The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [46]
Here he was! And nervously he tied a bow in front of the mirror, jammed his hair down with both hands, pulled out the flaps of his jacket pockets. Making between £500 and £600 a year on a fruit farm in – of all places – Rhodesia.1 No capital. Not a penny coming to him. No chance of his income increasing for at least four years. As for looks and all that sort of thing, he was completely out of the running. He couldn’t even boast of top-hole health, for the East Africa business had knocked him out so thoroughly that he’d had to take six months’ leave. He was still fearfully pale – worse even than usual this afternoon, he thought, bending forward and peering into the mirror. Good heavens! What had happened? His hair looked almost bright green. Dash it all, he hadn’t green hair at all events. That was a bit too steep. And then the green light trembled in the glass; it was the shadow from the tree outside. Reggie turned away, took out his cigarette case, but remembering how the mater hated him to smoke in his bedroom, put it back again and drifted over to the chest of drawers. No, he was dashed if he could think of one blessed thing in his favour, while she… Ah!… He stopped dead, folded his arms, and leaned hard against the chest of drawers.
And in spite of her position, her father’s wealth, the fact that she was an only child and far and away the most popular girl in the neighbourhood; in spite of her beauty and her cleverness – cleverness! – it: was a great deal more than that, there was really nothing she couldn’t do; he fully believed, had it been necessary, she would have been a gen us at anything – in spite of the fact that her parents adored her, and the them, and they’d as soon let her go all that way as… In spite of every single thing you could think of, so terrific was his love that he couldn’t help hoping. Well, was it hope? Or was this queer, timid longing to have the chance of looking after her, of making it his job to see that she had everything she wanted, and that nothing came near her that wasn’t perfect – just love? How he loved her! He squeezed hard against the chest of drawers and murmured to it, ‘I love her, I love her!’ And just for the moment he was with her on the way to Umtali. It was night. She sat in a corner asleep. Her soft chin was tucked into her soft collar, her gold-brown lashes lay on her cheeks. He doted on her delicate little nose, her perfect lips, her ear like a baby’s, and the gold-brown curl that half covered it. They were passing through the jungle. It was warm and dark and far away. Then she woke up and said, ‘Have I been asleep?’ and he answered, ‘Yes. Are you all right? Here, let me – ’ And he leaned forward to… He bent over her. This was such bliss that he could dream no further. But it gave him the courage to bound downstairs, to snatch his straw hat from the hall, and to say as he closed the front door, ‘Well, I can only try my luck, that’s all.’
But his luck gave him a nasty jar, to say the least, almost immediately. Promenading up and down the garden path with Chinny and Biddy, the ancient Pekes, was the mater. Of course Reginald was fond of the mater and all that. She – she meant well, she had no end of grit, and so on. But there was no denying it, she was rather a grim parent. And there had been moments, many of them, in Reggie’s life, before.’ Uncle Alick died and left him the fruit farm, when he was convinced that to be a widow’s only son was about the worst punishment a chap could have. And what made it rougher than ever was that she was positively all that he had. She wasn’t only a combined parent, as it were, but she had quarrelled with all her own and the governor’s relations before Reggie had won his first trouser pockets. So that whenever Reggie was homesick out there, sitting on his dark veranda by starlight, while the gramophone cried, ‘Dear, What is Life but Love?’ his only vision