Part 8

It was absurd. She wanted independence, and she had got it, full measure, pressed down and running over. She had been glad. She had been unobserved, left alone to do the little daring, extravagant things which bubbled up so surprisingly from beneath that ladylike exterior, little things like pretending she was a boy in her brother’s overcoat, and drawing his pipe from the pocket to put it between her teeth. She had always done them surreptitiously, even though she knew she was quite alone. Sometimes she had made up her face with her own grease-paints, and, to the light of her candle, minced round the shop in a wig and a bustle. These were not things she would have had the courage to do with her family in the neighbourhood. She had believed that she would shed her family quite lightly, blissfully, and for some time she had even deluded herself into the conviction that this was so. Then she was forced to the realization that their conduct had, in fact, sunk very deeply into the tender parts of her being. This realization took a long time to come. She had her first misgivings when she found that she could not think of them without a surge of anger uneasily allied to a surge of pain. Their silence had surprised her extremely. Daily she had expected to have some news of them; she had expected that they would trace her out—nothing easier—and many times in her mind she rehearsed the scene when one of their number, probably Bertie, would appear in the doorway of the room, and turn by turn, menacing, cajoling, and alarmed, would try to persuade her to return. These persuasions she would reject; of that she had been fully determined. It was not that she hankered after forgiveness and the evening circle round the lamp; it was not that she had desired the rôle of the prodigal child, picturesque and doubly precious after her escapade; no, it was not that she had wanted her family, but rather that she had wanted her family to want her. And not that alone. It was not, as she told herself plaintively, merely the petty, personal grievance that had hurt her. It was a wider, deeper injury. She despised them—she was compelled to despise them—because of their miserable cautiousness, their rejection of her, who was of their own blood, when she became a danger to their respectability. How politic they had been! how sage! She hated them because they had made her ashamed of them. They had become, to her, symbolic of that wary, chary majority whose enemy she was.

For the appearance of Bertie, however, she had waited in vain. They had made no attempt to retrieve her, nothing to show that they cared whether she lived or died, starved or prospered. Her expectation had turned to surprise, surprise to indignation. When it had finally become quite clear that they intended to take no steps towards getting her back, she accepted their indifference with a shrug that she tried to make equally indifferent. But the sore had remained; more, it had eaten its way down into her. There was no affection left now; but before she died she would be even with them. It was not a sore that impaired her happiness. Rather she nursed it, as she nursed all the secrets of her inner life; and it provided an incentive, if she had needed one, a sort of aim and _raison d’être_. Not a day passed but she wondered whether they heard the name of the celebrated Lydia Protheroe, and connected it with that of the little Alice they had so improvidently driven from their midst. She hoped so; spitefully she hoped so. She even contemplated going to London, where her reputation would widen with more chance of reaching their ears; but she could not uproot herself from her old clandestine house. She loved it, for the sake of six o’clock and the turning of the key in the lock.

So she lived with her two passionate secrets side by side: her vindictiveness and her absorption in the unreality of her own existence.

The one intensified the other. An outcast from the auspices of middle-class propriety, she was driven into the refuge of her queer fantastic world. She sought that refuge fanatically, it was a facet of her vindictiveness. From out of that world of shadows she should, some day, thrust the rapier of mischief into the paunch of their gross solidity. It was all a little confused in her mind. But she felt that she owned, by right of citizenship—unshared citizenship, and consequent sovereignty, a sovereignty like that of Adam in Eden—she felt that she owned those privileges which had always given to the hero of mythical combat an advantage so preponderatingly unfair and so divine: the cap of invisibility, the armour that no sword could pierce, the sword that could pierce all armour, the winged shoes, the nightingale for counsellor, the philtre of oblivion, the mirror of prophecy. And at night, flitting round her house or down into her shop, to the echo of her own low laughter, now masked, now sandalled, now casqued within a head incongruous to the body and more incongruous to the feet, like the unfolding in a game of drawing Consequences, she knew herself elusive, evanescent, protean.

But no one must know, no one must suspect.

VIII

It was on an evening in December that Bertie’s letter came. She was alone in the shop when she heard the click of the letterbox, and, getting the letter out, she instantly recognized the writing, and her heart, for a second, ceased to beat. She stood holding the letter, incredulous, and strangely afraid. Without knowing in exactly what way the opportunity would come to her, she had never for one instant doubted that somehow or other it would come. She tore the flap and read:

“MY DEAR ALICE,—

“It is now some forty years since that terrible and painful scene which ended in our separation, and I think you will agree with me that so many years should have sufficed to heal our differences. We are both, my dear sister, past the prime of our life, and it is my earnest wish (as I trust it may be yours also) that a reconciliation should sweeten the advent of old age. I write, therefore, to propose that we take advantage of this season of good-will to bury the feud which has so long severed us. Our father and mother, as you must be well aware, have long since gone to their rest; but I remain (an old fellow now), and my dear wife and Emily and her husband. Would you give us a welcome if we came to visit you this Christmas-tide? I will add no entreaty, but leave the rest to the dictates of your heart.—Your brother,

“ALBERT.”

She recognized Bertie’s style; he had always been partial to books. She was convulsed by an inward laughter. So they had got wind of her riches! So they had an eye on her will! So her prosperity might sanction, at last, her discreditable trade! Would she welcome them, indeed? They should see how she would welcome them. Bertie, his wife, Emily, her husband—that would make four. She would have them all. There was plenty of room, fortunately, in the old house upstairs. She would have them on Christmas-eve. For a clear day, Christmas-day, she would have them to herself; all to herself! Her mind worked rapidly. She sat perched on a stool beside the counter, nibbling the tips of her fingers and making her plans. Her excitement was such that she found it difficult to keep the plans in her head consecutive; but she knew it was urgent that she should do so; she grabbed back her intentions as they tried to evade her. The envelope—Bertie had addressed her as “Miss Lydia Protheroe.” He must have winced as he saw himself confronted by the necessity of writing that name. Bertie must be sixty-five now; Emily must be fifty-nine. So Emily had married—the little sister; she had always been a sly, mercenary little thing. Emily, Bertie, Bertie’s wife—they all rushed back to her in their old familiarity. Bertie must have grown very like his father; she hated the implication of continuance. _Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa_; that was not the case with people like her father and Bertie. They were always the same. Their moral timidity extended itself into physical plagiarism. What would Emily’s husband be like? All sugar to the rich sister-in-law, well-primed by the rest of the family. She let out a shrill of laughter. She would get them all into the house. She would put up the shutters and turn the key, and her Christmas entertainment would begin.

IX

They arrived in response to her invitation, on Christmas-eve, all four of them, driving up in the station fly, Bertie on the box. She stood on the doorway, awaiting them, and “LYDIA PROTHEROE, Theatrical Costumier and Wig-maker,” flaunted over her head in the gilt lettering on the black ground. She was conscious of her exquisite disparity with this description. Sleek bands, and snuff-coloured gown; Bertie and Emily should find her as they had left her; the difference should only by degrees dawn upon them. She was glad now that she should have rejected the alteration in her appearance which, to a less subtle mind, would have been so blatantly indicated. There was nothing blatant about Lydia Protheroe; oh no! it was all very surreptitious, very delicate; she was an artist; everybody said so; her touch very light, but very certain. She was a rapier to Bertie’s bludgeon. Bertie: he had descended from the fly, he had taken both her hands in his, he had grown whiskers like his father’s, his father’s watch-chain (she recognized it) spanned his stomach, he was pressing her hands and looking into her eyes with what she was sure he inwardly phrased as “a world of tenderness and forgiveness,” while simultaneously he tried to scan out of the corner of his eye the wares displayed in her shop-window—the dragon’s head, the waxen figure of a fairy, the crowns and harps—and she saw him wince, but at the same time, she saw his determination to ignore all this, or to accept it, if he was forced to, in a spirit of jovial resignation; and now Emily was kissing her, Emily with those same thin ungenerous lips and pointed nose, so like her own features and yet so different, because of a recklessness in Lydia’s eyes which was not in Emily’s—subtle again—and now Bertie’s wife enveloped her in a soft, fat little hug; and there was Emily’s husband, whom they called Fred, and who was a pink-faced little man in a bowler hat and, for some reason, an evening tie, pushed forward to embrace his sister-in-law with a reluctance he tried to turn into enthusiasm.

Lydia brought the brood into the shop; it gave her a strange pang to see them cross her threshold, succeeded by an exaltation to have got them safely there. She did not talk much; she let them do the talking while she surveyed them. Bertie was voluble; he had a lot of information to give her, mixed in with small outbursts of sentimentality. He had grown portly, and he was most anxious to conciliate her; she took the measure of Bertie in a moment. The others, clearly, were in his charge. His wife, as ever, watched him for her cues with little twinkling, admiring eyes. Emily produced a sour and unconvincing smile whenever Lydia’s eyes rested on her. As for Fred, he smiled nervously the whole time, and looked as though he felt himself very much of a stranger.

X

She had got them all into their rooms for the night. She relished the feeling that she had got them all safely shut in, and as she stood at the top of the stairs looking first to left and then to right along the dim passage, she felt the jailer of all those four people behind the closed doors. She would have liked a bunch of keys dangling from her belt. Squeezing her hands tightly together, she swayed backwards and forwards as she controlled her laughter. A single gas-jet, turned low, lit the passage. She wandered away. She wandered down into the shop, where the polished shields on the walls threw back the sharp flame of her candle, and the indistinct, peopled obscurity of the shop. She thought vaguely that the shop was too full—had always been too full—she must have a clearance—but there was no longer any room upstairs—she ought to scrap half her things—but no, they were too precious. She wandered away again, up into the attic. She peered round, thrusting the candle into the dark corners. A rat scurried past. Old trunks, too full to shut; velvet and damask and leather protruded; too full. Like life; too full. Like her head; too full. She wandered back to the dim passage. Closed doors. The gas-jet. She could turn off the gas at the main; that would put the house in darkness. They would not understand what had happened. They would run out of their rooms, and up and down the house, looking for light; finding none; blundering against objects in the dark. She would hear their footsteps, running; their hands, perhaps, beating at last upon the shutters. She had seen clearly enough that they already thought her strange. She had accompanied Bertie and his wife to their rooms, and under her scrutiny they had continued their talk; they had drawn a picture of the social life in their town; they had spoken of nice little parties. “Not so nice as the little party I’m giving now,” Lydia had cried, and left them.

Husband and wife indeed thought her very odd; the wife was puzzled and uneasy. All through dinner Miss Protheroe had been very silent, from her place at the head of the table where she sat surveying her guests, only occasionally she had given vent to some such outburst, which she had at once restrained; and the dining-room had been odd too, a room at the back of the shop, full of queer theatrical things, and a great figure of a Javanese warrior in one corner, seven feet high, with a bearded yellow mask under his helmet, and a lantern swinging from the top of the spear he held in his hand. Bertie’s wife thought this a novel and unpleasing method of lighting a room. She had begun to wish they had never come. For the rest, there had been a barbaric flavour about the meal, unsuitable to one so obviously an English spinster; they had eaten off the sham gold plate, and had drunk out of the sham gold goblets; the sham gold candelabra had flared in the middle of the table with its eight or ten candles, above a great golden bowl of artificial fruit.

It was difficult to believe that that setting was the invention of Lydia, sitting there so prim in the unchanged gown of bombazine. It was as disconcerting an indication as if Lydia had gotten up and danced.

Out in the dim passage Lydia paused before Emily’s door. If she despised Bertie, she fairly hated Emily. Not one of Emily’s childish sneakings and whinings was forgotten; and Emily was unchanged: she had been dragged here, reluctant, by Bertie, tempted by the pictures Bertie drew of Lydia’s wealth; unable to resist that, she had come, but she was bitter and ungracious, wringing out that thin, sour little smile whenever Lydia looked at her. That supposed wealth, now become one of Lydia’s dearest jokes! They wouldn’t find much—the vultures—they would find that Lydia hadn’t hoarded, hadn’t kept back more than the little necessary to her own livelihood, so long as charity had stretched out to her its piteous hands. It was not part of Lydia’s creed to feast while others went hungry. Not for that had she broken away from her traditions and her family. She would have liked now to sham dead just for the sake of seeing their faces and hearing their comments.

She wasted no time on Emily; she needed no sight of Emily’s face in order to whet her vindictiveness. She knew well enough what was going on behind all those closed doors. Whispers of cupidity, to the ugly accompaniment of the calculation of Lydia’s prosperity, oh, she knew, she knew! Mean souls! mean, prudent souls! They had thrown her out when she was poor; they fawned on her now that they thought her rich. Well, she would teach them a lesson; she would give them twenty-four hours’ entertainment which they would not be likely to forget.

She crept away, down the dark stairs into her shop. At home again, among her fanciful and extravagant confederates! She held out her arms towards her shop, as though to embrace it. They were allies, she and it, the world of illusion against the world of fact.

She set to work.

XI

Next morning her guests came down to breakfast with white faces. They shot doubtful glances at Lydia when she blandly wished them a happy Christmas. There were parcels put ready for them beside all their plates, and Lydia observed with sarcasm their reviving spirits as they opened them in optimistic expectancy, and their consternation as they discovered the contents: a big, pink turned-up nose for Bertie, a blue wig for Bertie’s wife, a pair of ears for Fred, and a black moustache for Emily. Led by Bertie, they tried at first to disguise their vexation under good-humour:

“Ha! ha! very funny, my dear,” said Bertie, putting on the nose and poking it facetiously into his wife’s face.

“But you must all put them on,” said Miss Protheroe, without a smile.

They looked at her: she was perfectly serious and even compelling. They began to be a little afraid, though they were even more afraid of showing it. They tried to expostulate, still good-humouredly, but, “If you don’t like my presents, you can’t eat my breakfast,” said Miss Protheroe.

They had to comply. Lydia presided gravely, while the four sat round the table, eating kippers, tricked out in their respective presents. Emily, whose black moustache worked up and down as she ate, was controlled only by the beseeching gaze of Bertie’s eyes over the top of the enormous nose; Bertie’s wife shed silent tears which fell into her plate.

“Shall you expect us, my dear,” Bertie said towards the end of that grim meal, feeling that it was becoming urgent to break the silence, “to go to church like this?”

“Church? you aren’t going to church,” replied Lydia.

There was a chorus: Not go to church on Christmas-day?

“No,” said Lydia; “but,” she added suddenly, “you can give me your offertory, and I’ll see that it reaches the proper quarter. Charity at Christmas time! Turn out your pockets.”

“Look here, Alice,” said Bertie, standing up, “this is going beyond a joke. Be very careful, or we shall be obliged to leave your house.”

“You can’t,” said Miss Protheroe. “The doors are locked, the shutters are locked and barred, and you stay here for as long as I choose to keep you. You are my guests—see? And I’ve waited for you, for forty years. I shan’t let you go now.”

They heard her words; they stared at one another with a sudden horror leaping in their eyes.

XII

Bertie’s wife began to weep, loudly and helplessly.

“Oh, let me get out of this,” she cried; “why did we ever come? Bertie, it was your fault. Oh, why didn’t you leave her alone? the wicked, mad woman? Think of the noises in the night. The house haunted, and Alice mad! For God’s sake let’s clear out.”

“She’s in league with the Devil,” said Emily in the black moustache.

They had all forgotten, by now, about the appearance they variously presented, and all stared at each other fearfully, grotesque, ridiculous, but unheeding.

“Christmas morning!” cried Bertie’s wife, and wept more bitterly than before.

“Here, I’ve nothing to do with this—_I_ never turned you out,” said Fred to Lydia, speaking for the first time.

“You haven’t given me your offertory yet,” said Lydia. “Now then,” she said, “out with it! Bertie, you used to be a churchwarden at home; you take round the plate.”

Bertie’s wife screamed when she saw a revolver in Lydia’s hand.

“Keep quiet, you women!” said Bertie, playing the male; “if she’s mad, we must humour her. Where’s your money?”

They fumbled, the two men in their pockets, the two women in their bags, not one of them daring to take their eyes off Lydia for an instant.

“Is that all you’ve got?” asked Lydia, when the plate presented by Bertie was filled with silver, copper, and notes; “turn out the linings.” They obeyed. “You may go to your rooms now, if you like,” she added, “but don’t be late for dinner; we’ll have it at one. And mind you come down as you are now. You’re no more disguised like that, let me tell you, than you are with your every-day faces. There’s no such thing as truth in you, so one disguise is no more of a disguise than any other. Your shams are just as much shams as my shams. And that’s one of the things you can learn while you’re here.”

They filed out of the room, past the tall figure of Lydia, who, like a grim grenadier, watched them go, still perfectly grave, but with an awful mockery in her eyes. She savoured to the full the absurdity of their appearance. There was no detail of incongruity which escaped her glance. When they had all got out of the room, and she had heard them scurrying, frightened rabbits, up the stairs, she sat down again in her chair and laughed and laughed. But it was not quite the wholesome laugh of one who plays a successful practical joke; it was, rather, a cackle of real malevolence, the malevolence that has waited and brooded and been patient, that has dammed up its impulse for many years. She sat and laughed at the head of her table, with the debris of the brown paper parcels strewn beside every plate.

XIII

Down to dinner under the threat of the revolver. She was intolerant now of the smallest resistance. She got them sitting there in the same travesty, forced them to eat, forced them to entertain her with their conversation. “No glum faces!” she said sharply. It was hard enough to look glum under those additions to nature; Bertie’s nose especially had a convivial air, it imposed upon him a gross jollity he was very far from feeling. They ate turkey and plum-pudding, unwillingly, choking back, according to their natures, their fury or their tears. Lydia had not stinted their fare; but then, she had never been niggardly. There was a lavishness in her providing; there were raisins, almonds, brandy; and she urged the appetites of her guests with an ironical though genuine hospitality. “Christmas dinner, you know,” she said to them as she heaped the food upon their plates. They protested; she nearly laughed at the piteous protest in their eyes shining out through their ridiculous trappings. But she remembered the forty years, and the laughter died unborn.

Forty years—and she had got them to herself. She would let them off nothing.

XIV

After dinner they huddled all four together in the same room. They could not lock themselves in, because Lydia had removed all the keys.

They whispered together a good deal, running up and down the scale from apathy to indignation. They had even moments of curiosity, when they ferreted among the hotch-potch of things they found stuffed away in the cupboards and drawers, and under the bed; and speculated marvelling on the queerness of Alice’s existence among these things: forty years of masquerade! But for the most part they sat gloomy, or wandered aimlessly about the room, dwelling in their own minds upon their several apprehensions. Bertie’s wife said, “It’s all so vague—only hints, so to speak,” and a background of shadows leapt into being.

Steps prowled past in the passage; they prowled up and down. The four in the room looked at one another. There was a faint cry outside, and a laugh.

“Two people, or one?” they whispered.

There was no telling how many people the house might conceal. The resources of the shop alone could transform Lydia into a hundred different characters. She would change her personality with each one. They could not contemplate this idea. It credited her with uncanny powers. Their imaginations, which had never in their lives been set to work before, now gaped, pits full of possibilities.

They peeped and were afraid.