'Eggs,' she said. 'Done soft, like you must be. What did you think of my uncle, Susan?'
I said, 'I'm sure he's very clever, miss.'
'He is.'
'And writing, I believe, a great big dictionary?'
She blinked, then nodded. A dictionary, yes. A great many years' labour. We are presently at F.'
She held my gaze, as if to see what I thought of that.
49
'Astonishing,' I said.
She blinked again, then put a spoon to the side of the first of the eggs and took its head off. Then she looked at the white and yellow mess inside it and made another face, and put it from her. 'You must eat this for me,' she said. 'You must eat them all.
And I shall have the bread-and-butter.'
There were three eggs there. I don't know what she saw in them, to be so choosy over.
She passed them to me and, as I ate them, she sat watching me, taking bites of bread and sips of coffee, and once
rubbing for a minute at a spot upon her glove, saying, 'Here is a drop of yolk, look, come upon my finger. Oh, how horrid the yellow is, against the white!'
I saw her frowning at that mark, then, until the meal was finished. When Margaret came to take the tray away, she rose and went into her bedroom; and when she came back her gloves were white again— she had been to her drawer and got a new pair.
The old ones I found later, as I put coal on her bedroom fire: she had cast them there, at the back of the grate, and the flames had made the kid shrink, they looked like gloves for a doll.
She was certainly, then, what you would call original. But was she mad, or even half-way simple, as Gentleman said at Lant Street? I did not think so, then. I thought her only pretty lonely, and pretty bookish and bored— as who wouldn't be, in a house like that? When we had finished our lunch she went to the window: the sky was grey and threatening rain, but she said she had a fancy to go out walking. She said, 'Now, what shall I wear for it?', and we stood at the door of her little black press, looking over her coats, her bonnets and her boots. That killed nearly an hour. I think that's why she did it. When I was clumsy over the lacing of her shoe, she put her hands upon mine and said,
'Be slower. Why should we hurry? There is no-one to hurry for, is there?'
She smiled, but her eyes were sad. I said, 'No, miss.'
In the end she put on a pale grey cloak, and over her gloves she drew mittens. She had a little leather bag kept ready, that held a handkerchief, a bottle of water, and scissors: she had me carry this, not saying what the scissors were for— I supposed she meant to cut flowers. She took me down the great staircase to the door, and Mr Way heard us and came running to throw back the bolts. 'How do you do, Miss Maud?' he said, making a bow; and then: And you, Miss Smith.' The hall was dark. When we went outside we stood blinking, our hands at our eyes against the sky and the watery sun.
The house had seemed grim when I first saw it, at night, in the fog and I should like to say it seemed less grim when you saw it by daylight; but it seemed worse. I suppose it had been grand enough once, but now its chimneys were leaning like drunks, and its roof was green with moss and birds' nests. It was covered all over with a dead kind of creeper, or with the stains where a creeper had long ago crept; and all about the foot of the walls were the chopped-off trunks of ivy. It had a great front door, split down the middle; but rain had made the wood swell, they only ever opened up one half. Maud had to press her crinoline flat, and walk quite sideways, in order to leave the house at all.
It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an 50
oyster.
It was odder to watch her going back in, and see the oyster shell open, then shut at her back.
But there was not much to stay for, out in the park. There was that avenue of trees, that led up to the house. There was the bare bit of gravel that the house was set in.
There was a place they called a herb-garden, that grew mostly nettles; and an overgrown wood with blocked-off paths. At the edge of the wood was a little stone win-dowless building Maud said was an ice- house. 'Let us just cross to the door and look inside,' she would say, and she'd stand and gaze at the cloudy blocks of ice until she shivered. At the back of the icehouse there started a muddy lane, that led you to a shut- up old red chapel surrounded by yews. This was the queerest, quietest place I ever saw. I never heard a bird sing there. I didn't like to go to it, but Maud took that way often. For at the chapel there were graves, of all the Lillys that had come before her; and one of these was a plain stone tomb, that was the grave of her mother.
She could sit and look at that for an hour at a time, hardly blinking. Her scissors she used, not for gathering flowers, but only for keeping down the grass that grew about it; and where her mother's name was picked out in letters of lead she would rub with her wet handkerchief to take off stains.
She would rub until her hand shook and her breath came quick. She would never let me help her. That first day, when I tried, she said,
'It is a daughter's duty, to tend to the grave of her mother. Walk off a while, and don't watch me.'
So I left her to it, and wandered among the tombs. The ground was hard as iron and my boots made it ring. I walked and thought of my own mother. She didn't have a grave, they don't give graves to murderesses. They put their bodies in quicklime.
Did you ever pour salt on the back of a slug? John Vroom used to do it, and then laugh to see the slug fizz. He said to me once,
'Your mother fizzed like that. She fizzed, and ten men died that smelt it!'
He never said it again. I took up a pair of kitchen shears and put them to his neck. I said, 'Bad blood carries. Bad blood comes out.' And the look on his face was something!
I wondered how Maud would look, if she knew what bad blood flowed in me.
But she never thought to ask. She only sat, gazing hard at her mother's name, while I wandered and stamped my feet. Then at last she sighed and looked about her, passed her hand across her eyes, and drew up her hood.
'This is a melancholy place,' she said. 'Let's walk a little further.'
She led me away from the circle of yews, back down the lane between the hedges, then away from the wood and the ice- house, to the edge of the park. Here, if you followed a path that ran alongside a wall, you reached a gate. She had a key for it. It took you to the bank of a river. You could not see the river from the house. There was an ancient landing-place there, half rotted away, and a little upturned punt that made a kind of seat. The river was narrow, its water very quiet and muddy and filled with darting fish. All along the bank there grew rushes. They grew thick and high. Maud walked slowly beside them, gazing nervously into the darkness they made where they 51
met the water. I supposed she was frightened of snakes. Then she plucked up a reed and broke it, and sat with the tip of it pressed against her plump mouth.
I sat beside her. The day was windless, but cold, and so quiet it hurt the ears. The air smelled thin.
'Pretty stretch of water,' I said, for politeness' sake.
A barge went by. The men saw us and touched their hats. Iwaved.
Bound for London,' said Maud, looking after them.
'London?'
She nodded. I didn't then know— for, who would have guessed it?— -that that trifling bit of water was the Thames. I thought she meant the boat would join a bigger river further on. Still, the idea that it would reach the city— maybe sail under London Bridge— made me sigh. I turned to watch it follow a bend in the water; then it passed from sight. The sound of its engine faded, the smoke from its chimney joined the grey of the sky and was lost. The air was thin again. Maud still sat with the tip of the broken reed against her lip, her gaze very vague. I took up stones and began to throw them into the water. She watched me do it, winking at every splash. Then she led me back up to the house.