The Complete Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield
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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 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 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.
“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, grey-green, 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.”
7
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.