Wild Places, page 7
‘What’s she frowning for?’ he asked. ‘Is she worried about anything?’ Suddenly serious: ‘I say – you know, are you in any financial difficulty? Do you want money? I’ll give it to you if you like!’
‘Money! Steady on the brake – don’t lose your head!’ – so she spoke to herself.
‘I’ll give you two hundred marks if you’ll kiss me.’
‘Oh, boo! What a condition! And I don’t want to kiss you – I don’t like kissing. Please go!’
‘Yes – you do! – yes, you do.’ He caught hold of her arms above the elbows. She struggled, and was quite amazed to realise how angry she felt.
‘Let me go – immediately!’ she cried – and he slipped one arm round her body, and drew her towards him – like a bar of iron across her back – that arm.
‘Leave me alone, I tell you! Don’t be mean! I didn’t want this to happen when you came into my room. How dare you?’
‘Well, kiss me and I’ll go!’
It was too idiotic – dodging that stupid, smiling face.
‘I won’t kiss you! – you brute! – I won’t!’ Somehow she slipped out of his arms and ran to the wall – stood back against it – breathing quickly.
‘Get out!’ she stammered. ‘Go on now, clear out!’
At that moment, when he was not touching her, she quite enjoyed herself. She thrilled at her own angry voice. ‘To think I should talk to a man like that!’ An angry flush spread over his face – his lips curled back, showing his teeth – just like a dog, thought Viola. He made a rush at her, and held her against the wall – pressed upon her with all the weight of his body. This time she could not get free.
‘I won’t kiss you. I won’t. Stop doing that! Ugh! you’re like a dog – you ought to find lovers round lamp-posts – you beast – you fiend!’
He did not answer. With an expression of the most absurd determination he pressed ever more heavily upon her. He did not even look at her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet.’
‘Gar-r! Why are men so strong?’ She began to cry. ‘Go away – I don’t want you, you dirty creature. I want to murder you. Oh, my God! if I had a knife.’
‘Don’t be silly – come and be good!’ He dragged her towards the bed.
‘Do you suppose I’m a light woman?’ she snarled, and swooping over she fastened her teeth in his glove.
‘Ach! don’t do that – you are hurting me!’
She did not let go, but her heart said, ‘Thank the Lord I thought of this.’
‘Stop this minute – you vixen – you bitch.’ He threw her away from him. She saw with joy that his eyes were full of tears. ‘You’ve really hurt me,’ he said in a choking voice.
‘Of course I have. I meant to. That’s nothing to what I’ll do if you touch me again.’
The strange man picked up his hat. ‘No, thanks,’ he said grimly. ‘But I’ll not forget this – I’ll go to your landlady.’
‘Pooh!’ She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. ‘I’ll tell her you forced your way in here and tried to assault me. Who will she believe? – with your bitten hand. You go and find your Schäfers.’
A sensation of glorious, intoxicating happiness flooded Viola. She rolled her eyes at him. ‘If you don’t go away this moment I’ll bite you again,’ she said, and the absurd words started her laughing. Even when the door was closed, hearing him descending the stairs, she laughed, and danced about the room.
What a morning! Oh, chalk it up. That was her first fight, and she’d won – she’d conquered that beast – all by herself. Her hands were still trembling. She pulled up the sleeve of her gown – great red marks on her arms. ‘My ribs will be blue. I’ll be blue all over,’ she reflected. ‘If only that beloved Casimir could have seen us.’ And the feeling of rage and disgust against Casimir had totally disappeared. How could the poor darling help not having any money? It was her fault as much as his, and he, just like her, was apart from the world, fighting it, just as she had done. If only three o’clock would come. She saw herself running towards him and putting her arms round his neck. ‘My blessed one! Of course we are bound to win. Do you love me still? Oh, I have been horrible lately.’
(first published in In a German Pension, 1911)
How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth, and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it – like a cloud – like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads, and both of them carried a big flax basket of ferns. They had no shoes and stockings on, and they came walking along, slowly, because they were so fat, and talking to each other and always smiling. Pearl stopped swinging, and when they saw her they stopped walking. They looked and looked at her and then they talked to each other, waving their arms and clapping their hands together. Pearl began to laugh.
The two women came up to her, keeping close to the hedge and looking in a frightened way towards the House of Boxes.
‘Hallo, little girl!’ said one.
Pearl said, ‘Hallo!’
‘You all alone by yourself?’
Pearl nodded.
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘In the kitching, ironing-because-its-Tuesday.’
The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.’
The dark women laughed, and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. ‘What’s your name?’ they asked her.
‘Pearl Button.’
‘You coming with us, Pearl Button? We got beautiful things to show you,’ whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up, and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes.
They walked a long way. ‘You tired?’ asked one of the women, bending down to Pearl. Pearl shook her head. They walked much further. ‘You not tired?’ asked the other woman. And Pearl shook her head again, but tears shook from her eyes at the same time and her lips trembled. One of the women gave over her flax basket of ferns and caught Pearl Button up in her arms, and walked with Pearl Button’s head against her shoulder and her dusty little legs dangling. She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell – a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it …
They set Pearl Button down in a log room full of other people the same colour as they were – and all these people came close to her and looked at her, nodding and laughing and throwing up their eyes. The woman who had carried Pearl took off her hair ribbon and shook her curls loose. There was a cry from the other women, and they crowded close and some of them ran a finger through Pearl’s yellow curls, very gently, and one of them, a young one, lifted all Pearl’s hair and kissed the back of her little white neck. Pearl felt shy but happy at the same time. There were some men on the floor, smoking, with rugs and feather mats round their shoulders. One of them made a funny face at her and he pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and set it on the floor, and flicked it with his finger as though it were a marble. It rolled right over to her. Pearl picked it up. ‘Please can I eat it?’ she asked. At that they all laughed and clapped their hands, and the man with the funny face made another at her and pulled a pear out of his pocket and sent it bobbling over the floor. Pearl laughed. The women sat on the floor and Pearl sat down too. The floor was very dusty. She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places, and she ate the fruit, the juice running all down her front.
‘Oh!’ she said in a very frightened voice to one of the women, ‘I’ve spilled all the juice!’
‘That doesn’t matter at all,’ said the woman, patting her cheek. A man came into the room with a long whip in his hand. He shouted something. They all got up, shouting, laughing, wrapping themselves up in rugs and blankets and feather mats. Pearl was carried again, this time into a great cart, and she sat on the lap of one of her women with the driver beside her. It was a green cart with a red pony and a black pony. It went very fast out of the town. The driver stood up and waved the whip round his head. Pearl peered over the shoulder of her woman. Other carts were behind like a procession. She waved at them. Then the country came. First fields of short grass with sheep on them and little bushes of white flowers and pink briar rose baskets – then big trees on both sides of the road – and nothing to be seen except big trees. Pearl tried to look through them but it was quite dark. Birds were singing. She nestled closer in the big lap. The woman was warm as a cat, and she moved up and down when she breathed, just like purring. Pearl played with a green ornament round her neck, and the woman took the little hand and kissed each of her fingers and then turned it over and kissed the dimples. Pearl had never been happy like this before. On the top of a big hill they stopped. The driving man turned to Pearl and said, ‘Look, look!’ and pointed with his whip.
And down at the bottom of the hill was something perfectly different – a great big piece of blue water was creeping over the land. She screamed and clutched at the big woman. ‘What is it, what is it?’
‘Why,’ said the woman, ‘it’s the sea.’
‘Will it hurt us – is it coming?’
‘Ai-e, no, it doesn’t come to us. It’s very beautiful. You look again.’
Pearl looked. ‘You’re sure it can’t come,’ she said.
‘Ai-e, no. It stays in its place,’ said the big woman. Waves with white tops came leaping over the blue. Pearl watched them break on a long piece of land covered with garden-path shells. They drove round a corner.
There were some little houses down close to the sea, with wood fences round them and gardens inside. They comforted her. Pink and red and blue washing hung over the fences, and as they came near more people came out, and five yellow dogs with long thin tails. All the people were fat and laughing, with little naked babies holding on to them or rolling about in the gardens like puppies. Pearl was lifted down and taken into a tiny house with only one room and a veranda. There was a girl there with two pieces of black hair down to her feet. She was setting the dinner on the floor. ‘It is a funny place,’ said Pearl, watching the pretty girl while the woman unbuttoned her little drawers for her. She was very hungry. She ate meat and vegetables and fruit and the woman gave her milk out of a green cup. And it was quite silent except for the sea outside and the laughs of the two women watching her. ‘Haven’t you got any Houses of Boxes?’ she said. ‘Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?’
They took off her shoes and stockings, her pinafore and dress. She walked about in her petticoat and then she walked outside with the grass pushing between her toes. The two women came out with different sorts of baskets. They took her hands. Over a little paddock, through a fence, and then on warm sand with brown grass in it they went down to the sea. Pearl held back when the sand grew wet, but the women coaxed, ‘Nothing to hurt, very beautiful. You come.’ They dug in the sand and found some shells which they threw into the baskets. The sand was wet as mud pies. Pearl forgot her fright and began digging too. She got hot and wet, and suddenly over her feet broke a little line of foam. ‘Oo, oo!’ she shrieked, dabbling with her feet. ‘Lovely, lovely!’ She paddled in the shallow water. It was warm. She made a cup of her hands and caught some of it. But it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing …
Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats – little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings – a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes.
(written 1910, first published 1912, first book publication Something Childish and Other Stories, 1924)
The Woman at the Store
All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies. The horses stumbled along, coughing and chuffing. The pack-horse was sick – with a big open sore rubbed under the belly. Now and again she stopped short, threw back her head, looked at us as though she were going to cry, and whinnied. Hundreds of larks shrilled; the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass, patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs.
Jo rode ahead. He wore a blue galatea shirt, corduroy trousers and riding boots. A white handkerchief, spotted with red – it looked as though his nose had been bleeding on it – was knotted round his throat. Wisps of white hair straggled from under his wideawake – his moustache and eyebrows were called white – he slouched in the saddle, grunting. Not once that day had he sung
‘I don’t care, for don’t you see,
My wife’s mother was in front of me!’
It was the first day we had been without it for a month, and now there seemed something uncanny in his silence. Jim rode beside me, white as a clown; his black eyes glittered and he kept shooting out his tongue and moistening his lips. He was dressed in a Jaeger vest and a pair of blue duck trousers, fastened round the waist with a plaited leather belt. We had hardly spoken since dawn. At noon we had lunched off fly biscuits and apricots by the side of a swampy creek.
‘My stomach feels like the crop of a hen,’ said Jo. ‘Now then, Jim, you’re the bright boy of the party – where’s this ’ere store you kep’ on talking about. “Oh yes,” you says, “I know a fine store, with a paddock for the horses and a creek runnin’ through, owned by a friend of mine who’ll give yer a bottle of whisky before ’e shakes hands with yer.” I’d like ter see that place – merely as a matter of curiosity – not that I’d ever doubt yer word – as yer know very well – but …’
Jim laughed. ‘Don’t forget there’s a woman too, Jo, with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’ll promise you something else before she shakes hands with you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
‘The heat’s making you balmy,’ said Jo. But he dug his knees into the horse. We shambled on. I half fell asleep and had a sort of uneasy dream that the horses were not moving forward at all – then that I was on a rocking-horse, and my old mother was scolding me for raising such a fearful dust from the drawing-room carpet. ‘You’ve entirely worn off the pattern of the carpet,’ I heard her saying, and she gave the reins a tug. I snivelled and woke to find Jim leaning over me, maliciously smiling.
‘That was a case of all but,’ said he. ‘I just caught you. What’s up? Been bye-bye?’
‘No!’ I raised my head. ‘Thank the Lord we’re arriving somewhere.’
We were on the brow of the hill, and below us there was a whare roofed with corrugated iron. It stood in a garden, rather far back from the road – a big paddock opposite, and a creek and a clump of young willow trees. A thin line of blue smoke stood up straight from the chimney of the whare; and as I looked a woman came out, followed by a child and a sheep dog – the woman carrying what appeared to me a black stick. She made gestures at us. The horses put on a final spurt, Jo took off his wideawake, shouted, threw out his chest, and began singing ‘I don’t care, for don’t you see …’ The sun pushed through the pale clouds and shed a vivid light over the scene. It gleamed on the woman’s yellow hair, over her flapping pinafore and the rifle she was carrying. The child hid behind her, and the yellow dog, a mangy beast, scuttled back into the whare, his tail between his legs. We drew rein and dismounted.
‘Hallo,’ screamed the woman. ‘I thought you was three ’awks. My kid comes runnin’ in ter me. “Mumma,” says she, “there’s three brown things comin’ over the ’ill,” says she. An’ I comes out smart, I can tell yer. “They’ll be ’awks,” I says to her. Oh, the ’awks about ’ere, yer wouldn’t believe.’
The ‘kid’ gave us the benefit of one eye from behind the woman’s pinafore – then retired again.
‘Where’s your old man?’ asked Jim.
The woman blinked rapidly, screwing up her face.
‘Away shearin’. Bin away a month. I suppose ye’re not goin’ to stop, are yer? There’s a storm comin’ up.’
‘You bet we are,’ said Jo. ‘So you’re on your lonely, missus?’
She stood, pleating the frills of her pinafore, and glancing from one to the other of us, like a hungry bird. I smiled at the thought of how Jim had pulled Jo’s leg about her. Certainly her eyes were blue, and what hair she had was yellow, but ugly. She was a figure of fun. Looking at her, you felt there was nothing but sticks and wires under that pinafore – her front teeth were knocked out, she had red, pulpy hands and she wore on her feet a pair of dirty Bluchers.
‘I’ll go and turn out the horses,’ said Jim. ‘Got any embrocation? Poi’s rubbed herself to hell!’
‘’Arf a mo!’ The woman stood silent a moment, her nostrils expanding as she breathed. Then she shouted violently, ‘I’d rather you didn’t stop … You can’t, and there’s the end of it. I don’t let out that paddock any more. You’ll have to go on; I ain’t got nothing!’
‘Well, I’m blest!’ said Jo heavily. He pulled me aside. ‘Gone a bit off ’er dot,’ he whispered. ‘Too much alone, you know,’ very significantly. ‘Turn the sympathetic tap on ’er, she’ll come round all right.’
