Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of
those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my
shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance--almost as if she too were a
stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an
equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her
books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring
to fret out and spin together mere memories that nobody will ever have
the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want
now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still
be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality?
There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot
answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this
familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant
garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only _within_ myself
there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be
contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures
returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and grasses to the
black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. "Alas, you
poor, blind thing," I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small
creature, "have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!"
All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I
realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I
was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or
consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of
a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know--know
absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for
everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At
times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am
sure, for instance, that Mrs Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of
Mr Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful
outhouse in his mother's garden to look in on him there--again. But I
did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that.
Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me?
Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I
should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him
that June evening. But I was soon lapped back into my life in London;
and thought only of Mr Anon, as I am apt to think of God: namely, when I
needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time
to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in
the night melted like dreams in the morning. Every morrow blotted out
its yesterday--as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase.
In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amusements
and eating and drinking--some hidden spring of life in me began to fail.
What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly
hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with
flattery. What airs I put on.
If this Life of mine had been a Biography, the author of it would have
had the satisfaction of copying out from a pygmy blue morocco diary the
names of all the celebrated and distinguished people I met at No. 2. A
few of them underlined in red! The amusing thing is that, like my
father, I was still a Radical at heart and preferred low life--flea-bane
and chickweed--to the fine flowers of culture; which only means, of
course, that in this I am a snob inside out. Nevertheless, the attention
I had shunned I now began to covet, and, like a famous artist or dancer,
would go sulky to bed, if I had been left to blush at being unseen. I
forced myself to be more and more fastidious: and tried to admire as
little as possible. I would even imitate and affect languid
pretentiousnesses and effronteries; and learned to be downright rude to
people in a cultivated way. As for small talk, I soon accumulated a
repertory of that, and could use the fashionable slang and current
"conversations" like a native. All this intensely amused Mrs Monnerie.
For, of course, the more like the general run of these high livers I
was, the more conspicuous I became.
The truth is, the Lioness's head was in peril of being turned, and,
like a blind kitten in a bucket of water, I came very near to being
drowned in the social cream-bowl. For what little I gained in public by
all this silly vanity I paid a heavy price when alone. I began to be
fretful and utterly useless to myself--just lived on from excitement to
excitement. And Fleming soon had better reasons for detesting me than
merely because I was horribly undersized.
Perhaps I am exaggerating; but the truth is I find it extremely
difficult to keep patience with Mrs Monnerie's pampered _protegee_. She
was weak and stupid. Yet learning had not lost its charm. My mind
persisted in being hungry, however much satiated were my senses and fine
feelings. I even infected Susan with my enthusiasm for indigestible
knowledge. For since Mrs Monnerie had begun to find my passion for
shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals a little
wearisome, it was her niece who now accompanied me to my many Meccas in
her stead. By a happy chance we often met on these pilgrimages the dark,
straight-nosed young man whom I had looked down upon at my first ballet,
and who also apparently was a fanatic.
However deeply engrossed in mementoes of the Dark or Stone Ages he might
be, he never failed to see us the moment we entered his echoing gallery.
He would lift his eyebrows; his monocle would drop out; and he would
come sauntering over to meet us, looking as fresh as apples cold with
dew. I liked Captain Valentine. So much so that I sent an almost
rapturous description of him to Mr Anon.
He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had
our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan.
He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet--to my unpractised
eye--looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old
caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me
to seat myself on the glass cases. So I could gloat on their contents at
leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent
student.
Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would
melt away like snow in Mrs Monnerie's library. A button specially fixed
for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round
the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be
strewn around me on the floor--gilded and leathery volumes, some of
them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the
lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between
them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds
and flowers, gems and glass, ruins, palaces, mountains--hunting,
cock-fighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped
into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they
might just as well have been autobiographies.
The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was
reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go
rooting and rummaging in Mrs Monnerie's library, like a little pig after
truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted--old plays, and
street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book
on Melancholy with its borage and hellebore and the hatted young man in
love; _Bel and the Dragon_, the _Newgate Calendar_. I even nibbled at
Debrett--and clean through all its "M's." The more I read, the more
ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble
of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very
sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.
They may have been harmful; but I certainly can't say that I regret
having read them--which may be part of the harm. You could tell the
really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle
cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet
hated the cloud they cast over me--like some horrible treacle in the
mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and God and
Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my
imagination went off the other way--with my heart in its pocket.
Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying
day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a pencil, can
_not_ make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of
these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a Squid, and a
very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works
on the shelves.
When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to
show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs Monnerie, I thought
her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old _mole_
habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and
unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of
course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don't
think it was either Mrs Monnerie's or Percy's pruderies that I had to be
careful about. To make _him_ laugh was one of the most hateful of my
experiences at No. 2.
I have read somewhere that the human instincts are "unlike Apollyon,
since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress
themselves up as Apes and Mandrils; he as a ringed, supple,
self-flattering, seductive serpent." Possibly that has something to do
with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don't
know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought
pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I
haven't the faintest wish in the world to "perpetuate my species." Not
that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I
suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing.
Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an Old Maid. Calling up Spirits
from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful
mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the
past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those
of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the
happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when
I brood on what the gift of it implies.
Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs
Monnerie--that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever
more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year
wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time
never stands still.
Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and
alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second
visit to Mrs Bowater's, the almost incredible news reached me that she
was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to
hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me good-bye. It
was _Mr_ Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the "good
nursing." Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened "to carry
him off into the next." At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly
head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor
old friend was in.
She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her
husband's letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I
fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:--
"DEAR EMILY,--The leg's giving me the devil in this hole of a
place. It looks as if I shouldn't get through with it. I should be
greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They'll give you all
the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen.
My love to Fanny. What's she looking like now? I should like to see
her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You've got about
a month or three weeks, I should think; if that.
"I remain, your affec. husband,
"JOSEPH BOWATER."
"Easy enough in _appearance_," was Mrs Bowater's comment, as she folded
up this stained and flimsy letter again, and stuffed it into her purse,
"but it's past even Mr Bowater to control what can be read between the
lines."
She looked at me dumbly; the skin seemed to hang more loosely on her
face. In vain I tried to think of a comforting speech. The tune of
"Eternal Father," one of the hymns we used to sing on windy winter
Sunday evenings together, had begun droning in my head. The thought,
too, was worrying me, though I did not put it into words, that Mr
Bowater, far rather than in Buenos Ayres, would have preferred to find
his last resting-place in Nero Deep or the Virgin's Trough--those
enormous pits of blue in the oceans which I myself had so often gloated
on in his Atlas. We were old friends now, he and I. He was Fanny's
father. The very ferocity of his look had become a secret understanding
between us. And now--at this very moment perhaps--he was dying. The
jaunty "_devil_" in his letter, I am afraid, affected me far more than
Mrs Bowater's troubled face or even her courage.
Without a moment's hesitation she had made up her mind to face the
Atlantic's thousands of miles of wind and water to join the husband she
had told me had long been "worse than" dead. The very tone in which she
uttered the word "steamer," was even more lugubrious than the enormous,
mocking hoot of a vessel that had once alarmed me out of the sea one
still evening at Lyme Regis. It was a horrifying prospect, yet she just
quietly said, "steamer," and looked at me over her spectacles.
While she was away, the little house on Beechwood Hill, "bought, thank
God, with my own money," was to be shut up, but it was mine if I cared
to return to it, and would ask a neighbour of hers, Mrs Chantry, for the
key. It would be Fanny's if anything "happened" to herself. So dismal
was all this that Mrs Bowater seemed already lost to me, and _I_ twice
an orphan. We talked on together in low, cautious voices. After a single
sharp, cold glance at my visitor, Fleming had left us to ourselves over
an enormous silver teapot. I grew so nervous at last, watching Mrs
Bowater's slow glances of disapproval at her surroundings; her hot,
tired face; and listening to her long drawn sighs, that again and again
I lost the thread of what she was saying, and could answer Yes, or No,
only by instinct.
What with an antiquated time-table, a mislaid railway ticket, and an
impudent 'bus-conductor, her journey had been a trying experience. I
discovered, too, that Mrs Bowater disliked the West End. She had first
knocked at No. 4 by mistake. Its butler had known nothing whatever at
all about any Miss M., and Mrs Bowater had been too considerate to
specify my dimensions. She had then shared a few hot moments in the
porch of No. 2 with a more fashionable visitor--to neither's
satisfaction. A manservant had admitted her to Mrs Monnerie's marble
halls and "barefaced" statuary, and had apparently thought the large
parcel she carried in her arms should have been delivered in the area.
She bore no resentment, though I myself felt a little uneasy. Life was
like that, she seemed to imply, and she had been no party to it. There
was no doubt a better world where things would be different--it was
extraordinary what a number of conflicting sentiments she could convey
in a pause or a shut of her mouth. Black and erect, she sat glooming
over that alien teapot, sipping Mrs Monnerie's colourless China tea,
firmly declining to grimace at its insipidity, until she had told me
all there was to tell.
At last, having gathered herself together, she exhorted me to write to
that young Mr Anon. "I see a fidelity one might almost say dog-like,
miss, on that face, apart, as I have reasons for supposing, from a
sufficiency in his pocket. Though, the Lord knows, you are young yet and
seemingly in no need of a home."
Parcel, reticule, umbrella--she bent over me with closed eyes, and
muttered shamefacedly that she had remembered me in her Will, "and may
God bless you, miss, I'm sure."
I clutched the gloved hand in a sudden helpless paroxysm of grief and
foreboding. "Oh, Mrs Bowater, you forgive----" I choked, and still no
words would come.
She was gone, past recall; and all the love and gratitude and remorse I
had longed to express flooded up in me. Yet, stuck up there in my chair,
my chief apprehension had been that Fleming might come in again, and
cast yet another veiled, sneering glance at my visitor.
Peering between the gilded balusters, I watched my old friend droop away
stiffly down the mild, lustrous staircase, bow to the man who opened the
door for her, and emerge into the sunny emptiness.
Maybe the thought had drifted across her mind that I had indeed been
dipped in the dye-pot. But now--these many years afterwards--there is no
more risk of misunderstanding. It is eight o'clock; the light is fading.
Chizzel Hill glows green. I hear her feebling step on the stairs. She
will peer at me over spectacles that now always straddle her nose. I
must put my pen and papers away; and I, too, have made my Will.