My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 7

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 was Saturday, and a holiday, went off together to climb Parnassus, and look for ships. Ships never came or almost never but none the less, we looked as industriously as if we had been wrecked sailors marooned out here on Hiliwa Dara, hoping for release.
Father had called the hill in the middle of the island Parnassus, because he was a poet, and used to go up there and write when he happened to have the time. I think, with the knowledge of later days, I can reconstruct much of the frame of mind that led him to settle on Hiliwa Dara. He was, as I have said, a poet ;