The Aloe by Katherine Mansfield Read Free Book Online

her, a tiny smile beamed on her lips; she thought it looked very nice, very satisfactory. If only servant girls could be taught to understand that it did not only matter how you put a thing away it mattered just as much where you put it – or was it the other way about. . . But at any rate they never would understand; she had never been able to train them . . . “Mother, Mother are you in the kitchen?” called Beryl. “Yes, dear. Do you want me?” “No, I’m coming,” and Beryl ran in, very flushed, dragging with her two big pictures. “Mother whatever can I do with these hideous awful Chinese paintings that Chung Wah gave Stanley when he went bankrupt. It’s absurd to say they were valuable because they were hanging in Chung Wah’s fruit shop for months before. I can’t understand why Stanley doesn’t want them to be thrown away – I’m sure he thinks they’re just as hideous as we do, but it’s because of the frames –” she said, spitefully. “I suppose he thinks the frames might fetch something one day. Ugh! What a weight they are.” “Why don’t you hang them in the passage” suggested Mrs Fairfield. “They would not be much seen there.” “I can’t. There isn’t room. I’ve hung all the photographs of his office before and after rebuilding there, and the signed photographs of his business friends and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on a mat in her singlet. There isn’t an inch of room left there.” Her angry glance flew over the placid kitchen. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll hang them here – I’ll say they got a little damp in the moving and so I put them up here in the warm for the time being.” She dragged forward a chair, jumped up on it, took a hammer and a nail out of her deep apron pocket and banged away – “There! That’s high enough. Hand me up the picture, Mother.” “One moment, child –” she was wiping the carved ebony frame – “Oh, Mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those winding little holes” and she frowned at the top of her Mother’s head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother’s deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily. At last the two pictures were hung, side by side. She jumped off the chair, stowing back the little hammer. “They don’t look so bad there, do they,” said she – “And at any rate nobody need ever see them except Pat and the servant girl – Have I got a spider’s web on my face, Mother? I’ve been poking my head into that cupboard under the stairs and now something keeps tickling me.” But before Mrs Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away again –” Is that clock right. Is it really as early as that? Good Heavens it seems years since breakfast?” “That reminds me,” said Mrs Fairfield. “I must go upstairs and fetch down Linda’s tray” . . . “There!” cried Beryl. “Isn’t that like the servant girl. Isn’t that exactly like her. I told her distinctly to tell you that I was too busy to take it up and would you please instead. I never dreamed she hadn’t told you!”
    Some one tapped on the window. They turned away from the pictures. Linda was there, nodding and smiling. They heard the latch of the scullery door lift and she came in. She had no hat on; her hair stood up on her head in curling rings and she was all wrapped up in an old Kashmir shawl. “Please can I have something to eat,” said she. “Linnet dear I am so frightfully sorry. It’s my fault,” cried Beryl. “But I wasn’t hungry. I would have screamed if I had been,” said Linda “Mummy darling, make me a little pot of tea in the brown china teapot.” She went into the pantry and began lifting the lids off a row of tins. “What grandeur my dears,” she cried, coming back with a brown scone and a slice of gingerbread – “a pantry and a larder.” “Oh but you haven’t seen the outhouses yet” said Beryl. “There is a stable and