Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs Monnerie was turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do; where to hide; how to "make myself small" during those torpid August days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac bush in the Square garden, I strayed off--my eyes idly glancing from straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust--down a narrow deserted side street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a black-green churchyard among tombstones.

A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on high. Quiet began to steal over me--long centuries of solitude had filled this vacancy as with a dream.

It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown--but to whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was this church merely the house of a G.o.d? There were G.o.ds and temples all over the world. Was it a house of _the_ G.o.d? Or only of "their" G.o.d? In a sense I knew it was also _my_ G.o.d's, but how much more happily confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore.

Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be different from all other human beings?

A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the m.u.f.fled thumping of the invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand, staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back and back--Lyme Regis, Mrs Bowater's--and f.a.n.n.y, Lyndsey, my mother and father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as gla.s.s. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.

And there was Mr Crimble--an immeasurable distance away; yet he had still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes wandered over my silk skirt and shoes.

My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It may sound absurd, but I had never _vividly_ realized it before. And how solemnly sitting there--like a spider in wait for flies. "For goodness'

sake, Miss M.," I said to myself, "cheer up. You are being deadly dull company--always half afraid. They daren't really do anything to you, you know. Face it out." And even while I was muttering, I was reading the words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: "Jenetta Parker"--only two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:--

"Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh: For, where I lie, Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast: It was; and now is past."

I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in obedience to her whisper, a much more n.i.g.g.ardly handful of none too bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer--part pity, part melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta; crossed myself and bowed to the altar--dulled gems of light the gla.s.s--and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed cobbles of the Mews and--trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner scared me out of _that_ little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I edged back as fast as I could to No. 2.

But it did me good--that visit. It was as if I had been looking back and up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old laboratory--a few bottles, a spider's web, and an occasional glint of moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace.

Chapter Forty-Two

Susan's visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy's multiplied.

Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs Monnerie's gaze would rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to whom Mrs Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be doing his best to cultivate his aunt's graces, would meander "in attendance" round and round the Square's square garden, while f.a.n.n.y's arm had now almost supplanted Mrs Monnerie's ebony cane. When Mrs Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least f.a.n.n.y seemed to think so. But since Percy's conversation had small attractions for me, it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared at nothing under a tree.

At less than nothing--for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I seemed to have lost the secret of day-dreaming. And if the quant.i.ty of aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days, besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes.

As for f.a.n.n.y, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, "Oh, I say, Miss Bowater!" and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have some one to discuss herself with, f.a.n.n.y so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in for money.

It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs Monnerie's--until, that is, f.a.n.n.y's arrival--she had transported her "Queen Bee," as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs de la Rue designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and flauntings, such an inward young woman, what alt.i.tudes I might have scaled. Mrs Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular "line"--but I don't think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.

That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and inscribed, "To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens."

Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed debutante of the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. "There was once a Diogenes whom the G.o.ds shut up in a tub."--Poor Mr Wagginhorne, he had been, after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.

In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs Monnerie's generosities, by my "chances," while I was with her. I just grew hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As f.a.n.n.y had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as rare, intelligence.

The society "Beauties," now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me--well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either s.e.x reminded me of petunias--the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure _pure_ admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that's a very different thing.

There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind--I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.

So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs Ballard, used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called "clever" people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes--a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit.

Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men's--and women's--experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amus.e.m.e.nts at Mrs Bowater's to imagine myself in strange places--keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of s.p.a.ce, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on any one I disliked at Mrs Monnerie's so as to enter _in;_ no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr Daniel Lambert.

On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey--and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore _those_ eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet's, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats--all three of them comparatively little men.

However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs Monnerie's, I never caught any one making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs Monnerie's friends talking to one another--discussing plays and pictures and music and so on--anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.

Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the coc.o.o.n more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not "out of their power and love"--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about "beauty," too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than--well, its "meaning." As if a b.u.t.terfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's way.

But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never "done" anything, nor "been" anything, except--and that half-heartedly--myself. No wonder I was censorious.

If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually polite enough; but--like the Beauties--inclined to be absent and restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau.

There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.

Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles d.i.c.kens himself with a copy of _David Copperfield_, and had actually sat on the young novelist's knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs Monnerie's enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.

I once ventured to ask him how to write.

His face grew very solemn. "Lord have mercy upon me," he said, "_to write_, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask G.o.d to forgive the blots." Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyegla.s.ses with his silk pocket handkerchief.

I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: "But, dear Mr ----, would you have me die of anaemia?"

And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next "Black Pudding Day" tempted us, we would collaborate.

Having heard _his_ views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: "So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?"

He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. "What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why--merely with brains," he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the _mot_ is traditional.

And last, how to "act": for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that?

More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what not. In consequence, I often amused Mrs Monnerie's friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, "How nave!"

How I detested the word. Nave--it was simply my ill-bred earnestness.

Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even t.i.tter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What you _could_ be serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard--that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it.

How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if f.a.n.n.y had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, to _my_ proportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absent-minded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining.

How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don't know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism--well, I may be smug enough, but I don't, and won't, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent's last golden oriole.

Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kind-hearted Glumdalc.l.i.tch. Am I not myself--not one of the quarrelsome "Fair Folks of the Woods"--but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes, "There's nowt like eels for eeliness."

I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others,--even though that body weighs me down to the earth like a stone--it is as if memory and consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary night-cry of Creation, "Let there be Light."

But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my story.

Chapter Forty-Three

The fact is, Miss M.'s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of which his aunt cordially approved--my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul, all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new device to give her _Snippety_, her _Moppet_, her _Pusskinetta_, her little _Binbin_, her _Fairy_, her _Pet.i.te Sereine_, an exquisite setting.