Spring Fashions
Winter had come and gone, and spring found Miss Quincey back again at St.
Sidwell's, the place of illumination; a place that knew rather less of
her than it had known before. After five-and-twenty years of constant
attendance she had only to be away three months to be forgotten. The new
staff was not greatly concerned with Miss Quincey; it was always busy. As
for the girls, they were wholly given over to the new worship of Rhoda
Vivian; impossible to rouse them to the faintest interest in Miss
Quincey.
Her place had been kept for her by Rhoda. Rhoda had put out the strong
young arm that she was so proud of, and held back for a little while Miss
Quincey's fate; and now at all costs she was determined to stand between
her and the truth. So Miss Quincey never knew that it was Rhoda who was
responsible for the delicate attentions she had received during her
illness; Rhoda who had bought and sent off the presents from St.
Sidwell's; Rhoda who had conceived that pretty little idea of flowers
"with love"; and Rhoda who had inspired the affectionate messages of the
staff. (The Classical Mistress had to draw most extravagantly on her
popularity in order to work that fraud.) Rhoda had taken her place, and
it was not in Rhoda's power to give it back to her. But Miss Quincey
never saw it; for a subtler web than that of Rhoda's spinning was woven
about her eyes.
Possibly in some impressive and inapparent way her unhappy little
favourite Laura Lazarus may have been glad to see her back again, though
the two queer creatures exchanged no greeting more intimate than an
embarrassed smile. In this rapidly-advancing world the Mad Hatter alone
remained where Miss Quincey had left her. She explained at some length
how the figures twisted themselves round in her head and would never stay
the same for a minute together. Miss Quincey listened patiently to this
explanation; she was more indulgent, less persistent than before.
Under that veil of illusion she herself had become communicative. She
went up and down between the classes and poured out her soul as to an
audience all interest, all sympathy. There was a certain monotony about
her conversation since the epoch of her illness. It was, "Oh yes, I am
quite well now, thank you. Dr. Cautley is so very clever. Dr. Cautley has
taken splendid care of me. Dr. Cautley has been so very kind and
attentive, I think it would be ungrateful of me if I had not got well.
Dr. Cautley--" Perhaps it was just as well for Miss Quincey that the
staff were too busy to attend to her. The most they noticed was that in
the matter of obstruction Miss Quincey was not quite so precipitate as
she had been. She offended less by violent contact and rebound than by
drifting absently into the processions and getting mixed up with them.
Rhoda saw a change in her; Rhoda was never too busy to spare a thought
for Miss Quincey. "Yes," she said, "you _are_ better. Your eyes are
brighter."
"That," said Miss Quincey, with simple pride "is the arsenic. Dr. Cautley
is giving me arsenic."
Now arsenic (like happiness) has some curious properties. It looks most
innocently like sugar, which it is not. A little of it goes a long way
and undoubtedly acts as a tonic; a little more may undermine the stoutest
constitution, and a little too much of it is a deadly poison and kills
you. As yet Miss Quincey had only taken it in microscopic doses.
Something had changed her; it may have been happiness, it may have been
illusion; whatever it was Miss Quincey thought it was the arsenic--if it
was not the weather, the very remarkable weather. For that year Spring
came with a burst.
Indeed there is seldom anything shy and tentative, anything obscure and
gradual about the approaches of the London Spring. Spring is always in a
hurry there, for she knows that she has but a short time before her; she
has to make an impression and make it at once; so she works careless of
delicacies and shades, relying on broad telling strokes, on strong
outlines and stinging contrasts. She is like a clever artist handicapped
with her materials. Only a patch of grass, a few trees and the sky; but
you wake one morning and the boughs are drawn black and bold against the
blue; and leaves are sharp as emeralds against the black; and the grass
in the squares and the shrubs in the gardens repeat the same brilliant
extravaganza; and it is all very eccentric and beautiful and daring. That
is the way of a Cockney Spring, and when you are used to it the charm is
undeniable.
One day Miss Quincey walked in Camden Town and noted the singular
caprices of the Spring. Strange longings, freaks of the blood and brain,
stirred within her at this bursting of the leaf. They led her into Camden
Road, into the High Street, to the great shops where the virginal young
fashions and the artificial flowers are. At this season Hunter's window
blooms out in blouses of every imaginable colour and texture and form.
There was one, a silk one, of so discreet and modest a mauve that you
could have called it lavender. To say that it caught Miss Quincey's eye
would be to wrong that maidenly garment. There was nothing blatant,
nothing importunate in its behaviour. Gently, imperceptibly, it stole
into the field of vision and stood there, delicately alluring. It could
afford to wait. It had not even any pattern to speak of, only an
indefinable white something, a dice, a diaper, a sprig. It was the sprig
that touched her, tempted her.
Amongst the poorer ranks of Miss Quincey's profession the sumptuary laws
are exceptionally severe. It is a crime, a treachery, to spend money on
mere personal adornment. You are clothed, not for beauty's sake, but
because the rigour of the climate and of custom equally require it. Miss
Quincey's conscience pricked her all the time that she stood looking in
at Hunter's window. Never before had she suffered so terrible a
solicitation of the senses. It was as if all those dim and germinal
desires had burst and blossomed in this sinful passion for a blouse. She
resisted, faltered, resisted; turned away and turned back again. The
blouse sat immovable on its wooden bust, absolute in its policy of
reticence. Miss Quincey had just decided that it had a thought too much
mauve in it, and was most successfully routing desire by depreciation of
its object when a shopman stepped on to the stage, treading airily among
the gauzes and the flowers. There was no artifice about the young man; it
was in the dreamiest abstraction that he clasped that fair form round the
collar and turned it to the light. It shuddered like a living thing; its
violent mauve vanished in silver grey. The effect was irresistible. Miss
Quincey was tempted beyond all endurance; and she fell. Once in
possession of the blouse, its price, a guinea, paid over the counter,
Miss Quincey was all discretion. She carried her treasure home in a
pasteboard box concealed under her cape; lest its shameless arrival in
Hunter's van should excite scandal and remark.
That night, behind a locked door, Miss Quincey sat up wrestling and
battling with her blouse. To Miss Quincey in the watches of the night it
seemed that a spirit of obstinate malevolence lurked in that deceitful
garment. Like all the things in Hunter's shop, it was designed for
conventional well-rounded womanhood. It repudiated the very idea of Miss
Quincey; in every fold it expressed its contempt for her person; its
collar was stiff with an invincible repugnance. Miss Quincey had to take
it in where it went out, and let it out where it went in, to pinch, pull,
humour and propitiate it before it would consent to cling to her
diminished figure. When all was done she wrapped it in tissue paper and
hid it away in a drawer out of sight, for the very thought of it
frightened her. But when next she went to look at it she hardly knew it
again. The malignity seemed all smoothed out of it; it lay there with its
meek sleeves folded, the very picture of injured innocence and reproach.
Miss Quincey thought she might get reconciled to it in time. A day might
even come when she would be brave enough to wear it.
Not many days after, Miss Quincey might have been seen coming out of St.
Sidwell's with a reserved and secret smile playing about her face; so
secret and so reserved, that nobody, not even Miss Quincey, could tell
what it was playing at.
Miss Quincey was meditating an audacity.
That night she took pen and paper up to her bedroom and sat down to write
a little note. Sat down to write it and got up again; wrote it and tore
it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such
emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps
none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force
and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just
as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on her
way to St. Sidwell's.
Old Martha was cleaning the steps as Miss Quincey went out; but Miss
Quincey carefully avoided looking Martha's way. Like the ostrich she
supposed that if she did not see Martha, Martha could not see her. But
Martha had seen her. She saw everything. She had seen the note open on
Miss Juliana's table by the window in the bedroom when she was drawing up
the blind; she had seen the silk blouse lying in its tissue paper when
she was tidying Miss Juliana's drawer; and that very afternoon she
discovered a certain cake deposited by Miss Juliana in the dining-room
cupboard with every circumstance of secrecy and disguise.
And Martha shook her old head and put that and that together, the blouse,
the cake and the letter; though what connection there could possibly be
between the three was more than Miss Juliana could have told her. Even to
Martha the association was so singular that it pointed to some painful
aberration of intellect on Miss Juliana's part.
As in duty bound, Martha brought up her latest discovery and laid it
before Mrs. Moon. Beyond that she said nothing, indeed there was nothing
to be said. The cake (it was of the expensive pound variety, crowned with
a sugar turret and surrounded with almond fortifications) spoke for
itself, though in an unknown language.
"What does that mean, Martha?"
"Miss Juliana, m'm, I suppose."
Martha pursed up her lips, suppressing the impertinence of her own
private opinion and awaiting her mistress's with respect.
No doubt she would have heard it but that Miss Juliana happened to come
in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really
amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for
five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or
dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the
afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and
mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly
loved a scene, for to be admitted to a scene was to be admitted to her
mistress's confidence; but the excellent woman knew her place, and before
that flagrant apparition she withdrew as she would have withdrawn from a
family scandal.
Miss Quincey advanced timidly, for of course she knew that she had to
cross that room under fire of criticism; but on the whole she was less
abject than she might have been, for at the moment she was thinking of
Dr. Cautley. He had actually accepted her kind invitation, and that fact
explained and justified her; besides, she carried her Browning in her
hand, and it made her feel decidedly more natural.
Mrs. Moon restrained her feelings until her niece had moved about a bit,
and sat down by her enemy the cabinet, and presented herself in every
possible aspect. The Old Lady's eyes lost no movement of the curious
figure; when she had taken it in, grasped it in all its details, she
began.
"Well, I declare, Juliana"--(five-and-twenty years ago she used to call
her "Jooley," keeping the full name to mark disapproval or displeasure.
Now it was always Juliana, so that Mrs. Moon seemed to be permanently
displeased)--"whatever possessed you to make such an exhibition of
yourself? (And will you draw your chair back--you're incommoding the
cabinet.) I never saw anything so unsuitable and unbecoming in _my_
life--at this hour of the day too. Why, you're just like a whirligig out
of a pantomime. If you think you can carry off that kind of thing you're
very much mistaken."
That did seem to be Miss Quincey's idea--to carry it off; to brazen it
out; to sit down and read Browning as if there was nothing at all
remarkable in her personal appearance.
"And to choose lilac of all things in the world! You never could stand
that shade at the best of times. Lilac! Why, I declare if it isn't
mauve-pink."
"Mauve-pink!" She had given voice to the fear that lay hidden in Miss
Quincey's heart. A sensitive culprit caught in humiliating guilt could
not look more cowed with self-consciousness than Miss Quincey at that
word. Criminal and crime, Miss Quincey and her blouse, seemed linked in
an awful bond of mutual abhorrence. The blouse shivered as Miss Quincey
trembled in nervous agitation; as she went red and yellow by turns it
paled and flushed its painful pink. They were blushing for each other.
For it _was_ mauve-pink; she could see that well enough now.
"Turn round!"
Miss Quincey turned round.
"Much too young for you! Why, bless me, if it doesn't throw up every bit
of yellow in your face! If you don't believe me, look in the glass."
Miss Quincey looked in the glass.
It _did_ throw up the yellow tints. It threw everything up to her. If she
had owned to a little fear of it before, it affected her now with
positive terror. The thing was young, much too young; and it was brutal
and violent in its youth. It was possessed by a perfect demon of
juvenility; it clashed and fought with every object in the room; it made
them all look old, ever so old, and shabby. And as Miss Quincey stood
with it before the looking glass, it flared up and told her to her face
that she was forty-five--forty-five, and looked fifty.
"Louisa," murmured the Old Lady, "was the only one of our family who
could stand pink."
"I will give it to Louisa," cried Miss Quincey with a touch of passion.
"Tchee--tchee!" At that idea the Old Lady chuckled in supreme derision.
"Capers and nonsense! Louisa indeed! Much good it'll do Louisa when
you've been and nipped all the shape out of it to suit yourself. However
you came to be so skimpy and flat-chested is a mystery to me. All the
Quinceys were tall, your uncle Tollington was tall, your father, he was
tall; and your sister, well; I will say this for Louisa, she's as tall as
any of 'em, and she has a _bust_."
"Yes, I daresay it would have been very becoming to Louisa," said Miss
Quincey humbly. "I--I thought it was lavender."
"Lavender or no lavender, I'm surprised at you--throwing money away on a
thing like that."
"I can afford it," said Miss Quincey with the pathetic dignity of the
turning worm.
Now it was not worm-like subtlety that suggested that reply. It was
positive inspiration. By those simple words Juliana had done something to
remove the slur she was always casting on a certain character. Tollington
Moon had not managed his nieces' affairs so badly after all if one of
them could afford herself extravagances of that sort. The blouse
therefore might be taken as a sign and symbol of his innermost integrity.
So Mrs. Moon was content with but one more parting shot.
"I don't say you can't afford the money, I say you can't afford the
colour--not at your time of life."
Two tears that had gathered in Miss Quincey's eyes now fell on the silk,
deepening the mauve-pink to a hideous magenta.
"I was deceived in the colour," she said as she turned from her
tormentor.
She toiled upstairs to the back bedroom and took it off. She could never
wear it. It was waste--sheer waste; for no other woman could wear it
either; certainly not Louisa; she had made it useless for Louisa by
paring it down to her own ridiculous dimensions. Louisa was and always
had been a head and shoulders taller than she was; and she had a bust.
So Miss Quincey came down meek and meagre in the old dress that she
served her for so many seasons, and she looked for peace. But that
terrible old lady had not done with her yet, and the worst was still to
come.
No longer having any grievance against the blouse, Mrs. Moon was
concentrating her attention on that more mysterious witness to Juliana's
foolishness--the Cake.
"And now," said she, pointing as she might have pointed to a monument,
"will you kindly tell me the meaning of this?"
"I expect--perhaps--it is very likely--that Dr. Cautley will come in to
tea this afternoon."
The Old Lady peered at Miss Quincey and her eyes were sharp as needles,
needles that carried the thread of her thought pretty plainly too, but it
was too fine a thread for Miss Quincey to see. Besides she was looking
at the cake and almost regretting that she had bought it, lest he should
think that it was eating too many of such things that had made her ill.
"And what put that notion into your head, I should like to know?"
"He has written to say so."
"Juliana--you don't mean to tell me that he invited himself?"
"Well, no. That is--it was an answer to my invitation."
"_Your_ invitation? You were not content to have that man poking his nose
in here at all hours of the day and night, but you must go out of your
way to send him invitations?"
"Dr. Cautley has been most kind and attentive, and--I thought--it was
time we paid him some little attention."
"Attention indeed! I should be very sorry to let any young man suppose
that I paid any attention to him. I should have thought you'd have had a
little more maidenly reserve. Besides, you know perfectly well that I
don't enjoy my tea unless we have it by ourselves."
Oh yes, she knew; they had been having it that way for five-and-twenty
years.
"As for that cake," continued the Old Lady, "it's ridiculous. Look at it.
Why, you might just as well have ordered wedding cake at once. I tell you
what it is, Juliana, you're getting quite flighty."
Flighty? No mind but a feminine one, grown up and trained under the
shadow of St. Sidwell's, could conceive the nature of Miss Quincey's
feelings on being told that she was flighty. She herself made no attempt
to express them. She sat down and gasped, clutching her Browning to give
herself a sense of moral support. All the rest was intelligible, she had
understood and accepted it; but to be told that she, a teacher in St.
Sidwell's, was flighty--the charge was simply confusing to the intellect,
and it left her dumb.
Flighty? When Martha came in with the tea-tray and she had to order a
knife for the cake and an extra cup for Dr. Cautley, she saw Mrs. Moon
looking at Martha, and Martha looking at Mrs. Moon, and they seemed to be
saying to each other, "How flighty Miss Juliana is getting."
Flighty? The idea afflicted her to such a degree that when Dr. Cautley
came she had not a word to say to him.
For a whole week she had looked forward to this tea-drinking with tremors
of joyous expectancy and palpitations of alarm. It was to have been one
of those rare and solitary occasions that can only come once in a blue
moon. The lump sum of pleasure that other people get spread for them more
or less thickly over the surface of the years, she meant to take once for
all, packed and pressed into one rapturous hour, one Saturday afternoon
from four-thirty to five-thirty, the memory of it to be stored up and
economised so as to last her life-time, thus justifying the original
expense. She knew that success was doubtful, because of the uncertainty
of things in general and of the Old Lady's temper in particular. And then
she had to stake everything on his coming; and the chances, allowing for
the inevitable claims on a doctor's time, were a thousand to one against
it. She had nothing to go upon but the delicate incalculable balance of
events. And now, when the blue moon had risen, the impossible thing
happened, and the man had come, he might just as well, in fact a great
deal better, have stayed away. The whole thing was a waste and failure
from beginning to end. The tea was a waste and a failure, for Martha
would bring it in a quarter of an hour too soon; the cake was a waste
and a failure, for nobody ate any of it; and she was a waste and a
failure--she hardly knew why. She cut her cake with trembling fingers and
offered it, blushing as the gash in its side revealed the thoroughly
unwholesome nature of its interior. She felt ashamed of its sugary
artifice, its treacherously festive air, and its embarrassing affinity to
bride's-cake. No wonder that he had no appetite for cake, and that Miss
Quincey had no appetite for conversation. He tried to tempt her with bits
of Browning, but she refused them all. She had lost her interest in
Browning.
He thought, "She is too tired to talk," and left half an hour sooner than
he had intended.
She thought, "He is offended. Or else--he thinks me flighty."
And that was all.