THE MORNING
A week ago I had been living in ---- Crescent, living in a room with an
old faded carpet on the floor, with one picture on the walls,--and such
a picture, I can see it still, it was a German oleograph representing
the Day of Judgment, and so badly done that the long trumpets seemed
sticking in the sides of the angels' cheeks, not out of their mouths,
and some of the devils, I remember, had their tails growing from the
middle of their backs. The looking-glass made one look horrible, and
the handles were off the chest of drawers, so one had to pull the
drawers out with a crooked hairpin.
I minded the picture more than anything. Some girls would have grumbled
at the chest of drawers, and never thought of the picture, but I have
always loved beautiful things, so I suppose that is the reason why I
grumbled so much at the picture and so little at the other thing.
You may think, then, how delightful it was next morning when I woke and
saw the light filtering in through the rose-coloured blinds. I sat up
in the bed and saw the glimmer of the great ivory hair brushes on the
dressing-table. I saw my rings lying in a heap--I would never have had
those rings only for Geraldine, I would never have been here, only for
Geraldine, I might have been in the Thames, floating with dead cats
and dogs by this, only for Geraldine. Then I fell back on the pillows,
smothered with a strange kind of horror; it was strange, because it had
no reason for being. It passed away slowly like a mist dissolving, and
I lay looking up at the blue ceiling, with rosy clouds painted on it,
and little Cupids peeping at each other from behind them. I pulled up
the blinds of my window to look out; then I opened the sash.
It was an autumn morning, warm and dark, the wind of the night before
had blown half dead leaves about the garden on which my window looked;
it had rained in the night, and the air was full of the smell of
dampness and decay, and a faint perfume like the bitter perfume of
chrysanthemums; there was just enough wind to make the trees move
their leaves about, and make a noise as if they were sighing. I love
this autumn weather; I don't know why, perhaps it's just because I
don't know why that I love it. That seems rubbish, but I am too lazy
to scratch it out. It is just like autumn now as I sit writing this,
though it is early spring, and the trees are all covered with little
green buds, making ready for another autumn that I shall never see.
Then I dressed. I put on three dresses, one after another, and they all
seemed not good enough; but I had no more fit for morning wear, so I
left on the third.
Then I came down to breakfast, and I found only one place laid. I could
have broken my plate over the old butler's head, but I didn't, and I
can't for the life of me tell why I could have done it, or why I didn't
do it. Breakfast proceeded in solemn silence.
"Would I have ham?"
No, I would not have ham! where was Geraldine?
Miss Geraldine breakfasted an hour ago alone in her wing of the house;
Miss Geraldine sent her compliments, and wanted to know if I would
visit her in her own rooms after I had finished breakfast.
He might take Miss Geraldine my compliments, and say that I would have
much pleasure in doing so. He had better go at once. No, I required no
more coffee.
He went.
Her compliments, indeed, and her wing of the house, I wonder why
she didn't send her card. Yes, I would visit her just as often as I
pleased--yet I would not if my visits didn't please. No, in that case I
would drown myself in the moat, but there was no moat; well, in the big
bath upstairs. And the way the old butler said, "Miss Geraldine" quite
calmly, though he knows Miss Geraldine is a boy; and she is a boy,
and she ought to be smacked for being such a prig. But why smack her
when it's not her fault? No, it's James Wilder and the old butler that
require smacking, and still--and still, these two old fools between
them have produced, or helped to produce, this weird child, just as she
is; and in all God's earth she is the most beautiful thing, and the
most strange. She is like a thing made of mist, yet she is real; she is
a ghost, yet one can touch her. What is she--what is he--who am I--I
don't know--I don't want to know. Ha! I felt just then the claws of the
little falcon pinching my wrist.
That was the jumbling kind of stuff that ran through my head as I
breakfasted; then, when I had finished, instead of going at once to
find Geraldine's wing of the house, I hung about the room looking at
the pictures, putting off my visit just as a person puts off a bite at
a peach. At last I came.
I seemed to know the way by instinct; there was no placard with "To
Geraldine" on it, but I found Geraldine for all that. I crossed the
hall and passed the picture gallery scarcely looking at the door. Then
I lifted a heavy corded silk curtain, and found myself in a corridor.
Upon my word, I thought I was in the Arabian Nights. Each side of the
corridor was panelled, and on the cream white panels were painted
flowers,--it was a regular flower-garden of painting. The roof was
white, with coloured windows, each made in the shape of a fan. These
stained glass fans were the prettiest things in the way of windows I
had ever seen--so I thought. The corridor ended in a heavy curtain like
the one at the other end; two doors stood on each side of the curtain.
I chose the right hand door, for I guessed it belonged to the room she
was in. I was right. I knocked. A voice cried, "Come in," and in I came.
Oh, this Geraldine! I must have seen her all askew last night, for now
she seemed eight times lovelier than she was then. Who had taught
this being the art of putting on dress? Surely not James Wilder or the
old butler. This dress she wore was made from a fabric intended to
represent the skin of some tropical lizard, scales of golden satin on a
body-ground of dull emerald-coloured silk. She rose from her chair like
a snake from a blanket. James Wilder, when he rose from a chair, always
reminded me of a flail in a fit. Yet she was his son.
We said "Good morning," but we did not kiss. Something seemed to have
come between us; we seemed instinctively to hold aloof from each
other. The Geraldine who came up to me last night to be kissed, just
as a tame fawn might have done, was not exactly the Geraldine of this
morning. And yet I liked this something that had come between us.
Kisses are just like apples; if you can get as many as you want they
grow tasteless, and the more you pay for them the sweeter they seem,
and they are never so sweet as when you steal them. I never heard of a
farmer robbing his own orchard, have you?
Then this fine lady sank back into the chair from which she had
arisen--it was not sitting down, it was sinking down--and with a
ghostly smile resumed her work. And guess the work--tapestry. Tapestry;
and she had done yards of it, when she ought to have been playing at
marbles and learning to swear.
As for me, I sat down plump on a chair close by, crossed my legs, and
nursed my knee with my hands. I felt inclined to whistle. Remember,
I was thinking of her now as a boy in petticoats, and as long as I
thought of her as that I was in my right senses, that is, my everyday
senses. I felt perverse, just as I always feel, and would have liked to
tease--only I wouldn't have dared--this half-absurd, wholly delightful
production of old James Wilder. But when I thought of her as a girl
I felt--I felt the dim remembrance of a past life, and an infinite
sadness.
I looked round at the room; it looked like the inside of a shell.
Fairies seemed to have furnished it. I never saw such exquisite things
before. There were cabinets inlaid with copper on ebony, and Venice
glass that seemed coloured with tints of the sea. A wood fire was
burning on the tiled hearth, and a great bowl of violets stood on a
table supported by carved dragons with jewels for eyes. The smell of
the violets made me feel faint every now and then, but the faintness
went away when I remembered this Geraldine was a boy. "Remember that,"
I kept repeating to myself. And in the middle of the room sat Geraldine.
The long French windows were open, and the garden, all damp and
sad-coloured, lay outside. Great chrysanthemums, potted out, were
nodding under the marble-coloured sky, and they all seemed nodding at
Geraldine. When a hitch came in the thread Geraldine's under lip would
pout out. I felt now and then as if I were acting in a play, and the
chrysanthemums' faces were the faces of the audience. Perhaps they
were. Anyhow, I had learnt my part very badly, so it seemed to me.
The tapestry was a great blessing; one could speak or not as one
pleased, and I generally preferred--not. I fell to wondering does
_she_ remember anything of that hunting morning so long ago: does she
remember the poison, has she forgiven the poisoner, and has God?
Then I began to talk to her again and she answered in a low measured
voice that sounded to me like a bell from the far past, yet in spite of
the ghostly kind of sadness with which her voice filled me, some of her
answers made me laugh.
She didn't know how to read; that came out in the course of our scrappy
conversation.
"But, _Geraldine_, why--you've never read your _Bible_, then?"
One might have thought from my tone that I was a shocked Sunday-school
superintendent, and it really did seem shocking to me that a person
should never have read the Bible.
"What is my Bible?" asked Geraldine, staring at me, half-frightened at
my astonishment.
"Oh, it's a book. I'll tell you about it some other time, but--but you
can't know Geography. Do you know where Japan is, Geraldine, or India?"
Geraldine's head shook. She looked dazed.
"Do you know where England is?"
Oh, yes, she knew where England was,--this house, this garden, all away
beyond there, was England--all over there.
How proudly she waved the white hand. It was patriotism pure and
simple. She was proud of her park, not because it was her park, but
because it was her native land. Her--his--I cannot say "his," I must
always say "her;" besides, it doesn't matter now. It will never matter
again, nothing will ever matter again. What gibberish I am writing;
how those trees nod and nod their heads as if they were nodding at the
little graveyard "away over there," just as the chrysanthemums were
nodding that morning at Geraldine.
She didn't know her Bible and she didn't know her Geography, and she
didn't know "nothing." What a lot of ignorance was stowed away in that
small head; but she knew something of natural history. The tapestry
work had stopped, and we were walking in the little garden where the
chrysanthemums were. I pointed to a snail on the path.
"What is that, Geraldine?"
"That," said Geraldine, "is a snail."
How proud she seemed of her knowledge, and how tenderly she lifted the
snail on to a leaf. The clock in the clock-turret was striking noon.
"Can you read the clock, Geraldine?"
"Oh, yes, and my watch."
A watch the size of my thumb-nail was produced. How learned she was,
really a kind of professor!
We walked down an alley of cypress trees without speaking, then we
stopped, for the sound of a gong came roaring from the house.
It was the luncheon gong, so said Geraldine, and I suddenly woke up
from a reverie to remember that I was not in the seventeenth but the
nineteenth century.