The Garden Party and Other Stories

In a steamer chair, under a manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away.  She did nothing.  She looked up at the dark, close, dry leaves of the manuka, at the chinks of blue between, and now and again a tiny yellowish flower dropped on her.  Pretty—­yes, if you held one of those flowers on the palm of your hand and looked at it closely, it was an exquisite small thing.  Each pale yellow petal shone as if each was the careful work of a loving hand.  The tiny tongue in the centre gave it the shape of a bell.  And when you turned it over the outside was a deep bronze colour.  But as soon as they flowered, they fell and were scattered.  You brushed them off your frock as you talked; the horrid little things got caught in one’s hair.  Why, then, flower at all?  Who takes the trouble—­or the joy—­to make all these things that are wasted, wasted…It was uncanny.

On the grass beside her, lying between two pillows, was the boy.  Sound asleep he lay, his head turned away from his mother.  His fine dark hair looked more like a shadow than like real hair, but his ear was a bright, deep coral.  Linda clasped her hands above her head and crossed her feet.  It was very pleasant to know that all these bungalows were empty, that everybody was down on the beach, out of sight, out of hearing.  She had the garden to herself; she was alone.

Dazzling white the picotees shone; the golden-eyed marigold glittered; the nasturtiums wreathed the veranda poles in green and gold flame.  If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness, time to know them!  But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the under-side of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away.  And, lying in her cane chair, Linda felt so light; she felt like a leaf.  Along came Life like a wind and she was seized and shaken; she had to go.  Oh dear, would it always be so?  Was there no escape?

...Now she sat on the veranda of their Tasmanian home, leaning against her father’s knee.  And he promised, “As soon as you and I are old enough, Linny, we’ll cut off somewhere, we’ll escape.  Two boys together.  I have a fancy I’d like to sail up a river in China.”  Linda saw that river, very wide, covered with little rafts and boats.  She saw the yellow hats of the boatmen and she heard their high, thin voices as they called…

“Yes, papa.”

But just then a very broad young man with bright ginger hair walked slowly past their house, and slowly, solemnly even, uncovered.  Linda’s father pulled her ear teasingly, in the way he had.

“Linny’s beau,” he whispered.

“Oh, papa, fancy being married to Stanley Burnell!”

Well, she was married to him.  And what was more she loved him.  Not the Stanley whom every one saw, not the everyday one; but a timid, sensitive, innocent Stanley who knelt down every night to say his prayers, and who longed to be good.  Stanley was simple.  If he believed in people—­as he believed in her, for instance—­it was with his whole heart.  He could not be disloyal; he could not tell a lie.  And how terribly he suffered if he thought any one—­she—­was not being dead straight, dead sincere with him!  “This is too subtle for me!” He flung out the words, but his open, quivering, distraught look was like the look of a trapped beast.

But the trouble was—­here Linda felt almost inclined to laugh, though Heaven knows it was no laughing matter—­she saw her Stanley so seldom.  There were glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm, but all the rest of the time it was like living in a house that couldn’t be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day.  And it was always Stanley who was in the thick of the danger.  Her whole time was spent in rescuing him, and restoring him, and calming him down, and listening to his story.  And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children.

Linda frowned; she sat up quickly in her steamer chair and clasped her ankles.  Yes, that was her real grudge against life; that was what she could not understand.  That was the question she asked and asked, and listened in vain for the answer.  It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children.  It wasn’t true.  She, for one, could prove that wrong.  She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone, through child-bearing.  And what made it doubly hard to bear was, she did not love her children.  It was useless pretending.  Even if she had had the strength she never would have nursed and played with the little girls.  No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them.  As to the boy—­ well, thank Heaven, mother had taken him; he was mother’s, or Beryl’s, or anybody’s who wanted him.  She had hardly held him in her arms.  She was so indifferent about him that as he lay there…Linda glanced down.

The boy had turned over.  He lay facing her, and he was no longer asleep.  His dark-blue, baby eyes were open; he looked as though he was peeping at his mother.  And suddenly his face dimpled; it broke into a wide, toothless smile, a perfect beam, no less.

“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.