Bliss, and other stories

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 blus

s 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

my dear? D

e 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

r him so that he might smell the enchanting perfume of her hair, took his arm, told him how marvellous life co

s, 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. Only once he got very drunk, but instead of blossoming forth, there he sat, stony, with two spots of red on his cheeks, like

up. Of course, they were still perfectly charming, and asked him to their shows, and spoke to him in the

e . . . don’t you? It can’t all be as innocent as it looks! Why come to P

shawl, stirring something in a saucepan and ladling out tit-bits to the swollen old dog lolling on a bead cushion. . . . Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful view. The two big windows faced the water; he could see the boats and the barges swinging up and down, and the fringe of an island planted with trees, like a round bouquet. The side window looked across to another house, shabbier still and smaller, and down below there was a flower

he saucepans with their lids on the wall behind the gas stove, the bowl of eggs, milk jug and teapot on the shelf, the books and the lamp with the crinkly paper shade on the table. An Indian curtain that ha

the evenings he went off to the café, or sat at home reading or making out the most complicated list of expenses headed: “What I ought

but those far-seeing women we

d and content rang out in the dusky air, and the people who had come to close their windows and fasten the shutters leaned out instead. Down below in the market the trees were peppered with new green. What kind of trees were they? he wondered. And now came the lamplighter. He stared at the house across the way, the small, shabby house,

turned she put her hands up to the handkerchief and tucked away some wisps of hair. She looked down at the deserted market and up at th

she washed up after supper, and then she came to the window, knocked a little mop against the ledge, and hung it on a nail to dry. She never sang or unbraided her hair, or held out her arms to the moon as young girls are supposed to do. And she always wore the same dark pinafore and the pink handkerchief over her hair.

down at his table he had to make an entirely new set of sworn statements. . . . Not to go to the side window before a certai

th her. She had a violent temper; they quarrelled terribly at times, he and she. She had a way of stamping her foot and twisting her hands in her pinafore . . . furious. And she very rarely laughed. Only when she told him about an absurd little kitten she once had who used to roar and pretend to be a lion when it was given meat to eat. Things like that made her laugh. . . . But as a rule they sat together very

pinafore, and carrying a basket. From where he sat he could not see the door of her house, but on the next Thursday evening at the same time he snatched up his cap a

er. . . . What could he do? He could only follow. . . . First she went into the grocer’s and spent a long time in there, and then she went into the butcher’s where she had to wait her turn. Then she was an age at the draper’s matching something, and then she went to the fruit shop

he thought proudly. “We have n

chosen. And when she came out of the dairy he went in after her. In a moment he was out again, and following her past his house across the flower market, dodging among the huge umbrellas and treading on the fallen flowers and the round marks where the pots ha

g at her severely he said, almost angrily:

anded he