A Sport of Nature Read Online Free PDF Page A

porcelain animal fell on the long-haired carpeting that was soft under bare feet in a bedroom, but the upraised paw and one end of the gilded bow on the collar broke.
    Olga agitated defensively, as if the destruction lying there were not a loss but an accusation made by Olga against herself. —It doesn’t matter. Oh I didn’t mean to upset you … and over Billie … Doesn’t matter. It can be put together again. Oh darling, I’m so sorry! Please!—
    â€”You don’t have to watch out for any treasures here, anyway.— Pauline trod on silverfish that ran from the pages of stacked journals she moved to make room for the girl’s clothes in a cupboard.
    â€”It’s going to be repaired.—
    But Pauline intended to start the girl off the way she should go on; it didn’t help anybody to be protected from the facts. —Things like that can’t be put together again. Oh yes, you can glue them, they look the same as before, to you and me; but their value for people like Olga is gone. They can’t take pleasure in anything that hasn’t got a market value. If they can’t look at it and think: I could get so-and-so for that if I wanted to sell it.—
    â€”So now Olga won’t be able to sell it?—
    â€”You don’t have to worry your young head over that. Olga doesn’t need to sell anything; it’s just that she needs to own things whose price is set down in catalogues.—
    Pauline and Joe’s house was not nearly so beautiful as Olga’s, and fewer services were provided. As if still at boarding-school, Hillela had to make her own bed in the room she shared with her cousin Carole; there was no Jethro in white suit serving at table, and no cook in the kitchen. Bettie, the maid-of-all-work, was helped by members of the family, the swimming pool was old and pasted your flesh with wet leaves. Alpheus—son of the weekly washerwoman—lived in what had been the second garage (Pauline’s old car stood in the yard) and doubled as gardener at weekends: Joe was giving him a chance as a clerk in his law office and Pauline was paying for him to take correspondence courses.
    But in the shared bedroom a kind of comfort the girl had not known before built up. Categories kept separate by the institutional order of boarding-school and the aesthetic order of the room with the fresh flower were casually trampled down. Clothes, schoolbooks, hairbrushes, magazines, face creams, Coke bottles, deodorants, posters, tampons, oranges and chocolate bars, records and tennis rackets—all were woven into an adolescents’ nest nobody disturbed. Pauline respected its privacy but assumed participation in the adult world. Before Olga’s dinner parties the children were given their meal in another room; Carole had been accustomed, since she had wandered in sucking her bottle, to dipping in and out of conversations among her parents’ friends in gatherings that cropped up at meals, in the livingroom or on the verandah. There was nothing to giggle over hotly in secret, in this house, because sexual matters were discussed openly as authority was criticised.
    Pauline and Joe had been able to avoid segregated education for their son Alexander by sending him to a school for all races, over the border in an independent neighbouring black state.But there was some reluctance, even at the expense of this advantage, to part with both their children. The other was the younger, and a girl—they decided to keep her under the parental eye at home, although to spare her, at least, the education primed with doctrinal discrimination at South African government schools. Olga (even in her sister Pauline’s house nobody denied the generosity of Olga when it came to family obligations) must have been paying the fees for Hillela at the expensive private school at which she had joined her cousin. From there one day Carole came home in tears because at the school