At that moment a great excitement started in the room and Bluebell jumped up as though she had been stung. No, she had not been stung. But the bee had collected all his force and had come to vigorous life and had come out fighting. He raced around the room, making a very loud noise, and tried to get out through the back windows, which looked over a green space that had a few trees and, at the far side, a bed where daffodils were in bloom. Mary Ann opened the window and he flew out. He was so big that she could follow his flight for a good distance. He seemed all right, and he seemed to know what he was doing. That bee will be swept right back to the ocean with the first wind, the voice said. You did him no good. He must be stupid or he would never have been blown down there in the first place . . .
She went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. All true, she said to herself. No doubt about it, everything you say is true.
The Children Are Very Quiet When They Are Away
It is a winter-afternoon sky, very dark, and lowering itself now to thicken the heavy mist that is gathering over the dunes. The Atlantic Ocean, hidden by the fading dunes, is thundering today. The line of the dunes is growing dimmer, and the huge house that stands up there over the sea is becoming ghostly. It is an enormously clumsy house, with hundreds of diamond-paned windows and a massive front door that has flights of stone steps going up to it. Inside, there must be at least eighty or ninety rooms, all of different shapes and some with balconies. In clear weather, some of the balconies can be seen from here.
“Here” is a small lawn that stretches its little length with modest satisfaction in front of a fat, romantic cottage that is very closely related to the amiable monstrosity on the dunes. The cottage might have been baked from a bit of dough left over after the giant’s place on the dunes was made. They are alike, and the cottage has its own massive doorway and its diamond-paned windows and its big beams and its gingerbread roof.
The giant house is inhabited in the summertime by seven children, and the cottage is the home of a black Labrador retriever and five handsome mongrel cats. The retriever’s name is Bluebell and she is almost six years old. On a bleak day like today, the cats stay indoors. They are asleep around the house, or they are at the windows, attentive to nothing. But at the edge of the driveway that separates the small lawn from the great one leading to the dunes, Bluebell lies on guard, with a large hollow bone between her front paws and her head turned toward the big house away up there in the distance. Bluebell must wonder why the children do not appear. They were always appearing, from all directions, and descending on her, when she did not reach them first. They used to swoop down from their house and across the lawn in a flight of white shorts and white shirts, and Bluebell never crossed the driveway to trespass on their grass until she was certain they were coming to her. They used to call her name as they ran for her, and as their breath shortened and their voices came closer, her name sounded louder, and the sound of it filled her with a joy that could only increase, because there was no limit to the children’s energy or to their affection for her. “Bluebell. Good Bluebell. Good Bluebell.” There had never been so many voices calling her all at once, or so many legs to charge at and then avoid, or so many admiring faces to watch and please. Please them all, always please, that was her duty, her only duty, and she had never before seen it so plain, or felt it to be so simple, or so interesting, or felt herself so valuable. She was a dog and she performed like a dog. She forgot her middle age and her extra weight and her gray muzzle, and she frolicked like a puppy, and like a mustang, and like a kitten.
She found a treasure in the short grass and then, after smelling it importantly, she tormented it for a few seconds with her paws before she pranced away and left it as it was, invisible. She entertained like a dog. She lay stretched on her back with her huge chest heaving dramatically. Upside down she is grotesque, a vulnerable monster. She might be a sacrifice, on the lawn, in the sunlight. Her front paws hang in the air empty and aimless, and the big, soft ears that make her look demure and mournful fall away, inside out, and leave her face exposed and wild. And her eyes are wild; they look at nothing. The children are astonished to see their familiar turn mysterious, and they make a circle around her. They are embarrassed, because she is shameless, and they try to clear the air with their laughter. “Look at Bluebell. She is funny.” Who is Bluebell now, and what is she? She is not herself. The smallest girl decides that Bluebell is a bench, and she sits heavily down on the softest place, the stomach. Bluebell springs rudely up and resumes her proper shape. Now she is a dog again, and she stands on four legs again. The children welcome her return by telling her her name: Bluebell, Bluebell, Bluebell. Bluebell brandishes her heavy tail and challenges the eyes that watch her with her eyes, and then she races away and they all race after her. She has never been so pursued. She has never been so famous or so celebrated. Her name is on every lip. She has come into her own. She is the only dog in the world.
But here it is winter, with the cold winter weather that is so good for playing in, and she has been waiting for hours, ever since last summer, and the children have not appeared. If she watches faithfully they will appear. They generally come out around this time. Whenever they come out is this time. Bluebell moves the old bone over to the middle of the driveway, and then she resumes her dignified attitude, with her paws precisely arranged, as though she were lying in wait on her own tomb. Her head is turned to the house on the dunes. It is lost in the mist. The house is gone. There is no sound except the pounding of the sea in the distance, and that sound means nothing to Bluebell. What use to plunge into the sea and brave the waves when she has no witnesses? The lawn is empty, shrinking away into the mist, and the air has turned to silence. No voice is calling from up there on the dunes. There is no Bluebell. Her name is lost. She was the only dog in the world, but now she is only a dog. It is all the children’s fault, all this absence. It is all their fault. They are too quiet. All this silence can be blamed on them, and all this waste. Bluebell takes her eyes from the dunes and puts her chin on the empty bone between her paws. She drowses. It is all the children’s fault. Everything is too quiet. It is all their fault. The children are quiet because they are away. But what is away, and then, what is here? Bluebell is here. Bluebell sleeps. Now Bluebell is away where the children are who are so quiet here.
In and Out of Never-Never Land
In East Hampton, it was the Fourth of July, the hour just before dawn—very early-morning tea time. Mary Ann Whitty looked into the brown eyes of her dog, Bluebell, and she thought, The dog is kind and good, but the cats have style. . . . She was sitting in her living room, which was remarkable to her because it was hers alone, and because it contained her furniture, her books, her dog, and her cats. The furniture was shabby, the books were worn and showed the signs of long storage, the cats all wore mixed furs, and Bluebell, the black Labrador retriever, was not as serene as a dog of her age and nature ought to be. Bluebell had spent too much time in too many different kennels.
Mary Ann did not care that her household was a trifle bedraggled. What mattered to her was that all her possessions were collected together in one place. She admired the room she had made for herself, and she admired everything in it. She was so pleased with herself and her possessions and arrangements that she even admired the lacks in her house. For example, a simple example, she had no dining-room table. She knew she should have a proper table, a proper place for eating, and that without it her life was makeshift, but she thought that makeshift ways were very well suited to this strange little house, which wore such a temporary air that the first time she walked into it she said to herself that it was not a real house but an impossibility, not a house at all, and that she must rent it immediately, because it might very well not be there when she looked for it again. Not that the house looked as though it might fall down or be blown away. It had a solid look; there was nothing at all fragile about it. But it did not look as though it belonged where it was, by the edge of the sea.
/> Mary Ann had a friend who rejoiced when he first saw it. “This is not a house by the sea,” he said. “It is certainly not a house in East Hampton. It is somewhere else. It is a town house. No, it is a house in the middle of a forest. The Black Forest, I think. It is a folie. Whatever it is, it is not real—not a real house, at any rate. And why did they put it sideways?”
Instead of facing the ocean, which was so close that the waves made themselves heard all day and all night, the little house faced its lawn—really only a strip cut from the huge lawn that swept down from the great house on the dunes where the seven children lived, all of them Bluebell’s friends. Alongside Mary Ann’s house, hidden from her by a tall hedge, there was a lovely, simple flower garden that slanted away from a small apple orchard and into a field of long grass. Bluebell wandered among the apple trees without permission, and without permission the cats had taken the wild field for their hunting ground. On Mary Ann’s side of the hedge the flower bed that stretched the length of her lawn was strikingly neglected, but the daffodils and roses and hollyhocks that had been planted there long ago still bloomed at their appointed times, as if to show what they once had been and still might be if somebody would give them a little help.
Sometimes Mary Ann walked from her front door to the grove of pine trees that separated her lawn from the golf course, and as she walked she inspected the tangle of weeds and withered vines that smothered the beds, and she thought, It is a disgrace. But the word “disgrace” came tranquilly into her mind and caused no uneasiness there. She excused herself from gardening as she did from sewing, simply by announcing she had not the gift for it. She was inclined to be mulish about the things she did not do—not drive a car, not garden, not sew—and it was in something of the same spirit that she congratulated herself as sincerely on what her house lacked as she did on what it held. But in spite of all it lacked, and for all its temporary air, the little house had an air of gaiety about it, and even of welcome. It is the high ceiling, Mary Ann thought, and the books, and the big fireplace, and the mauve rug casts a cheerful light. And in any case, she thought, the house, like me, is goodhearted in spite of itself.
It was absurd, the little house with its baronial front door and its towering diamond-paned windows that had more wood than glass in them, and its lofty black beams that were not very old and not at all necessary, and its scalloped black-iron hasps, and handles, and hinges on all the doors—even on the bathroom door. The hinges were always flying off the doors and landing at Mary Ann’s feet with a noisy clank, and she was constantly on her hands and knees searching for the long black spikes that would hold them back on the door until the next fit of humor took them, but she did not mind. The house was always losing bits of itself, and she spent hours trying to find lost pieces of paper—letters, bills, lists, old checkbooks that might tell her where the money had gone—but she persevered just as the house did, and she thought, As long as nobody asks me any questions, everything will come out all right.
Her house was closely related to the house on the dunes where the seven children lived. The children’s house was really enormous—hundreds of rooms pressed into the shape of a cottage and covered with a deep shingled roof. It had been put up shortly after the First World War, and at the foot of its majestic lawn its miniature, Mary Ann’s house, had been built for the caretaker. The people who had lived in the big house and employed a caretaker had all gone away long ago, and the seven children had been in possession there for years now.
Mary Ann, the newcomer, did not know exactly when Bluebell and the children had discovered each other. She imagined Bluebell on the grass in the sun one morning, or one afternoon, raising her big head to see a pair of bare legs, several pairs of bare legs, standing at a safe distance and on their own side of the driveway that separated them from Bluebell’s private ground. The children must have been on their toes, ready to fly if the strange dog turned fierce. Bluebell was very black, and her ample body was covered with shining flat fur, a handsome coat of it, but her muzzle was gray, and she had a comical look. Comical or not, she had long sharp teeth and great paws that could hold her prey to the ground if she chose to find prey. The children must have wondered about her. Bluebell would not have bothered to wonder. What she saw was what she always saw—not children or birds or cats or mice but interesting new manifestations of the friendliness she believed existed for her in all that lived. If it lived, it moved, and whether it moved by creeping or running or walking or flying or hopping or simply by blowing like torn paper about the lawn, Bluebell wanted it. This new apparition, so near to her and quite unknown, must have struck her with joy. Fourteen legs, seven faces, and a variety of voices, all there just waiting to be claimed. She would have begun her campaign at once, beating a vigorous overture on the ground with her heavy tail.
Mary Ann could only imagine all that. What was certain was that Bluebell no longer decorated the front of the house for hours in the morning and during the afternoon. Now she was always away, off somewhere, following the children into their house and out of it again, and traveling with them along the beach and over the golf course and even into the village. Bluebell had another secret now to lay on top of the eternal secret that was guarded, or imprisoned, by her animal silence. She had a new world of her own that was free of the cats and free of Mary Ann, but she showed her independence of them only at the moment of her departure from the house and the moment of her return to it. These days, when she went out in the morning, she was purposeful, and her eyes turned at once to the house on the dunes to see if anyone was out and about. And when she came back and her own door was opened to her, she burst in, breathless, and threw herself on the floor, unable to speak for exhaustion and importance. While she panted, her tail hammered on the floor and her eyes roved wildly around the room, reclaiming everything she saw, but most of all reclaiming Mary Ann. “I choose you,” Bluebell’s eyes said to Mary Ann, “you, you,” and her gaze turned fervently to the kitchen, where her dinner waited.
The cats showed a faint, lazy interest in all this commotion. The biggest of them, the bright orange, sat up and then stood up and stretched, and lay down again, wrapping himself up in his own coat. “I am ignoring you,” each cat said, opening its eyes just enough to show a gleam of light, and then, closing its eyes again, each cat said, as always, “I choose myself.”
But the moment had arrived when East Hampton, with its waves and sand and its wide golf course and its ponds of wild water birds and its fine main street and its hilly green graveyard, was about to be revealed all over again by the new light. Mary Ann heard the first birds, the smallest ones, who sing suddenly at the end of darkness. She listened to their sweet voices, and then she stood up and went to open the front door. It was still night out, but the darkness had retreated into the bushes and trees. She could see the sky shifting. It was the moment she liked, because it proved she was right and that nothing was real. It was also the moment when the cats went out to kill. She looked around the room and saw the big orange, the little black favorite, the long-haired wild one, and the quiet calico. Only Tom, the secret hunter, was absent. Tom hunted alone and far away and never, thank God, brought his little victims into the house. Mary Ann walked through the empty blue-floored room that led to her small kitchen and heated a saucepan of milk and gave it to the cats, hoping to lull them back to sleep and sloth. She turned out the light in the kitchen and saw the dim blue world outside. It was nearly time for the sea gulls to start their march inland. She would have liked to go outside to watch them, but the one morning she had gone out, her long white robe had startled them, and they had risen up in outrage and gone away screeching that their day was ruined.
She went upstairs and stood at her bedroom window, which faced the sea. The sea gulls were just appearing, coming in from the beach and lining up along the top of the long rise that banked the road going down to the sea. They began to walk at once, taking their usual path, which brought them at an angle across the golf course and down the c
hildren’s lawn to Mary Ann’s house. Now the golf course was ghostly with them, and they continued to advance, white birds that whitened and grew bigger as they drew closer. They all walked. The few that flew up descended to the ground at once and started walking again. Some sailed while they walked, showing their wings. They came this way every morning, sometimes more of them and sometimes fewer, and the leaders always stopped at the far edge of the narrow driveway that separated her lawn from the children’s. A few steps more would have brought the sea gulls to the walls of her house, but they never took the last few steps, and no matter how close they came they always seemed to be very far away. They walked like emperors, or like jockeys, or like stoics. They knew the ocean, and kept vigil by it in regimental rows, and they screamed against patience, and walked for their health on expensive grass, and Mary Ann thought they knew themselves and she was baffled by them. They were indomitable. There was no need to fear for them or pity them. In her imagination they were living stones that had found wings to save themselves during some long and drastic fall in forgotten times.
Now the leaders reached the edge of the driveway, the limit of their walk, and paused, and there was a general pause all the way back across the lawn and the golf course, and then they all rose up and flew back to the sea. To watch the sea gulls go was like watching the snow stop falling. You couldn’t say when the last flake fell, and you could not mark the last sea gull. Mary Ann turned from the window and looked at her bed, which was very large and took up most of the room. She had closed the bedroom door after her, but Bluebell had slipped in with her and was now curled humbly on a corner of the pink quilt. “All right, Bluebell,” Mary Ann said, “as long as you’re here,” and she lay down and pulled the quilt over her and fell asleep, knowing unrepentantly that the sun had risen.
The Rose Garden Page 27