The Garden Party, and Other StoriesMansfield, Katherine
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The Garden Party, and Other Stories
Mansfield, Katherine
New Zealand -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, New Zealand
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 to-day, 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 mattered.
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 to-day
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 earrings 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—yeep._ But Josephine felt they were not
sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little
crying noise. _Yeep—eyeep—yeep._ Ah, what was it crying, so weak and
forlorn?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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