FISH

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 666, 18 May 1929, Page 26

FISH

The cottage, low-roofed and mottled , with green, squatted at the side of ! the road like an enormous crab. The \ road curved down to the be>ach. Here ! was a jetty with broken boards that gave glimpses of cool green waters ! underneath. Here -were battered little boats rocking, and the smell of stale fish and black mud at low tide. From the front windows of the cottage Anna could only see the cliff with its tea-tree greyish-green and twisted. But always she knew exactly what the beach looked like. Always she could see the men with their arms brick-red lounging on the jetty, nets hanging out to dry, the colour of old leaves, the coarse grass growing over ; the sand, and occasionally a dead 1 stingray lying, a vague dark blot. 1 Now she moved about the room ’ heavily. She was big and awakward, with dull blonde hair gathered into an untidy knob on her neck. There was something strong and magnificent about her, but her blue eyes had the soft, inquiring look of a very young child. She picked up a shell from the man telpiece and put it down, wiping her fingers on her skirt. She could scarcely move without touching something that came out of the sea. Monstrous spiny sea eggs and delicate grooved ones like tiny pumpkins, pieces of coral as pink as a sunset,-or white like eggshells; dried fish tacked on to boards, with protuberant eyes and varnished skin; rough models of boats, seaweeds feathered and filigreed under glass domes; flat mother-of-pearl shells like fans, with a surface like ice; curved shells with lips the colour of faded damask roses. The room had the smell of the sea, a creeping, familiar tang that seemed to curl around you until it got inside vour nostrils. Anna could never get away from that smell any more than she could get away from the derisive sound of the waters chuckling on the beach below, and the odour of fish that seemed to cling about the cottage. Some moments she would will hard enough to lose her surroundings, and, sunk in the big rocking-chair, would think back and back. Sometimes she could almost get the smell of the cows in the dewy mornings, and the warm richness of clover opening on the country slopes. The sound of the sea then would resolve itself into the droning of bees in an old orchard, and the wind swishing in the sugar gums. She would be at the little farm by the creek, from which Ben on a visit to the bush had taken her, half eager and half afraid, but wholly in love. “Only a common fisherman,” they had said up there. But what did that matter? She had been tired of men that ploughed and sowed and reaped, and talked the jargon of the land. They were invariably selfish, and put the land before their women. A man of the sea would be different. Home to him would be a refuge from his work. He would take into it tenderness and love and consideration. But if Ben possessed any of the softer qualities that she had hungered for he was diffident about displaying them. Anna waited week after week for tender, loving words that Ben did not say because he did not know how. But she waited with a fine, steady patience, knowing that the time would come. They had been married exactly a year now. Anna, picking up things from the mantelpiece and putting them down again, thought broodingly how little anything in the way of an anniversary meant to a man—how much to a woman. It was always the woman who had to tell, and the telling was humiliating. Anna lifted her chin as she took out a rose from a basket and stroked it with firm, brown fingers. It was a brave, pink, silken rose, that had flaunted on her wedding hat a year ago. How gay they had been on that day; Ben had been moved to bold caresses, and there had been a gay courage in his eyes as he had taken the rose and pinned it on her shoulder Anna remembered it all over again—how she had held it under his chin—how she had cried out at him, wrinkling her nose at the faint fishy smell of his clothes. “Pouf! That is all right for now," she had laughed in her proud young way. “But a year from now I shall perhaps put the pink rose in front of you and you will not see it. You will only see fish with their horrid wagging fins and glassy eyes. You will not remember. Then I will want to go away, Ben Drew —away, away from it all, because 1 would scorn to stay with a man who did not see me first of all. And I tell you now I am frightened of the sea and all that moves in it-—and the terrible storms that come creeping in over the water ” Yes, she had always been afraid of storms and the queer, brooding stillness that presaged tempest. And whereas she wanted Ben to comfort her and tease her out of her terror, he merely laughed indifferently. Her mouth widened now into a tender, childish smile as she flattened the silken rose and laid it on the table. Ben would see it when he came in. He must see it! He would remember then, and he would stay with her. and they would have some kind of a celebration, perhaps, and they would talk of the old days up at the creek, and she would forget for awhile J