LITMIR.BIZ

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you hold one while I finish with the other?” asked Pat. Pip let go of Snooker. “Won’t I? Won’t I? Give us one. I don’t mind how much he kicks.”

      He nearly sobbed with delight when Pat gave the white lump into his arms.

      There was an old stump beside the door of the fowl-house. Pat grabbed the duck by the legs, laid it flat across the stump, and almost at the same moment down came the little tomahawk and the duck’s head flew off the stump. Up the blood spurted over the white feathers and over his hand.

      When the children saw the blood they were frightened no longer. They crowded round him and began to scream. Even Isabel leaped about crying: “The blood! The blood!” Pip forgot all about his duck. He simply threw it away from him and shouted, “I saw it. I saw it,” and jumped round the wood block.

      Rags, with cheeks as white as paper, ran up to the little head, put out a finger as if he wanted to touch it, shrank back again and then again put out a finger. He was shivering all over.

      Even Lottie, frightened little Lottie, began to laugh and pointed at the duck and shrieked: “Look, Kezia, look.”

      “Watch it!” shouted Pat. He put down the body and it began to waddle—with only a long spurt of blood where the head had been; it began to pad away without a sound towards the steep bank that led to the stream.… That was the crowning wonder.

      “Do you see that? Do you see that?” yelled Pip. He ran among the little girls tugging at their pinafores.

      “It’s like a little engine. It’s like a funny little railway engine,” squealed Isabel.

      But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms round his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees.

      “Put head back! Put head back!” she screamed.

      When he stooped to move her she would not let go or take her head away. She held on as hard as she could and sobbed: “Head back! Head back!” until it sounded like a loud strange hiccup.

      “It’s stopped. It’s tumbled over. It’s dead,” said Pip.

      Pat dragged Kezia up into his arms. Her sun-bonnet had fallen back, but she would not let him look at her face. No, she pressed her face into a bone in his shoulder and clasped her arms round his neck.

      The children stopped screaming as suddenly as they had begun. They stood round the dead duck. Rags was not frightened of the head any more. He knelt down and stroked it, now.

      “I don’t think the head is quite dead yet,” he said. “Do you think it would keep alive if I gave it something to drink?”

      But Pip got very cross: “Bah! You baby.” He whistled to Snooker and went off.

      When Isabel went up to Lottie, Lottie snatched away.

      “What are you always touching me for, Isabel?”

      “There now,” said Pat to Kezia. “There’s the grand little girl.”

      She put up her hands and touched his ears. She felt something. Slowly she raised her quivering face and looked. Pat wore little round gold ear-rings. She never knew that men wore ear-rings. She was very much surprised.

      “Do they come on and off?” she asked huskily.

      10

      Up in the house, in the warm tidy kitchen, Alice, the servant girl, was getting the afternoon tea. She was “dressed.” She had on a black stuff dress that smelt under the arms, a white apron like a large sheet of paper, and a lace bow pinned on to her hair with two jetty pins. Also her comfortable carpet slippers were changed for a pair of black leather ones that pinched her corn on her little toe something dreadful.…

      It was warm in the kitchen. A blow-fly buzzed, a fan of whity steam came out of the kettle, and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled. The clock ticked in the warm air, slow and deliberate, like the click of an old woman’s knitting needle, and sometimes—for no reason at all, for there wasn’t any breeze—the blind swung out and back, tapping the window.

      Alice was making water-cress sandwiches. She had a lump of butter on the table, a barracouta loaf, and the cresses tumbled in a white cloth.

      But propped against the butter dish there was a dirty, greasy little book, half unstitched, with curled edges, and while she mashed the butter she read:

      “To dream of black-beetles drawing a hearse is bad. Signifies death of one you hold near or dear, either father, husband, brother, son, or intended. If beetles crawl backwards as you watch them it means death from fire or from great height such as flight of stairs, scaffolding, etc.

      “Spiders. To dream of spiders creeping over you is good. Signifies large sum of money in near future. Should party be in family way an easy confinement may be expected. But care should be taken in sixth month to avoid eating of probable present of shell fish.… ”

      How many thousand birds I see.

      Oh, life. There was Miss Beryl. Alice dropped the knife and slipped the Dream Book under the butter dish. But she hadn’t time to hide it quite, for Beryl ran into the kitchen and up to the table, and the first thing her eye lighted on were those greasy edges. Alice saw Miss Beryl’s meaning little smile and the way she raised her eyebrows and screwed up her eyes as though she were not quite sure what that could be. She decided to answer if Miss Beryl should ask her: “Nothing as belongs to you, Miss.” But she knew Miss Beryl would not ask her.

      Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she had the most marvellous retorts ready for questions that she knew would never be put to her. The composing of them and the turning of them over and over in her mind comforted her just as much as if they’d been expressed. Really, they kept her alive in places where she’d been that chivvied she’d been afraid to go to bed at night with a box of matches on the chair in case she bit the tops off in her sleep, as you might say.

      “Oh, Alice,” said Miss Beryl. “There’s one extra to tea, so heat a plate of yesterday’s scones, please. And put on the Victoria sandwich as well as the coffee cake. And don’t forget to put little doyleys under the plates—will you? You did yesterday, you know, and the tea looked so ugly and common. And, Alice, don’t put that dreadful old pink and green cosy on the afternoon teapot again. That is only for the mornings. Really, I think it ought to be kept for the kitchen—it’s so shabby, and quite smelly. Put on the Japanese one. You quite understand, don’t you?”

      Miss Beryl had finished.

      That sing aloud from every tree…

      she sang as she left the kitchen, very pleased with her firm handling of Alice.

      Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was that she made her feel low. She talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there; and she never lost her temper with her—never. Even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything important Miss Beryl seemed to have expected it to happen.

      “If you please, Mrs. Burnell,” said an imaginary Alice, as she buttered the scones, “I’d rather not take my orders from Miss Beryl. I may be only a common servant girl as doesn’t know how to play the guitar, but…”

      This last thrust pleased her so much that she quite recovered her temper.

      “The only thing to do,” she heard, as she opened the dining-room door, “is to cut the sleeves out entirely and just have a broad band of black velvet over the shoulders instead.…”

      11

      The white duck did not look as if it had ever had a head when Alice placed it in front of Stanley Burnell that night. It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on a blue dish—its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it.

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