Bliss, and other stories
gave a little squeak. But the old woman only pressed her faintly, and
sighed again, took out her teeth, and put them in a glass of water
beside her on the floor.
In the garden some tiny owls, perched on the branches of a lace-bark
tree, called: “More pork; more pork.” And far away in the bush there
sounded a harsh rapid chatter: “Ha-ha-ha . . . Ha-ha-ha.”
5
Dawn came sharp and chill with red clouds on a faint green sky and
drops of water on every leaf and blade. A breeze blew over the garden,
dropping dew and dropping petals, shivered over the drenched paddocks,
and was lost in the sombre bush. In the sky some tiny stars floated for
a moment and then they were gone—they were dissolved like bubbles. And
plain to be heard in the early quiet was the sound of the creek in the
paddock running over the brown stones, running in and out of the sandy
hollows, hiding under clumps of dark berry bushes, spilling into a
swamp of yellow water flowers and cresses.
And then at the first beam of sun the birds began. Big cheeky birds,
starlings and mynahs, whistled on the lawns, the little birds, the
goldfinches and linnets and fan-tails flicked from bough to bough. A
lovely kingfisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich
beauty, and a _tui_ sang his three notes and laughed and sang them
again.
“How loud the birds are,” said Linda in her dream. She was walking with
her father through a green paddock sprinkled with daisies. Suddenly he
bent down and parted the grasses and showed her a tiny ball of fluff
just at her feet. “Oh, Papa, the darling.” She made a cup of her hands
and caught the tiny bird and stroked its head with her finger. It was
quite tame. But a funny thing happened. As she stroked it began to
swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round
eyes seemed to smile knowingly at her. Now her arms were hardly wide
enough to hold it and she dropped it into her apron. It had become a
baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird-mouth, opening and
shutting. Her father broke into a loud clattering laugh and she woke to
see Burnell standing by the windows rattling the Venetian blind up to
the very top.
“Hullo,” he said. “Didn’t wake you, did I? Nothing much wrong with the
weather this morning.”
He was enormously pleased. Weather like this set a final seal on his
bargain. He felt, somehow, that he had bought the lovely day, too—got
it chucked in dirt cheap with the house and ground. He dashed off to
his bath and Linda turned over and raised herself on one elbow to see
the room by daylight. All the furniture had found a place—all the old
paraphernalia—as she expressed it. Even the photographs were on the
mantelpiece and the medicine bottles on the shelf above the wash-stand.
Her clothes lay across a chair—her outdoor things, a purple cape and a
round hat with a plume in it. Looking at them she wished that she was
going away from this house, too. And she saw herself driving away from
them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even
waving.
Back came Stanley girt with a towel, glowing and slapping his thighs.
He pitched the wet towel on top of her hat and cape, and standing firm
in the exact centre of a square of sunlight he began to do his
exercises. Deep breathing, bending and squatting like a frog and
shooting out his legs. He was so delighted with his firm, obedient body
that he hit himself on the chest and gave a loud “Ah.” But this amazing
vigour seemed to set him worlds away from Linda. She lay on the white
tumbled bed and watched him as if from the clouds.
“Oh, damn! Oh, blast!” said Stanley, who had butted into a crisp white
shirt only to find that some idiot had fastened the neck-band and he
was caught. He stalked over to Linda waving his arms.
“You look like a big fat turkey,” said she.
“Fat. I like that,” said Stanley. “I haven’t a square inch of fat on
me. Feel that.”
“It’s rock—it’s iron,” mocked she.
“You’d be surprised,” said Stanley, as though this were intensely
interesting, “at the number of chaps at the club who have got a
corporation. Young chaps, you know—men of my age.” He began parting his
bushy ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass, his
knees bent, because the dressing table was always—confound it—a bit too
low for him. “Little Wally Bell, for instance,” and he straightened,
describing upon himself an enormous curve with the hairbrush. “I must
say I’ve a perfect horror . . .”
“My dear, don’t worry. You’ll never be fat. You are far too energetic.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose that’s true,” said he, comforted for the hundredth
time, and taking a pearl pen-knife out of his pocket he began to pare
his nails.
“Breakfast, Stanley.” Beryl was at the door. “Oh, Linda, mother says
you are not to get up yet.” She popped her head in at the door. She had
a big piece of syringa stuck through her hair.
“Everything we left on the verandah last night is simply sopping this
morning. You should see poor dear mother wringing out the tables and
the chairs. However, there is no harm done——” this with the faintest
glance at Stanley.
“Have you told Pat to have the buggy round in time? It’s a good six and
a half miles to the office.”
“I can imagine what this early start for the office will be like,”
thought Linda. “It will be very high pressure indeed.”
“Pat, Pat.” She heard the servant girl calling. But Pat was evidently
hard to find; the silly voice went baa—baaing through the garden.
Linda did not rest again until the final slam of the front door told
her that Stanley was really gone.
Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie’s stolid,
compact little voice cried: “Ke—zia. Isa—bel.” She was always getting
lost or losing people only to find them again, to her great surprise,
round the next tree or the next corner. “Oh, there you are after all.”
They had been turned out after breakfast and told not to come back to
the house until they were called. Isabel wheeled a neat pramload of
prim dolls and Lottie was allowed for a great treat to walk beside her
holding the doll’s parasol over the face of the wax one.
“Where are you going to, Kezia?” asked Isabel, who longed to find some
light and menial duty that Kezia might perform and so be roped in under
her government.
“Oh, just away,” said Kezia. . . .
Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the
room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time, but in the
morning it was intolerable. She turned over to the wall and idly, with
one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem
and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the
poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals,
the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight
glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only
large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns
of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had
seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of
dancers with priests attending. . . . For there were some tassels that
did not dance at all but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or
chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of
little men with brown top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of
sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.
“I dreamed about birds last night,” thought Linda. What was it? She had
forgotten. But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was
what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some
mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that
they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they
were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves.
Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and
could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right
because THEY were there; sometimes when she went out of a room and left
it empty, she knew as she clicked the door to that THEY were filling
it. And there were times in the evenings when she was upstairs,
perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly escape from
them. Then she could not hurry, she could not hum a tune; if she tried
to say ever so carelessly—“Bother that old thimble”—THEY were not
deceived. THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her
head away as she passed the mirror. What Linda always felt was that
THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up
and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would
really happen.
“It’s very quiet now,” she thought. She opened her eyes wide, and she
heard the silence spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she
breathed; she scarcely had to breathe at all.
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.
6
In the kitchen at the long deal table under the two windows old Mrs.
Fairfield was washing the breakfast dishes. The kitchen window looked
out on to a big grass patch that led down to the vegetable garden and
the rhubarb beds. On one side the grass patch was bordered by the
scullery and wash-house and over this whitewashed lean-to there grew a
knotted vine. She had noticed yesterday that a few tiny corkscrew
tendrils had come right through some cracks in the scullery ceiling and
all the windows of the lean-to had a thick frill of ruffled green.
“I am very fond of a grape vine,” declared Mrs. Fairfield, “but I do
not think that the grapes will ripen here. It takes Australian sun.”
And she remembered how Beryl when she was a baby had been picking some
white grapes from the vine on the back verandah of their Tasmanian
house and she had been stung on the leg by a huge red ant. She saw
Beryl in a little plaid dress with red ribbon tie-ups on the shoulders
screaming so dreadfully that half the street rushed in. And how the
child’s leg had swelled! “T—t—t—t!” Mrs. Fairfield caught her breath
remembering. “Poor child, how terrifying it was.” And she set her lips
tight and went over to the stove for some more hot water. The water
frothed up in the big soapy bowl with pink and blue bubbles on top of
the foam. Old Mrs. Fairfield’s arms were bare to the elbow and stained
a bright pink. She wore a grey foulard dress patterned with large
purple pansies, a white linen apron and a high cap shaped like a jelly
mould of white muslin. At her throat there was a silver crescent moon
with five little owls seated on it, and round her neck she wore a watch
guard made of black beads.
It was hard to believe that she had not been in that kitchen for years;
she was so much a part of it. She put the crocks away with a sure,
precise touch, moving leisurely and ample from the stove to the
dresser, looking into the pantry and the larder as though there were
not an unfamiliar corner. When she had finished, everything in the
kitchen had become part of a series of patterns. She stood in the
middle of the room wiping her hands on a check cloth; a smile beamed on
her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory.
“Mother! Mother! Are you there?” called Beryl.
“Yes, dear. Do you want me?”
“No. I’m coming,” and Beryl rushed in, very flushed, dragging with her
two big pictures.
“Mother, whatever can I do with these awful hideous Chinese paintings
that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt? It’s absurd to say
that they are valuable, because they were hanging in Chung Wah’s fruit