“You may suppose that I bombarded my housekeeper with questions. What? Did a living counterpart of the sixteenth-century joculatrix exist in the nineteenth? What was her station in life? Where was she to be found? In reply, I elicited the fact that Jane Ladds was a countrywoman of my own, the daughter of a wheelwright living in the village of Wickham, in Dorsetshire, where I myself had first seen the light. Jane was some half dozen years my junior, it appeared. My mother had once taken her into her service as under-scullerymaid, but in a casual encounter with the last new baby (my brother Robert, now commanding his battery of the Royal Horse Artillery at Jelalabad), Jane’s facial eccentricities had produced such a marked effect (resulting in convulsions) that the unfortunate protégée had been hastily dismissed. Since when she had kept house for her father, and was probably keeping it still; there not being, said my housekeeper, the slightest human probability that any potential husband would endeavor to interfere with the wheelwright’s domestic arrangements.� There comes a twinkle into Andrew’s brown eyes.
“‘No man would be mad enough!’ the old lady said. Judge of her surprise when I turned upon her and ordered her to write—write at once to Dorsetshire, ascertain whether Jane was still alive, still available, willing to take service, under an old acquaintance, in a bachelor’s London establishment? Stunned as she was, my housekeeper obeyed. The wages I instructed her to offer were good. An answering letter arrived within the space of a week, announcing Jane Ladds’ willingness to accept the offered situation. The letter was nicely written. I read and reread it with morbid excitement. I looked forward to the day of the writer’s arrival with an excitement more morbid still. At last the day came, and the woman....�
We inspire deep breaths, and unanimously cry, “Go on!�
“My writing table was piled high with books—I couldn’t see her until she came round the corner,� says Andrew, “and stood by my chair. She wore her Sunday clothes—Wickham taste inclines to garments of many colors. In silence I contemplated one of the finest examples of the Animated Grotesque it had ever been my fortune to look upon. Her hair was then red—the brightest red. Her nose was not so much a nose as a pimple. Her mouth was the oddest of buttons. Her forehead a ponderous coffer of bone, overhanging and overshadowing the other features. She was lengthy of arm, short of leg, dumpy of figure. She did not walk—she waddled; she did not sit—she squatted. Her smile was a gash, her curtsy the bob of an elder-pith puppet. She was, as she is now, unique. You are all familiar with her appearance. Search your memories for the moment when that appearance dawned upon you first, intensify your surprise, quadruple your sensations of delight—add to these, imagine yourself dominated by a fascination, weird, strange—inexplicable. In a word——�
Andrew’s pipe is out; he is gesticulating excitedly, and his eyes have an odd gleam under his shaggy brows.
“She took possession of me. I had her constantly about me. She brought me everything I wanted. I was never tired of gloating over my new-found treasure. Every accent of her voice, every odd contortion of her features, every awkward movement of her body was a fresh revelation to me. All this while I was working at my book. It was said afterward, in the newspapers, that the entire work, especially the closing chapters on the Human Grotesque, had been written in a fever of enthusiasm. The reviewer never knew how rightly he had guessed. Some of the theories I propounded and proved were curious. That Ugliness is in reality the highest form of Beauty—beauty in the abstract—was one of the mildest. I believed it when I wrote it; for I was madly, passionately infatuated with the ugliest woman I had ever seen—my parlor maid, Jane Ladds!�
We hang upon his words so that our pipes go out, and our whisky and sodas stand untasted at our elbows.
“Yes,� says Andrew, drawing a long, hard breath, “she possessed my thoughts—dominated me—waking and sleeping. I had the queerest of dreams, in which, with a joy that was anguish, a rapture that was horror, I saw myself attending crowded assemblies with my wife, Jane Fenn, née Ladds, upon my arm. She wore my mother’s diamonds, a décolletée gown from Worth’s; and as we moved along together, sibilant whispers sounded in my ears, and astonished eyes said as plainly, ‘What an ugly woman!’
“Then would come other visions ... Jane at the head of my table ... Jane rocking the cradle of our eldest born—an infant who strongly resembled his mother ... Jane here, Jane there—Jane everywhere!... My nerves, you will guess, must have been in a very queer state.
“All the time Jane Ladds would be deftly moving about me, dusting my books and curios, or going on with her sewing, or, to the utter stupefaction of my housekeeper, I had issued orders that she should sit in the window, where my glance might dwell upon her whenever I lifted my head from my work. Late, late into the small hours, when the sky began to gray toward the dawning, and the ink in my stand got low, she used to keep me company. Not the faintest shadow of impropriety could attach to the association in any sane mind. My housekeeper thought it queer, but nothing more.