We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet,
as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one
another, and broke into a long, mirthless peal of laughter--a laughter
that on her side presently threatened to end in tears. I left her to
recover herself, fixing my festering attention on her engagement
ring--two hearts in silver encircled by six sky-blue turquoises. And in
the silly, helpless fashion of one against the world, I plotted revenge.
The cab stopped. There stood the little brick house, wholly unaffected
by the tragic hours which had passed since we had so gaily set out from
it. I eyed it with malice and disgust as I reascended my Bateses and
preceded Pollie into the passage. Once safely within, I shrugged my
shoulders and explained to Mrs Bowater the phenomenon of the cab with
such success that I verily believe she was for the moment convinced that
her lodger was one of those persons who prosper in the attentions of the
mob--Royalty, that is, rather than pickpockets or corpses run over in
the street.
With my new muslin tie adorning her neck, Mrs Bowater took tea with us
that afternoon, but even Pollie's imaginative version of our adventures
made no reference to the lady in the carriage, nor did she share my
intense conjecture on what Mr Crimble can have found of such engrossing
interest in the hatter's. _Was_ it that the lady had feigned not to have
seen me entirely for my sake; and that Mr Crimble had feigned not to
have seen me entirely for _his_? I was still poring over this problem in
bed that night when there came a tap at my door. It was Pollie. She had
made her way downstairs to assure herself that I was safe and
comfortable. "And oh, miss," she whispered, as she bade me a final
good-night, "you never see such a lovely little bedroom as Mrs Bowater
have put me into--fit for a princess, and yet just quite plain! Bob's
been thinking about furniture too."
So I was left alone again with forgotten Fanny, and that night I
dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging
their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face
of my ferrety "herrand-boy." And afloat in the midst of the welter
beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the
gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the
sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke,
shuddering, breathed a blessing--disjointed, nameless; turned over, and
soon was once more asleep.
My day's experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four
hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when,
after Pollie's departure, a knock announced Mr Crimble, I greeted him
with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed
on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he
assured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that
our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he
noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals?
"In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny
black oblongs; you can't think how secret it looks!"
But Mr Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry
after the health of Mrs Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that
the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The
proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs
Hubbins was unavailing.
"I speak," he said, "of yesterday's atrocity. There is no other word for
it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own
church, indeed of my mother's house, I cannot disclaim all
responsibility for it."
Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk
about _his_ share. "Oh," said I, as airily as I could, "you mean, Mr
Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My
attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even
so much as a glimpse of St Peter's. So you see----"
"You are kindness itself," he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his
forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, "but the fact is,"
and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, "the fact
is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it
cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than--than it hurt mine."
"But honestly, Mr Crimble," I replied, glancing rather helplessly round
the room, "it didn't hurt my feelings at all. You don't feel much, you
know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is
important to know where we are, isn't it; and where other people are?
And boys will be boys, as Mrs Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose,
errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very
useful lesson--even though I didn't much enjoy learning it. If I am ever
to get used to the world (and that _is_ a kind of duty, Mr Crimble,
isn't it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each
other's insides--our thoughts and feelings, I mean--everybody would be
as peculiar there--inside, you know--as I am, outside. I'm afraid this
is not making myself very clear."
And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr Phelps with precisely
the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being
"deceitful on the weights."
Mr Crimble opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly, "You see, I must
be candid about such things to myself and try not to--to be silly. And
you were merely going to be very kind, weren't you? I am a midget, and
it's no good denying it. The people that hooted me were not. That's all;
and if there hadn't been so many of them, perhaps I might have been just
as much amused, if not even shocked at them, as they at me. We _think_
our own size, that's all, and I'm perfectly certain," I nodded at him
emphatically, "I'm perfectly certain if poor Mr Hubbins were here now,
he'd--he'd bear me out."
Bear me out--the words lingered on in my mind so distinctly, and
conveyed so peculiar a picture of Mr Hubbins's spirit and myself, that I
missed the beginning of my visitor's reply.
"But I assure you," he was saying, "it is not merely that." The glint of
perspiration was on his forehead. "In the Almighty's sight all men are
equal. Appearances are nothing. And some of us perhaps are far more
precious by very reason of--of passing afflictions, and----"
"My godmother," I interposed, "said exactly that in a letter to me a few
months ago. Not that I accept the _word_, Mr Crimble, the
'afflictions,' I mean. And as for appearances, why they are
_everything_, aren't they?" I gave him as cordial an imitation of a
smile as I could.
"No, no, no; yes, yes, yes," said Mr Crimble rapidly. "But it was not of
that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say
this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the
coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward.
The--the hideous barbarity of the proceeding." He had forgotten me. His
eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the
hatter's window. There fell a painful pause.
I rose and sat down again. "But quite, quite honestly," I interposed
faintly, "they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could
you have done? Why, really and truly," I laughed feebly, "they might
have had to pay, you know. It was getting--getting me cheap!"
His head was thrown back, so that he looked _under_ his spectacles at
me, as he cried hollowly: "They might have stoned you."
"Not with those pavements."
"But I was there. I turned aside. You _saw_ me?"
What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot
think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: "But honestly,
honestly, Mr Crimble," I murmured out at him, "I didn't _see_ you see
me."
"Oh, ah! a woman's way!" he adjured me desperately, turning his head
from one side to the other. "But you must have known that I knew you
knew I had seen you, you _must_ confess _that_. And, well ... as I say,
I can only appeal to your generosity."
"But what can I _do_? I'm not hurt. If it had been the other way
round--_you_ scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe _I_ might have
looked into the hatter's. Besides, when we were safe in the cab.... I
mean, I'm glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the
streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even
you.... It was wildly _exciting_, Mr Crimble, can't you _see_? And
now"--I ended triumphantly--"and now I have another novel!"
At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into
my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed
themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I
stood there, erect beside the bed--without a thought in my head. And I
began slowly, silently--to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and
laughed--not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some
infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the
strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my
very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size.
Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express
myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of
solitude--as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose,
was my bed, my glass, my hair-brushes and bottles--"Here we all are,
Miss M."--and on the other side of the curtains.... And how contemptuous
I had been of Pollie's little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my
handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out
once more into the world.
"Ah, here it is," I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my _Sense and
Sensibility_ from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it
almost ceremoniously in Mr Crimble's hands. A visible mist of
disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened
it, his eye strayed down the title-page.
"Yes, yes," he murmured, "Jane Austen--a pocket edition. Macaulay, I
remember...." He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb
slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. "But you were asking me
a question. What could I have _done_? Frankly I don't quite know. But I
might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you---- The Good
Shepherd. But there, in short," and the sun of relief peered through the
glooms of conscience, "I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd
though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had
unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand." His tongue
came to a standstill. "And when," he continued in a small, constrained
voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, "when Miss
_Bowater_ returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to
prove---- She would never--for--forgive...."
The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention
to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the
little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to
understand, to realize where my poor little "generosity" was to come in.
"Ah," I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, "she
won't be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn't, I am
sure, much _mind_, Mr Crimble."
"Easter," he whispered. "Well, you will write, I suppose," and his eye
wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, "and no doubt you will share
our--your secret." There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice,
and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only
and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why,
surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid,
he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys
love leads us into.
"No," I said solemnly. "I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is
because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she
would only be amused. Everything amuses her."
It seemed that we had suddenly reassumed our natural dimensions, for at
that he looked at me _tinily_ again, and with the suggestion, to which I
was long accustomed, that he would rather not be observed while so
looking.
On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, _there_, not on
my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and
so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far
more friendly towards Mr Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from
the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could--equals. I tossed a
pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr
Bowater's fixed stare on me, hastily included _him_ within its range.
Mr Crimble, Mrs Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived
with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his "fun," was
a lonely young man. He hadn't, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of
the world to be of much service to those who had. "They," and I think
she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr Crimble in particular,
"live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according.
Though, of course, there's those who have seen a bit of trouble and
cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all's said
and done."
And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church--no
more just a number of St Peterses than I was so many "organs," or
Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many
counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered.
"But he was very anxious about the concert," I ventured to protest.
"I've no doubt," said Mrs Bowater shortly.
"But then," I remarked with a sigh, "Fanny seems to make friends
wherever she goes."
"It isn't the making," replied her mother, "but the keeping."
The heavy weeks dragged slowly by, and a one-sided correspondence is
like posting letters into a dream. My progress with Miss Austen was
slow, because she made me think and argue with her. Apart from her, I
devoured every fragment of print I could lay hands on. For when fiction
palled I turned to facts, mastered the _sheepshank_, the _running
bowline_, and the _figure-of-eight_; and wrestled on with my sea-craft.
It was a hard task, and I thought it fair progress if in _that_ I
covered half a knot a day.
Besides which, Mrs Bowater sometimes played with me at solitaire,
draughts, or cards. In these she was a martinet, and would appropriate a
fat pack at _Beggar-my-neighbour_ with infinite gusto. How silent stood
the little room, with just the click of the cards, the simmering of the
kettle on the hob, and Mrs Bowater's occasional gruff "Four to pay." We
might have been on a desert island. I must confess this particular game
soon grew a little wearisome; but I played on, thinking to please my
partner, and that she had chosen it for her own sake. Until one evening,
with a stifled sigh, she murmured the word, Cribbage! I was shuffling my
own small pack at the moment, and paused, my eyes on their backs, in a
rather wry amusement. But Fate has pretty frequently so turned the
tables on me; and after that, "One for his nob," sepulchrally broke the
night-silence of Beechwood far more often than "Four to pay."
Not all my letters to Fanny went into the post. My landlady looked a
little askance at them, and many of the unposted ones were scrawled, if
possible in moonlight, after she had gone to bed. To judge from my
recollection of other letters written in my young days, I may be
thankful that Fanny was one of those practical people who do not hoard
the valueless. I can still recall the poignancy of my postscripts. On
the one hand: "I beseech you to write to me, Fanny, I live to hear. Last
night was full moon again. I saw you--you only in her glass." On the
other: "Henry has been fighting. There is a chip out of his ear. Nine
centuries nearer now! And how is 'Monsieur Crapaud'?"