Success
birthday is at the beginning of next month, you know, and you always
give me what I choose then; you can give me this.”
Her father grunted. “I can give it to the dustman and it would not
break me,” he said, “nor yet alter the fact that you’ve bought like a
fool, which is a thing I didn’t expect of you.”
She said she was sorry she had annoyed him, and then slipped away,
leaving him arranging affairs with Josiah, previous to starting on a
business journey which would take him away until to-morrow.
She went by a door in the far corner of the room; it was a narrow door
set in the panelling, so that one hardly noticed it: her own movements
were so quiet and light that one hardly noticed her coming and going
either. The old house was curiously quiet, in spite of being in the
heart of London: quiet and brown; in a way, one found her quiet and
brown, too, fitted to the surroundings—or the surroundings fitted to
her—as a mouse to its hole in the wainscot.
She had not, since she could remember, lived in any other place than
this, with her father and the work. They had come there when her mother
died, which was when she was very young, and had been there ever since.
There were people who said that the necessity to combine office, and
dwelling-house, and warehouse under one roof was as far from Barmister
now as were the pinched early days when he and his wife had apartments
in Bayswater. These people said he could have afforded to take a
house at Blackheath, or Surbiton, or some other suburb, and come to
and fro to his work like other men. They also said, among themselves,
not to him, that he ought to do it for the sake of his daughter, if
for nothing else. But he did not; so Nan had no chance of associating
with girls of her own age, or spending a pleasant, leisurely youth
cultivating a taste for literature, and dancing and playing, with the
probability of finally marrying a nice, wholesome young man with a
satisfactory position in the City, and in her turn founding a family
of useful, wholesome people to do the same all over again. She had no
chance of this, and, possibly through ignorance of what she missed, no
regrets about it.
That day, when she had left the office, and her condemned purchase,
she went back to her usual avocations: a few household duties in the
roomy basement, where reigned Mrs. Bidden, who had grown grey in the
same service; later to the sitting-room upstairs to needlework and
books—books on rather unusual subjects which sometimes sent their
reader, with her slow-moving, but curiously accurate, mind, to odd
places to verify facts. They sent her no further that day than to one
of the warehouse rooms, there to search out on a pear-wood pix for
some detail of carving which would fix the date when a certain form
of lance was used in Flanders. She could trust herself as to the date
of the Flemish pix, but, without guarantee, she could not trust the
author who made statements lightly and unsupported about the lances
used in Flanders. So she went in search of assurance to one of the
long-windowed rooms which, from childhood, had been her favourite haunt.
She could not remember the time when she had not been familiar with
the smell of wood and the dust which distils from old tapestry, nor
when there had not been for her a fascination in the big rooms with
their dust-dimmed, painted tables, their inlaid cabinets, and mirrors
filmy in the London air. Almost her clearest early recollection was
in connection with one of these rooms. To herself she called it “the
beginning of seeing things,” and to this day she remembered it and its
thrill of revelation, as a few people remember the moment when they
first found they were able to read or do some one of the few things
which open the doors of the world. It was many years ago, she must
have been very small at the time, for the cabinets had towered so tall
to her, when, in an October dusk, she had come suddenly upon a little
tulip-wood secretaire. Whether it had not been there when she last
came, or whether she had passed it by unheeded, she did not know: only
knew that now she saw it, and saw it perfect. Not that her ignorance
called it so, or really realised its beauty; yet it filled her suddenly
with a strange sense of completeness and utter satisfaction: a curious,
almost physical, feeling, mixed with the subconscious mental one. She
never forgot the sensation, though she never attempted to explain it:
she thought for many years that it was a common experience, and came to
everyone at some time; it was, to this day, a bewildering puzzle to her
how any could fail to feel perfection when it was there. The tulip-wood
secretaire was in her own room now; her father had given it to her. He
had come upon her that day, years ago, while she still stood before it,
and, though not a sympathetic man, had divined what was waking in her,
as possibly another would not. When later, in answer to his question as
to what he should give her on her birthday, she, ignorant of its value,
had asked for the secretaire, he immediately gave it.
It stood in the corner of her room now, and she looked at it
thoughtfully when, later that afternoon, she went to get her hat,
recalling the occasion of its giving, and debating whether this year
she should ask for the iron chest. Her father never refused her
birthday request; he would not now though, if it were for the chest,
he would not approve it. But, as it happened, she did not ask for it,
something occurred that afternoon which supplied her with quite another
request.
She went that afternoon to see Miss Janet Foregood, the one member of
her own sex with whom she was at all intimate. A client had sent a
present of a hamper of pears, and she, remembering Miss Janet’s liking
for them, took a basketful to her.
The Foregoods lived in Bayswater, not far from where Robert Barmister
and his young wife had lodged in the early days. The house was very
small, and rather grimy and dull-looking outside; inside such things
were impossible where Miss Janet lived. A little brisk woman she was,
some years younger, many sizes smaller and much quicker than her
brother Josiah. She was busy upholstering the seats of her best-room
chairs when Nan arrived, having bought some odd pieces of material for
the purpose.
“Travellers’ samples,” she explained. “I picked them out from several
dozen; no two alike, and some regular trash.”
The ones she had bought were not trash; she was a better judge of
fabrics in the dark than many women in the daylight; but they certainly
were not alike, she had been more particular to secure quality than any
near approach to uniformity of pattern. Nan admired the texture, as she
truthfully could, and said nothing about the design; then she presented
the pears, which were duly appreciated.
“I shall bake those big ones,” Miss Janet said; “though I say it
myself, I can bake a pear with anyone.” She could cook anything with
anyone, and she knew it. “Your poor dear mother loved a baked pear,
though she had no more idea how to do one than to fly! She was as sweet
a soul as ever lived, but as ignorant as a baby of how to do most
things. I remember the first time I saw her she was trying to cook a
bit of a chop for herself on the sitting-room fire in the rooms she and
your father used to have just round the corner from here. Dear! I never
saw anything so unhandy!”
“Perhaps she had never been taught,” Nan suggested.
Miss Janet was contemptuous of such an explanation. “You can’t teach
some people to cook,” she said, “and real cooking can’t be taught
anybody; your true cook’s born, not made, same as your true anything
else.”
She filled her mouth with little nails here, and proceeded to take them
out one by one to use. “The funny thing is,” she said, when nearly all
were used, “no one knows why they’re born so; there’s a great deal of
talk made about heredity, I know: all I say is—h’m!”
Nan suggested there was something besides immediate ancestry to be
reckoned with.
“There had need be,” Miss Janet retorted, “and even then you can’t
account for it, not for real, natural ability, what I call ability, not
mere handiness; it’s just an accident, a Divine accident. Take your
cousin, Michael Annarly, for instance—how do you account for him?”
Nan did not attempt to; indeed, she knew little of him personally.
“If all that is said of Michael Annarly is true,” Miss Janet said,
arranging a piece of trimming round her chair. “I don’t suppose it is
myself, seeing it’s said by a relation who thinks she glorifies herself
that way. Still, if half or a quarter is true, there’s enough to show
he must be a very remarkable person, such a one as doesn’t occur
many times in a generation. You’re not going to account for that by
parents and grandparents. His father—tea trade, with a hobby for tools
and messing about with machinery and gas-fitting in his young days,
plumbing you might call it, but I suppose you’d better say engineering.
His mother—your mother’s sister, and not at all unlike her, poor dear,
only prettier. I only saw her once, but I saw the resemblance straight
away—dreamy, imaginative, sensitive; big eyes like pools of water full
of reflections, delicate hands alive to the last inch of skin; married
young, younger than your mother, because she was prettier; died young,
quite strong physically, but too fine for this world: that’s what
Michael Annarly’s parents were.”
Nan did not contradict, Miss Janet was probably correct in her
statements, she generally was. On this matter at least she knew more
than Nan, whose sole source of information was the little lady herself,
and who saw a great deal less of the Annarlys than Miss Foregood did of
Mrs. Barker, a connection of theirs, distant certainly, but proud of
the relationship.
“To hear her talk,” Miss Foregood said, “one would think she was
responsible for Michael Annarly, instead of a second cousin of his
father’s and a poor one at that. He’s done well, I grant it to her,
but I don’t see what that’s to do with her, any more than his brains,
which do seem to be worth talking about. Just hold up that end of the
trimming, my dear, I want to see if there’s enough.”
Nan did so, and there was found to be exactly enough, which might
have been foretold, seeing that Miss Janet herself had measured it.
Being satisfied, she resumed her hammering and talking. “No,” she said
emphatically, “you can’t account for that kind of ability. It is like
old Moss’s cat. Moss was an old man down in the country where I lived
when I was a little girl; he had a white cat with a yellow tail. That
cat was what you might call a Divine accident; you might breed hundreds
and thousands of cats and not get another. The chances of getting one
would be greater if you bred from a yellow father and a white mother,
but the chances of getting the yellow and the white mixed just that way
aren’t worth reckoning; it was, as I say without disrespect, a Divine
accident. And that’s the way with real born ability; you can’t account
for it, it’s an accident.”
She knocked in her last nail as she spoke, and then rose to inspect her
handiwork.
“I think it looks very well,” she said; she seldom scrupled to say what
she really thought about her own doings, or other people’s.
“It looks very well indeed,” Nan agreed. She rose too, and said she
must go.
Miss Janet came with her to the front door, stopping on the way to put
the finished chair in its place.
“It is safer there than in the kitchen,” she said, though it was
difficult to think of any harm that could befall it in that spotless
room.
Nan went home by train, only a few minutes’ journey, getting out at
Tottenham Court Road Station, from whence she had not far to walk. By
the time she alighted twilight was falling, and a fine rain with it;