Bliss - Katherine Mansfield (paper ebook reader TXT) 📗

dreadfully rude, especially when he seemed to take it to heart so, she was quite determined. “No, really, please.” “Well, will you just sit down on the sofa for five minutes and let me drink your health?” The little governess sat down on the edge of the red velvet couch and he sat down beside her and drank her health at a gulp. “Have you really been happy to-day?” asked the old man, turning round, so close beside her that she felt his knee twitching against hers. Before she could answer he held her hands. “And are you going to give me one little kiss before you go?” he asked, drawing her closer still.

It was a dream! It wasn’t true! It wasn’t the same old man at all. Ah, how horrible! The little governess stared at him in terror. “No, no, no!” she stammered, struggling out of his hands. “One little kiss. A kiss. What is it? Just a kiss, dear little Fr�ulein. A kiss.” He pushed his face forward, his lips smiling broadly; and how his little blue eyes gleamed behind the spectacles! “Never—never. How can you!” She sprang up, but he was too quick and he held her against the wall, pressed against her his hard old body and his twitching knee, and though she shook her head from side to side, distracted, kissed her on the mouth. On the mouth! Where not a soul who wasn’t a near relation had ever kissed her before….

She ran, ran down the street until she found a broad road with tram lines and a policeman standing in the middle like a clockwork doll. “I want to get a tram to the Hauptbahnhof,” sobbed the little governess. “Fr�ulein?” She wrung her hands at him. “The Hauptbahnhof. There—there’s one now,” and while he watched very much surprised, the little girl with her hat on one side, crying without a handkerchief, sprang on to the tram— not seeing the conductor’s eyebrows, nor hearing the hochwohlgebildete Dame talking her over with a scandalised friend. She rocked herself and cried out loud and said “Ah, ah!” pressing her hands to her mouth. “She has been to the dentist,” shrilled a fat old woman, too stupid to be uncharitable. “Na, sagen Sie ‘mal, what toothache! The child hasn’t one left in her mouth.” While the tram swung and jangled through a world full of old men with twitching knees.

When the little governess reached the hall of the Hotel Grunewald the same waiter who had come into her room in the morning was standing by a table, polishing a tray of glasses. The sight of the little governess seemed to fill him out with some inexplicable important content. He was ready for her question; his answer came pat and suave. “Yes, Fr�ulein, the lady has been here. I told her that you had arrived and gone out again immediately with a gentleman. She asked me when you were coming back again—but of course I could not say. And then she went to the manager.” He took up a glass from the table, held it up to the light, looked at it with one eye closed, and started polishing it with a corner of his apron. “… ?” “Pardon, Fr�ulein? Ach, no, Fr�ulein. The manager could tell her nothing—nothing.” He shook his head and smiled at the brilliant glass. “Where is the lady now?” asked the little governess, shuddering so violently that she had to hold her handkerchief up to her mouth. “How should I know?” cried the waiter, and as he swooped past her to pounce upon a new arrival his heart beat so hard against his ribs that he nearly chuckled aloud. “That’s it! that’s it!” he thought. “That will show her.” And as he swung the new arrival’s box on to his shoulders—hoop !—as though he were a giant and the box a feather, he minced over again the little governess’s words, “Gehen Sie. Gehen Sie sofort. Shall I! Shall I!” he shouted to himself.

REVELATIONS

FROM eight o’clock in the morning until about half past eleven Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours were—agonizing, simply. It was not as though she could control them. “Perhaps if I were ten years younger .. .” she would say. For now that she was thirty-three she had a queer little way of referring to her age on all occasions, of looking at her friends with grave, childish eyes and saying: “Yes, I remember how twenty years ago… ” or of drawing Ralph’s attention to the girls—real girls—with lovely youthful arms and throats and swift hesitating movements who sat near them in restaurants. “Perhaps if I were ten years younger…”

“Why don’t you get Marie to sit outside your door and absolutely forbid anybody to come near your room until you ring your bell?”

“Oh, if it were as simple as that!” She threw her little gloves down and pressed her eyelids with her fingers in the way he knew so well. “But in the first place I’d be so conscious of Marie sitting there, Marie shaking her finger at Rudd and Mrs. Moon, Marie as a kind of cross between a wardress and a nurse for mental cases! And then, there’s the post. One can’t get over the fact that the post comes, and once it has come, who—who—could wait until eleven for the letters?”

His eyes grew bright; he quickly, lightly clasped her. “My letters, darling?”

“Perhaps,” she drawled, softly, and she drew her hand over his reddish hair, smiling too, but thinking: “Heavens ! What a stupid thing to say!”

But this morning she had been awakened by one great slam of the front door. Bang. The flat shook. What was it? She jerked up in bed, clutching at the eiderdown; her heart beat. What could it be? Then, she heard voices in the passage. Marie knocked, and, as the door opened, with a sharp tearing rip out flew the blind and the curtains, stiffening, flapping, jerking. The tassel of the blind knocked—knocked against the window. “Eh-h, voil�! ” cried Marie, setting down the tray and running. “C’est le vent, Madame. C’est un vent insupportable.”

Up rolled the blind; the window went up with a jerk; a whitey-greyish light filled the room. Monica caught a glimpse of a huge pale sky and a cloud like a torn shirt dragging across before she hid her eyes with her sleeve.

“Marie! the curtains! Quick, the curtains!” Monica fell back into the bed and then “Ring-ting -a-ping-ping, ring-ting-a-ping-ping.” It was the telephone. The limit of her suffering was reached; she grew quite calm. “Go and see, Marie.”

“It is Monsieur. To know if Madame will lunch at Princes’ at one-thirty to-day.” Yes, it was Monsieur himself. Yes, he had asked that the message be given to Madame immediately. Instead of replying, Monica put her cup down and asked Marie in a small wondering voice what time it was. It was half past nine. She lay still and half closed her eyes. “Tell Monsieur I cannot come,” she said gently. But as the door shut, anger—anger suddenly gripped her close, close, violent, half strangling her. How dared he. How dared Ralph do such a thing when he knew how agonizing her nerves were in the morning! Hadn’t she explained and described and even—though lightly, of course; she couldn’t say such a thing directly—given him to understand that this was the one unforgivable thing.

And then to choose this frightful windy morning. Did he think it was just a fad of hers, a little feminine folly to be laughed at and tossed aside? Why, only last night she had said: “Ah, but you must take me seriously, too.” And he had replied: “My darling, you’ll not believe me, but I know you infinitely better than you know yourself. Every delicate thought and feeling I bow to, I treasure. Yes, laugh! I love the way your lip lifts”—and he had leaned across the table—“I don’t care who sees that I adore all of you. I’d be with you on mountain-top and have all the searchlights of the world play upon us.”

“Heavens!” Monica almost clutched her head. Was it possible he had really said that? How incredible men were! And she had loved him—how could she have loved a man who talked like that. What had she been doing ever since that dinner party months ago, when he had seen her home and asked if he might come and “see again that slow Arabian smile”? Oh, what nonsense—what utter nonsense—and yet she remembered at the time a strange deep thrill unlike anything she had ever felt before.

“Coal! Coal! Coal! Old iron! Old iron! Old iron!” sounded from below. It was all over. Understand her? He had understood nothing. That ringing her up on a windy morning was immensely significant. Would he understand that? She could almost have laughed. “You rang me up when the person who understood me simply couldn’t have.” It was the end. And when Marie said: “Monsieur replied he would be in the vestibule in case Madame changed her mind,” Monica said: “No, not verbena, Marie. Carnations. Two handfuls.”

A wild white morning, a tearing, rocking wind. Monica sat down before the mirror. She was pale. The maid combed back her dark hair—combed it all back—and her face was like a mask, with pointed eyelids and dark red lips. As she stared at herself in the blueish shadowy glass she suddenly felt—oh, the strangest, most tremendous excitement filling her slowly, slowly, until she wanted to fling out her arms, to laugh, to scatter everything, to shock Marie, to cry: “I’m free. I’m free. I’m free as the wind.” And now all this vibrating, trembling, exciting, flying world was hers. It was her kingdom. No, no, she belonged to nobody but Life.

“That will do, Marie,” she stammered. “My hat, my coat, my bag. And now get me a taxi.” Where was she going? Oh, anywhere. She could not stand this silent, flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly quiet feminine interior. She must be out; she must be driving quickly—anywhere, anywhere.

“The taxi is there, Madame.” As she pressed open the big outer doors of the flats the wild wind caught her and floated her across the pavement. Where to? She got in, and smiling radiantly at the cross, cold-looking driver, she told him to take her to her hairdresser’s. What would she have done without her hairdresser? Whenever Monica had nowhere else to go or nothing on earth to do she drove there. She might just have her hair waved, and by that time she’d have thought out a plan. The cross, cold driver drove at a tremendous pace, and she let herself be hurled from side to side. She wished he would go faster and faster. Oh, to be free of Princes’ at one-thirty, of being the tiny kitten in the swansdown basket, of being the Arabian, and the grave, delighted child and the little wild creature…. “Never again,” she cried aloud, clenching her small fist. But the cab had stopped, and the driver was standing holding the door open for her.

The hairdresser’s shop was warm and glittering. It smelled of soap and burnt paper and wallflower brilliantine. There was Madame behind the counter, round, fat, white, her head like a powder-puff rolling on a black satin pin-cushion. Monica always had the feeling that they loved her in this shop and understood her—the real her—far better than many of her friends did. She was her real self here, and she and Madame had often talked—quite strangely—together. Then there was George who did her hair, young, dark, slender George. She was really fond of him.

But to-day—how curious! Madame hardly greeted her. Her face was whiter than ever, but rims of bright red showed round her blue bead eyes, and even the