Cat and Mouse Read Free Page B

haven’t got my girl, for all you think yourself so bright. She’s got her Carlyon: bassinets any minute now, and she won’t even have to live with her mother-in-law. Whereas you, my poor Katinka Jones, have to make do with a career, and look as if you like it! She had meant to have six children and, in the days before her chances had grown so thin, had expressed her opinions pretty freely in her gaily positive way, as to how the young should be brought up. Her married friends had listened, much interested, but continued to rear their families on conventional lines.
    Miss Evans was obviously devoured with curiosity, but did not like to put direct questions. Katinka volunteered a lively sketch of life in London, in the offices of Girls Together . “I think I have taken that book now and then to Penderyn,” said Miss Evans. Tinka surprised a rather startled look upon the romantic features of Mr. Chucky, as though he were puzzled by her. They came to the river.
    Miss Evans’s boat lay tossing on the swollen waters, jerking at its mooring like a goat on a too-short tether. Miss Evans tugged it in by the chain and hoisted her milk cans aboard. She refused assistance from Mr. Chucky and pulled them strongly across to the opposite bank. “It’s a long way,” said Katinka, “to come over with a pint or two of milk. Darned if I would! And up that path to the house! Do you come every day?”
    “Not every day. They tell me when they’ll want more. Not that I’d mind,” said Miss Evans, her blue eyes glancing over across the river to the dark mountain looming over them. “I like the walk. The river there’s peaceful! And you climb the path and look back over the valley and the village; it makes you understand how little it all is, compared with God.” She gave them a suddenly very lovely smile.
    If she were articulate, thought Katinka, swallowed up for a moment in Miss Friendly-wise, if she were a suburban spinster, she would be writing me letters full of platitudes, asking me whether she’s right to remain loyal to the memory of a fiancé killed in the war (when all the time I know by bitter experience that she’s probably never had a chance to be anything else) or whether she should stick to an ailing mother, or why she’s growing hair on her upper lip. … And I don’t know that I’m much better myself: jolly nearly thirty and nothing in my life but the office and the Women’s Press Club and being Bright in pubs. There was something to be said for being country bred, for finding one’s joy in the river and the mountainside, for knowing how to rise up out of the valley and leave the little cares behind.
    The little make-shift landing stage was almost entirely swamped. They scrambled ashore and began the long, steep ascent of the mountain to the house. A narrow path, cut into the hillside by the feet of men, straggling through the bracken up the treeless hill, dodging round a boulder here, split there by a rivulet coursing down to join the main stream; but all the time climbing up and up to the house. Above them towered the tall cliff of the Tarren Goch. It was as though, in some gargantuan frolic, a giant hand had scooped a great hole in the mountainside, had flung back the rocks so that, carelessly falling, they formed a kind of rough stairway, each step higher than a dozen men, up either side of the depression in the hillside. Mr. Chucky lagged civilly behind with Katinka, as Miss Evans forged sturdily ahead. “I used to play there as a boy. Underneath those rocks that are tumbled up each side of the quarry, there’s a sort of chain of caves—not real caves of course, but little dark rooms, formed by the heaped-up boulders. The one nearest Penderyn is best; you can go in almost at the bottom and climb right up through them, hardly seeing daylight till you come to the top.” He pointed to a narrow ledge that seemed to hang like a painter’s cradle, jutting out from the edge of the precipice almost at its