Oh, you selfish young zany of a man, after all you have said to her,
won't you make it up and let me return to my coffee? Not he.
Little nursery governess, I appeal to you. Annoying girl, be joyous as
of old during the five minutes of the day when you are anything to me,
and for the rest of the time, so far as I am concerned, you may be as
wretched as you list. Show some courage. I assure you he must be a very
bad painter; only the other day I saw him looking longingly into the
window of a cheap Italian restaurant, and in the end he had to crush
down his aspirations with two penny scones.
You can do better than that. Come, Mary.
All in vain. She wants to be loved; can't do without love from morning
till night; never knew how little a woman needs till she lost that
little. They are all like this.
Zounds, madam, if you are resolved to be a drooping little figure till
you die, you might at least do it in another street.
Not only does she maliciously depress me by walking past on ordinary
days, but I have discovered that every Thursday from two to three she
stands afar off, gazing hopelessly at the romantic post-office where she
and he shall meet no more. In these windy days she is like a homeless
leaf blown about by passers-by.
There is nothing I can do except thunder at William.
At last she accomplished her unworthy ambition. It was a wet Thursday,
and from the window where I was writing letters I saw the forlorn soul
taking up her position at the top of the street: in a blast of fury I
rose with the one letter I had completed, meaning to write the others in
my chambers. She had driven me from the club.
I had turned out of Pall Mall into a side street, when whom should I
strike against but her false swain! It was my fault, but I hit out at
him savagely, as I always do when I run into anyone in the street. Then
I looked at him. He was hollow-eyed; he was muddy; there was not a haw
left in him. I never saw a more abject young man; he had not even the
spirit to resent the testy stab I had given him with my umbrella. But
this is the important thing: he was glaring wistfully at the post-office
and thus in a twink I saw that he still adored my little governess.
Whatever had been their quarrel he was as anxious to make it up as she,
and perhaps he had been here every Thursday while she was round the
corner in Pall Mall, each watching the post-office for an apparition.
But from where they hovered neither could see the other.
I think what I did was quite clever. I dropped my letter unseen at his
feet, and sauntered back to the club. Of course, a gentleman who finds
a letter on the pavement feels bound to post it, and I presumed that he
would naturally go to the nearest office.
With my hat on I strolled to the smoking-room window, and was just in
time to see him posting my letter across the way. Then I looked for
the little nursery governess. I saw her as woe-begone as ever; then,
suddenly--oh, you poor little soul, and has it really been as bad as
that!
She was crying outright, and he was holding both her hands. It was a
disgraceful exhibition. The young painter would evidently explode if he
could not make use of his arms. She must die if she could not lay her
head upon his breast. I must admit that he rose to the occasion; he
hailed a hansom.
“William,” said I gaily, “coffee, cigarette, and cherry brandy.”
As I sat there watching that old play David plucked my sleeve to ask
what I was looking at so deedily; and when I told him he ran eagerly to
the window, but he reached it just too late to see the lady who was to
become his mother. What I told him of her doings, however, interested
him greatly; and he intimated rather shyly that he was acquainted with
the man who said, “Haw-haw-haw.” On the other hand, he irritated me by
betraying an idiotic interest in the two children, whom he seemed to
regard as the hero and heroine of the story. What were their names? How
old were they? Had they both hoops? Were they iron hoops, or just wooden
hoops? Who gave them their hoops?
“You don't seem to understand, my boy,” I said tartly, “that had I not
dropped that letter, there would never have been a little boy called
David A----.” But instead of being appalled by this he asked, sparkling,
whether I meant that he would still be a bird flying about in the
Kensington Gardens.
David knows that all children in our part of London were once birds in
the Kensington Gardens; and that the reason there are bars on nursery
windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people
sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away
through the window or up the chimney.
Children in the bird stage are difficult to catch. David knows that many
people have none, and his delight on a summer afternoon is to go with me
to some spot in the Gardens where these unfortunates may be seen trying
to catch one with small pieces of cake.
That the birds know what would happen if they were caught, and are even
a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every
student of them. Thus, if you leave your empty perambulator under the
trees and watch from a distance, you will see the birds boarding it and
hopping about from pillow to blanket in a twitter of excitement; they
are trying to find out how babyhood would suit them.
Quite the prettiest sight in the Gardens is when the babies stray from
the tree where the nurse is sitting and are seen feeding the birds, not
a grownup near them. It is first a bit to me and then a bit to you,
and all the time such a jabbering and laughing from both sides of the
railing. They are comparing notes and inquiring for old friends, and so
on; but what they say I cannot determine, for when I approach they all
fly away.
The first time I ever saw David was on the sward behind the Baby's Walk.
He was a missel-thrush, attracted thither that hot day by a hose which
lay on the ground sending forth a gay trickle of water, and David was on
his back in the water, kicking up his legs. He used to enjoy being told
of this, having forgotten all about it, and gradually it all came back
to him, with a number of other incidents that had escaped my memory,
though I remember that he was eventually caught by the leg with a long
string and a cunning arrangement of twigs near the Round Pond. He never
tires of this story, but I notice that it is now he who tells it to me
rather than I to him, and when we come to the string he rubs his little
leg as if it still smarted.
So when David saw his chance of being a missel-thrush again he called
out to me quickly: “Don't drop the letter!” and there were tree-tops in
his eyes.
“Think of your mother,” I said severely.
He said he would often fly in to see her. The first thing he would do
would be to hug her. No, he would alight on the water-jug first, and
have a drink.
“Tell her, father,” he said with horrid heartlessness, “always to have
plenty of water in it, 'cos if I had to lean down too far I might fall
in and be drownded.”
“Am I not to drop the letter, David? Think of your poor mother without
her boy!”
It affected him, but he bore up. When she was asleep, he said, he would
hop on to the frilly things of her night-gown and peck at her mouth.
“And then she would wake up, David, and find that she had only a bird
instead of a boy.”
This shock to Mary was more than he could endure. “You can drop it,”
he said with a sigh. So I dropped the letter, as I think I have already
mentioned; and that is how it all began.
III. Her Marriage, Her Clothes, Her Appetite, and an Inventory of Her
Furniture
A week or two after I dropped the letter I was in a hansom on my way to
certain barracks when loud above the city's roar I heard that accursed
haw-haw-haw, and there they were, the two of them, just coming out of
a shop where you may obtain pianos on the hire system. I had the merest
glimpse of them, but there was an extraordinary rapture on her face, and
his head was thrown proudly back, and all because they had been ordering
a piano on the hire system.
So they were to be married directly. It was all rather contemptible,
but I passed on tolerantly, for it is only when she is unhappy that
this woman disturbs me, owing to a clever way she has at such times of
looking more fragile than she really is.
When next I saw them, they were gazing greedily into the window of the
sixpenny-halfpenny shop, which is one of the most deliciously dramatic
spots in London. Mary was taking notes feverishly on a slip of paper
while he did the adding up, and in the end they went away gloomily
without buying anything. I was in high feather. “Match abandoned,
ma'am,” I said to myself; “outlook hopeless; another visit to the
Governesses' Agency inevitable; can't marry for want of a kitchen
shovel.” But I was imperfectly acquainted with the lady.
A few days afterward I found myself walking behind her. There is
something artful about her skirts by which I always know her, though
I can't say what it is. She was carrying an enormous parcel that might
have been a bird-cage wrapped in brown paper, and she took it into
a bric-a-brac shop and came out without it. She then ran rather than
walked in the direction of the sixpenny-halfpenny shop. Now mystery
of any kind is detestable to me, and I went into the bric-a-brac
shop, ostensibly to look at the cracked china; and there, still on the
counter, with the wrapping torn off it, was the article Mary had sold
in order to furnish on the proceeds. What do you think it was? It was a
wonderful doll's house, with dolls at tea downstairs and dolls going to
bed upstairs, and a doll showing a doll out at the front door. Loving
lips had long ago licked most of the paint off, but otherwise the thing
was in admirable preservation; obviously the joy of Mary's childhood, it
had now been sold by her that she might get married.
“Lately purchased by us,” said the shopwoman, seeing me look at the toy,
“from a lady who has no further use for it.”
I think I have seldom been more indignant with Mary. I bought the doll's
house, and as they knew the lady's address (it was at this shop that I
first learned her name) I instructed them to send it back to her with
the following letter, which I wrote in the shop: “Dear madam, don't be
ridiculous. You will certainly have further use for this. I am, etc.,
the Man Who Dropped the Letter.”
It pained me afterward, but too late to rescind the order, to reflect
that I had sent her a wedding present; and when next I saw her she had
been married for some months. The time was nine o'clock of a November
evening, and we were in a street of shops that has not in twenty years
decided whether to be genteel or frankly vulgar; here it minces in the
fashion, but take a step onward and its tongue is in the cup of the
ice-cream man. I usually rush this street, which is not far from my
rooms, with the glass down, but to-night I was walking. Mary was in
front of me, leaning in a somewhat foolish way on the haw-er, and they
were chatting excitedly. She seemed to be remonstrating with him for
going forward, yet more than half admiring him for not turning back, and
I wondered why.
And after all what was it that Mary and her painter had come out to do?
To buy two pork chops. On my honour. She had been trying to persuade
him, I decided, that they were living too lavishly. That was why she
sought to draw him back. But in her heart she loves audacity, and that
is why she admired him for pressing forward.
No sooner had they bought the chops than they scurried away like two
gleeful children to cook them. I followed, hoping to trace them to their
home, but they soon out-distanced me, and that night I composed the
following aphorism: It is idle to attempt to overtake a pretty young
woman carrying pork chops. I was now determined to be done with her.
First, however, to find out their abode, which was probably within easy
distance of the shop. I even conceived them lured into taking their
house by the advertisement, “Conveniently situated for the Pork
Emporium.”
Well, one day--now this really is romantic and I am rather proud of
it. My chambers are on the second floor, and are backed by an anxiously
polite street between which and mine are little yards called, I think,
gardens. They are so small that if you have the tree your neighbour has
the shade from it. I was looking out at my back window on the day
we have come to when whom did I see but the whilom nursery governess
sitting on a chair in one of these gardens. I put up my eye-glass to
make sure, and undoubtedly it was she. But she sat there doing nothing,
which was by no means my conception of the jade, so I brought a
fieldglass to bear and discovered that the object was merely a lady's
jacket. It hung on the back of a kitchen chair, seemed to be a furry
thing, and, I must suppose, was suspended there for an airing.
I was chagrined, and then I insisted stoutly with myself that, as it
was not Mary, it must be Mary's jacket. I had never seen her wear such
a jacket, mind you, yet I was confident, I can't tell why. Do clothes
absorb a little of the character of their wearer, so that I recognised
this jacket by a certain coquetry? If she has a way with her skirts that
always advertises me of her presence, quite possibly she is as cunning
with jackets. Or perhaps she is her own seamstress, and puts in little
tucks of herself.
Figure it what you please; but I beg to inform you that I put on my
hat and five minutes afterward saw Mary and her husband emerge from the
house to which I had calculated that garden belonged. Now am I clever,
or am I not?
When they had left the street I examined the house leisurely, and a
droll house it is. Seen from the front it appears to consist of a door
and a window, though above them the trained eye may detect another
window, the air-hole of some apartment which it would be just like
Mary's grandiloquence to call her bedroom. The houses on each side of
this bandbox are tall, and I discovered later that it had once been
an open passage to the back gardens. The story and a half of which it
consists had been knocked up cheaply, by carpenters I should say rather
than masons, and the general effect is of a brightly coloured van that
has stuck for ever on its way through the passage.
The low houses of London look so much more homely than the tall ones
that I never pass them without dropping a blessing on their builders,
but this house was ridiculous; indeed it did not call itself a house,
for over the door was a board with the inscription “This space to be
sold,” and I remembered, as I rang the bell, that this notice had been
up for years. On avowing that I wanted a space, I was admitted by an
elderly, somewhat dejected looking female, whose fine figure was not
on scale with her surroundings. Perhaps my face said so, for her first
remark was explanatory.
“They get me cheap,” she said, “because I drink.”
I bowed, and we passed on to the drawing-room. I forget whether I have
described Mary's personal appearance, but if so you have a picture of
that sunny drawing-room. My first reflection was, How can she have found
the money to pay for it all! which is always your first reflection when
you see Mary herself a-tripping down the street.
I have no space (in that little room) to catalogue all the whim-whams
with which she had made it beautiful, from the hand-sewn bell-rope which
pulled no bell to the hand-painted cigar-box that contained no cigars.
The floor was of a delicious green with exquisite oriental rugs; green
and white, I think, was the lady's scheme of colour, something cool, you
observe, to keep the sun under. The window-curtains were of some rare
material and the colour of the purple clematis; they swept the floor
grandly and suggested a picture of Mary receiving visitors. The piano
we may ignore, for I knew it to be hired, but there were many dainty
pieces, mostly in green wood, a sofa, a corner cupboard, and a most
captivating desk, which was so like its owner that it could have sat
down at her and dashed off a note. The writing paper on this desk had
the word Mary printed on it, implying that if there were other Marys
they didn't count. There were many oil-paintings on the walls, mostly
without frames, and I must mention the chandelier, which was obviously
of fabulous worth, for she had encased it in a holland bag.
“I perceive, ma'am,” said I to the stout maid, “that your master is in
affluent circumstances.”
She shook her head emphatically, and said something that I failed to
catch.
“You wish to indicate,” I hazarded, “that he married a fortune.”
This time I caught the words. They were “Tinned meats,” and having
uttered them she lapsed into gloomy silence.
“Nevertheless,” I said, “this room must have cost a pretty penny.”
“She done it all herself,” replied my new friend, with concentrated
scorn.
“But this green floor, so beautifully stained--”
“Boiling oil,” said she, with a flush of honest shame, “and a
shillingsworth o' paint.”
“Those rugs--”
“Remnants,” she sighed, and showed me how artfully they had been pieced
together.
“The curtains--”
“Remnants.”
“At all events the sofa--”
She raised its drapery, and I saw that the sofa was built of packing
cases.
“The desk--”
I really thought that I was safe this time, for could I not see the
drawers with their brass handles, the charming shelf for books, the
pigeon-holes with their coverings of silk?
“She made it out of three orange boxes,” said the lady, at last a little
awed herself.
I looked around me despairingly, and my eye alighted on the holland
covering. “There is a fine chandelier in that holland bag,” I said
coaxingly.
She sniffed and was raising an untender hand, when I checked her.
“Forbear, ma'am,” I cried with authority, “I prefer to believe in that
bag. How much to be pitied, ma'am, are those who have lost faith in
everything.” I think all the pretty things that the little nursery
governess had made out of nothing squeezed my hand for letting the
chandelier off.
“But, good God, ma'am,” said I to madam, “what an exposure.”
She intimated that there were other exposures upstairs.
“So there is a stair,” said I, and then, suspiciously, “did she make
it?”
No, but how she had altered it.
The stair led to Mary's bedroom, and I said I would not look at that,
nor at the studio, which was a shed in the garden.
“Did she build the studio with her own hands?”
No, but how she had altered it.
“How she alters everything,” I said. “Do you think you are safe, ma'am?”
She thawed a little under my obvious sympathy and honoured me with some
of her views and confidences. The rental paid by Mary and her husband
was not, it appeared, one on which any self-respecting domestic could
reflect with pride. They got the house very cheap on the understanding
that they were to vacate it promptly if anyone bought it for building
purposes, and because they paid so little they had to submit to the
indignity of the notice-board. Mary A---- detested the words “This space
to be sold,” and had been known to shake her fist at them. She was as
elated about her house as if it were a real house, and always trembled
when any possible purchaser of spaces called.
As I have told you my own aphorism I feel I ought in fairness to record
that of this aggrieved servant. It was on the subject of art. “The
difficulty,” she said, “is not to paint pictures, but to get frames for
them.” A home thrust this.
She could not honestly say that she thought much of her master's work.
Nor, apparently, did any other person. Result, tinned meats.
Yes, one person thought a deal of it, or pretended to do so; was
constantly flinging up her hands in delight over it; had even been
caught whispering fiercely to a friend, “Praise it, praise it, praise
it!” This was when the painter was sunk in gloom. Never, as I could well
believe, was such a one as Mary for luring a man back to cheerfulness.
“A dangerous woman,” I said, with a shudder, and fell to examining a
painting over the mantel-shelf. It was a portrait of a man, and had
impressed me favourably because it was framed.
“A friend of hers,” my guide informed me, “but I never seed him.”
I would have turned away from it, had not an inscription on the picture
drawn me nearer. It was in a lady's handwriting, and these were the
words: “Fancy portrait of our dear unknown.” Could it be meant for me? I
cannot tell you how interested I suddenly became.
It represented a very fine looking fellow, indeed, and not a day more
than thirty.
“A friend of hers, ma'am, did you say?” I asked quite shakily. “How do
you know that, if you have never seen him?”
“When master was painting of it,” she said, “in the studio, he used to
come running in here to say to her such like as, 'What colour would you
make his eyes?'”
“And her reply, ma'am?” I asked eagerly.
“She said, 'Beautiful blue eyes.' And he said, 'You wouldn't make it
a handsome face, would you?' and she says, 'A very handsome face.' And
says he, 'Middle-aged?' and says she, 'Twenty-nine.' And I mind him
saying, 'A little bald on the top?' and she says, says she, 'Not at
all.'”
The dear, grateful girl, not to make me bald on the top.
“I have seed her kiss her hand to that picture,” said the maid.
Fancy Mary kissing her hand to me! Oh, the pretty love!
Pooh!
I was staring at the picture, cogitating what insulting message I could
write on it, when I heard the woman's voice again. “I think she has
known him since she were a babby,” she was saying, “for this here was a
present he give her.”
She was on her knees drawing the doll's house from beneath the sofa,
where it had been hidden away; and immediately I thought, “I shall slip
the insulting message into this.” But I did not, and I shall tell you
why. It was because the engaging toy had been redecorated by loving
hands; there were fresh gowns for all the inhabitants, and the paint on
the furniture was scarcely dry. The little doll's house was almost ready
for further use.
I looked at the maid, but her face was expressionless. “Put it back,”
I said, ashamed to have surprised Mary's pretty secret, and I left the
house dejectedly, with a profound conviction that the little nursery
governess had hooked on to me again.