Bliss, and other stories
And, indeed, she loved Little B so much—her neck as she bent forward,
her exquisite toes as they shone transparent in the firelight—that all
her feeling of bliss came back again, and again she didn’t know how to
express it—what to do with it.
“You’re wanted on the telephone,” said Nanny, coming back in triumph
and seizing _her_ Little B.
Down she flew. It was Harry.
“Oh, is that you, Ber? Look here. I’ll be late. I’ll take a taxi and
come along as quickly as I can, but get dinner put back ten
minutes—will you? All right?”
“Yes, perfectly. Oh, Harry!”
“Yes?”
What had she to say? She’d nothing to say. She only wanted to get in
touch with him for a moment. She couldn’t absurdly cry: “Hasn’t it been
a divine day!”
“What is it?” rapped out the little voice.
“Nothing. _Entendu_,” said Bertha, and hung up the receiver, thinking
how more than idiotic civilization was.
They had people coming to dinner. The Norman Knights—a very sound
couple—he was about to start a theatre, and she was awfully keen on
interior decoration, a young man, Eddie Warren, who had just published
a little book of poems and whom everybody was asking to dine, and a
“find” of Bertha’s called Pearl Fulton. What Miss Fulton did, Bertha
didn’t know. They had met at the club and Bertha had fallen in love
with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had
something strange about them.
The provoking thing was that, though they had been about together and
met a number of times and really talked, Bertha couldn’t yet make her
out. Up to a certain point Miss Fulton was rarely, wonderfully frank,
but the certain point was there, and beyond that she would not go.
Was there anything beyond it? Harry said “No.” Voted her dullish, and
“cold like all blond women, with a touch, perhaps, of anæmia of the
brain.” But Bertha wouldn’t agree with him; not yet, at any rate.
“No, the way she has of sitting with her head a little on one side, and
smiling, has something behind it, Harry, and I must find out what that
something is.”
“Most likely it’s a good stomach,” answered Harry.
He made a point of catching Bertha’s heels with replies of that kind .
. . “liver frozen, my dear girl,” or “pure flatulence,” or “kidney
disease,” . . . and so on. For some strange reason Bertha liked this,
and almost admired it in him very much.
She went into the drawing-room and lighted the fire; then, picking up
the cushions, one by one, that Mary had disposed so carefully, she
threw them back on to the chairs and the couches. That made all the
difference; the room came alive at once. As she was about to throw the
last one she surprised herself by suddenly hugging it to her,
passionately, passionately. But it did not put out the fire in her
bosom. Oh, on the contrary!
The windows of the drawing-room opened on to a balcony overlooking the
garden. At the far end, against the wall, there was a tall, slender
pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though
becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn’t help feeling, even
from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal. Down
below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with
flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly,
crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The
sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver.
“What creepy things cats are!” she stammered, and she turned away from
the window and began walking up and down. . . .
How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room. Too strong? Oh, no.
And yet, as though overcome, she flung down on a couch and pressed her
hands to her eyes.
“I’m too happy—too happy!” she murmured.
And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide
open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.
Really—really—she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as
much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were
really good pals. She had an adorable baby. They didn’t have to worry
about money. They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden.
And friends—modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets
or people keen on social questions—just the kind of friends they
wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and she had
found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the
summer, and their new cook made the most superb omelettes. . . .
“I’m absurd. Absurd!” She sat up; but she felt quite dizzy, quite
drunk. It must have been the spring.
Yes, it was the spring. Now she was so tired she could not drag herself
upstairs to dress.
A white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and stockings. It
wasn’t intentional. She had thought of this scheme hours before she
stood at the drawing-room window.
Her petals rustled softly into the hall, and she kissed Mrs. Norman
Knight, who was taking off the most amusing orange coat with a
procession of black monkeys round the hem and up the fronts.
“. . . Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy—so utterly without a
sense of humour! My dear, it’s only by a fluke that I am here at
all—Norman being the protective fluke. For my darling monkeys so upset
the train that it rose to a man and simply ate me with its eyes. Didn’t
laugh—wasn’t amused—that I should have loved. No, just stared—and bored
me through and through.”
“But the cream of it was,” said Norman, pressing a large
tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle into his eye, “you don’t mind me telling
this, Face, do you?” (In their home and among their friends they called
each other Face and Mug.) “The cream of it was when she, being full
fed, turned to the woman beside her and said: ‘Haven’t you ever seen a
monkey before?’”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Norman Knight joined in the laughter. “Wasn’t that too
absolutely creamy?”
And a funnier thing still was that now her coat was off she did look
like a very intelligent monkey—who had even made that yellow silk dress
out of scraped banana skins. And her amber ear-rings; they were like
little dangling nuts.
“This is a sad, sad fall!” said Mug, pausing in front of Little B’s
perambulator. “When the perambulator comes into the hall——” and he
waved the rest of the quotation away.
The bell rang. It was lean, pale Eddie Warren (as usual) in a state of
acute distress.
“It _is_ the right house, _isn’t_ it?” he pleaded.
“Oh, I think so—I hope so,” said Bertha brightly.
“I have had such a _dreadful_ experience with a taxi-man; he was _most_
sinister. I couldn’t get him to _stop._ The _more_ I knocked and called
the _faster_ he went. And _in_ the moonlight this _bizarre_ figure with
the _flattened_ head _crouching_ over the _lit-tle_ wheel. . . .”
He shuddered, taking off an immense white silk scarf. Bertha noticed
that his socks were white, too—most charming.
“But how dreadful!” she cried.
“Yes, it really was,” said Eddie, following her into the drawing-room.
“I saw myself _driving_ through Eternity in a _timeless_ taxi.”
He knew the Norman Knights. In fact, he was going to write a play for
N. K. when the theatre scheme came off.
“Well, Warren, how’s the play?” said Norman Knight, dropping his
monocle and giving his eye a moment in which to rise to the surface
before it was screwed down again.
And Mrs. Norman Knight: “Oh, Mr. Warren, what happy socks?”
“I _am_ so glad you like them,” said he, staring at his feet. “They
seem to have got so _much_ whiter since the moon rose.” And he turned
his lean sorrowful young face to Bertha. “There _is_ a moon, you know.”
She wanted to cry: “I am sure there is—often—often!”
He really was a most attractive person. But so was Face, crouched
before the fire in her banana skins, and so was Mug, smoking a
cigarette and saying as he flicked the ash: “Why doth the bridegroom
tarry?”
“There he is, now.”
Bang went the front door open and shut. Harry shouted: “Hullo, you
people. Down in five minutes.” And they heard him swarm up the stairs.
Bertha couldn’t help smiling; she knew how he loved doing things at
high pressure. What, after all, did an extra five minutes matter? But
he would pretend to himself that they mattered beyond measure. And then
he would make a great point of coming into the drawing-room,
extravagantly cool and collected.
Harry had such a zest for life. Oh, how she appreciated it in him. And
his passion for fighting—for seeking in everything that came up against
him another test of his power and of his courage—that, too, she
understood. Even when it made him just occasionally, to other people,
who didn’t know him well, a little ridiculous perhaps. . . . For there
were moments when he rushed into battle where no battle was. . . . She
talked and laughed and positively forgot until he had come in (just as
she had imagined) that Pearl Fulton had not turned up.
“I wonder if Miss Fulton has forgotten?”
“I expect so,” said Harry. “Is she on the ’phone?”
“Ah! There’s a taxi, now.” And Bertha smiled with that little air of
proprietorship that she always assumed while her women finds were new
and mysterious. “She lives in taxis.”
“She’ll run to fat if she does,” said Harry coolly, ringing the bell
for dinner. “Frightful danger for blond women.”
“Harry—don’t,” warned Bertha, laughing up at him.
Came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing and talking, just
a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware. And then Miss
Fulton, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blond
hair, came in smiling, her head a little on one side.
“Am I late?”
“No, not at all,” said Bertha. “Come along.” And she took her arm and
they moved into the dining-room.
What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan—fan—start
blazing—blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do
with?
Miss Fulton did not look at her; but then she seldom did look at people
directly. Her heavy eyelids lay upon her eyes and the strange half
smile came and went upon her lips as though she lived by listening
rather than seeing. But Bertha knew, suddenly, as if the longest, most
intimate look had passed between them—as if they had said to each
other: “You, too?”—that Pearl Fulton stirring the beautiful red soup in
the grey plate was feeling just what she was feeling.
And the others? Face and Mug, Eddie and Harry, their spoons rising and
falling—dabbing their lips with their napkins, crumbling bread,
fiddling with the forks and glasses and talking.
“I met her at the Alpha show—the weirdest little person. She’d not only
cut off her hair, but she seemed to have taken a dreadfully good snip
off her legs and arms and her neck and her poor little nose as well.”
“Isn’t she very _liée_ with Michael Oat?”
“The man who wrote _Love in False Teeth?_”
“He wants to write a play for me. One act. One man. Decides to commit
suicide. Gives all the reasons why he should and why he shouldn’t. And
just as he has made up his mind either to do it or not to do
it—curtain. Not half a bad idea.”
“What’s he going to call it—‘Stomach Trouble’?”
“I _think_ I’ve come across the same _idea_ in a lit-tle French review,
_quite_ unknown in England.”
No, they didn’t share it. They were dears—dears—and she loved having
them there, at her table, and giving them delicious food and wine. In
fact, she longed to tell them how delightful they were, and what a
decorative group they made, how they seemed to set one another off and
how they reminded her of a play by Tchekof!
Harry was enjoying his dinner. It was part of his—well, not his nature,
exactly, and certainly not his pose—his—something or other—to talk
about food and to glory in his “shameless passion for the white flesh
of the lobster” and “the green of pistachio ices—green and cold like