They arrived in response to her invitation, on Christmas-eve, all four
of them, driving up in the station fly, Bertie on the box. She stood on
the doorway, awaiting them, and “LYDIA PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier
and Wig-maker,” flaunted over her head in the gilt lettering on the
black ground. She was conscious of her exquisite disparity with this
description. Sleek bands, and snuff-coloured gown; Bertie and Emily
should find her as they had left her; the difference should only by
degrees dawn upon them. She was glad now that she should have rejected
the alteration in her appearance which, to a less subtle mind, would
have been so blatantly indicated. There was nothing blatant about Lydia
Protheroe; oh no! it was all very surreptitious, very delicate; she was
an artist; everybody said so; her touch very light, but very certain.
She was a rapier to Bertie’s bludgeon. Bertie: he had descended from the
fly, he had taken both her hands in his, he had grown whiskers like his
father’s, his father’s watch-chain (she recognized it) spanned his
stomach, he was pressing her hands and looking into her eyes with what
she was sure he inwardly phrased as “a world of tenderness and
forgiveness,” while simultaneously he tried to scan out of the corner of
his eye the wares displayed in her shop-window—the dragon’s head, the
waxen figure of a fairy, the crowns and harps—and she saw him wince, but
at the same time, she saw his determination to ignore all this, or to
accept it, if he was forced to, in a spirit of jovial resignation; and
now Emily was kissing her, Emily with those same thin ungenerous lips
and pointed nose, so like her own features and yet so different, because
of a recklessness in Lydia’s eyes which was not in Emily’s—subtle
again—and now Bertie’s wife enveloped her in a soft, fat little hug; and
there was Emily’s husband, whom they called Fred, and who was a
pink-faced little man in a bowler hat and, for some reason, an evening
tie, pushed forward to embrace his sister-in-law with a reluctance he
tried to turn into enthusiasm.
Lydia brought the brood into the shop; it gave her a strange pang to see
them cross her threshold, succeeded by an exaltation to have got them
safely there. She did not talk much; she let them do the talking while
she surveyed them. Bertie was voluble; he had a lot of information to
give her, mixed in with small outbursts of sentimentality. He had grown
portly, and he was most anxious to conciliate her; she took the measure
of Bertie in a moment. The others, clearly, were in his charge. His
wife, as ever, watched him for her cues with little twinkling, admiring
eyes. Emily produced a sour and unconvincing smile whenever Lydia’s eyes
rested on her. As for Fred, he smiled nervously the whole time, and
looked as though he felt himself very much of a stranger.
X
She had got them all into their rooms for the night. She relished the
feeling that she had got them all safely shut in, and as she stood at
the top of the stairs looking first to left and then to right along the
dim passage, she felt the jailer of all those four people behind the
closed doors. She would have liked a bunch of keys dangling from her
belt. Squeezing her hands tightly together, she swayed backwards and
forwards as she controlled her laughter. A single gas-jet, turned low,
lit the passage. She wandered away. She wandered down into the shop,
where the polished shields on the walls threw back the sharp flame of
her candle, and the indistinct, peopled obscurity of the shop. She
thought vaguely that the shop was too full—had always been too full—she
must have a clearance—but there was no longer any room upstairs—she
ought to scrap half her things—but no, they were too precious. She
wandered away again, up into the attic. She peered round, thrusting the
candle into the dark corners. A rat scurried past. Old trunks, too full
to shut; velvet and damask and leather protruded; too full. Like life;
too full. Like her head; too full. She wandered back to the dim passage.
Closed doors. The gas-jet. She could turn off the gas at the main; that
would put the house in darkness. They would not understand what had
happened. They would run out of their rooms, and up and down the house,
looking for light; finding none; blundering against objects in the dark.
She would hear their footsteps, running; their hands, perhaps, beating
at last upon the shutters. She had seen clearly enough that they already
thought her strange. She had accompanied Bertie and his wife to their
rooms, and under her scrutiny they had continued their talk; they had
drawn a picture of the social life in their town; they had spoken of
nice little parties. “Not so nice as the little party I’m giving now,”
Lydia had cried, and left them.
Husband and wife indeed thought her very odd; the wife was puzzled and
uneasy. All through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very silent, from her
place at the head of the table where she sat surveying her guests, only
occasionally she had given vent to some such outburst, which she had at
once restrained; and the dining-room had been odd too, a room at the
back of the shop, full of queer theatrical things, and a great figure of
a Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet high, with a bearded yellow
mask under his helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top of the spear
he held in his hand. Bertie’s wife thought this a novel and unpleasing
method of lighting a room. She had begun to wish they had never come.
For the rest, there had been a barbaric flavour about the meal,
unsuitable to one so obviously an English spinster; they had eaten off
the sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the sham gold goblets; the
sham gold candelabra had flared in the middle of the table with its
eight or ten candles, above a great golden bowl of artificial fruit.
It was difficult to believe that that setting was the invention of
Lydia, sitting there so prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine. It was
as disconcerting an indication as if Lydia had gotten up and danced.
Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before Emily’s door. If she despised
Bertie, she fairly hated Emily. Not one of Emily’s childish sneakings
and whinings was forgotten; and Emily was unchanged: she had been
dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie, tempted by the pictures Bertie drew
of Lydia’s wealth; unable to resist that, she had come, but she was
bitter and ungracious, wringing out that thin, sour little smile
whenever Lydia looked at her. That supposed wealth, now become one of
Lydia’s dearest jokes! They wouldn’t find much—the vultures—they would
find that Lydia hadn’t hoarded, hadn’t kept back more than the little
necessary to her own livelihood, so long as charity had stretched out to
her its piteous hands. It was not part of Lydia’s creed to feast while
others went hungry. Not for that had she broken away from her traditions
and her family. She would have liked now to sham dead just for the sake
of seeing their faces and hearing their comments.
She wasted no time on Emily; she needed no sight of Emily’s face in
order to whet her vindictiveness. She knew well enough what was going on
behind all those closed doors. Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly
accompaniment of the calculation of Lydia’s prosperity, oh, she knew,
she knew! Mean souls! mean, prudent souls! They had thrown her out when
she was poor; they fawned on her now that they thought her rich. Well,
she would teach them a lesson; she would give them twenty-four hours’
entertainment which they would not be likely to forget.
She crept away, down the dark stairs into her shop. At home again, among
her fanciful and extravagant confederates! She held out her arms towards
her shop, as though to embrace it. They were allies, she and it, the
world of illusion against the world of fact.
She set to work.