II
It was a wet and windy afternoon toward the end of September. We were on our way home from a seaside place in Devonshire, where we had been staying for a change of air. Aunt Evelyn was going through a period of bad health, and her headaches were probably much worse than she admitted. Anyhow, she had been content to do very little, and I caused her no anxiety, for I had “taken up golf” and most of my time and energy had evaporated on the links. The people I played with at Bidmouth were equally engrossed by the game, and if they had any ideas about things other than golf they showed no inclination to share them with me. Aunt Evelyn wasn’t sorry to be going home again; there was plenty to be done in the garden, and how the cats had got on without her she couldn’t imagine.
Of my own sensations about our return I have no recollection: I may have felt vaguely dissatisfied, but I did not consciously allow myself to criticize the purposeless existence I was leading. At Waterloo Station we changed from one train to another for the final stage of our through journey. On account of her feeling unwell Aunt Evelyn had taken first-class tickets, and this made me conscious that we had a social position to keep up. Gratified by the obsequious attentions of the green-flagged guard, I couldn’t help wishing that my aunt had tipped him more than a shilling. As she remarked, he was such a very nice-mannered man, and I assumed that he was expecting half a crown.
At any rate, it was a relief to settle down in a corner of the dark blue cushioned compartment after my aunt’s unnecessary fussification about the luggage. Raindrops trickled down the windows as we steamed out of the station, and I was glad to avert my gaze from the dingy and dilapidated tenements and warehouses which we were passing. Poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells, and I resented the notion of all those squalid slums spreading out into the uninfected green country. While I perused a magazine called Golf Illustrated I stole an occasional glance at the two very first-class looking passengers who occupied the other corners of the compartment. One of them was a grey-haired lady with a crocodile-skin dressing-case and a fur cloak. She was reading a book with an air of refined hauteur. The other was a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a glossy top-hat which he had ceremoniously arranged on the rack above him. He was glancing at Blackwood’s Magazine, and he had a bunch of violets in the buttonhole of his opulent dark blue overcoat. From the tone of voice in which he inquired whether she would prefer the window down a little I inferred that the lady was a stranger to him. Compared with these influential-looking people, Aunt Evelyn in her countrified tweed coat and skirt and her dowdy little hat seemed only just presentable. I had yet to make the significant discovery that the most distinguished personages are sometimes the most untidy.
Fortunately for her peace of mind, my aunt was much too tired to worry about the impression which her exterior might be creating on two complete strangers who were surveying her for the first and probably the last time on earth. What she really cared about was a cup of hot tea. But we should be in the train another hour, and we couldn’t possibly get home before six o’clock. Aunt Evelyn, however, though she seldom travelled, was not without resourcefulness in the matter of railway journeys, and what she didn’t know about picnics wasn’t worth knowing. Now among the numerous light articles which she had brought into the carriage there was a certain plebeian-looking basket which contained every facility for making tea. Most essential among the facilities was a patent spirit-lamp for boiling the water; and this lamp was apt to misbehave itself and produce an unpleasing smell. Had we been alone I should have been willing enough to set it alight, and the whole business would have been quite companionable and cosy. But now, with those impeccably dressed people in their corners, I felt nothing except discomfort and disapproval when my aunt became busy with her basket. I totally dissociated myself from her preparations, while she muddled about with the lamp, which for some time refused to function and then flared up with sudden explosive ardour.
“I was quite afraid it was going to be tiresome,” she remarked, screening it with the Pall Mall Gazette and looking across at me with a smile. But the expected response was absent. I glowered contemptuously at the apparatus which she had placed on the floor. She then began measuring out the tea. In the meantime I was conscious that our fellow travellers were exchanging scandalized glances, and their haughtiness intensified itself with every phase of the capricious conduct of the lamp.
“There now! It’s gone out again!” exclaimed Aunt Evelyn, who had become slightly flustered, since she had observed that she was getting herself into bad odour with the other passengers.
By dint of striking several more matches and much twiddling of the wick she got the conflagration well under way again, although she had some difficulty in shielding it against a dangerous draught caused by the gentleman, who had let down his window with expostulating asperity.
As for me, I considered that Aunt Evelyn was making a regular exhibition of herself, and when her persistence had been rewarded by a cloud of steam and she held out a cup of moderately hot China tea, I felt so annoyed that I could almost have chucked it out of the window. However, I expressed my feelings adequately by muttering, “No, I don’t want any,” and putting my paper up as a barrier between myself and the objectionable sight of Aunt Evelyn sipping her tea with mechanical enjoyment. As there was a spare cup in the basket she politely said to the lorgnette-raising lady, “May I offer you a cup of tea, madam?” But the amenity was declined with an air of social remoteness.
For the remainder of the journey I couldn’t bring myself to say another word, and Aunt Evelyn endured my sulky silence—wearily apologetic. By the time we were home I knew quite clearly that my attitude toward the tea-making had been odious; and the more I realized it the more impossible it seemed for me to make amends by behaving gently to her. It was one of those outwardly trivial episodes which one does not forget.