

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 such a distance. Isabel, very superior, perched beside Pat on the driver's seat. Hold-alls, bags and bandboxes were piled upon the floor.

‘These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,’ said Linda Burnell, PAGE 4 her voice trembling with fatigue and over-excitement.

Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray, in their reefer coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battle-ship ribbons. Hand in hand. They stared with round inquiring 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 upon the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes … laughing silently.

Happily, at that moment, Mrs. Samuel Josephs, who lived next door and had been watching the scene from behind her drawing-room blind, rustled down the garden path.

‘Why nod leave the children with be for the after-doon, Brs. Burnell? They could go on the dray with the storeban when he comes in the eveding. Those thigs on the path have to go. Dodn't they?'

‘Yes, everything outside the house has to go,’ said Linda Burnell, waving a white hand at the tables and chairs that stood, impudently, on their heads in front of the empty house.

PAGE 5
‘Well, dodn't you worry, Brs. Burnell. Loddie and Kezia can have tea with by children and I'll see them safely on the dray afterwards.'

She leaned her fat, creaking body across the gate and smiled reassuringly. Linda Burnell pretended to consider.

‘Yes, it really is quite the best plan. I am extremely obliged to you, Mrs. Samuel Josephs, I'm sure. Children, say “Thank you” to Mrs. Samuel Josephs….'

(Two subdued chirrups: ‘Thank you, Mrs. Samuel Josephs.')

‘And be good, obedient little girls and—come closer'—they advanced—‘do not forget to tell Mrs. Samuel Josephs when you want to …'

‘Yes, Mother.'

‘Dodn't worry, Brs. Burnell.'

At the last moment Kezia let go Lottie's hand and darted towards the buggy.

‘I want to kiss Grandma “good-bye” again.’ Her heart was bursting.

‘Oh, dear me!’ wailed Linda Burnell.

But the grandmother leant her charming head in the lilac flowery bonnet towards Kezia, and when Kezia searched her face she said—‘It's all right, my darling. Be good.'

PAGE 6
The buggy rolled off up the road, Isabel, proudly sitting by Pat, her nose turned up at all the world, Linda Burnell, prostrate and crying behind her veil, and the grandmother rummaging among the curious oddments she had put in her black silk reticule at the last moment for lavender smelling salts to give her daughter.

The buggy twinkled away in the sunlight and fine golden dust—up the hill and over. Kezia bit her lip hard, but Lottie, carefully finding her handkerchief first, set up a howl.

‘Mo-there! Gran'ma!'

Mrs. Samuel Josephs, like an animated black silk tea-cosy, waddled to Lottie's rescue.

‘It's all right, by dear. There-there, ducky! Be a brave child. You come and blay in the nursery.'

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.

The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under PAGE 7 the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them. Even in the family groups that Mrs. Samuel Josephs caused to be taken twice yearly—herself and Samuel in the middle—Samuel with parchment roll clenched on knee and she with the youngest girl on hers—you never could be sure how many children really were there. You counted them, and then you saw another head or another small boy in a white sailor suit perched on the arm of a basket chair. All the girls were fat, with black hair tied up in red ribbons and eyes like buttons. The little ones had scarlet faces but the big ones were white, with blackheads and dawning moustaches. The boys had the same jetty hair, the same button eyes, but they were further adorned with ink black finger nails. (The girls bit theirs, so the black didn't show.) And every single one of them started a pitched battle as soon as possible after birth with every single other.

When Mrs. Samuel Josephs was not turning up their clothes or down their clothes (as the sex might be) and beating them with a hair brush, she called this pitched battle ‘airing their lungs.’ She seemed to take a pride in it and to bask in it from far away PAGE 8 like a fat general watching through field glasses his troops in violent action …

Lottie's weeping died down as she ascended the Samuel Josephs’ stairs, but the sight of her at the nursery door with swollen eyes and a blob of a nose gave great satisfaction to the little S. J.'s, who sat on two benches before a long table covered with American cloth and set out with immense platters of bread and dripping and two brown jugs that fairly steamed.

‘Hullo! You've been crying!'

‘Ooh! Your eyes have gone right in!'

‘Doesn't her nose look funny!'

‘You're all red-an'-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 sit at the end by Boses.'

Moses grinned and pinched her behind as she sat down, but she pretended to take no notice. She did hate boys!

‘Which will you have?’ asked Stanley (a big one), leaning across the table very politely and smiling at Kezia. ‘Which will you have to begin with—strawberries and cream or bread and dripping?'

‘Strawberries and cream, please,’ said she.

PAGE 9
‘Ah-h-h!’ How they all laughed and beat the table with their teaspoons! ‘Wasn't that a take in! Wasn't it! 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, smiled indulgently. It was a merry tea.

After tea the young Samuel Josephs were turned out to grass until summoned to bed by their servant girl standing in the yard and banging on a tin tray with a potato masher.

‘Know what we'll do,’ said Miriam. ‘Let's go an’ play hide-an'-seek all over Burnell's. Their back door is still open, because they haven't got the sideboard out yet. I heard Ma tell Glad Eyes she wouldn't take such old rubbish to a new house! Come on! Come on!'

‘No, I don't want to,’ said Kezia, shaking her head.

‘Ooh! Don't be soft. Come on—do!'

Miriam caught hold of one of her hands. Zaidee snatched at the other.

‘I don't not want to either, if Kezia doesn't't,’ said Lottie, standing firm. But she, too, was whirled PAGE 10 away. Now, the whole fun of the game for the S. J.'s was that the Burnell kids didn't want to play. In the yard they paused. Burnell's yard was small and square with flower beds on either side. All down one side big clumps of arum lilies aired their rich beauty, on the other side there was nothing but a straggle of what the children called ‘Grandmother's pincushions,’ a dull, pinkish flower, but so strong it would push its way and grow through a crack of concrete.

‘You've only got one w. at your place,’ said Miriam scornfully. ‘We've got two at ours. One for men and one for ladies. The one for men hasn't got a seat.'

‘Hasn't got a seat!’ cried Kezia. ‘I don't believe you.'

‘It's-true-it's-true-it's-true! Isn't it, Zaidee?’ And Miriam began to dance and hop, showing her flannelette drawers.

‘Course it is,’ said Zaidee. ‘Well, you are a baby, Kezia!'

‘I don't not believe it either if Kezia doesn't't,’ said Lottie, after a pause.

But they never paid any attention to what Lottie said.

PAGE 11
Alice Samuel Josephs tugged at a lily leaf, twisted it off, turned it over. It was covered on the under side with tiny blue and grey snails.

‘How much does your Pa give you for collecting snails?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing!’ said Kezia.

‘Reely? Doesn't he give you anything? Our Pa gives us ha'penny a hundred. We put them in a bucket with salt and they all go bubbly like spittle. Don't you get any pocket money?'

‘Yes, I get a penny for having my hair washed,’ said Kezia.

‘An' a penny a tooth,’ said Lottie, softly.

‘My! Is that all? One day Stanley took the money out of all our money boxes and Pa was so mad he rang up the police station.'

‘No, he didn't. Not reely,’ said Zaidee. ‘He only took the telephone down an’ spoke in it to frighten Stan.'

‘Ooh, youfibber! Ooh, you are a fibber,’ screamed Alice, feeling her story totter. ‘But Stan was so frightened he caught hold of Pa and screamed and bit him and then he lay on the floor and banged with his head as hard as ever.'

‘Yes,’ said Zaidee, warming. ‘And at dinner when PAGE 12 the door bell rang an’ Pa said to Stan “There they are—they've come for you,” do you know what Stan did?’ Her button eyes snapped with joy. ‘He was sick—all over the table!'

‘How perfeckly horrid,’ said Kezia, but even as she spoke she had one of her ‘ideas.’ It frightened her so that her knees trembled, but it made her so happy she nearly screamed aloud with joy.

‘Know a new game,’ said she. ‘All of you stand in a row and each person holds a narum lily head. I count one—two—three, and when “three” comes all of you have to bite out the yellow bit and scrunch it up—and who swallows first—wins.'

The Samuel Josephs suspected nothing. They liked the game. A game where something had to be destroyed always fetched them. Savagely they broke off the big white blooms and stood in a row before Kezia.

‘Lottie can't play,’ said Kezia.

But any way it didn't matter. Lottie was still patiently bending a lily head this way and that—it would not come off the stem for her.

‘One—two—three!’ said Kezia.

She flung up her hands with joy as the Samuel Josephs bit, chewed, made dreadful faces, spat, PAGE 13 screamed, and rushed to Burnell's garden tap. But that was no good—only a trickle came out. Away they sped, yelling.

‘Ma! Ma! Kezia's poisoned us.'

‘Ma! Ma! Me tongue's burning off.'

‘Ma! Ooh, Ma!'

‘Whatever is the matter?’ asked Lottie, mildly, still twisting the frayed, oozing stem. ‘Kin I bite my lily off like this, Kezia?'

‘No, silly.’ Kezia caught her hand. ‘It burns your tongue like anything.'

‘Is that why they all ran away?’ said Lottie. She did not wait for an answer. She drifted to the front of the house and began to dust the chair-legs on the lawn with a corner of her pinafore.

Kezia felt very pleased. Slowly she walked up the back steps and through the scullery into the kitchen. Nothing was left in it except a lump of gritty yellow soap in one corner of the window-sill and a piece of flannel stained with a blue bag in another. The fireplace was choked with a litter of rubbish. She poked among it for treasure, 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, PAGE 14 and she slipped through the narrow passage into the drawing-room. The venetian blind was pulled down but not drawn close. Sunlight, piercing the green chinks, shone once again upon the purple urns brimming over with yellow chrysanthemums that patterned the walls. The hideous box was quite bare, so was the dining-room except for the sideboard that stood in the middle, forlorn, its shelves edged with a scallop of black leather. But this room had a ‘funny’ smell. Kezia lifted her head and sniffed again, to remember. Silent as a kitten she crept up the ladder-like stairs. In Mr. and Mrs. Burnell'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. The only other room in the house (the little tin bathroom did not count) was their room where Isabel and Lottie had slept in one bed and she and Grandma in another. She knew there was nothing there—she had watched Grandma pack. Oh, yes, there was! A stay button stuck in a crack of the floor and in another crack some beads and a long needle. She went over to the window and leaned against it, pressing her hands against the pane.

From the window you saw beyond the yard a deep gully filled with tree ferns and a thick tangle of PAGE 15 wild green, and beyond that there stretched the esplanade bounded by a broad stone wall against which the sea chafed and thundered. (Kezia had been born in that room. She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a ‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade. The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.)

Kezia liked to stand so before the window. She liked the feeling of the cold shining glass against her hot little 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 the day flickered out and sombre dusk entered the empty house, thievish dusk stealing the shapes of things, sly dusk painting the shadows. At her heels crept the wind, snuffling and howling. The windows shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly—Kezia did not notice these things severally, but she was suddenly quite, quite still with wide PAGE 16 open eyes and knees pressed together—terribly frightened. Her old bogey, the dark, had overtaken her, and now there was no lighted room to make a despairing dash for. Useless to call ‘Grandma'—useless to wait for the servant girl's cheerful stumping up the stairs to pull down the blinds and light the bracket lamp … There was only Lottie in the garden. If she began to call Lottie now and went on calling her loudly all the while she flew down the stairs and out of the house she might escape from It in time. It was round like the sun. It had a face. It smiled, but It had no eyes. It was yellow. When she was put to bed with two drops of aconite in a medicine glass It breathed very loudly and firmly and It had been known on certain particularly fearful occasions to turn round and round. It hung in the air. That was all she knew and even that much had been very difficult to explain to the Grandmother. Nearer came the terror and more plain to feel the ‘silly’ smile. She snatched her hands from the window pane, opened her mouth to call Lottie, and fancied that she did call loudly, though she made no sound … It was at the top of the stairs; It was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting in the little dark passage, guarding the back door—But Lottie was at the back door, too.

PAGE 17
‘Oh, there you are!’ she said cheerfully. ‘The storeman's here. Everything's on the dray —and three horses, Kezia. Mrs. Samuel Josephs has given us a big shawl to wear round us, and she says button up your coat. She won't come out because of asthma, and she says “never do it again”.’ Lottie was very important.

‘Now then, you kids,’ called the storeman. He hooked his big thumbs under their arms. 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 brake chain 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.'

But Kezia edged up to the storeman. He towered beside her, big as a giant, and he smelled of nuts and wooden boxes.

two 
A 
JOURNEY 
WITH THE STOREMAN
PAGE BREAKPAGE BREAK
two 
A 
JOURNEY 
WITH THE STOREMAN

IT WAS THE FIRST time that Lottie and Kezia had ever been out so late. Everything looked different—the painted wooden houses much smaller than they did by day, the trees and 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 from Quarantine Island, the green lights fore and aft the old black coal hulks.

‘There comes the Picton boat,’ said the storeman, PAGE 22 pointing with his whip 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. In fact, she liked him altogether; he was an old friend; she and the Grandmother had often been to his place to buy grapes. The storeman lived alone in a cottage with a glass-house that he had built himself leaning against it. 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 snipped off a big blue cluster and laid it on the leaves as tenderly as you might put a doll to bed. 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 Sundays. The back of his neck was dark red.

PAGE 23
‘Where are we now?’ Every few minutes one of the children asked him the question, and he was patient.

‘Why! this is Hawstone Street,’ or ‘Hill 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?'

They reached their last boundary marks—the fire alarm station—a little wooden affair painted red and sheltering a huge bell—and the white gates of the Botanical Gardens, gleaming in the moonlight. Now everything familiar was left behind; now the big dray rattled into unknown country, along the new roads with high clay banks on either side, up the steep towering hills, down into valleys where the bush drew back on either side just enough to let them past, through a wide shallow river—the horses pulled up to drink, and made a rare scramble at starting again—on and on—further and further. Lottie drooped; her head wagged, she slipped half into Kezia's lap and lay there. But Kezia could not PAGE 24 open her eyes wide enough. The wind blew on them; she shivered, but her cheeks and her ears burned. She looked up at the stars.

'Do stars ever blow about?’ she asked.

'Well, I never noticed ‘em,’ said the storeman.

Came a thin scatter of lights and the shape of a tin church, rising out of a ring of tombstones.

'They call this we're coming to—“The Flats”,’ said the storeman.

'We got a nuncle and a naunt living near here,’ said Kezia—'Aunt Doady and Uncle Dick. They've 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 nenamel 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 got horns and it goes for you.'

Kezia considered.

'I don't want to see it frightfully,’ she said. ‘I hate rushing animals like dogs and parrots—don't you? I often dream that animals rush at me—even camels, and while they're rushing, their heads swell—e-nor-mous!'

'My word!’ said the storeman.

A very bright little place shone ahead of them, PAGE 25 and in front of it was gathered a collection of traps and carts. As they drew near someone ran out of the bright place and stood in the middle of the road, waving his apron.

'Going to Mr. Burnell's?’ shouted the someone.

'That's right,’ said Fred, and drew rein.

'Well I got a passel for them in the store. Come inside half a jiffy, will you?

'We-ell! I got a couple of little kids along with me,’ said Fred. But the someone had already darted back, across his verandah and through the glass door. The storeman muttered something about ‘stretching their legs’ and swung off the dray.

'Where are we?’ said Lottie, raising herself up. The bright light from the shop window shone over the little girls; Lottie's 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 verandah, watching Kezia, who seemed to come flying through the air to her feet. Into the warm, smoky shop they went. Kezia and Lottie sat on two barrels, their legs dangling.

'Ma!’ shouted the man in the apron. He leaned PAGE 26 over the counter. ‘Name of Tubb!’ he said, shaking hands with Fred. ‘Ma!’ he bawled. ‘Gotter couple of young ladies here.’ Came a wheeze from behind a curtain. ‘Arf a mo, dearie.'

Everything was in that shop. Bluchers and sand shoes, straw hats and onions were strung across the ceiling, mixed with bunches of cans and tin teapots and broom-heads and brushes. There were bins and canisters against the walls and shelves of pickles and jams and things in tins. One corner was fitted up as a draper's—you could smell the rolls of flannelette—and one as a chemist's with cards of rubber dummies and jars of worm chocolate. One barrel brimmed with apples—one had a tap and a bowl under it half full of molasses, a third was stained deep red inside, and a wooden ladle with a crimson handle was balanced across it. It held raspberries. And every spare inch of space was covered with a flypaper or an advertisement. Sitting on stools or boxes or lounging against things a collection of big untidy men yarned and smoked. One very old one with a dirty beard sat with his back half turned to the other, chewing tobacco and spitting a long distance into a huge round spittoon peppered with sawdust. After he had spat he combed his beard with a shaking hand. ‘We-ell! PAGE 27 that's how it is!’ or—'That's ‘ow ti'appens'—or ‘There you've got it, yer see,’ he would quaver. But nobody paid any attention to him but Mr. Tubb, who cocked an occasional eye and roared ‘Now, then, Father!’ And then the combing hand would be curved over the ear, and the silly face screwed up—‘Ay?'—to droop again and then start chewing.

From the store the road completely changed. Very slowly, twisting as if loath to go, turning as if shy to follow, it slipped into a deep valley. In front and on either side there were paddocks and beyond them bush-covered hills thrust up into the morning air like dark heaving water. You could not imagine that the road led beyond the valley. Here it seemed to reach its perfect end—the valley knotted upon the bend of the road like a big jade tassel.

'Can we see the house from here—the house from here?’ piped the children. Houses were to be seen—little houses—they counted three, but not their house. The storeman knew. He had made the journey twice before that day. At last he raised his whip and pointed.

‘That's one of your paddocks belonging, ‘he said, ‘an’ the next, and the next.’ Over the edge of the PAGE 28 last paddock pushed tree boughs and bushes from an immense garden.

A corrugated iron fence painted white held back the garden from the road. In the middle there was a gap—the iron gates were open wide. They clanked through, up a drive cutting through the garden like a whip lash, looping suddenly an island of green and behind the island, out of sight until you came upon it, was the house. It was long and low built, with a pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round—shallow steps led to the door. 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 leapt into light. Someone was walking through the empty rooms, carrying a lighted candle. From a window downstairs the light of a fire flickered; a strange, beautiful excitement seemed to stream from the house in quivering ripples. Over the roofs, the verandah poles, the window sashes, the moon swung her lantern.

‘Ooh!’ Kezia flung out her arms. The Grandmother had appeared on the top step; she carried a little lamp—she was smiling. ‘Has this house got a name?’ asked Kezia, fluttering for the last time out of the storeman's hands.

PAGE 29
‘Yes,’ said the Grandmother, ‘it is called Tarana.'

‘Tarana,’ she repeated, and put her hands upon the big glass door knob.

‘Stay where you are one moment, children!’ The Grandmother turned to the storeman. ‘Fred, these things can be unloaded and left on the verandah for the night. Pat will help you. She turned and called into the hollow hall: ‘Pat, are you there?’

‘I am’ came a voice, and the Irish handy man squeaked in new boots over the bare boards.

But Lottie staggered over the verandah like a bird fallen out of a nest. If she stood still for a moment, her eyes closed—if she leaned, she fell asleep; she could not walk another step.

‘Kezia,’ said the Grandmother, ‘can I trust you to carry the lamp?'

‘Yes, my Grandma.’ The old woman knelt and gave the bright breathing thing into her hands, and then she raised herself and caught up Lottie. ‘This way.'

Through a square hall filled with furniture bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were on the wallpaper), down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted on either side, walked Kezia with her lamp.

PAGE 30
‘You are to have some supper before you go to bed,’ said the Grandmother, putting down Lottie to open the dining-room door. ‘Be very quiet,’ she warned, ‘poor little Mother has got such a headache.'

Linda Burnell lay before a crackling fire, in a long cane chair, her feet on a hassock, a plaid rug over her knees. Burnell and Beryl sat at a 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 white comb in her fingers, and in a gentle, absorbed way, she was combing back 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?’ Mrs. Burnell did not even open her eyes—her voice was tired and trembling. ‘Have either of them been maimed for life?'

‘No, dear, perfectly safe and sound.'

‘Put down that lamp, Kezia,’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘or we shall have the house on fire before we're out of the packing cases. More tea—Stan?'

‘Well, you might just give me five-eighths of a PAGE 31 cup,’ said Burnell, leaning across the table. ‘Have another chop, Beryl. Tip-top meat, isn't it? First rate, first rate. Not too lean, not too fat.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Sure you won't change your mind, Linda, darling?'

‘Oh, the very thought of it ….!’ She raised one eyebrow in a way she had.

The Grandmother brought the children two bowls of bread and milk, and they sat up to the table, their faces flushed and sleepy behind the waving steam …

‘I had meat for my supper,’ said Isabel, still combing gently. ‘I had a whole chop for my supper —the bone an’ all, an’ Worcestershire sauce. Didn't I, Father?'

‘Oh, don't boast, Isabel,’ said Aunt Beryl. Isabel looked astounded.

‘I wasn't't boasting, was I, Mummy? I never thought of boasting. I thought they'd like to know. I only meant to tell them.'

‘Very well, that's enough,’ said Burnell. He pushed back his plate, took a toothpick out of his waistcoat 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?'

PAGE 32
‘Yes, Stanley.’ The old woman turned to go.

‘Oh, and hold on a jiffy. I suppose nobody knows where my slippers were put? I suppose I shan't be able to get at ‘em for a month or two, eh?'

‘Yes,’ came from Linda. ‘In the top of the canvas holdall marked “Urgent Necessities”.'

‘Well, you might bring them to me, will you, Mother?'

‘Yes, Stanley.'

Burnell got up, stretched himself, turned his back to the fire and lifted up his coat tail.

‘By Jove this is a pretty pickle. Eh, Beryl?'

Beryl, sipping tea, her elbow 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 you to get straight—couple of weeks, eh?’ he chaffed.

‘Good Heavens, no,’ said Beryl ‘The worst is over already. All the beds are up. Everything's in the house—your and Linda's room is finished already. The servant girl and I have simply slaved all day, and ever since Mother came she's worked like a horse, PAGE 33 too. We've never sat down for a moment. We have had a day.'

Stanley scented a rebuke.

‘Well, I suppose you didn't expect me to tear away from the office and nail carpets, did you?'

‘Certainly not,’ said Beryl airily. She put down her cup and ran out of the dining-room.

‘What the hell did she expect to do?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sit down and fan herself with a palm-leaf fan while I hired a gang of professionals to do the job? Eh? 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 on to the side of her long cane chair.

‘This is a wretched time for you, old boy,’ she said fondly. Her cheeks were very white, but she smiled and curled her fingers round the big red hand she held. ‘And with a wife about as bright and gay as a yesterday's buttonhole,’ she said. ‘You've been awfully patient, darling.'

‘Rot,’ said Burnell, but he began to whistle The Holy City—a good sign.

‘Think you're going to like it?’ he asked.

PAGE 34
‘I don't want to tell you, but I think I ought to, Mother,’ said Isabel. ‘Kezia's drinking tea out of Aunt Beryl's cup.'

They were trooped 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 the Grandmother's big bed.

‘Aren't there any sheets, my Grandma?'

‘No, not to-night.'

‘It's very tickly,’ said Kezia. ‘It's like Indians. Come to bed soon an’ be my Indian brave.'

‘What a silly you are,’ said the old woman, tucking her in as she loved to be tucked.

‘Are you going to leave the candle?'

‘No. Hush, go to sleep.'

‘Well, kin I have the door left open?'

She rolled herself 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 whispery voices rose and fell. Once she heard Aunt Beryl's rush of high laughter. Once there came a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose. Outside the windows hundreds of black cats with yellow PAGE 35 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 an’ mile 
Look ‘pon little chil’ 
Pity me simple Lizzie 
Suffer me come to Thee.

Fain would I to Thee be brought 
Dearest Lor’ forbd it not 
In the Kinkdom of Thy grace 
Make a little chil’ a place. Amen.'

And then they lay down back to back, 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 charming 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 fairy wings. The window PAGE 36 awas open, it was warm and still. Somewhere out there in the garden, a young man, dark and slender, with mocking eyes, tip-toed among the bushes and gathered the garden 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 white waxy flowers.

‘No, no!’ said Beryl. She turned from the window, she dropped her nightgown over her head.

‘How frightfully unreasonable Stanley is sometimes,’ she thought, buttoning. And then as she lay down came the old thought, the cruel, leaping thought, ‘If I had money,’ only to be shaken off and beaten down by calling to her rescue her endless pack of dreams. A young man, immensely rich, just arrived from England, meets her quite by chance. The new Governor is married. There is a ball at Government House to celebrate his wedding. 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 in his shirt and giving himself a good scratch before turning in, ‘is that, on the strict q.t., Linda, I've got the place dirt cheap. I was talking about it to little Teddy Dear to-day, and he said he simply couldn't understand why they'd PAGE 37 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 from now on and keep down expenses … cut ‘em as fine as possible. Not asleep, are you?'

‘No, dear, I'm listening,’ said Linda.

He sprang into bed, leaned over her and blew out the candle.

‘Good-night, Mr. Business Man,’ she said, 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,’ she said faintly, in her far away sleeping voice….

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 blanket edge his twisted feet protruded; and on the floor of his room there was an empty cane bird cage. He looked like a comic picture.

‘Honk, honk,’ came from the snoring servant girl next door; she had adenoids.

Last to go to bed was the Grandmother.

PAGE 38
‘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.

‘Who am I?’ she whispered. This was an old established ritual to be gone through between them.

‘You are my little brown bird,’ said the Grandmother.

Kezia gave a guilty chuckle. The Grandmother took out her teeth and put them in a glass of water beside her on the floor.

Then the house was still.

In the garden some owls called, perched on the branches of a lace bark tree: ‘More pork, more pork.’ And far away, from the bush came a harsh rapid chatter: ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.'

Dawn came sharp and chill. The sleeping people turned over and hunched the blankets higher. They sighed and stirred, but the brooding house, all hung about with shadows, held the quiet in its lap a little longer. A breeze blew over the tangled garden, dropping dew and dropping petals, shivered over the drenched paddock grass, lifted the sombre bush PAGE 39 and shook from it a wild and bitter scent. In the green sky tiny stars floated a moment and then they were gone, they were dissolved like bubbles. The cocks shrilled from the neighbouring farms, the cattle moved in their stalls, the horses, grouped under the trees, lifted their heads and swished their tails, 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 full of yellow water-flowers and cresses. All the air smelled of water; the lawn was hung with bright drops and spangles.

And then, quite suddenly, at the first glint of sun, the birds began to sing. Big cheeky birds, starlings and minors whistled on the lawns; the little birds, the goldfinches and fantails and linnets, twittered flitting from bough to bough, and from tree to tree, hanging the garden with bright chains of song. A lovely kingfisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich beauty.

'How loud the birds are,’ said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green field sprinkled with daisies, and suddenly he bent forward and parted the grasses and showed her PAGE 40 a tiny ball of fluff just at her feet. ‘Oh, Papa, the darling!’ She made a cup of her hands and caught the bird and stroked its head with her fingers. It was quite tame. But a strange thing happened. As she stroked it, it began to swell. It ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it, she dropped it in 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 Linda woke to see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the venetian blinds up to the very top.

‘Hullo!’ he said, ‘didn't wake you, did I? Nothing much the matter with the weather this morning.’ He was enormously pleased. Weather like this set a final seal upon his bargain. He felt, somehow, that he had bought the sun too, got it chucked in, dirt cheap, with the house and grounds. He dashed off to his bath and Linda turned over, raised herself on one elbow to see the room by daylight. It looked wonderfully lived in already; all the furniture had found a place, all the old ‘paraphernalia’ as she expressed it, even to photographs on the mantelpiece and medicine bottles on a shelf over the washstand. But this PAGE 41 room was much bigger than their other room had been—that was a blessing. Her clothes lay across a chair; her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it, were tossed on the box ottoman. Looking at them a silly thought brought a fleeting smile into her eyes—'Perhaps I'm going away again to-day,’ and for a moment she saw her-self driving away from them all in a little buggy—driving away from every one of them, and waving.

Back came Stanley girt with a towel, glowing and slapping his thighs. He pitched the wet towel on top of her cape and hat, and standing firm in the exact centre of a square of sunlight he began to do his exercises—deep breathing, bending, squatting like a frog and shooting out his legs. He was so saturated with health that everything he did delighted him; but this amazing vigour seemed to set him miles and worlds away from Linda—she lay on the white tumbled bed, and leaned towards him, laughing as if from the sky.

'Oh, hang! Oh, damn!’ said Stanley, who had butted into a crisp shirt only to find that some idiot a woman had fastened the neckband and he was caught. He stalked over to her waving his arms.

PAGE 42
‘Now you look the image of a fat turkey,’ said she.

‘Fat! I like that,’ said Stanley. ‘Why I haven't got a square inch of fat on me. Feel that.'

‘My dear—hard as nails,’ mocked she.

‘You'd be surprised,’ said Stanley, as though this were intensely interesting, ‘at the number of chaps at the club who've got a corporation. Young chaps, you know—about my own age.'

He began parting and brushing his stiff ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass, bent at the knees, because the dressing table was always—confound it—a bit too low for him. ‘Little Teddy Dear for example,’ and he straightened, describing upon himself an enormous curve with the hair brush. ‘Of course they're sitting on their hindquarters all day in the office, and when they're away from it, as far as I can make out, they stodge and they snooze—I must say I've got a perfect horror …'

‘Yes, my dear, don't worry, you'll never be fat.

You're far too energetic,’ said Linda, repeating the familiar formula that he never tired of hearing.

‘Yes, yes, I suppose that's true,’ and taking a mother-of-pearl penknife out of his pocket he began to pare his nails.

PAGE 43
‘Breakfast, Stanley.’ Beryl was at the door. ‘Oh, Linda, Mother says don't get up yet. Stay where you are until after lunch, won't you?’ She popped her head in at the door. She had a big piece of syringa stuck through a braid of her hair. ‘Everything we left on the verandah last night is simply sopping this morning. You should see poor dear Mother wringing out the sofa and chairs. However, no harm done—not a penn’ orth of harm,’ this with the faintest glance at Stanley.

‘Have you told Pat what time to have the buggy round? It's a good six-and-a-half miles from here to the office—'

‘I can imagine what this morning start off for the office will become,’ thought Linda. Even when they lived in town, only half an hour away, the house had to slow down each morning, had to stop like a steamer, every soul on board summoned to the gangway to watch Burnell descending the ladder and into the little cockle shell. They must wave when he waved, give him good-bye for good-bye and lavish upon him unlimited sympathy, as though they saw on the horizon's brim the untamed land to which he curved his chest so proudly—the line of leaping savages ready to fall upon his valiant sword.

PAGE 44
‘Pat! Pat!’ she heard the servant girl calling. But Pat was evidently not to be found; the silly voice went baaing all over the garden.

‘It will be very high pressure indeed,’ she decided, and she did not rest again until the final slam of the front door sounded, and Stanley was gone.

Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie's stolid, compact little voice cried: ‘Kezia! Isa-bel!’ Lottie was always getting lost or losing people and finding them again—astonished—round the next tree or the next corner. ‘Oh, there you are!’ They had been turned out to grass after breakfast with strict orders not to come near the house until they were called. Isabel wheeled a neat pram-load of prim dolls and Lottie was allowed, for a great treat, to walk beside 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.

‘Come back, Kezia. Come back. You're not to go on the wet grass until it's dry, Grandma says,’ called Isabel.

PAGE 45
‘Bossy! Bossy!’ Linda heard Kezia answer.

‘Do the children's voices annoy you, Linda?’ asked old Mrs. Fairfield, coming in at that moment with a breakfast tray. ‘Shall I tell them to go further away from the house?'

‘No, don't bother,’ said Linda. ‘Oh, Mother, I do not want any breakfast.'

‘I have not brought you any,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, putting down the tray on the bed table. ‘A spot of porridge, a finger of toast …'

‘The merest sensation of marmalade—’ mocked Linda.

But Mrs. Fairfield remained serious. ‘Yes, dearie, and a little pot of fresh tea.'

She brought from the cupboard a white woollen jacket trimmed with red bows and buttoned it round her daughter.

‘Must I?’ pouted Linda, making a face at the porridge.

Mrs. Fairfield walked about the room; she lowered the blinds, tidied away the evidences of Burnell's toilet, and gently she lifted the dampened plume of the little round hat. There was a charm and a grace in all her movements. It was not that she merely ‘set in order'; there seemed to be almost PAGE 46 a positive quality in the obedience of things to her fine hands, they found not only their proper but their perfect place.

She wore a grey foulard dress, patterned with large purple pansies, a white linen apron and one of those high caps, shaped like a jelly mould, of white tulle. At her throat a big silver brooch shaped like a crescent moon with five owls sitting on it, and round her neck a black bead watch chain. If she had been a beauty in her youth—and she had been a very great beauty; indeed, report had it that her miniature had been painted and sent to Queen Victoria as the belle of Australia—old age had touched her with exquisite gentleness. Her long curling hair was still black at her waist, grey between her shoulders, and it framed her head in frosted silver. The late roses—the last roses, that frail pink kind, so reluctant to fall, such a wonder to find—still bloomed in her cheeks, and behind big gold-rimmed spectacles her blue eyes shone and smiled. And she still had dimples. On the backs of her hands, at her elbows—one in the left hand corner of her chin. Her body was the colour of old ivory. She bathed in cold water, summer and winter, and she could only bear linen next to her skin and suede gloves on her hands. Upon everything PAGE 47 she used there lingered a trace of Cashmere bouquet perfume.

‘How are you getting on downstairs?’ asked Linda, playing with her breakfast.

‘Beautifully. Pat has turned out a treasure. He has laid all the linoleum and the carpets, and Minnie seems to be taking a real interest in the kitchen and pantries.'

‘Pantries! There's grandeur, after that bird-cage of a larder in the other cubby-hole!'

‘Yes, I must say the house is wonderfully convenient and ample in every way. You should have a good look round when you get up.'

Linda smiled, shaking her head.

‘I don't want to. I don't care. The house can bulge cupboards and pantries, but other people will explore them. Not me.'

‘But why not?’ asked Mrs. Fairfield, anxiously watching her.

‘Because I don't feel the slightest crumb of interest, my Mother.'

‘But why don't you, dear? You ought to try—to begin—even for Stanley's sake. He'll be so bitterly disappointed if …’ Linda's laugh interrupted.

‘Oh, trust me. I'll satisfy Stanley. Besides, I can rave all the better over what I haven't seen.'

PAGE 48
‘Nobody asks you to rave, Linda,’ said the old woman, sadly.

‘Don't they?’ Linda screwed up her eyes. ‘I'm not so sure. If I were to jump out of bed now, fling on my clothes, rush downstairs, tear up a ladder, hang pictures, eat an enormous lunch, romp with the children in the garden this afternoon, and be swinging on the gate, waving, when Stanley hove in sight this evening, I believe you'd be delighted. A normal, healthy day for a young wife and mother. A …'

Mrs. Fairfield began to smile. ‘How absurd you are! How you exaggerate! What a baby you are,’ said she.

But Linda sat up suddenly and jerked off the woolly.

‘I'm boiling. I'm roasting,’ she declared. ‘I can't think what I'm doing in this big, stuffy old bed. I'm going to get up.'

‘Very well, dear,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.

Getting dressed never took her long. Her hands flew. She had beautiful hands, white and tiny. The only trouble with them was that they could not keep her rings on them. Happily she only had two rings: her wedding ring and a peculiarly hideous affair, a square slab with four pin opals in it that Stanleyhad PAGE 49 'stolen from a cracker,’ said Linda, the day they were engaged. But it was her wedding ring that disappeared so. It fell down every possible place and into every possible corner. Once she even found it in the crown of her hat. It was a familiar cry in the house: ‘Linda's wedding ring has gone again.'

Stanley Burnell could never hear that without horrible sense of discomfort. Good Lord. He wasn't't superstitious. He left that kind of rot to people who had nothing better to think about—but all the same it was devilishly annoying. Especially as Linda made so light of the affair and mocked him and said, ‘Are they as expensive as all that?’ and laughed at him and cried, holding up her bare hand—'Look, Stanley, it has all been a dream.’ He was a fool to mind things like that, but they hurt him—they hurt like sin.

‘Funny I should have dreamed about Papa last night,’ thought Linda, brushing her cropped hair that stood up all over her head in little bronzy rings. ‘What was it I dreamed?’ No, she'd forgotten—'something or other about a bird.’ But Papa was very plain—his lazy, ambling walk. And she laid dowrn the brush and went over to the mantelpiece and leaned her arms along it, her chin in her hands, and looked at his photograph. In his photograph he PAGE 50 showed severe and imposing, a high brow, a piercing eye, clean shaven except for long ‘piccadilly weepers’ draping his bosom. He was taken in the fashion of that time, standing, one arm on the back of a tapestry chair, the other clenched upon a parchment roll.

‘Papa!’ said Linda. She smiled. ‘There you are, my dear,’ she breathed, and then she shook her head quickly and frowned, and went on with her dressing.

Her father had died the year that she married Burnell, the year of her sixteenth birthday. All her childhood had been passed in a long white house perched on a hill overlooking Wellington harbour—a house with a wild garden full of bushes and fruit trees, long thick grass and nasturtiums. Nasturtiums grew everywhere—there was no fighting them down. They even fell in a shower over the paling fence on to the road. Red, yellow, white, every possible colour; they lighted the garden like swarms of butterflies. The Fairfields were a large family of boys and girls; with their beautiful mother and their gay, fascinating father (for it was only in his photograph that he looked stern) they were quite a ‘show’ family and immensely admired.

Mr. Fairfield managed a small insurance business PAGE 51 that could not have been very profitable, yet they lived plentifully. He had a good voice; he liked to sing in public, he liked to dance and attend picnics, to put on his ‘bell topper’ and walk out of Church if he disapproved of anything said in the sermon, and he had a passion for inventing highly impracticable things, like collapsible umbrellas or folding lamps. He had one saying with which he met all difficulties. ‘Depend upon it, it will all come right after the Maori war.’ Linda, his second but youngest child, was his darling, his pet, his playfellow. She was a wild thing, always trembling on the verge of laughter, ready for anything and eager. When he put his arm round her and held her he felt her thrilling with life. He understood her so beautifully and gave her so much love for love that he became a kind of daily miracle to her, and all her faith centred in him. People barely touched her; she was regarded as a cold, heartless little creature, but sheseemed to have an unlimited passion for that violent sweet thing called life—just being alive and able to run and climb and swim in the sea and lie in the grass. In the evenings she and her Father would sit on the verandah—she on his knee—and ‘plan.'

‘When I am grown up we shall travel PAGE 52 every—where—we shall see the whole world—won't we, Papa?'

‘We shall, my dear.'

‘One of your inventions will have a great success. Bring you in a good round million yearly.'

‘We can manage on that.'

‘But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin…. We shall have a little boat—we shall explore the interior of China on a raft—you will look sweet in one of those huge umbrella hats that Chinamen wear in pictures. We won't leave a corner of anywhere unexplored—shall we?'

‘We shall look under the beds and in all the cupboards and behind every curtain.'

‘And we shan't go as father and daughter,’ she tugged at his ‘piccadilly weepers’ and began kissing him. ‘We'll just go as a couple of boys together—Papa.'

By the time Linda was fourteen, the big family had vanished; only she and Beryl, who was two years younger, were left. The girls had married; the boys had gone away. Linda left off attending the Select Academy for Young Ladies presided over by Miss PAGE 53 Clara Finetta Birch (from England), a lady whose black hair lay so flat on her head that everybody said it was only painted on, and she stayed at home to be a help to her mother. For three days she laid the table and took the mending basket on to the verandah in the afternoon, but after that she ‘went mad-dog again,’ as her father expressed it, and there was no holding her.

‘Oh, Mother, life is so fearfully short,' said Linda.

That summer Burnell appeared. Every evening a stout young man in a striped shirt, with fiery red hair, and a pair of immature mutton chop whiskers, passed their house, quite slowly, four times. Twice up the hill he went, and twice down he came. He walked with his hands behind his back, and each time he glanced once at the verandah where they sat—Who was he? None of them knew—but he became a great joke.

‘Here she blows,’ Mr. Fairfield would whisper. The young man came to be called the ‘ginger whale.’ Then he appeared at Church, in a pew facing theirs, very devout and serious. But he had that unfortunate complexion that goes with his colouring, and every time he so much as glanced in Linda's direction a crimson blush spread over his face to his ears.

‘Look out, my wench,’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Your PAGE 54 clever Papa has solved the problem. That young fellow is after you.'

‘Henry! What rubbish. How can you say such things,’ said his wife.

‘There are times,’ said Linda, ‘when I simply doubt your sanity, Papa.’ But Beryl loved the idea. The ‘ginger whale’ became ‘Linda's beau'.

‘You know as well as I do that I am never going to marry,’ said Linda. ‘How can you be such a traitor, Papa?'

A Social given by the Liberal Ladies’ Political League ripened matters a little. Linda and her Papa attended. She wore a green sprigged muslin with little capes on the shoulders that stood up like wings, and he wore a frock coat and a wired buttonhole as big as a soup plate. The Social began with a very painful concert.

‘She wore a Wreath of Roses'—'They played in the Beautiful Garden'—'A Mother sat Watching'—'Flee as a Bird to the Mountain'—sang the political ladies with forlorn and awful vigour. The gentlemen sang with far greater vigour and a kind of defiant cheerfulness which was almost terrifying. They looked very furious, too. Their cuffs shot over their hands, or their trousers were far too long … PAGE 55 Comic recitations about flies on bald heads and engaged couples sitting on porch steps spread with glue werecontributed by the chemist. Followed an extraordinary meal, called upon the hand-printed programme Tea and Coffee, and consisting of ham-beef-or-tongue, tinned salmon, oyster patties, sandwiches, col’ meat, jellies, huge cakes, fruit salads in wash-hand bowls, trifles bristling with almonds, and large cups of tea, dark brown in colour, tasting faintly of rust. Helping Linda to a horrible-looking pink blancmange, which he said was made of strangled baby's head, her father whispered: ‘The ginger whale is here. I've just spotted him blushing at a sandwich. Look out, my lass. He'll sandbag you with one of old Ma Warren's rock cakes.'

Away went the plates—away went the tables. Young Mr. Fantail, in evening clothes with brown button boots, sat down at the piano, and crashed into the ‘Lancers.'

Diddle dee dum tee um tee tum 
Diddle dee um te um te tum 
…. 
Diddle dee tum tee diddle tee tum!

And half way through the ‘evening’ it actually came to pass. Smoothing his white cotton gloves—a PAGE 56 beetroot was pale compared to him; a pillar box was a tender pink—Burnell asked Linda for the pleasure, and before she realised what had happened his arm was round her waist and they were turning round and round to the air of ‘Three Blind Mice’ (arranged by Mr. Fantail même).

He did not talk while he danced—but Linda liked that.

When the dance was over they sat on a bench against the wall. Linda hummed the valse tune and beat time with her glove; she felt dreadfully shy and she was terrified of her father's merry eye. At last Burnell turned to her.

‘Did you ever hear the story of the shy young man who went to his first ball? He danced with a girl and then they sat on the stairs and they could not think of a thing to say. And after he'd picked up everything she dropped from time to time, after the silence was simply unbearable, he turned round and stammered: “D-Do you always w-wear flannel next to the skin?” I feel rather like that chap,’ said Burnell.

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, in the PAGE 57 morning especially! She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wallpaper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, 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 in the quiet; she had often noticed it. Not only large, substantial things, like furniture, but curtains and patterns of stuffs, and 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 often the washstand jug sat in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.

‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? No, she'd forgotten…. But the strangest part about 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.

PAGE 58
Not for her (although she knew they ‘recognised’ her) their sly, meaning smile; they were members of a secret order 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 … they were so strong; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty she knew as she clicked the door to, that they were coming to life. And Ah, there were times, especially in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly tear herself away from them—when she could not hurry, when she tried to hum a tune to show them she did not care, when she tried to say ever so carelessly—'Bother that old thimble! Where ever have I put it?’ But she never, never deceived them. They knew how frightened she was; they saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. For all their patience they wanted something of her. Half unconsciously she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet—more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would happen … ‘It's very very quiet now,’ thought Linda. She opened her eyes wide; she heard the stillness spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed, she scarcely had to PAGE 59 breathe at all … 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.

In the kitchen at the long deal table under the two windows old Mrs. Fairfield was washing the breakfast dishes. The kitchen windows 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 washhouse and over this long whitewashed ‘lean to’ there grew a big knotted vine. She had noticed yesterday that some 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 dancing green.

‘I am very fond of a grape vine,’ decided Mrs. Fairfield, ‘but I do not think that the grapes will ripen here. It takes Australian sun …’ and she suddenly remembered how, when Beryl was a baby, she had been picking some white grapes from the PAGE 60 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 had rushed in … and the child's leg had swelled to an enormous size.

‘T-t-t-t.’ Mrs. Fairfield caught her breath, remembering. ‘Poor child—how terrifying it was!’ and she set her lips tight in a way she had and went over to the stove for some more hot water. The water frothed up in the 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 tulle. 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 very hard to believe that they had only arrived yesterday and that she had not been in the kitchen for years—she was so much a part of it, putting away the clean crocks with so sure and precise a touch, moving leisurely and ample from the stove to the dresser, looking into the pantry and the larder as PAGE 61 though there were not an unfamiliar corner. When she had finished tidying, 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 towel and looking about her, a tiny smile beamed on her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory. If only servant girls could be taught to understand that it did not only matter how you put a thing away; it mattered just as much where you put it—or was it the other way about…. But at any rate they never would understand; she had never been able to train them …

‘Mother, Mother, are you in the kitchen?’ called Beryl.

‘Yes, dear, do you want me?'

‘No, I'm coming,’ and Beryl ran in, very flushed, dragging with her two big pictures.

‘Mother, whatever can I do with these awful Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It's absurd to say they were valuable because they were hanging in Chung Wah's fruit shop for months before. I can't understand why Stanley doesn't't want them to be thrown away—I'm sure he thinks they're just as hideous as we do, but it's because of the frames—’ she said spitefully. ‘I PAGE 62 suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something one day. Ugh! What a weight they are?'

‘Why don't you hang them in the passage?’ suggested Mrs. Fairfield. ‘They would not be much seen there.'

‘I can't. There isn't room. I've hung all the photographs of his office before and after rebuilding there, and the signed photographs of his business friends and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on a mat in her singlet. There isn't an inch of room left there.’ Her angry glance flew over the placid kitchen. ‘I know what I'll do. I'll hang them here—I'll say they got a little damp in the moving and so I put them up here in the warm for the time being.'

She dragged forward a chair, jumped up on it, took a hammer and a nail out of her deep apron pocket and banged away.

‘There! That's high enough. Hand me up the picture, Mother.'

‘One moment, child—’ she was wiping the carved ebony frame.

‘Oh, Mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those winding little holes,’ and she frowned at the top of her Mother's head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother's deliberate way PAGE 63 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 back the little hammer.

‘They don't look so bad there, do they?’ said she. ‘And at any rate nobody need ever see them except Pat and the servant girl. Have I got a spider's web on my face, Mother? I've been poking my head into that cupboard under the stairs, and now something keeps tickling me.'

But before Mrs. Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away again. ‘Is that clock right? Is it really as early as that? Good Heavens, it seems years since breakfast!'

‘That reminds me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘I must go upstairs and fetch down Linda's tray.'

‘There!’ cried Beryl. ‘Isn't that like the servant girl. Isn't that exactly like her. I told her distinctly to tell you that I was too busy to take it up and would you please instead. I never dreamed she hadn't told you!'

Someone tapped on the window. They turned away from the pictures. Linda was there nodding and smiling. They heard the latch of the scullery PAGE 64 door lift and she came in. She had no hat on; her hair stood up on her head in curling rings and she was all wrapped up in an old cashmere shawl.

‘Please can I have something to eat,’ said she.

‘Linnet, dear, I am so frightfully sorry. It's my fault,’ said Beryl.

‘But I wasn't't hungry. I should have screamed if I had been,’ said Linda. ‘Mummy, darling, make me a little pot of tea in the brown china teapot.'

She went into the pantry and began lifting the lids off a row of tins. ‘What grandeur, my dears,’ she cried, coming back with a brown scone and a slice of gingerbread—'a pantry and a larder.'

‘Oh, but you haven't seen the out-houses yet,’ said Beryl. ‘There is a stable and a huge barn of a place that Pat calls the feed-room and a woodshed and a toolhouse—all built round a square courtyard that has big white gates to it! Awfully grand!'

‘This is the first time I've even seen the kitchen,’ said Linda. ‘Mother has been here. Everything is in pairs.'

‘Sit down and drink your tea,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, spreading a clean table napkin over a corner of the table. ‘And Beryl, have a cup with her. I'll watch you both while I'm peeling the potatoes for PAGE 65 dinner. I don't know what has happened to the servant girl.'

‘I saw her on my way downstairs, Mummy. She's lying practically at full length on the bathroom floor laying linoleum. And she was hammering it so frightfully hard that I am sure the pattern will come through on to the dining-room ceiling. I told her not to run any more tacks than she could help into herself but I am afraid that she will be studded for life all the same. Have half my piece of gingerbread, Beryl. Beryl, do you like the house now that we are here?'

‘Oh, yes, I like the house immensely and the garden is simply beautiful, but it feels very far away from anything to me. I can't imagine people coming out from town to see us in that dreadful rattling ‘bus and I am sure there isn't anybody here who will come and call…. Of course it doesn't't matter to you particularly because you never liked living in town.'

‘But we've got the buggy,’ said Linda. ‘Pat can drive you into town whenever you like. And after all it's only six miles away.'

That was a consolation, certainly, but there was something unspoken at the back of Beryl's mind, PAGE 66 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 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 aloft in every tree.'

But when she reached the dining-room she stopped singing. Her face changed—hardened, became gloomy and sullen.

‘One may as well rot here as anywhere else,’ she said, 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 in her fingers and watched her Mother. She thought her Mother looked wonderfully beautiful standing with her back to the leafy window. There was something comfortable in the sight of her Mother that Linda felt she could never do without. She knew everything about her—just what she kept in her pocket and the sweet smell of her flesh and the soft feel of her cheeks and her arms and shoulders, still softer—the way the breath PAGE 67 rose and fell in her bosom and the way her hair curled silver round her forehead, lighter at the neck and bright brown still in the big coil under the tulle cap. Exquisite were her Mother's hands and the colour of the two rings she wore seemed to melt into her warm white skin-her wedding ring and a large old fashioned ring with a dark red stone in it that had belonged to Linda's father … And she was always so fresh, so delicious. ‘Mother, you smell of cold water,’ she had said. The old woman could bear nothing next to her skin but fine linen, and she bathed in cold water summer and winter-even when she had to pour a kettle of boiling water over the frozen tap.

'Isn't there anything for me to do, Mother?’ she asked.

'No, darling. Run and see what the garden is like. I wish you would give an eye to the 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's been tossed by a wild bull hours ago,’ said Linda, winding herself up in her shawl again.

PAGE 68
But no, Kezia had seen a bull through a hole in a knot of wood in the high paling fence that separated the tennis lawn from the paddock, but she had not liked the bull frightfully, and 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 to the big iron gates they had driven through last night and she had begun 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 velvety leaves and feathery cream flowers that buzzed with flies when you shook them-this was a frightening side and no garden at all. The little paths were wet and clayey with tree roots spanned across them, ‘like big fowls’ feet', thought Kezia.

But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edgings, and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. It was summer. The camelia trees were in flower, 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. All kinds of PAGE 69 roses-gentlemen's buttonhole roses, little white ones but far too full of insects to put under anybody's nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick fat stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark that they seemed to turn black as they fell, and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright red leaves. Kezia knew the name of that kind: it was her Grandmother's favourite.

There were clumps of fairy bells and cherry pie and all kinds of geraniums, and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelargoniums, with velvet eyes and leaves like moth's wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but pansies, borders of double and single daisies, 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 very pleasant, springy seat, but how dusty it was inside! She bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose.

And then she found herself again at the top PAGE 70 of the rolling grassy slope that led down to the orchard and beyond the orchard to an avenue of pine trees with wooden seats between, bordering one side of the tennis court. She looked at the slope a moment; then she lay down on her back, gave a tiny squeak, and rolled over and over into the thick flowery orchard grass. As she lay still, waiting for things to stop spinning round, 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 her Grandmother. First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet lying on it-then she would put a very small little 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 the very thing I am looking for-’ The Grandmother slowly opened the box and came upon the picture inside.

'Good gracious, child! how you astonished me!'

'Did I-did I really astonish you?’ Kezia threw up her arms with joy.

'I can make her one every day here,’ she thought, PAGE 71 scrambling up the grassy slope on her slippery shoes. But on her way to the house she came to the 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 green top at all except one huge round plant, with thick grey-green thorny leaves, and out of the middle there sprang up a tall stout stem. Some of the leaves of this plant were so old that they curved up in the air no longer-they turned back-they were split and broken-some of them lay flat and withered on the ground-but the fresh leaves curved up into the air with their spiked edges; some of them looked as though they had been painted with broad bands of yellow.

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 with a red carnation in her hand.

'Mother, what is it?’ asked Kezia.

Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves, its towering 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 and not roots. The curving leaves seemed PAGE 72 to be hiding something; the big blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it.

'That is an aloe, Kezia,’ said Linda.

'Does it ever have any flowers?'

'Yes, my child,’ said her Mother, and she smiled down at Kezia, half shutting her eyes, ‘once every hundred years.'

three 
THE DAY AFTER
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three 
THE DAY AFTER

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 up a pound of those as well. The oysters and pineapple he stowed away in the box under the front seat—but the cherries he kept in his hand.

PAGE 76
Pat, the handy man, leapt off the box and tucked him up again in a brown rug.

'Lift yer feet, Mr. Burnell, while I give her a fold under,’ said he.

'Right, right—first rate!’ said Stanley—'you can make straight for home now.'

'I believe this man is a first rate chap,’ thought he, as Pat gave the grey mare a touch and the buggy sprang forward. He liked the look of him sitting up there in his neat dark brown coat and brown bowler. He liked his eyes. There was nothing servile about him—and if there was one thing he hated more than another in a servant it was servility—and he looked as though he were pleased with his job, happy and contented.

The grey mare went very well. Burnell was impatient to be home. Ah, it was splendid to live in the country—to get right out of this hole of a town once the office was closed, and this long drive in the fresh warm air, knowing all the time that his own home was at the other end with its garden and paddocks, its three tip-top cows and enough fowls and ducks to keep them in eggs and poultry, was splendid, too.

As they left the town finally and bowled away up the quiet road his heart beat hard for joy. He PAGE 77 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 these two now—black one side and white the other—perfect—a perfect little pair of Siamese twins—and he stuck them in his buttonhole. 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 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 afternoons. Not too many—three at most. Beryl was a good player too. He stretched out his right arm and slowly bent it, feeling the muscles. 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 PAGE 78 door. In fancy he heard himself intoning, extremely well:

'When-Thou-didst-overcome the sharpness of death Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to All Believers,’ 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 she was on his arm; they were walking about the garden together 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 out 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 brake on again. ‘He's a bit too ready with that brake! Ugh! What a brute of a thing it is—I can feel it in the pit of my stomach.'

A sort of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home. Before he was well inside the gate he would shout to anyone in sight—'Is everything all right?’ And then he did not believe it was until he heard Linda cry, ‘Hullo, you old boy!’ That was the worst of living in the country. It took PAGE 79 the deuce of a long time to get back. But now they weren't far off. They were on top of the last hill—it was a gentle slope all the way now and not more than half a mile.

Pat kept up a constant trailing of the whip across the mare's back and he coaxed her—'Goop now, Goop now!'

It wanted a few moments to sunset—everything stood motionless, bathed in bright metallic light, and from the paddocks on either side there streamed the warm milky smell of ripe hay. 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—out of the shadowy hall—her voice rang in the quiet. ‘Hullo, you're home again.'

At the sound of it his happiness beat up so hard and strong that he could hardly stop himself dashing up the steps and catching her in his arms.

'Yes, home again. Is everything all right?'

'Perfect,’ said she.

PAGE 80
Pat began to lead the mare round to the side gate that gave on to the courtyard. ‘Here, half a moment,’ said Burnell. ‘Hand me those two parcels, will you?’ 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 under one arm and the pineapple under the other. Burnell shut the glass door, threw his hat on the hall stand, and put his arms round her, straining her to him, kissing the top of her head, her ears, her lips, her eyes.

'Oh dear! Oh! dear,’ she said. ‘Wait a minute, let me put down these silly things,’ and she put down the bottle of oysters and the pineapple on a little carved chair.

'What have you got in your buttonhole—cherries?’ and she took them out and hung them over his ear.

'No, don't do that, darling. They're for you.'

So she took them off his ear and ran them through her brooch pin. ‘You don't mind if I don't eat them now. Do you? They'll spoil my appetite for dinner. Come and see your children. They're having tea.'

PAGE 81
The lamp was lighted on the nursery table: Mrs. Fairfield was cutting and spreading bread and butter and the three little girls sat up to table, wearing large bibs embroidered with their names. They wiped their mouths as their Father came in, ready to be kissed. There was jam on the table too, a plate of home-made knobbly buns and cocoa steaming in a Dewar's Whisky advertisement jug—a big toby jug, half brown, half cream, with the picture of a man on it smoking a long clay pipe. The windows were wide open. There was a jar of wild flowers on the mantelpiece and the lamp made a big soft bubble of light on the ceiling.

'You seem pretty snug, Mother,’ said Burnell, looking round and blinking at the light and smiling at the little girls. They sat, Isabel and Lottie 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 and jam into fingers.

'Like it better than town, eh, children?’ said Burnell.

PAGE 82
'Oh yes, Daddy,’ said the three little girls, and Isabel added as an afterthought, ‘Thank you very much indeed, Father dear.'

'Come upstairs and have a wash,’ 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 their room. He heard her ring tapping the marble as she felt along the mantelpiece for matches.

'I've got some, darling. I'll light the candles. ‘But, instead, he came up behind her and caught her, 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 two hands flat on his breast and looked up at him.

'I don't know what's come over me,’ he protested.

It was quite dark outside now and heavy dew was falling. When she shut the window the dew wet her finger tips. Far away a dog barked.

'I believe there's going to be a moon,’ said she. At the words, and with the wet cold dew touching her lips and cheeks, she felt as though the moon had risen—that she was being bathed in cold light—she PAGE 83 shivered, she came away from the window and sat down on the box ottoman beside Stanley.

In the dining-room, by the flickering glow 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 big black spots on it and in her hair she had pinned a black rose:

Nature has gone to her rest, love, 
See, we are all alone; 
Give me your hand to press, love, 
Lightly within my own.

She played and sang half to herself, for she was watching herself playing and singing. She saw the firelight on her shoes and skirt, on the ruddy belly of the guitar, on her white fingers.

'If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself, I really would be rather struck,’ she thought. Still more softly she played the accompaniment, not singing—'The first time I ever saw you, little girl—you had no idea that you weren't alone! You were sitting with your little feet up on a hassock playing the guitar—I can never forget …’ and she flung back her head at the imaginary speaker and began to sing again:

Even the moon is aweary—

PAGE 84
But there came a loud knock at the door. The servant girl popped in her flushed face—

'If you please, Miss, kin I come and lay the dinner?'

'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 ‘ave had a job with that oving,’ said she. ‘I can't get nothing to brown.'

'Really,’ said Beryl.

But no—she could not bear that fool of a girl. She went into the dark drawing-room and began walking up and down. She was restless, restless, restless. There was a mirror over the mantelpiece; she leaned her arms along and looked at her pale shadow in it. ‘I look as though I have been drowned,’ said she.

four 
THE ALOE
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four 
THE ALOE

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 new clothes yet, and so I left her at home. How's your husband?'

'Oh, he's very well, thank you. At least he had an PAGE 88 awful sore throat, but Queen Victoria (she's my grandmother, you know) sent him a case of pineapples and they 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.'

'Good morning, Mrs. Smith. Dinner won't not 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 isn't really quite a servant. 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't matter,“ said the new servant airily, 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 broad 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 petals for cold meat—some beautiful little rissoles made of earth and water and dandelion seeds—and the chocolate custard which she decided to serve in the pawa shell she had cooked it in.

'You needn't trouble about my children,’ said

PAGE 89
Mrs. Smith graciously. ‘If you'll just take this bottil and fill it at the tap—I mean in the dairy.'

‘Oh, all right,’ said Gwen, and she whispered to Mrs. Jones—‘Shall I go an’ ask Alice for a little bit of real milk?'

But someone called from the front of the house, ‘Children! Children!’ and the luncheon party melted away, leaving the charming table, leaving the rissoles and the eggs on the stones to the little ants and to an old snail who pushed his quivering horns over the edge of the pink garden seat and began slowly to nibble a geranium plate.

‘Come round to the front door, children! Rags and Pip have come.'

The Trout boys were cousins to the Burnells. 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, too, with pale blue eyes and a long tail that turned up at the end, who followed them everywhere; he was called Snooker. They were always combing and brushing Snooker and treating PAGE 90 him with various extraordinary mixtures concocted by Pip and kept secretly by him in a broken jug covered with an old kettle lid. Even Rags was not allowed to share the secret of these mixtures. He would see Pip mix some carbolic tooth powder and a bit of sulphur powdered fine and perhaps a pinch of starch to stiffen up Snooker's coat. But he knew that was not all. There was something else added that Pip wouldn't tell him of. Rags privately thought it was gunpowder. And he was never, never on any account permitted to help or to look on because of the danger. ‘Why, if a spot of this flew up,’ Pip would say, stirring the mixture with an iron spoon, ‘you'd be blinded to death. And there's always the chance—just the chance—of it exploding—if you whack it hard enough. Two spoonfuls of this will be enough in a kerosene tin of water to kill thousands of fleas.’ Nevertheless, Snooker spent all his leisure biting and nudging himself, and he stank abominably.

‘It's because he's such a grand fighting dog,’ Pip would say. ‘All fighting dogs smell—'

The Trout boys had often gone into town and spent the day with the Burnells, but now that they had become neighbours and lived in this big house and boncer garden, they were inclined to be very PAGE 91 friendly. Besides, both of them liked playing with girls. Pip, because he could fox them so and because Lottie Burnell was so easily frightened, and Rags for a shameful reason, because he adored dolls. The way he would look at a doll as it lay asleep, speaking in a whisper and smiling timidly, and the great treat it was to him to stretch out his arms and be given a doll to hold!

‘Curl your arms around her. Don't keep them stiff out like that. You'll drop her,’ Isabel would command sternly.

Now they were standing on the verandah and holding back Snooker, who wanted to go into the house but wasn't'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 and stay to tea. We brought over a batch of our gingerbread for Aunt Linda. Our Minnie made it. It's all over nuts—much more than yours ever has.’

‘I shelled the almonds,’ said Pip. ‘I just stuck my hand in 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?'

PAGE 92
‘When we 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 on to the lawn, planted his hands on the grass, bent forward, and just did not stand on his head.

‘Pooh!’ he said, ‘that lawn's all bumpy; you have to have a flat place for standing on your head, I can walk all round the monkey tree on my head at our place—nearly, can't I, Rags?'

‘Nearly!’ said Rags faintly.

‘Stand on your head on the verandah. That's quite flat,’ said Lottie.

‘No, smarty,’ said Pip, ‘you have to do it on something soft, see? Because if you give a jerk—just a very little jerk and fall over like that and bump yourself, something in your neck goes click and it breaks right off. Dad told me….'

‘Oh, do let's have a game,’ said Kezia.

‘Do let's play something or other.'

‘Very well,’ said Isabel quickly, ‘we'll play hospitals. I'll be the nurse, and Pip can be the doctor and you and Rags and Lottie can be the sick people.'

But, no, Lottie didn't not want to play that, PAGE 93 because last time Pip squirted something down her throat and it hurt awfully.

‘Pooh!’ said Pip, ‘it was only the juice out of a bit of orange peel.'

‘Well, let's play ladies,’ said Isabel, ‘and Pip can be my husband and you can be my three dear little children—Rags can be the baby.'

‘I hate playing ladies,’ said Kezia, ‘because you always make us go to Church hand in hand and come home again an’ go to bed.'

Suddenly Pip took a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket. ‘Snooker, here sir!’ he called. But Snooker, as usual, began to sneak away with his long bent tail between his legs. Pip leapt on top of him and held him by his knees.

‘Keep his head firm, Rags,’ he said as he tied the handkerchief round Snooker's head with a big funny sticking-up knot 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 kind of back and they prick up. But Snooker's got rotten ears; they're too soft.'

‘I know,’ said Kezia. ‘They're always turning inside out. I hate that.'

PAGE 94
‘Oh, it isn't that,’ said Pip, ‘but I'm training his ears to look a bit more fierce, see?'

Snooker lay down and made one feeble effort with his paw to get the handkerchief off, but finding he could not, he trailed after the children with his head bound up in the dirty rag—shivering with misery.

Pat came swinging by. In his hand he held a little tomahawk that winked in the sun. ‘Come with me now,’ he said to the children, ‘and I'll show you how the Kings of Ireland chop off the head of a duck.'

They held back; they didn't believe him: it was one of his jokes, and, besides, the Trout boys had never seen Pat before.

‘Come on now,’ he coaxed, smiling and holding out his hand to Kezia.

‘A real duck's head?’ she said. ‘One from ours in the paddock where the fowls and ducks are?'

‘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 PAGE 95 going to be any blood about,’ said Pip, trying not to show his excitement, ‘because the sight of blood makes him awfully wild sometimes.’ He ran ahead, dragging Snooker by the knot in the handkerchief.

‘Do you think we ought to?’ whispered Isabel to Lottie, ‘because we haven't asked Grandma or anybody, have we?'

‘But Pat's looking after us,’ said Lottie.

At the bottom of the orchard a gate was set in the paling fence. On the other side there was a steep bank leading 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 disused stable in the first paddock had been turned into a fowl-house. All about it there spread wire-netting chick-runs new made by Pat. The fowls strayed far away across the paddock down to a little dumping ground in a hollow on the other side; but the ducks kept close to the part of the creek that flowed under the bridge and ran hard by the fowl-house. Tall bushes overhung the stream with red leaves and dazzling yellow flowers and clusters of red and white berries, and a little further on there were cresses and a water plant with a flower like a yellow foxglove. At some places the stream was wide and shallow PAGE 96 enough to cross by stepping stones; but at other places it tumbled suddenly into a steep rocky pool like a little lake with foam at the edge and quivering bubbles. It was in these pools that the big white ducks loved to swim and guzzle along the weedy banks. Up and down they swam, preening their dazzling breasts, and other ducks with yellow bills and yellow feet swam upside down below them in the clear still water.

‘There they are,’ said Pat. ‘There's the little Irish Navy, 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 out of his pocket and began to walk towards the fowl-house lazily, his broad straw hat with the broken crown pulled off his eyes.

‘Lid-lid-lid-lid-lid-lid,’ he shouted.

‘Qua! Qua-qua!’ answered the ducks, making for land and flopping 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, close round him, quacking and pushing against each other in a white ring. From far PAGE 97 away the fowls heard the clamour and they, too, came across the paddock, their heads crooked 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 bent forward, seized two, tucked them quacking and struggling one under each arm, and strode across to the children. Their darting heads, their flat beaks and round eyes frightened the children, and they drew back, all except Pip.

‘Come on, sillies!’ he cried. ‘They can't hurt, they haven't got any teeth, have they, Pat? They've only got those two little holes in their heads to breathe through.'

‘Will you hold one while I finish with the other?’ asked Pat.

Pip leg go of Snooker. ‘Won't I! Won't I! Give us one. I'll hold him. I won't let him go. I don't care how much he kicks—give us, give us!'

He nearly sobbed with delight when Pat put the white lump in his arms.

There was an old stump beside the door of the fowl-shed. Pat carried over the other duck, grabbed it up in one hand, whipped out his little tomahawk, PAGE 98 lay the duck flat on the stump, and suddenly down came the tomahawk and the duck's head flew off the stump—and up the blood spurted over the white feathers, over his hand. When the children saw it they were frightened no more. They crowded round him and began to scream—even Isabel leaped about and called out, ‘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 and put out a finger as if he meant to touch it, then drew back again, and again put out a finger. He was shivering all over.

Even Lottie, frightened Lottie, began to laugh and point to the duck and shout, ‘Look, Kezia, look, look, look!'

‘Watch it,’ shouted Pat, and he put down the white body and it began to waddle with only a long spurt of blood where the head had been—it began to pad along dreadfully quiet towards the steep ledge that led to the stream. It was the crowning wonder.

‘Do you see that—do you see it?’ yelled Pip, and he ran among the little girls pulling at their pinafores.

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‘It's like an engine—it's like a funny little darling 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 as hard as ever she could and sobbed, ‘Head back, head back,’ until it sounded like a loud, strange hiccough.

‘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 put her arms round his neck.

The children stopped squealing 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 with his finger and said, ‘I don't think perhaps the head is quite dead yet. It's warm, Pip. Would it keep alive if I gave it something to drink?'

But Pip got very cross and said, ‘Bah! you PAGE 100 baby.’ He whistled to Snooker and went off. And when Isabel went up to Lottie, Lottie snatched away.

‘What are you always touching me for, Is-a-bel!'

‘There now,’ said Pat to Kezia. ‘There's a grand little girl.'

She put up her hands and touched his ear. She felt something. Slowly she raised her quivering face and looked. Pat wore little round gold earrings. How very funny. She never knew men wore earrings. She was very much surprised. She quite forgot about the duck.

‘Do they come off and on?’ she asked huskily.

Up at the house, in the warm tidy kitchen, Alice, the servant girl, had begun to get the afternoon tea ready. She was dressed. She had on a black cloth dress that smelt under the arms, a white apron so stiff that it rustled like paper to her every breath and movement—and a white muslin bow pinned on top of her head by two large pins—and her comfortable black felt slippers were changed for a pair of black leather ones that pinched the corn on her little toe ‘something dreadful.'

It was warm in the kitchen. A big blowfly buzzed PAGE 101 round and round in a circle, bumping against the ceiling—a curl of white steam came out of the spout of the black kettle, and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled. The kitchen clock ticked in the warm air, slow and deliberate like the click of an old woman's knitting needles, and sometimes, for no reason at all, for there wasn't't any breeze outside, the heavy venetians swung out and back, tapping against the windows.

Alice was making water-cress sandwiches. She had a plate of butter on the table before her and a big loaf called a ‘barracouta,’ and the cresses tumbled together in the white cloth she had dried them in. But propped against the butter dish there was a dirty, greasy little book, half unstitched, with curled edges—and while she mashed some butter soft for spreading she read:

‘To dream of four black-beetles dragging a hearse is bad. Signifies death of one you hold near or dear, either father, husband, brother, son or intended. If the beetles crawl backwards as you watch them, it means death by 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 the near PAGE 102 future. Should party be in family way an easy confinement may be expected. But care should be taken in the 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 stuffed her 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, although she didn't say anything, was the grey edges sticking out from the plate. Alice saw Miss Beryl's scornful, meaning little smile, and the way she raised her eyebrows and screwed up her eyes as though she couldn't quite make out what that was under the plate edge. She decided to answer if Miss Beryl should ask her what it was: ‘Nothing as belongs to you, Miss,’ but she knew Miss Beryl would not ask her.

Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she always had the most marvellous retorts ready for the questions she knew would never be put to her. The composing of them and the turning of them over and over in her brain, comforted her just as much as if she'd really expressed them, and kept her self-respect PAGE 103 alive in places where she had been that chivvied, she'd been afraid to go to bed at night with a box of matches on the chair by her 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 new Victoria sandwich as well as the coffee cake. And don't forget to put little doilys under the plates, will you? You did yesterday again, you know, and the tea looked so ugly and common. And Alice, please 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 had better be kept for kitchen use—it's so shabby and quite smelly. Put on the Chinese one out of the drawer in the dining-room sideboard. You quite understand—don't you? We'll have tea as soon as it is ready.'

Miss Beryl turned away.

‘That sing aloft on every tree—’

she sang as she left the kitchen, very pleased with her firm handling of Alice.

Oh, Alice was wild! She wasn't'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.

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It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was—she made her feel low: she talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn't't quite all there and she never lost her temper—never; even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything she seemed to have expected it to happen…. ‘If you please, Mrs. Burnell,’ said an imaginary Alice, as she went on buttering the scones, ‘I'd rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn't't know how to play the guitar …’ This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper. She carried the tray along the passage to the dining-room.

‘The only thing to do,’ she heard as she opened the door, ‘is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders and round the arms instead.’ Mrs. Burnell with her elder and younger sister leaned over the table in the act of performing a very severe operation upon a white satin dress spread out before them. Old Mrs. Fairfield sat by the window in the sun with a roll of pink knitting in her lap.

‘My dears,’ said Beryl, ‘here comes the tea at last,’ and she swept a place clear for the tray. ‘But, PAGE 105 Doady,’ she said to Mrs. Trout, ‘I don't think I should dare to appear without any sleeves at all, should I?'

‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Trout, ‘all I can say is that there isn't one single evening dress in Mess’ Reading's last catalogue that has even a sign of a sleeve. Some of them have a rose on the shoulder and a piece of black velvet, but some of them haven't even that—and they look perfectly charming! What would look very pretty on the black velvet straps of your dress would be red poppies. I wonder if I can spare a couple out of this hat.'

She was wearing a big cream leghorn hat trimmed with a wreath of poppies and daisies—and as she spoke she unpinned it and laid it on her knee, and ran her hands over her dark silky hair.

'Oh, I think two poppies would look perfectly heavenly,’ said Beryl, ‘and just be the right finish, but of course I won't hear of you taking them out of that new hat, Doady—not for worlds.'

‘It would be sheer murder,’ said Linda, dipping a water-cress sandwich into the salt-cellar, and smiling at her sister.

‘But I haven't the faintest feeling about this hat —or any other for the matter of that,’ said Doady, PAGE 106 and she looked mournfully at the bright thing on her knee and heaved a profound sigh.

The three sisters were very unlike as they sat round the table. Mrs. Trout, tall and pale with heavy eyelids that drooped over her grey eyes, and rare, slender hands and feet, was quite a beauty. But Life bored her. She was sure that something very tragic was going to happen to her soon. She had felt it coming on for years. What it was she could not exactly say, but she was ‘fated’ somehow. How often when she had sat with Mother, Linda and Beryl, as she was sitting now, her heart had said: ‘How little they know!’ or, as it had then: ‘What a mockery this hat will be one day!’ and she had heaved just such a profound sigh …

And each time before her children were born she had thought that the tragedy would be fulfilled then. Her child would be born dead, or she saw the nurse going in to Richard, her husband, and saying: ‘Your child lives but'—and here the nurse pointed one finger upwards like the illustration of Agnes in ‘David Copperfield'—‘your wife is no more.’ But no, nothing particular had happened except that they had been boys and she had wanted girls, tender little caressing girls, not too strong, with hair to curl and PAGE 107 sweet little bodies to dress in white muslin threaded with pale blue.

Ever since her marriage she had lived at Monkey Tree Cottage. Her husband left for town at eight o'clock every morning and did not return until half-past six at night. Minnie was a wonderful servant. She did everything there was to be done in the house and looked after the little boys and even worked in the garden…. So Mrs. Trout became a perfect martyr to headaches. Whole days she spent on the drawing-room sofa with the blinds pulled down and a linen handkerchief steeped in eau-de-Cologne on her forehead. And as she lay there she used to wonder why it was that she was so certain that life had something terrible for her, and to try to imagine what that terrible thing could be … until by and by she made up perfect novels with herself for the heroine, all of them ending with some shocking catastrophe. ‘Dora'—for in these novels she always thought of herself in the third person: it was more touching somehow—‘Dora felt strangely happy that morning. She lay on the verandah looking out on the peaceful garden, and she felt how sheltered and how blessed her life had been after all. Suddenly the gate opened. A working man, a perfect stranger PAGE 108 to her, pushed up the path, and standing in front of her, he pulled off his cap, his rough face full of pity.

‘“I've bad news for you, Ma'am …

‘“Dead?” cried Dora, clasping her hands. “Both dead? …”’

Or since the Burnells had come to live at Tarana … she woke in the middle of the night. The room was full of a strange glare. ‘Richard! Richard, wake! Tarana is on fire’ … At last all were taken out. They stood on the blackened grass watching the flames rage. Suddenly the cry went up: Where was Mrs. Fairfield? God! where was she? ‘Mother!’ cried Dora, dropping on to her knees on the wet grass. ‘Mother!’ And she saw her Mother appear at an upper window. Just for a moment she seemed to faintly waver…. There came a sickening crash….

These dreams were so powerful that she would turn over, bury her face in the ribbon work cushion and sob. But they were a profound secret; and Doady's melancholy was always put down to her dreadful headaches….

‘Hand over the scissors, Beryl, and I'll snip them off now.'

‘Doady, you are to do nothing of the kind,’ said Beryl, handing her two pairs of scissors to choose from.

PAGE 109
The poppies were snipped off. ‘I hope you will really like Tarana,’ she said, sitting back in her chair and sipping her tea. ‘Of course it is at its best now, but I can't help feeling a little afraid that it will be very damp in the winter. Don't you feel that, Mother? The very fact that the garden is so lovely is a bad sign in a way—and then of course it is quite in the valley, isn't it? I mean it is lower than any of the other houses.'

‘I expect it will be flooded from the autumn to the spring,’ said Linda. ‘We shall have to set little frog traps, Doady—little mouse traps in bowls of water baited with a sprig of water-cress instead of a piece of cheese. And Stanley will have to row to the office in an open boat. He'd love that. I can imagine the glow he would arrive in and the way he'd measure his chest twice a day to see how fast it was expanding.'

‘Linda, you are very silly—very,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.

‘What can you expect from Linda,’ said Doady, ‘she laughs at everything—everything. I often wonder if there will ever be anything that Linda will not laugh at.'

‘Oh, I'm a heartless creature!’ said Linda. She got up and went over to her Mother. ‘Your cap is PAGE 110 just a tiny wink crooked, Mamma,’ said she, and she patted it straight with her quick little hands and kissed her Mother. ‘A perfect little icicle,’ she said, and kissed her again.

‘You mean you love to think you are,’ said Beryl, and she blew into her thimble, popped it on and drew the white satin dress towards her—and in the silence that followed she had a strange feeling—she felt her anger like a little serpent dart out of her bosom and strike at Linda. ‘Why do you always pretend to be so indifferent to everything?’ she said. ‘You pretend you don't care where you live, or if you see anybody or not, or what happens to the children or even what happens to you. You can't be sincere and yet you keep it up—you've kept it up for years. In fact'—and she gave a little laugh of joy and relief to be so rid of the serpent, she felt positively delighted—‘I can't even remember when it started now. Whether it started with Stanley or before Stanley's time, or after you had rheumatic fever, or when Isabel was born.'

‘Beryl!’ said Mrs. Fairfield sharply. ‘That's quite enough, quite enough!'

But Linda jumped up. Her cheeks were very white. ‘Don't stop her, Mother,’ she cried. ‘She's got PAGE 111 a perfect right to say whatever she likes. Why on earth shouldn't she?'

‘She has not,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘She has no right whatever.'

Linda opened her eyes at her Mother. ‘What a way to contradict anybody,’ she said. ‘I'm ashamed of you—and how Doady must be enjoying herself! The very first time she comes to see us at our new house we sit hitting one another over the head.'

The door handle rattled and turned. Kezia looked tragically in. ‘Isn't it ever going to be tea time?’ she asked.

‘No, never!’ said Linda.

‘Your Mother doesn't't care, Kezia, whether you ever set eyes on her again. She doesn't't care if you starve. You are all going to be sent to the Home for Waifs and Strays to-morrow.'

‘Don't tease,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘She believes every word.’ And she said to Kezia, ‘I'm coming, darling. Run upstairs to the bathroom and wash your face, your hands and your knees.'

On the way home with the children Mrs. Trout began an entirely new novel. It was night. Richard was out somewhere. (He always was on these occasions.) PAGE 112 She was sitting in the drawing-room by candlelight, playing over ‘Solveig's Song,’ when Stanley Burnell appeared—hatless—pale. At first he could not speak. ‘Stanley, tell me, what is it?’ And she put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Linda has gone,’ he said hoarsely. Even Mrs. Trout's imagination could not question this flight. She had to accept it very quickly and pass on. ‘She never cared,’ said Stanley. ‘God knows I did all I could. But she wasn't't happy. I knew she wasn't't happy.'

‘Mum,’ said Rags, ‘which would you rather be if you had to—a duck or a fowl?'

‘I'd rather be a fowl—much rather,’ said she.

The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that evening. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on the 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 better basted. They were both such a rich colour and they both had the same air of gloss and stain. Alice a peony red and the duck a Spanish mahogany. Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife; he prided PAGE 113 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 after they'd done with it. Now, he did; he really took it seriously—he really took a pride in cutting delicate shaves of beef, little slices of mutton just the right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or a duck with nice precision, so that it could appear a second time and still look a decent member of society.

‘Is this one of the home products?’ he asked, knowing perfectly well that it was.

‘Yes, dear, the butcher didn't come; we have discovered that he only comes three times a week.'

But there wasn't't any need to apologise for it; it was a superb bird, it wasn't't meat at all, it was a kind of very superior jelly.

‘Father would say,’ said Burnell, ‘that this was one of those birds whose mother must have 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? Beryl, you and I are the only people in this house with a real feeling for food—I am PAGE 114 perfectly willing to state, in a court of law if the necessity arises, that I love good food.'

Tea was served in the drawing-room after dinner and Beryl, who, for some reason, had been very charming to Stanley ever since he came home, suggested he and she should play a game of crib. They sat down at a little table near one of the open windows. Mrs. Fairfield had gone upstairs, 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, and she moved the tall lamp to her side, so that she sat under its soft light.

How remote they looked, those two, from where Linda watched and rocked. The green table, the bright polished cards, Stanley's big hands and Beryl's tiny white ones, moving the tapping red and white pegs along the little board, seemed all to be part of one mysterious movement. Stanley himself sat at ease, big and solid in his loose fitting dark suit, a look of health and well-being about him. And there was Beryl in the white and black muslin dress, with her bright head bent under the lamplight. Round her throat she wore a black velvet ribbon. It changed her—altered the shape of her face and throat somehow—but PAGE 115 it was very charming, Linda decided. The room smelled of lilies. There were two big jars of white arums in the fireplace.

‘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 woefulness, 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, coming down the road again. They were pursuing each other. They did not so much want to get ahead as to keep near enough to talk—to keep near—perhaps that was all.

But no, there was one always who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up and wouldn't listen. Perhaps one was frightened of the other, or perhaps the white one was cruel and did not want to hear and would not even give him a chance to speak.

In the bosom of her dress Beryl wore a bunch of black pansies, and once, just as the little pegs were close side by side, as she bent over, the pansies dropped out and covered them.

‘What a shame to stop them,’ said she, as she PAGE 116 picked up the pansies, ‘just when they had a moment to fly into each other's arms!'

‘Good-bye, my girl,’ laughed Stanley, and away the red peg hopped.

The drawing-room was long and narrow with two windows and a glass door that gave on to the verandah. It had a cream paper with a pattern of gilt roses, and above the white marble mantelpiece was the big mirror in a gilt frame wherein Beryl had seen her drowned reflection. A white polar-bear skin lay in front of the fireplace, 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 back. Above it there hung an oil painting by Beryl of a large cluster of surprised looking clematis—for 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 meant to buy a Chesterfield and two decent chairs and—goodness only knows … 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, sillies, before it is too late. Fly out again.'

PAGE 117
But no, round and round they flew, and they seemed to bring the silence of the moonlight in with them on their tiny 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?’ Perhaps he felt her restlessness.

‘No, nothing; I'm going to find Mother.'

She went out of the room and, standing at the foot of the stairs, she called: ‘Mother!’ But Mrs. Fairfield's voice came across the hall from the verandah.

The moon that Lottie and Kezia had seen from the storeman's wagon was nearly full, and the house, the garden, old Mrs. Fairfield and Linda, all were bathed in a dazzling light.

‘I have been looking at the aloe,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘I believe it is going to flower, this year. Wouldn't that be wonderfully lucky? Look at the top there! All 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 PAGE 118 aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon those lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.

‘Do you feel too?’ said Linda, and she spoke, like her mother with the special voice that women use at night to each other, as though they spoke in their sleep, or from the bottom of a deep well—‘Don't you feel that it is coming towards us?'

And she dreamed that she and her mother were caught up on the cold water and into the ship with the lifted oars and the budding mast. But now the oars fell striking quickly, quickly and they rowed far away over the tops of the garden trees, over the paddocks and the dark bush beyond. She saw her mother, sitting quietly in the boat, sunning herself in the moonlight, as she expressed it. No, after all, it would be better if her mother did not come, for she heard herself cry: ‘Faster! Faster!’ to those who were rowing.

How much more natural this dream was than that she should go back to the house where the children lay sleeping and where Stanley and Beryl sat playing cribbage!

‘I believe there are buds,’ said she. ‘Let us go down into the garden, Mother, I like that aloe. I like PAGE 119 it more than anything else 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 sight of them her heart grew hard. She particularly liked the long sharp thorns. Nobody would dare to come near her ship or to follow after. ‘Not even my Newfoundland dog,’ thought she, ‘whom I'm so fond of in the day time.'

For she really was fond of him. She loved and admired and respected him tremendously; and she understood him—Oh, better than anybody else in the world! She knew him through and through. He was the soul of truth and sincerity and, for all his practical experience, he was awfully simple, easily pleased and easily hurt.

If only he didn't jump at her so, and bark so loudly, and thump with his tail, and watch her with such eager, loving eyes! He was too strong for her; she always had hated things that rushed at her, even when she was a child. There were times when he PAGE 120 was frightening—really frightening, when she just hadn't screamed at the top of her voice: ‘You are killing me!’ and when 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 seriously affected, and Doctor Dear has told you that I may die at any moment. I've had three great lumps of children already.'

Yes, yes, it was true, and, thinking of it, she snatched her hand away from her Mother's arm. For all her love and respect and admiration, she hated him.

It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings about Stanley, one just as true as the other, sharp defined. She could have done them up in little packets, and there was this other—just as separate as the rest, this hatred, and yet just as real. She wished she could have done them up in little packets and given them to Stanley—especially the last one—she would like to watch him while he opened that …

She hugged her folded arms and began to laugh silently. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How absurd it all was! It really was funny—simply funny. And the idea of her hating Stanley (she could see his astonishment if PAGE 121 she had cried out, or given him the packet) was funniest of all. Yes, it was perfectly true, what Beryl had said that afternoon—she didn't care for anything. But it wasn't't a pose; Beryl was wrong there—she laughed because she couldn't help laughing….

And why this mania to keep alive? For it really was mania! ‘What am I guarding myself so preciously for,’ she thought, mocking and silently laughing. ‘I shall go on having children and Stanley will go on making money, and the children and the houses will grow bigger and bigger, with larger and larger gardens—and whole fleets of aloe trees in them for me to choose from….’ Why this mania to keep alive indeed? In the bottom of her heart she knew that now she was not being perfectly sincere. She had a reason but she couldn't express it—no, not even to herself.

She had been walking with her head bent looking at nothing; now she looked up and about her. Her mother and she were standing by the red and white camellia trees. Beautiful were the rich dark leaves spangled with light and the round flowers that perched among the leaves like red and white birds. Linda pulled a piece of verbena and crumbled it and held up the cup of her hands to her mother.

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‘Delicious!’ said Mrs. Fairfield, bending over to smell. ‘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 of?’ said Linda. ‘Tell me.'

But Mrs. Fairfield said: ‘I haven't really been thinking of anything at all. 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 black-currant and gooseberry bushes in the vegetable garden. I noticed them to-day. I should like to see the pantry shelves thoroughly well stocked with our own jam….'

At this point in the manuscript the following note occurs:

This is a strange fact about Madame Allègre. She walks very well—quite beautifully. I saw her just now go down to the bottom of the garden with a pail in one hand and a basket in the other.

Prepare charcoal fire every night before turning in. Then one has only to go down, put a match to it and stick on the funnel, and it's ready by the time you're dressed! How clever.

I must break through again. I feel so anxious and so worried about the Sardinia* that I can't write. What I have
* TheSardiniawas the P. & O. liner in which Katherine's sister was returning from India, at the moment of the intensified submarine campaign of Germany.

PAGE 123 done seems to me to be awfully, impossibly good compared to the Stuff I wrote yesterday. I believe if I had another shock (!)—if for instance Mlle Marthe* turned up I might manage, but at present, je veux mourir. I ought to write a letter from Beryl to Nan Fry.
This is all too laborious.

‘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.’

‘In a way it's an awful relief, for he's 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 dreadful cubby hole in town.

‘But buried, my dear. Buried isn't the word!

‘We have got neighbours, but they're only farmers—big louts of boys who always seem to be milking, and two dreadful females with protruding teeth who came over when we were moving and brought us some scones and said they were sure they'd be very willing to help. My sister, who lives
* For Mlle Marthe, see “Letters,” Vol. I, pp. 55 and 61.

PAGE 124 a mile away, says she doesn't't really know a soul here, so I'm sure we never, never shall, and I'm 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 frightful frump in a year or two, and come and see you in a mackintosh with a sailor hat tied on with a white China silk motor veil!

‘Stanley says that now we're settled—for after the most ghastly fortnight of my life we really are settled—he is going to bring out a couple of men from the club each week for tennis, on Saturday afternoons. In fact, two are promised us 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, too, when you're walking about a tennis court in white shoes—and pulling up their trousers every minute—don't you know—and whacking at imaginary things with their racquets.

‘I used to play with them at the Club Court last summer, and I'm sure you'll 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 this place, but then when I am Mother's age I suppose I PAGE 125 shall be quite content to sit in the sun and shell peas into a basin. But I'm not—not—not.

‘What Linda really thinks about the whole affair, per usual, I haven't the slightest idea. She is as mysterious as ever….

‘My dear, you know that white satin dress of mine, I've taken the sleeves out entirely, put straps of black velvet across the shoulders and two big red poppies out of my dear sister's chapeau. It's a great success, though when I shall wear it I do not know….'

Beryl sat writing this letter at a little table in front of the window 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 mean a word of it. No, that wasn't't right. She felt all those things, but she didn't really feel them like that. The Beryl who wrote that letter might have been leaning over her shoulder and guiding her hand—so separate was she: and yet in a way, perhaps she was more real than the other, the real Beryl. She had been getting stronger and stronger for a long while.

There had been a time when the real Beryl had just made use of the false one to get her out of awkward positions—to glide her over hateful moments—to help her to bear the stupid, ugly, PAGE 126 sometimes beastly, things that happened. She had, as it were, called to the unreal Beryl, and seen her coming, and seen her going away again, quite definitely and simply. But that was long ago. The unreal Beryl was greedy and jealous of the real one. Gradually she took more and stayed longer. Gradually she came more quickly, and now the real Beryl was hardly certain sometimes if she were there or not.

Days, weeks at a time passed without her ever for a moment ceasing to act a part, for that was really what it came to, and then, quite suddenly, when the unreal self had forced her to do something she did not want to do at all, she had come into her own again, and for the first time realised what had been happening.

Perhaps it was because she was not leading the life that she wanted to—she had not a chance to really express herself—she was always living below her power, and therefore she had no need of her real self, her real self only made her wretched.

At this point in the manuscript the following note occurs:

What is it that I'm getting at? It is really Beryl's Sosie. The fact that for a long time now, she hasn't been even able to control her second self: it's her second self who now controls her…. There was a kind of radiant being who wasn't't either spiteful or malicious, of whom she'd had a glimpse—whose very PAGE 127 voice was different to hers—who was grave—who never would have dreamed of doing the things that she did. Had she banished this being, or had it really got simply tired and left her? I want to get at all this through her, just as I got at Linda through Linda. To suddenly merge her into herself.

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't right: she felt all those things, but she didn't really feel them like that.

It was her other self, whose slave or whose mistress she was—which? who had written that letter. It not only bored—it rather disgusted her real self.

‘Flippant and silly,’ said her real self, yet she knew she'd send it and that she'd always write that kind of twaddle to Nan Fry. 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—faint already, like a voice heard over a telephone wire, high, gushing, with something bitter in the sound. Oh, she detested it to-day.

‘You've always got so much animation,’ said Nan Fry. ‘That's why men are so keen on you.' PAGE 128 And she had added, rather mournfully (for men weren't keen on Nan—she was a solid kind of girl with fat hips and a high colour), ‘I can't understand how you keep it up, but it's your nature, I suppose.'

What rot! What nonsense! It wasn't't her nature at all! Good Heavens! If she'd ever been her real self with Nan Fry, Nannie would have jumped out of the window with surprise. ‘My dear, you know that white satin dress of mine'—Ugh! Beryl slammed her letter-case to.

She jumped up, and half consciously, half unconsciously, she drifted over to the looking glass. There stood a slim girl dressed in white—a short white serge skirt, a white silk blouse and a white leather belt drawn in tight round her tiny waist. She had a heart-shaped face, wide at the brows and with a pointed chin—but not too pointed…. Her eyes, her eyes were perhaps her best feature: such a strange, uncommon colour too, greeny blue with little gold spots in them.

She had fine black eyebrows and long black lashes—so long that when they lay on her cheeks they positively caught the light, someone or other had told her.

Her mouth was rather large—too large? No, PAGE 129 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 wasn't't 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 spreadness of it just because it was her nose and she was so awfully critical of herself. She pinched it with her thumb and second finger and made a little face.

Lovely long hair. And such masses of it. It was the colour of fresh fallen leaves, brown and red, with a glint of yellow. Almost it seemed to have a life of its own, it was so warm and there was such a deep ripple in it. When she plaited it in one thick plait it hung on her back just like a long snake. She loved to feel the weight of it drag her head back; she loved to feel it loose, covering her bare arms.

It had been the fashion among the girls at Miss Birch's to brush Beryl's hair. ‘Do, do let me brush your hair, darling Beryl.’ But nobody brushed it as beautifully as Nan Fry. Beryl would sit in front of the dressing table in her cubicle, wearing a white linen wrapper, and behind her stood Nannie in a PAGE 130 dark red woollen gown buttoned up to her chin. Two candles gave a pointing, flickering light.

Her hair streamed over the chair back. She shook it out, she yielded it up to Nannie's adoring hands. In the glass Nannie's face above the dark gown was like a round sleeping mask. Slowly she brushed, with long, caressing strokes. Her hand and the brush were like one thing upon the warm hair. She would say with a kind of moaning passion, laying down the brush and looping the hair in her hands: ‘It's more beautiful than ever, B. It really is lovelier than last time.’ And then she would brush again. She seemed to send herself to sleep with the movement and the gentle sound—she had something of the look of a blind cat, as though it were she who was being stroked, and not Beryl.

But nearly always these brushings came to an unpleasant ending. Nannie did something silly. Quite suddenly she would snatch up Beryl's hair and bury her face in it, and kiss it, or clasp her hands round Beryl's head and press it back against her firm breast, sobbing: ‘You are so beautiful! You don't know how beautiful you are—beautiful, beautiful!'

And at these moments Beryl had such a feeling of horror, such a violent thrill of physical dislike for PAGE 131 Nan Fry. ‘That's enough. That's quite enough. Thank you. You've brushed it beautifully. Good-night, Nan.’ She didn't even try to suppress her contempt and her disgust…. And the curious thing was that Nan Fry seemed to understand this, even to expect it, never protesting, but stumbling away out of the cubicle, and perhaps whispering ‘Forgive me’ at the door. And the more curious thing was that Beryl let her brush her hair again, and let this happen again … and again there was this silly scene between them, always ending in the same way, more or less, and never, never referred to in the day time.

But she did brush hair so beautifully.

Was her hair less bright now? No, not a bit!

At this point in the manuscript the following note occurs:

ROBIN SENDS TO BERYL—

Lives like logs of driftwood 
Tossed on a watery main 
Other logs encounter, 
Drift, touch, part again.

And so it is with our lives 
On life's tempestuous sea. 
We meet, we greet, we sever, 
Drifting eternally.…;

‘Yes, my dear, there's no denying it, you really are a lovely little thing.'

PAGE 132
At the words her breast lifted, she took a long breath, smiling with delight, and half closing her eyes as if she held a sweet, sweet bouquet up to her face—a fragrance that made her faint.

But even as she looked the smile faded from her lips and eyes—and, oh God! there she was, back again, playing the same old game. False, false as ever! False as when she'd written to Nan Fry. False even when she was alone with herself now.

What had that creature in the glass to do with her really, and why on earth was she staring at her? She dropped down by the side of her bed and buried her head in her arms.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I'm so miserable, so frightfully miserable. I know I'm silly and spiteful and vain. I'm always acting a part. I'm never my real self for a minute.’ 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 how the light shone on her hair, pouting and pretending to be a little girl when anybody asked her to play the guitar. Why, she even kept it up for Stanley's benefit! Only last night, when he was reading the paper, she had stood beside him and leaned PAGE 133 against his shoulder on purpose, and she had put her hand over his pointing out something, and said at the same time: ‘Heavens! Stanley, how brown your hands are,’ only that he should notice how white hers were!

How despicable! Her heart grew cold with rage!

‘It's marvellous how you keep it up!’ she had said to her false self. But then it was only because she was so miserable—so miserable! If she'd been happy—if she'd been living her own life, all this false life would simply cease to be. And now she saw the real Beryl, a radiant shadow … a shadow…. Faint and unsubstantial shone the real self. What was there of her except that radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she! Beryl could almost remember every one of them…. She did not mean that she was exactly happy then, it was a feeling that overwhelmed her at certain times … certain nights when the wind blew with a forlorn cry and she lay cold in her bed, wakeful and listening … certain lovely evenings when she passed down a road where there were houses and big gardens and the sound of a piano came from one of the houses. And then certain Sunday nights in Church, when the gas flickered and the pews were shadowy and the lines of the hymns were almost too sweet and sad to bear … PAGE 134 and rare, rare times, rarest of all, when it was not the voice of outside things that had moved her so—she remembered one of them, when she had sat up one night with Linda. Linda was very ill. She had watched the pale dawn come in through the blinds and she had seen Linda, lying propped up high with pillows, her arms outside the quilt and the shadow of her hair dusky against the white. And at all these times she had felt: ‘Life is wonderful—life is rich and mysterious. But it is good, too, and I am rich and mysterious and good.’ Perhaps that is what she might have said … but she did not say those things. Then she knew her false self was quite, quite gone, and she longed to be always as she was just at that moment, to become that Beryl for ever…. ‘Shall I? How can I? And did I ever not have a false self?'

But just when she had got that far she heard the sound of wheels coming up the drive, and little steps running along the passage to her room and Kezia's voice calling:

‘Aunt Beryl! Aunt Beryl!'

She got up. Botheration! How she had crumpled her skirt! Kezia burst in.

‘Aunt Beryl, Mother says will you please come down because Father's home and lunch is ready.'

PAGE 135
‘Very well, Kezia.’ She went over to the dressing table and powdered her nose.

Kezia crossed over, too, and unscrewed a little pot of cream and sniffed it. Under her arm Kezia carried a very dirty calico cat.

When Aunt Beryl had run out of the room she sat the cat up on the dressing table and stuck the top of the cream jar over one of its ears.

‘Now look at yourself,’ said she sternly.

The calico cat was so appalled at the effect that it toppled backwards and bumped and bounced on 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, put it on the dressing table and walked away, far too quickly and airily.

