When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the
ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with
snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching
the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater
scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet--their every
virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my
girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her
must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from
me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such
beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled
breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle
that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets
and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest
seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while
quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?
Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as
I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness
stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a
thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through
water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite
of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that
afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he
paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his
nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his
face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but
this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.
To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once
took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly
invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her
direction he accepted my invitation.
"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the
cup that cheers."
My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and
presently he and I found ourselves positively _tete-a-tete_ over her
seed cake and thin bread and butter.
But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent
intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his
thoughts were not wholly with me.
"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.
"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.
"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have
the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are
miserable. It is this pessimism--of a mechanical, a scientific
age--which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at
St Peter's, I think?"
"You wouldn't see _very_ much of me, if I did come," I replied a little
tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed
needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be
a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"
Mr Crimble opened his mouth and laughed. "I wish," he said, with a
gallant little bow, "there were more like you."
"More like _me_, Mr Crimble?"
"I mean," he explained, darting a glance at the furniture of my bedroom,
whose curtains, to my annoyance, hung withdrawn, "I mean that--that
you--that so many of us refuse to see the facts of life. To look them in
the face, Miss M. There is nothing to fear."
We were getting along famously, and I begged him to take some of Mrs
Bowater's black currant jam.
"But then, I have plenty of time," I said agreeably. "And the real
difficulty is to get the facts to face me. Dear me, if only, now, I had
some of Miss Bowater's brains."
A veil seemed suddenly to lift from his face and as suddenly to descend
again. So, too, he had for a moment stopped eating, then as suddenly
begun eating again.
"Ah, Miss Bowater! She is indeed clever; a--a brilliant young lady. The
very life of a party, I assure you. And, yet, do you know, in parochial
gatherings, try as I may, I occasionally find it very difficult to get
people to mix. The little social formulas, the prejudices. Yet, surely,
Miss M., religion _should_ be the great solvent. At least, that is my
view."
He munched away more vigorously, and gazed through his spectacles out
through my window-blinds.
"Mixing people must be very wearisome," I suggested, examining his face.
"'Wearisome,'" he repeated blandly. "I am sometimes at my wits' end. No.
A curate's life is not a happy one." Yet he confessed it almost with
joy.
"And the visiting!" I said. And then, alas! my tongue began to run away
with me. He was falling back again into what I may call his company
voice, and I pined to talk to the real Mr Crimble, little dreaming how
soon that want was to be satiated.
"I sometimes wonder, do you know, if religion is made difficult enough."
"But I assure you," he replied, politely but firmly, "a true religion is
exceedingly difficult. 'The eye of a needle'--we mustn't forget that."
"Ah, yes," said I warmly; "that 'eye' will be narrow enough even for a
person with my little advantages. I remember my mother's cook telling
me, when I was a child, that in the old days, really wicked people if
they wanted to return to the Church, had to do so in a sheet, with ashes
on their heads, you know, and carrying a long lighted candle. She said
that if the door was shut against them, they died in torment, and went
to Hell. But she was a Roman Catholic, like my grandmother."
Mr Crimble peered at me as if over a wall.
"I remember, too," I went on, "one summer's day as a very little girl I
was taken to the evening service. And the singing--bursting out like
that, you know, with the panting and the yowling of the organ, made me
faint and sick; and I jumped right out of the window."
"Jumped out of the window!" cried my visitor in consternation.
"Yes, we were at the back. Pollie, my nursemaid, had put me up in the
niche, you see; and I dragged her hand away. But I didn't hurt myself.
The grass was thick in the churchyard; I fell light, and I had plenty
of clothes on. I rather enjoyed it--the air and the tombstones. And
though I had my gasps, the 'eye' seemed big enough when I was a child.
But afterwards--when I was confirmed--I thought of Hell a good deal. I
can't _see_ it so plainly now. Wide, low, and black, with a few demons.
_That_ can't be right."
"My dear young lady!" cried Mr Crimble, as if shocked, "is it wise to
attempt it? It must be admitted, of course, that if we do not take
advantage of the benefits bestowed upon us by Providence in a Christian
community, we cannot escape His displeasure. The absence from His Love."
"Yes," I said, looking at him in sudden intimacy, "I believe that." And
I pondered a while, following up my own thoughts. "Have you ever read Mr
Clodd's _Childhood of the World_, Mr Crimble?"
By the momentary confusion of his face I gathered that he had not. "Mr
Clodd?... Ah, yes, the writer on Primitive Man."
"This was only a little book, for the young, you know. But in it Mr
Clodd says, I remember, that even the most shocking old forms of
religion were not invented by devils. They were 'Man's struggles from
darkness to twilight.' What he meant was that no man _loves_ darkness.
At least," I added, with a sudden gush of remembrances, "not without the
stars."
"That is exceedingly true," replied Mr Crimble. "And, talking of stars,
what a wonderful sight it was the night before last, the whole heavens
one spangle of diamonds! I was returning from visiting a sick
parishioner, Mr Hubbins." Then it was _his_ foot that Fanny and I had
heard reverberating on the hill! I hastily hid my face in my cup, but he
appeared not to have noticed my confusion. He took another slice of
bread and butter; folded it carefully in two, then peered up out of the
corner of his round eye at me, and added solemnly: "Sick, I regret to
say, no longer."
"Dead?" I cried from the bottom of my heart, and again looked at him.
Then my eyes strayed to the silent scene beyond the window, silent, it
seemed, with the very presence of poor Mr Hubbins. "I should not like to
go to Hell in the snow," I said ruminatingly. Out of the past welled
into memory an old ballad my mother had taught me:--
"This ae nighte, this ae nighte
--_Every nighte and alle_,
Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,
_And Christe receive thy saule_!"
"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured Mr Crimble, yet not without a trace of
alarm in his dark eyes. "But believe me, I am not suggesting that Mr
Hubbins---- His was, I am told, a wonderfully peaceful end."
"Peaceful! Oh, but surely not in his mind, Mr Crimble. Surely one must
be more alive in that last hour than ever--just when one's going away.
At any rate," and I couldn't refrain a sigh, almost of envy, "I hope _I_
shall be. Was Mr Hubbins a good man?"
"He was a most regular church-goer," replied my visitor a little
unsteadily; "a family-man, one of our Sidesmen, in fact. He will be
greatly missed. You may remember what Mr Ruskin wrote of his father:
'Here lies an entirely honest merchant.' Mr Ruskin, senior, was, as a
matter of fact, in the wine trade. Mr Hubbins, I believe, was in linen,
though, of course, it amounts to the same thing. But haven't we," and he
cleared his throat, "haven't we--er--strayed into a rather lugubrious
subject?"
"We have strayed into a rather lugubrious world," said I.
"Of course, of course; but, believe me, we mustn't always _think_ too
closely. 'Days and moments quickly flying,' true enough, though hardly
appropriate, as a matter of fact, at this particular season in the
Christian year. But, on the other hand, 'we may make our lives sublime.'
Does not yet another poet tell us that? Although, perhaps, Mr Hub----"
"Yes," I interposed eagerly, the lover of books in me at once rising to
the bait, "but what do you think Longfellow absolutely _meant_ by his
'sailor on the main' of life being comforted, you remember, by somebody
else having been shipwrecked and just leaving _footprints_ in the sand?
I used to wonder and wonder. Does the poem imply, Mr Crimble, that
merely to be born is to be shipwrecked? I don't think that can be so,
because Longfellow was quite a cheerful man, wasn't he?--at least for a
poet. For my part," I ran on, now thoroughly at home with my visitor,
and on familiar ground, "I am sure I prefer poor Friday. Do you remember
how Robinson Crusoe described him soon after the rescue from the
savages as 'without Passions, Sullenness, or Designs,' even though he
did, poor thing, 'have a hankering stomach after some of the Flesh'? Not
that I mean to suggest," I added hastily, "that Mr Hubbins was in any
sense a cannibal."
"By no means," said Mr Crimble helplessly. "But there," and he brushed
his knees with his handkerchief, "I fear you are too much of a reader
for me, and--and critic. For that very reason I do hope, Miss M., you
will sometimes contrive to pay a visit to St Peter's. Mother Church has
room for all, you know, in her--about her footstool." He smiled at me
very kindly. "And our organist, Mr Temple, has been treating us to some
charmingly quaint old carols--at least the words seem a little quaint to
a modern ear. But I cannot boast of being a _student_ of poetry.
Parochial work leaves little time even for the classics:--
"Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo.
Favete linguis...."
He almost chirped the delightful words in a high, pleasant voice, but
except for the first three of them, they were too many for my small
Latin, and I afterwards forgot to test the aptness of his quotation. I
was just about to ask him (with some little unwillingness) to translate
the whole ode for me, when I heard Fanny's step at the door. I desisted.
At her entry the whole of our conversation, as it hung about in Mrs
Bowater's firelit little parlour, seemed to have become threadbare and
meaningless. My visitor and I turned away from each other almost with
relief--like Longfellow's shipwrecked sailors, perhaps, at sight of a
ship.
Fanny's pale cheeks beneath her round beaver hat and veil were bright
with the cold--for frost had followed the snow. She eyed us slowly, with
less even than a smile in her eyes, facing my candles softly, as if she
had come out of a dream. Whatever class of the community Mr Crimble may
have meant to include in his _Odi_, the celerity with which he rose to
greet her made it perfectly clear that it was not Miss Bowater's. She
smiled at the black sleeve, cuff, and signet ring outstretched towards
her, but made no further advance. She brought him, too, a sad
disappointment, simply that she would be unable to sing at his concert
on the last night of the year. At this blow Mr Crimble instinctively
folded his hands. He looked helpless and distressed.
"But, Miss Bowater," he pleaded, "the printer has been waiting nearly
two days for the names of your songs. The time is very short now."
"Yes," said Fanny, seating herself on a stool by the fire and slowly
removing her gloves. "It is annoying. I hadn't a vestige of a cold last
night."
"But indeed, indeed," he began, "is it wise in this severe weather----?"
"Oh, it isn't the weather I mind," was the serene retort, "it's the
croaking like a frog in public."
"'A frog!'" cried Mr Crimble beguilingly, "oh, no!"
But all his protestations and cajoleries were unavailing. Even to a
long, silent glance so private in appearance that it seemed more
courteous to turn away from it, Fanny made no discernible response. His
shoulders humped. He caught up his soft hat, made his adieu--a little
formal, and hasty--and hurried off through the door to the printer.
When his muffled footsteps had passed away, I looked at Fanny.
"Oh, yes," she agreed, shrugging her shoulders, "it was a lie. I said it
like a lie, so that it shouldn't deceive him. I detest all that
wheedling. To come here two days running, after.... And why, may I ask,
if it is beneath your dignity to dance to the parish, is it not beneath
mine to sing? Let the silly sheep amuse _themselves_ with their
bleating. I have done with it all."
She rose, folded her gloves into a ball and her veil over her hat, and
once more faced her reflection in her mother's looking-glass. I had not
the courage to tell her that the expression she wore on other occasions
suited her best.
"But surely," I argued uneasily, "things are different. If I were to
dance, stuck up there on a platform, you know very well it would not be
the dancing that would amuse them, but--just me. Would you care for that
if you were--well, what I am?"
"Ah, you don't know," a low voice replied bitterly, "you don't know. The
snobs they are! I have soaked in it for years, like a pig in brine.
Boxed up here in your pretty little doll's house, you suppose that all
that matters is what you think of other people. But to be perfectly
frank, you are out of the running, my dear. _I_ have to get my own
living, and all that matters is not what I think of other people but
what other people think of me. Do you suppose I don't know what _he_, in
his heart, thinks of me--and all the rest of them? Well, I say, wait!"
And she left me to my doll's house--a more helpless slave than ever.
Not only one "star" the fewer, then, dazzled St Peter's parish that New
Year's Eve, but Fanny and I never again shared an hour's practical
astronomy. Still, she would often sit and talk to me, and the chain of
my devotion grew heavy. Perhaps she, on her side, merely basked in the
flattery of my imagination. It was for her a new variety of a familiar
experience. Perhaps a curious and condescending fondness for me for a
while sprang up in her--as far as that was possible, for, apart from her
instinctive heartlessness, she never really accustomed herself to my
physical shortcomings. I believe they attracted yet repelled her. To my
lonely spirit she was a dream that remained a dream in spite of its
intensifying resemblance to a nightmare.
I realize now that she was desperately capricious, of a cat-like cruelty
by nature, and so evasive and elusive that frequently I could not
distinguish her soft, furry pads from her claws. But whatever her mood,
or her treatment of me, or her lapses into a kind of commonness to which
I deliberately shut my eyes, her beauty remained. Whomsoever we love
becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what
we give as well as for what we accept. The very memory of her beauty,
when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in
her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often, it was
only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would
have incensed her to know it. When she came to me in my sleep, she was
both paradise and seraph, and never fiddle entranced a Paganini as did
her liquid lapsing voice my small fastidious ear. Yet, however much she
loved to watch herself in looking-glass or in her mind, and to observe
her effects on others, she was not vain.
But the constant, unbanishable thought of anything wearies the mind and
weakens the body. In my infatuation, I, too, was scarcely more than a
ghost--a very childish ghost perhaps. I think if I could call him for
witness, my small pasha in the train from Lyndsey would bear me out in
this. As for what is called passion, the only burning of it I ever felt
was for an outcast with whom I never shared so much as glance or word.
Alas, Fanny, I suppose, was merely a brazen image.
Long before the dark day of her departure--a day which stood in my
thoughts like a barrier at the world's end--I had very foolishly poured
out most of my memories for her profit and amusement, though so immobile
was she when seated in a chair beside my table, or standing foot on
fender at the chimney-piece, that it was difficult at times to decide
whether she was listening to me or not. What is more important, she told
me in return in her curious tortuous and contradictory fashion, a good
deal about herself, and of her childhood, which--because of the endless
violent roarings of her nautical father, and the taciturn discipline of
poor Mrs Bowater--filled me with compassion and heaped fuel on my love.
And not least of these bonds was the secret which, in spite of endless
temptation, I managed to withhold from her in a last instinctive loyalty
to Mrs Bowater--the discovery that her own mother was long since dead
and gone.
She possessed more brains than she cared to exhibit to visitors like Dr
Phelps and Mr Crimble. Even to this day I cannot believe that Mr Crimble
even so much as guessed how clever she was. It was just part of herself,
like the bloom on a plum. Hers was not one of those gesticulating minds.
Her efforts only intensified her Fannyishness. Oh dear, how simple
things are if only you leave them unexplained. Her very knowledge, too
(which for the most part she kept to herself) was to me like finding
chain armour when one is in search of a beating heart. She could shed it
all, and her cleverness too, as easily as a swan water-drops. What could
she not shed, and yet remain Fanny? And with all her confidences, she
was extremely reticent. A lift of the light shoulders, or of the flat
arched eyebrows, a sarcasm, a far-away smile, at the same time
illuminated and obscured her talk. These are feminine gifts, and yet
past my mastery. Perhaps for this reason I admired them the more in
Fanny--just as, in reading my childhood's beloved volume, _The Observing
Eye_, I had admired the crab's cuirass and the scorpion's horny
rings--because, being, after all, myself a woman, I faintly understood
their purpose.
Thus, when Fanny told me of the school she taught in; and of the
smooth-haired drawing-master who attended it with his skill, on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays; and of the vivacious and saturnine "Monsieur
Crapaud," who, poked up in a room under the gables, lived in the house;
or of that other parish curate who was a nephew of the head-mistress's,
the implacable Miss Stebbings, and who, apparently, preached Sunday
after Sunday, with peculiar pertinacity, on such texts as "God is
love"--when Fanny recounted to me these afflictions, graces, and
mockeries of her daily routine as "literature" mistress, I could as
easily bestow on her the vivifying particulars she left out, as a
painter can send his portraits to be framed.
Once and again--just as I have seen a blackbird drop plumb from the
upper boughs of a tree on a worm disporting itself in the dewy
mould--once I did ask a question which produced in her one of those
curious reactions which made her, rather than immaterial, an exceedingly
vigilant image of her very self. "What will you do, Fanny, when you
_can't_ mock at him?"
"Him?" she inquired in a breath.
"_The_ him!" I said.
"What him?" she replied.
"Well," I said, stumbling along down what was a rather black and
unfamiliar alley to me, "my father was not, I suppose, particularly wise
in anything, but my mother loved him very much."
"And _my_ father," she retorted, in words so carefully pronounced that I
knew they must be dangerous, "my father was a first mate in the
mercantile marine when he married your landlady."
"Well," I repeated, "what would you do, if--if _you_ fell in love?"
Fanny sat quite still, all the light at the window gently beating on her
face, with its half-closed eyes. Her foot stirred, and with an almost
imperceptible movement of her shoulder, she replied, "I shall go blind."
I looked at her, dumbfounded. All the days of her company were
shrivelled up in that small sentence. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered
hopelessly, "then you know?"
"'Know'?" echoed the smooth lips.
"Why, I mean," I expostulated, rushing for shelter fully as rapidly as
my old friend the lobster must have done when it was time to change his
shell, "I mean that's what that absurd little Frenchman is--'Monsieur
Crapaud.'"
"Oh, no," said Fanny calmly, "_he_ is not blind, he only has his eyes
shut. Mine," she added, as if the whole light of the wintry sky she
faced were the mirror of her prediction, "mine will be wide open."
How did I know that for once the serene, theatrical creature was being
mortally serious?