The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [44]
‘You see, Jug?’
‘Quite, Con.’
‘Now we shall be able to tell.’
But, oh dear, when she did go to look, she was as far off from a proof as ever! If anything was displaced, it might so very well have happened as she closed the drawer; a jolt might have done it so easily.
‘You come, Jug, and decide. I really can’t. It’s too difficult.’
But after a pause and a long glare Josephine would sigh, ‘Now you’ve put the doubt into my mind, Con, I’m sure I can’t tell myself.’
‘Well, we can’t postpone it again,’ said Josephine. ‘If we postpone it this time – ’
XII
But at that moment in the street below a barrel-organ struck up. Josephine and Constantia sprang to their feet together.
‘Run, Con,’ said Josephine. ‘Run quickly. There’s sixpence on the – ’
Then they remembered. It didn’t matter. They would never have to stop the organ-grinder again. Never again would she and Constantia be told to make that monkey take his noise somewhere else. Never would sound that loud, strange bellow when father thought they were not hurrying enough. The organ-grinder might play there all day and the stick would not thump.
It never will thump again,
It never will thump again,
played the barrel-organ.
What was Constantia thinking? She had such a strange smile; she looked different. She couldn’t be going to cry.
‘Jug, Jug,’ said Constantia softly, pressing her hands together. ‘Do you know what day it is? It’s Saturday. It’s a week today, a whole week.’
A week since father died,
A week since father died,
cried the barrel-organ. And Josephine, too, forgot to be practical and sensible; she smiled faintly, strangely. On the Indian carpet there fell a square of sunlight, pale red; it came and went and came – and stayed, deepened – until it shone almost golden.
‘The sun’s out,’ said Josephine, as though it really martered.
A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered.
Constantia lifted her big, cold hands as if to catch them, and then her hands fell again. She walked over to the mantelpiece to her favourite Buddha. And the stone and gilt image, whose smile always gave her such a queer feeling, almost a pain and yet a pleasant pain, seemed today to be more than smiling. He knew something; he had a secret. ‘I know something that you don’t know,’ said her Buddha. Oh, what was it, what could it be? And yet she had always felt there was… something.
The sunlight pressed through the windows, thieved its way in, flashed its light over the furniture and the photographs. Josephine watched it. When it came to mother’s photograph, the enlargement over the piano, it lingered as though puzzled to find so little remained of mother, except the ear-rings shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa. Why did the photographs of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As soon as a person was dead their photograph died too. But, of course, this one of mother was very old. It was thirty-five years old. Josephine remembered standing on a chair and pointing out that feather boa to Constantia and telling her that it was a snake that had killed their mother in Ceylon… Would everything have been different if mother hadn’t died? She didn’t see why. Aunt Florence had lived with them until they had left school, and they had moved three times and had their yearly holiday and… and there’d been changes of servants, of course.
Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the window-ledge. Yeep – eyeep