain his mother’s mending. ‘Are you hungry? Are you hungry? Hungry? Hungry?’ asks his mother as she wheels the pram over to a bench and sits down. Jean is never hungry. But he takes the biscuit that she shows to him, nibbles it, and stares at the grass on the other side of the low railing. [. . .] ‘Do you want to go home, want to go home, want to go home?’ said she. Why she asked him so many times nobody will ever know. There are certain human beings on this earth who do not care a safety-pin whether their loved one is beautiful or pretty or youthful or rich. One thing only they ask of her and that is that she should smile. Nothing else matters. Paul Verdun was one of them. Smile! he commanded. Smile now! And he searched his mother’s face as though it were the heavens and her smile the sun. And for the last time she folded up her newspaper parcels, packed them round little Paul, lifted him, set him down again, put his cap straight, and strapped him in. But as she drew the strap tight he realised what all this preparation meant. Shall we go home – go home, home! repeated his mother. It was horrible at home in the dark basement kitchen. His grandmother padded about in felt slippers. She wore a black handkerchief on her head and her hands were covered with little black mitts. And she was always shaking something that smelt disgusting in a saucepan

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over the fire. He hated his grandmother. He would have hated her more had he known how she scolded his mother for being sure that he should be taken into the open air every day. What could be more dangerous than the sun? It gave you fever, it gave you colds in the head. His grandmother declared the open air was weakening. Notes U Text: KMN, 2, pp. 304–5. Dated 1922 by JMM and published as ‘Baby Jean’, Scrapbook, pp. 224–7, with the second attempt at the story omitted.

•

A Bad Idea Something’s happened to me – something bad. And I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t see any way out for the life of me. The worst of it is I can’t get the thing into focus – if you know what I mean. I just feel in a muddle – in the hell of a muddle. It ought to be plain to anyone that I’m not the kind of man to – to get mixed up in a thing like this. I’m not one of your actor Johnnies, or a chap in a book. I’m – well I knew what I was all right until yesterday. But now – I feel helpless, yes that’s the word, helpless. Here I sit, chucking stones at the sea like a child that’s missed its mother. And everybody else has cut along home hours ago and tea’s over and it’s getting on for time to light the lamp. I shall have to go home too, sooner or later. I see that, of course. In fact, would you believe it, at this very moment I wish I was there in spite of everything. What’s she doing? My wife, I mean. Has she cleared away? Or has she stayed there staring at the table with the plates pushed back? My God! when I think that I could howl like a dog – if you know what I mean . . . I should have realised it was all u.p. this morning when she didn’t get up for breakfast. I did in a way. But I couldn’t face it. I had the feeling then that if I said nothing special, and just treated it as one of her bad headache days and went off to the office, by the time I got back this evening the whole affair would have blown over, somehow. No, that wasn’t it. I felt a bit like I do now, ‘helpless.’ What was I to do? Just go on – that was all I could think of. So I took her up a cup of tea and a couple of slices of thin bread and butter as per usual on her headache days. The blind was still down. She was lying on her back. I think she had a wet handkerchief on her forehead. I’m not

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sure, for I couldn’t look at her. It was a beastly feeling, and she said in a weak kind of voice, ‘Put the jug on the table, will you?’ I put it down. I said, ‘Can I do anything?’ And she said, ‘No. I’ll be all right in half an hour.’ But her voice – you know! It did for me. I barged out as quick as I could, snatched my hat and stick from the hall-stand and dashed off for the tram. Here’s a queer thing – you needn’t believe me if you don’t want to – the moment I was out of the house, I forgot that about my wife. It was a splendid morning, soft, with the sun making silver ducks on the sea. The kind of morning when you know it’s going to keep hot and fine all day. Even the tram bell sounded different and the little school kids crammed between people’s knees had bunches of flowers. I don’t know – I can’t understand why – I just felt happy, but happy in a way I’d never been before, happy to beat the band! That wind that had been so strong the night before was still blowing a bit. It felt like her – the other touching me. Yes, it did. Brought it all back, every bit of it. If I told you how it took me you’d say I was mad. I felt reckless – didn’t care if I was late for the office or not and I wanted to do everybody a kindness. I helped the little kids out of the tram. One little chap dropped his cap, and when I picked it up for him and said, ‘Here, sonny!’ . . . well, it was all I could do not to make a fool of myself. At the office it was just the same. It seemed to me I’d never known the fellows at the office before. When old Fisher came over to my desk and put down a couple of giant sweet peas as per usual with his ‘Beat ’em old man beat ’em!’ – I didn’t feel annoyed. I didn’t care that he was riddled with conceit about his garden. I just looked at them and I said quietly, ‘Yes, you’ve done it this time.’ He didn’t know what to make of it. Came back in about five minutes and asked me if I had a headache. And so it went on all day. In the evening I dashed home with the home-going crowd, pushed open the gate, saw the hall-door open as it always is and sat down on the little chair just inside to take off my boots. My slippers were there, of course. This seemed to me a good sign. I put my boots into the rack in the cupboard under the stairs, changed my office coat and made for the kitchen. I knew my wife was there. Wait a bit. The only thing I couldn’t manage was my whistling as per usual ‘I often lie awake and think, What a dreadful thing is work. . . .’ I had a try but nothing came of it. Well, I opened the kitchen door and said, ‘Hullo! How’s everybody!’ But as soon as I’d said that – even before – I knew the worst had happened. She was standing at the table beating the salad dressing. And when she looked up and gave a kind of smile and said ‘Hullo’ you could have knocked me down! My wife looked dreadful – there’s no other word for it. She must have been crying all day. She’d put some white flour stuff on

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her face to take away the marks – but it only made her look worse. She must have seen I spotted something, for she caught up the cup of cream and poured some into the salad bowl – like she always does, you know, so quick, so neat, in her own way – and began beating again. I said, ‘Is your head better?’ But she didn’t seem to hear. She said ‘Are you going to water the garden before or after supper?’ What could I say? I said ‘After’ and went off to the dining-room, opened the evening paper and sat by the open window, well – hiding behind that paper, I suppose. I shall never forget sitting there. People passing by, going down the road, sounded so peaceful. And a man passed with some cows. I – I envied him. My wife came in and out. Then she called me to supper and we sat down. I suppose we ate some cold meat and salad. I don’t remember. We must have. But neither of us spoke. It’s like a dream now. Then she got up changed the plates and went to the larder for the pudding. Do you know what the pudding was? Well, of course, it wouldn’t mean anything to you. It was my favourite – the kind she only made me on special occasions – Honeycomb cream. Notes U Text: MS ATL. Dated 1922 by BJK, p. 315. DNOS.

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The Canary1 . . . You see that big nail to the right of the front door? I can scarcely look at it even now and yet I could not bear to take it out. I should like to think it was there always even after my time. I sometimes hear the next people saying, ‘There must have been a cage hanging from there.’ And it comforts me. I feel he is not quite forgotten. . . . You cannot imagine how wonderfully he sang. It was not like the singing of other canaries. And that isn’t just my fancy. Often, from the window I used to see people stop at the gate to listen, or they would lean over the fence by the mock-orange for quite a long time – carried away. I suppose it sounds absurd to you – it wouldn’t if you had heard him – but it really seemed to me he sang whole songs, with a beginning and an end to them. For instance, when I’d finished the house in the afternoon, and changed my blouse and brought my sewing on to the verandah here,

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he used to hop, hop, hop from one perch to the other, tap against the bars as if to attract my attention, sip a little water, just as a professional singer might, and then break into a song so exquisite that I had to put my needle down to listen to him. I can’t describe it; I wish I could. But it was always the same, every afternoon, and I felt that I understood every note of it. . . . I loved him. How I loved him! Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must! Of course there was always my little house and the garden, but for some reason they were never enough. Flowers respond wonderfully, but they don’t sympathise. Then I loved the evening star. Does that sound ridiculous? I used to go into the backyard, after sunset, and wait for it until it shone above the dark gum tree. I used to whisper, ‘There you are, my darling.’ And just in that first moment it seemed to be shining for me alone. It seemed to understand this . . . something which is like longing, and yet it is not longing. Or regret – it is more like regret. And yet regret for what? I have much to be thankful for! . . . But after he came into my life I forgot the evening star; I did not need it any more. But it was strange. When the Chinaman who came to the door with birds to sell held him up in his tiny cage, and instead of fluttering, fluttering, like the poor little goldfinches, he gave a faint, small chirp, I found myself saying, just as I had said to the star over the gum tree, ‘There you are, my darling.’ From that moment he was mine! . . . It surprises even me now to remember how he and I shared each other’s lives. The moment I came down in the morning and took the cloth off his cage he greeted me with a drowsy little note. I knew it meant ‘Missus! Missus!’ Then I hung him on the nail outside while I got my three young men their breakfasts, and I never brought him in, to do his cage, until we had the house to ourselves again. Then, when the washing-up was done, it was quite a little entertainment. I spread a newspaper over a corner of the table and when I put the cage on it he used to beat with his wings, despairingly, as if he didn’t know what was coming ‘You’re a regular little actor,’ I used to scold him. I scraped the tray, dusted it with fresh sand, filled his seed and water tins, tucked a piece of chickweed and half a chili between the bars. And I am perfectly certain he understood and appreciated every item of this little performance. You see by nature he was exquisitely neat. There was never a speck on his perch. And you’d only to see him enjoy his bath to realise he had a real small passion for cleanliness. His bath was put in last. And the moment it was in he positively leapt into it. First he fluttered one wing, then the other, then he ducked his head and dabbled his breast feathers. Drops of water were scattered

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all over the kitchen, but still he would not get out. I used to say to him, ‘Now that’s quite enough. You’re only showing off.’ And at last out he hopped and standing on one leg he began to peck himself dry. Finally he gave a shake, a flick, a twitter and he lifted his throat – Oh, I can hardly bear to recall it. I was always cleaning the knives by then. And it almost seemed to me the knives sang too, as I rubbed them bright on the board. . . . Company, you see, that was what he was. Perfect company. If you have lived alone you will realise how precious that is. Of course there were my three young men who came in to supper every evening, and sometimes they stayed in the dining-room afterwards reading the paper. But I could not expect them to be interested in the little things that made my day. Why should they be? I was nothing to them. In fact, I overheard them one evening talking about me on the stairs as ‘the Scarecrow’. No matter. It doesn’t matter. Not in the least. I quite understand. They are young. Why should I mind? But I remember feeling so especially thankful that I was not quite alone that evening. I told him, after they had gone. I said ‘Do you know what they call Missus?’ And he put his head on one side and looked at me with his little bright eye until I could not help laughing. It seemed to amuse him. . . . Have you kept birds? If you haven’t, all this must sound, perhaps, exaggerated. People have the idea that birds are heartless, cold little creatures, not like dogs or cats. My washerwoman used to say every Monday when she wondered why I didn’t keep ‘a nice fox terrier’, ‘There’s no comfort, Miss, in a canary.’ Untrue! Dreadfully untrue! I remember one night. I had had a very awful dream – dreams can be terribly cruel – even after I had woken up I could not get over it. So I put on my dressing-gown and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a winter night and raining hard. I suppose I was half asleep still, but through the kitchen window, that hadn’t a blind, it seemed to me the dark was staring in, spying. And suddenly I felt it was unbearable that I had no one to whom I could say ‘I’ve had such a dreadful dream,’ or – ‘Hide me from the dark.’ I even covered my face for a minute. And then there came a little ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ His cage was on the table, and the cloth had slipped so that a chink of light shone through. ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ said the darling little fellow again, softly, as much as to say, ‘I’m here, Missus. I’m here!’ That was so beautifully comforting that I nearly cried. . . . And now he’s gone. I shall never have another bird, another pet of any kind. How could I? When I found him, lying on his back, with his eye dim and his claws wrung, when I realised that never again should I hear my darling sing, something seemed to die in me. My breast felt hollow, as if it was his cage. I shall get over it. Of course.

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I must. One can get over anything in time. And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank God I have. . . . All the same, without being morbid, or giving way to – to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this – sadness? – Ah, what is it? – that I heard. Notes U Text: MS NLC, dated 7 July 1922. DNOS. 1. KM’s last completed story, written for her friend Dorothy Brett. KM was fascinated by the caged birds she watched from her window in the Victoria Palace Hotel, rue Blaise Desgoffes, near the Luxembourg Gardens, and had written to her cousin, Elizabeth, Countess Russell, on 21 February 1922: ‘The woman in the room opposite has a wicker cage full of canaries. How can one possibly express in words the beauty of their quick little song rising, as it were, out of the very stones.’ A few days later she told Brett: I think my story for you will be about Canaries. The large cage opposite has fascinated me completely. I think & think about them – their feelings, their dreams, the life they led before they were caught, the difference between the two little pale fluffy ones who were born in captivity & their grandfather & grandmother who knew the South American forests and have seen the immense perfumed sea . . . (CLKM, 5, p. 70, p. 76) She did not in fact write the story until July, when Brett stayed with her at the Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre. It was there that KM also wrote her last poem. She had long referred to her lungs as her ‘wings’, and there is a plangent directness in her poem ‘The Wounded Bird’, which begins: In the wide bed Under the green embroidered quilt With flowers and leaves always in motion She is like a wounded bird resting on a pool

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and concludes: At night – in the wide bed With the leaves and flowers Gently weaving in the darkness She is like a wounded bird at rest on a pool. Timidly, timidly she lifts her head from her wing. In the sky there are two stars Floating – shining – Oh, waters – do not cover me! I would look long and long at those beautiful stars! O my wings – lift me – lift me I am not so dreadfully hurt (Poems, p.82) The canaries, too, came finally to serve as an image for what she considered the limitations of her own writing. In one of her last letters, she told her cousin Elizabeth on 31 December 1922, ‘I want much more material; am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages’ (CLKM, 5, p. 346).

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Appendix A: Attributed Stories

The following stories at times have been attributed to KM, but also strongly rejected. Antony Alpers, in Life, p. 148, thought ‘The Breidenbach Family in England’ was a clever parody of the German Pension stories, written by Beatrice Hastings and C. E. Bechofer, both colleagues and occasional friends of KM in her early association with the New Age. In BJK, p. 150, B. J. Kirkpatrick placed it among ‘Doubtful Contributions’, together with ‘The Mating of Gwendolen’, which nevertheless was accepted by Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr in Katherine Mansfield (1981), p. 12, but not by Alpers - see Life, p. 151. Kirkpatrick (p. 152) judged both ‘A Flirtation’ and ‘The Wild Rabbit: A Fantasy of the Future’ as ‘not by KM’, while Alpers dismissed the first as ‘not conceivably by K.M.’ in Life, p. 435, and the second as strongly in conversation with Vincent O’Sullivan.

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The Breidenbach Family in England (1911) Frau Breidenbach rolled up her breakfast napkin with a sigh, pushed it into the landlady’s silver ring and pointed it at the empty dish before her. ‘There, that’s the end of the good Munich sausage,’ she said, portentously; ‘and what on earth for the next meal?’ The Herr Doctor replied, ‘I suppose we can get something in the village, isn’t it?’ Frau Breidenbach sat up and folded her hands severely. ‘Have I not three times told you, Carl, that on account of the holiday on Monday the butcher will have nothing in the shop until half-past one on Tuesday? This is only Sunday. I leave to you what I am to do. You ought to help, because if Maria and I had not listened to you we should be still safe in Munich.’ The Herr Doctor looked at his daughter. ‘Maria, tell your 516

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mother that I am not to blame. My last words before leaving Munich were that the reputation of the English judges was declining, and that wasps were numerous in the country districts.’ Little flaxen pig-tailed Maria had very nearly opened her mouth. ‘Ach!’ Frau Breidenbach interrupted. ‘Ach, papa, when the tickets were bought and paid for, you were not so enthusiastic. But what do I care about bad judges and wasps? Everywhere are bad judges and wasps, but everywhere is not a butcher who will have no meat until next Tuesday. In Munich . . .’ Herr Breidenbach himself now sat upright. He had at last taken in the situation. He glared indignantly at his wife. ‘Is it that there will be no dinner to-day?’ he demanded. The Frau pursed her lips before replying: ‘I wish, Carl, you would learn to speak a little gently. Of course I have got a shoulder of lamb for dinner, with potatoes and a marrow, and with the jelly and custard and cheese and coffee, that should be sufficient. It is not the dinner that disturbs me, but the breakfast to-morrow.’ ‘Eggs!’ said Maria, suddenly. The Herr Doctor delightedly patted her hand. ‘Maria is always clever – –’ ‘Not an egg in the village!’ cried the Frau triumphantly.’ ‘England! byootiful England! oh, so much better than Germany! But there, papa, do not be vexed. I will contrive. Perhaps I can find still a packet of something in the big trunk. Oh, believe me, I am not such a fool as to come to England without thinking!’ ‘So! then we will go out now and sit in the field, eh, Maria?’ ‘First, Carl, I put on you your neck-scarf, and Maria fetches the rug, and then we go, though I am quite terrified of the people. Hurry, dear! That child grows so fat!’ ‘Poh! Do her good. Heavens! Emelie, will you plague me with a woollen scarf in August?’ Frau Breidenbach determinedly knotted the huge red roll around her husband’s throat. ‘It will keep the wasps off, anyway,’ she said. ‘Come, we go now.’ The field was right in front of their lodgings, and as the Germans – the stout Herr Doctor with stick and scarf, his wife in navy print and a smart hat and a stick, and Maria in white muslin and a stick – moved across the white road to the gate that led in, rural England giggled audibly from behind its window-curtains. Frau Breidenbach was prepared for everything to happen every time she stepped from shelter. She now hugged Maria and the Herr Doctor by their arms and whispered. ‘We do not look to the right or the left in case we offend somebody. The landlady did not salute me amiably this morning; I think I have offended her when I showed her the dear Kaiserin’s photograph.’ ‘Rubbish, my dear. The Crown Prince was the absolutely most popular figure at the Coronation. But look what is here – no bank in this field! I cannot sit down flat. How should I ever get up again?’ ‘Come along, we don’t meet the trouble yet,’ said the Frau; ‘we will go down the slope, some bank there must be.’ ‘But there

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is not!’ The Herr Doctor indicated the whole country-side with a waving stick.’ Ach, come, I will pull you up and Maria can push, and so we manage quite well. See here is a lovely view. Now we sit and enjoy forty winks. This place makes me so tired; it is the air.’ She sat on the grass and held out her arms. ‘So! Carl, I will catch you. You sit first in my lap and then you roll off to the grass. My poor dear is so stiff, isn’t he? Ach, heaven! I am nearly killed. Na, na, that is all right. Put your head on my lap. So! I move. Now we are very comfortable. But the sun shines right on your face, isn’t it?’ Maria shifted close to the Herr Doctor and spread the edge of her frock over his face. She played peep-o with him once or twice and laughed gently, but said nothing. Maria rarely spoke. Perhaps she was really too fat, or – who could say? – perhaps she was tired of the Herr Doctor’s everlasting ‘Maria is so clever!’ ‘Carl!’ exclaimed Frau Breidenbach, patting her husband’s shoulder, ‘you didn’t tell me – is your stomach better this morning? If not, I shall increase the dose of medicine. I thought in the middle of the night that I had not made it enough strong.’ The Herr Doctor thumped himself on the chest. ‘But yes, it is better. I think still there is a slight tendency to acidity. But it is much better. That is a very good prescription. Hoch! hough! hough!’ He coughed stomachically. ‘Ach! that poor cough!’ his wife crooned; ‘how anxious I am. But now we sleep a little, and to-night I make the medicine stronger.’ While the Frau dozed bolt upright and the Herr Doctor’s broad horizontal form heaved, Maria slipped away to watch an old labourer who came through the gate and set down a glass jar upon the grass. In the jar was some jammy-looking water. The labourer made a little hole in the paper that was tied over the top and went away. Immediately a wasp settled on the paper, crawled through the hole, fell into the water and began to swim about. Maria had a tender heart. She tore the paper wide and stuck a long twig in, and in a moment or two the insect crawled up the twig and flew away. It was amusing to stand and watch wasp after wasp fall in and crawl out by the twig bridge; but presently wasps came in dozens and scores, and as none were caught but all sipped and flew to tell the others and returned to sip again, the field literally began to buzz, and Maria moved away. Frau Breidenbach was just waking. She shook her husband. ‘Get up now, Carl. You’ve had a very good sleep. We go in for some hot milk.’ The Herr rolled to a sitting posture. ‘But how am I to get up?’ he inquired querulously, rubbing his ever-aching knees; ‘that is difficult to get up, we ought to have found a bank.’ Frau Breidenbach seized him under the arms. ‘Ouf!’ she ejaculated, pulling. ‘Push, Maria! Ach, Carl, help yourself a little, my dear! Ou-uf! So! Up! That was excellent. Come, now.’

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She led towards the gate, a trim, serviceable-looking figure with her blue dress and stick. Beside the jam-jar she stopped and called back: ‘Heavens, Carl, the wasps!’ ‘But what did I tell you – England is full of wasps.’ ‘But what wonder if the people do such things? Look here at this – a jar of strawberry juice to feed them!’ The Herr Doctor retorted, ‘That is a trap. They fall in and are drowned.’ Frau Breidenbach pointed indignantly. ‘Should I not have known as well as you if it was a trap? But see the stick – na, that is for them to crawl out safely. These English – and I have always heard so! – do not mind insects!’ ‘I cannot understand what the stick is for,’ mused the Herr Doctor, ‘but it is some sort of trap.’ ‘So! Let them be as clever at catching our soldiers!’ ‘Emelie! I have told you there will be no war!’ ‘Ach, Carl, you have a sweet nature, but you are sometimes very foolish.’ By this time they were about entering the house when the old labourer came back to the field. He stared at the jar and from that, bewildered, to the Germans. ‘Look, what enmity!’ whispered the Frau. ‘What did I tell you? Am I right? Why even a child, Maria, must see they are dying for war.’ The Herr Doctor looked keenly at Maria and winked. ‘But we shall never give them the casus belli, shall we, Maria? I have told you there will be no war!’ Maria, as usual, smiled, but said nothing. Notes Text: New Age, 9: 16, 17 August 1911, p. 371. Unsigned.

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The Mating of Gwendolyn (1911) Mrs. Vere Jenkyns and her daughter Gwendolen were sitting in the Park. It was a favourite form of recreation with these ladies during the season, one involving no discomfort, no expense, yet imparting a pleasant feeling of being in touch with Society. ‘We have been sitting in the Park.’ It always sounds well and has an agreeable flavour of smartness. So they sat on the borderland of fashion, in very large hats and very small shoes and a great amount of cheap lace, the mother a faded

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edition of the daughter, gazing intently at the ceaseless procession of carriages, or rather at the women in them. Occasionally they uttered a brief word of approval. ‘Not so bad, that.’ ‘What a divine hat!’ ‘Simply duckie!’ But for the most part they indulged in scornful criticism of the dowdy and ill-dressed. ‘Good heavens, Gwendolen! That hat!’ ‘And that face!’ ‘And the awful man! Could you picture yourself with him, Gwen?’ ‘Not even for the sake of the turn-out, mother, and I’d stand a good deal for the sake of that!’ Thus Gwendolen cultivated cheap cynicism. ‘Don’t forget Jimmy could afford something quite as good as that,’ Mrs. Vere Jenkyns said quickly. But Gwendolen replied: ‘Do look at that fat woman in purple! How can she?’‘I think, darling, you and I would look quite as well as most of these,’ Mrs. Vere Jenkyns sighed. ‘Ohm! why is it so unjust in this world? People like that there and we here? I often wonder why all these things are permitted. And ho! how we should appreciate it ! You, darling, were made, just made for riches. And ought to have them. Why, oh! why is it so unjust in this world?’ Mrs. Vere Jenkyns, as she always did when demanding solutions to problems of this nature, cast pale blue eyes reproachfully upwards, seeming to arraign a Deity who was showering down equipages upon the undeserving. ‘Oh ! well, mother . . . ,’ Gwendolen said with a resigned shrug of her shoulders. The widow of a tax-collector in India, Mrs. Vere Jenkyns, on a small annuity, lived in perpetual wonderment as to why Providence did not make it bigger. Gwendolen, too, felt that the universe had not as yet assigned her a place worthy of her. They ceased to titter and became silent for a moment. Then a tense whisper from Gwendolen: ‘Mother, there’s William Waller!’ Spell-bound, hypnotised, they gazed at the popular actor, who spoke to some friends, crossed the Row, disappeared up a side path in the most natural manner conceivable. Gwendolen’s face flushed pink, her heart beat quite quickly beneath her lace blouse, for, as she herself admitted, she was ‘awfully gone’ on William Waller. In fact, both ladies (as might be seen by a dainty badge dangling from their bracelets) were members of the W.W.W., the Worshippers of William Waller being a society numbering twelve chosen, enthusiastic female worshippers, chiefly from the suburbs.

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For a time they were wrapt in the glory of this vision. ‘He looked at you, Gwen. I distinctly saw him notice you. . . . But I did!’ Mrs. Vere Jenkyns assured her daughter. ‘What’s the good, mother? We shall never know him,’ said Gwendolen, the corners of her mouth drooping again. ‘Come, darling, it’s getting late, and you know Jimmy’s coming in this evening. We must go home in our motor,’ said the mother, playfully alluding to the West Kensington ‘bus. They rose, throwing away the chair tickets with nonchalance, and walked away in a dignified saunter. Home was a tiny flat in Kensington which Mrs. Vere Jenkyns refused to qualify as ‘West,’ thereby creating dire confusion in the minds of errand-boys and unaccustomed visitors. The drawing-room showed a prevailingly pink note, a bewildering litter of cushions, flimsy draperies, with basket-chairs as islands of refuge. The inevitable draped piano formed a convenient shelf for cheap knicknacks and photos. Photos, indeed, were everywhere, framed, unframed; photos of the ladies themselves (Mrs. V. J. in hopeless melancholy, Gwendolen amiable, yet arch), of friends, of actors. Above all a signed photo of the Worshipped One, presented by a self-effacing member of the W.W.W. In the evening a deeper glow of rose pink was diffused by a tall lamp with an enormous pink shade. And in the midst of all the rosiness, in the most comfortable basket chair, sat Jimmy. Jimmy was a plump little man, not yet fat, but distinctly in the prime of life, on the Stock Exchange, and his was the kind of face which imperatively demands a beard. There was nothing objectionable about Jimmy, he was rather amiable, rather voluble, rather fond of calling himself a ‘ladies’ man.’ The only thing was, he wasn’t a man (a rather spiteful member of the W. circle had said this). More like a lapdog – and a mongrel at that. ‘But useful to have round,’ Gwendolen admitted, when he took them to the theatre, or paid for taxis, or brought chocolate and flowers. Jimmy sipped whisky and soda and gave Mrs. Vere Jenkyns (who sat in another basket chair with her feet up) some tips from the Stock Exchange about her little flutters, whilst Gwendolen tinkled on the undraped portion of the piano and sang ‘Grey Eyes,’ ‘Pale hands pink tipped,’ ‘Nevertheless. . . .’ She was wondering why real men, really interesting men, who take the centre of the stage and make love in a masterful way, why such men never came into West Kensington. So few girls in Gwendolen’s set knew any men at all. Some were quite envious even of Jimmy – Jimmy, who was at all events useful if nothing else. If Jimmy’s

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usefulness could be incarnated in a more dashing personal appearance! Oh, well! She gave her resigned shrug at the impossible, for at twenty-seven Gwendolen had found out that many desirable things are impossible. It was a pity, she saw it clearly, Jimmy could never be anything but one of the minor parts, as it were, one of those who stand around and seldom have a line, if, indeed, they do not provide (unintentional) comic relief. Jimmy, sipping whisky and soda, was feeling very much at home. These women were the sort one liked to have about one, easily managed, with a pleasingly feminine atmosphere of frills and fripperies. Nothing strong-minded or of the suffragette. Gwendolen made an effect of prettiness (being in reality a thin and sharp-featured blonde) by fair hair waved and ‘treated’ to its utmost capacity, an effect of picturesque fluffiness, rustling draperies, jingling ornaments. Jimmy liked fluffy, jingling, rustling women. The pink glow, the sugary love songs, the feminine atmosphere – Jimmy felt like a gracious and powerful sultan. Yes, the little girl would suit him down to the ground. Gwendolen, looking across from the piano, saw him talking confidentially to her mother in a low voice. They were looking benevolently, indulgently at her, the sort of look one casts on a shy child who keeps aloof and must not be forced to come against its will. Gwendolen knew quite well what the look meant. Then Jimmy broke off, suddenly remembering a cheque which must be sent off that evening. In a very easy businesslike way he coolly filled in a cheque in three figures; it gave a wonderful sense of power and command to see how carelessly he did it, just as if a cheque in three figures was nothing! Gwendolen was impressed as her fingers strayed lightly over the ‘Waltz Dream.’ It must be very pleasant to have lots of money (this was the eternal refrain of mother and daughter), to be somebody, not to have to pinch and save – to have a nice large house, and one could get to know lots of ‘interesting’ people. . . . Jimmy really knew quite a lot of actors and singers, for instance. . . . Gwendolen longed to know ‘artistic’ and ‘interesting’ people. Later they were all three in a mellow atmosphere, vaguely warmed by the pink glow, vaguely animated by the sugary love ditties, by little sips of whisky and soda. After all, Jimmy was a man. He sat smoking at his ease (smoking is certainly a masculine attribute, and Jimmy was fond of smoking). Gwendolen finished her playing and closed the piano. Mrs. Vere Jenkyns was admiring something which Jimmy was showing her. ‘Exquisite! I never saw anything lovelier. And the setting! And what a perfectly wonderful stone! Come, Gwen, come and look.’

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It was a diamond ring, a lady’s ring. The two women adored jewels greedily. Mrs. Vere Jenkyns was arch, simpering, discreet, all in one. ‘Will it fit? I don’t know. You’d better find out,’ she said encouragingly.’ She’ll be a lucky woman who gets that! Eh, Gwen? Try it on, dear, just to see. No – the other finger – that finger, goosie.’ And Gwen slipped it on the third finger of her left hand and looked lovingly at it, whilst her mother and Jimmy smiled. ‘It looks fine now,’ said Jimmy, significantly, taking the hand in his lingering clasp. Mrs. Vere Jenkyns stole hastily away to efface herself in the bedroom, closing the door with a marked slam. ‘Won’t you let it stay there?’ asked Jimmy, holding the hand in a soft yet confident pressure. And Gwendolen let it stay. With a certain pleasure she realised that she was engaged to be married. Notes Text: New Age, 10: 1, 2 November 1911, pp. 14–15. Signed ‘Mouche’.

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A Flirtation (1912) The American girl came to the pension dinner-table just as the soupplates were being jerked away by the waiter. Her entrance made a little stir. The young Italian officer, who sat on her right, rose and, clicking his heels together, made a superb bow. The German student on the left was not so nimble, but he raised his spectacled eyes, beaming with adoration, and made a great shuffling with his chair. The waiter flew swiftly to learn her commands. Ladies stared critically to see how her hair was done this evening, and what dress she was wearing. They bowed and smiled without much cordiality. Only the elderly Miss Griggs at the bottom of the table, who gushed over the lovely latecomer, made frantic efforts to catch her eye and convey admiring greetings. Florida N. Baxter, of Oregon, U.S.A., had radiant blue eyes, an air of ‘style,’ and tiny American hands and feet. She was apt to make a late entrance at the dinner-table, especially when she had something new in the way of clothes to wear. On this occasion she seated herself with gracious self-possession,

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darting a dangerous glance into the spectacles of the German, who straightway over-salted his meat with a perturbed hand; then she turned her batteries broadside on the gallant officer. He hastened to respond with banal civilities. ‘Always beautiful, but particularly so this evening!’ he murmured. ‘Thanks.’ ‘Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see how the whole table is looking at you with admiration?’ ‘H’m!’ said Florida, helping herself liberally to beef. ‘I caught a real vinegary glance just now from that old lady right opposite.’ ‘An antipathetic person!’ said the captain.’ What does she mean by it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered the young lady innocently. ‘I will tell you,’ said her neighbour, fondly imagining he was initiating the young American into the ways of the world.’ It is because she and her daughter are jealous of you. An ugly girl, that daughter.’ ‘Oh, do you think so?’ ‘Per Bacco, yes! But never mind them.’ ‘I don’t mind anybody,’ said Miss Florida disdainfully. ‘Besides, I’ll pay them out. They always come to me to have their fortunes told, you know, and I pay off my old scores then.’ ‘What will you tell them?’ ‘Oh, I shall foresee a stroke caused by over-eating for the old lady (she’s greedy), and I shall tell the daughter she’ll never get married! They have great confidence in me as a fortune-teller. That’s how I keep them in order.’ The officer chuckled. Florida came as a gift of the gods to the men at Pension Tivoli. A pretty and witty American girl wandering over Europe alone was a wonderful specimen of the eternal feminine in the little Italian town. Miss Baxter on her side found the place just too lovely for words – so quaint, so artistic! She liked to be queen, and in Pension Tivoli she came into a little kingdom, a half-smart, half-shabby little world, in fact, peopled by cosmopolitan odds and ends of humanity at seven francs a day. So she pitched her tent for a while, and devoted herself to her education, which was always being carried on intermittently in her wanderings. She engaged a singing-master, a professor to read Dante with her, and a third, a young student, for philosophy. Florida fully intended to become a celebrity some day, either as singer, authoress, or society leader. She had not decided which. Meanwhile, holding with the poet that the proper study of mankind is man, and having long studied the species, she now applied herself to the genus Italian man. Dinner was the event of the day at Pension Tivoli. It was a lengthy

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affair. In Florida’s vicinity, however, conversation never languished and laughter was frequent. ‘Where have you been all day?’ asked the German, in a momentary lull. ‘Oh, out in the country to see a monastery!’ she answered carelessly. ‘Alone?’ ‘No; with a friend.’ As she spoke, a dark young man, who sat opposite, glanced at her, and a look of understanding passed between them. Then Florida gave all her attention to her ice. After dinner she held a little levee in her own room. It was only a tiny room, for the fair pilgrim spent so much of her allowance on dress and her various branches of study that very little remained for the necessities of living. But it was all the cosier because it was small, the admirers said, and they crowded in joyously, for Florida had the priceless gift of making people at home. The capitano sat on a travelling trunk which was covered with a Como blanket; the German and a friend occupied the large – very large – sofa. The dark young man ensconced himself on a camp stool in a corner, and sat silent, his black eyes fixed on his hostess. Cigarettes were smoked; Florida played and sang comic songs. The great thing was to have one’s fortune told. The habitués had it done every evening. You sat close to Florida and touched her hand in taking the cards and looked into her eyes, and no one else could have a word with her during the operation. But at last the visitors dropped off. The officer had to show himself in a box at the opera; the others followed. Only the dark young man in the corner remained. ‘Aren’t you coming too?’ inquired the officer, as he passed out. ‘No,’ was the curt answer. Florida’s eyes brightened. She scented a dramatic situation. The young man’s name was Orlando Rossi; his companions nicknamed him ‘Orlando Furioso.’ Florida thought the epithet promising. He was such a real Italian. His large black eyes could roll wildly; his skin was olive; black masses of curls crowned his head. He was only twenty-two, and he took Florida very seriously. This evening he was pale with jealousy. ‘Well, Signor Rossi?’ said Florida, when the others had gone. She was sitting in her rocking-chair by the wood fire, and rocking lazily to and fro. ‘Ebbene?’ replied Orlando, standing by the mantel-piece. ‘I hope – I see – you – well?’ said Florida, speaking slowly, in order to vex the young man by suggesting that he could not understand. Orlando was vain of his English.

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He shrugged his shoulders. ‘How silent you have been all the evening!’ Orlando replied in Italian: ‘Have you deigned to notice it? I am surprised.’ ‘Why should you be surprised?’ Florida put out her hand for a fan. ‘In fact, why should one be surprised at anything done by a woman?’ began Orlando, in tones of cold steel. ‘Woman is an enigma. The heart of woman is inscrutable as the Sphinx. One should not be surprised at anything a woman does.’ Florida twirled her fan a little and smiled. He became more excited. The veins on his temples swelled. Rage suited him; he reminded her of Othello. He raved wildly about fickleness, coquetry, the coldness and ambiguity of women’s hearts. ‘What are you angry about?’ asked Florida innocently, when he had run down for want of breath. ‘Have you no idea?’ ‘No – unless it is because I talked to the others.’ ‘At last!’ said Orlando.’ Yes, signorina! It seems to me that when a woman understands that a man loves her, when she goes into the country with him for a whole day, when she seems to have sympathy for him, and when she is then equally amiable with others – she is a coquette. Our women –’ ‘Oh, your women!’ exclaimed Florida impatiently. ‘I am not one of your women. Don’t imagine that Americans are like your Italian women! We are different! We don’t consider ourselves beneath you men; we don’t submit to be treated like children or dolls; we – –’ ‘Pardon, signorina. I do not wish to discuss the relative merits of American and Italian women. I only want – –’ Here Orlando fell on his knees by her side, passionately kissing her hands, her dress, shedding tears. ‘Beautiful sphinx! I love you. Why are you so cruel – so changeable? Why do you drive me mad?’ and so on. He put his arm round her. Even Florida, who had been kissed by many men without kissing back – even Florida felt almost shy, almost carried off her feet. Yet when Orlando wanted an answer she temporised. ‘Do you love me – yes or no?’ Orlando demanded. ‘Perhaps,’ she murmured. ‘Then I may hope?’ pleaded Orlando. She smiled at him, and said that Hope made life beautiful. Later on Orlando went off jubilant to the café on the Piazza, where he sat until midnight dreaming dreams and swallowing many consommations of raspberry vinegar. Meanwhile Florida sat before the fire, twirling her fan and rocking.

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‘I wonder if I shall really fall in love with the boy? He is very young. I am three – no, four years older than he. Well, these Italians always look older than they are. I think, after all, I like young men best – they mean it more and believe in you more. Well, we’ll see. At any rate, I am not bored here. Life is so dull sometimes, when there are no men around! Here, there’s not that to complain of! I can twist every one of them round my little finger.’ She rose from her chair, and, looking critically at her face in the mirror, she smiled. ‘I don’t wonder at it,’ she said, flashing her eyes to see how they sparkled. ‘I’d fall in love with you myself if I were a man. No, I wouldn’t. Oh, dear, I can’t sit here alone. I wish I’d made Orlando take me out somewhere. I’ll go round and talk to the old maid, by way of a contrast!’ After this Orlando became cavalier-in-chief, the others falling off as he advanced. At last he was alone in the field, and it had become a perfect duel between him and Florida. He swore to himself he would win her, ‘one way or another.’ What was the meaning of a woman who would not fall in love and yet kept you by her side as a lover? He grew impatient, nervous, irritable. Florida had been through so many love affairs and flirtations that she usually played the fish at the end of her line without an effort, but this one was ‘such a splasher,’ she said. She began to be uncertain of herself. ‘Shall I – or shall I not? Do I love him?’ she asked herself one day when she had a headache and felt sentimental. She was pleased for a moment, the situation seemed so real, so serious, and she had always lived on the surface of things. She tried to feel deeply. ‘Supposing it is to end in real love? Is he worth it? Is any man worth it? If I could only be sure whether I do love him or not! I don’t believe I can love. Love?’ Her tuneless heart gave no response. ‘Perhaps I am a sort of siren, a witch without a heart? Who was it said that of me once?’ The idea pleased her. ‘I’ll tell Miss Griggs that, it’ll thrill her,’ she said. And so it did. Florida lay on the sofa with smelling salts and tea, and acted to her audience of one. To this simple-minded lady Florida was a new type, a beautiful, mysterious creature who brought romance into daily uneventful life. To play Greek chorus to such a heroine was the most exciting thing she had ever done. Orlando was less impressed by the idea of Florida’s sirenhood. ‘You are a woman,’ he said, ‘you coquette like other women. And you have a heart, but you stifle it. All you English and Americans are like that. You are cold. We have hearts, we have warm blood, we – –’ They quarrelled idly. The weather was getting hot.

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Then a brilliant idea struck Florida. It was getting too hot to stay in town, everyone was going into Villeggiatura. Why not go to some lovely, cool spot and let Orlando come too? For she would have missed him too much! She went to a little watering-place and Orlando speedily followed. The life of Pension Tivoli was continued. Together the two walked, read, sketched, frequented the Casino. People looked askance at the intimacy and then concluded that to Americans all things are possible. Florida ignored people sublimely. As for Orlando, he would have been grieved if they had known how Florida kept him at a distance. But after a fortnight or so, when they walked out, there began to be long silences. Florida felt Orlando’s glances at the pretty women who passed. Could he be growing weary of her? Vanity forbade the thought. She did not realise that the Italian is nothing if not practical, and that Orlando was too practical to waste time for nothing. Florida wanted a slave, a worshipper, nothing more. But Platonics are not in the line of the ordinary young Italian. The most splendid person in the place was undoubtedly Mademoiselle Lulu, who sang badly in a foolish operetta at the theatre. She was coarsely pretty, and whenever she appeared off the stage, a retinue of men followed her. Florida expressed unbounded contempt for Lulu, but in her heart she admired this young person more than any woman she had ever seen. ‘How she rules them!’ she said. Florida studied her dress, her tricks of gesture; she learnt her idiotic songs. But she could not sing them as well as Mademoiselle Lulu, Orlando said. And one day she found out that he had sent a bouquet to Mademoiselle Lulu. She treated him disdainfully. ‘Let us have it out,’ said Orlando. ‘What right have you to be angry?’ ‘I am not angry. Send bouquets to all the world if you like!’ ‘You know you are angry.’ ‘I? Not in the least.’ ‘Then here are some roses I brought for you.’ Orlando presented them with careless politeness. Florida threw them out of the window with a grand gesture. ‘Flowers to that creature and to me in the same breath!’ she cried. But it was the wrong moment. ‘What is the good of being theatrical?’ sneered Orlando. The hometruth stung Florida into a rage. ‘Theatrical! I?’ she retorted.’ You don’t understand me. You can’t understand a woman like me.’ ‘Can’t I?’ said Orlando, coolly. ‘Oh, yes, I can. You are just like any other woman, only you try to be something more. Your high

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horse is just like the high horses of the others. Vanity is your ruling passion, as it is theirs. You lack something which most women possess, however. You have no feeling. Instead of heart you have brain; instead of blood you have water in your veins. You cannot fascinate long because you are sexless, arid. Everlasting coquetry, flirtation, playing friendship – how can it satisfy? You are incapable of making up your mind to be either wife or mistress. The cocotte takes her stand, but you –’ ‘You insult me!’ cried Florida, turning very pale. ‘I do not,’ replied Orlando.’ Truth is never insulting.’ ‘Go!’ cried Florida. And Orlando went. Then Florida wept bitterly, angrily, vainly. For the first time in her life she felt humbled. Late in the afternoon, when she was weak with weeping, she tried to think. ‘Do I love him? I almost believe I do. When he comes back I’ll – well, I’ll marry him. She shall not have him. I never liked any one so well after all – and the insulting things he said – he shall take them back, they must not be said to me! Oh! I shall conquer him again – when he comes back. But Orlando never came back. On the morrow he appeared in Mademoiselle Lulu’s retinue. And two months later his family arranged a marriage for him, with a certain plain little cousin who had just left school. ‘All women are alike,’ said Orlando, ‘and this one is of my own family at all events.’ And he was never weary of quoting the Italian proverb about choosing: Vino donna del tuo paese. Notes Text: New Age, 11: 14, 1 August 1912, pp. 326–8. Signed ‘Mouche’.

•

The Wild Rabbit: A Fantasy of the Future (1913) It was a fine day of late spring in the not far-distant future. Miss Parthenia Judd had spent the week-end with her friend Odilia Brown in the country, and this was the last day of her visit. On the morrow she would return to her home in the Central District, which was about

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a twenty-mile radius from old Charing Cross, a district connected throughout by the moving causeway or Trottoir Roulant system, whilst the ‘country’ of Odilia’s home lay out beyond Wendover, where the London municipal trams ended and what was known as open country began. Parthenia was essentially city bred; this was the first time she had left the Central District for more than a day’s excursion. ‘I had no idea I should love the country so much,’ she said, as they sat in the garden on this last afternoon. ‘When you invited me to Wendover, I loved the thought of being with you, dearest, yet I confess my heart sank a little at the thought of being so far out. But I absolutely love it! The stillness is so wonderful. From two to four this morning I lay awake listening to the silence. The trains had entirely ceased. For two hours, I assure you, not a sound!’ ‘I was terribly afraid the stillness might get on your nerves,’ Odilia confessed. ‘On the contrary, it appeals to me. How mysteriously refreshing is the absence of sound! But I love the music of the birds, how quaint, how exquisite in the dawn when the sparrows begin to chirp! Do you know I counted five nests in the garden! Can this be the season of hatching?’ ‘It is indeed the “merry month of May” of which old poets sang,’ Odilia replied, ‘and they always mention birds. Of course, formerly there were many varieties of birds, now practically extinct. I believe they all produced broods in May.’ ‘How interesting it must have been!’ exclaimed Parthenia. ‘Interesting, but rather noisy, surely? Still, it was no doubt charming to watch them.’ ‘Sparrows I have seen,’ mused Parthenia, recalling her rustic experiences, ‘cows, sheep and two starlings. Dearest, there is one other creature I am positively dying to see; would it be impossible? . . . A wild rabbit! I fear one has to go very far into the wilds to see a rabbit?’ ‘Darling!’ cried Odilia, ‘there is a rabbit in a hollow near Buttercup Glen, which used to be the favourite pasturing place for cows. Our gardener tells me he has seen it many times. It is the last one left in this neighbourhood. Quite a venerable creature, I believe.’ ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Parthenia, ‘perhaps I could get a moving picture of it! Would it let us approach sufficiently near?’ ‘I fancy this is rather a shy animal, especially now it is growing old, but if we take some food it may be enticed from its lair.’ ‘Are wild rabbits at all . . . fierce?’ inquired Parthenia, naturally unaccustomed to the fauna of her native land. ‘Oh, no! One of the smaller rodents,’ replied her friend carelessly. ‘We’ll look up its favourite food in the Encyclopædia. Better still, the

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gardener knows all about it. I have a vague idea of lettuce, radishes, potatoes, perhaps nuts.’ ‘Cooked?’ asked Parthenia. ‘Our cat eats cooked vegetables.’ ‘I fancy not,’ said Odilia dubiously. ‘But we’ll ask James.’ James, the old gardener, was very wise on the subject of rabbits, had trapped them many a time in his youth, pronounced this the last rabbit in that part of the country, and gave particulars as to its age and sex. He provided the young ladies with succulent lettuce and parsley, negativing suggestions of meat and bread and discouraging the assistance of Barking, the fox terrier, on the expedition. ‘Dogs used to worry rabbits,’ he told them, and Barking remained at home. Then, in the cool of the evening, bearing the lettuce in a paper bag and unwashed (the lettuce) – this last a raffinement of the cunning James – the two ladies boarded the electric tram in a delightful spirit of adventure and travelled to the very end of the line. They found themselves not far from the border of the Open Reserve, a tract of country kept in the spirit of Yellowstone Park, as a preserve for the native flora and fauna of the district. Soon they arrived at the gates of a large park or pleasure ground. ‘To think,’ said Parthenia, ‘that this ground has never been built on and perhaps never will be! Reserved for ever as a wilderness, a refuge for beast and bird which would otherwise become extinct! A spot wherein the poet may commune with nature, lying on a carpet of daisies; may watch the pageant of the stars across the midnight vault of heaven!’ ‘The gates will be closed at 9 p.m.,’ read Odilia from a notice at the entrance. ‘Come, dearest, we have still a couple of hours.’ Entering the enclosure, they plunged into gravel paths leading by beautiful grassy lawns, dotted over with buttercups and daisies. Hawthorns were in snowy blossom, ornamental ducks swam on the ponds in the distance thickets of trees, shadow-haunted, the remains of a beautifully wooded estate, lured lovers of romance. Parthenia’s young heart swelled with emotion. ‘How beautiful!’ she sighed, ‘how beautiful it is! But where is the wild rabbit?’ Strains of music swept towards them on the breeze. Twice a week the Town Band played, here in the evening. Debussy’s ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ floated down the avenues. ‘Perfect,’ cried Odilia, ‘in this setting! Such old-world strains are truly in keeping here, are they not? Modern music would jar in these groves.’ ‘Let us find the rabbit,’ said Parthenia, ‘I fear we must give up the music.’

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So they turned off to the left where all was deserted and silent. Here small paths led to fields and trees not trained by the gardener’s hand. And presently they came to a notice-board, on which was printed in Gothic characters: ‘To the Rabbit’s Burrow.’

A pretty pebbled path led down into Buttercup Glen, where Odilia pictured herds of kine nibbling the golden flower. Here it was cool and still, not even the faintest sound of music reached the spot where, alas for Parthenia! the rabbit had perished in his lair. In a neat glass case, air-proof and sterilised, embalmed with all the skill of the modern taxidermist, the rabbit, a beautiful snow-white creature, beamed amiably at them with pink eyes. . . . Deeply moved, Parthenia gazed in silence. Notes Text: New Age, 13: 15, 7 August 1913, pp. 427–8. Signed ‘Mouche’.

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Bibliography

Katherine Mansfield: Principal Works (in order of publication) In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911) Prelude (Richmond: Hogarth, 1918) Je ne parle pas français (Hampstead: Heron, 1919) Bliss and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1920) The Garden Party and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1922) The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1923) Poems (London: Constable, 1923) Something Childish and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1924) Journal, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1927) The Letters, 2 vols, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1928) The Aloe (London: Constable, 1929) Novels and Novelists, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1930) The Scrapbook, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1939) Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913–1922, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1951) Journal, Definitive Edition, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1954) The Urewera Notebook, ed. Ian A. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) The Aloe with Prelude, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Wellington: Port Nicholson, 1982) The Collected Letters Volume One 1903–1917, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) The Stories of Katherine Mansfield – Definitive Edition, ed. Antony Alpers (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984) The Collected Letters Volume Two 1918–1919, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) Poems, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 533

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bibliography

The Collected Letters Volume Three 1919–1920, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) The Collected Letters Volume Four 1920–1921, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols, ed. Margaret Scott (Canterbury: Lincoln University Press, 1997) The Collected Letters Volume Five 1922, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 2008)

Principal Biographies Alpers, Antony, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954) –––– The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980) Baker, Ida, pseud. ‘Lesley Moore’, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L.M. (London: Michael Joseph, 1971) Gordon, Ian, Katherine Mansfield, Writers and Their Work, No. 49 (London: Longmans, Green, 1954) Jones, Kathleen, Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller (Auckland: Penguin, 2010) Mantz, Ruth Elvish and J. M. Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1933) Meyers, Jeffrey, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978) Tomalin, Claire, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987)

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Index of First Lines

A February morning, windy, cold, with chill-looking clouds [. . .] 391 A lady and her husband are seated at breakfast. 27 A man poked his head in at the door and said tea was served. 289 A stout man with a pink face wears dingy white flannel trousers [. . .] 223 A stupid, silly poem that she had read years ago [. . .] 165 Act I Scene I. Breakfast room. Ivan enters, pours out a cup of coffee [. . .] 6 After a succession of idle, careless, or clumsy, or unwilling little boys [. . .] 297 After lunch Milly and her mother were sitting as usual on the balcony [. . .] 448 After luncheon the weather was so enchanting [. . .] 438 Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this [. . .] 141 Although it sounded all the year round [. . .] 426 Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold [. . .] 250 And after all the weather was ideal. 401 And then, after six years, she saw him again. 97 And when they came out of the lace shop [. . .] 488 As Gertie the parlour-maid passed through the green-baize door [. . .] 287 As old Mr Rendall sat at the window with the rug over his knees [. . .] 503 As she lay there, looking up at the ceiling, she had her moment [. . .] 190 At breakfast that morning they were in wonderfully good spirits. 394 At half past ten the yacht steamed into the Sound, slowed down. 481 535

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At half past two the servant girl stumped along the narrow passage [. . .] 103 At midday, Ernestine, who had come down from the mountains [. . .] 498 Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hôtel, as the prospectus said [. . .] 497 Carriages are not allowed to drive up to the doors of the clinique [. . .] 434 Certainly it was cold, very cold. When she opened her lips [. . .] 284 Children are unaccountable little creatures. 311 Claire replied most enthusiasthically. 322 ‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown with a dark red piping,’ she asked. 164 Dinner was over. There was a whiff of Father’s cigar from the hall [. . .] 398 ‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous,’ she said [. . .] 168 Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lay in a black iron bedstead [. . .] 178 Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lies in a black iron bedstead [. . .] 36 Eleven o’clock. A knock at the door. 261 Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say. 324 Five young gentlemen are having no end of an argument [. . .] 31 From eight o’clock in the morning until about half-past eleven [. . .] 213 Have you seen my cosmias dear? 484 He really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether. 93 He stood at the hall door turning the ring [. . .] 199 He was just in time. They were pulling down the blinds in the Post Office [. . .] 156 I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. 112 I had been in Port Willin six months when I decided to give a one-man show. 429 I suppose doctor, my patients are fond of saying [. . .] 434 If there was one thing that he hated more than another [. . .] 49 In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed [. . .] 230 In the afternoon the chairs came, a whole big cart full [. . .] 136 Is Life going to be all like this? thought Laura. 222 It fell so softly so gently it seemed to him that even tenderly it fell. 435 It is evening. Supper is over. We have left the small, cold dining room [. . .] 379 It seemed impossible that anyone should be unhappy [. . .] 467

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It seemed to the little crowd on the wharf that she was never going to move again. 240 It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they had missed the train. 218 It was neither dark nor light in the cabin. 173 It was not the afternoon to be on deck – on the contrary. 421 It was the late afternoon when Mrs Sheridan [. . .] 493 Just as she put her suitcase down on the landing [. . .] 166 Just as they reached the gate, Agnes turned back. 442 LADY: Yes, there is, dear; there’s plenty of room. 22 Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker. 443 Miranda Richmond, laden with parcels, is fighting her way out of the tram [. . .] 42 Miss Lavinia Bean sat at the dining room window [. . .] 210 Mr. and Mrs. B. sat at breakfast in the cosy red dining-room [. . .] 170 Of course he knew – no man better – that he hadn’t a ghost of a chance [. . .] 300 Of course there would have been no question of their going [. . .] 307 On a fine spring morning, one of those delicious spotless mornings [. . .] 504 On her way back to the garden Susannah sat down on the hall chair [. . .] 436 On his way to the station William remembered with a fresh pang [. . .] 330 On those hot days Eve – curious Eve – always carried a flower. 160 One great advantage in having your clothes made by Miss Phillips [. . .] 505 R’s first husband was a pawnbroker. 185 Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. 461 Sitting astride the low window ledge, smelling the heliotrope [. . .] 3 So he sat and smoked his cigarette, looking at the empty fire-place [. . .] 153 Something’s happened to me – something bad. 509 Spring. As the people leave the road for the grass [. . .] 175 Suddenly – dreadfully – she wakes up. What has happened? 226 That evening for the first time in his life [. . .] 317 That winter Mr. and Mrs. Williams of The Rowans [. . .] 472 The doctor – for Roy, of course, unable to resist the smallest [. . .] 188 The excitement began first thing that morning [. . .] 496 The leaves are falling on Hampstead Heath, lifting, spinning [. . .] 163

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The Picton boat was due to leave at half-past eleven. 372 The post was very late. When we came back from our walk [. . .] 255 The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives. 266 There are certain human beings on this earth [. . .] 507 There was a woman on the station platform. 4 There was an expression Rupert Henderson was very fond of using [. . .] 444 There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. 56 They came down to breakfast next morning absolutely their own selves. 338 To look at Mr. Potts one would have thought [. . .] 486 TOOTS: (puts down her tea cup and begins to rock gently) [. . .] 13 Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen [. . .] 342 VIRGINIA: (laying the letter down): I don’t like this letter at all [. . .] 25 Was it simply her own imagination or could there be any truth [. . .] 10 Well, who could have believed it – who could have imagined it? 502 What was there about that little house at the corner [. . .] 437 When dear old Mrs Hay went back to town [. . .] 414 When she opened the door and saw him standing there [. . .] 193 When the literary gentleman, whose flat old Ma Parker cleaned [. . .] 292 Why did old Mrs. Travers wake so early nowadays? 309 With despair – cold, sharp despair – buried deep in her heart [. . .] 235 ‘Y’are very snug in here,’ piped old Mr Woodifield [. . .] 476 ‘You know, my dear,’ said Kitty, standing in the middle [. . .] 480 You see that big nail to the right of the front door? 511

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Index of Stories

‘After a succession’ 297 All Serene! 394 At the Bay 342 Bad Idea, A 509 Bank Holiday 223 ‘Behind the hotel – à deux pas de l’hôtel’ 497 Black Cap, The 27 Bliss 141 Boy with the Jackdaw, The 153 By Moonlight 398 Canary, The 511 Carnation 160 ‘Carriages are not allowed’ 434 Common Round, The 36 Confidences 480 Cup of Tea, A 461 Dance at the – – –, A 222 Daphne 429 Daughters of the Late Colonel, The 266 ‘Did M. wear a grey dressing gown’ 164 Dill Pickle, A 97 Doll’s House, The 414 ‘Don’t you think it would be marvellous’ 168 Doves’ Nest, The 448 Escape, The 218 Family Dance, A 496 Father and the Girls 498 Feuille d’Album 93 Fly, The 476 Garden Party, The 401 Hat with a Feather 322 ‘Have you seen my cosmias dear?’ 484 Her First Ball 324 539

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Honesty 444 Honeymoon 488 ‘I suppose doctor’ 434 Ideal Family, An 317 In Confidence 31 ‘It fell so softly, so gently’ 435 ‘It was neither dark nor light in the cabin’ 173 ‘It was the late afternoon’ 493 Je ne parle pas français 112 Keeping Up 166 Lady’s Maid, The 261 Last Words to Youth 4 Late at Night 24 Late Spring 188 Laurels, The 5 Life of Ma Parker 292 Lily, The 503 Lost Battle, The 10 Love in Autumn 163 Love-Lies-Bleeding 103 ‘Lucien’s mother was a dressmaker’ 443 Man and His Dog, A 486 Man Without a Temperament, The 199 Marriage à la Mode 330 Married Man’s Story, A 379 Miss Brill 250 Mr and Mrs Dove 300 Mr and Mrs Williams 472 Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day 49 My Darling 502 New Baby, The 481 ‘On her way back to the garden’ 436 ‘One great advantage’ 505 Our Hilda 504 Pessimist, The 438 Pic-Nic, A 42 Pictures 178 Poison 255 Prelude 56 Psychology 193 ‘R’s first husband was a pawnbroker’ 185 Revelations 213 Second Violin 391 See-Saw 175

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Singing Lesson, The 235 Sisters, The 442 Six Years After 421 Sixpence 311 Stranger, The 240 ‘Stupid, silly poem, A’ 165 ‘Suburban Fairy Tale, A’ 170 Such a Sweet Old Lady 309 Sun and Moon 136 Susannah 307 Taking the Veil 467 Tea on the Train 289 That Woman 3 ‘There are certain human beings’ 507 There is No Answer 284 This Flower 190 To the Last Moment 156 Toots 13 Two Tuppenny Ones, Please 22 Voyage, The 372 Weak Heart 426 ‘What was there about that little house’ 437 Widowed 338 Wind Blows, The 226 Wrong House, The 210 You Love Me – Still? 287 Young Girl, The 230

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