“We left behind the painted buoyThat tosses at the harbour-mouth,And madly danced our hearts with joy
“We left behind the painted buoyThat tosses at the harbour-mouth,And madly danced our hearts with joy
While I was ill, though, I missed all the discussions about moving, and the results of the lecture and all that. Ariadne reported what she could. She said that Mother and George never mentioned me, but talked as if the drains had gone wrong, or a pipe had burst, or as if George had lost a lot of money somehow. Everything is to be altered and the world will be topsy-turvey when I get down-stairs again. Though I don’t suppose that even if I did get a chance of putting my word in, I could alter anything as I wished it? These grown-ups, once they getthe bit between their teeth——!
ITis no fun for George now, when everybody knows he is a married man. Lady Scilly took care of that, and told everybody as a good joke, and all her friends at the Go-ahead Club told their friends how George Vero-Taylor’s little girl had burst into the middle of his lecture there and given him away—such fun, don’t you know! It wasn’t fun for me, for I had nothing but the consciousness of a bad action to support me in Coventry, where they all put me for a month. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if George hadn’t been at home a good deal about that time. I think I prefer George as a visitor, and so does Elizabeth Cawthorne, though she says it is more natural perhaps for a gentleman to stop with his family, though wearing to the servants.
George is a philosopher. He has been forced to own up to a family, and thus has lost a certain amount of prestige, but he is now trying a new line. At any rate, he has been a good deal talked about, and got into the newspapers, and that will sell an edition, I should think. He has a volume on the stocks. Misfortunes never come single-handed, luckily. He settled to build a house—a house thatshould express him and shelter his family as well. Mother didn’t want to build. If wehadto move, she wanted a dear little house on the river at Datchet, or even at Surbiton, and she and I used to go down for the day third-class to see if there were any to let. We used to take a packet of sandwiches and a soda-water bottle full of milk for us both. Mother never hardly touches spirits. In this way we looked over heaps of little earwiggeries trimmed with clematises and pots of geraniums hanging from the balconies, with their poor roots higher than their heads, and manicured lawns right down to the water’s edge. George didn’t stop our doing this and taking so much trouble; I believe he thought it amused us and did him no harm. But all the time, he was hansoming it backwards and forwards to St. John’s Wood, where he meant to settle. He quietly chose a site, and bought it, and was his own architect, though a little Mr. Jortin he discovered, made the plans from his dictation. He got no credit, except for the blunders. George, being a man of the widest culture, wanted to show the world that he can do other things than write books. InWho’s Who, he doesn’t mention writing as one of his occupations, not even as one of his amusements. These are Riding, Driving, Shooting, Fishing, Fencing, Polo, Rotting and Log-rolling, or at least, that’s what his friend Mr. Aix read out to us one afternoon he came to see us, out of the very newest edition, and George was in the room too, and laughed.
All this time Ariadne and I were kept hard at itcopying things. George talked of nothing but atriums and tricliniums and environments. I only interrupted once, when I said that they had never mentioned a main staircase, and was it going to be outside, like those wooden ones you see in the country, with the fowls stepping up to bed on them? They thanked me, and added an inside stairs to the plan at once.
As soon as we get into the new house, George intends to raise his prices. He expects to get ten pounds per “thou.” He told Middleman, his literary agent, so. Up to now his price was four pound ten per “thou.” for articles, and the royalties on his last book are going to pay for the new house. Middleman says George will be quite right to charge establishment charges. Middleman is supposed to have a faint, very faint sense of humour, and that’s the only way people get at him. Mr. Aix says Middleman can run up an author’s sales twenty per cent. in no time, if he fancies you personally, or thinks there’s money in you.
George’s new book is going to be not mediæval this time; people have imitated him andThe Adventures of Sir Bore and Sir Wearifulwas brought out just to plague him, so he is going to quit that for a time. He thinks that the Isles of Greece would be a good place to dump a few English aristocrats and tell their adventures on. He will go abroad soon, but is waiting for some of the aristocrats to make up a party and pay his expenses.
Meanwhile Cinque Cento House, as it is to becalled, rose like a thief in the night, and as it grew higher and higher Mother’s face grew longer and longer. She refused to go near it, and it was Lady Scilly who helped George to arrange the furniture.
Aunt Gerty, however, is practical, and tried to get Mother to take some interest in her own mansion.
“I do,” Mother said, “but at a distance. I couldn’t be of any use advising, and whatever I advised, George would still take his own way. That odious woman, whom I thank God I have never set eyes on, is always about, and would put my back up if I met her there, and I should say things I should be sorry for after. No, Gerty, let them arrange it as they like, and buy furniture and set it up. It is George’s own money. He earned it.”
“Not by the sweat of his brow, at all events!” sneered my aunt.
“I came to him without a penny, and I haven’t the right to dictate so much as the position of a wardrobe.”
“You’re the man’s lawful wife,” said Aunt Gerty, as she always did. One got tired of the expression.
“Yes, unfortunately,” said Mother. “Or I’d have a better chance! But I amnotgoing to fight over George with that minx!”
How Mother did hate Lady Scilly, to be sure, a person she had never seen! I once told her she needn’t be cross with Lady Scilly, and how harmless she was, and how very little she really thought of Papa—snubbed him even, and treated him like dirt;and then she was cross withme, and said George was a man of whom any woman might be proud.
Ariadne and I went over to the new house often, to get measurements for blinds and curtains and things at home. Mother made them, and then we took them round. Lady Scilly was always there, from twelve to two, and George generally met her and they shut themselves into first one room and then another, discussing it. Vanloads of furniture kept coming in, and all George’s furniture from his old rooms in Mayfair. She kept saying—
“Oh, that dear old marquetry cabinet! How I remember it in Chapel Street, and how the firelight caught it in the evenings!” or else—“That sweet little pair of Flemish bellows? Do you remember when you and I”—something or other?
She marched about and settled everything. George took it quite mildly, and made jokes, at least I suppose they were jokes, for he made her laugh consumedly, so she said. It’s extraordinary how he can make people laugh—people out of his own family!
She is very friendly to me and Ariadne, and has promised to present Ariadne at the next Court. It’s to please George, if she does remember to do it. But if I were Ariadne I should refuse till my own mother had been presented first, so that she could introduce me herself. George ought to insist on it, but he always says “Let them rave!” and that means, Do as you like, but don’t bother me. What he won’t like will be forking out forty pounds forAriadne’s dress, and it will end by her staying at home. Ariadne wants to be presented badly; she is practising curtseys already, and longing for the season to begin. I would not condescend to owe even a pleasure to Lady Scilly, but Ariadne is so poor-spirited, and Aunt Gerty continually advises her to take what she can get, and make what she can out of George’s “mash,” when well disposed.
About Easter, George got his chance. Lady Scilly proposed a month’s yachting trip in the Mediterranean in somebody’s yacht that they were willing to lend her, on condition she invited her own party and included them. If I had a yacht, I would ask my own party, that is all I can say. She asked George to go with them—“We shan’t see more of Mr. Pawky (i.e. the owner) than we can help, and you can have a study on board and write a yachting novel, like William Black’s, and put old Pawky in. He is quite a character, you know, with a gilded liver, as they say—dyspeptic and all that. I can’t stand him, but you might bear with him a little in the interests of Art!” George had no objection to visiting the scene of his new book at Mr. Pawky’s expense, in the company of his own pals, and accepted at once. I wonder if they will batten down the hatches on Mr. Pawky as soon as they get out to sea, and keep him there for the rest of the voyage? It would be just like them.
George proposed to Mother that she should move in while he was away. He said somebody must go in to get the painters out. Then he would comehome fresh and full of material, and find his study organized and everything ready for him to begin. He said there would be ructions, inseparable from a first installation, and that would put him off work abominably, and spoil the whole brewing!
“Dear,” said Mother, “I fear we shall do badly without you—you are a man, at least—but I’ll be good, and spare you cheerfully!”
So he went. Then Mother set to work, and was perfectly happy. There was to be a sale in this house, because the furniture in it would not go with what George and Lady Scilly had chosen for Cinque Cento House, but there were some old pieces Mother could not do without. Her nice brass bedstead, and the old nursery fender that Ariadne nearly hanged herself on once in a fit of naughtiness, and of course all the bedding and linen and kitchen utensils from “The Magnolias”—one could hardly suppose Lady Scilly had troubled herself about that sort of thing? The greengrocer “moved” us for two pounds. Mother and Aunt Gerty and the cook saw the things off at Isleworth, and Ariadne and I and Kate—Sarah had gone, and I never got any better reason than that she “had to”—received them at Cinque Cento House. Mother had stuck to it, that she would not go near the place till she went in for good, so it was to be all quite new to her and Aunt Gerty. Ariadne and I, who had been in and out for months, wondered how they would like it, and expected some sport when their eyes first fell on it.
We had a long delightful day of anticipation, and putting things where they had to go, and in the evening Mother and Aunt Gerty came. They had got out of the train at Swiss Cottage, and asked their way to their own house. Aunt Gerty had her mouth wide open; Mother had hers tight shut. She was not intending to carp or pass opinions, but the front-door knocker was a regular slap in the face, and took her breath away.
She tried to talk of something else, and whispered to Aunt Gerty, “Rather an inconvenient place for a coal-shoot, isn’t it! Right alongside the front-door!”
I hastened to explain that that was the larder-window she saw, to prevent unpleasantness.
Mother shivered when she got into the hall, which is vast and flagged with marble like a church. “It strikes very cold to the feet!” she said to Aunt Gerty. “Mine are like so much ice.”
“Oh, come along, and we’ll brew you a glass of hot toddy!” Aunt Gerty said cheerfully. “It’s a bit chilly, I think, myself, but ’ansom, like the big ’all where ’Amlet ’as the players!”
Aunt Gerty is generally most careful, but she is apt to drop a little h or so when she is excited. She could hardly contain herself, as Ariadne and I had hoped, when she saw the gilt stairs leading up into the study.
“What price broken legs? Why, I shall have to get roller-skates or take off my shoes and stockings to go up them!”
“So you will, Aunt Gerty,” said Ariadne. “It is one of George’s rules. He made Lady Scilly even leave off her high heels before she used them.”
“Took ’em off for her himself with his lily hands, I suppose?” snorted my aunt. “Well, I don’t expect you will find me treading those golden stairs very often. I ain’t one of George’s elect.”
“Such wretched things to keep clean,” Mother complained. “The servants are sure to object to the extra work, and give up their places, and I am sure one can’t blame them, and such good ones as we’ve got, too, in these awful times, when looking for a cook is like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. Heavens, is the girl there all the time listening to me?”
Kate was, luckily, down-stairs, showing Elizabeth Cawthorne the way about her kitchen, or else it would have been very imprudent to tell a servant how valuable she is. Mother was cowed by the danger she had escaped, but Aunt Gerty went on flouncing about, pricing everything and tinkling her nails against pots and jugs, till she stopped suddenly and put her muff before her face—
“Well, of all the improper objects to meet a lady’s eye coming into a gentleman’s house! Who’s that mouldy old statue of?”
I told her that was Autolycus.
“Cover yourself, Tollie, I would,” Aunt Gerty said, going past him affectedly. “Oh, look, Lucy, at all those dragons and cockroaches doing splitson the fire-place! Brass, too, trimmed copper. My God!”
“I shall just have to clean that brass fire-place myself,” said Mother. “I shall never have the face to ask Kate to do it.”
“And no proper grate, only the bare bricks left showing!” Aunt Gerty wailed. “How could one get up any proper fireside feeling over a contraption like that! The Lyceum scenery is nothing to it. It makes me think of Shakespeare all the time—sopainfullymeretricious——”
Lady Castlewood in a basket under Mother’s arm, suddenly began to mew very sadly. Aunt Gerty had put Robert the Devil down on the floor, in his hamper, and I suppose a draught got to him, for he spat loudly. Ariadne and I let out the poor things and they bounced straight out on to the parquet floor, and their feet slid from under them. I never saw two cats look so silly!
“Well, if a cat can’t keep his feet on those wooden tiles,” said Mother, “I don’t suppose I can,” and she jumped, just to try, right into the middle of a little square of blue carpet, which, true enough, slid along with her.
“You can give a nice hop here, at any rate,” cried Aunt Gerty, catching her round the waist, and waltzing all over the room, till both their picture hats fell off, and hung down their backs by the pins. “Ask me and all the boys, and give a nice sit-down supper, and do us as well as the old villain will allow you.”
She was quite happy. That is just like an actress!Ariadne and I danced too, and the cats mewed loudly for strangeness. Cats hate newness of any kind, and they weren’t easy till I got some newspaper, crackled it, and let them sit on it, and then they were all right. Then Mother and Aunt Gerty rang the queer-shaped bell, as if it would sting them, and got up some coals which Mother had had the forethought to order in, and lit a modest little fire in a great cave with brass images in front of it under the kind of copper hood. It wouldn’t draw at first, being used to logs, and when it smoked we threw water on it, lest we dirtied the beautiful silk hangings. At last we fetched Elizabeth Cawthorne.
“Hout!” she said. “I’d like to see the fire that’s going to get the better of me!”
She made it burn, sulkily, and Ariadne and I went to a shop we knew of round the corner, and bought tea and sugar and condensed milk, to make ourselves tea with the spirit-lamp Aunt Gerty had brought. We had no butter or bread, only biscuits luckily, so we couldn’t stain the Cinque Cento chairs, whose gold trimmings were simply peeling off them. Sit on them we dared not, they would have let us down on the floor for a certainty. Mother and Aunt Gerty had a high old time blaming Lady Scilly for all her foolish arrangements, and then we all went down to the so-called kitchen to see how Elizabeth Cawthorne was getting on there. She was in a rage, but trying to pass it off, like a good soul as she is.
“Well, I never! Here’s a gold handle to my coal-cellar door! I shall have to wipe my lily handsbefore I dare use it. And a fine lady of a dresser that I shall be shy to set a plain dish on. Beetles here, do you ask, woman?” (To Kate.) “They’d be ashamed to show their faces in such a smart place as this, I’m thinking. And what’s this couple of drucken little candlesticks for the kitchen? Our Kate’ll soon rive the fond bit handles from off them, or she’s not the girl I take her for!”
She banged it hard against the dresser as servants do, to make it break, but it didn’t, and she looked disappointed. Mother then suggested she should unpack a favourite frying-pan she never goes anywhere without, and sent Kate out for a pound and a half of loin-chops, and cook was to fry them for our dinners.
The kitchen fire, after all, was the only one that would burn, so we ate our chops there, and sat there till bed-time. Ariadne looked like a picture, sitting at a trestle-table, and a thing like a torch burning at the back of her head. She was thoroughly disgusted, and got quite cross, and so did Elizabeth, as the evening went on. She hated trestles, and flambeaus, and dark Rembrandtish corners, and couldn’t lay her hand on her things nohow, so that when we all went up to bed, Mother said to her—
“Good-night, Elizabeth. You have been a bit upset, haven’t you? I wonder we have managed to get through the day without a row!”
“So do I, ma’am,” said the cook. “Heaps of times I’d have given you warning for twopence, but you never gave me ought to lay hold on.”
A horrid wind sprang up and moaned us off to sleep. I thought once or twice of George out on the Mediterranean on a tippity yacht, and didn’t quite want him to get drowned, though he had made us live in such an uncomfortable house. I had tried to colonize a little, and put up a photograph of Mother done at Ramsgate in a blue frame, to make me feel more at home. Ariadne had hung up all her necklaces on a row of nails. She has forty. There is one made of dried marrowfat peas, that she nibbles when she is nervous, and another of horse’s jesses, or whatever you call them, sewn on red velvet. We have a bed each, costing fourteen-and-six. They are apt to shut up with you in them. There is no carpet in our room, and there are not to be any. We are to be hardy. Nothing rouses one like a touch of cold floor in the mornings, and cools one on hot nights better than the same. Our water-jug too is an odd shape. I tilted all the water out of it on to the floor the first time I tried to use it. It must be French, it is so small. I shall not wash my hands very often in the days to come, I fancy.
Ariadne began to get reconciled to our room when she had made up her mind it was like the bower of a mediæval chatelaine, or like Princess Ursula’s bedroom in Carpaccio, but I prefer Early Victorian, and cried myself to sleep.
Next morning Ben come along; he had stayed all night at the Hitchings’, in Corinth Road. Jessie Hitchings likes Ben best of the family. She may marry him, when he is grown up, if she likes. Hehas birth, but no education, so that will make them even. The only glimmering of hope I see for Ben is that in this house there seems to be no bedroom for him, unless it is a room at the top with all the water tanks in it, which makes me think perhaps George is going to send him to school? For the present we have arranged him a bed in the butler’s pantry. Ben says perhaps George means him to be butler, as he has laid it down as a rule that only women servants are to be used in Cinque Cento House. They look so much nicer than men, George says; he likes a houseful of waving cap-ribbons. Mother thinks she can work a house best on one servant, and better still on none. George doesn’t mind her having any amount of boys from the Home near here, but that doesn’t suit Mother. She says one boy isn’t much good, that two boys is only one and a half, and that three boys is no boy at all. I suppose they get playing together? Ariadne and I would, in their place, I know, and human nature is the same, even in a Home, though I can’t call ours quite that.
GEORGEmakes a point of refusing to be interviewed. He hates it, unless it is for one of the best papers. Then he says that it is a sheer kindness, and that a successful man has no right to refuse some poor devil or other the chance of making an honest pound or two. So he suffers him gladly. He even is good enough to work on the thing a little in the proof: just to give the poor fellow a lift, and prevent him making a fool of himself and getting his facts all wrong. In the end George writes the whole thing entirely from beginning to end, and makes the man a present of a complete magazine article, and a very fine one too!
“I have been generous,” he tells us. “I have offered myself up as a burnt sacrifice. I have given myself all, without reservation. I have nothing extenuated, everything set down in malice. I have owned to strange sins that I never committed, to idiosyncrasies that took me all my time to invent, and all to bump out an article by some one else. I have been butchered to make a journalistic holiday!”
This is all very nice and self-sacrificing of George, but this particular interview read very well when itcame out, and made George seem a very interesting sort of man with some quaint habits, not half so funny as his real ones, though, and I think the interviewer might just as well have given those.
So, when I got a chance of telling the truth, I did, meaning to act for the best, and give Papa a good show and save him the trouble of telling it all himself, but nobody gave me credit for my good intentions, and kind heart.
In the first place, how dared I put myself forward and offer to see George’s visitors! But the young man asked for me—at least, when he was told that George was out, he said might he see one of the young ladies? Of course I don’t suppose that would have occurred to him, only I was leaning over the new aluminium bannisters, and caught his eye. Then an idea seemed to come into his head. The look of disappointment that had come over him when he was told that George was out changed to a little happy perky look, as if he had just thought of something amusing. He crooked his little finger at me as I slid down the bannister, and said would I do? and would he come in? Kate is a cheeky girl, but even the cook admits that Kate is not a patch upon me. Kate evidently didn’t think it quite right, but she slunk away into the back premises, and left me to deal with the young man.
He handed me a card. I thought that very polite of him, and “Mr. Frederick Cook,” and Representative ofThe Bitterndown in the corner, explained it all to me. We take in about a hundred rags, andthat’s the name of one of them. It’s calledThe Bitternbecause it booms people, so George says.
“I suppose you have come to interview my Father,” I said. “I’m sorry, but he is out. Did you have an appointment?”
“No, I didn’t,” said the young man right out.
I liked his nice bold way of speaking; he was the least shy young man I ever met.
“I don’t believe in appointments. The subject is conscious, primed, braced up, ready with a series of cards, so to speak, which he wishes to force on the patient public—a collection of least characteristic facts which he would like dragged into prominence. It is as if a man should go to the dentist with his mind made up as to the number of teeth that he is to have pulled out, a decision which should always rest with any dentist who respects himself.”
He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me very much.
“But then the worst of that is, you’ve got no appointment with George, and he is not here to have his teeth pulled out.”
I really so far wasn’t quite sure if he was an interviewer or a dentist, but I kept calm.
“All the better, my dear young lady, that is if you are willing to aid and abet me a little. Then we shall have a thundering good interview, I can promise you. You see, in my theory of interviewing, the actual collaboration of the patient—shall we call him?—is unnecessary. Indeed, it is more in the nature of an impediment. My method, which ofcourse I have very few opportunities of practising, is to seek out his nearest and dearest, those who have the privilege—or annoyance—of seeing him at all hours, at all seasons, unawares. If a painter, ’tis the wife of his brush that I would question; if an author, the partner of his pen—do you take me?”
Yes, I “took” him, and as George had called me a cockatrice—a very favourite term of abuse with him—only that morning, and remembering how she swaggers about being George’s Egeria, I said, “You’ll have to go to Lady Scilly for that!”
“Quite so!” he said very naturally. “Your distinguished parent dedicated his last book to her, did he not? Did you approve, may I ask?”
“No,” I said. “People should always dedicate all their works to their wife, whether they love her or not, that’s what I think!”
“Quite so,” he said again. “I see we agree famously, and between us we shall concoct a splendid interview. But now, if you would be so very good, and happen to have a small portion of leisure at your disposal——”
“I’ll do what I can for you,” I said, delighted at his nice polite way of putting things. “I’ll take you round the house, shall I? Have you a Kodak with you? Would you like to take a snapshot at George’s typewriter?”
“Certainly, if she is pretty,” said the silly man, and I explained that Miss Mander was out, and that it was the machine I meant. He said one machine was very like another, but that if he might see thestudy, where so many beautiful thoughts had taken shape? He said it quite gravely, but I felt he was laughing in his jacket all the time.
“We’ll take it allseriam!” I said, not wishing him to have all the fine words. “And we will begin at the beginning—I mean the atrium.”
He had a little pocket-book in his hand, and he said, as I led the way through the hall, “You won’t mind my writing things down as they occur to me?”
“Not at all!” I said. “If you will let me look at what you have written. I see you have put a lot already.”
He laughed and handed me his book, and I read—
“Through dusky suites, lit by stained glass windows, whose dim cloistral light, falling on lurid hangings and gorgeous masses of Titianesque drapery, and antique ebon panelling, irresistibly suggest the languorous mysteries of a mediæval palace....Do you think your father will like this style?”
“You have made it rather stuffy—piled it on a good deal, the drapery and hangings, I mean!” I said. “Now that I know the sort of thing you write, I shan’t want to read any more.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” he said, taking it back. “I’ll read it to you. ‘Behind this arras might lurk Benvenuto and his dagger——’”
“Not Ben’s dagger, but Papa’s bicycle.”
“We’ll leave it there and keep it out of the interview,” he said. “It would spoil the unity of the effect. ‘On, on, through softly-carpeted ante-roomswhere the footstep softer falls, than petals of blown roses on the grass....’”
“I hate poetry!” I said. “And we mayn’t walk on that part of the carpet for fear of blurring the Magellanic clouds in the pattern. Do you know anything about Magellanic clouds in carpets?”
“No, I confess I have never trod them before,” he said, becoming all at once respectful to me. I expect he lives in a garret, and has no carpet at all, and I thought I would be good to him, and help him to bump out his article, and not cram him, but tell him where things really came from. So I drew his attention particularly to the aluminium eagle, and the pinchbeck serpent George picked up in Wardour Street. I left out George’s famous yarn about the sack of our ancestral Palace in Turin in the fifteenth century, when the Veros were finally disseminated or dissipated, whichever it is. I don’t believe it myself, but George always accounts for his swarthy complexion by his Italian grandmother. Aunt Gerty says it is all his grandmother, or in other words, all liver!
We went down-stairs into the study, which is the largest room in the house.
“Your father has realized the wish of the Psalmist,” saidThe Bitternman. “Set my feet in a large room!”
“He likes to have room to spread himself,” I said, “and to swing cats—books in, I mean.”
“So your father uses missiles in the fury of composition?”
“Sometimes; but oftenest he swears, and that saves the books. He mostly swears. Look here!”
I had just found a piece of paper in Miss Mander’s handwriting, and on it was written, “Selections from the nervous vocabulary of Mr. Vero-Taylor during the last hour.”
The Bitternman looked at them, and, “By Jove! these are corkers!” he said. Then I thought perhaps I ought not to have let him see them. There was Drayton, the ironmonger’s bill lying about too, and I saw him raise his eyebrows at the last item, “To one chased brass handle for coal-cellar door.”
“That’s what I call being thorough!” saidThe Bitternman. “I’m thorough myself. See this interview when it is done!”
He was thorough. He looked at everything, and particularly asked to see the pen George uses. “Or perhaps he uses a stylograph?” he asked.
“Mercy, no!” I screamed out. “He would have an indigestion! This is his pen—at least, it is this week’s pen. George is wasteful of pens; he eats one a week.”
“Very interesting!” said he. “Most authors have a fetish, but I never heard of their eating their fetish before. This will make a nice fat paragraph. Come on!”
You see what friends we had become! We went into the dining-room, and I showed him the dresser, with all the blue china on, and the Turkey carpet spread on it, instead of a white one—that was howthey had it in the Middle Ages. He sympathized with me about how uncomfortable Mediæval was, and if it wasn’t for the honour and glory of it, how much we preferred Early Victoria, when the drawers draw, and the mirrors reflect—there’s not one looking-glass in the house that poor Ariadne can see herself in when she’s dressing to go out to a party—or chairs that will bear sitting on. Why, there are four in one room that we are forbidden to sit upon on pain of sudden death!
“Very hard lines!” saidThe Bitternman. “I confess that this point of view had not occurred to me. I shall give prominence to it in my article. Art, like the car of some fanatical Juggernaut, crushing its votaries——”
“Yes,” I said. “Mother draped a flower-pot once, and sneaked Ariadne’s photograph into a plush frame. You should have heard George! ‘To think that any wife of his—’ ‘Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion!’ And as for Ariadne, he had rather see her dead at his feet than folded in blue plush.”
“Capital!” saidThe Bitternman. “All good grist for the interview! And now, will you show me the famous metal stairs of which I have heard so much? There are no penalties attached to that, I trust?”
“Except that we are not allowed to go up them—Ariadne and me—without taking our boots off first, for fear of scratching the polish. We have to strip our feet in the housemaid’s pantry, and carry themup in our hands. That’s rather a bore, you will admit!”
“And your father? Does he bow to his own decrees?”
“Oh, no!” I said. “Papa is the exception that proves the rule.”
“Capital!” again remarkedThe Bitternman. “I am getting to know all about the great Mr. Vero-Taylor in the fierce light that beats upon the domestic hearth! But, by the way,” he said, with a little crooked look at me, “it is usual—shall I say something about Mrs. Vero-Taylor? People generally like an allusion—just a hint of feminine presence—say the mistress of the house flitting about, tending her ferns, or what not?”
“You must put her in the kitchen, then,” I said, “tending her servants. Would you like to see her?”
“I should not like to disturb her,” he said politely. “Will you describe her for me?”
“Oh, mother’s nice and thin—a good figure—I should hate to have one of those feather-beddy mothers, don’t you know? But I don’t really think you need describe her. I don’t think she cares about being in the interview, thank you, but you may say that my sister Ariadne is ravishingly beautiful, if you like?”
“And what about you, Miss——?” he asked, looking at me.
“Tempe Vero-Taylor,” I said. “But whatever you do, don’t put me in! George would have a fit!He won’t much like your mentioning Ariadne, but I don’t see why she shouldn’t have a show, if I can give her one.”
“Very well,” he said. “Your ladyship shall be obeyed. Now I really think I have got enough, unless——” I saw his eyes straying up-stairs.
“There’s nothing much to see up those stairs, except George’s bedroom, and I daren’t take you in there. It is quite commonplace, too; not like the rest of the house, but very,verycomfortable.”
“Oho! Your father reminds me of the man who plays Othello, and doesn’t trouble to black more than his face and arms,” saidThe Bitternman. “Andyourrooms?”
“Oh, our rooms are cupboards. Bowers, George calls them, and says we have more room to keep our clothes in than the lady of a mediæval castle would have. Now that’s all, and——”
The truth was, I wanted him to go before George came home, for I thought it might be awkward for me if I were found entertaining a newspaper man. George might have preferred to do his own interview, who knows? This reflection only just occurred to me, as all reflections do, too late.The Bitternman was very quick, however, and understood me. He thanked me very much, far more than he need, for on reflection I did not see how he was going to make an interview out of all the scrappy things I had told him, and I said so. He assured me I need be under no uneasiness on that score, that this particular interview would be unique of its kind, and wouldgain him great credit with his editor, and increase the circulation of the paper. If it had nothing else, he said, it would at least have asuccès de scandale, at least I think that is what he said, for I don’t understand French very well. While he was making all those pretty speeches we stood in the hall, and I heard the little grating noise in the lock that meant that George was fitting his key in, and oh, how I just longed to run away! But I didn’t. George opened the door, and came in and shook off his big fur coat. Then he sawThe Bitternman and came forward, andThe Bitternman came forward too, with his funny little smile on his face that somehow reminds me of the Pied Piper we used to read of when we were little.
“I came fromThe Bittern,” he said, and George nodded, to show he knew what for. “To ask you to grant me the favour of an interview——”
“I am sorry I happened to be out!” began George, and then I knew, by the sound of his voice, thatThe Bitternwas agoodpaper. “But if it is not too late, I shall be happy——”
“No need, no need to trouble you now, my dear sir,” the interviewer said, waving his hand a little. “I came, and I go not empty away, but with the material of a dozen articles of sovereign interest in my pocket. You left an admirablelocum tenensin the person of your daughter here, who kindly consented to be my cicerone and relieved me of the necessity of troublingyou. You will doubtless be relieved also. I shall have the pleasure of sending you a proof to-morrow. Good-day!”
And before George could say what he wanted to say, Mr. Cook had opened the door for himself and had gone. I said he had plenty of cheek. George said so, too, and a great deal worse. I was black and blue for a week, andThe Bitternman never sent a proof after all, so when the article came out—“Interviewing, New Style. A Talk with Miss Tempe Vero-Taylor,”—I got some more. That is the first and last time I was ever interviewed. George has peculiar theories about interviewing, I see, and I shall not interfere with them in future. I should think Mr. Frederick Cook would get on, making tools of honest children to serve his ambition like that. George didn’t punish him, of course, he is a power on a paper; while I am but a child in the nursery.
IWONDERif other families have got tame countesses, who come bothering and interfering in their affairs? I don’t mind our having a house-warming party at all, but I do hate that it should be to please Lady Scilly.
“A party! A party!” she said to George, clasping her hands in her silly way. “My party on the table!” like the woman in the play ofIbsen. “Ask all the dear, amusing literary people that I adore. And I’ll bring a large contingent of smart people, if I may, to meet them. Please,please!”
I don’t know what a contingent is, but I fancy it’s something disagreeable. Lady Scilly is George’s friend, not Mother’s. She has only called on Mother once, and that was in the old house, and then Mother was not receiving as they call it, so she has never even seen the mistress of the house where she is going to give the party. Christina Mander, George’s secretary, says that is quite the new way of doing things, and she has been about a great deal, and ought to know.
Miss Mander is a lady. She is very thin, one of those lath-and-plaster women, you know, that seem to live to support a small waist that is their greatestbeauty, but when we first knew her, she was plump and jolly-looking. We practically got her for George. Years ago, when we were quite little and had had measles, we were sent down to a sort of boarding-house at Ramsgate to an old lady, an ex-dresser in some theatre Aunt Gerty knew, and who could neither see to mend or to keep us in order, though she got thirty shillings a week for doing it. They never got us up till nine; I suppose the slavey thought sufficient for the day was the evil thereof, and tried to make the evil’s day as short as possible. One morning when it was quite nine, and the sun was shining in, Ariadne and I were feeling frightfully bored, so we got up in our night-gowns, moved a wardrobe, and found a door behind it into another house. It was quite a smart house, with soft plush carpets and nicely-varnished yellow doors. We went all over it. Only the cat was awake, licking herself in the window-seat. The bedroom doors were all shut except one, and we went in and found a nice girl in bed with her gold hair all spread over the pillow. She didn’t seem shocked at us, but laughed, and when we had explained, she wished us to get into the bed beside her. It had sheets trimmed with lace, and her initials, C. M., on the pillow. We did this every morning till we went away. She kept us up, afterwards sending us Christmas cards and so on, and when George advertised for a secretary to help him to sub-editWild Oats, she answered it, among the thousand others, and we remembered her name and made George engage her.
She had been to Girton, and to a journalistic school, and Mr. D’Auban’s dancing academy, and to Klondike—where all her hair got cut off, so that she hasn’t enough to spread over the pillow now—and behind the scenes at a music-hall, and a month on the stage, and edited a paper once and wrote a novel. All before she was thirty! At every new arrangement for amusement she made her people opposed her, and prayed for her in church. But she always got her own way in the end. Her mother, Mrs. Stephen Cadwallis Mander, came here to sniff about when George first took Christina on. She is a woman of the world, tortoise-shellpince-nezand all, but she took to Mother at first sight, and talked to her quite naturally about this “new move of dear Christina’s.”
She spoke in a neat, sighing voice, and told us that Christina had developed early, and was so different to her other children; she kept on saying the name of George’s new magazine, as if it shocked her very much.
“Wild Oats!Such a crude name! Though I suppose she must sow them somewhere, and best, perhaps, in the pages of a magazine. You’ll look after her, won’t you? Is there any danger”—she looked towards the study-door”—of her falling in love with her employer?” She laughed carelessly.
“Not the slightest!” said Mother, laughing too. “She will have her eyes opened, that’s all, to the seamy side of artistic life.”
“My daughter is so absurdly curious about thatwretched seamy side. After all, it’s only the side that the workers leave the knots on, they must be somewhere, just as plates must be washed up in a scullery. But we don’t need to go in and gloat on the horrid sight!”
“I quite agree with you,” said Mother. “Only if one happens to be the scullery-maid——”
Aunt Gerty came in just then and took her part in the conversation. I was glad to see she was dressed more quietly than usual.
“And,” said Mrs. Mander, “she buys everything that comes out, especially badly-executed magazines that talk about the fore-front of progress and look just as if they were produced in the dark ages. I know that she came to your husband entirely because she wanted to help to edit his magazine—Wild Oats. Is not that its name? From what Chris says, it sounds soveryadvanced!”
“Oh, very,” said Aunt Gerty. “But it won’t live!”
“You don’t say so?” Mrs. Mander put up herpince-nezand looked at Aunt Gerty, whom she already didn’t like.
“None of my brother-in-law’s things do!” Aunt Gerty went on calmly. “He is a prize wrecker—of women and magazines!”
Mrs. Mander looked startled, and Mother tried to change the conversation.
“Oh, he’s a law unto himself, my brother-in-law is,” went on Aunt Gerty. “But I don’t think he’ll convert Miss Mander to his views.”
“I hope not,” said Mrs. Mander, “for I notice that if you make a law unto yourself, you generally have to make a society unto yourself too! At least as far as women are concerned.”
“People will always let you go your own way,” said Mother; “but the point is, will they come with you—join with you in a pleasant walk?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Mander, “my daughter is the most headstrong of young women. I can’t control her, or you may be sure I should not have allowed her to undertake this post of secretary to Mr. Vero-Taylor.”
“I gathered as much,” said Mother, not offended a bit. “But I will look after her well!” She does; she gives her cod-liver oil every day to make her fat, and breakfast in bed once a week.
Christina says Lady Scilly is a female Mecænas! Ben says she a minx. Ben hates her, because she makes a fool of George, and he says Ariadne is a cad to accept her old dresses and wear them, and go out with her, but then, what is Ariadne to do? She likes to go to parties, and Mother won’t go anywhere, she is quite obstinate about that. I must say that George doesn’t try to persuade her much. You see, he isn’t used to having a wife, socially speaking, after going about as a bachelor all those years!
George agreed to have a party here, to please Lady Scilly, but Christina is quite sure that the idea had occurred to him already, for why should he build a house for purposes of advertisement, and then hideit under a bushel? A successful party is more good than fifty interviews, so she says, and sells an edition. She knows a great deal about geniuses. She says the hermit-plan would not suit George. I asked her what the hermit-plan was. She said she had known an artist, who took a lovely old house in the suburbs of London, and lived there, and never went out; anybody who cared must come out to see him, and then it was not so easy, for his Sundays were only for a select few—very selected. He only gave tea and bread-and-butter—very little butter—and no table-cloth—plain living, and high prices, for his pictures cost a lot, though he pretended he did not care if he sold them or not; in fact, it cut him to the heart to see any of them go out into the great cold brutal world, and he never exhibited in exhibitions, but in an empty room in his own house. He said, in fun, I suppose, that if the Academy were to elect him to be an R.A., he should put the matter into the hands of his solicitors. The end of that man was, she said, that he did become a Royal Academician, quite against his will, and princes and princesses of the blood used to come and have tea with him, without a table-cloth. But that would not do for George, for he isn’t at all hermit-like, and he can make epigrams! They say that is hisforte. I hate them myself, I think they are rude, and only a clever way of hurting people’s feelings so that they can’t complain, but then, of course, the family gets them in the rough; epigrams, like charity, begin at home.
George began to talk a great deal about the duty of entertaining. He said a man owed it to his century. And his party must be something out of the common run; it must be individual and exceptional. He thought he would give a party like the ones they gave in the Middle Ages. Judging from what he said, I think that it must have been very uncomfortable, and very expensive, for to be really grand you had to have cygnets and peacocks to eat. People stood about round the sides of the room, or sat on the floor or on coffers, and before the evening was half over the smoke from the flambeaux made it impossible for them to see each other’s faces! That didn’t suit Ariadne at all, and she snubbed the idea as much as she could.
Luckily, George changed his mind, and then it was to be a supper, still Mediæval, at six o’clock. We should have had to eat with our fingers, because only the carver has a fork, and he sometimes lends it, but it can’t go all round. That’s the reason we have finger-bowls now, and little bits of bread beside our plates instead of big bits of brown to eat off. And when you were done, did you eat the plate? As far as I can see, everybody handed everybody they loved nice pieces off their own trenchers and drank out of the same glasses, so the fewer persons that loved one the better I should have liked it. You should have seen Mother’s face when the middle-aged menu was explained to her! She said she would do what she could, but how was she going to put the grocers’ and the butchers’ shops back a century?
The first course, George explained, was quite easy—it was little bits of toast with honey and hypocras.
“Perhaps they will know what that is at the Stores?” Mother said, meaning to be funny. “There’s a very civil young man there might help me?”
“Next course, smoked eels,” went on George. “Any soup you like, only it must be flavoured with verjuice. That is the third course. Then you have venison, rabbits, pigeons, fricasseed beans, river crabs, sorrel, oranges, capers in vinegar——”
“It will relieve us for ever of the burden of entertaining for ever and ever, that’s one good thing!” Mother said, “for nobody will care to try thatmenutwice!”
“It would look well in the papers, though,” George said. “What do you say to barbecued pig?”
But Mother would have nothing to say to barbecued pig, and George and Lady Scilly finally settled that it was to be a masked ball, costume not obligatory, but masks and dominos imperative, with a cold collation at twelve o’clock, and all the guests to unmask then.
The date was chosen to please her, and it was changed three times, but at last it was fixed, and George got some cards printed that he had designed himself. They were quite white and plain, but with a knowing red splotch in one corner, which signified George’s passionate Italian nature. I was in the study when the first dozens of packets came, withMiss Mander, and she undid them. Secretaries always take the right to open everything!
“My Goodness!” she said.
“Isn’t it right?” I asked, getting hold of it, but when I had looked at it I was no wiser, for I couldn’t see what was wrong. There it was, written out very nicely, “Mr. Vero-Taylor At Home. Wednesday the twenty-first,” and the address in the corner, and all those rules about the dominos, and that was all.
“Oh, dear darling Christina,” I begged, deadly curious, “do tell me what is wrong with that? I cannot guess.”
“It’s just as well, perhaps,” she said. “Preserve your sublime ignorance, my dear child, as long as you can.”
And not another word could I get out of her! I suppose she calls that being loyal to her employer.
I told Ben, and he said he knew, and what was more, he would go one better. He got hold of one of the cards, and altered it. And then it wasMr. Vero-Taylor and Lady Scilly At Home! I think that was absurd, for though Lady Scilly meddles in all our affairs, she doesn’t quite live here yet! and Mother does, and what’s more, Mother never goes out at all except to take a servant’s character, or scold the butcher, or something of the sort, so she is really the one at home! Christina took it from him, and looked at it, and I’ll swear I saw her smile before she tore it up. So Ben had me there, for he still wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with the first card.
We began to write in the names of the people. Ittook us a whole morning, Ben, Ariadne, Miss Mander and I. I offered to help, and really, though I write rather badly, I can spell better than any of them, but I don’t believe they valued my help very much, and only gave me a card now and then to keep me quiet. There were six young men that Ariadne wanted asked—six, no less, if you please—and she’s only been out six months! And she kept trying to force them on George, same as you do cards in a card trick! But he didn’t take any notice, and kept walking up and down the room mentioning the names of all sorts of absurd people that nobody wanted, except himself. It was really going to be a very smart party; there were to be detectives and reporters, and what more can you have than that? All the countesses and dukes and so on were to come, of course, but I must say I had thought that George knew a great many more of them; he managed to scratch up so few, considering all the talk there had been about it. I kept saying, “Oh, do give me a Countess to ask. You give me all the plain people to do.”
Somehow or other, George did not seem to be pleased, and he sent us all away after fifty had been written.
Next day, he told us that he had thought it all out, and he was going to do an original thing, and instead of sending out cards for his party, he was going to announce it in the pages ofThe Bittern, and that all his friends, reading it, must consider themselves bidden. Mother said how should she know how manyto prepare for? I suppose the answer to that depends on the number of friends George has got, and whether they know that he considers them his friends. For think how awkward to assume that you were a friend and had a place laid for you, and then to come and find that you were only an acquaintance. I suggested that the real friends should have a hot sit-down supper, with wine, while the acquaintances should only go to a buffet and have cold pressed beef and lemonade. There should be a password,Hot with, andcold without, and they roared when I told them this, but I didn’t see why. Then the party would really be of some use, for after it people would know where they were! But how about the newspaper people? They couldn’t call themselves friends, or even acquaintances, so they wouldn’t be able to come at all, and what would George do then? I said all this, which seems to me very sensible, but no one noticed it. And the detectives! They have to be paid for coming, surely, and I’d rather see them than any of the others. “If they don’t come the party will be spoilt for me,” I said to Christina.
“It will be all right,” she said, and Ariadne was quite pleased, for of course, this way, her six young men can come, a dozen if they like.
Ariadne and I had costumes. I was the little Duke of Gandia, that brother of Cæsar Borgia that he killed, and Ariadne had the dress of Beatrice Cenci with a sort of bath-towel wound round her head. The funny thing is that she looks far younger than me in it, quite a little girl, while I look like a big boy.My legs are very long. George has a monk’s costume, one of the Fratelli dei Morti, and it is much the same sort of looking thing as a domino. Nobody would ever know him, and he looks very nice.
I am told that at masques you have to speak a squeaky voice or alter it somehow. George will have to, because he has a very peculiar voice, that anybody would know a mile off; people call it resonant, nervous, bell-like—I call it cracked. It is one of his chief fascinations, but he will have to do without it for once, and rely on the others.
The study was to be the ball-room, only George preferred to leave signs of literary occupation in the shape of his desk, which he just shoved away on one side, with the proofs of his new novel left negligently lying on it. We sprinkled copies of his last but one about the house, in moderation; it was rather fun—I felt as if I were planting bulbs. George likes these sort of little attentions, and I knew I was not to be put off by his finding one, as he did, and scolding me and telling me to put it on the fire.
ABOUTnine they all began to arrive, and by ten o’clock the house was overflowing. Ben was a capital commissionaire in a District Messenger’s costume he had borrowed, with George’s consent, and I do believe he enjoyed himself most of anybody. Of course at first all he had to do was to stand at the door and show people in, but he hoped that later in the evening he should have to chuck somebody out. It was likely, he thought, for all the literary world of London would be sure to be at our party. I’m sorry to say that Ben was wrong there, or else the literary people didn’t come, for those that did come were as quiet as lambs. There were detectives, several of them, and although I looked very particularly at their boots, which I have always been told is the way to spot a detective, I saw nothing at all out of the common. There was a man with a cloven hoof, but then he was meant for the devil. He was masked of course, but the devil needs no domino. AndIknew all the time that it was the little man who interviewed me once instead of George forThe Bittern, and got me into such a row, and very devilish of him it was, and I had no butter to my bread for aweek because of him. How I was supposed to know that George hated the truth instead of loving it, I can’t see, onlyThe Bitternman knew well enough, I expect! Never,neveragain will I interfere between a man and his interviewer!
There were hosts of newspaper people there; I heard two of them discussing us, sitting in the high-backed Medici seat. I managed to get jammed in behind, “powerless to move,” as they say in the novels, even if I had wanted to. Peoplearecareless. I heard heaps of conversations, anyhow, people even said things to each other across me, without stopping to think whether or no I wasn’t one of the family. I suppose because they were masked, they felt anonymous, as if it didn’t matter what they said, and it needn’t count afterwards.
The man I listened to wasThe Bitternman, dressed as the devil. The woman’s domino was all shot with queer faint colours, and, if any colour, sulphur colour. She was scented too, a nice odd scent.The Bitternman seemed to know her.
“I cannot be mistaken; am I not talking to the most dangerous woman in London?”
The woman seemed quite complimented, and smiled under her mask.
“Not quite, but very nearly,” she said. “I am a gas. Give me a name!”
“I will call you Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen. How does that suit you?”
“Is it a noxious gas?” she said, “for, honestly, I never am spiteful! I only speak of things as Ifind them, and one must send up bright copy, or one wouldn’t be taken on. I tell the truth——”
“Nothing extenuate, everything set down in malice!” said he. “The devil andThe Bitternare much obliged to you. It is the honest truth that makes his work so easy for him. We are of a trade in more senses than one. Now tell me, can’t we exchange celebrities? I’ll give you my names, and you shall give me yours. I suppose all the world is here to-night?”
“All the world—and somebody else’s wife!” she said quickly, and the devil rubbed his hands. “But that is the rub—we can’t know who they all are till twelve o’clock, and my idea is that a good many of them will decamp before they are forced to reveal themselves. Least seen, soonest mended.”
“Then we shall have to invent them!” he said. “The very form of invitation must lead to a good deal of promiscuity. Can you tell me which is Lady Scilly? She at least is sure to be here.”
“Naturally! Wasn’t it she who discovered George Vero-Taylor and made him the fashion, you know?”
“Do you suppose he was particularly obliged to her for digging his family out as well?”
“You naughty man! But it was a most extraordinary thing, wasn’t it? Delightful, and not too scandalous to use. For the man is really quite harmless, only a franticposeurand——”
“Ah, yes, and posed in London Society for ten years as an unmarried man! Suppose some nice girl had gone and fallen in love with him?”
“Ah, but he was careful, as careful as a goodpartihas to be in the London season. He lent them his books, and guanoed their minds thoroughly, but he always sheered off when they showed signs of taking him seriously.”
“Chose married women to flirt with, for preference? What does the wife say?”
“The wife? So there is a wife! But no one has ever seen her. Perpetual hay-fever, or something of the sort.”
“That is what Vero-Taylor gives out.”
“Oh, I don’t really think there is anything in—with Lady Scilly, I mean. He is too selfish—they are both too selfish. Those sort of women are like the Leaning Tower, they lean but never fall. It is an alliance of interest, so to speak. He introduces the literary element into her parties, and writes her novel for her, and in return she flatters him and takes his daughter out. Poor girl, she would be quite pretty, if she were properly dressed, but the mediæval superstition, you know—she has to dress like a Monna Somebody or other, so as to advertise his books. I believe she did refuse to have her hair shaved off her foreheadà la Rimini, but she mostly has to comply——”
“Well, I never heard of a man using his daughter as a sandwich-man before. Which is she?”
Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen pointed out Ariadne, whose bath-towel was tumbling all over her eyes.
“She looks half-starved!” saidThe Bitternman.
“My dear man,” said Sulphuretta Hydrogen,“don’t you know that they have a crank about meals, and refuse to have them regularly? I am told that they have a kind of buttery-hatch—a cold pie always cut in the cupboard, and they go and put their heads in and eat a bit when so disposed.”
“Well, they are free, at any rate—free from the trammels of custom——”
“Oh yes, they are free, but so very sallow!”
I was getting pretty much out of patience at having so many lies told about my family, and I was just going to contradict that about the buttery and the poking our heads into a cupboard, when the fat woman that they had said was Mother, but whom I was sure was not, strode up to Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, and said—
“Begging your pardon for contradicting you, Madam, but I am in a position to state that that is not so. Miss Ariadne is thin because she chooses to be, and thinks it becoming, but I can assure you that she eats her three meals a day hearty, and Mr. Taylor isn’t far behind-hand, though he is yellow!”
And then she swooped away, and I knew that it was Elizabeth Cawthorne! But where on earth had she got a domino and leave to come to the ball?
I thought I would go and look after Ariadne, who I saw could manage to make eyes out of the holes of a mask. But I suppose where there’s a will there’s a way. She was doing it all right, and the young men seemed to like it. Though I don’t believe young men marry the girls who make eyes at them best, and as Ariadne’s one object is to marryand get out of this house and have me to stay with her, I think she is going the wrong way to work. I went to her, and I asked her where Mother was.
“I am sure I don’t know,” she said crossly.
“I’ll tell you where Elizabeth Cawthorne is,” I said. “She is in the party—in the room!”
“Well, I can’t help that!” said Ariadne, tossing her head. “Mother ought to look after her better.”
I was sorry for poor Mother, because nobody seemed to mind about her in her own house, and even her own daughter didn’t seem to care whether she was in the room or not. As for George, he was looking all over for Lady Scilly, and at last he thought he had got her, but it wasn’t, for I thought I knew a little join in the hem of the domino—I seemed to remember having helped to hem it. They needn’t say that eyes can’t look bright in a mask, for this woman’s did. She went up to George, and she didn’t speak in a squeaky voice at all, but in French, not the kind of French she teaches me, but a thick, deep sort, right down her throat.
“Eh, bien, beau masque!” was what she said. “I know you, but you do not know me!”
“I know you by your eyes,” he said. “Eyes like the sea——”
Now, Lady Scilly’s eyes are quite common, it is only the work round them that makes them tell, and that would be hidden by the mask. One saw that George was talking without thinking.
“Eyes without their context mean nothing!” she said, and then I knew the woman was Christina, forthat was the very thing she had once said to Ariadne to tease her. She evidently thinks it good enough to say twice.
“Come!” she said to George. “Speak to me, say anything to me that the hour and the mood permit. I want to hear how a poet makes love!”
“Madame!” said George, bowing. I think he was a little shocked, but after all, if he will give a masked ball, what can he expect? Only I had no idea that Christina could have done it so well!
“Come,” she said again, tapping her foot to show that she had grown impatient. “Come, a madrigal—aballade, in any kind of china!”
I fancy it was then that George began to suspect that it wasn’t Lady Scilly. She couldn’t have managed that about ballads and lyrics.
He asked her if she would lift up the lace of her mask a little—just a little.
“No, no, I dare not!” she cried out. “There is a hobgoblin called Ben in the room—a sort of lubber fiend who loves to play pranks on people. Why on earth don’t you send that boy to school?”
I could not help giggling. George looked cross, for this was personal, and he took the first chance of leaving the mask’s side. There wasn’t a buzz of talk in the room, no, not at all, for everybody was trying so hard to say something clever and appropriate, that they mostly didn’t say anything, but mooned about, trying to look as if they were enjoying themselves hugely, and secretly bored to death all the time. The only time people are really gay,I observe, is at a funeral, or atEvery man, or somewhere where they particularly shouldn’t be jolly.
I was thinking sadly about my dear Mother, and wondering where she was, when I ran against a Frenchman, a real Frenchman, and he asked me where was the mistress of the house, and that showed me that other people thought about her too; I didn’t answer for a moment, and he went on in a kind of dreamy voice—
“I was brought here to see an English interior——”
“Well,” I said. “It’s inside four walls, isn’t it?”
“Mon Dieu, mademoiselle,” said he, “I had made to myself another idea ofle home Anglais—the fireside—themaîtresse de la maisonwith her keys depending from her girdle—the children—the sacred children, standing round her—bébécrowing——”
“There isn’t any baby!” I said, “and a good thing too! But this is a party, don’t you see, and we are all playing the fool, and we shall be sensible to-morrow, and if you will excuse me, I am one of the sacred children, and I am just looking for my mother’s knee to go and stand against.”
He made way for me with a “Permettez, mademoiselle!” and I went, thinking I would go and ask Ben at the door if he knew where she was. Ben didn’t know, but he said that a woman who was standing near the door, letting the cool night-wind blow in under her mask and telling people how she enjoyed it, was Lady Scilly. She was standing almost in the street, with a man, who was George.There are tall bushes near our door, rather pretty at night, though they belong to the next-door gardens. Ben didn’t know till I told him; he is the stupid child that doesn’t know its own father. He told me what they had been saying. She had begun by asking him if he approved of women wearing ospreys? There’s a silly thing to ask, for what could he say but that he didn’t, being a poet? Then she made a face, prettyish, out of habit, forgetting that it couldn’t be seen under her mask, and whined,
“Oh, I’m so sorry, it is the least wicked thing I do!”
“For beautiful women—I assume you are a beautiful woman, for purposes of dialogue,” George said; “there is no law of humanity. Go on. Pluck your red pleasure from the teeth of pain.” ...
“Yes, I am very wicked,” she said. “My impulses are cruel. Sometimes, do you know, I am almost afraid of myself.”
“As I am—as we all are,” said George.
“Why, am I so very terrible? What do I do to you? Speak to me. Why are you so guarded, so unenterprising?”
She cast a stage glance round. It was very funny, but George knew that Ben was the commissionaire and Lady Scilly didn’t, so she couldn’t think why George was so stiff. In fact, if George had only known it, he was bi-chaperoned—if that is the way to put it—for there was me too. Ben and I enjoyed it hugely, but I don’t think George did, because he could not quite make a fool of himselfbefore Ben. Besides, it was draughty out there, and George takes cold easily. He kept trying to get her to come in, and she pretended to be babyish and wouldn’t. She said she had never been out in the open street at midnight in her life before, and she thoroughly enjoyed it; that it was a Romeo and Juliet night, or some rot of that sort, and that she might never have such an opportunity again. But poor George felt he could not play Romeo, because of Ben, and there was nothing to climb, except a lamp-post that led to nothing, since Juliet was standing in the gutter below it.
George looked at his watch, and said, “In ten minutes they will give the signal for the removal of masks. Had you not better——?”
“I shall leave the party,” she said. “I shall walk straight home! It will spoil all the effect of this enchanted night, if we have to meet again in the glare of——”
“The lights are shaded,” George put in.
“I alluded to the glare of publicity!” she said. “I shall ask this commissionaire,” she said, “to call my carriage——”
“Better not,” said George hastily, “for you would have to give him your name,—your name which I know. For my sake—won’t you slip back into the ball-room and submit to the ordeal, as I know it is, of unmasking like the rest? Believe me it is best.”
“It is my host commands, is it not?” she said slyly, to show him that she had known it was he allthe time, and ran past him, in a skittish way. As if he hadn’t known all the time that she knew that he knew that she knew who he was! Grown-up people do waste so much time in pretending.
Well, I thought if masks were going to be removed, I had better take up a respectable-looking position at once, say, beside Miss Mander, which seemed suitable, and I went in. Then I saw Lady Scilly again, and wanted so to know what she was up to. She was stealing out of the room, and the devil was going with her. He wasThe Bitternman, of course, only I didn’t know she knew him. They were talking very earnestly.
“You know the way?” she was asking him.
“I know the house, like the inside of a glove,” he said, and indeed he did, for hadn’t I taken him all over it, the day he interviewed me instead of George, and there was a row? I think he is mischievous, rather like Puck was, inMidsummer Night’s Dream, so I thought I would stick to them. Lady Scilly wanted to go into an empty room to take off her mask and domino. That I could quite understand, as she had behaved so badly in both.The Bitternman offered to show her the way to George’s sanctum.