The Garden Party | Page 8

it and rubbed it again.
"Now turn round!" he ordered.
They turned round.
"All look the same way! Keep still! Now!"
And his hand opened; he held up to the light something that flashed,
that winked, that was a most lovely green.
"It's a nemeral," said Pip solemnly.
"Is it really, Pip?" Even Isabel was impressed.
The lovely green thing seemed to dance in Pip's fingers. Aunt Beryl
had a nemeral in a ring, but it was a very small one. This one was as
big as a star and far more beautiful.
Chapter 1.
V.
As the morning lengthened whole parties appeared over the sand-hills
and came down on the beach to bathe. It was understood that at eleven
o'clock the women and children of the summer colony had the sea to
themselves. First the women undressed, pulled on their bathing dresses
and covered their heads in hideous caps like sponge bags; then the
children were unbuttoned. The beach was strewn with little heaps of

clothes and shoes; the big summer hats, with stones on them to keep
them from blowing away, looked like immense shells. It was strange
that even the sea seemed to sound differently when all those leaping,
laughing figures ran into the waves. Old Mrs. Fairfield, in a lilac cotton
dress and a black hat tied under the chin, gathered her little brood and
got them ready. The little Trout boys whipped their shirts over their
heads, and away the five sped, while their grandma sat with one hand in
her knitting-bag ready to draw out the ball of wool when she was
satisfied they were safely in.
The firm compact little girls were not half so brave as the tender,
delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering, crouching down,
slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel, who could swim twelve
strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim eight, only followed on the
strict understanding they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she
didn't follow at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please.
And that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight,
her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms
as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger wave than
usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction, she
scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again.
"Here, mother, keep those for me, will you?"
Two rings and a thin gold chain were dropped into Mrs Fairfield's lap.
"Yes, dear. But aren't you going to bathe here?"
"No-o," Beryl drawled. She sounded vague. "I'm undressing farther
along. I'm going to bathe with Mrs. Harry Kember."
"Very well." But Mrs. Fairfield's lips set. She disapproved of Mrs
Harry Kember. Beryl knew it.
Poor old mother, she smiled, as she skimmed over the stones. Poor old
mother! Old! Oh, what joy, what bliss it was to be young...
"You look very pleased," said Mrs. Harry Kember. She sat hunched up

on the stones, her arms round her knees, smoking.
"It's such a lovely day," said Beryl, smiling down at her.
"Oh my dear!" Mrs. Harry Kember's voice sounded as though she knew
better than that. But then her voice always sounded as though she knew
something better about you than you did yourself. She was a long,
strange-looking woman with narrow hands and feet. Her face, too, was
long and narrow and exhausted-looking; even her fair curled fringe
looked burnt out and withered. She was the only woman at the Bay
who smoked, and she smoked incessantly, keeping the cigarette
between her lips while she talked, and only taking it out when the ash
was so long you could not understand why it did not fall. When she
was not playing bridge--she played bridge every day of her life--she
spent her time lying in the full glare of the sun. She could stand any
amount of it; she never had enough. All the same, it did not seem to
warm her. Parched, withered, cold, she lay stretched on the stones like
a piece of tossed-up driftwood. The women at the Bay thought she was
very, very fast. Her lack of vanity, her slang, the way she treated men
as though she was one of them, and the fact that she didn't care
twopence about her house and called the servant Gladys "Glad-eyes,"
was disgraceful. Standing on the veranda steps Mrs. Kember would call
in her indifferent, tired voice, "I say, Glad-eyes, you might heave me a
handkerchief if I've got one, will you?" And Glad-eyes, a red bow in
her hair instead of a cap, and white shoes, came running with an
impudent smile.