Three women could not be more different in temperament, likes, choice of friends than were the three Carr sisters. Each had her own house, interests, friends. Lizzie was a masseuse, Alice had a school, I was an artist.
When I acquired Woo, Lizzie protested, Alice shrugged, I gloated—Woo accepted both family and domesticity.
When evening came and the hum of our busy lives quieted, one or the other of the Carr sisters could be seen running across to visit the others. Our three houses were within a stone’s throw. If the visiting sister was I, a taggle of dogs, a Persian cat, and the monkey followed.
The creatures loved this between-lights visiting. When first I got the monkey, my sisters sighed when they saw us coming.
“Must they all accompany you, Milly?”
I replied, “Every one. The creatures expect it.”
Woo soon slipped into place, becoming a part of the habit, and no remark was made when she followed the dogs and me into my sisters’ houses.
First we came to Alice’s school. It was set in a gravelled play-yard with garden beyond.
As my house abounded in bird and beast, so Alice’s abounded in children. Her cottage sat like a wide, squat hen, and the hen in turn was brooded over by a great western maple. At this evening hour there would be a circle of children cheeping round the great open fire in the school room. Cribs full of sleeping cherubs were tucked away under the low-spread wing beyond. My sister “slept” and “ate” as well as taught children.
Alice’s kitchen door always stuck, then burst open violently. There were squeals of, “Shut it, shut it!” while the griffons, the cat, the monkey, the wind, and I poured in.
For economy of space a porcelain bathtub was plumbed under Alice’s kitchen table, the top hinged up. What with tub, cook stove, sink, wood box, and cooking utensils, there was not an inch of spare room. A stool wedged itself between bathtub and door. On this dogs, cat, monkey, and I all piled, crushing ourselves under an overhanging china cupboard. Alice rubbed down one child before the cook stove and the next one soaked. If the child in the tub was biggish, she let down the table-top so as to dim herself. There was space between the edge of the tub and the table-top for Woo to squeeze.
“Eek, eek, ow! Woo’s drinking my bath!”
“Oooo—she’s stolen my soap! She’s tearing my wash-cloth!”
I pulled Woo out. Then my sister’s big dog growled because Woo was after his bone. It was difficult to adjust all these troubles without treading on a child, a dog or the monkey’s tail. Sweater sleeves and child-pyjamas whacked from the clothes-line strung across the low ceiling. Alice was always calm. Monkey, dogs, children! The greatest of these were children. If my creatures amused her children Woo was all right. She always had some special treat—a candy or some cherries or grapes—in her cupboard for Woo. Monkeys might not be her choice but she was kind to mine. Woo regarded Alice as a goddess of eggs and bananas and loved her next best to me.
Once only I saw Woo angry with Alice: in the crowded kitchen Alice trod on her tail. In a fury the monkey grabbed the strings of Alice’s apron, hoping that they were as sensitive as her own tail. Woo tugged and squealed; for the moment the goddess of eggs and bananas was dethroned.
Every Christmas Alice filled a child’s sock and hung it with the children’s for Woo. The children screamed with delight watching Woo unpack, appraise her presents. She chewed a hole opposite each object in the sock and pulled out the goody, scrutinizing, smelling, licking, tossing it away with a grunt of scorn if it did not please her.
It was quite dark night when we passed through the gardens which linked my sisters’ places and came to Lizzie’s house.
“All wipe your feet!” Lizzie shouted.
No house ever shone as Lizzie’s did. Every moving object cavorted in the shine of her piano and in the brass coal-scuttle, copper kettle, andirons, and fender. Woo was in her element, kissing the reflected Woos, cooing and jibbering to them.
“Milly, don’t let her slobber over everything!”
Lizzie got a spotless duster out of a little bag and erased Woo’s kisses.
“Here, Woo, sit on this nice stool.”
Woo scorned the wooden stool that the black-bottomed kettle sat on. She rolled over on Lizzie’s blue rug, warming her tummy in front of the fire. She knew that Lizzie was a little afraid of her. She was a little afraid of Lizzie too, but flaunted indifference, bravely shaking the edge of Lizzie’s snowy apron till the starch rattled, staring Lizzie in the eye and showing every tooth.
“Nasty little beast,” scowled Lizzie and bowed as beneath a cross. Woo was one of life’s chastisings. Lizzie was pious—chastening thrilled her. It amazed and pained her that one of her family could have chosen a pet so incomprehensible as a monkey. Artists she supposed were queer, but owning monkeys out-topped every other queerness.
The walls of Lizzie’s room were smothered with neatly framed good-behaviour recipes and with photographs of missionaries dead and living—missionaries bestowing Bibles upon naked heathen, missionaries dashing up raging rivers in war canoes to dispense Epsom salts and hymn books to Indians, missionaries seated under umbrellas taming Hottentots. Of course, one did not have to look at the photographs, but when, as so often happened, a missionary sat in his flesh and blood before Lizzie’s sitting-room fire, that was different. Female missionaries drew their skirts up to their necks and shrieked as if Woo were a reptile. Male missionaries usually quoted texts about the devil, as if there was some connection.
If they had been invited to tea they stuck it out; otherwise they hastily left, unless they saw that Woo and I were making a quick getaway, which we usually did to relieve my sister’s embarrassment.
What with massage, missionaries, and good works, Lizzie was a busy woman and a good one. She never left you in doubt about your shortcomings, but was always the first to rush to your help in trouble. She did not flatter us to our faces; but the dogs and I—and soon too the monkey—knew that she was the Carr family’s backbone in time of trouble.
I began to notice that Lizzie was watching the monkey closer and closer, asking questions about her. I realized that Lizzie was using Woo in her work, hoarding Woo’s funniness to amuse some small patient under painful or tedious treatment, using her, too, to win a smile from some weary, bedridden old soul who had nothing but a ceiling to look at and no fun in her mind at all. Lizzie would say, “Milly, take the monkey to visit old Mrs So-and-So. Woo will while away a weary hour for her.”
Yes, in spite of their avowed aversion to monkeys in general, my sisters were using mine—one to cheer patients, the other to amuse children. Unsuspecting little Woo had a place to fill in the Carr family, a part to play in the big thing that is called life.
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