The sun was still full on the garden when the back door of the
Burnells’ shut with a bang, and a very gay figure walked down the path
to the gate. It was Alice, the servant-girl, dressed for her afternoon
out. She wore a white cotton dress with such large red spots on it and
so many that they made you shudder, white shoes and a leghorn turned up
under the brim with poppies. Of course she wore gloves, white ones,
stained at the fastenings with iron-mould, and in one hand she carried
a very dashed-looking sunshade which she referred to as her
“_perishall_.”
Beryl, sitting in the window, fanning her freshly-washed hair, thought
she had never seen such a guy. If Alice had only blacked her face with
a piece of cork before she started out, the picture would have been
complete. And where did a girl like that go to in a place like this?
The heart-shaped Fijian fan beat scornfully at that lovely bright mane.
She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible common larrikin and
they’d go off into the bush together. Pity to have made herself so
conspicuous; they’d have hard work to hide with Alice in that rig-out.
But no, Beryl was unfair. Alice was going to tea with Mrs Stubbs, who’d
sent her an “invite” by the little boy who called for orders. She had
taken ever such a liking to Mrs. Stubbs ever since the first time she
went to the shop to get something for her mosquitoes.
“Dear heart!” Mrs. Stubbs had clapped her hand to her side. “I never
seen anyone so eaten. You might have been attacked by canningbals.”
Alice did wish there’d been a bit of life on the road though. Made her
feel so queer, having nobody behind her. Made her feel all weak in the
spine. She couldn’t believe that some one wasn’t watching her. And yet
it was silly to turn round; it gave you away. She pulled up her gloves,
hummed to herself and said to the distant gum-tree, “Shan’t be long
now.” But that was hardly company.
Mrs. Stubbs’s shop was perched on a little hillock just off the road.
It had two big windows for eyes, a broad veranda for a hat, and the
sign on the roof, scrawled MRS. STUBBS’S, was like a little card stuck
rakishly in the hat crown.
On the veranda there hung a long string of bathing-dresses, clinging
together as though they’d just been rescued from the sea rather than
waiting to go in, and beside them there hung a cluster of sandshoes so
extraordinarily mixed that to get at one pair you had to tear apart and
forcibly separate at least fifty. Even then it was the rarest thing to
find the left that belonged to the right. So many people had lost
patience and gone off with one shoe that fitted and one that was a
little too big.... Mrs. Stubbs prided herself on keeping something of
everything. The two windows, arranged in the form of precarious
pyramids, were crammed so tight, piled so high, that it seemed only a
conjurer could prevent them from toppling over. In the left-hand corner
of one window, glued to the pane by four gelatine lozenges, there
was—and there had been from time immemorial—a notice.
LOST! HANSOME GOLE BROOCH
SOLID GOLD
ON OR NEAR BEACH
REWARD OFFERED
Alice pressed open the door. The bell jangled, the red serge curtains
parted, and Mrs. Stubbs appeared. With her broad smile and the long
bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand. Alice was
welcomed so warmly that she found it quite difficult to keep up her
“manners.” They consisted of persistent little coughs and hems, pulls
at her gloves, tweaks at her skirt, and a curious difficulty in seeing
what was set before her or understanding what was said.
Tea was laid on the parlour table—ham, sardines, a whole pound of
butter, and such a large johnny cake that it looked like an
advertisement for somebody’s baking-powder. But the Primus stove roared
so loudly that it was useless to try to talk above it. Alice sat down
on the edge of a basket-chair while Mrs. Stubbs pumped the stove still
higher. Suddenly Mrs. Stubbs whipped the cushion off a chair and
disclosed a large brown-paper parcel.
“I’ve just had some new photers taken, my dear,” she shouted cheerfully
to Alice. “Tell me what you think of them.”
In a very dainty, refined way Alice wet her finger and put the tissue
back from the first one. Life! How many there were! There were three
dozzing at least. And she held it up to the light.
Mrs. Stubbs sat in an arm-chair, leaning very much to one side. There
was a look of mild astonishment on her large face, and well there might
be. For though the arm-chair stood on a carpet, to the left of it,
miraculously skirting the carpet-border, there was a dashing
water-fall. On her right stood a Grecian pillar with a giant fern-tree
on either side of it, and in the background towered a gaunt mountain,
pale with snow.
“It is a nice style, isn’t it?” shouted Mrs. Stubbs; and Alice had just
screamed “Sweetly” when the roaring of the Primus stove died down,
fizzled out, ceased, and she said “Pretty” in a silence that was
frightening.
“Draw up your chair, my dear,” said Mrs. Stubbs, beginning to pour out.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, as she handed the tea, “but I don’t care
about the size. I’m having an enlargemint. All very well for Christmas
cards, but I never was the one for small photers myself. You get no
comfort out of them. To say the truth, I find them dis’eartening.”
Alice quite saw what she meant.
“Size,” said Mrs. Stubbs. “Give me size. That was what my poor dear
husband was always saying. He couldn’t stand anything small. Gave him
the creeps. And, strange as it may seem, my dear”—here Mrs. Stubbs
creaked and seemed to expand herself at the memory—“it was dropsy that
carried him off at the larst. Many’s the time they drawn one and a half
pints from ’im at the ’ospital... It seemed like a judgmint.”
Alice burned to know exactly what it was that was drawn from him. She
ventured, “I suppose it was water.”
But Mrs. Stubbs fixed Alice with her eyes and replied meaningly, “It
was _liquid_, my dear.”
Liquid! Alice jumped away from the word like a cat and came back to it,
nosing and wary.
“That’s ’im!” said Mrs. Stubbs, and she pointed dramatically to the
life-size head and shoulders of a burly man with a dead white rose in
the buttonhole of his coat that made you think of a curl of cold
mutting fat. Just below, in silver letters on a red cardboard ground,
were the words, “Be not afraid, it is I.”
“It’s ever such a fine face,” said Alice faintly.
The pale-blue bow on the top of Mrs. Stubbs’s fair frizzy hair
quivered. She arched her plump neck. What a neck she had! It was bright
pink where it began and then it changed to warm apricot, and that faded
to the colour of a brown egg and then to a deep creamy.
“All the same, my dear,” she said surprisingly, “freedom’s best!” Her
soft, fat chuckle sounded like a purr. “Freedom’s best,” said Mrs.
Stubbs again.
Freedom! Alice gave a loud, silly little titter. She felt awkward. Her
mind flew back to her own kitching. Ever so queer! She wanted to be
back in it again.