And then when I had newly passed my fourteenth birthday, came my tragic
disgrace.
It was in my midsummer holidays that the thing happened, and it was
through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She had “come into my life,”
as they say, before I was twelve.
She descended unexpectedly into a peaceful interlude that followed the
annual going of those Three Great Women. She came into the old nursery
upstairs, and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper’s room.
She was eight, and she came with a nurse called Nannie; and to begin
with, I did not like her at all.
Nobody liked this irruption into the downstairs rooms; the two “gave
trouble,”—a dire offence; Nannie’s sense of duty to her charge led to
requests and demands that took my mother’s breath away. Eggs at unusual
times, the reboiling of milk, the rejection of an excellent milk
pudding—not negotiated respectfully but dictated as of right. Nannie
was a dark, longfeatured, taciturn woman in a grey dress; she had a
furtive inflexibility of manner that finally dismayed and crushed and
overcame. She conveyed she was “under orders”—like a Greek tragedy. She
was that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant;
she had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater,
more powerful people who employed her, in return for a life-long
security of servitude—the bargain was nonetheless binding for being
implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hated
treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormous
habit of reference to these upstairs people, she had curbed down all
discordant murmurings of her soul, her very instincts were perverted or
surrendered. She was sexless, her personal pride was all transferred,
she mothered another woman’s child with a hard, joyless devotion that
was at least entirely compatible with a stoical separation. She treated
us all as things that counted for nothing save to fetch and carry for
her charge. But the Honourable Beatrice could condescend.
The queer chances of later years come between me and a distinctly
separated memory of that childish face. When I think of Beatrice, I
think of her as I came to know her at a later time, when at last I came
to know her so well that indeed now I could draw her, and show a
hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But
even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish
skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one
felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather
precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally
curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes
that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow.
And from the very outset, after a most cursory attention to Rabbits,
she decided that the only really interesting thing at the tea-table was
myself.
The elders talked in their formal dull way—telling Nannie the trite old
things about the park and the village that they told every one, and
Beatrice watched me across the table with a pitiless little curiosity
that made me uncomfortable.
“Nannie,” she said, pointing, and Nannie left a question of my mother’s
disregarded to attend to her; “is he a servant boy?”
“S-s-sh,” said Nannie. “He’s Master Ponderevo.”
“Is he a servant boy?” repeated Beatrice.
“He’s a schoolboy,” said my mother.
“Then may I talk to him, Nannie?”
Nannie surveyed me with brutal inhumanity. “You mustn’t talk too much,”
she said to her charge, and cut cake into fingers for her.
“No,” she added decisively, as Beatrice made to speak.
Beatrice became malignant. Her eyes explored me with unjustifiable
hostility. “He’s got dirty hands,” she said, stabbing at the forbidden
fruit. “And there’s a fray to his collar.”
Then she gave herself up to cake with an appearance of entire
forgetfulness of me that filled me with hate and a passionate desire to
compel her to admire me.... And the next day before tea, I did for the
first time in my life, freely, without command or any compulsion, wash
my hands.
So our acquaintance began, and presently was deepened by a whim of
hers. She had a cold and was kept indoors, and confronted Nannie
suddenly with the alternative of being hopelessly naughty, which in her
case involved a generous amount of screaming unsuitable for the ears of
an elderly, shaky, rich aunt, or having me up to the nursery to play
with her all the afternoon. Nannie came downstairs and borrowed me in a
careworn manner; and I was handed over to the little creature as if I
was some large variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a
little girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and
bright than anything else could possibly be in life, and she found me
the gentlest of slaves—though at the same time, as I made evident,
fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip
cheerfully and rapidly away. She praised my manners to Lady Drew and to
my mother, who said she was glad to hear well of me, and after that I
played with Beatrice several times. The toys she had remain in my
memory still as great splendid things, gigantic to all my previous
experience of toys, and we even went to the great doll’s house on the
nursery landing to play discreetly with that, the great doll’s house
that the Prince Regent had given Sir Harry Drew’s first-born (who died
at five), that was a not ineffectual model of Bladesover itself, and
contained eighty-five dolls and had cost hundreds of pounds. I played
under imperious direction with that toy of glory.
I went back to school when that holiday was over, dreaming of beautiful
things, and got Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made a great story
out of the doll’s house, a story that, taken over into Ewart’s hands,
speedily grew to an island doll’s city all our own.
One of the dolls, I privately decided, was like Beatrice.
One other holiday there was when I saw something of her—oddly enough my
memory of that second holiday in which she played a part is vague—and
then came a gap of a year, and then my disgrace.