Occasion for Loving Read Online Free

surprised to find how little of her son there was in the room; how tenuous his hold on this house was. Part of a cupboard had been enough to take the stained, half-out-grown schoolboy’s suit, the two or three holey pullovers, the cricket bat and the broken bagatelle board that made up his possessions.
    Jessie was anxious to make her guest comfortable. “Here—look—there’s at least another shelf going begging. You could put things you don’t need every day in here. And on top of the wall-cupboard in Clem’s room—you can put your empty cases upthere.” Ann came running to see. “How marvellous! There’s bags of room. Thanks so much.”
    â€œIt’s dreadful not to be able to have order,” said Jessie, her hands dropping to her sides in the manner of a woman between one task and the next. “I long for order.”
    â€œOh yes!” With careless, social enthusiasm, the girl suggested that she did, too; but she did not even know what chaos was, yet.
    She lugged her things cheerfully up and down the room, while Jessie sat on the bed and talked to her. Her ankles, fine as a race-horse’s, took any weight steadily although she wore such high-heeled shoes; she was really very gay and pretty. She gave a thump with her long-fingered hand on a drum that was part of Boaz’s collection of African instruments, and disentangled the belt of a dress from a pair of sandals.
    â€œDo you know anything about all this?” Jessie leaned over to pick up a gourd decorated with an incised design and mounted on a reed. “Look, I can play that!” said the girl. She dropped an armful of dresses back into the suitcase. She took the contraption and blew into it, laughing and struggling with it. She produced a few low, blurred notes, surprisingly sweet. “It’s a
chigufe
, a special end-blown flute.” Jessie tried it, but nothing came. “I can usually get something out of these things,” said the girl, smiling. “Do you work with Boaz—I never asked him what you did,” said Jessie. “Nothing much.” She was hanging up dresses again. “What sort of work do you do, I mean? What are you going to do while you’re here?” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll wander about with Boaz quite a bit, I suppose. And I’ll want to get to know what’s going on in Johannesburg. When I go somewhere I haven’t been, I like to get into it up to the neck, don’t you?”
    The two women got on pleasantly enough in the feminine preoccupation of making ready a place to live, but each was conscious of reservations about the other. Ann Davis, in her innocent self-absorption, busy making herself comfortable, wouldnever have remarked on this, but when they were alone in their room Boaz said anxiously, “Wonderful pair. I told you.” “Did she really want us to come, I wonder?” said Ann, curious. “I mean, she couldn’t have been kinder, but I had the feeling she wasn’t interested in me.”
    â€œShe doesn’t seem to work,” said Jessie to Tom.
    â€œI don’t know what she did in England.”
    â€œNothing. She has no work of her own.”
    â€œThat may be.” Jessie’s feeling of the extraordinariness of the fact did not strike him.
    â€œIt seems so odd.”
    He gave a sensible laugh. “Why odd?”
    â€œEveryone works,” she said stubbornly.
    â€œNow and then there could be someone who didn’t feel the need.”
    Work was an article of faith by which they—Tom, she herself, their friends—lived. How could it become, by the casual word, the mere presence of the girl, a dead letter? Yet it was, it could be. And what was the good of an article of faith that would deny it? There was life beyond life as she had conceived of it for herself; there were freedoms beyond the freedom she understood. She added another word or two to the near