He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan. He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet—to my unpractised eye—looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me to seat myself on the glass cases. So I could gloat on their contents at leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent student.
Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would melt away like snow in Mrs Monnerie's library. A button specially fixed for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be strewn around me on the floor—gilded and leathery volumes, some of them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds and flowers, gems and glass, ruins, palaces, mountains—hunting, cock-fighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies.
The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs Monnerie's library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted—old plays, and street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melancholy with its borage and hellebore and the hatted young man in love; Bel and the Dragon, the Newgate Calendar. I even nibbled at Debrett—and clean through all its "M's." The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.
They may have been harmful; but I certainly can't say that I regret having read them—which may be part of the harm. You could tell the really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet hated the cloud they cast over me—like some horrible treacle in the mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and God and Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my imagination went off the other way—with my heart in its pocket. Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a pencil, can not make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a Squid, and a very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works on the shelves.
When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs Monnerie, I thought her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old mole habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don't think it was either Mrs Monnerie's or Percy's pruderies that I had to be careful about. To make him laugh was one of the most hateful of my experiences at No. 2.
I have read somewhere that the human instincts are "unlike Apollyon, since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress themselves up as Apes and Mandrils; he as a ringed, supple, self-flattering, seductive serpent." Possibly that has something to do with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don't know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I haven't the faintest wish in the world to "perpetuate my species." Not that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing. Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an Old Maid. Calling up Spirits from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when I brood on what the gift of it implies.
Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs Monnerie—that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time never stands still.
Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second visit to Mrs Bowater's, the almost incredible news reached me that she was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me good-bye. It was Mr Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the "good nursing." Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened "to carry him off into the next." At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor old friend was in.
She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her husband's letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:—
"Dear Emily,—The leg's giving me the devil in this hole of a place. It looks as if I shouldn't get through with it. I should be greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They'll give you all the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen. My love to Fanny. What's she looking like now? I should like to see her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You've got about a month or three weeks, I should think; if that.
"I remain, your affec. husband,
"Joseph Bowater."