Chapter Thirty-Three
Mrs Monnerie had rifled her collections for my use—pygmy Venetian glass, a silver-gilt breakfast and tea service, pygmy porcelain. There were absurd little mechanical knick-knacks—piping birds, a maddening little operatic clock of which I at last managed to break the mainspring, a musical chair, and so on. My bath was of jade; my table a long one of ebony inlaid with ivory, with puffing cherub faces at each corner representing the four winds. My own few possessions, I must confess, looked not only worn but provincial by comparison. But I never surprised myself actually talking to any of Mrs Monnerie's exquisite novelties as to my other dumb, old, wooden friends. She delighted in them far more than I.
I suppose, really to enjoy such pomp and luxury, one should be positively born in the purple; and then, I suppose, one must be careful that the dye does not go to the bone. Whether or not, I have long since come to the conclusion that I am vulgar by nature—like my mother tongue. And at times, in spite of my relief at being free of the blackness that had craped in my last days at Beechwood, I often found myself hungering for my Bowater parlour—even for its smell. Another thing I learned gradually at No. 2 was that I had been desperately old-fashioned; and that is, to some extent, to belong to the dead.
Mrs Monnerie's chief desire, no doubt, was to give her new knick-knack a suitable setting. But it may also have reminded her childlessness—for she, too, like Mrs Bowater, was "nothing much better than an aunt"—of her childhood. Of course I affected as much pleasure in it as I could, and was really grateful. But she greatly disliked being thanked for anything, and would blandly shut her eyes at the least manifestation of gratitude. "Humour me, humour me, humour me," she once petulantly nodded at me; "there are at least a hundred prayers in the Prayer Book, my pet, to one thanksgiving, and that's human nature all over." It was what my frame must have cost that scandalized me. When, one day, after rhapsodizing (not without a shudder) over a cape and hat, which she had given me, composed solely of the shimmering emerald feathers of the humming-bird, I rather tactlessly reminded her of my £110 a year, and of my determination to live within it, her eyelids pinched me a glance as if I had explained in public that I had been bitten by a flea.
Yet as time went on, a peculiar affection sprang up in me for this crowded and lonely old woman. It has survived sore trials. She was by turns generous and mean, honeyed and cantankerous, impulsive and scheming. Like Mrs Bowater, she disapproved of the world in general, and yet with how different a result. A restless, darting mind lay hidden behind the great mask of her countenance, with its heavy-lidded eyes and tower of hair. She loved to sit indolently peering, musing, and gossiping, twiddling the while perhaps some little antique toy in her capacious lap. I can boast, at any rate, that I was a spellbound listener, and devoured her peculiar wandering, satirical talk as if it had been manna from heaven.
It was the old, old story. Talking to me was the next most private thing to talking to herself; and I think she enjoyed for a while the company of so queer a confessor. Once, I remember, she confided to me the whole story of a girlish love affair, at least forty years old. I could hardly believe my eyes as I watched her; she looked so freshened and demure and spirited. It was as if she were her own twenties just dressed up. But she had a dry and acrid tongue, and spared nothing and nobody. To her and to Mrs Bowater I owe nearly all my stock of worldly wisdom. And now I shall never have time, I suppose, to sort it out.
Mr Monnerie, as Fleming confided in me one day—and the aristocracy was this extremely reticent and contemptuous creature's favourite topic of conversation—Mr Monnerie had been a banker, and had made a late and dazzling marriage; for Mrs Monnerie's blood was as blue as Caddis Bay on a cloudless morning. I asked Fleming if she had ever seen "Lord B.," and what kind of man he was. She never had; but remarked obscurely that he must have lived mainly on porridge, he had sown so many wild oats.