Bliss | Page 7

and gave a loud "Ah." But this amazing vigour
seemed to set him worlds away from Linda. She lay on the white
tumbled bed and watched him as if from the clouds.
"Oh, damn! Oh, blast!" said Stanley, who had butted into a crisp white
shirt only to find that some idiot had fastened the neck-band and he was
caught. He stalked over to Linda waving his arms.
"You look like a big fat turkey," said she.
"Fat. I like that," said Stanley. "I haven't a square inch of fat on me.
Feel that."
"It's rock--it's iron," mocked she.
"You'd be surprised," said Stanley, as though this were intensely
interesting, "at the number of chaps at the club who have got a
corporation. Young chaps, you know--men of my age." He began
parting his bushy ginger hair, his blue eyes fixed and round in the glass,
his knees bent, because the dressing-table was always--confound it--a
bit too low for him. "Little Wally Bell, for instance," and he
straightened, describing upon himself an enormous curve with the
hairbrush. "I must say I've a perfect horror... "

"My dear, don't worry. You'll never be fat. You are far too energetic."
"Yes, yes, I suppose that's true," said he, comforted for the hundredth
time, and taking a pearl penknife out of his pocket he began to pare his
nails.
"Breakfast, Stanley." Beryl was at the door. "Oh, Linda, mother says
you are not to get up yet." She popped her head in at the door. She had
a big piece of syringa stuck through her hair.
"Everything we left on the veranda last night is simply sopping this
morning. You should see poor dear mother wringing out the tables and
the chairs. However, there is no harm done--" this with the faintest
glance at Stanley.
"Have you told Pat to have the buggy round in time? It's a good six and
a half miles to the office."
"I can imagine what this early start for the office will be like," thought
Linda. "It will be very high pressure indeed."
"Pat, Pat." She heard the servant girl calling. But Pat was evidently
hard to find; the silly voice went baa--baaing through the garden.
Linda did not rest again until the final slam of the front door told her
that Stanley was really gone.
Later she heard her children playing in the garden. Lottie's stolid,
compact little voice cried: "Ke--zia. Isa--bel." She was always getting
lost or losing people only to find them again, to her great surprise,
round the next tree or the next corner. "Oh, there you are after all."
They had been turned out after breakfast and told not to come back to
the house until they were called. Isabel wheeled a neat pramload of
prim dolls and Lottie was allowed for a great treat to walk beside her
holding the doll's parasol over the face of the wax one.
"Where are you going to, Kezia?" asked Isabel, who longed to find
some light and menial duty that Kezia might perform and so be roped

in under her government.
"Oh, just away," said Kezia....
Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the
room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time, but in the
morning it was intolerable. She turned over to the wall and idly, with
one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem
and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the
poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the
stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed
bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large
substantial things like furniture but curtains and the patterns of stuffs
and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the
tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with
priests attending.... For there were some tassels that did not dance at all
but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often
the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown
top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like
a fat bird in a round nest.
"I dreamed about birds last night," thought Linda. What was it? She
had forgotten. But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was
what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some
mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they
smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were
members of a secret society and they smiled among