OBSESSED
ANDREW FENN is known to the world as an art critic and essayist of unerring instinct and exquisite refinement, a writer of charmingvers de société, and teller of tales supposedly designed for children, but in reality more appreciated by children of a larger growth. He is much sought after, but little to be found, unless one has theentréeto his pleasant, roomy old house in Church Street, Chelsea, where he lives in the midst of his library—the whole house is a library—his etchings and Japanese curios. He is less of a traveler than he used to be; getting old, he says, and lazy, content with old friends, soothed by old pipes, fortified by old wine—he has a supremegoûtin wines—and nourished by excellent cookery.
His household staff consists but of an elderly valet and butler, and a housekeeper-cook. She has been in her master’s service twenty years, and is beginning to grow handsome, Andrew is wont to say. Certainly, if her master speaks the truth, she must have been, when comparatively young, extraordinarily unlovely, this most excellent of women. Even now she infallibly reminds the casual beholder of an antique ecclesiastical gargoyle much worn by weather. Her name is Ladds. She has never been married, but respect for the position of authority she occupies in Andrew’s household universally accords her brevet rank. She might have occupied another, and more important position, if——
“Yes,� Andrew says, when he is disposed to tell thestory—and he often does tell it to intimate friends, leaning back on the library divan, after a cosy dinner, holding his gray beard in one big fist, still brown with tropical sunshine—“Ladds is an excellent creature. She might have married me, might Ladds!�
We invariably chorus astonishment. Then some of Ladds’ famous coffee comes in, and Andrew gets up to hunt for precious liquors, and, having found them, continues:
“I cameverynear marrying her—once.�
Somebody growls: “Good job you pulled up in time!�
Andrew rounds on the somebody. “Ididn’t pull up.Shedid. Refused me!�
There is a general howl.
“I am telling you men the truth,� Andrew says, pulling the gray beard. “Fifteen years ago I was infatuated with that woman. She possessed my every thought; she dominated me, like——�
“Like a nightmare!�
“Apposite illustration,� says Andrew, nodding. “Likea nightmare. It was just about the time I published my book,Studies of the Human Grotesque in Art, Ancient and Modern. You remember, some of you, I was keen on the subject—had been for years. And I was a traveler and collector in those days: I’d got together a wonderful show of illustrative subjects. You won’t see many of ’em now. I gave them to the Smoketown Mechanical Institute afterward.�
He pulls at his long cherrystick, and blows a cloud of Latakia, and goes on:
“I’d the whole house full. Peruvian idols, Aztec picture writings, Polynesian and Maori war masks; Chinese and Japanese, Burmese and Abyssinian, Hindu and Persian monstrosities of every kind; Egyptian, Carthaginian,Babylonian, Druidical, Gothic—— Well, well! I’m thoroughgoing, and when I do a thing I do it thoroughly. It’s enough to say that every variety of libel upon the human face and form that human ingenuity or depravity has ever perpetrated, I’d carefully collected and brought together here.�
He waves his hand, with a curious cabalistical ring upon it that once belonged, it is said, to Eliphas Lévi, who had it from Albertus Magnus. But this may be mere report.
“I worked hard, and drank a great deal of coffee,� says Andrew, “so much that my old housekeeper began to be afraid something mysterious was the matter with me. She expostulated at last, and I explained. Then she got interested in the book; she was an intelligent woman, poor dear old soul, and she got specially interested in that section of the work which deals with the Grotesque in Nature. Everything in humanity that is purely grotesque—not deformed, unnatural, outrageous, but purely quaint and bizarre—I piled into those chapters. The work is illustrative, you know, as well as descriptive, and the queer photographs and engravings that scientific friends had contributed to this particular portion of it absolutely fascinated the dear old lady.
“‘To be sure, Master Andrew’ (she had known me from my knickerbocker and peg-top days), ‘but them are queer folk. And, my heart alive!’—she uttered a sharp scream—‘if that picture isn’t the exact moral of Jane Ladds!’
“I glanced over her shoulder. Itwasa portrait of Jane, certainly—a rude little wood cut of the sixteenth century, purporting to be a portrait of a female jester, attached, in her diverting capacity, to the Court of Mary Tudor, during the latter part of her reign, andmentioned by name in some of the accounts of the Royal household as ‘Jeanne la Folle.’ Unless the long-dead delineator of her vanished charms has shamefully belied them, Jeanne must have been one of the most grotesquely hideous specimens of womanhood that ever existed. Judge, then, whether the exclamation of my housekeeper awakened my interest, excited my curiosity, or left me apathetic and unmoved!�
We are silent. Our interest, our curiosity, are urging us to hurry on the conclusion of Andrew’s story.
“You may suppose that I bombarded my housekeeper with questions. What? Did a living counterpart of the sixteenth-century joculatrix exist in the nineteenth? What was her station in life? Where was she to be found? In reply, I elicited the fact that Jane Ladds was a countrywoman of my own, the daughter of a wheelwright living in the village of Wickham, in Dorsetshire, where I myself had first seen the light. Jane was some half dozen years my junior, it appeared. My mother had once taken her into her service as under-scullerymaid, but in a casual encounter with the last new baby (my brother Robert, now commanding his battery of the Royal Horse Artillery at Jelalabad), Jane’s facial eccentricities had produced such a marked effect (resulting in convulsions) that the unfortunateprotégéehad been hastily dismissed. Since when she had kept house for her father, and was probably keeping it still; there not being, said my housekeeper, the slightest human probability that any potential husband would endeavor to interfere with the wheelwright’s domestic arrangements.� There comes a twinkle into Andrew’s brown eyes.
“‘No man would be mad enough!’ the old lady said. Judge of her surprise when I turned upon her and orderedher to write—write at once to Dorsetshire, ascertain whether Jane was still alive, still available, willing to take service, under an old acquaintance, in a bachelor’s London establishment? Stunned as she was, my housekeeper obeyed. The wages I instructed her to offer were good. An answering letter arrived within the space of a week, announcing Jane Ladds’ willingness to accept the offered situation. The letter was nicely written. I read and reread it with morbid excitement. I looked forward to the day of the writer’s arrival with an excitement more morbid still. At last the day came, and the woman....�
We inspire deep breaths, and unanimously cry, “Go on!�
“My writing table was piled high with books—I couldn’t see her until she came round the corner,� says Andrew, “and stood by my chair. She wore her Sunday clothes—Wickham taste inclines to garments of many colors. In silence I contemplated one of the finest examples of the Animated Grotesque it had ever been my fortune to look upon. Her hair was then red—the brightest red. Her nose was not so much a nose as a pimple. Her mouth was the oddest of buttons. Her forehead a ponderous coffer of bone, overhanging and overshadowing the other features. She was lengthy of arm, short of leg, dumpy of figure. She did not walk—she waddled; she did not sit—she squatted. Her smile was a gash, her curtsy the bob of an elder-pith puppet. She was, as she is now, unique. You are all familiar with her appearance. Search your memories for the moment when that appearance dawned upon you first, intensify your surprise, quadruple your sensations of delight—add to these, imagine yourself dominated by a fascination, weird, strange—inexplicable. In a word——�
Andrew’s pipe is out; he is gesticulating excitedly, and his eyes have an odd gleam under his shaggy brows.
“She took possession of me. I had her constantly about me. She brought me everything I wanted. I was never tired of gloating over my new-found treasure. Every accent of her voice, every odd contortion of her features, every awkward movement of her body was a fresh revelation to me. All this while I was working at my book. It was said afterward, in the newspapers, that the entire work, especially the closing chapters on the Human Grotesque, had been written in a fever of enthusiasm. The reviewer never knew how rightly he had guessed. Some of the theories I propounded and proved were curious. That Ugliness is in reality the highest form of Beauty—beauty in the abstract—was one of the mildest. I believed it when I wrote it; for I was madly, passionately infatuated with the ugliest woman I had ever seen—my parlor maid, Jane Ladds!�
We hang upon his words so that our pipes go out, and our whisky and sodas stand untasted at our elbows.
“Yes,� says Andrew, drawing a long, hard breath, “she possessed my thoughts—dominated me—waking and sleeping. I had the queerest of dreams, in which, with a joy that was anguish, a rapture that was horror, I saw myself attending crowded assemblies with my wife, Jane Fenn,néeLadds, upon my arm. She wore my mother’s diamonds, adécolletéegown from Worth’s; and as we moved along together, sibilant whispers sounded in my ears, and astonished eyes said as plainly, ‘Whatan ugly woman!’
“Then would come other visions ... Jane at the head of my table ... Jane rocking the cradle of our eldest born—an infant who strongly resembled his mother ... Jane here, Jane there—Jane everywhere!...My nerves, you will guess, must have been in a very queer state.
“All the time Jane Ladds would be deftly moving about me, dusting my books and curios, or going on with her sewing, or, to the utter stupefaction of my housekeeper, I had issued orders that she should sit in the window, where my glance might dwell upon her whenever I lifted my head from my work. Late, late into the small hours, when the sky began to gray toward the dawning, and the ink in my stand got low, she used to keep me company. Not the faintest shadow of impropriety could attach to the association in any sane mind. My housekeeper thought it queer, but nothing more.
“She had—she has—very large, very rough, very red hands. I used to imagine myself kissing one of those hands when I should ask her to be my wife, and conjure up the grotesque smile of shy delight with which she would accept the unheard-of honor. The temptation to snatch and kiss that awful hand became so powerful that it cost me more effort than I can explain to resist its ceaseless promptings. And I would chuckle as I looked at it, and at the bizarre countenance that bent over the stocking that was in process of being darned—Jane’s peculiar, shuffling gait seemed to have a peculiarly wearing effect on stockings—and wonder,if she knew, how she would look, what she would say? Then she would thread her needle, or bite the end of her worsted.... That hand! that hand! The struggle between the masterful impulse to seize and kiss it, and the shuddering desire not to do anything of the kind, would, upon these occasions, be perfectly indescribable. And—one day—the very day that saw the completion of my book—I yielded!�
“Yes?� we cry, interrogatively. All our eyes are rounded, all our mouths wide open.
“She saw some of my papers flutter to the carpet as I pushed back my chair,� Andrew continues, “and obligingly crossed the room, stooped and gathered them up. A kind of mist came over my eyes, and when it cleared away, she was there—by my side—holding the written sheets out to me. That hand! I must—I must! Before the poor creature could hazard a guess at my intentions, I seized it—I kissed it—with a resounding smack. I cried deliriously, ‘Jane, will you be my wife? I adore you, Jane!’�
“And what did she do? What did she say?...�
“I’m coming to that! She drew away from me, and turned very white, and her poor red hands trembled, and her little button features twitched absurdly with the effort she made to keep from crying. But, as I seized her hands, and went on with my wild asseverations and protestations—Heaven only knows what I said!—the absurdity of the whole thing came on her, and she burst out laughing wildly. Then I caught the infection, and followed suit. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. I was shaken like a rag in the wind—torn, possessed by seven devils of risibility. But I went on raging, all through it, that she must marry me! At last she tore herself away, and ran out of the room, breathlessly to burst upon my housekeeper with the information that ‘Master was mad, and wanted the doctor.’ And she was not far wrong, for by the time he came I was fit for nothing but to be carried to bed. Twenty-four hours later I was raving in brain fever. Seven weeks that red-hot torture lasted, and then I came to myself, and found that through all the delirium and fever I had been patiently, uncomplainingly, tenderly nursed by poor Jane....�
Andrew’s voice grows a little husky as he nears the finish.
“Well, when I was convalescent, and knew that I owed my life to her devotion, it seemed to me that only one reparation was possible for the wrong I had done Jane. It was a hard thing to do—the madness being over—the morbid impulse that had swayed me being no longer in the ascendant. But I did it! You may have noticed�—he clears his husky throat—“that is, those among you who have spoken to Ladds—that she has a singularly sweet voice—a voice curiously out of keeping with her personality. Well, when she thanked me for my ‘kindness’ and—refused me, I might, supposing my eyes had been shut, have fancied that I was listening to a beautiful woman. She had been ‘marked out by the Lord’ to lead a lonely life, she said. When she was a young girl it used to make her cry when the lads went byher, ‘wi’ their vaices turned away,’ and the girls laughed when she put on a ribbon or a flower. But she got used to it; and she quite understood that I was trying to make up—like a gentleman as I was;—(a mighty poor kind of gentleman, I felt)—‘for summat as I’d said when I didn’t know what I was a-saying!’ Crazy people had queer ideas, and the village ‘softy’ had once taken it into his head that he was in love with Jane.... And she thanked me for sticking to my word now that I was well, and she’d be my faithful servant always and for ever, Amen! Years have passed since then.... Well, she has kept her word. I hope, when the end of everything comes for me, that honest, tender, devoted heart will be beating by my pillow. I hope——�
Andrew breaks off abruptly, and gets up and wishes us all good night.