‘I shall have to go.’
Almost immediately he heard her coming down. She had on her best dress of black voile, and her hair was tidy, but still damp. She looked at him – and in spite of herself, smiled.
‘I don’t like you in those clothes,’ she said.
‘Do I look a sight?’ he answered.
They were shy of one another.
‘I’ll make you some tea,’ she said.
‘No, I must go.’
‘Must you?’ And she looked at him again with the wide, strained, doubtful eyes. And again, from the pain of his breast, he knew how he loved her. He went and bent to kiss her, gently, passionately, with his heart’s painful kiss.
‘And my hair smells so horrible,’ she murmured in distraction. ‘And I’m so awful, I’m so awful! Oh no, I’m too awful.’ And she broke into a bitter, heart-broken sobbing. ‘You can’t want to love me, I’m horrible.’
‘Don’t be silly, don’t be silly,’ he said, trying to comfort her, kissing her, holding her in his arms. ‘I want you, I want to marry you, we’re going to be married, quickly, quickly – tomorrow if I can.’
But she only sobbed terribly, and cried:
‘I feel awful. I feel awful. I feel I’m horrible to you.’
‘No, I want you, I want you,’ was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her.
Katherine Mansfield
FEUILLE D’ALBUM
HE really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether. With absolutely nothing to say for himself. And such a weight. Once he was in your studio he never knew when to go, but would sit on and on until you nearly screamed, and burned to throw something enormous after him when he did finally blush his way out – something like the tortoise stove. The strange thing was that at first sight he looked most interesting. Everybody agreed about that. You would drift into the café one evening and there you would see, sitting in a corner, with a glass of coffee in front of him, a thin dark boy, wearing a blue jersey with a little grey flannel jacket buttoned over it. And somehow that blue jersey and the grey jacket with the sleeves that were too short gave him the air of a boy that has made up his mind to run away to sea. Who has run away, in fact, and will get up in a moment and sling a knotted handkerchief containing his nightshirt and his mother’s picture on the end of a stick, and walk out into the night and be drowned… Stumble over the wharf edge on his way to the ship, even… He had black close-cropped hair, grey eyes with long lashes, white cheeks and a mouth pouting as though he were determined not to cry…. How could one resist him? Oh, one’s heart was wrung at sight. And, as if that were not enough, there was his trick of blushing… Whenever the waiter came near him he turned crimson – he might have been just out of prison and the waiter in the know…
‘Who is he, my dear? Do you know?’
‘Yes. His name is Ian French. Painter. Awfully clever, they say. Someone started by giving him a mother’s tender care. She asked him how often he heard from home, whether he had enough blankets on his bed, how much milk he drank a day. But when she went round to his studio to give an eye to his socks, she rang and rang, and though she could have sworn she heard someone breathing inside, the door was not answered…. Hopeless!’
Someone else decided that he ought to fall in love. She summoned him to her side, called him ‘boy’, leaned over him so that he might smell the enchanting perfume of her hair, took his arm, told him how marvellous life could be if one only had the courage, and went round to his studio one evening and rang and rang…. Hopeless.
‘What the poor boy really wants is thoroughly rousing,’ said a third. So off they went to cafés and cabarets, little dances, places where you drank something that tasted like tinned apricot juice, but cost twenty-seven shillings a bottle and was called champagne, other places, too thrilling for words, where you sat in the most awful gloom, and where someone had always been shot the night before. But he did not turn a hair. Only once he got very drunk, but instead of blossoming forth, there he sat, stony, with two spots of red on his cheeks, like, my dear, yes, the dead image of that rag-time thing they were playing, like a ‘Broken Doll’. But when she took him back to his studio he had quite recovered, and said ‘good night’ to her in the street below, as though they had walked home from church together…. Hopeless.
After heaven knows how many more attempts – for the spirit of kindness dies very hard in women – they gave him up. Of course, they were still perfectly charming, and asked him to their shows, and spoke to him in the café but that was all. When one is an artist one has no time simply for people who won’t respond. Has one?
‘And besides I really think there must be something rather fishy somewhere… don’t you? It can’t all be as innocent as it looks! Why come to Paris if you want to be a daisy in the field? No, I’m not suspicious. But – ’
He lived at the top of a tall mournful building overlooking the river. One of those buildings that look so romantic on rainy nights and moonlight nights, when the shutters are shut, and the heavy door, and the sign advertising ‘a little apartment to let immediately’ gleams forlorn beyond words. One of those buildings that smell so unromantic all the year round, and where the concierge lives in a glass cage on the ground floor, wrapped up in a filthy shawl, stirring something in a saucepan and ladling out tit-bits to the swollen old dog lolling on a bead cushion…. Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful view. The two big windows faced the water; he could see the boats and the barges swinging up and down, and the fringe of an island planted with trees, like a round bouquet. The side window looked across to another house, shabbier still and smaller, and down below there was a flower market. You could see the tops of huge umbrellas, with frills of bright flowers escaping from them, booths covered with striped awning where they sold plants in boxes and clumps of wet gleaming palms in terracotta jars. Among the flowers the old women scuttled from side to side, like crabs. Really there was no need for him to go out. If he sat at the window until his white beard fell over the sill he still would have found something to draw …
How surprised those tender women would have been if they had managed to force the door. For he kept his studio as neat as a pin. Everything was arranged to form a pattern, a little ‘still life’ as it were – the saucepans with their lids on the wall behind the gas stove, the bowl of eggs, milk jug and teapot on the shelf, the books and the lamp with the crinkly paper shade on the table. An Indian curtain that had a fringe of red leopards marching round it covered his bed by day, and on the wall beside the bed on a level with your eyes when you were lying down there was a small neatly printed notice: GET UP AT ONCE.
Every day was much the same. While the light was good he slaved at his paintings, then cooked his meals and tidied up the place. And in the evenings he went off to the café, or sat at home reading or making out the most complicated list of expenses headed: ‘What I ought to be able to do it on,’ and ending with a sworn statement… ‘I swear not to exceed this amount for next month. Signed, Ian French.’
Nothing very fishy about this; but those far-seeing women were quite right. It wasn’t all.
One evening he was sitting at the side window eating some prunes and throwing the stones on to the tops of the huge umbrellas in the deserted flower market. It had been raining – the first real spring rain of the year had fallen – a bright spangle hung on everything, and the air smelled of buds and moist earth. Many voices sounding languid and content rang out in the dusky air, and the people who had come to close their windows and fasten the shutters leaned out instead. Down below in the market the trees were peppered with new green. What kind of trees were they? he wondered. And now came the lamplighter. He stared at the house across the way, the small shabby house, and suddenly, as if in answer to his gaze, two wings of windows opened and a girl came out on to the tiny balcony carrying a pot of daffodils. She was a st
rangely thin girl in a dark pinafore, with a pink handkerchief tied over her hair. Her sleeves were rolled up almost to her shoulders and her slender arms shone against the dark stuff.
‘Yes, it is quite warm enough. It will do them good,’ she said, putting down the pot and turning to someone in the room inside. As she turned she put her hands up to the handkerchief and tucked away some wisps of hair. She looked down at the deserted market and up at the sky, but where he sat there might have been a hollow in the air. She simply did not see the house opposite. And then she disappeared.
His heart fell out of the side window of his studio, and down to the balcony of the house opposite – buried itself in the pot of daffodils under the half-opened buds and spears of green…. That room with the balcony was the sitting room, and the one next door to it was the kitchen. He heard the clatter of the dishes as she washed up after supper, and then she came to the window, knocked a little mop against the ledge, and hung it on a nail to dry. She never sang or unbraided her hair, or held out her arms to the moon as young girls are supposed to do. And she always wore the same dark pinafore and the pink handkerchief over her hair…. Whom did she live with? Nobody else came to those two windows, and yet she was always talking to someone in the room. Her mother, he decided, was an invalid. They took in sewing. The father was dead…. He had been a journalist – very pale, with long moustaches, and a piece of black hair falling over his forehead.
By working all day they just made enough money to live on, but they never went out and they had no friends. Now when he sat down at his table he had to make an entirely new set of sworn statements…. Not to go to the side window before a certain hour: signed Ian French. Not to think about her until he had put away his painting things for the day: signed, Ian French.
It was quite simple. She was the only person he really wanted to know, because she was, he decided, the only other person alive who was just his age. He couldn’t stand giggling girls, and he had no use for grown-up women…. She was his age, she was – well, just like him. He sat in his dusky studio, tired, with one arm hanging over the back of his chair, staring in at her window and seeing himself in there with her. She had a violent temper; they quarrelled terribly at times, he and she. She had a way of stamping her foot and twisting her hands in her pinafore … furious. And she very rarely laughed. Only when she told him about an absurd little kitten she once had who used to roar and pretend to be a lion when it was given meat to eat. Things like that made her laugh…. But as a rule they sat together very quietly; he, just as he was sitting now, and she with her hands folded in her lap and her feet tucked under, talking in low tones, or silent and tired after the day’s work. Of course, she never asked him about his pictures, and of course he made the most wonderful drawings of her which she hated, because he made her so thin and so dark…. But how could he get to know her? This might go on for years …
Then he discovered that once a week, in the evenings, she went out shopping. On two successive Thursdays she came to the window wearing an old-fashioned cape over the pinafore, and carrying a basket. From where he sat he could not see the the door of her house, but on the next Thursday evening at the same time he snatched up his cap and ran down the stairs. There was a lovely pink light over everything. He saw it glowing in the river, and the people walking towards him had pink faces and pink hands.
He leaned against the side of his house waiting for her and he had no idea of what he was going to do or say. ‘Here she comes,’ said a voice in his head. She walked very quickly, with small, light steps; with one hand she carried the basket, with the other she kept the cape together…. What could he do? He could only follow…. First she went into the grocer’s and spent a long time in there, and then she went into the butcher’s where she had to wait her turn. Then she was an age at the draper’s matching something, and then she went to the fruit shop and bought a lemon. As he watched her he knew more surely than ever he must get to know her, now. Her composure, her seriousness and her loneliness, the very way she walked as though she was eager to be done with this world of grown-ups all was so natural to him and so inevitable.
‘Yes, she is always like that,’ he thought proudly. ‘We have nothing to do with these people.’
But now she was on her way home and he was as far off as ever…. She suddenly turned into the dairy and he saw her through the window buying an egg. She picked it out of the basket with such care – a brown one, a beautifully shaped one, the one he would have chosen. And when she came out of the dairy he went in after her. In a moment he was out again, and following her past his house across the flower market, dodging among the huge umbrellas and treading on the fallen flowers and the round marks where the pots had stood…. Through her door he crept and up the stairs after, taking care to tread in time with her so that she should not notice. Finally, she stopped on the landing, and took the key out of her purse. As she put it into the door he ran up and faced her.
Blushing more crimson than ever, but looking at her severely he said, almost angrily: ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you dropped this.’
And he handed her an egg.
Joyce Cary
GOVERNMENT BABY
‘SHE’S coming, Caffin.’ Two grinning faces appeared outside the mosquito house. The wire mesh gave them the look of early press photographs, grey and blurred.
Caffin, a pale, fat young man, lying on the bed in a singlet, glared savagely at them.
‘Can’t you let me sleep?’ he growled. ‘I got a head like a sore tooth.’
‘But you told us to tell you – it’s that mish girl that brought the tracts yesterday.’
‘Damn it all, why does she come now?’
‘Oh well, it’s all right, it’s only because you said to tell you.’
They smiled at Caffin and Caffin glared at them. The smiles were now a little doubtful and Caffin felt the doubt. He got up slowly, swearing to himself, dressed even to a necktie, drank a hasty gin to steady his legs, and stepped out into the afternoon sun.
His two hosts peering out of the top windows of the store bungalow across the glaring earth of the station, watched him intercept the girl at the opening of the mission road.
He took off his hat, she jumped off her bicycle with a quick eager gesture. Caffin stooped forward, hollowing his back and wriggling his behind in a Chaplin pose. The two men in the store laughed, and Billson, who was the agent in charge, a man of fifty who did not laugh easily, said in a tone of surprised pleasure: ‘That chap – he really is – ’
Caffin accosted the girl. He gave another wriggle and raised his hat high into the air. The two watchers suddenly exploded with laughter. They could not contain themselves. Billson did not seem the same man. The tall dignified agent, with his thick grey hair and reserved critical expression, fell back into a chair, kicked up his legs and crowed. He clasped himself. He could not bear it. With a violent effort he controlled himself, sat up and wiped his eyes.
‘You couldn’t believe it unless you saw it – what a nerve – ’
Meanwhile Caffin, his head swimming, played his part.
‘I read the tract you left at the store, Miss, and I was wondering if you had any more of the same kind.’
‘Oh, I’m so glad you liked it.’ She was a short, thick-set girl with a snub nose and round chin. She was neither plain nor pretty; an ordinary girl, but Caffin liked her skin and her expression. The first told him that she was young and new to Africa, the second that she was full of life and enthusiasm. He leant towards her giving his bottom another wriggle for the pleasure of his admirers, and said earnestly, ‘You don’t mind me speaking to you like this, Miss.’
‘Of course not – ’
‘Well, Miss, I only thought you might have heard something – ’
The delighted watchers, now including every white man in the station, saw Caffin’s modest air of repentant sinner, the girl’s eager and encouraging glances and gestures while he led h
er slowly towards the deeper shade of the bush road down which they disappeared. The bicycle left leaning against a tree was the only relic of the episode. Billson stared at it as if at something solid left over from a dream. ‘You couldn’t believe it,’ he murmured. ‘What a nerve.’
This was Caffin’s first visit to Dabbi. He had been sacked from some temporary job further down the river and had invited himself to stay with Billson who had once met him on a boat. Caffin was a well-known character. There were many stories about him and all of them created the idea of a complete liar, soaker, coward, and thief. But Dabbi thought them a little too good.
Saxby, the district officer, had used these very words at the club, ‘Perhaps a little too good, Billson.’
‘Oh, of course, the chaps pile it on,’ Billson agreed.
All the same, Caffin had a gratifying reception at the club that night. At least he had shown unusual gifts.
‘And where’s the lady friend?’ Saxby asked him.
‘She had to go back to her Bible class. She asked me to go along, but I said I was shy.’
The club which was held that night in the store compound down by the river, laughed heartily. Caffin didn’t laugh. He was a post-war hero and his pose was the hard-boiled, the bored, the victim of fate.
‘She’ll change you yet, Caffy.’
‘You bet,’ he said. ‘Back to the fold.’
There was another laugh, but Caffin said gloomily, ‘I can’t keep off ’em.’
Saxby, who had been as generous as anyone in his appreciation of the artist, said, ‘You’re a wonderful chap, Caffin – how do you do it?’
‘There’s only one thing to tell a girl – that you’re bad – rotten bad.’
‘You tell ’em the truth, Caffy,’ said a young soldier.
‘Yes, they won’t believe it – not a really nice girl.’
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 18