Ah, yes—that “stout, elderly woman”; so [p 179] />]superabundant whether as a type or as an individual; so prone—or “liable”—to impinge tyrannously upon the consciousness of her fellow-traveller, and in no less a degree upon that of the public servant, who, from his place aloft, guides, as it is phrased, the destinies of the conveyance. It was, indeed, one of the most notable of these—a humble friend of my own—who had the fortune to make the acute, recorded, historic observation which, with the hearty, pungent, cursory brevity and point of his class and métier—the envy of the painstaking, voluminous analyst and artist of our period— But again I stray.
She was climbing up, or climbing down, perplexed equally, as I gather, by the management of her parapluie and of her—enfin, her petticoats. The candid anxiety of her round, underdone face, as she so wonderfully writhed to maintain the standard of pudicity dear—even vital—to the matron of the British Isles appealed—vividly, though mutely—to the forbearance that, seeing, would still seem not to see, her foot, her ankle, her mollet—as I early learned to say in Paris, where, however, so exigent a modesty is scarcely … well, scarcely.
“Madam,” the gracious fellow said in effect, “ne vous gênez pas.” Then he went on to assure her briefly that he was an elderly man; that he had “held the ribbons,” as they phrase it, for several [p 180] />]years; that many were the rainy days in London; that each of these placed numerous women—elderly or younger—in the same involuntary predicament as that from which she herself had suffered; and that so far as he personally was concerned he had long since ceased to take any extreme delight in the— Bref, he was charming; he renewed my fading belief—fading, as I had thought, disastrously but immitigably—in the capacity of the Anglo-Saxon for esprit; and I am glad indeed to have taken a line or so to record his mot.
III.—As finally elucidated by Arnold Bennett.
Maria Wickwyre, of the Five Towns, emerged from muddy Bombazine Lane and stood in the rain and wind at Pie Corner, eighty-four yards from the door of St. Jude’s chapel, in the Strand. She was in London! Yes, she was on that spot, she and none other. It might have been somewhere else; it might have been somebody else. But it wasn’t. Wonderful! The miracle of Life overcame her.
She had arms. Two of them. They were big and round, like herself. One held a large parcel (“package” for the American edition); the other, an umbrella. She also had two legs. She stood on them. If they had been absent, or if they had weakened, she would have collapsed. But they [p 181] />]held her up. Ah, the mysteries of existence! More than ever was she conscious of her firm, strong underpinning. Maria waved her umbrella and her parcel and stopped a ’bus. The driver was elderly, wrinkled, weatherbeaten. Maria got in and rode six furlongs and some yards to Mooge Road, and then she stopped the ’bus to get out.
If she was conscious of her upper members and their charges, she was still more conscious of her lower ones. If she had her parcel and her umbrella to think about, she also had her stockings and petticoats to consider. The wind blew, the rain drizzled, the driver looked around, wondering why Maria didn’t get out and have done with it.
“If he should see them!” she gasped. (You know what she meant by “them.”) Her round, broad face mutely implored the ’busman to look the other way.
He wearily closed his eyes. He had been rumbling through the Strand for thirty years. “Lor’, mum,” he said, “legs ain’t no treat to me!”
Maria collapsed, after all, and took the 4:29 for home that same afternoon.