The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories by The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories (epub)

Author:The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241957394
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

Katherine Mansfield

FEUILLE D’ALBUM

HE really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether. With absolutely nothing to say for himself. And such a weight. Once he was in your studio he never knew when to go, but would sit on and on until you nearly screamed, and burned to throw something enormous after him when he did finally blush his way out – something like the tortoise stove. The strange thing was that at first sight he looked most interesting. Everybody agreed about that. You would drift into the café one evening and there you would see, sitting in a corner, with a glass of coffee in front of him, a thin dark boy, wearing a blue jersey with a little grey flannel jacket buttoned over it. And somehow that blue jersey and the grey jacket with the sleeves that were too short gave him the air of a boy that has made up his mind to run away to sea. Who has run away, in fact, and will get up in a moment and sling a knotted handkerchief containing his nightshirt and his mother’s picture on the end of a stick, and walk out into the night and be drowned… Stumble over the wharf edge on his way to the ship, even… He had black close-cropped hair, grey eyes with long lashes, white cheeks and a mouth pouting as though he were determined not to cry…. How could one resist him? Oh, one’s heart was wrung at sight. And, as if that were not enough, there was his trick of blushing… Whenever the waiter came near him he turned crimson – he might have been just out of prison and the waiter in the know…

‘Who is he, my dear? Do you know?’

‘Yes. His name is Ian French. Painter. Awfully clever, they say. Someone started by giving him a mother’s tender care. She asked him how often he heard from home, whether he had enough blankets on his bed, how much milk he drank a day. But when she went round to his studio to give an eye to his socks, she rang and rang, and though she could have sworn she heard someone breathing inside, the door was not answered…. Hopeless!’

Someone else decided that he ought to fall in love. She summoned him to her side, called him ‘boy’, leaned over him so that he might smell the enchanting perfume of her hair, took his arm, told him how marvellous life could be if one only had the courage, and went round to his studio one evening and rang and rang…. Hopeless.

‘What the poor boy really wants is thoroughly rousing,’ said a third. So off they went to cafés and cabarets, little dances, places where you drank something that tasted like tinned apricot juice, but cost twenty-seven shillings a bottle and was called champagne, other places, too thrilling for words, where you sat in the most awful gloom, and where someone had always been shot the night before. But he did not turn a hair.

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