We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drew it back awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of preserved fruit—all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.
He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never sported, except when he was out.
Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white. But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors—black and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns; shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell! I wonder they never crack—with laughter or great, splitting sobs.
The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It says “not at home.” When we sport it—which is simply shutting it—we defy the world.
Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a mean, drab life!
We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs—all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.
He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion—as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates of the period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.
How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca—cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress—and they are hardly women.
Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.
“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about—paralysis. She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.”