Hail Energeia! hail my native tongueConcisely full, and musically strong;Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
Hail Energeia! hail my native tongueConcisely full, and musically strong;Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue
Concisely full, and musically strong;
Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,
And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
My mother agreed thatstrungwould be preferable to "strong," and explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while, if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!" a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.
My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute masterpiece of calligraphy,Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimée par P. de R. These I could easily carry about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now undeservedly out of fashion.
Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of knowledge.
There were two of these in particular,The Observing Eye; or Lessons to Children on the Three Lowest Divisions of Animal Life—The Radiated, Articulated, and Molluscous, andThe Childhood of the World. Even at nine I remarked how nimbly the anonymous author of the former could skip from St Paul to the lobster; and I never wearied of brooding on Mr Clodd's frontispiece. This depicts a large-headed and seemingly one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous Sun.
Iwas that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a more obedient luminary than any lamp of man's. I would wonder what she would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both terrified and entranced me—the secret of all history seemed to lie hidden in the shadows beneath its dome. Indeed I needed no reminder from Mr Clodd that "Children (and some grown-up people too) are apt to think that things are wonderful only when they are big, which is not true."
I knew already, out of nowhere, that "the bee's waxen cell is more curious than the chimpanzee's rough hut" (though I should have dearly liked to see the latter); and that "an ant is more wonderful than the huge and dull rhinoceros." Such is childishness, however: I pitied the poor rhinoceros his "dull." Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the lesson that theeye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far more about an object than it can merely see.
Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and—who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved Mynheer Bosch.
Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the stars—Charles's Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred to keep them just "stars." And though I loved to lave my hands in a trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk, sans even air or ice or rain or snow.
How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors' accounts of the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but—well, never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust Monsieur Bon Papa's spyglass and reduce them to scale.
My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa's spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.
My mother's lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little, but she taught it well—even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to me—arithmetic, for instance, and "analysis"—and occasional fits of the sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized and to be "grown-up" some day.
So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to continue—and specially in respect of human nature—as long as I keep alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. "It's easy holding down the latchet when nobody pulls the string." But whatever size we may be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and is pitiless to bubbles.
Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants, like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other's intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him. Perhaps this is putting my old head on thoseyoung shoulders, but when I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of whose source and destination I was unaware.
All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard and slapped away at a lump of dough, "WellIknow a young lady who's been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass candlestick."
In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.
My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette. When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He'd rub his round stubbly head, and say, "Well, mamma, and how's Trot done this morning?" or he would stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to its uttermost tip, and whisper: "And so to Land's End, my love." Now and then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was actually his daughter.
But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair, and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind for days, and if ... but better not.
At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in my poor father's brains. And I know whatthatmeans. He had recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press.The Kentish Courier—I see his ears burning now—had referred to him as "the ingenious Mr Tapa"; and my mother's commiseration had hardly solaced him: "But, my dear, you couldn't have gone to Canton by yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little." The ingenious Mr Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.
"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."
Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.
And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment—how tangled is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full moonlight.
Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes closed, listening, I smilingly waited.
Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all wasutterly, icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.
The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her heedless ear.
It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight of stairs—down which hitherto I had always been carried—would waste more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one alternative—to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.
There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long, though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at somerisk of falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call, "Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the staircase....
For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead. In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every secret sound and movement in the house.
Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my grandfather, her absent musings—these all return to me.
Alas, that it was never in my power, except perhaps at that last moment, to be to her a true comfort and companion, anything much better, in fact, than a familiar and tragic playmate. Worse beyond words; how little I had done for her that I might have done!
But regret must not lead me into extremes. That is not the whole truth. There were occasions, I think, when she almost forgot my disabilities, when we were just two quiet, equal spirits in the world and conversed together gravely and simply, not as children, but as fellow-women. It is these I treasure dearest, while thanking her for all. Why, in the whirligig of time, if my authorities are trustworthy, and my life had fallen outdifferently, the problem might now have been reversed! I myself might have had natural-sized children and they a pygmy mother. The strangeness of the world.
Out of the listlessness of convalescence my interests began to renew themselves. Across the gulf that separated us I could still commune with my mother's quiet spirit. Her peace and the peace of her forgiveness began to descend on me; and her grave in my imagination has now no more sorrow than the anticipation of my own. From my windowsill loggia I could command a full "Hundred" of Kent. Up there on the barrowed hill-top it was said that on fine days a keen eye could descry the sea to north and south; though Dr Grose dismissed it as a piece of local presumption. Now that my mother was gone the clouds were stranger, the birds more sweetly melancholy, the flowers more fleeting. Something of youth had passed away to return no more.
Half my thoughts were wasted in futile resentment at my incapacities. Yet it was a helplessness that in part was forced on me from without. Still less now could my father take me seriously. We shared our silent meals together. He would sit moping, pushing his hand over his whitening hair, or staring over his spectacles out of the window to the low whistling of some endless, monotonous tune that would haunt him for days together and fret me to distraction. Now and again he would favour me with a serious speech, and then, with a glance, perhaps hurry away to his study before I could answer. To his half-completed dissertations on Hop, Cherry, and Paper, I learned he had added another, on the Oyster. Many of his letters were now postmarked Whitstable. He even advertised in his old enemy, theCourier, for information: and would break out into furious abuse at the stupidity of his correspondents. Meanwhile his appetite increased; he would nod in his chair; his clothes grew shabby; his appearance neglected. Poor dear, he missed my mother.
But I made a struggle to take her place. Every morning Pollie would carry me off to the kitchen for a discussion with Mrs Ballard over the household affairs of the day. With her fat, floury hand, she would hide her mouth and gravely nod her head at my instructions. But I knew she was concealing her amusement. "Oh, these men!" she once exclaimed at some new capriceof "the master's," "they are never happy unless they can be where they bain't." With my own hand I printed out for her a list of my father's favourite dishes. I left off my black and wore bright colours again, so that he might not be constantly reminded of the past. But when after long debate I took courage one day to propose myself as his housekeeper—I shall never forget the facial expression which he quickly rubbed off with his hand.
He fetched out of his trousers pocket a great bunch of keys, and jangled them almost ferociously in the air at me for a full minute together with tears of amusement in his eyes. Then he tossed down the last gulp or two of his port and went off. A moment after he must have realized how cruel a blow he had dealt my vanity and my love. He returned, seated himself heavily in his chair, and looked at me. Then stretching out his hand he dropped his face on to his arm. A horrible quietness spread over the room. For the first time I looked with a kind of terror at the hairy fingers and whitening head, and could not stir.
How oddly chance repeats itself. The door opened and once more, unannounced, Miss Fenne appeared in our midst. My father hastily rose to greet her, pretending that nothing was amiss. But when she held out her clawlike hand to me to be kissed, I merely stared at her. She screwed up her countenance into a smile; mumbled that I was looking pale and peaked again; and, with difficulty keeping her eyes from mine, explained that she had come for a business talk with my father.
A few days afterwards I was standing up at the window of my mother's little sewing-room—always a favourite refuge of mine, for there the afternoon sun and the colours of evening used to beat into the corner. And I saw a small-sized woman with a large black bonnet come waddling up the drive. She was followed by a boy wheeling a square box on a two-wheeled trolley. It was Mrs Sheppey come to be housekeeper to the widower and his daughter.
Mrs Sheppey proved to be a harassed and muddling woman, and she came to a harassed home. My father's affairs had gone from bad to worse. He was gloomy and morose. A hunted look sometimes gleamed in his eyes, and the spectacled nose seemed to grow the smaller the more solemn its surroundings were. He spent most of the day in his dressing-gown now, had quarrelled with Dr Grose, and dismissed Mrs Ballard. Therooms were dirty and neglected. Pollie would maunder about with a broom, or stand idly staring out of the window. She was in love. At least, so I realize now. At the time I thought she was merely lumpish and stupid.
Only once in my recollection did Mrs Sheppey pay my own quarters a visit. I was kneeling on my balcony and out of sight, and could watch her unseen. She stood there—tub-shaped, a knob of dingy hair sticking out from her head, her skirts suspended round her boots—passively examining my bed, my wardrobe, and my other belongings. Her scrutiny over, she threw up her hands and the whites of her eyes as if in expostulation to heaven, turned about in her cloth boots, and waddled out again. Pollie told me, poor thing, that her children had been thorns in her side. I brooded over this. Had I not myself, however involuntarily, been a thorn inmymother's side? I despised and yet pitied Mrs Sheppey.
She was, if anything, frightened of me, and of my tongue, and would address me as "little lady" in a cringing, pursed-up fashion. But I am thankful to say she never attempted to touch me or to lift me from the floor. Her memory is inextricably bound up with a brown, round pudding with a slimy treacle sauce which she used to send to table every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. My father would look at it with his nose rather than with his eyes; and after perhaps its fiftieth appearance, he summoned Mrs Sheppey with a violent tug at the bell. She thrust her head in at the door. "Take it away," he said, "take it away. Eat it. Devour it. Hide it from God's sight, good woman. Don't gibber. Take it away!"
His tone frightened me out of my wits and Mrs Sheppey out of the house. Then came the end. At the beginning of August in my twentieth year, my father, who had daily become stranger in appearance and habits, though steadfastly refusing to call in his old friend, Dr Grose, was found dead in his bed. He was like a boy who never can quite succeed in pleasing himself or his masters. He had gone to bed and shut his eyes, never in this world to open them again.
Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers in the house, I refused to be carried down to bid that unanswering face good-bye? No, I have no regret on that score. The older I grow the more closely I seem to understand him. If phantoms of memory have any reality—and it is wiser, I think, to remember the face of the living rather than the stony peace of the dead—he has not forgotten his only daughter.
Double-minded creature I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit. At times I have been tempted to blame my parents for my shortcomings. What wicked folly—they did not choose their only child. After all, too, fellow creatures of any size seem much alike. They rarely havenothingto blame Providence for—the length of their noses or the size of their feet, their bones or their corpulence, the imbecilities of their minds or their bodies, the "accidents" of birth, breeding, station, or circumstance. Yet how secure and perhaps wholesome is Man's self-satisfaction. To what ideal does he compare himself but to a self-perfected abstraction of his own image? Even his Venus and Apollo are mere flattering reflections of his own he- or she-shapes. And what of his anthropomorphic soul?
As for myself, Dame Nature may some day take a fancy to the dwarf. "What a pretty play it would be"—I have clean forgotten where I chanced on this amusing passage—"What a pretty play it would be if, from the next generation onwards, the only humans born into the world should be of mere pygmy stature. Fifty years hence there would remain but few of the normal-sized in the land. Imagine these aged few, miserably stalkingthrough the dwarfed streets, picking up a scanty livelihood in city or country-side, where their very boots would be a public danger, their very tread would set the bells in the steeples ringing, and their appetites would be a national incubus. House, shop, church, high road, furniture, vehicles abandoned or sunken to the pygmy size; wars and ceremonies, ambitions and enterprises, everything but prayers, dwindled to the petty. Would great-grandfather be venerated, cherished, admired, a welcome guest, a lamented emigrant? Would there be as many mourners as sextons at his funeral, as many wreaths as congratulations at his grave?" And so on and so forth—like Jonathan Swift.
But I must beware. Partly from fatigue and partly from dislike of the version of Miss M. that stared out of his picture at me, I had begun, I remember, to be a little fretful when old Mr Wagginhorne was painting my portrait. And I complained pertly that I thought there were far too many azaleas on the potted bush.
"Ah, little Miss Finical," he said, "take care, if you please. Once there was a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub and fed on his own spleen. He died.... He died," he repeated, drawing his brush slowly along the canvas, "of dyspepsia."
He popped round, "Think of that."
I can think of that to better purpose now, and if there is one thing in the world whose company I shall deplore in my coffin, that thing is a Cynic. That is why I am trying as fast as I can to put down my experiences in black and white before the black predominates.
But I must get back to my story. My poor father had left his affairs in the utmost disorder. His chief mourners were his creditors. Apart from these, one or two old country friends and distant relatives, I believe, attended his funeral, but none even of them can have been profoundly interested in the Hop, the Oyster, or the Cherry, at least in the abstract. Dr Grose, owing to ill-health, had given up his practice and was gone abroad. But though possibly inquiry was made after the small creature that had been left behind, I stubbornly shut myself away in my room under the roof, listening in a fever of apprehension to every sinister movement in the house beneath.
Yet if a friend in need is a friend indeed, then I must confess that my treatment of Miss Fenne was the height of ingratitude.
In my grief and desolation, the future seemed to be only a veil beyond the immediate present, which I had neither the wish nor the power to withdraw. Miss Fenne had no such illusions. I begged Pollie to make any excuse she could think of to prevent her from seeing me. But at last she pushed her way up, and doubtless, the news and the advice she brought were the best tonic that could have been prescribed for me.
As a child I had always associated my godmother with the crocodile (though not with Mr Bosch's charming conception of it, in his picture of the Creation). Yet there were no tears in her faded eyes when she explained that of my father's modest fortune not a pittance remained. In a few days the house, with everything in it except my own small sticks of furniture, was to be sold by auction. I must keep my door locked against intruders. All that would be left to me was a small income of about £110 per annum, derived from money bequeathed to me by a relative of my mother's whom I had never seen.
"I fancy your father knew nothing about it," she concluded, "at least so your dearmotherseemed to imply. But there! it's a sad business, a sad business. And that Tapa scandal; a lamentable affair." Having thus prepared the way, my godmother proposed that I should take up my residence in her house, and commit my future entirely to her charge.
"You cannot be an expensive guest," she explained, "and I am sure you will try to be a grateful one. No trulyconscientiousgodparent, my dear child,everrelinquishes the soul committed to her care. I sometimes wonder whether your poor dear mother realized this."
But it was my soul, if that is brother to the spirit and can be neighbour to pride, that revolted against her proposition. I had to shut my eyes at the very remembrance of Miss Fenne's prim and musty drawing-room. Every intimation, every jerk of her trembling head, every pounce of her jewelled fingers only hardened my heart. Poor Miss Fenne. Her resentment at my refusal seemed to increase her shortness of sight. Looking in on her from my balcony, I had the advantage of her, as she faced me in the full light in her chair, dressed up in her old lady's clothes like a kind of human Alp among my pygmy belongings. I tried to be polite, but this only increased her vexation. One smart tap of the ivory ball that topped herumbrella would have been mycoup de grâce. She eyed me, but never administered it.
At last she drew in her lips and fell silent. Then, as may happen at such moments, her ill-temper and chagrin, even the sense of her own dignity drooped away, and for a while in the quietness we were simply two ill-assorted human beings, helpless in the coils of circumstance. She composed her mouth, adjusted her bonnet strings, peered a moment from dim old eyes out of the window, then once more looked at me.
"It must be, then, as God wills," she said in a trembling voice. "The spirit of your poor dear mother must be judge between us. She has, we may trust, gone to a better world."
For a moment my resolution seemed to flow away like water, and I all but surrendered. But a rook cawed close overhead, and I bit my lip. Little more was said, except that she would consider it her duty to find me a comfortable and God-fearing home. But she admonished me of the future, warned me that the world was a network of temptations, and assured me of her prayers. So we parted. I bowed her out of my domain. It was the last time we met. Two days afterwards I received her promised letter:—
"My Dear Godchild,—Mr Ambrose Pellew, an oldclergymanfriend of mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable servant of his now living a few miles from London—a Mrs Bowater. For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give you board, lodging, andreasonableattendance. In all the circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew assures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and apractisingChristian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be yourhome. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished otherwise—that the roof of her old friend who was present at your Baptism andinsistedon your Confirmation, should have been your refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world."However, you have rejected this proposal, and havechosen your own path. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeplypainedto refer again to your obstinacy and ingratitude. Rest assured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers, and I trust, D. V.,that you will escape the temptations of this wicked world—a world in which it has pleased God, in spite of self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. xxxi. 24-28; Eccles. xii. 1."I remain, your affectionate godmother,"Emma E. Fenne."PS.—I reopen this letter to explain that yourfinancialaffairs are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable solicitors of Gray's Inn. They will remit you on every quarter day—Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th—the sum of £28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay £19 10s.at onceto Mrs Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions, charity, and so on. Itgrievesme that from the wreckage of your father's affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the dreadful storm that has broken over what we can onlytrustis a tranquil resting place. R. I. P.—E. E. F."
"My Dear Godchild,—Mr Ambrose Pellew, an oldclergymanfriend of mine, in whose discretion and knowledge of the world I have every confidence, has spoken for you to an old married, respectable servant of his now living a few miles from London—a Mrs Bowater. For the charge of thirty shillings a week she has consented to give you board, lodging, andreasonableattendance. In all the circumstances this seems to me to be a moderate sum. Mr Pellew assures me that Mrs B. is clean, honest, and apractisingChristian. When this dreadful Sale is over, I have arranged that Pollie shall conduct you safely to what will in future be yourhome. I trust that you will be as happy there as Providence permits, though I cannot doubt that your poor dear mother and your poor father, too, for that matter, would have wished otherwise—that the roof of her old friend who was present at your Baptism andinsistedon your Confirmation, should have been your refuge and asylum now that you are absolutely alone in the world.
"However, you have rejected this proposal, and havechosen your own path. I am not your legal guardian, and I am too deeplypainedto refer again to your obstinacy and ingratitude. Rest assured that, in spite of all, I shall remember you in my prayers, and I trust, D. V.,that you will escape the temptations of this wicked world—a world in which it has pleased God, in spite of self-sacrificing and anxious friends, to place you at so distressing a disadvantage. But in His Sight all men are equal. Let that be your continual consolation. See Amos vii. 2; Prov. xxxi. 24-28; Eccles. xii. 1.
"I remain, your affectionate godmother,
"Emma E. Fenne.
"PS.—I reopen this letter to explain that yourfinancialaffairs are in the hands of Messrs Harris, Harris, and Harris, respectable solicitors of Gray's Inn. They will remit you on every quarter day—Christmas Day, Lady Day, June 25th and September 29th—the sum of £28 10s. 0d. Of this you will pay £19 10s.at onceto Mrs Bowater, who, I have no doubt, will advise you on the expenditure of what remains on wearing apparel, self-improvement, missions, charity, and so on. Itgrievesme that from the wreckage of your father's affairs you must not anticipate a further straw of assistance. All his money and property will be swallowed up in the dreadful storm that has broken over what we can onlytrustis a tranquil resting place. R. I. P.—E. E. F."
So sprawling and straggling was my godmother's penmanship that I spelled her letter out at last with a minifying glass, though rather for forlorn amusement's sake than by necessity. Not that this diminishment of her handwriting in any sense lessened the effect upon me of the sentiments it conveyed. They at once daunted me and gave me courage. For a little I hesitated, then at last I thoughtoutin my heart that God might be kinder to me than Miss Fenne wished. Indeed I was so invigorated by the anticipation of the "wicked world," that I all but called her a crocodile to her phantasmal face. Couldn't I—didn't I—myself "mean well" too? What pictures and prospects of the future, of my journey, of Mrs Bowater and the "network" pursued each other through my brain. And what a darkness oppressed me when a voice kept repeating over in my mind—Harris and Harris and Harris, as if it were a refrain to one of my grandfather'schansons.Messrs Harris and Harris and Harris—Isawall three of them (dark men with whiskers), but trusted profoundly they would never come to seeme.
Nor from that day to this, through all my giddying "ups"and sobering "downs" have I ever for a moment regretted my decision—though I might have conveyed it with a little better grace. My body, perhaps also my soul, would have been safer in the seclusion of my godmother's house. But my spirit? I think it would have beaten itself to death there like a wasp on a window-pane. Whereas—well, here I am.
Those last few days of August dragged on—days of a burning, windless heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither and thither like flies under a ceiling—those strange, winged creatures that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a slave to one's stomach, is a folly.
The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased, until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings (with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences) collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and laughter, the tinkle of glass—the stretching hours seemed endless; and every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar object. I was glad my father couldn't hear the bidding, and sorry that perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios—howvaluable I was to learn later—was safely hidden away in an upper room. So passed my birthday—the twentieth—nor tapped me on the shoulder with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"
None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and wondered how it was that we human beings canbear even to go on living between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother, mute but compassionate.
By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers' vans and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore, been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After luncheon—the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came later?) is on my tongue at this moment—all the rest of the house being now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little repetitions? Perhaps on the Last Day—but I anticipate.
I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson, "September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.—M."; arranged my morrow's clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six by my grandfather's clock—it struck the hour out of its case, as if out of a sepulchre—a storm, whichall the afternoon had been steadily piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. Chizzel Hill with its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain, swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.
One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the glass, and, shading my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking to his nest.
Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done. It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in the air. Gone beyond recoverywere my father and mother: and I now realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.
Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when, between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear, pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I fell asleep.
And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown, grease-stained volume entitledNapoleon's Book of Fate. Then she would promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in my memory than any.
Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden—an orchard. And, as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there, since I could see as I walked. The grasses were coarse and deep, but they did not encumber my feet, and presently I found myself standingbeneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves hung enormous fruits—pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood there in the dew-cold grass, gazing up and up into those monstrous branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet seemed faintly to tremble as if at a muffled blow. One of the fruits in my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then again—thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in actuality I was.
Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten, come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had passed indeed before the whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if possible, let her in.
Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie's copper candlestick, with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With this alight in my hand, the stick being too cumbersome, I set out on my errand. The air was cool; the moon shone lustily. Just waked from sleep my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body, for it seemed that at the head ofthe staircase lay stretched the still form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my breath and went on.
To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse, rustle of straw, a stirring—light as the settling of dust, crack of timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And who, Who?—that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it. The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below suddenly broke out, not Pollie's but Adam Waggett's, hollaing in the porch. Adam—the wren-slaughterer—prove me a coward? No, indeed. All misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and continued the descent.
It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father's bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster, a broken chair straddling in the midst—a hideous spectacle it was. An immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place, came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings. I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie's messenger? When indeed in the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used by the servants. When at lastthe great stagnant kitchen came into view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags were swarming with cockroaches.
These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil's coachman may be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust; and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper—I felt sick at the sight. There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I perceived Adam's dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass that Pollie's mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me next morning.
I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air. I could see Adam's conical head outlined against the soft light of the sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for their spoil.
How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.
When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the air at my window, and there sat Pollie, in her outdoor clothes, the rest of the packing done and she awaiting breakfast. Unstirringly from my pillow I scrutinized the plump, red-cheeked face with its pale-blue prominent eyes dreaming out of the window; and sorrow welled up in me at the thought of the past and of how near drew our separation. She heard me move, and kneeling and stooping low over my bed, with her work-roughened finger she stroked the hand that lay on my coverlet. A pretty sight I must have looked—after my night's experiences. We whispered a little together. She was now a sedater young woman, but still my Pollie of the apples and novelettes. And whether or not it is because early custom is second nature, she is still the only person whom my skin does not a little creep against when necessity calls for a beast of burden.
Her desertion of me the night before had been caused by the untimely death of one of her father's three Alderney cows—a mild, horned creature, which I had myself often seen in the meadows cropping among the buttercups, and whose rich-breathed nose I had once had the courage to ask to stroke with my hand. This ill-fated beast at first threat of the storm, had taken shelter with her companions under an oak. Scarcely had the lightnings begun to play when she was struck down by a "thunderbolt." It was a tragedy after Pollie's heart. She had (she said) fainted dead off at news of it—and we bemoaned the event in concert. In return I told her my dream of the garden. Nothing would then content her but she must fetch from under her mattressNapoleon's Book of Fate, a legacy from Mrs Ballard.
"But, Pollie," I demurred; "a dream is only a dream."
"Honest, miss," she replied, thumbing over the pages, "there'ssome of 'em means what happens and comes true, and they'll tell secrets too if they be searched about. More'n a month before Mrs Ballard fell out with master she dreamed that one of the speckled hens had laid an egg in the kitchen dresser. There it was clucking among the crockery. And to dream of eggs, the book says, is to be certain sure of getting the place you are after, and which she wrote off to a friend in London and is there now!"
What more was there to say? So presently Pollie succeeded in turning to "Pears" in the grease-grimed book, and spelled out slowly:—
"Pears.—To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state."
"Pears.—To dream of pears is in-di-ca-tive of great wealth (which means riches, miss); and that you will rise to a much higher spear than the one you at present occupy. To a woman they denote that she will marry a person far above her in rank (lords and suchlike, miss, if you please), and that she will live in great state. To persons in trade they denote success and future prosperity and eleviation. They also indi- indicate constancy in love and happiness in the marriage state."
Her red cheeks grew redder with this exertion of scholarship, and I burst out laughing. "Ah, miss," she cried in confusion, "laugh you may, and that's what Sarah said to the Angel. But mark my words if something of it don't hap out like what the book says."
"Then, Pollie," said I, "there's nothing for it but to open a butcher's shop. For live in great state I can't and won't, not if the Prince of Wales himself was to ask me in marriage."
"Lor, miss," retorted Pollie in shocked accents, "and him a married man with grown-up sons and all." But she forgave me my mockery. As for the Dream Book, doubtless young Bonaparte must often have dreamed of Pears in Corsica; and no less indubitably have I lived in "great state"—though without much eleviation.
But the day was hasting on. My toilet must be made, and the preparations for our journey completed. Now that the dawn of my new fortunes was risen, expectancy filled my mind, and the rain-freshened skies and leaves of the morning renewed my spirits. Our train—the first in my experience—was timed to leave our country railway station at 3.3 p.m. By one o'clock, all the personal luggage that I was to take with me had been sewnup in a square of canvas, and corded. The rest of my belongings—my four-poster, etc.—were to be stowed in a large packing-case and sent after me. First impressions endure. No great store of sagacity was needed to tell me that. So I had chosen my clothes carefully, determined to show my landlady that I meant to have my own way and not be trifled with. My dear Mrs Bowater!—she would be amused to hear that.
Pollie bustled downstairs. I stood in the midst of the sunlit, dismantled room, light and shadow at play upon ceiling and walls, the sun-pierced air a silvery haze of dust. A host of memories and thoughts, like a procession in a dream, traversed my mind. A strangeness, too—as if even this novel experience of farewell was a vague recollection beyond defined recall. Pollie returned with the new hat in the paper bag in which she had brought it from home: and I was her looking-glass when she had put it on. Then from top to basement she carried me through every room in the house, and there on the kitchen floor, mute witness of the past, lay the beetle-gnawn remnant of my candle-stub. We wandered through the garden, glinting green in the cool flocking sunbeams after the rain; and already vaunting its escape from Man. Pollie was returning to Lyndsey—I not! My heart was too full to let me linger by the water. I gazed at the stones and the wild flowers in a sorrowful hunger of farewell. Trifles, soon to be dying, how lovely they were. The thought of it swallowed me up. What was the future but an emptiness? Would that I might vanish away and be but a portion of the sweetness of the morning. Even Pollie's imperturbable face wore the appearance of make-believe; for an instant I surprised the whole image of me reflected in her round blue eye.
The Waggetts' wagonette was at the door, but not—and I was thankful—notmyAdam, but the old Adam, his father. My luggage was pushed under the seat. I was set up, to be screened as far as possible from the wind, beside Pollie and behind Mr Waggett—no stranger to me with his neat, dark whiskers, for in the old days, at dinner parties, he would wait at table. I see him now—as gentlemanlike as a Devil's Coachhorse—entering the kitchen with his little black bag. Only once I swiftly turned my head over my shoulder toward the house. Then we were outside the iron gates, and bumping along through the puddles between the bowery hedges towards the station.
I thought of my father and mother lying side by side, beyond the sullen drift of nettles, under the churchyard wall. Miss Fenne had taken me there many weeks before in her faded barouche with the gaunt white mare. Not a word had I breathed to her of my anguish at sight of the churchyard. The whole afternoon was a nightmare. She regaled the journey with sentiments on death and the grave. Throughout it, I was in danger of slipping out of her sight; for the buttons on the sage-green leather seat were not only a discomfort but had failed to aid me to sit upright; and nothing would have induced me to catch at the trimmings of her dolman to save myself from actually falling off into the pit of her carriage. There sat her ancient coachman; clutter-clutter plodded the hoofs; what a monstrous, monstrous world—and she cackling on and on—like a hen over its egg.
But now the novelty of this present experience, the flowery cottages, Mr Waggett's square, sorrel nag, the ballooning northwesterly clouds, the aromatic rusty hedgerows, the rooks in the cornfields—all these sights and sounds called joy into my mind, and far too soon the bright-painted railway station at the hill-bottom hove into sight, and our drive was over. I was lifted down into Pollie's arms again. Then followed a foolish chaffering over the tickets, which Mr Waggett had volunteered to purchase for us at the rounded window. The looming face beyond had caught sight of me, and the last words I heard bawled through for any to hear were: "Lor, Mr Waggett, I'd make it aquarterfor 'ee if it was within regulations. But 'tain't so, the young lady's full natural size in the eye of the law, and I couldn't give in to 'ee not even if 'twas a honeymooning you was after." No doubt it was wholesome to learn as quickly as possible how easy a butt I was to be for the jests of the good-humoured. On that occasion it was a bitter pill. I felt even Pollie choke down a laugh into her bosom. My cheek whitened, but I said nothing.
An enormous din at the moment shattered around me, ten thousand times harsher to my nerves than any mere witticism could be. My first "steam-monster" was entering the station. All but stunned by its clatter, I barely had the presence of mind to thank Mr Waggett for the little straw basket of three greengages, and the nosegay of cherry-pie which he had thrust into my arms. My canvas-wrapped package was pushed in under the seat, the doorwas slammed to, the guard waved his green flag, Mr Waggett touched his hat: and our journey was begun.
Fortunately Pollie and I found ourselves in an empty carriage. The scream of the whistle, the grinding jar of the wheels, the oppressive odour of Mr Waggett's bouquet—I leaned back on her to recover my wits. But the cool air blowing in on my face and a far-away sniff from a little glass bottle with which her mother had fortified her for the journey, quickly revived me, and I was free to enjoy the novelties of steam-travel. My eyes dizzied at the wide revolving scene that was now spread out beneath the feathery vapours. How strange it was to see the green country world—meadow and stream and wooded hill—thus wheel softly by. If Pollie and I could have shared it alone, it would have been among my pleasantest memories.
But at the next stopping places other passengers climbed into the carriage; and five complete strangers soon shared the grained wood box in which we were enclosed. There was a lady in black, with her hair smoothed up under her bonnet, and a long pale nose; and up against her sat her little boy, a fine fair, staring child of about five years of age. A black-clothed, fat little man with a rusty leather bag, over the lock of which he kept clasped his finger and thumb, quietly seated himself. He cast but one dark glance about him and immediately shut his eyes. In the corner was an older man with a beard under his chin, gaiters, and a hard, wide-brimmed hat. Besides these, there was a fat countrywoman on the same side as Pollie and I, whom I could hear breathing and could not see, and a dried-up, bird-eyed woman opposite in a check shawl, with heavy metal ear-rings dangling at her ears. She sat staring blankly and bleakly at things close as if they were at a distance.
My spirit drank in this company. So rapt was I that I might have been a stock of wood. Gathered together in this small space they had the appearance of animals, and, if they had not been human, what very alarming ones. As long as I merely sat and watched their habits I remained unnoticed. But the afternoon sun streamed hot on roof and windows: and the confined air was soon so dense with a variety of odours, that once more my brain dizzied, and I must clutch at Pollie's arm for support. At this movement the little boy, who had more than once furtively glanced at me,crouched wriggling back against his mother, and, edging his face aside, piped up into her ear, "Mamma, is that alive?"
The train now stood motionless, a fine array of hollyhocks and sunflowers flared beyond the window, and his voice rang out shrill as a bird in the quiet of afternoon. Tiny points of heat broke out all over me, as one by one my fellow passengers turned their astonished faces in my direction. Even the man with the leather bag heard the question. The small, bead-brown eyes wheeled from under their white lids and fixed me with their stare.
"Hush, my dear," said the lady, no less intent but less open in her survey; "hush, look at the pretty cows!"
"But sheis, mamma. It moved. I saw that move," he asseverated, looking along cornerwise at me out of his uptilted face.
Those blue eyes! a mingling of delight, horror, incredulity, even greed swam in their shallow deeps. I stood leaning close to Pollie's bosom, breathless and helpless, a fascinating object, no doubt. Never before had I been transfixed like this in one congregated stare. I felt myself gasp like a fish. It was the old farmer in the corner who at last came to my rescue. "Alive!Iwarrant. Eh, ma'am?" he appealed to poor Pollie. "And an uncommon neat-fashioned young lady, too. Off to Whipham Fair, I'll be bound."
The bag-man turned with a creeping grin on his tallowy features and muttered some inaudible jest out of the corner of his mouth to the gipsy. She eyed him fiercely, drawing her lips from her bright teeth in a grimace more of contempt than laughter. Once more the engine hooted and we glided on our way.
"Iwantthat, mamma," whispered the child. "Iwantthat dear little lady. Give that teeny tiny lady a biscuit."
At this new sally universal merriment filled the carriage. We were jogging along in fine style. This, then, was Miss Fenne's "network." A helpless misery and bitterness swept through me, the heavy air swirled; and then—whence, from whom, I know not—self-possession returned to me. Why, I hadchosenmy fate: I must hold my own.
My young admirer, much against his mother's inclination, had managed to fetch out a biscuit from her reticule—a star-shaped thing, graced with a cone of rose-tinted sugar. Still crouching back like a chick under her wing, he stretched his bribe out atarm's length towards me, in a pink, sweat-sparked hand. All this while Pollie had sat like a lump beside me, clutching her basket, a vacant, flushed smile on her round face. I drew myself up, and supporting myself by her wicker basket, advanced with all the dignity at my command to the peak of her knees, and, stretching out my hand in return, accepted the gift. I even managed to make him an indulgent little bow, feigned a nibble at the lump of food, then planted it on the dusty ledge beneath the carriage window.
A peculiar silence followed. With a long sigh the child hid his face in his mother's sleeve. She drew him closer and smiled carefully into nothingness. "There," she murmured, "now mother's treasure must sit still and be a good boy. I can't think why papa didn't take—second-class tickets."
"But nor did that kind little lady's papa," returned the child stoutly.
The kindly old farmer continued to gloat on me, gnarled hands on knees. But I could not bear it. I quietly surveyed him until he was compelled to rub his face with his fingers, and so cover its retreat to his own window. The gipsy woman kept her ferocious, birdlike stare on me, with an occasional stealthy glance at Pollie. The bag-man's lids closed down. For the rest of the journey—though passengers came and went—I kept well back, and was left in peace. It was my first real taste of the world's curiosity, mockery, aversion, and flattery. One practical lesson it taught me. From that day forward I never set out on any such journey unless thickly veiled. For then, though the inquisitive may see me, they cannot tell whether or not I see them, or what my feelings may be. It is a real comfort; though, from what I have read, it appears to be the condition rather of a ghost than of a normal young lady.
But now the sun had begun to descend and the rays of evening to stain the fields. We loitered on from station to station. To my relief Pollie had at last munched her way through the pasties and sweetmeats stowed in her basket. My nosegay of cherry-pie was fainting for want of water. In heavy sleep the bag-man and gipsy sat woodenly nodding and jerking side by side. The lady had delicately composed her face and shut her eyes. The little boy slumbered serenely with his small red mouth wide open. Languid and heavy, I dared not relax my vigilance. But in the desolation that gathered over me I almost forgot my human company, and returned to the empty house which seemingly I had leftfor ever—the shadows of yet another nightfall already lengthening over its flowers and sward.
Could I not hear the silken rustle of the evening primrose unfolding her petals? Soon the cool dews would be falling on the stones where I was wont to sit in reverie beside the flowing water. It seemed indeed that my self had slipped from my body, and hovered entranced amid the thousand jargonings of its tangled lullaby. Was there, in truth, a wraith in me that could so steal out; and were the invisible inhabitants in their fortresses beside my stream conscious of its presence among them, and as happy in my spectral company as I in theirs?
I floated up out of these ruminations to find that my young pasha had softly awakened and was gazing at me in utter incredulity from sleep-gilded eyes. We exchanged a still, protracted, dwelling smile, and for the only time in my life I actuallysawa fellow-creature fall in love!
"Oh, but mamma, mamma, I dobeseechyou," he called up at her from the platform where he was taking his last look at me through the dingy oblong window, "please, please, I want her for mine; I want her for mine!"
I held up his biscuit in my hand, laughing and nodding. The whistle knelled, our narrow box drew slowly out of the station. As if heartbroken, he took his last look at me, petulantly flinging aside his mother's hand. He had lost me for ever, and Pollie and I were alone again.