Barbara holds me, she presses the soap into my mouth— presses it hard, then passes it back and forth across my lips and tongue.
'Speak like a devil, will you?' she says as she does it. 'Like a slut and a filthy beast?
Like your own trash mother? Will you? Will
you?'
Then she lets me fall, and stands and wipes her hands convulsively upon her apron.
She has Barbara keep to her own bed, from that night on; and she makes her keep the door between our rooms ajar, and put out a light.
'Thank God she wears gloves, at least,' I hear her say. 'That may keep her from further mischief ..."
I wash my mouth, until my tongue grows cracked, and bleeds; I weep and weep; but still taste lavender. I think my lip must have poison in it, after all.
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But soon, I do not care. My cunt grows dark as Barbara's, I understand my uncle's books to be filled with falsehoods, and I despise myself for having supposed them truths. My hot cheek cools, my colour dies, the heat quite fades from my limbs. The restlessness turns all to scorn. I become what I was bred to be. I become a librarian.
'The Lustful Turk,' my uncle might say, looking up from his papers. 'Where do we have it?'
'We have it here, Uncle,' I will answer.— For within a year I know the place of every b o o k u p o n h i s s h e l v e s . I k n o w t h e p l a n o f h i s g r e a t i n d e x — his Universal Bibliography of Priapus and Venus. For to Priapus and Venus he has devoted me, as other girls are apprenticed to the needle or the loom.
I know his friends— those gentlemen who visit, and still hear me recite. I know them now for publishers, collectors, auctioneers— enthusiasts of his work. They send him books— more books each week— and letters:
' " M r L i l l y : o n t h e C l e l a n d . G r i v e t o f P a r i s c l a i m s n o k n o w l e d g e o f t h e l o s t , sodomitical matter. Shall I pursue?'"
My uncle hears me read, his eyes creased hard behind their lenses.
'What think you, Maud?' he says. '— Well, never mind it now. We must leave the Cleland to languish, and hope for more in the spring. So, so. Let me see . . .' He divides the slips of paper upon his desk. 'Now, The Festival of the Passions. Have we still the second volume, on loan from Hawtrey? You must copy it, Maud ..."
'I will,' I say.
You think me meek. How else should I answer? Once, early on, I forget myself, and yawn. My uncle studies me. He has taken his pen from his page, and slowly rolls its nib.
'It appears you find your occupation dull,' he says at last. 'Perhaps you would like to return to your room.' I say nothing. 'Should you like it?'
'Perhaps, sir,' I say, after a moment.
'Perhaps. Very good. Put back your book then, and go. But, Maud— ' This last, as I cross to the door. 'Do you instruct Mrs Stiles to keep the fuel from your fire. You don't suppose I shall pay, to keep you warm in idleness, hmm?'
I hesitate, then go. This is, again, in winter— it seems always winter there! I sit wrapped in my coat until made to dress for dinner. But at the table, when Mr Way brings the food to my plate, my uncle stops him. 'No meat,' he says, laying a napkin across his lap, 'for idle girls. Not in this house.'
Then Mr Way takes the platter away. Charles, his boy, looks sorry. I should like to strike him. Instead I must sit, twisting my hands into the fabric of my skirt, biting down my rage as I once swallowed tears, hearing the sliding of the meat upon my uncle's ink-stained tongue, until I am dismissed.
Next day at eight o'clock, I return to my work; and am careful never to yawn again.
I grow taller, in the months that follow. I become slender and more pale. I become handsome. I outgrow my skirts and gloves and slippers.— My uncle notes it, vaguely, and instructs Mrs Stiles to cut me new gowns to the pattern of the old. She does, and makes me sew them. I believe she must take a sort of malicious pleasure from the dressing of me to suit his fancy; then again, perhaps in her grief for 128
her daughter she has forgotten that little girls are meant to turn out women. Anyway, I have been too long at Briar, and draw a comfort, now, from regularity. I have grown used to my gloves and my hard-boned gowns, and flinch at the first unloosening of the strings. Undressed, I seem to feel myself as naked and unsafe as one of my uncle's lenseless eyes.
Asleep, I am sometimes oppressed by dreams. Once I fall into a fever, and a surgeon sees me. He is a friend of my uncle's and has heard me read. He fingers the soft flesh beneath my jaw, puts his thumbs to my cheeks, draws down my eye- lids. 'Are you troubled,' he says, 'with uncommon thoughts? Well, we must expect that. You are an uncommon girl.' He strokes my hand and prescribes me a medicine— a single drop to be taken in a cup of water— 'for restlessness'. Barbara puts out the mixture, while Mrs Stiles looks on.
Then Barbara leaves me, to be married, and I am given another maid. Her name is Agnes. She is small, and slight as a bird— one of those little, little birds that men bring down with nets. She has red hair and white skin marked with freckles, like paper foxed with damp. She is fifteen, innocent as butter. She thinks my uncle kind. She thinks me kind, at first. She reminds me of myself, as I once was. She reminds me of myself as I once was and ought still to be, and will never be again. I hate her for it.
When she is clumsy, when she is slow, I hit her. That makes her clumsier. Then I hit her again. That makes her weep. Her face, behind her tears, keeps still its look of mine.
I beat her the harder, the more I fancy the resemblance.
So my life passes. You might suppose I would not know enough of ordinary things, to know it queer. But I read other books besides my uncle's; and overhear the talk of servants, and catch their looks, and so, by that— by the curious and pitying glances of parlourmaids and grooms!— I see well enough the oddity I have become.
I am as worldly as the grossest rakes of fiction; but have never, since I first came to my uncle's house, been further than the walls of its park. I know everything. I know nothing. You must remember this, in what follows. You must remember what I cannot do, what I have not seen. I cannot, for example, sit a horse, or dance. I have never held a coin in order to spend it. I have never seen a play, a railway, a mountain, or a sea.
I have never seen London; and yet, I think I know it, too. I know it, from my uncle's books. I know it lies upon a river— which is the same river, grown very much broader, that runs beyond his park. I like to walk beside the water, thinking of this. There is an ancient, overturned punt there, half rotted away— the holes in its hull a perpetual mockery, it seems to me, of my confinement; but I like to sit upon it, gazing at the rushes at the water's edge. I remember the Bible story, of the child that was placed in a basket and was found by the daughter of a king. I should like to find a child. I should like it, not to keep it!— but to take its place in the basket and leave it at Briar to grow up to be me. I think often of the life I would have, in London; and of who might claim me.
That is when I am still young, and given to fancies. When I am older I do not walk by the river so much as stand at the windows of the house and gaze at where I know the water flows. I stand at my own casement, for many hours at a time. And in the yellow 129
paint that covers the glass of the windows of my uncle's library I one day, with my finger- nail, make a small and perfect crescent, to which I afterwards occasionally lean and place my eye— like a curious wife at the keyhole of a cabinet of secrets.
But I am inside the cabinet, and long to get out. . .
I am seventeen when Richard Rivers comes to Briar with a plot and a promise and the story of a gullible girl who can be fooled into helping me do it.
C h a p t e r Eight
I have said it was my uncle's custom, occasionally to invite interested gentlemen to the house, to take a supper with us and, later, hear me read. He does so now.
'Make yourself neat tonight, Maud,' he says to me, as I stand in his library buttoning up my gloves. 'We shall have guests. Hawtrey, Huss, and another fellow, a stranger. I hope to employ him with the mounting of our pictures.'
Our pictures. There are cabinets, in a separate study, filled with drawers of lewd engravings, that my uncle has collected in a desultory sort of manner, along with his books. He has often spoken of taking on some man to trim and mount them, but has never found a man to match the task. One needs a quite particular character, for work of that sort.
He catches my eye, thrusts out his lips. 'Hawtrey claims to have a gift for us, besides.
An edition of a text we have not catalogued.'
'That is great news, sir.'
Perhaps I speak drily; but my uncle, though a dry man himself, does not mark it. He only puts his hand to the slips of paper before him and divides the heap into two uneven piles. 'So, so. Let me see . . .'
'May I leave you, Uncle?'
He looks up. 'Has the hour struck?'
'It has, I believe.'
He draws out from his pocket his chiming watch and holds it to his ear. The key to his library door— sewn about, at the stem, with faded velvet— swings noiselessly beside it.