Still, the library is kept warmer than my own room, to ward off mould from the books; and I find I prefer to write, than to sew. He gives me a pencil with a soft lead that 123
moves silently upon paper, and a green-shaded reading- lamp, to save my eyes.
The lamp smells, as it heats, of smouldering dust: a curious smell— I shall grow to hate it!— the smell of the parching of my own youth.
My work itself is of the most tedious kind, and consists chiefly of copying pages of text, from antique volumes, into a leather-bound book. The book is a slim one, and when it is filled my job is to render it blank again with a piece of india-rubber. I remember this task, more than I remember the pieces of matter I am made to copy: for the pages, from endless friction, grow smudged and fragile and liable to tear; and the sight of a smudge on a leaf of text, or the sound of tearing paper, is more than my uncle, in his delicacy, can bear. They say children, as a rule, fear the ghosts of the dead; what I fear most as a child are the spectres of past lessons, imperfectly erased.
I call them lessons; but I am not taught as other girls are. I learn to recite, softly and clearly; I am never taught to sing. I never learn the names of flowers and birds, but am schooled instead in the hides with which books are bound— as say, morocco, russia, calf, chagrin; and their papers— Dutch, China, motley, silk. I learn inks; the cutting of pens; the uses of pounce; the styles and sizes of founts: sans-serif, antique, Egyptian, pica, brevier, emerald, ruby, Pearl. . . They are named for jewels. It is a cheat. For they are hard and dull as cinders in a grate.
But I learn quickly. The season turns. I am made small rewards: new gloves, soft-soled slippers, a gown— stiff as the first, but of velvet. I am allowed to take my supper in the dining- room, at one end of a great oak table, set with silver. My uncle sits at the other end. He keeps a reading- easel beside his place, and speaks very seldom; but if I should be so unlucky as to let fall a fork, or to jar my knife against my plate, then he will raise his face and fix me with a damp and terrible eye. 'Have you some weakness about the hands, Maud, that obliges you to grind your silver in that way?'
'The knife is too large and too heavy, Uncle,' I answer him fretfully once.
Then he has my knife taken away, and I must eat with my fingers. The dishes he prefers being all bloody meats, and hearts, and calves' feet, my kid-skin gloves grow crimson— as if reverting to the substance they were made from. My appetite leaves me. I care most for the wine. I am served it in a crystal glass engraved with an M. The ring of silver that holds my napkin is marked a tarnished black with the same initial.
They are to keep me mindful, not of my name, but of that of my mother; which was Marianne.
She is buried in the loneliest spot of all that lonely park— hers a solitary grey stone among so many white. I am taken to see it, and made to keep the tomb neat.
'Be grateful that you may,' says Mrs Stiles, watching me trim the springing cemetery grass, her arms folded across her bosom. 'Who shall tend my grave? I shall be all but forgotten.'
Her husband is dead. Her son is a sailor. She has taken all her little daughter's curling black hair to make ornaments with. She brushes my own hair as if the locks are thorns and might cut her; I wish they were. I think she is sorry not to whip me. She still bruises my arms with pinches. My obedience enrages her more than ever my passions 124
did; and seeing that, I grow meeker, with a hard, artful meekness that, receiving the edge of her sorrow, keeps it sharp. That provokes her to the pinches— they are profitless enough— and to scolds, which pay more, as being revealing of her griefs. I take her often to the graves, and make certain to sigh, to the full strength of my lungs, over my mother's stone. In time— so cunning
am I!— I find out the name of her dead daughter; then, the kitchen cat giving birth to a litter of kittens, I take one for a pet, and name it for her. I make sure to call it loudest when Mrs Stiles is near: 'Come, Polly! Oh, Polly! What a pretty child you are! How fine your black fur is! Come, kiss your mama.'
Do you see, what circumstances make of me?
Mrs Stiles trembles and winks at the words.
'Take the filthy creature arid have Mr Inker drown it!' she says to Barbara, when she can bear it no more.
I run and hide my face. I think of my lost home, and the nurses that loved me, and the thought brings the hot tears coolly to my eyes.
'Oh, Barbara!' I cry. 'Say you shan't! Say you wouldn't!'
Barbara says she never could. Mrs Stiles sends her away.
'You're a sly, hateful child,' she says. 'Don't think Barbara don't know it. Don't think she can't see through you and your designing ways.'
But it is she who cries then, in great hard sobs; and my own eyes soon dry in the studying of hers. For what is she, to me? What is anyone now? I had thought my m o t h e r s , t h e n u r s e s , m i g h t s e n d t o s a v e m e ; s i x m o n t h s g o b y — another six, another— and they send nothing. I am assured they have forgotten me. 'Think of you?'
says Mrs Stiles, with a laugh. 'Why, I dare say your place at the madhouse has been filled by a new little girl with a happier temper. I am sure, they were glad to be rid of you.' In time, I believe her. I begin to forget. My old life grows shadowy in proportion t o t h e n e w — o r , s o m e t i m e s e m e r g e s t o d a r k e n o r t r o u b l e i t , i n d r e a m s a n d half- memories, just as those smudged strokes of forgotten lessons now and then start out upon the pages of my copy-book.
My proper mother I hate. Didn't she forsake me, before anyone? I keep her portrait in a little wooden box beside my bed; but her sweet white face has nothing of me in it, and I grow to loathe it. 'Let me kiss mama good-night,' I say one time, unlocking my box. But I do it only to torment Mrs Stiles. I raise the picture to my lips and, while she looks on, thinking me sorry— 'I hate you,' I whisper, my breath tarnishing the gold. I do it that night, and the night which
follows, and the night which follows that; at last, as a clock must tick to a regular beat, I find I must do it or lie fretful in my bed. And then, the portrait must be set down gently, with its ribbon quite uncreased. If the frame strikes the velvet lining of the wooden box too hard, I will take it out and set it down carefully again.
Mrs Stiles watches me do it, with a curious expression. I never lie quite still until Barbara comes.
Meanwhile my uncle observes my work and finds my letters, my hand, my voice, greatly improved. He is used occasionally to entertaining gentlemen at Briar: now he has me stand for them and read. I read from foreign texts, not understanding the 125
matter I am made to recite; and the gentlemen— like Mrs Stiles— watch me strangely.
I grow used to that. When I have finished, at my uncle's instruction I curtsey. I curtsey well. The gentlemen clap, then come to shake or stroke my hand. They tell me, often, how rare I am. I believe myself a kind of prodigy, and pink under their gazes.
So white blooms blush, before they curl and tumble. One day I arrive at my uncle's room to find my little desk removed, and a place made ready for me among his books.
He sees my look, and beckons me to him.
'Take off your gloves,' he says. I do, and shudder to touch the surfaces of common things. It is a cold, still, sunless day. I have been at Briar, then, two years. My cheek is round as a child's, and my voice is high. I have not yet begun to bleed as women do.
'Well, Maud,' says my uncle. 'At last you cross the finger of brass, and come to my books. You are about to learn the proper quality of your vocation. Are you afraid?'
'A little, sir.'
'You do well to be. For here is fearful matter. You think me a scholar, hmm?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Well, I am more than that. I am a curator of poisons. These books— look, mark them!
mark them well!— they are the poisons I mean. And this— ' Here he reverently puts his hand upon the great pile of ink-stained papers that litter his desk— 'this is their Index.
This will guide others in their collection and proper study. There is no work on the subject so perfect as this will be, when it is complete. I have devoted many years to its construction and revision; and shall devote many more, as the work requires it. I have laboured so long among poisons I am immune to them, and my aim has been to make you immune, that you might assist me. My eyes— do you look at my eyes, Maud.' He takes off his spectacles and brings his face to mine; and I flinch, as once before, from the sight of his soft and naked face— yet see now, too, what the coloured lenses hide: a certain film, or milkiness, upon the surface of his eye. 'My eyes grow weak,' he says, replacing his glasses. 'Your sight shall save my own. Your hand shall be my hand. For you come here with naked fingers, while in the ordinary world— the commonplace world, outside this chamber— the men who handle vitriol and arsenic must do so with their flesh guarded. You are not like them. This is your proper sphere. I have made it so. I have fed you poison, by scruple and grain. Now comes the larger dose.'
He turns and takes a book from his shelves, then hands it to me, pressing my fingers hard about it.
'Keep this from others. Remember the rareness of our work. It will seem queer, to the eyes and ears of the untutored. They will think you tainted, should you tell. You understand me? I have touched your lip with poison, Maud. Remember.'
The book is called The Curtain Drawn Up, or the Education of Laura. I sit alone, and turn the cover; and understand at last the matter I have read, that has provoked applause from gentlemen.
The world calls it pleasure. My uncle collects it— keeps it neat, keeps it ordered, on guarded shelves; but keeps it strangely— not for its own sake, no, never for that; rather, as it provides fuel for the satisfying of a curious lust.
I mean, the lust of the bookman.
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'See here, Maud,' he will say to me softly, drawing back the glass doors of his presses, passing his fingers across the covers of the texts he has exposed. 'Do you note the marbling upon these papers, the morocco of this spine, the gilt edge? Observe this tooling, look.' He
tilts the book to me but, jealously, will not let me take it. 'Not yet not yet! Ah, see this one, also. Black-letter; the titles, look, picked out in red. The capitals flowered, the margin as broad as the text. What extravagance! And this! Plain board; but see here, the frontispiece'— the picture is of a lady reclined on a couch, a gentleman beside her, his member bare and crimson at the tip— 'done after Borel, most rare. I had this as a young man from a stall at Liverpool, for a shilling. I should not part with it now, for fifty pounds.— Come, come!' He has seen me blush. 'No schoolgirl modesty here! Did I bring you to my house, and teach you the ways of my collection, to see you colour?
Well, no more of that. Here is work, not leisure. You will soon forget the substance, in the scrutiny of the form.'
So he says to me, many times. I do not believe him. I am thirteen. The books fill me, at first, with a kind of horror: for it seems a frightful thing, that children, in becoming women and men, should do as they describe— get lusts, grow secret limbs and cavities, be prone to fevers, to crises, seek nothing but the endless joining together of smarting flesh. I imagine my mouth, stopped up with kisses. I imagine the parting of my legs. I imagine myself fingered and pierced ... I am thirteen, as I have said. The fear gives way to restlessness: I begin to lie each night at Barbara's side, wakeful while she sleeps on; one time I put back the blanket to study the curve of her breast. Then I take to watching her as she bathes and dresses. Her legs— that I know from my uncle's books should be smooth— are dark with hair; the place between them— which I know should be neat, and fair— darkest of all. That troubles me. Then at last, one day, she catches me gazing. 'What are you looking at?' she says. 'Your cunt,' I answer. 'Why is it so black?' She starts away from me as if in horror, lets her skirt fall, puts her hands before her breast. Her cheek flares crimson. 'Oh!' she cries. 'I never did! Where did you learn such words?' 'From my uncle,' I say.