Blackboys! Wolverhampton! what was Wolverhampton beside Blackboys? What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations? What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?
Thane gambolled out, fawning and leaping round Chase, as Fortune opened the door of the house.
“Will you be having dinner, sir,” he asked demurely, “in the dining-room or in the garden this evening?”
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
To A.
I
The street door opened straight into the shop. The shop went back a long way, and was very dark and crowded with objects; everything seemed to have something else super-imposed upon it, either set down or hanging; thus against the walls dangled bunches of masks, like bunches of bananas, weapons of all kinds, shields and breastplates, swags of tinsel jewellery, wigs; upon the tops of the cupboards stood ewers, goblets, candelabra, all in sham gold plate; and the counters themselves were strewn with a miscellany of smaller theatrical necessities. It was only little by little that the glance, growing accustomed to the obscurity of the shop, began to disentangle object from object in this assortment. Everything was very dusty, with the exception of the shields and stray pieces of armour, which were brightly furbished and detached themselves like mirrors in their places on the walls, giving a distorted reflection in miniature of the recesses of the shop. There were stuffed animals, particularly dusty, with glass eyes and red open mouths showing two rows of teeth. There were grotesque cardboard heads, four times life-size, for giants. There was the figure of a knight in a complete suit of armour, with a faded blue cloak embroidered with the lilies of France hanging from his shoulders, and a closed helmet from which sprang a tuft of plumes that had once been white, but that were now grey with dust and age. This knight stood on the lowest step of the staircase that started in the middle of the shop and led to the upper floors of the house. A door across the top of the flight shut off the secrets of the upper storey from the observation of customers in the shop on the ground floor.
On the upper floors the house was old and rambling. It straggled up and down on different levels, along dark passages and into irregular little rooms, badly lit by small windows, and, like the shop, encumbered with objects; not only by the furniture, which was much too bulky for the size of the rooms, but also by properties which belonged to the shop, and which at various times had been huddled upstairs in the course of a clearance below. There were rows of dresses hanging on hooks, halberts and muskets propped up in the corners, albums of photographs for reference lying on the tables, pairs of boots and buskins thrust away behind the curtains and under the valences. You felt convinced that every drawer was packed so that it could only just be induced to shut, and that if you opened the door of a cupboard a crowd of imprisoned articles would come tumbling out helter-skelter. Everything was old and fusty; tawdry, and pretentious under its grime. Outside, the snow had gathered in tiny drifts along the leadwork of the latticed windows, making the rooms darker than they already were, and had heaped itself against the panes two or three inches above the window-sills. In the mornings the frost left fern-frond patterns on the panes; but although it was thus rendered almost impossible to see out, the bright frost and snow were a not unpleasant relief, for they were something clean and fresh, something of quite recent arrival and of certain departure, in contrast to the contents of the house, which had lain there accumulating for so many years, and which offered no promise of a disturbing hand in the years to come.
II
Over the shop door, on to the street, gold letters on a black ground said: Lydia Protheroe, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker. Lydia was not the name by which the proprietress of the shop had been baptized, neither was Protheroe the name of her parents; her husband’s name it could not be for she had never had a husband. What her real name was she had long since preferred to forget, and it was not difficult to do so, for as Lydia Protheroe she had made her fame, and in the town where she had come as a stranger there was no one to know her as anything else. The fame and the business she had built up together, amorously, jealously. It had taken her forty years. Somewhere back in the eighties she saw herself, young, determined, deaf to the outcry of her family; a young woman in a bombazine gown, with smooth bands of hair like Christina Rossetti, and arms folded, each hand clasping the opposite elbow; she saw herself thus, standing up, surveying the circle of her relations as they expostulated around her. They were outraged, they were aggrieved; they were respectable people who naturally disapproved of the stage; and here was Lydia—only to them she had not been Lydia, but Alice—announcing her intention of setting up a business which would engage her inevitably in theatrical circles. That a young woman should think of setting up business on her own account was bad enough, but such a business was an affront beyond discussion. She would bring shame upon them (here the personality of Lydia Protheroe first brilliantly germinated in Alice’s mind). They threw up their hands. Alice, who might enjoy all the advantages of a gentlewoman; Alice, who might reasonably have looked for a husband, a home, a family, of her own; Alice, who up to the age of twenty-one had given them scarcely any anxiety, who had been so very genteel, all things considered—in spite of a certain element of Puckishness in her which had peeped out so very rarely, a certain disrespect of their ideals—a mere trifle, a mere indication, had they but had the wit to read, of what was brewing beneath.
And what did she reply to their remonstrance? In what phrase, maddening because irrefutable, did she finally take refuge? That she was of age.