My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 7

I have ever met,
with an inly rooted attraction towards illnesses, deaths, and funerals.
We had had few deaths on Hiliwa Dara, but there had been one or two.
A native from among our field laborers had died of consumption; a

young brown girl had "gone out" in her confinement; a baby or two had
given in to baby ailments. Dinah made the most of all such occurrences;
it would be unkind to say that they actually gave her joy, but they
certainly did seem in some obscure fashion to liven her and do her
good. Her bedroom was hung round with funeral pictures; her father's
grave, her mother's grave, a faded funeral wreath in a frame ; a ghastly
photograph of her husband lying in his coffin, another of his headstone,
with herself in widow's weeds beside it. She had newspaper notices of
all these events pasted into a book, as actresses paste their photographs
of praise. She did not wear widow's weeds herself; it was Lorraine, who
never spoke of deaths, who wore eternal black for one dead but Dinah,
although she dressed in the rough blue affected by myself and Luke,
contrived to shed an atmosphere of widowhood over the very cookies
and pies that she made, and to spread a smell of funeral baked meats
about every ham she cured.
To-day, after helping round the excellent results of her cookery, she
heaved a deep sigh and remarked, with her head on one side (always a
danger signal) that she did not hold with tables made that way. Asked
(injudiciously) to explain, she said that a marvel table (concrete was
always "marvel" to Dinah) made her think of the tomb. And it seemed
unlucky, somehow, to be eating your food off of a grave. Dinah did not
read or at least, so little as hardly to be worth mentioning but she
certainly used different founts of type in her talk, and her capitals were
expressive in a high degree.
Father never did know when to let well alone with Dinah. I think his
inborn courtesy often prompted him to unnecessary and injudicious
politeness.
"Why so?" he remarked, slicing a honeycake. "I don't see that any bad
luck is likely to hit us now, if it hasn't done so in all the years that we
have been eating off this concrete table of ours."
"Man proposes, and God decomposes," said Dinah piously. There were
tears somewhere in her voice. She filled a cup of coffee, and buried her
face in it. Luke suddenly choked in his. He could never get accustomed
to Dinah's amazing malapropisms.

"I can't help smelling bad luck, somehow or other. It seems that kind of
a day," observed Dinah, looking, unmoved, at the world of sapphire
and gold that showed through the great window.
"And Master Luke there--" (she would keep up the master and the miss)
"sitting with the sermons of the grave about him, as you might say,
does give my stomach a turn." Luke, as a fact, was still wrapped in his
bath towel like a senator in a toga, or, as Dinah cheerfully put it, like a
corpse in its cerements.
Nobody took much notice of her. Dinah was like that sometimes. She
may, or may not, have been quite right in her mind. I have often
wondered. But she was a splendid worker, and without her efficient aid
in household tasks, my education at the hands of Lorraine would have
been sadly hampered. So every one indulged her.
"Talking of bad luck is bringing it," said my father, quite seriously. He
believed in the fructifying power of thought; it has become a common
faith, since those days....
Dinah rolled on unreproved. Her head was on one side; she was
buttering a piece of bread in a resigned sort of manner, as if she were
sorry for it, and for herself....
"You can't bring bad luck nor keep it away," she said. "You can only
make ready for it. Thank God, I always have kept the best of my
nightdresses not trespassed upon, folded up with mothballs inside of it
in a box, so that I can face my Maker with a mind at rest. And if ever
anything happens to me..." she addressed Lorraine now, eating her
bread-and-butter and dropping tears on it without the slightest
alteration in her voice "there's my will put away in the biggest tea tin
that we don't use. I'd like you to remember it. It always did seem a
scandal to me for any one to die intestine."
There was no handling Dinah when she got into this state.
Luke and I bolted our food, and fled. We coaxed Lorraine to run the
ends of Luke's new trousers through her machine, and then, as it