MISS LINDON moved her goods and chattels, together with Dandy, Dickie,
and Phoebe, into the little house at Kilburn. John and Unity followed
with the furniture he had procured on the hire-purchase system for their
respective rooms, and the curtain was rung up on the comic opera.
Herold had vainly tried to guide his friend in the matter of furnishing;
but their ideas being in hopeless conflict, he had given up in despair.
John, by way of proving how far superior his methods were to Herold's,
rushed into a vast emporium, selected the insides of two bedrooms and
a library complete (as per advertisement), and the thing was done in
a couple of minutes. He girded triumphantly at Herold, who would have
taken two years. Miss Lindon approved his choice, everything was so
clean and shiny. She especially admired the library carpet (advertised
as Axminster), a square of amazing hues, mustard and green and magenta
predominant, the ruins of an earthquake struck by lightning. It gave,
she said, such brightness and colour to the room. To the bedrooms she
herself added the finishing touch and proudly led John up-stairs to
inspect them. He found his bed, wash-stand, toilet-table, and chairs
swathed in muslin and pink ribbon. His heart sank. This was a mania. If
she had owned a dromedary, she would have fitted it out with muslin and
ribbon. He glanced apprehensively at the water-jug; that alone stood in
its modest nudity. Miss Lindon beamed. Was n't the room more homelike?
He had not the heart to do otherwise than assent.
“There 's one thing, my dear Miss Lindon, that John 's very particular
about,” said Herold, gravely, when he, in his turn, was shown over the
premises, with pomp and circumstance; “you must n't put ribbons in his
pyjamas.”
Unity, whose early-discovered gift of the needle was requisitioned
for this household millinery, thought it all mighty fine. It had been
impressed upon her that she was no longer a guest, as at Southcliff, but
an inmate of the house, with a definite position. She had passed from
the legal guardianship of the Sisters of Saint Martha to that of Mr.
Risca. The house was her home, which she shared on equal terms with him
and Miss Lindon. She was no longer to call them “Sir” and “Ma'am.” Miss
Lindon took the child to her warm heart and became “Aunt Gladys.” She
suggested the analogous title for her nephew; but he put his foot down
firmly and declined to be called “Uncle John.” He said it was farcical,
subversive of the tragic dignity of the situation. She yielded
complacently without in the least understanding what he meant.
“But you must have some name, dear,” she pleaded. “Suppose she found
that the house was on fire: it might be burned to the ground before she
could settle how to call you.”
“Oh, let her call me Demosthenes,” he cried in desperation, taking up
his pen,--he had been interrupted in the middle of an article,--“and
also tell her, my dear aunt, that, fire or no fire, if she comes into
this room while I 'm writing, I 'll make her drink the ink-pot.”
It was eventually decided that to Unity he should be “guardian.” The
sacrosanctity of his library was also theoretically established. Unity,
accustomed to discipline, paid scrupulous observance to the taboo; but
Miss Lindon could never understand it. She would tap very gently at
John's door, sometimes three or four times before he heard. At his “Come
in,” she would enter, manipulating the door-knob so as to make no noise,
and would creep on tiptoe across the resplendent carpet.
“Now, I'm not going to disturb you, dear. Please go on writing. I only
want to say that I'm ordering some tooth-stuff for Unity, and I don't
know whether to buy paste or powder.”
“Give her what you use yourself, my dear aunt.”
Then would follow a history of her dentist. Such a gentlemanly man; in
great trouble, too; he had just lost his fourth wife. John glared at
his copy. “Careless fellow!” he growled. Many of his witticisms were at
second hand.
“Indeed he's not. He's most careful, I assure you. I would recommend him
to anybody.”
And so forth and so forth, until John would rise and, taking her by
her plump shoulders and luring her across the threshold, lock the door
against her.
“She will drive me into a mad-house,” he complained to Herold. “I want
to murder her and hug her at the same instant.”
In its primitive essentials, however, the comic-opera life was not
impossible to the man of few material demands: he slept in a comfortable
bed, his bath was filled in the mornings, wholesome food, not too
fantastic, was set before him. The austere and practical Phoebe saw
to these important matters. It was in the embroidery of life that the
irresponsible grotesque entered. It took many weeks to persuade Miss
Lindon that it was not her duty, if he was out of an evening, to wait
up until his return. It was for her to look after his well-being. Before
going to bed he might want hot cocoa, or bread and milk, or a cheery
chat. How could he, in loneliness, procure these comforts at three
o'clock in the morning? It was no trouble at all to her to sit up, she
pleaded. When Dandy was ill, she had sat up whole nights together. John
prayed to Heaven to deliver him from illness. Another feature of the
masculine existence that passed her understanding was the systematic
untidiness of the library. Books, papers, pipes, pens, paper-clips, and
what not seemed to have been poured out of a sack, and then kicked in
detail to any chance part of the room. When she restored order out of
chaos, and sat with a complacent smile amid her prim gimcrackeries,
John would be dancing about in a foaming frenzy. Where were his long
envelopes? Where had that dear magpie of a woman secreted them? Her
ingenuity in finding hiding-places amounted to genius. Then in impatient
wrath he would take out drawers and empty their contents on the floor
until the missing objects came to light. Miss Lindon sighed when she
tidied up after him, not at the work to do all over again, but at the
baffling mystery of man.
For a long time Unity regarded the feckless lady with some suspicion,
sniffed at her, so to speak, like a dog confronted with a strange order
of being. For the first time in her young life she had met an elder in
only nominal authority over her. Of Phoebe, stern and Calvinistic,
with soul-searching eye, who by some social topsyturvydom was put into
subjection under her, she lived in mortal terror; but for “Aunt Gladys”
she had a wondering contempt.
“Unity,” said Miss Lindon one morning, in the early days, “when you've
finished writing your copy for your guardian, you had better learn a
chapter. Bring me your Bible, and I 'll find one. In my time all young
ladies learned chapters,”--so do orphans still in convents, until
orphans hate chapters with bitter hatred; but this the good lady did not
know,--“and then you might, like a dear girl, run off the hems of the
new sheets on the sewing-machine.”
“I dunno 'ow to work a sewing-machine.”
“Then tell Phoebe to give you a lesson at once. It's a most useful
accomplishment. You have such a tremendous lot to learn, my dear.
There's the piano and French, and embroidery and drawing, and nowadays I
suppose young ladies must learn politics. Perhaps you had better begin.
There 's a leading article on free trade--or the Young Turks, I forget
which--in the 'Daily Telegraph.' I'm sure it must be very clever. You
had better take away the paper and read it carefully,”--she handed the
paper to the bewildered child,--“and when you 've read it, come and tell
me all about it. It will save me the trouble of going through it, and
so both of us will be benefited. And, Unity dear,” she added as the girl
was leaving the drawing-room, “it's such a beautiful day, so in an hour's
time be ready to come out with me. We 'll take the omnibus to the Marble
Arch and walk in the park.”
Unity went into the dining-room, where in working-hours she was supposed
to have her being, and stared at her avalanche of duties: her copy and
the one or two easy lessons set by John; the chapter of the Bible; the
instruction on the sewing-machine, involving the tackling of a busy and
irritable Phoebe; the long column of print in the newspaper; and the
preparation of herself for walking abroad--all to be accomplished within
the space of one hour. For the first time in her life she encountered
orders which had not the doomful backing of the world authorities.
The copy and the lessons for her guardian were, however, matters of high
import. They filled her hour. At the end of it she put on her hat. A
ride in an omnibus was still novelty enough to be a high adventure. On
the way to the Marble Arch, Miss Lindon in her amiable way asked how
she had spent her morning, and hoped that she had not been getting into
mischief. Of Bible chapter, sewing-machine, or leader on free trade (or
Young Turks) she appeared to have remembered nothing. The result of
this flabbiness of command was lamentable. The next time Miss Lindon
dismissed her to the execution of certain behests, Unity, after closing
the door behind her, stuck out her tongue. It was ungenteel, it was
ungrateful, it was un-anything-you-like, but the act gave her a thrill
of joy, a new sensation. It was the first definite assertion of her
individuality. The red tongue thus vulgarly flaunted was a banner of
revolt against the world authorities.
It was a long time before she could accustom herself to taking her meals
at the table with Miss Lindon and her guardian. Such table manners as
had been inculcated at the orphanage had been lost in Smith Street, and
the chief point of orphanage etiquette was not to throw food about,
a useless injunction, for obvious reasons. Accordingly, despite her
probationary period at the Channel House, Unity regarded the shining
knives and forks and china and glass with malevolent dislike. The
restrictions on so simple a matter as filling herself with nourishment
were maddening in their complexity. Why could n't she bite into her hunk
of bread instead of breaking off a mouthful? Why could n't she take up
her fish in her fingers? Why could n't she spit out bones without the
futile intermediary of the fork? Why could n't she wipe the gravy from
her plate with soft crumb? Why could n't she use her knife for the
consumption of apple tart? And how difficult the art of mastication
with closed lips! She did not revolt. She humbly tried to follow the
never-ending instructions; but their multiplicity confused her, making
her shy and painfully nervous. Drink had a devilish habit of going the
wrong way. It never went the wrong way with her two companions. Unity
wondered why.
Then at the table sat her guardian, gloomy, preoccupied, Olympian in
the eyes of the child; and Aunt Gladys, weaving corrections, polite
instructions, reminiscences, and irrelevant information into an
inextricable tangle of verbiage; while Phoebe hovered about, fixing
her always, no matter what she was doing, with a relentless, glassy eye
which no solecism escaped.
There were also a myriad other external matters which caused her great
perplexity--the correct use of a handkerchief (one's sleeve was so much
handier when one's nose watered), a tooth-brush, nail-scissors. The last
she could not understand. Why, then, did God give people teeth to bite
with? The question of speech presented extraordinary difficulties. It
was months before her ear could even distinguish between _O_ and _aow_,
between _a_ and _i_, between _ou_ and _ah_; and the mysteries of the
aspirate became a terror. She grew afraid to speak. Thus her progress in
the graces of polite society was but slow.
John, not fired by enthusiasm, but intent on working out his scheme of
indemnification, gave up an hour or so a day to her mental culture. He
was not an unskilful teacher, but her undeveloped mind had to begin
at the beginning of things. She learned painfully. The great world had
revealed itself to her with blinding suddenness. For months she was
simply stupid.
“How are things shaping?” asked Herold one day. He had been lunching
at Kilburn, and Unity, feeling, that she was expected to be on her
very best behaviour before him, had been more than usually awkward and
ungenteel. This time a fish-bone had stuck in her throat.
John frowned. “You saw. Shapelessly. It's hopeless.”
“You 're absolutely wrong,” said Herold. “There are vast possibilities
in Unity.”
“Not one,” said John.
“Are you trying the right way? Do you remember what the old don said
when he came across two undergraduates vainly persuading the college
tortoise to eat lettuce: 'Gentlemen, are you quite sure you are trying
at the right end?' ”
“What do you mean?”
“Can't you try by the way of the heart?”
John flared up. “You 're talking rot. The child has n't had a harsh word
since she has been here. I'm not honey-tongued as a rule, but to her
I've been a female saint with a lily in my hand. And my aunt, with all
her maddening ways, would not hurt the feelings of a black beetle.”
“Quite so,” said Herold. “But all that's negative. Why can't you try
something positive? Give Unity love, and you 'll be astonished at the
result.”
“Love,” said John, impatiently. “You 're a sentimentalist.”
This time Herold flared up. “If I am,” he cried, “I thank the good God
who made me. This affectation of despising sentiment, this cant that
a lot of you writing fellows talk, makes me sick. If a bowelless devil
makes a photograph of a leprous crew in a thieves' kitchen, you say:
'Ha! Ha! Here 's the real thing. There 's no foolish sentiment here.
This is LIFE!' Ugh! Of all the rotten poses of the superior young ass,
this is the rottenest. Everything noble, beautiful, and splendid that
has ever been written, sung, painted, or done since the world began, has
been born in sentiment, has been carried through by sentiment, has been
remembered and reverenced by sentiment. I hate to hear an honest man
like you sneering at sentiment. You yourself took on this job through
sentiment. And now when I tell you in a few simple words, 'Love
that child whose destiny you 've made yourself responsible for,' you
pooh-pooh the staring common sense of the proposition and call me a
sentimentalist--by which you mean an infernal fool.”
John, who had bent heavy brows upon him during this harangue, took his
pipe from his mouth.
“It's you who are feeding the tortoise at the wrong end,” he said
unhumorously. “This is not a matter of sentiment, but of duty. I do
my best to be good to the child. I 'll do the utmost I can to make
reparation for what she has suffered. But as for loving her--I suppose
you know what love means? As for loving this poor little slut, with her
arrested development and with the torture the sight of her means to me,
why, my good man, you 're talking monkey gibberish!”
Herold lit a cigarette with nervous fingers. The animation in his thin,
sensitive face had not yet died away.
“I'm not talking gibberish,” he replied; “I'm talking sense.”
“Pooh!”--or something like it--said John.
“Well, super-sense, then,” cried Herold, who did not quite know what he
meant, but felt certain that for the instant the term would floor his
adversary. “And you 're as blind as an owl. Deep down in that poor
little slut is a spark of the divine fire--love in its purest, the
transcendental flame. I know it 's there. I know it as a water-finder
knows there's water when the twig bends in his hands. Get at it. Find
it. Fan it into a blaze. You 'll never regret it all your life long.”
John's frown deepened. “If you 're suggesting the usual asinine romance,
Walter, between ward and guardian--”
Herold caught up his hat.
“Of all the dunderheaded asses! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I
can't talk to you.”
And in a very rare fury he sped from the house, slamming doors after
him, leaving John foolishly frowning in the middle of the violent
Axminster carpet.
Unity, for all her fingers' nimbleness with needle and thread, was
clumsy with her hands. Glasses, bowls, vases, whatever she touched,
seemed to be possessed by an imp of spontaneous disruption. Hitherto
her code of morals with regard to breakage had been, first, to hide the
pieces; secondly, to deny guilt if questioned; thirdly, if found out,
to accept punishment with sullen apathy: for chastisement had followed
discovered breakage as inevitably as the night the day. Accordingly when
she broke a bowl of gold-fish in the drawing-room, she obeyed ingrained
tradition. She threw the fish out of the window, mopped up the water,
put a hassock on the wet patch on the carpet, and threw the shards of
the bowl into the dust-bin. Miss Lindon, entering soon afterward, missed
her gold-fish, bought only a few days before from an itinerant vendor.
Unity disclaimed knowledge of their whereabouts. Phoebe, being summoned,
took the parts of principal witness, counsel for the prosecution, judge,
and jury all in one. Unity stood convicted. The maid was sent back to
her work. “Now,” thought Unity, “I'm going to catch it,” and she stood
with her eyes on the floor, stubbornly awaiting the decree of doom. An
unaccustomed sound met her ear, and looking up, she beheld the gentle
lady weeping bitterly.
“I should n't have minded your breaking the bowl, though I should like
to know what has become of the poor little fishes,--they must be real
fish out of water, poor dears! and one of them I called Jacky was just
beginning to know me,--but why did you tell me a story about it?”
Unity, not having the wit to retort truthfully that it seemed the
natural thing to do, maintained a stolid silence.
Miss Lindon, profoundly upset by this depravity, read her a moral
lecture on the sin of lying, in which she quoted the Book of Revelation,
related the story of George Washington and an irrelevant episode in her
far-away childhood, and finally asserting that John would be furiously
angry if he heard of her naughtiness, bade her go and find the
gold-fish, which must be panting their little hearts out. And that was
the last Unity heard of the matter. She thought Aunt Gladys a fool.
Thenceforward she felt cynically indifferent toward accidental breakages
of Aunt Gladys's property.
But one day during John's absence she upset a Dresden china
shepherd,--such a brave, saucy shepherd,--that stood on his
writing-desk, and, to her dismay, the head rolled apart from the body.
It was one of his few dainty possessions. She knew that he set an
incomprehensible value on the thing. Even Aunt Gladys touched it with
extraordinary reverence. She turned white with fear. Her guardian was
a far different being from Aunt Gladys. His wrath would be terrible.
Herold was not far wrong in likening John Risca, as conceived by the
child, to a Hebraic Jehovah. His dread majesty overwhelmed her, and she
had not the courage to face his anger. With trembling fingers she stood
the poor decapitated shepherd on his feet and delicately poised the head
on the broken neck. She gazed at him for a moment, his sauciness and
bravery apparently unaffected by the accident, and then she fled, and
endured hours of misery.
The inevitable came to pass, John discovered the breakage, instituted
an elementary court of inquiry, and summoned the delinquent into his
presence.
“Did you break this, Unity?”
“No,” said Unity.
The lie irritated him. He raised his fist in a denunciatory gesture.
With a cry of terror, like a snared rabbit's, she clapped her hands to
her face and shrank, cowering, to the farther corner of the room.
“My God!” cried John, aghast at the realization of what had happened.
“Did you think I was going to hit you?”
He stood staring at the little, undeveloped, rawboned, quivering
creature. Her assumption of his right to strike her, of his capability
of striking her, of the certainty that he would strike her, held him in
amazed horror. The phantasmagorical to him was the normal to her. He had
to wait a few moments before recovering command of his faculties. Then
he went up to her.
“Unity, my dear--”
He put his arm about her, led her to his writing-chair, and kept his arm
round her when he sat down.
“There, there, my child,” said he, clutching at her side nervously in
his great grasp, “you misunderstood entirely.” In his own horrified
dismay he had forgotten for the moment her wickedness. He could find no
words save incoherences of reassurance. She made no response, but kept
her hands before her face, her finger-tips pressed with little livid
edges of flesh into her forehead. And thus for a long while they
remained.
“I was n't going to punish you for breaking the figure,” he explained at
last. “You did n't do it on purpose, did you?”
She shook her head.
“What made me angry was your telling me a lie; but I never dreamed of
hurting you. I would sooner kill myself than hurt you,” he said, with a
shudder. Then, with an intuition that came from the high gods, he added,
“I would just as soon think of hurting Miss Stella, who gave me the
little shepherd you broke.”
To John's amazement,--for what does a man know of female orphans, or of
female anything, for the matter of that?--Unity tore herself away from
him and, falling in a poor little lump on the floor, burst into a wild
passion of tears and sobs. John, not knowing what else to do, stooped
down and patted her shoulders in an aimless way. Then with a vague
consciousness that she were best alone, he went softly out of the room.
It was thus that, in the unwonted guise of ministering spirits, shame
and remorse came to Unity Blake.
She had broken a sacred idol. He had not been angry. She had told a
lie, and instead of punishing her,--of his horror-stricken motives she
had no idea,--he had held her tight in kind arms and spoken softly. He
had not actually wept, but he had been sorry at her lie, even as Aunt
Gladys had been. Now he, being what to her mind was a kind of fusion of
Jah and Zeus and Odin,--three single deities rolled into one,--was not a
fool. Dimly through the mists of her soul dawned the logical conclusion:
perhaps Aunt Gladys, in her sorrowful and non-avenging attitude towards
her mendacities and other turpitudes, was not a fool either.
The bewildering truth also presented itself that lies, being unnecessary
as a means of self-protection, were contemptible. In the same way she
realized that if folks had no intention of punishing her for destroying
their valuable property, even sacred gifts of fairy-princesses, but,
instead, smiled on her their sweet forgiveness, they must have in
them something of the divine which had hitherto been obscured from her
vision. She had proved to herself that they could not be fools; rather,
then, they were angels. They certainly could not enjoy the destruction
of their belongings; therefore her clumsiness must cause them pain. Now,
why should she inflict pain on people who were doing their utmost to
make her happy? Why?
She began to ask herself questions; and when once an awakening human
soul begins to do that, it goes on indefinitely. Some of the simplest
ones she propounded to Miss Lindon, who returned answers simple
in essence, though perhaps complex in expression; some her growing
experience of life enabled her to answer for herself; some of the more
difficult she reserved for her rare talks with Herold. But although
the awfulness of John's majesty was mitigated by the investiture of an
archangel's iridescent and merciful wings, she could never go to him
with her problems. Never again since that memorable occasion did he put
his arm around her; he held her gently aloof as before. But he had put
his arm around her once, and the child's humility dared not hope for
more.
Thus in a series of shocks, bewildering flashes of truth, followed
by dark spaces of ignorance, was Unity's development initiated, and,
indeed, continued. Her nature, deadened by the chill years, was
not responsive to the little daily influences by which character is
generally moulded. Only the great things, trivial in themselves, but
great in her little life--for to an ant-hill the probing of a child's
stick means earthquake, convulsion, and judgment-day cataclysm--only the
great things, definite and arresting, produced perceptible change. But
they left their mark. She was too dull to learn much in the ordinary
routine of lessons; but once a fact or an idea could be made to appeal
to her emotions or her imagination, it was there for all time. Not all
the pains and teaching of her two protectors, for instance, could alter
one inflection of her harsh cockney twang.
But one day after luncheon, Herold being present, Miss Lindon ordered
her to recite “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” which artless poem she had
learned unintelligently by heart, at Miss Lindon's suggestion, in order
to give pleasure to her guardian. To give him pleasure she would have
learned pages of the army list or worn tin tacks in her boots. After a
month's vast labour she had accomplished the prodigious task.
Very shy, she repeated the poem in the child's singsong, and ended up on
the “reef of Norman's Waow”.
John, not having been made a party to the “surprise” eagerly contrived
by Miss Lindon, nodded, said it was very good, and commended Unity for
a good girl. Herold kicked him surreptitiously, and applauded with much
vigour.
“By Jove!” said he, impelled by queer instinct, “I used to know that. I
wonder if I could recite it, too.”
He rose and began; and as he continued, his wonderful art held the child
spell-bound. The meaningless words resolved themselves into symbols of
vast significance. She saw the little daughter, her cheeks like the
dawn of day, a vision of Stellamaris, and felt the moonless dark of the
stormy night and the hissing snow and the stinging blast, and she
shivered at the awful sight of the skipper frozen at the wheel, and a
hush fell upon her soul as the maiden prayed, and the tears fell fast
from her eyes as the picture of the fisherman finding the maiden fair
lashed to the drifting mast was flashed before her by the actor's magic.
“Now, Unity dear, don't you wish you could say it like that?” Aunt
Gladys remarked.
Unity, scarcely hearing, made perfunctory answer; but as soon as she
could, she fled to her bedroom, her ears reverberating with the echoes
of the beautiful voice, and her soul shaken with the poignant drama, and
crudely copying Herold's gestures and intonations, recited the poem over
and over again.
The result of this was not a sudden passion for romance or histrionics,
but it was remarkable enough. It awoke her sense of vowel sounds and
aspirates. Henceforward she discriminated between “lady” and “lidy,”
between “no” and “naow,” and although she never acquired a pure accent,
her organs of speech refusing to obey her will, she was acutely aware of
the wrong sounds that escaped from her lips.
As with this, so with other stages of development, both in things
external and things spiritual. Scales had to be torn from her eyes
before she saw; then she saw with piercing vision. Plugs had to be
wrenched from her ears before she heard; then she heard the horns of
Elfland. Her heart had to be plucked from her bosom before she felt;
then her whole being quivered with an undying emotion.
So the weeks and the months passed and grew into years, and Miss Lindon
said that she was a well-behaved and Christian child, and that it was a
pity she was so plain; and Risca, forgetful, after a while, of her agony
of tears and of Herold's angry diagnosis, retained his opinion that she
was just dull and stupid, though well-meaning, and, having his head full
of other things, took her at last for granted, together with his Aunt
Gladys, as a normal feature in his sometimes irritating, though on the
whole exceedingly comfortable, comic-opera household.