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 oftheGod? Or only of "their" God? In a sense I knew it was alsomyGod'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 nevervividlyrealized 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."
"Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh:For, where I lie,Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast:It was; and now is past."
"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 myhand 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 ofthatlittle 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.
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 oneside, 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 débutante 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 justgrew 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 endurepureadmiration. 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—andwomen'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 enterin;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 explorethoseeyes, 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 iftheir 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 ofDavid 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.
I once ventured to ask him how to write.
His face grew very solemn. "Lord have mercy upon me,"he said, "to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots." Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.
I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: "But, dear Mr ——, would you have me die of anæmia?"
And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next "Black Pudding Day" tempted us, we would collaborate.
Having heardhisviews, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: "So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?"
He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. "What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why—merely with brains," he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose themotis traditional.
And last, how to "act": for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that?
More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what not. In consequence, I often amused Mrs Monnerie's friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, "How naïve!"
How I detested the word. Naïve—it was simply my ill-bred earnestness. Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What youcouldbe serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard—that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it.
How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook theirlorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, tomyproportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absent-minded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining.
How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don't know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism—well, I may be smug enough, but I don't, and won't, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent's last golden oriole.
Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kind-hearted Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself—not one of the quarrelsome "Fair Folks of the Woods"—but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes, "There's nowt like eels for eeliness."
I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual size,I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others,—even though that body weighs me down to the earth like a stone—it is as if memory and consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary night-cry of Creation, "Let there be Light."
But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my story.
The fact is, Miss M.'s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of which his aunt cordially approved—my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul, all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new device to give herSnippety, herMoppet, herPusskinetta, her littleBinbin, herFairy, herPetite Sereine, an exquisite setting.
Invitations were sent out to the elect on inch-square cards embossed with my family crest and motto—a giant, head and shoulders, brandishing a club, andNon Omnis Moriar.[1]She not only postponed her annual departure from town, but, as did the great man in the parable,compelledher friends to come in. She exhausted her ingenuity on the menu. The great, on this occasion, were to feast on the tiny. A copy of it lies beside me now, though, unfortunately, I did not examine it when I sat down to dinner. Last, but not least, Percy's pastry-cooks, Messrs Buszard, designed a seven-tiered birthday-cake, surrounded on its lowermost plateau by one-and-twenty sugar-figures, about a quarter life-size, and each of them bearing on high a silver torch.
Their names were inscribed on their sugar pediments: Lady Morgan (the Windsor Fairy); Queen Elizabeth's Mrs Tomysen; the Empress Julia's Andromeda; the great little, little great Miss Billing of Tilbury; Anne Rouse and poor Ann Colling; the Sicilian Mlle Caroline Crachami (who went to the anatomists); Nannette Stocker (33 inches, 33 lbs. avoirdupois at 33); the blessed and tender Anastasia Boruwlaski; Gaganini; the gentleMiss Selby of Bath; Alethea (the Guernsey Nymph); Madame Teresa (the Corsican Fairy); Mrs Jeykll Skinner; the appalling Nono; Mrs Anne Gibson (néeShepherd); and the rest.
It was a joke, none the worse, maybe, for being old; and Peter the Great must have turned in his grave in envy of Mrs Monnerie's ingenuity.
It may scarcely be believed, but I had become so hardened to such little waggeries that under the genial eye of Mrs Monnerie I made the circuit of this cake with a smile; and even scolded her for omitting the redoubtable Mrs Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticized the images too, as not to be compared, even as sugar, with the alabaster William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower.
The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come in a gush, all at once. Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from the great glass and announced my decision. Tiny tortoiseshell comb uplifted, she stood in the clear lustrousness looking in at my reflection, queer thoughts darting about in her eyes. At first she supposed it was but another fit of petulance. Then her hatred and disgust of me all but overcame her.
She quietly argued. I insisted. But she was mortally afraid of Mrs Monnerie, and rather than deliver my message to her, sought out Susan. Poor Susan. She, too, was afraid: and it was her face rather than her love that won me over at last. Then she had to rush away to make what excuse she could for my unpunctuality. It thus came about that Mrs Monnerie's guests had already sat down to table, and were one and all being extremely amused by some story she was entertaining them with, when Marvell threw open the great mahogany doors for me, and I made my solitary entry.
In primrose silk,à la Pompadour, a wreath of tight-shut pimpernels in my hair—it is just possible that Mrs Monnerie suspected I had chosen to come in late like this merely for effect. But that would have been an even feebler exhibition of vanity thanIwas capable of. All her guests were known to me, even though only one of them was of my choosing; for Mrs Bowater was in the Argentine, Sir Walter in France, MissFenne on her deathbed, Mr Pellew in retreat, and Mr Crimble in his grave. Fanny was my all.
She was sitting four or five chairs away from me on my left, between Percy (who had on his right hand a beautiful long-faced girl in turquoise green) and Captain Valentine. Further down, and on the other side of the table, sat Lady Maudlen—a seal-like lady, who, according to Fanny, disapproved of me on religious grounds—while I was on Mrs Monnerie's left, and next to Lord Chiltern. Alas, even my old friend the "Black Pudding" was too far distant to do more than twinkle "Courage!" at me, when our eyes met.
Recollections of that disastrous evening are clouded. So evil with dreams my nights had been that I hardly knew whether I was awake or asleep. But I recall the long perspective of the table, the beards, the busts, the pearls, the camellias and gardenias, the cornucopias, and that glistening Folly Castle, my Birthday Cake. Marvell is behind me, and Adam Waggett is ducketing in the luminous distance. The clatter of many tongues beats on my ear. Mrs Monnerie murmurs and gently rocks. The great silver dishes dip and withdraw. Corks pop, and the fumes of meat and wine cloud into the air. In memory it is as if I myself were far away, as if I had read of the scene in a book.
But two moments stand vividly out of its unreality—and each of them to my shame. A small, wreathed, silver-gilt dish was placed before me. Automatically I thrust my spoon into its jelly, and pecked at the flavourless morsels. Sheer nervousness had deprived me of my sense of taste. But there was something in Mrs Monnerie's sly silence, and Lord Chiltern's solemn monocle, and Percy's snigger, that set me speculating.
"Angelic Tomtitiska!" sighed Mrs Monnerie, "I wager when she returns to Paradise, she will sit in a corner and forget to tune her harp."
There was no shade of vexation in her voice, only amiable amusement; but those sitting near had overheard her little pleasantry, and smilingly watched me as, casting my eye down the menu—Consommé aux Nids d'Hirondelles,Filets de Blanchailles à la Diable,Ailes de Caille aux petits pois Minnie Stratton,Sauterelles aux Caroubes Saint Jean, it was caught at last by a pretty gilt flourishing around the words,Suprême de Languesde Rossignols. This, then, was the dainty jest, theclou du repas. The faint gold words shimmered back at me. In an instant I was a child again at Lyndsey, lulling to sleep on my pillow amid the echoing songs of the nightingales that used to nest in its pleasant lanes. I sat flaming, my tongue clotted with disgust. I simply couldn't swallow; and didn't. But never mind.
This was my first mishap. Though her own appetite was capricious, ranging from an almost incredible voracity to a scrap of dry toast, nothing vexed Mrs Monnerie so much as to see my poor, squeamish stomach revolting at the sight of meat. She drew up a naked shoulder against me, and the feast proceeded with its chief guest in the shade. Once I could soon have regained my composure. Now I languished, careless even of the expression on my face. Not even the little mincing smile Fanny always reserved for me in company could restore me, and it was at her whisper that Percy stole down and filled my acorn glass with a translucent green liquid which he had himself secured from the sideboard. I watched the slow, green flow of it from the lip of the decanter without a thought in my head. Lord Chiltern endeavoured to restore my drooping spirits. I had outrageously misjudged him. He wasnotone of Mrs Monnerie's stupid friends, and he really did his utmost to be kind to me. If he should ever read these words, may he be sure that Miss M. is grateful. But his kindness fell on stony ground. And when, at length, he rose to propose my health, I crouched beneath him shameful, haggard, and woebegone.
It was as minute a speech as was she whom it flattered, and far more graceful. Nothing, of course, would satisfy its audience when the toast had been honoured, but that Miss M. should reply. One single, desperate glance I cast at Mrs Monnerie. She sat immovable as the Sphinx. There was no help for it. Knees knocking together, utterly tongue-tied, I stood up in my chair, and surveyed the two converging rows of smiling, curious faces. Despair gave me counsel. I stooped, raised my glass, and half in dread, half in bravado, tossed down its burning contents at a gulp.
The green syrup coursed along vein and artery like molten lead. A horrifying transparency began to spread over my mind. Itseemed it had become in that instant empty and radiant as a dome of glass. All sounds hushed away. Things near faded into an infinite distance. Every face, glossed with light as if varnished, became lifeless, brutal, and inhuman, the grotesque caricature of a shadowy countenance that hung somewhere remote in memory, yet was invisible and irrevocable. In this dead moment—the whole blazing scene like a nowhere of the imagination—my wandering eyes met Fanny's. She was softly languishing up at Captain Valentine, her fingers toying with a rose. And it seemed as though her once loved spirit cried homelessly out at me from space, as if for refuge and recognition; and a long-hidden flood broke bounds in my heart. All else forgotten, and obeying mechanically the force of long habit, I stepped up from my chair on to the table, and staggered towards her, upsetting, as I went, a shallow glass of bubbling wine. It reeked up in the air around me.
"Fanny, Fanny," I called to her out of my swoon, "Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying, Holy Dying!Sauve qui peut!" With empty, shocking face, she started back, appalled, like a wounded snake.
"Oh!" she cried in horror into the sleep that was now mounting my body like a cloud, "oh!" Her hand swept out blindly in my direction as if to fend me off. At best my balance was insecure; and though the velvet petals of her rose scarcely grazed my cheek, the insane glaze of my mind was already darkening, I toppled and fell in a heap beside her plate.
FOOTNOTE:[1]To be truthful, this is not my family motto (norcrest); but the real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs Monnerie; and however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now misgivings, that it is true.
[1]To be truthful, this is not my family motto (norcrest); but the real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs Monnerie; and however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now misgivings, that it is true.
[1]To be truthful, this is not my family motto (norcrest); but the real motto seemed a little too satirical to share with Mrs Monnerie; and however overweening its substitute may appear, I have now hopes, and now misgivings, that it is true.
Thus then I came of age, though not on St Rosa's day. However dramatic and memorable, I grant it was not a courteous method of acknowledging Lord Chiltern's courtesy. In the good old days the drunken dwarf would have been jovially tossed from hand to hand. From mind to mind was my much milder penalty. And yet this poor littlecontretempswas of a sort that required "hushing up"; so it kept tongues wagging for many a day. It was little comfort that Percy shared my disgrace, and even Susan, for "giving way."
She it was who had lifted my body from the table and carried it up into darkness and quiet. In the half light of my bedroom I remember I opened my eyes for a moment—eyes which refused to stay still in their sockets, but were yet capable of noticing that the left hand which clasped mine had lost its ring. I tried to point it out to her. She was crying.
Philippina sober was awakened the next morning by the fingers of Mrs Monnerie herself. She must have withdrawn the kindly sheet from my face, and, with nightmare still babbling on my lips, I looked up into the familiar features, a little grey and anxious, but creased up into every appearance of goodwill.
"Not so excessively unwisely, then," she rallied me, "and only the least little thought too well. We have been quite anxious about Bébé, haven't we, Fleming?"
"Quite, madam. A little indigestion, that's all."
"Yes, yes; a little indigestion, that's all," Mrs Monnerie agreed: "and I am sure Poppet doesn't want those tiresome doctors with their horrid physic."
I sat up, blinking from one to the other. "I think it was the green stuff," I muttered, tongue and throat as dry as paper. I could scarcely see out of my eyes for the racking stabs of pain beneath my skull.
"Yes, yes," was the soothing response. "But you mustn't agitate yourself, silly child. Don't open your eyes like that. Theheat of the room, the excitement, some little obstinate dainty. Now, one of those darling little pills, and a cooling draught, perhaps. Thank you, Fleming."
The door closed, we were left alone. Mrs Monnerie's scrutiny drifted away. Their shutters all but closed down on the black-brown pupils. My head pined for its pillows, my shoulders for some vestige of defence, but pined in vain. For the first time I felt afraid of Mrs Monnerie. She was thinking so densely and heavily.
Yet, as if out of a cloud of pure absentmindedness, dropped softly her next remark. "Does pretty Pusskin remember what shesaidto Miss Bowater?... No?... Well, then, if she can't, it's quite certain nobody else can—or wishes to. I inquired merely because the poor thing, who has been really nobly devoting herself to her duties, seems so hurt. Well, it shall be a little lesson—to us all. Though one swallow does not make a summer, my child, one hornet can make things extremely unpleasant. Not that I——" A vast shrug of the shoulders completed the sentence. "A little talk and tact will soon setthatright; and I am perfectly satisfied, perfectly satisfied with things as they are. So that's settled. Some day you must tell me a little more about your family history. Meanwhile, rest and quiet. No more excitement, no more company, and no more"—she bent low over me with wagging head—"no moregreen stuff. And then"—her eyes rested on me with a peculiar zest rather than with any actual animosity—"then we must see what can be done for you."
There came a tap—and Percy showed in the doorway.
"I thought, Aunt Alice, I thought——" he began, but at sight of the morose, heavy countenance lifted up to him, he shut his mouth.
"Thank you," said Mrs Monnerie, "thank you, Sir Galahad; you did nothing of the kind."
Whereupon her nephew wheeled himself out of the room so swiftly that I could not detect what kind of exotics he was carrying in a little posy in his hand.
So the invalid, now a burden on the mind of her caretaker many times her own weight, was exiled for ever from No. 2. Poor Fleming, sniffier and more disgusted than ever, was deputed to carry me off to the smaller of Mrs Monnerie's country retreats, a long, low-roofed, shallow-staired house lying in thegreen under the downs at Croomham. There I was to vegetate for a time and repent of my sins.
Percy's fiery syrup took longer to withdraw its sweet influences than might have been foreseen. Indeed, whenever I think of him, its effects are faintly renewed, though not, I trust, to the detriment of my style! None too strong physically, the Miss M. that sat up at her latticed window at Monk's House during those few last interminable August days, was very busy with her thoughts. As she looked down for hours together on the gnarled, thick-leafed old mulberry-tree in the corner of the lawn that swept up to the very stones of the house, and on the walled, sun-drugged garden beyond, she was for ever debating that old, old problem; what could be donebyherselfwithherself?
The doves crooned; the cawing rooks flapped black into the blue above the neighbouring woods; the earth drowsed on. It was a scene of peace and decay. But I seemed to have lost the charm that could have made it mine. I was an Ishmael. And worse—I was still a prisoner. No criminal at death's door can have brooded more laboriously on his chances of escape. No wonder the voices of childhood had whispered, Away!
There came a long night of rain. I lay listening to the whisper and clucking of its waters. Far away the lapwings called: Ee-ooeet! Ee-ooeet! What follies I had been guilty of. How wilily circumstance had connived at them. Yet I was no true penitent. My heart was empty, so parched up that neither love nor remorse had any place in it. Revenge seemed far sweeter. Driven into this corner, I sent a desperate word to Sir W. It remained unanswered, and this friend followed the rest into the wilderness of my ingratitude.
But that brought me no relief. For of all the sins I have ever committed, envy and hatred seem to me the most unpleasant to practise. I was to learn also that "he who sows hatred shall gather rue," and "bed with thistles." With eyes at last as anxious as Jezebel's, I resumed my watch at the window. But even if Percy had ridden from London solely to order Fleming to throw me down, she would not have "demeaned" herself to set hands on me. She might be bold, but she, too, was fastidious.
Then Fleming herself one afternoon softly and suddenlyvanished away—on her summer's holiday. Poor thing; so acute was the chronic indigestion caused byherobstinate little dainty that she did not even bid me good-bye.
She left me in charge of the housekeeper, Mrs French, a stout, flushed, horse-faced woman, who now and then came in and bawled good-humouredly at me as if I were deaf, but otherwise ignored me altogether. I now spent most of my time in the garden, listlessly wandering out of sight of the windows (and gardeners), along its lank-flowered, rose-petalled walks, hating its beauty. Or I would sit where I could hear the waterdrops in a well. The very thought of company was detestable. I sat there half-dead, without book or needle, with scarcely a thought in my head. In my library days at No. 2 I had become a perfect slave to pleasures of the intellect. But now dyspepsia had set in there too.
My nights were pestered with dreams and my days with their vanishing spectres; and I had no Pollie to tell me what they forecast. I suppose one must be more miserable and hunted in mind even than I was,neverto be a little sentimental when alone. I would lean over the cold mouth of the well, just able to discern in the cold mirror of water, far beneath, the face I was almost astonished to find reflected there. "Shall I come too?" I would morbidly whisper, and dart away.
Still, just as with a weed in winter, life was beginning to renew the sap within me; and Monk's House was not only drowsy with age but gentle with whispers. Once at least in every twenty-four hours I would make a pilgrimage to its wrought-iron gates beside the square white lodge, to gloat out between the metal floriations at the dusty country lane beyond—with its swallows and wagtails and dragon-flies beneath the heat-parched tranquil elms. A slim, stilted greyhound on one such visit stalked out from the lodge. Quite unaware of his company, I turned about suddenly and stared clean down his arched throat—white teeth and lolling tongue. It was as if I had glanced into the jaws of destiny. He turned his head, whiningly yawned, and stalked back into the shade.
A day or two afterwards I made the acquaintance of the lodge-keeper's daughter, a child named Rose, about five years of age, with a mop of copper-coloured curls bound up with apale blue bow. At first glimpse of me she had hopped back as if on springs into the house. A moment after, her white-aproned mother appeared in the porch, and with a pleasant nod at me bade the child smile at the pretty little lady. Finger in mouth, Rose wriggled and stared. In a few days she grew accustomed to my small figure. And though I would sometimes discover her saucer-blue eyes fixed on me with a peculiar intensity, we almost came to be friends. She was not a very bright little girl; yet I found myself wooing her with all the arts I knew—in a scarcely conscious attempt, I suppose, to creep back by this small lane into the world's and my own esteem.
I made her wristlets of little flowers, hacked her out cockle boats from the acorns, told her half-forgotten stories, and once had to trespass into the kitchen at the back of the lodge to tell her mother that she was fallen asleep. Was it mere fancy that read in the scared face she twisted round on the pretty little lady from over her saucepan, "Avaunt, Evil Eye!"? I had become abominably self-conscious.
One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily pacing out of the country through the gates but Adam Waggett—red hands, black boots, and Londonish billycock hat all complete. Adam must have been born in a fit of astonishment; and when he dies, so he will enter Paradise. He halted abruptly, a ring of shifting sunshine through the leaves playing on his purple face, and, after one long glance of theatrical astonishment, he burst into his familiar guffaw.
This time the roar of him in the open air was nothing but a pleasure, and the mere sound and sight of him set Rose off laughing, too. Her pink mouth was as clustered about with milk-teeth as a fragment of honeycomb is with cells.
"Well, there I never, miss," he said at last, with a slow, friendly wink at the child, "Where shall us three meet again, I wonder." He flicked the dust off his black button boots with his pocket-handkerchief, mopped his high, bald forehead, and then positively exploded into fragments of information—like my father's fireworks on Guy Fawkes' Day.
He talked of young Mr Percy's "goings-on," of the august Mr Marvell, of life at No. 2. "That Miss Bowater, now, she's a bit of all right, she's toffee, she is." But, his hat! therehadbeen a row. And the captain, too. Not that there was anything in that; "just a bit of silly jealousy;likethe women!" He could make a better guess than that. He didn't know what "the old lady" would do without that Miss Bowater—the old lady whose carriage would in a few days be rolling in between these very gates. And then—he began whistling a Highland Reel.
The country air had evidently got into his head. Hand over hand he was swarming up the ladder of success. His "joie de vivre" gleamed at every pore. And I?—I just sat there, passively drinking in this kitchen-talk, without attempting to stophim. After all, he was out of my past; we were children of Israel in a strange land; and that hot face, with its violent pantomime, and hair-plastered temples, was as good as a play.
He was once more settling his hat on his head and opening his mouth in preparation for a last bray of farewell, when suddenly in the sunny afternoon hush a peculiar, melancholy, whining cry rose over the treetops, and slowly stilled away. As if shot from a bow, Rose's greyhound leapt out of the lodge and was gone. With head twisted over his shoulder, Adam stood listening. Somewhere—where? when?—that sound had stirred the shadows of my imagination. The day seemed to gather itself about me, as if in a plot.
In the silence that followed I heard the dust-muffled grinding of heavy wheels approaching, and the low, refreshing talk of homely, Kentish, country voices. Adam stepped to the gate. I clutched Rose's soft, cool fingers. And spongily, ponderously, there, beyond the bars, debouched into view a huge-shouldered, mole-coloured elephant, its trunk sagging towards the dust, its small, lash-fringed eye gleaming in the sun, its bald, stumpy, tufted tail stiff and still behind it.
On and on, one after another, in the elm-shaded beams of the first of evening, the outlandish animals, the wheeled dens, the gaudy, piled-up vans of pasteboard scenery, the horses and ponies and riff-raff of a travelling circus wound into, and out of, view before my eyes. It was as if the lane itself were moving, and all the rest of the world, with Rose and myself clutched hand in hand on our green bank, had remained stark still. Probably the staring child supposed that this was one of my fairy-tales come true. My own mind was humming with a thought far more fantastic. Ever and again a swarthy face had glanced in on our quiet garden. The lion had glared into Africa beyond my head. But I was partly screened from view by Rose, and it was a woman, and she all but the last of the dusty, bedraggled company, that alone caught a full, clear sight of me.
One flash of eye to eye—we knew each other. She was the bird-eyed, ear-ringed gipsy of my railway journey with Pollie from Lyndsey to Beechwood. Even more hawklike, bonier, striding along now like a man in the dust and heat in her dingycoloured petticoats and great boots, with one steel-grey dart of remembrance, she swallowed me up, like flame a moth. Her mouth relaxed into a foxy smile while her gaze tightened on me. She turned herself about and shrilled out a strange word or two to some one who had gone before. A sudden alarm leapt up in me. In an instant I had whisked into hiding, and found myself, half-suffocated with excitement, peeping out of a bush in watch for what was to happen next.
So swift had been my disappearance she seemed doubtful of her own senses. A cage of leopards, with a fair-skinned, gold-haired girl in white stockings lolling asleep on the chained-up tail-board, trundled by; and then my gipsy was joined by a thick-set, scowling man. His face was bold and square, and far more lowering than that of the famous pugilist, Mr Sayers—to whose coloured portrait I had become almost romantically attached in the library at No. 2. This dangerous-looking individual filled me with a tremulous excitement and admiration. If, as in a dream, my past seemed to have been waiting for that solitary elephant; then my future was all of a simmer withhim.
He drew his thick hand out of his stomach-pocket and scratched his cheek. The afternoon hung so quiet that I heard the rasp of his finger nail against his sprouting beard. He turned to mutter a sullen word or two at the woman beside him. Then, more civilly, and with a jerk of his squat thumb in my direction, he addressed himself to Adam. Adam listened, his red ears erect on either side of his hat. But his only answer was so violent a wag of his head that it seemed in danger of toppling off his body. Softly I laughed to myself. The woman yelped at him. The man bade her ferociously "shut her gob." Adam clanged-to the gates. They moved on. Beast, cage, and men were vanished like a daydream. A fitful breeze rustled the dry elm-leaves. The swifts coursed on in the shade.
When the last faint murmur had died away, I came out from behind my bush. "A country circus," I remarked unconcernedly. "What did the man want, Adam?"
"That hairy cat frowned at Rosie," whispered the child, turning from me to catch at Adam's coat-tails. "NoteatRosie?"
Adam bent himself double, and with an almost motherlytenderness stroked her bright red hair. He straightened himself up, spat modestly in the dust, and, with face still mottled by our recent experience, expressed the opinion that the man was "one of them low blackguards—excusing plain English, miss—who'd steal your chickens out of the very saucepan." As for the woman—words failed him.
I waited until his small, round eye had rolled back in my direction. "Yes, Adam," I said, "but what did hesay? You mean she told him aboutme?"
"Well, miss, to speak equal-like, that was about the size of it. The old liar said she had seen you before, that you were—well, there you are!—a gold mine, a—a blessed gold mine. Her very words nearabout." At that, in an insuppressible gush of happiness I laughed out with him, like a flageolet in a concourse of bassoons.
"But he didn't see me, Adam. I took good care of that."
"That's just," said Adam, with a tug at his black cravat, "what's going to give the pair of them a mighty unpleasant afternoon."
I dismissed him, smiled at the whimpering greyhound, smiled at Rose, whose shyness at me had unaccountably whelmed over her again, and followed in Adam's wake towards the house. But not to enter it. "A blessed"—oh, most blessed "Gold Mine!" The word so sang in me that the whole garden—espaliered wall, and bird, and flower—leapt into life and beauty before my eyes. Then my prayer (whatprayer?) had been answered. I squared my shoulders, shuddered—a Lazarus come to life. Away I went, and seating myself in a sunny corner, a few paces from a hive of bees, plucked a nectarine, and surrendered myself to the intoxication of an idea. Not "Your Master is dead," but "Your mistress is come to life again!" I whispered to the bees. And if I had been wearing a scarlet garter I would have tied it round their skep.
Money! Money!—a few even of my handfuls of that, and I was free. I would teach "them" a lesson. I would redeem myself. Ah, if only I had had a fraction of Fanny's courage, should I so long have remained wilting and festering at No. 2? The sweet, sharp juices of the clumsy fruit quenched my thirst. To and fro swept the bees along their airy highway. A spikedtree of late-blooming bugloss streamed its blue and purple into my eyes. A year ago, the very thought of exhibiting myself for filthy (or any kind of) lucre would have filled me with unspeakable shame. But what else had I been doing those long, dragging months? What had Miss M. hired herself out to be but a pot of caviare to the gourmets? Puffed up with conceit and complacency, I had been merely feeding on the world's contempt sauced up as flattery. Nonsensical child.
"Ah, I can make honey, too," I nodded at the bees; whereupon a wasp pounced out of nowhere upon my oozy fruit, and I thrust it away into the weeds. But how refreshing a draught is the thought of action, how comforting the first returning trickle of self-esteem. My body sank into motionlessness. The shadows lengthened. The August sun slid down the sky.
Dusk was abroad in the colder garden, and the last bee home, when, with plans resolved on, I stretched my stiffened limbs and made my way into the house. Excellent augury—so easy had been my daily habits that no one had noticed my absence. Supper was awaiting me. I was ravenous. Up and down I stumped, gnawing my biscuit and sipping my sweet country milk. I had suddenly realized what the world meant to Fanny—an oyster for her sword. Somewhere I have read that every man of genius hides a woman in his breast. Well, perhaps in mine amanwas now stirring—the man that had occupied my Aunt Kitilda's skirts. It was high time.
A moon just past its quarter was sinking in the heavens and silvering the jessamine at my window. My bosom swelled with longing at the breath of the slow night airs. Monk's House—I, too, had my ghosts and would face them down, would vanquish fate with the very weapons it had forged for my discomfiture. In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before a down-tilted looking-glass. If I had been malshapen, limbless, contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man's hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even if God had been idly at play when He had shaped me, and had then flung away the mould; even if to Mrs Monnerie I was nothing much better than a disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy's Chartreuse had beenmere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus elephant.
I tossed out on to the floor the old Lyndsey finery which some homesick impulse had persuaded me to bring away in my trunk. Seated there with busy needle under the window, sewing in every gewgaw and scrap of tinsel and finery I could lay hands on, I prepared for the morrow. How happy I was. Bats in the dewy dusk-light cast faint, flitting shadows on the casements. A large dark moth hawked to and fro above my head. It seemed I could spend eternity in this gentle ardent busyness. To think that God had given me what might have been so dreadful a thing as solitude, but which in reality, while my thoughts and fingers were thus placidly occupied, could be so sweet. When at length I leaned out on the cold sill, my work done, wrists and shoulders aching with fatigue, Croomham clock struck two. The moon was set. But there, as if in my own happy mind, away to the East shone Orion. Why, Sirius, then, must be in hiding under that quiet shoulder of the downs. A dwindling meteor silvered across space; I breathed a wish, shivered, and drew in.
And there came that night a curious dream. I dreamt that I was a great soldier, and had won an enormous unparalleled battle. Glaring light streamed obliquely across a flat plain, humped and hummocked with the bodies of the dead lying in disorder. I was standing in arrogant reverie alone, a few paces distant—though leagues away in being—from a group of other officers, who were looking at me. And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano. Lest I should be detected in this weakness, I turned out of the glare, and without premeditation, began to step lightly and abstractedly from huddling mound to mound. And, as these heaps of the dead increased in size in the gloom after the white western light was gone, so I diminished, until I was but a kindof infinitesimal will-o'-the-wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there wasoneEye....
And that is all of the dream that I could remember. For then I awoke, looking into the dark. A pencil ray of moonlight was creeping across my bed. Peace unutterable. Over my drowsy eyes once more the clouds descended, and once more I fell asleep.
Next day, after a long lying-in-wait, I intercepted Adam Waggett and beckoned him into the shrubbery. First I questioned him. A bill of the circus, he told me, had already been left at the lodge. Its tents and booths and Aunt Sallies were even now being pitched in a meadow three or four miles distant and this side the neighbouring town. So far, so good. I told him my plan. He could do nothing but look at me like a fish, with his little black eyes, as I sat on a tree stump and marshalled my instructions.
But my first crucial battle had been fought with Adam Waggett in the garden at Lyndsey. He had neither the courage nor even the cowardice to gainsay me. After a tedious siege of his sluggish wits, greed for the reward I promised him, the assurance that if we were discovered the guilt should rest on me, and maybe some soupçon of old sake's sake won him over. The branches of the trees swayed and creaked above us in the sunshine; and at last, looking down on me with a wry face, Adam promised to do my bidding.
Six had but just struck that evening when there came the rap of his knuckles on my bedroom door. He found me impatiently striding up and down in a scintillating bodice and skirts of scarlet, lemon, and silver—as gay and gaudy an object as the waxen Russian Princess I had seen in one of Mrs Monnerie's cabinets. My flaxen hair was plaited German-wise, and tied in two thumping pigtails with a green ribbon; I stood and looked at him. He fumblingly folded his hands in front of him as he stood and looked back at me. I was quivering like a flame in a lamp. And never have I been so much flattered as by the silly, stupefied stare on his face.
How I was to be carried to the circus had been one of our most difficult problems. This cunning creature had routed out from some lumber-room in the old house a capacious old cage—now rusty, but stout and solidly made—that must once have housed the aged Chakka.
"There, miss," he whispered triumphantly; "that's the ticket, and right to a hinch."
I confess I winced at his "ticket." But Adam had cushioned and padded it for me, and had hooded it over with a stout piece of sacking, leaving the ring free. Apart from our furtive preparations, evening quiet pervaded the house. The maids were out sweethearting, he explained. Mrs French had retired as usual to her own sitting-room; Fortune seemed to be smiling upon me.
"Then, Adam," I whispered, "the time has come. Jerk me as little as possible; and if questions are asked, you are taking the cage to be mended, you understand? And when we get there, see no one but the man or the woman who spoke to you at the gates."
"Well, miss, it's a rum go," said Adam, eyeing me with a grotesque grimace of anxiety.
I looked up at him from the floor of the cage. "The rummer the go is, Adam, the quicker we ought to be about it."
He lowered the wiry dome over my head; I bunched in my skirts; and with the twist of a few hooks I was secure. The faint squeak of his boots told me that he had stolen to the door to listen.
"All serene," he whispered hoarsely through the sacking. I felt myself lifted up and up. We were on our way. Then, like flies, a cloud of misgivings settled upon my mind. As best I could I drove them away, and to give myself confidence began to count. A shrill false whistling broke the silence. Adam was approaching the lodge; a mocking screech of its gates, and we were through. After that, apart from the occasional beat of hoofs or shoes, a country "good-night," or a husky cough of encouragement from Adam, I heard nothing more. The gloom deepened. The heat was oppressive; I became a little seasick, and pressing my mouth to a small slit between the bars, sucked in what fresh air I could.
Midway on our journey Adam climbed over a stile to rest a while, and, pushing back a corner of the sacking, he asked me how I did.
"Fine, Adam," said I, panting. "We are getting along famously."
The fields were sweet and dusky. It was a clear evening, and refreshingly cool.
"You may smoke a pipe, Adam, if you wish," I called softly. And while he puffed, and I listened to the chirping of a cricket, he told me of a young housemaid that was always chaffing and ridiculing him at No. 2. "It may be that she has taken a passing fancy to you," said I, looking up into the silent oak tree under which we were sitting. "On the other hand, you may deserve it. What is she like, Adam?"
"Black eyebrows," said Adam. "Shows her teeth when she laughs. But that's no reason why she should make a fool of a fellow."
"The real question is, is she a nice modest girl?" said I, and my bangles jangled as I raised my hand to my hair. "Come, Adam, there's no time to waste; are you ready?"
He grunted, his mind still far away. "She's a fair sneak," he said, rapping his pipe-bowl on a stone. And so, up and on.
Time seemed to have ceased to be, in this jolting monotony, unbroken except by an occasional giddying swing of my universe as Adam transferred the cage from hand to hand. Swelteringly hot without, but a little cold within, I was startled by a far-away blare of music. I clutched tight the slender bars; the music ceased, and out of the quiet that followed rose the moaning roar of a wild beast.
My tongue pressed itself against my teeth; the sacking trembled, and a faint luminousness began to creep through its hempen strands. Shouting and screaming, catcalls and laughter swelled near. And now by the medley of smells and voices, and the glint of naked lights floating in on me, I realized that we had reached our goal.
Adam came to a standstill. "Where's the boss?" The tones were thick and muffled. A feeble smile swept over my face: I discovered I was holding my breath.
A few paces now, the din distanced a little and the glare diminished. Then sounded another voice hoarse and violent, high above my head.
The cage bumped to the ground. And I heard Adam cringingly explain: "I've got a bird here for you, mister."
"A bird," rang the jeer, "who wants your bloody bird? Be off."
"Ay, but it won't be a bloody bird," gasped Adam cajolingly, "when you've seen her pretty feathers."
At this, apparently, recollection of Adam's face or voice returned to the showman. He remained silent while with palsied fingers Adam unlatched my bolts and bars. Bent almost double and half-stifled, I sat there in sight, my clothes spread brightly out about me. The cool air swirled in, and for a while my eyes dazzled at the bubbling blaze of a naphtha lamp suspended from the pole of the tent above the criss-cross green-bladed grass at my feet. I lifted my head.
There stood Adam, in his black tail-coat rubbing his arm; and there the showman. Still to the tips of my fingers, I sat motionless, gazing up into the hard, high-boned, narrow-browed face with its small restless eyes voraciously taking me in. Fortunately the choked beating of my heart was too small a sound for his ear; and he was the first to withdraw from the encounter.
"My God," he muttered, and spat into a corner of the canvas booth—with its one dripping lamp, its rough table and chair, and a few oddments of his trade.
"And what, my handsome young lady," he went on in a low, carneying tone, and fidgeting with his hands, "what might be your little imbroglio?"
In a gush, presence of mind returned to me, and fear passed away. I quietly listened to myself explaining without any concealment precisely what was my little imbroglio. He burst out laughing.
"Stage-struck, eh? There's a young lady now! Well, who's to blame 'ee?"
He asked me my age, my name, where I came from, if I could dance, sing, ride; and stared so roundly at me that I seemed to see my garish colours reflected in the metallic grey of his eyes.
All this was on his side of the bargain. Now came mine. I folded tight my hands in my lap, glanced up at the flaming lamp. How much would he pay me?
It was as if a shutter had descended over his face. "Drat me,"said he, "when a young lady comes selling anything, sheasksher price."
So I asked mine—fifteen guineas for four nights' hire.... To look at that human animal you might have supposed the actual guineas had lodged in his throat. It may be that Shylock's was a more modest bargain. I cannot say.
At first thought it had seemed to me a monstrous sum, but at that time I was ignorant of what a really fine midget fetched. It was but half my old quarterly allowance, with £2 over for Adam. I should need every penny of it. And I had not come selling my soul without having first decided on its value. The showman fumed and blustered. But I sat close on Chakka's abandoned stage, perfectly still, making no answer; finding, moreover, in Adam an unexpected stronghold, for the wider gawked his frightened eyes at the showman's noise and gesticulations, the more resolved I became. With a last dreadful oath, the showman all but kicked a hole in my cage.
"Take me away, Adam," I cried quaveringly; "we are wasting this gentleman's time."
I smiled to myself, in spite of the cold tremors that were shaking me all over; with every nerve and sinew of his corpulent body he was coveting me: and with a curse he at last accepted my terms. I shrugged my shoulders, but still refused to stir a finger until our contract had been written down in black and white. Maybe some tiny love-bird of courage roosts beneath every human skull, maybe my mother's fine French blood had rilled to the surface. However that may be, there could be no turning back.
He drew out a stump of pencil and a dirty envelope. "That, my fine cock," he said to Adam, as he wrote, "that's a woman; and you make no mistake about it. To hell with your fine ladies."
It remains, if not the most delicate, certainly one of the most substantial compliments I ever earned in my life.
"That's that," he pretended to groan, presenting me with his scrawl. "Ask a shark for a stamp, and if ruined I must be—ruined I am."
I leapt to my feet, shook out my tumbled finery, smiled into his stooping face, and tucked the contract into my bodice. "Thankyou, sir," I said, "and I promise you shan't be ruined ifIcan help it." Whereupon Adam became exceedingly merry, the danger now over.
Such are the facts concerning this little transaction, so far as I can recall them; yet I confess to being a little incredulous. Have I, perhaps, gilded my side of the bargaining? If so, I am sure my showman would be the last person to quarrel with me. I am inclined to think he had taken a fancy to me. Anyhow I had won—what is, perhaps, even better—his respect. And though the pay came late, when it was no longer needed, and though it was the blackest money that ever touched my fingers, it came. And if anybody was the defaulter, it was I.
There was no time to lose. My gipsy woman was sent for from the shooting gallery. I shook hands with her; she shook hands with Adam, who was then told to go about his business and to return to the tent when the circus was over. The three of us, showman, woman, and I, conferred together, and with extreme cordiality agreed what should be my little part in the performance. The booth in which we had made our bargain was hastily prepared for my "reception." Its table was to be my daïs. A loose flap of canvas was hung to one side of it to screen me off from prying eyes when I was not on show. My only dangerous rival, it appeared, was the Spotted Boy.
There followed a deafening pealing of panpipes, drumming of drum, and yelling of voices. In that monstrous din I was past thinking, justbeing; and I bridled to myself like a schoolgirl caught in a delicious naughtiness, to hear the fine things—the charms and marvels—which my showman was bawling about me. Then one by one, at first a little owlishly, the Great Public, at the charge of 6d. per adult and half price for children (or "full-growns under 3 foot") were admitted to the presence of the "Signorina Donna Angélique, the Fairy Princess of Andalusia in Spain." So at any rate declares the printed handbill.
In the attitude of Madame Recamier in the picture, I reclined on a lustrous spread of crimson satin and rabbit-skin draped over a small lump of wood for bolster to give support to my elbow. And out of my paint and powder, from amid this oasis—and with repeated warnings "not to touch" screamed by mygipsy—I met as pleasantly and steadily as I could the eyes of the grinning, smirking, awestruck faces—townsfolk and village folk, all agape and all sound Kentish stock.
"That isn't real, she's a doll," lisped a crêpe-bonneted little girl who with skimpy legs dangling out of her petticoat had been hoisted up under her armpits for a clearer view. I let a little pause come, then turned my head on my hand and smiled, leaned over and eased my tinselled slipper. An audible sigh, sweet as incense, went up under the hollow of the booth. I looked on softly from face to face—another dream. Some captive beast mewed and brushed against the sides of a cage drawn up a yard or two from where I lay. The lamp poured flame and smoke. The canvas quietly flapped, and was still. Wild ramped the merry-go-round with its bells and hootings; and the panpipes sobbed their liquid decoy. The Signorina's first reception was over.
News of her spread like wildfire. I could hear the showman bellowing at the press of people. His guineas were fructifying. And a peculiar rapturous gravity spread over me. When one's very self is wrapt in the ordeal of the passing moment, is lost like that, out of time and space, it seems, well—another presence had stolen into my mind, had taken possession. I cannot explain. But in this, it may be, all menareequal, whatever their lot. So, I suppose, a flower breaks out of the bud, and butterflies put off the mask of the chrysalis, and rainbows mount the skies. But I must try not to rhapsodize. All I know is that even in that low self-surrender, some tiny spark of life in me could not be content to let my body remain a mere mute stock for the ignorant wonder of those curious eyes.
The actual impulse, however, came from a young woman who, when next the people had streamed in, chanced to be standing close beside me. She was a weak-looking thing, yet reminded me in a sorrowful fashion of Fanny. Caught back by her melancholy, empty eyes, I seemed to lose myself in their darkness; to realize that she, too, was in trouble. I craned up from my wooden bolster and whispered in her hair: "Patience, patience. There shall be a happy issue, my dear, out of all your afflictions."