The Garden Party, and Other Stories
“I’m here!” that happy smile seemed to say. “Why don’t you like me?”
There was something so quaint, so unexpected about that smile that
Linda smiled herself. But she checked herself and said to the boy
coldly, “I don’t like babies.”
“Don’t like babies?” The boy couldn’t believe her. “Don’t like _me_?”
He waved his arms foolishly at his mother.
Linda dropped off her chair on to the grass.
“Why do you keep on smiling?” she said severely. “If you knew what I
was thinking about, you wouldn’t.”
But he only squeezed up his eyes, slyly, and rolled his head on the
pillow. He didn’t believe a word she said.
“We know all about that!” smiled the boy.
Linda was so astonished at the confidence of this little creature....
Ah no, be sincere. That was not what she felt; it was something far
different, it was something so new, so.... The tears danced in her
eyes; she breathed in a small whisper to the boy, “Hallo, my funny!”
But by now the boy had forgotten his mother. He was serious again.
Something pink, something soft waved in front of him. He made a grab at
it and it immediately disappeared. But when he lay back, another, like
the first, appeared. This time he determined to catch it. He made a
tremendous effort and rolled right over.
VII
The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea.
The sun beat down, beat down hot and fiery on the fine sand, baking the
grey and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the
little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it
bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through and through the
sand-hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers.
Pit-pit-pit! They were never still.
Over there on the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy
beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin
like a silver coin dropped into each of the small rock pools. They
danced, they quivered, and minute ripples laved the porous shores.
Looking down, bending over, each pool was like a lake with pink and
blue houses clustered on the shores; and oh! the vast mountainous
country behind those houses—the ravines, the passes, the dangerous
creeks and fearful tracks that led to the water’s edge. Underneath
waved the sea-forest—pink thread-like trees, velvet anemones, and
orange berry-spotted weeds. Now a stone on the bottom moved, rocked,
and there was a glimpse of a black feeler; now a thread-like creature
wavered by and was lost. Something was happening to the pink, waving
trees; they were changing to a cold moonlight blue. And now there
sounded the faintest “plop.” Who made that sound? What was going on
down there? And how strong, how damp the seaweed smelt in the hot
sun....
The green blinds were drawn in the bungalows of the summer colony. Over
the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were
exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back
window seemed to have a pair of sand-shoes on the sill and some lumps
of rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered
in a haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts’ dog
Snooker, who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was
turned up, his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional
desperate-sounding puff, as much as to say he had decided to make an
end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along.
“What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort
of staring at the wall?”
Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little
girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and
legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma’s bed,
and the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at
the window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room
that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light
varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the
shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table, for instance, was a
packing-case in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was
very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was
imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed
so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a
special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and
another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice
place for a watch to curl up in.
“Tell me, grandma,” said Kezia.
The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew
the bone needle through. She was casting on.
“I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling,” she said quietly.
“My Australian Uncle William?” said Kezia. She had another.
“Yes, of course.”
“The one I never saw?”
“That was the one.”
“Well, what happened to him?” Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted
to be told again.
“He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died,” said old
Mrs. Fairfield.
Kezia blinked and considered the picture again.... A little man fallen
over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole.
“Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?” She hated her
grandma to be sad.
It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look
back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To
look after _them_ as a woman does, long after _they_ were out of sight.
Did it make her sad? No, life was like that.
“No, Kezia.”
“But why?” asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw
things in the air. “Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn’t old.”
Mrs. Fairfield began counting the stitches in threes. “It just
happened,” she said in an absorbed voice.
“Does everybody have to die?” asked Kezia.
“Everybody!”
“_Me?_” Kezia sounded fearfully incredulous.
“Some day, my darling.”
“But, grandma.” Kezia waved her left leg and waggled the toes. They
felt sandy. “What if I just won’t?”
The old woman sighed again and drew a long thread from the ball.
“We’re not asked, Kezia,” she said sadly. “It happens to all of us
sooner or later.”
Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant
she would have to leave here, leave everywhere, for ever, leave—leave
her grandma. She rolled over quickly.
“Grandma,” she said in a startled voice.
“What, my pet!”
“_You’re_ not to die.” Kezia was very decided.
“Ah, Kezia”—her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head—“don’t
let’s talk about it.”
“But you’re not to. You couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t not be there.”
This was awful. “Promise me you won’t ever do it, grandma,” pleaded
Kezia.
The old woman went on knitting.
“Promise me! Say never!”
But still her grandma was silent.
Kezia rolled off her bed; she couldn’t bear it any longer, and lightly
she leapt on to her grandma’s knees, clasped her hands round the old
woman’s throat and began kissing her, under the chin, behind the ear,
and blowing down her neck.
“Say never... say never... say never—” She gasped between the kisses.
And then she began, very softly and lightly, to tickle her grandma.
“Kezia!” The old woman dropped her knitting. She swung back in the
rocker. She began to tickle Kezia. “Say never, say never, say never,”
gurgled Kezia, while they lay there laughing in each other’s arms.
“Come, that’s enough, my squirrel! That’s enough, my wild pony!” said
old Mrs. Fairfield, setting her cap straight. “Pick up my knitting.”
Both of them had forgotten what the “never” was about.
VIII
The sun was still full on the garden when the back door of the
Burnells’ shut with a bang, and a very gay figure walked down the path
to the gate. It was Alice, the servant-girl, dressed for her afternoon
out. She wore a white cotton dress with such large red spots on it and
so many that they made you shudder, white shoes and a leghorn turned up
under the brim with poppies. Of course she wore gloves, white ones,
stained at the fastenings with iron-mould, and in one hand she carried
a very dashed-looking sunshade which she referred to as her
“_perishall_.”
Beryl, sitting in the window, fanning her freshly-washed hair, thought
she had never seen such a guy. If Alice had only blacked her face with
a piece of cork before she started out, the picture would have been
complete. And where did a girl like that go to in a place like this?
The heart-shaped Fijian fan beat scornfully at that lovely bright mane.
She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible common larrikin and
they’d go off into the bush together. Pity to have made herself so
conspicuous; they’d have hard work to hide with Alice in that rig-out.
But no, Beryl was unfair. Alice was going to tea with Mrs Stubbs, who’d
sent her an “invite” by the little boy who called for orders. She had
taken ever such a liking to Mrs. Stubbs ever since the first time she
went to the shop to get something for her mosquitoes.
“Dear heart!” Mrs. Stubbs had clapped her hand to her side. “I never
seen anyone so eaten. You might have been attacked by canningbals.”
Alice did wish there’d been a bit of life on the road though. Made her
feel so queer, having nobody behind her. Made her feel all weak in the
spine. She couldn’t believe that some one wasn’t watching her. And yet
it was silly to turn round; it gave you away. She pulled up her gloves,
hummed to herself and said to the distant gum-tree, “Shan’t be long
now.” But that was hardly company.
Mrs. Stubbs’s shop was perched on a little hillock just off the road.
It had two big windows for eyes, a broad veranda for a hat, and the
sign on the roof, scrawled MRS. STUBBS’S, was like a little card stuck
rakishly in the hat crown.
On the veranda there hung a long string of bathing-dresses, clinging
together as though they’d just been rescued from the sea rather than
waiting to go in, and beside them there hung a cluster of sandshoes so
extraordinarily mixed that to get at one pair you had to tear apart and
forcibly separate at least fifty. Even then it was the rarest thing to
find the left that belonged to the right. So many people had lost
patience and gone off with one shoe that fitted and one that was a
little too big.... Mrs. Stubbs prided herself on keeping something of
everything. The two windows, arranged in the form of precarious
pyramids, were crammed so tight, piled so high, that it seemed only a
conjurer could prevent them from toppling over. In the left-hand corner
of one window, glued to the pane by four gelatine lozenges, there
was—and there had been from time immemorial—a notice.
LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH
SOLID GOLD
ON OR NEAR BEACH
REWARD OFFERED
Alice pressed open the door. The bell jangled, the red serge curtains
parted, and Mrs. Stubbs appeared. With her broad smile and the long
bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand. Alice was
welcomed so warmly that she found it quite difficult to keep up her
“manners.” They consisted of persistent little coughs and hems, pulls
at her gloves, tweaks at her skirt, and a curious difficulty in seeing
what was set before her or understanding what was said.
Tea was laid on the parlour table—ham, sardines, a whole pound of
butter, and such a large johnny cake that it looked like an
advertisement for somebody’s baking-powder. But the Primus stove roared
so loudly that it was useless to try to talk above it. Alice sat down
on the edge of a basket-chair while Mrs. Stubbs pumped the stove still
higher. Suddenly Mrs. Stubbs whipped the cushion off a chair and
disclosed a large brown-paper parcel.
“I’ve just had some new photers taken, my dear,” she shouted cheerfully
to Alice. “Tell me what you think of them.”