CHINA MAIL
FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, APRIL 14, 1989
TOR some the roses blossom late
FOR
in life. Joan Harris had found. it that way. Life had been hard for her, when it should have been blooming; it had presented such difficulties that she had grown to... despair of anything else arising, and yet in the thirties she had drifted into calm waters. She had
found peace.
Or wasn't it so? She sat stitching in the pleasant kitchen of the miller's house. There came the sound of the mill wheel churning, the clucking of the hens beyond the door, the faint sweet smell of the last sun- flowers and Michaelmas daisies. "I'm lucky," she told herself,
Joan had had to work hard in She her teens for an old father. had toiled early and late for him. and always she had cherished the idea that one day romance must be hers. Love Home Children. The three things that every woman wants deep down in the soul of her.
The essentials, Then, when lier father had died, she had found herself helpless. In these modern days people demanded training of any servant, and she had had no training in anything save the art of home-making. That seemed to be a lost art, the art that no- body wanted. For a little while she had gone from pillar to post, trying this and that and despair- ing.
There had been heartbreak and unhappiness, but she had had to go on that way. Then she had met Ted Cheam, Ted had swept.
Gay, her right off her feet. Glamorous, A romantic figure in the world which had become drab and everyday. Believing that love was hers, she had married, only to regret it. "I'm unlucky," she told herself, "one of those people on whom good-fortune turns the other shoulder."
Ted had lived the very opposite life from hers, and they thought along different lines. It wasn't anybody's fault, she told herself, but one of those things which just happen. She was shocked that
he drank a little, swore a lot, and had friends whom she would have called unscrupulous. Being shock- ed did not help her. Ted laughed at her scruples; he called her Little Mrs. Sunday-School, and life suddenly became rather dread- 'fal.
Romance is a fickle thing. Joan had gone on and on, hoping some- thing would happen, hoping she would have a baby, hoping life would become beautiful again, but through those difficult years. nothing had set things to rights. Nothing at all.
'There was no baby. Ted did not want one. Then suddenly there came the day when there was the final quarrel. He had kept o
on with the romance, so he told her, because his home was comfortable, she cooked well, and she kept his clothes patched. But as to the rest of it, he was through.
She had argued that they were married and it was for ever, she had stood there staring at him with reproachful brown eyes. He had laughed. Marriage, said he, but theirs had never been... mar- riage, When she heard that it seemed as though the world slid: from under her feet.
He told her quite frankly. He had had a wife years ago in and
"LATE ROSES"
continent. They had parted by mutual consent, and she was not likely to take action against him. But Joan had never really been married to him. He had laughed about it. He had thought it quite 'a joke.
.
Poor little Mrs. Sunday School After that they had gone their separate ways and she had closed the door on the three things that a woman wants most from life- love, children, and a home. They were not for her. She had for a time gone shifting from pillar to post, and finding life exceedingly' difficult, She applied for the position of housekeeper, and she. filled it ably, but it was hard to find the right post.
When she had come to the mill sho had known'at once that it was her niche.
Graham Strong was older than she was: a man with a pain in his eyes that she could not bear to Bec Forty, without wife or chil-
Short Story
dren and no ties in the land. Forty with a prosperous mill, and im- possible to find the right person From the very to run his home. first she had worked hard for him. ravages She had repaired the other housekeepers had made on the place; mending, tidying, put- ting right, and coming to love the mill and the pleasant garden, and the water beyond, with its still deep pool, and its dripping wheel.
And to love the man as well! For a time she had kept that from herself, choosing to draw down the blind on her innermost feelings. Graham with his fine face and hurt eyes. Then, one evening he had himself broken down the barrier between them. •- "You're different, so different,” he had said. He had stood there star- ing at her, and for a moment it seemed that the pain lifted, and as though all manner of happiness- were in store.' She knew that she cared, had not she been trying to blind herself to it all these months?
.
Now, as she sat there sewing in the room, she told herself that it was only a matter of time. Graham loved her, she had known that at once; and she loved him." He would marry her one · day. Autumn brings its late roses.. Its And they own late loveliness.
Love, would blossom for her. children, and a home. She hum- med a time as she sewed.
She heard a step on the crazy path without, and looked up. It
one of those gipsies again. old crony carrying a pack. Clothes pegs, 'all "madner things for sale. She tapped on the door. Joan in answer.
"Nothing
would bring the whole horde on your track.
This woman was good-looking in a cunning way. Black-eyed, with black hair unstreaked by grey. Her mouth had a boldness, and al- though her figure gave the idea of age, she was not old really. She said "Pretty lady, let me tell your fortune."
"I know my fortune,, thank
you
But the gipsy had taken her hand. "Ah" said she, "in love with the man who owns the place. And, he in love with you! That's a good start anyway," and she laughed.
Joan would have drawn back, but somehow she could not. There was so much truth in what the gipsy woman said, something that could not deny.
"Cross my hand with silver, lady?"
"I don't believe in fortunes," she said helplessly.
By Ursula Bloom
"But it's true, what I have told you; quite true. You cannot deny it?"
"Yes, it's true.”
Perhaps she ought not to have ad- mitted it, for after that there was 'no' chance of cscape. She handed a shilling to the gipsy woman, and -here she was inside the pleasant room, her pack set down on the floor. She was telling a story of love which overcome all difficulties. Joan had been married before, she said, but the way lay clear there; the man she loved was married but that way would clear also. And, as she said the very words, Joan felt a thrill of horror go through her.
She had not thought that Graham was married; ho had never said anything about it, and there was no reason in the past why he should have kept it from her. He had said marriage was a lottery, and the best way of tak- ing the first blooming off love. No
more.
"Married?” she gasped. "Married these many moons, pretty lady."
It was then that Graham hima self came in. The white flour was on his suit, and touching his dark hair as though with a premature greyness. As he crossed the thres- hold, he stopped dead, surprised to see the gipsy standing there holding Joan's hand and staring down into it.
asked,
What's all this?" he and there was a new toné ; about his
s voice, something that Joan had never heard there before. Some thing that startled her.
She said, "It is just a piece of silliness and then she knew that For the ind was King
that was tense and strained; a moment when Joan had the feel- ing
that she stood on the edge of a volcano and that at any second- it might blow up and kill her.
Then Graham spoke. “After all these years," he said brokenly, like a man who has been stunned.~
For a moment Joan stood still, then she knew that this was no place for her. If she stayed she would be trespassing on something intimate in his life, something to She which she had no right. turned and went out into the little · kitchen, She, stood there, clut- ching at the table and looking through the wide window to the peaceful fields and lanes of Ken- tish country. Something had hap- pened in the mill, something which ́ ́ she did not understand. Some- thing which, for a vague reason which she could not fathom, threatened her own happiness.
Long after Graham called her into the sitting-room. In that time he had become quite old. "I want to tell you the truth,” he said.
It was the very story she might · have suspected. A young man, romantically-minded as she had been herself in her teens. A man who set love and sentiment on a pedestal and worshipped at their shrine, and the meeting with a gipsy girl in a moment of madness and moonshine. Their marriage, and their raggle-taggle life for a whole year later. And, as his crazy passion for her died, the know-
·ledge came that he could not possibly tolerate her way of liv- ing, her disregard for law and` order, and her wandering ́ways. Her own knowledge that his life was not hers, and finally the day. when she had walked out on him and into the world beyond their ́doors. A creature of the hedges and ditches, a homeless vagabond who did not ask more of him.
He had gone on his life here, and all the while he had known that somewhere in the world she lived and wandered and stood as the barrier between him and honest marriage with the woman- he really loved.
"You see," he said desperately, "I do care for you. I wanted to marry you from the moment we (Continued on Page 7)
1 MEAN ITI WANT THE BABY POWDER THAT FIGHTS GERMS
MENNEN
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