Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield Read Free Book Online Page B

just hear the soft swish of the sea at full tide sweeping the pebbles. The sun was sinking.
    â€œAnd so you go back to the office on Monday, do you, Jonathan?” asked Linda.
    â€œOn Monday the cage door opens and clangs to upon the victim for another eleven months and a week,” answered Jonathan.
    Linda swung a little. “It must be awful,” she said slowly.
    â€œWould ye have me laugh, my fair sister? Would ye have me weep?”
    Linda was so accustomed to Jonathan’s way of talking that she paid no attention to it.
    â€œI suppose,” she said vaguely, “one gets used to it. One gets used to anything.”
    â€œDoes one? Hum!” The “Hum” was so deep it seemed to boom from underneath the ground. “I wonder how it’s done,” brooded Jonathan; “I’ve never managed it.”
    Looking at him as he lay there, Linda thought again how attractive he was. It was strange to think that he was only an ordinary clerk, that Stanley earned twice as much money as he. What was the matter with Jonathan? He had no ambition; she supposed that was it. And yet one felt he was gifted, exceptional. He was passionately fond of music; every spare penny he had went on books. He was always full of new ideas, schemes, plans. But nothing came of it all. The new fire blazed in Jonathan; you almost heard it roaring softly as he explained, described and dilated on the new thing; but a moment later it had fallen in and there was nothing but ashes, and Jonathan went about with a look like hunger in his black eyes. At these times he exaggerated his absurd manner of speaking, and he sang in church—he was the leader of the choir—with such fearful dramatic intensity that the meanest hymn put on an unholy splendour.
    â€œIt seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,” said Jonathan, “as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one’s life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody’s ledger! It’s a queer use to make of one’s . . . one and only life, isn’t it? Or do I fondly dream?” He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. “Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner. The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody’s ever going to let me out. That’s a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I’d been—pushed in, against my will—kicking, even—once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder’s steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I’m like an insect that’s flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, ‘The shortness of life! The shortness of life!’ I’ve only one night or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.”
    â€œBut, if you feel like that, why—” began Linda quickly.
    â€œ Ah! ” cried Jonathan. And that “Ah!” was somehow almost exultant. “There you have me. Why? Why indeed? There’s the maddening, mysterious question. Why don’t I fly out again? There’s the window or the door or whatever it was I came in by. It’s not hopelessly shut—is it? Why don’t I find it and be off? Answer me that, little sister.” But he gave her no time to answer.
    â€œI’m exactly like that insect again. For some reason”—Jonathan paused between the words—“it’s not allowed, it’s