“You see, you can go where you like in a show-house—or ought to be able to. It is public property, the property of the press, at any rate.”
“The press is too much with us, soon and late,” said she, laughing.
“Ah, but confess, my lady, you can’t do withoutus!” said this awful young man—though I suppose he has to be cheeky, so as to get his nose in everywhere in the interest of his paper. “You suffer us gladly.”
“I don’t suffer at all—I shouldn’t allow you to make me suffer,” said she, not understanding him. Smart women never do understand things out of the Bible.
I followed them; my excuse was, that I wanted to see they didn’t steal the spoons. They made the coolest remarks as they went up-stairs.
“I have never been beyond the First Floor in this House of Awe,” saidThe Bitternman.
“Haven’t you? It seems to get more and more comfortable and less eccentric as one goes up,” said Lady Scilly.
“Art is only skin-deep,” saidThe Bitternman. “Just look at that bed, which seems to me to have come from nothing more dangerously subversive or artistic than Staple’s.... Come, lay down your mask and domino, and let us go down again, and wait about in the back precincts till we hear our host give the word for unmasking.”
So they marched out of George’s bedroom, for that was where they had got to—and as no one ever need see that, he has it quite comfortable, and modern—and sneaked down-stairs by a different way. I followed them. Soon they got quite lost and were heading straight for the kitchen. I wondered if Elizabeth had taken off her domino, and gone back to her work, for though the supper wasall sent in from a shop, there would be sure to be something for her to do.
These two marched straight in, and I after them, and found themselves in a blaze of light and an empty kitchen—for the moment only, for one heard all the men stumping along from the dining-room on the other side, and the scullery-maid rinsing something in the scullery. Just as Lady Scilly andThe Bitternman burst in, Mother was standing alone, in a checked apron, before the kitchen-dresser, and turned right round and looked at them. She looked dignified and cold, in spite of the kitchen fire, which had caught her face on one side.
Lady Scilly andThe Bitternman took no notice of her, but walked about looking at things.
“And so this is the Poet’s kitchen!” Lady Scilly said, rather scornfully. “How his pots shine!”
“Very comfortable indeed!” said Mr. Frederick Cook. He seemed to despise George. Then he continued, laughing under his mask—“It’s no end of a privilege to see the humble objects that minister to the Poet’s use. This is his soup-ladle, and——”
Mother made a little step forward and finished Mr. Cook’s sentence for him.
“And this is his dresser, and this is his boiler, that is his cat—and I’m his wife!”
Lady Scilly skooted, Mr. Cook stayed behind and did a little bit of polite. He isn’t a bad sort, and Mother rather liked him after that, and he began to come here.
SMARTwomen like having a fluffy dog or a child to drive with them in the afternoons. Lady Scilly hasn’t got either of her own, so she is always borrowing me, and sending for me to lunch and drive. She seldom asks Ariadne, because Ariadne is out and nearer her own age—too near. That’s what I tell Ariadne, when she is jealous, and makes me a scene about it, and it is true. If it were not for the honour and glory of the thing, I don’t care so very much about it myself, Lady Scilly’s motor is always getting into trouble, because it is so highly bred, I suppose. We run into something live—or else the kerb—most times we are out, and it’s extremely agitating, though I must say she never screams, though once she fainted after it was all over. It is a mark of breeding to get into scrapes, but not make a fuss. We have all heard about it, she is just as much before the public as my father, though in a different way. I read an interview with her inThe Bitternthe other day (she had to start some Cottage Homes at Ealing to get herself into that!), and it said that hers was one of the oldest names in England, and that she was the daughter of a hundred Earls.Now I call that nonsense, for how could she be? There isn’t room for a hundred Earls since the Heptarchy, unless they were all at the same time, and that is not likely.
Lord Scilly is very well born too, he’s the eldest son of the Earl of Fowey. The Earl keeps him very tight. So they have to get along with expectations and a title, till the old man dies, and Lady Scilly wishes he would, but Lord Scilly doesn’t, because he’s not quite a beast. He is very nice, and rather fond of Lady Scilly, though he is always scolding her. That is the expectations, they spoil the temper, I fancy. I have heard that he doesn’t think it dignified, the way she goes on, lowering herself and turning his house into a menagerie. He doesn’t understand why she pets authors and publishers. The authors help her to write novels, and the publishers publish them for love and ninety pounds. George is writing one for her now, and he goes to her place nearly every morning to see about it. Lord Scilly doesn’t mind in the least her collaborating with George and the others, it keeps her out of mischief; but I expect he would be down upon her at once if she were to collaborate with one of her own class, that would be different.
I shall be glad when the book is finished, for Elizabeth Cawthorne, who tells me everything, doesn’t think so much collaborating is quite what is due to Mother, and that if she were the mistress, “blessed if she’d let herself be put upon by a countess.”
Elizabeth says Lady Scilly is a daisy—that’s whather name means, Paquerette. That’s what she tells me to call her. I am proud to call a grown-up person by her Christian name, and a titled lady too, and it makes Ariadne jealous, which does her good, and keeps her down. Paquerette treats Ariadne on quite another footing, any one can see she is not nearly so intimate with her as she is with me. I go there at all times and seasons, and I accept no benefits from her. I won’t. If she gives me things, I take them and give them to Ariadne. So I feel I may say and think what I like of her, while amusing myself with her, and listening to all the silly things she says. The funny thing is, I am always trying to be grown-up, and she is always trying to be childish.
The other day when I got to Curzon Street about twelve—Lady Scilly had sent a messenger for me—she was still in bed in the loveliest pale-blue tea-jacket, down to where the bed-clothes came up to, and she was writing her letters in pencil on a writing-board, trying to squeeze a few words in round a great sprawling gilt monogram that took up nearly all the paper. There were three French books on the bed, they had covers with ladies with red mouths and all their hair down, andLa Femme Polypewas the name of one, andMadame Belle-et-m’aimeanother. Lady Scilly says she always gets up all her history and philosophy in French if possible, so as to improve her grasp of the language. There was also on the pillow a box of cigarettes, and a great bunch of lilies, that made me feel sleepy. There are daisiesworked all over the curtains and the counterpane, and great bunches of them painted on the mirrors hanging head downwards, and about three sets of silver-topped brush things spread out on the dressing-table. As for photographs, I never saw so many in my life! There are about a dozen cabinets with “To darling, from Kitty London,” and as many more with “Best love, yours cordially, Gladys Margate,” and I have given up trying to count the ones of actresses! Then the men! There is one of the poet with the bumpy forehead, and wrinkly trousers, who wroteThe Sorrows of the Amethyst, and one of the K.C. who wroteDuchesses in the Divorce Court—the Ollendorff man I call him; and one of the men who did the Gaiety play calledThe Up-and-Down Girl, which Lady Scilly acted in the provinces once, for a charity, till Lord Scilly stopped her. There he is in his volunteer uniform looking like a lamb. I do like Lord Scilly, and I think he’s put upon. So I am as nice to him as I can be when I see him, which isn’t often. He never comes into her room where I principally am. There’s a desk in one corner, where she writes her little notes—I don’t suppose she ever wrote a real letter in her life, her handwriting is so big it would burst the post-bag—and there are two sorts of racks on it, one to hold her bills that she hasn’t paid, and that’s got printed on it in gold “Oh Horrors!” and another with those she has paid with “Thank Heaven!” on it, though that one is mostly empty. She never hardly pays bills, she says it is waste of tissue, and bad form,but sends something on account, and that I think is a very good way, for however broke you are, you must go on ordering dresses, else the dressmaker would close your account, and if you only go on long enough, the chances are you’ll die first and leave a nice little bill behind you, that, being dead, you can’t be expected to pay!
I hate kissing people in bed, I nearly always tumble over them; and also, if they are writing, I can’t help seeing what it is, and then if it is “Dearests” and “Darlings” I do feel awkward. But to-day when she had said “How do you do?” she handed me the writing-board.
“Write for me, dear,” she said, “to the most odious woman in London. And the most insolent, and the most unwashed! Insolent! Yes, positively she dared to play Lady Ildegonde inThe Devey Devastatorat amatinéeat Camberwell yesterday, in perfect dreams of dresses—stood by the management of course—and nails like a coal-heaver’s. Now don’t you think, that as the part of Lady Ildegonde was admittedly written round my personality, with my entire consent, that it is an outrage for Irene Lauderdale to dress the part better than I can afford to do! I shall not forgive her. Now you write. ‘Dear thing!’ Don’t be surprised, I can’t afford to quarrel with her, unfortunately! ‘You were wonderful yesterday! I know what’s what, and believe me that’s it!’ I mean the dresses, but she will think I mean her playing! That is what we call diplomacy. Don’t say anymore. Short, and spiteful. Now seal it. I will see that Mrs. Ptomaine guys Lauderdale in Romeo. Tommy will do anything for me, andThe Bitternwill do anything for her. We will go and see her this very afternoon. I must get up, I suppose. Ring for Miller, dear. Oh, good heavens! how bored I am!”
She threw one of the French novels (they were library books, so it didn’t matter) across the room, and it fell into the wash-basin, and then she seemed to feel better.
“I wish I could do without Miller!” she said. “Old Miller hates me, and I loathe her. But she will never leave me. Too good ‘perks’ for that. She always folds up my frocks as if she knew they would belong to her one day. So they will! I can’t afford to quarrel with a woman who can do my hair carelessly, with a single hair-pin. What am I going to wear to-day, Miller?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Miller (she’s Scotch, and she is rather stingy of “ladyships”), “there’s your blue that come home last week. It seems a pity to leave it aside just yet.”
“You mean you can do without it a little longer, eh, Miller? No, I can’t put that on, it’s too big for me since massage. I simply swim in it.”
“Then there is the greypanne.”
“Oh, that dam-panne, as I call it. No, it makes me look like my own maid. No offence to you, Miller.”
“I don’t intend to take any, my lady,” saidMiller, pursing up her lips. “What about your black with sequins?”
“Yes, let’s have the vicious sequins. It will go with the child’s hair. You see, I dress to you, my dear.”
But I knew it was only that she likes things to go nicely together, just as she chooses her horses to be a pair.
Then she sat down and did her face, very neatly; it is about the only thing she does really well. She put red on her lips, and white on her nose, and black on her eyes, till she looked like a Siamese doll I once had before I licked the paint off. I paid particular attention, for I shall do it when I am grown-up, that is if I am able to afford it—the best paints—and I am told that stands you in about four hundred a year.
Her hair is the very newest gold shade, the one they have in Paris—rather purplish—it will be blue next season, I dare say! It is just a little bit dark down by the roots, which is pretty, I think, and looks so very natural. All the time Miller was dressing it, she worked away at the front with the stick of her comb, pulling little bits out, and putting them back, and staring into a hand-glass as anxiously as if her life depended on it, while Miller patiently gummed some little tendrils of hair down on her forehead.
“Child, child,” she said to me. “Do you know what makes me sigh?”
“Indigestion?” I asked, quite on the chance, but she said it wasn’t, that she never had had it,it was only because she felt so terribly, so diabolically, so preternaturally ugly.
“Oh no, you look sweet!” I said. I really thought so, but Miller grinned.
“You are delightful!” Lady Scilly said. “And you can have that boa you are fiddling with, if you like. Tulle is death to me! Makes me meretricious; and, child, when your time comes, don’t ever—ever—have anything to do with massage! It grows on one so! One can’t leave it off, and it has to be always with one, like the poor. I have actually to subsidize a masseuse to live round the corner, and she cheeks me all the time. Oh,la, la!”
I know about massage. I massed Ariadne once, according to a system we read of in a book. I’ve seldom had such a chance at her. I pinched her black and blue, and she kept saying, “Go on! Harder! Harder!” but as it didn’t seem to agree with her afterwards, I didn’t do it again. But I took the boa to give Ariadne, I have no use for such things myself.
When Lady Scilly was ready she said—“We won’t lunch in, we will go to Prince’s and have afilet. Scilly’s in a bad temper because of bills. Well, bills must come,—and I may go, I suppose. There’s no reason one shouldn’t keep out of their way.”
She stuck a hat on with twenty feathers in it, and we went down, and she told the butler to call a hansom now, and tell the carriage to fetch us at three o’clock.
The butler said, “Very well, my lady. Yourladyship has a lunch-party of ten!” all in the same voice.
“So I have! Oh, Parker, what a fool I am!” and she flopped into a hall seat.
“Yes, my lady,” Parker said, quite politely, closing the hall-door again. He has known her from a child, so he may be rude.
So we took off our hats, at least I did—she wears a hat every time she can, except in bed—and went into the library where Lord Scilly was, and her cousin, a young man from the Foreign Office, Simon Hermyre, that I know.
Lord Scilly came up to her and said out loud, “You have got too much on!”
She softly dabbed her face with her handkerchief to please him, but so as not to disturb anything, and the young man from the Foreign Office laughed. He is a fifth cousin. Lady Scilly says her cousins grow like blackberries on every bush—one of the penalties of greatness.
“I’ve never really seen your face, Paquerette,” he said, “and I do believe it would justify my wildest expectations. Still, I think you are right not to make it too cheap. Who’s coming? Smart people, or one of your Bohemian crowds?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Mrs. Ptomaine, for one.”
“Dear Tommy!” said he. “I love her.... Desist, O wasp!” he said to one that had come in by the window and was bothering him. “This is a precursor of Tommy.”
“Tommy’s all right, so long as she hasn’t got herknife into you. She favours you, Simon. You are to take her in, and distract her, and see that she doesn’t make eyes at my tame millionaire.”
“Oh, Mr. Pawky!” said Simon. “Is he coming? You should put me opposite, so that I could intercept the glances. And why mayn’t Tommy have a bit of him? She’s terribly thin!”
“Because he isn’t a very big millionaire—only half a one—and there’s only just enough for me. So you know what you have got to do. You may flirt wildly with Tommy, if nothing else will do. Let me see, who else is coming? Oh, Marston, the actor, a nice boy, gives me boxes, and mortally afraid of Lauderdale—and some odd fill-ups. Just think, I nearly went out to lunch with this child, and forgot you all. I should like to have seen all your faces!”
Then all these people came, and Lady Scilly put me on one side of the millionaire and herself on the other. He looked very mild and indigestible, and as if millionairing didn’t agree with him. He could only drink hot water and eat dry toast. He made a little “How-Are-You-My-Pretty-Dear” conversation with me, but he attended most to Lady Scilly, of course. She was telling him all about Miss Lauderdale, andLady Ildegondeand the dresses, and discussing Society, as it is now.
“Titles! Why, my dear man, no one cares a fig for birth now-a-days. No, the only thing we care for is culture, and the only thing we can’t forgive is for people to bore us!”
I wondered where the poor millionaire came in, for he can’t culture, while he certainly does bore, but I suppose Lady Scilly wouldn’t waste her time for nothing, and perhaps there is some other attraction Society takes count of that she didn’t mention?
“I’ll go anywhere and everywhere to be amused,” she went on. “I’d go to Gatti’s Music Hall under the Arches—only music halls are a bit stale now! I’d go to a prize-fight in a sewer—anything to get some colour into my life!”
“Paint the town red, wouldn’t you!” muttered Lord Scilly.
“That is the way we all are,” Lady Scilly went on. “Look at Kitty London! She is going to marry a perfect darling of an acrobat, who can play billiards on his own back!”
“Cheap culture that!” said Lord Scilly, and I don’t know what he meant, but I knew he meant to be nasty; but the millionaire went on sipping his hot water, and enjoyed having a countess talk like that to him, and stood her any amount of dinners at the Paxton for it, I dare say. They say he runs it?
He was well protected, but still I could not help thinking that Mrs. Ptomaine on the other side of the table, not even opposite, seemed to have her eye on him, one of them at any rate, Simon couldn’t manage to distract both. I didn’t like her. She came to our ball in a mask, and flirted with Mr. Frederick Cook. I quite saw why Simon Hermyre compared her to a wasp. She looked as if she satup too late and drank too much tea, and I was sure that though they were very smart, her petticoats were all muddy at the bottom. She called Lady Scilly “Darling!” across the table every now and then to show how intimate she was. Lady Scilly never cares or notices. It is one of her charms. The actor was on her other side. I saw Lord Scilly stare at his eighteen rings and his nice painted face, as if he were a new arrival. But there is some excuse for him, he was just up—he said so—and I dare say he was too tired to wash the paint off when he got home this morning. Besides that, he is acting Juliet to Miss Lauderdale’s Romeo—that is the way they do it now. I wish I had seen Shakespeare when men acted men’s parts and women did women, but I was born too late for that.
When we got up from lunch, Mrs. Ptomaine cleverly caught her dress in a leg of her chair, and she wouldn’t let the actor disengage it, but waited till the millionaire came past her seat and had a feeble try at it. She smiled at him very gratefully for tearing a large bit of the flounce off in getting it out, but after all, it made an introduction, and she can have a new piece of common lace put in. Afterwards in the drawing-room she had quite a nice chat with him, before Lady Scilly sent somebody to break it up, as she did, after five minutes.
At four o’clock they all went and we took our drive after all. Lady Scilly never pays calls—only the bourgeois do—but we went to see Mrs. Ptomaine.
“I hadn’t a word with Tommy to-day,” LadyScilly said, “and I had several little things to arrange with her. I can’t sleep till I have put a spoke in Lauderdale’s wheel. Poor Tommy! What a fright she looked to-day! But she is not a bad sort, is Tommy, and devoted to me!”
“What does she do?” I asked.
“Oh, she works the press for me. She has command of half-a-dozen papers. Goodness knows how, for I am sure no editor would ever care for her to make love to him! She is useful, you see, she describes my dresses free. I don’t care for that myself, naturally, but the dressmakers do, if their names are given, and then they don’t worry so with their bills. And she interviewed me once, and I gave Kitty London such a lesson—things I wanted conveyed to her, you know, and could not quite say myself! It is rather a good idea to conduct one’s quarrels through the press, isn’t it? Here we are at Tommy’s flat! Up at the very, very top! The vulture in its eyrie—is it the vulture that has an eyrie? I know it has a ragged neck with cheap fur round it! Up we go! No lift! One oughtn’t to visit with flats without a lift! You ring!”
I rang, and Mrs. Ptomaine herself opened the door.
“So soon, darling! Delightful!” she said. She didn’t look very pleased to see us, I thought, but she was “in to tea,” I could see, for there were three kinds of little tea-cakes and a yellow cake made with egg-powder.
“I wanted to prime you about your critique ofLady Ildegonde, you know. Now, Tommy, it isunderstood, Lauderdale is to be snubbed and punished for her impertinence in daring to actme, in Camille’s dresses.”
“Darling, quite so! Of course. I had it nearly written. Dearest, you don’t trust your Tommy.”
“Not so much darling dear, now, if you don’t mind,” said Lady Scilly. “We are alone, and this child doesn’t need impressing. It fidgets me.”
“All right, sweetheart—I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Ptomaine, quite obligingly; but talk of fidgeting, she herself was in a terrible state. “Is it too early for tea?”
“Too late you mean, Tommy. What is the matter with you? Have you got a headache?”
“Three distinct headaches,” said poor Tommy. “Did three first nights last night, and got a separate headache for each.”
“How interesting!” said Lady Scilly. “I mean I am very sorry. Is there nothing I can do?”
“No, no, nothing. I have experience of these. Nothing but complete rest will do any good. If I could just lie down and darken the room and think of nothing for an hour.”
Lady Scilly got up to go after such a plain hint as that, and we were just opening the door when it opened itself and let in the millionaire!
Mrs. Ptomaine made the best of it. She got up to receive him with a very pained smile on the side of her face next Lady Scilly, and said to her in an undertone, “No chance for me, you see! This man will want his tea.Mustyou go?”
Lady Scilly hadn’t even said she must go, but she did go, and p.d.q. as my brother Ben says. What was more, she said “Good-bye, Mrs. Ptomaine,” in a tone that must have peeled the skin off poor Tommy’s nose. No more “dears” and “darlings”! To the millionaire she said, “So we meet again?” and from the way she said that polite thing, I should say he would have serious doubts as to whether he would ever be invited to drink toast-and-water in her house any more.
“There are as good millionaires in South Africa as ever came out of it,” she said to me, going down-stairs. “Poor old Pawky! One woman after another exploits the dear old thing. They are kind to him,pour le bon motif!He did say to me in a first introduction, ‘Hev’ you any bills?’ But I put it down to his South African manners and his idea of breaking the ice and making conversation. Tommy will fleece him. I hope she’ll get him to give her a new carpet!”
I know that Mr. Pawky gave Lady Scilly her box at the Opera, but then it was on consideration of her allowing him to sit in it with her now and then. Thus she gives aquid pro quo, which poor Tommy can’t do, having nothing marketable about her, not even a title.
If he values Lady Scilly’s kindness he is a fool to run after Tommy so obviously. But that is what I have noticed about these rich people; they seem to lose their heads, let themselves go cheap every now and then. Tommy is so ugly—she never lookednice in her life except when she was Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, at our party, and wore a mask and flirted with Mr. Frederick Cook—that he must be demented, or jealous of Frederick Cook, perhaps?
She has an organ, I mean a paper she’s on, and I suppose she can write Mr. Pawky up. Still I think he has made a bad exchange, for Mrs. Ptomaine won’t last. They change the staffs of those papers in the night, and any morning Mr. Frederick Cook may walk down to the office and find a new man sitting at his desk, and the same with Mrs. Ptomaine,—where there’s a way (of making a little) there’s a minx to take it! so she often says. Lady Scilly can’t lose her title except to change it for another and a nicer.
ITis a very odd thing that with a father a novelist, who can sell ten thousand copies of a book, you can’t get any sort of useful advice on the subject he has made peculiarly his own. Ariadne would much sooner consult the cook about such things. And it is not nice to ask advice from a person who can oblige you to follow it! George can’t in fairness advise as an author and command as a father, so the result is that Ariadne makes blunders at all these parties she goes to now. Poor girl, she only has me to consult. I say it is a mistake the moment you enter a room to fix your eyes on the man you want to dance with you, or even to ask him for a dance as Ariadne did once. She said she thought he was too shy to ask her, though he did know her a little, and she wanted to see if he danced as beautifully as he looked. A man shy! It takes a shy girl like Ariadne to imagine that! For Ariadne is both shy and superstitious. She gets that from Lady Scilly and Lady Scilly’s aunt, the Countess of Plyndyn. A very fat old lady with a corresponding hand, that when she holds it out to a fortune-teller, it is like counting the creases in afeather-bed. She makes them take count of every crease though, and begs them to invent a fate for her.
“Haven’t I got a future like other people?” she whines, and then the poor paid fortune-teller, in a great hurry, sows a crop of initials in her hand, and she is not more than pleased, and takes it as a right to have three husbands, although she is already seventy.
Lady Scilly never thinks of having an afternoon-party now without at least two fortune-tellers in different parts of the house. You see people waiting in little lumps at the doors; in a little more, and they would be tying their handkerchiefs to the handles, just as you do to bathing-machines, to say who has the right to go in first. They go in shyly, just like people who have made a stumble in the street, looking silly, and they come out looking humble, like people who have been having their hair washed. The fortune-teller doesn’t tell women the very serious things, for instance, that they are going to die themselves, though she tells them when their husbands are. They always tell Ariadne what sort of coloured man she is going to marry, but as there are only two sorts of coloured men, fair and dark, it is sure to come right sometimes. The last time the woman said, “Fair—verging on red!” and as Ariadne doesn’t know any man who has anything like red hair except Mr. Aix, whom she doesn’t care for, she frowned and said, “Are you quite sure?” The woman changed it to dark, almost black, in agreat hurry, and Ariadne was pleased, for it is a safer colour. Ariadne wears a piece of wood let into a bracelet that Lady Scilly gave her, just the same as she wears herself, and touches it whenever she thinks misfortune is in the air, or when she is afraid of making a fool of herself more than usual. She took me out to gather May dew in Kensington Gardens, and very smutty it was. She always counts cherry-stones, and once at the Islingtons’ lunch when it came badly, she actually swallowed Never!
Now, in Lady Scilly’s set, they call her “The girl that swallowed Never,” and it seems to amuse them. Anything amuses them, especially a nickname. I myself wonder Ariadne did not have appendicitis, or at least that apple-tree growing out of her ear they used to tell us of when we were children. At luncheon parties now, they make a joke of refusing to help her to greengage, cherry, or plum-tart, in fact to anything countable, and Ariadne doesn’t seem to see that it is plain to them all that she is anxious to be married, which, though it is true, sounds unpleasant, at any rate for the men. She is wild to be married, and to go away and leave this house and have a house of her own that she can ask me to come and stay at, and Miss Mander. I think it is a very good wish, only why make it public? Nor she needn’t let every one know that George only gives her fifteen pounds a year to dress like a lady on. It is cheaper to dress like an artist or a Bohemian, or in character, and so she does. We don’t have any dressmaker, we hardly know the feel of oneeven. Mother and Ariadne make their own clothes, and Mother never going out, is able to give Ariadne a little extra off her own allowance. I don’t know how much that is. She will never tell.
Mother has all the taste that Aunt Gerty hasn’t got. It is odd, how taste skips one in a family! Aunt Gerty is like a very smart rag-doll, dressed in odds and ends to show the fashion on a small scale. And fashion after all is only a matter of “bulge.” You bulge in a different place every year, and if you can only bulge a little earlier, or leave off bulging in any particular place sooner than other people, well, you may consider you are a well-dressed woman!
Ariadne makes money doing his reviews for George. He gives her sixpence a head, when he remembers to. Dozens of books come in to our house every week, fromThe Bittern, and forWild Oats. George is “Pease Blossom” onThe Bittern. We don’t need to subscribe to a library, we live in a book-shop practically, for they are all sold in Booksellers’ Row afterwards. George takes the important ones, of course, and gives the smaller fry to Ariadne to do. She is his understudy. When they are ready George writes hers up, and Christina types them, and it all goes in together. He once reviewed a batch of bad ones under the heading ofDarnel, and people thought him clever but malicious.
Papa doesn’t know it, but Ariadne has an understudy too. She lets the novels out to me, and gives me twopence a head. I must say that she has no idea of beating one down. I read them as carefullyas I have time for—it depends on how many Ariadne gives me—and then when she is doing her hair, I sit beside her, and tell her the plots. The more improper ones she keeps to herself, but I read those for pleasure, not work, so it’s all right.
Ariadne knows about a dozen useful phrases that she didn’t invent, but found ready made. “Up to the level of this author’s reputation” is one; “marks a distinct advance,” “breezy,” “strong, or convincing,” and the opposites, “unconvincing,” “weak,” “morbid,” “effete,” are useful ones. She uses all these turn and turn about, and always mentions “a fine sense of atmosphere” if she honestly can.
She has great fun sometimes, when she meets the authors in society. She flirts with them till they get confidential, and tell her about their books, and how totally they have been misunderstood by the press, and what a crassly ignorant set reviewers are! They explain to her that not one of the whole d—d crew has the slightest sense of responsibility, especially TheBittern, which has got the most God-forsaken staff that ever paper went to the devil with! Ariadne is amused at all this and gives them another chance of conversation, and then they go on to quote her own words to her!
Once, though, she got caught, and George very nearly took all the reviewing away from her, for he had to stand the racket himself, of course. She had actually said at the end of the review that it was a pity Mr. —— I forget the author’s name—did not relieve our anxiety as to the perpetrator of the hellishcrime, which to the very end he allowed to remain shrouded in obscurity. Well, as a matter of fact, there was a hanging scene and dying confession in the last chapter but one, but Ariadne unfortunately burnt that before she had got to it. She was using the novel as a screen to keep the draught off the flame for heating her tongs, and so she never read that part, and had to make up her own end. The editor ofThe Bitternhad to acknowledge the error and apologize in a footnote, because the author threatened a libel action. Ariadne doesn’t care about meeting that man in society!
It is fairer at any rate for Ariadne to review books than George, because she doesn’t write them. People who write books shouldn’t have the right to say what they think of other people’s; it is like a mother listening to tales in the nursery, and putting one child in the corner to please another. I once went into the study and saw George walking up and down, and throwing light bits of furniture about.
“D—m the fellow! He’s stolen the babe unborn of an excellent plot of mine, and mauled it and ruined it, beyond recognition!”
It was no use my putting in my word, and saying, “Well, then, George, you can use it again.” He went on fuming and fussing, loudly dictating a regular corker of a review.
“I’ll let him have it! Go on, please, Miss Mander. ‘The signal ineptitude of this author’s——’”
I am sure that was going to be a very unpleasant review to read, though I never saw it in print.
Ariadne is sentimental, and doesn’t care for realistic novels at all, which is a pity, as George’s greatest friend, and the person who comes oftenest to this house, is a realist, and wrote a novel calledThe Laundress. He lived in Shoreditch in a tenement dwelling for a whole year to learn how to write it from the laundresses themselves,—he went to tea with a different laundress every afternoon? The one he wrote about had three diamond rings and three husbands to match. He himself wore flannel shirts then, not nice frock-coats such as he has now, but the flannel shirts weren’t because he was poor, but so as not to frighten the laundresses by looking too smart. Then the book came out, and there was a great fuss about it, and it was published at sixpence, and our cook bought it, and it lies on the kitchen-table beside the cookery-book.
That is the reason Mr. Aix, being a realist, makes more money than Papa, who is an idealist. You see, Duchesses and Countesses want to hear all about laundresses, just as much as cooks do, but though Duchesses and Countesses are interested in mediæval knights and maidens, cooks—nor yet laundresses—aren’t.
“The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!” he says sometimes. “If I was proper, they wouldn’t even look at me!”
“Ay! the suburbs?” George says dreamily; “the kind, the mild, the tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things inPall Mall and Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy——”
“You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!” says Mr. Aix.
“I have shocked them—they love being shocked! I have startled them—that does them good. I have puzzled them—not altogether unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a common, romantic denominator——”
“You are like those useful earthworms ofle pèreDarwin, bringing up soil and interweaving strata,” said Mr. Aix wearily.
George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. “Yes, I dominate the lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you ever envisage Peckham?”
“I lived there and sold matches once,” said she, “and, moreover, I’ve kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs.”
“Is there anything you haven’t done?” said Mr. Aix, quite jealous of a woman interfering in his own line. He always makes a point of living among his raw material. When he was writingThe Serio-Comic, in order to get the serious atmosphere—which I should have thought gin would have done for well enough—he went every night of his life to some music hall or other, and went behind and talked to them, and fastened their frocks at the back forthem, and put in hair-pins when they stuck out just as they were going on. Then he stood them drinks, and didn’t preach for his life, for if he had, the serio-comics wouldn’t have told him anything or shown him the secret of their inner life. He had to pretend that he thought them and their life all that was perfect. Christina calls this novel “The Sweetmeat in the Gutter,” and loves it, though George says it is as broad as it’s long, and that ladies shouldn’t read it. But Christina has been to Klondike and seen the seamy side, so it doesn’t matter.Ihave readThe Serio-Comic, and I can’t see anything wrong. There’s more seriousness than fun in it. Miss Deucie Dulcimer’s real name is Frances Raggles, and she’s the mother of five in the course of three hundred and fifty pages, and there’s a brandy-and-soda in every chapter.
Mr. Aix is forty, but he looks like a boy. He has a snub soft nose like Lady Scilly’s pug, with wrinkles on the bridge of it. He wears spectacles because of his weak eyes, and he always says “Quite so,” as if he were good-natured enough to agree with Providence in everything. He is the opposite of George, who is proud to be considered cat-like. Perhaps that is why they are friends. If Mr. Aix were a dog, he would knock over everything with his tail. He has no tact. He never drinks anything but water, and does calisthenics before breakfast with an exerciser on a door. He is the kind of man who would put stops in a telegram—so very punctilious. His eyes are wall, and look different ways, andAunt Gerty says that once at a dance he asked two girls for the same polka, and they both accepted, because he looked at them both at the same time.
He is about the only person who doesn’t think Ariadne pretty, so Ariadne naturally dislikes him. She can’t help it. If we didn’t let her think she was pretty, she would have jaundice, or something lingering of that sort. She snubs Mr. Aix, but somehow he won’t consider himself snubbed. It comes of having no sense of decency, as the reviews say of him. Christina chaffs him, and teases him about his next novel, and asks him if it is to be calledThe DustmanorThe General, and what thelocaleis to be, the scullery or the collecting-places just outside London?
I have an idea that it will be calledThe Seamstress, for he has lately taken to coming up into the little entresol on the stairs where we sit and stitch, and make our frocks, and asking us to teach him to sew. He puts out a hand like a sheaf of bananas, Ariadne fits a needle into one of them, and he cobbles away quite painstakingly for an hour.
Once he came up when Ariadne was awfully tired, and could hardly keep her eyes open, as she always is after a dance.
“I have often wondered,” he began, “what must be the sensations of a young girl on entering on her kingdom of the ball-room. Is she dazzled, is she obfuscated by the twinkling repetition of the lights? are her senses stunned or stimulated by the ponderousbeat of the time, relentless under its top-dressing of melody, like despair underlying frivolity? Is she——?”
He would have gone on for ever if I had not interrupted—
“I can tell you. She’s thinking all the time, ‘Is there a hair-pin sticking out? Is the tip of my nose shiny? Is my dress too short in front, and is it properly fastened at the back, and what does Mr. —— it depends which Mister is there that evening—think of it all?”
“Don’t, Tempe!” said Ariadne.
“No, no, Miss Tempe, go on, I beg of you. Go on being indiscreet. Tell me some more things about women.”
“Do you know why women always sit on one side when they are alone in a hansom?”
“No, I have no idea. Some charmingly morbid reason, I suppose?”
“Oh, you can call it morbid, if you like,” I said. “It is only because there happens to be a looking-glass there.”
George and Mr. Aix have different publishers, but the same literary agent. A publisher once took them both to the top of a high hill in Surrey and tempted them—to sell him the rights of every novel they did for ten years, and be kept in luxury by him. But they both shook their heads and said, “You must go to Middleman!” Then he took them to a London restaurant and made them drunk, and still they shook their heads and sent him to Middleman,who makes all their bargains for them, but he can’t control all the reviews.
One morning Mr. Aix came in to see George, with a blue press-cutting in his hand; I was in the study then, as it happened, and I did not go. George never minds our hearing everything, he says it is too much of an effort to be a hero to one’s typewriter, or one’s daughter.
“I am in a rage!” Mr. Aix said, and so I suppose he was, though he looked more like a white gooseberry than ever. “Just let me get hold of this fellow they have got onThe Bittern, and see if I don’t wring his neck for him!”
George didn’t say anything, and so I asked—somebody had to—“What hasThe Bitternman done, please?”
“Done! He has dammed me with faint praise, that’s all! I’d have the fellow know that I’m read in every pothouse, every kitchen in England! Here, George, take it, and read it, the infamous thing!”
George read it—at least he ran his eyes over it. He didn’t seem to want to see it particularly, and gave it back as if it bit him, saying—
“Well, my dear fellow, you must take the rough with the smooth—one can always learn something from criticism, or so I find!”
“What the devil do you suppose I am to learn from an incompetent paste-and-scissors understrapper like that? He wants a good hiding, that’s what he wants, and I for one would have no objection to giving it him!”
“Well, it wasn’t me wrote it, Mr. Aix,” I said, “nor Ariadne!” He isn’t supposed to know that George farms out his reviews.
Mr. Aix laughed, and left off being cross. The odd thing was, that it had only just missed being Ariadne or me, for the book certainly came in for review. Most likely George wrote it, or else why didn’t he trouble to read it, when it was given him to read? It looks as if he were growing a little tiny bit of a conscience, for he knows he ought to have said toThe Bitterneditor, “Avaunt! Don’t tempt an author to review his friend’s book, when he knows he cannot speak well of it for so many reasons!” That is my idea of literary morality.
GEORGEcame back from his yachting tour with the Scillys very brown and cheerful, having collected enough sunshine for a new book, and Christina is typing it at his dictation.
George is a cranky dictator, and it takes her all her time to keep in touch with him. I have watched her at it. Sometimes he stops and can’t for the life of him find the right word, and I can tell by her eyes that she knows it, and is too polite to give it him; just the way one longs to help out a stutterer. But I have seen her put the word down out of her own head long before George has shouted it at her, as he does in the end. She picks and chooses, too, a little, for George is a tidy swearer, as the cabman said. I suppose he learned it in the high society he goes among! He does it all the time he is composing; it relieves the tension, he says, and she doesn’t mind. She manages him. George pretends he knows he is being managed, which shows that he doesn’t really think he is. I asked her once why she didn’t marry, but she said the profession of typewriting was not so binding as the other, for you could get down off your high stool if you wanted.
Christina always says rude things about epigramsand marriage. She is not very old, only thirty; but she says she has outgrown them both. Of course in this house epigrams are the same as bread-and-butter, hers and ours, for George pays her a good salary for typing those that he makes ready for print. As for epigrams, she says she can make them herself, and here are some I found written out in her handwriting on a china memorandum tablet. I expect she keeps a separate tablet for her remarks on Marriage.
1. Man cannot live by epigram alone.
2. Epigrams are like the paper-streamers they fling out of the boxes at abal masquéat the Opera. They flat fall immediately afterwards.
3. An epigram is like the deadly Upas Tree, and blights everything in the shape of conversation that grows near it.
4. Reverse an epigram and you get a platitude.
5. The savage, sour, and friendless epigram. The last sounds to me all wrong, for it has no verb. But I give it as I find it.
George’s new novel is to be calledThe Senior Epigrammatist, and the scene is laid in the Smart Sea Islands.
“Our well-known blend,” said Mr. Aix, “of opaline sea and crystal epigram knocks the public every time! But mark me, Christina dear, this sunlight soap won’t wash clothes. It isn’t for home consumption. It gladdens publishers’ offices, but leaves the domestic hearth cold. The fires of passion——”
“Don’t talk to me of passion,” said Christina. “I just detest the word. Passion is piggish! It’s a perfect disgrace to have primitive instincts, and I wouldn’t be seen dead with a temperament, in these days.”
She was putting a new ribbon into her typewriter and trying it. She typed something like this—
Christina x x x Ball x x C.B. x x (——) C. Ball B B——
“Who is Ball?” said Mr. Aix anxiously.
Christina answered as if she meant to bite his head off.
“A man who never made an epigram in his life, and stands six foot six in his shoes.”
“The noble savage, eh? Well, well, I wish him luck!”
I knew who Ball was; it is Peter Ball, and Christina likes him. She hasn’t said or typed anything against marriage since she knew him.
It was at a concert that some friends of hers gave in Queen’s Gate, that she first met him. I was with her, and we all sat in rows on rout seats, that skidded and flew off like shirt-buttons across the room whenever you got up suddenly. Peter Ball sat next us, and his legs were long, though his feet were small. He had a golden beard, which I hate, and so, I thought, did Christina. She had always said there was one thing she would not marry, and that was a beard.
He wished out loud that he hadn’t got let in for the sitting-down seats, so that he could not make aclean bolt of it when he had had enough of Miss Squallini. There was not any Miss of that name on the programme, so though he said loud, no one could be offended. A Maddle. Xeres told us quite slyly, lifting her eyebrows up and down, that “she knew a bank!” as if she had got up early like the worm, and found it all by herself. After that, one of the spare hostesses came wandering by and introduced him to us. He began to talk to Christina without looking at her, and gradually he forgot his legs and put one under the rout seat in front of him and lifted it up without thinking. The lady on it looked round indignantly and Christina smiled. After that he talked to us all through the programme though people shoo’d him, and then he stopped for a little and apologized, and went on again.
“I don’t often turn up at this sort of function, do you?” he asked Christina.
“No, I do not,” she replied, “I have too much to do as a general thing.”
“And stay at home and do it,” said he; “you’re wise.”
“I have to!” said Christina. “Oh,” she sighed, “I am so dreadfully hot.”
It was June.
“Why do you wear that bag?” he said, meaning her motor tulle veil, which was absurdly thick and made her look as if she had small-pox. But every one else apparently had a different form of the same disease, shown by a different size in spots. She said so, and that she wore a veil like every one else.
“Get out of it, can’t you, and let me take care of it for you, and that boa thing you have got round your neck.”
She took it off, and the boa, and gave them to him.
“I am afraid you will drop the boa, and let the veil work under the seat,” she said in a fright, as he nipped them both in one great hand. So he pinned them, boa, veil, and all, to his grey speckled trousers with her hat-pin, and sat all through the rest of the concert, looking at the bunch at his knee. I never saw a man like that before, he didn’t seem at all like the people who come to Cinque Cento House. I didn’t seem to see him there, and I rather thought I should like to. Why, he would make George straighten his back!
“I say,” he said presently, “do you like gramophones?”
“I love them,” said Christina, and I knew it was a lie.
“My people have a perfectly splendid one!” said he, and his whole face lighted up. “I wish you could hear it.”
Christina wished she could, and he said—
“Oh, then, we will manage it somehow.”
When the concert was over he didn’t bolt as he had said he wanted to, but gave us ices, Christina one, me two, and then Christina put the bag on again.
“If you were in my motor in that thing in a shower you’d get drowned,” said he. “Why, it wouldholdthe water. I should like to drive youin my motor all the same. I say, can’t I call on you?”
Christina told him very nicely that she was private secretary to the author, Mr. George Vero-Taylor, and hadn’t much time for herself. She seemed to say that this made a call impossible.
“Ah, I see! Live in, do you? Well, I’ll call there, drop my pasteboard, all straight and formal, you know, and then there can be no objection to my giving you a spin in the motor. Right you are! Sinky Cento House. What a rum name! Suggests drains! Never mind, I’ll be there, and then when I’ve made the acquaintance of your chaperon, she’ll allow you to come to tea with my mater, and make the acquaintance of the gramophone. My mater’s too old to go out. It’s a ripper, the gramophone, I mean, like some other people I am thinking of!”
“What a breezy man!” said Christina, on the way home. “He reminds me of The Northman I used to draw at South Kensington. I broke him, and had to pay seven-and-six for him.” Then she began to think—I believe it was about Peter Ball. Hewashandsome, for he had blue eyes and a little short, straight nose like the Sovereigns in Madame Tussaud’s.
“Isn’t he exactly like Harold of England?” I said to Christina. “I hope George won’t snub him when he comes to see you?”
“He won’t come,” said she; “but if he did he wouldn’t know he was being snubbed.”
“No, he would say to George, ‘Keep your snubsfor a man of your own size.’ But, Christina dear, I alwaysthoughtyou hated both marriage and gramophones.”
“I am not so sure about gramophones,” said she. “Perhaps a very big one——?”
“A six-footer, like Mr. Peter Ball, eh?”
She was quite moody and absent in the ’bus going home, and wouldn’t go on top to please me. Then I accidentally stuck my umbrella in over the top of her shoe as I walked beside her, and then she was too cross to speak at all. I respected her mood. That is why I am beloved in the home circle. But I have my own ideas, and they keep me amused.
I was unfortunately out of the way when Mr. Peter Ball did call, three days later. Mother and Christina were in, and Ariadne, who gave me a true account of it all. She says the first thing he said to Christina was, “I hope you don’t think I have been too precipitate?” I suppose he meant in calling? He stared about him a good deal at first, and she thought that George’s queer furniture made him feel shy, and that he thought the ivory figure of Buddha quite indecent. She was sure he didn’t admire her (Ariadne), but only Christina, because Christina is a “tailor-made” girl, that men like. Mother made the tea very strong that afternoon, so as to make him feel at home, and then after all he didn’t touch tea. She kindly offered him a brandy-and-soda and he declined that, but I expect it was only because it would have seemed disrespectful to Christina. All men are alike, andprone to a b. and s. if they can get it without disgrace. Mother was sure that he had fallen head-over-ears in love with Christina, and she with him at the very first sight. She told me so, and said she meant to help it on.
“It is because Christina is so used to seeing George every day,” said I. “Peter Ball is very different, isn’t he?”
Mother said that there was no accounting for tastes, and that for her part she considered George’s type was the nicest. But whatever we did, she said, we were not to chaff Christina about it, and put her off a very good match. A girl of Christina’s sort never took kindly to chaff, and though she should be sorry to lose Christina as a secretary to George, it being impossible to tell what sort of minx he might engage in her place, she for one wouldn’t like any personal consideration whatever to interfere with Christina’s establishment in life. Peter Ball is a landed gentry. He is M.F.H. in the county of Northumberland to the Rattenraw Hunt, and a capital shot and first-rate angler. When his old mother dies he will be richer, but he is a good son, and often stays with her in Leinster Gardens where he has asked me and Christina to go to tea next week.
I promised not to chaff, but if she had only known, it would have taken a steam-crane to put Christina off that particular thing. She talked lots about Peter. He was the “finest specimen of humanity she had ever come across!” “Such a contrast tothe little anæmic, effete, ambisextrous (I hope I have got it right?) creatures that haunt Cinque Cento House, who are all trying to get more out of their heads than is in them!” “Greek in his simplicity, a sort of mixture of John Bull and Antinöus!” I say, just wait till you see his mother; nice men’s mothers are sometimes sad eye-openers, and Peter Ball is always talking about his. Also it is quite on the cards that she may not like Christina, and then I am sure he will never propose to her. He is an admirable son. I believe he keeps a gramophone just to attract the girls he admires into his mother’s cave, and give her the opportunity of looking over them, and making up her mind if they are fit to be her Peter’s wife or no.
When the eventful day came, Christina was on thorns. She didn’t know how to dress. She finally left off the chiffon bag and wore a fringe-net, and her best-cut “tailor-made,” and took out her ear-rings lest they should damn her in his mother’s eyes. Then at exactly five minutes to four we rang the bell in 1000 Leinster Square.
A proud butler opened the door. George will only let us have maids, although he could afford ten butlers.
The house was beautiful, and not a bit like ours. “Early Victorian,” Christina whispered me. She was dreadfully nervous, and made me too. I dropped my umbrella in the rack with such a clatter that she blushed and scolded me. Then a palm-leaf tickled my head as I went by, and I begged its pardon,thinking some one behind was trying to attract my attention. We were taken into a big room with pedestal things in gold and stucco set down at intervals, and a clock with a bare pendulum which looks simply undressed to me, and a bronze Father Time with his sickle lying lazily across the top. On another clock there was a gilt man in a gilt cart whipping up two gilt horses. The carpet had large bouquets of roses on it, and I thought what a good game it would be to pretend they were islands and hop across from one to the other. I began, but she stopped me. In a corner was the gramophone, like a great brass ear put out to hear what you were saying. It was playing when we went in, like an old man with a wheeze, and in came Peter Ball looking as if he had just got out of a bath, and said, “How-do-you-do! it is playing ‘Coppelia.’” Then it played “Valse Bleue” and “Casey at the Wake,” and “Casey as Doctor,” and “When other Lips,” and then Peter Ball said his mother was ready.
Into another room we went, full of Berlin wool-work chairs, and screens of Potiphar and his wife, and the curtains were of green rep with ropes of silk to tie them back and gilt festoons to hide their beginnings, and an old old lady in a big arm-chair and a lace cap with nodding bugles was in a corner, just like another and older bit of furniture.
We were introduced; she was very deaf and very blind, and I am not sure she didn’t think I was the girl Peter wanted to marry. However that mightbe, she seemed pleased with us, and we talked of her son and the house. Christina, who used to say she preferred a Chéret poster to a Titian, and plain deal to mahogany, admired everything freely. The rosewood wheelbarrow with silver fittings given to Peter Ball’s father when he laid a first stone somewhere, she said was superb and so graceful; the picture of old Mrs. Ball by Ingres in a poke bonnet and short waist she said was far superior to anything by Burne Jones.
“Who is Burne Jones?” said the old lady, and Christina denied Burne Jones cheerfully. I thought of my favourite piece of poetry—