Free Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield

Please,” she cried, reaching for his arm, but he brushed her aside and hurried out onto the balcony over-looking the garden.
    â€œShe’s infected. Damn fool must have breached the cordon for some reason.”
    Bertha chased after him into the moonlit garden. His pace was so intent and quick, every step made the distance between them wider. Miss Fulton had given up running now. She simply walked towards the tall, slender pear-tree at the far end of the garden. It struck Bertha at that moment. The beauty of it. The perfection of the flowering tree, the luminous moon and slender figure dressed in shimmering silver.
    Harry was gaining on her. He trampled through a bed of slumbering tulips and was not more than ten feet away when Miss Fulton stopped in front of the tree.
    â€œYour lovely pear-tree,” she said, her dreamy voice resounding through the silent garden.
    Harry raised his shotgun and Bertha thought perhaps she hadn’t even heard the shot. All she could hear was Miss Fulton’s words dancing in her ears. She saw the body slump and fall to the ground at the base of the tree. And then she was gone.
    â€œI’ll have everything cleaned up and see Eddie makes it back home safely,” said Harry, extravagantly cool and collected as he turned away and walked back to Bertha. “You’d better get inside. It’s cold. You’ll catch your death out here.”
    She couldn’t look at him. The guards were shouting to each other as they rushed into the garden, lured away from their patrol by the call of gunfire. She couldn’t bear to look at them either. She simply ran back into the house.
    â€œYour lovely pear-tree—pear-tree—pear-tree!” That sweet voice like an everlasting echo even after she had closed the door.
    â€œOh, what is going to happen now?” she cried.
    But when she woke up the next morning and looked out into the garden, the pear-tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.

The Young Girl
    In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up as though for the first time—pinned up to be out of the way for her flight—Mrs Raddick’s daughter might have just dropped from this radiant heaven. Mrs Raddick’s timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring glance looked as if she believed it, too; but the daughter didn’t appear any too pleased—why should she?—to have alighted on the steps of the Casino. Indeed, she was bored—bored as though Heaven had been full of casinos with snuffy old saints for croupiers and crowns to play with.
    The leech on her neck was pulsing slightly, veins of dark brown throbbing under its pale skin. Its spindly tentacles wrapped around the daughter’s slender neck, disappeared beneath her gold curls and down under her coat. I felt my own leech swell as it fed off my pleasure in seeing so radiant a creature, and it released a trace of its nectar into my bloodstream.
    â€œNow Hennie, you go with the nice man. You don’t mind awfully, do you?” Mrs Raddick asked me, her eyes wild. Her own leech was bloated, enormous, almost as large as the handbag she clutched. It was latticed with purple and crimson. “Sure you don’t? There’s the car, and you’ll have tea and we’ll be back here on this step—right here—in an hour. You see, I want her to go in. She’s not been before, and it’s worth seeing. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to her.”
    â€œOh, shut up, mother,” said she wearily. “Come along. Don’t talk so much. And your bag’s open; you’ll be losing all your money again.”
    â€œI’m sorry, darling,” said Mrs Raddick.
    â€œOh, do come in! I want to make money,” said the impatient voice. “It’s all jolly well for you—but I’m broke!”
    â€œHere—take fifty francs, darling, take a hundred!” I saw