“The appearance of Matilda is Quakerish and even shabby.”
Once, in time long past, there were passages between Joey and Matilda. They were placed side by side, and as Joey looked on that demure Quakeress, her dove colour unrelieved except by two plumes of sober crimson; as he gazed on that marble eye while Matilda huskily and rapidly repeated the name of the kitchen-maid, Joey was aware of an emotion beautiful and strange. Self-control is a foreigner to that hot southern nature, and without a pause for thought he extended a claw—it was all he could do—to the lady.
In a moment Matilda stooped and bit it; and as he screamed with pain and anger she dropped it and burst into a hoarse fit of laughter.
Joey never offended in this way again, but this repulse is the reason of his deep, revengeful jealousy of Matilda.
Another simple scene recurs to my mind. Joey was in the drawing-room, Matilda in a room just above; the doors of both were open. Joey could therefore hear when a passing friend engaged Matilda in conversation. His angry excitement burst all bounds at last, and “Pop goes the Weasel,” sung with agonised fervour, came floating up the stairs. Matilda listened with her head on one side, and then sang slowly and impressively a few bars of a species of Gregorian chant. Silence fell below.
Now when they sit side by side they are leagues apart. Joey is viciously watching for any mark of preference given to Matilda, more ready than usual to drive his beak like a sledge-hammer at the finger of the unwary. And Matilda is calmly occupied in observing Joey. Some time in the course of the next seventy years or so she will begin to reproduce Joey; to indicate the way in which he spreads his tail like a fan and grubs in seed and sand, uttering half-audible exhortations to himself, which a stranger would take for imprecations on things in general. How satisfying it would be to an angry man if he could say, “Come on, Joey” in such a tone.
But they do not often sit side by side, for, though you would not think it, Matilda occupies a lower social station than Joey. While his home is in the drawing-room Matilda is the life and soul of the kitchen. Does this humble Matilda? On the contrary; she knows that the true gentlewoman is at home everywhere. If she is brought into the drawing-room she is neither embarrassed nor elate; only a pleasant and discreet reserve takes the place of a free flow of conversation. When she returns to the kitchen she talks rapidly for a long time, and is believed to be describing the things she has seen and commenting on the conversation.[2]
[2] It must not be imagined that Matilda always confines herself to generalities. She asked a housemaid kindly, “When are you going for your holidays?” And on a rapid entrance and exit of the cook inquired so politely, “And who was that?” that her companion immediately replied, “That was Mrs. ——.”
Alas for the sterner sex! When Joey undergoes an enforced eclipse in the pantry he abandons himself to the situation. He may be heard whistling “Pop goes the Weasel” line by line with his attendant. But this is no honest geniality; for if he is carried back to the drawing-room, and finds waiting for him a friend of higher social station, he turns and bites, if he can, the hand that late has fed him. Perhaps it is Matilda’s intellectual interests that preserve her from such vulgarity. She devotes herself to observation for the education of her mind, and when she is not observing she is recording the results of observation. The reproduction of simple sounds comes quickly, for she is a slave to realism. The screams of the peacock, the failing note of the cuckoo, cuck-cuck-oo, the angry mew of the cat, are rapidly and all too accurately reproduced. So, too, the kitchen-maid, before she had served her apprenticeship, was wont to hear her own sad name in corners cried in tones of growing exasperation. We were then living in a town; Matilda’s apartment gave on the street, and the errand boys helped her out with the performance.