"Yes?"
"It's hateful of you, Fanny.... From the hunchback."
Her astonishment, surely, could not have been pretence. "And what the
devil, you dear, stammering little midgelet, has your miserable little
hunchback to do with me? Why send his scrawls to _me_--and in bits?"
"Because," said I, "I thought you had been making fun of him and me
to--the others."
The light hands lifted themselves; the dark head tilted a little back
and askew. "_What_ a roundabout route," she sighed. But her face was
false to the smooth, scornful accents. "So you suspected me of spying on
you? _I_ see. And gentle Susan Monnerie was kind enough to smear a
little poison on the fangs. Well, Midgetina love, I tell you this. It's
safer sometimes to lose your reputation than your temper. But there's a
limit----"
"Hush," I whispered, for I had sharper ears than Fanny even when rage
had not deafened her own. I pounced on the envelope--but only just in
time.
"It's Mr Percy, miss," announced Fleming, "and may he come in?"
"Hallo!" said that young man, lounging greyly into view, "a bad penny,
Miss M. I happened to be passing Buszard's just now, and there was the
very thing! Miss Bowater says you have a sweet tooth, and they really
are rather neat." He had brought me the daintiest little box of French
doll bonbons. I glared at it; I glared at him--hardly in the mood for
any more of his little jokes--not even one tied up with pale-blue
ribbon.
"There's another thing," he went on. "Susan told us that your birthday
was coming along--August 25th, isn't it? And I have proposed a Grand
Birthday Party, sort of general rag. Miss M. in the Chair. Don't you
think it's a ripping idea of mine, Miss Bowater?"
"_Most_ ripping," said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance
with a slight and seemingly involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A
long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy
on the floor.
"But you don't look positively in the pink," he turned to me. "Now, does
she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn't she? Cherry, too: we
must have in another Vet." The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes
roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then
once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his
every turn and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself, "Go away, my
friend; go away, go away." Some nerve in him must have taken the message
at last, or he found Fanny's silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting,
curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted,
took his departure.
The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into
nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath
a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box.
"_Is_n't he a ninny?" sighed Fanny. "And yet, my dear: there--but for
the grace of God--goes Mr Fanny Bowater."
Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a
mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her
foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs Monnerie. She
laughed--looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge.
"Yes, my dear, it's quite true. I'm not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey.
So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive," she
pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, "I forget."
And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling
thing--not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found
it unamusing to forget. The next evening's post brought me an
exquisitely written little fable, signed "F. B.," and entitled
_Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf_. I couldn't enjoy it very much; though
no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud.
Still Fanny did not _care_. While I myself was like those railway lines
under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day's
neglect, a night's dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and
heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept
recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those
instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to
escape.
I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late
that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore.
Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I
spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say No to one
simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as Yes, and
far more unselfish. "Throw the stone," indeed; when my only desire was
to heal the wound it might make.
Thank goodness my letter was kinder than I felt. My candelabra burned
stilly on. Cold, in the blues, I stood in my dressing-gown and
spectacling my eyes with my hands, looked out of the chill glass into
the London night. Only one high garret window shone out in the dark face
of the houses.... Who, where, was Willie Arbuthnot with the peculiar
eyes? Had Lord Chiltern a tank on his roof--his back-yard? What a fool I
had been to abandon myself and come here. If they only knew how I
despised them. And the whole house asleep. So much I despised them that
not until I was dressing the following morning did I stoop into my
Indian mirror to see if I could discover what Lord Chiltern had meant.
During the next few weeks Mrs Monnerie--with ample provocation--almost
yawned at sight of me. In a bitter instant of rebellion our eyes met.
She detected the "ill-wish" in mine, and was so much taken aback by it
that I should hardly have recognized the set face that glared at me as
hers at all. Well, the fancier had wearied of her fancy--that was all.
If I had been just an ordinary visitor, she would soon have washed her
hands of me. But I was notorious, and not so easily exchanged as
bronchitic Cherry had been for her new Pekinese, Plum.
Possibly, too, the kind of aversion she now felt against me was a closer
bond than even virtuosity or affection. She would sit with a sullen
stare under her heavy eyelids watching me grow more and more heated and
clumsy over my scrap of embroidery or my game of Patience. Meanwhile
Chakka would crack his nut, and with stagnant eye sidle thievishly up
and down the bars of his cage; while Plum gobbled up dainties or snored
on his crimson cushion. We three.
Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs Monnerie was
turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do;
where to hide; how to "make myself small" during those torpid August
days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One
afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac
bush in the Square garden, I strayed off--my eyes idly glancing from
straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust--down a narrow deserted side
street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from
the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer
and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a
black-green churchyard among tombstones.
A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood
open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It
was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red
sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged
out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance
that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my
nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up
through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on
high. Quiet began to steal over me--long centuries of solitude had
filled this vacancy as with a dream.
It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown--but to
whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was
this church merely the house of a God? There were gods and temples all
over the world. Was it a house of _the_ God? Or only of "their" God? In
a sense I knew it was also _my_ God's, but how much more happily
confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore.
Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be
different from all other human beings?
A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the muffled thumping of the
invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be
wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the
public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand,
staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back
and back--Lyme Regis, Mrs Bowater's--and Fanny, Lyndsey, my mother and
father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the
waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and
the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in
memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.
And there was Mr Crimble--an immeasurable distance away; yet he had
still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must
the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes
wandered over my silk skirt and shoes.
My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It
may sound absurd, but I had never _vividly_ realized it before. And how
solemnly sitting there--like a spider in wait for flies. "For goodness'
sake, Miss M.," I said to myself, "cheer up. You are being deadly dull
company--always half afraid. They daren't really do anything to you, you
know. Face it out." And even while I was muttering, I was reading the
words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: "Jenetta Parker"--only
two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole
centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:--
"Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh:
For, where I lie,
Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast:
It was; and now is past."
I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in
obedience to her whisper, a much more niggardly handful of none too
bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer--part pity, part
melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta;
crossed myself and bowed to the altar--dulled gems of light the
glass--and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man
was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an
instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed
cobbles of the Mews and--trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and
Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner
scared me out of _that_ little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I
edged back as fast as I could to No. 2.
But it did me good--that visit. It was as if I had been looking back and
up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old
laboratory--a few bottles, a spider's web, and an occasional glint of
moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace.