On cloudless days the sun filled this square like a tank with a dry glare and heat in which even my salamanderish body sometimes gasped like a fish out of water. When rain fell out of the low, grey skies, and the scaling plane-trees hissed and the sparrows chirped, my spirits seemed to sink into my shoes. And fair or foul, London soot and dust were enemies alike to my eyes, my fingers, and my nose.
Even my beloved cloud-burdened north-west wind was never quite free of smuts and grit; and when blew the east! But it must be remembered how ignorant and local I was. In my long carriage journey to Mrs Monnerie's through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its capital is not a part of England, only a sprawling human growth in it; and though I soon learned to respect it as that, I could never see without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill.
Maybe my imagination had already been prejudiced by a coloured drawing which Mr Wagginhorne had sent me once for a Valentine when I was a child. It hangs up now in that child's nursery for a memento that I have been nearly dead. In the midst of it on a hill, in gold and faded carmine, encircled with great five-pointed blue stars, and with green, grooved valleys radiating from its castellated towers, is a city—Hierusalem. A city surmounted by a narrow wreathing pennon on which, inscribed in silver, are the words: "Who heareth the Voice of My Spirit? And how shall they who deceive themselves resort unto Me?"
Scattered far and near about this central piece, and connected with it by thin lines like wandering paths radiating from its gates across mountain, valley, and forest, lie, like round web-like smudges, if seen at a distance, the other chief cities of the world, Rome, Venice, Constantinople, Paris, and the rest. London sprawls low in the left-hand corner. The strongest glass cannot exhaust the skill and ingenuity of the maker of this drawing (an artist who, Mr Wagginhorne told me, was mad, poor thing—a man in a frenzy distemper—his very words). For when you peer close into this London, it takes the shape of a tusked, black, hairy boar, sprawling with hoofs outspread, fast asleep. And between them, and even actually diapering the carcass of the creature, is a perfect labyrinth of life—a high crowned king and queen, honey-hiving bees, an old man with a beard as if in a swoon, robbers with swords, travellers with beasts and torches, inns, a cluster of sharp-coloured butterflies (of the same proportion) fluttering over what looks like a clot of dung, a winding river, ships, trees, tombs, wasted unburied bodies, a child issuing from an egg, a phœnix taking flight: and so on. There is no end to this poor man's devices. The longer you look, the more strange things you discover. Yet at distance of a pace or two, his pig appears to fade into nothing but a cloudy-coloured cobweb—one of the many around his bright-dyed Hierusalem.
Now I cannot help wondering if this peculiar picture may not already have tinged a young mind with a curious horror of London; even though my aversion may have needed no artificial aid.
Still I must not be ungrateful. These were vague impressions; and as an actual fact, Mrs Monnerie had transported me into the very midst of the world of rank and fashion. Her No. 2 was now my home. The spaciousness, the unnatural solitude, the servants who never so much as glanced at me until after my back was turned, the hushed opulency, the formality! It was impossible to be just my everyday Miss M. My feet never found themselves twirling me round before their mistress was aware of it. I all but gave up gossiping with myself as I went about my little self-services.
Parochial creature that I was—I missed Mrs Bowater's "homeliness." To have things out of proportion to my body was an old story. To that, needless to say, I was perfectly accustomed. But here things were at first out of all proportion to my taste and habits, a very different thing. It is, in fact, extremely difficult in retrospect to get side by side again with those new experiences—with a self that was at one moment intoxicated and engrossed, and the next humiliated and desperately ill at ease, at the novelty of her surroundings.
I had a maid, too, Fleming, with a pointed face and greenish eyes, who, unlike Mrs Bowater, did not snort, but sniffed at things. Whether I retired for the night or rose in the morning, it was always to the accompaniment of a half-audible sniff. And I was never perfectly certain whether that sniff was one of the mind, or of the body, or of both. I found it hard to learn to do little enough for myself. Fleming despised me—at least so I felt—even for emptying my wash-basin, or folding my nightgown. Worse, I was never sure of being alone: she stole about so softly on her duties. And then the "company."
Not that the last black days at Beechwood were not even blacker for the change. At first I tried to think them quietly over, to ravel out my mistakes, and to get straight with my past. But I couldn't in all that splendour. I had to spend much more time in bewaring of faux pas, and in growing accustomed to being a kind of tame, petted animal—tame even to itself, I mean. So Mrs Bowater's went floating off into the past like a dingy little house on the edge of a muddy river. Amid that old horror and anxiety, even my dear Pollie's wedding day had slipped by unheeded. How often my thoughts went back to her now. If only she could have been my Fleming.
I tried to make amends for my forgetfulness—even to the extent of pocketing my pride, and commissioning Fleming to purchase for me (out of the little stock of money left me by Fanny) a cradle, as a wedding present for Pollie, and a chest of tools for her husband. Oddly enough, she did not sniff at this request. Her green eyes almost sparkled. At the very word, wedding, she seemed to revive into a new woman. And Pollie completely forgave me:—