Susan's visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy's multiplied.
Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs Monnerie's gaze would
rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to
distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her
only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to
whom Mrs Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be
doing his best to cultivate his aunt's graces, would meander "in
attendance" round and round the Square's square garden, while Fanny's
arm had now almost supplanted Mrs Monnerie's ebony cane. When Mrs
Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise
engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least Fanny seemed to
think so. But since Percy's conversation had small attractions for me,
it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared
at nothing under a tree.
At less than nothing--for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I
seemed to have lost the secret of day-dreaming. And if the quantity of
aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those
piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as
if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days,
besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of
London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits
of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making
her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished
me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes.
As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain
Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than
Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look
at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for
ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and
Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make
corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly
knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, "Oh, I say, Miss
Bowater!" and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have some one to
discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as
to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive
she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could
make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the
less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in
for money.
It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind
of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs
Monnerie's--until, that is, Fanny's arrival--she had transported her
"Queen Bee," as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social
function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not
played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs de la Rue
designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little
game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less
sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and
flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have
scaled. Mrs Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me
at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that
had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular
"line"--but I don't think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.
That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving
beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and
inscribed, "To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens."
Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed debutante of
the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. "There was once a Diogenes
whom the gods shut up in a tub."--Poor Mr Wagginhorne, he had been,
after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.
In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs Monnerie's
generosities, by my "chances," while I was with her. I just grew
hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely
wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As
Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were
pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as
rare, intelligence.
The society "Beauties," now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the
least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me--well, no
better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics
of either sex reminded me of petunias--the headachy kind, that are
neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them
that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I
could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be
extremely difficult to endure _pure_ admiration. True, I never remember
even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without
showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that's a very different
thing.
There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my
heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose
face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face
was absolutely the showing of his own mind--I never wearied of that. Or,
at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.
So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs Ballard, used to say,
is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually
the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact
remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called
"clever" people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes--a
little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe
that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing,
however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what
they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual
interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like
a threepenny bit.
Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got
on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I
could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not
matter so much. Clever men's--and women's--experiences all seem to be
in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye
of a needle, as poor Mr Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open
for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd
little amusements at Mrs Bowater's to imagine myself in strange
places--keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of
space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and
Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better
sense, to fix my attention on any one I disliked at Mrs Monnerie's so as
to enter _in;_ no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as
to make it a match at last even for poor Mr Daniel Lambert.
On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken
out by Mrs Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost
unbelievably long journey--and one not merely through this world, though
that helps. I did try to explore _those_ eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles;
and solitudes, stranger than any comet's, I would find myself in at
times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder
they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as
mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have
set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats--all three of
them comparatively little men.
However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart
that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To
care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there
being very little time for anything at Mrs Monnerie's, I never caught
any one making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used
to amuse myself by listening to Mrs Monnerie's friends talking to one
another--discussing plays and pictures and music and so on--anything
that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I
hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.
Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very
nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could
remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it
made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued
about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not "out of
their power and love"--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces;
and about "beauty," too, as if it were something you could eat with a
spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it
meant no more than--well, its "meaning." As if a butterfly were a
chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to
my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's
way.
But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school,
never been out of Kent, had never "done" anything, nor "been" anything,
except--and that half-heartedly--myself. No wonder I was censorious.
If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would
prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a
little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I
used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake
amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the
cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually
polite enough; but--like the Beauties--inclined to be absent and
restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage
over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could
occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau.
There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its
front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.
Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made
friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of
books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles
Dickens himself with a copy of _David Copperfield_, and had actually sat
on the young novelist's knee. No matter who it was he might be talking
to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion
whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet
little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he
squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs
Monnerie's enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.