"Them!" said she, with a flick of her duster. "A parcel of idle herrand boys. _I_ know them: and no more decency than if you was Royalty, my dear, or a pickpocket, or a corpse run over in the street. You rest a bit, pore young thing, and compose yourself. They'll soon grow tired of themselves."

She retired into the back part of her shop beyond the muslined door and returned with a tumbler of water. I shook my head. My sight pulsed with my heartbeats. As if congealed into a drop of poison, I stared and stared at the blind.

"Open the door," I said. "I'd like to go out again."

"Oh, miss! oh, miss!" cried Pollie.

But Mrs Stocks was of a more practical turn. After surveying my enemies from an upper window she had sent a neighbour's little girl for a cab.

By the time this vehicle arrived, with a half-hearted "Boo!" of disappointment, the concourse in the street had all but melted away, and Mrs Stocks's check duster scattered the rest. The cab-door slammed, the wheels ground on the kerbstone, my debut was over. I had been but a nine minutes' wonder.

Chapter Seventeen

We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet, as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one another, and broke into a long, mirthless peal of laughter--a laughter that on her side presently threatened to end in tears. I left her to recover herself, fixing my festering attention on her engagement ring--two hearts in silver encircled by six sky-blue turquoises. And in the silly, helpless fashion of one against the world, I plotted revenge.

The cab stopped. There stood the little brick house, wholly unaffected by the tragic hours which had pa.s.sed since we had so gaily set out from it. I eyed it with malice and disgust as I reascended my Bateses and preceded Pollie into the pa.s.sage. Once safely within, I shrugged my shoulders and explained to Mrs Bowater the phenomenon of the cab with such success that I verily believe she was for the moment convinced that her lodger was one of those persons who prosper in the attentions of the mob--Royalty, that is, rather than pickpockets or corpses run over in the street.

With my new muslin tie adorning her neck, Mrs Bowater took tea with us that afternoon, but even Pollie's imaginative version of our adventures made no reference to the lady in the carriage, nor did she share my intense conjecture on what Mr Crimble can have found of such engrossing interest in the hatter's. _Was_ it that the lady had feigned not to have seen me entirely for my sake; and that Mr Crimble had feigned not to have seen me entirely for _his_? I was still poring over this problem in bed that night when there came a tap at my door. It was Pollie. She had made her way downstairs to a.s.sure herself that I was safe and comfortable. "And oh, miss," she whispered, as she bade me a final good-night, "you never see such a lovely little bedroom as Mrs Bowater have put me into--fit for a princess, and yet just quite plain! Bob's been thinking about furniture too."

So I was left alone again with forgotten f.a.n.n.y, and that night I dreamed of her. Nothing to be seen but black boiling waves flinging their yeasty, curdling crests into the clouds, and every crest the face of my ferrety "herrand-boy." And afloat in the midst of the welter beneath, a beloved shape whiter than the foam, with shut eyes, under the gigantic stoop of the water. Who hangs these tragic veils in the sleeping mind? Who was this I that looked out on them? I awoke, shuddering, breathed a blessing--disjointed, nameless; turned over, and soon was once more asleep.

My day's experiences in the High Street had added at least twenty-four hours to my life. So much a woman of the world was I becoming that when, after Pollie's departure, a knock announced Mr Crimble, I greeted him with a countenance guileless and self-possessed. With spectacles fixed on me, he stood nervously twitching a small bunch of snowdrops which he a.s.sured me were the first of the New Year. I thanked him, remarked that our Lyndsey snowdrops were shorter in the stalk than these, and had he noticed the pale green hieroglyphs on the petals?

"In the white, dead nettle you have to look underneath for them: tiny black oblongs; you can't think how secret it looks!"

But Mr Crimble had not come to botanize. After answering my inquiry after the health of Mrs Hubbins, he suddenly sat down and announced that the object of his visit was to cast himself on my generosity. The proposal made me uncomfortable, but my timid attempt to return to Mrs Hubbins was unavailing.

"I speak," he said, "of yesterday's atrocity. There is no other word for it, and inasmuch as it occurred within two hundred yards of my own church, indeed of my mother's house, I cannot disclaim all responsibility for it."

Nor could I. But I wished very heartily that he had not come to talk about _his_ share. "Oh," said I, as airily as I could, "you mean, Mr Crimble, my little experience in the High Street. That was nothing. My attention was so much taken up with other things that I did not get even so much as a glimpse of St Peter's. So you see----"

"You are kindness itself," he interrupted, with a rapid insertion of his forefinger between his neck and his clerical collar, "but the fact is,"

and he cast a glance at me as if with the whites of his eyes, "the fact is, I was myself a scandalized witness of the occurrence. Believe me, it cannot have hurt your sensitive feelings more than--than it hurt mine."

"But honestly, Mr Crimble," I replied, glancing rather helplessly round the room, "it didn't hurt my feelings at all. You don't feel much, you know, when you are angry. It was just as I should have foreseen. It is important to know where we are, isn't it; and where other people are?

And boys will be boys, as Mrs Bowater says, and particularly, I suppose, errand boys. What else could I expect? It has just taught me a very useful lesson--even though I didn't much enjoy learning it. If I am ever to get used to the world (and that _is_ a kind of duty, Mr Crimble, isn't it?), the world must get used to me. Perhaps if we all knew each other's insides--our thoughts and feelings, I mean--everybody would be as peculiar there--inside, you know--as I am, outside. I'm afraid this is not making myself very clear."

And only a few weeks ago I had been bombarding Dr Phelps with precisely the opposite argument. That, I suppose, is what is meant by being "deceitful on the weights."

Mr Crimble opened his mouth, but I continued rapidly, "You see, I must be candid about such things to myself and try not to--to be silly. And you were merely going to be very kind, weren't you? I am a midget, and it's no good denying it. The people that hooted me were not. That's all; and if there hadn't been so many of them, perhaps I might have been just as much amused, if not even shocked at them, as they at me. We _think_ our own size, that's all, and I'm perfectly certain," I nodded at him emphatically, "I'm perfectly certain if poor Mr Hubbins were here now, he'd--he'd bear me out."

Bear me out--the words lingered on in my mind so distinctly, and conveyed so peculiar a picture of Mr Hubbins's spirit and myself, that I missed the beginning of my visitor's reply.

"But I a.s.sure you," he was saying, "it is not merely that." The glint of perspiration was on his forehead. "In the Almighty's sight all men are equal. Appearances are nothing. And some of us perhaps are far more precious by very reason of--of pa.s.sing afflictions, and----"

"My G.o.dmother," I interposed, "said exactly that in a letter to me a few months ago. Not that I accept the _word_, Mr Crimble, the 'afflictions,' I mean. And as for appearances, why they are _everything_, aren't they?" I gave him as cordial an imitation of a smile as I could.

"No, no, no; yes, yes, yes," said Mr Crimble rapidly. "But it was not of that, not of that in a sense that I was speaking. What I came to say this afternoon is this. I grant it; I freely confess it; I played the coward; morally rather than physically, perhaps, but still the coward.

The--the hideous barbarity of the proceeding." He had forgotten me. His eyes were fixed on the scene in his memory. He was once more at the hatter's window. There fell a painful pause.

I rose and sat down again. "But quite, quite honestly," I interposed faintly, "they did me no harm. They were only inquisitive. What could you have done? Why, really and truly," I laughed feebly, "they might have had to pay, you know. It was getting--getting me cheap!"

His head was thrown back, so that he looked _under_ his spectacles at me, as he cried hollowly: "They might have stoned you."

"Not with those pavements."

"But I was there. I turned aside. You _saw_ me?"

What persuaded me to be guilty of such a ridiculous quibble, I cannot think. Anything, perhaps, to ease his agitation: "But honestly, honestly, Mr Crimble," I murmured out at him, "I didn't _see_ you see me."

"Oh, ah! a woman's way!" he adjured me desperately, turning his head from one side to the other. "But you must have known that I knew you knew I had seen you, you _must_ confess _that_. And, well ... as I say, I can only appeal to your generosity."

"But what can I _do_? I'm not hurt. If it had been the other way round--_you_ scuttling along, I mean; I really do believe _I_ might have looked into the hatter's. Besides, when we were safe in the cab.... I mean, I'm glad! It was experience: oh, and past. I loved it and the streets, and the shops, and all those grinning, gnashing faces, and even you.... It was wildly _exciting_, Mr Crimble, can't you _see_? And now"--I ended triumphantly--"and now I have another novel!"

At this, suddenly overcome, I jumped up from my chair and ran off into my bedroom as if in search of the book. The curtains composed themselves behind me. In this inner quietness, this momentary release, I stood there, erect beside the bed--without a thought in my head. And I began slowly, silently--to laugh. Handkerchief to my lips, I laughed and laughed--not exactly like Pollie in the cab, but because apparently some infinitely minute being within me had risen up at remembrance of the strange human creature beyond the curtains who had suddenly before my very eyes seemed to have expanded and swollen out to double his size.

Oh, what extraordinary things life was doing to me. How can I express myself? For that pip of a moment I was just an exquisite icicle of solitude--as if I had never been born. Yet there, under my very nose, was my bed, my gla.s.s, my hair-brushes and bottles--"Here we all are, Miss M."--and on the other side of the curtains.... And how contemptuous I had been of Pollie's little lapse into the hysterical! I brushed my handkerchief over my eyes, tranquillized my features, and sallied out once more into the world.

"Ah, here it is," I exclaimed ingenuously, and lifting my _Sense and Sensibility_ from where it lay on the floor beside my table, I placed it almost ceremoniously in Mr Crimble's hands. A visible mist of disconcertion gathered over his face. He looked at the book, he opened it, his eye strayed down the t.i.tle-page.

"Yes, yes," he murmured, "Jane Austen--a pocket edition. Macaulay, I remember...." He closed-to the covers again, drew finger and thumb slowly down the margin, and then leaned forward. "But you were asking me a question. What could I have _done_? Frankly I don't quite know. But I might have protected you, driven the rabble off, taken you---- The Good Shepherd. But there, in short," and the sun of relief peered through the glooms of conscience, "I did nothing. That was my failure. And absurd though it may seem, I could not rest until, as a matter of fact, I had unbosomed myself, confessed, knowing you would understand." His tongue came to a standstill. "And when," he continued in a small, constrained voice, and with a searching, almost appealing glance, "when Miss _Bowater_ returns, you will, I hope, allow me to make amends, to prove---- She would never--for--forgive...."

The fog that had been his became mine. In an extravagance of attention to every syllable of his speech as it died away uncompleted in the little listening room I mutely surveyed him. Then I began to understand, to realize where my poor little "generosity" was to come in.

"Ah," I replied at last, forlornly, our eyes in close communion, "she won't be back for months and months. And anyhow, she wouldn't, I am sure, much _mind_, Mr Crimble."

"Easter," he whispered. "Well, you will write, I suppose," and his eye wandered off as if in search of the inkpot, "and no doubt you will share our--your secret." There was no vestige of interrogation in his voice, and yet it was clear that what he was suggesting I should do was only and exactly what he had come that afternoon to ask me not to do. Why, surely, I thought, examining him none too complimentarily, I am afraid, he was merely playing for a kind of stalemate. What funny, blind alleys love leads us into.

"No," I said solemnly. "I shall say nothing. But that, I suppose, is because I am not so brave as you are. Really and truly, I think she would only be amused. Everything amuses her."

It seemed that we had suddenly rea.s.sumed our natural dimensions, for at that he looked at me _tinily_ again, and with the suggestion, to which I was long accustomed, that he would rather not be observed while so looking.

On the whole, ours had been a gloomy talk. Nevertheless, _there_, not on my generosity, but I hope on my understanding, he reposed himself, and so reposes to this day. When the door had closed behind him, I felt far more friendly towards Mr Crimble than I had felt before. Even apart from the Almighty, he had made us as nearly as he could--equals. I tossed a pleasant little bow to his snowdrops, and, catching sight of Mr Bowater's fixed stare on me, hastily included _him_ within its range.

Mr Crimble, Mrs Bowater informed me the following Sunday evening, lived with an aged mother, and in spite of his sociability and his "fun," was a lonely young man. He hadn't, my landlady thought, yet seen enough of the world to be of much service to those who had. "They," and I think she meant clergymen in general, as well as Mr Crimble in particular, "live a shut-in, complimentary life, and people treat them according.

Though, of course, there's those who have seen a bit of trouble and cheeseparing themselves, and the Church is the Church when all's said and done."

And all in a moment I caught my first real glimpse of the Church--no more just a number of St Peterses than I was so many "organs," or Beechwood was so many errand boys, or, for that matter, England so many counties. It was an idea; my attention wandered.

"But he was very anxious about the concert," I ventured to protest.

"I've no doubt," said Mrs Bowater shortly.

"But then," I remarked with a sigh, "f.a.n.n.y seems to make friends wherever she goes."

"It isn't the making," replied her mother, "but the keeping."