My arrangement with Mrs. Monnerie had been that, however long I might stay with her, I should still be in the nature of a visitor; that No. 2, in fact, should be my town house, and Mrs. Bowater’s my country. But I was soon to realize that she intended Mrs. Bowater to have a very small share in me. She pretended to be jealous of me, to love me for my own sweet sake; and even while I knew it was mere pretence, it left its flattery on my mind; and for the first time in my life I feigned to be even smaller than I was; would mince my speeches, affect to be clever, even ogle the old lady, until it might be supposed we were a pair of queerly-assorted characters in a charade.
Nevertheless, I had had the obstinacy to insist that I should be at liberty to stay with Mrs. Bowater whenever I wished to do so; and I was free to invite any friend to visit me I chose. “And especially, my dear, anyone an eighth as exquisite,” Mrs. Monnerie had kindly put it. It may seem a little strange that all these obligations should have been on her side. But Mrs. Monnerie’s whims were far more vigorous than most people’s principles. The dews of her loving kindness descended on me in a shower, and it was some little time before I began to feel a chill.
Not the least remarkable feature of No. 2 was its back view. The window of my room came down almost to the floor. It “commanded” an immense zinc cistern—George, by name—a Virginia Creeper groping along a brick wall, similar cisterns smalling into the distance, other brick walls and scores of back windows. Once, after contemplating this odd landscape for some little time, it occurred to me to speculate what the back view from the House of Life was like; but I failed to conceive the smallest notion of it. I rarely drew my curtains, and, oddly enough, when I did so, was usually in a vacant or dismal mood. My lights were electric. One simply twisted a tiny ivory button. At first their clear and coloured globes, set like tiny tulips in a candelabra, charmed my fancy. But, such is custom, I soon wearied of them, and pined for the slim, living flame of candles—even for my coarse old night-light swimming in its grease in a chipped blue and white saucer.
XXXIII
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 knickknacks—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 knickknack 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 hummingbird, 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
