Regarded as a bibelot, Mrs. Wigger was, I think, of the first perfection. In her own genre, so to say, she was as finished, as impossible of improvement, as an Elgin marble, a Grecian urn, a bit of Chinese blue and white, a fan of old Japan, a Vermeer, a Whistler symphony, a caricature by Max Beerbohm. She was of massive mould and very individually shapen. Her face was very large and very red and heavily pock-marked. In her bizarre garments, in some indefinable way she imparted to the character of the born slattern something of the Grand Style. Her utterance was quavered in a weird, cracked voice, which had somewhat an effect as of the wind crying high aloft in a ship's rigging. She slipslod about, always a bit unsteadily. Her movements and her manner generally, I felt, made it not unreasonable to suppose that she had in secret certain habits no longer widely approved by society. The apple of her eye was an unkempt parrot which spent its days in vainly attempting to ascend the embracing sides of a tin bathtub.
Landladies, beyond all other persons, have the esoteric power of becoming for one the geniuses of places. It would, for instance, be quite impossible for anyone to visualize my Mrs. Cheeseman torn from, as you might say her context. If you were asked to describe Mrs. Cheeseman you would naturally do it in this way: You would say, "Well, I wonder what has become of the sweetest, quaintest, fairest old inn in all England!" And into your mind would come a rapid cinematograph picture:
A highway winding out of Dorking, stretching its way between hills to the sea. You round a turn and see before you long, low, glistening white stables—the stables, evidently, of a coaching inn. And presently you come into view of an ancient, white, stone building with a "Sussex roof." From a tall post before the door swings the board of the "King's Head." White ducks ride in a pond at the roadside there. Round this inn which you are approaching is the greenest, handsomest hedge ever seen. And along the road beyond you perceive the cottages of a wee village.
"We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." The romance of destiny which in its inscrutable way has been leading you all your long life long to the bosom, if I may so put it, of Mrs. Cheeseman, reveals its beneficence now by carefully graduated steps. At the other side of the main bulk of the "King's Head," which it was given you first to see, you come upon a delicious little flagged yard leading to another arm of the house, older still, very venerable, with a high roof low descending, a roof which tucks under its projecting wing many oddly placed little latticed windows gayly sporting innumerable tiny panes. Like a miniature cathedral spire, a tall, quaint chimney stands sentinel at one corner, and several chimney-pots peep over the roof's dark crown.
Up this little yard, bounded on one side by a multicolored flower garden whose fragrance bathes you in a softening vapor of perfume, you enter, by a door which requires you to stoop, the wee taproom. Here: a cavernous fireplace, settles are within against its sides, a gigantic blackened crane swung across its middle, and a cubby-hole of a window at its back. Above it is swung an ancient fowling-piece. The stone floor of the room, like the ancient flags without, is worn into dips and hollows. Along the window-sill of an oblong window measuring one wall is a bright parade of potted plants.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is something psychic about landladies. As you look about you at the environment in which you find yourself, you experience a premonition that you are nearing an affinity in the landlady world. It is strange, too, that there are places where you have never been before (in the life which you consciously remember) that give you at once completely the feeling of your having arrived at the home familiar to your spirit. And there presently occurs here an event in your career predetermined (I doubt not) æons and æons ago. A buxom body with the most glorious complexion (you ween) in all England—which is to say in the world—enters the ancient room: a lass whose rosy, honest, pedestrian face and bursting figure are to become forever more for you the connotation of the name "Maggie." The daughter, this, (you later learn) of your Mrs. Cheeseman.
Soon it is all arranged, and you are having your tea—a "meat tea"—in the sitting-room of the "King's Head," your sitting-room now. A bucolic slavey—a person whose cheerful simpleness is like to that of the little creatures of the field—attends you. In this commodious apartment of yours is a great scintillation of chintz; flowers, in pots and vases, everywhere caress the eye; and the fancy is kindled by the spectacle of many stuffed birds in glass cases. On the heavily flowered wall hangs a handsome specimen of the "glass" (invariably found in England) for forecasting the weather; a "pianoforte," as piquantly old-fashioned as a cocked hat, crosses one end wall; and venerable paintings (which time has mellowed to the richness and the general color effect of an old plug of tobacco), bright sporting prints, and antique oddities of furniture to an extent that it would require a catalogue to name, all combine to give an air of true sitting-room opulence to the chamber.
But of landladies, and the connotations of landladies, one could write a book of several volumes; and it being a very fair day, and a Sunday, and the first cool breath after a very hot summer, I do not think I shall write those volumes this afternoon; I shall go out for a bit of air and a look at the world.
CHAPTER XXIII
AN IDIOSYNCRASY
THEN there's the matter of these dedications. Several weeks ago I received a communication. I think it was sent by Miss Katherine Lord, or maybe it was Hamlin Garland. Anyhow, it was an invitation. The upshot of this invitation was that the annual exhibit of the "best books of the year" held at the National Arts Club, New York City, under the auspices of the Joint Committee of Literary Arts was now going—or was just about to go. Further, it was conveyed that the opening evening of the exhibit would be devoted to a reception for the authors of the books exhibited. Also, that on this evening speeches would be made by a number of distinguished persons acquainted with this matter on the subject of the idiosyncrasies of authors and editors. Further than this, this invitation made clear beyond all manner of reasonable doubt that the pleasure of the evening would be generally felt to be sadly incomplete without the presence there among the speakers of myself.