CHAPTER II
Household Gods
Punctually at four-thirty Miss Quincey vanished from the light of St. Sidwell's, Regent's Park, into the obscurity of Camden Town. Camden Town is full of little houses standing back in side streets, houses with porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size. Nobody ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side streets if they can possibly help it. The houses are all exactly alike; they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest against the advances of the pavement. Miss Quincey lived in half of one of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) with her old aunt Mrs. Moon and their old servant Martha. She had lived there five-and-twenty years, ever since the death of her uncle.
Tollington Moon had been what his family called unfortunate; that is to say, he had mislaid the greater portion of his wife's money and the whole of Juliana's and Louisa's; he, poor fellow, had none of his own to lose. Uncle Tollington, being the only male representative of the family, had been appointed to drive the family coach. He was a genial good-natured fellow and he cheerfully agreed, declaring that there was nothing in the world he liked better than driving; though indeed he had had but little practice in the art. So they started with a splendid flourishing of whips and blowing of horns; Tollington driving at a furious break-neck pace in a manner highly diverting and exhilarating to the ladies inside. The girls (they were girls in those days) sat tight and felt no fear, while Mrs. Moon, with her teeth shaking, explained to them the advantages of having so expert a driver on the box seat. Of course there came the inevitable smash at the corner. The three climbed out of that coach more dead than alive; but they uttered no complaints; they had had their fun; and in accidents of this kind the poor driver generally gets the worst of it.
Mrs. Moon at any rate found consolation in disaster by steadily ignoring its most humiliating features. Secure in the new majesty of her widowhood, she faced her nieces with an unflinching air and demanded of them eternal belief in the wisdom and rectitude of their uncle Tollington. She hoped that they would never forget him, never forget what he had to bear, never forget all he had done for them. Her attitude reduced Juliana to tears; in Louisa it roused the instinct of revolt, and Louisa was for separating from Mrs. Moon. It was then, in her first difference from Louisa, that Miss Quincey's tender and foolish little face acquired its strangely persistent air. Hitherto the elder had served the younger; now she took her stand. She said, "Whatever we do, we must keep together"; and she professed her willingness to believe in her uncle Tollington and remember him for ever.
To this Louisa, who prided herself on speaking the truth or at any rate her mind, replied that she wasn't likely to forget him in a hurry; that her uncle Tollington had ruined her life, and she did not want to be reminded of him any more than she could help. Moreover, she found her aunt Moon's society depressing. She meant to get on and be independent; and she advised Juliana to do the same.
Juliana did not press the point, for it was a delicate one, seeing that Louisa was earning a hundred and twenty pounds a year and she but eighty. So she added her eighty pounds to her aunt's eighty and went to live with her in Camden Street North, while Louisa shrugged her shoulders and carried herself and her salary elsewhere.
There was very little room for Mrs. Moon and Juliana at number ninety. The poor souls had crowded themselves out with relics of their past, a pathetic salvage, dragged hap-hazard from the wreck in the first frenzy of preservation. Dreadful things in marble and gilt and in papier-maché inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, rickety work tables with pouches underneath them, banner-screens in silk and footstools in Berlin wool-work fought with each other and with Juliana for standing-room. For Juliana, with her genius for collision, was always knocking up against them, always getting in their way. In return, Juliana's place at an oblique angle of the fireside was disputed by a truculent cabinet with bandy legs. There was a never-ending quarrel between Juliana and that piece of furniture, in which Mrs. Moon took the part of the furniture. Her own world had shrunk to a square yard between the window and the fire. There she sat and dreamed among her household gods, smiling now and then under the spell of the dream, or watched her companion with critical disapproval. She had accepted Juliana's devotion as a proper sacrifice to the gods; but for Juliana, or Louisa for the matter of that, she seemed to have but little affection. If anything Louisa was her favourite. Louisa was better company, to begin with; and Louisa, with her cleverness and her salary and her general air of indifference and prosperity, raised no questions. Besides, Louisa was married.
But Juliana, toiling from morning till night for her eighty pounds a year; Juliana, painful and persistent, growing into middle-age without a hope, Juliana was an incarnate reproach, a perpetual monument to the folly of Tollington Moon. Juliana disturbed her dream.
But nobody else disturbed it, for nobody ever came to their half of the house in Camden Street North. Louisa used to come and go in a brief perfunctory manner; but Louisa had married the Greek professor and gone away for good, and her friends at St. Sidwell's were not likely to waste their time in cultivating Juliana and Mrs. Moon. The thing had been tried by one or two of the younger teachers who went in for all-round self-development and were getting up the minor virtues. But they had met with no encouragement and they had ceased to come. Then nobody came; not even the doctor or the clergyman. The two ladies were of one mind on that point; it was convenient for them to ignore their trifling ailments, spiritual or bodily. And as soon as they saw that the world renounced them they adopted a lofty tone and said to each other that they had renounced the world. For they were proud, Mrs. Moon especially so. Tollington Moon had married slightly, ever so slightly beneath him, the Moons again marking a faint descent from the standing of the Quinceys. But the old lady had completely identified herself, not only with the Moons, but with the higher branch, which she always spoke of as "my family." In fact she had worn her connection with the Quinceys as a feather in her cap so long that the feather had grown, as it were, into an entire bird of paradise. And once a bird of paradise, always a bird of paradise, though it had turned on the world a somewhat dilapidated tail.