nineteen years ago, an’ me stayin’ on a visit wid me niece, that I saw
her--Maggie Donohoe--rest her unaisy soul, the misfortnit craythur!--I
saw her change the children’s clothes wid the two eyes I have in my
head,” said Aunt Biddy Kinsella, “barrin’ that only wan av thim was
at the keyhole. ‘Och, murdher!’ sez I, lettin’ a screech an’ flyin’
in on her--for I had the use av me legs in thim days--‘what have you
done, woman, asthore?’ ‘Made a lady av little Peggy,’ says she, wid the
fingers av her hooked like claws ready to fly at me, ‘an’ I dar’ you to
bethray me.’ ‘Bethray!’ sez I. ‘It’s bethrayed her to the divil, you
mane--that she’ll be brought up a black Prodesdan’, and not a dacent
Catholic, as a Donohoe should be by rights.’ ‘Holy Virgin, forgive me!
Sure, I never thought av that!’ sez herself, and all thrimblin’ we
undhressed the children an’ changed the clothes again. An’ a day or
so afther the Major’s baby was waned an’ wint back to uts mother. But
Maggie Donohoe was niver the same in her mind afther that day. Sit an’
brood she would, an’ hour by hour; an’ creep out av her own bed an’
into mine night afther night, and wake me wid her cowld hand upon me
mouth an’ the whisper in me ear to know had she given little Peggy’s
sowl to the divil or changed the childhren back afther all! An’ as
years wint on she kem to a quieter mind, but on her dyin’ bed the ould
fear and thrimblin’ got hould av her ag’in, an’ she tould Donohoe--not
what she’d done at all, at all!--but what she wanst had the intintion
av doin’, but that her heart failed her; an’ so made a fool av the man
that owned her, as many another woman has done before!”
Thus Aunt Biddy Kinsella, who, having spoken, may be dismissed to her
smoky corner under the turf thatch, where a greasy parcel reached her
in the middle of the following June, containing, not an olive branch,
but a concrete slab of wedding cake, with the joint compliments of Mr.
and Mrs. Dancey Juxon. For “the general run of feelin’ in the regiment”
was in favor of Private Juxon’s renewing his matrimonial engagements
to Peggy Donohoe, now that she had been proved, past all doubt, to be
herself. And by the last advices received from headquarters it appears
that Mrs. Lance-Corporal Juxon is acting at this moment as nurse to the
Garthside baby.
PONSONBY AND THE PANTHERESS
I have called this story “Ponsonby and the Pantheress,” because
Ponsonby’s nocturnal visitor undoubtedly belonged to the genus
_Carnaria_, species _F. pardus_, the _Pardalis_ of the ancients. The
whole thing hinges on Ponsonby’s getting a ticket of invitation to a
mighty dinner given by one of the great City Livery Companies. Had he
refused the invitation, and stayed at home with Mrs. Ponsonby, it would
have been better for him--and for her. He would not to-day have been
a silent, atrabilious man, who goes upon his way in loneliness--that
mated loneliness which is of all desolate conditions on this earth the
most desolate--with a vampire gnawing underneath his waistcoat. She
would not have been a much-wronged, cruelly neglected woman--or the
other type of sufferer, the woman who has been found out; and for ever
robbed of that which women hold dearest in life--the power to create
illusions.
It was a great dinner at that City Hall--a feast both succulent and
juicy, and upon a scale so prodigious as to put it utterly beyond the
power of a single-stomached man to do justice thereto. Many of the
guests had thoughtfully provided themselves with several of these
necessary organs, but Ponsonby--who had recently sold out of the Army,
and invested his commission money in business, and settled down with
Mrs. Ponsonby in a neat little house in Sloane Street--was still
young, and fairly slim.
The baked meats and confectionery were excellent, and “the drinks”--as
Betsey Prig might have observed--“was good.” It was revealed to
Ponsonby that he had absorbed a considerable quantity only by the
swollen condition of his latchkey when he tried to fit it into the
door of the little house in Sloane Street. But after a short struggle
the door opened, and Ponsonby paused a moment on the doorstep to
take some observations on the weather. It was just one o’clock as
he looked at his watch in the moonlight. Ponsonby was reminded of
Indian moons by the lucent brightness of the broad silver orb that
floated so majestically on the calm bosom of the dark overhead. She
was getting near her wane, but only notifying it by an exaggerated
handsomeness, like a professional Society beauty. Ponsonby thought of
that simile--all by himself--and was proud of it, as he had always been
a man more celebrated for his moustache than his intellect. He tied a
knot in his mental pocket handkerchief to remember it by, and, facing
round to go into the house, was a little disconcerted to find the hall
door gaping to receive him.
Then he went in, barred and bolted very carefully, and set the spring
burglar alarum--for once. Ponsonby was unusually careful and deliberate
in his movements on this particular night. Then he sat down on the hall
bench and took off his boots. Then he switched off the electric hall
light. Then he pondered whether he should or should not have just one
brandy and soda before going to bed--because he had come home so clear
and calm and cool-headed from that City dinner. Ay or No--and the Ayes
had it. He went into the dining-room. It had been furnished for the
Ponsonbys on the best authority; in oak, with Brummagem-Benares brass
pots and tea trays. The window curtains, and the drapery which hung
before a deepish recess in the wall to the left of the door as you
entered, were plush, of that artistic shade of olive-green which is so
shabby when it is new that you can’t tell when it gets old. The recess
had originally been intended for a book case; but young married people
just starting in life never have any books--they are too much bound up
in each other--and so it had been covered up. You can put things behind
a covering of this sort which you do not care to expose to the gaze of
the casual guest--a row of old slippers, or a pile of superannuated
Army Lists, or a collection of summonses--or the Family Skeleton.
Ponsonby switched on the light, and opened the liquor case with his
watch-chain key, and got a tumbler and soda siphon from the buffet,
and lighted a cigar. Then he sat down in an armchair, unbuttoned his
white waistcoat, loosened his collar, and prepared to be lonelily
convivial. He thought of his girl-like bride asleep upstairs, with her
cheek upon her hand, and her gold-brown hair swamping the pillow. It
says much for the state of Ponsonby’s affections, that while he knew
the uses of the monthly half pint of peroxide which was an unfailing
item on the chemist’s bill, he could still be poetical about that tinge
of gold. But newly married men seldom look into the roots of anything.
He lifted his glass and drank her health. “To Mamie!” he said, as the
frisky gas bubbles snapped at his nose. And then he glanced over the
edge of the tumbler at the curtained recess behind the door. And the
short hairs of his head rose up and began to promenade. And his teeth
clicked against the glass he held. For a bolt of ice had shot through
either ear orifice straight to his brain. In other words--Something had
laughed--an ugly laugh--behind that drawn curtain.
In another moment it was put aside. A woman came out of the recess that
had concealed her, and stood before him.
Not to mince matters, she belonged to the class we are content to
call unfortunate. From her tawdry bonnet to the mud-befouled hem of
her low-necked silk dress--a preposterous garment, grease-stained and
ragged, and partly hidden by an opera cloak of sullied whiteness--the
nature of her profession was written on her from head to foot. She was
not without beauty, or the archæological traces of what had been it;
but as she grinned at the astonished man, showing two rows of strong
square teeth, yellowed with liquor and cigarette smoking, and the
gathered muscles of her cheeks pushed up her underlids, narrowing her
fierce, greedy eyes to mere slits, and the hood of her soiled mantle
fell back from her coarsely dyed hair, she was a thing unlovely. She
seemed to snuff the air with her broad nostrils, as scenting prey; she
worked her fingers in their dirty white gloves, as though they were
armed with talons that longed to tear and rend; and, as she did so,
Ponsonby was irresistibly reminded of a panther.
Ponsonby had shot panthers in India, and had once been slightly mauled
by a female specimen. It was an odd coincidence that the old scars on
his left shoulder and thigh should have begun to burn and throb and
shoot unpleasantly as the yellow-white fangs of the intruder gleamed
upon him, framed in by her grinning, painted lips.
But Ponsonby recovered himself after a moment, and asked her, without
ceremony, how the devil she came there? He was not a particularly
bright man, but he knew, even as he asked. She had been crouching in
the shadow under the portico--some of the Sloane Street houses have
porticoes--when his cab drove up. She had watched him get out. Then,
when he had been standing with his foolish back to the open door,
gaping at the moon, the Pantheress had skulked in, with the noiseless,
cushioned step that distinguishes her race. And now he had to get rid
of her.
Which was not as easy a task as one might think.
He began by telling her that he was a married man.
“Knew that,” said the Pantheress. “Saw you take off your boots in the
hall. Saw you drink her health.” She mimicked him. “To Mamie!” And
laughed again--that unspeakably jarring laugh.
Ponsonby grew irate. He took his courage in both hands and went into
the hall, where he softly undid the door fastenings. Then he came back,
and offered to show his visitor out.
She was in the act of pocketing a silver race cup, won by Ponsonby at
a Pony Hurdle Handicap on the Bombay course in 1890, when Ponsonby
came back. He caught her wrist and bade her drop it. She gave it up
sullenly. Then, with a sudden accession of feminine meekness, she said
she would go--if he would stand her a drink.
It seemed a cheap bargain. The unwitting Ponsonby got out another glass
from the buffet cupboard, and mixed her a brandy and soda, not too
weak. She drew a chair--his wife’s chair--to the table, and sat down,
throwing her dingy cloak from her whitewashed shoulders. She put her
hand to her head, and drew thence a long steel pin with a blue glass
head, and took her gaudy bonnet off and threw it on the table. She did
not hurry over the consumption of the liquid, and Ponsonby began to
grow impatient. When he hinted this, she asked for a cigar.
He gave her one, and a light. And she drained the last drop in the
tumbler, and stuck the burning weed between her teeth, with a coarse
masquerade of masculinity. Ponsonby heaved a sigh of relief.
“Now, my girl, come along--time’s up!” He started for the door.
The Pantheress got up, and leaned against the mantelshelf, smoking. She
intimated that she had changed her mind--and would remain. Ponsonby
lost his temper, and threatened ejection by main force.
“Put me out? You daren’t!” rejoined the Pantheress. She added some
adjectives reflecting upon Ponsonby and the honor of his family--but
with those we have nothing to do.
Ponsonby’s under jaw came out, and his forehead lowered. He strode
toward the Pantheress; her sex was not going to plead for that delicate
piece of femininity, it was evident.
“I daren’t, eh?”
“You daren’t. Because I’d tear, and scratch, and scream, I would--till
the police came--till your wife woke up and came downstairs to see what
the row was about. Nice for you, then! Easy for you to explain--with
_two_ glasses on the table!”
Ponsonby broke into a cool perspiration. He spake in his soul and
cursed himself for a fool--of all fools the one most thoroughly
impregnated with foolery. For he saw that he had been trapped. The
Pantheress rocked upon her hips and laughed, shaking out a coarse aroma
of patchouli from her shabby garments.
“You had me in and stood me drinks. I can swear to that. My swell toff,
I think you’d better knock under!”
Ponsonby had to arrive at that conclusion, thinking of his wedded
happiness and the golden-brown hair scattered on the pillow upstairs.
He was awed to the pitch of making overtures--of asking the Pantheress
how much she would take to go?
The Pantheress sprang high. Twenty pounds.
Ponsonby had not as much in the house. With great difficulty, and much
exercise of eloquence, he got her to bate five. It was necessary that
she should be brought to forego another five, for all the ready cash he
could muster did not amount to much more than ten. How to attain this
desirable end? Ponsonby had a dramatic inspiration.
He had read many novels and seen many plays. In most of these the main
plot turned upon the ultimate victory of Human Virtue and Truth over
Vice and Disintegrity. In these books or dramas Vice was generally
personified by an adventuress--a brazen, defiant person, who had made
up her mind to ruin somebody or another; and Virtue, by an innocent
girl or pure young wife, who pleaded until the hardened heart was
melted, the fierce eyes moistened by an unaccustomed tear--until, in
short, the naughty woman abandoned her unhallowed purpose and left the
nice one mistress of the field. The theory is an admirable one in a
book or in a play, but in real life it does not hold good. Ponsonby has
since learned this; but at that time he was youngish and inexperienced.
He would weave a net, with those golden-brown tresses upstairs, in
which to catch the Pantheress. He begged her to listen, and told
his story quite prettily. He explained how, three years before, his
regiment having newly returned from India, he had met at a certain
South Coast resort, separated by a mile or two of arid common from
a great dockyard town, a lovely girl. She was a friendless orphan,
the daughter of a clergyman, had been a governess, had broken down
in health, and, with the last remnant of her little savings, taken a
humble lodging near the sea, in order to benefit by the ozone. How she
had found, during her innocent strolls on the beach, not only that
health of which she had been in search, but a husband. And, finally,
how every fiber of her soul, being naturally bound up in that husband,
and her present state of health delicate, the infliction of such a blow
as the Pantheress contemplated striking might not only strike at the
roots of love, but of life.
With which peroration counsel concluded, not wholly dissatisfied
with himself. He wiped his brow, and sent a hopeful glance at the
Pantheress. Her features had not softened, nor was her eye dimmed. Her
lips twitched, certainly, but the convulsive movement was merely the
herald of a yawn.
“You’re a good one to jaw!” she said, when he had finished. “Come, I’ll
not be hard on you. How much have you got?”
He named the amount.
“Hand out!” the Pantheress bade him.
He would give her half the sum then and there, Ponsonby said, with a
gleam of strategic cunning, and the other half when she was fairly
outside the hall-door--not before.
The Pantheress nodded, and clutched the first installment from his
hand greedily, and caught her dirty bonnet from the table and threw it
on her head. “No larks!” she said warningly--“come on!” and moved to
the room door, where she paused. “Ain’t you got manners enough to open
it for a lady?” she remarked in an aggrieved tone. Ponsonby, hastily
restoring the tell-tale second glass to the sideboard, sprang forward
and grasped the handle--and dropped it as though it had been red-hot,
for he had caught the sound of footsteps--light, regular, measured
footsteps--descending the stairs. He could not utter a word. He turned
a white face and glaring eyes upon the Pantheress. And the steps came
nearer. As the dining-room door opened, he fell back, helplessly,
behind it. The wall seemed to open and swallow him--thick, suffocating
folds fell before his face; he had backed into the curtained recess
whence the Pantheress had emerged thirty fateful minutes previously.
Through a three-cornered rent in the stuff, just the height of his eye
from the ground, and through which that beast of prey had probably
watched him, he looked--and saw his wife!
She wore a loose white wrapping gown; her hair--the hair--hung in waves
about her shoulders. Barring the bedroom candle she carried, and losing
sight of her prosaic nineteenth-century surroundings, she resembled one
of Burne Jones’s angels. But her calm expression changed, and her voice
was tuned to a key of unangelic indignation, as her glance lighted on
the painted, brazen Defiance, erect and bristling, before her.
“You ... a woman, what do you want? How did you?--how dared you come
here?”
The Pantheress was about, in answer, to launch the first of an
elaborate flight of insults, couched in the easy vernacular of
Leicester Square, when she stopped short. Her thick lips rolled back
from her gleaming fangs in a triumphant grin. She bent forward, with
her hands upon her thighs, and made a close inspection of the face of
Ponsonby’s wife.
“_What! Luce?_”...
The other recoiled, with a slight cry. And Ponsonby, in his retirement,
was conscious of a deadly qualm--for Mrs. Ponsonby’s Christian name
was Lucy! When he opened his shut eyes and peeped through the rent
again, it was only to receive a fresh shock--for Mrs. Ponsonby and the
Pantheress were sitting, one on either side of the table, chatting like
old friends.
“Luck was poor,” the Pantheress was saying, “and me low down in my
spirits. So when I found the door of a swell house like this open,
‘I’ll pop in,’ says I to myself, ‘and look about for a snack of
something and a drop to drink, and then make off if I can, clear,
or else go to quod--like a lady.’ And I did pop in--and I did look
about--and the first thing that turns up is--you! On a smooth lay,
ain’t you? Always a daring one, you were. A clergyman’s daughter, and
an orphan! We’ve most of us been clergymen’s daughters and orphans
in our time, but not a girl of us ever looked it more than you. And
you’re married! Ha! ha! With a swell church service, and singin’, and a
Continental tour to give the orphan a little change of scenery. She’d
seen so little in her time, the poor dear! Lord! I shall die of it!”
The woman rocked with silent laughter. It seemed to the man behind
the curtain that her eyes, across his wife’s shoulder, glared full
into his--that her coarse jeers were leveled at him. He could not
have uttered a sound, or stirred a finger, for the dear life. A kind
of catalepsy had possessed him. But he saw them drink together, and
heard them talk ... turning over with conversational pitchforks the
unspeakable horrors of the dunghill whence his white butterfly had
taken wing.... Ponsonby had never been an imaginative man, but that
midnight conference wrought his sensibilities to such a pitch that,
leaning against the wall in the corner of the curtained recess, he
quietly fainted.
* * * * *
He came back to consciousness in darkness through which struggled no
gleam of light. He did not know where he was until he staggered out
from behind the stifling draperies and switched on the light with
shaking hands. Then he found himself in his own dining-room. There were
no glasses on the table--the spring bar of the liquor stand was in its
place, the brandy decanter was, as he remembered to have left it, half
full. He found his candle on the sideboard and lighted it, and went
into the hall. The hall-door was barred and bolted.
“Thank God, I _have_ been dreaming!” said Ponsonby, and went upstairs.
There she lay--a breathing picture of reposeful innocence--fast asleep.
Ponsonby stooped and kissed the hair that flooded her pillow and
invaded his own, and silently swore by all his deities that he would
never go to another City dinner as long as he lived. Before he crept
into bed he knelt down--a thing he had not done since he was a boy--and
said awkwardly, “O God, I’m glad it was a dream! Thank you!”
He slept the sleep of the weary, and rose, not a giant, it is true,
but very much refreshed. He dandered down to the breakfast table in
a leisurely way, humming a tune. As he shook out his newspaper, the
absurdity and improbability of his recent vision struck him for the
first time; he laughed until he ached. Then he dropped his newspaper,
and stooped to pick it up. Something bright that lay upon the carpet
under the table attracted his notice. The man put forth his hand and
took it, and his ruddy morning face underwent a strange and ghastly
alteration. For the thing was a long steel bonnet pin, with a vulgar
blue glass head! Men have died suddenly of pin pricks before now.
But Ponsonby’s tortures are lingering. He is alive still, and she
is still Mrs. Ponsonby. He has never spoken--the Secret of the Blue
Glass Pin is hidden from the woman who walks Life’s path with him. But
sometimes she is haunted by a dreadful Doubt, and at all times he is
bestridden by an overwhelming Certainty.
A FAT GIRL’S LOVE STORY
IN THREE PARTS
I
The first thing I remember being told is that I was a Parksop, and the
second that it was worth while living, if only to have that name. Some
years after, it dawned upon me that we had got very little else.
Father was a landed proprietor upon a reduced scale, and a parent on a
large one. There were twelve of us, counting Prenderby, who had passed
into the Army a few years previously, and passed out of it later on
at the unanimous request of his superior officers. Father cut him off
with a shilling--which he forgot to send him--and sternly forbade him
to bear the name of Parksop any more. He has done well since, and
attributes his rise in life entirely to that deprivation. Nobody ever
writes to Prenderby except Charlotte.
If an abnormally fat girl could possibly be the heroine of a romantic
love story, Charlotte--“Podge,” as she has been nicknamed ever since I
can remember--would stand in that relation to this narrative. But, you
know, such a thing isn’t possible. If it had been, Belle, who comes
in between Podge and Prenderby, and is the acknowledged beauty of the
family, having all the hereditary Parksop points besides several of her
own, nobody would have wondered.
How did the story begin? With Roderick and me--coming home to spend a
vacation. It was likely to be a pretty long one, for the Head of the
School had behaved in a most ungentlemanly way, showing absolutely
crass insensibility, as father said, to the advantage of having one of
the best names in England on his school list, while it remained written
at the bottom of a check for fifty-nine pounds, odd shillings, and
half-pence, marked by a groveling-spirited bank cashier “No Assets.”
You may guess Roddy and me didn’t grumble much--the Parksops have never
been strong in grammar and orthography, so I’m not going to apologize
for a slip here and there--didn’t grumble much at hearing that we were
to stay at home for the present, and be “brought on” by the curate in
Euclid and Latin and Greek, and all the rest of the rot. He wouldn’t
strike for wages, father knew, because for one thing he was very modest
and shy, and for another he was spoons on Belle. If he wasn’t, why was
he always glaring at our pew in church? And for the same reason we
shouldn’t be overworked--a thing the most reckless boys acknowledge
to be bad for them. So the morning after our return we went down to
breakfast feeling as jolly as could be.
Father shook hands with us in his lofty way. We could see that he was
deeply indignant with the Head from the way in which his aquiline
nose hooked itself when we gave him a letter we’d brought with us. We
almost wished we had torn it up, because, having made up our minds to
go fishing that morning, we had meant to ask him for the key of the
old boat house by the pond, where the punt was kept, which key, with a
disregard of opportunity quite unnatural, as Roddy said--in a man with
so large a family--he always kept hidden away.
Belle gave us two fingers to shake and her ear to kiss, and the others,
as many as were allowed to breakfast with the elders, crowded round,
and then Podge came bouncing in and hugged us for everybody. We didn’t
care about the hugging, because it was such a smothering business, like
sinking into a sea of eiderdown, Roddy used to say, who was imaginative
for a Parksop. And here, as it’s usual to describe a heroine--though I
don’t acknowledge her for one, you know--it would be best to describe
Podge a little.