The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea.
The sun beat down, beat down hot and fiery on the fine sand, baking the
grey and blue and black and white-veined pebbles. It sucked up the
little drop of water that lay in the hollow of the curved shells; it
bleached the pink convolvulus that threaded through and through the
sand-hills. Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers.
Pit-pit-pit! They were never still.
Over there on the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy
beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin
like a silver coin dropped into each of the small rock pools. They
danced, they quivered, and minute ripples laved the porous shores.
Looking down, bending over, each pool was like a lake with pink and
blue houses clustered on the shores; and oh! the vast mountainous
country behind those houses—the ravines, the passes, the dangerous
creeks and fearful tracks that led to the water’s edge. Underneath
waved the sea-forest—pink thread-like trees, velvet anemones, and
orange berry-spotted weeds. Now a stone on the bottom moved, rocked,
and there was a glimpse of a black feeler; now a thread-like creature
wavered by and was lost. Something was happening to the pink, waving
trees; they were changing to a cold moonlight blue. And now there
sounded the faintest “plop.” Who made that sound? What was going on
down there? And how strong, how damp the seaweed smelt in the hot
sun....
The green blinds were drawn in the bungalows of the summer colony. Over
the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were
exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back
window seemed to have a pair of sand-shoes on the sill and some lumps
of rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered
in a haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts’ dog
Snooker, who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was
turned up, his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional
desperate-sounding puff, as much as to say he had decided to make an
end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along.
“What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort
of staring at the wall?”
Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little
girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and
legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma’s bed,
and the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at
the window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room
that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light
varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the
shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table, for instance, was a
packing-case in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was
very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was
imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed
so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a
special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and
another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice
place for a watch to curl up in.
“Tell me, grandma,” said Kezia.
The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew
the bone needle through. She was casting on.
“I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling,” she said quietly.
“My Australian Uncle William?” said Kezia. She had another.
“Yes, of course.”
“The one I never saw?”
“That was the one.”
“Well, what happened to him?” Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted
to be told again.
“He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died,” said old
Mrs. Fairfield.
Kezia blinked and considered the picture again.... A little man fallen
over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole.
“Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?” She hated her
grandma to be sad.
It was the old woman’s turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look
back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To
look after _them_ as a woman does, long after _they_ were out of sight.
Did it make her sad? No, life was like that.
“No, Kezia.”
“But why?” asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw
things in the air. “Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn’t old.”
Mrs. Fairfield began counting the stitches in threes. “It just
happened,” she said in an absorbed voice.
“Does everybody have to die?” asked Kezia.
“Everybody!”
“_Me?_” Kezia sounded fearfully incredulous.
“Some day, my darling.”
“But, grandma.” Kezia waved her left leg and waggled the toes. They
felt sandy. “What if I just won’t?”
The old woman sighed again and drew a long thread from the ball.
“We’re not asked, Kezia,” she said sadly. “It happens to all of us
sooner or later.”
Kezia lay still thinking this over. She didn’t want to die. It meant
she would have to leave here, leave everywhere, for ever, leave—leave
her grandma. She rolled over quickly.
“Grandma,” she said in a startled voice.
“What, my pet!”
“_You’re_ not to die.” Kezia was very decided.
“Ah, Kezia”—her grandma looked up and smiled and shook her head—“don’t
let’s talk about it.”
“But you’re not to. You couldn’t leave me. You couldn’t not be there.”
This was awful. “Promise me you won’t ever do it, grandma,” pleaded
Kezia.
The old woman went on knitting.
“Promise me! Say never!”
But still her grandma was silent.
Kezia rolled off her bed; she couldn’t bear it any longer, and lightly
she leapt on to her grandma’s knees, clasped her hands round the old
woman’s throat and began kissing her, under the chin, behind the ear,
and blowing down her neck.
“Say never... say never... say never—” She gasped between the kisses.
And then she began, very softly and lightly, to tickle her grandma.
“Kezia!” The old woman dropped her knitting. She swung back in the
rocker. She began to tickle Kezia. “Say never, say never, say never,”
gurgled Kezia, while they lay there laughing in each other’s arms.
“Come, that’s enough, my squirrel! That’s enough, my wild pony!” said
old Mrs. Fairfield, setting her cap straight. “Pick up my knitting.”
Both of them had forgotten what the “never” was about.