Life was seeming unutterably dreary when Aunt Cuckoo came into the room, her eyes flashing with anticipation, her being rejuvenated by excitement, to say that one of the maids had a stiff neck, and to ask if Jasmine would immediately go to her room and operate on it.
Jasmine followed her aunt upstairs, and expressed her sense of life's disillusionment by the vigour with which she manipulated, man-handled indeed, the neck and shoulders of the young woman, who after numerous vain protests burst into hysterical tears and gave a month's notice.
"Funny, isn't it," said Aunt Cuckoo when they left the room, "what little gratitude you find among the lower classes nowadays?"
"I think I did rather hurt her," said Jasmine, who was by now feeling rather penitent.
"I think you did it very well," said Aunt Cuckoo, "and I am very pleased with you. And of course her shoulders are so much harder than my poor arm."
Aunt Cuckoo, for all her folly, had for Jasmine a certain pathos, and during the late autumn and winter while she stayed at The Cedars she to some extent grew accustomed to the atmosphere of cold storage which prevailed there; she began to contemplate the slow freezing of herself during the years to come into an Aunt Cuckoo; she preferred the notion of a frozen self, which after all would always be liable to melt, to the notion of a withered self like Cousin Edith's, which would indubitably never bourgeon again. She did sometimes lunch with the Hector Grants at Harley Street, and she found them more insufferable every time she went there. Aunt Cuckoo could not help feeling gratified by this, because for many years now she had been jealous of Lady Grant.
"Of course I should not like to appear as if I was criticizing her," she would say to Jasmine. "But I understand what you mean about Lettice and Pamela, and I can't help feeling that they have been spoilt. It's the same with cats," she murmured, in a vague effort to elucidate the moral atmosphere.
When Aunt Cuckoo talked like this, Jasmine began to wonder if she could confide in her about Harry Vibart; but when she had to frame the words, her account of the affair began to seem so pretentious and exaggerated that she could not bring herself to the point, would blush in embarrassment, and hide her confusion by an energetic combing of Mustapha.
In the middle of the winter Aunt Cuckoo began to throw out hints of what Jasmine might expect from herself and Uncle Eneas in the future. She never went so far as a definite statement that they intended to make her their heiress; the prospect of future wealth was merely hinted at like the landscape under a false dawn. Yet even this glimmer over something beyond was enough to alarm Jasmine with the idea that her uncle and aunt would suppose that she was aiming at an inheritance. She tried by diligent combing of cats, by concentration upon the massage of Aunt Cuckoo's arm, and by the rapidity of her walking pace, to show that she appreciated what was being done for her in the present; but the moment Aunt Cuckoo began to talk of the future she was discouragingly rude. Nevertheless these hints, notwithstanding Jasmine's reception of them, would probably have taken a more definite shape if on the anniversary of the conversion of Saint Paul Aunt Cuckoo had not taken shelter from a sudden storm of rain in a small Catholic mission church at Golders Green. Here she felt vague aspirations at the sight of half a dozen poor people praying in the rich twilight of imitation glass windows; but she was more particularly and more deeply impressed by the behaviour of a woman in rusty mourning in bringing a pallid little boy to the feet of a saintly image that was attracting Aunt Cuckoo's attention and everybody's attention by lifting his habit and pointing to a sore on his leg. After praying to an accompaniment of maternal prods the child was bidden to deposit at the base of the image a bandage of lint, after which he stuck six candles on the pricket, lighted them, and followed his mother out of the church with many a backward glance to observe the effect of his illumination. Aunt Cuckoo was puzzled by all this, and overtaking the woman in the porch asked what it meant. She was told that the saint's name was Roch and that he had miraculously cured her little boy of an ulcerous leg. Aunt Cuckoo's arm immediately began to pain her acutely. On feeling this pain she went back into the church and prayed shyly, for she was not a Catholic and she had only heard the saint's name for the first time. The pain vanished as abruptly as it came, and Aunt Cuckoo, thrilled by the miracle, hurried home to tell Jasmine all about it. As soon as her mind had turned its attention to miracles Aunt Cuckoo began to fancy that she was being specially favoured by Heavenly manifestations.
"Of course one has said 'How miraculous!' before," she assured her niece. "But one employs terms so loosely. I learned that when I used to write." Aunt Cuckoo's voice, from many years of tonelessness, was, now that she was able to feel a genuine excitement, full of astonishing little squeaks and tremolos which had she been a clock would have led the listener to oil the works at once. "And the healing of my bad arm wasn't the only miracle," she hurried on. "Oh no, dear. I assure you it stopped raining the moment I came out of church, and you know how difficult it is to find a taxi when one requires one. Well, would you believe it, lo and behold, one pulled up just outside the church, and the moment I was inside it started to pour again. I'm so glad that you're a Catholic, dear. There, you see I'm already learning not to say Roman Catholic...."